I realize that the gap between this post and my more recent post has been longer than usual, leaving the regular denizens of the comment section here not a lot to discuss. What can I say? Life gets in the way sometimes, and that has been happening more often, or at least so it seems. Be that as it may, I hope to be able to rectify this situation starting today, and, as is so often the case, the merry band of antivaccine propagandists over at Age of Autism provided me just the target topic. Unsurprisingly, it’s Ginger Taylor, MS (a woman who never fails to include her master’s degree her byline, although I can’t help but suggest, as I often do, that it’s a master’s degree in Dunning-Kruger), who provides the grist with an article entitled (just like the title of this post), Are any of the COVID-19 vaccines self-spreading, self-propagating, transmissible vaccines?
It’s also a conspiracy theory that’s been starting to pop up on Twitter:
Betteridge’s law of headlines definitely applies to Ms. Taylor’s post, and the short answer to her question, “Are any of the COVID-19 vaccines self-spreading, self-propagating, transmissible vaccines?” is definitely no. The longer answer involves revisiting a topic that I wrote about a couple of weeks ago, namely the recent propaganda bubbling up from the darkest recesses of the antivaccine underground claiming that those recently vaccinated against COVID-19 somehow “shed” spike protein, leading to illness in the unvaccinated around them and to menstrual irregularities—even miscarriages!—in any poor reproductive age female who might get too close. Now, having discovered a publication from the Center for Health Security at The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Ms. Taylor is ready to kick the whole “shedding” trope a notch or two and turn the antivaccine conspiracy theories up to 11, by moving on to “just asking questions” (a.k.a., JAQing off) about whether COVID-19 vaccines are “self-spreading, self-propagating, transmissible vaccines.” The publication in question is a 2018 document entitled Technologies to Address Global Catastrophic Biological Risks.
Here is the passage that got Ms. Taylor all worried:
Self-spreading vaccines—also known as transmissible or self-propagating vaccines—are genetically engineered to move through populations in the same way as communicable diseases, but rather than causing disease, they confer protection. The vision is that a small number of individuals in the target population could be vaccinated, and the vaccine strain would then circulate in the population much like a pathogenic virus. These vaccines could dramatically increase vaccine coverage in human or animal populations without requiring each individual to be inoculated. This technology is currently aimed primarily at animal populations. Because most infectious diseases are zoonotic,40 controlling disease in animal populations would also reduce the risk to humans.
This is a cool technology, and, I will admit, that it does sound a little scare. However, note the intent: This is a technology primarily designed for animal populations, where it is not feasible to capture and individually vaccinate every animal in the population. It could potentially be used in human populations, but, given the issues of safety and ethics involved, such a use would be a lot more difficult to justify. Ms. Taylor also quotes part of this passage:
There are 2 main types of self-spreading vaccines: recombinant vector vaccines and live viral vaccines. Recombinant vector vaccines combine the elements of a pathogenic virus that induce immunity (removing the portion that causes disease) with a transmissible viral vector. Cytomegalovirus is one candidate vector for recombinant vaccines, because it is highly species-specific and moderately transmissible. Live viral vaccines are attenuated, meaning that the vaccine viruses are much less pathogenic than wild-type and would be similar to the oral polio vaccine or the live attenuated influenza vaccine (LAIV) in that those vaccines can sometimes transmit from person to person.
Ms. Taylor then quotes:
Self-spreading vaccines have already been used to protect wild rabbits from myxomatosis and to control Sin Nombre virus in rodent populations
And then the part of the report that observes:
In the event of a grave public health threat, self-spreading vaccines could potentially be used to broadly inoculate human populations. Like the approach in animals, only a small number of vaccinated individuals would be required in order to confer protection to a larger susceptible population, thus eliminating the need for mass vaccination operations, including PODs.
I will now quote part of the document that Ms. Taylor seems to ignore, the better to fire up her antivaccine readers (which worked). That is the issue of informed consent. The huge problem with using a self-spreading vaccine in any human population is the issue of obtaining informed consent. Once the vaccine strain of organism, regardless of how benign, starts spreading, the population to which it spreads never gave informed consent (or even consent). Contrary to the conspiracy mongering about “eliminating informed consent” (a common antivaccine trope about public health officials), the writers of this Johns Hopkins document do take informed consent very seriously indeed, noting:
While self-spreading vaccines could help reduce illness and death in a severe pandemic, this approach comes with several big challenges. One important component of the current vaccination approach for humans is the informed consent process. In order to receive a vaccine, individuals (or their legal guardians) must be informed about the risks of vaccination by a healthcare provider and provide their consent before being vaccinated. Those who decline are not forced to receive a vaccine. In the case of self-spreading vaccines, the individuals directly vaccinated would have this option, but those to whom the vaccine subsequently spreads would not. Additionally, self-spreading vaccines would potentially infect individuals with contraindications, such as allergies, that could be life-threatening. The ethical and regulatory challenges surrounding informed consent and prevention and monitoring of adverse events would be critical challenges to implementing this approach even in an extreme event.
Indeed. Then there is this risk:
Finally, there is a not insignificant risk of the vaccine virus reverting to wild-type virulence, as has sometimes occurred with the oral polio vaccine—which is not intended to be fully virulent or transmissible, but which has reverted to become both neurovirulent and transmissible in rare instances. This is both a medical risk and a public perception risk; the possibility of vaccine-induced disease would be a major concern to the public. Modeling efforts suggest that making self-spreading vaccines weakly transmissible might reduce the risk of reversion to wild-type virulence by limiting the number of opportunities for the virus to evolve. However, weakly transmissible vaccines would have to be introduced to more people to obtain sufficient immunity in the target population.
As we have seen with SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, the more widely in a population a virus spreads, the more opportunity there is for mutations to arise, leading to virus variants that could be more transmissible or even virulent. Even if that risk could be mitigated, as the paper’s authors note themselves, the threat would have to be grave indeed even to consider the use of self-spreading, self-propagating vaccines in a human population. Although this article was written in 2018, more than a year before the pandemic hit, reasonable people can have a science- and ethics-based discussion about whether even the current COVID-19 pandemic would be enough to justify taking a step as extreme as using self-spreading vaccines.
Indeed, last fall, as the clinical trials of the currently authorized COVID-19 vaccines were wrapping up, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists did just that:
Self-spreading vaccines could indeed entail serious risks, and the prospect of using them raises challenging questions.
Who decides, for instance, where and when a vaccine should be released? Once released, scientists will no longer be in control of the virus. It could mutate, as viruses naturally do. It may jump species. It will cross borders. There will be unexpected outcomes and unintended consequences. There always are.
While it may turn out to be technically feasible to fight emerging infectious diseases like COVID-19, AIDS, Ebola, and Zika with self-spreading viruses, and while the benefits may be significant, how does one weigh those benefits against what may be even greater risks?
And:
While researchers may intend to make self-spreading vaccines, others could repurpose their science and develop biological weapons. Such a self-spreading weapon may prove uncontrollable and irreversible.
We don’t have to dig very deep for a historical example of weaponized biology. As the apartheid-era South African biowarfare program shows, social, political, and scientific pressures can lead to the misuse of biological innovation.
These are, of course, exactly the sorts of questions that real scientists and bioethicists would ask about a new technology like self-spreading vaccines and exactly the sort of potentially malign uses they would worry about. Too bad a science- and ethics-based discussion of such vaccines is not what Ms. Taylor is interested in. Instead, she’s interested in provoking fear by “JAQing off.”
This is why she pivots immediately to this passage:
Covid-19 vaccines approved in the US and Europe included the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines, as well as the Janssen (Johnson & Johnson) and AstraZenica. The mechanism of these products is inject mRNA or DNA to force the cells of the individual to produce the spike protein, in the belief that the spike protein itself was not harmful in itself.
Note the language: “Inject” mRNA or DNA into the cells, as though doctors were wielding tiny syringes to “inject” each and every cell with this foreign gene. Note the setup: The “belief” that the spike protein is not harmful in and of itself. Of course, one reason the spike protein was chosen very early in the pandemic as the antigen for so many different COVID-19 vaccines under development is because it was already known then to be the protein that mediates entry of SARS-CoV-2 into cells through its ability to bind to a cell surface protein receptor called ACE2. Consequently, an antibody response to this protein, it was predicted, would be likely to prevent infection by keeping the virus from being able to enter cells.
Of course, Ms. Taylor is all-in with the narrative that the recently vaccinated “shed”…something. That something, presumably, is the spike protein. I discussed this particular trope in detail, in particular why it is nonsense, a couple of weeks ago, but I’ll have to revisit it again as I continue through Ms. Taylor’s insinuation that COVID-19 vaccines are “self-spreading” and “self-propagating.” First, she cites an ongoing survey of women after receiving COVID-19 vaccines:
As the public roll out of the Covid-19 vaccines based on the spike protein began, we began to see widespread reports of blood clots and other vascular symptoms in those who received the vaccine, including complications in menstrual cycles, and even miscarriages.
Research is currently underway at the The University of Illinois Urbana Champaign on the reproductive health outcomes of women who have received the vaccine. The survey became available to the public on April 7th, and by April 19th the researchers reported that they had received more than 25k survey responses.
Although I never wrote about this particular survey, I did see it when it first started to circulate last month. It’s a web-based survey being done by an anthropologist, with no involvement of medical scientists or physicians who are experts in women’s reproductive health. I predicted at the time that it would be positive, thanks to recall bias and no control group, and so it appears to have been. The best thing you can say about the survey is that it might be hypothesis-generating regarding whether COVID-19 vaccination has any detectable, reproducible effects on menstruation and pregnancy. The worst that can be said about it is that it’s scientifically worthless and will do nothing more than help spread misinformation based on earlier unproven and likely false claims that the COVID-19 vaccines cause miscarriages and even infertility.
Next up, Ms. Taylor cites:
In early May 2021, the Salk Institute published an article on a study in Circulation Research confirming that Covid-19 was primarily a vascular disease, not a respiratory disease as had initially been assumed.
“A lot of people think of it as a respiratory disease, but it’s really a vascular disease,” says Assistant Research Professor Uri Manor, who is co-senior author of the study. “That could explain why some people have strokes, and why some people have issues in other parts of the body. The commonality between them is that they all have vascular underpinnings.”
Further, it implicated the spike protein itself in causing damage to the vascular system.
“In the new study, the researchers created a “pseudovirus” that was surrounded by SARS-CoV-2 classic crown of spike proteins, but did not contain any actual virus. Exposure to this pseudovirus resulted in damage to the lungs and arteries of an animal model—proving that the spike protein alone was enough to cause disease. Tissue samples showed inflammation in endothelial cells lining the pulmonary artery walls.
Funny, but I discussed that very study in detail last week and how it does not provide any evidence that the spike protein, which is produced in small amounts in the cells affected by the vaccine, with very little getting into the bloodstream, is at toxic at the levels produced by the vaccine. Indeed, the Salk Institute article cited by Ms. Taylor even notes, “Now, a major new study shows that the virus spike proteins (which behave very differently than those safely encoded by vaccines) also play a key role in the disease itself.” Moreover, the principal investigator for the study has even been interviewed on the news, where he states most emphatically that his study does not support the idea that the spike protein produced by the various COVID-19 vaccines is harmful:
Let’s just put it this way for Ms. Taylor. The scientist who actually did the study is telling you that your interpretation of his study is completely off-base. In fact, he even states that having antibodies to the spike protein likely protect the vascular endothelial cells lining blood vessels from damage due to the spike protein!
It took her longer than I expected, but Ms. Taylor does eventually get around to “shedding”:
But the strange part of the story is that reports on social media have begun circulating that these same vascular symptoms, nose bleeds, bruising, headaches, menstrual disruption and even miscarriages, were being experienced by the unvaccinated who had recently spent time with one or more vaccinated individuals, or even in large crowds.
Such reports are now widespread on social media, but as the individuals reporting this bizarre phenomenon are not vaccine recipients, there is no where to report these potential second hand adverse events, as VAERS is a reporting system for only for vaccinated individuals.
Again, I discussed this before. There’s no good evidence that individuals vaccinated against COVID-19 “shed” spike protein, much less that the “shed” spike protein makes others who come into contact with the vaccinated ill in any way. Again, anyone who knows basic biology, biochemistry, and physiology would realize just how implausible the whole claim of “shedding” is, much less that a single protein shed from a vaccinated person could cause so many health problems. That’d have to be a really serious protein toxin, one of the worst known, especially since, although protein contact with skin can cause allergic dermatitis, proteins are not generally absorbed through the skin! That’s why, when doctors try to develop methods to get proteins absorbed through the skin they have to resort to techniques such as “chemical enhancers, iontophoresis, microneedles, electroporation, sonophoresis, thermal ablation, laser ablation, radiofrequency ablation and noninvasive jet injectors aid in the delivery of proteins by overcoming the skin barrier in different ways.” I suppose the antivaxxers promoting the “shedding” narrative would then pivot to absorption through the mouth or breathing, but, again, there’s no evidence that the vaccinated shed airborne spike protein, much less in the quantities that would be necessary for such transmission to occur.
Then, predictably, Ms. Taylor cites the Pfizer clinical trial protocol for its phase 3 clinical trial of its mRNA vaccine. It’s the same bit of antivaccine disinformation that I discussed in detail when Leila Centner spread it in late April. Basically, no, the Pfizer clinical trial document does not show that Pfizer “knew” that the vaccinated could shed spike protein (or something else) and thereby endanger the unvaccinated around them. The long version is here; the short version is just to say that, as usual when it comes to vaccines, Ms. Taylor is the Dunning-Kruger effect personified.
That must be why she finishes up her post with a flourish:
The questions that the public are asking are becoming widespread, and seem currently unanswerable. Are the vaccinated “shedding” something? If so, what are they “shedding?” The spike protein? Instructions for it’s cellular manufacture via viral vector? If so, how? Until seeing the Hopkins biotech paper, this seemed impossible to me. Are there real risks to the unvaccinated? Is anyone looking into this yet?
Are any the Covid-19 Vaccines Self-Spreading, Self-Propagating, Transmissible Vaccines?
No. They are not. The mRNA vaccines cannot “propagate,” and the mRNA used, even though it’s modified to last longer, has a relatively short half-life. (If that weren’t the case, a second dose 3-4 weeks later would not be required for the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.) Nor are the Johnson & Johnson or AstraZeneca vaccines “self-spreading” or “self-propagating,” even though they both use an adenovirus vector to induce the recipient’s cells to make spike protein. Let’s just put it this way. The adenovirus vectors used are called “replication deficient” for a reason. They can’t replicate and don’t spread.
In the end, what Ms. Taylor is doing is JAQing off. Think of her invocation of “self-spreading, self-propagating transmissible vaccines” as nothing more than taking the old antivaccine trope of “shedding” that had been repurposed for COVID-19 vaccines and putting it on steroids, all to spread fear of the vaccines.
147 replies on “Are any of the COVID-19 vaccines self-spreading, self-propagating, transmissible vaccines?”
ORAC: “.. it’s a master’s degree in Dunning-Kruger”
Agreed. There are quite a few anti-vaxxers who include their degrees even when they are highly unrelated to the subject matter: Taylor’s is in counselling; Katie Wright has two ( IIRC psychology and education), Alison MacNeil has one in social work; another TM has school psychology, Louise Kuo in marketing, Jennifer Margulies and Naomi Wolf have doctorates… in English..
I suppose that higher education of any sort might allow you to critique topics in science BUT it doesn’t guarantee that you’ll do it effectively. Have any of these people studied issues in bio / physio / development that allow them to speculate a bit more realistically about autism and/ or vaccines? I doubt it. Personally, I venture that if anyone accepts the idea that vaccines cause autism, they have already failed because there is research that shows no relationship and other research that illustrates the actual aetiology of ASDs. I doubt that they also had much depth in statistical analyses or research design.
This is probably hopelessly naive, but I hope most people with higher education get a sense of how hard it is to master complex topics that makes them more aware that their expertise may not translate to other areas, not less.
That’s awkward phrasing, but I’m going to go grade instead of figuring out how to simplify, and trust your ability to get the point.
Dorit, you are never naive.
Studies of metacognition show that people can discern what they know vs what they don’t ( to varying degrees) ; in fact, cognitive psychologists like JD Smith have even demonstrated this ability in monkeys, dogs and rats…
no studies yet on anti-vaxxers though.
I’m not totally joking..
Unfortunately, a reasonable mastery of one subject often seems to inflate one’s ego to the point that the person thinks they can pontificate on many.
There were a number of economist in the early days of the pandemic coming out with ludicrous models of the spread of the disease that clearly showed that the epidemiologists had it all wrong. Or have you noticed if you are in a book store, that many of the quack diet books are written by cardiologists?
Or, since my background is psychology, I am always impressed by the “experts” with backgrounds in engineering or physics and who may have once been frightened by a SAT, explain how useless the discipline is.
@ Denice
At first glance, rats are moro sensible than anti-vaxxers
“rats are moro sensible than anti-vaxxers”
Except that they both eat trash.
@Dorit: I’m not sure getting a Master’s degree takes you far enough. It’s pretty easy in most places to slip into a Master’s with just a little bit of schooling on top of an undergraduate degree. People usually fail out of PhD programs with this level of skill, before really confronting the devil of self-deceit.
@ foolish physicist
A Ph.D or a Nobel leads to emeritus disease or Nqbelism so a higher degree may even reinforce this.
Good point re relatively easy to get masters.
Hey! I left my Ph.D. program without a master’s all on my own initiative.
IMHO, there’s a difference between including your degree as part of your name, and listing the degree and subject in a short ID bit, as on a “staff’ page.
The first — e.g. Taylor always adding the “MS” — strikes me as puffing. In my academic career, starting back in grad school, I noticed that the only PhD faculty folk who insisted on being called ‘Doctor So-and-so’ were second tier minds at best (not that I mean that as an insult, 2nd isn’t that bad…) at second rate schools, and pretty much all the top scholars went by their first names. If you’ve ‘got it’, you don’t need to flaunt it.
OTOH, if you’re just identifying your degree somewhere accessible instead of beating the level of the degree into the ground — e.g. a little bio bit that would say Wolf has a PhD in English — that just strikes me as proper disclosure. ‘I’m an educated person, but not in this field.’ Maybe I’m naive about the particular crazy at hand with the more rabid antivaxers, but I don’t think anyone would actually present that an advanced degree in the humanities would allow them to critique topics in science. That’s certainly rule within academia, where faculty outside the sciences almost never claim any comprehension of what the scientists are doing. But back to the anti-vaxers, i could certainly imagine that holding any graduate decree could be put forward as evidence of an ability to “do your own research”. And as far as that goes, the more highly educated the wooist is, the deeper and more detailed they seem to be able to plunge into the science to create the sort of intricate pseudo-science it takes Orac a long blog post to deconstruct.
As far as ‘Dunning Kruger’ of “a reasonable mastery of one subject often seems to inflate one’s ego to the point that the person thinks they can pontificate on many”, I have to agree with John Kane that the worst offenders in academia come from STEM fields. A certain amount of this appears in relation to fields that are more qualitative, which they view as ‘soft’ or ‘trivial’ and so simple as not to be worth detailed study. You can spend ten years writing a PhD dissertation in Film Studies, and be summarily dismissed by a Physics professor who knows better than you do because he goes to the movies, and it’s all just entertainment anyway….
@ foolish physicst
What you say about the limits of Masters degrees is mainly field-dependent, and sometimes program dependent. In some cases, a Masters is ‘the end of the line’ and more coursework and rigor go into it. OTOH, a Masters from an R1 school/program focused on granting PhD’s is typically a sign that the student dropped out, or was never really considered for the ‘real’ (PhD) grad track to begin with.
I agree with you, but I’d like to add one caveat to your point about insisting, and it’s completely unrelated to this specific discussion. In talking to other young women faculty, and especially young women faculty of color, many of us insist on title in the early days, because to be blunt, students are more likely to get over familiar – and impolite – with young women faculty. You may need the title to get the kind of minimal respect male (white) faculty get automatically.
It can be less of an issue as you go higher (I don’t particularly care anymore), but that would really depend on the institution. In some, the issue never goes away.
Prof. Reiss: Yes, your point about young women faculty, and especially young women faculty of color is spot on. i did not mean to include such folks in my characterization, and it was careless of my to write “the only” instead of “most”.
The situation may also differ by field, and my experience may reflect conventions in the humanities where things were/are different in the sciences or law.
So, if I’m rethinking my biases, maybe I’d have to allow Ginger Taylor a bit of slack there too. Bummer ;- )
You weren’t discussing that context. I brought it in, and it is certainly taking your point out of where it was.
And I don’t think Ms. Taylor is doing it because of that situation. I think your points do fit her.
XKCD has anticipated you.
It seems as though the latter has been suspended from Twatter.
The fact that one does not like the clear, fact-based answer to her question does not make the question “unanswerable”.
And dropping large sections of the document that address exactly the things you’re talking about is not particularly honest.
HELLO!
Cue Mike Adams using this along with some picture of a bacteriophage to up his vaccine holocaust narrative another notch.
There’s something I’m surprised anti-vaxxers haven’t done “scientifically” yet given all their blather about us vaccinateds shedding S protein onto them, causing purported illness. Instead they go off on this self-replicating angle, perhaps likely because it sounds more dramatic but also possibly because like stopped clocks, their brains only rare stumble across the next step in petard hoisting and then only by chance.
There’s a brand-new scientific term for “self-spreading, self-propagating transmissible vaccines” – they’re called “diseases.”
You (wrongly) assume that everyone recovers from the disease or has no long term debilitating effects.
Update
Sorry. My computer is balking again. It had been good but froze up whilst I was ordering airline tickets, reporting VASTLY wrong prices yet! But fortunately the nice people at United fixed up that problem- not the computer, They are extremely courteous- probably thankful that business is picking up!
Some people say that the spike protein blows out of kids alot more because their smallness exposes more cells to it and spike pressure and equallibrium and stuff just makes the little ones spectacular founts of un-dead, ‘fectious spike-fingers.
This is why you still need to wear a mask. And goggles. And noise-cancelling headphones.
I’d say the tiger is just moping; but, clearly, it is not. Clearly. I’ll be ok, they tell me.
“My computer is balking again.” This one of mine’s has done that from day one after a complete wipe and BIOS, firmware patches. There is some hardware deficiency somewhere like low bus bandwidth, USB is pitiful, it eats memory like it’s making 50 backups of memory; thing can’t walk and chew gum at the same. It shipped with Windows 10 back in 2009. Shitty Dell.
“It had been good but froze up whilst I was ordering airline tickets, reporting VASTLY wrong prices yet!”
By “had been good”, you mean “it hadn’t done whatever in a while”?
“reporting VASTLY wrong prices”
Hmm. At the very least, always check the left of the address bar to verify https. Otherwise, a first pass evaluation stongly indicates the possibility of more than 5 toolbars filling the top of your browser. /s /not really
I usually have no problem booking tickets or hotels. I selected a flight and seats, put in all of my information and got a final total 4 times what it was supposed to be, it froze and I couldn’t go back and fix it! So I called the airline- they said that all was well and they didn’t have that total but the correct one; they had no idea why I got those numbers.
It’s possible that it was an offer for upgrades but it didn’t say that and the numbers didn’t work with listed first class, other options and they weren’t exactly 4 times the correct total. So who knows?
At any rate, the airline rep seemed very happy to help : I assume that business is doing better and their jobs aren’t endangered as they were last year. Prices have gone up since February so I imagine people are travelling.
Yah, AA seat 1C is probably going to cost a fortune when we get the hell out of here. I’d fly in steerage if they were still blocking off middle seats.
“So I called the airline…At any rate, the airline rep seemed very happy to help.”
Umm, Denice Walter? Did you call the number that was on the page with the “VASTLY wrong prices”?? I will not be angry.
I may have already said this, or meant to, idk anymore, damn moderate, ORAC is AFK so either a really delicate, time consuming situation, probably something having to do with tits, or the deep state got him. Or his wife saw a new stray puppy.
“I’d fly”
Da fuk is wrong with you people. Hast though not seen Airport ’77?
I have to say, it would be cool if they could develop such a vaccine (yeah I know they are not), spreading protection from a deadly disease faster than the disease could spread would solve a lot of issues.
Ohh, my DNA printer has arrived from ebay. Escusemwe while I engineere thy airborne HIV.
The “live” attenuated oral polio vaccine works this way, though not really intentionally. It is problematic in that the attenuated virus has a nasty tendency to revert to wild type sufficiently to cause disease. In spite of the reversion problem it has played a critical role in extirpation of polio from much of the world.
I imagine that our (tinu) Italian commenter should object to poliovirus vaccination as well, givent that over 99% of cases are asymptomatic. There is, of course, one small problem here.
Johns Hopkins scientists disclose,
Additionally, self-spreading vaccines would potentially infect individuals with contraindications, such as allergies, that could be life-threatening.
MJD says,
Furthermore, said contraindication could potentially increase the prevalence of allergy-induced regressive autism.
@ Orac,
I’m available to write a guest post when “life” gets in your way.
Note:.MJD will place Denise Walters in auto-moderation during each guest post.
[…] staff from their campus, a bizarre freakout over “vaccine shedding” and “self-spreading” that has zero scientific evidence to back such accusations, the recurring Facebook sharing […]
I’m surprised that conspiracy theorists haven’t been going wild (at least not in their usual haunts) over the NASA Wallops rocket launch, which has been delayed several times by “bad weather” but is tentatively rescheduled for Friday (tomorrow). According to NASA:
“The four-stage Black Brant XII rocket will be used for the mission that includes the release of barium vapor that will form two green-violet clouds that may be visible for about 30 seconds. The barium vapor is not harmful to the environment or public health.”
BARIUM? The stuff of chemtrails??? And how do we know that the rocket won’t be spewing a enormous stream of colorful spike proteins designed to immunize the entire United States against the will of its citizenry? Could it be a mass experiment involving self-propagating vaccines using a barium platform, to render us totally dependent on toxic Pharma drugs, or even depopulate the entire Eastern seaboard? It can’t be a coincidence that outdoor masking advisories have been lifted just in time for the launch.
NASA claims:
“The mission, called the KiNETic-scale energy and momentum transport eXperiment, or KiNet-X, is designed to study a very fundamental problem in space plasmas, namely, how are energy and momentum transported between different regions of space that are magnetically connected?”
http://nasa.gov/wallops/2021/press-release/nasa-wallops-may-8-rocket-launch-visible-in-eastern-united-states/
Huh, and we’re supposed to believe that jibber-jabber. Be very afraid, people!!!
What the heck is “green violet?” I generally call that mixture “brown.”
Probably bright spectral lines.
https://physics.nist.gov/PhysRefData/Handbook/Tables/bariumtable4_a.htm#4554.033 (violet)
https://physics.nist.gov/PhysRefData/Handbook/Tables/bariumtable3_a.htm#5535.481 (green)
In other news…
Dr Fauci says he doesn’t know what Rand Paul’s “problem” is. Most of us do. Heh.
The Pfizer vaccine was approved for kids 12-15.
We can expect wailing and rending of garments as even younger age groups are also approved.
Dr. Fauci’s “With all due respect” comment was perfect.
@ Denice
In case you didn’t see it, The Daily Beast has an article today about one of Null’s disciples who died after refusing the COVID vaccine. It’s behind their “Beast Inside” paywall, so I couldn’t read the body. The blurb from their email:
“The Totally Preventable Death of a Brooklyn Icon
By Michael Daly
Dolores Perri was a protégée of “natural living” guru Gary Null, who calls the COVID-19 vaccine a fraud. She didn’t get one—and died of the virus.”
He has been loudly singing her praises and wondering why her family did not call him for help when she got Covid..Maybe they are smart?.
Bill Maher tests positive ( they test those who work on his show) despite despite being fully vaccinated.
He has NOT ben waving his anti-vax flag high lately. Over 65 and scared?
@ sadmar:
Yahoo News has the whole article by Daly for free.
Perri’s son gives the story in depth. It’s even worse than I imagined.
Update?
I got my Ouchi, my Fauchi Ouchi.. and it didn’t even hurt. Still, I saw the needle. So, I wake up and I got another button?? It seems a waste of taxpayer funds and invites fraud. But ok.
This time, my arm already hurts after only a few hours. My sister spent two days worshiping at the porcelain temple, selling Buicks over the big, white phone after her second accostation; so I’m probably in for a pretty rough go. I feel relieved.
One thing that bothers me. Three weeks ago there was this massive crowd and the “wait here for 15 minutes” was basically a basketball court with ~120 people rotated every 15 minutes.
This time, empty. And, never mind the timely attempted signups, they did it alphabetically. There was only one line today, “pqrs”, and maybe ~10-12 people getting out every 15. Most “stations” were empty.
The last time, the cop told me to get into the “long” line also. What I am afraid of is that people have not come back for the second. Dad tells me that what may be happening is it is available everywhere now from Publix, Kroger, CVS, Walgreens,…, aunt Bess but her freezer is sketch.
I haven’t paid attention to who has what but Publix has Moderna and Janssen. I’m not even suggesting that mixing flavors is a bad thing. I’m more afraid that people are just not coming back for their second and we are atrocious at like 25%.
Orac, if I may interject here, I want to bring attention to a development that although slightly unrelated to this topic is extremely significant. Besides, seems like this post was a big –meh!–and not going anywhere. A few months ago, I made the prediction that governments would start backing off on Covid vaccination. Although I got the timing off, true to my word, the CDC has recently announced that vaccinated individuals can unmasked!
How is this them backing off on vaccination? Because they are recommending vaccinated people unmasked while at the same time not suggesting any enforcements for unvaccinated people to remain masked. The recommendation is bound to result in a free-for-all where everyone starts losing their masks and vaccination will become pointless. Interestingly, the CDC is spinning their recommendation as the exact opposite, suggesting that it is to incentivized vaccination when nothing could be farther from the truth.
Anyway, as an antivaxxer, I thought of taking this time to declare victory! Orac, I am also giving you permission to blog about this for your next topic. As always, I committed to doing my part in keeping this blog interesting and elevating it beyond just boring, pharma propaganda.
I always thought that it was interesting to read about curved space/time. The idea that the very structure of reality was curved but that you can’t see this because you are part of that reality. Now I can see that this idea is applicable to the mind of an anti-vaxxer too. Their minds work in twisted, convoluted ways but they can only see this as a straight road.
There is so much stupid in Greg’s mind that it acts something like a black hole. It sucks in all reality, bending and convoluting it until it all merges into the big pool of stupidity.
It also reminds me of the waterfall picture by Escher. The water always goes where they want, even if it has to run uphill and the water pipes are non-Euclidean.
A meringue of unknowing, if you will.
Boring troll is boring.
@ Greg
Yep, you are right that those not vaccinated will probably not wear masks and many of them will probably not get vaccinated; but with some of the especially new Covid variants and potential future ones we may see a spike in suffering, hospitalizations and deaths. As an antivaxxer you obviously ignore or don’t understand the overwhelming evidence of just how effective the vaccines are. So, what victory are you declaring? The potential of more suffering, hospitalizations, and deaths?
You do understand that wearing a mask is NOT a major burden and the CDC guidelines do not order businesses, local governments, etc to comply, so I would be that many will still require mask wearing. And, though I am fully vaccinated, even donating convalescent plasma (antibodies to COVID) every four weeks which used for hospitalized COVID patients, at 74 I will continue to wear a mask until much higher numbers of population either vaccinated or found to have been exposed, thus with antibodies.
Yep, once again, looks like I garnered all the usual suspects’ attention except Narad’s. He is probably busy on another thread telling off an antivaxxer while invoking some over the moon simile about a barnyard cat in a Turkish whorehouse. I don’t get it, but likely he does.
Joel, I will give it to you guys that the vaccine is appearing to save some very old and sick folks from their graves, but make no doubts about it that we are still dealing with the largest modern day medical experiment. Just recently, I came across an article about how the Indian variant is increasing in the UK and it seems to be resistant to the vaccine. What then Joel, churn out newer versions of Pfizer’s ‘miracle juice’? How long before the damn breaks and Bossche is proven right?
Yes, maybe I don’t really know what’s motivating the CDC, but I can’t help but think their latest pronouncement is not so far off from what the ‘heretics’ have been saying all along: Protect the elderly and let natural immunity do its job!
“…I will continue to wear a mask..”
Translation: I’m not so sure the vaccine works.
Sock alert.
<
blockquote>How is this them backing off on vaccination? Because they are recommending vaccinated people unmasked while at the same time not suggesting any enforcements for unvaccinated people to remain masked. The recommendation is bound to result in a free-for-all where everyone starts losing their masks…Interestingly, the CDC is spinning their recommendation as the exact opposite, suggesting that it is to incentivized vaccination when nothing could be farther from the truth.
<
blockquote>
Agreed. It was stupid. WTF Biden? You’ve done it now** . The Stick of Truth, I’ll tell ya what. It’s real tribal now. A pretty good proxy for if someone will get vaccinated is who do they believe won the presidential election. This puts especially employees at risk physically and health wise.
“Orac, I am also giving you permission [Ha!] to blog about this for your next topic.”
She Sang or On Remembering Greg Patzer, that guy that got his way, bitched then bragged then started smashing Bossche about it then was never seen nor heard from again. One may only hope that he came to see reason before purchasing just the most coveted of Carroll Shelby big block B.1.427/B.1.429 {wait till he gets a load of the most powerful, throaty, and sleek limited designer edition B1.428} of variants all the better to get his unmasked unvaxed friends up to speed on the production of new-fangled features only a viron could come up with. And, according to Rand Paul, GOFauchi.
**I had to go get a roll of fine cut yesterday. I stayed in bed most of the day because I got my second jab and woke up at 4am feeling generally bad — simulated baddie noticed — but had to go because they were to close in a half hour.
There was a ’70s model van there; reverse parked. I wait about five minutes and “fuck it, they are in there yapping with ‘Ned’.” Sure enough Ned and a lady are at the end of the counter yapping while Ned blazes his usual stinky cigar {he says he’s vaccinated (JJ) but it was always the same before.} The respirator does not stop cigar stink molecules and it lingers.
As he’s ringing me up, the lady says, “I like your mask, what type is that?”
— Vacuume cleaner bag, as I point to the prominent front-facing OREC.
— What? I can’t here you. {so she crosses 12 feet to stand three feet from me}
— Vacuume Vacuume.
— {She leans all the way in. Oh, I see. And is that to protect others or yourself? {she was not wearing one}
@ Greg
I am a volunteer in the Moderna Covid vaccine trials; but before volunteering I got out my textbooks on molecular biology and read carefully everything on mRNA. Then I did both a PubMed and Google Scholar search on anything and everything about research on mRNA for vaccines and finally a number of papers on corona viruses, altogether well over 50 papers. With that, I volunteered and now, after being vaccinated, instead of my usual whole blood donation, every four weeks I donate convalescent plasma which is used for hospitalized Covid patients. And the blood center found I had high titers of antibodies to Covid. One of the things I learned from ALL my research is that the S-Spike Protein of the corona virus elicits both antibodies and T-cells. Especially t-cells have cross-immunity, the ability to react to variants, perhaps not all; but many. In addition, I don’t mind getting additional shots. I get my teeth cleaned and examined at least once a year and complete labs and physical from my doctor. And so far the current vaccine gives a reasonable level of immunity against all the current variants. What do I mean by “reasonable?” Simple, one “may” get infected, even develop mild flu-like symptoms; but not severe enough for hospitalization and possibly death.
The mRNA vaccines are not “medical experiments”. Besides decades of research, they went through the required FDA studies and required studies of other nations and as a volunteer, we are called in regularly to check our blood, phoned regularly at home, etc. So far they have been checking me for about nine months.
As an anti-vaccinationists, I challenge you to watch a PBS documentary: EXTRA LIFE: A Short History of Living Longer: Episode 1: Vaccines. Just one vaccine, smallpox, was the beginning of how humans began living longer. And, as opposed to you, I’ve read a dozen books and probably several hundred articles just on history of smallpox, the same for many other vaccine-preventable diseases.
And I find people who callously think that older people are expendable despicable. Do you have parents or grandparents you care about? Even frail older people can live reasonable lives for years if not infected with a serious virus. I know I still miss my grandparents and parents every day and they have been gone for a quarter century of more and I wish I had had just one or two more years with them. However, you obviously ignore that the new variants appear to be attacking younger people, not necessarily killing them; but causing subclinical vascular injuries that only time will tell if they contribute to long term problems. And I am 74, overall in good shape, not on any medications. My BP is normally in 120s/70s and total cholesterol 175; but HDLs high, triglycerides low, etc. I walk my dog a mile twice daily and prior to lockdown went to local YMCA six days a week to use stationary bike, swim, moderate weight-lifting, now have stationary bike at home and a few lite weights; but when Y re-opens will probably rejoin. And besides getting the vaccine, I will continue to use a mask when standing in line at Costco and Trader Joe’s and do my best in stores to maintain physical distance because vaccine is NOT and I wouldn’t expect it to be 100% effective. I have always worn a seatbelt, long before mandated, and they only prevent death and serious injury by 50%, so COVID vaccines 94% actually quite good.
As for Bossche? One person’s claims because they confirm your beliefs is all you need. Have you ever read anything on immunology, microbiology, epidemiology, etc. I recommend a great inexpensive book, maybe even in your local library: Lauren Sompayrac’s “How the Immune System Works (6th edition).” Earlier editions OK. I could recommend several text books of over 800 pages; but his is only 150 pages, well-illustrated, and fun to read.
As for Bossch, here’s are a couple refutations:
Alex Kasprak (2021 Mar 26). Geert Vanden Bossche Stokes Fear of COVID-19 Vaccine To Promote His Own Flawed ‘Solution. Snopes. Available at: https://www.snopes.com/news/2021/03/26/geert-vanden-bossche/
DG (if use name, filtered) (2021 Mar 18). Countering Geert Vanden Bossche’s dubious viral open letter warning against mass COVID-19 vaccinations. Science-Based Medicine.
Why don’t you read them if you dare and get Sompayrac’s book.
Please explain your education and profession???
He’s just an asshole who has been banned at least once, Joel.* The less attention he gets, the sooner he crawls back into his poutine-filled hole.
*After repeatedly accusing Orac of being a coward for not banning him. He doesn’t understand basic concepts such as person-years.
@ Narad
Yep, I’m sure you are right, just difficult not to respond to such absolute bullshit.
By the way, did you follow my exchange with Sophie Amsden on the previous The Centner Academy: A private school run by wealthy COVID-19 conspiracy theorists?
She is really a SICKO. I clearly showed just how wrong she was point by point and she persists. In some ways she is worse than Greg. For instance, I watched the Senate hearings with Dr Fauci, etc. When he and others were asked how many of FDA, CDC, etc. employees were vaccinated, all they could do is guess, perhaps 50%, Dr. Marks added that some may have been vaccinated elsewhere, so what does Sophie claim? That 50% of employees “refused” vaccination. First, none of the testimony from any of the witness even remotely hinted at this. They weren’t even sure how many had been vaccinated. Called “facts not in evidence” but that is what she does. I don’t know why Orac allows Greg, Sophie, Aelxa, etc. do keep posting. It is one thing to allow even trolls to post a few times; but when they just basically keep repeating themselves, gets a bit tiresome. Oh well.
Now time to walk my dog. And then try to get some sleep, though I suffer from extreme insomnia, maybe get 5 1/2 hrs sleep out of 8. Next week i start a new therapy that I am not optimistic about; but willing to try.
I’m a bit curious why Gerg has received a second (or third) chance, but as for the others, it’s a high bar to get banned at RI. This is a feature, not a bug. Aelxa has at least received a warning over thread-flooding.
Good luck with the sleep; Augie the cat heard me roll over this morning and took it as a sign that it was time to demand breakfast (which he has only picked at). When I got up, I told myself, “G-ddammit, it had better not be 6 in the morning.” Sure enough. He usually gives me till 7. I’ll be lucky to make it through the Cubs game.
It’s just like the CDC to be weasels to the end. They could have said the experiment had gone on long enough and it was time to move on; Instead, they left it up to Bob to figure out why Tom’s pub is so much busier than his and whether he could let in a few more ‘fully vaxxed’ patrons. Now it’s vaccination vs capitalism. Vaccination doesn’t stand a chance!
Splashy lake? You want Splatchee Lake, just off hiway 14. Me and my brother drowned a cat there once.
Actually, vaccination helps capitalism here. No new COVID waves
Entertaining site.
Scientism is definitely taking hold and this site is one of the temples.
I took many vaccines in the past but won’t be taking this one. The most interesting part to me is why do you care?
Obviously you think these vaccines work and you probably took them, so why do you care so much about people who don’t want to take them (no matter the reason)?
There’s some people on here that went to elite PHD mills. Tell me, has there ever been a medicine or vaccine that was approved by the FDA but later had to be taken off market
because it has some nasty side effects? I wonder.
I could ask more questions but there’s really no point, is there.
Anyway looking forward to seeing whether these vaccines have any long term adverse effects. Anyone who claims they know that there aren’t any is a liar. Nobody know at this point.
For a hit-and-run commenter? No. You got that one right.
Funny thing: I do actually care other people, COVID is a nasty thing to have. I would be sad if you get it.
@ 32gfdf56564
You write: “Anyway looking forward to seeing whether these vaccines have any long term adverse effects. Anyone who claims they know that there aren’t any is a liar. Nobody know at this point.”
I was an early volunteer in the Moderna Covid Vaccine Trials; but before volunteering I got out my textbooks on molecular biology and genetics and carefully reviewed mRNA, then I did a thorough search of both PubMed and Google Scholar using various search terms to find everything about mRNA and vaccines. I found quite a bit of research going back over 30 years. And finally reviewed coronaviruses. As a volunteer in the clinical trial, we agreed to 25 months, so we go in for blood tests, etc., receive a phone call once a month, answer a questionnaire every week, and gave permission to access our medical records and contact our primary care physician. The trial began late August, so many in it have had follow-ups for 7 – 8 months. Given that the mRNA disintegrates rapidly in the cell, it can only create a limited number of S-Spike Proteins and these are NOT the complete S-Spike Proteins that are attached to the COVID-19 virus, only enough to be recognized by our immune system. Thus, as with a finger cut-off for fingerprinting, can’t do anything, can’t attach to cells, etc. So, based on everything we know about vaccines and what we know about mRNA, the probability of “long term adverse effects” is as close to zero as one gets. If we ignored everything known about vaccine follow-ups, everything known about mRNA, and had required “long-term follow-ups” the number dead, number hospitalized, number with long Covid, number with vascular damage would have been much much higher than it is! ! !
As for “elite PhD mills” my PhD is from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, then an NIH Post-Doctoral Fellowship where I got an MPH in Public Health from University of Texas School of Public Health and then an MS in biometry (biostatistics) and epidemiology. So, are you implying that many PhDs really don’t know what they are talking about; but you do??? Also, since my early years I have been fascinated with infectious diseases and read, for instance, and own a dozen books on just Smallpox and have read literally 100s of articles, same with polio, malaria, plague, etc.
You write: “So why do you care so much about people who don’t want to take them (no matter the reason)?”
Simple, as long as there are pockets where too few vaccinated and/or already survived Covid, there is a risk for a surge, especially given the newer variants (the vaccines still provide protection, maybe with some variants not as much; but difference between minor flu-like symptoms vs severe). Such a surge could again overwhelm hospitals, result in more cases of Long-Covid, and vascular damage even to kids, and deaths. And there are many who have conditions, e.g., undergoing cancer treatment, some autoimmune diseases, etc. who either can’t be vaccinated or only have a weak immune response to it. I care about my fellow human beings, including the aforementioned. The latest studies find the vaccines lead to almost zero viral shedding, thus, protecting everyone. If you don’t get vaccinated, become an asymptomatic carrier or temporarily asymptomatic while its incubating, you could infect an innocent other.
That was an informative, non-snarky response.
Unlike many….
“I took many vaccines in the past but won’t be taking this one.”
What vaccines currently on the approved schedule for children or adults do you recommend? Any?
When I see the word “scientism” I reach for my gun.
@ 32gfdf56564 I agree this site is entertaining but full of spooks parroting propaganda. You ask, “Tell me, has there ever been a medicine or vaccine that was approved by the FDA but later had to be taken off market
because it has some nasty side effects?” Yes… during post marketing surveillance. https://www.mdlinx.com/article/10-dangerous-drugs-recalled-by-the-fda/lfc-4008 There are A LOT more than this. The idea is to sell as much as possible to make a profit before discovery which could take several years and many casualties but they don’t care. Pharmas allegiance is to their shareholders as well as lining their own pockets.
Unfortunately, vaccination adverse events are not reported as efficiently and are often missed or blamed on coincidence. Many healthcare providers aren’t even aware of VAERS which is a lame attempt to capture these events. And since anyone can report an adverse event to VAERS, it is not reliable source according to “experts”.
Better keep an eye on this one, comrades.
Citation or GTFO.
@ cuckoo4cocopuffs
Actually there have been over 25 drugs that initially were approved by the FDA; but later post-marketing surveillance found serious problems; but some took over 10 years to remove from market. There was one vaccine for rotavirus removed. As I’ve written numerous times, CDC teams monitor VAERS and any serious claims of adverse reactions thoroughly investigated. Reports on intussusception were reported, a sort of twisting of intestines (all except one corrected by surgery). So in less than six months from approval, stopped by FDA. FDA has authority to stop a vaccine, not other pharmaceuticals and medical devices. And the post-marketing surveillance involves several programs. But what isn’t understood is that the risk of intussusception from the actual rotavirus is 5 to 10 fold higher. So, as I’ve written umpteen times, one has to look at benefits/ cost ratio. Part of reason removed was budding antivaccinationist movement. Next rotavirus vaccine not approved for six years, so probably several hundred cases or more of intussusception that could have been prevented and 50,000 hospitalizations per year, thus 300,000 hospitalizations. And, whereas the first rotavirus vaccine was based on study of around 12,000 infants, the second was based on study of 72,000 and there hasn’t been one substantiated case of intussusception.
So, Mr CUCKOO, the FDA requirements for approval of vaccines is much much higher than any other pharmaceutical or medical device, and following the first rotavirus, increased sample size requirements, much much better post-marketing surveillance, and, most importantly, as opposed to all other pharmaceuticals and medical devices, FDA has power to stop IMMEDIATELY any vaccine.
And you write: “Unfortunately, vaccination adverse events are not reported as efficiently and are often missed or blamed on coincidence. Many healthcare providers aren’t even aware of VAERS which is a lame attempt to capture these events. And since anyone can report an adverse event to VAERS, it is not reliable source according to “experts”.
Actually, you show your complete ignorance of VAERS and other post-marketing surveillance. The vast majority of doctors are aware of it, especially pediatricians and family doctors, even their respective organizations offer seminars and articles on websites, and thanks to antivax movement, a lot of websites and social media. And, yep, it isn’t a reliable source; but as I wrote above, any serious adverse event is investigated thoroughly, including obtaining medical records and it is only one of several post-marketing surveillance programs. You really shouldn’t assume because of your ignorance that most others are like you.
Oh, and i should mention that many other nations have their own vaccine approval and post-marketing surveillance and WHO links to a number of them. So, unless you believe that public health experts in other nations, with different histories, different cultures, different political and economic systems, different education systems, are all incompetent or allied with BIG PHARMA, etc. and don’t care about their nations people, especially children, vaccines are evaluated validly worldwide.
Go to CDC VACCINE SAFETY to learn about the various post-marketing surveillance programs. Available at: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/index.html
So, again, “CUCKOO” is a perfect moniker for you.
Update from NASA: “The launch of the Black Brant XII sounding rocket carrying the KiNET-X payload has been postponed to no earlier than 8:04 p.m. EDT, Sunday, May 16, due to cloudy weather in Bermuda.”
That means that the experimental dispersal of green-violet clouds of barium dust carrying self-propagating Covid-19 vaccines won’t happen for a few more hours. There’s still time to get indoors, caulk and seal all windows and doors, and put on your approved military surplus gas mask to avoid inhaling colorful spike proteins.
It should be safe to come out by morning, as long as you stay at least 25 feet* from suspected vaccinees at all times, to avoid shedding.
*some say 6 feet is enough, but they can’t be trusted.
“caulk and seal all windows and doors”
Soothsayer! Nothing will stop it. That would be like stopping mosquitoes with a chain -link fence!
People actually do read scientific papers here. You should do same thing.
It ridiculous to say that a random antivaxxer know more VAERS than medical professionals. If you know it, they certainly know it.
I did not go to an “elite PhD mill”.
But I have a Masters’ degree – in Science!
@ Dangerous Bacon
Yep; but don’t you understand that someone with a degree in, for example, business understands immunology, infectious diseases, etc. better than scientists and people with little to no education are much more open-minded? ?
And, of course, Trump followers, after all he is an “intuitive genius” who understands just about everything without having to read even a Reader’s Digest version. LOL
I just read your response which includes information about you volunteering for the trial. What you provided is an anecdote. Just because you didn’t have any issues doesn’t mean same will be true for 300+ million people.
I can eat peanuts all day but it doesn’t mean they are not deadly to some people.
I also find your trump comment interesting and revealing. This whole vaccine issue is clearly not about science. Yes, the author and people who comment do parrot some studies and claims made by the companies who made the vaccines but all of this, in the end, is about politics.
If trump were president this site would be about how dangerous the vaccines are and how trump is reckless for pushing companies to develop them so quickly. In fact that’s EXACTLY what Biden and Harris were saying before the elections.
And me? I still would not be getting it because I’m in very low risk category and I don’t want to have medical experiments done on my body.
@fdsdf45435345
It is Trump who thinks that everything is political against him. Results of first clinical trials were available only after he lost the election.
And, I continue to marvel at all the ironies of the CDC believing they are rewarding Covid vaxxers by recommending they go maskless in public and the entire thing being based on a honor system…
Businesses wanting to protect their butts, and, even more motivating, eyeing the larger pool of unvaxxed business will likely post signs informing that the mask guideline is an honor system and they cannot force their customers to prove their vaccination status so all customers should assume the inherent risks to the point of reconsidering their patronage. Of course, the most frightened, and, as always, they ironically being the vaxxed customers, may very well start doing just that. At the end of the day then, how will the recommendation not amount to vaxxed individuals feeling more penalized than rewarded? Again, indeed I am an antivaxxer, yet how can I not reasonably conclude that the CDC’s decision was too stupid of a move not to be a deliberate attempt to undermine Covid vaccination? Could it be that provaxxers really are that stupid?!
CDC’s recommendation is based on fact that vaccines are 95% effective. Want you have some citation ?
94.5 % Efficacy of Vaccine means :
Only 1 Person out of 167 Vaccinated Persons will be Protected from Corona
Pfizer recently announced that
its covid vaccine was
more than 90 percent “effective” at preventing covid-19.
Shortly after this announcement, Moderna announced that its covid vaccine was 94.5 percent “effective” at preventing covid-19.
Hidden toward the end of both announcements, were the definitions of “effective.”
Both trials have a treatment group
that received the vaccine
and a control group that did not.
All the trial subjects were covid negative prior to the start of the trial.
The analysis for both trials was performed when a target number of “cases” were reached.
“Cases” were defined by positive polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing.
There was no information about the cycle number for the PCR tests **”
There was no information about hospitalizations or deaths.
The Pfizer study had
43,538 participants and was analyzed after 164 cases.
So, roughly 150 out 21,750 participants (less than 0.7 percent) became PCR positive in the control group and about one-tenth that number in the vaccine group became PCR positive.
The Moderna trial had 30,000 participants.
There were 95 “cases” in the 15,000 control participants
(about 0.6 percent) and 5 “cases” in the 15,000 vaccine participants
(about one-twentieth of 0.6 percent).
The “efficacy” figures quoted in these announcements are odds ratios.
There is no evidence, yet,
that the vaccine prevented any hospitalizations or any deaths.
The Moderna announcement claimed that eleven cases in the control group were “severe” disease,
but “severe” was not defined.
If there were any hospitalizations or deaths in either group,
the public has not been told.
When the Risks of an Event are Small, odds Ratio can be Misleading
about About Absolute Risk. . **
A more meaningful measure of efficacy would be
the number to vaccinate to prevent one hospitalization or one death.
Those numbers are not available.
An estimate of the number to treat from the Moderna trial to prevent a single “case” would be fifteen thousand vaccinations to prevent ninety “cases”
or 167 vaccinations per “case”
prevented
which does not sound nearly as good as 94.5 percent effective.
The publicists working for pharmaceutical companies are very smart people.
If there were a reduction
in mortality from these vaccines,
that information would be in the first paragraph of the announcement.
However, you should pay even more attention about
what is left out of an announcement than about what is stated.
The pharmaceutical companies are more than happy
for patients to
Misunderstand What is Meant by Efficacy. **
Author:
Gilbert Berdine, MD
11/24/2020
Only 1 Person out of 167 Vaccinated Persons will be Protected from Corona
Gilbert Berdine is an associate professor of medicine at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center and an affiliate of the Free Market Institute at Texas Tech University.
https://mises.org/wire/what-covid-vaccine-hype-fails-mention
“94.5 % Efficacy of Vaccine means :
Only 1 Person out of 167 Vaccinated Persons will be Protected from Corona”
You are obviously innumerate. Do you understand what “percent” means? Actually it means 94.5 out of 100 persons will be protected. Ignore the ignorant motivated reason below.
It’s not very good at cutting and pasting, either.
@Khan data you asked are here:
Eric J Haas, Frederick J Angulo, John M McLaughlin, Emilia Anis, Shepherd R Singer, Farid Khan, Nati Brooks, Meir Smaja, Gabriel Mircus, Kaijie Pan, Jo Southern, David L Swerdlow, Luis Jodar, Yeheskel Levy, Sharon Alroy-Preis,
Impact and effectiveness of mRNA BNT162b2 vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 infections and COVID-19 cases, hospitalisations, and deaths following a nationwide vaccination campaign in Israel: an observational study using national surveillance data,
The Lancet, Volume 397, Issue 10287, 2021, Pages 1819-1829,
ISSN 0140-6736,
https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(21)00947-8.
(https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140673621009478)
During the analysis period (Jan 24 to April 3, 2021), there were 232 268 SARS-CoV-2 infections, 7694 COVID-19 hospitalisations, 4481 severe or critical COVID-19 hospitalisations, and 1113 COVID-19 deaths in people aged 16 years or older. By April 3, 2021, 4 714 932 (72·1%) of 6 538 911 people aged 16 years and older were fully vaccinated with two doses of BNT162b2. Adjusted estimates of vaccine effectiveness at 7 days or longer after the second dose were 95·3% (95% CI 94·9–95·7; incidence rate 91·5 per 100 000 person-days in unvaccinated vs 3·1 per 100 000 person-days in fully vaccinated individuals) against SARS-CoV-2 infection, 91·5% (90·7–92·2; 40·9 vs 1·8 per 100 000 person-days) against asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection, 97·0% (96·7–97·2; 32·5 vs 0·8 per 100 000 person-days) against symptomatic COVID-19, 97·2% (96·8–97·5; 4·6 vs 0·3 per 100 000 person-days) against COVID-19-related hospitalisation, 97·5% (97·1–97·8; 2·7 vs 0·2 per 100 000 person-days) against severe or critical COVID-19-related hospitalisation, and 96·7% (96·0–97·3; 0·6 vs 0·1 per 100 000 person-days) against COVID-19-related death. In all age groups, as vaccine coverage increased, the incidence of SARS-CoV-2 outcomes declined. 8006 of 8472 samples tested showed a spike gene target failure, giving an estimated prevalence of the B.1.1.7 variant of 94·5% among SARS-CoV-2 infections.
So…expect people to behave responsibly on their own recognizance and they laugh at you for being naive.
Sounds like the best solution is heavy handed legislation and oppressive monitoring. Check.
@ fdsdf45435345
You write: “I just read your response which includes information about you volunteering for the trial. What you provided is an anecdote. Just because you didn’t have any issues doesn’t mean same will be true for 300+ million people.”
Yep, just an anecdote if that was all I base my support on the vaccine on; but it isn’t. On Dec 30, the first article in a peer-reviewed journal of the study I am in was posted and it clearly documented risk of adverse events and outcomes, and only the unvaccinated had serious adverse problems, etc. The article is: Baden LR (2020 Dec 30). Efficacy and Safety of the mRNA-1273 SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine. New England Journal of Medicine. There have been a number of peer-reviewed articles since. In addition, I have followed CDC MMWR reports, including thorough investigations of any VAERS claims, WHO reports, Swedish National Reports, etc. And I have the education and skills to actually evaluate the methodologies, etc.
You write: “I can eat peanuts all day but it doesn’t mean they are not deadly to some people.”
Absolutely true; but that doesn’t mean that everything and anything will be deadly for some people. A gross overgeneralization, opposed by overwhelming evidence of the safety of the mRNA vaccines and preceded by 30 years of knowledge on how mRNA vaccines will work.
You write: “I also find your trump comment interesting and revealing. This whole vaccine issue is clearly not about science. Yes, the author and people who comment do parrot some studies and claims made by the companies who made the vaccines but all of this, in the end, is about politics. If trump were president this site would be about how dangerous the vaccines are and how trump is reckless for pushing companies to develop them so quickly.”
First, I suggest you go back to earlier blogs on this site during Trump’s Presidency. You will find caution at first, then as more info came out on the vaccines, support. This is NOT a political site, though some posting comments certainly take political stands. And it was Trump who launched Operation Warp Speed to get a vaccine and he and his family got it. So, you are just one more example of people who literally don’t know what they are talking about.
You write: “And me? I still would not be getting it because I’m in very low risk category and I don’t want to have medical experiments done on my body.”
First, it is NOT a medical experiment, despite your ignorance. The mRNA vaccines went through the complete requirements for FDA approval, e.g., animal studies, phase 1, phase 2, phase 3 clinical trials. Phase 3 involved 30,000 people including seniors and those with comorbidities. The one simple reason it got to market so fast is that traditionally vaccine manufacturers only started producing vaccines after FDA approval. With COVID vaccines the government agreed to pay whether approved or not, so they were manufactured and ready to go. And again, besides the FDA requirements, there is 30 years of research on mRNA vaccines.
As for being in a low risk category, several problems:
1) The new variants are targeting younger people and are more transmissible.
2) even if you get and are asymptomatic, new evidence of vascular damage that could eventually affect your health
3) some of the new variants are causing more harm in younger people, perhaps not many deaths; but long COVID
4) and you could be asymptomatic and give it to friends, loved ones, or innocent third parties
Given your absolute ignorance of the vaccine, not experimental, your ignorance in claiming it would be condemned under Trump when he promoted and received it, and your exaggerated belief that you are low risk, also ignoring potential risk to others, what more need I say?
Yep, I began with an anecdote, one that explained how I, based on extensive education, reviewed all that is known about mRNA vaccines, and have been carefully following vaccine reports and the pandemic in general.
@ Greg
You write: ” Of course, the most frightened, and, as always, they ironically being the vaxxed customers, may very well start doing just that. At the end of the day then, how will the recommendation not amount to vaxxed individuals feeling more penalized than rewarded?”
You just get stupider and stupider. Yep, I did get the vaccine because I followed closely the pandemic, reviewed everything in books and articles on coronaviruses and deemed COVID a risk for me and those around me. But how should I feel penalized? Even if others not vaccinated start not wearing masks, I still feel much safer, though I know the vaccine doesn’t confer 100% protection, the odds are high if infected I will experience a mild case and I and several friends who were vaccinated will still use masks when shopping in stores; but not when outside, not in crowds. The masks will also somewhat protect us against other airborne infections.
Your comment doesn’t even make sense, illogical! ! !
Deep breaths. Remember that the goal is inflict the worst punishment, indifference.
I can’t take deep breaths because they don’t have the very interesting carts I started on any more and the new ones have a chemical irritant to simulate the most worstestes aspect of a huge bong rip. It does not just blow your lungs up and make you caugh, it lasts for hours. Flemmy wheezing is not you gotta cough to get off.
I’m sorry. I tried to support y’all schetchy Iranians for years but I’m finally resigned to look askance toward online commerce with reputable pen-pushers.
Not going to work. I am too damn powerful, too irresistible. There was a guy here that went by ‘Has’ who would implore everyone to ignore me; no one did and he gave up in frustration never to be heard from again.
Besides — what are you complaining about? I am suggesting that you guys wouldn’t be so stupid to believe that a maskless honor system would in anyway benefit the vaccination drive and there must had been another ‘hidden’ motivator for the CDC’s decision and especially now that I am learning that it was rushed. What – are you disagreeing by suggesting you guys really are that stupid?!
@ Greg
Sorry, Mr. Blazkowicz: not a native speaker. What precisely do you mean by a “honor system” ?
Nominally, the idea that the unvaccinated (such as myself) will continue to wear masks when appropriate (such as myself). Bear in mind that the Gerg-thing has no sense of honor, making its confusion-trolling predictable.
“What precisely do you mean by a “honor system” ?”
For regular peons it would mean sort of “your word” backed by “your credibility/reputation” and it generally likes to be conserved for, if one does not squander it by cloaking in dishonor, then nothing is spent, only gained by displaying it (usually.. sometimes).
An example of the honor system:
— what is in this caustic stuff I’m inhaling?
— proprietary stuff, all safe, all good.
— cool beans.
{5 seconds later… Wait a minute. These guys have never sold me anything but knockoff crap at a premium, dammit. But… safe… “Thank you for your honesty. Have a nice day!)
With Greg? I detect a disturbance in the force. It could be a semantical trap though the bits and peices are still spread out all over the ground because he hasn’t figured out how to put it together yet. I’d still mind not to step in it though — there is some pokey stuff and one may aquire an infection.
@ Narad
“Nominally, the idea that the unvaccinated (such as myself) will continue to wear masks when appropriate (such as myself). Bear in mind that the Gerg-thing has no sense of honor, making its confusion-trolling predictable.”
Yeah. The guy seems twisted. There is no honor in wearing a mask, being vaccinated or not, being sick or not. There is a lack of honor in twisting words and meaning to fit an agenda. But Greg already knows that. (Of course he does…)
Allow me to introduce you to “just the tip” of the Gergberg
“…I don’t want to have medical experiments done on my body.”
That’s why I got the vaccine, rather than risk experimenting to see what the effect of massive coronavirus replication in my body via infection would be like.
I had Covid 19. Survived. Unscathed. Felt like a combo of allergy, cold and flu. No fever but down for a few days. Now I have naturally occurring antibodies!
@cuckoo4cocopuffs, just because you had what you believed was COVID-19 and survived doesn’t mean everyone else will. The worldwide death toll is already in the millions.
You are using the antivaccine trope “the diseases aren’t that bad.”
This is for the
ridiculebenefit of Sonny the Cuckoo Bird.@ EVERYBODY
Throughout the pandemic numerous authorities have speculated that COVID deaths were undercounted, e.g., dying at home from heart attack, so no labs done. Well, a recent report by a well-respected Center at University of Washington, based on an excellent methodology (I carefully read the methods section) has confirmed this. According to the report, the number of COVID deaths so far Globally is 6.9 million, double the official report and in the U.S. more than 905,000, about 50% higher. than the official number If one speculates based on what we know, probably in U.S. another 100-200,000 suffering long COVID, and many more who experienced asymptomatic cases with vascular damage that may lead to future health problems. So, anyone downplaying the seriousness of COVID, e.g., compared to flu, though even with the previous statistics obvious, are really NUTS, living in a world of fantasy.
References:
University of Washington Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (2021 May 6). News Release: COVID-19 has caused 6.9 million deaths globally, more than double what official reports show. Both available at: http://www.healthdata.org
University of Washington Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (2021 May 13). Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19.
@TBruce rudely writes, “Citation or GTFO” – https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/pubs/surv-manual/chpt21-surv-adverse-events.html
RE: VAERS Underreporting
“Evaluation of system attributes: A survey was conducted in 2005 to assess the knowledge, attitudes, and practices among healthcare providers about reporting to VAERS.[32] Data indicated that although 71% of respondents were familiar with VAERS, only 17% said they were very familiar with it. Approximately 37% of healthcare providers had identified at least one adverse event after immunization, but only 17% stated that they had ever reported to VAERS. Vaccine Information Statements (VIS) were the most common source used to learn about VAERS. CDC is continuing to support efforts to further evaluate providers’ perceptions and behaviors about VAERS and about reporting AEs after vaccination.”
@ cuckoo4cocopuffs
You did notice that the survey you refer to was conducted in 2005, that is 16 years ago? I won’t bother giving references; but only about 1% of mild adverse events are reported; but up to 25% of serious ones are reported. Internet antivax blogs were just starting to explode, social media as well and newsletters from major medical associations as well as conferences dealt with VAERS. Just one example from American Academy of Pediatrics:
H. Cody Meissner, M.D., FAAP (2016 Jul 21). Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System plays vital role in safety. AAP News.
And if you read through the paper you linked to, you would understand just how thorough each serious reported adverse events is investigated. Do you really believe that even with underreporting they wouldn’t receive any reports of some specific serious adverse event? Read up on intussusception, even discussed in your link.
Also, you ignore what I and others have written, that VAERS is only one of several post-marketing surveillance systems for vaccines. The Vaccine Safety Datalink, the real CDC vaccine-safety evaluation system, is a real-time link to approximately 11.3 million insured patients, including around 2 million children. It gives CDC teams vaccine, lot number, age, gender, comorbidities, any subsequent medical visits, including diagnosis. And there are other CDC post-marketing programs. Check out CDC Vaccine Safety. And, as I’ve already mentioned, other developed nations, e.g. UK, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Germany, etc. have their own vaccine approval requirements and post-marketing surveillance.
Do you really think that public health people, e.g., medical doctors, epidemiologists, etc. from different nations, with different histories, different cultures, different economic systems, different political systems, different educational systems are all either incompetent or dishonest, not caring about the welfare of their respective nations, especially their children?
So, you found a 2005 survey and think you proved anything. Just one more example of the irrationality, illogic of those opposed to vaccines. I repeat, VAERS is only one system. It is like criminal justice where police could call in, even arrest, a number of suspects; but find NOT one guilty or just one. VAERS is a system reporting what people suspect. And despite what you choose to believe, knowledge of VAERS has exploded over the past decade. Not only antivax blogs, social media; but news coverage, opinion pieces in newspapers and magazines, etc.
And there is one more system especially being used by CDC during the current COVID vaccinations, namely, the VA. You do understand that the VA has a large percentage of older people with many comorbidities, so a near perfect system for post-marketing surveillance of COVID vaccines and they have not found what you would like to believe in your ill-informed world of fantasy.
What I find fascinating and frightening is people like yourself who choose to believe, without any background in immunology, infectious diseases, epidemiology, etc, that you know the truth. As I’ve written several times, if given the plans for a bridge, I wouldn’t dare venture to choose one as I have NEVER taken a single course in structural engineering. In fact, though I got straight A’s in undergraduate courses in French and German, I wouldn’t dare attempt to translate some important document or act as a translator at a meeting. As Dirty Harry said: “A man has to know his limits” and people like you DON’T
You may actually be quite good at something, perhaps, business accounting, history, whatever; but doesn’t make you all-knowing.
Rude, am I?
What is rude is waltzing into a discussion and dropping a ridiculous comment, without being bothered to provide some support for for your assertion.
As for Joel answering instead of me, I thank him sincerely for his detailed reply, which requires no further addition from me.
@ Joel – I was responding to TBruce not you. And yes I realize the citation was from 2005. H. Cody Meissner, M.D., FAAP (2016 Jul 21). Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System plays vital role in safety – Yeah, this might have helped with pediatrician reporting or not but what about adults and their adverse reactions? Anything more current for this demo?
Please try to cipher out how replies work. TIA. HTH. HAND.
@ Narad – I know how replies work…does Joel? Dude is obsessed with dominating a majority of the threads.
Do you have anything helpful to add regarding the adult demo and adverse reactions reporting since what I posted was too old according to Joel?
Then put them in the right f*cking place and bear in mind that you don’t get to bitch about who responds to your comments.
@ EVERYBODY
By law, over 30 years old, every vaccine provider is required to give you a Vaccine Information Statement for each and every vaccine you or your child receives. In addition, many health providers requirement recipients or their guardians to sign that they have read the VIS and understood them. Of course, probably all providers don’t follow the law and many recipients don’t bother to read them. However, they are proof that the CDC goes out of its way to inform vaccine recipients about vaccines, including potential serious adverse events AND clear information how to contact VAERS.
You can find ALL current Vaccine Information Statements at:
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/eua/index.html
Included are VIS for each and every current Covid Vaccine. Below is an example:
Moderna Covid Vaccine
https://www.modernatx.com/covid19vaccine-eua/eua-fact-sheet-recipients.pdf
WHAT ARE THE RISKS OF THE MODERNA COVID-19 VACCINE?
There is a remote chance that the Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine could cause a severe allergic reaction. A severe allergic reaction would usually occur within a few minutes to one hour after getting a dose of the Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine. For this reason, your vaccination provider may ask you to stay at the place where you received your vaccine for monitoring after vaccination. Signs of a severe allergic reaction can include:
• Difficulty breathing
• Swelling of your face and throat
• A fast heartbeat
• A bad rash all over your body
Dizziness and weakness
Side effects that have been reported in a clinical trial with the Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine include:
• Injection site reactions: pain, tenderness and swelling of the lymph nodes in the same arm of the injection, swelling (hardness), and redness
• General side effects: fatigue, headache, muscle pain, joint pain, chills, nausea and vomiting, and fever
Side effects that have been reported during post-authorization use of the Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine include:
• Severe allergic reactions
These may not be all the possible side effects of the Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine. Serious and unexpected side effects may occur. The Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine is still being studied in clinical trials.
WHAT SHOULD I DO ABOUT SIDE EFFECTS?
If you experience a severe allergic reaction, call 9-1-1, or go to the nearest hospital.
Call the vaccination provider or your healthcare provider if you have any side effects that bother you or do not go away.
Report vaccine side effects to FDA/CDC Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). The VAERS toll-free number is 1-800-822-7967 or report online to https://vaers.hhs.gov/reportevent.html. Please include “Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine EUA” in the first line of box #18 of the report form.
In addition, you can report side effects to ModernaTX, Inc. at 1-866-MODERNA (1-866-663- 3762).
You may also be given an option to enroll in v-safe. V-safe is a new voluntary smartphone-based tool that uses text messaging and web surveys to check in with people who have been vaccinated to identify potential side effects after COVID-19 vaccination. V-safe asks questions that help CDC monitor the safety of COVID-19 vaccines.
@ Julian writes, “just because you had what you believed was COVID-19 and survived doesn’t mean everyone else will. The worldwide death toll is already in the millions.
You are using the antivaccine trope “the diseases aren’t that bad.”
Aw Julian… I was speaking of my personal experience with Covid. I was confirmed through testing. I didn’t just believe I had it. TYVM. Remember coronavirus is so mild for some, they don’t even have symptoms.
Now regarding self-dissminating vaccines – https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-020-1254-y
QED.
.
See?
@ cuckoo4cocopuffs
You must have missed the research that has found vascular damage even in those who were asymptomatic. Whether such damage will lead to possible health care problems down the line or not not known; but I got the vaccine and am glad I don’t have such damage.
I will keep my fingers crossed that you did NOT sustain any vascular damage.
@ Joel writes, “You must have missed the research that has found vascular damage even in those who were asymptomatic.” Yes. I did. Do you have more information or citation regarding your claim. Thank you.
I hope you keep testing your antibody levels, as the current data suggests that protection from wild-type infection wanes after ~6 months and you could be vulnerable again. Probably smart to top off with a vaccine.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/05/researchers-show-neutralizing-antibodies-correlate-with-covid-protection/
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41591-021-01377-8
In other news, the Catholic Church is moving to dencounce spooning with the devil.
” infection wanes after ~6 months and you could be vulnerable again. Probably smart to top off with a vaccine..”
This article says 8 months but then they really don’t know….lots of assumptions and guesses. I’ll rely on my immune system but thanks for your concern.
@cuckoo4cocpuffs Do not forget that SARS CoV 2 can evade your immune system very well:
Bouayad A. Innate immune evasion by SARS-CoV-2: Comparison with SARS-CoV. Rev Med Virol. 2020 Nov;30(6):1-9. doi: 10.1002/rmv.2135. Epub 2020 Jul 30. PMID: 32734714.
To cite your link
“A promising approach for mitigating the public health burden of chronic spillover and reducing the threat of future pandemics is to shift our focus to target high-risk pathogens within their animal reservoirs before viral spillover and/or emergence can occur.”
You never read your links, do you ?
“you never read your links”. You make a lot of assumptions. I’d think the science you preach would make you more objective or not. Perhaps you are a follower of scientism instead.
“The technology for developing transmissible vaccines now exists, and field trials focused on protecting wild rabbits from a viral haemorrhagic fever using this technique have showed promising results.” https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24732960-100-we-now-have-the-technology-to-develop-vaccines-that-spread-themselves/
How long do you think it will be before this “advancement” is tested on the human animal? Will we even know?
Our government has experimented on us without consent in the past. Ever heard of Operation Sea Spray? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sea-Spray
Ah, the painfully trite, the ultimate weapon of the comment paratrooper.
@cuckoo4cocopuffs
It was again rabbits. Write again when humans are involved.
No, I do not think humans will ever get these vaccines.
It’s very telling that cuckoo4cocopuffs assumes 1) that everyone is a Bond villain just waiting for their moment to strike and 2) that there aren’t plans and systems in place to watch out for things like this.
Silly Rabbit: Heck, I had the black plague and after a few days dead in a grave, I was back to work better than ever. Sounds like your immune system is a wimpy little thing. And given the grammatical and logical errors in your replies, I wouldn’t be so sure you had no adverse effects from Covid. Were you an average IQ person before the disease?
“after a few days dead in a grave, I was back to work better than ever.”
You’re a politician?
Well, arms are fallling off left and rigt. They seem to be organizing — Stong Together. I’m going to attempt to hide in this tall boy now.
My, God. What have we unleased?? The spikes shorted out all the electronics so we can’t go “wa wa HELPME please.
Reading these blogs, it’s readily apparent how much loathing there is for the antivaxxer. In fact, it’s not just here, it’s everywhere. Just recently I came across a Covid article calling for a pause to this hatred, suggesting that slowdown with covid vaccination may not be entirely due to antivaxxers. The author explained that it’s natural that there would be a slowdown since the most eager already got the vaccine and leaving those who were more apathetic or too busy to bother. She explained that such folks were not true antivaxxers that were radically opposed to vaccines.
Even with parents and kids’ vaccination, the majority of those parents that skip vaccines are not true antivaxxers but parents that may be more apathetic or negligent, yet it’s the minority hardcore antivaxx parents that always seem to garner most of the ire. Why is that?
To understand the reason, it’s helpful to start by considering how the antivaxxer sees the provaxxer or vaxxed individual. In addition to seeing the vaxxed individuals as a sucker who drank the kool-aid — or poison! — the antivaxxer also sees him as dirty, defiled — marred! It’s not so much that the antivaxxer feels that the vaxxed individuals was harmed in any real way — and he may very well believe this! — but the feeling that the vaxxed individuals was smeared in some unnatural, even spiritual way. For this reason, the antivaxxer will always see the vaxxed individuals as his inferior.
The vaxxed individual on the other hand may also hold contemptuous feelings for the antivaxxer. The vaxxed individual may consider the antivaxxer as scientifically ignorant, backwards, and selfish. Yet, in that vaccination is not his natural state, the vaxxed individual will never have the same level of confidence as the antivaxxer, and he may very well find himself entertaining the the thought that the antivaxxer may be right — that he, the vaxxed individual, may have been smeared in some unnatural way. The fact that he cannot undo his vaccination adds to the feeling of being marred.
This dirty secret that the antivaxxer may be right and have a reason to feel superior is where the vaxxer’s hate and grudge is coming from. Whatever positive attitude he may hold that he acted in a way that will promote his or the ‘herd’s’ health cannot erase this feeling. The only course for the hate is to seek revenge; the malicious tyrant will seek to force vaccines on the antivaxxer!
I certainly do not think that an antivaxxer like Robert Kennedy Jr is right. Everything he says is obviously wrong, a simple check tells it
North American Journal of Medical Sciences
Wolters Kluwer — Medknow Publications
What is regressive autism and why does it occur?
Is it the consequence of multi-systemic dysfunction affecting the elimination of heavy metals and the ability to regulate neural temperature?
Graham E. Ewing
There is a compelling argument that the occurrence of regressive autism is attributable to genetic and chromosomal abnormalities, arising from the overuse of vaccines,
which subsequently affects the stability and function of the autonomic nervous system and physiological systems.
That sense perception is linked to the autonomic nervous system and the function of the physiological systems enables us to examine the significance of autistic symptoms from a systemic perspective.
Failure of the excretory system influences elimination of heavy metals and facilitates their accumulation and subsequent manifestation as neurotoxins: the long-term consequences of which would lead to neurodegeneration, cognitive and developmental problems. It may also influence regulation of neural hyperthermia.
This article explores the issues and concludes that sensory dysfunction and systemic failure,
manifested as autism, is the inevitable consequence arising from subtle DNA alteration and consequently from the overuse of vaccines.
here, our curiosity is pricked
by some verifiable medical truths:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3878266/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21623535
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25377033
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24995277
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12145534
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21058170
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22099159
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3364648/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17454560
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19106436
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3774468/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3697751/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21299355
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21907498
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11339848
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17674242
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21993250
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15780490
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12933322
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16870260
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19043938
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12142947
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24675092
Causal relationship between vaccine induced immunity and autism
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12849883
Subtle DNA changes and the overuse of vaccines in autism
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3364648/
Vaccine and Autism- a New Scientific Review
http://www.cbsnews.com/…/vaccines-and-autism-a-new…/ … Continue
It is a veritable greatest hits of anti-vaccine junk science.
@Khan If you continue your link dump, do not include anymore papers about mercury or thimerosal. Thimerosal was removed from vaccines in 2001, and autism rate still went up.
In addition, you do not need to do a link dump. Post one paper in time.
I noticed that you added Tomljenovic paper. It did not include East Asian countries with high autism rate. Hongkong has highest autism rate in the world, and very low vaccination intake
@ Greg
You write: “This dirty secret that the antivaxxer may be right and have a reason to feel superior is where the vaxxer’s hate and grudge is coming from.”
“May be right?” On what do you base this? Do you understand immunology, microbiology, infections disease history and current status in world, epidemiology, etc.? Have you looked at up-to-date stats on increases in vaccinations and decreasing COVID cases? Have you checked out CDC’s Vaccine Safety Datalink, their main program for looking at vaccine adverse events?
I don’t hate you, just feel sorry for someone so delusional that they believe they are right without any scientific basis.
Joel, I think you missed my point. Setting aside the debatable argument that there is actual evidence that vaccination is a good thing, there is the psychological aspect of vaccination, and its the foremost area where the antivaxxer derives his sense of superiority. The antivaxxer feels injecting toxins in a person is also harmful in a psychological, even spiritual way. It’s robbing the person of his purity; he is being defiled. And, as I argued, in that being vaccinated is not a person’s natural state and it cannot be reversed, the vaxxed individuals may very well entertain this idea that he was marred in some unnatural way and even if he feels he is better off being vaxxed. On a subconscious level, he too may feel he was defiled, and he may envy the antivaxxer for his naturalness. I am arguing a great deal of vaxxed indivuduals ire for antivaxxers may be due from this psychological sentiment.
@ Greg
You write: “The antivaxxer feels injecting toxins in a person is also harmful in a psychological, even spiritual way. It’s robbing the person of his purity; he is being defiled. And, as I argued, in that being vaccinated is not a person’s natural state and it cannot be reversed, the vaxxed individuals may very well entertain this idea that he was marred in some unnatural way and even if he feels he is better off being vaxxed. On a subconscious level, he too may feel he was defiled, and he may envy the antivaxxer for his naturalness. I am arguing a great deal of vaxxed indivuduals ire for antivaxxers may be due from this psychological sentiment.”
Yep, I feel psychologically defiled every time I open the newspaper or go online and read about the increasing deaths, long Covid, and vascular damage and, at the same time, read about reduced cases as vaccination rates increase. And I also keep track of reported adverse events. And, if anyone, not you of course you, actually take the time to read up on mRNA vaccines and the lipid nanoparticles, they will understand that the mRNA breaks down in a few hours, only produces a limited number of S-Spike proteins, which are not even the complete S-Spike proteins that are attached to the COVID virus, so they can’t attach to cells, can only survive a short time. In other word, it doesn’t need to be reversed since it is short-lived. But it does create short-term antibodies and t-cells and memory antibodies and t-cells that protect against actual infection.
And it is not just protecting myself; but friends and loved ones if I should get an asymptomatic case or during incubation before full-fledged illness.
By the way, have you, a friend, or loved one ever received an antibiotic for a serious infection? Antibiotics are NOT natural to our bodies, so also “robbing us of our purity.”
How about has anyone you love or a friend ever received chemotherapy for cancer? Why not let the body do its thing? After all, chemotherapy certainly isn’t something normally in our bodies, so, again, “robbing us of our purity.”
Of course, you really don’t care as your goal is not to enter into an intelligent discussion; but just irritate people. So, I am not writing this for you; but for anyone else monitoring this blog.
Maybe the anti-vaxxers need to put on their big boy pants and leave that special snowflake attitude at the door.
[…] Are any of the COVID-19 vaccines self-spreading, self-propagating, transmissible vaccines? […]
It’s the first day of Shill University, and all the unscrupulous, shameful students that aspire to be shills are there waiting in the lecture auditorium — excited! Shortly, a stern looking middle aged man enters from a side door and he walks to the podium in the front. He pauses as he surveys the room. looking around at all the students.
He begins in a calm voice: “Welcome to Shill University. It takes a special calling to become a pharma shill, and frankly I will say most of you don’t have it. Most of you will fail this program.”
He pauses and then starts again, but now he is barking, “To succeed as a pharma shill, you must always abide by three rules! Everything you will learn here extends from from these rules. First, promote vaccines and never concede anything detrimental about them! Second, if you must concede anything, only do so because not conceding will hurt the vaccination cause by making things worse! Finally, if you are force to concede negative vaccine info, never –ever!– tell the whole truth; always make things seem better than they really are.”
Back to being calm: “These are the rules. Follow them and you will pass this course and become successful pharma shills. Good luck!”
The students’ excitement is now tempered. Will they be able to follow the rules? Will they pass the course and become successful pharma shills?
When trying to predict and account for vaccine pushers’ moves, it is always helpful to consider these three rules. For example, take the article below reporting that Fauci and Pfizer’s Head are saying that a booster will be certain. A few months ago. it was said a booster seemed probably, but rule 2 and 3 and my estimation that the trial’s efficacy results post a year had to be already in informed me that things were likely ‘certain’. I guessed that those results were bad. Now that things are confirmed as ‘certain’, again, rule 2 has me believing things are now likely disastrous. Probably more efficacy results are coming in and showing efficacy going completely off the the cliff post a year and rendering the vaccine useless.
Could the CDC’s recent announcement of a maskless honour system fit into these rules? It may very likely. Probably the announcement that is bound to result in the erosion of Covid vaccination was the CDC’s sleazy way of getting the public to pull the plug rather than they having to fess up that the experiment was a failure and having to deal with the inferno.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/19/health/covid-vaccine-booster-anthony-fauci/index.html
@ Greg
Fascinating how you avoid addressing my refutations of your comments. As for the need for a booster, so what? I get my teeth cleaned every year and an annual physical, including labs. And despite your incredible level of ignorance and/or stupidity regarding vaccines, getting a shot every year is no big deal. I get the flu shot every year and it is only about 50% effective, while the COVID vaccine is about 94%.
I assume your definition of a “shill” is anyone who disagrees with you. I am a strong supporter of vaccines, so must, in your opinion, make me a shill. My support could not possibly be based on over 40 years of reading and learning about history of vaccine-preventable diseases, about immunology, microbiology, and epidemiology? But your position is based on what? So, I accept being called a shill by you. Take it as a compliment.
In some ways your comments provide comic relief compared with the serious COVID pandemic; but, on the other hand, they are just one more example of people who are ignorant; but certain of themselves, the Dunning-Kruger Effect.
No, it’s not. He’s trying to yank your chain, nothing else. It is counterproductive to reply to him.
Again, no. He is Canada’s lowest cost distilled assholery.
Funny thing is that if you reverse your statements, you would get antivax university. Antivax university describes exactly attitudes of your ilk.
[…] proteins” and “shedding,” those are antivaccine lies. “Shedding” is not a thing, and spike protein is produced at barely detectable levels by the […]
Why does the Pfizer trial protocol call for monitoring and reporting those, not participating in the trial, who may yet have been exposed to their ‘study intervention by inhalation or skin contact’? Here’s one of the sections referring to this. There are a few others as well.
“8.3.5.1. Exposure During Pregnancy
An EDP occurs if:
• A female participant is found to be pregnant while receiving or after discontinuing study intervention.
• A male participant who is receiving or has discontinued study intervention exposes a female partner prior to or around the time of conception.
• A female is found to be pregnant while being exposed or having been exposed to study intervention due to environmental exposure.
Below are examples of environmental exposure during pregnancy:
• ? ?????? ?????? ?????? ?? ?????????? ???????? ??????? ???? ??? ?? ???????? ????? ?????? ???? ??????? ?? ??? ????? ???????????? ?? ?????????? ?? ???? ???????.
• ? ???? ?????? ?????? ?? ?????????? ???????? ??? ??? ???? ??????? ?? ??? ????? ???????????? ?? ?????????? ?? ???? ??????? ???? ??????? ??? ?????? ??????? ????? ?? ?? ?????? ??? ???? ?? ??????????.”
Discussed as part of this post:
https://www.respectfulinsolence.com/2021/05/07/centner-academy/
You’re welcome.
You pointed me to a bunch of red herrings and straw man arguments. The idea that all of that ‘inhalation or skin contact’ is referring to someone accidentally spilling some of the ‘study intervention’ on themselves is illogical at best. The protocol already contains a section for that, which uses ‘unplanned direct contact with the study intervention’ to describe that scenario. Can you point me to any other study protocols by Pfizer that refer to exposure by inhalation or skin contact? I examined several of their other vaccine study protocols and did not find any mention of this phrasing. As far as the safety and ethical concerns, since when has Pfizer demonstrated they care about that? Because there are plenty of (legal) cases where it’s been shown they’re quite willing to set those aside in the name of profits.
These are standard things to monitor, as you would know if you have exxtensively studied study protocols. Unplanned direct contact is not same thing as skin contact. Consider planned direct contact.