There's No There There

Over in the sidebar at Ace of Spades blog, there's a really good question:

Interesting: The same people who say we have to shut down the country based on nothing but guesses and "models" are the exact same people saying we must not prescribe hydroxychloroquine until we have full 10,000 participant double-blind trials and conclusive scientific proof.

It seems the alleged "Science-Lovers" and Twitter scolds are willing to roll the dice on some speculations, but are extremely aggressive that we don't gamble on other ones.

So strange that sometimes we take suggestive evidence as conclusive proof that we must do something dramatic and destructive -- shutting the country's economy down -- but in other case, suggestive evidence is not enough to encourage doctors to prescribe a well-tested drug with minimal side-effects.

Why?

Well, quite.

Hydroxychloroquine has been used prophylactically for decades to prevent malaria. If it caused people's heads to explode, someone would have noticed by now. In fact, it may well be the least-new new drug in history, but we're all supposed to believe that prescribing it in this specific case, and only this case, is somehow incredibly dangerous. Hey, maybe we ought to tell the pills they're been taken to fight malaria, and hope they won't know the difference.

As the great Ann Coulter points out, things were a little different with an earlier plague:

When it came to AIDS, the gay community’s successful campaign to compel the FDA to allow “compassionate” use of unapproved drugs was a civil rights milestone on the order of Selma.

In a 1990 editorial, for example, The New York Times praised the “educated and articulate” gay spokesmen for bringing about “changes in the traditional methods of testing drugs,” adding that the new procedures were “a compassionate response to AIDS sufferers.”

Meanwhile, the MSM is occupying its time with stupid have you stopped beating your wife questions and bogus atrocity stories about the lack of ventilators... no, wait. That was last week, it's PPE that's the scandal this week.

It's all outrage, all the time, but no one will ask why doctors across the world have suddenly succumbed to the exact same delusion about patients getting better when they're prescribed a specific type of drug therapy.

What do the MSM think is going on? Mass hysteria?

Nope, they don't think at all. Bias doesn't even cover it. For all their ostentatious globalism, the MSM are the most insular people on the planet, particularly in the UK. Even a pandemic is viewed in terms of how it affects things in a half dozen north London postcodes.

You can hardly get them to acknowledge that closing down the economy may have negative side effects. 

All of which is by way of saying I can well understand this. How much respect are we meant to have for a bunch of clowns who offer no actual insight whatsoever, just a continuous bunch of lame-o gotchas?

They're supposed to be the Smartest People In The Room but all they can offer is parochial talking points. If it's actual analysis you're after, you're better off with just a bloggers like Hector Drummond.

It goes a little deeper as well. As US Youtuber Stephen Crowder points out, with the shut down in place America's late night talk show hosts are now just particularly high-profile Youtubers...

High profile *bad* Youtubers.

It turns out that once you take away the football team size writers room and the slick production values you're left with the entertainment equivalent of a bunch of beached whales.

Yep, the smart set aren't smart, and the funny guys aren't funny, but at least their arrogance is intact!