It is still my firm belief that this malarky (C'mon Man!) is primarily about money, we all know how the current occupant of the White House likes his backroom Governmental deal kickback dollars. Anyone have a dollar amount on how much Pfizer &c are raking in per "free" Caccine dose courtesy of Uncle Sam?
I don't know; the head of Pfizer has been pushing boosters as expected but it's still up in the air what the FDA will do.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/13/covid-booster-shots-data-shows-third-shots-not-appropriate-at-this-time-scientists-conclude.htmlOf course there is a lot of money flying around, those vaxx clinics in the early stages were practically predatory when they had leftover shots to give out, you could see the dollar signs floating over unvaxxed heads. But in capitalism the impulse to help is inextricably linked to the impulse to sell -- Desantis pushing Regeneron, that FLCCCC pushing ivermectin and by the way they can hook you up with some too -- it is all scamming at some level.
You guys make some good points -- it
is social engineering, it is about money, it
is fear propaganda designed to drive behavior, it
is a case for what Big Government can do (there was even an article in The Atlantic right when covid first started to that effect, they're not trying to hide it) -- but that doesn't change whether the vaccine is effective either as personal protection or, with wide distribution, at keeping cases down generally. All you have to do is look at a map of vaccination and case rates to see that, whatever else it is, the vaxx does work, i. e. it
is primarily a good product. Whatever else it
is, is extraneous noise. And there are enough people who probably should have taken it, who let their politics dictate their assessments of personal risk, whose decision-making was fundamentally incompetent, to point out as suckers who should have known better.
The only thing that will turn this around is some long-term side effect, which is why Jacky and Laser are hoping for that, where you guys get to point and laugh and say ha ha you were right. But the other thing to hope for is for the vaxx rate to get high where they can no longer say it is a pandemic of the unvaxxed, where there are as many vaccinated old folks in Emergency as unvaxxed. That nearly happened here in Seattle, the state withheld reporting for a few weeks (they were working on the report) when the percentage of vaccinated in the hospital was around 40% and only released it when it got back down with an influx of rural unvaxxed -- I see them gaming the numbers. But that takes a vaxx rate of about 85%, if you look at here and other countries; it's probably why England ditched their vaccine passport, the case for blaming the unvaxxed wasn't as clear, breakthrough infections form too high a percentage of the hospitalized. We are a long way from that in most places, and there are a lot of unvaxxed fatties to burn through before natural immunity levels reach their equivalent.