The point of my hypothetical is that communicable diseases have a tendency to evolve to be less pathogenic over time.

That’s not actually a real thing. It was a theory by a guy in the 1800s that’s been soundly debunked but spread because people want to believe it’s true.

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/dec/08/facebook-posts/viruses-and-other-pathogens-can-evolve-become-more/

And notably they’re not really two entirely unrelated things. “SARS” is SARS-CoV-1 and “COVID” is SARS-CoV-2.

Office buildings are test tubes, schools are petri dishes.

Polling generally showed Democrats supporting masking by a massive margin. The most recent poll I could find (April 2022) had support for mandatory masking on public transportation among Democrats as 80-5.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/majority-of-americans-support-mask-mandates-for-travel-ap-poll-finds

What’s the point of this hypothetical? It’s both not remotely close to where we are currently and has redefined the consequences to absurdity.

“Would you still wear a mask if the consequence of infection was a single light sneeze?”

“Would you wear a seat belt if the only consequence of car crashes was a small bruise?”

And those were the good old days when they were just trying to be subtly racist, rather than the now times where they’re just straight up trying to smuggle Nazi dog whistles in.

And pair that with the government saying it’s mostly killing old people and those with health issues then just declaring it over. I wasn’t expecting lockdown forever, but just like keeping it as an ongoing health concern. Instead they’ve been wiping their site of tracking, dropping funding, and abandoning workers to just hope their employer isn’t going to get them sick. COVID being over is good politically and good for business, so COVID is over.

It’s not like the rich countries are self-evidently sober and stable in their politics and climate impacts. The richest one just had their own wannabe fascist and has both been responsible for a large part of emissions and rarely met their climate goals.

So sadly the Russians are the only ones who enter the „finding out“.

Counterpoint: It’s not sad that there isn’t going to be a war, whether or not it might be humiliating to an authoritarian regime.

I will never not downvote a link to the Daily Caller.

It doesn’t really seem like they’re accounting for the fact that this means that the participant candidates are going to skew towards people that are overweight, which is like the 2nd highest risk factor for cancer generally.

You say this based on what exactly? Because that’s a trivial thing to correct for in an observational study.

As someone who would also very much like to believe that aspartame is perfectly safe, I will point out that in a controversy over “is this commercially sold product dangerous”, the side that says “no” is going to get a lot more funding than the one that says “yes”. Maybe there’s some potential financial incentive for alternative sweeteners to boost aspartame-bad studies, but the aspartame-good group is very directly backed by behemoths.

These things aren’t easy to prove and more research (from publicly funded sources) would be good, but when you’re seeing a lot of confusing competing claims, keep in mind that industry funded research exists and it will be overwhelmingly on the side of “let us keep selling these very profitable products”.