> - The virus is not a concern if you go protest BLM

That’s right. It doesn’t care whether you do things for fun or for politics. It cares if you do them inside or outside, and that one’s outside. Feel free to go to the beach too.

> Masks protect you / masks don't protect you (I don't know which is true but it is one or the other)

Or maybe it's not a binary thing at all?

Early discussions centered around "masks are imperfect when worn by non-medical professionals and may lead to more risky behaviour".

In light of this people argued that it was best to not recommend them.

The science of covid does not map cleanly only public health advice. The latter is the art of the possible and the former is - like all science - incomplete and continually evolving.

> Virus as dangerous as Ebola (read on the front page of the Times in the UK!)

Except that's not what they actually said:

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/covid-19-death-rates-are-...

Watching the media say one thing about Hydroxychloroquine and the medical community saying the opposite - at the same time - was really eye-opening for me. As was watching how many people blindly accepted the media's take on it. Every time I brought it up on HN I got down-voted, even when providing citations. It's made me wonder what other things I'm unaware of where the biases in the media lead to large numbers of people believing falsehoods.

I am not actually sure some of your things follow; for example, while the virus clearly has a lower fatality rate than Ebola, it also spreads much more effectively than Ebola -- COVID-19 has already killed way more people than Ebola throughout history. I am not aware of the specific article, which could have compared them in many wasys, but I expect this is an example where the claim you're debunking is literally true, but maybe not especially useful because Ebola belongs to a very small class of diseases that are extremely fatal but not very dangerous all told because of the speed with which it kills. The same is true of any seasonal strain of influenza. I am sure the Times is a rag, but most of the comparisons I've seen with other diseases have correctly emphasized that respiratory infections spread so well that even if deaths exist only in the tail of the distribution they have a much higher capacity for carnage than most other infections. This has been a pretty consistent refrain since the beginning.

Likewise, it is not true that you can't develop a vaccine for diseases for which natural immunity from exposure is weak or absent. Some vaccines rely on stimulating a similar kind of natural immunity, others teach your immune system to target the pathogen in a different fashion than the natural immunity if any. For COVID-19 specifically there are vaccines on many different delivery platforms.

Likewise, the BLM point: the media coverage of the protests was definitely not crystal clear, but one consistent refrain was that the virus spreads fairly poorly outdoors (or, in fact, in areas with high air circulation) when wearing masks. The initial "reopen" "protests" were mostly people not wearing masks. The later BLM protests were mostly people wearing masks. Compliance was not 100% and obviously some degree of risk is involved in any protest, but as a whole I think the tone of the reporting was fairly reasonable. You may be conflating the tone of public health officials -- who largely engaged in (politically motivated) cost-benefit analysis about the protests by saying things like "whatever risk of COVID there is, the risk of violence in these communities is higher, so the protests are a public health good." I agree that these statements were not especially helpful or informed.

IFR reporting has been consistently <1%. I think you may be conflating early CFR reporting, which sometimes made claims about 2-5% CFR. That was based on the best available reporting and was not irresponsible at the time. What we've learned since this is that a large number of cases are asymptomatic, and so with a large testing apparatus we catch a number of infections that never would have become cases. This is still important in terms of managing public health resources and spread. Both the CFR and the IFR are important numbers to understand the dynamics. It is possible some source reported a high IFR rate, but I think even by April we had a fairly good indication that seroprevalence was substantially higher than known cases, and so the IFR would be correspondingly lower than the CFR.

Likewise the reporting on hydroxychloroquine. The narrative of reporting seemed pretty consistent: first, some doctors considered hydroxychloroquine as a sort of emergency treatment measure in the early days of the pandemic because it was believed something about the mechanism of action that's beyond me might be fruitful. In parallel to this kind of "battlefield medicine", a small number of trials and studies proceeded. These found mixed but generally negative results with the administration of hydroxychloroquine. At the same time, a collection of right-populist leaders around the world (especially Bolsonaro and Trump) advocated aggressively for hydroxychloroquine on the basis of either attempting to provide hope or else delusion, rather than evidence. This was followed by scary sounding reporting of isolated cases of idiots prophylactically taking either hydroxychloroquine or something that sounds vaguely like it, in some cases fatally. Media reporting cautioned people not to follow unsubstantiated medical advice, while politicians proclaimed there was a miracle cure. I think it is fair to say that people should not take serious prescription medicines prophylactically because they heard about it from a Facebook post. This presents both serious challenges to the supply chain (actual needs for hydroxychloroquine e.g. for malaria prevention were facing a run on supplies) and a risk of contraindication for those taking it without medical supervision. I agree that by much later in the year, say the mid summer, some of the reporting on hydroxychloroquine made it out as though it was a useless drug not used for anything, when in reality it is a perfectly usable drug that simply doesn't treat or prevent COVID-19, but you have to realize that the major misinformation there was not from media, it was from the moron with the world's largest megaphone.

I agree that reporting has not been perfect or crystal clear. This is a tough emerging thing that we knew nothing about a year ago and because the entire world stopped, people have demanded answers faster than they existed, and that's led to a feeding frenzy of reporting about anecdote, and a situation where ordinary and understandable missteps explode in magnitude.

But I think everything about the circumstances suggests charity and flexibility. I think we should also critically examine how we contribute to the problems of reporting and information spread, and especially how we project certainty when there is none (I think a pretty severe problem in your post) -- this is especially weird when things become politicized in a partisan way (also an undertone in your post). Maybe that wasn't your intent. Maybe we see these issues similarly and you just interpret the magnitude of media culpability differently. But my best read is that there's more wrong with the claims in your post than there is with those same claims in the majority of basically reputable media.

Poking my head in as a physician that is also frustrated with some of the reporting on this topic, it's worth noting that a lot of the reporting seems earnest, but loses context when the person translating 'expert talk' into 'layman talk' isn't qualified to do that translating, and loses some nuance. For instance, referring to your list of "lies":

1. Early on in the pandemic it was highly questionable what the value of masking was. We had mixed experiences to go on: on the one hand, even N95 filtration seemed to not be overwhelmingly effective in stopping viral passage in the laboratory, on the other hand we'd had previous SARS breakouts where universal cloth masking had stopped outbreaks. Neither of these things is "false", they're different facts that needed to be incorporated into a single world-view. What has emerged over time is "masking works, both by reducing the rate of transmission and by reducing viral load - the latter mechanism enough to decreased morbidity, mortality, and symptomaticity rates. It doesn't work by outright stopping viral transmission." "Evolving worldview" isn't the same as "lying."

2. Infection fatality rates were >5%. Important note: there are open and closed case rates. Open Case rates are cases that haven't "ended" yet, either by recovery or death. Closed cases are for those that have. When your population under study is accumulating new cases at an exponential rate, at any given time the majority of "open" cases are early in the disease (and thus haven't died or recovered yet), biasing the IFR downward. At the same time, it means the bulk of cases not destined to end in death are delayed into the future compared to those that end in rapid death - so the closed case IFR is biased upward. For a while we had open case IFR <1% and in a number of places closed case IFR >30%. Early in the course of the outbreak in the US, during the first wave before things skyrocketed and our hospitals went to capacity, our open case rate was ~3% and closed case was around 12%. The more we juggled stats, the more it looked like the 'true' rate was going to be around 4-6%. Again, how these rates evolve over time as we improve detection, management, and treatment doesn't change that this was true at the time.

- Immunity via vaccination and immunity via infection are not the same thing. You can develop an immune response that isn't super effective (e.g., targets a highly non-conserved region of RBD, or was adequate at producing antibodies that provoked macrophage activity but not effective at viral neutralization.) Or you can develop an immune response that isn't long-lasting. The vaccine, on the other hand, is designed to target a highly-conserved region (so it's cross-reactive across many sub-strains, which it is); it's tested for the production of neutralizing antibodies (which it does); and it's given in two doses to ensure a better lasting response by intentionally provoking the development of additional memory cells. These things are different. You falsely equated them, and thus determined one of them must be a lie.

I don't know about, for instance, the ebola thing. Not a paper I read. If I were to be generous, I'd say "reporters fail to convey the nuance and context that helps people make sense of apparently contradictory information." Because that's most of what I'm seeing in your post: attempts at making sense of the world, but without enough information to succeed at doing so, and identifying the gaps in your knowledge as 'lies' rather than ignorance.

You shouldn't be downvoted. These are valid questions that have been poorly handled by media and political leaders. Pretending they're right-wing talking points and ignoring them is a big part of why so many people distrust the mainstream narrative and recommendations regarding COVID.

You've made it fairly clear which camp you are in by the framing of your "falsehoods".

Masks primarily protect others, so whether they protect you is a secondary question.

And no-one (with any credibility) is really stating any of the other positions you've listed.

Also "20 000 new cases" - out of how many tests? 20 000? 100 000? There are claims of some companies returning only positive results, others only negative. Also the data collection has been so erroneous that analyses are therefore meaningless, and response action therefore just theatre.