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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023

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Covid global health emergency is over, WHO says

Yes, I know, Covid "has been over" for well over a year, pretty much no-one cares about this topic anyway, but I wonder if we'll now start more getting full appraisals of the entire Covid period. It is bewildering to consider how little people (apart from the two formed and ongoing "Covid tribes" - lockdown/vaccine skeptics on one hand, zero-covidists still wearing masks on the other hand) care about Covid now, considering how large it loomed for two years. For instance, I watched some Finnish election debates a few months ago, and the dire financial/general status of the health care system was frequently discussed with almost no mentions and indications that the Covid crisis and the decisions done during this period might have had anything to do with it.

What are all the ways people here would say the pandemic era changed the world? I don't think that all the effects will be visible or evident for years to come - there will yet be a lot of stuff where people in ten years might say "of course the Covid era changed that" but isn't properly yet considered to be a Covid effect.

Can we start to criticize the response yet?

Can we talk about rolling stone lying about ivermectin overdoses clogging hospitals?

Can we talk about cnn changing joe rogan's skin tone when he got covid for like a day?

Can we now talk about the financial incentives of some of the pharma companies and the hard push for mandatory vaccines?

Or the people who got fired for asking these questions?

Oh, you can even say that it was a lab leak, now:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64806903

Or the Lancet study for hydroxychloroquinen that had more covid subjects reported than covid cases for some countries. Who fakes a clinical trial to show something is ineffective if they don't have reliable cure waiting in the wings?

I was (and am) a heavy covid response skeptic (and continue to think the need to find a cure was for the vast majority of the population a solution in search of a problem) and saw a lot of sketchy data / science during the lockdown. What you are purporting takes the cake. Do you have a cite?

It's the surgisphere scandal. Impossible data initially taken at face value because it was politically convenient.

I read this summary of the scandal and it seems that papers based on false data provided by Surgisphere claimed that hydroxychloroquine was ineffective, which led to delays in real trials of hydroxychloroquine, but also that ivermectin was effective, which led to its use before the results of real trials were available.

Among the people who were arguing about covid treatment based on politics before any sound research was available, there was one side (Trump and co.) that supported the use of both drugs and another (CNN and co.) that claimed both were ineffective and opposed their use. The Surgisphere scandal appears to be embarrassing for both sides.

In the end, the trials determined that neither drug was effective.