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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.” |
>> 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.