Yes, it’s a lie. And I explained why. I’ll try it again for the hard of reading. The lie is delivered to the public in two parts:
There is lots of scientific work on mask-wearing
The science says that people who wear masks are safe, and people who do not wear masks are in danger, and placing others at risk.
There is no science on mask-wearing, and I suspect it hasn’t been done (despite shitloads of money sloshing around) because everyone is terrified that an RCT will support the null hypothesis. There have been plenty of opportunities to do observational studies (eg., US states where mandates were lifted early, or where a significant fraction of the population refused to wear them). Those studies haven’t been done either.
People who wear masks are not safe (either in a passive or active sense), and we can know this without any reference to (non-existent) direct evidence: mask mandates have made no observable difference to the progress of the pandemic.
As I said, there’s little point using logic here. People believe what they’ve been sold.
It is supported by science but after more than a year of covid you don’t need science to know that basic hygiene(that includes mask-wearing) does make a difference.
Cases of the anual flu were at an all-time low, both southern and northern hemisphere.
I am skeptical about natural immunity in this case. This is a freak virus for starters. And we were exposed to stuff like polio, smallpox and others for centuries, even millennia. Yet we lost millions.
And if I hear you say once more that the ones who have to die must die, I’ll throw my cats on you. My cousin’s wife had at least a minimum of 5 good years left in the worst case scenario. COVID took that away. It also took two otherwise perfectly healthy, aerobics fans nurses who were my nurse cousin’s coworkers. She is as rotund as me yet she is alive. I blame the masks I sent Made in Taiwan.
I was listening again to the interview minister Tang gave to Click BBC. When they ask her what technological advances have been the most important in Taiwan’s fight against COVID, yet we’re present during SARS, she replied without hesitation: soap and masks.
I think it’s a little … ungrateful to be skeptical of something that’s keeping you alive with great success, despite an onslaught of billions of pathogens. If it stopped working, you’d be dead within 24 hours.
Regarding COVID specifically, it’s now been around for a year and half (possibly longer, if you believe the rumours). Most people have come into contact with it. Therefore most have some level of acquired immunity. Remember that you do not need to actually develop the disease to develop immunity to the virus - that, fundamentally, is why vaccines work.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens when it hits Taiwan - which it will, sooner or later. My hunch is that Taiwan is not and never has been COVID-free, and that many people will show natural immunity.
If humans would stop fiddling with things, my suspicion is that natural processes would have sorted this out, with fewer deaths. But humans have to fiddle with things. Because humans always think that they know better than 100 million years of evolution.
I’m not particularly happy about people dying. But what do you suppose the alternative is? What’s the solution? Apart from getting vaccines out there, what is to be done?
Sounds about right. It’s the best we’ve got. All I’ve been trying to point out here is that our best is not very good, and there is nothing we can do about that, except perhaps show a little dignity and humility.
“The scale of the problem is frightening,” according to Mark Lawler, professor of digital health at Queen’s University Belfast. “Without immediate action, the Covid-19 pandemic is poised to spark a cancer epidemic across Europe.”
So we “saved lives” with lockdowns, but a million people are probably going to die early from cancer. But hey, at least they didn’t die of COVID, eh?
Even assuming that 99.7% is accurate (I’m guessing that the qualifier “for most people” was introduced so they could report a higher survival rate by excluding the people for whom death is more likely), the survival rate for even the AZ vaccine appears to be on the order of 99.99978% (=(1,000,000-2.2)/1,000,000).
Why do you consider the first (lower) value safe and the second (higher) value dangerous?
Moreover, the survival of the less than 1% depends on the actions of the 99% rest. We’re dead then…
… because we refuse to acknowledge that what makes us human is compassion, what helped us survive is cooperation. That is the mark of true civilization.
The main problem - as the video discusses - is that the vaccines represent an unknown unknown. A “long tail” event that was unanticipated could be absolutely catastrophic when you’re pushing for every human being on earth being given these vaccines.
I don’t believe it’s going to happen, but just imagine if they did cause infertility a year or two down the line. That’d be a bit of a problem for the human race, wouldn’t it? Even less-dramatic effects (there are some worrying hints that they may cause cardiovascular damage) might end up destroying more life-years than are saved. For example, if you shave one year off the lives of 50% of the entire population of the planet, you’ll have caused more harm than if you’d accepted the original risk of a small number of very old people dying.
To be clear, this is pure speculation. But we literally don’t know what these vaccines may do long-term.
Secondly, survival rate for under 50s is very high indeed. For under 20s it’s 99.9999% (feel free to check that yourself). 25,000 people under 50 have died “of or with COVID” in the US (0.0076% of the population). To put that in perspective, 47,000 died of suicide in 2019. There is absolutely no justification for giving experimental vaccines to these people because it does not enhance their (potential) survival rate.
The apparent effectiveness of the vaccine appears to be skewed by a particular demographic for whom they have a marked effect - that would be (I suspect) people between the ages of 50 and 65, who still have immune systems good enough to respond to the vaccine, but are in poor health due to self-inflicted conditions like COPD, heart disease, diabetes, etc.
For very old people, whose immune systems are declining, the vaccines seem to be much less effective. For the young - as mentioned - they are pointless, and the risk outweighs any potential benefit. As with most drugs, then, there’s a “sweet spot” where they have therapeutic value. And that, of course, is why governments are (or have been) giving priority to those people.
Okay, but surely exactly the same thing applies to COVID itself, no? Who’s to say that those who’ve apparently recovered from the disease (or even those who were asymptomatic - see, for example, infectious diseases like syphilis and leprosy etc., where symptoms can take years or decades to emerge) won’t become infertile or have cardiovascular complications years down the line? So it’s not just one unknown unknown but two unknown unknowns we’re attempting to compare.
Do you know of any precedent for the delayed risks you’re suggesting, i.e., vaccines having those effects down the line? I don’t. How about a mechanism through which they might occur after exposure to a vaccine? Me neither.
There does, however, appear to be precedent for the unknown unknown of COVID, namely, the so-called “long COVID” and other diseases that can lie dormant for years.
Sort of. But I’d say there are five relevant responses:
You’re comparing a “natural” risk with an elective risk. COVID is something that might happen to you. Vaccination is something that you (theoretically) choose to do. Most people are more psychologically able to accept “acts of God” than mistakes that they’ve inflicted upon themselves, or things that have been inflicted upon them by human agency.
You’ve moved the therapeutic goalposts. If you’re going to vaccinate someone with an “emergency vaccine”, then there must be a clear and demonstrable “emergency”, ie., preventing widespread death and mayhem. And that is how the vaccines have been marketed, tested, and sold to the public. But for the average 20-or 30-year-old, there is no emergency, and speculative reasons don’t factor into the vaccine approvals process.
It’s hard to disentangle media scaremongering and public hysteria from fact, but to the extent that “long COVID” even exists, it appears to be a combination of (a) ordinary post-viral syndrome, which in and of itself doesn’t merit an experimental vaccine and (b) some interaction with underlying metabolic conditions, perhaps for the same reason those conditions can result in death-by-COVID. This is something that needs to be addressed with a whole separate tranche of research, not just by insisting on “zero COVID”.
Numbers matter. If “only” 25,000 younger people (<50) have died “of or with” COVID, and we’re calling that an emergency that demands unprecedented and drastic measures - well, why isn’t suicide (47,000) a national emergency? Why aren’t drug overdoses (72,000) an emergency, or car accidents (39,000)? These could all (theoretically) be reduced with manpower and money, but we don’t do it. Why not?
If the vaccines were just made available to these young people - who are at a risk so miniscule that it doesn’t even figure in their top-ten of all-cause risks - I would be happy to agree with your view. But they’re being pressured to take the vaccine. In some places the vaccine is all-but-compulsory. This is not just unethical, it’s clinically unjustified.
Now, you’re going to say: but they’re being told to take the vaccine for the protection of others, but for that to be true then there must be some unspoken assumptions:
Vaccines don’t work for people who are at risk. If they did, it wouldn’t matter if the virus was out in the wild.
There is no intent to address the (known) causes of elevated risk in vulnerable populations.
Old people must not die of COVID. Other respiratory diseases are OK, but not COVID.
Most importantly, you must be able to justify the destruction of a legal principle that underpins a great deal of Western law (sovereignty over one’s own body) on the basis of the Common Good. This is a very ticklish proposition indeed.
There’s a list of examples here:
Another one that springs to mind is the persistence of vaccine-derived polio cases.
It’s also possible (although I admit not likely) that some modern problems are associated with vaccinations, but the link has not been made.
The point is that if you are giving vaccines only on the basis of need - that is, you have a very clear clinical justification for an at-risk population - then the benefit outweighs the (possible) risk of vaccination. If you are giving the vaccine to every person on earth - even to people with close-to-zero risk of disease - then the risk of unexpected side effects become unjustifiable.
Chewie is not off however in wondering if this guy could be Canadian. There are more and more of this breed north of the border, evidently influenced by the US Christian right and/or the US media environment (such as it is). Example: these clowns in Winnipeg last week:
Canada’s socialist Party (the NDP) was founded by fundamentalists into eugenics and for the sterilization of homosexuals.
That historical fact aside, the difference between the right and the left on masks is not as pronounced as you may think.
Canadians’ trust in government, doctors and scientists increased in the first months of the pandemic, and early adopters of masks spanned the political spectrum. However, that cross-partisan consensus splintered as the pandemic wore on. By early June, 94% of left-wing Canadians reported wearing masks as part of their normal routine compared to 68% of those who identified as rightwing, and the divide between the groups appears to be increasing.Public health experts are learning from Canada’s anti-mask protests | CMAJ
