> It broke my heart. A smart, good, kind man that I knew had been brain damaged. Like some kind of fucking psychological cancer.
You're applying your view of the world to him. You're also condemning him in your mind.
How about you do this instead: you know he's a smart, honest person. Listen to his argument, see where he's coming from, and try to understand _why_ he choose that conclusion.
Nothing is all cut and dry. I do think CoV2 is a real virus, but I think our reaction to it has been absolutely disastrous. We're seeing lowering fatalities rates. Some of that is due to better treatment (early on doctors were just putting people straight onto ventilators, which was a death sentence. Since then ventilators aren't used immediately and we've seen survival go up).
With all the measures put in place, people who do get exposed are also getting low exposure, which can result in minor infections/cough/cold and quicker recovery and possibly even resistance. We've known for a while the amount of exposure matters. No one is talking about how the NYC/Michigan/Kirkland (Seattle) high death counts were directly the result of issues with elderly car facilities and cramming tons of old people into places not equipped to handle them.
I have a Bachelors and Masters degree, have published several papers, and consider myself a reasonable person, and my person view is that we are overreacting. I've been writing about it just to see if what I write tracks in 5 years:
March: https://battlepenguin.com/philosophy/covid-19-is-two-disease...
May: https://battlepenguin.com/politics/this-is-not-a-time-of-hon...
July: https://battlepenguin.com/politics/secondary-effects/
We've watch the media go into a crazy hyper-overdrive mode on almost all information, with headlines that are contradicted by the actual text of the story. We also see zero coverage of the insane 40~50 cycles used in the current PCR tests, which generate tons of false positives. Every media outlet is focusing on "cases" but what if that "case" had minimal symptoms and required 45 PCR test cycles? That's either a very low viral load or a false positive, a good thing. But no one is covering that data.
Elon Musk found issues with the rapid test; and yes the rapid test is used for antibodies and has its limits. Instead of kindly explaining it to him, someone ranted on Twitter insulting him, implying he was a fool. But many people are buying these tests and are not aware of their limitations, so from that perspective, Elon did something good for bringing the issue to light, and he was insulted by someone who wanted to shame people into a certain narrative.
Things are super complex right now. The truth is somewhere in the middle of all the bullshit we're being fed.