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He definitely lied without question. Like I said, he admitted it outright, and has done so more than once. There's an article here about it that provides all th

He definitely lied without question. Like I said, he admitted it outright, and has done so more than once. There's an article here about it that provides all the links needed to verify this, written by an epidemiologist: https://slate.com/technology/2021/07/noble-lies-covid-fauci-cdc-masks.html https://slate.com/technology/2021/07/noble-lies-covid-fauci-... As the article states, there was no change in available data. That is yet another lie. If there was, he'd have pointed to the new study and everyone would have been looking at it, because it would be extremely famous as the study that upended mask science. No such study exists. One day "the science" changed, except it hadn't really changed, simple as that. He did the same with vaccine herd immunity: "When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent. Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, “I can nudge this up a bit,” so I went to 80, 85." The man is a liar. He makes claims about scientific issues that he makes up on the spot to generate policy compliance. He ran most of the US COVID response, therefore nothing he said can be trusted, nor can anything said by anyone who reported to him. That makes him by far the biggest source of COVID misinformation out there, by his own admission! "it's not on the same level as what the Daily Sceptic is publishing" That's right! The Daily Sceptic was created specifically to combat the sort of COVID misinformation government officials like Fauci, Ferguson and SAGE were spreading. I don't read it much anymore but I read it throughout COVID and its writers never lied, or at least I never caught it if they did. And they reply to people trying to "fact check" them, they don't ignore criticism. Every day, they downloaded the data, downloaded the papers, checked them against the claims being made and documented when they didn't match. They showed that "the science" was being made up on the fly and frequently built on bullshit. They are by far the best COVID fact checkers out there, which is why establishment authoritarians inside PayPal can't stand them. "Here in the UK it certainly felt like the government was basically playing catch-up and giving out advice only if they thought it had a high chance of being followed." The UK enforced its decisions via police power and fines, it wasn't voluntary. But regardless, the UK health authorities also routinely spread misinformation. As just one example SAGE claimed there was no data on Omicron severity so they'd assume it was as severe as delta, even though from the moment Omicron was discovered it was accompanied by data showing it was far less severe. They just ignored all of it, in an attempt to keep lockdowns going as long as possible. And they lied to the government about the contents of their own meetings (Sunak talked about this). Fundamentally, if you want to crack down on COVID misinformation, government agencies have to be the first to go. Nobody else comes close to their impact.

n4r9 4y ago
Yeesh, the herd immunity stuff is hard to justify. It feels like he started playing a PR game, with good intentions, but ended up eroding trust. I agree that government agencies ought to be held accountable just as much (if not more) than news organisations. When I said "not on the same level as what the Daily Sceptic is publishing" I meant that Daily Sceptic are currently pushing a dangerous anti-scientific agenda on several topics e.g. Ivermectin. I think you know what I meant and were being glib. I don't know if this approach is different from their early days, but I would describe their current agenda as pretty harmful. Re SAGE, I found one of their reports from Dec 2021 - early days of Omicron - which appears quite balanced to me. They didn't just ignore the available data, but they took a rational and critical approach towards what was quite preliminary at the time. > It is still too early to reliably assess the severity of disease caused by Omicron compared to previous variants. Although a preliminary analysis from South Africa suggests that this wave may be less severe than previous waves, a comparison of SGTF (mainly Omicron) and SGTP (non-Omicron) cases within this wave suggests less difference between variants. Some severity estimates should start to become available in about a week as hospital data accumulate. Even if there were to be a modest reduction in severity compared to Delta, very high numbers of infections would still lead to significant pressure on hospitals. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/sage-99-minutes-coronavirus-covid-19-response-16-december-2021/sage-99-minutes-coronavirus-covid-19-response-16-december-2021 https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/sage-99-minutes-c... Again, may be useful if you provided more of a reference for what you mean.
- origin_path 4y ago
  I don't think they write about Ivermectin all that often but I see a story in recent days, is it this one you mean? https://dailysceptic.org/2022/09/03/ivermectin-cuts-covid-mortality-by-92-major-study-finds-why-is-it-still-not-approved/ https://dailysceptic.org/2022/09/03/ivermectin-cuts-covid-mo... It's reporting on a very large study from Brazil that was published in a medical journal. If you think the study is un-scientific then could you explain it? Or better, why not write an article and submit it? The DS does publish articles that disagree with each other pretty regularly. They aren't a site that has a particular "line" on most topics beyond lockdowns, e.g. they have hosted articles both agreeing and disagreeing that there is an excess deaths problem in England. I ignore most Ivermectin stuff because at least as of last year there were lots of studies and they mostly seemed to be junk quality. Also I can't easily get it here anyway so whatever. But one thing I'm pretty sure of is that whatever health authorities say about it is nonsense. Horse paste and all that. I'm not being glib. For Omicron I meant this: https://cmmid.github.io/topics/covid19/reports/omicron_england/report_11_dec_2021.pdf https://cmmid.github.io/topics/covid19/reports/omicron_engla... It was LSHTM not SAGE sorry (hardly any difference though, LSHTM modellers contributed to SAGE stuff I think), they uploaded a document on 11th Dec - a long time after Omicron was announced - that stated "Due to a lack of data, we assume Omicron has the same severity as Delta". There was no lack of data that could have justified this assumption. This got in the press and spooked the govt. They later admitted it was all wrong: https://dailysceptic.org/2022/01/09/sage-gloomsters-admit-they-were-wrong-about-omicron/ https://dailysceptic.org/2022/01/09/sage-gloomsters-admit-th...

n4r9 4y ago

Yeesh, the herd immunity stuff is hard to justify. It feels like he started playing a PR game, with good intentions, but ended up eroding trust. I agree that government agencies ought to be held accountable just as much (if not more) than news organisations. When I said "not on the same level as what the Daily Sceptic is publishing" I meant that Daily Sceptic are currently pushing a dangerous anti-scientific agenda on several topics e.g. Ivermectin. I think you know what I meant and were being glib. I don't know if this approach is different from their early days, but I would describe their current agenda as pretty harmful. Re SAGE, I found one of their reports from Dec 2021 - early days of Omicron - which appears quite balanced to me. They didn't just ignore the available data, but they took a rational and critical approach towards what was quite preliminary at the time. > It is still too early to reliably assess the severity of disease caused by Omicron compared to previous variants. Although a preliminary analysis from South Africa suggests that this wave may be less severe than previous waves, a comparison of SGTF (mainly Omicron) and SGTP (non-Omicron) cases within this wave suggests less difference between variants. Some severity estimates should start to become available in about a week as hospital data accumulate. Even if there were to be a modest reduction in severity compared to Delta, very high numbers of infections would still lead to significant pressure on hospitals. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/sage-99-minutes-coronavirus-covid-19-response-16-december-2021/sage-99-minutes-coronavirus-covid-19-response-16-december-2021 https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/sage-99-minutes-c... Again, may be useful if you provided more of a reference for what you mean.

origin_path 4y ago
I don't think they write about Ivermectin all that often but I see a story in recent days, is it this one you mean? https://dailysceptic.org/2022/09/03/ivermectin-cuts-covid-mortality-by-92-major-study-finds-why-is-it-still-not-approved/ https://dailysceptic.org/2022/09/03/ivermectin-cuts-covid-mo... It's reporting on a very large study from Brazil that was published in a medical journal. If you think the study is un-scientific then could you explain it? Or better, why not write an article and submit it? The DS does publish articles that disagree with each other pretty regularly. They aren't a site that has a particular "line" on most topics beyond lockdowns, e.g. they have hosted articles both agreeing and disagreeing that there is an excess deaths problem in England. I ignore most Ivermectin stuff because at least as of last year there were lots of studies and they mostly seemed to be junk quality. Also I can't easily get it here anyway so whatever. But one thing I'm pretty sure of is that whatever health authorities say about it is nonsense. Horse paste and all that. I'm not being glib. For Omicron I meant this: https://cmmid.github.io/topics/covid19/reports/omicron_england/report_11_dec_2021.pdf https://cmmid.github.io/topics/covid19/reports/omicron_engla... It was LSHTM not SAGE sorry (hardly any difference though, LSHTM modellers contributed to SAGE stuff I think), they uploaded a document on 11th Dec - a long time after Omicron was announced - that stated "Due to a lack of data, we assume Omicron has the same severity as Delta". There was no lack of data that could have justified this assumption. This got in the press and spooked the govt. They later admitted it was all wrong: https://dailysceptic.org/2022/01/09/sage-gloomsters-admit-they-were-wrong-about-omicron/ https://dailysceptic.org/2022/01/09/sage-gloomsters-admit-th...