BickNowstrom

I think a lot of ammo for anti-vaxers comes from the government and media not being completely honest about vaccine side-effects. That's because it is difficult for an individualist or a socialist to separate public health from individual health. The CDC is not your personal physician. The CDC worries when newspapers publish facts about vaccines, such that some vaccines can cause severe and traumatic side effects, while being 52% effective, because they worry about obtaining herd immunity and need people to accept the vaccine for that. They want you to go through weird little side-effects, like not enjoying alcohol for months, so you don't infect a senior they count in the flu statistics. It's when "do no harm" means sacrificing the lives of a few to save the many.

Then there are political and funding concerns. If your own government funds your research to investigate if Agent Orange is harmful to the point of culpability costing billions, you are very careful and delicate with your conclusions. If your vaccination tests show that black Africans show more severe adverse effects, or that, maybe yes, the connection between vaccination and (worsening of) autism is both plausible and understudied, what do you do? For them its a single kid, maybe 2-3 in 100.000 which will start to suffer from autism years earlier, and a disease eradicated. For anti-vaxers, it is their kid.

Essential workers and at-risk people are first in line to receive the vaccine. The hope was availability in September, and public rollout in the beginning of 2021.

The anti-vax conspiracy mud has completely destroyed online information about this subject. There are more such subjects, where it is very difficult to find what the anti-activists are freaking out about. For instance, my gut tells me that physical and mental torture can be effective to obtain useful information. That that's why the mob, military, and police mainly use it for. But, online, nothing: torture is completely ineffective for the first 10 pages of Google. The Holocaust is another obvious one. 5G rollout ("completely safe, maybe, we don't know for sure. Improved Youtube streaming is important tho!"). Or try to find information on how the riots created a spike in infections. All news sites report on the same non-peer reviewed non-scientific institute paper, saying the riots caused spikes is a lie, yet the paper clearly postulates that riots increased infection for black participants and their families, but taken on the whole, they likely caused non-protestors to stay at home more for fear of violence and this reduced virus spread.

> Despite this marked difference in virus replication in the lungs, reduction in viral shedding from the nose was not observed.

So vaccinated people will not get too sick, not self-isolate, but will still shed the virus? That sounds concerning for the non-vaccinated.

[] ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccination prevents SARS-CoV-2 pneumonia in rhesus macaques

A 50000 people study is likely to see adverse events completely unrelated to the vaccine. Halting the trial is not a sign that they think it is related either, since it is protocol to rule things out before continuing.

mRNA would not have hit Phase III if found unsafe in earlier phases. If mRNA succeeds things will look really great, since it in principle it can protect against many other viruses and upcoming pandemics with slight modifications. The most reported side effect for mRNA is mild stiffness at application spot.

AstraZeneca and Oxford have subjects in the US, UK, Brazil, and South-Africa. The aim was to have diverse make-up of the testing groups, to have an order of magnitude more people in the Phase 3 trial than normal for a vaccine, to test in countries with high infection rates, and to deliver the results on 15th of September. A British subject from the British trial got ill.

I presume these countries have deals with Oxford/AstraZeneca so if a safe vaccine is available, they get guaranteed access. I've heard India is already producing the vaccine ahead of the Phase 3 conclusion. The phase 3 is only on hold since it is not clear if the vaccine was the cause. There are other causes for the adverse reaction, such as viral herpes infection, or onset nerve diseases not caught during subject checkup. Since not all vaccines offer 100% protection (while still being useful), COVID may have also been the cause of spinal nerve inflammation.

- U.S. Surgeon General Feb 6 > Americans should be more concerned about the flu than coronavirus [...] As surgeon general, I’m telling folks the number one way to protect ourselves is to get a flu shot.

- U.S. Surgeon General @Surgeon_General Feb 29 > Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS!

> They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!

- U.S. Surgeon General, Mar 6 [Deleted Tweet] > Early am flight. No one with masks (they aren't recommended for general public) but noticed several people using antibacterial wipes on seats (I do this too). I'm not worried about #COVID19 - I'm worried about #flu & the guy reclining all the way back into me before takeoff. :/

"Surgeon general says administration "trying to correct" earlier guidance against wearing masks" July 12 > We're trying to correct that messaging, but it's very hard to do.

So what do we call this? Criminal negligence?

The World Health Organization played World Trade Organization and warned against banning flights from China. The U.S. General cared more about hardware stores not running out of masks, so medics could still get the masks that the government neglected to store or produce in case of a pandemic. The greatest U.S. authorities (including Azar and Fauci) did not trust the intelligence of the general public enough to promote mask usage, as they were afraid we were going to infect ourself by licking the front the mask when discarding it. "Better to just avoid sick people" they said, completely ignoring the impossibility of identifying sick people with asymptomatic spread or avoiding other people in busy cities. "Only wear a mask when you are sick" they said, condemning people who thought for themselves and read the research, and wore a mask to protect themselves and their caretakers, to the status of Leprosy sufferers.

Snowden could have exposed this too.

Snowden was even willing to burn his future career, as he took a job with Booz Allen Hamilton with the sole purpose of leaking as much information as he could get his hands on.

As an admin at BAH he was using his colleagues' passwords for discovery. He was willing to burn their careers to hack access to more leaks.

So much leaks that he could not vet these all. This was no Ellsberg tasked with copying some confidential papers and reading lies in them. It was wholesale collection of all Snowden could get his hands on.

Then, instead of making his point with his own whistleblower findings, he went to journalists and handed them over all the documents, instantly making them available to intelligence agencies all over the world, burning all NSA/CIA analysts with records in the dump (for instance, everyone who contributed to Intellipedia, which had zero reason to be in a dump meant for whistleblower purposes).

Then instead of facing justice (and there are whistleblower protections for doing the right thing), he cooperated with Wikileaks and fled to China and Russia, causing a permanent PR disaster for US intelligence with his new public speakings, book deals, and social media influencing career.

The reason Snowden's leaks got a lot of attention is that they "proved" (we never got confirmation that they were real) that data on Americans is being collected. We already knew, by law, that the Americans are allowed to fully spy on European civilians. That's how they are able to warn on impending terrorist attacks and improve their buy-in with European countries leadership (or how they are able to perfectly copy Germany-invented motors or Belgium-invented speech-to-text technology before these countries are even building it, because a strong US economy is a matter of national security).