Updated 1 year ago
Before you watch documentaries, be sure to wiki them first. Too much antivaxxer Trumpian propaganda is flying around. Trump feeds off this chaos, and right now, if you pass this along you are helping kill hundreds of thousands of Americans.
For once I am not being a drama queen. Stop it, fuckers. Deprive Trump of his oxygen.
Here is a painstaking list debunking the claims of the video, by Dr. Kat Montgomery. Information about the scientist (who was caught fabricating data, fired for unsafe practices, and arrested for stealing) is easy to find, just search her name.
Dr. Montgomery is also a real person. Google her if you must. It is good to be a little skeptical; this certainly looks like one of those fake chain letters.
It isn’t.
First, background: I’m a physician (specifically a board-certified pathologist, which include microbiology and laboratory medicine) with a master’s degree in epidemiology.
In the last day or two, several friends have shared or posted about a video “documentary” called “Plandemic”. The film depicts now-discredited former researcher Judy Mikovits who shares a plausible-sounding narrative about the current pandemic. The problem here is that nearly all of her scientific statements are demonstrably false. If you have more to add to this list, or credible data to the contrary, please start a discussion. I suspect there are many more false claims in this video, but these are just the ones that stuck out to me as a physician with epidemiology training.
– She states “There is no vaccine for any RNA virus that works.” Incorrect: Polio, hepatitis A, measles, to name a few.
– Her retracted paper was actually not about vaccines at all, even though she insinuates that it was.
– She states that Ebola could not infect humans until it was engineered to do so in the laboratory. This is false.
– Likewise, many other zoonotic viruses have been shown to gain mutations that allow them to infect humans. This would not be some kind of new, crazy idea. We actually predicted it years ago: we just didn’t know exactly which virus or when it would occur.
– She states that the US was working with Wuhan to study coronaviruses years ago, like it’s a “gotcha” moment: yes, of course we were doing this – Wuhan is a coronavirus hotspot and it makes sense to study this family of viruses where it naturally occurs.
– She states that COPD lungs are identical to COVID-19 lungs. As a pathologist, this is ludicrous – any practicing physician would be able to tell COPD from COVID-19, both clinically and histologically.
– The statement taken out of context from the CDC death certificate recommendation reads in full “In cases where a definitive diagnosis of COVID-19 cannot be made, but is suspected or likely (the circumstances are compelling within a reasonable degree of certainty), it is acceptable to report COVID-19 on a death certificate as “probable” or “presumed”. In these instances, certifiers should use their best judgment in determining if a COVID-19 diagnosis was likely. Testing for COVID-19 should be conducted whenever possible.”. My physician colleagues are not being pressured to put COVID-19 on death certificates when it should not be there.
– The idea that physicians are incorrectly diagnosing COVID-19 due to financial incentive is also ridiculous. Medicare sometimes bundles payments for some conditions (i.e. if you have a heart attack, medicare may pay XX for your treatment) – it’s possible the hospital could get paid $13,000 for your COVID-19 admission, but do you know what that’s based on? The fact that the average cost of a hospital admission for a respiratory condition is $13,297.
– She states that hydroxychloroquine has been “extensively studied in this family of viruses” – in fact, it has not been studied well in coronaviruses. It HAS been studied in malaria, which is not a virus. And yes, it is considered an essential medicine for the treatment of malaria. Not for coronaviruses.
– Furthermore, the data on hydroxychloroquine are much weaker than they originally appeared: the small study that was highly publicized was not a randomized controlled trial, and the only patients who died were those who received hydroxychloroquine (and these were EXCLUDED FROM ANALYSIS!). This is terrible science. Even so, we want to investigate all possible treatments, so controlled trials are being conducted on hydroxychloroquine right now.
– She insinuates that there is a hydroxychloroquine shortage as a result of reduced production. In fact, there is a shortage because people who take this medication regularly are stockpiling it and because physicians are using it for COVID19 patients because they have nothing else to try.
– “All flu vaccines contain coronaviruses”. Nope, absolutely false.
– The ideas that sheltering in place somehow harms your immune system or that you may reactivate a virus in yourself by wearing a mask have been thoroughly debunked in other posts and I won’t get into the details here. Both national societies of emergency medicine have condemned the statements of these doctors, one of whom is not board-certified.
– Lastly, private companies removing false information from their platforms does not represent repression or promotion of propaganda. It’s helping to promote the spread of sound scientific information. If you think lies should be permitted to circulate freely alongside the truth with the intention of reaching people who won’t be able to tell the difference, you are part of the problem.
“Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.”
“More things should not be used than are necessary.”
Occam’s Razor: The simplest, likeliest explanation is usually the correct one.
Some unspoken assumptions of most conspiracy peddling
There are no coincidences
If someone took the time to give me all this complex information I didn’t have, there must be something to it.
But complexity or nuance in any denial or explanation is evidence of a cover-up
Experts can’t be trusted.
Expertise is meaningless in all fields, and education and official “expertise” make you less trustworthy, rather than more.
Except for this one expert I found.
All ideas are worth considering. Well, all ideas that come across my social media feed anyway.
Except for any ideas that are widely believed. Those are lies. Except for the ones that are obviously true and I believe, like, say, gravity’s existence, and the fact that cars need gasoline to drive.
Anyone who doesn’t accept my latest narrative must only get information from mainstream media.
Any information new to me must be new to everyone else, too.
If they don’t believe it, they must be dismissing it because they’re closed-minded.
Being open-minded means never knowing anything.
Except we all KNOW something secret and evil is going on. If I don’t understand something, no one else is able to.
If you accept anything the mainstream media report, that means you accept everything they report, and you support global industrial capitalism
Power is static. Nothing essential has changed in this country or the world order for at least about 100 years.
The powerful secret elite is competent enough to continue pulling off massive conspiracies, but either too dumb to hide their tracks from random YouTubers, or purposely leaving breadcrumbs to taunt us.
If you don’t accept my current conspiracy narrative, you deny the possibility of conspiracies.
