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I share your gut-level distrust of economics and general suspicion of experts, but at the same time I must admit that I have not given a serious attempt at learning economics and if I did, I might realize that at least parts of it are trustworthy.
With regard to such issues in general, I often use the "would many separated groups, even enemies, mostly agree about it?" heuristic. Obviously there is no reason to trust the intelligence community by this heuristic, since different countries' intelligence communities will, for obvious reasons, often completely disagree with each other in public.
On the other hand, most scientific communities and governments in the developed world, even ones in countries that are each others' enemies, support widespread COVID vaccination and treat climate change as a somewhat serious threat. I find it unlikely that the US academic community and the Chinese academic community, and the two countries' respective bureaucracies, are both controlled by one overarching global cabal of consenus-makers. Which leads me to increase my estimate of how likely it is that the so-called scientific consensus about COVID and climate change are accurate.
The response to the great Barrington declaration suggested to me that this consensus was manufactured. I also think the US government hands out a majority of infectious disease research money. So the impression of an independent international scientific community is misleading. Wuhan lab reviewed funding multiple times from the US.
I don't believe they treat it as a serious threat at all. I think they treat as an excuse for economic control. If they treated it seriously there are sub trillion dollar solutions that they could implement: sulfur dioxide seeding in the upper atmosphere, or a large sun shade in outer space.
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