What's crazy here is that FDA finally has a great head who actually tries to speed things up using Bayesian data modeling and understands drugs quite well (Marty
Makary) and does everything to make drug approval process cheaper and more efficient without compromising safety.
Unfortunately it seems like this decision was overwritten by his boss for political a win.
If we are using a good definition of "research", I agree.
But we aren't. Research within these contexts is consulting a Google search, a social media search, watching short form videos and consulting a sycophantic LLM.
I think the idea is it's better to rely on Phase 3 clinical trials like those done by Moderna in preference to say someone untrained searching X posts in a manner probably not unlike RFK.
It's ok to do the X post thing on a personal level but not really as someone in charge of the health of millions of others.
He can do more real research than ever as the head of the FDA, but ignores the results and fires the researchers. A real DEI hire - Destruction, Ego, Incompetence.
For individuals arguing on the internet, "Do your own research" has long meant cherry pick others' research to support your own worldview, regardless (or in spite) of its scientific flaws.
Doublespeak has a way of becoming exactly the opposite of what it says on the tin, regardless of its origins. It's literally in the name.
The people 'in the know' know what "Department of Peace" means, and the masses use it to laugh at anyone who dares to think they invent wars. That's the point.
Not OP but I would have hoped that it is self-evidently good if not great for a population to be capable and motivated to research things for themselves without solely relying on authorities and institutions.
Especially when so many of those entities are wildly rotten and corrupt; but even if they weren't.
Capable -- yes. Having to actually do it -- no. I would prefer to live in a world where I can depend on my fellow humans instead of living out a fantasy of self-sufficiency.
The "all the entities are wildly rotten and corrupt" meme is hyperstitious. I wish people would think before spreading it.
> The "all the entities are wildly rotten and corrupt" meme is hyperstitious. I wish people would think before spreading it.
Out of the 27 authors of Daszak's Lancet paper, used worldwide to claim that Coronavirus couldn't have come from a lab, how many had a conflict of interest?
How many news outlets repeated their claims verbatim, rather than reading it themselves to find the obvious 'errors'?
And how many academic institutions pointed out its flaws?
...
Too old an example? Ok - how many institutions sat on the Epstein files, lied about them, kept them sealed, etc, for decades? How many political leaders and business owners worldwide had direct links themselves?
How many media companies are giving adequate attention to climate change, and refusing to run ads from fossil fuel companies?
How many institutions/countries dared to tell Biden that arming genocide and vetoing ceasefires isn't actually okay? How many countries have sanctioned the perpetrators?
Read anything about EPA corruption lately? How about what ICE have been doing? Anyone in DOGE face any accountability for permanently compromising key government databases yet?
Because again, if you're relying on media and institutions to get your news on these things you might think everything is fine. It really, really isn't though. You gotta do your own research, I'm afraid.
... And no, none of that was because people believed the "all the entities are wildly rotten and corrupt" "meme". It wasn't ever that they just didn't trust the system enough.
So again, how do you propose one actually does this? Via crowdsourcing on FB? AI-generated news gathering? Consulting with a medium? Like what is your actual, concrete solution for how to obtain and distribute events and occurrences?
Journalism may be as imperfect as the humans who do it, but it's at least a concrete, operating means of informing the general public, with an ideally healthy array of outlets having overlapping coverage of the same events. Within this framework, "do your own research" would be called "reading broadly".
> ... And no, none of that was because people believed the "all the entities are wildly rotten and corrupt" "meme". It wasn't ever that they just didn't trust the system enough.
I have been around long enough to know that the meme does fit for some non-negligible section of the population. It's not to say that the system hasn't given a lot of people good reason for doubt, but a lot of people were already primed to throw the baby out with the bathwater and declare everything a conspiracy.
> what is your actual, concrete solution for how to obtain and distribute events and occurrences?
There are lots of valid ways to research things for oneself.
None of them involve making fun of people for doing it.
> Journalism may be as imperfect as the humans who do it, but it's at least a concrete, operating means of informing the general public,
Sure. Reading journalism can be part of doing one's own research.
> a lot of people were already primed to throw the baby out with the bathwater and declare everything a conspiracy.
Who primed them?
Here's a 'fun' and illustrative story that recently unfolded: Did you know that the 4chan forum where the Pizzagate conspiracy - which used the same code words as Epstein's circle - opened the exact same day that Epstein met with its founder?
That meant that when whistleblowers talked about real things that happened, or real emails leaked, some people were 'primed' to dismiss them because obviously Pizzagate was a hoax.
Some journalists did report well on that scenario; people like Whitney Webb or Sarah Kendzior. They didn't get invited to mainstream media to talk about it though.
... There are a lot of people who believe one of the dumbest conspiracies possible - that scientists are in cahoots over a global warming hoax. Why do they believe that? Could it be that the fossil fuel companies who knew climate change was real in the 70s helped to foster that? Could it be that the media who profits massively from running fossil fuel ads have been complicit?
It's not okay to have like 6 billionaires running all your media. It's not okay to have <80 familes owning half the worlds wealth. You end up with all these terrible cognitive side effects in your population from the propaganda they use. Blaming all that on people doing their own research is essentially blaming the victim, at the worst possible time.
> None of them involve making fun of people for doing it.
I'm expressing frustration at the lack of a proper answer, which you still seem to not be able to provide.
> Who primed them?
Conspiracy theory influencers, cult leaders, unscrupulous politicians, other people with existing mental illnesses, corporations with a lobbying agenda - the list is as long as there are people with a motive to influence the populace to their own gains.
> Here's a 'fun' and illustrative story
You're providing a single example (without any references, btw) as a means of exonerating your entire argument. But sure, pizzagate is suddenly looking a lot less dismissible out-of-hand now, given we've come to learn the sheer extent of Epstein's web.
I agree that much of the disinformation re global warming is at least funded by corporations and individuals with a profit motive; I agree that the concentrated ownership of the media and wealth are highly problematic.
But pumping the "do your own research" schtick and ignoring that it is a term highly co-opted by conspiracy theorists (as well as others with an agenda to misinform) is hardly helping.
So again, I ask: what is your concrete alternative to Fourth Estate?
> So again, I ask: what is your concrete alternative to Fourth Estate?
Sorry, you think the choice is between people doing their own research or having a 4th estate?
How odd. I don't know if I've ever met anyone with such a binary.
To be as clear as I possibly can, though I did already answer this: doing your own research and having actual journalism exist are not mutually exclusive things. They go very well together.
However, as the quality of media falls, the necessity to do your own research to get an accurate worldview increases.
Republicians. By declaring all parts of the government are full of fraud and incompetence. By "doing there own research" aka not really and just lying and misrepresenting things they didn't really research and didn't really understand. I mean it would be 1 thing if they actually found fraud and incompetence but republican appointed bodies like Doge were to incompetent to find any appreciable fraud that IGs were not already proscuting.
Its been this way for a long time ever hear of the Golden Fleece Awards, these were given to 'useless' basic research projects the government funded. I think the key take away being that do your own research gets equated to the government cannot do research and we won't trust any government research that doesn't comport with our worldviews. The irony being several of the reciepts of Golden Fleece Awards actually turned out to be very usefully and highly impactful economically speaking.
> that scientists are in cahoots over a global warming hoax.
I kind of reject this claim because the suppression of research especially at places like EXXON, or the teflon people did not come from the scientists generally speaking, but rather from the business interests above them who did not want that research to be shared and owned it. Public Scientist later exposed it and the irony here is that the very thing you are saying won't get exposed got exposed but the system your condeming. Main stream media is not the Fact finding body when it comes to research, it is the propogation business. The do your own research crowds I have experienced ignore the Science Fact Finding Groups regardless of the results because they are no doing research they are vibing their beliefs.
> It's not okay to have like 6 billionaires running all your media.
I agree 100% here but doing your own research doesn't change this incentive, this exists because we don't have resonable taxes and monopoly laws. I'd argue (in agreement with the other guy) that do your own research on everything becomes a distraction to actually getting the above things passed to handle this problem. How do enforce the monopoly laws when you haven't done your own personal Market wide analysis the conditions of beef after all we cannot trust others to do that. And I think this is the sentiment of the other poster in the thread group is trying to give and i tend to agree with it.
The government likely cannot make 10 decisions better than you personally can, but the government makes billions of decisions everyday probably more than you'll make in your entire life. The scale is the problem government solves and not trusting anyone doesn't necessiarly produce higher quality results boardly
> the very thing you are saying won't get exposed got exposed but the system your condeming.
Hate (well, love) to break it to you but the Exxon thing was exposed by... One person, doing research.
Neela Banerjee. And she didn't work for one of the media giants.
After she brought the hard proof which had lain dormant for 40 something years, yeah the mainstream media eventually put it out there. They didn't have much choice at that point, did they.
The scientists didn't expose it. The business people didn't expose it. The mainsteram media didn't expose it. They all got paid, all while the Earth got hotter, and hotter, and hotter; more and more reliant on fossil fuel.
> I'd argue (in agreement with the other guy) that do your own research on everything becomes a distraction to actually getting the above things passed to handle this problem. How do enforce the monopoly laws when you haven't done your own personal Market wide analysis the conditions of beef after all we cannot trust others to do that.
Mainstream media isn't ever going to tell you how to end the media monopoly. The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.
> not trusting anyone doesn't necessiarly produce higher quality results boardly
I didn't say not to trust anyone. I said that believing everything from rather obviously compromised and corrupt institutions isn't a rational way to get to grips with reality. That's as true of fossil fuel science as it was our pandemic response.
It would be great if the general public were willing and capable of reading the scientific papers which represent the research in question. However, in practice, virtually everyone who says "do your own research" is referring to skimming over a collection of Facebook posts, X posts, and podcasts.
This absolutely deserves criticism and even derision.
> However, in practice, virtually everyone who says "do your own research" is referring to skimming over a collection of Facebook posts, X posts, and podcasts.
Kinda hard to blame them for that when they were being lied to so obviously by official sources, about so many things; and when social and traditional media were censoring 'alternative' perspectives (many which later proved entirely correct) on a scale of hundreds of millions of posts.
No, we didn't all have the biology savvy to read and understand Daszak's paper ... But lots of people did have that knowledge - and either didn't speak up, or were censored into oblivion, or had literal actual death threats levelled at them.
Lots of institutions which had a duty to speak up didn't; not just about that, not just about the lableak theory, not just about the funding of GOF research [0], not just about how the virus behaved (animal reservoirs, natural immunity etc), and not just about the ways the vaccines were lied about.
Many of the institutions which did speak up, again, were censored into oblivion [1]; rendered irrelevant by the 'requests' of a Biden admin which was simultaneously threatening every major social media company with monopoly investigations. That's documented fact now, but it was blindingly obvious at the time too.
In context, any research was better than believing whatever you were told to believe; no matter how it changed from one week to the next. And I respect the people who tried, even if they didn't do it very well, better than the people who kept their mouths shut and did what they were told without any independent thought. And I even respect those people more than those who actively derided anyone who questioned authority even the slightest bit.
Yes, but what sources do they use for their research? Is it expected that everyone should get a PhD, a lab and do their own mRNA vaccine trials? That hardly seems feasible, no?
Still doesn't explain the "long term point of view" part, btw.
How am I supposed to research things myself? Let's say I want to research effectiveness and safety of a flu vaccine by myself.
I don't have resources to set up my own lab. I don't even know if the manufacturer will sell a dozen or so vaccines directly to me. So can't even do a basic stoichiometry on my own. And forget about me setting up a trial with actual people - I have no idea where I could begin to make it possible.
If by research you mean reading already published papers, that's literature review and I wouldn't call that a research. But because doing my own experiments and trials is out of question, I'm willing to settle for that.
Reviewing published papers comes with its own set of problems. A lot of papers are behind paywall and I don't have money for the ongoing journal subscriptions. I suppose I can rely only on open journals and pre-prints but that's not all of them. Messaging the authors directly is also an option but it's doesn't scale well and takes time.
Suppose I get my hands on a couple of relevant papers. How can I be sure what's written there is actually correct? It would be nice if I could double check against the raw data, but often that's not available. And at best all I can verify is that the paper's content matches the source data. I can't verify the data itself. At some point I have to trust the authors. Not to mention I don't have access to the data from research that wasn't published, for example because the experiments didn't show anything novel.
But that's fine. Nothing is perfect and after hours (if not days) of reading and playing with data I came to a conclusion that I'm happy with. Of course I have to review it again in a few years. The new research will be published by then. Maybe they will discover something different and I have to review that too.
Overall, I spent a lot of time and it was exhausting. Diligently reading and cross-referencing all that data is mentally taxing. I can't complain though because I've learned something.
There's one problem though. All of that effort was about just a single vaccine. But there's more of them. For other diseases too. And there are other problems I'd love to research. Windmills. Microplastics. Glyphosate. Dozens of types of food. Economic theories. How can I research all of that in a timely fashion?
I'm genuinely asking because I want to. I realize there will be trade-offs involved, but all of them are either relying on someone else (which we try to avoid) or won't be deep enough to form an informed opinion. And I'm not happy with either.
> Let's say I want to research effectiveness and safety of a flu vaccine by myself.
Sure. Let's say the manufacturer and the government claim that the vaccine is 100% effective, all of the time, with no side effects.
But you happen to notice that lots of women are complaining online about, say, missing their periods for months at a time after taking it. And getting the flu anyway.
Congratulations. You have done your own research, made your own observations, and thought for yourself.
That's the kind of thing many people were talking about. What else could they be talking about, since as you point out, they didn't have any access to raw data.
If you want to get hardcore into citizen science, that's really cool. You will have to pick a direction though; we can't do everything unfortunately. And funding is hard.
> A lot of papers are behind paywall and I don't have money for the ongoing journal subscriptions.
There are ways around this these days, but yeah the paywalling and siloing of knowledge is really holding back our potential as a species.
Did you know that it connects back to Ghislaine Maxwell's dad? Yeah, he was the guy most responsible for expanding the paywall model of academic research and maximising the profit from it. He could make or break scientific careers, keep certain discoveries to himself, hold leverage on academic institutions and professors...
Reading is worthless if you don't vet your sources. Encyclopedia Britannica and Uncle Johnny's Chemtrail Digest are not equally valid sources of truth.
And there's the actual hard part: institutional trustworthiness is in the shitter. Everyone will have their sources that they trust, and if were honest, none of us can really vet any of them.
A lot of these disputes can be simplified to "I don't trust your sources".
That's true; but I also think a lot of these disputes originate with "your research invalidates my axiomatic beliefs, so I will find whatever 'evidence' needed to counter them." Especially disputes percolating down from the political strata.
He is, and he's publicly admitted to both mercury poisoning (which leads to cognitive impairments and potentially insanity) and having part of his brain eaten by a worm[1].
Future me would have a really high quality EV with an amazing charging network, clean air and water, a habitable planet for my grand children, no domestic political extrajudicial paramilitary surveilling everyone with megawarehouse detention cities everywhere, outright ideological warfare against urban areas, etc.
We had a choice between Star Trek future world and Blade Runner+MadMax+Idiocracy, and we predictably chose the one we deserve because memes and a podcast.
Biontech, the one that had the first mrna vaccine, has a bunch of phase 3 trials this year, and they're all about curing cancer - it's literally how they're using all of the covid vaccine revenue, as funding for that endeavor.[1]
I can't find a specific source right now, but I remember reading that RFK's war on mRNA vaccines only applies the ones used for flu/Covid. They haven't gone after cancer vaccines.
> In a release Tuesday, Moderna said the FDA did not identify any safety or efficacy concerns with the vaccine. Instead, it said the FDA took issue with the “comparator” in its clinical trial — the vaccine the company used as a benchmark to evaluate its own shot.
> The FDA said the use of the standard flu shot as a comparator “does not reflect the best-available standard of care.”
Are they implying that a placebo should be the comparator?
"Except for vaccination for adults aged ≥65 years, ACIP makes no preferential recommendation for a specific vaccine when more than one licensed and recommended vaccine is available. Among adults aged ≥65 years any one of the following higher dose or adjuvanted influenza vaccines is preferentially recommended: HD-IIV3, RIV3, or aIIV3. If none of these three vaccines is available at an opportunity for vaccine administration, any other available age-appropriate influenza vaccine should be used (4,5)"
Trial designs are rarely perfect, and drug companies will try to stack the deck.
That being said, trial designs aren't made in isolation without consultation. Moderna's press release about this (https://feeds.issuerdirect.com/news-release.html?newsid=7346...) indicates that 2024 CDC said that performing an efficacy trial without using the higher dose would likely cause complications for recommending the mRNA vaccine for the >65 age group, but would not impact overall approval.
There’s a flu shot for old people. It appears Moderna chose not to administer that when appropriate. Maybe technically they aren’t required to. The whole thing sounds messy but who knows.
That's true some years, but not all. Usually, the difference is over 55 (or whatever) you get a quadrivalent vaccine instead of trivalent. That is, vaccine for the usual strains, plus a 4th. It's not totally different.
"Influenza vaccination is associated with significantly lower odds of myocardial infarction (MI), according to a large meta-analysis published late last week in BMC Public Health."
It’s a good thing the specific criticism of this trial is that they didn’t use the most effective vaccine for 65+ people, since you’re concerned about having the most effective vaccines.
To be fair, a lot of doctors were sounding the alarm in 2021 that forcing the Covid shot was going to cause blow back. They said word for word, that we might see the rise of measles and other similar diseases. It's actually very well documented on zdoggmd youtube channel (podcast) during this time. But there were tons of doctors saying the same thing.
Because the docs knew that far too many people would rather face risk to avoid doing what they’re told to do. And far too many people just don’t give a shit about other people. The npc’s aren’t real or pertinent.
The best way to keep immunocompromised and people who literally can’t take vaccines safe is by having so much herd immunity that the likelihood they a virulent load of a virus cannot get to those people.
A great way to get herd immunity is through mass vaccination.
Except herd immunity for COVID isn’t feasible or even possible. It mutates too much, the vaccines don’t confer effective enough immunity, etc.
It’s unfortunate, but it’s the reality of this disease. I’m not immunocompromised, but I still modify my behavior to try and protect myself: mask on planes, avoid certain situations, etc.
- Reduced demand on emergency rooms and other limited medical resources
- Decreased insurance claims, which are paid for by other patients in the form of premium increases
- Prevented burdens on taxpayers from illness or premature deaths of workers (welfare payments, orphanned children, lawsuits, etc.)
No one in a developed, Western society is an island. They borrow from society in childhood and pay society back as an adult. And they use common resources like drugs, hospitals, and (in the case of insurance) risk.
If we made everyone over 300lbs lose 100lbs, we’d also see those benefits.
Same if we limited the amount of cigarettes or alcohol people purchased.
Certainly the same if we enforced our drug laws around things like fentanyl (although ODing in a Waffle House parking lot at 32 might actually save the taxpayer some money in the long run).
> If we made everyone over 300lbs lose 100lbs, we’d also see those benefits.
> Same if we limited the amount of cigarettes or alcohol people purchased.
We already attempt to do these things through public health campaigns and laws against the purchase of cigarettes/alcohol by minors.
You're actually making my point for me, because public interventions to reduce smoking have saved tens of millions of lives and many billions of dollars of taxpayer money.
> Certainly the same if we enforced our drug laws around things like fentanyl (although ODing in a Waffle House parking lot at 32 might actually save the taxpayer some money in the long run).
In what universe is the US not trying to enforce laws around fentanyl?
Sure, and I'm saying that under that same justification, we should extend the same requirements to these other public health crises that President Biden tried to create for COVID vaccination.
Private sector business with 100 more employees? Nobody is allowed to smoke on premises because of the risk of second hand smoke, just like the OSHA justification for vaccination requirements.
>In what universe is the US not trying to enforce laws around fentanyl?
Oregon passed Measure 110, decriminalizing heroin, methamphetamine, and fentanyl, only backtracking because the policy was so bad. California has Prop 47, knocking possession down to misdemeanors on par with jaywalking. New York has safe injection sites, and I'm going to guess this isn't for safe injection of insulin.
Your point being ? That we should not do anything unless we do everything with no exception (that's an absurd way to view things and not a counter argument whatsoever), or that those things should be done (which is probably true but doesn't change his point at all) ?
Funny how bodily autonomy is all that important when it comes to right wing fear of vaccines, but completely irrelevant when it comes to abortions, womens rights in general, sexual abuse, trans rights and generally rights of anyone disliked by this admin.
> any vaccine that predominately helps old people actually increases costs to society in the long run
I think that big difference between the political sides is that one of them does not see "kill all old people" as ethical strategy.
> ok for the government to take away peoples bodily autonomy, as long as it benefits the economy
No. That's a straw man and you know it. I'm against forced vaccinations. No one in the US was forced to be vaccinated.
However, most of the people against vaccination in the US are against abortion rights, so how could this debate really be about bodily autonomy? Forced birth is actually forced by the government, unlike vaccination programs. There is no situation where you could be put in jail for refusing a vaccine.
> No one in a developed, Western society is an island
And you know the anti-vaxxers know this because they also intersect heavily with the set who get very mad/judgemental about unemployed people or about people who don't eat well and exercise.
Yeah I saw this blowback coming, but two wrongs (to the extent you see the first as a wrong) don't make a right.
There's no reason to be hindering availability of safe and effective vaccines because a previous administration made it mandatory for some people to get some vaccines.
Could have something to do with vaccines going from recommended by doctors after decades of trials to entirely new vaccine methods being YOLO'd onto everyone via government policies.
> This was evident in the dialogue from the antivaxers who had done their research on mRNA changing your genome and being activated by 5G radiation.
Well, no, it was evident in the fact that mRNA vaccine manufacturers would only sign contracts with countries that agreed to give them blanket immunity from any and all possible legal consequences.
It's my experience that a major part of the "anti covid vax and measures" point of view depends on refusing to understand that people who get grave form of covid but don't die from it still saturated hospital causing side deaths from other causes.
While it's understandable that intelligent people eventually come to the conclusion of figuring out how they can change themselves, we need to stop absolving the destructionists of responsibility. The political machine that made a public health emergency into a political issue did much more damage to our country than the vaccines being practically, but temporarily, mandatory.
It's not temporary though. The Covid vaccine push has caused an entire generation to now doubt simple life-saving vaccines. They erased a century of goodwill.
It really didn’t. It caused a subset of people already predisposed to such things to become harder stance on it and it expanded that insanity by making it a political talking point; but it is *not* a whole generation, it’s likely 30% of one country; and, over time, hopefully less.
A century of goodwill? It's not like US vacvine skeptics are a new thing. Ol' ben franklin was a vaccine skeptic until his son died to smallpox.
The new thing is the right has recently embraced antivaxxers as part of the coaltion.
Giving it a mainstream platform for a few political points was a deal with the devil, and they deserve to be condemed for that.
The only thing most people know or remember about the covid vaccines are that they're the reason the lockdowns ended and things got back to normal. The only people still mad about it are the types who were easily manipulated to be mad about it from the start.
Can people stop flagging dham's comment when they simply disagree?
FWIW, I think what you're saying here and in another comment, about this burning a century of good will, is true.
People turn it into a liberal vs right partisan issue, but that's a convenient simplification.
The people protesting the lockdowns, mandatory vaccination, ID checks everywhere were not politically homogenous: if you looked at who was vocal about it, there were people on the right, but the other half were wokes, hippies, liberals, leftists, socialists, antifascists.
What burned goodwill is the authoritarian measures, the weak arguments, the demonisation of those against it for political gain and status (Trudeau and Biden would routinely accuse those opposed to mandatory vaccination and lockdowns of various -isms in public speeches).
The pandemic was indeed a major public health issue, but the way this was managed made it about a fight against the erosion of rights and societal polarisation.
Does this refer to the administration of the shot or not administering the shot? I'm assuming based on your paranoia that you believe alleged medicine kills people.
The chances of someone trying to take advantage of you with fake medicine are nearly zero.
What's crazy here is that FDA finally has a great head who actually tries to speed things up using Bayesian data modeling and understands drugs quite well (Marty Makary) and does everything to make drug approval process cheaper and more efficient without compromising safety.
Unfortunately it seems like this decision was overwritten by his boss for political a win.
> Unfortunately it seems like this decision was overwritten by his boss for political a win.
I think RFK is actually mentally damaged. He's been on his "do your own research" anti-vax crusade forever.
To be fair, once you start making fun of "do your own research", you have already lost the debate from a long term point of view.
If we are using a good definition of "research", I agree.
But we aren't. Research within these contexts is consulting a Google search, a social media search, watching short form videos and consulting a sycophantic LLM.
I think the idea is it's better to rely on Phase 3 clinical trials like those done by Moderna in preference to say someone untrained searching X posts in a manner probably not unlike RFK.
It's ok to do the X post thing on a personal level but not really as someone in charge of the health of millions of others.
He can do more real research than ever as the head of the FDA, but ignores the results and fires the researchers. A real DEI hire - Destruction, Ego, Incompetence.
Except for it being doublespeak.
For individuals arguing on the internet, "Do your own research" has long meant cherry pick others' research to support your own worldview, regardless (or in spite) of its scientific flaws.
Except kelipo is still 100% correct to say that.
Doublespeak has a way of becoming exactly the opposite of what it says on the tin, regardless of its origins. It's literally in the name.
The people 'in the know' know what "Department of Peace" means, and the masses use it to laugh at anyone who dares to think they invent wars. That's the point.
Except reading Breitbart and watching some TikToks to validate your preexisting beliefs is not "research." So the analogy is still valid.
> you have already lost the debate from a long term point of view
I don't get what this is alluding to - can you expand, specifically wrt the long term part?
Not OP but I would have hoped that it is self-evidently good if not great for a population to be capable and motivated to research things for themselves without solely relying on authorities and institutions.
Especially when so many of those entities are wildly rotten and corrupt; but even if they weren't.
Capable -- yes. Having to actually do it -- no. I would prefer to live in a world where I can depend on my fellow humans instead of living out a fantasy of self-sufficiency.
The "all the entities are wildly rotten and corrupt" meme is hyperstitious. I wish people would think before spreading it.
> The "all the entities are wildly rotten and corrupt" meme is hyperstitious. I wish people would think before spreading it.
Out of the 27 authors of Daszak's Lancet paper, used worldwide to claim that Coronavirus couldn't have come from a lab, how many had a conflict of interest?
How many news outlets repeated their claims verbatim, rather than reading it themselves to find the obvious 'errors'?
And how many academic institutions pointed out its flaws?
...
Too old an example? Ok - how many institutions sat on the Epstein files, lied about them, kept them sealed, etc, for decades? How many political leaders and business owners worldwide had direct links themselves?
How many media companies are giving adequate attention to climate change, and refusing to run ads from fossil fuel companies?
How many institutions/countries dared to tell Biden that arming genocide and vetoing ceasefires isn't actually okay? How many countries have sanctioned the perpetrators?
Read anything about EPA corruption lately? How about what ICE have been doing? Anyone in DOGE face any accountability for permanently compromising key government databases yet?
Because again, if you're relying on media and institutions to get your news on these things you might think everything is fine. It really, really isn't though. You gotta do your own research, I'm afraid.
... And no, none of that was because people believed the "all the entities are wildly rotten and corrupt" "meme". It wasn't ever that they just didn't trust the system enough.
Quite the opposite.
> You gotta do your own research, I'm afraid.
So again, how do you propose one actually does this? Via crowdsourcing on FB? AI-generated news gathering? Consulting with a medium? Like what is your actual, concrete solution for how to obtain and distribute events and occurrences?
Journalism may be as imperfect as the humans who do it, but it's at least a concrete, operating means of informing the general public, with an ideally healthy array of outlets having overlapping coverage of the same events. Within this framework, "do your own research" would be called "reading broadly".
> ... And no, none of that was because people believed the "all the entities are wildly rotten and corrupt" "meme". It wasn't ever that they just didn't trust the system enough.
I have been around long enough to know that the meme does fit for some non-negligible section of the population. It's not to say that the system hasn't given a lot of people good reason for doubt, but a lot of people were already primed to throw the baby out with the bathwater and declare everything a conspiracy.
> what is your actual, concrete solution for how to obtain and distribute events and occurrences?
There are lots of valid ways to research things for oneself.
None of them involve making fun of people for doing it.
> Journalism may be as imperfect as the humans who do it, but it's at least a concrete, operating means of informing the general public,
Sure. Reading journalism can be part of doing one's own research.
> a lot of people were already primed to throw the baby out with the bathwater and declare everything a conspiracy.
Who primed them?
Here's a 'fun' and illustrative story that recently unfolded: Did you know that the 4chan forum where the Pizzagate conspiracy - which used the same code words as Epstein's circle - opened the exact same day that Epstein met with its founder?
That meant that when whistleblowers talked about real things that happened, or real emails leaked, some people were 'primed' to dismiss them because obviously Pizzagate was a hoax.
Some journalists did report well on that scenario; people like Whitney Webb or Sarah Kendzior. They didn't get invited to mainstream media to talk about it though.
... There are a lot of people who believe one of the dumbest conspiracies possible - that scientists are in cahoots over a global warming hoax. Why do they believe that? Could it be that the fossil fuel companies who knew climate change was real in the 70s helped to foster that? Could it be that the media who profits massively from running fossil fuel ads have been complicit?
It's not okay to have like 6 billionaires running all your media. It's not okay to have <80 familes owning half the worlds wealth. You end up with all these terrible cognitive side effects in your population from the propaganda they use. Blaming all that on people doing their own research is essentially blaming the victim, at the worst possible time.
> None of them involve making fun of people for doing it.
I'm expressing frustration at the lack of a proper answer, which you still seem to not be able to provide.
> Who primed them?
Conspiracy theory influencers, cult leaders, unscrupulous politicians, other people with existing mental illnesses, corporations with a lobbying agenda - the list is as long as there are people with a motive to influence the populace to their own gains.
> Here's a 'fun' and illustrative story
You're providing a single example (without any references, btw) as a means of exonerating your entire argument. But sure, pizzagate is suddenly looking a lot less dismissible out-of-hand now, given we've come to learn the sheer extent of Epstein's web.
I agree that much of the disinformation re global warming is at least funded by corporations and individuals with a profit motive; I agree that the concentrated ownership of the media and wealth are highly problematic.
But pumping the "do your own research" schtick and ignoring that it is a term highly co-opted by conspiracy theorists (as well as others with an agenda to misinform) is hardly helping.
So again, I ask: what is your concrete alternative to Fourth Estate?
> So again, I ask: what is your concrete alternative to Fourth Estate?
Sorry, you think the choice is between people doing their own research or having a 4th estate?
How odd. I don't know if I've ever met anyone with such a binary.
To be as clear as I possibly can, though I did already answer this: doing your own research and having actual journalism exist are not mutually exclusive things. They go very well together.
However, as the quality of media falls, the necessity to do your own research to get an accurate worldview increases.
> Who primed them?
Republicians. By declaring all parts of the government are full of fraud and incompetence. By "doing there own research" aka not really and just lying and misrepresenting things they didn't really research and didn't really understand. I mean it would be 1 thing if they actually found fraud and incompetence but republican appointed bodies like Doge were to incompetent to find any appreciable fraud that IGs were not already proscuting.
Its been this way for a long time ever hear of the Golden Fleece Awards, these were given to 'useless' basic research projects the government funded. I think the key take away being that do your own research gets equated to the government cannot do research and we won't trust any government research that doesn't comport with our worldviews. The irony being several of the reciepts of Golden Fleece Awards actually turned out to be very usefully and highly impactful economically speaking.
> that scientists are in cahoots over a global warming hoax.
I kind of reject this claim because the suppression of research especially at places like EXXON, or the teflon people did not come from the scientists generally speaking, but rather from the business interests above them who did not want that research to be shared and owned it. Public Scientist later exposed it and the irony here is that the very thing you are saying won't get exposed got exposed but the system your condeming. Main stream media is not the Fact finding body when it comes to research, it is the propogation business. The do your own research crowds I have experienced ignore the Science Fact Finding Groups regardless of the results because they are no doing research they are vibing their beliefs.
> It's not okay to have like 6 billionaires running all your media.
I agree 100% here but doing your own research doesn't change this incentive, this exists because we don't have resonable taxes and monopoly laws. I'd argue (in agreement with the other guy) that do your own research on everything becomes a distraction to actually getting the above things passed to handle this problem. How do enforce the monopoly laws when you haven't done your own personal Market wide analysis the conditions of beef after all we cannot trust others to do that. And I think this is the sentiment of the other poster in the thread group is trying to give and i tend to agree with it.
The government likely cannot make 10 decisions better than you personally can, but the government makes billions of decisions everyday probably more than you'll make in your entire life. The scale is the problem government solves and not trusting anyone doesn't necessiarly produce higher quality results boardly
> the very thing you are saying won't get exposed got exposed but the system your condeming.
Hate (well, love) to break it to you but the Exxon thing was exposed by... One person, doing research.
Neela Banerjee. And she didn't work for one of the media giants.
After she brought the hard proof which had lain dormant for 40 something years, yeah the mainstream media eventually put it out there. They didn't have much choice at that point, did they.
The scientists didn't expose it. The business people didn't expose it. The mainsteram media didn't expose it. They all got paid, all while the Earth got hotter, and hotter, and hotter; more and more reliant on fossil fuel.
> I'd argue (in agreement with the other guy) that do your own research on everything becomes a distraction to actually getting the above things passed to handle this problem. How do enforce the monopoly laws when you haven't done your own personal Market wide analysis the conditions of beef after all we cannot trust others to do that.
Mainstream media isn't ever going to tell you how to end the media monopoly. The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.
> not trusting anyone doesn't necessiarly produce higher quality results boardly
I didn't say not to trust anyone. I said that believing everything from rather obviously compromised and corrupt institutions isn't a rational way to get to grips with reality. That's as true of fossil fuel science as it was our pandemic response.
Sources matter.
It would be great if the general public were willing and capable of reading the scientific papers which represent the research in question. However, in practice, virtually everyone who says "do your own research" is referring to skimming over a collection of Facebook posts, X posts, and podcasts.
This absolutely deserves criticism and even derision.
> However, in practice, virtually everyone who says "do your own research" is referring to skimming over a collection of Facebook posts, X posts, and podcasts.
Kinda hard to blame them for that when they were being lied to so obviously by official sources, about so many things; and when social and traditional media were censoring 'alternative' perspectives (many which later proved entirely correct) on a scale of hundreds of millions of posts.
No, we didn't all have the biology savvy to read and understand Daszak's paper ... But lots of people did have that knowledge - and either didn't speak up, or were censored into oblivion, or had literal actual death threats levelled at them.
Lots of institutions which had a duty to speak up didn't; not just about that, not just about the lableak theory, not just about the funding of GOF research [0], not just about how the virus behaved (animal reservoirs, natural immunity etc), and not just about the ways the vaccines were lied about.
Many of the institutions which did speak up, again, were censored into oblivion [1]; rendered irrelevant by the 'requests' of a Biden admin which was simultaneously threatening every major social media company with monopoly investigations. That's documented fact now, but it was blindingly obvious at the time too.
In context, any research was better than believing whatever you were told to believe; no matter how it changed from one week to the next. And I respect the people who tried, even if they didn't do it very well, better than the people who kept their mouths shut and did what they were told without any independent thought. And I even respect those people more than those who actively derided anyone who questioned authority even the slightest bit.
0 - https://www.congress.gov/117/meeting/house/114270/documents/...
1 - https://archive.li/FhtHM
Yes, but what sources do they use for their research? Is it expected that everyone should get a PhD, a lab and do their own mRNA vaccine trials? That hardly seems feasible, no?
Still doesn't explain the "long term point of view" part, btw.
How am I supposed to research things myself? Let's say I want to research effectiveness and safety of a flu vaccine by myself.
I don't have resources to set up my own lab. I don't even know if the manufacturer will sell a dozen or so vaccines directly to me. So can't even do a basic stoichiometry on my own. And forget about me setting up a trial with actual people - I have no idea where I could begin to make it possible.
If by research you mean reading already published papers, that's literature review and I wouldn't call that a research. But because doing my own experiments and trials is out of question, I'm willing to settle for that.
Reviewing published papers comes with its own set of problems. A lot of papers are behind paywall and I don't have money for the ongoing journal subscriptions. I suppose I can rely only on open journals and pre-prints but that's not all of them. Messaging the authors directly is also an option but it's doesn't scale well and takes time.
Suppose I get my hands on a couple of relevant papers. How can I be sure what's written there is actually correct? It would be nice if I could double check against the raw data, but often that's not available. And at best all I can verify is that the paper's content matches the source data. I can't verify the data itself. At some point I have to trust the authors. Not to mention I don't have access to the data from research that wasn't published, for example because the experiments didn't show anything novel.
But that's fine. Nothing is perfect and after hours (if not days) of reading and playing with data I came to a conclusion that I'm happy with. Of course I have to review it again in a few years. The new research will be published by then. Maybe they will discover something different and I have to review that too.
Overall, I spent a lot of time and it was exhausting. Diligently reading and cross-referencing all that data is mentally taxing. I can't complain though because I've learned something.
There's one problem though. All of that effort was about just a single vaccine. But there's more of them. For other diseases too. And there are other problems I'd love to research. Windmills. Microplastics. Glyphosate. Dozens of types of food. Economic theories. How can I research all of that in a timely fashion?
I'm genuinely asking because I want to. I realize there will be trade-offs involved, but all of them are either relying on someone else (which we try to avoid) or won't be deep enough to form an informed opinion. And I'm not happy with either.
> Let's say I want to research effectiveness and safety of a flu vaccine by myself.
Sure. Let's say the manufacturer and the government claim that the vaccine is 100% effective, all of the time, with no side effects.
But you happen to notice that lots of women are complaining online about, say, missing their periods for months at a time after taking it. And getting the flu anyway.
Congratulations. You have done your own research, made your own observations, and thought for yourself.
That's the kind of thing many people were talking about. What else could they be talking about, since as you point out, they didn't have any access to raw data.
If you want to get hardcore into citizen science, that's really cool. You will have to pick a direction though; we can't do everything unfortunately. And funding is hard.
> A lot of papers are behind paywall and I don't have money for the ongoing journal subscriptions.
There are ways around this these days, but yeah the paywalling and siloing of knowledge is really holding back our potential as a species.
Did you know that it connects back to Ghislaine Maxwell's dad? Yeah, he was the guy most responsible for expanding the paywall model of academic research and maximising the profit from it. He could make or break scientific careers, keep certain discoveries to himself, hold leverage on academic institutions and professors...
There are a lot of people, including (but absolutely not limited to) RFK, who are mentally incapable of proper research on their own.
He (and similarly poorly informed people) would be better served by delegating the research task to somebody who is more capable.
We've got laymen Dunning-Krugering our health policy. This is bad.
Sure.
And how exactly does any of that make mocking people who research things for themselves cool and okay?
Unfortunately, “do your own research” is de facto shorthand for “I reject your reality and substitute my own.”
There's a good standup bit out there: we used to have a word for "doing your own research": reading! Now everyone gives you shit for it.
Reading is worthless if you don't vet your sources. Encyclopedia Britannica and Uncle Johnny's Chemtrail Digest are not equally valid sources of truth.
And there's the actual hard part: institutional trustworthiness is in the shitter. Everyone will have their sources that they trust, and if were honest, none of us can really vet any of them.
A lot of these disputes can be simplified to "I don't trust your sources".
That's true; but I also think a lot of these disputes originate with "your research invalidates my axiomatic beliefs, so I will find whatever 'evidence' needed to counter them." Especially disputes percolating down from the political strata.
Sure. But you put evidence in quotes, presumably because you probably don't trust their source(s). Just like they don't trust yours.
Obviously, in your head your sources are evidence while their sources are 'evidence', and the same might be true for them.
> I think RFK is actually mentally damaged
He is, and he's publicly admitted to both mercury poisoning (which leads to cognitive impairments and potentially insanity) and having part of his brain eaten by a worm[1].
1. https://cnas.ucr.edu/media/2024/05/08/rfk-jr-revealed-he-had...
On one hand it’s horrifying, on the other, this is what the administration was elected to do.
This technology is going to cure cancer someday. Too bad we won't get to use it. The FDA just killed 'future you'.
Future me would have a really high quality EV with an amazing charging network, clean air and water, a habitable planet for my grand children, no domestic political extrajudicial paramilitary surveilling everyone with megawarehouse detention cities everywhere, outright ideological warfare against urban areas, etc.
We had a choice between Star Trek future world and Blade Runner+MadMax+Idiocracy, and we predictably chose the one we deserve because memes and a podcast.
> because memes and a podcast.
What a weird thing to say, after we spent 20+ trillion dollars on a bipartisan war on terror.
More than enough to make America's energy 100% renewable, feed the planet, house every American, and so much else.
Instead we made Dick Cheney's friends a lot of money, killed a couple million innocent people, and sat on the Epstein files for decades.
Which part of all that are you blaming on memes and a podcast?
Biontech, the one that had the first mrna vaccine, has a bunch of phase 3 trials this year, and they're all about curing cancer - it's literally how they're using all of the covid vaccine revenue, as funding for that endeavor.[1]
1 https://european-biotechnology.com/latest-news/2026-a-year-o...
I can't find a specific source right now, but I remember reading that RFK's war on mRNA vaccines only applies the ones used for flu/Covid. They haven't gone after cancer vaccines.
This press release seems to confirm this: https://biontechse.gcs-web.com/news-releases/news-release-de...
"Moderna curbing investments in vaccine trials due to US backlash, CEO tells Bloomberg TV"
https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...
Those are for immunization against viruses. They're not the same kind of vaccine that will be used to cure many types of cancer.
https://archive.ph/sGvJW
> In a release Tuesday, Moderna said the FDA did not identify any safety or efficacy concerns with the vaccine. Instead, it said the FDA took issue with the “comparator” in its clinical trial — the vaccine the company used as a benchmark to evaluate its own shot.
> The FDA said the use of the standard flu shot as a comparator “does not reflect the best-available standard of care.”
Are they implying that a placebo should be the comparator?
No, they're implying that Moderna should have used a high dose flu vaccine in the >65 age group as the control condition in the efficacy trial.
EDIT: To be clear, I'm pretty sure that's just some pretext.
Context from the CDC guidance from August 2025 (https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/74/wr/mm7432a2.htm)
"Except for vaccination for adults aged ≥65 years, ACIP makes no preferential recommendation for a specific vaccine when more than one licensed and recommended vaccine is available. Among adults aged ≥65 years any one of the following higher dose or adjuvanted influenza vaccines is preferentially recommended: HD-IIV3, RIV3, or aIIV3. If none of these three vaccines is available at an opportunity for vaccine administration, any other available age-appropriate influenza vaccine should be used (4,5)"
Is sandbagging like this normal in getting FDA approvals or did someone at Moderna f this up?
Trial designs are rarely perfect, and drug companies will try to stack the deck.
That being said, trial designs aren't made in isolation without consultation. Moderna's press release about this (https://feeds.issuerdirect.com/news-release.html?newsid=7346...) indicates that 2024 CDC said that performing an efficacy trial without using the higher dose would likely cause complications for recommending the mRNA vaccine for the >65 age group, but would not impact overall approval.
That was 2024. I wonder what could possibly be different about today, in 2026?
This is specifically a political attempt by RFK Jr. to stop people from getting mRNA flu vaccines.
There’s a flu shot for old people. It appears Moderna chose not to administer that when appropriate. Maybe technically they aren’t required to. The whole thing sounds messy but who knows.
That's true some years, but not all. Usually, the difference is over 55 (or whatever) you get a quadrivalent vaccine instead of trivalent. That is, vaccine for the usual strains, plus a 4th. It's not totally different.
currently endorsed production technology is not responsive enough to produce an effective vaccine in time for unexpected viral antigen shift.
we need to cut the required lead time down to weeks, rather than months.
we also need to stand up a surveilance network again.
Unfortunate, just recently I read
"Influenza vaccination is associated with significantly lower odds of myocardial infarction (MI), according to a large meta-analysis published late last week in BMC Public Health."
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/influenza-vaccines/new-analysis-l...
We will still have flu vaccines, just not this vaccine.
The question isn't whether or not we have vaccines, it is whether or not we have the most effective vaccines.
It’s a good thing the specific criticism of this trial is that they didn’t use the most effective vaccine for 65+ people, since you’re concerned about having the most effective vaccines.
So, the majority of us, people under 65 are completely unaffected. And yes, the vaccine can be approved for 65- while not approved for 65+.
The fall 2025 approval was limited to 65+/preexisting conditions.
If this vaccine wasn’t being tested for 65+, it might not be approved at all based on that.
Older flu vaccines become less effective, as there are many flu strains and the dominant one changes. Different flu vaccine is recommended every year.
Let's just be plain as possible because online commenters are some of the most obtuse people.
1. Vaccines are good, everyone should get the fucking flu shot
2. There will be new vaccines targeting current strains of influenza available this season from other manufacturers using older methods
3. I have no fucking clue if an mRNA flu vaccine is good or bad, but I also don't care
4. I get mrna vaccines can be developed faster, we might be better served, but we are not losing existing capabilities
5. If we are short on vaccines produced with older methods that is likely poor business planning and not an actual technical limitation
6. I hate you
yes, lets find more ways to kill people besides bringing back the measles. God what a race to the bottom for this administration..
To be fair, a lot of doctors were sounding the alarm in 2021 that forcing the Covid shot was going to cause blow back. They said word for word, that we might see the rise of measles and other similar diseases. It's actually very well documented on zdoggmd youtube channel (podcast) during this time. But there were tons of doctors saying the same thing.
Because the docs knew that far too many people would rather face risk to avoid doing what they’re told to do. And far too many people just don’t give a shit about other people. The npc’s aren’t real or pertinent.
How did taking it benefit other people?
The best way to keep immunocompromised and people who literally can’t take vaccines safe is by having so much herd immunity that the likelihood they a virulent load of a virus cannot get to those people.
A great way to get herd immunity is through mass vaccination.
Except herd immunity for COVID isn’t feasible or even possible. It mutates too much, the vaccines don’t confer effective enough immunity, etc.
It’s unfortunate, but it’s the reality of this disease. I’m not immunocompromised, but I still modify my behavior to try and protect myself: mask on planes, avoid certain situations, etc.
It's easy to say this in hindsight
Was also easy to say with foresight for many of us.
Yes, but it's also an argument against trying to require COVID vaccination going forward with the justification that it would provide herd immunity.
- Reduced demand on emergency rooms and other limited medical resources
- Decreased insurance claims, which are paid for by other patients in the form of premium increases
- Prevented burdens on taxpayers from illness or premature deaths of workers (welfare payments, orphanned children, lawsuits, etc.)
No one in a developed, Western society is an island. They borrow from society in childhood and pay society back as an adult. And they use common resources like drugs, hospitals, and (in the case of insurance) risk.
If we made everyone over 300lbs lose 100lbs, we’d also see those benefits.
Same if we limited the amount of cigarettes or alcohol people purchased.
Certainly the same if we enforced our drug laws around things like fentanyl (although ODing in a Waffle House parking lot at 32 might actually save the taxpayer some money in the long run).
> If we made everyone over 300lbs lose 100lbs, we’d also see those benefits.
> Same if we limited the amount of cigarettes or alcohol people purchased.
We already attempt to do these things through public health campaigns and laws against the purchase of cigarettes/alcohol by minors.
You're actually making my point for me, because public interventions to reduce smoking have saved tens of millions of lives and many billions of dollars of taxpayer money.
> Certainly the same if we enforced our drug laws around things like fentanyl (although ODing in a Waffle House parking lot at 32 might actually save the taxpayer some money in the long run).
In what universe is the US not trying to enforce laws around fentanyl?
Sure, and I'm saying that under that same justification, we should extend the same requirements to these other public health crises that President Biden tried to create for COVID vaccination.
Federal worker? BMI needs to be below 30, because otherwise you're costing the system too much. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7990296/
Private sector business with 100 more employees? Nobody is allowed to smoke on premises because of the risk of second hand smoke, just like the OSHA justification for vaccination requirements.
>In what universe is the US not trying to enforce laws around fentanyl?
Oregon passed Measure 110, decriminalizing heroin, methamphetamine, and fentanyl, only backtracking because the policy was so bad. California has Prop 47, knocking possession down to misdemeanors on par with jaywalking. New York has safe injection sites, and I'm going to guess this isn't for safe injection of insulin.
Enforcement of laws around these drugs would mean arresting and prosecuting the flocks of fentanyl users bent over in Philly's Skid Row, SF's tenderloin, or basically all of Portland: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9372555/Philadelphi...
Your point being ? That we should not do anything unless we do everything with no exception (that's an absurd way to view things and not a counter argument whatsoever), or that those things should be done (which is probably true but doesn't change his point at all) ?
I'm agreeing that the current implementation of our public health system is a worst-of-all-worlds option.
Weigh 500lbs, don't work, and drink a six pack a day? You get free healthcare via Medicaid, making the taxpayer shoulder your burden.
Self-employed, 35, and can run a 7 minute mile, but broke a bone? Expect outrageous healthcare costs, deductibles, etc.
The current approach to public health is the epitome of a moral hazard.
So basically what you are saying it's ok for the government to take away peoples bodily autonomy, as long as it benefits the economy? Wild.
And if you really want to make this calculation, any vaccine that predominately helps old people actually increases costs to society in the long run.
Funny how bodily autonomy is all that important when it comes to right wing fear of vaccines, but completely irrelevant when it comes to abortions, womens rights in general, sexual abuse, trans rights and generally rights of anyone disliked by this admin.
> any vaccine that predominately helps old people actually increases costs to society in the long run
I think that big difference between the political sides is that one of them does not see "kill all old people" as ethical strategy.
> ok for the government to take away peoples bodily autonomy, as long as it benefits the economy
No. That's a straw man and you know it. I'm against forced vaccinations. No one in the US was forced to be vaccinated.
However, most of the people against vaccination in the US are against abortion rights, so how could this debate really be about bodily autonomy? Forced birth is actually forced by the government, unlike vaccination programs. There is no situation where you could be put in jail for refusing a vaccine.
> No one in a developed, Western society is an island
And you know the anti-vaxxers know this because they also intersect heavily with the set who get very mad/judgemental about unemployed people or about people who don't eat well and exercise.
In what sense was anyone in the US forced to get a Covid shot? I know many acquaintances who never did.
Yeah I saw this blowback coming, but two wrongs (to the extent you see the first as a wrong) don't make a right.
There's no reason to be hindering availability of safe and effective vaccines because a previous administration made it mandatory for some people to get some vaccines.
Actually there has been an unholy alliance between Christ clowns and new age hippies against modern medicine looooong before COVID.
Yeah but they used to live on the fringes of social media. Now they run the executive.
Could have something to do with vaccines going from recommended by doctors after decades of trials to entirely new vaccine methods being YOLO'd onto everyone via government policies.
This was evident in the dialogue from the antivaxers who had done their research on mRNA changing your genome and being activated by 5G radiation.
The good news is if you didn't trust the accelerated process you could choose masking/testing for moments away from YouTube and Joe Rogan.
> This was evident in the dialogue from the antivaxers who had done their research on mRNA changing your genome and being activated by 5G radiation.
Well, no, it was evident in the fact that mRNA vaccine manufacturers would only sign contracts with countries that agreed to give them blanket immunity from any and all possible legal consequences.
Bit of a red flag, that.
It really isn't, even considered in an absolute vacuum.
And the alternative was… what? Continue having people die because of Covid
It's my experience that a major part of the "anti covid vax and measures" point of view depends on refusing to understand that people who get grave form of covid but don't die from it still saturated hospital causing side deaths from other causes.
While it's understandable that intelligent people eventually come to the conclusion of figuring out how they can change themselves, we need to stop absolving the destructionists of responsibility. The political machine that made a public health emergency into a political issue did much more damage to our country than the vaccines being practically, but temporarily, mandatory.
It's not temporary though. The Covid vaccine push has caused an entire generation to now doubt simple life-saving vaccines. They erased a century of goodwill.
It really didn’t. It caused a subset of people already predisposed to such things to become harder stance on it and it expanded that insanity by making it a political talking point; but it is *not* a whole generation, it’s likely 30% of one country; and, over time, hopefully less.
A century of goodwill? It's not like US vacvine skeptics are a new thing. Ol' ben franklin was a vaccine skeptic until his son died to smallpox. The new thing is the right has recently embraced antivaxxers as part of the coaltion.
Giving it a mainstream platform for a few political points was a deal with the devil, and they deserve to be condemed for that.
The only thing most people know or remember about the covid vaccines are that they're the reason the lockdowns ended and things got back to normal. The only people still mad about it are the types who were easily manipulated to be mad about it from the start.
Can people stop flagging dham's comment when they simply disagree?
FWIW, I think what you're saying here and in another comment, about this burning a century of good will, is true.
People turn it into a liberal vs right partisan issue, but that's a convenient simplification.
The people protesting the lockdowns, mandatory vaccination, ID checks everywhere were not politically homogenous: if you looked at who was vocal about it, there were people on the right, but the other half were wokes, hippies, liberals, leftists, socialists, antifascists.
What burned goodwill is the authoritarian measures, the weak arguments, the demonisation of those against it for political gain and status (Trudeau and Biden would routinely accuse those opposed to mandatory vaccination and lockdowns of various -isms in public speeches).
The pandemic was indeed a major public health issue, but the way this was managed made it about a fight against the erosion of rights and societal polarisation.
Does this refer to the administration of the shot or not administering the shot? I'm assuming based on your paranoia that you believe alleged medicine kills people.
The chances of someone trying to take advantage of you with fake medicine are nearly zero.
Good luck
> Does this refer to the administration of the shot or not administering the shot?
I'm fairly certain "this administration" in the GP refers to the Trump administration; under its watch, measles have been resurrected.
> The chances of someone trying to take advantage of you with fake medicine are nearly zero.
The steelman for this position is unintentional, unforeseen harm, not malicious vaccine manufacturers.
> I'm fairly certain "this administration" in the GP refers to the Trump administration
Why would the presidency matter?
> The steelman for this position is unintentional, unforeseen harm, not malicious vaccine manufacturers.
...accidental administration of the vaccine? How would that work?
> Why would the presidency matter?
> ...accidental administration of the vaccine? How would that work?
Do you intend to have a sincere discussion on this topic?
> Why would the presidency matter?
Trump fired a ton of competent people and hired an absolute unqualified morons for high level government positions.