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Why do ypu need a conspiracy where incompetence would suffice (not saying that’s the case but nobody fully understanding what’s happening seems like a more reasonable explanation compared to “foul play”)? Also it’s not unreasonable to believe that many of the researchers understood that not all the side effects were known but still judged that deploying the vaccines is worth it because the benefits outweigh the risk by a magnitude or two (again it’s hard to say if they were right).

Yes, the struggle between knowing enough to act correctly and not acting because we don't know enough to act is the trade-off we wrestle with at the heart of medicine. This is what it means to do no harm. Improper actions don't need to be the result of a conspiracy to result in disaster, no. However, what we do have to do, is work with the best information we have to make the best decision we can and act when we're confident we know enough. Where we don't make the right decision, in hindsight, we learn from it for the future. If our processes and systems, uncorrupted - as best we can tell, say that it's much, much more beneficial to perform a procedure or take a medication then we generally do that. That's how modern medicine, as we know it, has worked since it has been modern medicine. It's always a game of statistics and learning.

Doctors still feed people green jello and white bread. And statistics is not applied in every hospital in America to prove this is shit food and not good for your health.

Wide spread poor choices in industry backed by science is not only possible, it's frequent and common.

To tell people to listen blindly and ignore all the evidence to the contrary _because_ of statics, popularity and consensus is the definition of anti-science.

Your supposition that I endorsed any of these positions you assert I did simply does not follow from my statements. I cannot respond to your rebuttal of an argument I did not make. Please, try to avoid non sequitur, if you wish to discuss our views and opinions confluently.

However, to touch upon your point about the recent evidence-based medicine and hospital management movements - yes, they were once sorely lacking, with existing pre-modern medical practices handling quite a bit of load. However, the consensus is that evidence-based practices are already well established for high risk areas of practice and only increasing as time goes on elsewhere.

It's important to note that modern versus pre-modern medicine isn't a hard line, but a continuum we're continually shifting to the left. It's very much more like the border between generations instead of the hard line between decades.

In any case, new practices/devices/medicines/etc... are held to a much higher standard than legacy approaches. This is a very good thing as they are, generally speaking, much more powerful tools. We've figured out how to understand evidence and understand when we have enough to make good decisions and now we use it. We didn't always, but we're working towards replacing what came before but until then we're often forced to use it because we've nothing better or it hurts worse to do nothing. That's how most things are - that's how medicine is.

> To tell people to listen blindly and ignore all the evidence to the contrary _because_ of statics, popularity and consensus is the definition of anti-science.

The consensus of experts on the validity of the collection and interpretation of data, relying on the tools of statistical analysis of that data to make sound decisions about the applicability of that data as evidence, in relationship to deciding the answer to question at hand - relying of multiple points of view and power to cross check, reproduce experiments, and systematically eliminate biases - is exactly what science is. Is the process perfect? Absolutely not! Is it better than taking everything in and saying "well, both sides make good points so I guess we'll never know", "look at all this untrustworthy, untested data I don't know how to interpret but with which I agree so the mainstream opinion must be wrong" and "who trusts academics anyway"? You know, actual anti-science? Absolutely, yes.

> In any case, new practices/devices/medicines/etc... are held to a much higher standard than legacy approaches.

At least for "new devices" I really wish this was consistently the case.

However there are many horror stories (including here on HN), about new medical devices being grandfathered in using some prior device or category certifications (from rough memory of the description).

And it really sounds like they shouldn't be. :/

That being said, there are other HN posts about rigorous things some new device manufacturers have had to go through too.

To be fair, it's not the doctors doing the feeding; it's the hospital administrators who are almost always business folks representing the interests of the shareholders (increasingly, PE firms).

Hospitals are glorified hotels with super over-priced roomservice and activities. But the business model is very similar.

Doctors don't feed people in hospitals. They have registered dieticians on staff for that. Most hospitals now feed patients more healthy food. Sometimes they just need to get some calories into certain patients, and green jello and white bread are easy to digest.

A very large proportion of the population spends 8-10 hours a day, 5-7 days a week, 3/4 to 11/12ths of the year, doing things they don't particularly enjoy, for money. Per Piketty & our dear senator from Vermont, less than 1% of world population controls over half of of the world's wealth.

"Conspiracy" is just rhetoric. It's a word to shoo people away who aren't inclined to think things through. Replace "conspiracy" with "paycheck", and you've just explained how the world works. There are chemical plants, with hundreds of employees each, that have been poisoning communities for generations. And most of these employees live in the same communities they've been poisoning! And the situation persists! And you're rolling your eyes at us for doubting that the medical establishment--the 3rd leading cause of death, after heart disease and cancer, with its whopping 19.7% of US GDP--couldn't hide their boo-boos (even if they tried!) behind esoteric epidemiologyese?

> "Conspiracy" is just rhetoric.

I believe that's at the heart of what we're discussing. There's an important distinction to be made between actual malice and simple ignorance. This is not a Russel Bliss/Times Beach situation, as you seemingly imply. This is many independent actors all working independently on many potential solutions, each of which stand to gain massive financial benefit for exposing malfeasance. I would not confuse that with "looking the other way for a paycheck". It's quite the opposite, in fact.

They aren't independent actors. If you spend any time in the journals, it's all funded by either the government or pharma. Mostly the government. And given regulatory capture, these entities might as well be one-in-the-same. Disagree with either, and kiss your grad students goodbye. There is also an unspoken professional hierarchy. It is simply understood that if you run contrary to the current 800-lb gorilla of the field, your career is going nowhere--look into what's been going on with the beta-amyloid hypothesis for the last 20 years, or recall Planck's remark that "science advances one funeral at a time".

Or, to paraphrase Lewis Grizzard:

"One boy, one whole brain. Two boys, half a brain. Three boys, no brain at all."

I have another aphorism for you: If you distrust everyone - especially those who do not know each other and have little to no other reason to cooperate or seek each other out - no one is going to be able to convince you to trust anyone.

I am an empiricist. For my own ailments, the track record has been:

Dr Google & Dr. Wikipedia: 4

GPs & Specialists: 1

And the one ailment that the system did successfully treat was primarily a result of misinformation that the system perpetuated. If the system were functioning, there would be no way for an amateur to outperform them so consistently.

edit: and since HN is slowposting me now:

I mentioned a study in my original comment:

https://www.bmj.com/content/353/bmj.i2139.long

While this comment made no claim to being a study. It is highlighting an extreme improbability. If random taco cart guy is besting the average software dev 80% of the time, that's a pretty clear sign something is wrong with the field.

edit 2: and to joshuamorton

Mine was by a professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins and his research assistant, subsequently published in the British Medical Journal. Yours is a blog post by a "science communicator," whatever that is supposed to be. Of course the BMJ article would be widely criticized by an industry that claims almost 20% of US GDP. They can afford to have it criticized--by professional criticizers no less.

And the BMJ article is but one of many on the misrepresentations and oversellings of modern medicine. Read Ioannidis, or Mendelssohn, or Illich, or Mullins, or so many others!

As an old person, who has seen a lot of people cut short by the hospitals, all of these takedowns have held true to life. I've seen heart patients MRSA-ed to death by the hospitals, who would have been just fine if they stayed home; cancer patients killed off by post-radiation pleural effusion long before the cancer would have gotten them; people losing 1/3 of their blood volume, or suffering from intestinal perforations, from "routine" colonoscopies.

The primary contribution to human life expectancy in the last century was not mainstream medicine. It was public hygiene.

As you're an empiricist, you also know that a study with an n of 1 is not a study; it is a case report and should be interpreted as such. You, by yourself, are not generalisable.

Someone who was interested in uncovering the truth, you'd look beyond the headline (https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/critical-thinking-health/m...), and realize that that "study" isn't a study, its as far as I can tell not actually peer reviewed at all. It's widely criticized for being a terrible and misleading application of statistics.

It doesn't pass the smell test (it would imply that more than 1/3 of deaths in hospitals are due to medical errors, which is, suffice to say, silly), but is highly enthralling, as it allows one to believe they're better than the experts.

Which isn't to say medical personnel are perfect or don't make mistakes, but it is to say that if you believe that study, you should really reevaluate both how you analyze medical studies, because you're doing a bad job of it, and reevaluate your worldview, and see if you're aiming to be different solely to be different.

Mine was by a professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins and his research assistant, subsequently published in the British Medical Journal. Yours is a blog post by a "science communicator," whatever that is supposed to be. Of course the BMJ article would be widely criticized by an industry that claims almost 20% of US GDP. They can afford to have it criticized--by professional criticizers no less.

And the BMJ article is but one of many on the misrepresentations and oversellings of modern medicine. Read Ioannidis, or Mendelssohn, or Illich, or Mullins, or so many others!

As an old person, who has seen a lot of people cut short by the hospitals, all of these takedowns have held true to life. I've seen heart patients MRSA-ed to death by the hospitals, who would have been just fine if they stayed home; cancer patients killed off by post-radiation pleural effusion long before the cancer would have gotten them; people losing 1/3 of their blood volume, or suffering from intestinal perforations, from "routine" colonoscopies.

The primary contribution to human life expectancy in the last century was not mainstream medicine. It was public hygiene.

edit: And if you, as a literate and numerate person, ever get sick, trust but verify. Listen to the doctor, but also do your own research. I can guaran-damn-tee that you will obtain vastly superior results. It's not that all doctors are scoundrels looking to kill you & take your wallet. It's that they are afflicted by the same tunnel-vision, group-think, & subconscious self-interest as any other group of professionals. When the only tool you have is a hammer...

Ah yes the "any criticism of what I'm saying is a part of the conspiracy".

When you have created an unfalsifiable position, you lose all credibility as you've ventured totally into conspiracy, not science or reason or empiricism or rationality or whatever.

> Listen to the doctor, but also do your own research. I can guaran-damn-tee that you will obtain vastly superior results.

Of course, and I said as much! But your fearmongering and aspersions on the medical community are both wrong and harmful. And doubling down on them isn't done out of evidence, it's because you need to feeling superior to the experts. That's stupid. The experts are usually right. Not always, but "usually*, and you're citing complete nonsense along with occasional mistakes by experts to imply that they're usually wrong. That's bad and dumb and wrong.

> I am an empiricist. For my own ailments, the track record has been:

> Dr Google & Dr. Wikipedia: 4

> GPs & Specialists: 1

cool! mine have been internet-1, professionals-5, which cancels out your own sample data.

consequently, you've got no more complaints about this, being an empiricist who follows the data and everything, right?

The WHO and it's director has an enormous amount of centralised global power on this matter, which anyone would argue is ridiculously dangerous and disproportionate, especially considering how many scandals and investigations the WHO have already had due to funding from private corporations and pharma companies.

And the fact that they simply changed the definition of what a pandemic is, seemingly on a whim, to no longer include death rates, with no scientific intervention, is that something we should accept as some kind of perfect and neutral decision making that's obviously in the interest of.. whom exactly?

I'm sorry, did you have a specific assertion or accusation to make? I can't tell.

>The WHO and it's director has an enormous amount of centralised global power on this matter, which anyone would argue is ridiculously dangerous and disproportionate

better phrased: 'I, personally, as 1 of the people in the world, argue this thing'

so, argue it, but try to stick to specifics: "This is the direct evidence that the CDC killed scientists who disagreed with this study" or whatever the specific conspiracy theory is as it pertains to this article

>It's a hundred countries, thousands and thousands of organisations and experts, and millions and millions of others

In most countries it's literally official policy to fire doctors if they question the vaccine or speak out against it.

and yet, for all the countries which don't do that, none have presented independently verifiable incontrovertible evidence of a show-stopping problem the others have not presented or addressed.

You know, the thing about silenced people is just that - they're actually silenced. You don't hear from them. So, all these people shouting about being silenced while also shouting about the vaccine not working or not being necessary and posting links to studies and case reports and nonsense?

Yeah, they're not being silenced. It's just that the evidence they're posting just isn't good evidence. The studies they're posting just aren't good studies. The case reports they're posting, well, they're just that - single case reports. Case reports do not generalise to populations.

That's all.

Just out of interest, why should the burden of proof be the way round you've framed it?

"independently verifiable incontrovertible evidence of a show-stopping problem" seems a fairly high bar.

The risks from COVID have been fairly well understood for a while now, if you're young and healthy and have no comorbidities the risk of dying from it is quite simply vanishingly small:

https://qcovid.org

EDIT: so a hypothetical 19 year old unvaccinated me has a 1 in 1,000,000 risk of dying after catching COVID according to that University of Oxford model.

You do know there are far worse things than death, right? Permanent disability. Heart/lung conditions. Mental illness. Chronic fatigue. All from a young age. This simple focus on death rates misses the mark entirely and it acts like these consequences don't exist or increase the more times you are reinfected. It's sad, really.

The burden of proof is on those who are arguing for a specific action or inaction to cause a specific result. So let be the weight of the clear and convincing evidence against the other - all of it.

> Permanent disability. Heart/lung conditions. Mental illness. Chronic fatigue. All from a young age.

Is there a serious study showing that the young and healthy (those w/o any comorbidities) are at significantly increased risk of these due to catching Covid itself? Those issues were affecting people long before Covid arrived.

QCovid predicts that that hypothetical 19 year old unvaccinated me has a 1 in 62,500 risk of "catching and being admitted to hospital with COVID-19". For context: what's the risk of ending up in hospital after a car accident in your part of the world?

> This simple focus on death rates misses the mark entirely

Some would say that two years+ of singular focus on Covid is what's missing the mark.

As my doctor keeps telling me, there are plenty of other viruses and plenty of other health conditions.

Honestly, if you want to talk about relative risk, I'm surprised you don't have that information already - especially given the implications your making. Of course there are always other conditions and diseases, this absolutely is reflected in the available data. Feel free to bring up specifics once you've retrieved and analysed them at your leasure. Happy to discuss them once you have.

> Of course there are always other conditions and diseases, this absolutely is reflected in the available data. Feel free to bring up specifics [..]

Covid is simply too new for any of us to have reliable long-term data. Even the UK's ONS said so in the Spring[0]:

"More deaths were registered in young people aged 15 to 29 years in England in 2021 than the average number registered in 2015 to 2019; however, there was no excess in 2021 for deaths from circulatory diseases.

We do not yet have a complete picture of how the coronavirus pandemic has affected deaths in young people, because it takes a long time to investigate deaths from external causes; we will continue to monitor the safety of vaccines and the changes in excess deaths.

Early indications show deaths in 2020 increased for some causes, particularly suicides in young females and accidental poisonings (mostly drug poisonings) in young males"

So let's put Covid to one side and talk about seasonal flu, since that's been with us for long enough.

The US and Canada were (at least relatively recently) the only places that recommend everyone over six months to get the (seasonal) flu vaccine.[1]

"Apparently, not a single country in Europe asks the general population to seek that same kind of protection, according to Robb Butler, the World Health Organization technical officer in vaccine preventable diseases and immunizations in the organization's Europe office in the Netherlands.

That's because global health experts say the data aren't there yet to support this kind of blanket vaccination policy, nor is there enough money"

The USA is "the land of the medicated" according to a NBC article[1] and "What the drug companies are doing now is promoting drugs for long-term use to essentially healthy people. Why? Because it’s the biggest market."[2]

YMMV, but $BigPharma's shareholders would definitely prefer you to take more medicine, and not ask too many questions.

[0] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...

[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2013/01/17/health/flu-vaccine-policy... [2] https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/america-land-medi... [3] https://www.amazon.com/Truth-About-Drug-Companies-Deceive/dp...

So, if you want to examine the data we do have about risks from COVID-19 in the setting of comparative risk, including other diseases, then I'm happy to do so. However, I do not wish to speculate about COVID-19 by changing the topic of discussion to influenza, excluding COVID-19, in this context, as though it were comparable. COVID-19 is not the flu. Speculating about data is not what we're discussing. If we don't have the long term data, we don't have the data. We do have preliminary data for COVID-19, so if you want to speculate about that and how it might develop - that'd be much more relevant.

It is easy to forget the Snowden moment. Before him releasing the documents, most people in the HN group and in general public would call somebody suggesting such practices of the US goverment as maniac.

Sorry - your argument just do not hold whatever the underlaying question is.

Goverments and most probably the rich can keep the secrets from us, in particular when the topic is complex.

Oh, no, lol - just about everyone thought the NSA was spying on citizens. We just didn't know exactly how or the precise scale of the operation. Bill Binney and cohorts/whistle blowers were very well known ages before then. Heck, Nixon couldn't even keep Watergate under wraps! Don't distort what "the average person would think" to launder your own opinion into something that a reader might think has more weight than "because I say".

"These people did something I don't like, therefore they are guilty of anything I suggest without evidence" does not seem like a reasonable argument in favor of your position