Prompted by Brick’s recent post, I am going to reply in this thread once and only once, as I now have a sufficiently busy combination of job & family life that about all I can manage in TN forums is logging my daily workout. Not that these forums are bad or anything, I just have had to pick & choose what I have time for these days and TN forums have fallen rather lower on that priority list.
But, since I started this thread, I still get notifications (which I may turn off, I know) and I felt this was worth one attempt. I do not expect to change many minds, if any,
Because they are fine. Really. Most vaccinated people are fine. Saying this will absolutely never convince certain people who think pharma and/or the government are engaged in some deep combination of hiding and/or manipulating the bodies and/or data.
There are a few things that hardcore anti-vaccine types do that are particulary effective at stoking such fires, confusing people, and trying to continue garnering ever-more followers to their cause, which I will try to explain below in the hopes that it helps anyone reading better distinguish credible sources of information from problematic ones. I don’t have cool or fancy names for this stuff and I’m not really a “misinformation expert” but these are some things that I have noticed.
Thing #1: a specific type of JAQing around where they post a video of something happening, ask when people are going to “wake up” and imply that the “medical community” (or whatever authority) is hiding or not looking into this. A recent example I saw was a prominent anti-vax account tweet out a video of weightlifters in gyms passing out after heavy deadlifts with the caption “I have NEVER seen anything like this before. How can the entire medical community not be curious as to what is causing this?”
Of course, the problem here is that any semi-experienced weightlifter or random lifting-forum guy has seen one of these before, from long before COVID. If Steve Kirsch hasn’t seen this before, it’s probably because he hasn’t spent much time looking! The replies quickly filled up with people showing him links to YouTube compilations of similar events from 2018 and earlier. He sort of halfway-apologized in the next tweet, but a) you’ll notice he didn’t delete the tweet and b) the message is already out there. Thousands of people have already seen this and left with the desired message he wanted to sow - that something strange is happening and “they” don’t want you to know about it or aren’t looking into it. I don’t really have time to fully unspool just how foolish that is, unfortunately, and I really doubt it would convince anyone who’s already primed to believe this kind of stuff.
This is how misinformation can spread easily. It’s kind of a confirmation-bias thing, I guess - people who are already scared and/or primed to believe this kind of stuff see this and file it straight into their “I Knew It! The Vaccines Really ARE Killing Us” folder.
Similarly, if anyone has heard about the “Died Suddenly” thing, one of the clips used in the trailer to try to insinuate that young athletes are just keeling over came from before COVID vaccines existed. It’s important to understand that the people producing this kind of stuff are absolutely shameless about this happening once in a while because they know they aren’t actually pursuing “truth” or anything of the sort. They’re producing an entertainment product of its own ilk that will draw likes and clicks and views and subscribers. Getting caught in a lie means absolutely nothing to them, they can just keep their head down and plunge ahead. Steve Kirsch should be immediately dismissed as a credible source of information from the tweet above, but it did (and continues to do!) exactly the job he wanted it to do. Pretty much every other prominent JUST ASKING QUESTIONS type has this happen at some point. It can be amusing when they get caught up in a thirst trap (Alex Berenson, humorously, once got caught with a BOFA DEEZ NUTZ when he asked what the BOFA vaccine was) but it’s also an important reminder that these people are not serious or pursuing truth, they’re pursuing likes and clicks and views and subscribers.
What these people need is a constant source of this type of JAQing around material along with whatever else they can spin to sound suspicious. Anything that sounds remotely suspicious works in their favor. As long as they keep pumping this stuff out there - on their twitter, youtube, substack, whatever - they’re trawling for more people who will get caught by one of their bait-posts and join the cause.
OK, thing #2: the post that says “I believe 2023 will see the critical mass reached” is a classic trope from conspiracy theorist types (and oddly, this currently exists BOTH on the “COVID isn’t a big deal and the vaccines are a deadily failure that the government is covering up” extreme AND on the “long COVID is going to disable us all” extreme). The critical mass hasn’t been reached yet, but it’s coming! SOON YOU WILL SEE!
I’m a bit amused by this one because it’s simultaneously on my radar in two different ways. The anti-vax nuts are like “just wait, your vaccinated friends will start dropping dead ANY DAY NOW” (and will do this in perpetuity or until something else comes along) and on the other side people are like “long COVID is coming for you, you just don’t know it yet, your immune system will get beat down eventually! If the 3rd infection didn’t get you, the 4th one will!”
This gets tied in with the insinuation now that anything “suspicious” happening to anyone is surely due to the COVID vaccine. There’s a bit of an amusing doublet going on here, too, since this is also happening with COVID. Say someone puts out some data that shows an increase in heart attacks in males age 25-44 in a particular country. This suits you either way, right? If you’re an anti-vaxxer, just blame it on the vaccines; if you’re a COVID-will-kill-us-all type, just blame it all on repeated exposure to COVID.
This happens both on a “macro” level (“heart attacks are on the rise in…”) and on a “micro” level (“oh, I had a friend who had a heart attack…it must have been (the vaccine / COVID)…”) and it’s natural if frustrating that people tend to a) lean on their own anecdotal experience first (“oh, my friend got the vaccine and had a stroke a month later…surely the vaccine causes strokes”) and b) if they have none default to whatever they’re sort of already primed to believe. A friend from graduate school works in infectious disease research (though primarily foodborne illnesses, not vaccine-preventable disease) and told me once (before COVID) that he was really worried about vaccination ever becoming a political wedge issue because…he knew it would look pretty much exactly what’s happening now.
I wish I could help people better understand the “micro” side of this issue. Things happen to you every day, and they don’t always have a clear cause. “Oh, I had a headache today…what did I do differently yesterday than usual? Did I eat something different? Drink something different? Maybe I just didn’t sleep enough…” - but when people are already sort of primed to think that something specific is the cause, it’s easy to jump straight to that. Right now, to lots of people out there, anything bad that happens to any of their friends, acquaintances, or celebrities is surely due to the vaccine (just look at the way prominent anti-vaccine folks responded to Damar Hamlin’s injury…they could not WAIT to get on that and start JAQing around…there are even people saying that he died and has been replaced by a body double). Actually knowing the cause of something is hard! Especially medical interventions. That’s why we do clinical trials and post-marketing studies. I totally agree that the messaging on all of this has been really challenging to follow, and sympathize with folks who feel it’s hard to know what information is credible and what is not.
A few closing statements:
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I believe that the risk/benefit calculus on the COVID vaccine is complex. It is true that the elderly, infirm, immunocompromised had a far higher risk of a poor outcome with COVID than “young and healthy” people and I understand why some are upset about things like vaccine mandates, especially those that do not work in any sort of high-risk setting (like a hospital or nursing home).
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I also understand why people who perceive themselves as relatively young, healthy, and fit would be reluctant to get another vaccine or booster given the information circulating. For full disclosure, I had COVID before vaccines were available (basically “mild cold symptoms and complete loss of smell for a few days” - though my wife had a far more difficult experience); I received a first dose of the J&J vaccine because that is what was available when I first had the opportunity; I have since received another J&J and most recently Pfizer’s bivalent booster; and for now I am just sitting and waiting. I had a rough night - shakes, fever, chills - after my first (J&J) and third (but first mRNA) vaccine, but recovered within 24 hours each time. I admittedly sympathize with someone who thinks “why should I get this shot and feel like shit for 24 hours again?” if they are not convinced the benefits are worthwhile.
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Though I do not have time for a full risk/benefit analysis of all available data for all available age groups here, I’m amused by the general observation that people who were once happy to write off COVID as a disease with a “99% survival rate” (or even “99.9% survival rate” which is still 1 death per 1000 cases) are now trembling in fear of vaccine complications that are orders of magnitude less common than that. No doubt that’s partially because one would be making a choice to get the vaccine whereas one might convince themselves they might not actually get COVID, but at this point that’s silly (everyone is getting COVID, lol, you’re just lying to yourself if you think otherwise). It is probably true that for people at high risk of bad outcomes from COVID, the vaccines are well worth accepting any risks of the (real but still very rare) potential vaccine complications. It is also probably true that for people at low risk of bad outcomes from COVID, that’s less clear, and I sympathize that it’s frustrating to not know a clear answer or even be able to get a clear answer from your doctor.
I think that’s about all I can usefully say for now. I will not likely respond at length to anything as I’m serious about the opening of this post - I already took too much time screwing around on this one. Best of luck to everyone.
Yeah, like why do all of the rebellious kids get the same haircut, wear the same clothes, etc.