TallGuyJohninBKK

The voice thereof.... --AI assisted.

Thailand sends Covid patients home on trains as virus cases and deaths mount in the capital July 28, 2021 "Bangkok CNN — Thai citizens seeking Covid-19 treatment in Bangkok are being returned to their hometowns by train, in an effort to alleviate the burden on the capital’s medical system. Thailand is struggling to contain its worst Covid-19 wave of the pandemic, with hospitals in Bangkok becoming overwhelmed by a surge in cases and demand for beds greatly outstripping capacity." https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/28/asia/thailand-covid-patients-train-intl-hnk

Pretty amazing that the COVID denialists and anti-vaxer conspiracy theorists are so much out in bloom today, and so divorced from what the world recognized as reality. It also says a lot about the posters here who keep supporting and advocating the nonsense COVID vaccine conspiracy theories that regularly get posted here -- divorced from reality.

Because the Thai govt had rules the protect the privacy of people living/staying in their COVID shelters, and as a result, the only photos that typically circulated or were allowed were of when the facilities were empty as they got ready to open.

I believe in making informed decisions, which is why I look to credible sources of information and disregard those with long and proven track records of spreading false and disproven claims. Credible info like this: How do we know mRNA vaccines are safe and effective? An explainer ... "A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analysis of data from hundreds of hospitals and Medicare claims found that, from 2023 to 2024, Covid-19 vaccines reduced immunized adults’ risk of ending up in an intensive care unit or dying from the disease by almost 70% during the first two months after vaccination and by half up to 10 months after vaccination." Stat https://archive.ph/fTkmP#selection-1733.61-1737.307

As usual, you have no pertinent facts or credible sources to support the claims you're making re the primary source of measles infections.... --AI assisted

There was no side stepping of the standard vaccine testing and approval processes for the COVID vaccines. They went thru the normal multi-stage cycle of clinical trials as any other vaccine had and would have. Myths vs. Facts: Making Sense of COVID-19 Vaccine Misinformation " MYTH: The COVID vaccines were not rigorously tested, which is why they have only emergency authorization approval and not full Food and Drug Administration approval. (Update: Pfizer’s vaccine received full FDA approval on August 19) FACT: “Vaccine developers didn’t skip any testing steps, but conducted some of the steps on an overlapping schedule to gather data faster.”—Johns Hopkins Medicine https://www.bu.edu/articles/2021/myths-vs-facts-covid-19-vaccine/

This is pretty safe and effective: Two Years of U.S. COVID-19 Vaccines Have Prevented Millions of Hospitalizations and Deaths December 13, 2022 Findings From December 2020 through November 2022, we estimate that the COVID-19 vaccination program in the U.S. prevented more than 18.5 million additional hospitalizations and 3.2 million additional deaths. Without vaccination, there would have been nearly 120 million more COVID-19 infections. The vaccination program also saved the U.S. $1.15 trillion (Credible Interval: $1.10 trillion–$1.19 trillion) (data not shown) in medical costs that would otherwise have been incurred. https://www.commonwealthfund.org/blog/2022/two-years-covid-vaccines-prevented-millions-deaths-hospitalizations along with: "In a new report, Stanford researchers outline steps that public health officials and the research community can take to curb the spread of vaccine-related mis- and disinformation online. "Despite overwhelming scientific evidence showing that COVID-19 vaccines are a safe and effective means to prevent severe cases of a disease that has killed nearly one million people in the U.S., there has been a proliferation of false and misleading claims trying to undermine the public’s confidence in their safety and uptake. {emphasis added]"

Two Years of U.S. COVID-19 Vaccines Have Prevented Millions of Hospitalizations and Deaths December 13, 2022 Findings From December 2020 through November 2022, we estimate that the COVID-19 vaccination program in the U.S. prevented more than 18.5 million additional hospitalizations and 3.2 million additional deaths. Without vaccination, there would have been nearly 120 million more COVID-19 infections. The vaccination program also saved the U.S. $1.15 trillion (Credible Interval: $1.10 trillion–$1.19 trillion) (data not shown) in medical costs that would otherwise have been incurred. https://www.commonwealthfund.org/blog/2022/two-years-covid-vaccines-prevented-millions-deaths-hospitalizations

U.S. CDC: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/ Thailand: --AI Assisted

In 2019, our last bad measles year, 77%* of index cases (i.e., patient zero for an outbreak) were U.S. residents who had recently traveled and returned home infected. The top source countries were the Philippines, Ukraine, Israel, Thailand, and Vietnam.

SciCheck’s COVID-19/Vaccination Project "Our goal is to increase exposure to accurate information about COVID-19 and vaccines, while decreasing the impact of misinformation. On this page, you’ll find answers to commonly asked questions, as well as links to our articles debunking misinformation. All of our COVID-19 stories can be found here." ... Fact Checks + RFK Jr. Justifies Cuts to mRNA Vaccine Projects With Falsehoods + Presentation Before CDC Vaccine Panel Misleads About Thimerosal + HHS ‘FAQ’ Distorts Data on COVID-19 Vaccination During Childhood and Pregnancy + HHS Misleads on mRNA Vaccine Safety After Pulling Moderna Funding ... + Florida’s 2024-2025 COVID-19 Vaccine Guidance Misunderstands, Distorts Existing Science + Flawed Autopsy ‘Review’ Revives Unsupported Claims of COVID-19 Vaccine Harm, Censorship etc etc etc. https://www.factcheck.org/covid-misconceptions/

COVID-19 Misinformation Persists, 4 Years After Shelter-in-Place While people’s lives are largely free of the extreme public health measures that restricted them early in the pandemic, misinformation about vaccines and conspiracy theories are still around. April 1, 2024 ... "COVID misinformation persists, although it’s now centered mostly on vaccines and vaccine-related conspiracy theories. PolitiFact has published more than 2,000 fact checks related to COVID vaccines alone. “From a misinformation researcher perspective, [there has been] shifting levels of trust,” said Tara Kirk Sell, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “Early on in the pandemic, there was a lot of: ‘This isn’t real,’ fake cures, and then later on, we see more vaccine-focused mis- and disinformation and a more partisan type of disinformation and misinformation.” ... But on social media and in some public officials’ remarks, misinformation about COVID vaccine efficacy and safety is common. U.S. presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has built his 2024 campaign on a movement that seeks to legitimize conspiracy theories about the vaccines. PolitiFact made that its 2023 “Lie of the Year.” [emphasis added] PolitiFact has seen claims that spike proteins from vaccines are replacing sperm in vaccinated males. (That’s false.) We’ve researched the assertion that vaccines can change your DNA. (That’s misleading and ignores evidence). Social media posts poked fun at Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce for encouraging people to get vaccinated, asserting that the vaccine actually shuts off recipients’ hearts. (No, it doesn’t.) And some people pointed to an American Red Cross blood donation questionnaire as evidence that shots are unsafe. (PolitiFact rated that False.) (more) https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2024-04-01/four-years-after-shelter-in-place-covid-19-misinformation-persists

Ahh, so you think illegal immigration to the U.S. only began during Biden's years as president??? Right!!!

Hulscher, another non-credible, disreputable "researcher" who's had his articles retracted by scientific journals after his work was found non-credible. As for the claims being made: Still No Evidence COVID-19 Vaccination Increases Cancer Risk, Despite Posts May 3, 2024 "Clinical trials, involving thousands of people, and multiple studies have shown that the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna are safe. Hundreds of millions of doses have been administered under close monitoring systems that have found serious side effects are rare. Studies have also shown that the vaccines work very well in preventing severe COVID-19 disease and death, saving millions of lives across the globe." https://www.factcheck.org/2024/05/still-no-evidence-covid-19-vaccination-increases-cancer-risk-despite-posts/ National Cancer Institute: Can COVID-19 vaccines cause cancer? Can the vaccines cause cancer to recur or make it more aggressive? There is no evidence that COVID-19 vaccines cause cancer, lead to recurrence, or lead to disease progression. https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/coronavirus/covid-19-vaccines-people-with-cancer#:~:text=Can COVID-19,your genetic code). False claim COVID-19 vaccines are linked to 'spike' in cancer cases | Fact check Our rating: False There is no evidence that COVID-19 vaccines cause cancer or are associated with a greater risk of developing cancer, experts said. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2024/03/13/covid-19-vaccines-are-not-linked-to-spike-in-cancer-fact-check/72943934007/

NewsGuard Reports More Than 300 Vaccine-Related False Narratives Now Spreading Online Nearly four years since the outbreak of COVID-19 — and amidst a constant stream of false claims about vaccine efficacy — NewsGuard reports that there are now more than 300 vaccine-related false narratives infecting social media and online search results (February 7, 2024 — New York) Health misinformation site Natural News (NewsGuard Trust Score: 5/100) reports that elderberries are more effective protection against flu than a vaccine. The National Vaccine Information Center (Trust Score: 12.5/100) cites research claiming measles vaccines cause measles. U.K-based Principia-Scientific (Trust Score: 20/100) claims COVID-19 vaccines contain monkey DNA. These are among the now more than 300 vaccine-related false narratives that NewsGuard’s healthcare information team has identified circulating on the internet, shared by 4,387 websites and other news sources and social media accounts — and counting. Two thirds of all the news and information websites that NewsGuard has rated as untrustworthy since 2018 publish healthcare misinformation. [emphasis added] “The vaccine-related false narratives we’ve found don’t just reflect the spike in conversations about vaccines since the pandemic,” said John Gregory, health editor at NewsGuard. “Long before COVID-19, people made all kinds of questionable statements about vaccines, related to autoimmune diseases, infertility, cardiac arrest and other health topics. In fact, 67% of news sites rated as generally untrustworthy (below 60/100) by NewsGuard have been flagged for publishing health misinformation, making it one of the largest categories of misinformation we track.” [emphasis added] (more) https://www.newsguardtech.com/press/newsguard-reports-more-than-300-vaccine-related-false-narratives-now-spreading-online/

A prior report from 2022 by Stanford University, but nonetheless one that is still relevant today for the unmoderated nonsense that is often posted online: -------------------------------------------- In a new report, Stanford researchers outline steps that public health officials and the research community can take to curb the spread of vaccine-related mis- and disinformation online. "Despite overwhelming scientific evidence showing that COVID-19 vaccines are a safe and effective means to prevent severe cases of a disease that has killed nearly one million people in the U.S., there has been a proliferation of false and misleading claims trying to undermine the public’s confidence in their safety and uptake. {emphasis added] ... As the pandemic continues to be an ongoing health emergency with new variants rapidly spreading, it is increasingly urgent that accurate vaccine-related information be accessible and readily available to the public, said Stanford scholar and leading expert on mis- and disinformation, Renée DiResta. ... A long history of anti-vax disinformation Public health organizations and social media platforms have been trying to tackle the problem of anti-vaccine activism and hesitancy long before the coronavirus pandemic. Indeed, vaccine misinformation can be traced back to when vaccines were first developed, DiResta explained. ... Today, online communities foment fears by offering digital spaces for mis- and disinformation to flourish in largely echo chambers where anti-vaccination activists, unrestrained by editorial gatekeepers, have been able to broadcast their claims, unchecked. Despite social media platforms developing policies against vaccine-related mis- and disinformation, anti-vaccination activists have become savvy at avoiding accountability for the misleading and pseudoscientific claims they spout." [emphasis added] (more) https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2022/02/curbing-spread-covid-19-vaccine-related-mis-disinformation

The other questions in the Rasmussen poll make it sound like it might have been financially sponsored (paid for) by RFK Jr. and/or his anti-vaxer allies. Does Rasmussen do that... Yes, they most certainly do: --AI assisted Curiously, some of the other polled questions (which didn't follow thru on the vaccine issue in any way, conspicuously): 2* Do you have a very favorable, somewhat favorable, somewhat unfavorable, or very unfavorable impression of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.? [emphasis added] 4* The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, known as the CDC, was the lead agency advising the government's response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Do some CDC employees involved in the government's COVID-19 response deserve to be fired? [emphasis added] No doubt we'll be seeing this claptrap show up in Kennedy's anti-vaxer talking points very soon.

Here's Rasmussen's actual question... only one on the posted topic... Leading more than a bit? How likely is it that people beat their wives...... Rasmussen really wants to know! And, the "mass deaths" nonsense in the headline isn't reflected in the Rasmussen poll or question at all, but instead, is the anti-vaxer fever dream of the OP's quoted anti-vaxer blogger and COVID misinformer Nicolas Hulscher. Hulscher is a cohort of disgraced COVID misinformer Dr. Peter McCullough, who was stripped of his medical board certifications for spreading COVID misinformation, and the two collaborated on a bogus journal article claiming COVID vaccine deaths that was later retracted by the journal that initially published it. https://www.factcheck.org/2024/07/flawed-autopsy-review-revives-unsupported-claims-of-covid-19-vaccine-harm-censorship/

Meanwhile, for a brief diversion into facts instead of anti-vax nonsense: Per the Associated Press in 2023: "The CDC has confirmed just nine deaths caused by COVID-19 vaccines. Those cases were causally associated with rare blood clots caused by the Johnson & Johnson shot. As a result, that vaccine [J&J] has been largely sidelined by officials. Severe reactions are rare. More than 674 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines had been administered in the U.S. as of Friday." https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-covid-vaccine-600000-americans-978248674052

--AI assisted --"The Associated Press has also addressed Rasmussen's methodology. In 2018, AP journalists noted that Rasmussen's telephone methodology systematically omits adults, many of them young people, without landlines. The AP also noted that Rasmussen does not provide details regarding its online-panel methodology. --A 2017 article by Chris Cillizza for CNN raised doubts about Rasmussen's accuracy, drawing attention specifically to potential sampling biases such as the exclusion of calls to cell phones (which, Cillizza argued, tended to exclude younger voters), and also more generally to a lack of methodological disclosure. [emphasis added] --Rasmussen has received criticism over the wording in its polls.[113][114] Asking a polling question with different wording can affect the results of the poll;[115] the commentators in question allege that the questions Rasmussen ask in polls are skewed in order to favor a specific response. For instance, when Rasmussen polled whether Republican voters thought Rush Limbaugh was the leader of their party, the specific question they asked was: "Agree or Disagree: 'Rush Limbaugh is the leader of the Republican Party—he says jump and they say how high.'" [emphasis added] --Rasmussen Reports has frequently claimed that COVID-19 vaccines are lethal,[102] promoted election denialism,[102][103][104][105] stated that a poll held 4 months after the 2020 United States Senate elections was representative of the results on the election day,[103] merged 3 topics into the same question, released the results 11 months later and claimed that the outcome of the poll was representative of COVID-19 vaccines' supposed mortality rate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rasmussen_Reports

This GOP-leaning political polling firm has turned into a purveyor of anti-vaccine propaganda Wed, June 19, 2024 "...something has happened to Rasmussen in recent years. Not only have its results become more sharply partisan, favoring Republican and conservative politicians, but it also has increasingly promoted right-wing conspiracy theories on topics such as race relations, election results and — perhaps most troubling — COVID vaccines and COVID origins. ... There are many reasons to disregard any such poll asking people what they think about a scientifically validated fact — in this case, that the record shows overwhelmingly that the COVID vaccines widely used in the U.S. are safe and effective. ... Rasmussen polls on COVID vaccines and other such topics aren't entirely worthless. They may not tell us anything useful about scientific research or electoral results, but they do offer a window into how propaganda and claptrap have penetrated deeply into our political discourse, at least within the right-wing fever swamp. [emphasis added] ,,, Such questions [as deployed in their polls] have obvious flaws. The most important is that most respondents have no way of knowing whether an acquaintance's death was related to the vaccine; nor does Rasmussen, which conducts its polls with robot calls, have any way of authenticating the respondent's answer." Los Angeles Times https://www.yahoo.com/news/column-gop-leaning-political-polling-100014929.html

Yep, stuff like that... Here are some of the other things that polls will tell you Americans believe: Which conspiracy theories do Americans believe? December 09, 2023 --Barack Obama was not born in the United States (31%) --voting machines were programmed to change votes in the 2020 election (29%). --the government is using COVID-19 vaccines to microchip Americans (20%) --the government was behind the 9/11 attacks (20%) --the 1969 moon landing was staged (18%). Go figure. The crazy things that some portion of the population believe. https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/48113-which-conspiracy-theories-do-americans-believe

Admittedly, the anti-vax movement has succeeded during COVID in persuading some portion of the American public -- falsely -- that COVID vaccines have substantive health risks risks. They don't, as study after study has repeatedly confirmed. But, then we have Rasmussen, a right-wing polling outfiit with a dubious history and a long record of trafficking, and spreading, anti-COVID vaccine rhetoric.... because, that's where the right-wing and the Republican party have gone under Trump and RFK Jr. However, just because Rasmussen comes up with a poll result claiming something, don't mean it's true that even that reported share of people really believe what they claim. Because, their history of polling on COVID vaccines has asked their questions in a way that's designed to drive a misleading result. And it does, time after time. Rasmussen Reports is, ostensibly, a polling organization. Why does its most recent poll look like something an antivaxxer like Steve Kirsch dreamed up? Because it’s not legit. It’s propaganda. "In the political world, Rasmussen polls are known for tending to have a bias towards the right in general and Republicans in particular. Seriously, even Nate Silver said over a decade ago, “My advice would be simply to disregard the Rasmussen Reports poll, and to view their work with extreme skepticism going forward.” ... Rasmussen reminds me of MSU Economics Professor Mark Skidmore and his execrably bad poll that claimed to have found that vaccines killed a lot of people. It was so bad that, after its retraction, the only “journal” that would touch it was antivaxxer James Lyons-Weiler‘s fake journal. ... No, Rasmussen is a disinformation operation and is basically trolling on its social media now.... I realize that, among pollsters, Rasmussen never had a particularly good reputation. It’s long been obvious that its polls tended to show significant right wing bias. However, even I hadn’t realized that Rasmussen had gone all in promoting COVID-19 and antivax disinformation." https://www.respectfulinsolence.com/2024/06/14/rasmussen-reports-goes-steve-kirsch-level-stupid-antivax/

That's what happens when too many Americans were wrongly convinced to skip COVID vaccinations that could have saved their lives: "Vaccines have proven to be spectacularly effective in preventing death from Covid-19, but throughout 2021 and 2022, the U.S. struggled to keep Americans up to date on vaccinations. Our Vaccine Preventable Deaths Dashboard shows that in that time when vaccines were widely available, every second Covid-19 death could have been prevented by vaccines. ... an analysis by our team at the Brown School of Public Health, in collaboration with Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and Microsoft AI for Health showing that between January 2021 and April 2022, vaccines could have prevented at least 318,000 Covid-19 deaths. This means that at least every second person who died from Covid-19 since vaccines became available might have been saved by getting the shot. [emphasis added] Brown University School of Public Health https://globalepidemics.org/vaccinations/ https://globalepidemics.org/2022/05/13/new-analysis-shows-vaccines-could-have-prevented-318000-deaths/