Sometimes very active discussions about peripheral issues overwhelm a thread, so this is a permanent home for those conversations.
I’ve opened a new “Sandbox” thread as a post as the new “ignore commenter” plug-in only works on threads started as posts.
Also, we should bear in mind that Pfizer is in competition with several other companies, their products are not identical, they can contain trade secrets kept secret to avoid someone copying the products or reverse engineering their processes. I think we can be fairly confident that there are ingredients not published, on the part of every competing company. I think the problem lies in assuming these ingredients are harmful because they are hidden.
Agreed. We are on the same page here.
I agree that it is irrational to believe corporations hide or fail to disclose adverse information.
This is not about whether corporations hide adverse information. This is about how you spew irrational drivel about covid policies without any reference point, putting your wacky ignorance to full display regarding how similar pandemics have been handled before (if you think there have not been similar pandemics, then yup, that’s your wacky ignorance speaking), and blowing out of proportion the mask and vaccine policies without the faintest idea why masks and vaccines exist. And you tied this in earlier pages further into partisan anti-Biden politics of your own country, completely forgetting that the vaccine policies started under Trump and the pandemic was worldwide and pretty much every country had lockdowns and masks and vaccines and those that did not faired worse, not better.
These are not characteristics of a critical thinker or a healthy skeptic. These are characteristics of a Q/MAGA cultist.
To avoid displaying such characteristics in the future is not too hard: Just don’t spew Q/MAGA talking points. Try to stay on one topic. If vaccine, then vaccine. If corporate policies, then corporate policies. If pandemics policies, then that. If partisan politics and elections, then that. And whichever you pick, it is a good idea to be reasonably informed and follow the factual timeline at least. My prediction is that you are incapable of this. You will continue your current line after again whining a bit about how this discussion is not nice, whereas actually you have been treated far too nicely here, as if Q/MAGA propaganda were worth discussing the same way as academic research or plain common sense. It really is not. People here are too nice to confront it.
ETA: When it comes to the covid vaccines, J-Mac and petrushka have the same cultist post-truth agenda.
Certainly corporations hide adverse information. Think of tobacco companies 50 years ago.
That doesn’t mean Pfizer has done so.
Why are specifics as opposed to unsupported generalities to hard to come up with, I wonder?
Wel, yes, adverse information is least likely to be publicized. I suspect a great deal of “classified” information has less to do with national security than to cover up stupid things someone doesn’t want the public to know.
Still, I think you have it somewhat backwards. Opposition to masks and vaccines is the initial “policy” (more like cult groupthink) position. OK, this requires that masks and vaccines are some sort of harmful conspiracy. And that in turn means those producing the vaccines must be a central part of the conspiracy. And THAT in turn means they are hiding the details that would prove they’re out to harm us.
And I think the initial opposition to masks and vaccines was derived from a deep distrust of government, and big business, and other shadowy evil forces that surround us and wreck our lives! It’s these forces responsible for the groomers, and CRT, etc.
Companies that “serve now and pay later” don’t need to hide anything…
I hope you understand what I mean…
If vaccines work, as per their real purpose, why would you need two, or a booster?
Can you follow the logic?
I don’t think there is any need for two slightly different vaccines, except that multiple companies were competing to produce one. The CDC no longer even recommends that anyone stick to either brand on subsequent shots.
The booster is needed for reasons of the biology of the virus. A virus that mutates very little requires no boosters for most people – a single childhood inoculation is sufficient. For something that mutates rapidly, antibodies can’t keep up with new variations. So the original vaccine “wears off” as the virus mutates. Covid, like the flu, promises to become endemic, and both covid and flu will likely require “variation chasing” annual vaccines.
J-Mac, I take annual flu shots. I just got a 10-year tetanus boosters. Is this evidence that “the real purpose” is something other than preventing disease?
I find this rant to be a bit unhinged.
At least this part seems calm and true: “the vaccine policies started under Trump and the pandemic was worldwide and pretty much every country had lockdowns and masks and vaccines and those that did not faired worse, not better.”
Not just the policies. The vaccines themselves. Warp Speed.
Note from the mad spelldude: you mean “fared”, not “faired”.
And I’m off and awayyyyy….
FYI: Passing the buck here, mad spelldude. For the record, I was quoting Erik.
OK, you are forgiven. If I had a dollar for every homophone error I’ve seen, I’d be a wealthy man today. The most common is reign/rein (and sometimes rain!), although today sight/cite/site misuse is more common than correct use. But English is rich with opportunities to get it wrong, from cell/sell to sale/sail to tale/tail to scene/seen to sole/soul and probably hundreds more. I’ll put up a picture or two, and I hope they’re not too small to see…
Seems I can only post one picture at a time, so…
And one more…
You’d think with AI autocomplete, we’d see less errors.
/s
Problem with that:
Autocomplete is getting better at detecting context.
But due to the AI Peter Principle, as it gets better, it also gets more assertive. So you get weirdness at a higher level.
I keep it turned on for entertainment.
Just a drive by to link to a recent paper that presents evidence on the safety of Covid vaccines. Apparently getting 130 jabs of the vaccine over a 12 month period did not have a downside.
Lancet paper
Alan Fox,
Did you get it, Alan?
Vaccine safety, like most things in biology, is determined by individual genetic factors, and by acquired immune system deficiency.
For reasons having nothing to do with virtue or personal habits, I do not get respiratory diseases. Or, if I do, the symptoms are never severe.
People around me had one or two bad days after the vaccine, and i didn’t even get a sore arm.
Our perception of risk an harm has interesting twists. I can read that 99 percent of occasional cannabis users are not harmed, so cannabis is safe.
But if 99.5 percent of people survive covid, it’s a crisis. This is a curiosity.
This might relate to the nature of the harm. If the 1% of occasional cannabis users suffer temporary sore throat, while the 0.5% of covid sufferers die a horrible death, this matters. From what I read, the dangers of weed use fall in the “may lead to” category, but nothing much seems definite.
Alan Fox,
Antivaxxers falling over themselves to deny that this really happened! It does not compute, in their worldview, so can only be a lie. A damned elaborate one, looking at the paper.
Yes, this.
What is “a curiosity” here, petrushka, is how your antivaxx truthering loses sight of any and all perspective in each next post. But then again, this is a necessary part of being a cultist.
Flint,
I don’t think temporary sore throat was implied.
I am not among those who think the response to covid was motivated by evil, or by cabalistic rehearsals of Orwellian controls. I do think that most policies were ineffective and unfortunate, but that was because the disease just wasn’t tractable.
There are all kinds of nasty things in the world — cancer, drug addiction, child abuse, etc. — that aren’t responsive to wishful policies. Sometimes we have judged treatments to be worse than the problem, or at least not acceptable.
I have no animosity to people who try, but I reserve the right to judge effectiveness.
Yes, as I think I mentioned at TSZ. It was some time last year. I had mild ‘flu symptoms and a sore throat. A Covid test showed positive and my wife went above and beyond in providing meals and keeping me isolated for the few days I was under par. She did not get Covid until a month or so later so that must have come from elsewhere. We had both had four vaccinations by then.
Eradication of disease by vaccination seems to have been forgotten. Smallpox, other childhood diseases, polio? Was it all a myth?
This is simply not the case. There is plenty of evidence, both from controlled testing and from regional statistics, indicating that wearing a mask, all by itself, was extremely effective. The vaccines also were highly beneficial for most people. Social distancing was less effective because conditions (indoor/outdoor, air circulation patterns, etc.) varied too much.
I don’t know what you would deem a “wishful policy”. I think it would depend on the particular nasty thing. Many, perhaps most, cancers can be controlled with early detection and proper treatment. Some approaches to drug addiction have worked better than others, but there’s no silver bullet. A combination of policies (high excise taxes, no legal advertising on TV, public education campaigns, etc.) have reduced smoking cigarettes to a small fraction of what it used to be. I wouldn’t say a policy that produces an improvement of, say, 20% is “wishful”.
Smallpox is slow to spread, and shows symptoms before it is contagious. Polio is spread mostly by ingesting fecal matter.
Covid is aerosol and can spread for days before symptoms appear. It was delayed in New Zealand and in China, but not stopped.
Lancet article
Another reason vaccines failed to eradicate covid. It evolves. Surprising for something that isn’t alive.
Were we offline for a few days, or was it just me?
I believe so, though I missed it. Vincent brought it to Lizzie’s attention and the webhost “fixed” it by deleting all plugins; hence the reduced functionality. I suspect the real issue was using an outdated version of PHP. This has now been changed to the latest stable version of PHP available with the hosting service. As I have time, I will try and restore the plugins that folks find useful. Any requests for particular ones will be seriously considered.
*
By now most logically thinking people must have realized that covid-19 pandemic was a scam. Those who care can look up some of my posts from as early as 2020 and 2021, which indicated that 4 large hospitals in Toronto Canada were empty while the provincial government succumbed to the pressure from the federal government to lock up the province of Ontario.
We all knew whatever respiratory disease the so-called covid-19 was, it was neither new when it comes to symptomatic infection, nor lethal unless one was 80 plus old and had comorbidities.
This leads me to the fact that it is clear that BigPharma with the help of
DoD in the US and other government agencies throughout the world cooked it.
There is no doubt about that.
The question remains as to “why’?
To cook a scam like this is not something an industry would do, unless there was a reason for it, but also an opportunity. Every crime, we can safely call covid-19 pandemic that, has two main driving factors: a motive and an opportunity.
The motive is very clear as of 2017. The Biopharma business model was broken.
Simply put, there was not return on the investment on BigPharma.
So, what could BigPharma possibly do? Well, to change a business was a start but it has to have some strings attached, such as no liability for their products.
The so-called vaccines with Emergency Use
Authorization solved the problem for a while but not for long…
So.. What is the next step? Disease X perhaps?
I think you do have to feel kinda sorry for the many millions of people who died of a scam. They should have known better.
My family knows firsthand of tow otherwise healthy people under 30 who died of covid.
My father survived the 1918 flu. He said some neighboring families were entirely wiped out.
Deaths from all causes were up by ten to twenty percent during the first year.
An edit button would be nice.
Wikipedia on Covid deaths
This supports the claim that most of the people who died were over 60, but there are notable exceptions.
And over 60 is not over 80.
J-Mac
That’s right! On December 24, 2021 you offered up a graphic, complete with cartoon finger pointing to the fact that there were zero ICU cases and 4 in-patient cases total in three major hospitals. Alan commented “I expect that’s gonna change”, and I made fun of you (sorry), using the same Unity Health Toronto source to show that the numbers became:
Date ICU Total
12/31/21 11 68
1/4/22 12 92
1/7/22 22 126
Regarding your Big Pharma conspiracy theory, vaccines are ~5% of pharma sales, so not a big factor (nutritional supplements are twice vaccines — that’s where the rip-off is…) and if you bothered to look at their performance you’d see robust year-over-year growth, mainly driven by the fragmentation of the oncology market. The pandemic slowed that growth a little.
But you do you, kid; just understand that people who lost loved ones to the pandemic are going to look on you as an ignorant asshole.
Still working on restoring plugins.
ETA: as a safeguard, there is a copy of TSZ here which includes everything up to 22nd March, 2024. All the plugins are restored there and that site seems fully functional. Anyone registered here should be able to log in there with the same credentials (I’d be grateful if anyone notices and reports any anomalies), though it might be wise to hang fire on posting there until Lizzie, I, or someone else, can correct the permissions for the plugins directory here at theskepticalzone.com.
Can you restore participants?
To a former state? I fear that is beyond my powers.
Things still seem to be under construction.
I notice that registration requires an email address. Is there a way to notify active members that the site is running, even if limping?
All existing members should be able to log in using their existing credentials. Spam registrations have mushroomed, as the captcha plugin was one of those disabled. I’ve reinstalled it and it should sift out spam registrations from genuine.
Incidentally, there’s a thread where I hope folks will let me know of suggestions or issues. Anyone can contact me via alanfox@free.fr and the PM system “Messages” is working now.
I was thinking of emailing the current list of contributors when I can find time.
Who agrees with me that those mysterious blood clots, often few feet long, found in the dead bodies of the vaccinated people would have been there anyways because dead viruses can cause eukaryotic cells to misfold proteins to the same degree as the so-called mRNA vaccines?
Thoughts?
I’d like to know if I’m allowed to post a post so that everyone can see and contribute to the pandemic stats in Canada and other countries where there was not pandemic. How could the pandemic fraud affect the evolutionary thinking?
The two lines of thought should not affect the other, unless there is bias involved…
J-Mac,
J-Mac, there’s a post authored by you in the pending posts file. Is it ready for publication?
No, it’s not ready. but I’d like to know if I can post here and what kind of censorship is in place, if any, and regulated by whom?
Is that too much to ask?
I’d like your opinion before there is a decision made whether I’m allowed to post at TSZ.
Is this disinformation or misinformation?
Apparently, the CDC DNA_jack works for has “released” a 148 page study on myocarditis after COVID-19 “vaccination” and every single page is completely redacted.
What’s your opinion as to why CDC would do it?
A. They know the mRNA vaccines are safe and effective (whatever that means).
B. Myocarditis rates after receiving the so-called mRNA vaccines are so , so low that there is no reason to confuse the conspiracy theorists further who got all another conspiracies about covid-19 right.
C. There is myocarditis after so called mRNA vaccines but the conspiracy theorists are ungrateful that their lives may have been saved by some unknown mathematical chance..
D. Some prominent members of this site jabbed themselves with what they believe to be a life saving remedy but they were fooled by their own ignorance…Is it possible?
E. I knew right from the start of the so-called pandemic something was wrong about it . I just didn’t know or understand what it was about. I knew it wasn’t about a new pathogen. So, those who believe that covid-19 was not about a new or more deadly pathogen, what was it about?
F. Japan is opening up. They have published some really interesting studies on cancer rates especially after the 3 booster (I’m sorry if the reader had to take it. You can get help) .
Z. I’m not a prophet. I have predicted few things that turned to be somewhat accurate. I’m not proud of it, because people either were injured or died…
If you were injured by mRNA so called vaccines, there is help.
DO NOT GIVE UP