I never thought masks worked as well as authorities claimed, but I understood that people wanted something that they could do to "be safe". I knew that the "plague story" script ended with a savior vaccine, which I fully expected to "work" on paper only - i.e. for the data to be fudged so that the authorities could say it worked and then people could feel "safe" again - even if what really happened was that the virus worked its way through the population and then simmered down as viruses tend to do.
The main risk that I was aware of from a traditional coronavirus vaccine was Antibody-Dependent Enhancement (ADE). However this typically showed up in animal trials pretty early, usually the first time vaccinees were exposed to a slightly mutated virus. Had we been presented with a Chinese-type attenuated-virus vaccine, my plan was to wait at least a year and watch the case reports and local news closely for anything that looked like the beginnings of ADE, then if all looked good I would get it, even if I didn't think I needed it. I'm not actually a particularly contrarian person, and I'll go along with symbolic-but-useless actions if I perceive them to be harmless and not in violation of my values.
For me, the biggest red flag was that the West was - without much thought or discussion - going all-in on purely experimental "vaccine" technologies that engineered our own cells to produce the viral antigen. One of these - oddly the less-favored - had only been used in a handful of African countries in recent years to target Ebola - and the other (mRNA) had no human track record whatsoever. This gave me some serious hesitation, for a several reasons:
1. I've done a fair amount of genetic engineering and "transfecting" cells with genetic material in my time in academia, and it was almost immediately clear to me that this carried a blanket risk of immune dysfunction/dysregulation (toward tolerance or autoimmunity/allergy) that could not possibly be ruled out by anything short of lifelong randomized trials, and for which six-month trials or first-year surveillance data are effectively useless.
2. Seeing public health authorities embrace and endorse these technologies also greatly lessened my respect for them. A wise general in wartime will not give all of his soldiers rail guns or his pilots Avrocars. Similarly a wise chief epidemiologist facing an actual pandemic will rely on time-tested approaches to developing an emergency vaccine and will only test the new technologies against familiar and relatively harmless targets like flu and chickenpox until they have proven themselves worthy and comparably safe.
That was where I was at in winter and spring of 2021, when the shots were first made available. Then came the incredible spike in VAERS reports, the silencing and gaslighting of vaccine victims, the research clearly linking spike protein to clotting and cardiovascular risks, and the "mass formation" mob morality that was clearly not interested in building a clear picture of the risks and benefits of these shots. So I went from "maybe" (in 2020) to "probably not" (in early 2021, seeing only genetic vaccines available) to "definitely not" by the summer of 2021.
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branchandroot
Re: The Epiphany (ML - A reflection thread on pandemic choices)
Date: 2023-07-19 02:20 am (UTC)I never thought masks worked as well as authorities claimed, but I understood that people wanted something that they could do to "be safe". I knew that the "plague story" script ended with a savior vaccine, which I fully expected to "work" on paper only - i.e. for the data to be fudged so that the authorities could say it worked and then people could feel "safe" again - even if what really happened was that the virus worked its way through the population and then simmered down as viruses tend to do.
The main risk that I was aware of from a traditional coronavirus vaccine was Antibody-Dependent Enhancement (ADE). However this typically showed up in animal trials pretty early, usually the first time vaccinees were exposed to a slightly mutated virus. Had we been presented with a Chinese-type attenuated-virus vaccine, my plan was to wait at least a year and watch the case reports and local news closely for anything that looked like the beginnings of ADE, then if all looked good I would get it, even if I didn't think I needed it. I'm not actually a particularly contrarian person, and I'll go along with symbolic-but-useless actions if I perceive them to be harmless and not in violation of my values.
For me, the biggest red flag was that the West was - without much thought or discussion - going all-in on purely experimental "vaccine" technologies that engineered our own cells to produce the viral antigen. One of these - oddly the less-favored - had only been used in a handful of African countries in recent years to target Ebola - and the other (mRNA) had no human track record whatsoever. This gave me some serious hesitation, for a several reasons:
1. I've done a fair amount of genetic engineering and "transfecting" cells with genetic material in my time in academia, and it was almost immediately clear to me that this carried a blanket risk of immune dysfunction/dysregulation (toward tolerance or autoimmunity/allergy) that could not possibly be ruled out by anything short of lifelong randomized trials, and for which six-month trials or first-year surveillance data are effectively useless.
2. Seeing public health authorities embrace and endorse these technologies also greatly lessened my respect for them. A wise general in wartime will not give all of his soldiers rail guns or his pilots Avrocars. Similarly a wise chief epidemiologist facing an actual pandemic will rely on time-tested approaches to developing an emergency vaccine and will only test the new technologies against familiar and relatively harmless targets like flu and chickenpox until they have proven themselves worthy and comparably safe.
That was where I was at in winter and spring of 2021, when the shots were first made available. Then came the incredible spike in VAERS reports, the silencing and gaslighting of vaccine victims, the research clearly linking spike protein to clotting and cardiovascular risks, and the "mass formation" mob morality that was clearly not interested in building a clear picture of the risks and benefits of these shots. So I went from "maybe" (in 2020) to "probably not" (in early 2021, seeing only genetic vaccines available) to "definitely not" by the summer of 2021.