If you don’t agree with lockdowns and mandatory vaccination you are according to the LEFT associated with ‘Far right nationalists, anti-vaxxers, libertarians and conspiracy theorists‘! That’s what Leftist’s think of freedom loving people! So, I wasn’t surprised to read a Leftist say ‘Scenes of protesters clad in hi-vis jackets and shouting anti-vaccination slogans have dominated the news this week. As the ABC reported:
Some of those gathered held a banner reading ‘freedom’, while others sang the national anthem and chanted ‘f*** the jab’.
Some attacked union offices, drawing criticism from officials such as ACTU chief Sally McManus, who described the protests as being orchestrated “by violent right-wing extremists and anti-vaccination activists.”
These images may shock some but for researchers like me — who research far-right nationalist and conspiracy movements, and explore the online spaces where these people organise — these scenes came as no real surprise.
Far right nationalists, anti-vaxxers, libertarians and conspiracy theorists have come together over COVID, and capitalised on the anger and uncertainty simmering in some sections of the community.
‘COVID-19 vaccine refusal rates may be high among white evangelical Christians, but the International Mission Board (IMB) — which deploys thousands of missionaries — is not hesitant about the shot.
The global agency of the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest evangelical Protestant denomination in the U.S., announced this month it is requiring vaccinations for missionaries they’re sending into the field amid the pandemic.
The IMB may be the first U.S. missionary agency known to have such a mandate, according to leaders in the field, as other faith groups approach the issue in a variety of ways including limiting where people can serve and making considerations for uneven global access to the vaccines.
“This is a very common-sense decision,” said Ed Stetzer, a Southern Baptist who is dean of Mission, Ministry and Leadership at Wheaton College. “Mission-sending agencies from the United States have the real opportunity to be vaccinated, and they’re going to places around the world that don’t.”
The IMB policy applies to both current and future missionaries as well as some staff members. Among the reasons it cited for the measure are health concerns and the fact that increasing numbers of countries are implementing their own vaccine requirements — some field personnel have reported needing to show proof to board airplanes and subways or enter restaurants and malls.
In a statement announcing the policy, IMB leaders acknowledged that it could be a deal-breaker for some people considering missionary work or currently serving with the organization.
The Rev. Allen Nelson IV, a pastor who leads a Southern Baptist congregation in Arkansas, said he is not against vaccines but is completely opposed to mandates for missionaries.
“This is something that must be left up to a person’s own conscience, research and discussions with a doctor, as well as their particular ministry context,” said Nelson.
The United Methodist Church, for its part, strongly encourages missionaries to get vaccinated but does not require it. That is partly because availability is not consistent around the world, according to Judy Chung, executive director of missionary services for the denomination’s Global Ministries.
“We have discussed how to promote vaccination without making a mandatory requirement,” Chung said, “because some may not have access to that yet.”
The denomination currently has about 240 full-time missionaries serving in 70 countries, and the most recently deployed cohort of about 40 has a vaccination rate around 80%.
“We want to make sure that our missionary population are safe so that they can focus on the mission work that has been assigned to them,” Chung said. “We want to make sure that we are not causing harm as we engage in mission.”
A key question for U.S.-based mission groups is whether they will fall under the Biden administration’s recently announced rule that companies with more than 100 employees must require workers be vaccinated for the coronavirus or undergo weekly testing.
If they do, Ted Esler, the president of Missio Nexus, an association that includes hundreds of missionary agencies in the U.S. and Canada, said about 30% of those agencies could be affected. He thinks they would comply with the federal mandate but said the issue is not currently stirring much discussion.
Ultimately, he noted, organizations’ internal rules may be rendered moot by vaccine entry requirements that many countries have instituted for visitors.
“Whether you have a policy or not,” Esler said, “if you’re going to serve cross-culturally in another country, you’re going to be faced with the government regulation.”
A June survey by the Public Religion Research Institute showed COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy decreasing and acceptance growing, but refusal rates holding steady. It also found significant variance of opinion between people from different faith traditions.
White evangelical Protestants had the highest vaccine refusal rate at 24% and among the lowest acceptance rates at 56%. By comparison, acceptance rates stood at 56% for Hispanic Protestants, 65% for Latter-day Saints, 66% for Black Protestants, 69% for other Protestants of color and 74% for white mainline Protestants.
The IMB has had vaccine requirements for other diseases in place since the 1980s, and it says some have chosen to skip international service because of it.
Esler, who served as a missionary in Bosnia in the 1990s with the Pioneers organization, said he had to be inoculated against diseases like diphtheria, polio, tetanus and typhoid before he could go.
Esler wasn’t eager to get a COVID-19 vaccine and is hesitant to advise others to roll up their sleeves. But he got vaccinated because he is continuing to travel.
“From my perspective, this is an issue more because of the fact that it’s COVID-related than it is vaccine-related,” Esler said.
‘Since mid-July 2020, the Corona Committee has been conducting live, multi-hour sessions to investigate why federal and state governments imposed unprecedented restrictions as part of the Coronavirus response and what the consequences have been and still are for people.’https://corona-ausschuss.de/en/
‘Perhaps you, like me, as a Christian, pay attention to certain celebrity conservatives, who take many of the same or similar viewpoints as you. You know there are differences. Where is the overlap? In diagnosing a worldview, there are various components to understanding it, as some people have or might put it, to see the map of the world. Some of them are knowledge, ethics, purpose, and epistemology, but among the others, I want to explore two of them, reality and truth, as they relate to celebrity conservatives versus true Bible believers. In general, very often true Bible believers are interested in the celebrity conservatives without their being interested in them. Part of their “fan base” are Christians, who listen to their podcasts and watch their shows. One of the celebrity conservatives, Jordan Peterson, the famous PhD professor, author, and public intellectual and speaker from Canada, doesn’t even call himself a conservative. Celebrity conservatives today might call themselves classic liberals (you can look up classical liberalism). Maybe he really isn’t conservative, but you also shrink your audience if you call yourself one. As well, “liberal” might mean you keep your job and other opportunities. Peterson does resonate with true Bible believers and they listen to, watch, and read him. When I write, celebrity conservatives, I’m especially saying, Peterson, Ben Shapiro, Charlie Kirk, Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, the late Rush Limbaugh, Dennis Prager, and Candace Owens. There are many others. There is overlap between their worldviews and the worldview of a true Bible believer. Before Covid hit and also before he had major health issues, my wife and I and another couple got tickets to hear Jordan Peterson in person in San Francisco, sponsored by the Independent Institute. As I was listening to him, I enjoyed many things he was saying. However, I knew he and I did not have the same worldview. I was glad he could say what he did in public, but it wasn’t nearly enough for me either. The celebrity conservatives like him are disappointing. In the last week, I was thinking about the difference between the worldviews of celebrity conservatives and true Bible believers. Even as I write this, I think about how a true Bible believer could even be a celebrity in our world. I don’t think it’s possible. The greater the celebrity status, the more you must be doing something wrong, and that includes evangelical leaders who have their own celebrity. They in part got there through capitulation and compromise. Their greater celebrity doesn’t speak well. The common ground in worldview, I believe, is that there is more proximity between celebrity conservatives and true Bible believers in their view of reality. I would say that they both attempt to function according to reality, even if it means abandoning the truth. The truth and reality do go together. They overlap completely for a true Bible believer, but they don’t for celebrity conservatives. Even actual reality and the reality of celebrity of conservatives don’t overlap identically. To stay a celebrity, like everyone else who isn’t a true Bible believer, celebrity conservatives forsake actual reality and even more so, the truth. Let me explain. I want to use Jordan Peterson as an example. Jesus either rose from the dead or He didn’t. Jesus can’t be the greatest figure who ever lived if He wasn’t truth and He lied about the resurrection. Peterson says that he’s not sure if he believes Christianity, but he tries to live like one. He’s also saying, he’s not committing to the truth of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, while living like Jesus did resurrect from the dead. He borrows a reality based upon the truth without actually believing the truth. Other conservatives do that, and it’s easy to see. The world we live in is the real world. Celebrity conservatives more than the mainstream culture try to explain positions according to reality, even if they deny much of the truth or many truths, depending how you want to put that. You may live a reality of Jesus and defend a life that fits His existence and deny the pivotal truth of His resurrection. Peterson does that. Complementarianism is the truth and celebrity conservatives borrow from a complementarian reality without the truth of complementarianism. Gender fluidity proceeds from egalitarianism. God designed men and women differently. That’s the truth. Celebrity conservatives deny complementarian truth while defending a complementarian reality. Let me get more simple. Whether you think he’s a conservative or not, let’s consider President Donald J. Trump as if he were a conservative. Trump operates according to a certain Christian reality that results in Christian support, including from true Bible believers. Trump thinks that one thing is better than another. Certain behavior is wrong. He believes that America as a standard of living better than other countries, which can be and should be protected at the border. This is one of the most fundamental conservative beliefs and it is a reality that borrows from the truth. Former President Trump doesn’t believe the truth, but he functions as though there is truth. He is a realist in that we must have standards. Things won’t be better when we can’t discern the differences of one thing from another. This is a reality according to a Christian worldview. The truth is more important. However, people who eject from reality are much further away from the truth. These either practical or positional nihilists must be rejected for something short of the truth, if that’s the choice. The path to the truth won’t come through their relativism. It can come through someone who at least embraces reality, even if it doesn’t mirror actual reality. The answer for humanity is still the truth. It isn’t the reality of celebrity conservatives.’https://kentbrandenburg.com/2021/09/12/reality-and-truth-celebrity-conservatives-versus-true-bible-believers/
‘On Sept 14, Washington Post released a shocking scandal about General Milley, stating that Milley had secretly informed the top military official of the Chinese Communist Party about U.S military plans against China. However, Trump dismissed this scandal as fake news. Is Gen. Mark Milley a scapegoat of the Deep State, and a victim of politics?
‘One of the silver linings to the Covid cloud is that we now know who “they” are. You know, the mysterious “they” who “say.” As it turns out, “they” are lawless politicians, media propagandists, ignorant experts, and deluded educators. Everything “they” have been telling us for 18 months is nonsense. We know it. They know we know it. And still they speak.
They (as personified recently by President Biden) are getting increasingly shrill, frustrated that they have not yet made everyone insane like them.
But who is crazy – them, or us? It’s hard to believe that mental illness could be as pervasive as it seems to be. We have a strong bias against recognizing mass hysteria. Here are some reality checks for those moments when it seems like you’re the last sane person on Earth.
Absurdity #1: Doing the same thing and expecting different results
An unending need for more Covid booster shots would be proof the shots don’t work. “C’mon, man! Get a shot! The shot will protect you! But not this shot, the next shot. No, I mean the one after the next one – that one will really…you know the thing….”
No, sorry. That’s cuckoo.
I got vaccinated so that fearful people would be reassured that it was safe to be around me, and do business with me. And it does give me a sense (justified or not) that I’m safer. But if two shots aren’t enough, then I’m done. More of what doesn’t work won’t work.
Absurdity #2: Believing contradictory things
“They” will say at 10:00 in the morning that everyone should get vaccinated, to protect us from The Covid. Then they’ll say at 10:02 that the vaccinated should wear masks to protect us from The Covid. Well, which is it? If the shots are effective, no vaccinated person should wear a mask. Ever. Freedom from the face diaper is your reward for getting the vaccine – and it would be proof to the skeptical that the vaccines work. It undercuts their position to say, “vaccines work, but wear a mask.”
These nutjobs may really believe the shots protect you, and simultaneously don’t protect you. Somehow. They live in their own scrambled mental universe where something can be itself and its opposite in the same way at the same time.
As President Biden really said in his speech announcing (illegal) vaccine mandates, “We are going to protect the vaccinated workers from unvaccinated coworkers.”
Huh? If your vaccination doesn’t protect you from the virus, how is giving someone else the same ineffective shot going to help you? Total lunacy.
Absurdity #3: Liars demanding to be believed
This one hardly needs elaboration. The frauds who’ve told us one falsehood after another for a year-and-a-half always insist that they are telling the truth this time; that they have only our best interests at heart, and if we don’t comply, they’ll shoot. Because, compassion.
But to give just one example, answer this question: How many Americans have died from The Covid? Now, that should be a pretty solid number. Out of respect for those who have died, not to mention the interests of science and public policy, we should know that number within a small margin of error. But the CDC number is a myth, everyone knows it’s a myth, and “they” know that we know it’s a myth. The real number is not known, and because of the shenanigans they’ve played with incentives and data, it can never be known.
It’s very cynical to lie to people about life-and-death stuff. Or more likely, psychotic. But liars will keep lying to you as long as you keep listening.
Absurdity #4: Insisting on inconsistency
“The vaccine is safe,” they tell us. Yes, as far as we know now, it is – judging by the usual standard of safety for this sort of thing. We call many drugs and treatments “safe” if only a fraction of a percentage of users get sick and die from taking them. Nothing is absolutely “safe” for everyone. We don’t expect that – that would be loony.
But if we were to apply that customary, sane, and normal standard to SARS-CoV-2, we would find that it, too, is “safe.” Few people get The Covid; those who do get it usually don’t get very sick from it; those who do get sick are not likely to die from it. Why is The Covid somehow different from every other danger that mankind has ever faced? Hint: it is not.
Then why is it treated differently?
If we were to apply our Zero Tolerance Covid Policy to other hazards, no one would ever get in a car again. And why don’t we have masking and vax mandates for children exposed to the seasonal flu, which really does kill children? The fact that they do not think about The Covid like they think about anything else is a sign that they’re not thinking straight.
If we’re going to reclaim our individual and collective sanity, we’ll have to deal just as rationally with the dangers posed by The Covid as we do the dangers posed by sugar, swimming pools, and SUVs. We’ll take reasonable precautions, and then go on with our lives.
I wonder whether, if we had kept our heads in the early days of the pandemic instead of allowing them to inflate The Covid into the ultimate bogeyman, we would be over and done with all this by now. More natural immunity, fewer variants, no excuses for carpet-bombing the economy, no endless wars against normality and sanity.
It seems that they’ve “flattened the curve” out to infinity, and the most likely explanation is that they don’t want the suffering and the disruption to end. “Never let a crisis go to waste” is the cry of a sociopath who will prolong a crisis, or create one if none turns up. And we have a lot of those folks.
‘AS THE FDA MEETING ON THE PFIZER BOOSTER CONTINUES, I’M RESENDING THIS POST FROM AUG. 9, SINCE SO MANY OF YOU HAVE SIGNED UP SINCE THEN. (If you’ve already seen it, I hope you don’t mind.)
More to come on boosters soon.
Original post:
As Covid cases, hospitalizations, and now deaths soar in Israel even though over 90 percent of older adults are fully vaccinated, the country is aggressively pushing a third shot.
Hundreds of thousands of older Israelis have already received it.
And other countries are preparing to follow.
Now the inevitable is happening. The third shot is beginning to fail.
The desperate move for a third shot is the latest and maybe most desperate manifestation of the panic around the vaccine failure that health authorities still will not openly admit is happening.
And it is profoundly anti-science.
These mRNA vaccines are not Pepto-Bismol. They have profound biological effects. They are encapsulated in fat particles whose long-term effects are unknown. They spread throughout the body (despite the early promise they would not). They hijack cellular machinery in exactly the same way an actual virus does.
They are no joke.
And – as rushed and flawed as their development was last year – at least regulators forced Pfizer and Moderna to test them in large clinical trials, with a total of more than 70,000 people.
The trials had two main goals: to make sure they didn’t have massive, immediate side effects (safety) and that they actually worked against the virus (efficacy).
In fact, the trials showed the vaccines did have a nasty short-term side effect profile – and that it worsened after the second dose. And despite their size, the trials failed to catch severe side effects for both the mRNA vaccines (which – at the least – cause heart inflammation in some young people) and the Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca vaccines, which cause a rare but particularly nasty form of blood clotting.
Still, most side effects appeared to fade after a few days. The trials also showed that at peak protection after the second dose, the mRNA vaccines reduced infections by 95 percent.
Thus their almost immediate authorization.
But now we know better.
The real-world data – from Israel, the United States, and everywhere else – are clear. Protection from infection fades within months even against the original coronavirus. It shrinks essentially to zero against the Delta variant (we can argue about time vs. variant effects, but the answer doesn’t matter in this context, either way the vaccines have stopped working).
For now, vaccine advocates are clinging to the hope that even if the vaccines do not protect against infection, they still provide some protection against more serious illness and death. I think the jury is still out on that question, but again it is largely irrelevant for this conversation – the Covid wards are filling in Israel, and most people in them are older and vaccinated. If the vaccines do offer any help after a few months against serious illness, it is far less than the 95-99 percent protection that advocates have claimed.
Thus the move for a third shot. And possibly more shots to come.
But please – please! – understand how radical a move this is.
At this point, these shots are basically being pushed forward on the basis of VERY early data from VERY small trials – a few dozen volunteers, at most – showing that people had significantly more antibodies a month after receiving a third dose.
I don’t doubt these slides are accurate.
THE VACCINES MAKE YOUR CELLS PRODUCE THE SPIKE PROTEIN. YOUR BODY THEN MAKES ANTIBODIES TO THOSE PROTEINS.
That’s what they do, and they’re very good at it. More vaccine makes your body do it more.
But that’s only the beginning of what we should know before encouraging a third dose. Here’s a PARTIAL list of questions we haven’t answered:
Does a third dose of the vaccine ACTUALLY REDUCE INFECTIONS IN THOSE PEOPLE WHO RECEIVE IT?
Does it reduce deaths (remember, even the original, huge Covid trials didn’t answer that question)?
Will the third dose produce a transient spike in infections, as the first dose appears to?
Will the antibodies last longer this time because we have more of them after the second dose, or will they decline more quickly?
Does the vaccine confer ANY long-term protection through T-cell immunity?
Will people who have received a third dose be vulnerable to future variants? Will they be more or less vulnerable than people who have been infected and recovered and are are naturally immune?
Will the side effects – which are generally much worse after the second dose than the first – be still worse after the third?
Will some people die from those side effects?
What is the overall safety profile of the third or more doses in a large population?
Does it differ by age?
—
I could go on, but I hope this is enough to show you how little we know.
Offering a third dose essentially means offering an entirely new vaccine regimen. If the FDA or other regulators had any guts they would insist on a new, full-size clinical trial (a BETTER trial, one powered to detect reductions in death) before allowing it.
Instead governments are rushing ahead based on what are basically early Phase 2 clinical trials – tiny and providing evidence of efficacy based on lab benchmarks rather than clinical data.
Yet, based on the stock action in Moderna and BioNTech in the last few days, investors are VERY confident these boosters are going to be part of our lives going forward.
whatyareckon 