Vaccine hesitant versus Anti-Vaxxer Why are they bundled into the same category?

Can mRNA be manipulated to create long-term functional changes where the mRNA message doesn't degrade within a short time frame?

The vaccine's efficacy cannot be (reasonably/logically/scientifically) controlled. Hence, the statement "covid vaccine prevents covid death" cannot be substantiated.

Vaccination requires inoculation among 70% of the population (some have pushed for 90% with Covid) to be "effective" and attain herd immunity. What is the significance in the 30% differential?

I was referencing a previous statement of mine to DoubleR in response to your point about the hospitalization and death statistics. Even if we were to place significance on the total number infected and the total deaths, it would still render a 98.4% "survival rate." I put survival rate in quotes because it's ecological and fallacious. The point I'm making is not to give validity to these statistics; it's to demonstrate that even if we are to indulge these fallacious reasons, it would still not favor vaccination.

Any focus on the mandate would require moral analysis; therefore, to avoid discussions on the morality of the subject, we have to drop the point about the mandate. I'm against it; you have mixed feelings. That alone should suffice.

And to what extent is the scope of this evidence considered? The side effects (allegedly) aren't the only things "limited to a narrow window of time."

How are long-term side effects supposed to be observed absent of a long-term?

The population data isn't relevant. It was referenced in an attempt to explain away what I presume they're concluding is a coincidence. But that's not scientific. And their investigation was influenced by the very producers of that vaccine. But you're right: I can no more say that death immediately after covid vaccine means that covid vaccine produced death, than you can say taking a covid vaccine and experiencing persistent survival afterwards mean covid vaccine prevented death.

This is part and parcel the reason "seem/appear" shouldn't be present in an argument: I am not at all stating that the studies are deficient because they're not "perfect." I'm stating the conclusions from these studies are logically inconsistent/unsound and based on fallacious reasoning. And, as I've mentioned above, even if were to indulge this fallacious reasoning, it still wouldn't favor vaccination, much less a mandate.

I never said Doctors couldn't monitor my personal antibody production; I said that the antibody production of another cannot inform on my own antibody production.

I can't fathom how that could be done. If it was possible, it would be common practice in the laboratory where it is a lot more laborious to make permanent changes to the genome or to regularly make short-term functional changes.

mRNA messages are, by their very nature, built to be used and discarded. You would have to change how loose, single-stranded RNA functions within a cell to achieve long-term functional changes.

Proven =/= substantiated. A strong correlation among a very large population over a long period of time provides substantiation.

It's not definitive proof, but claiming there is no substantiation for a claim backed up by massive amounts of correlative data (as well as a great deal of causational investigation into how the vaccine provides protection from the worst that COVID-19 has to offer)

seems absurd to me, especially when you aren't offering any alternate causality.

I disagree. Vaccination imparts maximum effectiveness when a population reaches herd immunity. That doesn't mean that vaccination requires herd immunity to be at all effective.

I'm not sure I understand the follow-up question.

I really don't understand how noting a survival rate among people who have been infected is fallacious, especially since your argument regarding how the ecological fallacy works is applying it to subsequent populations and we're talking about the actual population of infected. Why is this fallacious?

As for the latter statement, again, that seems like a statement with regards to the death rate from infections not being high enough to justify vaccination, which implies that there is some threshold at which such a number would be sufficient to favor vaccination. I'm not sure what that number is, and any choice seems arbitrary.

Again, not really sure I'm understanding your point. Traces of the mRNA and translated spike protein are absent from the body after a few days. Patients were monitored for weeks and months and that remained the case. If there is something that isn't limited to a narrow window of time that is worth considering, please, elaborate.

This doesn't seem to be responsive to the point you're addressing, since the point of that argument was addressing the likelihood of such long-term side effects rather than excluding any possibility of their existence. It's possible that long-term side effects could occur. It's implausible that they would based on the established evidence.

I include "appear" specifically for this purpose, since I recognized that I could be misstating your position and invited you to correct me. I'm not going to straw man you just because it's convenient to make a point. And, again, I think the difference here is between supporting a conclusion and proving said conclusion. You're right that the existing data is not definitive proof, but not providing complete evidence of causality does not mean that the evidence in no way supports their conclusions.

I believe it was your argument that the research in no way derives conclusions from the health of individuals.

Those are individual assessments, and those assessments can be carried forward into new patients to demonstrate the positive effects of the vaccine in those patients. As for saying that looking at the antibodies of one person "cannot inform on my own antibody production", in some sense, you are correct. It can't provide 100% certainty on how your immune system will respond to the vaccine. However, the multitude of studies monitoring antibody production certainly do inform how you're likely to respond.

I think narrowing down the argument to a given "person X" isn't exactly what the general argument has been for increasing vaccination. The argument has been that a broad swath of the population has benefited in these specific ways and imparts greater degrees of protection from the virus to those around them, therefore a larger swath of the population should also be vaccinated to similarly protect themselves and those around them.

I wouldn't call that a fallacious argument, and if it is, then I don't see how we apply any treatment or prevention to any population without engaging in fallacy.

Of course. It's not just possible, but highly likely that an unvaccinated individual will mount a sufficient immune response to eliminate the SARS-CoV-2 virus from their system, eventually. It's less likely that said unvaccinated person will mount an immune response as quickly as someone who is vaccinated. That has been tested.

It is therefore more likely that the virus will spread further and cause more harm in an unvaccinated patient than in a vaccinated patient. I'm not arguing that it's the difference between having an immune response and having none, I'm arguing that it's the difference between a weaker, slower immune response (in the unvaccinated) and a stronger, faster immune response (in the vaccinated). The absence of an early antibody-based adaptive immune response in patients who have not seen the virus or vaccine before is a known deficit in patients who have not been vaccinated or infected.

Another instance where I'm not entirely sure what you're asking. If you're asking what evidence would be required for me to buy that this is a lab-engineered strain with inserted genes, then I would expect to see the hallmarks of such genes. From what I've read, those hallmarks are absent. So, in lieu of that and under the assumption that scientists may have added genes without these hallmarks, I would have to see evidence that those scientists planned this out and executed it. Scientists keep lab notebooks and notes on what they do. It's plausible that they could have gotten rid of that evidence as well, in which case I will always find it difficult to accept this as damning. This is hardly the first time that a deadly new version of an existing virus suddenly got into and spread through the human population, and the kinds of changes to a virus that would lead to this exist in nature. I would have reason to be upset with researchers who didn't respect this facet of viral evolution and either chose to actively modify a virus to become more dangerous or, as I would consider more likely, simply did basic experiments with it in their lab and didn't take adequate precautions to prevent its escape from the facility. 

So then what advantage is there to these alleged effects of vaccination after being exposed to this virus for almost two years?

I'm not going to get into semantics with you. Suffice it to say that if you don't like that style of presenting an argument as a means to allow the other person to clarify, then so be it, but it's how I tend to handle things I will likely continue to do the same. Carefully choosing my verbiage as a means of placing myself as the source of misinterpretation is worth a shot, but I'm not always going to be so careful in selecting my words, and I think it's still far better to suggest that a plausible misunderstanding is occurring than to state another person's position with certainty.

The rest of this just seems like it's revisiting the same points we've now talked about at length. I don't agree that it's non-scientific or fallacious in every instance to look at correlative data, especially on a very large scale, and make conclusions that infer plausible causation, especially when you can actually test for far more specific elements of said correlation (e.g. the development of antibodies and resultant activation of immune response when someone gets the virus). I really don't understand the argument that these studies cannot in any way inform how you are likely to respond to the vaccine or to the virus, but clearly, that's an area where we just won't agree.

You can control for how an individual who has and hasn't been vaccinated would respond to the virus, even if you cannot control for every element of their behavior and prior immune development.

If we're looking at it from that perspective, I would say that it's effectively impossible to control for every variable in any experiment once you get a sufficient number of people to make statistical inferences, which would mean that every medical study is similarly flawed.

The question presumes that a majority of the population has been directly exposed to the virus, i.e. has been infected in some way, shape or form. If it doesn't presume that, then presuming that there is no positive effect of vaccination doesn't make sense to me, because while a majority of the population may not have been exposed to the virus, a majority has been exposed to the vaccine. But if we do presume that a majority of the population has been exposed to the virus (I'd like to see evidence of that), I'd say that the big difference is in the means by which that defense is mounted.

Naturally-generated antibodies can target any number of sites from the virus, and many of those sites can mutate without substantially negative effects for the virus. Vaccine-generated antibodies target a specific protein that is an essential virulence factor, changes to which can substantially impede the virus. Even for someone with effective natural antibodies, there is no harm in generating a separate set and a plausible benefit in having multiple modes to recruit immune responses.

It isn't a matter of whether we "agree." I've stated to you the reasons these conclusions are fallacious, which meet the description of these referenced fallacies. I'm not stating mere opinion. Feel free to verify/falsify whether my statements coincide with these descriptions. And I understand well everything you're stating. I am saying to you that this is not enough to render these prevailing conclusions--conclusions which ought to be based on stringent scientific and/logical standards.

But my contention isn't about controlling for variables. My contention is against the conclusion that "covid vaccine prevents covid death" has been controlled, which necessitates the observation of both a subject's death and survival. That is what's effectively impossible.

The pandemicity of this virus, and its classification as such, presumes that a majority of the population has been exposed to this virus, symptomatic or asymptomatic notwithstanding. And let's remember that vaccination started late last year, which would mean that the virus has had a year to likely spread (you stated that being unvaccinated made it more likely to spread quicker.)

This is has been your best argument thus far. With that said, having a separate set of modes to recruit immune responses has not been substantiated as necessary, the plausible benefit of which cannot be gauged until it has been controlled.

I suppose where I'm having the most trouble with your argument overall is that I can't understand what standard you would use to actually make a determination that anything works if you cannot use data obtained after the fact to make those determinations. What you're effectively arguing here, as far as I can tell, is that it's impossible to make these conclusions because it's functionally impossible to meet the level of stringency required to make them. Assuming that's the case, I sincerely question how we can make any such conclusions about any preventative measure. After all, the only means we have to evaluate the degree to which a population is afforded protection from an infection is, necessarily, after the fact. We can provide all the data to support what the vaccine actually does, establish how that helps immune responses, and determine that that likely contributes to declines in infections, hospitalizations and death tolls among that population, as correlates with the data. If your argument is that that's not enough to make these conclusions, then functionally, nothing is,

and I'm honestly not sure why you buy into vaccines at all if this is really your perspective.

Again, I disagree.

I think there are sufficient controls to establish that conclusion. You're effectively saying that there are other factors that could explain why death tolls are reduced among the vaccinated population, and if so, I'd honestly like to know what those are.

I also don't see why observation of both a subject's death and survival is required for a study to be sufficiently controlled because, if it is, then no scientific study that assesses survival (or anything, really - you cannot simultaneously view a person in two states at the same time, including "sick" and "healthy") is sufficiently controlled.

Every study is fallacious because it cannot meet the perfect standard demanded for internal controls. I'd respond to your "How?" that you gave prior to this, but if this is the standard for controls, then nothing I could say would meet it because no controls ever could.

I like how you turned pandemic into an adjective

but that's not what makes a pandemic. A pandemic doesn't and shouldn't presume that a majority of the world population has been exposed to the virus at some point. It literally means that it occurs over an area that encompasses multiple countries and affects some significant subset of the populations therein. Significant amounts do not necessitate majorities. The fact that the virus had lots of time to spread before vaccination started doesn't lend credence to your claim, either. All it does is tell me that the virus infected a lot of people. I'll certainly grant you that the numbers of infected that we know about is probably quite a bit smaller than the real number of infected, but I don't grant that the actual number is greater than 50% of the population. That kind of claim requires support.

You say "necessary", and I agree that it hasn't been demonstrated to be necessary to add this specific immune response to the natural antibodies generated by many in order to see effectiveness.

I would say that it has been demonstrated to be beneficial, and I would disagree with the statement that it's solely a plausible benefit. Even if we ignore basic viral mutation as a means of evolution and the demonstrated (yes, this has been tested) importance of the mechanisms inherent to the structure of the spike protein, it's not at all controversial to say that a more rapid adaptive immune response to the virus is beneficial in viral clearance, regardless of the virus. At worst, this immune response is net neutral for someone who has already generated their own antibodies.

..my argument is that vaccines which claim to "prevent death" cannot be proven to serve this effect because there's a necessary lack of observational data.

This sounds nutty to me...

...Mind over matter is one thing but ego over rational, logical common sense, based on evidence,  is another

Not "perfect;" just logically/scientifically sound. (And I wouldn't go as far as to state "Every Study." Only the ones which claim vaccines prevent death.)

But my argument isn't that vaccines don't work; my argument is that vaccines which claim to "prevent death" cannot be proven to serve this effect because there's a necessary lack of observational data.

..."“The dark ages still reign over all humanity, and the depth and persistence of this domination are only now becoming clear. This Dark Ages prison has no steel bars, chains, or locks. Instead, it is locked by misorientation and built of misinformation.”

My interpretation, flawed though it has been at times, of your words here is that you accept that many studies of vaccines have produced results you would say are logically/scientifically sound, i.e. that there are definitive conclusions you could make regarding their results.

I'm not sure if that encompasses what you could say about the effectiveness of those vaccines in a broad population, and perhaps your argument is that those kinds of broader claims are impossible to support in a logical/scientific manner. However, as your argument focuses on claims that vaccines prevent death, and you have also made the following statement:

But my argument isn't that vaccines don't work; my argument is that vaccines which claim to "prevent death" cannot be proven to serve this effect because there's a necessary lack of observational data.

I interpret that as an acknowledgement that vaccines do "work" in some measurable way that can be said to apply to a broad population. Again, I could be misinterpreting, but if your argument is that only the conclusions regarding prevention of death are insufficiently supported, then what conclusions about vaccines do you acknowledge as supported by the available evidence? In essence, I'd like to know what you would argue is proven by sufficient observational data with regards to vaccines.

I might be phrasing this poorly, but I hope you'll be able to determine my meaning.

An ecological fallacy is a formal fallacy in the interpretation of statistical data that occurs when inferences about the nature of individuals are deduced from inferences about the group to which those individuals belong.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc is an informal fallacy that states: "Since event Y followed event X, event Y must have been caused by event X." It is often shortened simply to post hoc fallacy.

Read through my statements--a tall task, I know--and not just respond to a single snippet after joining the discussion late. I explain the reasons for my statements.

I was reading through, and that comment stood out to me, cause I had just listen to Fauci snippet addressing what your snippet seemingly was saying.

They were opposites and I trust Fauci more than I trust your oppinion.

You may even have a long list of web sites that support your conclusion, that,

Not according to Fauci. 

Who do I trust more.  Obviously it is Fauci over you and my guess any web  sites you have to offer.

The USA population in 1952 was 156.369.000. The ratio of polio cases to population was .00037. So I assume you think that there was no need for the polio vaccine?

Sorry to interject

But It would seem a fair assumption to make.

Sugar cube V needle though.....Just reinforces some previous assumptions of my own.

Only joking?

Your conclusion from these statistics are based on a post hoc fallacy.  You're claiming an efficacy of vaccination simply by counting after the fact. In December of 2020, 336,802 were claimed to have died from COVID-19 in the U.S. Give or take, there are about 332,000,000 people in the United States. If we subtract the 2.8 million who were vaccinated at that point, then we'd have, give or take, 329,200,000. Now if we divide this number by the number of deaths in December of 2020, and multiply it by 100, then that is 0.102% of the unvaccinated who have succumbed to this virus. If we considered the amount of people who had remained hospitalized at that point, assuming they weren't vaccinated, then it would .0360% of the unvaccinated were hospitalized.

Your conclusion from these statistics are based on a post hoc fallacy.  You're claiming an efficacy of vaccination simply by counting after the fact. In December of 2020, 336,802 were claimed to have died from COVID-19 in the U.S. Give or take, there are about 332,000,000 people in the United States. If we subtract the 2.8 million who were vaccinated at that point, then we'd have, give or take, 329,200,000. Now if we divide this number by the number of deaths in December of 2020, and multiply it by 100, then that is 0.102% of the unvaccinated who have succumbed to this virus. If we considered the amount of people who had remained hospitalized at that point, assuming they weren't vaccinated, then it would .0360% of the unvaccinated were hospitalized.

I based my comment on your above comment. My point is if the vaccine saves mores lives than it takes, it is worth it.

I was referencing a previous statement of mine to DoubleR in response to your point about the hospitalization and death statistics. Even if we were to place significance on the total number infected and the total deaths, it would still render a 98.4% "survival rate." I put survival rate in quotes because it's ecological and fallacious. The point I'm making is not to give validity to these statistics; it's to demonstrate that even if we are to indulge these fallacious reasons, it would still not favor vaccination.

Because as an individual, one's chances of surviving or succumbing will always be 50/50. One either survives or dies. So I can no more say that as an unvaccinated individual, I have a "99% chance" of survival, than you can say that as an unvaccinated indivdual, I have a "XXX% chance" of dying. That will depend on one and one's condition.

Don't be sorry about something you had no intention of not doing.