Politics is tribal. “Conservatism” is situational. And so you can get some “unlikely comic book crossovers” if looking at the world through country-specific ideological prisms.
According to one recent poll, the most pro-vax Russians are United Russia (i.e. the most pro-Putin) voters, presumably reflecting the official state position which is and has always been pro-vaxx. 55% are now vaxxed, 28% planning to.
That is, precisely the opposite of what Western propaganda and the Russian liberal activists who feed it claim.
(While United Russia’s electorate is the most elderly these days, this doesn’t explain most of the differential, since the gap in pro/anti-vax sentiments between age groups in Russia is, unfortunately, one of the smallest ones in the world).
Liberals (Yabloko and “New People”) and nationalists (LDPR) are in the middle. That they are broadly comparable is quite astounding by Western standards, where anti-vaxx has become the standard “Far Right” position from the US to Germany, while liberals have made a cult out of double masking, total lockdowns, and similar inanities in a heroic attempt to catch up to rightoid idiocy. This clearly reflects the fact that Russian liberals feel alienated from society and exhibit low trust in official state positions, which especially expresses itself in Sputnik V skepticism (i.e. the one anti-vaxx position that Western liberals endorse). Clearly there’s a converse effect with respect to nationalists, whose natural inclinations towards conspiracy thinking are instead muted by patriotic sentiments towards “made in Russia” Sputnik V as well as the pro-vaxx position held by a state that isn’t overtly hostile to them as in the West.
Funniest of all though is that KPRF voters who are the most anti-vax: 51% say they haven’t and will not vax. My anecdotal impressions (“Communists tend to be some of the most active anti-vaxx agitators in Russia, so it is morbidly amusing in a way how they are helping kill off what remains of their fading electorate“) turned out to be exactly right. Communists aren’t huge fans of either the “Putin system” or the “Western globalists” so their positions also make sense, at least from the perspective of “your brain on ideology.”
Some differences on socio-economic policies aside, these commie populists seem to be the equivalents of America’s anti-vaxx Christian radio hosts, down to the red caps:
/r/russia: “The leader of the Yaroslavl communists, Alexander Vorobyov, died of COVID-19. Vorobyov was opposed to compulsory vaccination, in the photo he is depicted as a protester holding a poster “Compulsion to vaccinate is a crime.”
Yaroslavl oblast has long had one of the lower vaccination rates relative to other regions, despite hosting a large and prosperous regional capital and having the highest IQ amongst Russian regions outside Moscow/SPB. This Vorobyov fellow seems to have had quite a successful activist career until its untimely end.
But hey, then again, maybe it works. The KPRF is polling better than it’s done in years:
Before Westerners get too excited, the biggest beneficiaries are the Communist Party. Which is enjoying a surge in support, and polling as high as 38% in the industrial centre of the country.
The Far East is backing the ultra-nationalist LDPR, at United Russia's expense.
— Bryan MacDonald (@27khv) August 26, 2021
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Communists remember when you didn’t get forcibly injected by kikes, or at least it wasn’t considered a good thing. The liberals in Russia are probably just opposed to Sputnik because it’s Russian.
Infectious disease is old, vaccines that amplify infectious disease being forced on the population in part of a contrived global social crisis is relatively new. Old with the old, in with the new!
Israeli study shows that natural immunity is 13 times more effective than the vaccine.
https://twitter.com/zerohedge/status/1431220004037537793
Can we stop pretending that Covid is some apocalyptic threat that justifies these lockdowns and intake of dangerous, experimental vaccines that have no long-term studies, risks of ADE, and already 20,000+ deaths from side effects?
According to the CDC’s own data, you have a 99.7% chance of survival as long as you’re below 70. Even above 70, you have a 94% chance of survival. COVID squarely falls in the criteria of acceptable risks in the same league as airplane crashes and car accidents.
Covid is something like 30k nucleotides and has 11 protein-coding genes. The spike protein used in one of the vaccines is 4,284 (Pfizer), 4101 (Moderna) nucleotides out of that 30k. This is about 14% of the total genome.
Epitopes are what your body identifies to neutralize pathogens. It stands to reason that an interaction with a more diverse and comprehensive pathogen will result in more immune epitopes being generated.
The fidelity (accuracy) of RNA polymerases during replication is about every 10,000 to 1,000,000 nucleotides.
The estimated number of virions produced during an infection is 109 – 1011.
So a high estimate of 1 error every 10k nucleotides gives 3 mutation per virion, while the low estimate gives 1 mutation for every 33 virions produced.
Going from that 109 number of virions produced in an infection gives anywhere from 30 million to 3 billion mutated virions from a single infection!
So now imagine you inhaled some droplets, they will have numerous variations that your body will adapt to, while the vaccine has one single form of just one protein from SARS-COV-2, and it’s a leaky vaccine that is at best only temporarily effective at reducing symptoms.
Viral loads of breakthrough Delta variant infection cases were 251 times higher than those of cases infected with old strains detected between March-April 2020.
Neutralizing antibody levels after vaccination and at diagnosis of the cases were lower than those in the matched uninfected controls. There was no correlation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndrome_coronavirus_2#Genome
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7293463/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizer%E2%80%93BioNTech_COVID-19_vaccine#Sequence
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epitope
Communists reject godless vaccines – they prefer to fight diseases with prayer
https://cs14.pikabu.ru/images/previews_comm/2021-08_6/1630163546156944916.webp
https://cs12.pikabu.ru/images/previews_comm/2021-07_4/1626773075116832169.webp
But is the Russian vaccine an actual vaccine, as opposed to what they are trying to make Americans take? Or?
https://twitter.com/AFP/status/1431343224615055364
It is the scared old against the young. The young ones who buy into it – like AK – are not really young and seem to have no progeny.
I asked an old guy a hypothetical question: “would prolonging lives for 1,000 elderly be worth sacrificing 2 healthy young children?” He replied “yes, absolutely“, and something about the greater good. They are deranged by selfishness and fear.
That is what we are dealing with. In the past this level of old people selfishness was referred to as satanism, they used to literally sacrifice children for the “good of the society”. It is back: every time a young person dies of inflamed heart after the MRNA vaccine he/she is being sacrificed so the few scared 80-year old can maybe live 1 more year. The only good thing is that historically satan never wins, so AK is betting on the wrong horse.
It’s pretty simple–the burden is on the old and sick to live much more carefully than they used to. The burden is not on the young and healthy to take an experimental gene therapy.
If you are a person who has low risk of being infected (works in office with filtered air, lives with vaccinated people, etc), then from an individual, selfish view, it is a good idea to not be vaccinated, to avoid being an experimental mouse for drugs that do not have long-term safety studies. Even if you just delayed the vaccination for a year or two.
But if you have a high risk of being infected (i.e. working in environment where air is not filtered, living with unvaccinated people, etc), then the vaccine will likely be a less bad option, than being an unvaccinated experimental mouse for an “interesting” new virus. Concern about “inflamed heart”, is higher with the infection, than the vaccination.
In the Israel government study, with Pfizer vaccine, they found that risk of myocarditis was 3,2 extra cases per 100,000 people vaccinated, while it was 11 cases per 100,000 people for the infection.
Myocarditis is uncommon in either scenario, but the infection will be more dangerous than the vaccination for myocarditis . Of course, the safest option is being both unvaccinated and uninfected, but many people are being infected with the virus and for those people the vaccination reduces their risk of short-term adverse effects.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2112543
In Germany the Libertarians-leaning FDP voters are Anti-Merkel but they still get vaccinated, because they’re smart. I remember you said Russian liberals are on average high iq compared to United Russia voters. So why do they don’t get vaccinated? Most high-iq people usually don’t follow this kind of tribal craziness when it affects their personal lives.
Oops I miswrote my comment slightly (when will we be allowed to edit our posts?). It is 2.7 events per 100,000 people, vs 11 events per 100,000.
In either case, myocarditis is unlikely to be a risk for you as an individual.
As they say: “The key to comparing these risks depends on the risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection to an individual person, and that risk can vary according to place and over time. Given the current state of the global pandemic, however, the risk of exposure to SARS-CoV-2 appears to be inevitable.”
As long as the countries allow the virus to circulate through the population, then some extra people will die from myocarditis either way, with or without vaccine – it’s going to happen regardless.
In this context (of virus being allowed to circulate through the population), it also attained: “substantial protective effect of vaccines with respect to adverse events such as acute kidney injury, intracranial hemorrhage, and anemia, probably because infection was prevented”.
Of course the Russian commies are smart enough to be against the Vax.
Stalin killed off all the freak commies like we have in America.
Russian commies were cleaner living and more conservative than bible belt Christians.
when will we be allowed to edit our posts?
Since when were we not allowed to edit posts?
By definition, vaccine is something that prevents the disease. Calling anything else a vaccine is a lie, either innocent, or with an ulterior motive (i.e., fraud).
I was vaccinated against polio, TB, whooping cough, measles, and mumps in childhood in the USSR. As these were real vaccines, I never had any of these diseases.
Sputnik is certainly a lot more effective as a disease modifier and has lower incidence of severe adverse effects than the crap Pfizer and Moderna peddle, but it is still not a true vaccine: it does not prevent infection. It’s based on the same platform (two different human adenoviruses) as previously developed anti-Ebola vaccine (the part encoding Ebola protein was replaced with the part encoding covid spike protein), but it’s not as effective as anti-Ebola vaccine.
Newly registered Russian CoviVac contains inactivated whole virus, so it has a better chance of being a true vaccine. We don’t know yet, Phase III trial is under way.
when will we be allowed to edit our posts?
Since when were we not allowed to edit posts?
This is an edited post!!!
If you believe the US “intelligence community”, which not too long ago made a preposterous claim that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential elections, I have a bridge to sell you.
It is the scared old against the young.
Alas, the scared old are winning . . .
Pandemic’s teen mental health crisis in Victoria worse than feared
https://archive.is/y0qqE
Socialist Patriarchy of Lytsk FTW!
https://s1.livelib.ru/boocover/1000478877/200/5516/boocover.jpg
No, this is indication on the political winds in relation to China.
One study in the US from last winter found vaccine hesitancy was related to trust. Another found PhDs with high levels of vaccine hesitancy. Both would be consistent with smart anti-regime Russians being hesitant.
Then it’s legit. It makes sense to treat any US decision as purely political, having nothing to do with reality. Covid is no exception.
As I said before, I don’t care one way or the other, and haven’t for quite some time. Only here to observe the circus.
I don’t know how you put up with so much stupidity, arrogance, and abuse. You have the patience of a saint.
A vaccine provides immunity. Immunity isn’t a binary. Your argument is silly. Like saying that a cure which only works half of the time is not a cure.
Here in Austfaila, where the human detritus we call ‘elites’ in politics, the MSM, business etc, are all united, 100% in pushing the gene therapy, cytotoxic spike protein producing, injections, ‘vaccine passports’, so recently furiously denied as to be intended to be introduced, are, naturally, to be introduced. As ever, the Big Lie has now been Memory Holed. You won’t be able to get into a restaurant, theatre or public loo without your ‘voluntary’ shot.
The Nuremberg Laws, and the 1964 Helsinki Accords that specifically prohibited coerced medical procedures, are gone. They are verboten, of course, to even be mentioned in the totalitarian gibberfest we call our ‘Free Society’, where everyone is ‘free’ to have the same opinion-or else. Now, led by the ‘Opposition’, who see some advantage in targeting children, they are moving on to forcibly vaccinate children. No jab, no school, no playground, no movies etc. Those who the Gods wish to destroy they first make mad. And very, very, bad.
Yes – but then how would the pharma companies finally get their mRNA experiments pushed into the mainstream??? And how would big pharma be able to afford more political lobbying without all the money they are making from this?
I’m still not sure how Russia fits into the broader virus operation. Like I could see China collaborating with the Globalist dominated West to run the virus op, and indeed we see countries on the outer edge of the Western system (Japan, India) playing ball the least, but why does Russia go along with it?
Interesting that Russia developed her own vaccine, rather than taking a Western or Chinese one, uses less experimental technology, but still causes the body to generate dangerous spike proteins. Most of the attention has been on the mRNA injections, not sure how much Sputnik V or J&J damage killer T-Cells, or risk for ADE.
Perhaps Russia goes along to get along. Push the mask nonsense, push the vaccines, rather than Ivermectin & c. so that Russia doesn’t look “weird” and inattentive to an apparent crisis that has everyone else losing their minds. Maybe the Russian leadership would rather take their chances in a Chinese-run world where the West is massively depleted, so they play along.
What are the age groups? It would mean something if it was evenly distributed, but it is not. What I have seen is that the Covid-19 infection side effects and deaths are concentrated among the old and already sick. The vaccine side effects are evenly distributed and myocarditis is more frequent among young people.
Another issue is that Covid-19 infection is controllable – people can isolate or avoid certain activities-places. But vaccine consequences are not. It is a choice.
The moral equation is as I outlined above: is it permissible to cause death of a few young people in order to prolong the lives of the old? Because that is what the data shows no matter how much some try to obfuscate. We are not biologically equal – a young man or woman with their whole life in front of them is not the same as a 85-year old with health issues. You can’t sacrifice young or children no matter how many old people that would help.
It is hard to understand motivations. Based on observing Russia’s and China’s behaviour they may think that they are under a biological warfare attack – at a minimum they have not excluded the possibility. So they play it safe.
There is also historically a completely different mentality when it comes to fighting others – West is enamoured of its PR, its narratives, they talk all the time, spin stories and hope to prevail that way. Sometimes it even works. Russia-China (and a few others) think that showing what they think or know is very stupid, a weakness that helps the enemy. So they stonewall even when they don’t have to.
So your recommended plan is to avoid catching Corona by socially isolating for the next few decades???
And aren’t you getting kind of old yourself, I always was under the impression that you’re well over 40. Might be a mistake to imagine that you’re not really at risk from Corona like people in their 20s. I personally know via an acquaintance about a guy who was about 36 and died of Corona (don’t know if he had any preconditions, but at least he doesn’t seem to have been moribund before getting Corona). May be rare, but definitely quite possible.
Anyway, why are you diverting the discussion, Karlin isn’t a proponent of yet more lockdowns or of compulsory vaccinations for anybody, you’re arguing against a position nobody here holds.
All major liberast online influencers are rabidly pro-Sputnik. Varlamov, Katz, the Voice of this, the Echo of that, etc. Today their position overlaps a 100% with those of pro-govt media. Only on this, but it does.
The “good people must get the kike spike” prime directive is more powerful in them than the “anything Putin does is bad” cognitive foundation.
Who knows. Maybe after 30 years of cleansing-by-wilderness, the Rus commies are ready to become a mix of Chinese-style NatSoc reds and western-style populists.
https://imgpile.com/images/N3GLVh.png
https://imgpile.com/images/N3GO6E.png
https://imgpile.com/images/N3GWfR.png
The air-exchange concept, which is a commonplace in hospitals, has not penetrated in the US for residential or commercial buildings, despite my repeated postings on this website over the past year. My smart Asian-American (sorry for the redundancy) dentist installed an air exchanger over a year ago, but she is an exception. I then began my postings, to no avail. Too bad, because the Fed could print free money (at least for now) to pay for this, what’s another trillion. Yes, this would consume somewhat more electricity; drill.
It would have been easy to run a test of this concept in a few nursing homes. Turn the air over 6 times per hour instead of once an hour. If nobody contracted Covid in a nursing home…
Could this be conclusive proof that the President-Legit Joe Biden does not read UNZ??
It is way worse. In Colorado, out of 6 million people, 600 thousand got covid once, and 2 thousand got it twice. In other words, the risk of catching covid was 10% in the general population, but 0.3% in the convalescent. (Admittedly, the time for tracking reinfections is shorter than that for initial disease.) That is 97% reduction in risk.
At this point, I will adopt the typical vaxxer attitude, that is, never read nor quote any FDA publication documenting the effectiveness of any vaccine. But do you know any vaccine that is 97% effective?
This is why the requiement that convalescent be vaccinated gives away the game. At this time, the elites in Romania, America and probably Russia want to wash their hands of the whole thing. If you vax and still get sick, it will be called an unfortunate rare event. If you don’t vaxx, welp, you chose death, sorry, no regeneron cocktail for you.
This week, the Romanian police has verified vaccine facilities where there were suspicions of fraud. Suspicions were raised when some vaccinated people had the guts to still get sick. I call that ultranegationism. How dare they catch the disease? Perhaps their faith was weak, perhaps they infiltrated on purpose to undermine public trust in the vax!
PSA: there is no intact RNA in a vial taken from the deep freezer more than one day.
My anecdotal experience is that Sovoks are indeed the most adamant anti-vaxxers. I enjoy pointing out to them that if they still lived in the Soviet Union during this event, nobody would be asking their opinions on the vaccines, they’d just be lining them up and giving them the shots. This usually causes steam to come out of their ears, no reasonable or rational answer to this question has yet been produced.
Are there public vaccine passport burnings in Russia as in Italy?
One should add that sovok is a state of mind rather than a coherent political ideology. While all Russian commies are sovoks, not all sovoks are card-carrying commies. And indeed it is darkly humorous how the sovoks say they want the state to provide for and organize all aspects of life, but then when the state actually does get organized enough to roll out a vaccination program, they run for the woods like Alexander the First’s serfs fleeing the Mark of the Beast.
Not that I’ve heard of. Rather, vaccine passport counterfeit operations are quite profitable.
I thought this was a positive selling point:
https://krivoe-zerkalo.ru/content/v-mordovii-vrach-obmanom-vaktsiniroval-tselyj-rajon-ot-koronavirusa.html
Russia is lucky. They only have one communist party. We have two, the Republican Party and the Democrat Party.
“And aren’t you getting kind of old yourself” – No, Beckow as true komsomolets never gets old.
“would prolonging lives for 1,000 elderly be worth sacrificing 2 healthy young children?”
What the hell kind of a question is that? That’s like you saying to your neighbor: “Hey you’ve got 8 kids and my kid needs a new liver. Can’t one of your kids give my kid his liver?”
Just look around you and see the vast amounts of autistic and physically/mentally deformed children and adults. The others are hidden away in “homes.” So many others are dead. You can be sure some “Vaccines” are responsible for their condition and they were experimented on as children. They were guinea pigs and they had life destroying reactions so other kids and adults who had no reaction could go on living.
Old people are selfish for not dying? Old people should leave this earth? Do you have aged parents and do you suggest to them they should suicide themselves? Nobody is forcing children to get vaxxed except the satanic rulers of the earth, not old people.
Do you realize that those most vulnerable age groups are also most white, therefore such position is nothing but speeding up the white replacement rate?
It seems that Russia is unable to sustain the vaccination rate reached a month ago. The rate peaked just over 0.5% of the population/day and is falling below the 0.4%/day threshold again. It is very far from the 1%/day reached by European countries and even by many Latin American countries.
What informs your apparent belief that those who have used one of the Pfizer, etc., products are not as potentially infectious?
How much lower is the risk?
It’s hard to find the data on how many using Sputnik Vee, have gotten the virus afterward, but I heard /saw the data at 2 to 5%, have gotten the virus afterwards , witch beats Phyzer at 40% + in Israel. I’m holding off because I had the virus last Dec. – as I commented before. All my friends and wife have taken the Stutnik Vee and I have heard of no problems. OO dah Chee A T N.
It may depend on whether or not you have a dozen US Bioweapons Labs on your border – too. Ukraine has over ten and Georgia and Kazakhstan have some huge ones . Add a little sarin to the spray and you will have many more deaths. Crimean border are a great example – 350 to 400 cases a day. Pretty Bizarre for a summer with temp over 38′ C on some days. Covid is being spread – by vaxine and by the One world order. China has run out of bats by now – not Tbilisi.
Dear Anatoly is so infatuated with Corona-chan, that he is being carried away in every piece connected with the disease and its cure. Anatoly misleads you by the sleigh of hand. The real question is ‘whether the vaccination against Corona should be mandatory or voluntary’, not ‘whether it is useful’. No, Virginia, the only party leaders in Russia who call for mandatory vaccination are liberals; liberal-democrat Zhirinovsky and super-liberal Yabloko boss Grigory Yavlinsky. The United Russia and Putin are on the record against AGAINST mandatory vaccination. So are the Communists, as well. The Communists are against remote (distant) schooling and against QR passes, as well. And the question to vaccinate or not is best to be left to a personal judgement.
Now this might not be true. We make in vitro mRNA in bulk, purify it by LiCl precipitation, dissolve it in water, then add sodium acetate to 0.3 M and ethanol (to 70% v/v). In this suspension mRNA is stable at -80 oC for several years, yields full-length translated proteins in the cell-free translation system. Now, if you store mRNA in water-based solution w/o anything to suppress RNAses (which are extremely abundant everywhere), your statement might be correct.
Nothing to burn in Russia. There was an attempt in Moscow to introduce an equivalent – obligatory QR code of those fully vaccinated to visit restaurants, bars, barber shops, etc. It lasted all of two weeks, July 1-15, and was promptly cancelled because Russians flatly refused to patronize any establishment that required QR code. My advice to Italians, French, Germans, and others: have the balls to do what the Russians did.
Dmitry,
Perhaps it’s quite pointless trying to convince many on this forum about Covid-19 vaccines or about whether this so-called “Covid-19 pandemic” is a true pandemic or a totally bogus one , made up by globalist elites as part of a nefarious plan for absolute tyranny on a totally super grand scale. To be fair , I do understand the concerns of most who are “anti-vaxxers” or “vaccine hesitant”. That mainstream media( CNN, BBC, and their ilk) politicized covid-19 and used scaremongering to get the Orange man Trump out and sleepy Joe in , or try to help Moderna and Pfizer get their jabs on as many arms as possible etc – yeah , you can’t trust them. I mean, these MSM portray Covid as some apocalyptic plague and suddenly Governments come up with all kinds of regulations + punitive actions in the name of “containing ” the virus – fits the narrative of a bogus pandemic of a relatively harmless flu-like virus ‘created’ by ruling elites to take away personal freedoms. I reckon that would be the typical mindset of a Western “conservative”/ “right-wing”. On the other hand, there is the other extreme, we have Western “left wing”/”liberals” and “progressives” who believe MSM that here we have an apocalyptic plague , we gotta get everyone vaccinated – even children if possible , harsh lockdowns to quell the virus.
All I can say , as a healthcare worker who dealt with(and will soon be dealing again) Covid patients , is that the pandemic is real but not apocalyptic, the virus is more lethal than influenza ( patients tend to be those with risk factors like older age, with medical co-morbidities , pregnant women, those with obesity ) and associated with organizing pneumonia, pulmonary embolism/ venous thromboembolism, viral encephalitis, pancytopaenia(especially thrombocytopenia) and even arterial thrombosis. This pandemic has the propensity to overwhelm the healthcare system – I have seen this happen with my own eyes in !y country. I don’t need all those tedious statistics to convince me when I have to deal with these patients and see my healthcare center and others work on the brink of collapse.
The truth is somewhere in the middle. And about the issues on the adverse effects of vaccines , and the unknowns of long term side effects, yes the vaccine hesitant person has some merits. It’s ok to admit “we don’t know everything” and this is where Western governments /scientists/ medical fraternity fail their own population . The “authoritarian” method fails , especially when the regulations make frequent “u -turns” with all the uncertainties in a very fluid understanding of the virology and biology of the disease. And I reckon many Westerners are not like most East Asians who don’t value personal freedoms as sacrosanct compared to (perhaps in Western mind, an imagined rather than real) “greater good”, especially when we think our societies are being threatened by a crisis.
Perhaps Western governments and the Russian government should just allow their people to make informed decisions about vaccines on their own. If some don’t want vaccines, so be it and let them bear responsibility for their own choices. Stop shaming them or opposing their rights to make these choices and coming up with punitive action for not making the “desired ” choice. And instead ensure enough equipment and trained personnel for hospitals.
Possibly, but that is not the way it works. You can’t say A, and pretend that it doesn’t lead to B. Others will take your prep work – “what idiots wouldn’t stick the miraculous concoction in their blood? haha, must be commies” – and do the rest. There is a thin line between constant affirmation of the good that MRNA vaccines are bringing and making it compulsory. What other point would there be in attacking the unvaccinated?
Regarding isolation: by all means anyone who feels at risk should isolate, mostly the old, obese and sick. The rest of us should live our lives. Using random examples is pointless, I know a 34-year old who died of heart failure 4 days after 2nd vaccine. But that also means very little. What matters are statistics and they show that for under 40 there is a higher risk from vaccine side effects than from corona. With children the gap is wider. Even if it was about the same, why do something that is of no benefit to us?
So one more time: is it permissible to cause death of a few young people in order to prolong the lives of the old?
imo that’s pretty unfair to Karlin, his position on the issue as I understand it (vaccines for everybody who wants them, but no compulsion, no more lockdowns, people just have to live with the consequences of their choices) is pretty liberal. You’re getting agitated at the wrong target imo.
Last time I checked, the people pushing the MRNA vaccines on everyone, including on 12-year old kids are quite old. I believe Biden, Fauci and their assorted EU counterparts are all older people, some in their 80’s. What is more important is that the political support for the compulsory young people vaccinations is mostly among the old. They would like everyone to be vaccinated so they can be “100% safe”.
I proposed a key question: given that the vaccines benefit the old and hurt the young, can the old require the young, including children, to sacrifice themselves?
You avoid the question by some bizarre liver analogies and emotional manipulation like “Old people should leave this earth?”. That is nonsense. If some have to leave this earth it should be based on one’s biology: younger and healthier people should not be sacrificed to protect the older and sicker people. That is a very simple point, maybe unpleasant to think about, but nevertheless that is where we are. What is your choice? Would prolonging a 80-year old life be worth hurting or risking harm for a child? Ideally, we wouldn’t face this choice, but today we do. Where do you stand?
The deep freezer I refer to is the -80, where the vax used to be stored, safely, until minutes before injection. At least this was the rule in January.
By March, both Romania/EU and US authorities decided that vaxes may be safely kept at -20 Celsius.
Today, Moderna’s website says “The Moderna COVID‑19 Vaccine can be stored refrigerated between 2° to 8°C (36° to 46°F) for up to 30 days prior to first use”.
Even with the lack of data on RNA stability, I’ll trust Maniatis over Kixxmekia. There can’t be any intact RNA in the vax kept in the fridge for one month. The RNA vax is a mere exercise in humiliation.
This is not about AK. I was pointing out that the vaccine-enthusiasm naturally leads to eventual compulsion. It may be unfair to the rational people – on both sides – because we basically agree. But calling out recalcitrant unvaccinated without calling out vaccine fanatics is in a way taking a stand too.
Based on my ~30 years of experience with in vitro produced mRNA, I agree with that.
Anyway, those mRNA “vaccines” won’t lose much even if there is no mRNA left in the vial: if this mRNA is normal, its integrity in the vial doesn’t matter, as it would be destroyed within minutes after injection, in cells or outside, by endogenous RNases; if it’s chemically modified, its integrity won’t matter, either, as ribosomes (the machines that make proteins inside cells based on mRNA sequence) don’t work with chemically modified mRNAs. mRNA “vaccines” are a hoax, but judging by the profits of Pfizer and Moderna, a very successful one. As American saying puts it, “there is a sucker born every minute”.
Can you provide us a simple explanation of advantages and disadvantages of the different vaccines technologies (attenuated viruses, vectorial vaccines and mRNA vaccines)? What’s, for you, the best option?
Very insightful.
This seems to be related to the predilection of some who have used the product to parrot anything they hear that gives them comfort about their decision. Check out Dmitry’s upthread comment #10 that amplifies in passing the notion that the Pfizer, etc., products prevent contamination, and my pending request in #46.
Decliners, of course, are subject to the same tendency to parrot anything they hear that gives them comfort about their decision. But it’s the former that are fueling the drive towards eventual compulsion.
Lockdown/quarantine during pandemics, can be an acceptable policy morally, as it involved not just choice of people as an individual, but also how their behaviour can cause damage to other people.
So in theory it is an acceptable policy of civilized community.*
With compulsory vaccination, it will depend whether vaccine prevents transmission between people, or only upon yourself.
If it reduces only danger to yourself (but not to other people), then there isn’t moral acceptability to compulsory vaccinate the population. However, perhaps unvaccinated people can pay further for their own health costs if they need to be hospitalized due to their decision.
I’m myself unvaccinated. Intuitionally my concept is this should be the person’s choice, just like it’s not acceptable for government to say whether people can or cannot smoke crack, eat organic vegetables, swim in cold water, etc, as this is an area where a person has to decide for themselves.
But philosophically it should also be conditional during pandemics about the question whether this decision can harm to other people. Compulsory vaccination if it prevents harm to other people could be a policy acceptable for civilization. However, if vaccination doesn’t prevent harm to other people, then it is not acceptable compulsory vaccination policy.
Some of the conspiracy theories are a little inconsistent to say it mildly.
For example, how does the conspiracy theory operate for people who combine being anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers?
I can see that vaccination can theoretically be part of a conspiracy of the authorities to destroy human’s fertility, or install nanochips, modify DNA, etc.
But how can making people wear masks be part of a conspiracy theory?
People wearing masks become more anonymous, so it is more difficult for authorities to track them. If everyone wears a mask, then it would become more difficult for the authorities (or anyone else) to control the people. If you were a paranoid conspiracy theorist, you should welcome an increase in citizens’ invisibility.
This is indicated about an Alpha variant of coronavirus: “Two studies from Israel, posted as preprints on 16 July, find that two doses of the vaccine made by pharmaceutical company Pfizer, based in New York City, and biotechnology company BioNTech, based in Mainz, Germany, are 81% effective at preventing SARS-CoV-2 infections. And vaccinated people who do get infected are up to 78% less likely to spread the virus to household members than are unvaccinated people. ”
“A study from Finland, posted as a preprint on 10 July, found that spouses of infected health-care workers who had received a single dose of the Pfizer–BioNTech vaccine or that produced by Moderna in Cambridge, Massachusetts, were 43% less likely to get infected than were spouses of unvaccinated health workers.”
However for Delta variant there hasn’t been much evidence by late July of a reduction of transmission caused by vaccination.
“But studies on Alpha and other variants cannot be easily generalized to Delta, says Steven Riley, an infectious-diseases researcher at Imperial College London. So far, there are no published data on how vaccines affect infections and infectiousness with Delta”
“Unpublished preliminary data from Israel’s Ministry of Health show that Delta could chip away at some of the reduction in transmission provided by the Pfizer–BioNTech vaccine. And case numbers have risen sharply in Israel following Delta’s arrival, despite more than 60% of the population being fully vaccinated.”
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02054-z
I wouldn’t be surprised if it is a placebo. Russians were the only ones to study natural immunity and they discovered it is a non-threat before anyone had a vaccine out.
Theoretically, attenuated of killed virus (or any pathogen, for that matter) is the only type of vaccine that presents your immune system with the full complement of antigens to react to. Thus, whenever it’s possible to make it, that type would be the most effective vaccine. This strategy worked well against many diseases.
Adenovirus encoding one or more pathogen surface proteins is second-best: it gives your immune system one or more of the real targets, but does not give it the other targets exposed on the surface of the pathogen. This strategy worked well against a few diseases, e.g., Ebola.
mRNA vaccines never worked and still don’t. Basically, if what Pfizer and Moderna tell us about the composition of their concoctions were true, the efficacy of their “vaccines” would be zero. If they have measurable efficacy (even as low as 30-40%), that tells us that they lied about the composition. Thus, either one or the other is a lie. In my experience, people lie for a good reason. The fact that US Congress made both Moderna and Pfizer immune from lawsuits before their stuff was used in humans shows that they anticipated a lot of negative consequences. This anticipation turned out to be perfectly correct.
Well, to misquote you: calling out vaccine worshippers without calling out diehard, headstrong anti-vaxxers IS taking a stand too. We all are kinda taking a stand, just whether we are closer to one pole or another. Perhaps I am more in favour of vaccination and you are more against vaccination…and this statement is an oversimplification of our respective stands. It is a more nuanced topic in which I personally agree that there shouldn’t be compulsion in vaccination. It is simply untrue that vaccine enthusiasm ultimately leads to vaccine compulsion, similarly it’s untrue that vaccine hesitancy ultimately leads to complete anti-vaccination.
I think your point about this ‘generational conflict’ between “young vs old” with regards to covid vaccination is interesting :
1. That older fellows in position of power (in the EU or USA or Russia) with pro vaccination policy drives ‘prove’ the older generation wants to ‘sacrifice’ the young to save themselves is simply not true. Some of them had/ have probably political reasons to do that(like Biden ousting Trump?) . Donald Trump(not exactly spring chicken young) and many equally ancient Republican leaders would be more attuned to your position or those of the anti-vaxxer or vaccine hesitant pole. And there are young vaccine worshippers in the West too, just not in position of authority (which tend to have more of the older folks).
2. Ultimately it is whether each person thinks it’s well worth taking risk to get vaccinated for his/her own good vs the ‘common good’ of his/her society. In your case, you dispute it’s even for the ‘common good’ (it’s more for the good of the old) and thus unfair to ‘sacrifice’ the young to potential vaccine side effects. Salient argument but this belies, I think, a dichotomy of Western /European psyche vs East Asian psyche…. Personal freedoms, self interests being of more value than sacrificing for some form of common good. Worshiping youth and vitality rather than having some appreciation of the old(perhaps Confucianist influence has something to do with the East Asian mindset).
Just my personal views. As I have reiterated, vaccine compulsion or the heavy-handed, authoritarian way of handling this pandemic is simply not suitable for western/European populations because their value systems would clash with such methods.
Yes improving design of buildings and their air quality, should be a priority response to these airborne pandemics, just as modern sewage and water supply systems had responded to disease such as typhoid and cholera. You can imagine how much resistance there was to installing sanitation systems into buildings, when you see how people in India still today can enjoy the Ganges.
In Japan they are following this policy with a mass installation of ventilation systems to respond to the pandemic.
Regularly exchange or filtered indoor air wouldn’t completely prevent transmission, as there has been transmission in modern hospital buildings (with ventilation systems), as well as outdoors ( https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-08-06/nsw-covid-delta-outdoor-transmission-risk/100353394 ).
But it would be one of the most notdisruptive and economical policies, as well as one which would work for the long-term (as modern water supplies prevent illness for decades after they are installed into cities).
For example, this report showed Spanish schools are installing small air purifiers that are suitable for a bedroom, into large classrooms full of children.
1 of these might only achieve 2 air changes per hour for a room of the size shown in the video. So it will be the same for the children as being in an unventilated room for half an hour. (Maybe if they had added 3-4 of them to the classroom, maybe students studying in the school could be reducing a risk of airborne transmission – as well as preventing allergies or so on)
I agree with everything you’ve said, especially with regards to the conspiracy theories. To be honest, I was shocked that so many Western anti vaxxers subscribe to many ridiculous conspiracy theories.
About face masking and ‘infringement to personal rights/freedoms’, many of us in Asia watch in disbelief that huge populations in the West clash with each other with regards to this issue. To me, it was and still remains surreal, bordering on the absurd.
I guess a clarification is in order. I am for vaccination. I got many vaccines in childhood, including those against polio, TB, measles, whooping cough, and mumps. I am glad I did: I had none of these diseases. But I am against calling things that don’t prevent the infection vaccines. They are disease modifiers, no more and no less. So-called “mRNA vaccines” are simply fraud. The companies that push them are criminals. The governments that push them are accomplices.
Right. Do you always argue by assertion? Neither the West nor the East – nowhere for that matter – is that considered productive.
I didn’t use the term “wants to” because that is not what I think is happening. The older generation (oversimplification) wants the best for themselves – they are threatened by Covid and they want that to end. If that means forceful vaccination of the young and children – or heavily motivated vaccination – they will go for it. Not because they want it, but because their self-centered mentality drives them to it. They can sincerely argue that they don’t want it and that using the word sacrifice is offensive, even sacrilegious – after all they think of themselves as good people.
But the data is clear: for every few thousand old people who prolong their lives there are a few victims of the MRNA vaccines among the young. We can argue about the ratios, but not about whether it is happening – it clearly is happening. Maybe a ratio of 1,000 saved elderly to 1 dead young person seems ok to some, but it is fundamentally immoral and biologically upside down. We can appreciate the old, even venerate them, but should young people unnecessarily die or even suffer to keep them on this earth? There is a nugget of incredible immorality – even satanism – in arguing that should be the case.
This is not clear-cut, there are young people who are helped by vaccination. But as I argued above, a constant, uncritical enthusiasm for the Covid vaccination inevitably leads to some people wanting to make it compulsory. On the other hand, hesitancy about the MRNA vaccines doesn’t do anything – no plans to unvaccinate the willing, no restrictions, nothing. It is each person’s choice and that choice can change. There will be many who will reject boosters every 6 months, others will decide to get vaccinated. Not having the discussion will only lead to compulsion and that can never lead to anything good.
Yes if you look at how American media has been obsessed with Ron DeSantis policy against children wearing masks in schools in Florida. Florida is not lacking economic resources to manage this crisis (Florida is a single state with a trillion dollar GDP – i.e. Florida is 60% of Russia’s GDP; 600% of Ukraine’s GDP), and yet their government couldn’t attain a solution to allow a more hygienic education before the beginning of a school year.
It’s understandable that children found the masks to be uncomfortable, as masks without valves can be. (It was a same situation where parents complained about the masks for their children in Russia and other countries.) Also online learning is not acceptable for any more time.
But DeSantis and Florida then need to prepare installing HEPA filtration or ventilation into the schools during the vacation time – so that children would not need to wear masks when they return. Ventilate the school building, if you don’t want to wear masks. It is like [(a & b) v (a v b)] and DeSantis found the only wrong option [not(a) & not(b)].
Media is condemning DeSantis, as it became bipartisan debate in region Florida. Although it will be possibly the same incompetent situation in other advanced countries.
https://twitter.com/JoePajak/status/1431644850848403463
It looks like they are only temporary disease modifiers. Their long-term effects are by definition at this point unknowable. Any product with this benefit-risk profile would fail on the market – thus the attempts at compulsion.
There is today no insurance company that will write a policy protecting against any MRNA vaccine side-effects, they claim there is not enough data to do the actuarial analysis. So how can anyone claim that it is “safe”?
We live in interesting times: spreading hypochondria with an emerging mass psychosis, all of it used by some to get what they want whether it is more power, more money, more importance doesn’t matter.
There are two kinds of people
1) “Diehard anti-Vaxers”
2) The ignorant.
Of course, the claim that it’s safe is a lie. We don’t know anything about long-term effects. The info about short-term effects (the side effects) is heavily censored by the liars. But you don’t expect criminals to be truthful, do you?
I got Sputnik, taking advantage of my trip to Russia for an unrelated reason, on the assumption that it is what is claimed: the same adenovirus that worked against Ebola, with coding sequence of Ebola protein exchanged for that of covid spike protein. Judging by the speed with which it was developed, it could not have been something really novel, so using the same backbone that worked against another virus appears plausible. We don’t know long-term effects of this or anti-Ebola vaccine, either: they weren’t around long enough for that. But that was the best thing available, so I settled for it, even though it is not a vaccine: it does not prevent the infection, it only reduces the probability. I actually had covid after that, very mild symptoms for a couple of days, maybe thanks to Sputnik, maybe simply thanks to my general health.
So, I know first-hand that it’s not a vaccine, but based on what I know it is likely to be harmless. As strong viral promoter is used, the production of encoded protein won’t last long: cells have ways (that we don’t understand) of shutting down all strong viral promoters. This is why chicken actin promoter is becoming popular: it’s fairly strong, but the cells don’t shut it down within days. So, I figured Sputnik would be about as harmless as taking a gram of vitamin C per day. When a true vaccine (that prevents infection) becomes available, I might consider getting it. For now, I am relying on my antibodies: I have a good level, based on quantitative measurement in Moscow, where this is easily available in a few hundred locations. The funniest thing is, they use a kit from an American company, Abbots labs, but in the US you cannot get your antibodies level measured quantitatively (I have a hypothesis why: it is likely that Pfizer and Moderna “vaccines”, being frauds, do not make your immune system produce antibodies).
Everyone wants the best for themselves, nothing wrong with that.
I used the words ‘want to’ which doesn’t really reflect the reason(s) for ‘wanting’ the vaccine… The reason can be that awful selfish attitude of these oldies as you allude to. I don’t argue by assertion but you sure argue by nitpicking. Sorry if I have bad choice of words! Debating or arguing nor language is my Forte, but I am improving and learning by occasionally engaging in this comment section.
Maybe there are some oldies who are selfish, like the ones you allude to. But can you generalize this to every oldie? Personally, some of my older family members (above 70 yo) were vaccine hesitant but I persuaded them for vaccination because of their higher risk. I just don’t agree with the way you categorize old people as simply one big selfish group and are the ones promulgating forced vaccination or heavily promoting vaccination. Or that young people are victims of these nasty, hypocritical, satanic and immoral ‘sacrifice the young with unnecessary side effects or deaths due to covid vaccines to save the old’ argument. Did I say that the young MUST sacrifice so that the old can live through the covid pandemic? Some of the younger people in my country (including myself, still part of the ‘young’) do so because they are WILLING to be vaccinated, after trying to understand the risks of vaccination to the best of their ability. And that’s because they DO care about their old folks and also because they themselves do not want to risk getting hospitalized or intubated due to severe covid.
I think you have already made up your mind that anyone who argues for vaccination had been convinced by those selfish, evil old folks who want covid to end but at the expense of the young. I have said many many times that I don’t agree with forcing anyone to be vaccinated. It’s a personal choice. In fact I don’t agree with children and teenagers getting vaccinated, a harsh broad lockdown method whenever covid cases come up etc.
All the statistics and discussions…. Yes, yes these should carry on. I am just too tired to discuss these when in the end, the argument is : it’s those nasty evil hypocritical oldies are out to sacrifice the young so that these oldies don’t die of Covid. Maybe that’s what liberals /progressives etc say to ‘moralize’ their narrative when their real motives are purely political. Maybe there are many or some oldies who are nasty and selfish fellows like what you say, but certainly not all of them or even majority of them.
Could your clarify the biochemical difference between getting the spike protein via an adenovirus vaccine and via an mRNA vaccine? My cartoon picture of the central dogma of molecular biology is that DNA is going to produce mRNA and that it’s the mRNA that gets fed to the ribosomes to make the proteins, so naively I’d expect mRNA vaccines to be just cutting out the middle man and that in principle they should work no worse than adenovirus vaccines, and in fact possibly better, since there are fewer moving parts to get broken.
Not OOT. The French system is being moved to HK as Oriental Daily (leading conservative paper and the biggest rival to NED-funded Apple Daily) says.
I have rethought my stance on getting the jab myself. If the French can withdraw from the formal economy indefinitely, HKers hating the state much more deeply will do it more eagerly. We will be in agorist economies together…
(Vaccination rate (2 shots) has reached 45%)
Not that much if you come to Hong Kong. This is the only place that has received the whole anti-COVID-vaxx ideology wholesale from the US.
Alright. They have it lucky that the whole experiment was too short to kill any hapless businesses, but it still left many bad memories in the bitter former patrons.
I have said one of the repsonses anticipated by those pushing the mandatory vaccination op is to form an antivaxx front strong enough to kill any business being caught between a rock (mandates to take only vaccinated customers) and a hard place (boycotts). When the boycott thing get going, they want the resistance to double down and shift the blow to their actual target, the small businesses.
So if we are going to do this, it means it could be a decade or two, or a generation or two, before any semblance of normalcy is returned to your daily life. I am counting the years (a few at least) they would push the op, and the years (at least 10+ if the Russian experience is something to go by) for the recovery from the fallout. That (and the scale of near-total institutional collapse) makes the realignment of lifestyles away from liberal consumerism and towards communal self-sufficiency possible. And that is the only way anyone could weather the effects of an economic collapse, and come out stronger.
Antivaxxers (who are actually a broad coalition) should move past the anger and bargaining stages to acceptance. The time for asking the question of whether COVID vaxx should be accepted is past, since all the authorities are stamping out the middle ground. Instead, ask how you can survive as an outcast from the whole structure of the modern consumer economy.
Adenoviruses evolved over hundreds of millions of years to plant their payload in the host cell, and lead it to express whatever the adenovirus needs.
Conversely, the hosts (not only mammals but even simple bacteria) evolved to guard themselves against RNA.Usually, foreign RNA is cleaved on the autopilot, often without even inciting the simplest immune response.
Moreover, even the RNA that is supposed to be there, the kind that is made by a cell for its own needs, is diced almost on the spot. In order to increase or decrease their content of whatever protein, say, myosin, a mammalian cell or a bacterium uses almost exclusively RNA synthesis as the dial.The only way this is feasible is if any other related process goes much faster, so that RNA synthesis is the only bottleneck.FOr example, there would be no way to cut down on myosin production, if the respective RNA sits around in the cell for days and weeks after it was made.
The chemical tweak used in the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines merely doubles the half life of RNA. Therefore, there is no reason to suspect the vax RNA hangs around more than minutes. (Double a few minutes is still a few minutes.)
I agree with them over you–seen it and experience it.
The Boomers, who by and large are hedonistic atheists or the equal with a relgious term applied, are driving this hysteria. Who is point man? 80 year old Fauci. Biden= Boomer. Pelosi = Boomer Trump= Boomer (and total controlled opposition FRAUD) etc.
The entire generation has consumed everything possible, screwed up everything beyond hope, and left nothing but steaming crap for future generations. The Herpes of human generations that won’t go away –80 Fauci–why is he still there?
And yes they are pushing the mandatory Vax/poison bs and could care less how many children die due to their completely selfish agenda–they fear germs and death and feel entitled not to get sick for some reason–they’re big on telling others what they need to do for Boomer benefit.
There are exceptions but overall it plays out like this from what I’ve seen along with the Leftist Loons, of all ages, also pushing the DeathVx and the proven USELESS Masking. Boomers HATE when the truth is pointed out of course.
You know the elites slight boomers and zoomers equally, and they are inducing them to hate each other to death? Generational divides are some of the best ones to undermine the integrity of any society.
Ignore Dacian Julien Soros and his obsession with mRNA not lasting long enough as a string of organized molecules for them to be viable vaccines. Although he could be right about how long the mRNA in mRNA vaccines last, they’ve got a strictly defined lifetime and number of proteins they can cause ribosomes to make by the polyadenylation at their end. I’ve read as part of turning this into a viable therapy platform (but of course only for vaccines as of now) there’s a sweet spot in the number of adenosines at the end of an mRNA strand, too many and something causes failure.
I believe you’re entirely right in applying “the central dogma” of molecular genetics, less moving parts is one hypothesis as to the cause of some adenovirus vector vaccines side effects.
Virus vector vaccines are very new, prior to 2020 only one signal success using a different and replication competent virus against Ebola. For adenoviruses prior to COVID, Janssen used their Ad26 platform for the first dose of their Ebola vaccine, which only went as far as an European Phase III clinical trial and EMA approval. Oxford’s gleaned from chimpanzee feces was as far as I can tell an eight+ year grift, prior to 2020 never tried on more than 46 subjects at a time in Phase I trials. Gamaleya’s platform for Sputnik V uses Ad26 for the first dose, but is obviously immature because of the extreme difficultly everyone is having in making the second Ad5 based dose, so far only beyond test batches Russia and Argentina.
So that hypothesis is that the spike protein DNA that replaces the E1 set of adenovirus genes required for replication is not always getting transcribed into mRNA correctly and the resultant proteins are causing problems. For manufacturing, the human cells used in bulk cell culture have the E1 genes provided in a plasmid (short circle of DNA); the E3 set of genes that suppress immune system responses is entirely knocked out.
And the simplicity of the mRNA vaccines, leaving out a virus middleman as you put it, has resulted in their being much more manufacturable, the only cell required is the workhorse E. Coli bacteria for the second step of creating a huge number of DNA plasmids containing the code for a stabilized spike protein. As a full fledged organism it’s much easier to manage than human cells in a 2000L or larger sterile plastic bag in a bioreactor. Everything after that is done in vitro.
That would have been true if mRNA were as stable as DNA. It isn’t. By design, mRNAs have very short half-life in cells (minutes to hours; hours if they are protected by bound proteins; endogenous mRNAs are never exported form the nucleus “naked”, always protected by bound proteins), and even shorter outside of cells: we have tons of RNases (enzymes that degrade RNAs) everywhere.
In contrast, mRNAs produced on adenoviral genome (which is DNA, like our genome) in the nucleus are exported just like our native mRNAs, protected by proteins.
Speaking of central dogma, it’s like Newton’s laws in physics, valid only in some circumstances. E.g., coronaviruses (and several other kinds of viruses) have RNA genome, so the first thing that happens when an RNA virus enters the cell is reverse transcription (production of DNA on RNA template). Viral reverse transcriptases are targeted by many anti-viral drugs, as they are quite different from our own.
Our reverse transcriptase in involved in elongating telomers, repetitive sequences at the ends of chromosomes. Telomer shortening upon division is a natural passage counter in somatic cells, which after a certain number of divisions cannot divide any more, because their telomers are too short. However, in gamete precursor cells the process of telomer shortening is counteracted by their lengthening with the help of our reverse transcriptase, so that each new generation starts with about the same length of telomers.
Sorry for being technical, but it’s hard to explain this w/o technical terms.
Now that’s an interesting thesis. Not I think one the US ruling trash would have been able to come up with early on, but now it’s pretty obvious. But it needs an enforceable national mandate, and I see great difficultly attempting that in Red State America where I live, it’s federalism grand?
Not just overt resistance, but simple civil disobedience, you’s have to police the small businesses like is currently done for those under 21 buying alcohol. Although I suppose with enough spies it could learned who is sub rosa Officially following the mandate but in fact is letting everyone in but even punishing them would face resistance.
How come Globohomo trolls are late to this discussion: your “comment” is #83. And where is your colleague “Raches”? Globohomo shop is getting sloppy.
Technically every one of those except Trump is a late member of the Silent Generation, born in 1940 or 1942 for Biden. Do you perceive a divide in them like the one between the earlier demographic Baby Boomers who you are denouncing and the later ones who are either in Generation Jones or early Gen Xers? My parents are earlier 1930s Silents, and not at like Boomers. Very fatalistic about dying, they for example grew up before civilians (or anyone) had access to antibiotics (that was 1946 for US civilians) and of course the same for their parents and other elders who taught them how to avoid bacterial infections the old fashioned way.
This is easily doable if Biden’s puppeteers (some of them based in Europe) moves the entire French emergency laws on their vaccine passport system (which is civil law) to the Federal level in America (common law likely being overridden by executive orders)
Please, I can’t wait for the 2nd Civil War to end this madness! (Or ones in Europe. Simply taking out all the meals, planting your gardens and confining yourselves away from sight indefinitely actually work well for the elite – you need the Yellow Vests and general strikes to make a grand comeback.)
I have not made up my mind and we are not done with this – I like the analysis because it clarifies things and I appreciate your contribution. In many ways our understanding of the situation is similar. As for judgments, we differ, but judgments in a free discussion should vary, otherwise the discussion is not free. That is my biggest issue with the Covid mania: why are different views actively suppressed?
Sure, but their rights end at other people’s bodies – there is literally nothing as important as being in charge of one’s body. So no, the elderly who argue that the young and children should take risks to protect the old and sick are wrong – whether some do it mindlessly, others consciously, doesn’t matter. The point is to see clearly what is happening: a young person’s life or health in exchange for some older people living longer. That is a documented reality – it may be 1 per 1,000 or 1 per 100,000, still it is biologically upside down. Nature values the young more than the very old, any civilization worth its name has to do the same.
Are there some nasty and selfish elderly? Of course there are, as there are some irresponsible young people. But the young ones have no power, the old ones do. It is necessary to point it out. Let’s see what happens, but this could be the ultimate historical crime committed by selfish or misguided Boomers. Or not. I really wish it is not, but we won’t know for sure for years.
Opposition to covid countermeasures (anti-masking, anti-lockdown) and now mostly the same people as opposition to vaccines mobilized the stupidest part of population that has no political sense and does not know what’s up and what’s down. They killed the Yellow Vests movement which had a political sense and was aware of whom they fought and for what. TPTB are very relieved that the Yellow Vests were replaced with the anti-vaxxer morons. The Yellow Vests had a quiet support of the majority of population but the anti-vaxxers are seen by the majority as morons, which is accurate, and thus the majority will support the crackdown against them.
There is one thing that works in favor of the anti-vaxxers. It is the fact that the vaccines disappointed. Now Pfizer effectiveness against infection with delta variant is reported to be only around 40% which is only 1.67 reduction in probability of getting infected. For this reason it is not possible to come with harsh measures against the unvaccinated like charging them with willful endangerment of the society at large and of sabotage of state policy.
But the vaccine still are quite effective against hospitalization (around 80%) and thus it would be possible to burden the unvaccinated with increased costs of medical care. You want oxygen therapy to breath easier in hospital you will pay out of your pocket. General public will support measure of restricting access to some public places by the unvaccinated. Any place where the vaccinated constitute majority will put pressure on businesses and administration to limit the access to the unvaccinated.
Yeah, “easily doable” except for minor details like possibly sparking our 2nd Civil War as you note. Our ruling trash is trash, but I think somewhere in their hindbrains they’re aware, although not as such, that their assaults on roughly half of the country could result in a preference cascade after which their power will get effectively challenged.
They’ve certainly noticed the one domain in which this has happened, the Right to Keep and Bear Arms where they continue to suffer defeats in the free states all while they continue to turn the screws in today’s slave states. And perhaps they’re noticing the sorting of the population as many of those in the latter move to the former, “Biden” certainly moved quickly to “adjust” the final Official results of the 2020 census.
I have no comment on your true beliefs that are going to be detached even further from my interpretation of reality and many others as time goes on. You can keep them, try to reconcile it with what you see with your own eyes, and act accordingly.
If you want to keep your “don’t let a part of people coming near the other part” fetish, the French vaccine passport system is better than your ideas since they have (technically) an option of using recent -ve PCR tests in place of being vaccinated, as far as I checked, so the unvaccinated technically can still have chances to mingle with the vaccinated. No antivaxxer bothers to take this act of “grace” and “compromise” since they know, aided by their prior opposition to state policies as Yellow Vests, that the true objective is intense individual-level control over every citizen’s public acts, to prevent another bout of Yellow Vests protests to arise again, forever. Just look at their banners.
Sorry for being this blunt, I can’t help my autist tendencies in speech.
(And yeah, I have a game plan for French antivaxxers involving ’68-level Randian epicness, but I’m keeping it to myself for now.)
One of the common features in media stories across different countries (USA, UK, Russia, Israel) of young anti-vaxxers/covid-hoax campaigners who die from coronavirus, is having a lot of children and/or currently pregnant wife.
A not compassionate enough person, could say it is like the introduction story for the film “Idiocracy” (anti-Darwin Darwin award). Perhaps also that pregnant women can be transferring to their partners a high viral load. Or that these people dislike the idea of artificial interventions and might have been also opposed to things like contraception.
The last point might be sign of one of the main worldviews involved in the coronavirus sceptic community – dislike of what seems to them as “non-natural”. So if a government wanted this kind of people to be more careful or even be vaccinated, they could promote the idea of coronavirus itself as being “non-natural” – as is the situation with how people view HIV.
E.g.
“Caleb Wallace, a Texas anti-mask organizer who allegedly treated himself with the horse dewormer ivermectin, has died after contracting COVID-19. He was 30 and is survived by his pregnant wife and three children.” https://www.sfgate.com/coronavirus/article/caleb-wallace-anti-mask-rally-death-covid-16419641.php
“A Texas mother of four refused a Covid-19 vaccine… Lydia Rodriguez, 42, a piano teacher in the small town of La Marque died on Monday, two weeks after her husband, Lawrence, 49, succumbed to the virus” https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20210820-in-texas-an-anti-vax-mother-s-dying-wish-vaccinate-her-children
“A Covid sceptic who was hospitalised with the virus and went on to urge other people to get vaccinated has died. Marcus Birks, 40, from Leek, Staffordshire, died on Friday leaving his family “shattered”, his wife said… Mrs Birks, who is pregnant. ” https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-stoke-staffordshire-58376709
We probably won’t have a 2030 census that is federally organized. We will have ones in the style of India and Pakistan, or Greece and Turkey, or even former Yugoslavia, by then. And obviously censuses can be used to tell a demographic picture that is useful for the elites in power, not just the current one, but also past and coming ones.
Let’s agree to disagree. You may keep fantasizing how the anti-waxers will seed the world revolution and I will fantasize how to neuter them and lock the troublemakers up.
At least New York schools seem to be with better management on this topic than Florida. All schools in New York are installing air purifiers, although not likely with sufficient air changes to be so effective
https://ny.chalkbeat.org/2021/8/18/22630636/air-purifiers-hepa-nyc-schools-covid
There’s more than plenty of such dead natural wisdom nuggets lately, enough for a separate active reddit sub dedicated to them to appear:
https://www.reddit.com/r/HermanCainAward/
But mRNA vaccines produced some sort of immunological reaction. Otherwise we would not have observed the sharp decrease of deaths and cases observed in Western Europe and USA. May be the effect of this reaction is fading, but, I think, it can’t be denied. I´m not an expert and I’m learning from your messages but I think these so called vaccines have, so far, worked fine.
…dislike of what seems to them as “non-natural”… – Possibly the majority of anti-vaxxers are health nuts. Certainly “natural medicine” sites to large extent are responsible for propagation of anti-vaccine talking points because they have a knack for quasi-scientific explanations for the efficacy of their health supplement products. They all love science and scientism. Basically they do not know any other narratives than those which are anchored in some quasi-scientific mumbo jumbo. Just read some of older comments by Thor… how everything he was doing around his diets had specific scientific, or so he thought, foundation with scientific terminology, publications and visualization taken from PBS’s NOVA animations of invisible molecular processes. This health nuts contingent of anti-vaxxers is driven by grifters in the diet supplement business, which is not much smaller (factor of 4 iirc) than the Big Pharma; actually they are to some extent a part of the Big Pharma.
Then there is a contingent of the anti-vaxxers who literally believe that some hidden powers want to kill them, render them impotent and infertile and turn them into zombies. They do not have a good grasp of reality and operate on fragments of stories from sci-fi films and games that were stitched together in some nightmarish dream as their best theory of reality. If they were tested with say the Minnesota multiphasic personality inventory (MMPI) they all would be very high on the paranoid axis. I suspect that drug use including new potent strains of marijuana and possibly laced with some harder stuff is pretty common among them. They are not great performers in life and are rather despondent and dispirited and thus they get a kick out of doomsday ideations which would make all humans equal, where the poor or rather they would inherit the earths if only for few minutes before the armageddon. They are the most deluded of the anti-vaxxers and they genuinely would like to see the fulfillment of their paranoia (Jehovah’s Witnesses on steroids or rather on drugs).
Then there are the libertarians who see the world as I versus Them, i.e., the rest of humanity where the I is not responsible for Them and has no common interest with Them: Life is a zero sum game. The Them are the losers who one is not concerned with except for the very rich who libertarians are obsequious to in accordance with the most important cannon of libertarian creed: Be Good to the Rich. Basically this contingent is full of sociopathy and psychopathy. Their special ire goes for the government. This contingent is the most recalcitrant and “nobody tells me what to do” belligerent.
Basically there are three contingents: health nuts, psychotics and libertarians. The Venn diagram would be three intersecting circles. The part that excludes the psychotics and libertarians may contain the most mentally healthy segment of the health nuts who may constitutes regular folks, mostly women who are concerned with safety of vaccines for their children and would genuinely like to know what to do. They are the most reasonable vaccine skeptics however they are being incessantly propagandized by the diet supplement industry grifters and played on emotions with the worst case scenarios by the paranoid psychotics and fueled with animus by libertarian fetishism of liberty, constitution and so on.
Something else to look at is changes in age stratification of cases—although I only trust cases resulting in hospitalization because sampling of people outside hospitals is pretty random—and deaths. Compared to previous pre-vaccine peaks, in my local region where “vaccine hesitancy” is much less for elderly, both metrics are now much more weighted towards younger folks. And of course this allows the media to truthfully create propaganda sob stories of a parent who left a spouse and children behind. In the cases I’ve looked out, without any apparent comorbidities.
If we limit cases as I do, while there has been “fading” mostly we assume due to Delta’s immune escape mutations, Official efficacy rates are still quite high and here very few vaccinated people are ending up in the hospital and even fewer in an ICU or are dying.
Yeah, well, we have people all the way down to deniers of the germ theory of disease, so it can and is being denied. Although here less so as more and more people know someone who had a bad time of it, perhaps maimed and of course those who died. And that’s been reflected in a small but noticeable increase in vaccinations.
That means that the composition of their concoctions stated by both companies is a lie (as I said in #65).
Besides, I see no alternative explanation why quantitative antibody testing is not available in the US, even though the kits used for this purpose in Russia are made by Abbott labs in the US (see #74).
As far as the effect is concerned, it does not seem all that striking in Israel, where more than 5 million people were forced to be guinea pigs for the largest “clinical trial” of mRNA vaccines so far: the dynamics of new covid cases and deaths are very similar to what you see in countries with much lower “vaccination” rates https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/israel/
Circumstantial evidence backing the hypothesis of fading effectiveness of mRNA vaccines.
Compare with UK (mostly AstraZeneca)
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/uk/
A similar peak in the number of cases but not in the number of fatalities.
Argentina (mostly AstraZeneca and Sputnik)
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/argentina/
Chile (mostly Sinovac)
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/chile/
These curves seems OK.
USA (mostly Pfizer) seems to be trailing Israel
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
Yep, the stats show that in terms of effectiveness claimed “mRNA vaccines” trail every other kind used. No surprises there.
Yet in terms of profits, Pfizer and Moderna beat all other manufacturers. No surprises there, either.
Thanks. This was the right level of detail for me.
And that was the kind of explanation that I was seeking. However, although I followed your discussion of shortening and lengthening of telomeres, I didn’t see how it was connected to the rest of the discussion. Was it just meant to illustrate the subtleties of the central dogma?
I just wanted to explain why do we need reverse transcriptase at all. As far as we know, except for lengthening telomers it has no function in multi-cell organisms. However, that might just show how much we know. If we knew everything, scientists would have no jobs.
I’ve had AnonFromTN on my ignore list for some time, but your comments on his reply prompted me to check, and you should ignore everything he says because he gets some really critical things wrong, and you either need domain knowledge to know that or have to look up everything. This was the Big One:
There’s only one class of viruses that do this, the retroviruses that include HIV, retro referring to the reversal of that “central dogma” of molecular genetics.
Coronaviruses along with most other RNA viruses use other methods to reproduce their RNA. They have what’s called “positive-strand RNA” which is pretty much like regular mRNA and can be used directly as such. Here’s a fairly low level description from Wikipedia, the TL;DR is that they create negative sense RNA strands and use them as a template to create more positive sense RNA strands that can then been bundled into new viruses.
72% of the French population have been vaccinated. This makes for the vast majority of the adults. The number increases every day and everyone is fine.
Many of the ~12% of adults who remain are not actually anti-vaxxers too.
The idea that you have a game plan for this tiny and dwindling minority to seize power is too funny.
Thanks. Another relevant passage from the linked article is
This is in contrast to AnonfromTN’s claim:
However, note that AnonfromTN is talking about adenoviruses, not corona viruses, which are indeed DNA viruses, so far as I understand.
So the relevant question seems to be whether there is any protein coating left on a ‘live’ corona virus after it enters the cytoplasm. If not, then the argument that mRNA rapidly degenerates without a protein coat seems not obviously relevant.
By the way, is there not immunological data from Israel’s open air experiment?
You’re welcome.
That line of thought suggests investigating all the functions of the nucleocapsid protein, Here’s Wikipedia for a start on coronaviruses’.
Adenoviruses are indeed DNA viruses that replicate their DNA inside the cell nucleus, except that functionally is almost entirely removed when they are used as vaccine platforms (it’s supplied by a DNA plasmid added to the host cells that replicate the viruses, and a few viruses end up with that instead of the intended replacement by the target protein; Brazil cited too high a self-reported (Russian reported) rate of that in their rejection of Sputnik V). utu would be your best bet for information on “Israel’s open air experiment.”
Simple question – simple answer. The RNA of coronaviruses is wrapped by nucleocapsid protein. It enters the cytoplasm as a protein-RNA complex, exactly like our own mRNAs.
Here is a scientific review paper that describes various coronaviruses and their proteins:
https://www.scireslit.com/Virology/IJVID-ID13.pdf
Another indirect acknowledgement of the achievements of “mRNA vaccines”: the EU keeps restrictions for travel to and from the US and Israel, due to the surge in covid cases: https://ec.europa.eu/info/live-work-travel-eu/coronavirus-response/travel-during-coronavirus-pandemic_en
They may be vassals, but they are not suicidal.
I have to say that our views on the issue are mostly in agreement.
After I read this post and another post from Getaclue, maybe I am not so aware about the Boomers generation in the West that led to your conclusions. I don’t think we have a huge group of Boomers generation in my country. Even that generation is not equivalent to the same generation in the West.
Agree that there should not be suppression of differences in opinion. With regards to vaccination, I have always believed that there should be no compulsion. This whole pandemic has been politicized (and geopoliticized). If this is how humanity handles a pandemic, I shudder to think what will happen if we have a truly potentially apocalyptic pandemic in the future. It’s not a question of will it happen, but when it happens.
Thanks Dmitry.
I couldn’t put a ‘thanks’ because I have not been commenting enough.
To me, politicizing face mask in the West is totally bizarre… Maybe one can say it can be difficult for children but for adults, it doesn’t make sense. Hesitancy on vaccination is understandable, especially if one belongs to a younger age group with no co-morbidities or risk factors. I still can’t get over people in the West clashing and name – calling each side of the camp because of face mask. Can only shake my head in disbelief.
Thanks.
Although I would disagree with you about many aspects of this pandemic and also masking, I have to admit that I do not have direct experience with the effects of Boomers in the West. I agree with Yellow face Anon and That Would Be Telling that the ruling elites may be up to something to further weaken societal cohesion in the West by using this issue of generational divides.
FDA. Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee October 22, 2020 Meeting Presentation “CBER Plans for Monitoring COVID-19 Vaccine Safety and Effectiveness”
https://www.fda.gov/media/143557/download
Slide 16 of the presentation says (Western vaccines):
FDA Safety Surveillance of COVID-19 Vaccines : DRAFT Working list of possible adverse event outcomes Subject to change:
-Guillain-Barré syndrome
-Acute disseminated encephalomyelitis
-Transverse myelitis
-Encephalitis /myelitis/encephalomyelitis/meningoencephalitis/meningitis/encephalopathy
-Convulsions/seizures
-Stroke
-Narcolepsy and cataplexy
-Anaphylaxis
-Acute myocardial infarction
-Myocarditis/pericarditis
-Autoimmune disease
-Deaths
-Preganacy and birth outcomes
-Other acute demyelinating diseases
-Non-anaphylactic allergic reactions
-Thrombocytopenia
-Disseminated intervascular coagulation
-Venous thromboembolism
-Arthritis and arthralgia/joint pain
-Kawasaki disease
-Multisymptom Inflammatory Syndrome in Children
-Vaccine enhanced disease
Also
https://dailyexpose.co.uk/2021/08/22/medicine-regulators-knew-in-october-2020-that-the-covid-19-vaccines-would-cause-blood-clots-heart-damage-harm-to-children-and-death/?fbclid=IwAR2hFm8nzm8LgU1wFCs8XX3zNgdg_rNfFZbuCQ-MDBBMQJHaXl11upJv3Q8
I am thinking of the type who are vaccinated, but refuses to use their “reclaimed rights” to live a “normal” live under heightened surveillance, besides those who are genuinely antivaxx. I’m not describing a struggle over public health, but social and economic systems.
With regards to Hong Kong getting wholesale anti-covid-vaxx ideology from the West, I wonder if it is the same with Taiwan too? Politically, Taiwan is a vassal of the West, and has deep connections with the ” pro-democracy ” movement in HK. Or has more Taiwanese internalize Western MSM pro-vaxx and apocalyptic Covid pandemic narrative? Any idea if the MSM narrative is prevalent in Hong Kong or the anti-vaxx Western alternative media narrative? Any differences between older / Pragmatic HKers versus younger /idealistic HKers?
With regards to the vaccinated reclaiming their “normal” lives , that depends on quite a number of factors. I think , it would differ from country to country and the underlying “reason” a person got vaccinated:-
1. Trust the Government type(probably a minority in the West?) – likely lower IQ folks, behaviour depend on respective Government narrative. More in developing countries?
2. Trust the mainstream type – ie trust Western MSM, mainstream “scientific” narrative : probably most of the educated and middle to upper class in the developing world(who still submit to Western pre-eminence in most issues, many trust Western MSM versus their own local media), majority of the educated and middle/upper class in the West (tend to be ‘liberal’, socially “progressive” ) – these will likely cower in fear of the dreaded Covid despite being vaccinated.
3. Realist/pragmatist who got vaccinated – individualized, unpredictable response.
The linked article explains that both severe Covid-19 and spike-based mRNA vaccination probably reduce life span. Getting on an mRNA vaccine booster treadmill may be a dangerous choice.
SARS-COV2 would accelerate biological age
by Xavier Azalbert, Anne-Typhaine Bouthors, Michel Brack, Dominique Cerdan, Walter Chesnut, Gérard Guillaume, Jean-François Lesgards, Luc Montagnier, Jean-Claude Perez.
Luc Montagnier is a Nobel Laureate virologist. He has heterodox opinions about such matters as homeopathy.
https://www-francesoir-fr.translate.goog/opinions-tribunes/le-sars-cov2-accelererait-lage-biologique?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-GB&_x_tr_pto=ajax,elem
Don’t use words you don’t know the meaning of.
That’s a very dramatic way to describe having to provide proof that you have received a vaccine.
Many countries have required proof of Yellow Fever vaccination for many decades, either to visit them or part of them. They have also mandated those vaccines for their own citizens. I don’t remember anyone complaining about this sensible public health measure. In fact, I dare anyone to argue against it.
While increased surveillance is something I dislike, it seems to me that people have a far higher tolerance of it than even just a few years ago. Focussing on the requirement to prove vaccination to highlight increased surveillance is like trying to redistribute Bezos’ wealth by stealing a pair of his socks. Yes, it is that stupid.
You have this a funny way around. I haven’t seen persuasive evidence that masks work, while vaccines work incredibly well. It is astonishing how many have been developed and how effective they are. It makes me hopeful for a new age of vaccination.
It also makes sense to have deep debate over something with weak evidence either way, but it is stupid to keep arguing about vaccines in the face of overwhelming evidence. In this all, you can see that Western public discussion works well. The vaccine debate is swiftly ending as the evidence filters through the population, but the mask debate continues unimpeded by reality and all as good fun, more as a proxy for individual attachment styles than anything else.
C’mon man, almost all the RNA made by a cell also has a poly-A tail. There is nothing special about the polyA tail of the vax RNA, it’s just a poly-A tail, just like in the transcript of myosin (to reuse my example). It does not provide extra protection.
Again, in order for regulation to work during RNA production, any other step (RNA degradation, protein synthesis, protein degradation) must run at higher rates. You can’t begin to mimic the intracellular, continuous production of RNA with a few minutes of extracellular RNA injection.
If you are so keen on cutting middle men, why not use a protein vaccine, taking the RNA middleman out of the picture? The fact is, endemic viruses are too similar to us to elicit any decent immune response. Most of the protection occurs by infected tissue dying and isolating the infective agent. It’s the same with the staph, strep, C diff, the mono virus, chickenpox, all of which live on all of us, permanently; your immune system can’t do squat about them.
Donald Trump being an imbecile surrounded by other imbeciles, the previous US gov was taken for a ride by the few companies who pretended they make “RNA vaccines”.
Sinotibetan is correct. Objections to masking in the Wests was bizarre and irrational and arguments of alleged lack of “persuasive evidence that masks work” were rationalization not the cause. The cause was deeper, more primal and more primitive.
” In this all, you can see that Western public discussion works well.” – They do not. They are extremely wasteful and unproductive. Objections to vaccines are on te same level as to masks and they come from m the same place, i.e., the obscurantists and ignoramuses not knowing their place.
I wrote this but I also recognised the same for vociferous mask support. It seems that such an observation is beyond you.
There is a lack of evidence that they work and there is a lack of evidence that they cause harm in unexpected ways, but both conjectures are reasonable. I suspect they work a bit and they do some social harm. This is why the debate continues and becomes a proxy, on both sides, for “deeper, more primal” issues.
” I suspect they work a bit and they do some social harm.” The only social harm of masking is that the bank robbers may get away easier. Masking works on several levels: (1) as personal protection to reduce probability of getting infected., (2) reducing your own contribution to virus prevalent in environment and (3) reducing R0. The most important is (3) and it works when masking is almost universal. All arguments against masking are flawed and/or specious.
I know exactly what I am saying .
The worst thing a person can do for himself after a positive antigen test is to wear a mask. Doing so works against measures like nasal washes/sprays and gargling, which substantially reduce viral loads in the nasal passages, nasopharynx and mouth. The correct approach is to stay outside without a mask because wearing one would obviously recycle virions back into the infected person. Exhale the buggers into the sunlit world where they will quickly degrade.
That’s an interesting theory. I don’t know if recycling virions is a problem because I don’t know much about that type of thing. I do wonder though if it is true as doctors don’t seem to advise washing your nose and throat regularly in cases of respiratory infection. I assume that if it helped many people would have noticed it over the last few centuries. Maybe they have?
I’d also add that masking likely reduces social trust, reduces socialisation and generally isolates people from one another. The second-order effects of these are also going to be mostly negative. Keeping your face uncovered in the public sphere is a long-established human norm for many reasons beyond crime mitigation. Some Muslims banned women from this, but only because they didn’t want women to benefit from the public sphere. Masking would certainly be though of as a harmful measure outside of a pandemic. Sensible people only support it in a pandemic because they believe that the public health benefits outweigh the social consequences. I think they are likely wrong though still sensible, but to, as Utu does, allege that masks carry no harm at all except in bank robber prevention is a spectacular example of close-mindedness.
Taiwan isn’t antivaxx to any appreciable extent as far as I know of, the biggest controversy there is over the economic viability of locally-produced ones, and hence they are very amenable to vaccine imports (from Big Pharma of course). The whole pandemic discourse has really been internalized and the feeble alternative views need to be expressed with the affirmation of COVID as a serious disease, that is conceding the ground to the apocalypticists.
HK has 2 strains of “antivaxx” sentiment, namely a genuine one hating Sinovac for the perceived side-effect deaths and inefficacy (an angle also typical to Western antivaxxers), even when Sinovac uses a more traditional technology than the BioNTech (Pfizer) concoction available here; and the other opposing the contract tracing app and potentially vaccine passports (“health codes” as the mainland Chinese call it) as tools of invasive control, which is way more prominent since it aims to reconfigure daily life as in many parts of the West. I can envision even the vaccinated boycotting anywhere vaccine passports are imposed, like the French and for some time Moscow’s restaurants, when the recent threats to introduce health codes are acted on, given how despite the official number of downloads, only about 10% really uses the contract tracing app on a daily basis.
HK’s situation is extremely complicated, and the picture is befuddled by serious efforts to impose American ways of dissident thinking (framework of analysis?) onto vastly different local political conditions. The MSM is doing what their foreign influencers do, as well as providing a platform for state “experts” to make all the usual threats. But as you can expect, they are little watched, and most info of normies come from social media, where many “Yellow Ribbons” echo an Australasian strategy of absolute border closures externally and Florida-style normal life domestically. Both of them are code words for shutting out all the mainlanders and and lifting the gathering ban used against “protests”, respectively. “Blue Ribbons” feed on state-affiliated propagandists who are pushing the vaccination agenda, but you know the grounds are shifting quickly enough when even the largest paper in HK, the mildly pro-establishment Oriental Daily, came out on Monday with the headlines staunchly on the side of small businesses and against vaccine passports, even while keeping “pragmatic” provaxx signaling. Before coming to Unz, I had been in contact with a small political sect, long inspired by localism in America and Trumpist politics, who are fully committed to disseminating a total antivaxx, anti-Big Pharma and anti-globalist perspective, and they are slowly gaining adherents.
A thing about wokism, while we East Asians are seen by gweilos as pragmatists having nothing to do the Western madness, at least in the heavily Americanized Chinese areas (HK/Taiwan), a lot of more “harmless” woke values (e.g. multiculturalism and feminist/LGBTQ+ “rights”) are way more internalized than the way I imagine young European American wokes were brought up, tho the racial struggle insanity is immediately seen as it is, being homogeneous societies for now. One of the most prominent symbols of that political sect I mentioned, whose leader is on the side of “Trump” good or bad, is a trans woman now studying Japanese in Taiwan. So 2) of your vaccine compliance scenarios doesn’t exist here, and any woke values some young person has is dissociated from consideration of 3), unlike how woke group identity is signaled by also “trusting the science” in America.
One thing for certain, the generational divide is barely existent with regards to political ideologies, where a large part of anti- or provaxx convictions come from.
Thanks for following thru my long reply stringing my words together, and since I’m guessing you’re either from the mainland on VPN or an expat somewhere in the West, I felt like explaining a lot of things you might partly know or understand.
I totally agree with your interpretation on argument over masking up or not. The pro-mask are mainly those who still have a lingering trust in public institutions, and hence the version of science purported and propagated from there, no matter how much of the previous recommendations have been memory-holed. While the anti-mask tend to realize the social harm of universal masking and recognizes any public health benefit in that is diminishing, as well as losing their trust in existing institutions, but exceeds that rational assessment greatly by totally denigrating and dehumanizing anyone who is masked up, even voluntarily in places without mask mandates, for their own conceptions of freedom from ideological compulsion.
The only thing I can tell is their contest for the sole legitimacy to the truth of the matter, and increasingly, that only one truth can prevail and the proponents of the other to be eliminated. In the end, ideologies has replaced religious sects as the basis of really serious infighting.
BTW, was Yellow Fever inoculation as experimental as mRNA tech for COVID is when those mandates were passed? Has any significant criticisms on the efficacy and serious side-effects arisen on Yellow Fever inoculation? And most importantly, has any policies on Yellow Fever inoculation been appropriated for concurrent political or economic agendas?
Telomerases are just one of the retroid elements in the eukaryotic cell(called endogenous retroelements). There are other eukaryotic retroid elements such as retrotransposons. I do not think telomerases can reverse transcribe mRNA vaccines and reintegrate the retrotranscribed DNA into the human genome.
However, interestingly, there was a PNAS article which describes the plausibility of endogenous reverse transcription (and insertion into the cell genome) of the SARS-CoV-2 RNA by retrotransposons. Apparently caused a stir in virology/microbiology circles :-
https://www.pnas.org/content/118/21/e2105968118
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6543/674
I remember treating a patient who was shedding SARS-CoV-2 for more than a month! However, he was a very immunosuppressed patient who developed pulmonary embolism as well as organizing pneumonia and later cytokine storm secondary to Covid. I think the persistent viral shedding is due to his immunosuppressed state rather than any integration of viral genome into his genome.
A rebuttal of the SARS-CoV-2 genome integration into host genome article was just published, also in PNAS :-
https://www.pnas.org/content/118/33/e2109066118
Personally, I would never completely rule out integration of genes from non-retroviral RNA viruses as part of lateral gene transfer(horizontal gene transfer). I think this commentary by Koonin et al and article by Taylor and Bruenn demonstrates this possibility :-
https://bmcbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1741-7007-8-2
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/1741-7007-7-88
Intuitively, such a process of horizontal gene transfer of non retroviral RNA viruses would likely be via some endogenous retroelements in the eukaryotic host cells.
Biology is not like maths and many “dogmas” can be overturned as we learn more about these complex biological systems. Interestingly, if SARS-CoV-2 genome can indeed integrate into the human genome via endogenous retroelements (of course this is a super big if and most likely very unlikely), the argument made against mRNA vaccines which is that such vaccines lead to the spike protein gene integrating into host genome via endogenous retroelements partially fall away because natural infection by SARS-CoV-2 can do the same! I said partially, because then one would prefer a non mRNA vaccine, preferably that of a dead/deactivated one like the Sinovac vaccine. Then again, all of us have/will be infected by RNA viruses – if such a mechanism of horizontal gene transfer exists, then we cannot prevent it because it’s part of the evolutionary process in all eukaryotic lifeforms. Of course, this is still a hypothesis but we cannot rule this out.
Here is a video on retrotransposons , pseudogenes and “junk DNA” :-
https://youtu.be/ZIh1vQg1BO4
Hope all these are helpful and more importantly, interesting .
Because it’s possible, maybe even likely that producing the protein inside cells, which most closely mimics an actual infection, what I call the “active” approach, will provide better immunity than proteins floating around outside of cells? Does anyone have any idea how vaccine giant Sanofi Pasteur managed to screw up their Phase I and II V1.0 trials of their protein plus GSK adjuvant vaccine? It failed to generate sufficient immunity for those 55 and older, and they had to restart the whole process beginning in the spring of this year.
That suggests it might be harder or trickier to make good COVID-19 vaccines using this “passive” approach. I’m also really wondering what’s wrong with Novavax’s vaccine, protein made the same bug cell culture way, their own but still a standard variety of adjuvant. They haven’t even tried for an FDA EUA, and the U.K. which if memory serves invested in them, and has ordered 60 million doses, also hasn’t authorized it, along with the EU EMA. The other major Western contender I’m watching a bit is Canada’s Medicago, they grow their antigen in plants and use the GSK adjuvant.
Here again I think you’re so wrong you’re effectively a Troll and will be Ignored. The first three you refer to are bacteria. The latter two are caused by herpes viruses, which are very complicated and notorious for their ability to hide from the immune system. Don’t know much about mono, if I ever got it it was a mild case, but chickenpox and its sequelae shingles I know all too much about, being way too old to have gotten the vaccine for the former, and having gotten the latter when I was relatively young, early 40s. Like some other herpes viruses it hides out in nerve cells and can flare up very painfully when your body allows it to or whatever.
(Strong recomendation: seriously consider getting a shingles vaccination when you’re old enough, that’s the only thing I’ve filled a narcotic prescription for in my adult life.)
The functions of mRNA poly-A tail are explained here in more or less lay terms:
https://aghunt.wordpress.com/2008/06/05/the-polya-tail/
It’s explained in more technical terms here:
https://en-academic.com/dic.nsf/enwiki/331444
Also found this while searching for the simplest explanation of the role of poly-A tail:
mRNA is undetectable in Pfizer “vaccine”
https://www.henrymakow.com/2021/06/no-biological-content-in-pfize.html
Ayurveda, a natural system of medicine, originated in India more than 3,000 years ago and uses nasal irrigation routinely. Surely you’ve heard of Neti pots.
Pardon my bluntness, but in my experience most doctors don’t do a damn thing but prescribe patented drugs. They don’t know much about maintaining health naturally. They are flummoxed when a patient knows as much about a given medical issue as they do. To an extent, they are just running a racket. Sometimes their intervention helps people, sometimes it kills them faster. Years ago at a university general faculty meeting devoted to health insurance, a young professor from the English Department introduced her comment by beginning with “I have a healthy fear of doctors.” I thought she was remarkably insightful for a young person without scientific training.
Go to the FLCCC.com website to see recommendations regarding reducing viral replication in the nasal region. The members of this organization are the true heroes of the epidemic in the U.S. Along with a few lone wolves, like Dr. Harvey Risch, who have resisted the public health (phony descriptor given its corrupt behavior re SARS-2) establishment’s coverup of early treatments.
Anyone who wants to really understand what has happened in 2020-21 should watch this video of Risch’s.
The best case scenario would be that both Covid and the assorted vaccines are mostly harmless. But there are other scenarios. When Covid originally hit I was in Brussels and the inertia there was palpable. I recall BoJo getting sick and the general view was that if the fat, old, decrepit BoJo gets over it, it can’t be that bad. As with most diseases, increasing one’s immunity is the best strategy.
My view of the non-MRNA vaccines is that they are mostly placebos like most flu shots. Sputnik is not recognised so pumping it into one’s blood stream is rather pointless. If they persist with calling Covid a catastrophic pandemic, there will have to be newer, better remedies so waiting is a rational strategy. But the mass hysteria is getting old, most people have about a 0.05% chance of harm from Covid. This could establish a crazy precedent for the coming hypochondriac world.
After hunting, farming, industry, and service phases of society we are possibly heading towards a medical society. Not much fun, but the elderly would be thrilled: they could spread their hypochondria and petty ageing obsessions to everyone. We seem to be almost there.
No. I am not from Mainland China and not a citizen of the People’s Republic of China.
I am actually ethnic Chinese from a very multi-cultural south east Asian country, a so-called (? “flawed” ) democratic one.
I will read through your reply but thought of clarifying that so you know where I am from.
“Politically”/ “ideologically” I evolved from pro-Western , pro-democracy idealist during my teenage and early youth and now I am generally anti-Western and more of a realist/pragmatist. Currently, I am basically agnostic with regards to any particular political system but I have a lot of dislike for ‘Western liberal democracy’ , at least in it’s current form(s) in the West. To be honest, I am not too fond of the Chinese Communist Party but my distaste of current Western (supposedly liberal democratic) ideals like multiculturalISM(as some form of ideal in any given country) , pro-LBGTQ , social liberalism and anti-(traditional) Christianity (and somewhat apologetic to Islam) among others , are even more intense . I do not view issues like multiculturalISM(as an ideal) , LBGTQ and militant feminism to be harmless. These all , to me, are threats to societal order , and I dislike chaos. Actually I am a “Europhile” , a “Russophile” and nowadays a “Sinophile” and if I can indulge in a neologism, an “East Asianophile”. These Western ideals are some of my pet peeves.
The West , at its current form has morphed into a monstrosity which I can no longer accept, hence I am not in favour of its current supremacy. I see the West (especially USA and the EU) being the hegemon which promulgate these values and ideals to the whole world as cultural Corruptors.
While I can understand the Taiwanese and HK pro democracy group, I do not support them in the end because I see them as pawns in the Western geopolitical strategy to be sole hegemon by destabilizing a potential rival and threat to Western hegemony which is China. Just like what they did in Ukraine, in the colour revolutions of the ex-Warsaw pact countries , in all those Arab Springs and “overthrow” of so called authoritarian regimes in the Middle East , destabilizing the region ..all in the name of “democracy” and ” human rights” , which is just BULL to me, of utmost hypocrisy. While the West never really condemn Saudi Arabia and many Gulf States allies which are light years behind in terms of “liberal democracy'” or “human rights” , more so LBGTQ rights, or feminism or religious freedoms of non Muslims in their countries , they are selective in sponsoring “regime change” operatives and strategies in governments they want to destabilize such as Russia and China , supposedly more anti human rights and anti freedom than the likes of Saudi Arabia . Even if the West condemn in words these Gulf State allies. they never attempt any pro democratic regime change in these allies of theirs and suddenly the West is so concerned about Taiwan , HK democratic groups and “bad human rights” and “human rights abuse of Uyghurs” in China when China is now seem as a geopolitical rival? Sorry, I was not borned yesterday , and though not a political scientist or of supreme intellect, can see through such duplicity.
In fact, the ruling elites in the West disgust me. And I think they will lead to the eventual civilizational and societal collapse of Western countries, even if they succeed in destabilizing China or Russia or any rival to reign in their ephemeral supremacy. The rot in the West is too deep to cure nor to save themselves , and as an ethnic Chinese , though not a citizen of China , I care much about “my” people and “my” civilization. I am pessimistic of the ethnocultural survival of Europeans(especially those in Western Europe) …in my view their threat does not lie externally but from within -from their ruling elites, from their “progressive” and misguidedly Utopian academia and intellectuals. Once the rot leads to societal collapse in the West , other more martial and realistic races will conquer them . This is my view. I already mourn for the Europeans, of whom I once greatly admire in many aspects. I don’t want that similar fate to befall the Chinese or other peoples in Asia if we were to adopt (in my view) misguided Utopian values.
I believe you, being a libertarian will strongly disagree with my views. Geopolitics , philosophy etc are actually not my main interests nor my strong points , I am more into certain esoteric science stuff. But these issues are quite emotional for me as I just strongly disagree with many values and ideals now being actively promoted by Western powers.
Ok, I should read your post in detail. Sorry for this lengthy emotional rant.
Overall, I find your post rational.
However,
Begs the question not recognized by whom? It is not recognized by serial liars subservient to the Empire. So, from my perspective, if it were recognized by these people/institutions, it would be a clear red flag. The fact that they don’t recognize it works in its favor in my opinion.
I also find informative the fact that you can quantitatively measure your anti-covid antibodies levels in WHO-approved BAU units in hundreds of places in Moscow. This number of testing locations couldn’t have just sprung up w/o government help and approval. To me this suggests that Russian government, which clearly pushes Sputnik and other Russian preparations, expects you to have antibodies after Sputnik injection. In contrast, you cannot find a place in the US to measure your anti-covid antibodies quantitatively. Rational thinking suggests that this means that the US government does not expect you to have any antibodies after injection of concoctions it actively pushes. Sapienti sat.
Thorfinnsson is not an antivaxxer, and in fact I suspect someone who follows his dietary opinions will, all else equal, have lower COVID mortality risks.
https://twitter.com/akarlin88/status/1236433902220255232
https://twitter.com/akarlin88/status/1351078062985764867
It was not about him and I did not mean to imply he was an anti-vaxxers. It was about scientism in the milieu of the diet supplements industry.
I take evidence-based medicine with a pinch of salt, and even with such thing as face mask wearing in this pandemic! I am not against evidence-based medicine, mind you, but sometimes we need a good deal of common sense, something that’s lacking even among very intelligent people, even medical doctors. And we need to recognize the limitations of ‘evidence based’ medicine. Not saying I have lots of good common sense (I think sometimes thinking out of the box too often leads to lack of common sense – a malady of those in academia and so called intellectuals ) , but at least I recognize my flaws. Perhaps, as populations reach herd immunity (either by vaccination or infections or both), mask wearing on a large scale should be stopped.
You see, in my opinion, the bizarre issue was when the pandemic was initially raging in the West, absent of any developed vaccine , when knowledge about the disease is still inadequate, Westerners have already clashed about face mask wearing, I think mostly on ideological grounds rather than truly scientific ones. “Libertarians” hate the very idea of face mask wearing as an afront to their personal freedoms, a basic ‘human right’. THAT is the real issue, in my opinion. All other ‘lack of scientific evidence’ arguments are a cover for this basic anathema to this underlying ideology. ‘I am not wearing that freaking mask’. Period. Deep down this is a cultural and emotional issue. Rational arguments to cover an inherent irrationality.
Now, later on the West developed Covid vaccines. Assuming you are right that these vaccines work superbly, but time is needed to get people vaccinated and even in this forum you can see so many Westerners who will disagree with you about vaccine efficacy and will not, ever, get those horrible covid vaccines. Some don’t even believe this pandemic is real, it’s some horrible ‘plandemic’ hatched by those hated globalists enabled by the likes of Bill Gates, or Fauci the gnome or heaven knows what other conspiracy theories there are… All for some form of new world order of tyranny! And not that I mean Bill Gates, Fauci and those in Western Corporatocracy and technocracy are innocent! I seldom think of these issues in a binary way, in politics there are no true saints nor true sinners, only shades of gray. And politics is about power, and I support those that coincide with my interest and my values. So, absent of some public health policies (including such things as ‘face mask wearing’, social distancing, ‘lockdowns’, quarantines), many of which are afronts to personal freedoms, a value so sacrosanct in the Western psyche, many of which there are no credible ‘scientific evidence’, what should one do to end the crisis of an overwhelmed Healthcare in many of these Western countries? Wait till we have concrete scientific evidence for every of these ‘afront to my personal freedoms’ public health policies or else no way we should adopt them? At such times, a collective societal common sense or wisdom should prevail. Instead I see a society divided, anarchy, in fact sometimes the very idea of self preservation gets trumped by lofty ideology. I am not saying that face mask should be forever, or broad brush lockdowns are the way to go. In fact, as I have said many times, China style authoritarian methods will never work in the West because Western psyche /culture does not permit this. I don’t even think China style control of the pandemic and its so called ‘zero tolerance to covid virus’ policy is feasible nor replicable outside China, and I think not even feasible in the long term for China itself! Locking down whole cities of millions, doing PCR tests on every individual and quarantine those positive to keep a zero covid case in the whole country, is insane and totally not feasible over the long term. It is a problem that China will soon have to face. All these public policies should be tweaked in each country ‘s unique situations. Instead in the West, I see complete lack of societal cohesion and abject failure of the Western political elites. It is a classic case of societal failure and governmental failure, revealed by this covid pandemic, whether one believes the pandemic is real or fake.
If you read my post to Yellowface Anon, my values are actually closer to those in the conservative and traditionalist side in the West. It really pains me to see those Westerners who would usually agree with me on other issues, probably strongly disagree with me and might think I’m a China shill (or worse, a liberal /progressive shill) with regards to Covid, vaccination etc. This is because, in my opinion, views about Covid in the West is more ideological than scientific. My views on Covid, is a trigger to flag a liberal/progressive /pro authoritarian shill.
On the other side of the political divide, there are some control freaks who want to mandate these things such as face mask wearing(even when vaccination levels are high in some Western countries ) , or compulsory covid vaccination, or further lockdowns, or vaccine passports etc, I think more for political reasons. That’s why we see so much protest and anger in France, in Australia etc.
I find it interesting that these Western ruling elites who rail continually about authoritarian China, or the hermit kingdom North Korea, or bad bad oppressive Putler(thanks AK for this nickname for Putin)tend to self proclaim themselves as paragons of liberal democracy, the sole ideology that whole humanity must embrace because it is the best ideology ever conceived, a Messianic ideology only the West can forge… Freedom, equality, fraternity… Yet, they borrow public policies from so called authoritarian China! And these are the Democrats of USA, and left leaning, progressive parties in Europe. There is only one thing that unites these cacophony of disparate ideologues (libertarian, conservative, whatever) in the West – – and that’s to maintain Western supremacy and brook no geopolitical rival! The Australian government which daily rails on Chinese human rights atrocities and ‘unfree’ China insisted on locking down because of ‘surging Covid cases’ – using the playbook of the no. 1 Western geopolitical enemy. To me, it’s just surreal.
Utopian Idealism is the weakness of current Western society. I don’t know what happened to the hard realism of previous Western people which made them great. I am sorry but I am a realist. Idealism cannot save us but realism does.
Sorry, I digressed with this rant. As for so called ‘lack of evidence’ of face mask in covid, here is one ‘evidence’ :-
https://www.pnas.org/content/118/4/e2014564118
Probably one can find other studies which support and contradict this paper.
It all boils down to common sense when we cannot have certainties. A face mask prevents at least some droplets or spittle or what not from the wearer to extrude out to others. It can never confer 100 percent protection from covid or whatever viruses. Who really knows how much protection it gives (or maybe it is TRULY negligible) but here in Asia, we believe in self preservation and realism. We are not going to wait for evidence, the evidence may not even come by even after years of research. If it does not have any protection, well we get the virus like the unmasked but if it does confer some protection, then yes we are partially protected. This is just realism when we are uncertain.
I don´t think this commie anti-vaxx behavior explains the glacial Russian vaccination rate. Most people seem to be refractory to vaccines. Otherwise haw can you explain that Mexico surpasses effortlessly Russia even after starting the vaccination campaign much later?
Great rant! Ideologies, or maybe broadly, beliefs rule the world. The elites have one set of belief, the populists another, Big Pharma and Big Tech many variations of elitist or populist ideas (I’m counting their doppelganger natural medicine and Gab/Parler here), libertarians an extremely divergent one, the opportunists swinging from one end to another and the normies mostly confused and following one precept or another. These all makes sense from all their own viewpoints.
Much of the real actions in politics come from beliefs, whether sincere or cynical, and the firmer the beliefs/ideology, the greater weight they can lift. Objective truth has never mattered, and indeed there has never been the “objective”, just what the dominant worldview claims to be, in this case European scientific rationality. We’re living in a world where everyone’s worldviews are rapidly disintegrating, the Nietzschean revaluation of all values is coming along with many tipping or breaking points (Already the “Science” is taking a life of its own, spurring its own cult and rival cults, and entire economic paradigms are rapidly passing away or being ushered in). And so we will all be caught in in great struggles worthy of being the self-fulfillment of Revelatory prophecies, the West has locked themselves and us non-Westerners in by embracing the chaff of Semitic narrow-mindedness and Hellenic anti-philosophy (there were much better virtues to be gained even from these traditions). Greetings with my own rant.
It’s frickin’ lack of public trust. Russia has it since Soviet times, China surfacing or sinking from time to time under the ChiComs, France since Macron, America from Trump (as a cynicism spreading from Dems to Reps). The brutal acts directed from WHO has only propagated it widely. That is one of the intermediate signs the entire globalist system is heading for a denouement.
I agree, as the bard said: there is something rotten in Denmark. The controlled discussion, medical taboos, and the obvious heavy-handed push to use MRNA are red flags.
I would gladly test my antibodies, but for some reason they don’t want me to :). Regarding Sputnik: lack of certification makes it intentionally impractical within EU. As a realist, I don’t see much to gain – by the way, today is the last day one can get Sputnik in Slovakia. Our premier (a total goof) took it with his family. But the state is anti-Sputnik – the state is not particularly deep, but it is omnipresent, even the leaders are mostly for show. Hungary is better, and for some weird reason San Marino.
The highest duty of a person who is infectious is to not infect others. There is no excuse for not wearing a mask by her if she may get into a proximity of other people regardless of what flaky theories she may entertain about how mask might be detrimental to her health or the negative social impact of masking.
Clearly you are a troll and/or a useful idiot. If indeed there is an effort to destabilize society by promoting anti-social and detrimental attitudes to the well being of the society at large the sect of yours should get under the scrutiny of the internal security apparatus. Depending on your age they should administer threats and some beating or something more severe. The provocateurs and instigators should be investigated for possible links to the foreign security services.
Don’t give an inch to that flaky woman. She has no arguments only a desire to be disagreeable. There is plenty of evidence for efficacy of masking. Asian countries did a right thing to adhere to the universal masking policy and were blessed that they did not have recalcitrant and irrational objectors.
That Yellow Anon fellow is a provocateur who would like to seed the Asian countries with dissent to undermine ability of Asian society to succeed in actions that require concerted cooperation of all citizens.
People who are against the vaccines are not necessarily those who are against preventive measures.
What’s impractical for travel can be practical for health, or even survival. Look at Israel, where most people were forced to get “vaccinated” with kosher Pfizer, a huge spike in covid cases and deaths:
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/israel/
“Does anyone have any idea how vaccine giant Sanofi Pasteur managed to screw up their Phase I and II V1.0 trials of their protein plus GSK adjuvant vaccine?” Yes, it is the same reason why we don’t have vaccines against staph, strep pyogenes, C diff, Lyme, EBV, CMV, herpesviruses, and type B meningococcus: their surface is too amorphous and / or too similar to human proteins to yield an effective immune response.
You can repeat that nonsense about “X is a bacterium, Y is a different kind of virus”, but there is no effective vaccine against any other coronavirus, including the scary SARS v 1.0, the scarier MERS, and the ones that have been around for centuries – for the same reasons. All the spike proteins are heavily glycosylated, making their 3D structure highly variable. No 3D structure = little ability to raise effective antibodies, following vaccine or disease.
Sanofi did not “screw up” their trials. Only one in ten drugs pass all trials, despite a lot of data massaging by the drug companies. Sanofi was honest about trial results, which likely is not the case for both Moderna and Biontech. Sanofi took a bet and lost. In contrast, Moderna, who lost the RNA bet several times in the last decade, took no chances. They just planted their people in the USG.
People who are taken by scientism, despite knowing less about molecular biology than a hobbyist, are the reason why we have the abysmal rate of 90% of drugs undergoing tests despite being crap. Every once in while there is a loophole, and unproven drugs, like eteplirsen, get approved, to the delight of science idolaters and drug salesmen.
The idea that concordance between Sanofi trial’s outcome and the most likely scenario is somehow a “screw up” gives your game away. I wish you were a fanboy, but you confessed to making a living out of selling drugs. You can call it “healthcare”, but opioids are famously ineffective against neuropathic pain. Even I know that, although I never prescribed anything. So, rather than hoping on a believable, trustworthy, informative trial, you hope Sanofi “does not screw up”, that is, somehow gets molecules approved, even their safety or effectiveness is debatable or poor. Admittedly, we’d all root for approvals if we made the kind of money you make.
I guess you know about RNA roughly as much as Donald Trump. You definitely know less than me.
Yeah masks – ike most other things such as distancing and washing hands simply reduces chances… A person speaking through a mask releases less saliva into the air. A person breathing in will potentially take in less. It reduces the viral load people come in contact with. The same way washing your hands before touching your face reduces the potential of what might be on your hands.
Well, EM is not the tool for measuring RNA. What you see there is likely the detergent-coated bubbles. To measure RNA, you’d need … RT-PCR.
If only there was a PCR test for spike mRNA, lol.
You cant get more sick if you are already sick. The immune system doesnt fight like that. If the virus is already in you – the fight is in your system. Now yes when you are outside it absolutley makes sense to take in fresh air… But if you are sick with covid – you should be quarantining.
Actually there are such people but a tiny minority. While I am not against vaccines I am very much for non-pharmaceutical countermeasure to eliminate virus that would make vaccines unnecessary. In theory virus eradication was possible if all countries followed China, Taiwan, New Zealand. People who oppose masking are de facto the useful idiots of Big Pharma who produces vaccines.
Floomers who (1) denied virus existence or (2) minimized its danger were against all countermeasures and they are necessitated by their own logic to oppose vaccination at least the vaccination against the non-existent or harmless virus.
To measure the integrity of a long mRNA, you need to run either RT-PCR with unusually long product, or a large series of RT-PCRs with overlapping “normal” (200-400 bp) products.
An easier thing is to run presumed mRNA on an agarose gel with ethidium bromide (fluoresces under UV when bound to RNA or DNA): intact mRNA would run as a band corresponding to an expected large size, the debris would run as a smear.
That rise in infections in Israel is not related to vaccine, but because Israel removed almost all its previous year’s social distancing, after 50% of the population had been vaccinated. Israel’s authorities have now prioritized the economy, after most of the older population had been vaccinated, and the R naught number will be higher there than in countries like Japan (that have more socially distanced populations by culture, with more modern ventilation by engineering).
Now almost 60% of people have been vaccinated in Israel (some with up to three doses), and this vaccination of more than half the population is shown by the medical statisticians to be significantly reducing the hospitalization rates per infection. While the number of infections is reaching the highest level so far during the pandemic due to removing of all social distancing – in combination with Middle Eastern summer (high UV index that has a u-shaped relation to R number) pushing people into badly ventilated spaces, and the fact that Delta can cause breakthrough infections in vaccinated people.
We know that masks should be effective just from physics and engineering. Airborne particles on which virus can be transmitted is filtered significantly by the correctly fitted mask ffp2 and ffp3, according to the product specifications of the latter masks.
But if you still had doubted a mechanical explanation, then –
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jun/29/cambridge-hospitals-mask-upgrade-appears-to-eliminate-covid-19-risk-to-staff
Of course, such discussion is much more complicated than a possibility of ffp2 and ffp3 to filter virus, especially as most of the ordinary public do not wear those except in countries like Germany. But if someone said “masks don’t work” to reduce the transmission risk, as a generalized statement, then it’s not difficult to refute.
As for the overall strategy to reduce the rate of infection, New York school teachers had better phrased it than I can: “Education department officials noted that air purifiers are just one part of several layers of mitigation against COVID, including mandatory masking, social distancing, when possible, and random coronavirus testing. ” https://ny.chalkbeat.org/2021/8/18/22630636/air-purifiers-hepa-nyc-schools-covid
For “anti-vaxxers” (or people who do not want to be vaccinated this year), there is also a category of scientists – personally I was told not to be vaccinated by someone who works in a pharmaceutical corporation (and post-doctoral worker in genetics).
Reasoning in their case can seem more rational, if more cautious than most people would be – simply that you (unless you are being paid to test new medicines on yourself) should wait until a product has been tested on other people for some time, before trying it yourself.
This is reflected in the fact that people who attend to be participating for drug tests, can be paid thousands of dollars for their work; i.e. that there is accepted a general risk to working as an experimental mouse, that has to be compensated for economically in such workers.
Obviously the risk from being infected by the virus will be likely higher (and is not starting to be proved that it is higher) than the risk for being vaccinated, even for younger people. E.g. for myocarditis with Pfizer: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2112543
There is also a philosophical question of whether to not be vaccinated, can increase the risk of infecting others, and therefore that people should have moral duty to be vaccinated in order to prevent harm to other citizens. However, as there is now indication of the higher level of breakthrough infection in vaccinated citizens with Delta, then this philosophical question can become increasingly less relevant, it seems.
That study isn’t on the types of masks that people actually use.
It has been 2 months since it was reported on and still not passed peer review. Why?
Even the most germophobic individuals are socialising a lot more in the country where I am in now that they have been vaccinated. I assume this is the same everywhere. Vaccines cause people to catch more Covid because they free up people to catch Covid.
And this is after they’re “fully vaccinated,” two weeks after their last jab (although one week for a prime + boost such as the mRNA vaccines is probably enough)?
One thing first noted in Israel because they got a fast and quasi-big start (payed top dollar to Pfizer, and not a large population) was that many people stated behaving as if the campaign had gotten a long distance, including even if they weren’t vaccinated. Another thing that’s been seen in the US for example is people not taking heed of the minimum times needed for the immune system to learn a response or boost that response.
But, yes, I can imagine what you’re talking about, and with Delta becoming generally dominant it’s significantly easier for everyone to get infected, although for good vaccines the probability of bad outcomes is not reduced as much (generally speaking as I understand it, mostly tracking Pfizer/BioNTech metrics).
Yes economists/psychologists call “risk compensation”. SUV drivers operate more dangerously, because they feel safer in a larger automobile, cyclists exposed themselves to more risk when wearing a helmet, etc.
Also after 60% of a population has been vaccinated (and the other people are voluntarily refusing), then democratic governments (i.e. in Western countries) are becoming likely to make a decision to maintain the economy open – as these politicians start to feel less responsibility for the minority’s democratic decision to refuse a vaccine.
But children cannot be vaccinated yet, even if they or their parents want them to be vaccinated – so it was predictable that the debate in America could refocus on the question of masks in schools, with Ron DeSantis’s controversial policies in Florida. Not having an opportunity to be vaccinated, children’s health is still primarily dependent on the politicians’ decision about masks and social distancing.
Exactly. The vaccine will provide pretty good protection to anyone who wants it. The rest can enjoy their undiminished risk.
The Pfizer vaccine hit me as hard as the disease actually did, so I have no problem with the young being nonchalant about innoculation. It seemed particularly annoying to immediately get a fever, a 2 day headache and a dead arm, after already having Covid, but fortunately neither were anything to cry about.
OT, but “Free City” is a fun film that I feel you might enjoy. Our host AK would certainly find it interesting.
Don’t you find you post illogical? If “vaccine” were effective, lifting restrictions won’t be devastating. If you still need social distancing, masks, and lockdowns, what’s the point of presumed “vaccine”?
https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/781981619073318943/882498932456968203/TA0939.jpg
Thanks. Agree with you.
I wasn’t really trying to ‘give in’ to her arguments. The fact is that I am not an infectious disease physician nor a respiratory physician, who likely know more about Covid issues. I have not been nitpicking on face mask ‘evidence’ because this is quite common sense, and the concensus of my ID and respiratory physicians colleagues(after they looked through a lot of analyses on this) = face masks have some efficacy in reducing sars-cov-2 transmission. Majority of the population in my country never made a fuss about mask like Westerners do, and there are no ill effects except for slight inconvenience. To put it bluntly, I think the response to face mask wearing in the West is just ridiculous. Don’t care if they think we Asians are lemmings and idiots. Debate and argue with insistence on scientific evidence for such a simple thing..
That’s just CRAZY.
You know, I remember Western MSM, Trump, (I think even Fauci?) etc downplayed face masks. BBC was having this advertisement about washing hands with soap and water to prevent covid spread. I think the main reason is their governments/Healthcare screwed up… They initially didn’t have adequate supplies of masks and PPE for their Healthcare Frontliners so they came up with that narrative. The damage is done. Once they had enough supplies of masks and ppe, their Healthcare agencies make u turns about mask policy earning even more distrust in this’ freedom loving’ West.
As for Yellow Face, since you have called out this statement of his, I leave it to him to explain himself. Although he has often replied he agrees with me, I felt he has more symphaties with the pro democracy folks in HK and ‘libertarians’.
Anyway, I succumbed again to a ‘commenting binge’ on this forum. I think I should again be a passive reader and stop commenting here. Ultimately, commenting is a waste of time.
Take care!
The whole rationale of lockdowns and then stripping the unvaccinated of their social and economic rights is the assumption that they are potentially virus carriers and hence should not mingle. Those are collective punishment based on a presumption of guilt (i.e. potentially infected no matter your PCR test result is).
I will start putting you on the Ignore list for taking on the Stasi informant attitude.
On what utu is alleging, I don’t approve of those “pro-democracy” folks that are selling HK to whatever regime in power in America, and then when that is failing, fleeing for the UK where Johnson fumbles every day. If you have read Hoppe, you’ll know what the “democracy” they support is a sham that will degenerate into oligarchy, like the one already in place in HK. And I said I’m recuperating from doctrinaire libertarian ideology, even if I think Austrian economics can occasionally be a suitable analytical framework (based on a heavily Americanized set of assumptions, and as an ideal that is never realistic!), and some degree of “liberalizing” can be good before a suitable social balance is found, not to mention the woes of COVID policies.
Check my last comment and the one of his I replied.
Most places in the West, by only allowing the vaccinated to come out unrestrictedly while hiding the unvaccinated, are becoming a continent-spanning Potemkin village.
Unvaccinated and increasingly alienated “Israelis” should take the Gilad Atzmon pill and sympathize with their Palestinian brethren.
You demonstrate the apogee of hypocrisy. Your posturing as a moral person is pathetic given that you have devoted many hours to arguing against early Covid treatment with repurposed drugs and thereby contributed to the establishment narrative which has killed millions. You are one sick fucker.
You are the one who doesn’t understand immune function. The innate immune system of the nasopharyngeal mucosa does not fight SARS-2 well, except in supertasters, who have T2R38 genotypes associated with NO release from cells so endowed. See this paper:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2780134
For tasters and especially non-tasters the most direct way to fight the virus after possible exposure or at the first symptom is to gargle with a mouthwash containing cetylpyridinium chloride (Scope is one) and used nasal sprays of either iota-carrageenan, providone-iodine, or xylitol+grapefruit seed extract.
Repeating these measures multiple times per day.
Re-inhaling virions from unnecessary masking when the person is outside and quarantining would be stupid. And so would be anyone who took your illogical and ignorant advice.
Not necessarily. Propagandists of the official Western covid narrative fall into two categories: useful idiots and paid hacks. While the first category can be described as sick, the second is healthy, just cynical and venal.
Personally I think this was the perfect excuse to get their mRNA technology rammed through. Just like genetically modified food. Once they get people to accept it… Now you can expect to see all types of treatments using that technology. How will we all end up? Nobody can say for certain. They once claimed Round Up was safe. Why would anyone think using chemicals to kill plant life was safe long term for humans..???
This is why it isn’t just mRNA, but the crisis of confidence in the entire ideological regime where you can improve immaterial well-being using material interventions, without looking at the consequences. It’s the same rationale to oppose GMO food and gene therapy, and why the interests of organic food and natural medicine/healthcare proponents converge.
All i can say is “oh boy”. Gargling can not help the immune system fight. People gargle even with a cold to ease discomfort. It does not make your immune system fight better. Anything to make your immune system fight better (like vitamins and minerals) has to enter the blood stream where your immune system does its work. Wearing a mask is about preventing spreading… I dont think you understood the point.
As to not quarantining after getting sick. Its really common sense that does not require a Phd. That is why jobs offer paid sick days. They dont want sick people going into their workplace to make other people sick… These were common sense before a pandemic.
Yes and the same people have less trust in mainstream media so also end up on alternative news like this one (even if people disagree).
But yeah it is the whole ultra modern lifestyle. Nobody wants to do hard work. Well aside from the fact some “weeds” like dandelions have usage – who says a lawn or yard is just supposed to be grass…??? But even if thats what you want – nobody wants to do hard work. My grandparents were farmers. You pull weeds out with your hands – not by spraying chemicals. I mean didnt people see what happened in Vietnam and Laos..??? Well basically their weed killers are like watered down versions.
Me personally i am not anti vaxx… But mRNA therapies are not tradtional vaccines. In Singapore they cant understand why people who have the choice of Sinovac vs Pfizer why they chose Sinovac – which is reported by the MSM to have less efficacy. The answer for most was not trusting the long term effects of mRNA. My question to the west is why did no western tradtional inactivated virus get presented as an option to the populace – even if they are supposedly less effective. To me it screams “agenda”
“that you have devoted many hours to arguing against early Covid treatment with repurposed drugs”
Not many hours. I remember that exchange I had with you. All I did is to cite scientific literature that undermined each claim you made about efficacy of some treatments whether it was vitamin C, vitamin D, or zinc, HCQ or ivermectin. Each search took me just few minutes to get to results that you were too lazy to check.
I would support an alternative treatment if it existed but I won’t support flaky fantasies. Giving support to charlatanry that preys on desperation of ignorant people hardly could be consider ethical.
I’m on the side of Sinovac and against BioNTech. But for me, the social reorganization aspect is the way bigger deal. It’s just the terminus of incremental modernization, as some kind of brutal accelerationism.
“It’s just the terminus of incremental modernization, as some kind of brutal accelerationism.” – That’s what that guy from Iowa said who on his trip to San Francisco in 1973 by mistake wandered into the gay bathhouse. The brutal accelerationism was particularly memorable.
Somewhat more reasonable and constructive anti massvax position for discussion, considering that all Covid vaccines so far unfortunately have been non full sterilizing, but more or less “leaky” ones:
https://www.geertvandenbossche.org/post/a-last-word-of-caution-to-all-those-pretending-the-covid-19-pandemic-is-toning-down
As a quick counterpoint it should be noted that all the notorious current immunity evading variants emerged in places where virus was runing rampant before any mass vaccination campaigns were conducted, as the author himself acknowledges in the aforementioned text, so for his worrisome potential script to be confirmed, we should expect entirely new supervariants to emerge in places likes current Israel or current UK, but if this will not happen, then such position should be discarded as not proven in practice:
Alcoholism, divorce and homicides have long been higher in Russia vis a vis rural whites in the US.
Obesity is considerably lower in Russia, but tobacco use is higher. Even rural whites in New England, the least religious part of the US, have higher rates of church attendance than anywhere in non-Islamic Russia.
American conservatives have invested zero political capital into lobbying for Sputnik V to be approved in the US.
Political discussion is such a dynamic system. Someone says something stupid on one side, and there is an equally stupid response from the other side.
A side identified with the left says some unbalance, stupid or extreme opinion, and there likely will be an equally stupid or extreme opinion produced by the right. As such, all political sides become a mirror of each other’s stupidity and lack of objectivity. It’s like the increasingly swirling of a muddy water.
This is not only in the West though. But chance of finding a more objective or balanced answer will improve if you can find a sufficiently non-politicized person to ask, and these unpoliticized people might be easily become a minority (especially in America where partisan politicization of the public is becoming part of the entertainment industry).
Israel’s fourth wave looks like what we should probably expect? This is situation with no lock down, little social distancing (shopping malls full), 60% of the population vaccinated with a leaky vaccine (to the Delta variant) that reduces the rates of hospitalization and death. Israel is also a country which would presumably have a relatively higher R naught number compared to countries like Finland or Japan (Israel is Middle Eastern culture of low social distancing combined with one of the world’s highest population densities).
Politicians’ decision to not lock down for the third wave is also probably quite predictable, considering most of the old people have been vaccinated. Moreover the economic distress caused by the last lockdown resulted in widespread rioting by the Arab sector of the population, and even a conflict with Gaza (all this violent conflict was partly triggered by the economic effects of lockdown that killed the income of customer service workers, Arab sector; destruction of tourist industry in East Jerusalem, etc).
This is graph of the situation in Israel with deaths vs detected infections.
In the first, second and third wave – there was very strict lockdowns before the peak of the wave (including the army locking up some Haredi areas).
In the fourth wave (with Delta variant and more than half of people vaccinated)- there is no lockdown at all, and the economy is maintained open by the politicians.
Deaths relative to time are far above the first wave (when the army was locking down areas of Israel), but they have not reached the high levels of the second and third wave (where there was a strict lockdown before the peak).
https://i.imgur.com/hDEOmYi.png
Edit – oops I mean in this sentence “not lock down for the fourth wave.” (We really need a function to allow us to edit our posts for more than 5 minutes).
Unless and until someone can crack the severe problem with culturing the virus for the second dose it would be completely pointless.
And do “American conservatives” need to pick more unwinnable fights with our ruling trash?
On a lot of those “adverse side-effects”, sometimes the claim from official autopsies that any deaths apparently from comorbidities has nothing to do with vaccines themselves, can be right, by Occam’s Razor. But what is certain is that many types of vaccines can raise the susceptibility of chronic diseases becoming acute, not to mention mRNA-induced blood clots in previous healthy patients. If countries want to impose vaccine mandates, that is going to cover a large number of people with chronic diseases, and all the deaths immediately or closely after their vaccination, whether it is clearly vaccination-induced or not, will naturally lumped into a undifferentiated bloc of “adverse side-effect deaths” and culpability passed onto the state/Big Pharma. This is the wisdom of letting people decide whether to take the jabs.
The question of whether masks “work” depends on many factors, including the type of mask, how carefully they are worn, and very importantly whether the pathogen in question can spread via surfaces (if covid hasn’t evolved to do that yet, just give it time). There have been a number of RCTs on mask effectiveness (though only one for covid in particular), and the results are rather mixed:
https://www.city-journal.org/do-masks-work-a-review-of-the-evidence
Assuming the masks are certified ones for industry (N99/N95 or ffp2/ffp3), then it is the design specification of the product that it ensures it will protect against coronavirus.
You can just check the NIOSH or EU CE specifications against believed minimum size of the particles that can carry SARS-CoV-2: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7579175/
It’s more than a question of whether to filter 95% or 99% of the potential particles that could carry the virus, as the most of the particles will be a lot larger than the ones that N99/N95 mask are certified to filter at those rates. So the filter efficiency against particles that carry coronavirus should be higher than those 95% and 99% specifications of those masks (assuming the masks do not fail their design specification).
For example, the guideline for working together with asbestos is to wear an ffp3 mask. It’s possible or common that people will have “user error”, not wear the mask correctly, and could still be endangered by asbestos. But that’s a wider topic then whether the mask protects people from asbestos.
Similarly if you wear an automobile safety belt around your neck, it will probably not be very useful in an accident.
It’s not going to evolve from being a coronavirus. It’s limited by categories like being an enveloped virus rather than a non-enveloped virus. Non-enveloped virus can be transmitted efficiency by surfaces, but enveloped viruses have more problems in that sphere.
Human coronaviruses also need organic matter to move between surfaces and apparently doesn’t transfer on materials like plastic even with organic matter. https://www.mdpi.com/1999-4915/13/7/1352/pdf
“The transfer of HCoVs from hands to fomites, including food packaging and foods, is likely to be low and the resulting risk of spreading the virus by this mode will likely be low”
Thank you.
The West is in deep trouble, and we are the only adults left in the room, and preservers of Zivilisation.
Further motivation to set aside former squabbles, which when put in perspective, were not even that pernicious to begin with.
他在纳粹体系和犹太人大清洗史学史有一些深刻的评论
https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-reichstag-fire-decree-of-2021/#comment-4393941
https://www.unz.com/akarlin/open-thread-159/#comment-4814784
If this is 1944 and you are a senior officer in the Wehrmacht approached by one of Stauffenberg’s colleagues, how would you have reacted? My guess is like Manstein and Witzleben, you would not have ratted the July 20th plotters out.
You would have declined to participate not because you don’t find the NS Regime to be immoral, but rather offended by the conspirators’ offense to Rechtsstaat.
I would suggest to Stauffenberg to wear a suicide vest to be effective and as far as the Yellowface Anon I would resort to “brutal accelerationism” and had him drafted to military to a penal battalion to snap him out from his infantile ideations.
They don’t get vaccinated because they read more than the Daily Grub, and peruse more than Farcebook. The well-informed know that the ‘vaccines’ can be harmful, and are as near useless as remdesivir. If under sixty and in good health, they have nothing to fear, and a dose of CoViD will give them long-lasting immunity to the whole virus, not just the spike. Etc.
It’s probably the same old debate between using N95 (up to standard of preventing aerosol & droplet transmission) and regular medical masks (designed for surgeons and much less effective at any form of transmission), and opponents of universal masking will claim (with good sense) that simply using medical or cloth masks that are widely available becomes a form of compulsive symbolic action (virtue signaling).
你再看它現在情緒化，人身攻擊，比之前落差多大。這就叫當局者迷。
China’s mRNA Covid Shot-Maker Expects Efficacy Data by Year End
https://archive.ph/16OfP
It’s just license-produced Pfizer/BioNTech, so it can be applied to the kind used in the West.
Your sentence is partly wrong (“it’s just license-produced Pfizer/BioNTech”), and partly incomprehensible (“so it can be applied to the kind used in the West”).
Can’t you read? The article says it’s “China’s first homegrown mRNA Covid-19 vaccine”, and that it was “developed by Chinese vaccine maker Walvax Biotechnology Co., Suzhou Abogen Biosciences Co. and researchers from the Chinese military”.
As for “applied to the kind used in the West”, I have no idea what those words mean, but since you derive that statement from the first part of the sentence which is untrue, its intended meaning is probably irrelevant.
That’s the point I was making in #65:
It is supported by experimental data: those who have been infected are shown to have ~13-fold better protection than those “vaccinated”:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v1
For anyone with minimal familiarity with biology, this is only natural.
BTW, the authors were right to put this study on medrxiv before publication: considering billions the fraudsters are making on their mRNA “vaccines”, they have enough resources to block the publication of this inconvenient truth.
My mistake in reading only the title and thinking of the Fosun one.
Yes I am aware. They started coming up with one when some started complaining about the efficacy of their “normal” inactivated virus vaccine. The Chinese gov psyche is that they cant fall behind in any technology anymore so thwy will BUt here is the thing – Chines people have choices. Strange since the claim is they have less freedom. And I am pretty sure many Chinese wont trust the Chinese mRNA either. Again many in Hong Kong who have access to western vaccines still are using the traditional type. mRNA is experimental no matter who produces it. Westerners (meaning NATO) have no such choice. Even Mexico and the Dominican Republic has choices of which type to use.
It comes down to
1) Picking between types of vaccines to use
2) Picking between being vaccinated and unvaccinated (because of a myriad of equally anti-institutional trust reasons)
Portugal!
https://i.redd.it/mv3bq0l6n3l71.png
This map could be a good match for the intraeuropean development levels (vaccination rates correlating with the economic, social and cultural development levels of different countries in Europe), but then these outliers like the victory for Portugal, Spain and Sicily are somehow spoiling that match.
Design specifications of N95 means they will protect against coronavirus, by matching of definitions a priori.
So whether non industrial-certified masks will be effective is another question. But it’s like automobile passengers to ask whether tying rope around themselves will protect during an accident. It might or might not, but the product isn’t regulated or standardized in the way that automobile seatbelts have to be.
It will be difficult to know a priori if non-regulated masks will be effective, as they weren’t regulated for the efficiency standards like the N95 has to. And this allows the debate to become uninterestingly confusing, as some of the unregulated masks will probably not be effective to varying extents. (Although even partially ineffective masks would be better than nothing). Then there is a whole debate about valves vs no-valves in masks.
In Germany and Austria at least they have regulated what masks people have to wear to some extent.
Where did you get the idea that the only way to avoid “catching” Corona is thru social isolation? Oh, wait, that’s what they want you to think, and you fell for it. They tried to prove back in 1918 that the flu was catchable (transmissible) , but it did not work.
If I understand correctly, you are now claiming that the flu is not transmissible and thereby achieving a whole new level of crankiness.
What astonishes me is that you do this despite having no expertise and no more than videos that look like TV programmes from Idiocracy as evidence.
That is true… But I don’t think Bras Cubas got the point. In the NATO countries you are forced to use mRNA and that’s it.
Crap statement, cause Astra Zeneca and Johnson&Johnson are not mRNA.
Ok – I didn’t spell out every detail and say adenoviral vector also… But neither of those are traditional either. Adenos are still experimental in reality – but at least there was one commercial one as opposed to mRNA… But go ahead and believe what the pharma companies and the governments they bribe tell you.. No problem
To be exact, they don’t need to bribe the governments. They are part of the cabal that wholly owns “the governments” (except for those the Empire considers enemies, like Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, NK, etc.).
USA also seems to be doing quite good, when even 50% of Trump voters got vax, thus leaving antivaxers as a shrinking, but loudmouth minority:
https://i.redd.it/nen2xn491jl71.png
Absolutely correct…. They even force weak countries to accept GMO foods. But I digress.