Early on, there was a real disagreement between specialists on the origin on Covid, with some supporting natural origins and some supporting a lab leak. But that debate is now essentially over. With more data carefully examined, the evidence best supports natural origins.
The virus was initially repeatedly found in a specific animal market, and even a specific stall that appeared to be the source. For a lab leak to be the source, the person or people who leaked the virus would have to have repeatedly visited that market every time they leaked it and nowhere else so that it looked like that market was the source.
“In dropping government recommendations Monday that children routinely receive shots for four diseases, Kennedy’s allies believe they are closer to realizing a top priority: a country in which people who claim vaccine injuries can more easily sue vaccinemakers for millions in civil court.
Manufacturers of those vaccines would no longer be shielded from liability, the plan’s proponents assert, and could be driven from the market amid an influx of lawsuits alleging injuries from their products. In that scenario, the anti-vaccine movement would have a high-profile opportunity to shape the public narrative about childhood shots in courts nationwide.
Kennedy and Health and Human Services Department officials announced that longstanding recommendations that children receive flu, meningitis, hepatitis A and rotavirus vaccines were downgraded to a category known as “shared clinical decisionmaking,” meaning patients are encouraged to confer with health care providers before getting the shots.
In all, the number of “routine” vaccine recommendations — which assume vaccination as the default — have now been cut by a third, from 18 to 11, since 2024.”
In rare cases, modern vaccines have negative side effects, and under normal law, people can sue and sympathetic juries can reward huge sums of money. This would make vaccines unprofitable, and without vaccines many many people would die from a variety of diseases. Instead, in the 1980s, we set up a parallel system for vaccines where people with negative side effects can get a payment, but not an exorbitant sum from a normal lawsuit. This system is underfunded and understaffed and could use reform to keep up with claims, but throwing the system out risks for-profit vaccine companies ending the production of vaccines, resulting in many deaths. So, the system is needed, unless the government chooses to manufacture vaccines themselves. People can still sue vaccine manufacturers for negligence, but that is hard to prove.
Wolves don’t actually have alpha males. That idea was based on a study of wolves forced together in a zoo. In nature, wolves live in families. The mother and father of a family aren’t best understood as “alphas”, they are best understood as the mother and father of a family.
In Chimps, there isn’t just one dominant leader. The apparent alpha often does not lead in combat with other chimps, and the leader leads by cooperation and aid, not just force.
The current available evidence points toward Covid coming from an animal market, not a lab. There have been a lot of claims about it coming from a lab which have received a lot of coverage, but these have not proven out. All but very few of the experts in the field think it likely came from nature, not a lab. Many prominent people spreading the lab theory made a lot of money from it and some got jobs in the Trump administration. Republicans and activists have unfairly attacked people talking about the science and defunded their legitimate research, and used this as an excuse to defund a lot of other science.
“The researchers followed 22.7 million vaccinated individuals and 5.9 million unvaccinated individuals for nearly four years. They found not only that vaccinated people have a 74 percent lower risk of death from severe COVID-19, but also that those individuals have a lower risk of death, period. Specifically, people who received the shots have a 25 percent lower risk of all-cause mortality.
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The researchers sought to control for various confounders, such as a healthy-vaccinee effect, where healthier individuals are more likely to opt for vaccination, or a frailty-related bias, where those in poorer health may avoid it.
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“This study helps to put an end to the misinformation spread about mRNA vaccines,” the study’s lead author, Mahmoud Zureik, told Le Monde. “Providing data on the absence of long-term risks helps strengthen confidence in these vaccines, which will be developed for other viruses and diseases.”
Their results should indeed strengthen confidence. But Kennedy, who has been shifting research dollars to purportedly “safer” vaccines, will likely ignore it.”
Non evidence based recommendations from Trump’s CDC will result in deaths. The chaos of getting CDC workers to leave, and shutting down programs, and giving directives where the verbal and written directives don’t match, and restarting things when it is suddenly realized they are needed…is not good! Bad.
“What about his promise to maintain the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices without changes? Nope. RFK Jr. fired all of the vaccine experts and loaded up the committee with anti-vaccination appointees.”
“Millions, perhaps even billions of us who got ourselves vaccinated against COVID-19 should be dead by now, or if not yet, very soon. For years, prominent wellness influencers and other internet personalities have predicted that mRNA vaccines will lead to mass casualties. Infectious disease clinician Neil Stone has helpfully (and amusingly) compiled a number of such dire predictions.”