this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2024
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Prager u isn't education, it's propaganda.
You have to either watch them and think critically about the content or be "in the know" through our various lefty podcasters and what not though. Prager U does a decent job of hiding that it is propaganda imo. Though I don't know that I have ever watch a full video myself.
Years ago, I would keep YouTube playing constantly while I was at work and caught a handful of Prager u videos randomly, and this was well before I was the radical leftist I am now, they still rubbed me the wrong way. They did a great job making an argument that was fundamentally wrong but they'd always fail to explain an important mechanism for something critical. I can't think of any specific examples, I haven't actually watched one of their videos since I left that job. But it was always a huge leap that they disguised as a given fact. They're also just straight up lie about historical facts.
That's the problem right!? It takes no effort to lie but we have spill gallons of ink to fact check them.
The best propaganda is simply the slice of truth you choose to show that supports your original claims.
It is trivially easy to dig up instances of this or that medication having complications or side-effects. And I'll openly admit that COVID boosters still leave me feeling like shit for a day afterwards. So folks at Praeger can pull together an assortment of anecdotes and testimonials to build an anti-vax case that is entirely "true" while still being complete bullshit by way of omission.
That's where the whole "getting educated" stuff is a double-edged sword. You can very easily feel well-informed based on the volume of information - true, legitimate, seriously sourced information, confirmable facts - you've ingested, and still be lead to some utterly false conclusions.
You can play this game with Tylenol or Chemotherapy or Dialysis as easily as any vaccine. And I do get the sense that, as the UK moves towards divesting itself of a health care infrastructure because shit costs money, we're going to get more and more of this kind of "Don't even bother going to a doctor, they'll kill you!" medical denialism as a kind-of coping mechanism for a health care system that's been defunded to the point of uselessness.
The problem is that when this evidence is mildly negative against vaccination (e.g. myocardial cases in young males) it is denied rather than debated.
Like, on the one end, this is exactly the kind of shit that gets hyper-inflated. The mortality rate of COVID is closer to 2000 cases in 100k than 26.7. And contraction of COVID raises long term risk of heart issues as a consequence. The herd immunity to grants means that, if you can successfully identify high risk individuals, they're insulated from transmission by the bulk of the population getting vaccinated. So the fear of heart issues is mitigated only when everyone else gets the jab.
On the other, I think there's a criticism that we haven't continued to invest in improvements to the mRNA treatment now that we have a simple panacea. And this doesn't become criticism of vaccination. It becomes a criticism of vaccine skepticism undermining funding of new iterations of the treatment.
At some point, you can't keep coming back to the debate table in the middle of a pandemic. You need to move quickly and confidently, rather than re-litigating age old talking points if you want to minimize total public harm.
That might mean ramping up vaccine distribution. It might mean ramping up quarantine measures. It might mean dramatically expanding the availability of testing and contact tracing and improving access to public health care.
But when we've embraced a "cheapest, least economically invasive solution" policy method, that means we're fully on board with the vaccine whether its entirely safe or not. Because what we really care for, in the US, is economic growth. And a jab from even a mediocre vaccine solution is going to be vastly more friendly to the economy than doing nothing or doing a more traditional quarantine approach.
Ok. So my post was bait. I specifically chose a statistic of young males and myocarditis.
As expected you misread and responded quoting all age mortality.
This was the point I was trying to make. Honest discussions are impossible.
Above a certain age, yes.
Your link is not focused on young males.
In the specific case of myocarditis in young males, the Pfizer vaccine is higher risk.
True for vaccines in general, but for omicron (the dominant strain when most vaccines were given) transmission rates immediately after infection were the same, whether vaccinated or not.
Not empirically true for covid vaccines
Disagree. mRNA is now an accepted tool and is being explored for a huge number of medical applications.
There was no debate during the pandemic. Any criticism was silenced as being anti vaccine.
In public. But this shouldn't apply to doctors, scientists and other experts.
Cheapest would have been open sourcing the Oxford vaccine. Bill Gates stopped that from happening. "As a CEPI founder he had leverage"
Yes. There is no money in an open source, cost of production vaccine, but there is a LOT of money in future mRNA applications.
EDIT: Links added.