The superspreaders behind top COVID-19 conspiracy theories

Oh, okay then AP, thanks for debunking all that. It's a good job we have you in our lives to keep us on message and on track.

Diversity and Inclusion ????

Doesn't seem like it.

What they want is uniformity and exclusion.

Only 1 opinion is approved.

Diversity and inclusion are no excuse to give weight to lies. If something can be proved to be false then it is perfectly valid to say so. If you want to keep that mistaken opinion you are free to do it, but you cannot claim it becomes true just because you like it.

Science is not based on popularity or authority but on objective validated information that can prove something logically. The examples put here are criticized because they keep repeating false things, not because what they say is unpopular.

Some people cannot accept they can be wrong, so live in denial of the evidence that prove it. Rational people can change their minds with the data.

Science is not based on popularity or authority but on objective validated information that can prove something logically. The examples put here are criticized because they keep repeating false things, not because what they say is unpopular.

Some people cannot accept they can be wrong, so live in denial of the evidence that prove it. Rational people can change their minds with the data.

You are right about science. It is the trial of hypothesis adhering to an strict systematic method, wherein you need to control variables in order to correctly determine the validity of the hypothesis. If the result is the hypothesis is approved, the next step is calculating its statistical significance. One thing is to proof X plus Y equal Z in a lab, while controlling whatever variables have been considered. Another is to extrapolate that and say its significant in the real world, where numerous unforeseeable variables abound and where the sample of the lab test may not be enough to represent the whole statistical universe. Non-lab scientific tests rely on accurate reporting and record keeping by the participants on long haul scientific tests. People who in must cases are not scientists themselves and have no real sense or qualms about the impact misrepresenting, misreporting, etc. Thus are very hard to prove statistically significant.

Which is also the problem which the "scientific world view" of many here. Unless you are there in the lab making the science, you, we don't know how solid is that science. IS that simple. Of course having a critical mind starts by wanting to know if any reported science anywhere has been 1) hypothesis accepted 2) proven statistically significant and 3) peer reviewed/reproduced.

But even so, where does the science report originate? With so many labs and research center, researchers and universities being funded by Pharmaceuticals, large conglomerates, "foundations", so called "philanthropists" and even political parties.... how can anyone ever be sure if there is no agenda.

The same can be said about all media.

Being a critical thinker means taking EVRYTHING with a grain of salt, science, news, history, data, religion, "facts" can all be altered and twisted according to whom is paying for it, who is doing it, who is reporting it and why.

Why would anyone blindly choose to just trust the government and the mass media and do as told and said is the biggest cowardice and abdication of human responsibility towards our own freedom and liberties.

THEY are all people just like us. Nobody is perfect or a saint.

Which is also the problem which the "scientific world view" of many here. Unless you are there in the lab making the science, you, we don't know how solid is that science. IS that simple. 

That is irrelevant to the point made, which is that things that can be proven false should be considered false unless better evidence proves them true (if that ever happens). There is no value on arbitrarily consider as true these things without anything to base that consideration.

Or more simply, having evidence that something is true or false, even if the evidence is not perfect, is a perfectly valid argument to disregard opposite views not sustained by evidence.

Being a critical thinker means taking EVRYTHING with a grain of salt, science, news, history, data, religion, "facts" can all be altered and twisted according to whom is paying for it, who is doing it, who is reporting it and why.

That is neither something that make valid having irrational views not based on evidence. Sure everything is biased, but unless you demonstrate that bias, and how the evidence produced becomes invalid because of it (because that is not automatic, if you are biased towards an idea that does not make that idea more likely to be mistaken) then it is still fine to consider that knowledge as valid.

Nobody ever has to blindly trust the government nor the media to be scientifically congruent. Anybody can just go to the primary scientific sources to see what is the consensus. It does not have to be perfect nor immutable, maybe something considered false today will be considered true in the future, but always with the data to prove it.

If at this point anybody says something contradicted by the validated data then there is no problem with calling it mistaken. Because at this point it is, even if some people really want to believe in it.

The problem with your argument is the false dichotomy of making all knowledge either perfect or equally likely to be wrong. That is not the case.

That is irrelevant to the point made, which is that things that can be proven false should be considered false...

Yes, if they can be proven false. But this requires much more than simply saying something is false, or getting people who have conflicts of interest or are compromised in other ways to say something is false.

Unfortunately, that is rarely the case; many claim to know what is true and what is false, without being able to prove anything.

@virusrex

On first read I agree with what you said.

Only that "data" itself can also be manipulated so it really takes some effort, sometimes arduous efforts, to find trustworthy data. Let alone sources of such data.

The media is putting a lot of effort in trying to discredit those who are skeptical of the official narrative.

You could say the same with the lockdowns: https://ccpgloballockdownfraud.medium.com/

No evidence other than Chinese people mysteriously dropping dead in the street...

Evidence of the value of social distancing measures of different degrees of cost (economic, social, etc.) is variate and clear, it does not depend on any single incident or even country to be demonstrated as such. Depending on the situation they can be or not adequate, but saying that they are worthless is demonstrably false.

Yes, if they can be proven false. But this requires much more than simply saying something is false, or getting people who have conflicts of interest or are compromised in other ways to say something is false.

All the examples mentioned in the article are about people repeating things that have been unequivocally proved false by scientific data, not just by "saying something". Many are also precisely about people with very heavy conflicts of interest that would explain why they choose to keep spreading this misinformation.

Unfortunately, that is rarely the case; many claim to know what is true and what is false, without being able to prove anything.

This is not rare at all, scientific evidence is very easy to be accessed, the problem is that antiscientific people think endless valid reports proving things are false are just "saying" things. A big hint about people that like to talk about things they cannot prove is that they become silent when asked for evidence, or produce at much a youtube video about someone else on the same situation.

Only that "data" itself can also be manipulated so it really takes some effort, sometimes arduous efforts, to find trustworthy data. Let alone sources of such data.

That is the job description of the scientists and experts, which work not only to produce data but to examine other people's and validate it. Again this is not something that can be done to perfection, but if you have data saying something, and someone saying the opposite without data then siding with the data is the only logical thing. There are only two choices, you invest the time and effort to learn how to properly interpret scientific evidence or refer to the judgment of people that professionally do that.

The media is putting a lot of effort in trying to discredit those who are skeptical of the official narrative.

Not at all, only those who think lying and misleading others are valid ways to be "skeptical", people repeatedly using false arguments are not just skeptical, they are science deniers.

How about the CCP who claim that the US brought the virus in the 2019 military games tournament in Wuhan.

You know, the same CCP who’s top doctors and virologists seem to be catching sudden cases of disappearing or suiciding...

The media is putting a lot of effort in trying to discredit those who are skeptical of the official narrative.

It's not hard to discredit people without the credentials to understand what it is they're talking about. For example the Children's Health Defense website you cited has a board of directors made up of a grifter politician, a community college chem teacher, and a bunch of bachelor's degrees who believe in nonsense, without a single medical doctor among them.

Yet you trust them more than actual virologists. Because you're been manipulated by conspiracy nutters.

But it's not too late. You can escape. Just read a newspaper.

For everyone here automatically dissing anyone who questions the narratives coming from the mainstream media and governments, how sure are you that they are being straight-up honest with us? Given how many different interests are at play here, there is plenty of easily identifiable BS and hit pieces coming out pretty much every day. We only have to look at the baffling inconsistency of Japan's testing and reporting of infections as an example. By definition, theorising about Japanese politicians and bureaucrats getting together behind closed doors to discuss how to fudge the figures to ensure the Olympics go ahead makes one a conspiracy theorist. And on this site, most of us do it. Which makes us....I'll let you figure that out.

We've seen eminent experts in the fields of virology, epidemiology and related fields come out and question the effectiveness of lockdowns and instead argue for focused protection - they're not arguing against vaccination at all (Great Barrington). But instead of governments and their advisors engaging with them and discussing the pros and cons of lockdowns, lapdogs in the media publish hit pieces to smear them, At the same time, politicians who tell everyone to lock down are out and about maskless at fancy restaurants and at rallies for trendy causes. But they get a free pass. Even the ones who send infected patients from hospitals to nursing homes, resulting in the deaths of thousands.

And the WHO essentially declaring "nothing to see here" after the farcical "investigation" in China recently. Who believes that?

In a world where BS seems to be a currency worth more than Bitcoin, is it any wonder that people who have very little real power to influence they way of things suspect they're not being told the truth? Scientists, health industry professionals or anyone don't have a monopoly on honesty and integrity. Most are probably honest people, but nobody is infallible and some may be subject to certain pressures to fudge results to produce the results their funders want, or for other reasons. There are plenty of stories of doctors doing dodgy things and scientists getting bad research peer-reviewed by journals that have malleable standards. That's not saying it's certainly happening here, but its not outside the realm of possibility. Especially when there's so much at stake.

For everyone here automatically dissing anyone who questions the narratives coming from the mainstream media and governments

That would mean nobody, what is being openly criticized is people that lie and deceive with false information, there is a big difference. And for that the tool is the same as when criticizing governments, science.

We've seen eminent experts in the fields of virology, epidemiology and related fields come out and question the effectiveness of lockdowns and instead argue for focused protection

Last time I asked you to provide evidence for this you brought only one document without any kind of evidence promoted by people paid to make exactly that point in order to benefit precisely people in positions of power in the industry and government, scientist immediately reacted against this shameless promotion of baseless conclusions as invalid and that is why it has no recognition, media and governments have no importance on this. At this moment the consensus of science is that there is no effective way to produce focused protection without heavy social distancing measures because transmission is frequently done by asymptomatic carriers.

And the WHO essentially declaring "nothing to see here" after the farcical "investigation" in China recently. Who believes that?

The WHO declared that China is not giving them the information they need, it is not "nothing to see here" but "thye are not showing us anything here"

Thinking that science must be wrong just because you don't like the conclusions is not a valid argument, for example there are commenters here that openly lie and contradict themselves, but that is not enough to conclude that everybody lies.

Last time I asked you to provide evidence for this you brought only one document without any kind of evidence promoted by people paid to make exactly that point in order to benefit precisely people in positions of power in the industry and government, scientist immediately reacted against this shameless promotion of baseless conclusions as invalid and that is why it has no recognition, media and governments have no importance on this. At this moment the consensus of science is that there is no effective way to produce focused protection without heavy social distancing measures because transmission is frequently done by asymptomatic carriers.

Er, no. All you did was post a lame smear piece in response. Some scientists oppose Kuldorf et al, but thousands of others in relevant fields support them. In any case, what makes you enough of an expert to be sure they’re wrong without appealing to author you as you imply I am? The pharmaceutical companies marketing their vaccines have a far greater conflict of interest at play here than anything the GBD drafters have. Pfizer, Astra-Zeneca etc essentially have a captive population with media and governments doing their marketing for them and the taxpayer underwriting their products. That’s a pretty good deal if you can finagle it. And they have a vested interest in people being scared, without which it their products become less attractive.

It’s not much different to the phony war on terror. Quite a few corporations and politicians etc connected to them did very well out of drumming up fear and poking the bear to get people afraid of terrorism, and bang, in rolls the money for security contracts and reconstruction projects after wars launched under false pretenses. Remember the Iraq WMDs that never existed? People who protested about it were smeared as traitors in the press. And all the while, our freedoms were eroded through restrictive laws and so-called anti-terrorism security measures, the purchasing power of the money we earned was eroded through debt financed to pay for these wars, and thousands of people were needlessly killed.

The game is the same, just some of the players are different this time round.

Er, no. All you did was post a lame smear piece in response.

It was not a smear piece, as sure as you could not contradict even one detail that was reported.

Some scientists oppose Kuldorf et al, but thousands of others in relevant fields support them.

But strangely you still produce no primary source to prove that, those thousands remain nameless and without any data. And again, to prove your point you would need to provide evidence necessary to disprove many reports about the effects of social distancing measures, not details on a single one.

Read my comment I never said I am an expert, but that international experts of the world are in consensus against the baseless opinion that social distancing measures are useless. You keep getting trapped in the lowest kind of information you can find, which is the media, ignore that, it has no importance whatsoever for scientific conclusions, ignore them and you will get the same conclusion by reading primary sources, which are scientific journals.

Let me repeat it, the media that you consider so important is meaningless, if all the scientific and medical organizations of the world say the disease should be controlled with as much effort as possible and not dismissed as something not dangerous then it does not matter what the media says.

Your problem is thinking that because groups of people you don't like repeat something that must mean that something must be a lie, that is false. What if the media says that people should eat more vegetables and less meat and sugars to be more healthy? would it make this suddently a lie? obviously not.

You don't trust media or governments? ignore them. The scientific consensus is the same (you still have not produced those thousands of scientists that supposedly have data proving social distancing is unnecessary).

I have posted the link to the Great Barrington Declaration several times, including the page with the names, titles, positions and workplaces of over 54,000 medical practitioners and medical scientists.

here it is again

https://gbdeclaration.org/view-signatures/

Is that enough people in the industry for you? And we’re not arguing about social distancing, but again you’re intentionally misrepresenting me. The issue is whether lockdowns are effective and cause more problems than they solve. Have you actually read the GBD?

I have posted the link to the Great Barrington Declaration several times, including the page with the names, titles, positions and workplaces of over 54,000 medical practitioners and medical scientists

And I posted several detailed rebuttals mentioning lots of troubles with it, from people that complained their names were used without permission to specialists pointing out that the declaration provided exactly zero scientific evidence of the opinion expressed (but plenty of evidence of the serious conflicts of interest of the organizers).

You can keep posting it, it still have the same problems (still no data, still invalid conclusions) the contrary evidence I posted is the one that you could not contradict at all, not even a single detail.

If people ask you for scientific evidence and you bring none, what do you think it means? a rational, honest person would recognize the reason why you cannot find it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Barrington_Declaration

https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19/89204

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2600(20)30555-5/fulltext

"Within weeks, an opposing group of experts, also numbering in the thousands, had put their names to the John Snow Memorandum. The document, named after one of epidemiology's greatest historical figures, defended the restrictions to slow the spread of SARS-CoV-2 as “essential to reduce mortality, prevent health-care services from being overwhelmed, and buy time to set up pandemic response systems to suppress transmission”. It described focused protection as “a dangerous fallacy unsupported by scientific evidence” and warned that “uncontrolled transmission in younger people risks significant morbidity and mortality across the whole population”. The memorandum concluded by asserting that “controlling community spread of COVID-19 is the best way to protect our societies and economies until safe and effective vaccines and therapeutics arrive within the coming months”

A few weeks ago I posted these links regarding HCQ

There are plenty of studies into using HCQ with zinc to combat or prevent COVID-19, but the media and the like have only focused on the ones that didn't use zinc supplementation, because it is the combination of these two that shows positive effects. HCQ alone does very little to nothing. 

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306987720306435

https://academic.oup.com/advances/article/10/4/696/5476413

https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/journal.ppat.1001176

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0109180

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0924857920300996?via%3Dihub

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32150618/

https://www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/journal/jmm/10.1099/jmm.0.001250?crawler=true

https://c19study.com

This is just a small selection. If you're the expert you like to insinuate yourself as being, go ahead and blow these out of the water, with a detailed explanation for each one.

There are plenty of studies into using HCQ with zinc to combat or prevent COVID-19, but the media and the like have only focused on the ones that didn't use zinc supplementation, because it is the combination of these two that shows positive effects. HCQ alone does very little to nothing. 

Again, the media is irrelevant, ignore the media, you keep saying they lie all the time, but then you keep crawling back to it without any need. Go to the primary sources, metaanalisis and systematic reviews, they also prove that there HCQ is not useful at all, even with zinc.

Scientifically speaking trials that are not properly randomized always are biased, so if you keep directing people with risk of complications to the non-treatment group obviously you will keep getting better results from the opposite group, even if you only give placebo.

Also interesting is how you now blindly trust studies written by people working for big pharma and that would benefit from the results they got, so much for them being not trust worthy, but only when they say something you like?

This is just a small selection. If you're the expert you like to insinuate yourself as being, go ahead and blow these out of the water, with a detailed explanation for each one.

I have never insinuated such a thing, that is what you like to assume, but I have always base my comments in the expertise of professionals that do this kind of analysis for a living. As I keep telling you, you can freely assume I work at cleaning a restaurant, none of my comments depend on any kind of expertise I am supposed to have.

The first study you put has a COI that you have said would make it invalid, the second provides absolutely no data that indicates efficacy in the treatment of COVID, only explanations of the mechanisms mediating it if it did (but it doesn't) The third is the same, no data for COVID and not even any clinical data, it shows a mechanism on cells, that anybody knows frequently have no importance in living beings, much less on humans, The fourt compare treated patients with negative "controls" treated a another completely different hospital, not even under the same treatment otherwise, The fifth is not even about any effect in infectious diseases but on cancer (and without showing clinical significance), the next one is again an in-vitro study without any clinical results, the next one even the authors say their results are contradictory (After adjusting for the timing of zinc sulphate treatment, the negative associations between zinc and the need for ICU and invasive ventilation were no longer significant)

Your final refence is almost literally trash according to the experts not only on infectious diseases and pharmacology but also those that know how a meta analysis has to be done, because it included badly made or invalid studies on a few patients as if they had the same weight of properly designed, double blinded, randomized studies on thousands of patients, in simple terms they did the equivalent of putting together 5 studies, 4 of them done in 10 people each showing a tiny effect, and one done in 10,000 patients showing no advantage at all and say "80% of the studies prove this is effective". That is not how a meta analysis is done

more details about why this is lousy science everywhere in the internet, for example

https://www5.bahiana.edu.br/index.php/evidence/article/download/3449/3730

Once the very obvious bias in the articles you put as a reference is taken into account the results never indicate any clear advantage, even when the numbers are enough to do it if it was actually real. The same happens in studies where patients prone to complicate because of the HCQ are taken out of BOTH arms of the study.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-77748-x

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7695238/

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.14.20101774v3

And the same as the last time you could not dismiss any of the perfectly valid criticism that make obvious how the failed GBD is not an argument against any of the social distancing measures including lockdowns. So you implicitly accept the criticism against it is correct, only to repost it again next time.

What would you think if someone did the same about something saying lockdowns should be forced upon every country regardless of how many COVID cases there are? would you think "maybe this time the declaration is valid"?