zlacker

>>southe+(OP)
This whole article is really confusing. It sounds like there were two things:

- Covid disinformation

- Some nonsense about Hunter Biden

and they're being conflated. What does Hunter Biden's laptop have to do with preventing Covid disinformation? A disease that was estimated to kill up to 30m people worldwide.

>>scott_+O4
The US gov pressured social media companies to censor posts about both those topics for political reasons, even though a lot of what was said turned out to be true

>>cheese+b5
> censor posts about both those topics for political reasons

In the context of Covid disinformation, "political reasons" is simply not correct. We're only 2 years out but it was clear even at the time that there was a concerted effort to pretend there wasn't an active pandemic and governments were right to crack down on it.

The only thread connecting them is "disinformation" which is tenuous at best. It's not clear to me what Zuckerberg's letter refers to because the article seems to move between the topics as though they're basically the same thing.

>>scott_+z5
There's a scene is "30 Rock" where Alec Baldwin gives a speech the morning after a party that got way out of hand about how they must now all face each other in the cold, hard light of dawn. To me, it sort of feels like we are living through that now after covid. We've learned things about people that we didn't really want to know; particularly that others don't place a lot of value on our lives (something that anyone who grew up with a health condition could already have told you). It's all rather discomfiting.

I suppose it's human nature to reach out for miracle cures, but the way people behaved in the pandemic still surprised me. Reaching for random drugs like hydroychloroquine or dewormers (why couldn't it have been a fun drug like cocaine?) and eschewing actual covid vaccines makes one wonder how it is possible that one shares a reality with their fellow humans. Obviously they do not.

>>silver+F8
> I suppose it's human nature ...

It's pretty simple, the different realities like you said. People consume and trust different streams of information (for a whole bunch of reasons). Your info stream probably told you that people were gobbling horse goo and aquarium cleaner and dying by the droves, while threatening your grandmother, and you believed it because the sum total of your experience told you that was the most believable of the options.

Other peoples experiences led them to believe sources saying that there was a thing called ivermectin that sees use in agriculture but also in billions of human doses as an antiparasitic that seems to be helping against covid (and that big corporations are not to be trusted).

There are life stories behind each of these perspectives. Many people with either of these perspectives had never heard of ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine before their media of choice started praising or condemning them. Then suddenly they were experts.

I never took any of it. Was that the right decision? It seems to have worked out at least. I do try to avoid the trap of thinking any of the stuff blasted out by the media corporations, at no cost to you, has any other purpose than to get you to 1) vote a certain way or 2) buy a certain product, or 3) support some forever war. The news corps aren't just generously informing you - there has to be an ROI.

>>ifyoub+Qe
Interestingly I knew an engineer who took fish medication long before covid, and I came to respect that sort of DIY ethos for medicine and have taken it on myself where possible. Veterinary medications are just medications, so that sort of characterization tended to fly over my head a bit. But if there was a drug that easily cured covid, it would be obvious because it would easily cure covid.

>>silver+gl
> But if there was a drug that easily cured covid, it would be obvious because it would easily cure covid.

And that could explain why a lot of people believed ivermectin works: they had covid, they took ivermectin, they got better. They don't see the alternate universe where they didn't take it and they also got better, because that's what happens most of the time.

I'm convinced this is why so many other people think the vaccine was a miracle. We were being blasted with the idea that covid was a death sentence, so if you had a plain old mild case (like most cases were), it had to be because of some intervention (ivermectin or the shots or the phase of the moon).

I think this is true for most of the shit the medical industry tries to push on you, but I'm a kook and I know it.

>>ifyoub+yp
Yes, the dynamic you identified is why sham treatments have sold for millennia. Teasing out what works is tricky. For some (to include people I knew) covid was a death sentence, but the fatality rate was around one percent, wasn't it? You'd never fly on a plane that crashed in one out of one hundred flights, but still they aren't too bad as odds go. Even so, once the vaccine came out, the only people I knew who died of covid were those who did not take it. Merely the observation of one individual, but it seems to match the wider data that was found.

So given that information, what is one to do? I took the vaccine and take the newer versions now too along with a flu shot.

>>silver+Jr
The worldwide population COVID-19 infection fatality rate was estimated at about 0.27%, so substantially less than 1%. That number varied widely based on age.

http://dx.doi.org/10.2471/BLT.20.265892