@Smokin Joe, there is a huge difference between that snake oil saleman's claim that remdesivir kills those who receive it and studies that examine rare side effects. By Ardis' claim, I should be dead, but am not; by studies such as that from the NIH (one of which is headed up by Fauci, but I guess his faults aren't a consideration for this topic), I'm not one of the rare people who did suffer kidney damage that may have been from remdesivir (or from Covid?).
I mock the likes of RFK Jr., Joseph Mercola, and Bryan Ardis because that is the respect they deserve. They shovel pig crap against walls and it's not worth digging through their pig crap to see if there's a slab of bacon in it, because there isn't.
My point remains that many claims have some basis in verifiable fact. The more adverse the claim to the narrative, the more it will be suppressed. That's not paranoia, we've seen it with treatments, with the way the press uses pejoratives to describe approved drugs, and in complete ignorance of the body of research out there.
When someone makes some sort of claim, I head off to the scientific journals to see what is being said, who is saying, and I look at their methodology and results to see if there are flaws in their study, mainly to see if the conclusions presented are supported by the data, but also to see if the construction of the study was done in such a way as to produce a desired result. There is a big difference between seeing where the evidence leads and setting out to prove something. For most of us, we'll be glad to see this all end. But there are many in political offices and positions who are gaining power and wealth over the bug, and it is obviously going to their heads.
Unfortunately, that has included unbridled censorship and huge pressure for information outlets to conform to the narrative. Therefore, information contrary to the narrative has to seek alternate outlets, or it will b successfully censored. While we might not consider those outlets completely trustworthy or trust their veracity, at this point we're not going to get more than traces of truth in the majors. For that reason, I believe that we should look at what is being said, rather than summarily dismiss it because of
where it is published.
I will go to those websites and look for their sources. I will do web searches for medical literature (journal articles, not sales brochures) on the topic, and see if it is verifiable.
It seems most everyone has something to sell you, whether it be Pfizer, Merck, or some Mom and Pop whipping up Love Potion Number 9 in the sink.
I'm not looking for that, but something to tell me why something does work--or why it doesn't, not just making narrowly based assertions and applying them to a broad spectrum. (Like vaccinating children, who, except for very rare cases, get the bug with few lasting (as far as we know) ill effects, recover and have natural antibodies to fight it and variants in the future). If the shots work, then they should be a boon to those most at risk, and optional for the rest.
We humans are gloriously varied in that we don't all succumb to the same maladies, we don't all react quite the same to a given drug, and that is a survival mechanism for the species as a whole. Otherwise, we'd be pretty easy to wipe out.
Some even have natural immunity or resistance to some pathogens (something being investigated recently in reference to the Plague, looking for genetic variations that the survivors had and may have passed down to their descendants). Others acquire immunity by getting sick and overcoming the bug, with or without help from a wide variety of (now, government approved) pharma, herbs and supplements.
Every culture has had its herbalists, it's medicine men and women, "witch doctors", and pharmacists, and who is to say that an honest and unbiased reassessment of this outbreak won't be made at some time in the future that will look down on the efforts to promote and deride treatments and prophylactic measures for this with the same disdain as we look at the the hawk-billed masks of the Black Death and the penitents flagellating themselves across the continent.
But when someone makes an assertion, I would rather follow the breadcrumbs and see what is there. If there are no sources or data, it's opinion, and maybe even not a learned one, but it should be checked out.
