RFK - Make America Healthy? again?

Same messaging he uses about masks. 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 but not 22222

not for healthcare workers, not for the militaries, not for employees of companies with more than 100 employees until SCOTUS determined the Biden administration was utterly violating and raping the constitution trying to mandate that, not for residents in several counties where you were forbidden to go to a restaurant without being vaccinated.

not for college students who had already paid tuition and had to either vaccinate or lose that and so on.

don't lie.

I wasn’t going to get it but I had to because of my job. I wasn’t happy about it but I didn’t blame Biden, or faucci, or even trump for spending a billion dollars on funding development and supporting its early deployment

It's not a lie, Lucy.

Healthcare workers had a choice - get vaccinated or resign.

Service members had a choice - agree to all current and future vaccinations or don't enlist.

Corporate employees had a choice - get vaccinated or resign.

Students had a choice - get vaccinated or drop out and make money being a sparky or something.

Just because you're a weak cuck who can't stand behind his convictions if it's the least bit uncomfortable, doesn't mean those were not choices.

Oh ok so if the state threatens you with legal consequences if you don't do something, it's still a choice.

So making abortion illegal is just giving you a choice, you can still abort, and just face the legal consequences right?

how disgustingly in bad faith can you be to call it a choice , if you are punished by the state in case of "the wrong choice"? that would make literally the totality of laws "just a choice", at most you get killed by law enforcement, still a choice.

Truly bottom low of 12 years old arguing right here, "not a mandate because you still have a choice".

It is a mandate if the state threatens to do ANYTHING to you unless you do it, definitionally, semantically. Being a leftist is a mental disease truly, you lose the ability to understand and apply language properly.

If you don't want to build mistrust around vaccines maybe don't force people to take an experimental vaccine with no long term safety data and don't gaslight them when they suffer from adverse reactions to the vaccine.

1. You weren't forced to take it
2. It wasn't experimental
3. Long term for vaccines is a few months since vaccines are eliminated from the body in a few weeks, and there was PLENTY of data for that timeframe.
4. No one was gaslit. Adverse reactions were rare and treated appropriately.

If you want to be taken seriously on literally any subject ever, don't lie 4 times in a singe sentence.

lol.

Cmon, Gorg, not remotely close to her MO

The only reasonable justification I could see for the mandates were if the vaccine prevented the spread of the disease (to protect society) - the same rationale used for mandating MMR vaccines for children. The phase 3 trials didn't include transmission prevention as an efficacy endpoint so that claim can't be made. Some also argued the mandates based on protecting the healthcare system from being overloaded but that's a much weaker societal-protection case.

Still, the USA mandated it in various cases to various people, either with the federal or local government.

Yet there are still people like land of lakes who deny the USA mandated it in various cases. With atrocious, indefensible semantic nonsense related to "you could still choose not to take it" to deny a mandate was in place in various cases.

Reducing infections *always* reduces the spread of the virus, by definition. You are correct that they didn't measure transmission reduction in the trials, but that data was available pretty soon after release and it was found to be quite effective at reducing the spread.

This is not me arguing in favor of mandates as I am generally not in favor of them (from the government - private entities are of course free to set whatever rules they want).

Our government never really mandated the vaccine. Any such rule included an option for regular testing instead of vaccination which is more than reasonable during an actual pandemic. Military (lol, you sign up for the military, you are getting vaccinated with whatever they tell you to get, everyone knows that going in) and healthcare (absolutely should be mandated there for obvious reasons - anyone arguing against this is just not worth talking to) are special cases.

Not automatically no. If for example a person was completly shutting down personal contacts pre-vaccination, then after vaccination he resumes a fully normal life, the net result could be that person is now a higher risk for others for transmission than before he took the vaccine.

If the vaccine reduces the severity of symptoms on average (like in the covid vaccine case), you can also have more unknowingly infected people going around which would perhaps have stayed at home if they had visible and meaningful symptoms during the infection.

So no, there is no linear, obvious reduction of the spread just by reducing infections and symptoms severity.

The bold is only true is they don't take any public money directly or indirectly, if they do (like most colleges do) the same rules for government apply (or should apply)

The phase 3 trials didn't prove a reduction of overall infections (and thus transmissions). It proved a reduction in symptomatic infections. It's reasonable to imply that being asymptomatic reduces spread but that was never explicitly proven. In fact, there was much talk during the epidemic about the asymptomatic spread of the disease.

It actually demonstrated efficacy in reducing laboratory-confirmed infections not just symptomatic infections. I would agree with you had it been the case that only symptomatic infections had been reduced, but it isn't. While it's still technically possible that it was still making infections asymptomatic and thus much harder to detect in order to test, it is far less likely*. I am not saying that the testing proved a reduction in transmission, and experts at the time were very careful to make that clear at the time, it is still a very reasonable conclusion to draw.

But the real point is that reduction in transmission was amply demonstrated only a few months later. There was just an extremely low probability that transmission would not be severely reduced by vaccination, and that probability was completely dismissed by data very quickly.

*Typically, infections range in severity from low enough to not cause any symptoms to extreme. Reducing most infection severities to below the threshold of symptomatic, but never reducing infection to zero is so extremely unlikely as to be absurd. Yet, out of caution, scientists withheld judgement on this until enough data was in to say for sure. They, as I am now, always acknowledged that it is technically possible, especially with a novel virus.

Astrazeneca phase 3 trial proved both, which ironically put it in the backfoot because efficacy was lower (given they included the asymptomatic cases), so the narrative became it was a way worse vaccine, so it never got approved by the FDA.

Funny times they were.

The mRNA phase 3 methodology only tested participants if /when they reported symptoms, which means it could only detect symptomatic infections, thus could only report on the reduction of symptomatic infections.

Can you point me to the follow-up studies that showed a reduction in transmission? It's been a long time and don't recall seeing those.

Yes, I could, but it would take a bit and I'm at work. Maybe I can do so later today.

I don't recall seeing that AZD1222 reduced asymptomatic infections. Here is the press release describing a summary of its phase 3 results:

https://www.astrazeneca.com/media-centre...

Posts a list of 4 blatant lies and then tells me not to lie. Lol

Gotta hand it to you Gorgo, your ability to gaslight is no less impressive than your arrogance.

I understand how it seems this way, but it is well known in the design of these studies not to be the case. For instance, to be considered "symptomatic" you merely have to have a cough and a headache (to take the 2 most common symptoms of a VERY wide net of ailments affecting humans on earth). If these two symptoms were only caused by COVID, then your absolute statement would be true.

This is the reason that the efficacy is listed as "vs. lab-confirmed infection" and doesn't mention "symptomatic." While technically it is filtering for that, you could be completely asymptomatic for covid and just have an unrelated cough and headache. I know that seems semantic and like a technicality, but it's actually an important distinction in these types of trials.

edit: if memory serves, any type of cough would qualify to get you tested.

It's not how it seems - it's how it was. Having a "wide scope" for reported symptoms that triggered a COVID test during the trial is nowhere near sufficient methodology for claiming the detection of asymptomatic infections, which is why it was not one of the endpoints for the mRNA phase 3 trials.

Agreed, and the reason I was not claiming it and why they did not. I'm simply describing the reality of the probabilities, not what "should be reported in the studies." The experts were right, as you are now, to not include that and to be cautious in their proclamation (as I've already said). But they will tell you then as now that the reality is that it was extraordinarily likely to not be true that it severely reduced transmissions, as I am telling you now, along with the reasoning.

I don't think we really disagree, here. I'm just expressing to you what was most likely to be the case (in the extreme) while both of us are in agreement that it was not 100% certain to be the case based on the data and methodologies.

i recall as if it was yesterday that astrazeneca did test weekly *all participants* in both arms. Might be the case that they still only produced results for "symptomatic" cases but even in that case the threshold for what actually counted as a symptom was lower, because they were testing everyone and a positive person with even the slightest symptom was to be considered a symptomatic case.

In the trial design

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NE...

Participants were reminded weekly to monitor for Covid-19 symptoms. Participants who had one or more qualifying symptoms of Covid-19 underwent illness evaluations and SARS-CoV-2 testing. All trial participants were scheduled to have serum collected for SARS-CoV-2 antibody testing to assess the efficacy of the vaccine, regardless of the presence or severity of symptoms. All participants will remain in the study for 2 years (730 days) after receipt of the first dose of AZD1222 or placebo for safety follow-up and assessment of durability of immune response.

Afaik the bolded was the crucial difference with trial designs vs the mRNA platform vaccines