This is not the same thing as goalpost shifting. This is just the result of changes to best-effort predictions based on information in an evolving situation. These changes often directly contradict each other as new evidence shows them to be false. A goalpost shift is usually by someone who ignores evidence that disproves their theory, and moves on to something else as a tactic for distraction and/or self-delusion. They change the subject but never address the item that they were proved wrong about.

Fauci literally lied because he didn't trust the population with the truth. That's moving the goal posts.

No. That's lying. Moving the goal posts does not require lying, in fact in rarely includes it. It only requires that you change your argument when you're disproved.

The fable "The Dragon In My Garage" by Carl Sagan is a nice demonstration of a similar concept. http://people.whitman.edu/~herbrawt/classes/110/Sagan.pdf

See also, The Invisible Gardener: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_Invisible_Garde...

We absolutely did not learn that masks work during this pandemic.

At the start of the pandemic there was not much information on the effectiveness of public mask wearing to stop disease. It had been studied a tiny bit based on SE asian mask wearing cultures and the studies from memory were pretty inconclusive. We got much more and much better data when the pandemic began.

I'm not an expert and you should check these facts yourself, but my personal experience was that I investigated this after a trip to Japan many years before the pandemic began. I wondered why western culture did not have a similar mask wearing etiquette and my conclusion on the efficacy was that the evidence for it actually making a difference was sparse and weak.

EDIT: I may have misunderstood your emphasis. I took it to be on the time, as in you were saying that we knew beforehand that masks worked. I see this might not be correct. If you are saying that the evidence is still not good, you may be correct, but I think there is enough early evidence and plausible mechanism of action to assume that the right mask in the right setting is effective. I accept that single layer cloth masks might not do much.

There’s possible a lot of nuance there, that his short comment lacks (and probably leading to downvotes). There were several pre-pandemic studies that suggested masks would be harmful or didn’t show an effect. Then, state-by-state comparisons of laws in the US also show very little correlation. So if the emphasis was on (still) lacking retrospective evidence, that seems a fair complaint. Very recently, there’s a preprint article by a research group that looked back at the existing studies, and showed that many of them were too underpowered to be even capable of demonstrating the expected benefits. It has a great graph of this (https://www.reddit.com/r/COVID19/comments/pxet7q/unmasking_t...)

So—in contrast to the vaccine, where the data was gathered before giving authorization was given last year—it seems that mask mandates may have been just hopeful trials that assumed there wasn’t long-term problems associated with masks, well in advance of actually having relevant data. And, in further comparison, we also have drugs like HCQ, which were pushed ahead of the data—and continue to be advocate despite continued lack of evidence in large trials. So it feels unclear that data ever mattered as much as being seen doing something? I’m saddened by it all.

An optimisitic interpretation is that mask wearing looked to have a plausible mechanism for benefit, and so as the situation ran ahead of the data, the public health officials probably made a best effort guess that mask wearing will probably help and so made the recommendation. Not all public policy can be 100% informed by data 100% of the time. I like to think that this carried more weight in the decision than just wanting to appear to do something, though I am sure that also played some role.

Thankfully most evidence-respecting organizations including governments have taken the position that it is very unlikely that HCL is of any benefit as the data has become better. Its really only fringe groups who are pushing that one hard still and even many of those have moved on to ivermectin.

They work better at containing the spread of the virus than not wearing masks. Social distancing and some indoor restricts along with masks work fairly well. Vaccinations are even better.

Don't forget:

"You can't ban travel from China, that's racist!" --> "You can't ban travel from China, it won't do anything anyway!"

Then the rest of the planet introduced travel bans, which are still in effect a year later -_-.

Suppose that:

1. The China travel ban started when China had very few COVID cases.

2. The China travel ban started when we already had untraceable domestic spread in the US.

3. The EU travel ban started when the EU had a lot of COVID cases.

If those three things happened (#1 and #3 happened without a doubt, jury's still out on #2, because our contact tracing has been crap), it's possible for both of the statements you are quoting to be true. There's literally no point in banning travel from China, if Paris has 10x the prevalence of COVID, and you haven't banned travel from it.

Considering that the first major outbreak in the US was caused by travelers from the EU, it seems pretty clear that banning travel form China, but not from Europe didn't do much to keep COVID out of the US.

Why were European travelers being treated preferentially to Chinese ones, for over a month? I see a lot of people insisting that the travel ban wasn't racist, but I've never seen anyone explain this conundrum.

>>>There's literally no point in banning travel from China, if Paris has 10x the prevalence of COVID, and you haven't banned travel from it.

Was there ever an indication that Paris had 10x the COVID of Wuhan?

If travel bans don't work, why did China implement them domestically, specifically with respect to Wuhan?[1]

>>>Considering that the first major outbreak in the US was caused by travelers from the EU

Citation please? Maybe my Google-Fu is weak, but I'm getting Washington State as the site of the first major US outbreak, and the first US case was a Wuhan traveler in Washington State.[2][3]

>>>Why were European travelers being treated preferentially to Chinese ones, for over a month?

Look at this map regarding the spread of SARS[4]. It reached the world fairly quickly. Yet we didn't implement a global travel shutdown. Travel bans were rather focused on Hong Kong and parts of China[5]. The cost-benefit analysis of implementing strict travel controls on countries other than the origin point are probably based on an assessment of the ability of secondary locations (in your example, Europe) to contain the spread from a small number of imported cases. This would provide the maximum benefit (spread reduction) at the lowest overall cost to quality of life and economic activity. If they had taken sensible measures, as they did with Ebola and SARS, maybe they could have.

[1]https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/blogs/Whathappensif/how... [2]https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/04/us/coronavirus-in-washing... (PAYWALLED) [3]https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2001191 [4]https://www.nsf.gov/about/history/globalhealth_impacts.jsp [5]https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2003/5/23/who-lifts-sars-trav...

> Was there ever an indication that Paris had 10x the COVID of Wuhan?

This would be a meaningful response if it was a Wuhan travel ban. But it wasn't. It was a China travel ban.

Beijing, for instance, had ~300 total cases at the time the China travel ban was put in place. Paris, at the time that the EU travel ban was put in place had multiple thousands. The prevalence of COVID in the EU was more than an order of magnitude higher when the EU travel ban was put in place.

> If travel bans don't work, why did China implement them domestically, specifically with respect to Wuhan?[1]

Travel bans can work if you ban travel from places with a high case load. We didn't do that, though. We banned travel from places that we politically disliked, and didn't ban travel from places that we liked. Unsurprisingly, the virus didn't care about our political preferences...

> Citation please? Maybe my Google-Fu is weak, but I'm getting Washington State as the site of the first major US outbreak, and the first US case was a Wuhan traveler in Washington State.[2][3]

I live in WA. It was not a major[1] outbreak. New York was the first major outbreak, and very, very quickly overtook WA in case numbers.

> The cost-benefit analysis of implementing strict travel controls on countries other than the origin point are probably based on an assessment of the ability of secondary locations (in your example, Europe) to contain the spread from a small number of imported cases.

By late-February, COVID was completely out of control in Europe. By that point, anyone who thought that the EU had the ability to 'control the spread from a small number of imported cases' was either blind, or crazy, or just woke up from a two-month-long coma. They were way past the point of having to deal with a 'small number of imported cases' - they were at the point where uncontrolled community spread was overwhelming national hospital systems, and national lockdowns were being instituted.

And through all this time, we were welcoming European travelers with open arms.

I understand all of your arguments, and all the disaster mitigation steps you outline make sense - but they were not applied consistently to the two regions. By every metric, China was doing better at the time of the travel ban from it. By every metric, we should have banned travel from Europe in mid-February. We didn't, because we like the EU.

[1] I mean, it was major, if the baseline is compared to zero. It was not major if compared to what NYC went through a week later. NYC went from having one Covid case on March 1st, to 1,000 deaths by March 31st. New York state had more COVID cases than any country in the world by April 10th. [2] Meanwhile, Washington went from one case in January 21st, to one death on Feb 29th, to 247 deaths by March 31st. [4]

[2] https://www.investopedia.com/historical-timeline-of-covid-19...

[3] https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/coronavirus-washington-stat...

[4] Was the Washington outbreak the first one? Yes. Did it become a major one? Yes, by mid-March. Was New York worse off by every metric at that point? Also yes. Was New York a complete disaster zone by mid-April? Also yes. It was seeing a thousand deaths a day.

Ok, I think that's all pretty fair. I would have preferred a China-style lockdown to be implemented no later than February. I think we're closer to agreeing than disagreeing, in that we both feel the severity of the US's response was inadequate. I'm fortunate enough to live in Japan so I'm watching the disaster in my home country from afar.

The travel ban to China in the US mostly came from FAs blatantly refusing to fly to China. Also, yet we got EU flight bans nearly instantaneously. (Go figure)

If you ban travel from China but not Chinese nationals, then what's the point?

Nothing stops people from China from flying to Europe and then the US.

Nothing.

Yes, it was racism. Yes, it was pointless. Do you want to continue this discussion further?

>>>Nothing stops people from China from flying to Europe and then the US.

What portion of the traveling population is willing to take trans-continental detours like that? Some controls are better than NO controls.

>>>Yes, it was racism. Yes, it was pointless.

Are you saying that strict controls on population movements originating from the source geographic region of a virus should never be implemented as an early step to containment?

Obama did it in 2014 in response to Ebola: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/oct/21/us-limited-e...

and Asia did it to varying degrees in response to SARS in 2003: https://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/12/news/battling-the-spread-...

>>>I'm saying that calling it the "Chinese flu" and combining it with Trump's nationalist rhetoric and other outright racist remarks is racism, yes.

That's moving the goalposts. We were discussing the government act of implementing travel restrictions, as a policy. Rather than debate whether that is sound policy, you've retorted with "well he also said racist stuff...which is racist". This is why we can't make progress. Rather than address individual implementations on their own merits, all too often people are now lumping everything originating from the same decision-maker together and discarding the whole package.

>>>And what is the point of stopping flights from China only? When there were global outbreaks?

Because at the time (31 Jan 2020), ALL 210+ fatalities had travelled to China: https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2020/01/31/trump-we...

There was no spontaneous, independent outbreak of COVID appearing contemporaneously in Italy or the UK. A complete international travel ban probably WOULD have been the best idea (along with 90 days of Wuhan-style internal lockdowns). Short of that, a ban on the source nation of (again, at that time) 100% of the fatal cases seems like an appropriate compromise to not completely collapse confidence in the steady trajectory of the US & global economy.

>>>"Obama did it too" is not an argument.

It establishes precedent. Both for the policy itself, and that the deafening lack of "Racism!" criticism as proof of the hypocrisy inherent in the accusers today.

That's not moving the goalposts.

It's context. You want to ignore the fact that Trump was blaming China as a whole for coronavirus?

It's racism to blame the coronavirus on Chinese people.

So you want to tell me you are surprised when people see racism by the racist guy who does and says racist things pretty much constantly?

I'm not going sit here and line by line debate you. I lived during it. I know what happened. It was a nonsense policy like basically the whole of the Trump administration's response. It was a complete joke. There was no federal response to the domestic crisis here. We had no supplies. We had no leadership.

It's just a funny thing to point to this as some shining example of Trump doing the right thing when ever other indicator is saying otherwise.

>>>You want to ignore the fact that Trump was blaming China as a whole for coronavirus?

I think it's valid to blame the CCP government for the pandemic going global. Especially when the CCP instituted a strict DOMESTIC travel lockdown without a matching INTERNATIONAL one. Why did they let people continue to fly internationally from Wuhan?

>>So you want to tell me you are surprised when people see racism by the racist guy who does and says racist things pretty much constantly?

I'm saying that people are so wrapped up in their emotional response to Trump the person that it is interfering with their ability to accept sensible government policies. Policy decisions which are not distinctive from previous responses to global pandemic risks over the past 20 years. I see it all the time in my own (black American) community.

>>>I'm not going sit here and line by line debate you.

You asked if I wanted to continue the debate. Every one of my posts links to policy implementations in living memory, with citations. Your posts have no references, and you've doubled down on arguing about racism rather than debate policy, before bowing out of the conversation? So...concession accepted? This is why we can't have nice things...like a functioning government.

>>>There was no federal response to the domestic crisis here. We had no supplies. We had no leadership.

The US has known for a decade that it was unprepared for a pandemic[1]. Lack of supplies cannot be dumped solely on the feet of the most recent shitty Commander-in-Chief, in a long line of turds holding the office. As for leadership, half of the country spent the previous 3 years undermining the Executive Branch's authority because Orange Man Bad, and then was surprised when the massive (yet understaffed of key leadership positions near the top) Federal bureaucracy wasn't able to coalesce and pivot on a dime to tackle an emergent crisis? And you are SURPRISED at this? I'm not.

[1]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1936949/

So, you're not wrong that there have been plenty of shifts. Some of those were laughably optimistic even at the time, some of those are true (masks do work, but cloth masks suck). Some of the people are hypocritical and will get haircuts or whatever that they forbid others from doing.

But you know what basically everyone is doing? Getting vaccinated. Even Trump got vaccinated and told others to do the same. [1][2] If it's some kind of poison, as many are memeing, you'd think we wouldn't want to do that. You can argue that there are long-term unknowns... but that's equally true of the virus. And I've seen literally nothing that the vaccine has caused that isn't known to also be caused by Covid.

So I'd say not to get your science from journalists in general, wear a quality mask (N95 preferably, but at least surgical), and do what you can to lower the replication rate of this stupid virus below 1 so that it goes away. That last part is proving really hard so far.

[1] https://www.deseret.com/2021/4/23/22399234/former-president-...

[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-booed-al...

I encourage everyone to get vaccinated if they can, but the virus will never go away. You can't seriously expect asymptomatic people to continue wearing masks indefinitely.

https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immu...

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/covid-19-will-just-end-up...

> You can't seriously expect asymptomatic people to continue wearing masks indefinitely.

Millions of people throughout Asia have been for decades though.

No we haven't. We wear masks when we have flu symptoms, not all the time.

It does seem likely that the virus will become endemic, though hopefully reduced to something like a common cold virus. It is possible to get something in between, though, where the virus only exists in certain regions and thereby contain it, though this seems to be getting less likely.

We might get some traction with a booster tailored to delta, but only time will tell.

You seemed to have confused me with someone that is opposed to the vaccination. I have been fully vaccinated for months.

Most people do confuse my positions because I disagree with both sides. I am one of the unorthodox Vaccinated Ant-Vaxxer's that believes people should get vaccinated but I also respect individual liberty to allow them the choose to no inject themselves with a medical treatment if they do not desire it. Since I oppose government mandates then I must be "Anti-Vaxx".....

Crazy I know, to respect peoples body autonomy in 2021 during a pandemic no less......

I also have a high degree bullshit detector, and can not stand hypocrisy which I see ALOT of logical hypocrisy around covid.

>>do what you can to lower the replication rate of this stupid virus below 1 so that it goes away. That last part is proving really hard so far.

it is not "proving hard" it was always impossible and anyone to tell you otherwise is lying. SARS-COVID-V2 is endemic, and will likely settle out with annual deaths being over that of seasonal flu. This idea that we can "beat" COVID like we have beat other things like polio is just wrong.

> it is not "proving hard" it was always impossible

Well there's the Australian method, but I'd prefer things not go that way. I agree that people should have informed consent for vaccinating, that's why I try to inform people so that they consent.

>Well there's the Australian method,

I dont believe that is either practical or sustainable. Nor is it compatible with a society that has any respect for individualism which we in America do.

AU will be unlikely to keep their draconian measures in place forever, either economic reality, or social unrest will force a change

> AU will be unlikely to keep their draconian measures in place forever, either economic reality, or social unrest will force a change

It's worked well for us in Western Australia, and we're effectively a covid-free island with one of the best individual economies in the world right now.

The restrictions will be relaxed as we get 80% vaccinated - which we're very likely to do, this year.

Also the Australian method has given us less COVID deaths in the past two years than America had, yesterday. It is a pity that those 600k Americans that died won't be able to bask in America's superior environment of individual rights.

So you believe that Zero COVID deaths is the singular goal, to cast off all Human Rights, freedoms, and liberties in pursuit of that goal is ethical position?

That safety and security is triumphant over freedom and liberty?

That life is so dear, and safety so sweet, that is to be purchased at the price of chains and Tyranny complete with camps for which you send people?

Yes have pity and sadness for those have died, but I know what course I prefer.. for me give me liberty or give me death for I would rather die free, than a serf in a gilded cage

That's a pretty poetic way to say you're fine with letting 600 000 people have zero freedom. Australia will be opened up and 90% vaccinated with maybe 3k deaths. Unfortunately Little Caesars went bankrupt here, during that time, but I guess that's liberty dying on the altar of public safety. Enjoy the ultimate sacrifice those people made for two years of unlimited Applebees.

It is pretty short sighted if you believe the only businesses and people financially impacted and bankrupted in Australia were Little Caesars, I can assure you that is false

I am sure you likely enjoy a tech sector job which afford you the privilege of sitting on your bum all day having very little impact to your financial life, others are not an privileged.

> It is pretty short sighted if you believe the only businesses and people financially impacted and bankrupted in Australia were Little Caesars, I can assure you that is false

Oh cheers, I didn't know. I will reconsider my position on the 600k dead Americans.

Could you just humor me and do a little back of the envelope calculation of the loss of economy in the US vs AU vs the number of deaths? Hint: Australia's economy is doing fine. Let me know how much each life was worth.

> (N95 preferably, but at least surgical),

I wouldn't even go as low to recommend surgical (at least not without a mask fitter)

KF94, KN95 (reputable), FFP2, or an higher quality N95 NIOSH (shame they won't make those for kids)

well 98% of people vaxxed is nice goal to be aiming for.

But in reality once my kid can get the vaccine (he is 3 years old) I will be one the side of people wanting to remove all COVID restriction.

For now people that refuse to get the vaccine are un-necessarily putting my family in danger.

Goals should be achievable. I encourage everyone to get vaccinated if they can but we'll never reach 98% no matter what we do.

Fortunately CDC data shows minimal risk to children. The estimated infection fatality rate for the 0-17 age group is only 0.001%.

The main benefit of vaccination is reducing the risk of severe symptoms. Vaccinated people can still catch and spread the virus, thereby putting your family at risk. There is probably some reduction in contagiousness but we don't have clear data on that yet.

Forgot to mention if my son get any kind of lungs issue or pneumonia he would likely die. It’s because his lungs are already very week from some other issues.

So while “normal” kid are likely to survive if infected mine will not unless he has 0 symptoms.