5 ms·

When I bring this up in conversations with people they make me feel like a kook. I am not sure what to think anymore.

wut2doobiedo 5y ago
Because what to do is highly variable doesn’t mean we need to take unnecessary risk to know literal truth. Urban area population density requires different mitigations than rural, except rural communities rely on urban ones as logistics pipelines. So normalize; mask up, stay home. Prefer all gas, no brakes, based on stats? There may not be enough real people to keep the internet on later. Nothing about the lockdown was for saving you or me specifically, but systems of behavior we rely on.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- nradov 5y ago
  That isn't a valid reason. The infection fatality rate for most people who keep the Internet running is way less than 1%. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scenarios.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...
simonh 5y ago
For me this is interesting, but not really material to anything. Sure, the tests we have for this new virus have needed to be adjusted and calibrated as we learn more about it. It's unfortunate if the numbers are a bit messed up, it would be better if they were more accurate, but real life is messy. I don't think you're a kook, and I can only guess what those people were thinking. Maybe they just wondered... and therefore, what?
- kook_throwaway 5y ago
  Abusing high cycle thresholds for false positives isn't a new strategy. PCR inventor Kary Mullis is on video calling Fauci out for doing exactly that. Unfortunately I can't even link the two videos because they keep getting memory holed. If you search around you might get lucky, otherwise I'll upload my saved copy when I get off work.
  - javagram 5y ago
    Note that the background for this is that Kary Mullis believed AIDS wasn’t caused by HIV and was therefore angry at Fauci and the entire medical/scientific establishment for linking HIV and AIDS. He died in 2019 so his criticisms of Fauci were related to HIV, not SARS-CoV-2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kary_Mullis#Views_on_HIV/AIDS_and_climate_change https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kary_Mullis#Views_on_HIV/AIDS_...
    - themark 5y ago
      The video they are referring to has a very specific part about pcr testing (relevant to the discussion here). I think it is reasonable to trust his opinion on the matter regardless of what he thinks about AIDS.
      - briefcomment 5y ago
        He is also a Nobel laureate.
      - javagram 5y ago
        The video pretty clearly shows that his view is that testing for HIV is a conspiracy by the CDC to get funding to fight AIDS.[1] Unless you agree with him that AIDS isn’t caused by HIV, it doesn’t make much sense to trust him rather than all the scientific experts who have worked on PCR testing and virus detection in the last few decades. ( edit: Moreover, suppressing HIV using drugs has been successfully treating AIDS, which wouldn’t make sense if the disease wasn’t actually caused by the virus. ) Moreover, PCR testing during the covid epidemic, which he was not alive for, has clearly been working well. High cases later correspond to high hospitalizations and high covid-19 deaths and high excess deaths across many different countries. Frankly I don’t put much trust in his Nobel, any more than Michael Levitt who is also a Nobel laureate and has repeatedly made falsified predictions about the Covid-19 pandemic.[2] It seems pretty clear that Nobel prize winners can later lose touch with reality. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkqQIY7J0fQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkqQIY7J0fQ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Levitt#Covid-19 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Levitt#Covid-19
mizzack 5y ago
It didn't help that the WHO released the updated guidelines the day Biden was inaugurated. For that reason alone it became another thought-terminating political topic -- you're either dismissed as a conspiracy theorist for correlating these events, or you're dismissing the value of the vaccine rollout/lockdowns/other measures, or you're a sheep following the dominant media narrative.
- beerandt 5y ago
  It's harder to dismiss when you also consider the first vaccine approvals kept getting delayed until they were released immediately after the election.
  - javagram 5y ago
    Note that it was hardly “delayed” since all initial predictions for the vaccine to be approved were around 12 months, in the end it only took about 10 months. Reports last year indicated Trump’s own FDA was responsible for setting out the needed time for data gathering and review that pushed it into mid-November. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/white-house-okays-fda-months-monitoring-delaying-vaccine/story?id=73454563 https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/white-house-okays-fda-months... Meanwhile other countries including China and Russia didn’t approve their own vaccines faster, seeming to indicate the timeline had little to do with U.S. politics.
    - jimmygrapes 5y ago
      It is worth considering that maybe Sinovac (and whatever the Russian one(s) is/are called) may have been released far earlier than they would have been if the U.S. and others had not developed their own faster. Think of space wars - even if you lose the race to first, you still want to be in 2nd vs 500th. If they were developed at a more traditional pace, would they be more effective? Would any of them be? And what would be the consequences of waiting? Would it be millions more deaths, or would natural herd immunity emerge? Both? Would the more virulent variants have appeared without a marginally effective strain evolving as a result of marginally effective vaccines?

Because what to do is highly variable doesn’t mean we need to take unnecessary risk to know literal truth. Urban area population density requires different mitigations than rural, except rural communities rely on urban ones as logistics pipelines. So normalize; mask up, stay home. Prefer all gas, no brakes, based on stats? There may not be enough real people to keep the internet on later. Nothing about the lockdown was for saving you or me specifically, but systems of behavior we rely on.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
nradov 5y ago
That isn't a valid reason. The infection fatality rate for most people who keep the Internet running is way less than 1%. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scenarios.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...

simonh 5y ago

For me this is interesting, but not really material to anything. Sure, the tests we have for this new virus have needed to be adjusted and calibrated as we learn more about it. It's unfortunate if the numbers are a bit messed up, it would be better if they were more accurate, but real life is messy. I don't think you're a kook, and I can only guess what those people were thinking. Maybe they just wondered... and therefore, what?

kook_throwaway 5y ago
Abusing high cycle thresholds for false positives isn't a new strategy. PCR inventor Kary Mullis is on video calling Fauci out for doing exactly that. Unfortunately I can't even link the two videos because they keep getting memory holed. If you search around you might get lucky, otherwise I'll upload my saved copy when I get off work.
- javagram 5y ago
  Note that the background for this is that Kary Mullis believed AIDS wasn’t caused by HIV and was therefore angry at Fauci and the entire medical/scientific establishment for linking HIV and AIDS. He died in 2019 so his criticisms of Fauci were related to HIV, not SARS-CoV-2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kary_Mullis#Views_on_HIV/AIDS_and_climate_change https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kary_Mullis#Views_on_HIV/AIDS_...
  - themark 5y ago
    The video they are referring to has a very specific part about pcr testing (relevant to the discussion here). I think it is reasonable to trust his opinion on the matter regardless of what he thinks about AIDS.
    - briefcomment 5y ago
      He is also a Nobel laureate.
    - javagram 5y ago
      The video pretty clearly shows that his view is that testing for HIV is a conspiracy by the CDC to get funding to fight AIDS.[1] Unless you agree with him that AIDS isn’t caused by HIV, it doesn’t make much sense to trust him rather than all the scientific experts who have worked on PCR testing and virus detection in the last few decades. ( edit: Moreover, suppressing HIV using drugs has been successfully treating AIDS, which wouldn’t make sense if the disease wasn’t actually caused by the virus. ) Moreover, PCR testing during the covid epidemic, which he was not alive for, has clearly been working well. High cases later correspond to high hospitalizations and high covid-19 deaths and high excess deaths across many different countries. Frankly I don’t put much trust in his Nobel, any more than Michael Levitt who is also a Nobel laureate and has repeatedly made falsified predictions about the Covid-19 pandemic.[2] It seems pretty clear that Nobel prize winners can later lose touch with reality. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkqQIY7J0fQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkqQIY7J0fQ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Levitt#Covid-19 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Levitt#Covid-19

mizzack 5y ago

It didn't help that the WHO released the updated guidelines the day Biden was inaugurated. For that reason alone it became another thought-terminating political topic -- you're either dismissed as a conspiracy theorist for correlating these events, or you're dismissing the value of the vaccine rollout/lockdowns/other measures, or you're a sheep following the dominant media narrative.

beerandt 5y ago
It's harder to dismiss when you also consider the first vaccine approvals kept getting delayed until they were released immediately after the election.
- javagram 5y ago
  Note that it was hardly “delayed” since all initial predictions for the vaccine to be approved were around 12 months, in the end it only took about 10 months. Reports last year indicated Trump’s own FDA was responsible for setting out the needed time for data gathering and review that pushed it into mid-November. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/white-house-okays-fda-months-monitoring-delaying-vaccine/story?id=73454563 https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/white-house-okays-fda-months... Meanwhile other countries including China and Russia didn’t approve their own vaccines faster, seeming to indicate the timeline had little to do with U.S. politics.
  - jimmygrapes 5y ago
    It is worth considering that maybe Sinovac (and whatever the Russian one(s) is/are called) may have been released far earlier than they would have been if the U.S. and others had not developed their own faster. Think of space wars - even if you lose the race to first, you still want to be in 2nd vs 500th. If they were developed at a more traditional pace, would they be more effective? Would any of them be? And what would be the consequences of waiting? Would it be millions more deaths, or would natural herd immunity emerge? Both? Would the more virulent variants have appeared without a marginally effective strain evolving as a result of marginally effective vaccines?