and yet, for all the countries which don't do that, none have presented independently verifiable incontrovertible evidence of a show-stopping problem the others have not presented or addressed.
You know, the thing about silenced people is just that - they're actually silenced. You don't hear from them. So, all these people shouting about being silenced while also shouting about the vaccine not working or not being necessary and posting links to studies and case reports and nonsense?
Yeah, they're not being silenced. It's just that the evidence they're posting just isn't good evidence. The studies they're posting just aren't good studies. The case reports they're posting, well, they're just that - single case reports. Case reports do not generalise to populations.
Just out of interest, why should the burden of proof be the way round you've framed it?
"independently verifiable incontrovertible evidence of a show-stopping problem" seems a fairly high bar.
The risks from COVID have been fairly well understood for a while now, if you're young and healthy and have no comorbidities the risk of dying from it is quite simply vanishingly small:
EDIT: so a hypothetical 19 year old unvaccinated me has a 1 in 1,000,000 risk of dying after catching COVID according to that University of Oxford model.
You do know there are far worse things than death, right? Permanent disability. Heart/lung conditions. Mental illness. Chronic fatigue. All from a young age. This simple focus on death rates misses the mark entirely and it acts like these consequences don't exist or increase the more times you are reinfected. It's sad, really.
The burden of proof is on those who are arguing for a specific action or inaction to cause a specific result. So let be the weight of the clear and convincing evidence against the other - all of it.
> Permanent disability. Heart/lung conditions. Mental illness. Chronic fatigue. All from a young age.
Is there a serious study showing that the young and healthy (those w/o any comorbidities) are at significantly increased risk of these due to catching Covid itself? Those issues were affecting people long before Covid arrived.
QCovid predicts that that hypothetical 19 year old unvaccinated me has a 1 in 62,500 risk of "catching and being admitted to hospital with COVID-19". For context: what's the risk of ending up in hospital after a car accident in your part of the world?
> This simple focus on death rates misses the mark entirely
Some would say that two years+ of singular focus on Covid is what's missing the mark.
As my doctor keeps telling me, there are plenty of other viruses and plenty of other health conditions.
Honestly, if you want to talk about relative risk, I'm surprised you don't have that information already - especially given the implications your making. Of course there are always other conditions and diseases, this absolutely is reflected in the available data. Feel free to bring up specifics once you've retrieved and analysed them at your leasure. Happy to discuss them once you have.
> Of course there are always other conditions and diseases, this absolutely is reflected in the available data. Feel free to bring up specifics [..]
Covid is simply too new for any of us to have reliable long-term data. Even the UK's ONS said so in the Spring[0]:
"More deaths were registered in young people aged 15 to 29 years in England in 2021 than the average number registered in 2015 to 2019; however, there was no excess in 2021 for deaths from circulatory diseases.
We do not yet have a complete picture of how the coronavirus pandemic has affected deaths in young people, because it takes a long time to investigate deaths from external causes; we will continue to monitor the safety of vaccines and the changes in excess deaths.
Early indications show deaths in 2020 increased for some causes, particularly suicides in young females and accidental poisonings (mostly drug poisonings) in young males"
So let's put Covid to one side and talk about seasonal flu, since that's been with us for long enough.
The US and Canada were (at least relatively recently) the only places that recommend everyone over six months to get the (seasonal) flu vaccine.[1]
"Apparently, not a single country in Europe asks the general population to seek that same kind of protection, according to Robb Butler, the World Health Organization technical officer in vaccine preventable diseases and immunizations in the organization's Europe office in the Netherlands.
That's because global health experts say the data aren't there yet to support this kind of blanket vaccination policy, nor is there enough money"
The USA is "the land of the medicated" according to a NBC article[1] and "What the drug companies are doing now is promoting drugs for long-term use to essentially healthy people. Why? Because it’s the biggest market."[2]
YMMV, but $BigPharma's shareholders would definitely prefer you to take more medicine, and not ask too many questions.
So, if you want to examine the data we do have about risks from COVID-19 in the setting of comparative risk, including other diseases, then I'm happy to do so. However, I do not wish to speculate about COVID-19 by changing the topic of discussion to influenza, excluding COVID-19, in this context, as though it were comparable. COVID-19 is not the flu. Speculating about data is not what we're discussing. If we don't have the long term data, we don't have the data. We do have preliminary data for COVID-19, so if you want to speculate about that and how it might develop - that'd be much more relevant.
You know, the thing about silenced people is just that - they're actually silenced. You don't hear from them. So, all these people shouting about being silenced while also shouting about the vaccine not working or not being necessary and posting links to studies and case reports and nonsense?
Yeah, they're not being silenced. It's just that the evidence they're posting just isn't good evidence. The studies they're posting just aren't good studies. The case reports they're posting, well, they're just that - single case reports. Case reports do not generalise to populations.
That's all.