The Daily Sceptic are ABSOLUTELY sure Flu Vanished

....but fail to address our evidence

In response to our latest flu article the Daily Sceptic has published an article by Will Jones contradicting our claims about the vanishing flu. You can read it here.

The article suffers from a number of fatal rhetorical defects. Firstly, the headline for article is hugely overconfident and assumes an unobtainable level of certitude: “We Really Know”.

Given the unreliability of official statistics about the ‘covid phenomenon’: how can anyone really know anything? This is exactly the point we are arguing - what a fact tells us is determined by the credibility of the source. If the source has been tampered with, what makes you think you know anything based on the fact?

Secondly, epistemically speaking, it is not our responsibility to contradict all supposed facts supporting claims that the flu disappeared, but simply to highlight false claims contradicted by evidence. This is how we provisionally establish truth in science as it is in the law: by negation.

The Daily Sceptic article presents an argument based on:

1. Low % percentage positivity from flu testing in England and a Lancet article that found few positive samples for flu.

2. Viral interference, based on observed data (itself based on testing regimes)

3. An inconsequential typo!

We have actually presented comprehensive evidence that rebuts all of these points in previous substack articles, specifically:

1. We show how flu testing can produce false negatives here.

2. We tackle viral interference between SARS-CoV-2 and flu here. Laboratory experiments show it isn’t a thing.

3. And the typo was fixed in the substack post but wasn’t posted before the TCW article went to press.

So, the Daily Sceptic article has made no attempt to comprehensively take on the totality of our evidence against the claim that flu vanished and unfortunately has instead simply ignored much of the evidence we have mustered.

Note that the points in our article should not be over or misinterpreted. We are not claiming there is no such phenomena as viral interference. Nor are we making the claim that SARS-CoV-2 is the same virus as influenza. We neither need to make one nor other of these points for our argument to be valid based on the evidence to hand.

Tell us what you think in the comments.