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Comment by bediger4000 | Hacker News Reader

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“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”

- Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

If so, yes. But what if not so.

Links to the sources claiming his misinformation:

[1] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/07/right-wing-vaccine-r...

From [1] he says "Unless we really have a compelling case, no one under age 30 should receive any one of these vaccines." Hardly sounds unreasonable to me much less misinformation.

[2] https://healthfeedback.org/claimreview/vaccines-are-a-safer-...

From [2] they do not give an actual quote of him but undoubtedly a bastardized paraphrasing.

[3] https://factcheck.afp.com/us-cardiologist-makes-false-claims...

From [3] they rebut his claims that healthy people under 50 years do not NEED the vaccine for their own benefit by claiming they were the primary spreaders in the summer of 2020 (prior to vaccine availability) which is quite the non-sequitur.

None of these factchecks are compelling. Even so, I'd argue doctors should be able to voice their opinions without reprisals and slanders. By cutting off the debate you stall out anyone already on the fence but open to discussion.

Until omicron appeared in late 2021 there was a compelling case for vaccination and other steps to hinder Covid transmission. Health systems are still trying to deal with the overload and burnout from earlier Covid. Fortunately, current Covid is on the order of flu and hopefully it stays that way. It’s still there and spreading easily but current variants seem ok.

Actually it was late July 2021 (few months after mass administration) that we found out that vaccines had only a marginal impact on transmission (other steps yes which McCullogh is not arguing against or being factchecked here). But the compelling evidence was none more than blind wishful thinking, its hard to believe that antibody waning was some unknown thing to vaccine developers.

Pfizer had this data from Israelis already in March 2021 but scientific publications appeared in July 2021. Most vaccine mandates were introduced after that which is very strange because we already had all the data that vaccines are not going to stop the spread of infection thus making vaccines only good for personal protection to minimise the risk of severe disease and infection.

I had never heard about Peter McCullough until today. Short glance in wikipedia about him is not very impressive. He was wrong about hydroxychloroquine but so were many health authorities about certain other things. He got some things correct. For example, the last sentence in wiki is: _by disputing the necessity of vaccinations to achieve herd immunity_. He got that one right and those who (mis)labeled it as misinformation were wrong.

Banning him is not good for democracy. Better to have an open debate based on scientific data to show who is right.

I always wondered what would happen to Dr. Barry Marshall if Twitter had existed back then.

Would he have been banned for "disinformation" too?

"In 1982, they performed the initial culture of H. pylori and developed their hypothesis on the bacterial cause of peptic ulcers and gastric cancer.[9] It has been claimed that the H. pylori theory was ridiculed by established scientists and doctors, who did not believe that any bacteria could live in the acidic environment of the stomach."

"In 2005, the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to Marshall and Robin Warren, his long-time collaborator, "for their discovery of the bacterium Helicobacter pylori and its role in gastritis and peptic ulcer disease"."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Marshall

> Concerned about misinformation. Cites Wikipedia.

What a moronic, tautological comment. Because he was banned, he should be banned.

Couple of woke, social sciencies grads deciding on the truthiness of Dr. McCullough's tweets. Nothing to see here, move along.

He'll be back once Elon overhauls that miserable organization.

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