2 hours ago, h90 said:

prove that it saved lives is a pointless proof. You need to prove that it is a net benefit...which may vary massive between age groups

I guess your post makes sense if you think that saving lives has no value.

23 minutes ago, Danderman123 said:

In Real Life, vaccinated individuals died from Covid at much lower rates than the unvaccinated.

That may be true, but it still doesn't alter the fact that declaring "vaccines saved 14.4 million lives" is an absurd and unscientific claim.

 

Any number can only best guess from a computer model based on a set of assumptions and estimates. Change the assumptions and you change the number.

 

The Lancet guys did extremely detailed work, but the reality of computer modelling is that the error bars on any estimate are usually so wide as to make the answer meaningless - except for political purposes.

 

That was precisely the case of Imperial College's computer model of Covid deaths - wildly inaccurate, but politically useful. Hundreds more examples of this kind of thing can be found in the climate change literature.

I see the loony anti-vaxers here have evolved, much like a virus...

 

Before, they were busy denying that COVID was/is killing people. Now they're evolved to deny that the COVID vaccines saved many millions of lives... (As usual, with no credible sources or documented justification for their claims).

 

Despite overwhelming evidence this is true from numerous published studies involving both scientific projections and examinations of actual death rates between the vaccinated vs the unvaccinated.

 

Peter Hotez, the widely respected dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor University, calls it "The Deadly Rise of Anti-science."

 

"In this eyewitness story of how the anti-vaccine movement grew into a dangerous and prominent anti-science element in American politics, Hotez describes the devastating impacts it has had on Americans' health and lives."

...

"By weaving his personal experiences together with information on how the anti-vaccine movement became a tool of far-right political figures around the world, Hotez opens readers' eyes to the dangers of anti-science. He explains how anti-science became a major societal and lethal force: in the first years of the pandemic, more than 200,000 unvaccinated Americans needlessly died despite the widespread availability of COVID-19 vaccines."

 

https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/33293/deadly-rise-anti-science

 

Edited June 10, 20233 yr by TallGuyJohninBKK

On 6/7/2023 at 9:45 PM, anrcaccount said:

Most people aren't as smart as you Brian. 

 

Most people don't read any of the studies and papers.

 

Most people think a vaccine will stop them being infected with a virus. 

The problem with your thinking is that you confuse "not 100% effective" with "0% effective".

7 hours ago, TallGuyJohninBKK said:

I see the loony anti-vaxers here have evolved, much like a virus...

 

Before, they were busy denying that COVID was/is killing people. Now they're evolved to deny that the COVID vaccines saved many millions of lives... (As usual, with no credible sources or documented justification for their claims).

 

Despite overwhelming evidence this is true from numerous published studies involving both scientific projections and examinations of actual death rates between the vaccinated vs the unvaccinated.

 

Peter Hotez, the widely respected dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor University, calls it "The Deadly Rise of Anti-science."

 

"In this eyewitness story of how the anti-vaccine movement grew into a dangerous and prominent anti-science element in American politics, Hotez describes the devastating impacts it has had on Americans' health and lives."

...

"By weaving his personal experiences together with information on how the anti-vaccine movement became a tool of far-right political figures around the world, Hotez opens readers' eyes to the dangers of anti-science. He explains how anti-science became a major societal and lethal force: in the first years of the pandemic, more than 200,000 unvaccinated Americans needlessly died despite the widespread availability of COVID-19 vaccines."

 

https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/33293/deadly-rise-anti-science

 

Great post.

 

I think we have to accept that many people enjoy conspiracy theories and twisted logic - they really do - think flat earthers...

 

We can gently point out the truth but don't expect most of them to see it...

The latest WHO report on COVID worldwide shows continuing downward trends, amid the caveats about those numbers of much reduced COVID testing and reporting. But against those trends:

 

--"Australia's cases were up modestly, and with the onset of cooler weather in the Southern Hemisphere, the country is reporting rises of both COVID and flu. COVID-19 cases have doubled since March, and most people haven't had a COVID booster in more than 6 months, Australia's SBS News reported."

 

--"In China, the government is no longer releasing weekly data, but health officials have said the country is in the midst of an XBB wave, which isn't expected to reach the level of the country's late-winter surge, the South China Morning Post reported today."

 

--"Elsewhere in the Western Pacific, the WHO said 13 of 35 reporting countries have noted increases over the past 4 weeks, with the highest proportional increases coming from Mongolia, Cambodia, and Laos."

 

https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/covid-cases-trend-down-all-world-regions

 

And by comparison, based on the latest report from the Thai Ministry of Public Health, current new COVID hospitalizations and deaths in Thailand are at their highest levels of 2023, with new hospitalizations having increased for nine of the past 10 weeks.

 

https://aseannow.com/topic/1296929-covid-new-hospitalizations-and-deaths-rise-again-to-new-weekly-highs-for-2023-serious-condition-hospitalizations-and-intubations-decline/

 

 

16 minutes ago, TravelerEastWest said:

We can gently point out the truth but don't expect most of them to see it...

How true that is.

 

There are still people who believe everything that governments, health bureaucrats and Big Pharma tell them, despite evidence to the contrary from a solid 3 years of hypocrisy, stupidity, false statements, and drooling nonsense emanating from governments and their tame health bureaucrats.

 

Even throwing a dart at a board would have been a better way to decide policy than the policy that was generally enacted.

 

As the 19th century UK prime minister William Lamb wisely observed: "What all the wise men promised, has not happened, and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass."

27 minutes ago, TallGuyJohninBKK said:

The latest WHO report on COVID worldwide shows continuing downward trends

Yes. It does and very significant downward trends. Very good news. 

 

You now seem to need to dig very deep, to find the nuggets of bad news to justify your advocacy of covid hyper vigilance right?

 

From the latest WHO update ( bolding mine)

 

"Globally, over 1.7 million new cases and over 10 000 deaths were reported in the last 28 days (8 May to 4 June 2023), a decrease of 38% and 47%, respectively, compared to the previous 28 days (10 April to 7 May 2023).

 

During this 28-day reporting period, 144 of 243 (59%) countries and territories reported at least one case.

 

The situation at the regional level shows decreases in cases and deaths in all six WHO regions.

 

https://www.who.int/publications/m/item/weekly-epidemiological-update-on-covid-19---8-june-2023

 

 

Also your sourced comments on Australia are out of date, the latest week shows a 18% decline in reported cases.

 

Source per covidlive.com.au

 

 

 

2 hours ago, Eleftheros said:

How true that is.

 

There are still people who believe everything that governments, health bureaucrats and Big Pharma tell them, despite evidence to the contrary from a solid 3 years of hypocrisy, stupidity, false statements, and drooling nonsense emanating from governments and their tame health bureaucrats.

 

Even throwing a dart at a board would have been a better way to decide policy than the policy that was generally enacted.

 

As the 19th century UK prime minister William Lamb wisely observed: "What all the wise men promised, has not happened, and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass."

Governments have lots of politicians working in them - and they often lie. I think most people know this. Bureaucrats often move slowly and make mistakes and occasionally lie again most people know this. Drug companies sometimes lie and get caught and pay fines but overall they help us again most people know this.

 

I was in Thailand during COVID so i don't know much about what the situation was in America but like Monday night quarter backing things can always be done better in retrospect. 

 

As for the overall picture that your words paint - no I don't agree and I don't know many people who would agree with you.

 

But actually I have only read a few of your recent posts so I don't know if you are anti vax did you take a vaccine? I took Moderna and Pfizer no side effects and no COVID yet those around me got COVID and some got very sick. Note I am in a high risk group so I would not consider not taking the vaccine...

 

Overall millions of lives were saved by the vaccines - exactly how many no-one knows for sure but millions roughly... again exactly how many millions is difficult to say and not important - many lives were saved.

 

11 hours ago, Danderman123 said:

The problem with your thinking is that you confuse "not 100% effective" with "0% effective".

Too many seem to think along binary lines.....but only along the lines that suit their agenda, 

10 hours ago, Eleftheros said:

How true that is.

 

There are still people who believe everything that governments, health bureaucrats and Big Pharma tell them, despite evidence to the contrary from a solid 3 years of hypocrisy, stupidity, false statements, and drooling nonsense emanating from governments and their tame health bureaucrats.

 

Even throwing a dart at a board would have been a better way to decide policy than the policy that was generally enacted.

 

As the 19th century UK prime minister William Lamb wisely observed: "What all the wise men promised, has not happened, and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass."

Nothing typifies drooling nonsense more than rapid antivax Covid Deniers.

 

You know, the people that advocated horse dewormer as a cure. Or claimed that a million Americans died with Covid, not from Covid.

 

Concerning the last sentence, when confronted with data showing more than a million excess deaths during the pandemic, the Deniers weakly respond that "nobody died from the flu during Covid".

9 hours ago, anrcaccount said:

Yes. It does and very significant downward trends. Very good news. 

 

You now seem to need to dig very deep, to find the nuggets of bad news to justify your advocacy of covid hyper vigilance right?

 

From the latest WHO update ( bolding mine)

 

"Globally, over 1.7 million new cases and over 10 000 deaths were reported in the last 28 days (8 May to 4 June 2023), a decrease of 38% and 47%, respectively, compared to the previous 28 days (10 April to 7 May 2023).

 

During this 28-day reporting period, 144 of 243 (59%) countries and territories reported at least one case.

 

The situation at the regional level shows decreases in cases and deaths in all six WHO regions.

 

https://www.who.int/publications/m/item/weekly-epidemiological-update-on-covid-19---8-june-2023

 

 

Also your sourced comments on Australia are out of date, the latest week shows a 18% decline in reported cases.

 

Source per covidlive.com.au

 

 

 

 

Oops.

36 minutes ago, Danderman123 said:

Nothing typifies drooling nonsense more than rapid antivax Covid Deniers.

 

You know, the people that advocated horse dewormer as a cure. Or claimed that a million Americans died with Covid, not from Covid.

 

Concerning the last sentence, when confronted with data showing more than a million excess deaths during the pandemic, the Deniers weakly respond that "nobody died from the flu during Covid".

Hysterical playground name-calling is always a bad substitute for reasoned argument.

8 minutes ago, Eleftheros said:

Hysterical playground name-calling is always a bad substitute for reasoned argument.

seems ok to label and degrade members with no repercussions on this thread. strange that. 

Covid is forever. 

 

Now let's live the lives we have left, ok?

1 hour ago, jacko45k said:

Too many seem to think along binary lines.....but only along the lines that suit their agenda, 

Yes you have the group: We'll all die from Covid unless we get the vaccine. Ignoring that it was harmless for millions of unvaccinated.

And: The vaccine is deadly and Covid is complete harmless: ignoring that many people did die from Covid and I recall the majority of the vaccinated will die in autumn 2021...didn't happen.

no one reflects on the reality. Neither Covid nor the vaccine is killing everyone. Noone should follow prophets who were complete wrong in the past...(both on the we'll all die from Covid, nor on the vaccine is 90+% effective, nor these we'll all get blood cloths from the vaccine, etc...).
Things aren't binary as you say.....thanks for the word of reason

35 minutes ago, h90 said:

Yes you have the group: We'll all die from Covid unless we get the vaccine. Ignoring that it was harmless for millions of unvaccinated.

And: The vaccine is deadly and Covid is complete harmless: ignoring that many people did die from Covid and I recall the majority of the vaccinated will die in autumn 2021...didn't happen.

no one reflects on the reality. Neither Covid nor the vaccine is killing everyone. Noone should follow prophets who were complete wrong in the past...(both on the we'll all die from Covid, nor on the vaccine is 90+% effective, nor these we'll all get blood cloths from the vaccine, etc...).
Things aren't binary as you say.....thanks for the word of reason

how dare ye try to speak from a center logical position.

On 6/10/2023 at 6:50 AM, Eleftheros said:

Good find. It exactly proves my point that any estimate of "lives saved" is an entirely speculative exercise in mathematical modelling.

 

If you want to "prove" that the vaccines saved lives, you first have to assume that the vaccines saved lives, as the article explicitly states.

 

"Vaccination was assumed to confer protection against SARS-CoV-2 infection and the development of severe disease requiring hospital admission."

 

Of course, once you have simply assumed that the vaccine works, then it is not too difficult to "prove" that it saved a lot of lives. The exact number you come up with depends on how you tweak the parameters in your computer model.

 

It's a mathematically pointless exercise, but I suppose it serves a purpose. It probably provides some cover to governments and Big Pharma by "proving" how well they handled this outbreak.

 

Anything asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

-- Hitchens' Razor

 

You provide no evidence for your claim that the scientific modeling in the Lancet paper is nonsense.  You also twist the scientific meaning of 'assume' to conspiratorially suggest vaccines don't work.

 

But you know math, modeling, and error bars so you also know it's straight forward to prove your point, within reasonable limits (via simple calculation),

 

Perhaps you should make the effort to back your claims, or retract them? 

 

I didn't say the scientific modelling was nonsense.  I went out of my way to commend the authors for making such a detailed study. As I recall, I said something like "The Lancet guys did extremely detailed work." I'll go further than that; I think they probably did the best possible work that they could in impossible circumstances.

 

We don't even have a consensus on what constitutes a "Covid death" around the world. The UK used the metric "anyone who died within 28 days of a positive Covid-19 test"; other countries were more rational.

 

We don't have a consensus on what constitutes "being vaccinated". Is it one dose? Two? Three? How long after vaccination is someone still regarded as "unvaccinated"?

 

The authors of the study were forced to "assume" (their word, not mine) 14 separate factors which would affect their calculations. Again, I'm sure they did their best, but it's an impossible task. There is simply no way to come up with a definitive number in such chaotic circumstances.

 

Which is why I said before, and say again, that declaring "vaccines saved 14.4 million lives" is an absurd and unscientific claim.

https://www.commonwealthfund.org/blog/2022/two-years-covid-vaccines-prevented-millions-deaths-hospitalizations

 

Millions of lives were saved smart people have made estimates but it is difficult to have an exact number and an exact number is not needed.

 

Lets take a very small number of at least 10 million lives saved worldwide - done nothing else to talk about...

We have a guest who is showing signs of covid today they have been traveling around Thailand now in Phuket, My wife sent them to the pharmacy, 

17 hours ago, Eleftheros said:

 

 

We don't even have a consensus on what constitutes a "Covid death" around the world. The UK used the metric "anyone who died within 28 days of a positive Covid-19 test"; other countries were more rational

To be accurate: the definition of a Covid death mentioned above was used for the daily reports. But official death numbers were based on standard coroner reports, which were produced using lab reports and autopsies.

 

Ofiicial mortality numbers from Covid usually exceeded the daily numbers due to large numbers who died from Covid outside of hospitals.

New weekly update today from the Thai Ministry of Public Health:

 

 

 

This particular Covid wave will disappear like the rest.

 

The strategy is to limit infections, which then serves to reduce the chances of a nastier strain evolving. Every infected person serves as a biolab for Covid to evolve, so the fewer infected, the slower the virus evolves.

 

Covid Deniers and antivaxxers serve to promote infection, and thus assist the virus to evolve into possibly deadlier forms. They won't understand until its too late, and even then never comprehend the consequences of their actions. Just like Covid Deniers on their death beds claiming "its just the Flu".

Edited June 12, 20233 yr by Danderman123

41 minutes ago, Danderman123 said:

This particular Covid wave will disappear like the rest.

 

The strategy is to limit infections, which then serves to reduce the chances of a nastier strain evolving. Every infected person serves as a biolab for Covid to evolve, so the fewer infected, the slower the virus evolves.

 

Covid Deniers and antivaxxers serve to promote infection, and thus assist the virus to evolve into possibly deadlier forms. They won't understand until its too late, and even then never comprehend the consequences of their actions. Just like Covid Deniers on their death beds claiming "its just the Flu".

Thank you, good post, I didn't understand till just now that aspect of bad strains developing...

Off topic troll post removed

4 hours ago, Danderman123 said:

This particular Covid wave will disappear like the rest.

 

The strategy is to limit infections, which then serves to reduce the chances of a nastier strain evolving. Every infected person serves as a biolab for Covid to evolve, so the fewer infected, the slower the virus evolves.

 

Covid Deniers and antivaxxers serve to promote infection, and thus assist the virus to evolve into possibly deadlier forms. They won't understand until its too late, and even then never comprehend the consequences of their actions. Just like Covid Deniers on their death beds claiming "its just the Flu".

2021-2022 rhetoric. This is 2023.

 

Neither me nor any of my unvaccinated acquaintances have caught Covid. Every single vaccinated person I know has caught it at least once. 

 

Let that sink in.

On 6/10/2023 at 7:44 AM, TallGuyJohninBKK said:

I see the loony anti-vaxers here have evolved, much like a virus...

 

Before, they were busy denying that COVID was/is killing people. Now they're evolved to deny that the COVID vaccines saved many millions of lives... (As usual, with no credible sources or documented justification for their claims).

 

Despite overwhelming evidence this is true from numerous published studies involving both scientific projections and examinations of actual death rates between the vaccinated vs the unvaccinated.

 

Peter Hotez, the widely respected dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor University, calls it "The Deadly Rise of Anti-science."

 

"In this eyewitness story of how the anti-vaccine movement grew into a dangerous and prominent anti-science element in American politics, Hotez describes the devastating impacts it has had on Americans' health and lives."

...

"By weaving his personal experiences together with information on how the anti-vaccine movement became a tool of far-right political figures around the world, Hotez opens readers' eyes to the dangers of anti-science. He explains how anti-science became a major societal and lethal force: in the first years of the pandemic, more than 200,000 unvaccinated Americans needlessly died despite the widespread availability of COVID-19 vaccines."

 

https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/33293/deadly-rise-anti-science

 

"Before, they were busy denying that COVID was/is killing people. Now they're evolved to deny that the COVID vaccines saved many millions of lives... "

Both are not mutually exclusive. In fact they go pretty well together.

17 minutes ago, rattlesnake said:

2021-2022 rhetoric. This is 2023.

 

Neither me nor any of my unvaccinated acquaintances have caught Covid. Every single vaccinated person I know has caught it at least once. 

 

Let that sink in.

To start you might have had COVID without symptoms...

 

Are you and your non vac acquaintances healthy or in a high risk group?

 

Are your vaccinated friends going out more? Less healthy?

 

Endless questions could be asked to make sense of your experience...

 

Big question - are you saying it is a myth that unvaccinated people make up a very large percentage of those who get COVID and die or are seriously ill?

22 minutes ago, TravelerEastWest said:

To start you might have had COVID without symptoms...

 

Are you and your non vac acquaintances healthy or in a high risk group?

 

Are your vaccinated friends going out more? Less healthy?

 

Endless questions could be asked to make sense of your experience...

 

Big question - are you saying it is a myth that unvaccinated people make up a very large percentage of those who get COVID and die or are seriously ill?

Healthy, yes. Living normally.

 

Regarding the "big question": yes I am. Typically, official stats will dubiously state that hospitalized and dying people are "either unvaccinated or not completely vaccinated", which means of course the majority of them are jabbed, only not boosted enough to be considered "completely vaccinated". Also no indication of age or health condition. If you have stats showing me that the people seriously ill or dying are healthy unvaccinated people, please post them here.