561–570 of 649 posts
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That it could make sense for low risk people to wait and see how it goes?
See how it goes to get infected with the virus? It didn't pass any clinical trial.
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> Why do people still have to attack religion? Because religions are still dangerous animals, if you would indulge this metaphor. Just because we managed to declaw and tame one (values of Enlightenment supplanting values of Christianity), it does not mean that we can treat all of them imprudently. I suggest that you are arguing from the point-of-view that "my $ANIMAL is well-behaved and has not and would not hurt any…
I defend almost all religions, just not mine. Removing religion completely has been tried in a larger scale experiment in the Soviet Union and the results were very much worse than the most barbaric religions. When arguing about religion one shouldn't forget that they have a number of good attributes as well. Otherwise you are just fighting against a straw man and then it is no wonder why you win every single time :…
What am I supposed to say here? "Good thing I'm not Stalin"? Just because he's against religion, too, does not mean I want to use his methods.
> When arguing about religion one shouldn't forget that they have a number of good attributes as well.
I've heard that often, but that argument isn't very good. When the $ANIMAL mauls the offspring, one does not reminisce about how well it plays fetch, this does not counter-weight or undo the damage.
It is entirely possible to have the good attributes (let's say social cohesion or introspective peace of mind) entirely divorced from the gods-and-religion business (let's say by joining the local ping-pong club or taking up a meditative practice). I posit there is no attribute that uniquely belongs to religion and cannot be had otherwise.
> [monks] ended blood revenge, brought herbs and fruits and medicine and and and to Europe.
That result is a function of smart and persuasive people, not a function of belief in and worship of Yahweh. Mentally substitute the monks for hypothetical missionaries adhering to Voltaire/Smith/Kant &c., we could imagine the result is similar, just without the gods-and-religion business.
> Enlightenment grew out of the fertile soil of literacy and surplus and relative peace and quiet that this created, not the other way around.
I did not say that this fertile soil grew out of Enlightenment. I said that values of Enlightenment supplanted values of Christianity.
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> It’s a starting point though. The point is that the nurse and the car mechanic are at about the same starting point on the subject. Being willing to learn is great, but they have minimal extant knowledge from their profession .
Everyone seems to be missing the part of the story where I actually got connections and introductions to others in the medical field and got an answer, and the part where an anesthesiologist actually gave me what turned out to be a pretty good guess at the answer because they DO understand biology in general better than me and hey do have to learn a lot about the immune system even if they specialty isn't vaccines. M…
> Eventually someone referred me to their cousin in nursing school who referred me to their brother-in-law who is actually an epidemiologist...
This could've happened if their cousin was a car mechanic who had a brother-in-law with an epidemiologist. The nursing aspect of the story was irrelevant to the end result.
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The virus didn't go through the approval process either. We already know it has serious side-effects. It's self-replicating and able to spread to others. It probably wouldn't even pass animal testing. Why would you take the higher risk of choosing the experimental virus over the experimental vaccine? It seems to me you're holding the vaccine to higher standards as the virus?
I’m treating them the same: minimizing the likelihood of them entering my body. Also, there is 12 months more data for the virus than the vaccines. Based on available data, I’m not in an at risk group and have been tested every time I’ve knowingly had contact with anyone who has been infected.
The available data appears to show the virus is much more damaging than the vaccine. For every age group.
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>If they had been a valid option, emergency use authorisation wouldn't have been granted. You don't want to treat a disease (especially with drugs that have their own problems), you want to prevent it from happening in the first place. Vaccines help prevent it, and so would still have gotten authorized.
Agree but these two options weren't given a fair chance by Fauci. He clearly had conflicts of interest. The emergency use authorisation wouldn't have been granted if he had. These are viable alternatives. Quercetin is another one and much more benign.
That being said, absolutely none of those medications you mentioned are targeted drugs. Its not a good idea to take those drugs for years as a prophylactic, especially broad-spectrum drugs. The only reason to use them is if the disease is worse than the side-effects. We know their mechanism of action, and they're well known to interfere with other functions in the body.
Our body already has a targeted defense mechanism and vaccines are the primary means to leverage it.
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Come on, really!? In a discussion about how trolls use "I am just asking", you decided that doing the same is a good idea. I am not op, but I have been accused of sealioning in the exact opposite direction: I was defending some curriculum based on ideas from critical race theory. Edit: Well, as the comment below alluded to, I probably missed a pretty obvious piece of sarcasm... This is certainly funny in hindsight.
Sorry it wasn't clear. I tried to be as extreme as possible to avoid being taken seriously. (Although I guess these days that works the other way.)
Basically, it is now impossible to make a point by attempting to present an absurdly extreme viewpoint in the opposite direction, because too many of us have encountered people who genuinely espouse viewpoints even more extreme. (As well as the exact one you said—no matter what it happens to be.)
If you want to present such a thing sarcastically, you're gonna have to make an explicit indication of your sarcasm (even just a "/s" at the end is usually enough). Otherwise, you're very likely to just be taken as meaning it sincerely.
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> Like, having this magic, absolutely mind boggling potion that prevents serious illness and death isn't already the lottery win of our lifetime A lot of it boils down to people not trusting what they're seeing. Frankly, governments have done the world a disservice by speaking before they really had all the information at the start of the pandemic. In Canada at least an insane amount of what was said turned out to be…
> [...] lots of people see what looks like the "story changing", and distrust anything coming out of their government, [...]. Changing and updating our beliefs as evidence comes in is a fundamental ability that underlies numerous activities from scientific research to debugging software to driving on a congested road network. Why is it a problem for public health officials to update and change policy as we learn more…
Because when it comes to persuading hundreds of millions of people, it is often better to be certain than to be right or to flip-flop. That's a fact of leadership, regardless of whether you or I as scientists like it.
Also, they didn't just revise their statements with new information, they actively lied (the no masks thing) in a paternalistic way to deceive people into thinking they didn't need masks (so the masks would stay available for front-line medical staff).
That plan obviously backfired terribly.
This is good. Now states are combating such hesitancy by drawing lottery for vaccinated folks. Like, having this magic, absolutely mind boggling potion that prevents serious illness and death *isn't* already the lottery win of our lifetime?? People in India and elsewhere are dying because of lack of vaccines and here we have educated, first world countries struggle to get their citizens vaccinated. Unfortunately sham…
> Like, having this magic, absolutely mind boggling potion that prevents serious illness and death isn't already the lottery win of our lifetime A lot of it boils down to people not trusting what they're seeing. Frankly, governments have done the world a disservice by speaking before they really had all the information at the start of the pandemic. In Canada at least an insane amount of what was said turned out to be…
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> Like, having this magic, absolutely mind boggling potion that prevents serious illness and death isn't already the lottery win of our lifetime A lot of it boils down to people not trusting what they're seeing. Frankly, governments have done the world a disservice by speaking before they really had all the information at the start of the pandemic. In Canada at least an insane amount of what was said turned out to be…
Frankly, governments have done the world a disservice by speaking before they really had all the information at the start of the pandemic. They were doing the best they could to manage a crisis that it was their job to manage in an unprecedented situation. If people expected them to have perfect answers and solutions, they had unrealistic expectations.