The most important sentences for me in this article are “ By labeling whatever the current scientific consensus happened to be an immutable “fact,” media outlets made the normal evolution of scientific debates look dishonest, and pointlessly heightened mistrust of both scientists and media”.
This drives me absolutely crazy as someone who has done research for 3-4 decades. I wish to the heavens people would understand the scientific method and realize that science is about the constant state of learning and readjusting ones “consensus” about What to believe. If the media and our leaders had spent just a tiny bit of time in treating us as intelligent adults as the led us through this process instead of treating it like some gosh awful competitive game we would have saved so many more people and jobs.
Anyone who claims to "believe in science" and to claim a certain interpretation by way of the number of scientists behind it is essentially a moron, with no actual understanding of science.
Indeed. Such claims always remind me of Einstein's reaction to a pamphlet entitled "A Hundred Scientists Against Einstein": "If I had been wrong, one would have been enough."
Exactly. No scientist "believes" in anything. I have been involved in program management for a variety of projects that include evolutionary biology, but I would never say "I believe in evolution". Rather, I understand evolutionary biology and its role in X."
Oh man, “science is real” has definitely shot up the list of things I absolutely hate to hear/read, hahaha. Upon even a remotely critical read, it’s a completely meaningless statement, but for the in-crowd it’s a 100% confirmation of whose side you’re on.
I want to compile a list of all those kind of nauseating, meaningless, performative phrases in case I ever need to induce vomiting.
“Science is real.”
“Facts matter.”
“I believe in truth.”
That’s all I’ve got so far off the top of my head.
Science may be real, but all models are wrong, as the eminent British statistician G.E.P. Box observed, before continuing, to note that some models are useful. Most of the politically fraught issues involving science of late have involved not ordinary science, but modeling.
Maybe I got the gist of your post wrong, if so, I apologize, but to clarify...
...the statement "some models are useful" in the context you mentioned it, did not refer to being politically useful or useful for manipulating opinion. Box meant some models make meaningful predictions, but none will perfectly predict the future.
Like the European weather models that predicted Hurricane Sandy or perhaps like Billy Bean's models that helped identify more productive baseball players.
I like that. Especially since so many who are fond of the phrase seem to believe that reality is subject to sociopolitical modeling.
The single sociology class I took was constant warfare until the teacher let me know I could get a "B" by NOT criticizing the models and experimental methodology and designs used to generate what passed for "knowledge" in the field (for the purpose of then spinning out about a 10-to-1 ratio of hypothetical bullshit to "science" in the class).
I took the deal, coz I was just dragging down the class. The other students were eager to learn what they were supposed to believe, as communicated by the "credentialed" class, and move on to the next mini-lobotomy.
Haha that one drives my friend nuts, me and the other guys love deploying “it is what it is” at the exact right time to give him the maximum amount of grief. Never gets old. But yeah that’s definitely another one.
HOWEVER. "It is what it is." actually can communicate, clearly, the extent of one's knowledge wrt a particular thing. Kind of a "Well, we're starting 'Principle of Identity", folks."
It's a lot better than the pretense that you DO know something, but that something is based on someone liking a Tweet by someone who appeared on a podcast where they had once allowed an alt-right-adjacent person to speak.
There are worse places to start than acknowledged ignorance.
Ah, yes, the yard signs of the bien-pensants. I've been trying to come up with a really good a opposing version that would definitely include the lines "Science requires skepticism" and "Eros is not agape", to rendered in the same color scheme, of course.
We have a consensus, man. And soon enough, a new internal intelligence agency to root out the kind of wrongthink that, according to the recent Vice article, caused media careerists to wet their pants and suffer from PTSD.
The scientific method and hypothesis that come form it is not run as a democracy. In fact many times it may appear the direct opposite of a democracy. That is why doing polls among scientists is asinine
Every sane person believes in "science", if you define that as believing it is possible to obtain independently subjectively verifiable knowledge about the physical world. Whether you believe the opinions and inferences of any given scientist, or a group thereof, that's quite another matter. That's not believing in "science," it's believing in people.
No. In the common usage of words, science is the opposite of belief. Science seeks objective information and uses critical analysis to determine out best current understanding, regardless of emotional or political preferences or traditions. Belief is often without objective support, and sometimes in contradiction, and almost always driven by emotion, politics, and tradition.
A "belief" is simply an attitude that something about the world is true. Clearly, scientists believe it is it is possible to obtain independently subjectively verifiable knowledge about the physical world. Matter of fact, that is a terse definition of science offered by Karl Popper. If you don't believe it is possible to obtain independently subjectively verifiable knowledge about the physical world, you don't believe in science. Of course most scientific observations about the physical world are couched in probabilities, and not stated to be true or false. This is why fact checkers are stupid. They don't get that, and rate things true or false that should be rated more probable, less probable, or simply "impossible to ascertain." Probably the most idiotic thing about fact checkers is rating something false simply because they have no evidence it is true. That's the argumentum ad ignorantiam, and it shows up in a deplorably large number of fact checks.
Not common usage, but the definition of “belief” used in epistemology. Weirdly, nobody here seems to tarry over defining “belief.” Or “science,” for that matter.
Don’t discount the role of “scientists” in the defamation of their own profession. Quite a few are more than eager to utilize the political wind of the moment in order to lift themselves and their careers into the limelight.
In a more innocent time from the not too distant past, a chubby, middle aged scientist would push fake data to justify a Grant to fund his 6 month excursion to Paris to study "the link between the Parisian silver fish and throat cancer" with his 20 year old intern he recruited for the project.
Now he instead disseminates fake data to score political points. It's obscene to witness the decline of real science.
«In a more innocent time from the not too distant past, a chubby, middle aged scientist would push fake data to justify a Grant to fund his 6 month excursion to Paris to study "the link between the Parisian silver fish and throat cancer" with his 20 year old intern he recruited for the project.»
The greatest such endeavour was a (female) sociologist who got quite a bit of funding from a foundation for a very serious proposal for "Studying social interactions in littoral communities in the third world", and spent the next three years on Copacana Beach in Rio photographing and chatting up cute people while getting a nice tan.
Osterholm was great at scaring the living shit out of people, like me, last year. And there was a lot of appropriateness to his concerns. But once it became obvious those concerns were not warranted because the virus was not especially deadly to the vast majority of the world, he should have just said "thank god" and left the podium. He didn't.
In my experience the most "pro-science" people are the ones with the least scientific education. When "the science" disagrees with their political views they're just as likely to discard it as the "anti-science" people. The whole thing is stupid. You can't simultaneously denigrate objective truth and be "pro-science".
Great point, except you always have to qualify a scientific truth as the best understanding at the moment. But yes, amazing how the “science is oppression” crowd changed sides, and will do so again when another inconvenient truth emerges.
Science is always suborned to morals. Only facts that do not directly contradict strongly held opinions are allowed by the mind. This shows up in cognitive dissidence within both political parties.
One has to constantly fight this. It is possible but very, very hard. I have found that the best way is to find people you trust with your whole being but may have different ways of thinking and experience. The key is trust. I. This day and age trust has been so shattered that people will just not listen to others that challenge their thinking. Fortunately I have a very small network i truly trust and who will challenge me. That helps but it is not always very comfortable
They've eroded public trust in actual science so much already. Using the phrase, "Trust the Science!" like a cudgel to beat people into their religious cult.
«one reason China has had a Chief Censor for 2000 years: to weed out irresponsible disinformation that can damage the entire country»
So did most european countries for the past 1,000 years, and in both cases it was to protect incumbents under the guise of protecting "the established order". The main differences however between censorship in Europe and in China:
* In favour of China, it is such a diverse and fragmented and wild place that some bias in favour of "stability" is not purely for protecting incumbents.
* In favour of China, it has the "Mandate of the stars" principle, which differs from the european notion of the "Divine right of kings" in being conditional, and conditional on the benefit of the majority, which also limits self-serving protection of the incumbents.
* In favour of Europe, it had so many and varied jurisdictions that it was quite difficult to censors the same things everywhere, so there was always some place that would allow opinions "unpopular" elsewhere.
Yes. Very different officials, entirely different cultures. Chinese media is the most trusted on earth, largely because its government keeps its promises and doesn't tell lies.
«Chinese media is the most trusted on earth, largely because its government keeps its promises and doesn't tell lies.»
We all understand that you genuinely like China and even its government, but you are overselling this by a large factor.
As you know from recently published surveys, the different levels of government in China have very different appreciation rates, and the central government which has the best appreciation most likely has it because of an ancient chinese (and not just chinese one) concept, that the Emperor is benevolent even if the local officials are bad, and in this the "Gongchan" dynasty is not too different from most others.
BTW I don't doubt that much if not most of the central politicians and officials are fundamentally benevolent (even when corrupt); as a rather famous leader said, he did not see most of his family and friends being slaughtered in purges or killed in war for the chinese people to remain poor.
There are many other details that show that, from the 5 generals of the PLA who refused to carry out the Tien An Men repression to "Great Underground Wall of China" (two stories that in the "west" are not very much mentioned).
But even the central level of government is repressive, paranoid, and a gigantic mess, even if it is run by a cohort of engineers.
As to the press, there seems to be amazing press freedom as long as "hot" topics are avoided. That is not too different from the less tightly controlled countries of the "west" :-).
As a side note, I have been watching during lockdowns *a lot* of chinese TV series and movies (subtitled in english) on Viki.com and I have noticed over the years they have become more and more americanized, reflecting obviously what is happening to chinese culture. That is a very big long term problem. I hope that the chinese people will be as resistant to americanization as much as the japanese have been.
Last week the Washington Post published the result a survey of 20,000 Chinese. The UK's York University recruited more than 600 students from 53 universities across China to conduct one-on-one interviews online.
The result? "The data show that Chinese citizens’ trust in their national government increased to 98 percent. Their trust in local government also increased compared to 2018 levels — 91 percent of Chinese citizens surveyed now said they trust or trust completely the township-level government. Trust levels rose to 93 percent at the county level, 94 percent at the city level and 95 percent at the provincial level. These numbers suggest that Chinese citizens have become more trusting in all levels of government”.
There is zero evidence of corruption at the top, policy-making level and overwhelming evidence–like 98% home ownership and ending extreme poverty–to the contrary.
But even the central level of government is repressive, paranoid, and a gigantic mess, even if it is run by a cohort of engineers.
As to "there seems to be amazing press freedom as long as "hot" topics are avoided," can you name one?
I recall watching Bill Clinton lambaste the President of China for an hour, live, on Chinese national TV, about Tiananmen.
I agree that they will be resistant to Americanization.
I've always known people were amazingly uninformed regarding even basic scientific facts (from about age 8). As I grew up, I saw that beyond the bog standard anti-intellectualism in K-12 education, adults were horrifically ill-served by reporting on science and matters that involved science.
It was routinely worse than would have been produced by a well-meaning 7-grader. How could this happen? Eventually I realized, and test out, what I later taught my kids: "Any science article, drop down at least 3, 4 paragraphs, sometimes all the way to the concluding paragraph, and you see something from a "Public Education Director for Corporation A" or "Spokesperson for the Department of Bureaus" or some other knowledgeable-sounding party. I told them to ask if the organization the spokesperson was representing had a vested interest in the result of the scientific inquiry, or situation to which science was supposedly being applied. The answer was, of course, always yes.
"And that's why you have an article supposedly about "science" in today's newspaper." All my kids report this approach has served them well, though it's not much of an insight nowadays.
Wishing to the heavens for people to understand is a waste of your effort. Not because it will bear no fruit, because it’s already so. People do understand, pundits pretend otherwise and dishonestly use the weaponized idea that science is absolute to push any given agenda. But the average Joe isn’t quite as simple as the MMS and our Social Media Overlords project. We get it
Thank you. As a scientist it drives me crazy that people don’t understand the scientific method and how there are no hard and fast ‘truths’ in science. You put it very well
Fauci is correct on gain of function. It seems what YOU got from the COVID-19 pandemic is that we should not understand how diseases develop. We should NOT have trained anyone to deal with such events.
The media and "public health authorities" are a complete clown show.
The only time that quack Fauci has been right about anything is when he announced on 60 Minutes in March of 2020 that masks are useless, a fact all informed people have known since the Spanish Flu.
Regardless, we have the spectacle of Redfield, then director of the CDC, saying masks may be more effective than a vaccine.
Then we have the NYT, of all places, quoting a VT professor saying the "social distancing" nonsense was "almost like it was pulled out of thin air".
And, of course the tyrannical, impoverishing lockdowns which, like all the other "guidelines", show no statistical correlation with any Covid metric and therefore destroyed the financial lives of countless millions, for nothing.
And the latest clown-bureaucrat heading the CDC, Walensky, saying she has a sense of "impending doom".
And then we have ex-president Cheetoh's Experimental Emergency Warp Vax, which Kamala said she wouldn't take but then did, and which they now want to inject into children.
This despite the fact that, at last count, the CDC's own numbers show that 1086 people, in a nation of 320 milliion, under the age of 24 have succumbed to this plague. I'd like some "fact-checker" to explain how, exactly, that constitutes an "emergency".
My bullshit detector has run hot since Bush the Younger, but has now been pegged for over a year.
Masks are not supposed to protect you from the virus. They're designed to protect everyone from you. Why do you think doctor's wear masks in an operating room? It's not to protect them from the patient. It's to protect the patient from the doctors doing the operation. And no, masks are not supposed to filter out viruses and bacteria. They blunt the force of air coming out of your mouth when you sneeze; or in the case of the doctor's in the operating room, their normal breath (which contains bacteria). The blunting of the airflow keeps whatever you were spewing out confined to the area around your face, instead of around someone else's face.
Because there was and may still be a shortage ? Because they catch smaller particles than the cloth ones most everyone else is wearing ? Just because they're being worn doesn't mean they keep you from getting the virus or reduce your chances significantly.
N95 masks are particle masks and were NEVER designed to stop or reduce virons. Once again, sneezing into the crook of your arm also helps reduce the spread of the virus. WHAT'S YOUR POINT ?
I actually still have my CIF gas mask with a fresh filter. I can get more filters online pretty easily. I even have an adapter that lets me use the (mostly for painting/solvent) 3M filters they sell at Home Depot with it.
Never was tempted to use it during this entire thing, though. Dressing up in MOPP-4 for 14 months sounds like the dumbest thing ever.
They work to lower the dose of virus that people release and breathe in. FWIW - my brother tested filtering capacity. And made this video. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YSC1B2ZBSn4
I never said it was, you're the one squirming all over and back peddling your earlier claims. Then you changed your name from funpolice to some military sounding handle...........makes you wonder.
Filter all you want but you'd be way better off social distancing and avoiding crowded buildings with HVAC systems rather than depending on a mask.
I'd be willing to bet the false sense of security brought on by masks transmitted this virus much more than anyone in the know would ever let on.
Funny how people that were avid about masks ended up getting COVID anyway.
Ever wonder why there are no stats one way or the other on cases contracted by non or casual mask wearing and mask extremists ? Weren't there dummies running around bragging about wearing 3 masks at once ?
Large, randomized controlled trial (RCT - the gold standard of scientific methodologies) in Denmark was published on Nov. 19 in the Annals of Internal Medicine which found no statistically significant effect of wearing masks, and actually found that masks might actually increase the infection rate.
WHO meta-analysis of 10 RCT studies back in 2019 which found “no evidence that face masks are effective in reducing the transmission of laboratory-confirmed influenza.”
"Observational evidence suggests that mask wearing mitigates transmission of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). It is uncertain if this observed association arises through protection of uninfected wearers (protective effect), via reduced transmission from infected mask wearers (source control), or both."
From the second citation:
It was interesting - they said that there was no evidence that masks significantly helped, but they said that the quality of the evidence in this regard was "moderate" - and, they recommended that masks be worn! -
"RECOMMENDATION:Face masks worn by asymptomatic people are conditionally recommended in severe epidemics or pandemics, to reduce transmission in the community. Disposable, surgical masks are recommended to be worn at all times by symptomatic individuals when in contact with other individuals. Although there is no evidence that this is effective in reducing transmission, there is mechanistic plausibility for the potential effectiveness of this measure.Population: Population with symptomatic individuals; and general public for protectionWhen to apply: At all times for symptomatic individuals (disposable surgical mask), and in severe epidemics or pandemics for public protection (face masks)"
"Additional high-quality RCTs of the efficacy of face masks against laboratory-confirmed influenza would be valuable." In other words, the studies we have are not of sufficient quality to say that masks are of no use in preventing transmission
There is an ancient principle regarding the burden of proof, perhaps best expressed in Latin:
Ei incumbit probatio qui dicit, non qui negat.
Those that assert masks work have the burden of proving that they do. The reverse is not true - one cannot prove a negative.
Now, as a person with a scientific mindset, I am open to the hypothesis that masks are effective, but that is going to require proof, and that proof does not exist, even after decades of research.
This is how I know for certain that when little Mussolini politicians require my children to wear a fucking mask when they play basketball, and President Turnip-Brain wears a mask on a zoom call after being vaxxed, they are not "following the science" but rather are completely full of shit.
Multiple studies show that properly fitting masks, of the appropriate materials, significantly reduce the transmission of particles of the Covid nature - it is that simple ...
Who funded those studies and why don't we ever see studies that contradict those "multiple studies" ?? I wonder if it's to further enhance the fear of a virus with a 99.7% survival rate ??
«little Mussolini politicians require my children to wear a fucking mask when they play basketball»
They also require them to wear crotch masks. Try to bring your children to play basketball without one, and argue that your inimitable rights include refusing to wear one.
«in Denmark was published on Nov. 19 in the Annals of Internal Medicine which found no statistically significant effect of wearing masks, and actually found that masks might actually increase the infection rate»
That is a widely "misrepresented" result, here are some comments by an eminent statistician and risk expert on that study:
THEY GOT IT BACKWARDS! There are more flaws with the Danish Mask Study. In fact what is not flawed provides an overwhelming evidence in favor of masks (risk reduction >70%, perhaps >90%).”
“In fact masks (and faceshields) supplemented with constraints of superspreader events can save us trillions of dollars in future lockdowns (and lawsuits) and be potentially sufficient (under adequate compliance) to stem the pandemic.”
Both the "communist" government of China-mainland and the "anti-communist" government of China-Taiwan have been mandating masks:
“Taiwan, with a population of 23 million people, has had just over 600 coronavirus cases and seven deaths, numbers kept low by widespread adoption of face masks after the island’s deadly experience with SARS.”
“Authorities activated the island's Central Epidemic Command Center, which was set up in the wake of SARS, to coordinate between different ministries. The government also ramped up face mask and protective equipment production to make sure there would be a steady supply of PPE. The government also invested in mass testing and quick and effective contact tracing. Former Taiwanese Vice President Chen Chien-jen, who is an epidemiologist by training, said lockdowns are not ideal. Chen also said that the type of mass-testing schemes undertaken in mainland China, where millions of people are screened when a handful of cases are detected, are also unnecessary. "Very careful contact tracing, and very stringent quarantines of close contacts are the best way to contain Covid-19," he said.”
“My son came back from Taiwan in June. He said everyone wore masks, everything was open and his temp was checked in stores. He flew into LAX, they didn’t ask him one health Q nor where he was coming from. Nada!! He self quarantined with us for 2 weeks. Taiwan did it right!”
“Upon our plane touching down in TPE, we were immediately placed in two lines: one for folks with a working intl cell phone, one for the rest of us (to buy a very affordable local SIM card.) The government is then able to track us while we are in the country Once through immigration and baggage, we are required to take govt-approved covid-safe cars to our quarantine hotels. (If you are a local, you can self-isolate at home.) No leaving your room (or home) for 15 days. Not for walks- nothing. [...] At any point, if you break quarantine - which they can tell by the movements of your phone - you could be fined 10-30k. They are quite serious on this point. Then again, they haven't had a case in 200 days. And everyone has been living their lives freely since February. [...] Again, not an expert. But again: EVERYONE IN TAIWAN HAS BEEN LIVING THEIR LIVES FREELY SINCE FEBRUARY! I mean yes, people voluntarily wear masks in public places, but otherwise, restaurants, subways, etc are packed. So....”
“The flailing in Washington and state capitals looks even worse when juxtaposed with the success of China, which clamped down on Covid with compulsory mask wearking isolation of the sick, and effective contact tracing. Chinese are blithely eating in restaurants, sitting in theaters, attending school, and going back to work. On Jan. 18 the government reported GDP grew 2.3% in 2020, which makes China the only major economy to to avoid a contraction for the year. Exports helped: they rose 18% in December from a year earlier despite slow demand growth abroad because Chinese exporters grabbed market share from foreign rivals. [...] [...] The pandemic slammed the U.K.'s economy worse than any other member of the Group of Seven nations, with GDP declining an estimate 10.3%”
Random assignment of participants is only *one* criterion for a RCT experiment. You also have to selectively enforce your conditions exclusively on each group (your operational definition). You also need to have measures that are specifically sensitive to measuring the selective treatment effects in each group (dependent measure). Finally, your treatment needs to occur in a range of effect that is neither at the floor or ceiling.
While this study meets the first criteria, it fails on the others. There was no selective enforcement of the treatment condition; they use self-report of compliance with <50% reporting full compliance in the mask group. Positive antibody tests is non-specific because people can sero-convert without being infected (I know, I used to do vaccine research). Finally, the study was done in a region with low infection rates to begin with. Primary outcome was <2% on average, lower if you exclude sero-converted subjects. So overall they ran an uncontrolled RTC in a community with floor effects for infection rates using a non-specific measure; and they still found masks somewhat effective.
What I take from this is that if you have a community that already is practices good hygiene, then masks may not add much to your protection. But if you have a community with poor hygiene practices, mask wearing will add protection.
So, do masks work? Well it depends. If you live in a country like the US with infection rates +4% and poor hygiene to begin with then yes they will help. If you live in a country with people who are already hygiene conscious, then not so much.
Not at all. Science is about forming an understanding that is as close to the truth as possible. What people do with that understanding, how they politicize it, generate narratives etc., is not the domain of science.
So the fact that you didn't scrutinize any of the studies supporting the other side of this argument means you were actually helping generate a narrative then doesn't it ?
"Large, randomized controlled trial (RCT - the gold standard of *clinical* scientific methodologies)". FTFY.
In other domains of human science, such as experimental psychology, the RCT is also known as an independent measures t-test; the simplest experimental design you can have.
Who said useless ? Unnecessary perhaps for the general public or maybe just they are way more useful as a fear mongering prop than actually reducing the spread of the virus.
For all you hysterical true believers in masking, distancing and lockdowns out there, here's a little quiz on your knowledge of the effectiveness of your favorite totalitarian politician and "mitigation" mandate.
If it wasn't Covid, then what was it that kept our hospitals overflowing for months with critical patients, many of them dying? An outbreak of hypocondria?
"The University of Utah Health System, one of the largest hospitals in the state, reported its ICU is 95 percent filled"
"Indiana has fewer than one-third of its ICU beds available"
"The area around El Paso, Texas, a city of nearly 700,000, has 10 remaining ICU beds"
* CNN:
The king of fake news, as usual, does not provide capacity numbers.
* Philly Enquirer:
This is my favorite of your citations, as it does not even mention Covid, but instead deals with long-term care.
You know what it *does* mention though?
"Hospital emergency rooms frequently operate at or above their capacity depending on a host of factors."
Perhaps you should consider actually reading all those articles you copy and paste from the google.
Now, I am not saying that there were *NO* hospitals that were overwhelmed, simply that the situation, like nearly all official "news" regarding Covid, was vastly overblown for dramatic effect.
One article conspicuously absent from your list is this:
CBS admits to using footage from Italy in NYC coronavirus report
Hmmmm, I wonder why they felt the need to fabricate?
Also of interest is this:
* Thousands of healthcare workers are laid off or furloughed as coronavirus spreads *
"Across the nation, job losses in the healthcare sector have been second only to those in the restaurant industry, according to federal labor statistics."
So, in the middle of a "pandemic", where hospitals are being "overwhelmed", health care workers are being let go in droves, unused field hospitals are removed, and most hospitals are empty.
I can’t remember where I saw it, but some website compiled a list of links to like a dozen articles in the Guardian over the past 8 years or so where they warned the NHS was at capacity, plus a host of other hospitals in LA and other cities in the States — this wouldn’t even be the first time in a decade that these hospitals redirected new patients elsewhere, but it was presented as this “unprecedented” advent that justified turning everyone’s lives upside down and stoking hatred against anybody who didn’t oblige to their insane demands.
Back in 2015 or 2016, when Greenwald was writing for them, I commented on an article castigating some company for pollution, noting that one of the photos in the article header was of the Animus River disaster, which was caused by EPA incompetence and which they had placed in an article header just a few months before about the disaster.
Naturally, my post was removed for violating their "community standards", the most important of which is not to expose the leftist charlatans at the Graun as propagandists.
FWIW - my interpretation of the mask flip flop is that medical personnel couldn't get masks because assclowns were stockpiling them like toilet paper. (Son of a friend did this. Filled his living room.) So, to let hospitals and clinics get masks they needed, Fauci and others announced masks don't work. It helped significantly.
No, actually - because folks weren't wearing them, more got sick - more patients to treat for the medical folk, more exposure to the virus, more sick - and dead - medical folk ...
Can we see some evidence to support this supposition please ? I know CNN said it was so, but I'd like to see just how much difference wearing vs not wearing a mask actually makes......
Well, and i will make a supposition here, that catching it at all, and the severity of the disease if caught, is most probably dose related - sorta like walking next to a beehive - if a few bees sting you, painful but not serious, if a lot do, more of a problem - so reducing the dose of virus one is exposed to, which is what masks do, will make a difference. The problem is that to get the scientific rigor that requires a fair number of participants in a double blind study would require controls to be deliberately exposed to the virus - not considered an ethical thing to do ...
Less than 6% died only of Covid, including the 1086 under 24. The rest died with it.
Thanks to the CDC changing the reporting protocols of 23 years especially for Covid, it is impossible to know who among the 94% actually died of it, rather than with it.
This is no accident.
Everything government and their media stenographers have done has been orchestrated to maximize the fear and panic to justify the biggest usurpation in the history of the formerly free world.
Stop believing the propaganda, you are being played.
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
I'd add that it's probably not a coincident that Trump's former producer at NBC suddenly moved up to heading CNN while the dipshit Cheeto soared into office.
My hunch: They lost their grip along the way and had to bake up a scheme to stay firmly in power.
It involved using Trump to play the part of "The Heel" to bring all the threats up out of the ground like worms using prongs and a current.
Guess what I saw last week... a formerly mostly vacant Nation Guard base nearby now has about 200 transport trucks and a couple of big fuel tankers sitting there.
They're going to have their little Domestic War on Terror, whether anyone likes it or not.
This guy Brian below this will be getting his grip as this unfolds and will see it.
The coup went off without firing a shot but they're so ready to wipe out anything resembling opposition.
You might be thinking of Hanlon’s Razor, to whit….“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.”
You’re in here arguing/fighting about….what? You’re correct on several points, but don’t expect much of anyone to believe you. Here’s something I learned in Wuhan during the lockdown. Yes, I was in Wuhan for the entire charade, which allowed me several interesting conversations with doctors from Wuhan Medical Center regarding mask efficacy.
It’s not about filtration effectiveness or any of the other dumbshit stuff the morons in here choose to believe or disbelieve. It’s about probability distributions. One person, wearing a mask, is essentially meaningless. Several people, the same. There are all the combinations and permutations of masking, but the percentage of transmission starts to go WAY down when mask use is up around 90%, and when you can get 95% of the population masked, transmission rates drop to small single digits. It’s mathematical; it’s not open to debate, unless one wants to dismiss math. That said, I expect some mope to disagree and argue the math.
One of the reasons the virus was brought under control in Wuhan so quickly was EVERYONE wore a mask. Partial mask use approaches meaninglessness. It ain’t about most of the stuff the anti-maskers continue arguing; it’s about probability distribution.
Can we get a fact check on what I just wrote? Fact check, do I hear fact check? Someone get me a fact check….
I generally don't engage in these debates for the same reason I don't argue over qanon, but you're absolutely right not just about masks, but about the vaccine as well.
This is something we have confirmed multiple times to include the Asian outbreak of SARS-CoV-1 in 2003 and mass vaccination against small pox in New York in 1947 along with the Polio vaccine in the 1950's.
Most masks and vaccines don't prevent you from getting infected, they prevent you from being a spreader (and in many cases reduce the severity if you do get infected).
There's a reason the morons in Portland, OR and Seattle, WA had an outbreak of measles in 2017 when vaccination rates for this fell below 80%. Countries like Japan and S. Korea get this, America and Brazil do not.
Health officials at the CDC like Dr. Fauci and media have been a national embarrassment during this epidemic and have been caught deceiving the public and not admitting to their failures more than once, but that does not change what we have learned from the science any more than if they had been credible. They just made things much harder for the professional focused on public health over scoring political points.
So the lock down had nothing to do with it ? Masks are not that effective, sorry. I'm sure they can make a difference but they miss a good deal of the virions.
There are lots of other variables as well that need to be considered so trying to conclusively say masks were the silver bullet is just nonsense.
Members of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviour (SPI-B) expressed regret about the tactics in a new book about the role of psychology in the Government’s Covid-19 response.
One SPI-B scientist told Ms Dodsworth: “In March [2020] the Government was very worried about compliance and they thought people wouldn’t want to be locked down. There were discussions about fear being needed to encourage compliance, and decisions were made about how to ramp up the fear. The way we have used fear is dystopian.
“The use of fear has definitely been ethically questionable. It’s been like a weird experiment. Ultimately, it backfired because people became too scared.”
One warned that “people use the pandemic to grab power and drive through things that wouldn’t happen otherwise… We have to be very careful about the authoritarianism that is creeping in”.
As well as overt warnings about the danger of the virus, the Government has been accused of feeding the public a non-stop diet of bad news, such as deaths and hospitalisations, without ever putting the figures in context with news of how many people have recovered, or whether daily death tolls are above or below seasonal averages.
Laura Dodsworth has written a book on this topic: A State of Fear
Let's say someone holds you underwater and you die. By your logic, you didn't die from being held underwater, you died because you had diabetes, cardiac disease, or a broken leg. So we can't say you drowned.
If you hold anybody underwater long enough they will drown. 100% mortality regardless of co-morbidities. With Covid, over 90% of the documented deaths have substantial comorbidity. But that's not really the point. The key takeaway is the substantial comorbidity was not allowed to inform the policy debate. Instead we got far-reaching mandates when we should have had focused proscriptions for the truly at-risk.
Let's say we hold you under water until you die. Logic tells us that AIPAC would have to hire another sock puppet poster for their many sock puppet accounts.
Using that logic, we'd have to question the AIDS numbers as well, since nobody in the history of the world has ever died of AIDS. People die because their immune system is destroyed by AIDS, which enables a separate and unrelated disease to kill them. So 32 million people died with AIDS, zero people died of AIDS.
Serious question. What is defined as a Covid death? What test was done or what else was used to determine which deaths qualified as Covid deaths? Was that same specific standard applied throughout every jurisdiction?
I don’t that has ever been answered, nor will it, due to it’s implications for public trust in federal bureaucracy (as weak as it may already be). Hell, George Floyd could be counted as a Covid death under the guidelines......
Sometime last year after this all started I was reading a newspaper story on "the first Covid victims." One victim was 103 years old, which meant that person HAD survived the pandemic of 1918. In our town a person who was killed in an auto accident had previously tested positive for Covid. And so on. It just makes me want someone to explain under what specific circumstances a death is labeled, "Covid."
Getting hit by a dump truck, struck by lightening, massive heart attack, falling off a 70 story building, or being murdered while testing positive for covid.
This is the first I have heard anything this specific-extreme O2 deprivation in the blood. Interestingly, I was reading an article about my favorite Youtuber “bald and bankrupt”-he visits places like rural Belarus and the Tuvan Republic, and in it he spoke of almost dying of Covid contracted in Serbia(he wanted to visit somewhere aggressively anti-mask) and said his O2 levels were at possibly fatal levels.
Thanks --- now I have more questions . . . like, in the case of "respiratory failure," did there have to be an attendant Covid positive test at the time of death? Are physician observed Covid symptoms sufficient to I.D. a death as a Covid death? It would be interesting to read more about this, if you can recommend a resource.
Here is Kary Mullis, the guy who invented the PCR test, speaking truth about Fauci and the other "public health" apparatchiks sucking off the public teat and lying to us.
If you read to the end what I wrote, already said.
Example, May 2020. Doc calls me around midnight from ER.
"Holy shit, B. An entire family. 7, including grandparents. One is still alive after admission. <crying> Can't keep people alive to fucking admit them. <gets it together > This lady sits down, her O2 sat's below fucking 40%. And she's talking to me. That's impossible. I'm thinking what the fuck? She didn't make it. <cries a little again> gotta get back to it.... Hey! Get back ... fuck. (End call)
Yes, someone corralled into service, wrote COVID-19 as cause of death. No further diagnosis. The tsunami was out in the lobby dying on the floor.
Before the actual test came out they were designation anyone with a fever COVID.
"At the urging of a group of epidemiologists, the CDC this week updated its guidance for counting COVID-19 cases and deaths. It now includes both confirmed cases and "probable" ones which ever brings you the $13,000 extra from the government.
With a false positive rate of 0.8% - a figure used by Ms Hartley-Brewer and within the broad range of what we think might be the actual rate for community testing - you would get eight false positives. So in that context, it's true that roughly 90% of positives would be false.
"flu deaths NOTE: The week of April 4 was the last week in-season influenza burden estimates will be provided for the 2019-2020 season. *Because influenza surveillance does not capture all cases of flu that occur in the U.S., CDC provides these "estimated ranges" to better reflect the larger burden of influenza."
Those estimated ranges are added and counted as both COVID and FLU deaths counted twice.
In other words ALL FLU cases were counted as COVID but the Flu stats needed to be recorded so they just ADDED THEM as an average of previous years. What ever they added as flu should have been taken out of COVID.
Postipressionist: The argument that it is difficult to assess deaths by COVID-19 is rational.
Another rational concern about the data at any one moment in time, and one I was concerned about, was the variable rate of reporting we have in the US. Some sources of data deaths report right away while others are delayed for a number of reasons. So any one point in time was skewed.
In order to address both concerns, one can use the Weekly Excess Deaths data to simply look, as an actuary would, at how many deaths there were above actuarial expectations.
This chart (one has to scroll past the data descriptions a bit to get down to the chart) is consistent with the numbers of deaths being reported above what would be expected.
No influenza-associated pediatric deaths were reported to CDC during week 19. One influenza-associated pediatric death occurring during the 2020-2021 season has been reported to CDC. View Full Screen
SEE Pneumonia, Influenza, and COVID mortality Chart
Almost NO influenza deaths in 2020. How many people died from Influenza in 2020? ONE? That's because they were determined to be COVID 19.
Provisional Mortality Data — United States, 2020 | MMWR
COVID-19 was listed as the underlying cause of 345,323 deaths during 2020 and was the third leading underlying cause of death, after heart disease (690,882 deaths) and cancer (598,932) (Figure 2).
690,882 deaths from Heart disease all died WITHOUT COVID? same as last year? WHAT?
Only 6% of all deaths were COVID that's only about 20,752 people. the COmorbidity deaths 324,570 people died with other diseases + Covid. They assume that 324,570 are not included in any other numbers but the 690,882 stayed the same. 690,882 who died of heart disease had NO COVID. NOW THAT'S AMAZING don't you think?
The point of the data set is to eliminate cause of death from the analysis. So arguing about controlling for type of death would violate the purpose of the analysis and thus not appropriate.
Unless a lot of people who died haven't been counted or were counted more than once, then it would not be valid.
But it is also *not* evidence that any of what you are arguing is not valid or reliable. It is simply an analysis to remove "cause of death" as a factor which I found interesting and meaningful.
I never heard Fauci say "masks are useless". I've seen three video clips of Fauci answering the question, should we be wearing masks. Once in Jan. 2020, once in Feb. 2020 and once in early March 2020. All three times he said no, that he didn't think Americans need to be wearing masks. One of those clips he said, that being so, we need to pay attention to what the CDC and WHO say. At least these are the facts as I remember.
Last March, 2020, most biologists thought the virus was spreading by surfaces that were contaminated by infected people coughing and sneezing. If true, a mask wouldn't do yoi or me much good. When the data coming in indicated that 40-50% of people testing positive were asymptomatic, the CDC, Fauci and others realized their theory was wrong, and it appeared that the virus was airborne. That was the reason for the change in masks recommendation.
Perhaps it's because some of us reasonably educated and logical types are not aware of a study that proves masks "work". The definition of "work" is important here. Let's start with that.
No I didn't say they were totally ineffective. I said there is not proof that they significantly reduce transmission of the virus due to the fact that the virions DO NOT NEED droplets of moisture to travel and actually float in the air much longer without the weight of it.
Those masks DO NOT block the virus in any way shape or form or people would suffocate trying.
Please show me your non peer reviewed evidence that is mostly government issued and think tank funded.
(CDC) postulate that the particles of more than 5 μm as droplets, and those less than 5 μm as aerosols or droplet nuclei (Siegel et al., 2007; WHO, 2014). Conversely, there have been some other postulations, indicating that aerodynamic diameter of 20 μm or 10 μm or less should be reckoned to be aerosols, based on their ability to linger in the air for a prolonged period, and the reachability to the respirable fraction of the lung (alveolar region) (Gralton et al., 2011; Nicas et al., 2005; Tellier, 2009). Small aerosols are more susceptible to be inhaled deep into the lung, which causes infection in the alveolar tissues of the lower respiratory tract,
That's right out of the very report you didn't read and tried to use to bullshit everyone into thinking you actually know WTF you're talking about.
Holy shit, you need to stop virtue signaling like this.
How much ? How much does it take to get infected ? Once again you are employing random particle tests to say something might reduce the viral load without ever stating how much ? Is it .05% or 50% ??
TFP - I know you're one of Matt's frequent fliers and I enjoy reading your comments. You cite a lot of "facts and figures" (thanks) but not a lot of source material. The one link you have has no citations at all that I could see. That it came from a government source is a red flag for me. I agree that masks are indicated and likely effective under some circumstances. For example, I would wear a mask when visiting my 90 year-old father in law because the evidence indicates that population cohort is substantially at risk. We have been sold a far-reaching mandate that feels more political to me than health-related.
And plenty of people wearing masks still contracted the virus. Funny how there are no stats available on that particular phenomena just like they can't find patient 0.
If folks feel comfortable wearing a mask they should, they shouldn't have to listen to half baked "studies" done by scientists who know what will happen if the "study" doesn't say the right thing.
That's bullshit. And you're completely ignoring the fact that the masks are one size fits all and even a well fitting mask loses much of its effectiveness with facial hair which is extremely popular right now.
The Virus DOES NOT NEED moisture droplets to travel. That has never been proven much like almost all of your evidence is not peer reviewed and is mostly government sourced.
I am a scientist with graduate degrees in high energy laser physics and medicine. I practiced medicine or a while in Germany where I had done med school, but left it when I had to return to the US. I did enough study of math to construct rough models. From the outset there have been three pandemics: One of lies, one of government over-reaction, and least importantly, one of a modified common cold virus.
On January 1, 2020, Taiwan had sufficient reliable intelligence from inside China to close its borders because a contagious infectious disease had been unleashed. The day in early January the genome was published we knew it was a coronavirus, one of four families of common cold viruses that cause respiratory illnesses. We know that respiratory illnesses spread through the air, propelled by coughs or sneezes, and that outdoors is safe because even slight breezes will dissipate the cloud. In addition, if it is a virus, it will be damaged by sunlight.
Respiratory infections are typically most dangerous to the elderly and the immune-compromised, which gave us all the information we needed to protect ourselves. Sequester - quarantine - the old folks and forget about the rest of us. PPE for indoor workers starting with healthcare, spread out the sick among all hospitals, keep sick folks out of old age homes, wash hands, and carry on.
I wrote all of that and was thrown out of multiple platforms. Now-former friends accused me of spreading dangerous misinformation. I published results of a rough model using data from previous widespread coronavirus infections which showed an order of magnitude lower danger than the official models. Banned from more platforms, more friends turning their backs on me. I tried to find the origin of the six-foot social distance and couldn't. Eventually I learned that it was developed as a guess in the late 1800s about another disease. I knew that Wuhan had been the center for biowarfare research in China, but publishing that drew more attacks. I read studies on cross-immunity within virus families and referred to those. More accusations that I know nothing about science.
I weep for the needless hardship, anguish and death. The damage to inner-city children of color is unforgivable. Melanin blocks sunlight, reducing the level of vitamin D in the body outside the tropics. Less access to quality health care has put them behind, lack of vitamin D makes them more vulnerable, and poor diet finishes the trifecta. On top of that many receive their only meals through schools, including weekend packs of food since they won't be in school. All of that goes away. If there are two parents, one has to stay home and can't even work part time; if there's only one parent, there are no school-based programs to support these children. It's difficult not to think about accusations of racism and genocide.
Your last paragraph is sadly true. History should judge ALL responsible leaders-including state and local-harshly for what happened to inner city schools, but we will see the usual ass covering and monkey shit fights between political enemies.
Fauci dumped his credibility with me when he said the public didn't need to wear masks ... later he admitted that he said that because we didn't have enough and they needed to be conserved for health care folks.
If you notice, one of Taiwan's first responses was to ramp up mask production like crazy - enough for everyone to have 2/wk - our first response was to ramp up production of ventilators - closing the barn door after the horse was out. I observed over a year ago what a shame it would be if we had to ration ventilators because we had to ration masks ...
It seemed to me at the time that common sense said that a respiratory (and so much more) disease was spread by breathing out, and caught by breathing in, i.e. airborne, an air pollutant, if you will, and how do we handle air pollutants, by putting a filter on them - masks are an air filter - so the question was what are the most efficient viral air filters (and some common materials, in layers can work quite well) with an emphasis on proper fit should have been top priority for production and distribution.
«On January 1, 2020, Taiwan had sufficient reliable intelligence from inside China to close its borders because a contagious infectious disease had been unleashed.»
That is because the China-Taiwan government is always on the alert because China, both mainland and Taiwan, has been swept by infectious diseases quite often. Also the same apparently was reported by israeli news, citing an USA government source, well before that.
BTW the China-Taiwan government has never closed its borders, or imposed a general lock-down, it has just required mass testing of travellers and tracing and isolation of the few infected.
«Respiratory infections are typically most dangerous to the elderly and the immune-compromised, which gave us all the information we needed to protect ourselves. Sequester - quarantine - the old folks and forget about the rest of us. PPE for indoor workers starting with healthcare, spread out the sick among all hospitals, keep sick folks out of old age homes, wash hands, and carry on.»
That is sensible for "normal" respiratory infections, but for a more intense form like SARS-2 that is not what has been done in places like New Zealand and China and Korea-south and Kerala: the successful approach has been mass testing, and tracing and isolation the infected. However that approach in incompatible with reaganism/neoliberalism (“The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I'm from the government, and I'm here to help’”) and as a result neoliberal governments have adopted half-baked lock-downs and vaccinations to celebrate "saviors of humanity big pharma". The reporting abouit the COVID-19 in most neoliberal countries has been a huge marketing campaign for "big pharma" national champions, even if vaccines have been developed by dozens of countries.
You'll find that mass testing and tracing work reasonably well in a small island country. S. Korea is a de facto island. In the U.S. even when we were focused on stopping illegal immigrants from crossing the Southern border, we still had hundreds every week who escaped detection and fled into the interior. Now, we have an administration that told foreigners to come and we will give you free stuff and treat you well. People from 88 foreign countries have crossed our Southern border and at least 200,000 have been released into the country. What contact tracing? As soon as someone enters the NYC subway system all hope of tracing disappears. Singapore is touted as a great success; it is smaller geographically than any of the ten largest North American cities. The homeless population in California and New York makes a mockery of attempting contact tracing. It doesn't matter whether testing/tracing is incompatible with reaganism, it's incompatible with any large country.
Yes, vaccines have been developed by multiple countries. Not all are equal. Sinopharm, Johnson & Johnson and others are traditional vaccines using weakened or dead virus particles carried on an adenovirus (yet another common cold virus) to enter cells. They are not nearly as effective as messenger RNA vaccines in preventing infection, but are as effective in guarding against complications leading to hospitalization or death.
This is a recurring theme in America where we fail to grasp the impact of population and geography. T
Without arguing either side of the debate, I often hear people ask wgt we can't take the healthcare system in Sweden, a country with 10 million people the size of California and Oregon and impose it on the US, a country of 320 million people that is 22 times larger.
That is a misdescription: it is simply subject to test-trace-isolate. Same for south Korea etc.
«You'll find that mass testing and tracing work reasonably well in a small island country.»
It takes breathtaking stupidity to think that China-mainland or south Korea or Kerala are a "small island country". These are all countries that have head sickeness and deaths rates 100 times (or 1000 times) smaller than the USA, or the UK, or many "small island countries" where the reaganista anti-state approach has been taken.
My understanding from those smarter than I is that the real selling point of the Johnson and Johnson vaccine with it's far lower efficacy rate than either the Moderna or Pfizer vaccine is that it can be stored at refrigerator temperature for up to 3 months.
In the US where we have easy access to sub 0 freezers the Moderna and Pfizer vaccine work fine, but if you plan on vaccinating in remote parts of Sub-Sahara Africa that difference in storage temp is a real game changer.
Imagine if we pulled about a billion dollars from our enormous foreign war budget and used it to send people to places like Africa to vaccinate rather than bomb people. A world where the image of America is vaccination rather than a drone strike.
«On January 1, 2020, Taiwan had sufficient reliable intelligence from inside China to close its borders because a contagious infectious disease had been unleashed.»
In particular that "reliable intelligence from China" was the official communication from the chinese public health system to the WHO of the previous day:
“On 31 December 2019, the WHO China Country Office was informed of cases of pneumonia of unknown etiology (unknown cause) detected in Wuhan City, Hubei Province of China. As of 3 January 2020, a total of 44 patients with pneumonia of unknown etiology have been reported to WHO by the national authorities in China. Of the 44 cases reported, 11 are severely ill, while the remaining 33 patients are in stable condition. According to media reports, the concerned market in Wuhan was closed on 1 January 2020 for environmental sanitation and disinfection. [...]
For more information:
— Infection prevention and control of epidemic-and pandemic prone acute respiratory infections in health care, WHO guidelines:
— Wuhan Municipal Health Commission briefing on the pneumonia epidemic situation, 31 December 2019 (in Mandarin):
— Wuhan Municipal Health Commission briefing on the pneumonia epidemic situation 3 January 2020 (in Mandarin):”
Fauci is a very smooth political operator but there is a lot more there than meets the eye. He became the Democrats' favorite doctor when he artfully countered Trump's accusations against China last year and that criticism has given him a lot of cover for his real weakness in the Covid crisis, which is the fact that he is fatally compromised in his objectivity.
Senator Rand's criticisms of him are essentially valid: he is, and has been, the beating heart of gain of function research in virology for many years. When domestic GOF research was shut down by Obama, he did an end run around these restrictions by funneling NIH money to Eco-Health (Peter Daszak's organization) which then channelled it to the Wuhan Lab. He is up to his eyeballs in creating this Frankenstein - as are, more widely, the majority of the virologists that work for, and with, the NIH - and he knows it. Virologists as a group realize that there would be overwhelming pushback against this kind of research, thereby jeopardizing their livelihood, if this catastrophe was pinned on them.
That someone with such conflicts of interest has been looked to as an objective source of information on the origins of this virus is just more evidence of the corrupt (or, to give them more credit than they deserve, childishly credulous) nature of today's MSM. Of course, the rot does not stop with the origin of the virus. More broadly, it goes to the role of Fauci in his drive for vaccinations when highly effective therapeutics are, and have been, available. Fauci's organization (NIH) hold patents on COVID vaccines and stand to benefit by their being promoted over other treatments. Now that people are starting to see the face behind the mask of this character, we should reassess his early dismissals of anti-viral therapeutics like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin (the latter is now being used on a massive scale in India, the WHO's objections notwithstanding; surprise, surprise: it is working).
Remember that under US law the 'Emergency Use Authorization' for these vaccines cannot be granted if there is an effective therapeutic available. Like hydroxychloroquine. Like ivormectin. Interested readers may find this short clip from Bret Weinstein's excellent Dark Horse podcast very informative: youtu.be/zfqxCkJw0Rk?list=PLCXya1JzWcnSCHNSipO8fWFonSWyyDQq5
And finally, for those who read French, I highly recommend the following two books which chronicle the corruption (and, frankly, criminal behavior) that has characterized the 'management' of this crisis: "Big Pharma Démasqué' by Xavier Bazin and "Aux Origines Du Mal" by Brice Perrier.
Apologies for this lengthy addendum, which is a summary of Nicholas Wade's excellent article on the origins of the virus. It is a long and technical piece which not everyone will have the time (or interest) to get through. But it is, in my view, essential to understanding why the lab origin hypothesis is probable, so here I provide the Cliff's Notes version.
He makes four key arguments for the lab leak hypothesis, some of which are a little abstruse to the non-scientific reader, but here they are:
1) The place of origin. If the virus had an animal origin there would be evidence of the virus in infected animals or humans outside of Wuhan, specifically in the region where these types of coronaviruses are known to come from. In a year of looking, no such evidence has materialized.
2) No evidence of gradual zoonotic mutation. In every other case of a virus making a jump from an animal host to a human host, it has gone through a process of evolutionary development which incrementally makes it more adapted to humans. This was the case for SARS and for MERS. In the case of COVID the virus emerged fully suited to human infection with no evidence of less successful antecedents.
3) The furin cleavage site. (Here we get technical.) The spike protein on the virus is composed of two separate sub-units, known as S1 and S2. Cleaving the spike protein into these two subunits is the key mechanism that allows the virus entry into a human cell. However it takes a specific enzyme on the surface of a cell to do this cleaving. There are many types of enzymes that can potentially cleave a protein, depending on the particular amino acids that comprise the protein. However only in humans is there the furin enzyme, which does its protein cutting thing in the presence of a specific amino acid sequence on the protein to be cleaved. COVID is the only coronavirus yet discovered that has this ‘furin cleavage site’ in its spike protein (between the S1 and S2 sub-units, naturally).
4) Human specific codons. (Here we get much more technical, so I will try to compress this a bit.) Proteins are simply chains of amino acids. Each amino acid is built from three units (nucleotides) of DNA, which are called codons. It turns out that there is more than one combination of the four DNA nucleotides (A, C, G, T) that produces the same amino acid. For example, the codons CGT and CGC both produce the amino acid arginine. But the key fact is that humans have a definite preference for a specific codon producing a given amino acid. It just so happens that in the furin cleavage site the codons that produce arginine are specific to humans and are very rare in the other parts of the coronavirus genome.
Re: Item 1 - Just wrong. There are closely related viruses as far as Vietnam. I don't have the cite at my fingertips, but I saw that one. This argument is also like the old "missing link" stories that aimed to prove humans weren't evolved from lesser primates because we couldn't find all of the steps. No, you can't expect to find all the steps as suggested. That's ridiculous nonsense. RNA viruses mutate like mad. Instead you use evolutionary trees, and look at the apparent rate of mutations. There are multiple hypotheses for how SARS-CoV-2 adapted to humans. One is a set of men who got very sick for quite a while. Immune compromised might be another. It is doubtful we will find anything crystal clear. Reality isn't like that.
Re: Item 2 - Just wrong. Wade is either grossly ignorant, or deliberately falsifying here. There is plenty of evidence of natural origin. Not hard to find such studies. Here's one.
(May 2020) A close relative of SARS-CoV-2 found in bats offers more evidence it evolved naturally.
Re: Item 3 - Just wrong. Furin is present and it's highly conserved in mammals. (May 2020) Structural and functional modelling of SARS-CoV-2 entry in animal models.
"... in a panel of animal models, i.e. guinea pig, dog, cat, rat, rabbit, ferret, mouse, hamster and macaque. Here we showed that ACE2, but not TMPRSS2 or Furin, has a higher level of sequence variability in the Spike protein interaction surface, which greatly influences Spike protein binding mode.... TMPRSS2 and Furin are sufficiently similar in the considered hosts not to drive susceptibility differences.
Re: Item 4 - Just wrong. There is NO SUCH THING as a human specific codon! There are mostly mild differences in the production of tRNA for different codons. But you can use a human sequence in E. coli, and vice versa. The codon optimization just gives you somewhat higher production, that's all. So no. This is just not true.
Bluntly put, Wade's article is utter garbage. Wade is not a scientist. The people pimping it (like Trish Wood) are not scientists. The whole business of "Wade's article" getting such intense press I find highly suspect. So should you. Don't be so damn gullible FFS!
I am not a scientist, just a reasonably bright guy that reads a lot, so this will have to be fought out by folks at a higher pay grade than me. Of course, the lab theory is not strictly a product of Mr. Wade. Nicholson Baker made a similar case in a New York Magazine article in January and there were folks that preceded him, going back the better part of a year (Josh Rogin, Saager Enjeti, Bret Weinstein, Matt Ridley, Crystal Ball, Steve Hilton, etc.) although they were largely met with derision from the MSM and the designated scientific establishment.
As I say, I am not a scientist and maybe you are. But now that the battle has been joined, let's hope that the experts - all of the experts - are allowed to get to the bottom of this thing.
I appreciate the considered response. I am a scientist. I have publications in epidemiology, (modeling and field), biodefense, terorrism, gene therapy (patents), and policy. I do vaccine development. I've got vaccines for Ebola, COVID-19, West Nile virus, Hanta, and a few others in the freezer.
All of the parties mentioned made their cases with innuendo, pointing to Chinese governmental behavior. None of them made a case worth a worn out t-shirt. I think it is all propaganda mixed with incompetent dabbling of the Dunning Kreuger variety. (Although the real Dunning Kreuger graph is much less damning than the meme variety.)
«1) The place of origin. If the virus had an animal origin there would be evidence of the virus in infected animals or humans outside of Wuhan, specifically in the region where these types of coronaviruses are known to come from. In a year of looking, no such evidence has materialized.»
* If it was man-made it could have been made somewhere else and deliberately or accidentally spread in Wuhan in order to cripple a key node of the chinese economy.
* If it was of natural origin it could also have started somewhere else and collected, selected, and deliberately spread in Wuhan.
Regardless of its origin, the big deal that the smear campaigns seems design to obfuscate is what happened after the Wuhan outbreak: the test-trace-isolate approach in China resulted in less than 5,000 deaths over a year in a population over 3 times larger than the USA one where there have been over 500,000 deaths, and this without mass lock-downs, or mass vaccination.
The fact that you use the phrase 'smear campaign' leads me to think that you take the current hard look at a possible lab leak to be an indictment of China. I don't see it that way - certainly not in my case at any rate. I would be far angrier with the hubris and duplicity of our medical authorities in funding this research (and then covering it up) than with the Chinese if an accidental lab leak had taken place.
You also use the phrase 'design(ed) to obfuscate' to characterize such an investigation. Again I disagree as to the motivation for finding out. If it was a lab leak then this has dramatic implications for whether this research should be done at all. Perhaps more importantly, it casts the credibility of Fauci and the medical research community more generally into question on all of the issues that it has opined on, most importantly those regarding vaccines, therapeutics, and confinement.
As to your points that speak to the virus having been hatched someplace else and then planted in Wuhan, I suppose anything is possible. This is the official Chinese position, or is at least one that they trot out periodically when they are feeling particularly defensive. More specifically, they have claimed that the virus was created in our bio lab at Ft. Detrick, MD and then deliberately released at the worldwide military games in Wuhan in the fall of '19 in order to sabotage the Chinese economy.
Godfree Roberts, who I believe lives in China and is quite sympathetic to the Chinese viewpoint, has also promoted this theory. Again, I suppose anything is possible but Occam's razor generally cuts in the right direction and with the most efficiency.
"resulted in less than 5,000 deaths over a year in a population over 3 times larger than the USA"
Regardless of the truth in those numbers, which is to say I doubt there's much, I've wondered why it was that China took such unprecedented steps to eradicate covid if its scientists weren't familiarized with it. Almost like its leading scientists knew exactly what it was (at the time).
«Regardless of the truth in those numbers, which is to say I doubt there's much»
Similar sickness and death rates have been reported by China-Taiwan, Korea-south, Kerala, New Zealand, Vietnam and Japan. It is shocking to imagine that they are all complicit with Chinese Communist Party. :-)
«I've wondered why it was that China took such unprecedented steps to eradicate covid if its scientists weren't familiarized with it. Almost like its leading scientists knew exactly what it was (at the time).»
The same approach with the same results was taken by China-Taiwan, Korea-south, Kerala, New Zealand, Vietnam and Japan. It is shocking to imagine that the leading scientists in those countries “knew exactly what it was”.
Or perhaps your comment is made entirely of handwaving smears.
You're ignoring how China led with its unprecedented steps and many other countries followed, including us, because, well, they were unprecedented.
But haven't you ever wondered why China locked down - and I mean *locked down*, China style - many of its major cities if covid wasn't killing its people? Or that China was deathly afraid of what it released. Or both?
«You're ignoring how China led with its unprecedented steps and many other countries followed, including us, because, well, they were unprecedented.»
That the steps were "unprecedented" seems to me pure hallucinatory smears, here is appropriately for this post some "fact checking", for example in strongly "anti-communist" China-Taiwan similar steps were not at all unprecedented, they were part of a plan:
“Authorities activated the island's Central Epidemic Command Center, which was set up in the wake of SARS, to coordinate between different ministries. The government also ramped up face mask and protective equipment production to make sure there would be a steady supply of PPE. The government also invested in mass testing and quick and effective contact tracing. Former Taiwanese Vice President Chen Chien-jen, who is an epidemiologist by training, said lockdowns are not ideal. Chen also said that the type of mass-testing schemes undertaken in mainland China, where millions of people are screened when a handful of cases are detected, are also unnecessary. "Very careful contact tracing, and very stringent quarantines of close contacts are the best way to contain Covid-19," he said.”
The "anti-communist" governments of China-Taiwan and Singapore accordingly took "unprecedented" measures that had been carried out in previous epidemics at the end of December 2020:
Taiwan has implemented more stringent inspection measures for inbound flights from Wuhan, China, following an outbreak of pneumonia in the city, according to the Centers for Disease Control under the Ministry of Health and Welfare Dec. 31, 2019.”
Not quite, and anyhow other places occasionally: it takes time to prepare for mass testing and trace-isolate. The boast by the ex vice-president of China-Taiwan that no lock-down is ever needed is quite excessive. But there is a big difference between a mass lock-down of an entire country for a year and a some weeks in some place or another, that said the Wuhan metropolitan area has 10-11 million people, so it has more people than many countries.
“The Chinese city of Qingdao is testing its entire population of nine million people for Covid-19 over a period of five days. The mass testing comes after the discovery of a dozen cases linked to a hospital treating coronavirus patients arriving from abroad. In May, China tested the entire city of Wuhan - home to 11 million people and the epicentre of the global pandemic. The country has largely brought the virus under control. That is in stark contrast to other parts of the world, where there are still high case numbers and lockdown restrictions of varying severity. In a statement posted to Chinese social media site Weibo, Qingdao's Municipal Health Commission said six new cases and six asymptomatic cases had been discovered.”
BTW not everywhere, Bloomberg BusinessWeek has also reported that "communist" Minnesota has done a mass testing plan, even if not quite on such a large scale and speed as in other countries:
And that is the real story, not vaccinations, not lock-down, not masks, which are all distractions from the stark comparison between neoliberal countries and civilized countries. In the USA, UK, etc. the priority has been whichever policy impacted least the upper-middle and upper classes, and made the best marketing copy for "big pharma". It is not as if test-trace-isolate was unknown to "atlantic" epidemiologists, here are articles written early in 2020 be the UK Chief Medical Officer and Chief Science Officer:
“Sir Patrick Vallance says testing needs to be done at scale to find outbreaks and isolate people [...] Sir Patrick Vallance’s comments echo those of Chris Whitty, England’s chief medical officer, who said a week ago that Germany “got ahead” in testing people for Covid-19 and that the UK needed to learn from that.”
Eventually, even Bloomberg BusinessWeek broke with the neoliberal ideology that not getting infected and not infecting others is a matter of individual choice:
“Better, Faster Testing Is the Path to an American Comeback
Imagine going safely to a bar, or a wedding, or parent-teacher night, without a vaccine. It’s still possible, if the U.S. can get its act together.”
On this the Democratic politicians and press have not at all criticized the Trump policies, have respected that neoliberal ideology, just arguing distractingly about how hard lock-downs should be and how fabulous "big pharma saviours of humanity" have been.
That is a rather vague and difficult questions, because "outbreak" is not well defined: in China and elsewhere there are "outbreaks" of something almost every year, and SARS-2 symptoms, at least initially, can easily be mistake for something else, and many people infected with SARS-2 have no symptoms or trivial symptoms, so the SARS-2 outbreak in Wuhan could have started well before it got noticed and recognized as a new thing.
As to noticed and as a new thing, that was sometimes in December 2019. The official UK government timeline for example gives "end of December":
«On 31 December 2019, the World Health Organization (WHO) was informed of a cluster of cases of pneumonia of unknown cause detected in Wuhan City, Hubei Province, China.»
The WHO statement has these details:
«Symptom onset of the 41 confirmed nCoV cases ranges from 8 December 2019 to 2 January 2020. No additional cases have been detected since 3 January 2020. The clinical signs and symptoms reported are mainly fever, with a few cases having difficulty in breathing, and chest radiographs showing invasive pneumonic infiltrates in both lungs.»
The WHO a few days later called it “Pneumonia of unknown cause – China”. Wikipedia has a 2019 timeline that says:
«Phylogenetics estimates that SARS-CoV-2 arose in October or November 2019. It is not known whether the virus itself evolved in wildlife populations or if its distinctive spike proteins were selected for after zoonotic transfer to humans. A September 2020 review noted "The possibility that the COVID-19 infection had already spread to Europe at the end of last year is now indicated by abundant, even if partially circumstantial, evidence", including pneumonia case numbers and radiology in France and Italy in November and December. RT-PCR (Reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction) testing of untreated wastewater samples from Brazil and Italy have suggested detection of SARS-CoV-2 as early as November and December 2019, respectively, but the methods of such sewage studies have not been optimised, many have not been peer reviewed, details are often missing, and there is a risk of false positives due to contamination or if only one gene target is detected. Antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 receptor-binding domain were reported in 111 (11.6%) of 959 asymptomatic participants in a lung cancer screening trial in Italy from September 2019, which the authors claim may indicate an earlier start to the COVID-19 pandemic. The World Health Organization stated it was reviewing the results, seeking verification of the neutralization results, and that "the possibility that the virus may have silently circulated elsewhere cannot be ruled out"»
In any case the timeline is an interesting detail for amusement, the real story is that the government of China-Taiwan and other thoroughly capitalist countries as well as as "communist" ones have had negligible sickness and deaths rates thanks to state funded and organized test-trace-isolate, with nearly no lockdowns and nearly no business or jobs losses, and are in no hurry to be guinea pigs for vaccines.
Yet every expert rubbished the lab leak hypothesis when it was first proposed. And all 17 of the WHO inspectors plus their 17 Chinese counterparts ranked it least likely.
Okay, so what are you proposing then? That the virus began naturally somewhere years ago; has been circulating but somehow not causing a detectable outbreak; somehow made its way to Wuhan in late 2019; and then started an outbreak there?
Is that your hypothesis? How many of those 17 WHO inspectors have ranked your hypothesis as likely? If you think it's significant that they ranked the lab leak hypothesis least likely, then surely you have to accept that it's significant if they didn't rank your hypothesis higher? Or is their opinion only relevent for hypotheses you don't like, but doesn't count when it's yours?
I admittedly haven’t read much on the lab origin stuff, as Wade’s article got just a *bit* too technical for me and my eyes glazed over, but has anybody reconciled the lab leak theory with claims based on analyzing sewage (I think?) and finding reason to believe the virus has been in USA/Europe for many months longer than initially believed? Can the two theories even coexist or are they in competition? I really haven’t looked much into either one but it seems like they both have their own set of implications that kind of compete with each other.
All valid hypotheses compete with one another to some extent. In the case of the Wuhan story, if you put the two major hypotheses respectively on a scale, the evidence is tipping in favor of a lab release. Give Wade's article another go; it's worth the effort.
Gotcha, I’ll give it another look, thanks. Sorry my question was vague and I probably shouldn’t have asked if they “compete” per se when I was really asking if they’re mutually exclusive. I’ll give Wade’s article that second look though and I imagine that will give me a different perspective regardless.
Faucci is an opportunist who has been milking the taxpayer for decades. The man should have retired at least a decade ago. He's almost 80 years old, fifteen years past the normal retirement age for Federal workers. He got into the health service as a means of avoiding military service in Vietnam (doctors were subjected to be drafted into one of the military services but they could join Public Health as an alternative.)
He turned 80 last December. I lost ALL respect for him the minute he flip flopped on the masks within a month in the spring of 2020. The truth will come out about the gain of function funding by Fauci via the NAIAD in the Wuhan lab and his connection to it all. He's lied and lied and lied. Just listen to Joe Rogin, WAPO editorial writer out with a new book, discussing it on the Megyn Kelly podcast. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/covid-truth-on-wuhan-lab-herd-immunity-vaccines-variants/id1532976305?i=1000517073772
I agree with you on the conflict of interest point - but re vaccines, is it better to prevent a disease than to have to treat it .... The issue with these particular vaccines is another story, a patent story ...
One more comment since I did not pick up on the main point that you made until just now. You state that it is better to prevent a disease than to have to treat it. Right.
What I did not make clear in my prior posts is that ivermectin can be use not only to treat but also as a prophylactic - thus preventing someone from coming down with the disease in the first place. India is using it in this capacity - and Big Pharma is not pleased.
An important point that I did not make - thanks for the question.
Very interesting - just out of curiosity, are there any scientific reviews of the studies mentioned ...
How about side effects, immediate and long term ...
What it seems to me you are suggesting is that if we all took ivermectin, as prescribed, "until this thing blows over" (by Easter, maybe?), that we could forego masks and social distancing anywhere and everywhere.... Yes? No?
I don't take a doctrinaire stance on ivermectin one way or the other. It may well be the case that taking a course of ivermectin, as suggested by these doctors, is preferable to taking the new vaccines, the long term effects of which are anyone's guess.
There is the prudence argument with respect to the vaccines. These are not ordinary vaccines in the sense of injecting a dead or attenuated virus into the body so as to trigger an ordinary immune response. None of the covid vaccines are in that category and the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines in particular use a cutting edge technology (MRNA encapsulated by a lipid envelope) never been tried before. Since these 'vaccines' rely on an entirely new and tested method to generate antibodies, the long term (even mid term) effects are undetermined at this point.
If someone could take the equivalent of aspirin (e.g. ivermectin) until this thing blows over as opposed to an untried therapy that operates at the RNA level, many would do so. Furthermore, the law mandates it: remember, if there is a viable therapeutic to treat an illness then such a 'vaccine' would be deemed too unproven to be permitted to be used.
Jamie Metzl, a member of the World Health Organization's International Advisory Committee on Human Genome Editing, has speculated that the coronavirus originated in a lab in Wuhan, China.
In 2015 Wuhan lab was studying " Zoonotic Transition" (Bats) how an animal virus penetrates a human cell.
Metzl, to his credit, has been saying this for a while. With respect to FB, they have gone from being the most tolerant of the tech platforms to being the most restrictive. Remember Zuckerberg's dismissal of the left's accusation that the Russians' manipulation of his platform was responsible for Trump's election in '16? Now FB will not even allow a recording of Trump's voice to be on the platform!
I am surprised that FB only removed your post and not you.
I only go to FB for family communication. I don't want to be tainted by misinformation. My husband who was a Progressive, but is waking up, can't believe he's being censored. When I complained about them doing it 2 years ago, he laughed at me.
Several are based on combining a basically harmless viruses with parts of the spike protein - the mRNA ones are new to vaccine application, I agree - and have several downsides, more expensive, double dose, excessive cold storage requirements, more expensive, etc - did you mean "tested" or "untested"
Don't think Ivermectin is the "equivalent" of aspirin - It is a pharmaceutical, and has side effects of it's own - it is used as a Rx for various conditions, not as a preventative - which is what you seem to suggest - "take it until this thing blows over" - potentially for years?
Kindly tell me, citation, "where if there is a viable therapeutic to treat an illness then such a 'vaccine' would be deemed too unproven to be permitted to be used."
I repeat - seems to me better to prevent than to have to treat ...
'Tested' should have been 'untested' - late at night and typing too fast.
Ivermectin seems to be remarkably safe for an effective anti-viral. The group headed by Paul Marik and Pierre Cory is probably the best source of information. Some links:
The Secretary may issue an authorization under this section with respect to the emergency use of a product only if, after consultation with the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response, the Director of the National Institutes of Health, and the Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (to the extent feasible and appropriate given the applicable circumstances described in subsection (b)(1)), the Secretary concludes—
(1)that an agent referred to in a declaration under subsection (b) can cause a serious or life-threatening disease or condition;
(2)that, based on the totality of scientific evidence available to the Secretary, including data from adequate and well-controlled clinical trials, if available, it is reasonable to believe that—
(A)the product may be effective in diagnosing, treating, or preventing—
(i)such disease or condition; or
(ii)a serious or life-threatening disease or condition caused by a product authorized under this section, approved or cleared under this chapter, or licensed under section 351 of the Public Health Service Act [42 U.S.C. 262], for diagnosing, treating, or preventing such a disease or condition caused by such an agent; and
(B)the known and potential benefits of the product, when used to diagnose, prevent, or treat such disease or condition, outweigh the known and potential risks of the product, taking into consideration the material threat posed by the agent or agents identified in a declaration under subsection (b)(1)(D), if applicable;
(3)that there is no adequate, approved, and available alternative to the product for diagnosing, preventing, or treating such disease or condition;
This is why I ask for citations - actual wording matters ...
So, in this case the wording says "The Sec. may issue an authorization only if ..... the Sec concludes .... there is no adequate alternative for ... preventing or treating such disease ... "
So the ? is has the Sec concluded that there IS such an available alternative ...
You can argue that he should have concluded this with regard to Ivermectin, but if he didn't, he was not precluded from issuing the EUA with regard to the vaccine ...
If we work under an assumption that the lab-leak theory is true (and there is no evidence, as I understand, of natural development and spread of this virus,) then it would make sense why Fauci was foisted upon us to take the heat for what he had a hand in creating. No one wanted this hot potato. And as a result of all the ass-covering of the last year+ (again, if the lab-leak theory is true,) the powers that be have worsened our collective health, nearly cratered our economy, funneled trillions more dollars to billionaires, and politicized public health to such a degree that effective future communication in this realm are severely damaged. I could not be more disgusted.
Plenty of evidence for natural. Zero for "lab leak". Here's what I replied to "ChesterView" above.
Re: Item 1 - Just wrong. There are closely related viruses as far as Vietnam. I don't have the cite at my fingertips, but I saw that one. This argument is also like the old "missing link" stories that aimed to prove humans weren't evolved from lesser primates because we couldn't find all of the steps. No, you can't expect to find all the steps as suggested. That's ridiculous nonsense. RNA viruses mutate like mad. Instead you use evolutionary trees, and look at the apparent rate of mutations. There are multiple hypotheses for how SARS-CoV-2 adapted to humans. One is a set of men who got very sick for quite a while. Immune compromised might be another. It is doubtful we will find anything crystal clear. Reality isn't like that.
Re: Item 2 - Just wrong. Wade is either grossly ignorant, or deliberately falsifying here. There is plenty of evidence of natural origin. Not hard to find such studies. Here's one.
(May 2020) A close relative of SARS-CoV-2 found in bats offers more evidence it evolved naturally.
Re: Item 3 - Just wrong. Furin is present and it's highly conserved in mammals. (May 2020) Structural and functional modelling of SARS-CoV-2 entry in animal models.
"... in a panel of animal models, i.e. guinea pig, dog, cat, rat, rabbit, ferret, mouse, hamster and macaque. Here we showed that ACE2, but not TMPRSS2 or Furin, has a higher level of sequence variability in the Spike protein interaction surface, which greatly influences Spike protein binding mode.... TMPRSS2 and Furin are sufficiently similar in the considered hosts not to drive susceptibility differences.
Re: Item 4 - Just wrong. There is NO SUCH THING as a human specific codon! There are mostly mild differences in the production of tRNA for different codons. But you can use a human sequence in E. coli, and vice versa. The codon optimization just gives you somewhat higher production, that's all. So no. This is just not true.
Bluntly put, Wade's article is utter garbage. Wade is not a scientist. The people pimping it (like Trish Wood) are not scientists. The whole business of "Wade's article" getting such intense press I find highly suspect. So should you. Don't be so damn gullible FFS!
It's foolish to expect 30-year-old humanities graduates, whose only prior exposure to science was the natural history survey in their sophomore years, and who clearly regard "science" as simply another ideology like Marxism or critical race theory, to be our gatekeepers and interpreters of contemporary scientific understanding.
Meanwhile, though I suppose a case could be made that skeptical opinions on such ideas as the efficacy of masks or vaccines ought to be squelched in the name of public health, how could public health possibly be served by repressing discussions about the origin of the disease? After all, aren't these new cheerleaders for science at all interested in how COVID-19 appeared or how we can ensure it never happens again?
When the Nicholas Wade article appeared I was stunned, since if nothing else it is clear there's a preponderance of circumstantial evidence for the lab leak hypothesis, the notion that in fact this entire pandemic would never have happened if the US government hadn't funded deliberate attempts to make a more communicable and lethal virus. And isn't it at all newsworthy that the author of the original refutations of the lab leak hypothesis was actually one of the two people in the world most responsible if COVID-19 was in fact developed in a lab (and he's been frantically pushing that line ever since, as of course anyone of merely average integrity would if he had actually unleashed the current pandemic on the world)?
And yet I have heard (though cannot confirm) that links to a twenty page article on the lab leak hypothesis that appeared in New York Magazine in January were being auto-scrubbed from the YouTube comments section. What possible public health priority was served by that?
If the lab leak theory turns out to be true, the way to prevent another COVID-like disaster will be revealed as simple: prohibit gain-of-function research. That sounds like an easy fix to me, one we should be grateful for. And we can never know whether it's possible without fully investigating how this thing started.
Once again the media, through towering hubris, have stepped on their collective dicks; and for some crazy reason haven't yet twigged that people are beginning to notice these things.
Nicholson Baker in NY Magazine wrote the story in January. It took an author with little prior knowledge to say things that a world full of experts could not.
The Wuhan Lab origin was first known to me 3-17-20, see article below. The writing is a bit hysterical but click thru the links and you'll find a wealth of substantiation. IMO the story has simply been buried, deleted, and ridiculed for over a year exclusively due to TDS. Politics is the only lens for the MSM cyclops.
tl/dr article; gain of function work in bats by NIH at UNC was deemed too dangerous by US gov't, so UNC lab closed down. Many of the researchers were welcomed to Wuhan Lab to continue their research. Wuhan lab with documented prior history of containment lapses effs up.
I have said since last year that I thought folks on both sides of the Pacific knew more about this than they were revealing - but that we would probably never know because it was just too politically fraught ...
Further, if you think COVID-19 is bad, it's an old ladies tea party compared to a bioweapon. We know that multiple parties are trying to make bioweapons as we speak. They really want them. Do you SERIOUSLY believe that if we don't have people trained and ready to work on such problems, we will be able to deal with them well?!
«Further, if you think COVID-19 is bad, it's an old ladies tea party compared to a bioweapon.»
An interesting argument is that whether it was man-made or natural, SARS-2 could have been, or could be used as an *economic* bioweapon, as its main impact is its ability to overwhelm established health systems even without having high death rates, thus paralizying target economies, and if was deliberately deployed in Wuhan, it was to target an important node of the chinese economy.
With that, you see how China could, using exactly the same "logic" of conspiracy innuendo, accuse the USA of attacking China using COVID-19. Except they can add, "Why attack ourselves?"
This is why the rule, "Extraordinary accusations require extraordinary proof."
What is guaranteed, no matter what, is that there will be new pandemic viruses. You want to think that anything like Covid-19 must be man made. No reason to think that.
I've seen this for decades. Nice mommies and dudes standing up to oppose level 4 BSL facilities to research anthrax, Ebola, and more.
Just like Wuhan's lab, a BSL 4 brings potentially dangerous stuff in from OUTSIDE!
Who here is saying that a virus like SARS-Cov2 MUST be man made? I've seen no one here suggest that. But you seem to be suggesting, "really dangerous viruses occur naturally, so what does it matter if scientists also try to create really dangerous viruses in labs?"
Is that what you are saying?
And as a minor point, the gain of function research that WIV was doing on bat coronaviruses was taking place in BSL2 and BSL3 parts of the lab. Surely you wouldn't deny that this is reckless?
Wuhan Lab was studying "Zoonotic Transmission" How to penetrate a human cell with an animal virus. 3 of the Lab workers went to the Hospital in DECEMBER. That's why they are investigating THAT further.
"The public used to appreciate the humility of that approach, but what they get from us more often now are sanctimonious speeches about how reporters are intrepid seekers of truth who sleep next to God and gobble amphetamines so they can stay awake all night defending democracy from 'misinformation.'"
I once had to deal with a Politifact fact checker who clearly wanted to claim a (Republican) Senator got the numbers wrong on a topic in a speech he gave. (I had produced a report on the topic.) The guy clearly had an agenda, the numbers were straightforward, and I had to keep telling him that no, you can't do what he wanted to do with the numbers so he could claim the speech was wrong, etc. He had a hard time understanding you can't divide by zero. It wasn't even a controversial topic. In the end, he still got a quote he could edit to use to claim the Senator's statements were partially false. I can just imagine the researchers Politifact cherry-picked/misrepresented to "fact check" something as controversial as the lab origin possibility.
Even allowing for the usual human failures, that’s a crock. I’ll never forget the health insurance executive telling me the same thing - you guys never get it right, why should I talk to you. Then you gain experience and realize some folks have a highly personal view of what’s “right.” Meaning if you don’t explain it like I would have explained it and believe what I believe, you’re wrong, and an idiot, and a liar. Those folks will always be with us, and reporters will keep on trying to explain it the best they can.
I have been on the faculty of one of our leading medical schools for some time.
One of the very first things I drill into my students heads on their first day of rotating with me is THERE ARE NO FACTS IN MEDICINE. There is nothing in medicine that is so sacred that it is declared a fact.
To "fact-check" anything in medicine (and I would dare say science) in a political format is absolutely absurd.
I knew this whole COVID thing was going off the rails when I started seeing medical and scientific conjecture and hypotheses being "fact-checked". Then to have Twitter and Facebook censor anything that questions these "facts" added a whole other layer to the absurdity.
The only good thing about this whole affair is that our grandchildren are going to have quite a lot of laughs when they come to this part of the history book. "HOW COULD THOSE MORONS HAVE BEEN SO STUPID?" That is of course we survive. It is sometimes hard to imagine us surviving with the scum we have running medicine, the media, and our politics right now.
[The only good thing about this whole affair is that our grandchildren are going to have quite a lot of laughs when they come to this part of the history book. "HOW COULD THOSE MORONS HAVE BEEN SO STUPID?"]
I've often wondered how / what would be the thing that future generations look back to us as being complete dopes on (as we do to our ancestors). I didn't think it would be something we'd be able to see in real time, but here we are.
And still are!! I have a very resilient friend who has survived two bouts of cancer. Because of her health history, she took the mRNA as soon as it came out. Several months later, she wanted to go visit her son/grandchildren after they had been vaccinated. In the between time, she resumed her exercise regimen, etc. Her son asked both parents to quarantine (at home) for two weeks prior to driving out there despite all of them having been vaccinated. Talk about insane! The absurdity just doesn't end.
Science is about a methodology that ignores consensus and establishes, not checks, facts. Medicine is the second most primitive domain in science after climate science. I had the pleasure of working in the most primitive discipline in medicine, psychiatry.
I'm in my seventies and about 14 months from death (I'm tracking weight loss, frequency of lung infections, frequency of aphasia and several other objective measurements) and I'm gone in June/July next year from a combination of normal-pressure hydrocephalus, COPD, a lengthy list of neurological disorders, two CVAs, many TIAs. Already in a hospice-lite program. Gave up medicine when I returned to the US (med school and practice in Germany) not wishing to spend a year or two full-time relearning everything in English in my late forties. That was thirty years ago.
I salute you. There are no facts in medicine. Every patient is a universe of one. The scientists working in labs to create vaccines are heroes, but do not understand what a practitioner is. He/she is someone who will improve his/her patient's life using whatever is available. Sometimes that's hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin or magic to relieve pain. In Micronesia I encouraged physicians to learn pain-relief magic from local shamans. Funny, it looks just like hypnosis.
Thanks Matt - love subscribing to you. Love the comments and people here, great range of voices. But … Trump was right about hydroxychloroquine and other treatments and the Wuhan lab. So the so-called fact checking done by anti-Trump MSM lead to countless deaths. It's not just being misleading, they killed people. Just because they hated Trump. When is the media going to be held accountable for this?
Thanks, Jim, much appreciate your input. Trump was right it was a treatment that could save lives. Please don't accept what NIH says - for fourteen months I've been certain this “virus” was manmade. I've lost friends over this. But now, well, it's true. It always was.
But it is the symptoms that kill people, not the virus: respirators also treat the symptoms, but that seems to prevent a percentage of the sick from dying. So something is better than nothing.
However the point is always the same: cures and vaccines are good goals, but in the meantime a well funded and organized test-trace-isolate public health system can reduce sickness and economic impact to very small levels, and it has not been adopted in "Washington Consensus" countries because it is ideologically incompatible with reaganism.
Bill Heath makes a good argument below and I will prove his point about the American people by admitting I don't trust my government with that information even though I believe it would be a worthy and effective goal.
We were promised the census would never he used against us, but it was used during WWII by the FBI to identify and round up the Japanese for internment.
We were promised that vaccines are just vaccines, but we have repeatedly used DNA tests from this process to identify and target people for incarceration at home and drone strikes abroad.
You name a time we have trusted our government and I will give you an example of where they screwed us for trusting them. Those in power don't trust or respect us and will use all forms of violence and surveillance to keep us in line, enforcing rules against us that they openly violate with complete impunity themselves.
Why would I trust a group pf people with something like disease surveillance tracking when they have consistently lied and shown no trust in us?
It is practically incompatible with geography, size of population and mobility options. Reaganism has nothing to do with it. There are two countries, US and Australia, that were founded by people with an antipathy to automatic compliance with authority. Countries with a culture that supports automatic compliance with authority have no framework for understanding the attitude.
«It is practically incompatible with geography, size of population and mobility options. Reaganism has nothing to do with it.»
It seems comically stupid to think that the containment approaches of China-mainland, Kerala, Korea-south, Japan, have been "incompatible with geography, size of population and mobility options".
«There are two countries, US and Australia, that were founded by people with an antipathy to automatic compliance with authority.»
I am indeed aware that in both the US and Australia there are millions of people who exercise their indefatigable right to refuse wearing crotch masks in public or to drive around without the oppression of a government permit, because they are all "rugged individualists". :-)
Ask doctors what they've been taking all of this time to prevent COVID and they'll tell you hydroxychloroquine. It's why parts of Africa have seen very low COVID cases; they take it routinely to prevent malaria.
The trouble is, IMO, in so many discussions our opinion of the information disseminated by any particular party depends on our opinion of the party - so "anything so-and-so says must be wrong (or right) because so-and-so says it!" It is not judged, or even discussed, on whether or not the actual point may, in fact, be valid. As they say, even a broken clock is right twice a day ...
Genuine question: what do you think "accountability" looks like here? What does holding the media accountable mean outside of pointing to their failures?
excellent question. The media knowingly falsified, withheld and demonized valuable information that could have saved lives. I would like for them yo be put on trial. These media people have not only disgraced one of the greatest things ever - a free press - but have used it without any moral compass. This is criminal. And why Greenwald, Taibbi, James O'Keefe, among others are heroes.
I don't think you want to increase the likelihood of the government putting journalists on trial.
Take something like the lead up to the Iraq War. Journalists were systematically lied to by government officials to drum up cause for an unjust war. Though some were smart enough to see through the sham, others listened to senior intelligence & military brass and reported their story.
What happens to them in this situation? The get prosecuted by the same people who lied to them?
None of the media missing on big stories is particularly new. The skepticism from the vast majority of the press during the outset of Watergate is instructive here too among dozens of other stories of massive importance.
I get wanting some consequences for this stuff, but outside refusing to read people you believe to be liars (and libel cases), I'm not sure of a remedy that makes sense. Don't think we want the gov't prosecuting this. At all.
struggle with this one so perhaps you can help me.
I'm a classic liberal on the 1st amendment, but I have come to realize that some people in our democracy have more first amendment protection than others.
A classic example, prosecutors have absolute immunity in our system due to the Constitutional activism of some Conservative judges in the past.
If a prosecutor goes to the media and implies that a lesser crime I was involved in involved murder when that is not true and I was never charged with that, the prosecutor is protected from civil liability by absolute immunity and criminal liability by the fact that he's a prosecutor and is not going to prosecute himself.
As long as the media gives an "according to police" they can repeat any lie the prosecutor tells them with complete 1st amendment protection.
Now I'm sitting in a courtroom with jurors that have read in the local paper that my case involved murder while the prosecutor claims I cannot raise this issue since I was never charged with murder, which most judges will support.
I'm now convicted and spending the rest of my life in prison based on a false claim intentionally spread by a prosecutor in secure a conviction for something else. This is not a hypothetical. Prosecutors play this game with the media whenever they have a well known jury trial to pollute potential jurors in their favor to ensure a conviction.
Can this be defended from a classic liberal standpoint? Or, is a better to adopt Hammurabi's code: He who knowingly tells a lie about another person is guilty of that which he lies about?
Put another way, if you are going to falsely destroy another person's life you will have skin in the game, so think twice.
In such a case, can we have a Press with full 1st amendment protections when they use that power to deny the freedom and right to a fair trial to others?
Another example: A Newspaper supports the criminalization of some form of speech they don't approve of under the ubiquitous "fire in a crowded theater" argument that the Supreme Court had soundly defeated, but is still ubiquitous as an excuse to criminalize unpopular speech at the State Supreme Court level.
Does the press have a 1st amendment right to argue that other citizens should not have a 1st amendment right, but they should? What they call "hiding behind the Constitution" when other make unpopular speech they don't approve of?
I genuinely have no good answer and would appreciate your thoughts.
I'm in full agreement that some people have *more* first amendment rights than others and, additionally, that some speech is more powerful than other speech both in practice and as legal precedent. Cops are of course a great example---their burden for truth-telling should be higher but they lie to the media and in court with impunity. The lead up to the Iraq War is my stock example here for a reason: hundreds of thousands died for a lie. Zero consequences for the responsible officials. Domestic spying is another gutting example: look at the difference between Snowden and someone like Jake Clapper. The latter is regarded as a hero in some circles and most of our mainstream politicians treat Snowden as some traitor or pariah when he exhibited rare bravery at lifelong personal cost.
The vast differences between different classes 1A rights is a key point though. You bring up "the press have a 1st amendment right to argue that other citizens should not have a 1st amendment right." I'd also point to Ron DeSantis in Florida signing a law that makes certain Facebook can't "censor" people running for office but, of course, zero protections for the rabble. This stuff is pervasive and depressing.
As for the remedy? I wish I knew. There's a big difference, of course, with being wrong honestly and knowingly lying, especially in court or print. Proving the latter is difficult. In a world where shame and dignity mattered, there would be a reputation cost to lying. You probably don't need me to tell you that world does not exist (Marc Thiessen, America's number one torture advocate, is a syndicated columnist---just one of about a billion examples but one that always chaps my hide). We just have so many people in this country who operate not under a rubric of what's right but rather what they want and what they can get away with.
We all want consequences for deceit but when the arbiter is our government it's hard to see a way out.
It sounds like you struggle with many of the same challenges I do on this topic and I suspect we come down on the same side on protected speech as well. Your Marc Theissan and Ron DeSantis/Facebook examples are excellent as is your police example where they face no consequences for lying. I prefer the Prosecutor example only because they have absolute immunity. That means even if you proved they intentionally lied for a malicious purpose in court, the judge would still throw out the case under absolute immunity. It's a legal shield from accountability not even the police can match. Prosecutor's in Louisiana under DA Harry Connick knowingly sent innocent black men to the death chamber by hiding evidence (Brady Violation) that proved they were not guilty of the crime.
The consequences? They are still working as private attorneys today. They didn't even lose their law license and can never be sued due to their absolute immunity.
Professionals differentiate themselves by curating a system of standards, following and having respect for the process and standing behind the product. These are the ingredients of accountability. It's hard to do all that and still be an effective front for advertisers and it's why there are so few real journalists in the world.
>>The consensus was so strong that some well-known voices saw social media accounts suspended or closed for speculating about Covid-19 having a “lab origin.”
Great line, and it belies the light, humorous tone of the article. A consensus so strong you get cancelled for contradicting it. It's nothing new; we've been seeing it for years in the climate change arena.
Anyone who blathers on about "scientific consensus" is either a liar or a fool, perhaps both.
It is unfortunate that we cannot resurrect Galileo to ask him what he thought of the consensus of his day.
Sadly, the population has been so dumbed-down with government "education" and endless propaganda that they believe that politically-spawned groupthink is science.
"Blind belief in authority is the greatest enemy of truth."
~ Albert Einstein
"Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatsoever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, required only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus."
The notion of "scientific consensus" is not just a form of the logical fallacy known as *argument from authority*, which used to be taught in school, back when schools actually educated people rather than indoctrinated them with fashionable leftist absurdities.
It is not just childish nonsense for ignoramuses, however. It is destructive of progress (which is no doubt why progressives love it so) and downright dangerous.
Here is a partial list of scientific consensus "deniers" proven right:
1. Ignaz Semmelweis, who suggested that doctors should wash their hands, and who eliminated puerpal fever as a result, was fired, harassed, forced to move, had his career destroyed, and died in a mental institution at age 47. All this because he went against consensus science.
2. J Harlen Bretz, the geologist who documented the catastrophic Missoula floods, was ridiculed and humiliated by uniformitarian "elders" for 30 years before his ideas were accepted. All this because he went against consensus science. He was eventually awarded the Penrose Medal.
3. Alfred Wegener, the geophysicist who first proposed continental drift, the basis of plate tectonics, was berated for over 40 years by mainstream geologists who organized to oppose him in favour of a trans-oceanic land bridge. All this because he went against consensus science.
4. Aristarchus of Samos, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, brilliant minds and leaders in their field all supported the heliocentric model. They were at some point either ignored, derided, vilified, or jailed for their beliefs.
All this because they went against consensus science.
5. Carl F. Gauss, discoverer of non-Euclidean geometry, self-censored his own work for 30 years for fear of ridicule, reprisal, and relegation. It did not become known until after his death. Similar published work was ridiculed.
All this because he went against consensus science.
6. Hans Alfven, a Nobel plasma physicist, showed that electric currents operate at large scales in the cosmos. His work was considered unorthodox and is still rejected despite providing answers to many of cosmology's problems.
All this because he went against consensus science.
7. Georg Cantor, creator of set theory in mathematics, was so fiercely attacked that he suffered long bouts of depression. He was called a charlatan and a corrupter of youth and his work was referred to as utter nonsense.
All this because he went against consensus science.
8. Kristian Birkeland, the man who explained the polar aurorae, had his views disputed and ridiculed as a fringe theory by mainstream scientists until fifty years after his death. He is thought by some to have committed suicide.
All this because he went against consensus science.
9. Gregor Mendel, founder of genetics, whose seminal paper was criticized by the scientific community, was ignored for over 35 years. Most of the leading scientists simply failed to understand his obscure and innovative work.
All this because he went against consensus science.
10. Michael Servetus discovered pulmonary circulation. As his work was deemed to be heretical, the inquisitors confiscated his property, arrested, imprisoned, tortured, and burned him at the stake atop a pyre of his own books.
All this because he went against consensus science.
11. Amedeo Avogadro's atomic-molecular theory was ignored by the scientific community, as was future similar work. It was confirmed four years after his death, yet it took fully one hundred years for his theory to be accepted.
All this because he went against consensus science.
«Science, on the contrary, required only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant.»
This is stupid, glib bullshit because of a substantive argument and a social argument:
* Substantively, it is based on the idea that "the real world" is perfectly and universally consistent, so that verifiability independent of place, time and observer viewpoint is possible. That happens only in "physics". A famous physicists claimed "physics is science, the rest is stamp collecting". Most so-called sciences are actually "disciplines" like medicine or political economy, where are there are no perfectly consistent and universal facts, but broad generalizations are possible and useful across large segments of time, space, and observer viewpoints.
* Even for "physics" verifiability is not the matter because most physics facts, while being in principle universally true and verifiable, cannot be in practice verified by everyone, they have to be taken on trust by the public as credible hearsay. Does the Higgs boson exist? Build your own 30km diameter accelerators and check it for yourself! Is the moon made of which cheese? Travel to the moon and check for yourself whether it is made of cheddar or feta cheese. :-)
Used to be the Catholic Church exercised that kind of authority over discourse. Going back to anything like that is not an improvement in the human condition.
Progressives and their lapdog media aren't clear on whether they want to be Vatican sycophants, Puritan witch burners, or Orwellian double-speakers. Decisions decisions decisions.
I’m getting the feeling that the Covid origin thing is about to unravel bigly and even the media, big tech and the fact checkers won’t be able to keep a lid on it. Fauci is close to getting his tit caught in the wringer.
"A related problem had to do with news companies using the misguided notion that the news is an exact science to promote the worse misconception that science is an exact science."
True that. Even those who point to this correct statement to challenge the false certainty of another person often follow that up with an insistence on their own false certainty.
Politics has poisoned everything. Mr. Taibbi's talked about how sports has been infected by politics. I've had the same experience with science forums.
It was once considered rude to mention politics at a science convention with politicians and journalists universally pilloried for their appropriation of what they called "science" minus the scientific method. Sure scientists had political views, but you were expected to not share them.
The academy has been increasingly infected by the same partisanship that has ruined everything else. Science doesn't "prove" anything. The entire reason scientist meet is to vigorously disprove things through a rigorous, structured debate, then go have a beer. As the debate grows increasingly partisan fewer people are able or willing to go get a beer when the debate is over. It's a drag.
Start with the beer and then move on to a structured debate. That way, you still get the beer and you get to watch your colleagues duke it out in a brawl.
How is it even conceivable that you have Brian Stelter celebrating with Poynter? Is there anyone who’s been more of a biased partisan activist over the last 4yrs?
I first read that as Brian Setzer and thought “Hey, I’d pay $100 for that.” But then I realized you were talking about the chubby, balding propagandist with no dignity.
If you're going to get people to believe that "a desire to maintain an environment where everyone feels welcome and included" is a good reason to fire someone for having an unpopular viewpoint, you're going to have to get them thinking a different way about facts
The “fact-checker” label has acquired the self-serving and ironically named function of the Ministry of Truth. Maybe it wasn’t always this way, but it is now.
"I don't know." is the only thing that Ivy Leaguers don't know how to say. To admit a lack of knowledge puts you in a weak position relative to someone who really knows the answer. Everyone in the political-intelligence-corporate media complex suffers from this.
That all of them don't know much is effing obvious. Look at how clueless most of them are when operating the touch screen devices on election night. That there needs to be a "special" person on each network to operate the device (John King) while someone else reads the screen (Wolf Blitzer) is proof that these people are no more than Ron Burgundy with worse screenwriters.
Do you think that Rachel Maddow knows more about how to fix a toilet than her building superintendent? Does Leslie Stahl really know about the breakup of the Ottoman Empire and the division of the Mandate of Palestine better than someone who lived in Jersusalem in 1945?
Paddy Chayefsky's Network was supposed to be satire, not a how-to manual.
«Paddy Chayefsky's Network was supposed to be satire, not a how-to manual»
Like "They iive", "Network" and many other pieces of supposed satire are thinly veiled documentaries, with only a few cosmetic exaggerations. Much as probably are David Icke's "lizard theory" or even QAnon (unless it was designed to discredit the "many rich people are monsters who get away with it" type of story).
Sorry - when being "clueless" about operating a touch screen is an indication that someone "doesn't know much", it indicates to me how far down the rabbit hole of "technology" we have gone ... I hate "touch screens", the fine points of making them work smoothly escape me - but I know a lot about other things, which, IMO, are far more important than mastering a "touch screen" ....
C'mon man. 90% of the viewers at home can figure out what Kornacki is doing just by watching, and most of the under-25s would be able to do it faster...
The most important sentences for me in this article are “ By labeling whatever the current scientific consensus happened to be an immutable “fact,” media outlets made the normal evolution of scientific debates look dishonest, and pointlessly heightened mistrust of both scientists and media”.
This drives me absolutely crazy as someone who has done research for 3-4 decades. I wish to the heavens people would understand the scientific method and realize that science is about the constant state of learning and readjusting ones “consensus” about What to believe. If the media and our leaders had spent just a tiny bit of time in treating us as intelligent adults as the led us through this process instead of treating it like some gosh awful competitive game we would have saved so many more people and jobs.
Anyone who claims to "believe in science" and to claim a certain interpretation by way of the number of scientists behind it is essentially a moron, with no actual understanding of science.
Indeed. Such claims always remind me of Einstein's reaction to a pamphlet entitled "A Hundred Scientists Against Einstein": "If I had been wrong, one would have been enough."
Exactly. No scientist "believes" in anything. I have been involved in program management for a variety of projects that include evolutionary biology, but I would never say "I believe in evolution". Rather, I understand evolutionary biology and its role in X."
Rfhirsch: I am with you in spirit! But...
In theory, a good scientist trades beliefs for hypotheses. In practice, YMMV (your mileage may vary)...
"No scientist "believes" in anything." kind of sounds a lot like a belief which, if you meant it to be ironic, is fantastic!
I believe in evolution. 😁
There you go with your "no true scotsman" logical fallacy! I believe in facts over the truth! Don't deny the science.
The problem is the "facts" change as we learn more
??? Who are you replying to???
I suggest scientists believe in the scientific method ....
Hope this skepticism extends to the “settled science” of “climate change”
Conservation is good, climate change is a popular way to make that happen
Dude, science is real. Haven’t you heard?
Oh man, “science is real” has definitely shot up the list of things I absolutely hate to hear/read, hahaha. Upon even a remotely critical read, it’s a completely meaningless statement, but for the in-crowd it’s a 100% confirmation of whose side you’re on.
I want to compile a list of all those kind of nauseating, meaningless, performative phrases in case I ever need to induce vomiting.
“Science is real.”
“Facts matter.”
“I believe in truth.”
That’s all I’ve got so far off the top of my head.
Vapid, performative signaling is the currency of the day.
Science is real. Deal with it. I'm a scientist.
Science may be real, but all models are wrong, as the eminent British statistician G.E.P. Box observed, before continuing, to note that some models are useful. Most of the politically fraught issues involving science of late have involved not ordinary science, but modeling.
DNY: "some models are useful"
Maybe I got the gist of your post wrong, if so, I apologize, but to clarify...
...the statement "some models are useful" in the context you mentioned it, did not refer to being politically useful or useful for manipulating opinion. Box meant some models make meaningful predictions, but none will perfectly predict the future.
Like the European weather models that predicted Hurricane Sandy or perhaps like Billy Bean's models that helped identify more productive baseball players.
Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness
Science is real is true. But "science is real" is what politicians say to promote their ideologies.
Yup, it’s rhetorical shorthand for, “I’m right and if you disagree with me, you’re a science denier.”
Saying “science is real” has about as much usefulness in terms of information conveyed as saying, “water is wet”.
And I am a scientist, too.
And Quite often paid for by large corporations, think tanks, NGO's, and covert agencies.
Better to say, "Real is science". Or that trying to objectively understand reality is science.
And I am a scientist, too, with both industry and academic careers.
I like that. Especially since so many who are fond of the phrase seem to believe that reality is subject to sociopolitical modeling.
The single sociology class I took was constant warfare until the teacher let me know I could get a "B" by NOT criticizing the models and experimental methodology and designs used to generate what passed for "knowledge" in the field (for the purpose of then spinning out about a 10-to-1 ratio of hypothetical bullshit to "science" in the class).
I took the deal, coz I was just dragging down the class. The other students were eager to learn what they were supposed to believe, as communicated by the "credentialed" class, and move on to the next mini-lobotomy.
I commit science... : )
Add to this list “I’m a scientist” and “Some scientists say”
It is what it is...
Haha that one drives my friend nuts, me and the other guys love deploying “it is what it is” at the exact right time to give him the maximum amount of grief. Never gets old. But yeah that’s definitely another one.
HOWEVER. "It is what it is." actually can communicate, clearly, the extent of one's knowledge wrt a particular thing. Kind of a "Well, we're starting 'Principle of Identity", folks."
It's a lot better than the pretense that you DO know something, but that something is based on someone liking a Tweet by someone who appeared on a podcast where they had once allowed an alt-right-adjacent person to speak.
There are worse places to start than acknowledged ignorance.
I just want to explode when I hear these things
Ok. Go boom. 💥
Spoken like a true hypocrite. Posting about how science isn't real on a device created by science.
You forgot:
"Heil, Hitler!"
Because science, bitches!
Ah, yes, the yard signs of the bien-pensants. I've been trying to come up with a really good a opposing version that would definitely include the lines "Science requires skepticism" and "Eros is not agape", to rendered in the same color scheme, of course.
I’d buy one.
We have a consensus, man. And soon enough, a new internal intelligence agency to root out the kind of wrongthink that, according to the recent Vice article, caused media careerists to wet their pants and suffer from PTSD.
The scientific method and hypothesis that come form it is not run as a democracy. In fact many times it may appear the direct opposite of a democracy. That is why doing polls among scientists is asinine
Every sane person believes in "science", if you define that as believing it is possible to obtain independently subjectively verifiable knowledge about the physical world. Whether you believe the opinions and inferences of any given scientist, or a group thereof, that's quite another matter. That's not believing in "science," it's believing in people.
No. In the common usage of words, science is the opposite of belief. Science seeks objective information and uses critical analysis to determine out best current understanding, regardless of emotional or political preferences or traditions. Belief is often without objective support, and sometimes in contradiction, and almost always driven by emotion, politics, and tradition.
A "belief" is simply an attitude that something about the world is true. Clearly, scientists believe it is it is possible to obtain independently subjectively verifiable knowledge about the physical world. Matter of fact, that is a terse definition of science offered by Karl Popper. If you don't believe it is possible to obtain independently subjectively verifiable knowledge about the physical world, you don't believe in science. Of course most scientific observations about the physical world are couched in probabilities, and not stated to be true or false. This is why fact checkers are stupid. They don't get that, and rate things true or false that should be rated more probable, less probable, or simply "impossible to ascertain." Probably the most idiotic thing about fact checkers is rating something false simply because they have no evidence it is true. That's the argumentum ad ignorantiam, and it shows up in a deplorably large number of fact checks.
If that is, indeed, the common usage of words, then the common usage understands neither science nor belief.
Not common usage, but the definition of “belief” used in epistemology. Weirdly, nobody here seems to tarry over defining “belief.” Or “science,” for that matter.
Don’t discount the role of “scientists” in the defamation of their own profession. Quite a few are more than eager to utilize the political wind of the moment in order to lift themselves and their careers into the limelight.
*cough*Osterholm*cough*Fauci*cough*Mann*cough*
In a more innocent time from the not too distant past, a chubby, middle aged scientist would push fake data to justify a Grant to fund his 6 month excursion to Paris to study "the link between the Parisian silver fish and throat cancer" with his 20 year old intern he recruited for the project.
Now he instead disseminates fake data to score political points. It's obscene to witness the decline of real science.
Admittedly, I can see some rationale for the former.
Well we all know the Coney Island Whitefish has a measurable impact on women's fertility...
Bruh, those silverfish are DANGEROUS.
«In a more innocent time from the not too distant past, a chubby, middle aged scientist would push fake data to justify a Grant to fund his 6 month excursion to Paris to study "the link between the Parisian silver fish and throat cancer" with his 20 year old intern he recruited for the project.»
The greatest such endeavour was a (female) sociologist who got quite a bit of funding from a foundation for a very serious proposal for "Studying social interactions in littoral communities in the third world", and spent the next three years on Copacana Beach in Rio photographing and chatting up cute people while getting a nice tan.
Finally, a research grant I can support.
True of any profession. Mediocrities are always in search of alternative paths to the top that don't require skill or effort.
Fair enough
*cough*Kaepernick*cough*
Good heavens man! All this coughing and your avatar is not wearing a mask.
Do you want to kill us all?
Indeed, another Birx in the wall.
Nice!!
Osterholm is excellent. You, OTOH are an ignoramus.
Osterholm was great at scaring the living shit out of people, like me, last year. And there was a lot of appropriateness to his concerns. But once it became obvious those concerns were not warranted because the virus was not especially deadly to the vast majority of the world, he should have just said "thank god" and left the podium. He didn't.
Hard to resist fame.
Yeah, a bunch of twats.
In my experience the most "pro-science" people are the ones with the least scientific education. When "the science" disagrees with their political views they're just as likely to discard it as the "anti-science" people. The whole thing is stupid. You can't simultaneously denigrate objective truth and be "pro-science".
You can if you are educated in the postmodern framework. Lysenko is back, baby.
Great point, except you always have to qualify a scientific truth as the best understanding at the moment. But yes, amazing how the “science is oppression” crowd changed sides, and will do so again when another inconvenient truth emerges.
Science is always suborned to morals. Only facts that do not directly contradict strongly held opinions are allowed by the mind. This shows up in cognitive dissidence within both political parties.
One has to constantly fight this. It is possible but very, very hard. I have found that the best way is to find people you trust with your whole being but may have different ways of thinking and experience. The key is trust. I. This day and age trust has been so shattered that people will just not listen to others that challenge their thinking. Fortunately I have a very small network i truly trust and who will challenge me. That helps but it is not always very comfortable
It's fucking bullshit bruh.
They've eroded public trust in actual science so much already. Using the phrase, "Trust the Science!" like a cudgel to beat people into their religious cult.
Bah. People bug me.
That's one reason China has had a Chief Censor for 2000 years: to weed out irresponsible disinformation that can damage the entire country.
«one reason China has had a Chief Censor for 2000 years: to weed out irresponsible disinformation that can damage the entire country»
So did most european countries for the past 1,000 years, and in both cases it was to protect incumbents under the guise of protecting "the established order". The main differences however between censorship in Europe and in China:
* In favour of China, it is such a diverse and fragmented and wild place that some bias in favour of "stability" is not purely for protecting incumbents.
* In favour of China, it has the "Mandate of the stars" principle, which differs from the european notion of the "Divine right of kings" in being conditional, and conditional on the benefit of the majority, which also limits self-serving protection of the incumbents.
* In favour of Europe, it had so many and varied jurisdictions that it was quite difficult to censors the same things everywhere, so there was always some place that would allow opinions "unpopular" elsewhere.
Yes. Very different officials, entirely different cultures. Chinese media is the most trusted on earth, largely because its government keeps its promises and doesn't tell lies.
«Chinese media is the most trusted on earth, largely because its government keeps its promises and doesn't tell lies.»
We all understand that you genuinely like China and even its government, but you are overselling this by a large factor.
As you know from recently published surveys, the different levels of government in China have very different appreciation rates, and the central government which has the best appreciation most likely has it because of an ancient chinese (and not just chinese one) concept, that the Emperor is benevolent even if the local officials are bad, and in this the "Gongchan" dynasty is not too different from most others.
BTW I don't doubt that much if not most of the central politicians and officials are fundamentally benevolent (even when corrupt); as a rather famous leader said, he did not see most of his family and friends being slaughtered in purges or killed in war for the chinese people to remain poor.
There are many other details that show that, from the 5 generals of the PLA who refused to carry out the Tien An Men repression to "Great Underground Wall of China" (two stories that in the "west" are not very much mentioned).
But even the central level of government is repressive, paranoid, and a gigantic mess, even if it is run by a cohort of engineers.
As to the press, there seems to be amazing press freedom as long as "hot" topics are avoided. That is not too different from the less tightly controlled countries of the "west" :-).
As a side note, I have been watching during lockdowns *a lot* of chinese TV series and movies (subtitled in english) on Viki.com and I have noticed over the years they have become more and more americanized, reflecting obviously what is happening to chinese culture. That is a very big long term problem. I hope that the chinese people will be as resistant to americanization as much as the japanese have been.
As you know from recently published surveys?
Last week the Washington Post published the result a survey of 20,000 Chinese. The UK's York University recruited more than 600 students from 53 universities across China to conduct one-on-one interviews online.
The result? "The data show that Chinese citizens’ trust in their national government increased to 98 percent. Their trust in local government also increased compared to 2018 levels — 91 percent of Chinese citizens surveyed now said they trust or trust completely the township-level government. Trust levels rose to 93 percent at the county level, 94 percent at the city level and 95 percent at the provincial level. These numbers suggest that Chinese citizens have become more trusting in all levels of government”.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/05/05/did-pandemic-shake-chinese-citizens-trust-their-government/?utm_source=China+Digest+English&utm_campaign=66b2666aff-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_8_15_2020_13_19_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&ct=t(EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_8_15_2020_13_19_COPY_01)
There is zero evidence of corruption at the top, policy-making level and overwhelming evidence–like 98% home ownership and ending extreme poverty–to the contrary.
But even the central level of government is repressive, paranoid, and a gigantic mess, even if it is run by a cohort of engineers.
As to "there seems to be amazing press freedom as long as "hot" topics are avoided," can you name one?
I recall watching Bill Clinton lambaste the President of China for an hour, live, on Chinese national TV, about Tiananmen.
I agree that they will be resistant to Americanization.
I've always known people were amazingly uninformed regarding even basic scientific facts (from about age 8). As I grew up, I saw that beyond the bog standard anti-intellectualism in K-12 education, adults were horrifically ill-served by reporting on science and matters that involved science.
It was routinely worse than would have been produced by a well-meaning 7-grader. How could this happen? Eventually I realized, and test out, what I later taught my kids: "Any science article, drop down at least 3, 4 paragraphs, sometimes all the way to the concluding paragraph, and you see something from a "Public Education Director for Corporation A" or "Spokesperson for the Department of Bureaus" or some other knowledgeable-sounding party. I told them to ask if the organization the spokesperson was representing had a vested interest in the result of the scientific inquiry, or situation to which science was supposedly being applied. The answer was, of course, always yes.
"And that's why you have an article supposedly about "science" in today's newspaper." All my kids report this approach has served them well, though it's not much of an insight nowadays.
Wishing to the heavens for people to understand is a waste of your effort. Not because it will bear no fruit, because it’s already so. People do understand, pundits pretend otherwise and dishonestly use the weaponized idea that science is absolute to push any given agenda. But the average Joe isn’t quite as simple as the MMS and our Social Media Overlords project. We get it
Thank you. As a scientist it drives me crazy that people don’t understand the scientific method and how there are no hard and fast ‘truths’ in science. You put it very well
I predicted some years ago, as the interwebs heralded the democratization of media, that ad populum would be the new arbiter of truth.
And the idiocracy marches on...
Fauci is correct on gain of function. It seems what YOU got from the COVID-19 pandemic is that we should not understand how diseases develop. We should NOT have trained anyone to deal with such events.
All we got from that research so far IS COVID 19. There is no guarantee you can train people to deal with a virus that may not have formed yet.
The media and "public health authorities" are a complete clown show.
The only time that quack Fauci has been right about anything is when he announced on 60 Minutes in March of 2020 that masks are useless, a fact all informed people have known since the Spanish Flu.
Regardless, we have the spectacle of Redfield, then director of the CDC, saying masks may be more effective than a vaccine.
Then we have the NYT, of all places, quoting a VT professor saying the "social distancing" nonsense was "almost like it was pulled out of thin air".
And, of course the tyrannical, impoverishing lockdowns which, like all the other "guidelines", show no statistical correlation with any Covid metric and therefore destroyed the financial lives of countless millions, for nothing.
And the latest clown-bureaucrat heading the CDC, Walensky, saying she has a sense of "impending doom".
And then we have ex-president Cheetoh's Experimental Emergency Warp Vax, which Kamala said she wouldn't take but then did, and which they now want to inject into children.
This despite the fact that, at last count, the CDC's own numbers show that 1086 people, in a nation of 320 milliion, under the age of 24 have succumbed to this plague. I'd like some "fact-checker" to explain how, exactly, that constitutes an "emergency".
My bullshit detector has run hot since Bush the Younger, but has now been pegged for over a year.
Something is up.
Masks are not supposed to protect you from the virus. They're designed to protect everyone from you. Why do you think doctor's wear masks in an operating room? It's not to protect them from the patient. It's to protect the patient from the doctors doing the operation. And no, masks are not supposed to filter out viruses and bacteria. They blunt the force of air coming out of your mouth when you sneeze; or in the case of the doctor's in the operating room, their normal breath (which contains bacteria). The blunting of the airflow keeps whatever you were spewing out confined to the area around your face, instead of around someone else's face.
Fact check.
So masks only filter one way ?? Please explain how this works.......
Then why have medical folk treating Covid patients wear N-95s?
Because there was and may still be a shortage ? Because they catch smaller particles than the cloth ones most everyone else is wearing ? Just because they're being worn doesn't mean they keep you from getting the virus or reduce your chances significantly.
In that case, who cares if there is a "shortage"? Those silly medical folk ....
WTF ? Do you think they didn't wear them before to protect patients from dead skin, facial air, boogers, etc from getting into a wound ?
Oh, good grief ....
N95 masks are particle masks and were NEVER designed to stop or reduce virons. Once again, sneezing into the crook of your arm also helps reduce the spread of the virus. WHAT'S YOUR POINT ?
I actually still have my CIF gas mask with a fresh filter. I can get more filters online pretty easily. I even have an adapter that lets me use the (mostly for painting/solvent) 3M filters they sell at Home Depot with it.
Never was tempted to use it during this entire thing, though. Dressing up in MOPP-4 for 14 months sounds like the dumbest thing ever.
Well maybe they weren't "designed" to (debatable, I suppose - but they do :D
Evidently they don't or people wearing them wouldn't get COVID 19 and that just isn't the case.
Funny how it says nothing about virus's on the box I have.........
Ignore the troll
We've been trying but you just keep posting your BS.
My ? was in response to igtc's "They're designed to protect everyone from you."
seems to me any old mask would do that, unless you have the virus...
They work to lower the dose of virus that people release and breathe in. FWIW - my brother tested filtering capacity. And made this video. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YSC1B2ZBSn4
Enjoy. I have the data somewhere.
Dude, there is nothing scientific about that video or that test. Even the guy that made it admits it.
Aha. He put the particulate monitor results in the video about 3/4 of the way through.
Virons are not random particles.
Just because the virons travel in moisture doesn't mean they need it to travel.
OMG! That's RIGHT! How could I forget about their little wings! https://www.deviantart.com/jeyawue/art/Winged-Virus-Xans-UNDERViRU5-704315254
That was some good science there sock puppet.
NO medium does not mean exclusively moisture now does it ?? Once again, you're full of shit.
Hahahahaha
Except the study you cited says they don't. We're still waiting for you to provide a study that says it needs spit or snot to travel, funpolice.
I never said it was, you're the one squirming all over and back peddling your earlier claims. Then you changed your name from funpolice to some military sounding handle...........makes you wonder.
Sorry, not "not all informed people know" that masks are useless ...
Most masks can be made useless by wearing undnsr the chin or not over the nose. Or on top of the head.
Yup!
Or by just not fitting or facial hair. On top of all that they don't filter down to the size they need to in order to stop virions.
That's the point - filtration and fit - and I beg to differ re filtration ....
Filter all you want but you'd be way better off social distancing and avoiding crowded buildings with HVAC systems rather than depending on a mask.
I'd be willing to bet the false sense of security brought on by masks transmitted this virus much more than anyone in the know would ever let on.
Funny how people that were avid about masks ended up getting COVID anyway.
Ever wonder why there are no stats one way or the other on cases contracted by non or casual mask wearing and mask extremists ? Weren't there dummies running around bragging about wearing 3 masks at once ?
I addressed these issues re "stats" in another comment ...
"I'd be willing to bet the false sense of security brought on by masks transmitted this virus"
That right there is the best argument against mask mandates, and it is 100% true.
Large, randomized controlled trial (RCT - the gold standard of scientific methodologies) in Denmark was published on Nov. 19 in the Annals of Internal Medicine which found no statistically significant effect of wearing masks, and actually found that masks might actually increase the infection rate.
https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-6817
WHO meta-analysis of 10 RCT studies back in 2019 which found “no evidence that face masks are effective in reducing the transmission of laboratory-confirmed influenza.”
https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/329438/9789241516839-eng.pdf
Masks are bullshit theatre.
From your first citation: Abstract
"Observational evidence suggests that mask wearing mitigates transmission of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). It is uncertain if this observed association arises through protection of uninfected wearers (protective effect), via reduced transmission from infected mask wearers (source control), or both."
From the second citation:
It was interesting - they said that there was no evidence that masks significantly helped, but they said that the quality of the evidence in this regard was "moderate" - and, they recommended that masks be worn! -
"RECOMMENDATION:Face masks worn by asymptomatic people are conditionally recommended in severe epidemics or pandemics, to reduce transmission in the community. Disposable, surgical masks are recommended to be worn at all times by symptomatic individuals when in contact with other individuals. Although there is no evidence that this is effective in reducing transmission, there is mechanistic plausibility for the potential effectiveness of this measure.Population: Population with symptomatic individuals; and general public for protectionWhen to apply: At all times for symptomatic individuals (disposable surgical mask), and in severe epidemics or pandemics for public protection (face masks)"
"Additional high-quality RCTs of the efficacy of face masks against laboratory-confirmed influenza would be valuable." In other words, the studies we have are not of sufficient quality to say that masks are of no use in preventing transmission
There is an ancient principle regarding the burden of proof, perhaps best expressed in Latin:
Ei incumbit probatio qui dicit, non qui negat.
Those that assert masks work have the burden of proving that they do. The reverse is not true - one cannot prove a negative.
Now, as a person with a scientific mindset, I am open to the hypothesis that masks are effective, but that is going to require proof, and that proof does not exist, even after decades of research.
This is how I know for certain that when little Mussolini politicians require my children to wear a fucking mask when they play basketball, and President Turnip-Brain wears a mask on a zoom call after being vaxxed, they are not "following the science" but rather are completely full of shit.
It is bullshit. All of it.
Multiple studies show that properly fitting masks, of the appropriate materials, significantly reduce the transmission of particles of the Covid nature - it is that simple ...
Who funded those studies and why don't we ever see studies that contradict those "multiple studies" ?? I wonder if it's to further enhance the fear of a virus with a 99.7% survival rate ??
«little Mussolini politicians require my children to wear a fucking mask when they play basketball»
They also require them to wear crotch masks. Try to bring your children to play basketball without one, and argue that your inimitable rights include refusing to wear one.
Basketball players don't wear cups, you imbecile.
Is there not a single one of you lot that has any idea whatsoever what you're talking about?
Ever?
«in Denmark was published on Nov. 19 in the Annals of Internal Medicine which found no statistically significant effect of wearing masks, and actually found that masks might actually increase the infection rate»
That is a widely "misrepresented" result, here are some comments by an eminent statistician and risk expert on that study:
https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1331950909467844609
“Nassim Nicholas Taleb @nntaleb · Nov 26, 2020
THEY GOT IT BACKWARDS! There are more flaws with the Danish Mask Study. In fact what is not flawed provides an overwhelming evidence in favor of masks (risk reduction >70%, perhaps >90%).”
https://medium.com/incerto/the-masks-masquerade-7de897b517b7
“In fact masks (and faceshields) supplemented with constraints of superspreader events can save us trillions of dollars in future lockdowns (and lawsuits) and be potentially sufficient (under adequate compliance) to stem the pandemic.”
Both the "communist" government of China-mainland and the "anti-communist" government of China-Taiwan have been mandating masks:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-09-17/behind-china-s-epic-dash-for-ppe-that-left-the-world-short-on-masks
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-03/tsai-ing-wen-taiwan-s-covid-crusher-bloomberg-50-2020
“Taiwan, with a population of 23 million people, has had just over 600 coronavirus cases and seven deaths, numbers kept low by widespread adoption of face masks after the island’s deadly experience with SARS.”
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/10/29/asia/taiwan-covid-19-intl-hnk/
“Authorities activated the island's Central Epidemic Command Center, which was set up in the wake of SARS, to coordinate between different ministries. The government also ramped up face mask and protective equipment production to make sure there would be a steady supply of PPE. The government also invested in mass testing and quick and effective contact tracing. Former Taiwanese Vice President Chen Chien-jen, who is an epidemiologist by training, said lockdowns are not ideal. Chen also said that the type of mass-testing schemes undertaken in mainland China, where millions of people are screened when a handful of cases are detected, are also unnecessary. "Very careful contact tracing, and very stringent quarantines of close contacts are the best way to contain Covid-19," he said.”
https://twitter.com/CCahraman/status/1330553370365415424
“My son came back from Taiwan in June. He said everyone wore masks, everything was open and his temp was checked in stores. He flew into LAX, they didn’t ask him one health Q nor where he was coming from. Nada!! He self quarantined with us for 2 weeks. Taiwan did it right!”
https://twitter.com/thatalicewu/status/1330287079708893184
“Upon our plane touching down in TPE, we were immediately placed in two lines: one for folks with a working intl cell phone, one for the rest of us (to buy a very affordable local SIM card.) The government is then able to track us while we are in the country Once through immigration and baggage, we are required to take govt-approved covid-safe cars to our quarantine hotels. (If you are a local, you can self-isolate at home.) No leaving your room (or home) for 15 days. Not for walks- nothing. [...] At any point, if you break quarantine - which they can tell by the movements of your phone - you could be fined 10-30k. They are quite serious on this point. Then again, they haven't had a case in 200 days. And everyone has been living their lives freely since February. [...] Again, not an expert. But again: EVERYONE IN TAIWAN HAS BEEN LIVING THEIR LIVES FREELY SINCE FEBRUARY! I mean yes, people voluntarily wear masks in public places, but otherwise, restaurants, subways, etc are packed. So....”
https://www.bloombergquint.com/businessweek/a-guide-to-2021-covid-vaccines-stimulus-sanity
“The flailing in Washington and state capitals looks even worse when juxtaposed with the success of China, which clamped down on Covid with compulsory mask wearking isolation of the sick, and effective contact tracing. Chinese are blithely eating in restaurants, sitting in theaters, attending school, and going back to work. On Jan. 18 the government reported GDP grew 2.3% in 2020, which makes China the only major economy to to avoid a contraction for the year. Exports helped: they rose 18% in December from a year earlier despite slow demand growth abroad because Chinese exporters grabbed market share from foreign rivals. [...] [...] The pandemic slammed the U.K.'s economy worse than any other member of the Group of Seven nations, with GDP declining an estimate 10.3%”
Random assignment of participants is only *one* criterion for a RCT experiment. You also have to selectively enforce your conditions exclusively on each group (your operational definition). You also need to have measures that are specifically sensitive to measuring the selective treatment effects in each group (dependent measure). Finally, your treatment needs to occur in a range of effect that is neither at the floor or ceiling.
While this study meets the first criteria, it fails on the others. There was no selective enforcement of the treatment condition; they use self-report of compliance with <50% reporting full compliance in the mask group. Positive antibody tests is non-specific because people can sero-convert without being infected (I know, I used to do vaccine research). Finally, the study was done in a region with low infection rates to begin with. Primary outcome was <2% on average, lower if you exclude sero-converted subjects. So overall they ran an uncontrolled RTC in a community with floor effects for infection rates using a non-specific measure; and they still found masks somewhat effective.
What I take from this is that if you have a community that already is practices good hygiene, then masks may not add much to your protection. But if you have a community with poor hygiene practices, mask wearing will add protection.
So, do masks work? Well it depends. If you live in a country like the US with infection rates +4% and poor hygiene to begin with then yes they will help. If you live in a country with people who are already hygiene conscious, then not so much.
"While this study meets the first criteria, it fails on the others."
Now let's look at the studies being cited supporting masks do work and hold them to the same scrutiny.
Or would that be "anti science" conspiracy theory...............
Not at all. Science is about forming an understanding that is as close to the truth as possible. What people do with that understanding, how they politicize it, generate narratives etc., is not the domain of science.
So the fact that you didn't scrutinize any of the studies supporting the other side of this argument means you were actually helping generate a narrative then doesn't it ?
Those are for SURGICAL masks. Not N95 masks.
"Large, randomized controlled trial (RCT - the gold standard of *clinical* scientific methodologies)". FTFY.
In other domains of human science, such as experimental psychology, the RCT is also known as an independent measures t-test; the simplest experimental design you can have.
Who said useless ? Unnecessary perhaps for the general public or maybe just they are way more useful as a fear mongering prop than actually reducing the spread of the virus.
Ah, a Fauci fan from the early days! :D
For all you hysterical true believers in masking, distancing and lockdowns out there, here's a little quiz on your knowledge of the effectiveness of your favorite totalitarian politician and "mitigation" mandate.
https://www.covidchartsquiz.com/
Good luck.
If it wasn't Covid, then what was it that kept our hospitals overflowing for months with critical patients, many of them dying? An outbreak of hypocondria?
Which hospitals were "overflowing"? Where, exactly?
Be specific now, and provide links.
So what, you're googling fingers broken? There's hundreds of examples:
https://www.sun-sentinel.com/coronavirus/fl-ne-broward-hospitals-getting-overflow-20200728-akz7k5wmubb2billpnofsqtqdy-story.html
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/dalhart-community-leaders-step-up-as-hospital-overflows-with-covid-19-cases/ar-BB1ajbwn
https://www.wkar.org/post/inside-third-surge-hospital-overflow#stream/0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDf3Bxcn2GY
https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/30/us/brooklyn-hospital-coronavirus-patients-deaths/index.html
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/16/pandemic-states-virus-rebound-429753
https://www.cnn.com/videos/world/2021/01/14/uk-london-hotel-covid-19-hospital-pandemic-abdelaziz-intl-ldn-vpx.cnn
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/covid-hospital-transfers-ornge-paramedic-services-1.6025803
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/hospitals-overflowing-bodies-us-epicenter-virus-69906283
https://www.inquirer.com/health/expert-opinions/emergency-rooms-wait-times-boarders-20200220.html
Well, now, let's take a look at a few of these, shall we?
* Sun Sentinel:
"According to state data, Miami-Dade has 17% available capacity at all of its hospitals as of Tuesday. Broward has 16% available capacity."
* MSN:
"No ICU capacity".
But wait!
"Coon Memorial Hospital is a critical access hospital that can safely care for four COVID-19 inpatients at one time"
Yes. Four! https://dhchd.org/report-card-7-24-20/
* Politico:
"The University of Utah Health System, one of the largest hospitals in the state, reported its ICU is 95 percent filled"
"Indiana has fewer than one-third of its ICU beds available"
"The area around El Paso, Texas, a city of nearly 700,000, has 10 remaining ICU beds"
* CNN:
The king of fake news, as usual, does not provide capacity numbers.
* Philly Enquirer:
This is my favorite of your citations, as it does not even mention Covid, but instead deals with long-term care.
You know what it *does* mention though?
"Hospital emergency rooms frequently operate at or above their capacity depending on a host of factors."
Perhaps you should consider actually reading all those articles you copy and paste from the google.
Now, I am not saying that there were *NO* hospitals that were overwhelmed, simply that the situation, like nearly all official "news" regarding Covid, was vastly overblown for dramatic effect.
One article conspicuously absent from your list is this:
CBS admits to using footage from Italy in NYC coronavirus report
https://nypost.com/2020/04/01/cbs-admits-to-using-footage-from-italy-in-report-about-nyc/
Hmmmm, I wonder why they felt the need to fabricate?
Also of interest is this:
* Thousands of healthcare workers are laid off or furloughed as coronavirus spreads *
"Across the nation, job losses in the healthcare sector have been second only to those in the restaurant industry, according to federal labor statistics."
https://news.yahoo.com/thousands-healthcare-workers-laid-off-120025623.html
* U.S. Field Hospitals Stand Down, Most Without Treating Any COVID-19 Patients *
https://www.npr.org/2020/05/07/851712311/u-s-field-hospitals-stand-down-most-without-treating-any-covid-19-patients
* Most U.S. Hospitals Are Empty. Soon They Might Be Closed for Good | Opinion *
https://www.newsweek.com/most-us-hospitals-are-empty-soon-they-might-closed-good-opinion-1500028
So, in the middle of a "pandemic", where hospitals are being "overwhelmed", health care workers are being let go in droves, unused field hospitals are removed, and most hospitals are empty.
Smells like bullshit to me.
I can’t remember where I saw it, but some website compiled a list of links to like a dozen articles in the Guardian over the past 8 years or so where they warned the NHS was at capacity, plus a host of other hospitals in LA and other cities in the States — this wouldn’t even be the first time in a decade that these hospitals redirected new patients elsewhere, but it was presented as this “unprecedented” advent that justified turning everyone’s lives upside down and stoking hatred against anybody who didn’t oblige to their insane demands.
Yes, I remember that as well.
The Graun is fake news bullshit.
Back in 2015 or 2016, when Greenwald was writing for them, I commented on an article castigating some company for pollution, noting that one of the photos in the article header was of the Animus River disaster, which was caused by EPA incompetence and which they had placed in an article header just a few months before about the disaster.
Naturally, my post was removed for violating their "community standards", the most important of which is not to expose the leftist charlatans at the Graun as propagandists.
Just for posterity, this is that collection of “hospitals maxed out” headlines:
https://www.jeremyrhammond.com/2020/12/22/remember-overwhelmed-hospitals-across-the-us-two-years-ago/
WTF does this have to do with masks reducing the spread of covid ??
FWIW - my interpretation of the mask flip flop is that medical personnel couldn't get masks because assclowns were stockpiling them like toilet paper. (Son of a friend did this. Filled his living room.) So, to let hospitals and clinics get masks they needed, Fauci and others announced masks don't work. It helped significantly.
Ah yes, the noble lie.
You little totalitarians never run out of your justifications for rulers lying and manipulating the capite censi, do you?
For the "common good", don't you know? Decided, of course, by you.
Piss off, you arrogant turd. It is your lot society must overcome to ever become truly civilized.
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
~William Pitt the Younger in a speech to parliament in 1783
Wait, aren't you the one that says masks don't work? But when Fauci said it, it was a lie?
Oh, are you still here?
I thought you were done wasting time by not presenting any data or facts to support your love affair with face-diapers.
And apparently you don't understand the meaning of the phrase "piss off".
Why don't you look it up?
Couldn't resist your obvious contradiction :D
Got any data on it?
Then why didn't they tell us to strap an old t-shirt to your face? That still counts.
"Never ascribe to conspiracy what can be explained by dumbass."
No, actually - because folks weren't wearing them, more got sick - more patients to treat for the medical folk, more exposure to the virus, more sick - and dead - medical folk ...
Can we see some evidence to support this supposition please ? I know CNN said it was so, but I'd like to see just how much difference wearing vs not wearing a mask actually makes......
Well, and i will make a supposition here, that catching it at all, and the severity of the disease if caught, is most probably dose related - sorta like walking next to a beehive - if a few bees sting you, painful but not serious, if a lot do, more of a problem - so reducing the dose of virus one is exposed to, which is what masks do, will make a difference. The problem is that to get the scientific rigor that requires a fair number of participants in a double blind study would require controls to be deliberately exposed to the virus - not considered an ethical thing to do ...
Why are we not seeing massive deaths/cases/issues from immigration detention centers and prisons?
Some of the biggest outbreaks have been in prisons .....
Medical Fact: all bleeding stops, sooner or later, one way or another.
Masks have improved drastically since the Spanish flu.
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#datatracker-home 587,342 deaths logged by CDC
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm#Comorbidities
Less than 6% died only of Covid, including the 1086 under 24. The rest died with it.
Thanks to the CDC changing the reporting protocols of 23 years especially for Covid, it is impossible to know who among the 94% actually died of it, rather than with it.
This is no accident.
Everything government and their media stenographers have done has been orchestrated to maximize the fear and panic to justify the biggest usurpation in the history of the formerly free world.
Stop believing the propaganda, you are being played.
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
~H. L. Mencken
You're absolutely on point.
I'd add that it's probably not a coincident that Trump's former producer at NBC suddenly moved up to heading CNN while the dipshit Cheeto soared into office.
My hunch: They lost their grip along the way and had to bake up a scheme to stay firmly in power.
It involved using Trump to play the part of "The Heel" to bring all the threats up out of the ground like worms using prongs and a current.
Guess what I saw last week... a formerly mostly vacant Nation Guard base nearby now has about 200 transport trucks and a couple of big fuel tankers sitting there.
They're going to have their little Domestic War on Terror, whether anyone likes it or not.
This guy Brian below this will be getting his grip as this unfolds and will see it.
The coup went off without firing a shot but they're so ready to wipe out anything resembling opposition.
Very scary times.
Never ascribe to conspiracy what can be explained by dumbass.
You might be thinking of Hanlon’s Razor, to whit….“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.”
You’re in here arguing/fighting about….what? You’re correct on several points, but don’t expect much of anyone to believe you. Here’s something I learned in Wuhan during the lockdown. Yes, I was in Wuhan for the entire charade, which allowed me several interesting conversations with doctors from Wuhan Medical Center regarding mask efficacy.
It’s not about filtration effectiveness or any of the other dumbshit stuff the morons in here choose to believe or disbelieve. It’s about probability distributions. One person, wearing a mask, is essentially meaningless. Several people, the same. There are all the combinations and permutations of masking, but the percentage of transmission starts to go WAY down when mask use is up around 90%, and when you can get 95% of the population masked, transmission rates drop to small single digits. It’s mathematical; it’s not open to debate, unless one wants to dismiss math. That said, I expect some mope to disagree and argue the math.
One of the reasons the virus was brought under control in Wuhan so quickly was EVERYONE wore a mask. Partial mask use approaches meaninglessness. It ain’t about most of the stuff the anti-maskers continue arguing; it’s about probability distribution.
Can we get a fact check on what I just wrote? Fact check, do I hear fact check? Someone get me a fact check….
I generally don't engage in these debates for the same reason I don't argue over qanon, but you're absolutely right not just about masks, but about the vaccine as well.
This is something we have confirmed multiple times to include the Asian outbreak of SARS-CoV-1 in 2003 and mass vaccination against small pox in New York in 1947 along with the Polio vaccine in the 1950's.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/18/nyregion/nyc-smallpox-vaccine.html
Most masks and vaccines don't prevent you from getting infected, they prevent you from being a spreader (and in many cases reduce the severity if you do get infected).
There's a reason the morons in Portland, OR and Seattle, WA had an outbreak of measles in 2017 when vaccination rates for this fell below 80%. Countries like Japan and S. Korea get this, America and Brazil do not.
Health officials at the CDC like Dr. Fauci and media have been a national embarrassment during this epidemic and have been caught deceiving the public and not admitting to their failures more than once, but that does not change what we have learned from the science any more than if they had been credible. They just made things much harder for the professional focused on public health over scoring political points.
So the lock down had nothing to do with it ? Masks are not that effective, sorry. I'm sure they can make a difference but they miss a good deal of the virions.
There are lots of other variables as well that need to be considered so trying to conclusively say masks were the silver bullet is just nonsense.
In the U.K. the mass manipulation by the government has been exposed:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/05/14/scientists-admit-totalitarian-use-fear-control-behaviour-covid/
Quotes from the article:
Members of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviour (SPI-B) expressed regret about the tactics in a new book about the role of psychology in the Government’s Covid-19 response.
One SPI-B scientist told Ms Dodsworth: “In March [2020] the Government was very worried about compliance and they thought people wouldn’t want to be locked down. There were discussions about fear being needed to encourage compliance, and decisions were made about how to ramp up the fear. The way we have used fear is dystopian.
“The use of fear has definitely been ethically questionable. It’s been like a weird experiment. Ultimately, it backfired because people became too scared.”
One warned that “people use the pandemic to grab power and drive through things that wouldn’t happen otherwise… We have to be very careful about the authoritarianism that is creeping in”.
As well as overt warnings about the danger of the virus, the Government has been accused of feeding the public a non-stop diet of bad news, such as deaths and hospitalisations, without ever putting the figures in context with news of how many people have recovered, or whether daily death tolls are above or below seasonal averages.
Laura Dodsworth has written a book on this topic: A State of Fear
https://www.lauradodsworth.com/a-state-of-fear
Let's say someone holds you underwater and you die. By your logic, you didn't die from being held underwater, you died because you had diabetes, cardiac disease, or a broken leg. So we can't say you drowned.
If you hold anybody underwater long enough they will drown. 100% mortality regardless of co-morbidities. With Covid, over 90% of the documented deaths have substantial comorbidity. But that's not really the point. The key takeaway is the substantial comorbidity was not allowed to inform the policy debate. Instead we got far-reaching mandates when we should have had focused proscriptions for the truly at-risk.
I agree that the lockdowns were a bad idea. We should have released the vaccines in February instead. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7462018/
Let's say we hold you under water until you die. Logic tells us that AIPAC would have to hire another sock puppet poster for their many sock puppet accounts.
Though you'd think with a name like that, they could create an AI troll.
Get a grip fella. You have lost your brains.
Quite an impressive rebuttal. Not a fact in sight but rather a milquetoast accusation of insanity. How original.
Don't tell me, let me guess... you are a leftist.
😂😂😂
Using that logic, we'd have to question the AIDS numbers as well, since nobody in the history of the world has ever died of AIDS. People die because their immune system is destroyed by AIDS, which enables a separate and unrelated disease to kill them. So 32 million people died with AIDS, zero people died of AIDS.
460,000 fewer
And you Einsteins know this how, exactly?
I'd sure love to see an actual study that supports your assertions.
I'm sure that you are not just talking out of your asses, right?
Right.
Can we see some evidence for that supposition please Funpolice ??
Not all cases require hospitalization and most people were avoiding hospitals due to all the fear mongering.
Oh my, I'll bet it's at the bottom of the second page down towards the bottom.......
Serious question. What is defined as a Covid death? What test was done or what else was used to determine which deaths qualified as Covid deaths? Was that same specific standard applied throughout every jurisdiction?
I don’t that has ever been answered, nor will it, due to it’s implications for public trust in federal bureaucracy (as weak as it may already be). Hell, George Floyd could be counted as a Covid death under the guidelines......
Sometime last year after this all started I was reading a newspaper story on "the first Covid victims." One victim was 103 years old, which meant that person HAD survived the pandemic of 1918. In our town a person who was killed in an auto accident had previously tested positive for Covid. And so on. It just makes me want someone to explain under what specific circumstances a death is labeled, "Covid."
Ah, but he wasn't, was he ....
Who knows what the hospital admin claimed on the patient paperwork for federal reimbursement?!?!
Well, what did the coroner say as to cause - considering that he was DOA, the hospital couldn't exactly charge for "treating" Covid, now could it ....
I can address this for the ones I worked with.
-Death from respiratory failure.
-COVID pneumonia x-ray. This is bilateral, white typically 60% or more.
- O2 saturation below 80%. Cases came in with O2 seats below 40%. Those tend to die before admission.
- presence of COVID by PCR. This is optional because doctors learned what it looks like fast, it wasn't possible to test everyone.
- There were other symptoms, but that's most of it.
Getting hit by a dump truck, struck by lightening, massive heart attack, falling off a 70 story building, or being murdered while testing positive for covid.
This is the first I have heard anything this specific-extreme O2 deprivation in the blood. Interestingly, I was reading an article about my favorite Youtuber “bald and bankrupt”-he visits places like rural Belarus and the Tuvan Republic, and in it he spoke of almost dying of Covid contracted in Serbia(he wanted to visit somewhere aggressively anti-mask) and said his O2 levels were at possibly fatal levels.
Brain is another AIPAC sock puppet account cutting and pasting random crap and pretending he's a scientist. I think he's MarkS as well.
Intense nastiness, over and over again. Are you TRYING to poison the well?
Thanks --- now I have more questions . . . like, in the case of "respiratory failure," did there have to be an attendant Covid positive test at the time of death? Are physician observed Covid symptoms sufficient to I.D. a death as a Covid death? It would be interesting to read more about this, if you can recommend a resource.
Here is Kary Mullis, the guy who invented the PCR test, speaking truth about Fauci and the other "public health" apparatchiks sucking off the public teat and lying to us.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oza1j2_WqBk
These are the people that rocket scientists like Brian trust with their lives.
Pathetic.
I appreciate the link. Interesting clip.
Thanks for the link---never saw this before!
If you read to the end what I wrote, already said.
Example, May 2020. Doc calls me around midnight from ER.
"Holy shit, B. An entire family. 7, including grandparents. One is still alive after admission. <crying> Can't keep people alive to fucking admit them. <gets it together > This lady sits down, her O2 sat's below fucking 40%. And she's talking to me. That's impossible. I'm thinking what the fuck? She didn't make it. <cries a little again> gotta get back to it.... Hey! Get back ... fuck. (End call)
Yes, someone corralled into service, wrote COVID-19 as cause of death. No further diagnosis. The tsunami was out in the lobby dying on the floor.
Before the actual test came out they were designation anyone with a fever COVID.
"At the urging of a group of epidemiologists, the CDC this week updated its guidance for counting COVID-19 cases and deaths. It now includes both confirmed cases and "probable" ones which ever brings you the $13,000 extra from the government.
https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20200417/how-accurate-are-coronavirus-death-counts"
Then there was the FALSE POSITIVE test that was removed AFTER THE ELECTION:
WHO (finally) admits PCR tests creat false positives...
The disease prevalence alters the predictive value of test results; as disease prevalence decreases, the risk of false positive increases (2).
https://www.who.int/news/item/20-01-2021-who-information-notice-for-ivd-users-2020-05
With a false positive rate of 0.8% - a figure used by Ms Hartley-Brewer and within the broad range of what we think might be the actual rate for community testing - you would get eight false positives. So in that context, it's true that roughly 90% of positives would be false.
https://www.bbc.com/news/54270373
CDC only 6% of COVID deaths were COVID only:
https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/514915-is-us-covid-19-death-count-inflated
They are counting people who died of cardio vascular disease with covid as COVID & Cardio Vascular also. TWICE!
More than 859,000 Americans die of heart disease, stroke, or other cardiovascular diseases every year—that’s one-third of all US deaths.
https://www.cdc.gov/chronicdisease/resources/publications/factsheets/heart-disease-stroke.htm#:~:text=More%20than%20859%2C000%20Americans%20die,productivity%20from%20premature%20death%20alone
There were almost NO reports of FLU:
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/preliminary-in-season-estimates.htm
"flu deaths NOTE: The week of April 4 was the last week in-season influenza burden estimates will be provided for the 2019-2020 season. *Because influenza surveillance does not capture all cases of flu that occur in the U.S., CDC provides these "estimated ranges" to better reflect the larger burden of influenza."
Those estimated ranges are added and counted as both COVID and FLU deaths counted twice.
In other words ALL FLU cases were counted as COVID but the Flu stats needed to be recorded so they just ADDED THEM as an average of previous years. What ever they added as flu should have been taken out of COVID.
Thank you. I think the science/medical community owes it to people who they are telling you cant be with your dying parent, why.
Postipressionist: The argument that it is difficult to assess deaths by COVID-19 is rational.
Another rational concern about the data at any one moment in time, and one I was concerned about, was the variable rate of reporting we have in the US. Some sources of data deaths report right away while others are delayed for a number of reasons. So any one point in time was skewed.
In order to address both concerns, one can use the Weekly Excess Deaths data to simply look, as an actuary would, at how many deaths there were above actuarial expectations.
One such source is this:
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
This chart (one has to scroll past the data descriptions a bit to get down to the chart) is consistent with the numbers of deaths being reported above what would be expected.
Can't find cancer deaths for 2020
"In 2020, the diagnosis and treatment of cancer
was hampered by the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic."
https://acsjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.3322/caac.21654
These were the co morbidity deaths that were classified as COVID ALSO
26,000 Adult Respiratory Distress Syndrome cause, bacteria. -
87,000 patients died from bacterial pneumonia and influenza.
19,479 Cardiovascular Disease (Expected dearths146,365 )
44,871 patients Cardiac Arrest (Expected cdeaths 655,000 )
19,434 Cancer ( Expected deaths103,000 )
62,181 Diabetes (Expected dearths 80,058)
Projected or Expected Deaths for 2019 - 2019: 2,854,000 https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm#Comorbidities (Thus has been removed, I'm sure because they would have to subtract those deaths out of the expected because they are already in the Expected.
These numbers need to be subtracted from the EXPECTED deaths because they were labeled COVID deaths,
Weekly U.S. Influenza Surveillance Report | CDC
cdc.govhttps://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/index.htm
No influenza-associated pediatric deaths were reported to CDC during week 19. One influenza-associated pediatric death occurring during the 2020-2021 season has been reported to CDC. View Full Screen
SEE Pneumonia, Influenza, and COVID mortality Chart
Almost NO influenza deaths in 2020. How many people died from Influenza in 2020? ONE? That's because they were determined to be COVID 19.
Provisional Mortality Data — United States, 2020 | MMWR
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7014e1.htm
COVID-19 was listed as the underlying cause of 345,323 deaths during 2020 and was the third leading underlying cause of death, after heart disease (690,882 deaths) and cancer (598,932) (Figure 2).
690,882 deaths from Heart disease all died WITHOUT COVID? same as last year? WHAT?
Only 6% of all deaths were COVID that's only about 20,752 people. the COmorbidity deaths 324,570 people died with other diseases + Covid. They assume that 324,570 are not included in any other numbers but the 690,882 stayed the same. 690,882 who died of heart disease had NO COVID. NOW THAT'S AMAZING don't you think?
The point of the data set is to eliminate cause of death from the analysis. So arguing about controlling for type of death would violate the purpose of the analysis and thus not appropriate.
Unless a lot of people who died haven't been counted or were counted more than once, then it would not be valid.
But it is also *not* evidence that any of what you are arguing is not valid or reliable. It is simply an analysis to remove "cause of death" as a factor which I found interesting and meaningful.
If you don't find it so, so be it.
I should also clarify that the latest few weeks on the chart in the link posted above are typically under-reported.
I never heard Fauci say "masks are useless". I've seen three video clips of Fauci answering the question, should we be wearing masks. Once in Jan. 2020, once in Feb. 2020 and once in early March 2020. All three times he said no, that he didn't think Americans need to be wearing masks. One of those clips he said, that being so, we need to pay attention to what the CDC and WHO say. At least these are the facts as I remember.
Last March, 2020, most biologists thought the virus was spreading by surfaces that were contaminated by infected people coughing and sneezing. If true, a mask wouldn't do yoi or me much good. When the data coming in indicated that 40-50% of people testing positive were asymptomatic, the CDC, Fauci and others realized their theory was wrong, and it appeared that the virus was airborne. That was the reason for the change in masks recommendation.
Except that if the coughers and sneezers were wearing masks, those surfaces wouldn't have been contaminated ...
I agree. I believe at that time people were asked to stay home if they had flu-like symptoms.
We need a fact checker to verify this post….
I think we need to have Matt start verifying some accounts that keep changing names and pushing the same line of shit over and over again.
Perhaps it's because some of us reasonably educated and logical types are not aware of a study that proves masks "work". The definition of "work" is important here. Let's start with that.
I find it more interesting that you keep changing your name right after I showed how full of shit your are on this subject.
You're purposely not stating how much improvement there is from wearing vs not wearing a mask.
You're conflating particles of unknown size with virons which are very tiny.
The virus does not need droplets of moisture to transmit from one person to another.
Stop spewing bullshit.
You're the one that is non scientific due to your constant apples to oranges conflation of particles of unknown size compared to virons.
Um. WTAF? 95% filtration efficiency doesn't compute for you?
95% of particles of what size ? You can hold a piece of screen in front of you face and stop 95% of a certain size of particles.
Holy fuck how dumb are you ?
No I didn't say they were totally ineffective. I said there is not proof that they significantly reduce transmission of the virus due to the fact that the virions DO NOT NEED droplets of moisture to travel and actually float in the air much longer without the weight of it.
Those masks DO NOT block the virus in any way shape or form or people would suffocate trying.
Please show me your non peer reviewed evidence that is mostly government issued and think tank funded.
I'd love to shred it for all to see.
(CDC) postulate that the particles of more than 5 μm as droplets, and those less than 5 μm as aerosols or droplet nuclei (Siegel et al., 2007; WHO, 2014). Conversely, there have been some other postulations, indicating that aerodynamic diameter of 20 μm or 10 μm or less should be reckoned to be aerosols, based on their ability to linger in the air for a prolonged period, and the reachability to the respirable fraction of the lung (alveolar region) (Gralton et al., 2011; Nicas et al., 2005; Tellier, 2009). Small aerosols are more susceptible to be inhaled deep into the lung, which causes infection in the alveolar tissues of the lower respiratory tract,
That's right out of the very report you didn't read and tried to use to bullshit everyone into thinking you actually know WTF you're talking about.
Holy shit, you need to stop virtue signaling like this.
And then what happens to the moisture that's trapped on the mask?
Hint: It evaporates.
Until you exhale and send that virion sailing into the air everyone else around you is breathing.
How much ? How much does it take to get infected ? Once again you are employing random particle tests to say something might reduce the viral load without ever stating how much ? Is it .05% or 50% ??
Oh, seriously? Do bother yourself to read. Or you're just trolling for the lulz
Evidently you don't understand anything you read because all you do is distract and deflect. Answer the question Mr. AIPAC sock puppet.
TFP - I know you're one of Matt's frequent fliers and I enjoy reading your comments. You cite a lot of "facts and figures" (thanks) but not a lot of source material. The one link you have has no citations at all that I could see. That it came from a government source is a red flag for me. I agree that masks are indicated and likely effective under some circumstances. For example, I would wear a mask when visiting my 90 year-old father in law because the evidence indicates that population cohort is substantially at risk. We have been sold a far-reaching mandate that feels more political to me than health-related.
And plenty of people wearing masks still contracted the virus. Funny how there are no stats available on that particular phenomena just like they can't find patient 0.
If folks feel comfortable wearing a mask they should, they shouldn't have to listen to half baked "studies" done by scientists who know what will happen if the "study" doesn't say the right thing.
That's bullshit. And you're completely ignoring the fact that the masks are one size fits all and even a well fitting mask loses much of its effectiveness with facial hair which is extremely popular right now.
The Virus DOES NOT NEED moisture droplets to travel. That has never been proven much like almost all of your evidence is not peer reviewed and is mostly government sourced.
The paper you cited says so. Why didn't you read before you posted it ? You wouldn't look so stupid right now.
WTF good does that do for the rest of the mask ? You have trouble with critical thinking don't you ?
I am a scientist with graduate degrees in high energy laser physics and medicine. I practiced medicine or a while in Germany where I had done med school, but left it when I had to return to the US. I did enough study of math to construct rough models. From the outset there have been three pandemics: One of lies, one of government over-reaction, and least importantly, one of a modified common cold virus.
On January 1, 2020, Taiwan had sufficient reliable intelligence from inside China to close its borders because a contagious infectious disease had been unleashed. The day in early January the genome was published we knew it was a coronavirus, one of four families of common cold viruses that cause respiratory illnesses. We know that respiratory illnesses spread through the air, propelled by coughs or sneezes, and that outdoors is safe because even slight breezes will dissipate the cloud. In addition, if it is a virus, it will be damaged by sunlight.
Respiratory infections are typically most dangerous to the elderly and the immune-compromised, which gave us all the information we needed to protect ourselves. Sequester - quarantine - the old folks and forget about the rest of us. PPE for indoor workers starting with healthcare, spread out the sick among all hospitals, keep sick folks out of old age homes, wash hands, and carry on.
I wrote all of that and was thrown out of multiple platforms. Now-former friends accused me of spreading dangerous misinformation. I published results of a rough model using data from previous widespread coronavirus infections which showed an order of magnitude lower danger than the official models. Banned from more platforms, more friends turning their backs on me. I tried to find the origin of the six-foot social distance and couldn't. Eventually I learned that it was developed as a guess in the late 1800s about another disease. I knew that Wuhan had been the center for biowarfare research in China, but publishing that drew more attacks. I read studies on cross-immunity within virus families and referred to those. More accusations that I know nothing about science.
I weep for the needless hardship, anguish and death. The damage to inner-city children of color is unforgivable. Melanin blocks sunlight, reducing the level of vitamin D in the body outside the tropics. Less access to quality health care has put them behind, lack of vitamin D makes them more vulnerable, and poor diet finishes the trifecta. On top of that many receive their only meals through schools, including weekend packs of food since they won't be in school. All of that goes away. If there are two parents, one has to stay home and can't even work part time; if there's only one parent, there are no school-based programs to support these children. It's difficult not to think about accusations of racism and genocide.
Your last paragraph is sadly true. History should judge ALL responsible leaders-including state and local-harshly for what happened to inner city schools, but we will see the usual ass covering and monkey shit fights between political enemies.
This is the best comment on the true nature of all the bullshit I have yet to read.
Fauci dumped his credibility with me when he said the public didn't need to wear masks ... later he admitted that he said that because we didn't have enough and they needed to be conserved for health care folks.
If you notice, one of Taiwan's first responses was to ramp up mask production like crazy - enough for everyone to have 2/wk - our first response was to ramp up production of ventilators - closing the barn door after the horse was out. I observed over a year ago what a shame it would be if we had to ration ventilators because we had to ration masks ...
It seemed to me at the time that common sense said that a respiratory (and so much more) disease was spread by breathing out, and caught by breathing in, i.e. airborne, an air pollutant, if you will, and how do we handle air pollutants, by putting a filter on them - masks are an air filter - so the question was what are the most efficient viral air filters (and some common materials, in layers can work quite well) with an emphasis on proper fit should have been top priority for production and distribution.
«On January 1, 2020, Taiwan had sufficient reliable intelligence from inside China to close its borders because a contagious infectious disease had been unleashed.»
That is because the China-Taiwan government is always on the alert because China, both mainland and Taiwan, has been swept by infectious diseases quite often. Also the same apparently was reported by israeli news, citing an USA government source, well before that.
BTW the China-Taiwan government has never closed its borders, or imposed a general lock-down, it has just required mass testing of travellers and tracing and isolation of the few infected.
«Respiratory infections are typically most dangerous to the elderly and the immune-compromised, which gave us all the information we needed to protect ourselves. Sequester - quarantine - the old folks and forget about the rest of us. PPE for indoor workers starting with healthcare, spread out the sick among all hospitals, keep sick folks out of old age homes, wash hands, and carry on.»
That is sensible for "normal" respiratory infections, but for a more intense form like SARS-2 that is not what has been done in places like New Zealand and China and Korea-south and Kerala: the successful approach has been mass testing, and tracing and isolation the infected. However that approach in incompatible with reaganism/neoliberalism (“The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I'm from the government, and I'm here to help’”) and as a result neoliberal governments have adopted half-baked lock-downs and vaccinations to celebrate "saviors of humanity big pharma". The reporting abouit the COVID-19 in most neoliberal countries has been a huge marketing campaign for "big pharma" national champions, even if vaccines have been developed by dozens of countries.
According to the Financial Times (https://www.ft.com/content/0705d2eb-34ea-47b9-af9e-1aef5685eb58) Taiwan closed its borders to foreigners.
You'll find that mass testing and tracing work reasonably well in a small island country. S. Korea is a de facto island. In the U.S. even when we were focused on stopping illegal immigrants from crossing the Southern border, we still had hundreds every week who escaped detection and fled into the interior. Now, we have an administration that told foreigners to come and we will give you free stuff and treat you well. People from 88 foreign countries have crossed our Southern border and at least 200,000 have been released into the country. What contact tracing? As soon as someone enters the NYC subway system all hope of tracing disappears. Singapore is touted as a great success; it is smaller geographically than any of the ten largest North American cities. The homeless population in California and New York makes a mockery of attempting contact tracing. It doesn't matter whether testing/tracing is incompatible with reaganism, it's incompatible with any large country.
Yes, vaccines have been developed by multiple countries. Not all are equal. Sinopharm, Johnson & Johnson and others are traditional vaccines using weakened or dead virus particles carried on an adenovirus (yet another common cold virus) to enter cells. They are not nearly as effective as messenger RNA vaccines in preventing infection, but are as effective in guarding against complications leading to hospitalization or death.
Excellent analysis.
This is a recurring theme in America where we fail to grasp the impact of population and geography. T
Without arguing either side of the debate, I often hear people ask wgt we can't take the healthcare system in Sweden, a country with 10 million people the size of California and Oregon and impose it on the US, a country of 320 million people that is 22 times larger.
What could possibly go wrong?
«According to the Financial Times (https://www.ft.com/content/0705d2eb-34ea-47b9-af9e-1aef5685eb58) Taiwan closed its borders to foreigners.»
That is a misdescription: it is simply subject to test-trace-isolate. Same for south Korea etc.
«You'll find that mass testing and tracing work reasonably well in a small island country.»
It takes breathtaking stupidity to think that China-mainland or south Korea or Kerala are a "small island country". These are all countries that have head sickeness and deaths rates 100 times (or 1000 times) smaller than the USA, or the UK, or many "small island countries" where the reaganista anti-state approach has been taken.
My understanding from those smarter than I is that the real selling point of the Johnson and Johnson vaccine with it's far lower efficacy rate than either the Moderna or Pfizer vaccine is that it can be stored at refrigerator temperature for up to 3 months.
In the US where we have easy access to sub 0 freezers the Moderna and Pfizer vaccine work fine, but if you plan on vaccinating in remote parts of Sub-Sahara Africa that difference in storage temp is a real game changer.
Imagine if we pulled about a billion dollars from our enormous foreign war budget and used it to send people to places like Africa to vaccinate rather than bomb people. A world where the image of America is vaccination rather than a drone strike.
It will never happen, but a guy can dream.
Excellent piece. Bravo for your courage and compassion
«On January 1, 2020, Taiwan had sufficient reliable intelligence from inside China to close its borders because a contagious infectious disease had been unleashed.»
In particular that "reliable intelligence from China" was the official communication from the chinese public health system to the WHO of the previous day:
https://www.who.int/csr/don/05-january-2020-pneumonia-of-unkown-cause-china/en/
“On 31 December 2019, the WHO China Country Office was informed of cases of pneumonia of unknown etiology (unknown cause) detected in Wuhan City, Hubei Province of China. As of 3 January 2020, a total of 44 patients with pneumonia of unknown etiology have been reported to WHO by the national authorities in China. Of the 44 cases reported, 11 are severely ill, while the remaining 33 patients are in stable condition. According to media reports, the concerned market in Wuhan was closed on 1 January 2020 for environmental sanitation and disinfection. [...]
For more information:
— Infection prevention and control of epidemic-and pandemic prone acute respiratory infections in health care, WHO guidelines:
— Wuhan Municipal Health Commission briefing on the pneumonia epidemic situation, 31 December 2019 (in Mandarin):
— Wuhan Municipal Health Commission briefing on the pneumonia epidemic situation 3 January 2020 (in Mandarin):”
Fauci is a very smooth political operator but there is a lot more there than meets the eye. He became the Democrats' favorite doctor when he artfully countered Trump's accusations against China last year and that criticism has given him a lot of cover for his real weakness in the Covid crisis, which is the fact that he is fatally compromised in his objectivity.
Senator Rand's criticisms of him are essentially valid: he is, and has been, the beating heart of gain of function research in virology for many years. When domestic GOF research was shut down by Obama, he did an end run around these restrictions by funneling NIH money to Eco-Health (Peter Daszak's organization) which then channelled it to the Wuhan Lab. He is up to his eyeballs in creating this Frankenstein - as are, more widely, the majority of the virologists that work for, and with, the NIH - and he knows it. Virologists as a group realize that there would be overwhelming pushback against this kind of research, thereby jeopardizing their livelihood, if this catastrophe was pinned on them.
That someone with such conflicts of interest has been looked to as an objective source of information on the origins of this virus is just more evidence of the corrupt (or, to give them more credit than they deserve, childishly credulous) nature of today's MSM. Of course, the rot does not stop with the origin of the virus. More broadly, it goes to the role of Fauci in his drive for vaccinations when highly effective therapeutics are, and have been, available. Fauci's organization (NIH) hold patents on COVID vaccines and stand to benefit by their being promoted over other treatments. Now that people are starting to see the face behind the mask of this character, we should reassess his early dismissals of anti-viral therapeutics like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin (the latter is now being used on a massive scale in India, the WHO's objections notwithstanding; surprise, surprise: it is working).
Remember that under US law the 'Emergency Use Authorization' for these vaccines cannot be granted if there is an effective therapeutic available. Like hydroxychloroquine. Like ivormectin. Interested readers may find this short clip from Bret Weinstein's excellent Dark Horse podcast very informative: youtu.be/zfqxCkJw0Rk?list=PLCXya1JzWcnSCHNSipO8fWFonSWyyDQq5
And finally, for those who read French, I highly recommend the following two books which chronicle the corruption (and, frankly, criminal behavior) that has characterized the 'management' of this crisis: "Big Pharma Démasqué' by Xavier Bazin and "Aux Origines Du Mal" by Brice Perrier.
Apologies for this lengthy addendum, which is a summary of Nicholas Wade's excellent article on the origins of the virus. It is a long and technical piece which not everyone will have the time (or interest) to get through. But it is, in my view, essential to understanding why the lab origin hypothesis is probable, so here I provide the Cliff's Notes version.
He makes four key arguments for the lab leak hypothesis, some of which are a little abstruse to the non-scientific reader, but here they are:
1) The place of origin. If the virus had an animal origin there would be evidence of the virus in infected animals or humans outside of Wuhan, specifically in the region where these types of coronaviruses are known to come from. In a year of looking, no such evidence has materialized.
2) No evidence of gradual zoonotic mutation. In every other case of a virus making a jump from an animal host to a human host, it has gone through a process of evolutionary development which incrementally makes it more adapted to humans. This was the case for SARS and for MERS. In the case of COVID the virus emerged fully suited to human infection with no evidence of less successful antecedents.
3) The furin cleavage site. (Here we get technical.) The spike protein on the virus is composed of two separate sub-units, known as S1 and S2. Cleaving the spike protein into these two subunits is the key mechanism that allows the virus entry into a human cell. However it takes a specific enzyme on the surface of a cell to do this cleaving. There are many types of enzymes that can potentially cleave a protein, depending on the particular amino acids that comprise the protein. However only in humans is there the furin enzyme, which does its protein cutting thing in the presence of a specific amino acid sequence on the protein to be cleaved. COVID is the only coronavirus yet discovered that has this ‘furin cleavage site’ in its spike protein (between the S1 and S2 sub-units, naturally).
4) Human specific codons. (Here we get much more technical, so I will try to compress this a bit.) Proteins are simply chains of amino acids. Each amino acid is built from three units (nucleotides) of DNA, which are called codons. It turns out that there is more than one combination of the four DNA nucleotides (A, C, G, T) that produces the same amino acid. For example, the codons CGT and CGC both produce the amino acid arginine. But the key fact is that humans have a definite preference for a specific codon producing a given amino acid. It just so happens that in the furin cleavage site the codons that produce arginine are specific to humans and are very rare in the other parts of the coronavirus genome.
These are the technical arguments upon which Wade’s lab origin hypothesis rests. I find them compelling, particularly the last two points. The full paper can be found here: thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-people-or-nature-open-pandoras-box-at-wuhan/ and I recommend it highly.
Re: Item 1 - Just wrong. There are closely related viruses as far as Vietnam. I don't have the cite at my fingertips, but I saw that one. This argument is also like the old "missing link" stories that aimed to prove humans weren't evolved from lesser primates because we couldn't find all of the steps. No, you can't expect to find all the steps as suggested. That's ridiculous nonsense. RNA viruses mutate like mad. Instead you use evolutionary trees, and look at the apparent rate of mutations. There are multiple hypotheses for how SARS-CoV-2 adapted to humans. One is a set of men who got very sick for quite a while. Immune compromised might be another. It is doubtful we will find anything crystal clear. Reality isn't like that.
Re: Item 2 - Just wrong. Wade is either grossly ignorant, or deliberately falsifying here. There is plenty of evidence of natural origin. Not hard to find such studies. Here's one.
(May 2020) A close relative of SARS-CoV-2 found in bats offers more evidence it evolved naturally.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/05/200511142202.htm
Re: Item 3 - Just wrong. Furin is present and it's highly conserved in mammals. (May 2020) Structural and functional modelling of SARS-CoV-2 entry in animal models.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-72528-z
"... in a panel of animal models, i.e. guinea pig, dog, cat, rat, rabbit, ferret, mouse, hamster and macaque. Here we showed that ACE2, but not TMPRSS2 or Furin, has a higher level of sequence variability in the Spike protein interaction surface, which greatly influences Spike protein binding mode.... TMPRSS2 and Furin are sufficiently similar in the considered hosts not to drive susceptibility differences.
Re: Item 4 - Just wrong. There is NO SUCH THING as a human specific codon! There are mostly mild differences in the production of tRNA for different codons. But you can use a human sequence in E. coli, and vice versa. The codon optimization just gives you somewhat higher production, that's all. So no. This is just not true.
Bluntly put, Wade's article is utter garbage. Wade is not a scientist. The people pimping it (like Trish Wood) are not scientists. The whole business of "Wade's article" getting such intense press I find highly suspect. So should you. Don't be so damn gullible FFS!
Thanks for the detailed reply.
I am not a scientist, just a reasonably bright guy that reads a lot, so this will have to be fought out by folks at a higher pay grade than me. Of course, the lab theory is not strictly a product of Mr. Wade. Nicholson Baker made a similar case in a New York Magazine article in January and there were folks that preceded him, going back the better part of a year (Josh Rogin, Saager Enjeti, Bret Weinstein, Matt Ridley, Crystal Ball, Steve Hilton, etc.) although they were largely met with derision from the MSM and the designated scientific establishment.
As I say, I am not a scientist and maybe you are. But now that the battle has been joined, let's hope that the experts - all of the experts - are allowed to get to the bottom of this thing.
I appreciate the considered response. I am a scientist. I have publications in epidemiology, (modeling and field), biodefense, terorrism, gene therapy (patents), and policy. I do vaccine development. I've got vaccines for Ebola, COVID-19, West Nile virus, Hanta, and a few others in the freezer.
All of the parties mentioned made their cases with innuendo, pointing to Chinese governmental behavior. None of them made a case worth a worn out t-shirt. I think it is all propaganda mixed with incompetent dabbling of the Dunning Kreuger variety. (Although the real Dunning Kreuger graph is much less damning than the meme variety.)
Citation date for Item 3's cite should be (sept 2020)
Trish Wood did an excellent deep-dive interview with the author of this article on her podcast, Trish Wood Is Critical.
«1) The place of origin. If the virus had an animal origin there would be evidence of the virus in infected animals or humans outside of Wuhan, specifically in the region where these types of coronaviruses are known to come from. In a year of looking, no such evidence has materialized.»
* If it was man-made it could have been made somewhere else and deliberately or accidentally spread in Wuhan in order to cripple a key node of the chinese economy.
* If it was of natural origin it could also have started somewhere else and collected, selected, and deliberately spread in Wuhan.
Regardless of its origin, the big deal that the smear campaigns seems design to obfuscate is what happened after the Wuhan outbreak: the test-trace-isolate approach in China resulted in less than 5,000 deaths over a year in a population over 3 times larger than the USA one where there have been over 500,000 deaths, and this without mass lock-downs, or mass vaccination.
The fact that you use the phrase 'smear campaign' leads me to think that you take the current hard look at a possible lab leak to be an indictment of China. I don't see it that way - certainly not in my case at any rate. I would be far angrier with the hubris and duplicity of our medical authorities in funding this research (and then covering it up) than with the Chinese if an accidental lab leak had taken place.
You also use the phrase 'design(ed) to obfuscate' to characterize such an investigation. Again I disagree as to the motivation for finding out. If it was a lab leak then this has dramatic implications for whether this research should be done at all. Perhaps more importantly, it casts the credibility of Fauci and the medical research community more generally into question on all of the issues that it has opined on, most importantly those regarding vaccines, therapeutics, and confinement.
As to your points that speak to the virus having been hatched someplace else and then planted in Wuhan, I suppose anything is possible. This is the official Chinese position, or is at least one that they trot out periodically when they are feeling particularly defensive. More specifically, they have claimed that the virus was created in our bio lab at Ft. Detrick, MD and then deliberately released at the worldwide military games in Wuhan in the fall of '19 in order to sabotage the Chinese economy.
Godfree Roberts, who I believe lives in China and is quite sympathetic to the Chinese viewpoint, has also promoted this theory. Again, I suppose anything is possible but Occam's razor generally cuts in the right direction and with the most efficiency.
Precisely the point - whether GOF research should be done at all ...
"resulted in less than 5,000 deaths over a year in a population over 3 times larger than the USA"
Regardless of the truth in those numbers, which is to say I doubt there's much, I've wondered why it was that China took such unprecedented steps to eradicate covid if its scientists weren't familiarized with it. Almost like its leading scientists knew exactly what it was (at the time).
«Regardless of the truth in those numbers, which is to say I doubt there's much»
Similar sickness and death rates have been reported by China-Taiwan, Korea-south, Kerala, New Zealand, Vietnam and Japan. It is shocking to imagine that they are all complicit with Chinese Communist Party. :-)
«I've wondered why it was that China took such unprecedented steps to eradicate covid if its scientists weren't familiarized with it. Almost like its leading scientists knew exactly what it was (at the time).»
The same approach with the same results was taken by China-Taiwan, Korea-south, Kerala, New Zealand, Vietnam and Japan. It is shocking to imagine that the leading scientists in those countries “knew exactly what it was”.
Or perhaps your comment is made entirely of handwaving smears.
You're ignoring how China led with its unprecedented steps and many other countries followed, including us, because, well, they were unprecedented.
But haven't you ever wondered why China locked down - and I mean *locked down*, China style - many of its major cities if covid wasn't killing its people? Or that China was deathly afraid of what it released. Or both?
«You're ignoring how China led with its unprecedented steps and many other countries followed, including us, because, well, they were unprecedented.»
That the steps were "unprecedented" seems to me pure hallucinatory smears, here is appropriately for this post some "fact checking", for example in strongly "anti-communist" China-Taiwan similar steps were not at all unprecedented, they were part of a plan:
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/10/29/asia/taiwan-covid-19-intl-hnk/
“Authorities activated the island's Central Epidemic Command Center, which was set up in the wake of SARS, to coordinate between different ministries. The government also ramped up face mask and protective equipment production to make sure there would be a steady supply of PPE. The government also invested in mass testing and quick and effective contact tracing. Former Taiwanese Vice President Chen Chien-jen, who is an epidemiologist by training, said lockdowns are not ideal. Chen also said that the type of mass-testing schemes undertaken in mainland China, where millions of people are screened when a handful of cases are detected, are also unnecessary. "Very careful contact tracing, and very stringent quarantines of close contacts are the best way to contain Covid-19," he said.”
The "anti-communist" governments of China-Taiwan and Singapore accordingly took "unprecedented" measures that had been carried out in previous epidemics at the end of December 2020:
https://taiwantoday.tw/news.php?unit=2,6,10,15,18&post=168773
“Publication Date: January 02, 2020
Taiwan has implemented more stringent inspection measures for inbound flights from Wuhan, China, following an outbreak of pneumonia in the city, according to the Centers for Disease Control under the Ministry of Health and Welfare Dec. 31, 2019.”
https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/ministry-of-health-issues-advisory-on-viral-pneumonia-outbreak-in-chinas-wuhan
“Travellers arriving at Changi Airport from Wuhan to undergo temperature screening after pneumonia outbreak
Published Jan 2, 2020, 9:01 pm SGT”
Huh? Initially the entire Hubei province was shut down ...
Not quite, and anyhow other places occasionally: it takes time to prepare for mass testing and trace-isolate. The boast by the ex vice-president of China-Taiwan that no lock-down is ever needed is quite excessive. But there is a big difference between a mass lock-down of an entire country for a year and a some weeks in some place or another, that said the Wuhan metropolitan area has 10-11 million people, so it has more people than many countries.
For an idea of the approach taken:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-54504785
“The Chinese city of Qingdao is testing its entire population of nine million people for Covid-19 over a period of five days. The mass testing comes after the discovery of a dozen cases linked to a hospital treating coronavirus patients arriving from abroad. In May, China tested the entire city of Wuhan - home to 11 million people and the epicentre of the global pandemic. The country has largely brought the virus under control. That is in stark contrast to other parts of the world, where there are still high case numbers and lockdown restrictions of varying severity. In a statement posted to Chinese social media site Weibo, Qingdao's Municipal Health Commission said six new cases and six asymptomatic cases had been discovered.”
So we fu...d up there, too ...
«So we fu...d up there, too ...»
BTW not everywhere, Bloomberg BusinessWeek has also reported that "communist" Minnesota has done a mass testing plan, even if not quite on such a large scale and speed as in other countries:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-01-14/covid-testing-minnesota-is-the-best-state-for-checking-for-coronavirus
“The U.S. Needs More Covid Testing, and Minnesota Has Found a Way Get everybody in an entire state to spit into a tube? You betcha.”
«So we fu...d up there, too ...»
And that is the real story, not vaccinations, not lock-down, not masks, which are all distractions from the stark comparison between neoliberal countries and civilized countries. In the USA, UK, etc. the priority has been whichever policy impacted least the upper-middle and upper classes, and made the best marketing copy for "big pharma". It is not as if test-trace-isolate was unknown to "atlantic" epidemiologists, here are articles written early in 2020 be the UK Chief Medical Officer and Chief Science Officer:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/14/england-coronavirus-testing-has-not-risen-fast-enough-science-chief
“Sir Patrick Vallance says testing needs to be done at scale to find outbreaks and isolate people [...] Sir Patrick Vallance’s comments echo those of Chris Whitty, England’s chief medical officer, who said a week ago that Germany “got ahead” in testing people for Covid-19 and that the UK needed to learn from that.”
Eventually, even Bloomberg BusinessWeek broke with the neoliberal ideology that not getting infected and not infecting others is a matter of individual choice:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-10-01/coronavirus-pandemic-how-the-u-s-can-implement-rapid-covid-testing
“Better, Faster Testing Is the Path to an American Comeback
Imagine going safely to a bar, or a wedding, or parent-teacher night, without a vaccine. It’s still possible, if the U.S. can get its act together.”
On this the Democratic politicians and press have not at all criticized the Trump policies, have respected that neoliberal ideology, just arguing distractingly about how hard lock-downs should be and how fabulous "big pharma saviours of humanity" have been.
When was the Wuhan outbreak?
That is a rather vague and difficult questions, because "outbreak" is not well defined: in China and elsewhere there are "outbreaks" of something almost every year, and SARS-2 symptoms, at least initially, can easily be mistake for something else, and many people infected with SARS-2 have no symptoms or trivial symptoms, so the SARS-2 outbreak in Wuhan could have started well before it got noticed and recognized as a new thing.
As to noticed and as a new thing, that was sometimes in December 2019. The official UK government timeline for example gives "end of December":
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/wuhan-novel-coronavirus-background-information/wuhan-novel-coronavirus-epidemiology-virology-and-clinical-features
«On 31 December 2019, the World Health Organization (WHO) was informed of a cluster of cases of pneumonia of unknown cause detected in Wuhan City, Hubei Province, China.»
The WHO statement has these details:
«Symptom onset of the 41 confirmed nCoV cases ranges from 8 December 2019 to 2 January 2020. No additional cases have been detected since 3 January 2020. The clinical signs and symptoms reported are mainly fever, with a few cases having difficulty in breathing, and chest radiographs showing invasive pneumonic infiltrates in both lungs.»
The WHO a few days later called it “Pneumonia of unknown cause – China”. Wikipedia has a 2019 timeline that says:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_COVID-19_pandemic_in_2019
«Phylogenetics estimates that SARS-CoV-2 arose in October or November 2019. It is not known whether the virus itself evolved in wildlife populations or if its distinctive spike proteins were selected for after zoonotic transfer to humans. A September 2020 review noted "The possibility that the COVID-19 infection had already spread to Europe at the end of last year is now indicated by abundant, even if partially circumstantial, evidence", including pneumonia case numbers and radiology in France and Italy in November and December. RT-PCR (Reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction) testing of untreated wastewater samples from Brazil and Italy have suggested detection of SARS-CoV-2 as early as November and December 2019, respectively, but the methods of such sewage studies have not been optimised, many have not been peer reviewed, details are often missing, and there is a risk of false positives due to contamination or if only one gene target is detected. Antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 receptor-binding domain were reported in 111 (11.6%) of 959 asymptomatic participants in a lung cancer screening trial in Italy from September 2019, which the authors claim may indicate an earlier start to the COVID-19 pandemic. The World Health Organization stated it was reviewing the results, seeking verification of the neutralization results, and that "the possibility that the virus may have silently circulated elsewhere cannot be ruled out"»
In any case the timeline is an interesting detail for amusement, the real story is that the government of China-Taiwan and other thoroughly capitalist countries as well as as "communist" ones have had negligible sickness and deaths rates thanks to state funded and organized test-trace-isolate, with nearly no lockdowns and nearly no business or jobs losses, and are in no hurry to be guinea pigs for vaccines.
But you have done so well, you don't need the vaccine! Cheers!
Yet every expert rubbished the lab leak hypothesis when it was first proposed. And all 17 of the WHO inspectors plus their 17 Chinese counterparts ranked it least likely.
It also requires the virus to be able to time travel, since it was circulating in the USA 3-5 years ago. https://johnmenadue.com/who-had-covid-first/
Okay, so what are you proposing then? That the virus began naturally somewhere years ago; has been circulating but somehow not causing a detectable outbreak; somehow made its way to Wuhan in late 2019; and then started an outbreak there?
Is that your hypothesis? How many of those 17 WHO inspectors have ranked your hypothesis as likely? If you think it's significant that they ranked the lab leak hypothesis least likely, then surely you have to accept that it's significant if they didn't rank your hypothesis higher? Or is their opinion only relevent for hypotheses you don't like, but doesn't count when it's yours?
The Wade article is innuendo with zero scientific content
What specific points do you object to and what is your background?
He's MarkS from last week under a new sock puppet name but still pretending to be a scientist.
See above. I responded to you. Wade's article is drivel.
PhD microbiology. Vaccine research and development. Epidemiology papers. Chapters in West Point sponsored books on biodefense and terrorism.
And you? What is yours?
Okay, then show them to me.
I admittedly haven’t read much on the lab origin stuff, as Wade’s article got just a *bit* too technical for me and my eyes glazed over, but has anybody reconciled the lab leak theory with claims based on analyzing sewage (I think?) and finding reason to believe the virus has been in USA/Europe for many months longer than initially believed? Can the two theories even coexist or are they in competition? I really haven’t looked much into either one but it seems like they both have their own set of implications that kind of compete with each other.
All valid hypotheses compete with one another to some extent. In the case of the Wuhan story, if you put the two major hypotheses respectively on a scale, the evidence is tipping in favor of a lab release. Give Wade's article another go; it's worth the effort.
It was a great article. Gain of function is reminiscent of Frankenstein. Just smaller
Or much larger, if total damage is taken into consideration. :)
True. I meant the organism, not the end results. I would gladly join a mob to hunt down Fauci though!!
Gotcha, I’ll give it another look, thanks. Sorry my question was vague and I probably shouldn’t have asked if they “compete” per se when I was really asking if they’re mutually exclusive. I’ll give Wade’s article that second look though and I imagine that will give me a different perspective regardless.
Faucci is an opportunist who has been milking the taxpayer for decades. The man should have retired at least a decade ago. He's almost 80 years old, fifteen years past the normal retirement age for Federal workers. He got into the health service as a means of avoiding military service in Vietnam (doctors were subjected to be drafted into one of the military services but they could join Public Health as an alternative.)
He turned 80 last December. I lost ALL respect for him the minute he flip flopped on the masks within a month in the spring of 2020. The truth will come out about the gain of function funding by Fauci via the NAIAD in the Wuhan lab and his connection to it all. He's lied and lied and lied. Just listen to Joe Rogin, WAPO editorial writer out with a new book, discussing it on the Megyn Kelly podcast. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/covid-truth-on-wuhan-lab-herd-immunity-vaccines-variants/id1532976305?i=1000517073772
He lied about AZT as well didn't he ?
He sure did!
I agree with you on the conflict of interest point - but re vaccines, is it better to prevent a disease than to have to treat it .... The issue with these particular vaccines is another story, a patent story ...
One more comment since I did not pick up on the main point that you made until just now. You state that it is better to prevent a disease than to have to treat it. Right.
What I did not make clear in my prior posts is that ivermectin can be use not only to treat but also as a prophylactic - thus preventing someone from coming down with the disease in the first place. India is using it in this capacity - and Big Pharma is not pleased.
An important point that I did not make - thanks for the question.
Studies re its efficacy re prevention?
Here is a link that might help: covid19criticalcare.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/FLCCC-IVERMECTIN-Summary.pdf
Very interesting - just out of curiosity, are there any scientific reviews of the studies mentioned ...
How about side effects, immediate and long term ...
What it seems to me you are suggesting is that if we all took ivermectin, as prescribed, "until this thing blows over" (by Easter, maybe?), that we could forego masks and social distancing anywhere and everywhere.... Yes? No?
I don't take a doctrinaire stance on ivermectin one way or the other. It may well be the case that taking a course of ivermectin, as suggested by these doctors, is preferable to taking the new vaccines, the long term effects of which are anyone's guess.
As for scientific studies, this may be of help: https://covid19criticalcare.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/FLCCC-Ivermectin-in-the-prophylaxis-and-treatment-of-COVID-19.pdf
Good luck!
There is the prudence argument with respect to the vaccines. These are not ordinary vaccines in the sense of injecting a dead or attenuated virus into the body so as to trigger an ordinary immune response. None of the covid vaccines are in that category and the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines in particular use a cutting edge technology (MRNA encapsulated by a lipid envelope) never been tried before. Since these 'vaccines' rely on an entirely new and tested method to generate antibodies, the long term (even mid term) effects are undetermined at this point.
If someone could take the equivalent of aspirin (e.g. ivermectin) until this thing blows over as opposed to an untried therapy that operates at the RNA level, many would do so. Furthermore, the law mandates it: remember, if there is a viable therapeutic to treat an illness then such a 'vaccine' would be deemed too unproven to be permitted to be used.
WHO Adviser Says It's 'Likely' Coronavirus Leaked from Lab ...
https://news.yahoo.com/adviser-says-likely-coronavirus-leaked-200153962.html
Jamie Metzl, a member of the World Health Organization's International Advisory Committee on Human Genome Editing, has speculated that the coronavirus originated in a lab in Wuhan, China.
In 2015 Wuhan lab was studying " Zoonotic Transition" (Bats) how an animal virus penetrates a human cell.
When I posted this on FB it was REMOVED.
CDC said only 6% of Covid deaths were ONLY COVID.
Metzl, to his credit, has been saying this for a while. With respect to FB, they have gone from being the most tolerant of the tech platforms to being the most restrictive. Remember Zuckerberg's dismissal of the left's accusation that the Russians' manipulation of his platform was responsible for Trump's election in '16? Now FB will not even allow a recording of Trump's voice to be on the platform!
I am surprised that FB only removed your post and not you.
I only go to FB for family communication. I don't want to be tainted by misinformation. My husband who was a Progressive, but is waking up, can't believe he's being censored. When I complained about them doing it 2 years ago, he laughed at me.
Several are based on combining a basically harmless viruses with parts of the spike protein - the mRNA ones are new to vaccine application, I agree - and have several downsides, more expensive, double dose, excessive cold storage requirements, more expensive, etc - did you mean "tested" or "untested"
Don't think Ivermectin is the "equivalent" of aspirin - It is a pharmaceutical, and has side effects of it's own - it is used as a Rx for various conditions, not as a preventative - which is what you seem to suggest - "take it until this thing blows over" - potentially for years?
Kindly tell me, citation, "where if there is a viable therapeutic to treat an illness then such a 'vaccine' would be deemed too unproven to be permitted to be used."
I repeat - seems to me better to prevent than to have to treat ...
'Tested' should have been 'untested' - late at night and typing too fast.
Ivermectin seems to be remarkably safe for an effective anti-viral. The group headed by Paul Marik and Pierre Cory is probably the best source of information. Some links:
covid19criticalcare.com/covid-19-protocols/i-mask-plus-protocol/
covid19criticalcare.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/FLCCC-Alliance-I-MASKplus-Protocol-ENGLISH.pdf
covid19criticalcare.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/FLCCC-IVERMECTIN-Summary.pdf
Sorry, again I did not respond to one of your questions. :)
The emergency use authorization question is answered in the second paragraph on this page: www.fda.gov/emergency-preparedness-and-response/mcm-legal-regulatory-and-policy-framework/emergency-use-authorization
But if you want the actual act language, here it is (from https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/21/360bbb-3):
(c)Criteria for issuance of authorization
The Secretary may issue an authorization under this section with respect to the emergency use of a product only if, after consultation with the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response, the Director of the National Institutes of Health, and the Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (to the extent feasible and appropriate given the applicable circumstances described in subsection (b)(1)), the Secretary concludes—
(1)that an agent referred to in a declaration under subsection (b) can cause a serious or life-threatening disease or condition;
(2)that, based on the totality of scientific evidence available to the Secretary, including data from adequate and well-controlled clinical trials, if available, it is reasonable to believe that—
(A)the product may be effective in diagnosing, treating, or preventing—
(i)such disease or condition; or
(ii)a serious or life-threatening disease or condition caused by a product authorized under this section, approved or cleared under this chapter, or licensed under section 351 of the Public Health Service Act [42 U.S.C. 262], for diagnosing, treating, or preventing such a disease or condition caused by such an agent; and
(B)the known and potential benefits of the product, when used to diagnose, prevent, or treat such disease or condition, outweigh the known and potential risks of the product, taking into consideration the material threat posed by the agent or agents identified in a declaration under subsection (b)(1)(D), if applicable;
(3)that there is no adequate, approved, and available alternative to the product for diagnosing, preventing, or treating such disease or condition;
This is why I ask for citations - actual wording matters ...
So, in this case the wording says "The Sec. may issue an authorization only if ..... the Sec concludes .... there is no adequate alternative for ... preventing or treating such disease ... "
So the ? is has the Sec concluded that there IS such an available alternative ...
You can argue that he should have concluded this with regard to Ivermectin, but if he didn't, he was not precluded from issuing the EUA with regard to the vaccine ...
If we work under an assumption that the lab-leak theory is true (and there is no evidence, as I understand, of natural development and spread of this virus,) then it would make sense why Fauci was foisted upon us to take the heat for what he had a hand in creating. No one wanted this hot potato. And as a result of all the ass-covering of the last year+ (again, if the lab-leak theory is true,) the powers that be have worsened our collective health, nearly cratered our economy, funneled trillions more dollars to billionaires, and politicized public health to such a degree that effective future communication in this realm are severely damaged. I could not be more disgusted.
Plenty of evidence for natural. Zero for "lab leak". Here's what I replied to "ChesterView" above.
Re: Item 1 - Just wrong. There are closely related viruses as far as Vietnam. I don't have the cite at my fingertips, but I saw that one. This argument is also like the old "missing link" stories that aimed to prove humans weren't evolved from lesser primates because we couldn't find all of the steps. No, you can't expect to find all the steps as suggested. That's ridiculous nonsense. RNA viruses mutate like mad. Instead you use evolutionary trees, and look at the apparent rate of mutations. There are multiple hypotheses for how SARS-CoV-2 adapted to humans. One is a set of men who got very sick for quite a while. Immune compromised might be another. It is doubtful we will find anything crystal clear. Reality isn't like that.
Re: Item 2 - Just wrong. Wade is either grossly ignorant, or deliberately falsifying here. There is plenty of evidence of natural origin. Not hard to find such studies. Here's one.
(May 2020) A close relative of SARS-CoV-2 found in bats offers more evidence it evolved naturally.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/05/200511142202.htm
Re: Item 3 - Just wrong. Furin is present and it's highly conserved in mammals. (May 2020) Structural and functional modelling of SARS-CoV-2 entry in animal models.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-72528-z
"... in a panel of animal models, i.e. guinea pig, dog, cat, rat, rabbit, ferret, mouse, hamster and macaque. Here we showed that ACE2, but not TMPRSS2 or Furin, has a higher level of sequence variability in the Spike protein interaction surface, which greatly influences Spike protein binding mode.... TMPRSS2 and Furin are sufficiently similar in the considered hosts not to drive susceptibility differences.
Re: Item 4 - Just wrong. There is NO SUCH THING as a human specific codon! There are mostly mild differences in the production of tRNA for different codons. But you can use a human sequence in E. coli, and vice versa. The codon optimization just gives you somewhat higher production, that's all. So no. This is just not true.
Bluntly put, Wade's article is utter garbage. Wade is not a scientist. The people pimping it (like Trish Wood) are not scientists. The whole business of "Wade's article" getting such intense press I find highly suspect. So should you. Don't be so damn gullible FFS!
I cannot disagree with you.
It's foolish to expect 30-year-old humanities graduates, whose only prior exposure to science was the natural history survey in their sophomore years, and who clearly regard "science" as simply another ideology like Marxism or critical race theory, to be our gatekeepers and interpreters of contemporary scientific understanding.
Meanwhile, though I suppose a case could be made that skeptical opinions on such ideas as the efficacy of masks or vaccines ought to be squelched in the name of public health, how could public health possibly be served by repressing discussions about the origin of the disease? After all, aren't these new cheerleaders for science at all interested in how COVID-19 appeared or how we can ensure it never happens again?
When the Nicholas Wade article appeared I was stunned, since if nothing else it is clear there's a preponderance of circumstantial evidence for the lab leak hypothesis, the notion that in fact this entire pandemic would never have happened if the US government hadn't funded deliberate attempts to make a more communicable and lethal virus. And isn't it at all newsworthy that the author of the original refutations of the lab leak hypothesis was actually one of the two people in the world most responsible if COVID-19 was in fact developed in a lab (and he's been frantically pushing that line ever since, as of course anyone of merely average integrity would if he had actually unleashed the current pandemic on the world)?
And yet I have heard (though cannot confirm) that links to a twenty page article on the lab leak hypothesis that appeared in New York Magazine in January were being auto-scrubbed from the YouTube comments section. What possible public health priority was served by that?
If the lab leak theory turns out to be true, the way to prevent another COVID-like disaster will be revealed as simple: prohibit gain-of-function research. That sounds like an easy fix to me, one we should be grateful for. And we can never know whether it's possible without fully investigating how this thing started.
Once again the media, through towering hubris, have stepped on their collective dicks; and for some crazy reason haven't yet twigged that people are beginning to notice these things.
Nicholson Baker in NY Magazine wrote the story in January. It took an author with little prior knowledge to say things that a world full of experts could not.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-escape-theory.html
The Wuhan Lab origin was first known to me 3-17-20, see article below. The writing is a bit hysterical but click thru the links and you'll find a wealth of substantiation. IMO the story has simply been buried, deleted, and ridiculed for over a year exclusively due to TDS. Politics is the only lens for the MSM cyclops.
tl/dr article; gain of function work in bats by NIH at UNC was deemed too dangerous by US gov't, so UNC lab closed down. Many of the researchers were welcomed to Wuhan Lab to continue their research. Wuhan lab with documented prior history of containment lapses effs up.
https://arizonafreedomalliance.ning.com/group/news-in-a-flash/forum/topic/show?id=6399857%3ATopic%3A189511&xgs=1&xg_source=msg_share_topic
I have said since last year that I thought folks on both sides of the Pacific knew more about this than they were revealing - but that we would probably never know because it was just too politically fraught ...
Further, if you think COVID-19 is bad, it's an old ladies tea party compared to a bioweapon. We know that multiple parties are trying to make bioweapons as we speak. They really want them. Do you SERIOUSLY believe that if we don't have people trained and ready to work on such problems, we will be able to deal with them well?!
Is THAT what you got from the COVID-19 pandemic?
«Further, if you think COVID-19 is bad, it's an old ladies tea party compared to a bioweapon.»
An interesting argument is that whether it was man-made or natural, SARS-2 could have been, or could be used as an *economic* bioweapon, as its main impact is its ability to overwhelm established health systems even without having high death rates, thus paralizying target economies, and if was deliberately deployed in Wuhan, it was to target an important node of the chinese economy.
With that, you see how China could, using exactly the same "logic" of conspiracy innuendo, accuse the USA of attacking China using COVID-19. Except they can add, "Why attack ourselves?"
This is why the rule, "Extraordinary accusations require extraordinary proof."
What is guaranteed, no matter what, is that there will be new pandemic viruses. You want to think that anything like Covid-19 must be man made. No reason to think that.
I've seen this for decades. Nice mommies and dudes standing up to oppose level 4 BSL facilities to research anthrax, Ebola, and more.
Just like Wuhan's lab, a BSL 4 brings potentially dangerous stuff in from OUTSIDE!
Who here is saying that a virus like SARS-Cov2 MUST be man made? I've seen no one here suggest that. But you seem to be suggesting, "really dangerous viruses occur naturally, so what does it matter if scientists also try to create really dangerous viruses in labs?"
Is that what you are saying?
And as a minor point, the gain of function research that WIV was doing on bat coronaviruses was taking place in BSL2 and BSL3 parts of the lab. Surely you wouldn't deny that this is reckless?
Wuhan Lab was studying "Zoonotic Transmission" How to penetrate a human cell with an animal virus. 3 of the Lab workers went to the Hospital in DECEMBER. That's why they are investigating THAT further.
"The public used to appreciate the humility of that approach, but what they get from us more often now are sanctimonious speeches about how reporters are intrepid seekers of truth who sleep next to God and gobble amphetamines so they can stay awake all night defending democracy from 'misinformation.'"
Awesome sentence.
Telling as well, because the heart of the problem isn't just in the media - it is in the masses consuming it.
Not to mention the commodification of almost every aspect of life(science) which forces people to knuckle under or starve.
I once had to deal with a Politifact fact checker who clearly wanted to claim a (Republican) Senator got the numbers wrong on a topic in a speech he gave. (I had produced a report on the topic.) The guy clearly had an agenda, the numbers were straightforward, and I had to keep telling him that no, you can't do what he wanted to do with the numbers so he could claim the speech was wrong, etc. He had a hard time understanding you can't divide by zero. It wasn't even a controversial topic. In the end, he still got a quote he could edit to use to claim the Senator's statements were partially false. I can just imagine the researchers Politifact cherry-picked/misrepresented to "fact check" something as controversial as the lab origin possibility.
This is why people should never talk to the media. They don't want to help you. They want to get the quote they're out to get and all else be damned.
Sometimes they don't even want the out of context quote.
Many just want to claim "they spoke with both sides" before writing what they would have written if they had spoken with no one.
A Miranda Warning for talking to the press is needed. "Everything you say can and will be used against you in the court of public opinion."
It was part of my job.
Fair enough. Hopefully the employer learned something from it.
Naw ...
Even allowing for the usual human failures, that’s a crock. I’ll never forget the health insurance executive telling me the same thing - you guys never get it right, why should I talk to you. Then you gain experience and realize some folks have a highly personal view of what’s “right.” Meaning if you don’t explain it like I would have explained it and believe what I believe, you’re wrong, and an idiot, and a liar. Those folks will always be with us, and reporters will keep on trying to explain it the best they can.
Your "profession" is a joke, you're a glorified stenographer, and no normal people will ever trust you again.
Thank you Matt -
I have been on the faculty of one of our leading medical schools for some time.
One of the very first things I drill into my students heads on their first day of rotating with me is THERE ARE NO FACTS IN MEDICINE. There is nothing in medicine that is so sacred that it is declared a fact.
To "fact-check" anything in medicine (and I would dare say science) in a political format is absolutely absurd.
I knew this whole COVID thing was going off the rails when I started seeing medical and scientific conjecture and hypotheses being "fact-checked". Then to have Twitter and Facebook censor anything that questions these "facts" added a whole other layer to the absurdity.
The only good thing about this whole affair is that our grandchildren are going to have quite a lot of laughs when they come to this part of the history book. "HOW COULD THOSE MORONS HAVE BEEN SO STUPID?" That is of course we survive. It is sometimes hard to imagine us surviving with the scum we have running medicine, the media, and our politics right now.
[The only good thing about this whole affair is that our grandchildren are going to have quite a lot of laughs when they come to this part of the history book. "HOW COULD THOSE MORONS HAVE BEEN SO STUPID?"]
I've often wondered how / what would be the thing that future generations look back to us as being complete dopes on (as we do to our ancestors). I didn't think it would be something we'd be able to see in real time, but here we are.
It was the younger generation that was mostly DUPED - "Progressives".
And still are!! I have a very resilient friend who has survived two bouts of cancer. Because of her health history, she took the mRNA as soon as it came out. Several months later, she wanted to go visit her son/grandchildren after they had been vaccinated. In the between time, she resumed her exercise regimen, etc. Her son asked both parents to quarantine (at home) for two weeks prior to driving out there despite all of them having been vaccinated. Talk about insane! The absurdity just doesn't end.
Mass hysteria.
Science is about a methodology that ignores consensus and establishes, not checks, facts. Medicine is the second most primitive domain in science after climate science. I had the pleasure of working in the most primitive discipline in medicine, psychiatry.
I'm in my seventies and about 14 months from death (I'm tracking weight loss, frequency of lung infections, frequency of aphasia and several other objective measurements) and I'm gone in June/July next year from a combination of normal-pressure hydrocephalus, COPD, a lengthy list of neurological disorders, two CVAs, many TIAs. Already in a hospice-lite program. Gave up medicine when I returned to the US (med school and practice in Germany) not wishing to spend a year or two full-time relearning everything in English in my late forties. That was thirty years ago.
I salute you. There are no facts in medicine. Every patient is a universe of one. The scientists working in labs to create vaccines are heroes, but do not understand what a practitioner is. He/she is someone who will improve his/her patient's life using whatever is available. Sometimes that's hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin or magic to relieve pain. In Micronesia I encouraged physicians to learn pain-relief magic from local shamans. Funny, it looks just like hypnosis.
Thanks Matt - love subscribing to you. Love the comments and people here, great range of voices. But … Trump was right about hydroxychloroquine and other treatments and the Wuhan lab. So the so-called fact checking done by anti-Trump MSM lead to countless deaths. It's not just being misleading, they killed people. Just because they hated Trump. When is the media going to be held accountable for this?
Right about hydroxychloroquine in what sense? https://www.covid19treatmentguidelines.nih.gov/antiviral-therapy/chloroquine-or-hydroxychloroquine-with-or-without-azithromycin/
Thanks, Jim, much appreciate your input. Trump was right it was a treatment that could save lives. Please don't accept what NIH says - for fourteen months I've been certain this “virus” was manmade. I've lost friends over this. But now, well, it's true. It always was.
It just treats the symptoms, not the virus.
«It just treats the symptoms, not the virus»
But it is the symptoms that kill people, not the virus: respirators also treat the symptoms, but that seems to prevent a percentage of the sick from dying. So something is better than nothing.
However the point is always the same: cures and vaccines are good goals, but in the meantime a well funded and organized test-trace-isolate public health system can reduce sickness and economic impact to very small levels, and it has not been adopted in "Washington Consensus" countries because it is ideologically incompatible with reaganism.
Bill Heath makes a good argument below and I will prove his point about the American people by admitting I don't trust my government with that information even though I believe it would be a worthy and effective goal.
We were promised the census would never he used against us, but it was used during WWII by the FBI to identify and round up the Japanese for internment.
We were promised that vaccines are just vaccines, but we have repeatedly used DNA tests from this process to identify and target people for incarceration at home and drone strikes abroad.
You name a time we have trusted our government and I will give you an example of where they screwed us for trusting them. Those in power don't trust or respect us and will use all forms of violence and surveillance to keep us in line, enforcing rules against us that they openly violate with complete impunity themselves.
Why would I trust a group pf people with something like disease surveillance tracking when they have consistently lied and shown no trust in us?
It is practically incompatible with geography, size of population and mobility options. Reaganism has nothing to do with it. There are two countries, US and Australia, that were founded by people with an antipathy to automatic compliance with authority. Countries with a culture that supports automatic compliance with authority have no framework for understanding the attitude.
«It is practically incompatible with geography, size of population and mobility options. Reaganism has nothing to do with it.»
It seems comically stupid to think that the containment approaches of China-mainland, Kerala, Korea-south, Japan, have been "incompatible with geography, size of population and mobility options".
«There are two countries, US and Australia, that were founded by people with an antipathy to automatic compliance with authority.»
I am indeed aware that in both the US and Australia there are millions of people who exercise their indefatigable right to refuse wearing crotch masks in public or to drive around without the oppression of a government permit, because they are all "rugged individualists". :-)
No. It's not.
Ask doctors what they've been taking all of this time to prevent COVID and they'll tell you hydroxychloroquine. It's why parts of Africa have seen very low COVID cases; they take it routinely to prevent malaria.
The trouble is, IMO, in so many discussions our opinion of the information disseminated by any particular party depends on our opinion of the party - so "anything so-and-so says must be wrong (or right) because so-and-so says it!" It is not judged, or even discussed, on whether or not the actual point may, in fact, be valid. As they say, even a broken clock is right twice a day ...
Genuine question: what do you think "accountability" looks like here? What does holding the media accountable mean outside of pointing to their failures?
excellent question. The media knowingly falsified, withheld and demonized valuable information that could have saved lives. I would like for them yo be put on trial. These media people have not only disgraced one of the greatest things ever - a free press - but have used it without any moral compass. This is criminal. And why Greenwald, Taibbi, James O'Keefe, among others are heroes.
I don't think you want to increase the likelihood of the government putting journalists on trial.
Take something like the lead up to the Iraq War. Journalists were systematically lied to by government officials to drum up cause for an unjust war. Though some were smart enough to see through the sham, others listened to senior intelligence & military brass and reported their story.
What happens to them in this situation? The get prosecuted by the same people who lied to them?
None of the media missing on big stories is particularly new. The skepticism from the vast majority of the press during the outset of Watergate is instructive here too among dozens of other stories of massive importance.
I get wanting some consequences for this stuff, but outside refusing to read people you believe to be liars (and libel cases), I'm not sure of a remedy that makes sense. Don't think we want the gov't prosecuting this. At all.
struggle with this one so perhaps you can help me.
I'm a classic liberal on the 1st amendment, but I have come to realize that some people in our democracy have more first amendment protection than others.
A classic example, prosecutors have absolute immunity in our system due to the Constitutional activism of some Conservative judges in the past.
If a prosecutor goes to the media and implies that a lesser crime I was involved in involved murder when that is not true and I was never charged with that, the prosecutor is protected from civil liability by absolute immunity and criminal liability by the fact that he's a prosecutor and is not going to prosecute himself.
As long as the media gives an "according to police" they can repeat any lie the prosecutor tells them with complete 1st amendment protection.
Now I'm sitting in a courtroom with jurors that have read in the local paper that my case involved murder while the prosecutor claims I cannot raise this issue since I was never charged with murder, which most judges will support.
I'm now convicted and spending the rest of my life in prison based on a false claim intentionally spread by a prosecutor in secure a conviction for something else. This is not a hypothetical. Prosecutors play this game with the media whenever they have a well known jury trial to pollute potential jurors in their favor to ensure a conviction.
Can this be defended from a classic liberal standpoint? Or, is a better to adopt Hammurabi's code: He who knowingly tells a lie about another person is guilty of that which he lies about?
Put another way, if you are going to falsely destroy another person's life you will have skin in the game, so think twice.
In such a case, can we have a Press with full 1st amendment protections when they use that power to deny the freedom and right to a fair trial to others?
Another example: A Newspaper supports the criminalization of some form of speech they don't approve of under the ubiquitous "fire in a crowded theater" argument that the Supreme Court had soundly defeated, but is still ubiquitous as an excuse to criminalize unpopular speech at the State Supreme Court level.
Does the press have a 1st amendment right to argue that other citizens should not have a 1st amendment right, but they should? What they call "hiding behind the Constitution" when other make unpopular speech they don't approve of?
I genuinely have no good answer and would appreciate your thoughts.
I'm in full agreement that some people have *more* first amendment rights than others and, additionally, that some speech is more powerful than other speech both in practice and as legal precedent. Cops are of course a great example---their burden for truth-telling should be higher but they lie to the media and in court with impunity. The lead up to the Iraq War is my stock example here for a reason: hundreds of thousands died for a lie. Zero consequences for the responsible officials. Domestic spying is another gutting example: look at the difference between Snowden and someone like Jake Clapper. The latter is regarded as a hero in some circles and most of our mainstream politicians treat Snowden as some traitor or pariah when he exhibited rare bravery at lifelong personal cost.
The vast differences between different classes 1A rights is a key point though. You bring up "the press have a 1st amendment right to argue that other citizens should not have a 1st amendment right." I'd also point to Ron DeSantis in Florida signing a law that makes certain Facebook can't "censor" people running for office but, of course, zero protections for the rabble. This stuff is pervasive and depressing.
As for the remedy? I wish I knew. There's a big difference, of course, with being wrong honestly and knowingly lying, especially in court or print. Proving the latter is difficult. In a world where shame and dignity mattered, there would be a reputation cost to lying. You probably don't need me to tell you that world does not exist (Marc Thiessen, America's number one torture advocate, is a syndicated columnist---just one of about a billion examples but one that always chaps my hide). We just have so many people in this country who operate not under a rubric of what's right but rather what they want and what they can get away with.
We all want consequences for deceit but when the arbiter is our government it's hard to see a way out.
It sounds like you struggle with many of the same challenges I do on this topic and I suspect we come down on the same side on protected speech as well. Your Marc Theissan and Ron DeSantis/Facebook examples are excellent as is your police example where they face no consequences for lying. I prefer the Prosecutor example only because they have absolute immunity. That means even if you proved they intentionally lied for a malicious purpose in court, the judge would still throw out the case under absolute immunity. It's a legal shield from accountability not even the police can match. Prosecutor's in Louisiana under DA Harry Connick knowingly sent innocent black men to the death chamber by hiding evidence (Brady Violation) that proved they were not guilty of the crime.
The consequences? They are still working as private attorneys today. They didn't even lose their law license and can never be sued due to their absolute immunity.
Professionals differentiate themselves by curating a system of standards, following and having respect for the process and standing behind the product. These are the ingredients of accountability. It's hard to do all that and still be an effective front for advertisers and it's why there are so few real journalists in the world.
>>The consensus was so strong that some well-known voices saw social media accounts suspended or closed for speculating about Covid-19 having a “lab origin.”
Great line, and it belies the light, humorous tone of the article. A consensus so strong you get cancelled for contradicting it. It's nothing new; we've been seeing it for years in the climate change arena.
Anyone who blathers on about "scientific consensus" is either a liar or a fool, perhaps both.
It is unfortunate that we cannot resurrect Galileo to ask him what he thought of the consensus of his day.
Sadly, the population has been so dumbed-down with government "education" and endless propaganda that they believe that politically-spawned groupthink is science.
"Blind belief in authority is the greatest enemy of truth."
~ Albert Einstein
"Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatsoever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, required only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus."
– Michael Crichton (1942-2008)
The notion of "scientific consensus" is not just a form of the logical fallacy known as *argument from authority*, which used to be taught in school, back when schools actually educated people rather than indoctrinated them with fashionable leftist absurdities.
It is not just childish nonsense for ignoramuses, however. It is destructive of progress (which is no doubt why progressives love it so) and downright dangerous.
Here is a partial list of scientific consensus "deniers" proven right:
1. Ignaz Semmelweis, who suggested that doctors should wash their hands, and who eliminated puerpal fever as a result, was fired, harassed, forced to move, had his career destroyed, and died in a mental institution at age 47. All this because he went against consensus science.
2. J Harlen Bretz, the geologist who documented the catastrophic Missoula floods, was ridiculed and humiliated by uniformitarian "elders" for 30 years before his ideas were accepted. All this because he went against consensus science. He was eventually awarded the Penrose Medal.
3. Alfred Wegener, the geophysicist who first proposed continental drift, the basis of plate tectonics, was berated for over 40 years by mainstream geologists who organized to oppose him in favour of a trans-oceanic land bridge. All this because he went against consensus science.
4. Aristarchus of Samos, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, brilliant minds and leaders in their field all supported the heliocentric model. They were at some point either ignored, derided, vilified, or jailed for their beliefs.
All this because they went against consensus science.
5. Carl F. Gauss, discoverer of non-Euclidean geometry, self-censored his own work for 30 years for fear of ridicule, reprisal, and relegation. It did not become known until after his death. Similar published work was ridiculed.
All this because he went against consensus science.
6. Hans Alfven, a Nobel plasma physicist, showed that electric currents operate at large scales in the cosmos. His work was considered unorthodox and is still rejected despite providing answers to many of cosmology's problems.
All this because he went against consensus science.
7. Georg Cantor, creator of set theory in mathematics, was so fiercely attacked that he suffered long bouts of depression. He was called a charlatan and a corrupter of youth and his work was referred to as utter nonsense.
All this because he went against consensus science.
8. Kristian Birkeland, the man who explained the polar aurorae, had his views disputed and ridiculed as a fringe theory by mainstream scientists until fifty years after his death. He is thought by some to have committed suicide.
All this because he went against consensus science.
9. Gregor Mendel, founder of genetics, whose seminal paper was criticized by the scientific community, was ignored for over 35 years. Most of the leading scientists simply failed to understand his obscure and innovative work.
All this because he went against consensus science.
10. Michael Servetus discovered pulmonary circulation. As his work was deemed to be heretical, the inquisitors confiscated his property, arrested, imprisoned, tortured, and burned him at the stake atop a pyre of his own books.
All this because he went against consensus science.
11. Amedeo Avogadro's atomic-molecular theory was ignored by the scientific community, as was future similar work. It was confirmed four years after his death, yet it took fully one hundred years for his theory to be accepted.
All this because he went against consensus science.
https://twitter.com/HiFiWhiPhi/status/1235883344019288064
All science is THEORY, "The Theory of Evolution", "The Theory of Relativity", "The Conspiracy Theory".
«Science, on the contrary, required only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant.»
This is stupid, glib bullshit because of a substantive argument and a social argument:
* Substantively, it is based on the idea that "the real world" is perfectly and universally consistent, so that verifiability independent of place, time and observer viewpoint is possible. That happens only in "physics". A famous physicists claimed "physics is science, the rest is stamp collecting". Most so-called sciences are actually "disciplines" like medicine or political economy, where are there are no perfectly consistent and universal facts, but broad generalizations are possible and useful across large segments of time, space, and observer viewpoints.
* Even for "physics" verifiability is not the matter because most physics facts, while being in principle universally true and verifiable, cannot be in practice verified by everyone, they have to be taken on trust by the public as credible hearsay. Does the Higgs boson exist? Build your own 30km diameter accelerators and check it for yourself! Is the moon made of which cheese? Travel to the moon and check for yourself whether it is made of cheddar or feta cheese. :-)
Used to be the Catholic Church exercised that kind of authority over discourse. Going back to anything like that is not an improvement in the human condition.
Progressives and their lapdog media aren't clear on whether they want to be Vatican sycophants, Puritan witch burners, or Orwellian double-speakers. Decisions decisions decisions.
Why choose just one?
Right. All equal opportunity, that lot.
Good grief ...
You act as if being told the sun is the center of the universe is somehow better than being told the earth is.
Most humans are happy to defer to some kind of authority, as that relieves them of responsibility (for themselves).
I’m getting the feeling that the Covid origin thing is about to unravel bigly and even the media, big tech and the fact checkers won’t be able to keep a lid on it. Fauci is close to getting his tit caught in the wringer.
From you lips (finger tips?) to god's ear
"A related problem had to do with news companies using the misguided notion that the news is an exact science to promote the worse misconception that science is an exact science."
True that. Even those who point to this correct statement to challenge the false certainty of another person often follow that up with an insistence on their own false certainty.
Politics has poisoned everything. Mr. Taibbi's talked about how sports has been infected by politics. I've had the same experience with science forums.
It was once considered rude to mention politics at a science convention with politicians and journalists universally pilloried for their appropriation of what they called "science" minus the scientific method. Sure scientists had political views, but you were expected to not share them.
The academy has been increasingly infected by the same partisanship that has ruined everything else. Science doesn't "prove" anything. The entire reason scientist meet is to vigorously disprove things through a rigorous, structured debate, then go have a beer. As the debate grows increasingly partisan fewer people are able or willing to go get a beer when the debate is over. It's a drag.
If you’re truly interested in discerning the truth through rigorous study and review, it’s got to be a depressing time to be a scientist.
Usually is. This is USA, 21st Century.
Or Nazi Germany, 1941.
Start with the beer and then move on to a structured debate. That way, you still get the beer and you get to watch your colleagues duke it out in a brawl.
How is it even conceivable that you have Brian Stelter celebrating with Poynter? Is there anyone who’s been more of a biased partisan activist over the last 4yrs?
I first read that as Brian Setzer and thought “Hey, I’d pay $100 for that.” But then I realized you were talking about the chubby, balding propagandist with no dignity.
And a $100 VIP face time ticket? Sounds like old school musicians trying to pinch every possible buck from legacy fans
If you're going to get people to believe that "a desire to maintain an environment where everyone feels welcome and included" is a good reason to fire someone for having an unpopular viewpoint, you're going to have to get them thinking a different way about facts
Nobody who works in the iPhone-making factory feels like what they personally do or don't do isn't important or paid attention to.
That's why they have the suicide nets underneath the windows.
The nets are very inclusive
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1357833/Apple-responds-suicides-Chinese-Foxconn-factory-hanging-nets.html
The “fact-checker” label has acquired the self-serving and ironically named function of the Ministry of Truth. Maybe it wasn’t always this way, but it is now.
Politifact, in particular, is an egregious example. I don’t know how anyone can give them even the slightest credence.
"I don't know." is the only thing that Ivy Leaguers don't know how to say. To admit a lack of knowledge puts you in a weak position relative to someone who really knows the answer. Everyone in the political-intelligence-corporate media complex suffers from this.
That all of them don't know much is effing obvious. Look at how clueless most of them are when operating the touch screen devices on election night. That there needs to be a "special" person on each network to operate the device (John King) while someone else reads the screen (Wolf Blitzer) is proof that these people are no more than Ron Burgundy with worse screenwriters.
Do you think that Rachel Maddow knows more about how to fix a toilet than her building superintendent? Does Leslie Stahl really know about the breakup of the Ottoman Empire and the division of the Mandate of Palestine better than someone who lived in Jersusalem in 1945?
Paddy Chayefsky's Network was supposed to be satire, not a how-to manual.
It’s darkly funny how “I don’t know” is so unacceptable in the postmodern age.
I suppose they’ve replaced “knowing” with “feeling”, yet still call it knowing.
«Paddy Chayefsky's Network was supposed to be satire, not a how-to manual»
Like "They iive", "Network" and many other pieces of supposed satire are thinly veiled documentaries, with only a few cosmetic exaggerations. Much as probably are David Icke's "lizard theory" or even QAnon (unless it was designed to discredit the "many rich people are monsters who get away with it" type of story).
Sorry - when being "clueless" about operating a touch screen is an indication that someone "doesn't know much", it indicates to me how far down the rabbit hole of "technology" we have gone ... I hate "touch screens", the fine points of making them work smoothly escape me - but I know a lot about other things, which, IMO, are far more important than mastering a "touch screen" ....
C'mon man. 90% of the viewers at home can figure out what Kornacki is doing just by watching, and most of the under-25s would be able to do it faster...
My point stands - when criteria for "knowing much" means facility with a "touch screen" - sad day ...