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FDA meeting to pick next winter's flu shot is canceled, in ominous sign for US

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Re: FDA meeting to pick next winter's flu shot is canceled, in ominous sign for US

#71

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Because the ad tech is one helluva drug!

The people who voted Trump and don't wear the paraphernalia occasionally check news and from what I can tell aren't regularly doomscrolling. They'll probably get disagreeable if you talk politics with them. But in general daily interactions, they are polite and helpful. (Not to say I agree with their vote-- you're just asking about their temperament.)

But to a person the diehards I've met seem to be plugged in for a good portion of the day to their devices for outrage porn doomscrolling and posting incrementally angrier content.

Digression-- One time I looked up a Bill Burr bit about sandwiches on Youtube. For weeks it recommended manosphere bullshit and white-supremacist-adjacent conspiracy theory content.

MAGA is just one of the set of social media users who, for various reasons, clicked their way down those recommendation rabbitholes.

I'd bet there are at least a dozen devs reading this who could find the exact commit that Youtube began sending a predictable portion of their userbase down radicalization rabbit holes like these. Perhaps some time in the future there will be a memorial where that diff is etched in a large slab of stone.

Re: FDA meeting to pick next winter's flu shot is canceled, in ominous sign for US

#72

Is there a strategy here, or is this all emotional. Or is the strategy like, we can reduce social security spending if more old people die of the flu? This isn't entirely cynical, I do assume there are some pragmatists who might think this way.

Attempting to steel man the decision, they may not believe the vaccines work or are worth the expense and overhead. They may even go one step deeper and believe the vaccines aren't proven properly to know whether they work well enough.

It seems like the results will be somewhat predictable: the impact flu has every year is variable, with some years being incredibly bad and some being not that bad. Part of that is attributed to the vaccine rate, and how effective the vaccine is (this meeting is key to decision making about our expectations and how to make an effective vaccine), and part is simply random (based on too many correlated values, preventing good estimates of causation).

If this meeting is cancelled, we would expect the vaccine to be less effective and would see greater impact (simply because it wasn't tailored to the be the most likely effective vaccine), but due to all the variables I mentioned it could even appear that "things got better after we did this" (post hoc ergo propter hoc).

There is no steel man here, RFK just wants to demonstrate that his beliefs about viruses are true. We may or may not get enough unambiguous data to make conclusions about his beliefs in a year or two, but given the concomitant reduction in the effectiveness of the CDC due to Trump policies, and the sycophantic nature of the people being placed into leadership roles, we may simply never know because the data would not be collected, or the research not funded, or the publications retracted.

Or RFK could somehow be right and we see a huge magic increase in public health across the country (not seen in other countries that keep vaccination). I am not aware of very many scientists who believe this will happen.

Re: FDA meeting to pick next winter's flu shot is canceled, in ominous sign for US

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>With regards to MAGA specifically. I don't find most of the ideas I hear floated as more hateful than the overtone coming from the democratic side This is eyebrow-raising. I have no defense for any political party for all the un-subtle criticisms they inevitably put out, Democrats or otherwise. But to suggest that MAGA are, on par, less hateful than Democrats, begs expounding. In other words, you can certainly make…

I didn't get vaccinated for Covid after spending months reading whitepapers and listening to vaccine experts discuss the pandemic as it played out through 2020. I experienced plenty of hate thrown my way for 2 or 3 years after that decision, including in speeches from the president. I don't know how to quantify hatefulness, especially in a large group, well enough to absolutely compare the two. I do strongly stand be…

This sort of rhetoric might've worked pre-Presidency but you would have to be either deliberately ignorant or outright agree with some of the hateful rhetoric of the president. Things like depriving transgender individuals of their basic rights, moving to denaturalize citizens, the white house posting illegal immigration deportation ASMR [1] and many, many more.

[1] https://x.com/WhiteHouse/status/1891922058415603980

Re: FDA meeting to pick next winter's flu shot is canceled, in ominous sign for US

#74
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We simply now have a completely nuts anti-vax Secretary of Health. He probably actually thinks he's saving people from vaccine injury.

He was actually injured by the flu vaccine. That’s why his voice sounds the way it does

No, he claims that’s what caused it some years after being diagnosed.

Re: FDA meeting to pick next winter's flu shot is canceled, in ominous sign for US

#75
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We simply now have a completely nuts anti-vax Secretary of Health. He probably actually thinks he's saving people from vaccine injury.

He was actually injured by the flu vaccine. That’s why his voice sounds the way it does

I don't think he's ever said this. As usual, providing a few citations we can follow would greatly help your case.

Re: FDA meeting to pick next winter's flu shot is canceled, in ominous sign for US

#76
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “So one can only assume” They are “assuming” a major unannounced policy change based on… a single meeting cancelation. By this cause/effect protocol, I have personally witnessed dozens of multi billion dollar project cancellations, or so I assume. RFK Jr has never proposed canning the vaccine program. He wants certain studies performed, which presumably would run in parallel with the existing program. The constant…

Could it be possible you are wrong, and it is as bad as everyone here seems to think?

I find (after a verrrrry long time of arguing with people on the internet), when somebody acts as obtuse as the person you're replying to, they really aren't ignorant, they're trolling, or looking for an emotional argument. One of the common tells is making an obtuse statement that's fairly vague (to draw out responses) and then writing long replies to those that show much more cynicism/disingenous, which provoke people further, followed by "see! this is just an example of how deluded the people who disagree with me are!"

Re: FDA meeting to pick next winter's flu shot is canceled, in ominous sign for US

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> manufacturers have no clue what to do. Sounds like bad news. But can the manufacturers meet among themselves to hash it out? Would they? And if they did, would they make a worse or different decision than if the FDA were involved? Just trying to see a way this could turn out ok.

I'm pretty sure manufacturers could, but that would increase their costs. The US did it for them for free. So we're either going to get insanely expensive flu vaccines or none at all.

[deleted]

Re: FDA meeting to pick next winter's flu shot is canceled, in ominous sign for US

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>With regards to MAGA specifically. I don't find most of the ideas I hear floated as more hateful than the overtone coming from the democratic side This is eyebrow-raising. I have no defense for any political party for all the un-subtle criticisms they inevitably put out, Democrats or otherwise. But to suggest that MAGA are, on par, less hateful than Democrats, begs expounding. In other words, you can certainly make…

I didn't get vaccinated for Covid after spending months reading whitepapers and listening to vaccine experts discuss the pandemic as it played out through 2020. I experienced plenty of hate thrown my way for 2 or 3 years after that decision, including in speeches from the president. I don't know how to quantify hatefulness, especially in a large group, well enough to absolutely compare the two. I do strongly stand be…

I think part of why the shots became so controversial, is because the disease adapted anyway. You're basically having to decide on "less bad" vs "roll the dice" when you inevitably get COVID. People were already needing encouragement to get a flu shot; now you need two every 6-12 months? And then you had the whole sidebar discussion of getting Ivermectin, or snake oil silver supplements, or whatever else that was suggested as a cure; you don't get that with discussions over flu. So yeah, it all got uglier than it needed to be.

We in the US still haven't fully come to grips with the loss of over a million people to COVID. And now we're going to kick the can on proven public health measures, that have nothing to do with COVID, because of the off chance someone will become socially isolated / "less cool" to take care of their "freak" neurodivergent child.

Re: FDA meeting to pick next winter's flu shot is canceled, in ominous sign for US

#79
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I hope there's a slightly different timeline where people with hopelessness or depression have a place in nature to pursue purpose, community, diet, exercise, and meaningful labour. I think we all know in our gut that this would be of incredible benefit to most of these people. And I hope the public in this world are horrified by the idea that anyone could instead pump them full of addictive or unknown drugs and leav…

I don’t entirely disagree with you but this is a _very_ different world, that requires unraveling like everything about our modern society. I don’t think there’s a whole lot of overlap between RFK jr’s vision of the world, and the current chainsaw approach to government that calls every piece or government spending an entitlement.

Re: FDA meeting to pick next winter's flu shot is canceled, in ominous sign for US

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a collusion to create chaos and dismantle the system that can track what they are doing. You think “flu vaccine”, they steal elsewhere. Today a vaccine, last week an email to justify jobs, earlier USAID, next week something else. It’s a distraction.

Its interesting to see so many conspiracy theories pop up on a more left-leaning site. The last 6-8 years has largely seen democrats deriding republicans (or MAGA specifically) for sharing unproven claims of a deep state, pedophile rings, etc. Now we're seeing a growing list of conspiracy theories related to what and why the Trump administration is up to. The theories may even be right in the end, that does happen. T…

I’m not from the US. I’m just an outside spectator.
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