DECODED: The Binary Fallacy
No Simple Answers to Complex Problems
Last time on Decoded, we talked about the follies of "Gold-Standard Evidence-Based Medicine" and their self-assigned authority over the entire scientific realm. Now? The FDA is claiming that denying COVID vaccines to the public falls under "Evidence-Based Medicine," by cranks who insist that repeated SARS-CoV-2 infections are beneficial to pediatric health and development under the guise of “natural immunity.”
Today, we dismantle the central machinery of their anti-intellectual project: the “Binary Fallacy” employed to defend SARS-CoV-2 & attack public health mitigations as a form of regressive anti-intellectualism, rejecting hard technical science for easy answers & fantastical narratives rooted in emotional manipulation.
Pandemics are, like all disasters, complex challenges that require cross-disciplinary collaboration between experts in their respective scientific fields, with incredible technical minutiae that can require years of dedicated study to truly master one's understanding of reality. Foolishly, we've chosen to prioritize boorish theatrics over real knowledge. America now faces a tidal wave of dangerous ignorance as multiple anti-vaccine cranks work to sabotage the federal government's public health agencies in a vapid display of narcissism, selling simple answers to hard problems from the guise of credentialed expertise.
Starting five years ago, this led to a binary fallacy sabotaging America's pandemic response, killing and disabling far too many.
So Just What is the Binary Fallacy?
One of the key tools of selling these unscientific fictions to the public is something we'll call the "Binary Fallacy," in which complex matters are reduced to a simple 0-or-100 state. When talking about the disease COVID-19, caused by a SARS virus, the anti-vaccine playbook says that as long as the virus doesn't immediately kill you, then you make a full recovery with no lingering issues and have lifelong immunity. This is the foundation for the Great Barrington Declaration, which insisted they had latent psychic abilities to magically identify & isolate anyone "vulnerable" to COVID-19.
A growing body of peer-reviewed medical research shows that this is obviously false, with a growing number of Americans developing serious health issues after "mild" reinfections, including cognitive impairment and chronic fatigue, amongst other issues. This reality has been continually denied with all sorts of outlandish garbage. In fact, the binary fallacy how certain "experts," like Shamez Ladhani of St. Georges Hospital & the United Kingdom Health Security Agency, championed pediatric COVID-19 infections as beneficial!
From August 2021 via Twitter:
"Even if masks offer any protection against COVID-19, surely that would only delay the inevitable & PROLONG the pandemic? + let's not forget >90% of kids are infected outside school"
This is a credentialed medical professional posting a highly misleading statement in which every part of it is dead wrong in a variety of ways. Shamez would inadvertently acknowledge this when he argued that pediatric COVID-19 deaths should be concealed from the public:
"I think putting up the names & pictures of children who may or may not have died of COVID-19 on social media is crass & undignified."
Shamez Ladhani would go on to deny every last possible harm caused by the SARS virus he wanted children and their families to be infected with repeatedly in sloppily assembled "scientific" publishing that was rightfully condemned by anyone who takes medicine and science seriously, as Ladhani’s only co-authors were fellow anti-vaccine social media quacks.
On the flip side of this coin, if a single mitigation to prevent SARS-CoV-2 transmission doesn't demonstrate perfect, 100% efficacy all of the time, then "Evidence-Based Medicine" zealots immediately declare this intervention to be 0% effective, totally worthless, and in fact harmful, based on a bizarre vision of... "normalcy." One in which hundreds of millions of unvaccinated Americans could gleefully embrace COVID-19 without any disruption to schools, hospitals, or other essential institutions in early 2020.
Survivorship bias taken to an absurd, perverse extreme.
This is an incredibly seductive argument for a few reasons. All this death and disease around you? Oh, well actually you don't have any responsibility to prevent the forging of these chains of transmission in your community causing this suffering. All of those scientists and doctors encouraging mitigations - not only are they stupid, but they're actually tyrants engaged in a conspiracy to destroy your children. You don't need to think seriously about these complicated matters of what's a good respirator, when should you get a COVID-19 booster, etc. - some quack on social media will give you a simple-minded, careless answer and tell you what to think, regardless of whether or not it's based in science, but instead personal convenience.
For all of this nonsense, you get the gold badge of membership that comes with joining "Team Reality."
Immaturity in Policymaking
A large part of becoming a mature adult is admitting what you don't know. Of all the world's knowledge, we as individuals will only manage to attain an insignificant fraction of it within our incredibly limited lifetimes. We only grow stronger by sharing we actually know and acknowledging what we don't. Sadly, the structure of social media - perhaps even the larger economy - encouraged many among us to share dangerous falsehoods rooted in this Binary Fallacy.
We have established a very dangerous precedent for public health in America. One in which sucking up to those in power on Twitter, defending decisions no matter how thoughtless, is rewarded with senior positions in the federal government. If you're willing to throw your colleagues in medicine and science under the bus, and sing the tune of convenient, simple narratives for complex challenges, then there's decent odds you might just wind up with a cozy job sabotaging the National Institute of Health, denying the approval of lifesaving vaccines at the Food & Drug Administration, or heavens only knows what other evils - with journalists at mainstream outlets falsely mischaracterizing anti-vaccine grifters as mere "vaccine critics."
The follies of the Binary Fallacy will continue to rot the halls of America's public health agencies, as the arrogantly unqualified make poor decisions from the same line of thinking that foolishly argued SARS viruses are beneficial for pediatric health and development. Now Americans have been denied an updated COVID-19 vaccine for the fall are now quite low, with the Medical Establishing making foolish demands of impossible and impracticable RCTs. The approval of mRNA vaccines for other diseases is also seemingly unlikely.
Worst of all, for the countless Americans who developed serious health issues after acute COVID-19 infections, under the umbrella term Long COVID, there seems to be little hope that a newly anti-vax FDA will approve any future treatments or cure for this condition - as doing so would be a pointed admission that years and years of obscene antics denying that SARS-CoV-2 can cause serious, lingering health issues just like SARS-CoV-1 did two decades prior, was completely wrong.
The practitioners of the Binary Fallacy insist that they are right about everything, 100% of the time, from March 2020 going forward, and everyone else got the pandemic 0% correct. These sorts of childish antics, refusing to ever admit basic errors while slandering everyone else, have no place in science or medicine. Now, this sort of behavior has become a template to follow for those who wish to succeed in American medicine and science.
Next, we'll talk about how this lays the foundations for what is truly…
…The Worst Case Scenario.
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