1 hour ago, dogfish78 said:

Dude stop. It's Safe and Effective™️.

 

Weird, it's almost like people don't enjoy being ambushed by the press at their home.

12 hours ago, glockenspiel said:

If COVID19 were a grave threat to all and the vaccine worked well, you wouldn’t have to mandate it…

Right.. because everyone has behaved completely rationally for the last year and a half. 

The decision to impose a mandate should be a very carefully considered one, and IMO you really only have grounds for a mandate if you can answer "yes" to the following questions:

1. Does the disease in question pose a grave threat?

2. Does the vaccine do an extremely good job of protecting people and preventing transmission?

3. Is the vaccine safe?

 

So far those answers seem to be:

1. Only for very specific demographics

2. Yes and no

3. Probably  

 

These are very shaky grounds for a mandate especially considering the second widespread variant of this disease we encountered was able to take most of our vaccination assumptions and throw them in the dumpster.  But as usual, Democrats want to jump to telling people what to do.  It is their default state--using government coercion to solve perceived problems.  
 

But they always fail to take human nature into the equation.  When you censor something it'll just make it more popular. When you say everyone has to do something, some people are going to not do it just because fuck you.  And I love that. Do I still think it's a bad risk calculation not to get the vaccine? Yes.  But we really really really need to figure out as a society a way to have the emotional maturity to hold two thoughts in our brains at the same time:

-Getting the vaccine is a good idea

-Trying to Force it on people is a very bad idea

 

31 minutes ago, Blue said:

https://rumble.com/vnouq3-twitter-user-video-showing-the-shifting-narrative-in-vaccine-efficacy.html

This video has been making the rounds, a 2 minute review of the ever-shifting narrative on vaccine effectiveness.

Snips of headlines flashing by too quickly to read, and all of them completely without context. But the numbers counted down as classical music increased in tempo and volume. So that must mean something. 

On 10/16/2021 at 7:41 AM, dogfish78 said:

YOU THINK (((BEN SHAPIRO))) is part of the U.S. conservative movement? HAHAHAAHHA

Considering his enormous viewership, self-described conservative media company, and the fact that his talking points are reliably echoed all over baseops 6-9 hours after they air, yes. I do. 
 

So when do we get to the part where you make an actual argument.. because so far all I'm seeing is you drawing things out of a hat at random to disagree about.

On 10/15/2021 at 8:51 PM, Standby said:

Are what ifs are open?

What if, instead of locking down the country and forcing people to PIO their social interactions we just lived normal lives? I think more people would have been sick sooner, but do you think we’d be past it sooner as well? Are we delaying the inevitable and attempting to control an uncontrollable force of nature? Will letting it run its natural course bring a large immediate death toll but then taper significantly? I’m not smart enough to know, but I don’t believe anybody out there is either. All of the predictions have been wrong at this point. 

The counter argument to letting covid just do its thing has always been healthcare capacity. The peak of our last two spikes already overwhelmed hospitals in certain places and that was with all of the mitigation measures in place. 

2 hours ago, BashiChuni said:

No explanation from the elites 

It's almost like a new strain happened right about that time, changing the situation and all of the underlying assumptions. No need for elites.. it's quite obvious what happened. People on the right got it wrong too. Ben Shapiro was harping for weeks about how the pandemic was effectively over.. right before cases went through the stratosphere again. 

On 10/6/2021 at 8:21 AM, dream big said:

Covid hysteria is a useful tool for big government democrats (and republicans). It got Trump out of office, it increased dependency on government programs (why work when your Covid check is > your paycheck?), it continues to serve as a distraction from the mass importation of future voters from the Southern Border and mask the negligence behind the Afg pullout. If you were a big government corrupt politician I would never want the Covid hysteria to end!

All perfectly 100% true. And as I've been saying on this thread for quite a while now, it has absolutely nothing to do with the safety and efficacy of the vaccines. 
 

It's been wild to watch people on the right take their frustration with Democrat covid policy and project it onto a vaccine that is literally a miracle of capitalism.  Much in the same way, Democrats take their hatred of trump or joe rogan and protect that onto legitimate medical treatments like hydroxy and ivermectin. 

If only there were a third way where we looked at treatments based on empirical data, rather than judging them based on political baggage.

I just don't get the constant fascination with pinning this on China when in all likelihood our own NIH had a hand in funding the research that caused this too. And then they lied about it. 
 

 

23 minutes ago, Buddy Spike said:

Possibly.  China is a threat country that unleashed this virus onto the world.  Have you ever heard a WWII vet talk about Japan or Germany?  Or a Vietnam vet talk about the VC?  

There is a difference between “of Chinese descent in the US” and the country.  I would absolutely give anyone a pass for the country.  Fuck China.  

Needs more punisher logo

My favorite part about the no mask crowd I see at the grocery store is that the majority are obese, walking, talking sacks of comorbidities filling their carts with Cheetos and hamburger helper. 
 

Likewise, many of the anti vax Air Force people I know think of themselves as elite physical specimens except for the part where they can't run a mile and a half in under 14 minutes without a borderline medical emergency. 
 

It seems like the elderly have the sense to mask up and get vaccinated, but a lot of young unhealthy people fail to realize how severely obesity affects their odds. 

Lengthy, over-dramatic Facebook rants about bringing the "whole system down"

 

..telltale sign of a very mentally stable and well-adjusted person

1 hour ago, glockenspiel said:

I forgot that teachers, healthcare workers, airline travelers and the “couple” million of people you are missing are not “general population”. So you are for a sort-of mandate, which is totally different than a full mandate. What’s the difference between a nation wide mandate and requiring vaccination to travel? To go to school? To go to work? Less people will travel on airlines I guess? More  vaccine fraud? More people will homeschool their kids? People will leave their jobs?

The fact that you admittedly are “missing a couple” groups where the vaccine mandate “makes sense” is proof that your threshold is gray and if implemented will likely be determined by some person in an office building that doesn’t care about the individuals health nearly as much as that individual cares about theirs (or at least the individual ought to care). Bottom line is free countries don’t entertain this types of ideas.

for the record, also against blow darts- though the blow dart scene from get smart comes to mind. 

Weird, it's almost like policy decisions exist in gray areas with nuanced details that need to be considered to ensure the policy actually works. 

Plenty of jobs subject people to background checks, drug tests, and vaccination requirements. That's an employer's prerogative much like it's your prerogative to go work somewhere else if those conditions are too onerous for you.

 

 

Alternatively.. GUBMENT BETTER NOT TELL ME WHAT TO DO

6 hours ago, glockenspiel said:

Pawn, you are a proving to be a beacon of hope this morning…..you are at the five yard line— now just use the same logic with COVID vaccines mandates.

Was he ever arguing in favor of mandates for the general public? Has anyone done that on this thread?

Arguing that vaccines are safe and effective ≠ advocating for a mandate

Vaccine mandate for active duty military ≠ mandate for the entire general public

Much like Biden's heinously botched Afghanistan withdrawal, no one should be mad at *what* Snowden did, they should be mad at *how* he did it. 
 

Based on what buddies of mine in the three letter world have said, my understanding of his "whistleblowing" is that it was an indiscriminate data dump that compromised all sorts of unrelated parts of the intel community. 

5 hours ago, torqued said:

I'll ask, once again, for you to specify the "experts" to which you a deferring all substantiations for this argument. Who said this is not happening with COVID?

So the reason we have an increasing amount of variants is not because viruses mutate and create branches on the genomic tree, but because scientists are just looking for and finding previously existing related genomes? That makes no sense. Again, who is saying this?

The answer to your question is in the link I provided. You should read the entire paper because you must not have. Imperfect vaccines that only lesson the symptoms, drive the mutations which benefit from virulence without the cost to the host. It's the same process which drives antibiotic resistant bacteria.

You get a imperfect vaccine created for an unknown virus genome,  and you may not know you're sick when you get COVID. Viruses mutations that the vaccine wasn't tailor made specifically for are allowed to replicate and spread unbeknownst to you.

I get a COVID infection, know I'm sick, take the appropriate therapeutics and measures while my body creates anti-bodies for the exact genome that I am infected with.

Here are some "experts" you can refer specifically to in the future:

 

 

Maybe you before calling people out for not reading the giant homework assignment you so graciously gave us, you should read it yourself.

From the discussion section:

"Our data do not demonstrate that vaccination was responsible for the evolution of hyperpathogenic strains of MDV, and we may never know for sure why they evolved in the first place."

It turns out, as always, research findings aren't quite a simple as the google-able sound bites you search in order to try to win internet arguments. Having actually done research before helps you know that findings are always couched in caveats, statistical uncertainty, and specificity of their application.

But by all means, let's take snippets from the abstract of a research paper on a disease in chickens and extrapolate the results as gospel to a completely different virus in a completely different species with a completely different type of vaccine. 

 

Here's an article from some experts: professors of microbiology and epidemiology (good enough for you?) And it is actually about covid.. in humans.. not a different disease in chickens, and they talk about how the large population of unvaccinated is the key driver of mutations.

The argument boils down to this: A mutation is a random event that is extremely unlikely to make the virus more contagious or virulent. Even if it does, it's extremely unlikely that mutation will be passed on to someone else.  This is called the population bottleneck.  The population bottleneck helps prevent new mutations emerge because the odds are stacked against the virus.  By having a large portion of the population remain unvaccinated we are essentially giving the virus an infinite number of dice rolls and it will eventually hit   the jackpot, 

The article even talks about your chicken scenario, but says it isn't even relevant at this point because the virus is still running rampant and unchecked all over the world, propelled by the unvaccinated population.  

https://theconversation.com/massive-numbers-of-new-covid-19-infections-not-vaccines-are-the-main-driver-of-new-coronavirus-variants-166882

5 hours ago, torqued said:

Found this in less than a minute, but there's an endless supply of similar research. What's the probability of a rushed to market experiemental vaccine being "leaky?".

https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1002198

Could some vaccines drive the evolution of more virulent pathogens? Conventional wisdom is that natural selection will remove highly lethal pathogens if host death greatly reduces transmission. Vaccines that keep hosts alive but still allow transmission could thus allow very virulent strains to circulate in a population. Here we show experimentally that immunization of chickens against Marek's disease virus enhances the fitness of more virulent strains, making it possible for hyperpathogenic strains to transmit. Immunity elicited by direct vaccination or by maternal vaccination prolongs host survival but does not prevent infection, viral replication or transmission, thus extending the infectious periods of strains otherwise too lethal to persist. Our data show that anti-disease vaccines that do not prevent transmission can create conditions that promote the emergence of pathogen strains that cause more severe disease in unvaccinated hosts.

There is a theoretical expectation that some types of vaccines could prompt the evolution of more virulent (“hotter”) pathogens. This idea follows from the notion that natural selection removes pathogen strains that are so “hot” that they kill their hosts and, therefore, themselves. Vaccines that let the hosts survive but do not prevent the spread of the pathogen relax this selection, allowing the evolution of hotter pathogens to occur. This type of vaccine is often called a leaky vaccine. When vaccines prevent transmission, as is the case for nearly all vaccines used in humans, this type of evolution towards increased virulence is blocked. But when vaccines leak, allowing at least some pathogen transmission, they could create the ecological conditions that would allow hot strains to emerge and persist. This theory proved highly controversial when it was first proposed over a decade ago, but here we report experiments with Marek’s disease virus in poultry that show that modern commercial leaky vaccines can have precisely this effect: they allow the onward transmission of strains otherwise too lethal to persist. Thus, the use of leaky vaccines can facilitate the evolution of pathogen strains that put unvaccinated hosts at greater risk of severe disease. The future challenge is to identify whether there are other types of vaccines used in animals and humans that might also generate these evolutionary risks.

 

It's an interesting argument and I definitely understand how it could be possible with certain diseases. But we have experts saying specifically that isn't happening with covid and the perceived spike in variants is due to the entire world mobilizing to look for and classify them.

And my question still stands.. the vast majority of unvaxxed people who contract covid also survive and end up with some level of immunity, which is not 100% perfect. There are already unvaxxed people re-catching it, and spreading it. One might call the natural immunity "leaky" as well.  So how is it different from the perspective of driving mutations?  
 

Edit: also covid was already rapidly mutating prior to the vaccine. At least 7 variants were identified pre-vaccine including the current most concerning strain delta, which first presented in India back in December 2020. 

Point to ponder: why would vaccine-created immunity force viral mutations any more than natural immunity gained by having a variant of the virus. Immunity pushes mutations, period. Does the virus know or care where you got that immunity from? 
 

Here's another possible explanation:

“Early in the pandemic, only a limited number of labs were sequencing virus from infections, but since late 2020, surveillance programs have been ramping up,” Professor Jennifer Grier, Clinical Assistant Professor in Immunology at the University of South Carolina, told Reuters via email.

“Effectively, we are hearing so much more about viral variants in 2021 because, globally, we now have the systems in place to consistently detect and track mutations,” Grier added.

54 minutes ago, torqued said:

You should define "safe" and "effective".

Safe - Are you saying there are no adverse reactions or deaths? The statistics clearly show that there have been. Are you saying there are some, but not enough? What is the threshold? If they are safe, why can't anyone sue the manufacturer, even if batch is somehow contaminated?

Effective - Do breakthrough infections exist? Why? Why do we have boosters? Do you support mandatory boosters? How many? All of them? How would you like to see that tracked? When you have the 4th booster and someone else only has 3, are you going to attack them?

 

Safe - I'll refer you to the CDC, the clinical trials, and the experts in the field of immunology for that definition as they are the ones who come up with the criteria, not me. For it to be considered safe, my understanding is that adverse reactions have to be below a certain statistically significant threshold and below a certain severity threshold, both of which I also did not come up with. Much in the same way, walking out your front door is widely considered safe despite the fact that a chance does exist of you being hit in the face by a meteor.  That is because it is not a statistically significant chance. 
 

If you have statistical evidence (from a reliable source.. that you interpreted correctly) pointing in a different direction I would love to see it. Until then I will defer to the people who's entire life's work is to make these determinations. 
 

Effective - the vaccine reduces your risk of contracting covid and drastically reduces your risk of hospitalization, and death. 
 

On booster shots: why is there a new flu shot every year? Because immunity wears off and new variants emerge. As for how many boosters to get and when they will be approved for the general public, I will once again defer to experts. Much like they defer to me on matters pertaining to flying airplanes.

Yeah it's not a good look for milley for sure. Add this to the laundry list of reasons this guy needs to go. 
 

Having said that, I'm glad someone was thinking about how to mitigate the damage  a desperate and defeated trump could have attempted to do in his final days.  Glad it never came to this but the fact that the CJCS was so worried he thought this was a conversation that needed to happen should tell you all you need to know about trump's mental stability after the election loss. 

22 hours ago, dogfish78 said:

Just like the Sailors and asbestos right? GTFO out of here.

It's our birthright to have children and to think about our posterity, and it IS a valid concern to question how this drug affects the reproductive system. Some of us actually care for human life.

@torquedKEK you are forcing @Pooter to move the goalposts at the speed of light! 🤣

What goalposts exactly?  Throughout all of these discussions I have maintained the same exact points. 
 

1. the vaccine is safe and effective and no one so far has provided convincing evidence to the contrary. To include your and  @torqued's statistically illiterate flailing. 
 

2. While I think it's a very bad plan to pass on the vaccine, getting the shot should be entirely your choice unless you voluntarily surrendered some of your medical autonomy by joining the military. 
 

My suggestion, stick to what you're good at and keep posting your tangential Alex Jones-esque rants with a healthy side of racial slurs.

12 hours ago, torqued said:

My argument has always been that the vaccine is not completely safe and that vaccine is not completely effective.

Evidence continues to leak through the massive propaganda wall that this vaccine is neither.

I LOL'd because it was obvious you don't understand the table. The denominator is already in the table. FIRST COLUMN. WTF? I continue to LOL because I can't believe I have to point this out

All Old People (>50) Delta COVID Deaths (Denominator) - 1644

Vaccinated (Numerator) - 1054

Unvaccinated (Numerator) - 437

You are trying to bury the evidence in "denominators of all old people deaths for all reasons" when the fact of the matter is the deaths in that table are being attributed to COVID. Yes, old people die of a lot of things. But these are all the deaths in the UK being attributed to COVID by a positive specimen test and after receiving a vaccine. If the people in your denominators were dying from other old people reasons, they wouldn't be recorded in the table. Why would any of them be recorded as dying of COVID if they are vaccinated, and at higher rates (in the same row) than unvaccinated? It is because the vaccine doesn't work as advertised?

Yes, I am arguing there is evidence to suggest the vaccine does not reduce the rates of hospitalization and death to the extent that it should be mandatory for everyone. Breakthrough infections. A outdated vaccine that was manufactured for the original genomic sequence and one that will continue to mutate even if 100% of the population receives this vaccine.

Somehow I get the impression no one in your SQ cares about your personal assessment of their character.

 

Wrong again. You aren't controlling for the total number of people in the vaccinated and unvaccinated sub groups. Your continuing arrogance in the face of being so objectively wrong is getting pretty obnoxious. 
 

When you calculate a death rate you divide deaths in a particular sub group by total number of people in that sub group. You do not divide a death number by another death number. That results in a unit-less proportion that has no context. We will now spell this out so there's no more confusion. 
 

When you want to find the total covid death rate you do this:

Number of covid deaths /  number of people 

So if you want the elderly vaccinated covid death rate you do this: 

number of vaxxed old people deaths / number of vaxxed old people

And if you want unvaxxed old people death rate you do this: 

number of unvaxxed old people deaths / number of unvaxxed old people

Hopefully by now you have caught on that there are two different denominators and one is much larger than the other. And that is why the death rate can be much lower for vaxxed old people despite their numerator being larger.
 

The only thing your mis-analysis allows you to say is that approximately two thirds of the UK elderly covid deaths are among vaccinated and one third are the unvaccinated. But without the correct denominators that number does not tell you anything useful about death rates and relative risk level between the two groups.

Quick thought experiment. If everyone had the shot, vaccinated people would account for 100% of the deaths! My goodness! The vaccine must be pointless! It's almost like having the correct denominator actually matters. 

17 minutes ago, bfargin said:

Funny, I found the same to be true in the opposite direction.  

Quote with appropriate edits...

"The staunch vax mandate dudes I know are invariably the squadron shitbags, who spend way too much time publicly arguing politics on Facebook, and who will not be missed by anyone.. least of all the commanders who are relishing this excuse to get a complete liability out of their organization."

I actually haven't encountered a single one of those people. Most of the rest of us aren't "staunch mandate" we just have a modicum of awareness about what we signed up for and aren't going to torpedo our job and reputation because we got a little too riled up over some podcasts. 

Hope everyone who choose to die on this vaccination hill gets some immense satisfaction out of sticking it to big blue. Because that's likely all you're getting.
 

The staunch anti vax dudes I know of are invariably the squadron shitbags, who spend way too much time publicly arguing politics on Facebook, and who will not be missed by anyone.. least of all the commanders who are relishing this excuse to get a complete liability out of their organization.
 

The number of people who discovered their extremely sincerely held religious beliefs on stem cells just this past week is particularly rich. You'd think a supposedly principled person would think twice about faking a religious belief to justify their stubbornness, but I'm sure the crippling case of Dunning-Kruger prevents that level of introspection. 

1 hour ago, torqued said:

LOL. Now do this one:

https://www.bostonherald.com/2021/09/07/massachusetts-coronavirus-breakthrough-cases-jump-4415-last-week-more-than-600-fully-vaccinated-people-a-day/

and this one:

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/09/covid-hospitalization-numbers-can-be-misleading/620062/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

Perhaps try making an argument rather than just blasting out more links and expecting people to go on a scavenger hunt to figure out what your point is.

Are you actually arguing the vaccine does not reduce the rates of hospitalization and death?

And if you want anyone to take you seriously, can't just LOL away the fact that you were citing absolute death numbers without considering the denominators those numbers come from.