I don’t buy your argument that the science behind healthy younger people getting vaccinated was faulty. For one, myocarditis was more likely to be the result of getting covid than from getting the vaccine. As for its effect on spread:
Early (Alpha/Delta) data showed vaccinated people were less likely to get infected and to pass it on in households. With Omicron, protection against infection and onward transmission dropped and waned faster, though there’s still a measurable reduction for a few months after a recent dose. For example, one California prisons analysis estimated ~30% indirect protection against Omicron transmission within 3 months of vaccination.
If you think that the covid vaccine put one at a high risk of acute side effects, I dunno what to tell ya other than check out the reams of scientific literature that says otherwise.
As for whether people who had already contracted SARS-CoV-2 should have been exempt from getting vaccinated, I would like for you to lay out how that would have worked administratively. Seems much trickier than the vaccine cards. Since the vaccine was safe and free, I don't see the issue.
The “vaccine” was never safe because there was no long term safety data. “Safe and effective” was a lie from the very beginning. And we know it was in fact dangerous given the massive rise in deaths among young people since its rollout.
It wasn’t “fake news” that the vaccinated couldn’t spread the virus as easily prior to the emergence of the delta and omicron variants — it was a reasonable position based on what was known at the time. A lot of these kinds of criticisms of the COVID response rely a lot on hindsight bias.
I’d like to gently put forward that a lot of the positions people dismiss as “hindsight bias” leading to criticism of “at-the-time reasonable positions” were also “at-the-time reasonable positions”
The problem was that Fauci & Co. took absolute stances on emerging issues. The most obvious one would be COVID origins. Natural origins was “definitively proven” back in 2020, or so the headlines read.
And while we lived in that realm of absolute certainty people got called xenophobic conspiracy theorists on national news and received death threats (eg. ex-CDC Director Robert Redfield) for positing what was actually a reasonable alternate theory.
Until the point when the alternate theory tipped over the edge as the more likely, people made some awkward about-faces, and we’re all supposed to pretend it didn’t happen quite like that.
In your original example of vaccinated transmission, the official theory was that the “vaccinated do not get or transmit the virus”. It was the party line before the “winter of disease and death” party line in 2021.
The alternate theory was that a non-sterilizing vaccine would not prevent re-infection or transmission. But that was a conspiracy theory, at least until the CDC had to retract their original statement on the subject.
If you’d like to search any of that, I’d suggest setting the date range to only 2020-2021/2 to find what was being said at the time. Also, cycle through search engines to account for any algorithm bias. It’s an interesting exercise, I promise.
Does it? Because you might be quoting the current Wikipedia article/google AI summary, but I’m referring to the FBI, DOE, and CIA reports concluding lab leak is most likely, but will remain a theory due to the time passed and destruction of any evidence. I don’t personally consider appeals to authority a solid argument, but you can go look up the reports. It’s not an Infowars expose or anything.
As far as I’m aware the “smoking gun” for animal transmission is test swabs from the Wuhan market showing that COVID and raccoon dogs were in the same location at some point.
If you’d like to get slightly more conspiratorial, here’s a City Journal article looking at FOIA documents.
That belief pretty much invalidates anything you have to say about it. It blares ignorance of what has been discovered about the genetic tinkering that was done.
It was obvious AT THE TIME that the vaccine was not sterilizing, that’s limited sterilizing effects wore off too quickly to get constant boosters, and that it would mutate into variants. That’s real science.
A refreshing article, Ross, and it's always encouraging to see these sorts of sentiments from folks still in good standing on the left. More typically I come across the sort of reflexive defensiveness perhaps exhibited by a couple of your other commenters.
Did you happen to read David Zweig's book "An Abundance of Caution" about the school closures? I reviewed it a few months back in context of my experience chronicling Columbia's School of Public Health during Covid. https://ivyexile.substack.com/p/public-healths-sacrificial-lambs
My sense is that the pandemic would likely have been handled much differently if the president had been Hillary or somebody like Jeb, and also had it not cropped up during an election year. There are some brilliant people of integrity working in public health, but a big chunk of the time the field consists of gussying up rather idealistic activism with a few superficial STEM trappings to make the "scholarship" appear irrefutable. Covid provided a perfect pretext for PMC managerial technocrats still shaken from Brexit and Trump's shock victory to try to forcefully impose the sort of centralized top-down new normal that they'd always wanted.
Widespread COVID vaccination did, in fact, slow the spread of and reduce the severity of COVID infection, this was proven in innumerable scientific studies, as was the fact that unvaccinated young people had an approximately 100 times higher incidence of severe COVID symptoms (including death) than experienced severe injury from vaccination.
The director of the movie clearly explained that Alex’s life was an allegory for his life as the child of a violent alcoholic (Last Podcast on the Left ep Weapons: An interview with Zach Cregger)
Those who possess power, through money, influence, or connections, begin to see themselves not only as owners of the world and of people, but also as owners of truth itself.
In that view, absolutely everything becomes reduced to a tool or an object of their needs.
Closures were intended to protect the elderly and immunocompromised, but also to protect the wider medical system: an ER that's swamped with Covid cases has trouble coping with strokes and heart attacks.
And yet video after video showed that the hospitals were not swamped, and in fact many were almost deserted. The hospital ship sent to NYC was never used. The treatment protocols that required ventilators may have been stressed, but putting someone on a ventilator turned out to be a death sentence in most all cases.
Imagine how stressed the medical system is going to be when so many vaccinated children are going to require heart transplants over the next couple of decades.
Some of you people are so anxious to let bygones be bygones and forget what happened that you sound like you are mentally stuck living in 2021 with your rationalizations.
If you want people to move on from covid the worst offenders have to be removed and structural changes must ensure it doesn’t happen again.
In red states this happened. Public health officials were fired, their powers over the public are legislatively reduced, and most deep red states now have universal school vouchers.
The head of the teachers union during COVID is still the head. Fauci is a national hero to the left. They don’t deserve forgiveness.
i'm unsympathetic to vaccine whataboutism: they were oversold as far as limiting transmission, but they're our last layer of protection against an infinitely mutating virus. the risks of infection massively outweigh those of vaccination, and there's never been any serious scientific debate about that.
and while i'm always here to critique the gerontocracy, i think the allegory goes the other way! COVID collectivism -- an agreement to mask, distance, and limit spread in order to protect the vulnerable -- fell victim to this country's personal-liberties fetish, and five years later people are still dying over it. the elderly and immunocompromised are quite literally segregated, unable to shop or travel or consume safely in spaces perpetually swarming with airborne pathogens. we're gambling on a future of infinite covid infection, which millions of americans cannot afford. they're the ones losing out -- i'm with gladys!
If prominent Dems (pols, NOT pundits) could just *say sorry* about their COVID hysteria, lockdown and vaccine totalitarianism, and Floyd freakout, they could start to regain something other than pariah status with normal men with actual blood in their veins. The strategy from eg Matty Iglesias that all this stuff didn't actually happen is not gonna fly
Covid did not "ravage" any demographic as badly as the deadly treatment protocols did. Many deaths attributed to Covid were from intubating and Remdesivir. Many more were the classic annual flu deaths, which mysteriously evaporated from the statistics. Japan has shown that the probability of death relates directly to both the timing of Covid shots and the number of times someone received a booster.
The fact that later variants spread like wildfire was a direct result of using a "leaky vaccine" that neither prevented one from getting Covid or spreading it.
Society's cowardly impulse to punish those choosing wisely to forgo experimental gene therapy is unforgivable. Miserably weak excuses about "the best science we new at the time" is precisely the reason for the Nuremburg protocols. The authorities who foisted the lockdowns and firings deserve to swing from gallows.
I don’t buy your argument that the science behind healthy younger people getting vaccinated was faulty. For one, myocarditis was more likely to be the result of getting covid than from getting the vaccine. As for its effect on spread:
Early (Alpha/Delta) data showed vaccinated people were less likely to get infected and to pass it on in households. With Omicron, protection against infection and onward transmission dropped and waned faster, though there’s still a measurable reduction for a few months after a recent dose. For example, one California prisons analysis estimated ~30% indirect protection against Omicron transmission within 3 months of vaccination.
The choice wasn't COVID or vaccine though, it was "wait I already had COVID why do I need this shot?"
"Shut up and deal with the (high) acute side effects, and potential chronic ones"
If you think that the covid vaccine put one at a high risk of acute side effects, I dunno what to tell ya other than check out the reams of scientific literature that says otherwise.
As for whether people who had already contracted SARS-CoV-2 should have been exempt from getting vaccinated, I would like for you to lay out how that would have worked administratively. Seems much trickier than the vaccine cards. Since the vaccine was safe and free, I don't see the issue.
The “vaccine” was never safe because there was no long term safety data. “Safe and effective” was a lie from the very beginning. And we know it was in fact dangerous given the massive rise in deaths among young people since its rollout.
It absolutely had a high acute side effect load? Rate of flu like symptoms post vaccine was extremely high? Acute side effects doesn't mean death...
Avoiding getting the flu for a few months being a tradeoff for lifelong health problems. What a bargain.
No response from Ross on this one, where's the evidence?
It wasn’t “fake news” that the vaccinated couldn’t spread the virus as easily prior to the emergence of the delta and omicron variants — it was a reasonable position based on what was known at the time. A lot of these kinds of criticisms of the COVID response rely a lot on hindsight bias.
I’d like to gently put forward that a lot of the positions people dismiss as “hindsight bias” leading to criticism of “at-the-time reasonable positions” were also “at-the-time reasonable positions”
The problem was that Fauci & Co. took absolute stances on emerging issues. The most obvious one would be COVID origins. Natural origins was “definitively proven” back in 2020, or so the headlines read.
And while we lived in that realm of absolute certainty people got called xenophobic conspiracy theorists on national news and received death threats (eg. ex-CDC Director Robert Redfield) for positing what was actually a reasonable alternate theory.
Until the point when the alternate theory tipped over the edge as the more likely, people made some awkward about-faces, and we’re all supposed to pretend it didn’t happen quite like that.
In your original example of vaccinated transmission, the official theory was that the “vaccinated do not get or transmit the virus”. It was the party line before the “winter of disease and death” party line in 2021.
The alternate theory was that a non-sterilizing vaccine would not prevent re-infection or transmission. But that was a conspiracy theory, at least until the CDC had to retract their original statement on the subject.
If you’d like to search any of that, I’d suggest setting the date range to only 2020-2021/2 to find what was being said at the time. Also, cycle through search engines to account for any algorithm bias. It’s an interesting exercise, I promise.
Natural origin remains BY FAR the most likely cause of SARS-Cov-2.
Does it? Because you might be quoting the current Wikipedia article/google AI summary, but I’m referring to the FBI, DOE, and CIA reports concluding lab leak is most likely, but will remain a theory due to the time passed and destruction of any evidence. I don’t personally consider appeals to authority a solid argument, but you can go look up the reports. It’s not an Infowars expose or anything.
As far as I’m aware the “smoking gun” for animal transmission is test swabs from the Wuhan market showing that COVID and raccoon dogs were in the same location at some point.
If you’d like to get slightly more conspiratorial, here’s a City Journal article looking at FOIA documents.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/new-documents-bolster-lab-leak-hypothesis
There was clearly not enough evidence to state this plainly in 2020
That belief pretty much invalidates anything you have to say about it. It blares ignorance of what has been discovered about the genetic tinkering that was done.
You’re either a fool or a liar.
It was obvious AT THE TIME that the vaccine was not sterilizing, that’s limited sterilizing effects wore off too quickly to get constant boosters, and that it would mutate into variants. That’s real science.
A refreshing article, Ross, and it's always encouraging to see these sorts of sentiments from folks still in good standing on the left. More typically I come across the sort of reflexive defensiveness perhaps exhibited by a couple of your other commenters.
Did you happen to read David Zweig's book "An Abundance of Caution" about the school closures? I reviewed it a few months back in context of my experience chronicling Columbia's School of Public Health during Covid. https://ivyexile.substack.com/p/public-healths-sacrificial-lambs
My sense is that the pandemic would likely have been handled much differently if the president had been Hillary or somebody like Jeb, and also had it not cropped up during an election year. There are some brilliant people of integrity working in public health, but a big chunk of the time the field consists of gussying up rather idealistic activism with a few superficial STEM trappings to make the "scholarship" appear irrefutable. Covid provided a perfect pretext for PMC managerial technocrats still shaken from Brexit and Trump's shock victory to try to forcefully impose the sort of centralized top-down new normal that they'd always wanted.
I spent 30% of gdp and traumatized an entire society for two years because “orange man bad” basically implies these people should all be executed.
Widespread COVID vaccination did, in fact, slow the spread of and reduce the severity of COVID infection, this was proven in innumerable scientific studies, as was the fact that unvaccinated young people had an approximately 100 times higher incidence of severe COVID symptoms (including death) than experienced severe injury from vaccination.
Good essay until you started lying about Covid.
The political advantage of stupidity is that you can say things that aren't true while still appearing earnest.
The director of the movie clearly explained that Alex’s life was an allegory for his life as the child of a violent alcoholic (Last Podcast on the Left ep Weapons: An interview with Zach Cregger)
I would say the problem is even broader.
Those who possess power, through money, influence, or connections, begin to see themselves not only as owners of the world and of people, but also as owners of truth itself.
In that view, absolutely everything becomes reduced to a tool or an object of their needs.
Now, if only "Weapons" itself was as good as your analysis!...
Closures were intended to protect the elderly and immunocompromised, but also to protect the wider medical system: an ER that's swamped with Covid cases has trouble coping with strokes and heart attacks.
How amazing that anyone could be regurgitating this bullshit after so many years. You really haven’t been paying attention, have you?
And yet video after video showed that the hospitals were not swamped, and in fact many were almost deserted. The hospital ship sent to NYC was never used. The treatment protocols that required ventilators may have been stressed, but putting someone on a ventilator turned out to be a death sentence in most all cases.
Imagine how stressed the medical system is going to be when so many vaccinated children are going to require heart transplants over the next couple of decades.
Some of you people are so anxious to let bygones be bygones and forget what happened that you sound like you are mentally stuck living in 2021 with your rationalizations.
If you want people to move on from covid the worst offenders have to be removed and structural changes must ensure it doesn’t happen again.
In red states this happened. Public health officials were fired, their powers over the public are legislatively reduced, and most deep red states now have universal school vouchers.
The head of the teachers union during COVID is still the head. Fauci is a national hero to the left. They don’t deserve forgiveness.
Dr Murakami of Japan does not mince words:
"...the more doses you get, the sooner you're likely to die, within a shorter period..."
I like your critique of gerontocracy. But I'm confused by this sentence:
"The argument, proved to faulty as Covid inevitably evolved, was that the vaccinated could not spread the virus so readily."
What does "proved to faulty" mean?
i'm unsympathetic to vaccine whataboutism: they were oversold as far as limiting transmission, but they're our last layer of protection against an infinitely mutating virus. the risks of infection massively outweigh those of vaccination, and there's never been any serious scientific debate about that.
and while i'm always here to critique the gerontocracy, i think the allegory goes the other way! COVID collectivism -- an agreement to mask, distance, and limit spread in order to protect the vulnerable -- fell victim to this country's personal-liberties fetish, and five years later people are still dying over it. the elderly and immunocompromised are quite literally segregated, unable to shop or travel or consume safely in spaces perpetually swarming with airborne pathogens. we're gambling on a future of infinite covid infection, which millions of americans cannot afford. they're the ones losing out -- i'm with gladys!
Another reading occurs to me:
Aunt Gladys, clearly, is Nancy Pelosi.
If prominent Dems (pols, NOT pundits) could just *say sorry* about their COVID hysteria, lockdown and vaccine totalitarianism, and Floyd freakout, they could start to regain something other than pariah status with normal men with actual blood in their veins. The strategy from eg Matty Iglesias that all this stuff didn't actually happen is not gonna fly
Covid did not "ravage" any demographic as badly as the deadly treatment protocols did. Many deaths attributed to Covid were from intubating and Remdesivir. Many more were the classic annual flu deaths, which mysteriously evaporated from the statistics. Japan has shown that the probability of death relates directly to both the timing of Covid shots and the number of times someone received a booster.
The fact that later variants spread like wildfire was a direct result of using a "leaky vaccine" that neither prevented one from getting Covid or spreading it.
Society's cowardly impulse to punish those choosing wisely to forgo experimental gene therapy is unforgivable. Miserably weak excuses about "the best science we new at the time" is precisely the reason for the Nuremburg protocols. The authorities who foisted the lockdowns and firings deserve to swing from gallows.