RFK Jr.

First of all, there's more to his wacky views that his anti-vaccine.

RFK Jr. Makes Unfounded Claims About Mass Shootings, Covid-19: Here Are All The Conspiracies He Promotes

Second, the idea that only Democrats support candidates with a crappy past ... do you really want to go there? It has nothing to do with the thread.

 

While the COVID science has seemed to me a rather standard set of breakthroughs and missteps, I agree that that there were some problems with messaging. And the censorship from the platforms was very regrettable. Though it’s not necessarily valid to apply any kind of failure of one system to others, I agree that this is a common procedure for people, so COVID probably did open some avenues to MMR skepticism.

 

This is interesting. From where did you hear about these 200 studies? I’ve never heard anything like that during my research into this topic.

 

I wouldn’t even call the “censorship” by social media regrettable, lots of trash info out there posing as legitimate debate. The problem with social media is they try to do stuff like this by algorithm. How can they isolate “professional” misinformation peddlers (and foreign governments) from people just having conversations? What to do when regular people just get caught up in misinformation loops and essentially behave as useful idiots (like if social media bans you because the algorithm thinks you are a bot, I’d suggest such a person should contemplate what they are doing, unfortunately many just don’t seem to have this capability).

I recall during COVID there was a list of top 10 purveyors of misinformation, a couple of them obviously doing it all for money - making $10’s of millions. Just vile people. I have no issue with social media “censoring” those types. Aside from the obvious lack of societal value, ostensibly the misinformation peddlers are actually damaging the product (the platform) and damaging the customer base, using it to enrich themselves. Social media can and should ban such a person the same way a store can eject an obnoxious customer or a sports venue can eject a rowdy fan.

 

Why would you ? Being curated and/or scrubbed the way they are. Indeed, you pointed to the problem of censorship in your previous post.

From my vantage point, the best reason to be anti-vax is because there is literally nothing to vaccinate for. On this count, I’m at loggerheads with RFK Jr but would still prefer him to the alternative.

 

It’s a good point about regular conversations. My first thought is that these are private companies, so obviously they can set their own boundaries for any reason they wish, but that clearly doesn’t mean that these boundaries can’t have negative societal impacts. There’s some bad science out there, but it’s not always easy to discern from good science. More importantly, even good scientific results are routinely overturned, so leaving open lines of inquiry is very important. If one is going to block certain empirical claims (as opposed to say hate speech), occasionally something blocked will be vindicated by later research, and credibility will be lost. Often this loss of credibility will spread from the platform to the scientific field itself, which risks serious consequences.

 

The question is how do we know that the 200 studies exist if we’ve never seen them? We obviously shouldn’t use their absence as proof of their existence, so what is our evidence for their existence?

 

We could start with your meta-analysis. There’s five off the bat. A summary perusal of Google references smack of “Oh no they don’t!” It bears a striking resemblance to assertions that Covid vaccines aren’t killing people.

 

This Attack Ad on RFK Jr. Brought to You by Pfizer.

 

In the land of the blind the one eyed man is king

 

I’m not so sure. What you seem to be suggesting is that, because these five studies did not find a link, this this is evidence that there are another 200 that did find a link? This reasoning has the perverse outcome that if one of the five did recover an association, it would be less likely that there are another 200 that found the same association.

I’m not saying that I know that the authors of the meta analysis don’t have a bias, but even if they did, a cognitive bias isn’t evidence for the existence of another 200 studies.

 

Awhile back GSK conducted a study which showed a number of autism cases emerging after one of its vaccines. Here’s a link to that study …

https://autismoevaccini.files.wordp...cOxJ9B_KViWwL5anUQratOHQvnqYhln1-vncw_XPd3ClE

Oops! See what I mean ?

 

The point--TBL---....is RFK Democrat because he's Democrat?

...or is he a GOP plant???

As for the second part, the better question is...who the hell are you kidding, pretending a candy isn't qualified b/c a single person may have died by their hand, and they philandered during one marriage???

Didn't stop the Dem's from pimping billy bob, forgiving him all in the second go around (after the body count had become more than just a thing, but grew more legs than a centipede...), then didn't just tap his wife, but twisted and contorted their own rules to insure that SHE was the candy...

...and has since followed up with Biden Intel Brokering, Inc's CEO, 'the big guy', China Joe.

LOL!

Y'all ain't fooling anyone with that faux indignation bullshit.

 

Lockdowns were metaphorical of a strategy to separate people from one another (and other resources) so they couldn’t put two and two together.

 

That link takes me to a page that says access denied.

I think we are using different standards of proof here. If someone tells me there are 200 papers, I’d like to see them before believing this. If they tell me that they’ve been covered up, I’d like to see evidence of the cover up. Covering up 200 different studies would be such a massive undertaking without any single of the hundreds of conspirators coming forward, that it is certainly an extraordinary clam.

Further, even if we accept the idea that somehow a worldwide conspiracy is possible, there is good reason to be skeptical of this claim. 200 studies is a wild number. When I wrote that this topic had the most research of any that had never had a positive result, I was thinking about a number of studies in the 10-15 range. They are expensive and really difficult to carry out. 200 studies seems an implausibly high number, regardless of the outcomes of the studies.

Our two options in this case are 1) an impenetrable global conspiracy consisting of hundreds of different people in many countries hiding an exorbitant number of very expensive studies, or 2) one person told a lie. In the end, I think we have to stick to David Hume’s criteria for extraordinary claims: "That no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavours to establish”.

 

Can we extend Hume’s criterion to people being disease vectors and therefore needing vaccines (setting aside vaccine harms) ?

 

Now I think we’re conflating independent phenomena. We have 1) the empirical question of from where did the virus originate, 2) the organizational decisions to bar talking about that issue, 3) the government recommendation for people to take the vaccine. Importantly, these three aspects were all overseen by different parties 1 - scientists, 2 - private platforms, and 3 - federal, state, and municipal governments. There was no scientist that banned YouTube from showing anti-vax videos, and there was no city mayor who sequenced the COVID genomes.

Science moves at its own pace in an attempt to discover truths of the world, CEOs make their own decisions to maximize the profits of their companies, and governments pass laws to protect their citizens. That one of these entities might behave in a way that is counterproductive to either of the others is no great surprise. These three have a long history of clashing with one another.

 

We can and should.

 

In his case, mostly just that he’s saying something they want to hear.

Pre-COVID he was just your typical, run-of-the-mill “don’t take flu shots, they’re poison!” crank. A sentiment that tended to be housed, primarily, on the fringes of the “environmentalist left.”

When COVID came around and anti-vaccine sentiment bubbled up on the right (initially primarily as a result of pushback on mandates, but then spreading broadly from there), the folks like him who had been spouting nonsense about vaccines generally (and largely being ignored by both sides) for years were already sitting there as ready made “voices of reason” to embrace as to why this specific vaccine was supposedly bad.