Congratulations Uncle COVID Denier
In a long-anticipated move, the 2021 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences has been awarded to Your Uncle on Facebook for his unrelenting efforts aimed towards denying the severity of the Coronavirus Pandemic.
“Your Uncle has made transformative advances in our understanding of COVID-19 pathology by his deeply innovative approach of ‘doing his own research,’ ‘not getting duped by the media elites,’ and ‘Blindly sharing articles from FreedomUSAPatriotNews.com’,” the Breakthrough Prize Board said in its announcement.
“His capacity to trust conspiracy theorists on Youtube overqualified public health experts with decades of experience truly speaks to his mastery of the scientific method.”
While the Board’s selection is unsurprising, the timing of the award has come under scrutiny, as 2021 prizes are generally awarded in 2021.
“Sure, we could have waited around all next year reading gross boring science papers,” a Breakthrough representative told Synapse while visibly sipping from a bottle of Grey Goose, “but your uncle called shelter-in-place orders ‘tyranny’ and when he put it that way the 270,000 preventable US Deaths just didn’t seem all that bad. Also, the world is chaos and nothing matters.”
“Ideally we would have just taken one of the 2020 prizes away from whoever we gave it to in the first place,” another representative added, “but they’d probably make a big stink about it and honestly who needs that noise.”
For many, Your Uncle’s most memorable COVID-19 publication was in the comment section of a completely unrelated video about a November NFL game, where he started an argument about the lockdown and revealed some impressive preliminary data.
In a master stroke of statistical reasoning, Your Uncle divided the number of coronavirus deaths by the population of the entire planet, identifying that the disease has a 99.9997% survival rate and forever silencing the foolish epidemiologists and physicians who quantify disease severity only in people who have actually had the disease.
Never one to be resting on his laurels, Your Uncle then dug tirelessly through several pages of google search results to determine that “the flu killed 50 million people in 2016,” a number that was just as shocking as it was entirely fabricated.
“It’s one thing to use statistics in new, creative, and incorrect ways,” said a mathematician on the Breakthrough Prize Board, “but to synthesize numbers de novo- out of thin air- now that’s a generational talent.”
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and co-founder of the Breakthrough Prize, chimed in to support the board’s selection: “It’s great to see Your Uncle making such strides in challenging established scientific paradigms, and as it’s especially great to see it all happen on Facebook, the website where everything is true.”
Zuckerberg told Synapse he’s proud that the social network he started in his college dorm was now home to “such rich, fact-laden discussion” and said he sincerely hopes “that this will get Congress off my ass for a while.”
“I am a regular, earth-based human being” Zuckerberg added, unprompted.
The Breakthrough prize comes with a $3 million award, which your Uncle plans to spend on “an above-ground pool and a sizable donation to Rudy Giuliani’s upcoming legal defense fund,” according to reports.
Synapse reached out to Your Uncle for a comment, who told us we were Fake News and said mean things about us on Parler.
