Comments by "Harry Stoddard" (@HarryS77) on "NBC News"
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@Nobu Nee YT deleted my comment, probably because of links.
Re: PCR cycles, it seems like you didn't take a moment to check the misinformation you were reading online and to find out that there's a much less nefarious and technical reason for the Ct value (Politifact "CDC did not change its criteria")
As for "skyrocketing" cases, it's not happening because of vaccinated people. There has been an increase in new cases, even among the vaccinated, largely due to the Delta variant, but the total case number is far below what we experienced before the vaccine.
It's also not surprising that as the vaccinated population increases, more new cases will be among the vaccinated. Vaccines aren't magic—some percentage of people will get sick. It's just a smaller number, with less serious infections, than without the vaccine. If 100% of a population were vaccinated, 100% of cases would be among the vaccinated, but that's neither surprising nor alarming by itself. So if Israel has an 80% vaccination rate, it's likely to have a greater number of vaccinated people get sick.
The vaccines do seem to be less effective against Delta, but that efficacy is still above the mandated threshold. Getting vaccinated will also help prevent the mutation and spread of more infectious, virulent strains later. And the vaccines greatly lower your risk of serious disease and hospitalization in the event that you do get Delta after being vaccinated. This is how vaccines have always worked.
And yes, 1% of new cases, at least in the US, are vaccinated. 99% are not. We see that play out geographically where, particularly in the South, there are large areas of vaccine denial and more and more people are getting sick. The major, serious spikes are happening in places like Louisiana because of vaccine refusal.
Recent data shows that vaccination yields an 8-fold reduction in disease and a 25-fold decrease in hospitalization and death.
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@Nobu Nee Why can't you actually address the facts and data? Why, when shown that the facts contradict your view or that you've misunderstood the facts, do you retreat into personalizing the crisis into fearmongering—in the vaguest possible terms—over spooky, bad experts?
I think I know why. That style of argumentation doesn't require you to know anything. You just have to have a vague suspicion of experts, sometimes based on legitimate concerns but always overgeneralized. In fact, not knowing is a virtue for this style of argument, because experts know things, and since we've already stipulated that we can't trust experts (unless that expert is telling us covid is fake and to buy their supplement), it makes sense that knowing things is bad too.
But I'm not appealing to experts. I'm appealing to the overwhelming consensus of data. The two are not the same. The data would be more or less true regardless of the moral character or trustworthiness of whatever expert referenced it. Sometimes it's useful to consult expert opinion on the interpretation of data in a field we aren't trained in, as I showed above when someone misleadingly argued that ARR is THE correct way to understand vaccine efficacy, but that's not blindly trusting experts.
So, again, why can't you address the data, which overwhelmingly supports vaccination? Why can't you change your mind when it's readily demonstrable that you overlooked or misinterpreted something? If you're not basing your anti-vaxx opinion on data, but on conspiratorial presumptions, why should anyone listen to you?
I'm an anti capitalist and an anarchist/communist, so I think it's safe to assume that I'm not a shill for the state or corporations. As I replied to someone else, there's only a false virtue in the kind of reflexive contrarianism you're doing. It's just a way to avoid thinking. One can have a critique of how the crisis has been managed—eg vaccine inequality and apartheid, patent law, etc—but still recognize that vaccines are an important public health measure and that the data supports their efficacy.
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@Nobu Nee You might actually want to read the case report before citing a number you saw on boomer social media, because it doesn't support your point.
You're talking about a single county where presumably 10k+ attended several large events, and there were around 300 breakthrough cases. As the study points out, when more people are vaccinated, it's expected that a larger proportion of infections will occur among the vaccinated.
So the 74% looks much more alarming when you take it out of context. Massachusetts has a 63% vaccination rate.
To prevent breakthrough events like what happened in Barnstable, the CDC is recommending masking for everyone in areas where there are surges. This isn't surprising. They're not dismissing vaccine effectiveness based on this one period, in one state, in one county, because that'd be like dismissing seatbelts because occasionally people still die in really bad crashes even when they wear one.
Moreover, if you look at national data, or even just data for Massachusetts, new cases among the vaccinated make up less than 1%. The overwhelming number of new cases are among the unvaccinated. Please apply a little critical reason the next time your stupid friends send you a link.
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