Stupid shit in Medellin

[JjBee62]

It's equivalent to over for some. It's based on a different thinking. It is possible if this continues for another 10 years. Many more will just move on to live normally.

Why a bar is packed with people without masks? I see plenty of them. I know some just decided they want to live normally and not live in fear. That is why you see some people change their tune in this thread, although they gave a different reason.

For me freedom is a collective right. In that, I mean I have no problem going into a packed bar right now or every night, but I won't go back to my family before I quarantine myself for 2 weeks. LOL. I will do the quarantine for my family in this case because they don't think like me.

For anyone traveling internationally, the pandemic isn't over, no matter what they think. If you're required to have a negative test to enter a country, telling the airline that your positive test doesn't matter because the pandemic is over for you, won't get you on the plane. Taking off your mask on the plane will still have you in legal trouble, if you refuse to put it back on.

Not just bars, but entire stadiums are packed with maskless people. I don't know any people who have been living in fear. Mostly they are people who recognize the risks and base their actions on whether or not the risk is worth it.

Freedom is a collective, or community right. If the exercise of your freedom has a negative impact on others, then you're not exercising freedom, you're imposing tyranny.

I am also willing to take risks for myself, but I try not to put others at risk.

[JjBee62]

Thank you for this. I found the video, and managed to watch almost ten minutes of it before I threw in the towel. Oh dear. Well, to those who got so upset about the video: as they told Cheese Wagstaff in the Wire after the dog fight: "I think you have been played". I'll see if I can find a bit of time later today to type up a brief summary.

I enjoyed your summary. Although you went into more detail, I've been over all of those points several times. It's an exercise in futility. Either people see the easily verified truth immediately, or they will defend the easily debunked lie until the day they die.

[JjBee62]

One thing about JBee. Agree with him or not at least he researches his comments using reputable sources and doesn't just get his BS off of some conspiracy theory website or podcast.

BTW I think I recognize you two guys. Didn't they make a movie about you, starring Jeff Daniels and Jim Carey?

Shhh. Don't tell them my secrets.

[JjBee62]

+1. And everybody sees it but him and his senile sidekick paulie.

Another excellent example of not knowing what you're talking about.

Paulie and I had a big public, knock down fight right here over 3 years ago. It might have been the reason this thread was started. We haven't really talked since then. We're not sidekicks, friends or buddies.

Here's something you might understand when you reach emotional maturity. I agree or disagree with what is posted. It doesn't matter who posted it. Bullshit (for example, declaring the pandemic is over) is bullshit, regardless of the source. Good advice is good advice regardless of the source.

As for the rest of what you agreed with, I suggest you go read the other threads. There have been a few people over the years who might have agreed with me at one time or another.

[RamDavidson84]

Everyone has "common sense" after the fact which is the classic Monday morning quarterbacking angle. But the very nature of science is to amend conclusions and policy as more information becomes available. Homemade cloth masks were useful, depending on weaves, layers, and thread counts. Not all are created equally, and they were only promoted for a time due to the shortage of N95 and surgical masks. The former are the best, the latter still rather effective depending on the grade.

Be careful when you start accusing someone like Elvira of common sense, as there's surely more to the story, while you are swallowing some barstool analysis full of omissions. See above. Wink.

P.S. The same kicked, cried, and screamed because he was denied access to a supermarket in Mexico for not having a mask. He has also posted YouTubes of 4th rate shock jocks who discouraged mask wearing, while he predicted that less than 80 k Americans would die of Covid. So if you are looking to suck up you need to keep looking.

With hundreds of thousands of cases of Omicron daily, should we still have to take a covid test to re-enter the country? Hmmmmm.

Vaccines were supposed to be 95% effective. More people die in 2021 than 2020 when there were no vaccines available. Why are Vaccines mandates and Boosters are still being discussed? Why is no one talking about the false effectiveness of the vaccines? Hmmmmmmmmm.

How does China, a nation of 1.3 billion people, not have more cases of Omicron? Hmmmmm.

The answers to these questions seem like common sense to me, but half the country will cry murder if I were to state my opinion publicly. Hmmmmmm. Freedom of speech? Hmmmmm. LOL let the name calling and slandering begin! Jaja.

[Elvis 2008]

Next came the ballyhoo about the evidence of harm.

Given what's at stake, of course lots of people looked at the 20 deaths in the vaccine group from every possible angle. The final FDA report concluded not a single death was due to the vaccine.

All the BS aside, at the end of the day, you are left to trust the FDA. Fauci said 70% and we get to herd immunity, and we are there now. Was there a decrease in deaths due to Covid in 2021? Nope, so vaccine rates went through the roof and Covid deaths went higher. Fauci said that you were 11 X more likely to die from Covid if you are unvaccinated. Well then how come deaths from Covid went up and not down with 70% of the population being vaccinated?

Did the study predict the increased death rate? Yes or no? And if it did then you have to look at how the FDA determined that these deaths were not related to the vaccine, but you did not touch on that at all. When the government was shut down, half the FDA was still open because that is what % of the FDA is supported by big pharma. The government shut off funds to the FDA and they were still going.

And do you know when FDA / Pfizer / Moderna wanted to release safety data on the vaccine? 75 years from now. A judge rejected that and told them 8 months:https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/j...-cuts-8-months.

That is not exactly confidence inspiring is it?

The #1 killer in America is heart disease, and it is known the vaccine harms the heart. So if someone dies of a heart attack after getting the vaccine, how do you say the heart attack was or was not related to the vaccine? I do not even know how you would do it. Do you?

What I could certainly say is this person had atherosclerosis and say "Eh, that had nothing to do with the vaccine. He was a goner anyway" and blow it off.

That is not science. Science is showing us the method you used for blowing it off and seeing if it is valid.

This is part of what informed consent is about. Do you think most people who get the vaccine are told "the death rate was higher with those who got vaccinated but the FDA said it was no big deal" or are led to believe the vaccine is a life saver?

I keep reading about how these vaccines saved millions of lives. My question is where are they?

You can argue about whether the vaccine does increase deaths or say it may increase deaths. My question to you is where does anyone get off mandating or advocating for a therapy that may increase death rates?

[Elvis 2008]

Common sense goes like a long way and you have it down. I plan on doing the same and will keep an N95 with me in case I get in a crowd but will avoid them. No Metro this visit and will miss going to Arvi on the cable. Yes, exposure time is critical and ignored. Remember when you couldn't touch anything or needed to have everything sanitized because the virus would live for days and your hands would pick it up? The masks were BS because only the n95 is any good or the Korean or European counterparts but low supply and had to go to hospitals etc. So they have everyone wearing worthless paper or cloth but that was great for cheap mask makers. Anyway, stay healthy with your common sense approach that works.

CL, what is frustrating to me is that it is the number of droplets that cause disease, and the government has just emphasized the mask when that is a small part of the whole picture. Yeah, N95 probably works better than cloth. I think both are helpful though. Thing is that it is just not masks but length of time with someone and talking to them and also the force of the particles expired so more with singing, laughing, coughing, or the force of someone's voice. The goal is to limit the exposure of those particles.

And handwashing was a complete joke. Social distancing was pretty arbitrary as well.

The NFL did some great Covid studies. It was thought that you had to be present with someone for 10 minutes indoors to catch Covid from them. The NFL found that if people were talking to each other and not wearing masks, there could be transmission of the virus in as little as 5 minutes.

But like I said, you can throw that all out the window now. You have teams that are 98% vaxxed and half the team has Covid. I do not know what the time frame is with catching Covid now. It seems like it may be down to a minute or two and now the people do not look sick. Outside of doing what Paulie does and living in a bunker, I do not know how someone does not catch omicron.

[Elvis 2008]

How does Elvira do it? Well he lies a lot which is very easy to do on the internet. But yea it's ironic those complaining about CNN and MSNBC while immersing their brains in Tucker and Hannity, textbook pot calling the kettle black. Such is barely a step up from Alex Jones.

Nice insult but you did not answer the question. What have you been doing the last 2 years since the pandemic began? All I hear from you is your criticizing anyone else while talking nothing about yourself. Mr. E has been travelling so has JJBee, JustTK, Nounce but you have been mum. I repeat, what have YOU been doing?

[Paulie97]

Common sense goes like a long way and you have it down. I plan on doing the same and will keep an N95 with me in case I get in a crowd but will avoid them. No Metro this visit and will miss going to Arvi on the cable. Yes, exposure time is critical and ignored. Remember when you couldn't touch anything or needed to have everything sanitized because the virus would live for days and your hands would pick it up? The masks were BS because only the n95 is any good or the Korean or European counterparts but low supply and had to go to hospitals etc. So they have everyone wearing worthless paper or cloth but that was great for cheap mask makers. Anyway, stay healthy with your common sense approach that works.

Everyone has "common sense" after the fact which is the classic Monday morning quarterbacking angle. But the very nature of science is to amend conclusions and policy as more information becomes available. Homemade cloth masks were useful, depending on weaves, layers, and thread counts. Not all are created equally, and they were only promoted for a time due to the shortage of N95 and surgical masks. The former are the best, the latter still rather effective depending on the grade.

Be careful when you start accusing someone like Elvira of common sense, as there's surely more to the story, while you are swallowing some barstool analysis full of omissions. See above. Wink.

P.S. The same kicked, cried, and screamed because he was denied access to a supermarket in Mexico for not having a mask. He has also posted YouTubes of 4th rate shock jocks who discouraged mask wearing, while he predicted that less than 80 k Americans would die of Covid. So if you are looking to suck up you need to keep looking.

[Mr Enternational]

You nor anyone else has a right to spread disease. Nor was any such notion ever envisioned in the Constitution, thus you are just chasing your tail in a hooker forum.

Forced quarantines of TB patients have been rightly upheld by the SCOTUS. Non compliant selfish morons are being removed from our armed forces, and that's a very good thing.

Are you stupid or are you just dumb? Forced quarantine of actual TB PATIENTS you compare to forced discaharge of people with nothing wrong with them, people with no disease to spread. But I guess we are going by they MIGHT get a disease to spread around. So if calculations are correct, now that the noncompliant selfish morons are gone we should see nobody in the military come up with the disease to spread around. If there was a Nobel prize for stupid you would be a repeat winner. But since there is not you will just have to keep settling for being a loser.

[ChuchoLoco]

I avoided sick people and when talking to someone with Covid kept the conversations short. With all the talk of social distancing, hand washing, and lockdowns, what was missed was how the virus is actually spread. It was prolonged exposure to someone with Covid with alpha. With delta, the exposure was even shorter.

As of today, though, you can throw that out the window because of how contagious omicron is. I do not think I have had omicron but even if I get it, it is no big deal. With omicron, I would rather have the disease than the vaccine.

Common sense goes like a long way and you have it down. I plan on doing the same and will keep an N95 with me in case I get in a crowd but will avoid them. No Metro this visit and will miss going to Arvi on the cable. Yes, exposure time is critical and ignored. Remember when you couldn't touch anything or needed to have everything sanitized because the virus would live for days and your hands would pick it up? The masks were BS because only the n95 is any good or the Korean or European counterparts but low supply and had to go to hospitals etc. So they have everyone wearing worthless paper or cloth but that was great for cheap mask makers. Anyway, stay healthy with your common sense approach that works.

[Ptrbrgr]

First a disclaimer: I am not typing this to whitewash what happens in the pharmaceutical industry. It would be childish to say all of pharma is evil, but lots of nasty stuff happens there for sure, greed is rampant, and they surely do not lose any money over this pandemic. Not waiving their intellectual property protections during this pandemic I think is unforgivable. Just to get this out of the way.

I think one could take almost any biomedical report and summarize it in two different ways that seem to say completely opposite things. One way to do this is by cherry picking, as was pointed out here already, but I found that omitting facts is even more effective to spin things. There are some really clever people out there who have perfected that art. Sometimes they don't even lie. They tell you 100% the truth, but it is incomplete, and by leaving out critical facts they know exactly how people will misunderstand things. An example before we get to the Canadian Covid Care Alliance (CCCA) video, so you understand what I mean.

At the beginning of the pandemic an elderly lady in the neighborhood didn't want to wear a mask, because she was afraid it would make her sick. Turned out someone put a flier in her mailbox. One of the 'facts' on the flyer said they took some used masks to the lab, and the flyer included a very long list of all sorts of nasty sounding bacteria and germs they said they found. Small wonder the old lady thought she would get sick. I have no reason to doubt that these guys did this experiment and found all these bugs. It is called the microbiome, but they didn't mention that in the flyer. Every human body contains more non-human than human cells, and the bacteria etc were in the masks because they are also in your lungs and you breathe them into the fabric. They were yours to begin with. They don't make you sick, they actually keep you healthy. But what does an old lady know about the microbiome? These guys with the flyer knew exactly what they were doing. And they didn't say anything that was incorrect. And if you put something like this out on social media, it invariably gets shared within minutes by lots of people lamenting the danger of masks. These people are very clever, but they rely on lots of gullible people who have no filter to amplify their stuff.

In comparison, the CCCA video was moderately clever at best. They make ample use of omissions, but the video also contains falsehoods and at least one blatant monster lie, which is that the trial deviated from the 'plan' as they put it. Every clinical trial has a protocol. This is the gospel. Every T is crossed, every I is dotted. For those with a masochistic bent, you can find the protocol for this trial in the supplementary material of the NEJM paper, all 376 pages thereof. Every protocol has a detailed plan for interim analyses, and has exactly defined rules for stopping early. This can happen for example if you find early on that the vaccine is highly effective, or if there are adverse outcomes and safety issues. This trial was stopped early, exactly following the protocol, because it hit all primary efficacy endpoints and safety checks. This was reported in all media outlets at the time. The CCCA knows this. When they say the trialists deviated from the protocol, they are blatantly lying to you. There is no other way of putting it. And when you stop early, the trial is over, you unblind, and offer the vaccine to all participants, also according to protocol. If you have a highly effective vaccine, it would be unethical to do otherwise.

Onwards to the RRR versus ARR mambo jambo (if numbers aren't your thing, you might want to skip this section). Dcrist0527 pointed out in his post there is indeed an important difference. A clinical trial is always comparative, treatment versus placebo arm. Therefore you always report the outcome as a relative measure such as efficacy. There is nothing special about COVID trials. It's always been that way, always will be that way. That was the 95% cited in the NEJM paper. Now if you are a policy maker, and you want to know for example something about the basic reproduction number R0, you want to know something about absolute risks and reduction of those through interventions. But this is pretty complicated stuff and hard to estimate, because things constantly change. So what is the point of the CCCA in the video? They first tell you how you need to misinterpret the 95%, because otherwise their punchline doesn't work. Then they walk you through the math how to calculate the RRR and ARR. 162/18325 is 0. 88%, 8/18198 is 0. 04%, RRR is 95%, ARR is the difference, 0. 84%. To the lay person watching the video it might appear that Pfizer deliberately reported only the RRR because it is larger and the ARR looks dismal. But that is not how it works. If you want to say something about the vaccine itself, you have to report the RRR, reasons see above. Consider what would have happened if the trial had ended after 4 months instead of 2 months. If things stayed the same, you would expect roughly twice as many infections in both arms (not exactly, but for arguments sake it's good enough). 324/18325 is 1. 76%, 16/18198 is 0. 09%, RRR is still 95%, ARR is the difference, 1. 68%. So the ARR goes up, despite the vaccine effectiveness staying the same. Even if nothing changes, you can ramp up the ARR just by running the trial longer. Does that make sense? What is the interpretation of that? The ARR surely has its uses, but when you want to say something about the vaccine itself it is not particularly useful, despite what the CCCA tries to imply. The FDA user's guide they show in the video that says communicating absolute risks is preferable to communicating relative risks? Guess what, it is not for clinical trials, it is for medical decision making. If someone gets a genetic test because she has a family history of breast cancer, and it turns out she has certain BRCA variants, it is of very little help if we tell her the lifetime risk to develop breast cancer is 10 times higher compared to someone like her not having the variants. If we can tell her we estimate her lifetime risk to be 75%, she can make a decision whether or not to get a mastectomy. Just google the title of the user's guide, you find the pdf of the compendium on the FDA website. Chapter 7 page 60 is what they show you in the video. None of this has anything to do with clinical trials. The opening line to the chapter is "For patients to make informed decisions about their health care, they must understand the risks and benefits of their treatment options, including the numeric likelihoods". The CCCA knows that too. They are just counting on people being too lazy to look it up.

Next came the ballyhoo about the evidence of harm. They first make a big production about a significant increase in illness, showing a much larger number of adverse events. Well duh. That table shows all such events including arm soreness and fever and the like. And of course you'll see more sore arms if you inject a vaccine instead of saline. Those who get excited about these videos: do you actually ever look at the original paper? It is not that the Pfizer report hides this in any way. The results first say something about the population, and then comes a lengthy section about safety, including adverse events. If you don't know what reactogenicity means, look it up on Wikipedia: "In clinical trials, the term reactogenicity refers to the property of a vaccine of being able to produce common, "expected" adverse reactions, especially excessive immunological responses and associated signs and symptoms, including fever and sore arm at the injection site. " And the NEJM paper specifically refers to Table S3 the CCCA shows in the video: "Adverse event analyses are provided for all enrolled 43,252 participants, with variable follow-up time after dose 1 (Table S3). More BNT162 b2 recipients than placebo recipients reported any adverse event (27% and 12%, respectively) or a related adverse event (21% and 5% This distribution largely reflects the inclusion of transient reactogenicity events, which were reported as adverse events more commonly by vaccine recipients than by placebo recipients. " There is nothing sinister about it, it is totally normal and expected. If you look at the real safety concerns in that table such as life-threatening events, you see there are actually more in the placebo than in the vaccine group. No marks for guesses why the CCCA didn't highlight those numbers.

Next came a claim about an increased risk of death. Well, death happens, and remember that this trial included all ages, including participants in their 90's. So it is not surprising that some deaths occur. The question is whether there is truly a higher rate of death in the vaccine group, as the CCCA claims. For those who took a statistics course, remember Fisher's exact test? If you plug in the numbers the CCCA shows you, you get a pvalue of 0. 39, and the odds ratios could reasonably be anywhere between 0. 33 and 1. 46. So from these numbers you can not conclude whether the rates are the same, or if they are different, in which group they are higher. But the CCCA could have said something about the FDA report from November 8, 2021. Given what's at stake, of course lots of people looked at the 20 deaths in the vaccine group from every possible angle. The final FDA report concluded not a single death was due to the vaccine. But saying so in the video would have gotten a bit in the way of scaring people.

This concluded the main part of their misinformation campaign, and they went on to beating some dead horses, such as the fast timeline of the vaccine development. That was discussed ad nauseam already. Throwing billions of dollars at it, blanket indemnification for the pharmaceutical companies, an all hands on deck approach with fast tracking at the FDA, all of that surely helps getting a vaccine out the door quickly. At that point in the video I tossed in the towel. One last comment on that slide. There is vegan BM who says he refuses the vaccine because it was tested on animals. I fully understand and respect that position. But that BM was also one of the first here to link the video. JustTK, I hope you have been well! Did you catch that? The CCCA says that one of the reasons for the fast timeline was that Pfizer skipped important safety steps, including animal testing. Great news for you my man, you can now get a vaccine! Except, well, you can't, because the CCCA was lying about this as too.

[Dcrist0527]

Which has nothing to do with the price of rice in China. Such laws offer protection against self harm, excepting examples of parental negligence. You nor anyone else has a right to spread disease. Nor was any such notion ever envisioned in the Constitution, thus you are just chasing your tail in a hooker forum.

Well, thank you, peanut gallery. But I wasn't the one that brought up seat belts. Perhaps pay attention to context before allowing your head to explode. And using your logic, why haven't I been jailed for the years I haven't got the flu vaccine? Like jjbee, your misuse of "rights" is pathetic. Has ANYONE claimed the right to spread a virus? But sure, maybe slogans are easier for you to digest.

Forced quarantines of TB patients have been rightly upheld by the SCOTUS. Non compliant selfish morons are being removed from our armed forces, and that's a very good thing.

You are an angry one, huh? LOL. Curious how you feel about the lies and misinformation that SCOTUS spewed this week. Funny how the "science" is malleable to support your political cause.

[Paulie97]

Do you take any precautionary measures or are you lucky or just have a strong immune system?

P.S.: Fox News is also available in the bunkers.

How does Elvira do it? Well he lies a lot which is very easy to do on the internet. But yea it's ironic those complaining about CNN and MSNBC while immersing their brains in Tucker and Hannity, textbook pot calling the kettle black. Such is barely a step up from Alex Jones.

[Huacho]

I wear my seat belt. Why? Not because it's the law but I make the personal choice to protect myself. If someone chooses not to and they end up going through a windshield, well, we just improved the gene pool.

Or, they survive as a paraplegic, and you, JB, taxpayers in general, and I have to support them in a vegetative state for years. I'm old enough to admit that I only started wearing my seat belt when my employer required it. It became a habit. Then it became a law.

So how others' behaviors affect the society in which they live does actually matter. A lot of the stuff I hear opposing vax mandates is the exact same crap from 40 years ago about seat belt laws. Now, I'm quite sure that seat belt usage is lower among the un vaxxed. I'd bet my own money on it if anyone can prove it. So it's the same kind of people saying it's personal choice to get thrown through the windshield who are saying it's personal choice to run around un vaxxed. And the non-seat belt wearers affect society inexorably in the long run via health care costs, but the anti vaxxers are affecting society more and faster because their inactions affect and infect everyone around them, all the time, all day long.