HeartDoc Andrew wrote:
> Michael Ejercito wrote:
>
>> https://www.reddit.com/r/LockdownSkepticism/comments/1fweoqu/some_of_our_top_schools_are_embarrassing/
>>
>>
>> Some of Our Top Schools Are Embarrassing Themselves Over Covid
>> Why are places like Stanford and Johns Hopkins hosting gatherings of
>> well-known coronavirus cranks?
>>
>> Gregg Gonsalves
>> Share
>>
>>
>>
>> Stanford University President Jonathan Levin.
>> Stanford University president Jonathan Levin
>>
>> (Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)
>> Today, Stanford University is holding an all-day gathering on the Covid
>> pandemic, with its new president making opening remarks. It’s the second
>> such meeting at a prestigious university in recent months, after Johns
>> Hopkins hosted a “symposium on health policy” in September. They may
>> seem fine on the surface, but both events should be a source of
>> embarrassment for the institutions involved. (I have a personal stake in
>> the former gathering: I’m spending my time this fall at Stanford with a
>> group of wonderful, truly talented researchers, who I hope do not get
>> sprayed with the stink of this misbegotten affair.)
>>
>> The video player is currently playing an ad.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> While the organization and funding for these two meetings isn’t
>> explicitly linked, the cast of characters at both are eerily similar.
>> They each feature a collection of well-known Covid contrarians: those
>> who, in the early days of the pandemic thought we should “let ’er rip”
>> and get as many people infected as possible, with a performative nod to
>> protecting the vulnerable; suggested that vaccine and mask mandates were
>> somehow akin to Nazi totalitarianism; told us not to worry about
>> variants (“variants, schmariants,” as one of them remarked months before
>> Delta and Omicron blasted their way through the US); and said we’d have
>> herd immunity by April 2021.
>>
>> If you want just one piece of evidence about the kind of cranks we’re
>> talking about, consider this: A late addition to the Stanford meeting is
>> a senior editor of the Epoch Times, a far-right publication that not
>> only dabbles in Covid conspiracies but is a frequent purveyor of climate
>> change denialism.
>>
>> While the organizers have tried to add a few reasonable voices to the
>> meeting, it doesn’t change the overall thrust of these gatherings. As
>> former Texas governor Ann Richards said, “You can put lipstick and
>> earrings on a hog and call it Monique, but it’s still a pig.”
>>
>> Health reporters like Michael Hiltzik at the Los Angeles Times blew the
>> whistle on the Stanford conference in mid-September, and others who have
>> focused on debunking the pseudoscience of this crew have written about
>> the meetings on both coasts. The faculty at both institutions who are
>> pushed for and are behind these convocations have defended them on the
>> grounds of academic freedom—a defense that, in our current era of
>> freakouts over “cancel culture,” neither Stanford or Hopkins would have
>> had an easy time overcoming. Chalk one up to the contrarians for putting
>> these schools in an impossible situation—though that still does not
>> explain why Stanford’s president feels the need to personally show up today.
>>
>> The architects of these meetings come with bags and bags of right-wing
>> funding, some of it laundered through think tanks and other
>> institutions. They have met with Trump officials in the White House and
>> guided Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on Covid-19 policy. Some of them
>> even got a shout-out from Bret Stephens at The New York Times last week.
>>
>> They whine on and on about how terribly they’ve been treated, but, far
>>from being persecuted, they are celebrated on the right, even if the
>> mainstream members of their professions have, time and time again,
>> considered their ideas and roundly rejected them on their merits.
>>
>> My question is: Why host these meetings now and in these venues?
>>
>> Some have suggested this is about “auditioning” for the next Trump
>> administration as much as it is trying to rewrite the history of the
>> pandemic. Both are in part probably true. But if you zoom out and think
>> about these meetings in the context of the right’s war on higher
>> education, I believe the purpose becomes clearer.
>>
>> These Covid contrarians—who have found little support for their views
>> among their peers—have decided that the science has been turned into “a
>> dogmatic tool of oppression” for rejecting them. In their minds they are
>> Galileos against the church, and now they are tilting their fury against
>> the institutions themselves. This tack is of course reminiscent of the
>> right’s attacks on the universities as bastions of woke, left-wing
>> ideology, which either need to be reformed (by hiring more conservative
>> faculty) or gutted and rebuilt to their liking (e.g., New College of
>> Florida).
>>
>> In this light, these two meetings are about establishing a
>> beachhead—building credibility in what many of the organizers would
>> consider the liberal bastions of academia. If you cannot convince your
>> colleagues of the worth of your arguments, then you can cry out that
>> you’re being discriminated against for simply having “differing views.”
>> But things don’t work like that in science: we don’t teach intelligent
>> design alongside evolution, or alternative theories of the cause of
>> AIDS. Supporters of those discredited ideas would say we need to “teach
>> the controversy” and not be dogmatic, but there is no controversy to be
>> had: the preponderance of the evidence supports evolution and HIV as the
>> cause of AIDS. Similarly, many of the Covid contrarians’ favorite claims
>> have withered in the sunlight of scientific scrutiny.
>>
>> Current Issue
>> Cover of October 2024 Issue
>> October 2024 Issue
>> But just as the Federalist Society has established influence over law
>> schools and the judiciary, the Covid contrarians and their supporters
>> would like to do the same for medicine and public health, by
>> mainstreaming their views—both in academic settings and then in public
>> policy—by sheer brute force. They won’t give up, and they have the money
>> and resources to continue their campaigns. Should former president Trump
>> regain the White House, their fortunes will rise and these threats to
>> academic integrity, and to the public health itself (through adoption of
>> their views in practice) will go into overdrive.
>>
>> And for anyone who thinks this is all academic, in mid-September, the
>> surgeon general of Florida recommended against the use of mRNA Covid
>> vaccines, just as we’re heading into respiratory virus season,
>> endangering the lives of the residents of the state with quackery and
>> pseudoscience. Of course, it’s the same Covid contrarians who have
>> organized these meetings, who have been advising the DeSantis
>> administration for several years now on pandemic policy. Shame on them.
>
> In the interim, we are 100% prepared/protected in the "full armor of
> GOD" (Ephesians 6:11) which we put on as soon as we use Apostle Paul's
> secret (Philippians 4:12). Though masking is less protective, it helps
> us avoid the appearance of doing the evil of spreading airborne
> pathogens while there are people getting sick because of not being
> 100% protected. It is written that we're to "abstain from **all**
> appearance of doing evil" (1 Thessalonians 5:22 w/**emphasis**).
>
> Meanwhile, the only *perfect* (Matt 5:47-8 ) way to eradicate the
> COVID-19 virus, thereby saving lives, in the US & elsewhere is by
> rapidly (i.e. use the "Rapid COVID-19 Test" ) finding out at any given
> moment, including even while on-line, who among us are unwittingly
> contagious (i.e pre-symptomatic or asymptomatic) in order to
> "convince it forward" (John 15:12) for them to call their doctor and
> self-quarantine per their doctor in hopes of stopping this pandemic.
> Thus, we're hoping for the best while preparing for the worse-case
> scenario of the Alpha lineage mutations and others like the Omicron,
> Gamma, Beta, Epsilon, Iota, Lambda, Mu & Delta lineage mutations
> combining via slip-RNA-replication to form hybrids like "Deltamicron"
> that may render current COVID vaccines/monoclonals/medicines/pills no
> longer effective.
>
> Indeed, I am wonderfully hungry (
> https://groups.google.com/g/sci.med.cardiology/c/6ZoE95d-VKc/m/14vVZoyOBgAJ
> ) and hope you, Michael, also have a healthy appetite too.
>
> So how are you ?
>
I am wonderfully hungry!

Michael