Chris Bray is definitely possibly most likely not kidding around here:
We can’t award the gold medal yet, because the contestants are still showing up at the starting line.
Elsewhere at Substack, A Midwestern Doctor recently highlighted some of the most egregious vaccine propaganda that appeared during the current forever-pandemic, in a piece that has the potential to safely and effectively vaccinate your mind against bullshit:
But now we need to add a new example from the current week, because Peter Hotez exists and keeps publishing. His latest piece of analysis calmly warns that the new variant is maybe possibly or not the Most Worstest Evuh, in a huge rhetorical first that tries to overcome Covid exhaustion with louder hysteria:
tHiS oNe iS diFFeReNtttttttttt&#*$*$%^#&@, Version 957,1095,397.02. Your next winter of severe illness and death will be everything you were promised in your first winter of severe illness and death, we swear. If you died last time, JUST WAIT UNTIL YOU DIE AGAIN THIS TIME, FOOL.
How can you spot propaganda? Like this, from a paragraph near the bottom of Hotez’s latest:
Unfortunately, XBB.1.5 is still too new to have clinical data in-hand to show exactly what vaccines mean in terms of warding it off. At the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, we, like other groups, are scrambling to look at our own vaccine’s effects on XBB.1.5. However, the writing is on the wall here — boosting is your best bet at protecting yourself and your loved ones.
First sentence: We have no data about this. Third sentence: The thing we have no data for is your best bet to do the thing that we have no data for.
Every claim Hotez makes is a version of this maybe-definitely-uncertainty-certainty soup, telling you he doesn’t know while telling you that he knows
