Super grateful for your clarity and the depth of this response. There's a ton here.
First - I 100% agree on politicians and the motive there. Generally, that sounds reasonable - until you start digging a little deeper. I work at a data integration company, most of what we do is validate information before pulling it together and marrying it to disparate data sets. So a lot goes into understanding where the data comes from. Just like the "with covid" vs. "of covid" loophole is exploited to exaggerate death counts, hospitals are told not to ask patients with symptoms if they've been vaccinated. They're also only counting you as vaccinated if you've had both shots for >2 weeks. As of this morning, Israel counts you as unvaccinated if you haven't yet had your 3rd shot. So "vaccinated" is a very narrow definition, convenient for making rosy comparisons of a poorly tested treatment. In data science, we call that a segment.
When more effort is placed on changing the definition of something than changing the something, it's usually because the underlying something doesn't show what we want it to: in this case high vaccine efficacy. You'll start hearing that the vast majority of patients in the UK and Israel are vaccinated soon - Delta will be the culprit - as opposed to a poorly run trial with data that scientifically showed a 0.5% absolute benefit vs. doing nothing.
What strikes me as nefarious is that most vaccines are pulled when more than 50-100 people die in close proximity to them. We're in the tens of thousands globally and there's no discussion of it. Even when it happens in the public sphere: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-tyne-58330796.amp.
Full disclosure: I totally believe COVID is real and dangerous. I had it, paralyzed half my face for a month (bell's palsy) and I spend about 7hrs a week in the gym (34 y/o). No comorbidities or sickness here, it was awful - way worse than any flu I've gotten. That's why I've been doing so much reading. The second I found out that Gates was refusing to allow other countries to manufacture in their facilities (Canada, for example) or that 10x as many died of starvation because of lockdown in India vs. of COVID this I got really curious. Net lives saved are severely in the red.
Just starting now to discuss - here with you. So grateful for anything you can expose me to that I might have missed. I'll forward some studies on
Thank you!
Sources
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8088823/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8101859/
https://www.news-medical.net/news/20210830/Does-SARS-CoV-2-natural-infection-immunity-better-protect-against-the-Delta-variant-than-vaccination.aspx
RCT on Masks: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33205991/ inconclusive, but begs the question - why haven't we done one that IS conclusive yet - when we continue to use this as a primary method of mitigation?