sqeecoo
11mo ago
The influence of the vaccine lobby and big pharma is massive, but still far from total. With COVID vaccines, the vaccine companies were protected from any legal liabilty, so they didn't have to worry about little things like mrna vaccines leading to the unplanned production of random proteins that create risk of autoimmunity issues, as reported recently in Nature (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06800-3). However, pushing other unsafe vaccines without these liability protections is still risky for these companies.
sqeecoo
11mo ago
Interesting comment, and your opinion is very firmly stated. I'm not American and I only have a passing familiarity with US political shenanigans, so I'd be very interested to hear why you are so certain Trump committed an "awful" crime and is going to jail. Are we talking about Jan 6th here? My impression is that nothing he did was worse than the what the Democrats did in 2016 and during BLM (including disputing the election, calls to violence, riots and the storming of the White House during BLM), and that prosecuting political opponents is another step the US is taking toward being a failed state. But I'd be very interested to hear you lay out why this impression is wrong.
Lemme say right at the outset that people like different things, and it's totally fine not to like a piece of art many people find great. If you've found the Hobbit boring, it seems likely that these books just aren't for you, and that's ok. Some people love Proust, some find his books boring (I'm in the latter camp). With a bit of help especially however, even the latter group can still appreciate their genius, even if it's still not their cup of tea, so to speak.
One thing I'd like to say to you right away, though, is that the Lord of the Rings is not really a trilogy - it's one book in three tomes. If you've only read the first, it's like watching the first third of a movie and deciding it's boring. Totally fine too, but you haven't seen the full thing yet. More specifically, for instance, Merry and Pippin get more fleshed out and differentiated later in the story. Characterization is more through actions than words or descriptions, and you need the full story for the picture to be complete.
The slow start, for example, is to provide a contrast and a slow escalation of a camping trip adventure into something much more epic and darker. The hobbits' return to the Shire at the end of the tale, which is one of my favorite parts of the book and mirrors the feeling of a soldier returning home after a terrible war as Tolkien did after WW1 - but this only works in the books because we've become familiar with the Shire during the slow start, so we can appreciate the contrast in the perception of the characters and the change in how the community they return to sees them in turn.
The worldbuilding, sense of wonder, and love of nature the book evokes have been covered in other replies, but I'd add that Tolkien wanted to write a story containing the core elements of Christianity and Nordic mythology, but without allegory or direct counterparts and comparisons. An original, epic tale containing the *essences *of these two views of the world, as he saw them. Even if you find the book a bit boring, this is an aspect you might find intriguing and challenging (what are these core aspects presented in the story?), just like you might find a film kinda boring but appreciate the excellent photography work.
Here's a few non-obvious things I love from the first book:
How Tolkien describes things. When the Balrog appears in Moria, you have no idea what it is and get no real explanation (although Tolkien could have provided a lore explanation in excrutiating detail, there is none). However, Legolas, who has been established as skilled, ageless, and carefree when others despair, upon seeing the Balrog drops the arrow he had been nocking and covers his face in despair. You don't know what's going on and what this new danger is, but you do understand the shit has truly hit the fan. This is an example of worldbuilding and characterization, Tolkien-style, that may not be obvious and appreciated on a first read. Firstly, his incredible restraint in providing lore (imagine building a world in excrutiating detail and then providing basically no information when an important element of it enters your tale), and secondly, how he narrates and explains the relations between mysterious things by setting up characters as being a certain way (note how unafraid Legolas is of the fury of the mountain earlier in the story) and then contrasting this with their reaction in a different situation. The reader's point of view remains that of the hobbits (they are a bit bland for a reason, too), and they/we know almost nothing of this fantastical world, looking to wiser and stronger characters to understand what things mean.
I'm very sad that Legolas' arrow-dropping scene didn't make it into the movies, incidentally.
The escalation of horror. I was incredibly captivated by the whole Moria sequence in the first book, which is when things really get serious. The whole thing is basically Lovecraftian - especially the very vague but terrible Watcher in the Water. Then there's the magnificent ruins of an ancient civilization, the journal detailing the desperate last stand of the heroic dwarves (the "THEY ARE COMING" bit still gives me shivers - and it's written in hasty elvish script, not dwarven runes, a nice bit of worldbuidling even there), the bravery of the hitherto cowardly and meek hobbits in fighting the orcs, mirroring the desperate heroism of the last stand of the dwarves, and the final confrontation between Gandalf and the Balrog, an entity that's so beyond us that even powerful characters like Aragorn and Legolas can't hope to even try to fight it but can only flee as Gandalf looses his own desperate battle against it.
Again, it's totally fine not to like stuff like Lovecraft, journal entries in a destroyed facility (System Shock/Bioshock), or archeological wonder, or if the book's way of handling them just doesn't gel with you, but I found this stuff facinating. Also note in all of this that "heroic but doomed battle against outer monstrosities of Chaos, that is heroic because it is doomed" is one of those core themes of Nordic mythology that Tolkien is incoporating here.
Finally, let's look at the death of Boromir. Boromir has succumbed to the temptation of the Ring, failed in his oaths to protect the Ringbearer and attacked him himself, failed to protect the hobbits he tried to defend against the sudden attack by the orcs, and failed in his overall mission to bring aid to his homeland of Gondor. As he dies, he says to Aragon that he has failed. But Aragorn is one of the wise characters in the books: wise characters pick their words carefully and generally have a deep and correct moral understanding of the world. And Aragorn tells Boromir, as Boromir dies, that no, he has not failed, he has conquered: few have won such a victory.
Why does Aragorn say this, if Boromir has failed utterly in all his goals? I won't go too deep into this, but for Tolkien wordly success or failure is not the main thing. What is truly important is the moral battle within our hearts and conscience, and here Boromir prevailed in the end, in the face of the terrible, insourmoutable temptation of the Ring. Elements of the core ideas of Christianity are here, of course, but also of Nordic mythology where the ultimate defeat of all the gods and heroes during Ragnarok is no repudiation of the rightness of their cause and their moral victory.
Finally, let me offer another avenue of appreciating Tolkien: historical and military realism despite the fantasy setting. Here's a series of excellent and scholarly articles on military and historical accuracy in the books: https://acoup.blog/2020/05/01/collections-the-battle-of-helms-deep-part-i-bargaining-for-goods-at-helms-gate/
These may appeal to you even if the books don't, and they show Tolkien's deep understanding of strategy, logistics, and historical battles. The articles also help appreciate things that may not be obvious to a reader immediately - how differently battles work in Tolkien, who went through the horror of WW1, than in basically almost every other author and depiction, fantasy or otherwise. These things are not even close to being spelled out in the book, but morale and cohesion are the true decisive factors in every battle in the books, and once you appreciate how deeply that theme runs despite never being obvious, you also see how computer-gamey many other battles in media actually are (including in the LotR films).
There, I hope I've offered a bit of stuff to help answer your question :)
Thank you for the response, but it doesn't really address what I was saying. You claimed that "if the vaccines caused noticeable health risks it would be absurdly easy to see a correlation. Vaccination=higher mortality. That correlation isn't there." and that "This is one of those conspiracies that's really hard not to be condescending about because it's just so thinly supported."
I showed you that clinical trials (the best kind of data!) found a significant increase in serious adverse events after vaccination (health risk!) and increased deaths in the vaccinated group compared with controls (vaccination=higher mortality).
Your response that cites a study with different results may indicate that the situation is complex, with contradictory studies supporting different positions, but it does not show that the "correlation isn't there" - it's there in the randomized clinical trials (RCTs), which represent the best type of evidence. Your initial claim was very very strong, and it is what I'm contesting. You did not just say that there are contradictory studies on COVID vaccine health risk, you said that the claim of health risk is so thinly supported it's hard not to be condescending about that claim, when in fact the clinical trials that were used to approve the vaccines show both a serious health risk and that vaccination=higher mortality.
The study you quoted here (https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7043e2.htm) is not a RCT and thus immediately weaker evidence than the clinical trials, but let's look at it more closely. The study has a very surprising result, namely that vaccine recipients had lower non-COVID mortality than the unvaccinated. Unless you want to claim that the COVID vaccine magically protects against all forms of death, the study has missed something or introduced some kind of bias in their study design that skewed the results.
One explanation that immediately springs to mind when reading the study stems from this decision in the study design:
"To ensure comparable health care–seeking behavior among persons who received a COVID-19 vaccine and those who did not (unvaccinated persons), eligible unvaccinated persons were selected from among those who received ≥1 dose of influenza vaccine in the last 2 years."
So they only included unvaccinated persons who were vaccinated against the flu but were not vaccinated against COVID. The majority of the healthy population does not vaccinate against the flu - some healthy people do, of course, but it's primarily given to older or sick and thus vulnerable people. Among the people who were vaccinated against the flu due to being sick, but did not vaccinate against COVID, some proportion did not receive COVID vaccination because they had gotten sicker in the meantime, and thus COVID vaccination was deemed too risky. It is possible that this group was large enough (you don't need that many such people to skew the results) to lead to the result that unvaccinated people died from non-COVID causes more often more than the vaccinated - because a proportion of the sample was unvaccinated due to being too sick to receive the vaccine, thus resulting in more deaths among the unvaccinated group.
Of course, this explanation is not a certainty, but the decision to only include flu vaccine recipients in the unvaccinated group, without controlling for initial health status and with no mention of ensuring that the vaccinated were also flu vaccine recipients, was very questionable. It may have skewed the results of this study, leading to the result that COVID vaccines seem to magically protect from non-COVID death. Even if this is not the explanation of this weird result, the results of this study just make no sense - something is happening that the study doesn't account for, even if the result were to be correct. I therefore rate the reliability of this study a fairly low - definitely lower than the reliability of RCTs that show vaccination=higher mortality.
To summarize, the study you quoted here has a weird result that indicates some unknown factor at play that is skewing the results, and they made a questionable decision in study design that they did not match in both samples.
In any case, randomized controlled trials are stronger evidence, and they do indeed show vaccination=higher mortality and that there's a health risk from vaccination (16% increase in serious adverse events).
This contradicts your original very strong claim that there is no correlation indicating a health risk from COVID vaccines and that believing that is something it's hard not to be condescending about because it's so thinly supported. That claim is what I'd be interested in hearing you defend.
sqeecoo
1yr ago
It's definitely hard to separate negative effects of COVID from negative effects of vaccination, but here's an Israeli study on 200,000 unvaccinated people who had COVID that didn't find any increase in myocarditis in unvaccinated subjects post-COVID: https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0383/11/8/2219
So it seems likely that myocarditis is primarily vaccine-related.
As for health risks from vaccination, there's plenty of data on a clear corellation. Here's some highlights:
A Danish study on the original clinical trials that were performed to authorize the vaccines found higher overall mortality among those vaccinated with the mRNA vaccines than in the the unvaccinated control group (study linked in article): https://brownstone.org/articles/have-people-been-given-the-wrong-vaccine/
Mind you, this is very early on when the circulating strain of COVID actually matched the one in the vaccines, and they offered the best protection against COVID, but vaccination STILL had a negative effect on overall mortality. Vaccination=higher mortality, indeed.
Here's a study finding a 16% increase in serious adverse events after COVID vaccination, also based on the original trials: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X22010283
If you look at the VAERS database (the official US database for tracking vaccine adverse events), 75% of total reported vaccine-related deaths in the last 30 years have been in 2021 and 2022 - in other words, more vaccine deaths have been reported since the introduction of COVID vaccines than from all other vaccines over the last 30 years. Go to https://vaers.hhs.gov/data.html, and request data on death from all vaccines by year.
Now VAERS reports are far from fully reliable, but they are submitted by physicians, and the comparison with previous vaccine data is extremely negative for COVID vaccines. More vaccine deaths in the last two years than in the last 30 years combined, in the best vaccine adverse effect tracking database in the world. Wow.
As for the FDA, here's an article in BMJ (top medical journal) basically begging the FDA to relase vaccine safety data on COVID vaccine safety, which they haven't done: https://www.bmj.com/content/379/bmj.o2527?fbclid=IwAR3e8Rv7UdOUjx60Vf7CnrtZAcM7rCVxl5IRpT76ngyTokkALHVCbiO3Naw
Again, these are just the highlights - seems pretty clear to me that there is a "noticable health risk" from the vaccines.
No adverse events have been reported from mistranslation because the mistranslation has just now been discovered. But there's plenty to indicate mrna vaccines are not safe.
According to VAERS, the official US vaccine monitoring program, there have been more reported vaccine-related deaths since the introduction of COVID vaccines than from all the other vaccines in the 30 previous years of monitoring, combined. And while VAERS reports are not 100% accurate, they provide a clear picture of relative safety, and VAERS data clearly shows that COVID vaccines have led to more deaths than all other vaccines combined in the last 30 years (check total vaccine-related deaths by year for all vaccines at https://vaers.hhs.gov/data.html EDIT: Select "Search CDC Wonder", "VAERS Data Search", under 1., group search results by "Year reported", under 5., select Event category "Death", press "Send" under 5. - the resulting table shows that 70.49% of all reported vaccine-related deaths since 1990 are in the years 2021 and 2021).
Based on clinical trial data, overall mortality in the vaccine group and the unvaccinated control group was statistically equal for mrna vaccines, as opposed to adenovirus vaccines where mortality among the vaccinated was lower, indicating a vaccine risk outweighing the protective effect for mrna vaccines (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37163200/). Put more simply, more people died among the vaccinated than among the unvaccinated in the clinical trials used to approve the mrna vaccines.
Clinical trial data also shows increased risk of serious adverse events for mrna vaccines, outweighing risk of severe COVID in younger population groups: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X22010283.
And that's just a few of the data points we now have that indicate that the mrna vaccines are dangerous, so I'd say the risk has definitely borne out.
Regardless, a medical product that leads to the unplanned production of random proteins within the body would put the company producing it at extreme risk of legal action without the immunities granted to COVID vaccine manufacturers.
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