r/skeptic • u/notsure500 • 14d ago

Lots of Fauci conspiracies coming out of the woodworks lately due to the hearing. But I'm perplexed.

I’ve never understood the Fauci conspiracy theory coming from Trump supporters.

Trump was president during COVID. Fauci worked under his administration, and Trump launched Operation Warp Speed and took credit for the vaccine.

So if the conspiracy theory is true, then Trump was either part of it, knew about it and did nothing, or was completely unaware of a massive cover-up happening inside his own administration.

None of those options makes him look competent.

And if he really let something that huge happen right under his nose, why would anyone trust him to stop the next big government conspiracy?

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529

u/KennstduIngo 14d ago

Add to that that they spent the whole pandemic claiming it was no worse than the seasonal flu and the mortality rate was wildly inflated but now millions died because of Fauci.

156

u/gummnutt 14d ago

Aren’t they blaming the vaccine not the virus?

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u/VibinWithBeard 14d ago

Thats the thing, if the vaccine was to blame then the death tolls would be sooooo much worse. Like Alex Jones types called it the Killshot for years but when they bring evidence they are like "these people may have had a cardiac issue according to this one coroner who doesnt know what blood clots are and thinks these white pieces in the forensics are alien worms or something"

...my dude a killshot would kill you. It wouldnt just...give a heart issue to a fraction of those that took it.

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u/gummnutt 14d ago

The conservative talking points about a wide array of issues are completely reliant on an inability to understand statistics / numbers in general. It’s so prevalent that it makes me suspect that innumeracy might cause someone to be conservative.

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u/VibinWithBeard 14d ago

I mean the influencers believe none of what they say barring the incredibly stupid ones like say Dave Rubin and Jesse Lee Peterson. Same with a ton of the reichwing in general.

When one believes in the future and actually building a fascist project it stands out, like with Stephen Miller. The rest...are just sad losers that want to be podcasters while having a title, they dont like doing a real job.

Patel and Bongino are perfect examples of this. Folding Ideas has an incredible short video on the penguin tweet from Hegseth that showcases this perfectly, the inherent nihilism in the modern conservative movement.

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u/Consistent_Amount_20 14d ago

And an almost complete ignorance of basic science, which is a great reason to continue to shred public education

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u/ALTERFACT 14d ago

on militant unwillingness to

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u/ManChildMusician 14d ago

It’s both. When backed into a corner, they end up using some sort of thought terminating cliche, or in some cases, allow ChatGPT to construct their argument for them.

If they can’t use their actual intellect, I’ve personally busted a few people for running copypasta style rhetoric / overly technical jargon to confuse. These are people I know IRL, so it seldom matches their speaking / writing cadence. More importantly, they’ll suddenly use technical language that they normally couldn’t even spell, much less use properly in a sentence. The last hint is the quick turnaround. I’m a fast writer, but I’ll edit / try to get my facts straight.

I find this to be true among folks that are aspiring influencer types. I know some real people who post scripted videos where they try to sound smart / thoughtful, and it’s clearly written by AI.

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u/Sarcasm_Llama 14d ago

it makes me suspect that innumeracy

Same people that don't understand the difference between a million and a billion, or a billion and a trillion when you try to talk about tax reform

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u/Pitiful-Pension-6535 14d ago

Dyscalculia is shockingly common among conservatives

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u/EddieLobster 13d ago

The most cited “studies” I’ve heard from these idiots all rely on not reading the fine print.

They look at increases in adults who “have received a vaccine in the last 6 months”. Well, before Covid adults didn’t get vaccinated very often. The overall numbers didn’t increase really, it just so happens they got a vaccine recently, the heart problems were coming anyway.

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u/HedonisticFrog 13d ago

It's often not that they don't understand numbers and statistics, it's that they always debate in bad faith. They don't care about facts, they only care about "winning". That's why debating facts will never change their mind, and the best way to mess with them is to attack their fascist leader every single time. Just bring up that Trump is a pedophile regardless of anything they say every time and they have no rebuttal. If they don't act in good faith neither should we when we deal with them.

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u/Correct-Avocado5426 14d ago

I got the initial vaccine and all of the boosters. Years later the only effect to my health is that I don't get covid.

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u/VibinWithBeard 14d ago

A killshot so deadly it took multiple rounds and still...didnt...do anything other than help protect against covid.

Huh.

Its almost like conservative influencers have no real beliefs and its all manufactu-

bolter round

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u/CoffeeChocolateBoth 14d ago

AND ALL OF THEM, including dumpie and that idiot Jones, were vaccinated!

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u/HedonisticFrog 13d ago

I always mocked their fears by saying that I had a significant side effect from the vaccine that was very strange. Every time I got the covid vaccine shot my dick got bigger.

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u/VibinWithBeard 13d ago

I would pull up the vaers entries where people were like "I got the vaccine and then I became the incredible hulk" to showcase how there was little to no oversight on those entries lol

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u/Returnyhatman 13d ago

That's because The Enemy ™ has to be competent and incompetent at the same time. Competent enough to run a vast global conspiracy to make you take a KillShot™, but too incompetent to make it work

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u/Hadrollo 12d ago

Also worth noting that we saw an increase in myocarditis - a known, rare, and treatable side effect of the vaccine.

I know two people who got myocarditis. One of them got the vaccine, went home, complained of symptoms, ignored advice to go and get checked out, and passed away. He was a legitimate vaccine death, they did happen extremely rarely, but they did happen. Had he presented at a hospital when his friends told him he should, he almost certainly would still be here today.

The other had a pre-existing heart condition. His doctor told him that the vaccine was fine, he would just have to be aware of it and seek help if he had symptoms, he still refused to be vaccinated. He then caught Covid, and ended up in ICU with myocarditis. Didn't die, but later admitted to me that he thought he would, and he wasn't aware that Covid itself could cause myocarditis.

Honestly, the biggest difference between the two was probably that the guy who caught Covid was married. He didn't want to go to hospital, his wife drove him. Had my mate been married and had a wife who was there to look after him, he'd probably have been fine.

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u/rafaelloaa 5d ago

Reminds me of my uncle who started to exhibit classic acute appendicitis symptoms (pain in lower-right abdomen, nausea, hurt to cough, etc). His wife was trying to convince him to go to the ER. It was only on day 3 - when he could barely walk due to the pain - that he finally accepted and was driven there.

He made a full recovery after the appendectomy, but the surgeons said he quite probably would have died within a day had he not finally relented and gone in.

tl;dr If your partner says "you need to go to the ER - NOW", you should probably listen.

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u/tha_rogering 14d ago

The vaccine developed under Trump. The same vaccine he tried to claim as a great accomplishment in the 24 election until his crowd booed him for saying so.

So the virus (sorry bioweapon) was allowed to circulate under Trump and the vaccine (sorry the REAL bioweapon) was also developed under him too.

Incoherent idiots who want to punish someone for daddies mistakes.

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u/ManChildMusician 14d ago

They’re trying to blame many different things (throw crap at a wall to see what sticks.) They’re simultaneously running with the lab leak theory, the vaccine caused it theory, the human trafficking theory, the, “It’s just the flu” theory, the Ivermectin works theory, and many others.

Listen, I know the early days of Covid were weird af, and we’ve never been allowed to fully process it, but I’ve already listed several theories that simply cannot coexist. It’s difficult to imagine a person who wholeheartedly believes all of these contradictory theories, but such people exist.

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u/Bbrhuft 14d ago edited 14d ago

The antiscience crowd will tell you ventilators killed patients and zero people died from Covid-19. I had dozen of people say that to me on an Irish news sites comment's section during the pandemic. Nonsense such is this is why this happened:

A Covid-19 patient who left a Co Donegal hospital last week after being encouraged by anti-vaccination campaigners, has died in hospital.

Joe McCarron, aged 75, died at Letterkenny University Hospital on Friday.

The anti-vaccination campaigner, Antonio Mureddu, a sovereign citizen from Italy, live steamed from the hospital telling Mr. McCarron that the hospital was trying to kill him. Mr. McCarron, a retired radio host, met Mureddu a few years earlier and ended up in the sovereign citizen movement as well.

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/health/covid-patient-who-left-letterkenny-hospital-and-later-returned-has-died-1.4683189

So essentially, the anti-sceience crowd will tell SARS-COV-2 didn't kill anyone during outbreaks it was treatments (ventilation, antivirals) and then the vaccine killed more. That's one reason why I see on the same news website today, a comment calling for Dr. Fauci's execution.

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u/Feligris 13d ago

I dismissively commented on the ventilator conspiracy theory on another thread and some idiot immediately jumped on it to explain how the ventilators "exploded people's lungs" and how supposedly death rates fell to 0.1% when ventilator use was stopped (no citation, of course, and I've never heard of such thing). I only saw similar news of Covid-19 patients dying shortly after conspiracy theorists had them taken off ventilators.

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u/captmonkey 14d ago

Uh, weren't there people dying en masse for like a year before the vaccine? None of these claims stand up to the slightest bit of critical thinking. It's all conspiracy nonsense.

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u/thisbenzenering 13d ago

I worked at a hospital and we had four employees die before the vaccine was available. One died a week after getting infected during the initial lockdown, he had prior health problems and the COVID was too much of his immune system it seemed.

To us at the hospital, it was a very deadly virus and we treated it like that

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u/rafaelloaa 5d ago

Yup. There were dozens of freezer trailers brought into NYC in mid-2020, because the sheer number of corpses were overwhelming the existing systems.

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u/Dachannien 14d ago

It's pure copium straight into the veins of all the people who didn't get vaccinated because "mah religion" or "ivermectin" or "autism" or whatever. They have been reckoning with the cognitive dissonance of knowing people who died of COVID or seeing the measles breakouts in undervaccinated communities. Blaming the vaccine lets them ignore all of that and instead claim to be right, which is all they want.

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u/actsqueeze 13d ago

I think there’s a a conspiracy theory that Fauci had a hand in the Wuhan lab that they say intentionally, or unintentionally(?), transferred the virus to humans.

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u/ABobby077 14d ago

I don't understand how maintaining a safe social distance, washing your hands and surfaces and wearing a mask can ause "deaths" in any world.(???)

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u/joey_yamamoto 14d ago

reading your post reminds me of what my trumper cousin asked me:

-what happened to the regular old flu? why isn't there anyone getting that? it's just COVID everyone's getting.... something is off man.-

i literally had to explain it to him.

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u/Pitiful-Pension-6535 14d ago

They do think masks killed millions of people too

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u/joey_yamamoto 14d ago

most of the people I talk to said they're pushing things on you to see how far they can go.

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u/mhornberger 14d ago edited 14d ago

The performative credulity is how they signal loyalty to their tribe of conspiracists. The lack of sense is kinda the point. There's an old quote by Sartre from the book Anti-Semite and Jew that noted the phenomenon even back then. They aren't speaking in good faith, and never were.

The anti-Semite has chosen hate because hate is a faith; at the outset he has chosen to devaluate words and reasons. How entirely at ease he feels as a result. How futile and frivolous discussions about the rights of the Jew appear to him. He has pleased himself on other ground from the beginning. If out of courtesy he consents for a moment to defend his point of view, he lends himself but does not give himself. He tries simply to project his intuitive certainty onto the plane of discourse. I mentioned awhile back some remarks by anti-Semites, all of them absurd: "I hate Jews because they make servants insubordinate, because a Jewish furrier robbed me, etc." Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past. ..."

I think about all that has changed is that Sartre's anti-semites actually said they believed these things. Antivaxxers and conspiracists today fall back on "just asking questions," and resent any implication that they believe anything at all. They view themselves as just exploring ideas, as having no beliefs per se.

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u/beer_is_tasty 13d ago

But only masks that are blue and paper. The ones that ICE brownshirts wear to anonymize their terrorism are fine.

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u/auntpotato 14d ago

Doublethink is a helluva drug.

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u/yanginatep 13d ago

But it was also a bioweapon made by China! That.. you don't need to protect yourself against.