Hi
@linearb (how ya doin?)
I am well, thanks, I hope you are as well
I see these political and financial interests at play literally every night when I watch the evening news and their coverage on COVID-19.
The stink of Capital more or less pervades and perverts everything, so an incredulous person needs to constantly be questioning data sources. To be frank, I don't turn on the evening news, and I try pretty hard not to consume very much besides primary sources, and when I read whitepapers that seem to have any significance the next two things I do are check the stated conflicts of interest, as well as looking into the background and former work of the authors. If I don't have the background to make some comparison or interpret some part of a paper, I try to find someone in my trusted network who has a professional & academic background in whatever discipline is involves and see how they parse it.
This is tiring and time consuming but it's sort of the only way to understand basically anything right now, as far as I can tell :-/
This leaves a wide, wide margin of things it's not really possible to come to any concrete conclusions about, and so past a point I have to trust people to make their own decisions. On the other hand, consider these three questions:
"Is there good evidence, or reason to believe, that a gram positive antibiotic will be beneficial in treating an infection with a gram positive pathogen?"
"Is there good evidence, or reason to believe, that news channel A is more reliable than news channel B?"
"Is there good evidence, or reason to believe, that the Earth is actually flat like a piece of paper?"
To me, #1 is an obvious "duh, yes", #2 is an obvious "duh, no, you're loony for asking", but #2 is where the devils of details and our personal biases tend to creep in (and there are plenty of other undecidable problems like this).
All that said, if every mainstream source from multinational press is more or less telling the same story, there are likely to be
many factual elements to it, even if the
narrative is something that's been constructed to serve the interests of Capital (as all media narratives are, one way or another).
I don't actually know what they're saying about COVID-19 in the press right now, honestly! I follow the local numbers so I know what level of precautions is appropriate for us, and I follow non-preprint peer reviewed stuff and sometimes look at ScienceNews as an aggregator, and that's about it. The CDA & FDA have made enough statements through this which are not, in fact "following the science", that I decided by mid-2020, if I was, in fact, going to "follow the science", I'd need to do it on my own. I am fortunate to have a couple seriously credentialed infectious diseases specialists and MDs in my personal and close professional networks to help me parse unfolding or controversial information.
The media shoots itself in the foot on this stuff constantly. Case in point: I don't think Ivermectin does anything useful for COVID-19, but, I also don't think it's "horse dewormer". Yes, some people acting on low information were taking veterinary preparations, but Ivermectin is a pretty conventional anti-nematode pharmaceutical that's widely available in human formulations, which is in fact what a bunch of people took in some of these cases. But, you know, "ERs overflowing because dumbasses eat horse paste" makes a better headline than "ERs overflowing because of decades of systemic rot in the healthcare system, followed by One Weird Pandemic that pushed it over the edge" isn't the kind of headline that makes Blue/Red MAGA neocon/neolib types feel comfortable about going to brunch again, so, we get the horse paste headline.
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