Those linking climate misinformation with covid misinformation

are seriously embarrassing themselves and don't seem to understand what science is.

This paper ‘Misinformation and the epistemic integrity of democracy’ by Naomi Oreskes, Cook and others, published in Current Opinion in Psychology is a complete nonsense.

They say;

“As with climate change, much of the disinformation surrounding COVID-19 was strategically deployed. It has been estimated that the “anti-vax” online industry accumulates annual revenues of $35 million, and that their audience of 62 million followers may be worth upward of a billion dollars a year for the big social media platforms” This is according to the Center for Countering Digital Hate (2021) but the link could not be found.

Anyone know where this anti vax industry money is going; my cheque must be in the post?

Then they say that the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD), which advocated avoiding lockdowns against the majority of ‘experts’ and called ‘unethical’ by the WHO, is linked to climate consensus deniers the AIER. Again the reference can’t be found. Pro-vaccine, pro-oil Toby Young of Lockdown Skeptics fame is certainly linked to the climate deniers at IEA, the British version of the AIER, and he is funded by BP. Climate deniers did indeed get a boost from being ‘covid’ skeptics.

The authors then go on to reference two very embarrassing studies.

One shows a 0.59% increase in testing positive (for RNA sequences never shown to come from a disease causing entity), which could be for many reasons, in Republican states (who are apparently more likely to believe Covid misinformation) than Democrat ones. They associate the difference with differences in social distancing studied by tracking a couple of hundred thousand people by their smart phones. A 0.59% difference in testing positive for non-specific RNA sequences may be statistically significant in their elaborate computer models, but it certainly isn’t clinically significant.

They then reference differences in ‘excess deaths’ between Republican and Democrat voters. They are not even looking at ‘covid’ deaths, just all cause mortality, again which could be different for many, many reasons. The authors showed a tiny 0.9% difference which then rose to a still small 7.7% difference in 2021 after the mRNA jabs were ‘available to all’. However the authors do not adjust for vaccination status nor do they tell us what percentage in each group were actually jabbed and what percentage were not. I’m sure looking at voters in other State the opposite way around could be found with more deaths in Democrats. This is really poor science.

A 7.7% increase in excess deaths translates into an insignificant difference in the actual death rates between Republican and Democrat voters. The death rate always moves around 1%. The big, 100%, increase in excess deaths in England and Wales in April 2020 compared to April 2015-2019 translated as a 0.128% increase in the number of deaths that year compared to the previous years.

I’m not sure that the authors understand what excess deaths are. If they do, they’re pretending that they don’t. Excess deaths are relative. The differences could be explained by the Republicans actually having a lower average death rate in the previous 5 years compared to 2021 and Democrats having a higher death rate in the previous 5 years compared to 2021. There could also be many other differences in lifestyle and measures between the Red and Blue States or voters that are not related to vaccines at all. Drawing interpretations from observational studies with this quality of evidence is really poor science.

The authors go on to say ‘The response to the COVID-19 pandemic similarly involved increasingly personalized attacks on public health officials, such as Anthony Fauci, who was chief medical adviser to the president during the pandemic and became a central figure in the far-right imaginary.’

Fauci does not have to be part of an imaginary plot for everything he said to be critically analysed. Nor do you have to be far-right to ask for evidence for his pronouncements. It’s basic common sense. Fauci was culpable in deaths from AZT during the HIV/AIDS scandal and the way that he kept changing his mind on masks and other measures during the ‘covid’ debacle did not inspire confidence; whatever one’s political leanings.

Sunetra Gupta of the GBD was until 2020 married to Adrian Hill, who with Saint Sarah Gilbert, his co-owner at Vaccitech, designed a vaccine within 2 weeks of watching 4 Chinese people with pneumonia like symptoms: extraordinarily fast!. Google are heavily invested ($27 million) in Vaccitech and Saint Sarah was set to make £22 million from the AZ jab (if it hadn’t bombed). The words controlled opposition spring to mind.

What to do about misinformation? The authors site a study by Google (remember; heavily invested in vaccine companies!) on how to tackle and censure misinformation; aka suppress scientists who want to discuss evidence.

They suggest inoculation techniques such as this ‘The effectiveness of inoculation at a large scale was demonstrated in a study conducted by Google in Eastern Europe in 2022, which exposed 38 million citizens to brief videos that anticipated misleading arguments against Ukrainian refugees and explained why they were wrong. The campaign generally increased people's ability to identify misleading rhetoric.’ I’ll let that total misinformation about the US proxy war and the anti Russian propaganda speak for itself.

They conclude ‘At the time of this writing, it is difficult to avoid the realisation that one side of politics—mainly in the U.S. but also elsewhere—appears more threatened by research into misinformation than by the risks to democracy arising from misinformation itself.’

They think that we will all die if we start thinking for ourselves and look into vaccine efficacy.

Here’s the ‘covid’ ‘vaccines’ efficacy.

Here’s smallpox vaccine efficacy.

I looked into it and I’m not dead yet.

Scientific debate a threat to democracy? Surely not. Science IS debate. We have no democracy but rather hegemony by powerful industries that lobby governments. They are the ones threatened by debate.

As, apparently, are the authors of this misinformation paper.

Looking forward to debating evidence and what is and isn’t ‘misinformation’ with you John and Naomi; please stop ignoring me.

🐒