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Normally I'm sympathetic to a bit of healthy cynicism, but when the official narrative is backed by extremely strong extremely public corroborating evidence, sorry, I'm not going to sacrifice the safety of myself and those I care about to indulge someone else's politically-driven blindness towards said evidence.
The CDC says wear masks? Suddenly it becomes a "mind control" issue.
The FDA recommends not drinking raw milk? Republican lawmakers are literally sickening themselves drinking bacteria-laden dairy products in front of their colleagues to "trigger the libs".
The FDA issue emergency authorization to get a COVID vaccine to the public as quickly as possible during a pandemic, and suddenly Conservatives are claiming that COVID never killed anyone, it's the Vaccine that's killing people, even as the unvaccinated make up the lion's share of the casualties.
If you dive deep enough into the antivaxxer movements (a deeply right-wing movement), you'll find people arguing that drinking industrial bleach (Miracle Mineral Cure) is the solution to every health issue that "they don't want you to know about", even as they are shitting out pieces of their intestines (Google "rope worms"). Of courset the government saying "don't drink bleach" makes them double down.
I am all for a healthy distrust of the government or any other ruling authority, but it feels like roughly half the the U.S. population is so brain-broken that they have fully embraced contrarianism as a worldview.
A lot of those people lost a lot more than their jobs in the end.
The trials did indeed look pretty good, and they met their primary endpoints, but they were necessarily short-term trials, and IMO they were nowhere near as impressive as some of the old impressive vaccines. Try reading up on the history of the varicella vaccine:
https://academic.oup.com/jid/article/226/Supplement_4/S375/6...
Apparently you can give the vaccine after exposure, and it’s nearly 100% effective. 50 years after development and ~30 years after widespread rollout began in the US, the same vaccine still works, although the number of doses given has been increased to two because a single dose wasn’t quite good enough for herd immunity. (Chickenpox is far more contagious than at least the original COVID strain was.)
I rate the COVID vaccines as an excellent improvement for society, absolutely worth getting in most populations and unquestionably worthy of approval, but merely so-so on the scale of vaccines. (I’m not sure I rate them worthy of continued approval and widespread deployment at current prices. If nothing else, serious follow up should be required to determine how repeated use of the mRNA vaccines compares to, say, Novavax. And health agencies should consider moving to a fee-for-efficacy model instead of a we-pay-whatever model — if pharma companies know, in advance, that they’ll get paid more for doses of a better vaccine, maybe they’ll make one instead of resting on their mediocre laurels.)
> BNT162b2 was 95% effective in preventing Covid-19 (95% credible interval, 90.3 to 97.6).
Yet the deaths clearly mattered when multiplied up to population scale, because COVID was able to fill up the hospitals.
Also are these products really correctly labeled as vaccines given their protection is imperfect and not like actual vaccines? I wonder if some other term is more accurate and would eliminate some of the arguments around them.
No vaccine is perfect. They work by showing your immune system some example germ features, and most people's immune systems learn to defend against them. But immune systems are extremely complex and variable between people, and you can never guarantee a particular response.
Vaccines sometimes completely eliminate some diseases (smallpox is one). They do this not by giving every person 100% protection individually, but by reducing transmission enough that the germ dies out.
Since when were "actual vaccines" anywhere near perfect? The COVID vaccines were unusually good for vaccines, not unusually bad.
Even a low-efficacy vaccine can still be high-efficacy in a population due to herd immunity (you don't need 100% protection, you just need to push R below 1.0 so that the infected subpopulation sees exponential decay rather than exponential growth), but we don't even need to consider this nuance in the case of the COVID vaccines because they surprised so strongly to the upside.
They were never experimental. At this point in the game, if you're still repeating this lie, you're just revealing how little you understand about the world around you due to how much propaganda you believe.
And yes, refusing to do what your employer requires of you for the job will get you fired. Welcome to the free market. For decades employers have made vaccines for many different diseases a requirement of employment. You have the freedom not to get vaccinated, and your employer has the right to show you the door.
Most of them have an emergency authorization, not full [0], so pretty much experimental.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_COVID-19_vaccine_autho...
If you want to believe that you were being experimented on by getting vaccinated, you are free to believe whatever you want, but you are 100% factually wrong and most everyone around you knows it.
They really shouldn’t have that right. It’s discriminatory and a violation of basic rights to bodily autonomy. No one should be forced to undergo a medical procedure for employment. Others who may be worried about some illness are free to manage their own risk by wearing protection instead of forcing such choices on others.