01-02-2022, 03:59 PM
(01-02-2022, 11:56 AM)C_T_Russell Wrote: I once belonged to a cult and escaped many years ago, always told to only read their "official" publications, now everything i see in our media and from the government about this virus and vaccine is exactly presented in the same way, being told to only "trust" their "official" sources i.e the MOH website, etc.
How is that not the same thing? On one hand they say to do your own research, but then tell us only to read "their" information. So many parallels, its not funny.
Everything from the "outside" is dangerous, but "our" information is safe!
I like a balanced view on things, im only getting one side of the story from all the material i have read, with many questions unanswered and being told basically to trust them and the same narrative that its "safe and effective"
How safe and effective? At best 90% effective, but more evidence is showing its closer to 70% effective, and how safe? They could have said "reasonably safe" there is still a danger (myocarditis) Dr Cambpell touched on this in one of his videos how nothing is 100% safe, so its not accurate to say its safe when a certain number have well documented to have had myocarditis, no matter how low the percentage is.
The biggest difference between your cult experience and our current situation is that we are NOT being told to only read NZ Government information, and we have all the source information at our fingertips if we choose to look for it.
In times past people had only the "official" provider's word for what they were saying, but now with the internet all the original evidence and scholarly articles are available to read. Many are normally paywalled and cost huge sums to read, but most publishers are making covid information free.
People often use the term "research" to mean they have done an information search, most often on Google these days. In the scholarly world, research is the work the scientists and doctors do. They do trials and then publish the results in articles in reputable journals so that others can see, judge and replicate the work. All open and above board. It's this evidence that drives the advice we are given. And when you read the evidence, you can see that it matches what we are being told, but with caveats because of how fast things are changing. Research that would normally take months or years to be published is available very quickly, so those following up on the findings may see them differently from the original authors. The benefit is that we can watch it all as it happens, the downside is that it's confusing when experts have opposing views.
Granted, that's a very simplistic view, but if you want to have a look, a good way in is to use PubMed (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/) or Google Scholar (https://scholar.google.com/ and is very different from ordinary Google).
When you search ordinary Google, your search results include all sorts of stuff that may or may not be credible. Google records which sites you looked at and tries to helpfully give you more of the same next time. Before long, you only get to see the fringe material and don't realise there's a whole other world of information that you're missing.
With regard to "safety", yes, the ball keeps moving, but when I looked up vaccine safety back when it was first available, I was concerned about my risk of autoimmune disease. What I learned was that the vaccine can be associated with an autoimmune response, and can be associated with myocarditis, plus other things. But for these issues, the vaccine risk is FAR FAR FAR less than the risk of those things happening in people who catch covid. So the absolute safety of the vaccine isn't guaranteed, but in relative terms, yes, it is very safe.