Nassim Nicholas Taleb Argues in Favor of Vaccines

I like Nassim Taleb. I’ve read his books and many of his articles. I follow him on Twitter and feel like I’ve learned a lot from him over the years. The way he writes is very enjoyable, with all his anecdotes and examples and characters (like “Fat Tony”). His works read like the scribblings of a mad, but brilliant, scientist whose brain moves so fast his typewriter can’t keep up.

I also think he’s an honest guy, too. He’s independently wealthy, with a lot of his net worth derived from his investing career. He’s talked about the concept of having “fuck you money,” meaning that if you’re independently wealthy, and wealthy enough, you basically have the ability to do and say anything you want because you don’t have to rely on anyone else. You don’t have to ask permission from an employer or corporate sponsor.

He’s spent many years speaking out against GMOs and there are few people out there that hate Monsanto (now owned by German pharmaceutical giant Bayer) more than he does.

Taleb is generally pro-vaccine these days. Now you may be surprised, but this stance of his has not made me hate him. It has not made me unfollow him and throw out all his books and reevaluate my entire opinion on him.

In fact he’s probably the only pro-vaccine person out there on social media whose opinions I actually respect and value.

I talk a lot on this blog about honesty and truth, and how truth and freedom are the two highest ideals one should pursue.

To be dedicated to truth means to have an open mind. It means not having a pre-determined conclusion and then only considering arguments that are in favor of that pre-determined conclusion.

Because I respect Taleb, and because I care about the truth more than being right, it is my duty to consider, rather than ignore, his arguments in favor of the vaccine.

This morning he tweeted this out:

What he’s saying is that yes, the vaccines haven’t been around for long enough for us to study their potential harmful long-term effects, the fact that billions of people have been vaccinated already means that some of those harmful potential long term reactions have already showed up in some people, and thus we can conclude that the vaccines are generally safe because we don’t see people dropping dead left and right shortly after being vaccinated.

Certainly the vaccines will eventually display a harmful effect on some of the people who have taken them, but given the fact that 4 billion people have taken the vaccine already, those long-term harmful effects have already shown up in some of the people who got the vaccine. And it’s a relatively small percentage.

Now, you can point out that we don’t actually know how many people have had adverse reactions to the vaccine given the incentive for the government, media and the Big Pharma companies to ignore it. This is a fair point.

And you can also point out that, according to Taleb’s own charts (above), the prevalence of long-term adverse reactions to the vaccine is going to skyrocket over the next few years. If we’re already seeing some harmful effects of the vaccine in certain hyper-sensitive individuals now, it’s just going to get worse and far more prevalent on the next 2-3 years.

But I think Taleb would freely acknowledge that, and point to the sheer number of people who have already been vaccinated, and say that even if the number of adverse reactions goes up by 10x over the next 2-3 years, it still won’t equal a significant percentage of the number of vaccine recipients.

Taleb also highlights this idea of prolonged exposure to a harmful substance vs. the potential for a vaccine containing a sort of “sleeper poison” that will only rear its ugly head after several years have passed:

Now, an obvious rebuttal to this would be that the 6-month booster shot model is now becoming the standard around the world. Israel is already at the point where it is requiring 4 shots of the vaccine in order to qualify as “fully vaccinated.”

At what point do repeated booster shots constitute “long-term exposure”?

Plus, there is already a long and well-documented history of long-term harm being caused by a single shot of the vaccine.

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At any rate, if Taleb is right, then this is good news. We don’t want millions of people dropping dead because of adverse reactions to the vaccine.

I certainly hope he’s right in his confidence that the vaccine is largely safe.

But that still doesn’t change these facts:

• The vaccine makers, the government and the media who are promoting the vaccine are all untrustworthy.
• The vast majority of people have an extremely low risk of being hospitalized, much less dying, due to Covid.
• Natural immunity is 13x stronger than vaccine “immunity.”
• Vaccine mandates are abhorrent and probably unconstitutional.
• Pfizer is making $36 billion off of the vaccine.
• This “vaccine” is not a traditional vaccine like we’re all used to. This is an mRNA vaccine, and mRNA vaccines have never before been distributed on this wide a scale.