| I think you and I actually agree more here than it seems reading the thread. I don't agree with the idea of having specific ideas legally banned. Though being from the US I am used to the idea of having free speech and am pretty well wired to oppose laws that limit speech. I don't see any problem with a community (country in this case) coming up with speech laws that they agree with. I wouldn't consider Germany to have free speech as a right, though that may very well be by design as I'm not sure if that's even considered to be a thing. Where we diverge here is in specific examples of lies during the pandemic response. > Yeah, thank COVID deniers and antivaxxers for that one - there are quite the few countries who managed to get nearly everyone vaccinated At least in the US, herd immunity claims were the fault of health leaders rather than those opposed to the vaccines. Early on Fauci frequently quotes around 60% vaccine uptake as a threshold for herd immunity. As the vaccine rollout began his number kept climbing, ultimately leading to him admitting that the earlier numbers were lower on purpose as 85-90% would have seemed unreasonable to the public. He may have been worried about how it abti-vaxxers would respond, but it was Fauci setting those targets which he knew were lies. I only brought up Ivermectin because there were specific lies being told about it from the top. I totally agree there was no scientific reason to think it would be effective against Covid, I saw infrequent claims of its use as an antiviral but never saw clear data. The lie, though, was branding it as a horse dewormer. That's more a lie of omission as it isn't only a horse dewormer, but a lie none the less. With regards to the lab leak hypothesis, I wouldn't begin to justify or defend Trump or any of his supporters. They're free to believe and say whatever they want, I can simply ignore it or try to show how they're wrong in a specific topic (same for Biden supporters or anyone else, dumb isn't party-specific). That said, justifying a lie by pointing to a dangerous idiot isn't a good precedent in my opinion, and doesn't change the fact that they were lies. Health officials colluded to write papers and push a PR campaign to discredit the idea and anyone considering it. They knew that gain of function research of covid viruses was going on in the Wuhan lab and that a leak was possible. They also knew they had absolutely no evidence to support a zoological transfer. Trump may well have been spouting his own lies, I honestly don't know if he can tell the difference between truth and lies, but my point was simply that many in charge, including those with degrees and credentials that claim to be signs of expertise in the field, knowingly lied about many, many things during the pandemic. |