i'm guessing you have no idea what fraud means. Because I have never seen any evidence he has committed any.
For reasons I will decline to go into, I don't think you will ever fully appreciate the irony of you making that comment. But you can DM me if you want to talk about it. Just not going to talk publicly about the same.
Though I'll just note the following: It is beyond obvious to me you are not a lawyer and have no understanding of what constitutes fraud or the facts in this instance constituting fraud. Though if you would like to cure your ignorance, we can discuss.
The lockdowns ramp up, cases drop, the lockdowns ease and cases spike again. That would seem to confirm their utility.
This is a serious question. And I am not trying to be condescending. Just trying to understand. What math have you actually taken and passed? Where are you at in terms of education?
my understanding is that Sweden's policy was a failure.
That was the media narrative. It is wrong. You should focus less on media reports and the wholly vapid adjectives they use; and more on actual evidence.
The bottom line is this: in this media ecosphere, you have to critically consider what you're being told. Particularly in view of whose interests are being served by what you're being told. These are things that, at one point in the United States (and England at least), students were taught even in high/primary public schools. Now, it's not obvious that's the case.
You'll find no shortage of "experts" who weighed in on Sweden. But they all say the same thing; and none of them have done any kind of independent analysis. It's just an echo chamber of pseudoscientific nonsense in which a group of people go on TV or write nonsense for Vox or some other trash outlet like the Daily Mail to repeat the same shit their "peers" have said. Except none of them actually have the data to back up their claims.
So you might be wondering ... like ok, so let's say I'm right ... why haven't more people spoken up about that?
Well that would actually be a good question. First, the politics of how research gets funded. Guess who holds the power to write grants? The same people who are peddling the conspiracy theories that Sweden somehow faced an apocalypse from COVID. Second, the politics of how science is talked about now. You have to be on Twitter to appreciate how wholly deficient in evidence "expert opinion" has become. Sam Harris recently had a podcast where this topic was addressed. I can discuss each of these further as well.
They wanted to make 100% sure the vaccines were safe to ensure public confidence in them,
Wrong. Safe and effective, as the standard requires in the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia, New Zealand and others does not mean "100%." It never has, and never will. All medications, even over the counter drugs like aspirin and ibuprofen, are not "100% safe and effective."
But it is entirely possible the vaccines are less effective by new variants or by new variants that are likely to come up.
You have to have some basic understanding of virology to understand the problems with basically everything you've said about "new variants." I thought I made this clear above, but maybe I didn't. So we'll try again:
Viruses mutate all the time. That doesn't mean that any mutation is going to make any particular virus more infectious or more deadly. In fact, the opposite is what you'd expect. Viruses tend to get less potent over time; not the other way around, as is the case with bacteria for example.
Further, the way vaccines (and in particular the adenovirus vaccines) work in the body provides a shield of immunity that extends beyond any particular viral genus. For the purpose of facilitating your understanding; consider the difference between a species and a genus.
A species is the particular. A genus is the category of species that belong to the genus. Vaccines provide broad immunity against the genus; not the species. While some species may be outside the outer bounds of immunity within the genus, almost all will be within the set of protection. Because that's how vaccines work. mRNA vaccines included (albeit they're a little bit different than adenovirus vaccines).
Relatedly, the language used to describe these alleged "new variants" is highly misleading. The issue for any new variation is whether a strain emerges that is so qualitatively different from prior strains that it falls outside the scope of immunity conferred by any vaccine. And there is no evidence that any strain we have identified falls into that category. Nor is there evidence that the virus is mutating fast enough that this should even be expected to be the case.
That is to say ... the media say one thing (and their talking head experts that don't know anything, and who are literally paid to scare people to boost ratings) and the evidence says otherwise.
