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This comment reminds me of why arguments about lockdowns became so difficult, because the public forum was so often being poisoned with nonsense.
I think lockdowns are the greatest crime inflicted upon modern humanity outside of war. I strongly believe that those who supported and facilitated them should be at the very least imprisoned, if not far worse.
Nonetheless, I would never make a ridiculous claim to support my position like admissions being down, or ventilators killing more people, or vaccines being worse than the disease. Covid obviously was a pandemic. It, like the similar pandemics of the 50s and 60s, had a fatality rate of 0.1 - 0.3, and made a huge number of people very ill.
Lockdowns were a disaster not because Covid was all fake, but because the costs vastly outweighed the benefits. You don't need to lie or believe ridiculous things to understand that.
However, as soon as you start arguing about lockdowns, you are immediately lumped in with the 5G nutters, the anti-vaxxers, the china hoaxers, and so on. It was incredibly difficult to talk about it with normal people because, no matter how correct you are, being supported by masses of conspiracy nuts is an extremely difficult barrier to overcome.
I find these 'I'm one of the reasonable ones' posts so tiresome because the status quo will lump you in with other dissidents to discredit you no matter how many times you post comments like these. It doesn't matter how much you ridicule and insult the people further down the "conspiracy nut" totem pole than you. Your only defense is just being correct and telling the truth.
I think part of this is my shorthand is leading to confusion.
Hospital admissions and emergency room admissions were lower in February 2020 through at least April 2020 than previous years. This is findable data which I looked up years ago. You can think it's ridiculous all you like, but you are wrong and that is a true statement.
the dancing nurse/doctor phenomenon makes more sense (and you can just look into the periphery of the videos) when you realize part of the reason is the hospitals were not full, the pop-up tent hospitals were empty, and the hospital ships were empty
my claim is ventilators were overused and this overuse caused people to die
ventilators are dangerous and should only be used when the downsides of their lack of use are dire
in the early days of the covid hysteria, they were regularly being used on people when they shouldn't have been for various reasons but the result was people who would have lived otherwise fell into the ventilator spiral where they declined and then died
and this is why the protocol for their use w/re COVID19 treatment was significantly changed in the summer of 2020 which substantially reduced their use
have you ever heard of the 1976 flu vaccine which was pulled from use?
well shucks, this cannot be because it has the word "vaccine" in the name!
I get it dude, but these slimy 'I'm one of the reasonable ones!' posts gain you nothing and just make holding dissident beliefs harder and more costly as it reinforces exactly what you're complaining about.
After all: you're the conspiracy nutjob who thinks there was some crazzzzzzzzzzzzed conspiracy at local, state, and federal government and their corresponding institutions and people lied repeatedly about facts and stats on the ground and the known effects of lockdowns! I'm one of the reasonable ones, I don't believe lockdowns are the greatest crimes against humanity outside of war. Please don't lump me in with people like you.
Presumably because the lockdown stopped idiots like me from breaking bones playing sports and riding bikes (I've done both) and that decrease in hospital visits was larger than the increase due to COVID? Which was literally the point of lockdowns (at first, before we all went insane).
Had hospitals had to deal with both the regular base-line level of hospital admissions + COVID patients they would likely have gotten absolutely fucked and quality of care would plummet for all.
It also stopped people having heart attacks from going to the hospital, stopped people with cancer from having appointments, et cetera and so forth.
I really hope people with heart attacks, cancer appointments, etc still went
Them not going is a massive failure on our society
I'm not even pro-lockdown, I was very against them by mid 2020 when it was clear no one had a plan or coherent strategy.
I just dislike bad reasoning
A bunch of diagnostic services were cancelled which didn't necessarily reduce the amount of Triage attendees but impacted the discovery of major issues.
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Probably varied heavily by region and severity, and we'll never really know the stats.
At one point early on I had some sort of gallbladder attack, with symptoms fairly similar to appendicitis. I bet on it not being that, and it turned out okay. But maybe somebody else ignored the same symptoms for the same reason and it didn't. So goes life.
As we should!
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To be honest, I just don't believe you.
But more importantly, your thinking seems extremely blinkered, like you can't see the wood for the trees.
Covid was a very infectious disease, hence why even very strict lockdowns were mostly useless. Across the world a very large number of people died and probably a significant majority of the population was exposed to it.
How many people do you think died because of improper medical care from ventilators (keeping in mind the counterfactual where they might die anyway without any intervention)? What was the death rate or side effect rate from vaccines? It's not going to be even 6 figures. It's a fraction of a fraction.
How are you defining side effect? Unless you're defining it narrowly, "side effect rate" is going to be like 90+% of people that take a vaccine- the vast majority of people have some degree of soreness and lethargy after a vaccine, and COVID vaccines seem worse for this than most.
I'm also left to wonder how many side effects were not identified as caused by the vaccines because the message was broadcast loud and clear to every doctor that if you question the vaccines you risk becoming a pariah and a crank.
My wife got a condition that could have also been blamed on the vaccines, but since there was another plausible explanation for it, doctors clung to that other one. I'm not saying they're wrong, but I'm saying I'm not confident that they gave the possibility that the vaccines were the cause a serious, scientific look. Multiply events like this all over and who knows what the death rate/side effect rate even is? That's what happens when achieving political objectives is more important to politicians and the high level medical establishment than achieving the correct medical outcomes.
Thoroughly seconded.
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This is pretty close to COVID being fake. The costs were deliberately overblown (faked) in order to justify the intervention. It's manufacturing consent, and it's clear if you have eyes to see.
This is also deliberate as part of the same manufacturing of consent. This is how the demos is led around. This is how you condition people to hate, by providing approved targets and encouraging marginalization.
I suppose I understand this, but I don't care, and I can't see how anyone with any integrity can care so much about the opinions of others. The weirdos were right, and that made the respectable people uncomfortable. That's what integrity means, that's what it's for. If your rubric stops at "what other people will think" then I don't want you making decisions of any importance.
Lockdowns came in, and persisted, because ultimately the public in most countries were in favour of them.
If you want to stop them next time, then you need to get the average person on side - and for the average person, being associated with "5G causes cancer" is enough for an instant dismissal. Even today, you won't find that many people who really understand how incredibly damaging lockdowns were. You can't win a political argument just by being right
You have it backwards. People were in favor of lockdowns, because they came in and persisted.
Also on the opposing side - there's a lot more people thinking 5G causes cancer then there was before thr pandemic, because the establishment couldn't admit they were wrong. Look at any elite get-together, they've been crying about "regaining ze trust" for years now.
You're not stopping the crazies, you're literally paving the way for publically funded crystal healing.
Maybe. Status quo is a powerful thing. But at the same time, now that lockdowns have been used, it's always going to be a tool people think about whenever there is some crisis. In the UK, for example, there has been a small outbreak of meningitis cases at a University. It's not remotely hard to find people calling for lockdowns. And polling exposed a huge chunk of the population who love being petty tyrants, even today you'll find something like 25% support for closing nightclubs forever.
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Believing wrong things about 5G is less nuts than wanting to imprison the entire planet over a spicy cold. Your hatred of being "lumped in" with them is misplaced. They're wrong but they're better than the other, more dangerously wrong group that actually got to call the shots.
I don't have any issue with being lumped in with other people, it's a very common method of trying to discredit an argument.
But like I said to KMC above, if you actually want to win the argument and prevent lockdowns next time, you need to stop very easy wins for the other side like being tied to extremely dumb conspiracy theories.
That's not your choice. It's the enemy's. (Or, equivalently, the media's)
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