On 26/02/2021 11:36, Jethro_uk wrote:
On Fri, 26 Feb 2021 11:28:07 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

The vaccine tickles your immune system, making it a bit more alert. That
vastly improves *but does not eliminate* the possibility of catching it
badly enough to need hospitalization.

What I suspect will be much more significant over the coming months is
the emerging evidence that vaccinated people that do catch Covid catch it
much less severely than otherwise.

Of course.
Then the anti vaxxers will say 'that is because all the vulnerable
people died in the first wave'

The trouble is that very few people study philosophy, even fewer
*understand* it and almost no one applies it to real life problems like
this.

It is as impossible to prove that the vaccine *is* working as to prove
that it is ineffective.

We a
- practising social distancing
- wearing PPE routinely
- running at vastly higher levels of personal hygiene
- getting vaccinated
- being locked down
- developing natural immunity
- killing off the vulnerable

Only if case rates were *still going up*, would we be able to claim that
the vaccine (and all the other measures) was *ineffective*.

As it is, case and death rates are coming down but we have no way of
knowing ultimately how much was due to the vaccine.

And as animal testing is largely banned,. no way to find out, by doing
tests, either.

What can be measured is some kind of antibody response. But the chain of
reasoning from that to death and infection rates is still not clear cut.

People long for the simple minded security of Boolean logic. It
works/doesn't work. They long for absolute proof,. certainty and
irrefutable 'facts'.

Sadly all science offers - and there are fundamental philosophical
reasons why that is so (cf 'Problem of Induction') - are *models* that
more, or less, *work*.

And when people insist on being given 'facts' they get all disappointed
when the answer is 'we don't have them' and blame a government which has
been hoist by its own petard of claiming omniscience in matters of
social justice and 'protecting the peepul' in order to acquire its most
heartfelt desire, the omnipotence of a centralised unelected power
structure that can do anything it wants. Like the EU.

In the end its Darwin in action. People will make simple binary choices
and live or die by them, in more or less complete ignorance of the
reasons they should be examining.

That is deep social conservationism - Darwinism in action. For whatever
reason some people get the game of life right, and they then teach what
they did as dogma to their children. If its sound advice based on
something real, that advice hangs around a long time. If its bad advice
that just worked once, their children suffer, and die.

Forces that seek to overturn that social conservatism - that huge body
of consensual knowledge of 'stuff that worked for me dad, so its good
enough for me' by hailing 'progressive' 'social justice' '
modernisation' 'new liberalism' etc etc run the risk - nay are
*guaranteed* of - massively destroying society.

But of course, that is why they do it.

Marxism is all about destroying what worked for years in the
pathetically devout certainty that something better will emerge.

In all cases it has been arguably far far worse.



--
€œThe fundamental cause of the trouble in the modern world today is that
the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt."

- Bertrand Russell