MYTH: The COVID-19 vaccines were "rushed"

trashcan wrote:

2600 bro wrote:

Credentialism is boring/useless on anonymous message boards. Harambe could be anyone, can claim to be anyone, even a gorilla doctor. You should be able, on some level, to assess evidence regardless of the qualifications of the provider.

There's plenty of places for you go speak with or be informed by a non-anonymous "certified" doctor or whatever you want. LRC just isn't that place. Harambe doesn't owe anyone anything and is not playing into your game to attempt to discredit them.

When someone here identified himself as an emergency room doctor(he almost certainly is one), he caught a lot of flak. It just gets a person nowhere.

This ^

And the "just asking innocent extremely personal questions" shtick is extremely transparent, "inquiring minds."

The beauty of anonymity is I cannot use credentials to bolster my statements. I need to bring evidence and persuasion. Certainly a challenge!

Credentialism is not necessarily always useless on anonymous message boards. On a cycling site that I'm active on there's a Covid thread that has a college prof & few people in the medical field that regularly post. When someone is extremely passionate about a subject and has good knowledge of the subject, I'm always curious what they do for a living or what their educational background is. I have a background in athletic training/strength & conditioning/sports nutrition but I know very little about vaccines so it would be pointless for me to argue any of the science here.

How am I playing a game in an attempt to discredit him? Not only is he extremely passionate about the mRNA vaccines but he insults & demeans posters who either a) challenges him on the science of the mRNA technology or b) posters who express their intent of not taking the vaccine for their own personal reasons (he simply refers to these people as "dumb"). I'm just curious if he's in the medical field or something like that. I thought perhaps he may work for Pfizer & Moderna, thus it explain the aggressive behavior he displays in persuading people to take the vaccines.

And who are you? You'realso pretty aggressive in pushing the vaccines as well as demeaning & insulting other posters who don't agree with you. Based on your use of the word "bro" all the time you sound like a young kid who is maybe taking some science courses in college or something like that. I'm 60 and have a 21 yr old son playing college football who talks just like you with the "bro" slang and all that (he thinks based on your internet memes and behavior - you & Harambe are a couple of trolls).

My question for you is if you're providing all this evidence in support of the safety & efficacy of the mRNA vaccines - then why all the insults & ad hominem attacks on people that disagree with you? Why all the insults & personal attacks on posters who simply say they just really don't want to take the vaccine?

It's this behavior that makes you look like a troll and someone not to take seriously. How can you really expect to influence people who are hesitant & indecisive and "on the fence" if all you do is constantly attack & demean other posters?

I posted this on another thread, but I think the decision making process is important enough to share here. To be clear, I still make a lot of mistakes and my decision to wait and see on the vaccine might be one of those mistakes, but here is the process I went through to make that decision.

Here is how I have addressed problems most of my life.

First, what is my desired outcome?

What is the problem(s) preventing me from reaching my desired outcome?

What do I know?

What do I not know?

Where is the data to fill in what I don't know and help me make a decision?

Where are the experts and what do they say?

- Are they trustworthy? What is their track record? Are they honest? Honest to a fault?

- Follow the money. How do they get paid? Does this affect their advice?

- What are their inconsistencies? Professional biases? Personal biases? Are they transparent?

- Ask questions I already know the answers to. Are their answers true, lies, or equivocations?

I'd urge others to use this approach. I've done this throughout the whole covid thing and I will continue to do it. Here's where I am.

A. COVID-19 is far more deadly than the flu.

B. It attacks the body in multiple ways and can have long-haul health implications.

C. Our medical leadership has been incompetent and dogmatically narrow-minded.

D. Our medical leadership has eschewed very promising interventions, even going to the point of preventing doctors from using those interventions... HCQ, Ivermectin, weight loss for the obese, and vitamin D... to name four.

E. Rather than aggressively and simultaneously testing these promising interventions (widely available a year ago!) they have delayed and pursued a vaccination approach.

F. Follow the money... is there a financial, professional, or political bias in this approach? Yes, extremely so.

G. mRNA vaccines are very promising with far-reaching implications beyond just preventing COVID.

H. The short-term effects are rare (deaths of 1 in 60,000 or so using VAERS data as screened by others) and worth the risk of taking the vaccine, in my opinion.

I. The long-term effects are unknown. Not a single person on the planet has had two Pfizer shots for a full year yet. In June, it will be 36 test subjects. In December, it will be 18,600 test subjects. What is the health status of those 18,600+ people? We don't know! Worse, long-term effects might not show up for two to five years.

That's my decision process.

So far, here is where I am (and I am open to changing this opinion as more data becomes available).

Our medical leaders are dogmatically narrow-minded, inconsistent, escewed multiple inexpensive and easily testible alternative approaches, and lacks transparency. Thus, they are untrustworthy. Pfizer is in it for the money (billions of dollars) and thus untrustworthy. The vaccine, as incredibly promising as it may be in the short-term, still has long-term unknowns. Since my health is my responsibility, I am so far choosing not to get the vaccine.

Instead, I'm exercising, keeping my body fat percent around 7 % (as measured by calipers), taking 7,500 IU of vitamin D3 daily, plus all the other supplements that have shown promise in strengthening the immune system. I also have supplements that specifically modulate the immune system to prevent the cytokine storm, should my wife or I get COVID. (During a recent false alarm, we both took these cytokine suppressors.) I freely and enthusiastically share this information with anyone who will listen.

I'm more than willing to help others with knowledge, advice, my time, and even finances, but I draw the line at things that might threaten my health when these same people have neglected their own health for decades.

I realize that others might see that as selfish. So be it. You do you.

I can speak for myself here.

I have been discussing the pandemic since last March with people here and it's usually been painful. Some are standard LRC types that lean towards a more extreme political viewpoint but are, at least, capable of decent conversation. Some of them are just trolls - I try to ignore. But some are people who came to LRC at some point during this pandemic just to spew their pet COVID-denier theories - probably through some Google searches. I don't really have much patience for them, so, yes, I can get a bit aggressive.

It is not an ad hominem attack to say that not wanting the vaccine is stupid. If I declared "I am going to shoot myself in the foot" many people would call me stupid - even if I had "reasons " for it. My assessment of stupidity isn't my counterargument in favor of vaccination, it's just a reminder to other readers that certain rhetorical tactics shouldn't be taken seriously.

There is a difference between "questioning the science" and low-level concern trolling (e.g. "Why did the FDA approve a gene therapy for COVID??") or baseless lying (out of context CDC quotes, VAERS data misuse, ignoring excess deaths or testing data, etc.) People that use the latter options in support of their anti-vax posting don't get much sympathy from me.

Overall I am here because I use to like LRC a lot during my running days - even the dumb threads etc. So it's been a hard habit to break, but man did it fall apart in the last year.

Additionally, I'm not really here to convince the people I respond to. There's probably 10 people reading a thread for every 1 that posts. What can I say - I am a selfless hero. I do it all for no reward. :)

I don't expect to influence people who are out here concern trolling with blatant misinformation. I will never convince them. They've made up their mind!

I cannot really abide the propagandists and fearmongers. Calls for civility against people that far removed from reason are pointless.

The goal is more to get them to stop posting or suitably embarrass them by providing (shockingly!) a few facts and links.

The only people who think I'm a troll are people looking for excuses to discredit me because they don't like the (in)convenient truths I am laying bare. My background doesn't matter beyond that I know a reasonable amount about the topics involved and am willing to read and change my mind.

My tone may be a tad acerbic but I have been around the block enough times to know that most people blatantly posting misinformation are not doing it out of innocent curiosity. It's targeted fearmongering or trolling that, in this case, is particularly harmful as we attempt to get out of this COVID mess.

The CDC is as mainstream establishment as you can get on the subject of COVID-19.

Please tell us how the following qualifies as "misinformation", whatever that means.

For the umpteenth time, here is the link from the CDC about long term vaccine effectiveness.

**********

"How long does protection from a COVID-19 vaccine last ?"

"We don’t know how long protection lasts for those who are vaccinated."

DanM wrote:

The CDC is as mainstream establishment as you can get on the subject of COVID-19.

Please tell us how the following qualifies as "misinformation", whatever that means.

For the umpteenth time, here is the link from the CDC about long term vaccine effectiveness.

**********

"How long does protection from a COVID-19 vaccine last ?"

"We don’t know how long protection lasts for those who are vaccinated."

Misinterpretation of valid information, if intentional, if still misinformation.

The point is that until we have observed vaccines for X months we cannot say -with certainty- that the vaccine will last for X months. Based on decay of neutralizing titers, etc, evidence suggests immunity is not waning yet.

This is not complicated. This is why I call the fearmongers dumb. They are willingly discarding their critical thinking skills to embrace fearmongering propaganda that they -should- know is misinformation.

So you're either dumb or choosing to be dumb. Both are not a good look :)