Respectfully, I believe you are in the wrong here.
Covid and climate science denial can be strengthened by having a 'discussion'.
This is because conspiracy thinking is actually immune to evidence. The denialist will subvert your evidence in a way that it proves the conspiracy. In here they will probably complain that 'correlation is not causation' or some other methodology 101 trope, whereas the audience will think "oh, yeah, this is complicated, smart people are debating it, I guess the jury is still out and we don't know for certain if climate change is real or not, and the vaccines are not a silver bullet either, lets just wait until the debate is over'.
But, in fact, the debate is over.
So no, in this case the onus is one the person attacking a vast body of scientific literature proving beyond reasonable doubt that vaccines are effective to come up with something supporting those wild claims. It is not up to me to provide a literature list that nobody will ever read anyway, and anyone who is even remotely interested in finding the truth can google such a list in 5 min.
Thank you for your post. And I mean it. I've fallen into this trap so often myself, because nothing grinds my gears as conspiracy theorists do. I think next time I'll stop before I answer, think of your post and maybe copypaste it.
At this point, anyone still "asking for information" knows full well where to find it. It's not March 2020 any more.
"Actual data from US prisons" took me about 20 seconds to find a reputable source for (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37736396), likely less time than your comment asking for it took to type.
> Unvaccinated, infected inmates had an estimated 36% risk of spreading the virus, compared with 28% among infected vaccinees. After adjustment, any vaccination, previous infection alone, and both vaccination and previous infection cut the risk of SARS-CoV-2 transmission by 22%, 23%, and 40%, respectively.
> Booster doses and more recent vaccination further lowered infectiousness among vaccinated inmates, with each dose conferring an 11% risk reduction; the risk of transmission rose 6% for every 5 weeks that had elapsed since the last shot.
Out of 111,000 inmates, 31 were hospitalized and none died. Is there a small city with equivalent population where approximately the same numbers held?
I very much doubt there's a small city with total gender segregation, people living in large buildings they're not permitted to leave, and single-source universal healthcare.
(That's what makes it such a good observational study population; a whole bunch of variables are controlled away by default.)
I don't know about you, 8% sounds a rounding error and probably within the error margins. It certainly wasn't enough to open the country en-mass like the OP believes.
And now we have the opposite situation with those who have had the most boosters and now more likely to catch the new variant that is out.
This is a classic example of the way conspiracy theorists shift goal posts and demand more and more evidence, while waving away any evidence provided. It's _boring_ to engage with people like you. You have no idea what you're talking about, and demand that people who _do_ know what they're talking about give you an education that you don't actually want. You're just _performing_, you aren't having a genuine conversation with people.
> 8% sounds a rounding error and probably within the error margins.
It is not.
Erm yes it is ... from the study:
> In adjusted analyses, we estimated that any vaccination ... reduced an index case’s risk of transmitting infection by 22% (6–36%)
CI is much wider than 8pp and the estimated absolute transmission risk CIs actually overlap at 31%. So the study results are consistent with there being no actual difference, also.
If this is the best evidence of a difference in transmission it's not very good.
Also this is Omicron which hardly matters. The justification was the earlier variants.
Covid and climate science denial can be strengthened by having a 'discussion'.
This is because conspiracy thinking is actually immune to evidence. The denialist will subvert your evidence in a way that it proves the conspiracy. In here they will probably complain that 'correlation is not causation' or some other methodology 101 trope, whereas the audience will think "oh, yeah, this is complicated, smart people are debating it, I guess the jury is still out and we don't know for certain if climate change is real or not, and the vaccines are not a silver bullet either, lets just wait until the debate is over'.
But, in fact, the debate is over.
So no, in this case the onus is one the person attacking a vast body of scientific literature proving beyond reasonable doubt that vaccines are effective to come up with something supporting those wild claims. It is not up to me to provide a literature list that nobody will ever read anyway, and anyone who is even remotely interested in finding the truth can google such a list in 5 min.