I was hesitant for a while and the massive censorship was part of it. I got vaccinated in May and have convinced others to get the shot since the side effects, while existent, appear to be minor compared to the reduction in harmful symptoms. Talking to my doctor is what did it for me. He cleared up most of my concerns and pressed me that my remaining concerns were too nebulous to be useful. If he just said "shut up and take it" I wouldn't have.
My mother only got vaccinated last month. She and my father are both medical professionals (she's retired and my dad got it early on since he's super high risk). Her main hangup was the lies and coercion. She believed that if the vaccine was actually as great as they're saying they'd be able to make more objective goalposts and win arguments instead of stopping them because the other side is too stupid to make their own decisions. I'm confident there was also some element of "if I get it now I'm telling them their tactics worked."
> She believed that if the vaccine was actually as great as they're saying they'd be able to make more objective goalposts and win arguments instead of stopping them because the other side is too stupid to make their own decisions.
The problem I see here is that the (I hesitate to call it this) anti-vax "side" has been shifting goalposts since day n-1. If you've ever talked to someone who's shifted goalposts you'll see it's essentially an impossible situation; you can't convince someone who doesn't want to be convinced.
If I'm remembering the timeline correctly, it started with the vaccine being rushed and that we were essentially being experimented on. It's been six months since I – and many others – have had their first dose and we're completely fine. Some claimed to be concerned about the long term effects; do you think they know what the long term effects of a serious covid case is? (hint: it starts with a d and ends with "eath")
Oh, but it's also not FDA approved. I haven't looked at the numbers, but I bet vaccinations haven't gone up significantly since FDA approval. Obviously it's because the FDA isn't to be trusted, that's a given.
At some point it was too hard to get- yes, that's true. However, now you can walk into a Target and decide to get the shot in the middle of a shopping trip! I did that with a Flu shot a few weeks ago and it took about five minutes.
In short, you cannot argue in good faith with someone who does not. I don't have a good answer to this – I really wish I did – but that's the reality of the situation.
> do you think they know what the long term effects of a serious covid case is? (hint: it starts with a d and ends with "eath")
This is a dangerous message to push. The reality is that there are many lasting consequences of COVID that fall short of death but are, never the less, quite serious. The so called “long COVID” really needs to be part of the vaccine calculus because the health consequences are very much worse than the purported side effects from the vaccine.
I’ve seen this kind of phenomenon first hand when it comes to drugs. As a teenager, there was lots of anti-drug messaging trying to convince us that ecstasy was dangerous. And all of it focused on scaring kids by exaggerating the risk of death. But we could see people taking it regularly and none of them were dying. And so it undercut the message. But decades later, I know a few people who’ve had depressive episodes potentially linked to heavy ecstasy use. And that consequence was never a part of the decision-making process because the authorities discredited themselves by being unnecessarily and obviously hyperbolic.
We need better messaging that provides people with the full range of consequences for their choices. The “you’re going to die!!!” hysteria ends up being counterproductive. Even as deadly as COVID is, the truth is that unvaccinated people probably won’t die from their case…the vast majority survive. But if people understood how many recoveries included long-term health consequences that significantly affected their quality of life, they might be better able to weigh that against the potential side effects of a vaccine.
> I’ve seen this kind of phenomenon first hand when it comes to drugs.
In 7th or 8th grade, I remember watching a video in health class that included a (presumably fictional) dramatization where a kid died his first time trying marijuana because (unbeknownst to him) it had been laced with crack cocaine. It was difficult to take much of health class seriously after seeing that video.
If your audience doesn't have much background in your subject matter, they're still able to spot lazy arguments. They know they're unable to judge the merits of the rest, but the lazy arguments spoil the whole message. Many times, lazy arguments are less damaging when the audience has the necessary background to evaluate everything being said.
The late hip hop artist DMX first got hooked on crack after being given a blunt laced with crack. The addiction would haunt him for the rest of his life and eventually lead to his heart failure. In the video, about 3 mins in, you can see how much that moment weighed on him, after decades.
I'm saying maybe there's actually a decent bit of truth in the hokey video. But maybe that's they'd be better off showing DMX than an overdramatized skit.
No information is proper enough. Like the second comment from top points out, the goalposts are always shifted.
Information on vaccine studies? Rushed.
Information on vaccine rollouts from countries that have reached 75-80% of the entire population vaccinated? Faked/not applicable.
Information comparing cases/deaths in US states with neighbouring states having higher vaccination rates? Invalid.
Look, be honest here. There’s more than enough information out there and none of it is being hidden. Hundreds of millions have gotten the shot and the benefits are abundantly clear. For example - “Despite Delta, severe covid-19 is much rarer among vaccinated Britons“ (https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/09/18/despite-...).
But this doesn’t make a difference. Despite all this information being available, people will still rely on faulty information like “Nicki Minaj’s cousin’s friend became impotent after he took the vaccine”. FWIW, the White House treated Minaj like an adult and reached out to have a conversation with her. But she didn’t change her mind.
> treat people like adults
If they were intelligent adults they’d be able to evaluate the data for themselves. Instead they watch YouTube videos telling them to “do their own research” followed by checking out Nicki Minaj’s tweets.
Go ahead. Try having an open debate with Nicki Minaj or Kyrie Irving or any vaccine skeptic with millions of followers. Let me know how that goes.
From the get-go, the messaging should have been: "This is an evolving situation, and we're doing our best to keep up. Right now, our recommendations are X. As we learn, those are going to change."
That's what Japan did. Humility and respect.
It worked.
In the US, it was: "Masks don't work! You're too stupid to even know how to use one properly. Save them for nurses. No, wait, if you don't wear your mask, you're literally killing grandma! We'll arrest your goat-fucking inbred ass if you don't mask up. Trump's vaccine? You'd have to be a colossal moron to take that experimental garbage. Not for me! No, wait, it's Biden's vaccine now? If you don't get the jab, you're Hitler Squared! Don't want it? You're fired!"
How well this worked is left as an exercise for the reader.
You can't possibly compare the USA's culture to Japan's. The USA is incredibly individualistic and many Americans hold deep-seated distrust of any government/societal institutions.
Japan's culture is entirely communal. You don't talk on a cellphone on the train because it may inconvenience other passengers. You wear a mask when you're sick so you don't inconvenience others. So much of Japan's culture is rooted in making sure you aren't disrupting the general flow of society.
You can talk about "improper messaging" in the USA, but that rests squarely with President Trump. The entire point of that position is to be the figurehead of America and a unifying presence when things go wrong. He did not, and it caused irreparable damage to the trust and cohesiveness of the public early on in the pandemic.
> You can't possibly compare the USA's culture to Japan's.
I can and shall.
> Much of Japan's culture is rooted in making sure you aren't disrupting the general flow of society.
It may surprise you to learn that the US was like this before. And that Japan probably won't be in forty years' time.
You know that movie trope from the 70s and before, where somebody needs a car, gets in one, which is, of course, unlocked, pulls down the visor, and the keys drop into their lap?
That's what it's like where I live.
My town had a home invasion last week. I don't think I've ever heard of that happening here.
> But that rests squarely with President Trump
No.
The establishment burned every ounce of credibility available to burn, succeeded in ousting Trump from office, and is now crying that everything has gone all firey like.
If Trump got a Big Mac on Monday, that was proof he was a Nazi. If he didn't on Tuesday, that was more proof that he was a Nazi.
Biden could nuke Dallas tomorrow and MSNBC would defend him without question. As would probably half the GOP.
The problem with "winning at any cost" is the cost.
Like it or not, that's the state of things in the US.
> many Americans hold deep-seated distrust of any government/societal institutions.
Those insitiutions could work on earning trust, for example by showing humility and respect, like your parent suggested.
Instead they have chosen to outright lie to the people they have supposed to serve and now its somehow those peoples fault when they trust the institutions even less.
Your US section is mostly accurate (and mortifying for the "trust the government" argument) in terms of how it was mentioned, but I disagree the "Trump's vaccine" segment. The numbers of the rollout might fit that story after the fact, but doesn't make it true.
Moreover, the entire odyssey of you should get this vaccine but only if you're in a very specific age or risk pool and let's punish people and hospitals who violate this set of ever-evolving poorly communicated rules did happen and might be even worse.
There's a supercut of prominent Blue Team folks -- including the Vice President! -- publicly refusing to to take "Trump's Vaccine".
After Biden took office, they executed an "about face" so hard that their heads are functional gyroscopes.
Totally agreed on the rest. My stance is simple: get the shot if you're in a high-risk group. Otherwise, your choice, for which you should never be punished.
Ya, and I bet that supercut cut out all the context and key parts of what they said. I've seen one showing Kamala Harris saying she wouldn't take a vaccine that Trump told her to take. But they cut out the next sentence where she says, but if our health officials and doctors and scientists say it's safe to take it, then I will.
That worked in Japan because the culture there is far less selfish. People there would already wear masks when sick to avoid spreading it to others.
But in the US, you have people who continue to make arguments about how it's stupid to force them to wear a mask because others are afraid of getting COVID. I saw a really bad meme about that the other day where one person was walking with an umbrella and angrily telling someone else to also use an umbrella so the person with the umbrella wouldn't get wet.
I think the bigger point is the lack of trust in our public health rather than laying out the facts. The same way any person who is pro-vax will argue how beneficial it is, is the same way a person who doesn't believe it is beneficial to them will argue it out.
There is no one clear science, one clear truth to rule them all in this pandemic. This is the only truth I have come to terms with.
I see anti-vaxxers with their straw man arguments as just people who have no trust in the government and the health authorities. Can't blame them though, since the pandemic started almost 2 years ago, there is still a lot we don't know about it's actual origins.
I saw a similar video in junior high and thought it was ridiculous. Then in high school I knew a girl who was raped by several guys at a party who gave her weed laced with something that made her pass out. I don't know if I would have considered it a lazy argument if that girl had told her story when I was 13. There was just something hamfisted and out of touch about those DARE videos.
They could, but "I'm feeling kind of funny, it must be the weed" is easier to slide by compared to "I'm feeling kind of funny, I need to call Dad ASAP".
I guess they could have. At the time in the 90s, rohypnol wasn't so common. And now, girls are much more careful about watching their drinks than watching their weed. The fact that she was out at a party with older boys and smoking weed definitely made it impossible to tell her parents. But I guess the point of all of this is that these stupid educational videos about drugs would be more effective if they talked about real things that happen instead of trying to create false fears. The reality of being a teen surrounded by drugs and sex abuse is scary enough.
It is strange to me how many think that “you are going to die” is a harsher threat than “you will live a long life that will be severely crippled”.
If I die, I cease to exist. So, while from the standpoint of the pre-death me, it is very unfortunate, the post-death me is either a null or an ephemeral entity in a different dimension (depending on which of the belief systems works)
Remaining in the same spatial domain but set back into oblivion by my own choices is about as close to the definition of hell as it can get.
What if you caught covid in the early months of 2020 and have already suffered all of the debilitating long haul effects? Now you are actively living with the new normal that covid has left to your body?
That is where I am right now. My wife is double jabbed and has the worst cough in the world (after a weeks of all of the signs of covid she has tested positive for antibodies) meanwhile I have not even had so much as a sore throat.
I tested positive 15 months ago. Why do I need to be vaccinated?
FWIW I plan on getting the next redesigned booster but for now I see no reason to sign up
I think it would be reasonable to say ‘up to you’ since your risk to the public is negligible, but first what research have you done? Or are you avoiding decision making? Your risks are decidedly low in either way you decide. But currently, the CDC’s data suggest your net risk would be even lower if you get the currently approved dose, particularly while delta cases are still high and hospitals overwhelmed (e.g. and not procrastinating till it too goes away)
I’m surprised you read long haul covid as a mild case. I know someone with natural immunity that did an anti body test out of curiosity and their response was 10x those of typical vaccinated people after a similar half a year exposure. He will get fired if he doesn’t get the vaccine.
B) you may have missed the last line of my comment
C) trying to understand how this extremely contagious virus managed to not infect me while my wife and I shared bathrooms, beds, and car rides together. My best assumption is that I still carry immunity
Perhaps but that didn’t stop me from isolating. Fwiw, my wife may have been asymptomatic in the past and she figured she was safe to interact in public.
The moral of this story is that vaxxed or not this virus can still spread, so you can only be safe about yourself. Wear a mask, wash your hands.
Why did Pfizer data for their COVID-19 vaccine not report the injury and paralysis of a 12-year-old participant in the clinical trial? From a June 2021 article by Robert Kennedy's CHD non-profit org, https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/sen-johnson-ken-...
> Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) held a news conference Monday to discuss adverse reactions related to the COVID vaccines — giving individuals who have been “repeatedly ignored” by the medical community a platform to share their stories ... Among them was Maddie de Garay from Ohio who volunteered for the Pfizer vaccine trial when she was 12. On Jan. 20, Maddie received her second dose of the Pfizer COVID vaccine as a participant in the clinical trial for 12- to 15-year-olds and is now in a wheelchair ... “Why is she not back to normal? She was totally fine before this,” said Stephanie de Garay, Maddie’s mother. She volunteered for the Pfizer vaccine trial “to help everyone else and they’re not helping here. Before Maddie got her final dose of the vaccine she was healthy, got straight As, had lots of friends and had a life.”
> ... Upon receiving the second shot, Maddie immediately felt pain at the injection site and over the next 24-hours developed severe abdominal and chest pain, de Garay said at the press event. Maddie told her mother it felt like her heart was being ripped out through her neck, and she had painful electrical shocks down her neck and spine that forced her to walk hunched over ... She developed gastroparesis, nausea and vomiting, erratic blood pressure, memory loss, brain fog, headaches, dizziness, fainting, seizures, verbal and motor tics, menstrual cycle issues, lost feeling from the waist down, lost bowel and bladder control and had an nasogastric tube placed because she lost her ability to eat.
> ... Johnson argued that while most people don’t suffer significant side effects following vaccination, he is concerned about “that small minority that are suffering severe symptoms.”
The more we know about the statistical minority who suffer severe adverse reactions, the better we can screen vaccine recipients to avoid unusual but life-altering injuries.
They also seem to have limited understanding of statistics, chasing anecdotes and ignoring results (the data eventually has tended to contradict their messaging). Unfortunately, I agree that makes them rather useless as a source for answers, and means even if they do find an anomaly, it will be lost in their self-generated noise ratio. Plus, a broken clock is right twice a day, and all that.
> Analysis of the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) database can be used to estimate the number of excess deaths caused by the COVID vaccines. A simple analysis shows that it is likely that over 150,000 Americans have been killed by the current COVID vaccines as of Aug 28, 2021 ... I’m offering a $1M academic grant to
anyone who can show the analysis is flawed by a factor of 4 or more in either direction and provide a more accurate analysis to the correct number. We’ll have a panel of 3 judges decide if we disagree. Please send me an InMail on LinkedIn if you think you found I was off by a factor
of 4 or more. First one to show the “correct” answer gets the $1M research grant.
Do you take seriously the proposition that more than 100k Americans could die from the vaccine without us noticing? This would easily put it in the top 10 causes of death in America. And presumably this w
would be happening worldwide, at an even greater scale.
More than 2 billion people have gotten a vaccine worldwide.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. VAERS is self-reported and (as this shows) not reliable data.
Honestly I think you're proving the need for this ban on YouTube. You seem to be trying to get it right, but you've been hoodwinked by the misinformation.
It is indeed hard to get it right, and this is killing people.
A successful (somewhere between millionaire and billionaire) entrepreneur has put his credibility on the line with those extremely astonishing claims. He put $1M of his own money into an institution to investigate early treatment for Covid, using existing drugs. Donors to CETF include Marc Benioff, Elon Musk Foundation & Vint Cerf, i.e. reputable tech entrepreneurs, https://www.treatearly.org/donors. The work of CETF was endorsed by staff at Johns Hopkins, Columbia, UCSF, Yale & others, https://www.treatearly.org/testimonials.
He provided a 30 page document referencing the analysis of other doctors, explaining the rationale for those estimates. He has further offered $1,000,000 dollars to anyone who can show that the estimate is off by a factor of 4X, i.e. making the task easier for the person challenging his extraordinary claims.
His claims are so far from anyone's expectations that it should be trivial to disprove, right? There's a bug bounty of $1M dollars available to anyone. Why is no one bothering to claim it?
> His claims are so far from anyone's expectations that it should be trivial to disprove, right? There's a bug bounty of $1M dollars available to anyone. Why is no one bothering to claim it?
Because no one who would be interested in disproving it trusts the person offering the bounty to be doing so in good faith.
For some reason, this makes me think of duels :) Both parties would need to trust the judging entity and he didn't name the individuals in the panel of three. In theory, that panel could be refined until both parties were happy. Funds could be put in escrow.
>A successful (somewhere between millionaire and billionaire) entrepreneur has put his credibility on the line with those extremely astonishing claims.
Credibility? You have to be joking, what does he actually have to lose? According to Wikipedia he had a quarter of a billion dollars 15 years ago! He gets to live by rules you and I don't even know are possible, but suffice it to say that credibility is only ever a problem for the little people. Look at trump, after all.
Sure, Just like Elon and Zuck he'll couch his ego trips as for the people and pursued at great personal cost, but what actual price is failure to him? I'm guessing his true risk is limited to some teasing in the sauna.
The young economist looks down and sees a $20 bill on the street and says, "Hey, look a twenty-dollar bill!"
Without even looking, his older and wiser colleague replies, "Nonsense. If there had been a twenty-dollar lying on the street, someone would have already picked it up by now."
>>>>>
Surely there is not a $1M bill lying on the ground, ripe for the taking. That's why I'm not bothering to claim it.
1) self-reporting systems are subject to memetic effects. Like people calling in every suspicious thing they see to the cops if they hear the cops are investigating a high-profile murder, adverse effect reporting increases if people hear a rumor a vaccine may cause problems, whether or not anything in their day-to-day has actually changed.
2) The push to vaccinate everyone means a lot more people are candidates for reporting than in an average year. Given no side-effects from the vaccine, we would still expect VAERS reports to go up significantly. And since heart disease is a leading killer in the US, and unlike most vaccines, this vaccine is being given to the older population almost exclusively relative to the median age of most vaccine recipients, we're hard-pressed to distinguish "vaccine-caused heart disease" from "greater amounts of reporting from older patients resulting in more instances of heart disease showing up in the VAERS reports."
1) OK, but is it your suggestion that it's just uneducated people swept up in a craze who are flooding VAERS with valid-looking reports about e.g., pulmonary embolism, deep vein thrombosis, intracranial hemorrhage, and aphasia?
2) I think that's valid, we would expect reports to go up. But Kirsch limited his search to ages 20-60, I think to alleviate one of your concerns. We're seeing e.g. 3000x normal, 1900x normal occurrences even when filtering like that. Does that not seem alarming?
1) not at all. What I'm saying is that if a doctor has a 40-year-old patient with a deep vein thrombosis who hasn't had a vaccine since they were in their mid-20s, that case doesn't go into VAERS. But if they have a patient with deep vein thrombosis that had a COVID vaccination last month, it does. And since the pandemic has caused a national vaccination push, we're now seeing a lot more of the latter.
The people who call in a bunch of unrelated leads during a murder investigation also aren't uneducated; it's perfectly reasonable, expected human behavior that when people are looking for trouble they find it more than if they aren't expecting any connection. Whether or not the connection is actually causal.
2) insufficient data to know if it should be alarming, because outside of a pandemic circumstance, the 20 to 60 demographic doesn't get very many vaccinations. So you're comparing on other years a population with possibly very different behavior to the general population (for example, one explanation could be that there's correlation between people being healthier and people getting vaccinated on years that aren't pandemic years... Possibly because the kind of person who goes out of their way to get vaccinated when it isn't required for school attendance is the kind of person that cares about their health more than average, is more prompt on upkeeping preventative medicine, has access to the kinds of doctors that catch early signs of heart disease before they evolve into full-blown conditions, etc.).
I'm sorry in advance if I'm not understanding again, but is the suggestion that we normally get however many cases of e.g. aphasia, but we just didn't know in 2019 because there was no vaccine push? What then is VAERS for? If there was an alarming situation that VAERS would help us see, what would it look like?
VAERS is for gross data aggregation. But it is the absolute zeroth step in finding a causal link between vaccines and negative effects in the population. It's raw data without scientific controls for confounding factors (or even independent checks against self-reporting error), and misleading to the point of actively harmful without rigorous analysis and (more importantly) follow up study with proper scientific controls.
To give an absolutely terrible, but perhaps useful, analogy... You're an old sea captain on a sailing vessel without modern weather technology. VAERS is the crewman whose knee acts up about half the time before a bad storm. At best, if he tells you his knee's acting funny, you put your weather eye out... You don't turn around and go back to port.
OK. VAERS just sounds the alarm, at which point we have to investigate further. Peter Schirmacher apparently did autopsies and established a lower bound that about 30% of the victims died due to the vaccines. D-dimer tests have apparently shown clotting. Troponin levels are apparently indicating heart damage. Is the system not working exactly as intended, except that the inconvenient results are being suppressed?
No; the system is working as intended, but you're naming outliers that haven't been replicated or confirmed. It's not "suppression;" it's "This result was weird, and other people aren't seeing it." Which is far more often study error or misinterpretation or confounding factor than an actual issue.
... and that's the problem. The general populace doesn't know how rigorous medical testing works. And when they get their hands on something that sounds serious (but isn't actually at a scale that causation can be confirmed), or someone with an axe to grind decides to push a counter-narrative that doesn't stand up to scrutiny (but who cares whether it does if the general populace doesn't know how "scrutiny" works and is weighing the evidence of the medical community and the CDC vs. one pathologist in Germany as if their words have equal weight), it becomes a general problem for public health.
One that, apparently, Google has decided it doesn't want to be part of.
Even if I was to accept that 150k deaths was plausible (which I don’t, since that would show up in excess deaths and other gross statistical measures), that’s still more 10x safer than being unvaccinated (we’ve vaccinated far more people than have gotten COVID, and at a much lower death rate). If the high estimates by someone openly against this vaccine still tell you it is far safer to be vaccinated, what does tell you about what I think of Steve Kirsch?
Kirsch is advocating for the identification of high-risk groups and screening of recipients, not a blanket criticism of vaccines for all people.
We are living in the era of sophisticated micro-targeting of groups via advertising profiles and machine learning. Why are our online narratives degenerating into dualistic debates, as if we can only count to two? We have the technology to perform granular, data-driven risk assessment across a wide range of variables.
At a minimum, we can fund forensic investigations of the reports in VAERS, collecting whatever data is needed to trace the root cause of each injury, removing every report that is not credible. Where necessary, we can identify the need for additional data collection, e.g. baseline testing of high-risk individuals before vaccination, for comparison to post-vaccination tests. Standard scientific analysis.
There are also non-public reporting systems (e.g. HMOs) for vaccine adverse events. That additional data is available to CDC.
They aren’t permitted to delete reports, even non-credible ones.
It would also likely cost far in excess of $1M to investigate these. It is a clever trick though, because it sounds like a big bounty, while being actually a joke amount (he’s proposing spending far less $10 per person to investigate their medical records or autopsy). And seems possibly in bad-faith too, as he seems to be rejecting the population statistical data that already seem to refute his claims.
Advocating for identification of high-risk groups is another good smoke-screen since he’s saying nothing new, but making it sound like he’s smart and aware. Yes, there are people who need to talk to their doctor about risks, but the overwhelming majority of people aren’t in that group, but are made needlessly worried by such rhetorical tricks.
I can't be certain what he meant, but it seemed that the bounty was for an analysis that was comparable to those in his paper, not a full forensic review of each entry in VAERS.
An actual investigation could only be done by CDC, who have access to non-VAERS reports and other health surveillance infrastructure. A handful of independent autopsies have been done, they are expensive.
The FDA estimated hundreds of thousands of vaccine doses in that age group to save one life, accepting dozens of cases of Myocarditis in the process. That is assuming literally no one dies from the vaccine.
Let us say the vaccine kills one in 100,000, that would be easily dismissed as chance. None of the trials could capture this. Yet, it would make the vaccine worse than the disease for that age group.
So your hypothesis is that the FDA correctly identified dozens of mild cases of myocarditis through their surveillance and reporting, while simultaneously failing to notice hundreds of deaths?
The Myocarditis cases aren't all mild, they have led to heart failure and at least some of them are likely to lead to premature death. Consider that the JCVI (UK) does not recommend the second vaccine dose for children, due to this risk.
Secondly, I'm not saying that this has happened, there is no way for me to know. I'm saying that it is possible to identify such cases and still dismiss them. Sudden cardiac death in youth isn't that rare and even hundreds of excess cases could fall under the radar.
I'd also argue that the incentives are such that a dismissal is likely, now that the CDC has recommended the vaccine for children. The CDC used VAERS data in this assessment, which is incomplete to some degree and the window within which a possible side-effect is considered is small (two weeks).
1) the symptoms seem definitely bad, but IMHO not as a life not worth living
2) they usually don't remove the physical ability to commit suicide, so one can "fall back" to the "you are going to die" option (which I would of course, as per point 1, not recommend)
There's definitely an organized push to disseminate anecdotal stories of "see, he didn't get the vaccine, and on his death bed, his last wish was for everyone to get vaccinated."
Maybe these stories are put out by the AP? I'm in Lincoln, NE. Omaha is an hour a way. And these exact stories will run in both local papers the exact same day.
If you go on the Herman Cain Awards, there's some of that, but there's also a whole lot of people or their family posting anti-vaccine content right before (and sometimes after) the patient dies. Pure insanity.
Look folks, you can get owned by the libs or you can get owned by the virus. One of them leaves you living to post another day. It's the Trump vaccine, Christ. Remember when the pharma companies delayed announcing the vaccine to not give him the win before the election?
I hate that sub with a passion, I really do. Morbid schadenfreude at the deceased under a thin disguise of “awareness of the dangers of being anti-vax.”
It's perfectly reasonable to have a distaste for this, but I am curious as to if you take issue with this because the person in question is deceased, or if you just take issue with mocking someone under all circumstances.
> the doxxing
I can't say I've seen any of that. Admittedly I only ever see posts from that subreddit when they show up on r/all, so maybe it gets cleaned up on popular posts, but everything I've seen on the subreddit is just directly screenshotted from social media.
> and the general atmosphere of “the vermin are extinguishing themselves and the world is better for it.”
This one is really just a matter of your opinion on trolley problems. For what it's worth I'm pretty sure just about everyone on that subreddit would prefer the individuals in question have a sudden inspiration of critical thought and save their own lives.
> I'm pretty sure just about everyone on that subreddit would prefer the individuals in question have a sudden inspiration of critical thought and save their own lives.
That's backed up by the praise for people who post there saying they've changed their opinion.
I'm not going to lie and claim the feeling of schadenfreude isn't a factor, but it's more than that. The other reason that subreddit is happy about anti-vaxxers dying is because it means one less person spreading anti-vax sentiments (actually more since their family may stop too).
However, the subreddit isn't calling for anti-vaxxers to be killed. The deaths of anti-vaxxers who die for reasons other than COVID are not celebrated.
We care about vaccination rates because we care about human lives - so what have we gained if we lose our humanity in the process of trying to save it.
The lives of the people who aren't trying to get their peers killed, hopefully.
If someone is so hell-bent on dying that they'll ignore every single qualified doctor telling them that they're wrong, we can't really do much about that. But at least it usually stops them from getting other people killed with the same stupidity.
I am not American, but watching the way the vaccine has been politicised, I can understand a certain level of schaudenfreude as a reaction to after the years of Trump governing to 'owning the libs'.
I am not sure what to think about that sub, all I know is that where I live COVID hasn't been too bad, so it gives me a window into what it's like in the rest of the country. It mostly makes me feel bad, like looking at casualty lists from WW1 except someone told them they didn't have to go over the top. It's just so senseless and pointless.
The targets of vitriol should be the media and political figures who made vaccine hesitancy mainstream amongst conservatives, not individual people.
People are blinded by the public figures and institutions that they trust - and yes, that includes us.
They were steered wrong because they trusted the wrong people. You can imagine how fast the sentiment around vaccines would change amongst the professional class if suddenly the NYT, WaPo, HuffPo, Democratic politicians, etc. uniformly expressed that vaccines couldn’t be trusted.
> The targets of vitriol should be the media and political figures who made vaccine hesitancy mainstream amongst conservatives, not individual people.
Agreed. I never said I submitted anything to the sub or founded it or something. I do find it useful to see what is happening to people. A secondary reason I was there is my parents are anti-vax and comorbid and I was hoping to find something that would break their hypnosis, but it's too deep.
That said, as someone that was previous conservative and my parents are conservative, I can say definitively though that conservatism is a suckers game and it should be obvious to anyone that it's a pack of lies by the cruelest and most selfish people in our society with grifters and the super-rich at the top. Liberalism isn't much better (in some ways worse because they have enough credibility with workers to do real damage sometimes without pushback).
> You can imagine how fast the sentiment around vaccines would change amongst the professional class if suddenly the NYT, WaPo, HuffPo, Democratic politicians, etc. uniformly expressed that vaccines couldn’t be trusted.
That reality almost happened. At the presidential debates Harris said that she wouldn't take the vaccine if Trump told her to (which was about whether it was the FDA or Trump pressuring the FDA). If they really leaned into that, we'd be in a different world right now. Like everything these days, it's psychic whiplash how fast things change.
I remember Harris saying that and remembering always makes me chuckle.
I'm glad you mentioned that because that was my first thought reading the parent comment.
Regarding the "sucker's game" comment I can see where you're coming from but wanted to offer my perspective. I'm only a conservative because I'm anti big government, anti identity politics, and pro individuality. However, we live in a two party system so I have to root for the whole team. Those core issues outweigh all other factors. Sometimes after rooting for the same team for many years you just pick up the banner and wave it.
Have you asked your parents what their core beliefs are and why they're on that team? You might find they're one or two issue voters. Not sure if that would help you find some peace with them.
> Have you asked your parents what their core beliefs are and why they're on that team? You might find they're one or two issue voters. Not sure if that would help you find some peace with them.
My mother is a Q-anon type person that became deranged and believes in physically impossible conspiracies. She's jewish and hangs out in alternate youtubes that have videos of burning stars of david next to the Q stuff she's interested in. I think she became disoriented by her economic trajectory in life where she initially was working with a masters and then became a housewife that was unable to reenter the economy. She spent over a decade listening to right-wing talk radio and fell into the youtube zone. and At this point I do not know what will reach her.
My father is a lawyer that rubs shoulders with big real estate people. In his youth he supported Nixon. This lived experience of contact with the morally bankrupt rich capitalists has imo morally damaged him. When I asked him if a poor person should die on the street if they can't pay for healthcare, he assented. He doesn't want to be a bad guy, but outside of his specialty his thinking is not clear or imo firmly grounded. He watches Fox and listens to Tucker. He's a Regan type Republican.
> I'm only a conservative because I'm anti big government, anti identity politics, and pro individuality
I'm a communist because over time I realized that we are being divided against each other by the rich and need social solidarity and democracy to have a high-functioning society. I think freedom comes from having security in food, housing, education and from the creative output of individuals and groups and not from what you're able to buy. In other words, a decent society comes from addressing the needs of the people and cooperation, not from making them compete against each other.
It's not just vaccine hesitancy, they have been undermining public institutions in the US for ages. There is nothing remotely close to say, the NHS in the UK.
The worst post I've seen on that subreddit yet was one where the wife of the person who passed away made a post that claimed god had cured her husband... by killing him. Cured through death. My head nearly exploded at that one.
I've had the covid twice in 2 years, with nothing more than having to stay in bed, feeling a bit dizzy and play Skyrim for a day before I was able to work again (wfm). Second time was much milder. I'm pretty confident I can handle a third infection without dying nor getting vaccinated.
Please stop fearmongering people, if you're under 50 and have no comorbidity, you're not at risk.
On the opposite side, the waiter from the coffee shop where I use to sit and read my newspaper on sunday has got a
I'm glad you're doing okay, but long COVID is real. Also, for real, how many people do you know that have zero commodities??? Nearly everyone has one. America is fat, diabetic, and has no universal healthcare.
EDIT: We should absolutely be taking care of people that got sick, but America has no social solidarity whatsoever. It's disgusting.
Long-COVID sounds like pseudo-science to me. They poll a bunch of people who have had COVID, and then attribute the reported symptoms to COVID, when there are a host of confounding factors. For example, anxiety - the most commonly reported long-COVID symptom - can easily be explained by the extreme fear surrounding COVID, or the two weeks of total isolation that all people diagnosed with COVID are prescribed.
The negative impact of fear is being completely dismissed by a large cross-section of the population. Reposting what I posted above:
>>Great clip of Bill Maher citing a survey in which 41% of Democrats said that if you catch COVID, the chances of going to the hospital are >50%... (the correct answer is between 1% - 5%) Maher says the "liberal media needs to take responsibility for scaring the sh*t out of people"
Some of the symptoms could be seen as psychological, but I've read several studies that identified brain damage in imaging, lung damage, heart damage, and kidney damage. It's real. I'm writing an article on this, but the research has required so much reading and interpretation it's taking me a long time.
Some long COVID symptoms are loss of the ability to regulate heart rate reliably. This causes difficulty even standing up because you need to rebalance your blood pressure! It's not every single person that gets these problems, but the population burden is and is going to be enormous.
One cardiac study I read found that the closer they looked, the more heart damage they found, much of it subclinical. That subclinical damage is going to be important as you age even if you don't notice it right away.
Puntmann, V.O., Carerj, M.L., Wieters, I., Fahim, M., Arendt, C., Hoffmann, J., Shchendrygina, A., Escher, F., Vasa-Nicotera, M., Zeiher, A.M., Vehreschild, M., Nagel, E., 2020. Outcomes of Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Patients Recently Recovered From Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19). JAMA Cardiol 5, 1265. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamacardio.2020.3557
"To our knowledge, this is the first prospective report on a cohort of unselected patients with a recent COVID-19 infec- tion identified from a local testing center who voluntarily un- derwent evaluation for cardiac involvement with CMR. The results of our study provide important insights into the preva- lence of cardiovascular involvement in the early convales- cent stage. Our findings demonstrate that participants with a relative paucity of preexisting cardiovascular condition and with mostly home-based recovery had frequent cardiac in- flammatory involvement, which was similar to the hospital- ized subgroup with regards to severity and extent. Our obser- vations are concordant with early case reports in hospitalized patients showing a frequent presence of LGE,3,25 diffuse in- flammatory involvement,10,26 and significant rise of tropo- nin T levels.4 Unlike these previous studies, our findings re- veal that significant cardiac involvement occurs independently of the severity of original presentation and persists beyond the period of acute presentation, with no significant trend to- ward reduction of imaging or serological findings during the recovery period. Our findings may provide an indication of po- tentially considerable burden of inflammatory disease in large and growing parts of the population and urgently require con- firmation in a larger cohort. "
We don't have enough evidence at this point to be claiming long-COVID exists as a significant problem, and such a situation would contradict the very mild effects that COVID manifests in most cases. The evidence in support of it is not rigorous. If this was the breadth and rigor of the evidence being used support the idea that ivermectin is an effective COVID prophylaxis, no one would give the idea a second look.
Also, people who have had ICU care may get life-changing injuries from the care itself.
It's worth noting that with delta and unvaccinated younger cogorts, we can see hiw the relative risk of ending up in ICU increases for younger cohorts.
Sweden has good register web page for this. Choose fates after July 2021 to see how the distribution of cases moves to the left, younger cohorts.
In the time period before you were symptomatic but we’re still contagious did you potentially get anyone else sick? What’s your level of confidence if you catch covid again, you won’t spread it prior to being symptomatic? Are you comfortable with the fact that you could be the nexus that leads to many others getting sick? What if one of them dies? Or has a miscarriage? Or hospital bills?
Yeah, sure, I’ll be fine if I get covid. Will my toddler? Will the person at the store who doesn’t have the luxury of working from home? It’s such a big, selfish risk for something that’s so easy to deal with.
I'm implying that we all had a better life, better relationships with each other, and a healthier view of dealing with disease as a society before we started measuring this one.
I've had the covid twice in 2 years, with nothing more than having to stay in bed, feeling a bit dizzy and play Skyrim for a day before I was able to work again (wfm). Second time was much milder. I'm pretty confident I can handle a third infection without dying nor getting vaccinated.
Please stop fearmongering people, if you're under 50 and have no comorbidity, you're not at risk.
On the opposite side, the waiter from the coffee shop where I use to sit and read my newspaper on sunday has got a sight impairment since he got vaccinated: he now sees double. His doctor refuses to believe him. Unfortunately, the pro-vax people won't help him get a new job, nor compensate for his financial loss. Deal with it, plebs.
There are and they're out there counter to the random stories of "X got the vaccine and died the day after!"
But FWIW, I find that kind of thing to be too propaganda-ish and to push people away. I'd rather have a more boring discussion about the numbers and why we've seen thousands of people dying per day from Covid and the risks just aren't there from the vaccine. To hear some talk, we should just start randomly dying from it, but that obviously hasn't materialized.
I don't deny that either group exists, but I instead tell people that we have to take a step back because there aren't equivalent numbers of each event. There are orders of magnitude more Covid deaths (and injuries) than vaccine injuries. Yes, there are some of each, but as always, the actual numbers matter here.
I don't really find long Covid to be that useful in arguments. I suppose it has its place vs. the "untested" nature of the vaccine, but it's not really "untested" any more than the average flu shot is, and nobody is randomly dying in droves from those. Also it's in many millions of arms, so if there's something horrible that's going to happen due to it, well... where are all the deaths? We'd need to see millions of them to get anywhere close to the impact of Covid.
I mean it is a legitimate reaction people are having, it's not surprising the standard outlets pick up on these type of stories because they do push for the outcome of getting people to vaccinate.
I think these mass distributed stories work against the movement.
I’m looking at these stories, wondering why they’re running a story about a guy in NC when local Nebraskans are dying. Why aren’t they covering the local story?
Why is it cross posted across local news outlets.
Just lazy journalism or a concerted message. Feels gross either way. And not pursuasive. At all.
Oh definitely. And the stories about how hospitals are now like war zones. I totally understand the enormous toll and pain this pandemic has caused, but headlines like these make me feel like it infantilizes the problem in a way I can't quite lay a finger on. "Get your shots or else the boogeyman will take you away" works on kids, does not seem to work too well on adults.
And "the vaccine is the Boogeyman - look that's why we're not allowed to say so on YouTube" isn't infantilizing? You might be giving too much credit to adults who can't do basic math.
> You might be giving too much credit to adults who can't do basic math.
I agree and perhaps this is where most of the difference lies. I do tend to place an outsize trust on adults whether they can do basic math or not, probably from my upbringing in a rather rural setting where the average person may not be able to handle math beyond 4th grade and yet be very "street smart". I don't see them as any inferior as far as decision making is concerned.
I don't knock street smarts, and I do believe in living by your gut. I think people without formal education or much numeracy will - left to their own devices - come to very sane conclusions about viruses and vaccines if they're just given the raw data to work through. What they don't have is the armor to repel false arguments. The premise of telling someone who's never read a medical text to "do your own research" - by reading conspiracy sites online - is just so ridiculous that you know whoever is telling them that is laughing up their sleeve. I live in a deep red area so I see this all the time... when people say they did their own research on the vaccine, I think, wow. Research is a big word.
This is different from having a gut feeling that something is wrong and you don't trust the government. It's almost like the in-group of pro-vax, pro-science liberals has deliberately organized and promoted a mass display of ignorance by the skeptical country folks just for the purpose of pointing and laughing and delighting in their ignorance. And yet, the antivax fever that's swept over the red states is still ignorant, and even more so if it plays directly into a concerted plan to make them look like fools who are prolonging the pandemic.
They don't want to talk about long term effects of COVID because that would scare people away from reopening the economy. The vaccine protects against severe disease and death. Jury is still out on long COVID (for breakthrough cases, obviously the vaccine protects against long COVID when it protects you from getting a case at all and so people should definitely get vaccinated!!).
The most commonly reported breathing problem is "abnormal breathing", which can 100% be caused anxiety/stress/etc, especially when COVID hysteria is driving hypochondria.
There is no compelling evidence that the correlation between these self-reported symptoms, and having a COVID infection months prior, is due damage caused by the COVID infection, and not due to any number of other confounding factors. There have been no rigorous studies, i.e. large, randomized and controlled studies, showing this.
Notice how extreme rigor is demanded for the ivermectin studies but then really just mere correlation is enough to draw scare mongering conclusions about covid.
Also, the theory simply doesn't make sense, given the vast majority of COVID cases are mild, with no evidence of the kind of acute lung damage that can lead to long-term complications affecting breathing. If lung damage from COVID was really that pervasive, we would know about it, both from the acute symptoms, and from imaging scans.
It's not though. Recent studies show long covid drops off about 4 months and goes away completely after 6. Only a tiny fraction of a percent see anything beyond that.
>>The so called “long COVID” really needs to be part of the vaccine calculus because the health consequences are very much worse than the purported side effects from the vaccine.
Here is a typical study purportedly showing evidence for long COVID:
Anxiety is the most common symptom of long COVID.. All of the symptoms listed could be psychosomatic, due to fear around COVID.
Not to mention the prescribed two week isolation that is part of the standard of care for even an asymptomatic COVID infecion, which could have a profound negative impact on physical and mental health, given what is known about the health risks of isolation.
Not enough attention is paid to the dangers of over-reacting to COVID:
>>Great clip of Bill Maher citing a survey in which 41% of Democrats said that if you catch COVID, the chances of going to the hospital are >50%... (the correct answer is between 1% - 5%)
Maher says the "liberal media needs to take responsibility for scaring the sh*t out of people"
With regard to vaccines, my personal opinion is that they will prove to pose an extroardinarily low risk of producing a severe adverse effect, orders of magnitude lower than that posed by COVID.
People worry about vaccines not being tested for long term effects but covid is also not tested for long term effects. We can use common sense to deduce long term effects.
What we do know already is that COVID is not a retrovirus, so it doesn't have a genetic impact on cells that outlives the infection. We also know that the infection lasts a few weeks, then is cleared from the body.
Similarly, none of the vaccines change cell DNA, so will not have a genetic impact that outlives the vaccination's immediate post administration effects.
Therefore we can deduce that the only long-term impact of the COVID vaccines, and COVID, is from the damage done during the few days of immune response to the vaccine antigens, and few weeks when the COVID infection is active, respectively, and thus that the severity of the immediate-vaccine-response/infection can be expected to be proportional to the risk of long-term complications (i.e. long-term effects of vaccines, or long-COVID). So any vaccine that poses an extremely low risk of producing a severe immediate adverse effect, or any demographic which faces an extremely low risk of facing serious symptoms and death from COVID, should also face an accordingly low risk of long-term complications.
With vaccines, there is also the risk of 'antibody-dependent enhancement of virus infection', but so far, that hasn't manifested in any of the COVID vaccines.
> All of the symptoms listed could be psychosomatic, due to fear around COVID.
The same can be said for a majority of cancer symptoms, autoimmune disorders, etc. Handwaving symptoms away as "that could be imagined" doesn't make it so.
Having seen horrific xrays of the lungs of some COVID survivors, I have trouble believing that symptoms like "chest pain" and "abnormal breathing" are psychosomatic for a majority those reporting them.
I was having palpitations the morning of my cardiologist visit. Had an ECG and found absolutely nothing wrong. That led us to believe I was suffering from anxiety as SARS-CoV-2 can cause your body to reduce tryptophan and thus create a serotonin imbalance. Went on an SSRI for 6 months and those things have returned to normal. Joint pain and numbness still randomly occurs but has been slowly resolving
It’s hard not to marvel at this virus if it wasn’t trying to fsck you up at every turn
After a week of physical troubles due to covid, as I started getting better, I found a sort of fear/anxiety of losing loved ones took over me. resuming Rigorous meditation and getting back to work help me beat it in a week or two.
Though I'm not fully convinced for needing vaccine if already gone through symptomatic covid. If I have got the real thing training the immune system, what real benefit a controlled training by vaccine would give over that?
>>Handwaving symptoms away as "that could be imagined" doesn't make it so.
Handwaving away the effects of psychological stress also makes no sense. I didn't say they were imagined. I said they were psychosomatic, which means due to psychological stress.
More generally, when all of the long-COVID symptoms could be due to a host of other confounding factors, it makes no sense to blame COVID and make people even more afraid, and thus potentially exacerbate the very symptoms you are sounding the alarm about.
As Bill Maher noted, people, especially Democrats, are already vastly over-estimating the risk posed by COVID. It's not wise to dismiss the potential unintended adverse effects of this misassessment, and focus exclusively on the risk posed by COVID. A one-dimensional focus on COVID risk is a simplistic and imbalanced way of approaching risk management.
>>I have trouble believing that symptoms like "chest pain" and "abnormal breathing" are psychosomatic for a majority those reporting them.
Both are very common results of anxiety. Given there is no indication of widespread heart or lung damage from the vast majority of COVID cases, attributing these to COVID makes no sense.
We have no idea what two weeks of total isolation, which all of these people who are diagnosed with COVID are subjected to, does to people. Incidentally, anxiety and depression - the most commonly reported "long-COVID" symptoms - are one of the most common effects of loneliness:
So you want to conclude that it's COVID doing this to people despite no evidence of widespread heart/lung damage that could explain these responses, and when there are more plausible explanations emanating from psychological stress?
These links contradict my assertion that there is "no indication of widespread heart or lung damage from the vast majority of COVID cases"?
My statement is not incorrect. Your links show no such thing.
The vast majority of covid cases have very mild acute symptoms, so the vast majority of the reports of chest pains and "abnormal breathing" months after the infection, that are attributed to "long COVID", could not possibly be due to heart or lung damage from COVID. That kind of pervasive damage would show up in the acute symptoms and in imaging scans and we would know about it.
COVID is not some magical disease. The long term complications emanate from the damage during infection, with severe infections more likely to have long term complications. Mild infections are very unlikely to have long term complications except in so far as the collective hysteria, which is confirmed by polls, and that vastly over-estimates the threat of COVID and leads to extreme over reactions like two week total isolation prescribed for all cases, or all in person classes being cancelled in universities that have a few mild cases, has psychosomatic effects.
Eh, everyone has been moving goalposts. First it was "flatten the curve" to prevent hospital overrun. Then at some point it became "no one can ever get covid again" and we did wild things like close schools even if a person so much as got near a person with COVID.
I don't think one side has a monopoly on losing trust, behaving badly, or making anti-science decisions.
Closing schools and so forth was part of the flatten-the-curve effort. Really though, the CDC has been driven by the available science and by the reality of the pandemic, and when the CDC's guidance has changed it has invariably been in response to new data on COVID or to changing conditions (e.g. community spread, N95 mask availability, new variants).
It is overly generous to speak of "one side" as if there is another equally valid side to compare with. The CDC is not a political institution and they always cite published research in their guidance and public statements about COVID-19. The anti-mask/anti-vax crowd are going around spreading one fantasy after another, coming up with new and ever more outrageous conspiracy theories and excuses for refusing to cooperate; none of their claims have ever been based in reality, and that is why the story changes on a daily basis and why there are so many contradictory claims being made.
To put this in perspective, the high-level direction of the CDC's guidance has, since the very beginning of the pandemic, been to reduce the rate at which COVID spreads; the changes in their guidance have been about the details. The anti-mask/anti-vax crowd has gone from denying that there is a virus to saying that the virus is no worse than the flu to claiming that masks would suffocate them to whining about how mask mandates violate to their freedom and that they would rather die of COVID than comply with a mask mandate. They went from heaping praise on the last President simply because he was in office when the vaccines were first becoming available to complaining that the current President was being given too much credit for the vaccination effort to claiming that the vaccine is made from aborted fetuses, that the vaccine alters DNA, that Bill Gates inserted microchips into the vaccine, that the vaccine causes people to become magnetized, and that vaccine mandates are proof that the vaccine is the "mark of the beast."
How can you write so many words defending the CDC? Their "guidance" is based on cherry picked science at best, and gut feelings and political narratives at worst. There are plenty of studies that suggest lockdowns, closed schools and other "mitigation" efforts are ineffective or net harmful, but eh, just ignore those right?
Look at the most recent issue of vaccine boosters. The FDA panel of experts (whom we're supposed to trust now, right?) said boosters are not necessary. CDC comes in and says the FDA is wrong, boosters are good jk lol. What a joke.
Can you point me to a well done study on cloth masks and their efficacy? 19 months in and I have yet to see one. But people "feel" that masks must work, so CDC guidance says wear them. Surely at this point we should have so much compelling data about masks if they are effective...
Slipping in here with a question that will probably seem obnoxious, but isn't intended so.
If cloth masks are effective (I'm not arguing either way) and those who wear them felt endangered by those who don't, could they simply double their mask? Particulates passing in or out, in either direction, would be subject to the same amount of material as if both were wearing a single mask.
guy with mask + guy with mask = two masks
guy with 2 masks + guy with 0 masks = two masks.
I'm not suggesting that anyone should have to bear the responsibility of another, but the effect should be the same for the wearer if non airborne contaminated surfaces are of low risk. Unless it's a matter of directionality.
Could it be tested to observe a controlled situation where group A) exhales only through cotton while inhaling without, while a seperated group B) does the opposite, exhaling without and inhaling with?
Is this absurd to consider? I'm not feeling well and might actually be absurd right now.
That's actually a good question and has to do with the physics of respiration. When you inhale, you're creating negative pressure that pulls particles closest to you into your lungs, leaving a void that other particles fill as they randomly redistribute themselves. This causes aerosolized droplets to follow the path of least resistance around the mask, as if they are pulled, rather than landing against it. That's why real N95/100 masks require a proper fit: if there's even a sliver of space between the mask and face, inhaling will simply suck air in through that space instead of through the filter, which has a higher "resistance".
When you exhale, on the other hand, you create positive pressure which violently expels the droplets regardless of what's in the way. This creates droplets with high velocity and turbulent flows within the mask that prevent them from traveling a straight path through the mask and cause most of them to collide with the fabric.
Basically, once it's exhaled it's a hazard to anyone who doesn't have a properly fitted N95/100 mask (which requires specialized equipment, though it's relatively common)
Those guys who used to say 2+2=5 might have been on to something, but more correctly, it was probably 3 for fluid dynamics here.
I remember as an OTR driver the truckstop bathrooms I survived each day. The olfactory violence was palpable enough to feel it crawling through the mask and see it grinning as it coursed through what must have been an unusual ratio of gas to air. I'd think to myself in that sometimes surreal environment where photons seemed to sweat and stagger, that even an n95 was pointless, perhaps life itself. If rona be here, every particle is riding a pale horse in a hazmat suit. I'll always consider myself a permanent petri dish for that.
The idea is that the masks filter particulates at the source, and then again at the destination. See https://www.livescience.com/face-mask-visualization-droplets... for a visualization. Reasonable. Wearing masks when having symptoms is elementary courtesy, and self quarantining is even better. Unfortunately we've embraced the 'asymptomatic spreader' idea a bit too much and now we regard anyone that doesn't take the most extreme measures at all times as a de facto murderer, because there might be a tiny chance they are infectious. Not healthy.
I think part of the benefit of everyone wearing masks is that there is more value in limiting the distribution of virus laden particulates from the source, ie the infected persons mouth or nose, at least to an extent. That is best done when an infected individual has a mask on. Additionally, if we assume that wearing a mask limits spread, then unmasked individuals overall are a higher risk for receiving infection. Therefore community risk is higher.
That's how we end up with a calculus that determines that impinging individual liberty (requiring masks) has a net benefit (limiting overall community spread).
I guess a similar analogy might be: driving half the speed limit might in a weird sense feel like you're protecting yourself from harm in an accidental if else someone drives too fast, but the better policy would be that both directions of traffic maintain speed at or under the limits. Again, this is an instance where we limit individual freedoms when there is a perceived net benefit to community safety.
Stocks vs. flows. The idea is that masks reduce the flow into a reservoir (like inside air of a building), and not just direct transmission. In your example double masking might reduce your personal intake from a large reservoir (refilled by unmasked people who happen to be sick), while everyone wearing a mask should reduce the size of the reservoir.
Solid math and reasonable general principles, with an element or two I question. He comes close to clarifying it, though not quite. And while the percentage of 50 was a disposable placeholder to illustrate valid points, I doubt cotton could be quite so effective as 50% leading to 75% (and certainly not 100%) and some assumptions are required to flow along with the logic, as was mentioned. This is still reasonable for a fast-paced video; some finicky details must be overlooked. However, it is primarily based on math and no data was shown giving any unambiguous indication for cotton efficacy. Also, he addresses directionality as nearly equal for the illustration, but later provides another resource that accounts for it in detail. Was this prefactored? Otherwise surprisingly apropos and worthwhile.
you’re welcome. i’m a bit low on sleep so i missed part of your question, and don’t think the video addresses it — that is, are two [cotton] masks more effective than one. i honestly think that this is an interesting question. for most people, their intuition would be to answer “probably,” but i suspect there are some complexities that someone smarter than i am would have to address.
wearing two masks instead of one wouldn’t make things worse, though. but better? again, good question.
Cloth masks don't work at all, and surgical masks only reduce infections by 11%. N95s are probably a lot more effective but this study didn't measure those.
The problem with getting your science news from FB memes is that some nuance tends to get lost.
"Studies show that after getting vaccinated against COVID-19, protection against the virus may decrease over time and be less able to protect against the Delta variant. Although COVID-19 vaccination for adults aged 65 years and older remains effective in preventing severe disease, recent data pdf icon[4.7 MB, 88 pages] suggest vaccination is less effective at preventing infection or milder illness with symptoms. Emerging evidence also shows that among healthcare and other frontline workers, vaccine effectiveness against COVID-19 infections is decreasing over time. This lower effectiveness is likely due to the combination of decreasing protection as time passes since getting vaccinated (e.g., waning immunity) as well as the greater infectiousness of the Delta variant.
SCIENCE! or whatever agenda the current administration wants to push. This was the same reason all these "leaders" (including Joe and Kamala) were telling everyone to be skeptical of the jab previously, because "you can't trust the orange man's CDC and the vax he pushed through so fast!"
Big tech Co is pushing a bigger agenda and silencing dissent.
Greenwald used to be great but has turned into an alt-right shill at this point. He's intentionally not talking about the FDA panel and hiding that in his tweets, and neither does your NYTimes source.
They're talking about a different CDC committee that went against the FDA panel, and the CDC director sided with the FDA panel(which meant going against one recommendation of the CDC panel). So yes, you and Greenwald blaming the CDC for siding with the expert FDA panel.
This kind of misinformation spread on the right is insane and permeates every discussion. It's easier to spread misinformation than to fight it, this is such a sad state of affairs.
> CDC has been driven by the available science and by the reality of the pandemic
The Trump-appointed CDC directer Redfield exerted a ton of pressure in CDC to hide or manipulate data, overrode career civil servants’ decisions, fired or marginalized CDC scientists for doing their jobs, publicly spouted nonsense on Trump’s behalf including promoting conspiracy theories about China, etc.
People inside CDC were (for better or worse) not willing to stick their necks out to resist. CDC screwed up a ton in the first 6–12 months of the pandemic; 2020 was pretty much the worst year ever for the CDC. Federal agencies are sadly not fully functional without effective good-faith leadership and support from the top.
Is it the official stance of the CDC or WHO that a country with 99% of eligible adults double-vaccinated would have no need for masks, lockdowns, social distancing, travel restrictions or other restrictions?
I'm vaccinated, and in a country with 80% of people on two doses and 90% on one dose. But we still have a lot of cases, and a lot of people stuck on ventilators in hospitals.
It depends on the R0 of the mutation, and the efficacy of the vaccine.
For instance if Delta has an R0 of 8, and we're 100% vaccinated, and the vaccine has an efficacy of 85% against infection, the resultant Rt would be 1.2:
8 * (1 - (1 * 0.85))
So that means that some other form of mitigation on top of 100% vaccination would be necessary to stop the spread.
But for mutations with lower R0, or higher vaccine efficacy, herd immunity may still be possible.
That's kind of a moot point since the Delta variant has now out competed all other variants in the wild. If another new variant takes over from Delta it's unlikely to have a lower R0. At this point nothing we do can really stop the spread. Everyone should get vaccinated if they can because herd immunity won't protect anyone from infection.
> At this point nothing we do can really stop the spread. Everyone should get vaccinated if they can because herd immunity won't protect anyone from infection.
I think that's an overstatement of the links you are sharing.
Several parts of the country have pushed Rt < 1, so there are clearly things we can do to stop the spread, through a combination of vaccination and other mitigation measures.
And the definition of herd immunity is literally what protects people from infection. (Herd immunity includes vaccine immunity.) And even before the HIT, vaccination reduces contagion, reduces the doubling rate, buys time to implement further mitigation to drive down Rt < 1, and saves lives.
Anyway, what the Astra Zeneca guy is saying is just that our vaccines are not effective enough against infection to get Rt < 1 on their own.
mRNA Vaccines do have efficacy against infection, and additional effectiveness against infecting others; it's just that they're still not quite as effective as their effectiveness against hospitalization and death.
Improved vaccines, or the third-shots happening now (which do temporarily improve infection efficacy) improve those stats. Herd immunity isn't yet theoretically impossible even if it's a practical impossibility in our populations.
It probably is true that we can't go back to the way we were pre-covid, no distancing, no masks, and avoid COVID spread. We're not there and may never be since there's a likelihood that some variant of COVID will be endemic.
But there's plenty we can do - vaccination, and mitigation to get Rt < 1 during spikes. Those two practices protect people from infection.
Wait are you seriously saying masks, lockdowns, etc. during spikes _forever_? “The covid season is upon us, let’s stock up on masks, pull kids out of school, and cancel our overseas trip”? For the foreseeable future?
The point is Rt. If Rt is above 1, and the disease has a degree of mortality similar to what it has now, then it means the case count will double at some rate. And ICUs will fill up, and people will start dying from things like broken legs and pneumonia from not being able to get sufficient care. Does that make sense? That's just what Rt > 1 means; case counts are doubling. If Rt is above 1, then if you don't want the disease to eat the world, something needs to happen to get Rt back below 1. If not, it will happen naturally, solely through natural immunity and unnecessary death.
So the goal simply needs to be to keep Rt below 1, or to knock it back below 1 before prevalance becomes dangerous and threatens ICUs.
But that doesn't necessarily mean lockdowns. If there's a spike but already a good level of immunity, it might just mean masks on public transportation for a couple of months, or people naturally choosing to go out to eat three fewer times a month, or whatever.
The measure of required mitigation depends entirely upon the circumstance in the moment. If Rt spikes a little, you don't need to do much. If it spikes a lot, you need to do more. But with enough vaccination, we might not ever need full lockdowns for covid again.
> For instance if Delta has an R0 of 8, and we're 100% vaccinated, and the vaccine has an efficacy of 85% against infection, the resultant Rt would be 1.2:
For herd immunity, you also need to take into account that infected people—even symptomatic ones—are less infectious to others, if they're vaccinated.
Yeah, I'm familiar with that - I think that can be bundled into the efficacy number if you look at it as "efficacy against infecting others".
Last I heard, the CDC gave a 95% CI of the mRNA vaccines being 26% - 84% against infection (from Delta), and there's an additional 40% - 60% protection against infecting others (I've seen that estimate in multiple places but I don't know the source). If that's true, it suggests an overall range of 55.6 - 93.6 effectiveness against infecting others.
300 new cases / day, 5500 active cases, and 2 deaths / day, for a country with 10M people. (3 new cases / day, 55 active cases, 0.02 deaths / day, per 100,000.)
Compared with, say, the US: 112,000 new cases / day, 9,800,000 active cases, 2000 deaths / day. (34 new cases / day, 3000 active cases, 0.6 deaths / day, per 100,000.)
This always makes me laugh. The virus comes in waves and someone will point out one country is doing “better” when it’s just the fact the country is past the latest wave.
I even saw different regions of my country do this. Fast forward 2 months and the situations are reversed and so is the finger pointing.
Nobody is willing to take a stance that strong, because they can't know that for sure. There could be further viral mutations, an unexpectedly sudden decline in immunity from vaccines, a string of unlucky superspreader events, a completely unrelated pandemic, or any of a lot of other uncontrollable, unknowable factors that could make continued restrictions necessary in an almost-fully-vaccinated population.
It's an unfortunate circumstance that 90% of people being fully vaccinated might not be enough to stop COVID-19 in its tracks. Even just 1% of people being unvaccinated makes millions of people who could catch, mutate, and transmit the virus. Especially if those people were loosely clustered together, and didn't take precautions against spreading disease, they could possibly keep the virus active (and hospitals busy) for a long time on their own.
I agree in theory, but... we as a nation already crossed that boundary ages ago. Kids can't consent to anything, adults can't do certain drugs, adults also can't drink or smoke if they're under 21, and a lot of this isn't even recent. World War II saw the nation doing a lot of gymnastics to avoid letting people do things with their bodies. Further, we already ban certain forms of abortion, and it's not universally controversial that we do.
I think you're arguing from a fictional frame of reference.
Ideologically I'm somewhere in the right half of the spectrum, and even I'll admit that the state has absolutely taken the right to bodily autonomy, and I don't think it's a universally bad thing.
That is a good point. I used to fantasize of living in a fictional world where there is such a thing as inalienable human rights. I struggle to swallow the hard pill that a disease with a survival rate of 99.9% in under 65s has upended that fiction. (BTW, I am not facetious, and the coming winter risks being brutal).
I have long suspected that the modern 80 year life expectancy was a grand illusion. I wonder if the covid pandemic is Mother Nature's way of signalling that the party is over and it's time to return to 'Gaudeamus igitur, Iuvenes dum sumus'.
Look, if you could actually show up with actual bodily autonomy then this would be a different conversation.
The fact of the matter is that no one is capable of being autonomous in the face of communicable diseases because if you are infected you turn into a factory for the disease that affects everyone else.
Citing a 99.9% survival rate is disingenuous when it’s infecting everyone. That’s blatantly obvious with Covid shooting up to 2-3 place for cause of death and if recall correctly one of those other major causes of death it’s competing with is cancer which is actually a basket of diseases with unrelated causes.
Even with the vaccine “mandate” the US gov has set, you still have the option to get tested frequently and not be vaccinated.
You can’t refuse the vaccine, refuse to get tested and prove you are immune, and want to walk around uninhibited in public when you could be carrying this disease. That’s not bodily autonomy that’s just saying “fuck you I do what I want” to society, so don’t be surprised when claims of “my body, my choice” or clamoring about rights falls on deaf ears to the rest of society
I encourage everyone to get vaccinated if they can, it's the smart thing to do. But vaccinated people can still carry and spread the virus. They may be somewhat less contagious but we don't have clear data on that yet.
I feel like you read part of my response and then wrote yours immediately.
You are talking about how the vaccinated can spread the virus, which is I agree is true, but ignoring that they can only spread the virus when they get a breakthrough infection. The vaccine massively limits the chance of being infected.
If you cannot recognize the fact that the change of infecting someone else is a function with two variables where x*y where x is a Boolean of isInfected and y is a floating point of chanceOfBeingInfected then I don’t know how we can continue talking as you are in a different reality than I am.
If you get the vaccine your y value in the previous function drops dramatically. If you only look at the x value then of course you won’t see a value in getting vaccinated because you are ignoring the effects of vaccinating
CDC data shows that breakthrough infections are common. Since the virus is now endemic in the worldwide human population and can't be eradicated, all of us can expect to be exposed to it multiple times in our lives (just like the other 4 endemic human coronaviruses). Whether we're exposed by a vaccinated or unvaccinated individual is irrelevant.
Since exposure is inevitable, the smart move is to get vaccinated yourself. And take other steps to maximize your odds of surviving a breakthrough infection.
> CDC data shows that breakthrough infections are common
What do you mean by common? Do you mean that it happens or that it’s the same rate of infection as being unvaccinated? Your argument only works if the breakthrough infections are as “common” as getting infected without the vaccine.
> Whether we're exposed by a vaccinated or unvaccinated individual is irrelevant
But it is relevant that the chance of a vaccinated individual being contagious is _massively_ lower. You can’t argue that breakthrough infections of vaccinated individuals exist, so therefore coming into contact with a vaccinated person is as risky as coming into contact with an unvaccinated person.
You're not thinking this through clearly. Zoom out and consider longer time periods.
For any single interaction, your risk of virus transmission is probably lower with a vaccinated individual than with an unvaccinated individual (although the magnitude of the difference is unclear). But unless you're living as a hermit you're going to be in contact with thousands of people over the next several years. Some of those people will be infected and contagious. So you will inevitably be exposed multiple times.
The length of time does not matter when talking about infection rates and population groups.
If you have two population groups A and B and A has a massively lower infection rate then population group A is not going to have the virus surge through the entire population.
But this is all veering off my original point that you can’t claim bodily autonomy as a reason/right to not take preventative measures like the vaccine if you aren’t actually being autonomous.
It isn't infecting everyone or affecting everyone equally. Generally, more dense and poor areas have higher case rates. It doesn't make sense to apply the same restrictions everywhere, if your odds of catching the virus happen to be slim.
>It isn't infecting everyone or affecting everyone equally.
You are 100% correct. The vaccinated are barely affected while the unvaccinated are heavily affected.
>It doesn't make sense to apply the same restrictions everywhere, if your odds of catching the virus happen to be slim.
Correct again. We should not limit the vaccinated and prevent the unvaccinated who refuse to take routine tests from affecting the public.
Just so you think I am not allowing for any other option. I am 100% fine with someone who takes a Covid test and gets a negative every single day being allowed the same public privilege's as someone who gets the vaccine. My actual issue is with people who conflate not getting the vaccine with not getting tested as well but still somehow being allowed to walk around in public
You deliberately missed my point, which was about how and where the virus spreads, regardless of vaccination rates.
Transmission happens where people are crammed together. The Provincetown case from the summer vividly illustrated how this applies in highly vaccinated populations.
> You deliberately missed my point, which was about how and where the virus spreads, regardless of vaccination rates.
I didn’t deliberately miss your point, I’m saying your point is wrong.
You can’t talk about the “how and where the virus spreads” if you are acting as if vaccinated and unvaccinated populations have the same rate of spread. The existence of breakthrough infections does not invalidate the fact that the vaccine lowers transmission rates in the population.
It isn’t some binary field of isUseful where the presence of single transmission of the virus from someone who is vaccinated flips the value to false
As we delight at the thought of bringing misery to our fellow man, let's take a look at this intriguing report from UK, specifically the covid cases table at page 13 and covid case rates at page 17. Something strange: covid case rates among vaxxed/unvaxxed are roughly the same for >30 age group, showing a 2x-5x decrease in the vaxx population only for younger ages. Me thinks that this data warrants forcing all older people, vaxxed or unvaxxed, take a covid test every living day of their lives to prove their cleanliness and gain the priviledge of walking amongst the rightful. Hmm...
Making a second separate post. As this actually made me question things I went looking down this rabbit hole. Lo and behold this looks like a google bomb of bad material[1]. I then follow this through and find a whole set of people already pointing out how the paper does not claim that the vaccine is known to cause issues and pointing our your cherry-picking[2].
If you are going to spread misinformation across the internet, please at least run your clips through a thesaurus so they aren't a few seconds of googling away to discover the issue.
I am interested in push back, because the publication is internally inconsistent. One one hand they say on page 5 "With the delta variant, vaccine effectiveness against
infection has been estimated at around 65% with Vaxzevria and 80% with Comirnaty", on the other hand their own data says roughly no difference in infection rates between vaxx/unvaxx in >30 age group.
Alas, your link [1] is just a random reddit screenshot and link [2] is accidentally missing.
My apologies for missing that link last night especially as the user appears to have scrubbed the comment. Let me quote the same information I meant to have linked to.
This is from page 12 of your linked source, the bit with words before the nice graphs you wanted me to focus on.
> These data should be considered in the context of vaccination status of the population groups shown in the rest of this report. The vaccination status of cases, inpatients and deaths is not the most appropriate method to assess vaccine effectiveness and there is a high risk of misinterpretation. Vaccine effectiveness has been formally estimated from a number of different sources and is described earlier in this report.
In the context of very high vaccine coverage in the population, even with a highly effective vaccine, it is expected that a large proportion of cases, hospitalisations and deaths would occur in vaccinated individuals, simply because a larger proportion of the population are vaccinated than unvaccinated and no vaccine is 100% effective. This is especially true because vaccination has been prioritised in individuals who are more susceptible or more at risk of severe disease. Individuals in risk groups may also be more at risk of hospitalisation or death due to non-COVID-19 causes, and thus may be hospitalised or die with COVID-19 rather than because of COVID-19.
Your own source is saying your interpretation of the data is incorrect and explaining why you’d see higher rates of vaccinated individuals hospitalized. Why are you claiming that the study proves what it says it doesn’t prove?
Thanks for sharing. Just to make it clear, I am in full agreement that covid vaccines are very effective at reducing covid infection severity, especially in older age groups. The document we are discussing confirms as much.
> simply because a larger proportion of the population are vaccinated than unvaccinated and no vaccine is 100% effective.
They are computing case rates. This part of the argument doesn't explain that the case rates are similar in vaccinated vs unvaccinated population.
> This is especially true because vaccination has been prioritized in individuals who are more susceptible or more at risk of severe disease.
The cumulative vaccination uptake rates are 85%+ in >50 ages group, see charts on pages 9-10. While prioritization may have a sizable effect at small vaccination rates, once almost all of the population is vaccinated we have to assume the most of the vaccinated are not 'more susceptible or more at risk of severe disease', otherwise we are simply saying that (almost) everyone is more susceptible. Also, it is 'susceptible of severe disease' not simply 'susceptible of getting infected with covid'. If 10-15% of the population were to have 90% smaller susceptibility to covid infections within the same age group from natural causes, we would have heard about that by now.
For me, the mystery remains.
I could speculate a number of hypotheses, the first one being that there is something about they count 'covid cases' that doesn't match the rest of the literature, but I was unable to find the specific paragraph describing that. Perhaps there is something really dumb that escaped me :(
On the flip side, I also don't have visibility in how 'vaccine effectiveness' rates are computed in the rest of the literature. Perhaps there is something about how other people count 'covid cases' that presents a different picture.
That being said, theirs is a real life measurement of an entire country on natural timeframe, vs. studies that are usually done on population samples on limited timeframes, and then extrapolated to entire countries on natural timeframe. So while this is a single source, it is from a highly credible org with a highly credible setting, making it difficult to dismiss offhand.
For the record, somebody provided an alternate explanation along the lines of 'they are doing a dumb thing'. Specifically, population estimates are less reliable than vaccination counts, and as vaccination rates go near 90% and over, the unreliability greatly increases when computing unvaccinated_estimated = pop_estimate - vaccinated. A corrected graph using a different population estimate:
Oh hey, you finally posted data from a not immediately bad source that backed up your point. This is legitimately something that makes me look at the data and question current course.
Now question for you. Do you have other data sets backing this up, or only the single one that goes against the other data sets?
I actually am taking this into account, but a single set of data or studies that purports one conclusion is not going to make me ignore the hundreds of other studies that disagree
There’s no concentration camps for Covid, you can stay home.
You don’t catch hiv by walking by someone positive with it, and if you did like you do with Covid and it caused the same level of casualties then yes I would be all for the measures as we are using against covid
I happen to agree with that logic. Corporations have too much power. What I don't agree with is limiting regulation to a few companies based on the current situation.
When Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission got decided on narrow technical grounds this is the kind of thing my political ideology warned about. We gave far too much power to corporations to decide who they do business with. The laws around that sort of power were decided long before everyone could find out some of the most intimate aspects of your life in a few google searches.
The only reason I am against the anti vaxxers/anti covid measure people trying to take down the faang companies ability to stop their speech right now is because they only want to limit corporate power and private property as it extends to themselves.
Look at the florida law for instance that tried to damage social media companies that blocked people based on their political speech unless they owned a theme park, which was an explicit carve out for Disney.
I can get behind a movement that wants to prevent corporations from having enough power to limit individual rights. I cannot get behind a movement that only wants to prevent corporations from limiting rights on a group of people that I believe are hurting me, but will not limit corporations from limiting rights on everyone else.
Either the logic applies to all, or people are lying about caring about rights and just want to be the people on top.
There are human "rights", and then there is Mother Nature's reality. Rather than thread after thread of arguing over whose fault it is and taking potshots at our respective outgroups, perhaps we should instead consider finding The Experts on reality. Perhaps they do not exist, just as we once did not have various other experts.
If you/society do not like people walking around spreading viruses that affect other’s bodies, then perhaps you and society should do something about it.
For example, when the covid virus broke out on the scene, some experts developed a vaccine that seems to be pretty darn good at rectifying the situation. Now there seems to be a related but different problem: a fair amount of people who are opposed to taking that vaccine (walking around spreading viruses that affect other’s bodies), so perhaps a similar approach should be taken: find some people with expertise in the problem, and let them do their thing (maybe throw a few ten or hundred million at them to grease the wheels). As it is, the people who have been tasked with this job seem to be not performing up to the expectations of lots of people, so it might be a good idea to start looking for some who can.
We(society) are doing something about it. The convincing based on logic is over and now economic pressure and choosing who or who not to associate with is occurring.
I am sorry that you can’t have your hand held every step of the way as you and your group continually shit on everything and put the rest of us at risk.
Sucks to suck for everyone who loses their job cause they want to take a stance. They’ll be remembered as martyrs should they be proven right, but I wouldn’t put money on it.
> Based on my observations, when people lose their income (particularly as a result of policies they disagree with), they often become angry. On one hand, this can be enjoyable for observers. But then on the other hand, sometimes Mother Nature has a surprise in store that more than makes up for the pleasure. Let's hope for everyone's sake that this is not one of the times that the law of unintended consequences pays us a visit.
Would you mind not being cryptic and stating what you actually mean? I don’t expect people to find my beliefs tasteful or agree with them, but I am laying them out on the table to discuss at least.
If your claim is "handle these people with carebear gloves or they are gonna domestic terrorism you", then I ask you to consider why that logic would not work in reverse. If you have an entire group of people saying "let me spread this virus amongst your people and if you even try to say I am wrong, I will terrorize your people" what do you think the response from any rational group is?
While you haven't said it directly as you are, in my opinion, a coward. I see how you are implying that society should let the crazy do as they like or they will attack anyone who disagrees.
You should consider how well that went for the Confederate States of America when they decided their gumption could dominate industrial might and innovation.
Good luck sir, Mother Nature has a surprise in store for those who think they can outfeel logistics. Say hi your boog bois too
Yeah, because in the USA nobody ever instituted vaccine mandates until COVID happened. Oh wait, sorry, I forgot about all the vaccines we require children to receive before they can go to school.
> Oh wait, sorry, I forgot about all the vaccines we require children to receive before they can go to school.
Weren't those just for public schools? If someone was homeschooled, couldn't they have made it to adulthood without those vaccines, and then never again be asked about them?
This pandemic isn't a scenario in a board game where the rules are clear cut and easy to parse. A lot of the "wishy-washy"-ness that people attribute to the CDC is actually just them responding to the changing situation on the ground. People demand to know what percentage of the population needs to be vaccinated to return to normal so answers are given - but those answers will change as our understanding evolves.
Vaccinations save lives - and not only your own. Do it.
Not quite true. Vaccines protect people against the worst effects, but they're not as effective against infection. So a lot of unvaccinated people with the disease might have caught it from vaccinated people. (I'm pro-vaccination, I just don't like the practice of blaming it all on the unvaccinated people.)
> If vaccinations encourage new variants is a total different question. It is very possible. Evolutionary pressure is a bitch.
Fewer infected people means fewer mutations. As to whether those fewer mutations spread better (thanks to selective pressure)? It's a legitimate question, but thankfully the answer appears to be the no, the opposite, thanks to the neutralising antibody response. See https://twitter.com/sailorrooscout/status/142544990582960128...
The messaging now at least here in BC is all about increasing vaccination coverage. To a degree that I'm reminded of Goodhart's law "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure". Who cares how many people are vaccinated, what the goal should be is reducing hospitalizations, deaths and long-Covid for the good of people (don't die) and that of the health care system (ICUs not overrun). If there's a community who doesn't want to get vaccinated, who cares as long as the overall goal is still reached. We're focusing too much on cases and vaccinations to reduce cases at the moment in my view. We've lost touch with what's important, at least our messaging doesn't reflect that.
> the goal should be is reducing hospitalizations, deaths and long-Covid for the good of people (don't die) and that of the health care system (ICUs not overrun).
I agree, that's an excellent goal! Universal vaccination seems to be an excellent means of achieving it. Besides that, what other thrusts would you like to see?
Well, see, universal vaccination I would say is sufficient to achieve this goal but not required. I wonder if it would be better to focus on vaccination coverage in hotspots where we do have issues with hospitalizations.
What triggered me to wrote this is articles like this one [0] that, in my opinion, don't do anything to convince anybody to get vaccinated. All they do is shame people or groups of people. And what's missing from this article? While it talks about case numbers
> Manitoba's Southern Health region, which encompasses the RM of Stanley, made up roughly half of the province's new COVID-19 cases in recent weeks, but is only home to around 15 per cent of the population.
it completely leaves out what's actually going on in the hospitals in that particular region. Case numbers aren't meaningful. Especially with vaccines that are great at preventing serious symptoms but only good at preventing spread. Don't get me wrong, I'm vaccinated and I believe everybody should be. But the vaccines aren't gonna protect us from ever getting the virus. We all will get it. What matters is to strategically focus on vulnerable groups and difficult geographical areas. But unfortunately we seem to be looking for a one size fits all approach. But maybe people in rural Manitoba need to be taken care of differently than people in urban Toronto.
As a British Columbian who spent over a decade living in Australia, I learned there that name-and-shame is indeed very effective at changing behaviour!
I wasn't arguing whether or not name-and-shame works, I was arguing that it's wrong to do to begin with because it doesn't bring us closer to our goal.
I don't know, I never had an issue with that point. "Flatten the curve" is alright, but then what? It would be stupid to "flatten the curve" for a while, then call "mission accomplished" and pretend covid is over if that causes the situation to immediately go critical again.
So far the playbook seems to have been:
1) Flatten the curve: Use lockdowns, masks and social distancing measures to maintain a situation where hospitals can still cope. This is not a one-time goal, it's an ongoing effort: As long as there was no vaccine, "no significant transmission right now" does not mean everything is back to normal - because if measures are lifted, transmission can quickly increase and become critical again.
2) Because the situation in 1) seriously sucks for everyone, try to come up with solutions to end the pandemic permanently (or at least make it permanently nonthreatening for the health system so we can leave "pandemic mode" and treat it as an ordinary disease). So far the most obvious strategy for this is vaccination - hence the increasing push to get everyone vaccinated.
3) Evolutionary pressures on the virus might cause the vaccines to become less effective. This unfortunately calls into question whether 2) is really able to bring an end to the pandemic. If this is really the case, then new plans are needed, such as boosters, new vaccines, I don't know. This stuff is currently being figured out.
1) and 2) does not seem like "moving the goalposts" to me. The goals were the same since the beginning of the pandemic, though of course the situation and circumstances were changing (you can only keep up a lockdown for so long, vaccines changed from "vague hope" to "viable strategy", etc)
3) is a new development that was apparently somewhat unexpected (I remember the virus was being talked about as relatively mutation resistant, which evidently wasn't the case.) - but this was simply new knowledge and new developments that might require a change in strategy - the overall goal to get out of this mess (by either eradicating covid or make it nonthreatening) did not change IMO.
Of course if this goal turns out to be permanently unarchievable, the goalpost shifting might start...
There is no scientific proof, e.g. RCT, that lockdowns work. When did 'stay at home if sick, live life otherwise' become obsoleted?
Edit: "3) is a new development that was apparently somewhat unexpected". That evolutionary pressures on the virus might^H^H^H will cause the vaccines to become less effective was and is the #1 concern of the critics of mass mRNA vaccination campaigns.
> "There is no scientific proof, e.g. RCT, that lockdowns work.
You want to make a randomized, controlled study on entire countries? That's your idea of ethics in science?
> That evolutionary pressures on the virus might^H^H^H will cause the vaccines to become less effective was and is the #1 concern of the critics of mass mRNA vaccination campaigns.
No, it was one argument of whatever seemed convenient at that point to argue against vaccines. Consequently, their only advice how to cope with that problem seems to basically give up and don't do anything.
Honestly, I don't understand what strategy you guys would propose to end the pandemic. Apart from pretending it doesn't exist of course.
Sometimes I picture a lot of the covid measures as raising sandbag walls in front of a tsunami. Feels good to do something, anything, but the tsunami is going to do its thing, at best delayed a bit. The second the earthquake hit, Sendai was gone. There was nothing anybody could do about it. If that's "pretending it doesn't exist", then so be it.
* Vaccines are useful in preventing severe disease. Get one, especially if your are not a child. But they are also fragile and it's anybody's guess how they'll interact with a 'likely vaccine evading variant' (quoting Pfizer CEO here).
* It is unclear what effect the vaccines have on the virus evolution. We assume its going to be positive, but have no actual data on it.
* It is unclear what effect the vaccines have on disease spread. The big question is the effect of vaccines on the rate of 'asymptomatic spreaders', which may increase under a regimen of reducing symptom severity.
* Lockdowns have massive costs. Keeping the world running also saves lives, and it's not at all clear that the balance favors hard covid measures.
* Suspended school, masks and social distancing have severe costs in children. I am not sure we thought through the consequences on the next generation.
* The scapegoating shaping online is grotesque. Being a fortunate to be born post WW2 world with its bounty of health, I never understood the story of touching the leper. Until the reaction to the covid pandemic finally illuminated my mind.
The costs of attempts to cure the disease may be worse than the disease. And the disease is horrible.
I think it's an interesting discussion. Thanks for explaining your viewpoint, even if I don't agree with it.
But I'd like to ask again: You've listed a lot of points on what not to do. But so what should we do to tackle this virus? A virus that will quickly cause enough severe cases to require triage at hospitals.if left unchecked and that will not go away anymore on its own.
Or do you really view this as some sort of slow-motion Armageddon, destinied to bring in the end times - so any resistance is futile on principle?
The reality: The tsunami didn't end Japan. <50 age group covid is survived by 99.9% of the population. There is no Armageddon, at least not if the virus doesn't get significantly worse. Life expectancy might get a hit, fewer people are going to make it all the way to 80 and beyond.
The hope: Eventually everyone is getting exposed to covid, via vaccines, infection or both. At that point, hopefully, epidemic spikes will become minor, though sadly I don't think there is a path back to pre-pandemic innocence.
* Encourage vaccinations for everyone over 18, and especially over 65 where the bulk of the burden is. I say this with a heavy heart, because there appears to be at least one instance of leaky vaccines selecting for hypervirulent variants in veterinary applications. This is what gives me nightmares. I won't link to it, it's somewhere in my comment history if you are super-curious. Praying for the best. Maybe it's just me being prone to overweigh worst case scenarios. Maybe it's my grandma saying "God's punishment" for instances of lack of humility turning for the worse.
* Lift restrictions for children, especially under 12. I've seen credible data indicating that unvaxxed child covid risk is less than vaxxed parent covid risk. Keep schools open, remove blanket mask mandates, stop pushing vaccines, when it's beyond clear the risk and benefits for them are minuscule, and there are long-term questions around virus evolution trajectory. If I'm not mistaken, something like that happens already in a number of European countries: Swe and Den, possibly UK and NL.
* Exercise regularly, vitamin C & D, zinc, especially in winter season. This is a good time to open the conversation about obesity and diabetes. One side effect of the lockdowns is increased child obesity rates; this metric is trending the wrong way.
* Stay at home if having symptoms. Employer pays no questions asked.
* Probably a system of aid for symptomatic long covid cases. It is unclear how prevalent it is, but, for example, losing lung capacity is an absolute nightmare. Source: I could barely climb a flight of 5 stairs after a bout of pneumonia a few years back. Can't imagine holding a blue collar job in those circumstances.
* Probably skip eating out, partying or sports during an active infection spike, usually about 2 months. See covidestim.org for a very useful resource in estimating whether there is an ongoing spike or not.
* Hospitals are going to get overwhelmed during a spike because they are simply not built for spikes. If that is a concern, we should think on how to quickly scale capacity up and down. Might be very expensive. Perhaps something crazy like a National Health Guard.
* There are going to be victims, mostly old but some young. Please try to keep a bit of decency instead of rushing with every single case on social media for clicks and fear and panic. We are incurring great loss, we are supposed to mourn. It's disturbing.
* Stop scapegoating. The situation is miserable as is, no need to make it even worse through a hellish social landscape.
* Finally, please stop playing God. Recently a grant proposing to essentially design covid at WIH was leaked to the press. The grant was thankfully denied, but the thought that we are 2 inches away from triggering the next pandemic is troubling.
Edit: Come to think of it, this is how the system is supposed to work. People have different stations in life and different concerns. We stand together through hell and high water. We compromise. What we are getting instead is extremes: either hyper drastic measures or, I presume, complete lack of caution.
> When did 'stay at home if sick, live life otherwise' become obsoleted?
When we figured out there was asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic spread. Your advice probably leads to significantly more than 219 million cases worldwide, and 4.5 million dead.
That is not a RCT, that is comparing 2 data points selected after the results were known. The reason we have RCTs is that it is very easy to fool oneself, for example by filtering the experiment populations after the results are known. Remember when peer reviewed journals published experiments 'proving' ESP. https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/psychologists-confront-imposs...
Re asymptomatic. Vaccinated people also spread the disease asymptomatically. I have seen zero rigorous studies showing how vaccinated asymptomatic spread compares with unvaccinated asymptomatic spread. No, picking 3 studies and linking data between them is not a replacement for a rigorous RCT. This is a particularly salient question as the biggest selling point of vaccines is that they reduce symptom severity.
> I have seen zero rigorous studies showing how vaccinated asymptomatic spread compares with unvaccinated asymptomatic spread. [...] This is a particularly salient question as the biggest selling point of vaccines is that they reduce symptom severity.
And why are you linking spread & symptom severity?
Asymptomatic spreader: Person with an active infection that exhibits symptoms under their own personal threshold for self quarantine.
Core vaccines observable effect: Reduce manifestation of symptoms in infected persons.
It is possible that the vaccinated population has a larger rate and/or absolute numbers of people with no/low symptoms, aka 'asymptomatic spreaders'. It is also possible the other way around. I don't have hard data, nobody else seems to do.
Given that I don't actually know, I'm happy to refrain from speculation. I wish I could say the same from the 'any measure that may have some conceivable effect of reducing R0 must be mandated yesterday, or else you are personally responsible for the death of 4M people worldwide, and counting' crowd.
> I wish I could say the same from the 'any measure that may have some conceivable effect of reducing R0 must be mandated yesterday, or else you are personally responsible for the death of 4M people worldwide, and counting' crowd.
>> This is a particularly salient question as the biggest selling point of vaccines is that they reduce symptom severity.
You mean the 'any measure that may have some conceivable effect of reducing symptom severity must be mandated yesterday, or else you are personally responsible for the death of 4M people worldwide, and counting' crowd.
When did it ever get to no one can ever get Covid again? We tried to “flatten the curve” and still had large spikes. After we got some semblance of control we only kept infections down with lockdowns and other measures.
This is a tech based forum, surely everyone here has experience with a boss who complains that he’s paying you when the system never breaks, not knowing that it’s not breaking because of active measures being taken to prevent it
> Then at some point it became "no one can ever get covid again" and we did wild things like close schools even if a person so much as got near a person with COVID.
Anecdotally, I have never heard anyone make the argument "no one can ever get covid again" nor heard of a school being closed because "a person got near a person with COVID".
Sorry, yeah, I should have been more clear: I have heard of schools being closed, just not for the reason that "someone got near someone with covid". Inslee's statement says the reason is due to "increasing rates of COVID-19 related infections, hospitalizations and death", but maybe you have additional information about the real reason.
You pretty obviously can argue with people who don't argue in good faith. When they shift the goal posts call attention to it, explain it, and then meet them where they are at. People watching will see the other party being duplicitous.
I'm imagining YouTube or the government or whoever hiring some informed experts and inviting the vaccine hesitant on for debates. Let them make whatever arguments they want and when they are absurd or move the goalposts point it out. Are medical doctors X, Y, and Z, selected for being informed and skilled orators going to be outdebated by the likes of Alex Jones? Why can't we have some experts who just engage with the conspiracy theory stuff, not sneeringly but just dispassionately.
I don't think this would convince everyone. I don't think convincing everyone should be the goal. I do think it would convince more people than the current approach though and it would be more in keeping with free speech ideals.
I would pay a lot to watch this and other content like it. Exhaustive rebuttals that painstakingly enumerate over the minute, and ultimately unimportant, arguments fully refuting the hair brained arguments we’ve all seen shouted without an a drop of critical analysis behind them. Good luck getting an anti vaxxer to agree to an argument that’ll have to take place over months to allow time for proper research and production to occur.
People do regularly debate, debunk, and directly answer the conspiracy theory stuff. Plus, if there's a statement made that an invisible unicorn is controlling the world, how am I supposed to debunk that?
The debunking stuff just isn't content interesting these people who are not seeking it out.
I feel there are enough debates with flat-earthers, climate change deniers, covid-deniers, anti-vaxers etc. and it leads to nowhere. (at least in .cz) The same applies to other topics, for example some time ago there was Internet censorship in .cz widely discussed (a topic where I can be, given my education and job, absolutely sure what things are nonsense from the technical point of view), and I think the problem is arguments from the "objectively correct" side are indistinguishable to a layperson from the "crafted nonsense". For a layperson to make sense of such arguments, at least a several hours long lecture explaining the concepts would be needed (in case of vaccines: DNA replication, proteosynthesis, folding, antigens and immune reactions…; in the case of internet censorship: routing, DNS, HTTPS, SNI…), which is impossible to do in a "debate", we have "lectures" for this. Otherwise, they simply cannot get the arguments and why the other side is wrong, by other means than faith.
And yes, of course there are many websites, free online textbooks and recorded lectures explaining such concepts available to anyone willing to spend some time on it. Even in Czech, so no language barrier.
I could not get vaccinated in Germany. Every illegal immigrant could get vaccinated but I as a German citizen, since I was not registered with the police, (some countries have this, for a US citizen this sounds weird) could not.
Ok, caught corona in south America in the Andes mountains and had serious breathing problems but survived.
I have a biotech background and I am sorry to break the news to you. Vaccinations won't make corona go away. I fact it may force it to adapt faster.
So why should I get vaccinated now? I dislike all the government pressure that is put on citizens in this regard.
An the parties in Sao Paulo are back on. No masks. Germany is not considering Brazil even as a high risk country anymore.
So why the force for vaccinations? Freedom won't come back except if the Citizens demand it.
So you're not a virologist or epidemiologist then? Got it.
> and I am sorry to break the news to you. Vaccinations won't make corona go away. I fact it may force it to adapt faster.
The virus spreads more rapidly among and lives for longer inside the unvaccinated, as a result getting much more exposure to human immune systems, and thus giving it more opportunity to evolve.
If it was called the Trump Vaccine and he was mandating it, this whole thing would be flipped. It's that simple.
It has been tribal from the start and still is. We all know this is how things work at this point. It's not as based in science or rational arguments as it is based on motivated reasoning and confirmation bias.
> anti-vax "side" has been shifting goalposts since day n-1.
(claimer/disclaimer: I'm a hard-science type (famous university or rather, institute) and got vaccinated as soon as I could; I am from a very healthy family that does not suffer from outlier symptoms (like flu, but eh it's not bad, no allergies, no side effects etc.) so overall I just didn't worry about it, but I didn't worry about Covid before I got vaccinated either.)
but the biggest goalpost that got moved was, we have government regulations and protocols that concern drug approvals to make sure that the general population is not exposed to unnecessary risks. The Covid vaccines were fast tracked and unleashed untested: that's a huge goalpost shifted a huge distance. And nor was the administering of the vaccine accompanied by a notification of the major risks inherent in this approach, like for example, perhaps the viral spike protein was causing all the tissues' damage and the vaccine included the spike protein.
so, in my book the pro vax side has behaved reprehensibly and is doing even deeper damage to the body politic by normalizing censorship.
> but the biggest goalpost that got moved was, we have government regulations and protocols that concern drug approvals to make sure that the general population is not exposed to unnecessary risks.
That's not a goalpost that got shifted. We have standards for both normal approvals and emergency use authorizations. Both were followed for the vaccines (which got EUAs followed by, in some cases/uses, full approval.)
> The Covid vaccines were fast tracked and unleashed untested
No, they weren't, vaccine candidates were developed within a few weeks of sequencing the virus and basically the entire time between then and release was spent in clinical trials.
> accompanied by a notification of the major risks inherent in this approach, like for example, perhaps the viral spike protein was causing all the tissues' damage and the vaccine included the spike protein.
Pretty sure “this vaccine causes all the damaging effects of COVID” side effect would have shown up somewhere in Phase I-III trials.
> We have standards for both normal approvals and emergency use authorizations.
so, since you are implying that emergency use approval protocols are just as safe as normal protocols, why don't we follow emergency use protocols all the time? they're quicker!
> you are implying that emergency use approval protocols are just as safe as normal protocols
No, I’m saying that EUA protocols exist with defined standards for a reason, and putting things that mert the standards through them is not moving goalposts, since its exactly where the goalposts have been set for quite some time.
> why don't we follow emergency use protocols all the time?
We do, if people apply for an EUA. Of course, very often they don't because the standards that exist for EUAs would rule them out.
you are using double-speak to avoid agreeing with the clear sense of what I'm saying. Just come out and say, "these vaccines themselves posed an unusually high risk to the people receiving them; we just thought it was worthwhile because of the threat the virus posed"
It's not like I'm trying to get you to admit something else that's true, that "there are actually benefits to study in in having a portion of the population unvaccinated, since we don't actually know the long term effects of either the virus, natural immunity, or the vaccines"
There is no clear sense of what you're saying because you refuse to answer any clarifying questions. If you want to participate in a discussion rather than just lecturing us about how we're being "reprehensible," tell us what you mean when you say untested. Because the clear meaning of that word is untrue on its face and you have so far refused to offer any explanation for what you meant. "Trials that take time" is likewise utterly lacking in clarity, because there were trials, and they took time.
I am honestly trying to understand your point of view. I really do want to know what specific difference between EUA and approval you're referring to. Not as a gotcha, not as some kind of rhetorical trick--I am taking you seriously. But you seem to be deliberately refusing to return the favor.
You claimed that the vaccines were "unleashed untested". This claim was shown to be false: they are very much tested, albeit not as rigorously as in normal times - but these aren't normal times, and such possibility is precisely why the emergency protocols were already in place.
If the product cures an itchy rash, then a chance that it kills even one in a million users is a horrible side-effect and we need to know about.
If the product prevents a deadly disease, then we should be taking it even if we know for sure that it kills one in a million (because Covid is killing two in every thousand, and you're 2,000x safer taking the vaccine).
are you saying there's no cost benefit tradeoff in individuals deciding whether they want the vaccine?
oh, they'll clog up all the hospitals? then are you advocating illegalizing obesity and type 2 diabetes?
I just think the discussion and polity is varied and nuanced, and I don't trust all the people who want to shut down all discussion in favor of a weird monoculture
> then are you advocating illegalizing obesity and type 2 diabetes?
When people say "clog up the hospitals" they're talking about situations where patients are turned away not only from a local hospital, but every hospital in the state because all beds are occupied by Covid patients. I'm not aware of obesity or type 2 diabetes having this impact on our healthcare system.
If you're very old, you're likely to dies from covid (but also from all sorts of things - this is what old age is about). Not if you're young. So the cost-benefit analysis is different per user, and this is why some people think twice about it.
> perhaps the viral spike protein was causing all the tissues' damage and the vaccine included the spike protein
Yes, but without the vaccine, most people will get infected by real COVID, which introduces the same spike protein (in an uncontrolled quantity, as the virus is replicating) and several other proteins, causing even more damage. Is this a better outcome?
> we have government regulations and protocols that concern drug approvals to make sure that the general population is not exposed to unnecessary risks
These protocols are tuned to be super-safe when there is little at stake. With a raging pandemic, with a nontrivial mortality/long-term effects/economic and societal effects, you are going to change this.
Let's remind ourselves that many, many people are not at risk of covid[0]. It's just like asking everyone to wear hip airbags because falls can cause death when you're 90+.
If I may use your metaphor, falls aren't infectious. And because they aren't infectious, they don't overwhelm the medical system.
Yes, it's true that many people who get covid will have a mild case. Broadly speaking, the younger someone is, the better their chances.
And it is just as true that hospital systems in hotspot areas are overwhelmed, causing emergency standards of care, burnout among medical staff, long waits, and the postponement of things like surgery for cancer patients.
I understand that covid is infectious, however, for the people at risk for whom the risk-benefit balance is clearly in favor of benefit, then they can get vaccinated, right?
Yes they can. But that's an individual approach to a public health crisis: people not at risk can pass the virus on to those who are at risk. If you were in a high risk group, wouldn't you appreciate your neighbor -- who might not be in a high risk category -- getting vaccinated?
My government (France) ordered pregnant women to get vaccinated while it wasn't tested for this kind of population. Kind of funny when basically 99% of medications are usually forbidden for child-bearing people.
> you cannot argue in good faith with someone who does not.
But the solution shouldn't be to shut down the discussion by banning the other side, because then you just have two sides who fight dirty.
One side refuses to see reason and understand arguments, the other uses shaming, coercion, and censorship in place of the arguments. If the truth is on your side, you shouldn't resort to that.
The thing to keep in mind is that when we say "the other side", we just mean people who don't intend to get vaccinated.
This hides the fact that there is no actual "side" in the sense of a unified group of people who collectively agree to a set of principles, and goalposts that can even be moved. It's just a bunch of people who have their own brains, and reasons. They aren't all the same, or believe the same things, or make the same claims.
This is trivially obvious, but I see it ignored most of the time. People get accused of things they don't actually believe, and didn't say, or do. That makes them defensive and makes it impossible to have a good-faith discussion, and that's part of the mess we're in.
Some people think that the chance of death from a vaccine is not worth it, however slight that chance is. For the young and healthy, risking catching the vaccine shouldn't be that big of a deal despite all the hype about "long covid". With the virus having been around for two years now, there's a strong argument to be made about natural immunity.
I think they knew that they had a lot of ways to make a better vaccine, and they will work on that, but I don't think it's going to be done quickly enough. So, I guess we all just have to go along with the booster shots until they "get it right". The government got heavily involved in the process, so it was bound to end up half-assed. There were people that said they would never let the government force them to take Trump's rushed vaccine. They wanted to create a disruption and a huge resistance to his efforts. Biden came along and "changed" it, and now they sing the praises of the vaccine and the unbelievable science behind it endlessly.
You have an enormous pressure to take the vaccine by the behemoth government and the people that write the paychecks. If people use one of the only avenues they have to not get forced into something they have their own reasons for not buying into, I don't really blame them. The people you argued with about the vaccine have nothing to do with ordinary people and their decisions. If I was a lowly worker, I would probably just take it because I guess I would have bigger problems.
There may not be much weight behind the anti-vaccine argument, but there's a lot to be said about better governance that probably would have involved doing things that actually work instead of having to point to things that didn't happen, especially with the angst about not enough people having complied with the emergency measures. Of course, the skeptics believe we mostly did the wrong things in a bout of panic and the need for post-hoc justification grew alongside the mass hysteria. There was the option of focused protection, yet it seems we neglected many people in care homes while the government got busy fighting windmills. We also seriously tampered with natural processes and normal lifestyles. That may have been counterproductive. We are now in a situation where there is no herd immunity, high-risk people are finding it impossible to avoid the infection forever, and we lost a lot of opportunities as the world was on pause that it everyone's life may objectively be worse than should be expected even after all this time.
I registered an account just to respond to this: "So, I guess we all just have to go along with the booster shots until they 'get it right'."
The Pfizer and especially Moderna vaccines were as close as we could get to an ideal vaccine and had a high efficacy rate - for the Alpha variant. We did get it right. Additionally, the risk of death from the vaccine is effectively zero outside of extremely rare and very specific circumstances that are much less common than death or long term to permanent side effects of COVID-19.
The target is a moving one, especially when a substantial part of the population allows (or can do nothing to stop) the virus to mutate unchecked. The Delta variant has a slightly different spike protein, and we are very lucky the vaccines remain effective at all against it.
If there was a tradeoff between making the vaccine safer or more effective, I guess I would agree to making it safer. That's what it seems like they did by focusing on the spike protein, which was said to not be a defining characteristic of coronaviruses in general. You should understand that the spike protein they did produce may not be nearly close enough to resembling an easily recognizable virus for the immune system to do exactly what we want it to do. This is also one of the reasons that natural immunity seems to be so much stronger than vaccine-acquired immunity. The vaccine might be called good enough by some, but the delta variant overwhelming all our efforts so soon has to be called less than ideal. In fact, the vaccine was supposed to be the light at the end of the tunnel, but it's obviously not. Little has changed, and we aren't doing all that much besides chasing after a magical vaccination or booster shot rate even as Israel is showing us that it's all for naught and mutations are still appearing.
Teenage boys are at a higher risk of heart complications from the vaccine. If one of them dies from a sudden heart condition, are we supposed to say something that make it seem like getting the jab was the honorable thing to do? Imagine if a parent went through the trouble of proving that their child has already been infected with the virus and has a family history of heart conditions or something. With the current, inflexible thinking about vaccine mandates, the powerful might end up pressuring or forcing them to get vaccinated anyways.
I think you only implied it, but the idea that the unvaccinated were the source of mutations was based largely on estimates that the viral load would be higher when they get infected. That turned out to not be the case when looking at the high viral load of people with breakthrough infections. In fact, as a lockdown skeptic, I think it's becoming clear that locking down indefinitely and losing sight of hospital capacity was a mistake that can explain our current plight. The perfectly healthy and young population normally become our shield from viruses each year. The vulnerable were the ones that needed to avoid infection, and they can't do it forever (and a booster shot may still not even be enough). Then again, we listened to Dr. Neil Ferguson and told Dr. Sunetra Gupta that she didn't know what she was talking about, so I am sure you see it differently.
While interesting, the article you linked to doesn't really corroborate much of what you're claiming, though obviously I didn't post any sources at all in my claims.
It's also worth mentioning that many of these symptoms are caused by immune response and not the compounds of the vaccine itself.
It still sounds like you're over-inflating the risks of vaccines and deflating the risks of COVID-19.
You're still proposing herd immunity (of which we're not there yet) as a solution while ignoring the deaths and suffering that will occur until or if we reach that point. I find the ethics of that proposition questionable at best. It also ignores the higher lethality of COVID-19 compared to the flu: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2...
The more I hear people respond to or ignore the numbers, the more I'm convinced that most people just don't have a good number sense or sense of risk assessment.
1% chance of death from COVID-19? That fine. ~0.009% of myocarditis after receiving the vaccine which is close to the normal rate of incidence without the vaccine? Unacceptable.
You aren't clear about things, but are you really saying can't begin to consider exceptions to the rule? If so, there's not much more to say because we aren't connecting at all. Chance of death is not a precise nor often-calculated figure. Whatever you were talking about, you likely overstated it by 5-10 times. You could look at IFR, mortality rate, or excess deaths, but none tell the full story when you consider the chaos and disruption of 2020.
To list a few other things: We don't have reliable numbers for adverse effects, so clinical trials will have to be done. It was just one example, but it was about teenage boys that you have the numbers backwards for if you account for age of an individual. The immune response is cited as a major factor that leads to more serious and fatal cases of COVID, so I am not sure why you are treating that as an important distinction with the vaccine.
When the death count of children reached 300, there was a mainstream MD that questioned why researchers had, thus far, failed to contact the attending physicians to find out the circumstances of these unusual deaths. That should have been pretty important, but it wasn't. England may have dug a bit deeper to verify that 25 children had died from COVID in their country. If teenage boys are the highest risk group for myocarditis as a side effect, and their risk of death is infinitesimal, what kind of math are you offering? Teenage boys and young men generally were not being warned about the relative risk to themselves. That's seems like a problem. I guess heart damage could be considered _no big deal_, but it's substantial and much more visible than often-exaggerated long COVID, at least for the young and healthy. Maybe you prefer to speak about society at large, but there's not an automatic justification for that. If that's what we are actually doing, it should be acknowledged that we are asking children to make sacrifices for adults because I think many people see that as backwards, unethical, and completely unacceptable.
Herd immunity is not how you summarize any strategy, but it's kind of important just like food, money, and a functioning society. Spoiler Alert: We did technically pursue focused protection for the wealthy in wealthy countries. That's one hell of a game plan. If the vaccine worked as advertised, we would be rounding the corner on herd immunity. We are not, and that may be the least of what's gone wrong. Lastly, Bill Maher exposed his fellow liberals for getting the numbers on COVID wildly wrong, and this is consistent in survey data. The liberal media failed to inform when it's much more profitable to fearmonger and create clickbait with junk science. You aren't doing much better in my opinion, and it's probably not your grasp of stats but your bias that is the problem.
> Oh, but it's also not FDA approved. I haven't looked at the numbers, but I bet vaccinations haven't gone up significantly since FDA approval. Obviously it's because the FDA isn't to be trusted, that's a given.
I believe that the FDA has only approved one of the vaccines so far. When I got mine, I didn't have a choice.
Before Jan 20 the democrats too were the "anti-vax" side. Do you want me to dig up videos of Joe and Kamala telling everyone they'd be insane to take the "rushed" vaccine? I don't think such overt politicization of this issue is helping with "hesitancy". And neither does the incessant lying about "stopping covid". Vaccine is not going to stop covid. It'll just make people 10x less likely to die once they get it. Notice the choice of the word - we'll all get it eventually. This is a less "satisfying" message, but I'd argue it's a more persuasive one, simply because it's true.
> Before Jan 20 the democrats too were the "anti-vax" side. Do you want me to dig up videos of Joe and Kamala telling everyone they'd be insane to take the "rushed" vaccine?
The only infamous videos I am aware of have been misrepresented, in such the same way you are implying now.
Disclaimer: I got two shots of Moderna some time ago.
Your source shows just how strongly anti-vax Biden was, making the case that the vaccine can't be trusted because of political influence. Since Biden can't give us any credible assurances that politics aren't involved in FDA approval or CDC recommendations, nor can he address his own concerns about the vaccine's development being politicized, then, by his argument, the American people should not have confidence.
> The following week, Biden restated his concern about politics intervening in vaccine development:
> "Americans have had to endure President Trump’s incompetence and dishonesty, when it comes to testing and personal protective equipment. We can’t afford to repeat those fiascos when it comes to a vaccine. … Let me be clear: I trust vaccines, I trust scientists, but I don’t trust Donald Trump, and at this moment, the American people can’t either. Last week, Senator Harris and I laid out three questions this administration’s going to have to answer to assure the American people that politics will not play a role whatsoever in the vaccine process. If Donald Trump can’t give answers and the administration can’t give answers to these three questions, the American people should not have confidence."
PolitiFact is one of the most biased outlets I've seen.
> Oh, but it's also not FDA approved. I haven't looked at the numbers, but I bet vaccinations haven't gone up significantly since FDA approval. Obviously it's because the FDA isn't to be trusted, that's a given.
Actually, there was a big shift in the numbers about then. People are just divided over whether it was due to shaming people or the certification. I believe Matthew Yglasias posted about that, though he seemed to think it was from shaming people.
It's true that some people moved on to other arguments after that, but if someone has multiple independent reasons for not wanting something, you do kinda have to shoot them all down.
From my experience in trying to explain the benefits of the vaccine to the hesitant, there are more than a few who just won't listen, but there are quite a lot of people who will listen when you calmly explain things. Trying to be forceful will basically always backfire.
Many of them were previously meming about how Covid is not very dangerous, with only a 1-2% mortality rate. So I like to point out that the risk of vaccine injury is several orders of magnitude lower. You need thousands of people dying per day for months to convince anyone that the vaccine is anywhere near as dangerous as the virus, not the odd death of someone the day after they vaccinated here and there.
Once you get people into a direct comparison even if they push back on the numbers being fudged, you can point that every country in the world would have to be in on some conspiracy.
I feel like this is the most effective way to defuse the vastly over-hyped danger of the vaccine. Even if they try to quibble the numbers with the best and worst numbers possible, you don't get to risks that are even the same order of magnitude.
Saying that it's all not in good faith quickly becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, I find that most people are willing to have an honest discussion with someone who respects them and who will listen and address their concerns.
Those conditions are hard, though, because a lot of people seem to quickly throw human empathy out the window and start yelling. That... doesn't work at all.
Anyhow, that's my experience from talking to people. I've gotten several of the hesitant to vaccinate by trying to be as honest as possible about the risks and why worrying about the vaccine but not Covid doesn't make sense. But if you don't listen to or understand where the people arguing are coming from--which is often hard with internet strangers--you probably won't get very far, so I do understand why it's frustrating.
Where do you see that vaccinations increased after FDA approval (Aug 23)? I'm looking at the NYTimes vaccine dashboard and don't see any meaningful spike after that date.
If you don't take no for an answer and won't accept anything besides people agreeing to your goals then it is you who is not arguing in good faith. Correct misunderstandings, refute falsehoods, but ultimately you need to let people make their own decisions.
Accusing someone (or worse, groups) of "shifting goalpoasts" is a lame excuse to write of discussion. People can an do have multiple concerns where some of those take a backseat until others are resolved. People can be afraid to state their true concerns, often rightfully so considering how quick they can be grouped with all the other wrongthinkers and summarily condemned and ridiculed. And when it comes to groups - especially such nebolous ones as "the anti-vax side: - the apparent (ie loudest) argument can shift just by the group composition changing.
Depending on which country you look at you got different goals. Some tried isolation. Others tried herd immunity. We are currently trying those 2 dose vaccines and are already planning for a third before the winter has even started, and I suspect we will see talk about a forth dose by early spring. Then we have nations like Norway addressing covid as a new aspect of the seasonal flue with no end date.
The idea that we just take two doses and are done is clearly no longer the goalpost.
I understand being pro Covid-19 vaccine and wanting to get it to minimize your chances at a negative health outcome if you get infected.
Also mandating certain vaccines (like MMR) makes sense because they fully inoculate a person and eradicate these diseases.
But when it comes to Covid-19 vaccines I don’t understand the insistence others get the vaccine because it doesn’t fully inoculate against the virus nor does it prevent carrying/spreading the virus.
Perhaps there is an argument that hospitals are overloaded and 100% vaccination would relieve that burden, but I’m not in favor of mandatory vaccines that don’t fully inoculate and eradicate something on the basis it might help our overburdened healthcare system. It becomes a slippery slope, and opens the door to asking why we don’t then mandate diets, supplements and lifestyles that promote healthy immune systems in the name of minimizing chronic conditions that are a financial burden to tax funded Medicare and the healthcare system generally.
Shifting goal posts? They said the mRNA vaccines were not safe even before the first trial began.
You just can’t have a rational argument with folks who irrationally arrived at a viewpoint.
I'm from Israel. I got the vaccine. The goalposts here shifted to a third booster shot. They already admit the first two doses become ineffective very fast, contradicting the early research that actually got me to trust and take the vaccine in the first place. The stated effectiveness of the vaccine also went downhill. I also had some unusual vaccine side effects that I will not discuss here because I prefer my privacy and nobody believes random internet anecdotes anyway, I'm only going to get criticized for sharing.
I'm not going to get any booster, even tho they are heavy handedly mandating it here, with absolutely zero data. They don't even allow you to confirm a healthy antibody count, strengthening the suspicion that this isn't about "waning antibodies count" at all.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. I had my suspicions that this medical tyranny would keep on going on even when the medical data is non-existent, and that most people will not even notice the difference. That suspicion was fully confirmed. I personally apologized to my anti vaccine friend that he was right.
It's going to take a detailed research on why the original Pfizer trial was wrong on the effectiveness, what is the amount of antibodies required to be safe, and then I would see if I meet the criteria, if being recently vaccinated meets the criteria, if they understand the causes of the effects, if the booster actually gives reasonable advantage. And maybe then I'll consider it. If they don't put the side effects and the errors of the phase 3 trials under investigation I might not even vaccinate me or my future kids against other diseases as my trust of this industry was broken by the Pfizer experience.
1) It's impractical to test everyone for antibodies. There's enough empirical data to suggest that immunity wanes over time for most people that it makes sense to just give everyone a 3rd, booster shot.
2) It was always expected that vaccine immunity would wane over time. Nobody (of any relevant repute) ever suggested otherwise.
3) I don't doubt that you had side effects from the vaccine. But there's a strong probability that the side effects of an actual infection would have been much, much worse for you. You may potentially have an undiagnosed health issue that could have potentially been a comorbodity in an actual infection.
1) It's quite worrying since having a high antibody count can imply an increased risk of side effects. This is why we don't give 2 shots to people that have already had covid in the last 6 months.
2) You've got to agree that 6-9 months is a pretty short window of immunity for a traditionnal vaccine. We may maybe rather call it "prophylaxy" then, just like the dewormer you put on your cat every 3 months.
3) Do you have a source? This could be a very interesting pro-vaccine point.
"I am authorizing the emergency use of Pfizer-BioNTech COVID‑19 Vaccine for the
prevention of COVID-19, as described in the Scope of Authorization section of this letter
(Section II) and subject to the terms of this authorization. Additionally, as specified in
subsection III.BB, I am authorizing use of Pfizer-BioNTech COVID‑19 Vaccine and of
COMIRNATY (COVID-19 Vaccine, mRNA) under this EUA when used to provide: a two-dose
regimen for individuals aged 12 through 15 years; a third dose to individuals 12 years of age or
older who have undergone solid organ transplantation or who are diagnosed with conditions that
are considered to have an equivalent level of immunocompromise; or a single booster dose at
least 6 months after completing the primary series to individuals: 65 years of age and older; 18
through 64 years of age at high risk of severe COVID-19; and 18 through 64 years of age whose
frequent institutional or occupational exposure to SARS-CoV-2 puts them at high risk of serious
complications of COVID-19 including severe COVID-19."
If I'm interpreting this right:
- the existing vaccine is still available under emergency use authorization.
- a different vaccine called COMIRNATY was approved.
I didn't understand from FDA's letter if COMIRNATY exists.
First paragraph of the FDA announcement answers all your questions, chucklehead:
"Today, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first COVID-19 vaccine. The vaccine has been known as the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine, and will now be marketed as Comirnaty (koe-mir’-na-tee), for the prevention of COVID-19 disease in individuals 16 years of age and older. The vaccine also continues to be available under emergency use authorization (EUA), including for individuals 12 through 15 years of age and for the administration of a third dose in certain immunocompromised individuals."
The existing vaccine was approved, and had a marketing name change. It continues under an EUA for younger people.
Why is this Malone person more trustworthy than the CDC+FDA?
According to both the FDA News Release and the letter, it's under emergency use authorization for all ages, not only for 12-year olds and for booster shots.
It sounds like both you and your mother have both adopted an epistemology that incorporates the perceived amount of censorship, lies, and coercion performed by proponents of some claim into your discernment of the truth value of that claim. Namely, you both seem to have adopted some level of doubt about pro-vaccine claims because you both perceive that proponents of pro-vaccine claims participate in censorship, lies and coercion, or that those proponents of these claims do not engage in reasonable arguments with their critics.
There are two problems with this type of epistemology. The first is that, like all claims, attributes of the people making the claims are not relevant to the truth value of the claim ("fallacy of irrelevance"). The second is more important and more unique to this particular epistemology: the actions you perceive to be conducted by perceived proponents of some claim will vary heavily based on your own behavior. For instance, how do you know that pro-vaccine people "can't win arguments" and instead "stop them because the other side is too stupid"? Or that there is "massive censorship" favoring the pro-vaccine viewpoint? Surely that is just based on your own "media diet." Surely that perception depends heavily on where you spend your time on Twitter, YouTube, cable news, etc. Would you perceive something differently if it were the case that the vast majority of medical and public health experts who are pro-vaccine in fact have engaged in numerous reasonable arguments with critics and have nonetheless come to the same conclusion? Is there ever a point in which litigation of existing criticisms can end so that we can move on to new criticisms?
It's unreasonable to ignore these abuses. If the pro-vaccine argument is so persuasive, why must they perpetrate censorship and coercion?
Vaccines are widely recommended because they offer enormous benefits. However, they are not without risk or contraindications. People who claim otherwise are spreading misinformation.
People are right to be worried about the COVID-19 vaccines. Without proper studies, their risks and benefits are unknown. We're discovering this information by observing what's happening to the humans who took the vaccines after the fact. This is less than ideal, to put it mildly.
COVID-19 happens to be a potent enough disease that the potential benefit of these vaccines outweighs the risks. We must still be careful though. It's possible that we'll find that the benefits outweigh the risks only for certain age groups, for example.
For instance, how do you know that pro-vaccine people "can't win arguments" and instead "stop them because the other side is too stupid"? Or that there is "massive censorship" favoring the pro-vaccine viewpoint?
Did you notice the article that you are commenting on?
You over-fit the "fallacy of irrelevance". This is my feeling about the Monty Hall problem: The fact that Monty is now offering me the option to take make chances and switch to the other door, after I have chosen this one, when he knows which door actually has the prize, does seem relevant to which door has the prize.
You use big words like epistemsodhjapHwo but don't really counter his fundamental thesis that if doctor had said "shut up and take it", he would be more sceptical. That's healthy scepticism.
The lie that masks didn't work was the first and one of the biggest. At the time it meant that my wife's hospital wouldn't let her wear an N95 that we personally provided when interacting with obviously sick COVID-19 patients. She got extremely ill and after she recovered we decided it wasn't really worth it to work as a nurse in a medical establishment that could tell such obvious lies to its own people.
I can't speak specifically for your wife's hospital, but by the sounds of it this might have been less of a lie than bad information. Apparently during the early phase of the pandemic the knowledge about the usefulness of masks against airborne viruses wasn't accurate. People didn't think it was truly airborne, in which case masks wouldn't be that effective. As it turns out, it's very airborne and masks really do help stop transmission. A lot has been learnt, as well as a lot of mistakes made.
Well, the face of the government's response to the pandemic, Fauci, went on 60 minutes and stated flatly that masks didn't work. About a year later he went back on TV and was asked about his earlier comments about masks and he admitted - again, in no uncertain terms - that his previous comments stating that masks didn't work were said specifically to protect mask supplies for health care workers. Seems like he lied to me.
There's 1000 things you're not doing for your health right now because we don't have reason to believe they'll help. Maybe scientists will prove acupuncture cures cancer fifty years from now but anyone who advised against it right now will not become liars.
Or, the information that he had at the time was that masks didn't work. And it turned out that that information was wrong and that when information that it was wrong became available, then we changed the guidance.
I mean seriously, this is how science works and how guidance based on science works. We go wit the best answer we have at the time and continue to search for better answers.
> I can't speak specifically for your wife's hospital, but by the sounds of it this might have been less of a lie than bad information.
Well that doesn't help much with the trust issue. What else turns out to be bad information? Sometimes the line between lies and (intentional or not) bullshit is quite fine.
One thing I've observed since the start of the pandemic is that information and recommendations are constantly changing, and there's overreaction as well as underreaction. Also late reaction rather than preparedness. Sometimes excessive preparedness (see also overreaction), sometimes too little.
It don't find it surprising in the slightest that people end up not trusting the chaotic system.
That’s why there was so much emphasis on sanitising surfaces. Now we have a better understanding of its modes of transmission, and advice has changed over time. Some people just don’t seem to understand that our knowledge evolves, and so do recommendations and best practices.
If I recall correctly, it was thought early on that if the virus was transmissible via the air, that it was truly airborne, and thus masks that can't filter out virus-sized particles would be ineffective.
It turned out that the virus was transmissible via the air, but it was not airborne, it traveled via much larger respiratory droplets. Ordinary surgical masks were effective at stopping the spread of those droplets.
> At the time it meant that my wife's hospital wouldn't let her wear an N95 that we personally provided when interacting with obviously sick COVID-19 patients.
That's interesting - and must be a hospital issue. My hospital never made such a claim. They were simply upfront with their reason: There was a shortage of masks, and they were being reserved for those who needed to treat COVID-19 patients.
A friend's wife, who is a nurse, had similar problems at her hospital. The nursing staff-including those working with COVID-19 patients-were not provided with masks. At the time, the hospital stood behind a shield of "we're just following the CDC recommendations." Of course, the doctors who requested N95s were provided with masks, which really sent home a message that the administrators didn't value their nursing staff.
That seems very strange coming from a hospital. It has been pretty clear from those with medical knowledge that cloth mask do not work to protect the wearer, while N95 protect the wearer but depending on the construction might have a vent that do not filter the air that goes out. The mask that hospital workers need is N95 that also filter the out breath.
Early on, they didn't know if masks were effective against covid, because of the size of the particles. But they did still recommend them for healthcare workers:
Because of the way they are constructed, Randomized Control Trials will never show any benefit for any antiviral against COVID-19. Not Remdesivir, not Kaletra, not HCQ, and not Ivermectin. The reason for this is simple; for the patients that they have recruited for these studies, such as Oxford’s ludicrous RECOVERY study, the intervention is too late to have any positive effect.
The clinical course of COVID-19 is such that by the time most people seek medical attention for hypoxia, their viral load has already tapered off to almost nothing. If someone is about 10 days post-exposure and has already been symptomatic for five days, there is hardly any virus left in their bodies, only cellular damage and derangement that has initiated a hyperinflammatory response. It is from this group that the clinical trials for antivirals have recruited, pretty much exclusively.
In these trials, they give antivirals to severely ill patients who have no virus in their bodies, only a delayed hyperinflammatory response, and then absurdly claim that antivirals have no utility in treating or preventing COVID-19. These clinical trials do not recruit people who are pre-symptomatic. They do not test pre-exposure or post-exposure prophylaxis.
This is like using a defibrillator to shock only flatline, and then absurdly claiming that defibrillators have no medical utility whatsoever when the patients refuse to rise from the dead. The intervention is too late. These trials for antivirals show systematic, egregious selection bias. They are providing a treatment that is futile to the specific cohort they are enrolling.
And here is a study which looks at viral load since days of symptom onset, showing that at the 72 hour mark there is still plenty of Covid-19 in the body: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0869-5
I am not a medical expert, so there may be things to criticize about these studies. All I meant to point out is that people are looking into / have looked at the questions you raise. Doctors and nurses are pretty burnt out; I for one think that they'd be looking for prophylactic treatments.
It seems like your Ivermectin study is the type of information Youtube would be banning. It showed statistically significant improvements in symptoms and viral loads, which is the kind of information that walks a fine line between getting banned instead of just mocked.
There are two important sentences from the summary of findings:
First, the effects of Ivermectin on viral load were not significant:
"The ivermectin group had non-statistically significant lower viral loads at day 4 (p = 0·24 for gene E; p = 0·18 for gene N) and day 7 (p = 0·16 for gene E; p = 0·18 for gene N) post treatment as well as lower IgG titers at day 21 post treatment (p = 0·24)."
Second, Ivermectin did show earlier recovery:
"Patients in the ivermectin group recovered earlier from hyposmia/anosmia (76 vs 158 patient-days; p < 0.001)."
From the Washington Post article, a YouTube exec is quoted as saying “We’ll remove claims that vaccines are dangerous or cause a lot of health effects, that vaccines cause autism, cancer, infertility or contain microchips.” This leads me to believe the kind of medical misinformation YouTube is targeting is much more general.
Also, the medical consensus -- via things like Cochrane Review [0] -- is that there isn't enough data on Ivermectin. It's the statistical uncertainty around it that gives the medical establishment pause, and currently makes recommendations of using it misinformation. Should the scientific community discover something different, the definition of misinformation will change.
A bit off topic, but there are hundreds of millions of people in India who have been taking Ivermectin for significant amounts of time. In some states, serum positive levels are .01%. How are there not dozens of high quality studies being done during this period to quickly answer our questions?
> but there are hundreds of millions of people in India who have been taking Ivermectin for significant amounts of time.
Misinformation. Anti-vaxx groups are sighting India because a tiny state(Goa) with a population of 1.59 Million included Ivermecitin in their home isolation medicine kit along with zinc, doxycycline, homeopathy etc. and also announced that adults in the state would be given Ivermecitin.
A fraction of their population actually received that kit, Of which negligible population actually consumed those if any. Ivermecitin, Zinc, doxycycline were removed from that kit in Goa after federal medical authority asked it to do so and it was even removed from the treatment of COVID-19 patients in the hospitals throughout India.
So, No 'hundreds of millions of people in India' never took Ivermecitin and is no way related to the drop in cases of COVID in India. But Anti-vaxx groups are using this misinformation as an ammunition at unexpected places to further their agenda[1].
There's no need to be uncivil and slander people as anti-vaxx (I and literally everyone I know is vaccinated) or spreading misinformation just because you are misinformed.
I didn't call you particularly as anti-vaxx, I said anti-vaxx are promoting Ivermecitin using India/Goa and provided source for that claim.
What does the attached URLs has to do with your claim of "hundreds of millions of people in India who have been taking Ivermectin for significant amounts of time." and implying somehow that Ivermectin reduced the COVID case load in India which coincidentally is exactly what Anti-vaxx are peddling?
States which were using non-evidence based medication incl. Ivermecitin have dropped them after Directorate general of health services (DGHS) has issued guidelines to stop using them[1] and recently Indian Council of Medical Research have also dropped them from the list[2].
There's no reason to put India and Ivermecitin again in the same sentence unless it's to promote misinformation.
One description of the Spartacus letter is "A 41 page document chock full of disinformation about COVID-19 (including claims that the vaccines may be mind control technology)." And now that disinfo is being spread here on HN.
HCQ and Ivermectin aren't "antivirals" so obviously the OP is not concerned with a strict definition of antiviral. Besides, it's a meaningless semantic argument.
Except it's not irrelevant even. The central claim is encapsulated in the first sentence:
> Because of the way they are constructed, Randomized Control Trials will never show any benefit for any antiviral against COVID-19
By noting that there are indeed RCTs that show effective treatments for COVID-19 (fluvoxamine and monoclonal antibodies), it renders the entire point false.
The semantic argument about what constitutes an "antiviral" is meaningless as the OP themselves plays fast and loose with this by establishing that HCQ and Ivermectin (primarily used as antiparasitics) as antivirals.
> Because of the way they are constructed, Randomized Control Trials will never show any benefit for any antiviral against COVID-19. Not Remdesivir, not Kaletra, not HCQ, and not Ivermectin. The reason for this is simple; for the patients that they have recruited for these studies, such as Oxford’s ludicrous RECOVERY study, the intervention is too late to have any positive effect.
This claim is egregiously false itself. Several RCTs have been done for early exposure to covid or for prophylaxis.
Just out of memory I remember studies for HCQ prophylaxis (doesn’t work), remdesivir prophylaxis (does work), and monoclonal antibody prophylaxis (does work).
The lies created by anti vaccine activists are already spread widely and apparently convinced you these studies which happened didn’t happen.
How about the rampant false claims from various health officials and the WHO that masks didn't work in the very beginning of the pandemic. ...and this lie was intentional to protect mask stockpiles for healthcare workers.
How about the initial censorship of the outbreak on social media and news media, on the grounds that the "fear-mongering" about an outbreak in China was racist?
How about the labelling by the news media of the initial travel bans as racist?
How about health officials refusing to test anyone who hadn't personally travelled to China for months after the virus had been observed in the US.
Trust was destroyed in the first two months of this pandemic.
> How about the rampant false claims from various health officials and the WHO that masks didn't work in the very beginning of the pandemic.
That... wasn't the claim.
The claim was that people shouldn't stockpile masks for use beyond the circumstances in which they were recommended, because such additional use did not provide additional protective benefit.
This was roughly contemporaneous with guidance that most people should eliminate all non-essential contact with people outside their household. Masking for essential interactions was recommended by the same people advising against buying masks more generally.
> ...and this lie was intentional to protect mask stockpiles for healthcare workers.
It wasn't a lie, and preserving stocks for frontline workers and their essential interactions was an overtly cited part of the rationale, alongside the lack of additional benefit from superfluous masking.
> How about the initial censorship of the outbreak on social media and news media, on the grounds that the "fear-mongering" about an outbreak in China was racist?
That didn't happen.
> How about the labelling by the news media of the initial travel bans as racist?
The initial US travel bans, instituted after substantial domestic community spread was known and after substantial spread in lots of other foreign places that were not targeted by the bans was also known were, if not racist per se, more political posturing than public health.
> How about health officials refusing to test anyone who hadn't personally travelled to China for months after the virus had been observed in the US.
How is that a lie? Whether or not it (or the actual limit on testing, which was more nuanced) was the optimum way of managing limited testing resources may be a valid debate, but it's not a lie.
Sweden may be seen as a bit of an oddball but either way the head of the national public health agency was consistent in saying masks did not provide any benefits for individuals pretty far into the pandemic.
Not mentioned by the GP, but what was up with anything resembling a lab-leak theory getting the "unquestionably fake news" treatment for months?
I have not done any extensive digging into the vaccines myself and can't with good conscience say I'm well-informed. It still seems to me that the risk-trade-off is strongly in favor for getting vaccinated. Even so, I have full understanding for people who now have 0 trust in the public narrative. It's clear that there has been (still ongoing, I assume) a strong propaganda campaign that has at times been using misinformation and censorship (if you count deleting/shadowbanning social media content as censorship), involving governments, traditional news-media and social media. If the narrative around the effectiveness and risks of the vaccine holds, why do this?
The WHO, CDC, RKI, etc were all telling people not to wear medical masks and the press was happily parroting this information while the Korean and Chinese CDC were recommending the exact opposite. Not only were they doing that, they were also gaslighting those that pointed to e.g. the Chinese wearing masks and additionally made those that had the foresight to buy FFP2+ masks feel guilty for taking away the supplies of medical professionals. Never mind the immense failure of Western governments of outsourcing most of their mask production to China (which promptly banned exports) and not stockpiling PPI.
Some European countries were so stupid, that they donated hundreds of thousands of masks from their own supplies at the beginning of the pandemic and then ran out of masks for their own medical personnel.
The actions of all those organisation advising against masks were evil and stupid. People saw through their excuses and bought all the quality masks anyway. The rest was bought by the Chinese and sent back home, resulting in an almost completely empty market for quality masks last year.
I hope the likes of the CDC are never able to fix their reputation. Nobody ever apologised, nobody lost their jobs over this.
> The claim was that people shouldn't stockpile masks for use beyond the circumstances in which they were recommended, because such additional use did not provide additional protective benefit.
That is simply and verifiably false. This is a direct quote from an executive director of the WHO health emergencies program:
> There is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any potential benefit. In fact, there's some evidence to suggest the opposite in the misuse of wearing a mask properly or fitting it properly
Literally the first google result for "WHO masks don't work". There are plenty more after that. From the WHO's guidance published on April 6, 2020:
> there is currently no evidence that wearing a mask (whether medical or other types) by healthy persons in the wider community setting [...] can prevent them from infection with respiratory viruses, including COVID-19
You can speculate or demonstrate that the motives behind the claim did not match the claim itself. But to say that it wasn't the claim is flatly wrong.
That did appear to be the claim in Fauci's 60 Minutes interview. It was a pretty colossal messaging fuckup and damaged Fauci's credibility and trustworthiness early in the game.
You are right, many epidemiologists and related experts did assert that masks would not be useful to fight coronavirus. And they were wrong.
On the other hand, if it's a "colossal messaging fuckup" and damages "credibility and trustworthiness", then you pretty much have to give up on the whole 'science' thing entirely.
They were under the mistaken impression that coronaviruses were spread by large droplets produced by symptomatic individiuals---in which case social distancing and washing your hands would be as effective as masks, and the previous history (and current experience) says that convincing people to use masks correctly and consistently is very difficult. Further, having people stock up on masks like they were stocking up on toilet paper would mean that those who couldn't get along without them would be SOL.
Then it turned out that coronavirus could be transmitted as an aerosol, asymptomatically, meaning that social distancing and handwashing, while useful, were a lot less useful. Hence, masks.
But if you are expecting science to produce a single, correct, consistent TRUTH on demand, you are going to be disappointed. In fact, you're probably better off sticking with The_Donald memes, since they're all of the same quality.
i will begin this by saying that i am vaccinated and wear a mask. the CDC misled americans about the efficacy of masks specifically to reduce demand so that medical pros could get them. it's one thing to ask and another to straight up lie[1]. when an institution literally admits it is not truthful, that it is operating on some level where you must parse their motivations and countervailing evidence to determine whether they will give you correct advice, why should it be a surprise that people don't trust them?
this doesn't even get into the fact that fauci personally approved funding for GoF coronavirus research at the WIV, a fact which he has still not even acknowledged. there are many, many other reasons to distrust the CDC, but these are the ones that i found most personally flagrant.
The fuckup wasn't that we didn't know as much about the virus a year ago than we do today, but that by Fauci's admission the messaging to discourage mask use was adopted to avoid PPE shortages for healthcare workers. That's not "the whole 'science' thing" that's just bad comms.
To be clear I was fine with saving masks for healthcare workers and maybe there wasn't a better way to do that against the backdrop of people going apeshit in the paper goods aisle, but the point still stands.
Also don't forget that not too long back suggesting that COVID-19 might have escaped from a Chinese lab was considered "lunatic conspiracy theory mongering".
It's not an excuse to not get vaccinated, that you read it that way says a lot about the whole problem really. It's a reply to the GP's question about what "lies" (I personally would not use as strong a word) were spread by quite a few people and media who should know better.
> and this lie was intentional to protect mask stockpiles for healthcare workers.
Do you have any evidence that this was the reason for the claims?
> How about the initial censorship of the outbreak on social media and news media, on the grounds that the "fear-mongering" about an outbreak in China was racist?
What censorship? I heard about it quite early.
> How about the labelling by the news media of the initial travel bans as racist?
Did the news media label it, or were they reporting on people who were labeling it?
> How about health officials refusing to test anyone who hadn't personally travelled to China for months after the virus had been observed in the US.
AFAIK, there were lack of resources to test. Once the resources became available, testing was widespread.
> Do you have any evidence that this was the reason for the claims?
I did a search on youtube to find these sources ("fauci 60 minutes americans dont need to wear masks") I don't vouch for the channels, these are just the first place I found the relevant clips.
> Do you have any evidence that this was the reason for the claims?
This was said by all health officials around January-March 2020. After the stock issue got solved masks suddenly magically became effective for everyone around the summer time. As a "regular person" who took both vaccine shots and is casually observing these developments without reading news or whatever, that single event showed me that governments don't give a shit about telling us the truth in a crisis.
On the second point, to claim you do not know about this story is... surprising:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27388587
Just because you heard about it, doesn't mean there weren't attempts to censor these discussions.
In the first 15s or so of this Washington Post interview clip he explains that priority was being given to healthcare workers, and then also that asymptomatic spread was underestimated.
Up through roughly April-May 2020, many, if not most, epidemiologists and virologists believed that masks would not help the situation: they thought respiratory viruses were spread through large droplets produced by symptomatic individuals and that physical separation, sanitation, and behavior would work as well as trying to convince people to were useful masks consistently and correctly.
After that time, reports began to appear showing coronavirus could be spread asymptomatically, by normal breathing and speech, in an aerosol form that could stay airborne for long times. Under those situations, masks are the only solution.
The "ensure that enough protective equipment was available for frontline health workers" thing was mostly a response to "but it couldn't hurt" thinking.
"Then there is the infamous mask issue. Epidemiologists have taken a lot of heat on this question in particular. Until well into March 2020, I was skeptical about the benefit of everyone wearing face masks. That skepticism was based on previous scientific research as well as hypotheses about how covid was transmitted that turned out to be wrong. Mask-wearing has been a common practice in Asia for decades, to protect against air pollution and to prevent transmitting infection to others when sick. Mask-wearing for protection against catching an infection became widespread in Asia following the 2003 SARS outbreak, but scientific evidence on the effectiveness of this strategy was limited.
"Before the coronavirus pandemic, most research on face masks for respiratory diseases came from two types of studies: clinical settings with very sick patients, and community settings during normal flu seasons. In clinical settings, it was clear that well-fitting, high-quality face masks, such as the N95 variety, were important protective equipment for doctors and nurses against viruses that can be transmitted via droplets or smaller aerosol particles. But these studies also suggested careful training was required to ensure that masks didn’t get contaminated when surface transmission was possible, as is the case with SARS. Community-level evidence about mask-wearing was much less compelling. Most studies showed little to no benefit to mask-wearing in the case of the flu, for instance. Studies that have suggested a benefit of mask-wearing were generally those in which people with symptoms wore masks — so that was the advice I embraced for the coronavirus, too.
"I also, like many other epidemiologists, overestimated how readily the novel coronavirus would spread on surfaces — and this affected our view of masks. Early data showed that, like SARS, the coronavirus could persist on surfaces for hours to days, and so I was initially concerned that face masks, especially ill-fitting, homemade or carelessly worn coverings could become contaminated with transmissible virus. In fact, I worried that this might mean wearing face masks could be worse than not wearing them. This was wrong. Surface transmission, it emerged, is not that big a problem for covid, but transmission through air via aerosols is a big source of transmission. And so it turns out that face masks do work in this case.
"I changed my mind on masks in March 2020, as testing capacity increased and it became clear how common asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic infection were (since aerosols were the likely vector). I wish that I and others had caught on sooner — and better testing early on might have caused an earlier revision of views — but there was no bad faith involved."
In March 2020 the official recommendations coming from Hong Kong, China or Korea were the complete opposite to what the US, UK, Germany or the WHO were recommending.
While the former were pragmatic and -very importantly- had enough masks, the latter were actively discouraging people from using any kind of masks and especially the quality masks such as FFP3 (or even FFP2) which are designed to protect among other things against respiratory viruses.
Asian countries had mask stockpiles and could manufacture them, had the experience of SARS and were apparently quite content with the scientific evidence, limited as it was. Naturally, if one can't tell a pandemic from their own ass, doesn't have local mask production capacity and donated a huge chunk of their masks the limitations of the scientific evidence become very critical indeed.
Let's take a moment to remember how US and European politicians and medical professionals were confidently claiming at the beginning of 2020 that the virus would not reach the West and how there's nothing to worry about.
I highly doubt this explaination. Masks have been known for a very long time to be a good way to prevent the transmission of an airborne disease, especially like Covid, which involves generally a lot of coughing.
"...to be a good way to prevent the transmission of an airborne disease, especially like Covid, which involves generally a lot of coughing."
But that's the point! COVID can be spread by asymptomatic individuals! No coughing! And it's spread by aerosol particles, not large droplets that would be stopped by the gauze masks from 1919. Or if you stay a few feet away from other people and washed your hands before you touched your face.
I've posted links before from pre-2019 about the effectiveness of masks and the difficulties in getting people to wear them consistently and correctly. I've posted links before to papers from May and June, 2020, discussing asymptomatic transmission. This (https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/04/20/epidemiolo...) is an article by an actual, honest-to-gosh epidemiologist saying, "I changed my mind on masks in March 2020, as testing capacity increased and it became clear how common asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic infection were (since aerosols were the likely vector)."
You can doubt anything you want. You can believe Dr. Murray is lying. You can believe I'm lying. You can believe everyone is lying to you. But you are going to have a difficult time convincing rational people with no better evidence than your opinion.
None of your examples are about the vaccine as far as I can tell. Are you suggesting that because some experts allegedly lied about some things in the past, no experts ought to ever be trusted again about any medical or public health matters?
Trust is acquired on the logn run, and can be broken easily. Would you mind if Union Carbide openned a chemical facility near your house? Well, they had the Bhopal disasted[0], but they can be trusted again, right?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster
And trained pilots cause most plane crashes. Perhaps it’s time to place our trust elsewhere and randomly assign 2 passengers to the cockpit on every commercial flight!
Fauci told the American public that masks don't work. My mom already owned N95 masks and got looked at like a crazy person because she was wearing one when shopping, ect. Then suddenly it became "the science" on the heels of all the research that already existed... Turns out it was a noble lie to protect the supply of masks while production caught up with demand.
It looks like Fauci lied about the lab leak theory for his own reasons, although I'm pretty out of date on that issue. Even if not Fauci we know that scientists with conflicts of interest all signed an open letter saying the theory is bunk and it was uncritically paraded around as "the science."
We were very clearly told "get the vaccine and you'll get your life back" but that hasn't even happened in paces like Israel with extremely high rates.
The vaccine was initially sold to us as something that would prevent infection, but that turned out not to be true. (I'm willing to concede this probably wasn't a lie but just something we learned as time went on, but it does reflect that they may have been overconfident and refrained from discretion because it was a pro-vaccine talking point)
Vaccine passports used to be conspiracies. Same with the idea that we'd have to get booster shots every so often to stay current.
And this is probably the biggest one: So many of the politicians pushing covid restrictions fail to practice what they preach outside of photo ops. The list is a mile long of local, state and federal politicians constantly violating their own restrictions. It lends credibility to the idea that none of them believe any of it.
> And this is probably the biggest one: So many of the politicians pushing covid restrictions fail to practice what they preach outside of photo ops.
Thanks for bringing this up, it's something that everyone should be able to agree is unacceptable. I feel naive for asking, but WHY does the public allow politicians to get away with this hypocrisy? (eg. https://www.sfgate.com/bay-area-politics/article/London-Bree...)
In many cases there has been a single photo of a politician with a mask off. Lots of predatory paparazzi photograph public individuals all day. Catching someone at a bad moment or accidentally doing something is easy.
I think you may be getting downvoted because your response doesn’t relate to the example I gave, where the politician made an explicit statement in contradiction of their own health order.
This post should not be downvoted. These are legitimate concerns for half the US population. Whoever is poo-pooing this may disagree with these lies presented above. But again, you have half the US population who really DOES have a problem with these lies. And your solution is to just downvote the post and offer no response?
That "vaccine granted immunity" was a big one, it rapidly became less symptoms, and from that surreptitiously changed again to well you'll still have a week of feeling like shit if you catch covid, but you'll be less likely to die from it.
Then there's whatever percent of vaccinated that would have allowed the fabled reopen, we engaged trough most of these metrics, and we're still far from normalcy.
Heck my vaccine passport has a very clear, very bold expiry date on it, talk of normalcy are nonsense.
Oh and there's that "let's not tell peasants masks are useful as not to cause shortages to professionals." Maybe warranted, given what happened with hoarders and toilet paper, but still definitely a lie.
edit:
jesus christ look at the mess of downvotes this whole thread attracted, replies included, this place is populated by people more toxic than facebook's and more sensitive than twitter's.
and you wonder why the content platform are in full on containment mode. truth is you're bringing your corporate dystopia unto yourself.
From reading comments, it seems like a lot of people don't understand that Delta changed things.
In a world without Delta, the vaccines did do an incredible job of actually preventing infection. "Effectiveness [against confirmed infection] remained above 95% regardless of age group, sex, race, or presence of comorbidities."[1] But that study used data up to March 2021, which means mostly non-Delta variants. Against Delta, vaccine effectiveness in preventing infection might be closer to 50%+ (e.g. [2]) -- which is still very effective! It's just not effective as we would like. "Hi, here's a shot that cuts your odds of getting infected in half. Do you want it?" Um, yes please.
You have to change your behavior when the facts in the world change. The messaging had to change with the facts. Of course you can't use the old vaccination thresholds for re-opening if the virus is now infecting 10x (50% vs. 95%) as many vaccinated people as it was 2 months ago, that doesn't make sense.
The virus moved the goalposts. You can be angry about that, but that's reality.
We are so lucky that despite everything, the vaccines are still incredibly effective at keeping you from dying if you get COVID. I'm actually very angry at how the mask messaging was handled (there should absolutely be consequences for that), but it doesn't matter how angry I am, if I don't get vaccinated I am irrationally refusing the single best way to avoid dying in this pandemic.
> Could some vaccines drive the evolution of more virulent pathogens? Conventional wisdom is that natural selection will remove highly lethal pathogens if host death greatly reduces transmission. Vaccines that keep hosts alive but still allow transmission could thus allow very virulent strains to circulate in a population. [1]
The covid vaccine is just that - limits symptoms but still allows transmission.
> In an unvaccinated population, mutations occur at random producing a wide genetic spread with very few progeny resulting in long lasting lineages (Muller's ratchet), with a selection pressure that favors those variants that can (a) win the competition of replication among its cousins within a host, and (b) not kill the host so that it can thrive in new hosts.
> In a highly vaccinated population, mutations occur at random, but the genetic spread among versions of the virus is narrowed to those that can evade immunity, which has now been made more uniform among the vaccinated population. This further encourages such lineages even when they would not have won out within individual hosts in competition among its cousins. Such evasion increases chances of reinfection. [2]
>That vaccine granted immunity was a big one, it rapidly became less symptoms, and from that surreptitiously changed again to well you'll still have a week of feeling like shit, but you'll be less likely to die from it.
Please look up the medical definition of immunity.
no? I know very well the definition. that why I'm stating that the way it was worded at the beginning was a big fat lie, told to the public to coerce compliance, and latter reduced to a more realistic target to manage expectations.
You are entirely ignoring the point the other commenter made about delta changing things. You are simply repeating talking points I've heard over and over, it's exhausting.
you are willfully merging two separate topic into one trying to shut down an argument by adjacency, as if the trite answers you bring could move the discussion forward. do you have points of your own that relate to the topic at hand?
"That "vaccine granted immunity" was a big one, it rapidly became less symptoms, and from that surreptitiously changed again to well you'll still have a week of feeling like shit if you catch covid, but you'll be less likely to die from it."
The world changed between the beginning of vaccine availability and today. New variants emerged from unvaccinated populations and some of those variants (Delta being the most prominent currently being reported) are able to evade the immune response generated by the vaccine (breakthrough infections). The guidance was updated to reflected newly available information -- would you prefer that the CDC ignore new data and just stick with its initial statements?
The reason we are far from normalcy is that since the beginning of this pandemic people have been refusing to do what they need to do to slow the spread. If people had done what health officials asked, we might have been closer to normalcy. Take your complaints to all those right-wing extremists in the media and the government who politicized a public health crisis and who continue to tell people to ignore the CDC.
No. Variants spring up because of non sterilizing vaccines. We always knew to NEVER engage in mass vaccination during a pandemic situation. We also knew we can’t vaccinated against corona viruses. As evidenced by Israel and other countries.
> Could some vaccines drive the evolution of more virulent pathogens? Conventional wisdom is that natural selection will remove highly lethal pathogens if host death greatly reduces transmission. Vaccines that keep hosts alive but still allow transmission could thus allow very virulent strains to circulate in a population. [1]
This doesn't even make sense as biology. You're essentially saying the virus evolved exclusively because of the pressure vaccines, which is absurd on its face.
> Could some vaccines drive the evolution of more virulent pathogens? Conventional wisdom is that natural selection will remove highly lethal pathogens if host death greatly reduces transmission. Vaccines that keep hosts alive but still allow transmission could thus allow very virulent strains to circulate in a population. [1]
The covid vaccine is just that - limits symptoms but still allows transmission.
> In an unvaccinated population, mutations occur at random producing a wide genetic spread with very few progeny resulting in long lasting lineages (Muller's ratchet), with a selection pressure that favors those variants that can (a) win the competition of replication among its cousins within a host, and (b) not kill the host so that it can thrive in new hosts.
> In a highly vaccinated population, mutations occur at random, but the genetic spread among versions of the virus is narrowed to those that can evade immunity, which has now been made more uniform among the vaccinated population. This further encourages such lineages even when they would not have won out within individual hosts in competition among its cousins. Such evasion increases chances of reinfection. [2]
Immunity: the ability of an organism to resist a particular infection or toxin by the action of specific antibodies or sensitized white blood cells.
The vaccine gives immunity, by the definition of what immunity is. The reduced efficacy was communicated as soon as it was confirmed. There was no lie. This is how science occurs. The best conclusion was given from the data at the time.
Regarding the metrics for vaccination rates that would allow full normalcy: they existed before the Delta variant, and unfortunately this new variant has made herd immunity impossible.
The science is evolving, and these differences from a year ago are proof of that. I don't think the vaccine makers were very proud to admit that their wonderdrug wasn't what it was promised to be, but that's the way it is. The only remaining choice for anti-vaxxers in the face of increasingly contagious variants is take the shot or risk death. Your call.
Science got massively oversold. Who did that? Who benefits from that?
> The only remaining choice for anti-vaxxers in the face of increasingly contagious variants is take the shot or risk death. Your call.
I think if you call anyone hesitant to take these shots an anti-vaxxer, you contribute to making the narative so everything extreme. Many that are "c19 vaccine hesitant" are vaccinating their children on the locally standard schedule. It is just that this c19 vaccine is a bit different: did not yet stand the test of time and it is in many cases a whole new therapy (mRNA therapy's debut).
> take the shot or risk death
This sounds so dramatic. This choice is everywhere, just not with so much media attention. Diets, traffic accidents, extreme sports, ...
I think we should use vaccines only to protect those at risk, and/or those who want protection by it. Once they have the shot it's over.
The media is pushing a story that we need to all get vaccinated to protect others. I think, given the research, that this is never going to happen (virus will stay in corners of the world with unvaccinated people, virus will have new variants: virus will stay with us).
> "It is just that this c19 vaccine is a bit different: did not yet stand the test of time and it is in many cases a whole new therapy (mRNA therapy's debut)."
At this point, surely the various c19 vaccines are the most highly scrutinised and widely administered vaccines developed in the past 50 years or so. More than 6 billion shots administered, and counting. How much more time do you need?
Speaking specifically to the Pfizer vaccine, it’s gone from 95% effective against preventing severe symptoms against the Alpha variant to 88% against Delta in less than 6 months of the vaccine being widely available to the public (With some even less optimistic peer-reviewed studies coming out of Israel, I’m just going by what the CDC is reporting). So under these circumstances, maybe it makes sense to wait a year or two before making claims about the long-term effectiveness of the vaccines. If they aren’t effective long-term some people might make different decisions about what vaccine they decide to take.
The mRNA vaccines were developed to target the spike protein of the Alpha variant. We got lucky it works so well against Delta, or else they would have had to roll out a new vaccine.
Based on your wording, it sounds like you have the mistaken impression that the mRNA vaccines are expected to account for and target all future variants. A future variant may have a large enough mutation to the spike protein and render them 0% effective. But they can rollout a new vaccine very quickly with EUA. Sorry if I've misinterpreted.
I don't remember ever seeing #s promising long term effectiveness, but eventually later seeing a chart with projected effectiveness waning over time. What they should do is be careful to present variant specific numbers. There's too much generalizing, like I did as well, lumping Pfizer and Moderna together.
They are proven to be highly effective at preventing severe cases of Covid-19, including the delta variant.
What we don't know (yet) is whether that efficacy will still be as strong 2, 3, or 5 years down the track. But that, IMO, is not a good reason not to get the vaccine today. Trust me, you don't want Covid!
I literally want it. I prefer the virus over the treatment if the chances are 99.9%+ that I survive it. I expect it to me more like 99.99%+.
I say so since the beginning (when there was no vaccine): let me get it so I can help in old folks homes.
But what I got was mandates/lockdowns and free mRNA treatments. Not taking the jab means lots of hassle. I see what govts are doing to us. I dont like that. So I resist.
That is a pretty naive take on “safe”. Would you like for me to list the MANY actually tested and approved drugs that turned out to have nasty or deadly effects realized years later which resulted in them being pulled? It is actually stunning to see such trust in something so untested in real world situations knowing from who is producing it. Oh I could list many other drugs! This not even counting drugs like OxyContin or benzodiazepines.
well it's not like you can study long term effect by virtue of having a very large large short term datasets, no matter how much large the current dataset is.
My comment was in regard to vaccine safety/side effects, not long-term efficacy.
Flu vaccines are only really effective for a single season. Hopefully it’s longer, but even if c19 vaccines give you only 1-2 years protection before requiring a booster, I’d say that’s still pretty good.
> Even Pfizer’s own RCT showed no benefit for all cause mortality at six months
There are countries that have had Pfizer rollouts to millions of people over the last 8 months ( 1) . If this were true in the real world, the excess mortality would have shown up in the real-world data by now. It has not. it's rubbish. You tout this false and trivially falsifiable "fact" repeatedly. Quit it.
Are you saying that this finding does hold up in the real world? Despite .. the real world?
You honestly should see it coming that would be told that you're talking rubbish - you have trotted out this junk talking point repeatedly, and been told that this is not correct several times now, it was only a matter of time it is said directly.
You're misrepresenting the study. That study never had enough statistical power to detect a reduction in deaths. It's disingenuous to simply cry "no reduction in deaths! manufacturer study!"
> That vaccine granted immunity was a big one, it rapidly became less symptoms, and from that surreptitiously changed again to well you'll still have a week of feeling like shit, but you'll be less likely to die from it.
You're being downvoted but the medical industry in the US honestly has terrible PR. It's not surprising that people misunderstand.
Vaccines do grant immunity, but immunity doesn't mean "you cannot catch the virus" and it never has. It means that your immune system will recognise the virus immediately and fight it.
This is the same thing as "less symptoms".
"A week of feeling like shit" has nothing to do with the virus at all, they're not symptoms of an infection that you are feeling, they are side effects of your immune system learning to fight the virus that the vaccine is teaching it about.
All, or at least most, vaccines require occasional boosters, but if everyone is vaccinated when they should be, the virus will die out before any significant number of further infections can occur, as has now happened with Polio and Smallpox.
So in short: You were not lied to, but you absolutely should have had this explained to you with greater clarity.
If vaccines don’t provide immunity then what’s the point of all the public policy such as vaccine passports, etc? If you can still catch and spread it those who are vaccinated should be subject to the same testing requirements as the unvaccinated.
> If you can still catch and spread it those who are vaccinated should be subject to the same testing requirements as the unvaccinated.
You're misunderstanding the precise use of the word "can" here. I can win the lottery. I can win a coin toss. But the odds are drastically different, and so en masse, we should plan and test much more for the "much more likely" case than the other. Now, vaccination against COVID gives better odds of not catching and not spreading COVID. You still _can_, though.
> If vaccines don’t provide immunity
But they do, statistically they provide a high level of immunity. Not 100% though. You know this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28699699
So why are you contradicting yourself?
It's not a binary thing... Vaccines make it significantly less likely that you will be infected, or if you are infected that you will develop the viral load necessary to be infectious, or if you are infectious, the period of time you are infectious for will be much shorter. At each step along the way the vaccine makes less likely that the vaccinated individual will infect someone else.
It makes it sufficiently less likely that if everyone was vaccinated, each infected person would, on average, go on to infect less than one other person, and the pandemic would end. The more people who are vaccinate, the lower that average of "people that get infected by each infectious person" goes. That is why vaccinations are important to everyone, not just the individual who is vaccinated.
It's unlikely the virus would have died out in any circumstance, given how infectious it is and easy to transmit.
We're probably going to get progressively less deadly variants until the end of times.
Vaccines' downsides were definitely overplayed because they were trying to push vaccines.
Talking about the increased risk of blood clots, saying that you would still get symptoms, that you would still infect other people, that you would still have to wear a mask, that you would still have to do a test whenever you travel, that vaccines would lose efficacy and need a booster every 6 month - that's the kind of stuff that would get you branded as an no-vax and banned from youtube.
> Vaccines' downsides were definitely overplayed because they were trying to push vaccines.
We paused the use of the J&J vaccine over the blood clot issue that turned out to be a common side effect of many drugs and it was at a rate lower than common birth control pills.
No one has downplayed the side effects or done something nefarious is some nebulous attempt to exert power and disinformation over people.
Innate immunity in a world of many unvaccinated individuals is going to gradually reduce this virus to another variant of the common cold. In the mean time, the vaccinated like myself are going to harbor and evolve dangerous variants which will kill many of the unvaccinated. The unvaccinated are the real victims here, since the vaccinated ones won't help the virus become more benign as effectively as those who develop innate immunity against it.
Even if you are eventually proven correct (vaccinated putting pressure on the virus to get more dangerous), I think your personal decision to favour personal health to public health is the correct one. Everybody should primarily watch their own interests and their own health.
On the other hand, public policy leading to creation of more dangerous viruses would be a disaster and if that happens, it should be stopped.
Vaccines work by stimulating the immune system. "Immunity" in the context of vaccines does not, and has never meant something like 'diplomatic immunity.' Instead, it means that a vaccinated person's body has the tools to fight off the virus. Which looks like reduced symptoms and drastically reduced likelihood of death from the virus. Mild side effects are expected. [1]
This has been true since vaccines were first discovered /invented, and will continue to be true. Measles, Smallpox, Polio, etc.
Perhaps many people misunderstood what "immunity" meant... But that initial misunderstanding doesn't mean that they were being lied to by doctors and scientists. What it really means is that they were unintentionally lying to themselves about the definition of immunity.
The Covid vaccine does not work by directly stimulating the immune system, like all other vaccines do. Instead, it inserts synthetic molecules into some cells, turning them into little machines that constantly produce a toxin that is released into the blood stream. The immune system is supposed to learn to fight this toxin. This has NEVER before been done in any other vaccine. We could speculate for hours about what could go wrong, but for the moment lets just say that myocarditis and blood clots are definitely NOT mild side effects.
Myocarditis and blood clots are also (more frequently) side effects from getting C19.
Just because it's never been done before does not mean we have no idea what it will or won't do. Biology is uncertain, but it's important to examine the vaccine risks AGAINST COVID RISKS.
Nothing is no-risk, including the vaccine. However, the accurate comparison is getting covid without the vax, versus with the vax. Looking at the vaccine risks in isolation is somewhere between misleading and dishonest.
The vaccine can 1) hurt me with probability p1, and 2) help me with probability p2, in case I get COVID later in a few-month-window after the vaccine when it is efficient.
I can choose to not get the vaccine, but I can't choose to not get COVID. COVID may hurt me either way.
Depending on the values p1, p2, it's better to get the vaccine or not get it. The problem is, most people have no idea about values of p1, p2 and that they are highly dependent on personal details.
Transmission to others is still an issue in the un-vaccinated.
Your logic doesn't make sense. You absolutely can choose to not get the serious covid version that hospitalizes you: by getting the vaccine! By socially distancing, and not hanging out with people who don't take very basic precautions. Even your second sentence: "COVID may hurt me either way" doesn't reflect reality - it's MUCH MUCH MUCH more likely to hurt you if you are unvaccinated.
And while personal details may vary, we can estimate covid risks pretty well with the population base rate, sliced by a few basic dimensions (age, BMI, smoker status). We also have a pretty good idea of vaccine risks - almost none.
We may not know vaccine side effects long term, but we also don't know the effects of long term covid. We do know that short term, the disease is way worse than the vaccine, and the more people that have it, the more chance it gets worse.
Look, I'm all for people making their own choice when it comes to the vaccine. Similarly, I think it's fair that society have a say about when unvaccinated people are allowed to participate in society.
> You absolutely can choose to not get the serious covid version that hospitalizes you: by getting the vaccine! By socially distancing, and not hanging out with people who don't take very basic precautions.
That is not strictly true. Vaccination decreases the chance of bad COVID, but it does not eliminate it. This benefit is working for some people, but it is not for some other people (bad breakthrough cases, people with weak/no immune response to the vaccine who later get COVID).
Limiting contact with strangers via distancing and masks is a sensible strategy for someone afraid to get bad COVID. Except for intoxicating with CO2/H20 and being short on O2, there are little risks to this so I do practice that.
> it's MUCH MUCH MUCH more likely to hurt you if you are unvaccinated
Yes but both numbers are too small for me to care enough to risk the vaccine. This isn't the first week of the pandemic - we got more than a year and in this time people around me are still completely fine living their life, the virus has literally no impact where I live. It is different for other people who knew people who died from COVID, so they think COVID is much more scary. But numbers are clear - COVID isn't a plague-level problem and not everybody needs to get vaccinated for their benefit.
> the disease is way worse than the vaccine, and the more people that have it, the more chance it gets worse.
That is not obviously true. There is a competing opinion that it is not good policy to mass vaccinate with too leaky a vaccine, because there is the dire possibility that it will put pressure on the virus evolution so it gets better at evading this kind of vaccine. I am not saying one or the other is obviously the correct one, but I do not think anybody can say with certainty.
> Similarly, I think it's fair that society have a say about when unvaccinated people are allowed to participate in society.
Society has a discussion - and there is still no clear consensus on what to do. Different states/countries do different strategies. I think that is a good thing - in case some policy turns out to be quite bad, at least it won't kill everybody.
I call bullshit here. If you're that worried, get the J&J vaccine, it's just like all the others. Multiple orders of magnitude more people have died or come down with long haul COVID versus had these side effects so the argument that you're doing the safe thing does not hold water.
> Multiple orders of magnitude more people have died or come down with long haul COVID
Yes but a very small part of those are relevant to my personal assessment of risk of bad COVID. The risk depends strongly on age, health status, lifestyle and so on. Absolute numbers of deaths are not that important to personal risk assessment.
I would be completely shocked if your "personal risk assessment" is accurate. There is no clear indications on which folks will get long COVID, "age, health status, lifestyle, and so on" are generalizations not absolutes. Your chance of dying of COVID, regardless of your health status, is much greater than the chance of experiencing serious side effects in what is probably one of the most widely distributed vaccines in history.
"Feelings" have no place in science. These are numbers not subjective anecdotes, which appear to be what you're basing your decision on. Say what you like, the data doesn't lie, only people do.
Risk assessment given missing data is very much personal and subjective. It's ridiculous that some try to use "the science" as a justification for their personal values or risk assessments.
Do no harm. You have no idea of the real risk from the vaccine because they really aren’t looking. Not 1 child should have been made to suffer myocarditis or died from the vaccine vs their risk of covid. Not one. But many have.
"Think of the children!" one of my favorite ways to see people trying to get out of an argument. Who could possibly argue for wanting to hurt children!
I would love some citations here, as this seems to be the exact type of misinformation this act is trying to combat. The thought that hundreds of thousands of medical professionals across the world are willingly ignoring potentially fatal consequences for children out of some nefarious political agenda is ludicrous. If this was really happening, it would be trivial to show it, anecdotes are not hard data.
In the same vein, not 1 immunocompromised child should die from COVID when there is an easy and safe way to combat it. Not one. But many have.
I don't think it's from a nefarious political agenda, but more so ignorance, stubbornness and scientism/cargo cult science (trust the science is not scientific).
As many folks as we have dog piling onto "vax bad" train, there is no shortage of people with incentive to dig in here. The fact the vaccine has been fully vetted in the same manner as any other vaccine seems to be lost on most folks. Additionally, this seems to be an extension of general vaccine hesitancy which has absolutely no scientific basis whatsoever but continues be a problem in the US.
When you have nuts sticking spoons to their face, claiming to have been magnetized, and those folks are speaking with equal authority and to as broad of an audience as respected scientists, there's a problem.
> The fact the vaccine has been fully vetted in the same manner as any other vaccine seems to be lost on most folks.
In terms of time, these vaccines very much have not been fully vetted in the same manner as any other vaccine.
> this seems to be an extension of general vaccine hesitancy
In part, yes. However there seems to be roughly an equal amount of people who have never had any objection to vaccines in the past that now do.
> hesitancy which has absolutely no scientific basis whatsoever
You mean Scientific(TM) basis? Because there are numerous reason to be HESITANT in terms of science (the process of uncovering what is and is not true). E.g. vaccine reactions are not a myth - we should study them more; vaccine mechanism is still sometimes opaque - we should know more about that and how someone's genetic play a part; adjuvants that have side effects are also not a myth - what about finding safer adjuvants?
> nuts ... speaking with equal authority and to as broad of an audience as respected scientists, there's a problem
To be clear, you're saying they should be censored?
Censorship is a Russian Doll problem. It's turtles all the way down. Who makes the censors unbiased? Science should continue to be about questioning what is believed and believed to be true.
There are skeptics on both sides of the bell curve of intelligence. A nut, as you say, and an intelligent scientist may both come to the same conclusion - it doesn't make the nut's reasoning correct, but it also doesn't make the scientist's conclusion wrong either, just because the nut believes it too.
> In terms of time, these vaccines very much have not been fully vetted in the same manner as any other vaccine.
This is a tired, out-dated argument, all 3 vaccines in distribution in the US have been fully vetted and passed all tests, there is no more "emergency approval". If time is what you want then you're just saying there is absolutely nothing that will convince you to take it.
> In part, yes. However there seems to be roughly an equal amount of people who have never had any objection to vaccines in the past that now do.
Yes, now that is has become a political issue instead of a scientific one (like it should be), many more people have been duped.
> what about finding safer adjuvants?
How about being realistic about the side effects of the vaccine? This is one of the most studied, most widely distributed vaccines in history. If there any data to back up any sort of hesitancy, I believe the amount of people desperately searching for something useful to use in their war on science would find it.
> you're saying they should be censored?
I'm saying viewpoints that obviously have absolutely no basis in reality (Bill Gates microchips, magnetizing face spoons, etc) should not have a place to flourish alongside real scientific discourse. How about we vet an idea before we let the masses with little to no critical thinking skills consume it.
> doesn't make the scientist's conclusion wrong either, just because the nut believes it too.
I have no idea what you're trying to say here, however if a "nut" says something sane, that doesn't make them sane. I think the larger problem is there are a lot of people with a lot of money to make by preaching vaccine hesitancy. If people are maliciously influencing public opinion for personal gain and the detriment of public good, how do you suggest we combat that?
I agree censorship is not the answer but I also don't support giving a platform to people in a society where people will accept absolutely anything in their echo chamber without question or serious discourse. The media has lost the confidence of the people and everyone is so caught up in bipartisanship, it's a literal crime the vaccine hesitancy falls along political lines, if anything that should tell you it is not based in science.
“mRNA vaccines tell our cells to make a piece of the “spike protein” that is found on the surface of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Since only part of the protein is made, it does not harm the vaccine recipient, but it is antigenic and thus stimulates the immune system to make antibodies.”
>VITT is not associated with the Moderna or Pfizer-BioNTech mRNA vaccines.
We're talking 400 cases of VITT from two specific vaccines (AZ and J&J) out of 6.2 billion doses given. Furthermore, COVID itself is associated with getting blood clots. In fact, you have a much higher chance of getting blood clots by staying unvaccinated than getting the vaccine. Even further, blood clots are entirely treatable if caught early.
Of course, as others have said, blood clots aren't a legitimate concern for anyone. This is yet another shifting of the goalposts.
> Can you provide examples of the lies you're referring to?
The mask one not being useful is a lie where Fauci was trying to reserve masks for medical staff.
Why not lying again about the current vaccine effectiveness/side effects balance to reserve promising treatments to a certain category of the population?
He lied about the required levels to reach herd immunity too. Ends justify the means I guess? But it’s hard to take him at face value about anything anymore.
“In the pandemic’s early days, Dr. Fauci tended to cite the same 60 to 70 percent estimate that most experts did. About a month ago, he began saying “70, 75 percent” in television interviews. And last week, in an interview with CNBC News, he said “75, 80, 85 percent” and “75 to 80-plus percent.”
In a telephone interview the next day, Dr. Fauci acknowledged that he had slowly but deliberately been moving the goal posts. He is doing so, he said, partly based on new science, and partly on his gut feeling that the country is finally ready to hear what he really thinks.
Hard as it may be to hear, he said, he believes that it may take close to 90 percent immunity to bring the virus to a halt — almost as much as is needed to stop a measles outbreak.”
These are not lies, these are changes in our understanding of viral epidemiology that we have seen happen throughout the course of the pandemic, concomitant with the introduction of increasingly more contagious strains. Science has a lot of uncertainty in it and we’ve seen a lot of hypotheses refuted in the past year: surface transmission and microdroplets (actually mostly aerosol), mask inefficacy (they do work! mostly when everyone wears them), and herd immunity (probably harder than we initially expected). These are all things that were just poorly understood and understudied pre-pandemic. Our understanding of them is still rapidly developing and changing now. I realize it’s hard for the general public to understand, but science doesn’t know everything and we need to be able to accept when our understanding of something changes in light of new evidence.
I thought this was simple math. The reproduction value R of the original type was estimated to be around 3 (one sick person infects on average three other persons). So to get this below 1, we need a vaccination rate of around 2/3 (1-1/R). The delta variant has a higher R of 6-8, so we may need as much as 90% of the population to be vaccinated. It's completely plausible and has nothing to do with lying.
The lying is that the numbers have been changing, by his own admission, based on what he thought the American public should hear. If it is such "simple math", and the number is 90%, then Fauci saying 70% when he knew that was wrong is lying.
The R0 changed: initial WHO estimates were (1.4, 2.4); now multiple studies have a mean of 5.08 [1]. Thus the simple math changed. 60% likely does grant herd immunity at an R0 of 2.5; it does not for delta.
> Dr. Fauci acknowledged that he had slowly but deliberately been moving the goal posts. He is doing so, he said, partly based on new science, and partly on his gut feeling that the country is finally ready to hear what he really thinks.
Dr fauci himself admitted that he was giving bad numbers based on what he wanted the American public to hear.
This is the whole disconnect. The people like Fauci that we are supposed to blindly trust are clearly willing to deceive in order to satisfy their own goals. That's why people distrust him.
The Delta variant is sufficiently contagious that we can't achieve any real herd immunity through vaccination. It's still important to get vaccinated to protect yourself.
Those calculations of herd immunity threshold percentages were usually over simplified based on the assumption that immunity is a binary condition. But in reality while vaccinated people are less likely to suffer severe symptoms they can still get infected and spread the virus.
With early variants 60-70% may have very well been sufficient. As we get variants that can spread more easily that raises the bar on what we need for herd immunity. I don’t think a lot of people appreciate just how much worse Delta has been in this regard. Fingers crossed we don’t get an even worse variant.
But NYT article where the quote originated is from December 2020 (ie months before the Delta variant was officially named and more than half a year before it hit the US), so I don't think that is an explanation for why the number changed.
I think the most likely explanation is that public health officials believed that citing a 60-70 number would feel more achievable, and thus encourage people to continue masking/distancing until a vaccine was available. If they has said 85% in May 2020, maybe people would have thought it was hopeless and just opened up immediately.
Whether they judged correctly or not, I don't think it was a good idea to bend the truth because it erodes trust in institutions.
That may very well be. However, there's no need to wonder whether Fauci was being totally frank the entire time, because he has outright said that he knowingly gave a so-optimistic-its-a-lie estimate at first, in an effort to avoid intimidating people.
He said that at the time because COVID wasn't endemic all over the USA and he didn't want folks going out and hoarding all of the N95 masks which were needed at the time most critically for hospital workers.
Once the situation changed and everyone needed to wear a mask he said that folks should go out and buy masks (and after the supply gap was closed a bit).
Yeah he lied because he had to, and he lied later about herd immunity too. Whether it was good policy or not, I can’t assume anything he says is based on fact alone.
They weren't sure about airborne transmission from a-symptomatic people at the time. Delta variant has a higher r0 than alpha, so the herd immunity numbers change. Saying he's purposefully lying because the facts on the ground change is ridiculous.
> When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent ... Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, "I can nudge this up a bit," so I went to 80, 85. We need to have some humility here .... We really don’t know what the real number is. I think the real range is somewhere between 70 to 90 percent. But, I'm not going to say 90 percent."
...where is the false statement? Fauci gave one estimate, then gave another more conservative estimate in an attempt to encourage people to get the vaccine. At no point did he give a number out of the range supported by the available data.
Calling that "purposefully lying" is ridiculous. People who have to present a single number to summarize an entire body of scientific research for the general public always have to make a decision about how conservative of an estimate to give.
> People who have to present a single number to summarize an entire body of scientific research for the general public always have to make a decision about how conservative of an estimate to give
You expect those people to make their estimate based on the scientific research, not based on what he thinks the people are "ready to hear".
He literally said that the motivation for saying 80, 85 was the fact that a poll showing how many people had already been convinced to take it.
It's just a fact - he was selling the vaccine. I'm not alleging a conspiracy, or shady financial motives. I'm not saying the vaccine is bad, because I think it's amazing. But Fauci gave numerical estimates that he did not believe to be accurate, for PR reasons.
Talk about making a mountain of a mole hill. There's a range of possible values that the science supports and he said a number in that range when asked what he thinks.
So it's a white lie, at most, because he was always accurate. He stayed within the "real range" of 70-90, but he varied based on what people could tolerate hearing.
If he said 70-90%, then people may only hear 90 and think no way we'll get there. Sounds reasonable. If people hear we'll never get herd immunity due to delta and the potential for new variants, will more people get it or will it eliminate a reason for some to get it?
How would you have given a point estimate that both accurately reflects the scientific confidence interval estimate and also serves as an aspirational target for public policy?
Keep in mind that if your estimate is too low many people will die or have significantly reduced life quality. And if your estimate is too high internet trolls will use that as fodder to discourage people from getting vaccinated.
I was encouraging you to reflect on why you think this is lying, because you are really grasping at straws.
You have not established any point where he lied or stretched the truth. What you have established is your personal axe to grind against Fauci.
It's good to examine why you feel the need to grind this axe.
We know why Fauci is controversial. He is controversial because the president wanted to let people die because he felt that is the truth about the pandemic came out he would lose power. Fauci told the truth and as a result was villainized by political extremists.
This alone explains, I don't know, like 99.9% of sentiment about Fauci.
So when you spend a lot of effort trying to convince people in the internet that he lied about something, but you're unable to produce any evidence, the perception is that you have some other reason for wanting to believe he lied.
So again I encourage you to think through what the ideal response would have been. Instead of trying to find any tiny reason to criticize him, actually think through what the right thing to do was.
EDIT: To make it even more clear, by the article you quoted, 100% of the numbers he gave were within the confidence interval. That is what it means to give a "scientific evaluation" as you say.
In other words, by your own admission he never told an untruth or a partial truth. He quoted the low end of the confidence interval saying "we likely need at least this many people assuming the vaccines are this effective etc". His gut feeling was that the numbers were higher, but he didn't have the evidence to say that, so the message we "we need at least this many people."
Then as we learned more he revised the estimates up closer to where he thought they should be initially, but which he didn't have evidence for.
Since he was telling the truth 100% of the time, it's difficult to make a case that he was lying or that he is untrustworthy.
Folks weren't hoarding the masks, they were being bought and sent overseas, because the US didn't block exports, like for example China did.
Anyway, this whole hoarding issue can be elegantly side-stepped by not outsourcing mask production and stockpiling. I assume the US government was aware of the possibility of pandemics (likely flu), just like everyone else on the planet was.
You could also mobilize your military (or similar) to produce masks short-term. In fact, that is what Taiwan did when most of the WHO and the so-called first world countries were still refusing to admit that there was a pandemic.
There is also lying via omission, statistical manipulation and censorship. Why did Pfizer data for their COVID-19 vaccine not report the injury and paralysis of a 12-year participant in the clinical trial? June 2021 article from Robert Kennedy's CHD organization, https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/sen-johnson-ken-...
> Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) held a news conference Monday to discuss adverse reactions related to the COVID vaccines — giving individuals who have been “repeatedly ignored” by the medical community a platform to share their stories ... “We are all pro-vaccine,” Johnson said at the onset of the news conference. In fact, Johnson has had every flu shot since the Swine flu, is current on all of his vaccines ... he has not had a COVID vaccine because he already had COVID.
> Five people from across the U.S., including a 12-year-old girl who was part of the Pfizer clinical trial, joined the conference at the federal courthouse ... Among them was Maddie de Garay from Ohio who volunteered for the Pfizer vaccine trial when she was 12. On Jan. 20, Maddie received her second dose of the Pfizer COVID vaccine as a participant in the clinical trial for 12- to 15-year-olds and is now in a wheelchair ... “Why is she not back to normal? She was totally fine before this,” said Stephanie de Garay, Maddie’s mother. She volunteered for the Pfizer vaccine trial “to help everyone else and they’re not helping here. Before Maddie got her final dose of the vaccine she was healthy, got straight As, had lots of friends and had a life.”
> ... Upon receiving the second shot, Maddie immediately felt pain at the injection site and over the next 24-hours developed severe abdominal and chest pain, de Garay said at the press event. Maddie told her mother it felt like her heart was being ripped out through her neck, and she had painful electrical shocks down her neck and spine that forced her to walk hunched over ... She developed gastroparesis, nausea and vomiting, erratic blood pressure, memory loss, brain fog, headaches, dizziness, fainting, seizures, verbal and motor tics, menstrual cycle issues, lost feeling from the waist down, lost bowel and bladder control and had an nasogastric tube placed because she lost her ability to eat.
> ... Johnson argued that while most people don’t suffer significant side effects following vaccination, he is concerned about “that small minority that are suffering severe symptoms.”
The more we know about the statistical minority who suffer severe adverse reactions, the better we can screen vaccine recipients to prevent these injuries.
My wife’s theory is there would be less hesitancy if the vaccines were being distributed through people’s primary care physicians instead of at mass vaccination sites or Walgreens. People may distrust the media, the government and all sorts of other nebulous groups, but they largely trust their doctor.
You can almost certainly get the vaccine from your physician, and you can also call your physician’s office and leave a message asking them whether you should get vaccinated. They’ll call you back.
I picked up on the strangely vague "medical professionals" piece as well. One thing I learned from the pandemic is that not all health/medical professionals are created equal, and that there is a large portion of very specifically trained and fairly uneducated people in the medical community.
My mom was a RN most of her career then got her masters and went into education. My dad is a nurse practitioner. I didn't specify it explicitly because I didn't think it was relevant -- I was not trying to use vagueness to imply they were medical doctors and use them as a source of authority. All was trying to do was build them up at least a little, they do know more about the body than most people even if they aren't anywhere near experts on what the vaccine does.
It is, unfortunately, a relevant and important point. I've heard of plenty of nurses who got wrapped up in conspiracy theories and completely ignored the experts, but very VERY few doctors or pharmacists. Knowing how to take care of someone who is sick is a far cry from being an expert on vaccines or viruses.
My Wife, a ICU RN+CCRN spent most of her 2020 on the COVID floor. It was pretty brutal for her.
She has coworkers, of equal status, who experienced pandemic alongside her first hand - who were extremely hesitant to get the vaccine. This includes several months after the initial rollout to staff.
Something I heard from Shepard Smith cleared this up for me the other day- when talking about a potential shortage of “medical professionals” in NY due to the vaccine mandate, he also provided a statistic that 98+% of doctors and 95+% of nurses are vaccinated. This is a breakdown that I appreciated, as I value the health-related decisions of doctors more than the entire category of “medical professionals”.
> One thing I learned from the pandemic is that not all health/medical professionals are created equal, and that there is a large portion of very specifically trained and fairly uneducated people in the medical community.
I have medical professionals in my family. Your statement sums it up. In my experience, physical/occupational therapists are the most likely to believe in crazy stuff (from a medical standpoint). RNs come next. I'm sure there are people in between on that spectrum, but I don't interact with them much.
I think the data alone is an objective argument.
Using basic math (Bayes theorem) I can compute it reduce my chance of death by 668 time and Hospitalization by 116 times.
see below:
Covid Fact:
- proportion on covid death that are unvaccinated
p(not(vaccinated) | covid-death ) = 99%
- proportion of population this is unvaccinated
P(not(vaccinated)) = 14%
- proportion of population this is vaccinated
P(vaccinated) = 86%
Basic math:
- Probability of death from covid if not vacinated
P(covid-death | not(vaccinated)) = 0.99 * P(covid-death) / 0.14
- Probability of death from covid if vacinated
P(covid-death | vaccinated) = 0.01 * P(covid-death) / 0.86
- How many time more likely to die from covid if not vaccinated
P(covid-death | not(vaccinated)) / P(covid-death | vaccinated) = 608
Fact:
if you are not vaccinated,
You are 608 times more likely to die from Covid 19 and
you are 116 times more likely to be hospitalized.
The vast majority of people spend the vast majority of their lives being told what to do, in one way or another.
The problem with the vaccines (and lockdowns etc) is that these are new obligations, so making people realise how little control over their lives they actually have (in spite of the 'freedom' retoric so popular in the US).
> She believed that if the vaccine was actually as great as they're saying they'd be able to make more objective goalposts and win arguments instead of stopping them because the other side is too stupid to make their own decisions.
1) People ARE too "stupid". "Stupid" here is a placeholder for a larger discussion on biological, antropological, social and psychological evidence. Which all could be summed up as: We are meant to be just smart enough to survive, then some more. Average human capability for evidence evaluation and independent reasoning is quite low.
2) Effort for winning in an unbounded argument space is practically infinite. Debunking bullshit takes several orders of magnitude more resources than coming up with more bullshit.
There needs to be a point at which you should disqualify an arguing party as not worthy of further evaluation. That's another way for the other party to "win the argument". In this specific case, pro-vaccine people has long won the argument, and by a mile.
I'm glad you got vaccinated. But... Can you expand on why you were hesitant because of censorship? Because if there were lots of serious problems with the vaccine, they'd be covered in a second on fox news. Meanwhile, a lot of people are hugely influenced by false stories on social media, it's just a fact, with recent examples being things like ivermectin and the 2016 presidential election conspiracies, and don't forget q-anon.
Since covid is so deadly if you get it, and there are basically almost no cases of serious health issues with vaccination and furthermore, vaccination is also almost guaranteed to protect you from serious cases, why wouldn't you get it? Have you heard rumors of some problems from vaccination?
You're probably referring to Biontech*, but when I got AstraZeneca the chances of dying from the virus for my age interval was only slightly more than the chance of dying from the vaccine, as calculated by the ECDC.
* which as an aside does cause myocarditis and pericardits in particular for young males. This is important because for example in Germany the incidence was 1 case from 17.271 doses for males in the 12-17 age range and in most cases the symptoms appeared after the second dose, which may mean that a booster could also trigger it.
It's being ignored because it's fraught with problems.
People think they had COVID in the early pre-testing days, but it was just the flu or a bad cold. (My son was in this realm; severe pneumonia in early 2020, but later testing showed no antibodies.) You'd have restaurants swamped with angry "but I've already had it!" people.
Verification is hard; you can't just take word for it, so that means an antibody test, and at that point you might as well have just vaccinated them anyways while they were in.
The US completely botched testing: insisted of creating its own test which didn't work, wouldn't test most people and didn't scale testing capacity. I feel very sorry for those which had COVID and have sequelae and no way to prove they were sick. Sweden did something similar.
Verification isn't hard if you don't completely fuck up. There are countries in Europe which don't have the medical capabilities of the US and they were able to get this right.
You're cherry picking from people who think they had it. There are millions who know they've had COVID like myself, and I still have very high antibodies almost 9 months on. I am fit, do not have a comorbidity like obesity, hypertension, diabetes, etc. Remember, over 78% of all hospitalizations involve obesity and other comorbidities, and disproportionately affect much older people. It should be me and my doctor's choice on whether getting the jab is good for me or not. Censorship doesn't address the nuances of the issue. It leads to disenfranchising people. In addition, the vaccine spikes your antibodies, and if your antibodies are currently high, it can lead to more frequent or serious side effects. The 2018 Spanish Flu caused deaths in the young and healthy by having their immune systems go into an overwhelmingly high gear, but older people's weaker immune systems spared them this consequence. I have natural immunity, I am fit, and my risk of a second, severe infection is equal or less to your vaccinated status. After 9 months the vaccine's efficacy is much lower, and doesn't really work well against the variants. There is no long-term data, obviously, on the vaccine yet, since it was only given to the public less than a year ago. Let's see three to seven years from now. Let's remember Pfizer was the company that in 1996 setup a tent near a Doctors without Borders tent and gave an experimental antibiotic drug to 200 children, maybe more, without their parent's consent, and then 10 or 11 of those children died with others suffering other maladies thought to be from the drug. An illegal, immoral drug trial. They packed up their tent, and later back-dated a letter to say they had gone through ethics channels with the Nigerian government. So yeah, let's squash any anti-vaccine talk, because what's good for you is good for everyone. Personally, I am vaccinated with everything but the COVID vaccinations, so I am not antivax, and shouldn't be discriminated against like that. My older children got the vaccine, but me and my wife and our younger children have not, since we all had COVID, and we all have high antibodies. Fake vaccination cards also defeat your "fraught with problems" argument of people think they had it, but didn't argument. There will always be difficulties in sorting this out. That's no reason to go full-in on censorship.
I particularly think the Wikileaks that shows more unethical, illegal attempts to get out of it are even more interesting: "But last year a US diplomatic cable uncovered by WikiLeaks revealed that Pfizer hired investigators to look for evidence of corruption against the Nigerian attorney general in an effort to persuade him to drop the legal action."
Your son or you "thought" he had it. I had it. A positive COVID test, and antibody tests 8 and 9 months later. Not my imagination.
I recommend the vaccine for friends who have not had COVID, but that is their choice not mine. If I were in my twenties, healthy, and no comorbidities, I wouldn't personally get it. You only need to look at the chart of COVID deaths and hospitalizations by age bracket, and you can see that the risk is very low. Let's see if there are any issues 3 to 5 years from now. Unfortunately, Pfizer vaccinated their control group, so long-term safety studies will have to be restarted or done by others.
People with prior infection should be angry about not being allowed to have the same access as vaccinated people. The US State department accepts it for entry into the US, but a pizzeria owner needs to turn away natural immunity folk? You wonder why there's anger? Japan, Singapore, Norway, the UK, and Ireland are doing away with COVID restrictions, and for the most part, vaccine passports. The US is completely ignoring natural immunity outside of entry to the US. Weird.
Have you watched Tucker Carlson? I would be pleased if they charged the man with murder after this is all over. Do you think it's odd he won't answer questions about his own vaccination status?
"almost no cases of serious health issues with vaccination" how do you think you'd possibly hear about this when you are replying to an article where any anti-vaccine information is censored?
Well over 2 billion people have been vaccinated. You probably know some of them in real life - you don't need a broadcaster to tell you if there are problems.
You really think "any anti-vaccine information is censored"?
This policy on YouTube just started, and, last I heard anyway, there are other sources of information other than YouTube.
There have obviously been many many sources of information on the internet that allow anti-vaccine information. And, if that information was actually credible, it would have also been available to, for instance, those at YouTube who made this policy. What do you figure their agenda is for covering it up?
Thanks to your ongoing efforts, my 40+ year old sibling finally got vaccinated about three weeks before getting infected by her kids. She still had it pretty bad, so I think it’s likely you saved her a trip to the hospital or worse.
She was on the brink of getting vaccinated weeks earlier, but “That Guy” had cast enough doubt that a family member talked her out of it. So I’m glad you specifically mentioned him back then. Thanks to our civilization’s shiny new censorship machine it was maddeningly difficult to actually find good counter arguments to his claims, since we’re all supposed to just pretend bad claims don’t exist. So mostly I had to just point to the favorable evidence rather than being able to give a point by point rebuttal.
[...]
And her family is fox news conservative, so all the tribal hate made it especially hard for her to take their claims seriously. She stayed up all night making her decision, and had 250 browser tabs open by the end. So people do try, and do pay attention.
--- end quote #1 ---
and later, in response
--- start quote #2 ---
I had the same experience. I wanted to know whether the “vector vaccines alter your DNA” claims had any truth to them, given that “dna altering virus” is definitely something that exists. As far as I can tell, this is (probably) false, but it was really hard to find any evidence beyond “prof. dr. X says this is a conspiracy theory, now get your vaccine they are safe and effective ™”. It was really frustrating; I’m not surprised that many people feel like they are being tricked.
> I had the same experience. I wanted to know whether the “vector vaccines alter your DNA” claims had any truth to them, given that “dna altering virus” is definitely something that exists. As far as I can tell, this is (probably) false, but it was really hard to find any evidence beyond “prof. dr. X says this is a conspiracy theory, now get your vaccine they are safe and effective ™”. It was really frustrating; I’m not surprised that many people feel like they are being tricked.
This is a really frustrating perspective to hear.
> I heard this bogus claim about something I don't understand and wanted to know if it was true
> All I could find was doctors saying it was nonsense
> How could I know what the truth was?
I suspect it's a common form of reasoning. It's committing so many mistakes all at once.
* Refusal to acknowledge that you might be considering nonsense and thus perceiving anyone saying it's nonsense as malicious
* Complete refusal or certainty in your inability to do basic research on things that are well documented by many organizations and easy to find BUT STILL SAYING ITS HARD TO FIND
* Not just lack of trust, but certainty of distrust for authority figures. Anything they say has negative value.
It's far more upsetting to me than hearing people with malicious political agendas being assholes.
So you think it's a problem that people want to see an actual explanation, rather than just hearing authority figures say "don't worry your little head, we'll make the decisions for you"?
Every day we hear the mantra, "follow the science!". Here are people striving to do exactly that, and they're being criticized for it. Saying that they're not trying hard enough if they're not finding the answers they seek when it's framed the way you say it must be presented is not a recipe for helping such people overcome their objections.
If you want an actual explanation you can google "do vaccines alter your dna" and find plenty of results that explain it in simple detail for non scientists.
Others simply say "No it does not alter your dna" because that concept is irrelevant and made up. There's no basis for it.
You don't get to say you're unable to get an explanation if you're not getting it because you either refuse to do the most basic search, or do the search and refuse to acknowledge it.
This isn't about who has moral high ground. This is about convincing people to take the damned vaccine. I'd think it's more important to find ways to reach such people, than it is to feel morally righteous about the skeptic being a parasitic moron who isn't researching hard enough.
It's not about moral high ground. It's about lamenting the vast wave of anti-intellectualism that has reached such a disturbingly high level.
You cannot lead an effective society in which people embrace the doublethink of simultaneously refusing to acknowledge experts, refusing to even attempt to understand something themselves, and still demanding an understanding of something.
Maybe you should go back and read what I quoted. In both cases, the people said that they did eventually find what they needed, and decided to do the vaccination.
These two people were complaining not that they couldn't find anti-vax information. They were complaining that they couldn't find anybody directly refuting anti-vax claims, because those anti-vax claims had (assumedly) been censored.
But let's assume that you're correct. Wouldn't it be better to let the skeptic find some posting from a person who wrongly believed that, say, the vaccine causes sterility; and when they go read that (maybe just to bolster their own beliefs) they also see the reply from someone who addresses the skeptic's incorrect beliefs? If we prevent our hypothetical skeptic from finding that page that made him feel safe, he wouldn't have gotten to the counter-argument at all.
> Wouldn't it be better to let the skeptic find some posting from a person who wrongly believed that, say, the vaccine causes sterility; and when they go read that (maybe just to bolster their own beliefs) they also see the reply from someone who addresses the skeptic's incorrect beliefs?
No, because...
"The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it." ~ Albert Einstein
Can you expand on why you were hesitant because of censorship? ... Have you heard rumors of some problems from vaccination?
It made it more difficult to ascertain what the risks were, I didn't feel our officials were being honest with us (something I still think). Back in early 2021 it was a lot more open to speculation since it was an minimally tested treatment who's delivery method had never been widely deployed on humans before. We still don't know if there's long term effects and there's no way for us to find out until enough time has passed. I didn't want to be part of the initial test group.
Since covid is so deadly if you get it
I'm relatively young and not in any risk categories, covid does not pose much of a death risk to me. Significant non-deadly outcomes are another story (permanent lung damage, loss of taste, ect). I decided that protection from the latter category (significant non-deadly outcomes) was worth my rather nebulous fears that we'll realize it does some harm over the next decade.
and there are basically almost no cases of serious health issues with vaccination and furthermore
"Basically almost no" is a difficult term to quantify, but VAERS database does have plenty of entries.
> Significant non-deadly outcomes are another story (permanent lung damage, loss of taste, ect)
Is there credible, non-censorious evidence that the vaccine reduces these particular risks? This is the same argument that we keep seeing: you have to take this vaccine because ${thing that vaccines normally do but this one hasn't been shown to do}. The most egregious example is "provide immunity"/"improve outcomes for anyone around you". I just don't believe a word of it until I see the science.
I don’t know what level of convincing you need, but here in BC, unvaccinated people are about 25x more likely to show up in a hospital than vaccinated people:
Sorry, I just don't believe these numbers. Even mainstream media sources have begun admitting that hospital admission rates are meaningless because they reflect mostly test results from hospital admissions for concerns other than covid symptoms. It is interesting that despite this the unvaccinated are showing up more, but because it is for example plausible that the unvaccinated are just plain leaving their homes more, I think that actual scientific study is needed to explain these numbers.
I recognize that it's ridiculous to be in a situation where I'm rejecting facts; that's a great way to be led completely astray. But that's the world that censorship has created.
> I recognize that it's ridiculous to be in a situation where I'm rejecting facts; that's a great way to be led completely astray. But that's the world that censorship has created.
Sounds to me like you're blaming everyone else for something that's completely under your control.
> I think that actual scientific study is needed to explain these numbers.
Science is not done in the media. I'm tired of being told that I have to believe the science that's on TV when every single time I investigate it turns out the science says the exact opposite. The non-scientific "facts" in the media are even worse; take those overwhelmed hospitals in Oklahoma and the nationwide overwhelmed poison control centers, which were both bold-faced lies. (In case you've missed the non-retractions, Oklahoma hospitals denied having ivermectin patients and only 2% of calls to poison control had anything to do with covid.)
You still didn't answer the question of what would you actually believe. It seems like you might just call anything you don't like "the media". Let's see where you get your information.
Did you miss the first (last) component of the address? "news"? It's a press release, which is a step in the wrong direction from the media. I was attempting to steelman the opposing position by upgrading it to media interpretations of press releases.
I believe you’ve made your point that nothing will reasonably sway you. Even if a “scientific” study is performed (and many are certainly in progress - but science is slow!) you can simply latch on to any flaw in the study to reject the results.
Give me a good explanation of how a 25x effect size can be hand waved away. Even if you consider “leaving their homes more”, I have a tough time believing that you’ll be able to come up with an effect size that large on that basis alone.
As an addendum to this, I’ll point out that several jurisdictions dealing with very severe case loads, including Alberta and Saskatchewan in Canada, have cancelled many elective procedures in favour of putting more COVID patients in their wards. Doesn’t sound like these are “concerns other than COVID symptoms” to me.
Yes, I agree with you. People are so scared by the "scary potential dangers" that aren't happening that they don't take something that reduces their risk of death by massive amounts, 20+x times.
All you "young" people not taking the shot, there are lots of otherwise relatively young people dying every day. Don't die needlessly. Search for stories of people who regretted not taking it on your deathbed. Do you want your mom or dad to live without you?
You're going to make an anecdote-based emotional appeal to an audience whose belief that they're being manipulated has constantly been validated by incompetence, corruption, and censorship?
The VAERS database wouldn’t be what I would use for measures. I mean I saw a guy faint like one minute after getting the shot. Side effect? Nope he even said while he was talking to paramedics he spent the whole day freaking out about side effects and then blacked out. Paramedics said they see this all the time, people are scared. However the technology for the vaccines has been around for a few years now and the vaccines all went through rigorous testing. We don’t know the long term adverse affects of COVID, but with the mechanism of the vaccine plus the insanely high number of people who have received them we should feel even more confident in their safety. I mean I get the hesitancy people have. But honestly a lot of people are making decisions based on emotion to not getting the shot, and I think a lot of it is that reason and facts can’t counter emotion (not saying you in particular just a general observation).
Yikes. Rigorous testing? Yet concerned about long term effects of covid itself? With lack of logic like this no wonder we have leaders exploiting the unvaccinated.
And what exactly is the difference in your mind between "moderating" and "censoring" here? They seem exactly the same to me: both involve some other party deciding what is and is not acceptable to be published.
Private companies that allow you to reach millions of people are offering you the ability to use their service. It's not censorship when they don't allow you to use their service (and until today, they haven't stopped much), it's terms of service.
If I invite you to my house and you eat my dog's food, I have the right to tell you to leave. The movement wouldn't be what it is today without YT, so this censorship stuff is too much.
That libertarian/conservative talking point is often misstated, which intentionally or not becomes a red herring. Their claim isn't (or shouldn't be) that Youtube or Facebook or Twitter, in taking actions like these, aren't engaging in censorship. Their claim is that it's legal and not a violation of free speech (1A in the US), i.e. it's not government censorship, because that only applies when government is taking the actions.
There are several problems with this, outlined in Clarence Thomas's recent concurring opinion in Biden v. Knight. Dominant communications platforms are essentially part of the public square, and two well-established legal principles could come into play to restrict their actions: public accommodations and common carriers.
There's the additional problem that government is influencing how social media companies police content, not only indirectly through fear of retribution, but even directly. One instance that recently got media attention:
Why do you think censorship must be government action? Is there a definition posted anywhere that says this?
I've long seen it used to refer to, for instance, TV network censors. And every online dictionary I can find allows for entities other than government to be referred to as censoring.
Censorship is not a government action. It is literally filtering content and anyone can. You can censor yourself, a company could censor a band and change lyrics.
They run a platform that practices censorship. It is legal. Trying to say it is okay because they are a private entity doesn't wash and they should be called out. We could even band together and censor them.
No that's just govt. Censorship vs regular censorship. Moderation is the exact same thing they can both do it. Just because it isn't the government doesn't mean they aren't censoring.
Does she get flu shots because that has been all about coercion since the ramp up of medical profiteering that started in the 90s. Nevermind that the lethality of influenza precipitously declined in the 40s and isn't a mass killer. Covid is a far more credible threat that shouldn't be ignored so readily.
> because the other side is too stupid to make their own decisions
The unfortunate reality is - that is the actual crux of the problem. Maybe say "incapable of making" instead of "too stupid to make", since that makes the scope wider. But that is the long and short of it.
when you say "medical professionals" do you mean nurse or doctor ?
I have seen a huge amount of nurse refusing to get vaccinated but not so much for Doctor!
There are at least four people close to me who become more entrenched in their anti-vax stance the more this stuff happens.
It's so obvious to me how counter-productive these measures are. However I don't suppose increasing vaccination rates are part of the goal of these measures, but just protecting YouTube from having to do moderation or take responsibility for the content on their platform.
My mom for example, after many conversations and a great deal of effort on my part to present data and evidence that was free from shaming and judgement, has made two appointments to get vaccinated, and subsequently cancelled them. The second cancellation came after Biden's recent speech blaming unvaccinated people being directly responsible for killing the vaccinated, a nonsensical supposition.
This is scary stuff. The moral absolutism that the platforms endorse is creeping into more and more subjective areas, and essentially obliterating any hope of nuance or increased understanding about changing strategies and data.
Hi, I'm one of those people. I already had Covid before the vaccine, and have been exposed without reinfection since having it. I was neutral on the vaccine at the start, but now I'm only going to get it if I'm forced to. I'm not interested in being bullied into a choice that
a) could harm me, and is more likely to given my family history, and
b) there's conflicting evidence that it gives me any advantage over the immunity I already have.
If you'd like to change my mind, you can start by not threatening my livelihood, not calling me a murderer, and not treating me like I'm subhuman. Yes, I'm a little angry. Wouldn't you?
Convincing you largely doesn’t matter since you have antibodies already. Your message here sounds a bit like a challenge, “here look at me I’m antivax please convince me” — no, at best that’s an empty request, at worst it’s trollbait.
My ex girlfriend is the exact same as you. I called her out on it, she didn’t like that. Do what you like, but IMO what you are doing is dishonest.
She did eventually get it, though, for no other reason than: it’s harmless, and it’s easier and cheaper than doing a test before every concert she wanted to go to. She eventually apologized and said she was just being stubborn for the hell of it.
Calling the vaccine "harmless" is dishonest. It may have been mostly harmless for her, but the vaccine has caused death and other issues, most notably myocarditisand pericarditis in young men. For a young man who has had covid with mild or no symptoms, the vaccine could pose a greater danger than not. There is no one simple "right" answer here.
> Biden's recent speech blaming unvaccinated people being directly responsible for killing the vaccinated, a nonsensical supposition.
Can you explain how this is nonsensical? There is quite a bit of data showing that those who are unvaccinated are much more likely to spread the disease.
From the speech itself, "only 1 in every 160,000 fully vaccinated Americans has been hospitalized due to covid"
According to the most recent data from the CDC (https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/COVIDNet/COVID19_3.html), 960 out of every 160,000 Americans has been hospitalized due to covid (this is across all people regardless of vaccination status).
So there is _at least_ a 99% reduction in the rate of hospitalizations for the fully vaccinated, according to the figures he cited.
The message he's sending is that even if you are vaccinated, _you're not safe_. Why is this an effective message for persuading those who might still be convinced?
Is the overall outcome better than if our political leadership continued to transparently emphasize vaccine safety and outcomes, rather than scoring points with their political base? You convince more people to become vaccinated by being convincing. When you get more people vaccinated, you save more lives.
If someone's position is, that it doesn't matter if the overall outcome is worse, because the bad outcomes are more concentrated in selfish/stupid/red-state people, then I simply disagree with that.
Your way at arriving at 99% is quite dubious, as it assumes that from the beginning of the pandemic an equal number of Americans are vaccinated and unvaccinated, and that they are equally exposed to the virus, and that they are in equal risk groups, none of which is true.
From what I have read the those who are vaccinated are about 17 times less likely to be hospitalized. Here is a link to an example article showing that statistic:
There is very worrisome data coming out of Israel that shows that the risk of breakthrough infections is likely to rise, as delta becomes more predominant and the efficacy of the vaccines wane.
Simply put, I don't think the assertion that the unvaccinated are killing the vaccinated is untrue. There is a lot of data that shows that being unvaccinated greatly increases your chance of spreading the virus. The virus is a much bigger part of our lives due to the unvaccinated.
Data is increasingly showing that being vaccinated is not a guarantee that you won't wind up in the hospital, have long term symptoms, or die from the virus, especially if you are in an at risk group.
17x according to the data you linked above is 94% reduction and growing, following vaccinated and unvaccinated people separately since January 2021.
> There is very worrisome data coming out of Israel that shows that the risk of breakthrough infections is likely to rise, as delta becomes more predominant and the efficacy of the vaccines wane.
There has been very worrisome data every week since this pandemic began. The best data we have is that vaccines are safe and effective, and they're important as part of our collective efforts to minimize harm.
To me, that's the harm done by the coronavirus, not the harm caused by the unvaccinated to the vaccinated.
> Data is increasingly showing that being vaccinated is not a guarantee that you won't wind up in the hospital, have long term symptoms, or die from the virus, especially if you are in an at risk group.
I've heard this same thing from the people I know who don't want to get vaccinated. Doesn't change my mind that a) the best data we have suggests it will decrease their overall risk factor and b) calling people stupid and evil or policing what they listen to isn't a good way to win that argument.
Just to be clear, I am not vaccine hesitant, or whatever they want to be called, in the slightest.
94% and growing is not true, it is quite the opposite that the data is showing that vaccine efficacy is growing. Lots of good data shows that the efficacy of the vaccine is lower with delta and as we get further from when the vaccine was administered the efficacy drops significantly. This is the reason we need boosters, but their effectiveness will also wane over time.
Even if the vaccine were 99% effective, if 5,000 vaccinated people were to die from Covid every year, the data suggests that the vast majority of them (if not all) are a result of those who are choosing not to be vaccinated. So it is not a stretch at all to say that the unvaccinated are killing the vaccinated.
I don't think that overstating the positive effect of the vaccine is a good strategy. Yes they are effective, yes everyone who can should get one, but that doesn't mean that the unvaccinated are't responsible when someone who is vaccinated gets sick.
Pointing out that the unvaccinated are responsible for getting the vaccinated sick, in addition to all of the strains they are putting on our society (economy, public health, etc), is a good argument in favor of mandates. I for one am glad Biden and other leaders pushing mandates are making this argument.
The vaccinated aren't dying from COVID, they are dying from other things because they can't get an ICU bed. ICUs are full of unvaccinated COVID patients, which means all the people getting all the other normal sicknesses are being locked out of medical care.
That's what they mean by "the unvaccinated are killing the vaccinated". People who could have lived if they got ICU care are dying because the ICUs are already full.
My friend's father got pancreatic cancer. His chemotherapy was delayed because the hospital was full of covid patients. Now he's dead. People who get mad about being harangued to take the vaccine are failing to see the whole picture.
Your comparing the rate of hospitalization of one group for the entire pandemic then comparing the rate of the second for a few months. That's not going to give you any useful data for comparison.
Same here. Social Environment is hard to overcome. In the battle of social environment (group think) vs. individual reasoning, environment will win almost every time. This is a known bias among professional investors, and well appreciated there. Vaccine hesitancy follows this pattern, where future is unknown and FUD is trending.
Yeah I agree with this in sentiment but the impacts to the rest of society are pretty hard to just let them go do that. Namely burnout at hospitals, regular health procedures being pushed back, people unnecessarily getting infected/dying, etc. There some serious community cost to these hold outs.
Just let people sign a waiver stating they willingly decided to not get vaccinated, and forego treatment at hospitals for any covid-related complications. Problem solved.
But it isn't solved. Someone making these choices are killing folks not involved by passing the virus onto others and taking up space in hospitals ill equipped for so many people at once.
It isn't like refusing a cancer treatment on an easily treatable cancer, after all, but rather an infectious disease.
Normally I would agree, but right now if I get in a serious car accident there is a decent chance there won't be an ICU available at my nearest hospital because they're all full of COVID patients.
I stop tolerating your idiocy once it's consequences begin to affect me.
Obesity rates and the disease's effects on healthcare demand are well known. Hospitals are built based on predictions of how many types of patients and diseases they will treat. The mitigation of effects of obesity are built into our healthcare system already.
What throws a wrench into all of that planning, and ability to predict and respond to healthcare demand, is a novel pandemic that sends massive amounts of people to the ICU, which the healthcare system was never built to handle.
sort of, but not quite. you've articulated a good argument for something like a fat tax, but being fat doesn't immediately make others around you fat. (yes, you can be a bad influence on someone, but that won't land them in the icu in 2 weeks).
> the vaccines are not great at stopping the spread of delta
that's not an accurate take on how the vaccines work against delta.
the vaccine makes it so you are much less likely to get the virus in the first place. it also shortens the time you are infectious to other people if you do get a breakthrough case since your bodies immune system response goes into effect immediately and not after a while. an extremely simplified view is: antibodies neutralize free floating viral particles(antigens). B cells create antibodies. T cells tell B cells to go make antibodies and also kill infected cells with cytotoxins.
when you are vaccinated your T cells and B cells already know what to do if they see viruses so they can mount a defense immediately and it shortens the infectious period. in addition you will still have antibodies left over(i am unsure if you still make more for a period of time after the vaccine without any antigens) from when you got the vaccine so you will have a lower likelihood of getting sick in the first place since the antibodies can neutralize the antigens before they have a chance to infect too many cells and create more antigens.
by the nature of not getting sick in the first place and by not being infectious for as long the spread of delta is slowed
Diabetes and obesity is a risk factor in almost every ailment including cancer and heart disease, not to mention Covid itself. Of course it contributes to filling up ICUs.
are you intentionally straw manning me? i specifically acknowledged what you're claiming, and have been clear about how that doesn't make it comparable to something as fast acting as a virus.
I guess I misunderstood. Both being obese and being unvaccinated are risk factors for ending up in the ICU due to Covid. One is morally reprehensible according to some people and the other isn’t. I think we should accept both or none.
The difference is there aren't enough of them to bring our healthcare system to it's knees. Hospitals in many states are having to ration care, and triage patients right now. Before the pandemic, this only happened in rare emergencies (terrorist attacks, mass shootings)
It's a reminder of a bigger unresolved societal issue - how the healthcare resources are to be distributed to patients. Should vaccinated get preference? Young ones? Wealthy? Political class? Celebrities?
In whole world, they all do, and I am not sure it is always the right way things should work. We should have enough beds and staff to care for all people in need. Even those not in preferred societal classes or not with the right political views or even those who did some bad medical decisions.
Hospitals are a business. They only have room for patients as long as it is profitable. Covid pays the best right now so that is where they are focusing their business.
I'd agree if we were talking something akin to choosing not to take insulin even though you can easily afford it or refusing to treat an easily treatable cancer.
If you catch covid, there is a good chance you'll pass it onto others, unlike the previous maladies. And that is a real problem: Some of those people will die, most will pass on the virus to others, and a good number of folks wind up in the hospital.
And that's happening so much that folks are dying from non-covid things as well.
Pretty much, if you choose to die from Covid, you are going to take others down with you.
Unfortunately there's so many of these idiots they're clogging up the hospitals. I don't know why they don't just "do their own research" and die at home.
One of those "idiots" clogging the hospitals is my friend's mom. Daughter asked her to get the vaccine. An apparently healthy and not a very old woman ended up in the hospital with ventricular thrombosis three days after the first shot.
Hey Robert, I see you’re in New York City. Would you be comfortable explaining your comments to the 2/3 of black New Yorkers who are hesitant to get the vaccines?
>Hey Robert, I see you’re in New York City. Would you be comfortable explaining your comments to the 2/3 of black New Yorkers who are hesitant to get the vaccines?
Your tone is both unwelcome and doesn't add to the discussion. And "2/3" isn't even close to being right[0].
Which makes me stretch hard to find good faith in your musings.
I also find the censorship to be deeply disturbing, but for me that's counterbalanced by the fact that the arguments against vaccination are so dumb. The best argument is basically, "It's not researched enough and it might kill you." But so what, doing things that might kill you on the basis of limited data is like a basic part of being an adult.
In fact, over 3.5 billion people have been vaccinated (with at least one dose). It's about 45 % or world population. I'd say it's amazing, though there's still quite some way to go.
Our World In Data is a great source for this and other covid-related data for the world and individual countries.
At this point we can rule out any serious, acute side effects since people aren't dropping like flies after getting vaccinated. What's left are long term side-effects, and in my mind these would have to be pretty severe to compete with "long COVID", which seems to have pretty nasty neurological symptoms in some cases in addition to the characteristic loss of taste/smell.
Have any of the studies released data yet? I was under the impression that even the data from the short term studies wouldn't be released for another couple of years.
It isn't too early to /think/ they are safe (a subjective judgement since they do harm a small percentage of people, just like the debate whether the virus is 'bad' or not). It is impossible to know with certainty if there are long-term effects, and predictions made from past events are obviously uncertain.
Is this a standard that you've applied to all medical care you've ever received, or is this particular to this vaccine? For example, have you ever taken medicine or received a treatment that was invented in the past 50 years, and if so, why didn't you feel the need to wait for an entire human generation to go by first?
Treatment is usually for a condition that is acute or severely altering one's quality of life. The calculation is how any unknown long term sides weigh against the immediate danger or reduction in quality of life. It is an entirely different calculation for a prophylactic that may have unknown side effects.
Good point, tattoos have been around for ever. Bad comparison from me.
I'm actually excited about the new mRNA tech and the massive boost it got from the money during C19. I think lockdown is toxic to society and risks can be taken on vaccines to open things up.
I'm optimistic for humanity and thankful we had a mild-ish pandemic that was fatal for a relatively small percentage, but allowed us to improve our biotech so much in such a short time. This will surely help us next time.
Someone want to throw out there a better way to combat disinformation than just armchair criticizing their decision? I almost feel like people are siding with the anti-vaxxers out of "principle".
Just a no win situation. It's too easy for bad characters to screw up an entire system with little effort (look at trolls, spammers, etc). Either you moderate everyone and slippery slope down into censorship where the tools used to police are used on good actors, or you do nothing and watch the bad actors poison your entire ecosystem.
> Someone want to throw out there a better way to combat disinformation than just armchair criticizing their decision? I almost feel like people are siding with the anti-vaxxers out of "principle".
Social networks seem to be unable to optimize for anything other than "engagement," which inevitably leads to amplifying compelling but technically incorrect and outright dangerous content.
The thing to remember is that YouTube is essentially designed to boost disinformation. As implemented they have no effective counterbalance to this.
Is it also "censorship" when the YT recommendation system effectively buries factual and useful information for some people just because it's less engaging than the misinformation they currently consume? Maybe so?
The solution seems pretty obvious to me. There's a middle ground between banning and allowing to run rampant - and that's to add human reviewers to counterbalance the terrible job currently being done by their automatic recommendation system, and manually down-rank disinformation so it is less likely to be surfaced automatically in peoples' playlists.
Google will never do it, because it would 1) require paying humans to do work, which is expensive, and 2) it wouldn't drive engagement and generate clicks.
So they just take the easy way out, so they can keep on doing what they do.
I would argue it's much, much, worse than what you're saying. I mean this part:
> Google will never do it, because it would 1) require paying humans to do work, which is expensive, and 2) it wouldn't drive engagement and generate clicks.
Every regular business out there needs support. In the form of pre-sales, sales, post-sales, actual support folks, etc.
Google's entire business model is predicated on there being no meaningful human support.
If they're forced to implement the level of support their worldwide, what-they-consider-top-notch operation would actually require, their business model goes bust.
Ok, I'm probably exaggerating, but their profit margins would go down from ~25% to probably something like 5%.
They will <<never>>, ever do it, unless someone puts a legal gun to their head.
Thats the biggest problem with all of this stuff. They designed their whole business to not pay people. Not only their margins would shrink, but the perceived value of the company would shrink _a lot_. They will never do it.
I agree that adding human reviewers could help; but it will not resolve the root cause of YT being designed to boost disinformation in the name of engagement.
It’s encoded in their business model: the paying customer and the source of revenue is the advertiser. Thus, their interests are radically different from those of the users.
I believe there is something fundamentally wrong about such models, especially applied at scale, that I would not even oppose some light, focused regulation that brings it in check.
Otherwise, adding human moderation could maybe help in short term but the business model with find its way to ruin things again.
It may be an outcome, but it certainly wasn’t ”designed to boost disinformation.” If you watch a pro-vaccine videos, it will suggest more videos portraying the vaccine positively.
My take on things as time has gone on? It’s depressing but the problem is people. It doesn’t matter if you’re watching a pro-vaccine or anti-vaccine video, the comments are filled with hundreds or thousands of anti-vaccine comments. People are the common denominator of what’s wrong with the Internet today.
I agree it’s imprecise to say it is designed to boost disinformation (which I quoted from the parent); it is more precise to say it was designed to maximise revenue.
Which, due to the business model, is more or less incompatible with presenting the truth. Truth is often uncomfortable, full of caveats and subject to change; rarely does it make for a good story. If it turns out that presenting outright false information (including lying by omission, etc.) as established fact keeps eyeballs for longer and engages more people, then the algorithm would be doing just that.
Sure, if you watch technical content and train the algorithm by watching videos from solid, trusted sources, you can (for now) get it to give you sound recommendations, but I doubt this is reliable or representative. Thus, I believe acting as if YouTube was designed to boost misinformation is not necessarily wrong, and may be more or less an approximation of the average case.
And the problem is not quite people. If people are expected to constantly counteract the efforts of a sophisticated machine that doesn’t have their interests in mind and can spend a million dollars just optimizing its GUI and algorithms, which are then deployed against each individual user (who comes alone, tired after work, low on willpower and with lowered defences from the safety of their home) to exploit the darkest in them in order to show them more ads, then the problem is not quite people—the problem is that we are dealing with an adversary.
> I almost feel like people are siding with the anti-vaxxers out of "principle".
I can confirm your suspicions in my case. I'm vaccinated (against COVID, the flu, and tetanus, and all the other things you can get vaccinated against), but I think YouTube is wrong here.
I think the problem is less what YouTube is doing here and more that YouTube has this kind of power. If every country had 10 video Websites like Youtube that each had a 10th of the users from that country, and maybe some international users, then one portal taking a total ban-all hard-ass stance on misinformation wouldn't be a big deal.
What type of power do they really have? If you don't like their policies, don't use their services, it's that simple. The only power is in their user base. YouTube is not some necessary utility, neither is Facebook, Twitter, etc. None of these services are worth anything without users.
Social networks are unprecedented in our world. Never have you been able to spread misinformation and propaganda as quickly. I don't know what the right answer is, but it certainly shouldn't be to sit back and do nothing because "censorship". This misinformation campaign is actively killing people.
> Eroding trust by overtly controlling information sets the scene for propaganda to take deeper root.
Your choice is to either put the propaganda in front of more eyes or have the current believers doubling down, and you choose the few? The problem is the general population does not critically think enough for the sit back and do nothing approach to work in the real world.
Also, let's be clear: the eroded trust is with a private company that owns a community-driven platform. I know I'm getting downvoted, but seriously, move on if you don't trust them, their entire business is made from you using their service.
>* The problem is the general population does not critically think enough for the sit back and do nothing approach to work in the real world.*
This shows we have fundamentally different views of the world, so I don’t think there much more to this conversation.
I would just say, be careful what esteem you hold other people in, because on more than a few issues your are almost certainly “the general population” to someone else with the power to censor.
Post offices, libraries, and telephone calls all transmit misinformation every day. Shoot, misinformation gets spread across tables at Dunkin Donuts as people talk about life.
And that's not even getting more political and pointing out all the liars and fools in charge of newspapers and even governments. I'm not saying they're all bad. I'm saying we're not considering banning politicians and newspapers for being too incorrect. Partly because the practice of choosing and empowering censors is even worse.
Okay so you have your wish, there are 10 major video sites in the US who all have 5-20% market share. The forces that push one service moderate content will push the others.
Like there are a lot of social networks, have you noticed that every single one is monitoring for COVID related content and adding a banner?
tldr: competition can't solve political issues because there's a monopoly on government
There is government pressure (more correctly just social pressure) but the government hasn't given a mandate that these platforms must take this censorship stance.
And even then, this is only an issue because everyone is on just a handful of platforms -- so the companies build one-size-fits-all policies. But we're not all the same size.
I'm not terrified of my community encountering misinformation. I'm far more terrified of a community being unable to articulate and defend why the information is "mis".
When your child gets polio because some soccer mom spent too much time listening to crackpots online and decided not to vaccinate their children, that's when you realise they were correct. And perhaps society as a whole did not nearly go far enough.
I don't have numbers, but there's a substantial population of people wary of the covid vaccines that aren't wary of polio, measles, or even flu vaccines.
I don't know why this is downvoted, because I have also found it to be true (within my immediate family).
It's hard for me to dig to the actual reasoning, but I've poked and prodded, and I think it might just be some rationalizing to help them cope with the idea that they are, in fact, vaccinated against certain diseases.
Also they're just ignorant in some cases. I got a response to the tune of "yeah (I'm vaccinated against some things)--against diseases, not viruses." Which clearly fundamentally misunderstands some things.
I've also heard people who are just against mRNA vaccines. And some who are (somewhat reasonably IMO) against mRNA vaccines until they've had a reasonable time period to let side effects etc play out.
side effects of a two dose vaccine are almost certainly going to show up in the near term of less than 6 weeks. it's not something like a drug you take daily for years and years and get a side effect from years down the line due to prolonged use.
These are, by nature, very ephemeral due to them being mRNA and either being transformed into an instruction to make a small protein that then gets the body trained to neutralize or it gets neutralized on their own because they are not long lasting in the first place. There is no instruction inside the mRNA to make anything like the long lasting effects of a retrovirus. it's simply not there to do that.
vaccines like this are more like the effects of taking a Tylenol or aspirin once... yeah you can get side effects from it but there is no long lasting effect because it's gone from your system.
Regardless of why this was downvoted, it deserves an upvote for being correct.
"Are there long-term side effects caused by mRNA COVID-19 vaccines? How do we know?" Basically, no because we've studied them. mRNA vaccines are notoriously easily destroyed.
And it's utter BS in the real world - did they even stop to think that some countries have given out millions of doses of Pfizer over the last 8 months, and if "all cause mortality was unaffected" compared to the pandemic situation in 2020, it would be obvious as hell. It's therefor a very extra-ordinary claim, no proof whatsoever.
Yeah it's complete bullshit... vaccines are working and working well. the only people dying and taking up the ICU beds right now in any large numbers are the unvaccinated.
> Why are they pushing this disinformation?
either one of the following groups: russian/china disinformation bots or paid shills. people that like to be "in on the know" and take contrary viewpoints that are not mainstream. people that have fully bought into the above misinformation schemes. people that have taken to it like a political fight where reason goes out the window unless you are "winning".
I ultimately think that a lot of people "broke" during the pandemic looking for some "enemy" to fight since the reality of a wild virus that just happened was too scary a thought. many people need the world to make sense and want control. some control of that is making up enemies like china releasing the virus intentionally and all the world governments working together in tandem to somehow control everyone.
"During the blinded, placebo-controlled period, 15 participants in the BNT162b2 group and 14 in the placebo group died; during the open-label period, 3 participants in the BNT162b2 group and 2 in the original placebo group who received BNT162b2 after unblinding died. None of these deaths were considered to be related to BNT162b2 by the investigators. Causes of death were balanced between BNT162b2 and placebo groups (Table S4)."
Look into statins if you want to understand bias and corruption in clinical studies.
Giving a medication to over 20,000 people and not saving a single life in 6 months is pretty weak. An NNT of over 20k is unheard of. Anything above 10-20 (not 10k) should make people at least be allowed to ask questions.
They did save two lives if you look at the death causes. 2 died of covid that were in the placebo group. There is also the numerous numbers of cases that didn't get severe covid and have long term negative side effects. Two people in the placebo group died of covid... that means they died fairly quickly and of covid directly meaning the illness was more severe. one person in the pfizer group died of covid pneumonia which means they were likely older and had a less severe infection but they still got pneumonia and died.
The number of people that got covid or severe covid in the control group were many, many times more as the vaccine protected many from getting it in the first place.
The alpha gal carbohydrate introduced by a lone Star tick trains your immune system to reject it in the future resulting in the inability to eat red meats.
The alpha gal leaves your system very quickly, but the result of the (mis)-training of your immune system lasts forever.
Researchers are very clear that mRNA therapy may be useful for permanent treatment of a wide variety of conditions in the future. The material may not persist, but the effects certainly will.
The Israeli study indicates that natural immunity use up to 27x more effective than the vaccine against Delta. This indicates that something about the synthetic solution is inferior.
What other differences exist? Will any other immune abnormalities appear over time? That wouldn't be unusual. Were other systems altered due to unknown interactions? We still discover very important natural interactions every year, so this isn't far fetched.
What about your body only making limited, synthetic antigen antibodies instead of the better, more flexible natural ones in response to even more out of band gamma or mu strains? These are entirely unknown problems we're in the process of researching and for better or worse, we're the guinea pigs.
I don't see why those perspective is hard to understand. People with low openness personalities who tend to be risk adverse are going to respond very differently from those with high openness and lower risk aversion (not to mention differing knowledge).
It should be telling that doctors and nurses who have been watching covid patients die still often come to the conclusion that the vaccine isn't for them and is too risky.
I've been reading about coronavirus vaccine attempts since SARS. I've watched one attempt after another fail -- often in spectacular ways. The idea that a long string of failures suddenly meets with absolute success just at the correct moment defies belief. Those of us who took the vaccine should at least admit to ourselves that there's a non-zero chance things are wrong this time too (though hopefully not so spectacularly) but that those effects and effect rates are still lower on aggregate than the problems from covid.
>I've been reading about coronavirus vaccine attempts since SARS. I've watched one attempt after another fail -- often in spectacular ways.
I'd like to know what these attempts were and why the current vaccines are different. Do you know a good source of information about this? Or, can you list some of these attempts?
> What about your body only making limited, synthetic antigen antibodies instead of the better, more flexible natural ones in response to even more out of band gamma or mu strains? These are entirely unknown problems we're in the process of researching and for better or worse, we're the guinea pigs.
well, scores and scores of people not dying from a virus that's killed millions is why. those "limited" (and not synthetic those are real antibodies against real antigens) are working very well unless you believe that the current world wide vaccine drive is ineffectual against all data to the contrary... the vaccines have been a huge success against the coronavirus.
and you are the guinea pig already... just in the control group that's dying left and right at a very high pace and also leaving lots of people with "long covid" that is also giving them long term, yet unknown side effects.
> It should be telling that doctors and nurses who have been watching covid patients die still often come to the conclusion that the vaccine isn't for them and is too risky.
it is telling that there are unreasonable people out there however vanishingly small a number. In one recent survey of doctors 96% of them had gotten the vaccine. 45% of the remaining 4% were still planning on getting it. so that's about 2% of doctors that are not planing on taking it... i'd say that's an overwhelming number of doctors that are getting the vaccine.
mind you that 2% number includes people that never are face to face with people dying of the disease on a daily basis in all likelihood. it is very telling when the smartest people in the room are all taking the vaccine.
finally, that Israeli study is misinterpreted... it doesn't matter if you get infected as much after being vaccinated. what matters is if you get very sick after you get infected and to that end the vaccines are wildly successful. and even then the absolute numbers of people getting sick from the strain is very small; over 650,000 people in america have died from covid and the vast majority of them are unvaccinated. full stop.
Israel's Health Ministry has clearly stated that the vaccine is 39% effective against Delta strain [0] at preventing disease. Think about that, according to Israel, 61% of vaccinated people are catching full-blown COVID and by implication, some lesser amount are catching an asymptomatic version. The Gamma and Mu strains are known to be even more resistant to the vaccine.
People are so desperate for their fear to abate that they'll put on the blinders while trying to convince themselves of all kinds of things.
With at least 61% of vaccinated people getting a virus with one of the highest r0 around, the vaccine is 100% ineffective at killing transmission. The virus swims around many millions of vaccinated immune systems mutating until it finally finds something that works around the vaccine antibody. This is contrary to the media's anti-science garbage about unvaccinated being the cause of a virus mutating (why would it need to mutate around the vaccine antibody if they don't have any in their system?).
Paired with evidence that natural immunity is up to 27x better, the picture is pretty clear. The vaccine antibody is a response to a synthetic antigen rather than the natural one. The resulting antibody targeting the synthetic antigen (why I specifically referred to it as a "synthetic antigen antibody") is not as flexible against the actual disease.
My greatest hope at this point is that vaccinated people catching Delta are slowing the spread with the inefficient antibodies while developing natural antibodies, but I've seen zero studies about this. If this is not the case, then I fear we've kicked the danger can down the road and made it even worse. In the worst case, an ADE effect develops (not theoretical -- this was one of the biggest concerns/problems in previous SARS/MERS vaccine attempts) and 50+% of vaccinated people die.
> it is telling that there are unreasonable people out there however vanishingly small a number. In one recent survey of doctors 96% of them had gotten the vaccine. 45% of the remaining 4% were still planning on getting it. so that's about 2% of doctors that are not planing on taking it... i'd say that's an overwhelming number of doctors that are getting the vaccine.
Don't mistake getting and wanting. Most of my family are in the medical field. Some travel all across the country. Huge amounts of people had to be threatened with losing their livelihood before they got the vaccine. My sibling has had a couple months of symptoms from their vaccine (most likely because they'd already caught COVID and severe reactions are much more likely in that case). In truth, it is anti-science to require the vaccine from those with natural antibodies as we now know they have strictly better antibodies.
Then again, vaccination seems more about politics than science.
> Think about that, according to Israel, 61% of vaccinated people are catching full-blown COVID and by implication, some lesser amount are catching an asymptomatic version.
the fact that you think that breakthrough cases are somehow rare in a highly vaccinated population is nuts. of course the majority of cases will be vaccinated people in a highly vaccinated population. and also, I read the presentation it was based off and the confidence interval on that statistic is off the charts variable.
> With at least 61% of vaccinated people getting a virus with one of the highest r0 around, the vaccine is 100% ineffective at killing transmission.
That's not how those statistics work. The vaccine is not "100% ineffective at killing transmission". The nature of how the immune system works is such that there is a drop off in free antibodies in your blood stream that are able to prevent infection over time. that's 100% how it works. the fact that there is less serious cases of covid with shorter infectious periods of time with less strain on the ICU systems mean the vaccines are working.
I get you are scared of the vaccine for some reason or another but the mental gymnastics are hindering our ability to move on as a society. the vaccines allow covid to become endemic like the cold that just makes most people feel a bit shitty for a few days vs. completely overwhelm the ICUs and kill people for unrelated things.
> The alpha gal leaves your system very quickly, but the result of the (mis)-training of your immune system lasts forever.
But does it take years for the effect to show up after the alpha gal leaves your system? We are now 9 months into mass vaccination, and still no sign of these ominous long-term side effects that people seem so worried about.
they aren't even sure that the tick is the cause of that syndrome. they suspect it but there hasn't been a definitive link yet. also, people are allergic to all sorts of things like almonds or bees and can get new allergies later on in life.
>But does it take years for the effect to show up after the alpha gal leaves your system?
For this specific change, no. But the point is that there is ample chance for mRNA to induce semipermanent and/or permanent changes and there's no guarantee that they'll be detected early, especially when the vast majority of clinicians aren't even looking for them.
If these vaccines do indeed, say, increase long term risk of cancer or heart problems, it will likely take years or even decades to detect especially when there is a rigid, top down enforced taboo around questioning the safety/efficacy of the vaccine. Yet another reason that censorship like this is dangerous.
Researchers also get some of their ideas through free exchange on social media. Especially when the academic establishment develops a rigid orthodoxy around a topic; when all of the institutions align behind a single preemptive conclusion and then collude to suppress even rational, science based dissent across all platforms, your society stumbles down the false path of one sided research.
Sure, all of this is possible. Really improbable, but possible.
But what are these chances compared to a real infection with coronavirus, which has more proteins than the spike protein and causes more havoc in the body?
I drove for an hour into the countryside to get the Johnson and Johnson vaccine for this reason. I got it three days before the blood clots thing came out, and was in the ER the day before the news came out with the most terrible headache I’ve ever had in my life.
It's funny how people seem to be far more wary of their cells being subjected to a controlled dose of a carefully selected strand of mRNA than they are wary of their cells being subjected to a much larger bundle of mRNA that happens to include some variation of that carefully selected strand amongst many other things that together turn the cell into a weapon producing more copies of itself, and that will eventually kill every carrier whose immune system does not come up with a countermeasure fast enough. If the mRNA vaccine that contains a tiny subset of the virus is scary, how can the full version not be far more scary?
Actually that's what convinced me to get the vaccine, the fact of how the new bioengineering for mRNA worked. I was convinced that it would be highly successful and effective. And I honestly don't believe the theories that it's effectiveness is somehow wearing off. It's much more likely that it's just not effective against Delta+mutations as that is so far from the original variant the vaccine was designed for. I don't plan to get any booster shots until a new delta variant vaccine is available.
Don't forget the obvious merely logical counter argument:
How does one come up with "being vaccinated could potentially be a time bomb" without naturally coming up with "being unvaccinated could potentially be a time bomb"?
If you don't even know what mRNA stands for without Googling it, surely you couldn't possibly guess that one of these is more likely to be true than the other.
I don't think the average person can (or will, especially) really source reliable information on how mRNA works, let alone think through the potential risks.
It's a very technical question that involves a ton of knowledge about how our body works etc.
Despite reading up about it, I wouldn't personally feel confident enough to explain it at any level of technical detail.
I don't think we can expect the majority of people to understand it and then make decisions based on that--ever.
It's very unclear, without deep knowledge of both the vaccine tech and the virus, which time bomb is worse. I know what the experts say, and I personally believe them, but it's not surprising to me that others don't.
When politicians are the folks in charge of our personal health (to any degree), it's always going to immediately sew distrust-- as it should.
>It's very unclear, without deep knowledge of both the vaccine tech and the virus, which time bomb is worse. I know what the experts say, and I personally believe them, but it's not surprising to me that others don't.
But... that's the thing, isn't it? It's a fundamental issue with tackling the problem.
"I sure as hell have no idea whether 'a' or '¬a' is better, therefore 'a' is the one I am picking." It's a ridiculous level of favouring one alternative for no good reason.
I would find it acceptable if it were even based on some sort of loose heuristics for picking 'a', but they got nothing. For someone who might as well know nothing, why the heck are they so focused on 'going at it unvaccinated is probably the better outcome long term'?
Not believing the experts would lead to not having an opinion at all. What they are doing is believing that the experts are wrong.
I fully agree with all of this, yes. Disbelieving experts is wrong unless you are an expert or other experts also disagree, and I think that is a symptom of social media. SM, to me, is the real problem.
People should be taking health advice from their doctors. Not from politicians, not from companies, and most definitely not from their friends on social media. This whole age of "nothing is true", therefore disbelieving experts, is IMO being fueled by social media.
All that being said, back to the original problem: assume I don't trust (or maybe pay attention to) experts, and I know zero technical details of this vaccine nor this virus. I'm in pretty good shape and the virus is mainly killing old people. The vaccine is new, and despite it not killing people, (some of) my friends are posting on FB about how this vaccine is dangerous and I'm a test subject.
I think that's a pretty good model that fits a great, great many people. I don't think it's hard to see how they arrive on "don't get a substance I don't understand that just got invented injected into my body." I think it's the reasonable choice.
The idea that they all did research and arrived at a logical, informed decision is a problem. (Most) People aren't doing that, and broadly speaking, they're never going to.
I think that much of the distrust is not so much caused by lack of knowledge, but ultimately by inability to accept that sometimes shit just happens. They spent an entire year frantically making up culprits to blame for a virus that quite likely just happened, like a meteor strike. Making up culprits from thin air, but decidedly. Because their minds had never been confronted with tragedy lacking a scapegoat.
There's no logic to go from there to "vaccines are bad", but all the mental contortions they had to go through to blame someone primed them, hard, to active distrust.
I think his point very much means youtube should have done this sooner. There are tons of ppl that are 'anti- this vax only' because of the misinformation of youtube.
Vaccines do not always work. Vaccination is something you do as much for yourself or your own dependents (where it usually works) as for everyone else (where it might help protect someone for who it did not work well). This is the reason why antivaxx sentiment and "it should be my own choice" is antisocial and wrong.
This isn't a new situation. Free speech debates are as old as civilization itself. The printing press was at least as disruptive as the Internet, precisely because relatively small players could sabotage power of huge organizations such as the Church relatively cheaply.
I think that the old classical liberal principles still apply. A certain fringe of the population will eat any propaganda unthinkingly, domestic or foreign. But if a majority was so uncritical, democracies would have collapsed a long time ago.
We might actually be over the crest of max poisoning in social media. Lots of people have realized that such channels are not to be trusted. This is partly masked by the fact that a lot of new content is still churned out by dedicated players; silent majorities are silent.
Every specific case is different; you can always find some facts which differentiate one instance from the 'general case'. It is not enough to say 'this time is different', one must overcome the presumption that general rules should hold.
I think their point is that being algorithmically induced makes the general rule not hold (which I don't agree - algorithms can be pretty damn bad at achieving what one wants).
Mind you, damn thank you for saying that out loud. People on the internet sure love to jump on the wagon of pointing out the differences of instances from a general case that often aren't even relevant for the argument.
It gave newspapers and magazines the ability to do exactly that, and some absolutely have. It's pretty easy to draw parallels between those and "content creators".
Yes, they are. Almost every one has one or more mobile devices that we carry with us at all times.
These devices have various messaging/social media services that due to social expectations we use to interact with friends, family.
It's very, very hard to laser curate the kind of messaging you get, even if you know how to do it and are willing to do it (for example for some stuff you have to mute friends and family or otherwise block them).
Newspapers were much more hit and miss. You'd have to go out and buy a newspaper, their region was at best national, etc.
In absolute terms, you're right. We interact with media more than we ever have before.
The printing press was huge in relative terms, though. There was no mass media before that. The average person was unlikely to be able to read, much less to own any books. Communicating across even relatively short distances was infeasible. Most of the media they consumed was either from the church or at least regulated by the church.
The printing press was huge because the normal person's sphere of possible influence grew 100x. Much in the way that we've 100x-ed again with things like YouTube. The relative increase in sphere of influence is similar, the absolutes are massively different.
True, but I think there's a saying about quantity having a quality all its own.
The printing press was still running at humanly achievable speeds. The new stuff is super sonic. We can't cope with it. Plus with people living longer and longer and the natural neuroplasticity decrease that comes with age, more and more people are vulnerable.
It's the kind of thing that will need to be regulated very carefully and very strongly, because that's what laws are: barriers for when the human psyche fails. Imperfect barriers, but better than nothing.
> A certain fringe of the population will eat any propaganda unthinkingly, domestic or foreign. But if a majority was so uncritical, democracies would have collapsed a long time ago.
Like the millions of people who unironically watch CNN, FOX, ESPN, MTV and whatever else TeeVee networks are carrying?
> What is insidious, as Ulfkotte confesses, is that typically, intelligence agencies use “unofficial covers”—people working for the agency but not actually on its payroll as agents. It is a broad, loose network of “friends,” doing one another favors. Many are lead journalists from numerous countries. This informality provides plausible deniability for both sides, but it means an “unofficial cover,” as Ulfkotte became, is on his own if captured.
> The American reporter James Foley, allegedly executed by ISIS, found that out. Ulfkotte confirmed to this author that Foley did indeed work for various intelligence organizations, as this newspaper reported on last month. He also stated that if a journalist is accused of spying, such reports are almost always credible.
The point of this article is that journalists are just as fallible to money as everyone else. That the alphabet soup agencies don't mind using journalists for their own ends. To assume that stops with spying is an argument from silence (lol, but to assume that it does go past that is also an argument from silence).
It took a while to be especially effective, both because techniques of propaganda had to be learned, and because the general populace was not literate. As of 1500, population literacy rates in Western Europe were on the order of 10--25%. The climbed to 90%+ in the 19th century, the midpoint of which saw rapid advances in printing technology (iron presses, powered presses, web presses), a sustainable business model (advertising, as it happens). And in the year 1848, Europe basically exploded into revolution, affecting over 50 counries:
More generally, the role of the printing press as an agent of change (social, political, economic) is the subject of Elizabeth Eisenstein's book of the same name:
The question isn't "was this specific level of capabilities available previously" but "did the introduction of new media technologies significantly disrupt the cultures into which they emerged?"
And the case that Eisenstein makes, at book length, is "yes".
She's building off earlier work (notably McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy), and you can find numerous prior and subsequent references.
Newsstands contain dozens of newspapers, typically all owned by only 1 or 2 conglomerates. How is that any different than a Facebook feed which shows hundreds of groups spamming out propoganda, all of which are operated by a much smaller number of entities?
>I think that the old classical liberal principles still apply. A certain fringe of the population will eat any propaganda unthinkingly, domestic or foreign. But if a majority was so uncritical, democracies would have collapsed a long time ago.
I think most Americans are delusional and think "the good guy always win" because of the outcomes of WWI and WWII. The fact that Nazi Germany existed at all, or that democracy is non-existent in the second largest economy in the world should tell you that it's just not accurate to pretend that only the fringe of the population buys into propaganda.
53% of registered Republicans still believe Donald Trump won the 2020 election based on nothing other than propaganda... I think you underestimate how fragile Democracy is and you don't need to look much farther than Moscow.
> I think you underestimate how fragile Democracy is and you don't need to look much farther than Moscow.
Which is exactly why we need to uphold classical liberal principles, as well as speak truth with appropriate nuance.
The best way to deal with a bad idea is with a better idea, not by silencing the bad idea.
I'd have a lot more respect for Google in this case if they, in collaboration with researchers and experts, produced their own well-researched, nuanced, carefully stated arguments against what they disagree with.
Ahh the old paradox of tolerance. What you preach has failed literally every time it has been tried throughout history. You can’t stop intolerance with tolerance, you will lose every time. Full stop. And the irony of preaching tolerance while downvoting me is ripe.
> You can’t stop intolerance with tolerance, you will lose every time. Full stop.
[citation needed]. Popper's personal opinion that you linked to (and that is now used in a much more absolutist way that originally intended by its author, who never intended to cheer for censorship and crackdowns in name of democracy) isn't data and Full stop isn't a proof. Yes, Popper was smart. No, he wasn't an oracle of unquestionable wisdom.
Tell me, how was legalization of marijuana in the U.S. won? After all, chucking people into prison for decades is quite some intolerance. Did the MJ lovers stage an insurrection?
No, they won at the ballot box, which is the tolerant way. Not by reverse oppression of their enemies.
To disprove a sentence that says "every time", one example to the contrary is enough. This is your example. For another, take gay rights. There wasn't a gay revolution that would smite the religious conservatives and crush them.
> You can’t stop intolerance with tolerance, you will lose every time. Full stop.
I'm not proposing full tolerance of the intolerant. Rather, as Karl Popper explained, political institutions within a liberal democratic society are the most appropriate scope within which the people's will regarding what to tolerate is expressed. In other words, contact your representatives about what needs to be outlawed, and until something is outlawed, show liberal tolerance—which absolutely includes refuting bad ideas in public debate.
Regarding YouTube, their choice to deplatform people is their choice -- and it's not against the law, since they own the platform. I certainly disagree with the wisdom behind their choice. It's likely to cause more problems than it solves; but I'm tolerating it even as I argue against it in public debate.
At first pass, I don't see how this applies to people sharing information about vaccines whether personal experience, science, or misunderstood science.
How would you say that people sharing information about vaccines and their effects are intolerant?
How would you say that people not wanting to get vaccinated are intolerant of any particular demographic group? That's not targeting anyone by race, gender, sexual orientation, religion. It's a decision for them self about their person.
I am not an American. I actually live in a country that was a kicking baloon of totalitarian powers for decades.
The first instinct of an autocrat is to strangle free speech of his critics. This has been the case since forever.
For all their errors, societies that do have wide freedom of speech rarely lapse into tyrannies on their own account. The freedom to say that the emperor's new clothes are bullsh*t is precious.
As for your historical examples, Weimar democracy was deeply flawed in that it tolerated party militias and a lot of violence in the streets. Once people are threatened physically, they will seek 'protection' from gangsters. But violence is something very different from actual words.
And China isn't a case of a democracy that was taken over by cunning speeches of its enemies. CCP got into power by winning a civil war.
So we need to apply heavy-handed censorship to silence dissent so that we don’t turn into an authoritarian country like China or Russia where they use heavy-handed censorship to silence dissent.
Exactly. You don't uphold democracy by silencing its critics, either.
Democracy and liberal freedom is best upheld when (a) the government is founded on the principles of liberty and rule-of-law, and (b) the people treasure those principles and refuse to tolerate a government that fails to uphold them.
>Someone want to throw out there a better way to combat disinformation
Yeah. Don't do shit. Let the stupid run its course.
Trying to combat disinformation is like bombing villages in hope of hitting an ammo dump. The collateral damage is more damaging than ignoring the problem.
Imagine this attitude applied to climate change. Letting the stupid runs its course and choosing inaction, will lead to disastrous warming outcomes.
So, maybe there are situations where doing nothing is okay, but I don't think very large scale problems that require coordinated large scale action over long time scales to address, like global pandemics or mitigating the impacts of man made climate change, are the right situations for that kind of approach. Too many thousands/millions will die, too many billions/trillions of dollars of damage will be done, via inaction.
Of course, it all comes down to whether you can stomach the cost of inaction, because maybe you don't think the impacts are all that bad. I don't have an answer to that, if two parties fundamentally disagree about what the cost of impact will be or whether that cost is acceptable (e.g. many folks in the US apparently think 600k+ COVID deaths in the US isn't a big deal, and wasn't worth the interventions applied to mitigate it to that level).
> Imagine this attitude applied to climate change. Letting the stupid runs its course and choosing inaction, will lead to disastrous warming outcomes.
This is the same situation as climate change. Instead of doing sensible things, we banned plastic straws! (Now paper straws come in plastic packaging...). Or the situation that UK and Germany find themselves in (having invested in stupid but "green" solutions).
Not at all, we also shipped our garbage halfway across the world while pretending we were recycling; and we turned the taps off while we were brushing our teeth.
Funny that you mention that since this is a real problem with combating climate change. You need to focus on the meat of the problem, not grasping at (plastic) straws (sensible policy, but not conductive to a solution regarding this case).
The problem with climate change is that the average person can't see the effects until long past the point when the problem can be easily solved. It's not at all comparable to social media.
In Alberta, the <20% of individuals who remain unvaccinated make up >90% of ICU admissions. ICUs are so full surgeries are being postponed, resources are being diverted to COVID ICUs, and they may have to start triaging ICU patients soon because of the lack of capacity, all of which affects not only the unvaccinated but everyone needing medical care in the province. Letting the situation run its course will kill and has killed way more than just the anti-vax.
The case numbers in Alberta are half of the peak earlier this year (when Delta started ramping up). And yet 70% are vaccinated but only 3% were earlier this year (May).
Begs the question as to why the system is falling apart now and not earlier this year.
First of all, your assrtion about case numbers being half is not correct. The third wave peaked at 25k active cases. The current peak is at 21k active cases.
Second, despite the case number not being higher than the third wave, hospitalizations and ICU admissions are higher for the current wave compared to any before. This is despite the higher vaccination rate and due to the higher dangers of the delta variant. The third wave peaked at 555 non-ICU and 183 ICU; the current wave is at 860 non-ICU and 268 ICU. ICU cases are predominantly (~90%) unvaccinated individuals.
So the system is falling apart because the hospitals are being overwhelmed, because the delta variant is more dangerous that the previous dominant variants for unvaccinated people and there are more people in hospitals and in ICUs than ever before because of this.
And this is hurting everyone, not just anti-vaxxers or those who get COVID. They even had to close 75% of operating rooms in children's hospital, because they needed to divert the resources to adults in ICUs with COVID.
But why hasn't the higher hospitalization rate played out in other countries?
And regardless, it seems odd that you can hit 70%+ vaccination rates and see a worse outcome than when the vaccination rate was ~5%.
The only way those numbers work is if Delta is several fold more deadly/severe disease causing than the prior variants, and that hasn't been seen elsewhere.
I agree. The reasons for the situation in Alberta are
1) Delta variant being more dangerous that the previous ones, causing a higher number of infections ending up in hospitals and ICUs. I shudder at the though of what would have happened if we got a delta wave before vaccination. We are lucky we got it after vaccinating 70% of the population. India and Iran (and I am sure some other countries) got their delta wave before being able to vaccinate a large enough percentage of people and the result was a human tragedy.
2) During the previous waves, when the number of infections went up, the government imposed harder restrictions to avoid this very eventuality. During this wave, government thought the vaccines meant hospitalization and ICU would be fully disconnected from case numbers, so did not impose restrictions until it was too late and the ICUs were already on the verge of bursting. Restrictions such as mask mandates and capacity limits which were present in previous waves were not imposed until two weeks ago for this wave.
There doesn't seem to be much evidence to suggest Delta produces all that much more severe disease.[1] The CDC says "it might be". Much more infectious, yes, but not more deadlier or at least not so much deadlier as to explain the Alberta numbers (especially comparing a population that is 70% vaccinated now versus 5% in the last wave).
And again, we aren't seeing the same impact outside of Alberta. In the US, which has a lower overall vaccination rate, the death rate is actually lower than prior waves.
US's death and ICU rates are higher than Alberta though, which can be explained by the difference in vaccination rates. So Alberta's current wave is not out of ordinary.
Rate of death (per 100k population) over the past 7 days:
Alberta: 2.3
United States: 3.01
Number of COVID-19 patients in ICU per million population:
4chan is infinitely more enjoyable than the majority of social media and forums out there, precisely because of how lax the rules are and because of the lack of perverse incentives for users trying to one-up eachother for internet points. The only real rules are that you can't post anything illegal and that you have to stay vaguely on-topic, and it works great.
Also, /pol/ is not all of 4chan, there's a reason it's called a containment board.
The irony is that even /pol is more "diverse" than the groups commonly requesting content control.
I suspect in intolerant times like this a lot of Jews and black people, which are probably still the prime targets of /pols "hate" go there on holiday just to get away from crazy.
Maybe not too healthy, but very much preferable to another slick corporate or political message about how they will implement racism in the future. At least /pol fails with their racism. Governments and corporations are pretty successful with it.
It is a very public example of the result of limited moderation.
Free speech advocates advocating for absolutism in free speech need a counterargument if they're going to go down that road.
In my experience, aggressive moderation, whether by the community or by admins, is the only way to keep a public community from turning into a cesspool, so if you're arguing for no moderation you better have a solution for what that actually entails.
Doesn't 4chan kind of disprove this though? I mean sure /pol/ can be a bit of a cesspool, but that's not all of 4chan. It was designed as a toxic waste storage facility and it has done that job fairly well.
You can hold great conversations on any of the like 30 other boards on the site without worrying about censorship or performance for internet points. There is still moderation, just the minimum amount possible.
A default of anonymity also helps curb a lot of spillover into the real world that happens between users of other forum sites.
The only reason 4chan gets dragged through the mud is because its containment facilities (/pol/, /b/, etc.) are among the most active boards. That speaks more to the human condition than 4chan in that people, when given a choice, tend to gravitate towards the least moderated sections of a website because they are the most engaging.
In terms of a solution I think it offers a fairly good one. If you don't want to have to keep banning malcontents across your site, then give them a place to congregate and they will mostly stay there. Try to ban them and they swarm looking for a new home.
What’s wrong with 4chan? I for one think it’s awesome, one of the few outlets that haven’t gave in to censorship.
I can give you a counterexample of Reddit that turned into cesspool with (and may be because of) excessive moderation. Just check their front page with posts celebrating people dying of Covid https://www.reddit.com/r/HermanCainAward/
That’s some weasel wording with “(and may be because of)”. Also if you want posts of people celebrating death just stroll over into /b and mention anything to do with minorities and/or genocides.
/pol is not the only containment board or issue with 4chan
>That’s some weasel wording with “(and may be because of)”. Also if you want posts of people celebrating death just stroll over into /b and mention anything to do with minorities and/or genocides.
So like /r/HermanCainAward but without the doxing?
There's plenty of "death of the outgroup" celebration on Reddit even in big subs.
This thread was discussing whether moderation was needed or not for a forum and 4chan was brought up as a forum without moderation and all the issues with that.
You brought up /r/hermancainaward as an example of Reddit having a cesspool and tried to imply without evidence that moderating it had a hand in its creation, _and_ implied that it’s the same level of cesspool as a place like /b.
Even if we assume you are correct about it being the same level of cesspool, as we speak the Reddit admins have been instructing the hermancainaward moderators to clean up the board or be shut down, which would get rid of said cesspool.
The only thing shown is that people can be terrible as a group, but moderating at least removes the worst excesses. That does not show how to deal with those excesses in an unmoderated forum
they had done a lot of debate at there, about whether this behaviour is acceptable.
I just want to direct that the original purpose of this forums is try warn people what is the result of choice.
As people already mentioned here, try running a free-for-all moderation-free discussion board and see what happens.
Back in the day, the Internet was full of HTML discussion boards just like this one, and idiots were banned with no questions asked. It was beautiful, and no one complained.
This site has moderation, no one is complaining. YouTube is a "person" - legally now, but somehow they don't have the responsibility to be a good citizen?
The fact that allegedly smart people on HN use the term "censorship" in the context of non-government control is pretty shocking. You don't know censorship.
"Censorship" has absolutely nothing to do with it. A private company can allow/disallow whatever content they f---ing please, and the Wild West capitalists on this board should be the first ones to support this move. Who is going to force them? The government? Oh, hello.
> Back in the day, the Internet was full of HTML discussion boards just like this one, and idiots were banned with no questions asked. It was beautiful, and no one complained.
Back in the day, the Internet wasn't dominated by Facebook and Google.
You're arguing to let low information or critical thinking challenged people die because of the actions of others (whether those actions are in good faith or not is immaterial). If Youtube decides it wants to take action to promote the public welfare, that's their right as a business.
"Doing Something" is usually harm reduction within the framework of law and public policy, and there's a lot of harm out there, hence the continual debate over a) should something be done? and b) what can be done?
> I almost feel like people are siding with the anti-vaxxers out of "principle".
You say that like it's a bad thing. If we don't stop the censorship now, it'll be too late to stop it in a year or two when we're the ones being censored for some reason.
I think it's already too late. Removal of unpopular / non-mainstream opinions from large social media sites is now the norm and is celebrated (by those who didn't get silenced).
> Someone want to throw out there a better way to combat disinformation than just armchair criticizing their decision?
Yeah, don't do anything? Why do we have to do anything about """disinformation"""? What'll happen in a few years when the things you stand for and believe in are labelled as disinformation? Because if you start censoring and combating "disinformation" now, it's only a matter of time until the same practices start affecting you and the things you stand for.
Besides, do you really think banning people off of platforms for wrongthink is more likely to make them change their minds? If anything, those kinds of actions cause resentment to fester, which only leads to more radicalization (for lack of a better term) in the future.
This assumes that disinformation can't be identified objectively. Claiming that COVID vaccines implant a microchip is simply false. There's no good reason to allow that sort of claim to spread on social media in the midst of a pandemic where people can die because they believe blatantly false conspiracy theories.
You're committing the slippery slope fallacy. That any kind of censorship leads to the bad kind of censorship, instead of there being a reasonable standard for banning harmful disinformation, and not just differences in political, religious or whatever views. Societies always have to maintain some kind of balance between individual rights and the collective good.
So who's going to be the one that decides what disinformation is or isn't? Where exactly do you draw a line when deciding what constitutes disinformation, and as such what gets deleted out of existence? Sure, the microchip stuff is bullshit, but where do we draw the line exactly on what vaccine-related topics can or can't be posted about online?
And this is where we fundamentally disagree, I believe that any censorship of literally any kind is too much censorship. There is no such thing as a "reasonable standard" for banning "disinformation", because any two random people will disagree on what should be silenced or not.
First, I don't think governments should be banning the speech across the entire internet. But companies with large social platforms can and probably should do so in certain situations, such as a pandemic when conspiracy theories are being spread which make controlling the pandemic more difficult, and can lead to more deaths.
As for where to draw the line, society always has to figure out where to draw lines on what behavior is allowed and what isn't. It's always a matter of tradeoffs, not some absolute principal with no exceptions. Society may very well go too far in one direction, and often has, but we still end up drawing lines somewhere. Hacker News certainly draws the line on some speech, because of a desire to keep the site respectful and on topic.
For Covid, I think the reasonable standard acceptable to a majority of people is to ban intentional spread of conspiracy theories with clearly false facts that discourage people from being vaccinated, or putting harmful substances in their bodies to combat the virus, which are not medically approved.
Misinformation, aside from being a rather subjective thing to define, isn’t the cause of the problem, it’s just a symptom of it.
The cause of the problem is people losing trust in their institutions. People not trusting pharmaceutical companies barely needs any explanation due to their history of scandals (any opioid crisis threads on HN today?).
People not trusting public health institutions is a bit more serious. But it’s a perfectly rational reaction given how much they’ve lied over the course of the pandemic. Looking to misinformation as the source of the problem is just a way to deflect responsibility.
If the problem you’re trying to solve is “how do we combat misinformation”, then “strictly controlling the information they’re allowed to consume, and the things they’re allowed to say” seems like a reasonable response to a lot of people.
But if your problem is “why have people lost trust in our institutions”, then “because we failed to strictly control the information they’re allowed to consume, and the things they’re allowed to say” is quite obviously a counterproductive KGB-style response.
No censorship can make whoever yells the loudest be the most heard, which can snowball into millions of ramifications.
I'd like to go back to the early internet days where people had to at least make a geocities site to spread their word, with no financial incentives to getting more clicks or viewers. It wasn't perfect, but you had to be seeking that group / audience rather than having it thrown in your face everywhere.
The covid disinformation is like a religion; no amount of researched data is going to change peoples minds. Believe me, I've been patient in explaining facts and referring to data, but people just report fabricated data memes and click the laughing emoji (which in fact should be removed from Facebook...)
The problem is that bullshit takes significantly less effort to produce than a well-researched counter-argument.
With the sheer volume of disinformation out there, you can't even start to imagine having the required manpower to squash it all with refutation alone.
Yeah, fighting ignorance isn't easy. But the alternatives are much worse, ineffective in the long run, and by damaging your credibility, impair your ability to fight rationally in the future.
De-platforming is always going to fail because your opponents are hydras. "Yay, we crushed Milo Yiannopoulos!" Er, wait, how's that going, really? Malevolent troublemaking nihilists are still at large? _Donald Trump_ won the next election?
> De-platforming is always going to fail because your opponents are hydras.
The strongest evidence against this is that the groups being deplatformed seem really, really upset by it. Seems like they wouldn't be so concerned if it wasn't effective.
> "Yay, we crushed Milo Yiannopoulos!" Er, wait, how's that going, really?
Pretty well, given that he hasn't been relevant to anything in years.
Is the actual goal of de-platforming individuals to punish or silence specific individuals, or is it to suppress remove certain kinds of speech from public discourse?
I think a big part of vaccine resistance is because of the insane levels of propaganda and censorship.
Anyone who is even slightly suspicious of authorities will be much more hesitant to take a vaccine when any criticism of it is effectively forbidden.
Put it the other way around, how many will be convinced to get vaccinated thanks to censorship? Here in Scandinavia, I'm sure at least 99% of people happily give their children the standard childhood vaccines, so it's not like people are anti-vaccines in general.
YouTube's algorithm actively pushes people down rabbit holes towards fringe content.
The best way to combat this is not invest billions of dollars in infrastructure meant to do exactly the thing it just did.
Bad actors didn't poison the system, youtube covered itself in lacerations and jumped into sewer water. They stand back watching their algorithm divide and extremize everyone on every side of every debate, and now that the flame wars are starting to turn into mass graves they're hoping they can stop the whole thing by banning a few extremes here and there.
> Just a no win situation
I think there is a clear win here: AI should not be allowed to do what it is doing. Humans can't handle it. And the cost of lives is on Facebook and YouTube, plenty of employees took a stand to say exactly what was/is happening and were ignored.
A simple question: do you beleive that suppressing freedom of speech will seriously inclrease a number of vaccinated? I beleive that the best outcome is it will stay around the same. Some sensitive people will calm down and eventually vaccinate, others will become stronger anti-vaxxers, because "if it is forbidden by authorities, it should be somehow true".
If you don't mind my asking, how old are you? And did you grow up in the United States?
If you grew up in the US and are (significantly) older than Facebook and Youtube, you were raised in a society that had significantly greater suppression of free speech than is being discussed here. Nobody handed crazy people a megaphone and a world-wide platform to spread their nuttiness. They had to stand out in front of the post office or mall entrance (where they would be shooed away by security quickly) to enlighten the world about the evils of fluoride.
But that's probably just Bill Gates' chip talking.
I am 46 and I was born and living all my life in Soviet Union and now Russia. So you don't tell me what a significant free speech suppression feels like)
YouTube is not a megafone. TV and newspapers is. YouTube is just a medium. People still have to find those videos, click links, share them and so on. Unless, of course, YouTube algos are putting them on the front page because they are generating more ads profit.
And you could not stop information from flowing around in 1980-s (@see "Samizdat") and hundredfold cannot do it today. If you think then closing Parler solved the problem of internal division in USA - no, it just made it worse.
That is true but I am not as disillusioned that giving everyone a megaphone was positively conductive to spread more interesting art, discussions and general content. I would not want to go back to Youtube TV.
I think people that only see the dangers of misinformation that must be contained are the modern versions of priests to be honest.
Very tricky, embedding an assumption - that a particular example conforming to long recognized free-speech exceptions is the same as general suppression of free speech - in your question. Have you stopped beating your wife? Maybe, if you're acting in good faith and really are prepared to consider an answer other than the one you've ordained, you could try phrasing the question in a less prejudicial way.
Another simple question: if actions were ineffective like you describe, why would people take them? There isn't some cosmic homeostasis keeping the world the way you percieve it. If you get rid of anti-vax videos, fewer people are going to be exposed to that, and fewer people will be resultantly anti-vax.
I didn't describe anything as ineffective. On the contrary: those who vaccinated are now very effectively avoiding being seriously sick or even dead. What was ineffective is an information campaign about vaccines, their direct and side short and long term effects. At least in US, I believe.
I mean... Yeah... Long ago some people got together and said large government organizations should not censor speech. They thought this idea was good enough that it shouldn't just be law, they should Amend the US Constitution to protect people from a particular large organization's overwhelming power to suppress dissent.
But today the organization censoring speech is a public corporation [wealthier and more powerful than most governments], and because it doesn't have explicit ties to any government, we are supposed to assume that the spirit of the original rule is not being violated. Citizens may expect no freedom of thought or expression, even if the properties Google owns appear to be and function like public forums.
> because "if it is forbidden by authorities, it should be somehow true".
Note that that is incorrect, and ironically demonstrates a unjustifiably high degree of trust in authorities. Rather, if someone supports censoring something, it means that they believe that it[0]'s true. But that doesn't mean they're right - their revealed internal beliefs are no more infalliable than their externally claimed ones.
0: Technically, they believe that something in the general class of claims they're attempting to censor (eg some anti-vaxx claim, but not necessarily any of the specific ones that have actually been made) is true.
This seems incredibly naive. The present proliferation of anti-vaccine sentiment is almost entirely the result of propaganda pushed by a tiny number of people being amplified by social media. You can argue about whether or not it's right to suppress information on principle, but I don't see how you can argue it's ineffective. It's ineffective at combating actual truth when things like the Supreme Soviet just lie about meeting their five year plan goals and imprison anyone who presents real data, but scientific journals and newspapers introducing some editorial curation in what they were willing to amplify worked perfectly fine at actually suppressing fringe pseudoscience and false conspiracy theories for centuries.
I get it. Some conspiracies turn out to be true. Watergate happened. The Panama Papers happened. COINTELPRO happened. The FBI probably really did assassinate Fred Hampton. Galileo was right. But for every Galileo, there are a few thousand cranks thinking they disproved special relativity or invented a perpetual motion machine and refusing to grant them a platform has worked fine forever until social media came along and gave everyone an audience.
There was a huge lie about Russian election interference that was heavily pushed by media companies.
I am vaccinated but it is still a medical experiment. One that should be carefully monitored. Maybe we are guilty of enabling strains like delta. Perhaps not. As I said, it warrants close monitoring.
The heart of any anti-* sentiment is DOUBT. And in case of covid vaccines part of that doubt is totally legit. Yes, in a history of mankind there was never a medical substance so rushed to the market. And yes, our current covid vaccines are far from perfect. All you can do to counter these facts are bring another facts. And not shutting down intelligent reasonable people discussing all those facts.
We don't remember people who got other theories than Galileo. We don't even remember those who judged him. Because in the end all is remains is proven unshakable science.
> I almost feel like people are siding with the anti-vaxxers out of "principle".
Part of the issue is the blanket characterization of everyone who doesn't verbatim repeat the preferred rhetoric of Youtube/Google as "anti-vaxxers". As everyone informed and intelligent knows, the government, the corporate media and the "intelligence agencies" have been, by far, the greatest disseminators of "disinformation" for decades. From the Bay of Tonkin to babies pulled from incubators to WMD in Iraq to Hunter Biden's laptop being a Russian plot. The problem is that this sort of disinformation is not only allowed, but amplified by these same corporate media outlets (and their government handlers) who claim that we desperately need to eliminate free speech. You want to fight disinformation? Teach people how to think critically and be necessarily skeptical of everything they are told, no matter what the source. Teach people how to examine evidence that underlies assertions, and reject assertions that are made without evidence (or, worse yet, claims of "secret evidence" that are rampant in corporate media and government sources). Except this is the opposite of what Google/Youtube and the government want. They want total control over the information flow, along with a low-information population that uncritically soaks up whatever propaganda they are saturated with. They don't want a population that is equipped with the tools needed to sort through the lies and bullshit - they just want to control which lies and what bullshit they are exposed to.
I believe that tradeoffs between individual freedom and the common good are necessary. So I am biased in favour of intervening when it's necessary.
But it's very hard to see how these social network interventions are well thought out and have considered all the possible side effects, many of which are mentioned in other comments. I suppose they're tracking the data and will change course if this doesn't work how they expected..
Still, rather than being a case of deplatforming harmful speech, these look like amputations of entire conversations from the service, maybe to take the spotlight off the degenerate nature of Youtube as a human communication platform.
It's clear that the ability of bad characters to screw up an entire system, as you say, is at least partially enabled by Youtube's incentives, and the features those lead to (the old radicalization = engagement fiasco for example). A better way to combat disinformation would be to understand how Youtube often brings the worst out of its viewers, and to fix that. But it's not clear who has the incentive or the obligation to do it.
The alternative is to move the conversation to other types of social networks, with other incentives. But that seems even harder.
What is clear to me is that having most of the world get their news from a service that algorithmically (I think, it's unclear from the article) bans a fully vaccinated, pro-vaccine M.D. for suggesting people who have been infected have immunity (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28693407), to give an example, is not ideal. If they choose to do this instead of tackling the problems in their recommendation system, which rewards disinformation and other harmful types of content in all sorts of topics, not just vaccines, then it's even worse.
Good luck explaining to the mob that "there in fact is no fire", as they charge out of the theater.
I typically agree with you, and it was justice Louis Brandeis who said it so well: “If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”
On the other hand, the one exception to this is when the speech is question causes a clear and present danger. We are facing a rather perverse crisis in the world right now with respect to vaccine misinformation. I'm not saying I know the answer, but I know we did not get here through a lack of quality, persuasive information.
I have different definitions of a crisis to be honest. And I also think the crisis of misinformation is blown out of proportion and is in the interest of some established forms of media, which make quite a good buck with clickable headlines that sell the apocalypse.
This crisis is used to gain more control about information channels. This is also the main criticism here, nobody argues about the validity of claims some people bring forward as an argument against vaccination.
"The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic."
The above does in fact describe a "clear and present" danger. You'll notice, however, that saying anything on the subject of vaccines, a pedophilic cabal in Hollywood, or the Moon landing is in no way like triggering the immediate stampede of desperate people who have no time to consider the truth or falsehood of potentially being trapped in a burning building.
That analogy is simply too often misused. I have to wonder if its misuse isn't itself "misinformation."
I don't think spreading misinformation about vaccines is in anyway comparable to the examples of hollywood or the moon landing, and I do in fact think it's a perfect fit for the analogy:
It is an indisputable fact that there are people dying every day because they have decided not to take a vaccine based on misinformation. That group of people is also causing the deaths of others by overwhelming the emergency facilities of hospitals. Personally, I would argue that this danger is very much clear and present.
Every one of the people you describe had time to consider the information they got and to look for more information to confirm or contradict. Again, that is nothing like sitting in a crowded theater and hearing someone shout, "Fire!"
I think people are talking completely passed each other. The conservative crowd will debate the severity of the existing pandemic and whether the cure is worse than the illness. The vaccinate all crowd well just wants everyone to be vaccinated, the severity of the crisis is a forgone conclusion. I think both points of view have strong merit but its hard to mend the two views together they just don't really mix. The whole thing ends up being labelled "misinformation" because we aren't even on the same page. I find myself in the conservative camp which is a rare occurrence for me. But I can't for the life of me understand how people can be so enchanted with the heads of our federal organizations when the data behind their words does not stack up. Misleading the importance of data, stretching and inverting the burden of proof we should expect from our government ultimately makes me see them as liars. Watching liars speak is one thing but to see a whole populace see positive meaning, smiling nodding and go on to shout down anyone who tests the rhetoric, its blind fanaticism.
> The vaccinate all crowd well just wants everyone to be vaccinated, the severity of the crisis is a forgone conclusion.
There was a gallup poll recently that asked people what the risk of hospitalization was if you got infected.
95% of D voters overestimated the risk, 78% of them were more than 10x wrong, and 41% of them were more than 50x wrong. R voters did better, but still overwhelmingly overestimated the risks.
So we're having this enormous discussion on misinformation and how to combat it and making sure people get "trustworthy" news, and yet, Americans are completely fucking wrong about the disease. It's a giant elephant in the room that no-one is addressing!
No wonder you can't have a rational debate about weighing different risks against each other, if your opponents wrongly overestimate the risk by one or two orders of magnitude.
One thing that is hard to quantify is the risk of long-term effects, which are unknown.
There is an elegant argument, due to Laplace, that says that if you have an urn containing red and blue balls, you extract N balls, and M of them are red, you should assume that the probability that the next ball is red is (M+1)/(N+2), and not M/N as one might naively assume. The general case requires integrating the beta function, which is kind of advanced, but the M=0 case can be done with elementary calculus, as follows.
Call X the probability of extracting a blue ball, which we view as a property of the urn. If we don't know anything about X, before we extract any balls, we should assume a uniform prior distribution P[X]=1 for 0<=X<=1 (this is the main and only assumption). The probability of seeing M=0 red balls after extracting N, for given X, is the same as the probability that all balls are blue, i.e., P[M=0|X]=X^N. But we care about P[X|M], not P[M|X]. By Bayes' theorem, P[X|M] is proportional to P[M|X]P[X], times a proportionality constant that makes the total probability be 1. Because we assumed P[X]=1, we have that P[X|M=0] is proportional to P[M=0|X]=X^N. The integral of X^N between X=0 and 1 is 1/(N+1), yielding P[X|M=0]=(N+1) X^N. The expected value of X is the integral for X=[0,1] of X P[X|M=0], which is E[X]=(N+1)/(N+2). This is the expected probability of a ball being blue, with 1-E[X]=1/(N+2) being the probability of a ball being red. QED.
Now say we have historically observed 1000 vaccines and they were all safe in the long term. It is still perfectly rational to assume that there is a 1/1002 chance that this vaccine is unsafe in the long term. Anybody claiming otherwise better have a cogent argument about why the prior probability should not be uniform. Saying that 1000 vaccines were long-term safe and thus this one is long-term safe is equivalent to assuming a prior of the form P[X]=1/(X (1-X)), which is hard to justify (and diverges at 0 and 1).
Basically, the problem is that we are entering the territory where the risk from the disease is comparable to a rational estimate of the risk of what we don't know, and it's hard to come to any kind of cogent conclusion.
But anybody who claims that all past vaccines were long-term safe and thus this one is long-term safe clearly does not understand basic probability.
I think the crux of the issue is that "the cure is worse than the illness" is objectively false, as the vaccine has been proven to be safe, and bodies from COVID deaths continue to pile up. I try not to listen to politicians for the reasons you mentioned, but just looking at the data it seems like an awfully simple problem to me.
> I think the crux of the issue is that "the cure is worse than the illness" is objectively false
Since the disease is highly age-stratified and dependent on risk factors, the same goes for the vaccines. For elderly, it's a complete no-brainer. For me, in my forties, it's overwhelmingly false and I got vaccinated as bloody fast as I could. And for anyone in a risk group, it's false as well.
But for healthy kids and teenagers? It's a wash for them personally, but if they're hanging around people in risk groups, there's a clear benefit of them getting vaccinated.
> the vaccine has been proven to be safe
There are several vaccines, and some of them have issues. The AstraZeneca one is pretty much not in use any longer in the west because of the blood clotting issue, and there are reports now that teenage boys might suffer myocarditis from the Pfizer vaccine. Incredibly rare, but the risk is not zero.
You are generally correct that the cure is not worse than the disease, for an overwhelming majority of people, but the truth is more complicated, and without long-term safety data for these vaccines, I completely understand that some people are hesitant.
At the core of the anti-vaxx bullshit is a tiny kernel of truth, and I think it's better to address that than to completely suppress everything they say, because that's just gonna make people on the fence extremely suspicious and tip them over the wrong way.
> there are reports now that teenage boys might suffer myocarditis from the Pfizer vaccine. Incredibly rare, but the risk is not zero.
Another interesting factor at play here is that some people prefer for negative outcomes to come from inaction than action. It's like the trolley problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem) when people try to evaluate morality.
In this case, they would rather not take an action (get vaccinated) if there's a chance of harm and would prefer inaction (don't get vaccinated) despite the higher statistical risk of bad outcomes.
Right, the risks of the disease only apply if you actually catch it, and you might get lucky and avoid it. But choosing to get vaccinated means you take on whatever the tiny tiny risk of the vaccine is to you.
> But for healthy kids and teenagers? It's a wash for them personally, but if they're hanging around people in risk groups, there's a clear benefit of them getting vaccinated.
How many kids and teenagers aren't usually around groups of 40 year olds? Are there cities which are only populated with 12 year olds? Apartment complexes exclusively for those under 18?
Great in theory, but if you've ever debated someone who is not acting in good faith online it's near impossible. Their energy input is an order of magnitude lower than yours. And yes, in this specific context it IS misinformation, disinformation, or just flat out false.
Why not give a flat earther a huge prime time platform? I mean that in of itself proves nothing.
There have been many attempts and even in my own circles and in the end the it has nothing to do with the facts and all about fear and badly calculating risk.
I can understand the mentality if you're hesitant of the vaccines being new and want to wait, but just understand that the current data shows you're taking a higher risk by not taking it. Your choice in the end, though.
People who are full anti-vax are a different thing altogether.
> Why not give a flat earther a huge prime time platform?
They did. It happened, and the dude died in the rocket as it crashed to Earth. And following that, I stopped hearing so many murmurs about if a lake surface was flat or convex.
He died last year. He also had successful launches previously. And those didn't halt anything.
The world, collectively, has been a bit busy with other stuff since last year. If anything COVID conspiracy stuff has pushed out all other conspiracies.
It's not possible to embarrass someone with no shame. It's easy to lie and debate dishonestly[1]. Engaging in such a debate would only legitimize a position that may have no legitimacy to begin with.
> If the science is so clear, why not give an anti vaxxer a huge prime time platform and embarrass them in debate?
Neonazis clamor that they need a platform all the time. Now that we can see what that's like (the US, in case it is not clear) we can see that this is a terrible idea.
Pro tip: if you declare any and all "serious attempts to address the concerns" as "disinformation", then the only thing left is ostracism and censorship.
With these specific therapies:
1) Myocarditis (long term heart damage)
2) general inflammation and clot risk
3) long term risks of brand new mRNA technology
For myself and other young athletes, my research leads me to understand that the vaccine is higher risk than the infection.
My greatest concern is the totalitarianism behind vaccine passports. At this point even if the shot cured cancer I wouldn't take it because of how it's pushed.
There's a lot of misleading information out there about myocarditis that makes the risk sound much worse than it is.
Yes adverse myocarditis reaction is a risk. But it's something like 1 in 17,000. 1 in 500 Americans have died from covid.
Even if you're young and healthy, we have no idea the long term risks of contracting a serious case of covid. You have to factor that into the risk equation.
> But it's something like 1 in 17,000. 1 in 500 Americans have died from covid.
This is true but misleading. You need to account for age as the primary factor that determines the risk exposure.
Edit: Surprised that someone downvoted this. Care you explain what you disagree here? I am simply pointing out that it is not straight forward to compare risk levels because they are highly dependent on age.
Then again, those 1/500 are old age or with existing debilitating health conditions. The rest of the people have a close to zero chance of dying from Covid. It is not a great idea to expose them to that 1/17000 chance of getting an unnecessary heart condition that will affect them for life. And remember, myocarditis and blood clot issues are secondary effects we know about now. The vaccine was invented and released very recently and there is no way to know the long term effects. And don't forget, this vaccine works with a brand-new genetic technology never before released to the public.
The thing is that death is not the only strongly negative outcome of CV19. It's not uncommon for young and formerly healthy individuals to experience long term effects, sometimes with debilitating severity. That is just as much worth avoiding as death is and needs to be factored into risk calculations.
"Notably, a recent survey conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 29 % of healthcare providers themselves expressed hesitancy about receiving the COVID-19 vaccine. The same survey found that among the general public, the group that reported that they “definitely will not get vaccinated” may be the hardest to reach via most traditional public health means. Only two emissaries were reported as trustworthy sources by at least half the people in this group: their personal health care provider (59 %) and former President Trump (56 %). These findings suggest that individual health care provider endorsement and support may be one of the sole avenues for reaching this group with reliable and timely vaccine information [60]."
> At this point even if the shot cured cancer I wouldn't take it because of how it's pushed.
And there it is. For you at least, this has nothing to do with evidence, or facts, or information, or patience or empathy or reasoning or sound medical judgment or anything else, it's just plain stubbornness that's so out of control you're willing to die rather than do something someone else told you to do.
Look, I get it. I hate being told what to do. But at least be honest with yourself that that's what's going on, and that all your talk of side effects and whatnot is a smokescreen.
Refusing to do something purely because somebody is trying to make you do it still means you're letting other people control your actions. That's not liberty either.
You are not alone. The authoritarian threat and government overreach problems are IMO orders of magnitude more important and concerning than the virus. I will almost certainly be taking a stand and be terminated by my employer over this within the next few weeks.
Problem: An ongoing pandemic, requiring greater or lesser levels of isolation.
Solution: A vaccine. Vaccinated individuals are much less likely to suffer the ill effects of the disease and to transmit the disease. Isolation is no longer necessary.
Problem: Large portions of the population refuse to take the vaccine. Isolation is still required for this portion.
Solution: Allow those who have been vaccinated freedom from isolation.
You assume the policy of pushing vaccination is sound, so the methods of its implementation are not totalitarian or it isn't a concern. But even if it was a sound policy from the standpoint of the state, the methods employed (censorship of communications on COVID and vaccines, restricting freedoms of unvaccinated) is still a totalitarian method.
Dozens of books have been written documenting the absolute, unmitigated travesty of the Trump administration. 70 million people still voted for him, and a majority of those did so as a positive review of his performance!
I'm not sure what to do, but I know now that "mountains of evidence" does not stop alluring stupidity.
I have and I still think so. First of all, it is not realistic to assume that you will convince everyone; you won't. Second, practice is necessary and bad faith counterparts will help you get better.
It is not my impression that "energy input of people spreading X is an order of magnitude lower". On the other hand, they obsess over such topics and spend a lot of time spreading their views - that is why they are visible.
Why do we always assume that it's "misinformation" and that if people were told or shown better, they would want better. Many times, people actually want the bad thing. I can't help but see the "Free Speech" alarmism on HN originating from the fact that the market of ideas is no longer participating in arguments about right-wing viewpoints, but is actively moving against them and taking them off the shelf.
This is an outmoded concept based on the idea that humans are purely rational creatures, which we already know is false. Just providing better information does not sway individuals. People are far more swayed by information from their “tribe”, even if that information is patently false, than they are by quantitatively better information, because it makes them feel good. That’s why actions like this seem to be necessary.
You’re wrong, several Oxford and Harvard studies show that misinformation is best fought with more misinformation. Either that, or your own personal beliefs, which are _way_ more true than something studied for years by ivory tower academics who are always changing their mind. Like and subscribe to my podcast and buy my T-Shirts……
If this is correct, then why would you believe you've ascertained truth? The very hallmark of truth as we know it is that 'better' information, meaning more and more clarified data consistently resolve on the same conclusion.
The reasoning behind understand that “correct” and “persuasive” are two adjectives that aren’t synonyms and describe different values is fairly simple to communicate
People are not little machines that accept information as input, apply impartial rules of logic, and then spit out a correct answer. People are social-emotional animals with a carefully guarded sense of self, a basic need to belong, and all kinds of nervous system structures that, when activated, prevent rational thought.
This is not as simple as putting more information out there.
The gist of it is that making up bullshit takes almost no energy, whereas refuting that bullshit effectively will be very time-consuming. This is exacerbated by the fact that bullshit is usually packaged in a way that makes it spread way faster by, for example, exploiting social media "engagement" algorithms.
There are corollaries to this. For example, the idiom "a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth is done tying its shoes."
Yes, exactly. It's just so similar to forum spam. Free speech absolutists were far less in favour of free speech when it came to banning viagra-salesmen.
Like the forum moderators, it's perfectly okay for Google to just not want the headache of dealing with pests.
> Free speech absolutists were far less in favour of free speech when it came to banning viagra-salesmen.
Nope. We're in favor of viagra salesmen being able to speak to anyone who wants to listen to them, same as anyone else. It's just that effectively noone wants to listen to them, and we tend to design things accordingly because we're lazy and noone is complaining (that they want to listen to viagra salesmen).
I got the vaccine and I'm pro-vaccine in general (for vaccines that are long term preventative, not single-year preventative, ex: never gotten flu vaccine) however I keep finding myself wanting to defend the anti-covid-vaxxers as they're fighting a fight I sort of feel like I understand.
I was quiet about it until the mandate and planning to get vaccinated once everything child out.
After that I’ll die before I get vaccinated and I’ve been posting about it under my real name which is something I almost always avoid doing with non-software politics.
Provide a better education for the poor. I don’t mean education about a particular subject; better education in general.
In almost all conspiracy theories, one side has a lot of facts, the other has a lot of “feelings”. If you try having a conversation with someone who believes in some conspiracy you’ll eventually get to “I just don’t feel…”
Covid vaccine hesitancy does not seem to be about poor education, nor about poverty. The visible antivaxx activists are well-to-do people.
Distrust of government and authorities is a big factor. You have much more vaccine hesitancy in the U.S. than in Nordics (high-trust societies); Russians and Bulgarians are extremely sceptic of their governments, and extremely sceptic of vaccines.
I agree with the spirit of your comment, but I'd argue it's even more specific than distrust of government; I think it's mostly tribalism, at least in the U.S. I imagine if Trump had reacted differently to the pandemic (acknowledged it was a thing at the beginning and urged or mandated vaccines) I think you'd see a high vaccination rate within his base and a different demographic altogether showing their distrust of government.
Surely it is tribalism, but are you now giving a demonstration?
I have seen Trump boast about vaccines, in his usual distasteful way. I have seen him recommend vaccines. I have not seen him disparage or discourage vaccinations (though he's been extremely clumsy, as he was with everything).
It seemed to me that originally, when Trump boasted about the vaccines, his political opponents (the Democrats in US, and others elsewhere) were the ones who were sceptical about vaccine development - simply because of this tribalism.
Agreed, and I'm not OP, but I'd define "general education" to include concepts like effective fact-checking and media literacy, and not just for our children but for older folks as well.
I think a big part of the issue are some members of the older generations who left school long ago when there was maybe one newspaper in town. The internet, which came much later, gives everyone a voice and allows every idiot to dress stuff up, make it look professional, put lipstick on it and amplify it with the click of a button. How do you know to apply critical doubt to someone's claims when you don't even know how damn easy it is to produce a convincing fake? And if you do have a doubt, how would you even start fact-checking when all you know is Facebook and Youtube?
Too many people have their guard down, sitting in the comfort of their living room browsing The Algorithm, and don't even realize they are being attacked.
Education is only a part of it. One of other parts is trust in the system. Countries with more trustworthy politicians and more humane social policy have better response both to lockdown measures and vaccines.
How on earth is YouTube supposed to do that? They have no control over the however many thousands of public school systems exist in the United States, let alone education in the rest of the world.
If you have a formula to infallibly decide that A is a "bad actor" for any A in actual practice, you have solved the organizational problem of the past few millennia.
...or you just do some actual moderating instead of offloading your workload on machines. People worry about idiots and disinformation yet ignore and allow way more non conspiracy nutjobs all the time. Big Tech has such a cognitive dissonance its dizzying
> Someone want to throw out there a better way to combat disinformation than just armchair criticizing their decision?
Censorship is always bad. Always. When people accept it on a broader scale, more censorship will be applied eventually. People already accept it. At some point, broad censorship becomes the norm.
What needs to be disregarded completely is the fact that it's about a vaccine. People shouldn't talk about censorship in context of what's being censored. Censorship itself should always be the topic.
The fact that there's people dumb enough to believe things they shouldn't, isn't a problem that censorship solves. Furthermore are these people only so dumb, because politics made them dumb. They went to schools that made, or kept, them dumb.
By "dumb" I mean "incapable of thinking critically", which - to be fair - also applies to a lot of people on the vaxing side of the equation.
What they need is education. Locking them out of the public is only going to make them grow "underground". That's definitely not preferrable.
Squeezing something into a yes-no when the entire argument is in the question's premise is an unreasonable tactic.
"[What are your] suggestions for how to fight misinformation[?]" assumes that the priority is fighting misinformation. MrYellowP's major point is that the first priority is fighting censorship and the premise is misguided.
And it isn't explicit but I think I detect a secondary point that YouTube doesn't have a any good suggestions for fighting misinformation either. Doing something ineffective isn't better than doing nothing; their strategy is managing to get the anti-vax agenda in as headline news, and making the vaccine a more political issue (which is bad for its uptake).
If somebody asks for solutions better than X, giving constraints that preclude X is no better than a red herring. Contrary to your claim, MrYellowP never cast doubt on the importance of fighting disinformation, or even tried. It's just a distraction, a derailment, and a favorite tactic of disinformation enablers since forever.
> I almost feel like people are siding with the anti-vaxxers out of "principle".
I know I am. As someone with 2 shots that sympathizes quite a lot with the people who are commonly and ridiculously maligned as "anti-vaxxers", as though their position is even remotely similar to the people that term accurately described pre-2020, this will make my people dig their heels in even more. Good.
Sunshine is the best disinfectant, remember? Democracy dies in darkness, remember? The left has morphed into a censorious dictatorship that castigates anyone who doesn't think specific thoughts and punishes wrongthink by making pariahs out of those who wronglythink it. This is just a prominent example of the same authoritarian movement expressed through the burgeoning hegemony of big tech. Shit like this doesn't convince anyone, we'll just leave you to fester in your echo chamber, oblivious as you are to the fact that we'll be festering in our own.
Speaking of which, this announcement doesn't bother me at all. Youtube is over, it's just corporate sponsored tepid garbage at this point. It's not interesting anymore because creators aren't permitted to speak freely - not just w/r/t COVID. We are already moving to platforms where free expression is allowed and supported, and I hope Google does even more to hasten the exodus.
(I do actually not hold this one principle as absolutely, because Youtube is designed for public manipulation, so they have the onus of ensuring their manipulation isn't a bad one. But I do surely hold it for a neutral channel and that governments must ensure neutral channels exist.)
I don't know myself; however Steven Pinker published yesterday a new book called "Rationality". He promises to give the readers tools to cope with exactly this type of situations. I don't know if he delivers on it, I just started the book, but I really hope he does.
> Someone want to throw out there a better way to combat disinformation than just armchair criticizing their decision? I almost feel like people are siding with the anti-vaxxers out of "principle".
No, because it's pointless to legitimatize conspiratorial or fascistic views by engaging in a one-sided debate where one side is backed by scientific fact and the other is backed by Karen on facebook's idea that the election was stolen and that a COVID vaccine will kill you.
I would argue that there is no reason why freedom of speech should apply when you are actively trying to undermine the country (treason) and sow chaos/fear among the populace (terrorism).
> Someone want to throw out there a better way to combat disinformation than just armchair criticizing their decision?
Actually, people have, we've just moved on from the more important discussion which is whether YouTube (and other similar forms of social media / UGC) should exist in its current form.
I personally do not like regulation, but this is a situation in which the harm of social media / UGC is starting to outshine its benefit. I'm not sure if an outright ban of sites like YT is warranted but I think the frictionless experience of uploading/commenting/etc. on YT should be questioned.
Fortunately the First Amendment doesn't allow the US government to regulate such activities just because elitist authoritarians consider them harmful. This is an area where fundamental rights overrule cost-benefit analysis.
The FCC has no legal authority to regulate anti-vaccine content on TV. (I don't support such content, just explaining the law.) The FCC has some limited authority to regulate obscenity and indecency on over-the-air broadcast channels only. Congress gave them this authority because broadcast spectrum is a scarce public resource that reaches into everyone's home whether they want it or not. However the FCC generally has no authority over cable, Internet, or satellite content. Those systems aren't subject to spectrum scarcity and have effectively infinite capacity.
That makes sense, thanks! I'm wondering if there is some sort of regulation possibility on their processing of content or algorithms. In other words, similar to the cookie law in EU (which has an abysmal implementation) whereby individuals have more control on what they can and can't see and what gets promoted to them.
In general content promotion algorithms can't be regulated because a recommendation on which videos to watch is legally considered an opinion and thus Constitutionally protected free speech. The Supreme Court would probably only allow regulations in two narrow areas. The first would be where the promoted content is itself not Constitutionally protected due to obscenity or incitement of violence. The second would be commercial speech targeting children, who are legally considered as needing additional protection. For example the FTC can regulate some aspects of online services for minors under COPPA.
Principles aren't worth anything if people don't stick by them when expediency would recommend another course of action.
... This is why I chucked this particular principle overboard years ago. I don't personally think it holds water in light of irrational human actors and an under-informed public, given the immense power of modern bidirectional communications media.
> How do you propose to deal with unpopular opinions that turn out to be correct with this method?
Multiple tiers of signal (forums open to wider ideas that are, perhaps, more private than YouTube. Additionally, academic forums where people with relevant background can hash things out). I don't think the "everyone can see everything" Facebook / YouTube / Twitter model has been proven to work for difficult and sensitive topics.
YouTube is just not one of the places the messy conversations are safe to have. It's a cat-video host, not a pathology research organization or academic community (nor does it seem it wants to be).
> Also (and related) how do you propose to deal with corruption?
I don't know, but I think there's a burden of proof that the open model prevents corruption (assuming open is what we have now). It's massively vulnerable to propaganda and information distortion based on amount of effort put into amplify signal, not truth of information in signal. People with little background in a technical subject to lean on when exercising their critical thinking are very vulnerable to the notion "Everybody is saying it, so it must be true," and when you couple that to bubble effects I worry we see bad results.
The "wisdom of crowds" was always an experiment. It's possible for the experiment to fail.
People don't see what the actual problem here is - perhaps because they don't want to see. What is happening is very much the transformation from an open society to one where freedom of speech is limited and certain other individual rights are stripped away. Perhaps not de jure, but de facto.
And sure, one might argue that it's for a good cause (even though it's a complex topic). However, the fact is that as this is done once, it becomes something that can be leveraged as the norm. There is a very real danger here, and nobody knows whether it will realize or not.
The question is not whether you can post anti-vax content today. It's whether you can post anti-anything tomorrow.
I genuinely don't get it. YouTube, a private entity and not a government entity, is saying they don't want certain content on their platform. This is not the end of your free speech. This isn't really even a movement away from free speech. It's YouTube exercising their right to freedom of speech by not allowing what they believe to be harmful or disagreeable on their platform. They already do this with other categories of thing. This is no different.
You are more than able to start your own company and let whatever you want on that site. Or just go to your local city center with a megaphone and give people your thoughts - perfectly legal.
If YouTube is THAT essential to getting your views heard, you need to take a lesson from business - don't rely on anyone else for critical infrastructure.
This fallacy of "private entity" when talking about a corporation that's more powerful than most governments is truly ridiculous.
It's okay if the East India Company enslaves and exploits the savages and mongrels, murders opponents, rigs elections, installs corrupt politicians and destroys communities; it's a private company and it only hurts stupid people! Just stop buying their tea if you don't like it, amirite? Start your own company!
I don't see this same energy when peope want to nationalize internet or electric companies. Why is it that only when media companies moderate the content available on their platform do we suddenly not care about property rights?
If we're talking about regulating large corporations because they're monopolizing resources I'd much rather start in the energy sector to set some precedent before we just force youtube and facebook to allow nazis and anti-vaxxers to spout off whatever they want during a global crisis.
> Why is it that only when media companies moderate the content available on their platform do we suddenly not care about property rights?
I can't speak for what you're paying attention to, but plenty of people are wary of big cats in corporations and big cats in government. You can be against both.
The real false narrative is that choosing team red or team blue is the only interesting question and then you can turn your skepticism off.
Internet and electric companies don't have international political influence, nor major monopolies.
I'd rather have an honest discussion about dealing with a global crisis instead of having some asshole decide he's right and shut everyone else out - surely you can imagine the damage caused by a dictator who's wrong?
Except not. Google isn’t more powerful than most governments. They can’t kill or imprison people, or seize land or property. This is simply a false analogy.
What is your definition of "power"? Because I think your perspective is incredibly naive.
Google has immense power, far more than most governments.
Governments all around the world are often manipulated by corporations like Google, laws are written based off these influences of power, shaping democracy, all the time.
If they really wanted to they could do almost anything to you. They could easily steal your identity, they could frame you, they could put you in prison, they could do basically anything.
Is this legal? Obviously not, but power extends further than what is legal.
The fact is that states and corporations collude and compete with each other for political control internationally, and corporate power outranks the vast majority of state powers. Weirdly though, I can't find Alphabet Inc. in the power rankings.
I find it hilarious that in recent years, people on the left have started using the "don't like it? make your own! ;)" reply after it exclusively being a right-wing thing (e.g. telling people "don't like the USA? then leave"). Especially since both sentiments come from the same root: being out of a legitimate argument.
Except it isn’t… being a citizen isn’t the same as being a consumer, like you understand how much harder and more impactful it is to change the country you live in than the channel right? Yikes.
the same things are said about twitter or facebook, its absurd.
You don't get it because you agree with it. If it was your views being silenced you would suddenly remember how hard it is to create your own video platform that can compete with youtube (especially when the big tech monopolies will refuse services to you)
I disagree strongly with the action being taken here, but like your parent commenter, I don't get the consternation about their ability to take that action. I think that the first amendment guarantees both freedom of speech and of association to private entities, and that this is no more or less than a private entity exercising those exact rights.
If you want to nationalize all social media and force it to be a public square, that's fine, we can have that conversation. But that's not what people generally argue for, they instead expect private entities to be themselves subject to the requirements of the first amendment. But that isn't how it works. And I think that is a good thing, even when I disagree with the outcome.
I completely agree that YouTube should absolutely be free to do this but they're obviously doing this because citizens and their own employees demand it. The movement away from free speech is caused by the growing number of people (including people in this very thread) who want YouTube to do this, YouTube acquiescing to their demands is just a symptom of this trend.
YouTube is the profit-driven canary in the coalmine. YouTube's business model naturally incentivizes more speech of all kinds. This crackdown indicates there is mounting pressure - from democratically elected governments, from HN commentators, from our friends and neighbors that regulate & patronize YouTube - to stop being tolerant of certain kinds of speech like antivax.
> If YouTube is THAT essential to getting your views heard, you need to take a lesson from business - don't rely on anyone else for critical infrastructure.
> You are more than able to start your own company and let whatever you want on that site.
"If you don't like YouTube, build your own" is a really shitty take. It's very obvious the role that YouTube has right now and why massive censorship is a problem.
Youtube, Facebook and Twitter have been censoring content that nearly exclusively goes against left wing opinion narratives. At the top of Twitter right now are the DNC's "expert" opinion on whether the vaccine mandates are legal. They're shoving their political speech down everyones throat and censoring as many opposing views as they can get away with. But let's say that's legal for now.
If we take a equitable view of the situation, the vast majority of content that they're removing is simply being removed for wrong-think according to the DNC. This gives the Democratic party a leg up through overt censorship and information warfare of a sort they couldn't possibly have achieved through direct government action.
Whether that's legal or not is immaterial to me, they are stifling legal free speech of the de-facto public square, and those who cheer it on now won't be so happy in the future when the alignment of special interests shifts against them, I promise you it will happen and sooner than anyone thinks.
Google is a cancer on public discourse, how many fake media narratives have to collapse before people realize censorship of wrong-think is not a good idea for a healthy society?
Edit: Looks like Twitter finally removed their ridiculous propaganda from the trending section.
Not just their "expert" opinion, but whatever opinion is current this week. This is the same media machine that lied to us about masks, told us to be suspicious of a "Trump vaccine", and that covid was "just the flu". So logically the reasonable thing to do is censor everyone who disagrees, because then they'll be right.
Do you also feel it’s wrong of YouTube to not allow porn? Feels like people are laser focused on anti vax content due to the political nature of it, while not really caring about all the other moderation they already do.
Porn is a great counter example to the idea social media companies have some all powerful control over public information. Nearly all of them ban porn, a form of absolutely protected speech, but behold, it’s easy to find porn.
The whole “death of free speech” argument is such nonsense
Society is regressing back to a time where idea's like those in the Pre-Enlightenment era where prevalent, hopefully we do not regress all the way back to Dark Ages, where people will stoned and hanged for defying the church... In our time "the church" will likely be replaced with a new non-theistic religion of some kind, a Technocracy of "The Experts™" and "Authoritative Sources™" who are the ones that will tell us what "The Truth™" is today
The enlightenment involved the promotion of knowledge not "expert", it promoted the belief that a claim should be proven with data, it promoted that the best way to get to the actual truth is with robust inquiry, debate, trial and argumentation
To attempt to equate that with today "The Experts™" and "Authoritative Sources™" who instead of engaging in robust debate want to engage in robust censorship, these "Experts™" and "Authoritative Sources™" are more akin to Dark Ages Priests wanting to burn the heretic than they are of Enlightenment thinkers and scientists
I still don't understand your stance. Surely the public isn't barred from engaging in the scientific conversation if they have anything meaningful to say. It's just that that conversation is not very accessible because it is so technical. That was also the case in the Enlightenment: Science was practiced by those who had the time and resources to contribute substantiative knowledge. Speaking in broad strokes, the anti-vax movement strikes me as a counter-cultural movement, an "outsider art" to the mainstream scientific conversation. It's not that they can't engage with the science, it's that they reject that conversation altogether.
> Society is regressing back to a time where idea's like those in the Pre-Enlightenment era where prevalent...
I agree, people are denying vaccines work, taking fluoride out of tap water, and saying that the earth is flat. It seems like there's something seriously wrong with our media ecosystem when ideas like this are flourishing. I don't know if banning these ideas is good/effective, but we need some way to incentivize the veracity of ideas and not just their "engagement". What that mechanism might be, I don't know.
>>It seems like there's something seriously wrong with our media ecosystem
I think that is a symptom of the problem not the root cause
>>I don't know if banning these ideas is good/effective
its not, never has been, in fact has been shown to make the idea's spread further and become more extreme as people enter into information echo chambers.
>but we need some way to incentivize the veracity of ideas
Why? in reality the root cause is decades and decades of coddling children and the removal of critical thinking education in favor of memorization education.
The root cause is the failure to teach people how to use critical thinking and logic to assess the validity of data and claims made by people.
The reality is that "Trust the Experts™" is an example of this and really does make the problem worse because people are taught to just trust an authority instead of being able to look at a claim or data set and deiced for themselves if that claim should be accepted. The problem become with the "authority" people trust is wrong, either because they are a charlatan, or just ignorant themselves. However because people have been training to alway trust authority they become locked into this unable to think for themselves.
The more we move to a model of messenger over message, credential over data, the worse this problem will become. The additon of punishments for those that dare to resist "authority" is also going to end badly when that authority is wrong. Keep in mind I have countless examples of authority being wrong I can cite, a big on is that for decades and during my childhood the USDA pushed the food pyramid we now know to be wrong. They were the experts and anyone that dared say "hey maybe all these carbs are bad" were shunned... Vegetable oils are a another where the experts it seems may be been very wrong.
The enlightenment in part was the removal of charismatic messengers in favor of data driven objective truth. It did not matter who the person was it matter what they were saying and if they could prove their claim. All individuals were the same. We have lost that in favor of personality, credentials and authority over data, and proof.
Why is the vaccine safe? "Because the CDC and FDA said so"... that is not a valid response to me. Show me the data, show me the studies, show me the proof... that is the valid response.
For what it's worth, the studies are open. Science is a fairly transparent process. If someone is interested in educating themselves & understanding these discussions, there really is no barrier.
Here's an 8-hour press release by the FDA [1]. If you want to understand the logic behind the decision-making, it is absolutely available. It's just boring to watch, I suppose.
But that is not the argument being used to censor people, the platforms are saying you can not disagree with the source, you can not have an opinion contrary to the source, be it WHO, CDC, or FDA
They are appealing to the authority not the data, and in doing so they are proclaiming these organizations are infallible and beyond question which we know is false.
Having looked at the data I made the choice for myself that the vaccine was safe for me to consume, I did not do this because the CDC said so, or because the FDA did. I did not do this because YT put a banner under a video proclaiming the CDC is an infallible god that can never be questioned
Why I'm flummoxed by your argument is that the "infallible God" seems to be the scientific consensus. If anything, the analogy works in the opposite direction. There are many people who choose not to engage with the scientific conversation and instead choose an alternate way of understanding the world, one which is not based on population studies or pharmacology. If there's an example of a respected scientific work that has been censored, then you could change my mind.
One does not have to go far, just look back to the beginning of the pandemic where many people were banned and silenced for pointing out
1. Preliminary research showing masks work contrary to the official positions of CDC and WHO
2. People talking about how masks may not be as effective as original research thought, after the CDC said masks where perfect in every-way and infallible god like barriers preventing all covid. Or talking about how masks may work but masking policies down (the AI could not tell the difference was was shutting down anyone that dared question masks or masking policy)
3. Talking about Lab Leak before it was recognized officially as a possibility by WHO and CDC
4. Any talks about treatments that are not the offical vaccines some of which do have studies showing effectiveness, and I am not talking about the "horse paste" though even banning for that is ridiculous people where banned for talking about mAb treatment before it became blessed by the CDC
5. People that were questioning and talking about actual research that was being done on surface spread, showing it was not as prevalent as "Authoritative sources". People where bleaching their groceries when they got home due to the insanity and if you called that out... BANNED you disagreed with the CDC
I have more than that if you would like? I could probally triple my list of examples
Censorship is always bad not matter what people believe the "greater good" is.
Interesting. I'm not very knowledgeable about that. The people that got banned, were they scientists, or laypeople? And, regardless of whether they turned out to be right, would you characterize their beliefs as science, or speculation?
Regardless about whether or not the censorship was justified, my point is that there is an avenue for legitimate scientific discussion, via open forums, that the anti-vax community largely doesn’t participate with. That’s in part because it is so technical, and the barrier to entry is so high. Maybe there is a larger discussion to be had about how to keep these kinds of organizations accountable, given that their decisions are so complex.
Yes our freedoms are being eroded. It’s a slippery slope. All that bullshit.
Come on. A private company doesn’t want to contribute to people dying. Oh and by the way don’t they have the right to do what they want? You want what, regulation to prohibit this?
1. I think at the end of the day, the problem isn't "does YouTube have the right to do this?" it's "should YouTube be doing this, given their status?" For me even though they have the right to, I think it's just the wrong thing to do.
I personally am baffled by how the US as a society seems to be devaluing free speech principles in the private and public sphere due to some argument that it's needed to combat misinformation. This strategy never ends well, and it belies a lack of strength in promoting alternatives. The way to combat misinformation is with better information. Resorting to free speech restrictions is a sign of weakness in my opinion.
In the end I'd rather have YouTube (and other platforms) modeling a different approach.
2. I also think, regardless of how they got there, at some point a private business functions as a monopoly and should be treated as such. I'm not so sure how I feel about regulations along those lines, but I do think anti-monopoly legal response to this sort of behavior wouldn't be unreasonable. I'm not at all sympathetic to the GOP in general, but if they started coming down on YouTube for this kind of thing under anti-monopoly regulation umbrellas I think it wouldn't be irrational or unreasonable to me.
3. As a more immediate issue, I think this sort of thing always backfires. If you have a bunch of people thinking there's a conspiracy to shove untested vaccines down people's throats, and then you have a major media distributor like YouTube censoring all anti-vaccine discussion, what do you think they're going to conclude? I'm as pro-vaccine as someone can get, and think arguments against them are usually pretty absurd, but I have to say that this kind of thing starts to look like a conspiracy, even if it isn't one. Why give them ammunition? If you can't convince people the vaccine is a good thing, how do you think that shutting down discussion is somehow going to work better?
One thing this became extremely visible was Brexit to me. There are really good arguments why not leaving the union is the better choice. I am critical of the EU, but not to a degree that I want to abolish it as I think reforms are possible. I am not from GB and think their critical stance was very important within the EU since it institutionally lacks a real opposition. Without that it is an inefficient and bureaucratic technocracy (those actually don't really get results at all).
People asked questions about immigration, sovereignty, participation. These are completely valid topics and asking was basically decried as Russian propaganda. Meanwhile classical EU proponents never even argued that it isn't a compromise of sovereignty and participation! Denying that was denying reality.
The thing is, if that is the wide spread stance on how to deal with "misinformation", the whole thing suddenly isn't worth it anymore and it is not even close. People just basically argue that they want a technocracy that treats them like children. This was the image the pro-Brexit group crafted.
It is similar to what vaccination proponents do. I don't know how to tell them that they are part of what makes vaccination unattractive to many. I wouldn't advocate to ban them of course.
It's high time facebook, YouTube and Google get broken up like the Bell Corporation was (maybe even avoid some mistakes that were made with that company).
Regarding 3.:
I think it will radicalize some but it will also stop the misinformation of many more people. Overall I think it will lead to lives saved.
I didn't answer the question because it was a non-sequitur and it was obvious the question was being asked in bad faith to trip me up, like a cop who asks how many drinks you had after you just told him you hadn't had anything to drink.
I don't have a strong opinion on the matter. If someone were to do a good job regulating them and make the situation better I'd approve. If someone were to do a bad job and make things worse I'd disapprove.
So your solution is for someone else to come up with a solution which you would find satisfactory by criteria you are unwilling to provide?
Whether regulation should stop YT from doing this is a legitimate question. Nothing else will prevent it. Observe that the government telling a private company what they must host on their platform is potentially more dangerous than the government telling a private company to take down a piece of content (neither of these are happening here but if we entertain the notion of regulating YT then these are to be considered).
Why is this standard not applied to anti vax content? You find YouTube’s actions distasteful and you want them to stop. YouTube finds anti vax content distasteful and wants that to stop. YouTube either has the right to stop this type of content on their platform or they don’t.
Note that Google has billions of dollars and control of a huge amount of the world's data. Then note the reason the low standard is applied to anti-vax content is because they are about as close to being politically irrelevant as one can be.
They're struggling to even exercise basic human rights (freedom of movement, opinion, peaceful association, speech, etc, etc. There is probably a right for healthcare self-determination slipped in to the Universal Deceleration of Human Rights too it seems like the sort of thing they'd slip in). There is room to argue about whether the UDoHR applies here, but it is very notable that the anti-vaxers have nearly no power to have a quite reasonable interpretation stick.
Their opinions just don't matter. They appear to be on the verge of being confined to their homes while being widely condemned and socially ostracised. They are likely to be fired. Which is why it is so concerning that systematic oppression is being bought in to deal with them - this is Google crossing scary lines that didn't need to be crossed.
When a private company with a market share of information as large as Youtube acts as an arbitrer of truth, regulation to prevent this would be nice, yes.
There is no need for trusting anybody. The concept that we must trust the government or YouTube to determine truth is ridiculous. How about neither of them ban content they don’t like?
As individuals, we shouldn’t trust. We should verify.
OK great. So do you have a chemistry lab in your house to verify that the toothpaste you buy doesn’t contain heavy metals? Do you do your own testing of the meat you buy to ensure it doesn’t contain BGH, antibiotics, parasites? Do you manufacture your own water testing kits since you can’t trust sending samples to a lab? Do you manufacture your own computing devices since you can’t trust that others aren’t spying on you using your phone or laptop?
This is the kind of answer a 14 year old who hasn’t yet grasped the concept of not-absolutism would give. It’s absurd.
I am now incredibly interested in what the term “market share of information” is, because that’s a brand new nonsense term I’m sure will spread like wildfire.
This trend in combination with the new wave of everything being a subscription really has me worried as a recent college grad who therefore does not own a home or have much in the way of savings. If you don’t own anything and your access to essential items is decided by some megacorp like Google or FB, you bet people will fall in line with the latest recreational outrage real fast. Connected cars with subscription features that show you ads even if you do own them (see the Ford Mach-E), and financial institutions buying up single-family homes to keep as many people as possible renting forever and never gaining equity in anything. The World Economic Forum came out and said it blatantly: “You’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy.” That’s starting to read more like a command, not a prediction.
I can see the CEOs and politicians wanting to implement a Chinese-style 'social citizenship score' and if it falls below some level you get banned from all platforms and your travel rights are restricted, etc.
Oh boy. MSM is going to jam the importance of it down our throats. “Social citizen scores are necessary to save lives. Get your score now! Lottery for people who register early.”
But is free speech dependent on YouTube being a platform for complex discussions between knowledgeable people on a topic?
Maybe YouTube doesn’t want that role.
Maybe we can have a sci-debate website that does want these discussions, and maybe that site could tailor the feature set for exactly this purpose.
Maybe it would focus on citation and annotation features like thinkspot or Spotify or genius.
Maybe the site could have multiple ways to evaluate the reputation of someone making claims. Maybe it could have education, popularity, endorsements from other people with high reputation, and like three other dimensions of reputation measurements.
Maybe it could have tools to disclose conflicts of interest, the accuracy of past claims over time, and automatic linking to rebuttals.
Maybe YouTube just isn’t a fit for this information.
I'd agree that YouTube isn't designed for useful debate. That being the case, I'd rather see them say they won't allow discussion of vaccines at all, rather than promote one viewpoint and suppress all others. That seems like a less troubling way to handle a disputed topic: opt out, don't pontificate.
I really like the /pol/ version of this where they just edited in if you were of a certain race how this comic would read. Needless to say, it's wrong and everyone who agrees with that comic is wrong.
Personally, I don't care what Youtube bans and believe they should just do whatever they like. I don't care because Youtube does not provide any essential service to society. The content they serve is entirely expendable. The same holds for Twitter and Facebook. You could close these content distribution sites tomorrow and nothing substantial would change. A few of their competitors would gain a larger user base and that's it. If you rely for your income on some of these media channels (like ad revenue), you have a bad business model.
Principally, however, there could be a quasi-monopoly that turns out so essential for society that they should be treated as a public utility with a right to access instead of a private company that can enforce whatever house rules they like within the boundaries of law. I just don't think YT (or FB or Twitter or Google...) are there yet and find it hilarious that butthurt Youtubers so grossly overestimate their own importance.
I think we have to ask if this won't have a chilling effect on open discussion by moderate voices. I'm subscribed to the channel of an M.D. on YouTube who discusses COVID-19, vaccines, etc. He is very careful to (repeatedly) point out that he is vaccinated, he has personally vaccinated hundreds of patients, he encourages everyone to speak to their doctor and follow their recommendations, believing that the vaccine is beneficial for the overwhelming majority of people. But, for all that, he has had videos taken down, and worries that it will happen again.
Months ago he was insisting that the people who had contracted COVID-19 and who had antibodies in their system may not need the vaccine. Now, we have a number of studies coming out to support that. But months ago that was "anti-vax" (employing the slanderous use of the term).
People are going to cheer that "wackos" will no longer have a platform. It's not the wackos we should be worrying about. It's the stifling of legitimate public debate, the stifling of legitimate voices who find themselves in the minority.
I was banned from a Reddit sub for saying that a previous Covid infection probably infers some immunity. This was around 8 months ago. Now EU vaccine passports accept a recovery from infection as being sufficient proof of immunity.
On top of that now it's coming out that the Canadian military/government (and likely others) was intentionally deploying propaganda to make the populace more compliant.
This is why moderate voices are being drowned out. I got vaccinated pretty much as soon as it was available to me. Yet to some on the left, I'm a rabid anti-vaxxer (!?!) and to my anti-vaxx friends, a sell-out (ironically, they're far less angry, just disappointed in me for not pushing back against government overreach).
We've seen repeatedly over the last two years truthful and helpful warnings classified as dangerous misinformation by big tech platforms.
First they censored people warning us about COVID itself, then they censored people saying we should wear masks, then they censored any talk of it coming from a lab.
Every time citizens try to spread the truth, they are censored. Sometimes the truth becomes so obvious that they can't censor anymore.
Facebook is directly responsible for censoring American expat groups in China that were trying to warn their families about COVID in late 2019.
Facebook has no problem shielding criminals and dictators for money[1]. They will eagerly censor innocent people speaking truth to power.
Corporate America will protect its interests from the people. They are invested in a new normal, and China, and they will censor us to protect their investments.
Even if something was wrong with the vaccines, or there was some effective new treatment, they would censor it regardless. So why should we ever big tech platforms the benefit of the doubt?
> Every time citizens try to spread the truth, they are censored.
You actually mean spread an opinion. I doubt any one citizen would conduct a trial or research; some may actually look at data, but that is rare. These are opinions, most likely biased by a belief.
> You actually mean spread an opinion. I doubt any one citizen would conduct a trial or research; some may actually look at data, but that is rare. These are opinions, most likely biased by a belief.
You could say that about most breaking news.
It is not reasonable to expect people to conduct a rigorous field research before sharing their observations, especially if people's lives are on the line.
I distinctly remember citizen journalists sharing videos and pictures of the chaos in China at the end of 2019, trying to warn us. I remember all the tech platforms and our media doing everything they could to suppress it.
The mere suggestion that covid came out of a lab was banned by youtube, and downvoted by Reddit and HN heavily at the time. You were considered a crazy person. Now its the leading theory. It shows how fast people listen to authoritarians in desperate times despite common sense lingering in the background. That phenomenon has led to terrible events in the past and carries forward today. If someone says you cant discuss/debate something be suspicious.
It's clear that COVID-19 is a bat virus isolated in or near laos that was then modified by EcoHealth Alliance and Peter Daszak such that it can infect humans at the WIV or the nearby Chinese equivalent to the CDC.
All of the investigations into the origin of COVID-19 have Daszak on their advisory boards, the conflict of interest is literally insane.
The idea that a lab leak isn't the most likely cause is just willful ignorance at this point.
When it goes from a 'racist conspiracy theory' to something that mainstream politicians and the media are talking about while the west is isolating China for not-so-obvious reasons, it becomes a leading theory. The amount of anti-China propaganda has been steadily increasing while the wet-market theory has been all but buried.
One of the tragedies of the Internet is that it deprives people of the opportunity to see the faces of everyone in the room when someone's talking. In real life, you can see that two people are loudly arguing and the other eight people in the room are looking at each other uncomfortably, or wandering away and congregating in a different room. On the Internet, you're not even aware of anyone but the hotheads, so it's all too easy to forget that they exist, and come to believe that their opinions are normal.
Which, since nobody likes to feel like they're the only one who thinks a certain way, probably does end up discouraging people from having moderate opinions over the long run.
+1 another side effect of internet is normalization of fringe behavior. Imagine some subculture/behavior that expresses one in 100k (0.0001% of people). And imagine most people know something on the order of 1000 ppl IRL. If those subcultured people congregate on the internet (~4.5B) we find a group of about 45k people which overwhelmingly validates that behavior to the group because it's a group so much larger than everyone they know in real life. It feels like it's so much more normal (as in within a std deviation) than it truly is.
It's totally benign when it's something like fans of silly hats, but also quite dark when its a criminal behavior.
This one factor explains so many of the niche issues that have exploded into the “mainstream”. Or more accurately: they’ve created an illusion of being mainstream.
This effect is so strong that some of the topics can barely be discussed any more without putting livelihoods and even personal safety at risk.
And it's not just social media either. Traditional media plays a big role in framing the discussion, as in every debate they make a point in making sure that to the other side of the responsible and well spoken scientist there's some rabid lunatic; thus the finer points never see the light of the day and everyone else trying to raise them gets bunched with the lunatics.
Anyone who shames you for taking/not taking a form of medicine can safely be ignored. I know it's easier said than done but things like HIPAA exist for a reason. It's no one's business.
Really? Has any public health authority said "it no one's business whether you have unprotected sex with strangers"? On the contrary, there were and there are many campaigns to get people to have less risky behaviors.
Campaigns to inform, yes! And that allowed those engaged in risky sexual behavior to make decisions for themselves. But shutting down the bathhouses and swingers parties and park bathrooms was considered a violation of rights.
Now contrast that approach with mandates and arresting store owners and closing businesses.
the lack of a strong public health response to the hiv epidemic was certainly NOT based from a place of respecting the rights of those who engaged in minority sexual behaviors, but the complete opposite - the mainstream culture didn’t particularly care if they, or intravenous drug users, lived or died.
Nonsense. From Arthur Ashe to Ryan White to Magic Johnson, there was continuous noise and encouragement around HIV prevention and research through the entire period. And narratives were manipulated then, too. Even into the early 90s, there was widespread public thought that HIV might be spread through saliva, even though the research was pretty clear it was spread almost exclusively via anal sex and intravenous drug use (and blood transfusions from an HIV+ donor).
What does that have to do with respecting human rights? The gp is correct in that most of society didn’t care about the “gay disease” hurting the undesirables so they didn’t put effort into fixing it. They weren’t refusing to use government or corporate power to enforce controls on behavior out of some noble intention to preserve the rights of the minority groups affected
What? Many countries wrote laws specifically forcing people with HIV to register themselves and to disclose it to sexual partners. In fact the relevant laws used for covid in my country where those written to combat HIV.
LOL. A global pandemic that causes extreme healthcare crises might require extreme policies. “Using the most extreme possible examples to justify a policy,” how laughable!
Next, read about Quarantine Acts. Most nations have them.
It’s everyone’s business. Vaccinations are to protect a population. Some industries require vaccinations before the employee can work and this isn’t a new behaviour. Not looking after staff and those the staff interact with would seem negligent and a potential liability.
I agree, we should also require people to disclose their sexually transmitted diseases publicly. Especially HIV, which is fatal when left untreated and for all but the most wealthy it's detected so late it's a death sentence. It's important that we insure these people with HIV are not only publicly shamed, but also are barred from employment where they may transmit their disease.
This is what you mean, right? A real deadly disease being an actual public health concern, to the point that we should not only publicly shame people, but also bar them from employment?
It is illegal in many places not to disclose HIV status with sexual partners. If you could transmit HIV by just being in the same room with someone for 15 minutes, then absolutely you should be required to disclose it.
> Thanks to California Senate Bill 329, as of January 1, 2017, it is no longer a felony for people who are HIV-positive to have unprotected sex and not disclose their status.[0]
Care to think about the vaccinated health workers who get breakthrough infection and transfer it to their unvaccinated daughter who had to get a lung transplant? (real story from US)
Your argument is that a vaccinated person with a breakthrough infection can not give another vaccinated person a breakthrough infection?
Obviously your anecdotal story is tragic. No denying. But the ends don't justify the means.
Most of these health workers have been on the frontlines since the beginning before the vaccine. Many already aquired COVID and have some natural immunity.
I leave you with this:
How about the story of the girl who died because there weren't enough healthcare workers to treat her in time because they were all fired?
More health workers are fed up with constant stream of unvaccinated patients in hospitals (also a big overlap between assholes and unvaccinated in USA where vaccines are available), so they would rather want everyone to be vaccinated. Ask your doctor friends and relatives.
What would your imaginary girl do when all ICU beds are occupied by the unvaccinated?
You're talking about the unvaccinated masses of patients.
The NY mandate was for nurses who worked throughout the pandemic.
We could debate the merits of mandated vaccination for the general public but this mandate is putting a squeeze on healthcare workers which will likely contribute to a worker shortage that will not be without it's own collateral damage.
At Houston Methodist, where 150 employees left from a work force of about 26,000 people, the hospital said that there had been little lasting effect on its ability to hire people. And when Texas was hit with rising numbers of Covid cases over the summer, the hospital found that fewer of its workers were out sick.
“The mandate has not only protected our employees, but kept more of them at work during the pandemic,” a hospital spokeswoman said in an email.
ChristianaCare, a hospital group based in Wilmington, Del., said on Monday that it had fired 150 employees for not complying with its vaccine mandate. But the group emphasized that over the last month it had hired more than 200 employees, many of whom are more comfortable working where they knew their colleagues were vaccinated.
Not such great news for the hopeful mothers planning or already carrying a child who wouldn't wish their unborn offspring as a medical experiment. These are real people with real concerns. Not crazies who think there is a microchip in the shot. Studies on long term fetal impact are impossible with the mandated timeline.
If a woman has a pro-choice right to abortion, then it seems a pro-choice right to a medical injection is in order. The two points are logically inconsistent with each other.
Sincerly,
~ A Covid Vaccinated Citizen
PS. See below [1] for reasons why someone might question a fast developed medication.
You have a pro choice right to not get injected. You don’t have a pro choice right to not get the vaccine, not get tested, and move about freely amongst others because you are now violating others bodily autonomy en masse by spreading disease.
If you aren’t fine with someone walking around firing a gun randomly in the air because the bullets “might” land on someone then I don’t see how you can be fine with someone walking around during a pandemic with no sorts of proof that they aren’t spreading the disease at a high rate.
Both behaviors are a not guaranteed to cause harm, but the likelyhood has risen high enough to warrant preventative measures
I was under the mistaken belief that vaccinated people could still spread the virus. Thanks for the correction. Which begs the question. Who are we protecting? That group has chose to not be protected. The argument is circular.
Disclaimer: I support vaccination. I do not support authoritarian mandates in this case.
Vaccinated people can still spread the virus _if they have a breakthrough infection_.
Since they have a radically lower incident of infection compared to the non vaccinated, the rate of transfer of Covid for the two groups is in no way equivalent.
Thanks for the opportunity to correct your misunderstanding.
Disclaimer: I do support people’s right’s to make decisions for themselves. I do not support people foisting their negative externalities on the rest of society under the guise that their actions have no side effects.
A "breakthrough infection" is still an infection, No? It seems that sophisticated semantics are being used in media to veil underlying weakness in the arguments and premises and move the goal post.
> That group has chose to not be protected.
The side effects of people choosing not to get vaccinated is that they will get sicker because they choose not to get vaccinated, Yes?
It is not my business if they self-risk getting sicker, or if they consume to much sugar, or don't exercise enough, or sky-dive.
Surely you can see how this narrative becomes a circular self contradictory "double bind" [1] that could go on forever. It's a very fascinating way to indirectly exert control [2].
[1] A double bind is a dilemma in communication in which an individual (or group) receives two or more reciprocally conflicting messages. In some scenarios (e.g. within families or romantic relationships) this can be emotionally distressing, creating a situation in which a successful response to one message results in a failed response to the other (and vice versa), such that the person responding will automatically be perceived as in the wrong, no matter how they response. This double bind prevents the person from either resolving the underlying dilemma or opting out of the situation. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_bind)
[2] Double binds are often utilized as a form of control without open coercion—the use of confusion makes them difficult both to respond to and to resist. ((https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_bind)
>A "breakthrough infection" is still an infection, No? It seems that sophisticated semantics are being used in media to veil underlying weakness in the arguments and premises and move the goal post.
What is the per capita rate of infection between the unvaccinated population and the vaccinated population? I feel like you may be unaware that the while the vaccinated and unvaccinated population spread Covid at the same rate when they are infected, you seem to not understand that the vaccinated population gets infected at a far lower rate than the unvaccinated population.
>The side effects of people choosing not to get vaccinated is that they will get sicker because they choose not to get vaccinated, Yes?
>It is not my business if they self-risk getting sicker, or if they consume to much sugar, or don't exercise enough, or sky-dive.
Ah, ok. Maybe we need to make sure we have a baseline understanding of reality.
Do you, or do you not believe in the concept of negative externalities?
For example, if I walk into public and lay out a pile of radioactive waste do you believe that
A:This is not an acceptable action in society because it hurts others
B: It is acceptable because no one has been hurt yet and we cannot constrain someone's actions until they have damaged someone else in a provable manner
C:a third option I have not thought of, as I am open to new kinds of thinking.
But! If choosing to prevent one negative externality causes another negative externality, well you're proper fucked now! Hence the "double bind".
Now in regards to your proposed question. Radioactive waste is a totally different issue. So that's a hard A!
Now if the question is:
If an unvaccinated person walks into a public space filled with other vaccinated and unvaccinated people all of which made their own personal choice based on their personal circumstances.
C.) Well that's just life right? Freedom is inherently risky. Life for that matter.
People die needlessly because they aren't treated in hospitals because the hospitals are too full with people with covid. The ends justify the means. Vaccination mandates are nothing new and covid justifies it so that life can go on again. We are not only throwing people under the bus who are horribly misinformed (imo misinformation is a euphemism) but also those who are immunocompromised and those I talked about earlier who can't get treatment for anything else.
Sounds about right for reddit. It is anti free speech and anti education. If it sounds good but is made up and spreading lies, top of the posts you go.
There's an overwhelming tendency now to boil down all opinions to either "right side of history" or "wrong side of history", "anti-science" or "pro-science". This is especially true on social media, YouTube. etc.
Out in the real world there is so much nuance. There are actually black people who don't agree with BLM. There are intellectual people who don't think they need the vaccine. There are Democrats who are pro-life. There are Republicans who support gay marriage. There are bunch of undecided people on a bunch of topics.
We are not all on one side or the other. There is so much middle ground. I still believe most people are in the vast expanse of middle ground.
This is so spot on. I have seen countless of times in forums how if someone voices concern about a vaccine they are immediately called "Trump supporter", even though they might not even be from the US. Especially in US though it seems that in people's minds there's just 2 types of people, one are allies and the other are enemies. Allies all have the exact same beliefs, and enemies exactly the opposite. Therefore if someone has a belief that doesn't agree with mine it means they must also hold all the other beliefs and must be of the enemy group. I think it's more than ridiculous. And you also can't hold a belief that's in between the other beliefs, this immediately means you are the enemy.
There's something in human nature such that when we learn something that we don't like about someone else, we wish to think them even worse, perhaps to feel justified in our own hatred.
I like the way C. S. Lewis wrote it:
> The real test is this. Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that
something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made
out. Is one's first feeling, "Thank God, even they aren't quite so bad as that," or is it a feeling of
disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking
your enemies as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process
which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black
was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as
black.
And this is a dogshit simplistic way to view the world that leads to our. Social media and all of this tribalism makes all American dumber. It's removing our ability to understand and appreciate nuance and learning how to get along with those who think differently.
Ironically it was the liberals I most associated with opposition to vaccines in the recent past. In 2020 everything just became so much more polarized.
Frogpelt has an understanding that so many lack. I wish there was some way for this middle ground to speak and make itself now.
This "tribal" devolution of everything to two sides on an issue with interlocking viewpoints on all subjects is a major problem in our current climate.
I agree the nuance of this situation is lost when there are so many people who do not see the nuance to begin with.
A culture that cannot understand nuance is a culture more likely to go to war. To see others as "other", not seeking common ground, but seeing things that differ as reasons to hate
Society in general has been making chilling moves away from free speech, and this has been accelerated by the pandemic. I hope the pendulum will swing the other way, but it's also possible to cross a tipping point where we just lose our way.
It's funny to me because Free Speech is one of those topics on its own that doesn't permit nuance in my experience - either you're for it or you're a dictator/sheep/lapdog/etc.
In reality though, laws have been limiting speech for hundreds of years, and those laws and judgements are enforced by the government. The idea that it is sacrosanct and is (and should "continue" to be) unabated is already not what happens. The usual example is about shouting bomb in an airport or fire in a crowded movie theatre but those are more about mischief than any freedom to say a thing (you aren't punished for the words alone). However, Libel and Slander laws exist and have for a long long time and are limits on free speech.
I'm not in favor of draconian laws designed to chill debate but it's important to recognize that limits already exist and how we navigate where to draw the line is the key I think.
Nobody complained when social media sites shut down ISIL videos or Taliban content. And why would they? Those are bad ideas from bad people! But anti-vaccine content? Why, that could be your neighbor! And your neighbor doesn't deserve to be censored (unlike the evil people who definitely needed to be)
That's a very selective interpretation on events. ISIS propaganda spread like wildfire through Twitter. The administration did nothing and the media barely made a peep about the root cause until the horses had already left the barn. None of these "concerned" stakeholders gave a shit about the socially corrosive nature of social media and they still don't beyond their own interests.
>Where's your proof that the administration did nothing? Shutting down terrorism content is about the easiest political slam dunk imaginable.
Before they were terrorists they were "insurgents" of the "Arab Spring". Something that the administration and Twitter/SM were more than willing to lean into before they lost control of the situation.
>I have never seen ISIS propaganda. Plenty of "Fauci went to school with Bill Gates and was CEO of Moderna" memes, though.
That's more a function of your age and filter bubble not whether there was ISIS propaganda which is well documented.
This is a very strange approach to discourse. What action do you think was taken and where's the documentation?
The administration was openly showing support for the Arab Spring mobs and even built up a military coalition in its support. Lack of knowledge on current events isn't the same as taking a skeptical stance.
Social media companies actually had a hugely successful anti-ISIS recruiting and propoganda campaign. This was something that everyone wanted a bit of credit for, but was ultimately totally uncontroversial because terrorists bad and no one complains when companies deplatform them.
Your assertion is orthogonal to the original thread. When the "Arab Spring" started all the talking heads were going on about free speech, Democratic values, the positive role social media is playing, and beating the war drums. It's only after the situation had started threatening geopolitical interests did the tune change.
>Social media companies actually had a hugely successful anti-ISIS recruiting and propoganda campaign.
I question if that's the case. That's like closing the barn doors after the horses have already left. The networks were already in place. The damage already done.
Aggregators like r/syriancivilwar had no shortage of atrocities to share most of which directly from social media.
I'm having a hard time seeing your point. It seems like you're saying that because [entities] only started to do online counterinsurgency once ISIS was somewhat established, those entities didn't actually try to shutdown extremist content.
And well that's silly for two reasons. The first is that the social media landscape was very different 10 years (yeah really!) ago when the Arab Spring started, the companies didn't have "stop terrorism" on their radar.
The second is well until 2013 or 2014, ISIS wasn't really a thing (of note). So no one cared. For better or worse, denoting something as a terrorist organization matters. Countering terrorist propoganda sounds a lot better than countering propoganda put out by arab spring protestors agitating for more democratic governments.
And actually a third is that a lot of the initial arab spring was explicitly about pro-democratic and non-muslim or more secular governments. So this whole complaint doesn't make a lot of sense. Like yes, people were in favor of the use of social media for democratic organizing.
I'm just very confused, what point are you trying to convey.
The start of this thread is a comparative juxtaposition of anti-vaxxer and terrorist content. I think that's an interesting thought experiment but requires historical context with an emphasis on the roles social media and realpolitik played. Put bluntly, social media is socially corrosive, we are experiencing a non-partisan leadership vacuum, and all these polarizing events aren't as different as they seem.
>And well that's silly for two reasons. The first is that the social media landscape was very different 10 years (yeah really!) ago when the Arab Spring started, the companies didn't have "stop terrorism" on their radar.
10 years later and social media is still driven by polarizing engagement metrics and addictive anti-patterns. Banning content is an insufficient bandaid at best and scapegoat at worst. Fundamentally the same landscape.
>And actually a third is that a lot of the initial arab spring was explicitly about pro-democratic and non-muslim or more secular governments. So this whole complaint doesn't make a lot of sense. Like yes, people were in favor of the use of social media for democratic organizing.
It's not a given that it was about democracy any more it's a given antivaxxers are about safety/freedom. Are these the real issues, are they proxy issues, or is it layers of both?
occasionally I like to view the internet through a translating service. It's fascinating how different the world becomes outside Western European languages.
I didn't cheer. I don't cheer unless the videos are snuff (a beheading) or pornographic (not in ISIS' case).
For the later I wouldn't even erase such content from the internet. All I demand is a proper age verification system for viewers and the actors. More guarantees that the actresses aren't, in fact, being abused by their situation would be nice - what can I say, I dare to dream.
So you agree that there should be restrictions on speech that negatively impacts public health then. You just disagree on where the line should be drawn.
Those were essentially recruitment videos for enemies we were literally at war with. If we are literally at war with individuals skeptical of the COVID-19 vaccines, we should say so.
This is true, there are no absolute rights. However, the examples you cite have no resemblance to the stifling of careful discussion which might, in some way, question the wisdom of universal vaccination or inquire about the long-term effects, etc. That kind of speech is qualitatively different from incitement to violence and other clear and present danger cases. So I'm not sure how pointing out that in some abstract sense rights are never absolute has any bearing on this discussion. The chilling of speech in the public square that we are currently witnessing has no clear limits and the logic used to justify it ends up making this tantamount to setting up some kind of a wrongspeak standard. In a free society, individuals must be uninhibited in their investigation of the wisdom of public health policy. Equating this to the "yeling fire in a crowded theater" case is silly.
> In reality though, laws have been limiting speech for hundreds of years, and those laws and judgements are enforced by the government. The idea that it is sacrosanct and is (and should "continue" to be) unabated is already not what happens. The usual example is about shouting bomb in an airport or fire in a crowded movie theatre but those are more about mischief than any freedom to say a thing (you aren't punished for the words alone). However, Libel and Slander laws exist and have for a long long time and are limits on free speech.
Why is it that I have never heard these laws cited outside the context of justifying additional restrictions on freedom of speech, and especially restrictions on political speech? Without digging for an example, when is the last time you personally encountered someone who was prosecuted for saying a naughty word in a movie theater or saying mean things about someone online?
> either you're for it or you're a dictator/sheep/lapdog/etc.
This is the nature of the things we come to see as rights. Why is an X a 'right' and not just a nice idea? Because of a history of political entrepreneurs pushing, pushing, pushing against it -- it's just a reasonable tradeoff for this case, can't you see?
A right is a Schelling fence beyond which the 'reasonable' tradeoffs must face a much stronger presumption against them. Of course the world is complicated. One of the most salient complications is the ubiquity through history of clever people with justifications why they need power over others. When in this context you bring up the indisputable fact that no human question is 100% clear, the effect is to weaken the fence.
Academics have warned that their faculties get more ideological and contrarian views are suppressed, people begin to self-censor. There is certainly a very real threat to freedom of expression, opinion, speech or whatever you want to call it. I think in exchange we should recognize this a well.
That is of course also fundamentally contrary to your lapdog characterization.
I’ll be voting for anyone that advocates civil liberties.
Another thing that is not talked about enough is how small minority of people in Silicon Valley gets to dictate how the rest of the world sees information. Algorithms and things that Big Tech is doing behind the closed doors to influence the world. It doesn’t matter left or right, what matters is the unbelievable power of say 1000 people in SV that figured out content engagement algorithms at Google, Twitter, FB, Apple News, etc.
The most powerful people on earth are those that govern algorithms that preferentially show content to people. In China that’s their Big Tech fused with CCP, in the west it is SV Big Tech shunning anything that’s not woke. FB is an exception but even within FB there is a rout.
> small minority of people in Silicon Valley gets to dictate how the rest of the world sees information
if you think that minority is confined to silicon valley and "big tech" i think you'll be in for a rude awakening, but in this case youtube removing anti-vax videos when its obvious disinformation is a good thing imo
We need to start applying free speech to internet platforms as well -- an updated first amendment. Times have changed and these platforms can deny speech, effectively silencing political opposition. The people cheering it on are happy because their political opponents are being silenced. But imagine if the shoe were on the other foot. If you're a coward, you won't speak out against it. You'd rather relish your opponents getting deplatformed.
Anti-vax and ant-mask conspiracy theories aren't legitimate political opposition being deplatformed. They're dangerously false views making a pandemic worse. It doesn't matter who spreads them.
I’m not sure if this is true. I think there has always been restrictions to free speech, it’s just what’s not allowed has changed over the years. Try having pro Soviet material in the 70s.
I guess it depends on what you mean by "pro Soviet material" but Academia and adjacent fields were full of USSR sympathizers in the 70s. People like Marcuse were/are very influential figures.
Marcuse was a communist but not pro-Soviet by most measures.
Academia did indeed have quite a few Soviet sympathetic figure. Tbh, I'm not sure why the gp picked the 70's. The cold war was mostly thawing then as the failure of the USSR was becoming visible (though Reagan partly reignited it in 80s). The 1950s was a period where real and suspected sympathizers of the USSR were drummed out of their positions in academia, entertainment and elsewhere. The witch hunts died down in the 1960s as US society relaxed a bit itself.
What has 'social media' got to do with free speech? Who is stopping you saying what you want? If what you mean is that what write or say is not beamed on everyone's phone, that is not a free speech issue, it's that you can't persuade anyone to publish what you say, which is totally different.
>Society in general has been making chilling moves away from free speech
Private companies in the US have always had the right to refuse a customer anytime, for any reason. No shirt, no shoes, no service. Should a social media company be treated differently?
Massive social media platforms are blurring the lines of what public communication means in context of the public square.
We need careful consideration on both sides, and it's disingenuous to pretend that they're simply a private business and that we can treat them as if they aren't effectively virtual public squares that dwarf anything in the real world in scale and reach.
McDonalds has more than 10X the revenue of its closest competitor (KFC). Should they be prohibited from kicking out a customer who is causing a nuisance?
> It's not the wackos we should be worrying about.
It's really amazing to me how easily the "left" was able to be tricked in the same death of critical thinking as the "right".
The "stick to the libs!" angle is far more responsible for the rise in support of Trump leading up to the election. People on the "right" were manipulated for decades into reducing their political beliefs to defending themselves from a fictitious adversary (this is why I put quotes around these terms). If you listen to any radical Trump supporter you'll quickly see that a large part of their logic is based on a deeply held belief that roughly half the country is mind washed, irrational liberals that seek to destroy their way of life.
This rewriting of people skeptical of the vaccines as "wackos" serves the same purpose for the "left" and mainstream progressives have gobbled it up without hesitation. They now see roughly half the country as a bunch mind washed, irrational "wackos" that are a threat to the foundations of our society.
Both the "left" and "right" (terms which honestly don't make any political sense any more, evidence by exactly this irrational support for corporate suppression of voices on the "left" and it's dissent on the "right") are currently structured so that any real, meaningful political discourse about the future of the country is dissolved into two insane groups of people throwing rocks at each other.
If you find yourself defined by either of these major narratives, then you are being played.
What angle about vaccine skepticism isn't summarized as "it might negatively impact you so maybe don't get it".
The vaccine is totally the tragedy of the commons. If everybody gets it you are just making your life worse by also getting it.
If nobody gets it it is bad for everybody.
The reality is sometimes everybody collectively deciding to take one for the team is exactly what we need. Vaccination is one of those situations.
There are exceptions, I don't mean to imply otherwise, but those are not what is being talked about.
"Maybe we shouldn't vaccinate those who have been infected to vaccinate someone else" is being used to justify those who were presumed infected to not get vaccinated. The nuance is getting lost in a painful way.
I don't think that's a complete characterization of the anti-vaccine "movement" or "meme." It's also rooted in distrust of the government science institutions. For instance, many people are taking ivermectin at some risk to themselves, since prolonged human consumption of ivermectin may have adverse effects.
You're sketching a number of false equivalences. Left-of-center-in-the-US and Right-of-center-in-the-US each have their problems but that's bad argument for those being the same problems.
I don't think it's a conspiracy theory to say a substantial portion of anti-vaccine arguments have come from profit-driven fraud. That's pretty well document. That was the point of origin of the original study and various fraudsters have ridden that 'till today. Of course, there are those with nuance positions on the vaccines this will hurt them and hurt informed. Oppositely, the liars have effectively killed many people at this point.
There are a few actual fraudsters on the left but most active health-craze fraud is concentrated on the right in New Age circles (which can generally no longer be considered left).
Which is to say, the left-of-center has a number of problem (absurdist moralistic posturing, say) but straight-up-lying isn't equally divided here, among the politically respectable, it's concentrated on the right.
It’s easy to condemn the quacks and extremely ill informed, but all sorts of opinions get swept away. Skeptics, those who want to study the details, exceptions, oddities, etc., get swept up by the system thus stifling legitimate debate and learning of a critical topic.
Covid is a serious disease, there is denying of that. But information control of this kind is far more insidious and overtakes Covid here by a few steps in my opinion.
There is a loud advertising crowd that is transparently motivated to stick it to some deniers that will welcome this and I think they put pressure on Youtube. In some form they deserve each other.
I think this behavior is just as resistant to learning, not hat I think that this measure will even net you one more vaccinated person or that it will change any position. So this only incurs huge cost without benefit.
The stifling seems to be by design, or at the very least it's being considered acceptable collateral damage. Our modern censorship infrastructure does not see minority voices as legitimate.
That infrastructure may not even be capable (as evidenced here) of allowing for minority voices or any form of nuanced dissent, because it has been outsourced to a combination of incompetent "AI" (or dumb algorithms) as well as underpaid, understaffed, undertrained humans.
We are reaping the benefits of tech companies prioritisation of "scale" above all else.
> People are going to cheer that "wackos" will no longer have a platform. It's not the wackos we should be worrying about. It's the stifling of legitimate public debate, the stifling of legitimate voices who find themselves in the minority.
My opinion is that we didn't need YouTube/Facebook to conduct public policy debate before, and we don't need it now. It has brought nothing to the table except the, as you put it, "wackos". I really challenge the idea that there is value to them at all in the public debate.
Take this example you gave (by the way I agree that the doctor in question was doing good work). This doctor, 20 years ago, had direct influence in his own practice, some influence in his hospital, and maybe some influence in the health agency, although that is mostly reserved to the politically connected "big doctors" who sit at the top.
What is his influence to enact public policy change today? The exact same as it was then. He's no closer to personally convince his health agency or Hospital administration than he was 20 years ago. The difference is that now he has direct influence over millions of people, outside of any nuanced structure or supervision.
We may argue this isn't great, or democratic, that is true. But it is also true that YouTube videos and Facebook commenters have contributed nothing of value to public health debate. No single life was saved because of YouTube, except for videos where people were urged to see a "real doctor" and not follow Internet advice.
---
As a more general note, I always find the idea that YouTube/Facebook are free speech enablers disturbing. They are companies, they have nothing to do with rights. We have to perform a simple test: If YouTube went bankrupt tomorrow and had to close doors, would someone's right to Free Speech be diminished? They would suddenly not be able to reach as many people, but they'd still hold the exact same rights.
I would say the distinction here is allowing some parties "direct influence over millions of people" and not others. As other commenters have pointed out, it feels like the decision on who gets access to the "virtual town square" is a small, un-elected, and limited-accountability group.
I do agree with your final point-- if social media went dark tomorrow, no ones rights would be diminished. But if it went dark for only certain people, I think we would agree that -something- is being diminished (even if it's not necessarily a right or that it's in the best interest of everyone).
I fully believe that this is a topic where people get to land differently, and I respect those that do their mental calculus differently. There's so many second-order and third-order effects when it comes to speech, and then you amplify it to global-level... there's no great, clean answer. But ultimately, we get to choose what we weigh as most important-- as I've heard others on HN say, "If we wrap ourselves around every conceivable axle then nothing will be achieved."
I agree with you it's a hard topic. I consider myself jaded. I'm not even old and am starting to think the "olden days" (20 years ago) were simpler and saner. My perspective is of someone who is completely disillusioned with all of it. I don't think Social Media can have a net-positive impact in the world at all, even if I use it and find many good parts in it. The ugly bits will always outweigh the positive.
We have to ask ourselves: what are these new tools and inventions being used for? Are we better off today, where everyone has access to this virtual square, or 30 years ago where no one really had a place to say what were on their minds? I think it's clear, with respect to COVID-19, we're much worse off since the tools like YouTube and Facebook are being used to worsen the epidemic, not make it better.
Obviously it can have a good impact. I use YouTube everyday to educate myself on multiple topics (mainly history, computer science, architecture -- non-contentious things). I love that aspect of it, I have more access to knowledge now than I ever thought possible. But in order to limit YouTube to that it'll have to be heavily regulated and stripped down. Which raises the questions of free speech.
Still, I think we may find in a few decades that things like Facebook/Twitter/Youtube were better off left uninvented, never to have seen the light of day, like VX gas and nuclear bombs.
I wonder if the thing that should be uninvented is the profit motive for political speech. Why do people have to be paid to share their political opinions? We could still have Youtube and people saying whatever they like, but in a way that neither Youtube nor the creator is financially rewarded for popularity. Somehow. Of course that applies to traditional media too which is divisive because its profitable.
One of the reasons we find ourselves even in such a predicament is so odd: while governments the world over were (and are) quite willing to put very strong curbs, shut-downs etc. in place, they are hesitant to generally mandate vaccination. So now we are in these proxy campaigns on vaccinations.
Of course, one could argue that governments should not/cannot mandate vaccination, but then we also generally accept that governments can send you off to die in wars. Generally speaking, this whole mess actually brings some much deeper issues on state vs the individual to the surface. Those are the ones that will eventually need proper debate much more than finer points on immunology.
It would look like this: people get dragged out of their houses by armed men, and are forcibly injected while screaming and being held down. "We also send people off to war" is not a sufficient argument for removing the right to bodily autonomy.
Edit: oh, and probably you wouldn't get to see any videos of it online, because it's anti-vaccination content. Haha.
yet we force our children to be vaccinated in school in order to be part of society.
we also force other things that impinge on personal liberty, such as wearing seatbelts, getting car (and medical) insurance, etc.
I can see the argument that this is a slippery slope, such as "well, the common good dictates that I get this neuro implant to ward off the 2157 neurovirus", and unfortunately, the short answer is "it depends on the context".
Right now, vaccine holdouts are really screwing things up for us who want to return to some form of normality.
as with war measures or other emergency measures, personal liberty has historically been set aside for the common good. I don't see this going away, nor should it.
The conversation should be how to draw the right balance, so that, when the emergency is over, we return to some modicum of personal liberty, while still preserving the common good.
In some cases, it means that the mandate becomes the accepted practice (e.g., child vaccinations). In others, we would hope, personal liberty returns (e.g., habeas corpus).
TL;DR: it is contextual, rather than dogmatic and a-priori
> yet we force our children to be vaccinated in school in order to be part of society.
It's important to note that this isn't some worldwide, universal practice. Many countries, such as the UK, do not have vaccine mandates to enter their school system. There are also different rules in different U.S. states. It's also quite unfair to compare vaccines that have 1-3 doses to essentially vaccinate children for a lifetime against horrible and deadly diseases to a vaccine that needs endless boosters for a disease which presents very little risk for children or immune adults. My child isn't required to get an annual flu shot to go to school and I don't see how this is much different.
So I agree it is contextual and I think this is the proper context.
Also, all of these vaccines that ARE mandated for children against said horrible and deadly diseases were tested for YEARS prior to becoming mandatory to ensure that they are safe for children.
It is impossible to have that dataset for the COVID vaccines. The time has not elapsed yet. The trials have not been done. They are rushing to approve them in a sense of emergency, which I do understand. I do also acknowledge that the data so far is promising! I certainly hope that the vaccines are safe for children and that we can use these going forward in the future.
But I want the process followed; the full 3-5 year trial test before these are mandated. The emergency push for this towards children would be different if COVID was killing the same % of children that it kills the very old. But the data is overwhelming clear the world over: children do not die from COVID; well over 99% have no deaths or long term issues.
>Right now, vaccine holdouts are really screwing things up for us who want to return to some form of normality.
Is this even true anymore? Delta is highly contagious and the vaccines are leaky, thus it is not obvious that the effective R0 of Delta will be less than one assuming a fully vaccinated population. We already know that vaccinated people can still be infected, and not at minuscule rates, and once infected they are similarly contagious as an unvaccinated person. If Delta is endemic now, blaming the unvaccinated for the ongoing pandemic is just false.
It’s not true, because I know people with children under 5 who are prepared to socially isolate until their kids are able to get the vaccine because they believe you have a >50% chance of hospitalization due to COVID.
Some people are playing the long game and blaming vaccine holdouts, which in cases like this is irrational (but who said people are rational).
>Right now, vaccine holdouts are really screwing things up for us who want to return to some form of normality.
I think the challenge here is the media and the government are heavily promoting the MESSAGE that vaccine holdouts are screwing things up for everyone.
But the truth is that they are not. The unvaccinated are unvaccinated at their own choice. If they die from not being vaccinated, that's their problem.
I'm open to having triage laws at a hospital where, if they are overwhelmed with the unvaccinated, they can be sidelined for others coming in with other needs. The unvaccinated do have this strain on the medical system and it cannot be ignored. As many have said, the DEATHS from Delta and most of the hospitalized CASES from Delta are indeed among the unvaccinated.
But I think the right to chose is worth the cost.
Delta is also spreading around among the vaccinated. It is indeed true that Delta cases for the vaccinated are far more mild. Almost none result in hospitalization, never mind in death.
But Delta is endemic, vaccinated or not. For the first year of this virus, there NEVER was the assumption we could eradicate it entirely. It's a Coronavirus like the common cold; it WILL be endemic. There never was any other outcome once it passed into the millions of cases world wide.
The left's fantasy of authoritarian control and creating a perfect world from harm is simply unobtainable.
The common good is to learn to deal with this, as we do the flu. Reopen, learn, make the choices you think are best and deal with the consequences. This nanny state of lockdown to try to achieve the impossible is stupid, and turning tyrannical in it's pursuit of a utopia that cannot be had.
>yet we force our children to be vaccinated in school in order to be part of society.
Here's what's different: mandating it for everything else. It seems disingenuous to treat the documentation/mandate requirements between countries, public schools, and your local pub as equivalent.
>e also force other things that impinge on personal liberty, such as wearing seatbelts, getting car (and medical) insurance, etc.
"we do it for these other things" is something that sounds like an argument, but actually isn't. Does it make sense for this scenario, with this virus, at this point into the pandemic, and with these tradeoffs? If anything, saying "you've lost liberty elsewhere" is an argument for fighting tooth and nail for the bits that remain.
>the short answer is "it depends on the context".
I think you nailed the crux of the problem and the disconnect between people.
"The context" is wildly different depending on your disposition. For a large swath of the population, the 'context' is that COVID is not an existential threat which warrants the suspension of liberty. For others, the 'context' is that COVID represents such a threat to public health that personal liberty can be traded away.
We're doomed to fight, because each side finds the other reprehensible, and one side is trying to take away the liberty of the other.
>Right now, vaccine holdouts are really screwing things up for us who want to return to some form of normality.
This is categorically false. The unvaxxed aren't the ones preventing you from doing anything. They don't have the power to do so! The government is holding us all hostage and continuously shifting the goal post. Right now, it has been moved to the unvaxxed. Just as before it was about the curve, then controlling case numbers, then acquiring the vax, then reaching minimum vax numbers, now blaming all woes on those unvaxxed. If we look at Australia, maybe we can predict where the post will move next.
>The conversation should be how to draw the right balance, so that, when the emergency is over, we return to some modicum of personal liberty, while still preserving the common good.
For it to actually be a conversation, you have to accept that there are people with a different world view from you, and that they're not wrong, nor an enemy which is holding society hostage. Presumably everyone on this site can read a graph. We looked at the same data and came to different conclusions.
replying to this comment, even though actually applies to multiple replies to my parent comment.
> This is categorically false. The unvaxxed aren't the ones preventing you from doing anything. They don't have the power to do so!
That itself is categorically false. unvaxxed folks provide a tremendous wealth of externalities, such as undue burden on the healthcare system, behavioral and legal changes that require masking due to lack of critical mass in vaccinations, etc.
But, to get to the crux of your arguments:
you do have the personal liberty to not vaccinate. That is not being taken away from you.
However, you do not have the privilege of making it a protected class (which is really what you are talking about).
If you choose not to be vaccinated, you can:
- home school your children
- self-employ and self-insure
- self-medicate and avoid the healthcare system entirely
etc..
Now, none of this is practical in reality, but never at any point is your choice to remain unvaccinated impinged upon.
You simply don't have as many career or social options as you would like, equivalent to being unvaccinated as a protected class.
And that is a horrendous idea (i.e., being a protected class). You can't have it both way... personal liberty often comes as great personal cost. If you truly walk the walk, then be prepared to pay the cost.
>That itself is categorically false. unvaxxed folks provide a tremendous wealth of externalities, such as undue burden on the healthcare system, behavioral and legal changes that require masking due to lack of critical mass in vaccinations, etc.
Again, it's not the unvaxxed doing that to you. That's who you're currently being told is what's preventing you from returning to normal. And again, the last last 18months have been an ever shifting goal post of "if group X would do then..." or "if we had just done Y then..." and yet here we are. Too bad HN doesn't have RemindMe!, as we could check back in a few months post mandate to see what dastardly group/cause/issue is the problem this time.
Those "tremendous wealth of externalities"? That's called living in a society. There's no getting around it. Lots of negative, bad individual choices/actions have Nth order effects on everyone else. Americans specifically make a lot of very, very bad choices over the course of decades that causes "undue burden on the healthcare system" (pick you fav from the CDC's health report). Just because they're not as visible and 1st order as COVID doesn't mean they're not there and a massive portion of the hospital's load.
>you do have the personal liberty to not vaccinate. That is not being taken away from you.
>never at any point is your choice to remain unvaccinated impinged upon.
Ok. Honestly, I don't know where people come from with this argument. "You don't have to, we'll just remove your ability to work, feed yourself, and pay for housing until you comply." These sorts of things are generally challenged because in practice, it's a de facto mandate/ban/whatever. "You're free to choose size of the whip," where previously there was no beating involved, is not actually that great of a deal.
I don't think we're going to agree here, and that's fine.
There is one interesting outcome of this discussion, though:
Given our discussion, one of us has to bite the bullet on a particular point:
Artifact A:
> Those "tremendous wealth of externalities"? That's called living in a society. There's no getting around it.
Artifact B:
>These sorts of things are generally challenged because in practice, it's a de facto mandate/ban/whatever. "You're free to choose size of the whip,"...
I will bite the bullet, and accept that unvaccinated people are not directly causing me harm (unless, for example, one punches me in the face). I will wave my hands and accept the externalities as simply "living in society", (even though, as societal beings, unvaccinated folks do have a significant detrimental effect...)
Accepting, for the sake of argument, that personal responsibility ends at what the individual does (rather than any 2nd to n-order effects, i.e., "externalities"), then it also means that the argument "in practice, it's a de facto mandate/ban/whatever." doesn't hold, since no one individual is holding a syringe up to you and forcing you to take it.
again, can't have it both ways.
Thus, if we accept that we are societal beings, and externalities matter (e.g., 2nd to n-order effects), then my right to swing my fist ends at your face, and vice versa, directly and to a tolerable n-th degree.
Just as an employer can choose not to hire you for toxic behavior or any numerous reasons (particularly at at-will states), the only thing they cannot use as a factor is anything that makes you a protected class.
You are effectively proposing that the choice to be unvaccinated should be a protected class.
That is what I disagree with. There is no justification to make it a protected class.
It's a privilege to drive, not a right, thus it's reasonable that there are conditions around that.
You do have a right to an education but, at least in my state, you can completely exempt your child from vaccines and still send them to public school. But even if you don't, you have the right to educate your child in other ways (i.e. home school).
Arguably; drafts do look like that. I mean, I can't say how many people scream while being dragged off to fight in a war, but the concept is very similar.
There hasn't been a draft in most of our lifetimes. There also hasn't been a virus as deadly as this one.
So, maybe the better frame of reference would be: nationally mandatory vaccinations can be alright and make sense, under the same argument that allows the draft to be alright and make sense; we just need some quantitative framework under which it can be instituted.
For example: if covid becomes endemic (which seems to be likely), and we institute mandatory vaccinations for it during this phase of the pandemic, pre-endemic; the argument for mandatory vaccinations may make sense today, given the level of infections and deaths that are occurring, but will "mandatory boosters" make sense in three years when the level of deaths is (hopefully) far lower and more in-line with the seasonal flu?
The critical difference between a draft and mandatory vaccinations is: most people understand the general need for, but also hate the implementation of, the draft. Its a duty; its not desirable. In a democracy, this, alongside the massive cost and logistics effort of maintaining such a large army, acts as a very natural counter-balance to the impetus for people in power to abuse it.
Vaccines do not have such a counterbalance. They're very cheap per-shot, relative to the draft. The logistics are already in place and have successfully operated at scale. And, most concerning; many people want mandatory vaccination. No one should want it. Its an ugly necessity, but far too many people don't see the ugliness.
If you're reading this and need help to see the ugliness: Our government experiences corruption, like any government. Moderna's stock value has gone up by ~2,000% since the beginning of the pandemic. This, alone, is an obscenely powerful bias for people in key positions of power to push for more vaccination, irrespective of their need or efficacy; for example, maybe you assemble a panel of experts, who tell you vaccine boosters aren't necessary, then overrule the panel and say they're necessary anyway [1].
> And, most concerning; many people want mandatory vaccination. No one should want it.
The alternative is overflowing hospitals, masks forever and the restrictions on movement. I 100% want those who force this on society to stopped. The last 18 months have already been tremendously ugly. A vaccine mandate is far less so.
It is, if nothing else, hopefully proof to anyone with eyes that the Left is just as susceptible as the Right to turning something which should mostly be a medical decision, into a political one. Let alone the possibility that it could be corruption (which I feel is unlikely, but not impossible).
Much ire was thrown at Trump during his Presidency for filling many government positions with Yes-men who would blindly fall in line with the party.
Now, we have Biden's White House ranting non-stop about Boosters, a significant amount of concern that the Federal government, as a whole, has no unified message on whether boosters are even necessary and who they're necessary for, a CDC panel saying they're not necessary, and the head of the CDC falling in line with the Biden White House against medical advice. Its awfully similar to what Trump was lambasted for.
Ultimately the position I fall back on is: These decisions are medical decisions. Politics (and, it follows, corruption) need to be removed. When you take issues to the national level, politics and corruption will ABSOLUTELY, undoubtedly, in 100% of instances, be involved, no matter how well-intentioned the cause is. Thus, these issues need to stay out of the federal government, and be handled among the smallest number of people possible. Vaccination, for me and my children, may be something my doctor recommends; it may be something my school system requires; maybe even my workplace and the state has a say. But the discussion inevitably reaches a lower and lower quality as more voices and mandates and requirements are added.
The counter-argument to this is: Vaccination is only strongly effective if we reach some level of herd immunity, so we need federal mandates. Unfortunately, that's irrelevant; we live in a democracy, and if you push against the other side too hard, they push back, your mandate gets repealed, and your yes-men lose their re-election.
May point was: you already have only a limited right to bodily autonomy.
But that aside: I think pushing people in some (oblique) ways towards vaccination while at the other hand not mandating it sends a somewhat confused message.
I'm not sure if there is really any widespread acceptance in any democratic country that the government can just decide to send anyone to a foreign war. Every western soldier who died in Iraq, Afghanistan etc. volunteered. I think that if the US government just decided to reintroduce conscription back in 2003 it would had went down much worse than when they were sending conscripts to Vietnam and there'd probably be even much more resistance to that these days.
I’m not sure if you are familiar with Stop-loss [1] but it’s been used to some extent in pretty much every conflict over the last 30 years to keep people serving involuntarily.
Which country has given up its ability to conscript? Not just chosen not to exercise it. I would call that general acceptance of that policy. In a specific case, whether to exercise on that policy is a more complex choice.
There are many things governments in theory could legally do that would not be generally accepted by the public. I can hardly imagine a realistic scenario under which any western country could deploy conscripts in an overseas war without extreme opposition.
Indeed. I rationalized it so: COVID is a wild enemy that will do whatever to survive at our own expense. We need to fight and wage all-out war, conscript, treat the wounded and comfort the widowed.
That is not rational at all. It's a manageable disease class with limited health impact on population, in death numbers comparable to strokes. It is not appropriate to compare it to war at all; in most places people are not afraid of COVID much.
It’s only manageable with heavy handed medical care and heavy handed containment to preserve care capacity. Have you been living under a rock or are you just trotting out talking points? Let me ask: how many deaths in the USA alone? How does it compare to KIAs in one of the many US wars? Please stop pretending you know what you’re talking about
For the whole year 2020, heart disease was 2x bigger killer (700 thousand) than COVID (350 thousand). Cancer was bigger killer still than COVID. Stroke was smaller than COVID - I was wrong about that.
COVID gets scary in the few months when it gets out of control, like in January [2]. Those trips are a reason to use some extraordinary measures to prevent next ones.
Yes, like every infectious disease with a high mortality rate and capable of overwhelming our healthcare infrastructure. And no, the world of professionals do care, as always. You’re talking about yourself
> Months ago he was insisting that the people who had contracted COVID-19 and who had antibodies in their system may not need the vaccine. Now, we have a number of studies coming out to support that. But months ago that was "anti-vax" (employing the slanderous use of the term).
If you're claiming something that hasn't been demonstrated through peer-reviewed scientific research, then you're offering your opinion. If you present that opinion as a fact, then that's misinformation. I don't know what form his "insistence" had, but I've seen plenty of similar cases so far, and all of them have been from people pushing their own narratives, instead of informing people responsibly.
If you're pushing a narrative that implies that you shouldn't get vaccinated, then yes, that's "anti-vax".
> It's the stifling of legitimate public debate, the stifling of legitimate voices who find themselves in the minority.
Being in a minority does not absolve one of responsibility. If you're publishing your opinion, or if you're discussing your research before it's been peer-reviewed, you have the responsibility to make that clear, and even to point out that it does not agree with the current scientific consensus (if any exists).
> If you're claiming something that hasn't been demonstrated through peer-reviewed scientific research, then you're offering your opinion.
By that standard, this entire website and most of the software industry is misinformation. In fact, most political speech is misinformation.
> If you're pushing a narrative that implies that you shouldn't get vaccinated, then yes, that's "anti-vax".
GP is saying that the conversation is, and should be recognized as, more nuanced than that. There sure is an undercurrent of people making narratives but that's not a new problem. The left and right have weaponized narratives to the detriment of this country ad infinitum. If you're arguing we should only have evidence based discussion and that anecdotes and opinions don't matter, then you have new problems. The new problems will alienate and harm anyone that your current telemetry (and understanding) doesn't reflect. To me, that's an age-old problem where some value technocracy while others value bureaucracy; my personal opinion being that both are valuable but they need a distribution model in government that optimizes for problem solving.
> If you're publishing your opinion, or if you're discussing your research before it's been peer-reviewed, you have the responsibility to make that clear, and even to point out that it does not agree with the current scientific consensus (if any exists).
I agree, but it seems GP was indicating this doctor was doing just that and was still silenced.
> By that standard, this entire website and most of the software industry is misinformation.
Sure, if we ignore the context of my statement and this whole discussion, which happens to be about COVID vaccines.
Also, please note that what I said -- and what you quoted -- is that if your claim is not supported by peer-reviewed scientific research, then you're offering your opinion. I didn't say that offering your opinion is the same as spreading misinformation.
It's only when you're presenting your opinion as a fact that you're engaging in misinformation, which is what I said in the next sentence that you didn't quote.
> GP is saying that the conversation is, and should be recognized as, more nuanced than that.
"Having a nuanced discussion" and "being responsible with how you say things" are not mutually exclusive propositions.
> If you're arguing we should only have evidence based discussion and that anecdotes and opinions don't matter, then you have new problems.
Anecdotes and opinions should be clearly presented as such, so that everyone who encounters them can decide how much they matter to them. That's what I'm arguing.
> I agree, but it seems GP was indicating this doctor was doing just that and was still silenced.
I see nothing there that indicates whether the doctor was doing that or not. Like I said, I don't know whether the doctor "insisted" in a way that made it clear it was his opinion, unsupported by current research.
> I didn't say that offering your opinion is the same as spreading misinformation.
> Anecdotes and opinions should be clearly presented as such, so that everyone who encounters them can decide how much they matter to them. That's what I'm arguing
Agreed. Though, even data driven analysis is best-effort these days and that is a fact that folks like to ignore in these kinds of discussions. If someone has to make abundantly clear that something is anecdotal or opinion based I can agree to that, but I think a counter-weight needs to be assigned to data: explain the potential for gaps and how historically fraught this area of data has been. That arms folks with the information to assign weights themselves.
Ask liberals or conservatives and they will quickly point out their it's not their side that's misinforming.
The fact is that they are all misinfoming. Just yesterday in the congressional testimoney, Gen Milley, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Gen McKenzie - all said they informed the president for keeping 2,500 troops in May. President Biden couple of weeks ago denied that he had any recommendation from the generals or anyone in the government.
In the 19th century, Ignaz Semmelweis claimed that hand washing was a way to improve hygiene and communicable disease. If Google had existed in 1847, his claims would have been censored since they went strongly against the scientific consensus. History is littered with examples like this. Most of us with a STEM education spent years learning about example after example of a great scientist or whistleblower that was scorned by the medical or scientific community, and it turned out that countless lives could have been saved if people had kept a more open mind. I am greatly disappointed in anyone who claims to be educated but thinks that censorship is acceptable in a free society.
Or to take a more recent example, should the media have censored Drs. Marshall and Warren in 1982 when they claimed that the scientific consensus about the cause of stomach ulcers was completely wrong? Everyone thought that ulcers were caused by stress and spicy food, but it turned out to be bacterial infections. We always need to be humble and recognize that some things we believe to be correct will later turn out to be false.
> In the 19th century, Ignaz Semmelweis claimed that hand washing was a way to improve hygiene and communicable disease. If Google had existed in 1847, his claims would have been censored since they went strongly against the scientific consensus.
Was there an established practice of peer-reviewed research back in 1847? My understanding is that the scientific community evolved that system because it helps reduce the potential for errors and makes it easier to trust the research.
> Most of us with a STEM education spent years learning about example after example of a great scientist or whistleblower that was scorned by the medical or scientific community, and it turned out that countless lives could have been saved if people had kept a more open mind.
"Open mind" and "communicating responsibly" are not mutually exclusive.
> I am greatly disappointed in anyone who claims to be educated but thinks that censorship is acceptable in a free society.
I am just as disappointed in anyone who thinks that requiring responsible communication is the same as censorship.
Semmelweis was basically lynched (and ruined) by his peers. As usual.
> responsible communication
Yes but the contextual issue here is that of censorship. Or if you proposed a method to filter general publication through criteria involving responsibility, that would require more details.
If Google had existed in 1847, and the web for that matter, he would have been able to create and post as many videos espousing his theories on the web. Either through alternative sites, either by setting up 20 sites of his own for pretty much free, or by emailing, messaging or by buying a $50 laser printer and printing 5,000 pamphlets to hand out, and Google would have had zero power to stop him.
> If you're claiming something that hasn't been demonstrated through peer-reviewed scientific research, then you're offering your opinion.
Not necessarily. What is the bar to be defined as "scientific research"? What is the bar for "peer review"? Considering the massive amount of evidence that a large amount of "peer review" doesn't review much and that a measurable amount of "scientific research" is inadequate and sometimes outright fraudulent, any pursuit of truth shouldn't be built exclusively on such a weak foundation. But to your point, good research should hold more weight (and does!).
> If you're pushing a narrative that implies that you shouldn't get vaccinated, then yes, that's "anti-vax".
And yet concerns about the long-term safety of these vaccines are, by definition, untested. The long term efficacy of these vaccines are certainly in doubt. Both are reasonable concerns worth debating and exploring. But will get classified as "anti-vax" and will become subject to censorship "for our own good".
I am vaccinated. I believe these vaccines represent an astounding accomplishment. I believe people should have access to all information in order to make the best decisions for themselves.
I also have some skepticism regarding the messages and messaging that comes from the CDC and NIH. I also distrust the role they've played in any discussion regarding the origins of Covid.
Why we (in America at least) can watch abject government incompetence in the DoD, FBI, CIA, ICE, IRS, and on and on but pretend the CDC and the NIH, the ultimate gatekeepers of the Covid and vaccine narratives, are immune to such failings is beyond me.
The long-term safety is an angle that sounds reasonable, but isn't, and is used as an anti-vax talking point. A doctor is expected to know better.
First, historically, no vaccine has caused adverse effects beyond about 2 months. Second, millions have been vaccinated for nearly 9 months already. Third, the mRNA vaccine is metabolized in the body and leaves no trace of itself past 11-14 days. Fourth, it is not a daily medication.
A reasonable analogy of drinking a beer and being worried the after effects might hit you a year after the fact, because it's untested, is obviously approaching absurd.
Objections over long term safety are absolutely reasonable due to historical precedent (see the Polio vaccine) and because the litmus test of “peer-reviewed” research is the standard the parent I responded to set. There exists no “long term” research of mRNA vaccines from which to draw conclusions (another reason why the “peer-reviewed science” standard for truth is fundamentally flawed). I don’t think concerns over long-term danger is a strong argument (which is one reason I chose to be vaccinated) but it is absolutely reasonable.
All of this is correct. Many on the left seem forcibly unable to view the nuance described here.
Freedom of choice is an American value that doesn't exist anywhere else in the world to the degree that it does here. Freedom to decide what you do with your body trumps public health. Half of Americans believe this, and the other half doesn't.
Finding the compromise between those two viewpoints is exceptionally challenging. Each group has the temptation to view the other as being "willfully evil," whether for being selfish or for imposing tyranny.
I hope the solution is that our high vaccination rate of 70+% of adults and the prevalence of the spread of Delta (which creates natural immunity) will combine to reach herd immunity and we can get out of this craven, horrible timeline we find ourselves in.
"My right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins."
Your freedom to catch and spread covid to me is not supported by established law. It's also why we don't allow smoking in restaurants, etc. And it's also related to seat belt laws. George Washington forced our soldiers to take a smallpox innoculation and it was pivotal to us winning.
In 1905, in Jacobson v Massachusetts, the US Supreme Court upheld the Cambridge, Mass, Board of Health’s authority to require vaccination against smallpox during a smallpox epidemic. It ruled that the public health trumps your ability to freely engage in society if you will endanger it.
You'd like to reach herd immunity, but you didn't offer a solution; instead, you gave a hopeful outcome if we do nothing. We have millions that refuse to vaccinate yet wish to move freely in society. They are clogging hospitals and costing our society an estimated $6B, and climbing. Reaching herd immunity while using your version of freedom means that long covid disabilities and deaths are just an inevitable that we're hopeless to prevent.
> Your freedom to catch and spread covid to me is not supported by established law.
No all freedoms are given by eastablished law, many are implicit. Then later some freedoms can be restricted by the law.
Is there a law banning catching COVID or spreading COVID? I don't think so.
> It's also why we don't allow smoking in restaurants, etc.
Some establishments do allow it. It's your choice, if you want to visit them or not.
> And it's also related to seat belt laws.
It's not.
> George Washington forced our soldiers to take a smallpox innoculation and it was pivotal to us winning.
Yes, soldiers usually submit to wished of their commanders because otherwise their stance in the military deteriorates. Most people do not submit to military organization.
Good point about the reproducibility crisis. We seem to have forgotten about that.
There is a better alternative to listening to random people I think which is to follow the work of individual scientists whom we trust because we have been following their work over a long period of time and because they exhibit Jacob Bronowski's 'habit of truth'.
Unfortunately, I don't know any immunologists or epidemiologists! I'm guessing that censorship on balance makes it harder rather than easier to find them.
As much as scientists are taking a hard look at their own processes it is important to still lean on what is as close to known as can be.
You don't need to blindly trust science but also don't be blind to it. Assuming everything is false just leads to guts dominating which is unhelpful.
Similarly if there isn't studies done then relying on the ideas put forth by those who are in the field is better than arbitrary people looking for their five minutes of fame.
The peer review problem is "maybe we need to find a way to find good papers in addition to blocking bad ones" and the reproducibility problem is "people tend to focus so much on novel results that we end up effectively p hacking across all the studies we do".
Neither of those is the way it is usually referred to in layman's terms as "science is broken" that is an exaggeration but hey we do live in a world where that is how people talk...
Except you are missing a huge huge part of what you linked:
> We conclude that the reviewing process for the 2014 conference was good for identifying poor papers
When it comes to peer review that is the actual goal. Have a filter that prevents bad things from getting published.
In an ideal world we would have a process that allows good papers to be published as well.
However I think we can all agree that is a secondary concern. Especially since pre-publish announcements are common anyway, so it isn't like no one is looking at papers that aren't published.
Cloth masks showed no statistically significant reduction in the spread of Covid-19. (surgical masks - different story)
Yet I'm still surrounded by people - wearing predominantly cloth masks - that are full of outrage for the maskless. I've not heard any updates from the CDC on this issue.
> Cloth masks showed no statistically significant reduction in the spread of Covid-19.
This is a completely false characterization of the article you just linked.
There were significantly fewer COVID-19 cases in villages with surgical masks compared with the control villages. (Although there were also fewer COVID-19 cases in villages with cloth masks as compared to control villages, the difference was not statistically significant.) This aligns with lab tests showing that surgical masks have better filtration than cloth masks. However, cloth masks did reduce the overall likelihood of experiencing symptoms of respiratory illness during the study period.
“Unfortunately, much of the conversation around masking in the United States is not evidence-based,” Luby said. “Our study provides strong evidence that mask wearing can interrupt the transmission of SARS-CoV-2. It also suggests that filtration efficiency is important. This includes the fit of the mask as well as the materials from which it is made. A cloth mask is certainly better than nothing. But now might be a good time to consider upgrading to a surgical mask.”
---
We find clear evidence that surgical masks
lead to a relative reduction in symptomatic seroprevalence of 11.2% (aPR = 0.89 [0.78,1.00]; control prevalence = 0.80%; treatment prevalence = 0.71%). For cloth masks, we find an imprecise zero, although the confidence interval includes the point estimate for surgical masks (aPR = 0.95 [0.79,1.11]; control prevalence 0.67%; treatment prevalence 0.62%).
---
If you go to the chart, you find a 5% relative reduction with a p-value of 0.540 (!)
Regarding reduction in symptoms:
---
Additionally, when we look separately by cloth and surgical masks, we find that the intervention led to a reduction in COVID-like symptoms under either mask type (p = 0.000 for surgical, p = 0.048 for cloth), but the effect size in surgical mask villages was 30-80% larger depending on the specification. In Table A10, we run the same specifications using the smaller sample used in our symptomatic seroprevalence regression (i.e. those who consented to give blood). In this sample we continue to find an effect overall and an effect for surgical masks, but see no effect for cloth masks.
---
There's no intellectually honest way to interpret this data other than "cloth masks have very little effect, if any".
That summary is really hard to draw conclusions from;
“However, cloth masks did reduce the overall likelihood of experiencing symptoms of respiratory illness during the study period.”
And “ A cloth mask is certainly better than nothing. But now might be a good time to consider upgrading to a surgical mask.”
But also “ Although there were also fewer COVID-19 cases in villages with cloth masks as compared to control villages, the difference was not statistically significant.”
This is not true. The study found a reduction in COVID-19 symptoms for the cloth mask group. They also found a reduction in seroprevalence for the cloth mask group, but that reduction wasn't statistically significant. "Statistically insignificant" is not the same as "not true". It is very hard to sufficiently power a seroprevalence study.
This paper says we should abandon practices when they are shown to not work. I don't think anyone will disagree with that. But the original post made it seem like there were practices which were adopted willy nilly. But this paper just shows the self correcting nature of science.
I mean... This is the scientific framework. There was a mistake and the mechanism to fix it is to write more papers. I know it's not fixed yet, but that's the procedure. Do you believe this should never have happened? Then I guess we disagree on how powerful human intellect can be.
Of course not. Nobody is endorsing for that. The problem is these are hard problems to solve and forming a consensus is a hard problem in addition to it. If we keep flip flopping on every new data point we will have more misses than hits.
It's a sad sign of the times that "scientific consensus" doesn't sound crazy anymore. It was scientific consensus that the Catholic church based on to sentence Galileo. He was a lone dissenting voice. A bit of history for you. And this is besides the fact that true scientists have never sought consensus/peer-review. I'll stand by as you come up with non-modern, paper-churning, publish-or-perish examples of great scientists famous (or great) for work or theory that was accepted by means of consensus.
There's no Catholic Church prosecuting those who defy the official scientific position today. Galileo was not a lone dissenting voice - he was a proponent of Copernicanism, which he overstated the accuracy of his evidence for, feuding with the Church about whether he was overstating, and getting himself in terrible trouble with the Church. Once Kepler's models were confirmed with observations after Galileo with better telescopes the Church accepted. Later Enlightenment thinkers built a martyr myth around Galileo, and today the nature of his conflict with the Church is an ahistorical picture painted by later hagiographies of Galileo
This is a story that does not apply to our times. There've been many regular scientific revolutions even in the last few decades, the Church hasn't persecuted scientists, and the modern scientific consensus has followed with the revolutions. Whether it's the matter of the cause of the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction, the revolutions in molecular biology, revolutions in astronomy, or other areas where advances are regular, those outliers actually advancing science have only briefly been ahead of consensus in the real world, but most outliers are cranks, and only those with an expert training in a discipline are likely to be able to identify real advances over crank science. The Galileo model of believing outliers virtually always leaves you in the wrong unless you are a domain-specific expert on the topic.
Look at using MRNA as a medical treatment as another example of a recent revolution, one that's now available in a safe, effective vaccine form.
On scientific consensus delivering the goods, here you seem to have it backwards (or our experiences of how science is conducted differs fundamentally). To my knowledge, one person and one experiment (usually, except where the product is purely mathematical) is enough to propose a new theory (but also to refute an existing one). If a debunked theory was supported by scientific consensus (ie theory wasn't standing on its own), what happens to the consensus it merited? and the so-called scientists who "voted?" Or perhaps the scientific consensus was just paperweight?
Scientific consensus provides a means for bad science/scientists to escape ostracism (I use this with the full intensity of its definitions). Because it provides a thick and opaque veil behind which the clergy (all scientists) instructs the laity (the rest of us). Individual scientists no longer stand and fall on their own. So call them cranks if you want but the individuals standing on the banks of the "scientific consensus" stream are arguably the closest we have to 16th and 17th century scientists tinkering away in their private labs, making discoveries that continue to bear their names.
Now, to a philosophy of science I subscribe to: Popper's Falsifiability Test. An undercurrent (probably prominent, even) theme is this: new confirmatory experiments add nothing new if they don't deviate materially from the original experiment. Following this, the whole enterprise of scientific consensus stands on shaky grounds since it adds nothing. It transforms science into a faith-based exercise (akin to bishops at a synod throwing their weights behind certain theories and declaring other bishops as cranks/heretics). This I do not accept.
>To my knowledge, one person and one experiment (usually, except where the product is purely mathematical) is enough to propose a new theory (but also to refute an existing one).
To my knowledge theories proposed that way in modern science aren't taken seriously and in our present time are not the norm for any recent major scientific discoveries or research. Those days are long past. New science is done in expensive labs with very expensive equipment and gets funded by grants. The Alvarez Hypothesis was possible because of cutting edge nuclear science that could identify the iridium. LIGO, and every space science and astronomical discovery are driven by really expensive ever growing scopes. In astronomy, chem, physics, molecular biology, paleontology, et al today you'll need an expensive lab and very large grants to do cutting edge work. At this point we're building colliders many kilometers in length. Modern Science is a product of well funded labs with staffing and equipment funded largely by research grants. There are cases in domains like macrobiology where individuals could do field work and find a new species, but the domains where the individual scientist is doing meaningful work are dwindling to none, and you should update your model of how modern science actually operates and is funded, it's interesting.
This isn't an argument in favor of scientific consensus. There's no straight path between expensive, collaborative research/science and scientific consensus. If anything the units of science have moved from individuals to teams acting as a body. But this isn't scientific consensus.
I'll try to answer in two parts. First you seem to have missed the point that (1) the Church was no (or rather accidental) arbiter of science—they largely deferred to the prevailing consensus. Thus in the conflict with Galileo, they were upholding a status quo which itself was upheld on the foundation of "many scientists believe that …" ie scientific consensus. You have a point if you say that Galileo wasn't a lone dissenting voice but then you'd have to explain what it was exactly that silenced Rene Descartes from publishing (as he confessed). He self-censored out of fear of contradicting the Church's position. If you bear in mind that the Church conducted no scientific experiments, Descartes essentially wasn't comfortable going up against the consensus.
The Church did hold the consensus opinion, and accepted the minority opinion, Copernicanism, as a hypothesis. At that time, the epicycic systems made better predictions than Heliocentrism with round orbits. Kepler's later elliptical models did fit and won out after Galileo's day. Also, while Galileo presented some compelling evidence from astronomical observations, he was the only one able to make them, which made his claims difficult to confirm. He stated that Copernicanism was not a hypothesis, the Church tried to get him to walk that back, but Galileo bitterly feuded with an initially sympathetic, but ultimately hostile Pope Urban VIII enough to get himself in trouble. He was persecuted for defying the pope, the science was only a proximate cause to the root cause of his problem which was that he was rude to the pope.
That points to a bad system, but one that has nothing to do with the modern world we live in, and which if applied by analogy will fit so poorly as to be a bad analogy.
Also the Church conducted scientific experiments regularly, since a number of priests through the ages were scientists, and it was a result of priests taking observations in later, better telescopes that updated the Church's position on heliocentrism.
We don't disagree on all the factors leading up to Galileo's prosecution. But we should be careful judging why he was rude to the establishment. AFAIK it had all to do with the orthodoxy, not personal ongoing grudge. It's the same visceral rejection we have for obviously wrong/broken processes. The papacy around this time was in the throes of more urgent & existential problems, and so reaching for the huge mallet to kill Galileo once and for all made the most sense. Scientific consensus was that hammer.
That aside, individual priest carried out their experiments, not in the name of the Church. The Church had already leaned towards scholarship by this time (post-Bologna) and being the dominant component of all European cultures, it only made sense that it would attract people with interests in science and experiments. (By the time we had scientist-priests people didn't know why they were Christians, to begin with.) This is discounting roles in Church or its bodies—usually monasteries—that required a vow to dumbness.
I don't mean ubiquitous. I know what ubiquitous means. Latin wasn't ubiquitous in Rome. A thing of culture isn't ubiquitous. If anything it was transparent. Perhaps you should read about the era under observation before attempting to summarise/reinterpret?
Google/FAANG have no real point of control anywhere in the process of how the sciences operate. Scientists publish in journals, while social media, search, et al. are handy but not something that guides their research or their consensus.
The real gatekeeping comes in what research gets grants and funding, but if you look into what's happening there, it's not comparable to the Church proscribing things - it mostly means that the DoD, petrochem, and a few industries have outsized influence on what research is done.
>If you're claiming something that hasn't been demonstrated through peer-reviewed scientific research,
That's not how science has worked, especially in this pandemic. Most of what we know about SARS-CoV-2 came to us through biorxiv preprints and posts on forums like virological.org; the added value of peer review has typically been minimal (but often adding 3-12 months of delay in disseminating information). Even the role of peer review as a gate keeper has been wanting, lots of garbage studies about Covid-19 with glaring confounders keep getting published in peer reviewed journals. You could probably find a few hundred trials with systematic age differences between treatment groups that have been published in respectable venues. Some of these studies even contribute significantly to misinformation about the efficacy of sham treatments like hydroxycholoroquine and ivermectin.
There is unfortunately no short-cut to the development of individual scientific literacy, no trusted tier of experts which can safeguard us from misunderstanding and falsehood. We're all more or less on our own.
The same exact argument could be said about the platforms.
What evidence do they have that that there is no chance of complications for certain individuals?
They need to be held to the same standard they are holding their end users.
In the last year social media platforms have suppressed facts and discourse pre-emptively and only months later do we find out that there was truth in the censored content. They can't be the final arbitraters of truth.
There wasn’t scientific consensus that recovery from COVID did not leave antibodies in your system so as to make vaccine unnecessary. It was undecided.
> If you're claiming something that hasn't been demonstrated through peer-reviewed scientific research, then you're offering your opinion. If you present that opinion as a fact, then that's misinformation.
Unironically, I would consider your opinion here, to be dangerous mis-information. Yes really.
We do not have to throw out the entire body of past medical work, for every single "new" question that comes up.
So there are absolutely some, scientifically supported, conclusions, that we can come to, about diseases, using this past body of medical work.
If we listened to you it would result in people refusing to do basic things, like wash our hands and socially distance, because we haven't yet completed a full study, for a specific new disease that is going around.
And for people who might contest the "peer review" dimension, it's not so much about having peer reviewed things, it is about clearly disclosing the basis from which you're putting forward a statement you claim to be true.
That said, I'm not doubting that the YouTube mechanisms for suppression of irresponsibly disbursed information and misinformation has a high false positive rate especially when addressing similar topics. And hopefully YouTube can address that over time.
When the different vaccines came out we did not have peer-reviewed studies to show that they were effective, only the smaller studies done by the drug companies that developed them. In much we were accepting the opinions about the effectiveness as facts, as well as the side effects which were yet to be discovered.
We saw the same thing about the effectiveness of cloth mask and anti-bacterial cleaning had on spreading of covid. It took well past the first year before we started to see when, how, where and whom benefited from different strategies, and the meta studies is yet fully clear on the answers to those.
Looking what we don't know as far as today in terms of vaccinations, the biggest unknown variables seems to be about duration. With most nations having gone through two rounds of vaccinations, it seems now that a third one is now needed. One study cited recently was conducted on patients that is undergoing transplantation, with half of the patients missing antibodies while having taken two vaccination already this year. As a result there is a lot of talking about treating covid vaccination as something that will be added to the existing seasonal flue vaccinations that vulnerable groups take, but which the general population do not because of the short window of protection. Time will tell and it won't be anti-vax people that do the research or conduct the discussion.
Funnily enough, I have exactly this problem with ads on a youtube channel right now. On the Channel, one video mentions Covid in the context of healthcare politics. This results in instant rejection of ads for other videos about other topics. Requesting review of the denial results in confirmation of the denial in about 95% of the cases so far.
The video in question is citing official recommondations, i.e. is pro-vaccination, of course.
Obviously not enough people are shutting up, given the way that antivax content is the #1 propagator on Facebook.
There is money to be made from lying to people. That's why it's being banned. It should have been done last year honestly, but social media companies were afraid to anger Trump. They took the barest actions to add warnings, and no surprise, no one reads them.
Agreed shutting down discussion is not helping matters and we appear to be moving in an autocratic dystopian direction as a nation.
The FDA advisory panel was overridden to endorse a booster shot. Even mentioning FDA officials resigning and the board being overridden gets you labeled as anti-vax and blocked.
Problem is that combating misinformation in the free market hasn't been working so well. While I agree this is fine for most things, there are exceptions such as a pandemic or when a powerful political figure can invoke a riot.
> The results are presented to the media. [The media misrepresents the results to the public, intentionally or unintentionally]. The public debates it on social media.
I filled in the critical missing step. Science journalism is mostly trash.
Not sure I entirely agree with that either. Scientific debate is evolving with the times. Online isn't a traditional formal venue where these debates happen, but they do happen here too. Scientists discussing actual scientific facts, or disputing each other's claims get silenced too. Seems like a reasonable interpretation of "scientific debate".
And I suspect the OP meant "scientific debate" as the public's discussion of science and the policies that should be formed around the facts as they see them.
It is a matter of consumer protection. We allow a farmer to set up a farm stand and sell tomatoes by the side of the road without much regulation, because consumers in general can determine if the product is good.
We don't allow that farmer to sell auto insurance by the side of the road without regulation. This is because a consumer cannot possibly look at a few documents from the farmer and know the quality and reliability of that auto insurance policy that the farmer is selling.
Things are more complicated with regulating free speech because people approach the speech from very different angles. Maybe I watch a scummy Televangelist because I want to make a new farting preacher video. Maybe an elderly person watches the same video and gives away the money she had for food for the week. How do you balance the religious and free speech rights of the preacher, my right to make fun of him, and the consumer protection of the elderly person?
Frankly, i applaud this censorship. Granted i'm super left/liberal/pro-vax/etc so i'm _definitely_ not in the camp of anti-vaxxers, however we have for years put all our faith and trust in corporations.
Now private entities aren't aligning with a lot of people and they're shocked that corporations aren't the free speech utopia that they once thought. It frustrates me that many of these people didn't care when it was others that were oppressed, but i digress.
Regardless, this sort of mostly harmless but highly sensationalized censorship is very good for our freedoms in my mind because it forces us to decentralize. We've become far too centralized and complacent in unwarranted corporate faith. This is to be expected, and people should have been prepared.
Let Youtube/etc censor all it wants. We need better than Youtube. Wake people up to that. My 2c.
> Now private entities aren't aligning with a lot of people and they're shocked that corporations aren't the free speech utopia that they once thought.
I've worked at some of these companies so I can give you an insider perspective, because what you're saying isn't an accurate reflection of history. Maybe the internet wasn't a "Utopia" but compared to what it is now it certainly was.
In the tech community 5-10 years ago, all of us working for these larger platforms used to pride ourselves upholding free speech as a core value. At that time the only content banned were threats, copyright violations, child pornography, etc. Only after the 2016 election rolled around did everything change. The problem is that it's an incredibly slippery slope and once you start compromising your moral compass for "the right reasons", it quickly snowballs into something much worse than anticipated.
I agree but even 5-10 years ago - putting faith in a company being omnipotent is no different than government without oversight. I'm very pro government but oversight is required for it to function properly in my mind.
5-10 years ago was the source of the problem. We're seeing the fruits of this now.
I’m not a believer that vaccine science is a matter of “public” debate. It’s scientific debate, where only experts who have the tools, experience, and knowledge to argue should be allowed to weigh in. If you already have the problem of bad actors misappropriating yet-to-be-verified “scientific” claims for their own political agenda, then I don’t see why it’s right to let those ideas go out there.
I believe that people only have the right to speak their own opinion, but have none to spread disinformation.
But vaccination can't be as binary as that it's "safe" and that it's "effective" for each and every individual. As a layman I can't accept binary beliefs given like that. Nothing is truly safe. These words are meaningless to me. Everything has trade-offs and risks associated. Claiming something can be "safe and effective" to me throws so many red flags.
How can I tell if the research done on the subject and conclusions of it are in my best interests? For me easy example and what concerns me about both covid and vaccines are the long term effects, like brain fog aka "long covid". If vaccines can cause similar symptoms to what covid can cause, then can vaccines cause "long covid"? If spike protein can reach brain for example can it give you brain fog indefinitely?
I've seen several anecdotal reports where people have had brain fog, fatigue, lethargy and other long covid symptoms after vaccines for many months, some claiming they are still not over those. Reading Pfizer study for instance, I don't see that this was researched at all. All everybody seems to be caring about is short term hospitalizations, deaths and side effects. But where can I find data on how large percentage of people have long covid either from vaccines, or covid or breakthrough after vaccine?
There was a study done according to which 19% of individuals who had taken a vaccine and got breakthrough after had long covid. I definitely would like to see more information about that as I definitely don't want to get brain fog lasting for many months.
Experts should be allowed to weigh in, not office workers and bureaucrats. Where were the aerosol dispersion specialists when the CDC/WHO were preaching "droplet?"
But much of the debate isn't strictly scientific. What is appropriate policy is not something science can determine. People who will be affected by policy absolutely should weigh in on it.
Okay, but we really need to talk about what “stifling of public debate” means.
Companies are routinely pressured to fire people in public positions who espouse pro-Palestinian views.
Across the nation, states are enacting legal bans against teaching the history of racism, and firing teachers who dare to make students uncomfortable (by the same people who decried “safe spaces” less than a decade ago). Plenty of people on HN support this!
But for some reason, the only “free speech” issues that get attention here are radical right-wing viewpoints that get moderated on private tech platforms.
> states are enacting legal bans against teaching the history of racism
There's a big difference between keeping government employees from saying certain things during their official duties, and keeping everyone from saying certain things in general.
Sure, but there’s also a big difference between keeping YouTube users from saying certain things on YouTube, and keeping everyone from saying certain things in general.
We are on a news site focused mostly on tech, startups, and entrepreneurship that often just has other intellectual conversations. It makes sense that the general flavor of submissions leans tech.
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Not only your comment is unsubstantiated and has no evidence, it had already created a flamewar and caused the whole thread to go off topic which is exactly what the HN guidelines I highlighted to you is supposed to prevent as the topic gets divisive.
I'm assuming you have read the HN guidelines as well before commenting and I am clearly asking the other commenter for evidence to 'substantiate' their very divisive comment [0] which risks (and has already created) a flamewar in this thread. It was quickly flagged earlier by other users for that reason.
From the HN guidelines [1], it clearly states that:
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Where exactly is the evidence or citations in this comment? [0] There aren't any. It has no evidence and it is not substantiated.
As for the other two:
> Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
Clearly the commenter has successfully derailed the discussion to create a flamewar in this thread on top of lacking any evidence in their comment and now the whole thread has gone off topic. Even another commenter in this thread suggested it has gone off-topic.
I'm under the assumption that we've all read the HN guidelines before commenting and as the discussion or topic gets more divisive, even as the guidelines suggests: '...comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less...' [0]. That means these comments must be supported with evidence, which is what I have asked for from the start. So I ask once again:
Where exactly is the evidence or citations in the aforementioned comment that I have highlighted? [1]
Since the start of my replies, it has still not been substantiated and no evidence has been presented to support it.
My question remains unanswered and ignored from the very start even before you replied and the aforementioned comment [0] still needs to be supported with evidence, which is why I am asking otherwise it remains unsubstantiated.
Unless you think there is ANY evidence in it? So far in this thread I have asked for it many times and no-one can give a simple citation to support it. Maybe you can answer the following question?
Where exactly is the evidence or citations in the aforementioned comment that I have highlighted? [0]
If there is no evidence to a claim or a statement then it can be safely dismissed as baseless and it most certainly qualifies as off-topic divisive flame-bait which breaks the HN guidelines [1].
Are.... you actually reading my comments? Do you think you could actually read it? I am legitimately not sure if you are a bot, because you aren't actually directly responding to anything that I said.
But I'll summarize once again.
-------
My statement is about you. I am talking about how when you act this way (and by this way I mean, just posting links at someone, over and over again), not someone else, you come across as pretty bad faith.
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Do you understand what I just said? Do you understand the problem?
Or are you just going to copy paste the same thing again, without actually reading my post?
I am trying to talk about you here, because you are the one responding. And I don't think you quite understand how you come across, or the problem with your behavior here.
> Are.... you actually reading my comments? Do you think you could actually read it? I am legitimately not sure if you are a bot, because you aren't actually directly responding to anything that I said.
This isn't about me and that is irrelevant to the entire discussion. Now you resort to name calling me a bot just because I am asking for evidence?
From the very start and even before your replies, I am simply asking the user to substantiate their comment with citations because it lacks evidence and such unsubstantiated comments are clearly against the HN guidelines and I already reminded the user repeatedly. I'm not the only one who brought up the guidelines here on this thread.
That is it. There is nothing bad faith about asking for evidence. Unless you can substantiate it for them: Where is the evidence or sources to back up the baseless claims in [0]?
The fact that neither of you can simply cite your own claims leads me to think that you both knew you haven't read the HN guidelines after all and yet you continue to post here as if you have read them. Clearly you both haven't.
How is it that hard to comprehend given that so far none of you are able to even answer it and yet you try hard to turn this discussion about me because you have ZERO evidence to substantiate the claims in [0]. Therefore it can be dismissed as baseless flame-bait.
I appreciate you sticking up for me here, but you gotta let it be. They won’t drop it as long as you play ball with them and I’m sure dang has enough on his plate as it is. I think it’s pretty clear to any observers which of us is breaking the site guidelines.
> I appreciate you sticking up for me here, but you gotta let it be. They won’t drop it as long as you play ball with them
Well, its not about you per se. Instead it is that I am consistently disappointed, in how impossible it is to get a bad faith actor to drop the act.
I have had similar such conversations, with quite literally hundreds of people, on various social media platforms, and I can only think of maybe 1 single time, that I got the bad faith actor to drop it.
Even this whole "copy paste the same answer and don't respond to anything that the other person is saying" is one such bad faith tactic, that comes up often enough that it is a consistent pattern.
What's beyond disappointing and typical of users and threads like this is that such baseless flame-bait comments are left unsubstantiated even after asking them to give some citations. Otherwise the discussion gets into an off-topic flamewar. This can be easily prevented with simple EVIDENCE as already explained by the HN guidelines.
They know they haven't read the guidelines, so I and another commenter just reminded them. There is nothing wrong with admitting that you haven't read them and also admitting you have no sources to your claims is it?
I feel that is overreach by the state (and there are quite a few others), but I would also ask if boycotting is not violence then not using a specific pronoun would fall in the same category as the above -impolite but not violent.
As a teacher, your job is to educate in the subject, teach some social behaviors (civics0 and stay away from political indoctrination.
It isn't an overstep, but is probably just a weird method for compliance. The Export Administration Regulation is a US federal law that includes penalties for supporting boycotts of US trade partners and allies. Normally this is directed towards anti-Israel boycotts in the middle east where legislation in several countries prohibit trade with organizations that also trade with Israel. If a US entity adheres to that country's boycott by refusing business with Israel, then they are in a legally actionable position. I don't personally know how Texas may be notifying people about compliance requirements, but this is actually pretty standard language in many contracts involving export compliance sections.
Precisely. This is a private company taking a stand against dangerous medical disinformation in the middle of a pandemic and HN is willing to die on this hill. Meanwhile I see HN cheer what you just mentioned. It churns the stomach.
Reminds me of how Reddit just dropped the ban hammer threat on /r/hermancainaward because it was making right-wingers angry, while leaving up /r/conspiracy and other antivaxx disinformation subreddits. The faces of the dead have to be censored now, sanitizing the entire experience of /r/hermancainaward, making the experience little more than a bunch of anonymous antivaxx memes.
It's possible but what needs to be added to this (very common) what-if is the anti-pattern your response creates for solving complex problems. "Chilling effect" concerns have been raised since '08 or so, and that platforms have unilaterally moved on with a decision indicates to me the failure of this approach. What does that show?
It's a (very, very valid) counterpoint that's ultimately a slippery slope argument in disguise. Slippery slope arguments rarely present a way out of a mess, and instead just serve as this semi-stakeholder that won't help solve things but adds nice insight. A position's side needs to be more than just a slippery slope approach, in short. It's important to sense when "something" is going to get done, and shift from wise advice on second order effects to something more outcomes-oriented.
> Months ago he was insisting that the people who had contracted COVID-19 and who had antibodies in their system may not need the vaccine. Now, we have a number of studies coming out to support that.
No such study exists, please link to the primary research.
Vaccination always offers stronger protection than getting the virus [1], and more importantly, even if they offered equivalent protection for 99% of people, the portion of the additional 1% of people without a vaccine who show up at a hospital are going to be much sicker than the vaccinated with breakthrough infections and more likely to need to go or stay at a hospital for an extended period of time (29x more likely [2]), which our healthcare system cannot support. We've had to ration care and kick out cancer patients out of hospitals [3], who have subsequently died as a result of lack of care, but we should allow for limited resources to be used up by the willfully unvaccinated? I have personally had family members in need of critical care have care rationed due to hospitals being full with 99%+ unvaccinated folks. So much for the personal responsibility crowd living up to their slogans.
Your first link does not actually claim that “vaccination always offers stronger protection than getting the virus”. It indicates “among people who were previously infected with SAR-CoV-2 [the study] shows that unvaccinated individuals are more than twice as likely to be reinfected with COVID-19 than those who were fully vaccinated after initially contracting the virus”. So it’s comparing infected + vaccinated to just infected, not just infected vs just vaccinated.
You have just (unintentionally) shared misinformation about the vaccine. Would you support deleting your comment from HN?
So rephrasing what you said, unvaccinated individuals who are twice as likely to get reinfected than those with a who were vaccinated after infection means that vaccination doesn't always offer stronger protection than getting the virus?
This isn't exhaustive in the sense that it doesn't cover all permutations of vaccinated, infected, and, but it shows that at least infected + vaccinated is better than infected. That seems to meet the criteria that vaccination always offer stronger protection than getting the virus (at least in the vaccinated + infected vs infected populations).
But even a cursory glance at the study shows that the authors of the study knew this wasn't exhaustive, but they cite research [1] backing up OPs claim, and then add their voice to back up that vaccine > infection, vaccine + infection > infection, and make OPs conclusion in the Discussion section.
> This isn't exhaustive in the sense that it doesn't cover all permutations of vaccinated, infected, and, but it shows that at least infected + vaccinated is better than infected. That seems to meet the criteria that vaccination always offer stronger protection than getting the virus (at least in the vaccinated + infected vs infected populations).
It is consistent with that criteria, but generally “always” means something stronger than “we have evidence it holds in one case”. Especially if that case is the rarest permutation.
> But even a cursory glance at the study shows that the authors of the study knew this wasn't exhaustive, but they cite research [1] backing up OPs claim, and then add their voice to back up that vaccine > infection, vaccine + infection > infection, and make OPs conclusion in the Discussion section.
The paper you just linked was cited on the line “Reinfection with SARS-CoV-2 has been documented, but the scientific understanding of natural infection-derived immunity is still emerging” in the OP’s article. The closest line I can find to “back up that vaccine > infection” is an offhand “ Although such laboratory evidence continues to suggest that vaccination provides improved neutralization of SARS-CoV-2 variants, limited evidence in real-world settings to date corroborates the findings that vaccination can provide improved protection for previously infected persons” which doesn’t seem like a particularly strong stance for “vaccine > infection”. Especially when we get back to the original claim which used “always”.
And it appears that they may have been wise in not going that far, since now that we have studies in review that directly measure the endpoints we’re discussing it’s certainly not clear that this is true[1][2].
I’ll wait for those to get peer reviewed and more widely discussed before I’d be comfortable saying “in most cases infection > vaccine” (note I didn’t use the word “always”, which I doubt any researcher or clinician would) but the actual opposing claims in the papers you’ve cited are comparatively tangential to the original “always vaccine > infection” claim.
This was in the context of reinfections, read the context of the comments and the article. The argument being made is that because someone got infected with COVID, they should not need to get a vaccine because natural immunity provides better protection, which is clearly false per the CDC. You are less likely to get reinfected or wind up in the hospital, per the article: "The study of hundreds of Kentucky residents with previous infections through June 2021 found that those who were unvaccinated had 2.34 times the odds of reinfection compared with those who were fully vaccinated. The findings suggest that among people who have had COVID-19 previously, getting fully vaccinated provides additional protection against reinfection. Additionally, a second publication from MMWR shows vaccines prevented COVID-19 related hospitalizations among the highest risk age groups. As cases, hospitalizations, and deaths rise, the data in today’s MMWR reinforce that COVID-19 vaccines are the best way to prevent COVID-19."
I have trouble seeing how “vaccination always offers stronger protection than getting the virus” could be equivalent to “getting the virus plus vaccination always offers stronger protection than getting the virus”. But anyway you made a clearer claim this time around:
> The argument being made is that because someone got infected with COVID, they should not need to get a vaccine because natural immunity provides better protection, which is clearly false per the CDC.
That link and the study it cited did not compare natural immunity to vaccine protection, since every participant had been previously infected with COVID. That is inherent in the fact that the study examined reinfection, and they are clear that the vaccination occurred after the original infection. You can not compare two populations when one of them does not exist in your study!
The tradeoff is always the benefit of getting vaccinated weighed against the potential harm of side-effects. The only strong claim made on behalf of the efficacy of the vaccines is that they will greatly reduce the vaccinated individual's chance of hospitalization and death. Those chances vary due to a number of factors, age and obesity being just two of the most important. An otherwise fit and healthy individual in his or her twenties or thirties already has a low chance of being hospitalized or dying. But, for the sake of argument, let's agree that the benefit outweighs the risk.
That benefit to risk ratio changes if that same young, fit, and healthy individual has already been infected with COVID-19. So, now what's the tradeoff? My original point is that in the current environment, there are some people who would rather not only that this not be discussed; some would rather that discussion—and perhaps even research into the question—be shut down.
Let's not pretend we're being governed by scientists. We're being governed by bureaucrats. No matter their credentials, the function of a bureaucrat is gaining compliance and expanding his or her department. That's what's behind calls for censorship.
Note that this is specifically the case in regards to the Delta variant. All prior variants showed the vaccine being much more effective than infection immunity.
Although, even with this, getting both still provides even greater immunity with no downside.
(Plus I think far too many people will say "oh, I had a cold sometime in the last year but didn't get tested. That was probably COVID so I have an excuse to not get vaccinated now.")
I personally had the vaccine because I have high blood pressure and I'm borderline diabetic at 40+. I made my call and took my chances. Others should have the right to make their own call.
I'm saying that "no downside" and those sort of claims are outright false and people should have the right to choose for themselves wherether the risks are worth the reward.
Also here'a copy paste from the FDA meeting from oct 2020:
FDA Safety Surveillance of COVID-19 Vaccines : DRAFTWorking list of possible adverse event outcomes*Subject to change*Guillain-Barré syndrome Acute disseminated encephalomyelitisTransverse myelitisEncephalitis/myelitis/encephalomyelitis/ meningoencephalitis/meningitis/ encepholapathyConvulsions/seizuresStrokeNarcolepsy and cataplexyAnaphylaxisAcute myocardial infarctionMyocarditis/pericarditisAutoimmune diseaseDeathsPregnancy and birth outcomesOther acute demyelinating diseasesNon-anaphylactic allergic reactionsThrombocytopeniaDisseminated intravascular coagulationVenous thromboembolismArthritis and arthralgia/joint painKawasaki diseaseMultisystem I nflammatory Syndrome in ChildrenVaccine enhanced disease
While unfortunate, that's a much better statistical outcome than getting COVID, for the hundreds of millions who got COVID and have some form of long COVID, and 4.55M dead as of today.
That’s not really true that vaccination is always more protective, immunology is complex and there’s more interesting nuance to that. See the latest twiv with Shane Crotty, he goes into detail about how natural infection plus one shot creates a better response than reversing the order.
I’m not wringing my hands over anti vax content being pulled at all, but I don’t think we should be reductive about the science. That doesn’t help to establish trust.
That's not conflicting research and they very clearly state that this is not peer reviewed yet. I'd hold off on using this as the basis for any claim until then.
There is no conflicting research and the conclusion drawn by this research needs further parsing as it may not be applicable to all populations.
Nonetheless, this study should not be taken as an endorsement that getting infected is a better overall option for protection than the highly effective vaccines.
Vaccines work by prompting a targeted (partial) immune response. They give your body advanced designs for part of the virus so it can be proactive - the con is a vaccine can not provide all of the information.
Contracting a virus provides your body with the full genetic footprint of the virus. Assuming you survive, you should have better antibodies than what a vaccine can provide.
In practice it doesn't actually work out that way. 1/3 of people who get covid have no antibodies at all, whereas everyone (who is not immunocompromised) who gets the vaccine develops antibodies.
Sure, absolutely. The point the author is making is that since you're more likely to get an antibody response with the vaccine, you're getting a benefit from the vaccine that there's a decent chance you won't get from catching the virus.
The article doesn't say what you think it says. Please post a link to a peer reviewed article that shows that natural immunity drives better reinfection outcomes and recovery rates than vaccines do.
Right to ask, but not without also balancing against the issue of people being utter idiots. A little sensible conversation has lead to tens of thousands of hours doctors talking patients down when they come in demanding anti-parasitic medicines.
I don't know what the best balance is. One thing is evident: social media is not the venue for scientific debate.
No, they're not licensed for that. They're still testing. And that's even forgiving how much work the word "similar" is doing there.
It is still the case that thousands of people are badgering their HCPs, trying to get off-licence scripts for something that's efficacy is contested and method isn't certain.
The Venn diagram between people who want wormer and those that refuse a vaccine is practically a circle. I stand by my original statement on what sort of people these are.
If you want to have a chat about the ongoing research into protease inhibitors, that's great, but anecdotes about curing it with an ill-gotten tube of horse medicine is as dangerous and virulent as covid in the first place.
I think he was talking about Ivermectin, which is a glutamate-gated chloride channel binder. I've never heard of people taking unprescribed protease inhibitors, although I guess there's no end to snake oil.
>Ivermectin was found as a blocker of viral replicase, protease and human TMPRSS2, which could be the biophysical basis behind its antiviral efficiency.
The only reason You can watch any video for free on Youtube at all is because Youtube chooses to let you do so. It is not a public forum for debate, it is a business.
Not sure what You mean. Do You mean Youtube use other business’ wires, electricity, and services that Youtube pays for to provide You with free videos?
You could go lots of places with it. Tax breaks wherever they build and locate anything physical, section 230, and yeah everything else infrastructure that they use and rely on. Protocols, open source, gov technical bodies etc.
To me this is the key, I got the myocarditis symptoms post vaccine and notably none of the ER staff knew (or wished to acknowledge) that this was a potential sideffect. It's become heresy of the most dogmatic kind to not support the vaccine full stop.
Also it took an unrelated to this situation healthcare worker (therapist) to even suggest to me to report it on https://vaers.hhs.gov/ which is how they find out if the vaccine has side effects.
IMO we need to tolerate a lot of "free speech" in order to ensure the validly dissenting voices are not squashed.
What does this anecdote have to do with free speech? In my country rare cases of myocarditis were listed as a possible side effect immediately after the first potential cases came up and it was also all over the media. Do you claim that in your country the information was not available because of censorship and you nearly died? Which country do you live in? And what kind of medical doctor would not investigate a possible case of myocarditis (or any other kind of heart problems)?
> And what kind of medical doctor would not investigate a possible case of myocarditis (or any other kind of heart problems)?
One that fears ostracism from their peers or profession. In my region it's become heresy to even consider there may be risks to taking the "safe" vaccine.
I personally experienced this even before the vaccine's efficacy/safety was established when I expressed concerns about the medical industry's track record citing thalidomide (fetal deformities) and omeprazole (stomach cancer) as two cases where things were "safe" until they were not.
That's crazy and I'm sorry to hear that. I guess I'm lucky to have only had doctors so far in my life who listen to their patients and exclude possible diseases with the usual diagnostics. Sometimes medical doctors simplify small risks because laymen are often unable to judge them adequately in lack of good comparisons. The better way would be to provide meaningful comparisons, though.
It's highly debatable (bold face on that!!), but I'm not sure that Youtube counts as public debate. If you look at the comments sections on Youtube articles about vaccination, you will find a lot of manifestly false or misinterpreted information. If argued against, people will link to their evidence, which, unsurprisingly, is usually other Youtube videos. This is when you can go down a depressing rabbit hole. These are usually videos, slickly produced, making probably-intentionally bad faith arguments against vaccination. They will take public statements out of context, misinterpret public data, and use a combination of charisma and good (if scrappy) production values to give the viewer the sense that they are the ones telling you the truth. You will find these videos on pretty much any subject, and the makers are clearly monetizing them. You can then go down a rabbit hole, viewing video after video, each providing you with another nugget the confirms your growing suspicion that they're all out to get you.
While it's, again, highly debatable, increasingly to me these videos do not count as public debate, though they are certainly an exercise in free speech. They are not public debate because they do not subject themselves to any form of such debate and intentionally avoid it. If you want skeptical takes on left wing politics, you can see public debate on, say WSJ, Fox News, even OANN. Public in the sense that they put themselves out there in the public sphere and can be scrutinized thusly. These shadowy Youtube articles clearly bank themselves on A) not being found by people who will disagree, or B) have an audience who increasingly will not seek out or countenance opposing viewpoints.
The chilling effect is made worse by the fact that this censorship is conducted entirely by algorithms, and there are no reasonable channels available for appeal other than knowing Google employees or hoping to gain viral traction on other social media.
Rational people making a living from their channels will therefore decide to avoid the topic entirely, even if they have something substantive to add that’s in the public interest.
They're banning a set of channels that are known to be spreading vaccine lies and then they're also banning videos that are claiming that vaccines aren't safe.
We know they're safe because they undergo exhaustive testing. Banning videos from people that are lying isn't stifling debate, it's banning lies.
Do you agree they should also ban the lies about Russian collision? What about the lies about Hunter B.'s laptop? What about the videos of Fauci saying we shouldn't be wearing masks?
Most MDs are general physicians and know little about vaccines other than textbook knowledge that is decades old. Why would you trust them over a team of researchers? Especially at this point of the pandemic when we have so much data showing their effectiveness?
I generally trust MDs here more than others. That doesn't mean that some MDs couldn't be completely wrong. But almost all MDs agree that vaccines are very effective.
MDs have, via connections such as subscriptions to medical publications and net sites or databases, access to more information than most people, and because of their training have an ability to assess information, including which teams of researchers are doing genuine science, and which are selling horse dewormers.
I think one of the things we need to appreciate is the scale of video uploads that YouTube has to deal with. There are something like hours of videos uploaded to YouTube every single minute. Aside from dodgy medical advice, they need to look out for child pornography, revenge porn, snuff videos and incitements to terrorism and violence, not to mention copyrighted content. There's no way they could hire enough people to review every single video that's uploaded, so if they're going to have any review at all, it has to be automated.
Getting their algorithm to have any understanding of content that's being uploaded is an extremely difficult problem, and the fact that they're able to do so with any degree of accuracy is an impressive achievement, whatever the merits. Expecting a YouTube algorithm to be able to parse a nuanced reasonable argument from bullshit is to expect a level of AI sophistication that doesn't exist yet.
YouTube could, and probably should, hire people to review videos from high profile YouTubers, but this is only going to work for people who've already established themselves. There's no way to scale that down to everyone that wants to upload something.
So yeah, moderate voices pointing out that people who have already had covid have a solid degree of acquired immunity, or maybe we shouldn't shut down schools are being clobbered. That's a bad thing but it's tough problem to solve.
I also think there's a broader problem that a handful of private companies have such control over public discourse that they're able to effectively censor ideas at all. Or maybe they're not so effective, but the level of control that Google, Facebook, etc, have should give us pause.
I'm sympathetic to the idea that we should go back to the free for all internet that we had in the 90's where everyone who got online had equal access. This would allow a level of nuanced moderate discussion that we desperately need, but it will also allow crazies, and child porn and terrorists and all the rest. If we don't want that kind of stuff to be easily available online, we need to figure out not just where to draw the line, but how to draw the line. This is a hard problem.
> Months ago he was insisting that the people who had contracted COVID-19 and who had antibodies in their system may not need the vaccine. Now, we have a number of studies coming out to support that. But months ago that was "anti-vax" (employing the slanderous use of the term).
> It's not the wackos we should be worrying about. It's the stifling of legitimate public debate, the stifling of legitimate voices who find themselves in the minority.
We should be worrying about the wackos -- and stifling legitimate voices who find themselves in the minority.
I doubt I will agree with exactly where Google draws the line between whacko and legitimate voice, but I have no doubt the line should be drawn.
I also think there's no doubt Google has the right (and responsibility, IMO) to draw the line on their platforms.
I welcome that chilling effect, because people who believe YouTube and other sites are required to not do censorship are completely wrong. Not only they are not required to keep everything, they actually have right to remove anything ironically by the first amendment. The only reason they don't do it because they want to appear neutral.
Having the false belief that they can't censor is actually dangerous, because it makes everyone pile up to one service starving and killing competition creating monopoly.
> think we have to ask if this won't have a chilling effect on open discussion by moderate voices
You have to weigh that against the known chilling effect caused by the disinformation campaign.
You also have to include the fact that the disinformation campaign is killing people. And that it is known to be partially funded by governments specifically to shut down discourse and destabilize the US.
> I think we have to ask if this won't have a chilling effect on open discussion by moderate voices
I argue that it won't. We have had over a year for Anti-vaccination advocates to make their case. In all instances the goalposts tend to move. Spotlighting continual questioning and false claims benefits no one. It's time to move on.
We need to worry about the wackos especially, since these tend to network and radicalize more due to their skewed perception.
A prerequisite to the tasteful application of censorship in these cases is a functioning scientific and moral apparatus and strong civil society to keep things in the public interest.
It already has had a massive chilling effect, because anyone that even raises the slightest question about the situation is labeled as some kind of right wing Trump supporting radical. A lot of very normal, thoughtful people are not okay with what is happening.
Youtube should have instead declared war on the companies and people that are simply generating junk content to game their creator funds...
No one really wants to uncover the fact that most disinformation campaigns are simply created by people who are desperate to make money off of video views, and also those who want to sell off products (like horse de-wormer) that they may have an overstock of.
YouTube should de-monetize all independent and unverifiable political content instead of this censorship approach. Taking away the money making for people who just want to stoke public emotions to their benefit of popularity.
Politics should not be a for-profit business... No content platform wants to give that profit up because it generates a lot of money, but we face peril if the profits rise.
The wackos are the ones creating the context in which moderate voices lose their power. If you want moderation, you have to remove the extreme BS and the algorithms that thrive on it, which process buries moderates and makes their views anathema to the polarized extremes. Why allow polarized extremes to form on your private, I must emphasize privately owned, platform? This isn't the public square, freedom of speech does not guarantee freedom of reach. Content moderation is a good thing, it has the word moderate in it after all, that may signal that it promotes healthy dialogue just like public ridicule and scorn and shame should, in theory, moderate discourse actually covered by free speech in the public square, where it's not anonymous.
If you want moderation, you need human moderators.
The trouble with the tech giants is that their "free service paid by ads" business model completely collapses into red numbers if they start employing adequate numbers of people for that purpose.
So they resort to artificial intelligence, which is worse than natural stupidity in this regard.
Not only that human moderators are better than ML moderators, but we probably want human moderators enmeshed in the community. Having Filipinos moderate the speech of Arizonians is not going to work very well.
There should be a certain degree of cultural competency, though.
For example, Czech Facebook banned an ad with a word "Rifle" in it, because of an American ban on gun advertisements. But "Rifle" means "Blue Jeans" in Czech and nothing else. It is not a gun-related word in our language. And indeed the ad tried to sell blue jeans.
The problem is: who determines who the "wackos" are and what is and isn't "extreme BS"?
If it's defined by social consensus then during periods of groupthink and hysteria (common among humans) even the most reasonable people will be labeled wackos and shunned.
Well, any ISIS content on the platform could be considered recruitment material. If in the content of the video no crime has been committed, YouTube would not be justified in banning ISIS recruitment videos or any of their content.
My preferred policy would be to only remove speech which is actively calling for violence.
This fits in line with a common conception of what we view as reasonable limits on free speech.
Removing speech of people sharing their beliefs about the risks and rewards of putting substances in their bodies or other medical decisions doesn't meet this standard.
> Removing speech of people sharing their beliefs about the risks and rewards of putting substances in their bodies or other medical decisions doesn't meet this standard.
That's different from spreading conspiracy theories about putting substance in their bodies. Actual disinformation (blatantly false) and not just discussing their hesitancy to get a vaccine.
The wackos don't actually have the power to take down moderates as parent discusses. Only youtube has that power.
Content moderation is not inherently good or bad, it simply is. A version of Youtube that cracked down on well known science would be legal but not "good".
>I think we have to ask if this won't have a chilling effect on open discussion by moderate voices
first, youtube isnt where open discussion by moderate voices happens. Its a cavalcade of endlessly random videos promoting everything from free energy to colloidal silver cures and get rich quick schemes.
Second, the topic of conversation is vaccination methodology during an ongoing pandemic in which a sizeable quantity of affected persons refuse to vaccinate. This is without a doubt a sensitive topic and likely shouldnt use Youtube as a forum. You should have a gatekeeper and there should be a minimum level of scientific competency and acumen required to participate in the conversation. A moderator should exist, and that moderator is not youtube.
Might i suggest matrix or signal? or perhaps even pleroma?
as an aside, the concept of an "anti-vaccine activist" is puerile and absolutely should be banned. No reasonable person would evangelize healthy adults forego vaccination during a global pandemic.
the concept of an "anti-vaccine activist" is puerile and absolutely should be banned.
This type of categorical banning from public discussion never works. It just creates martyrs.
There's an object lesson they sometimes do in university classes or corporate retreats where two people are asked to push against each other's hands. It usually ends with "why are you pushing so hard?" "Because you were pushing so hard."
There's a human instinct that many of us have that is basically "fight makes right." That is, when vehemence in opposition to a thing goes beyond a certain point, the vehemence becomes "evidence" that the thing being opposed must have some legitimacy to it, or else there wouldn't be so much energy dedicated to opposing it.
> This type of categorical banning from public discussion never works. It just creates martyrs.
I see this, or forms of it, oft repeated but it's never synced up with reality for me. Sure, you will have some hard-core, dyed-in-the-wool proponents of someone/some topic that will follow them to the ends of the earth but you stop the radicalization of so many more than I have to count it as a net-win. I used to be staunchly 100%-free-speech, no-holds-barred but I am, and have been, coming to the realization that it's simply not tenable when you factor in technology/internet. Banning Parlor from App Stores and infrastructure absolutely cut down on their users. Sure, some will continue to use it but you cut off the on-ramp for radicalization. Same story with YouTube, actually it's even MORE compelling for YouTube since the majority people going to Parlor were people already inclined to think a certain way (aka: believe the election was stolen, COVID is a hoax, Democrats drink baby's blood, etc). With YouTube we have endless examples of people being slowly radicalized as YouTube's algorithm takes them further and further down the rabbit hole and, unlike Parlor, you can start down that path while watching something completely innocuous. See also: Reddit banning T_D or other subs promoting violence and hatred.
Suppressing the visible symptom of a cultural problem -- Parler, YouTube videos, whatever -- doesn't solve the cultural problem. It just means you don't have to look at it if you don't want to. People are still rolling coal with their flags flying if that's what they want to do.
It's kind of like pushing homelessness underground, except the phenomenon being suppressed has a lot more potential energy. You squish a balloon, and the air/water just moves elsewhere. Eventually the balloon pops though, and we actually get to see what we've been trying to hide from and suppress.
Ok, I understand what you are saying but I think this is a little different from “hiding the homeless” or putting them on a bus with a one-way ticket. I agree that people will just go further underground however it does stop the initial radicalization.
People are on platforms like FB, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, etc because they expect them to be safe (different people will define that differently of course). They also expect most (if not all) the content to be true (of course we know this isn’t always the case). Allowing lies, dis/misinformation to spread on one of these platforms legitimizes it for people.
As humans we are much more likely to believe content we see on a major platform vs myrandomthoughts.blogspot.com. That said, once radicalized on a major platform you might believe the afore mentioned site but you wouldn’t have given it a second look prior to that. So again, preventing the initial radicalizing by not allowing disinformation laundering on major platform does have an impact and stops the slide down for many, many people.
> There's an object lesson they sometimes do in university classes or corporate retreats where two people are asked to push against each other's hands. It usually ends with "why are you pushing so hard?" "Because you were pushing so hard."
Perfect example is the current crop of vaccination mandates being pushed by the federal government. Look up "New reported doses administered by day", and you'll see the number of vaccines being administered has been declining since the mandates were announced. If your goal is to get more people vaccinated and promote public health, it turns out forcing people to do so and censoring discussion actually has the exact opposite effect.
> and you'll see the number of vaccines being administered has been declining since the mandates were announced
Correlation is not causation. It's easy to suppose that causation in fact runs the other way - the mandates come to the fore at the point when doses given are already declining due to running short on willing unvaccinated people, and the vaccination drive is perceived as needing an "extra push".
Why doesn't it work? The goal is to stop the spread of dangerous misinformation among heavily used platforms. Of course some people are going to act like martyrs about it and move their following to some other platform. But it won't be one with the same potential to spread as much. Which is the goal.
Nah. I was raised in a religiously conservative environment and was taught all sorts of weird beliefs that was also married to right wing politics, and the demonization of the left you could hear everyday on AM radio and Fox News. They aren't disenfranchised. They have a faulty worldview that isn't based on critical thinking or scientific evidence, and has been fueled by propaganda for decades.
I used to be a big proponent of US-style free speech. Now I'm skeptical that it's such a good thing. It appears to me that some uses of certain forms of media are dangerous to a democratic society. Not just on the right, but in general.
So you were raised in a religiously conservative environment and clearly don't think much of it, but you've also internalised the idea that truth should come from authority.
That does a disservice to science IMHO. 'Scientists' are not simply priests with different regalia. Fundamentally, the invite their experiments to be replicated or they're not scientists. Anything can be accepted as truth with the threat of sufficient violence.
Knowledge comes from empirical verification and logical or mathematical arguments. Experts in relevant fields are more likely to be correct and capable of understanding the subject material than the average person who expresses skepticism. That doesn't mean infallibility, and experts often enough disagree with one another. Violence has nothing to do with it.
When there is a consensus around a well established scientific set of facts or model, skepticism isn't warranted by the general public. People pushing conspiracy theories under certain circumstances are a danger to the public on large media platforms. Therefore, I support them being removed.
Experts do disagree with one another often enough... unless they're all in the pay of a single interest group or our filter bubbles prevent us from seeing the experts on one side of the disagreement. You might not think either of those is happening, but if you trust the experts first how would you know if the former was happening? And wouldn't removing people make the latter failure scenario more likely?
> first, youtube isnt where open discussion by moderate voices happens. Its a cavalcade of endlessly random videos promoting everything from free energy to colloidal silver cures and get rich quick schemes.
Youtube also has people doing educational videos. I can watch recorded lectures there, if I want. Why do we need a gatekeeper for that?
It also has videos of people just sharing their experiences.
Should that be banned to, if those are negative about the vaccine? On what basis?
>>as an aside, the concept of an "anti-vaccine activist"
Well they change what "anti-vaccine" means [1], so now I am classified as a "person who has been vaccinated but is Anti-vaccine" because I oppose any and all governments mandates that would force a person to be vaccinated, or would impose conditions on them by government to participate in society.
private companies can impose them but government should not, not if we want to claim to be a free society.
Due to my position against authoritarian policies I am officially a "Vaccinated Anti-vaxxer" a oxymoronic label only government could come up with.
I never understood why vaccine mandates are so badly received. As long as there are solid exemptions in place, for proof of antibodies or twice a week testing, it should be normal to require it. The mandates themselves can be ok. I personally have a problem with the absolutely insane gaslighting that is happening in the US now. You are not allowed to question anything, or you get cancelled.
MD is a just a general doctor correct?
So, who is he to make that proclamation:
> Months ago he was insisting that the people who had contracted COVID-19 and who had antibodies in their system may not need the vaccine. Now, we have a number of studies coming out to support that. But months ago that was "anti-vax" (employing the slanderous use of the term).
MD means Doctor of Medicine, i.e., they completed medical school. Dr. Fauci is a Doctor of Medicine in that he completed medical school and received his MD.
After medical school, doctors will enter a residency program for a specialty, but they are still MDs (DOs are equivalent). Their post-graduate training (residency and fellowship) varies but they are still MDs. MDs who specialize in infectious disease or epidemiology are still MDs. MDs who specialize in family medicine are still MDs.
You are falsely inferring MD means GP (general practitioner) which it may or may not. And you are further falsely inferring that a GP cannot have expertise in virology and immunology, which they likely don't, but they may. If you were to conclude a GP does not have CREDENTIALS to speak authoritatively about virology and immunology, I'd accept that assertion.
Do you have the expertise to evaluate his expertise? Did the person who granted you proof of this expertise also have sufficient expertise to do so? What about the person above that? What is the root of expertise? Plato with his allegory of the cave, casually dismissing claims that come from the wrong mouths in his lofty opinion?
In my mind it would be simpler to evaluate claims as they are rather than bringing the speakers life story into it.
Don't be naive. It's not the wackos who won't have a platform. It's the people who know vaccines aren't dangerous, but realize they can snag an audience by claiming otherwise, so they prey on those people. These charlatans are the people who won't have a platform and, I say good riddance.
Try having a "legitimate public debate" about anything where the loudest 90% are there to be antagonistic for purely personal reasons (or, in English, jerks)
Really, about anything. Free software. Best football players. How to best build a bike shed.
Anyone with willingness for legitimate debate gets drowned by the noise.
> Months ago he was insisting that the people who had contracted COVID-19 and who had antibodies in their system may not need the vaccine. Now, we have a number of studies coming out to support that.
He was insisting without any studies? How is that not a problem?
If you look at the policy, you'll see that this isn't aiming at the doctor who says that some people don't need the vaccine, but specifically at people who spread specific claims that are considered solidly disproven with overwhelming consensus: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/11161123
You definitely raise valid points about the side effects of false positives during enforcement and the resulting self-censorship, but the other side of the coin is that we've seen that we unfortunately do have to worry about the wackos too.
What do you think I am trying to say? It's not hard. If you don't like what youtube are doing then don't use youtube. They are beholden to their shareholders, not you.
So you favor a kind of libertarian capitalism where the problems caused by businesses are the responsibility of people suffering from them? If you don't like being addicted to heroin, don't buy heroin?
Since you asked, to be honest, I don't believe you know what you're trying to say and are just repeating an argument you've heard before and didn't think critically about. But I wanted to give you the benefit of the doubt and see if I can learn some deeper idea you may have had.
Eh? I'm in favor of YouTube banning anti vaxxers. So I'm definitely not libertarian, where as you seem to be in favor of anyone at all being able to post on YouTube without censorship - doesn't that make you more the libertarian? What a confusing conversation we find ourselves in! Good day!
> I think we have to ask if this won't have a chilling effect on open discussion by moderate voices.
That's the point of all censorship. It isn't to censor the truly outrageous wackos spouting nonsense since hardly anyone believes them and most laugh at them. It's to censor the moderates who critically analyze and perhaps offer some truth.
Heliocentrism has been around since the ancient greeks which the church leaders could easily write off as being the ideas of backwards pagans. After all, you can see for yourself that the sun rises in the east and crosses the sky and sets in the west. They could "prove" it to the laity. It was only when telescopes and scientific evidence proved that the sun doesn't revolve around the earth that the church started censoring, excommunicating and killing people. The censorship wasn't to silence the uneducated wackos, it was to silence the likes of galileo, copernicus, etc.
Off topic, but as an astronomer I have to dispute your characterization of the development of heliocentric theory. Around the time of Copernicus and Galileo heliocentrism was a radical idea, but it also had a number of problems. Astronomers of the time expected that if heliocentrism was true and the Earth was moving we should observe parallax of the stars as the Earth orbits the Sun. But no such parallax was observed (and it took another three centuries before telescopes were good enough to measure this phenomenon). In fact it was more than 150 years before any direct proof of the Earth's motion was found (from a measurement of the aberration of light at the end of the 17th century).
Of course Galileo was put under house arrest and Bruno was burned at the stake, but in the case of Galileo, the reasons were more political in nature (going out of his way to insult the pope), and in the case of Bruno it was because of his heretical theological ideas (like the idea that the Trinity doesn't exist) rather than his scientific ideas. That doesn't excuse the Church's actions, but they really just weren't all that interested in the science.
> and in the case of Bruno it was because of his heretical theological ideas (like the idea that the Trinity doesn't exist) rather than his scientific ideas.
I do agree with the broader point, which is that there is something we could broadly call a "culture of free speech," and the Church was certainly not in favor of a culture of free speech.
However, on the specific point of what got Bruno in trouble with the Church, it was definitely with regard to his theological ideas. Debates on whether or not there were other worlds and beings living on other worlds were a popular subject among academics back in the Middle Ages. In fact St. Thomas Aquinas had taken the other position, namely that no other worlds existed, and the Church condemned his argument as heretical because they interpreted him to have said that God could not have created other worlds, which would place limits on God's power.
Again, none of this is to excuse the Church's persecution of Galileo, Bruno, or any of the other figures cited in the blog post you cite. Making a great intellectual discovery, scientific or otherwise, always requires some break with the conventional wisdom, and figures who are willing to do this in one area are likely to do it in other areas, too. Even if they happen to be wrong on many of these other fronts, they're following their train of logic to wherever it leads, and if you cut off those trains that produce socially inconvenient truths (think Newton's experiments with alchemy or his work on hermeneutics), you risk losing their ideas that turn out to be correct.
Is your claim that moderate voices are causing people to not get vaccinated then?
If that is the case maybe silencing them isn't a bad thing so that we can get past the pandemic rather than wallowing in "would we should we" territory.
EDIT: To be clear this was meant to be a joke about loosely defining "moderate". Many things are being said that aren't "Bill Gates is tracking you" that are also staunchly anti vaxx such as "it doesn't actually work" and "it can kill you".
> Is your claim that moderate voices are causing people to not get vaccinated then?
I suspect that's the case for the vast majority of the unvaccinated. Do you think most of the unvaccinated people are unvaccinated because of "metal chips in the vaccine" or "it's the serum of the devil"? Or do you think they are unvaccinated because they read up on the history of vaccines, talked to their doctors, etc?
> If that is the case maybe silencing them isn't a bad thing so that we can get past the pandemic rather than wallowing in "would we should we" territory.
But aren't we past the pandemic. I remember being told that we needed herd immunity. Remember "herd immunity"? It was all over the news and social media just a few months. Now we are way past herd immunity. It was the gold standard. Remember? To question it was to question science. But everyone forgot about herd immunity.
It's never good to silence moderate voices as it only leaves you the choice of extremes which tend to be wrong. And sadly, as it pertains to covid, the extremes have been wrong about covid - everything from death rate to mandates to metal chips...
Also, I can't think of another time moderate voices were silenced - other than the lead up to the 2nd iraq war when you absolutely could not question the lies about wmds. Can you?
> Or do you think they are unvaccinated because they read up on the history of vaccines, talked to their doctors, etc?
The history of vaccines shows a phenomenal success rate. And most physicians are in support due to the enormous impact vaccination has on hospitalization rates.
The problem is your definition of "moderate" is flawed. You have included craziness as part of the spectrum which isn't correct.
Many have said "it doesn't really work" or "somebody died from it" which are not moderate statements at all. Those are quite anti-vaxx when you dig into how skewed the numbers really are.
Trials so far have shown over a 90% drop in hospitalization during reinfection cases IIRC. Similarly in July 2021 there were 3 known deaths from 339 million doses. Hell there were 6,207 deaths from people who had been vaccinated (the 6,204 other cases were found to be unrelated)
> Now that we are way past herd immunity
We aren't past herd immunity. At all. 70% is a low ball number for herd immunity, many suggested a large rate is needed given the fast spreading of the virus. California is sitting at 58.8%.
> And sadly, as it pertains to covid, the extremes have been wrong about covid - everything from death rate
I mean the US has had 43 million cases and 693,000 deaths. It has so far killed 1.5% of the confirmed cases. I remember there were error bars from 1-3% but I believe since early 2020 that has been the expected range for cases. (Actual death rate requires knowing the infection rate which is super hard to do unfortunately)
> The history of vaccines shows a phenomenal success rate.
Absolutely. I'm vaccinated against a lot of the terrible diseases. Grateful for it. But the history of vaccines is also littered with missteps and unethical behavior as well.
> The problem is your definition of "moderate" is flawed. You have included craziness as part of the spectrum which isn't correct.
Nope. My definition of moderate is moderate. Being open to the facts and weighing the data and the ability to question orthodoxy - especially when orthodoxy has been wrong so many times.
> And most physicians are in support due to the enormous impact vaccination has on hospitalization rates.
Sure. Especially for the most vulnerable population - the elderly, people with immune system issues, etc.
> We aren't past herd immunity. At all. 70% is a low ball number for herd immunity, many suggested a large rate is needed given the fast spreading of the virus. California is sitting at 58.8%.
You are conflating "vaccinated" with herd immunity. Isn't vaccinated + those who had covid ( the original and natural vaccine ) over 90%? I may be wrong. Is 70% a "low ball"? I remember the original herd immunity was 60-70% and 70% was the high end. Then what's the herd immunity number?
> I mean the US has had 43 million cases and 693,000 deaths. It has so far killed 1.5% of the confirmed cases.
Now add in the "nonconfirmed cases" and how low does that 1.5% go.
I was for lockdown. I think the states that locked down should stay locked down for the duration of the pandemic so that we have useful data to compare against the non-lockdown states/countries. I'm for people getting vaccinated - especially the at-risk people. But why are you being so intentionally misleading? You try to mislead with only "confirmed cases". You try to mislead by conflating vaccination rate to herd immunity. If you have truth, science and data on your side why be so sneaky with the data and labels?
If you truly wanted the pandemic to be over, shouldn't you be celebrating the vaccine rate + people who got covid? Is your goal the end of the pandemic or that everyone get a shot? Because they aren't the same thing.
> I remember the original herd immunity was 60-70% and 70% was the high end. Then what's the herd immunity number?
The target is 100%-100%/R0.
The original COVID had an R0 of 3-ish, so 60-70% was plenty; delta has an R0 more like 8-9, so the new target is more like 90%.
Typical high-end infection rates were estimated at 25-35% of the population in most of the US after the second wave. 60% vaccination rates plus 35% infection rates gives you about 75% with some form of immunity, which was enough to shut down the original COVID, but not enough to shut down the Delta variant.
You may be beyond herd immunity, but most pro authoritarian/pro vaxxers I've spoken with on HN and elsewhere still firmly believe that the vaccine provides immunity, and to question it is to question The Science.
You are working from alternative facts and therefore by definition a wacko. Sorry, this turned into a completely flippant comment, but I don't know where to go from here. You only have to scroll down a few comments from here to discover someone who is still insisting that herd immunity is reachable via vaccination. What is there to say when people believe the sort of thing completely contrary to all of the science, and they're backed up by plenty of people who know better but find it convenient for them to believe it?
If you truly think this point of view is the right thing, consider replacing the word "vaccination" with "war". e.g. "Is your claim that moderate voices are causing people to hurt the war effort? If that is the case maybe silencing them isn't a bad thing".
If you allow corporations and governments to censor reasonable and moderate opinions at this juncture don't be shocked when it's used in the future in a context that you don't like, when a sufficiently large surveillance and technological state leaves you powerless to do anything about it.
So reducing the deaths is the equivalent of supporting war?
Actual moderates are fine. "Maybe you shouldn't get it" requires ignoring the 90% reduction in hospitalization rates for those vaccinated and the existence of only 1 in 100 million deaths from the vaccine from a side effect that doctors are actively on the look out for.
Maybe a healthy 25-year-old who has already recovered from COVID-19, who has been tested for antibodies and still shows a significant level of them, shouldn't get the vaccine, given analysis of the individual's benefit to risk ratio.
I'm the OP here, and the doctor with the YouTube channel I referred to was asking questions like the above. And after raising the issue adds, "I encourage you to speak with your doctor."
And that there is the root of the problem I have with the recent discourse. That the ends (fighting covid) justify the means (silencing legitimate debate, chilling effects, authoritarianism). I disagree in the strongest of terms.
The real concern is what happens when a truly scary leader gets their hands on those new powers you've just handed them.
As always, these debates need to happen in the open, as messy as that is. Shine light on bad ideas, don't let them fester in the cellar.
We aren't talking about a government. We are talking about private businesses.
These aren't debates, they are shouted opinions to the ether.
Honestly the bit about censorship not being bad was a bit. The "moderates" only reduce vaccination rate if you define moderate to include "it isn't that effective" or "you could die" which isn't a good definition of moderate.
The problem with your argument is that you assume that legitimate voices won't be coöpted by people pushing some agenda that is not supported by any data; i.e. you assume that the people on the other side of the "public debate" are operating in good faith. There is no debate when one side is not seriously & honestly looking at the data.
It's good to debate science and to question whether vaccines are safe and effective. The problem is that if someone with any credentials asks these questions in public, a firestorm of antivaxxers will immediately create thousands of posts claiming "doctor questions the safety of the vaccines." Most people who read those posts won't take the time to understand the nuance -- their takeaway will be "this confirms my belief that the vaccine was rushed/etc."
That's not to say that these debates shouldn't happen -- they absolutely should, but not on YouTube or social media where nuance is easily lost. During a global pandemic the consequence of airing objections in public on social media can mean that thousands of people might not get vaccinated because of bad or malicious actors. That leads to real deaths.
By censoring the debate on youtube, you're basically confirming to the wacko conspiracy theorists that there is in fact a conspiracy. The damage to civil society is far greater than a little misinformation.
The solution to bad speech is more speech. Speaking of nuance easily lost, an algorithm is not going to be able to figure out the nuance required to censor rationally. Honestly, I don't think most humans are capable of it. Best to err on the side of letting information spread.
"By censoring the debate on youtube, you're basically confirming to the wacko conspiracy theorists that there is in fact a conspiracy."
This is an excellent point. My view has been these are wackos but you can't silence wackos without giving someone in authority the discretion to decide who to label a wacko. But as you point out, having the discretion to decide someone is a wacko and has ideas too dangerous to be heard, at a large organized scale, actually is a conspiracy.
Agree, I saw multiple times that someone who actually discussing topic from their area from expertise, who tried to remove some hyperbole media added. For example he was saying that lockdowns (like an actual lockdowns) only made sense initially when there was a possibility to contain it.
The anti-vaxxers cut it out of context and spreaded it on FB and sounded like someone with credentials was basically saying that all precautions were not needed and this was all fake pandemic (this was a year ago, BTW before we had vaccines).
Written by a Google employee. This totalitarian thinking is a perfect example why the US is declining so rapidly into a poorer oligarchy. He (Xir?) is convinced that vaccines are necessary for COVID, and that plebes that use his product are too stupid for "nuance". Thus it should be banned speech. Thinking about it, there were discussions even in Nazi Germany or in the Soviet Russia: except that plebes went jail for them. They were the privilege of the very top: like Hitler discussing with Goebbels or Brezhnev with Kosygin. Or Pichai with Wojcicy in his oligarchical case.
I agree with most of what you said but my opinion is that right wing media, radio show hosts and podcasters have pushed it too far this time by peddling conspiracy theories that are doing actual harm to populace at large.
What should happen here? Do we not allow YouTube to ban content they don’t want on their platform? What type of content? Just anti vax or anything that’s not illegal? Should YouTube be forced to host racist content, porn etc? Is it just YouTube or any site with user generated content like forums? What about illegal content? Who gets to decide what’s illegal? Is YouTube the law enforcement on YouTube or do we need to go through courts to take down content that’s potentially illegal?
Do you have an opinion on any of these questions? Or are you just implying that the world is so complicated that no one should make any decisions about anything?
My opinion is a private entity like youtube should be able to choose what goes on their platform. We're free to criticize of course, and not use their product if we choose. But they have the right to not host content they don't agree with.
I'm not sure "legitimate public debate" is warranted in this case. Too many people who are not qualified think they have "done their own research" and come to conclusions causing real harm to other people.
Even MDs are not necessarily well-suited to make expert opinions on pandemics and vaccine technology and such. A lot of MDs are qualified to diagnose conditions and recommend treatment and prescription medication... that doesn't mean they should act like they know more than people who specialize in infectious diseases.
The place for "debate" of the effectiveness and safety of vaccines is peer-reviewed studies, not YouTube videos.
There is a certain legitimate distrust at this point over the lab leak issue. That's because of those two papers published in I believe Nature and the Lancet claiming that the evidence strongly supported a natural origin theory; those papers have now been discredited and some of the authors have deleted their Twitter accounts after exposure of their own emails that questioned natural origin theories due to anomalies in the viral sequence. That's very suspicious behavior for 'peer-reviewed research'.
The problem is that legitimate public debate has been fully warranted within the context of the pandemic response already - see the initial WHO recommendations not to close borders (closing borders was effective), the failure of the WHO to give useful advice about masks (even cotton ones worn without a tight seal work to a degree), and the failure of the media to accurately represent scientific consensus on whether there was a lab leak (it's very hard to find strong evidence either way).
There seems to be a common pattern where the media gets something wrong, scientists in the field aren't able to call it out, and there's a fairly long wait until someone has the visibility and credentials to point out the mistake. Banning discussion from more and more platforms could make it harder to correct real mistakes.
On the other hand, "do your own research" clearly doesn't work out well for a lot of people. I have no idea how to balance the competing factors. Maybe we have to accept some legitimate debate will be stifled by platforms, or maybe this is a problem for scientists themselves to solve.
While scientists have revised their advice in varying ways over the course of the pandemic, I would argue amateur armchair doctors have not been useful in that practice.
Also, some of your statements ignore context: Mask recommendations weren't withheld because they were believed to not be effective, but because there was a massive run on masks and the hoarding by people who didn't even yet need them was impacting the ability for health providers to get them in hospitals. Once cloth masks especially were plentiful and the supply of medical masks adjusted, the recommendations changed.
Public individuals trying to get ahead of the recommendations to put themselves ahead of the public good in that situation caused more harm than not.
The lab leak hypothesis has no bearing on public health, discussion of it right now serves political drama only. Investigation of causes and prevention of future pandemics is important... for the experts. I don't think it should be brought up in public circles at all.
The context was omitted for brevity, not ignored. It wasn't necessary to rehash the fine details of each example.
Have the WHO stated they deliberately withheld advice on masks to preserve PPE for healthcare workers? What you're talking about was one commonly held belief for why they did it, but a simple failure to give advice under conditions of uncertainty would also explain it.
The lab leak hypothesis absolutely has a bearing on public health in the future. You're right that even if the virus was leaked we can't unleak it, but debate about gain-of-function research and the safety standards of virology is critical to preventing future pandemics.
Can you go into detail about what harm public individuals caused?
> The lab leak hypothesis absolutely has a bearing on public health in the future. You're right that even if the virus was leaked we can't unleak it, but debate about gain-of-function research and the safety standards of virology is critical to preventing future pandemics.
I think you missed my point: There's no point to public discussion. Governments, health departments, infectious disease specialists, should all be determining the source of COVID-19, and if someone was at fault, making changes to prevent it.
But the public discussing their conspiracy theories about the origins of COVID-19 is solely there to drum up political drama about China, and move discussion from science into politics.
> Can you go into detail about what harm public individuals caused?
Beyond the massive additional spread of COVID-19 itself because of people refusing to take basic safety precautions like masking or social distancing, or refusing to get vaccinated based on dubious claims by people who know nothing about medical science, now we've got people actively poisoning themselves by taking "remedies" that people have come up with which have no basis in reality.
...When I picked up heartworm prevention for my dog today at the vet, I had to laugh that there are probably people trying to get their hands on it to "cure" their COVID-19.
Going back to the original point, public[0] discussion is vital for calling out other public discussion that's incorrect. We don't live in a world where the only people talking about covid are immunologists. Bodies like the WHO are subject to political considerations, the media approach covid from the angle of their existing biases, and that introduces a lot of potential for them to be totally wrong - as we saw in the original examples I gave.
[0] For a given value of "public" that only includes people who know what statistical significance is, read research papers, and don't confidently tell people to take antimalarials and dewormers on the basis of single studies with a low sample size.
"I think you missed my point: There's no point to public discussion. Governments, health departments, infectious disease specialists, should all be determining the source of COVID-19, and if someone was at fault, making changes to prevent it."
Is that not naive though? Without public discussion and pressure these entities would very likely sweep everything under the rug in the interest of their own careers, etc.
I think you'd have to be extremely cynical to believe there aren't informed parties with a vested interest in uncovering the truth. Obviously the United States would be very interested in knowing if misconduct in China created an extremely deadly and costly pandemic. Public health officials, believe it or not, probably mostly act in the interests of public health. And in the scenarios where systems fail, real journalists with a moral and ethical responsibility to responsible reporting should fill the gap... not crazy people running their own blog.
I woulb be surprised if even 1% of the videos being pulled out are moderate voices, but that's the price of moderation, in order to enjoy any freedom you need to stay alive but if you get killed by disinformation you lose them all, so in such cases as this one moderation of mass communication channels is the lesser evil even if a few reasonable people get their content pulled out.
I think America has a very serious problem right now accepting that personal liberties, while important, need to not deride public welfare. It's like the entire nation has taken it's anti-anything-socialized fervor to an extreme level and is now becoming self-destructive. During a pandemic it is unacceptable that prominent national politicians vocally fight against societal welfare but that's where we're at.
I'm looking at you guys from up here in Canada where there were some CPC (Conservative Party of Canada) candidates who are still openly anti-vax and the party leader took a lot of shit on the public stage for failing to stamp out their voices. The PPC (People's Party of Canada) by comparison is openly anti-vax and did secure a big chunk of voters (I'd assume the vast majority of anti-vaxers) but again failed to win even the party leader's seat and the GPC (Green Party of Canada) had their turnout decline staunchly after a combination of weak leadership and continued ambiguity over vaccine passport rollout. No where on the main stage except for the PPC (which failed to qualify for the debates) was there any voice actually advocating against vaccination.
This is I think why America has a real problem that the entire world is getting their civil liberties curtailed in order to address. The country needs to get its house in order - it is unacceptable that mask mandate prevention laws have been passed by governors that might legitimately consider a presidential run next year. This is a crisis that needs to be addressed seriously and overcome and at this point governments in the rest of the world are losing their ability to keep order internally because of how fractured the nation has got.
It absolutely sucks that it has come to this - but the domestic government in the US has not been acting competently. Even with both sides of the aisle have technically worked together you still have the BS "We're not going to side with them" crap going on. America has a long, long history of severely curtailing civil liberties - if you think this sort of an action is new I would direct you to one of the most regretful legal frameworks ever issued - the Sedition Act of 1918.
Get vaccinated and get your friends and family vaccinated - get those numbers up so you can be a world leader again.
No I think it's quite fair to view the PPC platform as anti-vaxx - the PPC has openly rejected provincial mask mandates and embraced disinformation. Bernier himself has avoided making any direct statements but he has surrounded himself with virulent anti-vaxxers.
The PPC is essentially the party of Bernier right now - no PPC MP has ever been elected (though they did take home 5% of the popular vote this election). As such the personal actions of Bernier is really all we've got to go on - so I don't believe it's particularly irrelevant, though I won't dispute that it is quite vague and not at all definitive.
Anti-vaxxer is a pejorative word, it lumps people together in ways that aren't fair. Many were just skeptical and wanted to discuss and debate the evidence, and that was ridiculed, as evident everywhere in this thread.
No we don't. The question we have to ask is whether allowing this content is worse for society than any stifling of moderate voices.
And the answer is obviously yes. Covid-hoaxers represent millions of people who are causing a national health crisis that doesn't need to be happening anymore. Fuck moderate voices who are "just asking questions". They can deal with playing a little less devil's advocate, and getting more in board with the obvious health benefits of vaccination.
STFU is not going to work to build trust in government and medical institutions. Frankly, believing it will is one of the reasons why things go downhill these days. "My way or the highway" has never really done anything good to make people understand eachother. I hear that you are frustrated, but your attitude is not going to help anyone except yourself.
> causing a national health crisis that doesn't need to be happening anymore
This just isn't true, it's never going away and nothing can stop it, this is it for the rest of your life. It'll get less deadly over time but you will get covid at some point in your life and you will get it again and again as it mutates over the years. Same with flu it was initially deadly, now it's just bad but it's never going away.
Hard agree. I've had it with moderate voices on this issue, it's a matter of life and death. Would we not push someone out of the way of an oncoming train? Do we not have lights, gates, and bells that ring when a train is going to come through? Should we take those down, and just leave it up to each individual and their opinion? Fuck their idiotic opinions.
A pandemic is a natural disaster akin to a forest fire. Once a disease reaches pandemic level there is very little that can be done to control or extinguish it. There is no going back to before no matter how hard we try.
So, we learn how to live with a new disease without letting fear dictate our behavior.
What does that statement even mean? So we walk into the path of the speeding train? We have at this point billions of data points showing that these vaccines save your life. Refusal to use them is both illogical and irrational. Their use should be globally enforced, just like MMR, Polio, and the other 30+ immunizations. Again, fuck your idiotic feelings.
It means we shouldn't fall for the promise of safety at the expense of freedom because we are afraid. Diseases are part of life like forest fires. Many totalitarian dictatorships of the past were welcomed in with thunderous applause because they promised to keep the population safe.
The promise of safety from infection is not something than any human can guarantee. The COVID vaccine does not prevent infection and does not stop the spread. The desire to force people to take a vaccine in the name of population safety is rooted in fear. Fear leads to the fearful cheering when the police beat someone for not wearing a mask. Fear leads to the fearful begging for a "leader" to keep them safe at all cost. Fear is used by megalomaniacs to expand their power and control. We should not be fearful.
This is not a slippery slope. Enforcement of basic health standards does not lead logically to some kind of fascist state. If anything, we are currently all victims of the forces of anti-science and anti-civilization. I had Chicken Pox when I was young, and I survived, although my fever went to 105 degrees F. My sons both skipped that particular disease. Good for them! This is called progress, and it does not lead automatically to Brave New World. You need to read more Heinlein, and less Internet.
Honestly, in a world where wackos will take the smallest soundbite they agree with from a moderate legitimate discussion, blow it out of proportion and weaponize it... It's hard to imagine this move by Google as overall bad. It's definitely heartbreaking, but so is the fact that a 3rd of the world is refusing to help out with solving the pandemic.
I honestly have no idea which move has an overall higher cost for society. Yet, we can't keep incentivizing wackos by giving them a platform or there'll keep being more and more of them.
Free speech, amplified to a wide audience is clearly having a negative impact on society and on out ability to be compassionate as a society. Maybe this is a step in the right direction.
Only time will tell but it's far to early to criticize the move. Especially when without it, wackos are gaining agency.
The main problem is that you think you need open discussion and public debates on this topic. You don't. That is not a movie or a painting, it's science. You need research, proof, scrutiny. This is a job and it's done by professionals.
Moderate voices, voices of reason, voices you like, voices you don't like, opinions, ... are irrelevant, useless, not needed, and just add noise. This noise, in all its forms and shapes is detrimental to the only thing that really matters and has value - what the actual researchers and scientists are communicating back to the public.
Opinions, wish-beliefs, convictions are something Reality doesn't concern itself with.
Think of it that way - when the plane is falling due to some technical problem, will you open facebook to scout for opinions and rally support, or will you just sit you bottom down and do as you're told by the cabin crew? What about during some surgical procedure - are you going to pop open a youtube stream so that your followers can judge and guide the surgeon?
Anyway, too late, too little. Damage has been done. And it's not really youtube or the social network's faults. Even without them, stupidity would find another way to make itself visible.
Free speech used to mean the right to say anything without persecution. Does it now mean the right to have ones opinion be actively globally distributed by a third party?
This is very much about fighting two viruses: one biological and the other one informational. We agree to limit contacts between people to stop the one but do not accept the same method to stop the other. Why? In both cases it is vital to ensure the measures to not cross certain boundaries and are rolled back.
> Free speech used to mean the right to say anything without persecution
Free speech used to be more of an ubiquitous social courtesy like that, yes.
However, that courtesy is rapidly disappearing in our society and free speech is being distilled down to its legal core which is: "you won't go to jail if you say something unpopular"
Everything else is on the table including losing your job, being boycotted, being hounded on social media, and otherwise ruining your life.
I personally like society better when free speech is a social courtesy extended to everyone by everyone, but... society's values change, and right now "harm reduction" is king.
> On 2 August 1775 a crowd of Sons of Liberty confronted him at his house. Brown requested the liberty to hold his own opinions, saying that he could "never enter into an Engagement to take up arms against the Country which gave him being", and finally met their demands with pistol and sword. Taken prisoner with a fractured skull, he was tied to a tree where he was roasted by fire, scalped, tarred, and feathered. This mistreatment resulted in the loss of two toes and lifelong headaches.
> Despite Robert's importance in Rehoboth community, he began to have problems with his fellow townsmen. On June 6, 1654, he was told to move his family out of the Plymouth Colony for allowing Abner Ordway and family, "persons of evil fame", to live in his home. The practice of banishing a family from the colony was known as a "Warning Out Notice."
Black people got lynched for using their right to free speech for much of this country's history. People who piss off their communities have been banished or exiled or worse for millennia. Our close cousins in the animal kingdom do the same thing; if you're a dick, you're either the new leader or you're out of the group.
This topic is frequently the one with the most hyperbolic revisionist statements, and I'm glad you point out the obvious to someone here. There's a near infinite list of things that would have gotten you in trouble socially if it got out during any time after WW2 to the late 90s.
The hand wringing about boycotts seems a little humorous. A few decades ago wasn’t the GOP the ones telling us if we didn’t like something, instead of regulating it we should vote with our wallets?
> Free speech used to mean the right to say anything without persecution.
It never meant that. People have always been similarly free to say "that guy is a dick, we shouldn't invite him to our get togethers" based on your free speech.
I think you’re saying exactly what OP was implying. Persecution as in legal consequences. “You can say whatever you want, but we’re going to ask you to leave our private establishment”.
It's entirely legal - and often appropriate - for someone with shitty views to be persecuted. People who march in neo-Nazi rallies with swastikas should see non-governmental consequences for their actions.
>It's entirely legal - and often appropriate - for someone with shitty views to be persecuted. People who march in neo-Nazi rallies with swastikas should see non-governmental consequences for their actions.
Who decides what counts as shitty views? Is it decided solely based off your political preference? How do you feel about people who march in pro-socialim rallies facing see non-governmental consequences for their actions, during the mccarthy era?
Ostracizing and later persecuting Jews was supported by large parts of the population in 1930's Germany and Eastern Europe. According to your logic, that made it OK too then?
> I heard anti-communism was pretty popular back in the day. Does that mean such actions should be endorsed/allowed?
Sure, why not? If you (or even your entire neighborhood) don't want to have a garden party with an open communist, that's your right. I similarly have the right to say "you're a dick for doing that". If I'm a civil rights activist, I have a right to endorse the Montgomery bus boycott, too.
> So your only objection to that was the government interventions?
With a fairly wide definition of "government interventions", yes. The Comics Code is something I'd consider intervention; "we'll self-regulate under threat of external regulation" is something I consider government intervention and a First Amendment violation in this case. The same for McCarthy's driving a fellow senator to suicide via abuse of power (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lester_C._Hunt).
I agree the general meaning would be free to say and do anything, however in reality free speech is freedom of speech from the government. Not individuals or private entities. What is common in law is the idea of the market place of ideas. This is generally what free speech to the average American is. We are free to spread information whether right or wrong in order for others to comment and critique and to grow as citizens. I think it's a horribly slippery slope to ban one group from speaking. You can't have an active conversation about a topic without allowing someone to talk. Their decision is sidestepping the root cause and is treating the symptom which is algorithms optimized for engagement. Misinformation and hysteria is what drives engagement.
People never say what they mean. Just say: I am comfortable with Big Tech having the right to pick and choose which opinions are valid and I don't think it will backfire in any way that upholds the exploitation of the oppressed.
Or one could say: Though I was alive through the War on Terror, I don't think giving exceptions to restrictions meant to protect individuals and peoples from extreme concentrations of global powers will tend to go wrong. Those in power will only use the new powers in the cases that I agree with, and not go further.
> Months ago he was insisting that the people who had contracted COVID-19 and who had antibodies in their system may not need the vaccine. Now, we have a number of studies coming out to support that. But months ago that was "anti-vax" (employing the slanderous use of the term).
I live in Iceland. Recovery from cov-sars-2 infection is considered as valid as a vaccine here.
The same goes for Norway and ( to the best of my knowledge) Sweden, Denmark and Finland.
They all recognize recovery from covid-19 as sufficcient protection.
Looking at US and Canada, along with a slew of terrifying commenters in this thread, the entire Nordic region consist of misinformed anti-vaxxers that have fallen prey to fake news by this definition.
We have also never put masks on our 24 month old toddlers. US and Canda WTF is wrong with you?
We have a very high vaccination rate here in Iceland but that did not stop hospitalisations, or deaths. But definetly decreased them.
Our high vaccination rate has had 0 effect on the spread of infections though. Even if hospitalizations have reaped the benefits because of it.
If anything we got the highest wave of infections we have ever encountered this summer. But with a clear decrease in hospital load.
We went back to mandates after only a very brief 4 week reopening because our high vaccination rate did absolutely nothing to stop the spread.
When this fact hit us in Iceland, when the summer wave hit, we as a country went into a state of mild shock. As so many
nations we declared victory way, way too soon.
No one mentions this in the news though.
Crickets.
We might not even exist for all CNN, Times, all the Posts and vox cares.
I am not in any high risk group. Got moderna 2 shots, I still have PTSD from the side effects of the second shot.
I sincerely thought I took the vaccine to help prevent the spread.
But I most likely went through one of the worst nights of my life for no good fucking reason whatsoever.
I statistically never needed the extra protection, I can still very much catch cov-sars-2 and still very much infect and kill another fully vaccinated vulnerable human being.
> I can still very much catch cov-sars-2 and still very much infect and kill another fully vaccinated vulnerable human being.
You just admitted that vaccinations decreased hospitalizations, which means that vaccinations decreased the severity of infections, which means that vaccinations decreased the chances of someone who is vaccinated from dying after getting infected
Iceland has had a grand total of 33 deaths since the beginning of the pandemic. There have been 3 deaths total since May 2021, which is remarkable on it's own, but especially since Iceland's infections during the pandemic peaked in early August 2021. So, no, vaccines didn't totally stop the deaths. But vaccines dramatically reduced them and prevented what likely would have been a spike in deaths in August.
> Many of the country’s recent infections have occurred among vaccinated people, but they’ve been overwhelmingly mild.
> Iceland’s rates of covid-19 hospitalizations and deaths have remained low. Of the 1,300 people currently infected, just 2 percent are in the hospital.
> The country hasn’t recorded a virus death since late May. [The article was written in early August before those 3 additional deaths].
No comment on whether you're an anti-vaxxer, but you are misinformed.
> No comment on whether you're an anti-vaxxer, but you are misinformed.
No they are not. Your fact check confirmed their statements. "We have a very high vaccination rate here in Iceland but that did not stop hospitalisations, or deaths. But definetly decreased them. Our high vaccination rate has had 0 effect on the spread of infections though."
I don't understand how can call the OP misinformed when you are stating identical statements. The only difference in your posts is the narrative (spin) surrounding the facts.
> which actually seems to remember that Iceland exists:
OP is from Iceland! Slow down and think about how condescending your post reads.
The tone of the original comment suggests that Iceland is in some dire situation with respect to covid, that the vaccine's effectiveness is questionable, and that the vaccine specifically hasn't prevented deaths. This couldn't be further from the truth.
Yes, tone matters. Tone that sends the message that vaccines aren't effective, as the original poster's tone suggests, is misinformation.
No, that was not the tone. No where in the comment was anything like "vaccine specifically hasn't prevented deaths."
That interpretation was created by you. Somehow you stretched "doesn't stop the spread" (a fact) to "hasn't prevented deaths / hospitalizations" which is in direct opposition to "But definetly[sic] decreased them."
You strawmanned an Icelander, then pivoted to tone policing. Please stop and apologize to the OP. Please reflect and understand that by invalidating people's real lived experiences you are creating more division, more animosity, more "anti vaxxers"! If you can simply reply to misinformation with good information (without strawmanning or tone policing), you will make actual progress on what I hope is your true goal; making people more informed about covid vaccines.
If your true motivation is to feel morally superior to random people on the internet, then by all means, continue to debate me.
>our high vaccination rate did absolutely nothing to stop the spread.
It was never going to. People have been asking for decades, "Why don't we have a vaccine for the common cold?" And the answer is because it's a type of virus that evolves too quickly. So we just can't. Not really. It's just not remotely as effective as say a smallpox vaccine. And SARS COV-2 is the same type of virus. A coronavirus.
It's just an opportunist money grab by big pharma, and an authoritarian power grab by those in power "for your own good".
It was always going to kill a large number (but small percentage) of people. The "vaccine" didn't stop that one bit. But you can't prove this because we can't go back in time and run to separate Earths, one with the "vaccine"s and one without. So they'll pretend it helped without it being possible to know if it did or not.
Seems like you owned yourself. By your own statement "But you can't prove this because we can't go back in time and run to separate Earths". Right now in the US, we don't have an answer to either question because of people that are unable to interpret the facts.
AstraZeneca is selling their vaccine at cost. Plenty of vaccines have been required for activities in the past, I had to provide proof of vaccination for both public school and college for my children. The real power/money grab is by all the folks blasting out this misinformation. I didn't pay a dime for my vaccine, it was provided at cost by Moderna to the organization, who distributed it for free to the public.
You realize don't you that Tucker Carlson and all the Youtubers get paid based on how much they get viewed, right? That's the money grab you're looking for...
Have you actually compared Iceland with its high vaccination rate and places without? Iceland is kicking ass. We know vaccinations reduce transmission as well as hospitalizations and deaths.
The problem is that questions about the vaccine are being labeled as anti-vaccine. Real data about the side effects of the vaccine constitutes science not anti-vax propaganda. It is distressing that supporters of informed consent are being lumped in with QAnon.
I'm starting to believe in the conspiracy theory that conspiracy theories are created by a conspiracy to make rational talking points easier to attack and silence. Rational dissidents can be easily silenced if they are connected to these propaganda movements.
When there's a flood of misinformation, then it's hard for anyone to get factual information out. It's a way to censor information by flooding it with adjacent misinformation to dilute and discredit the message.
"Truth decay" is the common term for this. Usually it's considered as an attack on expertise and authority, but associating a belief with a government conspiracy is no different than associating it with any other conspiracy. "Rational dissidents" is not redundant. Being a dissident doesn't make someone rational, and being conventional doesn't make someone irrational. All such assumptions or insinuations are forms of truth decay.
Are you making the argument that only people deemed credible should be able to discuss matters of science and the arbiters of credibility should be content moderators of a private company or worse the programmer of an algorithm? Respectfully, that sounds terrifying.
It’s a balance, but I personally do think so. You ever work for a boss who has no clue what they are doing but insist on micromanaging you, the person who is the subject matter expert?
What the web and social media has done is normalized everyone’s voice to 1. This is great for some things but not so great for issues where you truly need a subject matter expert. When an SME can be “refuted” by someone who not only knows less but also has incorrect and incomplete knowledge that’s a recipe for a dangerous situation.
Example: I don’t know nearly anything about water treatment plants. But literally nothing prevents me from starting a YouTube channel about how water treatment plans are insufficient and giving people recipes on how to use lead to kill bacteria in their drinking water. And let’s assume for the sake of the argument that I can sound quite convincing to those who don’t know me. Terrifying prospect, no?
I’m the before times the cost of publishing content was high and as a result only those who had something worthwhile to say were able to get their ideas out there. This all changed in the 1990s once the web “democratized” publication. But prior to that we somehow survived for millennia without everyone being able to express their uninformed or under informed opinion on technical matters.
I think having laypeople who don't understand what they are actually debating on engage in these unhelpful debates, rather than seek information from people who have put in the time required to be a domain expert, does a lot more net harm to society than good.
Imagine if people were so passionate about aircraft designs as they are vaccine delivery platforms. It's ridiculous when you lay it bare like this and replace vaccine with some other piece of uncontroversial technology. "I'm not flying in an airbus. I don't trust those engineers, and my cousin says there is weird radio signals that manipulate your mind and I trust that man with my life. Those engineers voted for Clinton" Nothing about the modern world would get done if we extended this unhelpful debateism to every piece of everything that requires a lot of hours of study to fully understand. We would be stuck in our tracks citing the same talking points everyone else in our cult of ignorance chants while bridges fail and crops go barren.
Yeah, and I think those threads are ridiculous personally, with all these people playing armchair engineer without access to any of boeing's data that an actual engineer would need to refer to in order to critically analyze a process.
No, I simply think that intelligence of a crowd is measured by the smartest person there, not the size of the crowd. YouTube gives equal voice to a subject matter expert as to any single one of 10,000 quacks. Given that it is a lot easier to be a quack than a SME, there will always be more quacks. As a result, when you see a crowd of 10,000 quacks arguing with a single SME, you might wrongly assume that the SME is wrong.
To me the solution is to not play the game: don’t get your opinions on matters that require a SME on YouTube. Or give the SME 10,001 the exposure than the quacks. Or teach science and critical thinking skills in public schools such that people are less likely to grow up such that they easily fall for bullshit sold to them by quacks.
Watching a discourse from 2 sides is not the same as having a discussion.
Besides (but not as much relevant), the idea that there are 2 sides for every issue and that they are both relevant (bothsideism?) is very wrong and usually harmful. "Bringing the 2 sides of an issue" is a common anti-information practice that hides that the issue has dozens or hundreds of different "sides", or that it's actually unanimous and the other side is morons and people with financial interest on you believing it.
The real data is that the common side effects are negligible and the serious side effects are exceedingly rare.
Over 6 billion doses have been administered since they were first given early this year. Even if you were waiting for the "guinea pigs" to experience side effects, that point has long passed. There is no massive die off. No massive set of complications. I work in a building where over 90% of the people have received two doses of Pfizer. In April. Everyone here has three arms, six toes, and a glorious horn, just like they're supposed to.
If you aren't convinced by now, you're not supporting "informed consent" you're conflating "being a contrarian" with "being concerned".
I agree with the sentiment, however it does not appear folks are putting actual science forward in their arguments. How do you rank people sticking spoons to their face and saying the vaccine magnetized them alongside serious discourse?
The "questions" that Tucker Carlson are not "questions" at all. "What if taking the vaccine turns you into a newt? I'm just asking questions here" (not an actual quote but along the lines of his questioning). People asking questions in good faith should definitely be discussed, it's the only way forward. People asking "questions" purely as a method to sow doubt and further their personal agenda is harmful.
> The problem is that questions about the vaccine are being labeled as anti-vaccine.
When is a question not a question? When - despite phrasing - it admits no possibility of a satisfactory answer. Then it is functionally a statement, and should be treated as such with associated burdens of proof etc.
> It is distressing that supporters of informed consent are being lumped in with QAnon.
And how is one supposed to tell the difference, when every outward appearance is the same?
It's ironic (or maybe not?) that the comments section here is filled with exactly the kind of anti-vax misinformation that YouTube is trying to take down.
To respond to one point I keep reading in here over and over: Getting and recovering from covid does not necessarily give you better protection from disease than getting the vaccine.
Also, of course, if you get covid...you got covid which was kind of the thing that we were trying to avoid. Not just for ourselves, but for our communities.
Another point I keep reading is, we don't know the long-term effects of these vaccines. And, it's undeniably true that we don't know with the certainty of evidence what will happen in ten years. But:
- 2.5 billion people have gotten at least one covid shot. This is one of the most-studied medical interventions in the history of medical interventions.
- We also don't know what will happen in ten years to people who caught long covid, and we do know that people who die from covid will not be alive in ten years.
Ironic indeed. How about referencing scientific sources rather than opinion pieces from political news sites. It's less than 2%, not 1/3, that don't develop antibodies.
> How about referencing scientific sources rather than opinion pieces from political news sites.
The dude is a MD PhD who's been on NPR, NYT, etc. He's literally a scientist who is a source -- a scientific source.
But sure, we can talk journal articles.
Where is your "less than 2%" number coming from? I see this in the first Nature article:
> Of the 125 subjects exposed to SARS-CoV-2 according to the baseline ground truth definition, 101 (80.8%) participated to the May serosurvey. Among them, 93.5% (86 out of 92, 95% CI 86.3–97.6%), 84.2% (85 out of 101, 95% CI 75.5–90.7%), and 100% (92 out of 92, 95% CI 96.1–100%) had a positive result for Abbott, DiaSorin and Roche, respectively, whereas 44.9% (44 out of 98, 95% CI 34.8–55.3%) had a neutralising titre greater than 1:40 (1/dil). In November, 86 subjects (68.8%) were tested again, all of them except one (98.8%) tested positive to at least one serological assay.
They're saying that 44.9% of people infected had neutralizing antibodies at the level they recognize, right? They re-tested the same people six months later, and >98% of them tested positive for one assay. This doesn't speak to the 98% number you cite above. Maybe you're looking elsewhere.
I'm not going to be sealioned into going through studies if you can't point me to the section that supports your point.
Ironic how this is devolving into literally a youtube comment section.
My contribution is: there is an actual study from israel that shows that recovered persons were much more (13 times more) protected than vaccinated individuals, and this is direct evidence, not inferences from antibody counts. We also don't know what the effect of vaccine is going to be as the virus mutates (ADE?). In particular, the vaccination of kids is a very contentious issue that requires debate, as kids are not in danger from Covid, thus it presents a major ethical challenge for societies.
Anyway my other contribution is that access to information should not be hindered. However youtube's problem is that it is a medium of manipulation , not a library. It would be against their interest to stop it from being so, therefore they are making the grave error of making themselves arbiters of science.
That's why this thread is at 2000 comments and counting. The censorship is no longer affecting some nebolous "other people". It's coming close. People can tell that they are next in line. That they will have to start practice serious self-censorship or get banned from FAANG-land, isolating them from friends, family and potential love interests.
> they will have to start practice serious self-censorship or get banned from FAANG-land, isolating them from friends, family and potential love interests.
You mean, there could be consequences for our words and actions?
If you lose friends, family, and love interests because of your position on covid vaccines, I hate to break it to you, but this consequence was not imposed by a corporation. It was imposed by your friends, family, and love interests, who, yes, probably find your stance hurtful.
You don't have a right to a relationship with anyone.
The scenario is "or get banned from FAANG-land, isolating them". Friends and family are totally fine with what you'd say, but they don't get to hear you because the algorithm found it hurtful.
If you recover from Covid it isn't really important how many antibodies you have. The important part is what indications the disease triggered. You have shifted this on antibody count without necessity. That is misinformation. We are talking about immunity, which can also mean that you do not need antibodies at all. On the contrary, Covid was healed with the first line of immune defense.
> the thing that we were trying to avoid
I think we need to be more precise now because of the shift: We do not want it to be dangerous. You are spreading misinformation or at least medically incorrect information.
My wife is very vaccine hesitant, and every time they make a move like this to block content or take it down, it only strengthens her position. She thinks they’re taking it down because they don’t want people to know the truth.
The only thing worse than bad ideas is the suppression of bad ideas. It’s tragic that we knew this at some point, but are going to have to figure it all back out again the hard way.
That line of reasoning doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
One of my family members is also very hesitant to get the vaccine and gets all kind of anti-vaccine propaganda through various groups and channels. She takes that content as "reasonable" and "potentially true" even tho basically all of what I've seen is simply untrue. E.g. an article claiming there were more deaths due to covid vaccines than to covid, which is "backed up" by official NHS statistics. How did they arrive at this claim? Well they just said any recorded covid death with a recorded precondition didn't die due to covid but due to the precondition and any death that occured within 14 days after a vaccine shot was definitely because of the vaccine. I think I don't have to explain the logical fallacy in that argument, but it does make for a nice headline and many (most?) readers only read the headline. Who really takes the time to carefully read and see if the claim has any logical basis? To make things worse, this kind of "news" is regularly republished across multiple sites hiding the "data" multiple links deep (if directly linked to at all).
That's the kind of content many anti-vaxxers are exposed to on a daily basis. For your line of reasoning to make any impact it would mean that not blocking this kind of content actually weakens the positions of anti-vaxxers. However, I strongly belief the opposite is the case. Being exposed to this kind of content and treating it with similar credibility as other news/media is strengthening their position too.
So we have a situation where keeping the content is reinforcing the beliefs and where blocking the content is also reinforcing the beliefs, because "legitimate" content telling "the truth" is blocked "without reason".
I'm also not convinced that outright blocking it is the right move. Hindering it's discoverability (e.g. by downranking it in the so dangerous social media reinforcement bubble algorithmns) and somehow making clear that it might be of very low credibility might be a better approach. It might also be equally hopeless.
>So we have a situation where keeping the content is reinforcing the beliefs and where blocking the content is also reinforcing the beliefs, because "legitimate" content telling "the truth" is blocked "without reason".
I'd say that blocking the content doesn't always reinforce their beliefs. For a lot of people, reading something that is then blocked at a later date reinforces the belief that the information they consumed is not only true, but so true that it has to be censored by some authority, because it would threaten said authority's legitimacy.
As an example, imagine you think that the police are too violent, and you stumble upon police bodycam footage of a cop getting unnecessarily violent at a traffic stop. You bookmark the video, and then later when you try to tell people about it, the video has been taken down the police, for whatever reason. Wouldn't that reinforce your belief that police are too violent?
I know this isn't a perfect example, because a video of someone doing something is much different than an article making claims based on little to no evidence. But the reason some people's beliefs are reinforced by censorship is because they can't help but wonder if the people doing the censoring are trying to hide something.
Except people will take any and all things that happen as conformation of their beliefs. YouTube leaving a video up is support, YouTube removing a video is the conspiracy in action.
"X is good for BitCoin" for any value of X, and not(X).
Some people are beyond saving- there is nothing that you can say or do to get them to accept that their beliefs are wrong. So you're better off expending efforts on the option that disrupts the radicalization pipeline.
I feel bad but yes I agree with this. I have a family member who won't get the vaccine because of "5G Microchips" and "government tracking us" with "poison" (despite her receiving literal poison in the form of chemotherapy, and clutching her phone with Facebook and TikTok no problem...)
What could I possibly say or do to convince this person otherwise? They are so far beyond rational understanding of the vaccine that I'd rather take down the misinformation than be afraid of somehow re-enforcing that family member's beliefs.
I remember early in the pandemic YouTube was removing any video where the word “pandemic” was used. They also censored videos suggesting mask wearing might be beneficial. Similar censorship occurred regarding the now well accepted lab leak origin of the pandemic. Because lab leaks must be racist or something.
Depends what you consider the radicalization pipeline to be. For example, if you ban a user from Twitter, and they end up on Parler, they're gonna be exposed to a lot more "radical" (for lack of a better word) stuff than when they were just on Twitter. It's really not guaranteed that banning "undesirable" content actually does disrupt the pipeline, so much as just further balkanize and radicalize the dissidents.
I like to do in-depth research for myself (example: watching an entire Trump or Biden speech instead of relying on a selected soundbite), viewing the original video or source instead of blindly believing on what mainstream media says about them.
Unfortunately as more things get censored from social media/YouTube whether fairly or unfairly, it looks like I'll have to spend more time on "alternative" platforms, being exposed to the stuff that is common on such platforms. In the end, there's going to be the Twitter echo chamber, and the Gab echo chamber, etc (note that Parler seems to be dead).
But your past the initial pipeline for radicalization.
A slightly more effective approach for you might have been to remove such videos from their recommendation algorithm. But, that doesn’t mean it’s ineffective for people who would be initially discovering this stuff.
> Depends what you consider the radicalization pipeline to be.
Platforms, by their nature, are mostly worried about what's happening on their platforms - when it's occurring elsewhere, it is no longer their problem. It is a mistake to think YouTube wants to bring an end to all misinformation everywhere - their focus starts and ends with misinformation on YouTube. Balkanization is the best option they can hope for, as long as it's not on YT.
But that banned user cannot radicalize others on twitter, the larger platform with a wider reach.
Parler is a niche platform for people already down the rabbit hole.
For the Romans, all that mattered is that the followers didn't wish to start an actual rebellion against Rome. Which doesn't seem like they did from the writings of Paul and the rest of the NT and early Christianity.
> “So you’re better off expending your efforts on the option that disrupts the radicalization pipeline”
But the pipeline is not a single thing. It’s a mutating and evolving entity. If you remove the content from one place, it shows up in another, but now it has more credibility because it’s been “removed for truth”.
Unless there is a plan to block these people from the internet entirely, disrupting the pipeline ends up being gasoline on a fire.
> If you remove the content from one place, it shows up in another, but now it has more credibility because it’s been “removed for truth”.
Such is the nature of a decentralized internet. The only centralized authority that can keep people off the internet is the government, and it would immediately run into freedom of speech issues (and I'm not a fan of government action. I'd much rather have private sites use their free speech/editorial powers to combat this).
Are many smaller fires better than fewer, but larger conflagrations? Depends on who you ask, I think so. However, platforms don't care about the larger picture, they are only concerned about the fires on their properties.
YouTube leaving something up shouldn't--and wouldn't--feel special if YouTube leaves everything up... but they don't, because they selectively take things down for "reasons" that are often inscrutable. Maybe it is easy to think that conspiracy theorists are stupid or something and will randomly believe anything, but that at least isn't the case for all of them, even if it is for some: they are just trying to figure out how to most easily explain inscrutable decision making processes, as YouTube does not take down the vast majority of false things said on YouTube, right? For whatever reason YouTube is only bothering to take down this false information, and do they seem to care more about the conclusions than the content... you can be very very sane and very very smart and still give weight to this being nefarious.
I am not arguing either way, I'm just trying to explain how some people see the world. I also don't really understand the point of your comment, because of course there are irrational people who have all sorts of beliefs.
"Except people will take any and all things that happen as conformation of their beliefs."
Then doing things on basis of motivating them is a dead end, and we should staunch the flow of falsehoods to keep other people from becoming contaminated.
> That line of reasoning doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
A previous fundamental tenant of public health was candid communication.
Censorship goes against that - many activities through this - such as not promoting general health and wellness, diet etc, - go against past foundations of PH.
If people are questioning the legitimacy of PH, censorship reinforces that perception.
I'd rather focus on "what now", because in my opinion there has not been any candid communication between the yays and the nays. All of the media produced along the lines of "5 common vaccine myths DEBUNKED by fauci" are drivel and work backwards from the position that anti vaxxers are dumb and irrational and all their complaints are totally wrong, rather than actually trying to convince people of anything.
What I would love to see is a public, formal debate between two people/groups about vaccine mandates. I might even pay to see it, or fund it or something. I think the closest we have had to this was Rand Paul "grilling" Fauci in a congressional hearing, which was not helpful because it devolved into the participants yelling over each other.
>candid communication doesn't address if the opposing view has overwhelming (and un-candid) counterpoints
I'm not sure if a formal debate counts as "candid communication", but I do think a formal debate would address this. If one side is totally unreasonable and none of their arguments hold up, everyone will see that. If one side just reverts to yelling, everyone will see that.
I know this is a pipe dream, because our media masters have decided that vaccine opposition is just too dangerous. But frankly I cannot think of a better opportunity for the people who claim they know best to actually prove that their opponents are wrong.
Fighting the good fight, day after day, without end? There is no way to force the right thing. There's no law that can't be repealed, no power that can't be corrupted. So we have to work and be vigilant, always.
your link shows where it was approved, those aren't usage numbers,
> ... there should be a preference for an alternative to the AstraZeneca [1]
> Canada’s largest province says it will stop giving out first doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine due to concerns over its link to rare blood clots [2]
> More nations halt use of AstraZeneca's COVID vaccine citing clots [3]
> your link shows where it was approved, those aren't usage numbers.
False. Here's the note on the image showing vaccine usage:
"Note: The Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine is known as Covishield in India. Only countries that report doses administered are shown. Other countries may have approved vaccines but have not administered them yet."
There's no silver bullet for cults and other addictions.
Unwinding decades of malfeasance and indoctrination takes time and effort.
Even those who snap out of it then spend decades coming to terms.
Even worse: The liberal tendency to cult shame and scold backfires. (Am guilty as charged.)
The only effective remedy I'm aware of is distraction and redirection. Like the guy who slow walked his wife out of the QAnon cult by encouraging her interest in the opera.
Looking at ONS and NHS statistics for deaths and using the same criteria to look at deaths within X days of a vaccine, and adjusting the excess deaths in each as compared to the baseline rate of deaths in previous years, adjusted by age group, has been considered anti vaccine propaganda for a lot of this covid debacle.
UNfortunately what your family member is doing is actually the mirror opposite of what the official reports and mainline consensus has been, that all deaths in X days of a positive covid test are caused by covid but that no deaths after vaccination are are caused by vaccines. Also consider that harms from covid have been reported averaged amongst all age groups to give and inflated risk for the young, while risks from vaccination have been averaged amongst all age groups to lower the stated risk to the young. I state this last point just to illustrate how deliberate misinformation has been government policy with regards to covid stats, so the same technique used by anti vaxxers is of no surprise whatsoever.
When the mainstream consensus uses precisely the behaviour nudging abuse of data as a conspiracy theorist, do not be supposed when some people are unable to see what the problem is.
That's exactly the allegation - that someone dying after taking the vaccine is investigated and only counted as a vaccine death if there's positive evidence of that being the cause, but COVID deaths were famously counted regardless of whether there was another cause. Causes like being in a motorcycle accident. Now, hopefully standards have improved for COVID deaths, but they're still not nearly as scrutinized as vaccine deaths.
This is precisely correct. As someone who was vaccine hesitant, I ended up getting the J&J but felt like a full 20 hours a week part time job to try to parse what was actually true.
Fauci, the CDC, the WHO; all of the communications from these institutions used the noble lie constantly, fudging numbers, re-casting things to fit their narrative. I already deeply mistrust the media apparatus, who also parrot this narrative.
Realizing that the vaccines are safe took a LONG time for me to come to. I do think I am very much in the minority of the vaccine hesitant category. Many of them dig not dig through all news sources from both sides like I have the perception I did (in truth, I looked at more on the right than the left).
But you have to understand that a huge swarth of the country do not trust ANY of the institutions. All of the officials are viewed as corrupt, manipulating liars.
So we have a situation where keeping the content is reinforcing the beliefs and where blocking the content is also reinforcing the beliefs, because "legitimate" content telling "the truth" is blocked "without reason".
This is pretty close to the truth. For a further nudge in the right direction you should apply that thinking to the state of mind your family member was in prior to encountering any "anti-vaccine propoganda".
They were not in a kind of limbo where they could go either way on covid vaccination. They consumed specific media because they already distrusted the authorities in power in the USG.
The reason you are ending up in this apparent to censor or not to censor paradox is because leadership had already previously failed to convince your family member that they could be trusted. Everything that came after was just mobilization.
Now in your situation you should of course censor the hell out of any anti-vaccine sentiment for the same reason that ISIS should not get to train on Army gym equipment and weapons: it *strengthens* your enemies.
Downranking will of course be equally hopeless. This is the equivalent of the Army allowing ISIS to train with them but only on Sundays at midday or something. Its incoherent.
The right answer has been and will always be to have a leadership class (and that includes the people at Youtube and Google as well as legacy politicians) who can be relied upon to display even a modicum of trustworthiness towards *all* Americans. Ironically censorship also fails to move the needle in the right direction at this point.
Germany was very hard on all the people who looked back on the "good old Nazi days" after ww2. I think that was a good thing. I don't think it happens often but I think it happens. However I don't think that there is anything so problematic that it needs to be censored today though.
There's a third option of actually engaging in the discussion. You know, actually investing the efforts of silencing anti-vaxers into explaining the truth instead. And it's not like that option is unfathomable to the media. When the truth is aligned with their agenda, they are already experts in "fact-checking" and pointing out where their opponents are wrong.
The rules of debate say it's always better to refute the main argument and to address their issues. If you resort to ad-hominem attacks, appeal to authority, or just plain censorship, to me it is a confession that you do not have better information to add to the debate. Which implies that I'm right.
>There's a third option of actually engaging in the discussion. You know, actually investing the efforts of silencing anti-vaxers into explaining the truth instead
A good faith discussion between opposing parties requires establishment of some common ground and a set of rules of engagement (eg 'claims must be supported with facts/data'). Cult leaders foster a sense of paranoia among their followers which makes a good faith debate virtually impossible.
You aren't after a good faith discussion and the vast majority of people with reasonable knowledge, myself included, accept that in general, vaccines save lives.
Ideally, a debate would be best. The challenge is that it's very easy to make false statements. It takes very little effort. You can "Gish gallop" your way through a discussion and the other side is forced to refute every single false statement. A lot of conspiracy theories spread and are believed because their narratives are so simple and easy to understand. Showing that they're wrong takes a lot of explaining, which often strengthens the conspiracy. I can't say I have a solution to it, but it's worth recognizing that discussion doesn't, unfortunately, always work to educate the masses.
Censor someone because disagrees with your position is plain stupidity. Keep the conversation going is a healthy path. The problem is that currently social platform want to CONTROL full the discourse in their platforms. By the way, it's the pandora's box of censorship. Hold my comments.
>basically all of what I've seen is simply untrue. E.g. an article claiming there were more deaths due to covid vaccines than to covid
No, the claim is that statistically for every life saved via vaccination, more lives are lost due to vaccine complications, based on officially compiled numbers.
It occurs to me that most of the people arguing for vaccination are just as ignorant and faith based in their argumentation as the people they demonize for arguing against it. This is probably a consequence of the normal distribution of competence, and a significant argument against censoring dissent (dishonestly conflated with "misinformation"), because when ≈70% of the population is not competent enough to consume and evaluate literature, suppression of counter narratives becomes an oppressive tool of the establishment, even when done by so called "private" companies. Our economic system is conveniently organized such that going public for the funding necessary to compete with VC money subjects your company to the rule of an inevitably politically connected board.
It's telling that almost all of this recent censorship (not just regarding the COVID vaccine) aligns so neatly with leftist views. This top down authoritarianism is leading to a parallel society, encouraged by the pervasive breadth and depth of dissent suppression: if you have the "wrong" opinion, you cant post videos on social media, you cant host your own social media on cloud providers, you can't host your own servers because CC companies will refuse to service you...
The authoritarian dystopia has already arrived, not with the sort of force we were warned about, but with welcome cheers from a naive, docile populace.
> She thinks they’re taking it down because they don’t want people to know the truth.
The sad truth is, they do this just because of fucking ad revenue. There's no grand conspiracy against, or even for anti-vaccination movements. It's just people selling the world for a quick buck.
And some people are still shooting me weird looks when I keep telling them that advertising is a cancer on modern society.
I’m not so sure. I can’t help but think a good proportion of Google/YouTube employees truly believe they are saving lives and fighting “misinformation” with this move. To me, citing lost ad revenue is a convenient scapegoat for what these partisan folks wanted to do the whole time.
Google is also a Bay Area company and happens to have a sizable number of vocal/activist employees with lofty world-saving goals. I also can’t help but think that having so much revenue and de-facto monopolies means they are comfortable with alienating “the other side”. I think they know people aren’t going to switch en-masse to a YouTube competitor because of this.
Agreed. As one example, take Amazon banning Parler from AWS. That clearly isn't a positive move for revenue (at least ignoring any potential shady behind-the-scenes kickbacks they could have gotten for doing so), but they did it because it aligned with many of their employees' ideology (among other reasons).
(As an aside Parler was idiotic for not running on their own hardware given they were billing themselves as the censorship resistant twitter, but that's neither here nor there)
> Google is also a Bay Area company and happens to have a sizable number of vocal/activist employees with lofty world-saving goals.
Which ends up being mostly used for PR, and causes occasional drama when some employees' view conflict with tech sphere's most vocal views. Notice the swift and harsh reactions of Google and other tech companies in those cases: that's what happens when their revenue is threatened.
> I also can’t help but think that having so much revenue and de-facto monopolies means they are comfortable with alienating “the other side”.
It doesn't really matter what "the other side" thinks. All "sides" are using YouTube and buying Android phones anyway, because they have very few other options. And all "sides" are equally good targets for advertising.
Google isn't worried about people migrating off YouTube because of these actions. They're worried about regulators, who are looking at content moderation practices and considering meddling in that space - which would be very threatening to YouTube's revenue.
Maybe because when they hear "advertising" they think car commercial or magazine ad and associate that with your comment. Those can be very good things. Mechanizing disinformation to pool people into cults and sell them to the highest bidder is not advertisement...it is what we call "big tech" until we can figure out another word.
Truth it is. Whatever their motto of the day, companies have no morals or principles, they are driven purely by their business goals and would change their policies in a blink of an eye when they feel it would help their business.
The big tech companies are facing intervention by the state at this point. Being broken up or regulated or, depending on country, just outright banned, could really clamp down on profits.
Their advertisers wouldn't much like that. Pharma being one of their larger advertisers, allowing videos about cheap out of patent drugs that may prevent someone from taking a vaccine is in direct opposition to this model.
This risks advertisers who do not want their brands associated with this content leaving the platform entirely. YouTube is not only trying to sell ads, they’re trying to remain “respectable” so the advertising whales keep spending.
You ever heard of the YouTube channel "dick or dildo"? YouTube doesn't remove content that is not respectable, gross, unsettling, no the criteria always seems to be certain opinions and lines of discussion. Advertisers have advertised on YouTube just fine with all the crazy wacko content on it before. " targeted advertising" is wonderful in the sense that advertisers get to decide what sorts of content their ads appear on, so they never have to worry about being associated with something they don't want to be.
This line of reasoning doesn't make sense under even the lightest scrutiny, it doesn't go along with what we actually see YouTube doing.
Media platforms have always been gatekeepers. Freedom of speech is great, freedom of mass speech is decidedly not. This is super controversial on HN but I think the Internet without some form of restrictions on mass speech is a net negative for human society. Otherwise you’re just daring bad actors to take advantage of the situation.
Companies doing this is arguably preferred to governments doing it, but only just barely.
Preach, my man. I've been saying that for years too. There's a fear that banning advertising would be a stain on free speech and that may be true but legislation is the only way outside of this cold war.
We're getting to the point where companies could pay parents to name their children after products. Oh wait, too late[0], we're already there.
If advertising is responsible for actually getting them to get off their asses to take down antivax misinformation and potentially save lives, that's making advertising sound really good right now. Though that might be crediting advertising a little too much, maybe some employees in charge don't want to take part in spreading misinformation.
==She thinks they’re taking it down because they don’t want people to know the truth.==
Sounds like she has already made up her mind, in which case I’m not sure it matters if the content is moderated or not. It’s possible she will find whatever reinforces the decision she’s already made.
==The only thing worse than bad ideas is the suppression of bad ideas.==
This sounds good, but is it true? The bad idea exists today and is spreading, does limiting that spread actually cause more harm? Is there evidence of this or a study to support it? In schools, we suppress all sorts of bad ideas. Take eugenics, has suppressing that idea made the belief in eugenics worse?
Exactly. My experience with people taught me that once an adult made up his/her mind with some belief, it is extremely difficult to shake. Confirmation bias will be in effect most of the time. The only chance to change it is when someone really close to the person (who he/she trusts), or someone this person admire/worship says otherwise. And in this case, since it's Youtube, it will never happen.
No, fortunately that is not worldwide practice. "Challenge", possibly, «suppress», not everywhere.
Would suppressing the discussion about eugenics worsen the matter: yes, for example by having to restart the discussion from stage one. The naïve would retain naïve ideas, unchallenged.
> Take eugenics, has suppressing that idea made the belief in eugenics worse?
Ideas like eugenics clearly have something to them that resonates with people, at least until they think hard enough about the ethics or logistics involved. There's a reason eugenics cropped up in the first place. So yes, insofar as you suppress a dangerously seductive idea, you do make it worse, because it takes actually explaining what the flaws were with the idea to shake people out of it.
If that's the case, did she make up her mind before or after consuming the anti-vaccine content?
In my experience, most people who are hesitant about the vaccine are that way because they distrust the government. The anti-vaccine content didn't cause their hesitancy. They only consumed it because it confirmed their pre-existing bias.
If the anti-vaccine content isn't the underlying cause of people not wanting to get the vaccine, censoring that content will not fix anything. I know many people who, like OP's wife, simply see the censorship as further justification for their pre-existing bias. We are likely killing free speech with nothing to show for it.
...News just in: there's an article today on The Conversation about eugenetic practices having been carried on in the USA in the past hundred years, and still ongoing: they involve forced sterilization of a considerable number of people.
So, since the "idea" has actual current practice, you may want it to be in the foreground, not «suppress[ed]».
And again about school, we were taught about the eugenetic effort of mid century in primary school, when we were eight years old: relatively "mature" content, but is it possible (yes, it is) that "if you treat children like children (and adults like children), they will behave like children?".
> The bad idea exists today and is spreading, does limiting that spread actually cause more harm? Is there evidence of this or a study to support it? In schools, we suppress all sorts of bad ideas.
So this is sort of meta isn't it? The easy phrase that sounds good gets a lot of traction, but actually proving whether it's true, long term, is a difficult problem!
Meanwhile back in the real world, a friend of ours died of COVID yesterday, leaving behind a husband and son. Pretty sure she was not vaccinated. She was relatively young and in good shape.
There's no simple answers. American has some of the strongest free speech rights, but also a scarily large anti vaxx population. (It's also worth noting that what YouTube decides to allow isn't a First Amendment issue.)
> She thinks they’re taking it down because they don’t want people to know the truth.
People already that far down the rabbit hole aren't going to be made more or less hesitant whether YouTube or others leave the content up or take it down because at this point they are already believing things that have been shown to be untrue (or at least highly unlikely to be true).
But taking it down might stop a lot more people being drawn in to the conspiracy theories and becoming that hesitant in the first place and further perpetuating the problem by forwarding on the misinformation.
Taking the information down saves a lot more from the misinformation than it pushes in the other direction. Not that I think we should abandon the latter of course, but they are going to need some other form of intervention anyway, whether this step is taken for the benefit of the others or not. We can't fix all the problems with one action, but needing other actions to help those more deeply entrenched doesn't mean we shouldn't perform this action to help those who are not yet there.
> She thinks they’re taking it down because they don’t want people to know the truth.
Hell, I always thought anti-vaxxers were looneys and was first in line for the COVID shot when it was available in March... but even I'm starting to be convinced that the anti-vaxxers might have a point because of all this effort to silence them. I'm becoming vaccine... remorseful?
I don't get this.
Here in Germany for example holocaust denial is illegal.
Assume you are in a country where it's not, say the USA. Assume you slowly witness a rise of naziism that as usual comes with holocaust denial. Now the USA make holocaust denial illegal. Would that make you reconsider if the holocaust really happened?
What the anti-vaxxers and their misinformation are doing has lead to the absolutely unnecessary loss of thousands of lifes. Depriving them of any platform is morally imperative.
You don’t have a monopoly on truth. The “anti-vaxxers” are not a monolithic group, and some people who are skeptics of consensus views on the various questions involved will probably be vindicated as other non-consensus views have been so far, which is normal in any chaotic situation where data is limited.
Tell that to the regularly highlighted examples of Covid-19 and/or vax deniers who end up ... dead.
Scientific, rational debate is ideal on these subjects ... but is that even possible anymore when people are jumping off the deep end so much. David Koresh would be envious.
Exactly, they have just as many examples of people who publicly say the vaccine is safe, who end up hospitalized or dead within a few weeks due to adverse reactions to the vaccine.
Anecdotal but I know of noone who died due to vacinne (only heard about blood clot). I also don't know of fit and < 40 years old that died although astma friend 30yo was heavily hispitalised.
Heard of many older/fat people who died. Some people close to dying sypposedly got helped by Amantadine.
I took 2 shots of Moderna and I am shareholder but I still think that banning debate is stupid. I still have doctor friends who personally don't feel the risks is in vacine favor for them personally.
IMO YT should be forced to allow filering of content by each user. I hate it so much that I am served stupid crap from time to time. This would be much better that this erosion of basic rights. There should be ability to share curation algos but that's obviously against ad driven,supply driven monipolies. Fuck em.
I would love to see some stats on this, because I'm very confident you couldn't find "many". There have only been 8200 deaths in the USA following a vaccine dose, and they aren't even confirmed to be caused by the vaccine. Compared to the 690k COVID deaths I think you're much, much more likely to find people that are antivax that died from COVID, than provax that died following a vaccination.
> Now the USA make holocaust denial illegal. Would that make you reconsider if the holocaust really happened?
Not me, but I could easily see it making other people suspicious. It directly plays into the anti-Semitic tropes about Jewish control of communications. Pass such a law and the first thing they would do is point to its passage as proof of whatever conspiracy theory they're espousing.
The correct response to bad speech is not censorship, it's more speech: refute those arguing for bad policy, counterprotest those espousing hate. Imprisoning Hitler and his cronies didn't work in Germany, and far right groups like AfD still gain traction in the country.
Eh as mentioned above, folks who already want to be convinced Bill Gates is implanting microchips in vaccines to track their movement (as they complain about this via their phone on facebook lol), aren't going to change their minds.
Deplatforming works and helps stop disinfomration. The racist Richard Spencer and the rightwing clown Milo Yiannopoulos both say they're broke and unemployed now thanks to everyone banning their racist content. These things are fine to do and work.
No: the words of Halprin were not that "information will be censored that denies that «vaccines save lives»". And if such position existed, I want to hear about it: it may come from a fool, it may come from someone reliable, I cannot know in advance.
And "saving lives" must be put in context: it is a generic objective, not a justification for censorship.
I'm very skeptical that deplatforming effectively curbs misinformation. If anything it magnifies it via the Streisand effect. It kicks off headlines, "This is the _______ that big tech doesn't want you to hear!" Focusing on individuals like Spencer and Yiannopoulos is missing the forest for a couple trees. Look at how widespread these people's ideas, as well as anti-vaccine sentiment, had become despite (and perhaps, because of) attempts to crack down on it.
A large percentage of the population believe an invisible being in the sky created the universe in 7 days, why is everyone so surprised that a percentage of the population believe Bill Gates is implanting microchips in vaccines?
There is absolutely no reason a government should make such things as denialism illegal. An act like that would certainly breed doubt immediately because the only reason to make something like that illegal IS because you're hiding something.
People are allowed to make their own choices. If they belive the holocaust isn't real, fine. When they discuss it, refute them.
In the US, the only time the line is crossed is when discussion calls for immediate and specific violence, could directly cause harm, or falls into the slanderous/libel and even that can be difficult to prove. I can see no reason for the above illegality of speech to expand.
Something like making holocaust denial illegal is borderline compelled speech. Sure, you could just not talk about the holocaust, but if you want or need to talk about it you must now espouse the official position of the government. Absolutely terrifying to think about.
Yes, exactly. Making something illegal is serious.
The result of making something like this illegal is:
1. Person is not allowed to talk OR
2. Person is allowed to talk but is now compelled to only espouse a message approved by the government.
Illegal speech in the US is speech which does harm or has a direct incitement to harm such as specifically calling for a violent action, shouting fire in a crowded theater, or lying about someone to harm their reputation and cause financial impact.
To make something like denialism illegal would require you to show that, by allowing someone to say it, they are causing direct and immediate harm. That's not the case here at all. Saying the holocaust didn't happen doesn't cause people to then go commit genocide. At worst it convinces people some horrific event didn't happen, but that horrific event is still horrific conceptually.
Denying vaccines work may convince people not to get them so maybe you'd argue direct harm there? But it's not clear to me how you can measure the harm since it's arguable that said unvaccinated person may get covid and be totally unphased. What about those people that got covid prior to the vaccine? How could you argue direct harm from them when they already have the antibodies sans the vaccine?
There's a problem and solutions with consequences. Every law limits freedom in one way or another. It's a case of how probable and sever is the problem compared to the consequences of the law.
In Germany the problem is Nazis and a choice about how to stop them doing it again. We have seen that such people can convince nearly an entire population (so the problem is likely) and start a world war (so the problem is extreme). Why would anyone debate the need for a law that limits a freedom in a case we consider pretty unworthwhile anyhow (limiting the freedom to deny the holocaust).
As for vaccines it's again a calculation where we know the problem is extreme (huge economic losses and deaths) and the likelihood increases based on how many people don't vaccinate - or whether people in specific jobs don't vaccinate. The calculation shouldn't be that hard.
Pretty sure that 1946 when the country was still full of old Nazi supporters the risk was pretty high. I don't think the risk is that high today, but the laws definitely served a good purpose when they were created.
If those in the positioning of governing achieve a sufficient disdain for the governed, they convince themselves that the populace is too stupid to pursue truth. You may find this a stretch, but it's roughly consistent with calling the voting public "deplorables."
I think it's already been touched on, but the reason Germany made it illegal is to prevent Nazism from happening again. The German government wasn't trying to hide anything. The German government was trying to prevent Nazi's from hiding something.
Paradoxically, but somehow yes, you should then nurture serious doubts about the situation - censorship means somewhere, something is clearly wrong. If a reaction is wildly disproportionate, you should raise suspicion. If the reason alleged for the disproportion is "what would be the reaction of people", you (though maybe not you specifically) should flee as if chased by the devil.
Your terminology is confusing: there is hesitance. The hesitant want clear, trustworthy information. Lack of clarity over the clash of what is seen and what is narrated reinforces hesitance.
The censorship of those who claim the impossible easily hits those who claim the possible, and the first can be used as a strawman against the second. This is one of the practical reasons why your «moral imperative» is invalid: these months showed that you cannot set the threshold.
>Would that make you reconsider if the holocaust really happened?
It would change my bayesian priors. Not enough to change my opinion entirely, but it would move me more towards the middle.
Imagine flat-earthers were suddenly banned from all public fora. Currently, I'm able to see the arguments they make, and they're decisively unconvincing. If I knew a lot of people believed something that strange but didn't know why, it would absolutely be more convincing than now, when I hear the arguments. I think the same is true of any seriously badly-reasoned belief.
So you'd be more convinced there was something to flat-earth arguments if they were banned? Despite the overwhelming scientific evidence that you can access? Some of which you can verify for yourself. I don't see any good reason why such views would change your bayesian priors just because something was banned. Something which I'm sure you could find elsewhere if you really were curious.
My assumption would be such views were banned (at least on certiain widely viewed platforms or in schools) because a sizable section of society thought they were not only obviously false but also promoted harmful views, like neo-nazism in the case of Holocaust denial.
Those views are so badly wrong that they're anti-science and anti-history. There's no reason to give them credence.
...I wish I knew. It's really hard to tell what other people believe at a fundamental level, and there's certainly a humorous undertone to nearly all flat-earth evangelism I've encountered. But what's telling is that I've pretended to be a flat earther myself when mocking climate sceptics. In terms of the basic trust in many other people OR basic competence in the realm of physics required not to hold a belief, climate change scepticism and round-earth scepticism actually seem fairly close to me. And I'm sure there are sincere climate sceptics.
Flat-earthism is a noncontroversial and extreme example of a belief that gets less believed when its proponents have the full benefit of free speech, but I think there are many more like it.
I mean, it certainly looks flat (or at least, not curved) to me when I look out my window ;)
it's pretty rare for an ordinary person to have the opportunity to directly observe the curvature of the earth. I personally don't notice it when I fly commercially. you can indirectly observe it with binoculars on the beach by watching ships (dis)appear over the horizon, but a) you have to recognize the implication, and b) this can be confounded by a mirage/shimmer effect.
it's not hard for me to imagine that some extremely skeptical people might doubt that the world isn't simply how it looks: flat.
We have satellites imaging the Earth as they orbit it. We have astronauts on the Space Station. People fly and sail all over the world. Maps and GPS work based on the Earth's curvature. There's no conspiracy by NASA or whoever which could possibly keep the truth from hundreds of millions of people who know for fact the shape of the Earth.
There's a guy in my area that legally named himself Hitler and drives around in a car covered with swastikas. He's not gained any followers, just ridicule and a bunch of court orders for being shitty to his children. Nobody wants to be him.
Building the tools to better censor is a slippery slope that moves quickly from silencing extremists to silencing activists.
>Would that make you reconsider if the holocaust really happened?
Pulling the h-card out as a cudgel in every single political argument has reduced people's ability to reflect or care about it. Same as the 'think of the children' arguments. It's an emotionally manipulative and dishonest debate method.
Americans tend to believe that the counter to bad speech is good speech. But on the vaccine front, it has become increasingly clear that good speech, backed by overwhelming evidence is insufficient for a significant minority to come to a reasonable mindset.
Free speech is great if almost everyone is reasonable.
America is not nearly there. Empirically, free speech has failed, as an insane fraction of American citizens are vaccine hesitant and believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen.
Have you considered that the number of vaccine hesitant people has increased specifically as a result of the ever-increasing suppression of dissent? To me it seems like that's exactly what's happening.
The US should have handled this exactly like a sane country:
- No lockdowns. You determine your individual risk level. Businesses are free to require masks if they want to. (I really would only be okay with a compelled wfh order, if possible.) The gov owes a lot of people a lot of money for compelling them not to work. The gov wouldn't owe money if consumers just stopped shopping places because they didn't feel comfortable not wearing a mask in a business that didn't require them.
- Vaccines rollout is: take it if you want. We recommend it. It appears to be safe. Here is the data. If you don't want it, fine, but we are business as usual so you're accepting a higher risk.
What they are proposing is how our nation is supposed to work. Everybody is responsible for assessing the risks for their self. If everybody does this then it is an effective way to handle an outbreak.
>vaccine hesitant and believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen.
This is a smear. Communities of Color are vaccine hesitant and for the most part do not believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen. It's gross of you to ignore the legitimate concerns of Communities of Color and to declare them election conspiracy theorist. You're attempting to lump together diverse groups into a single "not like me" group for your own ideological convivence. This is disgusting.
You don't even need to think the election was stolen to argue that opt-out mass mail in voting is a transparently hilariously stupid idea if you care at all about a secure chain of custody secret ballot. You know, the thing we explicitly designed elections around after realizing how important it was given widespread abuse and fraud.
Lumping all these groups of people together as was done here is a great example of the mindless zombie tribalism going on, which in large part is a result of propaganda.
There is a pretty large closure of ideas that now get you pegged as "one of the Bad People" for even stating them publicly, without strongly held support. For example, even suggesting that our election systems in the US are horribly broken or just merely flawed, a widely accepted bi-partisan position just a few short years ago, puts you into the bucket of being a "horse-paste consuming, anti-vax, insurrectionist, conspiracy monger." I wish this was a strawman, but it ain't.
> "Free speech is great if almost everyone is reasonable. ... Empirically, free speech has failed ..."
The problem being that democracy, even representative democracy, also only works if almost everyone is reasonable and (tying back to speech) informed. Once you give up on the population being reasonable, it's a short step to saying that someone "reasonable" ought to control what they see and rule over what they do "for their own good, of course". Even if that happens to be true, down that road lies madness.
Free speech is used as a dialectic medium to exchange information without having considerations of direct action taken against you (at least by the government). It is, effectively a deductive process. "Spreading" misinformation is not the same as discussing the obverse of the populist topic. Were you to fabricate tables, charts, and number which are used to conclude you're misinforming. This misinformation only extends in its ability to convince to the unscrupulous. Were you to, with due skepticism, promote the discussion of this data and provide an analytic outlook you're not misinforming, you're discussing, you're empirical. As an aside: if you're empirical and your opponent makes attempts to shut you up, what do you conclude? Make a tree, discuss the probabilities you assign to it.
Hilariously it seems to be that empiricism has failed. One does not generate a meaningful framework of human morality from non-transcendent scientific conclusion other than utilitarianism which in itself is conceptually flawed because each human presents hundreds or thousands of immeasurable and constantly moving targets. This is intractable. It is also why, despite the leaps and bounds in technological advancement, people still have to put in their 40 hours. It is why a CEO can rake in ~300x that of the company's average employee. It is why a large swath of the population must undergo the risks of debt peonage. It's why people feel that populist ideology should be inflicted on everyone, despite various circumstances - by the very definition a slave master relationship, the same sort of relationship virtually everyone rails against. Which brings me to the final point, I am not your property, and I suspect neither of us wants to be the property of the government or of corporations. I will assume they neither you nor they have property rights over me and thus I will consume and defer as I so please, but do go and inflict your blind ideology on to me.
The other half of the population probably believes you are evidence that free speech has failed. Would you give up your own free speech to show the strength of your convictions?
More seriously, what would be your solution to a country where two major power blocs both believe that free speech is acceptable so long as it stays inside their respective overton windows?
When the "good speech" has devolved into dunking on people with social media posts using fax and logic, I can see why it no longer works as a counter to bad speech.
Confirmation bias is a helluva drug. It encourages people to agree with those they like and disagree with those they don't. Sometimes those biases can be overcome with time and patient reasoning but in the hyper-connected, engagement-driven world of social media that rarely happens. In-group/out-group preference kicks in and people start defending those in their group against attacks of character, lending a false sense of legitimacy to their ideas - the ideas born of confirmation bias instead of logic. At a large enough scale, this results in a social divide perpetuated by echo chambers.
> But on the vaccine front, it has become increasingly clear that good speech, backed by overwhelming evidence is insufficient for a significant minority to come to a reasonable mindset.
The problem isn't the evidence, the details of which many people wouldn't understand or care to know, it's the credibility of the people making recommendations based on that evidence, and the way they have conveyed those recommendations.
The public-facing people championing public health have long since lost credibility but they aren't being replaced in an effort to restore public trust. That's the problem.
Which paves the way for the argument that many/most people also disbelieve the Holocaust, but they have to keep quiet because of the threat of government hanging over them.
No it hasn't. It would perhaps have if the strategy of history falsification that the far right kept trying since about the 60ies would have worked. These laws were one factor in making sure no such history falsification took place on a broad scale.
Scientologists in Germany face specific political and economic restrictions. They are barred from membership in some major political parties, and businesses and other employers use so-called "sect filters" to expose a prospective business partner's or employee's association with the organization.
Come on now, they aren't open Nazis or holocaust denials. They're run-of-the-mill European right wing populists against immigration, EU in general, and most things progressive.
No comorbidity has caused the life of thousands of people. Drinking slurpies and eating ding-dongs all day, the chickens have come home to roost. 80% of Covid deaths involved obese people. Stop blaming people who won't get the vaccine for the troubles. I got Covid from a friend who had the vaccine, lo and behold, we had the exact same symptoms, including losing taste, fever, cold sweats, etc., and he actually had it a little worse because he had headaches from it as well. Vaccine works, mmmhmm, ok, better get booster 3 and 4 and 5...to be sure.
I am remorseful at this point. By calculation taking the vaccine is sensible. But very closely so in my age group. There is currently a push to vaccinate children which is technically irresponsible since they won't suffer symptoms and would reach a better immunity they will never get with the vaccine. There is a lot of room for critique and much panic about a serious but not too deadly disease.
Why do people fear long-term effects of the vaccine (which seem very unlikely in light of past vaccine history) but dismiss equally unknown long-term effects of covid? It is true that most children are not affected by covid in the short term compared with other age groups, but some get neurological disease, and others have gotten "long covid". Those are not the same as the typical vaccine side effects. Feels like maybe a case of the "trolley problem".
> Feels like maybe a case of the "trolley problem".
I think that's it exactly. It seems some (many? most?) people believe that the consequences of actions deserve more scrutiny and a higher threshold to act, than inaction and the threshold to refrain from action. Lots of people—almost instinctively, at least for some of them—think acting to kill one to save five is worse than letting the five die through your inaction.
You have to go get the vaccine. You choose to get it. Getting COVID-19 is just something that'll happen to you, eventually. You don't choose to go get it.
Whether it makes sense or not, I think that really is the difference.
Why do people fear long-term effects of the vaccine (which seem very unlikely in light of past vaccine history) but dismiss equally unknown long-term effects of covid?
I think for three reasons:
1. Long COVID isn't a definable disease. That whole ground has been badly polluted by people claiming to have "long COVID" when they haven't ever even tested positive for short COVID, there being no symptoms in common with all reports, etc. It's very hard to say what the long terms effects of COVID really are even though there are now nearly two years of experience with it, for this reason.
2. Long term effects from vaccines have happened before, e.g. early ones gave people polio, more recently there was the Pandemrix / narcolepsy affair. Drugs of any kind are put through difficult safety trials because of a long history of accidents. They are artificial chemicals designed to manipulate the bodies most powerful internal mechanisms after all, no reason why it's impossible to have long term effects.
3. The side effects of COVID vaccines are drastically worse than any normal vaccine. They routinely make people very sick, but it doesn't get treated by scientists as a possible sign of bad things happening because these are "normal" and "expected". Some side effects weren't detected by the trials, like myocarditis, and others weren't detected despite being apparently very common, like stopped periods. Not detected because all the women were on birth control. In fact information on side effects of any kind is extremely poor - you get self reported documentation at best, as there are no major large scale surveys - and the establishment is quite obviously terrified of any attempt to find out more. The trials themselves ignored all events that happened 7 days after vaccination, which doesn't seem very long. That attitude is endemic.
In a situation where all discussion of side effects is heavily penalized or outright erased (e.g. Nicki Minaj losing her Twitter account), it's inevitable that people will conclude something is being frantically swept under the carpet.
Finally, consider something important: the ambient underlying assumption behind the vaccination programme is that everyone will get COVID at some point and it will be the same for everyone regardless of when they get it. In reality it's now been nearly two years and most people either haven't got it yet, even when heavily exposed because they were self-isolating with sick people (I am in this category), or alternatively, got it in such a way that it was so mild they didn't notice at all. If you assume the modellers are wrong again, and that a 100% chance of infection is not in fact correct, or alternatively that by the time you do get it it's mutated to a form that's no worse than a cold, then the tradeoff around vaccines looks quite different even for middle aged people. After all, zero spike proteins is better than some regardless of how you get them.
I agree it's fuzzy, just like "vaccine side effects". If you believe one is worth worrying about, the other one probably is as well. But long covid probably a stronger clinical record even if fuzzy.
2. Ok so we definitely know by now that the vaccine does not give covid in the same way that some older vaccines against other diseases would've. There's been clinical trials and billions of doses given. As for events like adjuvant-induced narcolepsy, so far they're conjectures as well. Conjecture for conjecture, I worry more about the one that's been filling children's hospitals with unexplained neuro diseases...
3. Yes there have been lapses in reporting of side effects but so far they seem to have been rather benign.
> the ambient underlying assumption behind the vaccination programme is that everyone will get COVID at some point and it will be the same for everyone regardless of when they get it
No, I disagree. The ambient assumption is based on what happens in an unchecked mass epidemic: massive excess deaths. It is not this way because everyone gets it or because everyone reacts the same to it. It is this way because this virus is bad enough on average. There is absolutely an element of collective responsibility in the assumption about the vaccination campaign - that it's not just to benefit the individuals who are vaccinated, and that no matter how good you think your odds are of survival, it is socially irresponsible for people not to get vaccinated just as it is socially unacceptable not to wear your seatbelt in your car, even if you're driving by yourself on a desolate stretch of road, or to do recreational heroin which is detrimental to your own health only. It's because even though the vast majority of the people doing these things survive, left unchecked, they impose a burden on society that society rejects.
The ambient assumption is based on what happens in an unchecked mass epidemic: massive excess deaths
The pandemic until very recently has been entirely unchecked yet there was not 'massive excess deaths' in many places that did relatively little, like Sweden. So you're asserting this with vague emotional terms like 'massive', but this is the exact assumption that I'm talking about.
Individual cost benefit analysis aside, normally vaccinated people would certainly feel safer and goes out more, offsetting the already meager reduction of transmissibility. (Certainly I don't have data to say if it is net benefit or not.)
If people really cares about the others, they should have had stayed home and eradicated the virus.
I would argue that having full scale lock-down and mass testing would be a lot less intrusive to one's liberty than using their jobs to coerce the injection of hastily made vaccine using novel technologies. But one isn't supposed to be following China's eradication strategy, or it would be undemocratic, right?
Not to mention the additional selection pressure due to leaky vaccines, but that's another story.
What dream world do you live in where people don't get sick or die of other vaccinations as a side effect? You're injecting a foreign substance into your blood stream. There's always a small risk.
Nicki Minaj got kicked off twitter for making an absurdly stupid and false claim because she didn't want to bother with getting vaccinated.
I've had lots of vaccines and none of them made me sick. I guess about half the people I know who have been vaccinated were knocked out for a day or two, with many of them reporting that they felt truly terrible. That's not normal.
As for Minaj's claim: you believe it's absurd and stupidly false, because you haven't heard anything else like it. But this topic is about censorship of anything that can be perceived as anti-vaccine. VAERS has quite a lot of reports of swollen testicles and/or testicular pain, so who is to say that her report was really false? It can't be proven by either of us one way or another; just assigned probabilities based on prior expectations. Expectations partly controlled by the type of act this thread is about.
That depends. If you don't physically exaggerate yourself, you generally don't feel anything, perhaps your arm is a bit painful and that is it.
But your doctor might have told you to not do sport for a day. I never had any adverse effects before and consequently ignored that advice after a tetanus vaccination. Completely knocked me down the next 2 days.
This vaccination has been administered on a very large scale, so it shouldn't necessarily discourage anyone if there are some adverse effects. Maybe the advice against doing sports must be extended to wanking, but side effects can be a result of circumstances.
> dismiss equally unknown long-term effects of covid?
If you believe vaccines have no potential negative effect beyond 1 week, you'll have to give a serious thought as to why you believe Covid can have long term effects.
Also past vaccine history means absolutely nothing. You can't assume the next bridge is built safely just because you have never seen a bridge fall before.
> If you believe vaccines have no potential negative effect beyond 1 week, you'll have to give a serious thought as to why you believe Covid can have long term effects.
I mean, covid can kill you, which is kind of a long-term negative effect? Surely you're not arguing that the vaccine is equally likely to have that particularly long-term effect, so then I'd ask why you think it's equally likely to have other long-term effects?
> Also past vaccine history means absolutely nothing. You can't assume the next bridge is built safely just because you have never seen a bridge fall before.
Really? I mean, do you...generally avoid bridges where you live?
It seems to me that if bridges don't collapse frequently, that would indeed be evidence that whoever is building / designing / approving them is doing something right, and that "the next" bridge is also unlikely to collapse?
> If you believe vaccines have no potential negative effect beyond 1 week, you'll have to give a serious thought as to why you believe Covid can have long term effects
...because they are different? A localized, single dose mRNA vaccine that transiently produces spike protein will have a completely different effect than systemic infection with a virus.
That's not what the OP said though. There are two unknowns: effects of long-term COVID, and effect of long-term vaccine.
The person you responded to quite clearly suggests it's illogical to ignore long-term effects of COVID in comparing the outcomes. Particularly in light of the actual evidence of neurological effects of COVID, and some evidence of long COVID being more than phantom effect.
If you assume a weighted value X for long-term vaccination impacts, but assume a 0 or anything materially less than X for the same for COVID it's just not a consistent evaluation.
> Also past vaccine history means absolutely nothing. You can't assume the next bridge is built safely just because you have never seen a bridge fall before.
It does not mean nothing. Yes just because previous vaccines were safe does not mean the next one will be safe. However success of previous vaccines mean we have the technology to create and evaluate future safe vaccines.
Similarly, because we have a history of building bridges we know what it entails to make future safe bridges -- however the bridge could still fall if make a mistake.
> If you believe vaccines have no potential negative effect beyond 1 week, you'll have to give a serious thought as to why you believe Covid can have long term effects.
Because viruses do cause long term effects in the form of just straight up irreparable damage to your organs or long last presence that re-emerges later. They are actively hurting you, and despite the popular phrase, what doesn't kill you tends to just make you weaker.
> Also past vaccine history means absolutely nothing. You can't assume the next bridge is built safely just because you have never seen a bridge fall before.
Are you suggesting you feel you're risking death every time you step on a bridge? Because that would have to be the case if past engineering precedents meant "absolutely nothing".
The reality is that medical precedent means a lot. We understand the mechanisms of vaccines pretty well. Our estimates on the efficacy of bridges tends to be pretty good. One can assess a bridge design and affirm that it's likely to stay up under X pressure for N years. If a problem were to occur, we would know the typical failure modes.
Vaccines aren't a black box. We know how they work and we can anticipate the failure modes. There aren't really any paths for "long term effects".
I've been upset by this myopic view since the very beginning. We are increasingly learning that viruses can have long-term effects on the body and mind, even prior to COVID. Agreed that we can't all walk around as 'bubble boys' out of fear of the unknown, but one should definitely avoid becoming infected with viruses where at all possible. That the initial symptoms are analogous to a flu for most people doesn't mean that's the end of the story.
HPV was 'just' genital warts, until we found out that it causes cancer. Other animal species have cancer-causing viruses as well. Or take Chicken Pox: basic kid's illness in the past (and yes, it was worth getting it when younger before a vaccine was available to avoid late-life illness) but if you've ever known anyone with a severe case of shingles you'll know that it's not 'just' a virus that causes itchy rashes in grade-schoolers. Shingles can ruin people's lives.
Assuming you won't have any long-term issues from exposure to a dangerous virus is just rolling dice.
The idea of letting my kids get a known neurologically-affecting virus without even the option of vaccination (yet) and just hoping that it won't cause them issues in the long-term fills me with dread.
How many people need to die before it's considered a "deadly disease"? As a person in a high risk group, it angers me to hear folks cast my life as disposable and my death as insignificant.
I've given up reddit after arguing with all these fools. A simple risk analysis will tell you it was the right thing to do. If you're wrong about the vaccine, you took a shot you may not have needed, if you're wrong about COVID, you're betting your life on it (and other people's as well).
It's not true that people get stronger immunity by catching covid. 1/3 of people get no antibodies at all, as compared to 100% of non-immunocompromised people who get vaccinated.
Yeah, looking at the linked study in the article, it seems folks who fought it off easily (often with low initial viral load) tended to be the ones who consistently tested blood serum antibody-negative. So if you had it and didn't get much more than a cough, there's a fair chance you didn't develop antibodies. Generic and local immune responses beat it in a lot of those cases (I gather), not virus-specific antibodies and a broad system-wide immune response.
That's really where I'm most concerned. We vaccinated both of our teenagers - after all, we get the flu shots every year, right? Now I really worry that there will be side effects from this rushed vaccine that we won't know about for decades.
Had you not, you should be equally worried that effectively guaranteeing them COVID, as this isn't going away, puts into their body a neurologically impacting virus, with growing evidence of medium term impacts, whilst in other medical fields a growing body of literature shows viruses can have severe life and wellness impacts decades later (whether that means Chicken Pox with Shingles, or Herpes/Cold sores and Alzheimer's).
Surely you're not making this statement in good faith because the same virus that gave you Chicken Pox can lay dormant in your body until it reactivates and causes Shingles:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shingles
> There is currently a push to vaccinate children which is technically irresponsible since they won't suffer symptoms
Vaccination isn't just about preventing COVID symptoms, but also slowing the spread.
> and would reach a better immunity they will never get with the vaccine.
Do you have an article about this, preferably one written recently that takes the Delta variant into account? The CDC doesn't really have information about COVID re-infection rates [0], so I'm not sure how much immunity is really given by getting infected compared to getting vaccinated.
I never once in my life considered an anti-vax position until now. I still think previous vaccines are fine as we have had decades of experience making and studying them, and only at the moment am concerned about the brand new mRNA vaccine, but the result of all of the recent events and all of the censoring really has thrown me for a loop and I actually have started reconsidering what I used to just assumed was true.
I lost all faith in mass media years ago, haven't watched CNN/etc in years, and now I've lost any faith I had in our institutions such as the CDC and FDA. Censoring any opposition and using full on physical coercion, forcing people to do what they say or else they'll take your job away from you, or else you won't be able to provide for your family, ruins any remaining trust I had in them and now I'm questioning everything that I just blindly trusted was true.
I don't know how many years it'll be before I ever trust them again. You may think I'm completely wrong and misled, and that's fine. But the actions these groups are taking are completely undermining themselves, they're completely screwing over their credibility. Not just for this issue, but for every issue into the future, and that is a serious issue. I no longer assume that what the FDA approves is good for use. I no longer assume what the CDC says we should do is what's best for me. The trust is gone. This dystopian situation of removing the voice of anyone who dares question them only further entrenches my doubt.
You don't have to trust the FDA or CDC. The mRNA platform is quite old relatively, and millions of doses have been administered with profoundly low adverse effects.
None of the material that's being pulled would in any way persuade me that getting vaxxed was a mistake. I'm very happy with my choice and highly recommend it. Most of the material being pulled is pernicious conspiracy rubbish, but too much legitimate discussion, some of which has a chance of persuading anti-vaxxers is being hoovered up in the cull.
Please don't make medical decisions based on crap you read on the Internet, and especially not based on articles about crap other people are reading on the Internet. Talk to a doctor. That's what they're there for.
Devil;s advocacy: then why so much ad spend to push pro-vaxx media? Also vaccinated, not remorseful at all. Wouldn't the responsible messaging be a huge ad wave of "talk to your doctor?"
My opinion: this isn't actually a feasible solution. There are not enough doctors for all millions of Americans, let alone all billions of humans, to consult with their doctor. It's also largely unnecessary. I did not consult my doctor. I looked at the situation, assessed my values, did my own cost-benefit analysis, and mediated all of this with a healthy amount of dialogue between my confidantes. As most people do.
I think this almost necessarily has to be litigated largely through public engagement. You know your situation, your risks, and you know if a serious consultation is prudential for you.
Even still, if the position is "don't make decisions based on biased media," why is the pro-vaxx media more valuable than anti-vaxx or vaxx-hesitant? I believe it resolves entirely to your individual values.
The argument should be: why is it profitable to the individual to value one over the other? I can only make this argument from my previously-established values, and I'm already pro-vaxx.
Almost two years of "two more weeks and we'll be out of this! just do your duty and we'll be free of this pandemic!"
I was very vaccine hesitant and would say I was coerced by government, private businesses (and the governments mandates handed to them), and by my peers. I ended up getting the vaccine recently but I am very scared of the potential consequences.
We need the world to rip off the bandaid and open up instead of our leaders prolonging this pandemic to gain more and more power.
The initial study was very heavily affected by sampling bias (medical personnel with hallway rumors and unbureocratic access to screening techniques).
Add to that that the risk of blood clots is strongly increased by typical isolation at home due to a lack of regular movement/exercise, and the (significant, but still very low) heightened incidence rate isn't enough to deny people vaccination.
I'm someone who was told to be cautious about some vaccines by medical professionals due to a past condition, and so when the covid vaccines started to come available, I both consulted a doctor and did some of my own investigation of things other professionals have published before determining to get vaccinated as soon as possible. Also I've been following VAERS reports since, just to keep a heads up.
As far as I can tell, adverse events from vaccination of any kind are orders of magnitude rarer than corresponding adverse effects from infection.
And nobody who is saying anything about "long term effects" that might show up later has been able to advance any plausible model for how that would happen considering that's vanishingly rare from vaccination in general.
You know that, and I know that. But people who already distrust authority and feel that the mechanisms of culture, finance, and government are biased against them don't agree.
They see money, time, and effort being expended by groups they already feel are against them to silence certain views. Of course they're then going to more prone to associate themselves with those views: "The enemy of my enemy is my friend."
I made a statement of fact supported by secretly recorded videos that I invite you to watch. I am happy to engage in discussion with you. However, I would like to mention the attitude implied by your comment, is probably more appropriate for the YouTube-Truth-Defining department...
Of course some of those titles and the agendas behind them are nuts. But you are confusing the veracity or not of certain facts, with how pleasant you find the messenger...
If I see a video of a US President saying no Generals recommended that US troops should stay in Afghanistan, and days later, I see the top US General saying he did recommended to the president to leave 2500 to 3500
troops on the ground...If you happen to watch
it on Fox News, it does not make it untrue...
In the case of some of the videos I suggested,
they relate to Johnson & Johnson vaccines.
Lets review, for example, some of the current
Lawsuits, including number of claimants they are
currently engaged in...
Pending Lawsuits Against J&J as of February 2021
=================================================
DePuy ASR XL Acetabular System and DePuy ASR Hip Resurfacing System
Number of Lawsuits - 550
Injuries - dislocation, loosening, metallosis (metal poisoning), revision surgeries
Pinnacle Acetabular Cup
Number of Lawsuits - 7,056
Injuries - dislocation, loosening, metallosis (metal poisoning), revision surgeries
Xarelto
Number of Lawsuits - 13,511
Injuries - severe, sometimes deadly bleeding events, blood clots, wound leaks, infection
Johnson’s Talcum Powder
Number of Lawsuits - 27,168
Injuries - ovarian cancer, mesothelioma cancer
"The company is facing smaller, emerging litigations for the
interstitial cystitis (IC) drug Elmiron and DePuy’s Attune knee implants. Elmiron litigation is in the beginning stages with a handful of cases filed in state courts, but lawyers expect hundreds more. People who filed lawsuits say
Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen Pharmaceuticals unit failed to warn them that the drug could cause vision problems, particularly a condition called pigmentary maculopathy."
=================================================
Does it sound like you want to get a vaccine from them?
According to the CDC, and most of this thread...you are a nutter and vaccine denier if you dont.
Very vell, I will bite since there is no deconstruction of this yet and it will be a good workout for me.
You posted a video/article of some people making some claims. What is the argument you want to support by posting that? I want you to state your argument as clear as possible so that we are not strawmannig eachother. Debate me!
I will not even go into the value of that article because it immediately raises all kinds of red flags which if you are incapable of seeing, there is no point arguing about the article. Issues related to jurnalistic integrity (revealing your supposed whistleblower), deliberate cutscene use for manipulation, deliberate tangling of source material in order to string a narative , tainted entity (as GP said, which can not be ignored), and many more. These people are clearly shitty hacks.
BTW, "A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on." - Winston Churchill
And in this case, it did already get translated in several languages and spread everywhere in the span of at most 2 days.
1) Even some technical employees of Vaccine producers
are skeptical of their products, particularly vaccination
of children. Watch the videos as they are secret
recordings of some of these employees. I am not claiming
all at J&J have the same position. But its a position
that currently gets you banned on YouTube and downvoted
here.
2) My other argument is that this whole thread is full
of claims of "vaccines safe", ignoring the error
implied by the generalization that comes with it.
The examples I posted of the J&J medical lawsuits
show the appalling record of this company. But if you
refuse a vaccine from them you are apparently
somebody you should not even debate.
And please dont mention the FDA...
"The story of "probably the worst drug approval decision in recent US history"
1.1 One of those employees is probably https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandon-schadt-48577053/ , Regional Deliver Operations for New York metropolitan area. I will just eliminate what this one said because his oppinion is irrelevant. His oppinion about the subject (safety, efficacy, importance, target of the vaccine) is irrelevant. It is worth just as much as the opinion of someone in the legal department on whether someone in a backend development team should use Python or C++ for a new company project.
1.2 That person (BS) is the only one actually claiming you don't need to vaccinate kids. He is not even claiming you should not vaccinate kids, just claiming as a personal oppinion that it is not necessary for kids.
1.3 The other one (JD) says to not vaccinate BABIES but to actually vaccinate kids once they are socialized.
1.4 JD in the video is actually pro-vaccine. The only sentence they managed to take out of context ("Don’t get the Johnson & Johnson [COVID vaccine], I didn’t tell you though,"), was in the context that he actually did get vaccinated and he got the Moderna vaccine because he believes that one is better.
1.5 So for the first point, the actual people interviewed do not even support your point. Even if the people editing the video did their best to make you believe that. Maybe you are the one who didn't watch the video. The people who made the video are so obviously selling a narative and so obviously lying through the power of video editing.
1.6 You never even claimed that all of J&J employees shared the same position. Do not get sidetracked.
1.7 You absolutely deserve to get downvoted for posting manipulative misinformation that is not even supported by the people being interviewed. You deserve to be downvoted for posting shit. This is the kind of material that does not belong on HN. And while I am against banning, it is YouTubes right to ban people/content from their platform.
2.1 Yes the claim is that vaccines in general are mostly (but not perfectly) safe. And that vaccines in general are a lot safer than the disease they prevent. And that the COVID vaccines follow the same trend and are mostly safe and definitely safer than the disease. (Note: In countries that managed to actually eliminate the disease through lockdowns, the risk calculation is different for obvious reasons) This, claim is not refuted by the link you posted. This claim has so far proven to be true.
2.2 The record of the company does not change whether the J&J vaccine is safe or not. (Is has so far proven - by third parties - to be mostly safe like the other COVID vaccines, and certainly safer than COVID.) You are however justified to be suspicios of the claims the company makes.
2.3 Even if you don't trust J&J, there is still Pfizer and Moderna. And if you don't trust mRNA technology, there is AstraZeneca. And if you don't trust the US and UK government, there is Sputnik V and some others. Your link, besides not actually supporting your point, is not relevant to all the other options.
3.1 Do not get the discussion sidetracked. The FDA/Alzheimers debate is a separate debate.
3.2 Please respect this structure when countering my arguments
P.S.: I need to rant!! While writting this rebuttal was not a waste of time, watching that video definitely was. It was so unbelievably cringe. I do not know who these (your original link) conspiracy peddlers are, but they are with certainty shit. The most shit they can be. They are shit from a human pov, shit from a professional pov, shit from a integrity pov, shit from a communication pov. just shit. shit faced pieces of shit. It is unbelievably frustrating that trolling has actually become a profession. Trolling was many things pre-2010 but it was not this.
Posting stuff like this is actually something you should apologize for. You should apologize to @pg, to @dang, to the rest of HN and to me for posting shit on HN. It is the kind of thing that is bound to get someone, who does not immediately dismiss you as a troll, nerd sniped in an (easy but ultimately useless and pointless) attempt to demolish such content.
Some of these are Technical employees some of them Managers familiar with
the internal company processes. Some you decided to disclaim their opinion
as personal opinion. Others because they are not high enough in the hierarchy
of the company. That is an acceptable attitude. However ignores the reasons
why they fundamentally would be making those statements.
These claims are just data points, but its bit like saying:
A Volkswagen sales person or Company car mechanic says their
cars are crap. I am going to ignore those data points because what
do they know about car engineering...I will listen instead to the
Chief Company Engineer...
Maybe, its because they are not that high in the hierarchy,
that they allowed themselves to make those statements.
Your argument seems to be that they dont know what they are talking about.
You ignore the fact,that one of them is clearly stating not to take their vaccine.
And you are the one misstating facts. JD says the older kids should only taking
as their "civic duty", does not say the vaccine is really required.( for kids)
> 1.6
I wont. I was reminding you upfront that I did not make the statement.
>1.7
If that is true or not the readers of this thread are welcome to decide by watching the
videos themselves and do further research. I would like to remind you, that
many facts now accepted, used to get people banned from Facebook and
YouTube months ago.
You are claiming I am posting something that does not belong to HN and I deserve to be
downvoted, as I am posting shit. If its all shit, dont worry, the downvotes will come. :-)
But you went further than that. I take your comment, that although you dont
endorse banning, you think YouTube is entitled to ban who they want from their platform,
as a veiled threat, that for some shit post here, you would also like to engage in a
similar type of scientific and political arbitrage.
The problem with that attitude is that it tends to backfire.
>2.1
You seem to forget or ignore that in many countries millions of people are
facing vaccine mandates, with no exceptions accepted, that include threat of job loss
unless they comply.
You ignore that vaccines used to have 5 to 7 years experimental trial periods.
You make a blank statement that vaccines have been shown to be safe based on what
were "warp" speed operations, on the face of unprecedented pandemic. And you make that statement
you forget or ignore the fact that all safety studies exclude the immunocompromised.
Compared to your somewhat blank statement of vaccine safety, lets see what the WHO says on
their website, for example about AstraZeneca. These are partial quotes but I think they
support my argument that you cannot make the statement you just made:
Thank you for agreeing with me concerning the company claims. About Pfizer,
yes I trust them even less, as until the pandemic they had a toxic reputation:
> 2.3
About Pfizer, yes indeed, I trust them even less. Until the pandemic
they had the most toxic of the toxic reputations.
"Pfizer is likely to make huge profits from its COVID-19 vaccine
but the greatest long-term benefit to the company may well
be the positive PR it has received as a result. That PR was
much-needed: before COVID-19, Pfizer had a toxic reputation
even compared to other pharma companies. "
"1986: Pfizer had to withdraw an artificial heart valve from
the market after defects led to it being implicated in over 300 deaths."
"2003: Pfizer has long been condemned for profiteering from AIDS drugs."
"2011: Pfizer was forced to pay compensation to families of children killed
in the controversial Trovan drug trial. During the worst meningitis epidemic
seen in Africa, in 1996, Pfizer ran a trial in Nigeria their new drug Trovan.
Five of the 100 children who took Trovan died and it caused liver damage,
while it caused lifelong disabilities in those who survived"
"2012: Pfizer had to pay around $1billion to settle lawsuits
claiming its Prempro drug caused breast cancer."
"2013: Pfizer paid out $273 million to settle over 2,000 cases in the US that
accused its smoking treatment drug Chantix of provoking suicidal and homicidal
thoughts, self harm and severe psychological disorders. Pfizer was also accused
of improperly excluding patients with a history of depression or
other mental disturbances from trials for the drug."
"2020: Pfizer reached an agreement with thousands of customers
of its depo-testosterone drug in 2018 after they sued it for increasing
the likelihood of numerous issues, including heart attacks."
I agree that for some, the risks of vaccine might be smaller than the
risks caused by COVID-19.
But governments and health organizations implementing obligatory legal mandates, are also
responsible for fatal outcomes like these Pfizer related examples:
"Young people’s deaths after Pfizer vaccines are new worry"
I wont get sidetracked. I tried to prevent you, mentioning things like organizations
like the FDA are watching out for the health of consumers. You implied that other 3rd parties are
watching out for vaccine safety. In reality they review material presented by the
vaccine producers. Its a very similar process to Boeing and the FAA reviews.
> 3.2
I tried to respect it as you made the effort to reply to my comments.
PS...rant...shit shit..rant...rant.. :-)
The problem with rants is that they can come to bite you in a few months.But now its here for posterity.
Hopefully these virus mutations will fade to progressively less threatening flavors.
My money however is on that they wont. Infections will be back.
As everybody agreed vaccines are "safe", and it will be politically and scientifically difficult to contradict
what was stated until now, you wont escape a mandated 4th, 5th and 6th dose.
You will be mandated to take it, as the principle is accepted in spirit and in law.
When the side effects start, I am sure the argument then will be:
"Oh we never said vaccines were absolutely safe, they were always risks..."
I acknowledge that you have responded to my comment and therefore I do not consider you were trolling. I do not acknowledge that you have addresed my points (especially 1.1 to 1.5). Actualy answering to this will however take significantly more time. I do not know if I will actually allocate that time, it's past midnight.
I tried to focus on your 2 points and how the initial link did not actually support either of them and it was mere video editing trickery. You have instead brought a good chunk of your world view on the subject into the discussion and even some accusations.
I decided to answer just to 1.x points because the rest is already off the rails and I consider discussing those points further to lead nowhere.
I will first reiterate my points to encapsulate them in an even more concise form and then address your response:
1.1 BS is Regional Deliver Operations. His opinion about vaccination is irrelevant.
1.2 Although BS's opinion is irrelevant, your point is not supported by what he says. He is sceptical that kids need them, not that they are safe and effective.
1.3 JD says kids should get vaccinated. This contradicts the narative of the article. Why kids should get vaccinated is offtopic.
1.4 JD did't get J&J because he got Moderna. JD does NOT recommend staying unvaccinated instead of getting J&J. JD actually recommends people to get Moderna instead of J&J. The video is edited to make it appear that he is against vaccines in general.
1.5 is just summarizing 1.1 - 1.4
-------------------------------------------------
As for your response:
> Some of these are Technical employees
FTFY: 1 of 2 is
> some of them Managers
FTFY: also 1 of 2, maybe a manager but irrelevant due to department
> familiar with the internal company processes.
maybe, but most probably irrelevant due to department. Also irrelevant because the debate is about the safety and efficacy of the J&J vaccine, not about the crimes of J&J the company.
> Some you decided to disclaim their opinion as personal opinion.
FTFY: 1 namely BS. Due to being in an irrelevant department.
> Others because they are not high enough in the hierarchy of the company.
Bullshit. I did not disclaim JD's answers. I said they do not support your point.
> That is an acceptable attitude.
Offtopic
> However ignores the reasons why they fundamentally would be making those statements.
Are you claiming they made declarations under duress?
> These claims are just data points
They do not support your point. One out of two is irrelevant the other actually says kids should get vaccinated
> , but its bit like saying: A Volkswagen sales person or Company car mechanic says their cars are crap.
Your analogy is not even an analogy. The correct analogy is: one is the delivery man and the mechanic says Porsche is better.
> I am going to ignore those data points because what do they know about car engineering...
I ignored the delivery man
> I will listen instead to the Chief Company Engineer...
Bullshit. I did no such thing. You are strawmanning me.
> Maybe, its because
Why they answerd the interview is irrelevant. You seem to think they are the Snowden of J&J. They are not.
> they are not that high in the hierarchy, that they allowed themselves to make those statements.
Bullshit. I never once mentioned hierarchy.
> Your argument seems to be that they dont know what they are talking about.
Bullshit. my argument is that regardless of knowledge, the oppinion of the delivery man is irrelevant. It was an interview with his oppinion. BS did not reveal anything, he just gave his oppinion and speculated. He is not a whisleblower. He is irellevant.
And JD says kids should get vaccinated. The reason is offtopic
> You ignore the fact,that one of them is clearly stating not to take their vaccine.
Yes, because BS is in a irrelevant department.
> And you are the one misstating facts.
Which one? The one bellow? I am not, he litteraly said: "Once you go out and you've got to go to preschool, ....., that's when you need to vaccinate"
> JD says the older kids should only taking as their "civic duty", does not say the vaccine is really required.( for kids)
Irelevant. I will not try to explain to you why that is important because it is offtopic and we do not start from the same base assumptions.
--------------
Also, with regards to 1.7, I made no veiled threats. You claiming I did is a nasty accusation and it is bullshit I will not accept. But 1.7 is actually offtopic from 1.x
Project Veritas has a history of editing and presenting footage in a misleading way as well as trying to plant fake stories in order to later discredit them[1]. There's an asymmetry here to you presenting information that based on past behaviour was probably published in bad faith and expecting someone to either accept that information as factual or go to the (much greater) effort of trying to debunk it.
I think it's fair for anyone in this case to dismiss the information as pure noise, given the source.
As I stated in another point in this thread...if Fox News, Donald Trump or Breitbart claim its 9.00 AM ...And it actually is 9.00 AM ...it does NOT make so that is 10.00 AM just because it come to you via those channels...
If a known liar tells you a thing, the correct thing to do is weight that statement with zero confidence, not to believe its opposite. You gain zero information, one way or the other.
This is the same thing people said about vaccine mandates ("mandating vaccinations will only make people dig in!"), but we've had concrete evidence of the exact opposite behavior just this week: after weeks of grumbling, thousands of unvaccinated healthcare workers went and got their shots ahead of NYC's mandate[1].
Edit: because I realize this is an apples-to-oranges comparison, here's an appropriate one: we don't allow cigarette companies to advertise, since smoking cigarettes is manifestly unhealthy. There's been an extraordinary amount of reporting on the undisclosed financial relationships between prominent anti-vaxxers and snake-oil companies; it's not clear to me why forbidding this kind of manifestly dangerous profiteering on a global pandemic actually represents a risk to free expression.
when you tell someone "get vaccinated or be fired" what choice do they have? My job required us to all upload our vax cards or be fired. I resisted for a few days and even applied for an accommodation on the basis of "crisis of personal conscious" but was told if my accommodation was denied then i would be fired. I eventually relented and uploaded my vax card because i wasn't going to risk my family's wellbeing over a random piece of paper.
i did file a formal HR complaint and asked for a list of other personal health information required for continued employment that was not in my offer letter. I expect no response though.
> when you tell someone "get vaccinated or be fired" what choice do they have?
That's the point. You don't have a right to endanger the healths of other people, and you never have; the legal groundwork for vaccination mandates significantly predates the current crisis.
> I eventually relented and uploaded my vax card because i was going to risk my family's wellbeing over a random piece of paper.
Close to 5 million people have died worldwide, and your concern for their wellbeing only begins when you're required to get a vaccine that's been free & convenient for months? With all due respect: have a little perspective.
Isn't this logically inconsistent? The vaccinated should be protected by the vaccine, and thus little to no threat should exist.
Ah but the vaccines are leaky you say, the vaccinated can acquire and spread the disease, and they can do so asymptomatically. And to that I propose a question: are the vaccines definable as effective, that being the case? If you're so positive of the vaccine, shouldn't your whole family unit be vaccinated? Children aren't very susceptible to the disease. Once boosters are deployed to the aceding population, will that cause a paradigm shift? Once a large proportion of children are vaccinated? Once we hit the constantly moving target for "herd immunity"?
No, it's all or none. It's arbitrary. It is not logically consistent. It is government policy in a nutshell.
People die constantly. Attributing causality exclusively to COVID19 is asinine. Even using an aggregate like excess mortality is a fool's errand. It's been clear since the beginning that comorbidity in combination with COVID19 is what typically causes death. Any numbers pulled to evidence how deadly COVID19 is are fraught with interdependencies and overlap and hardly present a true to life picture.
It's naive to think you can save everyone. It's okay that you're afraid.
> Isn't this logically inconsistent? The vaccinated should be protected by the vaccine, and thus little to no threat should exist.
This isn't why we encourage mass vaccination. We encourage mass vaccination because herd immunity protects everyone, including people who can't be vaccinated for legitimate reasons (allergies, immunocompromised status, &c).
I'm young and healthy; my chances of severe illness from COVID are extraordinarily low. I didn't get vaccinated primarily for my own protection; I did it because I have friends and family who need it more than I do, and whose return to normal life is predicated on the participation of society as a whole.
The rest of your post is misinformed about the role vaccines play, and would be addressed by improved public education about immunity, improved immune responses, and lower incidence of severe cases. Individual vaccines produce different outcomes along each of those axes, which has (understandably) produced a great deal of confusion as to whether the COVID vaccines "prevent" COVID or not. But the information is available, and it's incumbent upon you as a member of civil society to avail yourself of it.
> It's naive to think you can save everyone. It's okay that you're afraid.
Yes, you can. Herd immunity as a public health policy includes protection from severe illness; COVID vaccines have consistently been shown to provide protection against severe illness even when new variants appear.
Also, to point out the absurdity with all of this: we wouldn't have as many variations as we currently have if people were to actually get their vaccines. Handwringing over variants while also resisting the chief tool we have for reducing the likelihood of new variants is ridiculous.
I agree the vaccine does decrease the incidence of severe illness, even in the new variants. Based on this fact it should be given to the vulnerable.
A policy of mass vaccination to protect the vulnerable is a different thing and is more related to the concept of herd immunity. It can be very bad policy depending on the nature of the virus. Its really good policy for something like measles. Here's a link that takes a deep dive on how this relates to covid and the corona virus:
https://www.juliusruechel.com/2021/09/the-snake-oil-salesmen...
I did a brief parse of that site, and it's the standard crank spiel about anything vaguely pharmaceutical (plus some "Great Reset" dogwhistling and bloviating about America's founding fathers). He even threw in a Sherlock Holmes quote; how can I argue with that?
Yes, pharmaceutical companies are bad. They're so bad that it's a trite and tired observation to base conspiracy theories on. Nothing written therein changes the fact that the shot is free for you and produces improved healthcare outcomes. The US government already spends hundreds of billions of dollars keeping people alive after decades of damaging their bodies; paying a few billion more for some vaccines is hardly worth a global conspiracy.
Agree with your criticisms but his points on herd immunity are pretty good. If you want a more scientific dive into it this Alberta neurosurgen did a pretty good analysis on some of the same aspects, all referenced:
https://www.lifesitenews.com/opinion/not-justified-canadian-...
I'm not going to do an in-depth rebuttal of these types of articles, because I'm (1) not qualified to do so, (2) not inclined to do so, and (3) lack the time needed to disentangle the science-adjacent claims from the standard conspiracy chaff about freedom, pharmaceutical companies, &c.
But two points:
* Being a neurosurgeon, even a highly educated and titled one, does not make someone an expert on immunology. If he was an expert on immunology, he would be an immunologist. This is exactly the reason why there are stringent rules about diagnoses and evaluations in hospitals: doctors are no less susceptible to expert confusion than the rest of us.
* mRNA vaccines are a new technology. But they're not that new: research into mRNA transport and delivery began in the late 1970s[1]. By the 1990s, they were recognized as the frontier of vaccine development, and were primarily stymied by an absence of funding. Vaccinology's history spans 300 years, the majority of which involved stabbing people with unknown quantities of pathogens without any real understanding of what we were doing. mRNA represents a significant and positive increase in the use of our modern understanding of immune systems to develop medicine. That doesn't make them safe, but they do represent the safest approach (in terms of healthcare outcomes) we've had to vaccinology in its history.
If i knew my vaccination records were required to work where i work i would have taken my skills elsewhere. Not once was i ever told my medical records would or could be required for continued employment.
I got vaccinated to protect myself and those around me. My job has no business in my health records. period.
edit: also, i'm 100% wfh since before the pandemic started. I'm endangering no one at my workplace.
> My job has no business in my health records. period.
You mean other than the health insurance they (hopefully!) provide you, right?
Even beyond that, the idea that the piece of cardboard that the CDC gave you constitutes meaningful (much less private) medical data about you is facile. Depending on the state you live in, your employer de facto has knowledge of your medical history: if you went to a public or private school in most US states, they were legally required to obtain proof of your vaccination against multiple diseases. The reason your job doesn't ask for that proof independently is because we've succeeded at lower levels in mandating it.
> also, i'm 100% wfh since before the pandemic started. I'm endangering no one at my workplace.
That's fine. But your workplace (presumably) isn't your only social sphere.
Edit: You're also (again, presumably) going to return to your workplace or travel on behalf of your employer at some point.
Yup, the Streisand effect is real. Tyrion Lannister said it best - when you cut out a man's tongue, you're not proving him a liar. You're just proving that you fear what he has to say.
In addition to playing into anti-vaxxers’ belief that they are being silenced for nefarious purposes, reducing their arguments’ visibility also reduces the likelihood someone will publish a well-reasoned counterargument.
Skeptic videos might be disseminated on sites frequented solely by those willing to believe them, and they will be less exposed to dissenting opinions.
I think by now we should understand that it usually takes an order of magnitude more effort to counter-act a false claim than it takes to make it in the first place. If your proposed approach was viable there shouldn't be people around today saying that vaccines cause autism, as the original paper that made that claim has been debunked many, many, times. And yet, that lie is still extremely pervasive in society and directly causing harm to people.
Part of this is because of recommendation algorithms on social media sites like Youtube getting people into positive feedback loops. If you find a anti-vaxx video and Youtube recommends you two videos, one re-enforcing the video you've just seen (making you feel smart for having found and accepted the information in the original video) and one debunking it (which makes you feel stupid for having wasted your time on the original video), which do you think the average person is more likely to pick? Eventually the algorithm will "naturally" pick up that people watching anti-vaxx videos don't want to see videos debunking those views and will never show them to people watching anti-vaxx videos. The only way to solve this paradox is to blanket ban the anti-vaxx videos.
Oh, I’m well aware how much easier it is to throw out random unscientific claims than it is to respond to them analytically.
Which is actually part of why I’m opposed to a blanket ban. I’ve had to personally wade through papers and studies to determine whether a vaccine skeptic (an M.D., at that) had correctly interpreted the results.
They hadn’t. So I’d rather have someone else, with some expertise and clout, spend some time on it and publish their counterargument.
Ah, I missed your last sentence. Either way, though, I still think there is a benefit to banning anti-vaxx content from general-audience platforms in that it stops people who are not necessarily seeking out anti-vaxx misinformation from being exposed to it in the first place. A great example of this strategy working is Reddit. When they ban a hateful subreddit (like r/fatpeoplehate) it tends to noticeably improve the quality of the discourse on the site in general for a period afterwards as people who were drawn to join Reddit just to be hateful will have less reason to be on it and also because fewer "ordinary" people are exposed to those hateful ideas limiting their spread within the "general" user base of the site. I believe the same approach works equally well with misinformation movements.
Ultimately, I can’t fault a corporate entity for wishing to improve their customers’ experience by preventing dissemination of potentially harmful material. Perhaps I would agree with them if I had insight into their cost-benefit analysis. I still generally prefer to have all types of ideas out in the open.
You have premised that some content recommender uses an algorithm that creates clusterization of positions, and you conclude that «the only way» is to eliminate one of the two positions. I hope this sentence makes it clear where the issue is.
Which /also/ means, the reasonable moderates of the censored position disappear. With consequences.
Which should contain the rebuttal to that first "proposal": the "centrist algorithm".
She thinks they’re taking it down because they don’t want people to know the truth.
To some degree, that’s true. While the vaccines are overall relatively highly effective and safe, there is no denying that tens of thousands of serious injuries and deaths have occurred as a result of them. Overall the benefits strongly outweigh the risks, but there are risks nonetheless. This is not abnormal for anything that is injected into hundreds of millions of people.
However, platforms like YouTube - cheered on by the CDC and an incredibly heavy handed Biden administration - have decided that people don’t have a right to learn about these cases of “adverse reactions”. As well intentioned as they may be, hiding obvious facts from people calls into question everything else that they are being told. It only emboldens the vaccine hesitant when the powers that be are less than honest and forthcoming about the potential negative outcomes of the vaccine, regardless of how rare they might be.
An action that has nothing to do with the vaccination itself does not "strengthen" anything unless you have decided that you are just in opposition to something for the sake of being in opposition. Which is entirely what the anti-vaxx movement is really about from a political standpoint. Same thing with anti-mask.
I have a similar friend, and whenever I provide links to peer reviewed articles, I’m told that I’m a sheep, and to search on DuckDuckGo, as they don’t hide the truth… so, a YouTube ban is going to do little to him.
> She thinks they’re taking it down because they don’t want people to know the truth.
I'm sorry to hear this. I hope she find the help she needs to understand how and why she's been led to believe this. You might want to talk to her about where she's spending time online, and maybe look into her social circle. Lastly, if she's susceptible to conspiracy theories this won't end with COVID for her or you.
The tendency for anti-vaxxers to believe in their delusions more the more they are contradicted with facts is a thorny problem.
However the flow of new misinformation also strengthens their beliefs, and draws in new people to the delusional cause.
Overall I think deleting this misinformation channel is still a net positive.
We need some psychologists on the case. Or advertising professionals.
Yeah, 30-40% of the population needs psychologists and propagandists to evaluate or re-educate them. I think this viewpoint you're espousing might be part of the problem.
This is how hard it is to get any sense into indoctrinated anti-vaxxers. The actual facts are rejected as propaganda and reeducation. They won't trust eminently respectable sources of truth like the CDC or the WHO.
However, wildly untrustable sources with dubious motives are accepted as truth with no filter.
How did the adversaries hack their brains and lock the door behind them?
> eminently respectable sources of truth like the CDC or the WHO
In 2019, the CDC and WHO could have been considered "eminently respectable sources of truth", but they've both said things to totally tank all of their built up credibility in the last year and a half.
> She thinks they’re taking it down because they don’t want people to know the truth.
1) If they take false content down that will reinforce her beliefs.
2) If they leave false content up, she will keep consuming it, which will reinforce her beliefs.
3) So - when it comes to changing her mind (and the millions like her), 1 and 2 are a wash. She's adopted an unfalsifiable position. There is no policy Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, et al. can adopt to reason her out of this position. She will have to reason her self out of it at some point.
4) The purpose of taking down false content is not to change her mind, or change the mind of anyone else who has adopted an unfalsifiable position. The purpose is to stop the spread of false and untrue information. If there's 10 million people who have taken the unfalsifiable position the goal is to prevent another 10 million from adopting the same viewpoint.
5) However I can't be sure #4 will actually work. Its very difficult to lockdown information and prevent its spread.
6) And can these platforms moderate edge cases with accuracy? If they bungle the job users will lose trust in them as an information source. But - since these platforms are the main driver of misinformation, then discrediting them as information sources would be a net good.
7) So - no moderation means we continue the status quo of information and vaccine hesitancy.
8) Requiring moderation might combat hesitancy by a) preventing the spread of misinformation and b) discrediting platforms in the eyes of the hesitant or hesitant adjacent.
9) Because these platforms are public and performative they are ill suited for mea culpas. Rarely do people relish engaging with ideas that might prove you wrong, especially in a public setting. The work of helping people reason themselves out of unreason will be done outside these platforms.
I disagree. I think we can all agree that we don't need videos talking about how the "bad ideas" of slavery/child abuse/human trafficking/etc. are wonderful things. I think we are right to suppress them. You can make the same argument that allowing these videos validates that they must be telling the truth or YT wouldn't allow it. If all you are looking for is confirmation bias, it is all you will find. It sounds like you wife won't get a vaccine no matter what so let's not argue semantics about what will make her even less likely to get a vaccine.
But your wife should realized that if she can have her free speech then so can facebook. She's free to peruse odysee and gittr and get all the antivax stuff she could possibly ever want to see.
I feel as though there's actually nothing that would convince people like your wife to get vaccinated. Or at least the ultimate deciding factor cannot be predicted or understood. The problem is that people begin to personally identify with an opinion that they hold. And then they'll find any reason or justification for holding onto it.
CDC says get vaccinated? Oh, but they said not to wear masks early on. They can't be trusted. Medical researchers release studies showing vaccine effectiveness? Oh, but look at this random other study that shows otherwise. YouTube decides to moderate vaccine misinformation more strongly? Oh, what are they trying to hide? What are they scared of?
You can keep asking questions and doubting as long as you want if you're emotionally attached to an idea. Welcome to the mind of an anti-vaxxer.
What this all means is that we shouldn't take into account the effect YouTube's action will have on anti-vaxxers because we'd see the same effect regardless of what we do.
She might just die. I recently convinced a coworker to get the vaccine, and she did. And four weeks later contracted Covid-19, probably the delta variant, lost her taste and slept for 5 days straight. Had she not had the vaccine, it's quite likely she would now be dead.
How likely would she to be dead? I encourage everyone to get vaccinated if they can, but even without vaccination the CDC estimated the fatality rate at only 0.6% for the population as a whole. We should take this seriously but exaggerating the risks isn't helpful.
Uhh.. what makes you say that? What percentage of people who get covid actually get admitted to the hospital? What percentage actually die? Both answers are probably lower than you think.
You convincing her to get the vaccine probably fucked up her immune system and led her to getting covid. That scenario is equally possible at this point.
The point you missed in your argument, is that those 700k deaths were from the disease and the 8000 were most likely caused by vaccine legal mandates. The point of trolley problems like vaccine mandates are a type of, is that its not ok to kill 8000 to save 700,000.
>the 8000 were most likely caused by vaccine legal mandates
No, that's not true at all. EEOC didn't give the OK to employers to enforce vaccine requirements until May 28th. At that point 41% of the USA was fully vaccinated, 51% with a single dose. Now, 4 months later, 55% people are fully vaccinated and 62% have had a single dose. Therefore most of the doses that have been done went out before the idea of a vaccine mandate was even on the table.
Meanwhile, there's r/HermanCainAward and r/LeopardsAteMyFace which are each full of hundreds of examples of anti-vaxxers who got sick and died because they "did all the right things" and "stood strong against the government" but COVID didn't care.
Agreed. Maybe its then a question of what is most likely, and also based on medical history of each person. What about this idea? We try to convince people instead, and not make it mandatory?
Not getting your vaccination at this point in time, with all the information available is performative theatrics, not an intellectual decision based on facts. They're only going to be convinced when someone they know or love is either hospitalized or die from the disease.
"“Many of us were saying let’s use [the vaccine] to save lives, not to vaccinate people already immune,” says Marty Makary, a professor of health policy and management at Johns Hopkins University."
...
"As more US employers, local governments, and educational institutions issue vaccine mandates that make no exception for those who have had covid-19,8 questions remain about the science and ethics of treating this group of people as equally vulnerable to the virus—or as equally threatening to those vulnerable to covid-19—and to what extent politics has played a role."
...
"Not one of over 1300 unvaccinated employees who had been previously infected tested positive during the five months of the study"
...
"Real world data have also been supportive.Several studies (in Qatar, England, Israel, and the US) have found infection rates at equally low levels among people who are fully vaccinated and those who have previously had covid-19. Cleveland Clinic surveyed its more than 50 000 employees to compare four groups based on history of SARS-CoV-2 infection and vaccination status. Not one of over 1300 unvaccinated employees who had been previously infected tested positive during the five months of the study.
...
Researchers concluded that that cohort “are unlikely to benefit from covid-19 vaccination.” In Israel, researchers accessed a database of the entire population to compare the efficacy of vaccination with previous infection and found nearly identical numbers. “Our results question the need to vaccinate previously infected individuals,” they concluded."
Age old follow-up question. Who decides what anti-vaccine content is? Who is going to draw the fine line? How simple (i.e. black and white) is to make this distinction? Do you trust that person / entity making these decisions for you and your peers?
But even without defending free speach, looks to me that when you start censoring you just create multiple new problems with zero solution. So even from a design point of view it's clearly a bad thing.
What's the difference between whispering "fire" in a crowded movie theater vs. yelling it out loud? - is it simply the volume of ones voice? Might some intangible like intent have something to do with it? How do you even go about quantifying that? What if everyone laughs at your outburst? What if they trample each other to death?
I feel as though this crowd gets wrapped around the axel on these kinds of questions - anything with too much ambiguity that can't be code golfed into the tersest possible formal logic statement.
When Justice Stewart attempted to define what "hardcore pornography" actual __is__ he simply wrote "I know it when I see it" (1964 Jacobellis v. Ohio).
That analogy is rather good here because it has a dual interpretation - in terms of the actual history that could be dredged up by wiki editors [0] yelling fire in a crowded theatre has led to ~81 stupid deaths globally and failing to yell fire at an appropriate time has led to at least 278 really stupid deaths in the US. In practice there, there is evidence that yelling fire is not encouraged enough.
There are real threats that are mitigated by an open and tolerant approach to speech. Cracking down on people will lead to a culture that is really bad. Which should be intolerable since the crackdown is only trying to defend against things that are mildly annoying.
> Nearly 100 years ago Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., voting to uphold the Espionage Act conviction of a man who wrote and circulated anti-draft pamphlets during World War I, said"[t]he most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic."
> That flourish — now usually shortened to "shout fire in a crowded theater" — is the media's go-to trope to support the proposition that some speech is illegal. But it's empty rhetoric. I previously explained at length how Holmes said it in the context of the Supreme Court's strong wartime pro-censorship push and subsequently retreated from it. That history illustrates its insidious nature. Holmes cynically used the phrase as a rhetorical device to justify jailing people for anti-war advocacy, an activity that is now (and was soon thereafter) unquestionably protected by the First Amendment. It's an old tool, but still useful, versatile enough to be invoked as a generic argument for censorship whenever one is needed. But it's null-content, because all it says is some speech can be banned — which, as we'll see in the next trope, is not controversial. The phrase does not advance a discussion of which speech falls outside of the protection of the First Amendment.
From [1] by Ken White, a lawyer. As I am not a lawyer so I can't really comment on the nuance here. But it doesn't seem as simple as "Yelling fire in a crowded theater is not protected free speech".
Try it, if you are responsible for someone getting hurt (and any number of other direct implications) you are going to be criminally and civilly liable for it. The theater can sue you for lost profits. That doesn't sound very much like "protected" to me.
Not sure, I assume someone reports it then it gets turned over to AI to convert voice->script and compare it to a large set of known antivax rhetoric, if it surpasses a threshold it gets banned and stays that way until the owner asks for a review and then at that point a human probably enters the chat.
Would you be making the same points if the debate was about ISIS propaganda? Or Holocaust denialism? Or content encouraging child exploitation? Viral videos encouraging suicides?
Wouldn't it be suddenly obvious that these videos must be taken down immediately, accounts banned and that platform owners are responsible? Or would you advocate for free speech and watch as the algorithm encourages more and more people to leave their home and join ISIS in Syria?
After all, people are free to make decisions and are responsible for their actions. Suicide doesn't harm anybody else, right?
> Wouldn't it be suddenly obvious that these videos must be taken down immediately, accounts banned and platform owners are responsible?
It is obvious that you have a totalitarian mindset and believe in one 'objective truth'. A Free society that holds to the free speech principle should do the opposite. After all, this principle is not about protecting views that you agree with, but those that you don't.
History has shown time and again that censorship never resulted in a positive long-term outcome, and you are repeating past mistakes.
Also, coming from a totalitarian USSR and now living in a totalitarian Russia, I tell you this, fellow Americans: most of you here don't seem to understand the value of free speech and harm that censorship does to society.
Quick example: beside vaccine deniers, youtube now also bans users who doubt the official election results. What could possibly go wrong with that, right?!
Americans can be so short sighted. Banning speech about election results is fine, because it's the "other" side that lost ...this time. It doesn't occur to people that the wheel turns, and next time youtube and facebook might side with the others...then what?
Overrun hospitals. Ballooning medical bills. Attack on congress. Over 600,000 dead from COVID. High vaccine hesitancy. States enacting voting restrictions to discourage voter participation. Growing social discontent, division and distrust in institutions and democracy.
Your response? Government needs to step in and force YouTube to distribute election lies and COVID misinformation.
The growing "social discontent, division, and distrust in institutions and democracy" is fueled by the over zealous authoritarian push by certain elements of society to stamp out any disagreement or discord as "misinformation". The more one side doubles down on control from the top the more distrust in institutions will grow.
We've abundant historical examples of this occurring, and we're busy repeating the same mistakes and causing fundamental mistrust across a broad spectrum of society.
There are always crises. The current ones are not even that great compared to historical problems. Fixing crises should not mean that you can erode democracy for the sake of fixing said crises. That is literally how totalitarian regimes start: by swift action needed to fix the current "insurmountable" issues. I am not saying that the US will become totalitarian, but taking steps in the wrong direction does not bode well.
And to address some of your points,
> voting restrictions
When people say this, it's usually about voter ID laws, which are the norm in most of the developed world, all of Europe has this, with the exception of UK. There might be some issues with voter discouraging, but it's not as big of a deal as some make it seem.
> division and distrust in institutions and democracy.
Well, the entire pandemic handling was rife with things that caused this mistrust in institutions. From the masks (e.g. Fauci, the surgeon general and others lying about them not being needed, and then Trump going against them anyway for political reasons) to vaccines where even the top democrats were saying all over the place they won't take them because they were rushed under Trump. Well, what do you know? They are still rushed, under Trump, but now we try to convince everyone they are perfectly safe (while Trump not pushing for them anymore). WHO covering for China's role in the initial spread. Democrats acting all high and mighty in regards to masks and public gatherings, only to be maskless themselves [1][2][3], sometimes in large gatherings[4]. Or like Pelosi, which personally called the beauty salon to have a special appointment, even though all the salons were closed. The republicans were at least consistently against science on this: both in front and behind cameras.
If the authorities cannot convince people about COVID truths, that is on them, not on the people talking freely about how they mistrust the government and their solutions.
Distrust in democracy will grow even larger with every censorship action.
As a disclaimer, I made my own masks and wore them in shops even before they were recommended, it was pretty obvious that an airborne disease is slowed by a mask. I was the only one in store with a mask, early on. I got my vaccine as soon as I could, driving half a day to get it. Throughout the pandemic I kept my social distancing to maybe extreme measures.
What is happening now is dangerous for democracy and society, we're handing over way too much power to the government, mass media and social apps. The government should make sure there are no monopolies, but if there are (like youtube, twitter, facebook, google search) they should make sure there is a public open oversight over the rules governing them. This is our standard oil battle but with higher stakes, and most people seem just happy to be boxed in by private corporations, with no recourse in the future.
Clearly you are in an information bubble, I would encourage you to extract yourself from it because most of what you just listed is either a out right fabrication or at best a distortion from reality
Facebook has the right to limit content on their platform as much as you have the right to talk about it. Comparing this to being totalitarianism is ridiculous. No one is banning them from going elsewhere and spouting their drivel, but accepting it on a mainstream platform is just stupid.
> coming from a totalitarian USSR and now living in a totalitarian Russia
> Quick example: beside vaccine deniers, youtube now also bans users who doubt the official election results. What could possibly go wrong with that, right?!
YouTube is a de-facto monopoly (a fact further complicated that it seems to be closely aligned with the current ruling party).
Monopolies have a more or less successful history of being regulated. In other words, governments limiting their exploitation of their market position.
I will only point out that it took Twitter years to ban Trump despite him violating their ToS almost on a daily basis. Your point about "alignment" applies to power in general. Be it political power, money or influence and following.
How is YouTube exploiting their market position? Last time I checked it cost literally 0$ to use their video platform. What do you think government should do?
Twitter banning and censoring Trump was an extremely outrageous action. Only very short-sighted and brainwashed people cheer for it because they are unable to imagine whom this playform with enormous reach would ban next. What if it'll be your favourite candidate?
Of course, you'll say that your candidate will never break ToSs, but we've seen just today that these terms are rather random and can change on a whim.
It was only because Trump worked really hard to earn that banning with his false claims about an election being stolen. It's not something Twitter wanted to have to do. But Trump was acting in a very dangerous manner concerning the democratic outcome of an election which he refused to accept.
> I will only point out that it took Twitter years to ban Trump despite him violating their ToS almost on a daily basis.
They actually rewrote their ToS specifically to excuse not sanctioning his violations while continuing to sanction others without his institutional position for the same violations.
ISIS propaganda - at what point does a cleric preaching the Coran becomes ISIS propaganda? Should we stop seeing news where the taliban shout "death to america" - is that pro-taliban propaganda?
Should we ban videos showing life inside Kabul today? Is that taliban propaganda? What about a person interviewing that says under Americans the soldiers came in his home and broke his stuff and also streets were unsafe at night and now under the Taliban it's safer all around?
Holocaust - what is denialism? If you argue for the figure of deaths in Auschwitz being smaller than it is currently publicly known, is that denialism? Does that mean that you are never allowed to challenge the dogma in the "wrong direction" ? What if the official number is actually wrong? https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1992-05-07-920210... Btw, there are countries in Europe that will prosecute you for denying holocaust, but that is an actual formal process: the prosecutors gather evidence that you consistently try to deny it, with false information, for the sole purpose of minimizing it, not for research or open discussion reasons. This is something prosecutors should do, not some random employees at youtube.
Viral encouraging suicides - should we ban Radiohead altogether? What about "Virgin Suicides"? Should we ban all depressing music and movies? Where do you draw the line? Should we only see happy stuff all the time?
I think speech should be free, except for the cases where it causes actual harm, and those cases should be determined by an official body that has a democratic control over it, like the police, FBI, DAs etc. Youtube/twitter/facebook are completely undemocratic, opaque and unaccountable for their actions. They should not have this much power to steer speech.
And children abuse is a hairy one. When exactly is something ban-able? Does it start at anything below 18? What about countries where 15 is the norm(and the law). What about Romeo and Juliet? And what constitutes abuse? I personally think Desmond is a clear abuse, same with Cuties, same with all beauty peageants for kids. I would ban them all, but you see, I should never have that power, it should come from officials that are ultimately democratically elected.
So you're effectively proposing that government should be deciding what speech is allowed on the platforms. How is this free speech if government can silence you?
what if YouTube existed and was as popular as it is now, in the early 00s, leading up to the US invasion of Iraq, and there videos attempting to prove that Iraq did not in fact have weapons of mass destruction, and YouTube was deleting these videos?
wouldn't it be suddenly obvious that these videos must be taken down immediately, accounts banned and that platform owners are responsible? or would you advocate for free speech and watch as the algorithm encourages more and more people to question the Bush administration narrative, parroted and perpetuated unquestioningly by the media?
How would a video on youtube prove iraq did or did not have wmds? That wasn't determined until the US was able to inspect the country themselves. That's the thing of this. Anonymous accounts on the internet should not be seen as a source of truth since videos are easily misconstrued or manipulated or are outright fraudulent, yet people frequently hold up some faceless video as their truth rather than someone who spends all their time working in whatever area and is paid to have this expert knowledge. Like, imagine millions of people rejecting the advice of plumbers when it came to plumbing thanks to these crazy conspiracy videos being circled around the internet. That's not helpful to society, but its literally happening when it means medical advice.
> Would you be making the same points if the debate was about ISIS propaganda?
It doesn't matter, that's a fallacious comparison. It's not what the videos are about, and even if it was, who decides what is pro-ISIS propaganda and what is just discussion about what ISIS was doing? For years Youtube has been de-platforming anything that is not advertising friendly using AI, often de-listing videos altogether, with very little recourse unless you know someone who works at Youtube.
How would you make YouTube better? Monetise all content regardless of what advertisers say? Never remove any videos? Have courts make decisions whether video should be removed or not? Hire more human moderators as if humans are somehow super reliable and never make mistakes? I'm genuinely curious.
Not the OP, but You are not going to like my answer....
My Answer is simple "Unless the content constitutes a "True Threat" [1] as understood under US Constitutional Standards it should be allowed"
As to suicide, I advocate for assisted suicide to be Safe, Legal and Rare. if a person chooses to end their life that choice absent a clear and confounding mental health crisis should be respected by society. This idea that suicide is always wrong is simply false, there are all manner of reasons why one can logically choose suicide.
Google recently deleted the entire account of someone who had videos of vehicles in the Middle East, claiming it was extremist content [0]. He was a historian who was cataloging how vehicles are used and modified in military operations across the globe. But google’s bots (which are probably pretty similar to YouTube’s) classified it as extremist content.
So I disagree with the premise of your argument — that we’d all support the automatic removal of “ISIS propaganda”.
Mistakes will always happen. Content moderation is hard, especially at the scale of YouTube. And no - adding more human moderators wouldn't make it better.
Most people would support it. Based on your response, I assume that you wouldn't mind if YouTube recommended you some ISIS beheadings for example. Who would be to judge if the video is real or not? It could be just artistic reconstruction. Free speech absolutists would never trust YouTube to make this determination.
Why would you want to remove videos of beheadings? Can there be a better example to teach people that ISIS is a wild barbaric horde that must be destroyed?
Continuing your line of thinking, what would you want to remove next? 9/11 videos of planes flying into buildings? Holocaust documentaries? Surely, these videos can give bad ideas to viewers...
I personally agree with you. Issue is that this view is not shared by the majority of the population. Even naked female nipples are still somehow offensive to some people.
Imagine being called ISISTube. This wouldn't be good for business especially with the family oriented crowd.
Last I checked ISIS and the mexican cartel weren't attempting to start an insurrection and overthrow the American government, or at least they didn't have the slightest chance, unlike the orange man.
* YouTube’s team of content moderators who are directed ultimately by YouTube’s ELT. So… humans. I mean if we expect every highschooler in the US to be able to read a book and interpret its meaning I think we can figure out what anti-vaccine content looks like.
* That same team is going to draw the line. If it were me I would bring the banhammer on any content that had hints of grey because unless the fence is electrified people will try to cozy up to it.
* I mean yeah. You trust them literally every day 24/7 if you use YouTube at all. I don't see what's different now.
The solution is that groups of people who are actively purposely spreading disinformation that is right now in real life killing people loses the platform they have to spread that disinformation.
In the trolly problem of “I can’t say the vaccine contains government microchips and my relatives who are susceptible to this garbage might actually get the vaccine” and “I can say that spike proteins are causing salmonella but Aunt Susie will actually believe me” I know which way I’m pulling the lever.
What’s the body count and risk to others where you think it’s time for someone to be the adult and say you’re not actually allowed to be this stupid anymore because it’s hurting people?
> every highschooler in the US to be able to read a book and interpret its meaning I think we can figure out what anti-vaccine content looks like
Good. Supposing you are graduated from hight scholl and read a book. I beleive that covid vaccines are good and everybody in their right mind and without medical conditions should vaccinate. I also beleive that everybody has a right to decide by themself to take vaccine or to pass any time. Am I pro-vaccine or am I anti-vaxxer?
This is a perfect expression of the problem. That you think that this is what anti-vaxxer content looks like. This opinion doesn't even make it to "hot take" status let alone anything that would be modded. No scary corporate oligarchs are coming for you for having the cheese pizza of opinions.
But to be fair and actually answer your question it's pro-vaccine. You're literally stating the pro-vaccine stance verbatim.
So then why just don't leave those anti-vaxx people alone? They are 10-15% now top. Everyone else are even vaccinated or had been sick and now recovered. With Delta variant infection rate everybody will get their immunity pretty soon. Some will die because of their stupidity and there's nothing can be done about it. Or, even better, maybe one of those Israel drugs will come up good enough for emergency use.
There is something that can be done about it! That's the whole point! It's crazy to me that people are actually all through this thread saying that some moron's right to make an internet video telling people that COVID is a hoax and the vaccine is a government conspiracy to turn men into femboys is more important than the lives of the actual victims -- the vulnerable people who fall down the rabbit hole, end up believing this junk and not getting vaccinated.
I see a lots of other guys and gals on YouTube with cooking recipes of literally breadcrumbed mix of cheese and bacon on butter which will send victim's cholesterol through the roof. But I don't see anybody bannig them from doing this because they will cause people to die of heart diseases.
Perfect! This is an example of content that social networks don’t consider harmful enough to ban. An example of content that is considered too harmful to allow by every social network is pro-eating disorder and pro-self harm content.
Where do you think anti-vaxx lives on that spectrum?
YouTube is a private company, not a public service. Anti-vax is not a protected class of people, and so there is no law that says YouTube cannot discriminate against them.
As a company, they've decided to take this path. They don't have to justify it.
If that makes you angry, boycott them. Don't conduct business with them, which includes watching their content and ads.
And if you think that YouTube is large enough and a big enough monopoly that it should be treated as a public service and subject to the rules that apply to public services, then either nationalize it so that it is, or break it up so that there's competition in the market.
A private company shouldn't get to pick and choose what opinions are valid. YouTube is not an arbiter of truth, and there is no universal law that says YouTube's moderators will always be correct. As a massive corporation, when they decide to take the path of banning critics of Google, pro-Palestinian activists, feminists and so on, the other companies will follow suit. They don't have to justify it, because almost no-one will care.
If that makes you angry, go convince people that vaccines are safe and effective. You use the internet to out-argue anti-vaxxers, which should be easy because they're so wrong and ideological.
And if you think that YouTube is large enough and a big enough monopoly that it should be treated as a public service and subject to the rules that apply to public services, then either nationalize it so that it is, or break it up so that there's competition in the market.
> A private company shouldn't get to pick and choose what opinions are valid
They aren't. Their not deciding universal truths. They're deciding what content they want to host on their platform, which they operate and pay for. You have no control, nor any say, in what content that is. Go make your own.
And I'd gladly vote in favor of a break up of all the big tech firms.
Why shouldn't a government be able to decide what content it wants to host in its nation? Not a facetious question, I am curious to understand your reasoning (assuming you agree)
they literally decide truth and state their decided truth in UI boxes next to the video title, for certain classes of videos. this does not just apply to medical information.
(edit) my account is rate-limited for some reason even though I'm not engaging in any sort of flamewar behavior or anything, so I have to ask here instead: what's incorrect about this analysis?
> Should the government be able to force a private company to host content that they don't want to host?
If that company is so big and powerful that it's becoming an active threat to the democratic process, yes why not? Better yet, break it up and/or nationalize these companies. They are the biggest threat to democracy in modern times.
I do actually agree with this. At least we should be honest about what we're doing, that we're forcing this on businesses (and that's a good thing!)
Nationalization of most social media would do a tremendous amount of public good, and moderation should exist only for illegal content. That means: spam, porn, extreme political views should all be legal to post and not be able to be removed. Moreover, comments should not be removable, users shouldn't be able to ban each other and so on. And you shouldn't be able to post anonymously on these publicly owned platforms. Also, nothing would be monetized, which is also a huge boon to the public, as you won't have people trying to game algorithms for monetization purposes. It's just a far healthier way to operate social media for a society
I myself am vaccinated, but I hold no ill will towards those who do not get it; whatever their reason. And yet, the media is conditioning all of us to hate those people. To shame them. To ignore their reason and free-will.
The same people who are rabidly pro-vaccine are generally rabidly pro-choice when it comes to abortion. How does that reconcile? How come the government can sometimes tell you what to do with your body but not others?
And the same people who are in favor of the vaccine mandates are almost universally supporters of BLM and social justice. And yet... the majority of the vaccine hesitant are non-white. That doesn't square either.
The whole thing is absolutely fucking outrageous. I hate what the media has done to the United States. And I hate all the moral self-righteousness I see on display here and everywhere else.
I suggest just asking such a person about their principles. You’ll probably get a more helpful response if you refrain from characterizing their opinions as “rabid”. If you bring curiosity, you will disarm them, and perhaps learn something or effect a change in their thinking.
Big govt/regulation vs. small govt/freedom is just one axis. People’s viewpoints on specific issues are based on more than just this axis.
The whole thing is easily explainable: People who walk around spreading COV19 is killing other people. Everyone has a story like that, and it's unfortunate that we have to explain it again and again.
You have free will until you start killing other people over something that you can get for free, that lessens the long-lasting effects of a virus.
> You have free will until you start killing other people over something
You do a lot of things every day that "have a chance of killing people". You get in a car and send thousands of pounds of metal hurdling down the road, you use your cell phone and drive distractedly in that metal block. Or maybe you visit Home Depot and buy a pack of nails and a few of those drop out in a parking lot and a mother in her van with children run over those nails and later have a blowout. You buy an iPhone made in China or a T-shirt made in Vietnam that employs some child laborer who is exposed to harsh chemicals and they die earlier because you personally wanted some product for your enjoyment... and the list is almost infinite.
At what point do we acknowledge our minimal control over the butterfly effect of causality and cease the woke moralizing?
This is such a horseshit argument. If you're at risk, by all means get the vaccine. You're protected. Job done.
"But what about the children?!?!" is the next common refrain. What about them? Look at the numbers. COVID is not a relevant concern for pediatric public health policy.
Those people should understand they have their free speech and so does youtube as a private company. They still have other avenues. Vimeo, odysee, gab, gittr, breitbart. It's just the rest of us don't want to see their drivel.
Once again YouTube is standing against free speech.
Yes, most of you will cheer for it just as you did when Twitter banned Trump. You will say it's a private company, they have the right to do that. Don't expect people like me to support you when you complain about YouTube banning e.g. Russian activists.
Part of supporting free speech is that you have to support the speech you don't agree with.
> Once again YouTube is standing against free speech.
No, exercising it.
> Yes, most of you will cheer for it just as you did when Twitter banned Trump.
Well, I mean, its better than when Twitter rewrote its rule to officially privilege those in established positions of power to justify not taking actions against Trump's regular and egregious violations of their rules.
> Don't expect people like me to support you when you complain about YouTube banning e.g. Russian activists.
I don't expect that anyway. I expect people like you to continue to pursue the position that it is impermissible for YouTube to choose not to relay propaganda of your faction because it is somehow contrary to free speech rights for them to do so, while not taking that position for viewpoints you are less interested in, all while chanting the virtues of supporting speech you disagree with.
I, on the other hand, will continue to view it as within YouTube’s free speech rights to choose not to relay either kind of content, but undesirable for other reasons in certain cases (and, where it is bot a free choice by YouTube but compelled by a government seeking to suppress dissent, a violation of free speech by the government involved, not YouTube.)
> Part of supporting free speech is that you have to support the speech you don't agree with.
No, it isn't.
Part of supporting free speech is that you have to support the right of people to express viewpoints you disagree with, including by declining to relay the positions you do agree with.
(It also doesn't mean you have to support their choice to express those viewpoints, or the manner in which they do it, only their right to do it.)
“All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions.” George Bernard Shaw
“Freedom of expression is the matrix, the indispensable condition, of nearly every other form of freedom.” U.S. Supreme Court Justice Benjamin N. Cardozo in Palko v. Connecticut
"If you believe that the arguments against slavery in their time and against Jim Crow laws more recently could only have been expressed when people had the freedom to voice unpopular opinions, then you can’t now say that free speech is inherently dangerous." Stephen Pinker
“Goebbels was in favor of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you’re really in favor of free speech, then you’re in favor of freedom of speech for precisely the views you despise. Otherwise, you’re not in favor of free speech.” Noam Chomsky
"To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the right of the hearer as well as those of the speaker. It is just as criminal to rob a man of his right to speak and hear as it would be to rob him of his money.” Frederick Douglass
The concept of free speech is 2400 years old. Don't be one of those people that conflates that concept with the American first amendment which only blocks government censorship and is barely 200 years old.
Private companies, groups, and people can and do infringe on everyone's right to free speech.
In the time when the 1st amendment was written (which is not a holy document that decides all morality. Nor is the U.S. the center of the universe) corporations as we understand them did not really exist. The people that were concerned about free speech could only conceive a hostile government of King George could really suppress them and the people willing to hear their dissident ideas. They were rich local gentlemen that had public squares and private meeting rooms. It did not occur to them that they could be silenced by the local placard maker forming a cabal that would deny any attempt to express themselves.
The public square is alive. There are people in my downtown right now with megaphones uttering their own flavor of insanity. You also have more reach than ever before in human history thanks to the fact that anyone can pay a few bucks a month and set up their own website with their own rules.
And the right to free speech has nothing to do with you getting your ideas heard. It's everything to do with what you can and can't be prosecuted for, and therefore is irrelevant when we are talking about something like youtube which can't prosecute you in the first place. Even back then the law could have said something like everyone has a right to get their essay published in the newspaper, but it didn't, because you can imagine how that would quickly get ridiculous, and ultimately just like youtube newspapers were private entities, only they had even more influence and reach than youtube since everyone read them and took them seriously as the paper of record.
Note that the OP didn’t quote the First Amendment, he cited a number of powerful speeches/writings about free speech. The two are as similar as the concept of a rectangle and a piece of paper.
That's correct. The US government should have equivalents of Twitter, Google, Facebook and so on, though. And then speech on those platforms would be protected by the 1st amendment, including spam, pornography, and so on.
Enough. This sort of large-scale systematic suppression of human rights (in this case the right to the free exchange of ideas) is fundamentally evil and needs to be stopped.
That it's "for a good cause" is no excuse. Neither is the fact that the perpetrator of these mass-scale human rights violations is a corporate oligopoly rather than a government, nor that the target of these abuses is "them" rather than "us". All of that is a distraction. They. Are. Trampling. Your. Rights. This cannot be allowed to continue.
YouTube is a private enterprise. They have 100% the right to control what goes on their site. Would you be mad if a fishing forum banned non-fishing posts? Is that a large-scale systematic suppression of human rights?
No, because your hypothetical fishing forum is not "large scale", and because discrimination based on general topic does not suppress the free exchange of ideas the same way that discrimination based on the beliefs of the poster does.
If YouTube banned all health-related discussion regardless of what position the video was advocating for I would still disagree with that decision, but it would not be a blatant human rights violation the way their current policy is.
Someone I follow on instagram had opened up a conversation for women about irregular periods as a side-effect of the vaccine. They had to carry on the conversation using an emoji code to avoid getting banned.
The basic idea behind these bans is that authorities decide what is right, and common people should not have a forum to discuss the decisions.
It's basically soft-censorship, a partnership between government and large tech companies to make conversations contra government policy much more difficult to have.
Social media companies are stifling freedom of speech in America. Have you seen the "Who's banned from Twitter and who's not" meme with Donald Trump and the Taliban? Unpopular or non-conformist opinions are censored, and it's dangerous.
"But it's private companies! They can do whatever they want!" The telephone companies are private. Do they have a right to kill your connection when you talk about unapproved subject matter? Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, and so on are the modern de-facto means of communicating long distance and to wide-spread audiences.
"But it's dangerous to let these opinions reach the ears of the masses." Open discourse and trusting society to (eventually) make the right decision, given all available information, is something we've done (or attempted to do) in modern democracies. This is important.
> "But it's private companies! They can do whatever they want!" The telephone companies are private. Do they have a right to kill your connection when you talk about unapproved subject matter? Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, and so on are the modern de-facto means of communicating long distance and to wide-spread audiences.
If I started robo-calling millions of people with unapproved subject matter, I'd wager they'd kill my connection fairly quickly.
I am not convinved this is a logical metaphor. Robocalls directly bother every person on a list. A social media post goes to those who've consented (i.e. subscribed/followed) and other places the social media company decides they should go. I don't see what the two have in common.
Remember Wuhan lab outbreak ? It took 9 months for mainstream media to present it as plausible (France). Before that, it was called a "conspiracy theory", synonym to a fable. What did you think happened to people speaking about it on twitter, facebook or youtube before mainstream media greenlighted this theory ?
It made actual researchers and scientists shut up to not hurt their reputations. And made internet conspiracy conspiracies go crazy in all directions.
I believe the more we censor vaccine information, true or not, the more hardened people will get in their beliefs. What I'd love to see is YouTube change their algorithms to promote quality content over engaging content so good information rises to the top.
The fact that so many people are willing to choose a "lesser evil" is striking to me.
I wasn't even done with High School by the time I figured out that any dichotomy of two evils is a dead end, and that there is always a better place to focus energy upstream.
In this case, AI algorithms are the core problem. Their metrics for success (view time) appear to often lead to extremes. Nothing needs to be banned, it definitely needs to stop being suggested though.
Frankly, every time I read the comments on articles about COVID on HN I lose more respect for this community. Been here for years, but I may just leave and never come back.
I wish I could find the post now, but a few months ago on /r/science, research showed that people who didn't believe in global warming were more likely to change their minds when presented with balanced evidence for and against.
YouTube has no idea how damaging this is to the cause.
Folks who think that policy is a war do not understand people very well or are more interested in grandstanding and point scoring than changing minds. Viewing those who disagree with you as villains or children makes life harder for everyone.
/r/science has nothing to do with science and everything to do with whatever reddit's front page userbase needs to believe/ has been convinced to believe with ad dollars that month. It's a religion. Look at its usual submitters to see that it's a priesthood with its cult, not an open community. I say this as a non-vaccine-opponent (how ridiculous of a term is that?) Name-dropping it means nothing.
The last looks to be the closest to what you are talking about. But even then, it's not talking about "balanced evidence" in the way you seem to present. Because some people seem to think that to balance the evidence, it's one piece from here, one piece from there, giving them equal consideration.
But it's not, it's considering the evidence without consideration to the other side. We don't give the idea that the moon is made of green cheese the same weight as the idea that it's a big rock. Because the green cheese idea is just stupid. It does not deserve consideration.
And you also have the caveat that it's self-reporting and/or questionnaire driven. I can take someone who doesn't believe in global warming, show them how greenhouse gases cause warming, get them to verbally agree that that's what happening, get them to even agree that the same could apply to the whole world, but then they'll still not believe in global warming. Because they'll have a reason as to why the example doesn't apply. But if I never ask the final question, never ask if I actually changed their mind, I can present the results as if I've converted them.
i m more concerned about other services copying youtube and going very hard on any kind of covid evidence-seeking, e.g. the r/covid19 subreddit where scientific evidence is usually discussed
When have internet websites where the public can comment on not been heavily moderated? It's been like that since forums came out. HN is also heavily moderated, it keeps the weeds out of the garden.
So you understand and acknowledge that this vaccine can literally save your life, and you accept all the science that shows that it is safe and effective, but you refuse to get it because some people are being forbidden (by a privately-owned platform, only on that platform) to spread lies about how it's not safe or effective? That's a very strange position to take, to put your own life in literal mortal danger because other people want to spread lies (that you acknowledge are lies) that put their own lives and the lives of people who listen to them at risk.
I have values and principles that I want to see embodied by the society in-which I participate. The vaccination rate is (to my knowledge) the only metric being used to validate these policies that I can directly and consciously affect. So I do.
If I was unwilling to tolerate even the minute risk of not getting the jab, my position wouldn't be based on values or principles, it'd simply be aesthetic preference.
As it stands, I keep an eye on my health, keep an extra distance when I'm around others, mask when it makes sense, and keep social interaction to a reasonable minimum. If the mortality rate of covid increases significantly I'll reconsider my position in light of the new numbers, though I don't know if I'll reach a different conclusion.
While none of the widespread variants show increased mortality compared to the original strain, the Delta variant is significantly more infectious than the original strain meaning that even if you're still taking the same precautions you were before vaccines were available you're much more likely to get it today than you were then. And it's not just about whether you live or die, look up people who have "long COVID" who are still suffering significant disability for months after they've "recovered". Vaccination doesn't only prevent you from dying, it has also been shown to significantly reduce the length and severity of the infection if you do get it.
I'm a breakthrough case. Nobody in the testing office asked me if I was vaccinated. The breakthrough wasn't tracked in any system to my knowledge. How many more of me are out there? I only know anecdotally that at least 10 people 1 or 2 degrees of separation from myself are also breakthrough cases. I'm sure I was very contagious during this time but as soon as I tested positive I quarantined. I personally don't trust that these statistics are being tracked properly.
My point is that although I'm glad I got vaccinated, vaccination is not the panacea the media makes ot out to be.
Dude read that back to yourself and think about it for just 5 seconds.
"Validate" it how exactly. This is just like a child folding his arms and saying "well now I'm not doing it" because somebody asked them to. It's the same attitude that has left hundreds of thousands pointlessly dead, because owning the libs is more important than self-preservation.
Here's the thing: What about the vaccine is saving the lives of others? It doesn't prevent spread. It simply provides you with protection from the virus for a limited period (~270 days). So what, exactly, are unvaxxed people doing to harm others?
I'm not happy with it either. If there's another way to push back against corporate censorship that's more effective than boycotting their services and the objectives they're working towards, I'm all ears.
But so far as I can tell, I don't have a voice in the matter so I'll opt to be a statistical papercut.
Without condoning or condemning your goals or the goals of YouTube: the more effective way to push back is to get the vaccine and live another day to actually push back. Do you really think pro-censorship advocates will change their mind because anti-censorship advocates die in large numbers by refusing an effective medicine? Look around this thread, there are plenty of pro-censorship commentators right here. Do you think your death or hospitalization will move the needle in your favor?
Martyrdom is not a very effective and reliable strategy. People martyr themselves because there's nothing left, the cause they fight for is so important to them that they would rather die than lose the fight. Does that really describe you? Would you rather die than tolerate YouTube censorship? Maybe it is that important to you. I just want you to think it through a bit more, I don't really get the sense that you're weighing your options seriously.
i'm glad you have the balls to say this. Not being vaccinated is close to becoming a stance against authoritarian rule.
I'm vaccinated (almost regrettably now) but I support anyone's choice to not get vaccinated, i feel like you should because it's been shown to dramatically reduce your risk of getting seriously ill but I absolutely respect your choice and will defend the right to choose.
The vaccine is injected into muscle and causes a localized immune reaction. The protein doesn't really escape the muscle. So it might damage some muscle cells and capillaries, but those are stressed all the time anyway and will regenerate.
That was the expectation but we later found they travel around the body and particularly build up in bone marrow and your ovaries if you have them.
They also are technically "toxic" but you need to take that word with a grain of salt. The damage is still far less than what the virus will cause if you catch it without the vaccine.
Whats the point? You'll just debunk it with a bs "fact check"[1] article that links to outdated information or quotes people with outdated information and call it a day.
When the reality is:
- Spike proteins from the virus and the vaccine are in-arguably cytotoxic[2] (but the low load has not lead to any long term negative effects and you should still get vaxxed).
- Spike proteins do not stay near the injection site.[3][4] (only 20% of the dose is found to remain in the injection site after 48h)
The thing that fucks me off so much about this censorship from youtube is that it leads to the fact checkers becoming gospel, the same fact checkers that have been found to be paid shills of big pharma.[5] Even the fact check article I link to here links to a youtube clip where this is all discussed in detail, only it doesn't discuss it in detail be cause its only a clip. A clip that was created to avoid youtubes filters. The full video[6] covers all of this in detail.
> Whats the point? You'll just debunk it with a bs "fact check"
There's a PhD waiting for someone who can do an "influence analysis" of points and counter-points diffusing through articles, social media debates, fact-checkers, counter-articles, etc. Including methodologies to differentiate bots, paid PR firms, machine learning analysis/targeting, and organic participants being influenced by all of the above.
Those who have been involved in a few of these debates can almost predict the graph of responses, as you did with the fact-check lookahead parser :)
As a starting point, there's a social network analysis (100+ page PDF) of the "Covid Network Complex". One could work outwards from some of those nodes, to track lobbying and media influence. https://www.disclose.tv/the-covid-network-an-analysis/
Thank you for taking the time to put this all together and further your points. Jeez, the future looks dark when it comes to inquiry of truth. I've had discussions with other engineers who are supposed to be sufficiently trained about critical thinking and I see a very clear party-line ideologies getting mixed into their conscience.
It's partly due to underestimating the sophistication and incentives of the apparatus that has been constructed to influence organic humans, especially for the engineers who are essential to the construction of future digital societies.
Thanks for pointing all of this out. It's much better if we publicize the vaccine's potential risks in full context and alongside the much more significant benefits. If the anti-vaxxers are the only ones talking about inconvenient facts, a lot of people are going to go down a bad path.
> - Spike proteins from the virus and the vaccine are in-arguably cytotoxic[2] (but the low load has not lead to any long term negative effects and you should still get vaxxed).
ok sure but a high viral load is probably not comparable to the vaccine so we should use this information accordingly and be mindful of the dosages right? This doesn't seem very scary at all to me
>> "So far, there is no scientific evidence available that suggests that spike proteins created in our bodies from the COVID-19 vaccines are toxic or damaging our organs."
Is not the same as "...is not toxic and does not damage our organs."
In response you could look at this and decide maybe we're not getting the full story. Or you could look at the rampant censorship (the purpose of the OP) and decide that maybe we're not getting the whole story.
What the health care worker here is saying is that doctors are not reporting adverse effects like they should be.
Yes, Project Veritas makes their videos in hyper-over-produced fashion which seems ... weird, maybe a bit disingenuous. They cut and edit and potentially leave a lot of questions on the table with that. But when I go to comments sections on reposts of this video on various sites, there are numerous health care workers saying "This is how it is, this is what is happening where I am also." Is this foreign propaganda or some coordinated trolling? Maybe.
I watched the Project Veritas video too. I noticed that the featured health care worker did not say two things she definitely would have said if they were true:
1. She did not say that there was any coercion to avoid reporting adverse events. She just said it took too long to enter the data into VAERS (30 minutes) so people weren't reporting every event.
2. She didn't say the hospital was overflowing with people suffering from vaccine side effects, or that that number was remotely comparable to the number hospitalized with COVID.
So what's the likely truth?
1. Vaccine side effects are underreported, but mostly because people are not making much of an effort to report them, not for conspiratorial reasons. This is far from new - both underreporting of relevant events and overreporting of irrelevant events are common with every medical intervention.
2. The health burden of COVID still vastly outweighs anything happening with the vaccine.
It seems strange to be talking about whether the spike protein is harmful. Even IF it was, isn’t it better to experience a small amount via the vaccine instead of a large amount via the virus?
Whatever amount of spike protein you were exposed to by the virus was far worse for you than what the vaccine would have given you. Viruses reproduce themselves and cause uncontrolled, exponential production of spike protein. The mRNA vaccine provides a controlled dose and the lipid bubbles that deliver it don't reproduce.
Antibodies are produced by the immune system when needed, and the supply you have after an infection will wane over a couple months. What matters is whether your infection or vaccine trains your immune memory. With more training your body will have a better immune response, so you're better off vaccinated, whether or not you've had a prior infection.
You were lucky to have a mild case. That doesn't guarantee that you'll never have a severe case. The odds of having a severe case could be low for you, but the odds of a negative reaction to the vaccine are almost certainly far lower.
It's just a lot safer to expose yourself to a small piece of a virus than the virus itself. Just like it's a lot safer to wear a seatbelt in a car, even though tons of people have gone their whole lives not wearing seatbelts and never suffered for it. We're talking about the difference between two small risks here, but there's a clear, easy way for everyone to lower their risk (except those who cannot receive the vaccine for medical reasons).
Tons of people have avoided the vaccine because they're confident they'll never, ever have a bad case of COVID, only to get a very bad case of COVID and big regrets. Others are living with the agonizing regret of having advised family members not to get vaccinated, only for those family members to die of COVID. [1]
Fear mongering propaganda piece from a propaganda newspaper. I can't read it (not that I want to) because it's behind a paywall.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nr_y6qANhts
I'm lucky to be alive at all, the odds are basically 0% that we would be alive. My age, health practices, local demographic composition, the odds of having a bad case to begin with, and the fact that I've had it already basically guarantees that I'll never have a severe case.
You can buy the 'safe' story if you want, but for the same reason I wouldn't have sprayed my kids with DDT in the 70's, I won't be vaccinating today: intuition. I won't be voluntarily introducing this risk to myself out of fear. If you're sold on 'the staticstics', go for it. I'm going to rely on my intuition. I've been alive > 40 yrs and everywhere I turn the government and pharma companies constantly fuck everyone they can for a dime. There is too much that smells badly to put stock in this 'vaccine' for me.
Is it customary for you to dismiss reporting as propaganda without reading it? Understood about the paywall, and I don't always like NYT reporting either, but there are plenty of accounts of unvaccinated people getting COVID and regretting their decision out there. Often young and healthy.
News articles aside, state statistics of COVID hospitalization and death show a clear, dramatic correlation with % of the population unvaccinated. Is that all fake? Is there a conspiracy to fake all statistics that clash with your worldview? Wouldn't that be a bit too convenient of a way to dismiss anything that doesn't confirm your beliefs?
Do you ever wonder if the media people telling you about media deception should include themselves in the critique? There's no shortage of documented deception by Stossel and other Fox personalities. Who watches the watchmen? Can we dismiss some as propaganda without reading while blindly accepting others? Isn't that how progressives sometimes get in trouble, by summarily dismissing evidence that doesn't fit their beliefs? Does it make sense for non-progressives to do the same thing?
All vaccines are complex products of science and factory processes. Do you distrust all of them, or just the new one?
1. "Often" doesn't mean "the majority". About 12% of COVID deaths were under 50 in September, and 4% were under 40. COVID is one of the biggest causes of death in both age groups. You can verify all of this with a couple clicks on https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm
2. Disingenuous doesn't mean "disagrees with me".
3. A problem with blindly trusting sources from only one side is not improved by indiscriminately citing many more sources from that same side. Especially when one of those sources claims that "post-vaccine" deaths vastly outnumber COVID deaths. If the author is convinced that "post-vaccine" deaths are due to the vaccine, he should sound the alarm on the number of old people that die "post-waking-up-in-the-morning". This is an actual example of disingenuity, by the way.
Or credulously citing a single Idaho doctor's anecdotal observation, while his state's hospitals deal with an unprecedented capacity crisis as the unvaccinated flood in. Will you hold yourself responsible for being so gullible when it turns out to be fraud, error, or a sensationalized coincidence unrelated to the vaccine? Or will you simply move on to the next batch of nonsense? Do you actually care if your beliefs have any connection to reality, or is blind trust in one side's propaganda sufficient to satisfy your intellectual curiosity?
Anyway, I see from your response that you're no longer listening to what I say. The sources you cite aren't really answering any of my questions or rebutting any of my claims. So I have nothing further to say beyond what I said in my last post. See you later and good luck out there.
Poking around suggests that neither side is giving the whole story, though. Both are in thrall to the ideology of their showrunners and audience, and both ignore and distort inconvenient facts for that ideology. That's sadly the norm these days, no matter what source you read.
I wouldn't blindly trust my safety and the safety of my kids to either side. They both have huge vested interests in promoting the stories they promote.
With the traffic and gravity that YouTube etc have, they're almost as powerful news broadcasting tools as the classic news media.
True, they're a private company and liable for some things, but they all try to squeeze out every last cent before a government intervention.
Banning content like crypto, anti vax, gambling etc is understandable, but all the people without a voice will think they are silenced because they know the truth.
If we as society accept that, we should not claim to be any better than china, Russia, Cuba, it's just a slightly different approach, the end result is the same, undesired content is deplatformed.
By the way, I am a rationalist and never believe conspiracy theories, but I do get a good laugh out of them at times and how the people use counter arguments helps me to think in more perspectives.
The issue is that a few corporations control a majority of global human communications, and are accountable to no one for their decisions of what to censor/promote.
This is dangerous to democracy. If we do not subject them to the will of the people, they will eventually use this massive influence to make themselves immune to public scrutiny, and will one day be indistinguishable from an unelected branch of government.
It's interesting that a TV manyfacturer or a HDMI cable manufacturer is not expected to be liable for the content that streams through their products. But when it comes to YouTube, they aren't treated as just a vessel but as an actual source of content. I think the distinction is just the capability of each entity.
When device manufacturers start preferentially favouring, or discriminating against, specific content, channels, or voices, I think you'll find they're similarly regulated. As televisions get "smarter", they are no longer passive carriers but active agents.
An HDMI cable is literally a dumb pipe, and the end-user controls both ends, fully.
(Whether or not they control what reaches the feed-end of that pipe is of course a different question.)
So the second-order effects of YouTube banning content, as you point out, are interesting and hard to predict. The question is should fear of second order effects prevent YouTube from taking action towards a desired first order effect?
For some context, prior to Youtube changing the algorithm, flat earth videos basically created the modern flat earth movement [1]. It's likely that this effect can go the other way, too.
I like to think that people are less drawn to conspiracy theories etc. when they are socially well-connected. The trouble about the pandemic is that there is a negative feedback loop: we have these socially isolating restrictions because there is a deadly virus, and one reason the virus remains unchecked is, in part because a subset of socially isolated people are drawn to misinformation.
Apologies, I should have been clearer, if something is ambiguous and a government acts dodgy, I don't dismiss it. Buy things like no planes on 911, flat earth, chakras , reptile overlords, magic and so forth, I am default sceptical.
Recently I spoke with two senior scientists with decades of experience who specialise in pharmacology, biology, and vaccines, who both work at high-level labs that inspect all types of drugs.
They both were extremely sceptical of the vaccine, with one being openly antagonistic towards it.
YouTube's new rules allow them to post content, but they both say they've been warned by their jobs about speaking out - that they will lose their careers if they say anything against the vaccines.
Where is the room for their opinion? Because they are the top of the tree scientifically. What the hell is going on when we are silencing senior scientists who are extremely worried about an experimental drug that we're giving to the entire world??!
To clarify - the first scientist told me that her lab is not allowed to look at or test the vaccine, even though they test every other drug that comes into the country. She has only found a report from one other non-Pfizer lab that has looked at it under a microscope. To me, that is really scary.
>If there was a problem with the vaccine we probably would have noticed something by the time a billion people got injected with it.
Not when everyone who tries to talk about their bad experiences gets treated like qanon and the morons who thought 5G caused covid-19.
Even quoting CDC or letters from a company who makes the vaccines is considered dangerous misinformation and can get you banned if what you are showing doesn't paint the vaccine in a good light.
I would venture a guess that some of that is due to the people sticking spoons to their faces, saying they were magnetized by the vaccine. Do we really need to give those people a platform?
While we are walking a fine line here, people have proven they will believe anything that is said in an authoritative enough voice, regardless of merit. At what point does the harm outweigh the good? We know social media allows these people to find each other and create echo chambers to reinforce their viewpoints and recruit others. We would have no problem if this was "white supremacy" or "terrorism", however I think this will affect many more people.
I agree. This kind of skepticism-on-theoretical-grounds might have been interesting/valuable a year ago. At this point additional evidence for the vaccine's safety mounts every day as more people receive it. Evidence for the vaccine's efficacy is also mounting[1]. Claims to the contrary would need some extraordinary evidence to back them up.
Scientist #1 said that if she mentions anything against the vaccine, there would be retribution against her. This includes publishing any data that detracts from the vaccines safety. They're essentially creating an echo chamber where all news about the vaccine is good news.
Given the number of countries and institutions involved the scope of the conspiracy here would have to be vast. And there are plenty of powerful, vaccine-skeptical institutions (like the GOP) that would welcome this kind of data and venerate someone producing it. Indeed, some have already built media or political careers on COVID vaccine skepticism.
In addition, there's the J&J vaccine which was pulled after nasty side effects were found in a small number of patients. Where was the "they" who are supposedly creating the echo chamber in that case?
You're still making bold yet vague claims and providing no evidence. Just wishy-washy "an unnamed expert I know made this significant yet unverifiable statement".
One major issue was that in the beginning of this year we started with one dose, then went to a second dose a few months later, and then a third dose is starting to be recommended now a few months after that.
There are some serious evidence to back this up. A study done around early summer found that only about 50% of those that have taken two doses had any detectable traces of a defense, which was one of the reason that a third dose had to be added. By winter we don't know how effective the 2 dose or 3 dose will be.
To me that is where the focus of skepticism should be right now.
> There are some serious evidence to back this up. A study done around early summer found that only about 50% of those that have taken two doses had any detectable traces of a defense, which was one of the reason that a third dose had to be added. By winter we don't know how effective the 2 dose or 3 dose will be.
One study, going against countless others showing that the vaccines are highly effective.
The readily available data speaks for itself. Highly vaccinated populations are experiencing much slower transmission and hospitalization rates than their poorly vaccinated counterparts.
Also, we didn't start with one dose. Both mRNA vaccines were two-dose regimens from the day they started clinical trials last summer.
We don't have countless studies on how effective the vaccines over a longer period of time, and especially for those with two doses. Most seems to been done around 3 months, through most conclusions is based on simulations from observation data gathered by other vaccines such as smallpox, measles, mumps, and rubella. The observed half-life of neutralizing titers was 65 days for mRNA vaccines.
The evidence will be found in the future when we have more data. Most expectation is that while the protection will be significant lower but that there might be some longer term benefits. Highly vaccinated populations that has taken the vaccine in the last 3-4 months are going to be currently more protected than those that aren't, but that doesn't say much if we need a new vaccination this winter, next summer or the year after that.
It would be interesting to see a study done on those early groups of people that received the last dose of vaccine in 2020 during the summer and see how much protection that they still have now this fall in 2021. Got any links to such studies?
Science changes as new information becomes available, that's why it's so great, it's self-correcting on a long enough timescale. If you want a 100% verifiable, stake-your-life-on-it-this-will-never-ever-change, answer, science is not for you. Using this inherent property of science as a way to deny it is disingenuous at best.
You’ve got it backwards. It’s precisely because science is ever-changing that censorship of specific views is harmful. See, for example, the Soviet Union’s bet on Lysenkoism.
I'm not really sure what you're trying to say here, it doesn't seem relevant to my comment.
My point is that using the fact that science changes as new information comes in, thus the answer science gave us yesterday may be different from the answer science gives us today.
The parent comment is using the changing conditions around vaccines, the fact that they said 1 shot, then 2 shots, now there is talk of boosters, as evidence that it was irrelevant and should be ignored. My point is that must expect any answer science provides to potentially change. If people want an answer that is unchanging, science cannot give it to them.
I never said vaccines should be ignored, but the fact that we do know that the neutralizing titers for mRNA vaccines has a half-time, which is known to be correlated to the effectiveness of the vaccine. People who sells those vaccines as a final solution is not following what the research actually say. The big unknowns is how much of a falloff the protection has, how quickly, and if there will be any lasting protection after the neutralizing titers are gone.
I find it a bit interesting that in about 3000 comments, very few if any are from actually doctors or researcher that advocate in favor of the block. In general it seems to be quite few that are even advocating it as a final solution to the pandemic, but rather as a tool to reduce symptoms for people who later catch the virus.
Much more nuance that the original post, makes sense. I don't think you conveyed this in the original comment, which I conflated with effectively "They keep changing what they say, therefore they are lying, therefore I am not getting vaccinated". Granted you didn't say that, I believe that's the way I interpreted it due to hearing the same argument from a bunch of different folks. Thanks for the clarity!
> What the hell is going on when we are silencing senior scientists who are extremely worried about an experimental drug that we're giving to the entire world??!
What exactly is “experimental” about a vaccine that has not only been through very robust phase III clinical trials, but has also had literally billions of doses deployed?
The first scientist told me that practically no non-Pfizer labs have looked at it. That is not robust. Usually this stuff gets reviewed by everyone, but in this case, technical info is not available to other scientists who wish to learn more about the vaccine - according to her.
The room for their opinion is in peer reviewed medical journals. Short of conducting their own study, they could, for example, write a dissenting letter to the editor, or submit what's known as a "brief report." Posting to Youtube for clicks and views is to not take seriously their own knowledge. Covid-19 is a very serious issue; on the chance that your two senior scientists have information that the world needs, the appropriate venue is in the medium scientists and doctors use to communicate with each other.
Also, what does it mean to be "skeptical" of "the" vaccine? There are several vaccines. Were they skeptical of mRNA? Viral vector vaccines? All of them? Do they think that the covid-19 vaccines secretly don't work?
They both said they feel immense pressure not to speak out against the vaccine or publish anything against it. So the regular channels of dissent have been removed.
If they had significant data a journal would pick them up. There is no one silencing them but themselves, because they know they don't have good evidence and their sources also don't have good evidence. The lancet, one of the most prestigious journals in the world, took up an article that vaccines might be related to autism, because at the time the authors had significant data (that later turned out to be fraudulent but at this point pandoras box had already been opened, and now decades later people believe vaccines cause autism). So if they did have this smoking gun data that said the vaccines are something to be worried about, it would have been published by now in a huge journal.
Great points. In particular, that one original source of anti-vax anxiety comes from a study published in a top medical journal. If one thinks that the medical establishment is corrupt or self-censoring, or should not be trusted, etc., then does that also not apply to articles published in The Lancet?
I hope they have published their critique of the mRNA technology in the last decade because the technology has been around for a long time. It was just adapted for COVID-19 in the last year.
My guess is they have not said a peep about mRNA until this became political.
They said they feel immense pressure not to say anything negative, and that they feel they have been silenced. They're not even allowed to ask basic questions about the vaccine as part of their work, even tho that's what they do for a living.
Then she hasn't bothered looking into it from legit sources at all, or when she does find a legit source she assumes that since it goes against whatever conspiracy website she reads that its in on the conspiracy and therefore wrong. Here are your ingredients:
The one thing you can do to ensure vaccine hesitancy and distrust is to ban that very topic.
This standard they are setting up, already started with warnings and bans for in any way contradicting the WHO, is impossible to maintain in a consistent fashion.
I can still find thousands of videos on homeopathy, ranging from debunkings to lecture-style videos. There are people who would advocate using this rather than modern health services.
In fact, there are people who would advocate the use of witchcraft to treat cancer.
Will YouTube ban them all? Or will they just ban certain topics based on a whim?
I would say that currently today that there is a much bigger threat to public health of people believing in insane vaccine conspiracies than there is of people following homeopathy. If you kill yourself snorting ginger root it doesn't really affect other people like it does when you spread covid to 200 people in your church, since rough math would say two of them will die directly from your insane actions.
If we had an epidemic of homeopathy where millions of people are doing that instead of surgery and ending up dead instead of healed, we'd probably see similar enforcement.
You can't put out every tiny little fire, there are too many as you say, but stopping the big blazes that are currently taking over can certainly be done to an extent within your own platform with moves like this.
They're a private company and can do whatever they want. However, one only needs to see the trending page in any country to see the kind of crap YouTube promotes and profits from. So, please spare me of the corporate propaganda for YouTube's rationale of this decision.
> "They're a private company and can do whatever they want."
Flies in the face of jurisprudence accross industrialized nations, as many courts again and again ruled that a platform cannot "do whatever they wan't" if they dominate the market and thus effectively are a public space of opinion.
So this is your opportunity! Go make VaxxTube. The mistake they are making, if you are to be believed, is that they are leaving money on the table. Go pick it up.
Imagine the government decided that you go to prison for speaking against vaccines. That would be a mistake. This is the same kind of mistake, but on a smaller scale.
Imagine a straw man argument that has nothing to do with the current situation.
Better yet, imagine if the government told you that you must post a sign in your front yard that says “vaccines are good” or “vaccines are bad”. That’s a much more relevant analogy here.
Your right to not be prosecuted by the government for what you say is protected by the first amendment. YouTube’s right is similarly protected: they can say or not say what they want on their website without criminal consequences. So which is it, do you want the government to curtail YT’s free speech or not?
I am for liberty. I don't like when governments censor their citizens and I don't like when corporations censor their users or customers. There is no contradiction. The fact that google and co can censor others is just thanks to the government being liberal and allowing action that goes against this value. This is similar to the paradox of tolerance except for liberty: "do we allow free expression for those who use it to restrict others?". And I say we do, but I don't pretend to be happy when they do.
The contradiction is that you are saying the government can censor Google, just not you. So in other words you want to give the government the ability to tell Google “put this on your home page” for any value of “this”.
The only way to prevent a corporation from exercising their right to free speech is to have the government interfere. So the part where you said you don’t like Google censoring people is where you said you want the government to censor Google.
This is not about "disagreeing with what you say". This is about people literally dying. Not just the people spreading the information either, innocent bystanders that get killed by the disease.
"Your freedom to swing your fist stops where my nose begins". This anti-vaxx BS is already posing, or at least aggrevating, a serious public health issue. If it was just for the anti-vaxxers, I wouldn't care. It is affecting their children and people that simply cannot get the vaccine. At which point their freedom of reach (not necessarily expression, as far as I know their demonstrations are allowed) has to take the backseat when it comes to other people's health.
It used to be that I didn't want to work for Google because I'm not a fan of surveillance capitalism and all of the second order effects. I'm now realizing that there is a second, just-as-important reason: the level of censorship that Google enables.
A few years ago I wouldn't have thought there could possibly be a second reason just as important to me as the centralized, pervasive surveillance... but here we are.
The fact that he was talking to Bannon and saying that the vaccines don't work and aren't safe even though 2.5 billion people have been given them is ludicrous. Even doctors can grow stupid over time.
YouTube and Google just joined the most brutal regimes on Earth in suppressing different opinions than what is government given propaganda. I am from former communist Czechoslovakia, never believed that again in my life I will have to challenge news and meet with censorship on such a big scale.
If I recall correctly, the internet was born from a DARPA project to enable resilient communications that would ensure a nuclear missile launch order would always get through.
If so, then it is indeed contrary to the spirit of the internet to block messages on the basis that they guide people to actions which cause harm to existing structures. The internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.
My question is: How wise is the spirit of the internet? Does it lead to human flourishing?
youtube isn't the internet. Why should you or I be able to tell Youtube want to host on their own servers? If we don't like it we can go to other services.
IMO, go further. Remove all medical recommendation and assertions from YouTube. Leave YouTube for entertainment, and have other platforms - perhaps ones better regulated and better managed - for medical discussions in a scientific context.
There's inherent difficulty in trying to judge between wackos and pros, because wackos do their best to masquerade as pros. This is basically a turing complete issue, because there's always people straddling the line between wacko and pro. YouTube has mostly avoided the difficulty with this issue until now by avoiding moderation entirely (aside from certain categories that suffer from the same problems, like copyright claims), so the issue with most of YouTube is that you can jump from pro to extreme wacko and not realize it as a non-professional yourself. Meanwhile, all content creators, wacko and pro, are given the same platform to promote their claims - one that incentivizes eyeballs, clicks, and engagement, not one that incentivizes accuracy or merit (or one that allows discussion in a context independent of monetization and ranking, which are known to poison good faith discussion).
Similarly but unrelated, let's also ban drug ads on cable TV. These are much like buying a social media influencer to push your medical claims. It's disgusting.
Taken to its logical end, that would also prevent many very useful channels from existing. What about all the people who live with a mental illness and also have a Youtube channel documenting that experience? Should that be prohibited too? For which disorders? If you remove all ADHD-related individual content from YouTube, you're harming the platform and a crapton of people who have bettered their lives with the aid of such videos.
You're alluding back to the moderation problem. I claimed that discerning between pros and wackos is turing complete, and you have indeed shown that discerning between ANY kind of allowable content A and disallowed content B is also turing complete - you can get arbitrarily close to the line between A and B, so any algorithm (or human guidelines) is necessarily going to have issues on some edge cases.
I agree, you're absolutely right. Still, I claim it should be done, and maybe the content you listed should also be disallowed.
I'm not saying these videos and discussions shouldn't exist, I'm suggesting that perhaps it's time we dispelled the idea of a global Town Square - one platform for all content. It's a recipe for disaster. We've seen what can happen and what will continue to happen. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube - how many times do we have to watch a global town square devolve into shit flinging, disinformation, and hate?
Let's stop pretending that there can be a global free speech forum and that we can have some fair minimum ruleset to moderate all content on that forum.
We should opt for the opposite - a spectrum of platforms that appeal to different interests and are regulated in proportion to the severity of incorrect or bad-faith information in that interest.
The entertainment that dominates Youtube is minimally severe if incorrect or bad faith, so YouTube would have minimal regulation.
Content on personal health and experiences could go into HealthTube, where moderation exists to prevent making strong medical claims or pushing bullshit (the "pay an influencer to say that ElaMexaTrin cured my covid" problem), but people are otherwise allowed to post what they want about their personal experiences.
Content with strong scientific claims on health would go into MedicalTube, which is regulated and heavily moderated to prevent commercial interests and disinformation.
Really, if YouTube was forward thinking, all of these could be different subsets of the same platform. But instead we have one platform with the same erratic hand of moderation slapping things down left and right based on whatever changing ruleset seems convenient today.
>We should opt for the opposite - a spectrum of platforms that appeal to different interests and are regulated in proportion to the severity of incorrect or bad-faith information in that interest.
I fully agree. Even though the debate around centralization is a separate debate, it's not at all orthogonal. I still feel that federation is the way. Open standards and platforms that anyone with the capital can spin up on their own boxes.
You can't expect people to be informed and able to vote without access to information, including dissenting views.
The quacks do need to be out in the open facing ridicule. I think it gets worse if they are pushed to a telegram channel where they have no opposition.
I don't expect people to be informed. Because they're not. Even now.
I find it hilarious that people think they are informed on all the topics they consider themselves informed on. There is simply way too much information out there to be well-informed on all of it.
I can't be an infectious disease expert. I can't even be reasonably informed on all the stuff that goes on surrounding it. I need a sieve. I need filters. I need vetters. I need vouching. I need those who are informed on a topic to do all the legwork and present the results. And that's not you or other randos on the internet.
And that's what we've actually lost. We've lost all the filters and firewalls that stopped the majority of misinformation. With everyone having a global megaphone to broadcast their every thought, it's become harder to discern between those who are informed on a topic and those who aren't.
The world's signal to noise ratio is weighted too heavily towards noise.
You realize we have more access to more raw information than we have at any point in the past.
Even 20 years ago, we just did not have the scope of information that we do now. Those sources you fear are getting censored, we'd never even know they exist before. It just wouldn't reach us.
Domain experts would hash out the wheat from the chaff. The plausible from the bunk.
Now people are getting their information from Joe Fucking Rogan of all people.
I think this is a situation of "the perfect is the enemy of the good", or in this case, the better. Nobody is saying that would be a perfect system, just that it would be a hell of a lot better.
I'm sorry, I'm not quite sure I understand your point.
Are you saying that using our own limited understanding of the vast array of domains to process the impossible amount of information out there is a better system than deferring to various domain experts?
Because, just no. That would not be better. It would be worse. It is worse.
And I'm not saying deferring to domain experts is perfect. It is not. But it's better than expecting everyone to become domain experts in everything.
I think you're kicking the can of personal responsibility down, or in this case up, the road.
There are groupmind tendencies and competing groupthinks, as well as industrial corruption, in all of our scientific enterprises that I'm aware of. For me this is a serious issue, since I saw first-hand how pusillanimous scientists can become when their livelihoods or grants are endangered.
There is a war on for our minds. I think we each have to decide who we trust and don't trust. For many of us there is also a crisis of trust in our scientific institutions now.
You can't be an infectious disease expert, yet many, many people called the coronavirus pandemic in January 2020 when the WHO was saying "the stigma is worse than the virus". The powers that be have lost their credibility completely through this debacle, and it's ridiculous (but expected) that their response to this is to shut down avenues for dissent. Despicable.
Not a bad idea, although I'd start with a ban on medical - pharmaceutical advertising on Youtube. Most countries don't allow marketing of any kind of prescription drug (not sure about over-the-counter though), based on the very common-sense notion that only trained doctors (with no backdoor kickback deals with pharmaceutical outfits) should be advising patients on appropriate medicines for their condition.
I agree strongly, but my point is that in modern social forums the only difference between advertising and content is who is getting paid. I can promote my drug through traditional advertising, or I can promote my drug by sponsoring channels, or I can promote my drug by hiring a "viral marketing" firm to try and spread rumors about how my drug is so much more effective than the competition but being held back by an evil shadowy cabal of big pharma.
>Similarly but unrelated, let's also ban drug ads on cable TV.
Amen to that statement... Is there any more obvious cue that news is all a profit machine than a half hour repeating commercials about reverse mortgages and anti-depressants that cause diarrhea?
> Similarly but unrelated, let's also ban drug ads on cable TV.
I'm reminded of seeing anecdotes about British and Australian people watching US TV streams and them finding the prevalence of drug ads really bizarre.
Hope nobody against abortion is at the wheel in this scenario.
Censorship is a shortcut to avoid doing the real work of de-radicalizing people and convincing the undecided. It's not even a working shortcut.
For every issue liberals focus on, there has grown a loud minority who want to normalize Big Tech using their power to ban opponents because they don't see how it will always backfire, and/or they're bullies who crave power over other people.
> Remove all medical recommendation and assertions from YouTube
Should videos with content like "abortion is a human right and here's where you can access it" be removed? Do you trust Google to decide in your favor every time and for all time?
You're misunderstanding the premise of my suggestion. Please see my comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28694148 where I recommend we have different platforms for more sensitive topics, as YouTube has proven incompetent at managing discussions that require any level of moderation, civility, or nuance.
It's not a matter of Google deciding "in my favor". I want Google out of the picture entirely. Google is the problem here.
That would be another sensible approach. Or Youtube would need to employ doctors that judge on a case by case basis and articulate their decisions. Anything else is a bad solution in my opinion and this current position warrants a lot of pushback in my opinion.
This is worrying. I still remember, in March 2020 believing that face masks work was still the contrarian opinion. Large Western countries such as USA, Germany, changed their official position in April. WHO changed their position in June. My country (Finland) only in the end of August. If contrarian voices had been efficiently suppressed, would the medical mainstream have changed their position at all?
Are you suggesting YouTube helped reverse the position on masks?
The anti-mask recommendation was a decision made by the political mainstream, not medical. It wasn't a poll of doctors or scientists that determined whether we thought masks worked. And in the end, at least in the US, I don't think the official position switched because of contrarian voices. It switched because supply caught up with demand.
I'm against censorship. But I'm also against algorithmic promotion of dubious information.
As an example, several people I know personally told me they saw videos of black lives matter activists and antifa starting fires here in Oregon. It's ridiculous. But, there is enough evidence to show that those videos were created and promoted in the right way such that YouTube and Facebook put them into their viral loops and lots of succeptible people thought they were the truth.
How do we strike a balance between letting information be free and at the same time prevent black box algorithms and evil actors from hacking our society?
I know this comment will be lost in the shuffle, and I notice this was submitted by danso, so I imagine there's an intentionality here, but I very strongly believe submissions like these are a substantial and growing threat to HN.
Just remove them! Let's talk tech, startups, science! Submissions like these distract from the stuff I like on HN, but more importantly I worry they chase away the people I like from HN.
I flag each of these, hoping enough of us can get content like this removed, and I'm willing to be outvoted on that count, but I personally think HN is better off without this content.
Technology doesn't exist in a vacuum. It exists to address societal, political, existential (climate change), or financial problems. For example, let's talk about self driving cars (my field). The only reason they are necessary are fundamentally societal (people die from cars) and political (America doesn't want to invest in public transit for many societal reasons that aren't logical). It's a technology that doesn't have to exist. These societal issues are the reason why it's worth investing in the tech and they affect the design of the car and what problems it needs to solve.
I get the appeal of trying to look at technology solely in isolation, but society influences whether technology needs to exist and how it's designed.
The article is pay-walled to me. But I am interested - do they mention where the line for being "anti-vaccine" currently is? For example - is someone who is making a video about why he/she will not be taking a 3rd booster shot anti-vaccine and therefore banned?
Don’t post content on YouTube if it includes harmful misinformation about currently approved and administered vaccines on any of the following:
* Vaccine safety: content alleging that vaccines cause chronic side effects, outside of rare side effects that are recognized by health authorities
* Efficacy of vaccines: content claiming that vaccines do not reduce transmission or contraction of disease
* Ingredients in vaccines: content misrepresenting the substances contained in vaccines
Also, the policy states some exceptional cases such as countervailing views with a support from medical experts, firsthand experiences, etc.
I feel like the efficacy is debatable. It reduces severe symptoms but more and more vaccinated are contracting it daily even in places of 95+% vaccinated so there's a good dialogue to be had here
> It reduces severe symptoms but more and more vaccinated are contracting it daily even in places of 95+% vaccinated
That's what the world living with COVID looks like. Given the Delta's estimated reproduction number (5~8), there's no herd immunity achievable in a near future. Then make it less severe and transmissible so we can handle it without strict lockdown and overloading public health infrastructure. At least until we get a universal vaccine against COVID.
The original hope was that vaccinated people wouldn't get it at all, as per any other vaccine. Delta proved for this to not to be the case, unfortunately.
> The original hope was that vaccinated people wouldn't get it at all, as per any other vaccine
This is false. No vaccine provides 100% protection. Even MMR, one of the most battle-tested vaccine provides ~97% protection against measles and ~88% against mumps.
If you get higher than 70% efficacy then it's usually considered very helpful for public health. Last year, we were not even sure if we can get 50% efficacy (a borderline for approval) but it turns out that COVID vaccines are so effective that it even works reasonably well for variants, with a caveat of diminishing effects over time.
>it turns out that COVID vaccines are so effective that it even works reasonably well for variants
As per this CDC[1] report - "Two doses of mRNA vaccines were 74.7% effective against infection among nursing home residents early in the vaccination program (March–May 2021). During June–July 2021, when B.1.617.2 (Delta) variant circulation predominated, effectiveness declined significantly to 53.1%."
Exactly as I originally commented and you deemed false, due to the Delta variant, we observed an efficacy level (53.1%) considerably lower than any other modern vaccines. I'm not sure what's controversial about the statement that it's obvious that the COVID vaccines are unforunately not working nearly as well as we were originally told that they would.
Vaccine efficacy on the Delta variant is still a debatable topic, and it's dangerous to make any conclusion from a single reference limited to a very specific, narrow subset of sample.
You probably remember Israel's report (which is strongly motivated to promote booster shots) indicated that vaccine's efficacy was pretty low, but it turns out to be a textbook case of Simpson's paradox[1] from extremely biased vaccination rate.
From what I saw from KDCA's daily reports (which performs extensive contact tracing with a pretty high coverage, not even remotely comparable to the US), it's more of 70% protection against Delta. Though it's possible that its efficacy is waning over time, which may explain the gap between Korea and Israel.
Meanwhile, news just in: Slovenia apparently suspended today the use of JnJ, after the death of a 20yo in the past hours, «...until all details related to this case are clarified» (Health Minister Janez Poklukar)¹.
And I have difficulties in matching this piece of news with the reported words of Matt Halprin: «YouTube will take down videos that claim such vaccines are dangerous».
And also wonder if this (possible) case fits within the «rare side effects that are recognized by health authorities» (the policy).
this is legitimately dystopian. only can mention side effects that have been "recognized by health authorities" ? how would whistleblowing even be possible in this environment?
Misinformation should be put out in sunlight or else the public may lose the ability to think critically in some respects. Then they’ll be dependent on these companies to steer dialogue and be truth-tellers.
The thing is, youtube is crappy place for "whistle blowing" because video is a terrible medium for people evaluating information critically - any references a video might have will slip by a person, the general demeanor of a presenter can matter more than their content or credentials, etc.
It's not unreasonable for youtube to refuse non-mainstream health theories even if those theories deserve an airing somewhere.
its obvious that contrary opinions will be banned first with option to appeal coming after. im sure that will be a totally open and transparent process.
AFAIC, anything they can do to suppress the raving lunacy of people like the ones who convinced that poor man to leave hospital, may he rest in peace, is a good thing in my book.
For context, Michael Osterholm runs the Center for Infectious Disease Reasearch and Policy at the University of Minnesota and was a member of Biden’s COVID advisory board during the presidential transition.
Time for repeat showing of the free speech debate we’ve already had a dozen times, whoopee!
As ever, IMO, the problem isn’t the hosting or the banning, it’s the algorithms. I don’t care whether YouTube hosts anti-vaccine activists, I care that they actively promote anti-vaccine content to users simply because it’s proven to get clicks and earn them money. Bans like this look incredibly stupid when you realise YouTube itself is responsible for this disinformation getting so much traction.
I personally really preferred old Youtube, where your subscriptions were the main thing you saw along with the absolute "most popular viewed today" kinds of things.
The algorithm has only made the site worse in my experience and I always go directly to my subscriptions to be able to at least see things I'm subbed to.
I'm of the same opinion. A user's subscriptions seemingly matter very little nowadays, I've noticed. The focus on recommendations is so heavy I'm very often recommended videos I've already watched, some of them multiple times; very few recommendations are videos (old or new) from channels I'm subscribed to.
I've also noticed that many content creators are now offering email newsletters (such as Tom Scott) and encouraging subscribers to connect outside of YouTube, presumably as a response to this.
Why would YouTube recommend videos from people you're subscribed to? You already have a reliable feed of those videos on the subscriptions feed. They are trying to get you to subscribe to other channels to increase your watch time.
The feed on the home page is recommendations. That may, by chance, include things you're subscribed to but it will also include other recommended content and possibly not recommend things you are subscribed to as it's not meant to be a second copy of the subscription feed.
That still doesn't give reliable recommendations of your subscribed channels, it's just a chronological list of their new content.
If I subscribe to a youtuber with a back-catalog of several years of videos, I want recommendations of those prior videos, not only their brand new ones.
It did use to overwhelmingly recommend videos from channels you were subscribed to. Such videos made up a major portion of your recommendations.
And yes, there is the subscriptions feed, but it only shows new videos from subscribed-to channels; it doesn't function as a 'recommended' list for your subscriptions, which is what I miss and want.
I agree. This is actually my chief complaint about YouTube's front page. I wish there were options to categorically remove videos from channels I'm subscribed to and videos I've already watched from the recommendation feed.
There seems to be an AI safety problem here: The youtube algorithm is optimizing for engagement at the cost of some other less-quantifiable human value like social trust.
I am gonna go out on a limb and say Google's product dashboards likely all have engagement metrics and probably close to zero have "social trust" metrics.
I'm really curious if it would be possible for Youtube / Google etc. to expose their algorithmic interface to their public users so that they could twiddle with the settings themselves - or is that just technologically impossible given the internal structure of their systems? I really have no idea, but I've been wondering about it for some time.
I'm not sure that 'banning' and 'changing the algorithm so that it doesn't pop up' is meaningfully different. We can just assume that YT hasn't banned this content, but it never ever shows up in recommendations. The effect would be practically the same.
Banning means the content is not accessible at all.
Changing the Algorithm would mean the content is less discoverable but could still spread outside the platform via alternative methods, such as Tweets, Links, emails, slack, etc.
There is a difference, and the effect is not the same
We don’t live in the reality where the local book store and media owner keeping information away actually had an impact.
This only effects YouTube. Of the millions of other sites out there.
I think even the smart people are a bit stuck on YouTubes marketing effects on their limbic brain versus the reality; the bad info is just a Google search or friend posting in private away for anyone still.
Let me reframe: let’s say that YouTube hosts anti-vax content and as a result some percentage of people are swayed by this content to not vaccinate themselves or their children. Some percentage of them dies. Let’s say in absolute numbers it is 10,000 people. Do you think that YouTube did a good thing by allowing that content?
Or this way, let’s say that YouTube hosts earlier anti-mask content from Dr. Fauci/CDC and as a result some percentage of people are swayed by this content to not wear mask. Some percentage of them dies.
Do you think that YouTube did a good thing by allowing that content?
> Do you think that YouTube did a good thing by allowing that content?
They didn't do a good or a bad thing - they were a blank canvas someone put their art(video) on. Recently, that blank canvas is only willing to have certain art present on it - that's not a good thing. The only thing keeping it going is an inertial mass of subscribers, which over [possibly a long] time will dissipate.
Yes, because back then (as much as a communications fuck-up that was) this was scientific consensus. What Youtube is banning is pure propaganda and falsehoods.
The scientific consensus was that there was no evidence that mask would work (or not work) for 2019-nCoV. There's plenty of evidence that it helps prevent transmission of other respiratory viruses.
So which hypothesis would have most likely been true at the time? Not to mention that Dr. Fauci himself had admitted that it was a noble lie (aka pure propaganda and falsehoods).
Not directed at you, just to get that out of the way. But I am quite fed up that the masks-don't-help meme is constantly brought up. That was in early 2020, a lot of mistakes were made back then because nobody really knew what they were doing.
Especially because it usually brought up by people that are consistently wrong about pretty much everything, while propagating active lies, as a defense against anyone pointing out the utter BS they are spreading. That gets tiresome.
Ah, I didn't say that, did I? I am just tired of having the mask debacle from early 2020, and that is the only real issue that is constantly brought up to discredit the WHO/CDC.... because as you said, people make mistakes. I, for what it's worth, trust people that correct their mistakes over people that never do. because the latter never learn. And they have the tendency to put as much theories out as they can. Because then they have a high chance of being right at least once. Doing that long enough and they can claim to be right all the time. Which, obviously, they aren't. But it's incredibly hard to call them out on it.
That is a moral argument and has no place in a discussion of the laws of a modern western country. We are a system of law, not a system of justice.
Although I do agree with you that anti-vaxers should be treated no different than common terrorists; as Americans, under the law, they have a right to declare that they are terrorists and give their little illogical terrorist rants. The First Amendment is very clear on what is not covered, and the courts have repeatedly confirmed that being wrong, being disingenuous, and lying is covered (as long as you are not committing perjury or other similar, actual, crimes).
Our founding fathers knew exactly what they were doing when they penned this: in their day, they also had their form of denialism. The first amendment is, essentially, "It is better to keep silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubts.", but weaponized against the idiots that shall forever plague us.
That said, if a rational adult, one that we have, as a society, cannot tell the difference between the truth and the lies, then we have both failed as a society, but also have trusted an adult to actually act like one and they, personally, made the choice to act like a spoiled brat; acting like a spoiled brat is not a victimless crime, and sometimes, but not always, they are punished like an adult for violating the trust of the society that they live in.
It almost seems as if you believe you can't be lied to by the people you agree with. In this case, we'll call them "vaxxers" since you seem to believe only "anti-vaxers" are capable of duplicity.
Nope, because that's the beauty of science. I personally run on a "trust, but verify" basis: science allows society to come together and verify many aspects of claims: can it be done, can it be replicated, what's the likelihood of the replication actually measuring a real effect, etc.
"Vaxxers", as you have so put it, (or as I like to call them, normal human beings) have reached a level of proof that vaccines are safe, and that, specifically, the COVID-19 vaccines currently in deployment are several magnitudes safer than, say, contracting COVID-19 itself.
"Anti-Vaxxers", however, have (un?)intentionally proved that vaccines work, performing one of the largest voluntary human drug trials in history as the placebo group. Their sacrifice shall, hopefully, not be forgotten (lest we repeat it).
Their opinion lacks the ability to be classified as political, to be honest. It is a scientific "opinion" that has been proven wrong, repeatedly, by actual scientific research, but also by mere observational fact.
No one has a right to harm another person. Knowingly transmitting an infectious disease, after being repeatedly informed that it is, indeed, an infectious disease, and that the victims, worldwide, total almost 5 million worldwide and continues to climb, and they still continue to spread it, that is what makes someone a terrorist: you harm, maim, and kill people to spread discord. Why you do it is immaterial, "I didn't know", "I didn't understand", "I was following orders", are not excuses in a court of law.
You're only "knowingly transmitting an infectious disease" if you leave your house with COVID symptoms or a recent positive test result, not just if you aren't vaccinated against it.
The whole thing is a "correlation does not imply causation" fallacy because you just assume that changing one thing lead to the change of something else while ignoring all the other effect it has. For example by leaving the content and being a neutral platform the subjective value of the content on the platform is higher. More people who are not sure about something can listen both sides and choose based on that. However by removing it you exclude these people (for a million of other topics too) even trough they could very well end up on the "right" side after doing their own research.
They wont do this if its clear that the platform already removed one side and the other therefore is propaganda.
So by removing it, how many additional death would this actually cause? You just leave this out.
What if it causes thousands of deaths too? Let’s say in absolute numbers it is 10000 people.
You can now make a non-emotionally decision whether removing it or not is actually a good idea because the arbitrary appeal to emotion evens out.
This is the way think about such stuff, not by making arbitrary emotional "arguments" which can not be proven or disproved and may as well be completely irrelevant or even in reverse.
Whenever the "logic" of "X people (less) die if we do Y" is used its an attempt to make it emotional instead of rational it should ring some bells and raise some flags. You can see this with autonomous driving or gun control an many other topics. Its some kind of appeal to emotion fallacy combined with false cause fallacy. And instead of convincing anyone or find common ground it just pushes people to more extreme opposition. Because you "literally kill people if you disagree with X".
The pragmatic thing is to remove the blatantly false content to prevent deaths. That’s not an emotional argument, that’s a logical one. Some percentage of people will watch anti-vax videos on YouTube, will believe them, will not vaccinate, and some percentage will die. Not having that content there would mean more people get vaccinated and fewer die. Nobody is dying from getting vaccinated.
Also, I would love to see what common ground looks like with anti-vaxxers. I don’t think they are willing to give an inch on this, but willing to be proven wrong.
The damage to the "value of the content" is done anyway even if you "just" "remove blatantly false content". Also instead of an arbitrator of truth you need an arbitrator of "blatantly false" which is exactly as impossible and comes with the same risk of abuse of power, bias and all that.
Anyway you missed the point where I assumed the death evens out aka try make an argument that isn't based on emotion an "backed" by numbers we can not know.
>Also, I would love to see what common ground looks like with anti-vaxxers. I don’t think they are willing to give an inch on this, but willing to be proven wrong.
I'm not an anti-vaxxer but I'm p sure the common ground for most of them would be to let people decide. Anti-vaxxers who want to remove pro-vaccine information to prevent people from dying form the vaccine seem to be rather rare. As far as I know most are perfectly fine with anyone voluntary injecting toxic and dying. They might be wrong on almost everything but that doesn't mean common ground can not be found.
Also by picking the furthest away extreme position to proof no common ground is possible is kind silly. We wan common ground for the majority on both sides not with the extremists.
If we were talking about tetanus I would agree. People who refuse tetanus vaccines place nobody but themselves in danger. I don’t care if you choose to forego that vaccine as it will not affect me.
People who refuse vaccines for dangerous contagious diseases directly affect others: they may pass that disease to me, to my children, to my elderly family members, etc. At this point their choice is causing me harm. What is my remedy if this happens? I can’t sue them for the death of a loved one, I can’t hold them accountable criminally.
The only path forward I see is that if you choose to not vaccinate, that you also choose to fully isolate yourself until the pandemic is over: no going to work, school, social gatherings, etc. I would be comfortable with that common ground. But that’s not what is being offered by you or even those who refuse to get vaccinated. It is always the pro-vaccine/science/reason people that must give something up for the benefit of those refusing to get vaccinated, which is less common ground and more of a one sided demand.
The "put other people in danger" fallacy is the same appeal to emotion again. Its nonsense, you would never apply this kind of "logic" anywhere else.
Do you ban cars because you dont need one and all others put you, your children their grandparents in danger? No you dont.
If you dont want to be run over at any cost its your task to stay away form cars.
Similarly if you dont wanna get covid at any cost its your task to hide in the basement and dont let anyone in vaccinated or not.
Alternatively you can accept that life is a deadly risk and do the common sense things to reduce the risk for you and your loved ones and move on.
This may be taking the vaccine, putting on a mask, avoiding crowded places or even ware a warn west so you are less likely to be run over by a car. All of that is fine. It stops being fine if you demand others to do something so you can feel safe. Especially if what you demand infringed basic rights and/or is not solving the problem but just lowers the risk by an unknown possibly insignificant amount.
Its reasonable to demand that cars have working breaks because they need them anyway. The breaks aren't there to protect you from cars. Its however not reasonable to demand that all cars have advanced pedestrian detection that makes in impossible to run over people. It doesn't matter if you would feel safer that way or that it would safe X numbers of lives. Not because we dont care about lives but because making such a requirement would simply make most car driving people criminals and not actually save lives. Similarly if you demand unvaccinated people to stay at home, all you get is that you criminalizing people for leaving their home. It wont make them take the vaccine and it wont protect you from covid.
What a canard. Should YouTube leave up ISIS recruiting videos so those so-tempted can examine “both sides” of the issue?
There is no both sides to the vaccine debate. COVID-19 vaccine information led to one of the first rabies deaths in a long time because the treatment involves a vaccine given after a bite, and all this anti-vaxx propaganda is doing nothing but sowing FUD about one of the most obvious cost-benefit analysis’s that can be done in the field of medicine. And during a pandemic no less. YouTube has no obligation to suffer these fools.
No one claims ISIS recruiting videos are removed to save lives. The comparison doesn't make any sense. There are actual reasons why these videos are removed that aren't appeal to emotion fallacies.
It's an interesting question, but keep in mind that Youtube allows junk food advertising targeted towards children, which contributes to the obesity epidemic, and obese people have much higher medical needs and tend to die earlier (and are much more sensitive to COVID). Clearly, this contributes to untimely death, right?
So should we ban all junk food advertising on Youtube? Also, how about a ban on all pharmaceutical advertising on Youtube (which is the norm in most countries)?
IMO one of the reasons these debates go back and forth forever is because it’s impossible to come up hard and fast rules that cover every scenario.
Maybe a poorly thought out analogy but think about cars. There are a ton of car accidents every year, a good number of which result in death. But we don’t ban cars because they’re essential for the way many people live. But if 50% of all car journeys resulted in accidents? Maybe we’d be having a different conversation.
That was a special case. They messed up and retracted it. They thought the N95 mask shortage would harm healthcare workers and wanted to save the top masks for those most at risk. They realized they were wrong and changed their views.
Can as much be said for anti vaxxers? Did they make the mistake and recant it? Did they change their view with new evidence? No, they're misinformed and close-minded. They ignored millions upon millions of safe vaccine uses, pointing to unsubstantiated edge cases and ridiculous conspiracies. The CDC was not buying into such rubbish and I hope they never do.
Right. But what happens before it's retracted? The incorrect position of the authority is repeated, and now in this case is basically denied distribution by Youtube.
Now in this case youtube is probably right "scientifically", but what if they weren't like with masks? You basically have 0 discussion or challenge allowed to the authorities position.
And lets just bring in the recent controversy here, a panel of scientists said third shots shouldn't be administered. Yet the government decided they should. Which position will youtube censor?
Seems like your basic point is that no trusted authority should ever be wrong about something. I'm sure you would say, "No, that's not what I meant." But that seems like the only thing that could be implied by what you're saying.
You didn't address a very important point that the parent comment made which is that trusted authorities like the CDC are more likely to correct their mistakes whereas anti-vax propagandists will never retract their statements. That's part of what makes the CDC trustworthy compared to the propagandists.
The fact that the CDC or any other trusted public organization has technically made a mistake in the past seems like an irrelevant distraction. Haven't you ever had an argument with a spouse or family member where you called out something they were doing and they came back with, "Look who's taking."? And that felt like a bullshit tactic, right?
Accusations of hypocrisy are a really common fallacy in debate. They contribute nothing to the discussion at hand and are basically just an appeal to emotion. And what you're doing is just a version of that.
What if ISIS was right about the nature of God and we will all suffer hellfire in the afterlife?
There’s no obligation for YouTube to give terrorists a platform. Regarding a booster shot, I’m sure they will make reasonable calls, nearly exclusively only silencing bad-faith actors. Much like their policy towards CP or terrorist content.
There were other "special cases". Here in California and many other places in the U.S. committees were formed by non-medical people to decide who should get the vaccine first. Decisions were made not by whose more likely to catch/spread it first, but who was most worthy.
> Harald Schmidt, an expert in ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania, said that it is reasonable to put essential workers ahead of older adults, given their risks, and that they are disproportionately minorities. “Older populations are whiter, ” Dr. Schmidt said. “Society is structured in a way that enables them to live longer. Instead of giving additional health benefits to those who already had more of them, we can start to level the playing field a bit.”
In fact, if there was a supply problem, the best populations to give vaccines to first may have been some of the most "privileged" people in our society (even if we don't like them). Frequent travelers, college kids who are going to party anyway, etc. (Of course, people who work in retail stores, or front like health workers were obvious groups that nobody disagreed with.)
The point is, _who_ got the vaccine first wasn't decided by science, but by politics.
I admit to fudging my eligibility in order to get the vaccine early. I may do this again to get the booster if I decide I need it.
Well good thing that'll never happen again, right? /s
Given the repeated failings and intentional or unintentional misinformation we've seen thus far, why do you believe them messing up is a "special case"?
The government lied to their citizens because they weren't prepared enough and didn't stockpile enough N95 masks for their healthcare workers. That's what I'm reading.
That's okay to you?
I think it's absolutely abhorrent. Governments technically have a full monopoly on violence/power and to have them lie to you for what - the "greater good?"
You're also putting the entirely of all people hesitant or unwilling to get the vaccination into a large group which you can then generalize (albeit foolishly)
Two wrongs don’t make a right, do they? Also this is one of the most misquoted incidents in this saga, you don’t seem to know exactly what happened there.
I hate that the CDC did that action, only because it gave skeptics another reason to distrust them. But it is 100% clear to anyone who, you know, was alive when it happened that they did that to prevent a mask shortage for those who needed them most.
I would rather have seen some emergency declaration that N95s must be seized from stores and go to healthcare workers, but that would have caused perhaps an even bigger panic. Because then, everyone would have freaked out, vs. what they did. Now, we only have people who were already going to distrust government giving a shit about the mask declaration last year.
Back to good-faith vs. bad-faith: I'm not certain there is more than a hair's worth of anti-vaccine content that is produced with good intention or even attempted to be backed by statistics. Put simply, I wager there is no anti-vaccine content produced out of a legitimate, well-founded public interest. It's charlatans, fools, anti-science and anti-authority interests.
What's your position on the current third shot issue? Should we listen to the scientist panel that said no, or the government that said yes?
What is youtube's position? Will it delete all government communications because the scientists said on, or will it delete all scientific discussion because the government said yes?
Let’s not add misinformation here. It was a panel of researches at the CDC that said the evidence for boosters for under 65 at risk individuals was marginal that the thought it wasn’t worth it. A similar panel of researches at the FDA said it was a close call but they said it was worth it. The CDC panel is advisory to the FDA panel, not the other way around. The debate here is specifically for under 65 at risk individuals.
Besides, the official recommendation was more on the line of "a 3rd dose is much less useful than applying those vaccines on the antivaxers". What is very clearly correct, but is of a laughable political naivety, because the preferred goal is practically impossible to reach.
That's irrelevant, as I understand it. The debate wasn't about the scientific merits of a third shot - the debate was on the prioritization of whether the limited resource (the vaccine) was best allocated for a larger set of boosters, or if they should be used for others who are not yet vaccinated (perhaps worldwide).
Anyway, like I've said in another post and in a blog before, I think Youtube has less responsibility to be a neutral platform than ISPs and registrars do. If you want to host content, you should be able to do it yourself with Internet connectivity and DNS - IMO those should be "common carriers" that don't get the privilege of bias the same way platforms like Youtube do.
Think swallowing a tube of veterinary-grade medicine is safer than an injection that hundreds of millions of people have gotten with few problems? Go for it, on your home server with a domain name.
> What's your position on the current third shot issue? Should we listen to the scientist panel that said no, or the government that said yes?
We should listen to ourselves. If we don't have enough information to make an informed decision, then study and acquire that information. No one is responsible for you except for you - with the caveats of children/dependents being not responsible for themselves.
What Youtube or any other internet information says is irrelevant until you decide otherwise.
It's all very simple, considering Youtube has had a feature to keep videos out of their search indexes since, I don't know, forever...? It's effectively a form of voluntary shadowbanning, used by people who just want to embed videos somewhere else or, y'know, simply keep them somewhat private. YT could just say "right, anything we object to, gets removed from the search index." Two-minutes job. If you want to be more proactive, stop them from embedding too, so they can't be reposted elsewhere. The videos are then effectively neutered and only the already-nutcase will see them, limiting the virality.
I'd imagine most of this type of thing (prominent anti-vaccine personalities) is externally monetized via donations, as opposed to directly through YouTube.
That affects only content creator. YouTube, even if not directly profiting from ads, profits indirectly from you staying on the site and moving on to other 'monetized' videos eventually.
Ha. I think part of this struggle, to borrow your analogy, is that YouTube and Facebook are organizationally blind to the fact that they built a gun.
Or maybe Google is concerned. And Facebook just doesn't care.
But the root cause is "algorithms for increasing engagement will prefer shock content." Solve that, and they wouldn't need to band-aid issues like this.
Dude, the "root cause" is that profit is part of the equation. There is no "right algorithm" for controlling the public conversation. All fascism is bad fascism.
Fascism is governmental power (ie dictatorial control over the public conversation.) in the hands of the corporation. Which is exactly what we have here.
> “You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.”
Not to defend Biden, but the vaccine decreases the probabilities of getting COVID. You still get infected with sars-cov-2, and you are probably still contagious, but it's unlikely you get COVID (as in COronaVIrus Disease, the disease produced by sars-cov-2 virus (or coronavirus), that is the thing that eventually kills you and/or jeopardizes the public health system).
I might suggest we avoid using superlatives. I have seen disinformation about vaccines both from mainstream media presumptions that breakthrough infections won't happen at all, and also from other mainstream media publishing entire segments that the vaccine might cause infertility in women or somehow affect the fetus (a spreading of FUD basically).
> A study shows the vaccine accumulating in the ovaries - False
> This theory comes from a misreading of a study submitted to the Japanese regulator. The study involved giving rats a much higher dose of vaccine than that given to humans (1,333 times higher).
> Only 0.1% of the total dose ended up in the animals' ovaries, 48 hours after injection. Far more - 53% after one hour and 25% after 48 hours - was found at the injection site (in humans, usually the arm). The next most common place was the liver (16% after 48 hours), which helps get rid of waste products from the blood.
> And those promoting this claim cherry-picked a figure which actually referred to the concentration of fat found in the ovaries.
"Anecdotally I've heard many pregnancies ended from the shot."
No you haven't. You've heard of pregnancies ending in people that happen to also have been vaccinated but you have no proof connecting the two. The reality is that a lot more pregnancies fail than anyone cares to admit in public because couples tend to be private it about it. This is nothing new. It's heartbreaking for everyone that experiences it and anti-vaxxers latching onto it to serve their agenda is incredibly sad.
I might be wrong but maybe the point is that it's not proven safe long term.
While a good majority(like me) had it and it worked out well for us (risk vs reward wise), some might not be so lucky and it pissed me off that some people are like frogs in a well with a very narrow viewpoint.
It's now proven that it can cause death. 1 death is more than enough to justify not having it. Neither you or anyone have the right to force people to take that risk for the benefit of others. I only took it because I covered all most my bases and my chances of survival in case of Covid were pretty bad.
It wouldn't be the first time that problems appear after a long time and take ages to be proven. The most extreme example of that that I think is thalidomide.
EDIT: If you are going to reduce it to a game of numbers. Some risk side effects so that the majority goes on with their lives, then... when communists were leveling a church and the houses of 500 people could use the same justification since they were building blocks of flats for 10000 people on that area it was justified?
I've seen videos where drivers peacefully waiting at red lights were crushed by careening tractor trailers in freak accidents. Waiting at the red light literally got them killed. By your standards, we shouldn't force people to obey traffic signals since it"s proven that doing so can in rare cases lead to death.
Once again, we found a way to get rid of those we don't like by censoring them completely based on any utterance of a Topic or Viewpoint That Can Not Be Expressed Out Loud. Any open discussion or criticism on any sensitive topic could be enough to close down the participant's account, take away their right to be heard and even effectively erase them.
This is not a defense of any particular opinion as much as it is the right for people to be heard by those willing to listen and hopefully keep communication open to foster better education and understanding.
I have an honest question to all of the honest people recommanding their relatives to get vaccinated:
I've had covid twice, with very mild effects (stay in bed for one day or two). I'm young, no comorbidity, not obese etc. Clearly I won't die of covid, as experimental science goes.
I'm the only provider for my family (wife, kid). If I take the vaccine and get crippled, meaning I can't work anymore, will the pro-vaccine people that recommend it pay my family a pension to compensate the financial loss caused by their advice?
Let's just say that is an extreme unlikelihood. The risk that you would get a permanent lasting effect from covid is very large which has happened to many who have had covid, millions are not over their lasting effects. At least with the vaccine it is under someones control, designed vigorously to be safe and someone is legally responsible. If you got covid, bad luck, your problem. I don't know how it works in the US but where I live (DK) if you get some kind of bad side effect from a treatment you can get compensation very easily. I guess in the US there might be lawyers involved or I guess since you got it for free from the government that they are responsible.
Also it's still likely that if you get covid a third time that you will get a worse outcome.
Where I live (France), you'll get no compensation from the state (most H1N1 narcolepsies haven't still been compensated) , any lawsuit against big pharma would be quite risky and not compensated well anyway.
"Also it's still likely that if you get covid a third time that you will get a worse outcome. " > do you have facts backing this affirmation?
No, but you can get into multiple car crashes throughout your life. One would hope they take precautions for the future and start wearing their seatbelt.
Right, but there's also the social responsibility angle. Given that the vaccine is less risky than not getting vaccinated, then I believe you have a responsibility to get vaccinated.
This is why I prefer Rumble. Given how woke politically Google has become it is no longer a platform I want to support.
Whenever information is censored I am naturally suspicious around the motivations. Censorship also gives the censored opinion more credibility because if that opinion was so objectively false and crazy it would be easy to convince people about the craziness of it. But when your ideas are so weak that the only way you can convince people you are right is to censor, ban, violently crush etc. the opposing view this is what you get.
Even though I got the vax, given all of the authoritarian thinking etc. around the pro-vax stand, lockdowns etc. I often wonder if I made the right decision.
The lockdowns, vaccines etc. have mostly been a massive over-reaction. As a software engineer I have benefited from them economically, but I still don't think the devastation from the cure, which was been far worse than the sickness was the right thing and really have never supported it.
Life is risky and dangerous. Many anti-vaxers have a philosophy where they would rather live in a dangerous democracy instead of a "safe" authoritarian government. Trying to ban their ideas does nothing to win their hearts and minds.
Also, ironically, while everyone is making a big deal about hospitals being at capacity etc. when there is a surge of cases, why is it that nobody is putting as much energy into discussing the spiraling cost of health care of why it is that we have a system with so little slack for emergencies.
Not unlike the censoring any discussion of the lab leak hypothesis they (the censors) better be perfectly accurate every single time.
The moment they get it wrong and censor something that turns out to be the truth they lose 100% of their credibility and become a part of the conspiracy.
> balance between free speech versus disallowing harmful ideas to propagate?
There is no balance. The very fantasy of such a balance relies upon the presumption that 1) there are harmful _ideas_; and 2) that there is an authority that can certify some ideas as _safe_ vs _harmful_.
The discussion here gets overwhelmed by several generations of people who never actually understood what people had to give up for the right of everyone to speak and for the right of everyone to be able to expose themselves to any idea they themselves deem interesting or appropriate.
Also, enmeshment of barons of industry with powerful political operatives to suppress competition to both is literally fascism (regardless of the historical revision of the definition 100 years after the fact).
There are, though. There are ideas that are harmful.
The idea that the Jewish population was responsible for the harms and ills of pre-WWII Germany was a devastatingly harmful idea.
> 2) that there is an authority that can certify some ideas as _safe_ vs _harmful_.
It's obvious to me that there cannot be a singular authority that makes such determinations.
But it does seem totally plausible to have a distributed network of actors, each making their own determinations, and each influencing each other about which ideas are harmful, and which they will tolerate within their sphere. After all, that's the basic concept behind the "marketplace of ideas".
You can sell into the marketplace, but YouTube doesn't have to buy what everyone is selling.
I think it's just as totalitarian to tell a private entity that they must host content they disagree with, as it is to tell a private entity that they cannot speak about a specific topic to others. It's the antithesis of the marketplace of ideas.
I think the actual underlying issue is that YouTube, and a few other select entities, have an absolutely massive spheres of influence and feel like monopolies within. That's what kills the marketplace.
So, I do think private entities are completely within their rights to restrict their platforms however they see fit. I think doing so is even necessary for an effective marketplace of ideas that seeks truth. But I think we should also look at anti-trust laws that prevent individual private entities from having such a dominant position over an entire space.
> The idea that the Jewish population was responsible for the harms and ills of pre-WWII Germany was a devastatingly harmful idea.
Come to think of it ... If the pre-WWII harms and ills of Germany did not exist, would the scapegoating have existed? So, is it the idea that one could keep the peace by utterly destroying the enemy _after_ they lost that ought to have been banned?
Fast-forwarding a little bit, even after those particular manifestations had been banned, some Germans continued to kill people whom they considered to be of "inferior" races. Do you attribute the literal roasting of Turks to the idea that luxury on the one side and communism on the other side could magically wash away responsibility for the genocides committed by their ancestors?
I am curious because once we go down the path of blaming "ideas" instead of specific people for specific actions, it all gets pretty funky pretty fast.
It wasn't like the Nazi party was never banned in Germany. Do you take the survival of those ideas despite the various bans since 1923 as proof that banning ideas don't change anything about the people who'll do horrible things?
> So, is it the idea that one could keep the peace by utterly destroying the enemy _after_ they lost that ought to have been banned?
I wasn't advocating for banning any ideas, but rather than private entities should have the freedom to moderate their platforms. That private entities and persons should be allowed to say: "I won't share this idea".
One of the points asserted was that this requires us to agree to the point that "some ideas are harmful".
So, I was defending the claim that 'some ideas are harmful'. That is absolutely not the same as defending the claim that 'some ideas should be banned'.
Most of the rest of your comment deals with that latter claim, which I don't support and don't claim to.
My point wasn't that the idea should've been banned, but rather that the idea was harmful.
> but rather than private entities should have the freedom to moderate their platforms.
Do you think the Nazis were able to publish their positions in _Die Rote Fahne_?
> One of the points asserted was that this requires us to agree to the point that "some ideas are harmful".
Ideas are ideas. Ideas by themselves cannot be harmful. Actions have the ability to cause harm.
Well, OK, the idea that large corporations merging their power with the political authority to insulate the population from harmful ideas, well, that idea is definitely harmful because it cannot exist separately from the action of chilling free exchange of ideas.
With an actual private, for-profit business, consumers have the power of taking their money and spending elsewhere.
In this case, there is a dominant communication medium that is not subject to the discipline which the rest of us can impose on it by spending our money elsewhere because the "business" does not rely on our spending. So, bringing up the massive potential harms that can be visited on a society where the dominant communication channels all the do the bidding of political power centers is the only thing we can do. Maybe sufficient numbers of people will be convinced by this.
My point is that the actual harms of YouTube and others are from an anti-trust and monopoly perspective.
The problem isn't a private entity moderating their platform. The problem is a private entity that has so much power that moderating their platform amounts to a society-wide stifling of speech.
The solution isn't to restrict how the entities are allowed to moderate their platforms—it's to prevent and disallow them from being that powerful in the first place!
We may agree philosophically, but you are either not aware of how enmeshed political power is with a few large communications platforms or you are purposefully distracting from that point.
> it's to prevent and disallow them from being that powerful in the first place!
That ship has sailed. The here and now is the fact that we have a communication, tracking, and employment oligopoly in cahoots with the current centers of political power interested in preventing competition to both.
It hasn't. Monopolies have become powerful, then been disassembled before, and it can happen again.
Standard Oil was broken up, as was Bell Systems.
With some new legislation and lawsuits, we could absolutely reduce the power of Google/YouTube and Facebook over online communications.
I agree that those entities have already become far too powerful, but we can remove their power, and shred them into smaller pieces if we had the will to.
I agree that we may not have the will.
But I disagree that the solution is to put more constraints on the speech rights of private entities. You don't fight censorship with compelled speech. You fight monopolies with aggressive anti-trust legislation and action.
Your first argument is essentially that if the general public believe an organization to be bad, they can remove their support for that organization.
Why is YouTube any different? People can and do go to other platforms. You’re differentiating between giving value in the form of dollars versus giving value in the form of time & attention.
There are folks out there that believe some level of content moderation is useful, and I’d like to understand their argument. If my conclusion is that it’s not robust, so be it.
But let’s run a thought experiment. Let’s say an idea shows up on Twitter that Asian people are ruining the US. It spreads and gains attention. People start killing, and citing the Twitter misinformation as a key motivator. Can the vast majority of society not agree that 1) this is a harmful idea and 2) reasonable people agree it is harmful. And therefore Twitter has a responsibility to remove that content?
I'd agree with "1) this is a harmful idea and 2) reasonable people agree it is harmful", but not "therefore Twitter has a responsibility to remove that content".
If your definition of harmful boils down to "results in people getting killed", then: ban fossil fuel advertisements; ban advertisements for the military or content that glorifies militarism; ban any content that encourages people to over-consume energy and resources.
But we know this won't happen, because what we consider "harmful" is distorted by living within an inherently harmful society -- namely, a civilization based on violence, exploitation, and extraction.
The examples you’ve provided are very complex multi-dimensional topics.
The idea of harmfulness is indeed a spectrum, and my example is at one extreme end of the spectrum in order to illustrate that “content moderation should never ever occur” may not stand up to all examples.
Most developed nations have banned advertisements of cigarettes, so it’s totally a thing we have done previously. Why are there no folks outraged that we can’t advertise cigarettes to children?
We ban cigarette advertisements because there was finally a social consensus that addiction to tobacco products is harmful. But it’s still completely legal to get yourself addicted.
On the other hand, there’s no consensus about the harm from phone addiction. Maybe in 30 years we’ll ban iPhone advertisements.
Like I said in another comment, I’d rather we deal with the underlying conditions which may lead to harm, than try to suppress ideas.
So you fundamentally agree that if we have social consensus, it’s totally OK to prevent the spread of ideas or messages (“speech”) as we have done with cigarettes? That was my entire question, to the folks who argue that there is never ever a reason to restrict speech.
I too think that we should address underlying issues, but if there’s a lot at stake: why not both?
I think banning tobacco ads is not the same situation because the entities behind them are corporations. The corporations mislead the public for decades in order to get people addicted, purely for profit. The public harm done was a negative externality of their business model. I'm in favor of regulating corporations. (I don't think there should be any advertising, anyway)
If we're talking about banning speech that is critical about a medical intervention, or even banning ideas that disagree with a social consensus, that's different territory. Doctors and others aren't speaking out because they want to mislead the public, or in order to profit.
> if there’s a lot at stake: why not both?
Well, I've seen no indication that we're dealing with underlying issues. For instance, if you truly want to restore trust in institutions, it's counterproductive to shut down public discussions that are critical of those institutions...
That is a bogus argument. 1) Killing people is already a criminal act; 2) There are some people killing/beating people up with the slightest impetus. They will find that impetus whether Twitter allows people to discuss anything negative about the CCP; 3) Do you really want the speech of everyone to be regulated on the basis of the excuses used by psycho-killers?
Do you think Jodie Foster should have been banned from appearing in movies?
Update: And, just in time, this shows up[1,2]:
> Tech firm LinkedIn has censored the profile of US journalist Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian[3] in China, inviting her to “update” content without specifying what triggered the block.
Ah! She wrote a book about China[4].
Can't allow that! What if some random person becomes too critical of the CCP and assaults a random Asian-American in San Fransisco?[5]
One of the things that gets lost in the arguments around this sort of censorship (and, before I lose you, it is censorship and that is fine; we all engage in forms of censorship in determining what we will or will not ingest - the danger comes when some third party is acting as the censor for others) is the distinction between legality and morality.
Legally, it seems self-evident that YouTube should be permitted to curate their own content however they deem fit, whether it is fair in the abstract or not. I wouldn't want to live in a world where anyone was compelled to publish, disseminate or engage with content against their will.
Morally, this sort of mass banning of a position ought to be a taboo if we want a free society. We, as free citizens, have every right to petition that an open stance be adopted even if YouTube is well within their rights to refuse.
The other thing I tend to think important is to always ask one more question - would I support this action if it was taken if the sides of the issue were reversed? Sometimes the answer is 'yes', but I've found it a warning sign when the mental response is 'but....'
In a funny twist of fate, I for one have become less and less worried about the "opposite" scenario coming to pass, as time goes on and we observe the evolution of political discourse at least in America (and to a lesser extent globally perhaps).
What I mean is, the general trend towards anti-intellectualism in the right-wing, means that their policy positions generally trend towards being based on opinions rather than facts, and become further and further divorced from reality. For example, think about banning contraception or sex education, which are proven to reduce teen pregnancy and abortions; these are counterproductive policy positions the right wing takes, because they don't care to judge policies by their factual outcomes, but instead by what "feels right".
Ergo, as time passes, I find it less and less likely that corporations or organizations that have to live in the real world, deal with practical real world facts and outcomes, will end up taking right wing policy positions or censoring pro-reality positions. It would be fundamentally anti-profit and anti-capitalist to do so and goes against their self-interest (which is an incentive structure that political parties don't share, as spewing misinformation and even acting irrationally won't necessarily lose them voters or supporters, but companies who act irrationally will over time tend to be less profitable), which is cynically the best available guarantee of good decision-making that we have in our broken society.
TLDR: I am not worried about a world where "round Earther's" or pro-vaxx positions get censored, because corporations know that round Earth and pro-vaxx policies lead to better outcomes, being better grounded in reality.
You can't "reverse" the situation in good faith. Facts, science, logic exist on one side of the discussion, not both. So if we are going to reverse the situation, then we have to acknowledge that the original stance is science/logic invariant.
> Facts, science, logic exist on one side of the discussion, not both.
I'm not really sure I buy this. There are people who are simply misled, but most disagreements touch on either disagreements with regard to facts or else values about what is more or less important. I tend to find that there are thoughtful people who disagree with me that are worth hearing.
Beyond that, though, there is simply risk management. The harder it is to impose speech controls (governmental or corporately), the harder it is for them to be applied badly - and there is no tool that cannot be used for ill as well as good.
So big tech have become the holders of "truth". I don't care whose legitimacy they claim, governments are not the holders of truth either, and science changes daily. Suppressing freedom of information is not alright.
They should, but they won't be, and this sort of head-in-the-sand approach will just mean you personally get left behind, not that YouTube will change.
We live in the world we live in, not the one we should live in.
> The moves come as YouTube and other tech giants like Facebook Inc. (FB.O) and Twitter Inc. (TWTR.N) have been criticized for not doing enough to stop the spread of false health information on their sites.
Why not also state the opposite that they have been criticized for doing too much censorship of even valid and factual information? This clearly shows that the media lives in their own bubble.
Suppose we were at war with a hostile adversary, and that adversary had killed over 700,000 people already, and thousands more each day.
I can scarcely believe that any reasonable person would argue that blocking propaganda or misinformation that harms the war effort would be an egregious imposition on free speech. Once the imminent threat is over, those efforts can and should stop, but not while the destruction is immediate.
Covid-19 has killed more people in the United States than US combat casualties every war since World War 2 combined. It is the the worst mass casualty event any living American has ever experienced.
Why is it unreasonable that serious and extraordinary measures should be taken? Misinformation about the pandemic has surely massively contributed to that death total. The chilling effect on free speech is worse? No, it's not. It simply isn't true that free speech won't return. But those 700,000+ and counting dead are not coming back.
That's a good point about the extraordinary measures taken. Accordingly, since the number of deaths from the top three causes of U.S. deaths in 2019 were heart disease (659,041), cancer (599,601) and accidents (173,040), we should boycott all propaganda or misinformation around how being overweight is healthy, immediately close all fast food establishments, provide free fruits & vegetables for all Americans, close all beaches to prevent anyone from getting too much sun, immediately ban all products containing cancer causing agents of any kind, mandate all cars & trucks contain ignition lockouts that would prevent the vehicles from starting if seat belts were not worn properly, immediately ban all motorcycles, immediately ban all swimming pools or mandate all Americans wear flotation devices or risk fines & imprisonment, immediately ban all guns & knives regardless of their intended purpose, immediately ban all contact sports and other sports that are considered "extreme" or high-risk, and ban all ladders & stools. If we can reduce or eliminate outright the 1,431,682 people killed from these causes, regardless of the impact on the economy or personal liberty, it would be worth it. Those people are also dead and definitely not coming back. We owe it to their families and communities to do everything we can to prevent further deaths from these causes as well.
We're comparing a short term ban on provable lies about a cheap, safe and highly effective set of vaccines with a long term, permanent ban on all activities that could increase the risk of heart disease of cancer.
First, vaccines highly effective. Even if the draconian measures you proposed were implemented, would they even reduce the heart disease and cancer death totals? How much would the reduction be?
Second, vaccines are not an egregious imposition on your lifestyle. The cost is tiny, the time taken is tiny, the side effects are minor. I can't think of a single significant change in my life due to having been vaccinated, other than not worrying about dying due to Covid.
Finally, the ban on misinformation would be temporary, because the crisis will pass. Like wars, pandemics are temporary. Even before vaccination and modern medicine was invented, pandemics eventually end. When would the draconian measures you're proposing end? Heart disease and cancer are not communicable diseases. Your solution isn't a sustainable long term answer to anything.
Your comparison is frankly very dishonest and disingenuous. Wanting to reduce provably false misinformation about vaccines is nothing like the draconian, permanent measures you're proposing.
According to my wife (master in biology) it will be like flu due to mutations.
I am happy we have mRNA and ML for quicker discovery of vacinnes but they shouldn't be forced IMO.
Let the stupid die.
Here we had many people dying as they weren't even admitted to hospital due to covid policies. One was 21 year pregnant woman. Just this one would offset 50 deaths of old and sick anyway.
Well, the US sort of faced the situation that you were describing (fighting an enemy that killed six to ten million people in four years) and then passed a law similar to what you are describing. Have a a look at the Sedition act of 1918.
In hindsight it was a terrible idea, and was repealed in 1920.
I think a large part of it is because the "misinformation" keeps changing. At first masks did nothing, then saying masks did nothing became "misinformation". The lab leak theory was "misinformation", until suddenly it wasn't. Large group gatherings spread Covid, but the BLM protests didn't. The list goes on, and the "experts" have changed their mind so many times that the idea that Youtube should be deciding what kind of thought is allowed is horrifying.
I am fully vaccinated, but given how many times we've been blatantly lied to or mislead by experts and officials, I can easily see why so many people don't trust the vaccine. And given that we don't know what the experts and officials are going to say tomorrow, I support people's right to be skeptical and talk about their skepticism with others.
From what I've seen, they never lied about needing a mask. The early pandemic CBS interview with Fouci says wearing a mask is fine, but unnecessary for most people and would take masks from those who really need it. There was also a larger emphasis on sanitizing surfaces and avoiding face touching. This is because sars-cov-2 is more effective spreading infections as an airborn virus than expected. Once evidence showed otherwise, masking was recommended.
The lab leak theory shows a problem with human thought and why scientific methods are valuable. People focus on what's true, instead of eliminating what's impossible. To say the lab leak theory is a possibility is reasonable. However to say it might have spread to humans through another medium (eg, meat market) is also reasonable. To try and put any sort of probability between the two reasonable possibilities is a pointless endeavor. China is likely the only one with good enough evidence to say either way, and China isn't telling anyone else. Though even that doesn't say anything, because either way they wouldn't tell anyone else.
Big gatherings are bad, but the right to fight against tyranny is more important than the badness of the big gatherings. That is the context in which experts are not condoning BLM protests.
The problem is it's really hard to tell between a carefully considered expert opinion, and just someone talking out of their ass. It's also an evolving situation, with even experts trying to work with slow to come data. It's reasonable to say that people should focus on directing others to experts, and not and try to reinterpret or make predictions of their own.
2. Lab Leak: I remember you basically couldn't even bring up the lab leak theory here on HN a year ago. I'm not going to be gaslighted in to thinking that the debate between "lab leak" and "meat market" was just people debating probabilities. No. If you brought up "lab leak" you were dismissed as an unscientific racist. That didn't happen with the meat market theory.
> It's reasonable to say that people should focus on directing others to experts, and not and try to reinterpret or make predictions of their own.
Sure, that's perfectly reasonable to say. But that isn't the issue. The issue is forcing people who do voice their own skepticism out of public discourse, when even the main stream media can't agree week to week.
Surely misinformation has had an impact, but how big?
I wonder how that compares to the perceived incompetence.
Some official sources are wrong some of the time, everyone's favorite example: they told mask were useless in the beginning.
They corrected course, but then told vaccinated people they didn't need masks anymore, basically making the same mistake twice.
They halted AZ, paused J&J, had a gazillion change of mind on boosters.
We need to be able to hear challenges to official sources.
So yes, the chilling effect can make it worse if they go unchallenged. And it's also not simply true that free speech would return either.
That's the thing, COVID is an "eternal war" as described in dystopian novels. If you describe COVID in war terms, then it justifies all sorts of atrocities.
It's not though. Pandemics have happened before and they end.
Second, what's the atrocity being committed exactly? People temporarily are prevented from publishing extraordinarily brazen lies, clearly scientifically false, which are killing thousands of people? I can't see what the evil is here.
> I can scarcely believe that any reasonable person would argue that blocking propaganda or misinformation that harms the war effort would be an egregious imposition on free speech.
Count me as one of the unreasonables, then. Anti-war protests are logically "propaganda that harms the war effort" and the idea that those would be censored is extremely frightening to me.
> Covid-19 has killed more people in the United States than US combat casualties every war since World War 2 combined. It is the the worst mass casualty event any living American has ever experienced.
This is an apples-to-oranges comparison. Heart disease also kills more people in the US every year than every war since WW2, but YouTube isn't banning fast food commercials. [EDIT: In fact, they accept money in exchange for forcing people to watch those!]
Breakthrough case here. Clinic said that's all they've been seeing recently, dozens per day.
One thing I've never understood is why the vaccinated care so much about what he unvaccinated are doing?
Vaccinated people still carry viral loads so it's either how it affects you personally or your compassion for the enhanced vulnerability of the unvaccinated. Based on the toxic rhetoric towards the unvaccinated it seems to me the former.
You've done everything within your control to protect yourself so why do you feel the need to have an opinion on their bodily choices?
The vaccine limit the spread of the disease, that's a fact. By how much is up to debate but it is not just effective at making the disease less severe.
The wave of infections caused by the delta variant is faster, larger and deadlier in places with low vaccination rates. The vaccinated are less likely to test positive by about half, symptoms or not.
Not perfect but the vaccine protects others. If the unvaccinated took the necessary precautions to avoid infecting others, it would be their problem (if healthcare is not overwhelmed...), but usually they don't. Just look at anti-vaccine protests, you don't see a lot of masks...
And of course, if almost everyone in your area is vaccinated, most cases will be breakthrough cases.
2) Yes, but lots of people make personal choices that cause their own premature death. We aren't muzzling obese people for trumpeting the values of an all-bacon diet.
3) True, but this circles back to the fact that vaccinated people also carry viral loads and if you get infected while vaccinated it's much less severe so it almost negates any longer term carrying argument.
The real point of contention is the unvaccinated taking up resources that vaccinated people need because if you're in the hospital for covid then you're running your life like an idiot and I can't get my broken leg fixed from when I broke it doing parkour last weekend.
Except that the unvaccinated are doing in en mass, if there were 1/2 a million deaths from parkour us pro-social people would be screaming about it too.
In the end staying unvaccinated for no real reason (mah freedoms! is not a real reason, nor is any other misinformed gibberish like 'it's not a real vaccine' or 'I don't want to be in the experiment') is antisocial and should be squashed as any other antisocial behaviour like graffiti, stabbing car tires, sucker punching strangers, puking in doorways, dine and dash, etc... Yea yea yea, some of those are actual crimes. But that's not my point. It's selfish and unnecessary. Shame, shame, shame.
It doesn't stay put. It travels, from host to host. And the more the hosts act in a manner to promote that transmission, the further, faster, and harder it spreads.
My infant daughter had a fever the other day and the doctor's office said that normally if your baby has a fever for this long they would want you to bring the baby in to be seen by a doctor but they're not seeing any patients with fevers right now so just monitor the baby and see if it gets better.
I'm sorry to hear that. I just recently became a parent myself so I can imagine how much that would suck.
It sounds like your pediatrician is taking extreme precautions to protect their healthier patients and don't see the risks of treatng a fever worth the value it could provide.
Do you feel that the doctor would feel more comfortable treating all patients if everyone on the planet were vaccinated?
they weren't taking these precautions just a few months ago when case numbers in the area were lower, so I would assume yes they would feel more comfortable if everyone on the planet was vaccinated, as the case numbers in the area would then be much lower.
Part of it is a hope to get back to normal. The other part is that their "bodily choice" isn't self contained. If someone has ebola, is it their "bodily choice" to walk around infecting others? The unvaccinated are showing an extreme lack of empathy.
Also, go read some of the countless reports about how hospitals are overwhelmed, how states are allowing the rationing of care, how ICUs have no beds for heart attacks or normal pneumonia because the beds are full of people who don't trust doctor's enough to get the vaccine but want life sustaining help after getting covid. I predict we are going to see mass resignations from hospital workers who are burned out because one political party convinced its supporters to not take basic medical advice. I've lost two uncles from this disease. It sounds like you haven't. I hope you take a step back and think about what happens when someone you love needs ICU care but the staff, equipment and resources are full and your loved one can't be treated.
> The unvaccinated are showing an extreme lack of empathy.
I see this sentiment a lot and it indicates to me a fundamental misunderstanding what is driving people to avoid vaccination.
There is a very strong correlation between vaccination rates and trust in the government. Groups with historically low trust in the government (like conservatives, blacks, and hispanics) have the lowest vaccination rates. Conversely, groups with historically high trust in the government (like liberals and asians) have the highest vaccination rates. This suggests most people decided on whether to get vaccinated long before it was available based on their trust in the government which is pushing so hard for it. The resulting spread in misinformation is just the result of mass confirmation bias.
The "lack of empathy" argument depends on the unvaccinated actually believing the vaccine is safe and effective, yet still ineffective enough that their vaccination will help protect others. But they obviously don't believe that.
Suppression of misinformation wont help because - as I'm sure you've seen many times by now - the very act of suppressing information will only reinforce their confirmation bias. It's quite the dilemma.
I personally believe the only solution is for people to hear these people out to patiently, compassionately reason through their concerns. And I believe we should do this knowing full well that many will not be convinced the first time and many will not be convinced ever. Of course, it would help if we collectively agreed to stop harassing them and treated them like concerned humans with misunderstandings instead of malicious fools. Sadly, social media rewards the opposite of this behavior.
Fair point on the ICU beds. Maybe hospitals can require proof of vaccination before treatment. If no proof can be provided they have to go to a different department. That way the unvaccinated aren't taking resources away from the vaccinated. If we're going to take away their 1st amendment rights then why not take away their other rights?
Yes, but at the same time heart deseases are killing about the same number of people every year in US. And this is much more correct parallel than yours with hostile adversary.
If there was a cheap and effective vaccine against heart disease that would reduce the yearly death rate by 90% and require no other change in lifestyle then yes, I would be for banning misinformation and lies about that too.
>Once the imminent threat is over, those efforts can and should stop, but not while the destruction is immediate.
The destruction is always immediate, there's always risks, and there's always going to be another possible (virus|war|dangerous criminal|wrong-thinker|...) in the future.
The only time I have any (although low) expectation of a policy ending is when I'm given a definite end date with a binding promise that it won't be extended.
>I can scarcely believe that any reasonable person would argue that blocking propaganda or misinformation that harms the war effort would be an egregious imposition on free speech.
Propaganda is spread by who? Domestic traitors? Then arrest them and charge them for treason. If this was true they would be already behind bars but you don't seem to understand the only thing they are doing is expressing their opinion publicly nothing else.
> Misinformation researchers have for years said the popularity of anti-vaccine content on YouTube was contributing to growing skepticism of lifesaving vaccines in the United States and around the world. Vaccination rates have slowed and about 56 percent of the U.S. population has had two shots...
I assume 20% of the US population can't take the vaccine or something, maybe because they are kids. That suggests YouTube is coming out as a political opponent of ~25% of their customer base. This is an unwise course of action.
Also, the mandate part of vaccine mandate is legitimately scary. It is reasonable not to trust a big pharma-big government alliance actively controlling our medical life with no ability of the patient to opt out. It is easy to see this ending badly, US healthcare is not known for being full of angelic, selfless and friendly actors. These opinions should be aired.
> I assume 20% of the US population can't take the vaccine or something, because they are kids. That suggests YouTube is coming out as a political opponent of ~25% of their customer base. This is an unwise course of action.
Are you counting those children as political opponents? I don't think they have a political interest because they can't get it due to regulation yet, and they're also children.
YouTube frontpage promoted and is still promoting crypto scams. A family member lost $4000 to it, and they are still ongoing, and YouTube is too overwhelmed to pull them.
Good. It's long past time we stop humoring the destructive delusional narcissism of anti-vaxxers. Let them build their own fucking YouTube to host their bullshit.
I think a better solution would be to ban algorithmic media distribution. Let people post whatever they want on YouTube. If there wasn’t a toxic engagement algorithm radicalizing people this wouldn’t be a problem. That would kill the social media business model, which is an added bonus IMO.
I think people outraged at the content censorship on YouTube can look at the media landscape overall and consider that, compared with Hulu, CBS, MSNBC or Fox News, it's still a extremely permissive environment, an outlier in the world of ad-supported media companies. This looks like regression to the mean - as it becomes bigger and forever needs to get more money from advertisers to sustain growth, it gets pushed to provide a product that emphasizes middle-of-the-road views. YouTube of 10 years ago was so much smaller that it got away with a lot worse (eg terrorism apology and recruitment), but as it's grown, it's going to be increasingly difficult for controversial content to live on ad-support.
Reading the comments here is freaking terrifying to me. This is supposedly an educated and scientifically oriented subset of the human race and the levels of ignorance, dishonesty, and flat out lying going on here make me very, very sad. SMH.
The Sputnik V vaccine might be good. But there’s a fair bit of evidence that it’s mass manufacture has some problems. Which makes it difficult to say with certainty that what’s injected into peoples arms, is effective as what was tested during clinical trials.
One have to admit this is a major anti-vax move being performed by USA and EU.
If the government get to discriminate which vaccines are good and which are not, why their citizens won't do the same, even if they leave the 'good' bucket empty?
When I travelled to South America I had to do "the" vaccine shot (yellow fever I believe), but nobody would inquire me "which one" and whether it is on some white list.
As the moderate and wholesome voices get drowned out by the push of “the algorithm” towards engaging (read: polarizing) content, YouTube will sadly become like Facebook for me- obsolete and deleted. Once I’m convinced that your product is unhealthy, especially in this time, I’m out, and I won’t be back.
Sex, hate, anger, violence, political extremism- so over it.
How about a tech platform that actually does good for once?
What alcoholism and obesity were to the precious generation, we are on a fast track to a mental health crisis of epic proportion if something isn’t done. I don’t know how people work at places like fb/ig/yt in good conscience.
The real problem is with the discovery algorithm. If the algorithm sees a user watching subject XYZ, it keeps suggesting more XYZ to that user. The goal of the algorithm is to own the users eyeballs as long as possible. This results in more ad-views and a more accurate profile of the user.
So if a user watches one anti-vax video, YouTube then suggests a bunch of other anti-vax videos. Many people will start believing it, after being bombarded with misinformation.
Fixing the algorithm is hard. Instead, as usual, YT is just removing videos that cause the problems. This is just a bandaid
The whole private sector censorship reminds me of a very good piece by Matt Taibbi:
> "People in the U.S. seem able to recognize that China’s censorship of the internet is bad. They say: “It’s so authoritarian, tyrannical, terrible, a human rights violation.” Everyone sees that, but then when it happens to us, here, we say, “Oh, but it’s a private company doing it.” What people don’t realize is the majority of censorship in China is being carried out by private companies.
> Rebecca MacKinnon, former CNN Bureau chief for Beijing and Tokyo, wrote a book called Consent of the Network that lays all this out. She says, “This is one of the features of Chinese internet censorship and surveillance—that it's actually carried out primarily by private sector companies, by the tech platforms and services, not by the police. And that the companies that run China's internet services and platforms are acting as an extension of state power.”
> The people who make that argument don’t realize how close we are to the same model. There are two layers. Everyone’s familiar with “The Great Firewall of China,” where they’re blocking out foreign websites. Well, the US does that too. We just shut down Press TV, which is Iran’s PBS, for instance. We mimic that first layer as well, and now there’s also the second layer, internally, that involves private companies doing most of the censorship."
Heck, I view it all as 'misinformation', and I certainly don't need some cubicle drone at youtube to decide for me.
Certainly the average person is smart enough to understand the statistics of the thing, after all that's something of the point of epidemiology.
There should be enough data points by now to tell me a few things.
. What is the real value of a cloth mask worn inside in a crowd with strangers? What is the value of a properly fitted N95 mask? Give it to me as an odds calculation.
. Just what percentage of covid is picked up in bars? grocery stores? schools? at home? Our local health department is notably mum about that preferring only to hand out the county-wide ages and that's it.
.Actual strong data on value of vaccine in terms of infection and symptoms. 1st, 2nd, 3rd dose. How long are these valuable? How long will they remain so due to mutations? Odds.
.Actual data on nasty side effects of vaccine including odds.
.Fairly presented value of home remedies, anti-virals, etc.
.etc.
You can twizzle out some of this, but rarely. Cut down to the essentials, it wouldn't take up a single sheet of paper. Post that sheet of paper whenever anyone feels the need to opine.
Instead I'm treated to shaming and scolding and peoples' fear about their precious bodily fluids and I'm sick of everyone. Somehow this has become a proxy for the 2016/2020 elections complete with all the religious overtones. Please stop.
The funny part of this whole thing. Is that the same people that all they do is complain about privacy concerns by Apple and Alexa etc. here on HN are the same people that consistently downvote anything I say that is anti-vaccine. I thought this community knew no blind spots. Even if I am dead wrong on my stance, the concept that it gets downvoted just because I have a differing opinion is pathetic.
I think having a small percentage of the population who are anti-vax adds to the robustness of the species. What if, odds unlikely, that there was some problem with the vax where it killed or sterilized everyone who got it? It would be extinction except for the anti-vaxxers. Now this is an super unlikely event, but there's a non-zero chance this could happen.
Meanwhile, it seems that Russia has complained in the past 24 hours against some censorship on YT, based on "the fight against covid related misinformation", and raised a diplomatic issue accusing Germany to have supported the censorship.
Some may find curious or even amusing this odd paragraph on Le Monde:
> A la fin de janvier, le président Poutine avait jugé que les entreprises majeures du secteur de l’Internet étaient « en concurrence » avec les Etats. Il dénonçait leurs « tentatives de contrôler brutalement la société ».
The main online enterprises being in competition with the states - in the attempt to brutally control society?! The formulation could probably have been less "suggestive".
Youtube can do whatever it wants, but by taking this political stance, it creates a precedent that other actors will use to ask it to censor other political content.
I'm not anti-vax, I've had dozen of vaccines including covid, but I still think anti-vaxers should be able to express themself. Who knows, one day I may realize some doubts were justified.
I have an anti-vax person in my family. As disturbing and wrongheaded as their opinions are, I find it significantly more disturbing that they are being censored.
The irony is that this censorship doesn't even work. It just strengthens their resolve and deepens their conviction that they have found The Truth in their conspiracy theories.
I am not an anti-vaxxer but I think we should not silence those who question vaccines, their studies and their effectiveness. By banning vaccine criticism in public domain we essentially ensure that only FDA is responsible for calling a vaccine fake, once they approve we all have to fall in line and not be skeptical about them. This gives too much power to FDA (hence a higher possibility of corruption) and a free pass to pharma companies who might push more and more ineffective vaccines with the help of their friends in FDA and CDC.
Google is pretty good at content recommendation and I am sure if they want they can solve this problem much better by identifying diversity in the vaccine criticism and accordingly give it exposure.
Anti-vaccers have limited amount of claims. Instead of shutting them down and feeding into conspiracy if governments and big corps are so concerned they should make web sites where they disprove said claims with valid data in a way understandable by mere mortals. For interested there can be also list of references for further reading. Youtube and the likes are then free to promote / put on first page headlines from this websites.
Instead what I see when opening youtube (I am Canadian) is the pic of Theresa Tam: our Chief Public Health Officer. She is known to change her opinion every other day to the point that whatever she says can be ignored - she'll come up with something different tomorrow.
People don't get vaccinated because of the evidence but because they chose to believe in some authority. Heavy handed censors (or fact checkers in newspeak) and other coercive tactics lead people to distrust these authorities even more.
I'm for freedom of speech, people should be able to make their own choice with all the information available. There should be a right to be a "conscientious objector"[1] for vaccination. But to be fair, it would work only for an educated population that is capable to distinguish facts from misinformation. And for me, science should always be questioned, if not there is no research and no discoveries.
Self defense against people that want you dead is not censorship.
The rumor spreaders are clearly trying to do the maximum damage as possible in the society for money. Many of them ended being victims of the virus also, so nobody can't claim ignorance at this point or say that they were just joking. If they can't understand even the most basic facts explained by science is their problem, not twitter's problem or society's problem. Science is real. Deal with it.
The snake puppeteers poisoning and driving this people to their own demise are evil. Twitter is not obligated to help them to kill more people.
Censoring ideas just makes them more popular. If YouTube wanted to do the right thing they'd let people debate openly, instead this will just push people further into their respective echo chambers.
We live in a world where the rat that heads the NIAD cannot bring himself to publicly say that natural immunity (i.e. you’ve recovered from COVID) provides substantial protection and instead says things like “we’re still looking at the data on that…”: https://twitter.com/drsanjaygupta/status/1436133536239599619
If we’re going to let that continue unchallenged then banning dissenting voices is a drop in the bucket.
YouTube/Facebook/Twitter have proven that anonymized free speech doesn't work. You have no way of knowing if the discourse is being generated by trolls/bots/foreign actors.
I live in BC. I'm double vaxxed. We know the military, recently back from fixing Afghanistan, is using their proven effective propaganda techniques to make everything better at home.
My ex's mom is a real-ass epidemiologist, albeit not a pandemic person but you know on gov't boards and stuff. She was recommending my ex not get astrazenica, purely on the evidence.
Now, I have to have a passport to go to a restaurant. I have the card they gave me, but they will be requiring an app soon.
This is insane, it looks like pure divide-and-conquer tactics to me.
Neo-fascism, plain and simple. If this feels hyperbolic, I’m just applying definitions. The government has already admitted it colludes with these companies to censor. Time to build. Time to exit.
I guess I be spending more time on odysee and telegram. At worst it is censorship, at best youtube (meaning whoever random peoples are behind the compagny) think they know better than you and me.
Big Pharma worshipping elitist shills see that they're losing the argument, so instead of thinking harder or changing their minds, they ban their opponents. These people are the worst.
Anti-vaccers have limited amount of claims. Instead of shutting them down and feeding into conspiracy if governments and big corps are so concerned they should make web sites where they disprove said claims with valid data in a way understandable by mere mortals. For interested there can be also list of references for further reading. Youtube and the likes are then free to promote / put on first page headlines from this websites.
I don't understand the approach of banning certain content. It feels like the root cause here is self reinforcing filter bubbles that social media creates. Is it not possible for YouTube to instead change their algorithm around this to recommend a blend of videos for topics like this one? Kinda like labeling approaches used elsewhere but a little more subtle.
How will we tell if it works? A decrease in anti-vax sentiment and an uptick in vaccine take-up? How will we tell that it was due to YouTube?
What if it doesn’t move the needle at all (pun intended) - does it mean YouTube is much less influential than we (and they, apparently) think? Or that they waited too long and the anti-vax message had already embedded?
YouTube's business model is based on the free speech rights that have been secured by flesh-and-blood citizens for 245 years. The same benefits they don't see fit to extend to those citizens. They are like a beverage bottling company that draws clean water upstream before dumping their toxic waste back into the same river downstream.
It is believed that Vaccine supporters are dumb and ignorant, could be, but how can you prove that the other party is small and well educated.
Such carpet will fuel further the conspiracy theorists and they would say to their followers, "See, we were right! they do not want you to learn the truth about vaccine"
look on https://bitchute.com or https://brandnewtube.com and you will lots of information why I will not being taking an injected experimental medical procedure . No way no how!
YouTube is banning anti-vaccine activists and blocking all anti-vaccine content
Which will, of course, galvanize those who are skeptical of the vaccine and the intentions of our bureaucratic overlords. And because that's so obvious, it makes the conspiracy-theorist squirrel part of my brain wonder if that's the point.
What parties motivate Google? For example: does the US Government make requests to Google directly? Do advertisers? Lobbyists? Wealthy individuals? Friends and family of higher-ups? Is the source completely internal to Google? I'd love to see more about the process these ideas go through.
In this situation my money is on advertisers who are being criticized on social media for sponsoring 'undesirable' content because the algorithm put their ad in front of a random video. By and large I don't think YouTube cares what is in a video unless it is illegal or something advertisers don't want to associate with.
People keep arguing about the facts about side effects and long covid and death rates and hospital capacity. One side shows some facts in their favor and another “better” facts in another favor. This is pointless. If covid killed 10% or .00000001 of the population, censoring things like this is a terrible precedent.
Just as china has “private companies” do their censoring this is no different.
Just because the “facts” are very strong in favor of vaccination, and a majority of people are likely pro vax, this is a dangerous road.
Effectively the message, the story told about those facts is being dictated from government guidelines. You do not know what future stories will be forced to be believed in the future regardless of the “facts”.
Seriously just try and imagine a society who believes something you’re opposed too, where the facts don’t matter to you, and having it happen. Do you think you will never be on the other side?
This power will one day be wielded by those who you are adamantly opposed to.
The drug war was a huge misinformation campaign. can we ban anything that says marijuana has no medical benefit since the science is there like actual peer-reviewed articles saying that most of the negative information spread about cannabis is false
It's interesting to see people labeled as "anti-vaxxers" or "vaccine hesitant" or "unvaccinated".
If I was not looking to purchase a medication because I had no ailment, and then a medical professional came up and showed me the following chart and told me "Vaccines have cured most of the calamitous diseases of yesteryear, and here is a new one that you should take.", I would not then decide to get a vaccine. Would you? Look at the chart.
No need to argue with me; why bother. I didn't create the data used to make the chart. When that feeling starts to come back look at the chart once again. The data doesn't change. Your feelings might change, but facts will stay the same each time you load the chart. Try it out.
Labeling people, because they haven't made a choice to do something that you think they should do, is a strange phenomenon.
This won't end well. Suppression drives people to seek it more --and where they find it, they will have stronger investments in the ideas and it all will be harder to discuss to a rational conclusion.
does anyone else think that this is sort of the intended goal? not necessarily by YouTube in this case specifically but in a sort of meta sense, for many things such as this, in the past decade or so. it's almost as though those in power benefit when those who aren't in power are divided along ever more axes, axes which didn't exist only a few short years ago, but whose division is more significant than anything we've seen in many years.
for example, I'm reminded of how contemporary identity politics seemed to sprout up out of nowhere conveniently around the same time as the #occupy movement(s). since then, I haven't been able to shake the feeling that the powerful people in the world are maintaining power by dividing the populace.
All this for a virus with a 99% survival rate [1]. Nevermind the fact that media and government forces completely ignore natural immunity which has been shown to provide 27x more resistance to covid infection by a recent study [2].
You can't really be surprised at the general distrust and hesitancy. You can get a "Vaccine Passport" but you can't get a "Immunity Passport"?
I am really pumped for what this means for alternative platforms like rumble and odysee. This is the boost the independent web needs! YouTube was way too centralized.
The more wrong they are the more they n down. One of these days that strategy may pay off. Better than admitting you're incompetent egotistical dumbasses who have been acting like nazis.
On one hand, you can claim that YouTube is being proactive against what they perceive to be a problem and that's something.
On the other hand, they don't choose to be proactive against copyrighted material - they just comply with the law when the law comes knocking and that's that. It simply doesn't make sense for them to allow the law to do its job in one place and then be overly proactive in another. At the very least, it undermines their argument that they're only doing this to comply with the law. They're not. They actively want to censor material that they don't agree with and they'll use whatever excuse they need to do it.
Are people mad about censorship on YouTube also mad about all the censorship that occurs on this site? Stuff gets deleted and manipulated by the mods all the time.
It seems to me that some people on here believe there should be no moderation/censorship whatsoever on the internet. I don't know how they propose to keep sites from being completely overwhelmed by bad actors, spam and illegal activities.
they better be perfectly right every time or else they become a part of the conspiracy. You would think they would learn after the lab-leak censorship fiasco.
one major concern i have is when things like religion get blocked as misinformation, or the whole fake it til you make it crowd gets blocked. part of growing is seeing yourself differently than how you previously saw yourself, what is stopping youtube in 10 years from becoming stricter because of pressure from some new movement? imagine presenting your product in the most professional way possible and then getting flagged by you aunt who you never got along with saying the content is disinformation and you are just some try hard who can't code? or what about your dating profile? you decide to put your best foot forward by dressing nice and then you get flagged as misinformation? or here's one, what if the mainstream narrative is wrong? about something major? that most people consider the truth but its harming a certain minority group. if the internet existed during slavery times, and someone were to post a video saying black men and women are equal to white men and women and deserve to be treated equally, now you and i both know this is absurd but, that's because there was a lot of work done that changed the narrative. that work done was started by small groups and grew into a movement, imagine that movement today never getting off the ground because of it's seed content being plucked out of circulation due to it being "misinformation". sometimes social and science references are completely off, and for someone to question that mainstream narrative can appear to be misinformation for those believing a lie. don't tell me it doesn't happen; there are plenty of people who are gullible enough to hold a faulty mainstream narrative in place. look at all the crazy videos from last year and tell me if you think most people are intelligent enough to come to the right conclusions. no hate, it's just a reality.
Maybe I’d be more okay with this if the vaccines weren’t owned by multi billion dollar companies who stand to make billions of dollars by requiring the world to use their products.
Can you imagine that for anything else? You MUST use the product of ours, and we are actually going to make it illegal for you not to, and ban any discussion about not using it.
So is Joe Rogan gone from Youtube? Or only his "only fat people need to get the vaccine" videos are going to be banned? I wonder what other companies like Spotify would do to the big influencers that are spreading misinformation, etc.
The top two comorbidities, BY FAR, are old age and obesity. The CFR for normal-weight people under 65 is vanishingly small. This is an established fact.
One can fairly argue that he's doing a moral disservice to the obese and elderly by encouraging community spread, but this trend of throwing ethical disagreement under the banner of "misinformation" is absurd, when the actual science on hand supports the position.
Another day another ban-hammering from YouTube; so what.
It is their private platform and if you sign up you agreed to their T&Cs and they can choose to ban or remove whoever they want. Mistake or not, robot or not.
They will never change and it will only get worse.
Awesome! Finally. I think they should ban all anti-Facebook content as well. Facebook is a good company and never makes mistakes, to think otherwise is simply dangerous for the whole tech industry and must be removed.
Corporations like Youtube shouldn't be in the business of arbiting the truth, because they have time and time again proven themselves utterly incompetent at it.
Well, I do believe two FDA officials resigned in protest saying there was no scientific evidence for the efficacy of a third dose, and that does sound like legitimate informed scientific dissent.
I think the claim that this 'third dose' was pushed through by pharmaceutical corporations and compliant government officials can't be so glibly dismissed, given such issues.
Of course, future data might support or undermine this view, but it's hardly 'anti-vax hysteria'. Our pharmaceutical system has a long history of this kind of thing, due to their mindless focus on profit margins with much less regard for the safety or efficacy of their products. Look up the Vioxx debacle, for example.
I see we’re going to spend another day talking about “the death of free speech” because a private company doesn’t want to pay to host someone’s content.
I have wondered lately whether the anti-vax movement gains much of its power from the fact that most Americans don’t have a primary care physician anymore. I think almost any skeptic is convinced once they speak with a doctor they trust, who has read their chart. But most folks just visit doc-in-a-box places for their medical needs, especially in the last 10 years. I think this is bad for a lot of longer-term (public) health outcomes, one example being vaccination rates.
Cut off their revenue/ability to become a micro-celebrity /reward mechanism for incendiary garbage and these anti-vaccine activists will fade to obscurity. Too bad they didn't do this earlier so they could infect the general population with their deranged ideas.
also one thing to add, what if this is a gateway to censorship in order to hide information about certain elites legally? i am not advocating pizzagate conspiracy but this could be a way of silencing journalists doing their job and getting the news out oon one of the most powerful media distribution sites, people can build another site but when it comes to social change you want high impact.
What we're seeing is essentially the Death of the Free Flow of Information on the Internet;coming concomitant with a pervasive social slide towards Elitism when the whole point of the original revolution was to break down the siloes of power aggregated into gatekeeper hands.
In the Assault on Reason, AL Gore talked about the ability to craft systems that could enable people to create and engage with content in meaningful ways. No doubt viewing YouTube as an antidote to taking people out of a passive TV watching role and towards an active, civically engaged citizen.
The problem is, when anybody can say anything, Everyone will say Everything. YouTube's Really Dumb Idea here is to "mitigate the problem by eliminating discussion." We see how well that worked for the Catholic Church and sexual abuse allegations, the Silent Generation and LGBTQIA rights, etc.
Right after the web exploded in the early 2000s and we were all chanting "Information Wants to Be Free", a large number of us enthusiastically believed in Democracy and Reason. We believed in rational argumentation, with point, counter-point, analysis of biases and nuances, leading towards an ultimately acceptable conclusion.
Instead we got Flat Earth, Anti-vax, and Donald Trump. It's not hard to see why the enthusiasm is failing.
The problem is, it's not The Big Dumb Idiot Public's Fault. It's Ours, as technologists building these platforms.
A +/- button and free-text fields in 2021 is exactly the same technology we were using to talk in 2001, now with far more robots and malicious actors adding noise.
An Obvious Question that has been around since the advent of these technologies, that is in fact inherent in information itself, is "how do we identify Signal from Noise?"
Treating all Anti-Vax view, and even Donald Trump's banned accounts, as just "Noise" are bad precedents.
Rather, we should be leveraging Machine Learning and all the obtrusive user data we're gathering from ad farms to Actually Do Useful Things For Humanity like:
* identifying a user's background and their "conceptual distance" from the topic at hand. Aside from pointing someone to an arcane Wikipedia article likely last edited by an expert into incomprehensible oblivion, how can we determine a "learning path" series of links that can take someone from "completely ignorant" to "common knowledge educated?"
People love anonymity on the internet, but there are times when they don't, as well. (see Facebook's success)
On a random Hot Topic thread in a non-anonymous platform (FB, Twitter), the commenter's background could be probabilistically calculated to inform readers about how likely they are to know what the fuck they're talking about. I. E. If a random computer scientist blowjob like me is mouthing off about how inefficient the vaccine process has been and someone with a PhD in Molecular Biology from a reputable institution that's actively working in a lab developing in a proximal space replies to my comments with counters, that level of expertise needs to be highlighted.
"water flows uphill" and things that are just counter-factual can be detected and auto-flagged.
Actively elevating the discourse by both teaching people And giving easy tools to identify sources, evaluate their credibility, learn the argument space by highlighting the authorities and hubs of different views related to a topic, and ultimately lead to better discussions is Hard... But an infinitely better direction than draconian choices/policies that directly undermine trust in public discourse --which is a core tenet of democracy--.
YouTube has been cracking down on anything Covid related for over a year. Any discussion about Covid that has gone much past saying stay safe or get vaccinated has been instantly demonitized and hidden from people's subscriptions. This is just the next obvious step they were obviously going to take. The thing is, this is an incredibly complicated topic.
Legislation that could result in YouTube being held liable for user posted content that deseminates misinformation has been more than lightly discussed. The problem of misinformation is frequently made worse by the fact that studies have shown around 80% of misinformation of major topics can generally be traced back to fewer than a dozen unique users. It's not the same dozen people on every topic of discussion, but once some of the misinformation has gone viral it's extremely difficult to stop it getting shared again and again. This may seem like a matter of freedom of speech, but on some topics viral misinformation spreading can end up being deadly to thousands of real people.
Consider an analogy. If a person sets up to pull a prank by changing the words on a billboard, with only the intention of just surprising some people. But 3 car crashes occur where the drivers blaim the billboard for being a distraction. How much responsibility would you say the prankster has? How much should the billboard owner have for failing to prevent the prankster?
Now consider that instead of changing a billboard he changes the speed listed on a sign that cautions people not to take a blind turn at greater than 25 mph. Say he changes it to just be the same as the posted speed limit for the road and several cars spin out or there are minor fender benders. Then say he changes it to be even faster than the speed limit. How much responsibility should the prankster have for those accidents? How much should the city have for failing to prevent the prankster from being able to change their official signs?
There are strong points for debate in all of these situations. How easy was it for the prankster to access the billboard and make changes? What else were the drivers doing that a billboard could cause them to crash? What was so distracting about what they put on the billboard?
Why didn't the city post a sign that was more difficult to tamper with? How much effort did the prankster put into their fake? Why didn't local people notice the change and report it? How quickly did the city respond? How believable was the speed he put on the sign?
My point isn't to ask for the answers to these specific questions, but to point out that there is a difference between circumstances that requires greater responsibility from the medium the prankster changed. The contents of a billboard is just an advertisement, speed limits and road hazard signs are more important. Speed limits and road hazards also have to display probably true information that has some degree of validation that relying on them is safe.
This is a particularly tricky subject for YouTube because they are essentially a billboard, but people have started treating what's on it like road signs. How responsible should YouTube be when people use their platform to post complete nonsense that has the potential to get thousands or even millions killed?
Vaccination was developed over 200 years ago, and it saved millions of lives ever since. Only the most crazy people would dispute its effectiveness or insinuate that some sort of hidden powers wanted to poison humanity.
Now when did this group of crazy people become so large that they start confusing people who don‘t have the intellectual capacity to get informed by reading serious sources.
My gut feeling tells me it is not about vaccination per se. But that‘s another topic.
Of course it will. Welcome to the new propaganda. Same as the old propaganda.
Free speech is the act of standing up for those who you disagree with simply because you believe they have the right to be heard. In today's world of "woke" content creators, everyone seems to miss this point. What started out as fairly clear cut issues such as racism and homophobia has now bled into grey areas around vaccines and gain of function research.
On the latter, should we not be concerned about this? We're in the middle of a global pandemic and we're not allowed to discuss whether GoF research is too risky? We're not allowed to discuss the nuances of what a "lab leak" may really entail? For example, I think the theory that a researcher collecting specimens from the wild accidentally infecting people in wuhan or themselves holds a lot of merit. Yet, it cannot be discussed.
We should be outraged. And, back on the topic of anti-vaxers. They kind of have a point. Why should they trust the government, the CDC, the WHO and the like? What have they done to prove they are trustworthy at this point? Shutting down open discussion around this topic will only make the situation worse, not better.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28693407, partly because it's swerving into generic ideological flamewar, and partly because I need to prune some large subthreads in order to ease the load on our poor server, which smoke is coming out of right now. The latter is our problem and we're working on fixing it, but the former is the community's problem and everyone needs to work on fixing that.
Censoring discussion in an environment of coercive mandates. Anyone working for Google - how do you justify this? You have great options out there you know?
The problem is that for any major issues you can get attention and money for publishing a contrarian view. Platforms like youtube then can be megaphones for monetizing conspiracy theories which do actual harm. There is some distance between good faith discussion and promoting the opposite of whatever view is popular.
Content distributors are then on a knife edge with moderation, and how to moderate fairly is incredibly difficult. Youtube doesn’t want to be the vaccine conspiracy clearing house so at some point they decided to just ban it all. Making money from peoples attention brings this problem and moralizing won’t make it go away.
All your points are true but they don't lead to the conclusion that censorship is the answer. The problem is the attention algorithms create an echo chamber with little room for distasteful alternatives. The quack content is on page 1 getting all the money from anyone on a particular rabbit hole. There shouldn't be this rabbit hole, the quack content should always be on page 12. And in the earlier days of Google before the heavy focus on personalisation, this is the way it worked.
The problem is that the content is engineered to take advantage of humans and google and becomes the thing on the first page. You might be yearning for the old days of less effective SEO. It's a hard problem how to moderate away though algorithm design or manual intervention things which pull on the strings of human weaknesses.
Is an algorithm designed to de-prioritize content you don't like any better than a human selecting content for removal?
Google isn't the one who wants to cut their ad revenue and get accused for being Big Brother. Social media censorship has always occured because people demanded it. This time, it's not just an angry Twitter mob either. Even the president are saying that they are not doing enough to combat misinformation.
There's still people dying in large numbers, unvaccinated? Eventually people notice the body count against a point of principle. That's how we got to this point.
If they are unvaccinated and they die, so what? They made their choice. The doctors ought to be saying "Well, well, well, if it isn't the consequences of your own actions" not trying to force people to do something in order to save them from themselves.
Then you always hear "well the real problem is that the unvaccinated are taking up ICU beds from non-covid patients that need them, etc."
Ok, how long have we known about this problem now? Why are ICU beds such a fixed resource? Why can't we make temporary wards for unvaccinated covid patients to alleviate ICU beds?
If this problem happened in the tech world it would be lambasted. "Please stop making requests to X website, it makes the server crash and then the people that really need to access it can't". Yeah DDoS attacks happen and are hard to prevent downtime, but if the server loading problem still persisted over a year and a half later people would be outraged that the company did nothing to try to meet the load. In the tech world when servers can't handle its load we start scaling (either automatically or manually) until the server can meet the load (or otherwise take some sort of mitigating action to alleviate the DoS). Hospitals need to innovate a way to do the same, "please don't get sick with covid because we have no way of scaling to meet load spikes" is such a crappy way of operating.
Every infected person is host to the evolution of the virus. It is likely to become vaccine resistant given enough reproduction cycles. And it could become more, or less, deadly. If it starts killing children quickly, like measles, and is vaccine resistant because we let it simmer in 35% of the population, we will be very sorry.
Our best defense against this is to vaccinate as quickly as possible. Measles now rarely kills our children, due to vaccination.
Measles is fundamentally different. Asymptomatic transmission and zootic reservoirs have no impact. It's not a leaky vaccine and we aren't in the midst of a measles pandemic. Long lasting sterile immunity is provided by the measles vaccine. It makes a lot of sense to mass vaccinate for measles.
True, that is one limitation, but there are tons of other things you could do. A little innovation is required here. I do not believe it is an impossible problem. I think what's happening is that hospitals don't really want to innovate and are hoping to just wait for covid to blow over so then can return to "normal" operation and business-as-usual.
But I say they need to innovate because this isn't the last pandemic that will ever happen, and hospitals need a way to deal with loading spikes and denial of service just like every other system susceptible to those things.
Some may argue the medical establishment has done this: they made a vaccine.
Everyone pays for maintained capacity. If you believe in a free market then your hypothetical plague-better is going to go bust well before they get to reap benefits from having 100k ventilators in storage.
Innovation involves working around limitations. I already conceded that medical staff was a limitation. So how do you work around it? Training covid-specialized temps, perhaps? I don't know the answer because I'm not an expert in that problem domain. But I've innovated around similar limitations in my current domain expertise so I believe it is possible.
You can’t. That’s the point. Nursing, even at the lowest level, is not a trivial skill. The only people you could scale up at short notice like that — if there wasn’t also a general all-sector labour shortage — is nursing assistants, who have to generally do their thing under supervision of a registered nurse, which is an Associate degree or a Batchelor degree.
(There is an intermediate level of Licensed Practical Nurse who can be unsupervised but can’t supervise others, which is “just” a one year vocational course).
> But I've innovated around similar limitations in my current domain expertise so I believe it is possible.
Unless you’ve innovated around a crippling multi-state demand spike, during a general labour marked supply shortage, in a sector where getting things wrong is literally lethal and where people sue for malpractice even for sub-lethal errors despite the government mandated minimum qualification levels, I think you are making an error in thinking your experience is transferable.
(If you do have that experience, please share, as that sounds like one heck of an anecdote!)
That said: One thing you could “innovate” that would technically work is making a roving vaccination drone that hunts down and forcibly vaccinates people that don’t want a vaccine. Even ignoring medical ethics, I don’t think that’s a great idea. But technically…
Hmm, funny. I'm pretty sure I could train a non-programmer to do a specialized type of programming task in a few months if it were a crisis even though that person doesn't have a computer science degree. I don't see why healthcare is so much more difficult to train temporary specialists. Didn't we do it during WW2 (rapidly train medical specialists in a matter of months, aka medics, without a 4 year degree)?
> Unless you’ve innovated around a crippling multi-state demand spike, during a general labour marked supply shortage, in a sector where getting things wrong is literally lethal and where people sue for malpractice even for sub-lethal errors despite the government mandated minimum qualification levels, I think you are making an error in thinking your experience is transferable.
Yeah that's the real problem. Any innovations that alleviate the problem are going to run afoul of some bureaucratic, regulatory, and legal red tape put in place over the last century. So let me rephrase - I could probably innovate and solve this problem if I were a medical professional. But not without running afoul of some red tape somewhere. But I say red tape is meant to be broken in times of crisis.
> I'm pretty sure I could train a non-programmer to do a specialized type of programming task in a few months if it were a crisis even though that person doesn't have a computer science degree.
Then you’re either underestimating the complexity of programming or overestimating general skill level:
"""One of the difficult tasks was to schedule a meeting room in a scheduling application, using information contained in several email messages."""
"""Level 3 = 5% of Adult Population
…
The meeting room task described above requires level-3 skills. Another example of level-3 task is “You want to know what percentage of the emails sent by John Smith last month were about sustainability.”"""
People here are unusually good with computers.
I have no reason to think intensive care of respiratory illnesses is easier than code.
I don’t know enough medicine to say what typical treatment is, but a quick search says the entire USA has 93k ICU beds, that the number occupied by COVID patients went from 3500 in June to 26,000 in September, that the total number of COVID patients (including non-ICU) peaked at 97800 in September (and 133,250 in Jan) and that there are oxygen shortages in various hospitals worldwide because too many patients need the same treatment at the same time.
Given how easy it is to make oxygen — and to make something that makes it — a shortage of it can only happen when there are enough other things that also need to be fixed that it isn’t the limiting factor.
As someone else said elsewhere on this thread, the actual innovation is the vaccine.
> Then you’re either underestimating the complexity of programming or overestimating general skill level
The more specialized a task is, the narrower the range of skills you need to do that task. I could certainly train someone on how to do a specialized programming task such as cleaning CSV files in python in a matter of months. They wouldn't be able to do much else, but they would be able to do that fairly well.
Being a general practitioner is hard because the knowledge and skill pool is huge. Being an ultra-specialist easy by comparison.
Very often patients of rare diseases (including cancer types) know much more about their specific type of disease, known treatment methods, etc. than a general practitioner. How is this possible? The scope of their study is very narrow, so they can quickly go much deeper than a general practitioner on that one topic.
So yes, I still think it would be possible to train ultra specialized covid caretakers in a matter of months given how much we know about how the disease progresses. They don't need to know anything outside of specifically covid and they can flag any cases falling outside of their training to a more qualified person.
Think of it this way: you basically just train people to learn flow charts. The flow charts cover 90%+ of what typically happens to an ICU patient with covid. If they encounter something not in flow chart, they stop and escalate to a real nurse or doctor. You're saying such a scheme wouldn't be effective at all? I think it would free up tons of medical personnel.
> I could certainly train someone on how to do a specialized programming task such as cleaning CSV files in python in a matter of months. They wouldn't be able to do much else, but they would be able to do that fairly well.
After a few months? Average user might still be copy-pasting the # symbol, and need help every time they tried to edit and run a script because they mixed tabs and spaces.
> Very often patients of rare diseases (including cancer types) know much more about their specific type of disease, known treatment methods, etc. than a general practitioner. How is this possible? The scope of their study is very narrow, so they can quickly go much deeper than a general practitioner on that one topic.
You also get people like my mother, who took Bach flower remedies to boost memory (she died of Alzheimer’s 15 years younger than her mother of the same); or my dad, who insisted he was drinking enough water even though at that exact moment he had a drip in one arm to rehydrate him and another drip in the other arm for kidney medicine because his kidneys had almost failed due to dehydration; or people that think they can cure cancer with quack medicine like Steve Jobs did; or breatharians; or people who violently assault healthcare workers and vaccination teams during a global pandemic as in some American hospitals; or countless other examples.
Don’t get me wrong: I value free speech as a way to reduce groupthink, and that can affect experts too, but the experts are still, on average, much less wrong than non-experts. (Also applies to experts being plain wrong without groupthink, as they are humans not angels: still less wrong in their domains than the rest of us).
If medical science is anything like physics — easy to misunderstand, lots of Dunning-Kruger effect — the only people who genuinely become experts in their own diseases are unusually gifted, or already doctors (MD or PhD) or have enough other knowledge to separate real science from half-baked stuff that fails (or never entered) peer review. The rest are lucky they found real science and got close enough to understanding it too make a difference, and lotteries are not sound investment strategies for national growth.
If it’s like computer science, how many battles does the tech sector have to have with the government about cryptography? Or, heck, I’ve had clients and bosses who wanted things which aren’t even coherent, like a view remaining the same size on different sized and different aspect-ratio screens without adding borders, moving widgets, or resizing anything.
If it’s like politics, how many people want tax cuts without cutting government services, completely convinced it’s just a question of improving efficiency?
Or denigrate Media Studies as a “Mickey mouse degree”?
Or think they can beat olympian athletes?
Those are most of the personalities that go to GPs saying they know better. Only a tiny fraction are correct.
> Think of it this way: you basically just train people to learn flow charts. The flow charts cover 90%+ of what typically happens to an ICU patient with covid. If they encounter something not in flow chart, they stop and escalate to a real nurse or doctor. You're saying such a scheme wouldn't be effective at all? I think it would free up tons of medical personnel.
What makes you confident they don’t already do that? Because I think they already do that, with a separate flow chart for every condition.
Thing is, almost everything in medicine has a side effect. I just went onto Google to construct an example with commonly used painkillers, and to my mild surprise, guess what? WHO says no paracetamol for the side effects of the COVID vaccines. I was looking for which ones can’t be taken with alcohol. Untrained people, even smart and eager ones, are likely to not even know how to recognise the right moment to call in outside help.
But even if they could — let’s say an AI tricorder-esq app that can run on their phones — which sector would you deprive of much-needed workers to supply these temps?
And then you need to manufacture a few tens of thousands of sets of specific intense care equipment…
There is merit in your points. How does the world discover these alternatives when everything outside the current treatment regime is heavily censored?
Because there are only a limited number of trained nurses and doctors available. "ICU beds" as a metric actually means the number of patients the staff is able to care for, not the literal number of physical beds.
Not to mention, even if you have some extra to handle variable demand, exceptional circumstances are by their nature exceptional. It's irresponsible to carry that much more capacity when you'll only need it once a century.
Take for example the recent Hurricane Ida. There's still trash and debris to pick up. There's still damage to be fixed, houses to be rebuilt, etc. Insurance claims to process and pay out. Why?
Because there's going to be over 2 million cubic feet of vegetation to dispose of. Just in my parish. That's not considering the other parishes. Or other types of debris. There are trucks from several states and they've been working most days. And we still need to get rid of downed trees.
Because every house is going to have a claim. Every house is going to need some form of repair. Thousands of houses. All at once.
We aren't prepared to handle that sort of scale. And having the resources to handle that sort of scale is just going to languish when its not needed. It'll be waste.
Same deal with COVID. COVID is filling ICUs at a scale that is wasteful to keep on hand during normal operations.
And I'm sorry, saying they "need to innovate" is just the laziest criticism one can make. It exposes the fact that you have not thought of the problem at all beyond noticing the obvious lack of resources. Congratulations for noticing the obvious. How are they supposed to innovate? How do you know they haven't created temporary wards (they have where they could)? What does it take to make a site appropriate for an ICU ward? Etc, etc. There are problems that you don't even know exist because you don't know the problem domain. And that's ok. You're not expected to. But don't armchair quarterback the domain experts who have been working on this problem for the past year. It's not as smart as you think it is.
Okay, then why are hospital resources more finite than non-hospital resources that can scale?
> It's irresponsible to carry that much more capacity when you'll only need it once a century
But you need it for at least 2-3% of the century it seems, so the current model of "please don't overload our beds for 2-3 years" doesn't seem very sustainable either. It's almost like you want Amazon-style "elastic" resources that only kick in when you need them.
> Same deal with COVID. COVID is filling ICUs at a scale that is wasteful to keep on hand during normal operations.
So don't keep them on hand. Figure out a way to mobilize the resources when you need them.
> What does it take to make a site appropriate for an ICU ward?
For one thing, maybe making "a site appropriate for an ICU ward" is too stringent a requirement in times of crisis and overloading?
My solution: Setup circus tents in the parking lot reserved for unvaccinated covid patients where they can sleep on army cots with fewer ICU resources and where they die at higher rates than the normal ICU.
Bam, problem solved. Now the normal ICU is at normal capacity again and unvaccinated covid patients can still receive some limited form of care. If they die at higher rates, oh well, that's a consequence of not getting vaccinated and the direct result of their own choices. And it's better than letting vaccinated heart attack patients die because their unvaccinated comrades took up all the beds and it's also better than taking away everyone's freedom and forcing the vaccination upon everyone. Because now everyone is happy. The unvaccinated still have their freedom, the vaccinated still have their ICU beds.
I'm sure people more familiar with the problem domain could come up with something much better than circus tents in a parking lot. My point was that everyone seems to have accepted that hospitals are inflexible and that the only way to solve the problem is to flatten the curve indefinitely and I don't accept that. Sure, flatten the curve initially, but only until you figure out a better long term solution to dealing with loading spikes.
I just gave you a recent real-life example where non-hospital resources were finite. Did you not read about the on-going problems due to the recent hurricane I mentioned?
Also your solution would pretty much kill all those people. People are in an ICU ward for a reason, moving them to a parking lot tent is not the same. Now, they're not just battling COVID, but also everything else that's out there.
By your logic, putting a bullet in their heads would also solve the problem.
But the problem isn't "getting rid of COVID patients", it's "making sick people well".
> It's almost like you want "elastic" resources that only kick in when you need them.
No. I'm saying that doesn't exist. That it's folly to think that.
> So don't keep them on hand. Figure out a way to mobilize the resources when you need them.
This is you literally suggesting the solution is ""elastic" resources that only kick in when you need them". The thing I said doesn't exist and is an impossibly difficult problem.
This ignores the aspect of personal responsibility. Nobody is forcing these people to refuse the free and widely-available vaccine - they do so by choice and an adult consciousness, and it follows that you bear the consequences for your personal decisions.
The recent vote against boosters by the expert CDC committee and the resulting overturn by the head of the CDC highlights the need for broader free and uncensored discussion.
I read a lot of studies and get help parsing them from YouTube occasionally. Watching videos of more competent people poking holes in videos of quacks talking about the same studies is quite useful and persuasive.
Content like what you're describing is expensive to make, usually very boring and gets no views. You have to pay experts, read studies, interview government officials, maybe even read some science papers. Later you have to dumb it down enough so the common man can understand it. Content like this makes me want to defer the matter immediately to actual experts so I can stop thinking about it.
Now contrast this to viral content claiming that Bill Gates is conspiring to implant 5G chips, vaccine induced magnetism, government hiding thousands of deaths from COVID vaccines and all other conspiracy theories that are easy to manufacture from the comfort of your home, require no expert opinion and get tons of views. Content like this is super addictive, exploits my fears, sows doubt and leaves me less informed. This content wins is the economy like this.
I had a reply about attention algos promoting content higher than it deserves being the root problem. In the old days content with more credible links to it made it to the top for all regardless of your preconceived notions. Now everything is gamed out to your existing profile with God like precision.
They aren't credible, but for other reasons. Remember when covid wasn't airborne and thus masks didn't do anything unless worn by professionals? And border closures wouldn't be necessary and only xenophobes would call for them? And then how they banned corona tests by anyone but the CDC? And the approval delays?
They're playing politics, worry about second-order effects before first-order ones and do 180° turns instead of focusing on the core mission of assessing whether something is a) safe b) likely effective. The same situation happened again with the booster approvals, they dragged their feet again and decided that only those above 65 should be allowed to get them when in practice some international travelers already are forced to get more than two shots due to inconsistent regulations.
More nuanced policy, communicating uncertainty and "currently not recommended but allowed" middle grounds would help their credibility.
Any statistics and numbers need to be scrutinized carefully given the past year of the media and our institutions showing a clear bias in trying to inflate numbers for mass hysteria and scaring people into taking the vaccine.
> We're in the middle of a global pandemic and we're not allowed to discuss whether GoF research is too risky? We're not allowed to discuss the nuances of what a "lab leak" may really entail?
When the polio vaccine first came out was the public (i.e. non medical personnel) allowed to discuss whether the use of inactivated virus was too risky?
> Why should they trust the government, the CDC, the WHO and the like? What have they done to prove they are trustworthy at this point?
To this point? Are you serious? Does someone seriously need to explain to you all of the viruses (far more deadly than COVID mind you) that have been eradicated by government organizations?
> Shutting down open discussion around this topics will only make the situation worse, not better.
You're missing the point. The people who are crying "why can't we discuss GoF research or the lab leak" are not engaging in the argument in good faith. I absolutely think we need to discuss this topics in a meaningful way, however when most of the actors who are bringing up these topics are trying to cry wolf then why should we take them seriously?
The CDC of the past is not the CDC of today. It never is the same, people come and go. The make up of the political structure has overwhelmed the program:
1. CDC director overrules recommendation of board (political reasoning alone).
2. Dr. Faucci admits he lied about the amount of people needed to be vaccinated.
3. Dr. Faucci admits they lied about the need for masks. Which if we look at the data it is messy and shows only a 20% efficacy. If we look at recommendations prior to this outbreak, the documents say not to bother with masks. Do not tell me it was for the greater good to lie, they lied. Which people were told to shut up and listen when we all questioned the lie.
4. The head of the CDC is having an emotional break down on TV when all metrics are trending good (1Q). Why was she having a break down when the public data shows something else. Could it be she had knowledge of something?
The point is, agencies change, they adapt to the political masters. We have these three examples plus my fourth curiosity that point to the government agencies no longer being trustworthy in their guidance.
> When the polio vaccine first came out was the public (i.e. non medical personnel) allowed to discuss whether the use of inactivated virus was too risky?
I would certainly have thought so. Are you referring to something specific or just sowing seeds of doubt?
> To this point? Are you serious? Does someone seriously need to explain to you all of the viruses (far more deadly than COVID mind you) that have been eradicated by government organizations?
To me? No. I can read the whitepapers myself and understand the risks I'm taking. I'm fully vaccinated btw.
Regardless, you're sort of missing the point here. Shutting down dissenting views is authoritarianism and categorically not free speech. And, to be clear, it's not just "misinformation" that's being banned. There are legitimate issues with vaccines people should be informed of such as early warning signs of myocarditis that are also not allowed on YT.
> The people who are crying "why can't we discuss GoF research or the lab leak" are not engaging in the argument in good faith.
"They" are? Who is "they?" Are you claiming there's no point in discussing this? We still haven't sorted out where the virus originated and simply showing it is likely zootonic in origin isn't enough. Wuhan was doing active research on zootonic coronaviruses.
> I would certainly have thought so. Are you referring to something specific or just sowing seeds of doubt?
No, I'm genuinely asking you. Do you know?
> I can read the whitepapers myself and understand the risks I'm taking.
Oh you can? Do you have a background in immunology?
> Shutting down dissenting views is authoritarianism and categorically not free speech.
> There are legitimate issues with vaccines people should be informed of such as early warning signs of myocarditis that are also not allowed on YT.
That people are freely allowed to discuss with their doctors. Why on earth anyone expects to get medical advice from a for profit entertainment website is beyond me.
> Are you claiming there's no point in discussing this?
I literally wrote:
> I absolutely think we need to discuss this topics in a meaningful way
You're asking me to research something there's no evidence of? No, I'm not aware nor have I ever heard of this being a thing until now.
> Oh you can? Do you have a background in immunology?
No, but I took more than one statistics class in undergrad which is enough for me to make decisions I'm comfortable with.
> That people are freely allowed to discuss with their doctors. Why on earth anyone expects to get medical advice from a for profit entertainment website is beyond me.
Using your own point, doctors do not have a background in immunology. So I'm not allowed to read and interpret medical papers, but the same logic doesn't apply to a medical practitioner who has nearly zero formal education in medical research. Which is it?
> I absolutely think we need to discuss this topics in a meaningful way
I apologize for misinterpreting your comment, but in my defense, it's fairly confusing as to what point you're trying to make. On the one hand you say that you support "discussion of these topics in a meaningful way." On the other hand, you criticize me for desiring to read medical papers in an attempt to make informed decisions. You even go so far as to suggest I should blindly listen to my community college grad MP when it comes to medical advice. Which by the way, this is the same person that got me hooked on PPIs when I had GERD which is now causing joint issues and then tried to feed me opiates when I started experiencing said joint issues.
> On the one hand you say that you support "discussion of these topics in a meaningful way."
> On the other hand, you criticize me for desiring to read medical papers in an attempt to make informed decisions.
The two aren't mutually exclusive. I'm trying to say we ought to have a meaningful discussion about these topics and bad actors are making it worse to do so. People who simply take those talking points ("makes you think huh?") and regurgitate them and THEN say "why can't we discuss this" don't faithfully want discussions, they want EYEBALLS (read -> $$). I can't tell if this you're viewpoint, but you sure are sharing a lot of the same characteristics of these people ("I can research everything myself damnit!")
You absolutely should have the right to read white papers AND also trust that the government entity that interprets such articles has your best interest in mind. But you're insinuating that we should simply just have research/white papers and leave it to the general populace to interpret whatever they want. That is, IMHO, more dangerous than the alternative, especially when it comes to vaccinations where there is a near binary effect in place (you either get herd immunity or you don't, everything in between is potentially worse).
>When the polio vaccine first came out was the public (i.e. non medical personnel) allowed to discuss whether the use of inactivated virus was too risky?
They weren't?
>You're missing the point. The people who are crying "why can't we discuss GoF research or the lab leak" are not engaging in the argument in good faith. I absolutely think we need to discuss this topics in a meaningful way, however when most of the actors who are bringing up these topics are trying to cry wolf then why should we take them seriously?
Why would the good faith actors get punished for the actions of bad faith actors?
Happy for you to provide evidence that shows otherwise.
> Why would the good faith actors get punished for the actions of bad faith actors?
Would or should? They shouldn't get punished, but this precisely the point. Bad faith actors get far more attention than good ones. So this is already happening regardless of whether you want it to.
> Happy for you to provide evidence that shows otherwise.
Wait, you can't just posit something, argue as if it's fact, and then ask someone who challenges it to do the legwork of disproving it. If my argument proposed that fifteenth century blacksmiths weren't allowed to discuss unsafe anvil practices, it seems a little disingenuous to then say "happy for you to provide evidence that shows otherwise"; I'm the one that asserted that.
> They shouldn't get punished, but this precisely the point.
There's a difference between losing eyeballs to bad faith actors because they steal some of your market, and having your market banned because there are also bad faith actors in it.
I could argue that Wal-Mart should stop selling Xinjiang cotton due to forced labor, but wouldn't say that the solution to that is too ban all cotton products, even those responsibly produced.
Perhaps a more relevant analogy: Amazon might decide to ban Mein Kampf, but I'd hope they wouldn't ban books discussing why Hitler's platform and rhetoric were appealing to the Germans of the time. Frankly speaking, I wouldn't want even Mein Kampf to be banned: silencing bad or evil ideas makes them enticing (note the popularity of "check out/buy a banned book" events throughout libraries and bookstores).
Good faith actors being harmed by bad faith actors is always going to be a thing. Good faith actors being punished by other good faith actors seems like something we shouldn't be okay with, though.
> If my argument proposed that fifteenth century blacksmiths weren't allowed to discuss unsafe anvil practices, it seems a little disingenuous
If the you argument proposed (blacksmiths weren't allowed to discuss unsafe anvil practices) was factual and I'm asking you to provide evidence of such how is that disingenuous?
> I could argue that Wal-Mart should stop selling Xinjiang cotton
> Amazon might decide to ban Mein Kampf,
These are bad examples because you are explicitly paying for these items as opposed to clickbait / attention grabbing content which gets more viewership the more controversial it is (which has been proven by various studies).
> Good faith actors being punished by other good faith actors
Agreed, but who's the other good faith actor you're referring to here? YouTube?
> These are bad examples because you are explicitly paying for these items as opposed to clickbait / attention grabbing content which gets more viewership the more controversial it is (which has been proven by various studies).
This seems the same to me.
A book with a flashy cover or title is more likely to be purchased because it's attention grabbing. Action movies have trailers with explosions and one-liner quips because they're attention grabbing. Cereal boxes say "new and improved!" because it's attention grabbing. Magazines and cable news ask "Does Jell-o cause cancer?" because it's attention grabbing.
Controversial content gets more clicks because it's attention grabbing, so I would absolutely expect that to be more enticing than the same information packaged less flamboyantly (just like I'd expect more attention-grabbing books, movies, cereal, and magazines to perform better as well.)
>Happy for you to provide evidence that shows otherwise.
Just to confirm, are you claiming that the US government actively suppressed anti-vaccine views when the polio vaccine came out?
>Would or should?
sorry, should.
>They shouldn't get punished, but this precisely the point. Bad faith actors get far more attention than good ones. So this is already happening regardless of whether you want it to.
And what do you think about that? Specifically, good faith actors getting swept up by bad faith actors? Is that fine? Should we do something about it?
Sounds like a misunderstanding then. Your initial comment was
> > We're in the middle of a global pandemic and we're not allowed to discuss whether GoF research is too risky? We're not allowed to discuss the nuances of what a "lab leak" may really entail?
>When the polio vaccine first came out was the public (i.e. non medical personnel) allowed to discuss whether the use of inactivated virus was too risky?
The quoted poster seemed to be anti-censorship, so when you replied in opposition to that, it gave the impression that you thought there was actually censorship going on for polio vaccines.
>but isn't that precisely what YT is doing..? They're banning bad faith actors here, no?
They're banning everyone, bad/good faith actors alike. That's bad and should be stopped.
> They're banning everyone, bad/good faith actors alike. That's bad and should be stopped.
Are you sure? From the article: (emphasis mine)
> YouTube is taking down several video channels associated with high-profile anti-vaccine activists including Joseph Mercola and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who experts say are partially responsible for helping seed the skepticism that’s contributed to slowing vaccination rates across the country.
> As part of a new set of policies aimed at cutting down on anti-vaccine content on the Google-owned site, YouTube will ban any videos that claim that commonly used vaccines approved by health authorities are ineffective or dangerous. The company previously blocked videos that made those claims about coronavirus vaccines, but not ones for other vaccines like those for measles or chickenpox.
That sounds like to me they are discretionarily deciding who gets banned, no?
In terms of human viruses, governments have only eradicated smallpox and almost polio. We will not be able to eradicate SARS-CoV-2 the same way. Unlike smallpox and polio there are animal hosts (most other mammal species can carry and transmit the virus) and the vaccines don't reliably prevent infection. So I encourage everyone to get vaccinated to protect themselves, but we need to face reality that the virus will never be eradicated.
While I agree that free speech is important, misinformation is nonetheless an important topic to discuss.
Public policy debates are important because it leads to a more accurate state and more informed decision, but not when anti-vaccine opponents continue to undermine accurate information at every turn.
The lab leak theory was "misinformation" until it wasn't. They say "listen to the experts" and then censor actual doctors and scientists who say the wrong things. An "expert" is apparently someone who has a degree and holds the approved views, everyone else is spouting "misinformation."
Careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. An expert being wrong once doesn't mean all experts everywhere are always wrong.
Experts are a real thing. People who spend a lifetime learning about something will, on average, make better decisions about that thing then you or I. Pretending that this is not true is not only silly, it's often dangerous.
I don't think he's disputing that experts are real. He's saying that we need to be able to question the experts (ie the lab lead being refuted by scientists with massive conflicts of interest). Experts are also not a monolith, there were experts saying the lab leak theory was credible but they were shut down during the early stages.
> People who spend a lifetime learning about something will, on average, make better decisions about that thing then you or I.
I'm not convinced this is true. If you spend a lifetime doing something then I'd agree you'd be better than average at it. In such cases experts do not face much scrutiny, there's little doubt on a pilot's skill at flying a plane and no sane person thinks they are better at chess than Magnus Carlsen.
What is happening now is that we are taking people who have merely studied something extensively and asserting that knowledge gives them superior insight into decisions about the future. These "experts" might even be directionally right more often than an average person but that isn't enough. If expertise through a lifetime of learning leads to your confidence in your own abilities outpacing your actual abilities than they are going to make worse decisions than a lay person who is cautious in the face of uncertainty. Examples of this effect are abundant, the greatest team of financial experts ever assembled (LTCM) managed to lose every penny and then some while my parents 401k remained solvent.
There's good reason to believe a life insulated from the ups and downs of normal life leads to suboptimal risk judgement compared to a less educated person. There's a clear assymetry between overskepticism and overconfidence, the latter hurts you far more than the former. To suggest that skepticism is the more dangerous of the two denies the reality of most of the largest disasters of the last century.
Absolutely. But there are very few (no?) "experts on expertise". Which is what you need to be in order to make decisions about _which_ experts to trust in a field where there is plurality / majority consensus on some issue among those who are experts in the field.
> People who spend a lifetime learning about something will, on average, make better decisions about that thing then you or I
...at the expense of things they are not experts in. Ask an expert in virology how to prevent spread of the virus and they will give you a good answer. But that doesn't mean turning their advice into a mandated policy will work out well. Game theory comes into play there and an expert in virology is likely not an expert in game theory, politics, economics, or anything else involving policies affecting 350M+ people.
This. I'm a scientist working on identifying therapeutics for COVID-19. The number of relevant kinds of expertise is very large. There is no COVID-19 expert whose background covers everything, thus everyone has blind spots. It doesn't mean we should throw up our hands, but it does mean a bit of humility is in order from everyone involved. Unfortunately, that level of nuance and honesty does not seem possible in public debate. I really hate seeing science in public because it is quite different from what I experience in person.
In the lab leak case it appears that all the "experts" everywhere were wrong (or afraid to speak up, which is functionally equivalent).
One problem here is the conflation of government officials and academia with expertise. It's quite plainly possible to spend your life in academia yet end up with no actual expertise in the topic you're studying, as evidenced by the large number of papers out there presenting unvalidated predictions which end up being wildly false, over and over again. Fundamentally, in academia and government being wrong doesn't cause you to lose your job. Your job depends instead on your reputation and alliances. A large amount of groupthink and incorrect beliefs is a natural outcome.
I think it does happen by itself. After all, normally focusing your mind on a task full time does lead to superior knowledge and capability, and academics/government officials are able to spend all day on whatever their given topic is.
The problem is it's not sufficient to have time and money. You also need to be in an environment where you're expected to deliver genuine truth, and there are rewards for doing so and penalties for not doing so. And in the public/academic sector these things are lacking, which is sufficient to overpower the specialising effect of full time employment.
The problem is it is not just one mistake. Just look at the experts saying you don't need masks at the beginning of all of this. They didn't just get it wrong, they outright lied and admitted as much. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
Every profession has a certain percentage of unqualified morons working in it.
In most cases, it just means work doesn't get done and/or you have an unsatisfied customer. But in the case of medicine, it kills people.
Then you have the corrupt that will do anything to try to get rich and famous. This is where you'll have a doctor claiming they found a new treatment for a disease or some other discovery by manipulating data and not seeking peer review. Examples of this include the Andrew Wakefield who started the "vaccines cause autism" movement, and whatever doctor started claiming Ivermectin treats COVID.
I feel like 'malinformation' describes this kind of thing more accurately, as it is a style of misinformation that has directly harmful effects that can be fatal.
It's another level, compared to misinforming people about other things.
You can't argue with a cult. My entire wife's family are rabid GOPers and I have had multiple discussions where I have absolutely crushed them with facts and the outcome, nothing. They will simply deny anything that doesn't agree with their world view as "fake news" while believing anything Trump says without question.
How do you have a rational discussion like that? If folks can find absolutely zero common ground to agree on, there is no basis for any type of meaningful discourse.
I too have to deal with hard right wing Christians... I used to be one. The idea that they are too stupid or deluded to be talked to about anything just isn't true. Talking to people about emotionally charged issues is hard, and if your attitude is that they're all idiots you're not gonna do it productively. "Crushing" someone with facts will never, ever change their mind.
I've been able to have a lot of discussions with these types of people (albeit not everyone) because I understand them.
Right and Trump got boo'ed for saying people should get vaccinated because he's reaping the consequences of speaking without thought. I didn't say they're stupid, I said they're fools for believing what is obvious a bunch of politically motivated lies, science is no place for emotion.
What these people do lack is the ability to think critically about the subject, examine their biases, and challenge their assumptions. If we can't change people's mind with the truth, what possibly could make them realize they have been duped?
> Right and Trump got boo'ed for saying people should get vaccinated because he's reaping the consequences of speaking without thought.
Trump saying that massively reduced Democrats opinion on vaccines and massively increased Republicans opinion on vaccines though. People shift their opinions really easy over tiny things, every little bit that makes one side more convincing helps pushing people to the correct realization and vice versa. So it is very possible to convince a lot of people, thinking otherwise just ensure those people wont get convinced. It is a spectrum, every tiny step helps a lot, there is never a point where being more convincing no longer helps.
I hate to be pedantic but the poll you reference was in 2020 and Trump said that in May of 2021. I don't think it had a measurable effect on either party.
You are right, this was due to another statement by Trump. But Trump saying something about a vaccine had that big of an effect. As soon as Trump started talking about getting a vaccine out to the people Democrats started to think that an FDA approved vaccine would be a bad thing while Republicans started thinking it was a good thing. As you see in the graph after that statement both groups were almost equally willing to get vaccinated.
> Democrats' reduced confidence follows President Donald Trump's Labor Day announcement that a coronavirus vaccine could be ready in October, as well as subsequent news reports stating that Trump is eager to see a vaccine delivered before the election. Trump's accelerated timeline does not align with that of many government health experts, and this disagreement has raised concerns as to whether a vaccine distributed that soon would be effective and safe.
I would treat Democrats that refused a vaccination because it was Trump's FDA with the same disdain. The fact that this issue is divisive along political lines is what is so damn infuriating. This is science people, one of the few things left on the planet that can conceivably be free of emotional discourse and we're actively killing it for financial gain.
I'm not a Republican or a Democrat, I'm a scientist.
Most people aren't able to dispassionately pursue the truth. You need to remove emotional barriers first before the facts can be heard by finding ideological and emotional common ground somewhere and then using that camaraderie as an attack vector to convince them that something else that they believe is wrong. I have done that somewhat successfully with a fairly far-right person, managing to bring them back on some of their more extreme views.
It's possible you weren't the right person for this specific job. I believe that some alignment on at least some views is necessary for this process, otherwise the barriers just immediately go up.
Having said that, it's true that for some people no amount of reasoning or persuasion will work. The amount of cognitive dissonance and the extent to which the belief is tied into their self-worth and identity precludes anything but a years-long process of deradicalization. People aren't designed to be rational.
I didn't say they're stupid, I said their fools for believing what is obvious a bunch of politically motivated lies, science is no place for emotion.
No, you said "while believing anything Trump says without question."
If we can't change people's mind with the truth, what possibly could make them realize they have been duped?
Packaging matters. People are emotional and make rarely make factual determinations in a vacuum. Your attitude in our conversation so far tells me that you have a near-zero opinion of their intellect and have no idea why they believe what they believe (ie you say that they believe 100% of what Trump says, but 10 seconds later acknowledge they'll boo him at his own rally). You most likely come across as smug and superior in these conversations so while you may just be explaining that mRNA therapies have been in development for decades they will see it as an attack on them... Logical? No, but it's how humans operate. Maybe you're perfectly logical but I kinda doubt it.
Lets use creationism as an example because it's what I have the most experience with. You can argue until you're blue in the face with facts and won't get anywhere most of the time -- there were certainly people who had that experience with me 15-20 years ago. Looking back I wasn't interested in the facts. The Adam and Eve story had to be literal to explain original sin, which had to be a thing to explain Jesus' sacrifice which was one of the most central things I believed in. So when you'd crush me with facts demonstrating that the earth cannot be 6,000 years old you'd actually be tugging at the single most central thing I believed. Good luck.
I was reasoned out of young earth creationism, but I had to be in a place where Jesus was also on the table to be discussed. It took about a year from "oh shit, that's how radiometric dating works" to "uh yeah, none of this makes sense." Open discourse was the only way that was possible -- the talk.origins archive, books like Why Evolution is True by Coyne, lectures by friendly scientists, ect.
That's a lot of assumptions about me and my behavior. You're right on one thing, I don't understand how pride and selfishness can be such a driving force behind people's views. I don't think your analogy with creationism holds water though, it doesn't cause a public health hazard. While I don't personally endorse creationism, I could care less what you believe and only have an opinion if you are trying to force me into the same mindset and while science has undeniably proven creationism false, there is no real detectable detriment to folks believing it.
COVID on the other hand is a massive public health problem and I view this unfounded resistance in the same vein as drunk driving and yelling fire in a crowded theatre. Your freedom ends when it begins to endanger other people. If there were any even remotely reasonable arguments, I could engender some empathy for these folks, however there is not, it is complete lies, fabrication, and fear mongering. 2000 year old ghosts, while useful for creating a system of morality to keep people in line, is not a basis for scientific discourse.
In some ways, the political/medical alignment problem turns Cialdini on his head in that once one sees other people as "rabid GOPers" then an appeal using Cialdini's "Social Proof" would turn the target of persuasion against one's subject of persuasion.
If I, an unexpert, were to work on the problem, I would use the ambiguity of risk to hold the vax door open (if the target did other vaccines, did not hold strong religious whatevers against vax, etc). With the door open I might take advantage of information asymmetries and use Cialdini's "scarcity," letting them know that I know a particular place has vaccine X today which is better than vaccine Y because of some reasons, and that vaccine X is in short supply so if they were going to do it, this is a great opportunity.
Are they conspiracies when they start becoming true though? I remember when the vaccine mandates and passports were a "conspiracy" at the begging of the COVID lockdowns. Now, here we are...
Not unlike the censoring any discussion of the lab leak hypothesis they (the censors) better be perfectly accurate every single time.
The moment they get it wrong and censor something that turns out to be the truth they lose 100% of their credibility and become a part of the conspiracy themselves.
I remember having to provide vaccine proof to get my kids into public school, when enrolling them into college. How is this a new thing? Why is it such a big deal now? Why are these people kicking up such a fuss now?
The reason: GOP makes money and gains power by proving people will believe anything they say. This is a blind power grab and the only reason it is an issue is because it is a great talking point. Tucker Carlson and the like are only doing this to get money, why no one sees that is beyond me.
I agree, however how do you deal with folks knowingly spreading misinformation for financial gain? Most of the "sources" have an active interest in having people listen to them and will say anything that will get more people to tune in, no matter the content.
Do we just let them continue in an age where there are morons out there that will believe anything that is written in a coherent sentence or posted to Youtube with cool background music? At some point we have to hold people accountable, as this is straight up murder in some cases. Remember that girl that convinced her boyfriend to kill himself?
Why is that? The central point of my argument is that the death rate in the US is the highest it's been since the middle of WWII. Everyone keeps saying it's not a deadly disease, not many people are actually dying, that it is being inflated because it's being listed as the cause of death. The vaccines don't work, yet you're 11 times more likely to die if you have not been vaccinated. The fact of the matter is, this data is undeniable, there is no question on the number of dead people (not from COVID, just dead).
> death rate in the US is the highest it's been since the middle of WWII
Age standardized mortality rate (that is, accounts for an increasingly old population) is at 2008 levels in the UK. This doesn't account the total lack of treatment early on, patients were denied anti-inflammatory medicine and put on ventilators instead of normal oxygen.
> saying it's not a deadly disease, not many people are actually dying
Not many people are dying of COVID-19, they're dying with COVID-19. Most have serious underlying conditions.
> The vaccines don't work, yet you're 11 times more likely to die if you have not been vaccinated.
This is patently untrue. 87% of deaths and hospitalizations since July are vaccinated [1]. Now, this site might seem sketch, but you can download the reports from the Scottish government yourself and verify the math. I did, it's accurate. Tellingly, the latest report is missing the death count table.
If the vaccines have any affect at all, it's marginal, and only in the elderly. Of course, they don't work, that's why they're rolling out 'boosters' because the vaccines keep failing.
> Age standardized mortality rate (that is, accounts for an increasingly old population) is at 2008 levels in the UK. This doesn't account the total lack of treatment early on, patients were denied anti-inflammatory medicine and put on ventilators instead of normal oxygen.
Thank you for confirming my argument, vaccination rates in the UK are well over 80%.
> Not many people are dying of COVID-19, they're dying with COVID-19. Most have serious underlying conditions.
Actually, deaths from underlying health conditions are all up in addition to COVID deaths, try again.
> This is patently untrue. 87% of deaths and hospitalizations since July are vaccinated [1]. Now, this site might seem sketch, but you can download the reports from the Scottish government yourself and verify the math. I did, it's accurate. Tellingly, the latest report is missing the death count table.
That is not an honest statement, granted I should have qualified my statement with "in the US". Comparing a country with a much higher vaccination rate seems to be apples to oranges. Very interesting stat though, need to read more on that.
> If the vaccines have any affect at all, it's marginal, and only in the elderly. Of course, they don't work, that's why they're rolling out 'boosters' because the vaccines keep failing.
This is 100% supposition, what data would you cite, if any, to back this up?
EDIT: Did some more reading, apparently Moderna, Pfizer, and J&J only account for less than 34% of the vaccines administered in the UK, they are primarily utilizing other vaccines.
> Actually, deaths from underlying health conditions are all up in addition to COVID deaths, try again.
What does say about your WW2 mortality claim then?
Okay, so looking at the first study linked in the post article [1]:
Scroll down to the first table.
Not Fully Vaccinated: 569,142 cases, 6,132 deaths. Mortality in this group: 0.010774113
Fully Vaccinated: 46,312 cases, 616 deaths. Mortality in this group: 0.013301088
Look at those mortality rates closely, the Fully Vaccinated group is actually higher.
The next section has a different total number of cases, unexplained in the table itself, but let's take a look at the most vulnerable population in that table, 65 and over.
Now, that's a difference of 0.023472434 in mortality. I don't know what kind of math it takes to make 2.3% look like 11x better outcome, but I'm sure it's not math based in reality. That's about a 30% relative reduction in rate, and that's using highly specious numbers IMO, especially considering the CDC put out guidance to NOT TRACK 'breakthrough' cases unless the patient is hospitalized. Since this table includes a 'hospitalizations' column, one has to wonder how these vaccinated cases even got tracked in the first place.
Mind you, this is if you believe the CDC and their data in the first place, which I don't.
> What does say about your WW2 mortality claim then?
That statement doesn't even make sense. I'm refuting you statement that folks are not dying of COVID, their dying with COVID. It's just not true, if that were the case, we would see a corresponding drop in other causes of death. We didn't they actually went up, pretty close to how much they go up every year. But COVID deaths on top have gotten us to the point of WWII death rates in 1943. So in short, it completely proves my point.
> Look at those mortality rates closely, the Fully Vaccinated group is actually higher.
I think failure to interpret the study correctly does not actually make it incorrect. Try reading the whole thing instead of cherry picking numbers to try to prove your point.
> Mind you, this is if you believe the CDC and their data in the first place, which I don't.
What's there to "believe"? Deny what doesn't fit your world view is not a good playbook. Did you "believe" the CDC when Trump was in charge? Was it different then? Sometimes things we don't like still happen, even though we really don't want them to. Denying reality doesn't make it true.
> But COVID deaths on top have gotten us to the point of WWII death rates in 1943
Except, they didn't, as we discussed already.
> think failure to interpret the study correctly does not actually make it incorrect. Try reading the whole thing instead of cherry picking numbers to try to prove your point.
I don't need someone to interpret numbers for me, that's the difference. The rest of the 'study' is drivel. Not to mention, the data's already cherry picked.
> What's there to "believe"?
For starters, we have to take their numbers at face value. We know they're not aggressively collecting adverse reaction data, we know they're not doing much investigating vaccine caused death and illness, we know their numbers are most likely skewed to show the vaccines are beneficial. Despite this, the best they can come up with is a report that shows the mortality among vaccinated is higher than the unvaccinated.
Rape is horrible, but you're using as an example a country which has arguably the worst rape statistics in the world, where rape is used as a regular war tactic.
Even for racism and homophobia has now merged through grey areas. Someone who disagrees with mass immigration is a racist and someone who is pro the sanctity of marriage between man and woman (not that you can't get legal rights as a same sex couple) is now homophobia. There's so much nuance in under these big umbrellas that no one care to have a dialogue about, they just want clear cut right or wrong with the world is filled in fuzzy lines.
Ir hardly "cannot be discussed". I've participated in several online discussions about it, and cited several major news outlets covering the story. The White House is openly investigating the topic. Defending free speech is very important, but crying wolf about censorship is counterproductive to the cause.
It's difficult to claim that it's crying wolf in the comment section of an article by a reputable mainstream source telling us what's happening. Honestly it is a little surprising that the mainstream is even admitting the censorship is happening and not helping hide it "for the good of the people," but I guess if this article didn't appear they'd lose what was left of their credibility.
The current approach is to ban dissent for sanctioned topics (lab leak, hunter's laptop, vaccinations, etc.) and I agree that it's not working, because you get an echo chamber and force critics into the darkness whether they are right or wrong.
The right approach is always more information. People can think for themselves, $5000 of Russian ads didn't do anything more or have any more lies a D or R campaign ad did, so stop pretending it did.
If you want to ban foreign actors, that's fine. Targeting citizens with legit concerns and ideas is wrong and violates their rights, even if you launder your tyranny through private companies.
"There's no time to be debating the scientific consensus right now. We are in a crisis. Lives are at stake. Debating and questioning the consensus (even if it changes) will cause misinformation to propagate and lives to be lost. The only way to optimize for lives saved is to temporarily take away some fundamental freedoms like speech so that the smart people in charge can resolve the crisis with minimal loss of life."
Sorry, we had emergency legislation because of terrorism since 2 decades now. A bit desensitized by now. Perhaps I should look for something that induces fear?
i regret that i have but one upvote to give. I'm a little tired of the constant state of emergency and pearl clutching since about this time of year 2001.
This sounds like the rationale government leaders often employ to institute a dictatorship: "temporarily remove freedoms and grant the president emergency executive powers".
But somehow "temporarily" becomes "permanently" because no one in power wants to voluntarily give up that power.
"Why should they trust the government, the CDC, the WHO and the like?"
For similar reasons they should be trusting people creating content on private media platforms.
People need information and seek for sources, whatever they are. I don't think the lack of content on YouTube will make change most of people beliefs, if something will reinforce them to think this is imposed.
You can always go to other sources to look for what you want to see.
I know HN is always on a hair trigger to call out free speech issues, but "youtube does a poor job of curating covid information" is the expected outcome. You don't need to postulate a conspiracy or malicious actor to explain the expected outcome.
So it's kind of hard to take stuff like this seriously:
> ...we're not allowed to discuss whether GoF research is too risky?"
Of course you are. Youtube middle-management aren't the arbiters of what is and is not acceptable scientific or medical information. If they ever were, that would be a crisis worthy of outrage.
Don't forget, the term "anti-vaxers" has become a catch-all term for shutting down the slightest criticism about the virus, whether fact or opinion. I have seen this term slung at people simply questioning vaccine mandates and passports in casual conversations both online and offline. Very few people are anti-vax but they powers that be would like most people to think there are only 2 sides. We live in dangerous times.
Exactly: that term seems to be used as a strawman to attack the worse positions avoiding the reasonable ones.
Dismissal has been a constant presence. Somebody got damaged after infection? Some will come and dismiss with "anectodal". Somebody got damaged after vaccination? Others will come and dismiss with "anectodal". One tries to tell someone that he lost very real family members and friends to covid: "they must have been already sick". One tries to tell someone that he has known of a surprising number of people with adverse events: "they must have been already sick". And with that the issue has not progressed a bit.
We should have supported openly racist and homophobic speech. So that we'd be able to continue openly talking about other things, like science. But we all think we can control the beast.
> "Why should they trust the government, the CDC, the WHO and the like? What have they done to prove they are trustworthy at this point?"
This is the crux of the issue IMO. As someone pointed out in another comment, the CDC of the past is not the same as the CDC of today.
I am vaccinated as are my wife and kids (young adults). However, it was not a slam-dunk decision to get it.
Why the hesitancy?
- Trump pushed to get the vaccine in record time (maybe to score some political points?)
- When outbreak first hit the US, Trump tried to halt international travel to a large extent. He was berated for this, while it seemed to me to be a prudent action given the situation. Other countries put the clamps on international travel and I didn't see any criticism of them.
- While Trump was still in office, Harris and others were publicly quoted as saying that if Trump says they should get the vaccine that they would be hesitant (don't recall the exact quote). (Did they say this as a legitimate concern or as a way of scoring political points?)
- Biden administration, supporters, and MSM rush to label anyone who questioned whether the virus originated from Wuhan lab as "conspiracy theorists", "kooks", "crackpots", "nutjobs", etc. Then later on, well-respected scientists openly suggest that Wuhan lab could be the origin. (Who is trying to manipulate our perceptions and WHY?)
- Mask mandates openly ignored by the same people who advocated for strict adherence (Gov. Whitmer, Pres. Biden, former Pres. Obama's big birthday party, etc.) If wearing a mask is so important for public health, why are they NOT doing it at times?
- Sufficient public testimony from NIH scientists in Congressional hearings to conclude that NIH funding of Wuhan lab through 3rd party DID fit the definition of gain-of-function research (suggesting that Fauci is lying to the public. Why?)
- Earlier in outbreak, Biden administration stated that they don't foresee mask mandates. Later, mask mandates.
- There is ample anecdotal evidence to suggest that many hospitals were quick to report fatalities as being Covid when there was no Covid connection. Why? Were the hospitals coached to act this way? Was it about federal government payments? Make the numbers look a certain way?
- From the very earliest days of Biden administration, up to today, there has been record immigration on the southern border. Putting aside your position about how immigration should or should not be handled IN THE ABSENCE OF a worldwide pandemic, WHY are record number of immigrants being encouraged, supported, and processed at our southern border? Are they being tested for Covid? Mayorkas just made a statement a day or 2 ago that he was SURPRISED by the jump in delta variant numbers at the immigrant processing and staging locations!! Really??? WTF are these people thinking?
I could continue on, but by now you either see the pattern or you refuse to acknowledge that it's even conceivable that there could be a pattern of deception.
If I look back over the history of vaccinations, they have been an absolute blessing to all of humanity. There's no doubt about their effectiveness in wiping out terrible things such as Polio (as just 1 example).
However, today there is so much evidence that federal government, UN, WHO, state governments, local governments, MSM, Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, etc. are now operating under a perpetual mode of MANIPULATION to coerce the public to their DESIRED end goals, irrespective of truth and scientific fact. Both Democrat and Republican parties are guilty.
Are you really surprised that there are people who question the truth and sincerity of the powers that be?
I mean you are anti-woke and supposedly much more informed than so called "woke" people and yet all your information seems to be coming from a single source.
Greenwald is a pretty solid source compared to a large amount of journalists though, even if he probably doesn't have a neutral opinion by now. But he tries and that is the difference.
First, it's a misdirection. It's a bargain with the social far-left in an attempt to reduce the power of the economic far-left given that those two groups overlap so much. We will go along with your culture war because it's the cheapest alternative available to us.
Second, it's the first-mover problem and a coordination problem. Nobody's brand wants to be singled out by a social media mob. Being around the 5th percentile makes you a target. So everyone tries to be around the median. The median keeps shifting up and up, as the people in the 5th percentile keep re-upping the ante as they chase the ever-increasing median. It's just a consequence of social media mobs targeting the bottom percentiles for brand damage. Their only other option is to regime shift into full blown anti-woke, which simply isn't viable for many companies. If all companies simultaneously shifted downwards (by becoming not-woke), there wouldn't be a problem, but that coordination can't happen with heterogeneous entities.
___________ is a blunt instrument of the elites to shut down any discussion that threatens their narrative.
It's a propaganda technique. If the opposite of wokeism etc. were popular and accepted by a large number of people, propagandists would use that. They would, for example, brand any dissent as "not white" or "gay" or "miscegenated" or "degenerate" etc. They did in fact do this generations ago.
If we lived in a super-religious society any dissent would be satanic. This version is still leveraged within the evangelical community.
All narratives will be weaponized by propagandists regardless of whether the narrative itself has objective merit when considered in good faith.
This is a tactic and works largely the same regardless of what narrative is being weaponized.
Indeed, just look at how "carbon footprint" came from the oil industry. I left behind a conservative religious upbringing, but never found an escape from tribalism and guilt tripping, whether for conservative or liberal causes. Manipulating our need for agency (by touting personal responsibility) and belonging (by guilt tripping and shunning) is an astonishingly good way to divide and conquer a society that really has a lot in common.
Exactly. And this has been going on for a looong time. In fact, as long as I can remember watching news. It's all a religion, be it christianity, nationalism, communism, ecology, global warming, "woke"ism, anti-racism. The tenets are always the same: YOU are guilty just for being born, or existing, or wanting to live a normal life. YOU need to do something to correct this. YOU must be with us, if you're barely neutral you're the enemy. YOU will never fully achieve full pardon for your original sin, but you have to keep trying with all your strength, otherwise you're a heretic that deserves to be cancelled.
I am American, but I believe the American view of "we must allow everything so that important things aren't censored" is wrong. I believe it is possible to avoid the slippery slope and just ban certain things. For example, Nazi images are banned in Germany. In a sense, banning anti-vaccine propaganda is an even more important issue.
Video games with "too much" blood or gore are also banned in Germany, limiting artistic expression.
The "censorship in Germany is fine because it's just nazi stuff" argument doesn't hold water. They are currently progressing down the slippery slope.
Already you're saying it should be nazi stuff + vaccine propaganda. Next year it will be a third thing that is an important pet issue for you or an interest group.
Civilized adults don't tell other adults what they are allowed to read.
I don't buy this all-or-nothing argument. People in the US have tried to ban books, heavy metal music, video games etc. And the idea that we've ONLY survived those attempts because we allow people to fly/wear swastikas is ridiculous on its face.
It's not about swastikas, it's about a hard and fast rule that speech is permitted because speech itself is not directly harmful to anyone or anything.
Humans, of course, respond to speech and frequently do violence, but the speech itself is not the violence (there is an extra step involved).
This "no banning speech" general rule is why it has been largely ineffective when people have tried to ban books, movies, music, or games. It's not the swastikas; those are simply a side effect of the same root cause.
on the one hand, i think that calling this "censorship" is wrong because, in my understanding, "censorship" is an activity of the government in an attempt to remove the (presumably dissenting) voice of the populace. this is simply a company refining its product in an attempt to make it more attractive to current, or potential, consumers.
on the other hand, masks and vaccines have been so conflated with political ideology that it's easy to see why people immediately make the leap to "censorship" and it does highlight the critical reality that internet corporations either do, or believe they do, own your content and can remove it in order to suit their ends.
What an awesome idea. People who have consistently been wrong and censored the correct people are making more rules to censor more. More censorship and coercion will definitely convince people to take the shots. As someone who's fully vaccinated against polio, smallpox, chickenpox, measles etc., I still get called an anti-vaxxer. My buddies in the military who have more vaccinations than the general public get called anti-vaxxer because they don't want to take the COVID vaccine since they have already had covid infection. Amazing.
Currently, the government of Canada has misinformation on their own YouTube page and government site:
1. The Canadian government uploaded "How do I know COVID-19 vaccines are safe without long-term data?" on March 25, 2021, 4 months after vaccine was authorized under the interim order and when merely 4.45% of Canada was fully vaccinated. The government's video completely sidesteps the entirely valid question about lack of long-term safety data and stated: "Clinical trials for COVID-19 vaccines have been taking place since the spring of 2020 and millions of people around the world have already been vaccinated. The vast majority of side effects from vaccines are minor and occur soon after vaccination." The video obviously doesn't answer the actual question about lack of long-term safety data because it's impossible to know this in the very short period that the vaccines have been in the market. Without knowing this data, it is also impossible to give informed consent to the treatment.
One-Third of the drugs approved by the FDA and (by inference) Health Canada from 2001 through 2010 had major safety issues years after the medications were made widely available to patients. 71 of the 222 drugs approved were withdrawn, required a "black box" warning on side effects or warranted a safety announcement about new risks. The median follow-up period was 11.7 years and it took a median of 4.2 years after the drugs were approved for these safety concerns to come to light and issues were more common among psychiatric drugs, biologic drugs, drugs that were granted "accelerated approval" and drugs that were approved near the regulatory deadline for approval. Drugs ushered through an accelerated approval process were among those that had higher rates of safety interventions.
So when the median follow-up period was 11.7 years and it took a median of 4.2 years after the drugs were approved for these safety concerns to come to light and this was more common for those given "accelerated approval", is it not a valid for people to be concerned about long-term safety tests? With such a horrible track record for drug approvals and delayed withdrawals and discoveries of side effects, coercing young, fit and healthy people with negligible risks to inject an irreversible, involuntary, non-long term safety tested, short-lasting, unaccountable and rushed vaccine without any guarantees of how many and how often boosters will be required is wildly unreasonable.
2. The government also uploaded a video titled "Do I need to get the vaccine if I've already had and recovered from COVID-19?" on September 3, 2021. The video shows Dr. Marc-André Langlois, Executive Director of the Coronavirus Variants Rapid Response Network (CoVaRR-Net) and Professor, Faculty of Medicine, University of Ottawa, state that you should still receive both COVID-19 vaccine doses even if you’ve previously had a COVID-19 infection. The video completely fails to explain the rationale behind inoculating those with prior infection induced natural immunity when over 15 studies have now demonstrated that individuals with natural immunity from prior infection have longer lasting and stronger protection against infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalization compared to the vaccine-induced immunity. We have had over 18 months and millions of cases to work with world wide to study natural immunity and yet, Dr. Langlois, claims that it is still unclear how long natural immunity protection from an infection lasts and unclear of the reinfection from variants. Health officials had a 1 year head start to study natural immunity from infection before the vaccine was even rolled out, and yet they are falsely claiming that they know more about the vaccine than natural immunity. This, clearly shows that the government's claims are not based on any science or logic.
3. The government also uploaded a video titled "How long does it take for the COVID-19 vaccine to work after I receive it?" on September 3, 2021. The video again shows Dr. Marc-André Langlois, state that the second dose of the vaccine "boosts" the immune response and is essential "for longer lasting protection and better protection against the variants." This is also misleading because we know now that the fully vaccinated effectiveness declines to anywhere between just 16% to 66% in 3-6 months.
4. Even Health Canada's September 16, 2021 approval for the Pfizer vaccine misleadingly claims it prevents COVID even though they know that it is now uncontested that the vaccine does not "prevent" COVID in any meaningful way. It's just a potential severe symptom mitigator, not a prevention:
> "COMIRNATY is indicated for active immunization to prevent coronavirus disease 2019"
5. Health Canada approved Pfizer on September 16, 2021 using 6 month old outdated data (data cut-off dated March 13, 2021) claiming the vaccine showed a vaccine efficacy of 91.3%. Why use 6 month old data? They also said it's to "prevent coronavirus disease 2019". We know it does not "prevent" COVID. We know it's a potential severe symptom mitigator, not a prevention.
6. Quebec’s July 25, 2021 onwards "Being vaccinated, it’s a win Contest" lottery makes misleading and false claims such as "reap the benefits of optimal long-term protection, including protection from the variants of the virus." It is uncontested that the vaccine efficacy declines in 3-6 months and this doesn’t provide "optimal long-term protection". So Quebec is clearly offering such monetary benefits under false promises.
Plus informed consent requires the consent to be provided without coercion and without undue inducement and unfair incentives. Yet governments are running multi-million dollar lotteries to violate informed consent.
7. Ontario government also makes false promises when mandating vaccines stating: "You can protect yourself, your loved ones and your community by getting the COVID-19 vaccine." This is similar to the Federal government's misleading claims saying "You’ll have very good protection against infection, including against most current variants of concern."
The vaccine neither prevents you from catching COVID, not spreading it and the effectiveness declines in 3-6 months. Yet governments continue to mislead people.
8. Similarly, in the US, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) changed the definition of a "vaccine" after August 26, 2021:
CDC defines Immunity as "Protection from an infectious disease. If you are immune to a disease, you can be exposed to it without becoming infected."
On August 26, 2021, CDC defined a vaccine as: "A product that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease, protecting the person from that disease."
However, by September 2, 2021, CDC changed the definition of a vaccine to: "A preparation that is used to stimulate the body’s immune response against diseases.
These 2 have very different meanings. Till August 26, vaccines were supposed to "produce immunity to a specific disease, protecting the person from that disease" whereas now they claim it only "stimulates the body’s immune response against diseases" - i.e. it doesn’t produce immunity, nor protects the person from the disease.
Based on these new changes, any therapy that boosts the immune system would meet the new pseudo-definitions of "vaccine" and "protect". Even a smoothie with healthy fruits and vegetables such as spinach, yoghurt and garlic would qualify as vaccines as they "stimulate the body’s immune response against diseases."
9. Even though Pfizer and Federal government states that the Pfizer vaccine is effectiveness starts "1 week after the second dose", yet their data continues to use 2 weeks for detailing the breakthrough cases.
The number 1 principle of doctor-patient relationship is informed consent. All this misleading messaging by the governments makes people give "misinformed" consent. Imagine you were told a medical procedure is 95% effective at preventing you from catching HIV without any disclosures that this effectiveness declines rapidly. 3 months later, you realize that you still caught HIV, it was only around 16-66% effective and few months from now, you have an even higher chance of catching and spreading COVID. Would you be okay with this?
I have countless such examples. Those pushing for censoring misinformation are the biggest purveyor of misinformation.
. The ICUs aren't that overloaded, theres no reason to worry
.. -> We shouldn't have a lock down that is this strict allow people to make decisions on their own
... -> Restaurants shouldn't be required to be closed for indoor dining
.... -> Let people chose to wear the mask or not (Considering the US/CDC's terrible stance on masks that wasn't safe on a society level [The US gov ignored and discouraged stronger masks such as KN95, KF94, FFP2 for civilian usage])
.... -> The vaccine is too new, need more info
..... -> It's not fda approved, can't take it
...... -> My freedoms/won't get it/don't have more info
It's not just citiziens that are spouting nonsense about this. It's government officials spouting this. I talked with an liqour board agent about why fining a lady operating a bar with live music during the peak of the pandemic is the correct thing to do. (Executive order banned indoor dining and alcohol consumption in the state) He literally try to discredit me at every step of the way. This was an executive order + strict liqour board rules put down.
That the government is still visibly divided over whether vaccination is a good idea is what really troubles me here and it's pretty much purely America at this point. Canadian liberals don't like the Liberals - Liberals don't like the Conservatives and neither Liberals nor Conservatives like liberals. That all said every represented party in Canada (and almost every individual MP) is either pro-vax or losing a lot of clout right now. In the US the GOP is technically for vaccinations and sane mandates - but if you look at House Reps and Governors you'll see a lot of anti-mask mandate laws and other protests.
The government is of the people - but it should be the best of us not the biggest conspiracy theorists among us (having one or two is fine - but this problem is a lot bigger than just Marjorie Taylor Greene)
In no way is that "the government", and the most I can gather from that article is he's against mandates. Not the vaccines themselves.
I feel one of the biggest sources of divide right now is coming from all of those who try to conflate the two. Agree or not, one can be opposed to mandates to the point of rebellion while still rushing to take the vaccine. They are two completely separate things.
Even if he was one cog actively in "the government", I still would say that nothing here shows "That the government is still visibly divided over whether vaccination is a good idea"
I meant specifically the party leadership (since US political parties don't have formal representation) - If you look at McConnell and even Trump (when not hyperbolizing) you'll see they very consistently message that everyone should be vaccinated. One of the things I sort of appreciate about Trump is the fact that, even while getting booed at most of his events over it, he's continued to mention that he was vaccinated and it's perfectly safe. (This isn't meant to devolve into things we think about Trump - I just wanted to call out that single point).
Politicians need to be smart enough to know when to present a united front - they have a much greater visibility into the damage this pandemic is causing to the country by being completely immersed in dealing with it as their vocation. Yes, some people might still disagree (I've got no illusions or hope for a fully united consensus) but those people should be fewer, harder to see and much more ostracized than what the US political arena looks like today.
Politicians are also quite capable from detaching their personal beliefs from their public beliefs - Dick Cheney notably held to the party line opposing gay marriage while having an openly gay daughter. There are a litany of other examples of failing to practice what you preach - so yea, even if they privately hold these beliefs it's quite reasonable to assume that Mitch McConnell and others would be able to coerce them into falling in line when talking to the public.
This is not the same thing as goalpost shifting. This is just the result of changes to best-effort predictions based on information in an evolving situation. These changes often directly contradict each other as new evidence shows them to be false. A goalpost shift is usually by someone who ignores evidence that disproves their theory, and moves on to something else as a tactic for distraction and/or self-delusion. They change the subject but never address the item that they were proved wrong about.
No. That's lying. Moving the goal posts does not require lying, in fact in rarely includes it. It only requires that you change your argument when you're disproved.
At the start of the pandemic there was not much information on the effectiveness of public mask wearing to stop disease. It had been studied a tiny bit based on SE asian mask wearing cultures and the studies from memory were pretty inconclusive. We got much more and much better data when the pandemic began.
I'm not an expert and you should check these facts yourself, but my personal experience was that I investigated this after a trip to Japan many years before the pandemic began. I wondered why western culture did not have a similar mask wearing etiquette and my conclusion on the efficacy was that the evidence for it actually making a difference was sparse and weak.
EDIT: I may have misunderstood your emphasis. I took it to be on the time, as in you were saying that we knew beforehand that masks worked. I see this might not be correct. If you are saying that the evidence is still not good, you may be correct, but I think there is enough early evidence and plausible mechanism of action to assume that the right mask in the right setting is effective. I accept that single layer cloth masks might not do much.
There’s possible a lot of nuance there, that his short comment lacks (and probably leading to downvotes). There were several pre-pandemic studies that suggested masks would be harmful or didn’t show an effect. Then, state-by-state comparisons of laws in the US also show very little correlation. So if the emphasis was on (still) lacking retrospective evidence, that seems a fair complaint. Very recently, there’s a preprint article by a research group that looked back at the existing studies, and showed that many of them were too underpowered to be even capable of demonstrating the expected benefits. It has a great graph of this (https://www.reddit.com/r/COVID19/comments/pxet7q/unmasking_t...)
So—in contrast to the vaccine, where the data was gathered before giving authorization was given last year—it seems that mask mandates may have been just hopeful trials that assumed there wasn’t long-term problems associated with masks, well in advance of actually having relevant data. And, in further comparison, we also have drugs like HCQ, which were pushed ahead of the data—and continue to be advocate despite continued lack of evidence in large trials. So it feels unclear that data ever mattered as much as being seen doing something? I’m saddened by it all.
An optimisitic interpretation is that mask wearing looked to have a plausible mechanism for benefit, and so as the situation ran ahead of the data, the public health officials probably made a best effort guess that mask wearing will probably help and so made the recommendation. Not all public policy can be 100% informed by data 100% of the time. I like to think that this carried more weight in the decision than just wanting to appear to do something, though I am sure that also played some role.
Thankfully most evidence-respecting organizations including governments have taken the position that it is very unlikely that HCL is of any benefit as the data has become better. Its really only fringe groups who are pushing that one hard still and even many of those have moved on to ivermectin.
They work better at containing the spread of the virus than not wearing masks. Social distancing and some indoor restricts along with masks work fairly well. Vaccinations are even better.
1. The China travel ban started when China had very few COVID cases.
2. The China travel ban started when we already had untraceable domestic spread in the US.
3. The EU travel ban started when the EU had a lot of COVID cases.
If those three things happened (#1 and #3 happened without a doubt, jury's still out on #2, because our contact tracing has been crap), it's possible for both of the statements you are quoting to be true. There's literally no point in banning travel from China, if Paris has 10x the prevalence of COVID, and you haven't banned travel from it.
Considering that the first major outbreak in the US was caused by travelers from the EU, it seems pretty clear that banning travel form China, but not from Europe didn't do much to keep COVID out of the US.
Why were European travelers being treated preferentially to Chinese ones, for over a month? I see a lot of people insisting that the travel ban wasn't racist, but I've never seen anyone explain this conundrum.
>>>There's literally no point in banning travel from China, if Paris has 10x the prevalence of COVID, and you haven't banned travel from it.
Was there ever an indication that Paris had 10x the COVID of Wuhan?
If travel bans don't work, why did China implement them domestically, specifically with respect to Wuhan?[1]
>>>Considering that the first major outbreak in the US was caused by travelers from the EU
Citation please? Maybe my Google-Fu is weak, but I'm getting Washington State as the site of the first major US outbreak, and the first US case was a Wuhan traveler in Washington State.[2][3]
>>>Why were European travelers being treated preferentially to Chinese ones, for over a month?
Look at this map regarding the spread of SARS[4]. It reached the world fairly quickly. Yet we didn't implement a global travel shutdown. Travel bans were rather focused on Hong Kong and parts of China[5].
The cost-benefit analysis of implementing strict travel controls on countries other than the origin point are probably based on an assessment of the ability of secondary locations (in your example, Europe) to contain the spread from a small number of imported cases. This would provide the maximum benefit (spread reduction) at the lowest overall cost to quality of life and economic activity. If they had taken sensible measures, as they did with Ebola and SARS, maybe they could have.
> Was there ever an indication that Paris had 10x the COVID of Wuhan?
This would be a meaningful response if it was a Wuhan travel ban. But it wasn't. It was a China travel ban.
Beijing, for instance, had ~300 total cases at the time the China travel ban was put in place. Paris, at the time that the EU travel ban was put in place had multiple thousands. The prevalence of COVID in the EU was more than an order of magnitude higher when the EU travel ban was put in place.
> If travel bans don't work, why did China implement them domestically, specifically with respect to Wuhan?[1]
Travel bans can work if you ban travel from places with a high case load. We didn't do that, though. We banned travel from places that we politically disliked, and didn't ban travel from places that we liked. Unsurprisingly, the virus didn't care about our political preferences...
> Citation please? Maybe my Google-Fu is weak, but I'm getting Washington State as the site of the first major US outbreak, and the first US case was a Wuhan traveler in Washington State.[2][3]
I live in WA. It was not a major[1] outbreak. New York was the first major outbreak, and very, very quickly overtook WA in case numbers.
> The cost-benefit analysis of implementing strict travel controls on countries other than the origin point are probably based on an assessment of the ability of secondary locations (in your example, Europe) to contain the spread from a small number of imported cases.
By late-February, COVID was completely out of control in Europe. By that point, anyone who thought that the EU had the ability to 'control the spread from a small number of imported cases' was either blind, or crazy, or just woke up from a two-month-long coma. They were way past the point of having to deal with a 'small number of imported cases' - they were at the point where uncontrolled community spread was overwhelming national hospital systems, and national lockdowns were being instituted.
And through all this time, we were welcoming European travelers with open arms.
I understand all of your arguments, and all the disaster mitigation steps you outline make sense - but they were not applied consistently to the two regions. By every metric, China was doing better at the time of the travel ban from it. By every metric, we should have banned travel from Europe in mid-February. We didn't, because we like the EU.
[1] I mean, it was major, if the baseline is compared to zero. It was not major if compared to what NYC went through a week later. NYC went from having one Covid case on March 1st, to 1,000 deaths by March 31st. New York state had more COVID cases than any country in the world by April 10th. [2] Meanwhile, Washington went from one case in January 21st, to one death on Feb 29th, to 247 deaths by March 31st. [4]
[4] Was the Washington outbreak the first one? Yes. Did it become a major one? Yes, by mid-March. Was New York worse off by every metric at that point? Also yes. Was New York a complete disaster zone by mid-April? Also yes. It was seeing a thousand deaths a day.
Ok, I think that's all pretty fair. I would have preferred a China-style lockdown to be implemented no later than February. I think we're closer to agreeing than disagreeing, in that we both feel the severity of the US's response was inadequate. I'm fortunate enough to live in Japan so I'm watching the disaster in my home country from afar.
The travel ban to China in the US mostly came from FAs blatantly refusing to fly to China. Also, yet we got EU flight bans nearly instantaneously. (Go figure)
>>>Nothing stops people from China from flying to Europe and then the US.
What portion of the traveling population is willing to take trans-continental detours like that? Some controls are better than NO controls.
>>>Yes, it was racism. Yes, it was pointless.
Are you saying that strict controls on population movements originating from the source geographic region of a virus should never be implemented as an early step to containment?
>>>I'm saying that calling it the "Chinese flu" and combining it with Trump's nationalist rhetoric and other outright racist remarks is racism, yes.
That's moving the goalposts. We were discussing the government act of implementing travel restrictions, as a policy. Rather than debate whether that is sound policy, you've retorted with "well he also said racist stuff...which is racist". This is why we can't make progress. Rather than address individual implementations on their own merits, all too often people are now lumping everything originating from the same decision-maker together and discarding the whole package.
>>>And what is the point of stopping flights from China only? When there were global outbreaks?
There was no spontaneous, independent outbreak of COVID appearing contemporaneously in Italy or the UK. A complete international travel ban probably WOULD have been the best idea (along with 90 days of Wuhan-style internal lockdowns). Short of that, a ban on the source nation of (again, at that time) 100% of the fatal cases seems like an appropriate compromise to not completely collapse confidence in the steady trajectory of the US & global economy.
>>>"Obama did it too" is not an argument.
It establishes precedent. Both for the policy itself, and that the deafening lack of "Racism!" criticism as proof of the hypocrisy inherent in the accusers today.
It's context. You want to ignore the fact that Trump was blaming China as a whole for coronavirus?
It's racism to blame the coronavirus on Chinese people.
So you want to tell me you are surprised when people see racism by the racist guy who does and says racist things pretty much constantly?
I'm not going sit here and line by line debate you. I lived during it. I know what happened. It was a nonsense policy like basically the whole of the Trump administration's response. It was a complete joke. There was no federal response to the domestic crisis here. We had no supplies. We had no leadership.
It's just a funny thing to point to this as some shining example of Trump doing the right thing when ever other indicator is saying otherwise.
>>>You want to ignore the fact that Trump was blaming China as a whole for coronavirus?
I think it's valid to blame the CCP government for the pandemic going global. Especially when the CCP instituted a strict DOMESTIC travel lockdown without a matching INTERNATIONAL one. Why did they let people continue to fly internationally from Wuhan?
>>So you want to tell me you are surprised when people see racism by the racist guy who does and says racist things pretty much constantly?
I'm saying that people are so wrapped up in their emotional response to Trump the person that it is interfering with their ability to accept sensible government policies. Policy decisions which are not distinctive from previous responses to global pandemic risks over the past 20 years. I see it all the time in my own (black American) community.
>>>I'm not going sit here and line by line debate you.
You asked if I wanted to continue the debate. Every one of my posts links to policy implementations in living memory, with citations. Your posts have no references, and you've doubled down on arguing about racism rather than debate policy, before bowing out of the conversation? So...concession accepted? This is why we can't have nice things...like a functioning government.
>>>There was no federal response to the domestic crisis here. We had no supplies. We had no leadership.
The US has known for a decade that it was unprepared for a pandemic[1]. Lack of supplies cannot be dumped solely on the feet of the most recent shitty Commander-in-Chief, in a long line of turds holding the office. As for leadership, half of the country spent the previous 3 years undermining the Executive Branch's authority because Orange Man Bad, and then was surprised when the massive (yet understaffed of key leadership positions near the top) Federal bureaucracy wasn't able to coalesce and pivot on a dime to tackle an emergent crisis? And you are SURPRISED at this? I'm not.
So, you're not wrong that there have been plenty of shifts. Some of those were laughably optimistic even at the time, some of those are true (masks do work, but cloth masks suck). Some of the people are hypocritical and will get haircuts or whatever that they forbid others from doing.
But you know what basically everyone is doing? Getting vaccinated. Even Trump got vaccinated and told others to do the same. [1][2] If it's some kind of poison, as many are memeing, you'd think we wouldn't want to do that. You can argue that there are long-term unknowns... but that's equally true of the virus. And I've seen literally nothing that the vaccine has caused that isn't known to also be caused by Covid.
So I'd say not to get your science from journalists in general, wear a quality mask (N95 preferably, but at least surgical), and do what you can to lower the replication rate of this stupid virus below 1 so that it goes away. That last part is proving really hard so far.
I encourage everyone to get vaccinated if they can, but the virus will never go away. You can't seriously expect asymptomatic people to continue wearing masks indefinitely.
It does seem likely that the virus will become endemic, though hopefully reduced to something like a common cold virus. It is possible to get something in between, though, where the virus only exists in certain regions and thereby contain it, though this seems to be getting less likely.
We might get some traction with a booster tailored to delta, but only time will tell.
You seemed to have confused me with someone that is opposed to the vaccination. I have been fully vaccinated for months.
Most people do confuse my positions because I disagree with both sides. I am one of the unorthodox Vaccinated Ant-Vaxxer's that believes people should get vaccinated but I also respect individual liberty to allow them the choose to no inject themselves with a medical treatment if they do not desire it. Since I oppose government mandates then I must be "Anti-Vaxx".....
Crazy I know, to respect peoples body autonomy in 2021 during a pandemic no less......
I also have a high degree bullshit detector, and can not stand hypocrisy which I see ALOT of logical hypocrisy around covid.
>>do what you can to lower the replication rate of this stupid virus below 1 so that it goes away. That last part is proving really hard so far.
it is not "proving hard" it was always impossible and anyone to tell you otherwise is lying. SARS-COVID-V2 is endemic, and will likely settle out with annual deaths being over that of seasonal flu. This idea that we can "beat" COVID like we have beat other things like polio is just wrong.
> it is not "proving hard" it was always impossible
Well there's the Australian method, but I'd prefer things not go that way. I agree that people should have informed consent for vaccinating, that's why I try to inform people so that they consent.
I dont believe that is either practical or sustainable. Nor is it compatible with a society that has any respect for individualism which we in America do.
AU will be unlikely to keep their draconian measures in place forever, either economic reality, or social unrest will force a change
> AU will be unlikely to keep their draconian measures in place forever, either economic reality, or social unrest will force a change
It's worked well for us in Western Australia, and we're effectively a covid-free island with one of the best individual economies in the world right now.
The restrictions will be relaxed as we get 80% vaccinated - which we're very likely to do, this year.
Also the Australian method has given us less COVID deaths in the past two years than America had, yesterday. It is a pity that those 600k Americans that died won't be able to bask in America's superior environment of individual rights.
So you believe that Zero COVID deaths is the singular goal, to cast off all Human Rights, freedoms, and liberties in pursuit of that goal is ethical position?
That safety and security is triumphant over freedom and liberty?
That life is so dear, and safety so sweet, that is to be purchased at the price of chains and Tyranny complete with camps for which you send people?
Yes have pity and sadness for those have died, but I know what course I prefer.. for me give me liberty or give me death for I would rather die free, than a serf in a gilded cage
That's a pretty poetic way to say you're fine with letting 600 000 people have zero freedom. Australia will be opened up and 90% vaccinated with maybe 3k deaths. Unfortunately Little Caesars went bankrupt here, during that time, but I guess that's liberty dying on the altar of public safety. Enjoy the ultimate sacrifice those people made for two years of unlimited Applebees.
It is pretty short sighted if you believe the only businesses and people financially impacted and bankrupted in Australia were Little Caesars, I can assure you that is false
I am sure you likely enjoy a tech sector job which afford you the privilege of sitting on your bum all day having very little impact to your financial life, others are not an privileged.
> It is pretty short sighted if you believe the only businesses and people financially impacted and bankrupted in Australia were Little Caesars, I can assure you that is false
Oh cheers, I didn't know. I will reconsider my position on the 600k dead Americans.
Could you just humor me and do a little back of the envelope calculation of the loss of economy in the US vs AU vs the number of deaths? Hint: Australia's economy is doing fine. Let me know how much each life was worth.
Goals should be achievable. I encourage everyone to get vaccinated if they can but we'll never reach 98% no matter what we do.
Fortunately CDC data shows minimal risk to children. The estimated infection fatality rate for the 0-17 age group is only 0.001%.
The main benefit of vaccination is reducing the risk of severe symptoms. Vaccinated people can still catch and spread the virus, thereby putting your family at risk. There is probably some reduction in contagiousness but we don't have clear data on that yet.
Forgot to mention if my son get any kind of lungs issue or pneumonia he would likely die.
It’s because his lungs are already very week from some other issues.
So while “normal” kid are likely to survive if infected mine will not unless he has 0 symptoms.
You can walk yourself through the reasons why with simple math, really.
Every disease has an estimated R0. The number of people an infected person will infect. You probably have heard of this.
Delta, last I checked, has an estimated R0 of between 5 and 9.5.
Vaccination levels reduce that. And it's a simple equation. All you need to know is the vaccination rate for your population, and an estimated efficacy rate of the vaccine.
And from that, you can figure the new adjusted Rt:
rt = r0 * (1 - (vacRate * eff))
And that's it. And no matter what efficacy rate you pick (infection efficacy estimates for mRNA against Delta vary widely), the resultant rt will be less than the initial r0.
And if it's less, then that effectively means that the disease is less contagious for that population, compared to how contagious it was pre-vaccination.
And less contagious is better than more contagious.
So now I am legitimately curious. What part of the above reasoning do you actually disagree with?
(Incidentally, vaccination also improves your chances of avoiding future infection, even if you've already been infected.)
What is the efficiency against transmission of the latest mutations? AFAIK there is a great efficiency against bad symptoms, but much lower efficiency against transmitting the disease to others, but I don't know the latest numbers.
Last I heard, the CDC gave a 95% CI of the mRNA vaccines being 26% - 84% against infection (from Delta), and there's an additional 40% - 60% protection against infecting others (I've seen that estimate in multiple places but I don't know the source). If that's true, it suggests an overall range of 55.6 - 93.6 effectiveness against infecting others.
Over the summer Florida has been in the news because of an ongoing epidemic spike. Using hospitalization rates, the spike started sometime in early July. By late Sept it is almost gone. The fully vaccinated rate increased from 48% to 59% during the same time period. Is the receding fully explainable by the increase in vaccination rate, or can we consider other forces at play, for example forces of outside human control that have been at play in every single epidemic
before the vaccines era?
Edit: I plotted Rt as a function of eff, assuming r0=7 and vacRate=1. Rt goes below 1 only for values of eff > 0.85, which means that given the numbers for eff you gave in a different post "overall range of 55.6 - 93.6 effectiveness against infecting others", there are plenty of scenarios where vaccines by themselves cannot stop an infection wave even if the population is 100% vaccinated.
Edit2. For a 0.59 vacRate, there are some solutions for R0 * (1 - 0.59 * eff) < 1 with eff in [0, 1] and R0 in [0, 9], specifically there are solutions for R0 < 2.x Not going to cut it for 0.59 vaxx rate and delta, no matter how effective the vaccines are.
Natural immunity as a direct effect of an infection wave is my first guess. In some circles 'natural immunity' has become a dirty word :/
The assumptions between the equation rt = r0 * (1 - (vacRate * eff)) are too simplistic and unable to explain Florida infection wave behavior. There are more variables that we ignore when focusing only on Rt and vaccines.
The silver lining: At some point the whole population would have been exposed to covid, either through vaccines, infection or both. At that point the whole vaccination rate / effectiveness discussion becomes moot. Perhaps I wish the public discourse would keep an eye on 'estimated population fraction exposed to covid' that includes all plausible factors.
Yes, I brought up that equation merely to illustrate how vaccination alone can impact Rt downward - for a while it was unclear to me exactly how "partial vaccination" (before herd immunity) was a benefit; that helped me see that it really just mean it slows down the doubling rate until you get to Rt=1. But overall, Rt is impacted by all forms of mitigation including natural immunity.
The way I actually use that equation in my personal dashboards is to estimate what Rt "would" be, at today's mitigation levels, if no one had gotten vaccinated. So for instance, Portland's Rt is currently 0.92 (according to one model). By plugging in Portland's vaccination rate and efficacy estimates, you can estimate that Portland's Rt would be around 2 today if not for the vaccinations, if all other mitigation were the same.
On the one hand, 2 is a lot better than those estimates of 5 to 9.5, which means that we're impacted a lot by current mitigation practices (masks, distancing) and natural immunity. On the other hand, 2 is huge! Given estimates on infectious periods, that means that currently our cases halve every 90 days or so, but 2 would mean cases would be doubling every week or so. Gargantuan difference. So just an illustration that vaccination has a big impact and matters a lot.
This is missing the last step of calculations as any degree of lower r0 doesn’t necessarily prevent endemic disease. My understanding is that at this point, vaccines are about keeping symptoms mild and ICUs at low capacity through reduced spread and more effective immune responses. This seems compatible with the view that we will have to live with this disease for a long time.
I mostly agree with you but "And less contagious is better than more contagious." is a giant hand wave in a logical argument. You should explain what specific outcome in the longer term improved by this and justify that.
I don't know what pro-vax people are saying "get vaccinated and your old life comes back", that seems a mischaracterization to me. The reason to get vaccinated is to protect yourself and others from the disease.
Take the vaccine (Moderna if you can pick), significantly reduce the health risk of covid on you. Also, helps to dampen the overall rate in the county and reduces the risk new mutations that may create more breakthroughs.
If you're complaining about the withdraw of mitigations, that's because people and states have refused to participate in the mitigations as a whole.
If they were compliant, we'd be in a situation like Australia or Taiwan. Masks optional, nearly normal (they have restrictive borders), open concerts, and lockdowns only when a couple of cases pop up.
Australia has been on significant lockdown for long stretches at a time, I am not sure I'd consider that "nearly normal" since they have to keep locking down every time Covid is reintroduced somehow.
They are keeping Covid rather low, though I would not trivialize the cost of doing so.
> "and reduces the risk new mutations" likely the opposite is true. It is called evolutionary pressure.
Chicken and egg problem: You can't have evolutionary pressure without an environment to operate in. Vaccines reduce the space in which they can attempt to successfully mutate.
That environment of evolutionary pressure is exactly what is being created. An environment where strains with higher fitness for immune escape are more able to spread, in a compounding manner. Particularly with leaky vaccines as we're using for c19 that do not prevent contraction with high efficacy.
or read how antibiotic resistance comes about, which seems to be less contentious / politicly affected... But the same evolutionary mechanism is at work.
That's not how evolutionary pressure works. If fewer people are infected, the virus has fewer opportunities to mutate. Among those people, any surviving mutation has (by definition) a greater ability to escape the vaccine, but that's not the same thing as saying that the vaccine increases the chance of a new mutation.
There's a missing part to this by the way: you need a reservoir for new mutations to replicate in, and they have to be mutations which become dominant in the reservoir.
Since the vaccines reduced R(eff), generally below 1 (so far observed), any chain of infection through vaccinated people tends to terminate - not continue. Which means however vaccine evading that virus is, all of it dies.
This all changes if you have a large group of unvaccinated people presenting no challenge to it. Freely spreading for a whole lot of cycles through that population means more vaccine-resistant copies are now out there, with more opportunity to challenge vaccine resistant individuals they come into contact with (since R(eff) in the unvaccinated is ~8).
R(eff) lowers the higher the vaccination rate. There are some pretty obvious % targets depending on your R(eff) initial. For the initial population number it's ~90%.[1]
"no reliable evidence" - of course vaccination helps bring R(eff) lower. That's just the way the math works. If R(eff) is already low enough due to other mitigation, then additional vaccination helps bring it below 1. We see that all over the nation now, R(eff) rates dipping below 1 as vaccination rates increase.
I have trouble visualizing that, but if that's true it's just more reason to do whatever we can to get local Rt < 1. Vaccines get us partway there, other mitigation efforts like mask use, distancing (and natural immunity) get us partway there as well.
I'm personally vaccinated and not very worried about getting the disease if I have to be out and about. I feel my personal risk is low. But in terms of societal/community risk to others, that's why I have a personal policy of limiting myself socially so I don't contribute to spread.
The local metrics I personally follow are:
1) Is Rt above 1?
2) Are cases/100k above 10?
3) Is test positivity above 5%?
4) Is ICU usage above 85%
If any of those are on the wrong side, I'm limiting my social gatherings.
Let's be clear, mitigations were being removed when vaccination rates were increasing and hospital rates were decreasing. It's only because a significant enough portion of the country has decided that not getting vaccinated is more important to them and have caused our medical system to be put back under strain have the mitigations been put back in place.
80% of people 12 and up have received two doses of Pfizer or Moderna in Canada. COVID is still a major factor here (worse than ever in some regions with lower rates ~75%).
And how many of the people effected by that are unvaccinated? You are simply re-stating what I said, as vaccines rates went up AND hospitalizations went down, mitigations were removed. Then the Delta variant hit and has been an absolute disaster for those who have refused to get vaccinated and our medical care system. 20% is a significant amount of people, and hospitalizations have gone up and therefore mitigations have been put back in place.
I would love to get back to (semi-)normal, I'm sick of this shit. But I've done, and continue to do the things that are helping make things less worst, I wear a mask, I socially distance, I have my vaccine. If a new version of the vaccine came out that targeted the Delta version of Covid, I would get that too.
And I don't believe that Covid is going to be eradicated by everyone getting vaccinated. In fact, I don't know anyone that believes that. What I and others believe is that if we get very close to 100% vaccination, we can lift many of the mitigations being put in place.
Yes, people will still get Covid, but they will be less likely to get it, less likely to get sick if the do, less likely to have severe symptoms, less likely to go to the hospital, and less likely to die. And our hospitals won't be over run.
The main purpose of my comment was to add some clarity to the discussion with concrete numbers and references. Terms like significant, insignificant, less, more, etc, should be quantified with references in my opinion where possible.
To answer your question, the unvaccinated represent 75% of hospitalizations in one region that publishes raw data (https://bit.ly/3oriNqS).
It's that and that the more spreadable Indian/Delta Variant developed and took hold in April. (Variant name there for news references) Took the US 2 months to announce it was a concern.
You should still get vaccinated. Post-infection immunity is very heterogeneous, with respect to what level of protection you'll have, and how long it will last. You might have great protection for a bit, or you might get reinfected just like the first time, like many have.
The combined protection of natural with vaccination will be better than just one or the other. I hope you stay safe.
> Yes, you should be vaccinated regardless of whether you already had COVID-19 because:
> Research has not yet shown how long you are protected from getting COVID-19 again after you recover from COVID-19.
> Vaccination helps protect you even if you’ve already had COVID-19.
an Israeli paper[2] (probably the one you're thinking of) also mentions that yes - your immunity from having the disease is better than a vaccine but getting both still provides a much better outcome. Please note that this study is very recent and may be overturned in review.
> This study demonstrated that natural immunity confers longer lasting and stronger protection against infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalization caused by the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, compared to the BNT162b2 two-dose vaccine-induced immunity. Individuals who were both previously infected with SARS-CoV-2 and given a single dose of the vaccine gained additional protection against the Delta variant.
So maybe you'll end up super-immune! Congratulations! (now go get vaccinated)
It's been recently published and the warning on it is:
This article is a preprint and has not been peer-reviewed [what does this mean?]. It reports new medical research that has yet to be evaluated and so should not be used to guide clinical practice.
It's not something that can be held up as evidence in any direction at the moment.
FWIW, an anti-vax cousin of mine has had covid three different times. Each time he recovered, but each time he kept spreading it. So don't count having had covid once as a blanket "I don't need the vax" card.
A little off topic, but I wish we could stop using this nice-sounding "hesitant" euphemism. Hesitant implies that people are weighing options and open to changing their minds. With the amount of time they have been available and the overabundance of evidence that the COVID vaccines are safe, effective, and that they decrease hospitalizations and death, I find it very hard to believe that anyone is still "on the fence" about it.
> She thinks they’re taking it down because they don’t want people to know the truth.
And there it is--this doesn't sound like a person who is weighing their options in good faith. It sounds like someone who is already convinced of what the truth is. Let's stop calling them "hesitant".
What's the point of appealing to Mirrian-Webster? They're the tail, not the dog; nobody goes to one of their dictionaries to determine how a word or phrase is used.
That’s how they are traditionally being used. They are used as the ultimate source of truth. “We don’t agree, let’s see what the dictionary says”. That trick would still work on majority of people I’d think.
But yes, it’s the tail that is wagging the dog which is wagging the tail.
There have been cases where lobbyists and special interest groups got the dictionary definitions altered to suit they client’s needs.
Not really though. If you go back 2 years, people who were opposed to mandatory vaccinations were generally people who thought their children shouldn't be required to get vaccinated against measles. Vaccine mandates are crucial social policy
Maybe the reason USA has so many anti vaccers is because of vaccine mandates? It is much easier to believe that something is evil when you are forced to do it. Also many first world countries doesn't mandate vaccines and people get vaccinated anyway, so it isn't crucial social policy.
Exactly. COVID is so deadly, that people have to be coerced and mandated into taking it, when in the beginning of all of this, most were walking around asymptomatic with it.
No, that’s probably not the reason. The anti-COVID stuff preceded discussion of vaccine mandates. Europe has mandatory childhood vaccinations and not the same level of anti-vaccine sentiment.
Or they are tools for a medical totalitarian dystopia. 2 years ago there were effectively zero exception free vaccine mandates, and only a very few places where they were actually hard to get.
Merriam-Webster's standard in definitions is descriptive rather than prescriptive:
Merriam-Webster is a descriptive dictionary in that it aims to describe and indicate how words are actually used by English speakers and writers. Generally, the descriptive approach to lexicography does not dictate how words should be used or set forth rules of "correctness," unlike the prescriptive approach.
If Merriam-Webster are defining a word in a specific way, that reflects typical usage of that word, not M-W's "decision". It is literally the voice of the people.
The complaint is that Merriam-Webster is not reflecting typical usage by "the people" here, but rather spin from a concentrated press campaign. John Q. Budweiser down the street isn't using the word differently, but all the right newspapers and pundits are, and all at the same time. To John, that starts to look Orwellian.
In my country people that are already double-jabbed and say they want to wait for the 3rd dose/booster are already called science deniers and anti-vaxxers, so that's that.
It's certainly better than "anti-vaxxer" which labels them and buckets them as crazy and makes them dig their heels in further. If the goal is to convince people to get vaccinated, belittling them is not the right approach.
When I was in the process of disassociating from a high demand religion (a decade long process), I was struck with how effective people who insisted on reality were. Reality sounded belittling, but it really wasn't. I see an analogy here with the people insisting against vaccination with zeal and fervor. It is very hard to break through the bubble of cognitive dissonance, and lone/let live or "humor them" approaches frankly are disingenuous.
shrug. Labels are quite effective for concise communication, all negatives aside. Such as your classification of my point as a strawman (which I don't consider it to be), you communicate a precise response with a single word.
strawman is a description of your argument, not you. It doesn't make a judgement about what kind of person you are, and that you have been or always will make bad arguments.
It's very different from calling you Strawman-er, which would be making unfounded assumptions about your general argumentation style and would pre-judge future statements by you.
"Anti-vaccine advocate" is clear. It identifies a set of behaviors that are intellectually dishonest, either claiming hesitancy, outright denying science, or (even worse) economically benefitting by sowing confusion.
When people don't do this, they aren't advocating against vaccination.
My understanding of the strawman fallacy is that the strawman is inaccurate. None is expressed here, simply labeling a phenomenon.
> which would be making unfounded assumptions about your general argumentation style and would pre-judge future statements by you.
After decades of internet discussion, such charity from people holding opposing viewpoints appears to be rare even when explicitly and rigorously adopted.
Most people who are "COVID vaccine hesitant", or whatever term we want to use, aren't opposed to the concept of vaccination in general. Many of them have even gotten flu shots many times in the past, which as an aside when analyzed rigorously are barely better than placebo:
> Injected influenza vaccines probably have a small protective effect against influenza and ILI (moderate-certainty evidence), as 71 people would need to be vaccinated to avoid one influenza case, and 29 would need to be vaccinated to avoid one case of ILI. Vaccination may have little or no appreciable effect on hospitalisations (low-certainty evidence) or number of working days lost.
So 71 shots to avoid one case, or if we want to be charitable we should use the 29 shots per one ILI since really ILI is what we care about. And no actual effect on hosp. or working days lost (both of which is what we should really actually care about)
--
Anyway I got off track with the flu vaccine stuff, but anyway surely you're aware that far more people are "hesitant" about the COVID vaccine specifically than any of the other vaccines? So to cast it as a case of "anti-vaccine advocacy" is just wrong. That's not what's going on here and as long as you refuse to try to understand these people you will continue failing to impact their behavior.
> as you refuse to try to understand these people you will continue failing to impact their behavior.
You and I are not responsible for their behavior, and as a society we have entertained their petulance long enough.
I support vaccine mandates to increase the social costs for people who fail to perform their civic duty to be vaccinated. (Medically unable is a different story).
Well good for you, but you actually do need to look on the impact on behavior of the things you advocate for. Unless your goal is purely to punish/harm those that don't share your beliefs rather than some tangible outcome in terms of vaccination or [insert primary endpoint here].
> "We stopped elective inpatient surgeries. We stopped some of our outpatient patient visits. We stopped ICU medical transfers from other referral rural hospitals. ... We've asked for more time to work on strategies with the state to ensure that as many people as possible get vaccinated," said Tom Quatroche, the president and CEO of Erie County Medical Center.
I would be remiss if I didn't mention that we already know beyond a shadow of a doubt that mass COVID vaccination doesn't magically stop the virus from doing what it does. Israel has absurdly high vaccine uptake - including a sizeable proportion of triply-vaxxed people - and we're still seeing more "cases" than at the same time the previous year. So I wonder how much you've actually looked into the efficacy (in terms of chance of infection and spread) of these vaccines given the data. And I wonder how rigorously you've thought about the second and third order effects when phenomenoms like antigenic drift and immune escape and Marek's disease are very well known.
Anyway, I won't go too far down that rabbit hole since the discussion is more of "assuming vaccination is good and we don't have any ethical qualms with using violent police power to compel people to consume a pharmaceutical product where the manufacturers have literally no liability to the consumer for any adverse reactions, what is the best way to modify behavior" than about examining the premise of the utility of mass vaccination itself. It's probably already obvious that I completely reject the ethics of what you are in favor of. So setting the pesky notion of ethics aside for the time-being, I still think you're failing to see the very obvious harms that come from the brand of coercion that you're advocating for.
Like I said above, we're already seeing the effects of these mandates on healthcare capacity. Firing 5% of one's hospital staff is no small thing. And you seem to very much not see how censoring and suppressing alternate points of view only reinforces those points of view. Implicitly you seem to think that adopting a policy and actually enforcing it in the real-world are the same thing - which is a trap that many a naive intellectual has fallen into since time immemorial.
Hey, I apologize that my stance, as to me it appears to rub you the wrong way. If you're feeling heated or triggered, please accept an apology from an internet stranger.
My stance on the necessity of vaccines isn't a belief. Its from understanding the science of vaccines and the exponential mathematic of pandemics.
Why people choose to deviate from a very clear dominating strategy is simply not necessary for me to understand or research. The simplest assumption is they believe something that is not supported in the science, but have too much ego on the line to accept they are incorrect. This accurately classifies most of the concerns I've seen. I can empathize. We've all made mistakes in who we trust or what we conclude. But in the meantime, people like kids, the especially vulnerable, and those who cannot medically take the vaccine are put at risk. Hence why I am absolutely okay with a mandate to ensure the anti-vaccine advocates burden the social costs for their decisions.
> Why people choose to deviate from a very clear dominating strategy is simply not necessary for me to understand or research.
It's very important for you to understand if you hope to impact the behavior of people who don't share your beliefs. Or am I misunderstanding and you live in a universe where you can wave a magic wand? If so, I'd recommend just using that aforementioned wand to eliminate all mortality :P
> Its from understanding the science of vaccines and the exponential mathematic of pandemics.
It's logistic, not exponential, because the exponential growth tapers off as the proportion of immunity increases. This might seem like a nitpick*, but it's very indicative of the inability of those in your camp to foresee higher order effects. From a purely societal perspective, these vaccines do not offer anywhere near enough protection to actually avoid the propagation of the virus. All they've done is create a rich population of SARS-2-naive vaccinated individuals who provided perfect substrate for a variant like Delta, which possess point mutations on the spike, to rip through the vaccinated (given that, insofar as the vaccines were reasonably effective against "alpha", they prevented the vaccinated from acquiring natural immunity). It is no coincidence that a strain that largely-but-not-entirely bypasses vaccine immunity is now by far the most dominant strain here in the US.
* granted you could counter-nitpick me here by pointing out that the pandemic phase is specifically the exponential part of the epidemic curve
> But in the meantime, people like kids, the especially vulnerable, and those who cannot medically take the vaccine are put at risk.
Kids are not at serious risk of COVID-19. How can you claim to "understand the science" if you won't even admit this very basic fact? The infection fatality rate of COVID-19 is dramatically lower than Influenza, and we never pulled kids out of in-person schooling for two years straight when presented with pandemic Influenza. (Yet if we applied COVID risk standards, we would have)
Note that this is usually where people come in and make a bunch of unfounded assertions about long COVID and how the kids will be crippled for life. I hope you're not going to take that route :)
> the especially vulnerable, and those who cannot medically take the vaccine are put at risk.
Ignoring the ethical issue of how much responsibility someone has to ingest a pharmaceutical product with no manufacturer liability, I think a much more accurate statement is that those individuals are put at risk by those who have not acquired natural immunity. Briefly:
The difference between a SARS-2-naive vaccinated individual and a SARS-2-naive unvaccinated individual is real, but quite minor in the context of Delta in terms of infection & transmission. The difference between a SARS-2-recovered unvaccinated individual and a SARS-2-naive vaccinated individual is absolutely massive. (https://pastebin.com/8yR3y5NA to avoid cluttering this comment)
So, while ethically I don't accept the notion of assigning blame to transmission of highly infectious endemic respiratory viruses, if we're gonna assign blame, the relevant criteria is "previous exposure to SARS-2", not vaccination status.
>we don't have any ethical qualms with using violent police power to compel people to consume a pharmaceutical product where the manufacturers have literally no liability to the consumer for any adverse reactions,
Where, exactly, is anyone in the US "using violent police power to compel people to consume a pharmaceutical product"?
At most, folks are being required to either get vaccinated or regularly tested in order to keep working. Which is AIUI, at least under US labor law, absolutely legal.
So I ask again: where, exactly, is "using violent police power to compel people to consume a pharmaceutical product" happening?
Well personally I'm an ancap so I consider all laws/executive orders to be implicitly (and often explicitly) backed by the police power of the state. You can say that the government requiring employees to be vaccinated isn't violent police power because they're not holding them down and injecting them, but what exactly will the state do if the employer doesn't comply? They'll send in the guys with guns to enforce.
Really it's such a small thing to be splitting hairs over though. If you prefer, just read what I wrote and mentally s/violent police power/coercion
Sorry if I wasn’t clear enough. It’s being used in places like Biden’s federal mandate that will (when they announce the actual OSHA rule) slap private companies with massive fees if they have unvaccinated employees
Barely better than placebo? The paper you linked says:
"Inactivated influenza vaccines probably reduce influenza in healthy adults from 2.3% without vaccination to 0.9%"
That's a ~60% reduction, which is nothing to shake a stick at. But I don't think it's a surprise to anyone that the flu shots do not have a remarkably high reduction rate; that's been public knowledge for a long time. In fact the CDC's own data on this is even gloomier than the Cochrane review:
In any event, if people are concerned about mRNA vaccines for whatever reason, there are other vaccines out there like the J&J vaccine.
While there are always reasons to be distrustful of the gov't (it is not hard to find examples of the CDC, Surgeon General, etc being dead wrong on aspects of the pandemic), a cost benefit analysis of whether to get the vaccine or not should produce a pretty clear result.
Sorry, where are you getting that quote? I couldn't find your quote on the page. Anyway, that quote doesn't disprove the points I made whatsoever. The number needed to treat is enormous, and there's no detectable benefit on either hospitalizations or missed days of work:
> Injected influenza vaccines probably have a small protective effect against influenza and ILI (moderate-certainty evidence), as 71 people would need to be vaccinated to avoid one influenza case, and 29 would need to be vaccinated to avoid one case of ILI. Vaccination may have little or no appreciable effect on hospitalisations (low-certainty evidence) or number of working days lost.
That's literally the spitting definition of "barely better than placebo" in my book.
Indeed, I prefer "vaccine redundancy" over "vaccine hesitancy".
For people who've had Covid before, vaccine is simply redundant. (If you disagree, please provide sources / data for your view.) Of course, getting vaccinated would increase their immune system's response, but so would for someone who was vaccinated a month ago... at some point, it has to be "good enough" for normal life (not 100% safe anyways).
Israeli study says getting infected creates 13x stronger immune response than the vaccine versus Delta. How much stronger do we need to get that justifies taking the vaccine at that point? This is the entire point of why they say vaccine mandates are wrong for those that already had it.
Vaccination provides immune system training for exactly one viral protein. Recovery from natural infection provides immune system training for all proteins present in the variant that caused the infection.
Vaccination only provides an immune response for the spike protein, not a broad response.
No, the point is clear but missing an essential detail. Vaccination results in much better outcomes when you do get the disease. Ergo the ideal is to be vaccinated, and then if you so happen to get sick, recovery is quicker and you have a stronger immune response.
What are you talking about? I've seen studies that suggest vaccination in addition to natural immunity can result in higher levels of antibodies, but I've seen nothing to suggest that vaccination results in "much better outcomes" as compared to natural immunity.
People with natural immunity aren't even getting infected in any meaningful numbers, while fully vaccinated individuals are getting infected left and right.
If you are unvaccinated and previously got infected, you now have a much better outcome than being vaccinated, including from future variants of the virus.
> "I've had COVID - therefore I don't need to get the vaccine." Turns out that's not entirely true. On Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a study reporting that individuals who've had COVID are twice as likely to get reinfected
The article makes it sounds as if prior infection makes it 2x as likely to get infected as having the vaccine.
In reality, the study is only comparing previously infected individuals. So it's "just Covid" vs "Covid + vaccine". This is obvious. My original claim is, that "just Covid" is better (or equally good) as "just vaccine".
The reporter's slant and choice of words is irrelevant.
It looks a lot like you are looking for reasons to ignore the evidence. No one can help you if contrarianism is your end goal, and you can harm others plenty.
And, this is exactly why youtube is banning speech right now.
>I find it very hard to believe that anyone is still "on the fence" about it.
>And there it is--this doesn't sound like a person who is weighing their options in good faith. It sounds like someone who is already convinced of what the truth is.
But lots if these people DO change their minds. I have a relatively small circle of in-person family and friends, and five of the six hesitant people in that group are now covid vaxxed. There are those who will accept no evidence, but most of the "hesitant" aren't in that group.
+1 I sincerely want to believe this is true. What information in September was enough to convince them, where they weren't convinced in August (when the vaccines got full FDA approval).
EDIT: According to [1] the "Wait and See" bucket is down to about 7% as of September. I'd really love to know what new information they are waiting for. Fascinating!
Given that there have been 20 million vaccine doses administered in the US during the month of September, it would seem that you are wrong. The vaccine has been available for many months. Certainly some of those 20 million doses represent people who have been hesitating for one reason or another.
At this point in time, nobody not vaccinated yet is interested in your propaganda. Also, the post you are replying to is already sort of doxing his own wife, so please dont make it even worse by capitalising on that.
> overabundance of evidence that the COVID vaccines are safe, effective, and that they decrease hospitalizations and death
"evidence" that comes from tightly controlled information sources with clear non-truth oriented motivations, that can only accept one answer, and suppres all contrary evidence and discourse? Well if Pravda and the Party tell us the injection is a must and safe too then who could ever doubt it?
I was (and am?) "vaccine hesitant." I am vaccinated now, though it was probably unnecessary since I already had it. I'm really starting to wonder what exactly they injected into me and almost regret it. These are not the actions benevolent actors with nothing to hide.
FYI what pushed me over he edge was a combination of discomfort (wanted to occasionally re-engage with nightlife without worry and guilt), time, local community that I trusted more getting it, and some people in particular I wanted to meet up with that were particularly anal about covid fears.
This strikes me as entirely being exactly the things of which you are accuse the parent post's author.
> "people like you are part of the problem"
> "such judgemental bullshit"
> "judgmental jerks who prolong the schism between people"
Whatever your positions or beliefs on the matter, or opinions of the post author to whom you are responding, your opinions and views could be more effectively expressed
using logic and reasoning without the ad hominem and vulgarity.
In any regard: it's beneath the community standards of reasoned and respectful communication on HN, which I think many of us highly appreciate and value.
I think you can dial it back a notch. The comment they highlighted...
> She thinks they’re taking it down because they don’t want people to know the truth.
Isn't indicative of someone wanting to see long term data. That's someone who thinks the powers that be are hiding some smoking gun.
I'm sure there are folks with qualms about long term safety, but you're absolutely ignoring all the false information being pushed by a lot of the "hesitant". "Long term effects" is their strongest argument, but they rarely use it. Instead it's lots of stories being made up, statistics fabricated, and just flat out belligerence.
So yeah, I'm on board with the idea that "vaccine hesitant" is a term that should be used with discretion. Stand up for the truly hesitant. The rest are full of shit, and I have no problem with that label for them.
This isn't a debate among intellectuals about impact of mRNA generated spike proteins like you're framing it. It's an idealogical divide among those who properly evaluate risk of long covid vs. vaccination and low income conspiracy theorists.
> We have 30 years of mRNA studies and research, and at this point
The mRNA vaccines are the first ever approved for use in humans. This is indisputable.
There are no long term studies as to its side effects. Do I think there are any? No. But could I be wrong? Definitely. Thoughts and feelings aren't science. We need the long term data, which have none of.
I just want to point out that the difference between the mRNA vaccines and the other medications with long term side effects is that the mRNA vaccine is only active in your body for a few days. You don't get repeated injections on a timescale often enough to constantly have the vaccine in your body. The only thing that remains is the antibodies, which were made by your own body. On the other hand, blood pressure medication etc. needs to be taken daily and has active ingredients constantly circulating in your bloodstream.
> mRNA vaccine is only active in your body for a few days.
Isn’t the point of it to confer long term immunity? Specifically, it aims to alter the immune system, probably one of the more complicated systems our body has. Immune system disorders are no joke, they can kill or significantly reduce the quality of life. So there is a potential area for things to go wrong.
There is also the case of any long term effects triggered by the short term presence of mRNA. What if it lands in different types of organs, could that cause cancer in 2-3 years, other serious chronic condition. Not by the mRNA still being transcribed there but by some other unintended interaction or lasting damage.
I just don’t understand where the absolute confidence that it’s safe long term is coming from.
Note that my previous comment did not state anything to do with long term safety, only that there is a false equivalency being drawn. I agree that there is no long term (decades) study that I can point to about the safety of mRNA vaccines. However, my personal choice to take the vaccine was a conscious comparison of the benefits and risks (with attempts at quantifying the above).
> Do we know if the mRNA vaccine has any long term effects?
Phew, good thing we've got non-mRNA vaccines available.
The vaccine "hesitant" are not rational actors. They have some position they decided on and use post-hoc rationalizations to defend that position.
Their irrational positions have contributed to the current situation of clogged hospitals, increased deaths, and the continued need for costly mitigation measures.
False. Studied doesn't mean it worked or was feasible. This is the first mRNA vaccine approved for use in humans. The lipid nanoparticles used to deliver the mRNA was first tested in humans in 2015 but wasn't an approved drug.
Appeal to solipsism is not a compelling argument. It’s obviously been studied quite a while and feasible, the results speak for themselves. That govt is slow to react until forced is not apropos of anything.
Obtaining the long term data depends on reliable uptake of dependable data. When nurses and doctors refuse to acknowledge that a new symptom for the individual that happens within the hour/day/week of receiving the vaccine isn't even a possible side effect of the vaccine, then we don't have a reliable uptake of data. This is a common and largely unaddressed systemic complaint that destroys trust.
The chorus of "it's safe" becomes a self-reenforcing position regardless of actual outcome because it taints the view of those collecting the actuals in the field.
I have noticed this type of “vaccine side-effect hesitancy” too. Family getting serious heart issues after the vaccine, vision problems and other strange effects, and almost all of them have gaslighted by the doctors “it’s probably just a coincidence”, “it’s not the vaccine pretty sure, just take an aspirin”.
It’s the complete opposite response you’d expect from the medical community, where you’d think they would be very keen in investigating these issues.
It’s seems like they are almost afraid of even looking too hard…
I, too, would expect a "do no harm" approach to be overly cautious in recording potential side effects or symptoms post vaccine. To error on over reporting rather than this really odd refusal to consider even the possibility.
I'm not surprised that they're not afraid to look too hard about COVID-19 though. In the current climate, that road leads to loss of job and income.
It's far too varied to give you a small list. You can easily find story after story online if you look — though they're being purged as fast as the automated systems can manage it as this story demonstrates.
This is pretty standard operating procedure for vaccines since I started paying attention. I have children that suffered reactions from various vaccines — I also have been personally vaccine damaged. I try not to just repeat random stories online, so I will just keep this to my family and my immediate acquaintance. I've seen lots of things from a bout of severe allergies centered around the injection point to being severely ill following a shot to lasting new symptoms including new autoimmune disorders, or odd things like unusual hair growth. I had a friend who had a child die, that was previously perfectly healthy, from the disease (autopsy report) they were being vaccinated for the previous week.
Presenting a question about the vaccine being responsible, even for minor stuff, generally results in being gas lit. "Impossible", "You don't know what you're talking about", "Didn't happen", "Just a Coincidence" even when all rational reason indicates that the vaccine should at least be considered. These anecdotes are consistently shot down online for various reasons, but nobody seems to connect the dots that when you systemically ignore evidence there is no mathematical model that will somehow find what is really happening. The data is just lost because those who are supposed to be trusted to collect it are ignoring so much of it.
You look at all the comments here about the irrationality of those who don't accept the data, etc. This is not about data. This is about a loss of trust. You can show all the data in the world, but if the trust bridge has been burned then it's for naught. You can't cross the bridge again with a mountain of data because it's irrelevant. That bridge is being burned at the ground level every day, one by one, by a medical system that really doesn't care much about individuality or parental perspectives when they don't match their own.
This story itself continues to burn the trust bridge. We don't want your stories, your personal experiences, you cannot be heard. There is no discussion. Be silent. That's not how to build trust. It's purely an attempt to cull the information base in favor of the chosen outcome.
Right, people like you need to be stopped. Lets stop talking to people like you, and support them in our community. Lets stop helping people like you if they need something. Lets just drop people like you out of society.
While I almost entirely disagree with you, I agree with the general idea that most people aren't "hesitant". Personally I'm vaccine "hell no!" (because I don't have a personal medical need for the COVID vaccine, potential side effects aside, and I reject the societal benefit argument given the population dynamics of what happens when you vaccinate against just the spike).
So while I come at it from the total opposite reason, you're right that with the massive amount of propaganda and outright coercion that everyone (at least in the US) has been exposed to over the last several months, most people who are not vaccinated are fairly strongly opposed to getting it (not necessarily all for the same reason). There are definitely a bunch of "I wanna wait and see" type people, but given all the coercion/propaganda they are few and far between.
That's like saying I'm "vaccine hell no!" because I don't have a personal need for a polio vaccine lol. Across the entire spectrum you're at less risk from the vaccine than you are from the disease.
> and I reject the societal benefit argument given the population dynamics of what happens when you vaccinate against just the spike
That's so weird, all the data seems to indicate that in areas with high vaccination rates nobody gets sick and dies.
It feels like you've manufactured a windmill for yourself.
> Across the entire spectrum you're at less risk from the vaccine than you are from the disease.
You don't know me or my medical history, so you can't make that statement honestly. I am in a population where I am at borderline negligible risk from SARS-2 infection. The mere 24+ hours of post-second-shot acute inflammatory cascade, which is almost guaranteed, already eclipses the expected value of COVID symptoms I would experience if infected. (Perhaps you aren't aware of how stratified the risk is based off age and comorbidities?)
You doubly so cannot make such a statement when you don't know whether I've already had COVID previously. Someone who has had SARS-2 naturally and recovered is almost completely insulated from COVID risk. And this, by the way, is much moreso than compared to an unexposed-yet-vaccinated individual. And the effect size is massive, we're not talking about natural immunity being "20% better", we're talking like 800% better. Source: https://pastebin.com/8yR3y5NA
> That's so weird, all the data seems to indicate that in areas with high vaccination rates nobody gets sick and dies.
How closely have you been looking at the Israeli data? It is simply false that nobody gets sick and dies. The vaccines very significantly reduce the personal risk of hospitalization or death, but as I've already told you, my risk from SARS-2 is almost nonexistent, so that confers exactly zero benefit for me. The reason you and others are so concerned about vaccination is - I hope - the purported societal benefit of vaccination, and I've already hinted at the very predictable phenomenom that vaccinating against only the spike protein is just going to lead to antigenic drift and immune escape and will just end up spinning our wheels at best, and at worst it will actually lead to increased pathogenicity in the unvaccinated (https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jou...)
Your risk from the vaccine is lower than your risk from Covid lol - because you know the Covid disease creates fully functional viruses whereas the vaccine only incorporates a small subset that cannot reproduce. Why you would want the fully functional version is beyond me.
> Your risk from the vaccine is lower than your risk from Covid
You don't have the necessary information about my demographic and medical history to be able to make this claim. The following statement of yours is a non-sequitur because it in no way proves the claim of yours that I am at greater risk from SARS-2 infection than I am of a COVID vaccine:
> because you know the Covid disease creates fully functional viruses whereas the vaccine only incorporates a small subset that cannot reproduce. Why you would want the fully functional version is beyond me.
> You don't have the necessary information about my demographic and medical history to be able to make this claim.
I was referring to the aggregate, it is strictly correct unless you have a specific medical issue and I'm confident your doctor will inform you.
> The following statement of yours is a non-sequitur because it in no way proves the claim of yours that I am at greater risk from SARS-2 infection than I am of a COVID vaccine:
Sure it does. You will get COVID. You'll either be vaccinated at the time or you won't be.
> Sure it does. You will get COVID. You'll either be vaccinated at the time or you won't be.
That may be true, but it's another non-sequitur. You need to show that the acute and long-term risks of me receiving the moderna or the pfizer or the j&j, is lower than the risks to my health from getting COVID-19 while unvaccinated. And first you need to know whether I've already had COVID, because that's highly relevant to that calculation.
---
I think you're missing the general principle here, so let me see if this hypothetical helps you. Imagine a hypothetical virus that spreads just like SARS-2 but has a 0% IFR, no symptoms, and no complications whatsoever, whether short or medium or long term.
Imagine a vaccine that is 100% effective at preventing this hypothetical 0% IFR virus from infecting me. Imagine that in 99.9999% of people, the vaccine causes no harm, but in that .0001% of people, it causes harm.
Which is more dangerous to me, getting infected with the hypothetical virus, or getting vaccinated?
> Which is more dangerous to me, getting infected with the hypothetical virus, or getting vaccinated?
You not getting vaccinated and then getting infected with COVID is more dangerous to you and those around you than you getting vaccinated and then infected. Those are the only two options. Everyone on earth will contract COVID. There's no need to engage a hypothetical when we have the numbers in front of us.
Surely you believe then that folks who refuse to get vaccinated on principle like yourself and then contract COVID should be triaged strictly below anyone else who needs medical care? I'm not saying that you shouldn't receive care, but you should receive it after everyone else has been sorted out. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes IMO.
Is the polio and mRNA vaccine series really comparable? I was under the impression if you wanted to you could probably enumerate some huge differences.
Perhaps we should start by admitting there is no long term data on the Covid vaccines as a whole truth and we honestly start from there?
How about a steelman argument? Just don’t put it on YouTube, it would be censored.
6 billion doses administered and counting. 30 years of research on mRNA vaccines, 50 years of research on viral vector vaccines, and 20 years of research on coronaviridae. It’s about the best understood thing on the planet.
Perhaps it’s time to stop pretending there’s no long term data here.
> I agree. Please shut me up and post the links to long term human mRNA vaccine safety.
Please shut me up and give me any reason to believe that there would be long term effects.
You're asking me to prove a negative, to prove there's no god. It's the wrong question to ask. The question to ask is why you would think there is one in the first place.
The first vaccine was given almost a year ago, how long do we need to wait to placate your nebulous fear? Two? Ten? Twenty more? What basis do you have for selecting this timeframe?
The long-term data we do have is the 30 years of mRNA vaccine research.
> Across the entire spectrum you're at less risk from the vaccine than you are from the disease.
The current survival rate from the virus is at around 99.2%. The vaccine may or may not have long term health effects. How is taking the virus head on less risky?
Anyway, the other point is that that number is the overall IFR. If, like me, you know you're in a category that has almost no risk from COVID, then it's even more of a no-brainer. That's why it's completely absurd that the GP tried to tell me that I'm at less risk from the vaccine from the disease, when they don't know my age, # of comorbidities, metabolic health, past SARS-2 infection status, past non-SARS-circulating-hCoV infection status, etc. They simply don't know what they're talking about.
Because we know for sure that Covid infection causes significant long term damage in at least 10% of cases.
So if you want brain damage, scarred lungs, or some other organ malfunction, Covid infection is the way to go.
And the longer term risks are still unknown.
Which is why it's insane to play evidence-free yes-but-what-if FUD games about vaccine safety when the risks of infection are already known to be high for the survivors.
> Because we know for sure that Covid infection causes significant long term damage in at least 10% of cases.
Where are you getting your information? Your mayoclinic link doesn't make this 10% claim, nor did you provide any citation for it. I'm genuinely shocked by how divorced from the clinical reality your claims are.
SARS-1, which is SARS-2's less infectious but much more deadly older brother, didn't even cause long-term damage in 10% of cases. And you're trying to claim it for SARS-2, which is a virus where many who are infected will never even know they had it (if they don't get tested)?
Your claims are unfounded and, quite frankly, simply false. There's nowhere near 10% occurrence of "brain damage", scarred lungs, or "some other organ malfunction". (The vagueness of your terminology betrays you, btw)
Since you almost certainly haven't read any literature, let me provide you some reading material. I'll stick to just the lung issues subclaim. Some of these are on the older side but they're still relevant:
["Follow-up Chest CT findings from discharged patients with severe COVID-19: an 83-day observational study"](https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-27359/v1) - First Submitted May 4 2020, Published online May 12 2020
> Radiological abnormalities in patients of severe COVID-19 could be completely absorbed with no residual lung injury in more than two months’ follow-up.
^ note this is severe COVID-19, so that's from a population selected for severity of symptoms and they're still recovered by 2 months.
> Preliminary evidence suggests that these lung function abnormalities will improve over time
Conclusive evidence suggests that people who get vaccinated don't get lung function abnormalities. Why are you so dead set on refusing to get a vaccine haha? It takes a few minutes, it's free, and it's really not that big a deal. There's really no good reason not to get one.
People are opposed to being vaccinated because of a coordinated media campaign put out by elements in the mainstream media - not least from outlets like Fox whose employees are 90% vaccinated, while daily tests are mandated for the rest.
Being strongly opposed to something does not make opposition legitimate or warranted. It's perfectly possible to believe something which is absolutely harmful and objectively wrong on a mass scale. Such beliefs are not protected by law or by any reasonable definition of ethical morality.
So having said that - why do you think Fox and co. require tests and vaccinations for their own people while broadcasting anti-vaxxer denialism to their viewers?
Don't watch the news, I read it, never on fox. Don't want the vaccine because I was already infected. I lost my sense of smell for two weeks and slept a lot. Big deal. I don't want side effects of feeling shitty for a week after the vaccine and I don't think there has been enough time to study the side effects. The amount of propaganda and lack of an actual conversation on this fuels my cause. Additionally I don't trust the federal government to do anything other than spend money.
Oh dear. I really don't care what Fox News does. It is very sad to me that this passes as an argument for you. I don't care to speculate on the motivations of a giant corporation. It's also not even true that Fox is "anti vax" - you can find videos of Sean Hannity and the like imploring their audience to get vaccinated. Fox, like all media, makes an enormous portion of its ad revenue from pharmaceutical companies. So you're not even right on your characterization of Fox's stance. Fox is largely pro-vaccine. Trump is pro-vaccine. All the mainstream republicans are pro-vaccine. And none of this is at all relevant, so why are we wasting time talking about it?
I already said (in the comment you directly replied to) why I personally am not getting vaccinated against COVID. I don't understand where your rambling diatribe about Fox News comes from. I gather that you might be a binary thinker that thinks that everyone fits into a red or blue, left or right, democrat or republican, etc box?
> People are opposed to being vaccinated because of a coordinated media campaign put out by elements in the mainstream media
This is an unfounded assertion. And also simply not true BTW, at least for all of the unvaccinated people (myself included) that I know in my personal life.
To be clear, Hannity's position, at least as he states repeatedly on his radio show, is "Talk to your doctor and do what you both agree is appropriate for your personal health situation." He is generally pro-vaccine, but not in the "your needs are outweighed by the needs of society" way that appears to be popular now.
> the population dynamics of what happens when you vaccinate against just the spike
Haven't heard of this before, care to elaborate?
> the massive amount of propaganda and outright coercion that everyone (at least in the US) has been exposed to over the last several months
See idk if propaganda is the right word here. Imagine a world were covid was 20x as deadily, and the vaccine had absolutely zero side effects. How else do you get the message put to get it? Just say nothing? If hospitals are at risk of getting overrun, and unlike lockdowns, vaccines actually make differences in case numbers, the government has an obligation to do something (protect the general welfare clearly is a mandate to prevent overrunning healthcare facilities).
By making everyone's immune system respond in the same way, you're making it more likely that if the virus escapes (mutates in a way that evades the immune system, by modifying its spike protein), then it will escape completely (for everyone vaccinated by mRNA vaccines).
The hope is that by doing that, the virus would also lose the local optimum of the current spike protein, and become much less infectious.
The alternative is, with "natural" immunity, you generate a much more diverse immune response across the population.
I think that you could have made that case if we had a vaccine in April 2020, but by now US has 30-50% of its population with natural immunity. Additionally, the spike protein is the least likely mutation to enable escaping, as it both has to modify to be different enough from the original, plus somehow still be able to attach onto our cells with similar level of infectiousness. Thats why they choose to vaccinate against the spike protein vs any other part of the virus. None of the variants at the moment seem to be a concern for escaping the spike protein, with a billion vaccinations and a billion infections. We are literally running out of chances for that to happen.
There also remains enough spread now that vaccinated people are getting mini boosts of natural immunity. Israel has some great data on the combination of various number of doses and natural immunity, and the combo is very strong.
That being said, I don't know your medical history. I am a strong supporter of accepting natural immunity in lieu of a vaccine. But even so, that fear of escape isn't made worse by a naturally immune person getting vaccinated, as they already have the non-spike protein defenses.
The best study on this actually found no significant difference when giving a single shot to those who were naturally immune. Which makes sense because the chance of reinfection is so incredibly tiny that even if the shot completely eliminated the chance of getting COVID, the absolute size of the effect is still going to be quite small.
> Additionally, the spike protein is the least likely mutation to enable escaping, as it both has to modify to be different enough from the original, plus somehow still be able to attach onto our cells with similar level of infectiousness.
But you don't have to choose just one part. You could have an inactivated whole virus vaccine. That avoids the whole issue.
FWIW we are already seeing point mutations on the spike developing. That's probably why Delta is so damn good at spreading, right? The Israel data suggests a VE of ~39% against Delta. I personally don't believe Pfizer's original 95% VE number, but if you do, that's a startling drop.
What would actually happen if a year or two from now, it turned out that, however unlikely it may appear now, there really were serious long-term vaccine side-effects?
There's absolutely no way it would involve the pro-vax people saying, "We're sorry, you were right." More likely, the same political sides would dig in further, there would be a bunch of attempts to cover up and revise history, and the message would be "The evidence has changed, but people who never got the vaccines didn't believe in science and were still selfish and wrong."
That wouldn't be true if this were really about health.
This is the exact reason vaccine mandates are necessarily and even desirable as a policy. You're not alone, but the proportion of the population willing to live with discomfort in life is vanishingly small, and hopefully small enough that herd immunity can be reasonably established.
We see similar behavior/attitudes among off-grid folks who refuse to use credit cards or other common adaptations.
I make no judgment of you for your thoughts, just pointing out why a policy maker is justified in increasing the personal cost to ensure the responsibility of freedom isn't shirked, since an unvaccinated population invites variants and harms (imposes social cost) on people unable to be vaccinated (kids, medical issues). So long as Anti-vaccine advocates are willing to pay for the costs of their actions, have at it.
Yea, if only someone would post the links to the 10 year safety and efficacy of these vaccines it would really shut these skeptics up. Ok, well, maybe just the 5 year data. No? Well, I think even 3 would help.
If we’re going to disingenuously compare smallpox and measles vaccines, perhaps we could start with their efficacy. Are there any claims from even the mfgs that Covid shots are in the same range?
> If we’re going to disingenuously compare smallpox and measles vaccines, perhaps we could start with their efficacy. Are there any claims from even the mfgs that Covid shots are in the same range?
Ain't nothing disingenuous from me. The COVID vaccines are some of the most effective vaccines ever invented.
Turns out, if you were the only vaccinated person in a house against smallpox, the efficacy was only 60-something percent. But vaccination also prevents you spreading to others, not just getting infected—so when everybody in a house was vaccinated, the efficacy rose to around 95%.
That's an oddly specific ask. The vaccines are absolutely fantastic in the short term, and there's credible evidence indicating the vaccine protection is long term, by analogy with how other vaccines work.
Another reason to NOT by YouTube Premium, and leave my spare phone on autoplay when going out, so that youtube ad customers get to pay for supporting the biggest scam operation ever. 80% of the ads I get would never pass a sanity-check in my home country, such ads are simply illegal on our TV. But hey, the american is spreading scam ads, so lets just accept that.
Because they clog up the hospitals. In Singapore if you opt out of donating your organs after death then you also opt out of receiving organs. It’s just a sensible way of allowing people who really have a principled stance on an issue to do what they want while not being a burden on the rest of us.
Her belief was that she'd be feeding into a system that encouraged things to happen that were against her principles. I wouldn't call that self harm out of spite. Spite would be "they were right, but I'll be damned if I let them know that!" She never changed her mind on the censorship.
Is it that Yes people are too stupid to make their own decisions, but a government mandate isn’t the right tactic to influence their behavior?
That's pretty much what I see. People make sub-optimal decisions all the time for a variety of reasons and these decisions often affect others. Government mandates on bodily autonomy get tricky and have massive externalities. It's all good fun until you're the one the government says is making a bad decision.
What’s the right tactic to influence stupid people?
I don't think making a sub-optimal decision makes you stupid. In this particular case I think a better question would be "how do we influence people who are making bad decisions based on emotions and politics?" It's pretty tough to craft a government solution to that last part since the government is always political. Polite discourse is the best way IMO. It won't turn everyone, but when people get interested they won't be thrown back into their in-group by seeing nothing but coercion and vitriol.
Anti-vaccine activists, or any activists for that matter, are completely free to post their videos anywhere else they want. Hell, they can even set up their own video site, and publish thousands, millions, tens of millions of videos championing their cause. Why does a private company has to feature every agenda, every viewpoint, even ones they deem to be extremely harmful to society? Just because they got big enought to be global? If I set up my own youtube-like website, and I only have one thousand visits a day, will anyone argue that I'm obliged to show stuff I don't want? Is anyone saying the same thing about Vimeo? Youtube doesn't have to show isis beheadings, why should it be forced to show unscientific propaganda? If there were a movement claiming the polio and smallpox vaccines destroyed our immune systems, and we should re-introduce these diseases to the public at large so we could develop our natural defenses, should Youtube be force to publish their videos?
I'm sorry, but what you're saying is not censorship.
You are not getting the point and that you have such a naive mentality towards it is disconcerting because the consequences of your mindset breaking through as it seems to be has dire consequences for everyone, you included. You think dissidents have the ability to "post their videos anywhere else they want" but in reality the system that YouTube is deeply entrenched in and even essentially plays a leading role in actively attacks and sabotages and undermines those very alternatives you claim people can post things to.
This is not at all about the freedom of YouTube, it is about suppression of dissent and really the surreptitious persecution of dissidents.
What is really going on here is no different than when any other tyrannical regime disappears people in the real world, or even when the internet cries out in pain when, e.g., China silences people online. You may think they are being sent off to post and live on the internet somewhere else, but when they leave your sight form the bubble you live in, they are only then even more persecuted and attacked on a constant basis where you aren't even paying attention and are none the wiser to what is really going on.
In the end, "i told you so" will be utterly useless and worthless when the trap snaps shut and they come after you too once they have snuffed out and silenced everyone else they don't like, because this tyrannical authoritarian mindset is never satisfied and will always actively seek out new "dissidents" to persecute and one day you will find yourself on the wrong side too. It's just a matter of time, not whether it will happen.
YouTube can take the videos down, I don't think many people are arguing against that. The issue is that it is a bad idea to. This is one of many rather urgent signals to people who don't agree with Google that they should be setting up or looking for alternatives, and rather urgently.
Oh, I agree that it is a bad idea to do it. I just don't think a private company not putting a video on their site is what censorship is. I wish Youtube would not take those videos down, as they're not illegal. Anti-vaxxers will diminish with better public education, more focused on critical thinking and science literacy, and not because there are no more videos about it on Youtube. The videos will always find their way to reach their audience's screens.
> Anti-vaccine activists, or any activists for that matter, are completely free to post their videos anywhere else they want.
Really? Youtube happens to be the only platform that is restricting content? Even if that were true, the reason this matters is Youtube is a virtual monopoly when it comes to online video. Forget the technicalities. Yes, it's privately owned. Yes, there are other site. Yes, users could set up their own competing website. But, in practice, which is all that matters, Youtube is the one place people go for videos.
I feel like this always gets brought up, as if the slippery slope is a natural inevitability. What if it isn’t? What if you can ban actively harmful content without that ban spreading?
You are right, we need to ban the actively harmful content. Let's start with the stuff you like and want to hear that is problematic. You like cooking content? Well cooking unapproved dishes is associated with obesity. Banned! You like hiking and being outdoors? Well, it disturbs animal habitat and ecosystems. Banned! You oppose and want to speak out about the mandatory microphones and cameras in every room of your house? Well, that clearly interferes with the greater good of catching people trying to commit suicide, avert domestic harm, make sure you are raising your child properly and in accordance with expert approved government requirements, and to make sure you are getting your mandatory amount of exercise of the required energy expenditure every day in order to not be a burden on society ……
But no one is saying these contents should be banned. You can publish it, everywhere! Create a hundred sites and post it, feel free! Now, if I don't want it on my site, why can't I take it down?
You're saying that if I create a video site for videos of healthy dishes, that I should not be able to take down a video recipe for something that I think is very unhealthy.
London, circa 1830. Nobody is saying you have to work 70 hours weeks in a cotton factory. You can grow your own cotton, feel free to process it any way you want! As long as the attention market concentrates in the hands of a handful of megacorporations by virtue of economies of scale, the freedom you talk about is not very tangible.
I wish I didn't have to work 40 hours a week. Can I just go to some random plot of arable land that isn't cultivated and start farming? Can I just process it any way I want? US, circa 2021.
But those are all obviously, patently absurd. You’re proving my point. The slippery slope argument immediately descends into hysteria and pretends like people aren’t capable of understanding context.
You're embarrassing yourself now and you've proving the point about utter hysteria.
> the government is mandating the injection of untested corporate concoctions
They've been tested. Thoroughly. The results of those tests are public. And what's with the "corporate" scare word, there? Am I suppose to want my vaccine to have been brewed up by my neighbor or my local mom and pop drug store?
> you have been under prison lockdown home confinement for essentially 18 months now
No I haven't. No-one has. The lockdown lasted longer than two weeks but it finished last summer. Since then I've been shopping, eating at restaurants (usually outdoors, but indoors is available) and seeing friends. My children are at school, many people are back in their offices.
> they will come for you too one day, they always do once you have outlived your usefulness.
I'm going to go ahead and quote yourself back to you: you seem to have lost all ability to objectively see what is going on.
But yeah, yeah, I know. We're all idiot sheep, you're the only one with the 20:20 vision to see what the rest of us idiots don't. It couldn't possibly be that we're all informed and came to a different conclusion to you. Nope, not possible.
The problem is, who decides what actively harmful content is? For anyone in favor of this ban, imagine if Google had an anti-vaccine CEO, and was banning all pro-vaccine content for being "actively harmful" instead.
Then pro-vaccine people everywhere could start using google less and start talking about how Google has harmful/unscientific stances toward content, etc.
So what? Let them curate whatever they want. There are other platforms to post my video to. Hell, I can create another one. I can create 50 others. I can create a mailing list and send to everyone on it. Are we going to argue wether spam filtering is censorship too?
I've long said, Flickr's solution works pretty well. They have groups, you can form any group you want and set your own group rules. You can set filters and you can opt to view "adult" content or not (take me back to kittens").
It's all about opting-in.
You have certain taste, go find that group or found your own.
You don't like certain groups, don't become a member of such group.
You want to have your own private invite only group, go ahead, create your own invite only group.
Flickr never achieved the prominence of FB or IG, or flash in the pan like Tumblr, but I think they built it from the ground up to provide a decent service for everyone with a light touch. For illegal stuff, yeah, you get kicked out, that's legit. Need to escalate to site admins, that's possible too but only if the group admins are acting in bad faith.
If spam filtering didn't let recipients opt out, and permanently deleted emails instead of putting them in a spam folder, then it would be censorship too.
> Are we going to argue wether spam filtering is censorship too?
It certainly is censorship, but users opt in.
> There are other platforms to post my video to. Hell, I can create another one. I can create 50 others.
Its not just YouTube. Its their platform, and your hosting provider, and your DNS provider, and your payment processor, and your bank. Consider what happened to Parler.
Lets not cheer on the loss of a public good because we could theoretically replace it some day.
So, I presume you would be totally okay if Youtube one day decided they just wanted to deplatform anything such as "tax the rich" or "defund the police" or "no child left behind" or any talk about Mark Zuckerberg, just because they can?
What if one day FB is under investigation and FB decides it will only carry FB propaganda and not let any dissenting voices, would that be totally cool?
Yes, I'd be okay, and I would stop using them, as I have done with FB, and start looking elsewhere. Like I said before, I don't agree with Youtube taking anti-vaxx videos down, but I do think they, as a private company, should be allowed to. If they take enough content down, they'll end up losing users.
> What will be the next frontier they take on a their responsibility to curate?
Social Justice. Your very existence as part of society affects others, therefore anything that you say or think must conform to the standards of Social Justice the Platform has deemed necessary. If you don't like it, go found your own Platform.
Your argument is that censorship is good in certain situations. That is true, especially in the beginning. The reason why censorship is a four letter word is scope creep. There are little reasons to believe that Youtube is somehow immune to scope creep, once the mechanisms and the precedent are set.
I'm not for Youtube taking the videos down, I just don't think a private company taking a video down from their site is censorship.
And my take is, if Youtube starts limiting content too much, it will end up losing viewership, which will migrate to competing sites/apps.
"Youtube censors antivax content" is a true statement. It is not state censorship, but censorship nonetheless. Good thing / bad thing, for Youtube / for society at large, short term / long term, we can argue that. But let's get our facts & terminology straight.
This is semantics. In this case HN is censoring opinions right now through its moderation. Every forum on the internet censors. Your spam filter blocks others speech from reaching you etc.
While HN would kindly steer us towards polite curious conversation, the range of topics themselves is wide open. I have yet to see a site-wide blanket ban on, for example, adblockers. It is a contentious topic in the industry, there are entrenched trillion dollar interests that would rather have adblockers dissapear, and yet we can have a hopefully polite and informative conversation about the relative merits of subtopics in this area.
Yep, that's definitely hypocrisy. If you think a law or court ruling should be repealed or overturned, you shouldn't be advocating for other things using it as precedent in the meantime.
How is this hypocrisy? The cake was about whether or not places should be able to restrict access based on protected classes (and in particular sexual orientation).
I'd say yes, this is why. I think that since the FAANG's are so successful that they replaced the public square with themselves, they should have to preserve the freedom of speech just like the old public square used to.
It's a continuum though. Platforms and service providers can and do limit who can use their infrastructure, or how it is used. It's not as black and white as people like to make it.
I only recently learned that this was a myth. The core of S230 is:
No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
As long as YouTube isn't creating the content they are protected.
Not in the USA. [0] The Supreme Court, in Pruneyard v Robbins, expressly rejected the claim "that a private property owner has a First Amendment right not to be forced by the State to use his property as a forum for the speech of others." Turner v. FCC and Rumsfeld v. FAIR rejected similar claims.
Pruneyard is inapposite here. The facts in Pruneyard turn on two crucial elements:
* The California state constitution granted a broader right than the US constitution, and the speech in question was required to be permitted under California, but not US, rules.
* The speech in question was admitted by both parties to not reflect upon the shopping center's views, nor was the speech disruptive to its activities. Thus, freedom of association isn't going to kick in.
That last part in particular is key. For social media platforms, it is DEFINITELY the case that the content they host is imputed onto their own views. Alternative sites like Parler or Gab are invariably referred to with a note that they host predominantly far-right content--these sites are known almost entirely by what they carry, not the principles the sites claim to espouse. Even for larger sites like YouTube or Facebook, the ability to find certain kinds of negative content on these sites periodically blows up into major media furors.
A more appropriate precedent is Miami Herald v Tornillo, which held that a Florida state law requiring newspapers to publish candidate replies to articles was unconstitutional.
§230 says that YouTube is not liable for any content that users post to its site, regardless of how much moderation of that content YouTube does or doesn't do.
Everything after the comma in that sentence is actually the entire point of why §230 was passed; prior case law held that YouTube would be liable for all content if it did the barest amount of moderation.
YouYube is a publisher, but it's not a publication. A newspaper hires employees that are paid by the company to produce a publication, YouTube is a platform that allows individuals to publish arbitrary video content, there is a very obvious difference between the two, playing on "publisher" semantics to imply that they should be held liable for uploads by random people makes no sense.
If you selectively censor views you're taking on an editorial function. With that comes the responsibilities of being a publisher. Or that's how it ought to be.
I get that this is what you think would be ideal, but this isn't true. Having a content policy is not "editorializing". Using that logic Facebook is "editorializing" by not allowing nude photos on the site. This isn't what editorializing means, this is just abuse of semantics to shoe-horn the idea that YouTube should be held legally responsible for content produced by independent 3rd parties.
So if you have a video site like Youtube, you can take down whatever content you like, and that's cool. However, if you become very successful, and attract many viewers, than it's no longer like that. Now you can choose what you let on your site.
Is HN pro censorship? I mean, stuff HN doesn't want posted here can, and does get taken down by its moderators. You're just not complaining because HN isn't huge?
Complaints about HN editorial policy are not encouraged on HN.
You do raise an interesting point though. Historically, the production & distribution of content intended for mass consumption was expensive, often requiring entire teams to collaborate. The mere existence of a piece of content was subject to filtering, from conception to production to distribution. Most of this filtering was invisible and possibly unconscious, intrinsic to the moral norms of society at large.
The Internet changed that. Content creation and distribution costs have cratered. A solo creator can spam hours of content every week. We are drowning in a quantity and variety of content unimaginable 30 years ago. Media distribution organisations now rely on soft distribution shaping ('boosting' / 'deboosting') and are starting to craft explicit censorship policies. It is very unclear how this will all play out in the long term, though I would caution that explicit legalism can only go so far.
Let's say someone starts a video site where users post vegan recipes. It's a vegan video site. People create an account and can post what they want. Some users post barbecue videos, video on how to skin game, and the site owners remove these videos. If somehow a high percentage of society become vegan and this site blows up, becomes the biggest recipe site in the world, a quasi-monopoly of recipe videos. Do they now have to allow meat videos?
There is nothing credible about anti-vax. Not a single thing.
Opinions of the uninformed are worthless. I have yet to speak with a single anti vaxxer who did research and not “research” on the subject (that is did clinical trials or even is able to read an abstract of one). I will repeat it again: if anyone ever finds an actual problem with a vaccine safety study I will personally drop everything and go help them get this information in front of the FDA, the CDC, and the media. Not a single person has taken me up on this offer yet.
> I have yet to speak with a single anti vaxxer who did research and not “research” on the subject (that is did clinical trials or even is able to read an abstract of one).
> Malone received criticism for propagating COVID-19 misinformation, including making unsupported claims about the alleged toxicity of spike proteins generated by some COVID-19 vaccines;[6][10][22] using interviews on mass media to popularize self-medication with ivermectin;[23] and tweeting a study by others questioning vaccine safety that was later retracted.[6] He said LinkedIn suspended his account over what he claimed were posts he had made questioning the efficacy of some COVID-19 vaccines.[24] Malone has also claimed that the Pfizer–BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines could worsen COVID-19 infections.[25]
> With another researcher, Malone successfully proposed to the publishers of Frontiers in Pharmacology a special issue featuring early observational studies on existing medication used in the treatment of COVID-19, for which they recruited other guest editors, contributors, and reviewers. The journal rejected two of the papers selected: one on famotidine co-authored by Malone and another submitted by physician Pierre Kory on the use of ivermectin.[21] The publisher rejected the ivermectin paper due to what it claimed were “a series of strong, unsupported claims” which they determined did “not offer an objective nor balanced scientific contribution.”[21] Malone and most other guest editors resigned in protest in April 2021, and the special issue has been pulled from the journal's website.[21]
> Malone was criticized for falsely claiming that the FDA had not granted full approval to the Pfizer vaccine in August 2021.
No. But the person in question here worked on the subject at hand decades ago, not during the development of these vaccines. In the meantime he seems to have developed a political rather than a scientific view of the issue AND had a conflict of interest.
So going forward (by your definition) anyone with any differing opinion needs to setup their own video sharing website and server infrastructure just to share their ideas.
What happens when something you care about is being censored, are you going to go through the effort of recreating YouTube just to share a video?
People have incredibly short memories, but media conglomerates have ALWAYS been in the business of curating and censoring content.
Sometimes it’s about agenda, but more often than not, it’s about ad revenue and shielding themselves from risk.
This is more about spending themselves from risk because YouTube has been getting a lot of flack for actively spreading misinformation with their recommendation engine, which goes beyond merely hosting it.
If Google REALLY had an agenda, why did they let their recommendation engine push these videos while millions of people around the world died?
The truth is Internet media companies chose to profit from the engagement that misinformation was providing.
All of this censorship you see today is a big meaningless public relations show.
Conglomerates don’t care about free speech and they definitely don’t care about misinformation.
Yes - Those were my supporting points. It should go without saying that popular things are often not true.
My main point is they’re not doing this out of some agenda. They’re doing this to deflect that their algorithms PROMOTED misinformation via their recommendation engine.
That’s a step beyond hosting content.
Honestly, this PR strategy is working too. Look at how many dopes are arguing whether YouTube should or shouldn’t censor their content.
The difference is it's possible to believe that people spreading antivax misinformation are dangerous morons for objective reasons rather than just because it's a popular position.
What's your point? "Infections happen in only a small proportion of people who are fully vaccinated, even with the Delta variant" does suggest the vaccine is effective. You can still spread the virus, nobody's pretending it's 100% effective, but that doesn't make it ineffective
It's an antivaxxer classic, for them effective means 100% effective under all conditions, otherwise it's ineffective.
It's called fallacy of composition[0] when they cherry pick the cases where it's less effective to infer it's not effective as a whole, and fallacy of division[1] when trying to do reductio ad absurdum by claiming that, if it's effective as a whole, it should also be so under all underlying metrics.
A reasonable definition of effectiveness would be that it stops the virus from spreading through a population. Even in the case of Israel with the highest vaccination rate in the world, it has failed this test. I personally would say that it is effective because it has prevented a lot of deaths. But a reasonable person could disagree.
> Most vaccines do fully stop the spread, even for measles,
No, they don't. [0][1]
From [1]
> Two doses of MMR vaccine are about 97% effective at preventing measles; one dose is about 93% effective.
Obviously those 3% and 7% do spread, even though the symptoms are milder. For the 97 and 93% ones there's indeed very limited (if any) shedding [3].
Now that's holding different bars, because asymptomatic measles infections are less contagious by themselves, regardless of vaccination status, unlike COVID-19 which is still relatively contagious while asymptomatic. So you're attributing a positive point of measles infections as a fault of the COVID-19 vaccines, which is, as you might see, a pretty misinformed take.
Also, sterilizing immunity as you seem to understand doesn't really exist, in case that's the misconception you have [2]. In the end it's all about viral load, route of exposure, and level and type of immunity. A mucosal vaccine would behave more in the way your expecting intramuscular ones to work[4].
The fact is that the efficiency of the vaccine is being understood as we go. We started with the initial dose and are now considering second and third boosters because the efficiency diminished faster than expected
That’s beside the point of the WaPo article. YouTube is making the decision to remove any content that goes against vaccines, based in truth or not.
We started with 2 doses. Nobody talked about second or third boosters, because only a first booster has been recommended for those most at risk.
Is this the kind of information you're worried will be deleted, that is, gross misunderstandings of reality in the best case, outright lies to generate engagement in the worst?
Imagine, for a moment, a world in which 1 out of 15,000 fully vaccinated against measles are getting hospitalized from measles and an additional 1 out of 50,000 fully vaccinated against measles are dying from measles. And these numbers are increasing.
That is the case for the COVID19 vaccines. Visualization here[1]. The domain might be banned, but the code, snapshots, and the chart output here[2].
The rates are increasing because the cases/deaths are increasing as of the latest reported date you have. Now it's starting to decrease so your graph will show a decrease once you update it with the latest week data.
At least compare with a previous wave to see if there's a change according to vaccination rates (spoiler: there is), because as it is it's a worthless, albeit pretty, representation of data.
It is hard to make the comparisons I would like to make mostly because of the piss poor way the data are disseminated (or not disseminated).
For example, the CDC overwrites the previous information with every week's update. That is why the repo exists. To preserve any time series information in one place with a verifiable way to extract it out of ever-changing HTML pages and put it in a table.
In theory, the CDC ought to be able to put the relevant information in a table. At a minimum, we'd need `date`, `locality`, age distributions of fully, partially, and never vaccinated populations, age distribution of people who are hospitalized due to COVID19, and age distribution of people who died from COVID19.
Ideally, we'd have a data set consisting of one row per hospitalization/death with relevant dimensions such as age, sex, first shot date, second shot date, type of vaccine, locality, other conditions etc.
But, we do not. Because the bureaucracy has not deemed it appropriate to collect or share that information.
Instead, we need to rely on free form HTML pages where the provenance of the data are not clear.
What I have done is made visible one bit of information that would otherwise not be available: The normalized rate of fully vaccinated people being hospitalized or dying from the disease against which they are fully vaccinated has been steadily increasing over time.
The main reason is that the vaccines are not as effective as the 95% number that has been flouted time and again. Of course, it takes time for a person to be exposed, diagnosed, hospitalized, and maybe die, so the revelation has been happening over time instead of instantaneously.
> because as it is it's a worthless, albeit pretty, representation of data.
If I hadn't taken the snapshots and extracted the information from those pages, there would be no time series of breakthrough hospitalization and death rates anywhere. It seems to me it is worth something to save that information.
Plus, Biden told us the rate of hospitalization from COVID19 among the fully vaccinated was 1/160,000. The real number is 10 times that[1]. Isn't it worth something to know this?
>• Infections happen in only a small proportion of people who are fully vaccinated, even with the Delta variant. When these infections occur among vaccinated people, they tend to be mild.
And this is the actual misinformation. Recent study done in the UK with 100k subjects randomly sampled from the population found that two vaccines only reduce the amount of infections by about 55%: https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/english-study-finds-50-60-r...
I think "effective" there is being used to mean "effective enough that once you're vaccinated, you don't need to take any other precautions against that disease in particular in everyday life".
The problem witch vaccines is that makes YOU more resistant to the virus, while other people around can still be infected
So as long as people are not getting vaccinated everyone should keep using masks and keep social distance. Following that idea anti vax movements are more dangerous than we initially think.
Is there a typo in your comment? Claiming that the vaccines are "ineffective" is not "truth". As you point out, infections happen in only a small portion of the fully vaccinated population. That is, by definition, "effective".
The issue is that you're breaking the site guidelines. If you want to present your analysis of studies in a way that doesn't do that, that would be much better. Not destroying the ecosystem is more important than being right.
Except the intervention in study Rushworth cites wasn't a mask mandate. It was "Encouragement to follow social distancing measures for coronavirus disease 2019, plus either no mask recommendation or a recommendation to wear a mask when outside the home among other persons together with a supply of 50 surgical masks and instructions for proper use."
According to https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-6817, the website for said study: "A systematic review of observational studies reported that mask use reduced risk for SARS, Middle East respiratory syndrome, and COVID-19 by 66% overall, 70% in health care workers, and 44% in the community"
So masks themselves are effective, but only when people actually use them correctly.
According to the conclusion of the paper you just referenced,
Our results suggest that the recommendation to wear a surgical mask when outside the home among others did not reduce, at conventional levels of statistical significance, the incidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection in mask wearers in a setting where social distancing and other public health measures were in effect, mask recommendations were not among those measures, and community use of masks was uncommon. Yet, the findings were inconclusive and cannot definitively exclude a 46% reduction to a 23% increase in infection of mask wearers in such a setting. It is important to emphasize that this trial did not address the effects of masks as source control or as protection in settings where social distancing and other public health measures are not in effect.
So some mild effect for surgical masks they think (though the intervention group did more social distancing than the control group as well, hard to suss out the impact of that).
But then they say this:
"while cloth masks clearly reduce symptoms, we cannot reject that they have zero or only a small impact on symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infections"
If you read my comment thoroughly, I was talking about cloth masks. That link you posted is really only interesting as far as surgical masks.
The surgical mask effect is certainly interesting, but they couldn't de-correlate the effect from increased social distancing in the intervention arm. Certainly that seems just as likely to make a difference if not more so eh?
So I'm left where I started: Nothing of consequence about cloth masks, and a mild un-corroborated effect from surgical masks in a country that's about as different from the US as I could imagine.
I wouldn't base public policy on that study, that's for sure. I have no problem if people want to wear masks, go for it. But mandates? I have a higher bar than you to infringe on personal freedoms I guess.
It's important to know what is meant by "surgical" masks. Some of these have an electrostatically blown fiber inner layer which is an electret. Although the fit is not as good as an N95 respirator, the basic filter is comparable to an N95 or at least a KN95. The typical "procedure" mask that civilians wear doesn't have that yet.
It would be useful for people to look up what the definition of a cult is and try and determine which side of the Covid vaccine debate that applies to.
why not set the terms for anti-vax or “vaccine hesitant” behavior where people are deprioritized in terms of getting medical treatment for diseases they refuse to get vaccinated for?
Not rejected of course but if you deny Covid-19 vaccine you are behind in line after people who did get it.
"Freedom of speech is a principle that supports the freedom of an individual or a community to articulate their opinions and ideas without fear of retaliation, censorship, or legal sanction. The right to freedom of expression has been recognized as a human right in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and international human rights law by the United Nations."
It is hard to sympathize with people who sow disinformation that costs people lives.
But it is also hard to watch principles being ignored for immediate benefit.
Principles are tested not when it is convenient for you to follow them.
What I think is needed is people spending more time to figure out how it is possible to reconcile fight against misinformation with preserving basic human right which is ability to express your opinion.
"In the United States, some categories of speech are not protected by the First Amendment. According to the Supreme Court of the United States, the U.S. Constitution protects free speech while allowing limitations on certain categories of speech.[1]
(...)
Categories of speech that are given lesser or no protection by the First Amendment (and therefore may be restricted) include obscenity, fraud, child pornography, speech integral to illegal conduct, speech that incites imminent lawless action, speech that violates intellectual property law, true threats, and commercial speech such as advertising. Defamation that causes harm to reputation is a tort and also an exception to free speech."
So in short. There are existing laws that can be used to decide what is and what is not protected by freedom of speech.
These laws should in my opinion be applied by judicial system, not invented on the spot by corporations.
People should understand they are responsible for what they say online just as if they used other methods of communication.
And if the exceptions to free speech are incorrect or incomplete, we should demand that the law is corrected in a democratic process rather than having companies act on their own.
> What I think is needed is people spending more time to figure out how it is possible to reconcile fight against misinformation with preserving basic human right which is ability to express your opinion.
Simple: The right to free speech doesn't mean people have to listen, or guarantee access to a publisher. You can self-publish all you want.
> Ability to work with companies is no longer an option if you want any message through.
It never has been. Publishers refusing to publish speech isn’t a new phenomenon. Newspapers, radio and TV stations have been doing it since their inceptions.
What do you think an “editor” does?
> If you can't post on any social media you are as good as being completely censored.
That’s hardly true either. You can run your own websites, mailing lists, or just send stuff in the post. There are plenty of people that don’t use social media, I doubt they feel censored.
Thought experiment: how would you feel if YouTube banned all pro-trans content? ...or pro-choice, or anti-Isreal/Jewish material?
It doesn't matter to me if you're against companies censoring any of these things. Be aware that it means you're fine with authoritarianism, so long as it aligns with your politics...
> But it is also hard to watch principles being ignored for immediate benefit.
This won't even provide any "benefit" in terms of increased vaccination rates, but that's not the real purpose anyway. What they're really doing is carving up large chunks of people into information silos and trying to reduce the amount of communication happening between them.
If one were charitable to this action, you'd say they're blowing up a silo full of rat poison and disallowing people from adding poison back in.
The balance between "free speech" in the moral, not legal, sense and disinformation is going to be just like "security v. privacy" has been, but perhaps even harder to draw lines for.
If you accept as a premise that most anti-vax sentiment is driven by charlatan media outlets and influencers (and probably nation-state adversaries), and that much of what is repeated by laypeople is an echo of this intentional drivel, and that this drivel is immediately costing not only their own lives, but the lives of others, what do you do? It's literally a disease.
Which the Chinese would say about "people talking about democracy". So there it is: Where, if at all, do we in a "free society" draw the line where harmful disinformation campaigns get cut out?
I argued several years back that the "app layer" of the internet should have more freedom of control over their content, but that the "infrastructure" layer should be expected to be more neutral. In other words, if an anti-vax website or social network got hosted on AWS, it would be a different thing for AWS or a registrar to kick them out.
Well I reject your premise, but on a more fundamental level I simply do not believe (on the basis of overwhelming evidence) that the gargantuan tech monopolies and the people pulling their strings care at all about the public health, disease prevention, or human life, so I am left looking for other motives.
During the debate over Covid vaccines a common refrain has been "any safety issues have always shown up within a few months of administration." This is straight up misinformation: the Pandemix vaccine is a very high profile counterexample where symptoms first appeared about a year after the first shots were given, and it took another year after that for authorities to acknowledge the link. I only know about this because I occasionally peruse sources which would probably be labeled as "anti-vax," whereas the people repeating the false claim ad nauseam have often picked it up from sources which would be considered "authoritative," including public health authorities. But especially on this issue we have to pretend that there is one "side" which has a monopoly on accurate information.
I wonder how much longer YouTube will even allow you to point out that the manufacturers of the completely-safe-beyond-any-doubt-whatsoever Covid vaccines have been blanket exempted from liability for any injuries caused by their products.
I wish freedom of expression were GPL-style freedom instead of MIT-style freedom, e.g., "You're free to express whatever opinions you want. You may not keep others from expressing whatever opinions they want."
Can you imagine if the previous generation had this opinion?
"Television isn't the place to learn about the flaws in astrology, or about astronomy, the big bang, conflicting visions of human progress, galileo, and the like... we are totally fine in banning Cosmos and keeping children from learning any alternative to jesus christ our lord and savior"
I can. The previous generation is largely racist, sexist, homophobic, and bent on going back to the good old days when violence anyone who wasn’t a fist het white man was ok. They aren’t heroes for being born before YouTube.
I think you are attempting to move goal posts here.
This is specifically the phase 3 results. I won’t be your search engine: go look for whatever results you want yourself. You can also find the FDA and CDC committee opinions with all the supporting documents and rationale for the granted authorizations which will have even more information on exact what criteria was used to approve the COVID vaccine usage. You can then find similar info from both agencies on other vaccines. If you spot a mistake that does jeopardize the integrity of the studies or the decisions please let me know and I’ll help you contact these agencies and the media. Outside of that, please keep the goalposts where they are.
I’m not moving the goalposts. I asked for “The Clinical Trial Studies”, the link is to the “Incomplete Clinical Trial Studies”. I’m not taking issue with you about that, you did a polite thing to further a discussion.
My entire point (go up the comment tree a bit) is the studies are incomplete and therefore inconclusive at this point in time. And you haven’t displayed this attitude, but is a common attitude that they are golden at this point in time.
But no drug is approved with phase 4 studies because phase 4 cannot happen until the drug is approved. You need phases 1-3. What do you make of the fact that everyone involved, manufactures, the CDC, the FDA, and independent experts, all say that not a single step was skipped in developing and studying the COVID vaccines?
Moreover, whoever grabs power in future will be able to do the same by argumenting that this has been done before and their opponents said it is right back then.
The challenge is to determine how misinformation is defined. Would peer reviewed scientific papers that come to different conclusions than the current CDC guidelines be considered anti-vaccine? Should we consider conflicts of interest or sources of funding when determining misinformation? Are open ended questions about the safety and efficacy allowed? What about other medications?
We know vaccinated people still replicate and transmit the virus. So the only reason to get the vaccine is to potentially lessen the symptoms. With lessened symptoms you will be less likely to add to the clogged up the hospital system. Should we also ban food ads that contribute to obese or diabetic folks clogging up the hospitals? What about people choosing to ride motorcycles? Kids trampoline ads? Why do we still have cigarettes?
Even if some vaccinated people replicate and transmit the virus, they do so for a shorter amount of time and with less infectious virus than unvaccinated.
data source? "...less infectious virus than unvaccinated." the sars-cov-2 virus doesn't mutate and become less infectious somehow when it encounters a vaccinated person.
Given that youtube looks, walks and quacks precisely like the classic "public forum where free speech is valued" that we all know and love, this move is clearly a massive act of deceit.
>YouTube is banning anti-forced Sars COVID2 mRNA drug activists and blocking all anti-forced Sars COVID2 mRNA drug content
FTFWaPo
I'm not an anti-vaxxer. I'm happy to have my measles, mumps, rubella, and other vaccines. I'm looking forward to getting the new HPV vaccine (gardasil) now that they've started recommending it for adults and you can actually get your doctor to give it to you (a couple years ago they would refuse if you asked and said you'd pay for 100% of it).
Resisting this latest moneygrab by big pharma and power grab by authoritarians is not "anti-vaccine".
That's incredibly disingenuous. Because this drug is fundamentally different from what a vaccine is.
If the authoritarians and their followers pushing this can't even admit that it so radically different from a vaccine as to be outright lying to call it one, how can we even talk about it?
>a preparation of killed microorganisms, living attenuated organisms, or living fully virulent organisms that is administered to produce or artificially increase immunity to a particular disease
> A diesel powered train is still a train, even if the original trains were steam powered.
The new vaccine does the same job as the previous ones.
Your argument is something like:
"We were using a crude method to teach the immune system. We found a better, more precise method. This new method is new therefore it must be bad."
Using another analogy, it's like complaining that CDs are bad and that they're not actually disks, because you know, the original disks were using a mechanical principle to work while CDs use optical principles.
Definitions change, technology changes.
And "Big pharma" is the one also making the aspirin you most likely trust. Aspirin, paracetamol, heart drugs, etc.
False analogy. They made a drug and are calling it a vaccine. That the ministry of truth changed what their definition of 'vaccine' is at the same time changes nothing about reality.
>Ok, so why does it matter if it's a "drug" and not a "vaccine"?
Because they keep calling people who want to take the drug "anti-vaxxers" lumping them in with people who are against vaccines.
I'm not anti-vaxxer, so it's a lie to call me one. I also am not interested in taking the anti-COVID drug.
Not wanting to take the new, barely tested, anti-COVID drug does not make me an anti-vaxxer even if you change the definition of vaccine to include the anti-COVID drug.
>You're just being contrarian for the sake of being a contrarian. As they say, don't make a mountain out of a mole hill.
No, I am not. People have died, and had their health permanently degraded from this anti-COVID drug. I'm weighing the risks of that against COVID. I'm at very low risk of serious illness from COVID, and unknown risk from the anti-COVID drug. So I'm not taking the drug.
It's not "contrarian" and it's not "making a mountain out of a molehill" it's my body, my choice.
I thing vaccines are amazing and I look forward to new ones. The anti-covid drug isn't one. It's that simple.
The fundamentals are the same. It's something with the relevant spike protein that your immune system can identify, but without actually being the virus that causes the disease
I can't tell if I'm more disgusted by the anti-vaxxers or the censorship.
IMHO no content should be banned, ever. The only thing is to be held responsible for the content if you are not going to be impartial.
For example, instead of banning videos of anti-vaxxers, put a claim progress list clearly visible together with the video that can be maintained by those of opposing views.
For example, according to some anti-vaxxers, people with mRNA vaccines are about to die en mass. In places like Portugal, full vaccination rate approaches %90. Wouldn't be good to keep the video and see if Portuguese are dying?
Content moderation by elimination is one of the biggest sins of the internet era. The internet has become a place where history doesn't exist because you can't have a history without having the artefacts that make it. We should be able to look back a few years back and see who said what.
Techno-fascism rears its ugly head once more. These mRNA shots aren't flawless medications with zero side effects. People are getting strokes. People are getting heart inflammation. It's not even working against new variants. The emperor really doesn't have clothes. I've had dozens of vaccines in my life. The Covid vaccine might be the worst-performing vaccine of all time as far as effectiveness goes. You need 3 booster shots apparently in less than 9 months and you'll probably still get Covid. But meanwhile lets throw out all human rights that hundreds of millions died for and many more suffered for.
The reason freedom of speech is a must in a free society is that speaking is the same as thinking. Who watches the watchmen? There is no amount of "misinformation" that could ever hold a candle to the absolute evil that has been perpetrated throughout history by outlawing or banning or shunning free speech.
> I've had dozens of vaccines in my life. The Covid vaccine might be the worst-performing vaccine of all time as far as effectiveness goes.
Funny thing about those other vaccines. They protect against viruses that we already have collective heard immunity for.
As it happens, it turns out that herd immunity substantial reduces community transmission, and thus makes vaccines appear more effective. Without that, you’re pretty much always gonna get breakthrough infections.
So you want the COVID vaccine to be as effective as other vaccines. Then get vaxxed, and get everyone in your community vaxxed.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28693060&p=2
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28693060&p=3
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28693060&p=4
etc. (Sorry for the annoyance - comments like this will eventually go away.)