I just don't see them as useful for anything internal to the site. At best, the tags seem to be treated by search engines as equivalent to titles (likely due to the influence of stack overflow itself)... as far as I can see "things that you want in the title for SEO but don't fit there grammatically" is the only defense of them.
@By137 You can search this chat history for various references to "jkerian's opinion of tags". At some point, my opinion of tags on this site had basically come around to "against".
Honestly the most irritating part of that section of the job is that it's hard to "get consensus", since you sortof just "do" things in those areas by fiat.
@By137 My experience being a mod (way back when), was mostly focused on the few things that only mods can do. Like special tags on meta, cleaning up tags, editing things like the site FAQ, etc.
@lila Sure, but comparing the populations just makes the pro-vaccine side much stronger. The US is sitting at currently 150 million full_vaccination cases. Dallas county was sitting at a few hundred thousand total covid cases.
Regardless, I found a few transcript snippets. And although some things he says are quite correct, the presentation of "4,000 deaths" as a knock against the vaccine, even if true, doesn't really add up
You can quibble and point out that this merely means "deaths with covid", which is true in many cases... but the same is true of post-vaccine deaths and hospitalizations.
But his specific claim is"4,000 vaccine-related deaths and over 10,000 hospitalizations". For the sake of argument, let's simply grant that. Those are national (or international?) numbers... whereas Dallas county itself has had over 4000 deaths from covid.
There are some points where he's basically correct. There's no particularly good reason to rush to vaccinate people who have recovered from infection. Arguments to the contrary have all been extremely far-fetched counterfactuals. (even from people who are otherwise legitimate health authorities)
Keep in mind the article is basically argument from authority.... and the article isn't actually quoting, just summarizing. There are different authorities saying different things... you can evaluate them for expertise, but it really makes more sense to pick out his specific claims.
I mean... it's cute more than anything else. :) But your linked BBC article does answer the question in the headline "No, for now" in the article itself.
It is also a common adverse reaction to virtually every injection. And I'm suspicious that it was included in this list, as I suspect the numbers decrease below the level that people would consider serious if it was excluded.
I'm not exactly a vaccine cheerleader.... and basically feel the EUA's for children are ridiculous, irresponsible and dangerous. But one of the "5" ADRs listed here is "pain", and that is a known and common side effect, particularly of the second Pfizer dose. (~10%).
That sort of protest would be... relatively rare. For the most part the protests here (US) were over whether the government actually had the rights to do what it did... and just general objections to the shutdowns.
On a side note, and in fairness to Fauci... "worth risking a global pandemic" is kindof a loaded phrase at this point. But when asked the question, he could reasonably say that the risks of such were quite remote. And, to be honest, we still don't _know_ it had anything to do with WIV. We probably never will.
Although in case someone else reading this missed it as well... I'm NOT saying that there is certainly nothing more dangerous about the B1.1.7 mutation.
I'm saying that the science, at this point, doesn't support the claim that it is more dangerous.
If anything, I'd say he's trying to tamp that down. At least that's how I would read "There's some preliminary suggestion... that's not proven... there could be a connection."
Note that literally everything in that article that is interesting is hedged with "may". (except for a few cases where they're simply saying "no, that rumor isn't true")
(admitedly, the "strain" thing is kindof splitting hairs... the idea that there's something more than a "genetic family" required to be "a strain" seems odd to most people) :)
Note that "there is no indication" does not mean "it is not"... we don't know.
But we've had "new strain is MORE dangerous" media scares at least three times now. I'd like to see some evidence that isn't just a political actor trying to explain why their policies didn't contain covid.
There's been no indication that this "new strain" is particularly special. The information that it is "particularly infectious" came from a politician, to the confusion of at least one prominent scientist. The idea that it's "new" was a bit confusing to people who have been tracking it for several months now. It may surprise you to learn that the idea that this is even a new "strain" is a declaration of the media, and arguably is simply wrong. There is genetic variation in the SARS-Cov-2 virus, gisaid is tracking a few dozen of them... but not enough that any of them are called a new "strain".
Yeah... my understanding is that remdesivir works if you hit the infection very early (but even then it doesn't work great). So it may make sense for health care workers or heads of state (to take a /cough/ totally theoretical example) who are tested constantly, but won't be much use for the average patient who arrives at the hospital with the infection already well underway.
The decision on when to acquiesce silently to authority, when to report someone to authority, and when to ignore or openly defy authority is certainly a complicated question.
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