Skip to main content

Scott Adams is NOT on Team Reality

Cartoonist Scott Adams admitted the other day that the "anti-vaxxers"--meaning people who didn't want an experimental COVID shot--had "won." Like Emily "we were all in the dark" Oster, he chalked up his loss to bad luck instead of his own bad judgment. 


 


Sorry, Scott, but there's no substitute for doing your own research using primary sources and learning how to read those sources. It's like the first three rules from Joel Greenblatt's book You can be a Stock Market Genius:

  1. Do your own work.
  2. Don't trust anyone over 30.
  3. Don't trust anyone 30 or under. 

Get it? Sinking your fortune or your health into something you haven't carefully researched is risky. As for following the experts (under 30, over 30 or otherwise), these experts don't work for you, they don't suffer any consequences for being wrong, and renegades who pan a stock or pharmaceutical get excommunicated. 

Even though COVID dissidents were censored, information and lessons on interpretation were out there. Dr. Sebastian Rushworth's book COVID: Why Most of What you Know is Wrong explained, succinctly and in laymen's terms, scientific studies and statistics. Looking at Pfizer's own study, he called the number of severe adverse events "concerning" and observed that Pfizer didn't say what those events were. And--the book is from 2021--he noted, "none of these studies has looked into whether these vaccines prevent those who have been vaccinated from spreading the infection to others, so there is at present no data to support that claim." Dr. Rushworth was less concerned about the Moderna shot, but he was right about the rest simply by reading and interpreting the drug companies' own studies. All of this was presented in a way where you could check his work instead of taking him on faith.

Maybe not many people saw that book. Fair enough--but every state had COVID dashboards where you could see the overwhelming majority of deaths were among the old and the metabolically unhealthy. Independent journalist Alex Berenson was on Twitter and then Substack reporting on the shots; nurse John Campbell, Dr. Suneel Dhand, Dr. Vinay Prasad, biologists Brett Weinstein and Heather Heying and others were on YouTube interpreting COVID studies and news. For a while, YouTube had local TV news videos every day of people who'd suffered severe adverse reactions to the COVID shot. Plenty of information was out there for people willing to do their own work--or at least listen to others who had.

But there was something even more basic: the "vaccines" were novel, experimental-stage medical products created, tested and marketed by an industry with a spotty safety record. The people least insulated from disaster--the poor and least educated--were the most wary even if they couldn't explain why. 

To be fair to Scott Adams, there were people who more lucky than right. Some of them will take a loss when their child suffers or dies from an entirely preventable disease. But putting all of us in that category by calling us "anti-vaxxers" is intellectually dishonest and a disqualification for Team Reality.


UPDATE: 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Fly with Reuteri

If you're planning to travel by plane and you want to keep enjoying the benefits of l. reuteri yogurt, you might have gotten sticker shock from the price of l. reuteri probiotics. MyReuteri * costs $46 to $83 for 30 capsules, depending on the CFUs (colony-forming units, or the number of viable microorganisms). If you're thinking about economizing by putting some yogurt in a sturdy container and taking it with you, you can do that. I'll break down the pros and cons and look at some alternatives.  Photo from Unsplash . Cost Yogurt might be less expensive than probiotics, but it isn't free. A half-cup serving costs about 70¢ to make if you start with a previous batch. It contains about 90 billion CFUs if fermented for 36 hours.  This is a lot less than $5.56 for two capsules of 50 billion CFU MyReuteri, but for a one-week vacation, you'd only save $34 by eating yogurt instead. (You can freeze any unused capsules for later.)  Furthermore, the yogurt would have to go in ...
Post a Comment
Read more

30-second Fix for a Cracked Stick Blender

Use Mighty Fixit (if you still have some from 2012) or Rescue Tape (which looks like a similar product) to fix a cracked stick blender. After I fixed the attachment, I washed it in the sink and the tape held up. I also wrapped a knife handle several years ago, and it's been through thousands of washings.
Post a Comment
Read more

Thanksgiving recipes for Pumpkin Pie & Cranberries--printable!

If you'd rather read a printed recipe than watch a video, here are my recent recipes for Better than Grandma's Pumpkin Pie and Probiotic Cranberry-Apple Relish.  Hat tip to Dana Carpender, whose pumpkin pie recipe inspired this one. The cranberry-apple ferment is entirely my own creation.  Pumpkin Pie--no grains, sugar or emulsifiers Crust 2 cups shelled raw pecans 1/4 teaspoon salt 1/4 teaspoon monk fruit powder* (or 3 tablespoons sugar substitute) 4 tablespoons butter, melted 2 tablespoons water Pumpkin Pie Filling 1 pie pumpkin 1-1/2 cups half and half (with no thickeners) 3 eggs 3-4 teaspoons monk fruit powder* (or 3/4 cup sugar substitute) 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 tablespoon pumpkin pie spice Preheat the oven to 350F. Stab the top of the pumpkin all the way through the flesh in a few places at the top. Place the pumpkin on a cookie sheet and bake for 1 hour. Let cool. While the pumpkin is baking, put the pecans in a food processor with the S blade and run until they are finely...
Post a Comment
Read more

Holiday Dinner Tip from Restaurant Pros: Limit the Menu

After watching some people online getting freaked out about trying to put on holiday dinners and getting overwhelmed to the point that they're thinking about canceling the whole thing, I thought I'd put out a restaurant tip that will help people put on a dinner with less aggravation. A big complaint among the frustrated home cooks I've seen is that family members are not contributing to the dinner. But a bigger problem I see is that their menu is just too big. One lady's family is having her make 12 dishes all by herself, and some of these dishes look pretty complicated. Watch the video here or read on. The reason this is aggravating is that more dishes mean more shopping, more prep, and more cleanup. It's hard to make several dishes that will all be ready at the same time. Even though I used to be a prep cook at a restaurant, I've put on Thanksgiving dinners myself, and I cook from scratch almost every day, there's no way I'd try to make a 12-course di...
Post a Comment
Read more

Results of my Carrageenan-Free Diet

Certain things should be left in the aquarium. Readers may recall my ordeal last Saturday with a migraine headache and a trip by ambulance back to my parents' house. Thanks to one of the paramedics jogging my memory, I researched the almond milk I'd started drinking around the time I quit dairy. One of the ingredients was carrageenan, a substance used to induce inflammation, sensitivity to pain and other problems in laboratory animals. Supposedly, the "undegraded" form is safe for human consumption, but undegraded carrageenan has been found to be contaminated with degraded carrageenan, and there are ways that the digestive system could degrade carrageenan itself. For the past few months, I've felt a little bloated, and was starting to have some mild pain in my lower stomach. I thought it might have been the effects of the antibiotics, oral steroids or decongestant (which gave me an allergic reaction) from back in February. I didn't connect it to the sev...
10 comments
Read more