Conspiracy theories

Lots of crazy conspiracy theories out there:

Guess who was behind the epidemic's spread? This is a left wing conspiracy theory, and of course most of them are from those with TDR (trump derangement syndrome), aka the Hollywood/MSM axis that blames Trump for everything: although one suspects that China friendly trolls are pushing these stories, since China has been posting such theories on Facebook.

But on the right, the evil person of the week is Bill Gates.

evil bill gates is planning to give you a shot to make you a zombie. pushed by the anti vaxxers of course. 

One reason is that he said he was funding vaccines to lower the population.

This is weird, because Gates has funded vaccines that has saved hundreds of thousands of lives by funding vaccine outreach projects (especially measles vaccines, a big child killer in poor countries) 

So at first glance Gates saying his vaccines would cut the rate of population increase was interpreted as saying the vaccine was a birth control by stealth.

Hello: I worked in these types of jobs for most of my life. Let me explain how things work.

If you have time, Hans Rosling gives a good summary of how giving vaccines to keep children alive leads to people having fewer kids and cut population growth:





summary: in the past poor people lost  a lot of kids. So a village woman would have eight kids because she knew she'd lose some of them,  say four would die or become disabled from disease or accidents. That would leave 4: two would be girls who would leave to live with their husband's family. So that left two boys, and maybe one would stay home to take care of the parents in their old age.

Children don't cost much to raise: They can be put to work in the farm or herding the goats.

But in the modern world, nutrition is better, so fewer die of malnutrition, from simple diarrhea or pneumonia, or from tb, and vaccines mean you won't lose your children to measles, tetanus, diphtheria or end up with a kid crippled from polio.

Meaning if you have eight kids, you end up with the expense of raising eight kids: and with things changing, raising kids is now more expensive.

Because now your kids go to school: because you recognize that school is the way out of the back breaking poverty of simple village life.

so moms, knowing most of their kids will now live, figure they don't need to risk their lives having eight kids, and quickly decide they only want to have three or four.

But then women get an education and get a job, and often people move to the city, so women decide to have only one or two kids.

voila, population growth goes down as it has in East Asia and Europe and even Muslim countries like Iran and Turkey. (I use the word Growth, because the the population does continue to grow due to more older people, because folks no longer die at 40 but now live to be 65 or older, even in most poor countries).

Hence: vaccines lower the population growth and make people richer (destroying the environment but that's another story). Given enough time, the population will even stablize (maybe by the end of the 21st century).

hence, the conspiracy theorists are not seeing the entire picture, maybe because the press continues to push variations of the "population bomb means poor people must be sterilized against their will" propaganda.

All the conspiracy theories have a grain of truth in them, but they take a small defect and make it the whole story, ignoring the big story.

 Sort of like how the Dengue vaccine here killed a few kids so parents stopped all vaccines, leading to cases of polio, diphtheria and a couple hundred deaths from measles. Yet the backlash also ignored that vaccine probably did cut the death rate for Dengue which is very common here.


Conspiracy theories of various sorts go back centuries if not thousands of years.

But on TV, I get disgusted that the press seems to be pushing controversy to get viewers instead of giving information in a balanced way.

you know, watching the MSM push "gotcha" questions at Trump's news conference is disgusting: He fights them back, which is almost as bad for making things more polite, but then Bushyboy was polite and couldn't get his side of the story reported, whereas Trump tweets and everyone laughs and now knows his side of the story. 

Today he is being accused of not seeing a memo telling him to shut the flights from China, even though he closed the flights from China and took a lot of flack for it.

I sort of missed their point.

Yesterday, he caught a reporter spouting propaganda in the form of a question, and Trump pointed out she worked for China (she denied this, but her organization is essentially run by that government).

Trumpieboy is also pushing against the WHO who did not handle the epidemic but went along with China's "nothing to see here, folks, just move along" (i.e. it wasn't spread person to person) denial that it was a danger of spreading. Most of the questions are hostile to Trumpieboy, not the WHO of course.

By the way, I have noted that the WHO response in the Ebola epidemic was good: But their response to Wuhanflu was tainted by political correct propaganda pushed by China.