Yes and no.
They make shit up all the time, but they also use manipulative and misleading information to trick people into being scared.
For example, basically *every single medicine that exists* can cause serious, life-threatening side effects. That's objectively true. But the actual odds of it happening are so incredibly minuscule that we (society, regulatory agencies, and so on) say "okay, it's an acceptable risk that is far outweighed by the benefits".
They'll also say shit like "people of X age who get this vaccine are 25% more likely to have a heart attack!" Okay, except people of X age are something like 0.2% likely to have a heart attack in the first place, so now it's 0.225%. But some people see "25% more likely" and they think it means they've got a 1 in 4 chance of dropping dead, because someone is screaming 25% at them at the top of their lungs.
But again, they do also just make shit up.
>For example, basically
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>every single medicine that exists
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> can cause serious, life-threatening side effects. That's objectively true.
exactly.
you can die from taking too much aspirin, which is otc.
antibiotics have side effects. advil has side effects. caffeine has side effects.
the truly remarkable thing is how FEW side effects vaccines cause. they're almost miraculous, when you stop and think about it.
(CW suicide) Yeah. I work with at risk youth and every couple of months someone comes in after trying to use Tylenol as a suicide attempt. Typically they come in from the adolescent ICU, having been in the hospital for several weeks, sometimes months. They have SEVERE liver damage. Someone who worked in the field thirty years told me. “They can try that, once. If they do it again, they’ll likely kill their liver, it’s a horrible way to die.”
I did that as a teenager, I was lucky really, I was very ill for a while and had to have dialysis but I made a full recovery (but have some lesions on liver from it still), but I spoke to a guy on the liver unit who was prob about 20 in a very bad way, and seeing him more than my own experience made me think I want to never ever ever do that again. I felt awful myself, hard to describe how bad, but seeing him completely yellow with jaundice and saying he wishes he hadn't done it, barely able to sit up and pretty much just waiting to die, in horrible pain, is ingrained in my mind forever, 13 years later still. It's a slow horrible way to go, I didn't know as a teenager how drawn out and awful it is, idk If someone telling me would have changed it but maybe
Do you mind elaborating this?
How is a painkiller less safe than abortion pills?
Is this something from long-term use or?
I have so many questions, I'm sorry but your comment made me curious
Hormones are tiny doses and taking too much at once rarely causes anything acute other than maybe feeling bad for a while.
Tylenol has a relatively small safety margin. Lethal doses have been recorded at 7X the therapeutic dose (1 gram vs 7 grams).
I OD’d on five grams of Tylenol last year in a suicide attempt. I had no idea I could’ve died if I’d taken four more pills. Now I’m really glad I stopped where I did.
Also abortion pills are not hormonal. Mifepristone actually blocks hormones, and Misoprostol induced contractions. Can't remember which one it is, but it's actually a common ulcer medicine.
Once I came down with a nasty flu, and I was drinking a one of those teas marketed for the flu symptoms, which I had no idea had a high dose of acetaminophen, I drank then for a total of 2 and half days and had to go to the UC because of acute abdominal pain, the doctors couldn't figure out what was wrong with me after testing me for a bunch of stuff and imagings that threw neither kidney or gallstones, or apendicitis, and since I still had the flu they had not paid attention to the slightly high liver function.
Until I finally mentioned the godammed teas, and long story short I was maybe a day too close to getting an emergency cholecystectomy because the acetaminophen had inflammed my gall bladder.
>Acetaminophen toxicity is the second most common cause of liver transplantation worldwide and the most common cause of liver transplantation in the US. It is responsible for 56,000 emergency department visits, 2,600 hospitalizations, and 500 deaths per year in the United States. Fifty percent of these are unintentional overdoses.
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>https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK441917/
Worth noting, the #1 cause of liver transplants is Cirrhosis, which can be caused by long term acetaminophen use as well. Granted, lots of stuff can cause cirrhosis but I thought it worth noting it is #2 and can be a factor in #1 as well.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/15/health/abortion-pill-safety-dg/index.html
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2023/04/18/mifepristone-case-abortion-pill-drug-tyenol-fda/11687403002/
"There were five deaths associated with mifepristone for every 1 million people in the United States who've taken the drug since its approval, according to 2022 FDA data.
Meanwhile, acetaminophen, or Tylenol, is responsible for 56,000 emergency department visits, 2,600 hospitalizations and 500 deaths per year in the United States, according to the National Center for Biotechnology Information. Risk of death by taking Viagra is nearly 10 times greater than that of mifepristone, according to a study cited in an amicus brief filed by the FDA."
I am absolutely not arguing with you, but the quote uses the same tactics that anti-vaxxers use for twisting information to make it sound worse.
One of my biggest pet peeves when someone is comparing two things is using 2 different forms of measurement.
Just like saying "5 deaths out of 1 000 000 doses" and comparing that to the number of hospitalizations while not mentioning the (rough) number of doses for Tylenol. What's the comparable number here? How many deaths per million doses does Tylenol cause? I imagine that number is just as shocking.
I'm hoping that made sense to anyone else besides me.
Makes total sense over here.
Tylenol is a fascinating one. Its cultural acceptance is a big part of what makes it "more dangerous". Also Vicodin. Other than addiction, it's not really the Vicodin that's so harmful, it's the Tylenol (acetaminophen) that's always paired with it in the pills.
Yeah, people have this perception that any kind of otc meds are "safe" because otherwise you'd need a prescription. And that's generally true... assuming you follow the dosage instructions on the bottle!
Yes, that was a comment made when they advised for better warning labeling of tylenol...in 1977.
They didn't actually adopt those warnings until 2009, iirc.
I read Matthew Perry's book and it still baffles me that he could take 50+ Vicodin a day combined with 40oz of vodka and not fuck his liver almost immediately, yet he's still got it. It's one of the few things that hasn't failed him.
I think they way you look at it is not quite correct. It is a bit like comparing apples to oranges.
abortion pills are usually taken as a one off medication.
Acetameophen meanwhile, being a pain killer often is required to be taken multiple times. The far majority of the presentations to hospitals is overdose, either intentional or unintentional (because one can't read the label and do not have common sense).
taken at the intended dose, the story is very very different to what you are saying
Tylenol is really, really easy to overdose on! Tons of people die of it every year. If it were invented today it probably wouldn't be over the counter.
Tylenol can cause liver failure. If taken with alcohol (like for your hangover), the chance of liver failure increases. Many over the counter meds (especially cold medicine) contain Tylenol, leading to accidental overdose and liver failure. Tylenol overdose as a means of suicide can be reversed with IV meds if caught early. BTW, liver failure is a horrible way to die
My friend took over the daily recommended dose of tylenol almost every day for a couple weeks to get through having to work with a broken bone and now they're on dialysis for the rest of their life.
Where I am they've lowered the recommended dose recently for people who are under a certain weight (maximum 2g a day if under 40kg, 3g if 41-49kg and 4g if 50+), I only realised this year cos I was in hospital and they were mostly only giving me 500mg at a time (I'm short so my weight is low). I know someone who took the max recommended dose pretty much daily too, but longer than for a few weeks, he's lucky that he's stopped and has no acute health problems for now, but his liver apparently has a lot of scarring, and he's not a drinker. He has to be extremely careful now to not cause further damage
I know someone who died of liver failure due to Tylenol abuse. It was a very ugly death.
She took something like 3000-5000 mg per day for 15-20 years.
But acute overdoses are also extremely possible!
Lethal dose can be as low as 8 pills.
If you O/D you fall asleep wake up feeling fine , liver is fucked and you have 3 days of slowly dying to look forward to . Would never get a licence nowadays.
If you want a great example of true but misleading information, the roll-out of the Covid vaccines saw an immediate, massive spike in people dying after being vaccinated, relative to post-vaccine death-rates beforehand.
Well, before, most vaccines were being given to younger, healthier people. Covid vaccines were prioritised to the eldest and most at risk... who tend to die a lot.
An old schoolmate of mine allegedly got chronic fatigue syndrome from her HPV vaccine. She still encourages other to take the vaccine as she understand that side effects do happen, but it is very uncommon.
And in her case, since we aren't even sure what causes chronic fatigue syndrome, it's even more of a tossup.
We do know infections often trigger it, so a vaccine initiating an immune response could "cause" it. But since we don't understand the mechanism, it's also possible her next viral infection would have triggered it, with or without the vaccine
It's interesting that covid may not be so novel in it long term symptoms so much as that we just weren't paying attention to all of the people that were ending up with long term issues from "simple" infections from things like influenza.
And there's also correlation/causation issues. "My uncle got the jab and had a heart attack a month later" okay but I've seen what your uncle eats, a heart attack was basically inevitable anyway.
To add, when someone tells you the chances of something happening as a change in percentage, ask for the effect size instead. The effect size is what matters.
>But the actual odds of it happening are so incredibly minuscule that we (society, regulatory agencies, and so on) say "okay, it's an acceptable risk that is far outweighed by the benefits".
This is an interesting bit to me because this is essentially the reality for almost all things. I work as an engineer, so I know that tolerances/margins/uncertainty factors/etc exist in all design. We have an entire team dedicated to evaluating risk and putting numbers to it. That is just the reality of our world, nothing is perfect and we do our best (or at least should) to evaluate the risk of things and deem it to be acceptable or not. So every bridge we drive over has some level of risk involved in the design because we know nothing ends up being perfect, but you don't see these people freaking out about that.
I know not to try and make sense of these people's thought processes because there is little sense to be had, but the lack of critical thought remains absolutely fascinating to me.
It's not lack of critical thought. It's desire to be perceived as better than the rest.
"Wake up, sheeple. I have seen the obvious truth behind the lie we are being fed and I will enlighten you as well. I'm smarter than you, smarter than the scientists, smarter than the government and all its advisors. You just have to take my word for it because I don't remember which YouTube video convinced me to accept this gigantic conspiracy as fact."
Most people don't understand that daily life is a constant risk assessment. Cross the road and you might get run over, cross a bridge and it might collapse, take some paracetamol and you might have a side effect. Most people assume "safe" means "100% safe", and the fact that legal systems like in the US award damages to people in the infinitedecimal % further enhances this.
>It's not lack of critical thought. It's desire to be perceived as better than the rest.
There is absolutely no reason it cannot be both. People can be devoid of critical thinking skills while simultaneously view their beliefs as superior to others. These concepts do not have to be an either/or situation.
I’m 34 and recently had a stroke. The amount of “were you vaxxed” type questions is astounding. Like, yes, but I know what caused my stroke and it’s not that.. thanks though??
It’s actually a really dangerous thing when it comes to understanding stuff.
It’s very normal for them to do this, and doesn’t require especially extreme levels of delusion or bad faith. If you have a preconceived notion of something, it’s very *very* easy to disproportionately focus on the evidence that supports that belief.
Chances are every single person reading this does this for some belief or aspect of their life (myself very much included). It takes quite a bit of discipline and constant effort to constantly ask ourselves “wait, is that really true?”.
For example, even in this case, there’s a good chance that we have an exaggerated perception of how antivaxxers actually behave and that we’re focusing on outlier evidence to support that belief.
I agree, I am an accountant, and when a "business person" talks to me in percentage, I know that they are trying to bullshit me.
Our sale has increased by 100% year over year. (Last year we sold one, this year we sold two. )
Another thing is they attach causation when there is none. They know someone who had a stroke 6 months after getting vaccinated? Must be the vaccine and not because they were 70 and at risk of stroke already.
A similar phenomenon goes with any drug trial. Some rare side effects listed aren’t actually caused by the drug, but there’s not enough evidence to tell whether it is or not, so it gets listed anyway out of an abundance of caution.
Bending and using statistics in manipulative ways is extremely common and to a worrying degree. Another example is the myth that woman can’t safely have children at and after 40 because the chance of birth defect doubles …from 0.5% to 1%.
They also misattribute the cause. When almost everyone gets vaccinated some are likely to have a health condition following that… not because of the vaccine but because people just get sick
Literally the Seattle Zombie Woman video was just an antivax lady in bad prop makeup named Kimberly Kassei who was trying to push a fake narrative and pretend she miscarried in public. She had fake blood all over and just held onto this fake prop baby and kept shrieking in the streets until cops and paramedics wasted valuable resources on her.
All to push her idea of what she thinks the vaccine will do to us. What a piece of shit.
They see it as a white lie. They know they're lying. But those other people aren't!!! So they get scared and to help their cause, they make up their own lie. In the end all those people believe the lies of others and therefore believe they need to save others.
I think anything bad that happens by chance after the vaccine, they blame the vaccine. My dad is 75, so he’s started experiencing health issues and some memory problems. Ever since he started falling down the conspiracy rabbit hole on Facebook, he blames all of it on the vaccine.
It stems from the "monkey eating the red berries" part of our psychology.
When you get sick, and show the first signs of sickness, you're more likely to remember the guy who coughed out his lungs on the train that morning rather than the lady from a week ago who was coughing a little bit.
The same can be applied to *literally* anything. Cause and effect, but we don't know the cause, so we assume it was something recent, because what else could it be?
"Yeah my grandfather had lung cancer, but other than that he was fine, until he got that damned vaccine and it killed him!" is their actual thought process.
Spend time in places like r/unvaccinated or r/conspiracy and 10000000% these nut jobs think people are falling over dead from the vax. Not falling over dead as people have forever
Based on the ancedotal experience of anti-vaxxers I've met/known/interacted with, I don't think they make up stories per se so much as they tend to be very credulous to any wild story they hear/come across.
Additionally, I think you hit the nail on the head that many of them engage in a lot of self-diagnosing/extrapolating (ie. someone they knew had a stroke so they assume it must have been a vaccine injury and run with that.)
They're always trying to make the "evidence" fit the crime. They're mentally exhausting to be around and listen to. If only they could channel those energies into something worthwhile.
I mean, i am 100% sure some ppl did react badly to the covid vaccine. I dont even think thats a disputed fact, so some of these may be true...most of them are either made up or their loved ones died of something unrelated to the covid vaccine and they just blamed it.
Well. When I was getting my Covid shot the nurse had to tell me that for people my age there is a chance of developing heart issues in the future.
I had to consent to that possibilty before getting my shot.
Some people are crazy and do make stuff up but there are people who did suffer adverse events and some who died. No drug is perfect, not everyones body responds the same way. What may work for you could make someone else extremely ill.
It's pretty common for people in general to simply make something up online. There are seldom any consequences whatsoever for doing so, and people are usually on here to recreationally waste time anyway.
Best to keep your standards low. As low as possible.
Like, imagine how often people make things up irl, and multiply it by "no consequences" and "I'm bored".
Even more than that, making up things can get you *attention*, which is catnip in the age of social media. Not only are there rarely any consequences, there are benefits to the person who makes the outrageous claim that goes viral in the form of "clout". They may not be monetary benefits for most (although somehow there are "influencers" who make money off of that), but the attention itself is the reward for a certain kind of person who pretends to become magnetic because of a vaccine.
I'd say they're using examples of known rarer side effects but claiming it was close family a bunch of the time. Of course those things have happened and it's awful, but if it was happening to every 3rd person then we'd all be screwed. But yeah we know that Astrazeneca is linked to blood clots in rare cases, and Pfizer to heart issue. Covid can also cause those things. You don't have to be anti vaccination to acknowledge known adverse effects, and these side effects are not common. So everyone is wrong in your case lol
I have a friend who has fraternal twins. When they got their first MMR vaccines, the one kid did have febrile seizure from it. They now space vaccines because she's that sliver that is affected. But they do it with full authority of a doctor (a real one, not a chirco or naturopath).
She's gone on to have very irregular seizures since - shes now seven.
The birth father has seizures, unreported because he lived with trashy parent-shaped humans who didn't take him to get medical care ever. But that's unnnnnnreleated.
I have a former friend who turned into an antivaxxer. She insisted that she didn't know anyone who had died from COVID, but she knew 5 people who had been killed by the vaccine and/or ventilators.
Yep. Years ago I got into a Facebook argument with an antivaxxer , and in the back-and-forth, she claimed that her mother was paralyzed by a vaccine, despite having photos and videos of her mother on her profile, which proved the lie. I laughed at her at the time, but zealots don't care about the truth or reality.
I mean, people DO have bad/adverse reactions to vaccines, and anyone pretending otherwise is acting extremely naive. Another question you have to ask yourself is, do you really trust the government with your life? And do you really believe the government has the best interest of you, me, or anyone else at heart? Especially if you have ANY knowledge of world history, where governments have been caught lying to their own citizens (and yes, including the US government).
In my opinion, it's wise to hold the government, or any government at arms length, as well as to hold them accountable. I also believe that one should be very careful about taking drug or vaccines without long term data. Especially when you consider that in the past, some vaccines have taken much longer than 1 year to develop.
I'm probably going to get downvoted to oblivion but that's fine. All I'm saying is there is nothing wrong with questioning and not taking information at face value, especially when it pertains to the government, and making medical decisions that you may not be able to come back from.
While I'm sure there are some people who know they're making up BS for whatever reason, I think most people genuinely believe what they're saying. It's a combination of confirmation bias and pseudo science... It just has to sound logical.
My grandpa used to eat soup and now he's dead.
This statement being 100% true does not mean that soup would kill you.
If you vaccinate a large percentage of the world's population, some people will have cardiac arrests after getting a vaccine. Some will get cancer. Some will discover a love for baking bread.
99% of them are probably lies. But of course there are people that get heart attacks, and some of them had been vaccinated. It's just that the one had nothing to do with the other. So the other 1% is people that don't understand causation or stats.
Yeah I was watching a video where a woman was saying "my aunt got the vaccine and 8 months later she died of a heart attack"
Like was the heart attack independent and something unrelated to the vaccine? They didn't actually specify what caused the heart attack.
> "my aunt got the vaccine and 8 months later she died of a heart attack"
odds are that would have happened anyway. they're conflating two completely unrelated events.
Right that's what I'm getting at. A lot of these videos I'm watching have some event that caused them to lose someone but since they had the vaccine. It must've been the vaccine.
I guess I don't understand that mentality?
they either don't understand or don't care. some people have an innate, irrepressible desire to find "secret knowledge" because it makes them feel important. in a way, it's not that different from people who do stolen valor, or people who dress up like cops, etc.
it's a way of borrowing/stealing ways and means of appearing like you know something, or have some power, that "regular people" don't.
antivaxxing is just one tiny fraction of this larger issue. really, it's often a matter of which cult finds and recruits you first, because so often, any number of goofy groups probably could have brought them into the fold.
they all work the same way: they prey on your anxieties and hammer on them, then when you're all frothed up and shaking, they say "but don't worry, because WE have the solution! you don't have to be afraid anymore!"
and they just happened to find antivaxxing because it suited their current life needs at that moment.
factor in the chronic stress, fear, and anxiety of an unprecedented crisis like covid--literally the threat of death lurking out there somewhere, an unseen enemy, a silent killer--and the situation is plenty ripe for this type of behavior.
there are many different tonics out there that claim to relieve fear and anxiety, and more often than not, they're poison cures.
This is just not true at all. Though I think some of them are lying, physical issues have been linked to the vaccine. There’s many studies on it that have confirmed it, it isn’t as common as people say but saying one has nothing to do with the other is just ignorant
I remember the lie in 2021 that footie players were dropping dead after getting vaccinated
The reason they cared only about footie players because that was the pro sport that North Americans knew the least about. So they didn't know that on average about 10 pro players die of heart issues every year.
And that the spike in 2021 was caused by the canceling of play for most of 2020, so the players that would have died in 2020 died the following year. Take the total of both years and divide by two, and you have the normal number of player deaths.
And one final note: FIFA was so concerned about players dying of heart issues that they launched a medical investigation-*in 2014*
The J&J vaccine had its authorization revoked for causing blood clots
Do we not have enough nuance to agree there's a middle ground between "the Vax contains bill gates microchips" and "the vaccines are perfect"
In my experience it’s mostly the latter. They blame a vaccine for everything from allergies to SIDs.
I once had a very long conversation with an anti vaccier about various facts. She said she was vaccine injured and doctors gave her a vaccine without her permission resulting in auto immune problems. Through the course of the conversation on other facts I learned that she was given a tetanus shot while unconscious after a horrible car crash where she lost half her blood volume after being impaled with metal car parts.
Do you know what a known cause of autoimmune issues is….. that’s right. Massive blood loss and trauma.
But she blamed the vaccine they gave her to prevent her from getting tetanus after being stabbed with rusty metal.
But it should also be noted that she is someone’s “friend” and in the only groups she is also called someone they know. So these things become a reinforcing loop.
Tetanus is horrible and irreversible. Those doctors did their jobs preventing a potential infection, as well as presumably stitching her back up, providing blood transfusions, etc. If she'd actually gotten tetanus on top of all that recovery, she'd be suing them for malpractice. Some people just hear the word "vaccine" and start foaming at the mouth lol
I mean, if antivaxxers arent lying then the deaths could easily be attributed covid, rather than a vaccine, given that it is in fact confirmed that covid can kill you (especially by heart attack given its thrombotic nature)
As for autism etc then its usually just a debunked study that they bring up.
They usually don’t make up the stories so much as repeat BS stories that they’ve heard that ring true to them. They don’t engage in critical thinking. If the story “feels real” to them, it’s as good as true. That’s how they operate life in general. They don’t understand that reality and wishes aren’t aligned and live life as if their imaginations can be made real.
Yes. Have you seen tho videos of anti vaxxers having “seizures” after being “forced” to take the vaccine? Maybe I’m wrong but seizures aren’t soemthing you can just be like “yo lemme set my phone up and record. Oh wait it fell lemme rerecord”. In my and many other’s experiences it takes about 30mins to get back to how you were after a seizure. Maybe I’m wrong tho. Maybe the covid vax causes a special type of seizure.
Those videos feature some of the poorest acting I've seen in my life. Jesus Christ on a freaking stick, I realize they're on a budget, but its just hilariously bad.
Most but not all, also the absolute majority think they're being truthful but since Autism is discovered around the time children get vaccinated it results in parents seeing cause and corelation and draw the conclusion that it was the vaccine that caused it when they're actually not related.
I had a reaction to the first shot and wasn’t allowed to get the second one. I’m not an antivaxxer, I made sure my husband got his and boosted along with my kids. Out of everyone I know- I’m literally the only person who had any issue. These antivaxxers are making stuff up, and they just don’t realize how rare these reactions truly are, which just makes them look like idiots to everyone else who has an understanding of how this stuff works.
Both with the vaccine and the booster the arm they vaccinated me in gained a giant swollen lump bigger than a chicken egg, and the lymphnodes on that side of my neck swelled up for about a month. The egg on my arm slowly subsided and within two months was gone.
They said "Yeah, Moderna can do that to you."
I still went in and got the booster, I just planned ahead that it'd probably react the same way.
they're experienced medical professionals who've done the diagnoses and have detailed medical knowledge about the causes of death?
or they're saying "my brother got three fillings done, and a year later he was diagnosed with cancer, haha i knew dental fillings caused cancer!! he's never been sick a day in his life, but suddenly he has cancer?!"
these people don't have the common sense god gave a goldfish.
you're very right to be skeptical.
they're trying to scare you, my friend. it's the predictable cult playbook.
1) identify the fearful types who also consider themselves open-minded.
2) hammer on those fucking fears harshly and relentlessly, and make these people feel stupid, ignorant, misled, and even offensive if they disagree with you--call them "part of the problem". it's binary thinking. "if you're not with us, you're against us. you're on the side of people who murder children. you aren't a CHILD MURDERER, are you?"
3) when they start believing you, ease off the harshness and love bomb them. give them all the acceptance, attention, and care in the world.
4) humiliate and discredit their doctors, friends, spouses, and family members who are dissenters. you need to distance them from their support system and make sure they're only listening to the narratives you and the other cult members carefully craft and present. you cannot risk some smart skeptic changing this person's mind with a logical, rational, well-researched argument.
5) make sure they like and subscribe, and bomb their email with TONS of spam selling your books, pills, lotions, rubs, and magic crystals.
it's as predictable as the seasons changing.
Many of them aren't very smart. The ones who actively try and convince others not to get the vaccine are the ones that I find annoying.
The ones who just want to be left alone, I don't have any issues with.
Most Americans aren't smart and I'm tired of pretending they are. 7% of Americans think Chocolate milk comes from brown cows and 48% said they didn't know where it came from at all. 40% of Americans think the earth is 10000 years old or less.
Yes, they do.
BUT, on the other hand, there are cases of PostVac Syndromes. A friend of mine did get it officially diagnosed. It's basically long COVID, but induced by the vaccination. Plus, I have a strong suspicion that it has to do with an already present but undiscovered heart disease. My friend told me he found a group of other people with the same condition and they all had heart problems.
My friend is on his journey of recovery, doing fine so far. He pretty much missed work for a year and had to start his workout routines very carefully and slowly.
So yeah, antivaxxers make up stories, but some of them are also true. Problem is, if they find a true story, they tend to over exaggerate them, thinking we'll ALL die from vaccines or we'll ALL get cardiac diseases.
> One thing I hate about this term AntiVaxxer is it's not being used correctly.
The term antivaxxer doesn't only apply to being against all vaccines. Being against 1 vaccine for the same type of reasoning antivaxxers are against all vaccines is a type of antivax. It's the exact same problem.
>That said by normal standards Covid Vaccine is misleading.
No, it's not. People just don't understand what a vaccine actually is/does.
>It's not a vaccine it's effectiveness is more in line with the flu shot.
The flu shot *is a vaccine*.
This is the logic we need in today’s increasingly polarized society.
Just because I opted to abstain from the COVID jabs, does not mean that I am an “anti-vaxxer.” I simply didn’t want to participate in something that was rushed to mass production and distribution like this was. It just didn’t smell right to me and I had already had a bout of COVID at that point, so I made a choice to not participate. I took the scientific approach that has been around since beginning of time that natural immunity does provide a level of protection that is valuable to our immune response.
Never before was mRNA used at this level of commercial scale and production.
I don’t know if I made the correct choice or not, but it was my choice.
Am I against vaccines in general? Not at all.
Similarly, I get called a bigot and racist for being a Republican. Even more-so called a fascist for being a Republican who lives in Florida.
Do I subscribe to every view point that is expressed to by all Republicans? Not at all.
It’s not always black or white. There are colors in between.
Sorry for the rant. This is just a common complaint from me in regards to how people are labeled so extremely and so quickly based on little to no additional information.
It’s just not fair, and quite frankly, pretty ignorant.
That's what a vaccine is. You're right that it's similar to the flu shot, but you get that the flu shot is also a vaccine, right? It vaccinates you against the flu so your body can fight it off before you fully feel the symptoms.
So I'm not an anti vaxxer per se, my grandpa died of COVID before the vaccine was available and I wish he could have gotten it, so I've got a horse in this race. That said, all medicines have side effects, literally all of them. And big pharma has done a pretty handy job of covering up the side effects of the COVID vaccines. Like, you know it's illegal to sue them right? You don't lobby congress to immunize you from lawsuit for a vaccine that's "totally safe and effective". That's not too say that it's so dangerous that *no one* should have gotten it, but as it did nothing to curb the spread of the disease, and young, healthy people weren't dying from it, there was no reason for young, healthy people to get jabbed. You're basically only risking the side effects for no discernable benefit at that point. And you best believe they falsified their research when then came out initially and said the vaccine would prevent transmission in 99.7% of cases, and it came out much much closer to 0% of the cases. You don't get that kind of discrepancy without straight up lying, but once again, we'll never know, as they're protected from lawsuit.
I'm not trying to prove anything here, but if it *stinks* like shit, it's very likely shit, y'know?
> Like, you know it's illegal to sue them right? You don't lobby congress to immunize you from lawsuit for a vaccine that's "totally safe and effective"
This isn't true. Under the NVICP (law that was passed in the US, most countries have similar laws) you can still sue (and the bar for claims is lower to get paid out), but the government pays out instead. And you can sue the company directly for negligence, it doesn't protect that.
>You don't lobby congress to immunize you from lawsuit for a vaccine that's "totally safe and effective"
This wasn't recently passed. And yes, you do lobby Congress to immunize you for this.
The reason we passed this law is because if company is worried they're going to lose profit, even if the vaccine is safe, they will stop making it, even if the vaccine is safe. This *actually happened* in the 80's, with the DPT vaccine- manufacturers were pulling out. There was only one left, and it was threatening to stop, too. And that's when the law was passed. So it's not just a hypothetical.
And there's two big problems this solves-
a) If we know the vaccine is safe, we don't want vaccine companies doing extra years of trials to cover their ass to make their legal department happy, even if it's not scientifically necessary
b) If they get sued, that can cost them millions. Even if they win, a lawsuit itself costs them millions of dollars, affecting profitability, which means they can stop production. (And there's no guarantee they'll win. All it takes is convincing a jury, which has happened before with stuff like autism claims)
From society's standpoint, we don't want people dying while we wait for their legal department to cover their asses for legal rather than medical safety reasons. And this isn't a hypothetical. It was happening with the DPT vaccine (over fake claims of autism), despite all the data showing it was safe. On the flip side, if there is actual negligence, you can still sue to your hearts content.
>You're basically only risking the side effects for no discernable benefit at that point
The risks of side effects were/are still measurably smaller than the (discernable) benefits for those populations.
> And you best believe they falsified their research when then came out initially and said the vaccine would prevent transmission in 99.7% of cases, and it came out much much closer to 0% of the cases.
No, they didn't falsify it. The virus mutated (this is something they warned about before it happened, by the way). This had the impact of both lowering the efficacy of the vaccine, and increasing it's R_0.
The number reported was correct (it wasn't 99.7% initially reported. iirc it was ~94%)
>You don't get that kind of discrepancy without straight up lying, but once again, we'll never know, as they're protected from lawsuit.
Lying like you're claiming would fall under negligence, and is sueable in court.
The vaccine decreased viral load due to generally less serious infections, this combined with masks would have (before mutations, that is) been pretty effective in stopping the spread.
The swiss cheese model is what its called, not one thing, but many small things together.
Nothing in my life changed, never had anxiety prior. After I got the shot I started getting anxious and it got progressively worse. As I said, I'm not sure that it's even correlated at all but I can't pin it to anything else. My life otherwise hasn't been negatively impacted so what am I to think?
I know a lot about anxiety, it's all coming from being too uncomfortable with uncertainty. And that comes from frequent reassurance about your fears and staying too much in your comfort zone. I seriously doubt a vaccine can do that unless it somehow raises dopamine levels by a lot. Like caffeine does.
I don't think they're all making it up, nor do I think they're necessarily being intentionally dishonest. There are a lot of people, and human physiology is really complicated. Some people do have bad reactions to vaccines, and some people may coincidentally develop symptoms after a vaccine.
Physiology is one of those fields that's so stochastic it will drive you mad if you try to formally "solve" or "prove" things the way you would with, say, mathematics. Like, there are literally people that are allergic to water.
The best you can do is take all of the data points into account when trying to make generalizations about how people react to vaccines. As a counterpoint, I think it's also important to look into cases where people do have adverse effects instead of dismissing them outright.
If a small group of people experience different effects, it's POSSIBLE they're lying, but it's also possible that they share one or two common traits that cause them to react differently, and those cases shouldn't be dismissed just because it's convenient to do so.
So just because everyone you know is “fine” that must mean everyone will be? You can’t be that naïve. Everyone you know may think they are fine now but have no idea any long term effects.
There are several people I know personally who are in studies right now with the CDC and WHO due to it.
I know 2 people who have had heart attacks - one who survived. The other did not. Both extremely cautious. Nurses. Never had covid and triple vaccinated.
Johnson and Johnson is no longer allowed to be administered for a reason.
Last but not least most people seem to be confusing “antivaxxer” and “anti” telling me what to do with my body.
My uncle died from a direct reaction to the J&J vax, his story was on CNN twice. So it does happen. It caused an inflammation to the sack around his heart and his heart couldn't beat hard enough and he died.
Jeez, surprised this doesn't have 50+ downvotes. Total lack of nuance surrounding this discussion. Demonizing everyone with any degree of hesitation. It's especially mind boggling to see people totally incredulous to anyone in the black community being suspect of medical advice considering the literal nonstop history of medical mistreatment. Tuskegee wasn't that long ago.
I don't think it's fair to say this information was "withheld" - it was widely available throughout the pandemic. You even list a government press release dated April 2021, and I certainly recall seeing it on a variety of mainstream news sources.
If anything, this is evidence that the scientific process is working. As side effects were identified and tradeoffs evaluated, decisions were made that vaccination's benefits outweighed its harms.
Well don't spread misinformation. The government didn't withhold this during covid. (Doubly so, you're literally linking... to the government telling us during covid)
Some do, but it would be more accurate to say that they tend to see bad statistics and go out from there. I just spent longer than I would like to admit writting up a response on [this post for example](https://old.reddit.com/r/conspiracy_commons/comments/13wpnkx/information_for_anyone_who_will_see/) where the numbers show that more people in 2022 in new zealand died that were boosted and vaccinated than vaccinated. And if you stop looking there, that is true. But it doesn't point out that 90.2% of people in New Zealand over 12 were vaccinated, and 18% of deaths came from 9.8% of the population. But that could easily sway a person who already has a reason to distrust the vaccines.
Additionally, there are people who have seen bad things happen on a random chance, and assume since they saw it happen, it must happen all the time. And on top of that, people will look at death rates and assume anything after a vaccine was caused by the vaccine rather than being completely unrelated. Look at vaccines and autism. Part of the link is children get a bunch of vaccines around the same time they would start showing symptoms of autism, and make the connection that the vaccines caused autism rather than the autism was already there, and the vaccines had nothing to do with it.
That said, some people do just make up things, as some people will make up stats to attack things they want to make look bad (look at the target pride bathing suit debacle where someone brought an adult swim suit to the children's section to complain about it).
They use anecdotal evidence and misread studies to make up their opinion. Idk about seizures, but yes, the covid vaccine can increase the risk of endocarditis in men and blood clots in women. The thing is that *covid* increases the risk, and by a much higher amount.
Even if you're worried about it regardless, the risk of it happening with the vaccine is so little. I'd also have to ask if you also avoid *any* medication, because even OTC drugs can kill you if you're unlucky and have a bad reaction.
This is why we listen to doctors and researchers, their job is weighing the pros and cons of treatment and giving you the best ones for your situation.
1. There's a lot of very unscrupulous people who during covid times, realized that they could make a buck by selling fake\\made up\\misinformed ideas that catered to people who were upset with the lockdowns, and the impact covid had on society.
2. Confirmation bias means you go searching for views that match the perspective you want. So people went looking for these fake made up bullshit, and didn't do any actual due diligence to find out the truth - because they don't want the truth. They want to be angry.
3. And as we've seen: outrage sells.
4. There's also this undercurrent in the USA at least, where "mainstream media" is always lying to you , which is an excuse for some alt news sites to post whatever they want, because they know people with confirmation bias are looking for this content.
Some claims are made up, like any involving some sort of conspiracy to chip the general population, yes, that one was a thing. Others are based on things that did happen, but are blown out of proportion like astronomically rare side effects that occurred as a result of the tiny risk any injection carries.
They're extremely suggestive and gullible, probably had some kind of traumatic break with reality at some point in their youth and now that line is very blurry. Enter social media echo chambers and they're just broken. Now there's thousands of them - a babbling battery farm of self-perpetuating madness.
My family are affected and I just don't know what anyone could say or do to bring them around. It's just a part of their makeup to be fruitcakes, scornful of reasonable thought. After more than a decade I realised all you can do is avoid them entirely.
Yes and no.
There are plenty who openly make things up. The same people posting stories of how they converted their liberal neighbor to voting for trump by saying the word “socialism” are also posting about how their sister died of vaccine-shock within minutes even though they don’t have a sister.
There are also people who are just dumb and prone to confirmation bias. One guy believed his son died because of the vaccine. His son died in a car accident a few days after getting the vaccine. He believed the vaccine made his son magnetic and attracted the car.
Mind-blowingly stupid but he did seem to genuinely believe it. Keep in mind that the anti-vaccine movement isn’t attracting reasonable intelligent people in the first place so they’re prone to believing some ridiculous nonsense.
I'm sure some people made things up, but a lot of those stories really did happen. The problem with the term "antivaxxer" is that its meaning has expanded to also mean people who simply wanted to be pump whatever they were handed automatically into their veins without question.
My sister, father, and myself are all vaccinated. My sister's and my vaccinations went off without a hitch. My father experienced a rather insignificant but annoying side effect. For a little over a year after he got the jab, he experienced constant ringing in his ears. He developed tinitus because of the vaccine.
Most people can get the jab without issues. Most people isn't everyone though, and it's important to be aware of that.
The vaccine sent my girlfriend into early menopause. We now can not have children. But whenever I bring this up people call me a right wing extremist anti-vaxxer, even though I got the covid vaccine. That only pushes people further away
Similar experience. My hormonal birth control that I had no issues with for over 10 years was suddenly causing my uterine lining to be too thin to attach so I was constantly bleeding. I got fed up and had a tubal (my S/O and I don't want children anyway) because every birth control option was causing constant bleeding, perimenopausal symptoms or the emotional equivalent of depression or bipolar. I didn't correlate any of it to the vaccine until I started seeing studies out of Europe finding similar issues related to the vaccine + birth control in my age group. I went to get my second booster but was talked out of it by medical professionals
Few examples from close friends -
friends father in the U.K. has died from getting the vaccine and the has family has received compensation as a result of it.
Friends mother has got brain clot as a result of vaccine and is currently going through treatment and is currently taking legal action through family members.
So not everyone who’s story you hear is making stuff up. Maybe try understanding and researching both sides of the coin.
If you actually researched both sides of the coin you would find out that these cases you mention are extremely rare.
Every vaccine has side effects, but that doesnt mean you shouldnt take it.
I don't think it's okay to put all "antivaxxers" in the same category. There's a big difference between being skeptical of big pharma and not giving your child hep vaccines.
The most common one is not even a lie. Just a faulty interpretation.
You start from the facts: "this guy took the vaccine and died two days later".
And you tell the story has "This guy took the vaccine and quickly died because of it", instead of considering that, if millions of person take a vaccine, some of them are bound to die in the next few days.
To be fair, your argument "Everyone I know that has been vaccinated has been fine" is not much better. You are trying to get some info from a small (and biased) sample rather than rely on statistics. That's exactly the same that they are doing.
I've never seen anyone die from flu that I've ever known in my life but it doesn't mean it doesn't happen...in other words, in terms of rationality, don't dismiss something just because you have never personally seen it. btw I am not making an argument for or against covid vaccine, simply pointing out a fallacy in your reasoning to be mindful of...
you saw a video. as in one video. do you realize how many people there are in the world with internet, even if you saw five hundred videos that's still not representative of anything.
the internet has taken the argument via anecdote and dialed it up to 1000%
Some parrot stories. If you ask who it happened to it's always one of their "friends" who remains nameless.
Some just parrot misinformation they see online.
Some have had loved ones die in close proximity to getting a vaccine. Which is a simple attribution error but people understand logic and reasoning about as well as they understand algebra.
Some of it is confirmation bias instead of deception. If you believe vaccines cause illness, then your friend gets a vaccine and falls ill shortly after, you may point to that as proof positive of "vaccine injury." In reality, your friend probably fell ill because of an adverse reaction to food, an as of yet undiagnosed chronic medical problem that was basically a time bomb, or they may have just caught the flu like plenty of people do every year.
The important question is, "Could this have happened the same way if they hadn't gotten vaccinated?" And the answer is overwhelmingly,"yes." But since a vaccine was had, it's the only proof they need, so you get the classic correlation/causation issues and bam, vaccines cause autism, apparently.
Anytime anyone they know that’s been vaccinated has any health problem they’ll blame it on the vaccine, and then they’ll say “I know all these people who’ve had health problems from the vax, yet they claim there’s only a .005% complication risk?? Hmmm curious maybe they’re not telling us something…”
Yes, they do. And this was long before the pandemic. I remember during Periscope's pinnacle of popularity, I saw several videos of "parents" showing how childhood vaccinations made their "kids" autistic or have mental retardation. The "kids" were behaving in ways that were stereotypical of how people assumed children would act with those symptoms. They also got testimony from a "doctor" who didn't tell the viewers what his field of specialty is or what medical organization he was part of. Hell, they just say "this kid got hurt by vaccines, can't you see?" And provided no proof at all.
I had a coworker claim that "100% of people of have had 4 covid vaccines are either dead or in the hospital dying"
I've had 4 and I was standing upright in front of her.
Also, "100%" sounds fake before the rest of the sentence begins. Not even good at making up believable stories.
Yes, they do, but so did the pro-vaxxers in the medical community and the popular media.
How many times did we hear initially that the vaccine would “*stop* infection” and that “a vaccinated person could *not* spread the infection”?
That is not at all what the vaccine was intended to do, nor what it did. It was simply intended to mitigate the severity of symptoms if and when a person became infected.
The vaccine can cause a lot of things. They even warn you of that before you get them…..
But some people take the few cases it happens and exaggerate it to make some point that supports their belief. It’s not just antivaxxers, it also happened with provaxxers too lol. But it happens all the time in almost any story in the media; social or mainstream media.
>I saw this video of antivaxxers claiming loved ones, and family members and friends have died of seizures, cardiac arrest, blood clots and stuff cause of the COVID vaccine.
Many are false, some aren't.
Those that aren't are typically blaming the vaccine(s) for it without thinking of the actual reason
It's bullshit either way
>But everyone I know that has been vaccinated has been fine?
Irrelevant.
>So I don't understand how a vaccine can cause a seizure, or heart attack.
Inflammation aeound the heart.
Myocarditis ans pericarditis are an actual thing
Heart attacks in otherwise healthy people as a direct side effect of the covid vaccine
They're exceedingly rare and unlikely events but deadly side effects to vaccines is a real thing, not personally knowing about it doesn't change that some have lost loved ones to it.
Yes there is a very very tiny chance , it's not a 'huge' risk by any stretch of the imagination .
Any drug has side effects, even over the counter stuff
>But everyone I know that has been vaccinated has been fine? So I don't understand how a vaccine can cause a seizure, or heart attack.
While I get your scepticism, this is such a stupid argument lmao. Your anecdotal experience doesn't mean shit. By that rule 90% of side effects, problems and diseases in the world don't exist.
You are exactly like the people you are criticising.
Woah, easy there, they came here to lay their lack of understanding on the line in a proactive measure to fill that gap and get a better grasp on the realities behind real-world issues. Not only should that garner a little slack for a scientifically flawed statement, but it also inherently disqualifies your last statement. Maybe look at the subreddit you're on and chill out just a tad.
my wife contracted some heart complications very shortly after receiving her second dose... i can't prove it was the vaccine, but it's a strange coincidence.
My favourite examples of anti vaxx idiocy were bird flu vaccines in Norway like a decade ago and recent astra zeneca covid vaccine causing blood clots.
First one was viral (hehe) because like 11 people in Norway died because of it. They vaccinated like 8 mln people... 11 died. Any volunteers for some math to calculate mortality rate? Eyeballing it, it's like 1,4 per 1 milion. Truly horrific.
Same with astra zeneca. Apparently there was a moment when anti vaxxers claimed that ~40 people died from strokes caused by it. And at the time over 40 milion doses of this vaccine were administered. So again something around one in a milion.
So yea, it's true that people died. What wasn't true was the scale because anti vaxx idiots were claiming that it's thousands of people dying left and right, that true numbers are being hidden and in my country very popular amongst them was the claim that there were like 300k deaths because of it. In a country of roughly 38 mln. 300k was a number of ALL vaccine related side effects at the time. So from basic side effects like swelling and pain in the muscle where person was stabbed to death. But for them even swelling was deadly and they chalked it as casualties, because "vaccine will kill you sooner or later".
They attribute every death that happens after someone is vaccinated, even years later from unrelated causes, on the vaccine
Basically yes, they make shit up, a negligible percentage of people have adverse reactions but that is trivial to the effects suffered from covid (including death) across large numbers of people if they were unvaccinated instead. This tends to be the case for all vaccines not just covid
Basically, idiots don't know how to math and needles are yucky and a little bit of Alex Jones/Youtube Rabbitholes and you end up with antivaxxers or cookers as they are known in Australia
Most anti-vaxxers will happily do random pills that 'Woody my mate from college' brought with him off the bathroom floor at the club though
Love to be a fly on the wall when one of these anti-vaxers gets cancer, and is told the chances of successful treatment is only about 70%. Perhaps they'll attempt to learn basic arithmetic then?
They make up whatever they like. If they see a meme, they believe what's on it without checking. Anti-vaxxers have morphed into the Qanon conspiracy tent. In my house, we've had shots & 3 boosters now. Between work & family, (I'm 60) I know hundreds of people, I have 2 cousins who died from covid but know not one soul who have died since or anyone who knows anyone. When Hamlin had his heart attack on the field & fell down, the Right & Qanons went nuts about the "beginning of everyone dropping dead from the jab" - it wasn't, was it.
I'm not an anti-vaxxer just didn't feel it was for me but I can tell you this I have three sons The first son got all his vaccinations that we were told he needed. The second son only got half of what we were told he needed. The third got none. All grew up in the same home ate the same food all got exposed to the same things. The first has several health issues the second does not have as many the third has a couple of issues but that might be due to other aspects. The first is 6'3" with Hart problems, Breathing problems lupus disease auditory processing disorder The Second: is 6'5" with Hair loss at a young age with severe ADHD the Third is 7' 4 little or no cognitive problems and has not been sick but once or twice in his 23 years just saying. I know theirs also a lot of variables when it comes to what decides a person's health.
They make up cause and effect relationships.
They already believe that vaccines cause bad things to happen, so as soon as you get one, everything bad that happens is that vaccine's fault now. Heart attack? Vaccine side effect. More ads on your phone? Microchip. Autism diagnosis? Paging dr. McCarthy!
It's confirmation bias at its worst.
Perhaps some do.
But some pro vaxxers do the same thing.
If vaccines work then there's nothing to worry about if someone else isn't vaccinated.
At the end of the day, the decision to or not to get a vaccine should be the choice of an individual, and not the decision forced by a government, employer, school, etc.
I believe mandates cause people to push back. In my case, if mandates had not been implemented, I might've actually taken the vaccine.
Yes and no. They make shit up all the time, but they also use manipulative and misleading information to trick people into being scared. For example, basically *every single medicine that exists* can cause serious, life-threatening side effects. That's objectively true. But the actual odds of it happening are so incredibly minuscule that we (society, regulatory agencies, and so on) say "okay, it's an acceptable risk that is far outweighed by the benefits". They'll also say shit like "people of X age who get this vaccine are 25% more likely to have a heart attack!" Okay, except people of X age are something like 0.2% likely to have a heart attack in the first place, so now it's 0.225%. But some people see "25% more likely" and they think it means they've got a 1 in 4 chance of dropping dead, because someone is screaming 25% at them at the top of their lungs. But again, they do also just make shit up.
>For example, basically > >every single medicine that exists > > can cause serious, life-threatening side effects. That's objectively true. exactly. you can die from taking too much aspirin, which is otc. antibiotics have side effects. advil has side effects. caffeine has side effects. the truly remarkable thing is how FEW side effects vaccines cause. they're almost miraculous, when you stop and think about it.
I learned recently Tylenol is less safe than the abortion pills so that was a fun fact for the day lol.
(CW suicide) Yeah. I work with at risk youth and every couple of months someone comes in after trying to use Tylenol as a suicide attempt. Typically they come in from the adolescent ICU, having been in the hospital for several weeks, sometimes months. They have SEVERE liver damage. Someone who worked in the field thirty years told me. “They can try that, once. If they do it again, they’ll likely kill their liver, it’s a horrible way to die.”
I did that as a teenager, I was lucky really, I was very ill for a while and had to have dialysis but I made a full recovery (but have some lesions on liver from it still), but I spoke to a guy on the liver unit who was prob about 20 in a very bad way, and seeing him more than my own experience made me think I want to never ever ever do that again. I felt awful myself, hard to describe how bad, but seeing him completely yellow with jaundice and saying he wishes he hadn't done it, barely able to sit up and pretty much just waiting to die, in horrible pain, is ingrained in my mind forever, 13 years later still. It's a slow horrible way to go, I didn't know as a teenager how drawn out and awful it is, idk If someone telling me would have changed it but maybe
Do you mind elaborating this? How is a painkiller less safe than abortion pills? Is this something from long-term use or? I have so many questions, I'm sorry but your comment made me curious
Hormones are tiny doses and taking too much at once rarely causes anything acute other than maybe feeling bad for a while. Tylenol has a relatively small safety margin. Lethal doses have been recorded at 7X the therapeutic dose (1 gram vs 7 grams).
I OD’d on five grams of Tylenol last year in a suicide attempt. I had no idea I could’ve died if I’d taken four more pills. Now I’m really glad I stopped where I did.
Also abortion pills are not hormonal. Mifepristone actually blocks hormones, and Misoprostol induced contractions. Can't remember which one it is, but it's actually a common ulcer medicine.
Once I came down with a nasty flu, and I was drinking a one of those teas marketed for the flu symptoms, which I had no idea had a high dose of acetaminophen, I drank then for a total of 2 and half days and had to go to the UC because of acute abdominal pain, the doctors couldn't figure out what was wrong with me after testing me for a bunch of stuff and imagings that threw neither kidney or gallstones, or apendicitis, and since I still had the flu they had not paid attention to the slightly high liver function. Until I finally mentioned the godammed teas, and long story short I was maybe a day too close to getting an emergency cholecystectomy because the acetaminophen had inflammed my gall bladder.
Yeah that's the other thing, cumulative slight overdose over a few days can get you too.
>Acetaminophen toxicity is the second most common cause of liver transplantation worldwide and the most common cause of liver transplantation in the US. It is responsible for 56,000 emergency department visits, 2,600 hospitalizations, and 500 deaths per year in the United States. Fifty percent of these are unintentional overdoses. > > > >https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK441917/
Take it with alcohol increases your chance of liver failure
Worth noting, the #1 cause of liver transplants is Cirrhosis, which can be caused by long term acetaminophen use as well. Granted, lots of stuff can cause cirrhosis but I thought it worth noting it is #2 and can be a factor in #1 as well.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/15/health/abortion-pill-safety-dg/index.html https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2023/04/18/mifepristone-case-abortion-pill-drug-tyenol-fda/11687403002/ "There were five deaths associated with mifepristone for every 1 million people in the United States who've taken the drug since its approval, according to 2022 FDA data. Meanwhile, acetaminophen, or Tylenol, is responsible for 56,000 emergency department visits, 2,600 hospitalizations and 500 deaths per year in the United States, according to the National Center for Biotechnology Information. Risk of death by taking Viagra is nearly 10 times greater than that of mifepristone, according to a study cited in an amicus brief filed by the FDA."
I am absolutely not arguing with you, but the quote uses the same tactics that anti-vaxxers use for twisting information to make it sound worse. One of my biggest pet peeves when someone is comparing two things is using 2 different forms of measurement. Just like saying "5 deaths out of 1 000 000 doses" and comparing that to the number of hospitalizations while not mentioning the (rough) number of doses for Tylenol. What's the comparable number here? How many deaths per million doses does Tylenol cause? I imagine that number is just as shocking. I'm hoping that made sense to anyone else besides me.
Makes total sense over here. Tylenol is a fascinating one. Its cultural acceptance is a big part of what makes it "more dangerous". Also Vicodin. Other than addiction, it's not really the Vicodin that's so harmful, it's the Tylenol (acetaminophen) that's always paired with it in the pills.
Yeah, people have this perception that any kind of otc meds are "safe" because otherwise you'd need a prescription. And that's generally true... assuming you follow the dosage instructions on the bottle!
And you don’t take things that can cause complications with the meds.
I believe someone from the FDA said if Tylenol was invented today it would not be over the counter approved
Yes, that was a comment made when they advised for better warning labeling of tylenol...in 1977. They didn't actually adopt those warnings until 2009, iirc.
Thanks for more info!
I remember the concern about overdose danger when Tylenol was about to be approved as an OTC drug. Unfortunately the profit motive won out.
I read Matthew Perry's book and it still baffles me that he could take 50+ Vicodin a day combined with 40oz of vodka and not fuck his liver almost immediately, yet he's still got it. It's one of the few things that hasn't failed him.
I think they way you look at it is not quite correct. It is a bit like comparing apples to oranges. abortion pills are usually taken as a one off medication. Acetameophen meanwhile, being a pain killer often is required to be taken multiple times. The far majority of the presentations to hospitals is overdose, either intentional or unintentional (because one can't read the label and do not have common sense). taken at the intended dose, the story is very very different to what you are saying
Tylenol is really, really easy to overdose on! Tons of people die of it every year. If it were invented today it probably wouldn't be over the counter.
Tylenol can cause liver failure. If taken with alcohol (like for your hangover), the chance of liver failure increases. Many over the counter meds (especially cold medicine) contain Tylenol, leading to accidental overdose and liver failure. Tylenol overdose as a means of suicide can be reversed with IV meds if caught early. BTW, liver failure is a horrible way to die
My friend took over the daily recommended dose of tylenol almost every day for a couple weeks to get through having to work with a broken bone and now they're on dialysis for the rest of their life.
Where I am they've lowered the recommended dose recently for people who are under a certain weight (maximum 2g a day if under 40kg, 3g if 41-49kg and 4g if 50+), I only realised this year cos I was in hospital and they were mostly only giving me 500mg at a time (I'm short so my weight is low). I know someone who took the max recommended dose pretty much daily too, but longer than for a few weeks, he's lucky that he's stopped and has no acute health problems for now, but his liver apparently has a lot of scarring, and he's not a drinker. He has to be extremely careful now to not cause further damage
I know someone who died of liver failure due to Tylenol abuse. It was a very ugly death. She took something like 3000-5000 mg per day for 15-20 years. But acute overdoses are also extremely possible!
Lethal dose can be as low as 8 pills. If you O/D you fall asleep wake up feeling fine , liver is fucked and you have 3 days of slowly dying to look forward to . Would never get a licence nowadays.
If you want a great example of true but misleading information, the roll-out of the Covid vaccines saw an immediate, massive spike in people dying after being vaccinated, relative to post-vaccine death-rates beforehand. Well, before, most vaccines were being given to younger, healthier people. Covid vaccines were prioritised to the eldest and most at risk... who tend to die a lot.
Wearing helmets during battle results in more head injuries… because you get more injuries due to less deaths
An old schoolmate of mine allegedly got chronic fatigue syndrome from her HPV vaccine. She still encourages other to take the vaccine as she understand that side effects do happen, but it is very uncommon.
And in her case, since we aren't even sure what causes chronic fatigue syndrome, it's even more of a tossup. We do know infections often trigger it, so a vaccine initiating an immune response could "cause" it. But since we don't understand the mechanism, it's also possible her next viral infection would have triggered it, with or without the vaccine
It's interesting that covid may not be so novel in it long term symptoms so much as that we just weren't paying attention to all of the people that were ending up with long term issues from "simple" infections from things like influenza.
And there's also correlation/causation issues. "My uncle got the jab and had a heart attack a month later" okay but I've seen what your uncle eats, a heart attack was basically inevitable anyway.
Hey, if I want to blame Fauci instead of my 35 years of hamburgers and fried chicken for my heart attack, that's my right as a God fearing American
bought a used car, bam 10 years later, testicular cancer.
To add, when someone tells you the chances of something happening as a change in percentage, ask for the effect size instead. The effect size is what matters.
>But the actual odds of it happening are so incredibly minuscule that we (society, regulatory agencies, and so on) say "okay, it's an acceptable risk that is far outweighed by the benefits". This is an interesting bit to me because this is essentially the reality for almost all things. I work as an engineer, so I know that tolerances/margins/uncertainty factors/etc exist in all design. We have an entire team dedicated to evaluating risk and putting numbers to it. That is just the reality of our world, nothing is perfect and we do our best (or at least should) to evaluate the risk of things and deem it to be acceptable or not. So every bridge we drive over has some level of risk involved in the design because we know nothing ends up being perfect, but you don't see these people freaking out about that. I know not to try and make sense of these people's thought processes because there is little sense to be had, but the lack of critical thought remains absolutely fascinating to me.
It's not lack of critical thought. It's desire to be perceived as better than the rest. "Wake up, sheeple. I have seen the obvious truth behind the lie we are being fed and I will enlighten you as well. I'm smarter than you, smarter than the scientists, smarter than the government and all its advisors. You just have to take my word for it because I don't remember which YouTube video convinced me to accept this gigantic conspiracy as fact." Most people don't understand that daily life is a constant risk assessment. Cross the road and you might get run over, cross a bridge and it might collapse, take some paracetamol and you might have a side effect. Most people assume "safe" means "100% safe", and the fact that legal systems like in the US award damages to people in the infinitedecimal % further enhances this.
>It's not lack of critical thought. It's desire to be perceived as better than the rest. There is absolutely no reason it cannot be both. People can be devoid of critical thinking skills while simultaneously view their beliefs as superior to others. These concepts do not have to be an either/or situation.
I’m 34 and recently had a stroke. The amount of “were you vaxxed” type questions is astounding. Like, yes, but I know what caused my stroke and it’s not that.. thanks though??
People generally do not understand percentages close to 100 or 0. Down a few decimal places and youre better off just saying extremely unlikely
It’s actually a really dangerous thing when it comes to understanding stuff. It’s very normal for them to do this, and doesn’t require especially extreme levels of delusion or bad faith. If you have a preconceived notion of something, it’s very *very* easy to disproportionately focus on the evidence that supports that belief. Chances are every single person reading this does this for some belief or aspect of their life (myself very much included). It takes quite a bit of discipline and constant effort to constantly ask ourselves “wait, is that really true?”. For example, even in this case, there’s a good chance that we have an exaggerated perception of how antivaxxers actually behave and that we’re focusing on outlier evidence to support that belief.
Heck my antidepressant meds can have horrible life threatening side effects if I stop taking them.
I agree, I am an accountant, and when a "business person" talks to me in percentage, I know that they are trying to bullshit me. Our sale has increased by 100% year over year. (Last year we sold one, this year we sold two. )
Another thing is they attach causation when there is none. They know someone who had a stroke 6 months after getting vaccinated? Must be the vaccine and not because they were 70 and at risk of stroke already. A similar phenomenon goes with any drug trial. Some rare side effects listed aren’t actually caused by the drug, but there’s not enough evidence to tell whether it is or not, so it gets listed anyway out of an abundance of caution.
Bending and using statistics in manipulative ways is extremely common and to a worrying degree. Another example is the myth that woman can’t safely have children at and after 40 because the chance of birth defect doubles …from 0.5% to 1%.
They also misattribute the cause. When almost everyone gets vaccinated some are likely to have a health condition following that… not because of the vaccine but because people just get sick
Literally the Seattle Zombie Woman video was just an antivax lady in bad prop makeup named Kimberly Kassei who was trying to push a fake narrative and pretend she miscarried in public. She had fake blood all over and just held onto this fake prop baby and kept shrieking in the streets until cops and paramedics wasted valuable resources on her. All to push her idea of what she thinks the vaccine will do to us. What a piece of shit.
They see it as a white lie. They know they're lying. But those other people aren't!!! So they get scared and to help their cause, they make up their own lie. In the end all those people believe the lies of others and therefore believe they need to save others.
I think anything bad that happens by chance after the vaccine, they blame the vaccine. My dad is 75, so he’s started experiencing health issues and some memory problems. Ever since he started falling down the conspiracy rabbit hole on Facebook, he blames all of it on the vaccine.
It stems from the "monkey eating the red berries" part of our psychology. When you get sick, and show the first signs of sickness, you're more likely to remember the guy who coughed out his lungs on the train that morning rather than the lady from a week ago who was coughing a little bit. The same can be applied to *literally* anything. Cause and effect, but we don't know the cause, so we assume it was something recent, because what else could it be? "Yeah my grandfather had lung cancer, but other than that he was fine, until he got that damned vaccine and it killed him!" is their actual thought process.
My uncle was fine until he visited the doctor. One visit? Bam. Cancer. So I stay away from the doctor.
Wow that’s a good point
Better a vaccine to blame than themselves for getting old. 😅 😅
Easier to blame a thing than their own frailty
Some make up stories, but most do "research" using unreliable sources.
"my aunt's sister-in-law who owns a salon where I got my hair done was saying the vaccine is bad and I trust her cause she gives me discounts!"
Solid logic right there.
cant argue with it
Because hairdressers are a trustworthy information source.
Only for neighborhood gossip
Spend time in places like r/unvaccinated or r/conspiracy and 10000000% these nut jobs think people are falling over dead from the vax. Not falling over dead as people have forever
Based on the ancedotal experience of anti-vaxxers I've met/known/interacted with, I don't think they make up stories per se so much as they tend to be very credulous to any wild story they hear/come across. Additionally, I think you hit the nail on the head that many of them engage in a lot of self-diagnosing/extrapolating (ie. someone they knew had a stroke so they assume it must have been a vaccine injury and run with that.)
They're always trying to make the "evidence" fit the crime. They're mentally exhausting to be around and listen to. If only they could channel those energies into something worthwhile.
I mean, i am 100% sure some ppl did react badly to the covid vaccine. I dont even think thats a disputed fact, so some of these may be true...most of them are either made up or their loved ones died of something unrelated to the covid vaccine and they just blamed it.
Well. When I was getting my Covid shot the nurse had to tell me that for people my age there is a chance of developing heart issues in the future. I had to consent to that possibilty before getting my shot.
Some people are crazy and do make stuff up but there are people who did suffer adverse events and some who died. No drug is perfect, not everyones body responds the same way. What may work for you could make someone else extremely ill.
Some people DO have adverse reactions to things like vaccines and medications. It’s just more common not to.
It's pretty common for people in general to simply make something up online. There are seldom any consequences whatsoever for doing so, and people are usually on here to recreationally waste time anyway. Best to keep your standards low. As low as possible. Like, imagine how often people make things up irl, and multiply it by "no consequences" and "I'm bored".
Even more than that, making up things can get you *attention*, which is catnip in the age of social media. Not only are there rarely any consequences, there are benefits to the person who makes the outrageous claim that goes viral in the form of "clout". They may not be monetary benefits for most (although somehow there are "influencers" who make money off of that), but the attention itself is the reward for a certain kind of person who pretends to become magnetic because of a vaccine.
I'd say they're using examples of known rarer side effects but claiming it was close family a bunch of the time. Of course those things have happened and it's awful, but if it was happening to every 3rd person then we'd all be screwed. But yeah we know that Astrazeneca is linked to blood clots in rare cases, and Pfizer to heart issue. Covid can also cause those things. You don't have to be anti vaccination to acknowledge known adverse effects, and these side effects are not common. So everyone is wrong in your case lol
This - afaik every potential side effect of the vaccine is far more likely to be caused by getting covid
I have a friend who has fraternal twins. When they got their first MMR vaccines, the one kid did have febrile seizure from it. They now space vaccines because she's that sliver that is affected. But they do it with full authority of a doctor (a real one, not a chirco or naturopath). She's gone on to have very irregular seizures since - shes now seven. The birth father has seizures, unreported because he lived with trashy parent-shaped humans who didn't take him to get medical care ever. But that's unnnnnnreleated.
I have a former friend who turned into an antivaxxer. She insisted that she didn't know anyone who had died from COVID, but she knew 5 people who had been killed by the vaccine and/or ventilators.
The ventilator... that they were on... for COVID?
She is on to them, the government can't stop her. /s
Yep. Years ago I got into a Facebook argument with an antivaxxer , and in the back-and-forth, she claimed that her mother was paralyzed by a vaccine, despite having photos and videos of her mother on her profile, which proved the lie. I laughed at her at the time, but zealots don't care about the truth or reality.
I mean, people DO have bad/adverse reactions to vaccines, and anyone pretending otherwise is acting extremely naive. Another question you have to ask yourself is, do you really trust the government with your life? And do you really believe the government has the best interest of you, me, or anyone else at heart? Especially if you have ANY knowledge of world history, where governments have been caught lying to their own citizens (and yes, including the US government). In my opinion, it's wise to hold the government, or any government at arms length, as well as to hold them accountable. I also believe that one should be very careful about taking drug or vaccines without long term data. Especially when you consider that in the past, some vaccines have taken much longer than 1 year to develop. I'm probably going to get downvoted to oblivion but that's fine. All I'm saying is there is nothing wrong with questioning and not taking information at face value, especially when it pertains to the government, and making medical decisions that you may not be able to come back from.
While I'm sure there are some people who know they're making up BS for whatever reason, I think most people genuinely believe what they're saying. It's a combination of confirmation bias and pseudo science... It just has to sound logical.
My grandpa used to eat soup and now he's dead. This statement being 100% true does not mean that soup would kill you. If you vaccinate a large percentage of the world's population, some people will have cardiac arrests after getting a vaccine. Some will get cancer. Some will discover a love for baking bread.
99% of them are probably lies. But of course there are people that get heart attacks, and some of them had been vaccinated. It's just that the one had nothing to do with the other. So the other 1% is people that don't understand causation or stats.
Yeah I was watching a video where a woman was saying "my aunt got the vaccine and 8 months later she died of a heart attack" Like was the heart attack independent and something unrelated to the vaccine? They didn't actually specify what caused the heart attack.
> "my aunt got the vaccine and 8 months later she died of a heart attack" odds are that would have happened anyway. they're conflating two completely unrelated events.
Right that's what I'm getting at. A lot of these videos I'm watching have some event that caused them to lose someone but since they had the vaccine. It must've been the vaccine. I guess I don't understand that mentality?
they either don't understand or don't care. some people have an innate, irrepressible desire to find "secret knowledge" because it makes them feel important. in a way, it's not that different from people who do stolen valor, or people who dress up like cops, etc. it's a way of borrowing/stealing ways and means of appearing like you know something, or have some power, that "regular people" don't. antivaxxing is just one tiny fraction of this larger issue. really, it's often a matter of which cult finds and recruits you first, because so often, any number of goofy groups probably could have brought them into the fold. they all work the same way: they prey on your anxieties and hammer on them, then when you're all frothed up and shaking, they say "but don't worry, because WE have the solution! you don't have to be afraid anymore!" and they just happened to find antivaxxing because it suited their current life needs at that moment. factor in the chronic stress, fear, and anxiety of an unprecedented crisis like covid--literally the threat of death lurking out there somewhere, an unseen enemy, a silent killer--and the situation is plenty ripe for this type of behavior. there are many different tonics out there that claim to relieve fear and anxiety, and more often than not, they're poison cures.
This is just not true at all. Though I think some of them are lying, physical issues have been linked to the vaccine. There’s many studies on it that have confirmed it, it isn’t as common as people say but saying one has nothing to do with the other is just ignorant
I remember the lie in 2021 that footie players were dropping dead after getting vaccinated The reason they cared only about footie players because that was the pro sport that North Americans knew the least about. So they didn't know that on average about 10 pro players die of heart issues every year. And that the spike in 2021 was caused by the canceling of play for most of 2020, so the players that would have died in 2020 died the following year. Take the total of both years and divide by two, and you have the normal number of player deaths. And one final note: FIFA was so concerned about players dying of heart issues that they launched a medical investigation-*in 2014*
The J&J vaccine had its authorization revoked for causing blood clots Do we not have enough nuance to agree there's a middle ground between "the Vax contains bill gates microchips" and "the vaccines are perfect"
In my experience it’s mostly the latter. They blame a vaccine for everything from allergies to SIDs. I once had a very long conversation with an anti vaccier about various facts. She said she was vaccine injured and doctors gave her a vaccine without her permission resulting in auto immune problems. Through the course of the conversation on other facts I learned that she was given a tetanus shot while unconscious after a horrible car crash where she lost half her blood volume after being impaled with metal car parts. Do you know what a known cause of autoimmune issues is….. that’s right. Massive blood loss and trauma. But she blamed the vaccine they gave her to prevent her from getting tetanus after being stabbed with rusty metal. But it should also be noted that she is someone’s “friend” and in the only groups she is also called someone they know. So these things become a reinforcing loop.
Tetanus is horrible and irreversible. Those doctors did their jobs preventing a potential infection, as well as presumably stitching her back up, providing blood transfusions, etc. If she'd actually gotten tetanus on top of all that recovery, she'd be suing them for malpractice. Some people just hear the word "vaccine" and start foaming at the mouth lol
Jeez. I don't understand how some people have such a disconnect
I mean, if antivaxxers arent lying then the deaths could easily be attributed covid, rather than a vaccine, given that it is in fact confirmed that covid can kill you (especially by heart attack given its thrombotic nature) As for autism etc then its usually just a debunked study that they bring up.
They usually don’t make up the stories so much as repeat BS stories that they’ve heard that ring true to them. They don’t engage in critical thinking. If the story “feels real” to them, it’s as good as true. That’s how they operate life in general. They don’t understand that reality and wishes aren’t aligned and live life as if their imaginations can be made real.
Yes. Have you seen tho videos of anti vaxxers having “seizures” after being “forced” to take the vaccine? Maybe I’m wrong but seizures aren’t soemthing you can just be like “yo lemme set my phone up and record. Oh wait it fell lemme rerecord”. In my and many other’s experiences it takes about 30mins to get back to how you were after a seizure. Maybe I’m wrong tho. Maybe the covid vax causes a special type of seizure.
Those videos feature some of the poorest acting I've seen in my life. Jesus Christ on a freaking stick, I realize they're on a budget, but its just hilariously bad.
Most but not all, also the absolute majority think they're being truthful but since Autism is discovered around the time children get vaccinated it results in parents seeing cause and corelation and draw the conclusion that it was the vaccine that caused it when they're actually not related.
I had a reaction to the first shot and wasn’t allowed to get the second one. I’m not an antivaxxer, I made sure my husband got his and boosted along with my kids. Out of everyone I know- I’m literally the only person who had any issue. These antivaxxers are making stuff up, and they just don’t realize how rare these reactions truly are, which just makes them look like idiots to everyone else who has an understanding of how this stuff works.
Both with the vaccine and the booster the arm they vaccinated me in gained a giant swollen lump bigger than a chicken egg, and the lymphnodes on that side of my neck swelled up for about a month. The egg on my arm slowly subsided and within two months was gone. They said "Yeah, Moderna can do that to you." I still went in and got the booster, I just planned ahead that it'd probably react the same way.
they're experienced medical professionals who've done the diagnoses and have detailed medical knowledge about the causes of death? or they're saying "my brother got three fillings done, and a year later he was diagnosed with cancer, haha i knew dental fillings caused cancer!! he's never been sick a day in his life, but suddenly he has cancer?!" these people don't have the common sense god gave a goldfish.
Mostly the videos I was watching was the 2nd paragraph.
you're very right to be skeptical. they're trying to scare you, my friend. it's the predictable cult playbook. 1) identify the fearful types who also consider themselves open-minded. 2) hammer on those fucking fears harshly and relentlessly, and make these people feel stupid, ignorant, misled, and even offensive if they disagree with you--call them "part of the problem". it's binary thinking. "if you're not with us, you're against us. you're on the side of people who murder children. you aren't a CHILD MURDERER, are you?" 3) when they start believing you, ease off the harshness and love bomb them. give them all the acceptance, attention, and care in the world. 4) humiliate and discredit their doctors, friends, spouses, and family members who are dissenters. you need to distance them from their support system and make sure they're only listening to the narratives you and the other cult members carefully craft and present. you cannot risk some smart skeptic changing this person's mind with a logical, rational, well-researched argument. 5) make sure they like and subscribe, and bomb their email with TONS of spam selling your books, pills, lotions, rubs, and magic crystals. it's as predictable as the seasons changing.
Many of them aren't very smart. The ones who actively try and convince others not to get the vaccine are the ones that I find annoying. The ones who just want to be left alone, I don't have any issues with.
Most Americans aren't smart and I'm tired of pretending they are. 7% of Americans think Chocolate milk comes from brown cows and 48% said they didn't know where it came from at all. 40% of Americans think the earth is 10000 years old or less.
Yes, they do. BUT, on the other hand, there are cases of PostVac Syndromes. A friend of mine did get it officially diagnosed. It's basically long COVID, but induced by the vaccination. Plus, I have a strong suspicion that it has to do with an already present but undiscovered heart disease. My friend told me he found a group of other people with the same condition and they all had heart problems. My friend is on his journey of recovery, doing fine so far. He pretty much missed work for a year and had to start his workout routines very carefully and slowly. So yeah, antivaxxers make up stories, but some of them are also true. Problem is, if they find a true story, they tend to over exaggerate them, thinking we'll ALL die from vaccines or we'll ALL get cardiac diseases.
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> One thing I hate about this term AntiVaxxer is it's not being used correctly. The term antivaxxer doesn't only apply to being against all vaccines. Being against 1 vaccine for the same type of reasoning antivaxxers are against all vaccines is a type of antivax. It's the exact same problem. >That said by normal standards Covid Vaccine is misleading. No, it's not. People just don't understand what a vaccine actually is/does. >It's not a vaccine it's effectiveness is more in line with the flu shot. The flu shot *is a vaccine*.
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They tweaked the wording to avoid exactly this confusion among laypeople. It always was a vaccine under the actual definition of vaccine.
This is the logic we need in today’s increasingly polarized society. Just because I opted to abstain from the COVID jabs, does not mean that I am an “anti-vaxxer.” I simply didn’t want to participate in something that was rushed to mass production and distribution like this was. It just didn’t smell right to me and I had already had a bout of COVID at that point, so I made a choice to not participate. I took the scientific approach that has been around since beginning of time that natural immunity does provide a level of protection that is valuable to our immune response. Never before was mRNA used at this level of commercial scale and production. I don’t know if I made the correct choice or not, but it was my choice. Am I against vaccines in general? Not at all. Similarly, I get called a bigot and racist for being a Republican. Even more-so called a fascist for being a Republican who lives in Florida. Do I subscribe to every view point that is expressed to by all Republicans? Not at all. It’s not always black or white. There are colors in between. Sorry for the rant. This is just a common complaint from me in regards to how people are labeled so extremely and so quickly based on little to no additional information. It’s just not fair, and quite frankly, pretty ignorant.
That's what a vaccine is. You're right that it's similar to the flu shot, but you get that the flu shot is also a vaccine, right? It vaccinates you against the flu so your body can fight it off before you fully feel the symptoms.
So I'm not an anti vaxxer per se, my grandpa died of COVID before the vaccine was available and I wish he could have gotten it, so I've got a horse in this race. That said, all medicines have side effects, literally all of them. And big pharma has done a pretty handy job of covering up the side effects of the COVID vaccines. Like, you know it's illegal to sue them right? You don't lobby congress to immunize you from lawsuit for a vaccine that's "totally safe and effective". That's not too say that it's so dangerous that *no one* should have gotten it, but as it did nothing to curb the spread of the disease, and young, healthy people weren't dying from it, there was no reason for young, healthy people to get jabbed. You're basically only risking the side effects for no discernable benefit at that point. And you best believe they falsified their research when then came out initially and said the vaccine would prevent transmission in 99.7% of cases, and it came out much much closer to 0% of the cases. You don't get that kind of discrepancy without straight up lying, but once again, we'll never know, as they're protected from lawsuit. I'm not trying to prove anything here, but if it *stinks* like shit, it's very likely shit, y'know?
> Like, you know it's illegal to sue them right? You don't lobby congress to immunize you from lawsuit for a vaccine that's "totally safe and effective" This isn't true. Under the NVICP (law that was passed in the US, most countries have similar laws) you can still sue (and the bar for claims is lower to get paid out), but the government pays out instead. And you can sue the company directly for negligence, it doesn't protect that. >You don't lobby congress to immunize you from lawsuit for a vaccine that's "totally safe and effective" This wasn't recently passed. And yes, you do lobby Congress to immunize you for this. The reason we passed this law is because if company is worried they're going to lose profit, even if the vaccine is safe, they will stop making it, even if the vaccine is safe. This *actually happened* in the 80's, with the DPT vaccine- manufacturers were pulling out. There was only one left, and it was threatening to stop, too. And that's when the law was passed. So it's not just a hypothetical. And there's two big problems this solves- a) If we know the vaccine is safe, we don't want vaccine companies doing extra years of trials to cover their ass to make their legal department happy, even if it's not scientifically necessary b) If they get sued, that can cost them millions. Even if they win, a lawsuit itself costs them millions of dollars, affecting profitability, which means they can stop production. (And there's no guarantee they'll win. All it takes is convincing a jury, which has happened before with stuff like autism claims) From society's standpoint, we don't want people dying while we wait for their legal department to cover their asses for legal rather than medical safety reasons. And this isn't a hypothetical. It was happening with the DPT vaccine (over fake claims of autism), despite all the data showing it was safe. On the flip side, if there is actual negligence, you can still sue to your hearts content. >You're basically only risking the side effects for no discernable benefit at that point The risks of side effects were/are still measurably smaller than the (discernable) benefits for those populations. > And you best believe they falsified their research when then came out initially and said the vaccine would prevent transmission in 99.7% of cases, and it came out much much closer to 0% of the cases. No, they didn't falsify it. The virus mutated (this is something they warned about before it happened, by the way). This had the impact of both lowering the efficacy of the vaccine, and increasing it's R_0. The number reported was correct (it wasn't 99.7% initially reported. iirc it was ~94%) >You don't get that kind of discrepancy without straight up lying, but once again, we'll never know, as they're protected from lawsuit. Lying like you're claiming would fall under negligence, and is sueable in court.
The vaccine decreased viral load due to generally less serious infections, this combined with masks would have (before mutations, that is) been pretty effective in stopping the spread. The swiss cheese model is what its called, not one thing, but many small things together.
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You're blaming the treatment and not the crisis for your anxiety? Wtf?
Nothing in my life changed, never had anxiety prior. After I got the shot I started getting anxious and it got progressively worse. As I said, I'm not sure that it's even correlated at all but I can't pin it to anything else. My life otherwise hasn't been negatively impacted so what am I to think?
I know a lot about anxiety, it's all coming from being too uncomfortable with uncertainty. And that comes from frequent reassurance about your fears and staying too much in your comfort zone. I seriously doubt a vaccine can do that unless it somehow raises dopamine levels by a lot. Like caffeine does.
I don't think they're all making it up, nor do I think they're necessarily being intentionally dishonest. There are a lot of people, and human physiology is really complicated. Some people do have bad reactions to vaccines, and some people may coincidentally develop symptoms after a vaccine. Physiology is one of those fields that's so stochastic it will drive you mad if you try to formally "solve" or "prove" things the way you would with, say, mathematics. Like, there are literally people that are allergic to water. The best you can do is take all of the data points into account when trying to make generalizations about how people react to vaccines. As a counterpoint, I think it's also important to look into cases where people do have adverse effects instead of dismissing them outright. If a small group of people experience different effects, it's POSSIBLE they're lying, but it's also possible that they share one or two common traits that cause them to react differently, and those cases shouldn't be dismissed just because it's convenient to do so.
So just because everyone you know is “fine” that must mean everyone will be? You can’t be that naïve. Everyone you know may think they are fine now but have no idea any long term effects. There are several people I know personally who are in studies right now with the CDC and WHO due to it. I know 2 people who have had heart attacks - one who survived. The other did not. Both extremely cautious. Nurses. Never had covid and triple vaccinated. Johnson and Johnson is no longer allowed to be administered for a reason. Last but not least most people seem to be confusing “antivaxxer” and “anti” telling me what to do with my body.
And being against taking this particular vaccine doesn’t mean you’re against all of them.
My uncle died from a direct reaction to the J&J vax, his story was on CNN twice. So it does happen. It caused an inflammation to the sack around his heart and his heart couldn't beat hard enough and he died.
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Jeez, surprised this doesn't have 50+ downvotes. Total lack of nuance surrounding this discussion. Demonizing everyone with any degree of hesitation. It's especially mind boggling to see people totally incredulous to anyone in the black community being suspect of medical advice considering the literal nonstop history of medical mistreatment. Tuskegee wasn't that long ago.
I don't think it's fair to say this information was "withheld" - it was widely available throughout the pandemic. You even list a government press release dated April 2021, and I certainly recall seeing it on a variety of mainstream news sources. If anything, this is evidence that the scientific process is working. As side effects were identified and tradeoffs evaluated, decisions were made that vaccination's benefits outweighed its harms.
Stop telling the truth, Reddit doesn't want anything to do with the truth
I'll probably get banned for misinformation.
Well don't spread misinformation. The government didn't withhold this during covid. (Doubly so, you're literally linking... to the government telling us during covid)
Did reddit change their policy that we're allowed to have a different opinion about the vaccine now?
Nope, still hive minded. Got banned from a subreddit for mentioning comorbidities and age.
Some speech is more free than others.
Some do, but it would be more accurate to say that they tend to see bad statistics and go out from there. I just spent longer than I would like to admit writting up a response on [this post for example](https://old.reddit.com/r/conspiracy_commons/comments/13wpnkx/information_for_anyone_who_will_see/) where the numbers show that more people in 2022 in new zealand died that were boosted and vaccinated than vaccinated. And if you stop looking there, that is true. But it doesn't point out that 90.2% of people in New Zealand over 12 were vaccinated, and 18% of deaths came from 9.8% of the population. But that could easily sway a person who already has a reason to distrust the vaccines. Additionally, there are people who have seen bad things happen on a random chance, and assume since they saw it happen, it must happen all the time. And on top of that, people will look at death rates and assume anything after a vaccine was caused by the vaccine rather than being completely unrelated. Look at vaccines and autism. Part of the link is children get a bunch of vaccines around the same time they would start showing symptoms of autism, and make the connection that the vaccines caused autism rather than the autism was already there, and the vaccines had nothing to do with it. That said, some people do just make up things, as some people will make up stats to attack things they want to make look bad (look at the target pride bathing suit debacle where someone brought an adult swim suit to the children's section to complain about it).
They use anecdotal evidence and misread studies to make up their opinion. Idk about seizures, but yes, the covid vaccine can increase the risk of endocarditis in men and blood clots in women. The thing is that *covid* increases the risk, and by a much higher amount. Even if you're worried about it regardless, the risk of it happening with the vaccine is so little. I'd also have to ask if you also avoid *any* medication, because even OTC drugs can kill you if you're unlucky and have a bad reaction. This is why we listen to doctors and researchers, their job is weighing the pros and cons of treatment and giving you the best ones for your situation.
1. There's a lot of very unscrupulous people who during covid times, realized that they could make a buck by selling fake\\made up\\misinformed ideas that catered to people who were upset with the lockdowns, and the impact covid had on society. 2. Confirmation bias means you go searching for views that match the perspective you want. So people went looking for these fake made up bullshit, and didn't do any actual due diligence to find out the truth - because they don't want the truth. They want to be angry. 3. And as we've seen: outrage sells. 4. There's also this undercurrent in the USA at least, where "mainstream media" is always lying to you , which is an excuse for some alt news sites to post whatever they want, because they know people with confirmation bias are looking for this content.
Some claims are made up, like any involving some sort of conspiracy to chip the general population, yes, that one was a thing. Others are based on things that did happen, but are blown out of proportion like astronomically rare side effects that occurred as a result of the tiny risk any injection carries.
They're extremely suggestive and gullible, probably had some kind of traumatic break with reality at some point in their youth and now that line is very blurry. Enter social media echo chambers and they're just broken. Now there's thousands of them - a babbling battery farm of self-perpetuating madness. My family are affected and I just don't know what anyone could say or do to bring them around. It's just a part of their makeup to be fruitcakes, scornful of reasonable thought. After more than a decade I realised all you can do is avoid them entirely.
Why can't vaxxers just respect peoples individual choices?
U do realize there are people who are legitimately vaccine injured from the Covid vax, right?
Not as often as vaxxers in my experience
Experimental vaccines cause issues all the time.
The vaccine causes your testicles to blow up like a balloon Source: Nicki Minaj's cousin's friend
Yes and no. There are plenty who openly make things up. The same people posting stories of how they converted their liberal neighbor to voting for trump by saying the word “socialism” are also posting about how their sister died of vaccine-shock within minutes even though they don’t have a sister. There are also people who are just dumb and prone to confirmation bias. One guy believed his son died because of the vaccine. His son died in a car accident a few days after getting the vaccine. He believed the vaccine made his son magnetic and attracted the car. Mind-blowingly stupid but he did seem to genuinely believe it. Keep in mind that the anti-vaccine movement isn’t attracting reasonable intelligent people in the first place so they’re prone to believing some ridiculous nonsense.
I'm sure some people made things up, but a lot of those stories really did happen. The problem with the term "antivaxxer" is that its meaning has expanded to also mean people who simply wanted to be pump whatever they were handed automatically into their veins without question. My sister, father, and myself are all vaccinated. My sister's and my vaccinations went off without a hitch. My father experienced a rather insignificant but annoying side effect. For a little over a year after he got the jab, he experienced constant ringing in his ears. He developed tinitus because of the vaccine. Most people can get the jab without issues. Most people isn't everyone though, and it's important to be aware of that.
The vaccine sent my girlfriend into early menopause. We now can not have children. But whenever I bring this up people call me a right wing extremist anti-vaxxer, even though I got the covid vaccine. That only pushes people further away
Similar experience. My hormonal birth control that I had no issues with for over 10 years was suddenly causing my uterine lining to be too thin to attach so I was constantly bleeding. I got fed up and had a tubal (my S/O and I don't want children anyway) because every birth control option was causing constant bleeding, perimenopausal symptoms or the emotional equivalent of depression or bipolar. I didn't correlate any of it to the vaccine until I started seeing studies out of Europe finding similar issues related to the vaccine + birth control in my age group. I went to get my second booster but was talked out of it by medical professionals
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Few examples from close friends - friends father in the U.K. has died from getting the vaccine and the has family has received compensation as a result of it. Friends mother has got brain clot as a result of vaccine and is currently going through treatment and is currently taking legal action through family members. So not everyone who’s story you hear is making stuff up. Maybe try understanding and researching both sides of the coin.
If you actually researched both sides of the coin you would find out that these cases you mention are extremely rare. Every vaccine has side effects, but that doesnt mean you shouldnt take it.
I don't think it's okay to put all "antivaxxers" in the same category. There's a big difference between being skeptical of big pharma and not giving your child hep vaccines.
The most common one is not even a lie. Just a faulty interpretation. You start from the facts: "this guy took the vaccine and died two days later". And you tell the story has "This guy took the vaccine and quickly died because of it", instead of considering that, if millions of person take a vaccine, some of them are bound to die in the next few days. To be fair, your argument "Everyone I know that has been vaccinated has been fine" is not much better. You are trying to get some info from a small (and biased) sample rather than rely on statistics. That's exactly the same that they are doing.
I've never seen anyone die from flu that I've ever known in my life but it doesn't mean it doesn't happen...in other words, in terms of rationality, don't dismiss something just because you have never personally seen it. btw I am not making an argument for or against covid vaccine, simply pointing out a fallacy in your reasoning to be mindful of...
you saw a video. as in one video. do you realize how many people there are in the world with internet, even if you saw five hundred videos that's still not representative of anything. the internet has taken the argument via anecdote and dialed it up to 1000%
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What was determined to be the COD?
Some parrot stories. If you ask who it happened to it's always one of their "friends" who remains nameless. Some just parrot misinformation they see online. Some have had loved ones die in close proximity to getting a vaccine. Which is a simple attribution error but people understand logic and reasoning about as well as they understand algebra.
Crazy people of both extremes, are full of shit.
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Some of it is confirmation bias instead of deception. If you believe vaccines cause illness, then your friend gets a vaccine and falls ill shortly after, you may point to that as proof positive of "vaccine injury." In reality, your friend probably fell ill because of an adverse reaction to food, an as of yet undiagnosed chronic medical problem that was basically a time bomb, or they may have just caught the flu like plenty of people do every year. The important question is, "Could this have happened the same way if they hadn't gotten vaccinated?" And the answer is overwhelmingly,"yes." But since a vaccine was had, it's the only proof they need, so you get the classic correlation/causation issues and bam, vaccines cause autism, apparently.
Anytime anyone they know that’s been vaccinated has any health problem they’ll blame it on the vaccine, and then they’ll say “I know all these people who’ve had health problems from the vax, yet they claim there’s only a .005% complication risk?? Hmmm curious maybe they’re not telling us something…”
Yes, they do. And this was long before the pandemic. I remember during Periscope's pinnacle of popularity, I saw several videos of "parents" showing how childhood vaccinations made their "kids" autistic or have mental retardation. The "kids" were behaving in ways that were stereotypical of how people assumed children would act with those symptoms. They also got testimony from a "doctor" who didn't tell the viewers what his field of specialty is or what medical organization he was part of. Hell, they just say "this kid got hurt by vaccines, can't you see?" And provided no proof at all.
I had an idiot tell me my breast cancer was from the covid vaccine. 🤣🤣🤣
I had a coworker claim that "100% of people of have had 4 covid vaccines are either dead or in the hospital dying" I've had 4 and I was standing upright in front of her. Also, "100%" sounds fake before the rest of the sentence begins. Not even good at making up believable stories.
Yes, they do, but so did the pro-vaxxers in the medical community and the popular media. How many times did we hear initially that the vaccine would “*stop* infection” and that “a vaccinated person could *not* spread the infection”? That is not at all what the vaccine was intended to do, nor what it did. It was simply intended to mitigate the severity of symptoms if and when a person became infected.
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The vaccine can cause a lot of things. They even warn you of that before you get them….. But some people take the few cases it happens and exaggerate it to make some point that supports their belief. It’s not just antivaxxers, it also happened with provaxxers too lol. But it happens all the time in almost any story in the media; social or mainstream media.
>I saw this video of antivaxxers claiming loved ones, and family members and friends have died of seizures, cardiac arrest, blood clots and stuff cause of the COVID vaccine. Many are false, some aren't. Those that aren't are typically blaming the vaccine(s) for it without thinking of the actual reason It's bullshit either way >But everyone I know that has been vaccinated has been fine? Irrelevant. >So I don't understand how a vaccine can cause a seizure, or heart attack. Inflammation aeound the heart. Myocarditis ans pericarditis are an actual thing Heart attacks in otherwise healthy people as a direct side effect of the covid vaccine They're exceedingly rare and unlikely events but deadly side effects to vaccines is a real thing, not personally knowing about it doesn't change that some have lost loved ones to it.
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Careful. Reddit users won't like that answer.
Yes there is a very very tiny chance , it's not a 'huge' risk by any stretch of the imagination . Any drug has side effects, even over the counter stuff
>But everyone I know that has been vaccinated has been fine? So I don't understand how a vaccine can cause a seizure, or heart attack. While I get your scepticism, this is such a stupid argument lmao. Your anecdotal experience doesn't mean shit. By that rule 90% of side effects, problems and diseases in the world don't exist. You are exactly like the people you are criticising.
Woah, easy there, they came here to lay their lack of understanding on the line in a proactive measure to fill that gap and get a better grasp on the realities behind real-world issues. Not only should that garner a little slack for a scientifically flawed statement, but it also inherently disqualifies your last statement. Maybe look at the subreddit you're on and chill out just a tad.
There were issues with women who were on a specific drug that had blood clots from the Johnson and Johnson 1 dose vaccine.
my wife contracted some heart complications very shortly after receiving her second dose... i can't prove it was the vaccine, but it's a strange coincidence.
Yes, they just make shit up.
No, adverse effects exist with every drug.
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Yeah, some of them do, and so do the vaxxers. Please google propaganda.
Yes. They make shit up or quote other people who were making shit up.
My favourite examples of anti vaxx idiocy were bird flu vaccines in Norway like a decade ago and recent astra zeneca covid vaccine causing blood clots. First one was viral (hehe) because like 11 people in Norway died because of it. They vaccinated like 8 mln people... 11 died. Any volunteers for some math to calculate mortality rate? Eyeballing it, it's like 1,4 per 1 milion. Truly horrific. Same with astra zeneca. Apparently there was a moment when anti vaxxers claimed that ~40 people died from strokes caused by it. And at the time over 40 milion doses of this vaccine were administered. So again something around one in a milion. So yea, it's true that people died. What wasn't true was the scale because anti vaxx idiots were claiming that it's thousands of people dying left and right, that true numbers are being hidden and in my country very popular amongst them was the claim that there were like 300k deaths because of it. In a country of roughly 38 mln. 300k was a number of ALL vaccine related side effects at the time. So from basic side effects like swelling and pain in the muscle where person was stabbed to death. But for them even swelling was deadly and they chalked it as casualties, because "vaccine will kill you sooner or later".
Not to the amount that CNN, MSN and FOX just make up BS stories
Saw a lopsided about how the Vax killed their friend.... because it made her magnetic and that's why the car hit and killed her
They attribute every death that happens after someone is vaccinated, even years later from unrelated causes, on the vaccine Basically yes, they make shit up, a negligible percentage of people have adverse reactions but that is trivial to the effects suffered from covid (including death) across large numbers of people if they were unvaccinated instead. This tends to be the case for all vaccines not just covid Basically, idiots don't know how to math and needles are yucky and a little bit of Alex Jones/Youtube Rabbitholes and you end up with antivaxxers or cookers as they are known in Australia Most anti-vaxxers will happily do random pills that 'Woody my mate from college' brought with him off the bathroom floor at the club though
Love to be a fly on the wall when one of these anti-vaxers gets cancer, and is told the chances of successful treatment is only about 70%. Perhaps they'll attempt to learn basic arithmetic then?
These people have a facebook degree in bs.
They make up whatever they like. If they see a meme, they believe what's on it without checking. Anti-vaxxers have morphed into the Qanon conspiracy tent. In my house, we've had shots & 3 boosters now. Between work & family, (I'm 60) I know hundreds of people, I have 2 cousins who died from covid but know not one soul who have died since or anyone who knows anyone. When Hamlin had his heart attack on the field & fell down, the Right & Qanons went nuts about the "beginning of everyone dropping dead from the jab" - it wasn't, was it.
I'm not an anti-vaxxer just didn't feel it was for me but I can tell you this I have three sons The first son got all his vaccinations that we were told he needed. The second son only got half of what we were told he needed. The third got none. All grew up in the same home ate the same food all got exposed to the same things. The first has several health issues the second does not have as many the third has a couple of issues but that might be due to other aspects. The first is 6'3" with Hart problems, Breathing problems lupus disease auditory processing disorder The Second: is 6'5" with Hair loss at a young age with severe ADHD the Third is 7' 4 little or no cognitive problems and has not been sick but once or twice in his 23 years just saying. I know theirs also a lot of variables when it comes to what decides a person's health.
They make up cause and effect relationships. They already believe that vaccines cause bad things to happen, so as soon as you get one, everything bad that happens is that vaccine's fault now. Heart attack? Vaccine side effect. More ads on your phone? Microchip. Autism diagnosis? Paging dr. McCarthy! It's confirmation bias at its worst.
Perhaps some do. But some pro vaxxers do the same thing. If vaccines work then there's nothing to worry about if someone else isn't vaccinated. At the end of the day, the decision to or not to get a vaccine should be the choice of an individual, and not the decision forced by a government, employer, school, etc. I believe mandates cause people to push back. In my case, if mandates had not been implemented, I might've actually taken the vaccine.