How can there not be a COVID-19 thread?

Thomas Veil said:
If they do supply their "research", it turns out to be fabricated BS from some fly-by-night "news" source or some questionable "authority".

Which means you end up looking up that "research" yourself so you can debunk it with factual information...and they in turn tell you why that information is not to be trusted, which goads you to prove why it is...

...and on and on and hideously on.

Which is why in years past I'd actually argue points with people. Though they might not want to accept it, it was easy enough to show that Saddam did not in fact have the WMD Bush claimed he did. Try to take that tactic about the vaccine with a Q supporter, and all you end up doing is falling down a conspiratorial rabbit hole of ever-diminishing logic and reason.

And who has that kind of time?

That's why, at MR, I sort of gave up and began responding to that kind of idiocy with mockery.

You can imagine how that went down with the current mods.

It's not that I set out to be a hit-and-run troll. I'll discuss anything with someone who can be reasoned with, and I'll back down when I'm wrong. It's just that prolonged arguments with those kinds of people are akin to trying to sweep the beach clean of sand.
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Yeah, some guy was posting stuff from the QAnon-related “Swiss Policy Research” website and calling it peer-reviewed scientific studies.
 
SuperMatt said:
It is the anti-intellectual movement. If Einstein couldn’t name the starting quarterback of their favorite football team, they’d think “see he doesn’t know everything…”

Trump encourages this, so they love him.
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Republicans definitely got behind anti-intellectualism, which is ironic considering that the loudest people from there tend to have degrees from top 10 colleges/universities.

Thomas Veil said:
If they do supply their "research", it turns out to be fabricated BS from some fly-by-night "news" source or some questionable "authority".

Which means you end up looking up that "research" yourself so you can debunk it with factual information...and they in turn tell you why that information is not to be trusted, which goads you to prove why it is...

...and on and on and hideously on.

Which is why in years past I'd actually argue points with people. Though they might not want to accept it, it was easy enough to show that Saddam did not in fact have the WMD Bush claimed he did. Try to take that tactic about the vaccine with a Q supporter, and all you end up doing is falling down a conspiratorial rabbit hole of ever-diminishing logic and reason.

And who has that kind of time?

That's why, at MR, I sort of gave up and began responding to that kind of idiocy with mockery.

You can imagine how that went down with the current mods.

It's not that I set out to be a hit-and-run troll. I'll discuss anything with someone who can be reasoned with, and I'll back down when I'm wrong. It's just that prolonged arguments with those kinds of people are akin to trying to sweep the beach clean of sand.
Click to expand...
My MR Frenemy used to bash me for criticizing Trumps piss poor leadership on COVID, but he mentioned Fauci about 10 times and told me I'm appealing to authority, when I told him how ridiculous Rand Paul looks when he's trying to lecture the most cited ID physician in the world who also happens to be the chief editor of Harrison's the #1 Internal Medicine textbook on the Western hemisphere. He said the following about Fauci:
1. Overpaid. He makes 400K a year running a multibillion dollar institute. In academia he'd be paid 2x and in industry, about 10x...
2. Bureaucrat. He's a practicing physician scientist with administrative responsibilities.
3. He's living off the fame of old work. He edited the last 3 versions of Harrisons, the most recent in 2018 (it's 4048 pages just so you guys know the breadth of the work). He also published more than 20 manuscripts a year the past 20 years.. Including 2020 when I stopped counting after 32.
4. He lied about the masks. Now this is where I asked for references on the timeline because I didn't closely follow as to who said what. Never got a response.

Fauci isn't perfect and he said/did a few things I don't entirely agree with, but there's such a stark difference in quality of character and life-work between Trump (or Rand Paul) and Fauci that in my books being neutral about Trump but negative about Fauci is a huge indicator of a faulty value system.

Science isn't perfect (and it isn't supposed to be). One of the standards we have is based on probability estimation and setting the threshold of acceptable risk for error for false discovery to 5%. So with a lot of science you'll get plenty false discovery and the goal is not to be infallible, to goal is to be correct 19 out of 20 cases. If someone had doubts that that's a pretty damn good proportion just look at how life expectancy increased in the past century. Now when it comes to the Q-Cucks-Clan running from the opposite end of the spectrum. They fixate on that 5% where science was wrong and they treat this 5% as it was 95%. So they are wrong on 19 out of 20 issues, yet that 1 issue they'll get right will vindicate them (in their minds). This extreme confirmation bias is a way to define insanity.
 
P_X said:
Republicans definitely got behind anti-intellectualism, which is ironic considering that the loudest people from there tend to have degrees from top 10 colleges/universities.


My MR Frenemy used to bash me for criticizing Trumps piss poor leadership on COVID, but he mentioned Fauci about 10 times and told me I'm appealing to authority, when I told him how ridiculous Rand Paul looks when he's trying to lecture the most cited ID physician in the world who also happens to be the chief editor of Harrison's the #1 Internal Medicine textbook on the Western hemisphere. He said the following about Fauci:
1. Overpaid. He makes 400K a year running a multibillion dollar institute. In academia he'd be paid 2x and in industry, about 10x...
2. Bureaucrat. He's a practicing physician scientist with administrative responsibilities.
3. He's living off the fame of old work. He edited the last 3 versions of Harrisons, the most recent in 2018 (it's 4048 pages just so you guys know the breadth of the work). He also published more than 20 manuscripts a year the past 20 years.. Including 2020 when I stopped counting after 32.
4. He lied about the masks. Now this is where I asked for references on the timeline because I didn't closely follow as to who said what. Never got a response.

Fauci isn't perfect and he said/did a few things I don't entirely agree with, but there's such a stark difference in quality of character and life-work between Trump (or Rand Paul) and Fauci that in my books being neutral about Trump but negative about Fauci is a huge indicator of a faulty value system.

Science isn't perfect (and it isn't supposed to be). One of the standards we have is based on probability estimation and setting the threshold of acceptable risk for error for false discovery to 5%. So with a lot of science you'll get plenty false discovery and the goal is not to be infallible, to goal is to be correct 19 out of 20 cases. If someone had doubts that that's a pretty damn good proportion just look at how life expectancy increased in the past century. Now when it comes to the Q-Cucks-Clan running from the opposite end of the spectrum. They fixate on that 5% where science was wrong and they treat this 5% as it was 95%. So they are wrong on 19 out of 20 issues, yet that 1 issue they'll get right will vindicate them (in their minds). This extreme confirmation bias is a way to define insanity.
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This extends to tech as well. People who know diddly-squat about it will ignore everything incredible about a 2021 cell phone, and when it doesn’t read their mind and properly auto-correct their crappy typing, they declare it to be 💩.

Somebody who doesn’t understand a field, instead of listening to the experts, or trying to get some knowledge about it, just wait for the experts to make some minor mistake, which then justifies their own ignorance. “See he thinks he’s so smart; he said wear masks, then he said not to. What a moron. I take my medical advice from my 365 jokes-a-year calendar!”
 
SuperMatt said:
This extends to tech as well. People who know diddly-squat about it will ignore everything incredible about a 2021 cell phone, and when it doesn’t read their mind and properly auto-correct their crappy typing, they declare it to be 💩.

Somebody who doesn’t understand a field, instead of listening to the experts, or trying to get some knowledge about it, just wait for the experts to make some minor mistake, which then justifies their own ignorance. “See he thinks he’s so smart; he said wear masks, then he said not to. What a moron. I take my medical advice from my 365 jokes-a-year calendar!”
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Yup the Dunning-Kruger phenomenon is definitely a strong force on this side of the globe. Fun fact is that it also makes you an expert to anticipate medical questions based of 1st page google searches:D


Edd said:
thehill.com

Rand Paul: ‘I’m not getting vaccinated’

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said Sunday that he will not be getting vaccinated against COVID-19. During an interview with John Catsimatidis on his radio show on WABC 770 AM, Paul, an ophthalmologist, sa…
thehill.com thehill.com
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What a turd (ran out of words to describe him). He's quite confident in his antibodies 1 year out. It would be so ironic if he got it again:D Too bad 75-80% of congress are vaccinated, so others made sure the heavy lifting is taken care of for him.
 
Edd said:
thehill.com

Rand Paul: ‘I’m not getting vaccinated’

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said Sunday that he will not be getting vaccinated against COVID-19. During an interview with John Catsimatidis on his radio show on WABC 770 AM, Paul, an ophthalmologist, sa…
thehill.com thehill.com
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I would argue that anyone getting their medical advice from Rand Paul was never getting the vaccine anyway.
 
Eric said:
There really should be a nationalized system for verification but unfortunately it's become political which is ridiculous. There should be a simple and universal way to verify, if you don't want the vaccine then fine, you can't do certain things but don't penalize everyone else who has done the right thing.
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You mean like?



You would figure the people who hate the concept most, are the biggest cheerleaders of this country.
 
This study explored social factors that are associated with the US deaths caused by COVID-19 after the declaration of economic reopening on May 1, 2020 by President Donald Trump. We seek to understand how county-level support for Trump interacted with social distancing policies to impact COVID-19 death rates. Overall, controlling for several potential confounders, counties with higher levels of Trump support do not necessarily experience greater mortality rates due to COVID-19. The predicted weekly death counts per county tended to increase over time with the implementation of several key health policies. However, the difference in COVID-19 outcomes between counties with low and high levels of Trump support grew after several weeks of the policy implementation as counties with higher levels of Trump support suffered relatively higher death rates.
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Counties with higher levels of Trump support exhibited lower percentages of mobile staying at home and higher percentages of people working part time or full time than otherwise comparable counties with lower levels of Trump support. The relative negative performance of Trump-supporting counties is robust after controlling for these measures of policy compliance.
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Counties with high percentages of older (aged 65 and above) persons tended to have greater death rates, as did more populous counties in general. This study indicates that policymakers should consider the risks inherent in controlling public health crises due to divisions in political ideology and confirms that vulnerable communities are at particularly high risk in public health crises.
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I'll translate this, because the connotations are made a little too subtle (appropriate for a science paper, but too mild for the cost in human life). This is kind of the closest we'll ever get to tell that Trump's leadership behavior killed a lot of people in 2020. As I've been saying we could have had a decent summer just like in Europe if we opened up a little slower last summer. I.e. you'll be fucking shocked: Fauci was right.
 
Hey kids, guess what was supposed to happen a year ago?

https://www.twitter.com/i/web/status/1283518424774213632/

If he only added, "With another year & a different administration, by Memorial Day we will largely have this coronavirus pandemic behind us."

...and a "If followers of my boss don't storm the capital looking to hang me. Heh! Like that would happen."
 
JayMysteri0 said:
Hey kids, guess what was supposed to happen a year ago?

https://www.twitter.com/i/web/status/1283518424774213632/

If he only added, "With another year & a different administration, by Memorial Day we will largely have this coronavirus pandemic behind us."

...and a "If followers of my boss don't storm the capital looking to hang me. Heh! Like that would happen."
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It was really translucent bullshit.

Regardless, Pence is quite reliable. He managed to achieve a similar clusterfuck with COVID that he did with the HIV epidemic in Indiana.
 
Fox News had an article about Fauci’s emails that was the top hit when I searched for Fauci.

www.foxnews.com

Fauci emails spark flood of backlash: 'Needs to stop playing games'

A trove of recently released emails to and from top government epidemiologist Anthony Fauci is sparking fierce backlash against him from some Republicans.
www.foxnews.com www.foxnews.com

The Fox article is very disappointing. It pulls a couple quotes out of context and then fills most of the article with the responses of Republicans in Congress, as if they have anything to do with the story…? It treats their off-the-cuff reactions as equal or more important than the facts in the article. Take out the overheated political comments, and look at just the information from the emails. It’s clear there were conflicting theories of where the virus came from, and they were trying to get answers. Mostly, however, they were trying to figure out how to contain the outbreak…you know, they were concerned about the health of Americans.

Here is the original reporting from Buzzfeed, who actually put in the FOIA request and did all the reporting. It shows all 3000+ pages of the emails they got.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/nataliebettendorf/fauci-emails-covid-response

IMHO, the biggest misunderstanding from the right (not just of Fauci, but of everybody trying to handle the pandemic) is that the doctors knew everything from the beginning and were somehow hiding it from people. Of course, anybody using more of their brains knows this was a brand new virus, and it took some time before they figured out critical facts such as the spreading among people without visible symptoms. You can see that in the emails.

There are more emails obtained by the Washington Post.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2021/tony-fauci-emails/

Why didn’t Fox put forward a FOIA request? Are they happy to just snag a quote or two from other sources’ reporting, mixed in with tweets from GOP lawmakers? Apparently so. And still their Reader’s Digest for Kids version is the top hit.
 
SuperMatt said:
Fox News had an article about Fauci’s emails that was the top hit when I searched for Fauci.

www.foxnews.com

Fauci emails spark flood of backlash: 'Needs to stop playing games'

A trove of recently released emails to and from top government epidemiologist Anthony Fauci is sparking fierce backlash against him from some Republicans.
www.foxnews.com www.foxnews.com

The Fox article is very disappointing. It pulls a couple quotes out of context and then fills most of the article with the responses of Republicans in Congress, as if they have anything to do with the story…? It treats their off-the-cuff reactions as equal or more important than the facts in the article. Take out the overheated political comments, and look at just the information from the emails. It’s clear there were conflicting theories of where the virus came from, and they were trying to get answers. Mostly, however, they were trying to figure out how to contain the outbreak…you know, they were concerned about the health of Americans.

Here is the original reporting from Buzzfeed, who actually put in the FOIA request and did all the reporting. It shows all 3000+ pages of the emails they got.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/nataliebettendorf/fauci-emails-covid-response

IMHO, the biggest misunderstanding from the right (not just of Fauci, but of everybody trying to handle the pandemic) is that the doctors knew everything from the beginning and were somehow hiding it from people. Of course, anybody using more of their brains knows this was a brand new virus, and it took some time before they figured out critical facts such as the spreading among people without visible symptoms. You can see that in the emails.

There are more emails obtained by the Washington Post.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2021/tony-fauci-emails/

Why didn’t Fox put forward a FOIA request? Are they happy to just snag a quote or two from other sources’ reporting, mixed in with tweets from GOP lawmakers? Apparently so. And still their Reader’s Digest for Kids version is the top hit.
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Reddit only picked it up in r/Conservative and r/Conspiracy. At conspiracy they claim Fauci lied about masks, referring to a Feb email where nearly everything was factually correct except for the lack of knowledge about this pandemic being driven by the asymptomatic. One thing that came to my mind is that my MR Frenemy called him an overpaid bureaucrat...This is 10 pages of emails per day and probably not the full list. With this guy's hours, his hourly wage would be around $60.

He's clearly held to a much much higher standard than politicians. Just imagine if we had this level of access to Rand Paul's emails... The thing about NIH employees is that everybody's paranoid as fuck and if you log into the computer system you get a reminder that don't expect any level of privacy. So you shall expect absolutely no smoking gun.
 
P_X said:
Reddit only picked it up in r/Conservative and r/Conspiracy. At conspiracy they claim Fauci lied about masks, referring to a Feb email where nearly everything was factually correct except for the lack of knowledge about this pandemic being driven by the asymptomatic. One thing that came to my mind is that my MR Frenemy called him an overpaid bureaucrat...This is 10 pages of emails per day and probably not the full list. With this guy's hours, his hourly wage would be around $60.

He's clearly held to a much much higher standard than politicians. Just imagine if we had this level of access to Rand Paul's emails... The thing about NIH employees is that everybody's paranoid as fuck and if you log into the computer system you get a reminder that don't expect any level of privacy. So you shall expect absolutely no smoking gun.
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One other interesting fact was that redactions were made by the Trump administration.

Some of the emails were reviewed by the Trump White House before being turned over to BuzzFeed News. They represent just a portion of what was requested, and they are filled with redactions, making them an incomplete record of the time period and Fauci’s correspondence. Additional tranches are expected to be released in the coming months.
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And there are more to come…
 
April 1st past right?

www.vice.com

Anti-Maskers Ready to Start Masking—to Protect Themselves From the Vaccinated

An anti-vaccine conspiracy about the vaccinated is leading some anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers to contemplate wearing a mask and social distance.
www.vice.com www.vice.com
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A conspiracy ripping through the anti-vax world may finally drive some anti-maskers to do the unthinkable: wear a mask and keep their distance.

The conspiracy—which comes in several shapes and sizes—more or less says the vaccinated will “shed” certain proteins onto the unvaccinated who will then suffer adverse effects. The main worry is the “shedding” will cause irregular menstruation, infertility, and miscarriages. The entirely baseless idea is a key cog in a larger conspiracy that COVID-19 was a ploy to depopulate the world, and the vaccine is what will cull the masses.

Experts say the conspiracy is born from a fundamental misunderstanding of how vaccines work. It has been widely debunked and you can read about it here, here, and here, among other places.

Anti-vax influencers are instructing their fellow anti-vaxxers as well as anti-maskers (at this point the two communities overlap to a huge degree) that one of the best ways to defend themselves from this blight is to co-opt…social distancing, the very strategy they have long decried.

Sherri Tenpenny, an anti-vaxxer who was found to be key in spreading COVID-19 conspiracy theories, suggested on a recent anti-vax livestream that you may have to “stay away from somebody who's had these shots…forever.”

-

It’s not just social distancing that anti-maskers/anti-vaxxers are begrudgingly accepting. Some conspiracy theorists are wondering if perhaps their longtime bane, the mask, could become their salvation. One perplexed poster on the fringe site 4chan asked their fellow anons if they should “wear a mask around the vaccinated, because they shed the mRNA stuff?”

“I am going to be watching these vaccine shedding stories like a hawk,” wrote another man on Twitter. “Is my family going to need to wear masks to protect ourselves from the vaccinated?”
 
JayMysteri0 said:
April 1st past right?


A conspiracy ripping through the anti-vax world may finally drive some anti-maskers to do the unthinkable: wear a mask and keep their distance.

The conspiracy—which comes in several shapes and sizes—more or less says the vaccinated will “shed” certain proteins onto the unvaccinated who will then suffer adverse effects. The main worry is the “shedding” will cause irregular menstruation, infertility, and miscarriages. The entirely baseless idea is a key cog in a larger conspiracy that COVID-19 was a ploy to depopulate the world, and the vaccine is what will cull the masses.

Experts say the conspiracy is born from a fundamental misunderstanding of how vaccines work. It has been widely debunked and you can read about it here, here, and here, among other places.

Anti-vax influencers are instructing their fellow anti-vaxxers as well as anti-maskers (at this point the two communities overlap to a huge degree) that one of the best ways to defend themselves from this blight is to co-opt…social distancing, the very strategy they have long decried.

Sherri Tenpenny, an anti-vaxxer who was found to be key in spreading COVID-19 conspiracy theories, suggested on a recent anti-vax livestream that you may have to “stay away from somebody who's had these shots…forever.”

-

It’s not just social distancing that anti-maskers/anti-vaxxers are begrudgingly accepting. Some conspiracy theorists are wondering if perhaps their longtime bane, the mask, could become their salvation. One perplexed poster on the fringe site 4chan asked their fellow anons if they should “wear a mask around the vaccinated, because they shed the mRNA stuff?”

“I am going to be watching these vaccine shedding stories like a hawk,” wrote another man on Twitter. “Is my family going to need to wear masks to protect ourselves from the vaccinated?”
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Love it:D Also, pstt. Don't tell them that mRNA has low stability and a short half life (hence the special storage requirements).
 
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