Greetings and Salutations;<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I am seeing more and more truly nutty theories being pushed as the Covid-19 crisis continues. The Conspiracy Loonies are out in force, pushing nonsense ranging from the virus being a biological weapon attack by China, to it being an overblown hoax by the Democrats to tear down the administration (Guess who likes this idea the most???) to it being a way for Bill Gates to inject tracking\/mind control chips into everybody in the world. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I was just hooked into a thread that involves the “doctor” that the following essay mentions, so when I ran across this well written, and accurate discussion of why conspiracy loonies are a waste of time it jumped out at me. The biographical information given by the author checks out, by the way, so this is legitimate. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Stefan Richter<\/a> <\/abbr><\/a>Yesterday at 1:54 PM<\/abbr><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Yo I\u2019m not going to watch your 25-minute YouTube conspiracy video. I\u2019m not even going to watch your 5-minute conspiracy video. This isn\u2019t because I don\u2019t have an open mind. This is because video is a shitty way to transmit information, specifically geared towards emotional manipulation, and I hate it. I can read probably about five times as fast as people speak, so if you want me to look at a write-up, I\u2019ll try to find a time when I have the emotional energy for it. One of my friends was nice enough to summarize parts of it for me, which I respond to below. This is another long one.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n I want to address, specifically, the first thirteen seconds of the \u201cPlandemic Documentary\u201d conspiracy video, because that\u2019s all I watched. It starts by saying Dr. Judy Mikovits \u201chas been called one of the most accomplished scientists of her generation\u201d. Snopes did a good article on who she is: https:\/\/www.snopes.com\/fact-check\/scientist-vaccine-jailed\/<\/a> The problem with a lot of conspiracy theories\/videos usually comes down to this: https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Gish_gallop<\/a> -From what I can tell, a big claim in this video is that the pandemic isn\u2019t that dangerous, and that the measures we\u2019re taking are an overreaction. First off, I\u2019d like to say that I have a very legitimate concern about the potential authoritarian consequences of what it\u2019s going to take to track and treat patients. I have very serious concerns about the economic impact of what\u2019s going on. I don\u2019t think there\u2019s a good way out of this, and I don\u2019t think there are any completely good options. This shit sucks a LOT and it makes me really sad. What I don\u2019t have time for is the infantile fantasy that those choices somehow don\u2019t exist and that there\u2019s some reason that this situation doesn\u2019t actually suck as badly as it does. It\u2019s possible that we\u2019re overreacting as a society! It just really doesn\u2019t seem likely. As I\u2019ve said before, anyone claiming certainty about what to do here is somewhere between being overconfident and just plain lying. What I can say is that the overwhelming evidence so far indicates that the measures we\u2019re taking are going to mean the American death toll of this disease being hundreds of thousands instead of millions<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Basically she had done some reasonable science at some point, some of it on HIV, and then published a paper in Science about XMRV and chronic fatigue syndrome. The paper was retracted because nobody could replicate the findings, and it was concluded that the XMRV came entirely from laboratory contamination. Someone else wrote a poorly-sourced paper about how XMRV could have gotten into humans via vaccines, and the anti-vax\/plague-enthusiast community jumped on this as a possible way that vaccines hurt people. Mikovits also ran into some troubles with the law for allegedly stealing lab equipment after being fired. She\u2019s now basically off the deep end and popular in the anti-vax community. I would say that pretty much anything she says should be taken with SERIOUS skepticism.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
It takes a lot more effort to refute and argue against false claims than it does to make them. I\u2019m sure that somebody at some point will come up with a comprehensive point-by-point refutation of this video, it just takes a while. One of the bigger mistakes we\u2019ve made as a scientific community (and keep making) is that we let shit like this go unchecked for too long. It can be pretty obvious to someone with a scientific background (like the Bakersfield doctors bullshit) and still spread widely in the population.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n