> Exactly, doing the study on the Korea pop is a huge confound

Because... Koreans aren't people, or what's your argument?

No. Not even close.
Commenting off the headline alone should be a bannable offense in this sub...

What? I can't even tell what you are trying to say, other than that it's conspiratorial in nature.

Acupuncture is pure placebo.
One of my favorite studies compared actual acupuncture (needles inserted at extremely specific woo-woo energy sites) to a sham treatment of poking the subjects at random with toothpicks. The real acupuncture and the toothpicks were equally as effective at relieving pain.
(And note that unlike poking people with toothpicks, inserting actual needles carries actual risks (mostly infection))

Pain is very, very subjective. It can be greatly relieved by things like simple distraction and personal attention (hell, even swearing has an analgesic effect). Acupuncture provides both personal attention and distraction. So it "works", but it doesn't work better than sham treatment. Meaning it only works as well as a placebo. Meaning it is a placebo.

> And it didn’t even address part of the issues which is that some of the more holistic approaches (yoga, those fancy sea salt soak pods, acupuncture) are terribly expensive and many aren’t covered by insurance.

... because they're placebos.

In all probability, also some species of horseshoe bat.

Read the sub rules. Or the big sticked comment at the top of every single thread.

The most popular one right now is claiming that people are dropping like flies from their COVID vaccines (simply made up, but "evidence" is presented by ascribing any and all deaths, regardless of actual cause of death, to vaccines). Other ones include:

• "mRNA vaccines are gene therapy" (based on a complete misunderstanding of what mRNA is and what it does in our bodies).
• "COVID vaccines cause AIDS" (simply made up).
• "The vaccines contain tracking chips/5G chips/nanites" (simply made up, physically implausible/impossible).
• "Vaccines make you magnetic" (simply made up, and physically impossible - but "proven" by sticking metal objects to skin (they stick because of sweat and oils on the skin; it has nothing to do with magnetism or any vaccines)).
• "The vaccines shed to other people" (an actual but generally insignificant thing for some attenuated ("live") vaccines - of which there are none for COVID-19).

The mRNA you receive in an mRNA vaccine is gone within days.

The rest is just your regular immune system at work. And from that, we know that there is no way that problems would suddenly start appearing years afterwards. Because that's just not how immune systems work.

All the "evidence" for it being created in a lab is just a bunch of "doesn't it sound suspicious that...".

> I am desperately trying to not be conspiratorial, but here are the facts: A massive outbreak of a bat-based virus occurred in a large Chinese city far away from where any native bat populations could have harbored the virus.

The bats don't live in the city, and it doesn't really matter where they live, as they're caught and sold in a wet market, which is the perfect breeding ground for spillover events. Epidemiologists and virologists have warned China about this again and again, saying that it's only a matter of time before we have another SARS.

> There is also zero concrete evidence of the virus jumping from any species to another, all we got was a virus that was off-the-bat good at infecting humans, which is not normal when compared to literally every outbreak in human history.

What? There are plenty of viruses that jump straight from bat to human (rabies, Marburg, Ebola, Nipah). Then others that are great at killing us after going through a second species (SARS, MERS, Hendra). And again: wet markets. They couldn't be better designed to create the conditions for this to occur.
And I would like to remind you that it took 14 years to conclusively identify where SARS originated.

There is nothing special about SARS-CoV-2. Really, the only strange thing about COVID-19 is that it took this long for it to happen again.

No it wasn't.

Just HIV is two different animal vectors (and has spilled over from ape/monkey to humans at least a dozen different times). Influenza, like SARS-CoV-2, can infect pretty much any mammal, which is the reason we have the diversity of strains that we do. SARS passed from bats to civets before passing to humans.

Hendra. Marburg. Ebola. Etc.

It's not the least bit hard to believe.

Does SARS ring a bell? HIV? Influenza?

Virologists.

And as a sidenote, this is why vaccine trials usually take so long: it takes ages for enough people to get infected to be able to draw any real conclusions about the vaccine's efficacy.

With COVID, which was spreading like wildfire, you didn't need to wait long at all - you got statistically significant results within months.

> 78% effective how could they possibly have any kind of respectable sample size when it is such a rare disease.

The UK has had more than 3500 confirmed cases, and almost exclusively among MSM. That is more than enough.

> Are they having vaccinated people expose themselves to the virus to see because if they don't get exposed to it then there's no way to know if it is effective or not.

Like with any vaccine study, they are comparing infection rates between vaccinated and unvaccinated people.

The Macdonald triad is junk science and not based on any evidence.

The big thing that mars basically every single "exercise helps [mental health issue]" study posted on here is that they compare an intervention group getting personal attention (in this case, a "personally tailored physical activity intervention") and taking part in an activity, any activity, with a control group getting nothing (no personalized anything, no activities whatsoever). They never include a placebo-equivalent control group.

The original, not updated, mRNA vaccines are 60% effective at preventing infection with the omicron strain. And 95+% effective at preventing serious disease.

And as this linked article says about this study,

> Through their experiments, the scientists learned that vaccine boosters and hybrid immunity (acquired through a history of an infection and vaccination) both induce neutralizing antibodies in the bloodstream against Omicron BA.1, BA.2, BA.2.12.1 and BA.4/5.

No, it is pretty hard to detect traces of an odorless, colorless gas.