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> It boggles my mind that despite inflicting obvious and severe harm on your very own kids, people still believe in "vaccines". Let alone $10k. it boggles my

• exodust 4y ago
  "Wild success"? That isn't helpful. While I don't agree with previous comment implying obvious and severe harm from vaccines, it's well known that kids rarely get sick from covid. It's well known the vaccine effectiveness wanes in a short time, and doesn't stop symptomatic infection, and is doing very little to stop transmission. It's only real benefit is prevention of serious illness in those most vulnerable. Given these facts, you can't blame people for not wanting to jab their kids with covid vaccines.
  • trog 4y ago
    Assumed GP was talking about vaccines in general. But the COVID vaccines alone has an order of magnitude impact on body count, before you even look at reducing severity, reducing spread, and the other benefits. Hard for me to consider that anything other than a wild success. Is it perfect? Of course not. Do I wish it was better? Obviously. But it reduced the risk of COVID significantly for a huge number of people. Those of us in countries that had successful lockdowns look at the mortality rate of those that were not able or willing to do so & pretty thankful we were able to postpone the virus until the vaccine was deployed.
    • exodust 4y ago
      Many who blanket-praise the vaccine as you have, are doing so from a pre-existing "team sport" position on the subject. I'm not saying you are, but it's common. I live in a place which has the unfortunate claim of longest, harshest lockdown in the world (Victoria, Australia). Multiple lengthy lockdowns, curfews, masks outside enforced by cops, sitting on the beach was illegal, taking kids to park illegal; people were literally chased down the street by cops demanding to "see your papers". Many cops resigned, and now in 2022 Victoria is struggling to find new recruits after a mass exodus of cops - many of whom did not agree with the job they were ordered to do. Most people here do not consider those lockdowns a "success", and experts including epidemiologists have referred to our lockdowns as "draconian", and harmful. Now, in 2022 we have more covid deaths than before, and that's with a very high rate of vaccination in the community, particularly the older age groups. But they're still dying at a record rate. The virus still spreads and still takes out vaccinated and boosted victims. Therefore, I would never adopt the blanket "thankful" rhetoric that you've shared. Thankful for lockdowns, thankful for mandates, thankful for what is frankly, an underwhelming vaccine compared to other vaccines. Yet, "saved millions of lives" is the go-to catch-phrase, and anything else can't possibly be true. Can it.
      • trog 4y ago
        I'll cheer lead vaccines from a team sport position all day long; in this case I'm doing so from that perspective and from the perspective that the vaccine has shown to have a significant (order of magnitude) impact on death (etc, etc). I don't think it's totally unfair to call it 'underwhelming' though. We are so used to vaccines being wildly successful at stamping out a bunch of diseases that when something as virulent as this comes along & the efficacy isn't as high (in no small part due to the fact that so many countries decided to make it the only line of defence), it's easy to be disillusioned. I live in Queensland, Australia, where we had lockdowns that were similar in harshness but much more limited in length. I am very familiar with the Melbourne lockdowns (one of my colleagues got stuck there for months after he got trapped there after going down for a 1 week holiday). We probably just got lucky that we didn't have a Melbourne-style outbreak. But the simple fact is the lockdowns prevented us from having a widespread outbreak before the vaccine was deployed. The lockdowns sucked but my anecdata from my network (certainly generally privileged people whose careers were not wildly affected, so not a representative sample) was the lockdowns were worth it. It is trivial to look at mortality rate data between, say, US/UK and Australia to see the impact that the lockdowns had. It's simply undeniable that they saved lives. People complaining loudly about 'draconian' tend, in my experience, to be dipshit libertarians that would never brook any lockdowns under any circumstances simply because of their insane political views. Others complaining about lockdowns not working tend to be talking about their own lockdowns in their own contexts which were not as harsh as Melbourne (which, arguably, ended up working). Of course we have more COVID deaths than before - we've dialled back all the preventions! The policy decision was made to let COVID run free through society and that the vaccines (which we both agree are imperfect, but perhaps I'm the only one that acknowledges they're vastly better than nothing) were the only mitigation that we're apparently willing to tolerate. We've done fuck all about it and everyone seems surprised that the body count is still so high. I don't know why people are still surprised people are dying - we've clearly decided the policy position is to sacrifice people on the altar of the economy and that people are bored of dealing with COVID. We're not bothering with other mitigations despite it being a top 5 cause of death in Australia (top 3 in the US?).
        • exodust 4y ago
• jesterson 4y ago
  If you can call 15yo getting myocarditis a "wild success" I'll leave it to your conscience. It's not a single separated case as you may want to counterargument. A vaccine "wild success" is only attributable to financial statements for big pharma. This is really wild, I'll give you that