And that’s my point.

I don’t know what you’re talking about. Each time I got a vaccine I got a sheet of paper with a long list of side effects. Had to sign some sort of consent form, too. The first two times for the initial vaccinations (I don’t think it happened with the booster) I also had to wait there 15 minutes after receiving the shot to make sure I didn’t go into a dangerous anaphylactic shock reaction. This was all explained.

So plenty of side effects have been discussed right from the start. Also, the problem with myocarditis in young men has also been discussed by the CDC once it was discovered. You may indeed disagree with their recommendation that young men should get the shot anyway, but it’s certainly not being kept a secret that myocarditis sometimes occurs.

The CDC has certainly done plenty of things with which I disagree, and been misleading about some things. I’ve written at great length about much of this. But not mentioning side effects of the vaccines was most definitely not among the omissions.

One need not be an epidemiologist to note the infighting going on. Pull somebody’s license for speaking up about masking. Cancel somebody for asking about….. Mentioning Sweden will get you hammered pretty good. Ivermectin is so good they have to lie about it…see Rolling Stone’s pathetic put-up job. If it didn’t work, they wouldn’t be lying about it.
A Detroit dem pol got the kung flu early on and Trump got her HCQ, which she said publicly saved her life. The dem organization gave her a stern lecture. WTF? This is supposed to be about health, not political advantage….right? I mean, it is, right?
Birx says we call “with” “of” for reasons.
Health science, even a little bit, isn’t necessary to view all of this with suspicion. Who, among all of these actors, can I trust to tell me the medical truth?
The PCR tests give HOW MANY false positive? Which means….what?
I’ve taken friends and relatives to ER a number of times over the years. I have a kind of skeptical view of what it means when the ER is “overflowing”.

As I say, looking at this Chinese fire drill from the outside, you don’t need a medical degree to be concerned about who knows what about this whole thing.

And, I submit, this is an important component of the national discussion on the subject. People who don’t know “infect” from “Infarct” can legitimately be concerned about what they see going on.

I don’t know exactly what you mean by the fact that you “don’t see the mechanism” for the vaccine’s effectiveness. Do you mean that you want to understand exactly how it’s done? Or do you mean you don’t see the evidence of effectiveness itself? And how do YOU define effectiveness?

Plus, I’ve written 276 posts so far on COVID. I’ve also written hundreds and hundreds of comments. I’ve gone through the evidence over and over and over, and it is impossible to summarize it and incredibly time-consuming to try. I doubt you’ve read everything I’ve written – nor would I expect anyone to have done so – but it’s all there.

If you haven’t seen the evidence that the vaccine is effective – not in preventing COVID, but in making cases milder – and by what mechanism it could do this, then I suggest you look assiduously because it is there. But to help you out, I suggest reading this study.

What I have often found, however, is that those people who don’t believe that vaccines help have a tendency to reject all the evidence that they do help by saying that they don’t trust whoever has done the research. So if a person distrusts all research, I guess that person is free to believe whatever suits his or her fancy.

You write: “Your comment about experts criticizing the mythology of the nay sayers can be turned around – expert nay sayers have had their methodology questioned by experts on the other hand, maybe even more so.” Of course, and I’ve written about that many times. You don’t specify what comment of mine you’re talking about – I was the one doing the criticizing of the naysayers here.

As far as death statistics go, I’ve addressed that many times as well, even a bit on this thread such as in my comments to Richard Aubrey.

And if I sometimes sound testy on the subject, it’s just because I feel like I’ve been playing whack-a-mole on it for years. It’s complex and tiring, and that’s just the nature of the beast.

“Many people have posted links here that say otherwise, but I have spent a lot of time looking at the actual data in the research linked and the writers who say otherwise at those links are either not understanding the data itself or lying about it.”

We have two different issues: Do the vaccines work? And, Do they cause a lot of side effects (I added “a lot, because there is just too much evidence that they cause some)? And maybe a third – Are the side effects worse than the benefits (but you need to address the previous questions first for that)? I think from your post that you believe the first question to be true. I frankly don’t see the mechanism, beyond the first jab being effective, and my concern is for the 3rd, 4th, etc jabs. And don’t see you having addressed the 2nd and 3rd questions. Maybe because I tire you here…

Your comment about experts criticizing the mythology of the nay sayers can be turned around – expert nay sayers have had their methodology questioned by experts on the other hand, maybe even more so. The problem is that the pro vaccine side has been effective at deplatforming and deexperting their opponents.

One big problem is that a lot of the CDC’s figures are suspect, on both sides, for one reason or another. For the first year or so, inaccurate tests were being used, that possibly greatly overestimated the spread of the virus, and hospitals were being incentivized to find virus infected patients. Meanwhile the vaccines were being rolled out. Most of those problems have seemingly been cleaned up, nearing 3 years later.

I would appreciate any links that you come across that purported show that the vaccines are really that effective any more. Not covering the 1st two jabs, but the boosters. I just haven’t seen them. But you and I obviously haven’t been looking in same places.

The thing that I have searched for in vain, is how the subsequent vaccine inoculations are supposed to work. We got into a debate a couple weeks ago about how vaccines are supposed to work, and that some require multiple doses. Won’t replay that. I just have never seen a credible explanation of the mechanics of how the subsequent jabs are supposed to help, except through the massive triggering of a general immune response, which could just as easily be accomplished by the injection of any pathogen known to a body into it. Not saying that there isn’t one – just that I have never seen one. Any help here would be appreciated.

As for vaccine injuries, I don’t think that there is any question that they exist. Just too many side effects too close to injections. Know one PhD at Las Alimos who was forced by his employer (contractor to DOE) who only got vaccinated to keep his job. He was fine after the 1st jab, had heart issues immediately after the 2nd. His request to skip the 3rd was denied, and his heart blew up in size within days. Likely permanent damage. They want a 4th, but that is on hold due to litigation. Too many examples like that to dismiss the theory. I knew 3 very vigorous male friends my age (~70) who fell over dead this year, from heart attacks, with no past record of heart issues. Remember the old saw that once in random, twice is coincidence, and the 3rd is enemy action? Excess all cause mortality is showing this. Most all life insurance companies are showing it. Morticians, heart surgeons, etc are all seeing a lot of very weird stuff, since the vaccinations started. Most damming is that the excess all cause (and esp heart related) deaths seem to have followed vaccinations, as they were opened up to younger and younger cohorts.

Thank you for your patience here.

He may have, but would he have got the right answer? He’s not personally putting paychecks into employees hands and seeing which ones aren’t showing up anymore. If the people running his factories in China are honest with him, and not inflating the payroll so they can steal the wages for fictitious employees, then he may have got the right answer.

Usually what is done is that you contract with a Chinese factory and they are supposed to produce to your specifications; eternal vigilance is required to keep them from cheating you. I don’t know how Musk works in China.

https://unherd.com/2022/12/what-i-discovered-at-twitter-hq/

[Musk] famously, early in the pandemic, protested against being locked down when the shutdown orders came, and then moved Tesla’s headquarters to Texas… He was very clear that he was aware of the harms of lockdowns. He mentioned the early days of the pandemic — that he had a number of plants in China, with tens of thousands of employees. He said: “Look, if somebody dies in amongst my employees, I find out immediately, because we stop paying them.” But he noticed that there were very, very few deaths on that metric early on. So his view was that it wasn’t clear that the case fatality rate numbers that were coming out matched reality in China itself, even from the earliest days of the pandemic

The implication is that Musk asked someone to supply the numbers on dead Chinese workers. I’m willing to believe he did, based on his apparent habit of looking into things that most CEOs don’t deign to bother with.

There is, also, the cumulative effect. Duke is refusing a kidney transplant on a child because the kid is not vaxxed. There may be a solid medical reason for that, but it looks, on the outside, like some kind of bureaucratic power thing. Bad enough. Then comes Baby Alex, on the other side of the country. If true, whatever the medical reasons involved, it piles atrocity on tragedy.
Sort of like confirmation bias; Once is…bad luck. Two in a couple of weeks is….

For the ups and downs to mean anything, they have to be out of the ordinary. Just compare post-COVID and especially post-vaccine statistics to the ups and downs of earlier decades and see if there’s a statistically significant difference. Even then, you don’t know exactly what it would be due to – COVID itself, COVID vaccines, or something else (changes in drug use, for example)? But I’ve seen nothing that even attempts to compile statistics like that.