your comment is basically "no" which isn't a great foot hold from which to form rebuttals , i feel like id have to drink different flavors of kool aid to respond adequately , eg if one prioritized national interests over some elderly dying then your point of broad negative vs broad positive outcomes is invalid
Odds of dying from the AstraZeneca vaccine is about 1 in 50,000, or about 0.002% [0] for people over 60. In the USA there were 434,779 excess deaths [1] in the over 60 age group of 55M people, implying about 0.008% were killed by COVID. So taking AstraZeneca was the lower risk option, in the USA anyway.
In countries like Australia that largely managed to suppress COVID through quarantine and mass vaccination (using other vaccines), perhaps it wasn't the best option, and indeed Australia did opt to wait once the risks became evident. If you were in Peru or Mexico (both did a very bad job of managing COVID), if you were over 60 you would be mad not to have got the AstraZeneca jab if it was the only one on offer.
i read a study from sweden where a full three quarters of covid deaths were in the bracket of those aged 80 plus. to me this definitely impacts your proposed model of comparing vaccine vs covid deaths. thanks for introducing the constraint of governance, its a fantastic challenge and shows that my initially proposed idea isn't necessarily universally applicable.
As you can see that site doesn't have data broken down by age for Sweden so it would be interesting to see where they paper you mention got their data from. Sweden's excess deaths across all ages followed a similar curve to the USA, so it would be surprising if the age group breakdown wasn't similar too.
You can also see how well Australia managed COVID in comparison. "Excess deaths" in Australia's was driven into reverse by their management strategies. That wasn't due to vaccines. Australian couldn't buy vaccines for love nor money (aside form AstraZeneca which unlike the others could be manufactured there - but it was withdrawn very early), ironically because its other measurement strategies were so successful countries like Mexico were deemed more worthy. Those strategies were also very successful financially, with Australia emerging earlier and faster than just about all countries in the OECD. They did however cause immense friction within Australia, as some citizens deeply resented the temporary restrictions put on travel, mask mandates and the like.
your dataset is valid in the context of the argument. its hard for me as a layman to trust claims formed from such widespread sources, when i could hand wave the results away by assuming that deaths from all causes will proportionally increase among all age groups after a populace exits lockdown.
anyway that is not a real argument so ill backtrack a bit to provide a government source [0] for my previous claim. as opposed to australia, sweden let it rip. therefore of all countries, this particular dataset is the most universally applicable, since it most accurately reflects a baseline. and that baseline is an overwhelming majority of covid deaths among the elderly.
my original point was to compare conscription with a mandate forcing untested chemicals on the populace. if the chemicals were tested or if some other mandate was imparted (eg. your example of australia's management strategies), i acknowledge that this would be less apt of a comparison.
Hmm. Official statistics from an OECD government. A very trustworthy source. According to AI's it is "not* an outlier, the figures are the same for most OECD countries.
However the metric is different. I was quoting excess deaths, Sweden figures are deaths attributed to COVID. While it may true COVID caused a lot of deaths, in the elderly with a lot of comorbidities doctors had to put something on the death certificate and COVID was a popular choice at the time. But did it matter if they were going to die away? COVID killing me when I had a many good years left would be very unfortunate. Dying from COVID when I had only a few months because of other reasons doesn't concern me so much.
This means excess deaths measures something more relevant to me than measuring deaths attributed to COVID.
> with a mandate forcing untested chemicals on the populace.
I wasn't aware that any modern vaccine from an OECD country not being tested before used on a human. All COVID vaccines certainly were. The testing was necessarily accelerated, but it's unlikely the normal regime would have caught the issue with AstraZeneca.
Mandated vaccination is tricky. A healthly majority of the population with 80+ year old family members in homes is going to want the workers in those facilities to take every possible precaution, including alcohol disinfectants, masks and be vaccinated. Some of that majority were taking those same precautions in their own homes.
The same reasoning was applied to populations at less risk, at extreme kindergartens enforcing vaccination and quarritines. Where to draw the line is problematic, but in all OECD countries it was drawn well before mandatory vaccination of the entire population. That didn't happen.
ive employed the laymans heuristic that if you die with covid it is most likely what killed you, the comorbidities don't matter to me. on the surface your excess death metric makes sense but im not convinced and need time to reflect.
its too much of a coincidence for me that mrna was not viable until the very moment that it was needed. i vehemently disagree that further testing would have been redundant. moreover the non-mrna covid vaccine by novavax (released to the public less than a year after covid mrna vaccines) has a significantly better safety profile. no, mandatory vaccination of the entire population didnt happen, only the majority of able bodied workers (aka the powerhouse of the economy, hence a bit of rounding occurred when i took artistic liberty).
therefore the world could have waited a year, locked down, and not subjected its driving force to deadly peril. this did not occur, consequently the world's workers were forced to suffer so that pharma companies could make money, the world's elderly/immunocompromised could be protected, and goverments could print less money.
> its too much of a coincidence for me that mrna was not viable until the very moment that it was needed.
Shrug. Such things do happen. The history of development of mRNA crosses decades, with many wrong turns. The final tweaks needed to make it work did happen not long before COVID happened on the scene, but as COVID had not been heard of at the time I can't see how that could be have been artificially orchestrated. The mRNA developers did get extraordinarily lucky when a pandemic generate a healthy return on their decades of investment just as it became viable. Having read the history of mRNA, I don't begrudge them their luck. Individuals invested huge amounts of time, took large personal risks (to the extend of being fired for their persistence) in making it happen. Such efforts usually aren't rewarded.
> i vehemently disagree that further testing would have been redundant.
There was one recorded death to due mRNA COVID vaccines in Australia. Nearly everyone who was vaccinated in the early stages got several doses mRNA. So at the absolute best, more testing could have prevented one death there. But maybe not. Given that, your vehemently disagreement is difficult to understand.
> therefore the world could have waited a year, locked down
I don't know where you live, but in liberal Western democracies lock downs are problematic. The USA mostly failed at it as did most places. Australia did better, but babies going without food when parents weren't allowed to leave apartments effected with COVID caused a lot of angst even with people who broadly agreed with the direction the government took. Such mistakes are entirely avoidable of course, but when sudden drastic action happens fubar's are inevitable. (And it wasn't that serious because locals who weren't in a locked down zone purchased food out of their own pockets and dropped it off.)
The reality is, the enforced of vaccination for some groups of people was much easier for most Australians to swallow than those lock downs, mask mandates, enforced distancing, mandatory tracking apps on your phone, and enforced hand washing. You are in a small minority that thinks otherwise. When you look at the social and economic costs of lock downs vs mRNA vaccines (which history has shown to be very safe), the choice looks to be a no-brainer to me. China did for example did go the lock down route, and were able to enforce it because they aren't a liberal democracy. The outcome by every metric was far worse that Australia, who abandoned lock downs as soon as enough vaccines became available.
you believe in the timing of this discovery and i don't, we must agree to disagree there.
regarding the single recorded death in australia and your assertion that mrna vaccines are very safe, we are commenting beneath an article discussing otherwise, my disagreement is redundant.
regarding liberal democracies, the US has recently been executing its own citizens on the street and any government would do the same if deemed in the countrys best interests, it isnt clear why politics matter here.
regarding the ease of taking mrna vaccines, it is also easy to swallow cyanide pills. australians live a utopic life in low density housing. seems fairly clear that the average australian would accept mandates unquestioningly, furthermore that an australian lockdown would look a lot different to that of a high density country with a billion-strong population.
the reality is that we could have waited 6 months and not caused permanent damage to swathes of our world's future. this wasn't possible to fully predict at the time so i will give some benefit of the doubt. but when trillions are involved, safety of the common man is not the priority. which is also arguably the case when it comes to the gain of function research that initiated this entire situation.
> regarding the single recorded death in australia and your assertion that mrna vaccines are very safe, we are commenting beneath an article discussing otherwise, my disagreement is redundant.
No, we aren't commenting beneath an article discussing dangerous side effects of mRNA vaccines. Granted, the title might make you think that. But the article discusses one side effect: VTT. That side effect was caused by one vaccine: AstraZeneca. It is not an mRNA vaccine. As you noted, our discussion was about mRNA vaccines being responsible for a single recorded death, despite heavy use. AstraZeneca caused 8 or 11 deaths in Australia, depending on who you believe, yet distribution was limited.
> australians live a utopic life in low density housing.
It's true many Australians do live in low density housing. If you're well off I guess it life is pretty good, although I prefer the high density European cities to car centric suburbs. If you aren't so well off no place is a utopia. This summer it hit 48°C in the south. Cooler in Darwin in the north - 39°C, but 90% humidity. Australians get respite from this by going to the shopping centres, the pools or the sea, but you can't do that during a lock down.
> seems fairly clear that the average australian would accept mandates unquestioningly,
"While some protests were peaceful, others ended in clashes between protesters and police."
> furthermore that an australian lockdown would look a lot different to that of a high density country with a billion-strong population.
Maybe. You spend your time staring at your house walls or watching TV in both places. But as you say, Australian houses are bigger, so the walls would be further away /s
whoops i made the incorrect assumption that AZ was mrna. clearly it has scrambled my brain. either way my point stands that further testing would have saved young lives, which as you have noted was the tradeoff for getting the world economy back on track fast. net result seems similar to extended negotiations saving lives in war, so i still think that conscription and a mandate to take untested medicine are highly comparable.
i dont feel like arguing the lockdown point will lead us anywhere, anyway thanks for the laugh from your concluding statement
