Moon of Alabama - It's time to say goodbye--- in which we debunk a "debunking"

Now, let's move on to what he does say.

Firstly, his assertion that "new infections per day" is the best way to track the pandemic.

This is seriously flawed in more than one way:

The term "new infections per day" is incorrect. Just because Person A is tested on Monday and Person B is tested on Tuesday does not mean B is a "new infection", that is absurdly bad logic. If you start widespread testing, testing 10,000s of people every day - you have no way of knowing which infections are "new" and which are old. You could only get "new infections per day" by testing everybody every single day, which is obviously impossible.

If your test can't tell the difference between viral RNA fragments and living virions (which PCR does not, and cannot), then you can't tell the difference between someone who is actively infected and someone who was previously exposed to the virus and either never got sick, or got sick and recovered.

If your test doesn't assess viral load (which PCR does not, and cannot) then you have no way to distinguish between a person who has enough virions to cause disease and someone who does not.

If your test can react to the RNA of other viruses(which, counter to MoA's assertions, some studies suggest it does), then you have no idea who is "positive for Sars-Cov-2" and who just had a cold a couple of weeks ago.

All in all the "cases" number is unreliable and borderline meaningless. To use it as a measure of the pandemic would be to create a forever war on an enemy which may already be defeated.

Summary: The PCR tests have been shown to be highly unreliable in more than one way, and are a potentially disastrous way of "tracking a pandemic". Jeanmonod's preference for dealing with confirmed deaths instead of misleading test results is backed by science and experts in epidemiology.

6. ON LOCKDOWNS, DEATH AND HYPOCRISY

In the original article for OffG, Dr Jeanmonod wrote:

"General isolation, distancing and lockdown measures, by limiting social contacts, freedom and basic human rights, add to the death toll through an upsurge of psychosocial and economic destabilization, worsening of psychiatric and demented individuals and reduction of medical care to the whole population. We have thus a combined causality for an excess mortality of COVID-19, a significant part of it being not due to the SARS-CoV-2 virus itself but to the worldwide COVID-19 panic wave and the imposed introduction of drastic and inhumane measures."

Bernhard responds with his trademark tact and charm:

MoA; "That is the "Lockdowns kill" thesis that many covidiots use to claim that negative side effects of pandemic control measures outweigh their positive effects."

"The thesis is wrong. Spain had a total lockdown everywhere between March 14 and May 9. It also had a lot of excess death. A large countrywide seroprevalence study showed where the most people were infected. That data is available on a granular and localized level."

Here we see again the very careful process by which Bernhard selects his data, choosing to evidence his claim that "lockdowns don't kill people" with a rather tortured statistical reasoning based on numbers from six months ago, and limited to a single country (Spain).

This is where the "debunking" lurches from impolite strident arrogance into complete denial, intellectual dishonesty and - worst of all - abject hypocrisy.

Lockdowns do cause death and destruction, this has never been debated, even by the people instituting them. The question was whether or not the risks of Covid19 merited the undoubted toll of collapsing the economy and shuttering hospitals. No one, on either side of this argument, has ever suggested they do no harm at all. Until now.

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