The religious fervor surrounding the vaccines is surreal. I'm still trying to understand the psychology and passion which drove so many seemingly intelligent people to become foot soldiers in a crusade on behalf of Pfizer and Moderna.
Circa pre Covid19 era, roughly 1,000 years in twitter time, I often found myself calming down far left friends who were convinced all pharmaceutical companies were evil incarnates of unfettered capitalism, who's few benefit were far outweighed by their greed and corruption. Meanwhile my right leaning friends would be the ones to argue the 'Free Market' kept Pharm in check - mistakes might be made, but The Market would course correct.
Now I feel like we are in The Simpsons dome [1] and the camps immediately ran to the others position.
What is driving this? I understood, or at least, I *thought* I understood The Sunk Cost Fallacy, tribalism, Cognitive Dissonance, and Gestalt processing - and how all of these coalesce into "True Believer Syndrome". I've read When Prophecy Fails and many other accounts and thought "ok well we are too smart for that to happen now outside of a few pockets of loons here or there"...
I'm just stunned how wrong I was. If I could travel back in time just 3 years to explain to past self what will happen.... past self would think future self is absolutely deranged and it wasn't possible that the vast majority of the world would stake their careers, reputations, health, and friendships over the fastest ever to-market drug which at best increases your survival odds from 99.7 to 99.74.
And Paul even in this piece you still might have missed some highlights! [2], [3], [4], [5]
FULL DISCLOSURE: My kids and I are fully up to date on regular vaccines. I used to spend a disproportionate amount of time debating traditional anti-vaxxers. As a rule of thumb though, I generally don't take new products until they've been on the market several years/decades.
The small caveat I would add is that until a few weeks after the rollout began, the medical community was not aware of the problem of the vaccine waning.
For example, that's what Dr Jay Bhattacharya mentioned in this interview (you can watch for 2 minutes)
"The end point of the the trial was it stopped symptomatic disease. I thought how big a leap is it to say that it also stops infections at all. It turns out it was a big leap, and for the first couple of months after you're vaccinated it does reduce infection rates. There's still I think up to like 70% of efficacy against infection rates but by four or five months afterwards it drops very sharply and by about five months the protection against infection is very very small."
But still (as Jay says in the interview), the scientific community had enough information to see the vaccines were not preventing transmission by March 2021. Why governments worldwide still decided to go for vaccine mandates well beyond that stage is a big question.
Apologies if I bungled terminologies somewhere - I don't have any background in biology or medicine.
Yes. Part of the problem here is that normal vaccine trials go for a long time and evaluate "durability of immunity."
The covid vaccine trials were cut short - very, very short - and the mantra was "no corners were cut!" in spite of the fact that this MASSIVE corner was cut when it came to evaluating how long immunity lasts.
Then there are the corners cut that are actually an entire city block, maybe three. Like no consideration at all for long term effectiveness or safety. None as in zilch. And just to put the entire fubar to rest, after the alleged trials were completed everyone in the control group was given the real deal. What a brilliant way to hide any possible proof that those who were unvaccinated might turn out to be better off. Now two years later the data is showing this to be true while governments and their corrupt media voices continue to lie and encourage everyone to get jabbed for their own protection.
I agree with Naomi Wolf. A massive demonic spell has removed people’s ability to think straight and look at the truth.
Of course. The CDC is always correct. And when they change definitions or procedures it’s because they own the science. Isn’t that they way it’s supposed to be? After all we are all just stupid useless eaters who should never be trusted with an independent idea.
'Media and government officials were regularly conflating the difference between being infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus and being infected with COVID-19.'
I've spent almost 3 years spending half of every day reading about all of this. Yet I was unaware of the difference. No doubt most of the public is also. I wish you had explained it in the article — does it have to do with being symptomatic?
The religious fervor surrounding the vaccines is surreal. I'm still trying to understand the psychology and passion which drove so many seemingly intelligent people to become foot soldiers in a crusade on behalf of Pfizer and Moderna.
Circa pre Covid19 era, roughly 1,000 years in twitter time, I often found myself calming down far left friends who were convinced all pharmaceutical companies were evil incarnates of unfettered capitalism, who's few benefit were far outweighed by their greed and corruption. Meanwhile my right leaning friends would be the ones to argue the 'Free Market' kept Pharm in check - mistakes might be made, but The Market would course correct.
Now I feel like we are in The Simpsons dome [1] and the camps immediately ran to the others position.
What is driving this? I understood, or at least, I *thought* I understood The Sunk Cost Fallacy, tribalism, Cognitive Dissonance, and Gestalt processing - and how all of these coalesce into "True Believer Syndrome". I've read When Prophecy Fails and many other accounts and thought "ok well we are too smart for that to happen now outside of a few pockets of loons here or there"...
I'm just stunned how wrong I was. If I could travel back in time just 3 years to explain to past self what will happen.... past self would think future self is absolutely deranged and it wasn't possible that the vast majority of the world would stake their careers, reputations, health, and friendships over the fastest ever to-market drug which at best increases your survival odds from 99.7 to 99.74.
And Paul even in this piece you still might have missed some highlights! [2], [3], [4], [5]
FULL DISCLOSURE: My kids and I are fully up to date on regular vaccines. I used to spend a disproportionate amount of time debating traditional anti-vaxxers. As a rule of thumb though, I generally don't take new products until they've been on the market several years/decades.
___________________
[1] Simpsons Bar-to-church swap: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPiQiToZn6s&t=10s
[2] Bourla's hilarious "It stopped transmission in South Africa" tweet https://twitter.com/albertbourla/status/1377618480527257606
[3] Rachel Maddow, for some reason I can't find direct clip on YouTube from her channel anymore... https://twitter.com/aginnt/status/1475193955704881152 where were the fact checkers?
[4] Can't leave out the Vax Scene dance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSkFyNVtNh8
[5] This CDC infographic went all over my social media showing how those fully vaccinated were "90% less likely to get infected" https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7013e3.htm?s_cid=mm7013e3_w
I think you answered your own question with 'The religious fervor surrounding the vaccines...'
I've also spent a lot of time reading about mass psychology, especially in anthropological contexts. Ran across this today which I found helpful: https://robkhenderson.substack.com/p/you-cant-outsmart-your-own-nature
The level of dishonesty is simply unbelievable. You know this conceptually when you hear it, but seeing it collectively in one place is staggering.
Yes. I think most people realize we're being misled. But it takes time to just gather up the proof.
The small caveat I would add is that until a few weeks after the rollout began, the medical community was not aware of the problem of the vaccine waning.
For example, that's what Dr Jay Bhattacharya mentioned in this interview (you can watch for 2 minutes)
https://youtu.be/S5Fxxrudk70?t=4287
Copy/pasting edited transcript:
"The end point of the the trial was it stopped symptomatic disease. I thought how big a leap is it to say that it also stops infections at all. It turns out it was a big leap, and for the first couple of months after you're vaccinated it does reduce infection rates. There's still I think up to like 70% of efficacy against infection rates but by four or five months afterwards it drops very sharply and by about five months the protection against infection is very very small."
But still (as Jay says in the interview), the scientific community had enough information to see the vaccines were not preventing transmission by March 2021. Why governments worldwide still decided to go for vaccine mandates well beyond that stage is a big question.
Apologies if I bungled terminologies somewhere - I don't have any background in biology or medicine.
Yes. Part of the problem here is that normal vaccine trials go for a long time and evaluate "durability of immunity."
The covid vaccine trials were cut short - very, very short - and the mantra was "no corners were cut!" in spite of the fact that this MASSIVE corner was cut when it came to evaluating how long immunity lasts.
Then there are the corners cut that are actually an entire city block, maybe three. Like no consideration at all for long term effectiveness or safety. None as in zilch. And just to put the entire fubar to rest, after the alleged trials were completed everyone in the control group was given the real deal. What a brilliant way to hide any possible proof that those who were unvaccinated might turn out to be better off. Now two years later the data is showing this to be true while governments and their corrupt media voices continue to lie and encourage everyone to get jabbed for their own protection.
I agree with Naomi Wolf. A massive demonic spell has removed people’s ability to think straight and look at the truth.
'Like no consideration at all for long term effectiveness or safety. None as in zilch.'
Hey, not fair! Six months is, like, forever! /s
Of course. The CDC is always correct. And when they change definitions or procedures it’s because they own the science. Isn’t that they way it’s supposed to be? After all we are all just stupid useless eaters who should never be trusted with an independent idea.
And the medical community did not see this as a big red flag, which was also a bit shocking.
I think a lot of MDs not only don't read scientific sources, they also don't know how to evaluate them critically.
See Malcolm Kendrick, "Doctoring Data".
'Media and government officials were regularly conflating the difference between being infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus and being infected with COVID-19.'
I've spent almost 3 years spending half of every day reading about all of this. Yet I was unaware of the difference. No doubt most of the public is also. I wish you had explained it in the article — does it have to do with being symptomatic?