Don't know what to think

[MrsArchchancellorRidcully]

This is a serious qn. I'm not a virus denier, I obey rules and will take the vaccine as soon as I am offered.

Initially the things I saw on social media about conspiracy theories etc made me raise my eyebrows and sigh. They still do to an extent.

But. But. I am confused. I see more and more decent, experienced, sensible scientists raising doubts about how effective testing is, where have all the flu deaths gone and govts have seized this unexpected chance to 'reset the world' and keep people under control for a very long time.

I thought I would reach out to the collective for your views. I swear I'm a moderate. I'm not after a row about whether covid exists. I'm just really conflicted about very 'mainstream' people writing convincing things that make me pause and reflect.

OP, if we stopped testing and carried on our normal lives, how do you explain the £8,000-10,000 deaths per week in hospital this month?

I hate to break it to you OP but government and big business and rich people were ruling the world already. Who did you think was in charge?

Honestly dont think so much, it gets in the way of the conspiracy theories.

various scientists who insist the science is wrong and if we stopped testing it wouldn't be any more serious than the flu

Read that back. We don’t test for flu, bit every year thousands die. If we stop testing for covid, it won’t go away. It will still exist. We just won’t have any kind of grip on how many people have it. People won’t stop needing hospital help just because they don’t know they have covid.

Or are you suggesting it is all in our heads?

You need to read that link I gave you up the thread, OP, it gives the extent to which Heneghan/Yeadon et al have made utterly prepostorous statements all along and proved wrong over and over. Their 'casedemic' rhetoric has no grounding whatsoever and their 'science' falls on its knees in the face of facts.

Try John Burn Murdoch on Twitter instead, or Dr Rachel Clarke, or Prof Devi Sridhar for some balance.

And look at this.

www.covidfaq.co/Carl-Heneghan-and-Tom-Jefferson-Oxford-CEBM-eb9a2ceaff164e90a718a30e4fd14e95

Yeadon is not the ex CEO of Pfizer. He is also not an epidemiologist or virologist.

Some people who are epidemiologists, virologists etc can be found here:

www.ucl.ac.uk/oppenheim/Covid-19_tweeps.shtml

Yeadon tweeted in October that the pandemic was over and has also tweeted a false conspiracy theory about a hospital being empty and the surgeons playing golf. He's not a reliable source for anything really.

As for Heneghan:
One of the sad academic stories of the pandemic is the downfall of Oxford's Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine. For those (myself included) who looked up to CEBM's research before the pandemic, it's very disappointing to see the damage done to its reputation in the last year.
mobile.twitter.com/redouad/status/1354363219305967618

what if covid has given govts and large business and wealthy people the chance they have been looking for to 'rule the world'.

Err, that happened before Covid.

If we stopped testing it wouldn't be any more serious than the flu??? OP come on. If we stopped testing does that mean people wouldn't be in hospital from it? All hospitals back to normal? That's a really incredulous argument.

I can't believe that people are still being swayed by these 'arguments.' People don't end up in intensive care because of a test, they end up there because of covid - tested or not.

If we learn anything from this pandemic, I hope that it will be that we need to invest much more heavily in teaching good critical thinking skills, so that people don't just believe any shit that they read online.

I follow Carl Henneghan on Twitter.

I find he says thoughtful critical things about the unmeasured costs of Lockdown. I think he's interested in how to reduce net harms & do we really know what the price is we're paying in trying to 'control' the virus. Those are questions worth asking -- I guess I would say that since I veer into being lockdown skeptic.

I worry about how do we know when these measures are right ones and when they aren't -- what if another virus comes along with a death rate half of that of covid, or 10% of covid... at what point is the lockdown price too high? How does anyone know?

I never know how much Twitter filters things I don't want to see... just that I never noticed CH saying anything like "chance to 'reset the world' and keep people under control for a very long time". I don't see that CH subscribes to those conspiracy theories.

CH cowrote the editorial about why live tracking of covid deaths should be those within 28 or 30 days, which was a good recommendation.

Yeadon is not on my radar so I don't care about him.

I am a scientist.

I watched and read a few of Michael Yeadon's statements and videos.
He makes no sense. What he says is pure scientific nonsense and gibberish. I don't think the scientific community takes him seriously.