Putting this forward as a draft. Perhaps we should make a wiki to centralize the refutations and supporting evidence to each common claim.
#1 Covid isn’t deadly & it only affects the elderly and immunocompromised
There is significant excess mortality everywhere where Covid ran wild.
There is overwhelming evidence of long term damage occurring in a large percentage of young covid patients without any pre-existing conditions
Spread always starts in younger demos and inevitably filters through to the elderly and LTC facilities. Sweden utterly failed in their strategy of protecting the high risk. A year into this, 25% of Covid deaths are still in old age homes. If you infect somebody, it is sparking a fire you cannot contain and cannot estimate how far it will go (in Hilchos Nizkin one is Chayev for all damage his flames inflict provided they are propelled by prevalent natural powers). 1 person is likely responsible for ~50,000 cases in New Orleans.
#2 Gatherings aren't dangerous / people who don't wear masks don't die
There have been several threads dedicated to this argument. Most drunk drivers get home safely. The fact that many gatherings go on without creating any infections, in no way proves they didn't raise the likelihood of larger outbreaks.
The fact that many people don't wear masks and live on, in no way proves people who wear masks aren't a little safer.
As an illustration, Republican politicians had ~3x covid infections and deaths than Democrats.
#3 Protective measures aren’t foolproof
We follow safety precautions that offer partial mitigation even if they don’t always work, such as seatbelts and many medical treatments
#4 Masks don’t help
Sneeze into your mask and see the difference. We understand why masks would help, and there are CDC evaluations showing outcomes diverged significantly between similarly situated jurisdictions depending on mask mandated
#5 Kids/schools don’t spread Covid
Baseless. The most extreme studies only show a 50% reduction in transmission in kids under 10. That it still plenty of transmission. There is also overwhelming evidence the UK Mutation B117 is highly transmittable even amongst kids and infants.
#6 Exposure != infection
Many people are exposed to positive Covid carriers but happened not to be infected. This can be for a large variety of reasons: The carrier was never replicating the virus enough to spread to another person (low viral loads), by the time it started replicating enough, the carrier’s body neutralized the virus sufficiently for it to be too weak to infect another person, the time interval between when the replicating begun and neutralizing was brief (this is likely why some family members get infected and not other), you can just be lucky and the virus particles die or disperse before infecting somebody, or somebody’s body fended off an infection before it elicited an enduring immune response.
#7 We are immune
There are many documented cases of individuals who had covid and tested positive for antibodies, and got reinfected. There are also some whose original infection gets reactivated. We know this is rare, but it isn’t clear yet how rare.
On a community level, we know from Manaus, Brazil that even if 75%+ of a community is immune, Covid can still spread rapidly in a large outbreaks. Part of the reason is because of unequal dispersion of super-spreaders - since 1 person can infect 100, herd immunity doesn’t prevent the virus from spreading. In a gathering of 1000 people, there are still 300 susceptible patients
Many frum communities believes themselves immune only to be hit with large outbreaks
#8 Demonize the messenger
We never put our faith in a single person or establish reality based on one mans’ say. Moshe Rabeinu was wrong several times. We establish medical realities by the consensus of educated opinions, not by any sole authority. Fauci, the dems, and the media may be the worst evil, but it doesn’t make everything they say wrong.
#9 Precautions are more dangerous than the virus
Closing schools is a powerful and dangerous medicine, but overall suicide deaths are not higher in 2020. There are many protective measures that can be taken without any significant tradeoff. More than 1,000,000,000 wear a mask every day, so it is objectively not that difficult. Large weddings and gatherings can be avoided.
#10 Everybody will get covid sooner or later
In the US and Israel, more people have been vaccinated than have tested positive. This is less than a year in. It is quite foreseeable to avoid the infection altogether.