>He's been the canary in the coal mine on numerous issues surrounding COVID.
He's also been the carbon monoxide in the coal mine, steering people away from vaccines
He's also been the carbon monoxide in the coal mine, steering people away from vaccines
The more people that are vaccinated, the shakier his argument becomes.
Covid19 has very real, well documented risks. The common vaccines have very low known risks by comparison. The space for unknown risks shrinks by the day.
That's the danger inherit with being a contrarian. Mostly you end up being wrong. It's a very important role though, to challenge accepted beliefs and create a dialog around them.
1. Not allowing dissenting opinions in the scientific community along with silencing any criticism from both media and big tech. If we are silencing dissenting view points, then are we really getting the truth?
2. Pushing it on pregnant women, kids and healthy youngsters where the risk vs reward isn't in favour.
3. Pushing it on people who have already recovered from COVID. There's no reason for this.
I was hoping that after what's happened in the last 1.5 year (and even past centuries), we would have learnt our lessons on how bad censorship is. But people don't learn their lessons. Bret correctly called it "intellectual authoritarianism".
His YouTube channel's already got strikes and videos taken down and demonetized. He's moving his podcast over to Odysee because of this. His ArticlesOfUnity twitter account (unrelated to COVID) was banned too.
I don't see a problem with the latter. It is almost always the latter.
That tells me nothing will change your mind as it indicates that you still think social media censorship is anywhere remotely fair.
He's completely right about 1 and 3.
https://pharmaceutical-journal.com/article/feature/everythin...
It gives a lot of data on chances of symptoms and illness at various periods after the first and second doses from various studies, however the bottom line is that long term the national level studies show that:
“The vaccine also provided 97.2% protection against hospitalisation overall and 97.5% protection against severe and critical hospitalisation.”
These are outstanding results, among the best of any vaccine ever developed, and from studies of large a large and diverse population.
It was 100% effective is a study of 2,000 12-15 year olds. This is important because in countries like Brazil where the death rate is incredibly high, even the small fraction of victims that are children adds up to many hundreds, or even thousands of deaths.
The Shingrix vaccine is recommended for everyone over 50. It's a two-dose regimen to prevent shingles. If you've ever known anyone who has shingles, you'll rush to get those shots as soon as your doctor recommends it.
Guess what? The side effects can be rough. I know from personal experience: the second dose knocked me down for at least 24 hours. I felt awful and pretty much did nothing but sleep. By the evening of the next day, I was fine.
I also got my Pfizer vaccine shots around the same time, and had nothing worse than a sore arm. Even if someone had told me there was a 100% chance I'd have the same side effects from the COVID-19 vax as I did from Shingrix, I still wouldn't have hesitated. A day or two of feeling terrible versus the known dangers of COVID-19 is an easy choice.
Don't overplay the "major downside" bit.
Which COVID-19 vaccine did you get, and what side effects did you have, if any?
Honestly, I'm seriously starting to doubt whether it's even remotely feasible to achieve herd immunity with the current vaccines - the Delta variant is looking really worrying on that front.
The Delta variant is more contagious, but has not demonstrated vaccine escape behavior against Pfizer and Moderna [1], and although efficacy was shown to be reduced by mutations in trials, both vaccines still successfully result in complete neutralization in of the virus by antibodies in test titres (in brief: you vaccinate people, then draw their blood and expose the antibodies to virus in vitro and see whether neutralization is effective - it was).
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jun/15/the-covid-delt...