CurrentBias
Covid spreads pre-symptomatically and asymptomatically, and spreading it does harm people, so good luck with that logic
You missed that it was about the efficacy of mask mandates, not masks themselves
One of the smartest ways to win in the game Plague Inc is to make your virus have mild acute symptoms that are easy to dismiss or confuse as other things, and then really fucked up chronic symptoms later on. Symptom severity is not the same as underlying disease severity. The immune system doesn't always enter the panic mode entailed by a fever, in some cases because the virus has outsmarted it. HIV is a virus that starts as a cold, and then does all its damage silently. Judging a virus by its acute symptoms is one way to fuck around and find out
Not to speak for @jerome, but they were originally talking about the topics appearing in the trending news, which implies that they are referring to firefish.social's federation/lack of defederation from problematic instances, not the software itself
Just nitpicking this part, cause you are correct about the rest -- not even the CDC claims that the vaccines prevent infection. "The primary goal of the COVID-19 vaccination program is to prevent severe illness and death" and "symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection," not asymptomatic infection (which is far from harmless)