Are Covid Deniers Stupid?
thomasprosser.substack.com
thomasprosser.substack.com
People have predicted that vaccinated people will die in droves. They did not. One the other hand it was also predicted that the unvaccinated do the same. They did not either. Countries without access to vaccination did relatively fine. We will have this discussion again in next autumn.
I am just against vaccines mandates, good control groups (not optional in any scientific endeavour based on statistics) are necessary and I am for the freedom to choose. I am not responsible for the perceived safety of others. I am an anti-vaxxer now, I identify with this position and even support people that plainly deny the existence of the virus. Anti-vaxxer were not a problem, but some people made them one. Shame on them.
And to be clear, 100% of those who refuse the vaccine and get a bad case, immediately and ever so conveniently start trusting doctors again, tuck their tails between their legs and run to the nearest hospital.
See how in Germany the head of an insurance firm wrote an open letter saying his countries stats on vaccine injuries were wildly out of line with claims with vaccine injury billing codes. For pointing this out, his company fired him. Anyone making claims about hospital load change due to vaccines cannot be reliable, for this reason. The data just isn't there and sadly it's deliberate.
0. Covid deniers.
1. Anti-vaxxers.
2. Proponents of herd immunity
3. Fencers
First three categories are talked about, the fourth category is seldom discussed. These are people who will let the dust settle before taking a call. What I mean by "dust settle"? Well, people would first like to see that the vaccines are stabilised, enough data is there to get a vaccine if there is no requirement from medical standpoint(a UK doctor went viral during pandemic when he confronted the UK health secretary on forced vaccination).
The way the pandemic was handled seemed like a panic and blame-game by politicians, play-safe by scientists, and money-making by pharma.
There are really good videos by Dr. Jay Bhattacharya on this topic.
Not sure we need to do that for society as a whole. There's a difference between us, common people, and people with platforms, either private, or state-provided. These last two groups could be regulated, because misleading the public can have dire consequences to society.
I always suggest we should make lying or misrepresenting facts while representing a government (from school councils to president), should be considered a very serious criminal offence. Humanity cannot afford to have presidents who suggest drinking bleach may be a good idea or that COVID vaccines can turn you into an alligator. The only plausible excuse to lie for a government figure is national security, as misinformation can play a role that benefits society there.
In the bleach case, I heard the full recording. While he doesn’t say people should drink bleach, he suggests it could be useful.
You mean like claiming that Trump advocated drinking bleach? That kind of lying or misrepresentation?
He, as a layman, asked a medical expert about the possibility of some kind of injectable "disinfectant" (not bleach, specifically). While one might characterize that as naive, it's a long, long way from "Trump told people to drink bleach".
1- i am not a president
2- he kind of did it
If your local conditions are better than 95% of the globe, why would not promoting local condition be ever irrational?
Who is "we", and why do they get to decide?
I also dislike the idea of vaccine mandates. But I think the wise will usually get vaccinated.
I also know a very smart mechnical engineer who opposes masks, vaccines, and suffered a harsh recovery period from covid-19. I really like the guy and his family, and he has been good to us on multiple occasions when I was sick etc. I think misinfo is spread by those who want to weaken society and trust, but that has been discussed more elsewhere.
The CDC has proven completely unreliable on both vaccines and masks unfortunately. The mask studies they published are laughable and CDC vaccine stats conflate "unknown vaccine status" with "unvaccinated", which is obviously not valid.
You can believe people at your local church if you wish, but, that does not change the facts on the ground.
But importantly, those I cited originally (not including the CDC) are people we know well or personally, not just at our local church, who have earned our trust and that of others by their continued competence and behavior over time. They include medical people (at least 3-4 doctors and at least one nurse, now that I think more about it). They include local news reporting organizations made of people I have come to trust, who report what the hospitals and hospital association has been saying, based on their experiences, overcrowding, who gets sickest, etc, and their professional knowledge. Not just one source for this information, but multiple, trusted, known, and mutually-corroborating. Some who lost loved ones. All of this vastly more so than any typical flu season. Also my wife's father remembers well, what life was like before the polio vaccine and how everyone ("every mother's son" as he put it) wanted a vaccine to avoid that grief, once it became available.
The engineer I mentioned, that I know fairly well, also said after his difficult illness, that it would have been worth it to get vaccinated, in retrospect. So maybe earlier I should have said "opposed" the vaccine instead of "opposes".
I don't personally know of cases where doctors lost their licenses because of voicing doubts. For those that you mentioned as losing licenses, do you know them or the reporters personally, with a chain of trust starting from the original, clearly identified, observer?
I see government as made of many humans, with varying degrees of trustworthiness and competence, and therefore there is the importance of careful vetting of sources, and corroboration across such trusted sources.
I am curious as to your views on the 1) purpose of government. Also its 2) present nature. And 3) about the principles underlying the US Constitution, and 4) how to determine what sources to trust.
Thanks for the discussion, and all best wishes to you. :)
I understand that you trust the people around you. That's perfectly natural and expected. Unfortunately, in this very unusual case I fear it's leading you astray. Let's set aside whether the CDC are genuinely doing the best they can, and leave it at the fact that if this is their best, they need to be shut down. They have:
• Withheld vast amounts of critical data from the public and distorted the rest (e.g. the way they like to aggregate "unknown vaccine status" with "unvaccinated").
• Published pseudo-scientific studies that don't prove what they're claimed to prove, e.g. studies that lack control groups.
• Gone well well outside their legal boundaries e.g. with rent controls.
• Appear to have a worse understanding of biology than ordinary journalists.
Consider this video of the head of the CDC: https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/cdc-director-walensky-re...
"Nobody said waning, when when you know, oh this vaccine’s going to work. Oh well, maybe it’ll work - (laughs) it’ll wear off. Nobody said what if the next variant doesn’t, it doesn’t, it’s not as potent against the next variant."
But this is absurd. I was telling my own parents at the end of 2020 that I was very skeptical about the chances of a vaccine because nobody has ever made a successful coronavirus vaccine before, not because it's inherently impossible but because the viruses mutate so quickly that it stops working almost immediately. This is exactly what ended up happening. As Berenson points out in the linked page, he correctly predicted in January 2021 that by the end of the year the virus would have mutated, effectiveness would have consequently disappeared, people would be given third doses and the side effect profile of three doses would be worse than two. All this has occurred. Yet, the head of the CDC was left astonished by all this, apparently because nobody at the CDC told her. What does that say about the best that the humans at the CDC are capable of?
The CDC matters because unfortunately, in many realms - media and medical in particular - there is strong moral and legal pressure to simply parrot authority. Were the people really reporting their own experiences to you, or were they reporting what they felt sounded right? Often it's been the latter, even for people in trusted positions like hospitals. There are big penalties for anyone who doesn't:
https://trialsitenews.com/doctors-sanctioned-for-speaking-ou...
"Six U.S. doctors have had their licenses suspended and 18 more threatened as they are accused of spreading misinformation about COVID-19. The action comes amidst concern that their claims are generating mistrust in officially sanctioned health measures used to combat the pandemic."
This sort of thing has been going on globally. If you knew you'd lose your job for speaking out, you'd rapidly find ways to rationalize to yourself why everything is peachy.
"Also my wife's father remembers well, what life was like before the polio vaccine and how everyone ("every mother's son" as he put it) wanted a vaccine to avoid that grief, once it became available."
Does he remember that the Polio vaccine caused 200,000 cases of Polio due to a manufacturing error, I wonder? It was the Polio vaccine that led directly to vaccine manufacturing being excluded from normal product safety/liability laws, because otherwise nobody would make them anymore.
Honestly, before 2021 I never thought about vaccines. Having seen up close how this space operates, I find myself deeply unenthusiastic about them now. It's obvious that if anything goes wrong everyone in authority lies rather than admit having encouraged or forced something harmful/useless/both on millions of people. It's the scale factor that does it, I suspect. Vaccines always cause some bad side effects in some people, so to deploy them requires knowingly sacrificing some innocent healthy people "for the greater good". It's hard enough to make such a tradeoff in the best of times but especially when a disease is rare, or mild, or outright disappears, the moral issues become so grey or outright black that the only way to proceed is to engage in self delusion. The problem can be solved by only ever releasing neutral, honest data and not making recommendations or mandates, but public health officials don't think that way. They believe everyone is stupid, even though - as Walensky demonstrates - the standards of knowledge required to succeed in public health are very low indeed.
I don't think the vaccine effectiveness has disappeared, but may be slightly reduced over time. From all I read, those dying in hospitals now (edit: from covid-19) are almost exclusively not fully vaccinated. Again, local hospitals and sources.
Sounds sad about those doctors, regardless of who is right. We should all try to practice honesty and the Golden Rule. That matters very much.
Even if there were 200,000 cases of polio from the vacc (I think I remember reading something like that; I don't recall the #s), that sounds like human error (also sad), which must be corrected as far as possible, and it has still done vastly more good than harm, overall, through the history, as have MMR vaccs etc.
I'll be honest -- I read a lot, from traceable sources (not facebook etc), and that influences me, and I say all the above based on that.
But my biggest influences are the 15 (12, plus 3 in what we call the First Presidency) apostles of our worldwide Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (around 17 million members in most countries, most members now outside the USA, does a surprisingly large amount of humanitarian work worldwide with many partners, very family-oriented, and the best influence in my life--it's too much work, if it weren't true; more at my site on how I determined things for myself). So much to say there, it wouldn't fit in an HN thread but I have put it at my web site (in profile). The current president (prophet), Russell M. Nelson, had a pioneering career in open heart surgery before he was called (asked) to be a Church leader, initially a junior member of the 12, which is a lifelong assignment (he is now 95 or so). But neither he nor the others are worshipped, considered infallible, etc. But I have determined for myself, not by blind faith, that it is safe in life to follow their voices when they speak unitedly. In fact, we believe (and I believe) they are directed by God, and generally do their best to study issues before asking for direction. They have endorsed vaccines for decades, as having saved many lives. I would probably be considered an "arch-conservative" by some people's standards, but science, while also not infallible, is a useful tool, even essential for us, and all things should be done with wisdom and humility (that corroboration etc that I mentioned earlier). As far as I can tell, the people I referred to were reporting their own experiences. Definitely true with some of them, and seems highly likely true for the rest.
I, with you, disagree with mandates. I knew someone I consider trustworthy, who had a strong feeling not to vaccinate one of her children. Years later, when it was required for school, and done, the child became sick from it, and the mom was told by a medical pro that if the child had been given that vaccine as an infant, she probably would have died. I think we agree that the best, honest info we can get is very important, and that the parents or individuals are the best to make final decisions. But if schools or other institutions want to limit attendance to those that are less likely to harm others by spreading diseases, I can see there is a good discussion to be had there, for each case, and that more local decision-making is usually for the better.
Unfortunately, many humans cannot be trusted, based on their behavior over time. It takes ongoing effort to decide what to trust. I believe there is a path for all of us to find peace in this life, even amid the increasing commotion and confusion, and Eternal life in the world to come.
Still curious as to your thoughts from my previous comment's last paragraph, but no pressure.
(I think we probably agree on many things. And I'm sure I could have said some things better than I did.)
Who denies the claimed severity of covid19 being equivalent to the spanish flu? Hopefully everyone stands up... because that's completely deniable now. However, that's the claim that justified the unprecedented actions of locking down civilization. As opposed to the established standard of locking down just the sick.
Who has lost faith and trust in the medical professionals turn politician because of the endless lies as proven?
How about the misrepresentation of health measures taken throughout the process? How about the endless human rights violations.
How many people lost their job because they were pregnant and couldn't get vaccinated? The list of medicines allowed during pregnancy is VERY low. A pamphlet would be too big. Business card would suffice. Oh but you want to say the vaccine is safe for preggos? LOL. No... you just wanted to fire all those pregnant nurses. But wait... werent nurses in huge demand before covid... now you fired a bunch? Now you have such a shortage that you are obligating nurses to work insane hours?
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/nurses-union-submits...
Oh wow. Nobody saw that coming /sarcasm.
Sure, but there's no point writing an article about such a non-existent position. Unless the point is to strawman. Which we have seen far too much of lately.
Ukraine doesn't exist. This is all fake news by western countries to smear Russia.
Would you like to debate me on whether or not Ukraine exists?
No, that's not a real position to debate. Instead what the article is doing is no different than all the 'science deniers' stuff. How dare you deny the dogma of science!
If you look at the paper the article cites as evidence COVID denial exists, it's actually also not true. They ask people variants of "do you think the danger of COVID was exaggerated" and when people say yes, they get classed as people who think COVID is a hoax. So the claim that people think COVID is a hoax, is a hoax. This is what "science" has become.