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</o:shapelayout></xml><![endif]--></head><body lang=EN-US link=blue vlink=purple style='word-wrap:break-word'><div class=WordSection1><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><div style='border:none;border-top:solid #E1E1E1 1.0pt;padding:3.0pt 0in 0in 0in'><p class=MsoNormal><b>…</b>> <b>On Behalf Of </b>Stathis Papaioannou via extropy-chat<br><br><o:p></o:p></p></div><div><div><blockquote style='border:none;border-left:solid #CCCCCC 1.0pt;padding:0in 0in 0in 6.0pt;margin-left:4.8pt;margin-right:0in'><div><div><div><p class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto'>No Stathis, we will cheerfully take whatever measures which might possibly save us. We will ignore what our government says however. Two very different things. This has been amply demonstrated. Note they are not necessarily oppose, just different.<o:p></o:p></p></div></div></div></blockquote><div><p class=MsoNormal>>…But you’re all gonna die if it is required that at least a certain proportion of the population take the measures, and this proportion is larger than those who would do it voluntarily.<o:p></o:p></p></div></div></div><p class=MsoNormal>-- <o:p></o:p></p><div><p class=MsoNormal>Stathis Papaioannou<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>No Stathis, it really doesn’t work that way. Nothing we did stopped the virus. But the virus doesn’t kill everyone. We were told things like “…you’re all gonna die if you don’t…” this or that, but that kind of overblown rhetoric permanently damaged the credibility of those spouting such nonsense. Most of us knew someone who caught and recovered. I am one: I caught alpha very early in pandemic, and I do freely admit it kicked my ass bigtime. But after I came home from a hospital stay (still not knowing what that was) my bride and son both caught it, presumably from me. My bride experienced a moderate flu. For my son a very mild illness that caused one day off school and even that was a coin-toss. It was only after we all three recovered that we heard anything about this new covid disease out of China.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>As you recall, it was in about March 2020 that I and others posted that this looked like something that might have escaped from a research lab in China (I caught it from a medical worker who had just returned from China.) It was ridiculed as an absurd theory, which later turned out to be a likely explanation. This further damaged the credibility of those who did the “fact checking” in the spring of 2020, such as Face Book and Twitter. Now our trust in those organizations is very low, and may take years to recover, if ever. <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>This we can say: if we are told things like “…you’re all gonna die if you don’t do {x}” that is a quick way to turn the public against {x}. We didn’t trust that before and we trust that even less now.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Summary: We were told to follow the science by the people who were following the science fiction.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>spike<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p></div><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p></div></body></html>