![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Open (More or Less) Post on Covid 64
As we proceed through the second year of these open posts, it's pretty clear that the official narrative is cracking as the toll of deaths and injuries from the Covid vaccines rises steadily and the vaccines themselves demonstrate their total uselesness at preventing Covid infection or transmission. It's still important to keep watch over the mis-, mal- and nonfeasance of our self-proclaimed health gruppenfuehrers, and the disastrous results of the Covid mania, but I think it's also time to begin thinking about what might be possible as the existing medical industry reels under the impact of its own self-inflicted injuries. So it's time for another open post. The rules are the same as before:
1. If you plan on parroting the party line of the medical industry and its paid shills, please go away. This is a place for people to talk openly, honestly, and freely about their concerns that the party line in question is dangerously flawed and that actions being pushed by the medical industry et al. are causing injury and death. It is not a place for you to dismiss those concerns. Anyone who wants to hear the official story and the arguments in favor of it can find those on hundreds of thousands of websites.
2. If you plan on insisting that the current situation is the result of a deliberate plot by some villainous group of people or other, please go away. There are tens of thousands of websites currently rehashing various conspiracy theories about the Covid-19 outbreak and the vaccines. This is not one of them. What we're exploring is the likelihood that what's going on is the product of the same arrogance, incompetence, and corruption that the medical industry and its tame politicians have displayed so abundantly in recent decades. That possibility deserves a space of its own for discussion, and that's what we're doing here.
3. If you plan on using rent-a-troll derailing or disruption tactics, please go away. I'm quite familiar with the standard tactics used by troll farms to disrupt online forums, and am ready, willing, and able -- and in fact quite eager -- to ban people permanently for engaging in them here. Oh, and I also lurk on other Covid-19 vaccine skeptic blogs, so I'm likely to notice when the same posts are showing up on more than one venue.
4. If you don't believe in treating people with common courtesy, please go away. I have, and enforce, a strict courtesy policy on my blogs and online forums, and this is no exception. The sort of schoolyard bullying that takes place on so many other internet forums will get you deleted and banned here. No, I don't care if you disagree with that: my journal, my rules.
With that said, the floor is open for discussion.
Re: Vaccines as a class
To date I have mostly seen it used by believers who feel the need to affirm their belief before going on to question something about the covid shots. "I'm pro-vax BUT..."
The heretics will certainly come up with slurs for out-of-touch Progress believers - some already exist - but I don't think "pro-vax" will catch on.
From within the Progress paradigm, it is "anti-vax" to question the dogma that vaccines are safe and effective sacraments that ought to be given to all humans to ward off the evil of infectious disease.
The truly opposite viewpoint - that vaccines are *all* agents of evil that cause death and disability and have no benefits whatsoever, and that all vaccination should be prohibited by law - has a very small number of supporters, and I don't expect that number to grow by much.
Instead, it seems to me, we have a growing camp of "vax-realists" who see the class of products known as "vaccines" as medical interventions that can have both costs and benefits. There will probably be - at least temporarily - a swinging of the pendulum toward the opposite end, what might be called "vax-doubters". The vax-doubter position is an acknowledgement that vaccination can be useful *in theory* - and probably a willingness to get a rabies shot if bitten by a rabid dog - but a refusal to accept any more standard vaccines for self or family after being burned by the covid vaccine debacle and seeing the deep-rooted corruption and fraud within the vax-pharma-regulatory agency bureaucracy.
After another few generations - if the technology to produce vaccines still exists and the religion of Progress implodes - I would expect this to settle into an equilibrium in which vaccines are still in use on a purely voluntary basis, but only a small number of shots for which solid evidence of benefit exists. At that point I predict that people will look back on the "vax wars" as one of those strange episodes in human history where humans got themselves all in a tizzy over some distinction or other.
I expect that - as evidence of vaccine harm mounts - there will be a growing movement to blame all manner of deaths and diseases on vaccines without proof of a link. Hearthspirit has been making that argument here, and has suggested that Real Not Rare and other compilations of vax injury stories feed into it in a harmful way.
I actually see that phenomenon as distinct from the pro-vax/anti-vax debate and the sacramental status of vaccines, driven by a different by equally deep aspect of the human psyche. Most of us don't want to die or get sick, and so there is a strong tendency to find reasons to believe why suffering happens to *other* people (but couldn't happen to us). "He got cancer because he wallowed in harmful thoughts." "She got raped because of what she was wearing." "My uncle had a stroke because he was vaccinated." If we can assign cause to some distinction between ourselves and the person who is suffering, then we can feel more secure (while also blaming the victim for their own suffering).
It is important to avoid falling into that trap, but I also think it is important to acknowledge the reality of vaccine injury.
"Dance to participate" - yes! Although when confronting predators and pathogens, there is a certain amount of infantry required as part of the dance. There is a balance to be struck between "let viruses spread freely with no interventions" and "kill, lockdown, and quarantine to control".
Thanks also for putting words to my discomfort with the human hunting community. Those who participate - including some very serious hunters in my family - like to frame it in terms of bringing home food and being a part of nature. But too often the goal seems to be to establish human dominance over powerful creatures and to feed the ego by bringing home trophies. If you would drive 200 miles and sit in a tree for three days to shoot a giant buck but you wouldn't shoot the doe in your backyard, then it's not about food or participating the web of life...
Re: Vaccines as a class
(Anonymous) 2022-10-27 06:23 pm (UTC)(link)Re: Vaccines as a class
And, yes, to wanting *reasons* for that which we cannot understand... and not being at all equipped to understand the simple fact that sometimes, shale happens, and there is NO reason.
That said, my basic stance is that claims of safety (like any other claims used in marketing) require evidence of safety, and that the burden of that evidence lies on the claimant, not on the person questioning the claim.
As to... "There is a balance to be struck between "let viruses spread freely with no interventions" and "kill, lockdown, and quarantine to control"." Well, but ARE these the only available options? And, indeed, do we KNOW that "kill, lockdown and quarantine to control" is ACTUALLY what our immune systems are doing? Or is that simply what our current working *model* of our immune system looks like?
Re: Vaccines as a class
Re: Vaccines as a class
I didn't mean to suggest that there was a choice, or that the immune system works this way.
What I meant to convey, without using enough words, is that staying alive in a world of predators and damaging forces is like a dance, and sometimes the dance moves look like control and attack and kill and sometimes the moves look like bending with the wind and allowing viruses to replicate.
Brian Mowrey's "immune equilibrium" theory is one way of envisioning this dance with regard to the human immune system. (https://unglossed.substack.com/p/burned-all-my-notebooks)
He suggests, for example, that antibody levels against respiratory viruses waning over time is more of a feature than a bug, since it allows the viruses to get what they want (survival and replication) without needing to evolve to defeat adaptive immunity thereby becoming more dangerous.
What I meant to convey by "striking a balance" is that vaccination is a dance move. One side might believe it is always the best choice and another side might believe that any human attempts to train and tweak our immune systems are hubristic and wrong, but in reality it is a tool that will in all likelihood prove to be beneficial in some cases and harmful in others, and our task is to discern this for each virus and each person using the tools available to us, of which science done properly is one of many.
I suspect that so long as it is possible to vaccinate following rabies exposure to prevent fatal infection, we will choose to do so. I also suspect that vaccination by way of mRNA injection will prove to be a terrible idea that will never again be attempted once this episode of insanity is over. As for everything in between - smallpox, measles, polio, flu - time will tell, and the results may take centuries to be fully apparent. An intervention that is good from the perspective of patient survival may not be so good from the perspective of the ongoing coevolutionary dance between viruses and the human immune system.