Maybe Possibly Potentially a Definite

tentatively, you can take it to the bank, unless you can't, but maybe it's a slam dunk

We can’t award the gold medal yet, because the contestants are still showing up at the starting line.

Elsewhere at Substack, A Midwestern Doctor recently highlighted some of the most egregious vaccine propaganda that appeared during the current forever-pandemic, in a piece that has the potential to safely and effectively vaccinate your mind against bullshit:

What Was the Most Insane Piece of Vaccine Propaganda You've Seen?

But now we need to add a new example from the current week, because Peter Hotez exists and keeps publishing. His latest piece of analysis calmly warns that the new variant is maybe possibly or not the Most Worstest Evuh, in a huge rhetorical first that tries to overcome Covid exhaustion with louder hysteria:

tHiS oNe iS diFFeReNtttttttttt&#*$*$%^#&@, Version 957,1095,397.02. Your next winter of severe illness and death will be everything you were promised in your first winter of severe illness and death, we swear. If you died last time, JUST WAIT UNTIL YOU DIE AGAIN THIS TIME, FOOL.

How can you spot propaganda? Like this, from a paragraph near the bottom of Hotez’s latest:

Unfortunately, XBB.1.5 is still too new to have clinical data in-hand to show exactly what vaccines mean in terms of warding it off. At the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, we, like other groups, are scrambling to look at our own vaccine’s effects on XBB.1.5. However, the writing is on the wall here—boosting is your best bet at protecting yourself and your loved ones.

First sentence: We have no data about this. Third sentence: The thing we have no data for is your best bet to do the thing that we have no data for.

Every claim Hotez makes is a version of this maybe-definitely-uncertainty-certainty soup, telling you he doesn’t know while telling you that he knows:

But XBB.1.5 gaining so much dominance is a departure from the trend. As that combination of scrabble variants collapse into a single wave of one dominant variant—in this case, XBB.1.5—the wave could start to resemble previous and dangerous peaks such as the alpha wave that dominated in early 2021, delta during the last half of 2021, or BA.1 omicron about a year ago.

The new variant “could start to resemble” other variants, which could be very bad if it maybe happens. It could also start to not resemble other variants, or it could put on a rhinestone jacket and start touring as an old-time country and western crooner, or it could retire to Las Vegas and take up the slot machines as a hobby. But one of the possible outcomes is that it could be bad, so let’s just go with that one as a screaming doom headline.

Or look at how much unsupported guessing is packed into the closing paragraph:

I am hearing from family and colleagues who came down with breakthrough COVID infections in the weeks following their bivalent; all of them have been mild infections. As the CDC presents additional data following the emergence of XBB.1.5, I suspect that it will become even clearer that the booster can keep this menace at bay.

That’s science, see? He’s hearing that. This is what it sounds like when the true experts speak, so it’s important to do as the man says. He heard some stuff. Everyone he heard about who got the bivalent booster got mild Covid. And what was infection like for people who didn’t get the bivalent booster? Apparently he didn’t hear about that, so it’s not science. Peter Hotez has a grapevine like a goose’s sphincter, so tight and narrow it only allows a casual word to slip through from the recently vaccinated. Stay well clear of Peter Hotez’s Patented Science Goose Anus, dirty unvaxxed, as no word of yours shall pass.

Anyway, here again is the closing science from a Major Expert: “I suspect that it will become even clearer that the booster can keep this menace at bay.”

He suspects it. So have some of this no-evidence thing injected into your body right away, because some guy who’s on television a lot suspects things about it, and he owns one of those doctor-thingie white coats.

Science!