Meanwhile on Reddit: Morons Celebrate Blind Compliance

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[–]weavilsatemyface 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (4 children)

Until 2020, it was widely and uncontroversially accepted that the pharmaceutical industry was corrupt and rotten to the core. The media widely reported on how they push ineffective and even dangerous treatments, bribe doctors, lobby governments, essentially control most medical journals (close to 100% of all advertising in the journals comes from the top 10 pharma companies), and influence what papers get published and which don't.

The pharmaceutical industry is bigger than Big Oil: $1.5 trillion a year compared to about $1.4 trillion for the oil industry. You are rightly skeptical of Big Oil's propaganda but you swallow unconditionally Big Pharma's propaganda.

The corruption of medical science has been a scandal for decades, until it got memory-holed in 2020.

There is a revolving door between the regulators and the drug companies, vested interests decide what pharmaceutical products to recommend (e.g. the American CDC is part owner of the Moderna vaccine), and the regulators are almost entirely funded by the companies they're supposed to regulate. In the US I think it is about 70% of FDA funding comes from the drug companies. In Australia almost 100% of the TGA's funding comes from the drug companies.

And in dirty industry where the main players think nothing of selling HIV infected blood products and unsafe products, and deliberately manipulating drug trials to cover up the deaths of people, Pfizer is possibly the worst of the lot. Any fines they get are merely the cost of doing business.

Pfizer is so well known for their callous disregard of the law and patients' well-being that they are frequently used in studies of corporate ethics.

Almost one third of approved drugs have to be withdrawn due to poor safety, ineffectiveness or both. These are drugs that went through Stage 3 trials and were declared safe and effective, but weren't. And it takes an average of six years for approved drugs to be withdrawn. That's six years of very profitable sales while doing real harm.

And knowing just how hard it is to get the FDA to withdraw a drug if the drug companies object, we have to wonder how many of the other two thirds of approved drugs should have been withdrawn but weren't?

This is business as normal for the pharma cartels. The only difference with Covid was the unprecedented fear campaign and vaccine mandates. It's all about the benjamins. The drug cartels legally hooked millions of people on drugs which they knew were every bit as addictive as heroin for a mere few million dollars in profits, do you think they would hesitate for a second to sell useless, harmful vaccines for tens of billions?

[–]cunninglingus 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

We agree, corporations have been corrupt. Many of them, and their wealthy colleagues helped spread anti-vax disinformation. Big Pharma also benefited from that spread of lies about vaccines, which prolonged COVID cases and helped the virus mutate and spread further, requiring more vaccines. Almost all billionaires benefitted from the spread of COVID. Without the anti-vax lies, billions of others would have followed the appropriate scientific advice from day one: quarantine, social distance, wear masks, and take the vaccine.

[–]weavilsatemyface 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Oh man, that is a wild take. So according to you, pharmaceutical companies are spreading anti-vax disinformation so as to boost sales of their vaccines 🤡

the appropriate scientific advice from day one: quarantine, social distance, wear masks, and take the vaccine.

How were they supposed to take the vaccine from "day one" when it took almost a year to develop vaccines (never mind whether they were effective or not) and then months longer to get production high enough for everyone? There were still vaccine shortages in 2022.

And let's not even mention the elephant in the room, Africa, where vaccine uptake was lowest in the world and Covid deaths also lowest. I really don't want to hear racist explanations about how Africans can't accurately identify and count the billions of Covid deaths they must have really had, but just recorded them as eaten by crocodiles or something 🙄

None of those non-pharmaceutical interventions had, or have, any scientific basis.

Mass lockdowns of the uninfected were unprecedented and there was, and still is, absolutely zero credible scientific evidence supporting such nationwide or citywide mass lockdowns. With the possible exception of China, no country had mass lockdowns as part of their epidemic response policy until it all suddenly changed in 2020 on the basis of idiotically unrealistic, and completely unverified, computer modelling.

Just a few months before the official start of the Covid pandemic, in 2019, the WHO published their recommended response policy for respiratory disease epidemics and pandemics which included:

  • Only under extraordinary circumstances: quarantine of the infected.
  • Under no circumstances: quarantine of the exposed.
  • Mass preventative lockdowns of the unexposed was so inconceivable that they didn't even list it.

Presumably they thought that nobody in their right mind would be so mad as to lock down entire countries, especially after lockdowns were tried during the 2015 Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leonne and failed miserably to halt the epidemic. There was no evidence that lockdowns slowed transmission of the disease, credible evidence that it increased transmission within overcrowded housing, and the lockdowns were a complete disaster socially and economically for the poor. Lockdowns are not an effective intervention even for managing a disease like Ebola, which spreads by contact with bodily fluids. If lockdowns don't help with Ebola, they have no chance of helping with a respiratory disease that spreads by air, and everyone paying attention knew it in 2020.

There really was no excuse for lockdowns. Everyone knew, or should have known, they are not effective, especially the scientists who said otherwise despite the complete lack of any evidence, and that they are disastrous for the poor. But the privileged laptop class gain all the benefit (work from home in their pajamas) and none of the costs, so we got lockdowns. The white collar middle class got a working holiday, the working class took all the risk or lost their jobs and their income because Fuck The Poor.

Social distancing is nonsense for an airborne respiratory virus. Social distancing was based on the pseudo-science theory that Covid is only spread by droplets, not aerosols like every other coronavirus, including SARS, so it was always junk science, and scientists knew that from January 2020, February 2020 at the latest if they were particularly slow of mind or had been stuck in the mountains of New Guinea with no internet connection since 2001.

The kindest thing we might say about them is that, until the virus was identified as a coronavirus, it might have been wishful thinking that it was only spread by droplets. But once they knew it was a coronavirus, there was never any justification for social distancing. Pure, 100% pseudoscience and superstition.

There is little credible evidence that social distancing and lockdowns reduced the spread of Covid significantly, and lots of good evidence that they didn't.

Masks. Oh boy. I could write twenty thousand words on the topic. But do you remember how, right at the beginning of the pandemic, Fauci publicly said not to buy masks because there was no scientific evidence that they worked to prevent diseases like Covid? That was probably the most honest thing he said during the entire pandemic.

I will grant this:

  • If everyone was able to buy expensive, top of the range, re-usable N-95 masks and use them perfectly 100% of the time they are in public, then maybe, maybe, we could expect some reduction in viral transmission.
  • There is no credible evidence that disposable N-95 masks slow the spread of infection, even when used by healthcare professionals who are heavily motivated to use them correctly. If professional doctors and nurses cannot use them perfectly 100% of the time, there is no hope to expect the general public to do so.
  • Surgical masks are just a waste of time. Even for surgery, there is no credible evidence that they reduce the amount of infections, and that is for infections spread by droplets not aerosols. Against aerosols, they are a bad joke.
  • Cloth masks really are a case of "We must do something, this is something, so we must do it." They could never have worked, and the people saying to use cloth masks knew it. (Even with three layers, the gaps between the fibers are hundreds of times larger than the Covid virus. Expecting a cloth mask to filter viruses is like trying to catch houseflies with a tennis net.)

But at least cotton masks are biodegradable, unlike the hundreds of billions of surgical masks now polluting the planet and shedding microplastics into the environment.

Citations available on request. Not that I expect you will read them. You're all in favour of "the Science™" but not actual science.

[–]cunninglingus 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Indeed, this is why the anti-vax lies have worked so well: there are millions like yourself who are absolutely concinved, to the point that you're willing to write essays that repeat those lies. And nothing I write about the science of virology will convince you otherwise. Moreover, you likely vote Republican because that's the party - not to mention Trump - promoting the anti-vax claims. You've been conned, but you'll repeat anti-vax lies until your dying breath rather than admit you've been conned. Instead, you'll claim that I'm the brainwashed one. Problem is: you can no longer distinguish fact from fiction, and I can no longer convince you of what facts are. That's eroding the American mind.

[–]weavilsatemyface 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

And nothing I write about the science of virology will convince you otherwise.

That's because what you know about the science of virology could be written on a grain of rice and still have room for the Gettysburg Address.

How about instead of trying to psychoanalyse why I believe what I believe, you focus on the actual scientific claims?

Let's start with an easy one. What is the Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) of Covid, and how does it compare to SARS?

you likely vote Republican ... That's eroding the American mind.

Ha ha ha he thinks I'm American 😂 😂 😂