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Matt Phillips's avatar

I was talking to a colleague just this weekend as we watched Michigan beat Indiana.. ironically, the last time I was at the big house was closer to Covid, as the game just returned. At the time my two colleagues were both wearing masks. It was laughable as there were 110,000 people screaming at the top of their lungs in the big house. I looked at both of them and said have you lost your minds. If you were that concerned you should've watched this on TV.

Fast forward this weekend he did not have his mask on.

He did say there's been a dramatic change in the attitudes of his patients. They do not trust him. They question everything and it's a noticeable change.

Unfortunately, Dr. Fauci, who I remember as an intern when we didn't know what AIDS was ; made this his legacy despite amazing contributions in real Medicine.

As practicing physicians, you learn, never ever make things up .

If you don't know, you say I don't know .

You can say this is a bad virus it's killing a lot of people and the best we have right now is the vaccine. I think it's going to help ; so please get it. You can say this is a bad virus and it's killing a lot of people wear a mask. I think it might help.

And you always say we'll watch as things go on, and if we learn more, we change our recommendation . Unless you have a hemoglobin of five and we're giving you blood, we basically say about every medication that we think this will help you we'll watch for side effects and we'll stay in touch. If we don't get the result we want will change direction.

The problem was he was in front of the television station and he was pressured I'm sure by the White House to make forceful unequivocal statements . Unfortunately that's where you have to stand up and say I'm 75 years old. I've done this through four presidents. No one's going to tell me what to say. I think either he believed what he was saying or he got caught up in it.

The social media videos where they say back to back masks work, and then the next clip a mask doesn't work. The shot will prevent you from getting Covid. The next video- I never said the shot would prevent you getting Covid. Those back to back clips of the same person, saying opposite things was translated to mean that none of us are to be trusted .

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Vijay Gupta's avatar

Once you support a mask mandate or a vaccine mandate for everybody, you can't just say later that "we were not sure, but we mandated it anyway because we could."

If you mandate something for everybody, you better be sure that it is safe, effective, and necessary. Otherwise, don't mandate. Or change your profession.

Fauci may have made great contirbutions when he was a scientist in his youth. But for the last few decades, he was just a bureaucrat. And a bad one at that. He lied under oath about gain of function research funding. He created/edited the 'proximal origin' paper and pretended as if he had just discovered it by chance.

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Brad Banko, MD, MS's avatar

Name any significant contribution that Fauci has made to medicine.

I am convinced that that narrative about his competence is part of the myth behind his stupidity.

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James Young's avatar

You forgot to mentioned his active opposition to treatments that might benefit many, failure to advise even Vit D and general therapeutic nihilism.

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Diana Prince 🦸‍♀️'s avatar

Or to lose weight.

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Guttermouth's avatar

Nobody wants the new booster because they aren't being forced by state violence or complete economic ruination to get it.

The numbers are consistent with how many people would have gotten the shot if they'd had the freedom to say "no" the first time and the ones that said "yes" saw that it was worthless or hurt them.

Because the universe is unjust, none of those responsible are likely to get what they deserve. I can only hope that their names will be wholly vilified by posterity and that at least some of them go to their graves knowing that.

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Vijay Gupta's avatar

Vaccines are a money printing machine in more than one way. The profit from the sale of vaccines is the obvious way. But childhood vaccines also plant the seeds of many chronic diseases that produce lifelong customers for pharma.

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James A Geraghty MD's avatar

The mandate on these vaccines was a bad idea and appropriate studies should have been done. Pushing endless boosters without good studies is ridiculous, and people are pulling back.

However- the first 2 variants of COVID, at least, were often an unfortunate disease and many died, although mostly in groups that rapidly became predictable. So protecting those groups and stopping restrictions on the rest would also have been reasonable, and was done elsewhere.

None of this equates to the idea that the main childhood vaccines do not likely have a net benefit- that is a luxury belief that only people in this generation have, because they did not have 6 children and then watch 2 die before adulthood from diseases that then became preventable, like smallpox, diphtheria, polio, measles, etc. My grandparents’ generation venerated that group of vaccine scientists, because they had all lost children, or playmates growing up, and fully understood what a stunning advance it was.

Watching children try to die or be maimed from a disease you could easily have prevented is an unfortunate fate that some will probably experience.

So go ahead and criticize the current poor science, and by all means investigate for other unexpected vaccine side effects from childhood vaccines, but don’t pretend that the basic childhood vaccine sequence doesn’t save lives.

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Vijay Gupta's avatar

Childhood vaccines that were used before 1986 were "honest" products. Honest is different from safe and effective. Honest means that those vaccines were also necessary and useful, and they were not an overkill. Most parents accepted them with or without vaccine mandates.

But the 1986 law that granted immunity to vaccine makers changed everything for the worse. It led to the current vaccination schedule that is a huge overkill. It removed any incentive for manufacturers to make vaccines safer. Instead it created incentives for them to invent more and more vaccines with marginal benefits, and lobby/bribe politicians to make their vaccines mandatory. In other words, it converted an honest product into a dishonest money printing machine.

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R K's avatar

Here is where I am confused...since July, based on CDC data, hospitalizations with covid were increasing double digits % wise...last 3 weeks, significant drop.

This makes no sense..if covid mutated to a highly infectious variant, why cases dropped?? Seriously what happened last 3 years? Nobody I know died, my 87 yo mother refused to be vaxed and masked, just like her friends.

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marlon1492's avatar

I personally know (knew?) three people who died of COVID. It is real and it was deadly.

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Brad Banko, MD, MS's avatar

Maybe your mother has seen this movie.

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R K's avatar

Not sure what you mean..she has all kinds of health issues, people like her should be studied..it's a miracle she is alive. If we believed the nonsense we have been fed she should be dead. During "pandemic" I visited her all the time...first time I asked her if we should take recommended safety measures...she thought I was crazy.

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Brad Banko, MD, MS's avatar

I’ve run into a number of 90 yo patients over the years who would tell me that they haven’t had a flu shot in 20 years or more and never get the flu. Who am I to try to bully somebody like that with CDC advice?

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Ricardo R Bartelme, MD's avatar

I'm really sadden that the medical profession and public health keep recommending these boosters to healthy people without evidence that they are truly necessary safe and helpful. These professions will keep losing credibility, the little that they had will sink further downward.

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Diana Prince 🦸‍♀️'s avatar

In the pediatric clinic where I work we test for Covid very infrequently these days. Perhaps that’s why “cases” are dropping, b/ c ppl aren’t wing tested?

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David Brewer's avatar

That's why I now ignore the number of cases published and look at hospitalisations and deaths. I use even those figures with caution because of the distinct possibility of inflated diagnosis. Still, the numbers are low enough now to give good evidence that COVID should no longer be feared, if it ever should have been.

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marlon1492's avatar

Interesting!

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Robert M.'s avatar

Dr. Prasad, or another knowledgable person, Is this what't going on? The vaccine manufacturers cannot properly test the vaccines, because there isn't time. They cannot do proper RCTs with actual placebos, because they say it's unethical (Vaccine Makers give the control group the old version of the vaccine and call that the "placebo.").

They have the ideology that vaccines are so special and valuable they cannot be bound by the normal rules of drug-testing? They wouldn't subject the public to a new painkiller without rigorous RCTs with actual placebos, but they argue it's acceptable to do so for vaccines.

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Brad Banko, MD, MS's avatar

Vaccines (and virtually any treatment) are not so special that they don't deserve a critical evaluation before using.

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Mitch Barrie's avatar

Unlike other therapies, vaccines are administered to healthy people. The safety testing should be even more rigorous than with more typical medicines.

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Brad Banko, MD, MS's avatar

They have the ideology that vaccines are the money printing machine... since the Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 was enacted which protects pharmaceutical companies from liabilities from vaccine injuries. The number of childhood vaccines recommended since that law was passed has at least doubled. Interestingly, I can't find a simple graph of the number of different vaccines on this schedule over time. Here is a reference.

https://historyofvaccines.org/activities/history-immunization-schedule

And the fact that vaccines that the FDA approves and the CDC recommends for the childhood vaccination schedule are enforced as *mandatory* for school entry in many or most states.

https://www.ncsl.org/health/states-with-religious-and-philosophical-exemptions-from-school-immunization-requirements#:~:text=All%2050%20states%20have%20legislation,to%20children%20for%20medical%20reasons.

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Mitch Barrie's avatar

If you had $10 million to invest in a therapy that no more than 10% of the population will ever contract, at the risk of actually curing the patients and eventually deleting your market; or investing in a vaccine for that condition that can be administered to 100% of the population . . . it would be fiduciarily irresponsible to invest in the cure.

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Daniel Bruetman MD, MMM's avatar

I disagree that people are skipping the booster as a result of analysis of data or validation. People simply observe the world around them and realize that for the most part things have gone back to normal and we have moved on with our lives. Another shot adds nothing to reach this goal. We smell the scam and witness the absurd righteousness of promoting an unproven solution to a nonexistent problem.

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James Young's avatar

Very well summarized Vinay !!

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Vijay Gupta's avatar

What is the source of the data that the uptake is 2%. Anecdotally it seems higher than 2% (though not very high).

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Dr. K's avatar

Mandy Cohen (director of CDC) announced on Friday that 1 in 50 Americans have taken the vaccine. That is 2%. https://x.com/CDCDirector/status/1712852744875155864?s=20

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Tim Mackey MD MS's avatar

Curious what her PH’d is in and does she have any connection to Pfizer or has her bank account had a recent substantial addition. This truly is Piling it Higher and Deeper

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marlon1492's avatar

I don't know why I am always surprised by the lack of clear thinking by some people. "There was a 24% reduced risk of catching Omicron if the time between the original vaccination and booster was 12.9 months compared with 8.2 months, he reported.".

Approximately speaking, everyone got Omicron, vaccinated or not. So how can there be a 24% reduced risk? I assume because they only looked at a tiny time frame.

Embarrassing.

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Joan Breibart's avatar

All Pfizer needs is an Ozempic or Mounjaro.

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J Lee MD PhD's avatar

You are right again Dr. P. Your important point-by-point exegesis here is timely, terrific, and terse. It's bad enough in 2023 dystopian America when numerous street people are wearing scrub suits and apparently walking around in big cities pretending to be surgeons or perhaps interventional cardiologists -- these mental patients must be occupationally hallucinatory? But seriously, we simply cannot abide morons slinging BS about COVID matters whether online, on TV, or in print media despite having precisely zero credentials, zero training, and zero relevant experience.

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Athina Kaviris's avatar

Send Big Bird the memo

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Pam Peters's avatar

Keep sharing reality with the delusional messaging coming out from the administration. We need your continued voice!!

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Andrew Hodges, MD's avatar

Gotta love when the free market comes through. The truth has come out, and I'm thinking the emperor is slowly realizing he has no clothes.

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