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Comment by iudqnolq | Hacker News Reader

I don't like the term misinformation. I don't think Twitter should have restricted his tweets. However, it's important to remember Bhattacharya was wrong.

In the op-ed posted above he guessed that the predicted death toll of 2-4 million people was off by multiple orders of magnitude. He said that dramatic interventions like lockdowns would be justified to prevent that kind of death toll, but that COVID was nowhere near that deadly.

So far COVID has killed about a million Americans. So by the logic he lays out in that op-ed his policy proposals were wrong.

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We can never know how many people Covid killed in America, because the rubric in the US is to count as a Covid "death" any death where the deceased tested positive for covid. In that group might be someone who would have not died had they not had Covid, but it also includes many people who would have died regardless of Covid positivity.

It is also to count as a Covid hospitalization, anyone hospitalized who tests positive for Covid in the hospital.

In both cases, all we can say is that somewhere between none and all of them are actually in that condition because of Covid.

We can (and have) validated that measurement by comparing the total number of deaths of all causes to analogous past years.

He was responding to an estimate that placed the death toll at 3.4%.

The highest estimates now seem to be at around .28%.

That's more than an order of magnitude. He wasn't all that wrong.

Also, he advised focusing efforts on the most vulnerable; the elderly and people with comorbidities. He was very right there too. All those vaccines into kids and lockdowns of schools after the elderly were triple-vaccinated was a stunning misallocation of resources.

While I don't think many of Jay's points were wrong, he sort of established himself as an anti-establishment person. I think if he had acted slightly differently, we'd all be praising him for keeping us from making a big mistake.

But the reality is that the medical establishment has an immune system honed by decades of vaccine denialism (remember "vaccines cause autism because mercury") and tends to overreact when people- acting in good faith- question its findings publicly.

The medical establishment bring on a lack of trust due to their close ties with pharmaceutical companies who's aim is to simply make profits from the "medicine discovery of the day", no matter the consequences.

If the medical establishment (doctors, scientists, researchers, etc) took no funding from pharmaceutical companies, it might help their position. Taking funding from companies that have way too often been found of wrong doing, just poisons people's view of the whole system.

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