How the Covid cranks see themselves: As a kind of newly minted version of Galileo, And Scott Atlas- who wants to get 2 million plus Americans killed to get to a Covid resolution. Call him "Doctor Death"
"There's a new plan being pushed in the White House that proponents hope will kill the virus and get the president re-elected, And that plan is to just let most of all of us get infected. And if more than two million people have to die as a result, well, so be it. That may sound crazy or hyperbolic but that is really what it is. That plan is being pushed by a guy named Scott Atlas who this month became Trump's pandemic advisor. He fancies himself as the anti-Fauci and he says America should embrace a strategy of herd immunity.
This strategy has been tried before in Sweden and it was a disaster. The strategy led to five times as many deaths as its neighbors and they suffered the same level of economic setback. The outcome then was just a lot more dead Swedes, no economic benefit. This is where we are today, after months and 185,000 dead. The sheer nihilistic absurdity." - Chris Hayes, on 'All In', last night
"It is a bit crazy. We are many months into this and we know some things that work and which don't in terms of not having a lot of people die and not having your economy destroyed. Sweden is not the model for any of us. And even Scott Gottlieb former FDA commissioner has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal saying as much and why this stuff keeps coming up. This feels to me like laziness. We don't want to do the hard work in protecting American lives. There's just this strategy of let's let it go and see where it goes. Well, we know where it goes." Dr. Ashish Jha, Director of Harvard's Global Health Institute.
The header in The Sunday Denver Post piece from Aug. 23rd ('Doctors Battle Tidal Wave Of Covid Misinformation', Business, p. 5K) I almost passed over because I was sure I'd read about it all before. But I was wrong. Though I'd written previous posts on this batshit insanity, e.g.
I'd really had no idea how deep the mental rot of deranged beliefs went and the degree to which medical professionals - the real ones, not the fakes trotted out by Trump - were up against a tidal wave of bullshit, blarney and bollocks. For example, as the Post article notes, I wasn't aware that at least 800 people world wide had died - and thousands more hospitalized- because they'd ingested highly concentrated alcohol to kill the virus. The findings were published in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.
Even more concerning to many medical professionals is the extent to which false information is spreading online in the U.S. (such as related to masks and lockdowns) and which may be responsible for 40,000 or more of the more than 180,000 U.S. deaths. Much of this emerged in an online conference in July in which the groundwork had been laid to measure the harm of virus-related misinformation online. These falsehoods and misinformation "have undermined efforts to get people to wear masks and fueled a belief the seriousness of the disease is overblown."
Among the primary sources of misbegotten memes have been the crackpot Judy Mikovits (featured in the mockumentary 'Plandemic'), and the Stanford "meta research" quack John Ioannidis - who claimed the lockdowns were implemented without adequate evidence, and the fatality rate of Covid-19 is not much worse than seasonal flu.
According to Daniel Allington, a senior lecturer at King's College, London, the toxic effects of the tidal wave of misinformation are now evident in the statistics. As he pointed out (ibid.):
"This is no longer just an anecdotal observation that some individual doctors have made. This is a statistically significant pattern we can observe in a large survey."
This also has confirmed my fear that a large swath of the American public can no longer reason or think critically. Their minds have become receptacles - or perhaps better unwitting hostages- to parasitical mind viruses, such as from 'Plandemic'. These people, not all without college degrees, have little or no grasp of the virus' biology. Nor do they grasp that science is a process of self-correction in the context of successive approximations. If the Trumpkin "counter revolutionaries", cranks and quacks grasped that they'd know that initial errors or wrong assumptions (or prescriptions for behavior) are nothing new as a novel phenomenon is confronted.
But crank beliefs are only a part of how the medical system itself is being undermined. In the Post piece we meet Dr. Howard Mell, an ER physician in an Illinois suburb of St. Louis who relates how he was falsely accused (by a patient's wife) of filling out a death certificate to make money off Covid.
Mell tried to explain to the distraught woman that the form was accurate and also that his pay wasn't based on the cause of death. However, she was having none of it, yelling:
"We've seen online how you guys get more money!"
Thus her brain had been totally taken over by some online mind rot meme. This is why Dr. Joseph Varon at Houston's United Memorial Medical Center decided last month to allow direct filming of scenes inside an ICU - as televised on assorted MSNBC segments. In an interview later he explained he hoped by actually seeing these scenes of what front line medical staff are doing, people will drop the infernal (and idiotic) belief that it's all a "hoax" or "Plandemic". Or that ER docs are getting paid to incorrectly fill out death certificates.
As for Dr. Mell, he reports (ibid.) the situation has not improved.
"Several times per week he meets someone who believes false medical information that was discovered online."
The damnable thing is that the correct information CAN be found online, with a minimum of due diligence. So why isn't it? I suspect there are two reasons: 1) the actual information isn't as attractive (or exciting) as the misinformation. More often than not an understanding of basic scientific principles is already assumed which the non-specialist doesn't have the patience to assimilate. And (2) the minds of too many casual readers are already co-opted by preconceived beliefs or negative attitudes, i.e. a distrust of science, or regarding scientists as "elitists". Both of these in tandem can wreak havoc and help spread disinfo and falsehoods.
Then there is the problem of "confirmation bias" which reinforces the negative aspects noted above. That is, the tendency to find confirmatory evidence for what one already believes. For example, let's say - despite all the medical evidence on lockdowns being the best way to control the virus' spread after a surge - a person with an existing negative attitude reads this from the WSJ Weekend edition:
"We've never before responded to a contagion by closing down whole countries."
This from a contrarian imbecile and sometime novelist named Lionel Shriver, in a WSJ interview. The above quote was clear enough to mark her as imbecilic (given we've never before beheld a contagion like Covid - with a huge contingent of secret spreaders among the populace) but her quote on racial issues in the U.S. confirms it, e.g.:
"The far left's consuming obsession with race has been building for years. Then for months these same folks have been cooped up, fuming over their computers.
So the 2020 explosion of Black Lives Matter was enabled by Covid. Floyd's killing merely lit the fuse."
In other words, being shuttered in lockdown conditions flipped the brains of the millions of latent protesters and caused them to go literally ape shit, and act out in the streets. Not because of some higher purpose but because being locked in for months drove them partially bonkers. As I said, case closed on Shriver's imbecility.
Back to the report on Covid idiocy in the D. Post: Dr. Ryan Stanton - an ER physician in Kentucky - disclosed that a number of sick patients waited until it was nearly too late to visit a hospital with Covid symptoms. "They were convinced by what they had read online that 'Covid was no big deal'."
According to Dr. Stanton (ibid.):
"They thought it was just a ploy, a sham, a conspiracy. It just blew my mind that they could just put these blinders on and ignore the facts."
But that barely scratches the surface of how nonsense has infected people's minds. One paramedic cited in the piece, Thomas Knowles, reported being "troubled" - after searching social media for virus misinformation. He found a range of false claims such as doctors taking people's blood for research than leaving them to die, as well as injecting them with nanoparticles to control behavior. In Knowles own words (ibid.):
"I've never personally encountered such a strong, consistent - and so clearly coordinated from somewhere - a collective of people so entrenched in their false belief."
But let's also bear in mind that the brain rot starts at the top, i.e. with the top office holder in the land: Trump. And now we know he's appointed another notorious Quack - Scott Atlas - as a medical "advisor." and the Anti-Fauci. As noted in a recent WaPo expose,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-coronavirus-scott-atlas-herd-immunity/2020/08/30/925e68fe-e93b-11ea-970a-64c73a1c2392_story.html
Atlas, another Stanford screwball (from its Hoover Institution), is promoting a "herd immunity" approach which could leave over 2 million Americans dead in order to complete according to the Post's assessment. This is the moron Trump has offering him advice to pass on to the rest of us. One suspects Trump ditched Stella Immanuel, one of "America's Frontline Doctors"
as his go to quack after too many sensible people caught on to her demon shtick, i.e. spreading B.S. about demons' involving themselves in our health as a "residue" of human intercourse with them. Meanwhile Top Quack Scott Atlas' plan is based upon a:
“herd immunity” strategy to combat the pandemic, which would entail allowing the coronavirus to spread through most of the population to quickly build resistance to the virus, "
Trouble is, as Dr. Ashish Jha pointed out on 'All In' last night, millions would have to die before this could materialize. Dr. Jha referenced Atlas' invocation of the Swedish model, but as we know:
"Sweden’s handling of the pandemic has been heavily criticized by public health officials and infectious-disease experts as reckless — the country’s infection and death rates are among the world’s highest. It also hasn’t escaped the deep economic problems resulting from the pandemic."
But addle-pated conservos and their quacks love it because it requires minimal control aspects, basically reducing the approach to "let 'em live or let die".
The other side of this Trumpy horse manure is the yen to try to push a vaccine as workable, safe and effective by Nov. 3rd - so El Dotard can claim bragging rights. And so we behold numerous efforts to peddle such baloney, basically a politically motivated operation to assist Trump in getting re-elected. But I have no intention of going for any vaccine before next year, because I am 99.99999% certain none will be fully tested (e.g. including Phase 3) before then. The other aspect is that if a poor vaccine is rushed, there is little doubt it will quash any normative public vaccine effort. And that's the last thing we need given the existing conspiracy ideations about vaccines, and the potential for this virus to spread.
Finally, the latest lunacy to creep into the conspiracy memo-sphere is that the COVID 19 death toll is overstated. Fortunately, Dr. Anthony Fauci has slammed this low I.Q. bunkum and the right wing idiots spreading it. As noted in The Guardian,Fauci told NBC:
“There is absolutely no evidence that that’s the case at all. I think it falls under the category of something that’s very unfortunate – these conspiracy theories that we hear about. Any time we have a crisis of any sort there is always this popping up of conspiracy theories.”
The primary source of these horse shit claims and conspiracy canards- let us remember - is none other than Donnie Dotard. Another reason we need to get his fat, orange ass out of office lest he lower the U.S. median I.Q. by another 50 points by 2025.
See Also:
https://www.politico.com/newsletters/politico-pulse/2020/08/17/how-scott-atlas-caught-trumps-ear-789964
Excerpt:
Atlas, a fellow at Stanford’s conservative Hoover Institution, repeatedly used his TV hits to argue that fears about coronavirus outpace reality, a message that appealed to Trump and his advisers. Atlas has also argued against expanded Covid-19 testing, including a proposal championed by White House coronavirus coordinator Deborah Birx to scale up home testing through methods such as saliva tests. .. And recently, in a task force meeting, Atlas told Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease doctor, that science does not definitively support government mandates on wearing masks.
And:
According to Dr. Stanton (ibid.):
"They thought it was just a ploy, a sham, a conspiracy. It just blew my mind that they could just put these blinders on and ignore the facts."
But that barely scratches the surface of how nonsense has infected people's minds. One paramedic cited in the piece, Thomas Knowles, reported being "troubled" - after searching social media for virus misinformation. He found a range of false claims such as doctors taking people's blood for research than leaving them to die, as well as injecting them with nanoparticles to control behavior. In Knowles own words (ibid.):
"I've never personally encountered such a strong, consistent - and so clearly coordinated from somewhere - a collective of people so entrenched in their false belief."
But let's also bear in mind that the brain rot starts at the top, i.e. with the top office holder in the land: Trump. And now we know he's appointed another notorious Quack - Scott Atlas - as a medical "advisor." and the Anti-Fauci. As noted in a recent WaPo expose,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-coronavirus-scott-atlas-herd-immunity/2020/08/30/925e68fe-e93b-11ea-970a-64c73a1c2392_story.html
Atlas, another Stanford screwball (from its Hoover Institution), is promoting a "herd immunity" approach which could leave over 2 million Americans dead in order to complete according to the Post's assessment. This is the moron Trump has offering him advice to pass on to the rest of us. One suspects Trump ditched Stella Immanuel, one of "America's Frontline Doctors"
as his go to quack after too many sensible people caught on to her demon shtick, i.e. spreading B.S. about demons' involving themselves in our health as a "residue" of human intercourse with them. Meanwhile Top Quack Scott Atlas' plan is based upon a:
“herd immunity” strategy to combat the pandemic, which would entail allowing the coronavirus to spread through most of the population to quickly build resistance to the virus, "
Trouble is, as Dr. Ashish Jha pointed out on 'All In' last night, millions would have to die before this could materialize. Dr. Jha referenced Atlas' invocation of the Swedish model, but as we know:
"Sweden’s handling of the pandemic has been heavily criticized by public health officials and infectious-disease experts as reckless — the country’s infection and death rates are among the world’s highest. It also hasn’t escaped the deep economic problems resulting from the pandemic."
But addle-pated conservos and their quacks love it because it requires minimal control aspects, basically reducing the approach to "let 'em live or let die".
The other side of this Trumpy horse manure is the yen to try to push a vaccine as workable, safe and effective by Nov. 3rd - so El Dotard can claim bragging rights. And so we behold numerous efforts to peddle such baloney, basically a politically motivated operation to assist Trump in getting re-elected. But I have no intention of going for any vaccine before next year, because I am 99.99999% certain none will be fully tested (e.g. including Phase 3) before then. The other aspect is that if a poor vaccine is rushed, there is little doubt it will quash any normative public vaccine effort. And that's the last thing we need given the existing conspiracy ideations about vaccines, and the potential for this virus to spread.
Finally, the latest lunacy to creep into the conspiracy memo-sphere is that the COVID 19 death toll is overstated. Fortunately, Dr. Anthony Fauci has slammed this low I.Q. bunkum and the right wing idiots spreading it. As noted in The Guardian,Fauci told NBC:
“There is absolutely no evidence that that’s the case at all. I think it falls under the category of something that’s very unfortunate – these conspiracy theories that we hear about. Any time we have a crisis of any sort there is always this popping up of conspiracy theories.”
The primary source of these horse shit claims and conspiracy canards- let us remember - is none other than Donnie Dotard. Another reason we need to get his fat, orange ass out of office lest he lower the U.S. median I.Q. by another 50 points by 2025.
See Also:
https://www.politico.com/newsletters/politico-pulse/2020/08/17/how-scott-atlas-caught-trumps-ear-789964
Excerpt:
Atlas, a fellow at Stanford’s conservative Hoover Institution, repeatedly used his TV hits to argue that fears about coronavirus outpace reality, a message that appealed to Trump and his advisers. Atlas has also argued against expanded Covid-19 testing, including a proposal championed by White House coronavirus coordinator Deborah Birx to scale up home testing through methods such as saliva tests. .. And recently, in a task force meeting, Atlas told Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease doctor, that science does not definitively support government mandates on wearing masks.
And:
And:
Search Result
Excerpt:
Proponents point to Sweden as a successful model of this approach. Swedish government officials initially sought to let the virus run largely unchallenged in the general population while taking steps to protect the elderly. The Swedish view was that the country could reach herd immunity without jeopardizing the economy. But holding up Sweden as an enlightened model misreads important parts of its experience.
Many Swedes pulled back from normal activities to shelter themselves from infection anyway, even younger and middle-aged people. The country experienced 5,821 Covid deaths in a population the size of North Carolina. And Sweden is far short of herd immunity, even as the country’s economic recovery ranks among the worst in its region. A May survey of Swedish exposure to coronavirus found that 6.7% of those aged 20 to 64 had evidence of past infection, along with 4.7% of those younger than 19 and 2.7% of those 65 and older. Stockholm, the country’s single large population center, also has a much lower density than most American cities. That reduces Sweden’s risk of continued epidemic spread.
Yet embrace of the “Swedish model” is based on assumptions that sidestep some of these facts. The biggest misconception is a belief that there’s a large reservoir of Americans who are already immune to Covid. It’s important to protect the old and the vulnerable, who are at the highest risk of severe illness and bad outcomes. But like most issues of medicine, it isn’t a binary choice. Given the uncertainties of how this virus spreads and its high risk of infirmities, it would be unwise to abandon efforts to limit Covid spread wherever possible. That means continued universal masking, social distancing, and diagnosing and tracing of individual cases.
Proponents point to Sweden as a successful model of this approach. Swedish government officials initially sought to let the virus run largely unchallenged in the general population while taking steps to protect the elderly. The Swedish view was that the country could reach herd immunity without jeopardizing the economy. But holding up Sweden as an enlightened model misreads important parts of its experience.
Many Swedes pulled back from normal activities to shelter themselves from infection anyway, even younger and middle-aged people. The country experienced 5,821 Covid deaths in a population the size of North Carolina. And Sweden is far short of herd immunity, even as the country’s economic recovery ranks among the worst in its region. A May survey of Swedish exposure to coronavirus found that 6.7% of those aged 20 to 64 had evidence of past infection, along with 4.7% of those younger than 19 and 2.7% of those 65 and older. Stockholm, the country’s single large population center, also has a much lower density than most American cities. That reduces Sweden’s risk of continued epidemic spread.
Yet embrace of the “Swedish model” is based on assumptions that sidestep some of these facts. The biggest misconception is a belief that there’s a large reservoir of Americans who are already immune to Covid. It’s important to protect the old and the vulnerable, who are at the highest risk of severe illness and bad outcomes. But like most issues of medicine, it isn’t a binary choice. Given the uncertainties of how this virus spreads and its high risk of infirmities, it would be unwise to abandon efforts to limit Covid spread wherever possible. That means continued universal masking, social distancing, and diagnosing and tracing of individual cases.
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