I recently discussed the incredible paper by Walach et al. To remind you, here is its abstract again:
COVID-19 vaccines have had expedited reviews without sufficient safety data. We wanted to compare risks and benefits.
Method: We calculated the number needed to vaccinate (NNTV) from a large Israeli field study to prevent one death. We accessed the Adverse Drug Reactions (ADR) database of the European Medicines Agency and of the Dutch National Register (lareb.nl) to extract the number of cases reporting severe side effects and the number of cases
with fatal side effects.
Result: The NNTV is between 200–700 to prevent one case of COVID-19 for the mRNA vaccine marketed by Pfizer, while the NNTV to prevent one death is between 9000 and 50,000 (95% confidence interval), with 16,000 as a point estimate. The number of cases experiencing adverse reactions has been reported to be 700 per 100,000 vaccinations. Currently, we see 16 serious side effects per 100,000 vaccinations, and the number of fatal side effects is at 4.11/100,000 vaccinations. For three deaths prevented by vaccination we have to accept two inflicted by vaccination.
Conclusions: This lack of clear benefit should cause governments to rethink their vaccination policy.
In my post, I pointed out that the analysis was deeply flawed and its conclusion ridiculous. Many other observers agreed, and several editorial board members of the journal, Vaccines, that unbelievably had published this junk resigned. Yesterday, the journal reacted by retracting the paper. Here is their statement:
The journal retracts the article, The Safety of COVID-19 Vaccinations—We Should Rethink the Policy.
Serious concerns were brought to the attention of the publisher regarding misinterpretation of data, leading to incorrect and distorted conclusions.
The article was evaluated by the Editor-in-Chief with the support of several Editorial Board Members. They found that the article contained several errors that fundamentally affect the interpretation of the findings.
These include, but are not limited to:
The data from the Lareb report (https://www.lareb.nl/coronameldingen) in The Netherlands were used to calculate the number of severe and fatal side effects per 100,000 vaccinations. Unfortunately, in the manuscript by Harald Walach et al. these data were incorrectly interpreted which led to erroneous conclusions. The data was presented as being causally related to adverse events by the authors. This is inaccurate. In The Netherlands, healthcare professionals and patients are invited to report suspicions of adverse events that may be associated with vaccination. For this type of reporting a causal relation between the event and the vaccine is not needed, therefore a reported event that occurred after vaccination is not necessarily attributable to vaccination. Thus, reporting of a death following vaccination does not imply that this is a vaccine-related event. There are several other inaccuracies in the paper by Harald Walach et al. one of which is that fatal cases were certified by medical specialists. It should be known that even this false claim does not imply causation, which the authors imply. Further, the authors have called the events ‘effects’ and ‘reactions’ when this is not established, and until causality is established they are ‘events’ that may or may not be caused by exposure to a vaccine. It does not matter what statistics one may apply, this is incorrect and misleading.
The authors were asked to respond to the claims, but were not able to do so satisfactorily. The authors were notified of the retraction and did not agree.
Two questions still remain to be answered:
- Were Walach et al just incompetent or did they wilfully try to mislead us?
- How much nonsense is Walach allowed to publish before he is finally stopped?
216 Responses to Is Prof Harald Walach incompetent or dishonest?
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I think it’s a mixture of both. Since Walach was a professor at the European University Viadrina, he has published numerous articles that were full of rookie mistakes, as has been discussed at length on this blog and others. With the beginning of the pandemic, Walach has also positioned himself on the side of the corona skeptics. He does not deny the facts as obviously as e.g. Sucharit Bhakdi does, but he constantly tries to sow doubts with his articles by revealing alleged inconsistencies or filling knowledge gaps with seemingly solid extrapolations.
Walach has already referred in a similar dubious article to data from Wouter Akema, who in turn is associated with authors of the unspeakable Corman-Drosten Review Report. Walach is also a member of the advisory board of the “Stiftung Corona-Ausschuss (Corona Committee Foundation)”.
My guess: As long as he is considered a “serious” researcher by professional journals.
if it does not fit the lefts narrative, then all science is junk science, they did the same with hydroxychloroquine + Azithromycin and the Zinc regimine, and they pulled all reports for the ivermectin from youtube. and where is the proof of ANY kind that masks helped with covid in any case. you all are a bunch of hypocrites!!! you want proof here, educate your selves.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfjrpjqdQxI&list=WL&index=8
@moran
A YT-clip/podcast is a proof for what? Dream on.
BTW, I am German. I do not give a damn about your your ranting. You will have to work that out with your alt-right buddies from the US.
They do so love YT. Such great Revelations!
so tired of the left and their shear stupidity. when they are challenged with real facts and it does not fit their narrative, they ALWAYS ignore the truth. have a good and stupid life.
“Hello? Hello? Anybody home?”
@moran Brett Weinstein, the principal commentator in your YT clip, together with his wife, did a DarkHorse podcast that mentioned Walach’s paper. They read out the abstract. They openly admitted that they did not read beyond the abstract themselves. Given the extraordinary claim in the abstract, and even ignoring subsequent events, the fact that neither Weinstein nor his wife bothered to read further, to examine the methodology and datasets used by Walach, makes Weinstein, at best, a credulous and foolish commentator. At worst he is guilty, like Walach, of promoting falsehoods that damage public health in general and cost lives.
Walach cherry-picked the data in order to arrive at a conclusion that supported his preconceived notions. He also, wilfully, misinterpreted the data that he chose in order to further strengthen his “argument”. Something that Weinstein is more than capable of discerning if he were not more interested in promoting the falsehoods and lies about vaccines, the CDC, WHO, and having his own axe to grind over YouTube cancelling or demonetizing his DarkHorse channel. As he himself pointed out, his income has been halved by this decision.
The wider issue that concern’s me is how pseudoscientific rubbish, like Walach’s gets published in the first place. Yes, the paper has been retracted, yes, there have been resignations from the board of the publishing journal and the process of science has been defended. But, some damage has already been done and will likely be impossible to undo. This happened twenty years ago with Wakefield’s fraudulent claims about autism and the MMR vaccine in The Lancet, and we are still dealing with the fallout from that publishing debacle. In fact, one can draw a neat line right from Wakefield to Walach that suggests Walach’s beliefs actually have their origin with Wakefield. Who, I have no doubt, is still laughing all the way to the bank, pockets stuffed with dollars gotten from credulous fools like Weinstein and quite probably you moran.
Ernie Ernie Ernie. Perhaps some of your people here may want to hear a bit from the other side.
https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/coronavirus/retraction-paper-vaccine-deaths-spurs-demand-more-scrutiny-reported?utm_medium=social_media&utm_source=facebook_social_icon&utm_campaign=social_icons
thanks Daffy; but there is not much of another side, I’m afraid.
Quoting from the article:
“Only one of the three peer reviewers was identified by name, Anne Ulrich, chair of biochemistry at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany.
Her review said the authors made “plausible and convincing arguments” for why they chose the Dutch adverse-reaction data, and their analysis was “performed responsibly … without methodological flaws” and with “necessary caveats.”
After controversy, Ulrich told Science the analysis was done “responsibly and without flaws.” (One of the anonymous reviewers was confused why the authors compared the Dutch adverse-reaction data with “number needed to vaccinate” data from a large Israeli field study.)”
If every journal retracted every article on such flimsy excused, we would have a handful of remaining articles every year. Economic interests have overtaken good science. And cognitive dissonance wins again because the conventional narrative is simply too invested in itself to admit to the multiplicity of errors in this narrative.
The data from the Lareb report (https://www.lareb.nl/coronameldingen) in The Netherlands were used to calculate the number of severe and fatal side effects per 100,000 vaccinations. Unfortunately, in the manuscript by Harald Walach et al. these data were incorrectly interpreted which led to erroneous conclusions.
WERE WALACH ET AL INCOMPETENT?
Walach et al. falsely claimed that fatal cases were certified by medical specialists.
WERE THEY DISHONEST?
@Dana Ullman
I just completed a first draft of a paper with my analysis of the geology around my home town in the eastern part of the Netherlands, based on personal observations of latitude, longitude and altitude using GPS, and verified these against the most precise geological survey maps of the area that I could find. I also noted all relevant landscape features such as hills, depressions and stream valleys.
Then I proceeded to calculate the significance of said features in terms of the overall geometric shape of the landscape. After many hours of work, using the best statistical methods that I could find, I came to a rather sobering conclusion that should cause us to rethink cosmology:
THE EARTH IS FLAT.
Even the most precise analysis of my data did not show any noticeable curvature of the earth, whereas the different visible landscape features clearly stood out in the numbers as well.
And yes, I performed (and checked!) all my calculations with due diligence, responsibly and without flaws, often using several different methodologies to confirm the results. The only valid conclusion is that all those so-called ‘experts’ on cosmology and astronomy have been wrong all those centuries; they must have made some bad mistakes in either their assumptions or their calculations (BTW, I don’t think it is very likely that they all deliberately tried to deceive us with their notion of a round earth).
I hope to get this almost literally earth-shattering paper published some time in the following months, with peer review being an easy pass, as both my data and my calculations should be fine after many days of work.
So I guess that economic interests have foisted this whole ’round earth’ idea upon us, fooling us for ages, just as we have been fooled about those deadly vaccinations, and of course the old trope that homeopathy doesn’t work. It’s all to blame on Big Corp., and we really should be doing something about this, and shatter the old paradigms.
As a first and most important step, I propose to redefine science as ‘anything that I can think up and make other people believe in’. After all, homeopaths have been quite successful with this approach for over 200 years – far longer than most other branches of science. And from there, we can build on further expanding our
fantasy worldNew Scientific knowledge.I really think we can make a difference here!
Sir, I think you are on to something. Living in the west of the Netherlands I also have observed flatness. Perhaps you should add this observational data as independent verification of your conclusions.
Nicely done sir!
Anne S. Ulrich ist a biochemist by profession. She conducts research on the structural and functional analysis of biomembranes, transport processes across biological membranes, and lipid-protein interactions of antimicrobial peptides.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Ulrich
Dear Dana, can you please explain to me why a professional journal about vaccines assigns the review of an article about viruses and vaccines to a person from outside the field (*), who has no idea about the subject? Why did Ms. Ulrich review the article in the first place, rather than pointing out that she was technically unsuitable for the task and refusing it?
(*) BTW, Walach, Klement, and Aukema are also not qualified to make statements about immunology, virology or epidemiology because of their insufficient professional backgrounds
Not sure the field of study is relevant as the paper wasn’t on immunology, virology or epidemiology. The paper was on risk assessment using available data to make estimates on the cost/benefit of mass vaccinations. Being this was a data analysis, any scientist or mathematician of note would be qualified to review the paper.
Your probably not a fan, but I couldn’t find the rebuttal to the rectraction anywhere else. Wheeler goes over the rebuttal and does a pretty good job shaming the retraction.
And to clarify, the conclusion may be flawed…but it should be discussed more and openly. The fact that it is being ignored and actively silenced so quickly is concerning.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2gjsLr63tU
“The fact that it is being ignored and actively silenced so quickly is” a sign that science is working as it should, namely eliminate dangerously false data.
Science:
“the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment:”
Hard to study something if information is being ignored and silenced.
And please help me understand the point of a reporting system if we are going to just ignore it? I understand wanting to clarify that the reports don’t prove a causation, but I don’t understand the “science” behind creating a reporting system to identify possible safety concerns only to ignore it when a POSSIBLE concern arises.
the particular reporting system that Walach et al used was for generating a SIGNAL which then needs detailed analysis.
this was clearly explained but Walach et al ignored this caution.
This part I don’t understand….what do you mean by a SIGNAL?
From what I understood from the article they looked at the fatal cases which were supposed to be certified by medical specialists. Unless I misread or misunderstood this part.
“the Dutch data, especially the fatal cases, were certified by medical specialists (https://www.lareb.nl/media/eacjg2eq/beleidsplan-2015-2019.pdf (accessed on 29 May 2021)), page 13: “All reports received are checked for completeness and possible ambiguities. If necessary, additional information is requested from the reporting party and/or the treating doctor The report is entered into the database with all the necessary information. Side effects are coded according to the applicable (international) standards. Subsequently an individual assessment of the report is made. The reports are forwarded to the European database (Eudravigilance) and the database of the WHO Collaborating Centre for International Drug Monitoring in Uppsala. The registration holders are informed about the reports concerning their product.”).”
SIGNAL = standard terminology in post-marketing surveillance; e.g.: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23377696/
Not sure if I understand your point. In the article, which I cited earlier, they address that they looked at fatal cases and those cases were supposed to be certified. I apologize if my layman understanding of the terminology is lacking.
@Michael Moses
‘Signaling’ is the sole function of our Dutch Lareb pharmacovigilance organization (and of similar organizations such as VAERS), and it simply means that data from these organizations can only be used as a starting point for actual investigations, and not as a statistically reliable data set to draw conclusions from.
Maybe an example can make this clear: in 2011, HPV vaccination was added to the Dutch childhood vaccination programme. In 2012 and 2013, a relatively high number of adverse events were reported to Lareb (IIRC, about 50% more than other childhood vaccines – I’d have to look it up). But these reports decreased in number, and in 2014, HPV vaccination had even fewer reported side effects than most other childhood vaccines.
However, in 2016, the number of reported adverse events for HPV exploded: all of a sudden, a tenfold number of reports was received, often about serious conditions such as chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), neurological problems and cardiac problems.
So what happened? Had the HPV vaccine suddenly become a real health hazard? Did the vaccine manufacturers both(!) make serious mistakes at the same time? Just based on the number and seriousness of the reported side effects, one could conclude that the vaccine was too dangerous to be used after all.
But no, the real explanation was much simpler: in 2016, a Danish antivaccine shockumentary was aired on Dutch TV, claiming that HPV vaccination caused all sorts of terrible ailments(*) – and that prompted a lot of girls to attribute their medical complaints to their HPV vaccination, and file a report with Lareb.
Even so the Lareb data was used for its true purpose (i.e. as a signal), and new, thorough investigations were started into a possible link between HPV vaccination and CFS, among other things. The outcome was not surprising: no link was found; CFS was just as prevalent among vaccinated as unvaccinated girls (both groups being almost equally large).
And the situation now? Even though HPV vaccine uptake among 13-year-old girls has risen from 60% in 2015 to well over 75% now, the annual number of reported adverse event has dropped to normal again, which is lower than most other childhood vaccines. This tells us two things:
– There was nothing wrong with the vaccine to begin with, and
– You cannot use adverse event reporting systems to establish cause and effect, or even tell anything about the safety of a vaccine or medicine.
*: I once kept count, and ended up with no less than 28 completely different but often very serious ailments attributed to the vaccine, up to and including infertility and pancreatic failure.
Thank you.
Edzard,
There most definitely is another side.
Pfizer are making billions of dollars from the vaccine but in New Zealand, and I suspect elsewhere, they have been indemnified against prosecution. That seems odd.
Recently, a Norwegian expert group reviewed the deaths of 100 people in care. The group concluded that 10 deaths were probably caused by the Covid-19 vaccine while another 26 were possibly caused by it. I presume that the vaccine manufacturer was concerned about the results of review. But not concerned enough to withdraw their product.
https://sciencenorway.no/covid19-vaccines/a-few-nursing-home-patients-died-earlier-than-expected-after-getting-the-covid-vaccine/1863223
10 death with how many million doses of vaccine administered?
nobody is advocating not investigating vaccine safety!
in fact, this is being done constantly – but it has to be done rigorously.
Walach et al were not just not rigorous, but also probably dishonest about it.
Why do you twist the truth? The article also says:
they have been indemnified against prosecution.
Not in Europe. EMA has granted conditional marketing authorisation (no emergency approval), which is valid for one year and can be renewed annually. Financial claims in the event of vaccine damage will be borne by Pfizer/BioNTech in this case.
https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/human-regulatory/marketing-authorisation/conditional-marketing-authorisation
Danie, Danie, Danie …
“Just the news” is the brainchild of former Fox political commentator John Solomon, who has been heavily criticized by various media outlets because “of magnifying small scandals, creating fake controversy and advancing conspiracy theories.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Solomon_(political_commentator)#Reception
You’ve been fooled, Dana. Or can you really not think logically and critically? That would also be a possibility in view of your previous comments about SCAM.
… and Dana liked to compare me to Trump!!!
WHAT A GIT
@Dana Ullman
“The other side” consists of stubborn, scientifically less than competent people, who refuse to admit that their sorry excuse for a paper is fatally flawed as well as misleading.
Their initial defence was that their analysis was correct, but that the data on which they performed their analysis was somehow untrustworthy and bad – which is a laughable excuse, because if even the data were that bad, they should have recognized this and abandoned any attempt to analyse it.
And now, after some back-pedalling (“OK, we admit that we didn’t establish causality between vaccination and deaths”), they try to divert the public’s attention away from their own epic screw-up by sowing doubt about Covid-19 as a cause of death: “Currently we only have association, we agree, and we never said anything else [yes they did]. But the same is true with fatalities as consequences of SARS-CoV2-infections [sic],” which are “rarely vetted by autopsy or second opinion” to confirm they were caused by the novel coronavirus, rather than incidental to infection.”
After which someone tries to prop up this claim with the old canard that any death within 2 months following a positive Covid-19 test is registered as a Covid-19 death. Which of course is a shameless lie.
Also, these people seem to be oblivious of the concept of excess deaths, which appear to indicate that in many countries, the actual number of deaths due to Covid-19 significantly exceeds the reported number of Covid-19 deaths. So if anything, reported Covid-19 deaths are more likely too low than too high.
So no, contrary to what Walach and his cronies claim, there is nothing wrong with any numbers except the ones they themselves produced. And some article in a less than trustworthy right-wing rag does not change this.
Next time, please try to come up with proper peer-reviewed scientific sources instead of speculative and dubious claims from individuals who wouldn’t recognize real science if it bit them in the bottom.
Not sure what is fatally flawed about their paper. A reporting system is created to help address possible safety concerns. This reporting system has been used for decades and has been deemed reliable enough to pause and stop a variety of medical treatments. Why for COVID 19 is the system so unreliable now? Are the dutch full of anti-vaxxers too?
So they use this reporting system, which is the best we have so far, to give a risk analysis of the cost/benefit of mass vaccinations. Granted, they implied causation instead of clarifying it as a possible causation. But other than that, what is wrong with the report? And since we don’t know if it is just a correlation or a causation at this point, shouldn’t people at least be informed of the possible risks?
“This reporting system has been used for decades and has been deemed reliable enough to pause and stop a variety of medical treatments.”
without further detailed analyses?
any evidence for this statement?
Just off the top of my head…they paused the JJ vaccine just after a few deaths reported from blood clots.
Do you truly believe that the CDC and FDA are infallible? Do I need to actually give you a list of the things that have been approved only to later be pulled because it was later (sometimes decades later) found out to cause more harm than good.
@Michael Moses
Yes, and they did the same when a couple of similar reports emerged in connection with the AstraZeneca vaccine.
Do I need to explain to you that these half-dozen or so vaccine-related deaths only occurred after HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS of doses were administered? And with THOUSANDS of scientific and medical organizations in hundreds of countries closely watching out for harmful side effects?
Or, to put it in other words: you try to suggest that these Covid-19 vaccines may actually do more harm than good because deaths and other serious side effects may have been overlooked.
Which is very clearly not the case. Exactly the fact that vaccinations were immediately halted after a handful of suspicious deaths (which, at that time could be related to other causes for all we knew) is a clear sign that not only does the monitoring system work very well, but that all parties involved are hell-bent on preventing every single unnecessary death – and the only thing that they must really beware of, is that delaying vaccination of a million people to prevent one death (if even that) will actually CAUSE the death of multiple people who will get infected and die during that pause.
A new one, also horrible:
https://twitter.com/jamesheathers/status/1411005081902673921?s=19
That too in JAMA pediatrics!! How does this guy get away with publishing nonsense in reputed journals?
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/2781743
Another re(tr)action: https://twitter.com/pums_tweets/status/1412369022969057282
The University of Poznan terminated its affiliation with Harald Walach.
https://twitter.com/pums_tweets/status/1412369022969057282
Will this event make Walach rethink his behavior? I doubt it.
@Michael Moses
Which was a perfectly normal process within established rules, since rare side effects of vaccines do not show up until Phase IV, when they are given to large numbers of people. Vaccination was suspended, side effects evaluated, and then expanded warnings issued.
Hang on. Even the CDC and the Open VAERS database reports that there are 4 deaths out of every 100,000 vaccinations. So how is Walach wrong?
@FletchNZ
Walach is wrong about most aspects of his claims.
– He is wrong about the actual death rates as a result of vaccination. His number of 4.11 reported deaths per 100,000 vaccinations is correct, but he attributes every death reported AFTER vaccination TO that vaccination. Not only do all adverse event reporting systems such as VAERS have very clear disclaimers that you cannot and should not use the data in this way, but this is such an elemental mistake that it is suspected that Walach is not acting in good faith, and deliberately tries to misrepresent the risks of vaccination.
People of course die from all sorts of causes, and the chance to die increases with age. If you vaccinate e.g. 100,000 70-year-olds, you can expect some 150 of those people to die within one month of this vaccination – without vaccination being the cause (statistics source: https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html ).
– He is even several orders of magnitude wrong about his claims with regard to the ‘number needed to vaccinate’ (NNTV) to prevent one case of Covid-19. After seriously messing up some very limited statistics from Israel, he claims that it would take between 200 and 900 vaccinations to prevent one case of Covid-19, and thus approximately 20,000 to 90,000 vaccinations to prevent one death – which is complete nonsense.
If Covid-19 can roam free through a population of e.g. 10 million, then at least 35% of those people(*) will contract the disease, and probably even more, so let’s say 3.5 million. When the whole population receives a 90% effective vaccine, then only 1 million people will contract the disease (probably far less as a result of herd immunity, but let’s err on the generous side here).
This means that 10 million vaccinations prevent at least 2.5 million infections. So the NNTV is not 200-900, but four – at the very most. Of course, this number rises as more people become immune, either through vaccination or infection, but vaccination was started when the vast majority of people was still susceptible.
*: Two weeks ago, a club here in my home town was the epicentre of a super-spreading event: in just one night, almost 200 youth were infected with Covid-19 of 600 people total visiting the club. So it is safe to assume that of every 100 people exposed to the virus, some 35 at the very least will get infected.
You are right that we do not know if the death rates are a result of the vaccinations, yet we also do not know they are not. So wouldn’t the scientific and responsible thing to do is to try and verify the causality of these deaths before we dismiss them because we just don’t know either way at this point?
Likewise, couldn’t a similar argument be made for the Covid death rate? Before the vaccines, every news report had a death ticker with the number of covid deaths updated daily, yet those deaths weren’t verified to be caused by Covid. There is no way the CDC could have verified those so quickly. There have been reports that there has been a conflation between people dying by Covid and people dying with Covid.
Also, if I am understanding your NNTV values, you used a random report to estimate a 35% infection rate to calcualte that? If so, that would be very wrong. First, if Covid had a 35% infection rate we probrbaly all have been effected by now. Second, the report which got the vaccine approved estimates an infection rate of somwhere between .13% (185/13,883 Moderna study) and .75% (162/21,728 Pfizer study). So using a 35% rate is just wrong.
So he used the Israeli numbers, which makes sense given they were the first with the longest record of vaccinations, then compared them with the Dutch reporting system given they are supposed to be verified to a certain percent, if I understand the reporting right.
So we go back to wrong, or just not neccesarily right? So by most reports his calculations were right, so the issue is really causality, which I agree, he did not clarify well enough the distinction between causality and POSSIBLE causality.
Also on a side note, using Efficacy for calculations vs Absolute Risk Reductions is a bit misleading. After all, the Efficacy (from the study which gave the AEU) of the Pfizer Placebo is 80% (9/21,728) compared to the Moderna Placebo (30/13,883) in regards to severe cases and 100% efficacy vs death (0/21,728 vs 1/13,886). Which can be interpreted as saying, if you believe you are taking the Pfizer vaccine you are 80% less likely to have severe effect and 100% less likely to die from Covid than thinking you took the Moderna Vaccine. So in reality we are dealing with a realtively small percent, so these numbers can be easily skewed when using Efficacy as a baseline.
We know that those death rates due to vaccination are far lower than the reported rates, simply because lots of those reports have already been investigated (and yes, ALL those reports of deaths are investigated), and in most cases, no causal link with vaccination could be found.
I used a real-life infection event among young, seemingly healthy people to find a realistic value for the infection rate.
Are you kidding me!? Are you really trying to argue that if you let the virus loose in a population, only between 0.13% and 0.75% will end up infected? That is a very, VERY stupid claim, and it is the exact same horrible rubbish that got Walach his well-deserved retraction and unanimous contempt from the scientific community.
Of course the infection rate is FAR higher than 1%, just look at the statistics of e.g. the US: almost 35 million infections on a 340 million population = 10% infection rate, and that is with more or less effective countermeasures to prevent infection. Same goes for the Netherlands: 1.7 million cases on a 17 million population = 10%, even with preventive measures.
That the real infection rate is far higher still becomes clear by looking at what happened when all countermeasures were abandoned here 2 weeks ago: the daily number of infections exploded, from ~600 per day two weeks ago to some 10.000 per day now.
This tells us several things:
– Covid-19 countermeasures such as social distancing and lockdowns were quite effective in preventing infections(*),
– the infection rate for unvaccinated people must be far higher than 10%, and real-life events suggest that it is even higher than the 35% I mentioned, especially with the far more contagious delta variant.
And, given that the latest huge increase in infections almost exclusively happens among unvaccinated young people, with only very few new hospitalizations,
– vaccines are VERY effective in preventing Covid-19 infections.
So summarized: Walach produced nothing short of an absolutely epic f*ck-up, and it would appear that you are defending this inept crank with equally flawed ‘reasoning’ and cherry-picked numbers. Sorry chum, but you are Very Wrong.
*: Which is also evidenced by the fact that influenza was completely absent this winter season, as were all sorts of normally common childhood infections.
You are right, the low infection rate I cited was out of context and I apologize for that. After rereading the report it was on symptomatic cases and for a shortened observational period.
So you are probably right, the overall infection rate is much higher. I believe the most recent observation (up to 6 months) of the systematic cases from the initial vaccine study has it at about 4%. Not sure how relevant the asymptomatic cases are. I am having trouble discerning between asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic reports on transmissibility. I find reports that say asymptomatic can transmit it and then it references studies on pre-symptomatic cases. I don’t think you need to be an expert to know the difference…or maybe you do and I am way off here. But from my basic understanding is if your asymptomatic that usually means you caught the virus but at a lower viral level and therefore any transmission would be of low viral load thus reducing the chance of transmission.
And you are right, the vaccines are very effective in terms of efficacy. But from what I read, the Absolute Risk Reduction is a better reflection of risk analysis than efficacy. And the ARR is very low, especially with the young and healthy.
But back to the point at hand… I would be interested in your source to verify which deaths by vaccines have been investigated. I have seen reports saying they have been investigated, but nothing with any data to support their conclusions. I just see vague statements of how anti vaxxers use to make false claims, but no numbers of how many are actually false claims. Because if the data is out there that the Dutch system has been already investigated and concluded they weren’t caused by the vaccine then I agree with you and he we disingenuous or just incompetent.
The debate here is so rancorous that it is clear what is going on is more politics than science. Comments such as this only serve to cast doubt on the sincerity of your arguments which smells more like left wing fake news bluster than dispassionate debate:
“So summarized: Walach produced nothing short of an absolutely epic f*ck-up, and it would appear that you are defending this inept crank with equally flawed ‘reasoning’ and cherry-picked numbers. Sorry chum, but you are Very Wrong.”
what on earth is ‘left wing’ about calling out the dangerous errors of Walach or others? and what is not scientific about it? perhaps your own right-wing tendencies got in the way of analytical thinking?
@Michael Moses
First of all, I owe you an apology for my rather rude response – I see that your odd (under)estimates and claims were an honest mistake after all, and not the fact-free ramblings of yet another Covid denier and antivaccine crank as I suspected. It just goes to show that what is obvious to one person isn’t always as evident to someone else.
I can’t find much data on that either, but I recall one or two articles that suggested that asymptomatic cases may contribute even more to spreading Covid-19 than symptomatic cases – simply because the latter at the very least suspect that they’ve been infected, and usually take measures to avoid personal contact. And of course the more severe symptomatic cases aren’t much inclined to go out and meet other people anyway …
Our pharmacovigilance centre Lareb issues extremely detailed reports, see https://www.lareb.nl/media/2uwpelnj/signals_2021_cases_fatal_outcomes_covid_vaccines-update.pdf.
The tl;dr version: https://www.lareb.nl/news/overzicht-meldingen-overlijdens-na-coronavaccinatie
Translated summary:
“Up until mid-April, 3.7 million vaccinations have been administered. Up until that date, Lareb received 257 reports of death. Of those 257 reports, 213 were filed after vaccination with Pfizer/BioNTech (Comirnaty), 27 after the Moderna vaccine (Spikevax), and 13 after the AstraZeneca vaccine (Vaxzevria).
…
For nearly all reports, additional information was needed about the cause of death, observed side effects and underlying health conditions. Most of those who filed a report quickly provided all relevant information. Unfortunately, sufficient information was not yet available in 87 cases at the time of writing of this report.
For 128 reports with adequate information it is likely that vaccination was not related to the cause of death. In 42 reports, side effects may have contributed to deterioration of an already poor or underlying condition, possibly in relation to old age. This concerns known side effects of vaccination such as fever, nausea and general malaise.
One report concerned extensive thrombosis combined with low platelet counts, a very serious but also very rare side effect of the AstraZeneca vaccine and the Janssen vaccine.”
So if you put the numbers together, you get
– 257 reports of death after vaccination, of which
– 128 could be attributed to other causes, and
– 42 that may have been a contributing factor to the demise of the patient, of which
– 1 death due to TTS (thrombosis with thrombocytopenia) that was almost certainly caused by vaccination. Plus a remaining
– 87 reports with insufficient information.
So even if you assume that most of those 42 deaths were indeed caused by this vaccination, then the death rate is roughly 1 in every 100,000 Covid-19 vaccinations – still only a fraction of Walach’s 4.1 per 100,000.
The number drops even further when taking into account that the vast majority of deaths happened in very old, frail people, for whom even the strain of going out and getting the vaccine may have been too much. The article also mentions that the weekly number of reported deaths is steadily decreasing, as ever younger age groups are getting vaccinated.
It will be some time before we have more precise information – a thorough investigation of each reported death can take several months – but it is clear that Walach was very wrong to simply attribute all reported deaths to vaccination. And even though his ‘paper’ predated the above information by a week or so, he clearly did not take the trouble to look at previous Lareb reports which provided an equally nuanced picture (or, worse, he willingly and knowingly ignored those in order to present his own, twisted version of reality).
Anyway, I hope this gives a good picture of how reported deaths are investigated, and how those researchers do their utmost to produce reliable information.
I appreciate the response. It is difficult to find meaningful discourse, usually you either get people who will either just agree with you or call you names when you don’t agree with them.
I think your source and breakdown does partly what the paper is claimed to be doing. Assuming a conlcusion rather than clrarifying it as a possible conclusion. “…COULD be attributed to other causes” and “…INSUFFICIENT information” Those things don’t really prove there is no causation between the vaccine and the reported deaths. After all, we could use a similar argument with Covid deaths. They COULD have been caused by other health issues since 94% of those reported deaths had other health issues. And since hospitals get special Covid funding there is an added incentive to put Covid on the death certificate even in cases were they were not the cause or at least the direct cause. And there is ancedotal evidence (talking to people in the medical field) to suggest this is happening, though how much is hard to tell.
Now with that said, I do not believe it is happening on the scale that would inflate this many deaths…but the reality is I just don’t know and crazier things do happen. So it concerns me that when reports come out people rather censor instead of talk about it. If the vaccines are so great and safe, then why would the experts be afraid of any report? If anything they would want to shine the light on it to fully expose the flaws within it and give those that doubt the vaccine more confidence to trust the real evidence. Censoring and being told it is wrong does not help build confidence, epsecially given the track record of our “experts.” How many times were we told the lab leak was disinformation and crazy, how many articles with possible evidence that got censored, only to find out after a year that it is actually a resaonable possibility and those articles weren’t so flawed. So being told to trust the science, yet don’t discuss the science (even when flawed), is very concerning and doens’t sound like science.
Now, with all that said and a little more reading I do feel that the report way oversimplified things which lead to a misleading conclusion. So again, was he being dishonest, incompetent or purposeful to force a response, I do not know. Though either way, I believe the purpose of the paper was to analyze risk assessment, which I feel is very important, and this paper should have opened dialogue of how better to analyze this if their method was flawed. However, by retracting the paper and people resigning in protest, in essence just censors that dialogue of risk assessment rather than get to a better measurement of it. And if his method was dishonest, then what method would be honest? Not sure if I mentioned it in this thread, but from what I read, Efficacy is a dishonest way to measure risk assessment and Absolute Risk Reduction should be used instead. Yet, how many people even know what ARR is? I didn’t know until I had to do my own research. Most doctors don’t even know what it is, yet advocate taking the vaccine. Another reason why I have a hard time trusting doctors. Let’s say instead of saving 3 lives at the expense of 2 lives, maybe the vaccine will save 100 lives at the expense of 1 life. If so, is it still worth it and would it be justified to mandate it to others? We may never know more accuraste numbers because most honest discussions are being shut down at all levels.
From politico
“Biden allied groups, including the Democratic National Committee, are also planning to engage fact-checkers more aggressively and work with SMS carriers to dispel misinformation about vaccines that is sent over social media and text messages.”
This is very scary stuff if true….the government working with business to monitor our text messages and shut down information. Do I need to reiterate that the group initiating this is most likely the same group that said the lab leak was fake, that lied about masks to prevent a shortage, that wearing 2 masks is good, wear a mask even though your vaccinated, that we need to shut down outdoor events only to find out later that trasnmissions rate outdoor is far less than 1%, that Texas is committing murder by opening up only to see their rates drop, that people who have covid antibodies still need to get the vaccine, public schools need to stay closed for safety but will send their own kids to private schools that are open and the list goes on of how untrsutworthy these experts are.
On a side note, they say we may need boosters in a year because they don’t know if it will still be as good. So if they can’t predict how good it will be in a year, then how can the predict how bad it might be in a year or 5 years? So how can anyone say these vaccines long term benefits outweights the longterm risks when we have no idea what they are?
@Michael Moses
You are quite wrong here. In order to attribute deaths to vaccination, you have to prove positive causality, or at least show that is it very likely. Apart from one case (death due to TTS), any causality is fully absent. Basically, you are still making the same huge mistake that Walach made, i.e. claiming that deaths reported after vaccination CAN be attributed to that vaccination – the main difference being that Walach was more emphatic in his assertion. Suggesting that vaccines cause significant numbers of deaths because it can’t be proven that they are not the cause those deaths is plain wrong.
Your erroneous reasoning also becomes clear if you look at the causes of death in the detailed report that I linked to: I count no less than 30 often wildly different causes of death. Do you really want to suggest that all those different deaths ‘could’ be caused by the vaccine – and in the complete absence of a plausible mechanism at that? And have you actually READ the Lareb report? Then you will also have noted that it covers the first three month of vaccinations, during which time the most vulnerable (old, frail and sick) people were vaccinated. You know, people who had a high risk of dying anyway, making it even more unlikely that the vaccine was the cause of death. In this regard, you may also want to look up the concept of Bayesian statistics, which deals with (among other things) the chances of causal relationships while taking prior probabilities into account. There is no good prior reason to assume that vaccines cause significant numbers of deaths – IIRC, the most ‘deadly’ vaccine was the smallpox vaccine, which was estimated to cause approximately 4 or 5 deaths per 100,000 vaccinations – in the 1970s, mind you. Modern vaccines have much better safety profile.
And once again, you are very wrong. Just look at population statistics: 2020 saw an excess mortality of 15,000 people in the Netherlands, an overall mortality increase of 10%. And if you look at the timeline of those excess deaths, you will (hopefully) notice two things:
– Those deaths match Covid-19 infection waves exactly, which means that Covid-19 is indeed instrumental in those deaths, and
– Those periods of excess mortality are not immediately followed by a lower than normal mortality, telling us that the people who died were not on the brink of death, and would soon have died of ‘other causes’ anyway. On the contrary, most of those people had a life expectancy of at least several more years.
In fact, Covid-19 must have caused more than those 15,000 deaths, because normally around year’s end, influenza accounts for another 2,000 – 4,000 deaths on average – and we have had no influenza at all the past year. (This also does away with the myth that Covid-19 is no worse than a simple bout of flu.)
This is an untruth that is unfortunately still spread by Covid-19 deniers and cranks. See above for the explanation why this cannot possibly be true (and this medical fraud would also have to happen on a huge scale to have any impact on the overall numbers, which makes it even more unlikely). And oh, our Dutch hospital and health insurance system work in a completely different way, yet Covid-19 mortality figures are virtually identical to those in the US. So our Dutch health system is corrupted as well to inflate Covid-19 deaths? As are most other health systems around the world?
This kind of highly suggestive, evidence-free conspiracy rubbish has no place here. Please stop it.
Orchestrated medical fraud and deception, perpetrated by thousands of doctors, scientists and other people involved in this pandemic? Sorry, but that is nothing short of insane. I am sorry to tell you that you have just squandered any credits that I gave you for engaging in a rational, polite discourse.
Once again, you are quite wrong in several respects:
– Walach or his paper are NOT ‘censored’ in any way. The paper is still there to be read by anyone – in fact, I would encourage anyone with an interest in the topic to read it, AND to also read the various comments as to why it is highly misleading unscientific rubbish that should never have passed peer review.
– This paper does NOT constitute a proper risk assessment, or even contribute to such. It is a very good example how one can spread the most egregious lies and suggestive misinformation by cherry-picking numbers, abuse data from reporting systems (and disregarding any warnings and disclaimers that literally state that the data can NOT be used in that manner), and generally ignoring anything that does not fit in with the author’s message, such as publicly accessible population and health statistics. It is a prime example of Very Bad Science.
– There are huge numbers of scientific papers out there that actually do a good job of risk assessment for both Covid-19 and vaccination. It would appear that you choose to ignore those because they does not match your personal convictions.
– There are lots of other hugely incompetent people like Walach out there, writing all sorts of ‘assessments’ and ‘evaluations’ about Covid-19, vaccinations etc., usually because they don’t like Covid-19 countermeasures or adhere to some conspiracy theory or other. Should those ramblings be published as ‘science’ as well – because not publishing them would be ‘censorship’? I don’t think so …
…
The real scary stuff is people who are completely ignorant of science, medicine and statistics, spreading untruths, disinformation and suggestive nonsense, seriously harming public health and causing unnecessary deaths – because they convince people that they need not worry about a highly infectious and potentially deadly disease, and, even worse, scare people about vaccination, and at the same time instigate those people to ‘stand up for their rights’ to disregard health measures, decline wearing face masks, ignore social distancing etcetera. As a result, even people who are dying from Covid-19 are sometimes still denying that this disease is real, or talk it down as ‘not that big of a deal’.
This kind of ‘information’ should indeed be monitored with a wary eye, debunked, and even suppressed if necessary – because people who believe it run a significantly increased health risk. And even worse: they in turn spread it to vulnerable people who ARE trying to stay healthy by heeding the message from doctors and scientists. Sure, not all measures are equally effective, and some may be even unnecessary. But overall, they ABSOLUTELY WORK – as evidenced by the unprecedented explosion of Covid-19 cases here in the Netherlands within mere days after all measures were lifted.
So I strongly suggest that you re-evaluate your ‘information’ by comparing it to the reality and to scientific consensus. I especially want to urge you to look for information that contradicts yours, as that often provides the best way to figure out what is real and what isn’t (this is broadly how the scientific method works).
Statsitically speaking you are right in the need to prove causality and the vaccines are most likely not the cause of the reported deaths. However, if I am being told that I need to put something in my body, I think the onus should be on proving them safe, not the statistical default of you can’t prove they’re unsafe. After all, you can take a vaccine later if you realize they are safe, but you can’t untake a vaccine later if you realize they are unsafe. Though we may be getting a bit off topic, which I think is risk analysis. I agree that his paper’s conclusion was misleading but appreciated the focus on trying to formulate risk analysis which I think is the bigger issue.
You refer to a few sources that discuss the risk analysis and if you could share them with me I would appreciate it. All the things I have found are very vague. And I do look for sources that may contradict my initial beliefs, kind of how I ended up on this thread. 🙂
As for the deaths, I do agree that Covid had an impact on mortality rates. My point was that we don’t really know the real impact.
Correct me if I am wrong, but according to the CARES Act, hospitals get an extra 20% for COVID patients through Medicare and the CARES act also allows every health care provider to claim reimbursements for uninsured Covid patients. So based on this, one could argue there is a financial incentive to label things Covid, not sure how that is an untruth. Unless of course I misread it, that is possible. I won’t assume I am infallable.
As for your comparison, Netherlands 17,769deaths/1.74 mil cases ~ 1% death rate, while in the US 607K deaths/33.9 mil cases ~ 1.8% death rate. So the rates are not the same, unless I missed something again. Though not really sure if it makes a difference or not if the rates are the same to either point as the covid mortality rate among the different countries vary a lot.
I am sorry that you feel I lost credibility because I have seen people do crazy things. And it does not have to be “orchestrated” by thousands of people, just a few really, and many of thousands of people will just follow and history is full of evidence to support this. Again, I am not saying Covid is a made up thing or that it is not a serious threat, I am just suggesting it is hard to get to the truth of how serious it is because there are people who will gain politically and financial from distorting the numbers. After all, if it was all about the science and saving lives, shouldn’t we be making sure every person in the world over 50 gets the vaccine before trying to give it to our kids or those with anitbodies?
And I agree with you that people are ignorant of all the things you list, including our experts and policy makers. We were told we didn’t need masks, then when they felt it was appropriate they told us we did. Science tells us if you have the antibodies you don’t need a vaccine, yet we have been told to get the vaccine anyways. Science tells us that COVID is very dangerous for certain groups and not dangerous for others, yet everyone was told to lockdown regsardless of your risk factors. Science also tells us kids are very low risk, but lets force them to take a vaccine with no knowledge of possible long term effects. Science tells us that transmisson outdoors is very low, but outdoor events and the beachers were shutdown. Science tells us that Vit D helps against Covid, yet were were encouraged/forced to stay inside. Science tells us the vaccine works, but we were still told for months to wear a mask after getting the vaccines. Heck, for a while Fauci was telling us we should wear two masks. Science tells us that all these preventative measure work, yet states like NY and CA with the most preventative measures had similar if not worse rates than states like Texas and Florida which had less measures. Science finally told us that we didn’t need to wear masks outside, yet CA refused to lift their outdoor mask mandate until an arbitray deadline was reached. And your example, if science tells us the vaccine works, then why is there an unprecedented explosion of Covid cases in the Netherlands regardless if all the measure were lifted or not?
Now as for your rational of why it should be OK to monitor our text messages, I am a bit disapointed. I think you have made some really good points, but trying to argue that someone else should make sure we are properly informed by monitoring our text messages is scary and dangerous. I am guessing you wouldn’t want Trump’s administraion in charge of that, so why would we want anyone in charge of that? I pointed out several examples of how we have been given information contrary to the science and I think it is clear to most rational people that both sides will perpetuate misinformation. So the responsibility should be on the individual to take in as much information as possible and use their resources to determine what is best for them.
I think overall the vaccines are safe and should be used for high risk people. But why should people with low risks take any risk with a vaccine that has no long term safety record? I think about 6% of all Covid deaths are under the age of 50 and this doesn’t even factor in pre-existing health issues. So the number of people who are helathy and relatively young (under 50) dieing from Covid is relatively small.
“why should people with low risks take any risk with a vaccine that has no long term safety record?”
THANK YOU FOR DEMONSTRATING THAT YOU HAVE NOT GRASPED THE IDEA OF IMMUNISATION
Maybe you are right and I don’t understand the concept because I don’t believe immunization should be priority regardless of the risks. And if we need annual boosters, then are we really talking about immunization anyways?
I have mentioned the Absolute Risk Reduction rates which are very low. So by taking the vaccine (according to the initial study) we reduce our chance of getting symptoms by about 1%, severe symptoms about .05% and death by almost 0%. So these benefits don’t seem convincing to me to ignore the possibility of long term risk. And the Israeli numbers suggests that the ARR may even be lower in real life setting. Or am I misunderstanind the concept of ARR too?
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanmic/article/PIIS2666-5247(21)00069-0/fulltext
@Michael Moses
What a silly question …
– Because even for low-risk age groups, Covid-19 poses far more serious risks than vaccination(*)? Those people can still get pretty sick and, in rare cases, even die. And don’t forget long Covid: by recent estimates, some 10% of young, ‘low-risk’ Covid-19 patients still have one or more complaints 3 months after the actual infection has cleared up. I personally know several of these people with severe long-term sequelae, and their active life is effectively ruined at age 35 and 48 respectively, with no clear prospect so far of getting back to their previous, quite excellent state of health. So much for ‘low risk’.
– Because vaccines are not 100% effective, and ‘low-risk’ age groups will keep spreading the virus, causing suffering and death among those still at risk?
– Because the longer the virus can circulate in a population, the bigger the chance that more virulent mutations come into existence?
Vaccination of all age groups is the best way to minimize the impact of Covid-19 as quickly as possible, preventing countless cases of sickness (both acute and chronic) and death, also saving billions in medical expenses in the process.
*: And please note that in over 200 years of vaccination history, not a single vaccine ever had long-term harmful side effects.
True, long term side effects of vaccines are rare, but not impossible. And even though the tecnology of mRNA has been around for decades, we have no long term studies of them in humans as vaccines.
For example: The spike protiens being created are supposed to stay near the muslce and locol lymph nodes. However, some reports are finding them elsewhere. As of now, it is a small number and by most reports they are harmless. But since we can’t even figure out if the antibodies will stay in the body after 1 year, how do we know the spike protiens won’t be harmful to the body after 1 year or later just because they appear to be harmless now?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1114674/
Michael Moses,
I surmise that you are in the US, where as far as I can tell virtually every aspect of the pandemic has been politicised, with misinformation being spread by the very people who have been elected to positions of responsibility and really ought to know better. Meanwhile the rest of the world is looking on aghast as public health physicians are removed from their posts for doing their job because state governors don’t like what they are saying. I don’t think you would get quite such confusing messages if you lived elsewhere.
Though of course this disease is new and what we know about it is constantly changing as more information becomes available. It would be surprising therefore if “what the science says” didn’t change. However, it is important not to confuse the science (as published in medical journals) with how it is reported (in the popular press, by journalists who have no scientific training) and used as the basis for policies (by politicians who have their own agenda).
There are two main reasons to vaccinate:
1. To protect the person vaccinated. All of the approved vaccines appear to be very effective in preventing serious illness and death.
2. To control infection in the community. At the start of the pandemic each person on average spread the infection to 2 – 3 others, with the result that the numbers grew exponentially. Since the delta variant is more infectious it is estimated that each person now would spread it to eight others if there were no control measures in place. More or less by definition the pandemic can only end when the average number of new cases generated by each infected person is less than one. Vaccination is highly effective at reducing spread (not completely effective, as a minority of those vaccinated can still contral a mild or asymptomatic infection and spread it to others). In addition, other measures (wearing masks, washing hands, social distancing) are still required as they each make their own contribution.
Most people worldwide seem to understand this and regard it as a civic duty to be vaccinated in order to protect others. However, this does not seem to be the case in the US where perhaps the sense of responsibility to the community isn’t particularly strong.
Whatever concerns you might have about the safety of the vaccines must be balanced against the dangers of Covid itself. We know that they are not completely safe, but they are pretty safe and the probability of serious side-effects is very low. We also know that Covid kills an appreciable number of those who contract it, though the risk rises sharply with age, and to a lesser extent with various health conditions (obesity, diabetes, being male); there is also a small minority of people who are extremely vulnerable due to cancer treatment and other less common health problems. Finally, it is increasingly becoming apparent that about 10% of people contracting Covid have symptoms persisting for at least three months and in some cases much longer; these people are a different group from those most at risk of dying from the infection and on the whole are much younger.
Most importantly, the pandemic is not going to stop until nearly everybody is vaccinated.
I should also point out (as Richard has) that when a scientific paper is retracted, it is not removed from view but remains available to be read as before, but with an endorsement that it has been retracted together with the reasons why. This way the transparency required for the scientific process to work properly is maintained.
Yes, I am in the US and the information we get is very political and makes things confusing. But even with all the politics, I would say the US has done pretty well in the vaccinating category. I think we are about 49% there with 159 million fully vaccinated, other than China with 222 mil at 15% we have the most vaccinated people. Granted, we don’t have the highest rates out of all the countries, but the US has by far the best rate among the biggest countries. I think the UK with 34.8 mil at 52% is the next largest number of vaccinated that has a higher rate than the US. So not sure if I agree with you about most people worldwide seeing this as a civic duty, otherwise I would imagine vaccination rates would be much higher than the US.
Interesting facts, the UK has a lower population and higher vacination rate than the US, yet their new cases of 243K last week was higher than the US of 190K. And India with a vaccination rate of about 5% had 279K new cases last week. So Indear which is 20 x the size of the UK with 1/10 vaccination rate, yet only had 1.1 x more covid cases. So even without the politics, the numbers don’t always make sense if the vaccines are so effective…unless I am misunderstanding….seems like I have been doing that a lot lately….lol
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/weekly-trends/#weekly_table
https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations?country=OWID_WRL
I agree with the rationale to be vaccinated. I have had all the standard vaccines and had my children get the standard vaccines. So I don’t oppose vaccines or medical treatment in general. I just want to have a full (or at least better) understanding of what the risks are before taking any medical treatment to properly compare that with the risks of not taking it.
You make a good argument about balancing the risks of Covid vs the risk of the treatment. And I have read that Covid can cause scarring tissue which can lead to long term problems even for asymptomatic people, which is a reason to support mass vaccination. However, in these reports I get little details/numbers so it is hard for me to verify how big of a risk it is. So if you have any sources that go over the numbers of these cases I would appreciate it. Or any that compare risk analysis of Covid vs the vaccines as well.
As for your assertion that the pandemic won’t stop until everyone is vaccinated, not sure if this is the case. Gibraltar which is listed as having over 99% fully vacinated saw a 173% increase in cases over a 7 day period compared to the previous 7 day period. In addition looking at the top 4 vaccinated countries, 3 saw significant increases (173%, 400% and 1084%) over similar periods while only one saw a very small decrease of 3%. And on the other end, of the ten countries that saw the biggest improvement 6 of them have a vaccination rate of less than 1% with the 4 others at (47%, 36%,24% and 21%). The Congo with the best improvement is about .009% vaccination rate. So when I see numbers like these it is hard to believe the vaccines are as efective as we are told. Sources are provided above in case I am misreading them.
@Michael Moses
Unfortunately, yes – or at least its application in this context.
The ARR is not a metric of a vaccine, but says something about a (test) population. Here, it was calculated by looking at how many vaccinated test subjects in a vaccine trial contracted a Covid-19 infection at any time during the trial, and compare that to the number of infections in the unvaccinated group. Because it takes time for an infection to spread, and these trial typically run for a couple of months, relatively few people in the trial will be exposed to the virus during the trial, leading to a low baseline infection risk – thus already causing a lower ARR without taking the effects of vaccination into account.
Maybe an example with realistic numbers clarifies this:
Assume a 4-month vaccine trial involving 20,000 people, half of whom are in the vaccinated group.
During those 4 months, some 4% of participants(*) come into contact with the virus, i.e. 400 people in each group. In the unvaccinated group, all 400 people get Covid-19, whereas in the vaccinated group, 40 people get the disease. The relative risk calculation divides the two numbers, showing a vaccine efficacy of 90%. The absolute risk calculation, OTOH, subtracts the two numbers (= 360), and then divides this by the total group size, resulting in a far smaller ARR of just 3.6%. This, however, does not mean that the vaccine offers only 3.6% protection, or that people only run a (fixed) 3.6% chance of getting infected.
One very important thing to appreciate is that the ARR will increase with the time period observed: the longer an unvaccinated person walks around in a population where Covid-19 spreads, the bigger the chance that this person is eventually infected – and would have profited from the protection of vaccination. It is estimated that herd immunity will end further spread of the disease if ~80% of a population has become immune – either through vaccination or infection. If you vaccinate only 40% of a population (as you propose), then another 40% will eventually get infected, which is Not Good.
*: In the Netherlands, antibody tests in the overall population showed an increase of ~1% per month, so after 1 year, approximately 12% of the population had been infected during that time.
I understand that the ARR may change in real life settings, especialy in regards to things that are transmissable over increaseing amount of time. However, just as the risk to the vaccinated increaes over time, so does the risk to the vaccinated. So if the vaccines are effective, then the ARR should increase, if the vaccines are not effective, then the ARR may actually decrease.
So per the article I cited earlier (and below) the ARR among the Israeli population actually lowered in real life settings over a longer period of time. Now this could be anomoly because I do recall reading the ARR in the US did increase significantly. But regardless of it goes up or down it sounds like you are saying it is not a good way to assess risks or vaccine efficeintly either way.
So do you have any sources to suggest a better way to measure it other than using Efficacy, cause you must understand the flaw in that right? Using the results from the intial pfizer and moderna vaccine study, the pfizer placebo had an 80% efficacy vs the moderna placebo with severe symptoms and a 100% efficacy in deaths. However the ARR for severe cases was about .2% and about 0% for deaths. So in this example, using Efficacy you could argue one placebo is effective over another, while using the ARR you would be hard pressed to make that same argument, thus making ARR a more accurate measure for efectiveness.
And per the many numbers and sources I cited in respoinding to Dr. Money-Kyrle, hopefully you can see why some of us would be confused and question the effectiveness of these vaccines when countries with highest vaccine rates are contracting cases more than the countries with the lowest vaccine rates. Which leads us to, if the vaccines aren’t that effective then why take the risk.
The other issue which you brought up is herd immunity. Now according to our CDC approximately 114 mil of the US has gotten COVID, and 159 mil are fully vaccinated, so put them together and we have 273 mil people which gets us to ~80% and herd immunity. I know, there are a lot of overlapp between those who had Covid and those who got vaccinated, so the 273 number is not real. But my point is that if herd immunity is so important, then wouldn’t it be faster/better to identify those who already have the antibodies and then work from there? The fact that these experts are ignoring that aspect make me wonder what else are they ignoring? So how to trust the effectiveness of the vaccine, especially when the ARR are low and the numbers in the other countries don’t match up per my previous posts.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burden.html
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanmic/article/PIIS2666-5247(21)00069-0/fulltext
@Michael Moses
Sorry, but I have to seriously disagree with you again. The ARR is not a suitable metric at all for determining vaccine efficacy, as it describes infection chances for a very limited population in a very limited time frame. As already explained, the ARR will increase over time (at least in case of effective vaccines), and its definitive value can only be calculated after the fact, i.e. after the pandemic has run its course in a population, and herd immunity is established. This limited use is also why it isn’t often mentioned, and why it is useless to keep bringing it up.
This is in fact the general error that you (and Walach, and many other Covid-19 deniers) make: you try to draw general conclusions from small data sets over small periods of time in order to prove your point.
This is BTW also how global warming deniers make their point: just look at a lot of small intervals, and you will find many during which no warming is evident. Or just look at certain points on the globe (I believe the southern tip of Greenland was in vogue for a while) which show no warming for several years etc..
The solution is very simple: just look at the greater picture. Don’t base conclusions on just one or two small sets of data over just a few months, but always compare your analysis and conclusions with real world data, e.g. what population statistics and epidemiological data say. And these say that without any measures, the vast majority of people will eventually get infected with Covid-19, and that vaccination will prevent this in approximately 90% of cases.
The known risks of vaccination are several orders of magnitude lower than the known risks of contracting Covid-19. Until herd immunity is reached, most unvaccinated people will contract Covid-19 sooner or later. This means that it is by far the best strategy to vaccinate as many people as possible, including young people.
The fact that some countries show anomalous surges in infection despite high vaccination rates does not change this principle – because once again, those surges have a limited scope in numbers and time (they are, after all, anomalies), and thus are NOT the things you can to base general conclusions on.
(And oh, about antibody tests to determine who needs to be vaccinated and who don’t: not only would this triple the cost of vaccination alone (IIRC, an antibody serology test costs ~50, and most tests would still come up negative), I would not be surprised if all those blood tests also caused side effects (e.g. infection risk) comparable in number and severity to the more harmful side effects of vaccination.)
In summary, there are no good arguments against vaccination at all. It is a very effective way to prevent disease on the personal level, and prevent spread of the disease on a community level. Any risks associated with vaccination are absolutely negligible compared to the risks each and every one of us takes on a daily basis. Do you drive a car? Then just ONE Covid-19 vaccination has roughly the same risk of death that you run EVERY SINGLE DAY going out on the road.
So if you value your life, get vaccinated and stop driving …
If the vaccine is effective, then yes the ARR will increase. However, as I expained before as well, if the vaccine is not effective you will see the ARR stay the same or even decrease. So that actually sounds like a good metric to use, compare the ARR on a periodical basis and if the ARR increases over each period, then we have more evidence to support they are effective. The argument that ARR is not a definitive value doesn’t hold becuase Efficacy is not a definative value either. So we go back to, if ARR is not a good metric then what is?
You say that my conclusions are flawed because they are drawn from small, but real, data sets, while we are supposed to accept other conclusions becauses they look at the big picture, yet are based on speculative models? And for the record, the data sets I used includes hundreds of millions of people, so they are not small, nor did I make any conclusions, but rather posed legitimate questions/concerns based on real world data and population statistics which you said we should use. While you reference epidemiological models to conclude that 90% of covid cases will be prevented by the vaccine. However, Israel has just reported that half of their new covid cases are people who are fully vaccinated. So do I trust the data sets that are real, or the data sets which are modeled?
Now, if I were to cherry pick one or two countries for my argument then the anomaly argument could hold. But I cited over a dozen different countries with a wide range of populations, which includes large sets of data, along with the sources to verify I just didn’t cherry pick them, nor that they are anomolies. So to come to the conclusion that they are anomolies without any evidence is not only disengenious but also flawed reasoning.
Maybe if we were truly open minded and followed the science we could look at these countries that are unvaccinated, yet have lower rates, to explore other possible solutions? Maybe the solution involves vaccines, natural immunity and repurposed medicines vs just vaccinate everyone.
You make a good point about the cost of the blood tests, but given how much we have invested into the vaccine, not sure if that added cost would have a significant impact. Not to mention it may be offset by the cost we save by not having to vaccinate everyone. As for the side effects, you are being very disengenious in trying to compare the side effects of a blood test to a vaccine and starting to lose your credility with such disengenious statements.
As for your comparison to cars, that is a good point, but apples and oranges. We don’t have to worry about anyone telling us we have to drive. We have a better understanding of the risks of driving a car and each person(with some exceptions) chooses for themselves accordingly, even though your individual choice affects the risk of others. However with the vaccine, the choice is being taken away from many and may be taken away from everyone, yet we don’t even fully understand the risks of taking it vs not taking it. Why not take what Walach tried to do, and do it correctly so we can get a better understanding of risk/benefit.
Unfortunately it looks like you are choosing to ignore the real life data I have presented if you believe there are no good arguments as to why people may not want to take the vaccine at this time or that it may not be the most effective way (on it’s own at least) to eliminate the pandemic. To keep saying the vaccine risks are negligible is flawed because you are looking at a small period of time, which you have said is flawed reasoning. And I have cited you sources which say vaccines can have long term side effects, not to mention this is the first vaccine to use mRNA, so to compare them to prior vaccines is also flawed.
Michael Moses,
I have just spent about 45 minutes writing a detailed reply to your questions, and then accidentally closed my browser before I finished. I have to go to bed so I am afraid I am not going to rewrite it.
However:
1. When comparing statistics between countries it is important to be aware of how they are collected and what is being measured. India, for instance, with a large rural population with limited access to health care, doesn’t have the infrastructure to collect accurate epidemiological data, and it is well recognised that the official Covid statistics are a massive underestimate.
2. Different Covid variants behave differently, particularly with regard to how easily they are transmitted and therefore how much they spread. In the UK, for instance, 99% of new cases are the highly transmissable delta variant; I believe the proportion is much lower in the US. Many of the recent rises in numbers appear to result from the delta variant becoming established in various parts of the world.
3. The vaccines all give very good protection against serious illness and death, but they don’t necessarily prevent infection. In particular, although a single dose prevents infection with earlier strains of the virus, it has much less effect against the delta strain, and two doses are required, therefore. Even then, it only gives 70 – 80% protection against contracting (and therefore transmiting) the infection, depending upon age, which vaccine and how long the interval is between the doses.
4. Vaccinating nearly everybody is going to be necessary to bring the pandemic to an end, but on its own it won’t be sufficient. Other infection control measures will continue to be necessary.
5. It isn’t practical to test for antibodies before vaccinating, and the vaccine appears to give better protection than having the infection does, so the advice is to vaccinate regardless of whether there is a previous history of Covid. Also antibody levels don’t tell you anything about T-cell or B-memory cell response.
6. With regard to Long Covid, if you can you should read the 26th June edition of New Scientist, which carries a number of articles discussing long-term effects of the infection. About 10% of people contracting the infection still have symptoms of some kind three months later, persisting much longer in some cases. These can range from permanent scarring of the lungs, reduction in kidney function and brain damage in people with serious illness to persistent and disabling fatigue in those with milder initial infections. Women are more susceptible than men, and many young people are affected, so the risk factors for long covid are not the same as they are for serious illness and death.
7. With regard to herd immunity, what is required in order to end the pandemic is for each case to infect fewer than one other person on average (also referred to as R <1). If we rely on herd immunity alone, it is fairly straightforward to calculate what proportion need to be immune either as a result of previous infection or from being vaccinated. You need to start with the number of people infected by each case when no other control measures are in place (this number is called R0). When the pandemic started this was 2 or 3 (i.e. R0 = 2.5). You take the reciprocal of this number and subtract it from 1 to get the proportion that need to be immune for R to fall to less than 1, which gives you 1-2/5 = 60%. Since the vaccine (or previous infection) does not give 100% protection then the proportion needed to be vaccinated is a bit higher, say 70%.
However, the delta variant is much more easily transmitted, and it has been estimated that R0 is about 8. Therefore the proportion required for herd immunity is 1 – 1/8 or about 88%. Given that some people either can't be vaccinated or don't respond to it (e.g. as a result of cancer treatment) then this means that well over 90% need to be vaccinated for herd immunity to be effective.
8. For most people the risks from Covid-19 are so much higher than from the vaccines that vaccination is a no-brainer. However, when it comes to children the numbers are different. It is very rare for a child to become seriously ill from Covid or to die, and in nearly every case there has been an underlying serious health condition. Therefore rare serious adverse events (1 in 100,000) start to enter the equation. However, children can go on to infect adults who may become much more seriously ill or die. It such an adult is the child's parent or care-giver (or teacher, perhaps) then this is also indirectly harmful to the child. So the risk/benefit ratio is not a straightforward calculation.
I have ended up spending another 30 minutes on this which wasn't my intention. I hope you find it helpful.
Sorry that I could not benefit from your detailed reply and do appreciate your effort and time to still give a response. However, your responses are mostly vague talking points which does little to convince me of how effective these vaccines are.
1. Granted countries have different metrics, but to suggest India’s metric is off 20 fold doesn’t seem right. And though countries may vary in their method of collecting data, the country itself should be consistent in their method which would not explain why the percents are the way they are if the vaccines are so effective. India had 8% decrease while the UK had a 33% increase.
2. Again, the default of variants is just another talking point. Granted UK has more of the variant strand, but US has almost 5 times more people. Current reports have the variant at over 50% of US cases. So 100% of 68 million is still way less than 50% of 333 million, yet UK still has more cases. Now, looking at the growth rate, the US has an increase of 69% compared the UK rate of 33%, so you could make a decent argument that eventually the US will surpass UK, but not a fan of speculative arguments. Now, even with the US having a higer increase rate of cases they have a lower death rate increase (17%) compared to UK (48%). And Inda’s (-10%). Again, I understand metrics vary, but that doesn’t explain the discrepency in percentage change nor why the delta variant which is more contagous but less lethal caused UK to have higher death rates, if the vaccines are so effective.
3. Again, if the vaccines give very good protection, then why the discrepency in numbers.
4. Saying we need to vacicnate everyone does not make it true if the vaccines aren’t that effective. I gave you actual real life numbers where over 99% of the people are vaccinated and they saw a rise in cases. And I gave you real life numbers with almost 0% vaccinated and they see lower numbers. Shouldn’t the science tell us that maybe we should spend more time looking at those countries with low rates for possible solution that might be more effective than the vaccines? https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.26.21254377v1
5. Not practical to lockdown an entire country, but many did anyways. Yes, on paper the vaccine appears to give better protection than previous infection, but are there any real life numbers or studies to actually support this? And your right about the Antibodies, so that is a realistic dilema, but by most reports those antibodies from initial infection are still present.
6. Unfortunately I could not access the article you cited without a paid subscription. Regardless, I agree that Long Covid is a serious concern. But since we don’t have any reports on how the vaccine does in terms of Long Covid, not sure if it is fair to use as an argument. Especially when the real life numbers actually question the effectiveness of the vaccine in the first place. Israel which has an even higher rate of vaccination than the UK and is dealing with the similar rates of the delta variant as the UK has a smaller population, yet more number of cases and a bigger increase in rates both for cases and deaths. Note that half of those new cases were with people fully vaccinated.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/vaccinated-people-account-for-half-of-new-covid-19-delta-cases-in-israeli-outbreak-11624624326
7. I think most people understand the concept of herd immunity, though not neccessarily the math behind it. And though you say it is easy to calculate, our experts aren’t able to do it. Instead we are told somewhere between 70 – 90%, don’t need a science degree to come up with that. I think they have settled on the 70% number, but not sure if that is actually based on any science. And you say that previous infection does not give you 100% protection, but where is the science behind that? Cases are very rare and by most accounts I have found they couldn’t even determine if they were actual re-infections.
8. I tend to agree with you that for many people taking the Covid 19 is worth it. And we seem to agree that for certain people, such as chidlren, it becomes much more complicated to assess the risks. And though I don’t always agree with the civic duty argument for adults I at least understand it. I do not understand the argument that children have a civic duty to put themselves at risk. I always thought the adults had the civic duty to protect the children first?
Again I thank you for your time and responses. And though we may not agree, hopefully you can at least understand why some people have legitimate cause to not want to take the vaccine at this time.
@Michael Moses
You are wrong again. There is no legitimate cause for declining vaccination at this time. Any risks associated with vaccination are several orders of magnitude smaller than the risks associated with Covid-19 infection, even for children.
There are only bad reasons to decline vaccination, exclusively based on misinformation, lies and stupidity, of which Walach is an exponent.
Don’t get me wrong: it is everyone’s right to decide not to get vaccinated. But then it is my right to consider that a foolish and/or antisocial choice. Because those are the people who keep spreading the disease.
@Richard Rasker
“Because those are the people who keep spreading the disease.”
Of course, most of the time (at least in US) those are the same people who refuse to social distance and comply with mask mandates. At present we are seeing the results of this idiocy firsthand in some US states and counties with low vaccination rates.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/13/covid-cases-rise-in-us-counties-with-low-vaccination-rates-as-delta-variant-spreads.html.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/07/17/us/delta-variant-us-growth.html
With all those freedumb loving unvaccinated human petri-dishes running around without masks, it is just a matter of time a new variant emerges that the existing will not be able to control effectively.
@ Michael Moses.
Wow…just wow.
Great post, I echo your sentiments completely.
You continue where I had given up (here)
However, you stated everything much better than I ever did.
I look forward to reading more of your thoughts.
this is what the BMJ reported about this case:
https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n1726?utm_source=etoc&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=tbmj&utm_content=weekly&utm_term=20210716
@ Michael Moses
Did I tell you that I appreciate reading your point of view.
Please keep posting, you’re adding much to the conversation here.
@Listener
Yes, I’m beginning to see the advantages of spreading FUD about the purported risks of vaccination – especially from a Darwinian point of view:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/utahs-republican-governor-said-anti-064948679.html
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/florida-20-percent-covid-cases-vaccination-misinformation_n_60f24efbe4b0d5140ec005bb
https://www.businessinsider.com/sister-of-anti-vaxxer-died-covid-19-people-shots-2021-7
https://www.yahoo.com/news/alarming-surge-covid-19-cases-201412713.html
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/anti-vaccine-republican-states-1183585/
Hundreds of Americans die from Covid-19 EVERY SINGLE DAY. In stark contrast, vaccination causes the death of perhaps one or two persons per week – and that is a very rough estimate, because these deaths are extremely rare.
Yet despite my rather cynical opening remark and the fact that > 90% of those who now contract Covid-19 are in fact unvaccinated people who support and spread this misinformation, I really, really wish that they come to their senses instead of die. People should not die for something as stupid as political polarization.
There have always been martyrs willing to die for a cause.
The problem here is that many of those who are dying because they were scared about vaccination are not voluntary martyrs, but in fact tried to avoid harm and death – it’s just that they listened to the wrong people.
Which, in my opinion, makes it all the worse …
I expect that is true of a great many martyrs historically.
@Richard Rasker
Sir, i will repeat again. I had a case of Covid-19 last December, and very likely that I contracted it from my wife, who contracted it from her (adult) daughter. So my first point is, public distancing and masks will only prevent transmission so much, because once inside the home, the virus will find a way to spread when defenses are down.
I was vaccinated with Janssen vaccine in March…. along with my wife. Now, weren’t we good little compliant boys and girls to fall in line with the vaccination program … and OBEY ?
I now use Ivermectin as a prophylactic measure…. and yes, I have more confidence in Ivermectin than the vaccine. Why ? … because the Ivermectin success rates surpass the vaccine rates.
Yet why am I considered anti-vax if I took the vaccine ???? …. please do tell. Because I’m not in love with the vaccine concept ? Because I believe that individuals should have a choice about their medical decisions ?
US annual compliance for the annual flue is only 48% compliance…. why doesn’t anybody scream and kick about that ? … and why is it that less than fifty percent want a vaccine annually ? hmmm.
My answer is this, that the perception that vaccines are not completely safe. Please make them safe by removing the toxic ingredients… and then more patients will be accepting of injecting toxic substance directly into their blood stream.
And, by the way, I am willing to die, but it has little to do with politics and more with living life. Does anybody doubt that there will not arrive more covid-19 variants ? … hmmm.
I’ve had the virus, I’ve vaccinated myself, I use a preventative measure. However I’m not interested in hiding in my home, or living my life behind a face mask for the rest of my days…. if it happens that I die…. then I die. I refuse to attempt to hide from a virus for my remaining days.
Look, you do what’s best for you, and let me choose what’s best for me.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/jul/16/huge-study-supporting-ivermectin-as-covid-treatment-withdrawn-over-ethical-concerns
@EE
That is an amusing article you reference in your link… professor.
Ill point this out first. The studies that condemn Ivermectin to failure are those studies paid for my big phama that have a motivation to see that it fails. Thousands of MD’s world wide accept the efficacy of Ivermectin as a remedy for Covid-19, that is no coincidence in my view.
The article you site says that Ivermectin withdrawn over ethical concerns. However, they refrain from specifying what those “ethical concerns” were…. hmmm, why the hush hush ?
I find it quit interesting that Ivermectin has been dosed four billion times over many decades, but suddenly it is “dangerous”, or has ethical issues. These authorities restricting Ivermectin are the ones that should be accused and blamed for “KILLING” people, not anti-vaxers… and not right wing politicians.
Listener,
If you read beyond the first sentence you will find the answer later on in the same article, which goes on to explain the shortcomings of the study in detail.
It is not ivermectin that has ethical issues, but the fraudulent study claiming to show that it is effective against Covid.
Four billion doses sounds like a lot for a drug that most people would never have cause to take. Are you sure of your numbers? Are you including vetinary used, for instance?
It has been prescribed widely and for many years as an antihelminthic agent. The toxicity is well-established and documented in the data sheet and prescribing information.
More generally:
I am not very clear why Ivermectin is being promoted for Covid in the absence of any evidence showing its efficacy, though it has got me thinking some more about why people believe things. It seems to me that most people don’t make up their minds on the basis of evidence. For a long time I thought that people accepted ideas because they were appealing, but I think probably what convinces people is a good story. If a story fits what they already know (or think they know) and explains everything in a way that they can understand, and is also a good story, then most people will accept it without thinking to question it or critically examine its basis. Evidence doesn’t really come into it at all.
If you think of anything where there is a very large element of chance, such as the outcome of a horse race, people will always have an explanation (after the event) as to why things turned out the way they did. Why did a particular horse win or lose? The conditions that day suited it, the trainer had some secret method, the jockey had particular experience of that racecourse etc. etc… However, if this were all true then it would be reasonably straightforward to predict the winner in advance and bookmakers would be out of a job.
Evidence is required by doctors, scientists and Courts of Law, but for everybody else it seems to be something that is best ignored. I am amazed that the human race has got as far as it has, though perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that it is now on course for destroying itself.
“Look, you do what’s best for you, and let me choose what’s best for me.”
presumably, that also applies to smoking; it’s fine at home but not in public places.
@EE
Professor. need I remind you that exhaling cigarette or cigar smoke in public is not the same as… exhaling air in public.
thank you for this revellation
@Listener
You are on the right track here. Scientifically speaking, the chances of viral transmission from an infected to a non-infected person is a mathematical function more or less looking like this:
P(transmission) = (ViralInfectiousness * ContactTime * NumberOfInfectionsCloseBy * VocalActivityLevel) / (PersonalDistance * AircoEfficiency * MaskProtectionLevel)
No doubt I missed a few factors, but this is about the principle: anything that increases the numerator increases infection chances, and anything that increases the denominator diminishes those chances. If you spend a lot of time indoor with an infected person at close range, this hugely increases the chances of getting infected. Unfortunately, even a lot of good measures to prevent infection can be annulled by a far more infectious viral variant (e.g. the Delta variant at this moment). And, of course, most of the actual numbers in this formula are uncertain.
Still, the events here in the Netherlands clearly show that the whole package of measures (social distancing + obligatory face masks in public places + lockdown of cafes, pubs and concert venues etc.) worked quite well – only a few weeks ago, we were down to only a few hundred new cases per day.
Within mere days of abandoning almost all measures, the number of infections started to rise at an unprecedented rate, peaking at the current rate of 10,000 per day at this moment. This is a 50-fold increase in infection rates in just 10 days.
These developments also clearly show that vaccinations work very well: some 90% of new Covid-19 cases are among unvaccinated people, and those who were previously vaccinated but still contracted the disease (the already expected ~10% ‘vaccine failure’) mostly had far milder symptoms.
This has nothing to do with ‘obeying’ or ‘being good little compliant boys and girls’ – you followed sensible, science-based advice. Scientists are not out to have people ‘obey’ them. Scientists just try to find out what is real in our world and what isn’t, and apply that knowledge to practical problems (e.g. ‘How do we best prevent millions of deaths from a novel virus?’)
I can only laud you for making the right decision to trust our scientists – as history has shown that scientists are the people you can rely on most for good, truthful advice. Far more than e.g. politicians, corporate entities and other parties whose goal is not to find truth, but further their own cause. Sure, scientists make mistakes too, and can sometimes be corrupted. After all, they’re people. But overall, they are among the most trustworthy people you can find on this planet.
Then you have been seriously misinformed. Ivermectin has not been found to prevent Covid-19 infection, and it is most certainly not as effective as the vaccine. However in your case, this point should be moot anyway: not only did you live through a Covid-19 infection, you also got the vaccine. Which should make it pretty certain that you are not susceptible to the virus any more.
You mean the annual flu vaccine? There are several reasons why lower compliance is less of an urgent problem there:
– The flu doesn’t kill millions of Americans every year, even in the absence of any special measures instituted for Covid-19. If completely unchecked, Covid-19 would kill approximately 3-4 million Americans if left free to roam through the population without any measures and without vaccines.
– The flu vaccine has a relatively low efficacy of some 50%. The best Covid-19 vaccines are 90% effective, which means that they can really make a difference.
Well, formally speaking you are right: vaccines are not completely safe. There is always a chance of an anaphylactic reaction or other immune-triggered response that could cause serious problems and even death. BUT … the chances of these things happening are extremely small, as in one in a million or ten million or so. Far more people die from just falling out of bed in an unlucky accident – or any other cause of death you may want to look up. Getting vaccinated is without doubt one of the safest things you can do in your life – especially given that remaining unvaccinated usually comes with a much higher risk, even on the personal level.
To my knowledge, there are no toxic ingredients in any vaccines. Could you name some of those toxic ingredients, including information that they are actually toxic in the amount present? (As anything can be toxic in high enough doses.)
Once again: vaccines contain no toxic substances, otherwise they would never be approved for use in healthy humans. Also, vaccines are not injected into the bloodstream but in muscle tissue, but this is just a minor inaccuracy. Even if vaccines were injected into the bloodstream, I don’t think that would be detrimental to the recipient in any way.
I completely share your sentiments. Nobody wanted this virus, and nobody wanted all the measures to try and prevent spreading it, or even the vaccine that protects against it.
Unfortunately, the virus is a reality, and had we done nothing about it, then far more people would have died.
And even more unfortunately, some American politicians are abusing this pandemic and are attacking its most effective countermeasures for political gain, completely ignoring the inevitable fact that their extremely stupid and ill-informed actions will cost lives.
I couldn’t agree more. But about your choice: would you prefer a scientifically informed choice, or a choice that is based on what you hear from politicians or other people who care more about their own agenda than about the actual truth?
I do not have much time to properly respond to all the comments this weekend, but will get to them on Monday. However, I find it very disappointed that it seems like you are dismissing my concerns as political bias and the “misinformation” of an anit-vaxxer(reminder I and my kids have all gotten our standard vaccines so I believe in vaccines). I am an average guy with average intelligence who has presented factual evidence to explain why I have concern. Maybe I am wrong, I am not going to assume I am infallible, for example you have helped me to see the flaws in Walach paper. However, to dismiss all the concerns I have brought up with factual evidence as being anomalies is wrong. Sorry that I just don’t take your word for it. And then you finally post evidence to support vaccines and give 5 articles from the US. Yet, even with these surges the US still has less cases than the UK and Israel which have higher vaccination rates during the same time period. So is US the anomaly or am I to assume both the UK and Israel are the anomalies? And 3 of these articles you gave are highly opinionated with little factual evidence. 1 of them actually cites Los Angeles as a location of one of the surges and they have about 83% vaccination rate. The only thing that really supports your argument is that they say 97% of the hospitals are people who are unvaccinated, yet they don’t tell us anymore. For example, how many of that 97% are younger than 50 or healthy? Talk about misinformation, give us the whole truth and maybe so many people won’t be uncertain or have fears. I am a supported of those who are at risk getting the vaccine the whole time. My concern is low risk getting the vaccine and nothing you have given as evidence has supported them getting the vaccine.
@ Listener,
Thank you, but keep in mind my point of view is just that, an opinion based on what I can read and follow. So I encrouage you to make sure you read through the sources I have cited along with those of countering views and make the best decision you can for yourself.
@EE
Ahhhh … yes.
However, the “woke” authorities do want to limit my right to exhale air in public places.
@Listener
Unlike EE and his ilk, you are a breath of fresh air around here. You are the only one who is not in the pockets of big-pharma and speaks truth to woke culture warriors.
In one of your earlier posts, I see that you were lamenting about why people think you are an anti-vaxxer. I have got some advice for you Listener! You should proudly wear that anti-vaxxer badge. I have been doing the same since this pandemic started. I did not get vaccinate and never will. Every time I go out in public, I don’t wear a mask and I make it a point to lick door handles and even have a couple of strangers cough on my face. Despite all that, I am in perfect health and was never diagnosed with covid-19. Guess what, I do not take Ivermectin either! You might be wondering how a person who licks door handles every day in public never caught covid. I will let you in on my secret Listener! Are you paying attention? It is called cowpathy! I bet you never heard of it, that is because big-pharma doesn’t want you to know! Get ready to have your mind blown to smitherines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKBFtOB86Js
@Honest-Ape
You are correct, I had never heard of cowpathy. nor witnessed in action…. very informative video.
To each their own. If cowpathy pleases them, then who am I to poo-poo it.
Personally, I don’t need cowpathy, nor pharma meds. I subscribe to good health via healthy food and exercise, combined with fasting. Intermittent fasting combined with proper food selection will cure or avoid MANY a chronic illness.
The world is full of diabetics and obese people…. many of them living from meal to meal on toxic foods, after eating they wash down the meal with pharma meds to attempt to cure what ails them.
The pandemic is evidence of a sickened world population. Healthier countries like Japan weathered the covid storm better.
Again, to each their own. We live and die by our choices in the life.
Some bath in poo, others lick door knobs. I eat real food, at regimented intervals. Furthermore, the people I know doing the same thing are also in good health. I’ll stick with what I know is working.
I’l leave the door handle licking for you.
@Listener,
You are welcome! I know you would find the video very informative. After all we are cut from the same cloth buddy!
Totally agree with you on the fact that no one needs pharma, but that didn’t seem to stop you from getting vaccinated or use ivermectin. Did you know vaccines and ivermectin are both manufactured by pharma? For someone like yourself who believes in not taking toxins into one’s body, I find it surprising that you are sold on ivermectin. I guess big pharma always get its way one way or another..sigh!
You know what! the cowpathy people in that video are pretty healthy too, you can see that for yourself and one of them even swears by the fact that cow dung contains B12. Even better cowpathy uses all-natural ingredients, no chemicals or toxins, none of that $h1t. But hey, like you said we all have our own ways of surviving and I respect your decision to stick with ivermectin aka big pharma for now. But if you ever want to kick big pharma to the curb, cowpathy will be there for you. I am happy to hook you up with raw material if you need, I do charge a small finders fee though 😉
@ Honest-Ape
I think you might be going from one extreme to another. We need phramacetical companies just like we need governments. But we need them to be smaller, honest and more accountable. For example, as great as your cowpathy and healthy eating may be, I would imagine most(if not all) people would want anesthesia if a surgery is needed after a sever car accident. And though some could go without pain medicine, I think most people would want at least some when recovering from intensive surgeries. And by most account, vaccines have helped to eliminate many dangerous viruses such as small pox. So we could go through the gambit of all the theories of how medicines can do more harm, some of which I agree with, I still beleive that when used responsibly, the benefit to most medicines far outweight the harm.
@Michael Moses
You are my hero! I read everything you wrote on here and a big fan. I haven’t had a chance to respond to your posts yet but I am glad and honored that you have responded to mine. I appreciate your concern my friend! but I don’t think I am going to extremes. All I am doing is surviving without relying on pharma. I only use natural products, like humans did for centuries before big pharma came into existence.
It is way too long to quote here but I agree with everything you said about scientists in your post dated Monday 19 July 2021 at 18:37 . Guess what, the scientists the ones who run big pharma, they invent the drugs, they sit on the boards of pharma companies that market those drugs. There is no such thing as small honest accountable pharma company. If pharma companies are being dishonest, who is going to keep them under check? Feds?
Here is what the Feds says about using ivermectin to treat Coivd-19: https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/why-you-should-not-use-ivermectin-treat-or-prevent-covid-19
• FDA has not approved ivermectin for use in treating or preventing COVID-19 in humans. Ivermectin tablets are approved at very specific doses for some parasitic worms, and there are topical (on the skin) formulations for head lice and skin conditions like rosacea. Ivermectin is not an anti-viral (a drug for treating viruses).
• Taking large doses of this drug is dangerous and can cause serious harm.
• If you have a prescription for ivermectin for an FDA-approved use, get it from a legitimate source and take it exactly as prescribed.
• Never use medications intended for animals on yourself. Ivermectin preparations for animals are very different from those approved for humans.
Moreover, ivermectin was developed by Merck, one of the biggest pharma companies in the world and guess what! Below is what Merck says and they are in agreement with the Feds: https://www.merck.com/news/merck-statement-on-ivermectin-use-during-the-covid-19-pandemic/
• No scientific basis for a potential therapeutic effect against COVID-19 from pre-clinical studies;
• No meaningful evidence for clinical activity or clinical efficacy in patients with COVID-19 disease, and;
• A concerning lack of safety data in the majority of studies.
I think you will agree with me that Feds and big pharma are in cahoots with each other. If you look at the other side of this ivermectin debate, there are these so-called scientists (like Prof. Harald and ilk) that are saying (without presenting any evidence by the way!!) ivermectin can treat covid-19 effectively and vaccines are not safe. Like you said earlier, scientists are untrustworthy, they don’t answer your questions nor provide you with enough information. If you express your concern, they dismiss them and accuse you of spreading misinformation. They are all corrupt and in it for the money!! Regardless of whether they are in support of ivermectin or not, pro-vaccine or not, one cannot trust any of those so-called scientists.
That is why my friend, I don’t bother with any of this big pharma nonsense, whether they are vaccines or pain killer or opioids etc. I don’t even bother to post belligerent, long-winded; conspiracy laden, nonsensical rants using intentionally misrepresented data and accuse everyone and their mother for keeping you in the dark about the so-called scientific evidence that you will never in your life bother to read or understand. Rather than waste my time flinging poo at these so-called scientists, I just stick with using what nature has already given us i.e., cowpathy. I wish more people like you who suspect scientists of conspiring, start rolling around in cow dung as prescribed by cowpathy. It is truly a cure for everything that ails humanity!!! Whether you want to take the poo-pill or the pharma-pill is up to you Moses!!
@Honest-Ape
I’m pretty sure we are nothing of the “same cloth”.
You bring up a couple points I will address.
Pharma meds.
I have used them (mostly regrettably) and will continue to use them as needed. Infection (antibiotics), possibly for vaccines (as needed). Short term use… as in short term pain relief for severe pain (including short term steroids). Covid-19 prophylaxis.
I plan to stay far from any meds designed to take long term for chronic illnesses.
Generally my health is good… fortunately.
I got vaccinated because I want to continue traveling, and I was wrong assuming that a passport vaccine would be coming sooner than later, so far I’m wrong…. time will tell. I also am confident that eventually the vaccines will be required to participate in “life” going forward. I did NOT take the Covid-19 vaccine because I felt I needed it. The vaccine I accepted is only stated to be 72% effective, that leaves some room for failure. Had I waned to vaccine to protect me from illnesses, would I not have opted for a vaccine with a higher efficacy ?
So my preferred vaccine of choice was for old vaccine technology, as opposed to the mRNA. Ideally, I take no vaccines, but again, everything evaluated on it’s individual basis.
I took the shingles vaccine last year.
Did I want a dose of thimerosal ? which happens to be a two shot vaccine… so a double dose, no not exactly. Some shingles vaccines are only 50% effective, and the side effects can be somewhat risky. A good friend of mine shared with me after I already accepted the vaccine that he also took the shingles vaccine and afterward he developed a detached retina… a known side effect. He did not investigate prior to taking the vaccine, but he told me had he known the efficacy rates and the potential side effects… he would NOT have opted to take the vaccine.
The use of Ivermectin for me results from observing known cases in my sphere of people who used it successfully against Covid-19. Prior to that, I was not aware of Ivermectin, nor would have ever thought of taking it. Once I began to read on know more about the drug, I opened myself up to consider the option of using it myself mostly due to the fact that the side-effects are very minimal. If a pharma drug is non-invasive (like Ivermectin) and few are, then in my view, the efficacy rates can be more questionable…. as they are scientifically with Ivermectin. Where Ivermectin got my attention is the fact that thousands of MD’s worldwide are using the drug on patients as they have witnessed for themselves good success.
It is true that generally I oppose pharma drugs, however, my openness to Ivermectin stems from an unmet need worldwide for a solution to covid-19 illnesses. Remdesiver has NOT been proven to be very effective against covid-19… in spite of FDA approval… and that approval long after the unmet need continued. Furthermore, the cost of Remdesivir is prohibitive to much of the world population. So other than oxygen, what are the therapeutics for covid-19 ? So the unmet need also opens the door for some experimentation.
I’ll accept an occasional “toxin” in my body via pharma meds the same as I’ll occasionally accept a high sugar dessert or an alcoholic drink. However, I choose to not live life day to day on such toxins… that’s just me, your milage may vary.
So, how frequently do I use Ivermectin ? …. only if I’m going to be traveling, or if I feel any flu virus symptoms. I’m far from living life on pharma meds.
@Listener
You repeatedly use anecdotes to inform your decision making (see examples I quoted below), so do I. There is nothing wrong in doing so, I am just pointing out that we both do it.
“A good friend of mine shared with me after I already accepted the vaccine that he also took the shingles vaccine and afterward he developed a detached retina….”
“The use of Ivermectin for me results from observing known cases in my sphere of people who used it successfully against Covid-19….”
I relied on anecdotes from my neighbors and friends to finally decide on cowpathy because it has been in existence for thousands of years in India and a lot of people successfully used it all thru history and still using it to ward of nasty diseases. The fact that we end up with a different set of conclusions doesn’t make us different, it is the reliance on anecdotes in our decision-making process is what makes us a lot similar than you want to admit.
There is no doubt about the fact that we both agree that pharma companies are bad and peddle toxins. A minor difference is that you want to rely on pharma when it is convenient for you, under the guise of individual choice (plus some mental gymnastics), at the same time you are opposed to letting other people make their own choice.
“I was wrong assuming that a passport vaccine would be coming sooner than later, so far I’m wrong…. time will tell. I also am confident that eventually the vaccines will be required to participate in life going forward.”
You are in support of vaccine passports and exclusion of unvaccinated from general day-to-day life, all because they (the unvaccinated) made an individual choice to not get vaccinated. This amounts to forced vaccinations for people like me (who do not want to rely on big-pharma) who just want to “live and die by our choices in the life.” as you said so yourself.
People like us should stick together in rejecting big-pharma. If you keep making exceptions for this and that then there is a real danger of sellout to big-pharma.
@ Dr. Julian & Richard Rasker
It is getting late here and I have neither the time nor energy to respond tonight, and likely I may not find time tomorrow to respond either.
In the meantime, I suggest educating yourself on the Ivermectin facts. If you take the time to read this “scientific” information provided by the NCBI, you just might come away with a different view of Ivermectin. I’ve done my research, and I’m convinced…. you take the time yourselves.
Yes Doctor Julian, four billion doses worldwide since inception…. not counting the animals.
And yes, the drug was perhaps initially created and still used to kill parasites….. however, guess what ? … some antihelminthic drugs are effective against viruses and other small critters also…. you better investigate that while you’re at it.
Merck was all in on Ivermectin for decades till the drug went off patient, and the pandemic came along. Forget the damn RCT trials, they are biased Ivermectin has been tested in vivo for decades.
So are alcohol and vinegar and all kinds of other stuff that you can throw at them in a lab. 🙄
alcohol works: I had 2 glasses of wine yesterday and am still COVID-free.
I did not forget to post the NCBI link, i just couldn’t get my computer to copy and paste the link without restarting my computer….. urgh !
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3043740/
@Listener
[snip Ivermectin as a ‘wonder drug’]
The article you quote describes the indeed highly beneficial effects of Ivermectin in treating infections with parasites, and it is quite an interesting read.
However, no mention at all is made of any antiviral properties, so I am a bit puzzled as to why you think this supports your belief that it can prevent Covid-19 or any other viral disease. What we know at the moment is that Ivermectin only becomes effective as an antiviral agent at far higher doses than used to get rid of parasites.
But even if, for the sake of argument, we assume that it does prevent Covid-19 as you claim, then this still poses several problems:
– Do you suggest that people who are not immune to Covid-19 should take this medicine indefinitely? I personally don’t think it is a good idea to medicate healthy(!) people for months or years on end – especially given that it is fully unclear what this medicine does in the long run, as it has never been tested for chronic use.
– Also consider the cost: from what I can find, one adult treatment dose of Ivermectin costs several dollars. When people take 2 doses per week, that is a significant extra expense, especially for poorer people. And this is even without taking into account the point above that antiviral use requires far higher doses of this pharmaceutical than would be prescribed for antiparasitic treatment.
I’d say that on both points, vaccines do a far better job: just one or two shots provide long-term immunity to most people, and those two shots cost about the same as only a few weeks’ worth of Ivermectin use.
@Richard Rasker
Richard, if not for the many many MD’s putting their reputations on the line behind Ivermectin, I would be more doubtful. That said, despite Ivermectin being known as an anti-parasitic drug, it can also serve as anti-viral..
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32533071/
I would agree that the self-dosing of unqualified patients becomes a problem when people get sick or die from attempting to self-medicate. You tell me, how much is too much medication to treat covid-19 virus, or better yet, how much is the maximum dosing regimen while staying in the safe zone ?
“Do I suggest that people that are not Immune to Covid-19 take Ivermectin indefinitely ?”
No, however, many an MD or people that work in the medical field where exposure to Covid-19 is high are doing just that. I myself don’t feel good about do so, nor do I.(since as you pointed out it has not been tested for long term use).
The cost of Ivermectin in India and Mexico are as low as eleven cents per dose. It doesn’t get much more inexpensive than that.
ivermectin use began more than year ago…. long before any vaccines were available. Still today people are waiting and lining up all over the world to obtain their vaccines So when nothing else is available, then patients will go with what is available. Is the vaccine better, perhaps yes and perhaps no. One thing for sure the vaccines are all still EUA , this is because they have not been fully tested long and hard enough to give full approval. I saw read recently where some Authorities were pushing the FDA to give their stamp of approval so more people would take the vaccines. Governments joining hands with Corporations …. corny capitalism at it’s worst.
@Listener
Those many MD’s are most likely wrong. Positive studies were found to be seriously flawed or even fraudulent, and virtually all high-quality studies came up negative.
If you feel better using the stuff even though you are almost certainly immune by now, fine with me – you have received all and any information that can contribute to making a choice about this. It is up to you to decide which information to believe and which to ignore. But as long as Ivermectin has not been found effective in independent high-quality trials, you should not promote its use to other people.
@Richard Rasker
I believe the best confidence against covid-19 can be gained not from previous infections (due to variants). Not from vaccines, for the same reason…variants. Not to mention that no vaccine is 100% effective, and some much less than that. Israel is only experiencing about 60% efficacy with patients that have been vaccinate (evidently due to variants). Nor do I completely trust in Ivermectin. The best defense is a healthy body, strive to be as healthy as possible. After all, don’t we know that those who die from covid-19 are those with underlying health conditions ? …. I think so.
To those who might be interested to eat better for good health. I recommend the book “Why We Get Sick”….. by Dr. Benjamin Bikman PhD.
No, we don’t. On the whole, underlying health conditions account for a minority of Covid deaths.
The main risk factor for death from Covid is age, with the chance of dying if you become infected roughly doubling with each additional 5 years; since this is an exponential rise, it means that a 70-year-old has roughly 1,000 times the chance of dying if he becomes infected than a 20-year-old does. This applies to individuals who are otherwise healthy, and most of those who have already died are estimated to have had years of useful life ahead of them otherwise.
Another risk factor is sex, since men are twice as likely to die from it as women. Put another way, the increased risk from being male is equivalent to that of being five years older.
While lifestyle can influence other risk factors, such as obesity, there are other pre-existing conditions which are not particularly affected by lifestyle choices. Nor can lifestyle change your biological sex or your age.
Perhaps I am misreading your meaning of “underlying health conditions account for a minority of Covid deaths” but by most reports I have read about 95% of hopsital cases and 94% of deaths are people with at least one underlying health condition.
https://www.cdc.gov/pcd/issues/2021/21_0123.htm
https://www.jems.com/news/cdc-report-underlying-conditions-94-percent-covid-19-deaths/
You are right that lifesyle can’t change your age or sex, but at this point I don’t think we have any evidence to suggest that age and sex aren’t just a correalation. But to your point, I agree that there are pre-existing conditions that we have very little or no control over. This is why I do support vaccines and other medical treatments, so people can disucss their situation with a doctor they trust and decide if a vaccine or other option is best for them with the given information available.
@Dr. Julian
Thanks for bringing up age doctor. Age and underlying conditions do matter.
My step-parents are 80 & 90 years old with no underlying conditions. They did get covid symptoms, and they did test positive…. but they also used Ivermectin, and they are both doing just fine now. They continue taking Ivermectin regimen every three weeks because they run a business and are exposed daily to the public.
I also have a 43 year old step-daughter who is mildly obese (after having her fourth and fifth child at 40 & 41 years old.
She contracted covid -19 and was at the point that some of the family were talking of taking her to the hospital emergency. She had a resting heart rate of 126, combined with a blood oxygen reading of 82 (and going the wrong way rapidly). We administered the ivermectin immediately, we continued monitoring her through the night, by morning all of her vitals had returned to almost normal. ( 85 heart rate and 94 oxygen)
Michael Moses,
You have only to look at any data from 2020 breaking down the mortality from covid in any country to realise that age is a very strong risk factor of death that that dwarfs all the others. This was established early on in the pandemic beyond any doubt, and is one of the reasons why the mortality differs between countries with different age structures. The situation is somewhat different now, at least in the UK where I live, as the vast majority of the elderly at-risk have now been vaccinated, so that those who are currently being hospitalised and dying are younger than they were last year, and more of them have underlying health conditions (some of which reduce the effectiveness of vaccination).
Roughly speaking, having an underlying health condition doubles the risk of serious illness and death from covid. Having an age of 70, compared with being 20, increases the risk by a factor of about 1,000.
The fact that you have managed to miss the significance of this suggests to me that you have very little understanding at all of how the pandemic is behaving. This makes it difficult for me to know how to pitch any answers to your questions. I feel as though I am trying to explain jet-lag to somebody who believes that the earth is flat and who has never considered the possibility that anybody might think differently.
Listener,
What happened to your relatives is anecdotal and is not necessarily representative of the population as a whole. My grandparents on my father’s side both smoked, and lived to be 82 and 89. That does not alter the fact that smokers on average die about 15 years younger than non-smokers and suffer more ill-health on the way. While it is very tempting to generalise from personal experience, when it comes to healthcare this is usually misleading and often dangerous.
Dr. Money-Kyrle,
I appreciate that you acknowledge that there are legitimate reasons why people would question the effectiveness. Granted, you only allow this if people are ignorant of many factors, but nonetheless it is something I can also agree with. I think I have mentioned this before on how we only get bits and pieces of information, and most of us aren’t high level scientists, so we are ignorant in many ways. But that doesn’t mean we are any less intelligent or reasonable.
You make a good point about drawing conclusions from data without understanding what it represents, and I agree with this 100%. This is why I have not been making conclusions, but addressing concerns since I don’t have all the information which can explain the discrepancies. However, with all the concerns I have made, no one has shown me any supporting evidence that actually addresses these other factors which would explain the discrepancies. Or at least the most likely cause for the discrepancy. Case in point, you listed a lot of possible reasons but no actual evidence to suggest any of them are a bigger factor in the discrepancies than effectiveness.
This may be semantics, but I understood the word projected as being put into the air with only an initial force, which from what I understand a rocket has ongoing force. But either way, can’t science prove if the rocket will come down or not? Either way, I will admit that do not understand science the way you do.
My point about the age factor was that as we get older we also get more underlying health factors. So when comparing all people 70 to all people 20 based on just age, did they ignore that most people 70 are going to have a lot more underlying health factors than people 20. I have yet to see any analysis of healthy 70 vs unhealthy 70 with covid. If you have any please share. And if I am wrong to make a distinction between healthy older people and unhealthy (those with 1 or more underlying health conditions) people then that is an honest mistake which I am willing to admit I was wrong to do.
I also agree with you that Listener can’t use anecdotal evidence to make an argument. Though I will admit that I do agree with some of Listener’s points, I also agree with some of your points.
Michael Moses,
I listed a number of reasons why data from different countries are not directly comparable, and yet you are still trying to compare them. How can you talk about discrepancies between measurements when you haven’t established that they are measuring the same thing? Can’t you see that your question is meaningless?
Age and co-morbidity (the medical term for pre-existing health conditions) are INDEPENDENT risk factors for serious disease and death from covid, and of the two, age is by far the bigger one.
You yourself posted a link to a paper from the CDC a couple of days ago addressing the question of how co-morbidity affects risk. They were looking at people in the same age groups, though they also reported that it was a more important factor in younger people. Didn’t you read it first?
I’m afraid I don’t know who you are, where you live, how old you are, what is your occupation or what level of education you have attained. You seem to be consistently unable to grasp the fundamentals of most of what people have been saying here, and perhaps it would be easier to formulate answers in terms of something that you could understand if we knew something about you.
This is a link to the covid resource centre provided openly and free of charge by The Lancet, which is a prestigious non-specialist international medical journal, roughly on the same level as the New England Journal of Medicine. There are many specialist journals for epidemiologists, virologists, infectious disease physicians and others whose day-to-day job is dealing with diseases like covid, and I for one would be hard-pressed to understand them as I do not have that sort of specialist knowledge and experience. However, The Lancet is aimed at doctors of all kinds from psychiatrists to surgeons and I would hope that much of what they publish would make at least some sense to the intelligent and educated layman. Possibly you will find some better anwers there:
https://www.thelancet.com/coronavirus
Dr. Money – Kyrle
I agree that they are not directly comparable, I have admitted this several times. You ask me to establish that they are measuring the same thing and I conceded that they could be measuring things differently and that could explain the discrepancies. I don’t know how they are measured so I can’t say they are the same or different. Though I think it is fair to assume they are different, but is there evidence to suggest that difference is significant.
I then asked you to establish that they are measuring things differently, similar to what you asked me, and your response is the question is meaningless. So we go back to the dogma of science that Alfred refered to, that I am just supposed to assume because you are mored educated than I am, the differences you claimed were significant enough (without evidence) to cause the discrepancies.
It sounds like your saying I can’t come up with a hyptothesis on effectiveness without disproving all your reasons first.
And if I can’t compare effectivenss this way, the I go back to the question I have asked multiple times, how best to measure effectiviness to fairly compare risks?
As for the age issue, I thought I had already conceded that point, but if not let me say I was wrong and have been corrected. See, it’s not that hard to admit we make mistakes and get things wrong sometimes. 🙂
Thank you for the link, I am vaguely familir with The Lancet and have even referenced some of their articles. I have looked here to answer some of my questions, but so far found nothing yet which addresses my question above.
MM,
You have completely misunderstood what I am saying. If the mortality rates between two countries aren’t measuring the same thing you can’t compare them at all. It isn’t a matter of whether the difference in the numbers is significant or not.
If they are comparing the same thing but in different ways, you still need to know what they are measuring in order to make any comparison at all, including what contribution these differences make to the final result.
I am pointing out that you are making an unsound comparison and you are still asking me to quantify it. Can’t you see that that is nonsense?
Michael Moses,
I assume by projected you are thinking of something fired from a catapult, a gun or something similar which is released after being given an initial impetus, after which point the main forces acting upon it are gravity and friction and the object becomes ballistic (i.e. not self-propelled). This is actually how a rocket works, too, as the burn time is only a few minutes.
According to Newtonian mechanics, what determines whether an object will return to earth under gravity is the maximum velocity that it is able to achieve. If it exceeds the escape velocity (which is about 25,000 miles per hour) then it will be able to leave the gravitational pull of the earth altogether and continue moving through space indefinitely. In practice anything travelling close to 25,000 miles per hour near the earth’s surface will heat up so much as a result of friction from the air that it will burn up completely (and will neither reach space nor return to earth), so the job of the first stage of a rocket it to lift it mostly clear of the atmosphere before it can be accelerated to its final velocity. Also very few projectiles would withstand the acceleration necessary to reach escape velocity in only a fraction of a second without completely disintegrating.
Newtonian mechanics enables us to make the necessary calculations, but that is not science. Science is the process by which Newtonian mechanics was derived in the first place on the basis of observation and experiment. It was good enough to get Neil Armstrong to the Moon, but it is not actually correct.
Einstein proposed a completely different model of mechanics (special relativity) and gravity (general relativity). Calculations based on relativity give almost the same results as Newtonian mechanics in most situations that ordinary people are familiar with, but for fast-moving objects (close to the speed of light, which is about 670,000,000 miles per hour) or in strong gravitational fields they start to diverge from each other. Experiments in these situations have shown that Newton gives the wrong answers and Einstein’s model is a closer approximation to reality.
This has practical applications, such as in the global positioning satellites used for navigation. The timing signals have to be corrected to take account of the fact that time runs more slowly at the earth’s surface than it does at the altitude of the satellites, where gravity is less strong. Although it is only a tiny correction, without it the SatNav in our cars would be out by several miles.
It is an interesting thought that driving into town can require more advanced physics than sending a rocket to the moon.
We know that relativity is only an approximation to reality, though a very good one. For instance it breaks down completely in some situations related to black holes. It is also fundamentally incompatible with quantum mechanics, though mostly they address different situations.
When it comes to biology and biomedical sciences the approach has to be different from physics as the interactions between different components are so many and so complex that there is no possibility of deriving anything from fundamental rules and everything is subject to what are effectively random influences. In order to understand them it is necessary to understand the behaviour of random numbers. However, this is an area where our intuitions are completely wrong to the point of being wildly misleading. Fortunately there are areas of mathematics including probability theory and statistics which have provided the necessary tools to make sense of what is going on. Essentially these enable you to detect true effects among randomness.
I hope this gives you some idea of how I understand science.
Much as I hate to bring harsh reality to bear on fantasies, if ivermectin was effective as a prophylactic for COVID-19, the market would be truly colossal. The Holy Grail. The medication which vast numbers of people would need to take indefinitely. The ultimate profit machine.
Why,then, would nasty Big Pharma want to suppress the supposed “truth” of its effectiveness?
@ Lenny
From my understanding ivermectin is a cheap drug which no longer has a patent on it. Which means, if it were to be approved, then every country could make their own and Big Pharma would not benefit very much financially.
Currently the “science” can not tell us if it works or not. The official word is that Ivermectrin is not recommended because it is not “scientifically proven” to work and cases of self-medication cause more harm than good. Keep in mind, the science does not tell us it doesn’t work. So countries were able to give a brand new (patented) vaccine emergency authorization, yet they couldn’t spend the time to do a study on cheap repurposed drugs to see if it actually works or not, that doesn’t sound odd? And if you are using evidence from people self medicating, then you areally aren’t being fair either.
https://www.pharmaceutical-technology.com/features/ivermectin-covid-19-antiparasitic-political/
Dexamethasone is a cheap drug which no longer has a patent. There is clear evidence that, used appropriately, it saves lives in those seriously ill with Covid. Within a very short time of the results of the clinical trials becoming available it became standard treatment worldwide.
@Dr. Julian
Dexamethasone is only effective when used with a mechanical ventilator or oxygen.
Beyond that, the side effects are risky.
@Listener
What are your professional/educational qualifications?
@ Björn Geir
Here is a report from the New England Journal of Medicine which supports the listerner’s statement.
“The RECOVERY trial provides evidence that treatment with dexamethasone at a dose of 6 mg once daily for up to 10 days reduces 28-day mortality in patients with Covid-19 who are receiving respiratory support. We found no benefit (and the possibility of harm) among patients who did not require oxygen. ”
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2021436#:~:text=The%20RECOVERY%20trial%20provides%20evidence,who%20did%20not%20require%20oxygen.
Beyond that, the side effects are risky.
I am well aware of the side-effects of dexamethasone, having witnessed them many times over the course of a 30-year career practising medicine, and more recently having experienced them myself.
My point was not that dexamethasone is a panacea, but that it is a cheap drug, that is off patient, and yet when the evidence showed that it saves lives in when prescribed appropriately in very sick Covid patients it was rapidly adopted worldwide as standard treatment for those patients. Being cheap and off patient was not in any way a barrier to its use, but quite the reverse, and yet it is being suggested that the uptake of ivermectin is being resisted for exactly those reasons.
Most doctors worldwide are primarily interested in the welfare of their patients, not in pandering to Big Pharma, and base their treatment policies on the best evidence available (I think this is probably even true in the US, though the healthcare system there is fundamentally broken). The way the practice of medicine is portrayed by many of the people who comment on this blog is something that I find completely unrecognisable.
I do not think you can use dexamethasone to counter the ivermectin argument. As it has been ponited out and you seem to be aware of, dexamethasone is approved only to be used with respiratory support which does not eliminate the need for an emergency vaccine. However, if ivermectin were approved, then there would be no need for an emergency vaccine or to vaccinate 70-90% of the population worldwide. So to compare the two treatments just because they are both cheap is a false equivalency.
“However, if ivermectin were approved, then there would be no need for an emergency vaccine or to vaccinate 70-90% of the population worldwide.”
How would this scenario work? Everyone one in the world would dose on ivermectin periodically for the rest of their lives? As opposed to taking a shot or two of vaccine? Even if you take into account booster shots, a person would take one maybe two booster shots a year.
I get that patent on ivermectin expired and countries can in theory manufacture and distribute it. How many doses per million population do they need to manufacture? Compared to vaccine doses, a lot more doses of ivermectin will need to made. How are they going to distribute that many doses? Developed nations maybe able to do it easily, what about developing nations?
What happens if the virus to becomes immune to ivermectin? If that happens, then what? If you are going to tell me virus won’t become immune, I need you explain clearly using scientific evidence why that can’t happen.
Those are some of the questions I can think of at the moment. I may have more questions later.
Before you go on a conspiracy filled rant, I expect you to answer all my questions with scientific evidence and reference any an all sources you cite from. You are not allowed to cite any politically biased sources. I will determine which sources you cite are politically biased or not. I will also decide which parts of your response to accept or reject. You up for this challenge, Moses?
Jack,
From what I read (and please correct me if I am wrong),
https://www.fda.gov/vaccines-blood-biologics/vaccines/emergency-use-authorization-vaccines-explained
AEU can only be used if there are no other approved alternatives. So following that logic, if ivermectin were approved then that would be an alternative treatment thus preventing AEU. Now, you make a good point about some of the logistics of using ivermectin worldwide and perhaps those arguments could be used as making ivermectin not adequate. I will not speak for or against either other than to say there is some evidence to suggest an argument to be had
.
I will point out two sides of the ivermectin argument using the same data. Read for yourself and decide what a neutral person might think makes more sense.
One side which says it works.
https://www.thedesertreview.com/news/national/ivermectin-obliterates-97-percent-of-delhi-cases/article_6a3be6b2-c31f-11eb-836d-2722d2325a08.html
One side that it doesn’t.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/05/21/fact-check-india-covid-19-cases-hydroxychloroquine-not-related/5173021001/
I would also like to point out that the evidence that was used in a previous posts cited a study(below) to show no benefit to ivermectin. Yet the study referenced concludes that it had several limitations, the quality of previous studies are debatable and suggests doing another study. Not sure if that is clear evidence that ivermectin does not work and perhaps can explain (along with the articles above) why I (and others) might be confused as to whether or not ivermectin actually works.
https://bmcinfectdis.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12879-021-06348-5#citeas
Now, I am not sure if you got me confused with other people posting cause I am not sure why you would think I would go on a conspiracy rant. Unless you assume that if anyone has different views than you, they are pedaling conspiracies. There is a difference between agreeing there are reason to believe something could be true and believing they are true.
And perhaps I misread that last paragraph of your post, but you are coming across as a bit of a bully with trying to say what you will allow me to do and what things you will accept from me. Not sure why you would try and exert authority over another person. That is not a very productive way to engage in a discussion.
@Michael Moses
I did not have you confused with someone else, my last post is addressed to the person(s) posting as Michael Moses, that is you.
You certainly did misread my last paragraph as I do not know what you are talking about. You are confusing me with someone else.
I didn’t ask you to rehash the ivermectin debate, although I expected you would rant about it, and you certainly did. I also expected you would not answer the questions I posed (regarding a scenario that you proposed where covid will be treated with ivermecting without vaccines) and you did not. I guess you weren’t up to the challenge and/or incapable of doing so. I rest my case.
Jack,
Perhaps we just have different definitions of rant if you think what I have been posting have been rants while your posts are not. Apparently you don’t see the irony in your posts.
As for the scenario you proposed, I already conceded that you had valid points. Yet you still want me to create a scenario that can be dismantled with points I already agree are possible?
@Michael Moses
“Yet you still want me to create a scenario that can be dismantled with points I already agree are possible?”
The point is that if you make fantastical claims like the one I quoted below, you better be able to answer some follow up questions and not fold. Not only did you concede, you went further and posted information on AUE and efficacy of ivermectin, all of which is irrelevant to the scenario I asked you about. That is of course if you are not trying to have an honest discussion but rather appear like you are having one and promote ivermectin, or you are just ranting for ranting sake.
“However, if ivermectin were approved, then there would be no need for an emergency vaccine or to vaccinate 70-90% of the population worldwide.”
Jack,
I made a claim based on my understanding. You made points to disprove my claim. I said your points make sense and could disprove my claim. So I am still supposed to argue my claim is true when I admit it may be wrong? I can acknowledge that you may be right and I may be wrong in this case. Not sure why that is so difficult to understand.
As for the efficacy of ivermectin, you are correct in the fact that it was not relevant to my initial claim or your points. But I presented two articles, one for and one against ivermectin in order to engage a different discussion. It seems that you are not interesting in a different discussion which is fine, but as I have said before, I do not know if it works or not, and think it is an interesting topic.
@Michael Moses
Thank you Michael for posting the link.
Evidently, according to a few, to post accurate information here, one needs to have qualifications…. hmmm.
I omitted the link deliberately, because i assumed I might get challenged on my statement. So I was reserving that for a later post.
But I appreciate the fact that you also can search the internet and find answers for yourself just as I do.
@ Listener,
Your welcome,
Finding answers are easy, trying to verify if they are true not so much. This is what confuses me and I think you alluded to it in a previous post. With all the conflicting information out there, even from the “good” experts, I don’t get why people aren’t more understanding of why a significant number of people are hesitant.
@Moses@Listener
Aww…you two are two peas in a right-wing propaganda pod.
Of course, stuff will be confusing if you do not have a background in virology, evolution, infectious diseases, pharmacology etc. It is great that you two came here seeking answers and people around here have been very accommodating and patient in answering your questions. However, you two have an ulterior motive, evident from the political bias, repeated use of misinformation and conspiracy theories to support your point of views. It is easy to see thru you bad faith arguments. To top that off you two are absolutely ignorant of scientific process and display an utter contempt towards scientists and other experts in the field. I am sure you will respond to my post accusing me and everyone else of bias and cry some crocodile tears. Have at it!
@Michael Moses
It starts at the top, and trickles down.
Watch this Video, and we will all recognize the ORIGINAL Covid-19 vaccine deniers. Spreaders of mis-information.
Keep this in mind, the day that Vaccine injections peaked in the USA was was April 13th 2021. That same day also that Johnson & Johnson revealed the flaw of their Janssen Vaccine, and issued a warning. From that point in time, vaccine acceptance went down. Again, this public doesn’t have much confidence and trust in the safety of any of the vaccines.
A disease that people fear the vaccine more than the disease.
Yes, people are getting vaccinated, reluctantly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EU41M3AZUeA
to all
yes, speaking of Johnson & Johnson… found guilty and responsible another time. They will pay again, along with other healthcare corporations. Many states not will to join the settlement quite yet as they perceive damages amounts need to go higher.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/state-ags-urge-support-for-landmark-26-billion-opioid-settlement/ar-AAMppJP
@Listener
Thanks for that video. I am a big fan of Glenn Beck. Hands down, he is the best comedian out there.
Reg J&J, you mentioned you took the J&J vaccine and rely on pharma drugs, yet you hate big pharma. Don’t get me wrong, I hate big-pharma too, but I find your relentless hypocrisy daunting to wrap my head around.
You don’t need to rely on big pharma antibiotics anymore. Rather than believing in all kinds of right-wing BS that permeates the internet, all you got to do is frolic in pure A grade BS (literally) and you will be healthy as a hog. Don’t believe me? take a look at these “scientific” papers:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/314121278_Antimicrobial_activites_of_cow_dung_extracts_against_human_pathogens
https://www.sciencepubco.com/index.php/IJAC/article/view/29819
Interesting take below on how the problem wasn’t just the pharmaceutical companies pushing the products, but all those doctors we put our trust into, not upholding higher standards of care. Now, this could be isolated to just the US, but could help to explain why people in the US who don’t trust the “experts” have reason to not trust them and that they aren’t all alt-right wingers or conspiracy advocates.
“I have in mind the far larger number of well-intentioned physicians who have allowed themselves to get duped too easily and then found themselves far out of their depths. The drumbeat about the undertreatment of pain began in earnest in the late 1980s, and not long thereaftermedical experts began urging their colleagues to rethink the well-entrenchedresistance to using opioids, relying on only the barest of evidence to make theirpoint. Rather than celebrate caution in the use of narcotic analgesics, these popularizers condemned “opiophobia” as unenlightened, even barbaric. Drugmanufacturers, of course, saw this as an emerging business opportunity, and anineffectual FDA quickly lost control of the situation.”
https://dc.law.utah.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1216&context=ulr
I am not sure why we would think scientists by nature are more trustworthy than anyone else. Are they not susceptible to the same political bias and money that the rest of us are?
Are the Chinese scientists who may have created this virus more trustworthy? Are the scientists at the WHO that covered up the possible origin of the virus and delayed our ability to react more trustworthy? Are the Scientist at the CDC who says masks don’t work, then they do, and use them outside, then try using two masks, are they more trustworthy? Are the scientists who say Ivermectin doesn’t work, yet really don’t know one way or the other if it works or not, are they more trustworthy? Are the scientists who tell us our natural immunity doesn’t work even though they can’t cite a single study on verifiable reinfection, more trustworthy? And this list goes on, so to suggest that science and scientists are some purified sanctuary of enlightenment and we should always default to trusting them is its own form of misinformation.
This is why transparency is so important, because we cannot fundamentally trust what other people are saying to be correct and/or honest. This does not mean we are crazy conspiracy theorists, but rather observant of history. And history is full of evidence showing that people, including scientists, will be wrong, either by honest mistake or willful intent.
Now, I have never claimed the vaccines don’t work or people shouldn’t take them. I have provided numerous sources with factual evidence to suggest that the vaccines may not be as effective as we were told and asked several times what sources are available that do a fair and honest job of trying to answer the risk/benefit analysis which the Walach paper failed to do.
However, instead of giving sources of a more accurate risk analysis I am accused of being part of spreading misinformation and should just trust science that it is safe. Yet all the infomration I have provided is based on facts along with the source for everyone to verify, while the claims of safety are just that, since there is no evidence of long term risk on mRNA in the human body as a vaccine. And to compare mRNA to traditional vaccines in terms of safety sounds more speculative and thus appropriate for a hypothesis rather than a conclusion.
Richard claimed
“..vaccines do a far better job: just one or two shots provide long-term immunity to most people..”
yet there is no scientific basis for this conclusion. Since day one we were told we may need a booster since they wouldn’t know if it would give us long term immunity. In Israel they have already said they plan to give a booster because half their Covid cases are of fully vaccinated people, proving there is no long term immunity, or at least not for most people. So by definition isn’t that spreading misinformation?
Dr. Money-Kyrle says
“…and the vaccine appears to give better protection than having the infection does..”
Yes, we were told this in the beginning, but do scientists truly believe we should vaccinate hundreds of million of people based on what APPEARs to be true? That doesn’t sound very scientific. And of all the new cases, what percent of them are people reinfected vs vaccinated? From all reports I didn’t see any verified reinfection cases, yet there are plenty of breakthrough cases. So the facts suggest natural immunity is actually better, so wouldn’t that mean Dr. Money-Kyrle is also spreading misinformation?
So if we want people to have trust in science then all the information needs to be put out there. For example, we hear spikes of cases all over the world, but they don’t go over the actual numbers. Because those spikes are relative to previous weeks with very low numbers. I believe in most cases the numbers are still smaller than last year this time. Which could suggest the vaccines are working since we didn’t have them last year. Or maybe it is natural immunity, or maybe a combination of the two and/or other factors. Yet. I do not hear any open/honest dialogue on this topic… I just hear/read about vaccinating everyone because cases are spiking. It’s the only way to save lives. Or vaccinate everyone because 90% of severe cases are unvaccinated. Again, that number by itself is misinformation because it does not give us a full picture so we can make an educated decision. So if you want us to trust science, then give us all the information. Break that 90% down for us, if 99% of that 90% are people who are already at risk, then why should we get our healthy people/kids vaccinated if a risk/benefit analysis is not available for us? Granted, I understand we may never know for sure, but you would think with our knowledge we could come up with some honest estimates. Then from there we could have an honest debate on what risks are worth it.
Apparently science tells us it is worth vaccinating 12-15 years olds based on a study done with 2200 kids. Think about that, based on a clinical study of 2200 12 – 15 yr olds we now think we should to inject tens of millions of healthy kids. And healthy kids who have an almost 0% risk factor to the virus. Wouldn’t science say we should go from 2200 to a study of maybe tens of thousands before jumping to the whole population? I think Richard mentioned to me several times the flaw in looking at a small window of time with a small data set, yet the conclusion that all 12-15 should be vaccinated is not flawed?
So I have a hard time trusting people when they say follow the science which includes vaccinating healthy kids and those with natural immunity. Now if I am wrong, then please share with me sources as to why because I do truly want to be educated on this, so that I can make the best (or at least most informed) decision for my family and my community.
Scientists are not primarily motivated by power or money – otherwise they would not have spent years of hard study on gathering knowledge, but instead opted for a far easier and/or more lucrative career in politics or business.
So yes, I am quite convinced that on average, scientists are more to be trusted than politicians or business people.
Not only is there not a shred of evidence that this virus was man-made (and lots of evidence that it came from animals), it would be extremely difficult to engineer a virus from scratch. It’s just that scientists don’t like to rule out options unless they’re absolutely certain, so they still keep an open mind to the possibility that the origins are not 100% natural after all – even though the chances for this are extremely small. So please stop putting forward claims that the virus was engineered, unless you can contribute actual scientific evidence to that extent. Also see https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01529-3 for a nuanced article about this.
Sorry, but this again reeks of conspiracy talk for which there is no real evidence.
Well, yes, that is because you ARE spreading misinformation as shown above: you apparently believe that the the SARS-Covid2 virus is not simply a zoonosis that has unfortunately made the jump from animals to humans, but somehow insist that there are shady things going on with regard to its origin. The only shady thing was that in the very beginning, as the Chinese government was reluctant to admit that they had a big problem that they could not easily fix – and that was because they don’t like egg on their face. For all the rest, there is no evidence for wrongdoings.
Here you fail to understand even the basic things about infectious disease. As with any novel disease, virtually nobody is ‘naturally immune’ to SARS-Covid2 – the vast majority of people who come into contact with the virus will get infected, and they can further spread the virus. Many will develop symptoms, and relatively many (~1%) will die. People are only immune AFTER infection of vaccination with the virus – and in both cases this is natural immunity, because our immune system has learned to recognize the virus and immediately neutralize it upon renewed contact. And it is FAR safer to get vaccinated than to get the actual virus.
You must have seriously misread what I said. There is no evidence whatsoever that Ivermectin works to prevent Covid-19, but after 1.5 billion vaccinations, it is VERY clear that vaccines DO prevent the disease. And if Ivermectin would work in a preventive way, then it would have to be administered chronically, completely unlike a vaccine.
Anyway, I’m getting a bit tired of you continuously making ill-informed, evidence-free yet tenacious claims, betraying either a lack of insight in actual science, or a regrettable tendency to believe all sorts of misinformation spread through social media channels, rather than science-based explanations. So I’ll leave it at this. Have a nice life, and I really hope that you learned something here – for one thing that if you make claims that go against common (scientific) insights, then you should absolutely come up with supporting evidence as well. Also see the red banner at the top of this page.
I understand that you might not want to respond, so this is more in response for anyone else who would like to read it.
Your reasoning behind your trust in scientists makes sense, but since there is no way to measure what their motivation is or if/when that motivation changes, not sure if it is fair to factor that into trusting, or how to measure trust in the first place. I did provide a few sources out of amusement and the appearant double standards since I have been citing all my sources and you have not. So by comparing the two sources I think it would be hard to argue that scientists are among the most trusted being only one country has over 50% of high trust in them. But these are opinion polls, so take them with a grain of salt.
https://www.nim.org/en/compact/focustopics/worldwide-ranking-trust-professions
https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2020/09/29/scientists-are-among-the-most-trusted-groups-in-society-though-many-value-practical-experience-over-expertise/
Evidence: Gain of function research in Wuhan lab, abnormally high infection rate for an animal born virus to humans, active cover up of possible lab leak, and no verification of the initial transmission chain. Granted, these don’t prove it, but I never claimed it was true. I said it was possible and your own evidence supports that it could be possible, even if unlikely. That is a far cry from claiming there is no shred of evidence. So please take a moment to relfect on who really is spreading misinformation here.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/coronavirusfrontlines/2020/06/19/did-covid-19-come-from-a-lab-was-it-deliberate-bioterrorism-a-biodefense-expert-explores-the-clues/?sh=725f9947356d
https://www.rubio.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2021/4/rubio-questions-intelligence-community-on-covid-19-origins
https://nypost.com/2021/06/02/fauci-was-warned-that-covid-may-have-been-engineered-emails/
https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n1656
As for the WHO agency, I suppose it might be unfair to put all the blame on them, but they along with many other contributing scientists made it easy to cover up the lab leak story. And I will admit again, we don’t know for sure if it came from the lab, but there is evidence it could have and we should have followed that evidence from the beginning.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/04/world-health-organization-blame-pandemic-coronavirus/609820/
https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n1656
So far not one thing I have said is false and I have been honest in the best way I could of how I understand the information available. When I referenced natural immunity I was referring to the immunity one gets after an infection. I apologize if I was unclear on that. And you say it is FAR safer to get the vaccine than the virus, yet you have not given one source to actually support this claim. I have asked you multiple times if you have a source which honestly measures that risk and I have gotten nothing in return other than your say so. Sorry that I just can’t take your word for it, after all I did see the red banner at the top of the page. 😉
Maybe I did misread it, but I am pretty sure you said “just one or two shots provide long-term immunity to most people.” Yes, I left the ivermectin out, but not sure how that part is relevant unless you are saying it is only long term immunity relative to ivermectin? And if so, I think that is a very poor comparison. Or you just misspoke and rather than admit your mistake, as there is no evidence to verify that these vaccines give us long term immunity, you want to conflate two different things to sidestep the issue.
As for vaccinations VERY clearly working, we might need to define what exactly that means. As I pointed (with links to support the evidnece that appearantly forgot about or just simply ignored) out previously, half of the Israeli cases are vaccinated people. Gibraltar which has 99% vaccination, yet still has higher covid spike rates than countries with lower rates. And recently it came out that 40% of the hospital covid cases in the UK are fully vaccinated. I will still admit that vaccines work, but I am not sure why it is so hard to believe why people question how well they work when evidence like this comes up?
https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/60-people-being-admitted-uk-hospitals-had-two-covid-jabs-adviser-2021-07-19/
I also think you got confused between me and the other person because I never claimed Ivermectin works, I just said they should have spent time doing clinical studies on it to verify if it works or doesn’t. From what I can read, including your source, all they have done is prove that the studies done on ivermectin were flawed so the results can’t be trusted. There is a difference between saying we can’t trust the results and the results are wrong. I haven’t seen any clinical studies that actually says it doesn’t work. If anyone has seen them please share.
I am pretty sure every claim I have made has been supported with evidence and a link so people can verify it for themselves, yet you still say I make evidence free claims. So it is apparent that you really aren’t reading my responses in a good faith manner as is evident from your own responses and your own lack of supporting evidence. So we can leave it at that and thank you for your time and wish you a nice life too.
I have other things to do than spend a lot of time trying to teach you mathematics (which is not the same as arithmetic). However, this quote of yours is a good example; by coincidence this very same point was discussed on the BBC News web site this morning.
The fact that 40% of hospital covid cases in the UK are fully vaccinated tells as very little about the effectiveness of the vaccine and a great deal about the uptake of vaccination. If fewer people were vaccinated there would be a lot more people in hospital (and dying) but the proportion of hospital cases vaccinated would be lower.
Conversely, if everybody were vaccinated, then they woiuld account for 100% of hospital cases, of which there wouldn’t be very many.
No vaccine protects everybody. In the case of the covid vaccine there are people who are immunosuppressed by cancer treatment, for instance, who are unable to mount a response to it.
However, in most people who are vaccinated the illness is a lot lot less serious than it would have been otherwise.
thanks
I don’t need you to teach me mathematics, but I would prefer it if you keep my comments in context. You are correct that knowing the proportion of vaccinated hospitalizations alone does not give us a complete picture and I never claimed it did. I merely used it as evidence, along with many other things, to suggest why some of us have questions and concerns. You conveniently take the one comment alone to dismiss my concern rather than address them in context.
Since Israel has a higher vaccination rate than UK it would make sense that they have a hgher proportion (about 50% to 40%) of vaccinted hospitalization, but they should also have lower numbers, assuming the vaccine is as effective as we are told. Yet last time I checked, Israel still had more covid cases, higher rate of cases and deaths than the UK within the same time period.
Likewise, when we compare the UK to the US, if it as you suggest, the number of covid cases should be much less in the UK compared to the US but they aren’t.
And again, I understand it is not always that simple to compare different areas, and this by itself does not prove anything, but can you at least see why some people would question the effectiveness when we see these kind of discrepencies?
Michael Moses,
Yes, if they don’t take other factors into account. Such as age structure, other infection control policies, timing of lockdowns, differences in easing restrictions, variable success in controlling the movement of people across and within their borders, different methods of collecting data and different definitions used in presenting it, different healthcare systems, geographical variation in the prevalence of coronavirus variants…
Before you can start drawing conclusions from data you need to understand what that data actually represents, which is very often different from how it is reported.
@Moses
“I am pretty sure every claim I have made has been supported with evidence and a link so people can verify it for themselves, yet you still say I make evidence free claims.”
Your post dated Monday 19 July 2021 at 18:37 had a load of nonsense without any evidence. When someone pointed out the same, you posted a bunch of links in response, with more nonsense claiming that you have evidence all along. Did you plan this strategy ahead of time? Or realized that you messed up and went back to gather some links to support your earlier post that was devoid of any evidence?
Jack,
Interesting you point out the post on 7/19. I actually addressed two claims (vaccines provide long term immunity and immunities after vaccines are better than immunity after infection) that were made by opposing opinions that they could not(or at least have yet to) support and yet you attack my claims which I supported in a follow up post. I apologize for not providing the sources earlier, but I thought there was a consensus on the claims I had made.
And It would help if you would reference what I said that you thought was nonsense or which links you thought were devoid of evidence. Or are you suggesting all 9 of the sources I cited (7 of which are neutral or left leaning sources) were devoid of evidence?
When I say someone’s source is flawed I point out why I think it is flawed. For example the ivermectin sources that say ivermectin doesn’t work. I point out that the source says the study is unreliable which is different from saying it doesn’t work. And then I point out that the study it cites as saying it doesn’t work says within the study that their results aren’t conclusive and suggest another study. This is typically how a discussion is supposed to work. Otherwise you and I could just go back and forth saying each other’s post is a load of nonsense and we would get nowhere.
For the most part I have appreciated people’s responses and have learned from some of them. If you read all my posts you will see where I have corrected myself, agreed to countering points and tried to continue a productive course of dialogue to further my understanding. I’ve also stipulated several times that what I am saying is based on my understanding of the sources I provided and welcome anyone to explain those sources better to me.
Your hostile approach and attempt to lump everyone who may have different views than you into one group so you can easily chastise/insult us says more about your own convictions than it does ours.
I wonder if you see the irony of you saying I will respond by accusing you of bias after your rant accusing me of bias.
@Michael Moses
There is no reason for me to rehash the contents of your posts, others have already addressed much of the nonsense you posted and pointed out to you why you are wrong, and you just respond back with more BS and that goes on back and forth.
Unfortunately, you chose to perceive my posts as hostile and cry about it. This is exactly what I was talking about earlier. By the way, irony in my posts is intentional. Have a nice life!
Jack,
If there is no reason to rehash old posts then why bring them up? Unless your goal is merely to continue your demostration of irony, then well done.
Otherwise I do not understand the point of your posts or how I should percieve them. You repeat what others have already claimed without adding any new content, so am I supposed to learn something by you doing this?
The one post you actually had content made some really good points in which I agreed with. From that I thought we could have meaningful discussion and offered two opposing views on ivermectin to discuss. You took that as a rant and ignored the fact that I agreed with your points. Curious, does me saying you made good points fall under more BS or is it only BS if you disagree with it? Or does it not even count since you didn’t even acknowledge it?
Again, it seems like we have different definitions of words if you think I cired about anything. But you have the right to perceive things your way, I respect your right to do that and wish you a nice life as well.
Yes, you were told. Who by? And how did you establish how reliable a source of information they were?
The motto of the Royal Society is “Nullius in verba”, or in English, “Take nobody’s word for it”. In other words look at the evidence itself, not what people are telling you.
I think you fundamentally misunderstand the nature of science and scientists. Science is a method of finding the truth, but the best that a scientist can ever say is that something appears to be the case, as it is never possible to be certain. Scientific knowledge is always provisional, the best we can say at the moment on the basis of the evidence we have so far, but always an approximation, and always incomplete. The job of the scientist is to try as hard as possible to look for evidence that the current state of knowledge is wrong. If they succeed, then science moves forward; if they fail, then we can say that our current ideas appear to be a reasonable approximation to the truth.
You seem concerned that the advice about preventing the spread of infection appears to be changing. Given that nobody knew anything about Covid or SARS-Cov-2 at the start of the pandemic, is it really so surprising that advice and policies have changed as new evidence has become available?
There are standard statistical methods for calculating the reliability of a clinical study with 2,200 subjects, or indeed any other number. There are also standard formulae for calculating how big a study needs to be depending on the size of the effect your are expecting to find and how certain you want to be that your results are applicable to a wider population.
You seem to be saying that a study with 2,200 subjects can give a result which is true if applied to a population of a certain size (maybe you are talking about tens or hundreds of thousands) but not true if applied to a larger population (millions or tens of millions). How can that be so?
A prospective, randomised clinical trial is not the same as an observational study and allows much more robust conclusions. More importantly, the reliability of those conclusions can be accurately quantified.
It is also important to remember that in a situation where the infection is continuing to spread and people are continuing to die from it there is not the luxury of waiting for the results of lengthy clinical trials. There are many things we would like to know about this new disease which will not be apparent for several years at the earliest, but in the meantime there are decisions that need to be taken by policy makers, and basing them on incomplete evidence is better than not basing them on evidence at all.
Your comments suggest that you don’t have any training in statistics, or a particularly good grasp of the behaviour of random numbers. There is no particular reason why you should have (most people don’t) but these are areas where common sense is misleading to the point of being completely wrong, and I think you would be better placed to find answers to your questions, and to make sense of a lot of apparently conflicting information, if you could get hold of an undergraduate textbook of medical statistics and take some time studying it.
Not sure I agree with you that the best scientists can do is to make claims about what appears to be true. After all, we know gravity works and how it works and can prove it scientifically. Now, with the human body it definitely gets more complicated, but even then there are things we know for certain, and things we can only claim to appear to be true. I agree that our understanding of science changes as we get more information so it makes sense the advice can also change. However, my examples were that of issues where the information did not change yet the advice did. For example, as far as I know there was no new information on how masks work, they have been around and used for a very long time, yet the scientist tells us they don’t work and then another day they tell us they do. Then they told us we still need them outside even though there was nothing to suggest they work outside. We are told to keep the masks on, but when we talk in a public forum it is ok to take the masks off, which is completely contradictory to how masks work. At the 3:29 mark Fauci (US top infection expert) takes his mask off to speak.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30SfeeZmlTQ
Then the scientist even suggested wearing two masks may help.
“So if you have a physical covering with one layer, you put another layer on, it just makes common sense that it likely would be more effective,” Fauci told TODAY
So I agree with you on a lot of points, but the fact that you can’t concede that plenty of scientists make untrustworthy claims cloaked in “science” is concerning. Heck, this thread is based on Walach making an untrustworthy claim of the risks with vaccines. Now we could argue that scientists as a group aren’t as bad as other groups, but not sure how we could even measure that, so any claim of scientists being more or less trustworthy would be merely an opinion.
You are right, statistically speaking one could justify using a study of 2200 for an entire population. However, as history has shown us before, life doesn’t always follow statistical models. https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/recalls.html,
So rushing to get healthy kids vaccinated when they have approximately 0% risks (https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6932e3.htm) , while at the same time we are still struggling to get all the adults and high risk people vaccinated doesn’t sound scientifically sound to me.
So I was saying that since the stats say it is true, let’s test the truth of it by conducting a larger study to see if it holds true or if the smaller study was just an anomaly, as I have cited does happen. But maybe you are right and I just don’t understand how science works if it can ignore real life examples that have contradicted previous clinical studies.
And If I read the CDC correctly there was a .5-12.84% (95% CI) increase in serious adverse events and 5.5 – 8.6% increase in reactogenicity of grade 3 or 4. Now in full disclosure, the p-value of the adverse events is about 22% (assuming my understanding is right) which means statistically speaking, those events could be caused by random chance and not the vaccine. But again, when we are talking about health, I think the onus should be on proving something is safe rather than the default of you can’t prove it’s unsafe. Unless urgency is an issue like you referenced. However, I have yet to see any supporting evidence to suggest that healthy kids face an urgent threat from covid.
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/acip/recs/grade/covid-19-pfizer-biontech-vaccine-12-15-years.html#appendix01
And if scientists really want to get to herd immunity then shouldn’t they take into account more things than just vaccines? We don’t need a science degree to say everyone needs to get the vaccine. Why don’t they spend the time to factor in the percent of people with previous infections (estimated by CDC to be 35% in the US – cited previously), the lower rate of transmission of kids (https://www.healthline.com/health-news/kids-are-half-as-likely-get-covid-19-as-adults-heres-what-we-know#What-the-modeling-found), possible prophelatics along with the vaccine. I would be more likely to trust someone who actually makes an attempt to factor in those realities rather than suggest the only way to get herd immunity is to vaccinate everyone. Especially when I already cited you a country which has over 99% vaccination rate and still sees a significant rise in cases and deaths.
I think I have a good understanding of statistics as well as a good understanding of history and the real world. So when we are told the stats suggest one thing, yet history and the real world suggest another thing, we need to ask more questions, raise concern and not rush into things which may be worse. And I will admit, sometimes it is my lack of understanding which is the simple explanation for the discrepancy. But sometimes the discrepancy is due to a few who make mistakes (honestly or not) and Asch Conformity.
The second of those statements tells me that you do not have a good understanding of statistics:
1. The P-value does not tell you the probability that something is due to chance. You can’t calculate that without knowing what the probability is in the absence of data provided by the study, and then applying Bayesian theory in the light of the new data.
2. Even if the P-value is 1%, or 0.01% the findings of a study could still be due to chance.
3. What a p-value represents is the probability of getting the results obtained in a trial if there is actually not effect at all. In this case, if there are really not adverse effects at all, there is a 22% probability of getting the results found in that particular trial. As a more familiar example, suppose that you set up a trial to find out whether a coin is two-headed by tossing it and looking at the outcome. If you toss it twice, then if it comes up heads both times but is really a normal coin with heads on one side and tails on the other the p-value of the trial is 25%. Even if it comes up heads ten times in a row, which would give a p-value of about 0.1%, you couldn’t conclude whether it is double-sided or not without knowing how many double-sided coins were in circulation.
P-values are being used less and less in medical statistics these days as they can give a misleading impression that an effect is larger or more probable than it really is.
This tells me that you don’t understand physics either. How gravity works is one of the big questions that physicists are trying to answer at the moment. However, one thing they do know is that Einstein’s theory of general relativity (which is all about gravity), while it agrees better with experimental results than Newtonian mechanichs, is only approximately true and can’t be applied to all situations. In particular it is fundamentally incompatible with quantum mechanics, which has so far passed every single experimental test despite running counter to all our intuitions.
Science can never prove anything – that is not what it does. However, it is the best method that we have for approximating the truth.
Now I must stop as I have to get breakfast for my guests, then change the batteries in my camera traps (I am trying to photograph the otters that sometimes visit the stream near my house) before having my next dose of cancer treatment. Ideally I would also like to practise the piece by Bach (a rather tricky arrangement for the organ of a Vivaldi concerto) that I am studying at the moment but I don’t think I will have time for that today.
Again, you are misreading my statement. I never said anything about knowing the probability that it was due to chance. I merely stated that it could happen by chance. Two different things. Found an interesting article on p-values which supports your claim that p-values are being used less for a variety of reasons. Though as interesting as the article was, it does not make my statement or understanding of p-values any less true. It also raises some interesting points about how some scientists may feel pressured to find “significant” studies to get published rather than do studies that may matter more. Kind of questions the motivation/trust factor we talked about earlier.
https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/7/31/16021654/p-values-statistical-significance-redefine-0005
I did not see it, but did the clinical studies on the vaccine use the Bayes Factor, or did they use p-values and CI?
I will concede, I do not know much about physics. And if you are saying that we can’t prove an object, once projected in the air, won’t come back to the earth using science, then you are right and I do not understand science the way you do.
Sorry to hear about your treatments and wish you a full recovery.
Michael Moses,
What about rockets?
Einstein’s theory can’t handle singularities. Einstein initially thought that black holes could not form. The great problem is to fit together Einstein’s equations of spreadout spacetime with those of wave-point QM. That is proving to be no little problem.
You assert that the human body is more complicated than that. It is indeed exceedingly complicated – but much has been learned. As in physics.
There are scientists and there is science. Science is our best understanding of how the world fits together. It reveals what is hidden. Science is hard work. From Galileo onwards science has made incredible advances.
Scientists are human beings. Good and bad amongst them, both as scientists and as human beings.
Like the arts the sciences belong to anyone who appreciates their value. Good or bad as people or as scientists, science itself is good. It is for me at any rate.
Asch Conformity? Interesting science. The science community will make of it what they will. And others will also no doubt.
I don’t have a good understanding of statistics or anything else. I can spot those who do or don’t though.
Leight Jackson,
You make a lot of good points and I agree that science itself is good. I also think business, government and religion are all good things as well. But as you alluded to, the practitioners of these things are humans and there are bad ones among all groups. I use bad vaguely, as many may not be malicious but rather misguided. This is why I think open and honest dialogue is so important, to help those misguided people make better choices. And I will admit that I have been one of those misguided people from time to time. Heck, I might be misguided now, but just saying you’re wrong or you just don’t understand does nothing to help guide someone to the right choice. In fact, given recent times I would guess it actually pushes people further apart.
@Dr. Julian
“Science can never prove anything – that is not what it does. However, it is the best method that we have for approximating the truth.”
Say doctor, it appears that science may have been behind a lab leak unleashing the covid-19 virus in Wuhan China. So we could also reason that “science” doesn’t always move us forward. The lab-leak theory hasn’t been proven yet, but then nothing else has either, nor has the lab-leak been disproven. From what we do know, it is certainly more probable than some evolutionary mishap.
We’ve come a long way since March 2020, when the siren cry was lockdown for “15 days to flatten the curve”. The authorities knew at that time they were lying to us. What they were thinking was “lockdown till we have a vaccine”….. no ? … I’m pretty sure. They just couldn’t say that or there would have been a revolt. So they lied to us and slowly cooked us frogs slowly so we didn’t jump outta the pot.
Since then, we’ve also been lied to about the efficacy of distancing, they said six feet, but really there was no science that dictated that distance. They make up a number. They lied to us about the efficacy of learning face masks. They are still lying to us about facemarks since there in no scientific evidence that wearing face masks outside in public reduce viral transmission…. but the drumbeat continues. In fact, here is evidence that wearing face masks improperly (which is what the majority are dong) is detrimental to virus transmission. Yes, N-95 masks 9 ( not cloth masks, masks with breathing valves, scarfs and the like) in a surgical setting, where a patient is opened up and pathogens are most likely present prove to be a beneficial application, when the mask is not touched after placement and only used once.
Not to say that a face mask is zero percent effective, but the idea that masks will protect everybody from virus transmission is lubricous, and has been proven NOT to be effective in vivo, or the pandemic spread would have been extinguished months ago.
Yes, even the Fouci, CDC and WHO couldn’t speak to us without flip-flopping and getting it wrong on facemarks. Is it any wonder that the leaders of Nation States and the subjects of the kingdoms would be misinformed and confused ?
So back to slow the spread and flatten the curve. The medical community got it wrong from the beginning and assumed that since the virus was a respiratory issue, that mechanical breathing devices were the obvious answer… LETS GET MORE VENTILATORS !! Well, this proved wrong also, as many a patient on breathing apparatuses faired no better than those that didn’t use them.
Now after a few months some potential remedies crop- … among others Ivermectin and HCQ. Mind you that there are no “proven” remedies at his point in time, but for some reason the world covid “experts” say don’t use these drugs, they are ineffective for covid, but more than that, they are attempting to convince sick or at risk patients that these drugs which have been sold for decades are not safe …. even though they are still being used worldwide for other similar indications…. hmmm ?? …. more lies ?
So the vaccines with EUA come along, and they promise us to extinguish the virus if everybody complies to get jabbed. But now after many months into the vaccinations, millions of patients that never had the virus and took the vaccination are still in fact becoming covid-19 cases…. at rates MUCH higher than the supposed efficacy of the covid vaccines….hmmm.
So guess what ? … they either lied to us or they were wrong again.
The public push-back of vaccines goes back at least 150 years, to a time when vaccines actually did in many cases make the spread of disease worse than no vaccine at all. To a time when people actually risked their livelihood homes businesses and incarnation.
Is it any wonder that after the incompetence and lies that we’ve witnessed in the last 16 months that the public is skeptical and pushing back on vaccines ? …. masks ?? … lockdowns ??
Think about this, we have vaccines that are only currently about 60% effective (UK & Israel) to prevent spread of a disease that has a 99.7% survival rate for those over 70 years old.
Perhaps if the authorities would just quite lying to us, or at least admit that they don’t have all the answers, perhaps the general public would be more patient more compliant and stop being so skeptical.
History has shown us that most diseases were extinguished naturally or by other means before vaccines were ever administered ( contrary to what they want us to believe).
Covid-19 may prove to be different, but it will be years before we know if the vaccines were effective or not, and ultimately what the safety risks were…. because we still don’t know.
Let’s just all it what is. To say dogmatically, that vaccines are the only answer to the covid-19 virus is complete hogwash. From what we are seeing currently, more variants are springing up as time goes on, and will likely continue to do so. So will immunity ever be reached via vaccines ? … I doubt it. Unless the vaccins are move effective that 60%, how can we expect the vaccines to extinguish the virus. Furthermore, how can you expect the public to believe in the “SCIENCE” ?? .
@Listener
[One more reply – against my better judgement]
Your latest load of nonsense only betrays severe ignorance, unwarranted arrogance, and a highly malicious attitude towards the highly trained profesisonals who try to save as many people as possible.
– There is NO EVIDENCE AT ALL that scientists were in any way responsible for the emergence of the Covid-19 virus.
– It is an outright lie that the above is ‘more probable’ than anything else – quite the contrary. Most scientists think that the virus has natural origins, and consider the lab leak theory unlikely.
– Scientists and doctors did NOT lie to us. The most you can say is that they had no idea what they were up against back in March 2020. And neither did you.
– “Flatten the curve” absolutely worked, as did all those other measures – as evidenced by the exploding numbers of infections exactly from the moment that those measures were lifted here. No doubt, certain measures worked better than others, and some may have been unnecessary in retrospect. But when millions of lives are at risk, that is not the occasion to start squabbling about minor details such as wearing masks yes or no, or the exact optimum distance to prevent transmission. (And oh, those choices were absolutely based on scientific insights, together with common sense. There just was no precedent to base more accurate decisions on, as modern science never had to deal with a pandemic like this before.)
– If anyone is lying here, it is you: contrary to what you say, both hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin have been researched quite well in the short time span since the beginning of the pandemic, and there is still NO compelling evidence that they offer significant benefits for Covid-19 patients.
– Your untruths about vaccines are even more egregious. Covid-19 vaccines are certainly our best shot (no pun intended) at preventing death and sickness, and provide the best chance to get back to a normal life as much as possible. And yes, that only works if as many people as possible get vaccinated – even if the newest virus variants turns out to be even more infectious than the old one. Vaccinated people have a far smaller chance to end up in hospital or in the grave than unvaccinated people. (And if you think that there are better ways to fight Covid-19 than vaccination, then what are those?)
– Vaccines certainly did NOT “make the make the spread of disease worse than no vaccine at all”, not in the past and not now. This is a common lie peddled by quacks and antivaccine cranks. Sure, 150 years ago, vaccines weren’t nowhere near as safe as they are now, and no doubt, accidents did happen. But even then, they prevented far more death and mayhem than they caused harm.
– It is another horrible lie of yours that “Covid-19 has a 99.7 survival rate for those over 70 years old.” The infection fatality rate <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10654-020-00698-1/tables/3"is already 1.4% at age 65, and some 2.5% at age 75. The general 70+ age group has a risk of death of roughly 10% when they contract Covid-19.
– And it is another rather dumb antivaccine claim that “History has shown us that most diseases were extinguished naturally or by other means before vaccines were ever administered”. No, the majority of infectious diseases most certainly did NOT go away naturally, and they were the primary cause of death up until the early 1900s. Smallpox alone is estimated to have killed half a billion people in the last century of its existence. Diphtheria was a very common cause of death for children far into the 20th century (it almost killed my mother when she was a little girl, and two neighbouring kids did not survive the outbreak). Up until the 1950s, polio devastated the life of thousands of people every year. All these (and many other) diseases have become very rare and in one case even fully extinct thanks to vaccination.
Yes, improved hygiene and (later) antibiotics also greatly reduced the death toll of infectious diseases – but you know what? These things came from scientists and doctors, the very same people that you now accuse of lying and being incompetent.
No, vaccines probably will not eradicate Covid-19 any day soon, and scientists openly admit this. But they are by far the best way to prevent sickness and death that we have at the moment. And because they do slow down the spread of the virus, they also slow down mutation rates. There is no good reason at all to decline or advise against vaccination.
– About the public trust in science: even in the US, with the GOP actively trying to undermine this trust for their own nefarious political reasons, the public’s trust in science has only marginally decreased from the beginning of the pandemic.
Here in the Netherlands, trust in science has even reached an all-time high (in Dutch, use Google Translate for an English version). So quite contrary to your inflammatory rhetoric, scientists are still among the people we trust most. And rightly so.
Anyway, this is definitely my final comment in this thread, as I am rather fed up with responding to people who make the wildest and most erratic claims without knowing what it is they’re talking about. And that is putting it mildly.
hear, hear!
@Richard Rasker
“Covid-19 vaccines are certainly our best shot (no pun intended) at preventing death and sickness, and provide the best chance to get back to a normal life as much as possible.”
So Richard, even if you vaccinate one hundred percent of the population with a 100% effective vaccine. If 40% of the vaccinated population are getting infected where is heard immunity coming from ? We’re only a few months into fresh vaccines, what will happen in a few more months when the vaccine strength is weaker, when flue season comes, and when more variants show up ? I think from heard immunity will come from previously infected patients rather than vaccines.
“Vaccines certainly did NOT “make the make the spread of disease worse than no vaccine at all”, not in the past and not now. ”
Ummm… Richard, you had better re-read history. There were certainly vaccines that did more harm than good.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1383764/
Caused 40,000 cases of polio. How many cases do you think occurred naturally ?
I’ll leave it there and spare you embarrassment, but I’ll post more evidence if you push your narrative.
Currently we do NOT know the final outcomes of the present mRNA vaccines. We certainly know that they were not tested for pregnant mothers nor nursing mothers…. we were informed of that. Neither do we know the safety ramifications for male reproduction. Need I say more ?
I’ve never disagreed with using antibiotics, and I’ve stated so here repeatedly. However, the damage or potential damage caused by MD’s overprescribing antibiotics in recent years I believe is detrimental to good immune system health.
Again, causing harm for some.
Listener,
In all fairness, I am not sure if your source is relevant to your argument about vaccines themselves. It references the Cutter Incident which was pulled because of facility issues which produced bad batches of the vaccine, not the vaccine itself. And this was pulled within months I believe, which supports many people’s argument that any problem with the vaccine we would have seen by now. Though I don’t agree with that argument given this is the first time (that I know of) in which the mRNA has been used in humans for vaccines. So not sure what evidence there is to suggest it won’t have long term negative effects. So I do agree with your points about the lack of testing on fertility, pregnant women, nurising, etc.
It is confusing to me that some of the same people who say you can’t prove ivermectin works because there was no clinical study will also say the vaccine is safe for pregnant women with no clinical study. Now, I am not making saying one way or the other on ivermectin or pregnant women, but it seems like there is a different standard there.
From the CDC
“…experts believe they are UNLIKELY to pose a risk for people who are pregnant..”
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/recommendations/pregnancy.html
Interesting article of how words like unlikely have a wide range of meaning. From what I could gather from this article, unlikely could be up to about 40%. Is there a scientific/statistical definition to unlikely that someone can share?
https://hbr.org/2018/07/if-you-say-something-is-likely-how-likely-do-people-think-it-is
– There is NO EVIDENCE AT ALL that scientists were in any way responsible for the emergence of the Covid-19 virus.
I don’t assume that any of what Listener said is true, but to claim that there is no edvidence at all ignores your own source, the previoulsy cited evidence and the additional evidence cited below, makes you as bad as you claim Listener to be and weakens your entire argument. Unless of of course your only goal is to placate to those who already agree with you..then hear, hear!
“A classified US intelligence report – saying three researchers at the Wuhan laboratory were treated in hospital in November 2019, just before the virus began infecting humans in the city ”
“What do scientists think?
The issue is still being hotly contested.”
from your own source which says there may be no clear evidence, but that is a big difference than none at all.
“However, a lab leak has not been ruled out, and many are calling for a deeper investigation..”
‘Still, the possibility remains that SARS-CoV-2 escaped from a lab’
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-57268111
@Michael Moses
You are not one of the brightest bulbs in the chandelier, now are you?
I am talking about EVIDENCE, not suspicions, accusations, rumours, conjecture or fantasy.
Now, how can I get this concept of ‘evidence’ across to you … aha:
I can’t rule out that you have committed a horrible crime. And there might even be enough suspicious circumstances to warrant an investigation in any crimes you may have committed. And maybe you are even accused of having committed a crime.
But I hope that you agree with me that even ALL THESE THINGS still DO NOT amount to evidence that you actually committed a crime.
Once again: there is NO EVIDENCE AT ALL that scientists were in any way responsible for the emergence of the Covid-19 virus. So until the day that such evidence is found, it is plain wrong to claim or even suggest otherwise.
“I can’t rule out that you have committed a horrible crime. And there might even be enough suspicious circumstances to warrant an investigation in any crimes you may have committed. And maybe you are even accused of having committed a crime.”
“But I hope that you agree with me that even ALL THESE THINGS still DO NOT amount to evidence that you actually committed a crime.”
That analogy works against you. If there is enough suspicious circumstances to warrant an investigation then that means there was EVIDENCE. Investigations don’t happen without EVIDENCE. Now we could argue the semantics of evidence vs circumstantial evidence vs probable cause, but I think that misses the point.
I believe you posted this before:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01529-3
“Scientists don’t have enough evidence about the origins of SARS-CoV-2 to rule out the lab-leak hypothesis, or to prove the alternative — that the virus has a natural origin”
So based on the scientists still debating the issue, how can you claim there is NO EVIDENCE AT ALL? Or do scientiest normally debate when there is no evidence on one side? What make you so special that you can rule out the lab leak theory when so many other scientists can’t? Is it because you are the smartest bulb in the chandelier? 😉
I have supplied sources to verify these before but will do so again per request.
Evidence it could be engineered:
Wuhan lab study gain of function which involves bats
Genome pairing is questionable
Doctors from said lab go to hospital sick with similar covid symptoms
Shortly after said doctors go to hospital covid outbreak begins
Ourbreak occurs near Lab
Virus is highly contagious from human to human which is not common if coming from an animal but would be expected from a gain of function virus
No transmission chain has been verified
China obstructing investigations
Evidence can’t be engineered:
We don’t have enough evidence to prove it either way.
Everything could have happened naturally
Did I miss anything in my recap of evidence on both sides?
Interesting article.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/15187088/genetic-evidence-covid-wuhan-lab-leak/
Richard,
Thank-you for saving me the trouble of replying to Listener’s post, virtually all of which was factually wrong.
But I would like to emphasise the point that historically many virulent infectious diseases have fizzled out after killing all those susceptible to them (i.e. the majority) and those lucky few with genetic variations that made them less susceptible were the ones that left descendents.
@Dr Julian Money-Kyrle
As a matter of fact I wondered about this before commenting, and yes, this must have happened – but I could not find that many diseases that completely disappeared by themselves. The bubonic plague comes close: the bacterium is still found in several places in the world, but doesn’t seem to cause major outbreaks any more. Do you have more examples?
Then again, historical sources often mention outbreaks of diseases that don’t quite fit the symptoms of currently known diseases – but of course we can’t determine what caused those, as the pathogen isn’t usually preserved in archaeological materials.
Yes, all known epidemics and pandemics eventually ended, even smallpox, but after a while, when a sufficiently large group of susceptible people had emerged again (e.g. young children), the disease would return sooner or later, so that doesn’t really count.
Measles, smallpox and flu historically have had very high mortality rates in populations that encountered them for the first time.
According to Jared Diamond, in “Guns, Germs and Steel”, when Europeans first brought these three diseases to America they killed 90% of the native American population, though I don’t know where he got that figure from. Smallpox has always carried quite a high mortality, and there were long-term effects in many survivors, but a lot of people did survive it in places where the disease was endemic, such as Europe.
Measles, of course, still kills hundreds of thousands of people a year worldwide according to the WHO. This figure refers to deaths from the primary infection; measles also wreaks havoc with the immune system, leading to an increased risk of death from other infections for several years after contracting it.
I am a little surprised that he also counted flu here, as this is primarily a disease of birds, and many of the species that are its natural reservoir migrate very long distances, though I suppose migration is mostly in a North-South direction rather than East-West. Also flu is genetically much more unstable than most other viral infections so previous exposure to one strain does not necessarily confer immunity against a different one.
Syphilis is another infection that is much less virulent now than it used to be (the primary infection used to carry a high mortality rate, but by the time penicillin became available most syphilis deaths were from the tertiary phase which comes years later; it is thought that this was due to changes in the bacterium itself, however. It was known by doctors as the “Great Mimic” as it could present in so many different ways and tertiary syphilis can therefore be easily confused with other things. Testing for syphilis is still a standard part of screening for treatable causes of dementia, along with vitamin B12 deficiency, impaired thyroid function, normal-pressure hydrocephalus, sub-dural haematoma and multiple myeloma. However, although the primary infection is still relatively common, tertiary syphilis is very rare these days, and I have only seen two cases in my entire career (both very respectable elderly people who had no idea that they had it, one of them with numb feet (tabes dorsalis) and the other with a leaking heart valve (syphilitic aortitis).
@Dr Julian Money-Kyrle
Ah, yes, our infamous colonization gifts to our newly befriended (ahem) fellow humans … Indeed I had forgotten about those.
But even though those diseases may no longer be catastrophic to those exposed, they are still nasty enough to take seriously, and to vaccinate against in many cases – contrary to Listener’s suggestion that they became harmless enough to ignore by simply doing nothing about them.
Anyway, this thread has drifted way off-topic …
Wow…Richard. Sounds like a political rant to me…not a scientific analysis of Listeners claims. Scientists are people with biases, agendas, and most of all focus on their next research funding grants (a major source of bias). To say scientists are as pure as a new snow is ridiculous. Science as a process is a noble endeavor…but scientists are prone to all of the other characteristics that make people people. This entire post is evidence of that. Listener was making the point that the publics trust in science is lagging because of all of the information the public has been told as dogma that then changed which also then became dogma…which changed again which then became dogma…for the non-scientist to even question the new dogma is “anti-science”. People who question these dogmatic claims have been demonized, ridiculed, and disparaged. So, yeah, there is a great percentage of the public that is starting to call BS and unfortunately the scientists that were apart of the shifts in information are under the public scrutiny…rightfully so.
@Alfred Farmer
You make some sweeping statements about scientists in your rant. Since you are a person yourself and not an android, how do we know you do are not politically biased and posting here with an agenda? I guess we will never know.
I might be wrong but Listener seems capable of defending his claims. Unless you are Listener posting with a different name.
@Jack
I get tired of replying to every post… many times I just don’t have the time or energy to respond…. as is probable the case for many. I suppose most of us pick and choose when and where to post.
That said, I know disinformation when I see it. Joe Biden seems to get a pass on dis-information…. we’ll see how this one plays out…. lol
Peoples….I give you the leader of the free world… you can’t make this up.
At the town hall, CNN presenter Don Lemon asked the president whether he believes COVID is in retreat.
“The president said there is a pandemic for those who are not vaccinated against COVID. He went on to claim: “If you’re vaccinated, you’re not going to be hospitalized, you’re not going to be in an ICU unit, and you are not going to die.”
Biden also said: “You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/fact-check-did-joe-biden-spread-misinformation-on-covid-vaccines/ar-AAMrsDw
@Listener
“I get tired of replying to every post… many times I just don’t have the time or energy to respond…. as is probable the case for many. ”
Then maybe you should not post that much and there wont be a chance for people to respond to your posts and you wont have to respond to theirs. Problem solved!
“That said, I know disinformation when I see it. ”
That is certainly true that your mind is the the greatest mis-information-dar there is out there!!
Care to detect if there is misinformation in this video? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zicGxU5MfwE
Sorry Listener…Spoiler Alert….
Trump and the republicans have used misinformation. I think it is safe to say that most politicians, or anybody of power, uses misinformation. Which is why many people have become so skeptical in trusting authority, including those with science backgrounds. I think we have pointed out some examples of how those authorities, inlcuding scientits have put out misinformation. Granted we didn’t agree on every point as some were questionable, but some of it is undeniable, yet people still deny it.
@Jack
I’ve watched that video many times…DJT never suggested anybody to do that. He was verbalizing some potential solutions that were being investigated by the scientific community.
Nothing more.
@Listener
Didn’t know you have turd polishing skills. Keep on polishing my friend!
@Jack
I assume you are a scientist. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. Honestly. Making the point that the media, the politicians, and in some cases self-proclaimed scientists keep changing the narrative…which is fine as long as they admit that hey folks…we are trying to figure things out…we aren’t really sure what’s happening next or how things will go…but it isn’t that response. It’s do what we say which seems to keep changing with no admission that they changed the story. Listener attempted to make this point but it was completely blown over. Maybe you understand this point? Not sure…the “scientists” on this post keep saying how stupid everyone else is without acknowledging how many of the scientists from covid-fame have completely screwed the pooch wrt public trust.
@Alfred Farmer
You certainly assumed a lot of things!! That happens to people who live in fantasy land!
Forgive me for making a “scientific” observation. Cannot help it. After all I am a scientist according to you.
@Alfred Farmer
I can’t think of a single scientist who betrayed the public trust (apart from seriously deranged fools such as Walach). Can you name even one?
I DO know several politicians who seriously screwed over the public time and again with regard to Covid-19. One of the biggest offenders was this pathological liar and narcissistic psychopath, one Donald T.(*), who kept telling the public that there was no problem at all, that this whole ‘China virus’ would be gone by Easter, or by the start of summer for sure, or by the end of August on the outside – and that any measures to prevent the spread were leftist propaganda to ruin his Great Economic Boom and turn America into a commie gulag yada yada yada.
This man’s utter unwillingness and incompetence to deal with the pandemic may have cost upwards of a hundred thousand American lives, completely unnecessary. And it would have been far worse if Anthony Fauci hadn’t managed to maintain at least some sanity in all this – without getting fired and replaced with a sycophant like all other competent public servants, which is a medal-worthy feat in and of itself.
And unfortunately, those same GOP politicians are still at it, trying to frustrate the Democrat administration’s attempts to increase the vaccination rate – although there are signs that they are realizing that they’re cutting their own throat, because now it is almost exclusively their voters who are getting sick and dying in droves, exactly because of their toxic rhetoric (some of which appears to trickle in even here ..).
*: To be fair, he can be credited tot a certain extent for one thing: Operation Warp Speed. But for all the rest, the man has caused untold harm with his endless BS, lies, and refusal to support general health measures against Covid-19.
Dr. Fauci told the US that they do not need to wear masks because they don’t work. Yet, later he told us they work and that by wearing masks we could save lives. So how many hundreds of thousands of lives did Fauci risk by telling us masks don’t work in the beginning?
Everyone wants to blame Trump and the GOP and granted they defintelty deserve share of the blame, but suggesting it’s al their fault is unfair.
According to the chart Dem and Rep vacciantion rates were similar in April but has grown apart more since. Is this because of Trump or the Biden admin trying to force mandates on everyone? Not sure about other people, but I know if I feel like some one is forcing something on me, then I begin to question the quality of that something and start to have cocnerns and questions. I tried to come here for some of those answers and unfortunately I have basically been told I am not smart enough to understand that my concerns aren’t real and I should just take some experts word for it. And this is what I feel is being pushed with Biden’s shut down misinformation campaign. Honest people with honest concerns get scared when people say you aren’t allowed to ask those types of questions, just take our word for it. This causes distrust with each question that does not get properly answered.
https://www.kff.org/policy-watch/the-red-blue-divide-in-covid-19-vaccination-rates-is-growing/
MM,
Early in the pandemic the mode of transmission had not been established and it was thought to be primarily through direct contact and from surfaces (which is how flu is spread). On that basis it was not thought that masks would be particularly helpful, and I suppose Dr Fauci advised according to the current state of knowledge.
Subsequent research demonstrated that spread was mainly through aerosols (I.e. exhaled droplets) which prompted experiments to establish how far they would carry and how they could be stopped. These showed that masks substantially cut down the number of droplets ejected though some are more effective than others. Note that they protect other people, not the wearer very much. Some masks only stop about 50% of droplets whereas others block up to 98%, but none are 100% effective.
Social distancing also reduces the number of exhaled droplets reaching another person, as does not shouting or singing, good ventilation and being outside. All of these measures reduce the chance of spreading infection and combining them reduces it more than any single one.
Dr Fauci changed his advice in the light of new evidence. Some people regard this as a form of weakness (not sticking to your guns, making a U-turn, being inconsistent, poor leadership), particularly when applied to politicians. However, Fauci is a doctor, not a politician, and doctors are expected to base their advice on evidence and to be aware of new research as it becomes available. Most people understand this and can see that it is a strength.
As for all the people that have died because he wasn’t advocating masks sooner, what about all those who might have been saved by dexamethasone or CPAP if they had been used prior to the studies showing them to be effective? More to the point, what about the millions who could have been saved worldwide if leaders had instigated lockdowns as soon as it was apparent that covid was increasing exponentially rather than watching the numbers continue to rise in a totally predictable way (China, at least, got it right and set an example of what to do which the rest of the world ignored).
Dr. Money-Kyrle,
So you are saying early in the pandemic there was evidence to rule our respiratory droplets and suggest that Sars Covid 2 did not transmit similar to Sars Covid 1? From a layman perspective that makes no sense, but I do understand that sometimes things can be true that can be counter intuitive to common sense. So can you actually provide that evidence or the “new evidence” that came out that you said is why he changed his advice?
Note, that Fauci actually said the reason he said masks did not work was because he did not want there to be a shortage of PPE for health care workers. Now I get wanting to save PPE for health care workers, but lying to people about the masks puts other people at risk. So in essence, Fauci was deciding some lives were more important than others, which is a moral decision not a scientific decision…and we are supposed to trust Fauci to make that decision?
So I think you helped to make my point, instead of admitting that Fauci was wrong, you are still trying to justify that he did everything right and they were honest mistakes following science even when Fauci already admitted he lied. And instead of Fauci admitting he was wrong, he claims more superiotty by protecting health care workers or plays semantics to cover up his mistakes.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/anthony-fauci-lied-about-masks-now-he-complains-that-people-distrust-authority
Dr. Mullis, inventor of the PCR test, raises many questions about the integrity of Fauci as well as how the PCR test is being interpreted incorrectly by many scientists.
https://fcpp.org/2021/02/27/pcr-test-is-flimsy-say-inventor-and-courts/
I feel sorry for you Michael, if you equate the honesty and integrity of Biden and Trump as Presidents and party leaders. Trump is a complete scoundrel who cares only about one thing in this world – Donald Trump.
On this site what you will find from a number of its regular contributors is science, science and yet more science. You will also find a variety of individuals who claim the mantle of science whilst being complete nutters. This very thread relates to one of them.
If you question what honest scientists say to you because you believe you already know better than they do or simply don’t like how they respond you are not doing yourself any favours.
There are honest scientists, dishonest scientists and nutters who happen to be scientists.
(I could possibly be termed a science-nut.)
Leigh,
I appreciate your sympathy, but it is better suited for the people who believe Biden is honest or has integrity. He has been caught lying multiple times and had to drop out of his first presidential run for plagerizing speeches. He said when he took office there was no vaccine, yet he took the vaccine a month before taking office. The other day he said if you take the vaccine you won’t get Covid. I could go on if you like with evidence as well. There is a very long list of things Biden has said and done that shows he is not honest nor has any integrity. And this is not a partisan issue, many politicians on both sides are not honest or have integrity.
So with this said about Biden, it does not justify anything bad Trump has done and if you want to argue that Biden is not as bad as Trump that is one thing, but to suggest that Biden is some great alternative because he is honest is just wrong.
For a country that is supposed to be as great as the US claims to be, it is very disappointing that Biden and Trump were the two best options they could come up with.
So if you do live in the US, then please take some time to learn more about Biden, because he is not the great person the media makes him out to be.
As for scientists, honesty is tough. As you point out, they are going to have much more information on a particular topic at hand, so to some extent you need to have faith they are being honest with you. However, when a scientist can’t admit when they are wrong, then it becomes very difficult to trust them. And I will admit, that in some cases it may just be my lack of understanding which causes the confusion, but sometimes it is because they are simply wrong and won’t admit it. You don’t need to be a scientist to know Fauci is playing semantics semantics in order to be right.
This is an example why people don’t trust scientists.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xnbzjd6Gl8
Richard,
Andrew Wakefield is the name that immediately comes to mind.
@Dr Julian Money-Kyrle
[scientists betraying public trust]
This comment of mine was limited to the context of Covid-19, as expressed by Alfred Farmer (“… how many of the scientists from covid-fame have completely screwed the pooch wrt public trust.”)
Wakefield is indeed an example of someone who betrayed the public trust and his profession in a very serious way outside this limited scope. Here in the Netherlands we have Diederik Stapel, who fabricated a significant part of his research. And there are numerous others. But AFAICT, these liars and fraudsters are still the exception, not the rule as in some political groups.
Then again, I’m having increasing doubts about Chinese scientists too, whose work and careers are increasingly subservient to the greater glory of China’s overall reputation, e.g. churning out positive ‘research’ in the field of TCM in alarming amounts.
Richard,
I don’t think Andrew Wakefield is entirely off topic, as without him there would not be the widespread mistrust of vaccines that prevails today.
MM,
No, of course I didn’t say that. What a strange thing to suggest! Early in the pandemic we knew very little about SARS-CoV2 (the virus) or COVID-19 (the disease that it causes).
Early in the pandemic there was no evidence of mode of transmission other than epidemiological evidence, i.e. which people contracted it (though epidemiological evidence is a powerful tool). Many viruses (including the one that caused SARS in 2003) can survive on surfaces for an appreciable length of time and remain infectious to people touching those surfaces and transferring them to their eyes, nose, mouth or whatever. They get onto the surfaces primarily through exhaled droplets and also from people’s hands. Initially it was expected that SARS-CoV2 would be transmitted in the same way.
It was also thought that the effect of surgical masks was limited as virus particles are much smaller than the weave of the material.
Subsequent evidence showed that most infections were occurring via aerosols (small exhaled droplets suspended in the air) rather than from touching surfaces. This prompted experiments looking at droplets exhaled as a result of breathing, and from other activities such as talking, singing, shoulting, coughing, sneezing etc., and how far these droplets carried. In other words it was fluid droplets contining the viruses that were spreading the infection, not free virus particles.
Further research looked at what proportion of droplets were able to get through various types of mask. The findings were that all of them were able to stop a large proportion of droplets but some types (e.g. surgical masks) were more effective than others (e.g. home-made cloth masks).
I don’t know what research there has been to establish to what extent masks prevent infection, rather than spread of virus-containing droplets, but I would imagine that this would be a reasonably straightforward question for epidemiologists to answer.
The outcome is that mask-wearing (with surgical masks preferred), social distancing (the further the better, but two metres seems a practical sweet spot), ventilation, limiting time indoors with other people, avoiding shouting, singing etc. and frequent hand-washing are now advised in order to limit the spread of infection.
I live in the UK so I am not particularly aware of who said what in the US, at least initially. Later on the BBC started broadcasting Trump’s daily press briefings, often with a camera following the reactions of his advisers standing in the background, Fauci among them. It was very entertaining in a horrific sort of way. As an aside, there have been a number of TV documentaries, including an entertaining series by Miriam Margolyes, examining the question of Trump’s popularity and success in the US, which is something that most of the rest of the world finds quite baffling given that it is so hard to take him seriously at all.
With regard to the advice regarding mask-wearing, as far as I can tell Fauci was saying the same as infectious disease specialists elsewhere in the world, including our own scientists here in the UK, and the advice changed as new evidence became available. I have no idea whether he lied about anything and quite frankly I am not very interested in digging up historical news articles about US politics. Fauci comes across as one of the few players here who has consistently shown integrity and is frankly just trying to do his job.
Personally I am much less interested in who said what than I am in the medical side of things, i.e. how to prevent the infection from spreading further and how to treat those who are seriously ill from it, though as I am retired, and my specialism was oncology, I am not personally involved in managing COVID patients.
Dr. Money-Kyrle,
You are not willing to admit that Dr. Fauci lied about the masks when I provided you with evidence he did.
You say Dr. Fauci has integrity even though I provided evidence that he plays semantic games to cover up misleading congress.
Unfortunately I think that you may be too loyal to the science community to admit when they are wrong even when presented with solid evidence. I even cited an article that suggested that this is one of the reasons why the science community has problems, because scientists are reluctant to call out other scientists. This has become evident here.
I do want to thank you for your time and responses, I did find some of them helpful, but there is no point to continue if you’re unable to admit Dr. Fauci was dishonest.
MM
I have never set foot on American soil. I don’t know much about Biden except he’s been around politics for a long, long time. Trump has been all over the political news for four years. Before that he was just a TV rich man (or at least presented the appeareance of being) whom I hadn’t the slightest interest in. Now I’ve seen and heard more than enough of him to see exactly what he is. One thing is for sure, if Biden is just as bad then the USA is in even bigger trouble than I thought. I have an old friend in Texas who voted Trump first time and bitterly regrets doing so. Now thinks Trump is a complete idiot. His Dr. daughter works in Florida in vaccine research.
The mask thing in the US became an immediate gigantic political thing. Crazily so to my British eyes. It became somewhat politicized over time in the UK too, but not nearly to the same level of naked political tribalism. A smallish section of the Conservative Party and public had a problem with it but there wasn’t a clear psychotic split down the entire nation and political divide.
Fauci was big in science back in the days when Trump was just a TV guy with his name on a big tower. That Fauci has survived in high office under both, and if I’m correct earlier administrations, suggests he knows something worth knowing about, both in science and in science administration at the very top.
Thanks all the same, but I avoid YT links in these kinds of discussions, like I try to avoid the plague.
Yes, I wear a mask if I’m going close to others in confined spaces. Let’s say that we may or may not protect ourselves and others by doing so. To me the wise course is to give ourselves the chance that it may do so.
I have no doubt that there’s a YT demonstrating that masks are useless and another showing they are the entire solution to the problem.
Controversy is a big YT money spinner. YT should be used as an entertainment channel. Also useful as a practical instruction channel. For me that’s about it.
Anyone who bases their opinion of scientists on the basis of one YT is a fool.
Leigh,
OK, so to recap, you don’t know much about Biden, yet were willing to make the claim that he is honest and has integrity. Hopefully you can see how problematic that is. Now, to your credit, you acknowledged you don’t know much about Biden instead of trying to argue he is honest which I appreciate.
It is hard to determine if one person is just as bad as the other, but I would argue they are a different kind of bad. So depending on your politics I can see how one could argue that Biden or Trump may not be as bad as the other, but neither one is a great choice.
I am a bit confused on why so much disdain for getting news from social media or YT. I understand if it is some random person posting a meme or clip on YT, but if FB post a link to a reliable article or YT is a clip of reliable reporters, then I am not sure why there is a problem. If you click on the YT link and see it is fox news then fair enough, disregard it. But if the clip is of reliable people reporting then I am not sure why someone is a fool for using it just as they would if they read an article from the same reporter. And the YT clip I provided was from The Hill, which is one of the most reliable and unbiased news sources in the US. To disregard information without even looking at it seems unfair and even biased.
this is your last off-topic comment that I allow. and don’t tell me I haven’t been patient [you must have submitted about 50!]
MM,
Quite frankly I have no idea whether Dr Fauci lied or not, nor am I particularly interested. I don’t live in the US and I don’t take advice from him. Inasmuch as I have seen him on TV and heard what he has to see his views seem to align with other international experts.
I think I said that he comes across as somebody with integrity, which is not the same thing. What I know about him is what has been shown in the UK media. I have never met or worked with him, and I haven’t spoke with other doctors who know him personally, so I have limited evidence to go on. I am quite impressed by how he managed to survive Trump, who seems to have had a policy of firing any of his advisers who disagreed with him.
You have given a lot of opinions, but I don’t think you have provided any evidence of anything.
I am going with the science, not individual scientists. If you have ever read or heard any proper scientific debate on any topic you will find that discussions are qutie robust to the point of ruthlessness and they don’t pull any punches.
My interest here is promoting health and education, and in particular explaining things to people who don’t understand them very clearly. I don’t see that my views on Fauci, inasmuch as I have any, are remotely relevant. I have very little interest in US politics except that they can be quite entertaining at times and are so bizarre as to be difficult to take seriously. However, if you want to debate politics with me then I don’t particularly want to continue.
Michael,
I didn’t say Biden was totally honest and unbiased. I’ve seen Trump as President. I’ll get to see what Biden is. If he turns out to be the moral equal of Trump then God help America.
The BBC midday news on the situation in the USA was dreadful to behold.
What I see is a grisly experiment in natural selection.
A mass culling of the unvaccinated.
Meanwhile the Republican Party wants to wash the invasion of the Capitol by 10,000 crazy Trumpers right out of the history books, or if that’s not possible, try to wash it out of its collective memory.
I hope Biden doesn’t match this.
I don’t believe there’s anything more that can usefully be said. I do wonder what it would take to remove your doubts about the vaccine. Certainly not anything I can say. There are others here far more qualified to do that – if it be possible. And you are certainly not going to create any doubts in my mind of its value. I’ve grabbed my two doses as an oldie with cancer with both hands.
Good luck to you.
You’re going to need it.
Alfred,
It is fascinating how many eductated people can’t understand that they can’t always be right. Statistically speaking it just can’t happen. Likewise in life it just doesn’t happen as evident from the many examples over the past year or so. Yet in many discussions, it is I am always wrong and they are always right. You phrased it well, there is a Dogma to science that too many ignore. They can’t accept that scientest are just like most people and want to be accepted, so this could bias a lot of scientist to publish (I cited a source earlier which mentioned this) articles to support those accepted truths with little to no real significance. For example, mask…tons of studies out there to tell us mask MAY work WITH other counter measures. Then from that we are told the do work.
If you read most my posts I usually stipulate that I could be wrong and most of my claims are more about I don’t know and we need better information…but appearantly that is still wrong.
Michael,
If you say something that is wrong and are informed of that fact by an honest scientist, be grateful to have been corrected.
There is a number approaching too vast to comprehend of published papers on god-knows-what out there. A few hours or even days culling a number of papers, saying whatever about whatever, isn’t going to cut it. A scientist will have read god knows how many papers in order to publish just one.
A scientist tells you that you are wrong. You want more information. Will you read everything the scientist has read to reach the understanding he/she has reached in informing you “you are wrong”. How much would you comprehend? Would supplying you with one paper cut it for you when you have found one paper saying something differerent? How many would cut it? 20? 200?
So let’s cut to the chase. An enormous number of scientists are of one opinion and a small number disagree. What to do? Keep an open mind? The enormous number and the small number don’t have open minds. They both think they know best. What should you and I think?
I always go with the majority in matters of science. I am not qualified to disagree with any scientific majority. I don’t need to see the evidence, though I will have a look. The majority is my evidence. I would have to be cleverer or better informed than the majority to challenge it.
I have the benefit of having studied science to BSc. I trust Science . Not to be perfect, or even perfectible, but simply to be our best understanding of how the world works.
The internet is a wonderful creation of science with the potential for good and bad use.
It’s not the fault of science if careless or misguided or malevolent or greedy or stupid people abuse the practical products of science.
Scientists start by assuming that they are wrong and try very hard to prove it. If they can’t, and until comebody else does, their conclusions are provisionally accepted by other scientists. If a scientist turns out to be wrong this is the best thing that can happen to him as everybody learns from it and science as a whole moves on.
More generally, people who question themselves have been shown to make better judgements and decisions than people who don’t.
@Michael Moses
There are many examples throughout history of scientists being wrong…very, very wrong (Thalidomide as birth control, CFC’s, transorbital lobotomies, therapeutic lsd, climate gate scandal, Chernobyl, overly prescribed opoids, South Korean who claimed he cloned a human…and on and on. There are also great examples of scientists, philosophers, scholars, and others who went against what was “well established fact”, such as an Earth-centric view of the solar system and they were subsequently locked up in house arrest (Galileo) as I am sure the science-minded on this discussion might recall. Turns out…Galileo and Copernicus were right…they went against the grain based on data but a blood-thirsty public didn’t really care. That blood thirst is present today toward people that don’t trust the ever-changing and far left radically sympathetic media narrative.
Many of the points of view expressed in this discussion are primarily politically-motivated. Especially those of Richard, Leigh, and Jack. They attempt to come across as data-driven but they fall short when they make nasty comments about dissenting viewpoints. What a shame. It’s a microcosm of society these days. You either get inline, take your vaccine, wear your mask, and shut up or you get labeled (which the left seems to be very skilled at) anti-science, anti-vax, evil, or stupid. I’m afraid science, as a pursuit for understanding what is not currently understood, has been subverted with leftist political shaming and name-calling. Too bad.
@Alfred Farmer
Ah, the “Science Was Wrong Before” gambit …
Certainly, scientists and sometimes even science was wrong. But in the vast majority of cases, these errors were corrected by science as soon as they were discovered. And what’s more: these failures were not censored or forgotten as soon as possible, but in fact served as important wake-up calls to improve science.
The main problem with pseudoscience and quackery is that NO corrections are ever made. Then again, in most cases the only conceivable correction is abandoning the practice altogether, and that will not happen any day soon as long as said quacks and cranks earn their money selling their nonsense.
Completely wrong. Thalidomide was never used as birth control. It was originally used as an antiemetic, and as such it was prescribed to suppress morning sickness in pregnant women. The major scientific mistake here was that it was never properly tested on pregnant women, and turned out to cause birth defects. However, thalidomide is still used for a range of conditions.
Completely wrong again. There was no scandal, just a bunch of climate change denialists who got their hands on a collection of hacked e-mails and computer files from climate research scientists, and completely misrepresented their contents. The only thing you can blame those scientists for is that they failed to properly secure their computer data.
And yes, here we have the other one of the dynamic duo used to downplay the importance of scientific consensus, and defend cranks and ‘brave mavericks’, the ‘Galileo Gambit’.
And once again, you are demonstrating a serious lack of knowledge and insight. Galileo got into trouble mostly because his ideas contradicted religious dogma.
This is an interesting claim, especially in the light of what you say next:
Sorry old chap, but it would appear that you are the one insisting on bringing political sneers into a discussion that should primarily deal with the scientific merits (or rather the lack thereof) of Walach’s paper, and his motivations for publishing such poor work.
I don’t give a hoot about ‘left’ or ‘right’, and generally, I find that both sides have their merits and their weak points. But I rather detest people spreading lies and BS, especially if this is detrimental to public health – and there is no denying that the person occupying the White House between 2016 and 2020 is a prime example of someone who produces lies and BS as a matter of daily routine. And there is also no denying that lots of high-ranking GOP politicians still kiss this person’s behind. And that all this was not particularly conducive to furthering public health in the US, especially in the light of a spreading pandemic.
Well, those who refuse or oppose vaccination indeed aren’t very smart people – because a) vaccination is the best way that we have to deal with the pandemic at the moment, and b) there are no good arguments against vaccination. This has nothing to do with ‘left’ or ‘right’ or American politics; it is just what scientific consensus has found – worldwide.
It is quite simple really: if one or more scientists claim results that contradict the current consensus, then their findings are scrutinized like the work of any other scientist. If it turns out to be rubbish – such as Walach’s paper – then they get called out on that. And conversely, if antivaccine people would produce legitimate scientific results that support their claims that vaccination is somehow bad for people, then they will be taken seriously. But when all they do is produce FUD and misinformation, then yes, they will be looked down upon. And rightly so, in my opinion.
Galileo didn’t prove what he believed regarding the the motion of the earth. He found visible evidence that Jupiter had moons circling around it. That was the death of a cosmos where everything was centred on the earth’s centre. It certainly wasn’t proof of heliocentrism. He had arguments, not proof.
Copernicus’s system involved a series of invisible spheres within spheres for each planet resulting in their visible motion which was believed to be perfect circles. It was a considerably more complicated reboot of an ancient but completely false system centered on the sun rather than the earth.
Kepler drove himself half mad trying to fit new data otained from Tycho Brahe’s observations to a model of circular orbits. He eventually had to admit defeat and abandon the ancient notion that heavenly bodies must move in perfect circles. He discovered that they must move in ellipses though Galileo wasn’t too keen!
Newton showed that Kepler’s Law’s were consistent with his own inverse square law of gravitational force. He in turn was subject to attack as appealing to invisible spooky-wooky stuff.
“Can’t explain it, but there it is” he said.
He also thought the planetary system was unstable and suggested God might send comets in now and again to maintain good working order. He thought his work revealed the majestic omnipresence and handiwork of God.
Leibnitz took offence on God’s behalf. Godly make-do and mend? Absurd!
(Tip: Just stick to the Godless science boys. It’s tough enough as is.)
No blood-thirsty public was required for Galileo’s recantation. The pope thought he had been satirised by Galileo and he also got got up the noses of other Aristotelian/Church bigwigs. One drag on science back then was having to do battle with powerful Church conservatives to whom science must perforce bend the knee.
Science subverters of various hues may perhaps always be with us. Galileo was silenced back then. But not today. The RC Church belatedly admitted its error.
Figures in the RC Church flirted with Intelligent Design at one point but the RC Church has learned its Galileo lesson. It accepts evolution, albeit guided by the spooky invisible workings of God.
(I wonder if Newton may have thought of gravity as being an invisible, intangible marker of God’s hand at work.)
Michael Moses
I admire your ability and tenacity to converse with the opinions opposite to yours here at this forum. Again, I appreciate your comments.
I think you have already observed what I also have taken also taken to heart.
The status-quo positions here at this forum will not yield an inch of ground to anyone with a different point of view….even when presented with valid evidence.
For that reason, I now refrain from writing many lengthy posts. It’s simply not worth loosing time and energy wrangling over and over here about nothing that will change. I poke my head in now and again to see what’s the talk is…but nothing changes.
Edward Earnst ejected me from this message board many months ago by blocking my posts.
Why ?…..because he got tired of my opposing view…AND OPPOSING EVIDENCE …..nothing more. He never even offered a reason why. So I came back with another moniker.
My advice to you is don’t loose your life here.
Formally known here as RG.
“Edward Earnst ejected me from this message board many months ago by blocking my posts.
Why ?”
because you are even not smart enough to get the name of the host right?
@Richard
Thanks for the rebuttal. Especially the correction about thalidomide. But I think this is another example of you (and others) missing the forest through the trees. Thalidomide was wrongly used to control morning sickness and lead to major birth defects (as opposed to my mistake “birth control”).
The point was scientists mistakenly used thalidomide for one aspect of pregnancy not realizing the unintended consequences of major birth defects…it’s important to know the effects of a brand new medication before you get on a blog post and shame people for not jumping on board right away…many of us are waiting to see if there are long term negative effects of mRNA vaccines.
As I am sure you know and likely have dismissed already…Dr. Robert Malone who designed mRNA vaccines even understands this and advocates for people to weigh the risks and consider therapeutics as an option for those who aren’t comfortable (or aware) being apart of this global longitudinal medical experiment. Sage advice don’t you think?
No. Robert Malone did NOT design or invent mRNA vaccines. He did some preliminary work in the field, but that’s it. He invented the vaccines in the same way that the Wright brothers invented the F35.
https://www.logically.ai/factchecks/library/3aa2eefd
And have you ever wondered why thalidomide was not approved for use by pregnant women in the USA?
Yes. Good scientists.
And theraputics? Such as? None have been shown to be effective. And please don’t ramble about vitamin D, ivermectin or any of the similarly unevidenced rubbish touted by charlatans.
The vaccines work and are the best and the safest tool we have to end the pandemic.
See Is “mRNA vaccine inventor” Robert Malone “being erased from Wikipedia” for his claims about COVID-19? by Respectful Insolence, 2021-07-13:
https://respectfulinsolence.com/2021/07/13/is-mrna-vaccine-inventor-robert-malone-being-erased-for-his-claims-about-covid-19/
@Pete Attkins
Wikipedia has surrendered long ago to the PC world of corporate left wing media. There are no WP:RS (Wikipedia Reliable Resources). As was described in the article, it is not easy to change Wikipedia pubic information any longer, as was pointed out in your link. Wikipedia controls what it says now…. just like most other media sources are under control of the left.
Robert Malone “was” a scientist and a doctor… now the left will cancel him out as they attempt to do anyone that opposes them or offered a different narrative than they want to spread. So the left will proceed to cancel out Malone’s credentials because they disagree with his professional opinion.
Wikipedia never was a reliable source for everything, and certainly is less so now.
Is it really important that Robert Malone did or not not independently create the mRNA technology for the vaccine ? … or is it important to know that a person with Malone’s credentials offers a different opinion of the safety of the mRNA vaccines ? C’mon folks, can anybody offer ANY scientific evidence of what will be the effects of mRNA vaccines towards male and female reproduction ? …. I’m all ears. Evidently “Science” doesn’t care about human reproductive safety.
@Listener
My Man! loosing reproductive capability is not the only side effect. You forgot to list several other side effects that come with getting a mRNA vaccine and have not been studied yet. Here is the list along with plenty of evidence, for the folks who are pedantic about evidence.
1. Spontaneous corporal magnetization: https://www.dw.com/en/can-the-covid-vaccine-can-make-you-magnetic/av-57890465
2. Cerebral 5G communications without a cell phone or a tin-foil hat: https://fox8.com/news/coronavirus/cleveland-doctor-tells-ohio-lawmakers-covid-19-vaccine-can-leave-people-magnetized-interfaced-with-5g-towers/
3. Vaccine induced microchippery: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/jul/01/instagram-posts/video-microchip-reader-finding-chip-vaccinated-wom/
4. Vaccine induced infertility: https://www.foxnews.com/health/pfizer-moderna-covid-19-vaccines-dont-lower-sperm-count-study
You might think you are immune to all these side effects since you got the J&J vaccine. I got news for you pal!
Beware! Anything you see and think Gates will know!! Apparently, Bill Gates got his hands on J&J vaccine before it got shipped. One of the ways you know you got microchipped like cattle is that you get fleeting visions of the horrible Windows ME logo and/or blue screen of death. If anyone here used Windows ME that came out a few decades ago, they would know what I am talking about. It would have been better if Billy boy chose to install the latest and the greatest Windows 11 on the chip, but alas beggars can’t be choosers!!
Point is Listener! if you want to block the chip from communicating with Billy, you need to wear a specially designed tin-foil hat. I have designed such a hat for prospective customers like yourself. Let me know if you are interested in hiding from Gates, the hat costs an arm and a leg for sure.
“the hat costs an arm and a leg for sure”
What can I get for just a rib?
@Honest Ape
You got it wrong. I never suggested that loosing reproduction ability is or isn’t a definite side effect of Covid-19. Nor did I suggest it the only potential side effect.
What I did intend is that the scientific community doesn’t know the outcome, they have stated as much, so it’s a fact. I find it incompressible that they want to potentially go down the Thalidomide path again, for a virus that has a 99% survival rate.
You said;
“You might think you are immune to all these side effects since you got the J&J vaccine. I got news for you pal!As for reproductive .”
Im beyond the desire to produce offspring, and my hen is no longer laying eggs. That said, you are correct in that the J&J vaccine also has not been tested for reproductive side effects, at least as far as they have indicated.
is it a known pathology, if someone insists on having the last word, no matter how stupid and how wat off the original subject?
is there a name for it?
[disclaimer: I am not an immunologist or even a proper scientist. The following are my personal insights in this subject, based on my extensive interest in the matter, and I would really appreciate it if any errors or shortcomings are pointed out to be corrected.]
@Alfred Farmer
I absolutely agree. This is why ALL new pharmaceutical products (and procedures, and devices(*)) MUST be tested before being used in medicine. However, not all products are equal.
Apart from the fact that all vaccines that are being distributed have been tested for efficacy and side effects like any other pharmaceutical product, there are also some other points to note.
– Generally, medicines are substances that are not normally present in the body, and are intended to alter the body’s chemistry. This can be done in countless different ways. The problem is that it is almost impossible to target a medicine very precisely: very often, it has effects on other physiological systems than the targeted system, i.e. undesirable side effects. (This is also why alternative ‘medicines’ that are sold as ‘guaranteed harmless, without side effects’ usually don’t have any therapeutic effects either, beyond placebo.)
There is another reason why altering the body’s chemistry is difficult: the body has countless mechanisms to maintain homeostasis, which will often try to counter the effects of a drug. The liver and kidneys may try to get rid of a drug, and/or the body adapts to the presence of a drug etcetera (and then there is the problem that a drug’s metabolite may be far more harmful than the drug itself etc. etc.). And in rare cases as with thalidomide, a drug may cause serious mayhem in a very unexpected way. FYI: Thalidomide was tested on pregnant rats, without any adverse effects. In fact, the only way that its teratogenic properties could have come to light, especially in those days, would have been to have thousands of pregnant women test it …
– Vaccines are fundamentally different. All vaccines have exactly the same basic modus operandi: present the immune system with a pathogen or a part of a pathogen, in order to elicit an immune response. That is all. Which means that vaccines almost by definition can’t upset the body’s chemistry (as there are no ‘new’ substances involved), and that virtually all possible side effects are related to the immune system’s response. Also, most vaccines are only administered once or twice, or (as with the flu vaccine) once a year, which further limits the chances of any long-term side effects.
As for mRNA vaccines: these are by design even safer than regular vaccines, as they don’t involve growing pathogens, which first have to be inactivated, purified and/or otherwise made safe before they can be administered in a vaccine(**).
In fact, an mRNA vaccine does exactly the same thing that the actual virus does: it makes contact with cells in the body, and deposits its payload (a strand of mRNA) into a cell’s interior. The cell’s machinery then starts processing this mRNA to make viral proteins. The big difference is that the vaccine’s mRNA just codes for one virus protein (in this case the spike protein), instead of for all viral components (which would lead to the production of new virus particles and thus a real infection).
These spike proteins migrate to the cell’s outer membrane, where they are detected by the immune system and recognized as foreign. After another two weeks, the built-up immune memory ensures that any new contact with this viral protein (e.g. through Covid-19 infection) leads to an immediate response and eradication of the virus.
So to emphasize: the mRNA vaccine does nothing that the actual virus doesn’t also do, and it also involves no other chemical substances that may cause other effects than the (desired) immune response. IIRC, the vaccine also contains a few additives such as a mild preservative, but those have been in use for many decades without any ill effects whatsoever.
And even though vaccines are inherently safer than medicines, they are tested more rigorously than new medicines. After all, they are administered to huge groups of healthy people, which means that side effects are far less acceptable than negative effects with medicines that are only administered to people who need them.
Malone is one of those very few doctors and scientists who do not subscribe to the scientific consensus with regard to Covid-19 vaccines. Most scientists think that he is wrong (and there are serious doubts about those claims that he invented mRNA vaccines), and I see no reason to believe him – the chances of ‘brave maverick doctors’ such as Malone being right against the consensus are vanishingly small to begin with. I can’t even think of one example from recent history. Can you?
*: As a bit of extra background: I am regularly involved in the development of biomedical electronics, and as such, I am often required to comply with very strict standards for proven safety and efficacy. In fact, keeping up and producing all the required paperwork to document every step and every choice in the development process, and of course all mandatory test reports quite often increase a product’s development price by one or even two orders of magnitude. This is also why medical equipment can be insanely expensive compared to everyday gadgets bought in the store, even though the electronics are more or less comparable (although safety, quality and reliability most definitely are not comparable).
**: And because no pathogens have to be grown, modified and processed, the design and production of mRNA vaccines can happen far easier and quicker: just assemble the right RNA strand, package it in a micelle, and you can start testing within a few days instead of months or years.
@Richard
Please don’t misunderstand…I am very excited about the promises and initial data of mRNA vaccines. I think they are game changers…potentially. Again, my issue is around shaming those who need more information before they make a medical decision (that can’t be reversed). Information has been extremely politicized so it’s difficult to find out what’s true and what’s biased political talking points. For many of us, even the CDC, FDA, and WHO have been inconsistent in recommendations which generates doubt in a lot of folks…the “Trust us we are the government” has never been a good approach either.
mRNA vaccines in humans is new. We seem to have a good grasp of the short-term side effects and they appear to be rare (myocarditis, pericarditis, guillain barre, partial paralysis, death). We have very little understanding of longer-term effects such as possible autoimmune disorders and response to other corona virus infections of the vaccinated. That will take time. There are many who do their own risk assessment and determine that avoiding the unknowns of long-term negative effects, and even known rare short-term effects of this new technology is worth the risk of possibly getting covid, being sick for a few days, and recovering…all while generating antibodies naturally. Depending on your age cohort, risk of death of dying from the virus has been very, very low.
Can you guarantee a 30 year old female with no health issues will die if they contract covid? Of course not. Can you guarantee a 30 year old female will not have negative side effects from the vaccine? Of course not. So to pretend we have all the answers with the faux mantra of “follow the science” when the science is incomplete is intellectually dishonest. Admittedly the data currently suggests that the vaccine appears to be mostly safe but people don’t make decisions based on the population…they make decisions on how things may or may not effect them. The 30 year old female is extremely unlikely to die from covid and she is also 100% guaranteed not to have side effects from a new vaccine if she doesn’t take it. Calling her names or shaming her will likely only make her stick with her decision.
@Alfred Farmer
This appears to be a serious problem in the US, but not elsewhere in the world.
The nature of this vaccine makes it virtually impossible that there will be any longer-term effects. And once again: the vaccine does nothing that the virus itself also doesn’t do: it enters cells, incites the cellular machinery to produce (one) viral protein for a few days at most, and that is it.
With all due respect, but this is a rather dumb (and loaded) question. Of course you can never guarantee that someone dies, not even from the most terrible diseases. A 30-year-old female contracting Covid-19 has approximately a 1 in 1,000 chance to die from the disease.
However, the emerging problem with Covid-19 is not so much the already high death toll, but the nasty after-effects of the disease, known as long-haul Covid.
Based on current information, your 30-year-old female has a 1 in 5 chance of having to deal with long-haul Covid (i.e. suffering detrimental after-effects of the disease for more than 3 months after the actual infection), and a 1 in 10 chance of having to deal with these long-term sequelae for more than 6 months. These after-effects can be absolutely devastating, with a completely healthy 35-year-old suddenly reduced to a physical condition that is worse than that of an 80-year-old. So one in 10 of those 30-year-old females will suffer a serious long-term reduction in their quality of life, not seldom effectively ending their active and productive life. Do you find that an acceptable price to pay for shunning the vaccine?
This too is a rather dumb and loaded question. Sure, chances are that she will suffer some side effects such as pain at the injection site, and perhaps a bit of malaise. However, I can virtually guarantee that she will not have long-term side effects, and only a very low chance (as in: less than 1 in 100,000) of serious side effects, with perhaps a 1 in 1 million chance of death.
So summarized:
– Covid vaccines:
* Serious side effects: roughly 1 in 100,000
* Death: roughly 1 in 1 million
* Long-term side effects: none that we know of
* Long-term positive effects: reduces chances of hospitalization, death and long-haul Covid by at least 95%.
– Covid-19 infection:
* Serious effects (requiring hospitalization): approximately 1 in 100
* Death: 1 in 1,000
* Long-term detrimental effects (> 6 months): 1 in 10.
And once again please note that these figures are for your 30-year-old female. The numbers are far worse for males and older people (although long-haul Covid appears to affect all ages equally, including even children).
So even for a 30-year-old female, contracting Covid-19 still entails health risks that are several orders of magnitude higher than getting the vaccine.
So once again, and with emphasis: there is no good reason AT ALL to reject Covid-19 vaccination. The disease is far, far worse than the vaccine’s side effects.
@Alfred Farmer
Wow! You made some great points Alfred! Kudos to you! I quoted some of your insightful nuggets of wisdom below without your permission and I hope you forgive me.
“Scientists are people with biases, agendas, and most of all focus on their next research funding grants (a major source of bias). To say scientists are as pure as a new snow is ridiculous. Science as a process is a noble endeavor…but scientists are prone to all of the other characteristics that make people people.”
“Not sure…the “scientists” on this post keep saying how stupid everyone else is without acknowledging how many of the scientists from covid-fame have completely screwed the pooch wrt public trust.”
I would go further and say that ALL Scientists are left leaning liberals and use political talking points to their benefit. When you ask a question, they don’t provide you with information, they just dismiss you and say you have to blindly do what they tell you to do. You can certainly see that all over this thread. For example, when people like Moses and Listener posted several questions seeking information, the so-called scientists on this forum did absolutely nothing to dispel the myths and conspiracy theories Moses et al were posting, neither did the scientists repeatedly go to extraordinary lengths to patiently explain why Moses et al were wrong and provide them with proper resources. All they did was mock the good people who were just “seeking information”. They have also mocked you a good measure for standing up to what is right, and you certainly did stand up strong for what is right, from the right side of the issues, if you know what I mean 😉
“Information has been extremely politicized so it’s difficult to find out what’s true and what’s biased political talking points. For many of us, even the CDC, FDA, and WHO have been inconsistent in recommendations which generates doubt in a lot of folks…the “Trust us we are the government” has never been a good approach either.”
Absolutely! right from the on-set of the pandemic, then president DJT tried his best to provide all the information the country needed, only to be repeatedly thwarted by none other than the cunning saboteur named Snowball. DJT and GOP never lied to the country nor spread misinformation regarding COVID, that resulted in mostly people from republican leaning states and counties that decided to stay unvaccinated. As a result, there are large pockets of unvaccinated people (mostly in red states and counties) that triggered the ongoing fourth wave. But hey, its their god given right to get sick and/or die of covid, who am I to judge!
“There are many examples throughout history of scientists being wrong…very, very wrong (Thalidomide as birth control, CFC’s, transorbital lobotomies, therapeutic lsd, climate gate scandal, Chernobyl, overly prescribed opoids, South Korean who claimed he cloned a human…and on and on. “
It seems like you have certainly done your research Alfred! Great job! Above are some of the reasons why I don’t rely on science and/or scientists anymore. In order to avoid being a slave to science I gave up all my earthly possessions (car, home, computer, cell phone, etc.) all of which were invented by scientists and/or manufactured based on scientific principles that were discovered by some so-called scientist. I now live in a forest under a rock. I hunt for food and wear clothing made from the hides of animals I hunt. I don’t use anything that is remotely invented by scientists, except for this computer that I am typing this on at an internet café. I only do this to let people like you know that you are not alone in hating scientists. Also, if you do decide to act on your science hatred, I am here for you and anyone else (I am talking to you Listener) when you all want to join me in this new way of science-free life.
I will have to sign-off for now, people at this internet café are looking at me weird and probably getting ready to call the cops on me. I wonder if it is the animal hide I am wearing!
Honest Ape,
I appreciate your responses as they add a sense of levity to a somewhat dry conversation. However, for the record, asking questions or raising concerns based on facts is not the same as posting myths or conspiracy theories. Nor do I think any of us suggest that anyone should go to extraordinary lengths to explain anything. If the science overwhelmingly supports their statements, then it should be relatively easy to explain why I am wrong even with supporting evidence (as the red banner says).
is it a known pathology, if someone insists on having the last word, no matter how stupid and how wat off the original subject?
is there a name for it?
“if someone insists on having the last word, no matter how stupid and how wat off the original subject?”
Indeed, their absolute desire to have the last word seems to have blinded them from realizing that they are being brutally lampooned. Where you see pathology, I see an emergence of a new species. On this side of the pond, we tend to call them Homo moronicus subsp. republicanus.
Mr Farmer,
I don’t think that is true. As far as I can tell people make decisions based on stories. If they can find or invent a story that appeals to them and fits in with what they already believe then by and large they will accept it.
@Dr Julian
Your point about decision making wrt stories is probably true in general. But I think when it comes to medical decisions such as deciding to take a particular medication or treatment, it is more about the risk/benefit analysis and informed consent (which is the responsibility of the medical expert offering the treatment). I’m sure the medical expert could throw in a parable in hopes it may motivate the patient into taking the treatment, but I don’t believe that is typical…it comes down to what do I gain and what do I potentially lose (or what will it cost).
Mr Farmer,
That is how is ought to be. But there is a big difference between “ought to be” and “is”, and by and large people disagree on “ought to be”.
Risk / benefit ratio is difficult to judge without access to the full facts and the training and experience to understand them. Informed consent is another difficult issue because the person giving consent has to take it on trust that they are being properly advised, and the person taking consent very often has unrealistic expectations of how well they are being understood. I have been quite shocked when listening into some of my experienced colleagues explaining things to patients, using technical terms, for instance, that mean something very different to a doctor than they do to a layman.
Ultimately I think it boils down to the doctor telling a story that his patient is happy with in the light of what they already believe. Most of the time this isn’t necessary as the patient has already come to the clinic wanting or expecting treatment and I don’t think they even bother to read the consent form. For those who are more reluctant then a parable may do the trick.
The charisma of the story-teller is also an important factor. Take low-to-medium risk prostate cancer, which can be manage by radical prostatectomy, radiotherapy (these days IMRT), brachytherapy (a radioactive implant) or simply observation. In my experience the patient’s decision seemed to depend primarily on who they saw.
Then there are those who come to the clinic clutching a newpaper article (often from the Daily Mail, a popular daily newspaper in the UK with a reputation for good stories) demanding a specific treatment who will not be dissuaded however unsuitable it might be for them.
I’m sure it’s been debated in other posts so I apologize if I’m being repetitive…but I am noticing a number of scientists pushing back against the media mantras regarding vaccines. Dr. Gerry Quinn responds to some of the claims from the media and go along to get along scientists wrt covid 19 vaccines. Perhaps he too can dismissed like what has been done to Dr. Robert Malone in an earlier response but his point about natural immunity vs vaccine (s protein) immunity is interesting. He also pushes back against the narrative that the unvaccinated are vessels of viral variants while the vaccinated are not. Take a look and please discuss – https://www.hartgroup.org/unvaccinated-as-variant-factories/
OK Alfred. Let’s see what Dr Quinn has to say, shall we?
The Kent variant arose as a direct result of an immunocompromised individual being treated with plasma from a previously infected individual. A treatment which had been widely condemned as risky. Quinn is talking garbage.
Might that be something to do with, you know, the vaccines, Gerry? The majority of patients dying from the delta are unvaccinated.
Didn’t someone say “All viruses mutate and trying to blame humans for this phenomenon is as stupid as it is divisive”?
The self-contradiction is wonderful.
Quinn is another crank.
You really should try reading or understanding anything which you imagine supports your position, Albert.
Lenny,
Do you have any evidence for this claim, which seems rather far-fetched to me?
Having followed the link and read the paper I am inclined to agree with you here. The points he is making are theoretical, and usually in biomedical science most such theories are subsequently disproved experimentally. Some of his points are directly contradicted by the epidemiological evidence. For instance:
Regardless of whether a significant proportion of the population show some kind of T-cell activity as a result of exposure to other coronaviruses, it is quite clear that this does not confer useful immunity as if it did the pandemic would never have been able to get going the way it has. Indeed, with an R0 of about 2.5 at the start of the pandemic, only about 60% of the population would have had to be immune to prevent any possibility of an exponential increase in case numbers (the R0 of the delta variant is estimated to be 8, which is we we now need to vaccinate a much greater proportion than if we had had vaccines at the start).
I don’t know anything about Quinn, but I have looked at the list of other members of DELTA, some of whom I know personally, and I think you are probably right here.
Julian
Regarding plasma therapy of immunocompromised individuals and the emergence of the Alpha variant..
The original research was done on a patient in Cambridge.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03291-y
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/covid-variants-may-arise-in-people-with-compromised-immune-systems/
(I understand very little of this – I’m only parroting what those far more knowledgeable than me have written and linked to on Twitter)
A slightly detuned version designed more for people like me
https://www.varsity.co.uk/science/20415
@Lenny
Thanks for the reply! To summarize…
Dr. Walach – crank
Dr. Malone – crank
Dr. Quinn – another crank
I’m sensing a pattern here. If the scientists who either want to be prudent with mandating vaccines and/or have questions about the longitudinal effects of mRNA vaccines express their concerns, they all appear to belong to the group lovingly referred to as “cranks”. Got it.
Would you still consider them to be apart of the scientific community or should they be banished? I’m trying to understand the position that the public should “follow the science” and yet there are scientists that disagree with other scientists and state their reasons why and are immediately dismissed as science heretics. Which direction should the public go? What happens if you and the media consensus are wrong?
Am I to conclude that I should only follow the scientists with whom you agree?
There are scientists who aren’t so certain about how much of climate change is natural and how much is truly anthropogenic. Of course the very loud media and leftists tend to shout them down and they tend to stay a bit more quiet. Like the climate, the body is a very very complex system with an exhaustive number of variables to deal with. For the scientists (both climatologists and virologists) studying these systems, I find it hard to believe that they don’t have questions of their own wrt the degrees in which either the climate is a victim of man’s activities or the potential effects of a genetic-level technology never before used at a global scale on humans (7 months in…not that long).
Would you agree? or should I be included in your category of “cranks”? I think calling others names is a great way to make your point! haha!
Mr Farmer,
You are starting with your conclusions and working backwards to decide what evidence to accept. In science you have to start with the evidence before drawing any conclusion, and then you look as hard as you can for evidence against it, before provisionally accepting it until further evidence becomes available.
I don’t know what Dr Walach’s thought processes were, but the data that he was quoting didn’t support his ideas at all and his maths was unsound.
As far as I can tell, Dr Malone’s chief concern is that the US Government isn’t being transparent about the adverse effects of the various vaccines. I don’t know what the US Government has been saying or doing, but I think he has some valid points about the vaccine itself. However, when these are taken into account the risk / benefit ratio is still strongly in favour of vaccination.
Dr Quinn’s concerns are purely theoretical and not based on data or evidence (and some of them have already been contradicted by the evidence). They should be forming the basis of research, not policy.
Do you mean apart from the scientific community or a part of it?
No, they shouldn’t be banished. When scientists disagree what should follow is a robust, evidence-based debate.
Alfred Farmer,
The article to which you previously linked is not a scientific article, it is just a personal emission from Gerry Quinn for no stated purpose.
“His input into HART is in his personal capacity.”
[https://www.hartgroup.org/bios/]
It’s a pity that you don’t know enough about epidemiology to begin to know what it is that you don’t know. I suspect that you have no wish to learn; your modus operandi seems to be that of spreading FUD by ‘just asking questions’.
QUOTE
Fear, uncertainty, and doubt (or FUD for short) denotes a deliberate public relations propaganda campaign, most often intended to frighten consumers away from considering alternate products or services.
…
FUD also sees strategic use outside of a business context, as a way for cranks to try and erode faith in “the official account” (clearing a path for conspiracy theories) or in the scientific consensus (clearing a path for woo and denialism to creationism and pseudoscience generally).
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and_doubt
END of QUOTE
“If you really, genuinely believe that 99% of doctors in this country are dishonest, then you need to see a doctor, ironically.”
— Jimmy Kimmel on anti-vaxxers