Well, the AP there doing an amazing job of promoting Russia’s interests.

Instead of ten bullet points showing how and why Swann is factually wrong about Zelenskyy and the Ukraine war, they go off on a rant with barely concealed nationalist overtones about how his work was “funded” and people were “paid to promote it”. Well, stop the fucking press. Journalists influenced by governments and money! Headline fucking news.

If he’s wrong he’s wrong. Doesn’t matter who paid him, who he paid, who else agrees, who else those who agree also agree with… It matters if he’s wrong. If he is, just say it.

Trying to play cold-war era patriotism just plays directly into the hands of the conspiracy theorists who will, as we speak be saying “notice how they couldn’t actually deny any of his claims…”

Yes, because MI5 never lie for the government do they? Famous for telling the absolute truth all the time are MI5… terrible at counterintelligence as a consequence… But at least they’re honest…

Unbelievable. If the government says jump, you say…?

Antibiotics and other prescription medications are more often prescribed to older folks

But https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6996207/

In this study, we also analyzed antibiotic prescription rates according to age. The highest prevalence rates were observed in patients aged 71 years (80.3%) followed by 4-year-old children (60.7%).

Since 71 year olds wouldn’t show any long term effects, that leaves the four year old group.

as a prescriber, I do warn my patients of the dangers of taking antibiotics willy nilly.

Of course you do, I’ve no doubt you’re very diligent. Because now we know they have serious negative consequences. 40 years ago, however, the people this article is about would have merely been told they were “safe and effective”. That’s exactly the point I’m making.

You now have to take precaution with a medicine because of new information about its safety that wasn’t known at the time it was developed.

Same is true for every other factor mentioned in the report. Human innovation is absolutely suffuce with things we thought were safe and effective at the time, but later turn out to be quite unsafe.

Yet taking this unequivocal fact and applying it to a rational scepticism about new medicines has, since 2020, become ‘misinformation’.

Its the one that coincides with a concern of mine, yes.

Do you comment on absolutely everything regardless of whether it interests you or not?

Are you suggesting that the mere fact of being more interested in some issues than others indicates some kind of unreasonable level of fantisicm?

So “no firm conclusions” means what, in terms of the other comments here?

As far as I can tell, people are understandably a bit troubled, and a bit cross (since some of the proposed causes probably should have been dealt with a lot earlier). They’re maybe hastily jumping to theories about a few likely candidates. Do you blame them?

Or should we just do nothing? Wait, and put all our faith in…? What?

The vast majority of the things mentioned would do us absolutely no harm at all to avoid, or even legislate against as a precaution. So is there a good reason we should wait for “firm” conclusions?

Seemed as good a place as any.

I assume the report wasn’t posted in the spirit of “oh well, nothing we can do about it”. I assume the message was, “let’s try not to let this happen again”.

But maybe im assuming too much basic human compassion.

No, not at all.

I’m pointing out that concern about vaccine safety is legitimate given that many treatments thought “safe and effective” at the time later turn out to have been harmful. The effect antibiotics have on the gut biome being just the latest example.

People concerned about the safety of the drugs they are told to use are not all “lunitic conspiracy theorists” as often branded. Some simply have a completely reasonable caution about the hubris of the medical establishment.

Funny how so many responses have skimmed over the implication of antibiotic use.

Now ask yourselves, these antibiotics… If you’d have asked your doctor at the time “are these drugs safe and effective?”, what do you think the answer would have been?

Now ask your doctor if the latest vaccine is safe and effective and tell me how confident you feel about their response.

None of it is ‘clear’, and of course we don’t ‘know’. The question is what on earth you have on your list of reasons to give Antony Blinken the benefit of the doubt.

I’d love to know what it is about his record in office that inspires such trust.

Honestly, the level of fawning obsequiousness to the government these days is like something from Mccarthy’s America, I thought we’d moved on as a society.

The point isn’t whether he actually did approve bombing aid trucks. The point is that he, like any government official, should be terrified of the response if he did, because it’s only that fear that reigns in the abuse of power.

Do you think Antony Blinken is going to be terrified of “oh, we don’t have absolutely conclusive proof he actually said those exact words so we’ll just drop it”?