Of Freedom, Country and Vaccination

[Jannemann2]

I didn't see a comment really about the loss of a great American leader in Colin Powell, the possibility of any link to cancer which was the point under discussion.  No thoughts one way or the other I guess.

The link to cancer exists and it is extremely obvious and not what you might or might not have been implying. Mr. Powell was suffering a form of cancer which specifically concerns plasma cells. The biological function of these cells is to mass-produce antibodies against previously recognized pathogens. People with this type of cancer are known to have a severely reduced immunoresponse and hence a severely increased risk to fall victim to all kind of infections, even those, which are usually completely harmless for healthy people. These patients are also well known to often be unable to develop sufficient immunity from vaccinations - as the natural protection from vaccinations uses the same mechanisms and the same group of cells to induce a protection via antibodies against infectious agents.

Knowledge about that is actually established for decades. It is known and shown to be also the case for Covid-19 in several studies (as expected). In fact, doctors, researchers and even some politicians are concerned since the start of the whole pandemic about how to protect this very group of people which are known to be both: extremely vulnerable to Covid-19 and with a much reduced chance to get sufficient protection from vaccination.

The risk for severe cases of Covid-19 is higher in older people, and especially high for the age group of 80y+. Mr. Powell was 84 years old.

Mr. Powell got his second shot in February per sources. 8 month from now. Data from all over the world consistently shows, immunity is increasingly waning after 5-6 month; younger people still have good protection especially against severe courses. But waning of protection is much, much steeper in the age group 80y+.

So Mr. Powell had cancer, a form which severely reduces the ability to produce antibodies at all (from vaccination and infection with the actual SarsCov-2 virus), was member of an age group known to be severely endangered by Covid-19 (much more than the mean of the population) and which is also known to have a lower immuncompetence and therefore weaker protection from vaccination even without cancer. If he had been under actual treatment against cancer (I didn't see any information about this) it would have further weakened his immunocompetence. Unfortunate as his passing may be, he was exactly the kind of person you'd expect to fall victim to the virus.

With all the information I've just lined out available (in a more compressed form) in more or less every source I've seen about Collin Powells passing it's really difficult for me to understand why one would think it was necessary for the sake of free speech or some misguided idea of balance to indicate a connection between Mr Powells cancer and his Anti-SarsCov-2 vaccination. Of course you didn't say it, you said, maybe, or maybe not and you would never say there is a connection, but you still don't know ...

But you have actually put both pieces of information on the table close enough to indicate there could be a causal connection while no available data hints to that and the overwhelming majority of researchers don't consider it a serious threat (especially compared to the threat from the virus itself)

Free speech is something important. But with great power comes great responsibility. And presenting information in a way like you did here (and not for the first time in this thread) is irresponsible in my opinion because it fails to differentiate between information that is supported with a lot of data and information which is supported with few data or no data at all (like Anti-SarsCov-2 vaccines maybe inducing cancer). This is producing doubt and mistrust into vaccines that are currently our best weapon against the pandemic (by a large margin) and as a consequence that adds to the establishment of a climate where people get the false idea it is unclear whether the vaccines create more good or more harm and therefore might avoid this important way to protect themselves and die or get severely ill. The same goes for indicating Vitamin D, invermectin, hydroxychloroquine, and a daily walk would offer the same or even better protection. Which they do not.

(I'm not even talking about the last quote about refugees from Afghanistan and their vaccination status as an indicator that the government might have some hidden agenda to force the whole population to get vaccinated for whatever evil reasons they might have).