September 11, 2020 - 7:00am
As I may have mentioned, I’m taking part in the Oxford vaccine trial. As I predicted at the time, sticking a big stick up your nose and against your tonsils every week for a year is deeply unpleasant, but I am willing to make these sacrifices for the common good.
A few weeks after I had the vaccine, I was asked to come in again. They’d established that a second, booster dose had led to an improved immune response, so they offered one to anyone who wanted it.
(Of course, I may have had the control dose, a meningitis vaccine; if so, I’ll have had it in the booster shot as well. Since it’s double-blind, the doctors and nurses administering wouldn’t know either, but it has to be the same as the first or the whole trial gets buggered up. It feels like a logistical nightmare, but it’s probably got some simple system.)
It’s in the news that the trial has been halted after a participant developed transverse myelitis, an inflammation of the spinal column. So I wanted to write about this, because when I went in to have the booster shot, I also had to sign a whole new consent form. The new form said this: “[O]ne volunteer in the trials of ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 developed neurological symptoms which caused the study to pause while a safety review took place. The volunteer was later diagnosed with an unrelated neurological illness.”
That is, they got everyone on the whole trial — 10,000 in the UK alone — to sign a new consent form, because someone had developed a nerve condition which they already knew had nothing to do with the vaccine.
If you have 10,000 people and follow them for a year, some number of them will get ill. One of the most widely known risks of vaccinations is Guillain-Barré syndrome, which — very rarely — can be triggered by vaccinations. But I think there’s about a one in five chance* you’d see it just by fluke in a randomly selected group of 10,000 people in a year. That would definitely pause the trial, but it’s more likely than rolling a 1 on a D6.
It may turn out that the transverse myelitis is something to do with the vaccine (although I’d expect not) and if so that may affect the risk-benefit calculations around the vaccine (although I’d expect not very much). But what it definitely does tell us is that vaccine scientists are conscientious almost to the point of paranoia and that vaccines are in fact extremely safe as a result.
*note for nerds: the actual risk is 0.4 to 4 per 100,000 per year, depending on age. I’ve roughly assumed that’s an average of 2ish. That’s an average of 0.2 per 10,000 people per year: using a Poisson distribution calculator we can see that you’d see a case about once every five years. (In an earlier version of this paragraph, I got the answer right but the maths wrong, and since I’m writing a book about getting numbers right in the news, I felt I ought to admit that.)
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SubscribeLook around you. The feminists have won. Every day there are stories in the media about women and girls, but almost never about how our boys are faring. And nothing in the news about the fact that men kill themselves 3 to 4 times as often as women. The media is now dominated by feminist viewpoints, even the more toxic radical feminist views. I have always been for equality of the sexes but this has become a power grab, nothing more. The fact that feminists are quite happy to distort history to serve their ideology does little credit to their scholarship either.
Feminism did win. Women on aggregate still consume the bulk of welfare yet pay the least in taxes by a considerable margin. You can still argue that at State level men still pay for women to exist – either directly or indirectly via the State as proxy.
Historically women were not expected to dig coal mines and get lung diseases, asbestosis etc. They were not expected to get their arms and legs blown off in imperial wars. They were not expected to dig roads, lay railways, work on building sites, plough fields, muck out barns, herd cattle, build sewers, work on oil rigs, lay pipelines, spend days in storms deep-sea-fishing or dice with death in any fashion. Their work was mundane but safe.
Absolutely women should have been entitled to vote and treated as equals in property rights, education and marriage – but that is history and the story of how we emerged from the fields as a species – via cooperation and necessity. We did what we could, and corrected societal norms as we went along.
Now that most jobs are automated – including most housework – there is no reason that men should occupy all fields and women others; it’s down to disposition and interests. Only women have the added bonus of enjoying better educational support, work placements, charities just for women, government initiatives just for women, corporate initiatives just for women, better work-life-balance than men, less expected of women – a general “lowering of the bar” due to being female generally is ubiquitous – as if women were somehow deficient; but they are not (conversely, we are told.. better at everything). Yet still the grievance projection by focusing on the 0.01% of men at the corporate top, not the 99.99% driving vans, digging roads and building the world as ever they have.
Men just have themselves. Men do not get life choices – there are statistically no women who would work so a man can ride horses and go to yoga class and set up a hobby business. The reverse is the norm and expected – even with no kids. In divorce women almost always profit, the male is bankrupted. Feminists really need to have a close look at their very obvious statistical privileges before claiming eternal grievances based on personal projection. If feminists want to talk collectively they need to think statistically.
Feminism did win. Women on aggregate still consume the bulk of welfare yet pay the least in taxes by a considerable margin. You can still argue that at State level men still pay for women to exist – either directly or indirectly via the State as proxy.
Historically women were not expected to dig coal mines and get lung diseases, asbestosis etc. They were not expected to get their arms and legs blown off in imperial wars. They were not expected to dig roads, lay railways, work on building sites, plough fields, muck out barns, herd cattle, build sewers, work on oil rigs, lay pipelines, spend days in storms deep-sea-fishing or dice with death in any fashion. Their work was mundane but safe.
Absolutely women should have been entitled to vote and treated as equals in property rights, education and marriage – but that is history and the story of how we emerged from the fields as a species – via cooperation and necessity. We did what we could, and corrected societal norms as we went along.
Now that most jobs are automated – including most housework – there is no reason that men should occupy all fields and women others; it’s down to disposition and interests.
Only women have the added bonus of enjoying better educational support, work placements, charities just for women, government initiatives just for women, better work-life-balance (thanks to men) than men, a “lowering of the bar” due to being female generally is ubiquitous. It is still the norm pretty much everywhere for the man to do the awful commute and soulless but well-paying city job, and the wife has the lifestyle job.
Men just have themselves. Men do not get life choices – there are statistically no women who would work so a man can ride horses and go to yoga class or set up a hobby business. The reverse is the norm and expected – even with no kids. In divorce women almost always profit, the male is bankrupted. Feminists really need to have a close look at their very obvious privileges before claiming eternal grievances. If feminists want to talk collectively they need to think and look around statistically.