Agreed; vaccinations save lives, lots of them. But the but we also should blame the establishment for making people suspicious by being quasi-scientific and at times authoritarian about things. For example fining and threatening arrest of people alone at a beach with no one nearby during Covid, etc., as well as the obviously stupidity of six feet of separation. If something is contagious via aerosol six feet is not going to impact spread very much.
Sweden took a much more pragmatic approach and didn’t suffer for it. They’ve got a lesson we can learn.
This sort of argument is reductio ad absurdum. At the start of COVID there was no 99.999% sure scientific evidence about anything. Policy was drawn up on the basis of first principles, both on the knowledge of the virus and on behavioural norms among the public, and especially key groups who needed to follow the rules to save lives.
Enforcing public safety rules is hard. Knowing where to draw the line is hard for individual enforcement officers. That's what, in times of public crisis, it's important to overlook edge cases like these because they serve the larger purpose.
> Policy was drawn up on the basis of first principles
I played a small role in this that allowed me to see how these decisions were made. I think we should be honest at this point about how much of the policy was driven by vibes and politics. We had better data than people assume and it had almost no bearing on the decisions that were made.
Multiple governments had high-quality models that suggested a much lower IFR than what was widely reported, and in hindsight were proven correct. The news cycle was captured by people pushing doomsday scenarios and many people decided it was politically inconvenient to contradict that prevailing narrative. There weren't any complex motives, it was cowardice mixed with a bit of opportunism. I got to see this from the inside and I have no doubt that it would happen again, which gives me little confidence in the institutions.
There was an enormous amount of pressure to be seen to be doing something from the top in most countries, which led to a lot of the pointless theater that happened.
It is unfortunate but the poor reputation of public health officials due to COVID is well-deserved.
Not only that. If the line is way too far on one side or the other, everyone agrees that it is, and then it's shifted. If the line is approximately at the optimum, some agree it is, and those that disagree are about half convinced that it's too far this way, half it's too far that way.
So, having maximum disagreement is in itself arguably an indicator that you got it approximately right.
How was avoiding open areas in small groups and washing your groceries first principles? They also claimed that you shouldn’t wear a mask but instead focus on washing your hands. It’s unfortunate how many don’t want to learn from the mistakes made during the epidemic.
Sorry, science only gets one single shot to be 100% correct on everything. Otherwise it’s lies and misinformation to advance the science on a specific topic. Heliocentrism is a MSM misinformation propaganda campaign.
Six feet of separation is a reasonable defense against the larger droplets produced by talking or singing. If you're somewhere with good ventilation then these are the biggest threat.
The more obvious stupidity was around face masks, first by denying they worked at all, and then by acting like coarse weave cloth was as good as N95 or FFP3.
Agree with all you say but would add that those large droplets from sneezing etc are not the greatest vehicle for the virus so it’s like fighting a house fire with Solo cups of water.
Right, but if memory serves me correctly droplet based transmission was the prevailing theory for the first few months while the WHO was oscillating like a pendulum on its masking recommendations.
> droplet based transmission was the prevailing theory for the first few months
iirc that was the prevailing theory until after the vaccines came out. I don't recall it ever being in the news when it was determined to be airborne. By that time, COVID wasn't even newsworthy.
Definitely, I don't think official channels recognized aerosolized transmission until way too late, and even when they did it was very low key and non-committal.
I'm on team "ball was dropped badly re pandemic policy and communication", though I personally don't extend that to blind distrust in institutions in general. It was a tough (arguably unprecedented) situation in a media landscape primed for misinformation.
Aerosols diffuse and often (not always depending on airstream) become less dense 6 feet away. Yes if the wind is blowing the density won't be impacted much, but on the other hand the stream will move past you on its own instead of lingering unless there is a dense crowd generating a constant amount.
There were also scary studies coming out of China (though this was later) showing a single positive guy going for a run in a park infecting loads of people. The dynamics have only changed because people have partial immunity now, but it was like wildfire and it is still going up and down in terms of transmission.
To be honest, I think it's fine there was some over-reaction. Millions of people died. I think it's ok to be slightly uncomfortable for a little bit under such extreme circumstances. To be quite honest, there was an under-reaction. We had an opportunity to shut it down and decided not to follow the science like China did because of American exceptionalism. Now we are living with it forever until there is a better vaccine.
China protected their entire population until a vaccine was made available. This means their death rate was likely a third of ours. Their official statistics paint too rosy a picture (they claim only ~60k died), but a simple back of the napkin calculation 0.1% vaccinated die, 1% unvaccinated die, means they did 10x better than let-it-rip. We did something like 3x better than let-it-rip.
If you saw some of the videos from India of their hospitals being overwhelmed and of people being given welding gas for oxygen because they couldn’t produce pure gas fast enough you might not have considered it an overreaction. They were cremating so many people at once it was a major contributor to air pollution during one major outbreak.
The real danger for most people wasn’t the virus, it was the hospitals being so overwhelmed by the virus that they would no longer be able to provide care for other stuff.
Excellent point. Some of this happened in America too, though not to the same horrific extent as India. Iirc hospitals in Florida nearly ran out of oxygen and in some cases patients died for lack of oxygen.
To be fair, in that particular instance they were only welding the back door. They left the front door alone so that people could go out (at their assigned days and times). They got rid of the back door to make it so that community enforcement of these restrictions was possible.
At the level the epidemic reached in some area of China that may have been necessary to slow the flood, no different than rationing during famine.
I have some issues with China (corruption, nepotism, pervasive tracking), but this is not really one of them.
People collectively are sufficiently manipulable that society only functions when certain manipulations are forbidden.
This is true even though, as you say, mindlessly doing the opposite of what the government says is as dogmatic as blindly following it (a lesson I learned as a toddler, from my sister doing the "yes no yes no yes no no yes oops" trick on me).
Public communications is hard at the best of times let alone during a novel pandemic with high uncertainty on correct actions, but it's what the government needs to be good at to function, so them messing communications up is… well, I was going to say "blame worthy", but then I remember that air travel got good by avoiding blame culture, so shall we say "a learning opportunity"?
No, it doesn’t. Your comment is one that is politically motivated and so you can’t participate in an honest discussion on the subject. What do you disagree with specifically?
When someone comes up with a clever reason why drunk driving might be OK, I don't get in an evidence-based debate with them. It may very well be the case that they've found a scientific error in official guidelines! But if I carefully explain why the error doesn't change the baseline conclusion, they'll just find something else to fixate on. They're not looking for an increased understanding of pharmacology; they've decided that they want to drive drunk, and they're shopping for a reason why it's not shameful to inflict pointless risk on themselves and their community.
If your argument can’t hold up to scrutiny, then I think you may not know the position well enough or you need to adjust it. We can explain and show evidence why driving drunk is dangerous. We can show that vaccines are safe and effective. I don’t like wasting time with bad faith people, but to assume anyone who disagrees is wrong and not worthy of discussion is bad.
I don't agree. I think that shame is an important social technology for things like vaccines and drunk driving, where there's really no rational basis for disagreement. I don't know any vaccine hesitant parents who encountered some clever argument that proved to them they need to vaccinate their kids, but I know multiple who overcame their hesitation because they understood that it was expected of them and they would be judged harshly otherwise.
If you want to have a good faith version of this conversation, I've seen many people have voiced rational concerns and be shouted down because people simply don't want to hear it.
Primary example - Many parents, including myself, made sure our kids got every single one of their vaccines...but we wanted to avoided giving more than 2 per month so we altered the schedule slightly.
Fully vaccinated, just took a simple precaution that put our minds at ease.
The number of people who will call you "antivax" for that, for simply questioning the dosing schedule and taking a minor precaution is shocking. And that's what really made all of this so much worse.
Nobody that I saw, prior to the Covid vax at least, questioned whether or not vaccines did what they said they do. People just question whether sometimes there can be side effects. The answer to that is obviously yes. There are vaccine courts and people have been awarded lots of money from them. So the next rational question that anyone would ask is..."If there can sometimes be side effects, in what circumstances are they likely? Are there any precautions that can be taken if we can identify what those circumstances may be?"
It's no different than if somebody is lactose intolerant, has a gluten allergy or a peanut allergy. Some people are predisposed not to respond well to conditions that many of us have no issue with.
That's not a rational basis for disagreeing on the efficacy of vaccines themselves. It is a rational basis to ask about the conditions that can create unintended side effects; we already know they are happening. Denying that is irrational on its own...so why not have the conversation?
> but we wanted to avoided giving more than 2 per month so we altered the schedule slightly.
Why do you consider this a rational concern/precaution? What evidence lead you to believe the vaccination schedule, which is generally-accepted in the medical community, should be spread out?
I can give you a reason it's likely not rational: babies are protected by their mother's immunity for approximately 6 months after birth. The current vaccination schedule[1] is largely built with this in mind. Delaying vaccines for no other reason than "it's too many too fast" concerns does nothing but increase the chance your child ultimately gets infected with one of the pathogens vaccinated against.
Sure. The number 1 thing to understand is that without a clearly defined cause or even a hint of contributory factors for autism (think everything caused cancer or X may increase your risk of heart disease), there is an information vacuum.
Based on that people are left to speculate as to what influences appear to be probable on their own. One of the simplest correlations to make is of course, the sheer volume of vaccines on the schedule and whether the combined effect is creating any impact.
My wife and I went far beyond that and did speak to a retired OB who shared his own career observations with us. His explanation was that people naturally filter heavy metals, like aluminum, out of their systems but some people do it slower than others. Since aluminum is used in many vaccines, he recommended spreading them out to reduce the stress on the body to filter it out.
He went on to explain that he eventually started testing pregnant mothers and identified that when the high levels were often present in the mother, then many children ended up with the same issue. He started recommending a specific prenatal regiment to the expecting mothers to help correct it. Would even go as far as testing couples who were planning to try to have a baby before they were even pregnant.
>The number of people who will call you "antivax" for that, for simply questioning the dosing schedule and taking a minor precaution is shocking. And that's what really made all of this so much worse.
Okay, but why does it matter what morons say? A doctor or immunologist would usually say "Eh, whatever" to this request. Did a doctor call you an anti-vaxxer?
>it's no different than if somebody is lactose intolerant, has a gluten allergy or a peanut allergy.
Guess what! A bunch of doctors 15 years ago were scared of peanut allergies and suggested without evidence "a simple precaution", of "don't give young kids peanuts", and now something like 8 million people have peanut allergies that could have been maybe prevented.
That's what this is all about. "Smart" humans don't exist. Tons of times what we expected is not what science finds. That 15 year advice that lead to millions of peanut allergies was overturned not by random people getting uncomfortable about not understanding things, but by doctors studying the actual question and coming to a conclusion that fit the data.
Is there any data any which way on your belief that a delayed vaccination schedule like that is "Safer"? Safer than what? Safer how? What theory is it done under? But your doctor didn't care. Tons of parents do that. Some researcher will pull those stats someday and say clearly "Eh, it doesn't do anything good or bad" or "it's clearly better/worse" and then we can make an educated decision.
Until then, it is unscientific by definition. Does that make you feel bad? It shouldn't, most of what humans do is unscientific. But that won't make it wrong.
There is zero "safe" things you can do to a human body. Giving someone a sandwich is not safe and in rigorous study would result in a "side effect" list a mile long, and maybe even a death. 1.7 out of 100k deaths are from choking.
>Nobody that I saw, prior to the Covid vax at least, questioned whether or not vaccines did what they said they do
There is tons of public information to the contrary. Jenny McCarthy for example was anti-vax two decades ago and shouting it from the rooftops.
>"If there can sometimes be side effects, in what circumstances are they likely? Are there any precautions that can be taken if we can identify what those circumstances may be?"
And we did that with the Covid vaccine and every vaccine ever made before it and it has always been clear that the vaccine is just as safe as any other. Anti-vaxxers are people who don't understand the statistics of that studying.
The conversation was had, anti-vaxxers don't like the outcome of the conversation.
> Okay, but why does it matter what morons say? A doctor or immunologist would usually say "Eh, whatever" to this request. Did a doctor call you an anti-vaxxer?
The doctor did act like it was a hassle and their office now has a sign refusing service to any parents who wish to deviate from the official schedule.
> There is tons of public information to the contrary. Jenny McCarthy for example was anti-vax two decades ago and shouting it from the rooftops.
Did she ever challenge whether or not vaccines worked to prevent what they were supposed to prevent? Pretty sure she was just talking about total volume.
Thanks for explaining your reasoning. I can see shame working for some, but I don’t think that is effective for a large group. It also has the adverse effect of making those who are shaming others look wrong and scared of discussing the subject. Also, there is a point where you can be wrong or need to adjust your perspective. Shaming others is not a good way to go about that. The enlightenment wasn’t built on shame but instead it used reason and open inquiry. It was a rejection of using shame which was a prevalent part of forced rules.
> This sounds like the type of dismissive response that reinforces distrustful sentiments.
Notably, Mary Mallon (Typhoid Mary) was never convinced either. This didn't make her less dangerous. The big difference is the average lethality. If we were talking about Polio, people's paranoia is a lot less important.
Yeah, how dare we use non-attacking language to describe objectively accurate states and conditions.
It's a small step from there to the people who chided -me- because I said I was no longer willing to discuss in good faith with people who argued about "post birth abortions" (that they knew to be a lie) or adrenachrome farming from babies in pizza parlor basements. That it was my fault for these views propagating for not being willing to "understand" their perspective.
Their perspectives are a lie They know they're a lie. They just don't. fucking. care.
And then they whine about people being "dismissive" of them.
Thank you, fixed. And yes, and some cases absurdly, ridiculously so. I think the worst I heard was something like:
> And in several Demoncrat [sic] states, abortion is legal up until one month post-delivery! That is evil!
What do these morons (the ones who might actually believe what they say) think that looks like? Have birth, go home with your child, a few weeks later you're just not feeling it, and you go back to the hospital and hand over your infant and say "I'd like my post-birth abortion, please?"?!?
I don't blame anyone for not trusting the government. Anyone who's read (or lived) history and with a rational mind would scrutinize every single thing coming from them, particularly if their health is involved.
Another thing that doesn't help, but this is almost exclusively a memerican problem, is that people enjoy polarizing these issues to their absolute extremes. Things are either vantablack or HDR-white. And if you happen to be on the other end "you should die or go to prison".
You don't have to trust the government. There are plenty of institutions that can explain the value of vaccinations. If you only distrust your own government, just look at the recommendations in other countries.
That's the problem, though. It is those other countries that the pro-nationalist movement, where a lot of this stems from, don't trust. Things like worldwide consensus on the need for vaccinations are seen as an attempt to subvert their own nation.
So after all this scrutinizing, they come to the conclusion vaccines don't work? Like, we the vaccine experts doing web searches and trusting social media posts from unknowns? Not the people that actually do work with it like scientists? Super interesting conclusion.
Of course, we're not talking about experimental vaccines in labs. I think it's pretty clear everyone here is talking about FDA-approved vaccines that reach the population. The fact you want to argue this shows a severe lack of reading comprehension.
heh our county judge (Dallas County, TX) drove around my neighborhood and yelled at people walking their dog to get back inside. I met him at a fundraiser toward the end of the pandemic and asked him why he wasn't wearing a mask, he just turned around and walked away. Lots of people who wished they were powerful delighted in finely having their little hobby authoritarian regime to play in. The most depressing part of the COVID discussion was seeing HN jump on anyone daring to even discuss what Sweden was doing. I lost a lot of respect for HN then but I don't know why i ever assumed this community was immune to toxic group think behavior.
None of those bullet points are contradictory though?
They are all completely aligned with a policy reducing non-essential public exposure, with a tiered approach for transport that limits public exposure where better alternatives exist.
> tiered approach for transport that limits public exposure where better alternatives exist.
Travelling to a testing center almost certainly puts me within proximity of COVID patients at one point, particularly in the waiting room. Sitting in waiting rooms is how I got the case the city notified me of in the first place.
Cycling and exercise is not only a solitary activity, it is also conducted outdoors where we were told risk of airborne transmission was de minimis. It in fact limits public exposure more than travelling to a public place full of probable COVID patients.
> All of this while people were out contravening quarantine mandates anyway. Getting haircuts kills grandma - so how come everybody out on the streets was proudly posting pictures of themselves on social media wearing rainbow-colored masks, with perfectly manicured buzz cuts?
I think if COVID times taught us anything, it's that you can make all the "mandates" you want, but if you don't enforce them, they're just suggestions, and the public will mock and ignore them. It was infuriating watching people ignore stay-at-home, deliberately endangering everyone and prolonging the pandemic, and then laughing it up on social media, consequence-free. Absolutely shameful. But because the mandates were never really enforced, people freely acted like assholes.
All of this is true. Not just true, but verifiably true. We all lived through it as well.
Let me say that again, you (the reader) saw these things with your own eyes, you heard these things with your own ears, not just for a couple days but for more than a year.
You know this is true.
And yet, why would some people choose to ignore that it happened?
To me, this is/was an even greater eye-opener than the disease or the vaccine itself.
Sweden took a much more pragmatic approach and didn’t suffer for it. They’ve got a lesson we can learn.