Between April 2021 and March 2022, an estimated 55.9 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines would not have been administered absent the Campaign. Campaign-attributed vaccinations resulted in 2,576,133 fewer mild COVID-19 cases, 243,979 fewer nonfatal COVID-19 hospitalizations, and 51,675 lives saved from COVID-19. The total Campaign benefit was $740.2 billion, and Campaign and vaccination costs totaled $8.3 billion, with net benefits of approximately $732.0 billion. For every $1 spent, the Campaign and corresponding vaccination costs resulted in benefits of approximately $89.54.
That’s literally a psy-op, or to be kind a press release. The lead authors are from “Fors Marsh”, a government (HHS) propaganda (behavioral change) contractor. Two more authors work for HHS directly. None appear to be bona-fide researchers.
From a 2023 Fors Marsh press release:
For more than 20 years, Fors Marsh has been serving federal clients like the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT), and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Fors Marsh uses behavioral science to improve public health and well-being, promote public service, build climate resilience, increase civic engagement, and develop tomorrow’s federal workforce. Fors Marsh’s public education work has a strong focus on using an evidence-based approach to behavior change—one that ensures that data drives decisions, research provides consumer insights, and strategies and messages are culturally relevant.(emphasis added)
But really, you should have been able to tell that those figures were not credible, that that paper was not credible, that citing it would reflect badly on your own credibility. That must sound harsh, but nothing personal towards you or other disformation victims, infowar casualties. I’m saving my hostility for the criminals who have gotten away with monstrous crimes yet remain in power.
A real analysis would show net costs in the hundreds of billions, since the shots increase the risk of infection, even without getting into the direct morbidity and mortality risks.
Here’s Figure 2 from the Cleveland Clinic study (posted December 19, 2022) which looked at 51,011 working-age people who work at the Cleveland Clinic who have various vaccination status.
What? Galisteo was wrong about the the solar system – and the 10s of thousands of insiders who decried his observations were right?
Science is not a democracy! Evidence counts, not the number of people pushing a particular view. Especially when most of the people pushing the regime view are directly or indirectly on the regime payroll.
Yes, or it could be the fact that the people who didn’t submit to the vaccine are more likely to live in low population density areas, and therefore less likely to contract COVID. Or it could be a litany of other factors. Or Kirsch might be right and it could be evidence of antibody dependent enhancement, which has been observed in other mRNA vaccines. The cause we assign here is a matter of preference.
This is merely conjecture, not established fact. Yes, risk compensation happens but no, it is far from proven that is the cause of the observations. Even a moron understands that, to coin a phrase.
Juxtapose the observations with the fact that we were told (at least by US and UK health officials) that the vaccines would prevent illness. The vaccine were “safe and effective” and that this was “a pandemic of the unvaccinated.” Every word of this was a lie, including and & the.
So, where’s the apology? Where are the reforms? Who got fired for telling these howlers, who continued retailing them even after it was long established that they were wrong? Sharyl Attkisson has been documenting the lies and mis-statements that were not corrected even after they were pointed out — including by Members of Congress. Her latest podcast has a nice summary of these and other health-related malfeasance by the Regime.
This morning’s post by blogger Zman put me in mind of a couple of quotes about the role of lying by the Regime and its fellow travelers. First, one (mis)attributed to Solzhenitsyn:
They are lying. We know they are lying. They know we know they are lying. Yet, they are still lying.
Next, one (correctly) attributed to Theodore Dalrymple (Anthony Daniels):
When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.
Zman makes the interesting and controversial point that endemic lying is an inevitable feature of democracy:
In a world where the standard is public opinion, winning public opinion is what matters most. In fact, it must count for more than the truth, as the public often accepts as true things that turn out to be false. If the goal is to win the crowd, then playing to their deeply held misconceptions is just as good, if not better, than disabusing them of those misconceptions.
…
Like the Athenians, we have embraced the democratic spirit to the point where factual reality is just one tool in the toolkit of persuasion that may or may not be used by the successful. The modern sophist is untethered from the truth, both spiritually and emotionally, because the only thing that matters is tricking some portion of the public.
Whether or not his thesis is correct, the trajectory is accurately delineated and the West appears to have arrived at the endpoint he describes.
I have seen a fair number of persuasive podcasts recently - one cited in my recent post - which come to the same conclusion. They explain that the “rules based international order” relies on an interlocking web of formal and informal understandings which establish precisely what memes/narratives are permissible. The participants include, of course, nations and their entire, coordinated bureaucracies. These, in turn, finance many NGO’s and muscle social media companies which act as effector organs to censor deviations. This mechanism, in all likelihood, spells the end of anything like democracy where individuals possess meaningful agency. The new “our democracy”, instead, consists of a consensus of the correct organizations, not people.
At age 80, as I reflect over my life, my overriding sense is of betrayal. I was born in 1944 and was informed by the early post WWII optimism, where I truly saw the US as exceptional and the “last best hope”. That is certainly no longer true. The only question is how bad will it get? I also see the utter dependency of large populations upon technology (whose resiliency, we are learning, may be insufficient) and functional organization of supply chains (which depend on trust and goodwill of many human elements).
It has become apparent to me that these systems are much more fragile than I would like to think. Given the rising social breakdown apparent in most any day’s survey of news headlines, rolling failures of arrival of necessities to local shelves are easy to imagine. Even the arrival of fuel and drinking water (the topic of the OP) in my home can no longer be taken for granted. Many lives are immediately at stake as a result of the increasing chaos. It seems that such chaos may be the deliberate policy of numerous western states. Is it to accomplish complete dependency of everyone upon the state?
When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.
I need to wrote an effort-post on this – this is the issue. Truth matters, being right matters, intelligence and honesty matter. “Matter” is too weak a word, though.
I’m afraid that the West passed this point long ago. The conventional conception of democracy bears virtually no resemblance to the actual functioning of governments — not to mention that these Western governments were never conceived as democracies in the first place. Indeed, that these polities have drifted into liberal democracies from republics as they were founded is the root issue. Hence the title of the blog post linked above: The New Athens.
This is the hardest reality to accept. Lincoln’s use of the phrase last best hope came during the Civil War that, ironically, signaled the beginning of the dismantling of the American Republic as conceived by the Framers. The 17th Amendment and the New Deal pretty-much finished the job. The Electoral College is one of the last vestiges of the original vision and that’s hanging on by a thread. That’s democracy fer ya.
The faintest of all human passions is the love of truth.
– A.E. Housman
The ordinary modes of human thinking are magical, religious, social, and personal. We want our wishes to come true; we want the universe to care about us; we want the approval of those around us; we want to get even with that s.o.b who insulted us at the last tribal council. For most people, wanting to know the cold truth about the world is way, way down the list.
– John Derbyshire
More fluoride in the water, fewer dentist visits, less dental disease, fewer dental repairs—no surprises here.
Among individuals who moved between different areas, there’s a very marginally significant effect of fluoride on intelligence, but it’s not a harmful one, it appears to actually be good!
The potentially positive effect on log annual labor income, on the other hand, is more consistently significant.
What else might fluoride affect? Seemingly not much; not neurological or psychiatric diagnoses, nor prescription drug use, probably not mathematics, and if anything, it looks good for noncognitive ability.
Exactly. I just don’t understand how anybody can defend fluoridating a water supply…why take the risk, particularly when there are (more) safe and effective alternatives?
