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The Coronavirus Truthers Don't Believe in Public Health
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/wxevj5/the-coronavirus-truthers-dont-believe-in-public-healthSocial-distancing protesters, “medical freedom” advocates, and anti-vaccine activists all rely on deeply flawed ideas about how public health measures work—and how safe they are themselves.
Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai puts a lot of stock in his immune system, and in yours. The highly litigious self-proclaimed “inventor of email” has been campaigning zealously for the Republican nomination in Massachusetts' Senate race under the slogans “Be the Light” and “Truth. Freedom. Health.” Recently, as the coronavirus pandemic has continued to ravage the world, he’s boiled his message down to an even simpler talking point: Boosting your immune system will save your life. Social distancing and other public health measures advocated by Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top infectious disease expert in the U.S., are, he claims, “fearmongering"—or worse. In a recent Facebook live video, Ayyadurai said isolation “affects immune properties on the cellular level. You actually hurt your immune system.”
“If you want to give Fauci the benefit of the doubt, his training is horrible,” Ayyadurai added.
This is, of course, why Ayyadurai and his fans have been lobbying recently for Donald Trump to fire Fauci and replace him with Ayyadurai. He recently sent a letter to the president promising “immune and economic health” for the country, which he proposes to deliver by organizing Americans into four groups: Those who are COVID-19 positive; the hospitalized and in critical condition; those who are not hospitalized but are immuno-compromised; and, finally, those who are healthy and COVID-negative. That latter group, he proposes, should “get back to work immediately,” while taking high doses of Vitamin A, D, C and iodine. “Third-world countries” like Chad and Djibouti, he wrote, have had “ZERO deaths” from COVID-19, because they “get food right out of the ground” and are “out in the sun all day,” giving them high doses of vitamins that Americans are being deprived of in social isolation. (Chad and Djibouti, in fact, both have confirmed COVID-19 cases, and Djibouti recently had its first fatality. Numbers are expected to rise there, as they have everywhere else on the planet.)
Ayyadurai’s ideas about how presumably healthy people should behave aren’t in keeping with what we now know about the novel coronavirus, particularly given that asymptomatic carriers might be far more prevalent than initially believed. But he has nonetheless become one of the more visible faces of a peculiar coalition of people downplaying the deadly realities of the pandemic, calling for the country to “reopen,” and claiming that measures like quarantine and self-isolation are unnecessary, if not actively harmful. He’s also part of a more specific group of coronavirus truthers who claim that broad public health measures aren’t needed if personal health provisions—high doses of vitamins, “boosting” the immune system, or more exotic measures like an infrared sauna or nebulizing hydrogen peroxide, as infamous alternative health booster Joseph Mercola’s website recently recommended—are followed.
Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai puts a lot of stock in his immune system, and in yours. The highly litigious self-proclaimed “inventor of email” has been campaigning zealously for the Republican nomination in Massachusetts' Senate race under the slogans “Be the Light” and “Truth. Freedom. Health.” Recently, as the coronavirus pandemic has continued to ravage the world, he’s boiled his message down to an even simpler talking point: Boosting your immune system will save your life. Social distancing and other public health measures advocated by Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top infectious disease expert in the U.S., are, he claims, “fearmongering"—or worse. In a recent Facebook live video, Ayyadurai said isolation “affects immune properties on the cellular level. You actually hurt your immune system.”
“If you want to give Fauci the benefit of the doubt, his training is horrible,” Ayyadurai added.
This is, of course, why Ayyadurai and his fans have been lobbying recently for Donald Trump to fire Fauci and replace him with Ayyadurai. He recently sent a letter to the president promising “immune and economic health” for the country, which he proposes to deliver by organizing Americans into four groups: Those who are COVID-19 positive; the hospitalized and in critical condition; those who are not hospitalized but are immuno-compromised; and, finally, those who are healthy and COVID-negative. That latter group, he proposes, should “get back to work immediately,” while taking high doses of Vitamin A, D, C and iodine. “Third-world countries” like Chad and Djibouti, he wrote, have had “ZERO deaths” from COVID-19, because they “get food right out of the ground” and are “out in the sun all day,” giving them high doses of vitamins that Americans are being deprived of in social isolation. (Chad and Djibouti, in fact, both have confirmed COVID-19 cases, and Djibouti recently had its first fatality. Numbers are expected to rise there, as they have everywhere else on the planet.)
Ayyadurai’s ideas about how presumably healthy people should behave aren’t in keeping with what we now know about the novel coronavirus, particularly given that asymptomatic carriers might be far more prevalent than initially believed. But he has nonetheless become one of the more visible faces of a peculiar coalition of people downplaying the deadly realities of the pandemic, calling for the country to “reopen,” and claiming that measures like quarantine and self-isolation are unnecessary, if not actively harmful. He’s also part of a more specific group of coronavirus truthers who claim that broad public health measures aren’t needed if personal health provisions—high doses of vitamins, “boosting” the immune system, or more exotic measures like an infrared sauna or nebulizing hydrogen peroxide, as infamous alternative health booster Joseph Mercola’s website recently recommended—are followed.
Fucking Mercola
Sid
3 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
thanks for the recommendation. 
Sid