benpiper

A better headline: "Fake vaccines are everywhere"

What makes him think tech companies want "surveillance-resistant systems" (whatever that means)?

People have come to realize a few important things:

- Omicron is comparable to a really bad cold for most people

- The vaccines reduce the risk of death for only a very short time, then the effect wears off, and they have unknown long-term sequelae

- Living like it's 2020 is not sustainable

There's always a balancing act between vaccine safety and efficacy. The smallpox vaccine mimics a natural infection, but it's extremely dangerous because people who get vaccinated can actually spread real smallpox to others for a period of time, so they have to stay isolated.

Pre-Covid coronavirus vaccines tested in animals induced antibody-dependent enhancement and were thus deemed unsafe for human trials. A safe, effective Covid vaccine was always a long shot. Maybe one day we'll get one, but maybe we won't. Thankfully, there are multiple other drugs that are effective at preventing and treating Covid.

The very term "disinformation" is problematic because people use it too loosely. Disinformation is another word for propaganda, or information intended to deceive. The author of the post seems to use it correctly.

But people often use the term as a pejorative for any information that goes against their groupthink, regardless of whether the information is true or false. In the latter case, they're actually using the term "disinformation" as propaganda, ironically. The same is true of the term "fact check," which many of us identified as a red flag for propaganda years ago when it first started appearing.

There used to be a sort of IQ test to use the Internet. If you didn't have the technical skill and knowledge, you couldn't participate. That's all changed. Now using the Internet requires about as much skill as scribbling on the bathroom stall with a sharpie.