The Adults are Having a Quite Different Conversation
By Timon Wapenaar Sam Bowman with two contributors to Anti-Virus, his anti-lockdown sceptics website A piece in the New Statesman by Sam Bowman which ostensibly aims to debunk the “eight biggest Covid-sceptic myths” presents us with a pot-pourri of Twitter-troll inspired overripe low hanging fruit. No serious lockdown critic has ever framed the argument in the way Bowman represents it. Has Sunetra Gupta ever said that “we are overreacting to a virus which 99.5% of people will survive”? I doubt it. A Google search for “Sunetra Gupta” and the exact phrase “we are overreacting” yields Bowman's own article as the first hit, and only five other hits in total, none of which contained the damning quote. Likewise, there is not one lockdown sceptic of stature who says that “we aren't seeing excess deaths”, or that “we're witnessing a 'casedemic' of false positives from doing too many tests”. While there are assertions made about both excess deaths and a ‘casedemic’, their nature is much, much more nuanced than Bowman would have us believe. Indeed, his phrasing of the ‘casedemic’ is absolutely absurd. How on earth could any opponent worth arguing with believe something as patently stupid as “more tests result in more false positives”? He obviously hasn't read or listened to Heneghan, or Jefferson, or Yeadon, or McKernan. Or Levitt, or Gupta,...
