Sarah B. submitted this Comment of the Day over the weekend, and it dovetails neatly with today’s post on the immediate politicizing of the Baltimore bridge disaster. Of course, that most recent incident is but a fractal of the Wuhan Virus Ethics Train Wreck, which saw both misinformation spread by the news media and our supposedly non-partisan, trustworthy health organizations, agencies and institutions, cripple the economy, damage our children, turn large swathes of the population into fearful, mask-clutching weenies, and damage the integrity of a national election. That’s where Sarah’s cautionary tale begins.

Here is Sarah B.’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Notes on ‘Misinformation’”…

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My mother, an RN (and massage therapist) became livid at all her TDS suffering friends and patients repeatedly calling Ivermectin a “horse drug”. She went and got documents discussing the usage of Ivermectin in certain patients with various types of issues, and how the drug was routinely used to treat certain infections.

But despite the high usage of the drug on humans in these papers from reputable medical journals dated over decades, she was told that she was too simple to understand that this was misinformation and that Ivermectin was only a conspiracy theorist’s solution. She was told that she needs to check with people with real medical degrees, not just crunchy folks in massage therapy school. Her bachelors in nursing with decades of experience was ignored in this discussion.

My mother’s insistence that people should look at the evidence lost her friends and clients, many of whom no longer contact her at all and haven’t since 2020, despite being friends for decades prior.

My graduate work in energy technologies has had the same effect. I love it when I point out the major implications of stupid green policies and am told that I have bought into misinformation, and should listen to a cross country skier or an autistic child,both of whom know more than me on the issue. Proving oil resource availability with tensors is misinformation, but believing that cobalt is mined ethically because anonymous posters on the internet said cobalt mining issues are a conspiracy theory is good research. 

While I rarely speak with anyone in my circles about these things anymore, I used to get a huge amount of, “don’t just believe ______, follow the science” advice and people telling me I had no reason to disbelieve in the anthropogenicity of global warming, or the stupidity of global warming “solutions” because I was not smart enough to understand the science. A restaurant recruiter with a GED once told me that my graduate work in this area was irrelevant to the facts because he had read a book on it and I obviously had never done anything but watch Fox News.

The whole misinformation thing has gone completely off the rails and taken society with it. Overly politicizing everything is destroying all we used to hold dear.