Comment by CaptWillard
Comment by CaptWillard 12 days ago
[flagged]
Comment by CaptWillard 12 days ago
[flagged]
He is making a stink about Covid vaccine requirements during a period where hospitals were overflowing and bodies were being stacked in refrigerated trailers.
There are no stories about this outside the first month. The hospitals were initially ill equipped but were so well equipped after March/April that the giant boat they sent as a backup to New York was barely used.
Almost no healthy people died from COVID, most had co-morbidities and they should have been the only ones forced to vax and stay home.
Vaccines were a miracle. The state medical examiner converted one nearby university’s arena to a temporary morgue at one point in 2020. It’s mind boggling that people were and still are in denial about how bad it got before large parts of the population started getting vaccinated
For real. The sibling comment is flagged now but people seem to have memoryholed the impact of COVID on the healthcare system.
Hospitals were absolutely overwhelmed at many points during parts of the pandemic, outside of the first month. That was a major concern during the "surges" and spread of new variants.
I know this because my state routinely publishes hospital census levels and at many points during the pandemic elective and even non-elective procedures had to be cancelled due to lack of bed and staff capacity. The facility I work at was regularly impacted.
Search hospital related COVID stories during 2021 and 2022 and you'll find plenty.
Are we living in the same world? I had a child born about that time which was one of the few ways to actually get into a hospital. When I went in the fucking place was barren. A bunch of medical professionals shaking in their shoes waiting for something that never came. I knew then and there I knew i was being sold a lie and the news was carefully orchestrating snippets of misrepresented footage. And then went about my business as normal.
Look at the timeline of literally any plague, as they all follow a very similar pattern. For instance here [1] is the one for the Spanish Flu. There are a number of peaks and valleys that gradually recess to noise as viruses tend to evolve to less virulent forms while people also simultaneously develop broader immunity. This makes observational data highly unreliable for determining the efficacy of a vaccine during a plague.
The same is true of mortality/severity rates by vaccination status in hospitals. People who opt in to a vaccine are generally going to be more inclined to seek hospital treatment than those who opt out of such. So if somebody unvaccinated went to the hospital for COVID it would naturally be, on average, a much more severe case than a vaccinated person going to the hospital, with worse overall outcomes. And so you skew the results when looking at hospital data.
These biases and trends are facts most people may not be aware of, but big pharma certainly is.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu#/media/File:1918_s...
Are you referring to the most studied medicine in human history or the one that saved more lives than any other medicine in human history?
You've assumed that the vaccine reduces transmission risk, which is not the case:
I'm not surprised when I google the author of that paper, it's a bunch of antivax nonsense because the idea that the mRNA vaccines didn't reduce transmission is one of the dumbest I've heard yet. Here's a slightly (ha) better study investigating the matter from real scientists;
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanwpc/article/PIIS2666-6...
> Full vaccination of household contacts reduced the odds to acquire infection with the SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant in household settings by two thirds for mRNA vaccines and by one third for vector vaccines. For index cases, being fully vaccinated with an mRNA vaccine reduced the odds of onwards transmission by four-fifths compared to unvaccinated index cases.
I'm referring to the medicine deployed against a pandemic whose death count is still entirely unknown.
How many people died because of COVID?
You don't know. No one knows.
Meanwhile, everyone who knows better pretends that the most fundamental data about the subject, on top of which all other data and decsions were built ... is garbage.
Interestingly, excess mortality levels continue to remain extremely high - around 10%. [1]
[1] - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-p-scores...
Was there another pandemic whose statistics were based on mandatory asymptomatic testing (via PCR tests with deliberately high Ct values)?
Was there another pandemic where 94-95% of all deaths involved at least one comorbidity, and 77% involved three or more underlying conditions?
about 7 million people died of COVID according to the WHO: https://data.who.int/dashboards/covid19/deaths
AFAIK, that number more accurately reflects the number of people who died within two weeks of testing positive using PCR tests at high Ct values (35-45), inflating case counts.
94-95% involved at least one comorbidity.
Over 75% had at least four comorbidities.
This is what statistics is for? We rarely ever “know” (in the sense of your restrictive epistemology) the precise value of ANY demographic measure.
We don’t know how many people live in the United States at any particular moment, but the Census is still useful.
It's useful when done in good faith. During COVID there were numerous decisions that even if not intended to inflate mortality figures, then they did so inadvertently. In particular the CDC gave extremely broad guidance on what to classify as a death "of" COVID, and the government was giving hospitals additional funding per COVID death. So for the most ridiculous example of what this led to, in Florida some guy died in a motorbike crash and ended up getting counted as a COVID death because he also had COVID at the time. [1] He was eventually removed from their death count, but only because that case went viral.
Even in more arguable cases, preexisting conditions and extreme senescence are ubiquitous in deaths "of" COVID, and at this point there's probably no real chance of ever untangling the mess we created and figuring out what happened. For instance Colin Powell died at 84 with terminal cancer, Parkinson's, and a whole host of other health issues. His eventual death was flagged as 'caused by complications of COVID.' I mean maybe it really was, but I think the asterisk you'd put there is quite important when looking at these stats.
[1] - https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/florida-motorcyclist-covid...
I’m neither an epidemiologist nor a statistician (just a mathematician pretending to be a coder and/or butterfly), but I do not believe there are no mathematical tools to mitigate the statistical impact of comorbidities and accidental misreporting.
To contextualize this: my position is “weak signals are possible even with noisy data”; I read your response as “but the data is really noisy,” which, sure, agreed; the user I was responding to seems closer to the solipsistic position “there is effectively no data at all.”
Ah yes, because we don't have the exact numbers your appeal to idiocy must be normalized.
Do you know how many people are saved by antibiotics RIGHT NOW? You don't know?! NO ONE KNOWS!
Give me a break, we don't need to dissect every corpse to see how effective the vaccine is.
> I don't remember dissent being tolerated, let alone encouraged.
How many people were jailed or disappeared for their dissent?
Being able to dissent doesn't mean that people accept your opinion, it means that you are allowed to make your point using your own means.
People still get to disagree with you, point out where you are dishonest or mistaken, etc. etc. etc.
The idea that dissent wasn't tolerated is absolute BS. It was tolerated far more than it should have been, far more accommodations were made than necessary, such as in the military, which injects people with all sorts of vaccines but somehow decided that this well-tested one didn't have to be because some people were scared.
Literally none of that mind canon happened.