>As a healthy 30 year old I would prefer to take my risk with covid than take these vaccines.
As an exhausted 34 year old who spent the last year field-monitoring vaccine trials, I would love to see the sources that informed your position.
As an exhausted 34 year old who spent the last year field-monitoring vaccine trials, I would love to see the sources that informed your position.
As an adult that was vaccinated, thank you for doing your part to get us all here.
Firstly, I don't believe COVID related science is reliable. This isn't some conspiracy theory I picked up from YouTube. I developed this belief by actually reading a lot of scientific papers, or perhaps I should say "scientific" because it turned out that on close inspection almost all the papers I chose to study carefully were pseudo-scientific and sometimes fraudulent. I can count the ones that had no obvious errors or deceptive practices on the fingers of one hand. In no cases have there been any consequences for the perpetrators and in some cases the scientific establishment came together to cover up what happened.
At first I couldn't quite believe it and thought maybe there was some selection bias in the papers I was being exposed to, so I went back in the archives to review older papers from the world of public health (Zika, Swine Flu, AIDS). It turned out they were just as bad. I've written quite extensively about the problems in my prior comments here on HN [1], [2], [3], [4] and I also wrote a report that ended up being sent to the British Cabinet [5], so won't go into detail again, but suffice it to say I now have a large set of go-to examples for cases where scientists have been acting in ways scientists aren't meant to act.
A very small number of these problems are now coming into the public eye. For example in recent weeks a whole lot of people were surprised to see the lab leak hypothesis go straight from "debunked conspiracy theory" to Biden ordering it to be investigated, apparently without any intermediate points. Fauci has admitted on record (in the New York Times) that he lied in order to manipulate people's behaviour at least twice (masks, HITs) and thus he's very likely to have done it more often. These aren't actually my go-to examples of academic fraud because I tend to focus on the UK, where things are just as bad, but I'm sure every country has equivalents at this point because the issues aren't specific to Fauci, they appear to be cultural within public health.
A good example of this problem with vaccines specifically is the way the CDC is inflating their apparent effectiveness by changing the definition of COVID itself for vaccinated people [6]. That is, if someone took a test and presented the results twice in succession, and told one official they had been vaccinated and the other that they hadn't, the first could say they didn't have COVID and the second that they did. This sort of data manipulation is rampant, it's just one example.
So the scientific estabishment is not produced reliable knowledge. Many people still disagree with this, but they are going to eventually lose that debate because the evidence of problems is overwhelmingly strong.
Now, to vaccines. The risk of serious problems from taking these vaccines is low in absolute terms, clearly, as otherwise we'd be seeing mass die-offs by now given the very high speed and rates of vaccination. However, to make a rational decision you have to compare that to the risk of suffering serious problems from COVID. Even if the risk of both is low, if the risk of a cure is (for example) 50x higher than the risk of a disease, then the cure is worse and it's rational to take your chances with nature. For people in our age range this is especially important because the risk of suffering badly from COVID is negligible. There are far more dangerous things out there in our daily life. Average IFR estimates have converged on around 0.1% to 0.2%, which is already around the same area as seasonal flu, but those estimates must be multiplied by the chance of actually becoming infected in the first place and ideally age adjusted. I've been through multiple waves of COVID by now and not only never been infected, but nobody I know has caught it either. It seems quite plausible I will never catch it, vaccine or not. Many models were based on the assumption that nearly everyone will be infected sooner or later but those models fell apart under even the tiniest inspection, even before vaccines. And finally, it must be noted that the IFRs of 0.1-0.2% are based on a definition of death that is wrong and guaranteed to inflate the values (i.e. a virus that had been engineered to be entirely inert would still "cause" millions of deaths given how COVID deaths are defined).
All this added together means the risk of COVID to people like us is extremely low. And the risk of the vaccine?
Well, unfortunately we don't really know that. Knowing the risk relative to the risk of COVID for 30 year olds requires a level of data robustness and trustworthiness science has been unable to provide. For example VAERs is not a comprehensive database of all reactions, because reporting rates are much lower than 100% and it's unclear what the current highly politicized atmosphere is doing to reporting rates (probably suppressing them). What we do know is that there are simple and (by now) well understood mechanisms by which mRNA vaccines could create severe reactions.
The spike protein is, let's be clear about this, a toxin. If you were injected with sufficient amounts of mRNA vaccine for long enough you would die. Normally we're exposed to a dose of a virus that has spike proteins and causes production to start, but the virus gets stuck in the lungs and finds it hard to escape. Also, the dose may well be quite small. With the mRNA vaccines they're meant to stay in the shoulder muscle and eventually drain to a lymph node, but it seems that in some cases the person doing the injection may nick an artery by accident and end up injecting the vaccine straight into the bloodstream. Note that this is not meant to happen and studies into what does happen if this occurs have been occurring after the mass rollout of the vaccines. It appears the lipid nanoparticles also capable of crossing the blood brain barrier, where they may cause brain cells to start expressing spike protein and be destroyed - again, no studies of this have been done because both the mRNA adjustment technique and, more importantly, the lipid nanoparticles, are quite new. The trials were not completed, etc. The few studies that do exist are mostly in animals. At any rate, it can cause cells to be destroyed in places respiratory viruses would normally find hard to reach. [7] [8]
Is it possible vaccines are a lot more dangerous than we're being told? Yes, absolutely. No doubt at all. The standard retort to this is that it's a "conspiracy theory" but so what? Public health research is absolutely overrun with conspiracies, many of them aren't even well covered up. Certain specific subfields are nothing but conspiracies (looking at you, epidemiology). Lab leak hypothesis was described as a conspiracy theory, which thanks to China's evidence destruction it actually is by this point, but it's also almost certainly true. I hate to think about how many conspiracies there must be that don't get detected. The sort of people who try to deflect arguments by claiming they're "conspiracy theories" have come to look dumb and naive, because the things supposed "conspiracy theorists" say keep turning out to be true. Meanwhile the people who sacrificed every high minded principle to protect scientists from criticism are discovering they've been played.
Fundamentally, if someone is going to inject me with an extremely complicated substance that's specifically designed to make my body produce a toxin, after the normal safety studies have been bypassed, I want to double check what they're doing. If I can't because their work is filled with errors, it's perfectly understandable to conclude that maybe I'll put my faith in Mother Nature instead. Other people who have more trust in institutional competence can decide differently, and that's fine.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27231636
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26769138
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27245283
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26836661
[5] https://plan99.net/~mike/epidemiology.pdf
[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27366386
[7] https://trialsitenews.com/the-covid-19-spike-protein-may-be-...
[8] https://drmalcolmkendrick.org/2021/06/03/covid19-the-spike-p...
This one needs to be highlighted. Public officials, at best, have collective interest in mind, not individual interest.
I've seen the phrase "the risk still outweighs the benefits" thrown around a lot lately. I refuse to believe that this is an honest assessment, because the data just isn't there. During the trials (mostly done on healthy young individuals), absolute risk reduction hovered around 1%. That number is bound to have been higher during the second/third waves, but it's probably lower today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heparin-induced_thrombocytopen...
https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/90445
Late last week, Fauci told the New York Times that new science had changed his thinking on the herd immunity threshold -- but he also admitted that his statements were influenced in part by "his gut feeling that the country is finally ready to hear what he really thinks."
"When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent," Fauci said. "Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, 'I can nudge this up a bit,' so I went to 80, 85."
This example is important because Fauci is admitting here that he lied to the public about a value that had a supposedly scientific basis, in order to encourage people to take vaccines out of a sense of collective responsibility.
> I'm going to stick my neck out and explain why I've chosen to put myself at the back of the queue for vaccines this time around.
I'm not getting vaccinated because I think I had "Early Covid", which I define as a case of SARS-CoV-2 before there was a test to diagnose it. Someone on Twitter said the timeline promoted by the media is impossible [2]; Michael Burry (MD in The Big Short [4]) pointed out that December 2019 blood samples with SARS-Cov-2 showed "#containment was never possible" [3].
> For people in our age range this is especially important because the risk of suffering badly from COVID is negligible.
Bad medicine dramatically increases the possibility of dying from a SARS-CoV-2 infection, no matter your age.
Good medicine for bad cases of SARS-CoV-2 is the anti-serotonin drug Cyproheptadine [0], which are useful for pulling people out of their death spirals.
More vulnerable people wouldn't be put into their death spirals if doctors remembered that oxygen in excess is toxic, but we have to work with the doctors we have. "is this pure (toxic) oxygen, or the oxygen with the antidote?" should be asked by all patients who are given oxygen to worsen their body's ability to use oxygen [1].
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27365696 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26964750
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22993262
[2] "The #Corona crisis began with a panopticon of absurd events, improbable coincidences and outright lies. Time for a review of the impossibilities." - https://twitter.com/theotherphilipp/status/13649545484277022... and a reply, "The timelines from first realization of the virus to isolation/sequencing to diagnostic test kit are impossible. The test kits were prepared for an expected event." - https://twitter.com/EndCanada/status/1364973703080083465
[3] https://twitter.com/TaxiCabJesus/status/1334382030952353792
There is a very high chance you can get Covid-19 again, hence why the vaccines are going to require boosters.
If you want a dangerous, man-made virus hanging out repeatedly in your vital organs, that's your choice. I'd much rather prime my immune system to handle it via a vaccine so I don't have to have it in my heart, lungs, kidneys, pancreas, etc.
>The spike protein is, let's be clear about this, a toxin. If you were injected with sufficient amounts of mRNA vaccine for long enough you would die
By that definition everything in the world is a toxin - inject enough and it'll kill you. In practice the spike protein doesn't. I mean I had the pfizer three weeks back - it makes your arm sore and stiff and probably has similar effects elsewhere in the body if it travels but it's basically gone in a week and you're back to normal.
>IFRs of 0.1-0.2%
It'd got to be higher than that. In Mexico, population 127 mil, excess deaths are about 622k which is 0.49% of the population dead. If you guess half of them caught it, it puts the IFR about 1%. Obviously mortality varies by age etc. (excess deaths http://www.healthdata.org/special-analysis/estimation-excess...)
By the way, the fact that the body can flush it out doesn't mean it's not a toxin. Alcohol is gone from the body within hours of getting drunk but it's still a toxin, technically speaking.
In contrast, the mRNA vaccine works by getting cells to do things that cause them to be destroyed by the immune system ASAP. Even small amounts are thus (cyto)toxic and the question is how much can the body tolerate.
One of the things that makes me uneasy about the mRNA tech is there seems to be very little discussion or research about dosages, and in particular how cell death levels compare between getting vaccinated and actually being infected with the real thing. This would seem to be fundamental because at some level, the vaccine is actually creating the same problem inside the body that the virus is, the only difference is that the virus can self replicate whereas the mRNA does not (except apparently in the case of so-called "self-amplifying mRNA" vaccines, see below). Thus the question of dosage is critical. If being infected with the virus causes 10x less cell death than the vaccine then I want to take my chances with the virus. If the vaccine causes 10x less cell death than a real viral infection, then it looks better. As ultimately, it's cell death and the fight to destroy those cells that makes people sick.
Such numbers are (nearly?) impossible to find. Vaccine dosages are very different between the different manufacturers. The Moderna vaccine has a dose more than 3x higher than the Pfizer vaccine, for example (100 µg vs 30 µg), which is itself 3x higher than the dose for the Curevac vaccine (12µg).[1] It's a bit unclear how these very different numbers were arrived at or what they're being calibrated against.
W.R.T. the SAM vaccines, also in [1] we find the following text:
"The other type of mRNA vaccines, SAMs, do not only encode the target antigen but also RNA polymerase encoding ‘self-amplifying’ factors derived from Alphavirus ... These are in turn transcribed to many coding mRNA molecules, leading to prolonged and enhanced antigen expression ... The two SAM vaccines in clinical development are nCoVsaRNA by the Imperial College London and ARCT-021 by Arcturus/Duke-NUS (both as mRNA-LNP)."
It's very unclear to me, as a layman, how this artificial "self amplifying RNA" that incorporates elements from a virus is so very different from an actual virus, given that the SARS-CoV-2 is itself basically RNA surrounded by a coating in a form that can self-replicate. Traditional vaccines are virus based but the virus is inert. The new vaccines appear to be ending up at the same end-point but without the whole making it inert part.
It'd got to be higher than that. In Mexico, population 127 mil, excess deaths are about 622k which is 0.49% of the population dead.
The number comes from meta-studies that examine a large range of IFR studies. There is a lot of variance between them - they don't all arrive at the same value, presumably because IFR is inherently difficult to measure. Infected people who don't feel sick enough to report are the dark matter of epidemiology.
However, excess death values are quite tricky to evaluate because they're excess relative to some model of what should have happened in an alternate timeline where the event in question never occurred. For example you can calculate an excess death value for Sweden of zero by making one or two plausible assumptions, or you can calculate a higher value using equally plausible assumptions, and who is to say which is correct? Ultimately you can't know what would have happened otherwise, only extrapolate from the past and try to guess. Some of those extrapolations look suspect on examination (e.g. using fixed averages, or very short timespans), just like everything else around this topic.
> It's very unclear to me, as a layman, how this artificial "self amplifying RNA" that incorporates elements from a virus is so very different from an actual virus, given that the SARS-CoV-2 is itself basically RNA surrounded by a coating in a form that can self-replicate.
For one, we can implement protocols to ensure the mrna we are generating contains the instructions we want, at the effect size we want. We could go the non mrna route and grow it as a virus, but that is going to be less accurate, more costly, and take longer. We could also just let people develop natural immunity, which will also work. People will get varying effect sizes, and vary from barely immune to dead. Obviously no vaccine and no virus would be the best outcome. But we don't get that choice.
We could go the non mrna route and grow it as a virus, but that is going to be less accurate, more costly, and take longer.
These are things that concern vaccine makers for understandable commercial reasons, but what you're saying is that there's effectively no difference to the recipient beyond the fact that the artificial self-replicating mRNA might be higher "quality" in some way.
Let's put it like this: given the apparently low probability of being infected (for people my age, in a way that we actually notice, at current prevalence levels etc), most of us actually can choose "no vaccine and no virus". Or put another way we can choose between guaranteed cell damage from vaccines, or the chance of cell damage from virus the exact probability of which is some integral of prevalence, individual risk behavior, how quickly you get treated (e.g. with ivermectin), and how many people around you are vaccinated. To me it looks like a good tradeoff to not take the vaccine, especially when so many other people are: the chance of avoiding cell damage entirely is really quite high, and I like my body spike-free. Stories like the Reuters article this thread is about just reinforce that decision.
That’s how the immmune system works in general, with or without the vaccine.
> what you're saying is that there's effectively no difference to the recipient beyond the fact that the artificial self-replicating mRNA might be higher "quality" in some way
It’s the difference between taking a known dose with quality control or an unknown dose with no quality control.
> Let's put it like this: given the apparently low probability of being infected (for people my age, in a way that we actually notice, at current prevalence levels etc), most of us actually can choose "no vaccine and no virus".
Let’s put it like this. you can take vaccine and have an extremely rare chance if pericarditis, or eventually get the virus (it’s not going away) and have a higher chance of pericarditis.
The assumption that eventually SARS-CoV-2 will infect 100% of the population is a common modelling assumption. When I went looking for validation of it, I couldn't find any.
As for known dosages, as I say above, I couldn't find any information comparing dosages or cell death levels of vaccines vs actual viral infections. That would certainly be helpful to know, assuming such reports were reliable.
It's unlikely you will find validation outside an entry-level text book for virology or epidemiology. From my understanding it's a fundamental assumption that's easy to verify: ALL viruses with a similar transmissibility profile as SARS-Cov-2 (high R0, aerosols) have become endemic, that includes e.g. seasonal influenza and all other human coronaviruses.
That's the reason seasonal influenza is not a big issue most of the time, because we already had it in the past (or a related strain) and our immune system is primed. This happens usually as children and is the reason why both young children and their parents are a lot more ill than the average.
A completely new influenza strain, however, has a similar pandemic potential as SARS-Cov-2, and one hypothesis why the 1918 influenza was so deadly for younger generations is that they likely had not encountered it before, while the older had.
In fact, if SARS-Cov-2 wouldn't go the same route as basically all similar viruses have done before, it would be a big surprise. Try to speak to an expert in the field, preferably a virologist or an epidemiologist.
Somewhat related: it's a common cognitive bias to trust self-generated knowledge more than the knowledge from others.
Absolutely nothing in modern epidemiology is validated against real world data as far as I can tell, and virology isn't concerned with the course of epidemics, so I doubt this very much.
The problem this assumption faces (and it is as you point out, only an assumption) is it quickly runs into definitional and logic issues. That's a very common problem in epidemiology and public health as far as I can tell. Viruses evolve, and so when talking about whether they can eventually infect the whole population you have to very carefully consider:
1. How fast they evolve.
2. How fast they spread.
3. How much evolution is required to make something a "new" virus vs an "old" virus.
4. What those evolutions do to disease which is what everyone actually cares about.
If you don't have a very firm grip on these things (and epidemiology doesn't) then you can get into a situation in which by the time a virus has infected "everyone" it's no longer the same virus at all, and thus cannot be said to have actually infected everyone. All the talk of different COVID variants is pointing in this direction. Taken to an extreme it boils down to "everyone will get infected with a virus at some point" which isn't an interesting statement.
Somewhat related: it's a common cognitive bias to trust self-generated knowledge more than the knowledge from others.
Indeed it is, and scientists are very often guilty of this: they reject any and all negative feedback that comes from people "out of field", even if it's extremely relevant to what they're doing. For example rejecting feedback by computer scientists of the form "your program does not work" because computer science isn't the same thing as epidemiology.
But in this case I actually don't trust self-generated knowledge more than the knowledge from others, because I don't claim to have any superior knowledge of epidemiology. I just know the people who claim to be experts, actually aren't.
Society is not going to solve any of its big problems if Science is viewed as just another source of political rhetoric.
This isn't so much for you, but for anyone that doesn't know how to respond to this. This is how mother nature works: Human population gets genetic variability in their immune response. New virus hits the scene. Some people's immune system, with its (stability | random changes) offers them better protections. The others die. Those that die do not reproduce (dep. on age). Children of survivors have "better" immune system. Rinse and repeat. So generally speaking, going with mother nature means: People who don't have the right genes for this virus should die.
I absolutely believe this was from a lab leak and I also closely follow the science.
The question is, why would you want a potentially man-made virus (via gain of function research) in your system at all?
With the vaccine, you teach your immune system to see Covid-19 right away and take care of it at first sight.
Without it, you have to GET Covid-19, have it embed itself inside all of your vital organs, then have your immune system hopefully slowly learn and take care of it. Meanwhile it is sitting in your heart, liver, lungs, kidneys and pancreas doing damage that is coming to light in more and more studies.
Your an adult. Your choice, but in my mind this is a poor choice.
This is a common claim by public health authorities and scientists routinely put this assumption in their models, but there's no clear backing for it. And if you look at the history of outbreaks of respiratory viruses, actually they don't infect everyone.
If you relax the assumption that the choice is (virus | vaccine) to be a more accurate (vaccine | {virus | nothing}) type condition, the vaccine looks less attractive. Phrased another way, we can:
1. Get a virus that appears to have been leaked and/or enhanced by incompetent scientists, and their incompetence was then denied and covered up.
2. Get a vaccine that may or may not have been developed by incompetent scientists, but if they are incompetent then for sure there will be/currently is another coverup.
3. Do nothing. The expected likelihood of this is unclear, partly because despite decades of research epidemiology can't predict case curves for a respiratory virus, but given my lived experience so far the chance of remaining healthy seems high.
Clearly, for our bodies the best result is to have no virus and no vaccine. mRNA vaccines were hard to develop because the body treats foreign RNA as very dangerous and has lots of mechanisms to destroy it, hence the chemical manipulations required to bypass those mechanisms.
You're saying that whilst scenario (3) is clearly attractive, the chance of it happening is so low that it's not worth considering. I'm saying that I haven't seen any evidence that this is true, and I've seen evidence that it's not true, and at any rate the cost of losing this bet is that with very high certainty I get a nasty bug and feel bad for a few days. Well, OK. I've done that before. Also feeling wiped out for a few days is, presumably not coincidentally, a very common reported side effect of the vaccine. More reasons to take a gamble and go for scenario (3).
In practice of course all this is distorted by government action. My expectation is that I will eventually take it because government scientists are determined to push collective solutions over individual solutions like Ivermectin, and they can make life arbitrarily painful in their quest to make hold-outs submit. My hope is that if that does eventually happen, there will be more data, more certainty and doctors will have more experience with side effects.
Now let's assume this has always been the case. At what point, do you ever trust a vaccine or public health policy in general? Whether it's a vaccine for polio, rubella, hepatitis, etc. at some point does the collection of bad science become voluminous enough to somehow equal good enough science?
If you believe data integrity issues are extreme, there's no way to calculate risk of vaccine vs no action. Your decision would depend on whether you trust your own research over the official policy.
But given that most of us have no formal education on the subject, no resources to conduct more accurate studies, no access to primary data sources, nor an educated peer review group to critically examine our analysis, the chances of major flaws and biases seems quite high.
"If you believe data integrity issues are extreme, there's no way to calculate risk of vaccine vs no action. Your decision would depend on whether you trust your own research over the official policy."
Correct. I do actually trust my own research over official policy at this point, but, the difficulty of mounting an alternative data based argument is definitely there. That's why I didn't try but explained my policy via social explanations. However, we can make some assumptions that let us use at least a small amount of data. We can assume that whatever official statistics do exist are manipulated or exaggerated to increase the apparent attractiveness of being vaccinated. There's enormous amounts of evidence that this sort of manipulation is happening, so it means those statistics put an upper bound on things. The truth may be that they're less attractive, but it's unlikely that they're moreso. Thus if even the official statistics, when examined closely, aren't convincing, it seems reasonable to conclude the argument must be very weak indeed.
"But given that most of us have no formal education on the subject, no resources to conduct more accurate studies, no access to primary data sources, nor an educated peer review group to critically examine our analysis, the chances of major flaws and biases seems quite high."
I think this is the source of the disagreement. As far as I can tell, public health researchers and officials are characterized by:
1. No formal education in anything biological or medical. Tedros is of course a former African communist official put in his position by China but even academics can turn out to be untrained. Prof Ferguson, whose bogus predictions created lockdowns, was originally a theoretical physicist and has no qualifications in anything biological or medical. In fact nothing in his team's work has any biology in it. That's totally normal: the people who predict disease and suggest policy frequently have no training in it, they're just data analysts ("mathematicians" to the press, to most corporates they'd be junior business analysts). I touch on this in my presentations to the British government ministers: you can read all the relevant papers without once encountering any actual biology or even any theory of disease. Even when they have training it's irrelevant, because they don't use it.
2. No resources to conduct accurate studies. Most existing studies are done by academics in their living rooms at the moment, so they don't actually have more resources than I do. Again, public health is not medicine. Public health consists primarily of academics and bureaucrats, especially in the current environment, they are mostly just working-from-home Office jockeys. Plus if existing studies are mostly useless then that's still useful to know, as it informs what to do next (i.e. nothing). A basic principle is that if there isn't clear evidence that it's useful to do something, the right response is not to look desperately for something to do (that's the so-called "politician's fallacy") but rather leave things alone.
3. The same access to data sources as everyone else. The primary data is all available and when you read in the press or government announcements about COVID studies, almost always those are simply analyses of publicly available data sets.
4. Peer groups of people who are just as poorly educated as them, with the added problem of groupthink. A big part of why the research is so corrupt is the academic need to please their in-group without looking un-educated or confrontational, so the absence of such groups is an advantage rather than a disadvantage. And at any rate, there are plenty of people out there debating these things in forums that are freer and more open than the average scientific peer group.
Overall I think the chance of flaws and biases in self-done research is lower than amongst the professionals assuming you're willing to sit down and wade through a lot of data and reports, and to stick to the scientific method. The quality of the "professional" stuff is so unbelievably low that as long as you're not actively lying to yourself all the time, and as long as you know how to use Excel, you stand a good chance of doing a better job. Not because the world is filled with high quality amateur scientists but because the world is filled with low quality professionals.
Your work may be exceptional but the signal to noise ratio on public forums especially on subjects that have been politicized is just too high.
I would be curious to see what solutions exist for quality peer review that doesn't suffer from group think. Possibly providing anonymity for reviewers and cash incentives?
I think anonymity for reviewers and cash incentives are a great idea, but that already exists, it's a market. I don't think we need any clever or new solutions here. Simply stripping science of public funding would force it to convince large numbers of people (via markets) that the science is being done well and actually going somewhere.
It would also bring scientists within the purview of all the mechanisms that have evolved to handle fraud in the private sector, mechanisms like prosecutions, lawsuits, regulators, consumer reviews, trademarks and so on. Consider the huge difference between how Theranos was handled vs how the fraud coming from universities is handled.
I've read all your comments in this thread and all I can say is if this is the smartest forum on the planet and you are our prime example of critical thinking then we're in much worse shape than I thought we were. I'm not going to comment on each and every one of those but I'll leave this one general comment instead.
So you're afraid of vaccines, don't understand in basic principle even how they work, cherry pick your 'facts', get some of them hilariously wrong and manage to weave all that together to support your preferred conclusion: that you won't be vaccinated.
I'm fine with that: it makes you an anti-vaxxer, and there will always be a percentage of the people out there that make this decision based on whatever flawed reasoning they will find.
But just come out and admit it, don't bother with all the pseudo scientific justification of your position. And be grateful to all of those that will get vaccinated so that you too will indirectly be protected.
Some takeaways for you:
- you don't understand toxicity, it's definition or application to vaccination
- you don't understand the active ingredients of the various vaccine options in principle
- you don't understand the active ingredients of the particular COVID-19 vaccines
- you don't understand the definition of IFR
- you don't understand how politics work
- you don't understand how risk estimation works
- you don't understand how medical trials work, and what kind of shortcuts can be responsibly taken during an emergency
- citing a bunch of stuff that you apparently do not understand does not make your point any stronger
I could go on but I won't, suffice to say that if this were a discussion about some programming problem you'd be shut down pretty hard because that happens to be HNs core expertise. This is the kind of nonsense you get when laypeople are going to do their own research about a field in which they have zero experience trying to support some vague pre-conceived outcome.
As a layperson as well, but one who has come a little bit further than you did in their understanding of this field: you are so clueless I really don't know what I could say to support your effort while at the same time indicating that your particular brand of cluelessness is borderline dangerous: a lot of your readers will know even less than you do and will lap this up, possibly because it supports their inner discomfort, fear of needles and so on.
It highlights one thing for me with extreme clarity: it's a good thing that we managed to eradicate a bunch of very nasty diseases before social media came around because if we change a couple of words you can apply your comment to each and every vaccine that was ever released. And the world would look a lot worse than it does if that had happened.
Count your blessings: you live in an era where within 12 months of a new disease for which your immune system may not have a response ready can be created, tested and mass produced. That, and nothing else is what stands between us and a much more serious impact on our lives, the economy and ultimately our humanity.
Get vaccinated.
And stick to stuff you have actual expertise about.