Do you think it is the only reliable indicator of fact? Or do you think that there might be other factors involved, and that consensus may be just one of the factors when seeking sound medical advice?
Do you believe that a “consensus” may sometimes get it wrong? That it may even get corrupted? That it may make decisions that are even (gasp!) unscientific or against public health?
Or do you think a consensus (medical or otherwise) is always, and has always been, perfectly correct on every single occasion?
This is not a question of “belief” or “faith.” This is a question of science. The science and data was very clear, very early on. Go back and read my thorough post above for a refresher.
Please correct me if I’m wrong, but are you asking us to believe that Fauci is a completely trustworthy “medical expert” who made every decision about covid based solely on science?
Of course consensus isn’t infallible. It’s just the most reliable standard for a layperson to judge which experts to believe. If there were a significant disagreement among experts about the Covid pandemic then a layperson would have to resort to other, less reliable methods for determining who to believe.
Why so coy about what you’re claiming Fauci and the healthcare profession are guilty of?
That’s a lot of questions you’ve quite avoided answering
Let’s keep it to just one: “Do you believe that Fauci is a completely trustworthy “medical expert” who made every decision about covid based solely on science?”
A yes or no would be fine.
That’s a step forward for you. Well done
Who told you that?
Wrong. The first doesn’t necessarily lead to the second.
Unless, of course, there happens to be a global conspiracy to fool a credulous public …
Honestly, you really do seem to be stuck inside an until(HELL_FREEZES_OVER) loop here. Why do you bother posting the exact same sentences over and over again?
I think Dr. Fauci is a trustworthy medical expert who did his best to manage a public health crisis caused by a new and initially poorly understand virus.
Medical experts are the most likely source of reliable information at all times, and since this can only cease to be true if there is a global conspiracy, there cannot be a global conspiracy.
I think I posted almost precisely that graph there, constructed from ONS data, sometime back in mid-2020. IIRC the correlation was about 0.990. The implication is that doing things that improve your all-cause mortality risk will in consequence reduce your risk of COVID complications - and it’s borne out by scientific research.
Of course, the people doing that research are the wrong kind of scientists.
Yet again you’re just misrepresenting what people have said here for shits and giggles. The issue of COVID deaths has been discussed at length.
As for the conspiracy, I think it’s time you ponied up some evidence that there isn’t one - for example, I’m sure you have solid proof that Tony Fauci didn’t email his contacts to ensure that the Great Barrington Declaration people were silenced, that fraudulent studies were not cooked up to discredit ivermectin and HCQ, that the US government did not spearhead the shutdown of all social-media discussion of COVID that contradicted the narrative, or that the British government didn’t bring together a crack team of psychologists to create (and sell to other countries) a reference manual for brainwashing the general public. No doubt you can easily show that all of this is false; indeed, nothing more than a conspiracy theory.
Wow, you actually answered my question this time! Should we open a bottle of sake?
But now you’re indirectly asking more questions instead of trying to meet the challenge of proving yourself right. In case you don’t remember, you said
to which I replied
That means show me something I’ve posted and identify the pseudoscience or logical fallacy in it. Have fun!
(Out of sheer politeness…)
I’m not sure what your views on Covid vaccines and masks are.
There are many products identified as covid vaccines. Some fit the traditional definition of vaccine, others not. I am not aware of a single one that has achieved the kind of success (epidemiologically, not financially speaking) that people traditionally expect of vaccines (e.g. against smallpox).
Masks and respirators also come in many different forms and, generally speaking, obviously have not achieved the kind of success wrt covid (again epidemiologically not financially speaking) they were hoped to achieve either. Your mileage will of course vary depending on the type/model of device, how well fitted it is to your individual face, how long you use it, whether or not you’re surrounded by symptomatic carriers of the virus (which is a far more important factor), and so on.
To give a simple vaccine legs good or vaccine legs bad answer would be silly. You need to ask yourself (I really mean ask yourself here) what definitions of safe and of effective you’re willing to accept.
The world is complicated, and it doesn’t magically uncomplicate itself when covid comes along.
Woah! Didn’t you recently reject the possibility of finding any value in listening to a doctor who’s a mere nurse educator instead of a medical doctor according to the licensing requirements of whatever jurisdiction you prefer? Obviously you need the right kind of expert, not just any expert.
And yet, the vast majority of medical doctors (and doctors of any sort) are not experts in disease control, also known as epidemiology.
Oh and look at that, some epidemiologists aren’t even medical doctors. I don’t study the minutiae of medical licensing and therefore get lost in these distinctions, but you seem to be even more lost than I am.
To be fair, not all experts in the control of the spread of viruses are epidemiologists. Some are occupational health and safety experts. (I reckon the vast majority of them are not medical doctors either.) Have you ever tried asking them what they think of vaccine and PPE mandates for workplaces? They’ll tell you (don’t take my word for it – go and ask them yourself) about something called the hierarchy of hazard controls.
Long story short, PPE is the least desirable method of control because it’s the least effective.
Can the virus be eliminated? That’s what certain disinformation spreaders promised the world the vaccines and “vaccines” would do. They were obviously wrong. They even knew – if they were really paying attention – that they were wrong, as even the manufacturers didn’t officially make such claims.
Can the virus be substituted? Not really. People who recently tested negative for covid can be substituted for people who tested positive as long as staffing levels permit (which is arguably really an administrative control as you don’t automatically know who’s positive and negative), but some politicians decided (relying on “expert” advice of course) that it was more important to be “vaccinated” than to be covid negative. You may recall memes about it such as this one.
Can the virus be controlled through engineering? Short answer: yes. You can’t achieve perfect control this way (of course you can’t, as perfect control would be elimination), but you can reduce the likelihood of infection in indoor settings through improved ventilation. You can reduce it even further by going outdoors, though to qualify as an engineering (not administrative) control that would need to involve removing the roof and possibly the walls.
Can the virus be controlled administratively? See above regarding substitution. You can also implement maximum exposure periods to symptomatic persons, testing, and tracing… oh and mandatory paid sick leave, but that might cause your libertarian tendency to spring magically back to life or something.
Administrative controls will never be perfect of course. They may be so imperfect that people refuse to take them seriously (see “pingdemic”). What many people ended up deciding was better than a pesky web of intersecting administrative controls that didn’t seem to work very well was one great shining administrative control in the form of a vaccine passport.
[insert golden calf meme]
Then the passport system failed spectacularly, not because the masses rebelled against the Orwellianism of it but because it relied of course on the vaccines and “vaccines” that failed spectacularly at what they were initially perceived by the masses as being capable of (as promised by expert disinfo spreaders like Mr. Biden), compounded by changing ideas of what it meant to be “fully vaccinated”. The traditional concepts of one shot for life, one shot every ~10 years, even one shot every year were all thrown out. One shot every 6 months seemed to be catching on, despite talk of much shorter periods… but populations demonstrated themselves less and less willing to comply, probably because the twice yearly shots did not stop the spread of covid and didn’t even (in the long run) produce a strong popular perception of reducing the spread. You can bring up statistics from specific jurisdictions to quibble, and other will counter with statistics from other specific jurisdictions. The meta-studies were not impressive for the vax legs good side. The new meme of “I’m grateful for my vaccination because otherwise the symptoms would be worse” replaced the old meme of “if you get the vaccine you will not get covid”. Despite countless celebrity endorsements, the new meme just wasn’t good enough to keep the system together.
Can the virus be controlled through PPE? Short answer: an extremely qualified yes. (For non-native speakers reading this, that’s “qualified” in the negative sense, i.e. limited.) There was a gold rush on gloves and sanitizer, like the earlier gold rush on toilet paper. These products can be useful, but there are serious limits to their usefulness, especially when dealing with an airborne virus. Same for masks, the vast majority of which do an extremely poor job of blocking airborne virus particles (despite their relative success at stopping droplets, exposure to which could be better controlled administratively though). Overall, proving money spent on PPE was money well spent would be like pushing a rock up a hill for eternity, unless you have a very low standard of “well”.
I hope what you get from this is that the kind of analysis that’s needed for sound public policy – or even sound corporate policy in a private enterprise – is much more complicated than just “what did the head of the WHO or CDC or whatever say today at a press conference?”
Who are these anonymous individuals on the interwebs? Malhotra? Malone? Bridle? Campbell? They all have names. They’re not anonymous. They’re not fricking QAnon, capisce?
Deleted.
