truth headlines changed hour by hour.

"This age" would be what's widely believed right now, not when the belief first originated.

For example, New Age Paganism is especially pervasive in the 21st century, even though its origins date back well over 2000 years.

You have to look at which political party is in power.

If it's a Republican in office then a headline like that is bog-standard MSM warmongering. If it were a Democrat in office then that would be a call for action.

I see.

Turns out the jesus gang are the new kids on the block trying to slide in and lay claim to traditional values

i don't think you are in line with the scientific view on this. I think it is well accepted science that with Viruses like covid and the flu, the vaccines do influence the next generation versions that evade the vaccines. That the vaccines do 'fuel' mutations.


If you think about vaccines as a set of doors trying to block the virus, they do just that. Thus Alpha and delta struggle to get past prior vaccines but that means as the viruses push for success the successful mutations are the ones that evolve to get around the prior vaccine, now that they don't have to compete with the prior less successful versions (alpha and delta).

It is the vaccine that largely impacts how prior versions will be able to compete with newer strains that then become dominant.

What that DOES NOT mean is that the vaccine cannot be instrumental in allowing 'lesser dangerous strains' to escape and compete and that is generally what happens. While a more dangerous strain could potentially be the one to get around the vaccine and escape, it it less likely as, like the flu their is a balance of how deadly a virus can be, and yet be optimal in competing for bodies and spread. The common cold, for example is one of the most successful viruses in its mutations because it is not that serious (for most).

The vaccines create selection pressure on new variants, they don't encourage extra mutations like the headline suggests. COVID would still be cheerfully cranking out new variants even without any vaccines.

In the 65+ age group more than 95% of Americans have gotten vaxxed.

Assuming there are about 60,000,000 65+ Americans and the current number of Covid deaths is 120,000 per year (based on current weekly death avg) and 75% of the Covid Deaths are people 65+ and of those deaths 80% are not vaccinated, then the following is true: Of the 3,000,000 65+ people not vaccinated 72,000 are dying each year (currently). Which is roughly 2.4% of the non-vaxxed population. Of the 57,000,000 who have been vaxxed, 18,000 are dying each year (currently). Which is roughly 0.033% of the vaxxed 65+ population. And this doesn't account for the difference between those who have been boosted and those that haven't (these people die at approximately 1.8x and possibly more now, as frequently as those who are boosted)

There was a time when it was clear that the vaccine affected young men from a heart standpoint. And that some were dying. But if I am not mistaken that number was not particularly significant. Like 1 in 500,000. Which is a lot fewer than those who died from Covid in that age group. Something like 1 in 10,000 were physically affected from the vaccine. Which could be considered significant. Anecdotally my 18 year old son had some heart pain issues which when seen by a doctor resulted in no care necessary.

Of the <50 population probably about 5% are of the overall Covid Deaths apply, so 6,000 each year. The number of young men (16-37) even if it is about 50,000,000 would mean that if all had been vaccinated, roughly 100 would be dead from the vaccine.

So I'm thinking that 49% of American Adults have no clue of which 28% are very stupid. Whereas 70% of American Adults think they are of above average intelligence.

There is also a possibility that Rasmussen Reports (a conservative polling co.) may very well be asking the question in a biased way. I seriously doubt that 49% of Americans think that vaccines have caused a "significant" number of unexplained deaths. Unless the definition of "significant" was given as more than 100. In which case the poll itself isn't "significant"

It should also be noted that an incredibly large number of unexplained deaths (like 500,000 to 1,000,000) occurred in the US before there was a vaccine.

Viral mutations are random changes (or errors, if you will) that occur when the virus is copying its genetic material during reproduction. This change in code can lead to altered characteristics in the virus that can affect the efficacy of the vaccine. Or it may not. It's a completely random occurrence. So terminology like a virus mutates to get around a virus is misleading in that suggests the virus has an active intent. It's just a pure coincidence if a new mutation does better against a vaccine.

I'm perplexed as to the point of your last sentence.

It would seem that a not insignificant percentage of people who got vaccinated against covid are now questioning the safety of covid vaccines and I'm wondering why that's the case.

Sure but the variants that are coming out with their mutations are flowing from the viruses adapted to get around the vaccine. You cannot disconnect the two.

If we are on the 10th version of Omicron variant and Omicron is the dominant one now, in part because the vaccine blocked effectively other variants allowing Omicron to grow more uncontested, we cannot remove the role the vaccine played in the chain.

It is a role we know and embrace, as again the goal is to have the less virulent viruses out compete the more virulent strains.

It's because a lot of dingdongs are spreading disinformation about vaccine safety to credulous rubes.

What's your source this number? I ask because I just saw a tweet saying it's 1/5000.

Nothing needs to have happened at all. First off, we can assume the ~20% or so that got vaccinated were always in that camp, and a decent proportion of the other ~10% who didn't get a second dose. Then there would be some who got vaccinated only because they were compelled to do so because they wanted to do things they couldn't do otherwise. And I imagine there are plenty of people who were happy to get vaccinated even though they knew there would be adverse side effects and even death for some, because they felt said number of deaths would be less than if no one were vaccinated. And some who were old and thought the vaccine was a good proposition for them, but would have advised 30 year olds not to get vaccinated because they believe the risk of dying from an adverse vaccine effect was higher than dying from Covid, in that age group.

For all of those reasons, I have no difficulty squaring the US vaccination rates with those survey results, without a single person changing their mind. But of course we do also have people who changed their mind:

I can't find the source. It was like a year or a year and a half ago that I was reading about it. The problem with reported deaths after vaccinations is that they don't seem to be more than what was already happening. But there were some young people who were reported to have died within a week of having gotten a shot. I remember looking into it because my plumber had a friend whose son had died of a heart attack after receiving the vaccine.

This is an article from England where they didn't see any excess deaths from mRNA vaccinations based on heart reactions.

Here is a Newsweek article that shows how Florida's Surgeon General referenced a flawed study recently. In this article there is a quote "Daniel Salmon, director of the Institute for Vaccine Safety, told Newsweek on Saturday ... mRNA COVID-19 vaccines have been shown to cause myocarditis with the highest risk among younger males after the 2nd dose. In general, vaccine induced myocarditis seems milder than other types of myocarditis. There have a been a few reports of post-vaccination myocarditis deaths globally, but this seems to be exceedingly rare. Even among the highest risks groups for post-vaccination myocarditis, the benefits of the vaccines still outweigh the risks," Salmon said."

Here is another quote: "The incidence of cardiac outcomes after mRNA COVID-19 vaccination was highest for males aged 12–17 years after the second vaccine dose; however, within this demographic group, the risk for cardiac outcomes was 1.8–5.6 times as high after SARS-CoV-2 infection than after the second vaccine dose," the CDC said in the report."

The thing is that there are exceedingly few deaths from Covid infections for young males so there would far fewer from vaccine related heart issues.

And the mechanism by which a vaccine works (adding particular antibodies and memory t/b cells into your immune systems library of defenses) is the exact same way people recover and gain immunity after being infected. So it's the human immune system itself not the vaccine that is allowing certain random mutations to survive/thrive.

Would you say it's also the human immune system that is to blame for antibiotic resistant bacteria? Should doctors be free to prescribe antibiotics as much as they desire?

Antibiotics and vaccines are not the same thing and do not work the same way.

So antibiotics are then to blame for antibiotic resistant bacteria?

No.

I was in the bolded category.

If we're talking about resistance to antibiotics using them indefinitely will push the bacteria to evolve and become more resistant to treatments; there's a reason why -at least in the USA- it's not easy to gain access to the strongest antibiotics. If a surgeon performs a really complicated surgery he or she will want things to go smoothly afterwards so giving the patient strong antibiotics was something obvious before, not anymore. Now if you -a doctor- want to prescribe determined antibiotics you need to send a request that may or may not be approved. That wasn't the case a few years ago. There's a reason why there's reluctance to use our last line of defense against bacteria and I think the reason for such concern should be clear already.
You guys were talking about vaccines causing the virus to mutate, that's obviously true as it is also true for immunity we gain through infection, but I don't see how that could be an argument against vaccines.

Right, many people seem to have a pretty large misunderstanding in which they think vaccines are central to the creation of variants when they aren’t at all.