I came out of it fine. I wish some other people had learned:
- That a respiratory disease can spread quickly before you show symptoms, and kill millions
- That even though the government is wrong a lot, sometimes they're right about important things
- That you don't get to defect from polite society one day and then whine about being an outcast the next. Of course I'm mad at people who refused to take any precautions at all. They made things worse.
Chaos helps no one. It’s why even the democratic world has martial law.
We may be wrong together but at least we are together. Having people running in three directions at once will get everyone killed in wartime or disaster. Once the avalanche starts it is too late for the pebbles to vote.
I strongly disagree; People have agency, rocks and geological forces do not.
>We may be wrong together but at least we are together.
Is a great way to get everyone killed.
We, in the west love to tout how our diversity and free thinking makes us better than those who do not have those values. What I saw were a bunch of countries that wished they could rule the populace in the same manner as China and Saudi Arabia.
If we can not uphold our values when we face difficulties, then they are not values.
You speak of martial law and preventing chaos. Envision the outcry and response if Trump had enacted such a policy in early February when members of the Democratic Party were encouraging people to gather in crowds to show support for Chinese New Year?
While there's plenty of blame to go around for the government's disinformation campaign, never forget that the entire cast of FauxNews personalities were decrying the initial cautionary stance as a politically motivated hoax and then turned around and changed their tune when it didn't turnout to be a dud like SARS 1.0.
I'm not so sure. To me it seems people just could not stand masks to the point it actually created ongoing planetary scale mental health crisis. :shrug:.
> That even though the government is wrong a lot, sometimes they're right about important things
They weren't right during the pandemic though. From initially refusing to acknowledge the situation to lying and cohercing people into taking untested injections whose side effects on the population remain unknown, and of course censoring and character assassinating anyone who dared rise any objections against its conduct. And lets not forget actively avoiding finding out the origin of the virus because it wasn't politically convenient during an election year.
In this context, do you consider "even though the government is wrong a lot, sometimes they're right about important things" more informative than misinformative?
To disprove "That even though the government is wrong a lot, sometimes they're right about important things", you would have to prove that the government is wrong _all_ the time about important things. You just mentioned some things you think the government got wrong, but that is covered by the clause "That even though the government is wrong a lot" anyway. So it then just seems you wanted to soapbox about covid and governments, even if that isn't your intent.
In the context "lessons we learned from covid that we shouldn't forget", "the government is sometimes right about important things" cannot be one of them without specifics on what is it they supposedly got right.
Reasonable at first. Once it was known that the virus is transmitted via aerosols then forcing masks was the wrong thing to do, specially on children. Useless and damaging.
> minimizing in-person interactions
What benefit did it achieve? As a quarantine it was too leaky and it also led to mass psychological distress.
> funding medical research
What medical research? For some reason, the most obvious approach, repurposed drugs, was nowhere in sight. If anything demonizing it was the official policy (ie. the smear campaign against ivermectin).
> Reasonable at first. Once it was known that the virus is transmitted via aerosols then forcing masks was the wrong thing to do, specially on children. Useless and damaging.
And that's the reason we have governments for. So that people like you can't do unlimited damage. You can privately hate the government, but as long as you follow the rules, the damage is contained.
> this paper does not estimate the effect of wearing masks, but rather the effect of mandating mask wearing
This study doesn't control its variables properly. Places with no mask mandates are also places where people typicaly didn't take other precautions such as avoiding mass gatherings.
Anecdotally, when my son was in online classes and later on in person but masked he made remarks to me about how he felt like he had no friends and people didn't like him.
Partially(mostly?) was because during class breaks they were not allowed to interact.
"The hypotheses for the influence of face mask wearing on emotion recognition were partially supported. Results showed that whereas anger was better recognized, happiness and sadness were impaired in their recognition.
...
Therefore, the differential impact of face masks on emotion recognition can have an effect on children’s social interactions. For example, better recognition of anger can facilitate greater physical and social distance from one another (Calbi et al., 2021). On the other hand, lower recognition of happiness and sadness can be potentially detrimental for children’s social interactions. Happiness has been identified as key to boosting social interactions (Quoidbach et al., 2019), whereas recognizing sadness in others is important to display appropriate interpersonal emotion regulation (Kwon & López-Pérez, 2022)."
> You can privately hate the government, but as long as you follow the rules, the damage is contained.
Please state in quantitative (percentage) terms what "the damage is contained" means at object level reality.
Also please state the source(s) of this knowledge (this way it makes it explicit whether what you are describing is your opinion vs facts, as you seem to be presenting it as).
Let's check out the language from the link you did include:
>> Our results imply that...
>> This suggests that...
Wow, that's a neat trick. Is science not THE institution that we can turn to for non-misinformative information? I always hear that it is LITERALLY THE BEST at discovering and distributing truth, but then I constantly encounter this sort of thing, and rarely anything else.
Does this situation seem strange to you, even in the slightest?
You expect your opponents to cite sources and provide such nuance at your demand, but you have not reciprocated that patience. It is so easy when you foist expectations on others then wonder why people don't want you engage with you, then claim it is the science that is wrong.
So is what you are doing. I'd say your approach is even easier.
> when you foist expectations on others
I've foisted no expectations, I have only posed some questions or requests for clarifying detail regarding your facts.
Please do not misrepresent reality, it is rude, and can be harmful. If you would like others to be concerned about the safety of the collective, you should reciprocate.
> then wonder why people don't want you engage with you
Do you believe yourself to know why people don't want to engage with me, or that I wonder about such things? How could you possibly acquire such knowledge?
> then claim it is the science that is wrong.
I made no such claim (though, I did criticize the questionably accurate memetic reputation and marketing of "science", the institution that proclaims in their scriptures and marketing (though not so much in behavior) to welcome all criticism), why are you speaking as if I have? Are you perhaps "trying" (I use quotes, as it may seem like I am implying conscious intent, which I am not) to trick people into believing something that is not true, are you perhaps at least to some degree engaging in rhetoric in order to persuade other people to believe your preferred story?
Not really. This was the first widely deployed modified adenovirus vaccine. Not the first developed, but if I'm remembering correctly, none of the others made it out of trials.
"noun
1.
a substance used to stimulate immunity to a particular infectious disease or pathogen"
Vaccines activate immunity against specific pathogens, reducing infection severity and transmission risk. COVID-19 vaccines decrease disease severity and transmission probability.
This whole thing of "they arent vaccines" is bologna and everyone knows it
"Vaccine" is actually a pretty broad term and loses usefulness in these conversations outside of its use as a rhetorical tool. Yes MRNA vaccines are vaccines and yes they are different from other types of vaccine such as Live-attenuated vaccines, conjugate vaccines and others.
They're also by design inferior to other vaccines since they only target one specific antigen, rendering them useless very quickly against highly mutagenic viruses (like coronaviruses).
The quick adaptability of mRNA vaccines to new variants is a key advantage, not a weakness.
Their rapid development and adaptability make them probably the best type of vaccine for fighting quickly mutating viruses. This is shown by the rapidity and relative ease of development and deployment of bivalent vaccines. mRNA vaccines are one of the great technological triumphs of the American industry and science apparatus.
"The results suggest that the significant effect of ivermectin on survival was dependent on largely poor-quality studies. ... This highlights the need for rigorous quality assessments, for authors to share patient-level data, and for efforts to avoid publication bias for registered studies. These steps are vital to facilitate accurate conclusions on clinical treatments."
More specifically, to your point, and the research you cite, what actually appears to be happening:
> [patients] who were infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (five with AIDS-defining conditions) and harbored Strongyloides stercoralis received ivermectin on a compassionate basis for persistent intestinal infection.
Strongyloides. A _parasite_.
I hate the "I did my research" trope and everything surrounding it.
Is "extremely well-tested" an objective scientific term (as opposed to a subjective personal opinion)? If so, please link to an authoritative definition.
> and anyone saying they weren't is either lying or was lied to by a liar.
Not necessarily, they could simply be speaking subjectively, speaking untruthfully/misinformatively etc... hey, kind of like you are doing right now!
Aren't humans interesting when they try to practice logic? Let's hope our Dear Leaders and The Experts (including The Scientists) took some classes before they tried to pull it off under extremely difficult circumstances, in a problem space containing thousands/millions of variables, many of them hallucinated (but not realized as such, because science does not study that in a really serious way).
Do you think that they have? And if not, do you think this is something we should perhaps include in these highly intellectual conversations?
> The vaccines were extremely well-tested and anyone saying they weren't is either lying or was lied to by a liar.
Starting human trials before animal trials were finished is not what I'd call "extremely well-tested".
The standard testing procedure takes years. These injections were forced upon hundreds of millions of people after only a few months of testing, and that's even assuming that what little testing was done was done properly.
> Starting human trials before animal trials were finished is not what I'd call "extremely well-tested".
Citation needed. The FDA paperwork to authorize human trials and emergency authorization referenced the completed animal trials.
> The standard testing procedure takes years.
While testing processes do typically take years, this also factors in the production to testable levels of said vaccines, whereas mRNA vaccines are far more quickly and efficiently produced, reducing this time dramatically.
Also to be taken into account, work on coronavirus vaccination in humans had already been in the pipeline since the Avian Flu crises. This wasn't something new.
> These injections were forced upon hundreds of millions of people after only a few months of testing
Most people couldn't access the vaccine for much longer periods of time. Certainly no-one was being forced early on (and that goes for varying definitions of the word 'forced').
> Now some proponents of the anti-parasitic drug traditionally used for animals are falsely claiming COVID-19 vaccinations haven't passed animal studies.
Not my claim either.
This is my claim: human trials started before animal trials were finished:
> While testing processes do typically take years, this also factors in the production to testable levels of said vaccines, whereas mRNA vaccines are far more quickly and efficiently produced, reducing this time dramatically.
The quickness of production is unrelated to how long it takes to test its effects.
> Also to be taken into account, work on coronavirus vaccination in humans had already been in the pipeline since the Avian Flu crises. This wasn't something new.
Can you point out the mRNA vaccines developed then?
> Most people couldn't access the vaccine for much longer periods of time. Certainly no-one was being forced early on (and that goes for varying definitions of the word 'forced').
Someone who rejects the broad and overwhelming scientific consensus and cherry-picks extreme cantankerous outliers to support their position that there is a "they" who are "forcing" people do something for some handwavy conspiracy nonsense.
> From initially refusing to acknowledge the situation to lying and cohercing people into taking untested injections whose side effects on the population remain unknown
You're spewing bullshit right here. COVID vaccines went through clinical trials and had a great safety profile.
Is it acceptable to get mad at all suboptimal behaviors during that debacle, or only a subset of them? And if a subset: who decides, how do they decide, and who made the decision that this is the obligatory structure that we all must adopt without being asked for agreement?
The worst was a local meetup member who worked for a company that either made vaccines or worked in virology and still didn’t get his vaccinations. He had all these bullshit reasons he dressed up as science. He got screamed at by the oldest person in the group and stopped showing up. But goddamn.
Vaccines don’t work on everyone who takes them, and they tend to be less effective in the elderly. Every one of those people are counting on the rest of us to not bring shit to their doorsteps.
- That a respiratory disease can spread quickly before you show symptoms, and kill millions
- That even though the government is wrong a lot, sometimes they're right about important things
- That you don't get to defect from polite society one day and then whine about being an outcast the next. Of course I'm mad at people who refused to take any precautions at all. They made things worse.