List you favorite conspiracy theory

Discussion in 'Off-Topic Discussions' started by Kizmet, Aug 16, 2013.

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  1. Maxwell_Smart

    Maxwell_Smart Active Member

    The many abuses the pharmaceutical companies have done over the years is no exaggeration, that is a matter of documented fact. You're speaking about ideal-world best-case scenarios based on the law, but that's not how things have always gone in practice. Moreover, the "our technology has advanced" argument to connect speed with this belief of the indisputable safety of the COVID vaccine is flawed because the need for monitoring humans over a long period of time to see how a drug has affected them has been a critical part of drug development for the entirety of the time of modern medicine and up to the day before the first COVID vaccine went into the first recipient's arm, and it still is now. Proof of the industry understanding that is they themselves have been compiling and using the incoming data during the trials, so the need for that data hasn't changed at all, technology has not changed that and likely won't for a very long time. The only thing that's changed in this case is the acceleration of steps due to circumstance.

    I have had friends die after taking a COVID vaccine. One close friend was a healthy man in his mid-40s who didn't have COVID and no other issues, took the vax, dead 3 days later. Another lady in her mid-70s, only issue was a bad hip, never had COVID, dead a little over a week later, and another in her 70s had some heart trouble but never had COVID, dead about 10 days later. Does that and other reports of adverse side effects and deaths prove the vaccine is not safe overall? No, because every drug has this potential, but it does at least provide justification to be cautious given the quickness of release and the lack of safety data compiled over an extended period of time due to that quickness. The circumstance didn't eliminate risk, it simply changed its priority.
     
  2. SteveFoerster

    SteveFoerster Resident Gadfly Staff Member

    Post hoc ergo propter hoc, to put it mildly.
     
  3. TeacherBelgium

    TeacherBelgium Well-Known Member

    Correlation doesn't imply causation.
    It's indeed very unfortunate that these people died, but the overall count of deaths due to Astra Zeneca is only at around 200 cases that died from blood clots on a number of hundreds of millions who have been vaccinated.

    Is there risk for blood clots?
    Yes but the risk is so astronomically low that it's more likely to win the lottery than dieing from the vaccines.

    Are these vaccines perfect?
    No.
    But following Bolsonaro's tactics aren't safe either.
    Ask the Brazilians who are burrying bodies day and night.
    Ask the Indians what poor vaccination rates lead to:
    the crematoria are burning day and night in New Delhi.

    At least in Western countries that started lock downs and vaccination quickly the virus stayed under control to a bigger degree.
    The economic disaster that it caused is horrendous. But we were able to prevent worse.

    When Columbus set foot on American soil the native Americans died from viruses that Spanish citizens were not as badly affected by.
    Group immunity is a process that takes hundreds of years without decent vaccination.
    Vaccination accelerates it.

    We shouldn't use exceptions to that rule to feed conspiracy theories.

    Vaccination works well.
    Look at China.
    Look at Russia.
    Look at many parts of the US.
    Life is slowly returning to normal in these places thanks to mass vaccination campaigns.

    The reason we are struggling here in Europe is because vaccination goes tediously slow.
    The nursing home residents here are no longer the group in danger. They are all vaccinated.
    It's the 40-something guys with overweight who end up in hospitals now.

    A 57 year old acquitance was buried yesterday.
    Healthy but overweight.
    Died in his sleep from the virus.

    Didn't believe in masks.

    His kids lost their mother 3 years earlier.
    His son is 22, his daughter 31.

    His mother in law who turned 85 and is fully vaccinated and his own parents who are 87 and 88 and fully vaccinated are all the kids have left now.
    Three old people who are at the end of their lives are all the kids still have to count on. People who need care themselves.
    All because their father never wore a mask and didn't believe in vaccination.

    People eat all kinds of junk food and processed meat and drink cheap bottles of wine but never wonder what '' side effects '' that has.
    But a life saving vaccine is the devil.
     
    Rachel83az likes this.
  4. SpoonyNix

    SpoonyNix Active Member

    Covid-19 irrelevant? Please explain how you arrived at that one?
     
  5. SteveFoerster

    SteveFoerster Resident Gadfly Staff Member

    I meant that you made it seem irrelevant to you, by listing it as a global threat in a thread about conspiracy theories. By all means, though, correct me if I was wrong.
     
  6. SpoonyNix

    SpoonyNix Active Member

    You are wrong in your assumption that I find covid-19 irrelevant.
     
  7. heirophant

    heirophant Well-Known Member

    It certainly hasn't been in my personal life. I not only don't know anyone who died of covid, I don't even know anyone who was sick from it. All I know about its supposedly devastating swathe through the the US and the rest of the world is coming from... the media. I don't actively doubt it exactly, but do suspect that it's being misreported. Perhaps intentionally so.

    What I have seen with my own eyes is the devastation wrought by ham-handed attempts to combat the disease. The shutting down of main-street small business everywhere while mega-corporations like Amazon flourish. The virtual elimination of the small-business middle class that once was the heart and soul of the nation. Millions of small business people turned overnight into new wards of the state, more additions to the "underclass", clients of the patron class into which an ever greater fraction of the world's wealth is flowing.

    And I've seen the growing authoritarianism, as the state seeks to dictate when and how people leave their homes, where they are allowed to go and how they must behave once they get there. In the immortal words of Agent Smith in The Matrix, "The warning was for your Protection!". Except now it isn't a warning, it's an enforceable order. Scare people enough and they will agree to many things they wouldn't have agreed to otherwise.

    So I really do wonder if history will judge that the disease caused more damage, or whether most of the damage was caused by what in effect was an overactive societal immune response. There are two sides of that story and only one has been emphasized so far.

    Here's the latest "best estimate" "infection fatality" ratio numbers from the CDC here in the United States, broken down by age cohorts. This represents the number of people who are infected with covid who can be expected by health planners to eventually die.

    0-17 years old - 20 deaths per 1 million infections (0.002%)

    18-49 years old - 500 deaths per 1 million infections (0.05%)

    50-64 years old - 6000 deaths per 1 million infections (0.6%)

    65+ years old - 90,000 deaths per 1 million infections (9.0%)

    https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scenarios.html

    Covid is overwhelmingly a disease of older people. If you are under 65, even if you are infected you have less than a 1% chance of dying. And this is where the question of how covid deaths are defined arises. My understanding is that if somebody dies of natural causes and tests positive for covid, their death is counted as a covid death. The problem is that as people age, they experience more and more comorbidities, things like heart disease or COPD that might have killed them anyway, covid or no covid. (If you get old enough, everyone dies eventually.) So my guess is that if we broke down that 65+ cohort into those with other life-threatening conditions and healthier individuals, we would probably see a pretty dramatic difference in covid fatality rates.

    So it looks to me like what covid is typically doing is pushing people who are already sick through death's door. If that's true, then the best societal response would probably have been to protect the most vulnerable, rather than destroying the economy and the middle class, while stomping all over civil liberties, all in the name of "your protection".

    This is why the policies promoted by a number of state governors, to clear hospital beds in acute care hospitals for an anticipated overwhelming covid surge that never materialized, by sending less acute covid patients to nursing homes and forbidding those nursing homes from rejecting them, probably contributed to a significant percentage of total covid fatalities here in the US. Those nursing homes were populated by precisely the most vulnerable unwell elderly most at risk of dying from covid. This is an appalling story that remains to be told, along with the various attempts by state authorities to cover it up afterwards.

    Today, the survivors of that elderly nursing home population have all been vaccinated, as have most of the rest of the vulnerable elderly, so one would expect to see covid death rates falling. We do seem to be seeing that. It will probably continue to fall as more and more of the younger population gets its shots.

    But so much of the general population has had the bejeezus scared out of it by overwrought media stories about how dire everything was, that there's quite a bit of reluctance to halt the lockdowns and take off the masks. And inevitably in our current political climate, wearing a mask has become something of a political statement. As David Hogg the teenage gun-control fascist put it, wearing a mask is a hassle, but he's going to continue wearing one because he doesn't want people to think that he's a conservative.

    Here in California, despite the recent CDC guidance that there's no reason for vaccinated people to mask up indoors or outdoors, the state government still has mask orders in place. (Probably not in some small part for David Hogg's reason.) When I walk around outdoors, the majority of people I see (San Jose area) are wearing masks, even when they are out alone walking their dogs and not within half a block of anyone else. I don't know whether it's because they are afraid or whether they are virtue-signalling. (Probably a bit of both.) I don't wear a mask outdoors and must say that nobody has hassled me about it. I'm fully vaccinated but I do wear a mask in the stores that are open (still limited capacity etc.) because they won't serve me if I don't.

    I gather that most of the US is more back-to-normal than these more "progressive" parts of California and get the impression that people around here are bitter-enders in some kind of weird social movement that has never been clearly delineated or defined.
     
  8. Maniac Craniac

    Maniac Craniac Moderator Staff Member

    Sounds like the punchine of a joke that starts with "You might be a member of a cult if..."
     
    Last edited: May 20, 2021
  9. SteveFoerster

    SteveFoerster Resident Gadfly Staff Member

    He's not the only one I've heard say that. I was in a Trader Joe's yesterday, and even though they've changed their policy in keeping with the updated CDC guidance, I was one of two people in the whole store who wasn't masked.

    It's funny, for fourteen months I avoided going to crowded places and wore a mask anytime I was within ten feet of someone who wasn't in circle. I did that not because I think that experts are infallible, but because I expect that on balance their advice is the most likely to be right. And I don't think it's a failure when that advice changes in response to new information, because I understand that science is not a body of knowledge, it's a process of discovery and refinement of knowledge. So while I was happy to my part to get us all back to normal, the goal was to get back to normal. And now fourteen months later it seems like we're just about there.

    So I suppose performative mask wearing will continue for a while. And we shouldn't be surprised, as the notion that "belonging is more important than facts" isn't restricted to one particular in-group. But I'll keep following the best available advice... even if it means getting side-eye from progressives in the grocery store.
     
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  10. Maxwell_Smart

    Maxwell_Smart Active Member

    Putting it just as mildly, you misunderstood since it would only be that if the point right after hadn't been made:

     
  11. Maxwell_Smart

    Maxwell_Smart Active Member

    My post didn't suggest any of that, and I'll repost the part that came right after once again as it seems it's not being read for some reason:

    But ignoring outcomes is unscientific. Even the medical authorities are not ignoring them, they are keeping track and one COVID vaccine (J&J) was temporarily halted in the U.S. as a result of some negative outcomes just like both Brazil and Slovakia suspended the Astra Zeneca vaccine after some deaths occurred, so it astonishes me that in people's rush to be a defender they are actually taking positions that contradict the positions of the very establishments they're defending.

    Okay... for starters, Astra Zeneca is not the only COVID vaccine maker with a released COVID vax, so isolating data to Astra Zeneca is not telling the full story at all. Secondly, across all of the COVID vaccine's there have been over 4,000 deaths, about 200,000 adverse effects, and about 18,000 serious injuries, and that's just in the United States alone, there is data from other countries that is just as alarming, so let's not downplay this as if just 200 people died and nothing more serious is taking place. Let's not do that. Now, one more time, full quote:

    This isn't about a vaccine being "perfect" or not (who is expecting that?), nor is this about general vaccines working well or not in general, nor is this about junk food, and it's definitely not about what scumbag/racist/slave trader/mass murderer/religious nut Colombo did. All of that is completely beside the point. This is about the science, scientific adherence, and safety of the COVID vaccines, nothing else.

    We cannot (or at least I refuse to) pretend that this acceleration that never would've been deemed scientifically sound or safe at any other time in modern medicine before COVID in 2020 is suddenly safe now. It doesn't work that way. Data, data, data, that's the heart of the science here, and we simply don't have enough yet because not nearly enough time has passed. People are so unaware of why that's so critically important (not realizing that it has been important for every vaccine ever developed in the entire history of modern medicine) they are getting the vaccine and saying things like "I had my shot two weeks ago and I feel fine. It's safe!" There is no understanding amongst the general population that side effects can occur months or years after a pharmaceutical has been used, or that just because they personally have no side effects it doesn't mean that others of the population won't.

    The vaccine may be safe overall, but based on the way every other vaccine in modern medical history has been developed and tested, the scientific fact is that not nearly enough time has passed for it and it's corresponding data to process for the no-risk type claims to be made by the media, pharmaceutical companies, and the government medical authorities. This would've been true for any other drug released at any other time to the market before the COVID vaccines, it's still true now during, and it will be true after.

    I don't deal in "conspiracy theories" I deal in facts and logic. I'll be damned if the call and the need for long-term data to determine safety for a vaccine (or any other type of drug) and caution in the absence of it ever becomes a "conspiracy theory" when it's been at the base of medical science for more than 100 years. The world has lost its collective minds when it's slanting people who are speaking about basic tried-and-true science protocols as "conspiracy theorists". This is absolute insanity and I fear there is no going back after this.
     
  12. TeacherBelgium

    TeacherBelgium Well-Known Member

    There is no coming back from a tattoo either and people still get them without facing opposition.
    There is no coming back from a breast augmentation either and yet enough 16 year olds are getting it as a sweet sixteen present.

    Yes, the vaccination effects have not been observed for a very long time but we have tons of data from previous vaccines that the people who preceded us in health crises didn't have.

    People are worrying about the irreversibility of a vaccine but not about the irreversibility of a vasectomy or of tied ovarian tubes.

    Is the vaccine perfect? No.
    Is there an alternative? No.
     
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  13. Maxwell_Smart

    Maxwell_Smart Active Member

    A tattoo and a vaccine are not the same situation at all. The breast augmentation thing is just comedic, lol. Can we be serious? We're talking about freedom of choice, a virus, a vaccine, and real-world risks, not some pornstar having an elective surgery on her used-up fun bags, lol.

    BINGO! That's the problem. Every other vaccine ever released in modernity has had that data, every drug developer up to the day the COVID vaccines went into production was and still is working on that data for the drugs they're developing, as not having that data simply presents a greater risk to recipients of a drug, and the regulatory guidelines in place have for generations prevented that risk from being potentially overexposed to the general public. Nothing about the necessity of those barriers should be breaking news because this was known before the day the first COVID vaccine went into someone's arm. Nothing has changed since that time, the COVID situation is being treated specially only due to circumstance, hence the EUA period.

    If you were representing a pharmaceutical company and you went to the mainstream media the day before COVID hit with a new drug that you say could prevent or cure a virus, but you had only short-term data, they wouldn't air your drug unless it was only under the heading of it being an "experimental drug still in development with years to go" where people could sign up for trials. What makes you believe this has changed is what you need to be asking yourself. If this was considered dangerous on say, March 14th, 2020, a day before Operation Warpseed was announced, what made it not dangerous on Match 15th, 20202? Nothing, right? Because nothing changed, the danger was still the same. As I've mentioned before, circumstance doesn't change the level of risk, it only changes its level of priority.

    It's still not enough. It's not just a matter of available data in the present time, it's also a matter of data that comes in over a long period of time post-vaccination. Nothing can defeat the scientific barrier you're attempting to sidestep: long-term data is a mandatory and critically necessary part of determining safety and effectiveness of treatments and drugs in every field of the health/medical sciences and only those considered quacks deny this. It has always been this way in modern medicine, and it will likely always be that way, because there is no other way to understand the long-term effects of a drug without long-term data, and this data is imperative to developing modifications and new updates to the drugs that are released. These are not conspiracy theories, these are cold hard facts of science. I'm not making this up. I wish we could just get confirmed safe vaccines belted out in short periods of time every year and cure all kinds of things, but it just doesn't work that way, and if we're going in that direction of risk post-COVID a lot of people are going to get hurt behind it. However, I doubt that regulations will be relaxed like this outside of COVID and that will be yet another example that supports the point being made.

    That has no relation at all to this. What about the irreversibility of an appendectomy? Why stop there? How about the irreversibility of a decapitation? Makes no relational sense right? Neither does that quote.

    It doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to be safe.

    The jury is still out on its safety until time and data meet. The most sensible thing to do is be neutral on the safety issue whether you're in favor of taking the vax or not. But no one wants to do that. People are either ready to call it 100% safe or 100% unsafe. I'm looking at this logically instead: it could be safe, but there is no long-term data available to make that statement for sure, so until then, I consider the possible risks associated with not having that long-term data, and I continue to wait for more data as I observe the data that's available.

    Sure there is. Not taking it is an option (and it should remain one). This isn't the black plague. I'm in favor of people having a choice to take it or not take it, and very much against the ever-increasing passive-aggressive attempts to force people to take it, and even more against some countries that have made it compulsory. That is a major violation of human rights. We need to treat the situation seriously, but there is a point where it goes from serious to overboard. Some countries have already gone overboard, the United States is gradually getting there. It will not end well, and the people supporting some of these measures can't see the forest for the trees and understand how these things will eventually affect them in a negative way, too.
     
  14. Maniac Craniac

    Maniac Craniac Moderator Staff Member

    True, but it's not too late to change the subject :emoji_grinning:
     
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  15. SpoonyNix

    SpoonyNix Active Member

    ;)
    FWIW, I read your post before there were any responses to it. Later, I read the responses and thought "FFS, do they even English?!?"
     
  16. SteveFoerster

    SteveFoerster Resident Gadfly Staff Member

    I English well enough to know that dropping anecdotes meant to suggest X isn't overcome by then saying, "But hey, I'm not claiming X."
     
  17. DavidDarwin

    DavidDarwin New Member

    My favorite theory is that of a shadow government that makes world leaders look like puppets!
     

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