I have no clue who Alex Berenson is, nor do I care. What I do know is, they have ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA WHAT THEY ARE TALKING ABOUT.
Source: I am a very close former friend of Dan’s who received several calls regarding the cause of death. And no, I am not going to comment further on this. But, I think my track record makes clear that I would have no problem telling y’all if there was an actual vaccine conspiracy story here.
Whoever this Alex Berenson person is, they’re an absolutely despicable person for doing this to Dan’s legacy. I’m so angry right now.
I only met Dan a couple of times at Toorcon, so I can only imagine how angry you are. His memory doesn’t deserve this.
Unfortunately that’s Alex Berenson’s shtick of latching on to someone else’s problems to sell his work in the culture wars. Prior to COVID he had, despite having no qualifications or experience, written a book arguing against cannabis legalization alleging that it caused psychosis. This was flatly rejected by the scientific community for analytic errors but acted as a warmup for what he’d do during the pandemic when he found a larger audience for his lies and came pretty close to parlaying them into his own Fox show.
Why should any concrete details be mentioned? For all we know he might have eaten a burger from some poplar chain on the day he died, but that doesn’t make it ok for media to publicly in a non-scientific way to speculate “did McDonalds kill him?”, or try to imply that the family has some sort of responsibility for publishing enough details to exclude such a possibility.
It’s up to the doctors handling his case to make conclusions, and to the clinical trials of the vaccines to determine if there are connections of concern that should be taken into account when evaluations if they are safe. Which as many people getting it as we have, we can’t draw conclusions based on individual events that crackpots decide to dig into on Twitter based more on how known the patients are than on any real scientifically backed concern.
You won’t ever see in a scientific study mentioned: “ we only have a couple of cases so this isn’t statistically significant and there might be no link… but one of the patients had a lot of Twitter followers so we’ll speculate about a link anyway”
It is extremely stupid, and extremely disrespectful to the family. And the fact the author cannot see that says alort about him. It’s like screaming in the middle of a movie theater: “I’m not sure the sprinkler system is working, if there’s a fire and we might all die!!” With the root of your concern being that you say another movie recently where this happened.
It doesn’t matter if your concern is genuine, it’s still doesn’t mean it’s ok, because plenty of people will leave the theater based just on a “principle of caution” even though your just a baseless public menace. Though of cause in that case you are just hurting a company and inconveniencing moviegoers, in the actual case you are tormenting a grieving family and causing people avoid lifesaving vaccinations.
> For all we know he might have eaten a burger from some poplar chain on the day he died
Again, disingenuous strawmen like these are the problem.
The article specifically speculates on the basis of the condition that killed, the link established by /scientific studies/ afterwards between vaccines and the side effect, and the short duration between death and vaccination.
I’m fully vaccinated myself, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to ignore everything. There are always potential side effects, and it’s good to be aware of them.
Please stop being a radical who tells people to shut up and listen to “the science”, when even scientists are not 100% sure.
While it’s true that scientists want to be open to new possibilities, that doesn’t mean naively accepting that known charlatans like Berensen are acting in good faith when they pick up a particular idea to see if they can monetize it.
The linked paper is a case study of n=3 patients. There quite possibly is a mechanism where patients with certain pre-existing might want to monitor more closely but, as the paper notes, this appears to be quite rare given the massive number of people who’ve been vaccinated. The medical community monitors these things closely and I’m sure of two things: if there is something clinically useful which comes out of this it won’t be ignored, and anything useful will come out of work by medical professionals rather than a right-wing crank who will shamelessly attempt to harness a dead man’s reputation to boost his career.
Just before reading this, I read an article in the local newspaper (sz.de), interviewing the team at one of the hospitals. Their life is hard. Many patients, but also: Last year they had regular people as patients. Now they have many who wouldn't get vaccinated and are asking for much justification for every treatment.
One of them describes current corona patients as "a potpourri of difficult personalities".
The lady Alec Baldwin killed had guns pointed at her (by actors!) lots of times before, and hadn't died of it to that point! It's irresponsible to speculate that just because other people have been killed by guns, that was the case here!
Source: I am a very close former friend of Dan’s who received several calls regarding the cause of death. And no, I am not going to comment further on this. But, I think my track record makes clear that I would have no problem telling y’all if there was an actual vaccine conspiracy story here.
Whoever this Alex Berenson person is, they’re an absolutely despicable person for doing this to Dan’s legacy. I’m so angry right now.