Denier? Maybe. I will defend your right to say that until the very end. The more debate we have over this the better. One thing that has really bothered me since the beginning of all this is that folks have divided into camps and are extremely unwilling to hear any other point of view. I love that this thread has a gajillion posts - the more the better. For something that is this important, we should debate, argue, post data, yell at each other about it, and keep hashing it out. I tend to not trust those in charge (on both sides of the political spectrum), I would rather see the data, read the arguments (like on this thread), and then make decisions for my family based on my own judgement. Thanks for the feedback, and keep it coming! If I post something dumb, I want to know about it. I want to keep learning and figuring all this out. Let's keep it going - even after this is all over.
You can't debate stats and facts and numbers. But you can lie about them or cherry pick them to make a point that doesn't reflect reality. Just like you did to try to make a scientist look like a fool by presenting two different statistics on one graph to purposely minimize the significance of one of them.
You can have a debate in science when there is a new discovery (a novel virus with novel variants), but you can't present new conjectures as fact. Nor cherry pick information from unpublished "studies" that haven't been peer reviewed and show up on anti-vaxxer websites.
Remember hydroxychloroquine? When one doctor had patients who did well after receiving it, he didn't do what scientists are supposed to do: Follow up with a rigorous study and publish the data in a peer-reviews respected scientific journal. Instead, he short-circuited the scientific method by announcing he found a cure-all for COVID. He was wrong. And everyone who got on the hydroxychloroquine train wound up looking like fools, including the president.
Early in the pandemic, there were two doctors running a clinic in California who declared the pandemic was pretty much over because the overwhelming majority of the population already had COVID and we were heading into herd immunity. But they were wrong. They forgot very basic statistical modeling that all medical degrees teach that a self-selecting sample of a population (the people who were coming to their clinic because they were sick with COVID) can not be extrapolated to the general population. They were roundly and justly mocked as fools because they were so, so wrong.
But, according to you, at the time these two false claims were being made, that's just "part of the debate." No. It's not. It's wrong and it's not science and it leads to people getting hurt.
The opposing conjectures in science need to be established as true or false based on the scientific method. Not based on whether the results would lead to further inconveniences of one's "freedoms."
People saying, "but it's just my opinion, and isn't debate good?" Yes, debate is good, if you're going to back up your assertions with the scientific method done correctly. But to throw your opinions out into the general public as if it was true... that's just a fancy way of saying you're lying. Because you have no way of knowing if your "opinion" is really true or false.
Don't know why anyone would do something like that and set themselves up to be roundly mocked when their assertions are shown to be false. The doctor who hyped hydroxychloroquine and the two bozos who declared herd immunity should be sanctioned for their idiocy and their failure to uphold the scientific method and leading people astray.
Perhaps they feel no shame?
So, stop leading people astray with your "opinions.'
