Death Race 2020

Intervention harms don’t care about how many died of COVID

One strange cognitive bias I noticed during Covid was that, when I would point out the harms of the lockdowns and interventions, lockdowners would reply with Covid death numbers as a retort, which is a terrible response because what matters is not whether Covid deaths are large compared to the intervention deaths, but whether the number SAVED from Covid by the interventions is large compared to the intervention deaths.

But, EVEN STRANGER was that when a lockdowner would reply “But look at how many Covid deaths there are” to an anti-lockdowner, so many anti-lockdowners would try to argue that the Covid deaths were actually lower than the lockdowner claimed.

Which is irrelevant! Even if the number of Covid deaths were exorbitant, if the interventions did not reduce the number more than the deaths caused by the interventions, then that’s a net negative.

We had a situation where defenders of freedom were mistakenly feeling that they had the burden to show that there were fewer Covid deaths than intervention / iatrogenic deaths.

It became a perverse contest to convince the opposition that “their” deaths were higher.

But it was a false contest. And the anti-lockdowners had stumbled into accepting a much stronger burden than the one they actually had.

That hurt the movement.

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Stop comparing lockdown deaths to COVID deaths. Moment 76