One of my family members is also very hesitant to get the vaccine and gets all kind of anti-vaccine propaganda through various groups and channels. She takes that content as "reasonable" and "potentially true" even tho basically all of what I've seen is simply untrue. E.g. an article claiming there were more deaths due to covid vaccines than to covid, which is "backed up" by official NHS statistics. How did they arrive at this claim? Well they just said any recorded covid death with a recorded precondition didn't die due to covid but due to the precondition and any death that occured within 14 days after a vaccine shot was definitely because of the vaccine. I think I don't have to explain the logical fallacy in that argument, but it does make for a nice headline and many (most?) readers only read the headline. Who really takes the time to carefully read and see if the claim has any logical basis? To make things worse, this kind of "news" is regularly republished across multiple sites hiding the "data" multiple links deep (if directly linked to at all).

That's the kind of content many anti-vaxxers are exposed to on a daily basis. For your line of reasoning to make any impact it would mean that not blocking this kind of content actually weakens the positions of anti-vaxxers. However, I strongly belief the opposite is the case. Being exposed to this kind of content and treating it with similar credibility as other news/media is strengthening their position too.

So we have a situation where keeping the content is reinforcing the beliefs and where blocking the content is also reinforcing the beliefs, because "legitimate" content telling "the truth" is blocked "without reason".

I'm also not convinced that outright blocking it is the right move. Hindering it's discoverability (e.g. by downranking it in the so dangerous social media reinforcement bubble algorithmns) and somehow making clear that it might be of very low credibility might be a better approach. It might also be equally hopeless.

I'd say that blocking the content doesn't always reinforce their beliefs. For a lot of people, reading something that is then blocked at a later date reinforces the belief that the information they consumed is not only true, but so true that it has to be censored by some authority, because it would threaten said authority's legitimacy.

As an example, imagine you think that the police are too violent, and you stumble upon police bodycam footage of a cop getting unnecessarily violent at a traffic stop. You bookmark the video, and then later when you try to tell people about it, the video has been taken down the police, for whatever reason. Wouldn't that reinforce your belief that police are too violent?

I know this isn't a perfect example, because a video of someone doing something is much different than an article making claims based on little to no evidence. But the reason some people's beliefs are reinforced by censorship is because they can't help but wonder if the people doing the censoring are trying to hide something.

Some people are beyond saving- there is nothing that you can say or do to get them to accept that their beliefs are wrong. So you're better off expending efforts on the option that disrupts the radicalization pipeline.

What could I possibly say or do to convince this person otherwise? They are so far beyond rational understanding of the vaccine that I'd rather take down the misinformation than be afraid of somehow re-enforcing that family member's beliefs.

I like to do in-depth research for myself (example: watching an entire Trump or Biden speech instead of relying on a selected soundbite), viewing the original video or source instead of blindly believing on what mainstream media says about them.

Unfortunately as more things get censored from social media/YouTube whether fairly or unfairly, it looks like I'll have to spend more time on "alternative" platforms, being exposed to the stuff that is common on such platforms. In the end, there's going to be the Twitter echo chamber, and the Gab echo chamber, etc (note that Parler seems to be dead).

A slightly more effective approach for you might have been to remove such videos from their recommendation algorithm. But, that doesn’t mean it’s ineffective for people who would be initially discovering this stuff.

Platforms, by their nature, are mostly worried about what's happening on their platforms - when it's occurring elsewhere, it is no longer their problem. It is a mistake to think YouTube wants to bring an end to all misinformation everywhere - their focus starts and ends with misinformation on YouTube. Balkanization is the best option they can hope for, as long as it's not on YT.

The arguments goes in both directions, if you don't handle it correctly then being too heavy handed has the opposite effect.

Pontius Pilate doesn't really care, as long as he's washed his hands of the matter and has rid of the man (and crowds) from his court.

But the pipeline is not a single thing. It’s a mutating and evolving entity. If you remove the content from one place, it shows up in another, but now it has more credibility because it’s been “removed for truth”.

Unless there is a plan to block these people from the internet entirely, disrupting the pipeline ends up being gasoline on a fire.

Such is the nature of a decentralized internet. The only centralized authority that can keep people off the internet is the government, and it would immediately run into freedom of speech issues (and I'm not a fan of government action. I'd much rather have private sites use their free speech/editorial powers to combat this).

Are many smaller fires better than fewer, but larger conflagrations? Depends on who you ask, I think so. However, platforms don't care about the larger picture, they are only concerned about the fires on their properties.

Then doing things on basis of motivating them is a dead end, and we should staunch the flow of falsehoods to keep other people from becoming contaminated.

A previous fundamental tenant of public health was candid communication.

Censorship goes against that - many activities through this - such as not promoting general health and wellness, diet etc, - go against past foundations of PH.

If people are questioning the legitimacy of PH, censorship reinforces that perception.

What's next, in that case?

I'd rather focus on "what now", because in my opinion there has not been any candid communication between the yays and the nays. All of the media produced along the lines of "5 common vaccine myths DEBUNKED by fauci" are drivel and work backwards from the position that anti vaxxers are dumb and irrational and all their complaints are totally wrong, rather than actually trying to convince people of anything.

What I would love to see is a public, formal debate between two people/groups about vaccine mandates. I might even pay to see it, or fund it or something. I think the closest we have had to this was Rand Paul "grilling" Fauci in a congressional hearing, which was not helpful because it devolved into the participants yelling over each other.

>candid communication doesn't address if the opposing view has overwhelming (and un-candid) counterpoints

I'm not sure if a formal debate counts as "candid communication", but I do think a formal debate would address this. If one side is totally unreasonable and none of their arguments hold up, everyone will see that. If one side just reverts to yelling, everyone will see that.

I know this is a pipe dream, because our media masters have decided that vaccine opposition is just too dangerous. But frankly I cannot think of a better opportunity for the people who claim they know best to actually prove that their opponents are wrong.

To remove false information is not a failure to be candid

We have always removed false information

A private company removing content is not censorship

Public health has always been in favor of removing false information

The perception is being reinforced by false moral equivalences and false claims about the past

There is no downside to removing structured false information being presented by a foreign power

Your hand-wringing doesn't make sense

Logically many of your points that use ‘always’ are highly unlikely to be true, because we’d only need find one case to prove the statement false.

"vaccine producers are immune from liability", is not false but is anti-vaccine ... its taken down.

When reports about problems with AstraZeneca were coming out, those were tagged as misinformation, today most countries no longer give out AZ vaccine.

Theyre suppressing truthful info, why should you trust anything they say?

> ... there should be a preference for an alternative to the AstraZeneca [1]

> Canada’s largest province says it will stop giving out first doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine due to concerns over its link to rare blood clots [2]

> More nations halt use of AstraZeneca's COVID vaccine citing clots [3]

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/use-of-the-astraz...

[2] https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/canadas-large...

[3] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/more-nations-halt-use-o...

False. Here's the note on the image showing vaccine usage:

"Note: The Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine is known as Covishield in India. Only countries that report doses administered are shown. Other countries may have approved vaccines but have not administered them yet."

Unwinding decades of malfeasance and indoctrination takes time and effort.

Even those who snap out of it then spend decades coming to terms.

Even worse: The liberal tendency to cult shame and scold backfires. (Am guilty as charged.)

The only effective remedy I'm aware of is distraction and redirection. Like the guy who slow walked his wife out of the QAnon cult by encouraging her interest in the opera.

Meanwhile, cockblocking the grifters helps too.

UNfortunately what your family member is doing is actually the mirror opposite of what the official reports and mainline consensus has been, that all deaths in X days of a positive covid test are caused by covid but that no deaths after vaccination are are caused by vaccines. Also consider that harms from covid have been reported averaged amongst all age groups to give and inflated risk for the young, while risks from vaccination have been averaged amongst all age groups to lower the stated risk to the young. I state this last point just to illustrate how deliberate misinformation has been government policy with regards to covid stats, so the same technique used by anti vaxxers is of no surprise whatsoever.

When the mainstream consensus uses precisely the behaviour nudging abuse of data as a conspiracy theorist, do not be supposed when some people are unable to see what the problem is.

This is pretty close to the truth. For a further nudge in the right direction you should apply that thinking to the state of mind your family member was in prior to encountering any "anti-vaccine propoganda".

They were not in a kind of limbo where they could go either way on covid vaccination. They consumed specific media because they already distrusted the authorities in power in the USG.

The reason you are ending up in this apparent to censor or not to censor paradox is because leadership had already previously failed to convince your family member that they could be trusted. Everything that came after was just mobilization.

Now in your situation you should of course censor the hell out of any anti-vaccine sentiment for the same reason that ISIS should not get to train on Army gym equipment and weapons: it *strengthens* your enemies.

Downranking will of course be equally hopeless. This is the equivalent of the Army allowing ISIS to train with them but only on Sundays at midday or something. Its incoherent.

The right answer has been and will always be to have a leadership class (and that includes the people at Youtube and Google as well as legacy politicians) who can be relied upon to display even a modicum of trustworthiness towards *all* Americans. Ironically censorship also fails to move the needle in the right direction at this point.

Guess we are still in that paradox after all.

Can you think about one time in history when you conclude "the government was right to censor this"?

The rules of debate say it's always better to refute the main argument and to address their issues. If you resort to ad-hominem attacks, appeal to authority, or just plain censorship, to me it is a confession that you do not have better information to add to the debate. Which implies that I'm right.

A good faith discussion between opposing parties requires establishment of some common ground and a set of rules of engagement (eg 'claims must be supported with facts/data'). Cult leaders foster a sense of paranoia among their followers which makes a good faith debate virtually impossible.

In this case you may think you know. Maybe you are even correct. But maybe you won't be next time.

Anyone who won’t accept that vaccines save lives

Please stop with the cult like behavior.

That really depends where you are located. There are US states where <50% of the eligible population is vaccinated.

Why the qualifier, 'in general?' In what cases does one of the major US COVID vaccines reduce a healthy adult's life expectancy?

At that point you have to work out whether offering them a platform is something you want to do.

The sad truth is, they do this just because of fucking ad revenue. There's no grand conspiracy against, or even for anti-vaccination movements. It's just people selling the world for a quick buck.

And some people are still shooting me weird looks when I keep telling them that advertising is a cancer on modern society.

(As an aside Parler was idiotic for not running on their own hardware given they were billing themselves as the censorship resistant twitter, but that's neither here nor there)

This line of reasoning doesn't make sense under even the lightest scrutiny, it doesn't go along with what we actually see YouTube doing.

Companies doing this is arguably preferred to governments doing it, but only just barely.

That's one assertion. I don't buy it. If users have the tools to decide what information they're exposed to I think that solves the problem just fine.

We're getting to the point where companies could pay parents to name their children after products. Oh wait, too late[0], we're already there.

[0]https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-11-17-bethesdas-skyr...

Sounds like she has already made up her mind, in which case I’m not sure it matters if the content is moderated or not. It’s possible she will find whatever reinforces the decision she’s already made.

==The only thing worse than bad ideas is the suppression of bad ideas.==

This sounds good, but is it true? The bad idea exists today and is spreading, does limiting that spread actually cause more harm? Is there evidence of this or a study to support it? In schools, we suppress all sorts of bad ideas. Take eugenics, has suppressing that idea made the belief in eugenics worse?

Exactly. My experience with people taught me that once an adult made up his/her mind with some belief, it is extremely difficult to shake. Confirmation bias will be in effect most of the time. The only chance to change it is when someone really close to the person (who he/she trusts), or someone this person admire/worship says otherwise. And in this case, since it's Youtube, it will never happen.

No, fortunately that is not worldwide practice. "Challenge", possibly, «suppress», not everywhere.

Would suppressing the discussion about eugenics worsen the matter: yes, for example by having to restart the discussion from stage one. The naïve would retain naïve ideas, unchallenged.

Ideas like eugenics clearly have something to them that resonates with people, at least until they think hard enough about the ethics or logistics involved. There's a reason eugenics cropped up in the first place. So yes, insofar as you suppress a dangerously seductive idea, you do make it worse, because it takes actually explaining what the flaws were with the idea to shake people out of it.

If that's the case, did she make up her mind before or after consuming the anti-vaccine content?

In my experience, most people who are hesitant about the vaccine are that way because they distrust the government. The anti-vaccine content didn't cause their hesitancy. They only consumed it because it confirmed their pre-existing bias.

If the anti-vaccine content isn't the underlying cause of people not wanting to get the vaccine, censoring that content will not fix anything. I know many people who, like OP's wife, simply see the censorship as further justification for their pre-existing bias. We are likely killing free speech with nothing to show for it.

So, since the "idea" has actual current practice, you may want it to be in the foreground, not «suppress[ed]».

https://theconversation.com/forced-sterilization-policies-in...

--

And again about school, we were taught about the eugenetic effort of mid century in primary school, when we were eight years old: relatively "mature" content, but is it possible (yes, it is) that "if you treat children like children (and adults like children), they will behave like children?".

So this is sort of meta isn't it? The easy phrase that sounds good gets a lot of traction, but actually proving whether it's true, long term, is a difficult problem!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law - I'm not calling BS on the phrase we're discussing, just that we don't know!

Meanwhile back in the real world, a friend of ours died of COVID yesterday, leaving behind a husband and son. Pretty sure she was not vaccinated. She was relatively young and in good shape.

People already that far down the rabbit hole aren't going to be made more or less hesitant whether YouTube or others leave the content up or take it down because at this point they are already believing things that have been shown to be untrue (or at least highly unlikely to be true).

But taking it down might stop a lot more people being drawn in to the conspiracy theories and becoming that hesitant in the first place and further perpetuating the problem by forwarding on the misinformation.

Taking the information down saves a lot more from the misinformation than it pushes in the other direction. Not that I think we should abandon the latter of course, but they are going to need some other form of intervention anyway, whether this step is taken for the benefit of the others or not. We can't fix all the problems with one action, but needing other actions to help those more deeply entrenched doesn't mean we shouldn't perform this action to help those who are not yet there.

Hell, I always thought anti-vaxxers were looneys and was first in line for the COVID shot when it was available in March... but even I'm starting to be convinced that the anti-vaxxers might have a point because of all this effort to silence them. I'm becoming vaccine... remorseful?

Assume you are in a country where it's not, say the USA. Assume you slowly witness a rise of naziism that as usual comes with holocaust denial. Now the USA make holocaust denial illegal. Would that make you reconsider if the holocaust really happened?

What the anti-vaxxers and their misinformation are doing has lead to the absolutely unnecessary loss of thousands of lifes. Depriving them of any platform is morally imperative.

Scientific, rational debate is ideal on these subjects ... but is that even possible anymore when people are jumping off the deep end so much. David Koresh would be envious.

I took 2 shots of Moderna and I am shareholder but I still think that banning debate is stupid. I still have doctor friends who personally don't feel the risks is in vacine favor for them personally.

IMO YT should be forced to allow filering of content by each user. I hate it so much that I am served stupid crap from time to time. This would be much better that this erosion of basic rights. There should be ability to share curation algos but that's obviously against ad driven,supply driven monipolies. Fuck em.

Keep in mind this is also true of deaths following COVID. Remember this one in particular? https://wpde.com/news/nation-world/man-who-died-in-motorcycl...

Not me, but I could easily see it making other people suspicious. It directly plays into the anti-Semitic tropes about Jewish control of communications. Pass such a law and the first thing they would do is point to its passage as proof of whatever conspiracy theory they're espousing.

The correct response to bad speech is not censorship, it's more speech: refute those arguing for bad policy, counterprotest those espousing hate. Imprisoning Hitler and his cronies didn't work in Germany, and far right groups like AfD still gain traction in the country.

Deplatforming works and helps stop disinfomration. The racist Richard Spencer and the rightwing clown Milo Yiannopoulos both say they're broke and unemployed now thanks to everyone banning their racist content. These things are fine to do and work.

And also confirms the scepticism of those who have grown diffident of dominant narratives.

Deplatforming can also stop information.

--

The issue is an old epistemological issue: it is the "demarcation problem". We have been there. It's not trivial.

People are allowed to make their own choices. If they belive the holocaust isn't real, fine. When they discuss it, refute them.

In the US, the only time the line is crossed is when discussion calls for immediate and specific violence, could directly cause harm, or falls into the slanderous/libel and even that can be difficult to prove. I can see no reason for the above illegality of speech to expand.

Something like making holocaust denial illegal is borderline compelled speech. Sure, you could just not talk about the holocaust, but if you want or need to talk about it you must now espouse the official position of the government. Absolutely terrifying to think about.

That is the most illogical statement I've read all month.

The result of making something like this illegal is: 1. Person is not allowed to talk OR 2. Person is allowed to talk but is now compelled to only espouse a message approved by the government.

Illegal speech in the US is speech which does harm or has a direct incitement to harm such as specifically calling for a violent action, shouting fire in a crowded theater, or lying about someone to harm their reputation and cause financial impact.

To make something like denialism illegal would require you to show that, by allowing someone to say it, they are causing direct and immediate harm. That's not the case here at all. Saying the holocaust didn't happen doesn't cause people to then go commit genocide. At worst it convinces people some horrific event didn't happen, but that horrific event is still horrific conceptually.

Denying vaccines work may convince people not to get them so maybe you'd argue direct harm there? But it's not clear to me how you can measure the harm since it's arguable that said unvaccinated person may get covid and be totally unphased. What about those people that got covid prior to the vaccine? How could you argue direct harm from them when they already have the antibodies sans the vaccine?

In Germany the problem is Nazis and a choice about how to stop them doing it again. We have seen that such people can convince nearly an entire population (so the problem is likely) and start a world war (so the problem is extreme). Why would anyone debate the need for a law that limits a freedom in a case we consider pretty unworthwhile anyhow (limiting the freedom to deny the holocaust).

As for vaccines it's again a calculation where we know the problem is extreme (huge economic losses and deaths) and the likelihood increases based on how many people don't vaccinate - or whether people in specific jobs don't vaccinate. The calculation shouldn't be that hard.

But the Germans are not more prone to becoming "nazis" (again) than any other nation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Haverbeck

Cody, what other reason would exist to make denial of the holocaust or anything else illegal if not to hide something?

Your terminology is confusing: there is hesitance. The hesitant want clear, trustworthy information. Lack of clarity over the clash of what is seen and what is narrated reinforces hesitance.

The censorship of those who claim the impossible easily hits those who claim the possible, and the first can be used as a strawman against the second. This is one of the practical reasons why your «moral imperative» is invalid: these months showed that you cannot set the threshold.

It would change my bayesian priors. Not enough to change my opinion entirely, but it would move me more towards the middle.

Imagine flat-earthers were suddenly banned from all public fora. Currently, I'm able to see the arguments they make, and they're decisively unconvincing. If I knew a lot of people believed something that strange but didn't know why, it would absolutely be more convincing than now, when I hear the arguments. I think the same is true of any seriously badly-reasoned belief.

My assumption would be such views were banned (at least on certiain widely viewed platforms or in schools) because a sizable section of society thought they were not only obviously false but also promoted harmful views, like neo-nazism in the case of Holocaust denial.

Those views are so badly wrong that they're anti-science and anti-history. There's no reason to give them credence.

Flat-earthism is a noncontroversial and extreme example of a belief that gets less believed when its proponents have the full benefit of free speech, but I think there are many more like it.

it's pretty rare for an ordinary person to have the opportunity to directly observe the curvature of the earth. I personally don't notice it when I fly commercially. you can indirectly observe it with binoculars on the beach by watching ships (dis)appear over the horizon, but a) you have to recognize the implication, and b) this can be confounded by a mirage/shimmer effect.

it's not hard for me to imagine that some extremely skeptical people might doubt that the world isn't simply how it looks: flat.

Building the tools to better censor is a slippery slope that moves quickly from silencing extremists to silencing activists.

>Would that make you reconsider if the holocaust really happened?

Pulling the h-card out as a cudgel in every single political argument has reduced people's ability to reflect or care about it. Same as the 'think of the children' arguments. It's an emotionally manipulative and dishonest debate method.

Please protect 2nd amendment, free speach and privacy. Also would be nice to solve internet polarisation and economics of propaganda somehow.

Free speech is great if almost everyone is reasonable.

America is not nearly there. Empirically, free speech has failed, as an insane fraction of American citizens are vaccine hesitant and believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

The US should have handled this exactly like a sane country: - No lockdowns. You determine your individual risk level. Businesses are free to require masks if they want to. (I really would only be okay with a compelled wfh order, if possible.) The gov owes a lot of people a lot of money for compelling them not to work. The gov wouldn't owe money if consumers just stopped shopping places because they didn't feel comfortable not wearing a mask in a business that didn't require them. - Vaccines rollout is: take it if you want. We recommend it. It appears to be safe. Here is the data. If you don't want it, fine, but we are business as usual so you're accepting a higher risk.

Perhaps there is no way, in a liberal society, to have a silver bullet? It turns out principles matter in such situations.

This is a smear. Communities of Color are vaccine hesitant and for the most part do not believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen. It's gross of you to ignore the legitimate concerns of Communities of Color and to declare them election conspiracy theorist. You're attempting to lump together diverse groups into a single "not like me" group for your own ideological convivence. This is disgusting.

Lumping all these groups of people together as was done here is a great example of the mindless zombie tribalism going on, which in large part is a result of propaganda.

There is a pretty large closure of ideas that now get you pegged as "one of the Bad People" for even stating them publicly, without strongly held support. For example, even suggesting that our election systems in the US are horribly broken or just merely flawed, a widely accepted bi-partisan position just a few short years ago, puts you into the bucket of being a "horse-paste consuming, anti-vax, insurrectionist, conspiracy monger." I wish this was a strawman, but it ain't.

The problem being that democracy, even representative democracy, also only works if almost everyone is reasonable and (tying back to speech) informed. Once you give up on the population being reasonable, it's a short step to saying that someone "reasonable" ought to control what they see and rule over what they do "for their own good, of course". Even if that happens to be true, down that road lies madness.

Hilariously it seems to be that empiricism has failed. One does not generate a meaningful framework of human morality from non-transcendent scientific conclusion other than utilitarianism which in itself is conceptually flawed because each human presents hundreds or thousands of immeasurable and constantly moving targets. This is intractable. It is also why, despite the leaps and bounds in technological advancement, people still have to put in their 40 hours. It is why a CEO can rake in ~300x that of the company's average employee. It is why a large swath of the population must undergo the risks of debt peonage. It's why people feel that populist ideology should be inflicted on everyone, despite various circumstances - by the very definition a slave master relationship, the same sort of relationship virtually everyone rails against. Which brings me to the final point, I am not your property, and I suspect neither of us wants to be the property of the government or of corporations. I will assume they neither you nor they have property rights over me and thus I will consume and defer as I so please, but do go and inflict your blind ideology on to me.

More seriously, what would be your solution to a country where two major power blocs both believe that free speech is acceptable so long as it stays inside their respective overton windows?

Why there are only likes and not option of "I think this is stupid" or "I don't think it's true".

Well, to play devil's advocate - if it did, and anybody were to say it did, saying so out loud would also be illegal in Germany.

China is an example of platform-denying taken to the extreme,

Scientologists in Germany face specific political and economic restrictions. They are barred from membership in some major political parties, and businesses and other employers use so-called "sect filters" to expose a prospective business partner's or employee's association with the organization.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology_in_Germany

Who are you to judge what needs to be censored?

I think that's it exactly. It seems some (many? most?) people believe that the consequences of actions deserve more scrutiny and a higher threshold to act, than inaction and the threshold to refrain from action. Lots of people—almost instinctively, at least for some of them—think acting to kill one to save five is worse than letting the five die through your inaction.

You have to go get the vaccine. You choose to get it. Getting COVID-19 is just something that'll happen to you, eventually. You don't choose to go get it.

Whether it makes sense or not, I think that really is the difference.

I think for three reasons:

1. Long COVID isn't a definable disease. That whole ground has been badly polluted by people claiming to have "long COVID" when they haven't ever even tested positive for short COVID, there being no symptoms in common with all reports, etc. It's very hard to say what the long terms effects of COVID really are even though there are now nearly two years of experience with it, for this reason.

2. Long term effects from vaccines have happened before, e.g. early ones gave people polio, more recently there was the Pandemrix / narcolepsy affair. Drugs of any kind are put through difficult safety trials because of a long history of accidents. They are artificial chemicals designed to manipulate the bodies most powerful internal mechanisms after all, no reason why it's impossible to have long term effects.

3. The side effects of COVID vaccines are drastically worse than any normal vaccine. They routinely make people very sick, but it doesn't get treated by scientists as a possible sign of bad things happening because these are "normal" and "expected". Some side effects weren't detected by the trials, like myocarditis, and others weren't detected despite being apparently very common, like stopped periods. Not detected because all the women were on birth control. In fact information on side effects of any kind is extremely poor - you get self reported documentation at best, as there are no major large scale surveys - and the establishment is quite obviously terrified of any attempt to find out more. The trials themselves ignored all events that happened 7 days after vaccination, which doesn't seem very long. That attitude is endemic.

In a situation where all discussion of side effects is heavily penalized or outright erased (e.g. Nicki Minaj losing her Twitter account), it's inevitable that people will conclude something is being frantically swept under the carpet.

Finally, consider something important: the ambient underlying assumption behind the vaccination programme is that everyone will get COVID at some point and it will be the same for everyone regardless of when they get it. In reality it's now been nearly two years and most people either haven't got it yet, even when heavily exposed because they were self-isolating with sick people (I am in this category), or alternatively, got it in such a way that it was so mild they didn't notice at all. If you assume the modellers are wrong again, and that a 100% chance of infection is not in fact correct, or alternatively that by the time you do get it it's mutated to a form that's no worse than a cold, then the tradeoff around vaccines looks quite different even for middle aged people. After all, zero spike proteins is better than some regardless of how you get them.

I agree it's fuzzy, just like "vaccine side effects". If you believe one is worth worrying about, the other one probably is as well. But long covid probably a stronger clinical record even if fuzzy.

2. Ok so we definitely know by now that the vaccine does not give covid in the same way that some older vaccines against other diseases would've. There's been clinical trials and billions of doses given. As for events like adjuvant-induced narcolepsy, so far they're conjectures as well. Conjecture for conjecture, I worry more about the one that's been filling children's hospitals with unexplained neuro diseases...

3. Yes there have been lapses in reporting of side effects but so far they seem to have been rather benign.

> the ambient underlying assumption behind the vaccination programme is that everyone will get COVID at some point and it will be the same for everyone regardless of when they get it

No, I disagree. The ambient assumption is based on what happens in an unchecked mass epidemic: massive excess deaths. It is not this way because everyone gets it or because everyone reacts the same to it. It is this way because this virus is bad enough on average. There is absolutely an element of collective responsibility in the assumption about the vaccination campaign - that it's not just to benefit the individuals who are vaccinated, and that no matter how good you think your odds are of survival, it is socially irresponsible for people not to get vaccinated just as it is socially unacceptable not to wear your seatbelt in your car, even if you're driving by yourself on a desolate stretch of road, or to do recreational heroin which is detrimental to your own health only. It's because even though the vast majority of the people doing these things survive, left unchecked, they impose a burden on society that society rejects.

The pandemic until very recently has been entirely unchecked yet there was not 'massive excess deaths' in many places that did relatively little, like Sweden. So you're asserting this with vague emotional terms like 'massive', but this is the exact assumption that I'm talking about.

Maybe Sweden was lucky.

If people really cares about the others, they should have had stayed home and eradicated the virus.

I would argue that having full scale lock-down and mass testing would be a lot less intrusive to one's liberty than using their jobs to coerce the injection of hastily made vaccine using novel technologies. But one isn't supposed to be following China's eradication strategy, or it would be undemocratic, right?

Not to mention the additional selection pressure due to leaky vaccines, but that's another story.

Disclaimer: I'm fully vaccinated.

Nicki Minaj got kicked off twitter for making an absurdly stupid and false claim because she didn't want to bother with getting vaccinated.

As for Minaj's claim: you believe it's absurd and stupidly false, because you haven't heard anything else like it. But this topic is about censorship of anything that can be perceived as anti-vaccine. VAERS has quite a lot of reports of swollen testicles and/or testicular pain, so who is to say that her report was really false? It can't be proven by either of us one way or another; just assigned probabilities based on prior expectations. Expectations partly controlled by the type of act this thread is about.

But your doctor might have told you to not do sport for a day. I never had any adverse effects before and consequently ignored that advice after a tetanus vaccination. Completely knocked me down the next 2 days.

This vaccination has been administered on a very large scale, so it shouldn't necessarily discourage anyone if there are some adverse effects. Maybe the advice against doing sports must be extended to wanking, but side effects can be a result of circumstances.

If you believe vaccines have no potential negative effect beyond 1 week, you'll have to give a serious thought as to why you believe Covid can have long term effects.

Also past vaccine history means absolutely nothing. You can't assume the next bridge is built safely just because you have never seen a bridge fall before.

I mean, covid can kill you, which is kind of a long-term negative effect? Surely you're not arguing that the vaccine is equally likely to have that particularly long-term effect, so then I'd ask why you think it's equally likely to have other long-term effects?

> Also past vaccine history means absolutely nothing. You can't assume the next bridge is built safely just because you have never seen a bridge fall before.

Really? I mean, do you...generally avoid bridges where you live?

It seems to me that if bridges don't collapse frequently, that would indeed be evidence that whoever is building / designing / approving them is doing something right, and that "the next" bridge is also unlikely to collapse?

...because they are different? A localized, single dose mRNA vaccine that transiently produces spike protein will have a completely different effect than systemic infection with a virus.

The person you responded to quite clearly suggests it's illogical to ignore long-term effects of COVID in comparing the outcomes. Particularly in light of the actual evidence of neurological effects of COVID, and some evidence of long COVID being more than phantom effect.

If you assume a weighted value X for long-term vaccination impacts, but assume a 0 or anything materially less than X for the same for COVID it's just not a consistent evaluation.

It does not mean nothing. Yes just because previous vaccines were safe does not mean the next one will be safe. However success of previous vaccines mean we have the technology to create and evaluate future safe vaccines.

Similarly, because we have a history of building bridges we know what it entails to make future safe bridges -- however the bridge could still fall if make a mistake.

HPV was 'just' genital warts, until we found out that it causes cancer. Other animal species have cancer-causing viruses as well. Or take Chicken Pox: basic kid's illness in the past (and yes, it was worth getting it when younger before a vaccine was available to avoid late-life illness) but if you've ever known anyone with a severe case of shingles you'll know that it's not 'just' a virus that causes itchy rashes in grade-schoolers. Shingles can ruin people's lives.

Assuming you won't have any long-term issues from exposure to a dangerous virus is just rolling dice.

The idea of letting my kids get a known neurologically-affecting virus without even the option of vaccination (yet) and just hoping that it won't cause them issues in the long-term fills me with dread.

I've given up reddit after arguing with all these fools. A simple risk analysis will tell you it was the right thing to do. If you're wrong about the vaccine, you took a shot you may not have needed, if you're wrong about COVID, you're betting your life on it (and other people's as well).

https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/574284-natural-covid-...

It appears that you too have been a victim of the misinformation that youtube is attempting to mitigate!

That's really where I'm most concerned. We vaccinated both of our teenagers - after all, we get the flu shots every year, right? Now I really worry that there will be side effects from this rushed vaccine that we won't know about for decades.

We’ve had 9 months with the vaccine and everyone who gets it is doing great, but you think some problem is going to crop up in 20+ years?

Except for the ones who get sick or die of COVID you mean.

This isn't accurate - there's nothing indicating that the immunity from vaccine + exposure is worse than the immunity from exposure alone.

I lost all faith in mass media years ago, haven't watched CNN/etc in years, and now I've lost any faith I had in our institutions such as the CDC and FDA. Censoring any opposition and using full on physical coercion, forcing people to do what they say or else they'll take your job away from you, or else you won't be able to provide for your family, ruins any remaining trust I had in them and now I'm questioning everything that I just blindly trusted was true.

I don't know how many years it'll be before I ever trust them again. You may think I'm completely wrong and misled, and that's fine. But the actions these groups are taking are completely undermining themselves, they're completely screwing over their credibility. Not just for this issue, but for every issue into the future, and that is a serious issue. I no longer assume that what the FDA approves is good for use. I no longer assume what the CDC says we should do is what's best for me. The trust is gone. This dystopian situation of removing the voice of anyone who dares question them only further entrenches my doubt.

My opinion: this isn't actually a feasible solution. There are not enough doctors for all millions of Americans, let alone all billions of humans, to consult with their doctor. It's also largely unnecessary. I did not consult my doctor. I looked at the situation, assessed my values, did my own cost-benefit analysis, and mediated all of this with a healthy amount of dialogue between my confidantes. As most people do.

I think this almost necessarily has to be litigated largely through public engagement. You know your situation, your risks, and you know if a serious consultation is prudential for you.

Even still, if the position is "don't make decisions based on biased media," why is the pro-vaxx media more valuable than anti-vaxx or vaxx-hesitant? I believe it resolves entirely to your individual values.

The argument should be: why is it profitable to the individual to value one over the other? I can only make this argument from my previously-established values, and I'm already pro-vaxx.

I guess Youtube would supress reports of that now until it became official news ...

Any particular reason?

I'm someone who was told to be cautious about some vaccines by medical professionals due to a past condition, and so when the covid vaccines started to come available, I both consulted a doctor and did some of my own investigation of things other professionals have published before determining to get vaccinated as soon as possible. Also I've been following VAERS reports since, just to keep a heads up.

As far as I can tell, adverse events from vaccination of any kind are orders of magnitude rarer than corresponding adverse effects from infection.

And nobody who is saying anything about "long term effects" that might show up later has been able to advance any plausible model for how that would happen considering that's vanishingly rare from vaccination in general.

No they shouldn't be removed from the modern public forum because of that.

Don't let the two get confused. Just because someone is silencing people with stupid opinions doesn't somehow make those opinions less stupid.

They see money, time, and effort being expended by groups they already feel are against them to silence certain views. Of course they're then going to more prone to associate themselves with those views: "The enemy of my enemy is my friend."

"Antifa indoctrination in the classroom"

"Covid-19 Vaccine Exposed"

"FDA Official: ‘Blow Dart’ African Americans with COVID Vaccine is ‘Where We’re Going"

I think I can live without "engaging in discussion" with you.

If I see a video of a US President saying no Generals recommended that US troops should stay in Afghanistan, and days later, I see the top US General saying he did recommended to the president to leave 2500 to 3500 troops on the ground...If you happen to watch it on Fox News, it does not make it untrue...

In the case of some of the videos I suggested, they relate to Johnson & Johnson vaccines. Lets review, for example, some of the current Lawsuits, including number of claimants they are currently engaged in...

Pending Lawsuits Against J&J as of February 2021

=================================================

DePuy ASR XL Acetabular System and DePuy ASR Hip Resurfacing System

Number of Lawsuits - 550 Injuries - dislocation, loosening, metallosis (metal poisoning), revision surgeries

Pinnacle Acetabular Cup

Number of Lawsuits - 7,056 Injuries - dislocation, loosening, metallosis (metal poisoning), revision surgeries

Xarelto

Number of Lawsuits - 13,511 Injuries - severe, sometimes deadly bleeding events, blood clots, wound leaks, infection

Johnson’s Talcum Powder

Number of Lawsuits - 27,168 Injuries - ovarian cancer, mesothelioma cancer

"The company is facing smaller, emerging litigations for the interstitial cystitis (IC) drug Elmiron and DePuy’s Attune knee implants. Elmiron litigation is in the beginning stages with a handful of cases filed in state courts, but lawyers expect hundreds more. People who filed lawsuits say Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen Pharmaceuticals unit failed to warn them that the drug could cause vision problems, particularly a condition called pigmentary maculopathy."

=================================================

Does it sound like you want to get a vaccine from them?

According to the CDC, and most of this thread...you are a nutter and vaccine denier if you dont.

You posted a video/article of some people making some claims. What is the argument you want to support by posting that? I want you to state your argument as clear as possible so that we are not strawmannig eachother. Debate me!

I will not even go into the value of that article because it immediately raises all kinds of red flags which if you are incapable of seeing, there is no point arguing about the article. Issues related to jurnalistic integrity (revealing your supposed whistleblower), deliberate cutscene use for manipulation, deliberate tangling of source material in order to string a narative , tainted entity (as GP said, which can not be ignored), and many more. These people are clearly shitty hacks.

BTW, "A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on." - Winston Churchill And in this case, it did already get translated in several languages and spread everywhere in the span of at most 2 days.

1) Even some technical employees of Vaccine producers are skeptical of their products, particularly vaccination of children. Watch the videos as they are secret recordings of some of these employees. I am not claiming all at J&J have the same position. But its a position that currently gets you banned on YouTube and downvoted here.

2) My other argument is that this whole thread is full of claims of "vaccines safe", ignoring the error implied by the generalization that comes with it. The examples I posted of the J&J medical lawsuits show the appalling record of this company. But if you refuse a vaccine from them you are apparently somebody you should not even debate.

And please dont mention the FDA...

"The story of "probably the worst drug approval decision in recent US history"

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/09/26/politics/alzheimers-drug-...

1.2 That person (BS) is the only one actually claiming you don't need to vaccinate kids. He is not even claiming you should not vaccinate kids, just claiming as a personal oppinion that it is not necessary for kids.

1.3 The other one (JD) says to not vaccinate BABIES but to actually vaccinate kids once they are socialized.

1.4 JD in the video is actually pro-vaccine. The only sentence they managed to take out of context ("Don’t get the Johnson & Johnson [COVID vaccine], I didn’t tell you though,"), was in the context that he actually did get vaccinated and he got the Moderna vaccine because he believes that one is better.

1.5 So for the first point, the actual people interviewed do not even support your point. Even if the people editing the video did their best to make you believe that. Maybe you are the one who didn't watch the video. The people who made the video are so obviously selling a narative and so obviously lying through the power of video editing.

1.6 You never even claimed that all of J&J employees shared the same position. Do not get sidetracked.

1.7 You absolutely deserve to get downvoted for posting manipulative misinformation that is not even supported by the people being interviewed. You deserve to be downvoted for posting shit. This is the kind of material that does not belong on HN. And while I am against banning, it is YouTubes right to ban people/content from their platform.

2.1 Yes the claim is that vaccines in general are mostly (but not perfectly) safe. And that vaccines in general are a lot safer than the disease they prevent. And that the COVID vaccines follow the same trend and are mostly safe and definitely safer than the disease. (Note: In countries that managed to actually eliminate the disease through lockdowns, the risk calculation is different for obvious reasons) This, claim is not refuted by the link you posted. This claim has so far proven to be true.

2.2 The record of the company does not change whether the J&J vaccine is safe or not. (Is has so far proven - by third parties - to be mostly safe like the other COVID vaccines, and certainly safer than COVID.) You are however justified to be suspicios of the claims the company makes.

2.3 Even if you don't trust J&J, there is still Pfizer and Moderna. And if you don't trust mRNA technology, there is AstraZeneca. And if you don't trust the US and UK government, there is Sputnik V and some others. Your link, besides not actually supporting your point, is not relevant to all the other options.

3.1 Do not get the discussion sidetracked. The FDA/Alzheimers debate is a separate debate.

3.2 Please respect this structure when countering my arguments

P.S.: I need to rant!! While writting this rebuttal was not a waste of time, watching that video definitely was. It was so unbelievably cringe. I do not know who these (your original link) conspiracy peddlers are, but they are with certainty shit. The most shit they can be. They are shit from a human pov, shit from a professional pov, shit from a integrity pov, shit from a communication pov. just shit. shit faced pieces of shit. It is unbelievably frustrating that trolling has actually become a profession. Trolling was many things pre-2010 but it was not this.

Posting stuff like this is actually something you should apologize for. You should apologize to @pg, to @dang, to the rest of HN and to me for posting shit on HN. It is the kind of thing that is bound to get someone, who does not immediately dismiss you as a troll, nerd sniped in an (easy but ultimately useless and pointless) attempt to demolish such content.

Some of these are Technical employees some of them Managers familiar with the internal company processes. Some you decided to disclaim their opinion as personal opinion. Others because they are not high enough in the hierarchy of the company. That is an acceptable attitude. However ignores the reasons why they fundamentally would be making those statements.

These claims are just data points, but its bit like saying: A Volkswagen sales person or Company car mechanic says their cars are crap. I am going to ignore those data points because what do they know about car engineering...I will listen instead to the Chief Company Engineer...

Maybe, its because they are not that high in the hierarchy, that they allowed themselves to make those statements.

Your argument seems to be that they dont know what they are talking about. You ignore the fact,that one of them is clearly stating not to take their vaccine. And you are the one misstating facts. JD says the older kids should only taking as their "civic duty", does not say the vaccine is really required.( for kids)

> 1.6

I wont. I was reminding you upfront that I did not make the statement.

>1.7

If that is true or not the readers of this thread are welcome to decide by watching the videos themselves and do further research. I would like to remind you, that many facts now accepted, used to get people banned from Facebook and YouTube months ago.

You are claiming I am posting something that does not belong to HN and I deserve to be downvoted, as I am posting shit. If its all shit, dont worry, the downvotes will come. :-)

But you went further than that. I take your comment, that although you dont endorse banning, you think YouTube is entitled to ban who they want from their platform, as a veiled threat, that for some shit post here, you would also like to engage in a similar type of scientific and political arbitrage.

The problem with that attitude is that it tends to backfire.

>2.1

You seem to forget or ignore that in many countries millions of people are facing vaccine mandates, with no exceptions accepted, that include threat of job loss unless they comply.

You ignore that vaccines used to have 5 to 7 years experimental trial periods. You make a blank statement that vaccines have been shown to be safe based on what were "warp" speed operations, on the face of unprecedented pandemic. And you make that statement you forget or ignore the fact that all safety studies exclude the immunocompromised.

Compared to your somewhat blank statement of vaccine safety, lets see what the WHO says on their website, for example about AstraZeneca. These are partial quotes but I think they support my argument that you cannot make the statement you just made:

=====================================================================

"The Oxford/AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine: what you need to know"

"Should pregnant women be vaccinated?"

While pregnancy puts women at higher risk of severe COVID-19, very little data are available to assess vaccine safety in pregnancy.

"Who is the vaccine not recommended for?"

"People with a history of severe allergic reaction to any component of the vaccine should not take it."

"The vaccine is not recommended for persons younger than 18 years of age pending the results of further studies."

"Does it prevent infection and transmission? No substantive data are available related to impact of AZD1222 on transmission or viral shedding."

https://www.who.int/news-room/feature-stories/detail/the-oxf...

=====================================================================

>2.2

Thank you for agreeing with me concerning the company claims. About Pfizer, yes I trust them even less, as until the pandemic they had a toxic reputation:

> 2.3

About Pfizer, yes indeed, I trust them even less. Until the pandemic they had the most toxic of the toxic reputations.

======================================================================

"Pfizer: Six Scandals to Remember"

"Pfizer is likely to make huge profits from its COVID-19 vaccine but the greatest long-term benefit to the company may well be the positive PR it has received as a result. That PR was much-needed: before COVID-19, Pfizer had a toxic reputation even compared to other pharma companies. "

"1986: Pfizer had to withdraw an artificial heart valve from the market after defects led to it being implicated in over 300 deaths."

"2003: Pfizer has long been condemned for profiteering from AIDS drugs."

"2011: Pfizer was forced to pay compensation to families of children killed in the controversial Trovan drug trial. During the worst meningitis epidemic seen in Africa, in 1996, Pfizer ran a trial in Nigeria their new drug Trovan. Five of the 100 children who took Trovan died and it caused liver damage, while it caused lifelong disabilities in those who survived"

"2012: Pfizer had to pay around $1billion to settle lawsuits claiming its Prempro drug caused breast cancer."

"2013: Pfizer paid out $273 million to settle over 2,000 cases in the US that accused its smoking treatment drug Chantix of provoking suicidal and homicidal thoughts, self harm and severe psychological disorders. Pfizer was also accused of improperly excluding patients with a history of depression or other mental disturbances from trials for the drug."

"2020: Pfizer reached an agreement with thousands of customers of its depo-testosterone drug in 2018 after they sued it for increasing the likelihood of numerous issues, including heart attacks."

https://corporatewatch.org/pfizer-six-scandals-to-remember/

======================================================================

I agree that for some, the risks of vaccine might be smaller than the risks caused by COVID-19.

But governments and health organizations implementing obligatory legal mandates, are also responsible for fatal outcomes like these Pfizer related examples:

"Young people’s deaths after Pfizer vaccines are new worry"

https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/2021/08/24/national/soc...

"Twenty-three elderly Norwegians died within days of receiving the first dose of the COVID vaccine, local health officials say."

https://7news.com.au/lifestyle/health-wellbeing/covid-vaccin...

"Lisa Shaw: Presenter's death due to complications of Covid vaccine"

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-tyne-58330796

"New Zealand woman dies after receiving Pfizer vaccine"

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-58380867

"Michigan boy dies 3 days after getting Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, CDC is investigating"

https://eu.freep.com/story/news/2021/07/02/jacob-clynick-pfi...

> 3.1

I wont get sidetracked. I tried to prevent you, mentioning things like organizations like the FDA are watching out for the health of consumers. You implied that other 3rd parties are watching out for vaccine safety. In reality they review material presented by the vaccine producers. Its a very similar process to Boeing and the FAA reviews.

> 3.2

I tried to respect it as you made the effort to reply to my comments.

PS...rant...shit shit..rant...rant.. :-)

The problem with rants is that they can come to bite you in a few months.But now its here for posterity.

Hopefully these virus mutations will fade to progressively less threatening flavors. My money however is on that they wont. Infections will be back.

As everybody agreed vaccines are "safe", and it will be politically and scientifically difficult to contradict what was stated until now, you wont escape a mandated 4th, 5th and 6th dose.

You will be mandated to take it, as the principle is accepted in spirit and in law. When the side effects start, I am sure the argument then will be: "Oh we never said vaccines were absolutely safe, they were always risks..."

I tried to focus on your 2 points and how the initial link did not actually support either of them and it was mere video editing trickery. You have instead brought a good chunk of your world view on the subject into the discussion and even some accusations.

I will first reiterate my points to encapsulate them in an even more concise form and then address your response:

1.1 BS is Regional Deliver Operations. His opinion about vaccination is irrelevant.

1.2 Although BS's opinion is irrelevant, your point is not supported by what he says. He is sceptical that kids need them, not that they are safe and effective.

1.3 JD says kids should get vaccinated. This contradicts the narative of the article. Why kids should get vaccinated is offtopic.

1.4 JD did't get J&J because he got Moderna. JD does NOT recommend staying unvaccinated instead of getting J&J. JD actually recommends people to get Moderna instead of J&J. The video is edited to make it appear that he is against vaccines in general.

1.5 is just summarizing 1.1 - 1.4

-------------------------------------------------

As for your response:

> Some of these are Technical employees

FTFY: 1 of 2 is

> some of them Managers

FTFY: also 1 of 2, maybe a manager but irrelevant due to department

> familiar with the internal company processes.

maybe, but most probably irrelevant due to department. Also irrelevant because the debate is about the safety and efficacy of the J&J vaccine, not about the crimes of J&J the company.

> Some you decided to disclaim their opinion as personal opinion.

FTFY: 1 namely BS. Due to being in an irrelevant department.

> Others because they are not high enough in the hierarchy of the company.

Bullshit. I did not disclaim JD's answers. I said they do not support your point.

> That is an acceptable attitude.

Offtopic

> However ignores the reasons why they fundamentally would be making those statements.

Are you claiming they made declarations under duress?

> These claims are just data points

They do not support your point. One out of two is irrelevant the other actually says kids should get vaccinated

> , but its bit like saying: A Volkswagen sales person or Company car mechanic says their cars are crap.

Your analogy is not even an analogy. The correct analogy is: one is the delivery man and the mechanic says Porsche is better.

> I am going to ignore those data points because what do they know about car engineering...

I ignored the delivery man

> I will listen instead to the Chief Company Engineer...

Bullshit. I did no such thing. You are strawmanning me.

> Maybe, its because

Why they answerd the interview is irrelevant. You seem to think they are the Snowden of J&J. They are not.

> they are not that high in the hierarchy, that they allowed themselves to make those statements.

Bullshit. I never once mentioned hierarchy.

> Your argument seems to be that they dont know what they are talking about.

Bullshit. my argument is that regardless of knowledge, the oppinion of the delivery man is irrelevant. It was an interview with his oppinion. BS did not reveal anything, he just gave his oppinion and speculated. He is not a whisleblower. He is irellevant.

And JD says kids should get vaccinated. The reason is offtopic

> You ignore the fact,that one of them is clearly stating not to take their vaccine.

Yes, because BS is in a irrelevant department.

> And you are the one misstating facts.

Which one? The one bellow? I am not, he litteraly said: "Once you go out and you've got to go to preschool, ....., that's when you need to vaccinate"

> JD says the older kids should only taking as their "civic duty", does not say the vaccine is really required.( for kids)

Irelevant. I will not try to explain to you why that is important because it is offtopic and we do not start from the same base assumptions.

--------------

Also, with regards to 1.7, I made no veiled threats. You claiming I did is a nasty accusation and it is bullshit I will not accept. But 1.7 is actually offtopic from 1.x

I think it's fair for anyone in this case to dismiss the information as pure noise, given the source.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Veritas#Failed_attempt...

That is independent from your own research if those claims are true or not.

Edit: because I realize this is an apples-to-oranges comparison, here's an appropriate one: we don't allow cigarette companies to advertise, since smoking cigarettes is manifestly unhealthy. There's been an extraordinary amount of reporting on the undisclosed financial relationships between prominent anti-vaxxers and snake-oil companies; it's not clear to me why forbidding this kind of manifestly dangerous profiteering on a global pandemic actually represents a risk to free expression.

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/28/nyregion/vaccine-health-c...

i did file a formal HR complaint and asked for a list of other personal health information required for continued employment that was not in my offer letter. I expect no response though.

That's the point. You don't have a right to endanger the healths of other people, and you never have; the legal groundwork for vaccination mandates significantly predates the current crisis.

> I eventually relented and uploaded my vax card because i was going to risk my family's wellbeing over a random piece of paper.

Close to 5 million people have died worldwide, and your concern for their wellbeing only begins when you're required to get a vaccine that's been free & convenient for months? With all due respect: have a little perspective.

Ah but the vaccines are leaky you say, the vaccinated can acquire and spread the disease, and they can do so asymptomatically. And to that I propose a question: are the vaccines definable as effective, that being the case? If you're so positive of the vaccine, shouldn't your whole family unit be vaccinated? Children aren't very susceptible to the disease. Once boosters are deployed to the aceding population, will that cause a paradigm shift? Once a large proportion of children are vaccinated? Once we hit the constantly moving target for "herd immunity"?

No, it's all or none. It's arbitrary. It is not logically consistent. It is government policy in a nutshell.

People die constantly. Attributing causality exclusively to COVID19 is asinine. Even using an aggregate like excess mortality is a fool's errand. It's been clear since the beginning that comorbidity in combination with COVID19 is what typically causes death. Any numbers pulled to evidence how deadly COVID19 is are fraught with interdependencies and overlap and hardly present a true to life picture.

It's naive to think you can save everyone. It's okay that you're afraid.

This isn't why we encourage mass vaccination. We encourage mass vaccination because herd immunity protects everyone, including people who can't be vaccinated for legitimate reasons (allergies, immunocompromised status, &c).

I'm young and healthy; my chances of severe illness from COVID are extraordinarily low. I didn't get vaccinated primarily for my own protection; I did it because I have friends and family who need it more than I do, and whose return to normal life is predicated on the participation of society as a whole.

The rest of your post is misinformed about the role vaccines play, and would be addressed by improved public education about immunity, improved immune responses, and lower incidence of severe cases. Individual vaccines produce different outcomes along each of those axes, which has (understandably) produced a great deal of confusion as to whether the COVID vaccines "prevent" COVID or not. But the information is available, and it's incumbent upon you as a member of civil society to avail yourself of it.

> It's naive to think you can save everyone. It's okay that you're afraid.

What?

A policy of mass vaccination to protect the vulnerable is a different thing and is more related to the concept of herd immunity. It can be very bad policy depending on the nature of the virus. Its really good policy for something like measles. Here's a link that takes a deep dive on how this relates to covid and the corona virus: https://www.juliusruechel.com/2021/09/the-snake-oil-salesmen...

But two points:

* Being a neurosurgeon, even a highly educated and titled one, does not make someone an expert on immunology. If he was an expert on immunology, he would be an immunologist. This is exactly the reason why there are stringent rules about diagnoses and evaluations in hospitals: doctors are no less susceptible to expert confusion than the rest of us.

* mRNA vaccines are a new technology. But they're not that new: research into mRNA transport and delivery began in the late 1970s[1]. By the 1990s, they were recognized as the frontier of vaccine development, and were primarily stymied by an absence of funding. Vaccinology's history spans 300 years, the majority of which involved stabbing people with unknown quantities of pathogens without any real understanding of what we were doing. mRNA represents a significant and positive increase in the use of our modern understanding of immune systems to develop medicine. That doesn't make them safe, but they do represent the safest approach (in terms of healthcare outcomes) we've had to vaccinology in its history.

[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02483-w

I got vaccinated to protect myself and those around me. My job has no business in my health records. period.

edit: also, i'm 100% wfh since before the pandemic started. I'm endangering no one at my workplace.

You mean other than the health insurance they (hopefully!) provide you, right?

Even beyond that, the idea that the piece of cardboard that the CDC gave you constitutes meaningful (much less private) medical data about you is facile. Depending on the state you live in, your employer de facto has knowledge of your medical history: if you went to a public or private school in most US states, they were legally required to obtain proof of your vaccination against multiple diseases. The reason your job doesn't ask for that proof independently is because we've succeeded at lower levels in mandating it.

> also, i'm 100% wfh since before the pandemic started. I'm endangering no one at my workplace.

That's fine. But your workplace (presumably) isn't your only social sphere.

Edit: You're also (again, presumably) going to return to your workplace or travel on behalf of your employer at some point.

Skeptic videos might be disseminated on sites frequented solely by those willing to believe them, and they will be less exposed to dissenting opinions.

Part of this is because of recommendation algorithms on social media sites like Youtube getting people into positive feedback loops. If you find a anti-vaxx video and Youtube recommends you two videos, one re-enforcing the video you've just seen (making you feel smart for having found and accepted the information in the original video) and one debunking it (which makes you feel stupid for having wasted your time on the original video), which do you think the average person is more likely to pick? Eventually the algorithm will "naturally" pick up that people watching anti-vaxx videos don't want to see videos debunking those views and will never show them to people watching anti-vaxx videos. The only way to solve this paradox is to blanket ban the anti-vaxx videos.

Which is actually part of why I’m opposed to a blanket ban. I’ve had to personally wade through papers and studies to determine whether a vaccine skeptic (an M.D., at that) had correctly interpreted the results.

They hadn’t. So I’d rather have someone else, with some expertise and clout, spend some time on it and publish their counterargument.

Which /also/ means, the reasonable moderates of the censored position disappear. With consequences.

Which should contain the rebuttal to that first "proposal": the "centrist algorithm".

To some degree, that’s true. While the vaccines are overall relatively highly effective and safe, there is no denying that tens of thousands of serious injuries and deaths have occurred as a result of them. Overall the benefits strongly outweigh the risks, but there are risks nonetheless. This is not abnormal for anything that is injected into hundreds of millions of people.

However, platforms like YouTube - cheered on by the CDC and an incredibly heavy handed Biden administration - have decided that people don’t have a right to learn about these cases of “adverse reactions”. As well intentioned as they may be, hiding obvious facts from people calls into question everything else that they are being told. It only emboldens the vaccine hesitant when the powers that be are less than honest and forthcoming about the potential negative outcomes of the vaccine, regardless of how rare they might be.

An action that has nothing to do with the vaccination itself does not "strengthen" anything unless you have decided that you are just in opposition to something for the sake of being in opposition. Which is entirely what the anti-vaxx movement is really about from a political standpoint. Same thing with anti-mask.

I'm sorry to hear this. I hope she find the help she needs to understand how and why she's been led to believe this. You might want to talk to her about where she's spending time online, and maybe look into her social circle. Lastly, if she's susceptible to conspiracy theories this won't end with COVID for her or you.

However the flow of new misinformation also strengthens their beliefs, and draws in new people to the delusional cause. Overall I think deleting this misinformation channel is still a net positive.

We need some psychologists on the case. Or advertising professionals.

However, wildly untrustable sources with dubious motives are accepted as truth with no filter.

How did the adversaries hack their brains and lock the door behind them?

In 2019, the CDC and WHO could have been considered "eminently respectable sources of truth", but they've both said things to totally tank all of their built up credibility in the last year and a half.