Coronavirus and You - Page 685

On February 02 2023 04:12 travis wrote:
okay, so as i expected, you guys could give a shit
you really care about the truth huh

On February 02 2023 04:29 ChristianS wrote:

You really go for that debatebro thing huh? I kinda wanna ask you for evidence of a single death that can be definitively attributed to the vaccine, although the kind of response you’d want to make would be insufferable for an already-dying thread and, historically, would probably have been grounds for mod action in the past.

So I’ll just say this: why on Earth would doing a public debate with some anti-vaxxer I’ve never heard of be a good thing for someone to do? It enhances the public stature of some random anti-vaxxer and it’s an extremely poor method of determining scientific truth. What scientific truths of the modern era have ever been determined by having two guys at podiums yell at each other?

If this guy has compelling evidence that the scientific establishment is wrong he should write it up and publish it. Then people can respond to the evidence in a venue of their choosing without subjecting themselves to a chest-beating PR stunt.

On February 02 2023 04:12 travis wrote:
okay, so as i expected, you guys could give a shit
you really care about the truth huh

On February 02 2023 04:40 JimmiC wrote:
In my little neck of the woods we just got a warning about a whooping cough outbreak because only 1/3 of children around here are vaccinated.

This kind of "cool" antivaxx BS has real world effects and we are only starting to see it.

On February 02 2023 04:29 ChristianS wrote:

You really go for that debatebro thing huh? I kinda wanna ask you for evidence of a single death that can be definitively attributed to the vaccine, although the kind of response you’d want to make would be insufferable for an already-dying thread and, historically, would probably have been grounds for mod action in the past.

So I’ll just say this: why on Earth would doing a public debate with some anti-vaxxer I’ve never heard of be a good thing for someone to do? It enhances the public stature of some random anti-vaxxer and it’s an extremely poor method of determining scientific truth. What scientific truths of the modern era have ever been determined by having two guys at podiums yell at each other?

If this guy has compelling evidence that the scientific establishment is wrong he should write it up and publish it. Then people can respond to the evidence in a venue of their choosing without subjecting themselves to a chest-beating PR stunt.

(Deaths related to the covid-19 vaccine are divided into 19 with an underlying cause of death and 22 with a contributing cause of death. Most of the deaths were reported from March and April 2021. The average age for all vaccine-related deaths was 79 years.)

The average age for vaccine-related deaths where the covid-19 vaccine was reported as the underlying cause was 77 years. Of the 19 reported deaths, most reported chronic diseases, including dementia, kidney disease, chronic lung disease and cancer. In four cases, thrombocytopenia, cerebral haemorrhage or infarction have been reported on the death certificate.

The underlying cause of death is defined as the cause of death that started the series of events leading to death.

On February 02 2023 06:11 Liquid`Drone wrote:


Eh, the Norwegian public health institute has between 19 and 41 deaths attributed to the Covid-vaccine.

(additionally - , and underlying is defined as )

I mean, these are professional people with medical and scientific expertise, so they haven't made any claim as to 'how many deaths have been prevented by the covid vaccine in Norway', but there's no question that number is significantly higher, so it's not like this is in any way supporting the 'other side'. However, I don't really think there's any question that the vaccine has caused a number of deaths worldwide, even though the number is obviously smaller than the deaths prevented.

I am, honestly, curious what the presented arguments are going to be, because the way I see it, the data overwhelmingly supports that vaccinated people have been far less likely to die or be hospitalized from contracting COVID, and I hope travis' isn't earnestly thinking that 'but that data is manipulated/manufactured/not trustworthy' is going to be a particularly convincing argument for the non-convinced. If the argument is one like 'the vaccines made people sufficiently safe that they decided to stop socially distancing, and this contributed to COVID spreading far more (I mean, I myself got COVID after my third dose, at which point I wasn't worried about it and basically did nothing to shield myself from it because I figured it was inevitable, while my pre-vaccinated self socially distanced pretty seriously) and thus more people dying, I could actually picture 'well, hm, technically maybe that's correct'. Somehow I have a hard time seeing that be the argument presented, though. Either way the debate is obviously worthless from the perspective of 'determining who is scientifically correct', but I'm still curious to what the actual arguments are, and if they differ significantly from what I've heard from travis in the past.

On February 02 2023 06:46 schaf wrote:

The argument to win this debate is "I have definitive proof that people died from taking the vaccine. You have statistical inferences that a number of people would have died, but you don't have definitive proof that a specific person did not die from COVID due to the vaccine."

On February 02 2023 00:41 ChristianS wrote:
Damn this thread sucks again.

I’m not gonna watch a whole Project Veritas video for multiple reasons, but I did read a Newsweek summary. Apparently it’s his usual MO, hidden camera “candid” interview with some employee of a supposedly evil organization, with a lot of deceptive editing to make it look like they said stuff they didn’t. If O’Keefe were a journalist this would be deeply irresponsible, both because he’s lying about what they said and because one employee’s testimony he didn’t know was an interview is poor evidence of what that organization is actually doing. Since he’s a propagandist, not a journalist, those criticisms don’t really apply; his job is to deceive the public, and he’s doing it. Any decent person should despise that regardless of whether he’s on your “side,” but it’s not a violation of professional ethics; he has none.

In this case the claim of the video is that Pfizer is doing so-called “gain of function” research (to the extent there’s a claim at all, anyway; often with this sort of thing it’s more about innuendo than any specific claim). This is not my area; that’s pretty much pure biology, and I’m a chemist, so I only know a little about what those weirdos get up to in lab. But my impression is that part of the confusion here is that a lot of weird right-wingers suddenly thought they were experts on virology because we all did a lot of googling during the pandemic. So there’s a lot of experiments that no expert was calling “gain of function” that a bunch of laymen think sounds like gain of function. Then they cry and scream and shit and piss when experts say that’s not what that is.

Consider viral attenuation. My chemist-brain limited understanding of this process is that you take a virus which infects humans, and suspend it in a media with a mix of human cells and, say, chicken cells. At first the virus is much more adapted to infect the human cells, but over time you reduce the human cells in the media and increase the chicken cells, creating evolutionary pressure to adapt. If you do it just right, you’ve created a virus that’s much better at infecting chickens - but no longer very good at infecting humans. I believe several vaccines in the last century are based on this approach. Nobody calls this gain of function. But the virus gained function, didn’t it? It’s better at infecting chicken cells now? This is where there’s not much you can tell the weird right-wingers besides “you really don’t have the relevant expertise to have an informed opinion here.” Frankly, I don’t think I do either.

Anyway Project Veritas published a video in which somebody who supposedly works for Pfizer (and FWIW it’s not really O’Keefe’s MO to hire an actor for that part) says Pfizer is doing some stuff that sounds a little gain of function-ey, at least with enough jump cuts to narration that recontextualizes the quotes. From the footage alone it might not even be clear he’s saying that.

But we’re past that now. We’re no longer talking about the video, we’re talking about the response to the video. As usual BlackJack isn’t particularly interested in the thing itself, as much as what the thing can tell us about wokeness, censorship, etc. in our society. If the video is bullshit, why aren’t the MSM writing refutations of it?

But what is there to refute exactly? The video claims Pfizer is doing types of research they shouldn’t. Pfizer denies this, and there’s no real evidence that they are. But it’s pretty hard to prove a negative. Pfizer has extensive business ventures in all kinds of areas, and they’re mostly confidential, but even if they gave some journalists unprecedented access in the name of transparency, how could you ever know they didn’t just hide the bad stuff? That it wasn’t a controlled PR stunt like the Twitter Files?

Meanwhile the weird right-wingers have already decided the video proves all kinds of insane nonsense I don’t think even O’Keefe claims. It wasn’t a lab leak, Pfizer engineered the virus so they could sell us the cure! They’re already planning the next one! Something something JFK Jr! As usual, it’s not clear to what extent they actually believe all of this; it often feels like there’s an element of spontaneous grassroots disinformation, like Day9’s chat telling him to find the rope.

Frankly, I think an article enumerating the video’s claims and clarifying what we actually know about each one would be a public service, but it’s just not all that newsworthy. It certainly wouldn’t get many clicks. Project Veritas’s schtick has gotten pretty old, they’re a pretty known quantity, and they haven’t really provided anything useful to discuss. I’m sure the video has gotten however many million views and weird right-wingers will yell about it for a bit, but they just don’t make the splash they used to. Their last few videos didn’t really shift the public conversation much, and even the conspiracy theorists moved on to new stuff to yell about after a bit; in all likelihood this will play out similarly.

On February 02 2023 07:02 Magic Powers wrote:


I'd like to see a source for these claims. I can't find anything that supports the claim that the Pfizer vaccine has provably caused deaths. For deaths related to other covid vaccines I'd also want to see a source.

On February 02 2023 03:29 Liquid`Drone wrote:
But that quote has fauci stating 'when you're in the middle of an outbreak', that to me means it is entirely fair to consider it applicable advice for when an outbreak happens, even if the statement was technically made before the outbreak broke out.

To be clear once again, Americans don’t need masks. The CDC says that healthy people in the US shouldn’t wear them because they won’t protect them from the novel coronavirus.
In fact, warns US Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams, face masks might actually increase your risk of infection if they aren’t worn properly.

So, why weren't we told to wear masks in the beginning?

"Well, the reason for that is that we were concerned the public health community, and many people were saying this, were concerned that it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply. And we wanted to make sure that the people namely, the health care workers, who were brave enough to put themselves in a harm way, to take care of people who you know were infected with the coronavirus and the danger of them getting infected."