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I didn't say the response was perfect and all advice was accurate, but neither is selling bullshit like Ivermectin for COVID with zero evidence it was effective.

It's wild to suggest the best way to deal with the next pandemic is less science, less experts. No it's more science and more experts, that's what's required to solve the next pandemic and climate change, and super bugs and more.

Your comment seems to suggest that we should throw away all knowledge and faith in institutions because the knowledge we had at the time of a very dynamic situation wasn't perfect or to your liking.

It's painful to read honestly.

Next pandemic, we should just try random off the shell treatments until we find something that sticks I guess. Screw the experts?

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Not the author of the comment you replied to but I don’t believe that is the point. No one is saying that it is not important to listen to experts, but in fact many experts tried to say these things and were quickly shut down by the main stream media for not going along with what we were supposed to believe.

Versus the experts, politicians, and media who in the exact same time period were still confidently stressing the importance of achieving herd immunity because if you got vaccinated you couldn’t get COVID, and therefore couldn’t transmit it to others.

The issue for me is that comment starts with a lie, the initial clinical trials for COVID-19 vaccines were designed to measure efficacy against symptomatic disease, not transmission prevention. Health officials and scientists generally communicated that while vaccines showed strong protection against severe illness that wasn't the scientific consensus. Therefore I never took the vaccine thinking I would never catch COVID, I took the vaccine with the understanding that it would better protect me from the worst outcomes. A lot of people seem to like hearing an "alternative view" because that often suits their own worldview...which is sometimes, the vaccines are a form of population control by the rich elite, or something like that.

So to your point, they absolutely are suggesting we should ignore experts by buying into nonsense and using false claims to question the science behind vaccines and medical trials.

So on March 29th 2021, when the Director of the CDC Rochelle Walensky said:

“Our data from the CDC today suggests that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don’t get sick, and that it’s not just in the clinical trials but it’s also in real world data.”

Or on May 16, 2021 when Anthony Fauci said:

“When you get vaccinated, you not only protect your own health and that of the family but also you contribute to the community health by preventing the spread of the virus throughout the community… In other words, you become a dead end to the virus. And when there are a lot of dead ends around, the virus is not going to go anywhere.”

Or on July 21st 2021 when Joe Biden said:

“You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.”

Tell me, exactly what was I supposed to take away from that messaging, if indeed I’m apparently lying?

I suppose Rachel Maddow didn’t say the following on March 29th 2021, while her show was routinely hosting government officials and health experts to talk about COVID:

“Now we know that the vaccines work well enough that the virus stops with every vaccinated person. A vaccinated person gets exposed to the virus, the virus does not infect them, the virus cannot then use that person to go anywhere else. It cannot use a vaccinated person as a host to go get more people.”

Imagine if Pfizer’s CEO tweeted the following on April 1st 2021:

“Excited to share that updated analysis from our Phase 3 study with BioNTech also showed that our COVID-19 vaccine was 100% effective in preventing #COVID19 cases in South Africa. 100%!”

I must have quite the active imagination to hallucinate these things and arrive at a bizarre conclusion that differs so much from what you recall.

Once again, the answer to these problems is not more bullshit...it's less. As I already acknowledged there were fuck ups, incorrect messaging, and the response had flaws. Yet scientists and medical experts were the best chance we had at getting through it, and they will be instrumental in handling the next one.

The reason you're not dead from Ebola spreading is because scientists know that Ivermectin doesn't work for Ebola, for example.

We're not ready for the next pandemic, we're in a way way worse position and let's say it was an even more serious virus, we're sure as shit not just going to podcast our way out of it next time.

So you’re just going to hand-wave away falsely claiming I’m lying about the experts and media explicitly spreading wrong information under some nebulous belief that putting blind faith in authority is still better than believing anything else?

I might find the whole “scientists know better than you or I do” drivel cute if I wasn’t one myself, or if I didn’t witness my peers repeatedly exaggerating or downright lying because they thought it was for the greater good.

Grow up.

Sure bud.

Two more weeks to flatten the curve bud.

No. Next time people like yourself should listen to what he actually said about certain topics versus what you were told he said by those with an axe to grind. Then you might temper your language and accusations of propaganda, or at least properly aim them in the opposite direction.

Since 2016 I've listened to hundreds of hours of his podcast, maybe more. He is a useful idiot. At this point he has to know that, but continues doing what he does for the money. He is an entertainer and his show is entertaining, sure, but that is all it is. It's not factual, he does no journalism, he will repeat whatever nonsense suits his world view.

I now listen to it just to see what kind of BS I should expect to find in my daily interactions with other "bros. If you think he is offering some kind of alternative view point to the MSM, you've just not realized he is the MSM. He is the "swamp".

Ah, now we get to the crux of it. Despite him being a comedian, who hosts a podcast in pretty much the same format he has since 2009, just doing unscripted long-form unedited with friends and people he finds interesting, and despite him saying ten thousand times he’s not an expert and not to take his advice just because something worked for him:

You’ll now pivot to some narrative that because he’s popular and people might take the wrong message away that he has a duty not to talk about certain things, not have certain people on, have others on to balance it out when someone says false things, push back on his guests and argue with them etc.

“Unscripted” :)

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