The Most Important Thing in a COVID Debate
I've been meaning to write a post about this for a while but keep getting distracted. However, I've got another hour to kill at Addis Ababa airport so I'm writing it now but without the graphics I had originally intended to do.
Even now, with the abundance of evidence showing that none of the COVID interventions was effective but most were quite harmful - especially the “vaccine” - we still find ourselves being demanded to defend our analyses.
Since I disengaged with the trolls some time ago, it's actually amongst ourselves that we do this, clinging to the scientific method of falsifying hypotheses and having ourselves reviewed honestly by our peers.
My problem with this is that we lose sight of the most important thing in a COVID debate. That is, upon whom is the burden of proof?
Spoiler alert: it’s not us.
When the Government, one of its agencies or a pharmaceutical company intervenes into the lives of ordinary people, the burden is on them to prove that their intervention was:
Necessary.
Safe.
Effective.
At this point, I was going to illustrate the point with probability distributions and confidence intervals but there's actually no need. I think most people can get the gist simply with the analogy of setting the bar.
There is no bar for us but the one for them is set extremely high.
And yet, they have done nothing to prove they have attained it with respect to the three essential, aforementioned points.
If you want the salient facts that go with it, I thoroughly recommend this article by Robin Koerner, Academic Dean of the John Locke Institute:
I've learned so much from this debacle.
1) Don't blindly trust govt or HC industry.
2) Do your own research.
3) You can't help people who don't want your help.
Basically, my default assumption is I'm on my own, until people/institutions earn my trust. As a veteran of Wall Street, this skeptical approach comes easily to me.
An easy way to summarize this article is to quote Carl Sagan: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". Using that standard, the government response was a complete failure and an attack on both science and reason.