Alright, so I guess 1.5 billion is trivial and doesn't meet your goal post. Great to know that it doesn't meet some arbitrary threshold on what constitutes to govt aid, which you claim did not happen at all (meaning no money) for the development of the vaccines. Your opinions on Moderna's vaccine are irrelevant to the fact they received a huge sum of money from the fed.
I didn't claim government aid didn't happen. I think that original post was far enough back I should quote what I said again:
Operation Warp Speed's only additive contribution to the vaccination effort was agreeing to purchase, vials, if the vaccines worked, and to cover some of the loss if not. It wasn't even a huge contribution relative to any other part of. Warp Speed had no unique guidance, coordination efforts, or other "facilitation" or "laxing of rules."
Part of the criteria for Warp Speed was absolutely a (fairly miniscule) chunk of change in terms of medical development, used to negotiate favorable long-term purchase agreements with the companies currently doling out the vaccine. I don't think anyone should care that the government did a market bid program, because that's been done over and over with areas the feds have fucked up and needed private assistance. Instead, I was addressing the idea that Warp Speed is a problem because it somehow compromised the integrity of the trials. If you think these companies getting cash is the root problem, that's fine, I don't.
You agree it is a multifaceted issue. Masks aren't the be all and end all as shown by the CDC study that analyzed mask use in restaurants from March - December. The human behavior I mentioned is due to that, and as summer approaches, more and more people will be going masks off after a year of this lunacy. As with any survey, I would be cautious extrapolating them to the greater population.
You take issue with one of the sources the study cites, great. The overall contents of the dangers of consumer masks is not wrong, Quebec recently found hazardous materials in some of the blue masks that were supposed to be used for school children. It is no doubt cheaper cloth masks also contain loose debris that is mentioned in the paper. We get it, you really hate studies that go against your dogmatic beliefs and even go as far to call them done in bad faith even if the majority of it is factually accurate. The study only aims to challenge the overall efficacy and health benefits of masks and it makes the argument well on psychological, physiological, and actual virus prevention fronts. That paper is not the only thing out there, it's a good overarching summary that segues into the failed lockdowns and mask policies for further discussion - of which have been studied.
We will have to agree to disagree and chalk the rest up to personal preference/opinions here.
Bolded parts; I have not discussed whether consumer masks are appropriately quality checked, and you are becoming increasingly hostile and misrepresenting my posts. I don't care whether the majority of his study is "factually accurate," if the masks all have hazardous waste or magically light you on fire, I care about the
central claim on the
"actual virus prevention fronts," which is in several cases false and the author has argued inexcusably bad faith. This is my one specific challenge and you win little by engaging me on the rest, because we probably agree on most of it.
I'm going to bold allcaps this shit: on this topic,
I DO NOT DISAGREE WITH THE SOURCE HE CITED AND I READ. THE SOURCE HE CITED DISAGREED WITH HIM.
He cited a source to justify his claims that neither N95 or consumer masks would work, but the source he cited to claim so does not say what he says it does. That's "bad faith." In another, he literally quoted the part where an actual actual peer reviewed meta analysis disagreed with him, but his objection was that the meta analysis was too selective with data (they had to be, because several of the mask groups overperformed & didn't qualify for the study's criteria).
You cannot pretend this paper has been credibly reviewed by experts against him making up shit and fudging numbers with even a single such blatant mistake, and I don't have the time to go through his sixty sources he used to cite the definitions of "and" "vaccine" "bad" etc. This is the same reason I don't talk about the endless array of preprints that claim the Rona is going to wipe out the human race, or treat OSF papers like gospel.
The reason I checked his sources in the first place to was see if they challenged my understanding of this topic, and they didn't. If you have not read his sources and none of my concerns over these misrepresentations raised any questions about the validity of his claims, yours might be.
The reason this central claim matters is because it informs. If no mask is the same than a mask, then there would be no reason to encourage masking. If there is a significant reason to mask, then it's a good idea to address whatever valid concerns there are over the safety and optimization of mask performance,
not a reason to eliminate masking entirely. It'd like banning cars over the first car crash, as though horses and buggies were safer.
If you hate masking or have personal concerns or live in Quebec, fine, again, I am not concerned with your personal choice. Investigations into whether or not these factories or materials have been adequately handled are important, and a valuable service. I am concerned with the ongoing narrative that masks "don't work" which is at this point overwhelmingly wrong, distracts from legitimate concerns, and undermines health science. Civilians can weigh their risks/benefits as they stand, but I'll be damned if we have to deal with fucking nurses running into aerosolized cancer AIDS because tHe PoReS aRe ToO bIg To HeLp AnYwAy for the rest of time.
You don't have to swallow two lies to take one truth.
So the whole point of someone young and healthy getting a vaccine despite beating COVID is to protect against catching COVID a second time but the reason we need this is because we are unlikely to catch COVID a second time?
This is part of why "shoring up" a patient with natural immunity is in this case recommendable, especially in the vulnerable. It means you know how and when to schedule follow-ups, what to monitor, etc.
The "T-cells & B-cell memory" are considerably less reliable if you're fat, old, or immunocompromised, was the reason. On the other part,
As a personal answer, because I was completely asymptomatic the first time around? Why, when my T-cells & B-cells have now already learned to recognize SARS-CoV-2, would I bother with a vaccine that is just going to do the same as my immune system?
Also we don't have long-term data on COVID vaccine immunity vs natural recovery immunity.
Shit most of the disinfo on natural recovery comes from 1) "muh no antibodies", which is completely disregards T-cell & B-cell response and 2) evidence of reinfections, which make up a minority of cases in healthy adults and people are getting COVID even after the vaccine anyways.
B-cells are the driver of passive immunity by antibodies, and if they're having to undergo a response beyond that, it means your immunity has failed and the virus is already systemic.
T-cell
quantity is a driver for your ability to fight off a disease after it goes systemic, which is why academic estimates of natural immunity are tracking how long COVID-specific T-cell quantity & T-cell specificity (ability to respond) lasts. There are consumer grade T-cell tests in the works and one finally got approved in March (actually had them last year, fuck the FDA), and there's an attempt to determine how important T-cell memory is versus antibody quantity. There will be a balance, somewhere between zero antibodies and the limit of T-cell immunity, that provides a much more detailed perspective on when and how you can be reinfected.
The reason antibodies have been the marker so far is because they're easier to measure (generally) and they were faster to the punch on filling the public health need. I think I'm repeating myself, but the failure to distribute rapid and accurate tests due to beaurocracy is in my view the biggest failing in the US response to the pandemic. Almost none of this would have been necessary if every American had access to the rapid and relatively accurate ten-minute antibody tests back in April when they were first generated.
The first point is that vaccines don't "do the same as your immune system," your immune system is doing the heavy lifting. The vaccines are just tricking it into thinking that it needs to maintain, because we know it does, even if biology doesn't. Vaccines increase your B-cell quantities (therefore antibodies), T-cell specificity and quantity, just like any infection might. You are not injecting antibodies, you are injecting antigen. Vaccines have a consistent quantity of antigen load simulating a relatively powerful infection, while natural infections are inconsistent- asymptomatic cases, for example.
The other point is that, if you get a shot, we will (at least when better data comes in) know how
long you will be immune, which means we know if/when you'd need a booster, and we'd be able to tell inform as much, which matters when you're maintaining the immunity of millions of people. Good luck finding out how long your specific natural exposure with render you immune without a booster getting you "up to par," or participating in a clinical study that would do it for you.
2. We don't have complete long-term data, trends are already coming in, but what is anticipated is that those trends will be fairly consistent. The length between vaccinations will be about 80% of the "max immunity" that people with baller ass immune systems have. I do agree that data on reinfection is still pretty limited, though.
As far as population health & eugenics: it's a large part of the seditious push for services like Planned Parenthood, selective taxes on alcohol/cigarettes/etc, and attempting to control the serving sizes of fast food places (or the prices) by state law. Any of the policies generated by population health over personal health taken to their rational extreme is going to rely too heavily on mandate and too little on health education and inevitably become a tyrannical means of enforcing health "across all levels." Fatties don't exist anymore because everyone has an 1700 calorie quota and you can only add salt twice a week, and it's off to the camps if your weekly BMI is over 22.
Edit: Also, what does "now do COVID death numbers" mean? VAERs is not a causal document, death certificates are. The "every death = COVID death" shit was a meme pushed in a deliberately dishonest way, if that's what you mean. While I'm at it on the obligatory editing, I should throw in that mRNA vaccines are in fact unique because instead of presenting antigen they simply present the thing the cells would would produce after being exposed to antigen. It skips a step, and helps avoid your body going into overdrive, since antigen can stick around too long, producing much more predictable results & better outcomes in elderly people and the immunocompromised who can't handle antigens well, allowing them to produce more B-cells and T-cells than they would with conventional vaccines.
Oh, and to address some of the smarmy "ha ha look at how much better than I am than da COVID cultistz, I hate reading" circlejerking I ignored
No better way to demonstrate you're 100% reasonable and sane than to ignore everything someone says, assume you know what they're going to say, and get proven wrong repeatedly. Notice how any time I've addressed a few specific people posting in this thread's specific claims, they ghost the topic and try to talk their way around me like they won the nobel prize? Truly mysterious.
