Pfizer and “Risk Reduction”

In 2021 I was joyous that Pharma had vaccines that were on the order ot 95% effective. Now we know what that means.

How Pfizer duped billions via statistical manipulation: Pfizer reported that its vaccine shows a 95% efficacy. That sounds like it protects you 95% of the time, right? But that's not actually what that number means. That 95% refers to the relative risk reduction, but it doesn't tell you how much your overall risk is reduced by vaccination.

For that, we need absolute risk reduction. In the Pfizer trial, 8 out of 18,198 people who were given the vaccine developed COVID-19. In the unvaccinated placebo group, 162 people got it, which means that even without the vaccine, the risk of contracting COVID-19 was extremely low at 0.88%, which the vaccine then reduced to 0.04%. So the net benefit or the absolute risk reduction that you're being offered with a Pfizer vaccine is 0.84%. That 95% number, that refers to the relative difference between 0.88 and 0.04%. That's what they call 95% relative risk reduction.

And relative risk reduction is well known to be a misleading number, which is why the FDA recommends using absolute risk reduction instead, which begs the question, how many people would have chosen to take the COVID-19 vaccines had they understood that they offered less than 1% benefit?

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Eli Steele is Over it

Eli Steele (son of Shelby Steele) is "over it":

We are over black power

We are over white guilt

We are over white privilege

We are over respectability politics

We are over white fragility

We are over white-adjacent

We are over inclusivity/belonging

We are over BIPOC

We are over victimhood

We are over oppressor vs. oppressed

We are over cancel culture

We are over antisemitism

We are over cultural appropriation

We are over systemic racism

We are over Black Lives Matter

We are over DEI

We are over systems of oppression

We are over reparations

We are over Uncle Tom

We are over performative allyship

We are over ideology

We are individuals.

Who is Eli Steele?

[From Grok] Eli Steele is an award-winning American filmmaker, writer, and commentator known for his documentaries that critically examine race, identity, and social issues in the United States. Born around 1974, he is Black, Jewish, and deaf (relying on cochlear implants and lip-reading), and he lives in Los Angeles with his two children. He is the son of Shelby Steele, a prominent Black conservative author and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, with whom Eli has frequently collaborated on projects.Background and HeritageSteele's family history reflects resilience and diverse experiences: his paternal great-grandfather was born into American slavery, while his maternal grandmother escaped Nazi persecution in Europe before returning to rescue her family. These roots inform his perspective on identity and freedom, often framing his work around themes of individual agency over group-based ideologies.

I'm not over the modern versions of these things because I immediately recognized these things to be the grifts they are, performative grabs for money and power.

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Don’t Cancel the Cancelers

Adam Goldstein of FIRE:

Time and time again, we resort to this mob mentality when tragedy strikes. When Barbara Bush died. When the Queen died. Rush Limbaugh. Otto Warmbier. George Floyd. After 9/11. After October 7. The attempted assassination of Donald Trump.

As free speech advocates, it places us in a painful position. Charlie Kirk’s assassination was an attack on free speech and open discourse. In a free society, we must not be afraid to express our views, no matter how strongly some might oppose them. That’s the point of free speech. But it is precisely for that reason why we must not respond to mockery of Kirk’s assassination by canceling everyone who offends us: because that too creates a society where people are afraid to express themselves.

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Michael Shellenberger: The Political Left Needs to Renounce Violence

Michael Shellenberger, at Public:

"Why did they engage in so much dehumanization for so long? In large part, the reason is because Kirk challenged left wing mythology on gender, race and modern feminism. One cannot change one's sex through drugs, surgery or magical thinking. Kirk and other conservatives noted. There is no epidemic of police officers killing black men. In fact, the numbers declined dramatically from the 1970s to the birth of black lives matter. Black Americans commit crimes at numbers clearly disproportionate to their share of the population, and some research does, in fact, suggests that liberal, secular women report more mental health issues and lower life satisfaction than conservative, religious women who are more likely to be married and to have children.

The left cannot tolerate these challenges to its worldview, and so it resorts to censorship and silencing. The share of college students who support using violence to stop a campus speech rose from 24% to 34% between 2021 and 2025 poignantly, in April, Kirk himself posted on x about rising support for violence on the left. Assassination culture is spreading on the left. He noted, 48% of liberals say it would be at least somewhat justified to murder Elon Musk. 55% said the same thing about Donald Trump.

In California. It's simply not good enough now for Democratic politicians like Newsom and news media outlets like the New York Times, who spent the last decade dehumanizing millions of their fellow citizens, including Trump and Kirk, to simply say that they shouldn't be killed. If they truly oppose political violence, they should apologize for their relentless false accusations of racism and bigotry, and they should try to make amends by humanizing conservatives.

The media Democrats and the wider left must stop portraying MAGA supporters who have Christian nationalist and conservative views as equivalent to Nazis and fascists through the use of loaded terms like "Far Right."

Let us all come together and condemn violence of any kind. Said former MSNBC commentator Dowd, in his apology. Well, if he really means that, then he and others at MSNBC, The New York Times, the Democratic Party, must go further and renounce their own demonization of Kirk, Trump and other conservatives, We have little confidence that the Left will apologize or change its behavior for many of the same reasons the Left dehumanized Kirk in the first place. The mainstream view of the left today, as represented by everyone from Democrats in Congress to the New York Times to NPR and PBS, is that Western civilization itself is corrupt and evil. The Democratic Party of the last roughly 12 years has lost any semblance of being a Liberal Party and has become an overtly illiberal radical Left one

From the Left's reaction to the assassination, more Americans and people around the world will see that the Left hated and still hates Kirk precisely because he loved Western civilization and fought to conserve it. If any Democrats and progressives really want to end political violence, they would stop encouraging fanaticism and instead embrace dialog and debate. They would go beyond simply writing articles, and instead go to colleges and universities and start having honest conversations about race, sex, gender and other issues essential to discussing it openly, if we were to move forward as a country.

They would stop accusing their political opponents of spreading hate or misinformation and instead listen to what they actually have to say. That's what is so important to our country, is to find our disagreements respectfully because when people stop talking, said, Kirk. That's when violence happens. Thanks for listening."

Continue ReadingMichael Shellenberger: The Political Left Needs to Renounce Violence