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Feb 16, 2022·edited Feb 16, 2022

The biggest problem with accepting stratified risk as a reality has everything to do with the current en vogue paranoia about "equity" sweeping our society. Understanding risk factors means "doing more" for some people than others; or it can mean enforcing "harsher rules/mandates" on some groups more than others. Or it can mean expecting those who need to protect themselves more to do it on their own, not putting an undue burden on the rest of society to have to deal with a small group's concerns relative to the greater populace.

This is inconsistent with the way certain members of certain political parties are taught to think. Today, we are taught that any application of any societal rules that have a "disparate impact" is fascist/racist/-phobic. We are also living in a time when the great majority are supposed to give way for the specialized physical and/or mental needs of the smallest of minorities, so as not to cause "oppressive" conditions.

The truth is the world is not fair or equitable. We may be "born" equal, but entropy happens, and we don't end up that way. The overweight, elderly person with bad hygiene and genetic predisposition to certain illnesses who needs to use mass transportation is out of luck sometimes.

A healthy 5 year old in kindergarten shouldn't be forced to lose his childhood because of this.

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Feb 16, 2022·edited Feb 16, 2022

Very reasonable article and yet not one mention that the FDA suspended long-term testing of this new class of vaccine. Scientifically speaking we have no idea what it's going to do to people long term. Also no mention about treating the disease of covid. The world has many many doctors who have had extraordinary success treating this disease using various means both early middle and late treatment... Hell as a country we can't even recommend vitamin d for covid... The national health system is a joke and doctors cowering in the face of political pressure speaks more about the moral ethical weakness of physicians than it does about the state of medical science in our country. I don't disagree with anything the good doctor said but it's interesting the areas he didn't cover and one can presume why.

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founding

Everyone needs to get vaccinated with the vaccine for the variant that isn’t circulating anymore. Do it for the children.

I’m actually starting a business called ‘Nostalgia Vaxx’ where we vaccinate you against flu strains from the 1990s.

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I have a 6 year gold granddaughter who has been getting speech therapy MASKED! That's criminal.

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So refreshing to see a very reasonable viewpoint from a medical professional. No one trusts Fauci or the CDC anymore because they have blatantly lied about alternative treatment options, the origin of this virus, natural immunity, masking and much more. I am not anti-vaccine but I will not take this particular vaccine because I am not only young and healthy but I have natural immunity from getting Covid and beating it in two days. I will not be forced into putting something in my body that based on the research, I do not need. In a few years from now, we will look back on this time with regret for the horribly unconstitutional mandates and the psychological damage that fear mongering and masking has done to kids. I hope we as a nation, and science, can recover from this - we need truth, moderation and bravery now more than ever.

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Great piece. Gee...I wonder if these "noble lies" and not so noble lies might be applicable to climate science?

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Excellent article, Dr. Prasad. You clearly lay out the case for the inexplicable use of a blunt force, one-size-fits-all instrument used to address Covid when a more nuanced approach would have been far better.

Another Covid casualty - for myself and my wife - is the complete distrust we now have for any government agencies (NIH, CDC, FDA…..etc), politicians or media that spout their never-ending nonsense to us. Seemingly working in concert they turned a medical problem into a political problem. We will never trust a word they say without a heavy dose of skepticism. Fauci, Collins, Walensky, CNN, MSNBC, Kamala, Biden…..they all either lied to our faces or were too dumb to know they were repeating lies. Shame on them.

Keep up the good work……and, turn up the heat.

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Great post. I actually believe vaccine uptake would have been higher--at least among everyone above the age of about 30--had there been more honesty from the start. The extent to which health officials have destroyed their credibility during this pandemic may prove to be one of its most harmful long term effects.

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Feb 16, 2022·edited Feb 16, 2022

Good article:

But I would argue the killing of science started with the global warming debate. The tactics that Dr. Prasad decries were started by Al Gore and his ilk. I had no stance on global warming 6-7 years ago until I heard a number of Gore supporters (and Gore himself) basically state that they "don't debate anyone that disagrees with them." Well that isn't science, so I started digging. And it went beyond not debating. It went into full fledged career destruction, defunding of projects, etc etc. To the point where only the almost retired or very reputationally stable or the occasional rebel was willing to make any counter arguments. And I've heard the argument that, "global warming is probably an issue, so why not just get everyone behind it?" Well, the fanatical approach undercuts the practical. (argued by Michael Shellenberger, Bjorn Lomborg, and Steven Koonin). It degrades trust in institutions when free thinking adults look at the hyperbole next to the data and realize it doesn't match up. Especially when that hyperbole is used to push destructive policies that hurt people's livelihood and don't actually solve the stated problem (as is the case of many of the proposed policies). And there are even more negative externalities to this approach. 1) To get everyone scared about global warming our scientists blame every problem on global warming. This takes research and focus on solving other real and important environmental problems not caused by global warming. (Falling biodiversity, shrinking habitats, chemical pollution etc.) 2) It turns citizens against each other (same as described above) so there can't be a rationale debate about the problem 3) It hurts our understanding of our world when scientists are incentivized to search for one signal in the messy study of Earth's ecosystem, 4) It is an attack on the mental health of younger generations. There are already stories of young people feeling more depressed and getting sterilized so they don't bring children into the future destruction of the world, etc. 5) And it gives gov't an excuse to claim emergency and whittle away our freedoms. I want to make clear - I'm not against worrying about global warming. But I'm on the side of the scientific method first. And any group that deviates from the scientific method, in any area of study, is doing it for a reason that probably is political and not good for society. What Dr. Prasad describes as the problem has been going on long before COVID. The politicization of science and the attack on the scientific method needs to be stopped.

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What a great article with excellent points. Thanks Doc.

But I still wonder about suspension of long term testing, no testing on fertility, and the fact that I had to learn about Vitamin D, Quercetin, Zinc, and NAC from "nefarious sources" spreading "lies and rumors".

I'm 63 and I take these simple supplements, and haven't gotten sick with anything, since a strange hacking cough I had around Christmas 2019. 🤔

Anything, that is, but my second Pfizer shot last April. The strange symptoms finally subsided in November.

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These ten lessons were well known and part of practicing medicine prior to Covid-19 and then "Dr's" Birx, Fauci' and Redfield - all government apparatchiks - screeched the opposite. Follow the money... Medical boards were then coerced to avoid cheap, effective treatments in favor of corporate treatments called vaccines that, in light of VAERS data, would never have been released.

The greatest lesson learned, for me anyway, is that all of our institutions are compromised by everything other than actual science; the policies of our govt 'leaders and scientists' led to tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths and nobody will be punished.

On the upside I now know the effective treatments like Ivermectin and have obtained healthy supplies.

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The left was the first group to scream about how they’d NEVER put a “Trump vaccine” anywhere near their bodies. They were so incensed by their blind hatred of this man and his tweets that they were willing to go to any length to discredit him and anything remotely associated with him. So the stage was set for this entire pandemic…

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founding

I will once again mention the deep irony of the DNC in 2020 promoting Biden’s empathy by featuring a kid, Brayden, with a speech impediment.

Meanwhile, their party, across the country, was actively unleashing a literal plague of speech impediments with their dipshit child abuse protocol.

What a bunch of scumbags.

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The CDC has thoroughly (and probably irredeemably) disgraced itself in a moment that should have been an opportunity to show why it exists in the first place. COVID should have been the CDC's Super Bowl. Instead, now if someone at the CDC told me the sun rises in the East, I'd want to look out my window to confirm.

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I would have loved to hear his opinion on the ongoing vaccine trials for 6 mo's to 4 year olds. I don't understand how the drug companies should be allowed to "fast track" those vaccines when there is no emergency in that age group.

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Excellent summary by Dr. Prasad. His recommendations sound much like those proposed in the Great Barrington Declaration in October of 2020, which was reflexively discredited by government health care authorities and the mainstream media. We expect incompetence and politics with elected officials. To see such incompetence or worse extend to formerly professional agencies like the CDC and the FBI is painful and worrying.

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