...the only comments were attacks on the messengers...
If someone makes an extraordinary claim without checkable supporting evidence, it can be useful to consider:
-Is the source reliable?
-Have they made extraordinary claims before, and if so, were they correct?
Supposing we read the claim,
"I can't reveal the location at the moment, but I've had clearance to report that while I was at a research facility a radio source was detected, producing an apparently structured signal consistent with an intelligent extraterrestrial origin."
If the author was Seth Shostak or Michio Kaku, we might suddenly pay attention. Many of us might eagerly await further news.
If the author was Luis Elizondo or Jaime Maussan, we might not have the same level of interest.
Naas
has made extraordinary (and arguably fear-mongering) claims about public health measures before, and has been wrong.
That doesn't mean everything she says is wrong, but if she makes another extraordinary claim, we might pause for thought.
Her substack archive of "Meryl's CHAOS Newsletter" is here,
https://merylnass.substack.com/archive.
Many of her strongly-held views , e.g. about the benefits vs. risk of vaccines generally, and anthropogenic global warming, are not supported by data from
any nation and are at variance with the overwhelming majority of reliable studies.
Possible reasons for this are:
(1) There is a pan-national conspiracy, involving pretty much all virologists, bacteriologists, epidemiologists, respected medical researchers, the World Health Organisation, meteorologists, climatologists, science/ medicine journal editors and peer-reviewers.
(2) Naas' views about vaccines and global warming are wrong.
Her opinions about
preventing disease are bizarre;
from "
What's Up With Birdflu?":
External Quote:
A real virus, but there are lots of viruses and we ignore 99% of them, and if we simply ignored bird flu, maybe there would be nothing to worry about?
Influenza can be a killer. Some major influenza strains have been of zoonotic origin- they start in a non-human species but (often due to mutation) cross the species barrier and cause illness in humans. There are major international collaborations in detecting and studying emergent influenza strains, their effects and spread, not least the
Global Influenza Surveillance and Response System, administered by the
World Health Organisation (WHO).
If a strain of bird flu arose which was more readily transmissible to, and between, humans, there is a problem: We can't realistically control the movement of birds.
Naas' informed opinion is- ignore it and hope for the best; raise fears about effective disease prevention instead.
-Oh, and demonise WHO and pretend it's a bit like SPECTRE in the James Bond films, or a Communist conspiracy.
A quick opinion on the WHO: Like many organisations with a large bureaucratic element, there is undoubtedly waste and grift within WHO. However, the WHO and its workers are largely responsible for the eradication of smallpox; no cases since 1977 and declared extinct in nature in 1979
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox.
This was done by the creation of a surveillance system (of the type Naas doesn't want for bird flu) and systematic vaccination.
Smallpox had a fatality rate of approx. 30%, possibly higher. many survivors were permanently scarred, sometimes blinded.
There wasn't (while smallpox existed in the wild) an effective treatment.
Efforts largely co-ordinated by WHO (but now more commonly run by individual nation's health agencies) have almost eradicated polio in nature,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio, though it remains in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
External Quote:
In Afghanistan, the Taliban banned house-to-house polio vaccination between 2018 and 2021. These factors have set back efforts to eliminate polio by means of vaccination in these countries.
Vaccine workers were killed. Outbreaks in other nations have occurred with their origins in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
I have some sympathy with the former US government position that they payed a disproportionate amount towards WHO, but proportionate to wealth (size of economy) Germany, Japan and the UK each contributed more than the USA.
The eradication of smallpox, and reduction of polio, has been economically beneficial for every country (let alone the reduction in human suffering).