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 pres…
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.
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.