demagogue on 21/2/2022 at 05:55
I can only speak for my own experience.
For me it was ~10 months where I was going to the cardiologist once a week. Most of my heart episodes were around 3~4am, which made me deathly afraid of sleeping, so I'd try to sleep as lightly as possible in little spurts. So during the day I'd be exhausted and useless. Then you add incredible fatigue to that.
But the hard part was that every week there'd be some new slew of symptoms... This week it's debilitating vertigo and room-spinning, this week it's crazy diarrhea, this week it's crazy itchy lungs, this week it's my skin breaking out in rashes all over, this week it's extreme sensitivity to light & pitch, this week it's phantom pangs in my chest like someone pressing their thumbs from the inside, I posted a list earlier somewhere in this thread...
But it just wouldn't end, and sometimes I had to think, well maybe this is life now. I'll go to my grave without ever having a good night's sleep and normal feeling day again. It's the uncertainty that makes it so ridiculous. If one is certain the symptoms will let up, you can soldier through. But if you're really not feeling hope that it will let up, that's what makes it so crushing. You have to put yourself in the frame of mind of someone 6 or 7 months into it without any indication it's going to let up and new symptoms are still emerging! I wouldn't use the phrase "life ruined" because I was still (technically) able to go to work through all of that. (My productivity took an obvious hit though.) It was just psychologically crushing for a good while. I could say there's a lot I wanted to do and couldn't, so I could say it's accurate to say I lost the bulk of a year and a half to it.
This is all anecdotal, so I'm not going to claim it's peer reviewed fact. But it's the kind of experience that dominates a person's day to day life.
catbarf on 22/2/2022 at 14:52
Quote Posted by Thor
I'm also sure that none of you or your acquaintances suddenly had a major dip in overall health/death after any one/multiple of the c19 vaccines (must be just me and all the other misinformation spreaders).
Neither me nor any of my acquaintances have had any major dip in overall health- let alone death- after any vaccine.
So, let's look at the data instead of anecdotes. Oh, the overwhelming consensus of medical trials and subsequent public health observation is that COVID-19 vaccines haven't been associated with death. Funny that. The 'I'm just a rational skeptic' shtick doesn't really hold up if you're ignoring the most objective evidence we have.
Does anyone else remember anti-vax people insisting that the CDC was failing to distinguish between people who died
of COVID-19 and people who died of unrelated causes while positive? It's funny that now that the population is majority vaccinated, apparently anyone who gets sick or dies in proximity to vaccination must have done so because of the vaccine.
PigLick on 22/2/2022 at 15:24
Quote Posted by demagogue
.
This week it's debilitating vertigo and room-spinning, this week it's crazy diarrhea, this week it's crazy itchy lungs, this week it's my skin breaking out in rashes all over, this week it's extreme sensitivity to light & pitch, this week it's phantom pangs in my chest like someone pressing their thumbs from the inside,
But it just wouldn't end, and sometimes I had to think, well maybe this is life now. I'll go to my grave without ever having a good night's sleep and normal feeling day again.
this is my normal life due to some real serious chronic diseases, I am in high risk category and I dread the day I get covid.
faetal on 22/2/2022 at 16:38
Quote Posted by catbarf
The 'I'm just a rational skeptic' shtick doesn't really hold up if you're ignoring the most objective evidence we have.
Yeah, but that evidence was fabricated by SCIENTISTS, who are the establishment, who can't be trusted.
Apart from one scientist who says the vaccine contains HIV. Him, we can trust.
Cipheron on 25/2/2022 at 01:42
Quote Posted by Thor
Interesting, that the
fact checkers denounce a nobel prize winner literally a few days after his death. I'm sure his opinion was based on systematic racism, misogyny, antivaxx and anti-science beliefs.
Where did they "denounce" him? They're saying that he never said it in the first place.
Quote:
Social media users have widely shared a claim that late French virologist Dr Luc Montagnier suggested people who had received a third dose of a COVID-19 vaccine should get tested for human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).
There is no evidence Montagnier said this, and COVID-19 boosters can not lead to positive HIV tests.
Montagnier, who won a Nobel Prize for his part in discovering HIV, died on Feb 8. 2022, according to reports (here, here) .
Social media users have since shared a quote attributed to Montagnier, but
Reuters could not find any evidence the words came from the French scientist.So no, they're not denouncing him for saying stuff. They're saying he never said it in the first place.
Secondly as an aside, what you're doing is "appeal to authority" in that something can't be wrong because a Nobel Laureate said it. That is also why they attached the original conspiracy lie to his name - because it give the liars an air of authority to their lies.
However from Wikipedia:
Quote:
In 2017, 106 academic scientists wrote an open letter "calling [Montagnier] to order". The letter read: "We, academics of medicine, cannot accept that one of our peers is using his Nobel prize [status] to spread dangerous health messages outside of his field of knowledge."
And this was 2017, well before the pandemic so not related to that. The guy was in the right place and time to work on the HIV cases, that's what his Nobel Laureate is about. People were getting sick and he worked in a retrovirus lab, and they were asked to isolate the virus. If he didn't work there, whoever worked there would have discovered it, and gotten the Nobel Prize instead. The prize was awarded because HIV itself was important, not because of his unique discovery or anything.
It doesn't make him a genius at everything. His more recent solo "research" is pure quackery, no peer review, lots of bizarre claims that aren't backed up by anyone else. So no, him having worked on HIV and gotten a Nobel when he was younger doesn't mean shit when he now puts out paper after paper of poorly written pseudo-science quackery. Basically he's just been throwing shit at the wall hoping one of things will stick and cement his fame. Him being in the right lab to work on HIV doesn't make him a genius above other scientists, that's not what a Nobel even means. He was trying to milk that fame later on, but all his solo research was fucking retarded bullshit.
(
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luc_Montagnier)
I mean, there's speculative research, and that's fine. You can have out-there ideas and research them. But this guy is sloppy, unprofessional and prone to outlandish ideas and not backing it up with proper research methodology. The guy was clearly a hack: they have a term for this "pathological science"
He wouldn't be the first Nobel Laureate to do that. A good example is Nobel Laureate in Chemistry Linus Pauling pushing the whole idea that Vitamin C cures/prevents colds. Vitamin C doesn't do FUCK ALL for colds, it's been tested in clinical trials for 50 years and has ZERO effect, but it's a billion dollar industry selling the supplements worldwide based on bullshit written by Linus Pauling. He did this by writing a book about it - which conveniently side-steps the need to do actual science and get your work peer-reviewed.
So yeah ... if a Nobel Laureate says something, use the normal skepticism. If something isn't published and peer-reviewed it's not "science" just because a science-person said it, it's an opinion. A "good" scientist is not one who's always right, it's one with lots of new ideas to try out. Most new ideas will actually be rubbish - you don't come up with new science by being "right" all the time, since then you took no risks and proposed no new ideas.
You shouldn't trust "scientist" with an untested idea *even in* their specific field of expertise. If it's not tested, it's a guess. And that's if they're completely up to date with the state of research in their field. If they're NOT up with all the latest stuff that's another red flag, and if it's not in the specific subdomain that their own research is in, that's a double red flag. This French guy did his good research 40 years ago, since then most people in the field have said his new work is rubbish, so you wouldn't trust him in *virology* let alone a field he doesn't work in.
Cipheron on 28/2/2022 at 18:53
I wanted to run the latest conspiracy post by you guys, it's from a Daily Mail article claiming they're citing a lab's work
(
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10542309/Fresh-lab-leak-fears-study-finds-genetic-code-Covids-spike-protein-linked-Moderna-patent.html)
Quote:
More evidence Covid was tinkered with in a lab? Now scientists find virus contains tiny chunk of DNA that matches sequence patented by Moderna THREE YEARS before pandemic began
...
They claim there is a one-in-three-trillion chance Moderna's sequence randomly appeared through natural evolution.
...
SARS-CoV-2, which causes Covid, carries all the information needed for it to spread in around 30,000 letters of genetic code, known as RNA. The virus shares a sequence of 19 specific letters with a genetic section owned by Moderna
Ok, scientists claim that a 19-letter DNA sequence has a 1 in 3 trillion chance of appearing by random. There's one big problem with that. Since there are 4 possible DNA letters, a 19-long sequence has 4^19 possible combinations. That's 274 billion, which is already less then 3 trillion. And since there are 30000 base-pairs, and it can appear ANYWHERE, then there are 30000 chances to match. That gives actual odds of about 1/10 million.
So what went wrong with their math. I worked it out by reading their paper, figure 2.
They DID get to the 1/10 million figure properly using the same reasoning I used above, but what they did next was a mathematical error. The Moderna data contains 3300 base pairs, so what they did was calculate the probability of an *arbitrary* sequence of length 19 appearing in THAT data, then multiplied it by the probability of it also appearing in the Covid genome data, getting the 1 in 3 trillion figure.
The big problem here is that we are NOT trying to check the probability of an *arbitrary* sequence of DNA appearing in both data sets, but the probability of *any* of the ACTUAL sequences from the Moderna data set also appearing in the Covid genome data.
So there are basically ~3300 sequences from the Moderna data (since we can start on any base-pair). Taking the chance of *each* 19-long sequence out of 3300 not matching *anywhere* out of the 30000 Covid bases gives an actual chance of getting *at least one match of length 19* of 1 in 2777. Which is out from their published figure by a factor of 10 BILLION.
However, there's one final trick they pulled. The 19 letters didn't match in one piece. The actual "match" they found was one sequence of length 12 and another sequence of length 7, presumably matching a sequence of length 19 from the Moderna data. So the thing is, with their "method" you split the 19 long sequence take into two segments and if you find both *segments* in the Covid genome, you can claim a "match" for the whole 19 letters.
Doing that, if you take an arbitrary 19 letters then you can break it into any two sized pieces, I've done the maths (Google Sheets) and there's about a 1/64 chance of finding that sequence (in two pieces) somewhere in the Covid genome. That's down from the 1 in 10 million chance if you were looking for that sequence but were NOT allowed to cut it.
However, that 1/64 doesn't yet take into account the circa 3300 possible points you could have started the sequence in the Moderna data. If you're allow to look for ANY of those AND you're allowed to do the split trick, the probability of finding NONE of them turns into ~ 63/64 ^ 3300. Which is probability so small that Google Sheets just tells me it's ZERO. Approximately 63^3300 / 64^3300.
So FAR from being unlikely it turns out using their methodology you're DEAD CERTAIN to find matching sequences.
faetal on 28/2/2022 at 20:06
Well a source other than the Daily Mail would be the only place to start, as the Daily Mail isn't a scientific source.
I'm not clicking the link because they don't deserve clicks, but I'll assume they didn't put the source in the article?
In which case, better to just invoke (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitchens%27s_razor) Hitchens unless something scientific is provided.
Likely it's just some hack journalist misinterpretation of something.
faetal on 1/3/2022 at 14:29
Got it.
A less scientific, but more obvious question in addition to your breakdown (which is great) is - why are they even comparing Moderna's database of sequences to anything?
Were they putting the cart before the horse? Seems likely, and as you say, they are guaranteed a hit.
Another question - if shady forces are engineering viruses to infect humanity with, why would they do something stupid like copyright the sequence they are going to use and leave that data somewhere it can be found?
What is it with conspiracy theorists thinking that all of the breadcrumbs are going to be left in the open for people to interpret?
I guess in the absence of actual facts, shitty takes on loose associations are all you're left with.
