You have no clue what you are talking about. I didn’t make any comment on Harris’s views of Trump’s positions on Covid nor climate denial.
As for me, you don’t know my views on Covid or climate denial.
As for my views on Covid origins, I merely think that both should be allowed a hearing. As for my views on climate denial, I doubt they are different than yours.
A bit more on Covid origins, I feel that there was no good reason that the following is true or close to it,
“Many media outlets, news organizations, so-called ‘fact checkers,’ social media platforms and thousands of individual people. All those who made this point that the lab leak was a possibility, were portrayed as conspiracy theorists. Then suddenly for no reason – there was no change at all in the evidence – but suddenly upon the publication of Nicholas Wade’s piece the tide turned and suddenly it became possible for anyone to discuss this hypothesis out loud without being demonized. Which I found bewildering. Literally nothing new had emerged, it was just another presentation, there had been many prior presentations that had gone through the evidence, but suddenly it was like somebody had given people the green light to think for themselves.”
What other drivel have you got here?
I already “confessed” to posting a link with the intent (wait for it — the horror) that people would click on it.
Vacuous? If Fauci contradicting himself is vacuous well by definition it’s vacuous.
Who is Allen? And if your mere calling something vacuous makes it so … see above.
I don’t disagree, but we technically still don’t know the context of those clips. So since he could be speaking about different points in time, it’s not actually clear whether we have even one. We could, but in a time of widespread disinformation wouldn’t it be reasonable to check?
If it were easy to do, I would. Certainly. Especially in light of your challenge. I’d be surprised to learn that you’d wish the story as presented in the video to be true. Is that correct? Are you going to check on it further? I doubt that either of us is very much in a position to do so. If you are, please. Correct me if I’m wrong to believe the video. It seems, from reading some of the posted YouTube comments, that the woman, Briahna Joy Gray, was a Fauci supporter. The two of them (Briahna and Robbie) are often on different sides of a particular issue. I certainly don’t think that both of them were in cahoots ganging up on Fauci. I’d expect her to have pushed back if it had been in her power to do so. And she is better placed than me (and probably you?) to do so. Maybe that is as close as we can get to agreement. But why can’t we get further?
So, if I can’t check, is it reasonable for me to assume, at least on the balance of probabilities, that it is factual? If it is not true and the video I shared gets many views and much traction, (at this moment from that one source it has 78k views) is it not easy for “the other side” to shed light on this? It would seem that they’d be very motivated to correct the perception left, if untrue. Even if true, I expect they will push back as they can.
No, because you can check. Instead of ranting about what people say in YouTube videos, you could have spent the same amount of time examining the data for yourself.
You’d have learned something instead, at a minimum that these matters are not binary as you present them.
A fair point, but most public health officials don’t deal with problems on this scale. Most PHOs probably don’t do formal cost/benefit analyses either, but if they do the cost of a human life is usually very high.
Now it’s my turn to rant …
But consider what that cost may have been if the pandemic had not been slowed down by every means possible. For a time early in 2020 the “Doubling time” for new things infections was about 3 days. This is exponential growth, and if that rate had continued long enough, then it’s no exaggeration that there could have been many millions of deaths instead of only one million.
How does that cost/benefit analysis look now?
I agree that children were harmed by COVID restrictions, and that is bad. What I’m saying is that when looking back with 20/20 hindsight, we must also consider the costs that were avoided.
I take your point. I think when it comes down to it the cost-benefit analyses are in the hands of policy/lawmakers who are adviced by anything from healthcare professionals to economists, lawyers, (sadly) even spin doctors/political strategists, and so on. Each of these in turn probably has as their job to view the problem primarily from the perspective of their profession. Economists look at money, public health professionals look at saving lives and wellbeing, etc. In reality it’s probably all a bit more messy and nobody really fits so neatly into any category.
I don’t think anyone is under any illusions that the system is perfect, or that the best possible decisions are always made. But as crap as it might have been at different times, we also have to be cognizant of the fact that there’s a limit to how much information was available to lawmakers when the pandemic began. Any idiot can now claim they knew it all along, especially if they just happened to guess correctly at the beginning of the pandemic.
There’s a difference between “I knew/predicted this would happen” and “I really just guessed it on no real basis, and it turned out I was right by sheer luck, so now I’m going to claim I knew it all along.”
A moderation note: when there is a troll on the loose, it’s really helpful to have flagged posts to deal with. Calling someone a troll is about as effective as feeding them.
And consider how low the cost would have been had we simply shut down the world for 3 weeks in mid-2020, with wealthy countries feeding and sending tests to poor ones, as soon as we had a reliable test.
The problem is they aren’t actually followed (and certainly not universally). Obviously if everyone actually followed the lockdowns (and simultaneously), the virus couldn’t spread. It’s just that in practice they can’t be implemented effectively without absolutely draconian measures. We underestimate the stupidity of the average person, and then there’s the fact that we have no say in how other countries respond to pandemics. There’s certainly no use in implementing a lockdown in country A if countries B, C, D etc. don’t.
In principle a lockdown of a few weeks should be fine and effective, if people obeyed it and all countries implemented it simultaneously, but recurring lockdowns again and again and again as novel variants crop up and move across borders and between different populations is next to worthless.
Then there are the anti-maskers who- I kid you not- literally claimed that masks were an attempt to stifle speech by some sort of communistic NWO/world-government conspiracy. Again, so dumb it defies comprehension.
Lack of cooperation and sheer stupidity will get us all killed. This is the world we live in.
The authors of the GBD are among the plaintiffs in the Missouri vs Biden case and the ruling shows that they had very good reason to complain and to think that their first amendment right was violated by governmental agencies. So nothing here sounds as a conspiracy theory, not at all.
