China Bashing

[Nominal Animal]

Feel free to point me to what I missed ...

Reality.  You missed reality.

Sorry, but that's lame. It was you who insisted that "It is all in the public record, and you'd know that if you had read them (at europa.eu)".

Lame?  Ignoring someone who posts stuff without actually reading the posts before and only picks snippets of the last posted post to nitpick on and does quick Google searches to find snippets to bolster their argument instead of reading those reports fully in the first place, is now lame?  Okay.

Now I understand why I so often find it nearly impossible to interact with you in a mutually useful manner.  It is hard, man.

It is also not a simple issue at all, with both patient genetics, protein folding due to replication errors, the spike protein itself being toxic (to heart muscle cells), and fast mass manufacturing issues leading to quality issues involved in the soup.

In Finland, the government refused to check the doses for contaminants, even after Japan recalled entire batches due to contamination.
And what is not covered by the indemnification?  That's right, *manufacturing defects*.

Now, you be un-lame, ebastler, and describe to me exactly how one could sue Moderna or Astra-Zeneca in Europe for believed contaminants in the therapeutics.  If you cannot –– I cannot myself, but I haven't examined the issue from a personal viewpoint, as I don't need to ––, will you apologize for calling me lame?  No?  Because even when you're wrong, you're still truthy, and thus nobody disagreeing with you deserves an apology?

I think you two should be ashamed of yourselves, for the way you are communicating here.  You can do much better, if you bothered to try.

I for one do not believe in any conspiracy theories that say that the mRNA therapeutics were designed to be harmful.  I fully believe they were intended to protect people.  However, the politicians made damn sure they would not be blamed, and used the pandemic as an opportunity to try and grab new powers (like the vaccination passes).  The companies knowing the experimental nature and highly accelerated development cycle, required protection from possible lawsuits, indemnification, and the politicians agreed to that and tried to keep the indemnification and purchase agreements secret –– von der Leyen still tries, even though court on 17th decided EU commission was in the wrong in trying to.  That is what happened.  I've already been very clear I do trust the experts (as much as one should trust any humans they do not know personally), but not the politicians nor civil servants acting on behalf of politicians (or their own income stream and questionable research funding practices, as in the case of Antonio Fauci and gain-of-function research on related viruses near to where the epidemic is believed to have started).  Yes, I fully believe Antony Fauci was lying through his teeth all the time, to protect his own income, reputation, and to avoid repercussions for funding very questionable gain-of-function research.  All the politicians who said the first dose would give lasting immunity were just hoping; it wasn't backed by independent researchers, only by politicians and sales people.  Even the medical companies' internal research indicated they provided very low immunity rates. Then the politicians switched to "oh, the first dose didn't, but the second would".  Then the booster would.  Then it would at least reduce the symptoms and help you get over it quicker.  All without independent expert support of the claims, based solely on politics, civil servant and company marketing division blather.  And so on.

Nothing similar has happened before with any vaccine, not even with Pandemrix and swine flu (that ended up causing narcolepsy).  The narcolepsy issues were found by the Finnish and Swedish health authorities.  Compare to mRNA therapeutics, where the same governments refuse to even random-test the doses for contamination observed in other countries.  Here in Finland, for example, the expert statements from health authorities did not support the policies, and there was quite a lot of public talk about the divide; but were framed (in the "world's free'est media") as "random individuals undermining politicians taking responsibility of the crisis".  Even if the heads of departments have medical backgrounds, they're still political appointees here, and thus directly responsible to politicians (or they will be replaced), so there is no reason to trust their public statements unless they contradict politicians.  They sometimes did, here.

The fault here is on the politicians.  I fully believe the companies were hoping for mRNA to be a solution, and they made an absolute mint on them.  The policies, however, were made by politicians, and not experts.  Can I prove it EU-wide?  I'm not sure, because I haven't tried.  For Finland, it is easily done, as the divide between the cabinet (prime minister onwards) and the health authorities is now in the open.  The current head is trying to act as if it did not exist, because the politicians think he is good at that and can hide the tracks at least sufficiently that no lawsuits will ensue.  And we don't even have a constitutional court, only a parliament appointee to act as the highest interpreter of the constitutional law, and for the last twenty years or so, has mostly ensured that politicians' wrongdoings are kept hidden, and only dealt with if the public has uncontrovertible proof.

That's all that I have to say.  Many of you are not going to believe –– ebastler for example rarely believes anything I say.  That is fine.  The purpose of my posts on this subject is not to convince anyone or change anyones mind, only show that this is the basis for my opinions, and if someone wants to, they can do their own research to decide whether that basis should affect their own opinion or not.  I consider the opinions themselves as basically worthless, and only the reasons behind those opinions worth discussing and examining.  Thus far, it has been quite one-sided examination in this thread.  That is fine, too, because the thread in general isn't worth participating in, really.  If there had been descriptions of the reasons for their opinions, it might have been more interesting.  In the past, in at least one discussion I really tried to pull those out of ebastler, but it was like trying to drag a concrete barrier; not worth the effort, with results rather underwhelming (reasons quite vague and ebastler unwilling to elaborate).

[zilp]

Now, you be un-lame, ebastler, and describe to me exactly how one could sue Moderna or Astra-Zeneca in Europe for believed contaminants in the therapeutics.  If you cannot –– I cannot myself, but I haven't examined the issue from a personal viewpoint, as I don't need to ––, will you apologize for calling me lame?  No?  Because even when you're wrong, you're still truthy, and thus nobody disagreeing with you deserves an apology?

If you were damaged by a contaminated dose due to the contamination and you could prove that, then you would hire a lawyer who would file a suit with the court that is responsible for the case.

The companies knowing the experimental nature and highly accelerated development cycle, required protection from possible lawsuits, indemnification, and the politicians agreed to that and tried to keep the indemnification and purchase agreements secret

It's just that the fact that that is part of the contract was not a secret!?

And also, you make it sound like such an indemnification clause is necessarily a problematic thing that indicates corruption or that people were lying about the safety of the vaccine or something. But that is just plain nonsense.

The problem is that a vaccine manufacturer that holds the patents on some vaccine is not required to sell any vaccine at all. And if they don't sell you a vaccine, then you don't have a vaccine.

Now, every dose they sell has a risk associated with it that they might have to pay damages if there is an adverse reaction. They can quantify this risk as an amount of money by multiplying the expected damages payment in case things go wrong with the probability that a given dose causes adverse reactions.

Then, if they sell a dose for 15 EUR, say, they would be irrational to sell that dose to anyone where their models predict expected damages higher than 15 EUR minus costs, because that sale would be expected to cause them a loss.

As such, by default, the manufacturer would just limit the use of the vaccine to groups where the risk is minimal and the expected return after damages paid out is a profit.

That would leave lots of people without access to the vaccine. However, these people are not necessarily actually safer for not receiving the vaccine, because they still face the risk of an infection.

It's just that the expected damages for an unvaccinated person from an infection are not something that the vaccine manufacturer considers in their profitability calculation, because that is not something that they are liable for.

And that is where the indemnification clause comes in:

The state says: We want people for who the expected damages from vaccination are lower than the expected damages of an infection to have access to the vaccine, because that is still an expected benefit for that person (and by extension for society at large). In order to motivate the vaccine manufacturer to sell to such people (i.e., to authorize use for such people), the government then agrees to cover those damages. Or rather, in a purchase agreement, they'd probably just agree to cover all damages that aren't due to fraud (i.e., the manufacturer lying) or negligence, because that saves the effort of figuring out which case belongs in which category, but would then demand a lower price in return (i.e., reduced by the expected damages in those cases where the manufacturer would be willing to sell anyway).

[AVGresponding]

There are places where you can discuss this sort of thing freely, but it doesn't belong here. Mods, for the love of criminy, lock this completely derailed thread already

[Simon]

All right, locked