Given demonstrated cuts in transmission and severe disease, proven mandate effects on uptake and outcomes, and established legal grounding, the claim that evidence was insufficient to justify mandates is not supported.
That Kampf piece isn’t what you're trying to sell it as. It’s a opinion-based book chapter in a Springer volume, not a peer-reviewed research paper. That means it wasn’t reviewed by independent subject-matter experts or subjected to methodological scrutiny. It’s basically an editorial essay compiled from selectively cited studies which measure viral load (Ct values) instead of actual transmission. The author even admits “the epidemiological relevance remains uncertain,” which is academic code for “this doesn't matter.”
The argument also ignores that PCR viral load is a weak proxy for contagiousness. Ct values vary by swab technique, timing, and test type, and don’t necessarily correlate with live virus or infectious period. Real transmission studies look at secondary attack rates (how often close contacts get infected) which is the gold standard for measuring infectiousness. Kampf doesn’t do that. He just stacks correlational lab data and calls it proof that vaccines don’t reduce transmission. That’s not how epidemiology works.
If you actually read the peer-reviewed literature, the evidence directly contradicts his claim. Madewell et al. (JAMA Netw Open 2022, 5(4): e229317) analyzed dozens of household studies and found vaccination reduced both susceptibility and infectiousness, though less for later variants.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
And a Spanish cohort study (PMC10975059, 2023) found vaccinated index cases had an adjusted odds ratio of 0.21 for transmitting compared to unvaccinated.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10975059/
So when someone waves around a non-peer-reviewed book chapter that literally says “the relevance remains uncertain” as if it’s the definitive takedown of global vaccine data, they’re not being honest... or they don’t understand what they’re citing. The serious literature is consistent: vaccines shorten infectious periods, lower secondary attack rates, and reduce transmission risk. Kampf’s chapter is opinion dressed up as research, and anyone presenting it as “proof” just revealed they didn’t read past the abstract.
Get out of here with what you think the study says. You didn’t read it, you skimmed a line and built a conspiracy out of it. You’re advertising that you don’t understand the difference between a book chapter and peer-reviewed research.
Ah yes, the standard bad-faith argument playbook: shift from evidence to ideology, invent a straw man, and move the goalposts when the facts don’t cooperate.
I never mentioned a conspiracy. You made that up so you’d have an easier argument to knock down. We were talking about evidence and methodology, and now you’ve pivoted to “government overreach” and “panic.”
Guidance changed because the data changed. That’s what science is supposed to do. New variants, new evidence, new risk assessments. We update, refine, repeat. Calling that “lying” or “overreach” is just admitting you don’t understand how empirical reasoning works.
I personally knew people young and old who died from COVID. The mortality spike wasn’t some abstract statistic. It was families, coworkers, and neighbors. When you downplay that or call the response “panic,” what you’re really saying is you’re fine with more people dying unnecessarily as long as you’re not inconvenienced.
You can keep moving the goalposts if it helps you avoid the obvious, but the facts don’t change. The vaccines worked, the mandates increased uptake, and the alternative was a lot more dead people.
>>You didn’t read it, you skimmed a line and built a conspiracy out of it.
>>I never mentioned a conspiracy.
Well that's awkward.
Yes a very, very few young people died from it (mostly with pre-existing conditions) and a lot of old people died from it.
Although the definitions of "dying from COVID" were so broad and numerous as to be meaningless, and the mortality spike lacks credibility as a result. And how do you calculate the numbers of lives saved? Against modelling? That worked well.
The vaccines worked, but were over-prescribed to people that didn't need them and were at risk from side-effects. The economy cratered, people lost their jobs, babies and toddlers were developmentally delayed due to mask wearing and other students had their education affected by school & university closures.
You could catch the virus standing up in a restaurant, but not if you sat down. You should stay at home and might die, unless you needed to attend a BLM rally, then it was OK. You must keep a distance of 6ft from other people, but 5ft 6" was dangerous. You should wear a mask, even though cloth won't stop the virus and meta-reviews showed they didn't work at the population level. You shouldn't go to work if you have an email job as you might die, but if you have a working class job in a store on the tills you can meet hundreds of people a day with no issues. This science stuff is good.
>>And the alternative was a lot more dead people.
What, like in Sweden? I think we all know for the next pandemic the sensible response will be closer to the Great Barrington Declaration than whatever the fuck it was we thought we were doing before.