As predicted:
The movie begins with a string of ominous news clips about the pandemic and the COVID vaccines, and includes short interviews with people of color who talk about COVID-19 being âpropagandaâ and why they donât trust the vaccine. Robert F Kennedy Jr. also appears to offer a warning to viewers about vaccines: âDonât listen to me. Donât listen to Tony Fauci. Hey, and donât listen to your doctor.â
Childrenâs Health Defense made one of the filmâs co-producers, Curtis Cost, available to talk with NPR. He is a longtime anti-vaccine activist, who has previously claimed that âviruses do not cause anything, itâs a hoax, itâs a myth, so whether you are talking about HIV virus, the flu virus or any other virus, does not cause anything.â
Idiots. Playing on legitimate fears, to achieve, something? Damn, it makes me tired.
Once again, you can get a real one legally and for free!
Max Joseph von Pettenkofer would like you to put your money where your mouth is
This is not good news
Yet another Republican holocaust trivializer.
Democratic state Rep. Lisa Subeck, who is a board member of the National Association of Jewish Legislators, noted that just over a month ago the Legislature voted unanimously to require education about the Holocaust in Wisconsin schools.
âAt a time when antisemitic incidents continue to rise, hyperbolic rhetoric by Republican elected officials about the Holocaust needs to end now,â Subeck said. âThese types of statements pile onto ever increasing antisemitic incidents in our state, and continue to create divisions in an already ultra-divided country.â
Exactly.
FFS, starting to think Elie Wieselâs âNightâ should be required reading for these assholes.
Well. Yes. It should be. But maybe Primo Leviâs The Drowned and the Saved too?
Because he addresses directly how he Nazis told their victims how no one would care or remember them.
Hadnât heard of that one, thanks.
I was thinking of asking you for a ârequired reading listâ for public servants, but didnât want to put you on the spot. Was thinking the list would be a good start for anyoneâs reading plan.
Primo Levi is my go-to Holocaust book, honestly. He gets above the need to purify the victims, which also strips them of their humanity. But itâs useful for thinking about how institutions like prisons actual function on a particular logic and how they strip people of their humanity outside of cases like death campsâŚ
Primo Levi is definitely on that list with several works.
Itâs horrifying. People comparing their slight inconveniences with Nazi terror, claiming a victimâs role and comparing themselves to the victims of the shoa is not new, but that it happens so often, and publicly, and people double down on it: that I find really dangerous.
I began a career in ~print while I was still in high school. As you can imagine, I had a nonzero number of requests for fake IDs and suchlike. Iâve always been fairly risk-averse, so my compromise to avoid forgery was making realistic looking credentials from nonexistent institutions.
My point with all that is that I have a hard time accepting that knocking up one of these vaccination cards passes whatever threshold is, or should be, necessary to invoke the F-word. Lawyers love the R-word, so did the CDC make a reasonable effort here?
If I read it properly, it is not so much the fake vaccine card, but the unauthorized use of an official seal that gets this over the line into criminal territory. Worth noting, however, that IANAL in any way, shape or form.
There is an overwhelming body of indicators that this virus wasnât âdesignedâ. I hope we can agree on that.
I dispute that there is a âgrowing recognitionâ of a lab leak as a relevant hypothesis of origin for the pandemic. There are some scientists who say this hypothesis should not be abandoned. That is part of the scientific process. Those voices have been there from the beginning, and they have been heard, discussed, and their hypothesis is still seen as unlikely.
Giving the most likely and thus currently accepted hypothesis, a zoonosis, the same weight as another, much less likely hypothesis is an example of false balance.
Different people mean different things when they say âdesigned.â I personally donât consider a naturally occurring zoonotic virus that was collected and subsequently cultured in a lab for study (and possibly escape in the process) to be âdesignedâ but opinions may differ. And I hope that we can agree that the lab in question did exactly that kind of collection and research, because thatâs not really in dispute.
Iâve never seen any evidence that this virus was created as some kind of bio weapon, if thatâs what you mean.
Yes, this is what I mean, and there isnât only no evidence for it, there is evidence against it.
Coronaviruses in labs are sampled from their natural hosts, and then atudied. A change of hosts is difficult for a virus. It happens rarely. This Coronavirus had an intermediate host, and subsequently jumped to humans. This jump, again, is unlikely. For this to happen successfully, it is very likely that high individual densities of hosts occurred at each step, so that multiple infection events took place. And Iâm talking about longer periods of time, here. This might happen at a one-off chance encounter, but it extremely unlikely.
This is an evolutionary event. While we meme âlife finds a wayâ, life takes massive amounts of try and error to do so.
To be clear: it is very likely that we will never know the true original host, and the true intermediate host. Also, it is clear that we can not completely an unequivocally rule out the lab leak hypothesis. That does not mean that the accepted hypothesis of a zoonosis is wrong. It also does not mean it is equally likely as other hypotheses, and those should carry equal weight, or should be investigated with an enormous amount of public attention and massive resources until âdisprovenâ.
Since we can agree that no engineering took place, I hope we should also be able to agree that, while not disprovable, a unlikely hypothesis deserves less attention than a likely hypothesis.
In SARS, 2003/2004, studies showed that the intermediates were very likely raccoon dogs and viverids. This is a likely source today as well. We havenât seen such studies, yet. I repeat: it is unlikely (next to impossible) to find the actual source unequivocally. However, we could look at the likely hypothesis, and see if we can find corroborating evidence.
Not sure why youâre emphasizing the âvery.â There is pretty convincing evidence on the intermediate hosts for related viruses, like camels for MERS. And weâre devoting far more resources to finding the origin of Covid than we did for prior viruses, testing tens of thousands of animals.
