premium-gecko

> every family's weird uncle refuses to get a vaccine

Suppose I thought you should get some injections, and you researched it and concluded they almost certainly wouldn't benefit you, and might harm you. Would you be OK with being characterized as a weird uncle who refused to get a treatment?

The Club of Rome is some odious stuff. It seems to be a group of academic doomsayers who like to play around with toy models in order to justify quasi-communism and other goals related to neo-Malthusian beliefs. They may be the primary progenitors of using toy models to cast the bones and make scary predictions about the future, especially with regard to climate alarmism. From The Limits to Growth:

"In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like, would fit the bill. In their totality and their interactions these phenomena do constitute a common threat which must be confronted by everyone together. But in designating these dangers as the enemy, we fall into the trap, which we have already warned readers about, namely mistaking symptoms for causes. All these dangers are caused by human intervention in natural processes, and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy then is humanity itself."

If you feel any need to do that, you should probably consider looking for some different job. There's a karmic burden for making a living in an immoral way.

> A pandemic ravaging the globe doesn't seem clear?

A fear campaign ravaged the globe. If there hadn't been a fear campaign, I don't think anybody but doctors and immunologists and such would have been aware anything significant was happening. Similar to previous seasonal illnesses that were technically pandemics, but no normal person recalls doing anything about it. For example, ask people who are old enough what they remember about the HK flu in 1968.

> Herd immunity and personal protection are both parts of every vaccine, they go hand in hand

I'm still waiting for the example from the past where we administered a vaccine to someone, saying to them "this is not to protect you, since you are not at risk from this virus, but it is just to protect someone out there, we don't know whom". Are you able to provide such an example?

> If it's virtually zero risk

It would be great if we knew that, but we don't. We usually have long testing periods, but we didn't this time, for reasons that remain unclear.

> Stop trying to make out like this is some sort of new or extreme position.

Please remind me, when was the last time that we gave people vaccines not to protect that person specifically, but to allegedly protect some unknown other person, somewhere?

I have a movie in my head about how and why "progress" happens, and what its true nature might be. I imagine someone maybe a thousand years ago, living in primitive conditions, holding the body of their loved one who has passed away for some reason. The person is hurt, sad, furious, indignant at God/nature for allowing this thing to happen. The person promises that no matter how many lifetimes, or how much effort it takes, they'll fix the world to be the way God/nature should have done but was too evil or incompetent to make it.

Well, it turns out that the person's loved one could have been saved. All that was needed was what we consider to be a modern hospital. But a modern hospital has quite a lot of technological dependencies, and so do those things, and so do those things, and so on. But let's say you do it. You got copper wire and steel and internal combustion engines and concrete and microscopes and global communication networks and microprocessors and on and on and on and on and on. Now people don't die of that same thing, whatever it was. Via technological magic, we just look inside the sick person's body, see the nature of the illness, and put in the right chemicals, or perform an amazing non-invasive operation via a robotic snake or whatever. Problem solved via vision and the sustained application of brain power.

But it wasn't free. The global communications network you needed for all kinds of things, it's being used to deliver pornography. Pornography addiction is a thing now, a problem that wasn't even previously possible. The same tech you use to make the chemicals that can save someone's life, they're used to make painkillers. Back in the day, drug addiction was something like drinking too much, or maybe smoking tobacco. Addiction to these painkillers is common now, and many people are dying and/or ruining their lives. The same technologies you needed to facilitate global collaboration have made it possible for the first time for governmental powers to do effective mass surveillance. And so on, and so on, and so on.

The point of the parable is to suggest that back in the day, when we were indignant about the death of our loved one, we didn't realize it, but we were kind of at a fork in the road. We could choose to fix ourselves, and accept the death, and see it as just the result of circumstances, and therefore blameless and perfect, or we could choose to try to fix the world. This choice has very very deep implications. When we try to fix the world, it seems like the result might be that we sort out the original problem at the cost of creating a bunch of new problems that are equally bad, or possibly even much more complicated and difficult to solve.

Are school-age children at risk from this virus? If not, what is the medical justification for performing a medical procedure on them?

> This will not go on an on

At what point would you be willing to admit you were wrong? If we're still doing whatever-variant this time next year, would you reconsider?