"Compare [Alex Jones] to the monsters who ordered hundreds of millions of people to get toxic and deadly non-vaccines they didn't need"
Now if something is 'deadly' then it must kill a fair percentage of the people who are exposed to it, and since 70% of the world's population is vaccinated …
"Compare [Alex Jones] to the monsters who ordered hundreds of millions of people to get toxic and deadly non-vaccines they didn't need"
Now if something is 'deadly' then it must kill a fair percentage of the people who are exposed to it, and since 70% of the world's population is vaccinated against Covid, if you think the vaccines are deadly then surely you must think hundreds of millions have died from them.
Now this comment is an outlier in terms of hysteria levels, but there are certainly plenty of conspiracists who claim that all excess deaths since Covid are down to Covid vaccines, or attribute every sudden death to vaccines (the 'died suddenly' meme). Most of these people aren't numerate enough to quantify their claims but they are implicitly claiming that the vaccines have killed millions of people, and even though there are various different types from different manufacturers, they all happen to be deadly, and presumably every health authority in every country has just decided to ignore it.
Cutting more to the chase, I think the people who claim many millions of deaths from the mRNA vaccines are probably wrong. But I also think that the people claiming negligible deaths from those same vaccines, to the point that the risk/reward ratio is still favorable even in healthy young people, are also probably wrong.
I think a lot of the world's health authorities have reached this same conclusion, such that the following statement
> presumably every health authority in every country has just decided to ignore it
is inaccurate. Look up the official policies of European countries with respect to these specific vaccines and you will find that many of them have stopped recommending them below some age threshold. Denmark was the first, which stopped recommending the vaccines for healthy people under 50 in 2022. Why would they do that other than an estimation that in this cohort the vaccine posed a potentially higher risk than the infection it was intended to prevent?
An analysis of Pfizer's own clinical trial data published by Peter Doshi et al in 2022 [1] found an excess rate of 1 in 800 for "severe adverse events of special interest" (read: disability, chronic conditions, things you definitely do not want to have) in the treatment arm of the trial. This was around the time that European countries started curtailing their recommendations. I would argue they have done their job, and it is the US FDA and CDC, now outliers on the world stage on this issue, who are in dereliction of duty.
OK I see the comment now. I think there are a few steps of interpretation of the author's intent, especially the interpretation of the meaning of "deadly" as "something that kills a fair percentage of people that were exposed to it".
A lot of people called COVID-19 "deadly", a lot of them with much farther reach than Alex Jones - the president of the United States for example. Given that the population-wide infection fatality rate was known to be most likely in the ballpark of 0.2-0.3% from seroprevalence studies as early as May 2020, and that these same studies found a still much lower IFR in young people (all of which is borne out repeatedly in later more comprehensive studies) [1], you must therefore logically think that either:
A) it was unwarranted or alarmist for these people to describe the virus as "deadly" beyond the middle of 2020 since it did not appear to "kill a fair percentage of people exposed to it"
Or B) 0.2% is "a fair percentage of people exposed to it [COVID-19]". Accounting for age, 0.05% is a fair percentage of people under 70 exposed to COVID-19, and 0.01% is a fair percentage of people under 30.
Which one?
[1] see seroprevalence studies from Santa Clara county CA by Bhattacharya, Ioannidis et al, similar follow-up study in LA county.
*I* didn’t describe Covid as “deadly” so this gotcha doesn’t work. It’s dangerous if you’re in a high risk group but I wouldn’t say it’s a deadly disease for most people…. “Potentially fatal” would be a better description.
I guess a very generous interpretation of that comment could be that he thinks the vaccines have ‘only’ killed millions of people. Obviously that’s still batshit and Covid is much more dangerous than the risk of very rare fatal side effects from the vaccines. I get the impression that you’re some kind of anti-vaxx whack job so I will not be discussing this further.
So you do not think it's fair to make blanket statements which scaremonger about the virus to the general population. I agree.
And I also don't think it's useful to scaremonger about the mRNA vaccines. But I do think it is not unreasonable to estimate that the risks they pose to healthy young people outweigh the risks the virus poses, in agreement with many health authorities around the world, and on the basis of Pfizer's own trial data as analyzed by Doshi et al in 2022 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9428332).
A 1-in-800 rate of serious complication *does* lead to a reasonable conclusion that at least millions globally were seriously harmed by the mRNA vaccines, though not necessarily killed.
If that makes me a "whack job anti-vaxxer" then I don't know what to tell you, other than that your communication style is probably counterproductive to your goals.
Here in this comments section Bill Rice Jr says:
"Compare [Alex Jones] to the monsters who ordered hundreds of millions of people to get toxic and deadly non-vaccines they didn't need"
Now if something is 'deadly' then it must kill a fair percentage of the people who are exposed to it, and since 70% of the world's population is vaccinated against Covid, if you think the vaccines are deadly then surely you must think hundreds of millions have died from them.
Now this comment is an outlier in terms of hysteria levels, but there are certainly plenty of conspiracists who claim that all excess deaths since Covid are down to Covid vaccines, or attribute every sudden death to vaccines (the 'died suddenly' meme). Most of these people aren't numerate enough to quantify their claims but they are implicitly claiming that the vaccines have killed millions of people, and even though there are various different types from different manufacturers, they all happen to be deadly, and presumably every health authority in every country has just decided to ignore it.
Source:
https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/bret-weinstein-sure-has-a-lot-of/comment/50130394?r=r7kts&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&open=false
Cutting more to the chase, I think the people who claim many millions of deaths from the mRNA vaccines are probably wrong. But I also think that the people claiming negligible deaths from those same vaccines, to the point that the risk/reward ratio is still favorable even in healthy young people, are also probably wrong.
I think a lot of the world's health authorities have reached this same conclusion, such that the following statement
> presumably every health authority in every country has just decided to ignore it
is inaccurate. Look up the official policies of European countries with respect to these specific vaccines and you will find that many of them have stopped recommending them below some age threshold. Denmark was the first, which stopped recommending the vaccines for healthy people under 50 in 2022. Why would they do that other than an estimation that in this cohort the vaccine posed a potentially higher risk than the infection it was intended to prevent?
An analysis of Pfizer's own clinical trial data published by Peter Doshi et al in 2022 [1] found an excess rate of 1 in 800 for "severe adverse events of special interest" (read: disability, chronic conditions, things you definitely do not want to have) in the treatment arm of the trial. This was around the time that European countries started curtailing their recommendations. I would argue they have done their job, and it is the US FDA and CDC, now outliers on the world stage on this issue, who are in dereliction of duty.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9428332/
OK I see the comment now. I think there are a few steps of interpretation of the author's intent, especially the interpretation of the meaning of "deadly" as "something that kills a fair percentage of people that were exposed to it".
A lot of people called COVID-19 "deadly", a lot of them with much farther reach than Alex Jones - the president of the United States for example. Given that the population-wide infection fatality rate was known to be most likely in the ballpark of 0.2-0.3% from seroprevalence studies as early as May 2020, and that these same studies found a still much lower IFR in young people (all of which is borne out repeatedly in later more comprehensive studies) [1], you must therefore logically think that either:
A) it was unwarranted or alarmist for these people to describe the virus as "deadly" beyond the middle of 2020 since it did not appear to "kill a fair percentage of people exposed to it"
Or B) 0.2% is "a fair percentage of people exposed to it [COVID-19]". Accounting for age, 0.05% is a fair percentage of people under 70 exposed to COVID-19, and 0.01% is a fair percentage of people under 30.
Which one?
[1] see seroprevalence studies from Santa Clara county CA by Bhattacharya, Ioannidis et al, similar follow-up study in LA county.
In 2021 a systematic literature review by Ioannidis confirmed a reasonable estimate of 0.27% population-wide IFR and 0.05% IFR in the under-70 population (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7947934/).
Similar findings in a November 2020 paper in Nature surveying data from 45 countries(https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2918-0). IFR estimates from that paper summarized in a table here: https://www.acsh.org/news/2020/11/18/covid-infection-fatality-rates-sex-and-age-15163
*I* didn’t describe Covid as “deadly” so this gotcha doesn’t work. It’s dangerous if you’re in a high risk group but I wouldn’t say it’s a deadly disease for most people…. “Potentially fatal” would be a better description.
I guess a very generous interpretation of that comment could be that he thinks the vaccines have ‘only’ killed millions of people. Obviously that’s still batshit and Covid is much more dangerous than the risk of very rare fatal side effects from the vaccines. I get the impression that you’re some kind of anti-vaxx whack job so I will not be discussing this further.
So you do not think it's fair to make blanket statements which scaremonger about the virus to the general population. I agree.
And I also don't think it's useful to scaremonger about the mRNA vaccines. But I do think it is not unreasonable to estimate that the risks they pose to healthy young people outweigh the risks the virus poses, in agreement with many health authorities around the world, and on the basis of Pfizer's own trial data as analyzed by Doshi et al in 2022 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9428332).
A 1-in-800 rate of serious complication *does* lead to a reasonable conclusion that at least millions globally were seriously harmed by the mRNA vaccines, though not necessarily killed.
If that makes me a "whack job anti-vaxxer" then I don't know what to tell you, other than that your communication style is probably counterproductive to your goals.