DEEP DIVE: Covid Myths - "Why the Medical Establishment (Deservedly) Lost Americans’ Trust
1) More than 1,000 medical professionals signed a widely-publicized open letter arguing that protesters should be advised differently about Covid based on their race and policy views
2) The American Medical Association recently released a guide calling on doctors to use politicized, Orwellian language with patients.
3) Fauci and others told a “noble lie” at the start of the pandemic that cloth/surgical masks don’t prevent Covid (a “noble lie” is when someone lies to you, but the lie is “for your own good.”)
4) The media/tech establishment pushed a “noble lie” that natural immunity is worse than vaccine-only immunity.
5) The medical, media, and tech establishments told a “noble lie” that Covid-19 was naturally-occurring, and not the result of a lab leak in Wuhan...
Given all the above, Americans had excellent reasons to lose trust in the medical establishment and the establishment journalists who cover it. The above lists just a few of reasons people lost trust. I’m leaving out many examples, such as how establishment media misleadingly referred to Ivermectin as merely “horse dewormer” (it’s routinely used in humans) or how they unfairly praised New York and demonized Florida — even as Florida was doing well, by the numbers...
Tragic mistakes made by skeptics of the medical establishment
6) Skeptics are wrong to say that 70% of Covid deaths in the UK are among vaccinated people, as if it were a bad thing
7) Skeptics overhyped fears about clinical studies...
9) Contrary to skeptics, side effect harm is NOT comparable to Covid harm...
Thanks to Australia and New Zealand holding Covid deaths to near zero, we have a clean dataset un-confounded by Covid deaths. Between May and October 2021, in both NZ and Australia, more than half of their populations were given vaccines, including Pfizer and Moderna. If Covid vaccines cause death, we should see rising all-cause mortality as they are administered. Between the main vaccination period of May-Oct (bounded by the vertical black lines) Australia’s mortality rises slightly, and New Zealand’s falls slightly. This suggests deaths from vaccine side effects are negligible...
10) Skeptics overhyped vaccines causing Covid variants"
Meme - Republicans against Trumpism @RpsAgainstTrump: "If Trump hadn't been president we wouldn't have had 500K dead Americans from Covid."
Republicans against Trumpism @RpsAgainstTrump: "Can we stop already politicizing a pandemic that killed more than 800K Americans? Thanks"
About 30% of Canadians felt 'pressured' to ‘comply’ with COVID-19 policies - "Nearly one-third of Canadians said they felt pressured to follow the public health rules during the pandemic, according to research done by the Health department... “Some participants mentioned feeling a deep sense of guilt when they contracted COVID-19 as the infection was seen as a failure on their part to comply with public health or to keep themselves and their surroundings safe,” said the report COVID-19 Tracking Survey and Focus Groups on Canadians’ Views."
Weird. We are told there was no coercion
Meme - Melissa Chen: "This isn't some random blue-check on Twitter. This is the actual New York Times reporter who is tasked with covering the pandemic, and she has revealed her belief that pursuing the truth, including taking seriously an ever-more-plausible theory about a deadly virus's origins, is "racist." Also, how is it racist to suggest COVID-19 came from a lab but it's not racist to suggest it came from a Chinese wet market, the competing (and increasingly implausible) theory? The unintentionally hilarious thing about dismissing the lab theory as "racist" is the alternative theory posits the world got sick because Chinese people eat bats or pangolins or whatever."
Apoorva Mandavilli @apoorva_nyc: "Someday we will stop talking about the lab leak theory and maybe even admit its racist roots. But alas, that day is not yet here."
iTamara on X - "7 years ago I took in a 16 year old kid whose Parents kicked him out. He was my Son's best friend and I didn't have the heart to say "no". I told his Father then that he would turn 18 and not want anything to do with them if they didn't fix their relationship with him right away. They didn't take my advice. Things actually got worse. Then at Christmas time during covid, they basically told him he wasn't welcome around ANY of his family if he wasn't vaccinated. He's 23 years old now and still lives with me. He rarely speaks to his parents. This makes me very sad, but looking back I would have taken him sooner. He has so much emotional damage from his parents and it pisses me off 🥺 I can't imagine life without him now. He is my kid."
Meme - "As to 53 y/o male patient who got COVID-19 during treatment for hepatitis C virus associated vasculitis, "... the patient's skin lesions and peripheral neuropathy rapidly worsened, followed by the development of intestinal ischemia, which led to death.""
"Reminds of the guy who got bitten by a snake and had covid at the same time. He went blind and fell into a coma. Covid is like a double bomb if you have any pre existing issues." "It also rises chances of existing conditions, such as bites and injuries."
"Honestly, this virus should never have been allowed to be roaming freely like this. Its literally a slow death sentence to everyone it reinfects."
Covid hysteria from 2022. I like how correlation is causation when you're a lefist. Given that covid is endemic, presumably the whole world is going to die soon
KanekoaTheGreat on X - "FDA Committee vaccinologist who recommended mRNA for all children six months and older on why he's not taking the booster: "We certainly were surprised by myocarditis and pericarditis, and we'll see whether or not over time when we're 5 years into this, 10 years into this, 15 years into this, whether there's any evidence of residual myocardial disease...""
Meme - Dr. Simon Goddek @goddeketal: "I wanted to check in and see if your position on this statement you made previously has changed."
Alastair McAlpine, MD @AlastairMcA30: "Fact: The Covid vaccines are incredibly effective (100% against severe disease!)
Fact: The vaccines are very very safe (severe reaction 0.005% AT WORST. No deaths). Anyone who tells you otherwise is simply incorrect. Or has an agenda. #Vaccineswork"
"Hey @AlastairMcA30, it's me again, Simon, with three more questions.
1. When will you apologize to those who've experienced vaccine injuries?
2. As a medical doctor, how can you view "vaccine-induced harm" as unimportant and trivial?
3. Did you take the Hippocratic Oath?"
James Bembridge @TheBembridge: "APP meeting on vaccine injured. Barely any MPs present."
Alastair McAlpine, MD @AlastairMcA30: "Good. There are far more important issues than this nonsense."
Meme - Occupy Democrats: "BREAKING NEWS: Intel senda a defiant message to its anti-vaxxer employees, announces that all unvaccinated workers will soon be placed in unpaid leave if they fail to abide by the company's vaccine mandate. RT TO THANK INTEL FOR STANDING STRONG!"
Meme - Occupy Democrats: "BREAKING: Goldman Sachs announces that it will begin requiring all employees to receive booster shots against COVID, as well as submit to 2 COVID tests per week in order to keep employees safe from the raging Omicron variant. RT IF YOU THINK THAT EVERY COMPANY SHOULD DO THE SAME!"
Ahh... When Occupy supports big companies in crushing individuals! Ditto with their supporting for evicting the unvaccinated
COVID-19 Hospitalizations Rising In North, Falling In South, And The Media Is Silent - "Outside of a few articles mentioning the rise in cases, the media has largely ignored the new developments, after spending the summer denouncing DeSantis as an anti-science nutjob. With headlines like “Ron DeSantis has no idea what he’s talking about” and “Ron DeSantis leans into mask-mandate fights as Covid cases soar in Florida,” these headlines are now ignoring any political blame now that Blue states in the north are seeing spikes in cases and hospitalizations. Local Michigan outlets, however, are covering the increases, and appear to side with Geraghty’s assessment"
From 2021
NP View: Elected leaders must be responsible for COVID response - "It was a strange spectacle to see Toronto Mayor John Tory, in his polite Toronto way, asking his city’s medical officer of health, Eileen de Villa, to please give parents just 24 hours notice before shutting down the city’s schools, if that’s what she felt she had to do with COVID cases rising. But, nope, Dr. de Villa said action was needed immediately so, boom!, upside-down go the lives of a couple of hundred thousand Toronto families. Again. And this time without the ability to send children to daycare centres. What’s wrong with this picture? Mayor Tory was elected. Dr. de Villa was not. The mayor is responsible to voters, whom he must face every four years. (Almost 500,000 Torontonians went out and marked his name on a ballot in 2018.) Dr. de Villa answers to the Toronto Board of Health, which consists of six city council members, six members of the public and one representative from education. Her responsibility to the public is much less direct than the mayor’s. True, she is a scientist — an MD and a Master of Health Science, not to mention an MBA — and the mayor is not. But through this difficult year of COVID we have learned two things about “the science.” First, its pronouncements are not always clear. And, second, our problem includes more than science... we should insist on seeing the evidence. What is truly science-based can withstand pushback. Challenge-and-response is how science proceeds. And we are, after all, a democracy. The fact of our democracy helps immensely with the large part of the current crisis that is not scientific. The decision whether to lock down a city or province, close a school system, or order people to stay in their homes for two weeks or four or however long should not be taken without good scientific advice about what the dangers and likely payoffs are concerning infection rates, hospitalizations, ICU use and, in the limit, deaths. But, there is much more to such decisions than that. There is economic damage, which is not merely a reduction of mindless consumption. There is loneliness. There is loss of the freedom we should all cherish, of the ability to earn a living and of the self-esteem and dignity that brings. Yes, it is a fine thing to belong to a society that distributes cash in an emergency but finer still to be able to make one’s way in life without a year or two of roadblock. All these other things inevitably, unavoidably must be balanced against “the science.” True, some social scientists, including economists, increasingly study happiness. The King of Bhutan has asked for his kingdom’s Gross National Happiness to be tracked. But most of what must be weighed against “the science” is not calculable. It is, as the credit card commercial says, priceless. Scientists have no special expertise in making the myriad value judgements that must be taken into account in coming to a reasonable balance. Politicians have no special expertise in it, either. But they are responsible, both in the sense that making policy decisions is their job, but also in these sense that they are answerable in that job to the people who elected them. If they screw up, we can replace them. Existential constitutional crises aside, this pandemic may be the hardest challenge the country has faced since World War II. It’s worth remembering that even in that world crisis, in the great democracies civilians controlled strategy. They obviously took advice from and delegated many actions to military experts. But they were in charge."
From 2021
Meme - Kavin Senapathy @ksenapathy: "I've said nobody deserves to get COVID-19 but my glee re Joe Rogan getting it is palpable. It's like a butterfly in my soul. Should I feel guilty about it or no?"
Weird. We keep being told that being woke is about having empathy, but they cheered when Herman Cain died and celebrated when Donald Trump got covid, and still get orgasms at the thought of "covid deniers" dying
Politics of COVID-19 vaccine mandates: Left/right-wing authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, and libertarianism - "Mandatory and punitive vaccination policies, such as requiring vaccination certificates for public activities and firing employees who refuse vaccination, have raised considerable objections. With a sample of U.S. crowdsourced workers (N = 983), this study investigates how four ideologies–left-wing authoritarianism (LWA), right-wing authoritarianism (RWA), social dominance orientation (SDO), and libertarianism–explain vaccine acceptance and attitudes toward vaccine policies. Results show that LWA predicts higher vaccine acceptance and support for COVID-19 vaccine mandates and the punishment of unvaccinated individuals, whereas libertarianism and RWA show negative relationships. SDO is linked to opposition to vaccine mandates. This study underscores the role of specific ideological components in shaping attitudes toward vaccine policies while also contributing to the arguments that LWA and libertarianism have important implications for studying sociopolitical attitudes."
Someone was going on about how the left couldn't be for denying healthcare to those who hadn't gotten the covid vaccine, because healthcare access was a fundamentally left wing position. No true leftist puts sugar in his porridge
Do left-wingers discriminate? A cross-country study on the links between political orientation, values, moral foundations, and the Covid-19 passport - "To increase Covid-19 vaccine uptake and protect vulnerable people, many countries have introduced a Covid-19 passport in 2021, allowing vaccinated individuals to access indoor facilities more freely and travel to foreign countries. However, the passport has had unintended consequences as it discriminates against those who do not want to get vaccinated for medical, religious, or political reasons, or those who do not have access to vaccines. The present study (N = 678) assessed across Brazil, UK, USA, and a group of other countries, the links between political orientation, human values, and moral foundations, and attitudes towards the Covid-19 passport and whether people perceive it as a discriminatory measure. Results showed that left-wingers, typically more inclined to recognize discrimination, favor the passport more and perceive it as less discriminatory than right-wingers. This pattern remains consistent even after controlling for human values and moral foundations, independently predicting attitudes towards the passport. Overall, our findings provide novel insights into a context in which left-wingers support measures that involuntarily discriminate against certain groups."
Meme - Clifton Duncan: BFA, MFA, FHRiTP @cliftonaduncan: "It's a good thing Trump isn't instituting these mandates, otherwise we'd have to endure a bunch of reporting about how and why the vaccines aren't safe"
Vindictive comments about Captain Sir Tom Moore mark a new low for our country - "At the end of a year when Captain Tom gave so much of his precious time, effort and spirit to galvanising the nation, are we really going to judge him or his family for fulfilling a bucket list dream and going to Barbados, on a flight paid for by British Airways as a thank you from the nation, at a time when it was legal and there was a travel corridor? We are better than that. But the sad reality is, over the past few months, the government has been encouraging exactly this tendency towards fanatical curtain-twitching behaviour. Desperate to cover up their own myriad failings, they’ve sought to shift the blame to us. They’ve blown out of all proportion the knock-on effects of the behaviour of a minority of die-hard rule-breakers, when the consequences of their own dithering have been dire."
From 2021
Fines of the times - "Slovenia was the site of heavy fines, as Prime Minister Janez JanÅ¡a enacted very tough restrictions on assembly and movement. But later, the country’s Constitutional Court struck down these measures as unconstitutional. And now, Slovenians who were fined under these rules will be receiving refunds, thanks to new legislation. This includes a delivery driver who was fined for not wearing a mask outdoors. It also includes people fined for daring to participate in protests against the measures. Significantly, the fines were imposed by JanÅ¡a’s right-wing government, but are being refunded by what is said to be a center-left successor. It should be safe now to ask COVID catastrophists to hand in their progressive card—if they actually still have the audacity to claim to be progressive, which has always been laughable. Refunding these fines is actually one of the first and biggest steps taken anywhere in the world to right the wrongs of the past four years. It also suggests Slovenia has moved past the pandemic while many American bodies remain in “zero COVID” mode. Remember last week when the CDC was using the wrong COVID numbers for Hawaii County, Hawaii, which caused HawaiÊ»i Volcanoes National Park to practically shut down based on incorrect data? The CDC has continued using wrong data this week, showing a hospital there has 40 cases even though it only has 21 beds. Random Internetters contacted the hospital about this discrepancy—thereby doing the CDC’s job better than the CDC does. The CDC is falsifying public records, and Hawaii County isn’t the only affected county. There are other places around the country where the numbers don’t add up. Federal and other agencies still tie restrictions to the CDC’s color-coded map that uses obviously made-up data. Even in counties that seem to show correct data, some institutions appear to be making up their own numbers: A hospital in Kansas just enacted a new mask mandate, saying it was seeing a spike in COVID admissions. It refused to provide numbers to a radio news reporter. But the CDC’s new numbers show that county has zero hospitalizations... American institutions proudly broadcast their COVID incompetence, while Slovenia seems to be making a serious effort to rectify atrocities that took place there."
Meme - "Walking into your third winter of death, still unvxxed, still not a commun!st and still not using pronouns..."
Thousands Of COVID Studies Are 'Inefficient And Wasteful,' Scientists Say - " First and foremost, size. In the Lancet paper, Reis, Mills and their co-authors say most of the clinical trials to date have been too small to provide conclusive evidence that a possible treatment does or does not work. Some of these authors calculated last June that more than 100 unique therapeutic agents were being investigated for COVID-19, with substantial overlap and duplicated trials. On average, there were fewer than 100 participants in the individual trials where hundreds or even thousands might be needed for valid results. "The vast majority of trials are so small that they will never definitively give you an answer," says Mills. Worse still, "we have lots of examples of small trials that give you an answer and it happens to be wrong because of the play of chance." What's more, the virus is a moving target. Its structure is changing over time – early data may come from one variant, later data from another. And it doesn't sicken everyone. Reis says, "We need numbers that can address those issues. Otherwise, at the end of the day, we don't have any results, so we are wasting time and wasting money and wasting effort for everyone.""
Remarks by President Biden on Fighting the COVID-19 Pandemic (2021) - "Now to the schools. We know that if schools follow the science and implement the safety measures — like testing, masking, adequate ventilation systems that we provided the money for, social distancing, and vaccinations — then children can be safe from COVID-19 in schools."
This liberal was trying to gaslight people, claiming no one ever said "trust the science". Amazing
Is America Prepared for the Pandemic After COVID-19? - The Atlantic - "“To be ready for the next pandemic, we need to make sure that there’s an even footing in our societal structures,” Seema Mohapatra, a health-law expert at Southern Methodist University, in Dallas, told me. That vision of preparedness is closer to what 19th-century thinkers lobbied for, and what the 20th century swept aside. It means shifting the spotlight away from pathogens themselves and onto the living and working conditions that allow pathogens to flourish. It means measuring preparedness not just in terms of syringes, sequencers, and supply chains but also in terms of paid sick leave, safe public housing, eviction moratoriums, decarceration, food assistance, and universal health care. It means accompanying mandates for social distancing and the like with financial assistance for those who might lose work, or free accommodation where exposed people can quarantine from their family. It means rebuilding the health policies that Ronald Reagan began shredding in the 1980s and that later administrations further frayed. It means restoring trust in government and community through public services. “It’s very hard to achieve effective containment when the people you’re working with don’t think you care about them,” Arrianna Marie Planey, a medical geographer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told me. In this light, the American Rescue Plan—the $1.9 trillion economic-stimulus bill that Biden signed in March—is secretly a pandemic-preparedness bill. Beyond specifically funding public health, it also includes unemployment insurance, food-stamp benefits, child tax credits, and other policies that are projected to cut the poverty rate for 2021 by a third, and by even more for Black and Hispanic people... “The president has told many of us privately, and said publicly, that equity has to be at the heart of what we do in this pandemic,” Vivek Murthy, the surgeon general, told me... Socially privileged people now also enjoy the privilege of immunity, while those with low incomes, food insecurity, eviction risk, and jobs in grocery stores and agricultural settings are disproportionately likely to be unvaccinated. Once, they were deemed “essential”; now they’re treated as obstinate annoyances who stand between vaccinated America and a normal life."
From 2021. Weird how this looks suspiciously like what the left wanted before covid. Apparently prioritising young racial minorities over old white people for covid vaccines even though the latter have a higher chance of dying is a good way to fight covid. Not to mention demonising the unvaccinated despite the equity considerations
Age-stratified infection fatality rate of COVID-19 in the non-elderly population - "The largest burden of COVID-19 is carried by the elderly, and persons living in nursing homes are particularly vulnerable. However, 94% of the global population is younger than 70 years and 86% is younger than 60 years. The objective of this study was to accurately estimate the infection fatality rate (IFR) of COVID-19 among non-elderly people in the absence of vaccination or prior infection. In systematic searches in SeroTracker and PubMed (protocol: https://osf.io/xvupr), we identified 40 eligible national seroprevalence studies covering 38 countries with pre-vaccination seroprevalence data. For 29 countries (24 high-income, 5 others), publicly available age-stratified COVID-19 death data and age-stratified seroprevalence information were available and were included in the primary analysis. The IFRs had a median of 0.034% (interquartile range (IQR) 0.013–0.056%) for the 0–59 years old population, and 0.095% (IQR 0.036–0.119%) for the 0–69 years old. The median IFR was 0.0003% at 0–19 years, 0.002% at 20–29 years, 0.011% at 30–39 years, 0.035% at 40–49 years, 0.123% at 50–59 years, and 0.506% at 60–69 years. IFR increases approximately 4 times every 10 years. Including data from another 9 countries with imputed age distribution of COVID-19 deaths yielded median IFR of 0.025–0.032% for 0–59 years and 0.063–0.082% for 0–69 years. Meta-regression analyses also suggested global IFR of 0.03% and 0.07%, respectively in these age groups. The current analysis suggests a much lower pre-vaccination IFR in non-elderly populations than previously suggested. Large differences did exist between countries and may reflect differences in comorbidities and other factors. These estimates provide a baseline from which to fathom further IFR declines with the widespread use of vaccination, prior infections, and evolution of new variants."
From 2022
Damn covid deniers! They need to be deplatformed and never allowed to work again!
COVID may be no riskier than the flu for many people, some scientists argue - "Has COVID-19 become no more dangerous than the flu for most people? That's a question that scientists are debating... "We have all been questioning, 'When does COVID look like influenza?''' says Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease specialist at the University of California, San Francisco. "And, I would say, 'Yes, we are there.'" Gandhi and other researchers argue that most people today have enough immunity — gained from vaccination, infection or both — to protect them against getting seriously ill from COVID. And this is especially so since the omicron variant doesn't appear to make people as sick as earlier strains, Gandhi says. So unless a more virulent variant emerges, COVID's menace has diminished considerably for most people, which means that they can go about their daily lives, says Gandhi, "in a way that you used to live with endemic seasonal flu... The debate over COVID's mortality rate hinges on what counts as a COVID-19 death. Gandhi and other researchers argue that the daily death toll attributed to COVID is exaggerated because many deaths blamed on the disease are actually from other causes. Some of the people who died for other reasons happened to also test positive for the coronavirus. "We are now seeing consistently that more than 70% of our COVID hospitalizations are in that category," says Dr. Shira Doron, an infectious disease specialist at the Tufts Medical Center and a professor at the Tufts University School of Medicine. "If you're counting them all as hospitalizations, and then those people die and you count them all as COVID deaths, you are pretty dramatically overcounting." If deaths were classified more accurately, then the daily death toll would be closer to the toll the flu takes during a typical season, Doron says... A second reason many experts estimate that COVID's mortality rate is probably lower than it appears is that many infections aren't being reported now because of home testing... Dr. Ashish Jha, the White House COVID-19 response coordinator, agrees, especially because the vaccines and treatments for COVID are better than those for the flu. "If you are up-to-date on your vaccines today, and you avail yourself of the treatments, your chances of dying COVID are vanishingly rare and certainly much lower than your risk of getting into trouble with the flu," Jha told NPR... Much of the estimated risk for long COVID comes from people who got seriously ill at the start of the pandemic, she says. And if you account for that, the risk of long-term health problems may not be greater from COVID than from other viral infections like the flu, she says."
From 2022. All the covid hystericists were upset at the claim, even in December 2023. I'm sure some still claim that saying that covid deaths are overcounted is a conspiracy theory