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Notes -
Prediction on Expert Trusting in 2025
After reviewing Dave Collum's Year in Review (you can search for it on the Peak Prosperity Website), I was rather impressed that Professor Collum was still claiming that the Covid-19 Vaccine caused more deaths than it prevented. It seems like such a wild and bold claim might discredit a lot of his valid criticism regarding scientific overreach, censorship, and other less contested points.
I have extreme doubts about the safety profile of the mRNA vaccines, but have not taken to spreading such a wild claim. Rather, I try to gently introduce people to the mRNA as one of the strongest adjuvants ever created, and there was a successful campaign to essentially rebrand therapeutic "flu shot" like products as a MUST have, even if they offer risks beyond your normal protein adjuvanted product. Personally, the youngest patient I ever saw was a young man with an abnormal EKG 2 days after a Moderna booster shot. He stands as one of my youngest patients that ever showed ST Elevations. However, I also saw a young man who had an abnormal heartbeat (a-fib) before the vaccine was available, after a rough bout with an early strain of the SARS-2 Virus. Articles about treating Cancers in the body with mRNA have been exciting: a disease like cancer is a grave illness that might require aggressive and invasive cures. I look forward to seeing their results.
What I am most interested in is the transition from a "trust government appointed experts of lead federal agencies" to a more nuanced narrative of "do not trust THESE appointed experts of lead federal agencies. Simply put, almost everyone who told me they were just going to "do what they were told" when I questioned them on intrusions on peacetime civil liberties, leans left, and I assume on matters of economics, immigration, and justice they will suddenly throw salt on the soil of "following instructions of our experts." I know that a "national security expert" has a different strata of respectability as a "epidemiologist virology expert," but there is an exciting transition that must take place to allow distrust of institutional experts to occur. Perhaps there will be an elevation of contradictions "oh well systemically this field is not equitable or good faith, while this field has the best interest of humanity in mind." I think it will be a solid argument. The bricks of essentially nullifying some laws in favor of outcomes have been laid very well by media and academia. If you bring up "following national security experts," you will once against be called racist, Islamophobic, or whatever de jure insult to make you reconsider being an expert-truster. I'd love to hear someone's else opinion on this.
Personally, I expected conservative NIH, CDC, and FDA staff to be, well, disappointingly conservative about their recourse. I happen to think the "greatest peacetime intrusion of civil liberties in American history" (paraphrased, Chief Justice Gorsuch) should be heavily interrogated. I think we will be disappointed though. RFK's platform has a ton of "red meat" to chew on as far as overhauling various recommendations that have nothing to do with Covid-19. I would say the inspection of Autism and Vaccines is a possibly unfortunate red herring for those who want to see more discovery in the Covid-19 saga.
Structurally, some "force" made sure that Americans and the Western Developed world at large was only offered novel biotechnology vaccines. You can probably get Novavax or some other protein-adjuvanted vaccine now, but the FDA delayed their approval beyond most vaccine passport schemes, vaccine mandates, or general (let me take glib liberty here) "you now have to take novel biotechnology flu shot equivalents to be considered a good or serious person) structural endeavoring. Luckily, with the overturning of Roe V. Wade, there is now an even structural battleground of medical autonomy and physician paternalism. I have let some staunch public health advocates know that while I am pro-choice, each state now has the right to consider a fetus a vulnerable member of its public health community. Ouch.
So, as the next Republican cabinet is formed around the basis of immigration, economy, national security, or any other topic the executive / congressional government manages, whether you are Right or Left, let's enjoy standing up, lifting the table, turning them, and enjoying a drink together to ring in the New Year. You know, RFK says alcohol is something he avoids, so I think you should have a drink. Personally, I'm not taking that stuff.
I love this! Great message.
And yes very much agreed on Covid-19. I think the majority of the public health apparatus needs to be dismantled and rebuilt from the ground up.
Also the people who create gain of function viruses need to either face EXTREMELY series penalties for slip ups, or else just sotp doing it altogether. And put Fauci in jail for the rest of his life for massive fraud and endangerment of life, of course.
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The horse is out of the stall at this point. People who mistrust the medical establishment aren't going to suddenly start trusting it because there's a few Trump appointees making recommendations, and the medical establishment is robust and independent enough not to be too effected by a few Trump appointees.
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To me, it just seems like, for the last 3 years, many of the Covid skeptics and Covid conspiracists have been doing constant victory laps on evidence that is insufficient, to say the least. Yes, some of the contrarian things were correct, but there was a large number of wild claims about vaccine killing half or third of people taking in space of years, sterilizing people to the degree of "unvaccinated sperm becoming more valuable than gold", being filled with gunk that basically makes your veins look like huge black worms etc. that obviously didn't come true. Sure, not every Covid skeptic said this stuff, or even most of them, but the more moderate skeptics still seemed, at least to me, generally unwilling to start debunking the wilder variants. At least insofar as my personal experience goes, I do not know anyone who seems to have suffered a major vaccine injury (nor do I know anyone who has died of Covid, though one guy I know apparently came pretty close), which makes me question those who claimed to encounter vaccine injuries left and right.
There's Rogan saying that all the conspiracy theorists were correct on the basis of a report saying that "Operation Warp Speed Was a Great Success and Helped Save Millions of Lives", which obviously would be the complete opposite of reality if the mRNA drugs manufactured and distributed as a part of OWS were deadly poison. Indeed, a great number of Covid skeptics ended up fulsomely praising - not just supporting as the last bad option but actively campaigning for - Trump, who has never stopped bragging about his great vaccine and successful Warp Speed operation and, when pressed on the incongruity, usually resulting to "well, he didn't support a mandate!", as if it was still OK to use tremendous amounts of tax money in order to support a lie and actively push a deadly poison on people, which is what he would have been doing if the mRNA vaccine claims were correct.
As said, the mainstream Covid response was flawed in many ways, opened a room for a lot of corruption and included a push for mandates and vaccine passports in a way that almost certainly has caused more harm than good in eroding public trust to public health authorities and experts - but the "counter-experts" don't seem particularly willing to utilize the same standard of evaluation on themselves, or their own community.
I think this is an unjustified demand for rigor.
Who do you mean by the "counter-experts"? They are a non-connected group of people with a huge diversity of opinions.
Are you saying it's not justified to criticize Orthodox beliefs unless everyone who criticizes those beliefs is correct? Because that's impossible. There is no shared community between Anders Tegnell (who led the Swedish Covid response) and Alex Jones (a nut).
And of course many critics of the Covid overreach did in fact criticize those who made incorrect claims.
The content (the rigor) of the criticism does matter. Unjustified claims (such linked claims by Rogan) remain unjustified if the orthodoxy (as if such existed) was incorrect.
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The situations aren't symmetric. Unlike the mainstream who indeed were a unified group, the skeptics were not. If Jay Bhattacharya was right, he doesn't have to answer for the "COVID was caused by 5G" people before taking a victory lap.
Perhaps I should specify I was talking specifically about vaccine skeptics (i.e. those generally opposed to mRNA vaccination), which Bhattacharya (or Tegnell, referred to in another post) wasn't.
Generally speaking what caused this thought was the Joe Rogan quote about "conspiracy theorists being right about everything", in which case it was Rogan implicitly dumping a lot of people with varying views in the same category.
He didn't say "all the conspiracy theorists were correct", he said "all the "conspiracy theorists" were correct", meaning, all the people who were called conspiracy theorists for disagreeing on the points he cited were correct.
Another proof that authorities dishonestly expanded the definition of a pejorative term to include their critics/political foes and burned through yet more of the public‘s trust.
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Rogan isn't an expert, he's a commentator.
Same difference. The normies listen to Rogan to decide who to trust. When he has Alex Jones on, they are now conspiracy theorists.
No, an expert and a commentator are not "same difference".
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I think trust was fading before as people were aware of the lies of the media and public leaders long before Covid. What I think Covid and its massive overreaction did was tear off the bandage. People are now pretty open about their distrust of officials and official information organs. But whether the trust can be restored is up to those officials and those information organs taking a hard look at themselves and their practices and deciding to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Until those things happen, I just don’t see the public taking the CDC, FBI, or other organizations seriously. Nor do I think, absent such a change, most mainstream news outlets can become a trusted source of news. Not lying and apologizing for previous lies is critical here.
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IDK about any of that, but I just got back (delayed) from a vacation in which I saw a major airline (co)pilot drop like a tree ten feet in front of me while waiting at the gate in an airport -- living a 4chan "vaxxies dropping like flies" meme is kind of weird. (pretty good that he did so before the flight left I guess, although it did take two days for the airline in question to get somebody there who wasn't houred out and could take us home)
As long as we're dropping anecdotes, my dad's best friend developed serious heart issues almost immediately after getting vaxxed, which have put him in the hospital a couple times already. The dude's diet is severely restricted now, and he's already had an episode in which he fell in the front yard and had his wife call someone strong enough to help him up. His grandchildren have barely started speaking as he's headed for the exit.
The vaccine injury patient I had was reported to enter heart failure in the ICU. Shockingly low ejection fraction. They would not meet with me about the case via zoom or communicate via email.
Relevant username if I ever saw one
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