In a sane country you are innocent until proven guilty. That fact you exist as a human being is all the evidence you need to prove you are innocent.
If you have to "prove you are innocent" the government is the one violating the law, not you.
Seizing your family's wealth and denying you ability to make a living is punishment for a crime you are not convicted of. That itself alone is beyond violation of justice.
And yes it is "standard" for the government to leverage administrative law to seize assets before a court case. The true purpose of this is to deny a person ability to defend themselves against the government. This is the very definition of evil and tyranny. There is no excuse.
> Third, it seems entirely fair and reasonable for Amazon to have pressured the DOJ to seize/freeze assets. Isn't that very standard in any case of fraud (or whatever this is ultimately prosecuted as)?
Well just wait until somebody decides to seize everything you own with no explanation, no crime, no evidence, and no ability to appeal and see how you "fair and reasonable" it feels after that.
patents are government granted monopolies on algorithms. "Algorithm" defined as "a set of rules that precisely defines a sequence of operations"
It's just series of steps, a recipe. You do "A", then "B", then "C" as outlined in a patent then you violate a patent and the person has the right to sue you. Whether the steps are outlined involve math or not isn't really relevant.
What is covered and not covered by a patent is very arbitrary and based on court precedent. Any sort of sanctions against "pure math functions" are usually easily worked around by including "as done in a computer" or similar language.
Patents are a very good way for governments to retard progress while rewarding large companies for investing in large numbers of lawyers.
I estimate about 75% chance it's a configuration problem on his end.
The "I hate Pulse Audio and especially Lennart" crowd tends to want to either go back to "Alsa" or tried at some point to install the old OSS drivers and then gave up.
This means trying to configure dmix to work properly, trying to configure your audio outputs with tools like 'alsamixer' and things of that nature.
This is about a 100% guaranteed approach to screwing up audio in Linux. For years it is what unsuspecting newbies were told by "really smart people" on the internet when faced when any sort of audio issue and all it really does is ensure that their OS audio is going to turn into a dumpster fire.
The only way to fix it is to aggressively find your "custom" audio settings for every application, find all the alsa configuration files and delete them. And then find out where your distribution saves your alsa mixer settings between reboots and link them to /dev/null and reboot.
Audio settings of this nature are very persistent and nothing Pulseaudio or Pipewire can do to help you fix it.
> The "I hate Pulse Audio and especially Lennart" crowd tends to want to either go back to "Alsa" or tried at some point to install the old OSS drivers and then gave up.
Well, yeah, since when pulse showed up and started breaking people's audio it effectively replaced alsa (even though they kind of operate at different layers). So if you didn't like that, of course the solution was to rip out Poettering's bugfest and revert to alsa. Thankfully at some point pulse stabilized a lot and in my experience tends to just work out of the box these days, but people tend to have their habits set by the early versions that were pushed out before they were ready.
Yeah, but that defeats the purpose of creating the state in the first place.
The entire point is being able to tell people what to do for your own profit.
It's a lot easier if you pretend you are doing it for the subject's benefit as it reduces the resistance to rule immensely. But you don't want to let that go too far or they start getting a big head and start thinking that paying you billions of dollars is optional.
> Waah the big bad EU forced companies to disclose how they are using my data!
The people that should be mocked are the EU bureaucrats that thought this was a good idea and the people that defend it.
It's a idiotic legislation that does NOTHING to protect your data. It's feel-good nonsense that EU can occasionally use as a club to extort business corporations that they want something from.
The only thing that it accomplished is to create a false sense of security in the public.
These companies are not trustworthy and neither is the EU government.
The correct solution to this problem is at the browser level and at the human level. Don't disclose information to the internet you don't want to show up on the internet.
> It's a idiotic legislation that does NOTHING to protect your data. It's feel-good nonsense that EU can occasionally use as a club to extort business corporations that they want something from.
Absolute nonsense. Tracking has to be disclosed, and is only permitted after obtaining informed consent from users. Without the law I'd have no idea what thousands of companies are doing with my data, without my consent.
I donno. Seems like white blood cells are kinda important.
We have a huge number of interactions with bacteria and viruses and all sorts of microorganisms. Hundreds? Thousands times a day? Scratches in the kitchen while preparing food, for example, floods our body with stuff that white blood cells are required to deal with.
Giving up some of the ability to deal with those for a small reduction in the symptoms associated with a specific disease doesn't seem like a useful trade off.
Dishonesty can never satisfy intellectual curiosity. It’s not an insinuation, it’s a scientific possibility that warrants further investigation, especially when boosters are being rushed to market with similarly abbreviated clinical trials. There are some reasons for suspicion. One is the rapid fading of the vaccine’s effectiveness. Why is it so much faster than expected? What’s the mechanism? Another is that every other coronavirus vaccine tested has resulted in decreased immune function due to Antibody dependent engancement. Do we know the current vaccines cause ADE? Not so far as I’m aware. Is it something that should be researched? I’d say so.
Not being aware of any research about ADE doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened… There has been a ton of it and it tends to be something that shows up pretty evidently in clinical trials.
If you do a Google Scholar search for COVID vaccines and all-cause mortality, you'll see that in most studies, people who got vaccinated die less in general (i.e. counting deaths from all causes).
Population level or absolute increases in deaths do not tell you the marginal impact of getting vaccinated. For example, there's no contradiction between both vaccinated and unvaccinated dying more and vaccines being protective.
If you select for careful, risk-averse populations, you'll see correlary effects of your selection and theirs, irrellevant to the measure you're taking.
People are dying at rates well outside historical norms. Things have causes. What is the cause of people dying more?
One would think after a pandemic with an outsized effect on those already in a moribund state that overall deaths would be down, but they aren’t, they are up. Why is that?
Why are excess deaths higher after rollout of the mRNA injections than before?
Nothing about it adds up, other than one sacred cow elephant in the room.
If people are dying more, there is a cause for that, people have tried everything they can that doesn’t involve going down sacred cow avenue, and they’ve come up empty.
Can be seen in the European data. Excess mortality should be back to normal levels, but it's barely changed between 2020, 2021 and 2022. Worse, older people do seem to be doing better but younger age groups worse.
> People are dying at rates well outside historical norms. Things have causes. What is the cause of people dying more?
I suspect it's your preexisting bias that makes you assume it's vaccines vs any vast number of other possible explanations. The point is, that we don't know what is driving these deaths. Research should be done, and if evidence turns up which suggests it's more likely vaccines than most other possibilities then sure it'd make sense to say vaccines may be the cause. Do you really think we have enough evidence pointing to vaccines being the cause right now? If so, where is it?
Until we have more answers it's impossible to say what the cause is, but what we do know and have evidence for is that Covid has become extremely (and unnecessarily) politicized, that data on the number of cases and deaths have been being interfered with by government officials, that there is a very strong economic incentive to get people to act in ways that could cause them to get infected, and that people who have been careful are growing tired of the restrictions being safe puts on them as well. We absolutely should expect uncertainty in the number of cases and deaths we see reported, and that could result in some amount of increase in excess deaths. So could complications not directly attributed to the virus, but caused by it still.
We've also got a whole lot of people these days drinking poisoned water and people who don't even have drinkable water. I can't even keep track of the all the cities that are under boil water orders. We've got people without power. We've got areas of the country flooding, other areas that on fire, people living in extreme poverty (including those who lost their job due to lockdowns or their ability to work because of long covid or their household income due to illness or deaths).
It seems like if there's one thing we're going to have to start getting used to it's increasing amounts of death. With so many causes throwing their contributions into the mix it's going to take time to sort it all out and we'll have to do it in an environment where at least some of the data is being manipulated and many people have their egos wrapped up in "taking sides".
Personally, I accepted the possibility that the vaccines could have terrible effects down the road (it was clear enough that there were no major issues in the short term) and I came to terms with that ages ago. If it does start to look like the vaccines have done some great harm then at least I can say that the choice to get vaccinated was easily the best that could be made with the information I had at the time. Sometimes you can make the right choice and still end up screwed when new information is discovered. I'm still hoping that doesn't turn out to be the case here, but if it is there's no point in denying it. Pretending it isn't true if it is would only make it harder to try to fix it (if that's even possible).
There are three things that have changed since the number of deaths went up in 2020.
Covid, lockdowns and the associated harms and the vaccine. Now apparently covid deaths are down, yet excess deaths remain elevated. So the two obvious changes are a rushed "vaccine" with what appears to be fraudulent trials and lockdowns causing delayed diagnosis, treatment or suicide.
It should be easy to compare vaccinated to unvaccinated groups to find out if the vaccine is causing problems. But rather then do that, the authorities have done their best to destroy the control group and coerce everyone to take the failed "vaccine".
Excess deaths are widely considered to be “from Covid” right now. It is possible there’s something else going on, but as the parent said, the numbers you should care about when making a vaccine decision are the mortality rate of the vaccinated vs the unvaccinated.
Unvaccinated people are dying at a much higher rate. If your biggest concern is not dying, you should be vaccinated.
I was going through serious medical issues when I lost access to my doctors from Covid.
I got lucky in that the 20th medication they tried just before lockdown ended up working. Would most likely probably be dead if things had shut down a month earlier.
Tons of people in support forums were in a panic over lost access. Needed testing / procedure.
Not fun when brain is swelling and doctors say they can’t see you.
I have loved ones that suffered similarly. I do not doubt there were excess morbidity/mortality from restrictions. I'm not doubting, but there is a ton of nuance in epidemiological data like this and I'm wondering about things like demographic cuts and magnitudes of numbers which are necessary to understand the statement.
And, likewise, you cannot NOT attribute them to the vaccine.
Inconclusive data is not to be either used as a calibrated measure nor to be simply ignored.
The excess deaths are quite possibly attributable to both the virus and the vaccines if, as one plausible but very unproven example, they're due to inflammation and/or micro-clotting caused by the spike protein. But in an environment where everyone will be exposed to the actual virus eventually, with uncontrolled initial exposures, it comes down to whether the benefit of getting vaccinated is worth the risk. The data I've seen says that it is.
There are large crowds that took 2 doses in pandemic period (getting vaccinated properly back at the time) but not receiving boosters.
It would be easy to track:
- 2 dose, no other booster
- all boosters
- no vaccine
and readjust results considering age and other bias etc.
If all booster people have excess deaths, than "not from Covid" ?
If 2 dose people excess deaths < all boosted people, than something about vaccine?
No vaccine could be control.
The unvaccinated have been receiving lower quality of care. The symptomatic have Been diagnosed without PCR accuracy. The data being collected is bad. Let's not treat it as good data, and see assumptions such as this for what they are, which falls in the "not good data" category.
> Excess deaths are widely considered to be “from Covid”
Considered by whom? The funny thing is that there was no non-covid excess mortality in 2020, that stated on 2021, which is the same time the v{censored} started.
> Unvaccinated people are dying at a much higher rate.
Insurance companies have already begun publishing reports indicating that excess mortality rates are inversely related to vaccine adoption (i.e. higher excess mortality in states with lower vaccination rates).
Thanks. Very noisy data, so I'd say far from conclusive, particularly given the confounding variables that differ between states. Still, the best attempt I've seen to actually look into this issue.
Countries like the UK have national vaccination databases. They could easily put this issue to rest with a study of excess deaths by vaccination status, controlling for age/health/etc., except they conspicuously have chosen not to.
Starts on page 33, for any one else curious at looking. Quite interesting to see what appears to be their hazard ratio relative to the state population: their members have a much higher excess death rate, and their members show minimal correlation to the vaccine rate of the state they are in—presumably reflecting that older, sicker, or more health-conscious people opt in more often to buying health care plans?
Do you mean “Weekly number of deaths (from all causes)?” If so that is such a junk chart I don’t see how it supports either claim. The X axis label is absolute garbage. It’s completely unclear where the new year begins. A naive reading (counting back from 2022) has the excess deaths starting in 2019!
1. That wasn't a controlled experiment. Observational data < RCTs.
2. You are mixing up mortality and mortality attributed to COVID. It's a common error. For overall mortality the picture is far less clear. For example in the Pfizer trials there were more deaths overall in the vaccinated arm than the unvaccinated arm i.e. RCT evidence = no mortality benefit.
Also, we now have excess deaths above the expected baseline for long periods in 2022, which is unprecedented. Governments are highly reluctant to split these deaths out by vaccine status, but the increase seems mostly attributed to heart and blood clotting related deaths. So the data from the "experiment" is not obviously positive.
>You are mixing up mortality and mortality attributed to COVID.
There's also the problem of governments playing funny games around deaths and "vaccinated". Someone who died from an adverse reaction immediately following their shot would not count as a vaccinated death, because the _definition_ of "vaccinated" meant you completed the vaccine schedule which was multiple shots over time.
In trials the vaccines were tested in tens of thousands of people where adverse reactions were meticulously recorded and there just isn’t any evidence that the vaccines caused immediate death in anybody.
Then beyond that there isn’t any evidence that there also is a government conspiracy following the first dubious claim.
> For example in the Pfizer trials there were more deaths overall in the vaccinated arm than the unvaccinated arm i.e. RCT evidence = no mortality benefit.
> Governments are highly reluctant to split these deaths out by vaccine status, but the increase seems mostly attributed to heart and blood clotting related deaths.
There were approximately 40k people in the vaccinated and the placebo groups. One group had 17 deaths, and the other one had 21. If you are not aware of this information, how can you consider yourself informed on the topic?
There is a pretty good reason that the Pfizer RCT doesn't show excess mortality benefit. It wasn't designed to study that. The recruited population is mostly healthy as individuals with multiple risk factors were excluded. For example the proportion of the study group over 65 and the proportion with at least 1 comorbidity is much smaller than the population as a whole. The studied group was very unlikely to experience mortality in the first place so a much larger study would be needed to show any evidence of an effect on mortality. The difference between 17 and 21 is not statistically significant.
In the absence of a large enough RCT we're left with observational studies and there are a ton of these now. The observational data shows a large mortality benefit in the vaccinated population and I'm not aware of a single observational study that shows the opposite, but I suppose there could be one out there that I have missed.
The preponderance of the evidence is pretty strongly in favor of the vaccinated population experiencing lower mortality than the unvaccinated population.
And yet, this is the "science" that was used to push the vaccines on the entire population. It just so happens that the group with the larger number of deaths was the vaccinated group, but we aren't allowed to talk about that. A question: why was this not discussed?
> And yet, this is the "science" that was used to push the vaccines on the entire population.
Yes. It's sound science. What problem do you have?
> It just so happens that the group with the larger number of deaths was the vaccinated group, but we aren't allowed to talk about that. A question: why was this not discussed?
It wasn't discussed because 17 vs 21 in a sample size of 40K is not a statistically significant difference. I don't know how to make that more clear without going into a lesson in high school-level statistics.
So, really, it was discussed, as indicated since you and they heard of the discussion. It is indeed quite simple to discuss even, since the conversation should end with learning that this is covered in high-school stats class.
What is more ironic to me is that this is the total deaths number, without any regards to cause. And in a large population of 40k healthy individuals, is is expected for a few to unexpectedly die over 6 months. This is ironic, since skeptics also often seem to claim that 10-50% excess all-causes death in the population was just random noise.
Lack of statistical significance does not mean you get to assume the outcome you want, it means you can't say for sure if the effect exists or not. Therefore if you see more people who take the vaccine die than those who didn't, you need more data. End of story.
This should be obvious, indeed, obvious from high school statistics classes. If the effect does in fact exist and you roll out the vaccine on a global scale, you will end up creating a truly enormous number of deaths that should have never happened. Therefore you must be sure that the number of deaths will reduce. Their data couldn't prove this so it should never have been approved. But of course the whole thing was on rails from the start. The idea that governments would have rejected the vaccine trials when they were telling people vaccines were the only way out of lockdowns and buying up millions of doses before the trials even completed, is naive in the extreme.
The core problem for COVID vaccines is of course that COVID just isn't very deadly and many of the so-called COVID deaths were in people dying anyway of other reasons where the cause of death was spuriously mis-assigned, i.e. not people who will join trials. That's why they struggled to show any impact on death.
"To examine the possible non-specific effects (NSEs) of the novel COVID-19 vaccines, we reviewed the randomised control trials (RCTs) of mRNA and adenovirus-vector COVID-19 vaccines ... For overall mortality, with 74,193 participants and 61 deaths (mRNA:31; placebo:30), the relative risk (RR) for the two mRNA vaccines compared with placebo was 1.03 (95% CI=0.63-1.71)"
Excess deaths in the UK. Useful because (a) it's all in English and (b) the UK authorities do split out deaths by vaccine status unlike most places:
"For 14 of the past 15 weeks, England and Wales have averaged around 1,000 extra deaths each week, none of which are due to Covid. If the current trajectory continues, the number of non-Covid excess deaths will soon outstrip deaths from the virus this year – and be even more deadly than the omicron wave. The Government has admitted that the majority of the excess deaths appear to be from circulatory issues and diabetes – long-term, chronic conditions that can be fatal without adequate care."
UK data at first appears to show that the unvaccinated die at a higher rate. However, this is only because they're using incorrect population figures. Although it may seem absurd the government population figures in the UK are officially labelled "experimental" because they are universally acknowledged to be far too low. In some age groups the official population is lower than the number of people who came forward for immunization, so these figures cannot be used and indeed the UK HSA didn't use the official population stats when computing their own effectiveness rates, but rather estimates from NIMS (National Immunization Service). If the same methodology is used then you can calculate chart 4 on this page from officially released data:
"The ONS data is interesting because it also includes data on non-Covid deaths by vaccination status ... Using this alternative estimate of the population of England [from NIMS] now suggests that the vaccines substantially increase the risk of death for reasons other than Covid."
Unfortunately and worryingly, even the NIMS estimates are likely to be seriously off. According to NIMS about 9% of the British population refused vaccination but a few months ago the BBC commissioned a professional survey from a polling firm, to ask people questions about their vaccine status and if they didn't take it, why not. They were surprised to discover that 25% of people said they were unvaccinated.
> To examine the possible non-specific effects (NSEs) of the novel COVID-19 vaccines, we reviewed the randomised control trials (RCTs) of mRNA and adenovirus-vector COVID-19 vaccines
Did you bother to click on that first link? It's broken because the authors retracted the paper. This kind of stuff is the reason it's hard to take vaccine skeptics seriously.
Yes, that's how I quoted from it. The link had a number deleted from the end, a mistake whilst editing the post. I fixed it. The authors haven't retracted the paper.
> For overall mortality, with 74,193 participants and 61 deaths (mRNA:31; placebo:30)
31 deaths with mRNA and 30 deaths with placebo with over 74K people in the trial to me means that mRNA carries zero risk. In a sample size that large, 1 additional death means essentially zero correlation.
"This article is very painfully committing the Base Rate Fallacy."
You didn't read past the first sentence, did you? Embarrassing, because the article starts by explaining the base rate fallacy and pointing out that the social media meme it starts by highlighting is wrong. Then it goes on to do correct analysis, which shows the conclusions I gave. You'd have known this if you read my post properly too, because I have a whole paragraph about the stats involved in correctly calculating base rates. If you think there are mistakes in the rest of the article please explain them, but you do need to actually read it first.
"I'm not going to accept "Daily Sceptic" as a source."
Again you didn't even click the link and look, did you? The image is a table of data from official government statistics, they simply happen to host the screenshot. But I knew I'd get a response like that from someone. Lack of intellectual curiosity around this topic is extreme - for obvious and understandable reasons of course. But still.
Re: PowerBI
Where do you see that? There are virtually no COVID deaths (a.k.a. "had a positive test a month before death") since the end of the winter in the UK. Look at the data for the various kinds of heart failure, for example. You see clear excess where COVID isn't implicated starting around the end of April.
"1 additional death means essentially zero correlation."
After incorrectly snarking about not understanding statistics, you're now demonstrating a mis-understanding yourself (albeit a very common one).
You can't simply look at a small difference and say "not statistically significant therefore there is no risk". That's not how statistics works. Firstly, the overall sample size was very large, it was an RCT. So we can say with great certainty that the vaccines have no effect on mortality, yet, that was the entire purpose of developing them. I see up thread some people are now trying to deny this, claiming that the vaccine trials were never meant to even study death rates! Truly Orwellian stuff. Death is the endpoint that motivated everything.
What we can't say with great certainty is if the vaccines are truly more deadly than the placebo. But statistical significance is not the same thing as significance. This is a really common logic error you see even amongst scientists themselves (when badly motivated). This result means the vaccines might be more deadly than the placebo or might not, and therefore the correct response is to gather more data. The incorrect answer is to say "eh, yolo, let's assume the optimistic result", especially if you're about to force people to take it on a massive scale.
But of course they didn't gather this data. The people who created and run the COVID vaccine programmes think that any expression of doubt about vaccine safety is immoral anti-science anti-vaxx insanity, which in turn means they can't neutrally measure or act on data. Their conclusions are chosen before they even do a single experiment, so they just went ahead and did it.
At any rate, the placebo in these trials was incorrect. They gave the placebo arm vaccines too, just different ones, so this is actually not comparing against reality (=no vaccine) and therefore overly generous to the vaccine under test.
As you see in the article, this is a mathematical model which indicates vaccines saved 20,000,000 lives. It is completely unprovable and only serves as a nice sounding talking point.
I also could claim 20,000,000 lives were saved by natural immunity. Or vitamin D from sunshine. Or the placebo effect.
Prove it then... not even the 20 million but just a single death saved because of the vaccine. You cannot. It's not a rip on you, nobody can. Hence it's not provable.
If anyone could, they would have already and wouldn't have to resort to nonsense theoretical computer models.
VERY interested in your attempt though gets out popcorn
Really, you think that?
There are excess deaths and dropping fertility. What is the cause? People have tried every explanation they can think of and nothing adds up except for one thing few people want to talk or think about, why is that?
We’re not talking about speculation, we’re talking about clear thinking and rigorous deduction of potential causal pathways. The drop in fertility is, horribly so, blindingly obvious. In country after country, 9 months after mRNA injections rollout for young people we are seeing a striking drop in births. We know there is an effect on women’s reproductive system and men’s. Men’s sperm counts drop a study from Israel has shown. Many, many reports from women of their periods having been effected.
Unfortunately, there is nothing speculative about this. Nobody wants this to be the case. That this was pushed the way it was on young people is criminal and insane.
In terms of death or injury there are definitely cases where it is entirely clear cut just hours or days after an injection somebody is dead or severely debilitated in a way clearly linked to the shot.
Those are deaths or injuries that had no business occurring and yet they did, why?
In the aggregate/macro overview we’re seeing it in data where it can’t be hidden and in the day to day. Just do a search for something like “unexpectedly died”
Again, who wants this thing so many went fanatical about a year ago to have caused this?
Something did cause it though, and at this point the most likely and parsimonious explanation is the shots. And not for lack of trying alternative explanations. Why stick your head in the sand if that leads to more death and destruction. We’ve found ourselves in a hole in terms of societal health, let’s stop digging.
This is the first I’ve heard of the invisible space alien theory. What is the evidence for it?
> The drop in fertility is, horribly so, blindingly obvious. In country after country, 9 months after mRNA injections rollout for young people we are seeing a striking drop in births.
The US birth rate continues to climb after the introduction of vaccines, for the first time in decades.
I have yet to see a chart that shows a decline that wasn’t painfully manipulate to hide the fact it declined much less after vaccinations than it had in the decade leading up to it. Though I have only seen articles for a handful of countries.
Common internet debate confirmation bias to grab the first thing you think supports your point after a quick scan, link to it like it is a slam dunk, and read no further.
You sounded like you were genuinely interested in learning more, saying you hadn’t seen most of the data so I posted some links to get you started. There is a lot more there than the link you posted.
I don’t think Chudov would say “unfounded,” even if it is temporary that is still a scandal almost beyond words.
“Take this shot you don’t need, that we’ve either
terrorized or coerced you into taking and it may permanently or temporarily impinge on your ability to reproduce or cause a host of other maladies “
No part of that is acceptable.
And even if it is temporary after one shot, how temporary is it going to be if the shots continue to be pushed and mandated, and each additional shot increases the effect?
The University of California system has just announced they are mandating yet another shot!
It is madness and criminal.
Ok, I should have read further and posted a full reply. I had seen his data before, and it looked a bit scary, so I am interested, but I also quickly noticed that it lacked statistical error bars and was excluding any data that contradicted his hypothesis.
Would it change your perspective if you learned that the still birth rate in 2022 was still lower than every previous year, except for the years 2019 and 2020 that he uses as comparison?
Does it change your perspective if you learned that the birth rate has been dropping about 2-3% per year, except for the year in comparison (2021) when it was 2% higher than the previous year?
Does it change your perspective if you learned that vaccinated mothers appear to have been slightly more likely to have a healthy, normal birth over this same time period (fig 3-9), though the difference was not statistically large?
All of these links are directly from his blog post, so I know he also had access to this data, which shows it was safe and even beneficial to you to get vaccinated, and he apparently chose to ignore it.
> even if it is temporary after one shot
If it doesn't reoccur though, it is temporary, regardless of what else happens. But the data would already have included the effect of boosters by now. In some ways, the blog post also suffers from a lesser known problem of being too-big of an effect. It was >8% decrease when <20% of the population had a vaccine, so now that >60% has had a vaccine, we should see a >25% drop in births. That is too big an estimated effect he's observing in one specific area for it to be invisible to other statistical measures and countries. So that hints something else is wrong with his analysis, failing to account for something, or taking small numbers as divisors to make them look bigger.
I had heard a fun podcast on excess effect size being a possible yellow-flag for statistics, but cannot locate the exact one for you. If I recall right though, it was related to Andreas Glöckner's discussion of the size of the mental depletion effect linked from
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/in-a-job-interview-how-much.... In that article he shows how the correlation was too strong between "mental depletion" and outcome, that it likely points to there not being a causal-link.
I didn't know I was going to look more, but I decided to look at his Hungary data. He mentions in conclusion that his R^2 of 0.22 is "relatively low", but does not seem to understand that is means his theory fails to explain more than 75% of the variation between counties. And thus his result is that he is highly confident (97%) that less than 25% of the difference might be correlated to vaccinations.
Thus, to come back to belltaco's point, his post shows there is far more evidence for invisible space aliens (75% unexplained correlation) who only target Hungarians than for vaccines (25% possible correlation).
Over a million people, in the U.S. alone, died in under two years after being infected with this virus.
Even granting the unlikely possibility that this mouse model is reflective of the immune response in humans, whatever other microorganisms people were encountering were demonstrably less dangerous than SARS-CoV-2.
Unless you know of some other highly infectious microorganism that rapidly spread to hundreds of millions of people and killed 1-2% of those it infected?
> Even granting the genuinely unlikely possibility that this mouse model is reflective of the immune response in humans, whatever other microorganisms people were encountering were demonstrably less dangerous than SARS-CoV-2.
The mouse model is apparently enough for the new booster.
So they ran the phase 2/3 trial in >1000 humans for fun?
The problem with anti-vaxxers is you just imagine a world in which everything is underhanded and a conspiracy when all the science and data is out there in the open, just ignored.
Anti-vax? You have no clue what my beliefs are on this, I'm not anti-vaccine. I remember just last year the Biden administration forced through the booster shots (after a propaganda campaign predicated one & done, that then extended into mandates, which Biden, Pelosi & others said were never on the table or illegal, later to be proven unconstitutional by the supreme court).
Senior officials at the FDA resigned over the insufficient evidence of efficacy. Not only was it unclear that they should be approved for seniors, they just opened it up to everyone. It's only gotten worse now. It's not even remotely clear to me that the average healthy person (not on the standard American diet, chronically ill with the typical stuff like diabetes & obesity) needs upwards of 4 vaccines, and counting, for a virus that's much more attenuated & practically everyone has some form of immunity at this point.
Also: to answer your question, from what I can tell the studies haven't shown efficacy. They only show that antibodies rose, which we know isn't absolute proof of efficacy with regards to infection or disease.
I never said the trials showed efficacy, though there are multiple high quality trials which do show serious benefits of 3rd/4th shots in various age groups. I just say they ran human trials, which your comment implied they didn’t.
Also:
- no good evidence the virus is attenuated (lower hospitalizations/mortality likely driven by increased population immunity)
- a lot of FDA/CDC officials agreed with the decision too, and I think on the whole were proved right to offer to the booster to older populations before all the studies were completed.
- nobody is forcing you to get the 3rd/4th shots, why do you want to prevent other people from getting them if they want them? You are sooo sure they are bad?
Sure let people get them voluntarily. My point is that all this irrational exuberance is very clearly precipitously eroding trust in public health authority & science generally.
> My point is that all this irrational exuberance is very clearly precipitously eroding trust in public health authority & science generally.
Nobody needs vaccines for this. We have actual evidence of doctors who got kickbacks for giving patients addictive drugs they didn't need, of pharmaceutical companies lying about known risks, of scientific papers that are nonsense being published, of the CDC lying to the public because they didn't trust us to act like adults and not stockpile masks. There is a US doctor telling her patients that their illnesses are caused by alien DNA and demon sperm, and she's still allowed to keep her medical license. These are hurting trust in science and public health.
I don't blame people for being skeptical of what's going on, but far too often what people are doing is just putting their trust into whatever backs up what they've already decided must be true. People who thought the vaccines were bad before they had any evidence at all to support that have total faith in every study and doctor they can find which might support their position while insisting that the mountain of evidence that contradicts them is a lie cooked up by a conspiracy.
Everyone should be distrustful of research papers, doctors, and public health agencies right now. They earned that, but that just makes it more important that people do a better job of avoiding their own biases and evaluating the imperfect information we have. For all the problems that exist in science, when the vast majority of scientists are telling us something it's best that we listen. We should be most cautious when listening to people who are telling us what we want to hear.
If you're going to unveil a new vaccine it should be proven to be effective. Anything else at this point (when practically everyone has developed an immune response through infection or previous vaccination) is unethical.
The mouse models were challenge studies, i.e. how do vaccinated mice respond to exposure to the omicron variant? That's what matters. Versus what you are demagoguing. Conflating with "tested", that since the new booster was given to humans and no abnormal AEs were observed & antibody levels rose, that automatically means it must be effective.
This is precisely the scenario that degrades public trust in institutions when this fast-and-loose science is being rolled-out live on large populations.
However this exact issue you are talking about was debated at the public FDA hearing on whether or not to approve the updated boosters. Most, but not all, of the people on the committee believed that it was worth the risk with incomplete information.
It isn’t ethical or possible to run the studies you want given the existing prevalence in the virus, so you do the best you can. It isn’t fast-and-loose to make decisions with imperfect data when all you have is imperfect data.
Also there were even more interesting and nuanced arguments against the updated booster but evidently you didn’t read the FDA meeting notes and see the arguments from the couple people who voted against it. Oh well.
> Most, but not all, of the people on the committee believed that it was worth the risk with incomplete information
This is hardly surprising considering two of the people most likely to disagree resigned from the FDA after the last booster approval, due to their disagreement with the process. [0]
The people who resigned were FDA Office of Vaccines Research and Review Director Marion Gruber, Ph.D. and Deputy Director Phillip Krause, M.D.
After resigning, they also published a critique in the Lancet of the policy of boosters for everyone. [1]
What? I’m not arguing a decision a year ago. I’m arguing it’s unsurprising there was no disagreement the second time they asked everyone if they want to approve the boosters, since the people who said “no” the first time are the same people who resigned in protest when nobody listened to them.
and the reasons why it should be clear to you are what, precisely?
Do you have some particular expertise in public health? Or are just another person who believes that applying their own intelligence and internet sleuthing skills are sufficient to allow them to question the decisions made by people who make this sort of thing their life's work?
Science requires participation to work. If these “experts” cannot explain their data and people can’t reproduce their results… something is badly wrong.
Neither "experts" nor anybody else have any obligation to convince every skeptic of their position, even if it is preferable for them to explain the data they get from reproducable studies.
I'm sure the Army would love to have the draft and would make it their life's work to get every American to be all they can be. Every American has to sleuth their way through the rat race or you will be taken for a sucker.
It doesn’t require a conspiracy to think something is majorly wrong with how the last 2.5 years were handled. Everybody played to their incentives and thought they were doing the right thing. The outcome was a complete disaster and a horrific overreaction. But people thought they were doing the right thing.
It’s kind of like a modern engineering failure. It takes multiple failures to bring down complex, redundant systems. That is what happened here.
> when all the science and data is out there in the open, just ignored.
I lost count of the number of times somebody yelled or called me “dangerous” for showing this data. Most of the public data goes directly against the narrative people like to push. It gets tossed right into the “conspiracy” bin. Virtually nothing about our response was based on science or data.
> Virtually nothing about our response was based on science or data.
Virtually nothing?
So the thousands and thousands of studies on vaccines, treatments, mask policies, vaccine policies, school policies, air filtration techniques, etc, etc… those were just done for no reason?
To say we live in an imperfect society with imperfect leaders and imperfect citizens is a fair point. Incorrect decisions were and continue to be made for political reasons or religious reasons or whatever else. That’s what happens in an imperfect society. To say “virtually nothing” about the response is based on data is just ridiculous.
Again, anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists make up a world where decisions are made in secret for suspicious reasons when generally all the data and arguments are out in the open and are just ignored.
Are all the highly esteemed professors, scientists, politicians, healthcare workers, and researchers who signed the great barrington declaration anti-vaxx conspiracy theorists?
Do you have any idea how many people in real life yelled at me and called me incredibly nasty things for suggesting that maybe, just maybe this myopic fixation on Covid was going to have some serious long term effects and maybe, just maybe we are overreacting?
You can’t speak against the narrative. Speaking out against what we did was and still is career suicide if you are in healthcare, science or research.
There has been a continual incredibly strong push to label anything that goes against “the narrative” as misinformation, “anti-whatever”. Speaking out as a member of the medical/science community gets you blacklisted. Beware of any research that got published in the heat of this mess—there were strong incentives to only publish research that supported “the narrative”.
There is a huge difference between saying we made a lot of mistakes in the response to covid and saying “virtually nothing” was based on data.
I don’t support people being shut down as you talk about, however you should also appreciate that a ton of people speaking out against the “narrative” were just grifters spreading misinformation for whatever random reason. A lot of the blame for legitimate dissent being ignored is due to the fact that most dissenting views were actively in bad faith.
Why not plural microorganismS?
Although a neglible increase of mortality across countless events where broad-acting immunity protects us may be outside your ability to calculate, it's still readily applicable to recognize that a lot of straw exists on a camel's back without simply studying just the one which broke it. An overall increase in mortality from all causes is congruent with valid scientific theory and is a hypothesis worth evaluating without eschewing existing data.
Your question is unneccessarily leading with false premises by which you define the answer without accepting the known truth.
If you're looking for just one organism which would need to spread, then you're looking in the wrong place for how, i.e., people were killed by myocarditis, or inability to stay nourished while suffering vaccine-induced side effects, including inability to defend with the same metabolic fervor from the flu.
As another commented pointed out, we have hundreds of millions of data points in people now post-vaccination and post-boosters, which haven’t detected a problem, and only 12 here in mice, that the authors suggest warrants further study. Which hypothesis are you saying has “no data”?
It is hard to see a problem if you are not looking for it or if the cause is distant from the reaction.
An Example: My friend had undiagnosed alpha gal for months because the anaphylactic reaction happened to him more than 12 hours after eating red meat so they did not know the connection.
Is Long Covid actually not from COVID but from this weekend immune system having to fight off old latent viruses it once had not problem with?
You’d be amazed at the number of unexpected effects I could find studying just a single mouse!
Having a small number data points means that a single outlier can impact your results. And since “no results” typically doesn’t get published, the rare events end up disproportionately represented in journals.
The smaller the sample size, the more likely the “effect” you’re seeing is just random chance.
You're welcome to post the other pandemics that occurred in 2020 through 2022.
Flu was practically wiped out for example. COVID19 was more fit, and many people were taking precautions (ie: masks) that also hampered the spread of Flu.
If mRNA vaccines really inhibited general immune response to other viruses / bacteria, it should be demonstrable. Just line up the number of people who died / got sick of non-COVID19 diseases in 2020 through 2022 and compare them to the COVID19 vaccine patients, stratified for age/sex/race.
Okay. Take any COVID-19 test kit and see if someone sick with the flu tests positive with them.
There is a simple thing called science. COVID-19 test kits are literally free. It wouldn't even be a hard test to do. EDIT: In fact, most COVID19 test kits come with their documentation, showing how well they test vs the Flu (guess what? Most of them don't detect the flu at all)
You should probably investigate how sensitive PCR tests can be. We cranked those things up to 11 so anybody with a spec of the virus got labeled as a Covid case.
Be specific. Because each test kit has documentation on how well it has cross-reactivity to other virus strains. I know its complicated with lots of competition here in the USA and lots of different manufacturers.
So I need to know exactly which test kits you were using, and which virus (Influenza type A? H1N1? Adenovirus? Influenza Type C?)
EDIT: For example, Abbot's test kit has the following documentation: https://www.fda.gov/media/136258/download . We can see page 10 how much it cross-reacts with other viruses: which is not at all.
It doesn’t even matter honestly. The data used to justify all our incredibly costly mitigations is a toxic dumpster fire. You could take that data and twist it to justify anything you wanted.
And even then the actual science and data never mattered from a public policy (or even public health) standpoint. It’s been politics, fear-mongering and straight appeals to authority all the way down.
> You could take that data and twist it to justify anything you wanted.
No. My question is if your side has any data at all on the assertions you're making.
Because in my experience, with regards to this debate, one side seems to just be flaunting falsehoods, while the other side has actually done tests and demonstrated their results.
I'm trying to figure out which side you're on. The side with data, or the side without. If you think the data was poor, fine, whatever. Where's your data that supports your viewpoints? Even if you break someone else's argument, it doesn't matter unless you yourself have data that supports your own side.
It’s not my job to prove masks work, lockdowns work, or vaccines work. That isn’t how science works. You can’t prove shit doesn’t work. The hypothesis is these mitigations work and are worth their respective costs. The burden of proof is on the people making these claims and pushing to enact them.
Outside of vaccines I’ve yet to see any convincing evidence that any of our NPI’s worked in a way that justified their incredible costs on society. The fact that we did them without any understanding of their efficacy is astounding to me.
> It’s not my job to prove masks work, lockdowns work, or vaccines work.
Can you stay on topic? This subthread is about a simple discussion. Do COVID19 tests detect the flu?
The answer is no.
Now if you wish to move your goalposts. Feel free to do so. But don't expect me to condone or accept your obvious fallacy. If you're changing the subject so intensely, I more or less take it as a discussion win in my favor at this point.
I think I've readily proven that your earlier discussion point has no data behind it. And I have no reason to believe you have data behind any of the other discussion points you're bringing up.
EDIT: Now if you start posting some data, maybe I'll start to listen again. But I'm not going to take or respect just wanton assertions in this subthread.
>There is a much simpler explanation which is: people with the flu were testing positive for COVID and health authorities were counting flu cases as COVID.
That is if the authorities were stupid. I can't say for the US but where I live there was no reduction in flu tests and there were still barely any cases found.
If enough people in the population take certain precautions, and those precautions limit the spread of disease, then there is some sweet spot between the virus’ contagiousness and number of people who take precautions that will cause the virus to not spread.
Some people wore masks some of the time, varying by seasonality, weighted regionally by the dominant political ideology of the area. My understanding is that masks were more effective against the flu than covid because Covid can spread in finer particles than the flu, which makes masks more effective in fighting the flu.
> people with the flu were testing positive for COVID and health authorities were counting flu cases as COVID.
We know this happens, the critical missing part of your argument is your estimate of frequency. If your theory were true, the precipitous drop in flu cases indicates that almost everyone with the flu also had Covid. That doesn't pass the smell test to me - I feel confident we would have heard if there were that high a correlation, given all the research going on at the time.
That only makes sense if people were wearing masks to combat the flu before covid started and then Republicans stopped wearing them to spite covid mitigation efforts but that's not the case.
From my understanding the flu is less contagious than covid so any efforts we were taking to stamp out covid that were holding covid in check would have stamped out the flu.
>Just line up the number of people who died / got sick of non-COVID19 diseases in 2020
This is _extremely_ difficult to do, as a mix of both incentive structures and poor policy lead to any death with a positive PCR test being counted as a COVID death.
It's practically impossible now to go back and figure out how many were _actually_ "killed by COVID" vs "died _with_ COVID".
COVID19 doesn't even play a role until 2 or 3 lines later. Doctors write down "Killed by X" which was caused by "Y" which was caused by "Z". COVID19 is never "X", its always Y, Z, or later.
---------
Because we have these statistics, we can correlate "X" causes. If "X" is "blunt force trauma to the head", it is unlikely that "Y" or "Z" will be COVID19.
But don't take my word for it. There's plenty of death certificates, and such data has been coallated together.
See Table 2 in this list, as an example. You can see that the immediate cause of death for most COVID19 patients is Pneumonia, unspecified (J18.9), followed by Acute respiratory failure (J96.0).
Which of these ICD codes do you think is being misclassified as a COVID19 death? Please be specific. Any such large scale misclassification would be obviously in the data here.
You're right. At one point I read it was as high as 10 years that the average person who died of covid could have otherwise lived on for. I suspect that number has changed a few times over the pandemic, but even a few years more years with a loved one is priceless, losing anything close to a decade would be a massive loss.
I’m sure George Floyd would have lived a little longer if he wasn’t Covid positive when he died.
It doesn’t matter anyway. The data required to support our mitigations stopped mattering a long long time ago. ..Sometime back when the “4% kill rate” predicted by the imperial college paper turned out to be very very wrong and when all those temporary military hospital things got closed because they weren’t being used. That might have been a good time to reevaluate what the fuck we were doing but instead of celebrating the fact that Covid wasn’t nearly as bad as predicted we just doubled down for a year and a half more instead.
Honestly it’s best to just take the numbers at face value and assume any overcount is balanced by undercounts.
If 95% of people died from covid, and 5% died with covid, then basically for all intents and purposes and how we use this data, the distinction is irrelevant.
I agree. I just take the numbers at face value. Trying to suggest they are under or over counted is a fools errand. It will take decades of distance from this event for cooler heads to tally up what really happened.
> Is a terrifying admission about the gamble that was taken.
Right, but according to Reddit, the Australian/New Zealand governments and other places people who didn't want to expose themselves to this stuff where all ignorant selfish assholes.
I think you might have been browsing an alternate-reality Reddit. The one I read was constantly bemoaning that no one in America was taking it seriously, "why aren't we locking down like China and New Zealand", etc.
It's strange to me how so often you will see people bemoaning Reddit for some opinion that goes against the grain, when in reality Reddit is composed of a sampling of millions of humans and therefore is fully aligned with mainstream thought. Some people see a few comments or threads that disagree with them and they use that to say "All of Reddit has lost its mind", always forgetting the vast numbers of comments and threads where people generally agree with them. Funny how people do that..
Reddit is a sampling of roughly 20% of 18-29 year old men who use the Internet. That’s not exactly “mainstream thought”, it’s a self selected demographic and what is popular on Reddit reflects that.
> and therefore is fully aligned with mainstream thought
It's obviously not fully aligned with 'mainstream thought', when the expression of many widely help positions will get individuals and whole subreddits banned
If you are buying a Cisco router you are buying a closed source product. Why would you expect them to open source anything when you are happy to give them money for closed source firmware?
You are literally paying them for being closed source.
Stop rewarding these corporations for screwing you over and they will cease to screw you over. Either they will change their ways or go out of business if enough people feel the way you do. And, regardless, you would have solved these sorts of problems for yourself long before that happens.
It's been a very long time since Cisco was the only game in town for enterprise networking. Companies like Broadcom have released powerful ASICs that allows practically anybody to build a high performance routers and switches.
I would not hold up Broadcom as being any better than Cisco in the openness department. If anything it's just more of the same, which while it technically satisfies the definition of competition, does not largely modify the lands ape of networking dedicated hardware in the more open direction.
hyperscalers got into building their own switches a decade ago. whitelabel silicon and software _IS_ available, but the entrenchement is still huge as noone ever got fired for buying cisco.
Don't Cisco use those exact Broadcom chips in these types of low-end products? A high-performance chip is just one part of the product, you need software also.
If you have to "prove you are innocent" the government is the one violating the law, not you.
Seizing your family's wealth and denying you ability to make a living is punishment for a crime you are not convicted of. That itself alone is beyond violation of justice.
And yes it is "standard" for the government to leverage administrative law to seize assets before a court case. The true purpose of this is to deny a person ability to defend themselves against the government. This is the very definition of evil and tyranny. There is no excuse.
> Third, it seems entirely fair and reasonable for Amazon to have pressured the DOJ to seize/freeze assets. Isn't that very standard in any case of fraud (or whatever this is ultimately prosecuted as)?
Well just wait until somebody decides to seize everything you own with no explanation, no crime, no evidence, and no ability to appeal and see how you "fair and reasonable" it feels after that.