While I appreciate what you're trying to say here, your point is orthogonal to the discussion. The original comment was about the tone of patio11's post and th

While I appreciate what you're trying to say here, your point is orthogonal to the discussion. The original comment was about the tone of patio11's post and the assertion that an anonymous white paper significantly altered policy decisions of one of the world's most technologically, scientifically, and academically advanced countries. The response the original commenter got from barry-cotter was to "shut up and listen to your betters" because the commenter wasn't a "certified expert" followed by a rant that could have come straight from an episode of Coast to Coast AM. Even his attempts below to walk back his position or re-frame his post as being somehow tongue-in-cheek fail basic logic checks and sound like the ravings of a lunatic bent on exposing some great conspiracy by the learned elite that control the medical-industrial-media complex. It's just worthless noise. He says we shouldn't trust the experts because they got it wrong, but we should trust patio11 because he didn't get it wrong (or did he? who knows, it's in the future!), but we should trust the "certified experts," but we shouldn't trust the goddamn "prestige media" because all they cared about in February was making fun of people who thought this was a real problem, but wait a minute isn't that media also now taking aim at people who think we should relax social distancing? So is the media going after people who think it's a real problem or are they going after people who don't think it's a real problem? See what I'm saying? It's just anger and frustration being vented through a keyboard. It's noise and serves no discernible purpose. We can quibble about patio11's true contribution (we can, but I won't) but, again, that is orthogonal to the point which is that a lot of self-righteous folks have used the coronavirus outbreak as a great way to lash out and/or push their ideology in not so civil manners and through fear-mongering ("THOUSANDS of EXCESS DEATHS in Tokyo!!!"), and we should discourage this behavior as a community.