[runako]

Skepticism is often warranted, but frequently the vaccine skeptics pair skepticism with denial of accepted facts.

So for example in this case, the skeptic asserts that the virus is not much worse than the flu. This, despite evidence that basically everyone on earth has seen that this is not the case. (Many people personally know someone who has died of Covid in the last year, despite not ever having known anyone who has died of the flu over the prior decades of their lives.)

Even prominent Covid denialist Trump a) took an experimental antibody treatment and then b) got an early dose of the vaccine after c) spending trillions of taxpayer dollars on Covid relief efforts. If someone like Trump who actually thinks it's the flu also behaves as if it's a serious disease, it makes skeptics like OP here seem much less credible.

What's interesting about the vaccine skepticism on HN is that in any biotech thread, the discussion is around how the FDA is too strict (skeptical) about approving new therapies. But now people suddenly think the FDA is too loose in approving new therapies? The irony is that the FDA is already the skeptic here (see the J&J pause, for example). Occam, again.

[adamrezich]

I'm not commenting on your third paragraph because calling Trump a "covid denialist" is too ridiculous and unrelated to what is being discussed to even begin to explore.

in your second paragraph, you use anecdotes as a means of persuasion, despite referring to "accepted facts" two sentences prior.

none of this addresses my point which is that well-reasoned skepticism is usually met with seemingly dogmatic opposition. for example, elsewhere in the threads here, it was posited that perhaps not every death that was reported as being due to covid was accurately reported as such, given that a.) it's possible to die with covid in your system without it being the thing that killed you (especially assuming the popular "asymptomatic carrier" assertion is true) and b.) that there are demonstrable profit motives for hospitals (many of which, including my local one, have been condensed into mega-corporations in the past couple of decades). this is a reasoned, reasonable cause for skepticism. yet again, to express things like this is to be deemed a "conspiracy theorist," and to have one's reputation diminished and one's statements nullified as a result.

e: re: 4th paragraph, how is one supposed to experience cognitive dissonance from holding both of the following ideas in their mind at the same time?

- the FDA is too strict when it comes to approving experimental, elective procedures and medications

- the FDA isn't strict enough when it comes to allowing several competing drugs to be emergency-use-authorized without sufficient testing, especially when for many people the choice is between taking an experimental drug and losing employment (or worse...?)

[allturtles]

When you seem to be arguing that hospitals around the world all independently cooked the books to inflate COVID deaths because of nefarious profit motives, yes, that sounds like the definition of a conspiracy theory.

If you don't believe the reported COVID death numbers, you can look at excess deaths over prior years, which largely track with or exceeds the reported numbers for COVID deaths.

Ultimately, for most people it's pretty obvious at this point that COVID is a catastrophe of the likes we haven't seen in many decades. Trying to persuade people at this point is tiresome, it would be like living in 1943 and trying to persuade skeptics that, yes World War II is a big deal.

[adamrezich]

> When you seem to be arguing that hospitals around the world all independently cooked the books to inflate COVID deaths because of nefarious profit motives, yes, that sounds like the definition of a conspiracy theory.

except for the lack of conspiracy? when did the definition of "conspiracy" change to encompass the actions of individuals not explicitly working in concert with each other?

why is it so difficult to entertain a possible world wherein sars-cov-2 was hyped to be this massively devastating pandemic, and it was indeed pretty bad in terms of confirmed cases... but then when the number of deaths, while definitely nonzero, wasn't reaching the numbers it was "supposed to" on a per-hospital basis, many individual hospitals fudged some numbers here and there in order to get covid money since there was so much of it flying around into everyone else's pockets? this seems like a completely pragmatic, if unethical, course of action to take. there's a lot of hospitals in the US. do you find it likely that nothing along these lines happened at all, and that, again, with billions of dollars getting moved around here and there, and basically zero chance of getting caught, everyone in positions of decision-making unilaterally chose to act 100% as honestly and altruistically as possible?

again, I'm not asking you to accept this possible world as unconditionally Proven Fact or anything like that—I'm merely asking you to entertain the possibility, without breaking the glass and pulling the "Conspiracy Theory" lever. why is this sort of thinking seemingly beyond many peoples' abilities?

where does one acquire this massively optimistic outlook on human nature, especially with regard to those in positions of power, and in the presence of gargantuan amounts of money?

[allturtles]

> do you find it likely that nothing along these lines happened at all, and that, again, with billions of dollars getting moved around here and there, and basically zero chance of getting caught, everyone in positions of decision-making unilaterally chose to act 100% as honestly and altruistically as possible

You seem to be excluding a large middle. You seem to be saying that either COVID is a fraud perpetrated on us by hospitals, or else I must be arguing there is no such thing as corruption.

Your theory is not impossible but it would require a large amount of evidence to believe or even seriously consider. It's similar to the argument that Trump was actually elected president, but large amounts of independent local fraud threw enough votes to Biden to flip the result.

There's also the problem of independent lines of evidence that also point to major Covid death (e.g. excess deaths), and the fact that the Covid pandemic is a global problem - does every country have Covid money incentives that explain inflated deaths?

[adamrezich]

> You seem to be excluding a large middle. You seem to be saying that either COVID is a fraud perpetrated on us by hospitals, or else I must be arguing there is no such thing as corruption.

I didn't leave the middle out at all... in fact, I was claiming that it was you who was leaving out the middle by asserting that a non-zero amount of corruption by multiple separate hospitals would be a "conspiracy theory."

my goal in the posts in this thread is not any specific worldview that I may or may not subscribe to, but instead to point out that skepticism is healthy and shouldn't be shouted down with cries of "conspiracy theory." especially for a situation fraught with other such discrepancies, if one is willing to look for them, and, again, not assume honesty and altruism for 100% of humans in positions of power who are involved.

your comparison example is a poor analogy, because the voter fraud theory is that there was a conspiracy of multiple state/local actors acting in concert to obtain a desired electoral result. this specific aspect of the larger "covid situation" requires no such conspiracy, only human greed and corruption on the individual scale.

you state that you still require evidence to "believe or even seriously consider" my hypothetical scenario. why is that the case? again, do you think it's more likely that everyone at every hospital in the US acted 100% honestly & altruistically in this regard? when it comes to the individual, it's "innocent until proven guilty," of course. but when looking at large numbers of unconnected individuals making discrete decisions, from positions of power, with billions of dollars on the line... why do you assume "uncorrupt until proven corrupt?"

[allturtles]

> you state that you still require evidence to "believe or even seriously consider" my hypothetical scenario. why is that the case? again, do you think it's more likely that everyone at every hospital in the US acted 100% honestly & altruistically in this regard? when it comes to the individual, it's "innocent until proven guilty," of course. but when looking at large numbers of unconnected individuals making discrete decisions, from positions of power, with billions of dollars on the line... why do you assume "uncorrupt until proven corrupt?"

Again, I never claimed that there has been zero corruption, that is your strawman. What requires evidence is that corruption is the reason for large numbers of reported covid deaths, in the face of the obvious alternative explanation, which is that it's substantially more contagious and more deadly than the flu.

If I started from the assumption that if someone has a motive to do something nefarious then they probably did it, and then had to work to disprove it, that would be corrosive to all human relations. How could you even function in society under that worldview?