i mean, i’ve seen people die gasping for breath from covid (and not just diabetic cancer-patient 80 year olds before mreh mreh preexisting conditions. healthy, young people too.), so getting vaccinated was the easiest decision i’ve ever made. i felt wiped out for a couple days, then was absolutely fine. it’s strong medicine, and unfortunately as with all strong medicines some people will have bad side effects, but covid is fucking brutal and also has horrible, potentially permanent side effects. seems like some people’s cost-benefit analysis is completely off.
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I don’t expect to have my life significantly limited if choose to not take the vaccine, but I’m planning to take one anyway. I think most vaccine hesitancy is more about having cognitive biases than making informed decisions. There’s something about receiving an injection and getting potential side effects from it that is for some reason way scarier to some people than getting an actual disease, having potential side effects and giving the virus a comfy environment to mutate into something worse. I don’t really get it. Why is it so bad to skip a step and so much better to let the virus do whatever it wants to your body and immune system? People that treat getting sick multiple times as nothing while ranting about vaccines creep me out.
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are you going to vaccinate birds? cats? dogs? bats? CRISPR-modified mice in the wuhan lab where this virus (((allegedly))) escaped from? there’re plenty of potential hosts for covid viruses, you won’t be able to avoid contact with them all.
to your surprise they don’t follow the hashtag stay home save lives mantra too.
because for a ton of people covid came and went with no symptoms and no long-term damage (and people who died as a confirmed result of the injections likely have been infected naturally during the two years gap before the vaccination roll-out), and because Taiwan and a number of other countries curbed the infection without relying on the vaccines.
engaging their critical thinking and having actual health experts employed by the state who handled multiple sars outbreaks in the past kinda helped.
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Well that’s here too, No mask means NO entry. But that’s good. But it also could be that are some stores who might are okay with “no mask”. But if the police notice it, there could be a “fine”
In the beginning people were a bit of against at it, but currently nobody complains anymore and just wears a mask when going shopping.
But the reason is just simply, because you need to mind others around you. Just don’t be a selfish dick
But now I’m think of it…
At workplaces I think people cannot forse any employee to wear a mask. They only can “ask” their employees to wear a mask. Just like “we would be happy if you would wear one”.
Isn’t that the case for any damn vaccine we get in our life anyway?
We get a vaccine against other sicknesses and that’s also not without any risk.
Also so many medicines we take, it’s also not without any risk.
And we take them without thinking much…
Even if you are healthy… you can get COVID-19 in a very nasty way. So of course you just can think “it’s just a regular cold”. but when it really hits you… you might can’t live you life right now at the moment.
But those stories of younger people who received all kind of side effects of COVID-19 you just don’t see/read much.
However you are still free to get one so if you decide to get one;
For the moment choose “Pfizer” or “moderna”. Next year and they years after the vaccines will be upgraded into better vaccines. so we don’t really to worry about “Pfizer getting immunity”. It just scares people off, those vaccine developers know this already(that’s 100% not new for them ) and they surely work already on solutions.
I just wanna travel and live normal again, and when we won’t do anything against this virus… we never will be able to go back to normal life?
And I wished we could beat this virus just with some real good worldwide (goodbye to your freedom) lockdown for a month or 2-3. But sadly that’s not possible.
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LMAOOOO fuck the vaccine. Biden and the United Snakes of America can shove that shit up their asses.
These ppl ain’t never did shit to help Black ppl, but they’re supposed to have our best interest at heart? Riiiiiiight. 
History says otherwise.
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no.
beloved I don’t understand what point you’re trying to make here.
you also have several other ways to assist your own natural immunity without putting MRNA-based shit into your blood stream, which will probably be beneficial all around in the long term.
you seem delightfully clueless, considering WHO has been already caught intentionally shilling for pharma giants during the pig shit flu pandemic
and judging by Taiwan outright ignoring WHO guidelines this time and building their own emergency virus response strategy, a year from now on I won’t change my stance on this.
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I ain’t getting that shit for reasons others here have pointed out perfectly. Despite the efforts of my shitty government (Germany once again shows its sympathy for totalitarianism in this whole affair).
Gotcha. If companies can issue certificates without actually running tests, that kind of defeats the purpose lol. Every 2-3 days sounds like lot to me. It’s ok haha, I haven’t been social in months myself. That’s a positive way to look at it $$$
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What’s this animal nonsense? Sure, there was an animal-to-human transmission at some point along the line, but it’s pretty clear that the most important infections happening right now are human-to-human. That’s what I’m worried about; and people not giving any shits anymore, all while being scared to death of vaccines and weirdly cozy with rolling the dice with the virus.
I think it’s extremely self-centered, irresponsible and frankly illogical to come to the conclusion that the disease is not that bad just based on the mild symptoms they themselves had, when at the same time so many people are obviously having a bad time, suffering from long-term symptoms or dying. Then a vaccine comes out and suddenly mild symptoms in exchange for a strengthened immune response mean nothing and the rare side effects mean everything. That shit makes no sense to me.
And yeah, I’d be great if vaccines weren’t necessary. I’d have been great if China had had better standards of hygiene and didn’t try to sweep the initial epidemic under the rug. I’d have been great if Western countries had managed to respond quickly and decisively when it was clear that the virus had arrived and wasn’t going to go away overnight. But we live in the real world. Shit happens all the time, everywhere. We have to deal with it.
Taiwan has overrall done very well with their response, as have many other Asian countries, but even they are moving towards vaccinating their population as their cases are quickly rising. It’s way too late to look at their initial successful response as a model for the future, because it was based on aggressive mitigation and containment. That doesn’t work when the virus is everywhere. What does help is everyone doing their part to minimize the number of cases. What also doesn’t work is the Western model of questioning every method of fighting the virus in the name of critical thinking, then getting infected, infecting everyone around you, waving it all off and turning every attempt at reasonable discussion about the science into politics. Yes, sometimes it’s politics and sometimes it’s big business, but you know, don’t let that get in the way of fighting the disease.
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I’m sorry to hear about those around you affected by the virus. I don’t deny that covid is real and that it does affect people, but from my observations the reported effects of both the virus and vaccine have been extremely inconsistent at best. I’ve read about both people who have suffered greatly from covid and people who were just inconvenienced by it. All from both young and older age groups. Same for the vaccine, some people seem to have little to no issues while others apparently suffer severe biological side effects.
My hesitations come from there being no hard straight facts. The media can promote doctors and journals all they want, but until the results are out, I’m going to play it safe. There are a lot of extreme claims out there like that since it’s an mRNA vaccine it will alter your DNA and that it will never leave your body. Or that it can cause infertility. I’ve read from several websites saying that these claims are false and that they’ve been debunked. They’ll provide links to other articles that speak on the matter or provide a PDF document that’s just text, but no one can provide an actual test with real findings. Anyone can put text on a website and just because you’re CNN or some hot tech site doesn’t make it more certified for me.
Anthony Fauci the apparent medical expert on covid has flip flopped on several occasions regarding masking recommendations. First it was no mask, then one mask, then double masking. Hell, he’s been caught live on camera not following his own rule. So, if the experts can’t give a clear answer AND aren’t going to follow their own rules, yeah I’m gonna be cautious.
I see. I guess it might depend on the store. In any case, in the US we certainly aren’t fined by law enforcement for not wearing a mask.
My company is definitely a mask enforcer. Before the vaccine, if people wanted to go into the office for any reason, they had to schedule a day to go in and masking was a must. No excuses.
I’m not going to argue with you anymore, since you have found a comfortable coping strategy that compares (unvaccinated?) population to biotanks exclusively existing to produce mutant virus strains, and don’t see any logical distortion in that.
more people died as a result of lockdown than the covid itself, they just fell into your blindspot because there’s no research into those deaths, and how many of them are/were avoidable, and no media coverage - they prefer to feed you dramatized indian burning burials, or whatever is shocking enough.
since you didn’t enter the denial phase on that (thankfully), I will leave a quotation from wired:
Gates pushed for a plan that would permit companies to hold exclusive rights to lifesaving medicines, no matter how much they benefited from public funding. Given the enormous influence Gates has in the global public health world, his vision ultimately won out in the Covax program—which enshrines monopoly patent rights and relies on the charitable whims of rich countries and pharmaceutical giants to provide vaccines to most of the world.
Moreover, vaccine companies have profited more than enough from their investments. Pfizer spent $3 billion in vaccine research but stands to make $26 billion in vaccine sales in 2021. As economist Jayati Ghosh explained, massive government subsidies, including $12 billion from the US alone, seemed to almost entirely cover the cost of vaccine research. It is no secret that Moderna’s vaccine was basically entirely funded by the US government.
which brings the mRNA vaccine point back again: none of the big pharmaceutical companies went for the proven and reliable inactivated virus solution, it’s the experimental shit that got developed last minute, that is currently essentially being trialed now, with zero accountability and insane profit expectations on the manufacturer’s side.
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thank you for the compassion. it’s been the worst year of my life and hopefully we won’t need the mass mobilisation of health professionals into looking after covid patients again.
yeah, there’s a huge range of reactions to covid. some very elderly and very frail people have been fine, and some very young and very healthy people have died or been extremely, long-term ill. that’s part of why working through it has been so stressful – there’s things that we can identify as risk factors and that can lead to worse outcomes, but we’ve had people who on paper should have been absolutely fine get absolutely wrecked in the hospitals with it.
there are lots of hard, straight facts. there is also a huge amount of misinformation, and it’s understandable why people who either don’t have the time or the training to trawl through hundreds of pages turn to things like that, and the reporting has been absolutely shocking in this pandemic from all sides of the spectrum. it’s all been really confusing and scary, and i get it, i really do. you say about not being able to see a test with real findings, and that’s just because you can’t prove that something doesn’t happen to a level that will satsify people who have decided on misinformation. i can’t create a test that will prove that taking a paracetamol will NOT give you wings and horns and allow you to fly to heaven and fight god. it’s impossible to create a test to prove something that is impossible to happen. mrna changing your dna can’t happen. the vaccine making you infertile isn’t a thing. if being told why it can’t happen isn’t enough for you and millions upon millions of doses given, then i’m sorry but nothing will be. that’s your prerogative, and luckily you will be protected by other people opting for the vaccine. you may possibly be limited in travel or employment choices if you don’t take it, but no one is going to come to your house and force you to if you’re not comfortable with it. you have full agency over what goes into your body, so if you don’t feel like you are able to, then that’s fine.
the thing that really stands out to me is that people don’t seem to get what a horrific virus covid is. you may get it and be totally fine, but there’s a non-negligible chance you won’t be. you can also unfortunatley have a bad reaction to the vaccine, but those side effects are more rare than the ones that come from catching covid, which is why i think people’s cost/benefit analyses are off. i also get that passively catching covid can seem less scary than actively getting a treatment when it comes to bad reactions, so it’s important to make the best choice for yourself that you can.
i can’t speak on fauci, i don’t know much about him because i’m not american, but i’m sorry that somebody in a position of trust has clearly broken it. on masking however, experts weren’t sure what to recommend first because it was a novel virus that they were discovering how it operates. they made the best recommendations for the information they had been able to come to, but then they found out more about how it spreads and their recommendations changed. that’s a good thing. if a scientist makes a recommendation then finds out more things that show that their recommendations were false, it would be an absolute disaster to not update their findings and recommendations. i get how that can be confusing for the people hearing it though, but we just didn’t know anything about it when it came about. cloth masks don’t do much for you yourself, but they are able to cut transmission enough when used en-masse that if you are in a place with a covid-positive person and everyone is wearing a mask, then the chances of you also contracting covid are reduced a non-negligible amount. it’s not some magical barrier, though, and relies on the majority complying. you won’t know you’re sick until you’ve been spreading it for days, you can’t know, and that’s why they’re important to help cut enough trains of transmission. if you got noticeable symptoms on the first day, it could be different because it would be easy to isolate: finding out what a huge deal asymptomatic spread is was why masks became recommended or mandated, and we didn’t know about that at the beginning of the pandemic.
since you don’t want to take the vaccine, i would advise keeping up with some social distancing until your community reaches really low numbers of community spread. that’s going to give you the best chances of coming through this totally unscathed. 
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which brings the mRNA vaccine point back again: none of the big pharmaceutical companies went for the proven and reliable inactivated virus solution, it’s the experimental shit that got developed last minute, that is currently essentially being trialed now, with zero accountability and insane profit expectations on the manufacturer’s side.
i’m not sure where you’re located, but if you’re in the us, mexico has approved and deployed covaxin and coronavac which are both inactivated virus vaccines, so when travel opens up more broadly, you may be able to get the vaccine technology that you feel comfortable with and a vacation at the same time. if you never do that’s fine and your prerogative, but it’s an option for the future!
My company is definitely a mask enforcer. Before the vaccine, if people wanted to go into the office for any reason, they had to schedule a day to go in and masking was a must. No excuses.
And I think that’s totally fine.
Protecting each other health comes first before someone’s own egoism. ← that’s how I see it.
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You’re right, for someone like me, nothing other than real analysis won’t convince me. And I’m fine with accepting the inconveniences. I’m willing to get fired for holding onto my rights and having limited travelling options.
First off, I just want to say I absolutely respect your takes and my response is in no way an attempt to disagree with you out of animosity or discredit your experience. It’s also not directed specifically to you.
With that said, I try to keep up as much as I can with the news. I don’t follow US mainstream media anymore because they’ve been proven to suppress information and lean heavily on one side of the spectrum. 0% journalism, 100% controlled narrative. I’m not saying it’s propaganda, buuuuuut:
I’m also not convinced that analysis getting pumped out via the media or the government is reliable. As an example, the US national public health agency AKA CDC (short for center of disease control and prevention) has used some questionable algorithms in calculating covid deaths which I think has inflated the actual number of deaths in 2019/2020. Basically, if there’s a fraction of a plausibility that someone might have passed from covid, it was counted as a covid death. No test results required. The document that details this is still on their website and is accessible to anyone.
This clip explains it much better (2:05 talks specifically on the covid death diagnosis)
Another reason why I personally feel like the severity of covid is overstated is due to mutiple accounts of US politicians making mandates on social distancing, not travelling, masking up, etc. and then not following their own rules. Huge one is when president Biden signed a mandate requring anyone entering a federal building to wear a mask. Just hours later after signing it, he and his family show up inside a federal building on live TV no mask and around other people. Here’s a list of a whole lot of other politicians who seem to think that covid is not as bad as they are making it out to be:
If this outbreak is as bad as they are saying, why wouldn’t they follow their own advice? Wouldn’t they want to do everything they could to stay safe? And yet, they seem to act the most careless.
I dunno, for me the “facts” and reactions to them aren’t lining up. And the rules seem to bend depending on who talks about it. This is just my observation though.
On vaccines specifically, I also find it strange that companies (at least in the US) are literally bribing their employees to take it. If something is truly good you don’t need to put out bribes, people will be drawn to it by themselves. If safety is truly the goal, I would think government and companies would allow their people to act in whichever way they are comfortable and keep up the mask and social distancing recommendations until the vaccine is in a more stable condition. However, they seem very keen on pushing out the vaccine in its current state despite reports of people experiencing extreme side effects.
I’ve calculated the costs and benefits for myself, and for me I’m not seeing a lot of immediate benefits of injecting myself with mystery substance.
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I can’t find the exact videos I’m thinking about neither on twitter, nor on youtube right now which is weird, but you probably were already too busy with the workload when the Great American Drama Over Wearing The Masks Outdoors burst out.
it was pretty much exclusively white trash christians (with like some non-white trash like protestants who were the first to bring covid to south korea through their cultish mingling.)
the problem is they are a sizeable, politically influential community.
I found a based Canadian example, but there were more during the first, most enforced lockdowns:
but of course it’s so much easier to blame everything on “chinese hygiene”
I really appreciate you engaging with me, and I don’t take you having a different take from me offensive or confronting. i think you are incorrect about this thing, but I don’t think you’re stupid or bad or whatever else. we all have to make the best decisions for ourself, and hopefully we are both on the way out of this whole thing.
it’s hugely unfortunate that people in positions of power and influence let the people, and you, down like that. it is, in my opinion, inexcusable and shameful.
the thing with covid, is it is more likely than not that if you got it you would come through fine. most people don’t die, most people don’t end up with severely impacted lives. the vast majority of people are absolutely fine. the trouble is that when you’re working with such large numbers of people in the population, those small chances end up making very big numbers. and secondly is that we can’t really predict that well who is going to need hospitalisation and get extremely severe disease and who is going to shrug it off. the two things together make for a very volatile and scary situation when it’s left to run rampant, because if we get back to the situations we were in last year then people can’t access hospitals for the wide variety of emergency and routine procedures. in the uk we were very close to breaking, and if we had then there would have been millions of people completely without access to a hospital, for both covid and the multitude of other situations that require medical attention. you saw what happened in india. it’s terrifying and heartbreaking. we now have a monstrous backlog of “non emergency” surgeries, some of which have now become emergencies. we are going to be catching up for a very long time and there will be many people who die because there was not the people to be able to give them the treatment they needed back when we were in the heights of the emergency. this is the situation we are in, and our health service didn’t even fully break. it was and is really fucking bad, and it could have been so much worse.
the bottom line is that you probably would be fine. society would not be. and even the most individualistic person still relies on society and community.
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that whole thing is very weird to me. like I get it, I suppose, but it feels very weird from the outside.
America’s insistence on masking outdoors has been baffling too since we’ve known for nearly a year that outdoors spread is can be basically discounted as long as people aren’t like, spitting in each other’s mouth and licking each other’s eyeballs. I know Americans are generally quite friendly but I didn’t know they were that friendly.