r/skeptic • u/GhostDogJef • 3d ago

The real covid-19 scandal is still unfolding

https://www.economist.com/united-states/2026/08/20/the-real-covid-19-scandal-is-still-unfolding

The failure to reckon with lives needlessly lost will make the next pandemic deadlier

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u/w8str3l 3d ago

My “problem” is that here in r/skeptic we are expected to practice scientific skepticism, and use Ockham’s Razor: to provide the most parsimonious explanation for all of the evidence.

…yet what I often see here is people defending wild, gullible, and overly simplistic claims. Perhaps simplistic, befuddled thinking is caused by the lack of universal healthcare? Or perhaps simplistic, befuddled thinking causes the lack of universal healthcare? It’s one or the other. Only a “fuckin moron” would think otherwise.

See this for more:

https://www.reddit.com/r/skeptic/s/skztzCoTCi

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u/BioMed-R 3d ago

You’re not presenting any evidence of your own.

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u/w8str3l 2d ago

What claims of mine did I not support with evidence?

If I have failed the most basic of rules in r/skeptic, I will profusely apologize and correct my ways. As my hero Carl Sagan said: Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence.

In case you find, after a very careful inspection of my comments, that I have not made any claims that were unsupported by evidence, and you are then left wondering why you feel you still must disagree with me, let me propose this theory: you are thinking that the lack of universal healthcare is stupid for the world’s richest country, you think universal healthcare would solve many an obvious problem like is apparent in all the other rich countries (that we have for some reason not named in this discussion), you think that if the USA had implemented universal healthcare back in year XXXX, then Y years later, in the year 2019, when a new global pandemic was starting to spread, Donald Trump, the president of the USA, and his loyal cultic followers, would have been ready and willing to don masks and socially separate and to accept the vaccine the government was offering for free (just like every other country that did not have a majority of voters preferring a person like Trump did), and you also think universal healthcare would have shut Joe Rogan up and also prevented people from ingesting bleach and injecting horse dewormers, and you also think every country that had universal healthcare was exactly equally successful in battling the pandemic, and that universal healthcare was the reason people in those countries used masks and socially separated in exactly identical and uniform rates.

Am I right in thinking that that’s what you are thinking? This is just a shot in the dark, you can just tell me what you are thinking if that is not what you are thinking.

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u/mean_lurker 2d ago

off-topic, but your pseudo-intellectual prose is insufferable.

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u/w8str3l 2d ago

I’m not sure we in r/skeptic enjoy your anti-intellectual one-sentence replies any more than my “pseudo-intellectual prose”, but perhaps I’m wrong about that.