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Comment by Dalewyn | Hacker News Reader

I feel the covid fearmongering by governments, medical companies, medical authorities, and the media has made public discourse in general (let alone specifically medical) even more prohibitive.

Today, we aren't supposed to question or otherwise so much as discuss something if it goes against or strays from any established narratives. At one point, so much as uttering the word "corona" could get you silenced by the powers-that-be regardless of the context.

This is all ridiculous because the foundation of science (protip: medicine is a science) is to always remain skeptical and engage in rich discourse. Blind trust in science is no different from worshipping a religion or cult.

We are the Galileo against the Church's Geocentric Model, but far more precarious and farther gone.

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> Blind trust in science is no different from worshipping a religion or cult.

Let me translate this: "Blind trust in the best recommended knowledge science has at the current moment in time is no different from worshipping a religion or cult."

No. This is wrong.

Science's recommendation at any given time is based on assembly and analysis of evidence. It evolves over time in the presence of additional evidence.

Religion or cults do not.

OTOH, paying attention to what the "my uncle got COVID, spent a week in only pink lighting, and subsequently recovered!" most recent FB post in your feed is wrong. The internet mob is not following the scientific method. They are posting anecdotes. Those anecdotes are filtered by the mediums for ability to create attention in others; and then those are presented.

I am reminded of the somewhat grim "Facebook COVID researcher" joke: https://i.redd.it/ovumfo3f48ca1.jpg

I think in a benevolent reading, you have to read it as: "Scientific facade hides many charlatans."

Engineering and applied science are entire universes removed from the ideal of science that gets painted here in defense of them.

Yes, scientists who pursue science in the way highlighted exist (and they are often not well paid for it) and it is a very respectable and admirable pursuit.

But there is a way larger mass of people and companies who strike a balance between profit and being scientifically backed enough, with incentives to tilt the balance into the direction of profit.

The whole point of science is that you’re supposed to question things intelligently, which inherently means you’re allowed to question things. Censoring “disinformation” in the name of science is how you get Galileo and the rest to roll over in their graves, and it didn’t even work. 30% of America is still unvaccinated, and a huge portion of them were probably radicalized by people being censored for spreading disinformation, because deliberately making yourself out to be Big Brother doesn’t convince anyone that you’re right (even though they mostly were).

That being said, you should look at things intelligently, but you can’t force people to do that, or you get situations where you can’t question that the Sun revolves around the Earth because that’s not seen as intelligent. The “mRNA vaccines will kill you” crowd are idiots, but censoring them only makes their point seem stronger and goes against the principles of scientific inquiry. Proving them wrong, which is easy, is better

No, that's not the whole point of science though. That's where science starts, and where most "disinformation" ends. The next point of science is to evaluate each claim on its own merits, but most people prefer not to do that, because it takes effort. Blindly believing the claims that are most convenient to you is also a good way to get Galileo and the rest to roll over in their graves.

I initially phrased it badly, and modified it to better explain my point. Forcing everyone to accept the current viewpoint of most scientists, especially in a rapidly evolving field such as studies on a virus discovered less than 5 years ago, is stupid, but you also shouldn’t blindly believe nonsense and most Covid disinformation is. You need actual evidence, and luckily platforms like The Lancet make it relatively easy to find studies (although they should be more open tbh)

The Lancet is the most ironic example you could've named, given the enormity of the error they made in February 2020 publishing the Daszak letter. This act was the single biggest instigator of the exact issue you're talking about: "Forcing everyone to accept the current viewpoint of most scientists, especially in a rapidly evolving field such as studies on a virus discovered less than 5 years ago".

Luckily, nobody is forced to blindly believe in anything. However, there is a huge mass of people, who would benefit from blindly believing in scientific consensus, because they know too little about how to question things properly. Their methods are often very-very bad.

> Science's recommendation at any given time is based on assembly and analysis of evidence. It evolves over time in the presence of additional evidence.

I think you’re confusing science with “The Science”.

The 6 foot rule and mask mandates weren’t science, they were “The Science”.

People aren’t Luddites or anti-science, but they do often know when people (bureaucrats, politicians) are full of shit.

Millions have died. Are still dying, especially in China. More could have died if there hadn't been a robust world-wide response.

How do you illicit a robust world-wide response? By making the potential consequences of not acting abundantly clear, aka "fear-mongering".

But you should address citizen concerns, rather than oppress them.

For example: yes, the vaccine has side-effects. But here is the data on which we decided to still approve it: a much better aggregate health outcome and lower risk of death.

That has been done. Ad nauseam. If you didn't notice that you had to actively ignore it or live under a rock or something.

No. For instance, on YouTube, even mentioning COVID would get you demonetized. Thunderf00t's video debunking lack of oxygen through masks was even taken down repeatedly. [1]

And in the beginning, there were recommendations NOT to wear masks, because masks were not proven effective for THIS PARTICULAR virus. Which would have been impossible, since it was a month old. But my supposition is that the medical community wanted to buy them first, so I wore a scarf.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drN1VyLkEIY

YouTube has an incredibly aggressive demonetization policy. Its moderation is not a reflection of the FDA or CDC or whatever

Google and Facebook are so big and so closely tied to the government, they might as well be another branch of government.

They might not even be financially viable without government deals like PRISM.

> Google and Facebook are so big and so closely tied to the government, they might as well be another branch of government.

By this logic almost every corporate out there is a branch of government. Which is trivially provable as being false.

> They might not even be financially viable without government deals like PRISM.

This is just absurd :-)))) Do you think Nike's ad money are funneled through PRISM?

This reads like goalpost moving. It started with asking why science wasn’t being explained, and then used a private company’s aggressive censorship policies as an example while ignoring the government’s official statements and published studies, which are the actual authorities in the matter.

I don't think 'citizen concerns' has anything to do with Youtube demonetization; you've already moved the goalposts.

The reason for the recommendations for not wearing masks was so that health care workers wouldn't run out of PPE.

They could have said nothing. They could have told the truth. They could have said that people should wear whatever masks or textiles they can.

Except that's not what they said, right? People like Fauci said there was no reason for the general public to use masks, which is a lie.

>YouTube demonetisation

Isn't this the very point of the GGP comment? Social media algorithms do a very poor job of selecting relevant information to present to users.

> That has been done. Ad nauseam.

Has it? Because Pfizer said they needed 75 years to release the vaccine trial data, and that was just a few months ago. Things were not as transparent as you imply.

It is hard to tell whether you seriously believe this, or simply want to make an argument. Pfizer said they needed 75 years to redact a particular set of vaccine trial data given the resources they had allocated. They had already released an enormous amount of data, but were subjected to a nuisance suit asking for more. The statement that they wanted 75 years to release vaccine trial data is misleading.

Transparency is not a "nuisance", it's a requirement. Dismissing people's concerns as immaterial or nuisances is a big reason why people have lost trust in institutions.

As for whether my claim was misleading, are you suggesting that the proposed schedule for releasing the vaccine safety data would not have taken 75 years?

The fact that Pfizer released aggregated data based on their own analyses is immaterial if third parties can't analyze the raw data replicate the results.

Perhaps we can disagree on what constitutes transparency. Is the data release transparent if it does not include the full name and social security number of each participant? Surely that information would allow additional analysis. Transparency is not binary - there are trade offs. The nuisance part of the suit was in data that required painstaking redaction, without a strong argument for benefit.

> Is the data release transparent if it does not include the full name and social security number of each participant? Surely that information would allow additional analysis

No, that has no medical, public health or accountability benefit, and you know very well that this isn't the data the scientists are requesting be released.

> The nuisance part of the suit was in data that required painstaking redaction, without a strong argument for benefit.

The strong argument for benefit is that the public deserves to have a independent, public accounting of the processes that led to vaccine approvals. This has significant implications for how public health should be managed going forward, how government mandates surrounding vaccines should be handled, and even how public messaging affects institutional trust and vaccine adoption.

Secretive processes managed by an unaccountable elite/select group whose judgment of the data we must simply trust is not how science works, or even how government should work.

Edit: and to be clear, the documents they were forced to release to date on adverse events during the trial are already raising some eyebrows, and no doubt much more debate is to come.

But the vaccines are not better for all segments of the population. For, say, a healthy 20yo male, the data clearly shows that a second shot of Moderna has net negative expectations. This demographic would be much better served by fewer lower dosage shots spread further apart. For a frail 80 year old every jab helps.

For vaccines the choice was never about vaccinating everybody or vaccinating nobody and when you only look at aggregate health outcomes you can justify any number of horrific medical practices. E.g. is serving everybody peanut butter good in aggregate because there are more malnourished people in the world than people with peanut allergies?

"The data" does not "clearly show" any of that. Particularly there was not even a hint of such evidence until months or years after the vaccines have been approved.

It's not so easy to find the exact age at which the vaccine becomes "net-positive" even assuming a negative effect can be shown at all. Which would also be very minor, on average. Turns out, "healthy 20yo males" don't generally react purely to vaccines.

Clearly it's very hard to push for a vaccination mandate when acknowledging uncertainties like "more research is needed to determine which age/gender cohorts net benefit from vaccination". Much easier to push forward based on aggregate results from preliminary data. Some people think the end justifies the means but I'm very much opposed to misrepresenting scientific results to justify public policy.

You're misunderstanding the decision at the time. It wasn't a case of "more research needed for decision" but rather "decision needed before more research".

There isn't really any data showing a clear net negative outcome for any age group. And even if there had been some doubt, the overall picture, was and is that vaccinating everyone is saving lives and it had to be done as quickly as possible. Waiting for more data would have cost more lives. And the results show that decision was correct.

I'm understanding just fine, it's clearly our ethics that differ.

Are you implying that this wasn't done? This was precisely the communication I've seen, personally.

The AZ vaccine was withdrawn in the EU only a few months after it was launched. Citizen concerns were addressed incredibly quickly by bureaucratic standards.

Yes, the process was not nice looking, but it never is.

Running about 6.7 million dead so far, so there's little tolerance for fantasists. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

Fewer than 1 in 1000, mostly elderly, on a planet of almost 8 billion.

Obviously not good, but it's not apocalyptic either. (Not bad enough to justify writing off 'freedom' as an awful selfish far-right concept that should be purged from society entirely?)

Obviously not good, but it's not apocalyptic either.

That's the death count with the measures put in place. If C-19 hadn't been taken as seriously as it was then you might be adding a zero to that death count. Maybe two.

9/11 killed fewer than 1 in one million of the world population and look at the response to that. Including impacts to freedom.

Maybe that was the event that completely broke everybody's sense of proportion. 100ml liquid bottle? Can't take it on a plane. Airborne pathogen? Sure, why not, bring it aboard.

Politicians felt they had to (or seized the opportunity to?) enact a disproportionate response to 9/11 because it’s (politically ) better to fail by going too far than not going far enough.

I suspect the same is true of covid, but how do we break the cycle? Is it innate in politics?

Same way we break any cycle. We vilify those who peddle it and shun those who support them.

Which freedoms are you missing currently? This obviously depends on location, but apart from few closed venues (which was good decision during height of pandemic) and few months of limited cross border travel (choice of every state) no freedoms were curtailed here in Switzerland, and absolutely 0 are curtailed now. Same applies for whole EU AFAIK.

Unless you mean obvious a-holes that back then refused to put on masks in shops and public transport and made it a political issue, which it was not, simply a security one.

It was wonderful to see all those slightly weird quiet types suddenly go full blown nuts and dive head first into various redneck conspiracy theories, if they weren't drowning in them before. Reasonable mankind lost those for good probably, but they were never truly part of it so at least now we see situation more clearly and can manage expectations more realistically.

Switzerland closed schools, hardly "a few" venues, it was pretty much every venue. They banned gatherings of more htan 5 people, unless it was financially beneficial (say people building something for money)

>Not bad enough to justify writing off 'freedom' as an awful selfish far-right concept that should be purged from society entirely

Why the ridiculous straw man?

And we do them a disservice if we fail to examine what went wrong

I estimate 8 billion people [0] are going to die of something; if we shut the economy down every time 7 million people die there will be nothing left.

Up until COVID there was a pretty good social contract going on where we'd all promised never to do the things that the authorities then went and did. 7 million deaths doesn't justify that, WWII alone was 70-80 million people lost trying to promote the opposite of the COVID response. Liberty is important. And might turn out to be a better policy depending on how bad the shock of the COVID response turns out to be (see, for example, the article).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population

During WWII, in the place least impacted (USA) there were substantial, government imposed interruptions to daily life and business: government mandates on production, rationing, a military draft, curfews, the literal internment of Japanese Americans.

Of course, these interruption were tiny compared to those of life in England or France or other battlefields of the the war. There’s an entire genre of literature and film devoted to lives ripped apart by the interruption of World War II.

The lesson of WWII isn’t that we never need to impose individual sacrifice, but rather that the preservation of our liberty requires deep collective sacrifice on occasion, and to work to protect it not just for ourselves but for our friends who by virtue of luck are in a worse situation than we are.

Yeah, WWII was a much bigger deal than COVID. And we come out of COVID to discover what? Suddenly we've got war in Europe involving the country with the world's biggest nuclear arsenal. We've got some terrifying tensions in the Pacific with the worlds largest manufacturing superpower that is going to rip the region a new one of they go haywire. We should have been focusing on war and peace, not trying to innovate new ways of torpedoing basic liberties. Signs suggest we might be about to lose a lot more human lives than just 7 million in the next 10-20 years. I hope not.

But that wasn't the point I really wanted to make; what I'm trying to say is that we should be dealing with a substantially bigger emergency before the COVID response was justified. Seriously; how hard is it to just leave people alone to make their own decisions, and pass information to them to try and help them make the best decisions?

Fundamentally, you can't leave people to make the decision "spread the airborne pathogen" when that affects other people to this extent.

Obviously there is a limit - China has recently hit the end of political support for zero-covid restrictions, because they were extremely onerous even in an already totalitarian country.

Fundamentally, you can. And do all the time with flus and colds and any number of other airborne pathogens that we don't mandate vaccines, masks, social isolation, shutdowns of economy and education, etc.

And most measures and expert driven response were pretty ineffective anyway. People whip out the 6 million number as though it has any bearing on the number of people who might have died or been saved by different responses to COVID which is really pretty disingenuous and emotionally inflammatory. A lot of government particularly health policy involves tradeoffs with lives, you can't just try to put blame on people for deaths if you don't like their position and use that as an argument. Because some extremist can always come in on the other side of your position and make exactly the same argument against your position.

In other words, why would you be the arbiter of exactly what is reasonable and what is "extremely onerous" and when you can and can not allow people to make their own decisions? It's circular logic, you basically justify your position by asserting they are the right decisions.

> Fundamentally, you can't leave people to make the decision "spread the airborne pathogen" when that affects other people to this extent.

Because....?

When it comes down to it, you're arguing for a type of society that prioritizes certain values, and those who disagree with those policies are arguing for a society that prioritizes different values. You are not automatically right or morally superior simply because you value safety more than freedom.

Not even safety. The ruling class has shown itself to be greedy, untrustworthy, and incompetent in their response to everything from climate change to hurricanes to pandemics to wars to corporate regulation.

It astounds me that people look at the utterly bungled and hare brained government responses to covid (or 9/11 or Katrina or the war on drugs or Vietnam) and can turn around say, "See? We need to give these corrupt greedy nitwits even more power to control our lives."

There are any number of cases in our society where we decide that you can’t just decide what you want to do because your behavior has consequences on others.

You can’t speed 65mph through red lights, for instance. In public spaces, or with actions that can’t be contained, many of your choices have consequences for me, so I get to have a say.

There was basically no risk of COVID in public spaces. It doesn't spread in fresh air.

The restrictions generally targeted private spaces. In Australia we even went as far as banning friends visiting each other at home.

> You can’t speed 65mph through red lights, for instance.

Driving is a privilege, not a right. You earn that privilege by agreeing to follow certain rules.

Being able to walk in public spaces or associate with whom you wish in private spaces is a right, not a privilege. You don't need to earn your rights. Do you see the difference here?

Internment of innocent Japanese Americans during WW2 has always been repugnant. It wasn't justified then and it's still considered shameful today. It's not "individual sacrifice [needed to] preserve liberty", it was just racist and abusive.

Governments will overreach and violate civil liberties when the people don't resist (Snowden revelations, anybody?). That's the lesson.

Let me clear that I’m not saying all of the govt actions that took liberties away in wwii were justified or helpful or good. Japanese internment is one of the clearest examples of paranoia that was destructive and did not help the war effort.

But many other actions, from curfews, to govt planning of the economy, a draft, collective bomb shelters in London, etc, clearly did help preserve life and Liberty in the long term.

But my larger point to the original comment was that wwii may have had an order of magnitude more causalities, but it also came with at least one order of magnitude more disruption. My own grandfather lost over a year of his life to POw camp and walked with a limp for the remain 77 years of his life. His family that were still in Europe on the other hand were systematically rounded up and murdered, their property confiscated, first by the Germans then by the soviets. But he was proud to have made the sacrifices he did to stop fascism in its tracks.

> Japanese internment is one of the clearest examples of paranoia that was destructive and did not help the war effort.

Sure, but it makes the point that just because people claim some measure is for the collective good, doesn't mean we should just take that at face value. Power is easily abused and we should be demanding more transparency and accountability from people who want to impose onerous top-down restrictions for speculative reasons. Instead, we get legions of people shouting down and vilifying those who are expecting more.

> But many other actions, from curfews, to govt planning of the economy, a draft, collective bomb shelters in London, etc, clearly did help preserve life and Liberty in the long term.

A literal interpretation of this (comprehensive) text yields a rather bold claim.

> WWII alone was 70-80 million people lost trying to promote the opposite of the COVID response

I'm sorry but this is ludicrous. WW2 wasn't fought for liberty or freedom - the big 3 Allies were an extremely oppressive dictatorship, a colonial empire and US (which interned it's Japanese citizens in concentration camps and still had bloody segregation as something normal, so while somewhat better than the other two, far from a bastion of liberty). Furthermore, they were only fighting as an alliance of convenience because the war came to them (Axis invading/declaring war), the only exception being the UK deciding to finally stick to it's promises, and not sign a peace treaty (and that was very much thanks to Churchill's perseverance, there were enough people who wanted peace at all costs).

The war was to stop and defeat the Nazis and Imperial Japan, and to a lesser extent Fascist Italy. Liberty and freedom, or saving the Jews/Poles/Greeks/Czechos/Slovaks were never among the goals, or the war would have started much earlier and wouldn't have waited for Axis powers to declare it.

Also, the vast majority of the dead were on the Eastern Front, civilians and soldiers alike, and the people there were highly repressed before, during and after the war.

And in every participant in the war there was extreme censorship and liberty restrictions (like not being allowed to eat whatever one wants, and not being allowed to have lights on at night, curfews, etc.).

You should express that as a percentage of the population and also show precisely which groups died.

Specifically, it was very old and otherwise very sick people.

A large percentage of the deaths were simply pulled forward a couple years. Tragic and awful, yes. But worth 2 years of major disruptions to life and the huge lingering economic impacts?

At this point, I think most would say no. It was absolutely not worth it.

> Blind trust in science is no different from worshipping a religion or cult.

> We are the Galileo against the Church's Geocentric Model, but far more precarious and farther gone.

This sounds far more like the utterances of a cult than even the most dismissive "listen to doctors, they know better than you" media commentary...

The bad faiths attempts at "skepticism" are at least in large part to blame for that response.

It's as if I yell fire in a crowded theater, then when there is no fire and my speech rightly faces consequences I complain about "the-powers-that-be" limiting my future attempts at yelling "fire".

Scientific skepticism is good, but requires a certain level of being informed. Good, scientific skepticism does not occur on the internet in 99+% of instances. Usually what is actually occurring is politicking and spreading disinformation. Conflating that with the good kind of scientific skepticism is quite dishonest, intellectually speaking.

> I feel the covid fearmongering by governments, medical companies, medical authorities, and the media has made public discourse in general (let alone specifically medical) even more prohibitive.

A opposed to the fearmongering that vaccines are to be avoided at all costs, and that they only exist to control the masses and further enrich the rich?

I don't think it would be "as opposed to", both are manifestations of the same/similar underlying cognitive bugs in the brain/mind, the same sort of issues can be seen in many of the comments in this very thread, written by genuinely smart people who sincerely believe that what they say is true.

> always remain skeptical

Do you remain skeptical about whether the earth is a mostly roundish ball of rock or a flat disk on the back of some elephants?

How much effort do you put into that scepticism. How often do you re-evaluate your view?

> always remain skeptical

The appropriate amount of skepticism is exactly proportional to the probability that the theory is false.

Since a lot of people are very certain about vaccines, they are very un-skeptical about them. And therefore don't want to spend time on "skepticism".

(Of course if one's prior distributions are very whacky, it's no surprise that they end up with bad posterior distributions after reading/seeing new data/information.)

> and engage in rich discourse.

There's definitely room for improvement. Especially when some folks throw out sentences like "At one point, so much as uttering the word >corona< could get you silenced by the powers-that-be regardless of the context."

The MRNA vaccines that were introduced were novel and used a mechanism that hasn't been used at scale before and without long term human studies.

And increased amount of skepticism in such a case is completely warranted.

Skepticism of every and each human mRNA vaccine was completely warranted before we had data. That's why there were (and are) clinical trials, all of which do post-treatment data collection (some for 2 years). Exactly to get solid reliable data about effects of mRNA vaccines, exactly so that we can definitively say whether it was a good call or not, whether the continued skepticism is warranted or not. (Or more precisely, how much skepticism is warranted.)

Appropriate amount of skepticism about long-term (5+ years) consequences is still warranted, though as time goes on that amount is seriously decreasing.

What's your point?

If the current clinical trials find potential negative consequences, that hardly helps the people who already took the vaccines, many who were pressured against their will.

If skepticism is warranted, then it's wrong to be pressured to go through with a health procedure.

What? No. Risk-benefit analysis does not stop being valid just because there's a higher uncertainty.

If phase IV follow up finds problems people who are affected can be notified, funding can be allocated, etc, etc. Also known "potential negative" consequences are much better than unknown ones, because there are likely risk minimization and harm reduction strategies.

Public health is a cruel topic, because there are so many hazards, side-effects for preventative measures, so little resources, etc. It's "great" that COVID was "mild" compared to the extreme possibility of something like Ebola, but it was also much-much-much harder to contain, because it spread by air ... and it killed a lot more people in the end, because people did not take it seriously, did not manage it (inadequate testing), fall prey to the do-everything or do-nothing fallacy (eg. stay at home, meet no one ... or go to work and packed restaurants).

In this regard it's very likely okay that people were pushed, pressured, and persuaded to get the damn jab.

Higher uncertainty obviously influences a risk-benefit analysis.

If there is higher uncertainty about the validity of the purported benefits as well as the claimed safety, then it might very well be fine to decide to not participate in something, especially if you don't fall into a demographic that's particularly vulnerable.

Solid research really needs much longer timelines. Let's take some hypothetical and unlikely scenario that offspring of people who received an mRNA vaccine develop a medical condition. Mass vaccination would affect everyone so we cannot afford to be careless here. While the chances are remote, they are still above 0% and therefore 2-5 years of research seems just not enough.

0% isn't a real probability: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QGkYCwyC7wTDyt3yT/0-and-1-ar...

The rest of the argument is fine in so far as it goes, but because we already see acute and chronic damage from COVID, the hypothetical undiscovered long term damage from any given vaccine (and there are many fundamentally different ones, they're not all mRNA) would have to be both surprisingly frequent and severe just to get up to a swings-and-roundabouts with the actual illness.

I disagree. Always be skeptical, BUT we have a whole scientific method to use to address that skepticism. When the other side refuses to engage in that, it gets very frustrating. The vaccines had clinical trials and VERSA databases as skepticism warranted, and were shown to be effective and safe.

Yes, exactly, thanks for putting it in better terms.

p.s. it's VAERS https://vaers.hhs.gov/

> we aren't supposed to question or otherwise so much as discuss something if it goes against or strays from any established narratives

I guesss you are referring to vaccine scepticism.

Comparing anti-vaxxers to galileo is ridiculous.

Comparing anti vaxxers to vaccine sceptics is ridiculous.

> I feel the covid fearmongering by governments, medical companies, medical authorities, and the media has made public discourse in general (let alone specifically medical) even more prohibitive.

The fact that you still call it "fearmongering" with nearly 7 million people dead and how many others with negative long term health conditions from the virus tells you why there is a backlash against anti-intellectualism.

You are certainly not prohibited from challenging the status quo. You know that because there are thousands and thousands of anti-mainstream videos and blogs that tell us viruses aren't real, or covid is just the flu, or vaccinations cause more issues than covid itself, and, and, and....

Engaging in rich discourse happens while scientists are trying to form a consensus. But eventually a consensus is formed and then the outliers who mostly only generate noise tend to get ignored. 1 in 1000000 times then may be correct and successfully challenge the status quo, but mostly they're wrong but convinced beyond any reasonableness that they are not wrong. You cannot argue against all of these people, it is just too tedious, so in the end they just get ignored or stopped from spreading nonsense on certain forums.

My wife was in nursing school during/after the pandemic. One of her classmates/friends (37 year old mother of 3) was skeptical of the vaccines and wasn’t sure she was going to continue the nursing program because they were requiring vaccination. She contracted C-19 over the summer of ‘21, spent 2 months in the hospital before dying. Would she still be here for her kids if she’d taken the jab? It’s impossible to know, but more than likely she would have fared better than she did without it.

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