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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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