> Covid disinformation got people killed.
If they trust bad medical advice on YouTube and die, it's their problem.
If they trust bad medical advice on YouTube and die, it's their problem.
Its also a problem for the platform - who is now party to it happening.
YouTube allowing bad medical advice will hurt YouTube. Their safest option, is to disallow it.
YouTube censoring videos people want to see will also hurt YouTube.
The stats I've seen suggest the vast majority of people have caught COVID between 2019 and now and pretty much all the preventative measures that worked reliably were things that either individuals could do themselves or that required targeting travellers specifically.
It isn't obvious that people trusting YouTube about COVID affects any third party. Who and how are they affecting?
Nothing you do, ever, is in isolation. So nothing you do, ever, will not affect someone else. Pretending that everyone is a sole unit, to excuse behaviour, has never made sense.
People weren't listening to PhDs getting banned. They were listening to influencers get banned.
> People weren't listening to PhDs getting banned. They were listening to influencers get banned.
I'm a people, you know.
[0] https://www.ajtmh.org/view/journals/tpmd/103/4/article-p1621...
Also, you know who tends to be most in favour of "let stupid people face the consequences of their poor choices"? Those who want to profit from those people and their choices.
Do we know how many otherwise healthy children caught Covid and died from it?
My impression from the official figures is that in most countries the number is vanishingly small if not zero.
Remember that even polio only put like 1% of its victims into an iron lung
If you want to make an argument that an overweight child should still be considered otherwise healthy, that would be a welcome and relevant argument, and also an interesting one.
You'd close schools to protect a minority of children with comorbidities from a virus which doesn't threaten the vast majority of children, knowing that school closures will definitely damage all children?
Umm.
(Otherwise healthy) school-age children - and younger adults - always faced a very low risk from Covid-19, and we had solid statistical data on this from at least May 2020 onwards.
Maybe we need to look at where our decision-makers get their information, and their incentives?
Much easier just to suspect an unfounded conspiracy instead.
Maybe your username should be “empathyfail”
The flu, for example, was always a worse risk than polio, people just became fearful of polio because we found a way to save some lives in a non-ideal way, which became very visible.
> "otherwise healthy"
Yeah, not all kids are otherwise healthy. There's kids with Leukemia or whatever that are extremely immunocompromised because of chemotherapy. They have to coexist with anti-vaxxers and, believe it or not, their lives matter too.
> caught Covid
You think the anti-vaxx crazy train starts and stops at Covid? These people have been attacking MMR for much longer than Covid. Children DO die to measles, mumps, and what have you.
The absolute number.
...or getting infected, of course.
[0] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
The current breed of mRNA vaccines targets the spike protein, and the TRIM21 gene. Some of them also attack the S protein directly.
All of them work to boost various antibodies. The "targets" are in addition. By targeting the spike protein, the attack hits the RNA of the virus, not just the protein. The entire cellular structure of the virus breaks down. The same with TRIM21 targets.
The bodies natural defences never targeted the spike protein, and instead focuses on the N-layer, not "all parts of the virus". These natural defences rarely manage to cause the viral cell to decay, they tend to work by slowing reproduction instead.
Think of the children ... :-)
Though, to be fair, my whole family caught a "virus" during 2nd phase except my father but we didn't go to hospital and just bed rest for 2-3 days. My family really were skeptical of vaccine but personally I don't mind vaccines and would prefer it.
Regardless, herd immunity was not a serious possibility at any point (given the high Rº and lack of a vaccine that could prevent transmission), which, considering this was known very early on makes your question, again, a good one not a rhetorical one, despite your intent.
Finally, regardless of herd immunity, at risk individuals would still require vaccination, which makes the herd immunity as a goal, again, irrelevant, which is where I started. It's a nice by-product.
what you call "herd immunity" is merely letting people die and then go "we have herd immunity" as part of your survivor bias
only solution that works most of the time, regardless of pathogen (including covid): air filtration (respirators and/or whole room)
After vaccination or a passed infection the immune response is there. When a sufficient immune resopnse from a large enough portion if the population is enough to lower the critical cases below some threshold, we call that type of immunity herd immunity.
It's not binary, but a useful concept nonetheless, and one that some people devote their professional lives to. It can be observed every flu season.