You give the average person the ability to do "research" and they are killing themselves because people fall for all kinds of bullshit. Cults exist. Scam artists are a dime a dozen.
This stuff gets associated with trump and the right because they associate themselves wth it. I don't vote Democratic, I just don't think you're being realistic about how people operate, regardless whether I beleive that "censorship" is the answer or not.
And if only "experts" are allowed speech, then how do we qualify an expert? Bc if we go by the last 2 years we're not even allowing public debate amongst medical experts, intellectuals or even the person who helped invent an mrna vaccine without gross censorship.
Experts has come to mean government appointments and government agencies,which makes them all potentially influenced by political pressures.
So the only "valid" opinions have obvious flaws and no one else, regardless of qualifications is allowed to speak up.
Bc medical experts and scientists not deemed as part of the agenda get derided as "the average person" bc they dared to have wrongthink.
There's been plenty of active mainstream reporting of Merck's new COVID pill, as well as other promising treatments. What are you talking about?
Getting a COVID shot continues to be the single best public health policy, which is why people are going to continue to advocate for it. But there has been no lack of mainstream coverage of developments in both proactive and reactive treatment.
I'll preface my comment here by saying I'm very pro-vax, and after a several month wait for my own peace of mind, got fully vax'd over the summer. I have encouraged everyone I know who's on the fence to go get one. In the context of being perfectly content if they don't, since it's their body, and since I'm vax'd, I no longer really care if you are or not.
Your comment is extremely disingenuous. Yes, now, finally, two years into COVID, a non-vaccine drug is getting mostly positive active mainstream reporting. But this is after two full years of any and all discussions about anything other than the vaccine immediately being angrily met with demonizing and mockery. If you didn't tow the establishment line, you were and still are labeled an anti-vaxxer.
To the point where it seemed almost as if, pre-vax, people didn't want a solution prior to the election in case in might help a particular someone win again. And almost as if, post-vax, people didn't like the thought of an option being available for someone who didn't want the shot - almost as if the lifestyle they formed and embraced around admonishing everyone regarding the shot could fall apart just at the very idea of something else possibly working even just a bit.
Take ivermectin as an example; opinions on it aside, and I really don't have many since I'm vaccinated and it's irrelevant to me, but you can not possibly in good faith feign ignorance over the fact that this drug, on the list of the WHO's essential medicines, with over 100K active prescriptions (pre-COVID) in the US alone and millions around the world, which is essentially as "harmless" as an antibiotic, and has saved many lives and eyeballs, was deemed as nothing more than "horse paste" by the blue checkmarks on Twitter and in most media outlets, including some of our very own governmental institutions. Yes, the few people who bought and used actual animal-grade ivermectin were idiots, but perhaps this could've been avoided by not playing into their fears by attempting to silence any and all positive press about the drug, given, again, the drug's extremely minor side effect profile that's considered lower than most common antibiotics that most doctors are known to be extremely willing to prescribe without a second thought at even the slightest possibility that it might help whatever ails their patient, even if they're pretty damn sure it won't. It should be noted that this new Merck drug has the potential for more adverse effects than those antibiotics. But it's being met with more positive press, while a less harmful drug was attacked from all angles. Food for thought.
So in short, yes, this Big Pharma sponsored/discovered COVID drug developed especially for COVID has been receiving coverage - although the comment sections in articles about them are filled to the brim with people angry at its approval given that they believe it may discourage people from getting vaccinated. But almost every single other non-vaccine (most not being establishment-discovered, or being popular in conservative/independent circles, which I'm sure is the reason - as it having more attack-points vs. a drug specifically designed for COVID, which is hard to attack since you can't call it horse paste) has been met with absolute vitriol and mockery.
This is a lot of presumption. I got vaccinated as soon as I could (early spring, for my region, age, and health group), which is well after the actual R&D phase for the vaccine that I received. Every person I know got vaccinated as early as they could, in spite of reservations they had about the former president's reliability. They did that because they (and I) trust their healthcare providers to provide informed guidance more than they trust themselves, regardless of their intellectual capacity. They also did it because it's their civic duty, and also because it's the selfish thing to do.
The rest, I have nothing to say to. I haven't spent any meaningful amount of time mocking (much less thinking) about people who have taken ivermectin, so I don't feel compelled to respond on behalf of the crowd you've identified.
And most consumers don't even bother to do much research before selecting a car. They buy the Toyota because they had one before and liked it, or their friend who knows about cars said it's reliable.
I was given Tremfya, a biologic, for mild psoriasis. I've had a horrible reaction to it and it's exacerbated what used to be a minor autoimmune issue into something debilitating.
After autoimmune destroying my life, I was given Lexapro for anxiety which took my anxiety levels from like a 5 out of 10 to a 1000. Even after being off it for a year, I'm still really messed up and haven't gone back to pre-lexapro levels.
I was given gabapentin for neuropathic pain. It did nothing for my pain but now I have full body shivers and twitches and I have horrible withdrawal trying to get off gabapentin gradually.
Doctors push what the pharmaceutical companies tell them too.
Look into the effects of cipro and -floxin type antibiotics causing lifelong neuropathy.
My mother developed AVN from prednisone - causing her to need dual hip and dual shoulder replacements bc her reaction to the steroid caused her joints to turn necrotic.
Her lack of mobility and age has come with higher blood pressure.
Her blood pressure medication gave her gout.
"trust the experts"
Instead, the "solution" did the opposite. But worse, kids stayed inside, didn't exercise, put on (likely more) weight, didn't share illness (read: weakened immune system) and then those kids were ordered back to school in that highly vulnerable state.
The solution? The jab. With absolutely not acknowledgement or recognition they were prepped to be put in harns way.
This isn't a conspiracy theory. This is what happened and continues to happen. Unfortunately, such observations and analysis get marginalized as being a Covid denier or anti-vax. That doesn't make sense.
BTW covid is plenty dangerous to non obese as well.
The vaccine shot actually works well and is incredibly easy to use compared to a grueling year long weight loss and sustaining it for a lifetime, for most people.
“ More than 900,000 adult COVID-19 hospitalizations occurred in the United States between the beginning of the pandemic and November 18, 2020. Models estimate that 271,800 (30.2%) of these hospitalizations were attributed to obesity.6”
This is from your link - even if the government put everyone in concentration camps and forced them to lose weight, it would do nothing for the other 70%
Meanwhile vaccines are about 80-90% effective against hospitalization and death.
And falling. Remember how people were parading around 95%?
Just like ‘99% of people in hospital are unvaccinated’. While now in some areas it’s ‘70% vaccinated’.
Vaccines are not a magic bullet and delaying covid using measures that make people fat is not a smart move. Not to mention stealing 1.5% of peoples lifetime to delay a disease that less than 1% would die from.
Vaccines aren’t a magic bullet. But they’re the most cost effective item we have. You cite some irrelevant statistics but appear to agree with my statement that the vaccines remain more than 80% effective against death.
The vaccine costs less than $100 and takes about an hour of time to do. There is no way to lose weight that cheaply or quickly and as a result people continue to ignore government advice and health campaigns urging them to do so.
Moreover, losing weight does not stop you from catching or spreading COVID at all, whereas the vaccines have been shown to reduce transmission.
But from the typical ‘I endured lockdown just fine’ tripe it’s clear what you think:
I have no problems with restricting others from doing things I don’t care about and I think it’s fine to force others to adopt my position. Because I think I know better than them.
And those first few months of peoples basic human rights being taken away based on ideas that clearly were never going to work? Oh, they were just a few dumb months. Pfft who cares. We’re over that now, there’s a new battle to fight. Who thinks about these measures that were going to be the end-all solution? There’s a new measure that’s going to be the end-all solution. To force on others because clearly we know what’s best for them.
That's not what the narrative says. It's earier (and popular) to say "it's a pandemic of the unvaxinated" than to tell the truth. That is, diet, lifestyle and personal health matter. They impact day to day heatlth, and they impact your ability to recover from unplanned health challenges (e.g., car accident, Covid, etc.)
The idea that there is zero connection between diet + lifestyle and health is completely unscientific. To promote / deny that during a pandemic is insane.
Hospitalization is a deceptive metric. What's more important is: long term hospitalizations, as well as higher use of treatment (e.g., ICU).
That's that data needed. This other stat - like so many Covid stats - is too high level. The Devil is in the details.
Because since not everyone can improve their immune function, nobody should, right? Messaging otherwise would be ableist or give people an idea that they could do something aside from hunkering down, and that's more important than reducing hospitalizations and saving lives...
It is the coercion / loss of livelihood and other threats, that are getting people up in arms (figuratively, and who knows, someday in real life)
Imagine if various establishments used a weight/health card where one is scored on some heuristic, and allowed access.
Just look at intellectuals like Noam Chomsky's prescriptions on how to treat the unvaccinated...
People were up in arms and fearmongering over the vaccine since 2020. This isn’t about coercion - there’s a reason the same people typically don’t get vaccinated themselves. If they believed in the effectiveness of the vaccine they’d be vaxxed themselves (like Republican Governors and Fox News tv hosts).
I personally know someone who thought the vaccine had a good chance of killing me and other acquaintances who took it, all because he read some random posts on the net.
It’s perfectly possible to be for vaccinations and against mandates.
Most people don’t fall into that category though. The “people” who are up in arms usually cite stuff like the vaccines rewriting DNA, being unsafe, untested, Nuremberg violations, “did my own research” and a hundred other reasons they found online to claim the vaccine is unsafe or ineffective.
This is the straw man
They didn't treat it like the Black Death; if anything, death estimates were way too low.
https://www.npr.org/2020/04/09/830664814/fauci-says-u-s-coro...
> The final toll currently "looks more like 60,000 than the 100,000 to 200,000" that U.S. officials previously estimated, Fauci said.
As for obesity and age, they were pretty clear on that:
https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/practices/fauci-offers-upda...
> "It’s so clear that the overwhelming weight of serious disease and mortality is on those who are elderly and those with a serious comorbidity: heart disease, chronic lung disease, diabetes, obesity, respiratory difficulties," said Anthony Fauci, M.D., director of the National Institutes of Health's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
> "There will be outliers, as we’ve seen with influenza, [a person] who is young and healthy who winds up getting COVID-19, [gets] seriously ill and dies," Fauci said in a taped interview with Howard Bauchner, M.D., editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association. "But if you look at the weight of the data the risk group is very, very clear."
You're getting mad at imaginary experts.
In addition to flat out lying about that Chinese lab, of course.
Any programmer knows “that should take a couple hours” may take just a few minutes or wind up taking days. We’ve all been there, despite being experts in our field.
At no point did I ever feel public health experts portrayed a COVID case as a death sentence. Much of the early uncertainty was whether the CFR was 1% versus 2% or so.
But when it later turns out it didn’t work, well we can never be sure now can we?
But even if common sense makes it clear that the ideas of these experts are unachievable and are never going to work, like the ‘covid 0’ plans and the ‘15 days to stop the spread’ plans, or the doomsday predictions that are clearly never going to come true, I can’t choose not to suffer the consequences.
These experts are a lot less than perfect. Some of them are more like politicians then like scientists. And the ones that are more like scientists frequently contradict each other, which is perfectly fine but should show people with common sense that it is not the brightest idea to blindly trust anything they say.
I'm not sure this applies to medicine or vaccines. I don't think any of us are in the position of "making up our own mind" about what works in medicine and what doesn't, which is why we have double-blind clinical studies. We can't even explain why/how placebo works.
I had a condition that was misdiagnosed repeatedly, including in the ER. My condition is not even "rare", just slightly uncommon, and I had a very textbook case of it.
Your doctor is not an oracle. They are a car mechanic that works on organics.
What does that mean? That there are two conflicting absolute truths?
That's the doctors that MSNBC interviews. Nothing else.
Don't get onboard - you'll lose your job. Even if you work from home.
have tons of side effects and still are up to patients as to whether or not to take them - gabapentin for neuropathic pain.
biologics for autoimmune disorders.
we don't force anti-biotics on anyone.
we don't force anxiety meds on anyone.
find me a drug that's doled out by the establishment who hasn't destroyed someone's life or even ended their live.
the same establishment that created the opiate epidemic is saying "trust us now"..
The same one that over prescribes antibiotics, especially dangerous ones like Cipro that gives people neurapthic pain for their entire lives.
Dermalogists hand out Biologics for even mild psoriasis - which states in the literature "we do not entirely now how or why this works" (Tremfya) and "may cause cancer". (Humira)
Cardiologists will prescribe blood pressure pills without realizing someone might have kidney damage or high uric acid and then the pills end up giving them gout.
anti-anxiety meds are a "try all of them and see which one works for you!" but every single one of them has a list of side effects and can make your anxiety/depression a million times worse. getting off of them has a "discontinuation syndrome" which can fuck you up for years.
Prednisone gave my mother AVN - an autoimmune disorder that turned her joints necrotic - requiring 2 shoulder and 2 hip replacements.
"Trust us" they say - as they lie about the usefulness of masks.
Trust us they say as they lie about lab leak theories
Trust us they say as they told us that we'd need 60% of herd immunity, then changed it to 70% then to 80% and now saying we'll never reach it b/c you don't get herd immunity with a corona virus. It's just with us forever, but hey.. keep getting 3, 4 5 shots forever.
Trust us. We're the experts. The captured FDA. BigPharma and all the doctors you go to that control them
Trust us as we yank peer reviewed studies from journals b/c it conflicts with our messaging.
So yes - people are in a good god damned position to at least TRY to process it.
> You allow the dialog to take place and make up your own mind.
You want to replace a reliance on empirical evidence (science) with rhetoric debates instead? This is going backwards in terms of progress as a society. I think you do not really want to do that.
Ultimately I think the expectation that platforms ought to facilitate and tolerate discussion of topics just because they are “ideas”, “suggestions”, “opinions” and not presented as fact is toxic. If you want to do actual research do it in the correct setting (not a public forum). And fortunately, that is where actual research is happening.
It is not some overarching plan by some godly G-man, you don’t see these drugs being promoted because there is ultimately no scientific proof of their effectiveness. If Moderna had the same attitude towards science and statistics as the people who are pushing “alternative” treatments, we would have had a COVID vaccine much sooner.
The number of replies to your comment against this idea is terrifying. What's even worse is the outright hostility --- it's not good enough that they trust the experts and you don't. You have to go along with it too, according to them, or they'll attack you. It's a totalitarian mindset.
Medicine is perhaps the field least amenable to this.
It's so hard to figure out what drugs and therapies even work that full-time Ph.D and MD level experts in biology and medicine very often get things very wrong. Look at fat, cholesterol, sugar, and how certain foods like eggs have been classified as healthy or unhealthy multiple times. These people are not idiots nor are they all involved in some conspiracy. It's just unbelievably hard to disambiguate all the confounding factors and see actual cause and effect with a system as complex as the human body.
Even highly educated highly intelligent laypeople don't stand a chance against quacks. Anything can be made to sound plausible in medicine.
You might say "well then couldn't they be wrong about the vaccines?" The answer is that yes, they could. It's just that medical experts have maybe a 60-70% chance of getting everything wrong vs a 99.9% chance for the general public.
I have reviewed all of the available dialog, and I have concluded that not only is the coronavirus fake, the world is flat.
You allow the dialog to take place and make up your own mind.
>I would argue that anyone who had a solution to Covid should rush to get it published in a reputable
Any tool thats not a vaccine gets associated with Trump or the right wing and is dismissed.
Its even stifled funding for anti-virals that give a 50% reduction in hospitalizations.
The government could have spent the last 18 months encouraging people to lose weight, stop smoking, drinking, and eating fast food.
The ONLY tool silicon Valley, the msm, much of acamdeia, the DNC and their loyal sycophants care about is the vaccines and even the slightest discussion of any potential alternative gets promoted as inherently anti-vaxx even if it could be used in conjunction with vaccines