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Knitting Car

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True, they weren’t. But the reason why vaccine trials weren’t designed to test efficacy against infection was that it was completely obvious from the vaccines’ mechanism of action that they couldn’t possibly do anything about limiting infection and spread. Nobody tests a car to find out how effectively it can knit. Because it’s obvious it can’t. A car is designed for a different purpose.

I detest Big Pharma more than most but this, honestly, isn’t Pharma’s fault. People need to learn to be responsible for their own health. We already have an opioid epidemic because tens of thousands of gullible individuals took the most addictive drug in existence just because it was prescribed.

Life doesn’t work that way, my friends. The ultimate responsibility lies with us. If you were surprised to find out that COVID vaccines don’t stop infection and spread, you need to rethink your healthcare strategy.

27 responses to “Knitting Car”

  1. methylethyl Avatar
    methylethyl

    For over a year what the whole vaccine circus has looked like is… some kid, who has an over-complicated board game in his closet that he got for Christmas three years ago, but it needs at least six players and so far he’s never had enough friends over at once to play it. He yearns for the opportunity to drag the thing off its shelf. It has complicated parts and a large rule book. Then, when he finally does have enough people over, it doesn’t matter that they want to play other games, or that the game in the box is painfully boring… we must now play the game. Because he has been wanting to play the game for three years.

    so someone back in research had this mRNA thing, and there were some shiny articles about it in Science Weekly or WhizzBang Future Tech magazine, and he’s be itching to do something with it– so now that there’s urgency and a ton of grant money or something NOW’S THE TIME! AT LAST! even though the tech isn’t really well suited to the purpose, there were better ideas out there, etc.– nope, all alternate options must be blocked so we can finally get the six-player game out of the closet and make everyone play. Because mRNA is The Future (TM). Not because it was the best option…

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  2. cliff arroyo Avatar
    cliff arroyo

    “couldn’t possibly do anything about limiting infection and spread”

    Did people in the US not know this? I thought it was extremely obvious from the beginning (not just here but lots of other sources).

    It wasn’t stressed but when they would say 95% (for example) effective in stopping transmission… in terms of an airborne virus… isn’t that effectively 0? It either stops transmission or it doesn’t and 95 (or whatever percentage they were giving indicated it…. doesn’t).

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    1. Tom S Avatar
      Tom S

      I think it’s not just that it wasn’t stressed, but that many of our political and media leaders strongly implied (and some outright stated) last spring that, if you got vaccinated, you wouldn’t get Covid. Granted, most (but by no means all) started charging their tune once it became apparent in summer that that wasn’t the case. This is why there were a lot of tweets and posts last fall from people expressing confusion about getting Covid even when they “did everything right” (usually meaning not just getting vaccinated/boosted but also wearing masks and socially distancing).

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      1. Clarissa Avatar
        Clarissa

        It’s like getting medical information from cartoon characters, though. Why is anybody still listening to these people? Just on Friday I had a colleague excuse her request for switching to Zoom because she got COVID “although I’m vaccinated and boosted and I have no idea how the hell this could have happened.” It’s like people completely lost the capacity to process information.

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        1. Pen Avatar
          Pen

          In my state they put it in the official information given to you by pharmacies and doctor’s offices. You’re supposed to be able to trust that that information, at least, is accurate.

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  3. jmmatlock Avatar
    jmmatlock

    “ We already have an opioid epidemic because tens of thousands of gullible individuals took the most addictive drug in existence just because it was prescribed.”

    False. I know this is the narrative being trotted out, but please don’t buy it or sell it. Even with the massive overprescribing, the number of people who become addicts due to their own legitimate prescription is vanishingly small – in the range of 1%-2% when the criteria for inclusion is broad. Give me 100 opioid addicts in a room, and I’d be astonished if you could find me ONE who started out with their own legitimately-prescribed medication. The vast, vast majority would tell you they got started after they (or someone they knew) bought or stole someone else’s medication.

    Just as we saw them do with Covid, the opioid crisis has been spun by government and media – for their own twisted purposes – into making the vast majority of people believe it’s something it never was. I’d urge everyone who has been sucked in by the lies about the “opioid crisis” to read some of Dr. Josh Bloom’s and the American Council on Science and Health’s excellent analysis on this issue. Here’s a good one to begin with: https://www.acsh.org/news/2018/11/05/who-telling-truth-about-prescription-opioid-deaths-dea-cdc-neither-13569

    This is another good one (in the chronic pain community, Dr. Andrew Kolodny is their Dr. Fauci): https://www.acsh.org/news/2017/10/12/opioid-epidemic-6-charts-designed-deceive-you-11935

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      I’m not sure I understand. I witnessed the out of control opioid prescribing spree myself. I was prescribed so many pills I could start a minor drug dealing operation. The only reason I’m not addicted right now is because I never took the pills.

      I also don’t understand why anybody would steal or buy somebody else’s prescription before they were addicted. Surely, only somebody who’s already an addict would do something like it.

      In short, what’s the contention here, that opioids weren’t massively overprescribed or that they aren’t extremely addictive?

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      1. Pen Avatar
        Pen

        I can see how it could happen. Say you know someone in a lot of pain who is given painkillers that don’t work. Someone they know takes sympathy on them and goes, “hey I’ve got oxy left over from my last procedure, do you want to try that?” It’s not stealing, it’s borrowing or gifting. Then they might give some to their friend who becomes addicted and then proceeds to steal. Or they could become addicted themselves and start stealing it. Giving people leftover prescriptions doesn’t seem harmful on its face—they can use it more than you can at that point—but it’s very easy to backfire when it comes to opioids.

        People do it with non-addictive stuff all the time—anti-emetics, stronger NSAIDs, albuterol inhalers when a friend or family member has forgotten theirs. It could be very simple to fall down that alley with opioids as well.

        Of course there are also the kids who sell oxy and cough syrup to their friends, which turns it into peer pressure. It’s usually the one kid stealing a relative’s prescription at that point and that can very easily cause addiction as well.

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      2. jmmatlock Avatar
        jmmatlock

        “ I was prescribed so many pills I could start a minor drug dealing operation.”

        I am not contending that there was not an over correction in the prescribing of pain medication, where we went from doctors being unwilling to prescribe anything even for those in the excruciating end stages of cancer to (a few) doctors writing prescriptions for anyone who asked and many who didn’t (now we’ve swung back to the former in many places). Nor am I suggesting that there have not been doctors willing to prescribe medication without legitimate need. The existence of pill mills made it clear that there are people who will always put profit over patient safety and health.

        Would I be accurate in guessing that the times you were prescribed an opioid were NOT unreasonable times for a doctor to offer pain medication? Once the pill mills (which were always confined to a few states with lax oversight) were addressed and shut down, the illicit prescribing was really rare, so I would be shocked if your doctor was one of the fraction of a percentage who pushes opioids on their patients without cause.

        Regardless, you yourself laid out the exact error that the narrative falsely pushes:

        “The only reason I’m not addicted right now is because I never took the pills.”

        How do you know that’s true? You seem to be suggesting that anyone who takes an opioid is absolutely going to be an addict, yet the factual statistics show this is the incredibly rare exception. Don’t take my word for it though: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/07/truth-us-opioid-crisis-too-easy-blame-doctors-not-prescriptions

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        1. Clarissa Avatar
          Clarissa

          This wasn’t a pill or two. I was prescribed gigantic quantities. A month supply for a minor dental procedure. It was insane.

          Have you read Sam Quinones’ Dreamland? It’s beautifully written and I highly recommend.

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      3. jmmatlock Avatar
        jmmatlock

        “You’ve probably read that 80 percent of heroin users started with prescription medications—and you may have seen billboards that compare giving pain medication to children to giving them heroin. You have probably also heard and seen media stories of people with addiction who blame their problem on medical use.
        But the simple reality is this: According to the large, annually repeated and representative National Survey on Drug Use and Health, 75 percent of all opioid misuse starts with people using medication that wasn’t prescribed for them—obtained from a friend, family member or dealer.
        And 90 percent of all addictions—no matter what the drug—start in the adolescent and young adult years. Typically, young people who misuse prescription opioids are heavy users of alcohol and other drugs. This type of drug use, not medical treatment with opioids, is by far the greatest risk factor for opioid addiction, according to a study by Richard Miech of the University of Michigan and his colleagues.” (https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/mind-guest-blog/opioid-addiction-is-a-huge-problem-but-pain-prescriptions-are-not-the-cause/ )

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        1. Clarissa Avatar
          Clarissa

          Back in 2011, I talked with our deputy sheriff. He told me that the biggest issue in our little town was that middle-class moms and grannies were getting addicted to heroin. This was a situation that repeated itself throughout the region. Suddenly, I had students telling me terrible stories about moms, dads, aunts, uncles becoming addicted. This is a terrible calamity. The idea that this was a young people’s problem is simply untrue. We had so many completely normal, middle-class and middle-aged people suddenly going off the rails that it was insane.

          But it’s not surprising that there are profs whose research is funded by Big Pharma who are putting out “studies” that none of this happened.

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        2. Clarissa Avatar
          Clarissa

          I googled Richard Miech. He’s a sociologist. This isn’t even a serious scholar in a serious field.

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          1. jmmatlock Avatar
            jmmatlock

            Really? That’s the route you’re going to go? How many people have we seen over the last two years tell us Alex Berenson isn’t qualified to talk about vaccines, or that we can’t trust anything Steve Kirsch says because he’s just a retired tech guy, or that there’s no point in reading anything by El Gato Malo because it’s some anonymous person without any credentials? Did you even bother to read either of the first two links I posted? What happened to the blogger who has been preaching for the last two years for people to evaluate whether the information offered is accurate, and that it’s fallacious and lazy to refuse to even evaluate the information if the source doesn’t have the “right” credentials?

            I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that you’d chose to go that way, given how many other people I’ve run into this year who have concluded that the government, the CDC, the media and Big Pharma can’t possibly be trusted on anything Covid-related, but still believe that all of those entities are absolutely trustworthy on every other issue.

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            1. Clarissa Avatar
              Clarissa

              I’m interested in the narrative you are proposing because I’ve never heard it before. I’m genuinely curious. But I need to understand what the narrative is, and it has to be internally coherent.

              It would be really helpful if you couldn’t resume the narrative in a couple of sentences. Who invented the opioid epidemic and why? What renders oxycodone non-addictive?

              I’m genuinely interested in understanding.

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              1. jmmatlock Avatar
                jmmatlock

                “It would be helpful if you couldn’t resume the narrative in a couple of sentences.”

                I’m honestly not certain whether you’re asking me to summarize this in a couple of sentences or looking for something else entirely. I will say this: as we’ve seen with Covid, when the government & media to perpetuate their lies in meme-able one-liners (“stay home to flatten the curve” “your mask protects me” “the unvaxxed just want to kill my grandma”), it really requires considerably more words – and a good deal of evidence – to untangle those lies.

                But here’s my best attempt at a 2-sentence summary: There is indisputable evidence showing the absence of any correlation between the number of opioid prescriptions and opioid abuse and addiction. Being handed a prescription for an opioid is no more likely to “make an addict” of the patient as the ubiquitous availability of alcohol is to “make an alcoholic” of anyone able to purchase it; statistically, the opioid prescription is far less likely to lead to addiction.

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              2. Clarissa Avatar
                Clarissa

                How can that be, though? Opioids are extremely addictive. This was always known, and that’s why prescribing them for minor pain issues is very knew and very American. They are a lot more addictive than alcohol.

                It can’t be a coincidence that the opioid epidemic in the US started so soon after it became widely accepted – in this country and nowhere else – that opioids weren’t addictive. If the prescriptions don’t drive the epidemic, then why were there so many pill mill clinics? Why were people lining up for them? What are those people if not addicts? Oxycodone prescriptions for “chronic pain” went from 670,000 in 1997 to something like 6 million 5 years later. Is it a coincidence that an explosion in overdoses followed on its heels?

                If the official narrative isn’t true, then what’s the alternative explanation? What explains this gigantic explosion in prescriptions over such a short time?

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      4. methylethyl Avatar
        methylethyl

        Actually I’ve known several teens-and-twenties people who would ingest, snort, or smoke anything offered to them. Boredom seems to be sufficient for some people.

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        1. methylethyl Avatar
          methylethyl

          So… I’m definitely on board with the assertion that addicts don’t typically start out as prescription users. Based on what I’ve seen, I think they mostly start out as bored idiots dealing with various depression and assorted mental illness issues. Though I have known at least one person who went the prescription route.

          But I also think the number who become addicts is a pretty small fraction of the number of people who try the drugs– prescription or otherwise.

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          1. Clarissa Avatar
            Clarissa

            There’s no contradiction here, though. The bored idiots seek prescriptions for imaginary illnesses or minor ailments and then get addicted. At one point, I had over 100 oxycodone pills. If I were an idiot, I’d start taking them. And would like them because they feel good. Then I’d get addicted.

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            1. methylethyl Avatar
              methylethyl

              Nah, all the bored idiots I know got the pills without a script. Stole them from a family member, bought them from “a guy” or bummed them from someone else who bought them from “a guy”. The 16-year-old girl working in a pizza parlor who uses her bathroom breaks at work to “snort percs” did not get them from a doctor.

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              1. Clarissa Avatar
                Clarissa

                In sure she didn’t. But many people did. It’s an absolute tragedy when you see a person who at no point considered getting a heroin addiction develop one because she thought these were legitimate and necessary meds.

                The extraordinary irresponsibility of the doctors who prescribed this garbage in insane quantities is mirrored by how irresponsibly COVID vaccines are being promoted today.

                In 10 years, if we see major negative side effects (which I hope doesn’t happen), they will tell us the same they are saying today about opioids: it never happened and if it did, it’s your fault.

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              2. methylethyl Avatar
                methylethyl

                I ain’t arguing. It is ridiculous how much of that stuff is prescribed, and dreadfully irresponsible on the part of everyone involved. The drug companies bear a huge blame for marketing that crap like it was safe. It’s slow-release heroin. And I know a lot of idiots who never had a prescription for it, but nonetheless trusted the marketing-created perception that the stuff is “safe” because it’s prescribed (to other people) by doctors– lots of people who have a healthy fear of heroin are perfectly willing to get high on some pills they bought off of some guy, because everybody’s seen that crap prescribed for minor dental work, routine surgery, etc.

                So yes, the drug companies are responsible for both the RX addictions and a lot of the non-rx addictions as well.

                But also… not everyone who takes the pills because they think they’re safe, gets addicted. It’d be useful to understand the difference between people who do, and people who don’t. Is it social? Genetic? Does it have to do with underlying mental health? All of the above and then some? Does anyone know? From what I’ve seen personally, the difference between people who tried it and didn’t continue, and people who tried it and developed a problem, is… the ones who developed a problem were already kind of crazy to start with.

                But since nobody requires a mental health eval before getting a script for pain pills, AFAIK (certainly, nobody tried to find out before I had my wisdom teeth out, and gave me a jar of opiates that I didn’t use), perhaps that’s just another side of the gross irresponsibility…

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  4. jmmatlock Avatar
    jmmatlock

    Moving this to a new comment thread because the other’s getting too skinny to read:

    “How can that be, though? Opioids are extremely addictive….They are a lot more addictive than alcohol.”

    First, how do you know that is true? Because that’s what has been reported by the media and pushed out as fact by the government? If prescription opioids were as addictive as those entities were claiming, you would not have been able to fill a prescription for 100 pills and not finish the bottle. There would be no pills sitting in medicine cabinets across the country for non-patients to steal (and if that was the case, the government wouldn’t be running public service campaigns to warn people not to leave those medications where anyone else can find them and take them). Every single American who had their wisdom teeth pulled between 1985 and 2010 would either be a functional chronic addict or dead from an overdose (not to mention the millions more who were given a prescription for opioids for a laundry list of other things).

    Second, you’re falling into the trap the media and government set up – conflating prescription opioids with illegal street opioids. They are not the same, do not have the same potential for addiction, and do not have the same chemical effect on the body. There was this line that went viral, suggesting that prescription opioids are “just prescription heroin” (this was even repeated here in this discussion – “it’s slow-release heroin”).

    That’s like calling vanilla extract “grocery store ethanol.” Yes, prescription opioids do target the same receptors in the brain, but not in the same way, or to anywhere near the same degree. And because they do not target the receptors the same way, in the same degree, they do not hold anywhere near the capability of “creating an addict” as the illegal opioids do.

    For example, tramadol (weak and legal), morphine (strong and legal), heroin (strong and illegal), and fentanyl (very strong and mostly illegal) are all designated “opioids,” even though they have little in common except binding to some opioid receptors. This is a ridiculously unscientific way to classify drugs.

    For instance, the CDC says : “The age-adjusted rate of drug overdose deaths involving synthetic opioids other than methadone, which include drugs such as fentanyl, fentanyl analogs, and tramadol increased from 1.0 per 100,000 in 2013 to 11.4 in 2019.”

    This makes about as much sense as saying that “deaths from semi-automatic firearms and being bored to death by Biden’s press conferences went up 30% over the past two years.” While most of us would determine that the guns, not the press conferences, were responsible for the increase in deaths, there is no way to conclude anything of the sort about tramadol and fentanyl from the CDC’s own data. The two drugs lumped into the same category for no reason except that it helps perpetuate the narrative they’re trying to push (that prescription opioids are causing the “opioid crisis” and largely responsible for drug overdoses).

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      The pharma industry argued for 30 years that it somehow managed to make Oxycodone non-addictive. This narrative was accepted widely by the medical establishment. The media and the government supported this view for 30 years. Then it became impossible to deny that addiction and overdoses were soaring. Let’s not skip these 30 years and pretend there wasn’t a concerted and aggressive campaign to convince us all that these meds weren’t addictive.

      What you are saying is verbatim what the official line was for 3 decades. And there’s still no explanation for the dramatic increase in prescriptions of opioids for “chronic pain” within just a few years. What explains it? What could have possibly led to such a massive increase? What led to all the sudden addiction? I have an explanation. It’s the idea that opioid meds aren’t addictive that was heavily marketed. What’s your explanation? Why did people in just one country all of a sudden start to massively seek these prescriptions? There’s got to be an explanation.

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      1. jmmatlock Avatar
        jmmatlock

        “The pharma industry argued for 30 years that it somehow managed to make Oxycodone non-addictive.”

        Can you point me to any statements which back that up? I ask, because even in the most recent lawsuits that have Purdue paying out billions to various states, no one submitted any evidence that they ever claimed to make ANY of their medications “non-addictive.” The litigation accuses the company and (and members of the family that own it) of aggressively marketing one very specific opioid – OxyContin (which is specifically a long-acting time-released version of Oxycodone, without the acetaminophen component, intended exclusively for long-term pain management needs) – while downplaying its addiction and overdose risks.

        To be clear, I don’t disagree with the prosecution of this company or the family that profits from it. They may have truly believed that their long-acting medication would be less likely to trigger addiction (the available evidence suggests that there is not much difference in “addictiveness” unless the medication is specifically being abused), but it’s clear that they knew within the first year that not only were addicts easily able to defeat their time-release mechanism to access the full opioid dosage all at once, but in that same time they had clearly received reports that the pills were intentionally being crushed (which was all that was needed to defeat the time-release mechanism) and snorted, stolen from pharmacies, and that there were already doctors being charged with selling prescriptions. Yet they waited until the year the patent was set to expire to “reformulate” the drug to make the time-release mechanism tamper-proof, continued to aggressively market the drug, and chose to turn a blind eye to obvious signs of “pill mills” in their pursuit of profits.

        “And there’s still no explanation for the dramatic increase in prescriptions of opioids for “chronic pain” within just a few years. What explains it?”

        You have to be willing to look further back than 30 years. The prescribing of medication for pain in the US looks something like a “pendulum” for most of the past century. There have been points where pain medication was easily obtainable and many were given it for incidental reasons. Then the pendulum swings the other way, and even your great-aunt Margaret who is dying of terminal brain cancer is being refused anything to ease her suffering. Enough people die that way, and enough people begin living years after year in agony with physical problems that cannot be fixed or helped, and the outcry becomes great enough that the Powers That Be begin to worry about their job security, the restrictions are loosened, and as the pendulum swings the other way, doctors are trained/instructed to offer or prescribe liberally. Sadly, there doesn’t seem to be much of a middle ground. What we do NOT see is any “pendulum effect” in abuse rates or overdose rates. The wide availability of prescription pills may correspond with more addicts choosing to use them over street drugs (prescription drugs are very heavily regulated, and thus a much safer option than street drugs), but it does not appear to have any impact on rates of addiction.

        “What could have possibly led to such a massive increase?”

        As I just explained, the massive increase in prescribing (most recently) came as the pendulum swung back to liberal prescribing. If you further back in history, there was increasing concern about drugs as a whole around the early 1970’s (see “The War on Drugs” and Nixon’s declaration of drug abuse as “public enemy number one”), and a misunderstanding of the difference between “dependence” and “addiction.” Thus began the 25 year swing to the “nobody needs an opioid for any reason” side.

        In the mid-1990’s, incidentally coinciding with Purdue’s release of OxyContin, there was a push in the medical community (bolstered by support from the Department of Veteran’s Affairs that coincided with the aging/increased medical problems of the WWII vets, and backlash from families of vets who’d committed suicide rather than live in pain) to view pain as “the 5th vital sign.” The campaign, while well-meaning, led many doctors to view the prescribing of pain medication as no different than the pharmaceuticals for high blood pressure, fever, or asthma. Which meant a lot of patients were given prescriptions for medications they didn’t really need, and, even when they did, much more than they’d ever use.

        “What led to all the sudden addiction?”

        What leads you to believe that the addiction is sudden? I don’t see any evidence of that. When you look at this report from the NIH (https://www.drugabuse.gov/drug-topics/trends-statistics/overdose-death-rates ), it shows a very steady, gradual increase in illicit drug use/drug abuse. The only “sudden increase” on there is the big increase in heroin use that actually coincides exactly with the reformulation of OcyContin which made it “un-abuse-able” (which just means those who were already addicts simply switched to a different drug).

        “What’s your explanation? Why did people in just one country all of a sudden start to massively seek these prescriptions?”

        Well, now you’re changing your position. Previously you claimed the problem was the doctors prescribing ginormous numbers of pills. That’s very different than “people all of a sudden start to massively seek these prescriptions.” Which one is it?

        If you’re truly interested in this, I would encourage you to research it more. As I mentioned previously, Josh Bloom and the team at the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) have written extensively and clearly on the issue. They even do a good job of showing how some of the “research” that supposedly shows “prescriptions = addictions” is cherry-picked data (like this one, which followed the same exact tactics the CDC used tried to “prove” that “natural immunity to Covid is worse than vaccine-induced immunity: https://www.acsh.org/news/2018/12/06/do-opioid-scripts-tooth-extraction-really-cause-abuse-or-just-useless-numbers-13647 ).

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  5. jmmatlock Avatar
    jmmatlock

    I’m been frustrated by the cognitive dissonance as we’ve discussed this issue through multiple of your posts now, to the point that it was disrupting my sleep last night. So I came back this afternoon, determined to parse out exactly where the problem was coming from. Turns out, it was in the very first thing I responded to. Can you see it?

    “People need to learn to be responsible for their own health. We already have an opioid epidemic because tens of thousands of gullible individuals took the most addictive drug in existence just because it was prescribed. Life doesn’t work that way, my friends. The ultimate responsibility lies with us.“

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