Multiple Logical Fallacies Elevate COVID Vaccines Over COVID Treatments
December 8, 2021
Monday morning, as I did my morning bicycle ride (I live in a safe neighborhood), I listened to Breitbart News host Alex Marlowe interview John Nolte, another Breitbart personality about COVID vaccination hesitancy. By the end of the interview, they’d wandered through several logical fallacies that need to be exposed so people can accurately balance vaccines versus treatments.
Marlowe and Nolte quoted data purporting to show that Washington state counties that Trump won have much higher COVID death rates than counties that Biden won. Vaccination rates are blamed for the difference. Marlowe went on to declare that it’s been proven that Ivermectin is a “dewormer” and should be removed from the conversation. These factoids are so illogical for a so-called conservative outlet that we must have a short refresher.
Figures Don’t Lie, but Liars Can Figure
The key offender here is something called “relative risk.” If there’s a one in a million chance of something happening, that’s a minuscule absolute risk. If it goes up to two in a million, it’s still a minuscule absolute risk that you really won’t get bothered about. But that same difference can be presented as a 100% increase in risk or a doubling, which sounds really awful.
When it comes to COVID, the overall rate of death is in the tenths of a percent in the most vulnerable population. Headlines about Republicans killing off their voter base are simply scaremongering in the decimal points using relative instead of absolute risk. The real rate of death under age 50 for COVID is “indistinguishable from zero” according to the weekly British monitoring service.
Figures Don’t Lie, but Liars Can Figure (Part 2)
Let’s suppose that David Leonhardt is presenting accurate data from Washington State and that red counties are seeing excess deaths. Let’s discount the “overtesting” issue because it is likely the same in all areas. Let’s also assume that the “vaccines” do offer some degree of protection, even though data clearly shows that such protection fades rapidly, with new variants making them even less effective. So, what’s happening?
Here we’re seeing the Fallacy of the Excluded Middle. The loud voices refuse to accept that there’s an option beyond “vaxxed or not vaxxed.” In this case, Marlowe’s blithe “dewormer” comment shows that he’s committing a different logical fallacy, the Appeal to Authority. He has accepted the FDA’s false warning that “you are not a horse, etc.” so you should not take Ivermectin, an extremely safe drug with a wide range of antiviral effects.
Randomized controlled trials have proven that IVM reduces COVID deaths even better than the vaccine. The state of Uttar Pradesh in India used IVM to wipe out COVID for 241 million people. But those people in Washington’s red counties were ruled by Dark Lord Inslee, making IVM and HCQ unavailable. No medical discussion can be complete without these alternatives.
Liars Can Force You to Behave How They Want You to Behave
As I’ve noted, for you to exercise an option to seek alternative treatment, you must have a physician who is willing to prescribe such medication. But most of those doctors will refuse because, under the dictatorial rule of officials such as Governor Inslee, such prescribing is likely to get that doctor’s license to practice medicine revoked. With such a Sword of Damocles overhead, few prescribers will go near IVM or HCQ. That means they can talk vaxxed or not vaxxed as if those are the only possibilities.
Image by Andrea Widburg.
Omicron
This virus is mutating according to Muller’s Ratchet. That is, it’s getting easier to catch, and less likely to make you really sick or dead. It’s affecting young children more than earlier variants. Any benefit of the vaccine is unknown. At the same time, there’s no reason to suspect that IVM and HCQ would not be effective against it.
In other words, Omicron is just one step of COVID-19 becoming another variant of the common cold. Or it may have simply swapped some of its genetic sequence with a common cold virus. That might explain why it’s showing up all over the world at once.
Masks Don’t Help
I feel like I’m beating a dead horse here, but facts are facts. We have dozens of surveillance studies that show that the general public wearing masks has no effect on the transmission of airborne viruses. You either have an easy-to-breathe-through cloth diaper that doesn’t filter or an expensive disposable diaper that filters but that you breathe around. Neither one has any useful effect. A recent study supposedly shows that masks work, but it has so many (scientific) holes that it simply doesn’t hold water.
COVID is a Mild Disease (if you treat it!)
COVID is one of those mild diseases that sends sick people over the edge because they don’t need much of a shove. But for healthy people to die of it, they must be kept away from effective drugs like IVM and HCQ. Having prevented treatment, the Quixotic Quislings of Quarantine can then claim that COVID is far worse than it actually is.
With any of the proven protocols for those drugs, COVID is no worse than the flu. But the billions available in the COVID lottery are so large that it’s hard for anyone to remember that the task of a doctor is to treat the sick, not to keep them away from treatment because they didn’t get a shot that is less effective than the $8 India spent.
Parting Thoughts
The COVID pandemic is a man-caused disaster, and I’m not talking about how the bug was created. In the earliest days, we didn’t know how to treat it but within a couple of months effective HCQ protocols were available. Those protocols, though, contradicted the bureaucrats at NIH/CDC/LSD who were married to their own approach of lockdown, distance, and vaccinate – unless you are one of the elites. They were the smartest people in the room, and anyone who contradicted them was the spawn of the devil.
We have extremely effective protocols that anyone who gets sick should be able to use, but those bureaucrats can punish anyone who prescribes one of them. In short, we are in a concentration camp from sea to shining sea. America the Beautiful is now COVIDia the Rapacious. We are cannon fodder at the command of those who know nothing but do not care.
Ted Noel MD is a retired Anesthesiologist/Intensivist who podcasts and posts on social media as DoctorTed and @vidzette. His DoctorTed podcasts are available on Apple, Stitcher, Pandora and other channels.
