i don't believe they're as efficacious as i initially believed.
Holy shit, it's evolving. Sort of.
I have also changed my position somewhat. Historically when a new infective agent is alien, the body has no defences at all. Think about the devastation that the Europeans visited on the Americas in the form of new diseases. But the adaptive immune system does what it says on the tin.
I'd be wary of believing historical claims like this that are so far back in history none of us have any way of actually verifying it to be true. I mean if we can't even make our fucking minds up about what literally just happened in the past 3 years (wet market, lab, other, etc) then there's zero chance of anything further back being reliable at all.
Especially when the winners write history. It may be conducive to whitewash history in a certain fashion, perhaps to obfuscate our own criminality and blame others (other people, other cultures, a virus, etc) - e.g. the brutality of the Spanish Inquisition and claims of human sacrifice. How many times have we seen the same strategy used in the 20th century alone by the Anglo-American empire, it clearly works.
Also, I still have yet to 'get covid'. By conventional logic I really should have had it by now given it is supposedly both highly contagious and novel, therefore I should be susceptible like anyone else.
In places like Japan it's common for people to wear masks to prevent the spread of influenza.
My understanding is that Eastern nations wear masks because the air pollution is so rank. The Philippines has a similar population to Japan, a slightly higher population density, it is hotter but equally as humid as Japan, yet their influenza rates are way lower and to my knowledge mask usage (pre-2020) was nowhere near as ubiquitous as in Japan.
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
