COVID-19: A Second Opinion

SenatorRonJohnson1 HN recommenders · 2022–2026
2.7M views · news · news · Uploaded 2022-01-25

A 38-minute highlights video from a January 2022 Senate roundtable hosted by Ron Johnson, where doctors and experts offered dissenting views on pandemic response, early treatment and vaccine safety. It condenses a five-hour event.

HN mentions it mostly as a condensed summary of that roundtable, in threads about COVID debate and content moderation, and not as a consensus recommendation.

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4 comments from Hacker News

@twofornone2022 · in “Pfizer board member suggests end to mask, vaccine mandates”

I don't think you understand how many assumptions are baked into the current conclusions that vaccines and masks are effective. This relies on accurate reporting of vaccination status and accurate reporting of breakthrough cases. Meanwhile in the real world covid is spreading unabated, record case counts, regardless of vaccination rate or mask compliance. Clearly something isn't adding up. Meanwhile the rosy estimates of safety and effectiveness have been repeatedly and consistently walked back. I think it's time to recognize that our institutions have had their analyses and recommendations tainted by strong and pervasive political and social biases, from the laypeople who have no incentive to report breakthrough cases, all the way up through the chain past academics and policymakers who have their careers riding on the validity of 2 years of covid research and policy that cannot be contradicted without trashing credibility. That's not to mention the career and social stigma associated with speaking out or publishing negatively against the vaccines. It doesn't help that dozens of hours of testimony on behalf of researches and clinicians before congresspeople is simply being ignored[0]. Add media to the rabidly biased groups and you're getting closer to reconciling what is being published and communicated about the vaccines and virus with what is happening in the real world. 0. [VIDEO]

@loceng2022 · in “Spotify deletes 70 Joe Rogan episodes”

Have you seen this yet? "COVID-19: A Second Opinion" - [VIDEO] "On January 24, 2022 Senator Ron Johnson invited a group of world renowned doctors and medical experts to the U.S. Senate to provide a different perspective on the global pandemic response, the current state of knowledge of early and hospital treatment, vaccine efficacy and safety, what went right, what went wrong, what should be done now, and what needs to be addressed long term. This 38 minute video highlights the 5-hour discussion." The 38 minute compilation is a great, easily consumable summary - however here's the link to the full 5+ hours of testimony - [LINK] - which obviously has far more depth to it. The reason I ask if you've seen it is Joe's had multiple of these highly credentialed, front-line workers (doctors, researchers, etc. with expert domain knowledge and experience), on his podcast - some multiple times. It's going to get harder to ignore these people and what they have to say the more formal the setting the information is shared. Another video everyone should watch is Maddie De Garay's mother giving testimony for 10 minutes of their experience of her daughter being in Pfizer's 12-15 year old vaccine clinical trial. The limitations designed into the clinical trial reporting app might be most obvious to UX designers, but I think everyone will be able to understand the design implications: [LINK]

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@loceng2022 · in “Spotify deletes 70 Joe Rogan episodes”

It's quite telling that your standards are so low, and that you think an app purposefully designed to prevent reporting of adverse events is somehow me expecting "perfectionism." That component on its own is not a complex problem - it's blindingly obvious. You're trying to gaslight to categorize something as simple and obvious is a "conspiracy theory" is "classic" attempt to lazily smear and demonize, meanwhile you actually avoid addressing my specific points. So let's address 1 of my specific points shall we, and not claim that I'm merely being a perfectionist to dismiss discussing it? Is it a problem, yes or no, that the adverse events that could be reported by participants in at least the Pfizer mRNA clinical trial for 12-15 year olds limited what could be reported by highly specifically creating a relatively short list of relatively minor potential adverse events? Yes or no? Now, please brainstorm and extrapolate to the potential consequences of the app that participants were provided as the only means of reporting adverse events, and write out your thoughts here. It's obvious you don't care much for integrity as you dismiss crucial structure for an apparatus meant to and necessary to capture the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth - but interestingly the operators and designers of the clinical trial decided to design the app to not allow any free-form writing option - like you and I are able to do here? Surely you're smart enough and have enough integrity t

@alex11382026 · in “Google Co-Founder Sergey Brin's Unretirement Is a Lesson for the Rest of Us”

So if we're linking stuff (and please don't scream at me for Rumble, Youtube loves removing videos) here's one [LINK] I was initially trying to make a point that the ideological lines that people have drawn have made it so they automatically think RFK is anti-science and they as a consequence have a whole host of assumptions for which I don't even blame them if they haven't spent time reading up about it. I apologize for not countering every single point and going to covid but it's kind of worth pointing out that RFK a) raises some very substantive charges against Fauci for frankly war criminal like actions throughout his unfortunate history of practicing medicine and b) it wasn't "mismanagement". They did, seriously, the opposite of good practice (both accepted good practice and what was discovered in 2020 going forward) in just about every case If you're not sympathetic to that then of course you're going to disagree and you might think that the only reason someone like Musk bought X (and please don't think this is me Musk fanning, I dislike him for several reasons) is just to have a joyride (which is still possible); they used to ban so many people and real doctors for information that they didn't like and it was a serious problem and if they could do that for covid then they also did it for other things Edit: (see, I do know how to edit comments) here's it on Youtube which is the highlights [VIDEO]