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Comment by saurik | Hacker News Reader

That doesn't make any sense: the CDC claims "in the United States it is estimated that 11% of the population 6 years and older have been infected with Toxoplasma" and Wikipedia claims "serological studies have estimated that 30–50% of the global population has been exposed to and may be chronically infected with latent toxoplasmosis"... and yet, other than pregnant women, does anyone ever get tested for it? The CDC even goes so far as to directly claim "most people who become infected with Toxoplasma gondii are not aware of it because they have no symptoms at all"!

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Presumably, they tested a representative sample at some point and extrapolated

Extrapolated what? I am taking what the CDC is saying here as truth, at which point it seems almost impossible that 99.5% of people would know correctly if they have toxoplasma... it would seem like your accuracy on guessing that should be extremely low. (FWIW, I am guessing that you somehow failed to read the context of the conversation and are saying the CDC tested a sample of the population and extrapolated the number of people who have it... "duh".)

Like the various health authorities in the US tested a representative sample for Covid RNA, antigens, and antibodies to determine unbiased population level data?

/me runs.

You run, but it’s pretty obvious one reason that never happened is because you can use the phrase “best available evidence” to do whatever you want when you control the funding for evidence gathering.

That’s unnecessary. The CDC and the WHO are perfectly willing to make statements that contradict the best available evidence even without deliberately suppressing the production of better evidence. It’s easier to just ignore the evidence.

(I don’t think this is malice. A combination of being unwilling to admit mistakes and simply not being very good at one’s job seems more than adequate to explain this.)

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