From Piltdown Man to anti-vaxxers … What science’s worst hoaxes can teach us
When being anti-vax was the preserve of the woo crowd with their crystals and Glastonburies being anti-vax was a real and valid concern. American schoolkiddies could go to school unvaccinated for example, if the parents were into woo enough that they insisted so (the American system of enforcing vaccination is to insist that schoolkids be so, but there are get outs).
Once being anti-vax became a right-wing (OK, falling off the edge of right-wing in some cases) concern then being anti-vax is a afraid.
Note, this is not to discuss being pro- or anti-vax for either childhood disease or covid. It’s a comment on how definitions of fraud change dependent upon which corner of the political square is agin’ ’em.
《The discovery was announced at a Geological Society meeting》
Is noting that prices are really arbitrary a bit like saying, as late as the 1960s, that Africa and South America fit together, but being opposed by mainstream economists on the one hand and geologists on the other, on quite ridiculous and emotional grounds?
I became anti-vax when they decided to change what ‘vax’ meant.
I’ve no real problem with: ‘This medicine has been through proper, rigorous, testing and trials over a period of years to the standards set by the regulatory authorities and been deemed to be safe and effective’, but do have a problem with: ‘the drug companies who give us lots of money have said that they haven’t carried out any of that controlled trials and testing nonsense but they give us their word that it’s ok so roll up your sleeve’
Bit like ‘Conservative’ or ‘Labour’ – they decided to change what it meant.
p.s. Saw a vid this morning discussing US funded Ukrainian BioLabs which were experimenting with coronaviruses in 2015…….also using drug addicts, convicts and military personnel in tests of HIV drugs.
The Piltdown skull sits in a curtain draped case in the offices of Dawson & Hart solicitors of Uckfield, W. Sussex as a testimony to the veracity of the legal profession.
The term anti-vax has been thrown around this past couple of years to the point where like other epithets, it is meaningless. What they really mean is people who are not opposed to vaccines per se, but said ‘no thanks’ to this one because it was rushed and largely untried. We had no long term data on potential risks and for the majority of the population the risk/benefit balance didn’t justify taking it.
But that makes me an anti-vaxer apparently. I’m also a racist, a *phobe and whatever other insults they sling about.
* Insert made up phobia of choice.
The definition of “anti vax” was changed recently to include those opposed to mandatory covid boosters every few months.
So, I am now a proud anti-vaxxer.
Is that a win or unintended consequences?
Who/Whom, innit?
Exactly as our friends have said above.
I have arms ( and bum ) like pin cushions because of vaxes I took to travel to various iterations of Bongobongoland and Shitholistan.
I had no dog in the MMR fight, but thought Wakefield had raised legitimate concerns until he went completely overboard. ( I am not vaccinated against mixed metaphors). And of course that situation was made worse by Blair and his coterie of morons.
But the Clotshot didn’t smell right. The fervency with which govts around the world sold/coerced/mandated it ( while politicians pretended to take it ), coupled with the evidence of my own eyes ( it made my Mum very ill indeed ) and the fact that I was immunocompromised at the time made me sceptical. Now the realisation that if one is lucky, it won’t do anything and if unlucky it’ll kill the recipient has made my doubts justified.
Today’s conspiracy theories are tomorrow’s news in Clown World.
The good thing about the whole covid vax thing is that all the idiots took it in droves, and hopefully it will cull the lot of them eventually. Darwinism at work.
The C19 vaccines were tested in exactly the same method and manner as others before them.
They were “rushed” in that, due to a global pandemic, steps were carried out in parallel.
The trials were able to recruited for, and results obtained, because of that same global pandemic.
In immunological terms, anything over a few weeks is long-term. If the alleged long-term effects haven’t arisen by now then when will they arise?
The hilarious “clot shot” name arose due to the identification of a rare side-effect in a certain cohort who received the AZ vaccine, not any of the mRNA vaccines. A side-effect that was detected by the monitoring agencies and that resulted in that vaccine being removed from the main recommended vaccine list. Hardly the actions of a medical establishment cover-up.
The risk balance of taking/not taking any vaccine changes with prevalence. And?
“if one is lucky, it won’t do anything and if unlucky it’ll kill the recipient has made my doubts justified”. A very small number (less than 100) of people have died in the UK where a Covid vaccine has been listed as a cause of death. Over 150m doses have been given in the UK. You, as they say, do the math.
These vaccines are amongst the most intensely studied medications in history. No credible evidence has been presented to suggest they are anything other than safe and effective.
Take the vaccine, don’t take it. As has been the case throughout, it is entirely your choice. But if, after several years, you are still repeating the same points that have been repeatedly and thoroughly refuted, then your position isn’t based on evidence.
“ The definition of “anti vax” was changed recently to include those opposed to mandatory covid boosters every few months.
So, I am now a proud anti-vaxxer.”
I go labelled anti vax in one forum even though I am vaxed and boosted because I am against mandates and said that if I was young and healthy I probably wouldn’t bather with it.
All being anti vax, racist or,as Longrider says choose your phobia means is that you don’t follow the orthodoxy as promulgated by the BBC and Guardian.
To underline Tim’s initial point above the line I once heard it expressed in the following rant: Strange the way that chinese traditional medcine is a valuable holistic corrective to the dehumanising reductionism of western medcine right up to the point of its going shopping for a few gonads from endangered species at which point it’s once again relegated to mystical mumbo-jumbo.
What science’s worst hoaxes can teach us
Just two weeks to slow the spread, guys!
Time for a Fisking:
“The C19 vaccines were tested in exactly the same method and manner as others before them.”
They were not. In particular preclinical work was extremely limited. Various aspects of the Phase 3 trials also differ in important ways from “others before them”. More on that below
They were “rushed” in that, due to a global pandemic, steps were carried out in parallel.
They were also “rushed out” at speed that is unprecedented for any medicine intended for widespread use.
The trials were able to recruited for, and results obtained, because of that same global pandemic.
Oh there is no doubt that people were (and would have been) queueing around the block to enter the trials. Given the relatively small number of events in both arms, it’s less certain that the pandemic status had that much influence on results.
In immunological terms, anything over a few weeks is long-term. If the alleged long-term effects haven’t arisen by now then when will they arise?
There is a key difference between a vaccine and (almost) every other drug. A vaccine is intended to cause a permanent and irreversible physiological change. Other drugs are not, and generally side effects due to other drugs subside on dechallenge. Long-term effects of the vaccines are not only present, several are now in the product labels.
The hilarious “clot shot” name arose due to the identification of a rare side-effect in a certain cohort who received the AZ vaccine, not any of the mRNA vaccines. A side-effect that was detected by the monitoring agencies and that resulted in that vaccine being removed from the main recommended vaccine list. Hardly the actions of a medical establishment cover-up.
But, these vaccines were also “tested in exactly the same method and manner as others before them”, weren’t they? So I am confused. Only some of the vaccines that passed said testing are bad, but the testing was good which is why the others are OK? Or, perhaps, was there something wrong with the testing? And, or merely, the fact that clinical testing never gives you enough information on a product, particularly rare safety effects and the decision to market is always at-risk?
That latter being the case, widely acknowledged to be the case, one does not rush a product into billions of arms the minute the magical emergency use (US) or conditional (EU) marketing authorization is granted.
The risk balance of taking/not taking any vaccine changes with prevalence. And?
The benefit/risk ratio of taking a vaccine also varies with the individual risk that infection poses to the individual. This is one of the biggest things that has been forgotten in this – individual benefit/risk ratio must always be considered. And, ethically, everyone has the right to refuse treatment.
A very small number (less than 100) of people have died in the UK where a Covid vaccine has been listed as a cause of death.
Ignoring for the moment that the official death toll is substantially lower than the actual death toll, that VAERS data shows unequivocally (even acknowledging the effect of attention bias) that these are by some distance the deadliest vaccines for which we have data, that is an unacceptable number of acknowledged deaths. It is a totally unacceptable death toll for a prophylactic. The benefit/risk ratio should be absolutely and abundantly clear for something you are going to take “on spec” and this, until 2020, was also the expectation of all global regulators.
Benefit/risk of these vaccines may be acceptable in 80 year old COPD patients in nursing homes, it is not acceptable for young men.
On that difference between official and actual death toll, it should be noted that Vioxx was responsible for a disputed, but at least 5-figure number of deaths before anyone noticed.
It is also worth looking at excess mortality, which is at unprecedented highs in most developed countries. And, interestingly, birth rates, at unprecedented lows. Now, it’s hard to disentangle which of the policy initiatives of the last 3 years are responsible for what proportion of those effects, not to mention the hazards in calculating a “should be” underlying death rate (this would be a bigger problem were not the increased mortality so staggering), but is that the issue? All of the policy was wrong.
These vaccines are amongst the most intensely studied medications in history. No credible evidence has been presented to suggest they are anything other than safe and effective.
See above on safety. On efficacy, the fact that they are effective for such a short duration is a major problem. This was covered up in the trials by examining events during a very short period of time after full vaccination. Eliminating events after ~3 months after “full vaccination”, and to some extent also discounting those that occurred until 2 weeks after the second shot, magnified the efficacy. Particularly in a placebo controlled trial, which is inappropriate for vaccine trials where the primary endpoint relies heavily on participant self reporting. You cannot effectively blind a vaccine trial with a placebo.
A vaccine should be a “one and done”, for life, or at least for many years/decades. Humans are not livestock.
Take the vaccine, don’t take it. As has been the case throughout, it is entirely your choice.
It is entirely one’s own choice. It was entirely one’s own choice to be excluded from any shop, public venue, or any other activity apart from going to the supermarket, on two lengthy occasions, the second of which lasted over seven months. We, “the unvaccinated”, weren’t made to sit at the back of the bus, we weren’t even allowed on the fucking bus. It remains entirely one’s own choice to be unable to visit one’s own employer’s head office because it is in the US which still has vaccine mandates.
In a way, it is a great privilege to work in this field, and to be openly critical of these vaccines (more, the mandate and coercion than the products, actually) in front of colleagues, open about why I still cannot go to see my boss, and not get fired and cancelled. Many millions of other people with less fortitude or of less value to their employers have to make the choice between long-established ethical principles (what you take is your business, and no one else has any right to know about it) and their careers, livelihoods, and feeding their families.
That is what makes me sick, and the dismissive way in which cunts like you treat this wholesale destruction of the social contract and medical ethics.
But if, after several years, you are still repeating the same points that have been repeatedly and thoroughly refuted, then your position isn’t based on evidence.
Indeed it is clear who is still repeating the same points that have been repeatedly and thoroughly refuted, and whose position is not based on evidence.
“ Ignoring for the moment that the official death toll is substantially lower than the actual death toll, ”
What is the actual death toll? Give us your evidence. Or is it being covered up as well?
“ It is also worth looking at excess mortality, which is at unprecedented highs in most developed countries”
Yet no evidence anywhere of this being caused by vaccines. No mechanism proposed, no association demonstrated, nothing.
“ And, interestingly, birth rates, at unprecedented lows.”
Not true. Not even remotely true.
As someone whose job is mortality and morbidity analysis it’s been a privilege to watch cunts like you wildly lie and misrepresent data.
I drifted away from this site a few years ago: I’d had my fill of posts about Ritchie and the comments were becomely increasingly deranged. Seems I made the right choice.
Our good friend in the Fourth Reich has delivered a superb fisk of the latest shill, or perhaps militant fool.
Well done, Sir.
Going back to the original point about Wakefield. I was unaware of the whole farrago until it came time to get the child vaxxed for MMR at which point my wife at the time brought up all the Quackery about MMR and Austism.
Now nobody wants to inflict that on a child, so the MMR vaccine was passed over in favour of a rather expensive £70 single shot measles vaccine and the kid went on to be diagnosed with Aspergers anyway. Fortunately, she’s a girl, so it doesn’t really affect her very much.
As for Wakefield, at the time I thought he had a point (albeit something that was beyond my medical understanding) and was being targeted by the medical establishment. Later I came to the conclusion that he was a monomaniac who just wouldn’t let it lie.
The truth? Somewhere orbiting around the constellation of “Correlation is not Causation”, I think.
Your choice, of course:
“I drifted away from this site a few years ago: I’d had my fill of posts about Ritchie and the comments were becomely increasingly deranged. Seems I made the right choice.”
I would, perhaps gently, point out that Bin4R’s professional life revolves around pharmaceutical drug testing……
Round about the early eighties the number of vaccines US children were obliged to take shot through the roof. Extraordinary numbers, far more than UK kids take. Hence, it doesn’t surprise me that increasing numbers of people are reflecting on the wisdom of that. If having such doubts gets one pigeon-holed as “anti-vax”, well, they’ve probably been called worse.
4R
Thank you.
I would, perhaps gently, point out that my professional life revolves around UK mortality and morbidity analysis.
And the insinuations about excess mortality/reduced birth rate due to vaccines don’t stand up to the slightest scrutiny.
So I’ll take his word on vaccine testing if he takes mine on population statistics.
And if he doesn’t accept my credentials then I don’t see why I should accept his.
Anyway, have fun.
This article (https://dailysceptic.org/2022/04/02/how-many-people-have-died-from-the-covid-vaccines/ ) is from nearly a year ago, so the number will be out of date. But anyway:
That’s more than 2000 reported just in the UK. One estimate (corroborated by data released by the German insurance industry) is that just 10% of adverse events are reported.
A Daily Sceptic article citing Josh Guetzkow and that Israeli study.
You wouldn’t accept that crap from Ritchie, Monbiot etc so no, you’ll have to better than that.
So you just dismiss the numbers because you don’t like the source reporting them?
From Thalidomide to mRNA vaccines – what crimes have been committed in the name of The Science.
There. FIFY.
@ BinW
“… this is vastly more than have been reported in previous years, which is due of course to the Covid vaccines.”
This unsubstantiated, evidence free claim on its own completely discredits the report.
@BiW
No, I dismiss articles and claims that have been comprehensively refuted. I’ve seen that article before: it seems to be a popular one to be linked to for some reason. Equally, there are many responses to that one pointing out all the flaws, non sequiturs and errors in it.
The Daily Sceptic is a junk source and Guetzkow has been repeatedly shown to be wrong. It is a textbook example of Brandolini’s Law.
Yet no evidence anywhere of this being caused by vaccines.
He didn’t say that it was. If you are going to rebut someone’s argument at least try to rebut what they said, not what you would like them to have said.
Since 2000, Pfizer has incurred $10.268 billion in penalties, including $5.637 billion for safety-related offences; $3.373 billion for unapproved promotion of medical products; $1.148 billion for government contract-related offences; $60 million under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act; and $34.7 million for ‘kickbacks and bribery’.
But are the VAERS and Yellow Card numbers correct or incorrect? I don’t care if Josh Guetzkow is a poopyhead or a Trump supporter. Instead of just telling us the numbers shown are wrong, why don’t you give us a source for the real facts?
My apologies for calling you a cunt. That was uncalled for and unhelpful.
“ Ignoring for the moment that the official death toll is substantially lower than the actual death toll, ”
What is the actual death toll? Give us your evidence. Or is it being covered up as well?
That’s not likely as death statistics are hard to fake and most countries take a very keen interest. I suspect the number of recorded all-cause deaths in most western countries is within spitting distance of the true number.
What it takes for a regulator or company to acknowledge an adverse effect of a product, in particular an individual death, is a standard of evidence well beyond that that would see you convicted of murder. We know these decisions are extremely conservative, if a regulator says “Joe B died of this product” then we are damn near 100% certain they did. The flip side of that high standard of evidence demanded is that many Joe Cs who died of it never get recorded as having died of it. If their death was even reported and investigated.
There have been quite some cover ups going on in the Reich, for example oppressive measures against coroners who dared to request autopsies of suspected vaccine victims. Whether it is systematic enough to have had an impact on conclusions of vaccine safety is difficult to say. What is easy to say is such measures are never justifiable.
“ It is also worth looking at excess mortality, which is at unprecedented highs in most developed countries”
Yet no evidence anywhere of this being caused by vaccines. No mechanism proposed, no association demonstrated, nothing.
Indeed I already acknowledged this. but we don’t need an association with vaccines, since so much of the restriction on every day life was part of an effort to get as many people vaccinated as possible. The vaccine may have been only the enabling technology for the repressive measures that have resulted in the current absolutely undeniable excess mortality.
If you could search this site you would see comments from me from around the time of the first lockdown predicting a long tail of deaths upon exiting this period of collective insanity. That was before anyone even knew that anyone would be selling any kind of vaccine.
“ And, interestingly, birth rates, at unprecedented lows.”
Not true. Not even remotely true.
Unfortunately Tim’s spam filter blocks any post I add a link to, but for just 1 example, easy to look up,in Sweden the raw number of births in 2022 was 8.3% below that of 2021. That’s a month’s worth of lost births.
A magnitude of this difference, I am sure you will appreciate, cannot be explained solely by demographics or stochastic fluctuation.
Incidentally, I spent quite a while defending the “not tonight darling” hypothesis for vaccine-induced reduction in birthrate to people going a bit overboard on this. If both parties in a couple take the vaccine at different times and don’t feel up to it, you can lose 2 shots [sic] at conception in close succession. I am no longer so sure.
Incidentally, our population stats correspondent may wish to comment on why infection rates after vaccine roll out were tens to hundreds of times higher than before, and what that tells us about vaccine efficacy.
Likewise, I apologise for calling you a cunt. Equally unhelpful.
And we are probably conflating arguments.
You moved on from the safety/efficacy of the vaccines to the general government responses, including lockdowns. You won’t get any disagreement from me on some of the ineptitude shown across the world.
I can only speak to UK data (which I am extremely familiar with, for professional purposes).
There is no evidence of a falling birth rate in the UK beyond the well-established and indisputable long-term trend. Any supposed discrepancies that have been raised in the UK are due to inappropriate comparisons of numbers of different datasets with different rates of completion due to timeliness of recording births. My limited conversations with colleagues in other countries have suggested the same.
“Instead of just telling us the numbers shown are wrong, why don’t you give us a source for the real facts?”
Umm, Brandolini’s Law.
Well, that’s me convinced!
The vaccine does not work as advertised. It is less safe than it should be. Both effects are subtle (but visible, just) at a population level because, well, for safety they damn well should be, and for efficacy because the threat posed by the disease in terms of outcomes we care about is massively overstated, as has been obvious since the Diamond Princess.
The vaccine does not work as advertised.
Indeed. We were told that it would stop people getting the disease. When that was shown to be false, we were told that it reduces impact. This appear to be somewhat over stated. If you are fit and healthy, covid is unlikely to kill you. The best that can be said of the vaccine is that it is mostly harmless.
If you are in the at risk group, it may be worth taking a punt on it because it might just work. Otherwise, probably best left alone. Just as most of us don’t need to take flu shots.
The anti Covid jabs don’t seem to be particularly effective. I was even told by the nurse who gave me the first jab that I still needed to do all the distancing, masking and avoiding going out unless it was essential. I take this as pretty much an admission that it doesn’t work. Had the jabs been effective all the restrictions could have been dropped as soon as the majority of people had been treated.
– I would, perhaps gently, point out that my professional life revolves around UK mortality and morbidity analysis.
That’s nice, but you waded into the thread enthusiastically addressing other issues in which you don’t have speciality and apparently no greater understanding than most of the rest of us.
– So I’ll take his word on vaccine testing . . .
Will you though? Or will you be repeating those statements next time you come across a covid “vaccine” debate?
– Umm, Brandolini’s Law.
Unfortunately, smug and trite responses don’t do it for us when we are faced with bullshit misinformation like mask mandates, which are still enforced in places despite mask efficacy being ruled out. We just have to fucking comply.
– As someone whose job is mortality and morbidity analysis . . .
How are things going with the death of expertise?
I love the way the even the last bastions of vax diehards are sliding into ‘well you didn’t have to take it did you?’ mode, as if the last 2 years never happened. The threats that if you didn’t take them you couldn’t work, or socialise, or get hospital treatment, or send your kids to school, or even leave your house. There were even demands that the unvaccinated should be forced to wear an identifying badge. None of that ever happened apparently……..well I haven’t forgotten, nor am I forgiving. I have a fervent wish that all the people who supported the above die ‘suddenly’ as a result of the vaccines they wanted to force on everyone else.
well I haven’t forgotten, nor am I forgiving.
Likewise.
Both my wife and I were faced with a vaccine or job decision so while it was our choice it was not exactly a fair choice was it.
I do wonder how effective the vaccine is vs just improved general health (obesity, vitamin D etc) which was ignored for so long
“Bin4R’s professional life revolves around pharmaceutical drug testing”
in which case I would expect that he knows that it is impossible that “VAER data shows unequivocally” anything. All this kind of data can do is suggest potential areas to investigate. The whole necessity of blind randomised control trials is based on the extreme unreliability of just giving someone a treatment and then seeing what happens.
Charles,
When in 1 year some orders of magnitude more deaths are reported than all previous years for all vaccines combined, that is indeed an unequivocal sign that something is very much not right.
It is said unequivocal sign even given the known large quantity of garbage in pharmacovigilance databases like VAERS.
The advantage of pharmacovigilance over trials for safety is the sheer number of people being treated. In all but the oddest of indications the trials will be only a tiny fraction of people treated. Statin trials involved at most a few thousand people, but tens of millions are treated with them.
Blinded (n.b., covid vaccine trials very imperfectly blinded) and randomized trials are only ever done to a size that will show likely efficacy. It is not financially or logistically possible to run trials large enough to see rare safety effects.
I had a sudden thought.
Just in case anyone got the wrong idea.
I am not a Wakefield apologist – I think that he had a point about IBS in kids who had had the MMR jab, because that sounded plausible, but I thought the autism argument was utter tosh.
As to GlennD, I am basing my prejudices ( antejudices) on observation of those whom I know have taken it. Moreover the C19 vaccine does not prevent infection as we were promised on numerous occasions , it was a lie. If the most fundamental reason to take a drug was a lie, how much more that we were told about it were lies ?
I stand by my argument – if you are lucky it doesn’t do anything.
Nor is it ethically acceptable to run trials so large they will show rare safety effects.
“I do wonder how effective the vaccine is vs just improved general health (obesity, vitamin D etc) which was ignored for so long.”
Effective enough, judging from having to walk around in the S.A. homeless shelters during the entire pandemic.
Got the Janssen shot, and a year on a Moderna booster, but judging by the sheer amount of positive tests I’ve had in the period with no symptoms at all, where the peeps that didn’t take them fell over like a bowling alley,….ummmyeah…. they work.
The testing/isolation thing got so bad, we pretty quickly got to hear that we were only supposed to test when we had symptoms, or when we’d been in direct contact with someone diagnosed with the WuFlu. And bugger with the masks.
Of course, what happened here is that I/we got the vaccine, waited for it to have worked through our system, and then simply went on with business. As they were intended.
You got your vaccine-induced resistance, which sorted you out when the inevitable moment came you ran into the Real Deal, and gave you that Natural Booster that completed the job, making you immune unless you insisted on snogging someone who was down with the Chinese Plague.
The people who did do the scaredy-cat Isolation Thing every time the damned test even twitched ended off worse, and properly infected more often. Because they never developed that natural resistance to the Lurgy and the new flavours in it, because they actively avoided exposure to the point where that induced immunity inevitably deteriorated.
One of the reasons why the vaccinations seem to be less effective than they actually are, is because the Idiot Busybodies mandated a society-wide “follow-up protocol” that actively invalidates any real protection the vaccine gives.
The lockdowns were actually counterproductive in Getting Over It All.
As far as nutrition goes: a healthy body helps in…well… everything. I did take vitamin supplements + extra D at the height of the pandemic, but that was mostly because with all the sick-calls life was… busy. That 9-5 thing wasn’t often an option, even as a volunteer rostered for max. 16 hours a week… So you start taking shortcuts and use smarts.
Ad BIFR prolly has more accurate knowledge, but as far as I am aware the Janssen vaccine was the only one that has, at least nominally, gone through the whole, unabridged, testing rigmarole.
And that is because their CoVid vac was a straight-up modification of the Ebola vac they’ve been developing for years now, and have been testing the Slow Way.
They simply exchanged the Ebola bit with the CoVid bit in the Rhinovirus they used and did the short route that’s allowed for modifications of existing medication.
There’s the bit where the method of introduction was meant to be as a nasal spray and not intramuscular injection, but hey…
And I must say that the Rhino they use is so generic that for the past years Sniffles has been a thing of the past for me, so at least the Rhino immunisation works..
The CoVid bit that went with it.. well… Seems to have worked..
I’m sorry Grikath old chap, you rather lost me
You got your vaccine-induced resistance, which sorted you out when the inevitable moment came you ran into the Real Deal, and gave you that Natural Booster that completed the job, making you immune
Did you actually catch it or not ?
Is there really such a thing as asymptomatic infection ?
Bi4R – gratuliere – prima Verfiskung!
As far as I know, Die Welt, is the only bit of the MSM that has run with an investigation into the Pfizer trials and this translation is well worth reading unless you are GlenDorran.
On the question of mortality/morbidity the great professional (GD again) doesnt tell us much. Claire Craig on her substack has a useful piece.
Wading in. (Not argument from authority but….)
My professional experience is overseeing those who make professional judgements on mortality expectations based on extensive analysis of mortality data including the modifiers for conditions and new medical treatments. It’s a good well educated guess. The uncertainties are huge and frankly they can’t manage the risk as they can’t even measure it well except with lots of hindsight.
So colour me sceptical when someone says death rates in 2022/3 are not elevated and its nothing to do with vaccines even if they were elevated. We are certainly seeing people we pay when they are alive not being as alive as we expected. The path of the chart line is puzzling as we’ve just had a pandemic that should have taken out all the infirm old people.
The thing with the Wakefield farrago, there was an existing alternative to the combined MMR vaccine, take them seperately.
Look out though, Bird Flu is about to arrive. Will it be Just Another Flu or will it be mass panic all around?
@Otto, Yes and yes.
The process is simple:
– Get vaccinated so that your body recognises the Baddie’s mugshot and can Rally the Troops real fast.
– Run into the Baddy in Real Life™, the Troops get called in and beat off the Baddies before they get past the first couple of trenches. In the aftermath the Troops pick the bodies to figure out what *exactly* they’re dealing with and adjust protocol.
( As in: you only get mild to very mild symptoms. A Sniffle that’s indistinguishable from any other cold for a day or two.)
– Run into the Baddies again, and again, and…. But unless the Baddies come in huge numbers, they don’t even get to entrench, because the Troops can see them coming a mile away.
(As in: you are “immune”, but can still get contaminated and carry the Plague for a couple of days.)
And yes, there’s such a thing as asymptomatic infection, and thus asymptomatic carriers. Typhoïd Mary is a classic example, but Athlete’s Foot and Chlamydia are also classic examples.
For CoVid, especially when you’re “immune” and otherwise healthy, it’s possible. That window of a couple of days that is a simple fact for any viral infection.
Which is the reason why CoVid developed so fast the be highly infectuous and less Troublesome… With rising “immunity” it only had that day or two to propagate, so it had to adapt or perish.
Grikath
“Get vaccinated so that your body recognises the Baddie’s mugshot and can Rally the Troops real fast.”
Not my field, but – as I understand it – they don’t recognise it real fast, because vaccine anti-bodies are mostly IgG (or perhaps IgM), not IgA. It’s IgA that first off does the “real fast” stuff (ie, mucosal), and which clears the majority of infections.
Sure, can be effective for severe illness because severe (ie, lungs and beyond) is where IgG can get to work effectively. And it could never properly stop transmission because, wrt timescale, the disease (like most respiratory) spreads relatively early on, from mucosal infection?
Which could be a key problem in principle with this kind of vaccine (as opposed to nasal) against a respiratory virus?
Please, correct me (in layman’s terms preferably) if I’ve fundamentally misunderstood it?
– Look out though, Bird Flu is about to arrive. Will it be Just Another Flu or will it be mass panic all around?
Don’t worry, jgh, we’ve got our best people working on it:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-11789787/Professor-Lockdown-Neil-Ferguson-warned-200MILLION-people-die-bird-flu-crisis.html
“judging by the sheer amount of positive tests I’ve had in the period with no symptoms at all, “
As we’re comparing records – here – two infections. The first in January 2020, so no test, but symptoms and circumstances leave me in little doubt. Second in September 2022, antigen test positive.
That second was one of two tests I took during the entire 3 years – the other was to get into a hospital when unwell. I am not especially interested in what particular easily transmissible, self-limiting pathogen I have when I’m coughing with a mild fever.
Is there really such a thing as asymptomatic infection ?
Yes. One learning for me from this is infection is a kind of spectrum rather than a binary. OK, it’s a binary that results in a spectrum. Without getting too woke about the whole thing.
Grikath, you know better than to rely on anecdata.
I also hate argument from authority. If I’m (as I frequently am) wrong, then I am.
Also Grikath, I don’t obviously know your background but there may be one or two kinda minor differences between you and the average clientele of South African homeless shelters. The economic position, and presence of a (among South African homeless very common) immune deficiency-inducing infection, and if presence treatment or not thereof, would be just some to give due consideration to.
Somewhat late to the party, but . . . .
GlenDorran wrote:
“The C19 vaccines were tested in exactly the same method and manner as others before them.
They were “rushed” in that, due to a global pandemic, steps were carried out in parallel.”
In other words, in prior vaccine tests, the process was carried out in a series of sequential steps, but in these tests, the same steps were carried out, not sequentially, but in parallel?
So they were tested in “exactly the same method and manner”, except when they weren’t – so that’s what you’re telling me?
I’m no expert, but it seems to me that, if you’re testing for long-term side effects, your tests need to last over, you know, a long term. A test for an effect a year from now cannot be replicated by 12 concurrent tests of a month each. And, indeed, we are now observing that many of the effects of these vaccines have a longer latency than the few weeks of testing that these vaccines went through before they were ‘rushed’ into use – your word, not mine. Their startling decline in efficacy, the large number of reports of pericarditis and myocarditis, the apparently-developing issues around fertility, and the overall questions around excess mortality – none of these effects would have been seen in the rushed and truncated testing of these vaccines, simply because they have developed months, sometimes years after the major vaccination programs.
Put bluntly, these vaccines have massively underperformed when compared with the vast claims that were repeatedly and forcibly made for them, and, had they been properly tested on the same timeline as many other vaccines have been, and to the same standards, they would never, ever have been approved for use under any circumstances. For a very-large proportion of the population, and especially for that very-large proportion of the population for whom the risks of a case of Covid are/were very low indeed, the risks of taking the vaccine now appear to be worse than the risk of catching Covid, and the benefits of the naturally-acquired immunity so-obtained (both in terms of the resistance to the disease and the duration of immunity) appear to match or exceed the effects of the vaccine. The passage of time seems to show that those who were cautious about taking the vaccines were more-probably-than-not right in their caution.
llater,
llamas
@BiFR I love Anecdata. They make for nice analogies that saves you from having to explain TechSpeak™.
I do try to label them as such, and stick on the implied YMMV warnings.
As for the shelters here.. No HIV in the locations I cleaned up messes and made the buildings keep on going.
Hepatitis, liver damage due to whatever “designer” the idiots snort up their noses, Sudden Deaths ( 4 in the past 6 months..) probably due to that same snorting, the full range of other STD’s, Noro, and two particularly nasty strains of S. Aureus with an Appetite.
Pick your poison… 😉
But when it comes to compromised immunity, be it HIV, Cancer/Chemo, morbid obesity/diabetes, or a wrestling match with Elli, all bets are off anyway.
@PF “fundamentally wrong” is Tuber Territory… Or Question Mark.. So hardly.
Vaccinations do give a different Ig-profile. Mostly because, when done right, you only introduce/present a very minor “infection” to the whole system.
No need, or persistent signals, to go to full alert. So the system does take note, registers the threat for future reference, and puts out basic sentries. But no Panic Button or massive response.
(if your body does the Panic Button at this stage… well.. that’s those “adverse effects”…)
This is, of course, reflected in the nature of the antibodies generated, but only in the ratio between them. [insert many-many factors]. But IgA still gets produced as a result and does its job as intended.
And don’t forget that as far as the body is concerned, it has only encountered a little spike of Weird. It doesn’t read newspapers or government propaganda. It’s reactive, not pro-active..
To get the full fanfare the system needs a *second* introduction of the same antigen when it’s still wondering whether or not to forget it altogether.
This is where the dual-jab protocol comes from, or that natural infection is needed.
Smallpox, measles, mumps, chickenpox, polio, etc.. only needed one jab in our Youf, because those viruses were ..well.. everywhere. So you were guaranteed to run into them soon enough and get that Natural Booster. ( or they got you before, and you Sucked It Up like a good little kid, and (generally) survived, usually without any lasting effects. But each class had a kid that…)
Nowadays, with titers of those viruses in the environment being not a patch on what they were, you *need* that second jab to be fully protected, and you see that reflected in the vax protocols ( here. YMMV elsewhere..).
Because the chance of running into these particular nasties in sufficient quantity in the wild has become so small that you can’t guarantee natural reinforcement within the effective window of that first shot.
As for nasal application.. From what I’ve been given to understand from the peeps at Janssen involved, the application as a spray doesn’t work …as hoped..
It was developed to be used in Africa, in areas with deep distrust against White Man Medicine, especially combined with Needles.
Turned out that while nasal application does give you the desired Ig-profile, you’d need a highly elevated (expensive!) virus titer to make things stick.
Because the upper respiratory tract is (unsurprisingly) noisy when it comes to immune system triggers, so you need to shove a lot up it to distinguish yourself from the Noise of the Competition. Not exactly..helpful or desireable.
Especially when the effect to the layman would seem like you giving them a fullblown cold “to protect them”.. You don’t make Friends that way..
Intramuscular introduction of the antigen takes far less, because the antigen clearly isn’t supposed to be there, there’s already a trauma reaction due to the injection, and far less or no “noise” to deal with.
And while the resultant Ig-profile is differently balanced, there’s enough of the “fast stuff” produced to deal with that all-important reinforcement introduction efficiently.
Mind.. the Janssen approach is fundamentally different from the Moderna/Pfizer approach, and most available data on Ig-response is based on Moderna/Pfizer jabs..
As for the Chinese, Russian, and Indian homebrews, RNA-based or “classic”.. good luck on finding anything reliable..
The only real positive about the whole clusterf*ck is that, at least for the moment, there’s enough funding and interest to actually get fundamental data, however partisan sometimes.
oh BiFR. Sorry for using Jargon… I belatedly realise that S.A. as an acronym can have different associations …
S.A. = Salvation Army, not South Africa in this case.
Ha ha
Thanks for clearing that up and your response earlier, Grikath.
I thought SA meant Sitheffrika as well. Doh !
Sally Army is a more accepted shortening 🙂
Grikath
Thanks, that’s very helpful. Re the balance of IG wrt the mucosal response, I think it was Malone or Kory or one of those chaps (I can’t remember which one now) who was explaining the potential problem with the predominance of IgG (compared to IgA etc), and hence which might explain the relative lack of potential effectiveness wrt early infection / transmission compared to the more effective result (at least for a period) against severe disease.
That’s interesting, re all the existing noise up the nose, I hadn’t thought about that in terms of needing to “compete” to increase effectiveness. Which might suggest that a truly effective (sterilising) vaccine against respiratory may seem optimistic.
@Bloke in the Fourth Reich – “When in 1 year some orders of magnitude more deaths are reported than all previous years for all vaccines combined, that is indeed an unequivocal sign that something is very much not right.”
No. It can easily be becuase huge numbers of people received a high profile vaccine and considerable anti-vax publicity made them assume it had something to do with bad things that subsequently happened. A bit like how people reported more leukaemia cases near nuclear power stations and thought the power stations caused it. It was subsequently shown that even though there really were more cases, there were also more cases at the sites which had been considered for nuclear power stations but where no power station was built.