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Liam Madden's avatar

Hi Mathew,

I am repeatedly hearing the media blare, "the vaccine is ~99% effective against hospitalization etc." Yet I also see the rapidly declining indications of efficacy in UK and Israel, where ~40-60% of hospitalizations are among the vaccinated. I find it implausible that there would be such stark differences in case rates, even accounting for differing levels of vaccination. I'd love your take on this. ie, do you trust this data? (and I don't mean the Cleveland Clinic data referred to which used an irrelevant timeframe to make such inferences, that is clearly bullshit, I mean the more recent claims which are too numerous to even bother citing).

The only thing that I think could skew it that much, aside from outright fabrication, is that the tests in the US are run at different cycle thresholds among the vaccinated vs the unvaccinated. But that, too, seems like it would be difficult to pull off logisitically. ie, a hospital gets 100 sick unvaccinated people, and orders PCR tests at 40(Ct) and finds 99 of them are positive, vs 100 vaccinated people and orders PCR tests at 28 (Ct) and finds 1 of them is positive. While that is what would happen if they did such a glaringly manipulative protocol, it would take implausible (to me) levels of coordination to make sure all these hospitals treated the testing so asymmetrically. Am I wrong about that? What is your thinking on the issue?

It requires mental force for me to stay open to the fact that these data could be legitimate. My bias to distrust the official narrative is nearing calcification, which has its own dangers, and I want to be weary of that. But either way, even if it as remarkably effective at preventing severe cases as 99%!, then shouldn't the vaccinated feel highly assured in their safety and not exposed to undue risk by the unvaccinated? ie- WTF would the rationale be for mandates/passports etc if the vaccinated were afforded so much protection?

Something doesn't add up and I need help figuring it out. If I had to boil it down to one question, do you trust these claims?

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Banta's avatar

I am not surprised at all by the superficial critiques leveled at your analysis. The barrier to entry for these conversations is high and if you don't have a robust statistical background (or the desire to learn), then most people have to take the approach of "the media tells me this is laughably false, so there has to be an obvious mistake in the methodology." Unfortunately, after years of research into various unrelated topics like cosmology, history, etc, I have come to realize that almost nothing that gets promoted as "conclusive" in the mainstream actually has the necessary legwork backing it. Most folks are content (whether through lack of time, cognitive dissonance, or fear) to believe that "people smarter than figured this out." Which is partially amazing because I also think most people of average or greater intelligence are also aware of the conflict of interests in our corporate media, medicine, government, etc.

I believe the extreme specialization of knowledge plays a large role in this... most people, by necessity, are very familiar with their own little niche and have very little exposure to information outside of their particular sphere (this obviously contributes to the Gell-Man effect, described a few articles back). When one considers this specificity within the medical industry alone, for example, just within the last half century or so, the average person has gone from having a primary physician who handled essentially all of their maladies to the point where their main doctor more or less just exists to write referrals to other experts, so every person has a full team of medical authorities responsible for their health (to say nothing of the issues that arise when we outsource responsibility for our personal well-being to third parties who have, no matter how well-intentioned, a profit motive).

So, most of us don't have the time required to fully understand a wide range of topics, so many attempt to assess validity by judging the analyst's character nstead of reviewing the data (and the quality of said data). This I further compounded by herd mentality and not wanting to appear as a foolish tin-foil hat nutter. The funny thing is, I have some very unorthodox opinions and I also do not subscribe to grand, unified conspiracies. Certainly, concealed agendas and propaganda do exist, but for many topics, it's as simplistic and naive to believe in hidden cabals making world impacting decisions as it is to believe the mainstream narrative. Paradigms, which arise both organically and with motivated assistance, sort of take on a life of their own. Essentially, I think the problem is a symptom of over-organization and historically, this is what contributes to the fall of a civilization. We create a complex machine with very specific parts that are not interchangeable and the focus shifts to filling these precise roles, at the expense of general understanding. So, contrary to much conspiratorial thinking, the problem is that eventually there's no one pulling the strings because everyone's forgotten how to do so, lost in the minutia of specificity. Compound this with a culture that values brevity above accuracy (Twitter and it's character limit is a wonderful sign of the times) and I believe that analytical "mistakes" on the level of what is described on this substack are to be expected as the rule, not the exception.

Apologies for my rambling, as I review more of the data and analysis here, I hope to be able to contribute in a more direct way. There are certainly enough red flags in the data I've reviewed over the last 18 months to cause me to reject most of the "accepted" premises of this pandemic, but I haven't applied the sort of statistical analysis done here in a couple decades, so I have a lot of mental cobwebs that need clearing. But even just a cursory review of the VAERS database should alarm anyone with even a basic knowledge of math, it's hard to hand-wave away AEs and deaths that are at least an order of magnitude higher than all other vaccines combined (which appear to have about the same total amount administered when compared to the total COVID doses). And I don't believe that assuming that the COVID vaccines AEs are recorded more consistently than AEs from other vaccines would be enough to get them to a similar level of safety, especially in light of reports that COVID vaccine AEs have been encouraged to not be recorded. Like Matthew though (and I think most who are interested in researching this, contrary to "popular opinion"), I do not want this to be the case... I'd rather not live in a world where a dangerous, un-approved, ineffective experimental gene therapy is promoted and mandated. In another classic case of projection, the "follow the 'science'" folks somehow think that the people who point out potential hazards are suffering from a form of wishful thinking... which I can't help but find incredibly odd. At no point in my life did I want to be a contrarian who disagrees with virtually everything presented by traditional academia via the mainstream (and social) media. It's frankly exhausting and certainly a lot harder than simply wearing a mask and getting a couple shots. If I was going to pick something to have "wishful thinking" about, I'd pick something a lot better!

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