3 ms·

> For example in recent weeks a whole lot of people were surprised to see the lab leak hypothesis go straight from "debunked conspiracy theory" to Biden orderin

> For example in recent weeks a whole lot of people were surprised to see the lab leak hypothesis go straight from "debunked conspiracy theory" to Biden ordering it to be investigated, apparently without any intermediate points. I absolutely believe this was from a lab leak and I also closely follow the science. The question is, why would you want a potentially man-made virus (via gain of function research) in your system at all? With the vaccine, you teach your immune system to see Covid-19 right away and take care of it at first sight. Without it, you have to GET Covid-19, have it embed itself inside all of your vital organs, then have your immune system hopefully slowly learn and take care of it. Meanwhile it is sitting in your heart, liver, lungs, kidneys and pancreas doing damage that is coming to light in more and more studies. Your an adult. Your choice, but in my mind this is a poor choice.

mike_hearn 5y ago
I think there's a common assumption in some of these replies that eventual infection is a P=1.0 event. This is a common claim by public health authorities and scientists routinely put this assumption in their models, but there's no clear backing for it. And if you look at the history of outbreaks of respiratory viruses, actually they don't infect everyone. If you relax the assumption that the choice is (virus | vaccine) to be a more accurate (vaccine | {virus | nothing}) type condition, the vaccine looks less attractive. Phrased another way, we can: 1. Get a virus that appears to have been leaked and/or enhanced by incompetent scientists, and their incompetence was then denied and covered up. 2. Get a vaccine that may or may not have been developed by incompetent scientists, but if they are incompetent then for sure there will be/currently is another coverup. 3. Do nothing. The expected likelihood of this is unclear, partly because despite decades of research epidemiology can't predict case curves for a respiratory virus, but given my lived experience so far the chance of remaining healthy seems high. Clearly, for our bodies the best result is to have no virus and no vaccine. mRNA vaccines were hard to develop because the body treats foreign RNA as very dangerous and has lots of mechanisms to destroy it, hence the chemical manipulations required to bypass those mechanisms. You're saying that whilst scenario (3) is clearly attractive, the chance of it happening is so low that it's not worth considering. I'm saying that I haven't seen any evidence that this is true, and I've seen evidence that it's not true, and at any rate the cost of losing this bet is that with very high certainty I get a nasty bug and feel bad for a few days. Well, OK. I've done that before. Also feeling wiped out for a few days is, presumably not coincidentally, a very common reported side effect of the vaccine. More reasons to take a gamble and go for scenario (3). In practice of course all this is distorted by government action. My expectation is that I will eventually take it because government scientists are determined to push collective solutions over individual solutions like Ivermectin, and they can make life arbitrarily painful in their quest to make hold-outs submit. My hope is that if that does eventually happen, there will be more data, more certainty and doctors will have more experience with side effects.

mike_hearn 5y ago

I think there's a common assumption in some of these replies that eventual infection is a P=1.0 event. This is a common claim by public health authorities and scientists routinely put this assumption in their models, but there's no clear backing for it. And if you look at the history of outbreaks of respiratory viruses, actually they don't infect everyone. If you relax the assumption that the choice is (virus | vaccine) to be a more accurate (vaccine | {virus | nothing}) type condition, the vaccine looks less attractive. Phrased another way, we can: 1. Get a virus that appears to have been leaked and/or enhanced by incompetent scientists, and their incompetence was then denied and covered up. 2. Get a vaccine that may or may not have been developed by incompetent scientists, but if they are incompetent then for sure there will be/currently is another coverup. 3. Do nothing. The expected likelihood of this is unclear, partly because despite decades of research epidemiology can't predict case curves for a respiratory virus, but given my lived experience so far the chance of remaining healthy seems high. Clearly, for our bodies the best result is to have no virus and no vaccine. mRNA vaccines were hard to develop because the body treats foreign RNA as very dangerous and has lots of mechanisms to destroy it, hence the chemical manipulations required to bypass those mechanisms. You're saying that whilst scenario (3) is clearly attractive, the chance of it happening is so low that it's not worth considering. I'm saying that I haven't seen any evidence that this is true, and I've seen evidence that it's not true, and at any rate the cost of losing this bet is that with very high certainty I get a nasty bug and feel bad for a few days. Well, OK. I've done that before. Also feeling wiped out for a few days is, presumably not coincidentally, a very common reported side effect of the vaccine. More reasons to take a gamble and go for scenario (3). In practice of course all this is distorted by government action. My expectation is that I will eventually take it because government scientists are determined to push collective solutions over individual solutions like Ivermectin, and they can make life arbitrarily painful in their quest to make hold-outs submit. My hope is that if that does eventually happen, there will be more data, more certainty and doctors will have more experience with side effects.