Whispering into my wife's ear about whether she wants to try and "conduct activities leading to successful conceptions" tonight and seeing if I get lucky.
Does the Euro anti-vaxx movement look like the current US one? Vague impression was that the Euro movement still resembled your description of the pre-2020 anti-vax movement (eg crunchy hippies), but I could be wrong. The swap of those two movements in political saliency has been one of the most fascinating stories of my lifetime.
One thing that I think this data might be useful for is to illustrate the ongoing bifurcation of society and the Eloi-ification of the Left; in that case decreased fertility of the Vaxx'd is merely another symptom of their withdrawal into their palaces.
In England, a lot of crunchy hippies and old-school working-class folks were radicalised by covid and the lockdowns into alt-right politics. So, many people who used to be anarchic, conspiracy-minded leftists who voted Green are now anarchic, conspiracy-minded rightists who vote Reform. We also don't really have anywhere properly rural in the American sense; you're never more than a half-hour drive from a city. So I don't think the distinction you're talking about is really relevant here.
“getting the Covid shot doesn’t make one any less likely to get off birth control, find an attractive partner and raw dog them. That’s the only thing that will reverse the decline.”
Hey, ugly people can have kids too! Just ask your mom.
On stylising the 2019 coronavirus: since we don't capitalise flu or influenza, I think it's best to just call it covid, nocaps. Call me a wild-eyed conspiracist, but I suspect that promoting the allcaps version was part of the nudge-unit tactics to make people take the virus as seriously as the nudgers thought we ought to.
I understand and support people who want better health and are skeptical of government and big business. I think they deserve to be heard and they should be involved in decision making. They are correct to be suspicious of others and be loud since their voices and wants are marginalized.
But most of them are also very dumb (as are most people). And they don't have organizations that filter for intelligence (big business and universities) but instead largely filter for making crazy outlandish low-brow conspiratorial claims (conservative media).
There should be advocacy groups for these people and separately funded groups that do unbiased science funded by those advocacy groups.
A lot of this would be solved by having a study comparing fully unvaccinated individuals with vaccinated individuals when they turn 18. Of course there will be sampling bias, but an honest researcher can give a pretty good case.
What makes so many people wary is the massive growth of the number of required vaccines, and very little research about how much is too much. Pro-vaxxers crow how you could get 10,000 vaccines at the same time without issue, which sounds more psychotic than just admitting we don't know.
The problem is the pro-vax side has taken an extreme bunker mentality that shouts down any reasonable question as being anti-science, and the crunchy people have lost all trust in the system.
The doctor pushed my pregnant wife to get the vaccine, hard. There was little to no data about the safety of the vaccine during pregnancy at the time, but she insisted it was perfectly safe.
I think that study should be funded by those conservative advocacy groups I mentioned and I also think when talking with primary care physicians those same advocacy groups can request different kinds of care based on what the patient wants (conservatives and progressives have different cost benefit concerns).
A couple doctors did studies like that and were threatened with their license getting revoked. Mind you, the studies were weak, but still better than a lot of slop that enters medical journals.
Why I am pushing for conservative advocacy groups over expecting the system to change for us is that even if we want the system to change for us we will need our own advocacy groups to get that done. Democracy is the wizard of oz front end illusion; advocacy groups are the back end reality.
(This is only a small anecdote) but direct experience with the vaccine did indeed reduce the number of what I would call "fertility months". At the time, I was in a religious community with high birth rate, and high vaccine compliance. Pretty much every woman I know had messed up menstrual cycles, and a few had miscarriages. Granted that the arrow of causality is tough to tell, I would still say that the minimum was maybe 4-6 mo/woman of reduced fertility among us. That could easily mean one fewer kid over the course of someone's fertility lifetime.
> It didn’t prevent you from getting Covid or spreading it
This seems like at least as much of a misrepresentation as labeling "births" "successful conceptions". It doesn't lower the rate to 0, but it does lower it! And when dealing with an exponential domain like infections, a small reduction in the exponent can have a huge impact down the line.
It doesn’t lower it enough to justify mandatory vaccination as public policy designed to prevent the spread of the disease. It worked decently well for alpha and beta, but for omnicron and beyond, the infection protection provided by the vaccines was marginal at best. And those variants quickly became the dominant strains.
I was very enthusiastic about getting the covid shot when it came out (I even dyed my hair blue to celebrate. Yes, I did that. I'm not sorry, it was fun having blue hair.) Now I'm mostly ambivalent...I went ahead and got a booster recently because my brother was visiting from out of town and the last time we all got it my son got a face rash which was the worst part and yadda yadda...Well, anyway, I think the thing that irritated me the most about its rollout was the way they acted like eradication was possible. Thinking about vaccines and how we eliminated childhood infectious diseases gives me the warm fuzzies but they never really communicated to the public that there was a major difference between the smallpox vaccination campaign and this only mildly effective shot for a respiratory virus that kills mostly very old people. At the beginning they flat-out said "if you get this shot you only have a one-in-ten chance of getting covid!" and they never revisited it. Of course everyone knows now that they're gonna get it repeatedly.
'Smallpox vaccine' needed 100s of years and and a lot of relabeling "diseases" to 'work'. They relabelled 'cases' 'chickenpox, 'measles' and 'monkeypox' etc. and sold new 'vaccines' for these. To get the 'covid vaccine' to 'work' takes time and some new categories to move the 'cases' over into (or moving them back to their previous categories).
Frankly, because of all this, I find it impossible to believe the out-of-nowhere "concensus" that the vaccine was bad in retrospect. Just seemed to be something that everyone shouted into existence by lying about what they'd actually heard and/or only hearing stuff from within echo chambers, before it got adopted as a "concensus."
Similar things have happened to the online right recently.
The young feline doth protest too much. Is this study a slam dunk? No. But they did what they could with the data that was available, and they had to fight (with the help of some Czech senator) to get the data that they did get. While not a slam dunk, the results are a cause for concern, and the obvious response should be: "Dear governments, more data, please."
And actually, I listened to an interview with Tomáš Fürst (one of the study authors) just yesterday. (It was on Rádio Universum, for anyone who happens to speak Czech). He was very open about the study's limitations. But he said it should lead to a conversation. As it should. More data, please, and more studies, please.
One thing he (Tomáš Fürst) mentioned in that interview was that some mRNA batches led to dramatically more adverse effects than others. He mentioned that there were several (I believe he said nine) batches that ended up both in the Czech Republic and in Denmark, and lo and behold, those batches that had lots of reported adverse effects in the Czech Republic also had lots of reported adverse effects in Denmark, and those that had few reported adverse effects in the Czech Republic also had few reported adverse effects in Denmark. (I think this is very interesting, since otherwise, skeptical felines could argue that some areas are simply more prone to complaining than others. Yes, this might be. In two different countries, though??) And actually, he speculates (but admits he cannot prove it) that the reason that some countries had far greater drops in fertility rates than others is because different countries got different batches.
Covid amptly demonstrated that the medical system has no interest in doing the right thing, it merely does the instituionally approved thing. I will never trust a medical doctor again without thorough vetting, instead I'll eat well and work out and maintain my own health.
My parents lost four friends to turbo-cancer after getting vaxxed, and my 20 year old nephew died on the couch while staying up to play video games, his girlfriend found him the next morning. They tried to blame it on fentanyl, toxicology took a year to perform, and it came back clean.
Until I see people put on trial and executed for crimes against humanity I really don't care if the vaccine was only slightly murderous, or if long covid was a thing. The whole thing was evil, top to bottom, and that is the fundamental issue here. Not whether the vaccine was safe and effective.
It seems like the authors are not native English speakers and it is quite difficult to understand. The successful conceptions are not the same thing as birth rate. You can look at the source data in a spread sheet to better understand what they were doing:
Initially there was no 'vaccinated'. Then there was 'vaccinated' during pregnancy and eventually there was few 'vaccinated' during pregnancy but before pregnancy. They have created columns for : vaccinated before conception: lower bound unvaccinated before conception: upper bound vaccinated before conception: upper bound unvaccinated before conception: lower bound.
There is another sheet with more computations of:
number of women 18-39 in population (thousand)
number of SCs in all women (thousand)
number of SCs / 1000 women
number of women 18-39 vaccinated at the end of month (thousand)
number of SCs in vaccinated women (thousand): minimum
number of SCs / 1000 vaccinated women: minimum
number of SCs in vaccinated women (thousand): maximum
number of SCs / 1000 vaccinated women: maximum
number of women 18-39 unvaccinated at the end of month (thousand)
number of SCs in unvaccinated women (thousand): maximum
number of SCs / 1000 unvaccinated women: maximum
number of SCs in unvaccinated women (thousand): minimum
number of SCs / 1000 unvaccinated women: minimum
These are for example Data from column B of the sheet "Computation1" divided by 1000 and shifted by 9 months (see column N of the sheet "Computation1")
It appears to be based on the 'vaccination' status at the time of conception. It doesn't necessarily mean they were 'unvaccinated' at the time of birth as far as I can tell. The selection bias doesn't look like it would be a constant because initially there would have been many 'unvaccinated successful conceptions' that were 'vaccinated' during pregnancy. They didn't measure the birth rate but merged some data sources to look for a signal in the preconception 'vaccination' status on successful conceptions. I think more graphs could be done with this data to highlight how the 'selection bias' shifted. I don't think I understand it that well tho. What ever it is it doesn't look like any sort of proper evidence to justify injecting women.
They were only ~40% effective at preventing asymptomatic infections that could still spread to other people. As a personal choice to reduce one's risk of severe illnesses they were good. As a mandatory public health measure enforced by termination, they made no sense. A 40% reduction in the spread of a novel airborne virus with an R0 greater than measles is worthless for preventing the spread.
The concept in immunology is “original antigenic sin”, the observation that exposure to a pathogen causes the immune system to overfit its response to that particular molecular pattern, and it’s difficult for it to adapt when it encounters a similar pathogen that is different enough to break through. There are lots of papers about the concept and I don’t vouch for this one in particular except as an example exploring the concept as it relates to the covid vaccine.
In particular, the mRNA vaccines only produced the spike protein, no other viral surface markers that the immune system could imprint on. This subjected the spike protein to intense selective pressure, and later variants had a spike protein different enough to evade the protection of vaccination. By contrast, people with natural immunity were exposed to a variety of viral markers that they produced antibodies for, allowing them to fight off more novel strains. The key is that when the immune system imprints on the spike protein alone, it basically gives up trying to identify other antibody targets when presented with similar threats.
That’s not really how OAS works, OAS works within-antigen. It’s theoretically possible (not certain, somatic hypermutation is a powerful thing) that it happened within spike response but an inaccurate spike antibody won’t impair response to other antigens
What does “impair” response to non spike antigens is a lower antigen load, due to the vaccine reducing severity of infection
Also if you had an unpleasant mRNA experience, novavax works ~ as well and has a better side effect profile!
Whispering into my wife's ear about whether she wants to try and "conduct activities leading to successful conceptions" tonight and seeing if I get lucky.
Does the Euro anti-vaxx movement look like the current US one? Vague impression was that the Euro movement still resembled your description of the pre-2020 anti-vax movement (eg crunchy hippies), but I could be wrong. The swap of those two movements in political saliency has been one of the most fascinating stories of my lifetime.
One thing that I think this data might be useful for is to illustrate the ongoing bifurcation of society and the Eloi-ification of the Left; in that case decreased fertility of the Vaxx'd is merely another symptom of their withdrawal into their palaces.
It's a good question about vaccine attitudes in Europe. I don't actually know if this is the case, maybe one of our European friends can enlighten us.
In England, a lot of crunchy hippies and old-school working-class folks were radicalised by covid and the lockdowns into alt-right politics. So, many people who used to be anarchic, conspiracy-minded leftists who voted Green are now anarchic, conspiracy-minded rightists who vote Reform. We also don't really have anywhere properly rural in the American sense; you're never more than a half-hour drive from a city. So I don't think the distinction you're talking about is really relevant here.
“getting the Covid shot doesn’t make one any less likely to get off birth control, find an attractive partner and raw dog them. That’s the only thing that will reverse the decline.”
Hey, ugly people can have kids too! Just ask your mom.
On stylising the 2019 coronavirus: since we don't capitalise flu or influenza, I think it's best to just call it covid, nocaps. Call me a wild-eyed conspiracist, but I suspect that promoting the allcaps version was part of the nudge-unit tactics to make people take the virus as seriously as the nudgers thought we ought to.
I understand and support people who want better health and are skeptical of government and big business. I think they deserve to be heard and they should be involved in decision making. They are correct to be suspicious of others and be loud since their voices and wants are marginalized.
But most of them are also very dumb (as are most people). And they don't have organizations that filter for intelligence (big business and universities) but instead largely filter for making crazy outlandish low-brow conspiratorial claims (conservative media).
There should be advocacy groups for these people and separately funded groups that do unbiased science funded by those advocacy groups.
A lot of this would be solved by having a study comparing fully unvaccinated individuals with vaccinated individuals when they turn 18. Of course there will be sampling bias, but an honest researcher can give a pretty good case.
What makes so many people wary is the massive growth of the number of required vaccines, and very little research about how much is too much. Pro-vaxxers crow how you could get 10,000 vaccines at the same time without issue, which sounds more psychotic than just admitting we don't know.
The problem is the pro-vax side has taken an extreme bunker mentality that shouts down any reasonable question as being anti-science, and the crunchy people have lost all trust in the system.
The doctor pushed my pregnant wife to get the vaccine, hard. There was little to no data about the safety of the vaccine during pregnancy at the time, but she insisted it was perfectly safe.
I think that study should be funded by those conservative advocacy groups I mentioned and I also think when talking with primary care physicians those same advocacy groups can request different kinds of care based on what the patient wants (conservatives and progressives have different cost benefit concerns).
A couple doctors did studies like that and were threatened with their license getting revoked. Mind you, the studies were weak, but still better than a lot of slop that enters medical journals.
A couple vaccine doctors are not enough. IQ researchers are not enough. They need institutional backing.
Why I am pushing for conservative advocacy groups over expecting the system to change for us is that even if we want the system to change for us we will need our own advocacy groups to get that done. Democracy is the wizard of oz front end illusion; advocacy groups are the back end reality.
(This is only a small anecdote) but direct experience with the vaccine did indeed reduce the number of what I would call "fertility months". At the time, I was in a religious community with high birth rate, and high vaccine compliance. Pretty much every woman I know had messed up menstrual cycles, and a few had miscarriages. Granted that the arrow of causality is tough to tell, I would still say that the minimum was maybe 4-6 mo/woman of reduced fertility among us. That could easily mean one fewer kid over the course of someone's fertility lifetime.
I do think it's very plausible the vaccine had short term effects on fertility, yes.
> It didn’t prevent you from getting Covid or spreading it
This seems like at least as much of a misrepresentation as labeling "births" "successful conceptions". It doesn't lower the rate to 0, but it does lower it! And when dealing with an exponential domain like infections, a small reduction in the exponent can have a huge impact down the line.
It doesn’t lower it enough to justify mandatory vaccination as public policy designed to prevent the spread of the disease. It worked decently well for alpha and beta, but for omnicron and beyond, the infection protection provided by the vaccines was marginal at best. And those variants quickly became the dominant strains.
I was very enthusiastic about getting the covid shot when it came out (I even dyed my hair blue to celebrate. Yes, I did that. I'm not sorry, it was fun having blue hair.) Now I'm mostly ambivalent...I went ahead and got a booster recently because my brother was visiting from out of town and the last time we all got it my son got a face rash which was the worst part and yadda yadda...Well, anyway, I think the thing that irritated me the most about its rollout was the way they acted like eradication was possible. Thinking about vaccines and how we eliminated childhood infectious diseases gives me the warm fuzzies but they never really communicated to the public that there was a major difference between the smallpox vaccination campaign and this only mildly effective shot for a respiratory virus that kills mostly very old people. At the beginning they flat-out said "if you get this shot you only have a one-in-ten chance of getting covid!" and they never revisited it. Of course everyone knows now that they're gonna get it repeatedly.
'Smallpox vaccine' needed 100s of years and and a lot of relabeling "diseases" to 'work'. They relabelled 'cases' 'chickenpox, 'measles' and 'monkeypox' etc. and sold new 'vaccines' for these. To get the 'covid vaccine' to 'work' takes time and some new categories to move the 'cases' over into (or moving them back to their previous categories).
https://odysee.com/@dharmabear:2/The-Truth-About-Smallpox-Kate-Sugak-720-Eng:e
Frankly, because of all this, I find it impossible to believe the out-of-nowhere "concensus" that the vaccine was bad in retrospect. Just seemed to be something that everyone shouted into existence by lying about what they'd actually heard and/or only hearing stuff from within echo chambers, before it got adopted as a "concensus."
Similar things have happened to the online right recently.
The young feline doth protest too much. Is this study a slam dunk? No. But they did what they could with the data that was available, and they had to fight (with the help of some Czech senator) to get the data that they did get. While not a slam dunk, the results are a cause for concern, and the obvious response should be: "Dear governments, more data, please."
And actually, I listened to an interview with Tomáš Fürst (one of the study authors) just yesterday. (It was on Rádio Universum, for anyone who happens to speak Czech). He was very open about the study's limitations. But he said it should lead to a conversation. As it should. More data, please, and more studies, please.
One thing he (Tomáš Fürst) mentioned in that interview was that some mRNA batches led to dramatically more adverse effects than others. He mentioned that there were several (I believe he said nine) batches that ended up both in the Czech Republic and in Denmark, and lo and behold, those batches that had lots of reported adverse effects in the Czech Republic also had lots of reported adverse effects in Denmark, and those that had few reported adverse effects in the Czech Republic also had few reported adverse effects in Denmark. (I think this is very interesting, since otherwise, skeptical felines could argue that some areas are simply more prone to complaining than others. Yes, this might be. In two different countries, though??) And actually, he speculates (but admits he cannot prove it) that the reason that some countries had far greater drops in fertility rates than others is because different countries got different batches.
I prefer Greg Cochran's (and perhaps others) mellifluous name for it:
WuFlu
It's not the crime, it's the cover-up.
Covid amptly demonstrated that the medical system has no interest in doing the right thing, it merely does the instituionally approved thing. I will never trust a medical doctor again without thorough vetting, instead I'll eat well and work out and maintain my own health.
My parents lost four friends to turbo-cancer after getting vaxxed, and my 20 year old nephew died on the couch while staying up to play video games, his girlfriend found him the next morning. They tried to blame it on fentanyl, toxicology took a year to perform, and it came back clean.
Until I see people put on trial and executed for crimes against humanity I really don't care if the vaccine was only slightly murderous, or if long covid was a thing. The whole thing was evil, top to bottom, and that is the fundamental issue here. Not whether the vaccine was safe and effective.
It seems like the authors are not native English speakers and it is quite difficult to understand. The successful conceptions are not the same thing as birth rate. You can look at the source data in a spread sheet to better understand what they were doing:
https://github.com/Schmeling-M/C-19-Conception
Initially there was no 'vaccinated'. Then there was 'vaccinated' during pregnancy and eventually there was few 'vaccinated' during pregnancy but before pregnancy. They have created columns for : vaccinated before conception: lower bound unvaccinated before conception: upper bound vaccinated before conception: upper bound unvaccinated before conception: lower bound.
There is another sheet with more computations of:
number of women 18-39 in population (thousand)
number of SCs in all women (thousand)
number of SCs / 1000 women
number of women 18-39 vaccinated at the end of month (thousand)
number of SCs in vaccinated women (thousand): minimum
number of SCs / 1000 vaccinated women: minimum
number of SCs in vaccinated women (thousand): maximum
number of SCs / 1000 vaccinated women: maximum
number of women 18-39 unvaccinated at the end of month (thousand)
number of SCs in unvaccinated women (thousand): maximum
number of SCs / 1000 unvaccinated women: maximum
number of SCs in unvaccinated women (thousand): minimum
number of SCs / 1000 unvaccinated women: minimum
These are for example Data from column B of the sheet "Computation1" divided by 1000 and shifted by 9 months (see column N of the sheet "Computation1")
I'm glad they published their data, but unless they were tracking pregnancies and not births (they were not), they measured the birth rate.
It appears to be based on the 'vaccination' status at the time of conception. It doesn't necessarily mean they were 'unvaccinated' at the time of birth as far as I can tell. The selection bias doesn't look like it would be a constant because initially there would have been many 'unvaccinated successful conceptions' that were 'vaccinated' during pregnancy. They didn't measure the birth rate but merged some data sources to look for a signal in the preconception 'vaccination' status on successful conceptions. I think more graphs could be done with this data to highlight how the 'selection bias' shifted. I don't think I understand it that well tho. What ever it is it doesn't look like any sort of proper evidence to justify injecting women.
Vaxxed?
The vaccines were effective https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanmic/article/PIIS2666-5247(22)00390-1/fulltext
They were only ~40% effective at preventing asymptomatic infections that could still spread to other people. As a personal choice to reduce one's risk of severe illnesses they were good. As a mandatory public health measure enforced by termination, they made no sense. A 40% reduction in the spread of a novel airborne virus with an R0 greater than measles is worthless for preventing the spread.
Sure, I’m against the federal mandates but the vaxes were good at keeping people alive who got them.
You look like you’re triple Vaxxed
unfortunately I only got 2 shots, it was a priority for me to get boosted but I never got around to it.
> there’s also evidence that vaccinated people are actually more likely to catch the newer strains than those with only natural immunity.
What's the source for this?
The concept in immunology is “original antigenic sin”, the observation that exposure to a pathogen causes the immune system to overfit its response to that particular molecular pattern, and it’s difficult for it to adapt when it encounters a similar pathogen that is different enough to break through. There are lots of papers about the concept and I don’t vouch for this one in particular except as an example exploring the concept as it relates to the covid vaccine.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-47451-w
In particular, the mRNA vaccines only produced the spike protein, no other viral surface markers that the immune system could imprint on. This subjected the spike protein to intense selective pressure, and later variants had a spike protein different enough to evade the protection of vaccination. By contrast, people with natural immunity were exposed to a variety of viral markers that they produced antibodies for, allowing them to fight off more novel strains. The key is that when the immune system imprints on the spike protein alone, it basically gives up trying to identify other antibody targets when presented with similar threats.
That’s not really how OAS works, OAS works within-antigen. It’s theoretically possible (not certain, somatic hypermutation is a powerful thing) that it happened within spike response but an inaccurate spike antibody won’t impair response to other antigens
What does “impair” response to non spike antigens is a lower antigen load, due to the vaccine reducing severity of infection
Also if you had an unpleasant mRNA experience, novavax works ~ as well and has a better side effect profile!
Screaming "Age bias!" at my phone over and over