Cont: Corona Virus Conspiracy Theories Part IV

[Petra]

You asked a meta question and I provided a meta answer.

Pay better attention please.

Just to let you know your response has the same credibility as what prompted my question. Zero.

 

[Cosmic Yak]

Do you see how your post has zero content, that it's just full of ad hominem and derision. There's no actual criticism of any particular statement or claim.

So if it's unsupported assertion after unsupported assertion why not put one down?

Your hostility is a bit over the top isn't it? My goodness.

1. Look up what ad hominem actually means.
2. Unsupported assertions don't need any further attention. Hitchens' Razor: That which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
3. If there is any hostility in my post, it is towards lies and misinformation, not towards you. I was, and remain, greatly amused that you would give credence to any of that bilge. That is my feeling and my opinion, and I am entitled both to have and to express them.

 

[Petra]

When you’re pushing a conspiracy theory that requires the complicity of virtually the entire medical profession and pretty much every government in the world, the last person you should be drawing attention to is William of Ockham.

Do you see how what you say doesn't say anything?

 

[Petra]

1. Look up what ad hominem actually means.
2. Unsupported assertions don't need any further attention. Hitchens' Razor: That which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
3. If there is any hostility in my post, it is towards lies and misinformation, not towards you. I was, and remain, greatly amused that you would give credence to any of that bilge. That is my feeling and my opinion, and I am entitled both to have and to express them.

But first you need to prove that an unsupported assertion is indeed unsupported. You might think an assertion is unsupported but I might think it's supported. You need to identify what you criticise. Do you not see that? Can you not see how your post doesn't really say anything?

 

[Petra]

The reason you haven't been hearing so much about AIDS is that the identification of HIV (the virus that causes AIDS) led to the development of antiretroviral therapies that control the virus and slow the progression to AIDS.

Oh, of course, of course.

So Kary Mullis won the Nobel Prize for biochemistry but he's a dumb AIDS denialist, right? This video is only 74 seconds long but in it you'll see:

Robert Da Prato, MD, HIV Testing Specialist, United States Armed Forces
repeat what he heard Kary Mullis say followed by Kary Mullis himself saying how he saw no scientific papers that showed a causal link between HIV and AIDS.
https://odysee.com/@scamdemic:7d/karymullisaids:0

 

[Petra]

If the moon is made of green cheese and the 381kg of moon rocks collected by six Apollo missions are fraudulent, then we can infer there may be rats living on the moon.

What you did was avoid my argument that the science put forward for suspicion of a new virus was fraudulent.

What do you say to the claim of fraud?

1. UNSCIENTIFIC: SUSPICION OF NEW VIRUS
Suspicion of a "novel" virus is based on an alleged "cluster" of 44 cases of pneumonia of "unknown origin" in the highly-polluted city of Wuhan.
44 cases doesn't make a cluster and pneumonia has many causes - "unknown origin" makes no sense.
Then, if indeed these 44 cases of pneumonia were caused by a novel virus why is the association between pneumonia and the novel virus now completely lost?

 

[Nick Terry]

You do recognise that not all experts support the mainstream narrative, don't you, but you seem to act as if there are no naysayers among the experts. I wouldn't dare to look at scientific papers I know nothing about and simply apply my own mind but when experts lay out their criticism clearly I think we, as laypeople, can follow along and see where their criticism deserves merit.

Then there are things we can easily see that are wrong ourselves. Currently, a friend is staying with me for a week longer than planned because her PCR test returned a positive result and she's not allowed to board her flight until it's negative - she also had to wait 7 days to have the second test. She is perfectly well, showing no symptoms. She was suffering cold symptoms before and while she was suffering those symptoms underwent two Rapid Antigen Tests which both returned negatives. Interesting, no? While sick she returned negatives and while well she returns a positive.

Her being held hostage for a week while perfectly well is lunacy of the highest order but only one such example. If you can't see anything wrong ... well I simply don't know what to say.

I bolded a keyword you're misapplying.

Case in point, your anecdote about your friend who tested positive with a PCR and negative with lateral flow tests/rapid tests.There's been reporting that rapid tests detect the Omicron variant less well than PCR tests. This has been reported at the same time as self-isolation has been cut in most countries in the world from 10 days to 7 or even 5 days.

I can confirm this anecdotally based on the experiences of my students - a number first report that a flatmate tested positive, but they themselves tested negative with rapid tests, yet are experiencing cold-like symptoms. They then say they are self-isolating and will therefore miss classes for a week. A number then finally test positive with rapid tests or a PCR test. Others test positive straight away and then keep testing positive even at the 7 day threshold.

Rapid tests are far from perfect, PCR tests are more reliable, but take longer - this is the basic trade-off we're experiencing now we are out of lockdown and are relying on vaccines to prevent serious illness and increased strain on hospitals.

My university saw 1100 students and staff test positive in the week starting January 24, which is a bit under 5% of all students and staff. But the numbers who are in self-isolation due to exposure to those who've tested positive, is 3-4 times that figure. Colleagues report absence rates of a third, which is also what I'm seeing in my classes. It may go to half in the next 1-2 weeks, because the snowball effect of chain infections is so palpable.

The keyword 'narrative' isn't really applicable to scientific evidence, until it is turned into a historical narrative, i.e reporting, chronicling and noting changes over time.

The pandemic is a historical event and a collection of events, of peaks, troughs and waves, which are recorded through statistics and personal experiences. National and regional authorities are able to collect data on infection cases (positive tests), tests taken, hospitalisations, ICU/ventilator cases, and deaths. Sample surveys like the British Office of National Statistics weekly surveys provide recognised and generally reliable, but less precise measurements.

We can also observe absences at schools, colleges/universities, at work, and the impact of staff shortages on transport, delivery services and more - which have unsettled supply chains and caused visible shortages of goods in stores.

There is enough reporting on this in most countries/regions, even if it might be less prominent in 2022 than in spring 2020, to confirm what is blindingly obvious: there is a new variant of coronavirus, designated Omicron, which has swept through the world from the end of November 2021, causing massive spikes of positive tests, large-scale absences from education and work, increased hospitalisations but not as bad as some previous peaks, and a higher death rate than in the summer and autumn of 2021, but lower than the winter 2020/2021 wave caused by the Alpha variant. All of this coexists with statistics monitoring the take-up of vaccines and booster doses.

Currently western countries like the US and UK are on the down-slope from their absolute peaks of recorded positive tests in January, but the number being infected remains for now significantly higher than in many previous peaks, indeed the UK is still seeing more cases per day than in the winter 2020/2021 wave, and the US is hovering above the averages for that peak a year ago.

The UK has excellent data-sets because we are a more centralised country, even so there are four nations and multiple regions, and there's the ability to drill down to postcode (zipcode) level. My own postcode, as it's where many of the students live, has a rate significantly above the national average. That statistical observation confirms my everyday experiences, that Omicron is ripping through my city and my university. The local statistics for vaccinations are skewed because a large part of the population are students and thus got vaccinated at their home addresses; something I could easily confirm by asking them.
https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/

Omicron is milder than the previous variant, Delta, which was more aggressive than the variant before that, Alpha, which was certainly more infectious and aggressive than the original variant. The new variant is not quite as reliably picked up by rapid tests, as mentioned, but PCR tests and sequencing can detect it, and distinguish it from previous variants, because of changes to its genome.

Anecdotally, friends and family have tested positive and experienced some symptoms far more frequently in the past 2-3 months because of Omicron, than in the whole of 2020 and 2021.

My youngest sister's family all tested positive in January 2022, staggered over several weeks, with only their eldest boy experiencing any symptoms at the time, but my sister complained of extreme tiredness after she returned to work, which is a widely reported phenomenon (post-infection fatigue). My aunt and uncle on my mother's side both tested positive in 2021 and 2020 respectively, my uncle was hospitalised in the first wave for a week and survived.

In the UK, we were repeatedly locked down during 2020 and the first part of 2021. The entire academic year in 2020-2021 was taught remotely in universities, contacts were minimal. Restrictions were removed in July 2021, when the older generations were vaccinated but before twentysomethings were scheduled to get their jabs. The new academic year in September/October 2021 saw a return to classrooms with students generally able to have been vaccinated in time. Masks were not compulsory. Despite persistent levels of infection nationally, positive tests among students in the autumn term were quite rare. The vaccines prevented not only serious illness from Delta, but they also warded off measurable infection.

This has changed. Omicron is more infectious, but it is also less easily detected by rapid tests. People are still getting sick, but vaccinations and boosters have blunted hospitalisation rates below winter 2020/2021 in absolute terms. In the UK, we had close to 40,000 hospitalised last winter, this winter the peak was just over half of that. The average death rate is significantly below last winter's peak, again vaccines and boosters have blunted the impact of the Omicron wave.

It was already clear, by the way, that one could catch coronavirus twice - because of the differences between the original variant and Alpha or Delta. That is even more prominent with Omicron; reinfections are now being included in the UK statistics and measured, with a distinct proportion being counted as reinfections.

There have been 7,054,000 positive tests for coronavirus in the UK since December 1, 2021, versus 12,436 deaths in the same time-frame. Given the lag between infection and the outcome of cases which develop into serious illnesses, the 7 million infections will result in further deaths in the next 2-4 weeks. But it's still better than last winter.

In the winter of 2020/2021, in the same period (Dec 1-Feb 5), there were 53,887 deaths in the UK from coronavirus, the worst moment of the pandemic as a whole, a full third of all deaths (33.7% of 158,243 in the UK). There were 2,390,469 positive tests in that time-frame, back when there were fewer rapid tests, but also back when the UK was in lockdown.

We've not been in lockdown for many, many months, and the limited restrictions of 'Plan B' (compulsory masks indoors/on public transport, with pubs and restaurants as a gigantic loophole) introduced in December 2021 were lifted on January 26.

The Johnson government is talking of removing the legal requirement to self-isolate if testing positive in March. It remains to be seen whether the Prime Minister is forced to resign before then, because of the scandal over repeated parties in 10 Downing Street during 2020-2021 at a time when lockdown laws imposed fixed-penalty fines on those who breached rules on social gatherings, including restrictions on the number who could attend funerals.


Viewed historically, the era of the coronavirus pandemic from January 2020 to February 2022 is quite real, and has left a colossal quantity of historical evidence and data. It has unfolded somewhat differently in various countries, and at various moments - peaks, troughs, waves, restrictions and loosenings, vaccinations and under-vaccinations all being documentable aspects. Scientists have detected four major variants and several minor ones, medical professionals have cared for patients with all of these variants, and societies, families and individuals have their experiences with them. 5.7 million deaths worldwide, several hundred thousand children in the US orphaned after losing both parents, and a boatload of trauma from Long Covid, bereavement and the psychological impact of lockdowns and restrictions disrupting travel, holidays, family and social life.

Viewed historically, the denialism, conspiracy theories and anti-vaccination campaigning are now part of the historical record of the pandemic as well, but posterity won't be impressed by any of that. The underplaying and dismissal of the virulence of the disease in early 2020 looks ridiculous after nearly six million deaths (and the world will pass that threshold before too long). The documentable discrepancies in vaccination rates and death rates in red and blue counties in the US mean 10s of 1000s of deaths can be attributed to misinformation and disinformation in 2020-2021. This website will be a future historical source, anecdotal to be sure, of how that played out: https://www.sorryantivaxxer.com/

Future historians of science and medicine, as well as of 21st Century societies, will drown in the sheer volume of material recorded in mainstream, social and alternative media, as well as in the thousands of papers published in 2020-2022 and beyond about the pandemic. The main Wiki page for the Covid-19 pandemic has 499 footnotes - following through to all the sub-pages would make that thousands of references, and that is a crowd-sourced simplified online encyclopedia, not a definitive account of all of the evidence that exists regarding coronavirus.

How the pandemic is seen in the medium and long term - what the 'narrative' as in interpretation of the era of coronavirus will be - remains to be seen. It is vanishingly unlikely it will be brushed off as a nothingburger. We can already see key moments in 2020-2021 when various governments and local authorities made lethal mistakes, as well as how knowledge expanded to better equip us to cope with the pandemic. How we see the current phase - whether it is the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning - will also involve criticisms, since managing a public health crisis concerns people's lives and livelihoods, and judging risks.

2020's shutdowns were unprecedented and have already been analysed for their novelty by historians, like the economic historian Adam Tooze, and will continue to be, since the reverberations will continue for some time to come. We're now back in an era of inflation for the first time since the early 1980s, for one.

I am, however, confident in predicting that no conspiracy theorist will be able to narrate with evidence and while accounting for the preponderance of the evidence, a history of the coronavirus pandemic from 2020 onwards.

 

[Andy_Ross]

You mean your fake court?

Anti Vaxxers in the UK are swarming in to vaccination stations and claiming to be acting as 'Common Law Constables' for the 'Common Law Court'.

They threatened to arrest the police at one of them, and at another they were threatening to arrest the Royal Marine medics that were helping administer the vaccinations.

 

[Resume]

I don't think this is a very fruitful exercise so I'll end it here

Evidence?

 

[Resume]

Oh, I see why now. The truckers are evil racist naziis.

Practicing legitimate nazi, racist political discourse.

 

[Cosmic Yak]

I wasn't reversing the burden of proof! What I put down was what I think is fraudulent science, namely, what was put forward for suspicion of a new virus. Please respond to that. I didn't bring 5 million deaths into the argument. Let's just stick to whether the science is fraudulent or not.

Fine. Let's do that.
Present your evidence that the science is fraudulent.

Criticism isn't necessarily in the form of a research paper although it certainly may be a critique of a research paper.

The paper you derided co-authored by Dr Mark Bailey and Dr John Bevan-Smith has a whole section on the fraudulence of the genome but I put forward the simple fact of taking only swabs from a single patient to create a genome as being fraudulent science ... that's as far as I went because my understanding is limited, however, if you believe that a sample from one patient is good science then perhaps you can explain why.

The paper is not peer-reviewed. Perhaps you could provide some peer review yourself, not of the roll-eyes, derision type but with some clear statements of what is wrong with the section of the paper criticising the science put forward for creating the genome.

No. Once again, you appear to misunderstand the concept of burden of proof.
If you think that Covid is fake, that viruses don't exist, and that Covid tests don't work, then it's up to you to prove that.
Where is your evidence for these assertions?
Note that you are making two distinct claims here: one about bad science, and another about fraud. You need to show evidence for both.
Oh, and don't bother with the 'UFOs in vaccines' paper again, because others here -e.g. W.D.Clinger- have already addressed it, and found it wanting.

 

[Paul2]

No, I don't reject what scientists say because I don't agree with them, I reject what they say because others, including scientists and doctors, have pointed out clearly what is wrong with what they say.

The problem with this is that there are very few, if any, scientific conclusions that rely on more than a lay person's knowledge that don't have some crackpot scientist somewhere in the world who can show why it's wrong.

The criterion you have offered - reject a scientific conclusion, even if it is widely accepted - if there are some scientists who claim it is wrong and can specify why - is unworkable for subjects requiring technical or expert knowledge to adjudicate. Especially since you aren't in a position to decide if the challenge to a widely held scientific conclusion is valid or not, even if it sounds like it at first glance.

 

[Andy_Ross]

Canadian truckers protesting govt COVID policies are now called racist. Trudeau said so.

Can someone explain why?


Sent from my moto g(7) power using Tapatalk

Maybe the nazi and confederate flags they were flying?

 

[Cosmic Yak]

But first you need to prove that an unsupported assertion is indeed unsupported. You might think an assertion is unsupported but I might think it's supported. You need to identify what you criticise. Do you not see that? Can you not see how your post doesn't really say anything?

OK, if you really want to do it this way, let's do it this way.
All these quotes are from that paper you wanted us to read, and on which you are relying so heavily.

The fraud concerns a purported novel coronavirus, invented not found by virology, which allowed Bill Gates to predict a once-in-a century pandemic requiring billions of vaccines to combat, by which he meant to vastly increase the assets of the Bill and Melinda Gates Trust that sits alongside the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

No support is provided for these claims about Bill Gates. The one reference does not support the claim.

“vaccines”, which are not vaccines but bio-weapons

Unsupported assertion.

Everything was thus set to release genetic and nanoparticle technologies onto unsuspecting populations under the guise of a health crisis just a few weeks away. All it took was the substitution of influenza, which had long since failed to strike fear into the world, with an imaginary deadly and “novel” coronavirus.

Unsupported assertions, with a side order of conspiratorial bilge.

Talking of conspiratorial bilge:

By the end of March 2020, democracy was on its knees, the people as the People excluded from public life, imprisoned in their homes, accepting their fate in the same tragic silence as the sad-eyed of the Shoah, packed into boxcars, rolled across a grey-scale landscape to a fate worse than death. The camps of exclusion were now our homes. And then the unthinkable: politicians announced that they would be inoculating their populations with highly experimental genetic encoded injections never before used on humans that still had years to run on their already truncated and farcical clinical trials.

It pains me to read this twaddle, but it's a sacrifice I'm prepared to make in the cause of scepticism.

I looked through the rest of the paper: nowhere are these assertions given any form of evidentiary support.
We can start with these, then. Numerous examples of completely unsupported assertions. Easy to find, and I wonder why you did not notice this.
If you dispute that these claims are unevidenced in that essay, then do please quote the evidence, from that essay.

 

[bruto]

1. I have yet to see a believer in equality and democracy flying a Nazi or a Confederate flag, even one who believes we should "teach the controversy." If displaying the very symbols of fascist hate has no meaning, what does? So yes, Bubba, if you fly that flag, you're either what it says, or you're an utter moron.

2. I was thinking about the allegation that PCR test positives are nearly 100 percent false, and wonder how they could be anything but 100 percent false if one doesn't believe in the virus in the first place. If you start from that premise, of course all positives could only be false, and all negatives can only be true. To the denier of viruses, a PCR test is the equivalent of dowsing or evaluating the added power of homeopathic dilution. But we'd better watch out for circularity here. If you don't believe in viruses in the first place, you cannot attack the test for inaccuracy, as it tests for nothing. Nor, of course, can you blame the inaccuracy of the test for false beliefs about the virus, if all such beliefs are false to start with.

 

[Foster Zygote]

The leap from "COVID-19 isn't serious" to "viruses aren't proved to exist" is on the order of the leap from "Apollo was faked on a stage" to "spaceflight is impossible because the earth is flat and the moon is only 3,000 miles above the plane and within the dome enclosing the sky".

 

[W.D.Clinger]

That "paper" is a perfect example of my earlier point about these claims being laughably, pitifully wrong.
Unsupported assertion after unsupported assertion, 'everyone else is lying except me', 'all the other scientists are wrong and lying, and always have been, except me, because I say so'. 'Bill Gates globalists blah blah blah'.
Oh, and, if you scroll down to p 42 onwards, 'UFOs in vaccines'!

And bonus 'nano-chips'.

Petra, this is utter drek. How can you swallow this bilge?

Do you see how your post has zero content, that it's just full of ad hominem and derision. There's no actual criticism of any particular statement or claim.

In that post, which you believe to have zero content, Cosmic Yak wrote "if you scroll down to p 42 onwards, 'UFOs in vaccines'!"

Many people would interpret that as criticism of a particular statement/claim.

From page 42 of that paper by Mark Bailey and John Bevan-Smith:

Figure 6. Caption: UFOs found in vaccines.

Criticism needs to include actual content. Criticism does not just consist of deriding something because someone you don't like endorses it or simply expressing an opinion. Criticism involves rigour, it means taking what is put forward and saying why there's something wrong with it.

So you don't understand why "UFOs found in vaccines" counts as something wrong with the Bailey and Bevan-Smith paper?

The paper you derided co-authored by Dr Mark Bailey and Dr John Bevan-Smith has a whole section on the fraudulence of the genome but I put forward the simple fact of taking only swabs from a single patient to create a genome as being fraudulent science ... that's as far as I went because my understanding is limited, however, if you believe that a sample from one patient is good science then perhaps you can explain why.

So you are spectacularly ignorant of the subject you are discussing. That's not at all surprising, because you accept Bailey and Bevan-Smith's paper as factual.

So Kary Mullis won the Nobel Prize for biochemistry but he's a dumb AIDS denialist, right?

You seem to think a Nobel Prize confers credibility.

In 2008, Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for their discovery of human immunodeficiency virus."

Harald zur Hausen shared that year's prize "for his discovery of human papilloma viruses causing cervical cancer".

Yet you consider Sam Bailey more credible than these Nobel Prize winners when she denies the very existence of any connection between any virus and any disease.

What you did was avoid my argument that the science put forward for suspicion of a new virus was fraudulent.

What do you say to the claim of fraud?

1. UNSCIENTIFIC: SUSPICION OF NEW VIRUS
Suspicion of a "novel" virus is based on an alleged "cluster" of 44 cases of pneumonia of "unknown origin" in the highly-polluted city of Wuhan.
44 cases doesn't make a cluster and pneumonia has many causes - "unknown origin" makes no sense.
Then, if indeed these 44 cases of pneumonia were caused by a novel virus why is the association between pneumonia and the novel virus now completely lost?

Here's what I did say when you asked that same question earlier:

Not to mention almost 400 million subsequent cases and more than 5 million deaths.

If you had paid attention and responded honestly, I would not have had to repeat that.

I didn't think it was necessary to point out that "the association between pneumonia and the novel virus" has never been lost.

 

[Foster Zygote]

I have yet to see a believer in equality and democracy flying a Nazi or a Confederate flag, even one who believes we should "teach the controversy." If displaying the very symbols of fascist hate has no meaning, what does? So yes, Bubba, if you fly that flag, you're either what it says, or you're an utter moron.

I'm sensing the imminent arrival of an anecdote about a friend who flies a Confederate navy jack from his truck but is none the less all about racial justice and equality.

 

[sackett]

Whoa, fellers. Don't introduce an unnecessary dichotomy, either a Confederate nazi or a complete moron.

In my experience, the two conditions are almost always combined and co-mixed in the same individual.

Haven't you seen the bellies on some of those guys? Plenty of room in there!

 

[Resume]

I'm sensing the imminent arrival of an anecdote about a friend who flies a Confederate navy jack from his truck but is none the less all about racial justice and equality.

And of course in this case, lives in Canada. Next to someone's girlfriend.