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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 9, 2023

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Why? This seems to me like you picked "an order of magnitude safer than what it allegedly is" and if the alleged rate of danger were different, you would have picked a different goal.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-35653-z

Here's one estimate. I would never base policy on one study, usually that's something the CDC would do.

I find these numbers to be particularly confusing in light of how dangerous COVID itself is. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)02867-1/fulltext#seccestitle140 says that at age 65, the IFR for COVID is about 1.7%

This is data from a year ago. We are talking about how the bivalent booster is associated with ischemic strokes, especially held against the risk of omicron.

And according to https://www.cdc.gov/stroke/facts.htm, the baseline rate of ischemic stroke in the US is slightly over 2 per 1,000 people, again much higher than the alleged risk of the vaccine.

Let's stick to relative risk? This is not useful.

Driving is dangerous.

Agreed. But we have to go places, like schools, small business, and our places of worship. So no one proposes stopping driving. I'm proposing stopping the EUA novel biotechnology vaccination campaign.

We are talking about how the bivalent booster is associated with ischemic strokes, especially held against the risk of omicron.

Which it is not by the very report you are using. You've jumped from "The CDC reported a signal which they investigated and found nothing" to "The vaccine is associated with strokes" as though that were proven and established.

Why not go the whole hog and say the vaccine causes women to ride broomsticks to the meeting with the Devil? You are determined the vaccine is bad and then go looking for straws to build your house with, instead of looking at established risks and then forming an opinion.

Definite side-effects of getting the vaccine that have been established: muscle pains, fever, diarrhoea, mild allergic reaction.

Possibility of more serious side-effects: anaphylactic reaction

Very rare side effects

Very rare side effects may affect up to 1 in 10,000 people.

These include:

myocarditis

pericarditis

Myocarditis and pericarditis are inflammatory heart conditions.

The risk of these very rare conditions is higher in younger men.

These conditions are more likely to occur after the second dose and mostly happen within 14 days of getting the vaccine.

2 European studies have estimated the risk of myocarditis, after the second dose of the vaccine as:

1 additional case for every 7,600 men aged 12 to 29 (within 7 days)

1 additional case for every 5,320 men aged 16 to 24 (within 28 days)

We do not know the risk of myocarditis or other rare side effects after a booster dose yet.

If you want to argue that the risk for young men is too high as compared to the risk of contracting Covid and the effects of that illness, you have a valid case there. You do not have one for general scare-mongering.

Fair, I'm not going to rip off my wallpaper over elderly and at risk people receiving bivalent vaccines - precisely because I have a calculation of their quality life years remaining, that is very different from younger healthy people.

The exact people who benefit from a covid vaccine have less quality life years to live than those who do not.

The vaccine has a novel, not totally understood method of mRNA translation, and then goes through another not completely understood process of protein folding, and then enters the immune system (not completely understood). The pharmacokinetics of the nano lipid particle are not characterized or understood. And there is a concerning signal of a blood clot appearing in patient's brains.

I am not scare mongering, I am being highly critical, since I'm not the one defending the novel RNA transfection vaccines.

When they run trials for new vaccines, they will compare them to the harms that the RNA transfection vaccines caused, and the new vaccines are going to look amazing. My guess is they will use protein-adjuvanted methods.

Here's one estimate. I would never base policy on one study, usually that's something the CDC would do.

I didn't ask for an estimate, I asked why 1 per 1 million is the higher tolerable level of risk.

This is data from a year ago. We are talking about how the bivalent booster is associated with ischemic strokes, especially held against the risk of omicron.

Why does it being a year old matter? Even if the IFR is a few times lower, it's still much, much, much higher than what you're talking about.

Let's stick to relative risk? This is not useful.

Do you plan on explaining why or are you just going to make assertions?

But we have to go places, like schools, small business, and our places of worship. So no one proposes stopping driving.

It's entirely possible to build towns and cities that don't require you to drive literally everywhere, but no one seems to care about the risk from driving when designing cities or choosing where to live. At least, not at the magnitude you're talking about: 100 miles could be saved in 2 months by moving 1 mile closer to work, but does anyone care about that? Not in the slightest. A minuscule improvement in civil design would save orders of magnitude more lives than eliminating all risk from vaccines, with lots of other positive side effects to boot.

This entire post of yours is just one big isolated demand for rigor.

1 in one million, compared to 1 in 100,000, in our current data collection environment, is a good signal to keep track of if you are considering your options to receive a covid-19 vaccine. Perhaps you can take J&J, Novavax, or Covaxin and maintain protection against SARS-2.

The IFR is lower and vaccines are not denting hospitalization or death rates as they plummet from their previous heights (mass naïve infection). Most people have had a much better inoculation than a monovalent vaccine - they've had a SARS-2 infection.

Do you plan on explaining why or are you just going to make assertions?

Well, because a stroke as a cardiovascular event, I'm interested in the dynamic between mRNA vaccination and your cardiovascular system. A stroke, downstream of pathology, will offer valuable information when it goes above the baseline.

It's entirely possible to build towns and cities that don't require you to drive literally everywhere....A minuscule improvement in civil design would save orders of magnitude more lives than eliminating all risk from vaccines, with lots of other positive side effects to boot.

Well, you are demanding rigor, and yet I feel like this is a complex claim. Even a city would involve having people driving to bring supplies and transportation towards these centers - a mandatory risk.

We should be paving our public serology with only the best, most well understood vaccines that we are capable of developing and testing and passing on in our limited lifetimes. There is a broader umbrella of rigor that I am requesting to be frank.

A lot of the rigor I'm demanding will also take time, more time than has been allotted for these Bivalent updates. The first injectable, multi-transcriptional (unknown if combined or separated) mRNA vaccine to market has shown an unexpected safety signal.

1 in one million, compared to 1 in 100,000, in our current data collection environment, is a good signal to keep track of if you are considering your options to receive a covid-19 vaccine. Perhaps you can take J&J, Novavax, or Covaxin and maintain protection against SARS-2.

...why? What makes it a good signal? Again, compared to the baseline number of strokes, you probably would not ever be able to detect these increases. If you wouldn't seriously consider the risk of driving 1000 miles, why would you seriously consider this risk?

The IFR is lower and vaccines are not denting hospitalization or death rates as they plummet from their previous heights (mass naïve infection). Most people have had a much better inoculation than a monovalent vaccine - they've had a SARS-2 infection.

Do you have some data for these claims? I've seen them, but I've also seen the opposite (e.g. that vaccine provides a better immune response than previous infection). Case and hospitalization rates are certainly nowhere near their high of a year ago (https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/covidview/index.html) but if the virus is mutating to become more contagious and less severe over time, and vaccines aren't actually effective, you should still see a high case count.

A stroke, downstream of pathology, will offer valuable information when it goes above the baseline.

What valuable information? How does this answer my question?

Well, you are demanding rigor, and yet I feel like this is a complex claim. Even a city would involve having people driving to bring supplies and transportation towards these centers - a mandatory risk.

I'm not really sure what you are trying to say. There are plenty of alternatives to using large motor vehicles in city centers, near pedestrians. Also, deliveries of goods represent a tiny fraction of all trips taken in populated areas, so you can still have those while reducing personal car trips. Urban design is a complex topic, but so is medicine. Do you want me to recommend you some urbanist sources?

has shown an unexpected safety signal.

This seems like a much weaker conclusion than:

Another drop in the bucket - or is the bucket spilling out the top now?

mRNA vaccines are dangerous

your vaccine should not significantly increase cardiovascular risk. It should be absolutely negligible