38% of US adults believe government is faking Covid-19 death toll
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
The actual survey question was “Do you think the government is exaggerating the number of Covid 19 deaths?”
That’s different than “faked”. One could answer “true” if they believed anyone who dies and tested positive from Covid is counted as a Covid death, which overestimates what people imagine when they think of “Covid death”. That would be exaggerating the numbers, but not necessarily faking them.
My argument is just that the headline doesn’t even summarize the survey correctly. The 38% who said “yes” were agreeing to a much softer conclusion.
The government is also completely incompetent at leading a normal, above-board project, so do you really think they'll be able to successfully lead and keep quite about a nationwide conspiracy?
The idea is the government will “massage” numbers to come to the conclusion they want.
The government wants as many people vaccinated as possible. As such they have little incentive to correct Covid deaths if the current number is an overstatement. And don’t get me wrong, counting Covid deaths is not trivial. So it’s not manipulation of data, it’s more like “our current way is fine in all it’s flaws”.
Tax is irrelevant, governments can just print whatever the shortfall is (and they do). Realistically, there are lots of incentives for governments to kill their own population. Beyond national security there's the standard reason of just making mistakes, and then avoiding admitting to having made them. It happens regularly throughout history.
As for conspiracies, sure they can do that. Snowden revealed massive conspiracies that had lasted decades and involved thousands, maybe tens of thousands of people. Now we learned that the US government seems to have funded Chinese research that led to SARS-CoV-2 escaping into the wild. You might counter that these are the ones they failed to keep quiet, but they were kept quiet for a long time. Who knows how many more are out there. The discovery rate on conspiracies is certainly not 100%.
My own conclusion is we need the general population to have fundamental understanding of what a vaccine is. And that microchips need energy sources.
But the general population has no idea about this because it isn't taught in school. They just have facebook and whatsapp fakenews. That's why I propose the topic be included in education curriculum, it has been causing problems for some decades
This talk about "microchips" is the definition of misinformation, I've never seen anyone seriously propose that, it's only used to paint anyone who has any kind of doubt about the "vaccines" and "vaccine mandates" as a crazy person.
Saying people are crazy solves no problem. If you think you are right then you have a responsibility to educate them. Casting stones at others won't end well.
Indeed education is not going to help you. One of the big problems with the credibility of COVID experts is the frequency with which they contradict high school level biology without explanation. The claims that natural immunity is worse than vaccination are quite obviously in conflict with high school level biology, for example. The claim that massive scale testing programmes have ~no false positives is likewise going to be hard to accept for anyone who struggled to make basic experiments work in high school labs.
However, if misinformation is convincing people who are supposed to be educated, they weren't properly educated to start. In short: It is not enough.
That week, the county health dept. reported 3 COVID deaths.
Now all of the sudden we are to expect everyone to blindly trust the government blindly? And let’s not get started with party lines!
This limits how much governments that are reporting aggregates across their small jurisdictions within them such as state and even more so federal government can fudge the numbers without it being apparent to anyone who checks their sources.
Also there is non-death data that should decently correlate with deaths but is reported by different people which provides another check on the death numbers. For example, number of ICU COVID patients should move similar to number of COVID deaths. That data would come from admissions records or transfer records of hospitals.
I think we need clearer lines about what is a "carrier" and what is a "publisher".
In my view, if you perform any kind of moderation you are a publisher and should be held responsible for any harm caused by misinformation you serve.
We then need publicly funded bodies and a functioning judicial system to move quickly to silence things that are said that are just not true. Whether you are reading it on Facebook, Google, or somebodies random website, we have to stamp it out.
It's a huge, difficult task. But hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost to covid alone because people don't trust media, they don't trust officials, the don't know what to believe.
What you need is a critical press, which in my opinion is mostly gone in my country of origin (The Netherlands), probably many more countries in the Western world. Some examples from US that show the press not operating in a honest way would be the Trump "Russia gate" debacle and the "horse dewormer" coverage of Ivermectin.
What we need is a press that's dedicated to present the truth. Think of it as something similar to the BBC, but fully independent and impossible to influence without getting exposed.
What we have is large organizations that profit from misinforming a large population. This endangers democracy and the very fabric of our societies.
The freedom of the press comes from the requirement of an informed population for the functioning of a democracy. When the organization ceases to inform, it should not enjoy the legal protections afforded to the press.
But true, maybe it didn't foresaw companies becoming so influential that they rival states. But the solutions I heard was forcing these companies to moderate content, an approach that is so obviously flawed that I cannot believe how many supporters the idea can mobilize.
Still, government misinformation is still a threat. The Russian interference story was a pretty big scandal in my opinion because it was mostly made up and worse media and intelligence agencies corroborated on direct lie. Exactly like they did on Iraq. This has Operation Mockingbird quality at least and people responsible didn't face any repercussions. Frankly, the only people that would let them face consequences are the allegedly stupid flyover rednecks. But if these people really are stupid, what do I call the others?
Is there a geopolitical tension with Russia or Putin? Sure. Would Putin try to get people in the US to fight each other? Of course! But I doubt he would have needed to do much to be honest, not because of a lack of trying.
That was very shocking, because it eroded public good will towards the US, making it obvious the government would use whatever falsehoods to justify an illegal war despite the fact international experts on the ground were clearly stating the opposite. That and using its privileged position in the UN Security Council to avoid any repercussions, effectively nullifying the organization and showing it has no teeth against the US.
The Russia thing has some interesting facets however. Did Putin actually plan on Trump being elected? I very much doubt so - nobody in their right mind would expect that. Was he pleased? I bet he was. We know Russia has been financing disinformation campaigns in Europe to destabilize the EU, and the far-right has embraced that as a convenient way to reach power. The damage that caused to US politics will take decades to repair, and even if it can heal itself is debatable at this point.
I've been thinking about it all day, and perhaps it is OK if half the world is walking around thinking the earth is flat. Perhaps it doesn't really matter if our leaders don't believe in science. Does it really matter that 700,000 people died of covid unnecessarily?
But does it really matter if your speech is censored if nobody believes what you say anyhow? just another mad voice in a sea of madness?
But assuming the whole point of society is to try an improve the lives of people living in it, I think we need a foundation of trust, and we should do out best to suppress things that undermined that trust. Trust in our officials, Trust in our media, Trust in each other.
When a prominent personality says vaccines cause autism, they are willingly harming society and should be held accountable for the harm they cause.
That would enable even more political prosecution of subjects and would put extreme chilling effects on everyone including any press outlet.
Remember: you shouldn't lie in public forms, you shouldn't lie to the press, and the government shouldn't have more secrets than what is strictly needed for its operation.
I think that is not enforceable in the slightest and a ridiculously totalitarian approach regarding truth. Public officials lie to the press all the time if you include withholding information.
Causing harm is extremely subjective and you don't even find 2 humans that completely agree here.
You’ll have to excuse me when the “Ministry of Truth” tells me what to believe.
Too boring. Won't generate enough clicks.