Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive May 24, 2026
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NewsReaction Politics as Persuasion

Back to episode — Episode 2959 CWSA 09/15/25

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they will, with the exception, by the way, of Cenk, but one of the reasons I like Cenk Uygur, I think it's pronounced. I never know how to pronounce his last name, but Cenk is fabulous in letting you talk and doesn't like to be interrupted if you interrupt him. And I appreciate that as well. But even though I quite often disagree with Cenk, I've had two online conversations with him. He does not i…

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oncologists are seeing lots of the young come in with cancers that sometimes they've never seen. So the young have a big uptick in cancer. So therefore, it's true that there's a big uptick in cancer since the pandemic and therefore logically it's either from the vaccinations or it's from the COVID itself but you believe it's from the vaccinations. All right. How can it be true that there's a big uptick in children getting rare cancers? That part is true. But also not true that it had anything to do with the pandemic. How could both of those be true? There's a big uptick since the pandemic, but the pandemic is not blamed for the uptick. Do you believe that?

Here's how you could believe it. I don't know what's true here. I really don't know what's true, but the claim is that the uptick is a continuing trend from well before the pandemic. So in other words, if you graphed it, you would indeed see a super alarming increase in young people with cancer, but it started so far before the pandemic, like years before, that it's just a continuation of a straight line. So given that the trend was already well established and all we're seeing is the continuation of the trend, it does not give you any confirmation that the pandemic itself was much of a cause of it. Now there was a decrease because there were fewer people going to the doctor. So decrease in just spotting the cancer and then there was increase in cancer because the people had not been treated because of the pandemic. But that was a brief effect. If you look at the long-term trend, apparently there's a lot more cancer, but it doesn't seem to have a confirmed connection to the pandemic.

Now, I'm not going to ask you to believe me. You know why? All data is fake. All data is fake. Do you think you can rely on that data to know what's going on? I don't. But there are some things that at one point you may have thought was true and I wonder if you still do. How many of you believe that during the pandemic healthy young athletes were dropping dead on the field? How many of you thought that was true? I'm pretty sure that's debunked. There's no evidence that anything like that ever happened.

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But for a while, I think almost everybody I knew thought it was happening. I doubted it from the beginning. Under the theory that if that were happening, these sports teams would not be able to stop talking about it. I mean, they would know, but they weren't. They were acting like nothing was happening. So I thought, hmm, how could all these healthy athletes be dropping dead and yet the people who…

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