Zobel said:

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again i'm not sure where you think we disagree.

healthy children and young adults have a much lower risk for poor outcomes. I agree.

however, even considering that, the vaccines lower that risk further. the risk ratio for the vaccine or number needed to treat or whatever you want to is in favor of vaccinating kids. just like it is for the flu shot (another disease which has a low risk to young people). covid vaccines have a lower risk of serious side effects than the flu shot.

I am not defending fauci or any public official. public messaging sucked. but that doesn't mean social media was good.

if we're talking about learning lessons, based on what you're saying then one lesson is that the general public sucks at medical research and has some really confused opinions about vaccines.

i suspect that a lot of this was driven by the idea of a "noble lie" which is the wrong response to the statement above.

what happened
people may not understand -> let's infantilize them and lie if necessary to get the outcome we want

vs what should have happened
people may not understand -> let's improve our communication and have frank, open discource

maybe its a pipe dream, maybe the latter isn't possible. i really don't know, to be honest. social media disinformation is a really powerful obstacle.

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Zobel said:

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again i'm not sure where you think we disagree.

healthy children and young adults have a much lower risk for poor outcomes. I agree.

however, even considering that, the vaccines lower that risk further. the risk ratio for the vaccine or number needed to treat or whatever you want to is in favor of vaccinating kids. just like it is for the flu shot (another disease which has a low risk to young people). covid vaccines have a lower risk of serious side effects than the flu shot.

I am not defending fauci or any public official. public messaging sucked. but that doesn't mean social media was good.

if we're talking about learning lessons, based on what you're saying then one lesson is that the general public sucks at medical research and has some really confused opinions about vaccines.

i suspect that a lot of this was driven by the idea of a "noble lie" which is the wrong response to the statement above.

what happened
people may not understand -> let's infantilize them and lie if necessary to get the outcome we want

vs what should have happened
people may not understand -> let's improve our communication and have frank, open discource

maybe its a pipe dream, maybe the latter isn't possible. i really don't know, to be honest. social media disinformation is a really powerful obstacle.

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My point is there are articles saying both sides. You believe what you believe and I believe what I believe. And we make a decision.

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Even if you are correct, I still do not think there should have been mandates. Personal health choices are complex and the government should not be telling people what to do. Especially young healthy people and children.

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Just curious, were you in favor of mask mandates?

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There ended up being lots of truths on social media that would not have come out if not for social media and government can't be trusted

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Zobel said:

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My point is there are articles saying both sides. You believe what you believe and I believe what I believe. And we make a decision.

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that's not good enough for me, personally. truth exists, and it isn't subject to our personal beliefs. i don't accept - for me - to say well there is conflicting data so i throw up my hands, or that means i can just pick whatever i want to believe and roll with it.

i stand by the assertion that the best available evidence shows the vaccines reduce your chance to be infected. i also expect that depends a lot on which vaccine you get vs which viral strain is out there at the time, which makes it a moving target. but if we go back before people went nuts and talk about the flu vaccine, that is just as true and everyone knew it. they picked a flu vaccine, and some years it worked great and other years it didn't. nobody ever said well that means the flu vaccine doesn't work.

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Even if you are correct, I still do not think there should have been mandates. Personal health choices are complex and the government should not be telling people what to do. Especially young healthy people and children.

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i think it's more complicated than that. im lucky enough to be responsible for nobody but my kids. but... elected officials do have some responsibility, depending on their job. i dont have a problem with vaccine requirements for public schools, for example.

this just becomes a discussion of personal vs socialized risk and liberties. and society always hangs in a tension between those two things, whether we're talking about laws against risky behavior or the draft or whatever. there's no bright objectively clear line there.

BUT! there is a right and wrong way to do it, which definitely matters. OSHA general duty clause is about the wrongest way i can think of.

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Just curious, were you in favor of mask mandates?

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eh, ambivalent. they have precedent in the US, they're a massively minor inconvenience, and they probably provide some small benefit. for me personally, i hated wearing them and pretty much ignored them whenever i could get away with it. i think a lot of people lost their ever lovin' minds over it and acted like brats, and other people went completely nazi over them. people need to just chill the hell out mostly. it's not a big deal. put it in the category of "might help / won't hurt".

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Government thinking we are too stupid to make our own health care decisions ticks me off.

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Zobel said:

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Government thinking we are too stupid to make our own health care decisions ticks me off.

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i mean.. this is a pretty large gradient.

you could use this to argue against seatbelt laws, or car safety standards, or automobile safety inspections. or the FDA or limits on drugs at all. or the entire practice of medical licensing or really professional licensing of any sort.

I wonder what would happen today in NYC if there was something like the smallpox outbreak in 1947. it would probably be a ****show, and RFK would probably show up and convince a big chunk of them not to get vaccinated.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1947_New_York_City_smallpox_outbreak

there is a link between individual responsibility, individual liberty, and civic virtue. that fabric has worn thin in our country, and so that limits or changes governance.

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BluHorseShu said:

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HumpitPuryear said:

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Zobel said:

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Covid vaccine was NOT beneficial and likely harmful for healthy young adults and children.

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*citation needed

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No citation needed. Its common knowledge that young adults and children did not face serious threat from Covid. We were told we need to vaccinate them to achieve herd immunity. Another lie.

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It wasn't the threat of health to them it was the threat of spreading it. And 'no citation needed' is weak. Sure there were mistakes, and we expect better but in that first year they weren't sure about everyones risk. Young adults and children with chronic health problems were absolutely at high risk.

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Ugh, I'm not reading that.

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I think I explained myself above. I've listened to and read so much, but nothing could convince me ivermectin doesn't work because I used it. And it worked... Literally, at midnight I was shaking from chills, had fever, whole body aching. Took ivermectin and acetaminophen. Woke up at noon 90% percent better.

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Zobel said:

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Ugh, I'm not reading that.

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i mean this in the nicest way possible, but that is why you have a bad opinion.

if you apply this same heuristic broadly in your life, you will have bad opinions frequently.

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I think I explained myself above. I've listened to and read so much, but nothing could convince me ivermectin doesn't work because I used it. And it worked... Literally, at midnight I was shaking from chills, had fever, whole body aching. Took ivermectin and acetaminophen. Woke up at noon 90% percent better.

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ok. then there is zero point in discussing it. but it is important to note why we are at a complete impasse.

"i took x and got better" is not how medical evidence works. there are really good reasons for that, maybe some you might even consider. but as long as you don't care to understand that "i took x and got better" is not compelling medical evidence, and will pretty much convince no one, then there's no point in discussion.

that doesn't make me a liar, or arrogant. it doesn't make you a bad person or dumb. it just means there's no point in talking about this, because you're unwilling to come to the table.

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…At best, COVID-19 is roughly as deadly to children as measles was before the vaccine (and that's even with a percentage of the population ages 0-19 having been vaccinated). More likely, COVID-19 is considerably more deadly to children than measles was in the 1950s, before the vaccine was developed.

Yet back then doctors and scientists considered measles, its status as a "normal childhood illness" notwithstanding, to be a deadly threat that warranted a vaccine-and rightly so! We shouldn't tolerate 500 children dying every year and something like 1-3 per 1,000 suffering severe neurological sequelae, and in the 1960s we didn't. The measles vaccine resulted in a dramatic decline in the number of cases of measles per year. In contrast, today a distressing number of physicians just shrug their shoulders metaphorically at an equal or higher level of carnage due to an infectious disease, and trot out the same old antivax arguments used for measles based on COVID-19 supposedly being "not a threat" to children in order to argue against pandemic mitigations in schools or vaccine mandates. And, yes, I'm calling out certain physicians by name, including Drs. Vinay Prasad, Allison Krug, and Tracy Beth Hoeg, to begin with, for doing just this.

Let me finish by putting it this way. If you use arguments against vaccinating children against COVID-19 that are in form identical to the arguments that antivaxxers used to use before the pandemic to argue against vaccinating children against measles, pertussis, and the like, namely that the disease isn't a threat to the children, while ignoring that the disease kills hundreds of children a year, what should I call you? You've lost the right to get all indignant if I call you an antivaxxer. If the name fits…

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Zobel said:

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Again. The reason we use studies is because without a control you can't tell what is happening.

I'm ignoring your remdesivir and Fauci things because they're non sequiturs. It does not follow the because remdesivir is bad, Ivermectin is good, or that because Fauci was wrong, Kory was right.

I gave you an extremely thorough review of 30(!) papers on ivermectin, including a really even handed discussion of the results. You dismissed it, even though the conclusion is that ivermectin showed benefit it some really well done studies.

Honestly at this point I don't think I'm the arrogant one.

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Zobel said:

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By the way doc I know you're not in pediatrics but covid19 was the leading cause of death in the age group of 0-19 in the category of infections and respiratory diseases in 2021-2022.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2800816

And the ethics article you linked wasn't about vaccines - it was about boosters. Which, I think, is an important distinction.

Regarding COVID and kids David Gorski put it this way - and this is addressed to two of the authors of the ethics paper you referred to -

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…At best, COVID-19 is roughly as deadly to children as measles was before the vaccine (and that's even with a percentage of the population ages 0-19 having been vaccinated). More likely, COVID-19 is considerably more deadly to children than measles was in the 1950s, before the vaccine was developed.

Yet back then doctors and scientists considered measles, its status as a "normal childhood illness" notwithstanding, to be a deadly threat that warranted a vaccine-and rightly so! We shouldn't tolerate 500 children dying every year and something like 1-3 per 1,000 suffering severe neurological sequelae, and in the 1960s we didn't. The measles vaccine resulted in a dramatic decline in the number of cases of measles per year. In contrast, today a distressing number of physicians just shrug their shoulders metaphorically at an equal or higher level of carnage due to an infectious disease, and trot out the same old antivax arguments used for measles based on COVID-19 supposedly being "not a threat" to children in order to argue against pandemic mitigations in schools or vaccine mandates. And, yes, I'm calling out certain physicians by name, including Drs. Vinay Prasad, Allison Krug, and Tracy Beth Hoeg, to begin with, for doing just this.

Let me finish by putting it this way. If you use arguments against vaccinating children against COVID-19 that are in form identical to the arguments that antivaxxers used to use before the pandemic to argue against vaccinating children against measles, pertussis, and the like, namely that the disease isn't a threat to the children, while ignoring that the disease kills hundreds of children a year, what should I call you? You've lost the right to get all indignant if I call you an antivaxxer. If the name fits…

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Zobel said:

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I'm not sure what Fauci has to do with any of this. I haven't cited him as a source and frankly have no idea nor do I care what he thinks about any of this.

The conclusion about ivermectin is more or less that everyone was wrong. The studies that were good that found benefit had tight correlation with countries that have a high prevalence of worms - which ivermectin is a miracle drug to treat, and are also a covid comorbidity, and also also covid steroids can cause a hyper infection of worms that can kill you. The data leads us to see ivermectin works where people have worms and doesn't do anything where they don't. Which is really interesting

Also a lot of the ivermectin studies were outright fraudulent and should be rejected out of hand.

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Zobel said:

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I don't have any particular opinion about boosters. I'll defer to your opinion.

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dermdoc said:

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snowdog90 said:

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Zobel said:

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Thank you for continuing to converse with me. We may never agree, and that's fine.

And I'm very passionate and opinionated (sometimes a jackass).

So again, thanks.

I came to this board to talk about Jesus, since I recently (finally) surrendered my life to Him, but got sidetracked by good old covid.

So God bless you, and I'm sorry for all the times I've spoken in a malicious way. I am trying and will continue to try to do better.

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Congrats on your encounter with Christ. May you be filled with joy and shalom.

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Zobel said:

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Cheers, all good, God forgives!

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