• argv_minus_one@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    If the cure to cancer were found, like a virus to prevent deaths from COVID-19, sites like Twitter and Lemmy would spread lies and disinformation and tell people to avoid authentic facts and science.

    They would try, but they would fail. COVID-19 is history now, because of vaccination, despite the best efforts of anti-vax death cultists to stop it.

    • RoundSparrow@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      I find anti-science is going as Carl Sagan predicted it could in his 1995 book.

      I do not meet people who would consider a microscope a useful tool to look at the virus. Their faith is in information on TV or websites, not even considering that the virus can be directly observed. I saw almost nobody asking for a TV show to show microscope footage and taking a test from a person and demonstrating it can be seen. Virus has been on Earth for millions of year, the microscope is the new thing they aren’t facing.

      There is a popularity aspect of misinformation. Sagan teaches about that too.

      • argv_minus_one@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        There were pictures and diagrams of the virus. There was even art made in the virus’ likeness.

        I’ve never seen a claim that COVID-19 was caused by anything other than an observable physical object. There have been many claims that it’s a manmade bioweapon and that vaccines are ineffective and harmful, but I’ve never heard of someone claiming it’s an intangible curse from God or something.

        • RoundSparrow@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          There were pictures and diagrams of the virus. There was even art made in the virus’ likeness.

          But there were people who couldn’t seem to associate that it comes from friends and neighbors and that they could spread it, and seem to think it is all about a laboratory or ‘people die in hospitals’.

          There have been many claims that it’s a manmade bioweapon

          Yes, exactly, in a laboratory, not in friends and neighbors who carry it around and spread it peer to peer.

          The same thing with computer virus, many users I have had to remove virus on their computer claim it magically jumped on their computer. When computers were not even networked. You often had to go track down who they got a floppy disk from.

          • argv_minus_one@beehaw.org
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            1 year ago

            That’s some backwards logic, then. The whole point of bioweapons is that, once introduced into the population you’re trying to exterminate, it spreads among them peer-to-peer.