The Twitter Files: How Twitter Rigged the Covid Debate
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Since when our government has become so righteous and correct that any challenge to its message is misinformation? Heck, since when the humanity gets closer to truth by trusting a single institution? I thought forbidding people from challenging a single institution is called Indoctrination.
Case in point: why is quoting CDC's own inconsistency a sin? https://twitter.com/davidzweig/status/1607387725065232384?s=...
Because it was misleading, putting it in quotes implies that it wasn't
> Editor’s Note: Readers are alerted that the conclusions of this article are subject to criticisms that are being considered by the Editors. A further editorial response will follow once all parties have been given an opportunity to respond in full.
To me, labelling them as misleading is exactly the right call and in my experience this has also happened to Tweets where pro-vaccine data was cherry picked.
I feel like people from both sides simply do not follow each other, and so they only see flagging of “their own” people and assume that they are targeted.
What he likely meant, though didn't communicate, was that only people with prior natural infection need not take it.
But even that is misinformation, though it might be his professional opinion. If it is his professional opinion, it verges on malpractice, because it was indeterminate at the time to what degree a natural infection destroyed immune memory cells. We have later found evidence that severe covid-19 cases do in fact disrupt immune memory [1]. This is a thing he should know to be wary of, as measles famously erases huge swathes of immune memory.
This in addition to the systemic effects of huge spikes leading to moderate to severe cases going without proper care as a result of a squeeze on resources...
It was a bad take, and everyone reading it should have been told it was a bad take.
[1] https://news.uthscsa.edu/immune-memory-less-durable-after-se...
It's a critical discussion because right now, it really, really looks like a cadre of people actuated by having power over others (instead of the freedom to build and create by themselves) have co-ordinated through NGOs, operating on compromised institutions and platforms, to deceive the western world into removing all limits to state intervention and protections for basic human dignity and liberty, and to leverage the crisis to ensconce new powers.
The people of the world need to be shown how we were not deceived and betrayed. I don't know how long the window of opportunity for truth and reconciliation will last.
Keeping them cooked up at home for years is a lot more damaging than a cold. Like immeasurably bad idea.
They never closed down schools (except for universities) in Sweden for this reason. They also never forced masks or curfews. The main thing that they did was to limit inside capacity to 50 people max for restaurants and other avenues.
There were groups of people who would protest that the government should be enforcing masks, basically full reverse of what people were protesting in all other places around the world.
My anecdata shows that the children who fared well through all of this didn't need group interaction at all. A small number of peers (<4) and a teacher or two were completely sufficient for children up through almost teenage years. In fact, those students are WAY ahead of where there would be even before Covid.
Small groupings like that for children would have been completely fine through Covid.
The problem in the US is that we, as a society, lack the collective will to fund something so obviously, ridiculously beneficial like that for an extended amount of time.
I wonder if the debate was stifled because of reductionist comments like this. COVID-19 is far more serious than a cold. How can we be expected to have a real discussion about this topic when you either don’t understand or choose not to understand the difference between a cold and COVID?
1) https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Deaths-by-Sex-Ages-0-18-years/xa4b...
Kids were relatively resilient from the virus.
Now addressing the logic in your response, are you suggesting we should have similar school shutdown measures for the flu every year? For a similar three year period influenza will kill 400-600 kids.
And that doesn't matter one bit, because their direct experience means nothing to the actual reality. Millions of people are dead and using one's own personal experience to pretend that it was actually no big deal is just willful ignorance.
“Their direct experience means nothing to the actual reality.”
This is how the enlightenment ends, in a nutshell. Over-confident denial of reality, supported by misleading statistics and buggy models.
“Since we’re awash in this contemporary ocean of speculation, we forget that things can be known with certainty, and that we need not live in a fearful world of interminable unsupported opinion. But the gulf that separates hard fact from speculation is by now so unfamiliar that most people can’t comprehend it.” — Michael Crichton
I’d also argue that a random quote from the author of Jurassic Park isn’t really moving the conversation forward.
Sounds far far more like the people who think covid is nothing more than a cold.
And at least in Australia the vast majority of cases of covid happened after people where vaccinated, so on a personal experience level that's why most didn't have a severe sickness from it.
Your anecdotal experience is not reality.
Mortality rate of less than 0.03%.
Average age of death in the UK was 83 and with 2 or more comorbidities.
Completely overhyped.
Many obese people and then you wonder why they can't fight this off. Now, the exception is the less common immune deficient people - that I understand but damn I know people who eat like utter rubbish
Those same “many people” are often quoted, often alluded to, and often used to ignore quantifiable facts.
Your direct experience does not negate my direct experience, and I’ve never experienced an otherwise healthy adult entering the hospital because of a bad case of the flu and dying. I cannot say the same for COVID.
While I agree that COVID may have been overblown in some respects, it was also politicized and in doing so a lot of FUD was spread. Which led to many people rejecting a vaccine that would have reduced the impact to not only themselves but the rest of the population around them.
Not for kids.
And we always knew this, but our public officials didn't listen. It's one of those cases where it was better to do _nothing_ instead of force this massive mask trauma on our children. And still, they want us to vax 5 year olds against a virus that has long passed us by. For what?
Anyways, long story short - I'm pretty sure it was COVID .
Such a narrative would seem to imply that those adults are expendable.
Nurses and Doctors who knew they had Covid should never have been forced to get vaccinated.
Very simple. Not difficult to understand.
Just like a seatbelt does not necessarily mean you will not be harmed in an accident. Or do you believe all efficacy data to be made up ?
You're right, if you want to protect yourself against risk of severe outcome, that's fine. But vaccination does little to protect other people, it seems.
I'm double vaxxed, not boosted.
Please innoculate yourself from such extremism by studying this document very, very closely:
The danger was in people’s minds and that was stoked aggressively by nearly every major institution we have: the government, the medical field, the media, and the tech companies. Each of them benefited from promoting fear.
Old people could have been even more protected while the rest of us continued on living. The emergency money could have been spent on providing more services to the elderly. Instead they were locked up with little help. In 2021 40% of Covid deaths were in nursing homes.
And finally, if you’re past the life expectancy and you know you may only have a few years left, would you spend it locked away isolated from your friends and family, or would you try to make the most of it, knowing that whatever happens you’ve made it further than most already? Many elderly were interviewed and were upset by the lockdowns for this reason. The average covid victim was in this very situation. Why did we take away their agency in their final years?
Lost. Their. Minds.
wife and I happily read books and watched movies and played board games and went on hikes like usual
I did mind redditors wishing death on people who expressed healthy skepticism about the government.
Now, I am pro vaccine but my lord what sort of medicine student would forcefully make someone take something.
Then the lockdowns, the woes endured. It was a terrible time, nothing good of it came.
Luckily there was some good government defiance here, positives of living in a 3rd world place like South Africa was that if you lived far away from city centers you could get what you needed. Even when they tried banning certain items.
Clearly, you didn't have to go through the sort of problems some faced. That is not because they were stupid.
In 2020 I looked at the data and decided that it wasn’t important to wear a mask. Do you remember how those people were treated in 2020? Now look at the covid infection rates today—they’re in the same ballpark as they were in 2020. And yet, most people refuse to wear a mask now.
I knew it wasn’t rational back in 2020 and yet I faced increasing aggression from my neighbors, my workplace, and my government for living my best understanding of the truth. Now almost three years on, people have decided that the truth has changed in my favor and I’m no longer insane.
Can you see how someone who thought the lockdowns were immoral would have been under great stress during the last few years?
Unless you believe vaccines do not help and surgeon's do not need to mask up either for any reason.
We will see who’s going to hell in the end.
Those with immune deficiencies, I know some - they are my friends, have it completely in their being and right to stay at home if needs be.
Don't let the government make everyone suffer just because some will.
It's hard to tell either way, to be honest.
They do not care if these obviously dystopian abuses of power are wrong because they are ideologically aligned with those in power (at least, they think they are)
I'm tired of the assumption that our fundamentally human networks are things we cannot maintain by our own efforts.
I guess we will never find out, which is unfortunate.
The cold fact that 80% of Twitter was not essential (and that this must also apply to the federal government and other big/corrupt institutions) is not going away, though.