I was, yes. Worried that it wasn't clear enough, though, I was only going to include the first sentence. Should have put something in about being bought out by "Big History" or something.
2019-2020 coronavirus pandemic (Vaccination 2021 Edition)
- Thread starter McElroy
- Start date
OT: The religious people of this country (US) crack me up. Ever since the quarantine started, they've been blabbering on about how they should have the right to assemble, and it's against their religious freedom, blah blah. With multiple pastors and the like making stirring speeches about "god being bigger than covid" ...and then dying from the virus. Like constant babble about this shit, and then, a day after idiot Trump declares that churches will be open because they are "essential", there is a roman catholic priest, posting an article on CNN (because he's apparently one of their religious content people), saying Mr. President, we dont' need to have our churches to have our faith.
Ok well apparently you think you fucking DO, because you guys haven't shut the fuck up about it for the past 2 months! I just....sigh.
Though honestly, I hope they do all decide to start congregating again and infect each other to the gills. I generally don't like the idea of people dying in droves, but I lose most of my sympathy and compassion for people when they act like fucking idiots, and bring it upon themselves.
Ok well apparently you think you fucking DO, because you guys haven't shut the fuck up about it for the past 2 months! I just....sigh.
Though honestly, I hope they do all decide to start congregating again and infect each other to the gills. I generally don't like the idea of people dying in droves, but I lose most of my sympathy and compassion for people when they act like fucking idiots, and bring it upon themselves.
And potentially anyone else they come in contact with before they die, or anyone who needs the medical resources to keep them alive, though.
Once again, your assessment is the complete opposite of the truth. Much of my confidence is from the behavior of governments (other than Sweden) and experts matches my understanding of the data. The serious models of the expected death toll were always in roughly the same scale as what I thought. I'm not the one claiming people are making their decisions based on caring about money, not at all. I think people in power are doing their best to minimize the damage of the pandemic. It's not a money vs lives decision, it's a lives vs lives decision.
And of course I constantly question the validity of data. That's science. If you aren't critical of the methods and results, you're not doing science.
But you're not a scientist. You have asserted to me that your lack of education in epidemiology gives you a special insight that the professionals do not have. Do not try to fake modesty after making claims like that.
I did not say that. I explicitly said that I have less knowledge. I also posted a source by experts a couple posts above my response to you. I am reliant of the experts to give me information before I can say anything. I just described the beneficial feature of having an outside perspective. It was a more fun answer than "stop trying to end discussions, it's not helpful to demand random strangers on the internet have degrees in what they discuss on a forum."
And I'm not modest, I'm humble. Very different.
Copernicus potentially dedicated his work to the Pope, and explicitly pleaded that this was a hypothesis rather than a description of truth, precisely because he was worried about what the reaction of the church would be. That sort of thing could, and sometimes did, get someone investigated for heresy, particularly whilst the Catholic church was so sensitive, given the rise of Protestantism.
The relationship between learning and the Catholic church is mixed, and overall in my view broadly positive. The Catholic church, for a long time, promoted increased understanding of the world and patronised many academic disciplines, that faith and reason went together in the greater glory of God. On the other hand, neither can we deny that the historical record plainly shows that the Catholic church has interfered with and resisted knowledge when it has suited it to do so.
Trump isn't blabbering about this on behalf of Catholics, though. He's representing the evangelical Protestants in his Republican base, because they're the ones whose enthusiasm he needs most. And a fair chunk of them are the sort to think its God's will if they live or die, and perhaps more importantly, potentially losing out on the fat profits they normally get from running their services.
You phrase this very, very accurately. The historical record plainly shows that. That doesn't mean it's true. I don't know if you followed the link to flat earth theory, or if you're already familiar with how that played out, you might have seen the rabbit hole of the widely discredited "conflict thesis", the historical premise that religion and science are in conflict, that was pushed by some historians a century or so ago. It's not that science and religion were actually in conflict, it's that some historians (ones not very fond of religion) put untruths on the record to advance their agenda, and their legacy is some of the most widely spread falsehoods that people commonly believe to this day. Everyone knows the grade-school portrayal of Columbus discovering the Earth is round is ahistorical nonsense, most people don't know that myth is anti-Christian propaganda designed to suggest European Christians were stupid and ignorant before science came about.
Our ignominious descent into failure state continues. The US will not allow poorer countries to access any vaccines we develop because sharing knowledge somehow "stifles innovation." That's another phrase in particular that every time a rich person says it I want to cut their tongue out.
More like they think that it's God's will that they live, and His will that the sinful Others die.
That's why I also linked to the study saying zinc inhibited SARS-CoV. I'm not just going take the word of some people posting on forums nor was that the 1st such forum I've found about medical people talking about quercetin as doing the same thing as chloroquine. There was a study pointing to zinc helping with regards to the new coronavirus as well. It has nothing do with being for homeopathic medicines over pharmaceutical medicine, I'm just for finding what works. The non-pharmaceutical side does have a distinct disadvantage in the fact studies aren't really done because there's no money to be made there, thus why would anyone fund such studies. Not too mention, quercetin and zinc are completely safe to take (just don't take like a million % of the daily recommended amount), and cheap and easy to buy.
There are plenty of occasions where the religious - including the Catholic church - have trampled on science because it has said things about the world that didn't fit with their scriptural understanding. Whatever the strength of the "conflict thesis" as a whole, that thesis wasn't magicked up out of nothing. It stems from patterns of real, documented incidents of suppression of knowledge. Like I said, just take heart from the fact there are many worse offenders than the Catholic church.
Yes I know, but we've already got so many people defying the quarantine, it's practically pointless. Might as well give them the green light to go all say Yay Jesus together, and pray themselves into a grave. Yeah they're going to take people with them, but let's face it, that's already happening anyway.
I said this to my girlfriend the other day. I don't believe in it but every time I leave the house to get something I see groups of people that probably think they are keeping the guideline distance from each other, but they're not. examples I've seen are the other week we (Myself and the gf) got some takeout from some place and outside in the carpark was two women. They obviously were not related and had a whole bunch of kids in their soccer mum van. one of them was on the phone and I overheard her saying 'tell bobby and Sarah not to leave yet, I've ordered way too much food'.
Today I saw on the reddit page for my town that there had been 4 new outbreaks and by that I mean in separate parts of the town. altogether it's something like 30 new cases. They were all from groups of families that had gotten together for mothers day. some of them had driven from out of state to be here.
Right now I can hear the kids out in the street playing basketball. They'll go home at night and then meet up in the day to hang out, go to each others houses etc.
Like I said I don't truly believe in giving up on social distancing but if so many people aren't then what's the point?
That's fine, I'm not trying to have a go at you, or suggest you just randomly picked up something as if from nobodies on a Reddit thread.
I'm just tempering that Zn2+ hypothesis, because I think some people (such as in that thread on ResearchGate) are going much crazier over it than the evidence warrants. Lots of people - including ones who work in science and healthcare - have suddenly become very interested in stuff they don't know much about, and they're reaching at anything and everything. This means stuff like quercetin, too.
Quercetin is a drug, hydroxychloroquine is a drug. There isn't really much more money in hydroxychloroquine compared to quercetin: they're both generics anyone can make.
I really do think it was magicked up out of nothing. There were certainly some clashes between Protestants and Catholics that had questions of the natural world involved, but not enough to justify the theory by any means. The actual best example of religion clashing with science is creationism vs evolution, but that's not really a good example of religion trampling on science. At the time they were formulating the conflict thesis, evolution was sweeping the scientific community pretty much uninhibited, and people of science were seeking out the religious to try and debate them and claim victory (not terribly unlike early youtube, to be honest). It wasn't until decades later in the 1920s that fundamentalist creationists really came about, as a backlash against those who believed science was at war with religion. The belief that science and religion are incompatible has been championed for like a couple centuries by those who resent religion, they took on the stupid mantle that evolution disproves religion, and some people heard that and went "ok, then evolution must be fake". That is the actual order of those events. And to this day, if you look up actual scholarly positions on the conflict between religion and science, the prominent voices espousing no conflict are still largely religious, and the prominent voices claiming there's a conflict are still all atheists.
There is no conflict between science and religion. There is, however, a conflict between atheists and religion, and the atheists want to claim ownership of science.
The Catholic church is a huge organisation and has been for centuries, And while overall pretty much pro science and knowledge-gathering, scientific background or understanding has generally not been a promotion criterion in the organisation, at best in certain orders.
The Catholic church also had had wide reaching powers of censorship. That was never meant to hinder science, but could be abused to do so.
Both things together did lead to more than enough instances where Catholics blocked science. Even if the church in general was pro science.
That does not mean that secular gouvernments generally have a better track record. Just look at Lysenkoism or the US and global warming.
But what mostly lead to the depiction of the Roman Catholic church as anti-science, anti-knowledge etc. was social science. The Church has always had strong opinions about the society and how humans should live together. And that was often in direct conflict with what various philosophers/wannabe-reformers proposed. The Church also tended to use its censorship-privilege to suppress ideas undermining the gouvernment/social system/status quo. And many of those reformers or social theorists claimed progressiveness and science for themself.
Other than that, yes, there are often conflicts between science and protestants. And people assume that the catholic church as the most powerful and rigig church just shares those opinions.
I think there's more evidence pointing towards zinc plus a zinc Ionophore (chloroquine, quercetin, etc.) working than just the hydroxychloroquine working by itself. Quercetin is something natural (found in fruits and vegetables) and without nearly the side effects of hydrochloroquine, if any side effects, along with less interactions with other drugs. Plus, you don't need a prescription for it and it's cheaper than the generic hydroxychloroquine. The non-generic of the drug is $11/tablet. There is money to be made with hydroxychloroquine. There's pretty much no risk trying the quercetin + zinc treatment while costing very little. I would definitely try it if I tested positive and was in the higher risk groups for covid-19. From what I've read about everything, remdesivir seems to be the best at treating the virus but it's also not very readily available and it could be rather expensive as the company that makes it can literally charge whatever they want (and they have a history of charging exorbitant amounts for drugs).
Okay: why?
If you want to look at papers discussing the potential mechanism of action of hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine for covid-19, many of them fail to even mention it being a zinc ionophore. That is to me a huge warning sign that such a mechanism is not generally viewed favourably. I would again warn that this is peak season for a large number of low-rent scientists to flood the airwaves with their theories, padding out their publication records and egos.
A drug that's done the rounds forever. There are lots of these sorts of chemicals from plants that have been flagged up as useful for something somewhere, and structural analyses keep pointing them up as promising for things because they look good for binding to things, and then they repeatedly fail to pass muster. Someone's going to look at quercetin for covid-19 because it's the responsible thing to do, but for most people in the industry with years of experience of these things, it just causes their eyes to glaze over and think "Oh not that again".