Elon Musk is a nice chap

[tooki]

Elon buying Twitter is definitely a good thing. He wants to clamp down on child porn, which wasn't being dealt with properly by the previous owners. People can scream all they want about bad people, being able to use bad words, but those who harm children are the lowest of the low. Targeting them should be the number one priority, not censoring politically incorrect speech.

Clamping down on kiddie porn…. by gutting the content moderation teams? Uh huh.

In a few weeks he had dealt with it orders of magnitude better than Twitter under the old management. Actually there was a Twitter CP scandal a few months ago (and a few times before) but large advertisers did not care that much. Elon came in and they withdrew before he even started changing anything. Priorities...
https://nypost.com/2021/01/21/twitter-sued-for-allegedly-refusing-to-remove-child-porn/
https://www.opindia.com/2022/10/censor-chief-vijaya-gadde-is-fired-how-twitter-refused-to-take-down-child-porn/

What has he actually done about it? As far as I can tell, he’s done three things:
1. Fired the person in charge of that before. (Fair, since the results were not good.)
2. Laid off most of the content moderation department.
3. Promised that it’s his “#1 priority”.

That’s it. Pink slips and promises. I think it’s much too early to be lavishing praise on him for “dealing with” anything.

[wraper]

What has he actually done about it? As far as I can tell, he’s done three things:
1. Fired the person in charge of that before. (Fair, since the results were not good.)
2. Laid off most of the content moderation department.
3. Promised that it’s his “#1 priority”.

For example, most of the CSAM material which used specific hashtags for search was cleaned. Twitter did add a direct reporting option for child sexual exploitation. (ONLY on tweets with content images/videos).

2. Laid off most of the content moderation department.

Laid off misinformation department, not moderation.

[Sal Ammoniac]

not censoring politically incorrect speech.

That’s all well and good as long as you recognize that blatant disinformation and incitements to violence go well beyond “politically incorrect speech”.

[wraper]

not censoring politically incorrect speech.

That’s all well and good as long as you recognize that blatant disinformation and incitements to violence go well beyond “politically incorrect speech”.

A lot of doctors and medical scientists got banned on twitter because they were "spreading COVID misinformation". Even though often they just discussed hypotheses or said something that later turned out to be true. All just because someone decided what is the accepted truth at the moment, even though nobody really knew. As of inciting violence, that does not get a free pass under Elon either. FWIW previously you could incite violence or spread hate as much as you want as long as you were leftie. For example, ANTIFA was inciting violence on Twitter just fine.

[coppice]

not censoring politically incorrect speech.

That’s all well and good as long as you recognize that blatant disinformation and incitements to violence go well beyond “politically incorrect speech”.

Who is spreading misinformation, and who is telling the truth? Who is a reliable arbiter of that? Certainly no human or any current machine. Currently most "fact checkers" are people with no expertise on minimum wage. The biggest liars are the people with the most power to suppress comments from others. Many genuine long term respected experts in their fields have been suppressed heavily over the last 2.5 years by politically connected numbskulls. The very factions in our society who were the biggest advocates of free speech, open enquiry, and minimal censorship in the past have become the most censorious. Its a sad state of affairs.

[SiliconWizard]

This whole Twitter frenzy is unfortunately obviously 99.9% a political affair, and has nothing to do with common sense, truth or facts.
Don't even start with the covid shit. The official statements were themselves mostly disinformation and some will have to pay for it at some point.
And you're right, some forms of violence are perfectly tolerated on most social media. The same has been seen on YT, Facebook, etc.

Society's never been more polarized than it is now. At least in the west.

[Zero999]

not censoring politically incorrect speech.

That’s all well and good as long as you recognize that blatant disinformation and incitements to violence go well beyond “politically incorrect speech”.

Whether or not one gets banned depends on which side they're on. Making death and rape threats against J K Rowling is fine, because she has views which are not popular with the content moderators.

[tom66]

This is the fundamental issue with social media though.  It is so easy to spread lies, like "Trump won the 2020 election" or "COVID is caused by 5G" which cause negative effects.  How do you balance the "fire in a crowded theatre" free speech whilst not causing the censorship of legitimate conversation and criticism of governments / corporations / ideas?

I don't think there is a solution. 

[james_s]

This is the fundamental issue with social media though.  It is so easy to spread lies, like "Trump won the 2020 election" or "COVID is caused by 5G" which cause negative effects.  How do you balance the "fire in a crowded theatre" free speech whilst not causing the censorship of legitimate conversation and criticism of governments / corporations / ideas?

I don't think there is a solution.

Getting rid of social media entirely would help but I don't know how you'd ever do that. The internet has done as promised and given a voice to marginalized groups. It has shrunk the world and allowed people of all sorts to congregate with other similarly minded people. This unfortunately comes with a large cost, many marginalized groups were marginalized for a reason.

[Buriedcode]

...Many genuine long term respected experts in their fields have been suppressed heavily over the last 2.5 years by politically connected numbskulls. The very factions in our society who were the biggest advocates of free speech, open enquiry, and minimal censorship in the past have become the most censorious. Its a sad state of affairs.

Do you have examples?  Several "respected experts" have embraced pseudoscience, Didier Raoult, Robert Malone are a couple of examples.  Just because they are "respected" doesn't mean to say they don't spread misinformation (for grift?) or dangerous ideas, and I didn't even include those who are well respected in other fields (which makes their view on infectious disease worthless). For some, even disagreeing with someone, or pointing out obvious flaws in their opinions is considered "censoring" or "cancelling".  Did you expect twitter to just let obvious misinformation go unchallenged when the US was losing 3k people a day?

I'm not sure what your definition of free speech is.  It has to be censored in some way, and how that is done and by who, has been a debate for at least two decades now.

[coppice]

...Many genuine long term respected experts in their fields have been suppressed heavily over the last 2.5 years by politically connected numbskulls. The very factions in our society who were the biggest advocates of free speech, open enquiry, and minimal censorship in the past have become the most censorious. Its a sad state of affairs.

Do you have examples?  Several "respected experts" have embraced pseudoscience, Didier Raoult, Robert Malone are a couple of examples.  Just because they are "respected" doesn't mean to say they don't spread misinformation (for grift?) or dangerous ideas, and I didn't even include those who are well respected in other fields (which makes their view on infectious disease worthless). For some, even disagreeing with someone, or pointing out obvious flaws in their opinions is considered "censoring" or "cancelling".  Did you expect twitter to just let obvious misinformation go unchallenged when the US was losing 3k people a day?

I'm not sure what your definition of free speech is.  It has to be censored in some way, and how that is done and by who, has been a debate for at least two decades now.

An example would be the signitories of the Great Barrington Declaration, who's sin was basically asking that we stick to long established plans for how to deal with a pandemic. If we had, the death toll might have been much lower.

[PlainName]

the Great Barrington Declaration, who's sin was basically asking that we stick to long established plans for how to deal with a pandemic

What long-established plans were they?

AFAICS, the plan would be to not have lockdowns or mask mandates and rely on herd immunity. Good hygiene and staying at home when infected would reduce the level at which herd immunity would... achieve something.

As we now know, herd immunity wouldn't and won't work. The lockdowns and masks mitigated against the more than 200K deaths and gave us a bit of breathing (sorry!) space until the vaccinations became available. Hmmm. I didn't check but was the GBD ambivalent about vaccinations? At that time it was thought we wouldn't have one for at least a couple of years, so to get them within a year was a surprise. Nevertheless, vaccinations did the biz where herd immunity wouldn't.

So, was the long-established (that is, before October 2020) plan for herd immunity, vaccinations or something else?

[coppice]

the Great Barrington Declaration, who's sin was basically asking that we stick to long established plans for how to deal with a pandemic

What long-established plans were they?

AFAICS, the plan would be to not have lockdowns or mask mandates and rely on herd immunity. Good hygiene and staying at home when infected would reduce the level at which herd immunity would... achieve something.

As we now know, herd immunity wouldn't and won't work. The lockdowns and masks mitigated against the more than 200K deaths and gave us a bit of breathing (sorry!) space until the vaccinations became available. Hmmm. I didn't check but was the GBD ambivalent about vaccinations? At that time it was thought we wouldn't have one for at least a couple of years, so to get them within a year was a surprise. Nevertheless, vaccinations did the biz where herd immunity wouldn't.

So, was the long-established (that is, before October 2020) plan for herd immunity, vaccinations or something else?

No reasonable plan could be based on a vaccine being produced. Nobody had ever succeeded in producing an effective corona virus vaccine, so planning on one in 18 months would have been an act of faith. The vaccines did nothing really useful, anyway. They have no effect on transmission, little effect on reducing infection, but may give some reduction in seriousness. They also don't give any persistent protection. It seems they don't properly stimulate the immune system to create memory T-cells, or their effectiveness wouldn't fade so quickly. People in places like Kaohsiung, who had contracted the original SARS in 2003, were tested against SARS COVID 2 very early on, and their immune system reacted strongly to it. So 15 years later they apparently still had a functioning immune response to a similar virus. We were lucky. The thing that really stopped COVID was its mutation to something not too serious.

The long established plans were that you couldn't contain an infection like COVID once it had started spreading, so heavy lockdowns were a futile approach. When the authorities started taking action it was already spreading widely. Jay Bhattacharya, one of the Great Barrington signatories, ran studies in Santa Clara and LA countries at the beginning of April 2020, showing 3% of those tested positive for COVID antibodies. So the prevalence was already too big to keep a lid on the disease, at least in California. Those studies also showed that the real death rate was about 0.2%, which was about right. Less than 1/10the rate the authorities were claiming, based only on the death rate among people showing up at a doctors. This is a pattern that has repeated through other epidemics, and is a known issue that must be studied promptly at an outbreak, but rarely is. Respiratory illnesses mostly affect the elderly, but instead of ring fencing places like care homes and protecting the actual vulnerable people, a number of places actually shipped recovering, but still infectious, people to care homes to both recuperate, and kill the residents. The panic measures that were taken completely ignored all the long term issues that had been taken into account in calm sober planning. All those issues we will be facing for years, with diseases not treated in time, stunted child development and education, and so on

Mask mandates are just theatre. Only something like an N95 mask has any real impact on transmission, and you can't wear one all day. Its too exhausting. I had people pushing me to wear them in 2003, when I was working in SARS hit areas. Its just not practical. People quickly cheat, and adjust the mask so they can breath around the edges. Masks saved nobody.

[wraper]

...Many genuine long term respected experts in their fields have been suppressed heavily over the last 2.5 years by politically connected numbskulls. The very factions in our society who were the biggest advocates of free speech, open enquiry, and minimal censorship in the past have become the most censorious. Its a sad state of affairs.

Do you have examples?  Several "respected experts" have embraced pseudoscience, Didier Raoult, Robert Malone are a couple of examples.  Just because they are "respected" doesn't mean to say they don't spread misinformation (for grift?) or dangerous ideas, and I didn't even include those who are well respected in other fields (which makes their view on infectious disease worthless).

Of course one who did a major contribution in invention of mRNA vaccines is a "pseudoscientist". Haw dare he call a knee-jerk reaction and overbroad use of vaccines stupid. However if you watch what so impeccable Anthony Fauci said in the past, he made a lot of diametrically opposite claims and never admitted any fault. And god forbid you dare to question his actions, you'll be named conspiracy theorist.
What's so outrageous was in Malone's claims? For example:

Malone says, for instance, that proteins produced by vaccines can damage the body’s cells and that the risks of vaccination outweigh the benefits for children and young adults

Which actually seems to be true. From what I've seen, for children they basically give no significant benefit, however have more of the side effects than when used for adults. WTF is with this broad mandated use of vaccines lacking proper clinical testing on everyone. Mass media claims they have been properly clinically tested but that's not true. For example in US they are used under emergency use authorization by FDA, not a normal approval which requires all of the necessary clinical trials. If benefits strongly outweigh possible negative consequences, sure, use them, like for elderly people. But when you aren't 100% sure, jabbing every child is a poor practice. Especially considering there are known serious side effects and no full clinical trials were done. In the past it was claimed that jabbing the children stops the infection spreading which endangers older people, but by now it became obvious vaccines do not stop the spread. So it's beyond me why we still continue vaccinating children.
In fact, Russia invading into Ukraine stopped the COVID spread much better than any vaccine. COVID was basically gone from the news in a just few days.

[Zero999]

The lockdowns and masks mitigated against the more than 200K deaths

There's no evidence to support this. It's also just as likely the lockdowns caused 200k deaths.

The lockdowns protected the old and vulnerable, at the expense of the young and healthy. Let's say they mitigated against 200k deaths, yet caused 50k deaths. If the 200k were mostly in the over 75s, yet  50k were mainly in the under 35s, then they would have caused many more years of healthy life lost.

They also don't give any persistent protection. It seems they don't properly stimulate the immune system to create memory T-cells, or their effectiveness wouldn't fade so quickly.

Has this been proven either way? Don't forget Protection against reinfection from natural immunity is also short lived.

My layman's understanding is there are three layers of protection: the antibodies in the mucus membranes, those in the blood and memory T-cells. The antibodies in the mucus membranes are produced in response to natural infection. They are short lived diminishing shortly after clearing the virus. Those in the bloodstream are longer lived and the T-cells offer lifelong protection.

If T-cells give long lived protection, then why do we have reinfection? It turns out they only offer protection against severe disease and death, not mild infection. Protection against reinfection starts to decline after the antibodies in the mucus membranes are gone and more so, as those in the blood diminish. This means that on reinfection virus infects the upper airway, causing mild cold/flu type symptoms and the T-cells help the body to rapidly produce antibodies which deal with the virus, before it gets into the lungs. It's not just the type of virus which determines disease severity, but where the infection is. The same virus in the nose will cause a cold, whilst if it gets into the alveoli it can cause pneumonia and death.

The vaccines don't produce mucosal immunity, but antibodies in the blood. I don't see why they wouldn't produce T-cell immunity and the data does show they have a greater protection against severe disease, than reinfection, which would support that. Either way, it doesn't matter, as long as the vulnerable person gets exposed the real infection, whilst they still have a significant level of protection from the vaccine, they'll make the T-cells.

[tom66]

[..] The vaccines did nothing really useful, anyway. They have no effect on transmission, little effect on reducing infection, but may give some reduction in seriousness. They also don't give any persistent protection.

This is not really true.  Certainly for the first COVID strain, and even Delta, the vaccines were quite effective (>60% for the mRNA versions) at preventing transmission, and still >90% effective at preventing hospitalisation and then something like 50% effective in the hospitalised population at reducing death rates (suggesting that they were reasonable effective at stopping you from getting a serious outcome, but if you did have a serious outcome, they were only marginally beneficial.)

The transmission protection for Omicron was much lower, because in part it's a much more transmissible variant, and the vaccines are less effective against that.  But they still offered good protection against severe outcomes.  I think knowing now that they aren't as useful against transmission does indicate that they should be targeted towards the older and more vulnerable populations - and that looks like what the NHS and PHE are doing here, no one healthy under 50 is going to be offered a shot unless they're a caretaker for a vulnerable person.

You can see the effect that the vaccination program had on reducing the death rate; vaccines were in place before the 2021 wave.  It dropped it by almost 90%, which correlates strongly with the vaccine rollout.  A similar pattern is seen worldwide.
https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/deaths?areaType=nation&areaName=England

Note the dominant strain in early 2021 was Delta.

In terms of long term protection, the vaccines show pretty good effectiveness, at least as good as the flu vaccine, but the problem is the virus mutates so often and will mutate to avoid vaccines, so it will be necessary to offer boosters to this population even if the vaccine lasted a long time.

The long established plans were that you couldn't contain an infection like COVID once it had started spreading, so heavy lockdowns were a futile approach. When the authorities started taking action it was already spreading widely.

Broadly agree lockdowns were too late, but at the early stage of the disease it was an unknown, we did not know if we would see healthy 30 year olds collapsing from the disease. So the first lockdown was justifiable in the face of an unknown, possibly deadly virus. And yes we could have looked at Asia to see how their demographics were faring, but (a) the data from China was not trustworthy, and (b) as we have seen there are genotype and cultural differences across ethnicities that impact the behavior of COVID.  For instance, Japan has had very low death rates despite having an aging population and low vaccination rates until the after the Tokyo Olympics - about 10% of what the UK has seen.

Respiratory illnesses mostly affect the elderly, but instead of ring fencing places like care homes and protecting the actual vulnerable people, a number of places actually shipped recovering, but still infectious, people to care homes to both recuperate, and kill the residents. The panic measures that were taken completely ignored all the long term issues that had been taken into account in calm sober planning. All those issues we will be facing for years, with diseases not treated in time, stunted child development and education, and so on

I think the effects of long COVID and myocarditis from COVID indicate that it's not as simple as protecting the elderly.  It's also very difficult to isolate the elderly from an outbreak like this (think grandma living with parents who are working.) But I do agree that there should have been a more targeted approach, the lockdowns did serious harm and I'm not convinced that the lockdowns past any vaccination program were ever justifiable. I also don't see the point in partial lockdowns, like the UK did during the second wave before Christmas, it was something like you could go to the pub but only if you ate a meal. Lockdowns have to be harsh and brutal if they are going to stop the virus, otherwise you're just slowing the inevitable exponential curve.

[Tangent_Tracker]

Personally, I think Musk is a f*cking idiot. I bet he would not score terribly high in an IQ test. It has been demonstrated that he lied about his qualifications and doesn't in fact hold any formal college quals as far as I am aware, his programming has been described as a complete mess by those who have been given the job of tidying it up, and he plagerises ideas and makes out like they are his own. Who else could invent a 100 year old concept like hyperloop and then "give it away" for the good of humanity lol.. He is a piece of sh!t. I loved how thunderfoot ripped his white paper apart, but of course it's easier than air hockey 

I reckon he will be getting his comupance for all the pump and dump he's been doing by promising X next year and not delivering. For the solar tiles scam, and starlink is just doomed. Already they are capping data and they can never get enough people buying remote access at the prices they are asking... They will have to roll it out to urban areas and there wont be enough bandwidth! Folks are realising now and you can see that reflected in Tesla share price, for instance.

He has pulled the wool over so many people's eyes it's unbelievable. Surprised anyone wants to work for his these days.

Game is nearly over and he should be driving round in a car with a breifcase full of samples for a dishwashing company.


Here is a video that breifly explains him and the others better than I could....

[Zero999]

This is not really true.  Certainly for the first COVID strain, and even Delta, the vaccines were quite effective (>60% for the mRNA versions) at preventing transmission, and still >90% effective at preventing hospitalisation and then something like 50% effective in the hospitalised population at reducing death rates (suggesting that they were reasonable effective at stopping you from getting a serious outcome, but if you did have a serious outcome, they were only marginally beneficial.)

That's certainly true, but even back them we were warned of mutations and that protection against infection was unlikely to be long-lived as antibody levels decline.

In terms of long term protection, the vaccines show pretty good effectiveness, at least as good as the flu vaccine, but the problem is the virus mutates so often and will mutate to avoid vaccines, so it will be necessary to offer boosters to this population even if the vaccine lasted a long time.

The data in support of the boosters is flaky. Only proper randomised, double blind, placebo controlled trials were conducted for the first two doses. The third wasn't blinded or placebo controlled and the newer bivalent Omicron vaccines weren't properly tested on humans, just mice. Antibody titers were used to justify approval, rather than protection against severe disease and death.

It appears protection against severe disease and death from natural infection and the older vaccines is still maintained. T-cell immunity appears to be holding up against newer variants. SARS-Cov-2 is very different to influenza. It's probably on the path to becoming another common cold virus. It's possible, HCoV-OC43, a virus which now causes a common cold disease was responsible for the 1889 to 1891 pandemic, which was previously thought to be influenza.
https://sfamjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1751-7915.13889

If the above is true, annual boosters are unnecessary. Everyone will be infected when they're very young and get lifelong protection against severe disease. It's true, there will still be old and vulnerable people who die, but that's always been the case. Common cold viruses such as  HCoV-OC43 do cause severe disease such as pneumonia, leading to death of the vulnerable, but that's just life.

Broadly agree lockdowns were too late, but at the early stage of the disease it was an unknown, we did not know if we would see healthy 30 year olds collapsing from the disease. So the first lockdown was justifiable in the face of an unknown, possibly deadly virus. And yes we could have looked at Asia to see how their demographics were faring, but (a) the data from China was not trustworthy, and (b) as we have seen there are genotype and cultural differences across ethnicities that impact the behavior of COVID.  For instance, Japan has had very low death rates despite having an aging population and low vaccination rates until the after the Tokyo Olympics - about 10% of what the UK has seen.

I think you've missed the point. Random antibody samples showed the spread was already too extensive to eradicate the virus. The fact it was already present across the world, meant there was no chance of eliminating it. Perhaps if China went into lockdown, before it spread from there, it might have been contained, but it was too late by the time it appeared in Europe and America.

I think the effects of long COVID and myocarditis from COVID indicate that it's not as simple as protecting the elderly.  It's also very difficult to isolate the elderly from an outbreak like this (think grandma living with parents who are working.) But I do agree that there should have been a more targeted approach, the lockdowns did serious harm and I'm not convinced that the lockdowns past any vaccination program were ever justifiable. I also don't see the point in partial lockdowns, like the UK did during the second wave before Christmas, it was something like you could go to the pub but only if you ate a meal. Lockdowns have to be harsh and brutal if they are going to stop the virus, otherwise you're just slowing the inevitable exponential curve.

You say partial lockdowns were a waste of time, but when the UK originally went into lockdown, there were plenty of countries not in lockdown and people were still allowed to enter the country. It made no sense. Perhaps if the whole wold went into lockdown, it could've been stopped, but that wasn't going to happen.

Long COVID is a complex topic. It's possible some of it is psychological, due to all of the hysteria stirred up around the virus. Now I'm not discounting people's suffering, mental illness is real. It's just it's bad if some of it is caused by the authorities and mainstream media, rather than just the virus.

Myocarditis is also a complication of the vaccine, especially mRNA and is more common in males under the age of 40. There is evidence to show the risk of myocarditis post vaccination is greater, than that of SARS-Cov-2 in males under 40, especially following Moderna. It's also highly likely it's vastly under-reported.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.23.21268276v1.full.pdf


The idea of vaccinating children, to protect the elderly was always immoral, even when vaccines provided a high degree of protection against transmission. It's like lining up the children to defend the elderly. Medicine has always been about protecting the individual, rather than wider society.

[PlainName]

It's like lining up the children to defend the elderly.

But that's what we do with stuff like pensions. We rely on the children taking care of their elders, and that's how society works. We send off kids to die in wars because they're too young to be parents and have kids themselves. And, of course, they are fitter and more capable, but surely those would be the attributes we would want to use at home rather than spread over some battlefield mud.

[PlainName]

Here is a video that breifly explains him and the others better than I could....

He's entertaining but then he is a comic. And, uh, sometime TV presenter. I wonder what attributes you think he has, other than those, that make his video meaningful in a "this is what's really happening" sense?

[tom66]

Broadly agree lockdowns were too late, but at the early stage of the disease it was an unknown, we did not know if we would see healthy 30 year olds collapsing from the disease. So the first lockdown was justifiable in the face of an unknown, possibly deadly virus. And yes we could have looked at Asia to see how their demographics were faring, but (a) the data from China was not trustworthy, and (b) as we have seen there are genotype and cultural differences across ethnicities that impact the behavior of COVID.  For instance, Japan has had very low death rates despite having an aging population and low vaccination rates until the after the Tokyo Olympics - about 10% of what the UK has seen.

I think you've missed the point. Random antibody samples showed the spread was already too extensive to eradicate the virus. The fact it was already present across the world, meant there was no chance of eliminating it. Perhaps if China went into lockdown, before it spread from there, it might have been contained, but it was too late by the time it appeared in Europe and America.

[..]

You say partial lockdowns were a waste of time, but when the UK originally went into lockdown, there were plenty of countries not in lockdown and people were still allowed to enter the country. It made no sense. Perhaps if the whole wold went into lockdown, it could've been stopped, but that wasn't going to happen.

I don't recall that ever being an objective of the lockdown strategy, except possibly in some countries like New Zealand which managed to react early enough.  (Notably, NZ and the UK both entered lockdown around the same time, but NZ had many fewer cases, making total eradication inside the country a possibility.)

Of course, across the world CoV-2 would never be eradicated, the stated objectives of the lockdowns were to give the health service breathing space, ideally reducing the reproductive rate below 1.  The fact that the border remained open - a friend of mine flew in from China on Feb 2020 and was not even so much as asked if they had symptoms - is a colossal failure of this government (but given how much they've cocked up, is it all that surprising?) 

Long COVID is a complex topic. It's possible some of it is psychological, due to all of the hysteria stirred up around the virus. Now I'm not discounting people's suffering, mental illness is real. It's just it's bad if some of it is caused by the authorities and mainstream media, rather than just the virus.

I do think that there's an under-investigated link between anxiety and disease, a friend of mine who is otherwise healthy was terrified of getting long COVID and, well, he got it and feels really sick as a result. (He has just started to get better.)  However, there is definitely evidence of serious harm from long COVID, even if you disregard the anxiety link.  Things like brain micro-clots (possibly a cause of the oft-reported 'brain fog' - a bit like permanent "hypoxemia" if such a thing could exist) and lung tissue damage.  As for myocarditis, I do think there's something to be investigated in the vaccines there, but given the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines elicit similar responses against COVID but have much different risk profiles for myocarditis, it suggests it may be related to a subcomponent of the vaccine that is less well understood, rather than the mRNA technology.

[Tangent_Tracker]

Nothing in the video itself, but there is enough info out there to see what is really going on, and the video is a good brief narrative on that..

Time will tell ;-)

[MT]

Elon buying Twitter is definitely a good thing. He wants to clamp down on child porn, which wasn't being dealt with properly by the previous owners. People can scream all they want about bad people, being able to use bad words, but those who harm children are the lowest of the low. Targeting them should be the number one priority, not censoring politically incorrect speech.

Then under Twatters new dictator Mr Musk this happens (while reinstalling The Trompet and Alex Jones, or did or did he not is the question?) To be or not to be as Prince Musk.. sorry.. Hamlet said!):  or  you decide.




And according to this random found lawyer Mr Hamlet is in for a barrage of legal issues that most likely according to him Mr Hamlet will run Twatter crap to the ground, which of course would be very nice if he did!

[coppice]

[..] The vaccines did nothing really useful, anyway. They have no effect on transmission, little effect on reducing infection, but may give some reduction in seriousness. They also don't give any persistent protection.

This is not really true.  Certainly for the first COVID strain, and even Delta, the vaccines were quite effective (>60% for the mRNA versions) at preventing transmission, and still >90% effective at preventing hospitalisation and then something like 50% effective in the hospitalised population at reducing death rates (suggesting that they were reasonable effective at stopping you from getting a serious outcome, but if you did have a serious outcome, they were only marginally beneficial.)

Are you sure about that? Transmission of this particular virus occurs from the mucus membranes, but the vaccines have not been producing antibodies in the mucus membranes. Studies seem to show next to no reduction in transmission, and nobody from the vaccine makers ever said they might. "Get the vaccine and save granny" was something governments made up themselves, based on no evidence. There were recent reports of them making "shocking" admissions about this, but they've actually said all along that they never tested for the vaccine's effects on transmission during the approval trials. Recent studies show higher rates of transmission from people who have been fully vaccinated. However, it is unclear if that is a quirk of the vaccine or if people who feel protected are just more careless about getting infected.

The reduction in hospitalisations have more to do with mutation than vaccine.

[tom66]

Are you sure about that? Transmission of this particular virus occurs from the mucus membranes, but the vaccines have not been producing antibodies in the mucus membranes. Studies seem to show next to no reduction in transmission, and nobody from the vaccine makers ever said they might. "Get the vaccine and save granny" was something governments made up themselves, based on no evidence. There were recent reports of them making "shocking" admissions about this, but they've actually said all along that they never tested for the vaccine's effects on transmission during the approval trials. Recent studies show higher rates of transmission from people who have been fully vaccinated. However, it is unclear if that is a quirk of the vaccine or if people who feel protected are just more careless about getting infected.

The reduction in transmission is in line with the reduction of developing symptoms:  the vaccines were highly effective against the original strain against preventing infection (~90%), and extremely effective against preventing hospitalisation (~99% if I recall correctly.)  They were engineered for the original strain, so it makes sense.  For Delta, the vaccines were less effective, infection protection was around 60% and hospitalisation around 90%.  If you are not infected, you are considerably less likely to spread the virus.  There are of course a few people who get the virus only in their respiratory pathway and can still transmit it in small doses, but since the virus is mostly spread by aerosolised droplets, it requires a more severe immune response to get the highest transmissibility.

In fact, what we saw with the vaccination program is it essentially reduces (with Delta) the transmission rate to be similar to that of a full lockdown, but with no restrictions actually required.  For 6 odd months we had a reproductive number hovering around 1, despite restrictions being minimal in this time.  It took a near-total lockdown with almost all social contact being legally prohibited to achieve this.  It's remarkably effective if you consider that.

The reduction in hospitalisations have more to do with mutation than vaccine.

The evidence does not support this assertion.   The reduction in deaths and hospitalisations in the UK occurred post the mass vaccination drive, especially once the over 50's had been vaccinated.  At this time, Delta was still dominant.  (And remember in both unvaccinated and vaccinated individuals, Delta has a higher fatality rate, not a lower one.)  Omicron did not emerge until November 2021, well after the vaccine program had offered a vaccine to every adult.