(Note – this is a copy of a post I stuck on my shiny newish blog which, so far, consists solely of gibberings about Covid and vaccines! I need to expand my focus… Posting this here as it has an evolutionary flavour. Looking forward to arguing about Natural Selection for the tenth time!).
I have discussed Geert vanden Bossche’s debatable theories before. Briefly, he argues that mass vaccination in a pandemic ‘selects’ for mutants that escape the immunity conferred by the vaccine, and this threat is reason enough to just stop. He ignores selection for escape of what is loosely, but erroneously, termed ‘natural immunity’, and the enormous health and social costs attaching to the sledgehammering of this nut. Unfortunately for his theories, all variants so far have arisen in poorly vaccinated settings.
Now, Bret Weinstein – who claims to be an evolutionary biologist, yet – attempts, in his podcast and substack, ‘On Driving SARS-CoV-2 Extinct’, to rescue vanden Bossche from the dumpster and brush the banana skins from his shoulders.
Here’s an excerpt – ‘Rounding the earth’ is the work of one Mathew Crawford:
(I am aware that a properly-conducted review would include links to sources. In my defence, I can’t bear to! Do your research.)
Now, this is pretty desperate stuff. Rather than recognise the possibility that there are other causes for increase of a variant besides vaccine, it is enough that a vaccine has been used, on however small a number, within a few hundred miles of the epicentre!
Selection requires a differential in output. If one variant produces exactly the same number of secondary cases (on average) than another in the same environment – if they possess the same R value, in epidemiological terms – there is no opportunity for selection. It cannot increase relative to the other (by selection) without a differential it can affect: to get into more bodies it must have the greater R.
The role of vaccine effectiveness
Now, this selective advantage can only happen even in principle if the efficacy of the vaccine against infection (VE(i)) is greater than zero. Efficacy in ideal conditions represents the differential between a vaccinated and an unvaccinated group of the same size and composition, where no-one knows which group they are in. In real world use, the term ‘effectiveness’ is used instead of ‘efficacy’. In the real world, people know if they are vaccinated or not, affecting behaviour, and it also becomes more difficult to equalise groups with respect to other differentials such as age, comorbidity, socioeconomic factors and so on. Because of this – news though this will be to countless amateur internet data analysts – you cannot naively count cases in the two groups, and claim this accurately captures VE.
So, an accurately determined VE(i) gives the percentage differential in case count between treated and untreated groups of equivalent composition. 100% effectiveness means no cases in the vaccinated group, 0% means an identical (or a statistically insignificant differential in) case count. Intermediate values give the percentage reduction – eg 40% VE means 6 cases in the vaccinated for every 10 in unvaccinated: a 40% reduction. From this and the above, then, it is clear that VE 0 cannot generate vaccine escape – there is no possibility of getting into more bodies if the vaccine is completely ineffective; there is no selective pressure if it doesn’t work.
But the relationship is not simply dichotomous. The strength of selection in the vaccinated, minimal when VE is zero and maximal when 100%, must therefore vary continuously between those extremes. The phrase “does not stop you catching it or passing it on”, regurgitated monotonously online and whenever anyone sticks a microphone in front of a sceptic, means only that VE(i) is less than 100% – whereas the intent of most regurgitators is to suggest VE(i) is therefore zero, and there are exactly as many cases in a vaccinated as an unvaccinated group.
It is true that VE(i) is steadily going down, due to waning, antigenic drift and the generalised immune escape of variants. Many even claim (based on shoddy VE-hacking by those amateur analysts referenced above) that VE(i) is negative for omicron.That being so would mean that omicron, at least, is not the variant vanden Bossche is looking for.
For how can it select for immune escape if it confers no immunity?
We can extend this argument backwards. Each variant going forwards has successively diminished VE(i) – and, as the ‘does not stop’-ers continually remind us, immunity wanes anyway. Therefore, Vanden Bosschian Selection must have been getting steadily weaker as a force, if it ever existed. But because Crawford has managed to locate a handful of vaccinees in the vicinity of each step, he gives them the same assumed selective force as ‘wild-type’. I’d bet a pound to a peanut that Crawford and Weinstein have been pushing the implicit-0% “does not stop” narrative throughout 2021 (God forbid anyone should have a reason outside themselves to get jabbed!). And yet, a classic have-cake-eat-cake scenario, they also argue as if selective power were maximal throughout the series. No waning, no antigenic drift.
It is interesting to see how doggedly people have been pursuing the absolutist “does-not-stop” line, and they seem almost relieved that omicron and waning have come along to retrospectively justify the falsehood they have been pushing throughout 2021. “It’s going down” is a tacit admission that it was once up, no? But you’d have struggled to find a sceptic able to concede that in mid 2021. To concede it would kick one of the legs out from under their no-vax-‘cos-I’m-OK stance. Yet the graphs they gleefully point to now show clearly that, when they were vigorously arguing against there being any protective effect whatsoever, there quite clearly was.
Sure it wanes. But you don’t start off waned. Anyone commencing a course now will not have to worry about waning for a good while. Regarding waning as a justification for not getting jabbed is akin to regarding a motor vehicle’s Certificate of Roadworthiness as unnecessary, since it will expire next year. On the other hand, anyone who had the disease in early 2020 may have little protection left; renewal may be appropriate.
The role of frequency
Ignorance of diminishing VE is not even the main thing wrong with Crawford’s analysis. If we assume, for argument’s sake, that a variant can gain a copy specifically by infecting a vaccinated person, and these are rare, how is this supposed to translate into widespread transmission? The individuals in these trials were jabbed then went back to their communities, spread out; little pinpricks in the broader ground of unvaccinated individuals. Our variant gets an extra copy from infecting such a vaccinee, but it may have a long wait to find another. Remember that it only gets an advantage in vaccinees, in this example. The rest of the time, it wanders round the unvaccinated in direct competition for bodies with its ancestor, against whom it has no advantage. So this restrictive scenario isn’t going to work.
OK, you say, let’s give it an advantage in the rest of the population too. Perhaps it can evade innate immunity, or evade the immunity of the previously infected. Indeed it might, and does. But now, we have abandoned vaccination as a unique cause of selective advantage altogether. If we create a selective advantage outside of vaccinees, that could easily be a prime driver itself – especially if there are far more such individuals. It doesn’t speak well of Weinstein’s grasp of evolutionary biology that he failed to notice this effect of the rarity of the advantageous circumstance on the strength of selection.
This is what we see in practice. The variants thrown up so far do not differentially ‘prefer’ vaccinees. They are simply hyper-infectious, and evade innate, infection-acquired and vaccine-induced immunity with not much discrimination. Such discrimination as does exist appears to give greater advantage, if anything, to escape of infection-acquired immunity. This is the opposite of what is needed; people can’t argue that ‘natural immunity generates fewer cases’ at the same time as arguing ‘vaccines select more strongly’.
The role of mutation
Mutations do not necessarily arise where they find their advantage. They are a function of number of replications – the more infections there are, the more opportunity for mutation. Once arisen, mutations are metaphorically chucked against the wall to see if any stick. Outside of hosts that provide an advantage (in terms of additional bodies entered), they can only drift. Once they hit the right kind of host, they get a boost, and if there are a lot of such hosts, they get a lot of such boosts. This can be enough to drive out and replace the ancestral type, where ‘the right kind of host’ is common. But consider: if there were a way of reducing the number of replications, that would reduce the number of mutations. Do we have such a way? Well, yes. Vaccination. Sure it’s not perfect. Sure it wanes. But it will help limit the problem. If people who spent last year arguing against the protective effect had instead embraced it, we might be in a better position now Even 20% effectiveness against infection is protective – 8 cases per 10 unvaccinated, instead of 10. That’s two individuals not passing it on who otherwise would have. And because, unlike additive parameters like hospitalisation and death, the effect compounds, the benefit goes beyond one generation. With an R of 2, after 1 interval we have 16 instead of 20. After 2 we have 32 vs 40. After 3, 64 vs 80, and so on. And of course, the presence of other vaccinees in the population reduces that R anyway. Every little helps.
“They changed the definition of vaccine”.
Top of the pile: the lamest, shittest argument anyone ever advanced, from a crowded field of inanities (Take a bow “Mullis said…”, “2023…”, “not been isolated…”). How does what you call something have any bearing? It originally meant ‘cowpox inoculum’ anyway. So if there is no cow involved, I ain’t having none of your stinkin’ ‘vaccine’ 🤣
“I didn’t get vaccinated and I’m still alive” is top notch too. This thing called ‘survivorship bias’… 😁
Which ‘mumble’ was actually part of Kary’s delightful denial of the role of HIV in AIDS. He’s not talking about SARS.
Thanks
You think it is curious that different viruses behave differently? Interesting. Anyway, masks and social distancing impacted the dynamics of all infectious respiratory diseases. For example, we had an epidemic of RSV in summer, whereas it usually peaks in winter.
Nah, I’ll stick to me beer.
Well, I suppose I should respond to this:
Uh, no, they aren’t the same thing. However, you are correct that they are similar in that they aren’t “cured”, that is, both might be endemic. Cancer isn’t cured either, but it is also something different.
After a little thinking, we might recognize that covid and flu are spread the same way – primarily through exhaled droplets and aerosols. Which means the best way to avoid either one is an equally effective way to avoid the other. Perhaps a massive national campaign of vaccine, masks, avoiding crowds, washing hands, etc. is overkill for the flu, but as you note this effort to prevent the spread of covid had a side-effect of preventing the spread of flu as well. NOT a coincidence.
If we consider a vaccine as a means of training the immune system to rapidly recognize and mobilize against an invader, then mRNA qualifies as a vaccine. Now, the Johnson&Johnson shot was a vaccine according to the original definition. It wasn’t as effective or long-lasting as the mRNA shot, but it proved far better than nothing.
Only if they ARE fools.
You need to ruminate for a while on what contagious means. For the original, alpha and delta strains, kids had more resistance. Which means they contracted the virus, had no symptoms, came home and infected their parents. This happened a LOT. You seem to think that if someone is asymptomatic, therefore spreading the virus is no problem.
The omicron variant, now, seems to infect people of all ages equally.
The good news is, resistance to one variant increases resistance to others — and there will be others, so if we can get everyone as well protected as possible, this strongly reduces the opportunity for new variants to arise. The bad news is, there are simply too many people who have heavily armored willful ignorance, who represent an ample virus-breeding population (while regarding responsible people as fools).
Only a liberal would think of turning a potential medical emergency into a book deal.
It could very well have something short of thrombosis. But the fact that un- faux vaxxed legs swelled for a temporary amount of time and twice in 5 days suggests (given the fact that it had never happened before but did while being in the presence of several faux-vaxxed family members) something more than pheripheral enema.
As for shedding, the body ‘sheds’ lots of toxins. The probability of the body wanting to shake off millions of spike proteins is not far-fetched at all. If a body can shed live attenuated viruses, it can also shed other pathogens like spike proteins.
Absolutely. Our physical activity was not out of the normal for our daily routine. In fact my wife’s oldest sister and her husband (68 and 72 respectively) stood for 4-5 hours prepping dinner without issue). Moreso, we had never encountered swollen legs before the vacation and have not encountered it since then. Oh, and if salt was a factor in the swellling, then it would also have been a factor in other family members. So cleary, the swelling was not caused by too much physical activity or a radical change in diet. More likely, the swelling was a defense mechanism acting as a flushing mechanism to eliminate toxins.
The fact remains that the only two people who didnt get a co\/id flu shot, were the only two people that got swollen feet. and again, those swollen feet have not returned since returning home. So although correlation does not automatically equal causation, neither is it ruled out.
So in our case swelling as a defensive response to toxins is the more likely explanation compared to your ‘salty tired feet’ explanation.
What is lamer, is given the fact that the flu shot of old was not being called a vaccine for the obvious reason that it didn’t and couldn’t do what small pox, polio and other vaccines could (as in cure the disease) BUT mRNA shots because they were working on that scary sounding co\/id flu are now suddenly vaccines.
You guys are letting your emotions (and/or maybe vested interests?) get the best of you. TSZ my arse!
LOL, the millions of co\/id survivors before anyone ever heard of mRNA shots couldnt agree with you more.
Allan, you would make a great SNL skit.
Well, after a little bit more thinking, we might recognize that our technology is not as good as we think and that just maybe those tests in addition to doctors, hospitals and statisticians cant always tell the difference between the two so in the interests of time (and money) defer to the scary sounding co\/id-19 when in doubt.
A rose by any other name is still a rose. As I told Allen, if the co\/id shot is a vaccine so were the flu shots given prior to the pandemic. But notice that those shots were NOT called vaccines. We all know of people who would announce they were going for their annual flu shots.
Wait. If we should mask our kids against co\/id because it is so contagious even asymptomatic kids could infect their parents, why didnt we mask them up during all those flu seasons? So spreading influeza flu viruses is OK, but spreading co\/id viruses is appalling behavior.
Hmmmmm.
There’s a rap song in there somewhere.
As a matter of fact, smallpox, polio and other vaccines did NOT “cure” the disease. If you contracted it, the vaccines were useless. What they did was train the immune system to resist it, preventing people from getting it in the first place. And it takes about 5 seconds with google to learn that flu shots are vaccines. There isn’t any debate about that. Also, there are still half a dozen or more cases of polio in the US each year, despite the vaccination. No vaccine is perfect.
Instead of just thinking, you might actually arm yourself with information. Which will inform you that there is no ambiguity between covid and flu. Indeed, it’s possible to suffer from both at once. There is NO issue with misidentification of covid. Nobody is deliberately saying some other disease is covid to save time and money. (Although the Trump administration made some effort to misidentify covid as something else to “make the numbers look better”.)
And you are correct, the covid shot is a vaccine and so is the flu shot. And yes, both of these ARE called vaccines, because both of them ARE vaccines. In the UK, you don’t get a “vaccine”, you get “the jab”. Which is the covid vaccine.
We didn’t mask our kids NOT because the flu is not contagious, but because it is sufficiently LESS contagious that what amounts to a cost/benefit analysis tells us that we’re not going to get the public to mask themselves and their kids against the flu. We are, as a society, WILLING to accept 10 or 20 thousand flu deaths a year rather than take serious precautions. To use your phrase (which is accurate), spreading the flu is deemed OK by our society. It’s less deadly. In fact, it is ENOUGH less deadly so we’ve decided to take our chances. But once again, when we take serious steps against covid, this works very very well against the flu as a sort of knock-on benefit.
None of that makes a feeble semantic argument any less lame. And vested interests? Take a bow the equally lame ‘Pharma shill’ argument. Roll up folks, it’s Antivax Bingo time.
But … NO vaccine ‘cures the disease’. That’s not so much lame as ignorant. What I suspect you mean is 100% prevent the disease. But smallpox, polio etc don’t do that either. No vaccine – even those so-called “vaccines” not extracted from cowpox pustules – is 100% effective.
Steve,
It’s Allan. I get that a lot.
That’s a bit confused. You think survivorship bias among the unvaccinated is somehow different pre and post vaccine? How peculiar. Not sure you’ve grasped what it is.
Survivorship bias
Steve,
You can’t think your way to that one. The tests definitely do distinguish Covid and flu. Their genomes differ substantially, which means PCR is definitely up to the job of IDing them. But if you’d rather it was a pandemic of flu – against the evidence – have at it. That still makes it a pandemic of something.
Here is something I wrote on the subject of PCR and the perpetual myth peddled that it is nonspecific.
And here’s another one on the related issue of death certification, which is a clinical opinion, not simply a test result.
Well, I don’t think that’s true at all, but no matter — I know it is not relevant. I was not suggesting that anyone make a book deal, merely that your reluctance to seek confirmation that you had suffered from the much touted (yet never documented) Covid-vaccine-shedding could be viewed as quite selfish: as in, why are you so reluctant to demonstrate that covid-vaccine-shedding is real? Think of all the pain and suffering you could save others! You would be a hero! A totally unremunerated one, if you so choose, of course. Do you really lack the courage of your convictions?
Well, I think we can agree that it was not pheripheral, and it definitely wasn’t an enema. 😮
Humm. Not sure what the quotes around “sheds” are meant to convey here, except for an acknowledgement that your analogy is stretched beyond the breaking point. The body METABOLIZES most toxins, with some EXCRETION too. Perhaps you bought into the “urine of vaccinated people kills tadpoles” story. It’s false.
Live attenuated viruses can replicate inside a patient, producing functional virions. THESE are what may get ‘shed’. Dead viruses, replication-defective viruses, protein vaccines and mRNA vaccines cannot be ‘shed’ in a similar manner. So, no, you are wrong.
No! Too LITTLE physical activity will cause edema, and no-one suggested a “radical change in diet”, just more salt than usual: remember those sausages? Your more health-conscious family members probably don’t have renal insufficiency. What is your eGFR?
Nope. Although I am enjoying the shift from “thrombosis” and a “potential medical emergency” to a natural “defensive response to toxins”. I did not know that swollen ankles promote toxin flushing. You learn something new every day.
DNA_Jock,
Fuck me, just seen this (I usually skim, 80% of Steve’s output is little more than an extended ‘lol’).
*Cough* The Real Anthony Fauci, anyone?*** And the endless grinding of the Grift-o-Matic – ivermectin at $1250 a pop from Kory; lucrative click-grabbing Youtubers and podcasters? I might have a lol myself.
Lol.
[***Eta – RFK Jr’s a Democrat? Oops, own goal! Must have been confusing him with JFK Jr and QAnon. Lol.]
Moderna CEO answers how they have patents on novel virus sequences
Science wins… whatever it means…
Is Geert vanden Bossche manipulating the data? Or, is it the UK government?
If latter, heads will be rollin…
https://voiceforscienceandsolidarity.substack.com/p/vss-science-updates-during-pandemic-b30?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjo0NTcxMzQzNCwicG9zdF9pZCI6NDk4ODgyMDEsIl8iOiJYbnJOMiIsImlhdCI6MTY0NzAzNTU4MywiZXhwIjoxNjQ3MDM5MTgzLCJpc3MiOiJwdWItNTU1Mjk1Iiwic3ViIjoicG9zdC1yZWFjdGlvbiJ9.hAOA5rDO0vdvUUZF7mnyeLJ8nDuRRSd_RZrnlht6lX4&s=r
J-Mac,
OMG that is hilarious!
You might want to read Table 13 of their source data, which actually, y’know, compares rates, like any grownup would.
Here’s a quick summary:
Comparing the rate of dying between the fully vaccinated and the unvaccinated, the unvaccinated are dying three to four times faster than the vaccinated, per capita. It hits 7-fold for people in their 30’s, but that’s kinda noisy data.
My personal favorite, however, is this graphic which (in addition to using the raw numbers LOL, lists the three different levels of “vaccinated” and ALSO their sum. There is no conceivable justification for such lies.
How moronic.
The graphic:
J-Mac,
Equally hilarious! Sixty seconds on the internet reveals that that 19 nucleotide sequence is also found in the chimney swift Chaetura pelagica APOPT1 mRNA and in mycobacterium conspicuum (APO22613.1).
You have been sold a pile of codswallop.
Moderna patented the human MSH1 sequence in the hopes of using it for cancer therapy.
Thank you for the entertainment, though.
The Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2022 is awarded to dr. Vladimir Putin, who stopped the multi-year Covid-19 global epidemic in 2 days…
Bravo!!!
J-Mac,
J Mac, what the fuck are you talking about? Are you intentionally being as wrong as possible?
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2022/03/global-covid-cases-rising-again
Seven day average of deaths, worldwide, are at their lowest since April, 2020.
New Zealand, which reached 95 percent vaccination before having a case surge, has a case fatality rate of about 0.05 percent.
Compared to countries that surged in 2020, which have CFRs of about 0.8 percent.
NZ has a comparable age demographic and obesity rate, compared to US/Europe.
petrushka,
Do you mean to tell me vaccines work, and are not really just the evil dealings of the New World Order to make all of us sterile, submissive, automitrons? Is that really what you are trying to tell us??
I gotta have a word with J Mac. And Russell Brand.
The marketing of the vaccines was bad.
They were supposed to stop transmission. That didn’t last. They were supposed to stop infection. That didn’t last.
They were mandated. That made perfect sense when applied to healthcare workers, but not as much sense when applied to people not directly exposed to the public in indoor spaces.
If the stakes had not been so high, the marketing of the vaccines would be a farce.
Then there’s the problem with black people. The have bad memories of the Public Health Service, and these were not addressed. Unfortunately, the lesson learned from Tuskegee was counterproductive. The opposite of useful.
petrushka,
You seem badly misinformed. To rework that old Stevie Wonder joke, “Hey, being Black ain’t so bad… at least I’m not Republican.”
You really should take Erik’s advice to heart, and diversify the news sources you consume. Try to wean yourself off the Dirty Digger’s products, they’re killing you.
DNA_Jock,
My son lives in Harlem. My statement was informed by direct observation. Black people had much lower vaccination rates and much higher death rates, at least in the first six months. Black leaders like Farrakhan did indeed tell their followers that the vaccines were poison.
I also know that New York City had walk in clinics requiring no identification and no appointment. My daughter was vaccinated at one of these.
It appears that over time the disparity has narrowed.
So you can tell, by looking at them, whether “Black people” have been vaccinated or not. My daughter, niece, and nephew all live in Manhattan, but I lack your superpowers, I guess.
Well, thank heavens none of the Trumpista right-wing talking heads were ever dumb enough to diss vaccines! [finger to earpiece] what? Marjorie Taylor who?
Strangely, I remember your complaining about the difficulty in scheduling your wife’s vaccination. My daughter had to resort to the CVS shuffle, and her friends in Manhattan hung out at Walgreens at closing time to score surplus unused doses. When did these no-appointment walk-in clinics start operating? When racial disparity started to close, perhaps?
Consistent with the well-documented ‘access to health care’ explanation, and quite unlike the Republican vs Democrat divide, which is wider than ever. Funny that you can only manage to locate one Kaiser study.
No matter: what I was actually disputing was your Murdoch-driven narrative regarding “They were supposed to stop transmission. That didn’t last. They were supposed to stop infection. That didn’t last.”
They were supposed to REDUCE transmission. They were supposed to REDUCE infection. They do.
In medicine, the verb “prevent” does not entail a 100% reduction. It never has.
As Jock says, how can you miss the thundering bomb noises exploding at you doorstep while a mouse squeaks? You have heard of one black leader recommending against vaccines, and that’s equal to nearly the ENTIRE planet of Republican loons?
Fear the vaccine passport, 666 will be branded on your forehead, Bill Gates is trying to inject you with microchips (he is a dick, but still), Aaron Rodgers says if you want to be immunized, just call Joe Rogan, Ricky Shroeder sees Nazis in his stairwell with hypodermics, test the covid vaccines on prisoners says hero Scott Baio, which is fine because he would have to step over Sarah Palin’s dead body first to get one, and, and….where were all these anti-vaxxers 3 years ago before covid? Because at least then you could respect them as having a life principal rather than a damn red state, orange idiot , Tucker Carlson, Russel Brand grifter love fest.
But, you have never heard of any of this. Because the loud drone of Louis Farrakhan.
Good for you Pietruszka.
DNA Joke pretends not to get it. Or, if he does, he has to support his bias.
Phoodoo doesn’t get it. He probably thinks that 100% relative risk reduction in the Pfizer study means he is protected. He is a moron just like the fake christian DNA joke.
You probably read between the lines of Pfizer EUA. I knew 2 years ago it is bs.
I’m glad we joined the same club.
I’d recommend the 19th booster to them and all the supporters of the increased antibody titer… Boost your life while you can for the good cause of ….. whatever…
J-Mac,
I will say this J Mac, I greatly respect your ability to type out such long and physically taxing paragraphs, with polio in both arms. I don’t know how you do it.
If I were trying to save someone’s life would you care how if it were your life?
What people don’t understand, like poodoo and DNA joke, and possibly the rest on this blog, with the exception of Pietruszka, who must have had a change of heart, is that we have always had respiratory infections; i.e. some of them leading to pneumonias and many, many deaths. The 2017-2018 ” Flu Season” was so bad that hospitals in Ontario, Canada, but also all over the world were over capacity. We had patients all over the hospital corridors and even the hospital’s gyms. Same applies to Italy, Spain, England and other EU countries and the US.
When Covid-19 came, it was a breeze. Empty hospitals with much, much lower respiratory infections. I had expected something like that, but not this …
The question still remains: Who is doing it?
And most importantly: WHY? What is the agenda?
Cool story, bro.
We had never have a problem with people with the flu vs people hospitalized ALSO with the flu-like symptoms until covid… PCR testing is what made it worse…
PEOPLE LIKE DNA JOKE are going down…
If you feel the only way to persuade other people is by threatening them, then your position may need some re-evaluating.
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/us-blacks-latinos-remain-covid-19-vaccine-deliberate/story?id=79830353
“ Brandi Collins-Dexter, a digital ethnographer who tracks the spread of disinformation within the Black community, said many vaccine hoaxes draw on both historical and modern instances of racism.
One such hoax that circulated among the Black community claimed that the vaccines could lead to issues with fertility, piggybacking on the Black genocide frame, Reuters reported.
Latinos have also been subject to widespread vaccine-related misinformation due to social media platforms’ lack of ability to accurately detect misinformation written in Spanish. A study conducted by Change Research on behalf of Voto Latino, in March found that 51% of unvaccinated Latino respondents stated they would not get vaccinated against COVID-19 and found the primary agent driving such resistance was Facebook and its role in spreading misinformation.”
Perhaps I was wrong, but I didn’t make it up, and this is not a right wing news source.
I get it that English is not your first language but there are significant differences between the meaning of the words “threatening” and “warning”… I hope you can appreciate that.
I get it that English is not your first language but there are significant differences between the meaning of the words “threatening” and “warning”… I hope you can appreciate that.
petrushka,
What is your point?
Right. I am sure that Jock is really touched by your concern for his well being.
You really don’t get it.
This bs. is not about “pandemic”. It’s about so-called evolutionary science that jumped the gun into a conclusion that SARS COV2 MUST BE a product of evolution that just can do anything.
Do you know who is worried the most after all this nonsense propaganda machine is settled down?
By now everyone, in the right frame of mind, can make a “scientific prediction” what the CDC, in cooperation with FDA, is going to do to make sure of the following:
– everyone, as long as he/she lives in a country that can afford it, gets a regular gene therapy injection once every 3 to 6 months.
– to make sure that Big Pharma gets off the hook of liability, the gene therapies have to get the vaccine schedule for the newborns. Once they do that, it’s over. It was planned before COVID-19. Greed never sleeps…
I am most impressed that you even found a role for evolutionary scientists in this global conspiracy for world wide pharmaceutical dominion. If you keep this up I am sure you’ll manage to fit in everyone and everything you dislike, including that neighbour that always parks in your spot.
This does not sound paranoid at all.
After 2 years of total absence on the world scene of seasonal upper respiratory infections the influenzas are making their way back, as per most reliable sources, such as WHO stats.
Some worried it (the flu) reached an evolutionary dead end, or it was just outcompeted by the “novel virus SARS-CoV-2” with its 70 plus “novel’ features already existing in the patent record dating back to early 2000…
Greed never sleeps…
What I’m really glad about is that the word “Science” will have to change its meaning if this panicdemic ever ends.
If I were the Creator, that’s exactly how I would punish the greedy and the proud evolutionary experts who started this nonsense in the first place…
Science would have to be now referred to as “Shitience” for what I care and I became who I am thanks to good science…
You have to believe in something. Otherwise, what is the point?
IF your belief system falls apart one day, make sure you have a garden to attend to…
Serial non sequiturs. Hardly surprising that flu cases almost disappeared when people were taking measures to prevent the spread of airborne diseases. Hardly surprising flu has made a comeback now fewer people are taking precautions.
What has that to do with (corporate?) greed?
You can only usefully talk about your own beliefs. It’s a waste of pixels to project about others.