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John, here’s a chance for you to do some due diligence, as you put it, on the sources and claims you’ve been citing.
These are links that I have encountered but haven’t had time to review yet.
Do the Pfizer documents really show that their vaccine hardly works? Seems highly unlikely, considering the huge reduction in hospitalisations and deaths since its deployment, so probably the claim is bunk:
What about the data integrity issue?
https://respectfulinsolence.com/2021/11/15/wtf-happened-to-the-bmj/
So what do we know about the “Covid Care Alliance” who have been promoting these claims?
https://globalnews.ca/news/8517353/canada-doctors-covid-vaccine-disinformation/
OK, I’ve had time to review the articles I linked above. The respectfulinsolence blog is too verbose for me; I keep wishing it would get to the point. The “An antivaccine slasher myth originated in The BMJ” article does eventually get around to its critique of the whistle-blower’s criticisms of Ventavia; the claims based on it by the Covid Care Alliance are unsupported and greatly exaggerated. But I already knew that from the mortality and vaccination curves.
The “Revealed: How a web of Canadian doctors are undermining the fight against COVID-19” article lists a lot of highly dubious behaviour. It doesn’t contain any proper “smoking gun”, but smoking guns are anyway more the stuff of conspiracy theorists.
But in reviewing the articles I did encounter a link I found particularly helpful. In my opening post I wrote of “influence campaigns”. Here’s a nice concise article detailing the funding and roots of the covid trivialisation campaign, and its links to climate change denial, and the historical tobacco-related illness doubt campaign:
https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/09/13/covid-19-and-the-new-merchants-of-doubt/
John, you’ve wasted masses of my time. Please e-mail your postal address to clark at killick1 dot plus dot com so as I can invoice you 🙂
John gone?
Hey Clark, the stuff you and your sidekick Butthead-Dumber post might get you a paid gig as a system pig with the likes of FactCheck, Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat or the Atlantic Council. You would have to dox your e-mail though…
Oh, wait…John, I make no secret of my e-mail address because the whole purpose of my e-mail account is so that people can contact me. I’m Clark Killick, my landline number is not ex-directory, I live in Highwood near Chelmsford and you could find me on the electoral register.
*** MODS *** I request that John’s above comment not be deleted despite it contravening the moderation policy.
John, the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat and the Atlantic Council all propagandise for US/NATO foreign policy, a subject routinely shrouded in secrecy as Julian Assange’s cruel and protracted imprisonment confirms. So far as I know, these propaganda organisations have said little about medical science, which is an internationally collaborative endeavour conducted to a large extent in public view. If your insinuation had validity, you would merely have to turn to Russian or Chinese medical science to find the supposed contradictions you wish to popularise. Russia has its own problems with conspiracy theories about vaccines and they’re very similar to those in the so-called West, stemming from very justified distrust in government and mass media.
I do not support “the system”; my position is considerably more complicated than that. My opinion is that most “Western” governments demonstrated, and continue to demonstrate, gross stupidity in their cack-handed response to the pandemic, but that the type of stupidity displayed was and is rather predictable given their unquestioning commitment to neoliberalism.
I find it very disappointing that so far you have avoided engaging with the points I have raised, because covid has cast light upon many important and interesting matters that we could be discussing.
Glenn_nl, please try to be more compassionate and less outspoken towards John, and others sucked in by conspiracy theory.
John, by “Butthead-Dumber” I assume you were referring to glenn_nl, as this was the only commenter who got personal. I apologise for my own frustration, but as an engineer you should be able to understand what’s provoking it – for over a year now I have had to address the same few fallacies over and over again; it’s a massive waste of time and effort, and it obstructs progress towards far more interesting and potentially productive discussion.
And John, I see the human predicament and rapidly gathering crisis far more as a tragedy than as a conflict. I think that the common tendency to see it in terms of conflict is very much part of the problem, and a defining characteristic of the propaganda within which we’re all immersed and to which we all contribute. You, me, everyone; we’re all stuck with these problems together, no way out save death, nowhere to escape to. We need each other’s minds to address the problem, or our civilisation won’t earn the capacity to survive and nature will annihilate it.
So instead of tackling the replies to his “smoking gun” evidence, instead of having the courage to either concede or counter the points made, John just lets fly with a load of personal abuse and runs away.
I’m shocked, shocked I tell ya!
It’s particularly hurtful coming from someone who was obviously so sensitive to ad hominems, that he whined about even the slightest hint of it. “Butthead dumber” indeed, will I ever recover? ???
With all due respect, Clark, fuck him. People on this thread took the time to review the “evidence” John presented, provided comprehensive and thoughtful replies, and researched topics on request. And their thanks? To be completely ignored and/or insulted.
‘John’ will be back, don’t you worry. He’ll get all excited at some new BS he thinks is the _real_ smoking gun, and present it under another guise. And then run away again once it’s debunked.
Glenn_nl, John indeed responded with personal abuse but whether he has run away remains to be seen – though I suspect you may be right, as such a response has proven to be the most common in this now familiar situation.
But John suffered severe personal loss and trauma – his mother’s painful death and his wife’s long struggle against illness – he must have felt terrible. He very probably felt severe guilt about infecting his wife, though she would probably have caught it eventually from some other source had John not visited the boat club. Your early comment may have reawakened such turmoil in John’s mind.
Our rationality is a vulnerable thing, dependent as it is upon the evolutionarily far older motivational parts of our minds. This is an evolutionary inevitability, a predicament we’re all stuck within, and the pandemic has brought enormous pressure upon our convoluted cognitive systems. I think that one of the reasons that, after two thousand years, the story of Jesus is still so widely shared (albeit lumbered with prodigious superstitious baggage) is that it says he taught by use of parables. Instead of criticising directly and thereby provoking defensive resistance, he told moral stories about absent, abstract or fictional third parties. I wish I had such patience and creativity; I try to appeal directly to my opposite number’s rationality, but that may be the very reason I so often fail to reach it.
If anyone is interested in accessing the VAERS system covid data you can see it here. Near the middle top if you hover over “COVID vaccine data” there is a drop down menu for different metrics.
John. you place great reliance and authority on the VAERS reported adverse incidents. You ought to read the disclaimer carefully.
“VAERS accepts reports of adverse events and reactions that occur following vaccination. Healthcare providers, vaccine manufacturers, and the public can submit reports to the system. While very important in monitoring vaccine safety, VAERS reports alone cannot be used to determine if a vaccine caused or contributed to an adverse event or illness. The reports may contain information that is incomplete, inaccurate, coincidental, or unverifiable. In large part, reports to VAERS are voluntary, which means they are subject to biases. This creates specific limitations on how the data can be used scientifically. Data from VAERS reports should always be interpreted with these limitations in mind.”
You might want to take a look at this.
“During December 2020–July 2021, COVID-19 vaccine recipients had lower rates of non–COVID-19 mortality than did unvaccinated persons after adjusting for age, sex, race and ethnicity, and study site.”
Israel.
John raised the example of Israel:
– ‘all cause mortality data in Israel, one of the most “protected” populations, show steep increases following the 1st/2nd jab, the 1st booster, AND the 2nd booster. The last peak is just as high as the first…’
I took a look at Worldometers, and indeed the covid deaths peak post vaccination was even higher (though not as wide) as three of the preceding ones (archived copy to keep it static).
John seemed to be merely parroting denialist websites based in the UK and Canada, and I strongly suspect they’d have cited Canadian, US or European data had it confirmed their contention. But they cherry-picked Israel, so I wondered, what happened there?An idea suggested to me was that Israel has considerable orthodox Jewish population that refused vaccination for religious reasons. One that occurred to me was that I’d read that, disgustingly but typically, Israel wasn’t offering vaccination to the Palestinian population. To really get an answer we’d need to discover what proportion of hospital admissions and deaths consisted of the unvaccinated; I read that it was high in the UK.
John, you could do that, if you’re really into doing “due diligence” on your sources rather than merely repeating from sites you want to believe. Our World in Data or Stasia might be useful sites.
Here’s an article about vaccination and deaths in Israel:
The main points seem to be:
- Over a third of those who died were unvaccinated,
- Early vaccination led to waning immunity by the time Omicron hit,
- Uptake of the 2nd booster was only 50%, and
- All other protections (social, testing) had been dropped.
It goes without saying that if the Pfizer vaccine had caused ADE in Israel, it would have caused it everywhere else too.
The article also links to a study that found that
“The rate of confirmed infection was lower in people 12 or more days after their fourth dose than among those who received only three doses and those 3 to 7 days after vaccination by factors of 2.0 and 1.9, respectively. The rate of severe illness was lower by factors of 4.3”
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.02.01.22270232v1
John, there are some aspects of your thinking that really puzzle me. Would you discuss them with me please?
Apologies; I truncated my quote at 15:35. I also left out the confidence intervals for clarity, but they’re quite wide for the reduction in severe illness. The whole quote is:
– “RESULTS The rate of confirmed infection was lower in people 12 or more days after their fourth dose than among those who received only three doses and those 3 to 7 days after vaccination by factors of 2.0 (95% confidence interval [CI], 2.0 to 2.1) and 1.9 (95% CI, 1.8 to 2.0), respectively. The rate of severe illness was lower by factors of 4.3 (95% CI, 2.4 to 7.6) and 4.0 (95% CI, 2.2 to 7.5).”
er…I rest my case
Huh. I can’t imagine why you picked the client you did. You fancied a spell of being devil’s advocate? Just something to do? I’m mystified :/
I can think of some more unpleasant motivations but I’ll refrain from posting those.
So have we made any progress in this debate? In the blue corner are “system pigs” or mindless sheeple shilling for the establishment, and in the red corner is an ignorant denialist acting as Satan’s legal representative. There’s only one way to sort this out: FIGHT! Combat will be by snide remark.
On the other hand, getting back to the real issues: how would systematically reclassifying causes-of-death account for the sharp increases in the death rate in countries around the world, observed during the pandemic?
I think the red corner risks looking silly by swinging punches from an absurdly weak position.
The debate we’ve been having isn’t the one I attempted to start; John effectively provoked two pages of off-topic diversion, dredging up the same half dozen empty non-arguments that have been displacing intelligent discussion of our predicament for over two years. My initial points were:
- Covid can do long-term damage to survivors, eg. it causes delayed hepatitis in children,
- New variants could evade immunity leading to further large peaks in hospitalisation and death,
- Because governments failed to stamp it out we’re all going to get covid over and over again. We’ve little idea so far whether damage to our health will be cumulative – not that our health matters much compared with “damage to the economy” and the “threat of totalitarianism”, of course.
It’s ironic. John raised the issue of Antibody Dependent Enhancement (ADE) as if it was something only vaccines could do. But infection by different variants of a virus can cause ADE too, I think dengue fever is a well known one, so that’s another potential danger from covid becoming endemic.
No, no, no! Only a system pig would say there’s any danger from a virus that John tells us was deliberately engineered from HIV to be a bioweapon. HIV is harmless! Bioweapons are harmless! It’s all just a trick to make us take the depopulation injection!
J: “I rest my case.”
Threw the case, more like it. You could be disbarred for representing your client as shabbily as that. Might have a charge of contempt of court too, for trying to run BS like that past the judge – knowingly presenting false testimony is an offence, you know.
I know I’m diverting my own thread here, but how can anyone actually think like this? It’s a bioweapon, AND it’s almost harmless, AND the WHO’s IFR is accurate, AND the authorities are inflating the figures. How can anyone fail to notice such blatant contradiction in their own thinking? It’s just intellectual mush.
And “Facebook and Google, who have jointly and in lockstep with .gov vigorously suppressed any debate on covid and its treatment, up to and including career destruction” (here). Sorry, which “.gov”? The Trump .gov that said it would be gone by April 2020, or the New Zealand .gov that successfully kept it out, or the UK .gov who in early March 2020 said we were “going to take it on the chin” and that “we’d like a nice big pandemic” but then three weeks later imposed lockdown? And how are Google and Facebook supposed to destroy a scientist’s career?
I think John must be a system pig trying to discredit the conspiracy theorists. That or covid scrambled his brain.
