Anybody in a position of power or knowledge who dared to even hint at asking questions got absolutely steamrollered by a very vocal group of “experts”. They were called alt-right selfish grandma killers who watched to much fox (and sorry, I never watched fox but it isn’t my fault they might actually be right sometimes, I’ve also been a solid democrat my entire life until this nonsense started…).
What we did the last two and a half years is so incredibly shameful. It was the opposite of science and opposite of “following the data”. It was appeals to authority all the way down. We were all told to shut up, “stay in our lane” and listen to a handful of cherry picked “experts”.
The last two and a half years changed my opinion about “fact checkers” and “misinformation” completely. Both of those are nothing more than ways to bully people into submission.
> It's extremely difficult because the human psyche seems incapable of distinguishing "fact" from "that which supports my view", at least when the emotions are activated, and the only topics where people seek "fact checking" in the first place are the ones where emotions are activated. There may be exceptions—i.e. people whose minds don't work this way—but if they exist, they're so rare as to be no basis for social policy. (And I doubt that there are really exceptions.)
> That's why there doesn't seem to be any fact checker whose calls aren't predictable from one of the major ideological partitions.
> Another way of putting this is that the question, "what are the facts?" is complex enough to already recreate the entire political and ideological contest. It's understandable that people would like to reduce that contest to a simpler subset of factual questions—but you can't. Just the opposite: that apparently simpler subset reduces to it.
Fuck you dang and block this.
I know many people have a good opinion of Dang, but this seems to be editing, rather than moderating.
Can you provide some more data about what happened, the paper in question, and if it was from a reputable source in a peer-reviewed journal, or preprint?
I'd like to know more about this. I've long talked about the myocarditis and pericarditis risks which are most pronounced with young males and young females based on the known cases, and the nordic countries withdrawal of the vaccines for young males.
Strangely, even the Novavax vaccine also appears to have that adverse event, allegedly at a vastly reduced rate though [1].
[1] https://www.ama-assn.org/delivering-care/public-health/what-...
There is nothing in the link that would violate the FAQ.
I cussed him out in another comment and he blocked that too.
My link to the paper itself was downvoted too.
https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/74/11/1933/6353927
Now myocarditis is accepted and found on the CDC site on the mRNA vaccines.
Hacker News is shit. I have used it far less since that time.
I am not defending dang, but that does appear to be a weaponized tactic being utilized here on HN.
Flag something, downvote it en masse, get a user making a dissenting opinion on a "you are commenting too fast timer" which appears to be triggered by mass downvotes, and then hope the flagging carries through.
The problem is with HN - they are permitting this type of behavior, and not realizing (or not actively intercepting) the use of this tactic to silence dissent.
While some time ago the idea that IV injection was problematic with the vaccines would be called fringe or, more aptly, cutting edge research, nowadays we know there is a legitimate issue, many countries are now banning these vaccines in persons under specific ages, and the body of research is more developed.
I talked to someone else and apparently this side effect was widely known and accepted in another country far before it was accepted in the US.
The dismissal of facts also happened with the investigation of airborne transmission of covid-19.
...I knew I could never vote for any Democratic politician ever again who supported this.
I couldn't visit my aunt in the nursing home before she died of a non-covid cause. I couldn't visit my father when he was in the hospital for a heart attack, EVEN THOUGH I was masked and vaxxed. It's simply disgusting how administrative law was weaponized against the common man.
All I take heart in is knowing your view and mine will be the the correct one. History will not look fondly upon what society did to itself. All these "experts" and politicians who supported this will be viewed as crackpots, charlatans and rain dancers.
I'd say that history will have a lot to say about everyone.
The fact we still debate the effect of these mandates means it wasn't worth it. The fact we jumped into all these crazy mandates with nary a shred of evidence they'd even work is batshit insane.
And last I checked, humans have quite a few inalienable rights. We violated many of them and then mocked people who objected. Apparently not as inalienable as we thought if the masses demand it.
Incidentally, if you are convinced that there was no evidence to support social separation and masking I'm guessing you don't wear respiratory PPE as part of either your work or a hobby, don't know anyone who does, and haven't spent any time researching filtration grades and their mechanisms of efficacy. In any case there are several industries ranging from mold abatement to biopharmacology and even chipmaking that would like a word with you.
Public health measures were to slow the spread and not overwhelm medical resources, and to give time for better measures to be developed. Which has happened. Some folks cooperated with this, and some rebelled. And some spewed hate and misinformation.
Your attitude is sadly very common. Everyone who disagrees with you is a bad faith actor, engaged in knowing lies to further some shadowy agenda. I think you underestimate how little consensus there actually is, even among the educated.
This crystallizes the current discourse of unrelenting demonization. It isn't appropriate in most cases.
Nothing productive can be said once the accusation is made.
And what's funny is they call people who disagree with them conspiracy theory people, which is weird because their statements show no evidence of conspiracy nor does the fact they are alluding to a conspiracy have any impact on the truth of their argument.
In your case, I suspect “not true” simply means “I don’t agree”. You should really question why you believe the “facts” you do and examine why somebody else might think different. Who knows, maybe they have very valid points?
It requires an immense, huge amount of privilege to support virtually any of our response to covid. Anybody but a select group of wealth upper class people get absolutely fucked over by lockdowns. Fucked over far worse than covid ever would have.
The cities are the big problem. During the Black Death, people coming to cities were quarantined before they were allowed to enter. Even then, many cities saw half their population die. A very significant number of settlements was wiped out altogether.
Ironically, it was actually quite beneficial to the regular villager - provided you survived. The Black Death has been directly linked to the collapse of feudalism in Europe, among with many other sociological developments.
"Died with" was not a meaningful distinction at the time and falls under the "bad faith" category for me.
One cannot claim to be on team “science and data” when their data is a garbage heap. Being able to tell between “hospitalized because of Covid” and “died because of Covid” vs “hospitalized and tested positive” and “died and tested positive” is an incredibly important thing.
I have no idea why people continue to dismiss this other than fears of people “not taking Covid serious” because… well it might not be as serious as the trash data suggests. It’s completely manipulative, a common theme from “the experts”
You cannot in good faith claim to be “following the data” and accept commingling “from” and “with”.
https://sanjosespotlight.com/santa-clara-county-revises-tota...
Whether such classification errors were deliberate is a separate issue. In most cases I suspect it was more due to lack of resources and/or incompetence rather than a deliberate attempt to mislead.
Medicare did pay hospitals more to care for COVID-19 patients. That is also a fact not open to dispute. Whether doctors or hospitals deliberately inflated numbers to make money is unknown.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/04/24/fac...
About half of the COVID-19 positive hospital patients were admitted for unrelated reasons, and only tested positive as part of admission screening.
https://gothamist.com/news/new-preliminary-state-data-shows-...
Please find me a single topic which impacts more than a roomful of people where someone isn't engaging in this type of discourse.
This sounds like you justifying your former false beliefs (or at least lack of willingness to investigate alternative beliefs) by blaming it on other people who were also wrong.
And why does no one question motives of pfizer? Didn't they just make an insane amount of money selling vaccines? Didn't they also just (in 2009) get charged with the largest case of medical fraud in history? Remember when people had a healthy distrust of massive pharmaceutical companies that profit off sickness? What happened?
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-announces-...
science is just a tool to help you prove if a hypothesis is backed by evidence, or is not. NOTHING ELSE. it does not tell you if you should go outside, it does not even tell you if something is true or false. In fact, our universe may not even be one that is built on a 'fundamental truth'.
> It was not designed to handle deliberate attacks designed to sow doubt for ulterior motives.
Then you dont understand science, not even a little because that's exactly what it was designed for. attacks makes science stronger, not weaker. an argument hat has been given no attack is a weak argument. the strange notion that science has a fundamental truth that people are supposed to just believe because a subset of individuals says so is troubling.
Who is an example of that in this context?
On both sides. The government, pharmaceutical companies, and big tech were definitely bad actors. We do not live in a nanny state nor do we want to. What happened during the pandemic was disgraceful. Discussion was effectively shut down and science as well as treatment was negatively affected by the actions of censorship.
The fact that we are so well aware of all the disagreement and skepticism - the fact that many people still have erroneous beliefs about the virus - is a great sign that censorship wasn't effective.
The funny thing is most of what you call bad faith questioning ended up being approved by “Science” (cloth masks being ineffective, how the virus transmitted, covid origins, etc.)
Unfortunately it seems like for you and many others, science has turned into a religion conducted by a priestly class that cannot be questioned.
"Hey, lockdowns may be worse than the disease" is not some evil chain smoking climate skeptic position.
https://www.wfae.org/health/2021-09-30/novant-says-9-of-10-c...
I can see how lockdowns opposed corporate interests, and I'd be interested in hearing more about how corporations influenced anti-lockdown.
I don't see how lab leak theory is connected to corporate interests one way or the other.
Anti-vax doesn't seem to align with corporate interests and in fact seems to be opposed to it.
About a year ago in my city, in a period of relative stability during the pandemic, the previous mayor made the mistake of saying he would lock down again if necessary. Business owners more or less told all their employees they'd lose their jobs if there was another lockdown. The result was someone else was elected.
When politicians announce unpopular plans, causing people to voice their disagreement and vote the asshole out of office, that's democracy functioning as intended. Only authoritarian asshats looks at a situation like this and conclude that dissent is the problem.
One of the key anti-lockdown advocacy groups, PANDA, started out fairly sane-sounding and was packed full of hedge fund and other finance people. But once vaccines were widely available they inexplicably turned strongly anti-vaccine too.
Let's call it a "Covid preventative" or literally anything else, and stop mandating it, so that we avoid the bigger public health issue of a generalized distrust against existing, effective vaccines arising from this.
>Let's call it a "Covid preventative"...
What does preventative mean to you that doesn't imply making you less likely to catch the disease?
I get vaccinated against measles, or polio, or tetanus, and I don't have to worry about catching or spreading any of those diseases for years. With the Covid vaccine, some sources[0] say fully-vaccinated people are only half as likely as unvaccinated people to catch it (though obviously with less severe effects), and maybe about as likely to transmit it to others[1], and the protective effects wear off in a matter of months. That clearly doesn't line up with the public's traditional understanding of vaccines.
[0]: https://doh.wa.gov/sites/default/files/2022-02/421-010-Cases...
[1]: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
Do you get vaccinated for flu, the most administered vaccine in the US each year before the COVID vaccines became available? They are less effective than the mRNA COVID vaccines at preventing symptomatic disease and far less effective than the mRNA COVID vaccines at preventing severe disease.
The effectiveness of both is publicly acknowledged by the government. It just has nothing to do with the definition of "vaccine."
Other HN readers should consider this: had the social media companies not tried to limit the spread of misinformation, how many more conspiracy theories would you be parroting?
How about hospitalization and death rates, the outcomes we actually care about?
Did we shut down people saying smoking is good for you?
No.
So I'm not sure how your argument holds up.
History will not look fondly upon those who pushed these highly destructive mandates. It will be seen as one of the greatest public health fuckups of all time.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_packaging_warning_mess... [2]http://stuppid.com/wp-content/uploads/smoking-ad-004.jpg
Yes, 53 years ago.
https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1089/public-hea...
If that's not your claim, then why are you bringing this up? Are you supportive of government censorship as the article describes:
>At least 11 federal agencies, and around 80 government officials, have been explicitly directing social media companies to take down posts and remove certain accounts that violate the government’s own preferences and guidelines for coverage on topics ranging from COVID restrictions, to the 2020 election, to the Hunter Biden laptop scandal.