Ok, I'm not going to attempt to respond to your last post because I don't have the time or energy to try to answer an essay's worth of stuff. I have a job and more important things to do. I swear it's your MO to respond to a small post with a book's worth of stuff just so the other person gives up because normal people don't have the time to post that much. Congrats, you win. If you're retired or disabled, then I get it. I'm not going to do it.
No. It is my "MO" to show people the respect of giving them a thoughtful response based on the information available to me. And no, it is not my intent to make you "give up"... though that seems pretty convenient to you.
So, you think the vaccines are pointless failures and I think you are 100% wrong.
So you insist on building strawmen... and I think that's a bigger waste of time and effort than long responses. I have been pretty clear that the vaccines DO reduce severe cases and deaths so far. They are NOT preventing infections the way were were led to believe.
And did you ever take time to read the article about leaky vaccines? I would rather you do that an then ignore me than continue to ignore the risks and unknowns relating to the vaccines.
That being said, they were working on developing treatments at the same time as developing vaccines. They could develop both. The vaccines were ready first. You need both. You don't just wait for people to get sick...you try to prevent it. At the rates that people were being hospitalized in some areas, hospitals were overwhelmed, so a vaccine that can at least keep more people out of the hospital is a GREAT thing. That has happened. At the same time, better treatment options have been developed as have new medications. That's great.
"Operation Warp Speed" was not a plan to throw the full weight of the federal government into a pursuit of treatments. It was a make or break race to develop a vaccine. Trump got behind it but Fauci was the thinker.
If they had put that emphasis and money into treatments then those coming on line now might have been available a year ago. Time, expertise, and money are what makes these things go.
I am DEFINITELY not absolving Trump here. There were people advising him to go a different direction from Fauci. He was tasked with the responsibility of that decision and chose the wrong way. He was trying to play it "safe" with Covid but in the end a large number of voters cited his mishandling of Covid for their votes against him.
You base your opinion on the vaccines being a failure, so there's no way for us to agree.
What do you think equals success? I apologize. That should have been our starting point. To me, the smallpox vax is a "success" because it provides complete immunity to almost everyone who takes it. Flu vaccines are less effective but reduce the risks by 40-60% without significant side effects. The typical flu vaccine will give protection from a particular strain for 2 or 3 years.
I don't think you can call a vaccine a success when 40% of new cases are among the fully vaxed and the vaxed have a CFR of .03%. The Asian flu had a CFR only about 3 times greater.
If you felt they weren't effective enough so more effort should've been steered towards treatments, then maybe I could start to see where you're coming from...but calling them an outright failure is not something I can agree with. Either way, if you weren't making this argument at the start of the pandemic, then you're strongly leaning on the benefit of hindsight in bashing those who pushed for vaccines who had no such benefit. I believe the medical community as a whole have done the best they could based of what they knew of this new virus.
Not targeting the whole medical community. Targeting the guy in control of billions of dollars worth of research money and the politicians.
If you want to call those vaccines which are that ineffective and MAY contribute to more virulent strains of the virus when viruses typically weaken with each mutation a success... then you're right. We'll just have to disagree.
Anyways, that's all I've got time for. And Rand Paul is still an a-hole (many in his own party agree).
He isn't... and the proof is that many in his own party and pretty much all liberals... think he is. I tend to STRONGLY favor people in politics who aren't loved by the political class in DC or MSM. Generally it means they're exposing them.
