It's England, but the song remains the same across the world.

 https://open.substack.com/pub/2ndsmartestguyintheworld/p/conspiracy-theories-become-conspiracy?r=ixekp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

 

Money quote....

Meanwhile what is particularly striking is just how many suspicions voiced by sceptics from early 2020 onwards and mocked as conspiracy theories have turned into plausible claims and accepted facts:

1. The virus may have originated in the laboratory of the Wuhan Institute of Virology;

2. Covid modeling was dodgy and dressed up outliers as reasonable case scenarios;

3. Lockdowns don’t work;

4. Lockdowns kill through perverse consequences and inflict other damaging harms, including interruptions to critical life-saving children’s immunization campaigns in developing countries;

5. School closures are particularly bad policy. They did not curb transmission but they did cause long-term harm to children’s education, development and emotional well-being;

6. Masks are ineffective. They stop neither infection nor transmission;

7. Infection confers natural immunity at least as effective as vaccination;

8. Covid vaccines do not stop infection, hospitalization, or even death;

9. Covid vaccines do not stop transmission;

10. The safety of vaccines using new technology had not been definitively established, neither for the short term nor for the long term;

11. Vaccine harms are real and substantial but safety signals have been summarily dismissed and ignored;

12. mRNA vaccines are not confined to the arm but spread rapidly to other parts, including reproductive organs, with potentially adverse consequences for fertility and births;

13. The harm-benefit equation of vaccines is, like the disease burden itself, steeply age-differentiated. Healthy young people did not need either initial or booster doses;

14. Vaccination mandates don’t increase vaccine take-up;

15. Vaccine mandates can fuel cross-vaccine hesitancy;

16. Suppression of sceptical and dissenting voices will lessen trust in public health officials, experts and institutions, and possibly also in scientists more generally;

17. Estimates of “Long Covid” were inflated (CDC estimate of 20 percent of Covid infections against UK study’s estimate of 3 percent) by using generalized, non-specific symptoms like mild fatigue and weakness;

18. Health policy interventions involve policy trade-offs just like all other policy choices. Cost-benefit analysis is therefore an essential prerequisite, not an optional add-on.