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Comment by jlebar | Hacker News Reader

Do you take seriously the proposition that more than 100k Americans could die from the vaccine without us noticing? This would easily put it in the top 10 causes of death in America. And presumably this w would be happening worldwide, at an even greater scale.

More than 2 billion people have gotten a vaccine worldwide.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. VAERS is self-reported and (as this shows) not reliable data.

Honestly I think you're proving the need for this ban on YouTube. You seem to be trying to get it right, but you've been hoodwinked by the misinformation.

It is indeed hard to get it right, and this is killing people.

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A successful (somewhere between millionaire and billionaire) entrepreneur has put his credibility on the line with those extremely astonishing claims. He put $1M of his own money into an institution to investigate early treatment for Covid, using existing drugs. Donors to CETF include Marc Benioff, Elon Musk Foundation & Vint Cerf, i.e. reputable tech entrepreneurs, https://www.treatearly.org/donors. The work of CETF was endorsed by staff at Johns Hopkins, Columbia, UCSF, Yale & others, https://www.treatearly.org/testimonials.

He provided a 30 page document referencing the analysis of other doctors, explaining the rationale for those estimates. He has further offered $1,000,000 dollars to anyone who can show that the estimate is off by a factor of 4X, i.e. making the task easier for the person challenging his extraordinary claims.

His claims are so far from anyone's expectations that it should be trivial to disprove, right? There's a bug bounty of $1M dollars available to anyone. Why is no one bothering to claim it?

> His claims are so far from anyone's expectations that it should be trivial to disprove, right? There's a bug bounty of $1M dollars available to anyone. Why is no one bothering to claim it?

Because no one who would be interested in disproving it trusts the person offering the bounty to be doing so in good faith.

For some reason, this makes me think of duels :) Both parties would need to trust the judging entity and he didn't name the individuals in the panel of three. In theory, that panel could be refined until both parties were happy. Funds could be put in escrow.

> Why is no one bothering to claim it?

I think of that old joke:

>>>>

The young economist looks down and sees a $20 bill on the street and says, "Hey, look a twenty-dollar bill!"

Without even looking, his older and wiser colleague replies, "Nonsense. If there had been a twenty-dollar lying on the street, someone would have already picked it up by now."

>>>>>

Surely there is not a $1M bill lying on the ground, ripe for the taking. That's why I'm not bothering to claim it.

>A successful (somewhere between millionaire and billionaire) entrepreneur has put his credibility on the line with those extremely astonishing claims.

Credibility? You have to be joking, what does he actually have to lose? According to Wikipedia he had a quarter of a billion dollars 15 years ago! He gets to live by rules you and I don't even know are possible, but suffice it to say that credibility is only ever a problem for the little people. Look at trump, after all.

Sure, Just like Elon and Zuck he'll couch his ego trips as for the people and pursued at great personal cost, but what actual price is failure to him? I'm guessing his true risk is limited to some teasing in the sauna.

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