Red pill vs. purple pill: a discussion
I am trying to move a purple piller (a red pill wanna be but is having trouble letting go of the narrative) to become a full-fledged member of the red pill community.
I had an interesting email exchange with a purple piller I have great respect for. Purple pillers are people in-between who are smart and persuadable.
I’m omitting his name since this isn’t about him. It would be interesting if you can guess who he is. It isn’t Vinay Prasad or Jay Bhattacharya, but those were excellent guesses.
His beliefs are highlighted with the red bars. My response follows.
If you agree with me on all the issues, you can get an official red pill Club membership card. If not, let me know in the comments and see if you can persuade the crowd.
Are vaccines really beneficial?
Vaccines are one of the most important inventions in history, with the smallpox vaccine alone having saved millions upon millions of lives.
ARE YOU SURE? How do you KNOW that? Could Andrew Wakefield have been right? How do you explain his data? Why was ESP-VAERS shut down if vaccines are SO safe? and why has the CDC not done the safety surveys required by law that they are supposed to do?? They got sued and are still not doing this. The Amish don’t get vaccinated and are super healthy. Where is your Observational study to counter Wakefields? Paul Offit says the smallpox vaccine is too dangerous to use due to the 1 per 1M vaccinated kill rate.
Should the vaccines be halted completely?
To claim that everyone should be vaccinated is just as wrong as claiming that nobody should be vaccinated.
TOTALLY DISAGREE. With the COVID vaccine the data is crystal clear that they increase ACM for all age groups. Since EARLY TREATMENT WORKS, your statement is IRRESPONSIBLE. Do not make it.
Do the COVID vaccines have a positive risk-benefit for the elderly?
Covid vaccines have reduced covid mortality among older high-risk people. They should not be given to children or the covid recovered with superior natural immunity.
No way. YOU HAVE NO SOLID data on the tradeoff of delta COVID mortality vs. the rise in non-COVID ACM. If you have solid data, show it. If you don’t have that data then your call for this is irresponsible.
Recovered immunity vs. vaccine immunity
Natural immunity after covid recovery provides better immunity than vaccines. To mandate vaccination of covid recovered people goes against 2,500 years of scientific knowledge.
100% AGREE.
Vaccine passports and mandates
Vaccine mandates and passports are bad, for a variety of reasons.
100% AGREE.
Who has caused more vaccine hesitancy: the pro-vaxxers or anti-vaxxers?
The vaccine fanatics have caused more vaccine hesitancy than the vaccine skeptics ever managed.
SUBJECTIVE. May be true. Not really something I’ve measured.
Are the RCTs well done?
The covid vaccines were approved using insufficient RCT evidence, using surrogate endpoints / badly designed trials.
AGREE, especially after the initial trials. Saying antibodies are produced has no clinical relevance at all.
Should manufacturers run the RCTs?
Manufacturers should be required to conduct proper RCT if they wish to sell the vaccines.
THE PROBLEM IS AUDITING these RCTs. There is insufficient scrutiny on these trials. Example, 21 vs. 15 deaths in Pfizer. Drug company says, “excess deaths not caused by vax” … did they do autopsies? What tests for causality rules out the vax? WE ARE NEVER TOLD. The simplest thing is to make ALL the data public prior to any regulatory action being done, like any type of approval.
Safety monitoring post-approval
The vaccine safety system is broken. Too much emphasis on VAERS while we get very little data/reports from the superior VSD and BEST systems.
I agree on the safety system being broken, but this is by design. Why do you think they killed ESP-VAERS?? It was because it worked TOO well!!! I was in RFK’s book. VSD is a joke. It is not publicly available. BEST isn’t either. We need to have DATA TRANSPARENCY. Look at that VSD vax study showing a 71% decrease in ACM. That’s unbelievable.
The VSD showed a lower rate of myocarditis than VAERS without a URF correction factor (I was stunned and I wrote about it in my Estimating the number of Deaths article which references Slide 13 in Grace Lee’s ACIP prezo). That DESTROYS the credibility of VSD. Something is SERIOUSLY wrong here. How can VAERS show a 1200-fold increase in PE after vaccination and none of these other systems throw off any safety signals? Your trust is misplaced. All these systems are broken but VAERS is the least controlled and most public. TRANSPARENCY is key here and VSD and BEST are hidden from public view. All the VSD results are garbage that I’ve seen (like Grace Lee’s slide above and the VSD Fountain of Youth study).
My sixth-grade nephew called me one evening. He'd been given a school assignment to interview an older person, and I fit the bill. He asked me a series of questions he'd prepared beforehand, then closed with the following: "Is there any advice that you'd like to give a young person like me?"
"Question Everything," I told him. In his twenties now, he seems to have taken it to heart.
Just a little anecdotal piece here. Yesterday a friend talked more openly than she has in the past 2 years about an incident that started to change her mind about the vaccines. When she said she was not sure about getting boosted, one of her closest friends went ballistic. Her emotional reaction to that attack was the single most important event that caused her to start doubting and talking about the whole narrative she has been going along with for over 2 years now. It's a start. Thanks, pro-vaxxer.