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He does criticise the craziness of the far-Left in the United States in supporting the death cult of Hamas. He’s spot-on there. Meaning: he agrees with me.
But at the beginning of the pod above, talking to Rich Roll, he goes on again about Covid. About which (I think) he was wrong on nearly every count.
Over at his podcast in March of 2020, when the pandemic was still new, he talked to Nikolas Christakis. They both shared views at the extreme end of the panic spectrum. They were both alarmist and what they were pushing for turned out to be the worst policies.
I kept this blog all during Covid, which I would line up with Sam’s at any time -- and I’d be shown correct in my take on it. Which was, simply: don’t panic. I was also pretty quickly “lockdown skeptic”, because the data. Some of which I generated myself with figures from Oxford University on the severity of the Lockdowns worldwide, vs. the death rates per country, which showed no correlation. I was also right about schools closures being wrong, and about masks being ineffective. But, for Sam, Sam’s right.
At the site over there, I made a comment just now:
I’m back here 4 years later coz Sam is back on some pods saying pretty much the same thing as he said then: namely that he got it all right and everyone else was wrong. That is itself Wrong!
From the first few minutes of the pod above I note the following mistakes in what Sam Harris says “these ar the facts, that I hope we can agree on”:
1) Covid much worse than Flu, says Sam. No. Covid IFR was 0.02% cf. Flu of 0.03%. So slightly more for Covid than flu, but with Covid skewed significantly to super-elders with comorbidities.
Children just as much at risk, says Sam. No. Not in the United States, nor here in Hong Kong from where I’m writing this, nor anywhere else in the world. The stats simply do not bear this out.
2) Social distancing “essential”, says Sam. No. Fauci now admits that there was no scientific basis for the distancing measures. And to the extent they kept people indoors, they only led to increased transmission. Best thing we could have done is to encourage people to go outside. And to get fit. And to lose weight. None of which was suggested by either Sam or Fauci, or the CDC.
3) Schools everywhere should be closed, says Sam. No. The Europeans were already reopening schools by the time of the above pod, and Sweden had never closed them. But Sam and the Left simply smeared those who pointed this out, at the time.
School closures were dramatically bad for students. The closures were restricted to public schools, while private schools, the likes of which Sam’s kids probably go to, were kept open. Grossest hypocrisy. Which we knew then, not just now in retrospect. Unless you were Sam Harris. In which case you didn’t know it, and remain to this day proud that you didn’t.
That’s in the first five minutes. I can’t bear to go through the rest.
I did listen to this pod in real time, at the time 4 years ago, from here in HongKong where we were close to the epicentre of the outbreak, up in Wuhan, and I thought Harris and Christakis were both way over-panicky at the time.
And we’d been though the SARS epidemic of 2002, which was more deadly than Covid.
Let’s be plain. Sam got it wrong. He’s never come close to even hinting that he might think so.
But he did. He got it wrong.
ADDED: I just remembered: that the reason they closed schools in mid 2020 was that Trump had said that schools should be open. For a political gain, for a political point, for TDS-broken brains, they harmed millions of school children. That alone should be cause for investigation. Shame on them.
AND: they delayed the roll out of vaccines to past the election in 2020, because they didn’t want Trump to have an “October surprise”, by releasing a vaccine. Again, shame on them.
