I'm still using the Pixel 4, I'm happy with it. I tried the Pixel 6 but it's just too gigantic, and the camera strip sticks out too much, so I went back to the 4
PoST (Chia specifically) produces 20,000 times less e-waste than Bitcoin. Chia also has 20x the nodes as Bitcoin. A comparison of network security would probably be the best way to compare the scales of each.
In the long run, hard drives used for crypto lookups in PoST (farming) have very low load and can last for a decade.
Whereas Bitcoin ASIC miners become obsolete much faster and can't be reused for general purpose computing afterwards.
> Consensus in both of them is based on unforgeable costliness, to make it economically unviable to create alternative histories.
> In both systems, total cost of mining approaches the block reward. For example, if block rewards are $10 million a day, then $10 million worth of energy is used in PoW. PoST burns through $10 million worth of hard drives.
The lie that masks didn't work was the first and one of the biggest. At the time it meant that my wife's hospital wouldn't let her wear an N95 that we personally provided when interacting with obviously sick COVID-19 patients. She got extremely ill and after she recovered we decided it wasn't really worth it to work as a nurse in a medical establishment that could tell such obvious lies to its own people.
I can't speak specifically for your wife's hospital, but by the sounds of it this might have been less of a lie than bad information. Apparently during the early phase of the pandemic the knowledge about the usefulness of masks against airborne viruses wasn't accurate. People didn't think it was truly airborne, in which case masks wouldn't be that effective. As it turns out, it's very airborne and masks really do help stop transmission. A lot has been learnt, as well as a lot of mistakes made.
Well, the face of the government's response to the pandemic, Fauci, went on 60 minutes and stated flatly that masks didn't work. About a year later he went back on TV and was asked about his earlier comments about masks and he admitted - again, in no uncertain terms - that his previous comments stating that masks didn't work were said specifically to protect mask supplies for health care workers. Seems like he lied to me.
There's 1000 things you're not doing for your health right now because we don't have reason to believe they'll help. Maybe scientists will prove acupuncture cures cancer fifty years from now but anyone who advised against it right now will not become liars.
Or, the information that he had at the time was that masks didn't work. And it turned out that that information was wrong and that when information that it was wrong became available, then we changed the guidance.
I mean seriously, this is how science works and how guidance based on science works. We go wit the best answer we have at the time and continue to search for better answers.
> I can't speak specifically for your wife's hospital, but by the sounds of it this might have been less of a lie than bad information.
Well that doesn't help much with the trust issue. What else turns out to be bad information? Sometimes the line between lies and (intentional or not) bullshit is quite fine.
One thing I've observed since the start of the pandemic is that information and recommendations are constantly changing, and there's overreaction as well as underreaction. Also late reaction rather than preparedness. Sometimes excessive preparedness (see also overreaction), sometimes too little.
It don't find it surprising in the slightest that people end up not trusting the chaotic system.
That’s why there was so much emphasis on sanitising surfaces. Now we have a better understanding of its modes of transmission, and advice has changed over time. Some people just don’t seem to understand that our knowledge evolves, and so do recommendations and best practices.
If I recall correctly, it was thought early on that if the virus was transmissible via the air, that it was truly airborne, and thus masks that can't filter out virus-sized particles would be ineffective.
It turned out that the virus was transmissible via the air, but it was not airborne, it traveled via much larger respiratory droplets. Ordinary surgical masks were effective at stopping the spread of those droplets.
> At the time it meant that my wife's hospital wouldn't let her wear an N95 that we personally provided when interacting with obviously sick COVID-19 patients.
That's interesting - and must be a hospital issue. My hospital never made such a claim. They were simply upfront with their reason: There was a shortage of masks, and they were being reserved for those who needed to treat COVID-19 patients.
A friend's wife, who is a nurse, had similar problems at her hospital. The nursing staff-including those working with COVID-19 patients-were not provided with masks. At the time, the hospital stood behind a shield of "we're just following the CDC recommendations." Of course, the doctors who requested N95s were provided with masks, which really sent home a message that the administrators didn't value their nursing staff.
That seems very strange coming from a hospital. It has been pretty clear from those with medical knowledge that cloth mask do not work to protect the wearer, while N95 protect the wearer but depending on the construction might have a vent that do not filter the air that goes out. The mask that hospital workers need is N95 that also filter the out breath.
Early on, they didn't know if masks were effective against covid, because of the size of the particles. But they did still recommend them for healthcare workers:
Because of the way they are constructed, Randomized Control Trials will never show any benefit for any antiviral against COVID-19. Not Remdesivir, not Kaletra, not HCQ, and not Ivermectin. The reason for this is simple; for the patients that they have recruited for these studies, such as Oxford’s ludicrous RECOVERY study, the intervention is too late to have any positive effect.
The clinical course of COVID-19 is such that by the time most people seek medical attention for hypoxia, their viral load has already tapered off to almost nothing. If someone is about 10 days post-exposure and has already been symptomatic for five days, there is hardly any virus left in their bodies, only cellular damage and derangement that has initiated a hyperinflammatory response. It is from this group that the clinical trials for antivirals have recruited, pretty much exclusively.
In these trials, they give antivirals to severely ill patients who have no virus in their bodies, only a delayed hyperinflammatory response, and then absurdly claim that antivirals have no utility in treating or preventing COVID-19. These clinical trials do not recruit people who are pre-symptomatic. They do not test pre-exposure or post-exposure prophylaxis.
This is like using a defibrillator to shock only flatline, and then absurdly claiming that defibrillators have no medical utility whatsoever when the patients refuse to rise from the dead. The intervention is too late. These trials for antivirals show systematic, egregious selection bias. They are providing a treatment that is futile to the specific cohort they are enrolling.
And here is a study which looks at viral load since days of symptom onset, showing that at the 72 hour mark there is still plenty of Covid-19 in the body: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0869-5
I am not a medical expert, so there may be things to criticize about these studies. All I meant to point out is that people are looking into / have looked at the questions you raise. Doctors and nurses are pretty burnt out; I for one think that they'd be looking for prophylactic treatments.
It seems like your Ivermectin study is the type of information Youtube would be banning. It showed statistically significant improvements in symptoms and viral loads, which is the kind of information that walks a fine line between getting banned instead of just mocked.
There are two important sentences from the summary of findings:
First, the effects of Ivermectin on viral load were not significant:
"The ivermectin group had non-statistically significant lower viral loads at day 4 (p = 0·24 for gene E; p = 0·18 for gene N) and day 7 (p = 0·16 for gene E; p = 0·18 for gene N) post treatment as well as lower IgG titers at day 21 post treatment (p = 0·24)."
Second, Ivermectin did show earlier recovery:
"Patients in the ivermectin group recovered earlier from hyposmia/anosmia (76 vs 158 patient-days; p < 0.001)."
From the Washington Post article, a YouTube exec is quoted as saying “We’ll remove claims that vaccines are dangerous or cause a lot of health effects, that vaccines cause autism, cancer, infertility or contain microchips.” This leads me to believe the kind of medical misinformation YouTube is targeting is much more general.
Also, the medical consensus -- via things like Cochrane Review [0] -- is that there isn't enough data on Ivermectin. It's the statistical uncertainty around it that gives the medical establishment pause, and currently makes recommendations of using it misinformation. Should the scientific community discover something different, the definition of misinformation will change.
A bit off topic, but there are hundreds of millions of people in India who have been taking Ivermectin for significant amounts of time. In some states, serum positive levels are .01%. How are there not dozens of high quality studies being done during this period to quickly answer our questions?
> but there are hundreds of millions of people in India who have been taking Ivermectin for significant amounts of time.
Misinformation. Anti-vaxx groups are sighting India because a tiny state(Goa) with a population of 1.59 Million included Ivermecitin in their home isolation medicine kit along with zinc, doxycycline, homeopathy etc. and also announced that adults in the state would be given Ivermecitin.
A fraction of their population actually received that kit, Of which negligible population actually consumed those if any. Ivermecitin, Zinc, doxycycline were removed from that kit in Goa after federal medical authority asked it to do so and it was even removed from the treatment of COVID-19 patients in the hospitals throughout India.
So, No 'hundreds of millions of people in India' never took Ivermecitin and is no way related to the drop in cases of COVID in India. But Anti-vaxx groups are using this misinformation as an ammunition at unexpected places to further their agenda[1].
There's no need to be uncivil and slander people as anti-vaxx (I and literally everyone I know is vaccinated) or spreading misinformation just because you are misinformed.
I didn't call you particularly as anti-vaxx, I said anti-vaxx are promoting Ivermecitin using India/Goa and provided source for that claim.
What does the attached URLs has to do with your claim of "hundreds of millions of people in India who have been taking Ivermectin for significant amounts of time." and implying somehow that Ivermectin reduced the COVID case load in India which coincidentally is exactly what Anti-vaxx are peddling?
States which were using non-evidence based medication incl. Ivermecitin have dropped them after Directorate general of health services (DGHS) has issued guidelines to stop using them[1] and recently Indian Council of Medical Research have also dropped them from the list[2].
There's no reason to put India and Ivermecitin again in the same sentence unless it's to promote misinformation.
One description of the Spartacus letter is "A 41 page document chock full of disinformation about COVID-19 (including claims that the vaccines may be mind control technology)." And now that disinfo is being spread here on HN.
HCQ and Ivermectin aren't "antivirals" so obviously the OP is not concerned with a strict definition of antiviral. Besides, it's a meaningless semantic argument.
Except it's not irrelevant even. The central claim is encapsulated in the first sentence:
> Because of the way they are constructed, Randomized Control Trials will never show any benefit for any antiviral against COVID-19
By noting that there are indeed RCTs that show effective treatments for COVID-19 (fluvoxamine and monoclonal antibodies), it renders the entire point false.
The semantic argument about what constitutes an "antiviral" is meaningless as the OP themselves plays fast and loose with this by establishing that HCQ and Ivermectin (primarily used as antiparasitics) as antivirals.
> Because of the way they are constructed, Randomized Control Trials will never show any benefit for any antiviral against COVID-19. Not Remdesivir, not Kaletra, not HCQ, and not Ivermectin. The reason for this is simple; for the patients that they have recruited for these studies, such as Oxford’s ludicrous RECOVERY study, the intervention is too late to have any positive effect.
This claim is egregiously false itself. Several RCTs have been done for early exposure to covid or for prophylaxis.
Just out of memory I remember studies for HCQ prophylaxis (doesn’t work), remdesivir prophylaxis (does work), and monoclonal antibody prophylaxis (does work).
The lies created by anti vaccine activists are already spread widely and apparently convinced you these studies which happened didn’t happen.
How about the rampant false claims from various health officials and the WHO that masks didn't work in the very beginning of the pandemic. ...and this lie was intentional to protect mask stockpiles for healthcare workers.
How about the initial censorship of the outbreak on social media and news media, on the grounds that the "fear-mongering" about an outbreak in China was racist?
How about the labelling by the news media of the initial travel bans as racist?
How about health officials refusing to test anyone who hadn't personally travelled to China for months after the virus had been observed in the US.
Trust was destroyed in the first two months of this pandemic.
> How about the rampant false claims from various health officials and the WHO that masks didn't work in the very beginning of the pandemic.
That... wasn't the claim.
The claim was that people shouldn't stockpile masks for use beyond the circumstances in which they were recommended, because such additional use did not provide additional protective benefit.
This was roughly contemporaneous with guidance that most people should eliminate all non-essential contact with people outside their household. Masking for essential interactions was recommended by the same people advising against buying masks more generally.
> ...and this lie was intentional to protect mask stockpiles for healthcare workers.
It wasn't a lie, and preserving stocks for frontline workers and their essential interactions was an overtly cited part of the rationale, alongside the lack of additional benefit from superfluous masking.
> How about the initial censorship of the outbreak on social media and news media, on the grounds that the "fear-mongering" about an outbreak in China was racist?
That didn't happen.
> How about the labelling by the news media of the initial travel bans as racist?
The initial US travel bans, instituted after substantial domestic community spread was known and after substantial spread in lots of other foreign places that were not targeted by the bans was also known were, if not racist per se, more political posturing than public health.
> How about health officials refusing to test anyone who hadn't personally travelled to China for months after the virus had been observed in the US.
How is that a lie? Whether or not it (or the actual limit on testing, which was more nuanced) was the optimum way of managing limited testing resources may be a valid debate, but it's not a lie.
Sweden may be seen as a bit of an oddball but either way the head of the national public health agency was consistent in saying masks did not provide any benefits for individuals pretty far into the pandemic.
Not mentioned by the GP, but what was up with anything resembling a lab-leak theory getting the "unquestionably fake news" treatment for months?
I have not done any extensive digging into the vaccines myself and can't with good conscience say I'm well-informed. It still seems to me that the risk-trade-off is strongly in favor for getting vaccinated. Even so, I have full understanding for people who now have 0 trust in the public narrative. It's clear that there has been (still ongoing, I assume) a strong propaganda campaign that has at times been using misinformation and censorship (if you count deleting/shadowbanning social media content as censorship), involving governments, traditional news-media and social media. If the narrative around the effectiveness and risks of the vaccine holds, why do this?
The WHO, CDC, RKI, etc were all telling people not to wear medical masks and the press was happily parroting this information while the Korean and Chinese CDC were recommending the exact opposite. Not only were they doing that, they were also gaslighting those that pointed to e.g. the Chinese wearing masks and additionally made those that had the foresight to buy FFP2+ masks feel guilty for taking away the supplies of medical professionals. Never mind the immense failure of Western governments of outsourcing most of their mask production to China (which promptly banned exports) and not stockpiling PPI.
Some European countries were so stupid, that they donated hundreds of thousands of masks from their own supplies at the beginning of the pandemic and then ran out of masks for their own medical personnel.
The actions of all those organisation advising against masks were evil and stupid. People saw through their excuses and bought all the quality masks anyway. The rest was bought by the Chinese and sent back home, resulting in an almost completely empty market for quality masks last year.
I hope the likes of the CDC are never able to fix their reputation. Nobody ever apologised, nobody lost their jobs over this.
> The claim was that people shouldn't stockpile masks for use beyond the circumstances in which they were recommended, because such additional use did not provide additional protective benefit.
That is simply and verifiably false. This is a direct quote from an executive director of the WHO health emergencies program:
> There is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any potential benefit. In fact, there's some evidence to suggest the opposite in the misuse of wearing a mask properly or fitting it properly
Literally the first google result for "WHO masks don't work". There are plenty more after that. From the WHO's guidance published on April 6, 2020:
> there is currently no evidence that wearing a mask (whether medical or other types) by healthy persons in the wider community setting [...] can prevent them from infection with respiratory viruses, including COVID-19
You can speculate or demonstrate that the motives behind the claim did not match the claim itself. But to say that it wasn't the claim is flatly wrong.
That did appear to be the claim in Fauci's 60 Minutes interview. It was a pretty colossal messaging fuckup and damaged Fauci's credibility and trustworthiness early in the game.
You are right, many epidemiologists and related experts did assert that masks would not be useful to fight coronavirus. And they were wrong.
On the other hand, if it's a "colossal messaging fuckup" and damages "credibility and trustworthiness", then you pretty much have to give up on the whole 'science' thing entirely.
They were under the mistaken impression that coronaviruses were spread by large droplets produced by symptomatic individiuals---in which case social distancing and washing your hands would be as effective as masks, and the previous history (and current experience) says that convincing people to use masks correctly and consistently is very difficult. Further, having people stock up on masks like they were stocking up on toilet paper would mean that those who couldn't get along without them would be SOL.
Then it turned out that coronavirus could be transmitted as an aerosol, asymptomatically, meaning that social distancing and handwashing, while useful, were a lot less useful. Hence, masks.
But if you are expecting science to produce a single, correct, consistent TRUTH on demand, you are going to be disappointed. In fact, you're probably better off sticking with The_Donald memes, since they're all of the same quality.
i will begin this by saying that i am vaccinated and wear a mask. the CDC misled americans about the efficacy of masks specifically to reduce demand so that medical pros could get them. it's one thing to ask and another to straight up lie[1]. when an institution literally admits it is not truthful, that it is operating on some level where you must parse their motivations and countervailing evidence to determine whether they will give you correct advice, why should it be a surprise that people don't trust them?
this doesn't even get into the fact that fauci personally approved funding for GoF coronavirus research at the WIV, a fact which he has still not even acknowledged. there are many, many other reasons to distrust the CDC, but these are the ones that i found most personally flagrant.
The fuckup wasn't that we didn't know as much about the virus a year ago than we do today, but that by Fauci's admission the messaging to discourage mask use was adopted to avoid PPE shortages for healthcare workers. That's not "the whole 'science' thing" that's just bad comms.
To be clear I was fine with saving masks for healthcare workers and maybe there wasn't a better way to do that against the backdrop of people going apeshit in the paper goods aisle, but the point still stands.
Also don't forget that not too long back suggesting that COVID-19 might have escaped from a Chinese lab was considered "lunatic conspiracy theory mongering".
It's not an excuse to not get vaccinated, that you read it that way says a lot about the whole problem really. It's a reply to the GP's question about what "lies" (I personally would not use as strong a word) were spread by quite a few people and media who should know better.
> and this lie was intentional to protect mask stockpiles for healthcare workers.
Do you have any evidence that this was the reason for the claims?
> How about the initial censorship of the outbreak on social media and news media, on the grounds that the "fear-mongering" about an outbreak in China was racist?
What censorship? I heard about it quite early.
> How about the labelling by the news media of the initial travel bans as racist?
Did the news media label it, or were they reporting on people who were labeling it?
> How about health officials refusing to test anyone who hadn't personally travelled to China for months after the virus had been observed in the US.
AFAIK, there were lack of resources to test. Once the resources became available, testing was widespread.
> Do you have any evidence that this was the reason for the claims?
I did a search on youtube to find these sources ("fauci 60 minutes americans dont need to wear masks") I don't vouch for the channels, these are just the first place I found the relevant clips.
> Do you have any evidence that this was the reason for the claims?
This was said by all health officials around January-March 2020. After the stock issue got solved masks suddenly magically became effective for everyone around the summer time. As a "regular person" who took both vaccine shots and is casually observing these developments without reading news or whatever, that single event showed me that governments don't give a shit about telling us the truth in a crisis.
On the second point, to claim you do not know about this story is... surprising:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27388587
Just because you heard about it, doesn't mean there weren't attempts to censor these discussions.
In the first 15s or so of this Washington Post interview clip he explains that priority was being given to healthcare workers, and then also that asymptomatic spread was underestimated.
Up through roughly April-May 2020, many, if not most, epidemiologists and virologists believed that masks would not help the situation: they thought respiratory viruses were spread through large droplets produced by symptomatic individuals and that physical separation, sanitation, and behavior would work as well as trying to convince people to were useful masks consistently and correctly.
After that time, reports began to appear showing coronavirus could be spread asymptomatically, by normal breathing and speech, in an aerosol form that could stay airborne for long times. Under those situations, masks are the only solution.
The "ensure that enough protective equipment was available for frontline health workers" thing was mostly a response to "but it couldn't hurt" thinking.
"Then there is the infamous mask issue. Epidemiologists have taken a lot of heat on this question in particular. Until well into March 2020, I was skeptical about the benefit of everyone wearing face masks. That skepticism was based on previous scientific research as well as hypotheses about how covid was transmitted that turned out to be wrong. Mask-wearing has been a common practice in Asia for decades, to protect against air pollution and to prevent transmitting infection to others when sick. Mask-wearing for protection against catching an infection became widespread in Asia following the 2003 SARS outbreak, but scientific evidence on the effectiveness of this strategy was limited.
"Before the coronavirus pandemic, most research on face masks for respiratory diseases came from two types of studies: clinical settings with very sick patients, and community settings during normal flu seasons. In clinical settings, it was clear that well-fitting, high-quality face masks, such as the N95 variety, were important protective equipment for doctors and nurses against viruses that can be transmitted via droplets or smaller aerosol particles. But these studies also suggested careful training was required to ensure that masks didn’t get contaminated when surface transmission was possible, as is the case with SARS. Community-level evidence about mask-wearing was much less compelling. Most studies showed little to no benefit to mask-wearing in the case of the flu, for instance. Studies that have suggested a benefit of mask-wearing were generally those in which people with symptoms wore masks — so that was the advice I embraced for the coronavirus, too.
"I also, like many other epidemiologists, overestimated how readily the novel coronavirus would spread on surfaces — and this affected our view of masks. Early data showed that, like SARS, the coronavirus could persist on surfaces for hours to days, and so I was initially concerned that face masks, especially ill-fitting, homemade or carelessly worn coverings could become contaminated with transmissible virus. In fact, I worried that this might mean wearing face masks could be worse than not wearing them. This was wrong. Surface transmission, it emerged, is not that big a problem for covid, but transmission through air via aerosols is a big source of transmission. And so it turns out that face masks do work in this case.
"I changed my mind on masks in March 2020, as testing capacity increased and it became clear how common asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic infection were (since aerosols were the likely vector). I wish that I and others had caught on sooner — and better testing early on might have caused an earlier revision of views — but there was no bad faith involved."
In March 2020 the official recommendations coming from Hong Kong, China or Korea were the complete opposite to what the US, UK, Germany or the WHO were recommending.
While the former were pragmatic and -very importantly- had enough masks, the latter were actively discouraging people from using any kind of masks and especially the quality masks such as FFP3 (or even FFP2) which are designed to protect among other things against respiratory viruses.
Asian countries had mask stockpiles and could manufacture them, had the experience of SARS and were apparently quite content with the scientific evidence, limited as it was. Naturally, if one can't tell a pandemic from their own ass, doesn't have local mask production capacity and donated a huge chunk of their masks the limitations of the scientific evidence become very critical indeed.
Let's take a moment to remember how US and European politicians and medical professionals were confidently claiming at the beginning of 2020 that the virus would not reach the West and how there's nothing to worry about.
I highly doubt this explaination. Masks have been known for a very long time to be a good way to prevent the transmission of an airborne disease, especially like Covid, which involves generally a lot of coughing.
"...to be a good way to prevent the transmission of an airborne disease, especially like Covid, which involves generally a lot of coughing."
But that's the point! COVID can be spread by asymptomatic individuals! No coughing! And it's spread by aerosol particles, not large droplets that would be stopped by the gauze masks from 1919. Or if you stay a few feet away from other people and washed your hands before you touched your face.
I've posted links before from pre-2019 about the effectiveness of masks and the difficulties in getting people to wear them consistently and correctly. I've posted links before to papers from May and June, 2020, discussing asymptomatic transmission. This (https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/04/20/epidemiolo...) is an article by an actual, honest-to-gosh epidemiologist saying, "I changed my mind on masks in March 2020, as testing capacity increased and it became clear how common asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic infection were (since aerosols were the likely vector)."
You can doubt anything you want. You can believe Dr. Murray is lying. You can believe I'm lying. You can believe everyone is lying to you. But you are going to have a difficult time convincing rational people with no better evidence than your opinion.
None of your examples are about the vaccine as far as I can tell. Are you suggesting that because some experts allegedly lied about some things in the past, no experts ought to ever be trusted again about any medical or public health matters?
Trust is acquired on the logn run, and can be broken easily. Would you mind if Union Carbide openned a chemical facility near your house? Well, they had the Bhopal disasted[0], but they can be trusted again, right?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster
And trained pilots cause most plane crashes. Perhaps it’s time to place our trust elsewhere and randomly assign 2 passengers to the cockpit on every commercial flight!
Fauci told the American public that masks don't work. My mom already owned N95 masks and got looked at like a crazy person because she was wearing one when shopping, ect. Then suddenly it became "the science" on the heels of all the research that already existed... Turns out it was a noble lie to protect the supply of masks while production caught up with demand.
It looks like Fauci lied about the lab leak theory for his own reasons, although I'm pretty out of date on that issue. Even if not Fauci we know that scientists with conflicts of interest all signed an open letter saying the theory is bunk and it was uncritically paraded around as "the science."
We were very clearly told "get the vaccine and you'll get your life back" but that hasn't even happened in paces like Israel with extremely high rates.
The vaccine was initially sold to us as something that would prevent infection, but that turned out not to be true. (I'm willing to concede this probably wasn't a lie but just something we learned as time went on, but it does reflect that they may have been overconfident and refrained from discretion because it was a pro-vaccine talking point)
Vaccine passports used to be conspiracies. Same with the idea that we'd have to get booster shots every so often to stay current.
And this is probably the biggest one: So many of the politicians pushing covid restrictions fail to practice what they preach outside of photo ops. The list is a mile long of local, state and federal politicians constantly violating their own restrictions. It lends credibility to the idea that none of them believe any of it.
> And this is probably the biggest one: So many of the politicians pushing covid restrictions fail to practice what they preach outside of photo ops.
Thanks for bringing this up, it's something that everyone should be able to agree is unacceptable. I feel naive for asking, but WHY does the public allow politicians to get away with this hypocrisy? (eg. https://www.sfgate.com/bay-area-politics/article/London-Bree...)
In many cases there has been a single photo of a politician with a mask off. Lots of predatory paparazzi photograph public individuals all day. Catching someone at a bad moment or accidentally doing something is easy.
I think you may be getting downvoted because your response doesn’t relate to the example I gave, where the politician made an explicit statement in contradiction of their own health order.
This post should not be downvoted. These are legitimate concerns for half the US population. Whoever is poo-pooing this may disagree with these lies presented above. But again, you have half the US population who really DOES have a problem with these lies. And your solution is to just downvote the post and offer no response?
That "vaccine granted immunity" was a big one, it rapidly became less symptoms, and from that surreptitiously changed again to well you'll still have a week of feeling like shit if you catch covid, but you'll be less likely to die from it.
Then there's whatever percent of vaccinated that would have allowed the fabled reopen, we engaged trough most of these metrics, and we're still far from normalcy.
Heck my vaccine passport has a very clear, very bold expiry date on it, talk of normalcy are nonsense.
Oh and there's that "let's not tell peasants masks are useful as not to cause shortages to professionals." Maybe warranted, given what happened with hoarders and toilet paper, but still definitely a lie.
edit:
jesus christ look at the mess of downvotes this whole thread attracted, replies included, this place is populated by people more toxic than facebook's and more sensitive than twitter's.
and you wonder why the content platform are in full on containment mode. truth is you're bringing your corporate dystopia unto yourself.
From reading comments, it seems like a lot of people don't understand that Delta changed things.
In a world without Delta, the vaccines did do an incredible job of actually preventing infection. "Effectiveness [against confirmed infection] remained above 95% regardless of age group, sex, race, or presence of comorbidities."[1] But that study used data up to March 2021, which means mostly non-Delta variants. Against Delta, vaccine effectiveness in preventing infection might be closer to 50%+ (e.g. [2]) -- which is still very effective! It's just not effective as we would like. "Hi, here's a shot that cuts your odds of getting infected in half. Do you want it?" Um, yes please.
You have to change your behavior when the facts in the world change. The messaging had to change with the facts. Of course you can't use the old vaccination thresholds for re-opening if the virus is now infecting 10x (50% vs. 95%) as many vaccinated people as it was 2 months ago, that doesn't make sense.
The virus moved the goalposts. You can be angry about that, but that's reality.
We are so lucky that despite everything, the vaccines are still incredibly effective at keeping you from dying if you get COVID. I'm actually very angry at how the mask messaging was handled (there should absolutely be consequences for that), but it doesn't matter how angry I am, if I don't get vaccinated I am irrationally refusing the single best way to avoid dying in this pandemic.
> Could some vaccines drive the evolution of more virulent pathogens? Conventional wisdom is that natural selection will remove highly lethal pathogens if host death greatly reduces transmission. Vaccines that keep hosts alive but still allow transmission could thus allow very virulent strains to circulate in a population. [1]
The covid vaccine is just that - limits symptoms but still allows transmission.
> In an unvaccinated population, mutations occur at random producing a wide genetic spread with very few progeny resulting in long lasting lineages (Muller's ratchet), with a selection pressure that favors those variants that can (a) win the competition of replication among its cousins within a host, and (b) not kill the host so that it can thrive in new hosts.
> In a highly vaccinated population, mutations occur at random, but the genetic spread among versions of the virus is narrowed to those that can evade immunity, which has now been made more uniform among the vaccinated population. This further encourages such lineages even when they would not have won out within individual hosts in competition among its cousins. Such evasion increases chances of reinfection. [2]
>That vaccine granted immunity was a big one, it rapidly became less symptoms, and from that surreptitiously changed again to well you'll still have a week of feeling like shit, but you'll be less likely to die from it.
Please look up the medical definition of immunity.
no? I know very well the definition. that why I'm stating that the way it was worded at the beginning was a big fat lie, told to the public to coerce compliance, and latter reduced to a more realistic target to manage expectations.
You are entirely ignoring the point the other commenter made about delta changing things. You are simply repeating talking points I've heard over and over, it's exhausting.
you are willfully merging two separate topic into one trying to shut down an argument by adjacency, as if the trite answers you bring could move the discussion forward. do you have points of your own that relate to the topic at hand?
"That "vaccine granted immunity" was a big one, it rapidly became less symptoms, and from that surreptitiously changed again to well you'll still have a week of feeling like shit if you catch covid, but you'll be less likely to die from it."
The world changed between the beginning of vaccine availability and today. New variants emerged from unvaccinated populations and some of those variants (Delta being the most prominent currently being reported) are able to evade the immune response generated by the vaccine (breakthrough infections). The guidance was updated to reflected newly available information -- would you prefer that the CDC ignore new data and just stick with its initial statements?
The reason we are far from normalcy is that since the beginning of this pandemic people have been refusing to do what they need to do to slow the spread. If people had done what health officials asked, we might have been closer to normalcy. Take your complaints to all those right-wing extremists in the media and the government who politicized a public health crisis and who continue to tell people to ignore the CDC.
No. Variants spring up because of non sterilizing vaccines. We always knew to NEVER engage in mass vaccination during a pandemic situation. We also knew we can’t vaccinated against corona viruses. As evidenced by Israel and other countries.
> Could some vaccines drive the evolution of more virulent pathogens? Conventional wisdom is that natural selection will remove highly lethal pathogens if host death greatly reduces transmission. Vaccines that keep hosts alive but still allow transmission could thus allow very virulent strains to circulate in a population. [1]
This doesn't even make sense as biology. You're essentially saying the virus evolved exclusively because of the pressure vaccines, which is absurd on its face.
> Could some vaccines drive the evolution of more virulent pathogens? Conventional wisdom is that natural selection will remove highly lethal pathogens if host death greatly reduces transmission. Vaccines that keep hosts alive but still allow transmission could thus allow very virulent strains to circulate in a population. [1]
The covid vaccine is just that - limits symptoms but still allows transmission.
> In an unvaccinated population, mutations occur at random producing a wide genetic spread with very few progeny resulting in long lasting lineages (Muller's ratchet), with a selection pressure that favors those variants that can (a) win the competition of replication among its cousins within a host, and (b) not kill the host so that it can thrive in new hosts.
> In a highly vaccinated population, mutations occur at random, but the genetic spread among versions of the virus is narrowed to those that can evade immunity, which has now been made more uniform among the vaccinated population. This further encourages such lineages even when they would not have won out within individual hosts in competition among its cousins. Such evasion increases chances of reinfection. [2]
Immunity: the ability of an organism to resist a particular infection or toxin by the action of specific antibodies or sensitized white blood cells.
The vaccine gives immunity, by the definition of what immunity is. The reduced efficacy was communicated as soon as it was confirmed. There was no lie. This is how science occurs. The best conclusion was given from the data at the time.
Regarding the metrics for vaccination rates that would allow full normalcy: they existed before the Delta variant, and unfortunately this new variant has made herd immunity impossible.
The science is evolving, and these differences from a year ago are proof of that. I don't think the vaccine makers were very proud to admit that their wonderdrug wasn't what it was promised to be, but that's the way it is. The only remaining choice for anti-vaxxers in the face of increasingly contagious variants is take the shot or risk death. Your call.
Science got massively oversold. Who did that? Who benefits from that?
> The only remaining choice for anti-vaxxers in the face of increasingly contagious variants is take the shot or risk death. Your call.
I think if you call anyone hesitant to take these shots an anti-vaxxer, you contribute to making the narative so everything extreme. Many that are "c19 vaccine hesitant" are vaccinating their children on the locally standard schedule. It is just that this c19 vaccine is a bit different: did not yet stand the test of time and it is in many cases a whole new therapy (mRNA therapy's debut).
> take the shot or risk death
This sounds so dramatic. This choice is everywhere, just not with so much media attention. Diets, traffic accidents, extreme sports, ...
I think we should use vaccines only to protect those at risk, and/or those who want protection by it. Once they have the shot it's over.
The media is pushing a story that we need to all get vaccinated to protect others. I think, given the research, that this is never going to happen (virus will stay in corners of the world with unvaccinated people, virus will have new variants: virus will stay with us).
> "It is just that this c19 vaccine is a bit different: did not yet stand the test of time and it is in many cases a whole new therapy (mRNA therapy's debut)."
At this point, surely the various c19 vaccines are the most highly scrutinised and widely administered vaccines developed in the past 50 years or so. More than 6 billion shots administered, and counting. How much more time do you need?
Speaking specifically to the Pfizer vaccine, it’s gone from 95% effective against preventing severe symptoms against the Alpha variant to 88% against Delta in less than 6 months of the vaccine being widely available to the public (With some even less optimistic peer-reviewed studies coming out of Israel, I’m just going by what the CDC is reporting). So under these circumstances, maybe it makes sense to wait a year or two before making claims about the long-term effectiveness of the vaccines. If they aren’t effective long-term some people might make different decisions about what vaccine they decide to take.
The mRNA vaccines were developed to target the spike protein of the Alpha variant. We got lucky it works so well against Delta, or else they would have had to roll out a new vaccine.
Based on your wording, it sounds like you have the mistaken impression that the mRNA vaccines are expected to account for and target all future variants. A future variant may have a large enough mutation to the spike protein and render them 0% effective. But they can rollout a new vaccine very quickly with EUA. Sorry if I've misinterpreted.
I don't remember ever seeing #s promising long term effectiveness, but eventually later seeing a chart with projected effectiveness waning over time. What they should do is be careful to present variant specific numbers. There's too much generalizing, like I did as well, lumping Pfizer and Moderna together.
They are proven to be highly effective at preventing severe cases of Covid-19, including the delta variant.
What we don't know (yet) is whether that efficacy will still be as strong 2, 3, or 5 years down the track. But that, IMO, is not a good reason not to get the vaccine today. Trust me, you don't want Covid!
I literally want it. I prefer the virus over the treatment if the chances are 99.9%+ that I survive it. I expect it to me more like 99.99%+.
I say so since the beginning (when there was no vaccine): let me get it so I can help in old folks homes.
But what I got was mandates/lockdowns and free mRNA treatments. Not taking the jab means lots of hassle. I see what govts are doing to us. I dont like that. So I resist.
That is a pretty naive take on “safe”. Would you like for me to list the MANY actually tested and approved drugs that turned out to have nasty or deadly effects realized years later which resulted in them being pulled? It is actually stunning to see such trust in something so untested in real world situations knowing from who is producing it. Oh I could list many other drugs! This not even counting drugs like OxyContin or benzodiazepines.
well it's not like you can study long term effect by virtue of having a very large large short term datasets, no matter how much large the current dataset is.
My comment was in regard to vaccine safety/side effects, not long-term efficacy.
Flu vaccines are only really effective for a single season. Hopefully it’s longer, but even if c19 vaccines give you only 1-2 years protection before requiring a booster, I’d say that’s still pretty good.
> Even Pfizer’s own RCT showed no benefit for all cause mortality at six months
There are countries that have had Pfizer rollouts to millions of people over the last 8 months ( 1) . If this were true in the real world, the excess mortality would have shown up in the real-world data by now. It has not. it's rubbish. You tout this false and trivially falsifiable "fact" repeatedly. Quit it.
Are you saying that this finding does hold up in the real world? Despite .. the real world?
You honestly should see it coming that would be told that you're talking rubbish - you have trotted out this junk talking point repeatedly, and been told that this is not correct several times now, it was only a matter of time it is said directly.
You're misrepresenting the study. That study never had enough statistical power to detect a reduction in deaths. It's disingenuous to simply cry "no reduction in deaths! manufacturer study!"
> That vaccine granted immunity was a big one, it rapidly became less symptoms, and from that surreptitiously changed again to well you'll still have a week of feeling like shit, but you'll be less likely to die from it.
You're being downvoted but the medical industry in the US honestly has terrible PR. It's not surprising that people misunderstand.
Vaccines do grant immunity, but immunity doesn't mean "you cannot catch the virus" and it never has. It means that your immune system will recognise the virus immediately and fight it.
This is the same thing as "less symptoms".
"A week of feeling like shit" has nothing to do with the virus at all, they're not symptoms of an infection that you are feeling, they are side effects of your immune system learning to fight the virus that the vaccine is teaching it about.
All, or at least most, vaccines require occasional boosters, but if everyone is vaccinated when they should be, the virus will die out before any significant number of further infections can occur, as has now happened with Polio and Smallpox.
So in short: You were not lied to, but you absolutely should have had this explained to you with greater clarity.
If vaccines don’t provide immunity then what’s the point of all the public policy such as vaccine passports, etc? If you can still catch and spread it those who are vaccinated should be subject to the same testing requirements as the unvaccinated.
> If you can still catch and spread it those who are vaccinated should be subject to the same testing requirements as the unvaccinated.
You're misunderstanding the precise use of the word "can" here. I can win the lottery. I can win a coin toss. But the odds are drastically different, and so en masse, we should plan and test much more for the "much more likely" case than the other. Now, vaccination against COVID gives better odds of not catching and not spreading COVID. You still _can_, though.
> If vaccines don’t provide immunity
But they do, statistically they provide a high level of immunity. Not 100% though. You know this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28699699
So why are you contradicting yourself?
It's not a binary thing... Vaccines make it significantly less likely that you will be infected, or if you are infected that you will develop the viral load necessary to be infectious, or if you are infectious, the period of time you are infectious for will be much shorter. At each step along the way the vaccine makes less likely that the vaccinated individual will infect someone else.
It makes it sufficiently less likely that if everyone was vaccinated, each infected person would, on average, go on to infect less than one other person, and the pandemic would end. The more people who are vaccinate, the lower that average of "people that get infected by each infectious person" goes. That is why vaccinations are important to everyone, not just the individual who is vaccinated.
It's unlikely the virus would have died out in any circumstance, given how infectious it is and easy to transmit.
We're probably going to get progressively less deadly variants until the end of times.
Vaccines' downsides were definitely overplayed because they were trying to push vaccines.
Talking about the increased risk of blood clots, saying that you would still get symptoms, that you would still infect other people, that you would still have to wear a mask, that you would still have to do a test whenever you travel, that vaccines would lose efficacy and need a booster every 6 month - that's the kind of stuff that would get you branded as an no-vax and banned from youtube.
> Vaccines' downsides were definitely overplayed because they were trying to push vaccines.
We paused the use of the J&J vaccine over the blood clot issue that turned out to be a common side effect of many drugs and it was at a rate lower than common birth control pills.
No one has downplayed the side effects or done something nefarious is some nebulous attempt to exert power and disinformation over people.
Innate immunity in a world of many unvaccinated individuals is going to gradually reduce this virus to another variant of the common cold. In the mean time, the vaccinated like myself are going to harbor and evolve dangerous variants which will kill many of the unvaccinated. The unvaccinated are the real victims here, since the vaccinated ones won't help the virus become more benign as effectively as those who develop innate immunity against it.
Even if you are eventually proven correct (vaccinated putting pressure on the virus to get more dangerous), I think your personal decision to favour personal health to public health is the correct one. Everybody should primarily watch their own interests and their own health.
On the other hand, public policy leading to creation of more dangerous viruses would be a disaster and if that happens, it should be stopped.
Vaccines work by stimulating the immune system. "Immunity" in the context of vaccines does not, and has never meant something like 'diplomatic immunity.' Instead, it means that a vaccinated person's body has the tools to fight off the virus. Which looks like reduced symptoms and drastically reduced likelihood of death from the virus. Mild side effects are expected. [1]
This has been true since vaccines were first discovered /invented, and will continue to be true. Measles, Smallpox, Polio, etc.
Perhaps many people misunderstood what "immunity" meant... But that initial misunderstanding doesn't mean that they were being lied to by doctors and scientists. What it really means is that they were unintentionally lying to themselves about the definition of immunity.
The Covid vaccine does not work by directly stimulating the immune system, like all other vaccines do. Instead, it inserts synthetic molecules into some cells, turning them into little machines that constantly produce a toxin that is released into the blood stream. The immune system is supposed to learn to fight this toxin. This has NEVER before been done in any other vaccine. We could speculate for hours about what could go wrong, but for the moment lets just say that myocarditis and blood clots are definitely NOT mild side effects.
Myocarditis and blood clots are also (more frequently) side effects from getting C19.
Just because it's never been done before does not mean we have no idea what it will or won't do. Biology is uncertain, but it's important to examine the vaccine risks AGAINST COVID RISKS.
Nothing is no-risk, including the vaccine. However, the accurate comparison is getting covid without the vax, versus with the vax. Looking at the vaccine risks in isolation is somewhere between misleading and dishonest.
The vaccine can 1) hurt me with probability p1, and 2) help me with probability p2, in case I get COVID later in a few-month-window after the vaccine when it is efficient.
I can choose to not get the vaccine, but I can't choose to not get COVID. COVID may hurt me either way.
Depending on the values p1, p2, it's better to get the vaccine or not get it. The problem is, most people have no idea about values of p1, p2 and that they are highly dependent on personal details.
Transmission to others is still an issue in the un-vaccinated.
Your logic doesn't make sense. You absolutely can choose to not get the serious covid version that hospitalizes you: by getting the vaccine! By socially distancing, and not hanging out with people who don't take very basic precautions. Even your second sentence: "COVID may hurt me either way" doesn't reflect reality - it's MUCH MUCH MUCH more likely to hurt you if you are unvaccinated.
And while personal details may vary, we can estimate covid risks pretty well with the population base rate, sliced by a few basic dimensions (age, BMI, smoker status). We also have a pretty good idea of vaccine risks - almost none.
We may not know vaccine side effects long term, but we also don't know the effects of long term covid. We do know that short term, the disease is way worse than the vaccine, and the more people that have it, the more chance it gets worse.
Look, I'm all for people making their own choice when it comes to the vaccine. Similarly, I think it's fair that society have a say about when unvaccinated people are allowed to participate in society.
> You absolutely can choose to not get the serious covid version that hospitalizes you: by getting the vaccine! By socially distancing, and not hanging out with people who don't take very basic precautions.
That is not strictly true. Vaccination decreases the chance of bad COVID, but it does not eliminate it. This benefit is working for some people, but it is not for some other people (bad breakthrough cases, people with weak/no immune response to the vaccine who later get COVID).
Limiting contact with strangers via distancing and masks is a sensible strategy for someone afraid to get bad COVID. Except for intoxicating with CO2/H20 and being short on O2, there are little risks to this so I do practice that.
> it's MUCH MUCH MUCH more likely to hurt you if you are unvaccinated
Yes but both numbers are too small for me to care enough to risk the vaccine. This isn't the first week of the pandemic - we got more than a year and in this time people around me are still completely fine living their life, the virus has literally no impact where I live. It is different for other people who knew people who died from COVID, so they think COVID is much more scary. But numbers are clear - COVID isn't a plague-level problem and not everybody needs to get vaccinated for their benefit.
> the disease is way worse than the vaccine, and the more people that have it, the more chance it gets worse.
That is not obviously true. There is a competing opinion that it is not good policy to mass vaccinate with too leaky a vaccine, because there is the dire possibility that it will put pressure on the virus evolution so it gets better at evading this kind of vaccine. I am not saying one or the other is obviously the correct one, but I do not think anybody can say with certainty.
> Similarly, I think it's fair that society have a say about when unvaccinated people are allowed to participate in society.
Society has a discussion - and there is still no clear consensus on what to do. Different states/countries do different strategies. I think that is a good thing - in case some policy turns out to be quite bad, at least it won't kill everybody.
I call bullshit here. If you're that worried, get the J&J vaccine, it's just like all the others. Multiple orders of magnitude more people have died or come down with long haul COVID versus had these side effects so the argument that you're doing the safe thing does not hold water.
> Multiple orders of magnitude more people have died or come down with long haul COVID
Yes but a very small part of those are relevant to my personal assessment of risk of bad COVID. The risk depends strongly on age, health status, lifestyle and so on. Absolute numbers of deaths are not that important to personal risk assessment.
I would be completely shocked if your "personal risk assessment" is accurate. There is no clear indications on which folks will get long COVID, "age, health status, lifestyle, and so on" are generalizations not absolutes. Your chance of dying of COVID, regardless of your health status, is much greater than the chance of experiencing serious side effects in what is probably one of the most widely distributed vaccines in history.
"Feelings" have no place in science. These are numbers not subjective anecdotes, which appear to be what you're basing your decision on. Say what you like, the data doesn't lie, only people do.
Risk assessment given missing data is very much personal and subjective. It's ridiculous that some try to use "the science" as a justification for their personal values or risk assessments.
Do no harm. You have no idea of the real risk from the vaccine because they really aren’t looking. Not 1 child should have been made to suffer myocarditis or died from the vaccine vs their risk of covid. Not one. But many have.
"Think of the children!" one of my favorite ways to see people trying to get out of an argument. Who could possibly argue for wanting to hurt children!
I would love some citations here, as this seems to be the exact type of misinformation this act is trying to combat. The thought that hundreds of thousands of medical professionals across the world are willingly ignoring potentially fatal consequences for children out of some nefarious political agenda is ludicrous. If this was really happening, it would be trivial to show it, anecdotes are not hard data.
In the same vein, not 1 immunocompromised child should die from COVID when there is an easy and safe way to combat it. Not one. But many have.
I don't think it's from a nefarious political agenda, but more so ignorance, stubbornness and scientism/cargo cult science (trust the science is not scientific).
As many folks as we have dog piling onto "vax bad" train, there is no shortage of people with incentive to dig in here. The fact the vaccine has been fully vetted in the same manner as any other vaccine seems to be lost on most folks. Additionally, this seems to be an extension of general vaccine hesitancy which has absolutely no scientific basis whatsoever but continues be a problem in the US.
When you have nuts sticking spoons to their face, claiming to have been magnetized, and those folks are speaking with equal authority and to as broad of an audience as respected scientists, there's a problem.
> The fact the vaccine has been fully vetted in the same manner as any other vaccine seems to be lost on most folks.
In terms of time, these vaccines very much have not been fully vetted in the same manner as any other vaccine.
> this seems to be an extension of general vaccine hesitancy
In part, yes. However there seems to be roughly an equal amount of people who have never had any objection to vaccines in the past that now do.
> hesitancy which has absolutely no scientific basis whatsoever
You mean Scientific(TM) basis? Because there are numerous reason to be HESITANT in terms of science (the process of uncovering what is and is not true). E.g. vaccine reactions are not a myth - we should study them more; vaccine mechanism is still sometimes opaque - we should know more about that and how someone's genetic play a part; adjuvants that have side effects are also not a myth - what about finding safer adjuvants?
> nuts ... speaking with equal authority and to as broad of an audience as respected scientists, there's a problem
To be clear, you're saying they should be censored?
Censorship is a Russian Doll problem. It's turtles all the way down. Who makes the censors unbiased? Science should continue to be about questioning what is believed and believed to be true.
There are skeptics on both sides of the bell curve of intelligence. A nut, as you say, and an intelligent scientist may both come to the same conclusion - it doesn't make the nut's reasoning correct, but it also doesn't make the scientist's conclusion wrong either, just because the nut believes it too.
> In terms of time, these vaccines very much have not been fully vetted in the same manner as any other vaccine.
This is a tired, out-dated argument, all 3 vaccines in distribution in the US have been fully vetted and passed all tests, there is no more "emergency approval". If time is what you want then you're just saying there is absolutely nothing that will convince you to take it.
> In part, yes. However there seems to be roughly an equal amount of people who have never had any objection to vaccines in the past that now do.
Yes, now that is has become a political issue instead of a scientific one (like it should be), many more people have been duped.
> what about finding safer adjuvants?
How about being realistic about the side effects of the vaccine? This is one of the most studied, most widely distributed vaccines in history. If there any data to back up any sort of hesitancy, I believe the amount of people desperately searching for something useful to use in their war on science would find it.
> you're saying they should be censored?
I'm saying viewpoints that obviously have absolutely no basis in reality (Bill Gates microchips, magnetizing face spoons, etc) should not have a place to flourish alongside real scientific discourse. How about we vet an idea before we let the masses with little to no critical thinking skills consume it.
> doesn't make the scientist's conclusion wrong either, just because the nut believes it too.
I have no idea what you're trying to say here, however if a "nut" says something sane, that doesn't make them sane. I think the larger problem is there are a lot of people with a lot of money to make by preaching vaccine hesitancy. If people are maliciously influencing public opinion for personal gain and the detriment of public good, how do you suggest we combat that?
I agree censorship is not the answer but I also don't support giving a platform to people in a society where people will accept absolutely anything in their echo chamber without question or serious discourse. The media has lost the confidence of the people and everyone is so caught up in bipartisanship, it's a literal crime the vaccine hesitancy falls along political lines, if anything that should tell you it is not based in science.
“mRNA vaccines tell our cells to make a piece of the “spike protein” that is found on the surface of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Since only part of the protein is made, it does not harm the vaccine recipient, but it is antigenic and thus stimulates the immune system to make antibodies.”
>VITT is not associated with the Moderna or Pfizer-BioNTech mRNA vaccines.
We're talking 400 cases of VITT from two specific vaccines (AZ and J&J) out of 6.2 billion doses given. Furthermore, COVID itself is associated with getting blood clots. In fact, you have a much higher chance of getting blood clots by staying unvaccinated than getting the vaccine. Even further, blood clots are entirely treatable if caught early.
Of course, as others have said, blood clots aren't a legitimate concern for anyone. This is yet another shifting of the goalposts.
> Can you provide examples of the lies you're referring to?
The mask one not being useful is a lie where Fauci was trying to reserve masks for medical staff.
Why not lying again about the current vaccine effectiveness/side effects balance to reserve promising treatments to a certain category of the population?
He lied about the required levels to reach herd immunity too. Ends justify the means I guess? But it’s hard to take him at face value about anything anymore.
“In the pandemic’s early days, Dr. Fauci tended to cite the same 60 to 70 percent estimate that most experts did. About a month ago, he began saying “70, 75 percent” in television interviews. And last week, in an interview with CNBC News, he said “75, 80, 85 percent” and “75 to 80-plus percent.”
In a telephone interview the next day, Dr. Fauci acknowledged that he had slowly but deliberately been moving the goal posts. He is doing so, he said, partly based on new science, and partly on his gut feeling that the country is finally ready to hear what he really thinks.
Hard as it may be to hear, he said, he believes that it may take close to 90 percent immunity to bring the virus to a halt — almost as much as is needed to stop a measles outbreak.”
These are not lies, these are changes in our understanding of viral epidemiology that we have seen happen throughout the course of the pandemic, concomitant with the introduction of increasingly more contagious strains. Science has a lot of uncertainty in it and we’ve seen a lot of hypotheses refuted in the past year: surface transmission and microdroplets (actually mostly aerosol), mask inefficacy (they do work! mostly when everyone wears them), and herd immunity (probably harder than we initially expected). These are all things that were just poorly understood and understudied pre-pandemic. Our understanding of them is still rapidly developing and changing now. I realize it’s hard for the general public to understand, but science doesn’t know everything and we need to be able to accept when our understanding of something changes in light of new evidence.
I thought this was simple math. The reproduction value R of the original type was estimated to be around 3 (one sick person infects on average three other persons). So to get this below 1, we need a vaccination rate of around 2/3 (1-1/R). The delta variant has a higher R of 6-8, so we may need as much as 90% of the population to be vaccinated. It's completely plausible and has nothing to do with lying.
The lying is that the numbers have been changing, by his own admission, based on what he thought the American public should hear. If it is such "simple math", and the number is 90%, then Fauci saying 70% when he knew that was wrong is lying.
The R0 changed: initial WHO estimates were (1.4, 2.4); now multiple studies have a mean of 5.08 [1]. Thus the simple math changed. 60% likely does grant herd immunity at an R0 of 2.5; it does not for delta.
> Dr. Fauci acknowledged that he had slowly but deliberately been moving the goal posts. He is doing so, he said, partly based on new science, and partly on his gut feeling that the country is finally ready to hear what he really thinks.
Dr fauci himself admitted that he was giving bad numbers based on what he wanted the American public to hear.
This is the whole disconnect. The people like Fauci that we are supposed to blindly trust are clearly willing to deceive in order to satisfy their own goals. That's why people distrust him.
The Delta variant is sufficiently contagious that we can't achieve any real herd immunity through vaccination. It's still important to get vaccinated to protect yourself.
Those calculations of herd immunity threshold percentages were usually over simplified based on the assumption that immunity is a binary condition. But in reality while vaccinated people are less likely to suffer severe symptoms they can still get infected and spread the virus.
With early variants 60-70% may have very well been sufficient. As we get variants that can spread more easily that raises the bar on what we need for herd immunity. I don’t think a lot of people appreciate just how much worse Delta has been in this regard. Fingers crossed we don’t get an even worse variant.
But NYT article where the quote originated is from December 2020 (ie months before the Delta variant was officially named and more than half a year before it hit the US), so I don't think that is an explanation for why the number changed.
I think the most likely explanation is that public health officials believed that citing a 60-70 number would feel more achievable, and thus encourage people to continue masking/distancing until a vaccine was available. If they has said 85% in May 2020, maybe people would have thought it was hopeless and just opened up immediately.
Whether they judged correctly or not, I don't think it was a good idea to bend the truth because it erodes trust in institutions.
That may very well be. However, there's no need to wonder whether Fauci was being totally frank the entire time, because he has outright said that he knowingly gave a so-optimistic-its-a-lie estimate at first, in an effort to avoid intimidating people.
He said that at the time because COVID wasn't endemic all over the USA and he didn't want folks going out and hoarding all of the N95 masks which were needed at the time most critically for hospital workers.
Once the situation changed and everyone needed to wear a mask he said that folks should go out and buy masks (and after the supply gap was closed a bit).
Yeah he lied because he had to, and he lied later about herd immunity too. Whether it was good policy or not, I can’t assume anything he says is based on fact alone.
They weren't sure about airborne transmission from a-symptomatic people at the time. Delta variant has a higher r0 than alpha, so the herd immunity numbers change. Saying he's purposefully lying because the facts on the ground change is ridiculous.
> When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent ... Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, "I can nudge this up a bit," so I went to 80, 85. We need to have some humility here .... We really don’t know what the real number is. I think the real range is somewhere between 70 to 90 percent. But, I'm not going to say 90 percent."
...where is the false statement? Fauci gave one estimate, then gave another more conservative estimate in an attempt to encourage people to get the vaccine. At no point did he give a number out of the range supported by the available data.
Calling that "purposefully lying" is ridiculous. People who have to present a single number to summarize an entire body of scientific research for the general public always have to make a decision about how conservative of an estimate to give.
> People who have to present a single number to summarize an entire body of scientific research for the general public always have to make a decision about how conservative of an estimate to give
You expect those people to make their estimate based on the scientific research, not based on what he thinks the people are "ready to hear".
He literally said that the motivation for saying 80, 85 was the fact that a poll showing how many people had already been convinced to take it.
It's just a fact - he was selling the vaccine. I'm not alleging a conspiracy, or shady financial motives. I'm not saying the vaccine is bad, because I think it's amazing. But Fauci gave numerical estimates that he did not believe to be accurate, for PR reasons.
Talk about making a mountain of a mole hill. There's a range of possible values that the science supports and he said a number in that range when asked what he thinks.
So it's a white lie, at most, because he was always accurate. He stayed within the "real range" of 70-90, but he varied based on what people could tolerate hearing.
If he said 70-90%, then people may only hear 90 and think no way we'll get there. Sounds reasonable. If people hear we'll never get herd immunity due to delta and the potential for new variants, will more people get it or will it eliminate a reason for some to get it?
How would you have given a point estimate that both accurately reflects the scientific confidence interval estimate and also serves as an aspirational target for public policy?
Keep in mind that if your estimate is too low many people will die or have significantly reduced life quality. And if your estimate is too high internet trolls will use that as fodder to discourage people from getting vaccinated.
I was encouraging you to reflect on why you think this is lying, because you are really grasping at straws.
You have not established any point where he lied or stretched the truth. What you have established is your personal axe to grind against Fauci.
It's good to examine why you feel the need to grind this axe.
We know why Fauci is controversial. He is controversial because the president wanted to let people die because he felt that is the truth about the pandemic came out he would lose power. Fauci told the truth and as a result was villainized by political extremists.
This alone explains, I don't know, like 99.9% of sentiment about Fauci.
So when you spend a lot of effort trying to convince people in the internet that he lied about something, but you're unable to produce any evidence, the perception is that you have some other reason for wanting to believe he lied.
So again I encourage you to think through what the ideal response would have been. Instead of trying to find any tiny reason to criticize him, actually think through what the right thing to do was.
EDIT: To make it even more clear, by the article you quoted, 100% of the numbers he gave were within the confidence interval. That is what it means to give a "scientific evaluation" as you say.
In other words, by your own admission he never told an untruth or a partial truth. He quoted the low end of the confidence interval saying "we likely need at least this many people assuming the vaccines are this effective etc". His gut feeling was that the numbers were higher, but he didn't have the evidence to say that, so the message we "we need at least this many people."
Then as we learned more he revised the estimates up closer to where he thought they should be initially, but which he didn't have evidence for.
Since he was telling the truth 100% of the time, it's difficult to make a case that he was lying or that he is untrustworthy.
Folks weren't hoarding the masks, they were being bought and sent overseas, because the US didn't block exports, like for example China did.
Anyway, this whole hoarding issue can be elegantly side-stepped by not outsourcing mask production and stockpiling. I assume the US government was aware of the possibility of pandemics (likely flu), just like everyone else on the planet was.
You could also mobilize your military (or similar) to produce masks short-term. In fact, that is what Taiwan did when most of the WHO and the so-called first world countries were still refusing to admit that there was a pandemic.
There is also lying via omission, statistical manipulation and censorship. Why did Pfizer data for their COVID-19 vaccine not report the injury and paralysis of a 12-year participant in the clinical trial? June 2021 article from Robert Kennedy's CHD organization, https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/sen-johnson-ken-...
> Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) held a news conference Monday to discuss adverse reactions related to the COVID vaccines — giving individuals who have been “repeatedly ignored” by the medical community a platform to share their stories ... “We are all pro-vaccine,” Johnson said at the onset of the news conference. In fact, Johnson has had every flu shot since the Swine flu, is current on all of his vaccines ... he has not had a COVID vaccine because he already had COVID.
> Five people from across the U.S., including a 12-year-old girl who was part of the Pfizer clinical trial, joined the conference at the federal courthouse ... Among them was Maddie de Garay from Ohio who volunteered for the Pfizer vaccine trial when she was 12. On Jan. 20, Maddie received her second dose of the Pfizer COVID vaccine as a participant in the clinical trial for 12- to 15-year-olds and is now in a wheelchair ... “Why is she not back to normal? She was totally fine before this,” said Stephanie de Garay, Maddie’s mother. She volunteered for the Pfizer vaccine trial “to help everyone else and they’re not helping here. Before Maddie got her final dose of the vaccine she was healthy, got straight As, had lots of friends and had a life.”
> ... Upon receiving the second shot, Maddie immediately felt pain at the injection site and over the next 24-hours developed severe abdominal and chest pain, de Garay said at the press event. Maddie told her mother it felt like her heart was being ripped out through her neck, and she had painful electrical shocks down her neck and spine that forced her to walk hunched over ... She developed gastroparesis, nausea and vomiting, erratic blood pressure, memory loss, brain fog, headaches, dizziness, fainting, seizures, verbal and motor tics, menstrual cycle issues, lost feeling from the waist down, lost bowel and bladder control and had an nasogastric tube placed because she lost her ability to eat.
> ... Johnson argued that while most people don’t suffer significant side effects following vaccination, he is concerned about “that small minority that are suffering severe symptoms.”
The more we know about the statistical minority who suffer severe adverse reactions, the better we can screen vaccine recipients to prevent these injuries.
This is an interesting thought that crypto (or at least proof of work crypto) is backed by a sunk cost of an otherwise useless task.
But let me extend that paradigm: why is (or isn't) gold also not baked by a sunk cost? What was the point of all that expensive mining and digging if not for the sole purpose to extract that shiny metal from the earth's crust?
To some degree they are similar. The one difference is perhaps that BTC mining income is effectively guaranteed, ie if you join a mining pool and invest enough money, you will get a return of known quantity. In contrast, you could invest a virtually unlimited amount of money in a gold mining operation but not get anything back.
Anyone else care to comment on the S-1 itself? Revenues doubling, and a rare example of a tech company that is actually profitable before IPO (to the tune of $320M net profit on $1.1B in revenue). Seems like a great business to me!
Given current market conditions, I wouldn't be surprised to see a market cap on first day of trading of $50B or more
Some sources say Coinbase has already been trading at >$100B on private markets [1].
I find it interesting that about 2/3 of their trading volume (and thus revenue) is from institutions. Also that 44% of their trading volume is from "Other Crypto Assets", which implies that there must be a rather large bit of institutional activity in "Other Crypto Assets", and it's not just the stereotypical retail crypto investor trading in alt-coins.
Clarification: It did not prevent you from selling your holdings (ie. did not make you a bag holder). It only prevented you from opening a new position.
Major gay cities aren't necessarily major lesbian cities. The Castro happened because the military discharged gay men from the Pacific theater and a lot of them ended up there - was there a comparable dynamic for lesbians? I don't know of one. And I don't think Atlanta is very significant to gay men.
Exactly. Surprisingly, I can't find any statistics. But San Francisco now has zero lesbian bars, and quite a number of popular gay bars. This is a good article on the contrast in community resources: https://hoodline.com/2016/07/is-there-a-place-for-lesbians-i...
> Exactly. Surprisingly, I can't find any statistics. But San Francisco now has zero lesbian bars, and quite a number of popular gay bars.
Your statement that "a city that has a large group of gay men doesn't necessarily have a large group of lesbians" is accurate, but this is a bad piece of evidence to cite in favor of it. Almost all cities with large LGBTQ+ populations have far more bars and clubs targeted at gay men than at lesbians.
San Francisco had a few lesbian bars a few years ago, all of which have since closed. That pattern - lesbian nightlife disappearing - is pretty consistent across other cities that have large LGBTQ+ populations.
Could be. But it could just as well mean that gay men tend to move to cities in a way that lesbian women don't. Note also that the piece I linked goes well beyond bars.
I dunno if we are just rare, or simply not as vocal or active about being out as gay males, on average - but firsthand I’ve seen a lot more gay guys than I’ve seen fellow lesbians. (Much to my dismay...)
There's a greater concentration of lesbians and other queer (not cis gay) people in the East Bay — especially those in families, raising kids and so on.
