Pooter

So If you disagree with someone enough, it's now okay to go to their house and fuck with them on their personal time? Is this not exactly the logic the left uses?

To track down someones home address and confront them by surprise while they're walking, and film them without permission? Yes, that is professionally inappropriate. It's wrong when protesters accost republicans in DC restaurants and this is wrong too. Respect for public and private life boundaries should exist for people you agree and disagree with. Here's a crazy idea. Go to the Pfizer offices and get a statement from the company. I'm sure they have an attentive and very well staffed PR department.

Weird, it's almost like people don't enjoy being ambushed by the press at their home.

Right.. because everyone has behaved completely rationally for the last year and a half.

The decision to impose a mandate should be a very carefully considered one, and IMO you really only have grounds for a mandate if you can answer "yes" to the following questions: 1. Does the disease in question pose a grave threat? 2. Does the vaccine do an extremely good job of protecting people and preventing transmission? 3. Is the vaccine safe? So far those answers seem to be: 1. Only for very specific demographics 2. Yes and no 3. Probably These are very shaky grounds for a mandate especially considering the second widespread variant of this disease we encountered was able to take most of our vaccination assumptions and throw them in the dumpster. But as usual, Democrats want to jump to telling people what to do. It is their default state--using government coercion to solve perceived problems. But they always fail to take human nature into the equation. When you censor something it'll just make it more popular. When you say everyone has to do something, some people are going to not do it just because fuck you. And I love that. Do I still think it's a bad risk calculation not to get the vaccine? Yes. But we really really really need to figure out as a society a way to have the emotional maturity to hold two thoughts in our brains at the same time: -Getting the vaccine is a good idea -Trying to Force it on people is a very bad idea

Snips of headlines flashing by too quickly to read, and all of them completely without context. But the numbers counted down as classical music increased in tempo and volume. So that must mean something.

Considering his enormous viewership, self-described conservative media company, and the fact that his talking points are reliably echoed all over baseops 6-9 hours after they air, yes. I do. So when do we get to the part where you make an actual argument.. because so far all I'm seeing is you drawing things out of a hat at random to disagree about.

The counter argument to letting covid just do its thing has always been healthcare capacity. The peak of our last two spikes already overwhelmed hospitals in certain places and that was with all of the mitigation measures in place.

It's almost like a new strain happened right about that time, changing the situation and all of the underlying assumptions. No need for elites.. it's quite obvious what happened. People on the right got it wrong too. Ben Shapiro was harping for weeks about how the pandemic was effectively over.. right before cases went through the stratosphere again.

All perfectly 100% true. And as I've been saying on this thread for quite a while now, it has absolutely nothing to do with the safety and efficacy of the vaccines. It's been wild to watch people on the right take their frustration with Democrat covid policy and project it onto a vaccine that is literally a miracle of capitalism. Much in the same way, Democrats take their hatred of trump or joe rogan and protect that onto legitimate medical treatments like hydroxy and ivermectin. If only there were a third way where we looked at treatments based on empirical data, rather than judging them based on political baggage.

I just don't get the constant fascination with pinning this on China when in all likelihood our own NIH had a hand in funding the research that caused this too. And then they lied about it.

Needs more punisher logo

My favorite part about the no mask crowd I see at the grocery store is that the majority are obese, walking, talking sacks of comorbidities filling their carts with Cheetos and hamburger helper. Likewise, many of the anti vax Air Force people I know think of themselves as elite physical specimens except for the part where they can't run a mile and a half in under 14 minutes without a borderline medical emergency. It seems like the elderly have the sense to mask up and get vaccinated, but a lot of young unhealthy people fail to realize how severely obesity affects their odds.

Lengthy, over-dramatic Facebook rants about bringing the "whole system down" ..telltale sign of a very mentally stable and well-adjusted person

Weird, it's almost like policy decisions exist in gray areas with nuanced details that need to be considered to ensure the policy actually works. Plenty of jobs subject people to background checks, drug tests, and vaccination requirements. That's an employer's prerogative much like it's your prerogative to go work somewhere else if those conditions are too onerous for you. Alternatively.. GUBMENT BETTER NOT TELL ME WHAT TO DO

Was he ever arguing in favor of mandates for the general public? Has anyone done that on this thread? Arguing that vaccines are safe and effective ≠ advocating for a mandate Vaccine mandate for active duty military ≠ mandate for the entire general public

Much like Biden's heinously botched Afghanistan withdrawal, no one should be mad at *what* Snowden did, they should be mad at *how* he did it. Based on what buddies of mine in the three letter world have said, my understanding of his "whistleblowing" is that it was an indiscriminate data dump that compromised all sorts of unrelated parts of the intel community.

Maybe you before calling people out for not reading the giant homework assignment you so graciously gave us, you should read it yourself. From the discussion section: "Our data do not demonstrate that vaccination was responsible for the evolution of hyperpathogenic strains of MDV, and we may never know for sure why they evolved in the first place." It turns out, as always, research findings aren't quite a simple as the google-able sound bites you search in order to try to win internet arguments. Having actually done research before helps you know that findings are always couched in caveats, statistical uncertainty, and specificity of their application. But by all means, let's take snippets from the abstract of a research paper on a disease in chickens and extrapolate the results as gospel to a completely different virus in a completely different species with a completely different type of vaccine. Here's an article from some experts: professors of microbiology and epidemiology (good enough for you?) And it is actually about covid.. in humans.. not a different disease in chickens, and they talk about how the large population of unvaccinated is the key driver of mutations. The argument boils down to this: A mutation is a random event that is extremely unlikely to make the virus more contagious or virulent. Even if it does, it's extremely unlikely that mutation will be passed on to someone else. This is called the population bottleneck. The population bottleneck helps prevent new mutations emerge because the odds are stacked against the virus. By having a large portion of the population remain unvaccinated we are essentially giving the virus an infinite number of dice rolls and it will eventually hit the jackpot, The article even talks about your chicken scenario, but says it isn't even relevant at this point because the virus is still running rampant and unchecked all over the world, propelled by the unvaccinated population. https://theconversation.com/massive-numbers-of-new-covid-19-infections-not-vaccines-are-the-main-driver-of-new-coronavirus-variants-166882

It's an interesting argument and I definitely understand how it could be possible with certain diseases. But we have experts saying specifically that isn't happening with covid and the perceived spike in variants is due to the entire world mobilizing to look for and classify them. And my question still stands.. the vast majority of unvaxxed people who contract covid also survive and end up with some level of immunity, which is not 100% perfect. There are already unvaxxed people re-catching it, and spreading it. One might call the natural immunity "leaky" as well. So how is it different from the perspective of driving mutations? Edit: also covid was already rapidly mutating prior to the vaccine. At least 7 variants were identified pre-vaccine including the current most concerning strain delta, which first presented in India back in December 2020.

Point to ponder: why would vaccine-created immunity force viral mutations any more than natural immunity gained by having a variant of the virus. Immunity pushes mutations, period. Does the virus know or care where you got that immunity from? Here's another possible explanation: “Early in the pandemic, only a limited number of labs were sequencing virus from infections, but since late 2020, surveillance programs have been ramping up,” Professor Jennifer Grier, Clinical Assistant Professor in Immunology at the University of South Carolina, told Reuters via email. “Effectively, we are hearing so much more about viral variants in 2021 because, globally, we now have the systems in place to consistently detect and track mutations,” Grier added.

Safe - I'll refer you to the CDC, the clinical trials, and the experts in the field of immunology for that definition as they are the ones who come up with the criteria, not me. For it to be considered safe, my understanding is that adverse reactions have to be below a certain statistically significant threshold and below a certain severity threshold, both of which I also did not come up with. Much in the same way, walking out your front door is widely considered safe despite the fact that a chance does exist of you being hit in the face by a meteor. That is because it is not a statistically significant chance. If you have statistical evidence (from a reliable source.. that you interpreted correctly) pointing in a different direction I would love to see it. Until then I will defer to the people who's entire life's work is to make these determinations. Effective - the vaccine reduces your risk of contracting covid and drastically reduces your risk of hospitalization, and death. On booster shots: why is there a new flu shot every year? Because immunity wears off and new variants emerge. As for how many boosters to get and when they will be approved for the general public, I will once again defer to experts. Much like they defer to me on matters pertaining to flying airplanes.

Yeah it's not a good look for milley for sure. Add this to the laundry list of reasons this guy needs to go. Having said that, I'm glad someone was thinking about how to mitigate the damage a desperate and defeated trump could have attempted to do in his final days. Glad it never came to this but the fact that the CJCS was so worried he thought this was a conversation that needed to happen should tell you all you need to know about trump's mental stability after the election loss.

What goalposts exactly? Throughout all of these discussions I have maintained the same exact points. 1. the vaccine is safe and effective and no one so far has provided convincing evidence to the contrary. To include your and @torqued's statistically illiterate flailing. 2. While I think it's a very bad plan to pass on the vaccine, getting the shot should be entirely your choice unless you voluntarily surrendered some of your medical autonomy by joining the military. My suggestion, stick to what you're good at and keep posting your tangential Alex Jones-esque rants with a healthy side of racial slurs.

Wrong again. You aren't controlling for the total number of people in the vaccinated and unvaccinated sub groups. Your continuing arrogance in the face of being so objectively wrong is getting pretty obnoxious. When you calculate a death rate you divide deaths in a particular sub group by total number of people in that sub group. You do not divide a death number by another death number. That results in a unit-less proportion that has no context. We will now spell this out so there's no more confusion. When you want to find the total covid death rate you do this: Number of covid deaths / number of people So if you want the elderly vaccinated covid death rate you do this: number of vaxxed old people deaths / number of vaxxed old people And if you want unvaxxed old people death rate you do this: number of unvaxxed old people deaths / number of unvaxxed old people Hopefully by now you have caught on that there are two different denominators and one is much larger than the other. And that is why the death rate can be much lower for vaxxed old people despite their numerator being larger. The only thing your mis-analysis allows you to say is that approximately two thirds of the UK elderly covid deaths are among vaccinated and one third are the unvaccinated. But without the correct denominators that number does not tell you anything useful about death rates and relative risk level between the two groups. Quick thought experiment. If everyone had the shot, vaccinated people would account for 100% of the deaths! My goodness! The vaccine must be pointless! It's almost like having the correct denominator actually matters.

I actually haven't encountered a single one of those people. Most of the rest of us aren't "staunch mandate" we just have a modicum of awareness about what we signed up for and aren't going to torpedo our job and reputation because we got a little too riled up over some podcasts.