I can confirm your suspicions in my case. I'm vaccinated (against COVID, the flu, and tetanus, and all the other things you can get vaccinated against), but I think YouTube is wrong here.
tldr: Monopolies bad, YouTube bad, facebook bad.
Like there are a lot of social networks, have you noticed that every single one is monitoring for COVID related content and adding a banner?
tldr: competition can't solve political issues because there's a monopoly on government
And even then, this is only an issue because everyone is on just a handful of platforms -- so the companies build one-size-fits-all policies. But we're not all the same size.
I'm not terrified of my community encountering misinformation. I'm far more terrified of a community being unable to articulate and defend why the information is "mis".
- Jen Psaki 7/15/2021
Social networks are unprecedented in our world. Never have you been able to spread misinformation and propaganda as quickly. I don't know what the right answer is, but it certainly shouldn't be to sit back and do nothing because "censorship". This misinformation campaign is actively killing people.
Eroding trust by overtly controlling information sets the scene for propaganda to take deeper root.
Your choice is to either put the propaganda in front of more eyes or have the current believers doubling down, and you choose the few? The problem is the general population does not critically think enough for the sit back and do nothing approach to work in the real world.
Also, let's be clear: the eroded trust is with a private company that owns a community-driven platform. I know I'm getting downvoted, but seriously, move on if you don't trust them, their entire business is made from you using their service.
And that's not even getting more political and pointing out all the liars and fools in charge of newspapers and even governments. I'm not saying they're all bad. I'm saying we're not considering banning politicians and newspapers for being too incorrect. Partly because the practice of choosing and empowering censors is even worse.
This shows we have fundamentally different views of the world, so I don’t think there much more to this conversation.
I would just say, be careful what esteem you hold other people in, because on more than a few issues your are almost certainly “the general population” to someone else with the power to censor.
When your child gets polio because some soccer mom spent too much time listening to crackpots online and decided not to vaccinate their children, that's when you realise they were correct. And perhaps society as a whole did not nearly go far enough.
It's hard for me to dig to the actual reasoning, but I've poked and prodded, and I think it might just be some rationalizing to help them cope with the idea that they are, in fact, vaccinated against certain diseases.
Also they're just ignorant in some cases. I got a response to the tune of "yeah (I'm vaccinated against some things)--against diseases, not viruses." Which clearly fundamentally misunderstands some things.
I've also heard people who are just against mRNA vaccines. And some who are (somewhat reasonably IMO) against mRNA vaccines until they've had a reasonable time period to let side effects etc play out.
These are, by nature, very ephemeral due to them being mRNA and either being transformed into an instruction to make a small protein that then gets the body trained to neutralize or it gets neutralized on their own because they are not long lasting in the first place. There is no instruction inside the mRNA to make anything like the long lasting effects of a retrovirus. it's simply not there to do that.
vaccines like this are more like the effects of taking a Tylenol or aspirin once... yeah you can get side effects from it but there is no long lasting effect because it's gone from your system.
The alpha gal carbohydrate introduced by a lone Star tick trains your immune system to reject it in the future resulting in the inability to eat red meats.
The alpha gal leaves your system very quickly, but the result of the (mis)-training of your immune system lasts forever.
Researchers are very clear that mRNA therapy may be useful for permanent treatment of a wide variety of conditions in the future. The material may not persist, but the effects certainly will.
The Israeli study indicates that natural immunity use up to 27x more effective than the vaccine against Delta. This indicates that something about the synthetic solution is inferior.
What other differences exist? Will any other immune abnormalities appear over time? That wouldn't be unusual. Were other systems altered due to unknown interactions? We still discover very important natural interactions every year, so this isn't far fetched.
What about your body only making limited, synthetic antigen antibodies instead of the better, more flexible natural ones in response to even more out of band gamma or mu strains? These are entirely unknown problems we're in the process of researching and for better or worse, we're the guinea pigs.
I don't see why those perspective is hard to understand. People with low openness personalities who tend to be risk adverse are going to respond very differently from those with high openness and lower risk aversion (not to mention differing knowledge).
It should be telling that doctors and nurses who have been watching covid patients die still often come to the conclusion that the vaccine isn't for them and is too risky.
I've been reading about coronavirus vaccine attempts since SARS. I've watched one attempt after another fail -- often in spectacular ways. The idea that a long string of failures suddenly meets with absolute success just at the correct moment defies belief. Those of us who took the vaccine should at least admit to ourselves that there's a non-zero chance things are wrong this time too (though hopefully not so spectacularly) but that those effects and effect rates are still lower on aggregate than the problems from covid.
But does it take years for the effect to show up after the alpha gal leaves your system? We are now 9 months into mass vaccination, and still no sign of these ominous long-term side effects that people seem so worried about.
For this specific change, no. But the point is that there is ample chance for mRNA to induce semipermanent and/or permanent changes and there's no guarantee that they'll be detected early, especially when the vast majority of clinicians aren't even looking for them.
If these vaccines do indeed, say, increase long term risk of cancer or heart problems, it will likely take years or even decades to detect especially when there is a rigid, top down enforced taboo around questioning the safety/efficacy of the vaccine. Yet another reason that censorship like this is dangerous.
Researchers also get some of their ideas through free exchange on social media. Especially when the academic establishment develops a rigid orthodoxy around a topic; when all of the institutions align behind a single preemptive conclusion and then collude to suppress even rational, science based dissent across all platforms, your society stumbles down the false path of one sided research.
But what are these chances compared to a real infection with coronavirus, which has more proteins than the spike protein and causes more havoc in the body?
I'd like to know what these attempts were and why the current vaccines are different. Do you know a good source of information about this? Or, can you list some of these attempts?
well, scores and scores of people not dying from a virus that's killed millions is why. those "limited" (and not synthetic those are real antibodies against real antigens) are working very well unless you believe that the current world wide vaccine drive is ineffectual against all data to the contrary... the vaccines have been a huge success against the coronavirus.
and you are the guinea pig already... just in the control group that's dying left and right at a very high pace and also leaving lots of people with "long covid" that is also giving them long term, yet unknown side effects.
> It should be telling that doctors and nurses who have been watching covid patients die still often come to the conclusion that the vaccine isn't for them and is too risky.
it is telling that there are unreasonable people out there however vanishingly small a number. In one recent survey of doctors 96% of them had gotten the vaccine. 45% of the remaining 4% were still planning on getting it. so that's about 2% of doctors that are not planing on taking it... i'd say that's an overwhelming number of doctors that are getting the vaccine.
mind you that 2% number includes people that never are face to face with people dying of the disease on a daily basis in all likelihood. it is very telling when the smartest people in the room are all taking the vaccine.
finally, that Israeli study is misinterpreted... it doesn't matter if you get infected as much after being vaccinated. what matters is if you get very sick after you get infected and to that end the vaccines are wildly successful. and even then the absolute numbers of people getting sick from the strain is very small; over 650,000 people in america have died from covid and the vast majority of them are unvaccinated. full stop.
People are so desperate for their fear to abate that they'll put on the blinders while trying to convince themselves of all kinds of things.
With at least 61% of vaccinated people getting a virus with one of the highest r0 around, the vaccine is 100% ineffective at killing transmission. The virus swims around many millions of vaccinated immune systems mutating until it finally finds something that works around the vaccine antibody. This is contrary to the media's anti-science garbage about unvaccinated being the cause of a virus mutating (why would it need to mutate around the vaccine antibody if they don't have any in their system?).
Paired with evidence that natural immunity is up to 27x better, the picture is pretty clear. The vaccine antibody is a response to a synthetic antigen rather than the natural one. The resulting antibody targeting the synthetic antigen (why I specifically referred to it as a "synthetic antigen antibody") is not as flexible against the actual disease.
My greatest hope at this point is that vaccinated people catching Delta are slowing the spread with the inefficient antibodies while developing natural antibodies, but I've seen zero studies about this. If this is not the case, then I fear we've kicked the danger can down the road and made it even worse. In the worst case, an ADE effect develops (not theoretical -- this was one of the biggest concerns/problems in previous SARS/MERS vaccine attempts) and 50+% of vaccinated people die.
> it is telling that there are unreasonable people out there however vanishingly small a number. In one recent survey of doctors 96% of them had gotten the vaccine. 45% of the remaining 4% were still planning on getting it. so that's about 2% of doctors that are not planing on taking it... i'd say that's an overwhelming number of doctors that are getting the vaccine.
Don't mistake getting and wanting. Most of my family are in the medical field. Some travel all across the country. Huge amounts of people had to be threatened with losing their livelihood before they got the vaccine. My sibling has had a couple months of symptoms from their vaccine (most likely because they'd already caught COVID and severe reactions are much more likely in that case). In truth, it is anti-science to require the vaccine from those with natural antibodies as we now know they have strictly better antibodies.
Then again, vaccination seems more about politics than science.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/23/delta-variant-pfizer-covid-v...
the fact that you think that breakthrough cases are somehow rare in a highly vaccinated population is nuts. of course the majority of cases will be vaccinated people in a highly vaccinated population. and also, I read the presentation it was based off and the confidence interval on that statistic is off the charts variable.
> With at least 61% of vaccinated people getting a virus with one of the highest r0 around, the vaccine is 100% ineffective at killing transmission.
That's not how those statistics work. The vaccine is not "100% ineffective at killing transmission". The nature of how the immune system works is such that there is a drop off in free antibodies in your blood stream that are able to prevent infection over time. that's 100% how it works. the fact that there is less serious cases of covid with shorter infectious periods of time with less strain on the ICU systems mean the vaccines are working.
I get you are scared of the vaccine for some reason or another but the mental gymnastics are hindering our ability to move on as a society. the vaccines allow covid to become endemic like the cold that just makes most people feel a bit shitty for a few days vs. completely overwhelm the ICUs and kill people for unrelated things.
"Are there long-term side effects caused by mRNA COVID-19 vaccines? How do we know?" Basically, no because we've studied them. mRNA vaccines are notoriously easily destroyed.
https://immunizebc.ca/ask-us/questions/are-there-long-term-s....
Is there some common knowledge that counters this that I'm missing?
How does one come up with "being vaccinated could potentially be a time bomb" without naturally coming up with "being unvaccinated could potentially be a time bomb"?
If you don't even know what mRNA stands for without Googling it, surely you couldn't possibly guess that one of these is more likely to be true than the other.
It's a very technical question that involves a ton of knowledge about how our body works etc.
Despite reading up about it, I wouldn't personally feel confident enough to explain it at any level of technical detail.
I don't think we can expect the majority of people to understand it and then make decisions based on that--ever.
It's very unclear, without deep knowledge of both the vaccine tech and the virus, which time bomb is worse. I know what the experts say, and I personally believe them, but it's not surprising to me that others don't.
When politicians are the folks in charge of our personal health (to any degree), it's always going to immediately sew distrust-- as it should.
But... that's the thing, isn't it? It's a fundamental issue with tackling the problem.
"I sure as hell have no idea whether 'a' or '¬a' is better, therefore 'a' is the one I am picking." It's a ridiculous level of favouring one alternative for no good reason.
I would find it acceptable if it were even based on some sort of loose heuristics for picking 'a', but they got nothing. For someone who might as well know nothing, why the heck are they so focused on 'going at it unvaccinated is probably the better outcome long term'?
Not believing the experts would lead to not having an opinion at all. What they are doing is believing that the experts are wrong.
People should be taking health advice from their doctors. Not from politicians, not from companies, and most definitely not from their friends on social media. This whole age of "nothing is true", therefore disbelieving experts, is IMO being fueled by social media.
All that being said, back to the original problem: assume I don't trust (or maybe pay attention to) experts, and I know zero technical details of this vaccine nor this virus. I'm in pretty good shape and the virus is mainly killing old people. The vaccine is new, and despite it not killing people, (some of) my friends are posting on FB about how this vaccine is dangerous and I'm a test subject.
I think that's a pretty good model that fits a great, great many people. I don't think it's hard to see how they arrive on "don't get a substance I don't understand that just got invented injected into my body." I think it's the reasonable choice.
The idea that they all did research and arrived at a logical, informed decision is a problem. (Most) People aren't doing that, and broadly speaking, they're never going to.
There's no logic to go from there to "vaccines are bad", but all the mental contortions they had to go through to blame someone primed them, hard, to active distrust.
I’m fine now but it was scary.
Do you have any principles when it comes to freedom of information? Just curious how far authoritarian you are.