Durka wrote: ↑Wed Aug 28, 2024 12:33 pm
Look at some of the things that were said and done.
One shot of a vaccine will stop you from being infected with covid. It didn't.
Then, two shots will stop you being infected with covid. It didn't.
Then, 3 shots will stop you from being infected with covid. It didn't.
At some time in there we were then told that it won't protect you from being infected, but it will reduce the consequences if infected.
We were also told by Pfizer, right at the start, to take their vaccine because it would mean that you would not pass the virus on and infect someone else.
I think most of that is either false or distorted. It was pretty clear from the beginning to everyone who was paying attention that these vaccines would
reduce your chance of both getting and spreading COVID, not
prevent either, because that's how most vaccines work. It's also inaccurate to say that the concept of boosters was progressively introduced along the way; that was openly discussed from the beginning (see, e.g. this article from March 2021:
https://theconversation.com/why-do-we-n ... nes-155951, or this one from January 2021, i.e. a month before vaccines became available in Australia:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/2021 ... ccine-dose). If you can find any evidence of Pfizer execs or any health authorities in 2020/2021 suggesting that boosters would be unnecessary, please feel free to provide a link.
I disagreed with a number of the Victorian government's policies during lockdowns, including some of the decisions you mention in your post. Some crackdowns were draconian and unnecessary, and contrary to basic principles of civil liberties. But none of that suggests that the risk of COVID itself was overhyped or blown out of proportion, or that the effectiveness of vaccines was overstated. And it's important to make that clear, because it's easy to say in hindsight – after the pandemic was successfully mitigated around the world in part by widespread vaccine rollouts and take-up – that COVID wasn't such a big deal. Doing so, and cherry-picking a few dissenting opinions from medical specialists, is doing exactly what you say at the beginning of your post: making a public health crisis a political (and, specifically, ideological) issue. Questions about transmission, containment and immunisation are really about fact – determined by scientific testing and observed effect – not "pro-vaxx" or "anti-vaxx" opinion.
It's not wrong to question or doubt authorities or mainstream narratives, but if it comes from a predetermined ideological bias that favours "alternative" (i.e. vaccine-sceptic and economically libertarian) viewpoints, then you're unlikely to make as clear and careful an assessment as you need to. And the worst-case outcome of that is to assume ahead of time that the next pandemic that health authorities freak out about will be bogus too.
Even if we were to agree that COVID was a boy-who-cried-wolf situation (and I obviously don't), it's worth recalling how that story ends. Because the moral isn't that wolves don't exist, or aren't as bad as they're made out to be.
"Every time we witness an injustice and do not act, we train our character to be passive in its presence." – Julian Assange
