Help! I need some rebuttals with links to answer friends who are promoting that viral video "Plandemic" alleging conspiracy about Covid19. Especially from those of you that better understand the science. Thanks!
Thanks! Useful links.
Parts of this video set off my Bullshit Detector, it was too choppy and convoluted in presenting a reasonable argument. What it amounted to was casting aspersions on the CDC, Dr. Fauci, Bill Gates and the WHO, suggestions of corruption, greed and criminal acts are not the same thing as producing a smoking gun. From the way the video clips were pieced together I would be willing to go out on a limb and say that at least in part her statements were taken out of context.
What is more disturbing to me is that we live in an age where we no longer trust the fifth estate to provide us with reliable information and the same goes for our government institutions, many people no longer trust them. I have been disgusted to hear politicians offer to level with their citizenry as though they were doing us a favour by proposing to tell us the straight goods, as if we were children that can't handle the facts so they just feed us convenient lies all the time, except on special occasions like pandemics.
A few things of note:
She doesn't say that the virus was genetically engineered but that the virus had been accelerated in its evolution. Gene splicing would leave obvious markers that any decent geneticist would be able to spot but accelerated evolution which is selective breeding would look perfectly natural because this is the way that viruses evolve in the real world.
She also implicates Dr. Fauci in the horrible response to the AIDS pandemic and the millions of lives lost as a result. Certainly the response was lack lustre at best and the virus was touted as a cure for homosexuality, intravenous drug users and others that were deemed unfit for society by some right wing types. No smoking gun but definitely a case could be made that the public health organizations dragged their heals when it came to finding a cure and fortunes were made by the makers of the miracle drugs.
The absolute bungle that has been the response so far in the USA, UK and other nations does lend credence to the idea that perhaps there is an underlying agenda at work and I doubt this video would have gained any traction otherwise. The POTUS rambles on incoherently at daily briefings to the point that many journalist don't even bother to attend these sessions or refuse to air them live because of the inaccuracies presented. The actual numbers are not nearly as high as one would expect in order to justify the lock down of the world and the collapse of the global economy, I don't know a single person who has died from COVID but I do know some people who will lose their businesses, their homes and their life savings before the summer is out. It is little wonder that people are having doubts about the pandemic but let's see what round two brings us, possibly much more devastating than round one but time will tell.
The final teary segment right at the end of the video was designed to tug at the heart strings and that's not good journalism, that's spin and it made me question everything in the video even more. It incites panic, distrust and fear at a time when people are already under a massive amount of stress and are therefore less likely to consider things coolly and logically.
I think something may be rotten in Denmark but I don't think this is it, maybe it will help us track down what is actually causing the smell.
If I may rebut your not-quite-a-rebuttal:
The shambles of a response in the UK and USA was due largely to a political agenda, not to promote a disease or to promote drug manufacturers, but to deny the need for any response and indeed, deny the crisis in the first place. 34 times over the course of the first 3 months of this year, Trump downplayed the problem because he feared it would bring the economy down on his watch. He also praised China's response, a course he's now reversed. It's apparently now all China's fault.
"The numbers are not as high" precisely because of social distancing and the other measures taken to prevent the spread of the virus. You may not know anyone who has died of the disease, but that's because deaths are only(!!!) around 60,000 compared to the numbers we might have right now without taking measures, according to the more optimistic models. And since I work in the prison system, where we now have almost daily deaths among infected prisoners and have lost staff members as well, I almost guarantee that I know someone who's died- even though we don't publicize the names of the prisoners and they're now quarantined at a different facility from mine.
The "lackluster" response of public health organizations has been because they've had one hand tied behind their backs by their political masters. Witness the fact that part of the White House pandemic response is headed by Trump's son-in-law, and staffed by volunteers from the corporate world, who, it turns out, knew nothing about procuring PPE for American hospitals and actgually modified a website to say that the national stockpile was not meant to supply the states, after all. Drs. Fauci and Birx have had to spend vital hours every day correcting the misinformation that Trump blathers, rather than actually doing their jobs.
There's no conspiracy here. It's simply that people like Donald Trump and Boris Johnson are the worst people to have running a nation at this time. Witness New Zealand and Australia's success in fighting the virus. New Zealand is now at a negative rate of infection and Australia is almost flat. Germany is another prime example, in the middle of Europe. We could have done this.
@Paul4747 Thanks for the rebutt of my not quite a butt. The data is sketchy at best, there are no clear answers and that is fertile ground for conspiracy theorists. The death toll may have been reduced by flattening the curve but just how well was social distancing implemented, not very well from my point of view in Canada and we did a much better job compared to the US of A; so was that really the reason that the death toll to date is so low? My point is that it is hard to decide if the situation is the result of gross incompetence or malfeasance. Time will tell.
Canadian, we get to spell it luster or lustre, Eh!
@Paul4747, @Surfpirate Thanks!
Here's one that offers quick (not detailed) rebuttals to several claims:
Thanks, again!
I'm afraid that I don't understand virology well enough to help on that front.
If it were me, though, I would approach this from a different direction anyway: statistics, politics, and logic. Such a conspiracy, after all, would necessarily involve a great many players who aren't generally known to work well together.
I'll see what I can dig up.
Yeah, the science would be slow plodding for me..
Meh, I'm not going to do your OR their research for you. Google is your friend. Ignore hits from sources that aren't credible / reputable.
If they are conspiracy theorists then you'd be wasting your time anyway.
They are not conspiracy theorists but innocent folks susceptible to the latter. If you don't wish to help, that's fine. No need to be snarky about it. I just can't do the research at the moment but needed a source for a quick FB reply.
@TheMiddleWay Thanks for that comment. I agree, especially on reaching out and not writing people off. Hopefully we humanist agnostics/atheists can improve communication with others.