While Phoenixmgs' health claims seem to constantly go into the 'bro science' category, getting people to vaccinate themselves right now is primarily about their own risk of getting a severe illness. The spread reduction against current omicron variants is abysmal. Risking a more severe disease is a bad health choice, but elevating catching covid above most ordinary health risks is pretty useless at this point. Masks are alright, but effectiveness requires compliance at least if not above the level it was on during the start and height of the pandemic. That's undoable.
Our Covid Response
- Thread starter gorfias
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Reading between the lines, it is into the territory of the New Age-y "Wellness" industry, albeit a substantial way from the insanity of sticking jade eggs up one's cunny a la Goop. Excessive belief in vitamins and hostility to conventional medication, overreliance on diet, etc. One might note for instance Steve Jobs, who potentially died because he thought to combat his cancer with herbal bullshit rather than medicine. It is a remarkable thing to consider: such a lauded man for his successes, so smart and talented, so associated with technology and progress... why oh why would he not take his meds?
I've seen psychologists suggest that some of this represents fear of illness / death, and having control. We definitely can prolong our lives and reduce risk with good diet, exercise, etc. But for some it goes too far. Life is shockingly fragile, brief, and uncertain. We really might be hit by a bus tomorrow, the volcano next our town explodes, or we get untreatable cancer, or that heart defect we didn't realise we had suddenly goes pop. The suffering of illness and death are scary. If a person convinces themself that they can control their health and the point they die, this helps manage their fear of illness and death. Then, the attraction of nature: because the idea is that we function in nature, and drugs, vaccines, etc. are both foreign to our bodies' intended experience and under the power of the medical and pharmaceutical establishment, who are very much not under our control. This is how outsize fears of adverse side effects and - at the extreme end - Bill Gates's microchips emerge: this suspicion and fear of loss of control. A major aspect is that modern medicine is very poorly understood by the vast majority using it, and that gap of understanding can be filled with fear and suspicion. Lack of understanding (thus lack of control) can also be managed, however, with pseudoscience. If it looks sciencey enough and says the things they want to hear, they can pretend they know and are in control.
It is then irony that some of unfortunates hasten their own deaths, because the psychological comfort from feeling that they are in control exceeds doing the right thing for their own health.
Turning anecdotes into quick rationalizations is just about the lowest level of evidence, but it isn't always wholly unscientific. Like, I can't know for certain that my aunt's husband wasn't cured through antioxidant therapy. It seems to coincide. Maybe he truly lacked some vitamin X that doctors just don't account for. What I know for certain is that the process would break under scrutiny, but y'know, who the fuck is going to check over that stuff? Weak health data floats around like a miasma.
Another rough point is turning decent statistical evidence into strict guidelines. Like, the nutrition and CVD study linked earlier. There are carbs that are excellent for us. If the message to take out is "eat more carbs" then something must also be done to ensure it's not milkshakes and hot dog buns. And whaddyaknow that's already in our general (population-wide) nutritional guidelines.
Finally, the feeling of knowing you are healthier and more capable than the next person fucking rules. Having one's ego in check is necessary, however, unless you're seeking promotion to Major Asshole AND/OR wanting to surround yourself with like-minded individuals. I admit to not being a saint in this matter, but in my experience it's still almost always better to try to reach for the person behind the disability/illness/poor health and so on. But patience is limited sometimes, and trying to always be consistent and rational when solving problems is unbearable in the end.
I found this very much with some of the ivermectin kooks. This guy Dr. Pierre Kory turned up before the Senate and called it "almost a wonder drug" or something like that back in December 2020 or so. On what data, exactly? As far as I can tell, basically nothing - anecdote. He and colleagues created a detailed treatment regime using it, but I'm not sure they've ever published meaningful data on its effectiveness. Why is that, I wonder?
He's still tubthumping ivermectin, as more and more data has piled in against. And not only that, he's now also promoting scare stories that the covid vaccines are killing people and ominous attacks on "Big Pharma". Maybe no surprise, as he has thoroughly hitched his economic wagon to crankery: he may as well go all in. Although there's something about him that makes me suspect he is a massive narcissist and unwilling to admit error, too.
I can certainly see why one of his prior employers early on in covid appears to have given him the boot.
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This is kind of just a tactical decision about how to structure the messaging, though. Appeal to protecting the individual against severe illness and you'll have better luck. Appeal to protecting society in a very broad sense, to a relatively minor degree over a long period... and you won't have much luck, because that's pretty abstract.
But it's also true that those who actually get a severe illness are significantly greater transmission risks. Their viral load is far greater, and they shed a lot more viral agents.
Compliance was pretty shite even at the height of the pandemic. And a lot of that can be attributed to shoddy, inconsistent or incoherent messaging from the government(s), which is something that can absolutely be addressed in a future epidemic or pandemic.
Hopefully they do that in the comfort of their home. Nevertheless, BA.4 and 5 are pretty tough to tame with the contemporary vaccines, and just like you said "reduces transmission risk moderately for a couple of months and practically not at all after that" (to bluntly paraphrase) doesn't sell very well. Hopefully the promises of "tailored" vaccines against newer variants hold true. The general public probably won't be convinced anymore.
Are you saying he says one thing then says another thing? Because he said that and he meant that. I don't know why you don't actually what to look at the actual data and science. The CDC numbers themselves say that natural immunity alone is strong enough as well. And every single study on the subject has also said the same exact thing to.
There is at least a scientific majority saying cloth masks don't do anything or very very little. What I have said wrong about vaccines or community transmission?
I double-check what they say to the actual data. There's plenty of other things that have been said that would be nice be true but I never claimed those to be facts because they didn't correspond to actual data.
Stop providing me with bullshit evidence. The RCTs show masks don't work. Just looking at your first source, it's just a bunch of pie-in-the-sky hoping:
The impact of using masks to control transmission in the workplace has not been well studied.
Overall, our understanding of the relative merits of different cloth mask designs and materials is still limited.
This ain't even true...
One possible additional benefit of masks as PPE is that they do not allow hands to directly touch the nose and mouth, which may be a transmission vector.
Fauci literally today basically said cloth masks don't work and you have to wear N95/KN95 masks. Yeah, the entire population is not going to do that in like any country.
You ignore actual data and science...
I have excessive belief in vitamins and hostility to conventional medicine and you accuse me of peddling ivermectin and HCQ? That doesn't even make sense. Show me any drug that is doing any better than an individual that is healthy when getting covid? We know obesity is one of the biggest risk factors for covid, and you have complete control over not being obese. Eating healthy for 2 years would put anyone in a better place for covid than masking that does virtually nothing. I don't care what kind of things work, I just care that they work or don't work.
You effectively said vaccination and levels of immunity have negligible impact on the transmission of the virus in the population, which is laughably wrong.
Jesus Christ, your approach to data is so monumentally poor. You've quoted a couple of lines which acted as limited qualifications in the context of the entire study, and don't negate the conclusions at all, and used them to hand-wave the entire study and 4 or 5 other studies away. This is why people won't keep reposting evidence over and over to you.
You're provided evidence. Then you object to the evidence, on really shoddy and limited grounds, which says more about your lack of understanding of data than it does about the studies themselves. Half the time (as with most of the sources I gave there), you skip right over them, completely ignored. Then later, you'll come out with the same lie: "Nobody has presented any evidence ever!! If there's evidence, why won't anybody present it?!?!?"
And we'll have to say, yet again, that it was presented. You either ignored it entirely or objected based on failure of basic comprehension on your part.
But you don't trust Fauci, remember?
And in the 3 minute video from march I linked here, he said there's value in a "naturally immune" person getting vaccinated. Why are you ignoring that?
I did also say it was not extreme, and there are differing attitudes that contribute to ending up in that sort of ballpark. Your negative attitude to the vaccine and relentless talk about remdesivir are consistent with a certain degree of hostility to "Big Pharma", etc. (Reading around, at a lot of people promoting HCQ / IVM have track records in this area).
Firstly, the majority of people dying of covid are old, and many of them are healthy for their age.
Secondly, no a lot of people kind of do not have control over obesity, for a number of reasons. These can be things like genetics, mental health issues, iatrogenic causes, disability, poor education and much more. In an absolute sense, we could in a simplistic sense say that almost no-one has to be obese, but for many "control" is so difficult that it is extremely hard for them to deal with.
And I really don't want to hear the usual blaming, stigmatising shit against overweight people from others who are not and have a terrifying shortfall in their ability to empathise and imagine what it is to be another human being (never mind that studies suggest it is counterproductive to tackling obesity). Dealing with being overweight is frequently a complex and difficult intervention, and we don't have 2 years to sort this sort of thing out mid-pandemic.
And yet this is incredibly clearly not true. You pushed ivermectin for a long time on the basis of nothing, yet resolutely oppose remdesivir that objectively has a better evidence base. You are still fanatically opposing masks despite a good evidence base.
There is definitely something going on that means you are not neutrally assessing whether things work or not, which suggests there very much are external factors distorting your view.
I really wish this 'Covid will kill the Obese' thing would die. Obese is one of like 30 different co-morbidity indicators for dying of covid, most of the rest have nothing to do with 'being unhealthy'.
Another, way more important, comorbidity is being unvaccinated. That's way easier than dropping weight and far more effective
Actually pay attention to the science. I guess in your world, Paul Offit, the foremost vaccine expert in the US is laughably wrong. It's literally impossible based on the incubation time to prevent infection.
https://zdoggmd.com/paul-offit-9/ (~36:30
But I’m trying to figure out a nice way to say this, who cares? The goal is preventing severe illness. It’s okay, we’re gonna have to get used to mild illness. This is a short incubation period, mucosal, respiratory infection. It has an incubation period of whatever, four to six days. That is short, and so while you may have great memory responses, it takes too much time for activation of those memory cells to become, say, in the case of memory, B cells, antibody screening cells, to prevent a mild infection. I mean, you need a long incubation period, two to three weeks in order to, for that to happen, which is what happens with measles. You can eliminate measles because it has a long incubation period, meaning two to three weeks.
How is any of those sources you posted better evidence than the RCTs?
But you guys trust Fauci and he said masks don't work. Also, what's even the point of a mask mandate with what we know. 1) You ain't going to get people to wear N95s, 2) If someone wants protection they can wear the N95 and be protected, 3) Having everyone wearing masks that don't help in community transmission is accomplishing what (except forcing your beliefs on others)?
I'm not. The CDC numbers say there is only a very very very slight increase in protection in hybrid immunity (the lines on the chart are basically on top of each other with only natural immunity vs hybrid immunity). If I'm protected against severe disease, why would I care about having an ever-so-slightly more protection? Why would you force people to get something that's every so slightly providing an extremely little protection. Why not force people to not drink pop, that will save far more lives than forcing these vaccines.
I don't have a negative attitude towards the vaccine. I have a negative attitude to being forced to get something I didn't need to get. I bring up remdesivir because it didn't have any more data than ivermectin did but one was being given out like candy and the other was demonized. Even the WHO for the longest didn't recommended giving patients remdesivir. The standard for evidence should be the same and it wasn't, that has always been my point.
You do have total control over your own diet. You don't have to drink pop, eat fries, eat fast food, drink dessert in a cup every morning. What stigmatizing or blaming? You control what goes in your body, that is the truth. Just tonight, I got a burger at the restuarant and substituted the fries for soup and they still gave me the fries. And I only ate literally one fry, it's not nearly that hard.
Fauci literally said masks don't work....
And diet is the direct cause for most co-morbidities, but let's not talk about diet because it can hurt people's feelings... Type 2 diabetes is one of the main risk factors for severe covid. How the fuck do you think you get type 2 diabetes?
So have you been vaccinated against covid?
Oh yes it did have better data.
Ivermectin has never had a robust study in support of its use but remdesivir did, even if the advantage demonstrated in that early study was relatively small. Subsequent evidence has then further defended a modest benefit from remdesivir, and no benefit from ivermectin. That remdesivir was relatively heavily used in the USA is more a quirk of the USA's healthcare system that it takes very little account of cost effectiveness (and hence part of the reason US healthcare is eye-wateringly expensive).
Sure. And likewise you have control over whether you base your knowledge on reading high quality scientific papers and drawing reasonable and accurate information from them... and yet you rarely do.
So you see, it's not always that easy to exercise that control, is it?
A small technical truth to conceal a huge dishonesty. He said very early on in the pandemic not to wear a mask, and then he changed his mind with more evidence.
Yeah because I was forced to, and I didn't get one of the mRNA ones either.
The Solidarity Trial showed it didn't work. The WHO said not to give it to patients. There was quite a period of time where both drugs had no good data showing they worked.
Figuring out what's good to eat and not good to eat isn't rocket science.
No, Fauci said that literally yesterday or the day before that in the video I posted. He said you need (K)N95 masks.
...
Fast turn around in that. Only got approved, what, this month?
Regular masks stop you from spreading, (K)N95s stop you from getting.
Unless Asia in general is wrong.
I got the J&J because 1) it is one and done and 2) it was the one with the least adverse effects for my group. I assume you're talking about Novavax because guess what the stupid mandates did. Those that were in the Novavax trial and got vaccinated didn't count as being vaccinated for the mandates and were forced to get vaccinated again to comply.
1) That's not what Fauci said. He said in transmission you need a N95. 2) No, they don't, the RCTs show that.
Just because Asia does something makes it right? There's never been any data saying masking has worked for even the flu. Or maybe Japan did far better (mortality wise, not case wise) because their population is far healthier than the US, but no, it must be the masking!!!
I mean, there was a reason why i didnt reply this message to you. You were always going to clearly misunderstand what I wrote