Letter to the Editor

[Paul in Saudi]

https://www.limaohio.com/opinion/464025/letter-why-i-wont-get-the-shot

This seems to be a real letter from a real person to a real newspaper:

The Only Responsible action currently is not to take the shot. This is not a vaccine, it’s an experimental gene therapy and doesn’t prevent covid or keep you “safe.” Approved under Emergency Use Authorization because of lies regarding hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin as a treatment. It was not “FDA approved.” It’s a genetic code that’s turning your body into a pathogenic manufacturing machine. This will be this generation’s “thalidomide.” These are the horrors of industrial medicine. The effects are unknown. Early reports are horrifying. If you have not researched experimental gene therapy, you are just willfully ignorant and uninformed. Credible doctors are trying to get the warnings out to the public but are ridiculed, silenced, and censored.

Courts, abusing their powers, are coercing personnel if not fully vaccinated they must wear a mask, clearly contrary to science and being forced to disclose their most personal medical information as to whether they were vaccinated. Jurors, too frightened to refuse to answer, are being questioned in open court in front of other jurors about their medical information. This is clearly a violation of their constitutional rights and HIPPA laws. These judges made an oath to uphold our constitution. People are being forced to make a choice to wear a mask and risk their health or take a shot that may cause their death. This abuse of power is shameful and wrong. People are going to die from this experimental gene therapy. Those in authority pressuring others to take this shot, will be held accountable by God. I cannot be silent.

Carlene Huston-Kinworthy,

Attorney at Law,

Lima

 

[Valka D'Ur]

My MLA's FB page is infested with similar anti-vaxxer BS.

 

[Birdjaguar]

https://www.limaohio.com/opinion/464025/letter-why-i-wont-get-the-shot

This seems to be a real letter from a real person to a real newspaper:

The Only Responsible action currently is not to take the shot. This is not a vaccine, it’s an experimental gene therapy and doesn’t prevent covid or keep you “safe.” Approved under Emergency Use Authorization because of lies regarding hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin as a treatment. It was not “FDA approved.” It’s a genetic code that’s turning your body into a pathogenic manufacturing machine. This will be this generation’s “thalidomide.” These are the horrors of industrial medicine. The effects are unknown. Early reports are horrifying. If you have not researched experimental gene therapy, you are just willfully ignorant and uninformed. Credible doctors are trying to get the warnings out to the public but are ridiculed, silenced, and censored.

Courts, abusing their powers, are coercing personnel if not fully vaccinated they must wear a mask, clearly contrary to science and being forced to disclose their most personal medical information as to whether they were vaccinated. Jurors, too frightened to refuse to answer, are being questioned in open court in front of other jurors about their medical information. This is clearly a violation of their constitutional rights and HIPPA laws. These judges made an oath to uphold our constitution. People are being forced to make a choice to wear a mask and risk their health or take a shot that may cause their death. This abuse of power is shameful and wrong. People are going to die from this experimental gene therapy. Those in authority pressuring others to take this shot, will be held accountable by God. I cannot be silent.

Carlene Huston-Kinworthy,

Attorney at Law,

Lima

The Albuquerque Journal prints letters of this sort regularly. Demonstrating one's ignorance in a letter to the newspaper is pretty common. That doesn't mean the writers are not sincere; they are still just wrong.

 

[sendos]

I am embarrassed to share the same profession as Carlene.

 

[Arakhor]

You could easily have reservations about mRNA vaccines without going into full-bore crazy land. Ranting about hydroxychloroquine and masks being bad for your health certainly does her no favours.

 

[The_J]

Uninformed, illogical people .

 

[amadeus]

Credible doctors are trying to get the warnings out to the public but are ridiculed, silenced, and censored.

Doctors, presumably of medicine, cannot get their alarmist doctrines published, but lawyers with no medical training can? This is a confusing regime of censorship.

 

[Paul in Saudi]

At one point I used to cut & paste letters to the editor and post them elsewhere. There are lots of worthy ones. The issue of course is copyright.

Darn shame, I love dumb letters to the editor.

 

[Tee Kay]

What a boring as conspiracy theory. I like the other one better where the vaccine connects you to the internet

 

[Kyriakos]

Doctors, presumably of medicine, cannot get their alarmist doctrines published, but lawyers with no medical training can? This is a confusing regime of censorship.

A lawyer doesn't get regulated by a board of doctors; in fact they have no reason to care more about the latter than any other non-doctor.

I am personally waiting for the time we get past these babysteps, and directly to a logical conclusion of people making fun of others not accepting (say) the Riemann Conjecture. I think it would happen already, if it was mentioned on tv everyday like some mRNA vaccines.

(tldr: while it can be correct to accept something solely on authority, it never is something to be proud of)

 

[El_Machinae]

I have a lot of sympathy for people who are concerned about the vaccine, because finding evidence to 'disprove' your concerns is actually quite hard. More than once, I've gone looking for data that I'd fully expect in a more established intervention, and not been able to find it for the vaccine.

 

[Birdjaguar]

@El_Machinae

THE NUMBERS

| By Jo Craven McGinty

Odds Are, Probabilities Will Trip Us Up

Odds are you have bought at least one lottery ticket in your life, even though your chance of winning was 1 in a million—or, if you play Mega Millions, more like 1 in 302,575,350. But people are generally bad at assessing probabilities, often relying on anecdotal evidence to make decisions rather than considering the numbers. “When we hear about someone winning the lotto or being struck by lightning three times, we think it’s more common than it really is,” said Christoforos Anagnostopoulos, a statistician at Imperial College London. “We use heuristics based on entirely irrelevant situations.”

According to the research of Ellen Peters, an expert in decision making at the University of Oregon and author of “Innumeracy in the Wild,” the lack of skill can have consequences for your wallet and your health. People who are less numerate adopt fewer healthy behaviors; they are 40% more likely to have a chronic disease; they end up in the hospital or emergency room more often; and they take 20% more prescription drugs but are less able to follow complex health regimens.

Those who are good with numbers and confident in their ability fare better, Dr. Peters has found. And those who are bad with numbers but feel confident in their ability do the worst. If you’re wondering where you fit in, one famous example suggests many of us might belong to the overconfident camp.

In 1990, Marilyn vos Savant in her “Ask Marilyn” column for Parade magazine responded to a reader question that went something like this: Suppose you’re on a game show, and you are given the choice of three doors. Behind one is a car. Behind each of the others is a goat. You pick a door, and the host, who knows what is behind all of the alternatives, opens one of the two you didn’t choose to reveal a goat. He then gives you the option to stick with your first choice or switch. Is it to your advantage to switch?

Ms. vos Savant said to switch because the first door has a 1/3 chance of winning, but the second door has a 2/3 chance. Reams of protests poured in from professors, mathematicians and other intellectuals who disputed her answer, prompting one reader to chime in: “You made a mistake, but look at the positive side. If all those Ph.D.’s were wrong, the country would be in some very serious trouble.”

Uh-oh.

As Ms. vos Savant made clear in subsequent columns, her answer was correct. In a nutshell, her critics erroneously believed that once one of the three doors was eliminated, the odds of finding the car behind either of the remaining two doors was 50-50.

That isn’t the case.

The odds of choosing the correct door to begin with were 1 in 3, and the odds that the car was behind one of the other two doors were 2 in 3. When one door is eliminated, those odds remain the same: The odds of having selected the correct door initially are still 1 in 3, and the odds that the car is behind one of the other two are still 2 in 3—but only one of those doors remains. Switching doors in this situation would double the chances of winning the car. “One of the big errors is going on your gut without looking at the information,” said Katherine Ensor, a statistician at Rice University and president-elect of the American Statistical Association.

The game-show puzzle might be trivial, but in real life, Dr. Ensor points out that probability plays a role in online dating, insurance rates, stock-market investments and the results of medical tests. When Talithia Williams, a statistician and mathematician at Harvey Mudd College, was pregnant with her third child, a physician recommended inducing labor because she was past her due date and a routine test had suggested the baby might be under stress.

The physician warned that the chance of miscarriage doubles when a pregnancy goes past the due date. But when pressed, he revealed that the odds rise from 1 in 1,000 just before a due date to 2 in 1,000, or 0.2%, just after. Dr. Williams, who shared her experience in a Ted Talk, could live with those odds. She and her husband opted not to induce.

Perhaps it’s no wonder today that some people are wary of receiving the Covid-19 vaccine knowing that at least 28 people have suffered serious blood clots after receiving the Johnson & Johnson shot—even though nearly nine million people have received it without consequence—and millions of the J& J vaccine doses are at risk of expiring. So, what are the odds of an adverse reaction?

Dr. Anagnostopoulos, who has helped develop a probability- based dice game called Borel, offered this example.

“Let’s assume that the risk for a certain group of people was that 1 in 50,000 would get a clot after having the vaccine,” he said. “If instead you were told you need to roll six dice and get all of them to be a one, would it be easier for you to make a decision?”
The odds of simultaneously rolling six ones, he said, are also 1 in almost 50,000. But you probably wouldn’t bet on it happening to you.

 

[Rashiminos]

Good ol' fashioned monkey mind favors a quick heuristic based on short term dramatic effects. It can certainly overhype a few conspicuous side effects in a bid to avoid doing whatever it was that immediately preceded the undesired effect. In the wild there are quite a few time sensitive hazards where that mode of operation pays off. It's not as adept at measuring subtler alterations to life quality over long durations of time. Not much is. There are any number of externally sourced influences operating in the body already. It's not easy to predict which bodily environments the introduction of vaccine to would produce more issues in than the virus itself. Inasmuch as we haven't successfully constrained the virus (and I never expected the US to do it at any rate), refusing the vaccine means accepting the virus for all intents and purposes. Maybe the virus will kill some. Maybe it won't. Maybe the vaccine... yadda yadda. If you don't want that, take the virus.

 

[Birdjaguar]

There appears now to be a way to know more about ones susceptibility to the virus and how it might affect you. Refusing the vaccine will kill some directly, oh well. but refusing the vaccine will also add to the risk of many others by creating a bigger pool of people for the vaccine to harbor in and to mutate. Unless one has a known health problem with such a vaccine, refusing it is a selfish act of political egotism.

https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/coronavirus-free-the-jab.669441/page-28#post-16111146

 

[Rashiminos]

There appears now to be a way to know more about ones susceptibility to the virus and how it might affect you. Refusing the vaccine will kill some directly, oh well. but refusing the vaccine will also add to the risk of many others by creating a bigger pool of people for the vaccine to harbor in and to mutate. Unless one has a known health problem with such a vaccine, refusing it is a selfish act of political egotism.

Any time I have cause to doubt the existence of the Lord my God, he bumps me on the nose. LOL.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Any time I have cause to doubt the existence of the Lord my God, he bumps me on the nose. LOL.

Well, as I see it, the Lord God of the OT needs to spend a bit more time slapping a few folks around to bring them inline with his NT "Faith Hope and Charity" mission.

 

[El_Machinae]

Unless one has a known health problem with such a vaccine, refusing it is a selfish act of political egotism.

That just doesn't follow, and is emblematic of the problem with the conversation. I can only re-iterate, it is actually very difficult to reassure oneself regarding the safety of the vaccine, if there are concerns. There is a lot of bullying done by people who could not possibly know if the safety data is sufficient, all based on partisan teamsport ideology.

If the vaccine is beneficial to the person receiving it, then calling its refusal 'selfish' doesn't flow. Sure, it might be laziness. It might be subconscious fear. But the vaccine is being presented as a product that is not only beneficial to the society, but also beneficial to the person taking it. Heck, most people I know definitely have a blend of the two motivations.

 

[Birdjaguar]

That just doesn't follow, and is emblematic of the problem with the conversation. I can only re-iterate, it is actually very difficult to reassure oneself regarding the safety of the vaccine, if there are concerns. There is a lot of bullying done by people who could not possibly know if the safety data is sufficient, all based on partisan teamsport ideology.

If the vaccine is beneficial to the person receiving it, then calling its refusal 'selfish' doesn't flow. Sure, it might be laziness. It might be subconscious fear. But the vaccine is being presented as a product that is not only beneficial to the society, but also beneficial to the person taking it. Heck, most people I know definitely have a blend of the two motivations.

How is not getting a measles vaccination not a selfish thing? Putting one's "whatever" reasons above community safety is a selfish act. And we do know more vaccinations are better than fewer vaccinations. Fewer vaccinations mean more illness/deaths over a longer time than more vaccinations.

Measles cases in 2019

• From January 1 to December 31, 2019, 1,282* individual cases of measles were confirmed in 31 states.
• This is the greatest number of cases reported in the U.S. since 1992. The majority of cases were among people who were not vaccinated against measles. Measles is more likely to spread and cause outbreaks in U.S. communities where groups of people are unvaccinated.

Vaccines are beneficial to the larger group. The reason people don't get vaccinated are personal. Those are two very different standards. The anti vaxxers put their personals beliefs and thinking above the community benefit. A pretty good definition of selfish given the immediate potential harm. It is right up there with driving drunk and texting while driving. Putting others at risk while indulging in personal idiocy.

 

[El_Machinae]

I wouldn't call "selfless" the opposite of "selfish". A person who jumps on a grenade is selfless, but the person who wouldn't isn't deemed "selfish". I mean, there's a social mechanism where we either bully or encourage other people to jump on grenades, but even the motivation to call someone else 'selfish' would be selfish if you're trying to get them to take on risk to benefit you or yours.

It quickly spirals out. But the main thing is that the person who's experiencing vaccine hesitancy is more afraid than you are of the vaccine. It's not like you're a better person if you get vaccinated, because your fear is literally less. So, because you're less afraid, then balance of what you're being asked to do vs. the perceived benefit is just ... different.

As I will say again, if someone is trying to relieve their concerns, there's very little data allowing them to do that. Or sure, there are the regular antivaxxers, but by all metrics they're mainly risking themselves or those they care about with their improper comprehension of facts.

It's hard to call them 'selfish', universally. I know more than one that was willing to get infected by the virus, isolate, and then rejoin society in order to build herd immunity. And yeah, I know the subset that is hoping that they don't have to get a vaccine because enough other people will. But that's a broad spectrum.

 

[Moriarte]

Having considered the development and results of the global program on smallpox eradication initiated by WHO in 1958 and intensified since 1967 … Declares solemnly that the world and its peoples have won freedom from smallpox, which was a most devastating disease sweeping in epidemic form through many countries since earliest time, leaving death, blindness and disfigurement in its wake and which only a decade ago was rampant in Africa, Asia and South America.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox

Maybe a history lesson will help?