201–210 of 241 posts
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I suspect that a pattern of not disclosing that statistics that are implied to be factual are actually to some degree ~estimates contributed to the extreme level of polarization over "facts" and "the science", as well as the increasing distrust of the media. Sure, most people don't consider these things too logically, but then if those distributing the facts can't be bothered either, how shall we accurately assign bl…
Whose to blame for 60,000 people dying in Vietnam? Whose to blame for Lobotomies winning the Nobel Prize? Whose to blame for Thalidomide being widely distributed? Almost anything can be passed off as legitimate without accountability with a concerted effort by 'authorities' and the 'news media', it's even worse in the modern short attention span news cycle.
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It's probably just worth reading the book as I have only summarized a tiny fraction of it, and I suspect any debate about the topic could end up as just re-writing the book in forum comments. Obviously Duesberg discusses the history of AIDS treatments. Indeed it doesn't discuss treatment history after the book was written, but it makes a convincing case that the AIDS treatments that did exist up to that point were fr…
Seems weird to me. My brother in law literally works with HIV every day in a biology lab. There are thousands of academics who do the same. Why would they bother if it was just some random virus? I can't really speak to the arguments you've presented. Frankly, they seem totally explicable for any number of reasons, but it's not my field. My feeling is simply that tons of people who work in the field believe that HIV…
Science is often said to be self correcting. I no longer believe this. Rather it's ridden with groupthink, politics and power games. I watched in 2020 as the scientific "consensus" about COVID models became defined by whichever factions were most aggressive, most shameless and most willing to lie, despite the evidence right in front of my face. Like I said, I never developed a strong opinion on the "HIV not the cause of AIDS" theory, partly because I don't really care. COVID is far more important. But could scientists end up collectively believing something that just isn't true at all for decades? Yeah, absolutely. I totally believe that's not only possible but quite likely. Scientists will still be claiming that COVID models worked well when we're all in care homes.
As to why anyone should care: because how do you know who to listen to, if you don't evaluate their past reliability? You say that you'll believe anything academics tell you because it's "not your field". Sounds like you might be a scientist? I think a lot of us would like to know what's true even in fields that aren't our own, especially because governments have a habit of making the pronouncements of scientists everyone's problem.
The most baffling thing is not standardising CT values for RT-PCR tests. I have looked and I cannot even find how increasing CT values affect the false positive rate for the PCR testing. If my understanding is correct a single increment of CT essentially doubles the sensitivity of the test, so difference between CT value of 35 and 40 is 32 fold. CDC is suggesting CT value of 28 for detecting breakthrough infections a…
Covid has both pre-sympomatic AND asymptomatic transmission. This has been proven.
In many places, a negative PCR test means you do not have/carry the disease and can participate in risky activities. The NFL, and the NBA, did this. Movie studios did this. Australia and New Zealand did it as a whole country.
To do that, you need a very sensitive test, not something that only confirms symptomatic infection.
Of course, a very sensitive test has more false positives. But you have to weigh that with the possibility of an outbreak among those who tested negative. Imagine what would have happened if NBA had an outbreak after PCR tests--"The Tests Are USELESS!" the media would say.
How many false positives? Look at how many players sat out during the NBA bubble.
Now back to breakthrough infections. The CDC's thought is that vaccines protect well against existing strains, and their guidelines follow that assumption. Nothing in their guidelines accounted for the Delta, though they are changing their stance now, but slowly.
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Wrong, all-cause death statistics are tracked separately from infections. See for instance https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
How does reporting things that have nothing to do with covid separately have anything to do with it? Cause of illness is linked to cause of death and they will track proportionally.
When 100,000 people are reported to die of covid in the USA or another western country with a high quality reporting system, in the same region and time around 100,000 more deaths from any cause are recorded than would normally be expected. Therefore, there’s no reason to believe the covid-19 deaths are inflated (the “with covid not from covid” theory).
Edit: see for instance https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/core/lw/2.0/html/tileshop_pmc/t... which is visually quite striking. Figure found in https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7852240/
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Whose to blame for 60,000 people dying in Vietnam? Whose to blame for Lobotomies winning the Nobel Prize? Whose to blame for Thalidomide being widely distributed? Almost anything can be passed off as legitimate without accountability with a concerted effort by 'authorities' and the 'news media', it's even worse in the modern short attention span news cycle.
Who's to blame for 600,000 dead in the United States?
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Yes, CMS requires clinical labs to submit to external proficiency testing under CLIA'88. The College of American Pathologists is a designated accrediting body and the one I'm used to using. You are not allowed to do anything out of the ordinary with proficiency testing samples. You can't send them out to someone else and report what they reported to you. You just report the results. If you fail, they test you again.…
I was working in a hospital when they discovered the blood lab was not prepared for the Joint Comission, and I saw the panic based on the scale of consequences you describe. My question refers to blinded testing meaning the lab in question does not know which, and handles, [in this case unexposed swabs from the factory] and it might range around 1-2% of samples on a continuing basis. To me that is the more industrial…
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Who's to blame for 600,000 dead in the United States?
The average death is 80 years old with two comorbidies so....the natural cycle of life?
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How does reporting things that have nothing to do with covid separately have anything to do with it? Cause of illness is linked to cause of death and they will track proportionally.
You can see that covid-19 related deaths aren’t “inflated” by comparing the numbers to excess deaths and seeing they correlate (not just nationally, but by region and time). When 100,000 people are reported to die of covid in the USA or another western country with a high quality reporting system, in the same region and time around 100,000 more deaths from any cause are recorded than would normally be expected. There…
https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid
"The raw death count helps give us a sense of scale: for example, the US suffered roughly 360,000 more deaths than the five-year average between 26 January and 3 October 2020, compared to 209,000 confirmed COVID-19 deaths during that period."
The Covid death counts may be correct or a even little lower than expected then.
Further confirms my thoughts that I would not like to be an 80 year old with two co-morbidities around Covid.
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The video they are referring to has a very specific part about pcr testing (relevant to the discussion here). I think it is reasonable to trust his opinion on the matter regardless of what he thinks about AIDS.
The video pretty clearly shows that his view is that testing for HIV is a conspiracy by the CDC to get funding to fight AIDS.[1] Unless you agree with him that AIDS isn’t caused by HIV, it doesn’t make much sense to trust him rather than all the scientific experts who have worked on PCR testing and virus detection in the last few decades. ( edit: Moreover, suppressing HIV using drugs has been successfully treating AI…
There is no correlation between COVID health outcomes and levels of testing.
