This is not just some guy being censored by Twitter for wrongthink on vaccines. This is a professor of the Harvard school of medicine. One of the most cited epidemiologists on the planet. He’s currently on the board that studies COVID vaccine safety.
But you can’t share or even like his message because a bunch of uneducated dumb interns on Twitter doesn’t approve it.
Of course, Twitter stock price has more than doubled during lockdowns. So Twitter management is profiting handsomely from the official COVID narrative.
Clarissa's Blog 
Open, informed debate is essential to social progress including informed debate on all these Covid vaccines.
Attempts by powerful elites to curtail informed debate on this subject (and many others) are a profound threat to us all – a far greater threat than any we have seen so far posed by the Covid vaccines themselves.
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The problem is that we can’t evaluate the threat from the vaccines if even the world’s leading scientists aren’t allowed to speak about the vaccines. It’s a vicious circle.
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“we can’t evaluate the threat from the vaccines…”
Really? I’m good, over 500 million doses have been given so far. There’s no evidence whatsoever that people are dropping like flies so I don’t see any “threat.” And the jabs seem to work much better than the ordinary flu vaccine. I’m lining up for the AstraZeneca as tens of millions of shots have been safely given in the UK.
On the other hand, there’s never going to be enough “proof” to satisfy the humourless and narcissistic anti-vaxxers as they are beyond reason.
I’m all for open debate and discussion of these kinds of public issues but “not allowed to speak” is not actually the same as getting dirty looks from Twitter.
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Nobody ever suggested that people would “drop like flies.” It’s the long-term effects that people worry about. There is not a single person on the planet who will tell you they know what the long-term effects will be because it’s a new technology. One such possible effect is, for instance, autoimmune disorders.
Another falsification of the terms of discussion is “dirty looks” from Twitter. I was talking about looks. I was talking about censorship.
It already says a lot that in such a short comment you need to find 3 strawmen to avoid discussing the actual text I wrote: anti-vaxxers, dropping like flies, and dirty looks. It’s not a sign of a strong position when you can’t defend it without completely rewriting the points you are addressing.
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“The people who compare this with proof of childhood vaccination are either faking it or, I’m sorry, irredeemably stupid.”
“It already says a lot that in such a short comment you need to find 3 strawmen to avoid discussing the actual text I wrote”
Ad hominem is the weakest form of argument – but your blog, your rules.
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“there’s never going to be enough “proof” to satisfy the humourless and narcissistic anti-vaxxers as they are beyond reason”
Perhaps Clarissa is not the only one making ad hominem arguments here. 😉 I think that Just George had it right in the other thread. It may not be possible to have a calm discussion about vaccines.
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One crucial difference is that, as usual, I don’t want anybody to force or coerce the believers in mRNAs to not take them. If they were persecuted or discriminated, I’d stand by their side to fight for their right to put whatever they want into their bodies.
Unfortunately, as usual, they don’t want to return the courtesy. They want the control over the lives and bodies of others. Controlling their own is not enough. This is not about “vaccines.” This issue has been around for a very long time. What degree of control should you have over other people and under which excuse?
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“What degree of control should you have over other people and under which excuse?”
Uh-oh. Clarissa has forgotten that this has nothing to do with control and everything to do with herd immunity which means that she should stop acting like a conspiracy theorist and get her vaccine because “we are all in this together”. She’s totally exposed like a wounded zebra being stalked by lions in the Serengeti Desert/unwinnable vaccine debate.
Also, thankyou Random reader 🙂
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It’s not a vaccine debate. We are discussing a completely new, untested gene therapy with unknown long-term effects.
People who took it are so angry precisely because they know they did something utterly unnecessary and potentially dangerous. The sight of people who didn’t reminds them of how unnecessary their turning themselves into a Pfizer guinea pig was.
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This was actually supposed to be a post about censorship, not Pfizer technology. Something utterly egregious is happening. Scientists are silenced, screamed down, and persecuted. But nobody cares. It’s so much more important to inform the world that your private medical decisions are superior to somebody else’s. What goal is this “I took the ‘vaccine’ and I’m super happy’ supposed to achieve? A contentment that verbalizes itself so insistently and aggressively is hard to find believable. I had eggs for breakfast and enjoyed them. Would it be a healthy or normal thing to do for me to head over other people’s social media to yell and scream on them for putting a different breakfast into their bodies?
It was identical with lockdowns and masks. “You are going to DIE!!!” OK, can you just leave me to it, then?
And it’s identical to the “do you want to become an anti-racist?” trainings at work. The incessant pushing of the trainings on everybody, the rage when the trainings are refused, the utter conviction that the trainings should be forced on people for the good of society, even the conviction that it’s a public health issue – these are all identical.
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I do agree with you, Clarissa. I support the right of anyone to take any medication or vaccine they want. However, I do not think it is unreasonable to ask for vaccines (based on any technology) to be properly tested and fully approved by FDA before we start having a discussion about mandating their use. But apparently, that has become an offensive thing to say, because vaccines/common good/love thy neighbor…
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Baloney. It’s about wanting herd immunity, so that your stubborn “my -body, my-choice” neighbors don’t go around spreading potentially fatal diseases all over the place. Which is a very reasonable position.
Not that I really care : I just heard the wonderful news from the CDC that vaccinated people like me CAN’T CATCH OR EVEN CARRY THE VIRUS — so I’m taken care of now, and the rest of the world can do whatever it pleases!
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This is an eminently healthy position, Dreidel. Take whatever you want but don’t chase others trying to force it into their bodies to feel less alone with your decision.
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“Baloney. It’s about wanting herd immunity, so that your stubborn “my -body, my-choice” neighbors don’t go around spreading potentially fatal diseases all over the place. Which is a very reasonable position.
Not that I really care : I just heard the wonderful news from the CDC that vaccinated people like me CAN’T CATCH OR EVEN CARRY THE VIRUS…”
Oh no. GSW has trapped himself badly by mentioning herd immunity and saying that vaccinated people can’t catch or carry the virus at the same time, because he is totally left open to someone saying “if getting vaccinated means that you cant catch or carry the virus, it means that people who want to be protected can be vaccinated while those who are concerned about side effects can take their chances with the virus.
So by censoring the debate, it means that the uneducated dumb interns at Twitter are railroading people into making a medical choice by denying them information about side effects when everyone at Twitter can just get a vaccine for themselves and stay out of other people’s affairs, which was Clarissa’s original point.”
After that in the unwinnable vaccine debate everyone will talk about control freaks making medical decisions for all of 5 minutes before that one troublemaking baboon at the Serengeti waterhole mentions people who can’t get a vaccine because of an allergy or immune condition and whether or not herd immunity should be achieved for them…
…followed by people who aren’t trained in any medical science related field talking about how high the risk is or isn’t for those billions of people who are supposed to be vaccinated…
…followed by people who aren’t statisticians or data scientists trying to figure out if the overall harm is worth it for the sake of a small number of people who can’t take the vaccine…
Meanwhile in the background, the parties that are sophisticated to actually give definitive answers are selling vaccines, week in, week out, for a billion dollars a week.
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Oh no. I thought that a comment by Driedel was by GSW. For goodness sakes.
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It was a great comment. If only everybody could adopt the same position, we’d all be much happier. I don’t understand why that’s not possible. I’m happy Dreidel got to make his own choice and sincerely congratulate him with it. Why doesn’t it go in both directions with so many people?
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“Why doesn’t it go in both directions with so many people?”
Why couldn’t people in 1980s Ukraine have a reasoned public debate with communist officials about the merits of Western capitalism and its potential superiority over the communist system?
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It was the other way round. The communist officials declared a switch to capitalism, and the people hated them for it. Once a sheep, always a sheep, unfortunately.
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“It was the other way round. The communist officials declared a switch to capitalism, and the people hated them for it. Once a sheep, always a sheep, unfortunately.”
I didn’t know that, and thought that the Ukrainian communists behaved a bit like North Koreans.
Anyway Clarissa since I despise the vaccine debate very much after having argued it to death for years obliterating absolutely everybody in debate with nothing to show for it except that the number of angry hysterical people kept going up, all I want to say in answer to your question is that in this world there are some people who want to get their way so much that they wont engage in anything at all that might get in the way of them getting their way.
When you run into those people, whether it’s sociology, politics, or vaccines, what happens is that the first conversation is used to find out whether you agree with them or not. If you agree with them, then fine, you are accepted into their tribe, which in this case is the side of zealot pro vaxxers.
If you disagree with them though, what ensues is a very rapid slippery slope down a path of increasing nastiness that cycles through the logical fallacies, followed by harassing and irritating circular arguments that reflect the fact resistance of the person you’re talking to, and then finally the thing they call “cancel culture”, where the possibility of their mind being changed was zero the whole time.
I really do think that it is a pathology or set of pathologies that the person has that makes it practically impossible to reason, but I don’t have the qualifications to prove that specifically and, looking at the state of the world, think that setting out to prove it is pointless anyway because humanity as a whole isn’t in a learning mood.
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I know, I experienced it before when I asked some very mild and non-combative questions about the HPV vaccine a few years ago. The question was completely academic because I’m way past the need for such a vaccine. Yet people behaved in highly emotional ways that I couldn’t comprehend. So I ended the discussion because it got too weird. I’m now starting to understand that the word “vaccine” triggers (many) English speakers like it doesn’t trigger anybody where I’m from. It’s like a learned reflex. They hear it and they get emotional.
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