Last updated on February 7th, 2023 at 02:41 pm
Personally, I am celebrating Festivus on December 23 because we start with the Airing of Grievances, and I have a whole list of grievances for this year. We can start with Google hating this website to nearly losing my life to cellulitis to getting COVID-19 to lots of other things.
I know I’m alive and not begging for food, but the Airing of Grievances during Festivus will still be cathartic.
But I think there is one thing I am thankful for — all of you who support this website through reading and sharing articles, through Patreon, and through GoFundMe. I cannot thank you enough. I wouldn’t be here without your support.
Vaccine articles
Over the past year, Google’s SEO algorithms have hit my website hard. I’m not sure what caused it, but many topics I focus on have been clobbered moving from top 10 to unranked. Ouch!
But there are articles that have been big hits. I wish I knew what made a hit and what didn’t, but I realize that few care about my vaccine articles anymore. I think there are better places to get information about anti-vaccine conspiracies (see Orac), and vaccine science (see Vaxopedia and DeplatformDisease).
I will still write about some vaccines, especially for HPV, Lyme disease, diabetes, and some other niche vaccines. But how much more can I say about COVID-19 vaccines? People are either getting them because of the scientific facts, or they reject those scientific facts. Not much I or others have said about the vaccine has moved the needle very much.
As Sam Harris once said:
Water is two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen.
What if someone says, “Well, that’s not how I choose to think about water.”?
All we can do is appeal to scientific values. And if he doesn’t share those values, the conversation is over. If someone doesn’t value evidence, what evidence are you going to provide to prove they should value it? If someone doesn’t value logic, what logical argument could you provide to show the importance of logic?
We present the evidence, robust evidence, about COVID-19 vaccines, yet there will be people who say “…but VAERS says everyone is dying from the vaccine.” They aren’t, but anti-vaxxers just aren’t listening. By the way, I’ll continue to pontificate about the uselessness of VAERS data, because it’s just too frustrating.
Otherwise, I am going to try very hard to move from 90% of my articles about vaccines to 25%. Let’s see if I can do it.
2023 and beyond
I started this blog to write about pseudoscience, and I kept moving to vaccines. It’s like the old line from “The Godfather”, “just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in.” That’s what vaccines do.
What I’m going to focus on are newly published medical articles (almost always clinical trials or large epidemiological studies) that may provide evidence that doing this or that may or may not have an effect on your health. Like the article about walking and dementia.
Also, I will tackle old medical myths that keep popping up that everyone thinks is fact-based, but when you dig into it there’s not much there. Like drinking X liters of water. Or MSG (my favorite).
I hope most of it is of interest to the reader. Of course, if it isn’t, I’m kind of wasting my time.
Of course, Dorit Rubinstein Reiss will continue to provide inciteful and fact-based articles on legal and social issues about vaccines. Her articles are very important in debunking certain vaccine myths, at least from a legal aspect.
If you have an interesting topic that you’d like me to tackle, leave it in the comments. I can’t promise I’ll get to every one of these requests, but I might.
I hope all of you have a safe and wonderful holiday season. Eat your fill of whatever makes you happy. Laugh and smile with friends and family. Don’t let your drunk Uncle Jim tell you that the tryptophan in turkey will put you to sleep.
As for me, I’m back to listing my Airing of Grievances for Festivus. I might skip the Feats of Strength.
