This post will act as a rebuttal to the Sam Harris episode #335, by using a point-counterpoint method. Before I begin, I must admit that I did not listen to the podcast, but will be working off of a bootleg copy of the transcript for it, even though it appears that Mr. Harris does not provide one. Harris quotes have red markers.
School closures made total sense until they didn't. I was absolutely in favor of closing the schools in March of 2020, … It was a mistake to keep them closed once we knew how benign the virus was for kids and how deleterious the effects were of keeping them out of school. The people who were against school closures in March of 2020, given what was happening in Italy and what we didn't know about the virus, were wrong.
School closures never made sense. Verity et. al. showed, before April 2020, that kids didn’t face much risk from COVID (IFR of 0.00161% in children aged 9 and under):
While this PDF image is dated for June 2020, the study was published on 30 Mar 2020. And regarding detrimental effects from keeping kids out of school, we could foresee them (you don’t need a clinical trial to show that it’d harm kids).
But if you think that the vaccines just harmed people on balance and that ivermectin is an effective prophylactic against COVID, and that the establishment's response to COVID was mostly just a pretext for governments to arbitrarily turn the ratchet of state power toward tyranny. We are living on very different parts of the information landscape. You're in the shady part. You're in the climate change as a hoax part.
More on this point above much further down …
Before vaccines, Democrats and Republicans in the United States died more or less at the same rate. But after vaccines, Republicans were 43% more likely to die than Democrats. That's almost all one needs to know about the consequences of politicizing public health information.
Actually, Republicans not only died at a higher rate than Democrats before COVID, but the rate disparity has been increasing ever since 2001. In 2001, Republicans had a death rate that was 6% higher. By 2019, after ObamaCare was in place, it had risen to being 15% higher:
COVID merely exacerbated an already-established trend, taking it to a new level.
Vaccine misinformation and vaccine hesitancy got people killed. … But that doesn't mean that I supported vaccine mandates. I never supported them, in fact, except for medical workers. … Of course, this was on the assumption that the COVID vaccines would reduce transmission, and that assumption eroded with the emergence of Omicron in the fall of 2021 and the winter of 2022.
But CDC breakthrough hospitalizations and deaths showed a very high hospital death rate in those who had been double-dosed:
And that 28% hospital death rate is even higher than the 6%-to-12% hospital death rate found in 2020 — before the COVID shots even became available.
The original claim was that the vaccine would prevent transmission, and therefore everyone had a civic responsibility to take it to help us achieve herd immunity and protect people who can't take vaccines.
You don’t develop civic responsibility from fraudulent research which intentionally misclassifies “cases” within 14 days of doses as being “unvaccinated.” A claim is not enough.
But despite how many errors we made, I trust the mainstream consensus on most questions about COVID and vaccines, at least to a first approximation, which is how I approach another very polarizing topic, climate change. There are a few caveats here, but I believe that the mainstream picture of COVID is far more likely to be correct than the fringe picture pushed ad nauseam by many people in alternative media.
Go ahead and keep doing that if you want. You do you, but let the rest of us decide.
How many people have died from COVID in the United States? … The CDC currently puts the total US deaths at little over 1.1 million. … Incidentally, at least two of the guests I had on this podcast in the first month of the pandemic, estimated that we would have something like a million deaths in the US before the dust settled. … In any case, until proven otherwise, I accept the CDC data and believe that we had something like 1 million deaths from COVID in the US.
Are those million deaths from the same virus that attacked the Diamond Princess cruise ship, the one with the infection fatality rate only 40%-80% higher than flu?
But this is just to say that staying fit and eating only grass-fed beef isn't a strategy for dealing with pandemics in general. And all of the anti-vax bullshit that has been spun up around this variable could well get a lot of people killed next time. … We need to be able to trust public health messaging in an emergency. We need an information ecosystem that doesn't amplify baseless conspiracies and lies.
I’ll take the fitness and the grass-fed beef and the vitamin D and the rest, over blind and now-unfounded trust in messaging which was wrong at nearly every turn.
It is quite possible that without vaccines, three million more people would have died from COVID in the US.
Would those 3 million deaths be from the same virus that attacked the Diamond Princess cruise ship?
How many people died unnecessarily in the US because they didn't get vaccinated? In other words, how many people did vaccine hesitancy kill? Well, that number is currently believed to be around 300,000. … It seems that around 300,000 Americans are dead today who would not be dead had everyone just gotten vaccinated blindly, like obedient sheep.
From that same virus, right?
So given that I get a flu shot every year, I suspect that a yearly COVID shot is in my future.
You do you.
How many people were killed by the vaccines? Well, my contact at Johns Hopkins said, I literally know of just two deaths directly attributed to the vaccines in the US, one of which was J&J related. … Just two and only one mRNA related? I don't know what to tell you, fellows, but where are the bodies? … Let's put the number at 2,000. What is there to talk about? Let's put it at 20,000, a four order of magnitude error. Given the other numbers I've just cited, what is there to talk about?
Before the VAERS system was overwhelmed and overhauled, the rate of death reports to VAERS was from 15 to 30 death reports per million doses. Considering how 673 million doses went out by March 2023 …
That makes for 10,000 to 20,000 implied death reports in VAERS. Using a liberal estimate of an 18% capture rate of the underlying events, those boundary conditions imply a bare minimum of 55,000 to 110,000 underlying deaths due to COVID shots.
What was the difference in the risk of hospitalization or death between those who had been fully vaccinated compared to those who hadn't taken the vaccine? Well, from what I can tell, it was a likely three to four-fold reduction in all age groups, and that includes kids who don't see that much benefit not being at high risk. In all adults, it was more like a tenfold difference. In those over 65, we saw a twentyfold difference in the rate of hospitalization or death.
A 20-fold difference implies a “vaccine effectiveness” of 95%, but isn’t found unless you unscrupulously don’t start counting hospitalizations and deaths until a few weeks after a dose, because — at least for those of working age — COVID hospitalization rates go higher in those who recently took a dose:
The high 1.30 risk ratio just to the right of the orange box is age-adjusted, but failed to reach statistical significance. After people have been put into the hospital, they can’t be put into the hospital again, so if you don’t begin counting hospitalizations until a few weeks later, the admission rate will have the “appearance” of dropping.
Is there any reason to believe that ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine are effective prophylaxis against COVID? Ie. Adequate substitutes for vaccines?
Dr. Pierre Kory at the
Community shows there are 520 reasons to:Conclusion: Sam Harris is dangerously mistaken regarding COVID, COVID shots, and alternative treatments, and he demonstrates advocacy of key tenets of Eastern philosophy — such as that the individual should be sacrificed to the collective.
Oh, is he still going with the 300,000 avoidable deaths?
https://cm27874.substack.com/p/the-conversion-of-sam-harris