4,560 karma · joined October 15, 2014
It would be easy for me to tell my customers exactly what they need to say to get the maximum, but I've been told not to do that, so I guess it's on them to figure it out.
On the substance: “definitions of dying from COVID were meaningless” is hand-waving. Excess mortality does not care about coding quirks. Every rich country saw a visible spike in deaths above baseline. And on Sweden, the data is not on your side. Norway and Sweden took opposite approaches in 2020. Norway used strict lockdowns, tight border controls, and intensive outbreak tracking, while Sweden kept society largely open.
The results weren’t subtle. As the Juul paper puts it: “That resulted in 477 COVID-19 deaths (Norway) and 9,737 (Sweden) in 2020, respectively.”
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38262870/
Holding up the outlier with vastly more dead people as the “sensible” model is quite a choice.
Your laundry list of culture-war anecdotes about restaurants, rallies, 6-foot rules, and cloth masks is not an argument about vaccines or mandates. It’s a vibes reel. Early non-pharmaceutical rules were inconsistent. Inconsistent does not mean "bad". The inconsistency doesn't retroactively erase the evidence that vaccination reduced severe disease, reduced transmission and pressure on hospitals. You keep skipping over the data I cited on secondary attack rates and infectious periods because it collides with your story.
You have also walked back your own claim which I appreciate. You are now saying “the vaccines worked, but were over-prescribed,” which concedes the core point while trying to shift the conversation to every grievance you can think of: models, school closures, toddler masks, the economy. We started with “this chapter proves vaccines do not reduce transmission.” It does not. Peer-reviewed household and cohort data contradict it. Everything you have added since is fog to avoid saying “I was wrong about that.”
1. Unfalsifiable claim.
2. Reversed burden of proof.
If fraud is real at meaningful scale, you show it. You don’t assume it, declare the system rigged, and treat every failed audit or court case as part of the conspiracy. That’s not analysis. It’s a closed loop designed to protect the claim from scrutiny.
To date, every audit, recount, signature review, and court case has found illegal voting rates so low they have no statistical impact. Meanwhile, multiple Republican-backed laws have been struck down by federal courts for intentionally or disproportionately disenfranchising specific groups of eligible voters.
So one side is dealing with documented, court-verified disenfranchisement. The other is raising a theoretical scenario that has no evidence behind it. Hypotheticals do not outweigh the real, observed effects of restrictive voting laws on lawful voters.
I once had three valid drivers' licenses, because my wallet was stolen (later returned), and I left my ID at a bar. All three were valid for use at the same time despite being reported lost/stolen - they had identical barcodes, etc.
I never mentioned a conspiracy. You made that up so you’d have an easier argument to knock down. We were talking about evidence and methodology, and now you’ve pivoted to “government overreach” and “panic.”
Guidance changed because the data changed. That’s what science is supposed to do. New variants, new evidence, new risk assessments. We update, refine, repeat. Calling that “lying” or “overreach” is just admitting you don’t understand how empirical reasoning works.
I personally knew people young and old who died from COVID. The mortality spike wasn’t some abstract statistic. It was families, coworkers, and neighbors. When you downplay that or call the response “panic,” what you’re really saying is you’re fine with more people dying unnecessarily as long as you’re not inconvenienced.
You can keep moving the goalposts if it helps you avoid the obvious, but the facts don’t change. The vaccines worked, the mandates increased uptake, and the alternative was a lot more dead people.
The argument also ignores that PCR viral load is a weak proxy for contagiousness. Ct values vary by swab technique, timing, and test type, and don’t necessarily correlate with live virus or infectious period. Real transmission studies look at secondary attack rates (how often close contacts get infected) which is the gold standard for measuring infectiousness. Kampf doesn’t do that. He just stacks correlational lab data and calls it proof that vaccines don’t reduce transmission. That’s not how epidemiology works.
If you actually read the peer-reviewed literature, the evidence directly contradicts his claim. Madewell et al. (JAMA Netw Open 2022, 5(4): e229317) analyzed dozens of household studies and found vaccination reduced both susceptibility and infectiousness, though less for later variants. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
Jung et al. (JAMA Netw Open 2022, 5(5): e2213606) demonstrated that vaccinated people cleared live virus faster and transmitted less frequently. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
Maeda et al. (Int J Infect Dis 2023) confirmed vaccinated index cases were significantly less likely to infect household members. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S120197122...
And a Spanish cohort study (PMC10975059, 2023) found vaccinated index cases had an adjusted odds ratio of 0.21 for transmitting compared to unvaccinated. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10975059/
So when someone waves around a non-peer-reviewed book chapter that literally says “the relevance remains uncertain” as if it’s the definitive takedown of global vaccine data, they’re not being honest... or they don’t understand what they’re citing. The serious literature is consistent: vaccines shorten infectious periods, lower secondary attack rates, and reduce transmission risk. Kampf’s chapter is opinion dressed up as research, and anyone presenting it as “proof” just revealed they didn’t read past the abstract.
Get out of here with what you think the study says. You didn’t read it, you skimmed a line and built a conspiracy out of it. You’re advertising that you don’t understand the difference between a book chapter and peer-reviewed research.
Fauci’s “herd immunity” comments came before Delta and Omicron turned one virus into a family reunion. Updating that view wasn’t deceit. It was responding to evidence, something the “verify, don’t trust” crowd supposedly likes, except when the verification disagrees with their memes.
The definition of “vaccine” never secretly changed. It was clarified to include immune responses that reduce severe disease and transmission rather than guarantee sterilizing immunity. That’s immunology, not conspiracy. Every major vaccine like flu, pertussis, rotavirus all have that same property.
mRNA COVID vaccines still saved tens of millions of lives worldwide and sharply cut hospitalization rates, even after variants eroded transmission blocking. Boosters are needed because immunity wanes and variants keep changing, just like flu shots.
So yes: “trust, but verify” is good advice. But the verification process already happened through global trials, regulatory review, and post-marketing data. The people misleading you are the ones pretending scientific self-correction is the same as deceit.
How do you know?
One could easily say that since the risk of myocarditis is much higher after COVID infection than vaccination, that vaccines prevented far more cases of myocarditis than they caused.