Read on Twitter
Must be time to do a covid fuckwit round up. All the denialist arguments. I haven't seen one in a while.
'Actually way more people have caught it than reported so the mortality rate is basically like flu and it will soon be over.'
'They aren't dying of it, they are dying *with* covid.'
'Cases are high because tests are high.'
'There are loads of false positives.'
[After the lockdown has brought cases down to very low levels] 'Look SAGE said 350k would die but nothing like that have died! What was the lockdown for it was obvs a con.'
'The code is very dodgy because it does not look like a software engineer wrote it and not understanding the model I ran it and it is definitely wrong.'
'This is going to be fine because most people already have some kind of immunity for some other reason and it will disappear.'
Look, cases went up even in countries with lockdowns! They don't work!
There's never been a second wave of anything, so no reason to believe there will be one this time!
The herd immunity point will be way way lower than 60% because %%$$£££**88((((=== so let's go for it.
There's a lot of room in the morgues.
Look the corridors in hospitals are empty see my photos!! [Empty to enforce social distancing of course].
Excess deaths don't look too bad compared to X years ago! [Misinformation because mortality has been falling in many countries, and social distancing for covid19 has reduced seasonal flu deaths.]
This isn't a second wave it's just a small local outbreak that is going to fizzle out [that one was a Yeadon blog]. No need for another lockdown.
Mean age of death = life expectancy at birth so it's not reducing life! No lockdowns! [wrong because life expectancy at age X is >> life expectancy at birth]. [h/t @kentindell ]
'Remember all that fuss about ventilators and Nightingale hospitals? What was all that about eh? The lockdowns were a waste of time, it was a false alarm.'
Let's use Mother Nature's natural vaccination program! It's been tried for millenia! No need for lockdowns and all this lab nonsense!
Lockdowns are causing more death and ill health than they are preventing!
'Long covid is bullshit!'
'There's 0 evidence that masks work!'
[Obvs there are some really weird US conspiracy based ones, covid19 being a Dems/Soros/Chinese plot etc].
There's a genre of hard to pin down denialism summarized as 'No need to panic, everyone be careful, no need for drastic action, fear is worse than covid itslef' [The Sikora genre].
'There is not going to be a vaccine, we just have to live with it.'
Juxtaposed with [see eg Ian Lavery recently] 'I'm very worried about how fast these vaccines have been developed, normally they take like 10 years.'
[with sarcasm] 'Remember the winter flu lockdowns?! [nudge nudge]'
'Loook what lockdowns did to GDP!' [Failling to account for the effect of virus prevalence on GDP.]
There also seems to be an extreme version which is roughly 'this is not actually happening' sourced to Delingpole. But I need to look into that further before certifying it for this list.
It's the purest form of denialism, of course. Just denying it.
There's 'we should let everyone out and simply shield the vulnerable'. [Sometimes made in ignorance/good faith, ie not appreciating the impracticality of it.]
There's 'look this is really a question of free speech reasonable people can disagree and all voices must be heard this is just a sinister attempt to....' not quite the same category, but motivated by the same end.
Please keep sending them in; important for historians of the period to have these documented.
I suppose that for posterity I should go through and dig out examples of each of them.
I'm sure that in one of the lockdown sceptics blogs the 'other kinds of immunity will make it fine' one was supplemented with 'there's too much peer pressure and vested interest in the science community to let this truth out.'
This is a high-class bit of covid fuckwittery, related second hand: https://twitter.com/homo_moleculus/status/1346815224058437643
I nearly forgot Matt Ridley's great one 'we shouldn't lock down because this will prevent evolution naturally working so that the virus mutates to a less virulent form.' Hahahaha.
Here's another. 'I'm not a covid denier [distraction, accusation directed at denying obvious facts about incidence and strategy to treat]... the real denier is someone who denies econ consequences [of which there are none]': https://twitter.com/JamesMelville/status/1347205091238047752
I've not nailed down precisely what should appear in this wiki but this is tragically stupid, and it's about the covid vaccines. https://twitter.com/BBCNEandCumbria/status/1347224777388384264
H/t @Gilesyb for finding this very stupid comment by Toby Young: https://twitter.com/Gilesyb/status/1347557207123111937
Here's another, which is a different category. No logical failures. Just staying something that is wildly untrue. Is Toby lying here, or just really stupid? You decide. https://twitter.com/GeorgyBradders/status/1347565952200810496
Good example here. Ripple, not a wave. https://twitter.com/ste_lovell/status/1347680124657954818
This is Premier League stupidity: an advertising campaign asking people to behave as though they have it [they might be asymptomatic] is, apparently the same as assuming people are guilty until proven innocent. https://twitter.com/sundersays/status/1347686934945148928 From top class moron @MaajidNawaz
Thanks for all the contributions. If you find examples of the generic ones I started with, send them in!
I saw one just today that read something like 'Lockdowns are immoral regardless of how many people would otherwise die' stated over and over.' But it was written by a random person, and I have lost it. You'll have to take my word for it.
Particularly egregious and coordinated piece of commentary by covid morons @PaulEmbery @JuliaHB1 and others was this: https://twitter.com/paulembery/status/1342780150358962176
Paul compounded his malevolent intervention by going on the attack to claim that all he was doing was simply quoting true data. Econ/media studies/policy sci undergrad teaching moment there as to how bad faith populists conduct themselves.
The original tweets are so bad because the under 60s with no pre-exisiting conditions sounds like it excludes just a small group of old and very ill people who might have died anyway. In fact.... : https://twitter.com/jdportes/status/1343585457486102530
Another one, first encountered in my ex five-a-side group that had one particularly stupid covidiot in it, repeated a lot, is that we don't need to do lockdowns, we just need to be 'vigilant'. How vigilance works with an invisible virus and asymptomatic patients idk.
[In his case 'vigilance' included suggesting we engage in 'civil disobedience' and organising communal PE lessons for kids shut out of school.]
Obvs pieces for completeness that everyone must have encountered: former Twitter account holder Trump wondering about ingesting bleach, and somehow getting UV light into the body to kill the virus.
