You have a very high opinion of Governments in order to perpetuate a conspiracy on that scale.

It's part of the secret plan. Governments make sure they appear to be hopelessly incompetent at almost everything, so that nobody believes they can execute on conspiracies flawlessly.

> You have a very high opinion of Governments in order to perpetuate a conspiracy on that scale.

That's exactly what a government shill would say. /s

But seriously, I never found Hanlon's razor particularly convincing. The conspiracy theories usually say that there is some entity ABOVE your government that hands down the orders to the oblivious politician actors. Compartmentalization[0] is a common method in the military and intelligence community to keep the majority of their minions in the dark about the true nature and extent of their work.

Take Snowden for example: none of the (according to wikipedia) 30,000-40,000 internal employees stepped forward to blow the whistle on NSA's pervasive and illegal dragnet surveillance. It took Snowden, an external contractor of all things, to do what's right.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compartmentalization_(informat...

It's a matter of what you can persuade people is reasonable. It's not surprising at all to me that pretty much all the people in the NSA think that dragnet surveillance is justifiable. In fact they clearly do think that. I have a much harder time believing that CIA agents would think it's ok to blow up the Twin Towers in order for George Bush's cronies to clean up on military contracts, for example.

And in the case of the Japanese COVID figures, it’s not some single government agency, subject to pressure from above, that announces the infection totals. Hospitals and clinics throughout the country report infections they’ve identified to local government agencies, and those local government agencies put the data on their websites, from which the media get them. The Tokyo site is at [1] and the Tokushima Prefecture site is at [2], for example; NHK’s compilation site is at [3].

There are many people working throughout health care and government who would get very angry if they learned that the figures were being artificially suppressed, and there is an independent press that would be eager to report on it. And now that many prefectures are reporting zero cases and deaths on most days, if some people there had in fact been recently infected or had died, they or their families would notice the discrepancy and raise a stink, too.

I live in a Japan, and it is a relief that, at least for the moment, the infections have dropped so low. The nationwide figure on Monday was 50 new infections, the lowest in a year and a half. I doubt, though, if anyone who follows the news from Europe believes we’re necessarily out of the woods yet.

[1] https://stopcovid19.metro.tokyo.lg.jp/en

[2] https://www.pref.tokushima.lg.jp/foreignlanguage

[3] https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/special/coronavirus/

why do you think governments cannot perpetuate conspiracies at this scale?

https://scroll.in/article/1005956/behind-bihars-vaccination-...

https://caravanmagazine.in/news/narendra-modi-birthday-covid...

https://science.thewire.in/health/bihar-manufactured-a-vacci...

what they did was, knowing this "birthday" of the idiot in chief was about to come, they falsified official covid vaccination figures to "show the acheievement" of having done that many vaccinations in one day.

Just a pointless exercise one might say but this is a concerted effort by the ruling party in india to normalize hiter/lenin/mao/xi style obedience to the "great leader" because that is how they wish to remain in power. conspiracy? probably. people already know so doesn't matter but still

I am not sure about other countries, but here is what's going on in the Netherlands in 2021:

Since March, an average of 1,100 more babies have been born monthly compared to last year, an increase of 8 percent.

What are you implying? Government fudging birth numbers as well?

It seems plausible. To throw out a hypothesis, if work-from-home/lockdowns started in April/May 2020, people staying home/not going out on weekends might just get busier boinking each other, and even if they didn't want kids, statisically more accidental pregnancies will happen.

OP is not implying government conspiracy, OP is implying the latter.

I don’t know. If only because of the erectile dysfunction reports, I think most men would prefer not to get COVID. Probably their partners would appreciate them not getting it as well.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8450276/

I wonder why you got downvoted. I've found the paper you had linked quite interesting and to the point of this discussion