HN user
During the initial COVID outbreak, did Canada allocate huge sums of money ostensibly to shore up the medical system like we did here in the U.S.? Where did all of it go? Certainly none to nurse's salaries.
Probably not even any benefit against severe disease among hospital staff, given that the vast majority of them have already recovered from COVID.
Allen Dulles used to just call up the Washington Post to get reporters fired. This is a legitimate source, to me.
It's sort of the equivalent of when Noam Chomsky says, "sure, JFK and 9/11 may have been carried out by organized conspirators within the U.S. government, but it doesn't matter and there's no point interrogating it because it makes no difference from a policy perspective." In the cases where it's not outright disinfo it's a psychological defense mechanism, a way of ceding the bare minimum of ground to the conspiracy theorists which is demanded by the mountains of evidence, while still hiving it off from the rest of one's worldview.
The Attorney General, the highest ranking law enforcement official in the country, personally reviewed the footage surrounding Epstein's prison block to confirm this for himself.
The Attorney General whose father got Epstein his start in life by hiring him to teach math at the prestigious Dalton School with zero qualifications? The Attorney General who spearheaded much of the coverup and spiking of investigations surrounding Iran Contra? That attorney general?
At this point the odds-on favorite to win the Republican nomination in 2024 is Donald Trump, a man with extensive ties to Epstein going back decades, and who is on record issuing vague compliments about his sexual predation.
At this point, it's pretty silly that it is still considered "conspiracy theory" to aver that intelligence agencies have placed agents in major corporations throughout the world. Even mainstream limited hangout-type sources have started to acknowledge this. They discuss it on that Wind of Change podcast about the theory that the CIA wrote the Scorpions' song.
Or, to be more precise, it's silly that it is considered "conspiracy theory" in the way most people use the concept, as coterminous with "a false idea."
I see lots of commentators arguing about 'lockdowns', but very little discussion what actually constitutes 'lockdowns'. Lockdowns in China looked very different to lockdowns in Europa or lockdowns in the US. Lockdowns in 2020, in most countries, were very different to lockdowns in 2022.
I'm not sure why I'm supposed to care about this distinction when they've all proven to be completely ineffective can-kicking at best, enormously costly interventions whose scope was extended well beyond their initial "15 days to slow the spread" mandate for precious little (if any) benefit and an accumulating roster of harms.
After these pediatric hepatitis cases popped up, there was a vocal contingent of MDs and Zero COVID types on Twitter arguing that it showed the urgent necessity to do whatever it takes to protect children from SARS-CoV-2 infections. It's sad to think that this fearmongering is probably causing a lot of children not to get the pathogen exposure they need in early childhood.
Likewise, the hostility towards masking is owing to some substantive inability to evaluate second order risks.
Funny, that's how I would describe the widespread insistence that we can indefinitely conceal half of everyone's faces in public (when the only effective masks are ones which create a large amount of plastics pollution), or assiduously suppress the spread of pathogens, without having some as-yet unknown knock-on effects. It's bizarre that so many treat these things as unalloyed goods with zero downside whatsoever.
You think Pax Americana is the only thing standing between Honduras or Colombia or Yemen and instant genocide?
Probably the one that spends more on its military than the next six countries combined? The vast majority of which is dedicated to far-flung imperial projects benefitting only a tiny sliver of its populace?
Why should we go first in eliminating fertilizer?
Maybe we could start with reducing emissions by the military, one of the absolute largest sources on earth? And after that maybe ban private jets and 100,000 sq ft mansions?
Much of the rhetorical analysis is based on the medical premise that getting vaccinated has no individual or contagion reduction efficacy. Politics aside, this was simply not true (though thanks to variants may be true today). We will never know now if specific variants could have been avoided if people got promptly vaccinated.
Delta arose in India before widespread vaccination was even available there, and Omicron comes from a sublineage which even predates Delta. So we actually know the answer to the question of whether immune escape variant mutation could have been prevented had fewer people been unwilling to take COVID vaccines -- it could not have. (And all this is setting aside the fact that there is not actually a magical solution to the impossible logistical problem of getting a shot into every person on Earth all at once, to say nothing of animal reservoirs.) This should have been expected given that decades of research prior to Operation Warp Speed had failed to discover durable and effective sterilizing vaccines against coronaviruses. Even with the original strains which predominated at the time the vaccines were introduced it was never studied and not clear whether they could prevent transmission, and many public health authorities and the CEO of Pfizer said so at the time.
And this was all quite clear long before the propaganda and scapegoating campaigns the article is criticizing kicked into gear. The CDC Provincetown study which showed the vaccinated were transmitting quite easily came out in late July. And today, a simple comparison of highly vaxxed jurisdictions to less vaxxed ones suggests that the shots are actually raising the incidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection, which may be why we've stopped hearing so much about the "vaxxed vs unvaxxed" outcomes and increasing numbers of public health authorities are removing the breakdowns from their reporting.
Well this is a semantic and socio-political question and not a scientific/medical one, but ok. Generally, the term there was "antivaxxer" and referred to people who were vocally opposed to vaccines, or in some cases who those hadn't had their children undergo the usual course of routine vaccinations. In a few cases it was even applied more broadly to people who were simply opposed to mandating childhood vaccinations to attend public school, regardless of their own vaccination status. This is all clearly a completely different category from the 2021 incarnation of "the unvaccinated."
I don't understand the criticism here. The article is an analysis of messaging from government and media. The small number of scientific and medical claims present in it (such as "people who've taken COVID vaccines still get infected and spread the disease") are all quite uncontroversial.
Is it your contention that only "health experts" and people with MPH degrees are qualified to speak on these matters? Is there some actual excerpt from the article you can point to as evidence of the author supposedly venturing beyond his area of expertise?
I used the term "they" very carefully. It's only an "upside" to a very select group of people.
On the upside, the force they're left with is much more heavily skewed to order followers and regime loyalists.
lol are you sure about that?
Ah, good to know that this was the input being referenced when health authorities were issuing proclamations that there was definitely 0% chance of any impact on fertility from the mRNA vaccines.
They didn't just have a broad, open-ended "did you notice anything was off?" question?
"Pillaging" lmao what are you talking about?
Just to be clear about what actually transpired, traffic was blocked (a minor inconvenience) to protest mandates which were destroying people's livelihoods -- mandates which never had even the slightest scientific justification since they were all implemented well after the CDC Provincetown study in July showed the vaccinated spread COVID quite easily, but which the provax side continued to insist on through the fall and winter in a display of pointless stubbornness.
Most of the hospital protests were also in reaction to mandates for staff, as well as the absolutely psychotic and vindictive policy many of them adopted of refusing to provide transplant surgery to the unvaccinated.
If this is happening in 42% of women, how could it possibly have been missed in the clinical trials?
There are some sizeable demographics for whom this may not be the case: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4125239
The excess risk of serious adverse events of special interest surpassed the risk reduction for COVID-19 hospitalization relative to the placebo group in both Pfizer and Moderna trials (2.3 and 6.4 per 10,000 participants, respectively).
Given the general 2020 media climate of hyping any random problems which could be attributed to "the pandemic," I feel like there would be at least one article from that period mentioning that women were experiencing menstruation changes before the vaccine rollout in early 2021.
What the fuck is "natural immunity" when we have had 5 variants of omnicron and infection doesn't provide immunity to the other variants?
It still provides a very high degree of protection against severe disease, which is already vanishingly rare in children without comorbidities. And is also all you get from the vaccines, along with all their attendant known and unknown risks.
One theory I have heard to explain this is that the vaccine is simply suppressing immune response, which helps prevent the cytokine storm that led to severe disease. Of course, this might also make infection more likely, which may explain why so many governments have stopped publishing the case rate breakdowns by vax status.
It makes a kind of intuitive sense: if you make your own body produce some key portion of the virus, maybe your immune system gets tricked into thinking it's not such a big issue?
It seems like you're under a misapprehension that there is some mutually exclusive tradeoff of "vaccine vs infection" to be made, but this is not the case. It's well established now that natural immunity is more effective and longer lasting than the vaccines. And again there's no point in the infectivity comparison because whether someone is vaccinated or not makes no difference to their odds of contracting or spreading Covid -- if anything, the current level of case rates in highly vaccinated countries vs less vaccinated ones suggests the vaccines have made infection more likely.
My point is that your continuing assertions that an unvaccinated infection must result in higher levels of spike protein exposure than Covid-shots-plus-the-eventual-infection-you'll-still-get-anyway is not really backed up by anything. It's just an assumption you are making. Beyond that, naive comparison of the levels involved may not fully capture the level of clinical risk: maybe the mRNA causes higher levels of spike detached from an intact virus, or maybe it causes it to spread to parts of the body which an infection doesn't.
The ideal here would be to have a randomized control group which could be compared to various different vaccination profiles on an ongoing basis to assess overall risk and outcomes on a population levels, but that's impossible because all the control groups were promptly vaccinated the second EUAs were granted.
Age stratification is an important consideration. A 12 year old comorbidity-free male's risk of a cytokine storm from a COVID infection is effectively nil, but his risk from the COVID vaccines (which many have been required to take to participate in school activities) is substantial.
They tried to create coronavirus vaccines for 50 years and failed terribly. So far it seems to have been a good bet that all those issues were not magically solved in 9 months of "Operation Warp Speed."
If you don't like mRNA vaccines, there are a number of alternatives using different mechanisms to deliver material to train the immune response.
Yes, one such alternative, which is perfectly safe for a large proportion of the population, is natural SARS-CoV-2 infection.