Most Comical/Hysterical COVID News Stories of the past few years

Yes because what I choose to put in my body is no one's business. The vaccines don't stop the spread so it has no effect on anyone what I do (and I think we all know from real world experience that they don't stop symptoms either).

The one time I did catch COVID I didn't give it to anyone because I was at home before and during, before anyone accuses me of being a super spreading plague rat lol. Didn't need hospital or medical attention and it was well after lockdowns and mask mandates anyway

You continue to make false claims about vaccines "don't stop the spread" or symptoms. This is false medical misinformation without foundation.

Especially for 2021 when the vaccines were being rolled out, and vaccine passes were in operation, there is well documented evidence on their "effect" at stopping infections, symptoms, transmission.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(22)00089-7/fulltext

Various governments around the world, such as Denmark and england, who don't recommend vaccination for under 65s or those not at risk of severe illness must also be misinformed and self centered then. I'm sure you never cared before about if people got the flu shot and you shouldn't care about this one either

Like I said, I am vaccinated for other things, with vaccines that actually prevent illness, as is my child.

Not sure when that study was concluded, looks like it's in retrospect. At the time it was decided by default that if you get vaccinated automatically you are immune and cannot spread the infection, and we all know that this is not true, I know I know the poor scientists had to produce a cure at the "speed of science".

Also if you don't mind, from the same article, would you care to comment on this statement:

Well that is not what is reported in the article. I quoted it in bold for you.

I couldn't care less if somebody wants to get or not get an injection, until it was forced in order to resume the standard way of living: at that stage I disagreed and decided that I had to be free to chose what kind of medication to take or what kind of precaution was necessary. However that didn't sit well with "the experts": I mean if the vaccine was so effective as you said and if the effects were not waning, why the hell people were indoctrinated to stay clear from the unvaccinated? Before you say something along the line of "so to protect the unvaccinated from the infection", don't forget that according to the whole narrative if you were vaccinated automatically you couldn't be infected.

Also I am not sure what got into you that in every comment you have to mention anti-vaxxer if somebody is trying to disagree with your post (not only you), I think it's an unhealthy obsession at this stage. Take care man, no seriously

I must be one of the lucky few unvaccinated survivors so? 🙄

I caught COVID, didn’t have any major symptoms. I took an antigen test, and when the positive result showed up, I was like so that's COVID? Pfft! I've had worse bouts of the cold when I was younger. The only real thing was I lost my sense of smell for a week or so.

It was ridiculous the government urging EVERYONE to get vaccinated. I'm not anti-vax, but not everybody needed to be vaccinated. The elderly and the immunocompromised, yes. I wore the face masks in shops and similar settings, used the hand gels right up until the end of last year, and I isolated when I had COVID. Who knows, maybe I had it other times but didn't have any symptoms.

Your individual experience does not dictate national health policy though. There was a measured approach, offering vaccines to people based on priority. Just because some people were low risk does not make them no-risk. You conclusions about who should have been offered the vaccine does not tally with the medical experts advice, which is what drove government policy.

Remember when the Pfizer CEO said a study showed that their vaccine was 100% effective at preventing covid? I do. They lied, end of story. Pharma companies do it all the time, they are just out to make money after all

I don't need to prove my claims that the vaccines don't stop infection or transmission, don't stop symptoms (as stated earlier) and that effectiveness wanes to zero after several months. Those are widely accepted facts. To claim otherwise is misinformation

It's also misinformation to state that no one ever said the vaccines would stop infection or were 100% effective when they did say those things.

Where is the lie in that statement? the information he links to spells it out exactly what he says. I predict a response from you that jumps to some other random conspiracy-theory nonsense. Go on, answer the question, what lie did he just tell?

Just to bring this back on topic...

That should be mandatory. Nothing to do with covid. Anyone encroaching any closer is clearly a sociopath and should be promptly placed in Dublin Bay.

I miss the lad on here who bought a bunch of polo neck jumpers so he could avoid wearing masks. He'd just roll up the neck and he was grand.

Hindsight is 20:20 vision.

Really should start a thread on how to fix the next pandemic without knowing anything about it.

I think he suffocated eventually :)

Imagine trying to do that with an angora jumper. A mask would be more comfortable.

This is completely false and I refuse to believe you don't know it. Whatever you are and whatever your agenda, you are not stupid.

There was and is little to no protection from infection and little to no protection from 'passing it on'. How you could claim otherwise is beyond me. This is long beyond a doubt. At some point the most vaccinated countries had the highest infection rates. After!

Whatever remains is the claim that it protects from serious outcomes. Which conveniently is very hard to prove one way or the other. Especially when in many cases the required datasets to do so were 'accidentally' never collected to begin with.

Same as for the the 'not wearing off' thing. Well you could argue if it didn't protect much to begin with then of course it isn't wearing off. But let's assume for a moment it did offer some protection. If it wasnt 'wearing off' how come it was argued that we need boosters every 12, then every 6 then in some instances/countries every 3 months?

Sorry none of what you claim there makes any sense.

I have cited studies, across this forum and recently on this thread proving what I have said. Demonstrably disproving your false claims of "little or no protection." The reason why the boosters are needed is that the protection wanes and needs to be topped up. However that doesn't negate the significant protection against infection established in the studies during the period of the study which was at least 6 months. If you're not infected you can't pass it on. The protection against infection was more effective versus earlier strains, but the discussion was about 2021 and the decision to get vaccinated and the justification for vaccine passes. The protection against severe covid was also irrefutably established with more durable protection and also versus different variants. All of this has very important societal wide impact during a pandemic.

So you are not just wrong about the data, your claims about the data are wrong e.g. "Which conveniently is very hard to prove." Eh no, it has been proven over and over in study after study, as well as the real world experience in ICUs with figures cited on this thread.

You haven't even tried to challenge the figures presented. Therefore this is an entirely bad faith argument. Of course it doesn't make sense to you when you don't even try to engage with the evidence.

By contrast you present zero facts, zero evidence, just misinformation and semantic games. At this point it is fair to call it anti vax disinformation.

So because your so-called studies aren't holding up to real-world observations you need to discredit me as anti-vax. Only it's quite a ridiculous statement to make about someone who got three doses of it.

I'm not anti-vax. I took them. I actually trusted those broad statements about their efficacy. And I'm still not saying they're bad. They didnt harm me. But what I'm saying is that real-world observations do not support the claims that were made about them. And you can cite your studies all day long the real-world data is simply what it is and it can't be talked away.

Your attempt to brand me as anti-vax is a new low even for someone as blinkered and dogmatic as yourself.

In trials the vaccines performed very well against the key strain of Covid at the time. So naturally there was a lot of hope.

Unfortunately the virus mutated, and those other newer strains became dominant. Some individuals confused initial hope as some sort of "promise" that the vaccines would stop Covid.

Despite this broad hope, there were many articles and news reports urging people to be cautious about the vaccines, that they may not be as effective in stopping Covid due to the various new variants emerging.

Anti-vax is a way of thinking, quite a few anti-vaxxers are themselves vaccinated, they just have a particular irrational agenda against the Covid vaccines.

The vaccines have been remarkably safe, very effective in reducing deaths and have saved countless lives. We just don't have the medical technology to completely "stop" Covid (or seasonal flu)

Pretty much the opposite amongst almost everyone I know. And they would be from a huge varying range of ages and social sectors. Very few people seem to be happy they took the vaccine imo.

You can just assume the numbers show 10x real world efficacy for the vaccinated vs. the unvaccinated.

Honestly, I can understand people looking for, or waiting for, the longitudinal studies to understand the nuances, but the vaccines working and being effective across all the things you want vaccines to be effective for is in the "water is wet" category, scientifically speaking, leaving those who want to re-litigate it, solely in the cranks and loons groupings. The vaccines effectively knocked about 1-2 years off the pandemic, depending on the numbers of deaths we were willing to accept to get back to some sort of normality (if you're in the "there was no pandemic" category, then there's no hope for you).

I was living in the UK until the end of 2020 and Contact Tracing was taking off that summer before the vaccines. You weren't aloud in anywhere until you scanned a QR code on the door and gave your details to a .gov.uk domain. Doubt anyone would give up that level of information to a government nowadays if it were to happen again.

And then you had the Irish app that geolocated you and let you know if you were within close proximity to someone who had a positive test. That was handy at the time but crazy how much we were monitored at the time in hindsight.

It was all to the reduce the spread. Some of it worked, some of it didn't work as well as planned.

If there's another pandemic, depending on severity, it's likely we will have similar measures/restrictions to reduce the spread/pressure on health systems.