I don't think that's accurate:

Secondary sources are saying "4 per 1,000,000 vs 5 per 1,000,000," which agrees there's no difference in risk, but I still wouldn't credit them above the Oxford paper. source

The association between blood clots and adenovirus exists in the political sphere because of theatrical "suspensions" of adenovirus vaccines starting with J&J in the US for "further investigation" after six women got blood clots, but you said "statistically associated." I don't think a statistical association was ever established during this unfolding news story about blood clots, and the association was subsequently disproven by the above paper, and maybe others.

The original supension's purpose was to spread the word to hospitals, "avoid heparin when treating the blood clots that result from vaccines." Heparin is often used for blood clots but makes vaccine blood clots worse. A pause to change treatment plans makes sense, since with vaccines as opposed to disease we have total control of the schedule. I don't fully understand the heparin advice and may be garbling something, but that was the outcome of the J&J suspension: new advice on how to treat the clots that do occur.

There was never statistical evidence you could avoid blood clots by using mRNA instead.

Prefer PDF to Youtube videos and Google News links.

This might end up being true but is not the consensus view yet. It's the right question, but cardiac specialists don't agree we have an answer yet.

With biology it can be important to define terms actionably because few things are black and white. A PCR test can detect an asymptomatic infection that does not spread. Do you count that as a "reinfection?" If not for the test, it would not exist.

When it comes time to make a decision, do we compare the asymptomatic infection that doesn't spread against a vaccine that's long-term effective only against "severe outcomes"? To me, it seems like this often happens now because terms aren't defined and biology is more complicated than a board game. This is fundamentally a swindle.

With respect to "many" people, "breakthrough infections" are far more common that "reinfections." We've known this for a long time. The results are very clear.

This may be so, but I'm concerned we're making bad decisions in an authoritarian way and think it's critical we return to basing decisions on data over anecdotes. We have a lot of data that doesn't agree reinfections are common. An anecdote or impression could tell us where to look, but it shouldn't be decisive, especially not on something so well-investigated.

Instead it seems the discussion is driven by meme-driven speculation, and by small, poor studies cherry-picked by what's left of FDA and CDC after the resignations. They recently presented a cherry-picked study misleadingly, comparing vaccinated-and-previously-infected vs. previously-infected, but using that politically to defend the ongoing force-vaccination of previously-infected nurses and others (which should compare previously-infected-alone against vaccinated-alone). This sloppy interpretation nearly dominated the slashdot threat at the time, but thankfully got some deserved push-back.

We spent over a year saying "there is so much about this virus we don't know." I think a small faction was gleeful not to know, so they could speculate freely, while most of us wanted to know as soon as possible. Now, we do know, but that small faction is still around, trying to pretend we don't. I can't accept that any more.

That's almost certainly false. While it technically can happen that a naturally immune person spreads, natural immunity to any variant is somewhere between six and thirteen times more sterilizing than vaccine immunity. It can be difficult to get a good number because people who know they're vaccinated may behave differently, and different age and medical cohorts choose to avoid vaccination, but studies attempt to compensate for this, and review articles consider the result a clear consensus.

In other words, multiple studies have shown this, and no study has contradicted it. Some studies have claimed to show a small benefit to being both vaccinated and recovered over being just recovered. They're not very good at controlling confounders in my opinion, and they necessarily ignore the risk of vaccination because we haven't kept good data on it, which likely make their conclusions backwards because the benefits are small, and the vaccines don't last. But no study I've seen convincingly disagrees with this claim: being recovered alone is better than being vaccinated alone, for both spread and severe outcomes.

That's probably why we don't see spread in Sweden but we do in Israel, Ireland, Iceland, and all the >90% vaccinated countries. Who are you going to believe, tertiary source propaganda and government ministers on CNN, or your lying eyes?

In any case, with the mountain of evidence available, any claim that vaccination alone is better than natural immunity alone, for any purpose, shouldn't even be considered without evidence, in PDF form with a data table, and "considered" does not mean accepted. It means weighed against, minimum, the citations above.

Citation needed.

besides being "without evidence," it's unclear what this "viral load" stuff would even mean, given the above. It's just a "marker." Does it spread or not? Does it lead to severe outcomes or not? We already know. We've known for months.

agreed. unfortunate we're reduced to dealing with anecdotes.

Vaccines don't substitute for tests because they're not as effective as a test at preventing spread to a vulnerable person. That's why tests and vaccines are often used by the same people.

According to Israeli studies, and confirmed by several others, all cited by the CDC's July 29th leaks, RRR on becoming infectious is <50% and the viral load is similar in vaccinated vs unvaccinated. The risk to the vaccinated person is much lower, but vaccines aren't a substitute for testing for stopping spread in high stakes scenarios like nursing homes. They do affect spread but not enough to protect someone at 100x greater risk, and not enough for eradication like smallpox. That was the substance of the CDC's leak.

The facts cannot be inferred by telling just-so stories from the reaction to them. We are well past that. You have to look at the facts directly.

and not protective against spread when worn in the way ordinary people wear them. However ordinary people can use a test properly.

The mask debate is so tiresome it's banned from some subreddits, but no reasonable cautious person would substitute a mask for a test. No sane person would prefer a mask to a test, if you could have only one.

Minimum, you must agree there's no scientific consensus on masks so it's not an excuse for not bothering to make tests available.

My primary care clinic won't give one without a prescription. It's a fancy, expensive clinic in a big city, so the results usually come within 1 day, but aren't guaranteed to come that fast, and it took me one more day to haggle the prescription. The walk-in clinic down the street, which doesn't take appointments but will give you a prescription and a test at once if you pay premium for it, takes hours to do the test and more than three days to return a result.

Your dismissive claim is misinformation. PCR tests are great in Iceland, but in the US the situation is uneven. They're not a substitute for rapid tests. They're not rapid, cheap, or convenient.

"Adequate" is a weasel word.

What?

Where is this tic coming from? That doesn't have anything to do with actual information.

lots of words to say, "The FDA has a job."

Yup, but not doing it as well as the Europeans.

speculation.

The correct solution is obviously to place restrictions on the children, not on the adults.

There's an age limit to that strategy, and it's about 12. This solution can't do any better than placing the same "information you are allowed to see" restrictions on adults as on rebellious, resourceful "young adult"-age children. That's correct and traditional, and it's good.

As an adult, I've never seen porn worse than Piers Anthony and C J Cherryh because I haven't gone looking for it. I don't think children should be reading those books, but I'm torn whether to actually do anything about it other than say that they're perverted in cringey ways and hope they come to the same realization I did as a child, "actually, this is disgusting." Most people accept that limiting what children can read is self-defeating.

Meanwhile I'm sure porn worse than those young adult books does exist, and I think maybe it shouldn't. I'm not totally against content restrictions on adults, around things like porn or gambling. I'm not sure what they should be. We could have an "itty bitty titty committee" like Australia. We could require building tools that amplify the willpower of the user, like an alcoholic that has a lock on a liqour cabinet (he can break it open with a crowbar, but maybe it's enough to get past a moment of weakness).

Building a massive population control grid to separate teenagers from adults has lost the plot. I don't understand how anyone could be so stupid, because it's so obvious which thing is more threatening, and it is putting adults under the control grid. And imaginging that adults will be able to get around an Internet restriction while teenagers won't is obviously ridiculous. Instead they will have to learn to control their consumption by choice, using tools, which is possible to do by providing tools, advocating, and modeling "yes, this distraction and filth threatens to degrade me, too."

Yup.

They are already doing this in Sweden and Estonia. It's frictionless and free for a web site to demand government-backed ID over a web browser (run indirectly via banks in Sweden, or directly by the government in Estonia). Once a system for nailing web sessions to bags of meat is built, it is almost irresistible. Add a contrived excuse why it has to be used all the time, and it will be.

We could build an "anonymous attestation" system to satisfy the contrived excuse of age-checking while allowing unlimited pseudonymous identities, but we won't, because everyone knows the excuse is not real but contrived and that what we're seeing is the roll-out of a power structure. The discussions have already become ridiculous and ungrounded: we need to "protect democracy" by "fighting populism." There are no more custodians, just wannabe-lords and peasants.

This doesn't make any sense. You want to "know who [you're] talking to," but your only reason is some flattering feudal ownership fantasy, and you flatter yourself a second time by saying you "don't much care" so everyone should congratulate you on being broad-minded.

Yup, that tracks.

I respect your intent and even your love of fidonet, but I really disapprove of this squirrely language here. The proper way is to start with the actual costs and benefits of each decision, then go back to whether each person is treated fairly and the endeavor is encouraged to flourish second, and relative to those costs and benefits. "Your yard" does not come into it, old man! I say that as one old man to another. ; )

For example, if you ask someone to give you their real name under threat of deleting their account, but promise not to give it to any of the other peasants^Wusers on the BBS, you're establishing a heirarchy. If you're not validating the real name, no legitimate purpose other than establishing the heirarchy is served.

That was the fidonet attitude, posturing little dictators lording things over people because it was "my server" or "I paid for" this or that and constantly demanding to be first monkey over anyone else who didn't run a BBS and was a mere caller. I couldn't stand it.

The first thing I did was to run a BBS. I only had one regular user, but I didn't care because it evaded the attitude problem: I posted messages via echomail instead of by calling someone else's board, and then nobody could try to settle an argument by claiming they "paid for" something and I didn't. The "upstream" board could say he's bigger than me, but now he has a real problem because if he plays that game he will lose friends. The greatest toxicity is somehow at the leaf of the graph.

The second thing I did was to get away from those people entirely and on to the proper Internet as soon as I could. Though the infrastructure universities ran was tens or hundreds of times more expensive they didn't lord it over anyone else.

A statement appropriate to the situation would be, "because you are calling the BBS, your phone number is exposed to me, which could identify you. I promise not to keep logs of this phone number and to keep caller ID disabled on the line. I promise never to disclose the phone number to other users even if it's accidentally disclosed to me. I promise not to use *69 for cases of "abuse" or other frustration where no crime has been committed. However in a criminal investigation there's no way I can keep your phone number private from the government, and I do keep logs of when users' calls started and ended."

It would never have occured to a fidonet operator to make that relevant, appropriate statement because everyone was thinking about "my yard" and all the mere users were getting low-key hazed. In the Internet's context, this kind of statement is recognizable as something you do to establish credibility and protect users. The attitudes are night-and-day different, and I don't want to go back to that old amateur nonsense.

Every time someone brings up the glory days of BBSs, I agree, but then I bring up this. It's important. It was bad, and it can happen again.

This lack of arrogance and a controlling, posturing attitude prevalent on fidonet was, in retrospect, as important to anonymity as liberal principles and American court precedent that unchilled, uncoerced speech and free association of adults takes priority over allowing kids to roam freely. "Anonymous FTP" was exactly that, while BBSs were constantly trying to push users around with download "privileges." SMTP deliberately made minimal effort to authenticate senders while echomail, although still technically primitive, wasted complexity on a trust graph. Many universities had "labs" that you could walk in and use anonymously, without providing any name real or fake, in the same way that you are allowed to enter a public library and read a book without even inventing a name for yourself. Usenet had a group for posting anonymous person-to-person messages encrypted with PGP, to frustrate traffic analysis. The second development from the PGP team after email encryption itself was anonymous remailers, which were a semi-manual form of onion routing (the relay nodes were run as a public service, but you had to compose your route manually).

This was all built to an ideal that anonymous dissent keeps the boot off our faces and that village mentalities quickly grow toxic, but a prerequisite was dropping the fidonet attitude of trying to push others into contrived patron-client relationships and then control them to no ends but self-aggrandisement. Meanwhile in the "amateur" BBS community, that controlling attitude, or a desire to escape it, was an organizing principle.

It's hateful, off-topic bigotry to compare the broad views of half the country with dragging people behind pick-up trucks and burning homes down. Calling one faction "less than basically decent" is exactly the dehumanizing behavior you'd probably like to say you're against, yet it's coming from you.

The contradictions are so obvious, come in such a tight loop, and are injected into every thread with so little provocation, I don't understand how it can go on, but it does. No side always lives up to its ideals, but this pattern is so nakedly obvious to everyone at this point I am confused. We're not involved in anything like an ordinary "discussion" any more. "Hate" is truly seductive.

It's telling that, after dividing into two "sides," most on both sides still think Gilmore was probably ousted over factional politics even though we have no facts to suggest that. It is so assumed nobody even says that part out loud. The only dispute is whether he deserved it or not.

The situation is ridiculous. But it is real.

That paper predates Delta and is directly, unambiguously contradicted by the CDC's July 29th leak, which was front page news at the time it happened and a major turning point in the conversation.

It was also contradicted by earlier evidence, but the CDC leak was basically impossible to miss for anyone following the issue.

What is your intent in spreading this misinformation?

Evil, Counterintelligence, Revenge, and Extortion.

(Ransoms, assassinations, arms, childporn.)

meh.

If organized crime were as out of control as it has been in the past we might be concerned with making tools available to stop it. Historically those have been financial tools.

For the moment I agree with you. The government and their corporate partners have overreached and used financial networks to control political speech, and illegally and unconstitutionally surveilled private transactions in bulk. I think it's currency. I think blocking it, or treating it as a security instead of a currency to give an excuse to surveil it, are part of a globalist totalitarian roll-out to oppress the peasants.

I'm just saying, I'm not sure how this will end, and I'm prepared to change my mind.

It's not good enough to show "markers" like antibodies. Every other vaccine that has been approved had to show a benefit in a real outcome like death, hospitalization, or infectiousness, and show it in a randomized controlled trial. Pfizer has not done this in children. They didn't do it for children 12 - 16, and there's no way they did it for children 5 - 11. I think it probably cannot be done, but I know they have not done it.

Meanwhile, the Høeg paper is showing it's possible there's a net harm to the child, at least for adolescent boys taking two doses. This is an unreasonable standard: we never approve a treatment because some other scientist has so far failed to show that treatment is harmful, or failed to get proof of that harm past adversarial peer review. That's ridiculous and not logic: we don't prove negatives. It's the other way around. Pfizer has to prove a benefit. They didn't do that for 12 - 16, and their drug was authorized for 12 - 16 anyway. We should not have gotten into a position where a paper like Høeg's needs to exist. Now they're pushing further. The kutzpah here is unbelievable.

They need to accept bitcoin over the lightning network to reduce fees and confirmation time. It's not reasonable to do small transactions like this on the main chain, even right now, and it's certainly not sustainable in the future as more than a toy. But doing them on the lightning network is reasonable and sustainable.

Plans like this are unpopular with some people because they provide an alternative to their oikophobic agenda to punish ourselves by deindustrializing. Performative virtue with no plausible plan and pathetic totalitarian urges are nothing new for environmentalists.

Nuclear was one big tell. Germany has massively invested in carbon virtue signalling, but they've also shut down nuclear plants so their net progress is minimal compared to France or Finland.

Carbon capture is another big tell: the plants can be built near cheap electricity and look like they can scale, but they don't give you authority to order people to scurry about doing your bidding and making sacrifices. Do you care about the number you say you care about, or do you care about performance and control?

A lot of people just want to make someone else do something, they don't care what, just so long as the other person is forced.