Your reasoning was very good, and Adams should have been aware of those arguments then.
But he chose to conform, and now he tries to justify that he was tested, and failed.
When the jab came out, I made a decision flow chart, and the very first question was: is it tested or not. The answer of course was negative, and I did not need to consider anything else afterwards. This was easy to do, even Adams could have done it.
Also Doshi came out very early with his article explaining why the jab was not useful. I think his editorial was written even before the vax was released. This information was also available to Adams.
I had some Twitter "discussions" with Adams years back. He is always trying to pretend that he is evaluating arguments objectively from all sides. With the vax he definitively did not.
When they announced Warp Speed I was already highly suspicious because too many people (*ahem* Fauchi, Birx) had already provably lied. The Diamond Princess showed it wasn't anywhere near as dangerous as they had claimed. So when the jab came out I looked at the "data" and it was crap, even in the best light the benefit was marginal. Adams' will never accept that many people saw the very same things while he was blinded by $cience.
Adams can be entertaining and sometimes insightful, but when it comes down to it he's a Technocrat.
The problem is that he thinks he is rational and understand the sceince, but has really not much clues about immunolog/vaccinology.
But since he thinks he knows a lot, he believe that everyone else must also be clueless. Only an impostor or a liar would pretend to know more than the creator of Dilbert!
I remember seeing his whiteboard back then. As I recall, the travel he wanted to do was a vacation with a hot chick. He was thinking with his little brain, not the one in his head.
> he chose to conform, and now he tries to justify that he was tested, and failed.
Well put. It's really this simple.
And he was tested not just on the stabs front, but also the media/propaganda one.
On the stabs front, there has been massive concern about stabs as a medical procedure going back to the Spanish flu, if not before. There have been massive bodies of research, opinion, analysis, personal experience, etc., assembled on this topic. It ALL could EASILY be found on the Internet in 2020. It could easily have been raised for public discussion by Muh Influencers like Adams, instead of being dismissed because it wasn't coming from Authority.
Adams couldn't see through phenomena like Dancing TikTok Nurse Extravaganzas, or Tony "Dr. Death" Fauci at the podium, or Chynese propaganda videos, or the sudden rising of vicious wagon-circling by Pharma and its paid salesdroids (doctors, nurses, "public health" Karens, LE, etc.), or the uncanny isomeric nature and flow of so many of the Authoritative talking points (same language, same phraseology...suddenly changing at the same time...over and over and over). Plus all those Twitter and Facebook bot accounts.
Adams was, and remains, so fully immersed in the Simulation of the internet that he thinks it's real. And it's his teat-clamped faithfulness to the Simulation that undid him. To admit that something was obviously "off" about the propaganda campaigns--that sought to criminalize asking questions, not just silence dissent, and that demanded mass obedience/conformity--would mean having to recognize that he was serving his masters above all.
The dodge of "I'm just evaluating arguments objectively from all sides" is the biggest psyop of all. Nobody does that. Nobody. This is precisely why propagandists gain so much power over the masses: we ALL have emotions and biases to our approaches, and they know how to exploit them.
The point of public discourse should be to lay out "facts," sources, biases, emotions, etc., and examine/weigh them in the light of NEW INFORMATION or DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES.
Instead? The Scott Adamses of the world, ensconced in their Influencer sinecures in the Simulation, want to pretend that they are superhumans who never do any of that human stuff, like sometimes be wrong. The fact that he's still "presenting his analysis" shows who he is. The manly thing would be to say, "Heck, I was really incredibly wrong about this, and I look forward both to self reflection, and to learning from those who were right."
Of course we don't know who he REALLY works for. But he is the opposite of a transparent minded person interested in the truth.
Scott is just pissed that he took the vax and others didn’t, and tell him about it. I don’t give a shit whether he believes my family and I had legitimate “reasons/information” about the vaxxines, we didn’t take them. Eggheads love to overthink things to make themselves feel justified, so suck it Scott, you lost, we won.
Even Russian Roulette with a monetary payoff might render a positive expected value for an atheistic materialist (no afterlife!) of sufficient age and lack of health, which was my general take on the elderly who were hiding at home in terror and wanted to try the shots.
Once people started treating the shots like a religious sacrament or giving them names like "Fauci ouchie" I knew that whatever was happening wasn't rational or good, as whatever people were believing about the shots was a matter of faith and not evidence. Not following the crowd of Kool aid drinkers is a perfectly reasonable hermeneutic.
I knew mRNA technology was highly experimental as I had researched it in 2014-15 in order to write a novel about the pharmaceutical industry which I never finished. I also knew from that research that it took fourteen years to properly research a drug for FDA approval. But as soon as Trump said “operation warp speed” and was arguing with Fauci about 2 months versus 1 year for an experimental vax I knew there was no way I’d be taking it, unless it was clearly and obviously completely safe, so I waited to see. And then the coercion, which in Western Australia was dreadful. Barred from work for six months. (My day job is a music teacher / musician although I have taught computing and tutored science in the past) And then, people I knew dying within hours of taking the thing.
I heard Scott Adams’ inane arguments at the time (2020-21) and realised he was an idiot and unsubscribed from his podcast.
I can’t believe he is still justifying himself. He should let it go. He made a stupid mistake, which is the province of people who think they are smart.
The combination of experimental plus coercion of course is so obviously against the first paragraph of the Nuremberg code that I can’t believe how stupid so many scientifically educated people were.
There are at least two (and probably more) lines of evidence by which basically everyone, and Adams especially, had sufficient reason to refuse the nuvaxx.
First, the very fact that people were being compelled by force to get it was sufficient reason not to get it. Not merely because of the (reliable!) heuristic that nobody forces everyone to get an actually beneficial medicine, but because one has a moral duty to refuse such an obvious evil. Everyone with any degree of moral development knew, and knows, that forcing people to have treatments against their will is wrong. Furthermore, even children possess sufficient reason to understand that these compulsions only have force because people en masse give into them, and that if people were to en masse refuse them they would have no power. Adams himself knew the facts in this case and certainly possesses sufficient intelligence. Someone probably even pointed it out to him at some point. (This is separate from the moral duty to oppose the dictates of an evil cabal).
Second, as others have pointed out, it was common sense prior to 2020 that one ought not to take experimental medicines because they will probably do more harm than good. Everyone knew this, and then chose to forget. (Ask Adams how many experimental miracle drug trials he’s signed up for!) People who bothered to think about it had the further strong information that the long-term effects of a new medicine could not, by definition, be known.
This is even without factoring in that those saying otherwise about the nuvaxx were and are part of an evil cabal that lies all the time, which really everyone should know since there’s decades of evidence that’s right in front of everyone, and that you shouldn’t do what such a group says (see above). That itself is again separate from the conspicuously obvious lies being told. When the CDC had to change its definition of “vaccine” in order to keep telling people that the nuvaxx was one when critics pointed out that it wasn’t (to say nothing of all the similar incidents) there really was no excuse for Adams or people like him to doubt that the nuvaxx was not good.
And, of course, that’s without considering the weight of these separate lines of evidence converging.
I want to reinforce your comment that prior to 2020, it seemed like common sense to avoid taking experimental medications. I thought it was common sense to avoid taking even newly approved medications. Most people I know would avoid buying a new vehicle the first year it came out.
And I would have believed this caution applied doubly to an injection versus a pill whose effects might be mitigated by your digestive process and immune system.
But I was proven wrong.
Propaganda is just much, much more effective then I knew at the time.
Oh look, Clot Adams once again trying to prove he's not a midwit with midwittery, thereby proving he's a midwit. This fuckin' guy.
Midwits love listing off fallacies. What is the fallacy where you say, "I'm super smart and I didn't have this information, therefore nobody could have." A bare assertion and appeal to ignorance I guess.
Some of us kept abreast of the most reliable information we could find and updated our thinking accordingly. Others staked their identity on one particular conclusion prematurely, then doubled down and ignored any contradictory information henceforth until thoroughly embarrassed and discredited. Others still did the latter and continue to rationalize their stupidity to this day, because their raging inferiority complexes can't deal with admitting they made a mistake.
I think there was some strong but unquantifiable evidence that something was amiss with the whole Covid thing.
Right from the beginning I smelled a rat. The hysteria just seemed so contrived, so forced. Even as limited as I am in both research ability and cognitive capacity, I did a little reading and started to notice that points of view contrary to what was obviously becoming the preferred story were being shouted down. Nobody seemed happy to hear that the infection fatality rate might not be all that horrific, even though there was very credible evidence to that effect. What really gave it away was the whole thing about masks, 6’, plexiglass and “flatten the curve”, all of which were obvious nonsense.
I chalk it up to not superior knowledge or insight but to living in a rural area. Out here, we know what bullshit smells like. The whole “covid” fiasco unmistakably had that distinct odor.
“Real” vaccines are dubious enough; there was no way I was going to take a fake vaccine for a fake disease.
"Nobody seemed happy to hear that the infection fatality rate might not be all that horrific, even though there was very credible evidence to that effect."
Precisely. By April 1st we knew people were NOT dying in vast numbers. And so the narrative swung hard over into "protect the vulnerable by shutting down society" except for a little bit of rioting after George Floyd died of a drug overdose in Minneapolis; that rioting was necessary because we are a spiritual people.
On MRNA, the idea that you cause the body to create the spike, you invoke an autoimmune condition without a provable end-point, that was enough for me to avoid the vaxx. That was buttressed by articles about leaky vaccines and reverse-mareks.
Lon: Early on, when the hype was turned up to ten I listened to a radio news report of a man in New York who caught the virus. According to the story it went to one of his legs and the leg had to be amputated. That one may've convinced thousands of people to get the shot, not knowing or caring Covid is a respiratory virus.
Disagree that anyone needed a coin flip or entrails. Pfizer’s post-marketing report presented the results of the first 89 days of their jab. Result: 42K “serious adverse events,” 9 pages of single-spaced SAEs, 1,223 dead. Anyone taking the jab after that was just not paying attention.
My confusion, from the beginning, was why anyone trusted the media. It had been clear for a long time that they love to spread panic and they couldn't be trusted.
And then, like you said, very early results from the Diamond Princess and, most damningly, the videos coming out of China with people just dropping dead in the streets which we knew within a month or two were completely fabricated. Plus the media kept getting caught in egregious lies designed to increase the panic levels and then everyone would seemingly forget and just move on from that to believing the next egregious lie.
It was really the most incredible thing I've ever seen. And I would say I was influenced by the people I read online but anyone that was pushing the vax I just stopped reading, like all the HBD people. And to this day I cannot trust anyone who has not renounced their error on that.
There was never a chance I was going to take it, not from the very beginning. I did have one other reason though which was just happenstance. 6 months before the pandemic, I read The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine by James Lefanu which is an excellent book that describes the capture of medicine by the pharmaceutical industry and from that bibliography read a book on the epidemiologists and another on human experimentation and so by the time I saw it coming down the pike late January early February I was already prepped and ready to say no way. And for that coincidence, I thank God
For me, it was enough to know that there is no way they had time to effectively study the "vaccine." Covid-19 hit the US in January of 2020, and "vaccines" were being put into people's arms -- even the arms of pregnant women -- 11 months later. Huh-uh. Nope. The talking heads' hyperbole and attitude of panic about it all didn't help, and knowing how Fauci and Gates operate was another big red flag. I'm not a mathematician, statistician, logician, or doctor, but those things were enough to put me off it.
Thanks for writing this. I too read the Diamond Princess study by John Ioannidis and concluded that I didn't need a vaccine as I was youngish and healthy. Also the simple fact that most vaccines take 5 to 10 years to come to market made me take a wait and see approach with these new ones. There was also lots of ridiculous propaganda about asymptomatic spread, no natural immunity if you got the actual disease, "social" distancing, etc. I basically became a conspiracy theorist because of Covid!
First, there was no new disease, and no virus at all. There was a great marketing campaign, which used terrorist techniques, and they announced they were going to do it.
All that was enough information to take ***any*** correct decision. Unless one happens to be a maladjusted hypochondriac and a high-functioning narcissist, like Scott Adams, and like so many other people with a platform. No amount of information would have helped such individuals to take any decision.
But most people's narcissism is well within the workable range, and most people are too poor to be hypochondriacs.
They reasons why they started this mindwar are multiple, and I want to focus on one very obvious to any human being living in the real world, unlike Scott Adams: controlled demolition of the economy. Only a person with an economics degree could ever miss that.
The two greatest problems for me now are that the best people will always believe there was a real virus, even if I tell them the self-evidently true proposition that it's much easier to manage a totally manufactured epidemic of disease than a partially manufactured epidemic of disease. It's impossible: today the belief in the virus is stronger than belief in God. Maybe 50 years from now, future generations begin to open up to the reality of the humongous crime committed. But the people living today cannot accept reality and most will die refusing to accept reality on this very important issue.
My other problem is that the most important lesson is not being learned. That lesson is that fear is the greatest health risk, and the greatest political risk, and the main reason why people really go crazy. We have to learn to be friends with fear, so that we can disarm Communists and Fascists and all other enemies of civilization, including hypnotists and marketeers, who enjoy so much manipulating fear. And this is a problem because I see a lot of mediocre imbeciles, some with one or two Ph.D. degrees, who insist that the law should be based on their fear of disease and death. Such people, who are very privileged people in monetary terms, should be sent to the mines in Africa for six months, to understand that the law cannot be based in any form of fear. The law should be based in the idea of making justice. People with major personal defects of character, such as hypochondria, should never participate in any lawmaking process, much less in any form of government.
I am mentally inferior to both of the principal characters in this article, so I guess I got lucky in saying "no" to the vax. But I swear at the time I used information I scoured from many sources including the early reporting that people with vitamin D levels in the high end of standard recommendations did not suffer life-threatening symptoms of the Doom. I began supplementing D and had a near 100 level by early 2021. In addition, I read the first (I believe it was the first) post-marketing report from Pfizer in May, 2021, showing over 1200 people had died from taking the shot(s) within the first 75 days of rollout. That number astounded me, considering Swine Flu vaccinations were halted after less than 75 deaths had been attributed to the shots (and further considering I did not trust Pfizer to be honest about the numbers). I'm in my 60s and in general good health with zero prescription drugs so perhaps I was just lucky to be in a position to call "heads" as the coin landed face up.
I can't believe Adams is still trying to justify his decision. I thought this essay was a rejoinder to his vax justification from a couple of years back. What a profoundly arrogant man! As others have pointed out, his much younger wife (did he not analyze that anomaly?) wanted to travel, so he got vaxxed. She left him. 0/2, Scott. Just take the loss and move on.
And that certainly explains why he CAN'T take the L and move on. He abrogated his personal sovereignty 50 ways to Tuesday...and to admit he was wrong would have to mean admitting some pretty dark things psychosexually.
I know right? Clott just can’t let it go. Even the most strident defenders of the vaxx have moved on and hardly ever talk about it, as evidenced by the 15% current booster uptake. I am surprised that it is even that much. I think they are all on the Reddit zero covid community 😂
I was a member of Scott's locals community after covid started, up to his vax decision.
He was aware of the Diamond Princess stats, which implied low risk.
He was aware of treatment options, which dramatically alter the risk/reward for vaccines (e.g. ivermectin and hydroxychloroquinine).
He was aware of the injury from spike protein produced by the vax, and the risk from the mRNA lipid delivery system.
Numerous people in the community engaged him and pointed out the flaws in his "facts" and his "logic". None of it had any effect.
He basically said "experts know everything you know, and more, trust the experts". Ignoring that his community was full of experts, that bought-and-paid-for-experts can't be trusted, that you can find experts on both sides of most issues, and that your priorities for risk/benefit may be very different from "the experts".
Your reasoning was very good, and Adams should have been aware of those arguments then.
But he chose to conform, and now he tries to justify that he was tested, and failed.
When the jab came out, I made a decision flow chart, and the very first question was: is it tested or not. The answer of course was negative, and I did not need to consider anything else afterwards. This was easy to do, even Adams could have done it.
Also Doshi came out very early with his article explaining why the jab was not useful. I think his editorial was written even before the vax was released. This information was also available to Adams.
I had some Twitter "discussions" with Adams years back. He is always trying to pretend that he is evaluating arguments objectively from all sides. With the vax he definitively did not.
When they announced Warp Speed I was already highly suspicious because too many people (*ahem* Fauchi, Birx) had already provably lied. The Diamond Princess showed it wasn't anywhere near as dangerous as they had claimed. So when the jab came out I looked at the "data" and it was crap, even in the best light the benefit was marginal. Adams' will never accept that many people saw the very same things while he was blinded by $cience.
Adams can be entertaining and sometimes insightful, but when it comes down to it he's a Technocrat.
The problem is that he thinks he is rational and understand the sceince, but has really not much clues about immunolog/vaccinology.
But since he thinks he knows a lot, he believe that everyone else must also be clueless. Only an impostor or a liar would pretend to know more than the creator of Dilbert!
I remember seeing his whiteboard back then. As I recall, the travel he wanted to do was a vacation with a hot chick. He was thinking with his little brain, not the one in his head.
It was his young wife. She wanted to travel. He got stabbed to make it possible.
Not sure that's "thinking" in either sense you suggest. More like choosing possible poison over certain marital discord.
> he chose to conform, and now he tries to justify that he was tested, and failed.
Well put. It's really this simple.
And he was tested not just on the stabs front, but also the media/propaganda one.
On the stabs front, there has been massive concern about stabs as a medical procedure going back to the Spanish flu, if not before. There have been massive bodies of research, opinion, analysis, personal experience, etc., assembled on this topic. It ALL could EASILY be found on the Internet in 2020. It could easily have been raised for public discussion by Muh Influencers like Adams, instead of being dismissed because it wasn't coming from Authority.
Adams couldn't see through phenomena like Dancing TikTok Nurse Extravaganzas, or Tony "Dr. Death" Fauci at the podium, or Chynese propaganda videos, or the sudden rising of vicious wagon-circling by Pharma and its paid salesdroids (doctors, nurses, "public health" Karens, LE, etc.), or the uncanny isomeric nature and flow of so many of the Authoritative talking points (same language, same phraseology...suddenly changing at the same time...over and over and over). Plus all those Twitter and Facebook bot accounts.
Adams was, and remains, so fully immersed in the Simulation of the internet that he thinks it's real. And it's his teat-clamped faithfulness to the Simulation that undid him. To admit that something was obviously "off" about the propaganda campaigns--that sought to criminalize asking questions, not just silence dissent, and that demanded mass obedience/conformity--would mean having to recognize that he was serving his masters above all.
The dodge of "I'm just evaluating arguments objectively from all sides" is the biggest psyop of all. Nobody does that. Nobody. This is precisely why propagandists gain so much power over the masses: we ALL have emotions and biases to our approaches, and they know how to exploit them.
The point of public discourse should be to lay out "facts," sources, biases, emotions, etc., and examine/weigh them in the light of NEW INFORMATION or DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES.
Instead? The Scott Adamses of the world, ensconced in their Influencer sinecures in the Simulation, want to pretend that they are superhumans who never do any of that human stuff, like sometimes be wrong. The fact that he's still "presenting his analysis" shows who he is. The manly thing would be to say, "Heck, I was really incredibly wrong about this, and I look forward both to self reflection, and to learning from those who were right."
Of course we don't know who he REALLY works for. But he is the opposite of a transparent minded person interested in the truth.
Scott is just pissed that he took the vax and others didn’t, and tell him about it. I don’t give a shit whether he believes my family and I had legitimate “reasons/information” about the vaxxines, we didn’t take them. Eggheads love to overthink things to make themselves feel justified, so suck it Scott, you lost, we won.
Excellent.
Even Russian Roulette with a monetary payoff might render a positive expected value for an atheistic materialist (no afterlife!) of sufficient age and lack of health, which was my general take on the elderly who were hiding at home in terror and wanted to try the shots.
Once people started treating the shots like a religious sacrament or giving them names like "Fauci ouchie" I knew that whatever was happening wasn't rational or good, as whatever people were believing about the shots was a matter of faith and not evidence. Not following the crowd of Kool aid drinkers is a perfectly reasonable hermeneutic.
Also, Adams definitely was team panic:
https://x.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/1240036471458770946?t=c0TKzJzqWYUu6jL7xU4Oag&s=19
"Not following the crowd of Kool aid drinkers is a perfectly reasonable hermeneutic."
Good not agree more.
Covid was not the beginning of the unjustified sanctification of vaccines, but it revealed it to a lot more people.
Hahahaha! They had "finger cots" at my polling place in Nov. 2022!
I knew mRNA technology was highly experimental as I had researched it in 2014-15 in order to write a novel about the pharmaceutical industry which I never finished. I also knew from that research that it took fourteen years to properly research a drug for FDA approval. But as soon as Trump said “operation warp speed” and was arguing with Fauci about 2 months versus 1 year for an experimental vax I knew there was no way I’d be taking it, unless it was clearly and obviously completely safe, so I waited to see. And then the coercion, which in Western Australia was dreadful. Barred from work for six months. (My day job is a music teacher / musician although I have taught computing and tutored science in the past) And then, people I knew dying within hours of taking the thing.
I heard Scott Adams’ inane arguments at the time (2020-21) and realised he was an idiot and unsubscribed from his podcast.
I can’t believe he is still justifying himself. He should let it go. He made a stupid mistake, which is the province of people who think they are smart.
The combination of experimental plus coercion of course is so obviously against the first paragraph of the Nuremberg code that I can’t believe how stupid so many scientifically educated people were.
There are at least two (and probably more) lines of evidence by which basically everyone, and Adams especially, had sufficient reason to refuse the nuvaxx.
First, the very fact that people were being compelled by force to get it was sufficient reason not to get it. Not merely because of the (reliable!) heuristic that nobody forces everyone to get an actually beneficial medicine, but because one has a moral duty to refuse such an obvious evil. Everyone with any degree of moral development knew, and knows, that forcing people to have treatments against their will is wrong. Furthermore, even children possess sufficient reason to understand that these compulsions only have force because people en masse give into them, and that if people were to en masse refuse them they would have no power. Adams himself knew the facts in this case and certainly possesses sufficient intelligence. Someone probably even pointed it out to him at some point. (This is separate from the moral duty to oppose the dictates of an evil cabal).
Second, as others have pointed out, it was common sense prior to 2020 that one ought not to take experimental medicines because they will probably do more harm than good. Everyone knew this, and then chose to forget. (Ask Adams how many experimental miracle drug trials he’s signed up for!) People who bothered to think about it had the further strong information that the long-term effects of a new medicine could not, by definition, be known.
This is even without factoring in that those saying otherwise about the nuvaxx were and are part of an evil cabal that lies all the time, which really everyone should know since there’s decades of evidence that’s right in front of everyone, and that you shouldn’t do what such a group says (see above). That itself is again separate from the conspicuously obvious lies being told. When the CDC had to change its definition of “vaccine” in order to keep telling people that the nuvaxx was one when critics pointed out that it wasn’t (to say nothing of all the similar incidents) there really was no excuse for Adams or people like him to doubt that the nuvaxx was not good.
And, of course, that’s without considering the weight of these separate lines of evidence converging.
I want to reinforce your comment that prior to 2020, it seemed like common sense to avoid taking experimental medications. I thought it was common sense to avoid taking even newly approved medications. Most people I know would avoid buying a new vehicle the first year it came out.
And I would have believed this caution applied doubly to an injection versus a pill whose effects might be mitigated by your digestive process and immune system.
But I was proven wrong.
Propaganda is just much, much more effective then I knew at the time.
Oh look, Clot Adams once again trying to prove he's not a midwit with midwittery, thereby proving he's a midwit. This fuckin' guy.
Midwits love listing off fallacies. What is the fallacy where you say, "I'm super smart and I didn't have this information, therefore nobody could have." A bare assertion and appeal to ignorance I guess.
Some of us kept abreast of the most reliable information we could find and updated our thinking accordingly. Others staked their identity on one particular conclusion prematurely, then doubled down and ignored any contradictory information henceforth until thoroughly embarrassed and discredited. Others still did the latter and continue to rationalize their stupidity to this day, because their raging inferiority complexes can't deal with admitting they made a mistake.
A version of "appeal to authority".
I think there was some strong but unquantifiable evidence that something was amiss with the whole Covid thing.
Right from the beginning I smelled a rat. The hysteria just seemed so contrived, so forced. Even as limited as I am in both research ability and cognitive capacity, I did a little reading and started to notice that points of view contrary to what was obviously becoming the preferred story were being shouted down. Nobody seemed happy to hear that the infection fatality rate might not be all that horrific, even though there was very credible evidence to that effect. What really gave it away was the whole thing about masks, 6’, plexiglass and “flatten the curve”, all of which were obvious nonsense.
I chalk it up to not superior knowledge or insight but to living in a rural area. Out here, we know what bullshit smells like. The whole “covid” fiasco unmistakably had that distinct odor.
“Real” vaccines are dubious enough; there was no way I was going to take a fake vaccine for a fake disease.
"Nobody seemed happy to hear that the infection fatality rate might not be all that horrific, even though there was very credible evidence to that effect."
Precisely. By April 1st we knew people were NOT dying in vast numbers. And so the narrative swung hard over into "protect the vulnerable by shutting down society" except for a little bit of rioting after George Floyd died of a drug overdose in Minneapolis; that rioting was necessary because we are a spiritual people.
A suggestion for smelling a rat: If you are told to just follow the expert, it's a psyop.
https://x.com/VigilantFox/status/1894491782354010549
On MRNA, the idea that you cause the body to create the spike, you invoke an autoimmune condition without a provable end-point, that was enough for me to avoid the vaxx. That was buttressed by articles about leaky vaccines and reverse-mareks.
Lon: Early on, when the hype was turned up to ten I listened to a radio news report of a man in New York who caught the virus. According to the story it went to one of his legs and the leg had to be amputated. That one may've convinced thousands of people to get the shot, not knowing or caring Covid is a respiratory virus.
Disagree that anyone needed a coin flip or entrails. Pfizer’s post-marketing report presented the results of the first 89 days of their jab. Result: 42K “serious adverse events,” 9 pages of single-spaced SAEs, 1,223 dead. Anyone taking the jab after that was just not paying attention.
Yes, well, how many major media outlets presented those details? How many non-scientist people you know will actually go look at a study report?
Propaganda works. We should consider ourselves lucky that they overplayed their hand so egregiously.
My confusion, from the beginning, was why anyone trusted the media. It had been clear for a long time that they love to spread panic and they couldn't be trusted.
And then, like you said, very early results from the Diamond Princess and, most damningly, the videos coming out of China with people just dropping dead in the streets which we knew within a month or two were completely fabricated. Plus the media kept getting caught in egregious lies designed to increase the panic levels and then everyone would seemingly forget and just move on from that to believing the next egregious lie.
It was really the most incredible thing I've ever seen. And I would say I was influenced by the people I read online but anyone that was pushing the vax I just stopped reading, like all the HBD people. And to this day I cannot trust anyone who has not renounced their error on that.
There was never a chance I was going to take it, not from the very beginning. I did have one other reason though which was just happenstance. 6 months before the pandemic, I read The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine by James Lefanu which is an excellent book that describes the capture of medicine by the pharmaceutical industry and from that bibliography read a book on the epidemiologists and another on human experimentation and so by the time I saw it coming down the pike late January early February I was already prepped and ready to say no way. And for that coincidence, I thank God
HBD?
Human biodiversity.
https://www.humanbiologicaldiversity.com/
For me, it was enough to know that there is no way they had time to effectively study the "vaccine." Covid-19 hit the US in January of 2020, and "vaccines" were being put into people's arms -- even the arms of pregnant women -- 11 months later. Huh-uh. Nope. The talking heads' hyperbole and attitude of panic about it all didn't help, and knowing how Fauci and Gates operate was another big red flag. I'm not a mathematician, statistician, logician, or doctor, but those things were enough to put me off it.
Thanks for writing this. I too read the Diamond Princess study by John Ioannidis and concluded that I didn't need a vaccine as I was youngish and healthy. Also the simple fact that most vaccines take 5 to 10 years to come to market made me take a wait and see approach with these new ones. There was also lots of ridiculous propaganda about asymptomatic spread, no natural immunity if you got the actual disease, "social" distancing, etc. I basically became a conspiracy theorist because of Covid!
One of the first things that started me down the skeptical road was the demonization of formally revered scientists like John Ioannidis.
First, there was no new disease, and no virus at all. There was a great marketing campaign, which used terrorist techniques, and they announced they were going to do it.
All that was enough information to take ***any*** correct decision. Unless one happens to be a maladjusted hypochondriac and a high-functioning narcissist, like Scott Adams, and like so many other people with a platform. No amount of information would have helped such individuals to take any decision.
But most people's narcissism is well within the workable range, and most people are too poor to be hypochondriacs.
They reasons why they started this mindwar are multiple, and I want to focus on one very obvious to any human being living in the real world, unlike Scott Adams: controlled demolition of the economy. Only a person with an economics degree could ever miss that.
The two greatest problems for me now are that the best people will always believe there was a real virus, even if I tell them the self-evidently true proposition that it's much easier to manage a totally manufactured epidemic of disease than a partially manufactured epidemic of disease. It's impossible: today the belief in the virus is stronger than belief in God. Maybe 50 years from now, future generations begin to open up to the reality of the humongous crime committed. But the people living today cannot accept reality and most will die refusing to accept reality on this very important issue.
My other problem is that the most important lesson is not being learned. That lesson is that fear is the greatest health risk, and the greatest political risk, and the main reason why people really go crazy. We have to learn to be friends with fear, so that we can disarm Communists and Fascists and all other enemies of civilization, including hypnotists and marketeers, who enjoy so much manipulating fear. And this is a problem because I see a lot of mediocre imbeciles, some with one or two Ph.D. degrees, who insist that the law should be based on their fear of disease and death. Such people, who are very privileged people in monetary terms, should be sent to the mines in Africa for six months, to understand that the law cannot be based in any form of fear. The law should be based in the idea of making justice. People with major personal defects of character, such as hypochondria, should never participate in any lawmaking process, much less in any form of government.
What? You are not terrified of microplastics in the environment that are now embedded in your brain? How dare you!
Our grandparents were filled with lead, our parents with asbestos, us with microplastics. Life goes on
I am mentally inferior to both of the principal characters in this article, so I guess I got lucky in saying "no" to the vax. But I swear at the time I used information I scoured from many sources including the early reporting that people with vitamin D levels in the high end of standard recommendations did not suffer life-threatening symptoms of the Doom. I began supplementing D and had a near 100 level by early 2021. In addition, I read the first (I believe it was the first) post-marketing report from Pfizer in May, 2021, showing over 1200 people had died from taking the shot(s) within the first 75 days of rollout. That number astounded me, considering Swine Flu vaccinations were halted after less than 75 deaths had been attributed to the shots (and further considering I did not trust Pfizer to be honest about the numbers). I'm in my 60s and in general good health with zero prescription drugs so perhaps I was just lucky to be in a position to call "heads" as the coin landed face up.
Anyway, interesting debate!
By the way I must add in all honesty I was not immune from the early panic.
Me neither. I participated eagerly, and was rather excited like we were involved in a big Hollywood movie or something.
Shame on me.
I can't believe Adams is still trying to justify his decision. I thought this essay was a rejoinder to his vax justification from a couple of years back. What a profoundly arrogant man! As others have pointed out, his much younger wife (did he not analyze that anomaly?) wanted to travel, so he got vaxxed. She left him. 0/2, Scott. Just take the loss and move on.
And that certainly explains why he CAN'T take the L and move on. He abrogated his personal sovereignty 50 ways to Tuesday...and to admit he was wrong would have to mean admitting some pretty dark things psychosexually.
I know right? Clott just can’t let it go. Even the most strident defenders of the vaxx have moved on and hardly ever talk about it, as evidenced by the 15% current booster uptake. I am surprised that it is even that much. I think they are all on the Reddit zero covid community 😂
I was a member of Scott's locals community after covid started, up to his vax decision.
He was aware of the Diamond Princess stats, which implied low risk.
He was aware of treatment options, which dramatically alter the risk/reward for vaccines (e.g. ivermectin and hydroxychloroquinine).
He was aware of the injury from spike protein produced by the vax, and the risk from the mRNA lipid delivery system.
Numerous people in the community engaged him and pointed out the flaws in his "facts" and his "logic". None of it had any effect.
He basically said "experts know everything you know, and more, trust the experts". Ignoring that his community was full of experts, that bought-and-paid-for-experts can't be trusted, that you can find experts on both sides of most issues, and that your priorities for risk/benefit may be very different from "the experts".