So -- all that said, I think when tempers get heated (or people have just watched a loved one die of a terrible disease), they might be prone to pigeonholing anyone who disagrees with them into the most extreme caricature possible. I try to avoid this: there is plenty of room for discussion around a lot of the uncertainties here, or the degree to which it's appropriate for governments or corporations to mandate that vaccines be administered. Those aren't "flat earther" comments. Saying "actually COVID-19 isn't any more dangerous than a bad flu" is a flat earther comment, because it's a clearly falsifiable premise, which can also easily be falsified using any one of thousands of available data inputs, and it can only be "substantiated" by relying on QAnon bullshit.
Saying "regardless of the risks that COVID-19 poses, I personally do not want to get a vaccine / wear a mask / whatever", is an opinion so it's not falsifiable even if I don't agree with it, so it's also not very useful to try to have an argument about.
That's an interesting take on it. I think being outside the UK you need to consider that here, unlike in large parts of the US (although with Biden's inauguration could this change?) we are still in lockdown. The only reason for that is, SARS-CoV-2. So eventually the debates will inevitably pivot between suppression policies and lethality of the disease.
At the beginning of lockdown last year we were told that it would be just "3 weeks to flatten the curve". Nearly one year later and all our government is hinting at is that it might start easing lockdown at the end of March but that restrictions will not lift completely because we'll then return to Tiers, which as I explained in a previous post is just hopping from one lockdown to another for many people depending on which Tier one lives in.
There's obviously a lot of water gone under the bridge since January 2020 but the all-mortality figures for 2020 are now in. In a pandemic it's the all-mortality figures that are what I've come to understand will ultimately be the main metric we should concern ourselves with. Off of those stats the point that has been made by Dr. Mike Yeadon and Dr. Clare Craig among many others is that the pandemic is over in the UK. It was over by June last year. The winter spike of the dominant virus is high but it is within the envelope given the circumstances (there are excess deaths every winter). To that point, debating what's real and what's not becomes largely immaterial in my view because the data cant lie, even if the media can spin it.
Some stats I've seen just today (although I've not been able to verify them) is that population adjusted mortality rates in the UK were more or less the same for 2020 as they were in 1999. We've had a rough year and we know COVID-19 is nasty but this continuing armageddon upon which brutal locking down resides; bodies "piling up", collapse of the NHS (which if you'll pardon my sarcasm has been collapsing every other year since time began) continues to fuel the news cycle that is driving the hysteria that ultimately perpetuates lockdown because of public support. And that is the critically important point in my view.
Conversely the stats on the damage lockdown is causing are eyewatering. But believe it or not, there seems to be a cohort of people in the UK who dismiss those figures out of hand because "we don't have a reliable model for what the stats would've been if we didn't lock down". The problem here is, people have very short memories. And as Ivor Cummins pointed out, there's a lot of sophistry at play. Government/media already told us (projection or prediction it doesn't really matter any more) that if we didn't lockdown there could be 500,000 deaths due to COVID-19. That was the figure the media ran with and set a ball rolling that hasn't stopped.
One year later we now have a pretty reasonable understanding of the other side of that model. We now know that lockdown has caused a huge backlog of elective surgeries (that we all pay for in our taxes here in the UK) being denied in 2020.
We know that thousands of people were denied routine (and non-routine) cancer screening during 2020. We can only imagine at this point how many of those numbers will translate into an avoidable cancer death.
We know that ONS are being reticent about things like elevated suicide figures, which is why people are looking at other data like, Ambulance call out data, to gauge what is happening regarding that. I heard Dr. Clare Craig state that in London alone, the call out rate for suicide has elevated by about circa 30% during lockdown.
We know that self-harm is up during lockdown.
We know that domestic abuse is up during lockdown.
We know that 250,000 businesses will collapse as a result of lockdown.
We know that generations of our kids and their kids will be burdened with the cost of furloughing 10 million people during lockdown.
Having said all of that, we know that mortality rates, that spiked during the pandemic (which is over), are now within the seasonal envelope. Given all of this, I do not believe that COVID-19 has been the Biblical end times plague that the media whipped up during 2020
and is still whipping up. But I do believe that the vicious policies continually being enacted as a result are outrageously and tragically disproportionate.
To be honest, I think everything else is academic. In my view, at this point in time, if someone is a virus supporter and maintains the narrative hook, line and sinker that is driving the hysteria which our media delights in telling us is "ripping" through the nation then we're never getting out of this mess. I don't like to go the emotional leverage route but if large numbers of people don't seriously began to challenge this then lockdown deaths are ultimately going to be on them. The situation is that serious.
I'd rather not get into the vaccine debate. As I say, I'm beginning to find this process exhaustive and quite honestly, what I wanted to do at the beginning was put the other perspective out there in as few posts as possible and then let people make up their own minds. The only thing I'll say is that I'm not entirely convinced at this point that it's even right to refer to the mRNA jab as a vaccine. Irrespective, my main concern right now is whether or not it's appropriate to deploy novel technology like this on such a grand scale during a period of mass hysteria.
You raised a point about the flu, and the only thing I'd say about that is that I understand why people assimilate the flu with COVID-19.
@Ed209 stated himself that he felt like he had the flu. It's a natural comparison for people to make when things like the flu and various other respiratory viruses do the rounds each year. Also, we know how serious flu is for the elderly, immuno-compromised etc. At the end of the day there's a lot of academics and medics out there who are making the same flu comparison because I suppose as far as mortality, endemicity, infectiousness etc are concerned, it makes sense in their eyes for them to do so.
There are 4 people that I've followed a lot during this past year:
Dr. Mike Yeadon
Dr. Clare Craig
Dr. Malcolm Kendrick
Ivor Cummins
Craig, Kendrick and Cummins have recently done podcasts with a guy called Steve Katasi who I think has done an excellent job of conducting fact based balanced interviews. Those audio (totalling about 6 hours worth) are on his site and between all three I feel there is a useful counter-balance to every aspect of what's been discussed in these threads recently, from the outbreak itself, to the data, PCR, and also the situation regarding things like flow-control through the NHS. If anyone wishes to get a bit more technical, Yeadon is an interesting source on that and there's plenty of stuff out there with him talking.
I'll leave it at that. Suffice to say, these are not conclusions on my part; they're perspectives I suppose. I've also not arrived at them by diving straight in. It's been a long process. And as I said to Ed209 a while ago, if our media had done it's job we wouldn't even be having this conversation. I don't mean to patronise but I sincerely hope that you in the US don't end up en-masse in the mess we're in here because if you do I think there's a good chance your viewpoints may change a bit. Take it easy.