It’s quite unclear why it makes you update about personal instead of the thesis. The vaccines likely don’t do as much damage as Kirsch first claimed but that’s not the same thing as he being a crackpot.
The article also makes some strange leaps. It assumes that death due to suicide couldn’t be due to the vaccine. Lipid nanoparticles get used as a vehicle to transfer drugs through the blood-brain barrier so it’s plausible that there are cases were the vaccine goes into the brain, a bunch of neurons expressing spike proteins, getting killed of by the immune system and that leading downstream to suicide in rare cases.
There’s the general idea in the post that it’s vaccines vs. no vaccines. To the extend that it is it’s only because the US government and the EU is not willing to buy and approve Novavax and doesn’t maximize vaccinating as many people as possible by giving different options. If the government would have been willing to engage in a non-tribalistic response Bred might have increased overall vaccination at the cost of pushing it back for a few months just like he convinced more people to take COVID-19 seriously.
Ideally the US would also just allow vaccines like RaDVaC but in contrast buying and approving Novavaxx would be easily possible if the NIH, CDC and FDA would be staffed by people who take the pandemic more seriously then tribal fights.
I haven’t seen Kirsch advocate for Novavax, does he? Might U.S. officials be thinking to themselves “we bought plenty enough vaccines for everyone already, no need to buy more”? How do you conclude that the mRNA vaccines cross the blood-brain barrier? Do you have safety concerns with the J&J vaccine?
I haven’t seen Kirsch advocate for Novavax, does he?
In the linked video, it’s quite clear that both Kirsch and Bret are generally pro-vaccine and object to new vaccine technology. They do say in the video that more conventional vaccine technology could be better. They don’t speak explicitely about Novavax.
How do you conclude that the mRNA vaccines cross the blood-brain barrier?
mRNA vaccines use lipid nanocoating. That same technology is used in other context to get drugs to cross the blood-brain barrier.
Do you have safety concerns with the J&J vaccine?
Safety-wise I would expect that side-effects follow some distribution. A vaccine that’s going to make a substantial portion of the people that take it too ill the next day to work is likely to have more serious bad effects then a vaccine that makes very few people to ill to work the next day.
I haven’t read about the J&J vaccine side-effects specifically, but even if it would have less safety issues a single dose vaccine is not going to give you the same protection against COVID-19 and that matters.
Generally viral vector vaccines and the mRNA vaccine get your body to attack some of it’s own cells in a way that a vaccine where the protein (or subsection) is injected doesn’t. There are arguments that this is going to make the vaccine more effective as it allows the immune system to do additional things. It however comes at the cost of the vaccine having more side effects because a few of your cells get actually killed by your immune system.
The results of Novavaxx suggest that this is not needed to have an effective vaccine for COVID-19.
Given the way the economics of drug development work, pharma companies are incentivized to push for a maximum in clinical effects at the cost of side effects because that increases the chances of drug approval. With vaccines that scientists do for their own protection like RaDVaC or Stöcker’s vaccines the incentives are the other way around and safety is a primary consideration. It’s quite ironic how the FDA’s safety processes of requiring those trials give us less safe vaccines.
Might U.S. officials be thinking to themselves “we bought plenty enough vaccines for everyone already, no need to buy more”?
Yes and that would be pretty stupid in a world where people might be willing to take a vaccine with less side-effects then the one’s already on the market but not those already on the market.
This both goes for the people who are afraid of missing a day of work after taking the vaccine and those who are concerned about the new technology platforms.
I will still get my second shot with the BioNTech vaccine this week but I’m annoyed that I can’t have Novavaxx and might spend 1-2 days without the ability to do anything for no good reason.
mRNA vaccines use lipid nanocoating. That same technology is used in other context to get drugs to cross the blood-brain barrier.
I’m no biologist, but I know all kinds of things have lipid membranes (including bacteria), so I doubt that simply being lipid-covered is all you need to cross the barrier.
I haven’t read about the J&J vaccine side-effects specifically
Well, it’s important to Kirsch’s position. After all, J&J has 568 deaths attributed to it according to OpenVAERS even though J&J is not mRNA-based (curiously, OpenVAERS is now reporting dramatically higher death numbers for Pfizer over Moderna, whereas they were ~equal one month ago).
I calculated that according to the latest numbers, 3.9% of vaccines injected were J&J vaccines (which is 8% of people “fully vaccinated” since you only get one dose of J&J).
Now, if my thesis is correct that the VAERS deaths are ordinary deaths that would have happened anyway, then approximately 3.9% of the deaths should be attributed to J&J. In fact, OpenVAERS (updated July 9) assigns 5.2% of deaths to J&J. Does this mean that actually there is a greater chance of death associated with non-mRNA vaccine shots? (well, the numbers are probably 2-3 weeks out of sync with each other, as the VAERS data lags behind. Perhaps this could account for the difference. Historical data is available, but not in an easy-to-read form. So I used the Wayback Machine instead, and found that … er, 3.8% of vaccine shots had been J&J on July 1. No significant difference.)
The same sort of hypothesis can be applied to non-death VAERS reports, of course, but I leave that analysis for someone else who cares enough to do it.
Yes and that would be pretty stupid in a world where people might be willing to take a vaccine with less side-effects then the one’s already on the market but not those already on the market.
Perhaps… but if I’m right, Novavax would end up getting VAERS death reports at roughly the same rate as other vaccines. If most people who are reluctant to take a vaccine are (like my father) getting their beliefs from people like Kirsch who harp on VAERS, Novavax might not end up being perceived as safer even if it is. So a relevant question, I think, is whether we could expect right-wing news outlets to effectively communicate “Novavax has less side effects / is safer” (because I don’t think an article in The Atlantic would sway the likes of my dad. edit: so I just Googled “side effects” Novavax site:foxnews.com and the first result is a video subtitled “Kurt ‘The CyberGuy’ Knutsson tells ‘Fox and Friends Weekend’ how he accidentally joined the Novavax trial coronavirus vaccine and what side effects surprised him the most.” The side effects weren’t bad, but the anecdotal approach being taken is not encouraging.)
Edit: btw, I totally agree that FDA needs reform, and it certainly wouldn’t hurt to deploy small amounts of Novavax to test demand.
When it comes to VEARS my main hypothesis is that VEARS used to be pretty bad at actually tracking side effects. One of the key arguments for it being bad is that if you look at history only a minute amount of the side effects that you would expect given what happens in clinical trials end up in VEARS.
It’s likely that some people who are responsible for VEARS thought that it’s very important that it’s good at picking up on side-effects given how we deployed the vaccines and the increased amount of VEARS cases is simply because the system was improved to get doctors to report cases more often.
Unfortunately, the sphere of people who are interested in making that argument is quite small given that it’s about admitting past flaws in vaccine safety.
I don’t think that Kirsch is as focused on VAERS as you assume. Kirsch is a VC for whom strong opinions-loosely held is central. That’s why he could easily switch from running an NGO that has vaccination as part of it’s mission to speaking up against the vaccines.
The article in The Atlantic won’t convince your dad but “we should use Novavaxx instead of mRNA vaccines” is a contrarian position that’s open to be argued especially when it’s an actual choice for people to take. It won’t be argued by real antivaxxers like Mercola but there’s no reason for it not to be argued by Chris Martenson, Steve Kirsch or Bret Weinstein. It also makes a good story for Tucker (for Tucker it doesn’t even need to be true to make a good story).
So, my dad is continuing to refuse vaccines, and while he’s not naming any of the people he trusts on this issue, one of his claims is about “infertility” and the only original source of infertility claims I’m aware of is Steve Kirsch. So I’d like to ask for your perspective on this.
Kirsch was praised by Bret Weinstein for continuing to update his anti-vax article as he found new information. And yet, Kirsch’s headline claim about the danger of vaccines—the very first claim he makes, the claim that the vaccines “likely killed over 25,800 Americans”—was retracted on June 18 by the person to whom Kirsch linked as evidence of that claim, Austin Walters. Walters also explained why his claim was wrong. But Kirsch didn’t change the beginning of his article at all. So Kirsch was supposedly keeping his article up-to-date, but he made an exception for the 25,800 deaths claim (and then, of course, he removed his name from the article and other names including Robert Malone appeared instead.)
Also, Steve said this: “Biodistribution of lipid nanoparticles which carry the mRNA show that the ovaries get the highest concentration” … but this is clearly untrue.
My question is, does this reduce the credibility you attach to Steve Kirsch and Robert Malone? If not, why not?
Also, do you know of any other original (not parroted) sources of infertility claims other than Steve Kirsch?
(On the other hand, if it does reduce their credibility… Yuri Deigin says he was a friend of Bret Weinstein before all of this started, and says that he told Bret about how Steve was misreporting the data re: ovaries (among other things). Do you know if Bret has ever backpedaled about this claim or otherwise distanced himself from Steve Kirsch? And if not, does it speak to Bret’s credibility?)
Even if what Steve is saying about the vaccines producing problems in the ovaries which can cause infertility would be true, that shouldn’t matter to your dad because he doesn’t have ovaries. I haven’t heard any claims for male infertility.
Also, Steve said this: “Biodistribution of lipid nanoparticles which carry the mRNA show that the ovaries get the highest concentration” … but this is clearly untrue.
My question is, does this reduce the credibility you attach to Steve Kirsch and Robert Malone? If not, why not?
My view of Kirsch is at the moment is that he strongly pattern matches and this seems to both result in fast detection of issues and also in overmatching and seeing patterns where there are none.
Here there’s more concentration in the ovaries then in most other tissues according to the EMA documents but saying it’s the highest concentration is overstating it.
Generally, I haven’t meet anyone who had clear negative consequences from the vaccine in the way Kirsch describes so I find the thesis that the side effects are so common falsified.
Credibility is a quite complex thing. There’s a tradeoff between taking no action and requiring a lot of evidence and taking action based on too little evidence.
Besides the lying one of the problems with people in the establishment like Fauci is that they require a lot of evidence and as a result we still haven’t updated our vaccines to the delta spike protein. Kirsch is one the other hand of that spectrum.
Taking a lot of bets and not needing all to payoff is likely what makes him a good venture capitalist. I do think it’s worthwhile to listen to people on all parts of that spectrum.
Steve appears to have two separate and very different evidence thresholds. In the “25,800 deaths” case, he accepts evidence in one direction readily while ignoring evidence from the same source in the other direction.
Also, he should have known that the ovaries statement was false from the first time he said it (and the fact that he chose neither to show the original source data, nor link to it, nor even be specific about where he got the information, suggests that he knew what he was doing.)
It’s puzzling that your analysis ignores the facts I put before you.
Steve appears to have two separate and very different evidence thresholds. In the “25,800 deaths” case, he accepts evidence in one direction readily while ignoring evidence from the same source in the other direction.
Anyone who’s serious about medicine has different evidence thresholds for risks and safety of drugs. That’s why the FDA takes a lot of evidence to allow a new drug to be marketed while at the same time withdrawing a drug from market.
I just learned that my Dad’s unvaccinated brother died with Covid-19 yesterday.
One thing I didn’t mention before was that my Dad knew his brother was in hospital with Covid on a ventilator, and still refused to take a vaccine because he claims it has caused “100,000” deaths (plus justifications that don’t apply to him, like “infertility!” and “harms children!”).
Now I suppose Kirsch isn’t the one using the number 100,000; he was saying 25,800 four months ago and now the Malone/Kirsch/etc group is saying things like this:
[...] the death toll is over 40,000 people.
[...] the vaccine is more likely to kill you than save you. For example, Pfizer’s own study showed deaths from COVID were reduced by a factor of 2, but this saving was more than offset by deaths from cardiac arrest which went up by 4X.
(Of course, the details of both of these claims are behind a paywall, though the first one was published before the paywall went up so interested parties can see it on the Wayback Machine. I googled for a little while for these claims, finding Snopes and Politifact reporting “False” and “pants on fire” for a claim of 45,000 deaths, though I found no one else making or analyzing the second claim, just NYT saying “Heart Problem More Common After Covid-19 Than After Vaccination”. FWIW I got a new permanent heart problem after contracting Covid and before getting the vaccine, but there’s a strong chance it’s unconnected.)
Regardless of who said “100,000”, Kirsch helped get the ball rolling, and now my uncle and former legal guardian is dead.
But people like you, and probably even my Dad, can’t bring themselves to consider that maybe, just maybe, Kirsch et al are not acting in good faith (or are otherwise epistemically compromised). Why is that? I really can’t fathom it. I mean, sure, there’s outgroup hate and ingroup love, but to risk your life without allowing even a seed of doubt in your mind that you could be wrong?
I really can’t fathom it. I mean, sure, there’s outgroup hate and ingroup love, but to risk your life without allowing even a seed of doubt in your mind that you could be wrong?
I’m vaccinated. To the extend that I’m making currently choices about risking COVID-19 it’s a combination of not ordering Ivermectin from India, not taking my taffix and chosing to go to events where there are other people.
I’m thinking I’m arguing for more doubt on most of the major issues involved. The expecation is the lab leak hypnothesis where I think there’s less doubt than many other people but that’s not directly medical policy.
Lest you forgot, the two pieces of evidence in question are the assertions (1) “X” and (2) “my assertion X was wrong and here’s why” on the same blog post. You’re saying it is reasonable to conclude from (1) and (2) that X is true.
Moreover the blog post is written specifically by a fan of Kirsch (it linked back to Kirsch for its claim that “the Pfizer mRNA vaccine will have the highest concentration in the ovaries and bone marrow”) so Kirsch should have no reason not to trust (2).
The core point is that even J&J is not a traditional vaccine. It’s also genetic (DNA-based) with a classic non-LNP delivery mechanism using an adenovirus. From what I understand, it penetrates a different subset of cells (using ACE receptors, afaik) that get killed by the immune system in the same way as with mRNA-vaccines.
Kirsch has now done so in his article “15 things everyone needs to know about COVID”. The first thing he says everyone needs to know is “Avoid all the COVID vaccines, even Novavax. The data shows that these vaccines kill more people than they save.”
It’s quite unclear why it makes you update about personal instead of the thesis. The vaccines likely don’t do as much damage as Kirsch first claimed but that’s not the same thing as he being a crackpot.
The article also makes some strange leaps. It assumes that death due to suicide couldn’t be due to the vaccine. Lipid nanoparticles get used as a vehicle to transfer drugs through the blood-brain barrier so it’s plausible that there are cases were the vaccine goes into the brain, a bunch of neurons expressing spike proteins, getting killed of by the immune system and that leading downstream to suicide in rare cases.
There’s the general idea in the post that it’s vaccines vs. no vaccines. To the extend that it is it’s only because the US government and the EU is not willing to buy and approve Novavax and doesn’t maximize vaccinating as many people as possible by giving different options. If the government would have been willing to engage in a non-tribalistic response Bred might have increased overall vaccination at the cost of pushing it back for a few months just like he convinced more people to take COVID-19 seriously.
Ideally the US would also just allow vaccines like RaDVaC but in contrast buying and approving Novavaxx would be easily possible if the NIH, CDC and FDA would be staffed by people who take the pandemic more seriously then tribal fights.
I haven’t seen Kirsch advocate for Novavax, does he? Might U.S. officials be thinking to themselves “we bought plenty enough vaccines for everyone already, no need to buy more”? How do you conclude that the mRNA vaccines cross the blood-brain barrier? Do you have safety concerns with the J&J vaccine?
In the linked video, it’s quite clear that both Kirsch and Bret are generally pro-vaccine and object to new vaccine technology. They do say in the video that more conventional vaccine technology could be better. They don’t speak explicitely about Novavax.
How do you conclude that the mRNA vaccines cross the blood-brain barrier?
mRNA vaccines use lipid nanocoating. That same technology is used in other context to get drugs to cross the blood-brain barrier.
Safety-wise I would expect that side-effects follow some distribution. A vaccine that’s going to make a substantial portion of the people that take it too ill the next day to work is likely to have more serious bad effects then a vaccine that makes very few people to ill to work the next day.
My safety concerns personally started with Stöcker having nobody of >100 people that he vaccinated being ill the next day. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RfdCJZtE7gPisjXFC/how-do-the-side-effects-of-novavax-compare-to-other-covid-19 was how I was trying to find out whether Novavaxx as a traditional platform manages to have less side-effects and it actually has.
I haven’t read about the J&J vaccine side-effects specifically, but even if it would have less safety issues a single dose vaccine is not going to give you the same protection against COVID-19 and that matters.
Generally viral vector vaccines and the mRNA vaccine get your body to attack some of it’s own cells in a way that a vaccine where the protein (or subsection) is injected doesn’t. There are arguments that this is going to make the vaccine more effective as it allows the immune system to do additional things. It however comes at the cost of the vaccine having more side effects because a few of your cells get actually killed by your immune system.
The results of Novavaxx suggest that this is not needed to have an effective vaccine for COVID-19.
Given the way the economics of drug development work, pharma companies are incentivized to push for a maximum in clinical effects at the cost of side effects because that increases the chances of drug approval. With vaccines that scientists do for their own protection like RaDVaC or Stöcker’s vaccines the incentives are the other way around and safety is a primary consideration. It’s quite ironic how the FDA’s safety processes of requiring those trials give us less safe vaccines.
Yes and that would be pretty stupid in a world where people might be willing to take a vaccine with less side-effects then the one’s already on the market but not those already on the market.
This both goes for the people who are afraid of missing a day of work after taking the vaccine and those who are concerned about the new technology platforms.
I will still get my second shot with the BioNTech vaccine this week but I’m annoyed that I can’t have Novavaxx and might spend 1-2 days without the ability to do anything for no good reason.
I’m no biologist, but I know all kinds of things have lipid membranes (including bacteria), so I doubt that simply being lipid-covered is all you need to cross the barrier.
Well, it’s important to Kirsch’s position. After all, J&J has 568 deaths attributed to it according to OpenVAERS even though J&J is not mRNA-based (curiously, OpenVAERS is now reporting dramatically higher death numbers for Pfizer over Moderna, whereas they were ~equal one month ago).
I calculated that according to the latest numbers, 3.9% of vaccines injected were J&J vaccines (which is 8% of people “fully vaccinated” since you only get one dose of J&J).
Now, if my thesis is correct that the VAERS deaths are ordinary deaths that would have happened anyway, then approximately 3.9% of the deaths should be attributed to J&J. In fact, OpenVAERS (updated July 9) assigns 5.2% of deaths to J&J. Does this mean that actually there is a greater chance of death associated with non-mRNA vaccine shots? (well, the numbers are probably 2-3 weeks out of sync with each other, as the VAERS data lags behind. Perhaps this could account for the difference. Historical data is available, but not in an easy-to-read form. So I used the Wayback Machine instead, and found that … er, 3.8% of vaccine shots had been J&J on July 1. No significant difference.)
The same sort of hypothesis can be applied to non-death VAERS reports, of course, but I leave that analysis for someone else who cares enough to do it.
Perhaps… but if I’m right, Novavax would end up getting VAERS death reports at roughly the same rate as other vaccines. If most people who are reluctant to take a vaccine are (like my father) getting their beliefs from people like Kirsch who harp on VAERS, Novavax might not end up being perceived as safer even if it is. So a relevant question, I think, is whether we could expect right-wing news outlets to effectively communicate “Novavax has less side effects / is safer” (because I don’t think an article in The Atlantic would sway the likes of my dad. edit: so I just Googled “side effects” Novavax site:foxnews.com and the first result is a video subtitled “Kurt ‘The CyberGuy’ Knutsson tells ‘Fox and Friends Weekend’ how he accidentally joined the Novavax trial coronavirus vaccine and what side effects surprised him the most.” The side effects weren’t bad, but the anecdotal approach being taken is not encouraging.)
Edit: btw, I totally agree that FDA needs reform, and it certainly wouldn’t hurt to deploy small amounts of Novavax to test demand.
When it comes to VEARS my main hypothesis is that VEARS used to be pretty bad at actually tracking side effects. One of the key arguments for it being bad is that if you look at history only a minute amount of the side effects that you would expect given what happens in clinical trials end up in VEARS.
It’s likely that some people who are responsible for VEARS thought that it’s very important that it’s good at picking up on side-effects given how we deployed the vaccines and the increased amount of VEARS cases is simply because the system was improved to get doctors to report cases more often.
Unfortunately, the sphere of people who are interested in making that argument is quite small given that it’s about admitting past flaws in vaccine safety.
I don’t think that Kirsch is as focused on VAERS as you assume. Kirsch is a VC for whom strong opinions-loosely held is central. That’s why he could easily switch from running an NGO that has vaccination as part of it’s mission to speaking up against the vaccines.
The article in The Atlantic won’t convince your dad but “we should use Novavaxx instead of mRNA vaccines” is a contrarian position that’s open to be argued especially when it’s an actual choice for people to take. It won’t be argued by real antivaxxers like Mercola but there’s no reason for it not to be argued by Chris Martenson, Steve Kirsch or Bret Weinstein. It also makes a good story for Tucker (for Tucker it doesn’t even need to be true to make a good story).
So, my dad is continuing to refuse vaccines, and while he’s not naming any of the people he trusts on this issue, one of his claims is about “infertility” and the only original source of infertility claims I’m aware of is Steve Kirsch. So I’d like to ask for your perspective on this.
Kirsch was praised by Bret Weinstein for continuing to update his anti-vax article as he found new information. And yet, Kirsch’s headline claim about the danger of vaccines—the very first claim he makes, the claim that the vaccines “likely killed over 25,800 Americans”—was retracted on June 18 by the person to whom Kirsch linked as evidence of that claim, Austin Walters. Walters also explained why his claim was wrong. But Kirsch didn’t change the beginning of his article at all. So Kirsch was supposedly keeping his article up-to-date, but he made an exception for the 25,800 deaths claim (and then, of course, he removed his name from the article and other names including Robert Malone appeared instead.)
Also, Steve said this: “Biodistribution of lipid nanoparticles which carry the mRNA show that the ovaries get the highest concentration” … but this is clearly untrue.
My question is, does this reduce the credibility you attach to Steve Kirsch and Robert Malone? If not, why not?
Also, do you know of any other original (not parroted) sources of infertility claims other than Steve Kirsch?
(On the other hand, if it does reduce their credibility… Yuri Deigin says he was a friend of Bret Weinstein before all of this started, and says that he told Bret about how Steve was misreporting the data re: ovaries (among other things). Do you know if Bret has ever backpedaled about this claim or otherwise distanced himself from Steve Kirsch? And if not, does it speak to Bret’s credibility?)
Even if what Steve is saying about the vaccines producing problems in the ovaries which can cause infertility would be true, that shouldn’t matter to your dad because he doesn’t have ovaries. I haven’t heard any claims for male infertility.
My view of Kirsch is at the moment is that he strongly pattern matches and this seems to both result in fast detection of issues and also in overmatching and seeing patterns where there are none.
Here there’s more concentration in the ovaries then in most other tissues according to the EMA documents but saying it’s the highest concentration is overstating it.
Generally, I haven’t meet anyone who had clear negative consequences from the vaccine in the way Kirsch describes so I find the thesis that the side effects are so common falsified.
I take that as a no. That is, you judge his specific hypotheses but refrain from judging his credibility.
Credibility is a quite complex thing. There’s a tradeoff between taking no action and requiring a lot of evidence and taking action based on too little evidence.
Besides the lying one of the problems with people in the establishment like Fauci is that they require a lot of evidence and as a result we still haven’t updated our vaccines to the delta spike protein. Kirsch is one the other hand of that spectrum.
Taking a lot of bets and not needing all to payoff is likely what makes him a good venture capitalist. I do think it’s worthwhile to listen to people on all parts of that spectrum.
Steve appears to have two separate and very different evidence thresholds. In the “25,800 deaths” case, he accepts evidence in one direction readily while ignoring evidence from the same source in the other direction.
Also, he should have known that the ovaries statement was false from the first time he said it (and the fact that he chose neither to show the original source data, nor link to it, nor even be specific about where he got the information, suggests that he knew what he was doing.)
It’s puzzling that your analysis ignores the facts I put before you.
Anyone who’s serious about medicine has different evidence thresholds for risks and safety of drugs. That’s why the FDA takes a lot of evidence to allow a new drug to be marketed while at the same time withdrawing a drug from market.
I just learned that my Dad’s unvaccinated brother died with Covid-19 yesterday.
One thing I didn’t mention before was that my Dad knew his brother was in hospital with Covid on a ventilator, and still refused to take a vaccine because he claims it has caused “100,000” deaths (plus justifications that don’t apply to him, like “infertility!” and “harms children!”).
Now I suppose Kirsch isn’t the one using the number 100,000; he was saying 25,800 four months ago and now the Malone/Kirsch/etc group is saying things like this:
(Of course, the details of both of these claims are behind a paywall, though the first one was published before the paywall went up so interested parties can see it on the Wayback Machine. I googled for a little while for these claims, finding Snopes and Politifact reporting “False” and “pants on fire” for a claim of 45,000 deaths, though I found no one else making or analyzing the second claim, just NYT saying “Heart Problem More Common After Covid-19 Than After Vaccination”. FWIW I got a new permanent heart problem after contracting Covid and before getting the vaccine, but there’s a strong chance it’s unconnected.)
Regardless of who said “100,000”, Kirsch helped get the ball rolling, and now my uncle and former legal guardian is dead.
But people like you, and probably even my Dad, can’t bring themselves to consider that maybe, just maybe, Kirsch et al are not acting in good faith (or are otherwise epistemically compromised). Why is that? I really can’t fathom it. I mean, sure, there’s outgroup hate and ingroup love, but to risk your life without allowing even a seed of doubt in your mind that you could be wrong?
I’m sorry to hear about your uncle, DP.
I’m vaccinated. To the extend that I’m making currently choices about risking COVID-19 it’s a combination of not ordering Ivermectin from India, not taking my taffix and chosing to go to events where there are other people.
I’m thinking I’m arguing for more doubt on most of the major issues involved. The expecation is the lab leak hypnothesis where I think there’s less doubt than many other people but that’s not directly medical policy.
Kirsch is also fully vaccinated. You’re still
deflectingnot answering the questions I ask.Lest you forgot, the two pieces of evidence in question are the assertions (1) “X” and (2) “my assertion X was wrong and here’s why” on the same blog post. You’re saying it is reasonable to conclude from (1) and (2) that X is true.
Moreover the blog post is written specifically by a fan of Kirsch (it linked back to Kirsch for its claim that “the Pfizer mRNA vaccine will have the highest concentration in the ovaries and bone marrow”) so Kirsch should have no reason not to trust (2).
The core point is that even J&J is not a traditional vaccine. It’s also genetic (DNA-based) with a classic non-LNP delivery mechanism using an adenovirus. From what I understand, it penetrates a different subset of cells (using ACE receptors, afaik) that get killed by the immune system in the same way as with mRNA-vaccines.
Kirsch has now done so in his article “15 things everyone needs to know about COVID”. The first thing he says everyone needs to know is “Avoid all the COVID vaccines, even Novavax. The data shows that these vaccines kill more people than they save.”