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It's quite annoying how I am always asked to prove the truth of my statements about the pandemic and, when I show the research, am told that it must be wrong because it's the opposite of the Real Truth. The other day I gave someone a copy of the letter the Surgeon General in Florida had published about the dangers with the "vaccines" only to be told he was a quack who was friends with Steve Bannon who is clearly a right-wing nutcase and evil man. So the Surgeon General of Florida can't be trusted, apparently. Yet my friend has no research, proof or evidence that this man is a quack - he clearly googled his name and read something. The Believers in the Pandemic don't need to question their beliefs do they? I'm considered to be "a bit wacky" because I have refused to follow any of the rules and maintained from March 2020 that this was all hysterical nonsense. People say I must have a problem with authority and smile in a patronising way!!!!!

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My experience as well - & I hate that patronising smile! I have concluded that most people fell for the panic narrative out of dumb fear & just don't want to know/admit they have been had big time.

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Don’t forget the rolling eyes…”here she goes again”

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Could not agree more. I was shocked how deep the rot went, any professional who did not agree with the narrative was not just dismissed but their whole professional career re-written. It was almost impossible to have a civilised conversation or question the “speed of science”. Although I do feel that the position is slowly changing. I, for one, from early on simply did not buy into the narrative as it made no sense, where were the bodies? The mortuaries were not overflowing. I am not trying to dismiss the illness as it was profound for certain people, especially with co-morbidities and on many prescriptions. I now realise that I had Covid November/December 2019, it knocked me for six and recovery was slow ( i had a blood test sometime in April2020 and antibodies confirmed). The push for a vaccine and no thought to therapeutics was confusing to say the least. Nothing made sense.

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I had the exact same experience about Ed Dowd on Tucker Carlson. LIke "slowly I turned," Tucker is just lies, lies, lies. There are patterns in these responses I suspect. It is an issue of epistemology, and the believers have to wrap their minds around the fact that trillions of dollars have been spent to co-opt their trusted sources of information, and the propaganda takeover of so many media platforms and journals and magazines has been incremental. What passes as news is now not in the least objective, but that happened slowly. Believing that no sources and no government are trustworthy in an atmosphere of fears around climate and extinctions, WWIII, the destruction of nations, more pandemics, rapid technological shift, exponential daily divisiveness is a huge leap over a chasm that threatens to suck them down. I didn't figure things out quickly myself, and I have refused to believe things before that turned out to be true because I couldn't imagine that things were that bad. I hoped/believed that things would correct, that that reality was the fringe, not the reality. But they really are condescending in their surety, My friend and I finally had to have a code word, since we each think the other is in a QAnon like cult. Though I"m right lol.

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I had an almost identical conversation w a very smart, healthy 50-year-old physicist relative in summer 2022 (!!!) who was so relieved he got the vax before getting infected because he would have had a 2% chance of dying. Unlike your experience, when I sent him the studies and stats he ghosted me. In 99% of my attempts to expose panicking Pauls to real data all I get is a blank stare/no response. That’s what really scares me...

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I've found the same thing: I've been able to persuade my close friends when speaking face to face, but email and social media posts have got me nowhere. The isolation of lockdowns inhibited normal discourse and polarised the issues: text is very inferior to human face to face comms.

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I was spectaculary wrong about one thing. I thought there was no way in hell the public would continue to support a "vaccine" once it was definitively proven that these shots did NOT prevent infection or spread.

As it turns out, the colossal flop of a vaccine became more popular and more in demand than ever. It was mandated in numerous organizations.

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Is this sunk cost fallacy, I wonder?

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That probably applies as well as "confirmation bias." In layman's terms, when people make some big decision, they look for support that they made the right decision and will not look for evidence they were wrong. In fact, they will militantly attack people who question their decisions or choices. If they have strength in numbers, they will use those numbers to gang up on the naysayers. I guess, psychologically, they are trying to protect themselves from the trauma of admitting they were wrong on such a big issue.

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There seemed to be a good case made for injections of a substance conferring immunity. I regret having three of the bloody things.

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Yes, about 1/800 risk of very serious adverse effects. I'm glad I and my family in Scotland avoided it: I smelled a rat immediately, far too experimental and novel, and the commercial/political bias was massive.

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My wife and I both had the Coof in early 2020. We are both in the age group where it should have been very serious. It was like a bad cold/flu but we handled it and recovered fine. I lost my sense of taste for a while and had tinnitus. Not much out there on treatment yet, but Zeb Zelenko's protocol. We took Vitamin C, D = K, , Zinc and Quercetin. Following that, we studied everything we could about the disease, and the treatments. It became so obvious that we were being gas lighted on every level from government and media. What an education! One thing I have taken away from my experience is that it is very hard to influence the "panicking Pauls". It is only when the Jabs negatively effect them or family and friends that doubt will take hold. Even then, many will reject their doubt because that could mean they were fooled and wrong, so they stick with what they were told. Too bad, so sad, sucks to be them.

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You got one thing wrong (very early into the pandemic) and you quickly realized you were wrong.

How many things has the CDC gotten wrong?

Have the experts at this agency got ONE thing right?

https://billricejr.substack.com/p/what-hasnt-the-cdc-lied-about

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One thing yes, but looking back I feel I was stupid.

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I don't think you were stupid. How could you know this was NOT "the big one?" You quickly re-assessed.

Gov. DeSantis was wrong originally. He quickly re-assessed and started to use his own critical thinking skills ... and then (surprise! surprise!), he "led."

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You weren’t stupid, Thor! I can’t imagine there was ANYBODY right @ the very start who didn’t at least wonder what was going on.

We were very lucky that some real info came out (about the 99.7 survivability for the vast majority & that average age of death from wu-flu was higher than the average age of death from any cause) BEFORE everything got shut down, de platformed & labeled conspiracy theory. In all of the US only Christy Noem DIDNT shut down.

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In these times, for a great many people, truth is simply what their authorities say it is.

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I made one key mistake I can think of: after analysing the situation regarding face masks (both community masking and hospital face mask protocols), I concluded that the issue depended upon whether we were dealing an infection spread primarily by microdroplets or primarily by aerosols, since the masking could only possibly be effective if microdroplets were the primary vector (and even in this case, they might not be effective). When a key paper was published confirming aerosol spread, I concluded the masks were ineffective, which not coincidentally dovetailed with studies like DANMASK-19, that showed ineffectiveness of community masking.

However, this was a mistake. Actually, there was no research confirming aerosol spread at all. I should have been suspicious when the paper claiming aerosol spread *also* claimed that the masks were effective, which was an utterly implausible claim.

The true situation, I have now established, was that essentially no research on the transmission dynamics were ever conducted, and that we have little knowledge about the transmission dynamics of *any* respiratory infection. This, I think, is the only major mistake I made in the scientific evidence throughout the Nonsense.

I made numerous other mistakes, though, most obviously believing that it would be impossible to maintain the narrative after Spring 2021, when deaths were evidently going to bottom out. I had not, of course, realised how PCR was about to utterly redefine the meaning of the word 'case'...

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Yes, the mainstream media sure pumped up the fear and volume, and initially there was almost no other source of information. I thought the cruise liner - the Diamond Princess - was a really useful early example - as almost no crew were seriously affected, and I think only 14 of the - mostly rather elderly - passengers died. This is much like the winter vomiting bug, mostly harmless, but potentially fatal to very old people. So, I started to look for alternative information, and soon found Ivor Cummings podcasts and blogs, which were well-informed, calm, reflective and thoughtful. He signposted to a lot of other great independent blogs, and soon the competing media were at loggerheads. However I got banned a few times from Facebook, and realised that this time there was a genuine Information war going on. This was quite extraordinary to me: the media had been captured, gagged and shackled.

Once your government doesn't want you to know something, then that is what you need to know most. Its not totally new, the UK government has always has a somewhat difficult relationship with the truth (see e.g the Iraq doggy dossier. Death on the Rock, or the Spycatcher saga) . But this was about public health, not national security: and soon the Military were actively involved in monitoring doctors and scientists who dared to speak out, whilst demonstrators (like me) were singled out for arrests and fines.

Big Brother State all right.

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I've always wondered why the big outbreak on the USS Teddy Roosevelt didn't get more attention. Or at least the antibody study that was done of crew members. This antibody study found that 60 percent of the crew (of 4,850) had actually been infected not just the 20 to 25 percent that previous PCR tests suggested. Of the 4,850 crew members only one died and he was 44, probably one of the oldest sailors on the ship. Few were hospitalized. So the case fatality rate was 0 out of 3000 (approximately) for crew members under age 44.

I also think this virus came on board that ship when it left port from San Diego on Jan. 17, 2020. This is based on info of the antibody-positive sailors who self-reported when they first experienced Covid symptoms. These early cases would have been the first "confirmed" cases in America.

Also, the antibody study only tested 382 sailors (about 7.8 percent of the crew). Why didn't they test more crew members for antibodies? My theory is this would have provided more (and overwhelming) evidence that this virus was spreading on the ship as early as Jan. 17.

But for almost three months crew members - stacked on top of each other - were living together in confined spaces. And the virus spread to at least 60 percent of the crew. And nobody under the age of 44 died from this virus.

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Regarding "Panicking Pauls" generally I'd guess that most here have a few contacts who are ultra-Covidists, people who have taken all their vaccines and still religiously wear their masks at every opportunity. I know one such a person and recently I had to discuss with this person the issue of the ill effects of the Covid vaccines. To make my point, I gave this person a link to documentary video and a rather long list of articles discussing the disadvantages and toxic effects of vaccines. This person replied:

"For anti-vax vaccine discussions/propaganda; I still ask that you be done with this and leave me alone. I don't want to receive any more propaganda, at all. It is not productive, nor energizing.”

My response:

“Hmm... If you have such a STRONG emotional reaction to any serious question about the Covid crisis or vaccines it gives the impression that somewhere along the line you already suspect ‘something is wrong with this’... But just as you are entitled to your opinions you must also accept that others are entitled to their opinions and ALSO to express them.”

It is very likely that many here know people like this person. The emotionality of their reaction shows that they are clearly under stress. There is a big monkey wrench in the works that won't go away, but the day may come when they are brutally confronted with the reality of the lie (in tragic circumstances?) It seems pretty clear to me that the outright REFUSAL of people like this person to seriously consider criticisms of The Official Covid Narrative is a good indication of their level of fear. Somehow these people know that opening this Pandora's box of criticisms of the official Covid narrative could let a terrifying monster out of its cage, that is leading to the conclusion that the government, the mainstream media" and the health care system management are my enemies... Because serious questions could lead to the realization that: "If they've lied about this, then it is likely they've lied about that and that would also mean they've..." Thus, for many, it is GREATLY preferable that this monster stay in its cage... At all costs... It is the only bearable “solution”...

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This is religion I think. Not in the normal sense, but in the cult sense.

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Here is a hard-hitting (5 minute) video by a Canadian that explores some personal repercussions of Covid Apartheid (or the hypocritical Covid Inquisition)...

Because I Asked Questions (Tom Marazzo - YouTube - 5 minutes - 1/3/2023)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNvb49Pu4ik

While Marazzo mainly seems to be talking to the "Panicking Pauls" amongst his neighbours and relatives, it seems to me that the MAIN target is the Justin Trudeau government...

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Wow! This is powerful stuff.

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My mistakes were the following:

1. Initially, I was in favor of shielding the elderly in care homes. I realised after a few weeks and interviews with residents that this should always be up to the individual. Many would have rather risked seeing their family.

2. I went out and clapped for the NHS once.

3. For a while, I thought the goo might make some sense for some of the elderly.

4. I thought the Chinese might be doing a ruse to weaken the West economically- that became less likely with their zealous, suicidal zero Covid policy throughout 2022.

5. I thought the public would never accept a second Lockdown. Man was I wrong on that one!

But that's it.

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All understandable, except for the clapping perhaps. The clapping was the worst!

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Hmm... Regarding manipulated, “Panicking Pauls”, I just read this article, with very good stuff.

Would You Rather be a Fool or a Tool? by Dr. James Alexander

https://dailysceptic.org/2023/03/25/would-you-rather-be-a-fool-or-a-tool/

Alexander’s basic premise is solid, that is, anyone finding the courage to go against the Official Covid Narrative had to accept being termed a “fool”, accepting his own marginalisation. Generally speaking, I expect most individuals accepting this path during the Covid crisis had already had some experience on this path before the Crisis. Here is a useful quote from Alexander’s article

“Some time ago Sinead Murphy in the Sceptic asked why academics failed us so badly during the pandemic. Her answer was polite. The less polite answer is that academics are, by and large, tools.”

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