Left-wing people are oblivious to the concept of their own credibility.
That's not a snide remark. It's an important truth. It belongs right alongside all the other Cluster-B talk people engage in regarding the Left. They don't merely underappreciate the impact of their credibility on the conversations they're outraged about; they're oblivious to it.
They simply can't engage on the fact that when their "truth is subjective; words are power constructs" doctrine gets caught spitting out a lie, people stop believing them. Growing vaccine skepticism can't be their fault, even a little bit, because they didn't author it!
I suppose I could generalize their obliviousness to that of "indirect consequences" as a whole (tons of evidence for that one in their... entire platform throughout history...), but for now let's stick to the fact that they simply can't even begin to grapple with the fact that people don't align with them because they're known habitual liars.
The Boy Who Cried Wolf can't believe that nobody is coming to help fight off the wolf anymore.
Related comment: In 2020, some people decided to believe that COVID-19 didn't even exist at all. They had only one reason for feeling this way: The fact that the Left hyped it so much. They didn't get it from right-wing thought leaders - certainly not President Warp Speed.
Who on the Left would ever even slightly entertain the idea that the Left, not the Right, was the cause of this conspiracy theory?
Leftism in practice (Democrat Party elites) is little more than controlled opposition, funded by globalists, oligarchs, including pharma oligarchs and various other billionaires, such as tech billionaires and international finance.
The Pritzkers for example are both corrupt Democrats and corrupt Pharma oligarchs.
That creates a situation where power tends to flow to the most sociopathic and psychopathic (and sadistic, narcissistic) personality types and away from more sane people.
---
Why "cultural leftism" (piety/status/virtue signaling "cancel culture") is a magnet for mental dysfunction and SADISM under postmodern social conditions.
Dark Triad experiment successfully replicated and enhanced (adding sadism).
yaschamounk. substack. com /p/the-cruelty-is-the-point
excerpts:
... the paper by Bates et al also adds the missing piece of the puzzle. The “willingness to assert victimhood,” they hypothesize, may also “be amplified by the motive of sadistic pleasure in the downfall of weakened opponents.” In other words, the people who invoke the need to defend victims in order to justify treating others poorly don’t necessarily have a concrete strategic goal in mind; some of them do so because they are looking for a socially sanctioned outlet for their sadistic instincts. In those cases, the cruelty is the point.
Every community, however noble its stated intentions and however progressive its purported values, needs a mechanism for defending itself against the small minority of people who are prone to exploit and manipulate their social environment. If yours doesn’t have one, it’s inviting the sadists, the narcissists and the psychopaths to run the show.
---
PSYCH RESEARCH SHOWS CORRELATION OF LEFTISM TO SADISM
To play devil's advocate, wasn't the COVID vaccine targeting specifically the more lethal Alpha and Beta strains, and thus its efficacy would fall off for later strains? I wouldn't have gotten the vaccine if I didn't live close to a major international airport, but it made sense to me at the time, given how seemingly dangerous yet downplayed the Alpha strain was.
I did not get the vaccine. At first that was because I am healthy and my reading indicated it affected the old. When mandates were discussed, my response became, "try to inject anything in me and I'll shoot you." I did not experimental untested drugs in college. They all had a track record!
I had Covid at least twice, never missed work, and took the dogs on a 3 mile walk on the worst day. It sucked that it made coffee taste bad. No change in whiskey though.
Note: I work from home, so no one else to pass it to.
The devil would have a better chance of benefiting from this advocacy if he weren't still pushing that jab even now, though.
I.e.: Yes, that's not a bad point, perhaps, but it only applies for the first six months of the event, maybe. And it's also still not a "vaccine" by the traditional measure irrespective of that.
THANK YOU! I am sick of being labeled an antivaxxer for pointing out these shots (flu and COVID) are of little benefit and that the COVID shots can really hurt people.
I am not anti-vax, but like the article asserts, I am anti-whatever-the-current-thing is. I have also been a recipient of Flu Vaccine in the past 10 years, 3 times. Every time I got that shot, I got slightly sick following and then caught some variant of the flu a couple months later. The 7 years I didn't get that shot? Magically, no flu, barely even a head cold. Because of this, I didn't trust C19, because I read the medical spots on it and I heard the same numbers and same propaganda. I'm glad I didn't, even though I got Covid twice. Both times were relatively flu-like in symptoms. I'm no paragon of health, I have chronic issues. But, the anecdotal evidence of my coworkers and their familial members suddenly presenting with illnesses (as documented by newer findings) that have no family history of, I'm glad I didn't take that "thing" (it's a crime to call it a vaccine).
The "industry" has made itself a mockery, and they wonder why they lose credibility with every little line they draw. Own your mistakes, restore accountability, and maybe just maybe, you restore the trust.
Having chronic issues is a good reason to avoid any vaccines and quite frankly, if the medical profession employed professionals instead of hack technicians, they'd tell people that.
I like the Seasonal Flu Effectiveness chart. In 2020-2021, the CDC said, “yea, instead of trying to suss out the effectiveness of this year’s ‘vaccine’ we should opine about systemic racism.”
Remember when COVID the strains were named after the countries in which they originated, and then changed to avoid seeming insensitive? I have a theory that I haven't quite been able to flesh out or name yet; but the basis is, that any broad acts that make a moderate like me eye-roll are probably bad for your movement. The left has been incredibly adept at shrinking their own tent.
I hate to break it to you but in the early 90s at CSU in north central Colorado, there was a big measles outbreak at the university. Of course they used it to try to push for more vaccinations and enforce their "policy" on all students being fully vaccinated/boosted.
BUT, and that but is a very big but - the outbreak was *largely* amoungst The Fully Vaccinated, and NOT coming from the small percentage of unboosted/unvaccinated students.
A few years later a friend of mine, who knew I was against most vaccines, asked me to be her "spiritual advisor" since the state allowed for a religious exemption at the time and the university was harassing her about her not having her boosters up to date. I told her to tell them that she knew that the measles outbreak had been about 80% amougst the fully jabbed and that she wasn't a risk to the school. The administrator she was talking to was honest enough to mumble, "Actually the percentage was about 84% vaccinated."
Aaaannndddd.....I am guessing this is largely true in many other measles "outbreaks", regardless of what the lies, damned lies, and statistics say.
I'm fine with vaccines for really dangerous diseases, but measles, mumps, rubella, and chickenpox are not dangerous diseases - especially when we allow children to get them and develop their natural immunities.
Link? But also, hang on, if 16% of the cases were from unvaccinated people, but only say 8% of the population was unvaccinated, that would mean the unvaccinated were twice as likely to be infected...
Also, 450 kids per year died of measles before the vaccine. I'll leave it to you to look up how many died of mumps and rubella. Why would you want to go back to that?
Dear Handwaving Freakoutery, I clicked on your 'buy the author 182 cloth face masks' but your link doesn't have a 'make a one time donation' option. You should add one!
I wish substack had a 'heart++' option or something --like 'tip jars'. I see articles on substack all the time that really are exceptional, it seems like a real shame that substack doesn't even have the option to give some $$ to express our appreciation.
"Antivaxxers are getting people killed, and provaxxers are empowering the antivaxxers by using the same pseudo-religious approach to the topic instead of sticking to the science...This constant virtue seeking behavior has infected the entire vaccine discussion"
Maybe we need a new nomenclature to reset this discussion and move away from things like "anti vs pro" language.
Focusing on covid mostly, do you think there's no value in medication (if you don't call it vaccine) that reduces the severity of symptoms, probability of hospitalisation etc etc quite significantly, and a probability of getting infected/developing symptoms at all by a third?
Or is your point mostly about communication that treats covid vaccine the same as a smallpox one?
If Covid were rampant and much worse for you than it currently is, and natural immunity wasn't 3 times better than the vaccine, then I can maybe see a case for getting Covid jabbed twice a year. I'm not against vaccines. Just against pretending shit tier vaccines are as good as the measles vaccine.
The claim that the vaccine reduces symptoms or need for hospitalization is at best a guess. We simply don’t know. I had the first two but finally got Covid earlier this year. Without the swab test as I entered the hospital for another procedure I would have never known. I am not a younger person but use vitamins and watch diet. Covid seems to vary a lot with individuals.
My wish is for our authorities to try to better understand our varied responses. One size fits all failed.
Early vaccines are guilty until proven innocent for causing the massive increase in food allergies. This does not mean get rid off all early vaccines. If a bad disease significantly hits infants or toddlers, jab away. Whooping cough and tetanus would fall in this category, IMO. Puncture wounds happen.
But hepatitis B? If the mother tests positive, by all means vaccinate. But otherwise it's safe to say that few infants and toddlers will be into intravenous drugs or unsanitary sexual practices. Am I missing something here?
Sure, but then you have to account for the idea that we're all going to be exposed to diseases like flu or covid, and therefore it makes sense that a lower efficacy would be applied to these highly-communicated diseases.
Or, that was true with covid. Now that we've all had it, shouldn't I expect the "vaccine" efficacy to fall at the same time we expect the CDC's threshold to increase?
I don't know, but if I recall the two studies linked in the article correctly, the two measles spikes pre-2020 were indeed among immigrant populations.
"When I buy ballistic body armor I do not want to have to flip a coin to see whether it stops the bullet. I don’t want airbags that only activate on “heads” but not “tails.” I don’t want smoke detectors that only work on odd days of the week"
Whether it's what you want or not, that's precisely what you're doing. To butcher dumb and dumber, when you wear body armor, you're taking a risk of getting shot in the face. People still die in car accidents despite airbags. People still die in fires despite having smoke detectors.
I appreciate your research and analysis here, but imo it's not as good as what I normally see from you - you're using the same arbitrary 50% threshold the cdc "pulled out of a hat" rather than a cost-benefit analysis like you usually do. Is a 36% reduction in covid worth the hour of hassle and risk of side effects for different age groups or not? That's how i'd expect you to frame the question.
Other sidenotes - You're right the messaging could be better, but i think you're being too hard on companies that make vaccines - it's hard work because viruses mutate all the time, and as far as I know thier margins are not very high at all.
> To butcher dumb and dumber, when you wear body armor, you're taking a risk of getting shot in the face.
Except of course that's not what he's talking about. He's talking about getting shot *in the armor* and it having only a 50% chance of stopping the bullet. Your analogy is more akin to "You got a tetanus vaccine, but you still got measles anyway."
> Is a 36% reduction in covid worth the hour of hassle and risk of side effects for different age groups or not?
Is a 36% reduction in covid effects worth destroying the meaning of the term "vaccine"? Name it accurately, tell people the up and down sides of getting it, don't federally mandate *firing people* for *not* getting it, and you'll probably see a lot less hostility towards it.
Warmek answers this well I think. I can see how the current jab might be worth getting for very old people or for people with blood cancers, and so forth. The word "vaccine" carries a strong weight with it, and at this point of definitional debasement we might as well call Claratin a pine pollen vaccine. Actually it probably works better.
Since when did the definition of a vaccine become “a single injection that prevents all disease?” Maybe this is how the lay public thinks, but you obviously know that vaccines, like every other medicine, are named not based upon some threshold of efficacy but rather based on their innate characteristics (e.g., chemical class, mechanism of action, biological system affected, therapeutic effect, route of administration).
Also, pharma companies make far, far more money from patent-protected repeat use meds like GLP-1 agonists than from public domain single dose vaccines. This is another simple fact that shouldn’t be in dispute.
America’s public health bureaucracy certainly trashed their credibility during COVID. But they did it not through poor naming of therapeutic agents or regulatory capture by the pharmaceutical industry. Instead, they unabashedly flaunted their politics, pandered exclusively to the fears of their fellow partisans, and, like all good bureaucrats, couldn’t restrain their glee when given the opportunity to exercise a little power.
I mostly agree with you (I haven't gotten any covid shot past the first two because the side effects were pretty rough from the second one) but I guess I just don't put as much weight in the word vaccine - it's useful for some people, so what would you call it instead? I also don't think it's fair to assume the pharma companies allow the vaccines to be ineffective because they don't care - seems to me it's just hard because viruses mutate all the time.
Yeah I wondered that, but according to Google AI, that wasn't true in every case. I just feel like it's easy to be abackseat driver and complain vaccines aren't effective enough, even though companies are working hard to make them them better (for money sure, but sitill...)
Yes, companies that failed to bring a COVID-19 vaccine to market, or whose vaccines performed poorly, faced significant financial losses. However, the extent of the losses depended on factors like government funding, existing company size, and ability to pivot to other products.
Companies with failed candidates
Merck: This company was forced to abandon its two COVID-19 vaccine candidates after they failed in trials. While this was a major misstep, the company's diversified portfolio meant it continued to grow and see its stock price rise. Merck's failure stands in contrast to its success with the COVID-19 antiviral pill, molnupiravir, which offset some of its vaccine losses.
CureVac: The German biotech company's stock fell dramatically after its initial vaccine candidate, CVnCoV, showed disappointing 47% efficacy in a 2021 trial. The company discontinued the candidate but later received financial relief by partnering with GlaxoSmithKline (GSK).
Novavax: Though it eventually developed a viable protein-based vaccine, Novavax struggled with manufacturing and regulatory delays, leading to significant financial challenges and a decline in its stock value. The company had to issue a press release in 2023 expressing doubt about its ability to continue operations without more funding.
Companies with approved but unsuccessful vaccines
Even companies that successfully brought a vaccine to market could lose money if it struggled to gain market share.
AstraZeneca: Although its vaccine was widely distributed globally and saved millions of lives, AstraZeneca never filed for authorization in the US, and a very rare side effect dampened its uptake in some places. Because the company had provided its vaccine at no profit during the pandemic, the effort initially drained its earnings, although it eventually broke even. AstraZeneca's stock has since performed well thanks to its strong portfolio of other drugs, particularly in oncology.
Johnson & Johnson: The single-dose J&J vaccine also saw limited use due to concerns about rare side effects. While the company's stock has risen since the start of the pandemic, it received far less financial benefit from its vaccine than its competitors.
Factors that influenced financial outcomes
Government funding: For many companies, government aid significantly de-risked the development process. Taxpayer dollars funded much of the research and manufacturing for the successful mRNA vaccines and reduced the financial risk for companies like Moderna. Governments also used advance purchase agreements to reduce market risk for vaccine developers.
Portfolio diversification: For large, established pharmaceutical companies like Merck, AstraZeneca, and Johnson & Johnson, a failed or struggling COVID-19 vaccine was a setback, but it was cushioned by a large, diversified portfolio of other successful drugs.
Investor response: Investors often moved money in real-time based on news of clinical trial results. Some investors even made short-term, high-risk bets on smaller biotech firms like Novavax and Moderna during the pandemic. Ultimately, stock market performance varied widely based on success and failures.
Thanks for the data on failed vaccines. Risky business. Heard Gates won big on Moderna returning 20:1 profit. But that was then. Moderna awaits future success. At the time Moderna had an inside track.
Very very technically, a "vaccine" is a substance introduced into the body through the skin. An "IMMUNISATION" is a process the confers or increases immunity, regardless of what method is used to do the immunisation. A "vaccine" does not have to be beneficial to be a vaccine, it is a method. An immunisation vaccine is a substance introduced through the skin to confer or increase immunity. You can vaccination somebody to make them ill, but it is still a vaccine.
Left-wing people are oblivious to the concept of their own credibility.
That's not a snide remark. It's an important truth. It belongs right alongside all the other Cluster-B talk people engage in regarding the Left. They don't merely underappreciate the impact of their credibility on the conversations they're outraged about; they're oblivious to it.
They simply can't engage on the fact that when their "truth is subjective; words are power constructs" doctrine gets caught spitting out a lie, people stop believing them. Growing vaccine skepticism can't be their fault, even a little bit, because they didn't author it!
I suppose I could generalize their obliviousness to that of "indirect consequences" as a whole (tons of evidence for that one in their... entire platform throughout history...), but for now let's stick to the fact that they simply can't even begin to grapple with the fact that people don't align with them because they're known habitual liars.
The Boy Who Cried Wolf can't believe that nobody is coming to help fight off the wolf anymore.
Related comment: In 2020, some people decided to believe that COVID-19 didn't even exist at all. They had only one reason for feeling this way: The fact that the Left hyped it so much. They didn't get it from right-wing thought leaders - certainly not President Warp Speed.
Who on the Left would ever even slightly entertain the idea that the Left, not the Right, was the cause of this conspiracy theory?
> Who on the Left would ever even slightly entertain the idea that the Left, not the Right, was the cause of this conspiracy theory?
Congratulations, you made me actually laugh out loud here reading this and imagining it. 🤣
Leftism in practice (Democrat Party elites) is little more than controlled opposition, funded by globalists, oligarchs, including pharma oligarchs and various other billionaires, such as tech billionaires and international finance.
The Pritzkers for example are both corrupt Democrats and corrupt Pharma oligarchs.
That creates a situation where power tends to flow to the most sociopathic and psychopathic (and sadistic, narcissistic) personality types and away from more sane people.
---
Why "cultural leftism" (piety/status/virtue signaling "cancel culture") is a magnet for mental dysfunction and SADISM under postmodern social conditions.
Dark Triad experiment successfully replicated and enhanced (adding sadism).
https://yaschamounk.substack.com/p/the-cruelty-is-the-point
yaschamounk. substack. com /p/the-cruelty-is-the-point
excerpts:
... the paper by Bates et al also adds the missing piece of the puzzle. The “willingness to assert victimhood,” they hypothesize, may also “be amplified by the motive of sadistic pleasure in the downfall of weakened opponents.” In other words, the people who invoke the need to defend victims in order to justify treating others poorly don’t necessarily have a concrete strategic goal in mind; some of them do so because they are looking for a socially sanctioned outlet for their sadistic instincts. In those cases, the cruelty is the point.
Every community, however noble its stated intentions and however progressive its purported values, needs a mechanism for defending itself against the small minority of people who are prone to exploit and manipulate their social environment. If yours doesn’t have one, it’s inviting the sadists, the narcissists and the psychopaths to run the show.
---
PSYCH RESEARCH SHOWS CORRELATION OF LEFTISM TO SADISM
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886924004240
www. sciencedirect. com /science/article/pii/S0191886924004240
excerpt:
Highlights
• Tested association of virtuous victim signalling with Dark traits
• Two studies (N = 1500), preregistered hypothesis tests and open data
• Strong association of virtuous-victim signalling with Dark Triad
• Virtuous-victim signals strongly predicted by Narcissism & Machiavellianism.
• Study 3 showed Sadism predicts attacking those accused of victimization.
...
To play devil's advocate, wasn't the COVID vaccine targeting specifically the more lethal Alpha and Beta strains, and thus its efficacy would fall off for later strains? I wouldn't have gotten the vaccine if I didn't live close to a major international airport, but it made sense to me at the time, given how seemingly dangerous yet downplayed the Alpha strain was.
I got the vaccine because I figured I did so many untested experimental drugs in college that one more wouldn't hurt. 🙂
Just a wonderful article.
I did not get the vaccine. At first that was because I am healthy and my reading indicated it affected the old. When mandates were discussed, my response became, "try to inject anything in me and I'll shoot you." I did not experimental untested drugs in college. They all had a track record!
I had Covid at least twice, never missed work, and took the dogs on a 3 mile walk on the worst day. It sucked that it made coffee taste bad. No change in whiskey though.
Note: I work from home, so no one else to pass it to.
The devil would have a better chance of benefiting from this advocacy if he weren't still pushing that jab even now, though.
I.e.: Yes, that's not a bad point, perhaps, but it only applies for the first six months of the event, maybe. And it's also still not a "vaccine" by the traditional measure irrespective of that.
Regardless of what the vaccine actually does their communication about it is the issue
The highest case fatality rate was for Beta at 4.2%, whereas Omicron was at 0.7% according to https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/among-sars-cov-2-variants-beta-had-highest-death-rate-meta-analysis-suggests and thence earlier strains are the ones I care about. The media being filled with lying retarded propagandists who can't comprehend the subject matter they're reporting on is completely beside the point here.
THANK YOU! I am sick of being labeled an antivaxxer for pointing out these shots (flu and COVID) are of little benefit and that the COVID shots can really hurt people.
I am not anti-vax, but like the article asserts, I am anti-whatever-the-current-thing is. I have also been a recipient of Flu Vaccine in the past 10 years, 3 times. Every time I got that shot, I got slightly sick following and then caught some variant of the flu a couple months later. The 7 years I didn't get that shot? Magically, no flu, barely even a head cold. Because of this, I didn't trust C19, because I read the medical spots on it and I heard the same numbers and same propaganda. I'm glad I didn't, even though I got Covid twice. Both times were relatively flu-like in symptoms. I'm no paragon of health, I have chronic issues. But, the anecdotal evidence of my coworkers and their familial members suddenly presenting with illnesses (as documented by newer findings) that have no family history of, I'm glad I didn't take that "thing" (it's a crime to call it a vaccine).
The "industry" has made itself a mockery, and they wonder why they lose credibility with every little line they draw. Own your mistakes, restore accountability, and maybe just maybe, you restore the trust.
Having chronic issues is a good reason to avoid any vaccines and quite frankly, if the medical profession employed professionals instead of hack technicians, they'd tell people that.
Any thoughts on the possibility this could at least partially stem from importing a bunch of folks who were never vaccinated?
I like the Seasonal Flu Effectiveness chart. In 2020-2021, the CDC said, “yea, instead of trying to suss out the effectiveness of this year’s ‘vaccine’ we should opine about systemic racism.”
Remember when COVID the strains were named after the countries in which they originated, and then changed to avoid seeming insensitive? I have a theory that I haven't quite been able to flesh out or name yet; but the basis is, that any broad acts that make a moderate like me eye-roll are probably bad for your movement. The left has been incredibly adept at shrinking their own tent.
I hate to break it to you but in the early 90s at CSU in north central Colorado, there was a big measles outbreak at the university. Of course they used it to try to push for more vaccinations and enforce their "policy" on all students being fully vaccinated/boosted.
BUT, and that but is a very big but - the outbreak was *largely* amoungst The Fully Vaccinated, and NOT coming from the small percentage of unboosted/unvaccinated students.
A few years later a friend of mine, who knew I was against most vaccines, asked me to be her "spiritual advisor" since the state allowed for a religious exemption at the time and the university was harassing her about her not having her boosters up to date. I told her to tell them that she knew that the measles outbreak had been about 80% amougst the fully jabbed and that she wasn't a risk to the school. The administrator she was talking to was honest enough to mumble, "Actually the percentage was about 84% vaccinated."
Aaaannndddd.....I am guessing this is largely true in many other measles "outbreaks", regardless of what the lies, damned lies, and statistics say.
I'm fine with vaccines for really dangerous diseases, but measles, mumps, rubella, and chickenpox are not dangerous diseases - especially when we allow children to get them and develop their natural immunities.
Link? But also, hang on, if 16% of the cases were from unvaccinated people, but only say 8% of the population was unvaccinated, that would mean the unvaccinated were twice as likely to be infected...
Also, 450 kids per year died of measles before the vaccine. I'll leave it to you to look up how many died of mumps and rubella. Why would you want to go back to that?
Dear Handwaving Freakoutery, I clicked on your 'buy the author 182 cloth face masks' but your link doesn't have a 'make a one time donation' option. You should add one!
I'll send you my address for cloth mask delivery. 🙂
I wish substack had a 'heart++' option or something --like 'tip jars'. I see articles on substack all the time that really are exceptional, it seems like a real shame that substack doesn't even have the option to give some $$ to express our appreciation.
Absolutely Brilliant!
Love this line:
"Antivaxxers are getting people killed, and provaxxers are empowering the antivaxxers by using the same pseudo-religious approach to the topic instead of sticking to the science...This constant virtue seeking behavior has infected the entire vaccine discussion"
Maybe we need a new nomenclature to reset this discussion and move away from things like "anti vs pro" language.
Thank you very much.
Focusing on covid mostly, do you think there's no value in medication (if you don't call it vaccine) that reduces the severity of symptoms, probability of hospitalisation etc etc quite significantly, and a probability of getting infected/developing symptoms at all by a third?
Or is your point mostly about communication that treats covid vaccine the same as a smallpox one?
If Covid were rampant and much worse for you than it currently is, and natural immunity wasn't 3 times better than the vaccine, then I can maybe see a case for getting Covid jabbed twice a year. I'm not against vaccines. Just against pretending shit tier vaccines are as good as the measles vaccine.
The claim that the vaccine reduces symptoms or need for hospitalization is at best a guess. We simply don’t know. I had the first two but finally got Covid earlier this year. Without the swab test as I entered the hospital for another procedure I would have never known. I am not a younger person but use vitamins and watch diet. Covid seems to vary a lot with individuals.
My wish is for our authorities to try to better understand our varied responses. One size fits all failed.
Early vaccines are guilty until proven innocent for causing the massive increase in food allergies. This does not mean get rid off all early vaccines. If a bad disease significantly hits infants or toddlers, jab away. Whooping cough and tetanus would fall in this category, IMO. Puncture wounds happen.
But hepatitis B? If the mother tests positive, by all means vaccinate. But otherwise it's safe to say that few infants and toddlers will be into intravenous drugs or unsanitary sexual practices. Am I missing something here?
Some risk/reward calculations are in order.
Sure, but then you have to account for the idea that we're all going to be exposed to diseases like flu or covid, and therefore it makes sense that a lower efficacy would be applied to these highly-communicated diseases.
Or, that was true with covid. Now that we've all had it, shouldn't I expect the "vaccine" efficacy to fall at the same time we expect the CDC's threshold to increase?
Re: measles infection rates. Is there any data outlining vaccination rates among the migrant population the US has received since 2020?
I don't know, but if I recall the two studies linked in the article correctly, the two measles spikes pre-2020 were indeed among immigrant populations.
"When I buy ballistic body armor I do not want to have to flip a coin to see whether it stops the bullet. I don’t want airbags that only activate on “heads” but not “tails.” I don’t want smoke detectors that only work on odd days of the week"
Whether it's what you want or not, that's precisely what you're doing. To butcher dumb and dumber, when you wear body armor, you're taking a risk of getting shot in the face. People still die in car accidents despite airbags. People still die in fires despite having smoke detectors.
I appreciate your research and analysis here, but imo it's not as good as what I normally see from you - you're using the same arbitrary 50% threshold the cdc "pulled out of a hat" rather than a cost-benefit analysis like you usually do. Is a 36% reduction in covid worth the hour of hassle and risk of side effects for different age groups or not? That's how i'd expect you to frame the question.
Other sidenotes - You're right the messaging could be better, but i think you're being too hard on companies that make vaccines - it's hard work because viruses mutate all the time, and as far as I know thier margins are not very high at all.
> To butcher dumb and dumber, when you wear body armor, you're taking a risk of getting shot in the face.
Except of course that's not what he's talking about. He's talking about getting shot *in the armor* and it having only a 50% chance of stopping the bullet. Your analogy is more akin to "You got a tetanus vaccine, but you still got measles anyway."
> Is a 36% reduction in covid worth the hour of hassle and risk of side effects for different age groups or not?
Is a 36% reduction in covid effects worth destroying the meaning of the term "vaccine"? Name it accurately, tell people the up and down sides of getting it, don't federally mandate *firing people* for *not* getting it, and you'll probably see a lot less hostility towards it.
Warmek answers this well I think. I can see how the current jab might be worth getting for very old people or for people with blood cancers, and so forth. The word "vaccine" carries a strong weight with it, and at this point of definitional debasement we might as well call Claratin a pine pollen vaccine. Actually it probably works better.
Since when did the definition of a vaccine become “a single injection that prevents all disease?” Maybe this is how the lay public thinks, but you obviously know that vaccines, like every other medicine, are named not based upon some threshold of efficacy but rather based on their innate characteristics (e.g., chemical class, mechanism of action, biological system affected, therapeutic effect, route of administration).
Also, pharma companies make far, far more money from patent-protected repeat use meds like GLP-1 agonists than from public domain single dose vaccines. This is another simple fact that shouldn’t be in dispute.
America’s public health bureaucracy certainly trashed their credibility during COVID. But they did it not through poor naming of therapeutic agents or regulatory capture by the pharmaceutical industry. Instead, they unabashedly flaunted their politics, pandered exclusively to the fears of their fellow partisans, and, like all good bureaucrats, couldn’t restrain their glee when given the opportunity to exercise a little power.
They are in fact named based on a threshold of efficacy of preventing spread of the disease. Or at least they were up until 2019.
Congratulations on achieving metaphysical certitude.
The WHO sets the thresholds in fact.
I mostly agree with you (I haven't gotten any covid shot past the first two because the side effects were pretty rough from the second one) but I guess I just don't put as much weight in the word vaccine - it's useful for some people, so what would you call it instead? I also don't think it's fair to assume the pharma companies allow the vaccines to be ineffective because they don't care - seems to me it's just hard because viruses mutate all the time.
Margins from Covid gave Pfizer ~30% profit. Now returned to ~20%. Not as profitable as Apple but better than Exxon.
But also curious where you're seeing those numbers - i couldn't find them
Used grok for profit by year.
A dozen other companies lost a bunch of money trying and failing to make a working covid vaccine. Profits are how we reward risk taking in capitalism.
As I recall the government picked up all the costs even for the failed trials
Yeah I wondered that, but according to Google AI, that wasn't true in every case. I just feel like it's easy to be abackseat driver and complain vaccines aren't effective enough, even though companies are working hard to make them them better (for money sure, but sitill...)
Yes, companies that failed to bring a COVID-19 vaccine to market, or whose vaccines performed poorly, faced significant financial losses. However, the extent of the losses depended on factors like government funding, existing company size, and ability to pivot to other products.
Companies with failed candidates
Merck: This company was forced to abandon its two COVID-19 vaccine candidates after they failed in trials. While this was a major misstep, the company's diversified portfolio meant it continued to grow and see its stock price rise. Merck's failure stands in contrast to its success with the COVID-19 antiviral pill, molnupiravir, which offset some of its vaccine losses.
CureVac: The German biotech company's stock fell dramatically after its initial vaccine candidate, CVnCoV, showed disappointing 47% efficacy in a 2021 trial. The company discontinued the candidate but later received financial relief by partnering with GlaxoSmithKline (GSK).
Novavax: Though it eventually developed a viable protein-based vaccine, Novavax struggled with manufacturing and regulatory delays, leading to significant financial challenges and a decline in its stock value. The company had to issue a press release in 2023 expressing doubt about its ability to continue operations without more funding.
Companies with approved but unsuccessful vaccines
Even companies that successfully brought a vaccine to market could lose money if it struggled to gain market share.
AstraZeneca: Although its vaccine was widely distributed globally and saved millions of lives, AstraZeneca never filed for authorization in the US, and a very rare side effect dampened its uptake in some places. Because the company had provided its vaccine at no profit during the pandemic, the effort initially drained its earnings, although it eventually broke even. AstraZeneca's stock has since performed well thanks to its strong portfolio of other drugs, particularly in oncology.
Johnson & Johnson: The single-dose J&J vaccine also saw limited use due to concerns about rare side effects. While the company's stock has risen since the start of the pandemic, it received far less financial benefit from its vaccine than its competitors.
Factors that influenced financial outcomes
Government funding: For many companies, government aid significantly de-risked the development process. Taxpayer dollars funded much of the research and manufacturing for the successful mRNA vaccines and reduced the financial risk for companies like Moderna. Governments also used advance purchase agreements to reduce market risk for vaccine developers.
Portfolio diversification: For large, established pharmaceutical companies like Merck, AstraZeneca, and Johnson & Johnson, a failed or struggling COVID-19 vaccine was a setback, but it was cushioned by a large, diversified portfolio of other successful drugs.
Investor response: Investors often moved money in real-time based on news of clinical trial results. Some investors even made short-term, high-risk bets on smaller biotech firms like Novavax and Moderna during the pandemic. Ultimately, stock market performance varied widely based on success and failures.
Thanks for the data on failed vaccines. Risky business. Heard Gates won big on Moderna returning 20:1 profit. But that was then. Moderna awaits future success. At the time Moderna had an inside track.
Very very technically, a "vaccine" is a substance introduced into the body through the skin. An "IMMUNISATION" is a process the confers or increases immunity, regardless of what method is used to do the immunisation. A "vaccine" does not have to be beneficial to be a vaccine, it is a method. An immunisation vaccine is a substance introduced through the skin to confer or increase immunity. You can vaccination somebody to make them ill, but it is still a vaccine.
All vaccines are dangerous period