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Diana's avatar

My kids have a book called “An Illustrated Guide to Bad Arguments.” We could rewrite the entire thing using examples from the mRNA vaccine rollout. Truly, it seemed to be the end of logic among those who should have known better. Well-educated, intelligent people said stupid things— when they even bothered to try to provide levelheaded explanations. One of my favorites— probably appearing somewhere on a pamphlet provided to doctors for reasoning with stubborn patients was— “while this is a new vaccine, we know from long experience with vaccines that (blah blah blah).” Sure. That’s why I tell my kids that fentanyl is safe, effective, and has no long term side effects because Claritin, Tums, and Tylenol are on the shelves of the local pharmacy.

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Rikard's avatar

Rydberg? Thanks, now I'm hungry!

https://swedishfood.com/swedish-food-recipes-main-courses/536-beef-rydberg

For vaccines efficiency, all graphs for such should start in the year 1900. The reason for this is, most of the diseases we vaccinate for dropped off /more/ between ca 1900 and 1950, than between 1950 and 2000.

Reason being, nutrition, better housing, clean water, and modern sanitation (and knowledge of such) increased the odds of people surviving infections - the much-maligned idea of a society providing basic yet decent living conditions for all is empirically speaking superior to all other measures.

What the vaccines did was that they broke the back on smallpox, and that led politicians, pundits, and capitalists to think we could eradicate disease - old magazines and books from the 1950s and 1960s are choc-full of the same fervent belief in the miracles of science "in just ten years time" as were the tech-mags of the same time predicting cities on the Moon before the year 2000.

Whereas most actual researchers into biology, vaccines et cetera were quite wary of meddling with mRNA, DNA and such and for good reason - no putting the djinn back in the bottle once it's out.

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