you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]StillLessons 11 insightful - 2 fun11 insightful - 1 fun12 insightful - 2 fun -  (2 children)

The greatest casualty of the Covid panic has been the destruction of the word "science".

Regulatory bodies around the world have re-defined "science" to mean "policy". This is a very rapid, very effective way to undo hundreds of years of learning made possible by critical analysis. In its place, we find ourselves in the same environment in which those who disagreed with the the Catholic Church found themselves in the middle ages. To say the health consequences of this are going to be severe is a radical understatement.

The WHO's re-definition of the phrase "herd immunity" is singularly the most destructive change in thought I've seen in decades.

The suicide of the enlightenment. It's logical, given the guilt embedded in our social consciousness associated with the carnage of centuries of Europeans slaughtering millions of people around the world militarily, but it's still so hard to watch all the good that Europeans accomplished be flushed down the toilet in our desperate effort to purge this guilt. Is it not possible to acknowledge the damage that was done without simultaneously destroying all the real positives that Europe also brought to human thought?

[–]madcow-5 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Agreed. The word was a little twisted at times before, but COVID19 killed it entirely. It's used a lot now to mean whatever a perceived authority said. Anyone wearing a suit or a lab coat.

What was the redefining of herd immunity though?

[–]StillLessons 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Herd immunity for a century has been understood to be achieved through two methods: first some portion of the population is infected with the agent (perhaps geting sick, perhaps not) from which the immune system learns how to fight it (among the survivors), and the next time people are exposed to the same pathogen, people's immune systems kill the pathogen before it can reproduce. The second path (which was widely recognized as inferior, it is important to note) was to vaccinate, which is to introduce a substance similar enough to the original pathogen to awaken people's immune system so that if they later came in contact with the real pathogen, the body would be "trained" to fight it already. So two paths to herd immunity: natural infection and spread through the community, leading to a group of immune people having had it, or vaccination providing a group of people whose bodies should recognize the pathogen if they encountered it.

The WHO - in its infinite politicization - decided within the past couple of months to eliminate the natural method of developing herd immunity. In other words, the only way (per our policy overlords) for herd immunity to develop is through vaccination. According to them, the people who get the bug, survive, and provide a population of bodies that now recognize the actual pathogen, don't count. Not useful. If you're not vaccinated, you are not "immune", as they now use the term.

This is the single greatest piece of stupidity I could ever imagine, because it flies in the face our understanding of thousands of years of human evolution. Natural immunity is precisely why we are resistant to the literally thousands of potential "pathogens" that surround us in the biome. We are exposed to uncounted microorganisms daily, and we don't get sick because we naturally evolved to live alongside them.

But Gates and the WHO don't want that. They want CONTROL.

If this change in thinking is successful, it will be responsible for millions of deaths, as our understanding regresses hundreds of years.