[2OEH8eoCRo0]

> After a few minutes of gloating about pharma bro Martin Shkreli “rotting at Fort Dix” for raising the price of Daraprim, a lifesaving HIV medicine, from $13 to $750, Laufer grew serious. “It’s been two years, but despite everything that’s happened, the price of Daraprim hasn’t changed,” he said.

Shkreli went to jail for securities fraud- not raising the price of a drug. I think Shkreli was a convenient scapegoat for the pharmaceutical industry though. All the time and energy people spent angry at Shkreli was time spent not directing their anger at the industry that allowed it.

[trhway]

while all that drama on the surface, the industry had coopted government's War on Drugs and pushed opiates (great thing when used as needed) into the opioid epidemics, and now they coopted government's War on Covid and has been pushing billions of doses of the vaccines (great thing when it works) which clearly fail to control the spread (and thus these vaccines have only limited use, i.e. only for the people who really need it (like high risk groups, etc.) - the situation pretty similar to opioids. And if one looks at those 3rd, 4th, ... boosters - sales tactic wise it looks eerily similar to the jacking up the "12hr" opioid dose approach as it simultaneously increases sales and creates addiction). I wonder if several years down the road we'll see vaccine trials/settlements similar to the opioids ones.

[psd1]

> these vaccines have only limited use

It's clear that the vaccines don't confer total immunity. They do change the course of the infection if you contract it, though. As you'd expect: they induce your immune system to create antibodies.

Spend even a few minutes browsing stories from ICU nurses and you'll conclude that pretty much all their admissions are unvaccinated.

Vaccinated => get sick Unvaccinated => get very sick, maybe die

That seems like a great utility to me.

Sure, that's anecdata, but data doesn't convince people who call others "sheep"

[trhway]

that has no meaningful bearing on the situation of many people who has very low risk of serious decease to start with. Yet the industry got its way, and the vaccines are forced down the everybody's throat.

[snakeboy]

Seems like they're pretty different cases, given how life-destroying opioid addiction is.

Pushing vaccines is mostly just profiting by adding another layer of bureaucracy and annoyance into daily life.

I'm not really more angry at pfizer than I am Booz Allen for wasting however many billions of my tax dollars.

[trhway]

>Seems like they're pretty different cases, given how life-destroying opioid addiction is.

Pfizer/Booz Allen waste of billions of tax dollars do come with resulting indirect damage to people health and lives who could have been helped otherwise. And for direct damage - I think jury is still out on that one. For example, in UK according to the link they already count 0.3M of heart issues which they officially pinned on pandemic stress

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/health/post-pandemic-stress-...

with more expected to come:

"Mark Rayner, a former senior NHS psychological therapist and founder of EASE Wellbeing CIC, said that as many as three million people in Britain are already suffering from PPSD, thanks to stress and anxiety caused by the effects of Covid-19.

He fears this could result in a dramatic rise in physical health issues, such as coronary heart failure, if cases are not detected or treated early."

Pinning on pandemic stress means they couldn't pin it on covid - either it is non-infected people or timing isn't correlated enough. Now, simple politically correct choice - stress or mRNA vaccines known for causing heart issues?

[snakeboy]

> Now, simple politically correct choice - stress or mRNA vaccines known for causing heart issues?

Huh? You assume the vaccines cause heart issues, and use as evidence for concluding that vaccines cause heart issues...? Did I misunderstand?

I don't really have an opinion here since I haven't looked at any of the data you're referencing.

Moreover, this is straying from my initial point, which was that opioid addiction is life-destroying on an scale far beyond what we have yet seen from vaccines, and it doesn't even require any careful study to see that since the effect size is so huge, with explicit societal harm in the form of drug trafficking, crime, and overdose deaths.

[jjoonathan]

Pro-opiate and anti-vax? Niiiice!

[kragen]

I'd like to be able to discuss ideas on their merits instead of being confronted with factional applause lights like "anti-vax".

[jjoonathan]

Arguments like "clearly fail to control the spread" are low effort Gish Gallops that need to be treated as such.

Publicly slugging it out in the weeds grants an optical stalemate to an argument that deserves to lose. Do this a million times in a row and you can launch an entire contrarian movement off vapors -- which is exactly what we have seen.

[trhway]

I don't see any arguments beside cheap meta and labels from your side (which seems to be pretty characteristic of the people pushing the current vaccine campaign).

>Arguments like "clearly fail to control the spread" are low effort Gish Gallops that need to be treated as such.

The failure to control the spread has been obvious for at least half-a-year for anybody doing simple arithmetic on public numbers (and like others i have commented on that as far back then). Now beside being obvious, it is also confirmed by a proper scientific publication

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02689-y

" A person who was fully vaccinated and then had a ‘breakthrough’ Delta infection was almost twice as likely to pass on the virus as someone who was infected with Alpha."

"Unfortunately, the vaccine’s beneficial effect on Delta transmission waned to almost negligible levels over time. In people infected 2 weeks after receiving the vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca, both in the UK, the chance that an unvaccinated close contact would test positive was 57%, but 3 months later, that chance rose to 67%. The latter figure is on par with the likelihood that an unvaccinated person will spread the virus."

[kragen]

At first I expected the advent of mass vaccination to end the pandemic, because it only had to drop R by a factor of two or so to drop below the critical percolation threshold, so even a vaccine providing 50% sterilizing immunity would be good enough, and the mRNA vaccines turned out to be even more effective than expected. I turned out to be spectacularly wrong about that; as you may or may not be aware, the pandemic did not end a year ago. It turned out that, unlike vaccines like the smallpox vaccine, the covid vaccines did not provide much sterilizing immunity.

Moreover, the virus has become endemic in a number of zoonotic reservoirs, including deer, feral cats, and some mustelids, and vaccinating or exterminating those populations is not realistic in the next few decades. This is not currently a significant source of human outbreaks as far as I can tell, but after the humans reach herd immunity, it will be the only one.

Consequently, the cost-benefit tradeoff for covid vaccinations with the currently available vaccines needs to be evaluated with respect to the benefit to the person being vaccinated. I'm glad I'm vaccinated: as an obese 45-year-old man, my risk of death from covid might approach 1%, which is enormously higher than any plausible risks from any of the vaccines I'm familiar with. But that tradeoff is not the same for everyone, and there are populations where the rate of death or permanent harm from a vaccine, though still extremely low, is likely higher than the rate of death or permanent harm from covid itself.

The situation would be different if, for example, vaccinating schoolchildren prevented them from infecting and inadvertently killing their grandparents. But it doesn't. So the fact that the existing vaccinations clearly fail to control the spread is extremely relevant to the cost-benefit tradeoff, in particular because it means that there's no valid public-interest argument for requiring people to get vaccinated. Since both the cost and the benefit flow to them individually, they should be able to make the decision individually, except in cases such as small children and comatose patients.

This is an argument that deserves rational consideration, not dismissal with mindkiller phrases like "vapors" and "anti-vax". That's the sort of argument, or rather non-argument, that "deserves to lose".

[denton-scratch]

> after the humans reach herd immunity

That doesn't appear to be on the cards; neither vaccines nor actual infection confers immunity, in either case you only get resistance. And if you can't get individual immunity, talk of herd immunity is silly.

COVID is going to be endemic.

My hope is that omicron confers cross-resistance to other variants. From what I've heard, an omicron infection is nastier than a bad dose of 'flu, but much less nasty than infection with delta. With omicron's extreme success at transmission, perhaps omicron will give the whole world a degree of resistance to all COVID variants, and endemic COVID will eventually become no more scary than endemic adenovirus.

[gpshead]

Bad premise. It is not all about benefit to the person being vaccinated even in a low imputed immunity scenario. The unvaccinated fill up and overwhelm healthcare systems. That disrupts all medical care for everyone. By being vaccinated you are reducing the burden for everybody.

[psd1]

That's straw-manning