https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Week_in_Virology
but the booster made me sick for about a day. i chose not to get boostered a second time, and around 7 months after the first booster i got covid.
I was out solid for a week, feeling really sick. and was still sick for the full second week but good enough that I could do home office. I couldn't exercise (for me, climbing) until the start of week 4. the annoying coughs continued for another 2-3 weeks, but a minor issue overall.
mind you, my resting heart rate is around 55 and I'm quite the sporty guy. I'm 33 so not in any risk group.
no way I want to be about of doing fun physical stuff for 3 weeks at some point in the near future again. so I'm going to get boostered probably in 2-3 months if it's still possible. I'll take the 1 day of sickness and then back to normal over 3 weeks of general suckage every time.
The hosts and guests both openly and candidly talk about some of the disagreements they have with the prevailing public health guidelines while at the same time give so much detail and depth into virology and immunology so as to show how full of shit the big anti-vax misinformation peddlers are.
So many anti-vaxxers say you can't have any disagreements with the party line or you get cancelled and then these prominent experts at the top of their fields do it every week on TWiV and don't get cancelled (because they aren't full of shit).
(That's an everyday speech 'imply', not a mathematical 'imply'; where of course the existence of sets containing x says nothing about the existence of sets not containing x.)
actual facts
https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/covid-deaths-in-israel-h...
look at that chart and then recall the absolutely mad state so many people went into Summer 2021
"time to blame the 'unvaccinated'"
"time to inject them against their will"
"time to violate their basic human rights"
https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/i-know-what-you-did-last...
maybe, just maybe, the "unvaccinated" were able to see something you weren't and chose the better path
Yay for facts, and not emotions! For the obtuse: the last sentence was sarcastic.
Give me a long detailed scientific paper and then maybe it's worth considering.
The shots were sold as “If you get this shot you won’t get the virus” but apparently people still are getting the virus. And not just getting the virus, but dying from it. And dying from it in greater numbers than before the shots! WTF is up with that?!
Clearly the shots don’t work as they were supposed to.
And they are killing people. Excess deaths are way up in mRNA injected countries.
And they are preventing people from being born. Birth rates are way down in mRNA injected countries.
Not good.
From 1 screenshot graph! Is that all the data you need to draw your conclusions? Is the graph even real, or is a graph from a random blog good enough because it supports your viewpoint? (Let's be honest, "both sides" have this deficiency; "This PNG supports my viewpoint, I'm right!"). Let's see the vax rates (to me the page is trying to trick people by presenting "Over 95% are vaccinated" but that's for people over the age 50. Let's see the rate of "returning to normal" and partying and mingling by people who think since they were vaxxed 6 months ago they were safe.
> And they are preventing people from being born. Birth rates are way down in mRNA injected countries.
Oooh... it must be the vaccine! How about the fact that there's been economic instability since the pandemic? Nah: mRNA introduced, birth rates down, must be mRNA!
Look, birth rates have been down since 2007, oh, must be Bill Gates' time machine: https://www.aei.org/economics/the-reasons-for-americas-birth...
Sorry if you're insulted, but geez, either this comment slaps some sense into you (here I am fighting against a windmill) that you're an idjit who needs to be more scientific about his way of thinking, or you're just going to reaffirm your beliefs, because it's more comforting to think that you have a clue and everyone else are the idjits[2]. A toast to that!
[1] Yeah TBH it's a foreign substance, I don't know what liquid they injected into me, at the end of the day I had my faith in the scientists making and checking the vaccine, just like we all put faith that the burger we're eating have been checked properly - by whoever is in charge for checking those things - for mad cow and other diseases.
[2] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont... - Yes, arguably your "facts" won't change the minds of "I have faith in the vax" people either...
It's Google's chart. Search for "covid", then select Israel from the country drop down.
The poster you replied to is asserting that this chart should look much better by now, given the promises made when the vaccine when it was introduced. I don't see why you need "a long detailed scientific paper" to agree or disagree with this.
How is that selfish?
> If you would like to be selfish, you should do it in a very intelligent way. The stupid way to be selfish is … seeking happiness for ourselves alone. … the intelligent way to be selfish is to work for the welfare of others.” - Dalai Lama
Specific individual rights can and do trump collective rights, but this is a conversation we have to have as a society. For instance, if I am down range, my individual right trumps everyone’s right to fire a gun down that range. It’s the flip side of the same coin. Positive freedoms are zero sum with negative freedoms. Realizing that is step one to having a productive conversation about these things.
Once we get past that fact, by realizing that it is zero sum, and your individual right takes away some collective right (and vice versa) we can look at specific instances and debate those. But when the conversation begins with “you’re taking away my rights”, the rest of the conversation is guaranteed to be unproductive, because, depending on your perspective, both outcomes take away someone’s rights.
I agree, though:
a) I didn't make that claim
b) You may as well just say "one right does not always trump another", which is just as true and more insightful
Which makes this part:
> This lack of nuance in your argument is absurd.
actually absurd. And this part:
> The selfish part is suggesting that your individual rights trump everyone else’s rights.
as I've already pointed out, is not something I claimed. This was my claim:
“To protect or support one individual's rights is to protect or support everyone's individual rights."
Perhaps you'd like to try again, and this time actually address me with some respect, not least by actually replying to what was written and not what is most convenient to you in the fantasy argument you've spilled out from your head.
Even if they did work, the profile of who was at risk was clear, it wasn’t healthy young people. So why was it pushed on healthy young people?
From the outset the risk reward ratio was not clear for those without high comorbidites, the minute the myocarditis signal showed up it should have been pulled for most people.
Bearing in mind we now know myocarditis is just one of a multitude of negative side effects.
So why did it go on being pushed and coerced to healthy people, actively harming them?
So not being in the population at risk I have no intention to take a booster. Am I an anti-vaxer? I certainly disagree with public health policy in most countries.
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2022/04/covid-patients-may-be-higher-risk-blood-clots-6-months#:~:text=Ho%20and%20Pell%20said%20that%20while%20many%20Omicron,of%20infections%20%2894.5%25%20in%20this%20study%29%2C%22%20they%20wrote.It used to refer to parents which completely refused to vaccinate their children. It has transformed into a weapon, like racist, fascist, etc and is used to silence and manipulate discourse.
Now whole governments are admitting that people under 50 don't really need those vaccines after all. We now have studies claiming that serious vaccination side effects are more likely than serious covid sickness in young men.
The anti vaxxers were proven RIGHT by this in many of their claims. How should they EVER trust governments again? How should they ever leave their anti-vax echochambers again? It was shown time and time again that governments and their high profile rockstar twitter "experts" get the facts right as many times as a broken clock the time, sometimes even spreading deliberate misinformation/lies ("Faucis noble lies") and absolutely can not be trusted.
My government as well scammed me into getting a second vaccine, after the retracted their claim that the single shot J&J vaccination would suffice.
I am not even an anti vaxxer -I am happy my parents are vaccinated. They always were at an at-risk age, but I am not and I am not interested in getting another covid vaccine. I remain terrified at the prospect of a reinstatement of the green pass system.
Wtf are you talking about. TWiV absolutely thinks everyone needs two cycles of vaccination period… and it’s likely beneficial to get three.
We call it science the process/method, rather than science the religion.
> The hosts and guests both openly and candidly talk about some of the disagreements they have with the prevailing public health guidelines while at the same time give so much detail and depth into virology and immunology so as to show how full of shit the big anti-vax misinformation peddlers are.
I'll keep that in mind next time I am censored.
> So many anti-vaxxers say you can't have any disagreements with the party line or you get cancelled and then these prominent experts at the top of their fields do it every week on TWiV and don't get cancelled (because they aren't full of shit).
Profanity aside, it sounds like you are touting controlled opposition, or, Establishment figures critiquing establishment positions.
When were you censored? I mean actually censored.
Bearing in mind that being ignored, or the owners of publishing systems choosing not to cooperate with you in propagating your opinions on platforms they own or operate, is editorialising and not censorship.
This line of debate leads nowhere other than a dead end where each side is convinced that the other is a spy. And considering your post history, I don't know if there's a reason to lend you much credence at all.
To any medical intevention there is risk. A chance of adverse events. A chance it won't work. Side effects. Your physician should make you aware of these potential issues, making you aware of them, before treating you. We call it informed consent.
The ethical angle is a little more complex. Considering above, but also, knowing the statistics around fatality rates of various conditions, and the adverse events that go along with the interventions. Some cases it means they should, or shouldn't be treated. Also, you have to consider a patient's personal beliefs, religion, etc. Running roughshod over patient beliefs is considered unethical.
Each person should make their own decisions based on knowing their health, and consulting with a competent medical professional that understands all of above. There are simple calculators that exist for fatality rates around covid depending on age, weight, mordibities, etc. Thank JHU.
Which I do, thanks mostly to my wife that is a dual board certified surgeon.
> This line of debate leads nowhere other than a dead end where each side is convinced that the other is a spy. And considering your post history, I don't know if there's a reason to lend you much credence at all
Either I am a liar, well-informed, or quite crazy. Take your pick. I'd just like to think that I married well
It's almost like most people can be reasonable if given the opportunity and proper information. People are also surprisingly good at picking up on BS, even if they then misattribute the source or reasoning.
On the one hand you say anti-vaxers are not cancelled but on the other hand you refer to them as full of shit. In spite of so many of their claims about the vaccine having been proven correct: it doesn't prevent transmission, it doesn't prevent severe covid or death, and for some age groups the risks outweigh the benefits: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4206070.
Yes, it does…?
Anti vaxxers tend to not discuss nuanced details and instead come out with unsubstantiated claims like “vaccines cause autism” which is going to get most people to stop listening to them
Have you actually read any of the publications by prominent anti-vax scientists? For instance, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/359989585_Innate_im... is hardly lacking in nuanced details or full of unsubstantiated claims, nor is https://www.voiceforscienceandsolidarity.org/scientific-blog... .
This second link is even worse, it’s a blogpost with a a short paper riddled with citations linking to other blogposts from the same site making wild claims about how the vaccine actually makes things worse. I started on section 1 after his synopsis and he just points to a diagram included in his paper and then trots out the debunked anti vaxxer claim of
> vaccinees are now increasingly becoming asymptomatic shedders of SC-2.
There is no data or citation supporting that beyond his diagram. He just makes a claim and then starts making logical leaps off that claim.
This is the kind of “evidence” that makes everyone groan and roll their eyes when people claim that the anti vaxxers actually have proof and no one’s paying attention to them because it’s a conspiracy or doesn’t toe the party line. I am legitimately upset that I gave you the benefit of the doubt and wasted my time reading through these just to find out that your claims are as weakly supported as I had assumed.
[1]the sentence below, anti vaxxers commonly bring up lack of precedent as a reason the vaccines can’t possibly work
> The utilization of mRNA vaccines in the context of infectious disease has no precedent.
[2] > We show evidence from the VAERS database supporting our hypothesis.
And rightfully so. Policies adapt to the currently prevailing COVID variant. A change of policy today is not a vindication for statements made months ago under different circumstances.
Also, if the one making the statement is not an expert themselves, they're typically cherry-picking statements of real experts to match their preoccupations, while the topic is in fact still under debate and the verdict can swing either way.
True experts' doubts just reinforce their positions instead of weakening them, IMO.
For the record, I have got 3 shots (2 Pfizer + 1 Moderna), and I don't regret it. But I respect people who chose differently because the unknowns about the vaccines.
Vaccines became broadly available in relatively wealthy countries in 2021 wherein the only reasonable position would have been that vaccination of all groups would decrease net mortality even among those unlikely to die and reduce damage to people's bodies that we were already seeing even with mild infections of otherwise healthy people.
A reasonable analysis of a complex topic with an unknown number of unknown factors is ultimately going to have at least some support among smart people for niche positions.
Going with what your emotions proves you are intellectually incapable.
Picking out one smart person with an articulate position that matches your emotional position proves you are an intellectually incapable person who thinks they are smart.
Picking out a niche position and searching for a handful of smart people who support it because it makes you feel smart to be a contrarian makes you intellectually incapable AND smug.
I respect people with the aptitude and the niche knowledge to break new intellectual ground even if they turned out to be wrong. I do not respect the 1000 idiots following that one fellow into the brush who ignored all the other smart people going the other way and neither should you.
You are oversimplying and again conflating both groups. You assume people made their mind first and then looked for experts' to support which it's not fair to a lot of them.
Let's focus on an specific case. A healthy 25 years old male living in on of those countries. If he's an skeptic and decides to make a data oriented decision, the truth is that his chance of dying or getting a severe infection was really slim and probably comparable to the odds of getting a myocarditis because of it.
Yet the media and the government, at least in my country, did not make any difference between his case and a 60 years old with hypertension. Everyone had to take their shot or be denied his right to go to a pub or restaurant.
One of the problems here, and the source of a lot of trouble it's that sending nuanced messages it's very hard and goverments feared that being cautious could affect negatively to vaccination rates. So they took the simplistic path of presenting the vaccines as a silver bullet for everyone (and they were but in a very varying degree).
I can understand that decision but at the same time, it has thrown a lot of fair "skeptics" under the bus.
IMO, your attitude is even more harmful than the typical vaccine conspiracy theories, because those are typically easily disproved!
But disguising a dogmatic attitude in the language of science is poisonous for discourse and misuses science itself.
Looking at the benefits and drawbacks of a new vaccine is the most normal thing in the world. And thanks to those that didn’t allow themselves to be bullied by misguided do-gooders is why we have a better understanding of the vaccines and doctors can explain to patients if the vaccine makes sense to them.
Usually, in matters with very personal consequences, I don’t submit anyone’s position to the rigor of, say, a mathematical proof—irrationality is allowed. Most people refusing the vaccine have either died or survived multiple infections. I believe the individual has unquestionable sovereignty over such matter of life and death. Likewise the vaccinated dead, either from COVID infection or vaccine complication.
Overall, it’s really quite simple to understand that different people view this life thing differently and make trade-offs accordingly. It may not favor you, but calling the other sides names or applying a pretend touchstone of intellectualism is the height of intellectual laziness. Given that your position is also the position of the majority, I wonder at all if “intellectually incapable” should be used here. The majority is provably the intellectually incapable.
> Most people refusing the vaccine have either died or survived multiple infections.
Most people refusing to wear bulletproof vests into war zones have died or survived being shot at. This says nothing for the strategy whatsoever.
> I believe the individual has unquestionable sovereignty over such matter of life and death.
We were discussing whether there were reasonable antivaxxers who had arrived at their position through commendable means as opposed to ignorant folks who got their medical advice from facebook. People's right to refuse to participate in vaccination is an entirely different question.
> Likewise the vaccinated dead, either from COVID infection or vaccine complication.
It's easy to find millions of people killed by covid. Where can I find the number of people killed by the covid vaccine?
> Overall, it’s really quite simple to understand that different people view this life thing differently and make trade-offs accordingly.
Surely many things are very complicated with no clear answer. This doesn't appear to be one of them. Given the cardiovascular and lung damage apparent in even the majority of mild infections and the potentially progressive nature of repeated infection starting out vaccine naive seems to be a bad strategy for any age and one that could only have been arrived at by failing to attend to reality.
Its not intellectual laziness to attend to the body of work done by experts. It is what one does in fields in which one is not a subject matter expert. One acquires as much information as is available much of it surface level understanding and reads a variety of sources and what other sources say about those sources until you develop enough of an understanding do operate in the relevant space to the degree required to make decisions.
In this way one learns enough about automotive tech to select a good car, to drive it, and to keep it running between visits to the shop.It is entirely normal to do this without learning enough to rebuild the engine much less build or design one from scratch.
If one discovers someone else is commuting in an eastern European sedan of antique vintage which lacks seatbelts or airbags I will happily conclude without being an engineer that they are essentially "bad at picking cars" even if it comes to pass that they have what they believe is a very sophisticated understanding of engineering and can put their death trap together blindfolded.
It turns out that one doesn't need to be an engineer to read analysis that says that these two safety features are highly desirable and that they by choosing dangerous cars have chosen a notably bad strategy for not ending up a meat crayon.
> Given that your position is also the position of the majority, I wonder at all if “intellectually incapable” should be used here. The majority is provably the intellectually incapable.
Ya people are stupid but it doesn't follow that what the majority does is necessarily stupid because the majority does it ergo being a contrarian doesn't perforce make you clever either. Claims should be evaluated on their own merit.
The claim that vaccines are more dangerous than covid seems not only unfounded but unworthy.
I think the high number of adverse events, and the weirdness around allergies, and my wife's colleague that was receiving a huge amount of pressure to get a 2nd shot, despite having a severe adverse event, has ruined it for me personally.
> Going with what your emotions proves you are intellectually incapable.
No emotions. The adverse events in any number of journals, and the VAERS reporting data, as passive surveillance which underreports signficantly, convinced me there were issues.
> I respect people with the aptitude and the niche knowledge to break new intellectual ground even if they turned out to be wrong. I do not respect the 1000 idiots following that one fellow into the brush who ignored all the other smart people going the other way and neither should you.
Please don't call anyone idiots here on HN. We read the articles, and the medical journals, and the pros and cons and came to an informed opinion, not including all the noise that was public pressure.
Having had covid, I can definitely say I am happy I did not get vaccinated. If you have a bunch of comorbidities or are old, or you want it just cause, go get it. But don't force those of us that are healthy, with no comorbidities that already did the social distancing to get some therapeutic with a shady safety record and likely negative efficacy. I don't believe we needed to rush these vaccines, or therapeutics, or whatever ineffective thing they are, out the door.
What is really tragic is when I hear about the infants with severe adverse events to these vaccines..........
It's not necessarily a reasonable position when the clinical trials themselves showed an unusually large rate of adverse events in vacinees vs the placebos: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X2.... The bad logic is the logic that it's okay to assess the efficiency of a novel therapeutic by the protection it provides against infection rather than by it's overall effect on excess mortality, as such an approach is going to miss any safety signals.
That's about the worst case of projection I've seen on HN. Just because that's your position is very far from it being the only reasonable position. There were plenty of sensible people calling for vaccination of the over 50s and other vulnerable classes at the time.
The overlap is not exact, that's why I say use a venn diagram but essentially anything anti-establishment has a anti-vaxxer component since vaccinse are considered establishments' game.
You know the only people more full of shit than the anti-vaxxers? The "trust the science" shills. The anti-vaxxers may have the wrong idea but from 2020 to...well about the last few months we saw that anyone who even remotely questioned the efficacy of vaccines was "anti-science" and a "science denier". Major platforms spent millions (billions?) to kill as much of this as they could despite the fact the "fact checkers" had no idea either. Fact checkers by-and-large are editorial writers on a power trip. I don't think anyone whose been awake at the wheel for the last 4 years is surprised at this. But they gained an entirely new level of unjustified power in 2020.
A few years later all of the sudden some of the "conspiracies" were at least shown to have some veracity: the vaccines aren't nearly as effective as advertised, the studies were rushed/manipulated, boosters are not effective, the lab leak hypothesis, etc.
Now, a real "science believer" would simply change their view at this point to match the reality of the situation. We spent two years pretending we have a full view of exactly what COVID is, what caused it, where it started, etc. The truth is we have no idea. The best scientists so far can't even agree on if a booster works or not (and by works I mean is effective along a wide population of varying demographics). People are seemingly religious bound to the "wear your mask, trust the science" non-sense. If anything, these people are just as bad as the people saying the vaccine is carrying nano-robots.
If you recall, in 2020 especially, the idea that the virus originated in the BSL lab in Wuhan was put into several papers. None of which can be found anymore (at least I cannot find them). These scientists were "canceled" immediately.
There's a lot of nonsense coming out of both sides. But to pretend it's simply "those pesky anti-vaxxers" as if none of them can rub a collective two brain cells together is frankly funny. I have a feeling the Pfizer documents once fully released and analyzed will be a treasure trove of hindenberg level disasters once the religious party-line fervor comes to an end.
The 'bivalent' boosters, as far as I understand (non-expert), combine a widely proven safe (likely billions of individuals who've had the treatment at this point) technology and version of the vaccine, which might no longer match the dominant wild strain of the virus, with a derivative of that same vaccine tuned to that current dominant strain of the virus.
In order to be most effective that updated booster should be used while the variation it was designed to protect against is still in the wild.
more people have died since the shots, than before, come on bro! It's staring you in the face
https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/all-you-need-to-know-abo...
What would you consider a worthy citation source, the same people who have lied or been wrong about everything to date?
No need for goofy phd words like “robust inferences”
Much more than 70% of the at risk population were injected, they are the ones that are dying. That shots were sold as stopping the virus entirely, “If you get this shot you won’t get the virus” let alone die from it!
So why have there been more deaths since the shots than before?!
The shots don’t work. Not only do they not work, they are killing people. In mRNA injected countries, excess deaths are running well above historical norms.
Not only are they killing people, they are preventing people from being born. In mRNA injected countries birth rates are way down.
Birth rate trends in Israel, German and Russia are the same as in prior years
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/DEU/germany/birth-rate
https://igorchudov.substack.com/p/new-data-from-germany-birt...
The effect we are talking about is something that necessarily only shows up within the past year, 9 months after young people started getting the shots.
A line chart going back 70 years is not useful here.
If you look at the data, linked above, where it is possible to see the effect I’m referring to, it is not something to blithely dismiss with a chart where it isn’t even possible for the effect to be visible.
Birth rates may be down over the long term, but year to year they are fairly stable, we are seeing moves to the downside hugely outside the range of normal year to year variability. And we are seeing it in a wide range of different populations with the commonality that we are seeing this hugely statistically significant effect occur in all these various populations like clockwork nine months after the young people in those populations started getting the shots.
>This is a continuation of my post from yesterday about a massive 13% decline in births in Germany. Such a decline is a nine-sigma event, meaning that it is so unlikely to occur by chance, that it would naturally happen as rarely as an asteroid striking the Earth
…
When expressed in “sigmas”, units of standard deviation, the 23.24% drop in the birth rate in Taiwan is a 26-sigma event!
This is can be described as “unimaginable” in terms of the likelihood of happening due to random chance
https://igorchudov.substack.com/p/depopulation-of-taiwan
https://igorchudov.substack.com/p/taiwan-birth-rate-cratered...
https://igorchudov.substack.com/?sort=search&search=Taiwan
Regarding “excess deaths,” I maybe should’ve mentioned I was referring to what has come to be called “non-COVID excess deaths.” The excess deaths are found in statistics of “all cause mortality.”
Is data for non-COVID excess deaths available for Russia and Iran?
In Germany birth rates are way up for April and May
I'm sure Igor will find something else to get upset about, as hysterics typically do
The number of people who have died from the virus after shots were introduced, that were supposed to stop people from contracting the virus, let alone dying from it, is bigger than the smaller number of people who died from the virus before the shots were introduced.
Do you find this an important data point? Do you think it is enough to win the prize? Do you want to co-author with me? Where should we publish?
Suffice it to say that I don't think that chart means what you think it means.
I don’t have any citations on hand, but should be easy enough to search for, especially now.
Nowadays it is used to create an us or them division. Which in turn removes any nuances.
What about the people who were silenced about their negative vaccine reactions...[1]
orjournalists like Alex Berenson that were banned from twitter from talking about the data? The first journalist to win against twitter in court and get unbanned, ever [2]
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/covid-vaccine-side...
[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/08/alex-...
He is the first journalist to take twitter to court and get unbanned, so he is in fact already a historical journalist, wether you agree with him or not.
>He is the first journalist to take twitter to court and get unbanned
The fact that he was a "journalist" had nothing to do either with the reason for banning him or why he was restored (he was restored solely because a twitter employee behaved like a moron).
Should I stop believe my lying eyes?
Clearly there was a disagreement about the danger it posed to children, and perhaps more importantly: the danger that infected children would pose for the adults around them. Because that's another frequently ignored issue: vaccination is not just about protecting the individual, but about protecting the community.
But that disagreement doesn't mean that someone is lying, and it certainly doesn't mean that everything is bullshit. It means that people disagree. And with a very new disease, that shouldn't really be a surprise to anyone. Now there was clearly also a lot of misinformation from various sources, including sometimes governments, but the only way to deal with that and figure out what's what is honest, open discussion by people who know what they're talking about.
Stop demanding absolutely truths about things we cannot yet know, and instead try to think constructively about what would be the best thing to do considering the lack of information we have to deal with.
This sounds like a run-of-the-mill political debate that hopefully in the end was decided on the basis of an expert panel. (And no, of course, medical experts are also not infallible. I don't think we have investigated a disease and responded to it as fast as to this one ever before in the history of mankind, so there were bound to be made some wrong or misleading hypotheses.)
I would expect government members making decisions to consult expert virologists/epidemiologists first. The fact that they can make two contradictory statements means that either they did not consult any experts, or they consulted different experts, which means there is no consensus among experts on the topic.
Let me stop you right there, let's quote famous antivaxxer site called CDC:
"Recent studies show flu vaccine can reduce the risk of flu illness by between 40% and 60% among the overall population during seasons when most circulating flu viruses are well matched to the flu vaccine viruses."[1]
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/vaccines-work/vaccineeffect.htm
So 40% efficacy IF WELL MATCHED to virus, if not matched it's somewhere between 0-40%.
I'm not sure why you think COVID boosters not matched to current variant will have somehow bigger efficacy than influenza boosters which have only 0-40% efficacy, if not lucky. That's one of the reasons why it's pretty much pointless to get vaxxed against influenza/coronavirus for healthy people, the efficacy is next to zero in both cases for healthy people. For seniors, if they are lucky it will help them, if not it hopefully won't do more damage than good.
Let me stop you right there. I'm not sure why you think he thinks Covid boosters not matched to the current variant will have bigger efficacy, or the comment doesn't display correctly on my screen.
I just don't see how you came to that conclusion. They aren't remotely similar viruses, they aren't the same vaccines, yet you confidently declare that if X is true for the influenza vaccine, it must also be true for the coronavirus vaccine? How come?
That's a disingenuous reading of the thing you just quoted.
It's 40% to 60% if well matched - assuming that that the range is evenly distributed then the middle point is 50% not 40% and reducing overall risk of flu by 50% is a good thing since flu is much more a killer of the old and young (usually - there have been exceptions, 1918 Flu (aka Spanish Flu) killed younger people at a much higher rate).
Flu shot efficiacy is typically under 50% so if they guessed the wrong strains you happen to be exposed to that season it is totally worthless. There seems to be a common misconception that it will somehow help you even if they guessed the wrong ones but I'm not sure why that is so prevalent. If there are 5 viruses, and they got 4 of them, you still have 0% protection against the missing one.
I don't know why COVID would be any different.
Some years it nets highly negative efficacy depending on your previous years vaccination (see 2014 flu).