By Tony Attwood
Apologies for the delay in publishing this article. This was due to a technological failure requiring immediate action on my part. Or put it another way, my glasses broke and I had to go to the opticians to get them repaired.
But now on with the show…
In Britain today a seemingly growing number of people believe that the various vaccines on offer in relation to coronavirus are in fact a major threat to individuals and our civilisation. .
What is interesting is that the people who believe that it is the vaccine that is the danger and not the virus, have no scientific evidence to back this up, but their campaigns are getting a lot of publicity and many people are refusing to be vaccinated.
Now I can’t quite follow the logic in why people who believe that the vaccine is a danger are making such a fuss. After all, if the vaccine is a danger, then after a while, people like me who got vaccinated at the very first chance will quickly either die out, or will find themselves being controlled by the powers of the state. That will be obvious on Untold, and you will be able to spot it the moment I start telling you that there is nothing wrong with refereeing in the Premier League.
It’s a bit different with my theory about football, which suggests that there is a fair amount of evidence that refereeing in the Premier League is not as honest and honourable as might be thought, and that the media refuse to carry this story just because it involves harder work than making up transfer rumours.
The one conclusion that is inescapable is that at the heart of both issues (the existence of the anti-vaccine movement, and the refusal of newspapers and most blogs to consider even the possibility that all is not well in refereeing) is the abandonment by one side of scientific or statistical evidence.
There is no evidence linking the vaccine with the ability of the state to read one’s mind and influence one’s behaviour. There is evidence of the fact that referees are influenced by crowd behaviour and that most of what the newspapers and blogs publish about forthcoming transfers is fantasy.
And that is the worrying bit. Where there is no evidence, many people believe the story. Where there is evidence, few people believe the analysis.
“Ah,” say the anti-vax campaigners, “there is evidence but it is being suppressed,” and that is where I get worried, because part of my argument about refereeing not being free and fair in the PL is based on the notion that PGMO is a highly secretive organisation that actively discourages all talk of biased refereeing, and that the media goes along with this.
Meanwhile one report shows that using “vaccination” and “immunisation” as the base of web searches,, examining the first 10 sites displayed on seven leading search engines 43% of websites were anti-vaccination (including all of the first 10 on Google). The “main rhetorical appeals involve themes of the scientific veracity of anti-vaccination argument; rapport with parents seeking to protect their children from harm; and alleged collusion between doctors, the pharmaceutical industry, and government to deny vaccine harm.”
As a result most of us know about the anti-vaccination argument and seemingly growing numbers of people believe it.
On the other hand our campaign aimed at showing the biased nature of newspaper articles over the issue of the balance and fairness of referees in the Premier League remains unknown, and the number of people who believe it remains small. So much so that even the highly regarded science magazine New Scientist published an article denying that there had even been a swing from home wins to away wins during lockdown – something that was quite untrue. Worse they refused even to acknowledge complaints about the article, let alone issue a retraction.
Thus we can see that campaigns based on no evidence at all, and which contradict reality, can get high levels of publicity, while a rational and reasonable argument (such as one saying that referees are influenced by the crowd, or that there is no scientific evidence that vaccination does more harm than good) can be ignored.
The survey into anti-vaccination campaigns concludes there “is a high probability that parents will encounter elaborate anti-vaccination material on the world wide web. Factual refutational strategies alone are unlikely to counter the highly rhetorical appeals that shape these sites.”
Meanwhile we might conclude on refereeing that there “is a high probability that football fans will encounter no evidence to suggest that referees accuracy levels are much lower than publicly claimed, and the way referees are selected can act against the interest of certain clubs.
Which shows that in terms of overcoming fake arguments, evidence is not the issue. There is no evidence that vaccination harms people or is part of a plot to control people but some people believe it. There is evidence that something is seriously wrong with refereeing in the Premier League, but many people won’t believe.
It’s a funny ol’ game.
As a side note, the use of the internet to spread misinformation about vaccinations and government control may actual push some liberal governments to control the internet more. Perhaps not as far as erecting a great firewall (a la China) but I for one would not be surprised to see the EU enacting some laws to control the internet.
Andre Wakefield a medical professional famously published fraudulent scientific papers that contributed largely to apathy to MMR vaccine. Ultimately he was discredited and derigistered but not before he planted seeds of doubt. He did this by using his professional background to gain legitimacy.
Presentation of logical information does not necessarily mean they are factual.
Am not saying this applies to your case but Vaccines have a wide concurrence and approval within the scientific community. It’s not just one Scientist presenting facts but several other scientists checking on those facts and agreeing with them.
That is why anti-vaxxers are ridiculed because they disagree with facts that professionals in the medical industry agree on.
The last time I checked it was only you presenting facts. And then declaring that those who disagree with you are similar to anti-vaxxers.
No. It’s very different.
I’ve had 3 Covid vaccines. The first was the best. It was day 2 of rollout. To claim there is no evidence of harm shows that your reality compass has drifted way off north. Jabs 2 and 3 were preceded by significant anxiety regarding the well documented potential side effects. As a frontline Covid worker my risk/ benefit analysis is pretty one sided. But your inference that parents of kids are 5G cranks is unfair and unbalanced.
Tony,
it is even worse then you think. In a small swiss canton, Appenzell, very much agrar territory, people voted to allow continuing use of pesticides that have been proven beyond all doubt to be harmfull to men, animals, insects, if not deadly. Yet more then 60 % are against vaccination…
Go figure.
Just shows that at this point today, science, math, everything our civilisation is based and was constructed upon (even if some of it is bad) is worth nothing anymore. Anyone can say : I’m doing research – just sifting through the internet and come up with the definite reason why something is bad or good – A Nobel is so overrated, is it not ?
Yet all these naysayers are using that same science and technology daily when it suits them. Like flatearthers boarding a cruiseship for a congress when this cruiseship sails under the false pretense (from their point of view)that the earth is spherical… or anti-vaxxers accusing the whole medical establishment of being corrupt, incompetent, murderous and dangerous, cheking into a hospital for something other then Covid-19
Maybe we, as Arsenal fans ought to start saying out loud that in fact Arsenal won last year’s PL and find all sorts of indices in weird places proving that while the public was not present, the games shown on TV were fake, the actual games were held in secret places and the results manipulated and players and staff were threatened with their lifes if they ever talk about it. That would be a fun project. In the same vein as the ‘Birds are drones’ conspiracy theory that has taken root in the US.
Sadly I have witnessed harm caused by vaccination. For me it is a fact that they can harm badly. Just as for me it is a fact that the refs are biased and can harm Arsenal.
Why would take a vaccine that does not prevent you from getting the illness and also does not stop you giving the illness to other people. It is experimental and you are the test subjects many people have died and their are many that are suffering adverse reactions, if you have taken choice to be inoculated all well and good but do not ridicule people who do want to be part in the mass experiment,
Peter Doshi, an associate editor at the British Medical Journal, one of the world’s leading medical journals, wrote an article in the journal that analysed the clinical vaccine trials run by the manufacturers of the following vaccines
Moderna
Pfizer
AstraZeneca
Janssen
Sinopharm
Sinovac
You can read it here
https://www.bmj.com/content…
He came up with the following conclusion: None of the vaccine trials have been set up to prove whether the vaccines prevent transmission of the virus or confer immunity from the virus or prevent hospitalisation or death from the virus. Their only claim is that it reduces the severity of the Covid 19 symptoms. Doshi asked the chief medical officer at Moderna, Tal Zaks whether the vaccine prevents transmission of the virus. He responded and you can read this on page 3 of the attached document.
“Our trial will not demonstrate prevention of transmission because in order to do that you have to swab people twice a week for very long periods, and that becomes operationally untenable”.
So there is no scientific evidence that these injections do any good other than lessen symptoms.
And 20 thousand in Europe already dead from them. Two of these were known to me.
We have lost family members to blood clots AFTER they were inoculated while they had no symptoms or blood problems previously. A family member now has asthma after his inoculation and his doc said that it happened cause he had Covid. So good luck to those that were inoculated, but till it becomes a proven vaccine against Covid I’ll take my chances by not having it.
“There is no evidence that vaccination harms people”- that sounds like something you would see in the main stream media regarding referees and Arsenal!
Try looking at the official government website (which is not promoted in the media, I wonder why) and you will see that there has been over 1600 deaths from it reported in GB alone (which is estimated to be less than 10% of the actual cases).
It’s here :-
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/coronavirus-covid-19-vaccine-adverse-reactions.
I suppose you are also all for the upcoming vaccination passports and associated discrimination coming to a country near you soon.