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I was nodding my head right along, right to assemble, check, masks optional, check. no mandates, check. All good. I disagree with him on death rate. It’s 1 in 500. And then he got to ‘noted virologist’ And a paper written by someone who used 6 of his own prior papers to boister the claims of a 7th paper. Which is pretty weird even for scientists.

So I looked him up. Friend of nonprofiteer RFK,jr. Seems to be against all vaccinations. For anything. And rather fatalistic. To quote a statement from the top of the second page of his paper, “ No pivotal clinical trial for a vaccine preventing an infectious disease has ever demonstrated an improvement in health.” Which was a letdown because not dying from measles or pertussis or even covid is a lot healthier than dying from it. I think maybe the pastor should have looked futher than the book cover for a source to prop his argument.

Had he addressed the vaccine issue the same way he addressed gatherings or masks, based on one’s own risk assessment, it might have come across better. Such as should one parent get vaccinated so the kids have one parent left just in case, do we have our finances in order, what medical services can we access, what if we have to make a career change, how do we deal with mandates that aren’t going to go away soon, all of the elements that go into decision making, it would have been a stellar article. Especially with such a strong start. But it sort of fizzled at the end with the scary story stuff injected in that didn’t match the title.

https://www.reuters.com/article/fact-check-no-evidence-that-pfizers-covi-idUSL1N2MZ382

"More than six weeks passed with no letup on the government-ordered quarantine. While media reports and health department predictions continued to be dire, the actual impact of the virus on our congregation was only mildly worse than the annual flu. Relatively few congregants tested positive, and those who did typically recovered quickly. It was soon obvious (and CDC statistics proved it) that healthy people in their fifties or younger were not in imminent mortal danger from the spread of COVID-19."

Which, together with almost all infections being traced to household-type settings (and about a third being in long-term care facilities), and almost all deaths being among those who had a number of comorbidities - mainly obesity and conditions usually related to it - and hardly any youth dying with Covid, testifies against the all-ages long term broad scope of restrictions, esp. with its "stay-sheltered" mantra, rather than a national fitness program of like weight (no pun intended) for those who are able.