I'll preface this mess by noting that I was one of the most ardent and diligent mask wearer in my vicinity, and the first to be vaccinated (I was due to surgery anyways, so I was practically half dead lol, nothing to lose, a world to win).
Quote:T-Hawk masks and vaccines have PLENTIFUL AND OVERWHELMING evidence of working.
I have reasons not to take the american ones anymore. When I was due for my booster (and in my case with my health problems the idea of body autonomy is an incomprehensible concept) the doctor recommended moderna instead of pfizer because there was an unknown amount of risk of pfizer causing heart inflammation, and the whole reason my life is fucked up is because I had heart inflammation when I was in the womb. (i.e. literally
born this way, although I don't get a special flag for it lol.) I also had an inflammation hit my heart when I was 9-10 and it showed up when they dissected the removed aorta this summer (I have a plastic tube instead with a mechanical valve that can be heard from the other end of the room, life is funny. The vomiting I have been having for a month and a half is less so).
The next week or so, I learned that moderna too is likely to cause the same thing. AstraZeneca was a pain in the ass enough for me (and there is the blood clot situation), so that's out, Janssen is from the makers of the cancerous baby powder, no reason to trust them.
In fact there is this, just three days ago,
https://www.reuters.com/business/healthc...021-12-17/
That leaves me with the eastern vaccines. There is Sinopharm, which is the obvious "safe" candidate for anyone with complications since it's literally just inactivated virus, there is no way to go wrong with that one as long as it is thoroughly scrutinized (and it IS given extra scrutiny, every batch, when it arrives to hungary) and the same concept is the basis of our own hungarian vaccine research. We also are acquiring / acquired the license to produce it when our factory at Debrecen comes online next year. (We have a cooperation agreement with the chinese side already)
Note that this is weaker in terms of protection (but not as weak as astrazeneca), but it is way safer, and it is better than nothing.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/ar...3X2100639X
The other is the winner against the alpha variant, sputnik V (see above). We already have the license for Sputnik V, we are getting the technology, and we will produce it when the factory comes online. There are more cases where sputnik is not recommended, (a pretty long list) but it is the strongest so far. It is a vector vaccine and it is safer than Astra too, despite the long list of counter-indicated groups (while our health institute doesn't scrutinize the brit vaccine nearly as hard), since every batch also gets a second-check when it arrives to my fair country.
Now let's take a look at how good all this is at the end of the day:
![[Image: unknown.png]](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/333498826516070402/922608978096164914/unknown.png)
We have the same, sorry MORE infections per day (look at the line showing the 7-day average) than we had in spring before/during vaccination. Fat good it did. It was announced before that covid is over with the vaccine, that we only need to reach 50-55% for the need of restrictive measures to end, and look, here we are again wearing masks on public transport, even though it's been decisively proven that it is not really helping other than being a polite gesture.
See, in the late 2020 we had a pretty large wave despite putting our trust in masks. You'd call that the first wave, but in fact that is the second. The first wave was so small it doesn't register on the image and it happened in the spring of 2020. I don't know how exactly we did it, but I believe it's worth studying since we had at some point the highest deaths per million
in the entire world (basically, america would be past
1.2 million with this death rate, 50% more than what they report), and that is a large difference.
Now onto a more positive result, deaths. To be more precise, having fewer of them.
![[Image: unknown.png]](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/333498826516070402/922610792241696838/unknown.png)
As you can see we have the same infection count, less deaths. That is one good result from medication + vaccination + herd immunity (Since that is the main difference from the spring wave: more postcovid immunity, more vaccinations, and introduction of better antiviral drugs)
This also means we have way less (about 30% less) hospitalizations than last time, when we were recruiting volunteer workers who were taught care in non-intensive care so they could help the overloaded staff and deployed when and where needed.
Note that this is not just some fake news maker, this is the hungarian chamber of doctors, and in the linked news + video the president of the chamber's Győr-Moson-Sopron county organ is even recommending not to apply at the hospitals since they have enough work as is.
https://www.facebook.com/mokgyor/posts/2898182593783544
Also worth noting is that even in end of may, when we were already removing restrictions and cases were going down, and hospital capacity was freeing up, the Gottsegen György Országos Kardiológiai Intézet was chock full of patients. Not covid, but in general. I was the guest of the childcare ICU after they put the pleura drain back in because they didn't have a spare bed in the adult unit, and it wasn't until I was going to the sanatorium that they'd have free bed capacity. So I got to watch an old man die from pulmonary hypertension. The next morning his remains were taken away in a box. You could say I had a VIP seat. So it goes.
That is not fake news, this was my reality. I have paper proof of which parts of the hospital took care for me postop if someone is still doubting.
Western vaccines and their political dimension
So I no longer trust american vaccines, although they have good results in the study.
Firstly, their makers (J&J) and their side effects (MRNA) are too risky at least for me, and I accept everyone who thinks that this risk is too much for them. I gambled my life with that shot, I lived to tell the tale, but not everyone gets lucky. It is at the end of the day a fair worry. Endocarditis can and will cripple you for the rest of your life and you will have to forget the fear of needles and the concept of bodily autonomy. That is assuming you live to tell the tale. You'll be lucky if you can live a more or less independent life.
Secondly, let's analyze it from a real scientific point of view, which I sadly (but unsurprisingly) don't see applied to your politics.
As I said before, you have institutionalized corruption, in the form of revolving door which I define here as officials going from political office to advisory or high leadership positions in influential businesses, and lobbying which is a more "classic" form of paying off officials.
What this leads to is that both you all AND T-hawk failed to properly assess the state's real function, although at least T-hawk is, even from this wrong position, correctly warning against it's expansion. The state's real function has been long ago analyzed by german philosophers and political scientists Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
Quote:...the bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.
In lights of the above, with the officials being high ranking representatives of large businesses, the lobbying, (even here the health lobby was noted to be too strong
on this page, and who can forget the war industries hmm?) this definition seems painfully accurate. Remember when Biden had that nice meeting with big business leaders and said "nothing will fundamentally change"? Precisely that.
So the state's job is not protecting individual rights, not protecting the people. The state's function is managing the common affairs of the big businesses. Big tech, Big pharma, Big guns/MIC. The people are nothing more than voters every 4 years, choosing which of the two sides of the same coin they dislike less.
This establishes that the decisions in the usa are not made by the people as a whole (despite "by the people" being such a notable part of the Gettysburg address), but by the leadership of businesses.
What is the primary function of any business? To turn a profit. And there is no profit to be made if you cannibalize your market. This is why we see powercreep in games as a service like MMOs where every expansion is a new time to get in the gear treadmill, this is why in wargames from games workshop the newest models are usually more powerful than the old ones as per the official rulebooks, and this is why pharmatic companies are not in the business of curing illnesses, but treating them.
This last part is important. If you cure a patient, then that is one less person buying your product. If you don't cure that patient but make him buy your product to stay alive, you created a captive market with no real choice of not buying, so in a practical sense you are taxing that person as if you were the government, since you have the same power over his life, which depends on your product.
Now, it shouldn't take too long to dig out the american big three vaccine makers' laundry. J&J's case is notable since it was recent.
Regardless of laundry though, the fundamentals stay the same. These vaccine makers made a killing (literally and figuratively), earning record profits and by keeping tight control over the patents, and thus deciding who gets access and who doesn't in america's vicinity, especially the case with Pfizer's "Brazil ransom" case. Who in the right mind would give up such a market and such power? Yes, nobody. These businesses have a vested interest in keeping pandemics dangerous enough so that there is always a market for their products, for mutations to come along, and drive demand, and through demand prices, and through prices profits sky high. That is a natural course of a business being a business. Nothing special. It is their right, since private property, which business is, is sacred. Human life is not. It's free market being the free market, since free market always leads to trusts, cartels, and finally monopoly through cycles of crises. It is the consolidation of practical political power into the hands of a few individuals, not elected but who play both sides of the election to make sure they don't lose.
Eastern vaccines and the chief difference
In comparison, both eastern vaccines were developed and produced in state institutes. Now we know that the capitalist state is the managing committee of the affairs of the bourgeoisie (i.e. businesses, i.e. the people who own the big things).
This demands the question, what is the difference?
It is the international situation of the local, russian bourgeoisie compared to the world hegemon. The russian state is mostly controlled by it's national bourgeoisie, which is threatened by the compradors who would sell the country, piecemeal, to the americans, british, etc. If it doesn't retain political power, there won't be russia and everything there will be owned by shell, exxon, etc, while the many nations inside the federation will be at each other's throats much like we see in the balkans. That is to say, the russian bourgeoisie can not at the moment afford to make the same moves as the american one.
The result, the
state developed vaccine has been licensed to India, China, South Korea, and Brazil for production (with my fair Hungary joining next year). This is a fundamentally different approach from the private hands of the Usa.
In China, the ruling government is communist, the economical foundation is socialist, so the state, again, serves a different purpose.
As a result, Sinopharm too is open to foreign production, with a factory under construction in Belgrade, alongside our hungarian one.
I'll contrast this again to Pfizer and Astrazeneca, which are against licensing for foreign production, and didn't even deliver their doses on time. This is the difference between a monopolist whose eye is on nothing but profit, and actual medics whose goal is to help prevent disease.
This, the flipflopping opinions on vaccination by western politicians (Two doses, booster, every half year, mandates, anyámtyúkja) and the lack thereof here, as well as the overall better results (Safer or even stronger) means I have no reason anymore to trust the western vaccines, (esp. with my own and my family's experiences and the contrast between them) but every reason to trust our eastern partners.
So for those hesitating, I recommend them to come and stay here, get at least the safest one, and enjoy not living in the same madness as the remaining americans.
; played in Civ VI PBEM 4, 5, 15; DL suboptimal Civ VI PBEM 17