and meanwhile people are losing this businesses, their livelihoods, their mental health and absolutely everything. A women in California invested heavily in outdoor dining equipment, only to be shut down, and then she sees a movie production company setup a full catering set right next to her restaurant.
The top infection dresses experts can be wrong. Don't appeal to authority. There are literally thousands of other doctors and scientists who say further lockdowns are not helping. The WHO is saying lockdowns should not be used except as a last resort!
Don't listen to just one person. Look at all the options. Lockdowns don't work.
Lockdowns 100% work. Just like the medieval term "quarantine" proved that it works, 500 years ago. They're very effective at stopping infectious diseases. You don't have to be a brain surgeon to figure out why they work.
The side effects of lockdowns suck A LOT, but less than uncontrolled spread of a virus amongst 8 billion people. Besides the fact that it would completely destroy out healthcare systems, in which case we're back to the Middle Ages, we're a few mutations away from a much deadlier disease. It would be ultimately irresponsible to allow Covid to run rampant.
We should be careful here because a lockdown and a medieval quarantine are not the same. In the middle ages quarantine typically meant keeping a ship at port and preventing from landing - and that's a very doable thing. You literally just prevent them from dropping their gang plank, and they have supplies and everything they need on board.
The same does not apply to lockdowns. People need groceries, many people have limited cooking capabilities, and homes are not self sufficient - you need maintenance people, regular supplies, so on. And, those people who live in apartments and other small domiciles are not going to stay cooped up forever on end - they are going to go get food and visit people and no amount of threats is going to prevent that.
And that's the issue. Lockdowns always have a maximum timetable that they're effective for and then they suddenly become less effective - and you don't get to reset that timer all that easily. Masks help but they are a partial solution - they have a relatively low effectiveness rate that is fine individually but in mass don't hold up.
Many governments - and I'll pick on California specifically - keep locking down tighter and tigher. Curfews, dining restrictions, gathering restrictions and more that have been going on for more than 6 months now. Do you really think getting more restrictive will be helpful at all?
Right. Quarantine that is suggested, like it's been in the US, and quarantine that's enforced are very different. Again, national strategy for "let's all stay exactly where we are for four weeks while people in hazmat suits deliver you groceries" would have been closer to medieval quarantine.
Show me the evidence. You look from nation to nation, region to region, and there is no effect at all from masks or lockdowns. You are imagining they work because the TV tells you to, but they don't.
What tells you that what you are seeing there is them welding people inside their apartment buildings? I see someone welding something. I don't see how you can tell who they are or what they are doing or why based on this video.
Um, the part where the guy opens the door and sees a bar welded in front of it?! There are Chineese sources that show bars being put up against peoples' doors:
But they are difficult to confirm because China heavily restricts all coms in and out of the country, or are you going to try to deny the Great Firewall of China or extreme media censorship exists next?
Here's an opinion piece from the WaPo by a Chinese citizen also stating people were welded into their homes:
The actual numbers are totally opposite of what you say. Please show some sources. I think Shapiro covers the arguments against lockdowns very well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymD9ipSm-eg
I'm against them because they literally do not work, and they violate our basic civil rights. A man in Canada was shot months ago for not wearing a mask, after he left the store, outside his own home. In Quebec over New Years Eve, police arrested someone for having more than five people in their homes. New York wants to pass ordinances that lets them put people in camps if they're infected.
This is absolute insanity. The virus is an excuse to violate all our basic human rights. The United States constitution is basically suspended at this point.
Look at this woman who was arrested for trying to save her deteriorating mother locked in a care home:
> While most countries imposed a lockdown in response to COVID-19, Sweden did not. To quantify the lockdown effect, we approximate a counterfactual lockdown scenario for Sweden through the outcome in a synthetic control unit. We find, first, that a 9-week lockdown in the first half of 2020 would have reduced infections and deaths by about 75% and 50%, respectively. Second, the lockdown effect starts to materialize with a delay of 3-4 weeks only. Third, the actual adjustment of mobility patterns in Sweden suggests there has been substantial voluntary social restraint, although the adjustment was less strong than under the lockdown scenario. Lastly, we find that a lockdown would not have caused much additional output loss.
> Lockdown therefore appears to have been successful not only in alleviating the burden on the intensive care units of the two most severely affected regions of France, but also in preventing uncontrolled epidemics in other regions. These simple observations support results from other studies which have estimated the impact of lockdown on SARS-CoV-2 spread to be strong.
> COVID-19's daily increasing cases and deaths have led to worldwide lockdown, quarantine and some restrictions. This study aims to analyze the effect of lockdown days on the spread of coronavirus in countries. COVID-19 cases and lockdown days data were collected for 49 countries that implemented the lockdown between certain dates (without interruption). The correlation tests were used for data analysis based on unconstrained (normal) and constrained (Tukey-lambda). The lockdown days was significantly correlated with COVID-19 pandemic based on unconstrained (r = −0.9126, F-ratio = 6.1654; t-ratio = 2.40; prob > .0203 with 49 observations) and based on Tukey-lambda (r = 0.7402, λ = 0.14). The lockdown, one of the social isolation restrictions, has been observed to prevent the COVID-19 pandemic, and showed that the spread of the virus can be significantly reduced by this preventive restriction in this study. This study offers initial evidence that the COVID-19 pandemic can be suppressed by a lockdown. The application of lockdown by governments is also thought to be effective on psychology, environment and economy besides having impact on Covid-19.
The full text of the 2nd paper is literally only two pages and only appears to look at regions in France and not other countries. There are literally no graphs, no detailed explanation of the methodology and the very next article is literally "Is COVID-19 being used as a weapon against Indigenous Peoples in Brazil?" which speaks of this very weird identity politics finding its way into major academic journals. There are references to an Appendix that I can't seem to find the full-text of, but it bothers me the paper itself doesn't seem to have a detail methodology section, risk analysis and also lists some pretty big financial incentives/interests.
The 3rd study is the only really detailed source provided, yet it only covers data up to May 5th. It also has this interesting quote:
> In addition, it is claimed that, besides the positive aspects of the lockdown, people who comply with this restriction cause a weakened immune system. The main reason for this is that there is too much food consumption and limited mobility. The effect of the lockdown caused by the COVID-19 pandemic on human health may be the subject of future work
It also tries to look at environmental impacts and mentions the inconsistency of lock-downs across all areas. I'm also having a hard time understand the "Transformed data" as it doesn't seem to correlate to either of the two preceding graphs at all. Also keep in mind, correlational near r=1 shows that Ice Cream sales can lead to Polio:
"We in the World Health Organization do not advocate lockdowns as the primary means of control of this virus," Dr. David Nabarro (World Health Orginization).
You can find multiple articles that quote this from the WHO and link to the full 1 hour interview with the Spectator. The full interview goes on further to talk about how continued lockdowns will lead to move poverty and devastation.
There's also this study that tears apart the models used by many:
Also you know that 2-million Neil Ferguson model? Here's the source code for it. It's disastrous: non-reproducible results and 3 different random seeds. They literally ran it multiple times and took averages (with ranges of fatalities varying by up to 60k). Also it has race conditions and can't be run in parallel. Fucking mess:
A) Tens if not hundreds of governments, with wildly different agendas, ranging from dictatorships to ultra liberal democracies, converge on enforcing different degrees of lockdowns. Tens of different graphs I've seen have infection rates go down, like clockwork, roughly 10-14 days after stricter lockdowns are enforced. Keep in mind that they're all aware of the economic costs, mental health issues, etc. They're not doing this for fun. And they're not going to lock us forever, there is no "freedoms" slippery slope here.
B) A rather fringe group of libertarians, freedom fighters and the like, who dislike government overreach, prove that models used by all those governments are all wrong, thus indirectly confirming their long held beliefs and biases.
In Romanian we say: "If someone says you're drunk, ignore them. If two people say that you're drunk, go to bed even if you haven't touched a bottle of liquor."
The odds of your sources being a scientific revolution are low. They're much more likely to be Nostradamuses (Nostradami?) than Galileos.
Plus, using Ben Shapiro as a source? Isn't he obviously an agenda pushing hypocrite? I mean, a broken clock is right twice a day, but still :-)
It's not remotely comparable. You can test seat belts with crash dummies. It's a clear experiment, and yes, people should have been skeptical of seat belts until they were proven to be effective. Auto companies were pushing against seat-belts and safety. Today big industry is pushing for lockdowns (and we should question those motives).
It's a bad argument. There are literally thousands of people in the Great Barrington Declaration, who have sound arguments for ending lockdowns. We can literally look at the numbers across the globe from different policies in different countries and see there is no direct correlational between any government action and fatalities. Correlation isn't causation, but we DO NOT even have correlation!
Scientists and doctors are saying we need to end this mass hysteria. We should listen to all the experts, not only the ones we agree with.
> Scientists and doctors are saying we need to end this mass hysteria. We should listen to all the experts, not only the ones we agree with.
To quote Wikipedia, citation needed. And please don't like to a YouTube/Facebook/Instagram whatever of someone in a white coat. I have not seen this from anyone with any reasonable credentials.
I was just able to sign it as a medical professional. I am not one. Literally nothing on that site is verified. I keep seeing you quote things in this thread related to this site, which as far as I can tell has zero authenticity, and to random YouTube videos. Hint: if a doctor or researcher can only publish their findings on YouTube/Facebook/Instagram, they don't have anything worthwhile to say.
Alright, so lets not look at the signers, let's look at the clearly listed authors on that page:
> Dr. Martin Kulldorff, professor of medicine at Harvard University, a biostatistician, and epidemiologist
> Dr. Sunetra Gupta, professor at Oxford University, an epidemiologist with expertise in immunology, vaccine development
> Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, professor at Stanford University Medical School, a physician, epidemiologist, health economist, and public health policy expert
> Dr. Alexander Walker, principal at World Health Information Science Consultants, former Chair of Epidemiology, Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health
Some of these people have done interviews too. You can go look them up on major news programs.
> Hint: if a doctor or researcher can only publish their findings on YouTube/Facebook/Instagram, they don't have anything worthwhile to say
We're talking about an ongoing crisis where we see clear censorship in media, big tech and academic publications. People are basing world changing decisions off pre-prints and pre-pubs. Does it really matter where a doctor or researcher publishes their views so long as it is a real doctor or researcher? Why does the platform make their opinion invalid?
I repeat, I was just able to use a fake name to sign that document. Nothing prevents anyone from signing it as any of those people. Just for giggles, I just literally signed it a second time as "Dr. DJ Sumdog, PhD, associate professor at Hacker News". Check your email to complete the process.
Furthermore, the people you listed above have been found to have conflicts of interest regarding this declaration. The medical and public health communities have soundly rejected this declaration. This declaration makes no sense if you examine it with any kind of critical eye. Start with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Barrington_Declaration#R... and from there check the linked sources.
There is no censorship in the media regarding medical research of COVID-19. There is fact checking. Just because you believe something that is false and the media isn't reporting that falsehood as fact does not mean the media is censoring you. It means it's false. Occam's Razor will quickly tell you that the chances of a global conspiracy are much lower than the chances of what you are saying here being false. Think about just how many people would have to know about this conspiracy and all of them would keep it perfectly secret. Every news organization in the world would have to collectively conspire to keep the truth from us, right? Every journalist, every editor, every publisher, every news anchor, every weatherman, every sportscaster, every public official. Do you know how quickly that would unravel? I know it's easy to believe a conspiracy because it's so appealing but it's just not what is going on.
The platform is an indirect indication: if the scientific community rejects your hypothesis, it's most likely because your hypothesis is bullshit. Think critically for a moment the way they taught in you middle school and realize that what you are quoting are unverified unreliable sources and fringe ideas. If you were saying that drinking motor oil cures COVID you'd have about as much credibility. I am done trying to argue with you because you are not worth arguing about, but I do beg you to use your head and think instead of falling for every damn hoax out there like you seem to have. Happy New Year and stay safe.
> Furthermore, the people you listed above have been found to have conflicts of interest regarding this declaration
There are also conflicts with Fauci has his strong connections to the Gavi health alliance and many big pharma companies. Some of them might have conflicts, but all of them? And even if they do, what about the arguments themselves? Science is not a consensus.
> There is no censorship in the media regarding medical research of COVID-19. There is fact checking
You have got to be fucking kidding me?! The Hunter Biden story, published by one of the largest newspapers in the United States (the NY Post) was censored on every major platform (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and was it was later found that he was under active investigation by the FBI. We are in one of the absolutely worst eras of censorship of our times. It has grown ti 1984 levels of insanity by Big Tech and Big Media.
You cannot possible be saying there is no big media censorship and it's all "Fact Checking". That's total fucking bullshit. We have cases where the news media contradicts their own headlines within their own articles (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmgMu5sefzA) and literally fact checks opinions and hyperbolas (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPruYq320MM)
> The platform is an indirect indication: if the scientific community rejects your hypothesis, it's most likely because your hypothesis is bullshit.
You are essentially saying "The Media is the Message." It's a massive logical error. Remember at one time, the major scientific publications said black people were inferior to whites due to their skull size. It was provable science at that time. Science is not about majority rule, it's about examination and facts that can be reproduced by others.
> it's most likely because your hypothesis is bullshit
That's assuming the result based on the medium. You realize a bunch of researches got totally baseless papers published in respected grievance study journals, right?
furthermore, there have been many cases where the medium has been banned throughout history, by the academic and scientific communities, for things that are commonly accepted as fact today:
The top infection dresses experts can be wrong. Don't appeal to authority. There are literally thousands of other doctors and scientists who say further lockdowns are not helping. The WHO is saying lockdowns should not be used except as a last resort!
Don't listen to just one person. Look at all the options. Lockdowns don't work.