[gadders]

There's no conspiracy. There was just panic and over-reach from government.

If you think the vaccine stopped transmission, why did the official guidance change around whether it did or not?

And even if (a big if) it stopped transmission, it was still out of line with the severity of the disease.

[op00to]

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.

[gadders]

>>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.

[op00to]

That is not “awkward,” it is reading comprehension. I said you skimmed a line and built a conspiracy out of it, meaning you spun a story of deceit and “noble lies” out of a cherry-picked source. You then tried to rescue yourself with “there’s no conspiracy,” as if that is what I had claimed. That is you inventing a position to knock down.

On the substance: “definitions of dying from COVID were meaningless” is hand-waving. Excess mortality does not care about coding quirks. Every rich country saw a visible spike in deaths above baseline. And on Sweden, the data is not on your side. Norway and Sweden took opposite approaches in 2020. Norway used strict lockdowns, tight border controls, and intensive outbreak tracking, while Sweden kept society largely open.

The results weren’t subtle. As the Juul paper puts it: “That resulted in 477 COVID-19 deaths (Norway) and 9,737 (Sweden) in 2020, respectively.”

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38262870/

Holding up the outlier with vastly more dead people as the “sensible” model is quite a choice.

Your laundry list of culture-war anecdotes about restaurants, rallies, 6-foot rules, and cloth masks is not an argument about vaccines or mandates. It’s a vibes reel. Early non-pharmaceutical rules were inconsistent. Inconsistent does not mean "bad". The inconsistency doesn't retroactively erase the evidence that vaccination reduced severe disease, reduced transmission and pressure on hospitals. You keep skipping over the data I cited on secondary attack rates and infectious periods because it collides with your story.

You have also walked back your own claim which I appreciate. You are now saying “the vaccines worked, but were over-prescribed,” which concedes the core point while trying to shift the conversation to every grievance you can think of: models, school closures, toddler masks, the economy. We started with “this chapter proves vaccines do not reduce transmission.” It does not. Peer-reviewed household and cohort data contradict it. Everything you have added since is fog to avoid saying “I was wrong about that.”

[gadders]

You accused me of saying there was a conspiracy. I said that was not what I said.

>> On the substance: “definitions of dying from COVID were meaningless” is hand-waving. Excess mortality does not care about coding quirks.

This is wrong as well. If I get run over and test positive for COVID, that's not a COVID death. If more people die because of cancer because they couldn't get access to oncology during lockdown, that's an excess death.

>>Your laundry list of culture-war anecdotes about restaurants, rallies, 6-foot rules, and cloth masks is not an argument about vaccines or mandates. It’s a vibes reel.

It's not a vibes reel and they're not culture war items. Nice try trying to make things political. It's an example of policy mistakes made be a panic-ed government, based on rubbish like modelling.

>>You have also walked back your own claim which I appreciate. You are now saying “the vaccines worked, but were over-prescribed,”

The vaccines worked to reduce the severity of illness, not transmission. Possibly some effect on transmission at the start, minimal later on, mandates and making people lose their jobs if they didn't get vaccinated were excessive.