Biden Joins the All-Stars of Constitutional Contempt

[JD Miller] Based on VAERS data you have about a 1 in 12,000 chance of dying from the Covid 19 vaccine. (there is actually a greater chance of dying of second hand smoke - 1 in 8,000-, so I do understand why some will chose to take the vaccine- I also understand why many will not since there is at least some risk).

I went back and searched for more information on false Vaers reports and found an article where a whistle blower was claiming that the numbers should be something like 45K. That was not the number I was using. I was using the current number of over 14,000 vaccine deaths reported this year to Vaers. Most years do not even reach 400 reported deaths from what I was reading. It should also be noted that these deaths are not attributed to any particular vaccine, so that does present a challenge, but it is worth noting that the reported cases took a substantial jump this year. The figure I shared was based on the assumption that the jump in reported deaths were a direct correlation to the new vaccines. Such assumptions may not be unreasonable, but are not definitive either.

One of the problems I just found out about as I was researching this further is that anyone can make a report to Vaers. Although it is run by the government, there are concerns about “stuffing of the ballot box” so to speak. Still there are threats of fines and prison for false reporting. I would hope that anyone who falsely reports would be prosecuted. I do not want to assume that just because no one has been arrested this year that there has been no false reporting.

Thus the Vaers numbers should be taken with at least some degree of caution. On the other hand, Andy’s hypothesis of near zero should be discounted as well. We personally know of one young man who passed away after getting the vaccine. We also have a lady in our church who worked in a nursing home and watched multiple people die after getting the Covid vaccine. Sure these are personal examples and not peer reviewed studies, but when it is people you know, it does have an impact on how you view things- especially when you have family members that have been warned by medical professionals and even the CDC not to take the vaccine.

A friend shared this on Facebook. You will have to decide for yourself whether what he says commends itself to you.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-thirty-tyrants

[JD Miller] We personally know of one young man who passed away after getting the vaccine. We also have a lady in our church who worked in a nursing home and watched multiple people die after getting the Covid vaccine. Sure these are personal examples and not peer reviewed studies, but when it is people you know, it does have an impact on how you view things- especially when you have family members that have been warned by medical professionals and even the CDC not to take the vaccine.

These are the types of anecdotal reports I have heard as well. The problem is that dying after getting the vaccine is not the same as dying BECAUSE you got the vaccine. Here in Atlanta, Hank Aaron famously died right after getting the vaccine, and many anti-vax sites picked up on that and promoted it as an example of the vaccine killing someone. The Fulton County medical examiner, though, reported that he died of natural causes, not related to the vaccine or covid.

I’m not sure people understand how seriously the CDC and others in public health are responding to these reports of adverse reactions to the vaccine. Here is one report from the CDC regarding rare serious adverse events reported after COVID-19 vaccination, including Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS) and thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome (TTS) after Janssen COVID-19 vaccination and myocarditis after mRNA (Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna) COVID-19 vaccination. It is clear that they are following up, looking at the data carefully, and making informed public health recommendations.

Remember the abundance of caution that was taken with the J&J vaccine – they put a hold on it while they followed up on the reports of adverse reactions. They held it even though it was probably not in the best interest of reducing vaccine hesitancy. Read that report. They are doing this sort of thing weekly. It’s too bad that the face of our Covid response has been politicalized, because at the heart of it are hundreds and thousands of anonymous hard working Americans giving their professional lives to defeat this virus and care for their fellow citizens.

[RajeshG]

A friend shared this on Facebook. You will have to decide for yourself whether what he says commends itself to you.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-thirty-tyrants

So, Democrats (and the wealthy elite) are in cahoots with China to subvert democracy and take over America, and they are using COVID to do it? Got it.

This weekend, I just had a friend die from complications due to COVID. He was a missionary to Honduras and leaves behind a wife and three children. He decided to not get a vaccine. That decision cost him his life.

But, we can continue to make this all about the wealthy elite, democrats, and the “dangers” of the vaccines.

[JD Miller]

Thus the Vaers numbers should be taken with at least some degree of caution. On the other hand, Andy’s hypothesis of near zero should be discounted as well. We personally know of one young man who passed away after getting the vaccine. We also have a lady in our church who worked in a nursing home and watched multiple people die after getting the Covid vaccine. Sure these are personal examples and not peer reviewed studies, but when it is people you know, it does have an impact on how you view things- especially when you have family members that have been warned by medical professionals and even the CDC not to take the vaccine.

The VAERS numbers should be taken with a huge degree of caution and absolutely no causality should be assumed by anyone just reading the data. The purpose of VAERS is to enhance the safety of drugs. It is used to observe what are called signals. The benefit of VAERS is that it provides significantly more data to assess the safety of the drugs. The drawback is that because it is open, practically everyone who is looking at it doesn’t what the data means and thus it drives misinformation. The VAERS data is used with significantly more robust data that is also publicly available in some cases and not available in others. Drug Companies, FDA and the CDC take drug safety extremely seriously. When I worked at Solvay Pharmaceuticals, we had a couple of hundred in our pharmacovigilance department. At Abbott it numbers in the thousands. These scientists and statisticians look at the data every day. In fact, it is their only job, and work with the similiar teams in the FDA and CDC to assess the safety. In fact, they are under law to do this.

As of this moment there are no deaths attributed to the COVID vaccine. You cannot look at the rise of cases in VAERS to indicate anything and you cannot highlight that someone was given a vaccine, died and therefore the vaccine was the cause. With such a broad distribution as this vaccine (almost 350M shots in a matter of months) and the natural death rate of over 8,000 a day, people are going to die after getting the shot, taking a shower, eating breakfast, walking their dog…..

Helpful podcast at The Dispatch: https://advisoryopinions.thedispatch.com/p/future-of-bidens-vaccine-man…

Q&A format on …

• Constitutional right to not take a vaccine? (1905 Jacobson v. Massachusetts)
• Federal gov authority under commerce clause of the Constitution
• The authority of OSHA
• The authority/legality of Emergency Temporary Standard (an OSHA thing)

The thing is a bit more complex than I initially thought. I still lean toward this ought to be Congress not the executive.

On the general rights question, one could certainly make the argument that if the 14th amendment can provide a right privacy that extends so far as to allow termination of pregnancy, it ought to go far enough to protect a right to not be vaccinated. But the weakness of that argument is that if abortion rights are an abuse of the amendment, so would non-vaccination rights.

But the commerce clause exists so… for better or worse, there it is.

I didn’t get far enough into the podcast to catch the OSHA and ETS aspect.

This much is clear: it’s not executive overreach for a pres. to order OSHA to make a rule. But it might be beyond OSHA’s authority to make the rule it ends up making, and OSHA is still executive branch… hence, still “executive overreach.” But we don’t have the rule yet, so it’s a bit premature, but only a bit. Presumably, they’re going to try to fufill the President’s parameters, so those already calling it overreach are not wildly speculating.

I think a great part of the confusion about VAERS is by design—we might say VAERS collects correlations, and another group determines, rightly or wrongly, causation. The Vaccine compensation program is also intentionally “easy” so that we get people who’ve lost loved ones (or had them hurt) after vaccination don’t clog up the courts and torment vaccine makers. Hence it tends to produce gaudy numbers of how awful vaccines can be, when we know logically that actual causation must necessarily be lower than the VAERS numbers. (you can’t cause something that never happened)

One other thing that I think really hurts public health authorities regarding vaccines is that they’ve allowed the image to come out as if a vaccine makes one “bulletproof” against a particular pathogen. The result is that when inevitable cases arise where the vaccinated get sick (like my wife’s OB nurse), the public thinks “must be those vaccines don’t work” rather than “this is an anecdote, let’s see what the statistical data say.” It also doesn’t help that the Chinese government COVID vaccine is marginal at best in this regard.

(even apart from the public’s difficulties with statistics)

[Bert Perry]

One other thing that I think really hurts public health authorities regarding vaccines is that they’ve allowed the image to come out as if a vaccine makes one “bulletproof” against a particular pathogen. The result is that when inevitable cases arise where the vaccinated get sick (like my wife’s OB nurse), the public thinks “must be those vaccines don’t work”

Just to reclarify, VAERS is used to detect signals. Nothing more, nothing less. You cannot derive anything else from the data as it sits. You cannot statistically identify anything in regards to causes, likelihood, effects……

I have heard your comment above across a lot of areas. “vaccine prevents the disease”. Do you have any links to this? I am generally curious as to this. I don’t know anyone who is versed in vaccines who believes that. There are definitely news outlets that probably portrayed that because they probably don’t know better. But I have heard your comment from lots of people around me, stating “Since Suzy got the vaccine and got sick, the vaccine must not work, so therefore why should I take it”. I have had a hard time trying to find where the idea that taking a vaccine doesn’t make one sick originated from.

[Aaron Blumer]

The thing is a bit more complex than I initially thought. I still lean toward this ought to be Congress not the executive.

What you have seen for a long time is that Congress is unwilling to take on these types of initiatives, and find it easier to give that authority over to the Executive Branch. And if you study Executive Orders, we have not seen the really egregious ones in our lifetime.

It could be an over reach, the courts will have to decide, but I can guarantee that Biden’s team spent a lot of time analyzing this and put in place something they felt comfortable to hold up and that they could win. Although it is always a bet. I think where they will be able to pull this off is that they are not mandating a vaccine, they are mandating a safe work environment during a pandemic. There are clear options for individuals who would choose not to take the vaccine.

David, I’m not quite sure where ALL of the tendency to see vaccines as making one bulletproof comes from, but two sources of the issue are first of all how effective some of the early ones were against things like polio and smallpox, and second of all the documents that are provided by federal agencies to parents via their pediatricians. The latter really don’t, IMO, speak much to the statistical uncertainties.

We need to remember that those we’re trying to persuade are not people who read the links and say “OK, that’s a neat way of keeping the proteins in the lymphatic system instead of going directly to the liver”, but rather people whose last acquaintance with statistics was in algebra class in high school. I’d argue the CDC has simplified things to the point of succumbing to an appeal to authority argument—and that really doesn’t appeal well to this demographic. The CDC understands that this demographic is not able to graph a binomial expansion; what they do not remember is that this demographic does play the lottery and go to casinos, and does have some feeling for likelihoods.

It is, again, especially problematic when in this case, there are a number of places where there are things that this demographic DOES understand clearly that don’t speak well of the public health establishment. The low vaccination rates here are, in effect, saying “if you don’t speak honestly about the things I do know, I’m not going to trust you about the things I don’t.”

dgszweda wrote:

I think where they will be able to pull this off is that they are not mandating a vaccine, they are mandating a safe work environment during a pandemic.

It is not unreasonable to expect a safe work environment. I would consider a 1 in 160,000 chance of getting seriously ill from Covid 19 after being vaccinated very safe. Especially when there is a 1 in 262 chance of dying on our roadways. BTW even with the Vaers data the vaccine looks quite safe statistically (that was part of my point. If only a tenth of the rise in Vaers are from the new vaccine- debatable I know- it would still be in the similar range of safety as the 1 in 160,000 number so I see no reason to pit the vaxed against the unvaxed). I just do not understand the overreaction our government is taking, nor the overreaction that so many others are taking in bullying the unvaccinated- especially those with real medical issues that even the CDC recognizes.

[JD Miller]

I just do not understand the overreaction our government is taking, nor the overreaction that so many others are taking in bullying the unvaccinated- especially those with real medical issues that even the CDC recognizes.

662,000 people have died of COVID. Millions have been hospitalized, and 100’s of thousands continue to be hospitalized. That hospitalization and subsequent deaths are thought could be reduced by upwards of 84%. This is largely preventable and the vaccines are extremely safe and for the most part don’t cost money. There is no doubt that this is a public health problem and the government is responsible for health.

If we had a way to reduce abortions by 84%, Christians would be all over it. The odd thing is that the number of abortions is roughly the number of COVID patients that have died in a given year. The concern is that the more that do not get vaccinated, the less the vaccination works for those who have it. People are fine with those who legitimately cannot take the vaccine. That is the purpose of herd immunity, to protect those that are still vulnerable.

There is divide that is happening in the US. A divide that maybe 80% to 85% agree with the vaccine and a 10% to 15% that continue to resist based on all types of crazy reasons. Right or wrong on either side, the majority is starting to put pressure on the minority. It is easy to say this is Biden or this is the government doing this. But the majority of people support it and a very large percentage are already vaccinated. Biden is just a reflection and a representation of what is taking place within the nation.

Many people have not been really impacted by COVID, and that is oftentimes the resisters. I have seen many resisters change their mind after it impacts them. I know of families where everyone has died except for a young girl. I have an employee who is now going to their fifth funeral for a friend who has died of COVID. My mom has a coworker where both the husband and wife died days apart from COVID. I have a friend who attends a local church here and 7 members died in less than 2 weeks from COVID. Pretty sad when the pastor is doing funerals every day for a week at the church for church members. It is easy to look at statistics that say someone only has a 1 in only X chance of dying from this, but if it is you or your family member the statistic is meaningless.

We could say that this is an overreach from Biden, or you could say that a large majority of the country is getting tired of the resisters and Biden is just listening to the country or his constituents who elected him to office.

Just read these stats from ABC News (aka Democrat-controlled, deep state media):

COVID-19 live updates: More than 90% of virus hospitalizations in US are unvaccinated

Those vaccinated are more than 70% less likely to require hospitalizations.

For the most part, people who are being hospitalized and who are dying from COVID now are people who chose not to receive one of three free vaccines. These are needless hospitalizations and deaths.

Don’t blame your hesitancy to get vaccinated on vaccine safety, religious / moral objections, Andrew Cuomo, Biden’s Constitutional contempt, or deep state conspiracies. The blame clearly rests on your obstinate pride. Unless you’re immunocompromised, there’s no excuse.

[T Howard]

Just read these stats from ABC News (aka Democrat-controlled, deep state media):

COVID-19 live updates: More than 90% of virus hospitalizations in US are unvaccinated

Those vaccinated are more than 70% less likely to require hospitalizations.

For the most part, people who are being hospitalized and who are dying from COVID now are people who chose not to receive one of three free vaccines. These are needless hospitalizations and deaths.

Don’t blame your hesitancy to get vaccinated on vaccine safety, religious / moral objections, Andrew Cuomo, Biden’s Constitutional contempt, or deep state conspiracies. The blame clearly rests on your obstinate pride. Unless you’re immunocompromised, there’s no excuse.

Again, the lying behavior of Dr. Fauci and other public health officials has everything to do with why many people are not getting vaccinated. Everything. They’re the main source for this information, and even the Atlantic is admitting that about half of COVID hospitalizations are really for something else. Now granted, X + COVID is going to be worse, by and large, than just X, but if public health officials don’t speak honestly about the things that vaccine resisters do understand, there is not a chance they’re going to believe public health officials on the things they don’t understand.

I’ve gotten the jab myself, despite knowing that I’d gotten some good immunity due to my own bout with the disease, and I really do want people to start taking the testimony that people like David provide seriously. The ugly reality, though, is that you’re never going to get through to your target populations—really the poor of all races—by talking down to them after having mislead them on things they understand. A good picture (one for which they were pilloried) from SNL is here.