I will take the vaccine when I am ordered to do so, and not one day sooner.
Many of us who are "hesitant" have thoughtful, serious concerns.
Some of these are technical concerns -- spike protein toxicity, antibody-dependent enhancement, the evolutionary pressure caused on the virus by this narrowly-targeted vaccine.
Some of these are ethical concerns -- mass deployment of an entirely new class of vaccine, for which there can be no long-term safety data, and for which there is thus no scientific basis on which to declare it "safe."
Some of these are corruption concerns -- why have the government and media only sought to push treatments which will provide massive profits to industry, while suppressing discussions of other potential treatments which are cheap such as Vitamin D and Ivermectin?
The most-"hesitant" group is now PhDs. I am a PhD, and have published extensively in the scientific literature in my field of study. So I am not ignorant or "anti-science."
None of our concerns has been treated seriously. Discussions of them online are censored at the behest of the government. We're told to "follow the science" and do what we are told, despite the fact that science *requires* us to challenge the dominant narrative. Science is a process of questioning and not trusting what we can't prove. "Follow the science" is *anti-scientific.*
Now we are told "the voluntary phase is over," as we knew eventually it would be. Everything before was just platitudes and lies.
But remember: you never answered our concerns. Just because you can force us to do a thing, doesn't make it right.
Quite the opposite. History tells us very clearly that when the legitimate concerns of heterodox thinkers are scoffed at, when the majority succumbs to groupthink and enforces its will on the minority by force, and when dissenting opinions are censored, society is always about to make a huge mistake.
Whether history ultimately shows that "the vaccines are safe and effective" or not, we *are* making a huge mistake. And one way or another, we will pay dearly for it.
Unless you have a PhD in epidemiology or related field, your PhD has about as germane to this topic as your CCW or fishing license. Even then, the world is full of PhD's who are just plain wrong. You can study hard and can work under an advisor, congrats.
You demonstrated exactly what I was talking about. I listed a whole series of serious concerns. But you didn't address any of them. Instead, you went straight to an ad hominem attack against me.
This is a microcosm of what the entire discussion has been at a national and world level. The "hesitant" bring up serious concerns, grounded in the science and the ethics, but the other side seems incapable of even understanding those concerns, and seems to immediately default to canned, pre-programmed responses intended to shut down the discussion. And this is happening even with people like you, who are otherwise very intelligent, thoughtful, insightful people. The more our concerns not disproven, but instead are dismissed and we are attacked personally, the more we will believe that something very, very wrong is happening, and the more "hesitant" we become.
Of course you should not trust my opinion because I have a PhD, no matter what it's in -- that would be appeal to authority, which is also anti-science. The only reason I even mentioned I have a PhD is because the go-to ad hominem is to accuse the "hesitant" of being science-deniers.
So, again, to those advocating for the vaccines, please address our concerns instead of attacking us personally. I would love nothing more than to believe that "the vaccine is safe and effective" and is the solution to all our problems with no substantial downside for anyone in the population. But I don't believe the data supports that conclusion at this time.
Again, you're not addressing any of the issues. You're advocating for the mass, forcible deployment of an experimental medical treatment of a type which has never been used successfully in humans. Proving safety, effectiveness, and adherence to medical ethics is your side's responsibility.
A few examples:
1. Why are we throwing our military into chaos and forcibly deploying experimental medications to deal with a disease which has caused only 28 fatalities out of the 2.2 million member force?
2. How is a "leaky" vaccine, which is now acknowledged to neither stop people from getting the disease nor spreading the disease, supposed to stop the pandemic?
3. How does your side respond to studies showing that "leaky" vaccines lead to *increased* danger of viruses, by counteracting the normal evolutionary pressures causing viruses to become more transmissible but less lethal?
4. Why are we deploying a vaccine with such a narrowly-targeted method of action, which introduces an evolutionary pressure on the virus favoring the survival and reproduction of variants against which the vaccine is not effective?
5. Why are we deploying a vaccine whose method of action is based on generating SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins in humans, when we now have data indicating that the spike proteins themselves are one of the major causes of COVID-related damage to the body?
6. What are we doing to address concerns of antibody-dependent enhancement, in which the vaccine makes the disease *more* lethal, as has been seen in all previous attempts at coronavirus vaccines, and which the data coming from Israel hints is now happening?
7. Why is leadership at every level of our society telling us the vaccines are "safe," when we have absolutely no data on long-term safety?
8. Why is leadership at every level of our society not hammering away at the message that we should be attacking medical conditions known to be correlated with extra danger from COVID, such as low Vitamin D levels and being overweight, when attacking those issues would reduce deaths from COVID as well as other causes?
9. Why are discussions of established, relatively safe, cheap drugs like IVM and HCQ, which may have benefit in at least some COVID cases, suppressed in favor of discussing experimental drugs which will lead to greater profits for industry?
10. Why is the government allowed to violate the spirit, if not the letter, of the First Amendment, by flagging social media posts for deletion by the tech giants when they go against the administration's agenda?
11. What are the long-term consequences of the reported accumulation of vaccine nanolipid particles in the ovaries?
12. Why have reports of adverse vaccine events, as reported in the VAERS database, skyrocketed with deployment of these vaccines?
13. Why are we continuing to deploy the Pfizer vaccine when the recently-released trial of 44,000 people showed a decrease in COVID deaths which was more than offset by increases in death from other causes?
14. Why are we forcibly deploying experimental medical treatments in violation of article 1 of the Nuremberg code, which requires that "The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that the person involved should…be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, overreaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion"?
I could go on...
Ultimately, some of these concerns will end up being non-issues. I hope they ALL end up being non-issues! But right now there are a lot of unanswered questions, and until we have good answers, it is unethical to deploy these vaccines on a mass scale. Based on what we know now, it IS ethical to deploy them on a limited scale to volunteers in high risk groups, particularly the elderly.
If the pro-mandatory-vaccine camp isn't directly addressing concerns like these, and instead just repeats its programmed mantra that "the vaccines are safe and effective," then the only thing the pro-mandatory-vaccine camp is proving is its own intellectual and moral bankruptcy, and the "hesitant" will double-down on their decision.
n my many thoughtful and measured discussions with colleagues about this (and some other issues), I have noticed that silence on their part almost always implies defeat. Sal has no response to you or your concerns, except perhaps: get out of the military.
To which I respond: sounds good to me.
Maybe he can complain some more about the LCS and the Ford. That should get his blog back on track. Give the readers what they know!
Also, I laughed at his appeal to epidemiology - the same jerks that got us in this whole mess! Yes, I will *definitely* keep trusting them.
LCS and the mRNA/DNA vaccines have some things in common. In both cases, we misread the big picture and then overlooked apparent 80% solutions which could be deployed immediately at relatively low cost in order to pay industry huge amounts of money to develop a beyond-cutting-edge product which was not well-thought-out, and which in hindsight doesn't appear to do what we were told it would do. In both cases the elites kept doubling-down on their bad decisions, but in both cases we'll probably end up just going with the 80% solution we should have chosen in the first place, after wasting a lot of time and money, and after demonstrating our systemic incompetence and undermining the confidence of our own people in our leadership.
Sal and those who follow him are good, smart people and they frequently "get it," which is why I'm spending my time typing these long replies here.
My overall conclusion? Quoth Sal: "We need new elites. We need new processes. We need a new culture."
Welcome to the Fourth Turning. Strap in; it's going to get worse before it gets better.
Cdr, I didn't know you were an epidemiologist. Interesting. I mean certainly all epidemiologists agree that the shot is safe, right? And certainly we would not be advising for a medical treatment under a pseudonym unless we ourselves were an epidemiologist?
Or are we talking fundamentalist faith in a new God and hypocrisy now?
I mean seriously, we're from the government and we're here to help.
As usual, solid. Appropriate to the moment.
Good put.
I will take the vaccine when I am ordered to do so, and not one day sooner.
Many of us who are "hesitant" have thoughtful, serious concerns.
Some of these are technical concerns -- spike protein toxicity, antibody-dependent enhancement, the evolutionary pressure caused on the virus by this narrowly-targeted vaccine.
Some of these are ethical concerns -- mass deployment of an entirely new class of vaccine, for which there can be no long-term safety data, and for which there is thus no scientific basis on which to declare it "safe."
Some of these are corruption concerns -- why have the government and media only sought to push treatments which will provide massive profits to industry, while suppressing discussions of other potential treatments which are cheap such as Vitamin D and Ivermectin?
The most-"hesitant" group is now PhDs. I am a PhD, and have published extensively in the scientific literature in my field of study. So I am not ignorant or "anti-science."
None of our concerns has been treated seriously. Discussions of them online are censored at the behest of the government. We're told to "follow the science" and do what we are told, despite the fact that science *requires* us to challenge the dominant narrative. Science is a process of questioning and not trusting what we can't prove. "Follow the science" is *anti-scientific.*
Now we are told "the voluntary phase is over," as we knew eventually it would be. Everything before was just platitudes and lies.
But remember: you never answered our concerns. Just because you can force us to do a thing, doesn't make it right.
Quite the opposite. History tells us very clearly that when the legitimate concerns of heterodox thinkers are scoffed at, when the majority succumbs to groupthink and enforces its will on the minority by force, and when dissenting opinions are censored, society is always about to make a huge mistake.
Whether history ultimately shows that "the vaccines are safe and effective" or not, we *are* making a huge mistake. And one way or another, we will pay dearly for it.
active duty?
Unless you have a PhD in epidemiology or related field, your PhD has about as germane to this topic as your CCW or fishing license. Even then, the world is full of PhD's who are just plain wrong. You can study hard and can work under an advisor, congrats.
CDR Salamander,
You demonstrated exactly what I was talking about. I listed a whole series of serious concerns. But you didn't address any of them. Instead, you went straight to an ad hominem attack against me.
This is a microcosm of what the entire discussion has been at a national and world level. The "hesitant" bring up serious concerns, grounded in the science and the ethics, but the other side seems incapable of even understanding those concerns, and seems to immediately default to canned, pre-programmed responses intended to shut down the discussion. And this is happening even with people like you, who are otherwise very intelligent, thoughtful, insightful people. The more our concerns not disproven, but instead are dismissed and we are attacked personally, the more we will believe that something very, very wrong is happening, and the more "hesitant" we become.
Of course you should not trust my opinion because I have a PhD, no matter what it's in -- that would be appeal to authority, which is also anti-science. The only reason I even mentioned I have a PhD is because the go-to ad hominem is to accuse the "hesitant" of being science-deniers.
So, again, to those advocating for the vaccines, please address our concerns instead of attacking us personally. I would love nothing more than to believe that "the vaccine is safe and effective" and is the solution to all our problems with no substantial downside for anyone in the population. But I don't believe the data supports that conclusion at this time.
You are the one you appealed to credentialism, not me - as such it was not an ad hominem attack, it was an attack on argumentum ab auctoritate.
CDR,
Again, you're not addressing any of the issues. You're advocating for the mass, forcible deployment of an experimental medical treatment of a type which has never been used successfully in humans. Proving safety, effectiveness, and adherence to medical ethics is your side's responsibility.
A few examples:
1. Why are we throwing our military into chaos and forcibly deploying experimental medications to deal with a disease which has caused only 28 fatalities out of the 2.2 million member force?
2. How is a "leaky" vaccine, which is now acknowledged to neither stop people from getting the disease nor spreading the disease, supposed to stop the pandemic?
3. How does your side respond to studies showing that "leaky" vaccines lead to *increased* danger of viruses, by counteracting the normal evolutionary pressures causing viruses to become more transmissible but less lethal?
4. Why are we deploying a vaccine with such a narrowly-targeted method of action, which introduces an evolutionary pressure on the virus favoring the survival and reproduction of variants against which the vaccine is not effective?
5. Why are we deploying a vaccine whose method of action is based on generating SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins in humans, when we now have data indicating that the spike proteins themselves are one of the major causes of COVID-related damage to the body?
6. What are we doing to address concerns of antibody-dependent enhancement, in which the vaccine makes the disease *more* lethal, as has been seen in all previous attempts at coronavirus vaccines, and which the data coming from Israel hints is now happening?
7. Why is leadership at every level of our society telling us the vaccines are "safe," when we have absolutely no data on long-term safety?
8. Why is leadership at every level of our society not hammering away at the message that we should be attacking medical conditions known to be correlated with extra danger from COVID, such as low Vitamin D levels and being overweight, when attacking those issues would reduce deaths from COVID as well as other causes?
9. Why are discussions of established, relatively safe, cheap drugs like IVM and HCQ, which may have benefit in at least some COVID cases, suppressed in favor of discussing experimental drugs which will lead to greater profits for industry?
10. Why is the government allowed to violate the spirit, if not the letter, of the First Amendment, by flagging social media posts for deletion by the tech giants when they go against the administration's agenda?
11. What are the long-term consequences of the reported accumulation of vaccine nanolipid particles in the ovaries?
12. Why have reports of adverse vaccine events, as reported in the VAERS database, skyrocketed with deployment of these vaccines?
13. Why are we continuing to deploy the Pfizer vaccine when the recently-released trial of 44,000 people showed a decrease in COVID deaths which was more than offset by increases in death from other causes?
14. Why are we forcibly deploying experimental medical treatments in violation of article 1 of the Nuremberg code, which requires that "The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that the person involved should…be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, overreaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion"?
I could go on...
Ultimately, some of these concerns will end up being non-issues. I hope they ALL end up being non-issues! But right now there are a lot of unanswered questions, and until we have good answers, it is unethical to deploy these vaccines on a mass scale. Based on what we know now, it IS ethical to deploy them on a limited scale to volunteers in high risk groups, particularly the elderly.
If the pro-mandatory-vaccine camp isn't directly addressing concerns like these, and instead just repeats its programmed mantra that "the vaccines are safe and effective," then the only thing the pro-mandatory-vaccine camp is proving is its own intellectual and moral bankruptcy, and the "hesitant" will double-down on their decision.
n my many thoughtful and measured discussions with colleagues about this (and some other issues), I have noticed that silence on their part almost always implies defeat. Sal has no response to you or your concerns, except perhaps: get out of the military.
To which I respond: sounds good to me.
Maybe he can complain some more about the LCS and the Ford. That should get his blog back on track. Give the readers what they know!
Also, I laughed at his appeal to epidemiology - the same jerks that got us in this whole mess! Yes, I will *definitely* keep trusting them.
LCS and the mRNA/DNA vaccines have some things in common. In both cases, we misread the big picture and then overlooked apparent 80% solutions which could be deployed immediately at relatively low cost in order to pay industry huge amounts of money to develop a beyond-cutting-edge product which was not well-thought-out, and which in hindsight doesn't appear to do what we were told it would do. In both cases the elites kept doubling-down on their bad decisions, but in both cases we'll probably end up just going with the 80% solution we should have chosen in the first place, after wasting a lot of time and money, and after demonstrating our systemic incompetence and undermining the confidence of our own people in our leadership.
Sal and those who follow him are good, smart people and they frequently "get it," which is why I'm spending my time typing these long replies here.
My overall conclusion? Quoth Sal: "We need new elites. We need new processes. We need a new culture."
Welcome to the Fourth Turning. Strap in; it's going to get worse before it gets better.
Cdr, I didn't know you were an epidemiologist. Interesting. I mean certainly all epidemiologists agree that the shot is safe, right? And certainly we would not be advising for a medical treatment under a pseudonym unless we ourselves were an epidemiologist?
Or are we talking fundamentalist faith in a new God and hypocrisy now?
I mean seriously, we're from the government and we're here to help.
on the money
Will be interesting