Well that's the problem... during an emergency (like a pandemic) there are extreme time pressures to get results. Things like debates, inquiry of knowledge, peer review, etc. take time (and taking time = deaths). I believe that is why people were being told to "shut up". Not saying bludgeoning the masses to blindly accept the bleeding edge consensus was the right route to go, just trying to understand why that was the route chosen in the USA.
It is no wonder that people took a position opposite this.
Personally, I was vaccinated the moment it was available to me and I encourage people to be vaccinated. But we're at the point where people are being told to trust the science on vaccinations by the same people lying at each previous step along the way.
The naked power grab under the name of "emergency" has been going on for a year and a half now. A lot of places are just trying to increase their emergency powers where a significant portion of the people have just had enough.
Then there is the matter of preferred treatment for certain groups. Kids in California will be required to vaccinate -- but not the big union prison guards. The major league sports require all their employees to vaccinate -- except the players. BLM gets a pass on gathering, but just living one's life and being able to pay your bills isn't sufficient.
Closing borders was racist. Fauci admitted he intentionally misled people [1]. It was totally natural and totally not even conceivable that it had been engineered or part of a program that intentionally makes viruses more infectious. Masks don't work. Masks do work (even though we now know it to be aerosol, not droplet like the flu). So on and so forth.
It is hard to maintain an air of credibility when you are consistently proving to not be credible.
[1] https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/90445 (the source NYT article was paywalled)
> "There is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any potential benefit. In fact, there's some evidence to suggest the opposite in the misuse of wearing a mask properly or fitting it properly," Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO health emergencies program, said at a media briefing in Geneva, Switzerland, on Monday.
This was science not that long ago [0]... Then whoops, mandatory masks... "but trust science now, we're surely 100% correct now!".
[0] https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/30/world/coronavirus-who-mas...
This what doing science looks like. This is working correctly. You haven't pointed out any flaws, you've pointed out a success case.
Edit: I'm from Europe so don't assume I'm a Republican just because I criticise him.
1. The initial statements were not guesses. They were an accurate summary of the state of the scientific literature at the time and were presented as such ("there is no specific evidence", "there is some evidence to suggest the opposite").
2. The later change, which occurred with whiplash-inducing speed, wasn't based on any new evidence or studies. That's why Fauci had to come up with this story about how they'd been engaging in a noble lie: there was no new evidence for him to point at.
3. There is now clear evidence that mask mandates don't work, namely the real world data, yet recommendations have not changed and all this new evidence has been ignored.
Specifically, if large-scale mandates did work then it would be clearly visible in the case curves of each country that introduced them, by definition, because creating clearly visible drops in those curves was the only reason they were introduced. Yet no such drops are visible. You can't look at a country's data and work out when masks were introduced or removed, it's impossible, people have tried. Thus mask mandates failed on their own terms and no further studies or experiments are actually necessary to answer the question of whether they're effective.
I don't really know why you're trying to defend "science" in the abstract like this. COVID science is the work of specific groups of people, it's not an abstraction, and it turns out to fall far short of the lofty standards we were taught to expect at school. COVID science in the real world is riddled with obvious hypocrisy and contradictions, routinely ignores or even rubbishes any evidence that would undermine collectivist social policies or make scientists look bad, and just in general is a sad joke. Arguing that this obvious failure is actually a success, and this is what all science looks like, can only make things worse by harming trust in other groups of scientists with higher standards (e.g. maybe physicists?).
I am sorry, but this is a BS argument. First of all, COVID-19 (classic variant) had a 7 to 14 days incubation period. Upon infection rate curves it acts as a low-pass filter (aka smoothing filter). You will not see sharp drops even if contagion abruptly stops. The curve will decay over one or two weeks. Also, mask mandates were not introduced at random moments of time. Typically they were enacted or enforced when infection was on the rise. At best the expectation was that masks will slow down the up-trend.
Obviously, masks do not fully protect against inhaling the virus. But they do limit the blast radius from infected people coughing and sneezing. This is why in Asia people are routinely wearing masks during a regular flu season. Masks do not stop infection but they reduce spread to some degree. Common sense is oftentimes better that shaky science on top of questionable data.
"Masks do not stop infection but they reduce spread to some degree"
So you assert yet nobody can show it doing so in the real world data. Places geographically next to each other that differed in mask mandates saw no impact. The UK removed its restrictions in the summer and cases immediately fell. Etc etc.
When you impose mask-mandate related events with the case curves this becomes especially obvious:
https://ianmsc.substack.com/p/every-comparison-shows-masks-a...
The Effectiveness (or lack thereof) of specifically the masks has been investigated in many settings with the flu many times before.
e.g.
This was published back in 2014:
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
Page 44-47 of the PDF goes over in length masks used in a community setting. They specifically talk about compliance, what sort of mask was being worn and whether the mask was fitted and how that may have affected the results of various studies, transmission rates etc. Many studies found that people stopped complying after a certain amount of time, other found it varied on the culture.
What did we see with mask usage during COVID? Many people wore the same mask for days on end, or they put them in their pocket, or just stuck one of the passenger seat of their car (like my neighbour did). Some stopped bothering wearing the mask after a few weeks, and there was differences in compliance dependent on the culture.
A lot of this was known back in 2014.
You can find numerous other studies going back years now on the relative effectiveness of masks and different types of masks and the result for cloth masks (which the types that people were using) weren't great.
Are you telling me that all these medical professionals that had the ear of officials didn't know about any of this?
The findings from the scientific method are not infallible, just better in every way than the findings from any other method. Better than the words of charlatans, better even than the words of the wisest humans to ever live.
It's not perfect and it's not magic. It's just significantly better than anything else by leaps and bounds.
I think it's fucking amazing and I wish you could see that too.
Then notice that the made up straw man quote, which no one actually said despite being between quotation marks, you say "trust science now, we're surely 100% correct now."
You choose to read "maybe X, maybe Y, we recommend Z" as "we're surely 100% correct now." That's on you.
That’s because when you put things into millions of people, you are guaranteed to run into an edge case here or there. The fact that you can point to so few significant AEs caused by the COVID vaccines is a pretty incredible achievement given the unprecedented scale of rollout.
The point is that no one with any credibility ever said we could expect zero adverse events from the COVID vaccines, nor 100% efficacy. No one.
So basically, covid is less dangerous for young people than swimming (more than 5 people drowned this year) and still, most of the anti-covid measures affect them the most (and old people the least).
Way to go Romania, standing for the test group.
"No specific evidence" is weasel-wording. I have family in China. Before the spread here in the West, people were buying up N95 masks and sending them to Asia because they knew what was coming.
I'm of the opinion that the advice to not bother with masks early on was intended to address an expected shortfall for medical personnel. That is, it was manipulation.
Is there specific evidence that vaccines don't cause long-term harm? And if in time, evidence shows that they do cause harm, who will be responsible? (in slovenia, all the vaccines were safe and effective, then we first stopped using astrazeneca due to clots and a woman dying, then israel said they don't work enough, and mandated a third shot, then a girl died in slovenia due to Janssen, and only mrna vaccines were recommended for young people, then sweden and denmark stopped using moderna, so we're down to one safe vaccine).
Even the stupidests little things, like sanitizing the living crap out of stuff, even before the mask mandates, was something that was 'true' back then, then the 'truth' changed, and we still had to pay for all the useless crap... we had mandated sanitizers in elevators, all the high buildings paid a shitton of money for them (because the dispensers were expensive then and hard to get), then someone though about fire codes, and "woops, remove them".
TLDR: the problem is not that science changes, the problem is, that we do very socially and economically dangerous and expensive stuff now by blindly trusting whatever the current scientific idea is, not thinking about "what if the science is wrong?" (eg. if covid is transmitted mostly by air and not by touching infected surfaces).
People who were buying masks then were branded as conspiracy theorists, loonatics, got lauged at by commenters everywhere. And our scientists still claim, that the current findings are true, that they won't change, and that everyone not doing as instructed by the expert groups is an idiot again.
Scientists discover what they can (falliable as they may be).
Politicians take scientist's best understanding at the time, balance the concerns of various groups, and make a decision.
Politicians decisions are backed up with violence (always, not just for this) because states having a monoply on violence is just how states work.
Scientists discover what they can.
A healthy media informs the public so they can decide to act on this knowledge.
At the same time politicians find ways to help or subsidize desired behavior, and lend weight to the media message. Harmful behavior is prosecuted (the word you're looking for is "force"... not violence).
That's how it's supposed to work. It doesn't work that way anymore, but it's supposed to.
Yes its regrettable that the media seems to be mucking up its role as the fourth estate (or at least sowing division and acting in ways that seem less than beneficial to the well being of the group). However, that's hardly unique in history, and arguably one of the primary functions of a free press is to spread dissent in order to keep the power of the state in check.
> Harmful behavior is prosecuted (the word you're looking for is "force"... not violence).
Is there a difference? or is it "force" when it happens to other people, "violence" when it happens to you or you disagree with it?
That's exactly why I trust the science and try to shut-up in discussions on topics that I have no idea about (with varying results, I'm only a human).
I trust that people who spend their lifes doing research can and do have productive debate (to certain limits - they're also just humans).
A good example of how badly wrong COVID science can go was the discovery at the start of the pandemic that the most influential epidemiological model had lots of programming bugs in it that made its predictions wildly vary from run to run. The cause was a mix of thread safety bugs, out of bounds reads, floating point error accumulation, mixing up variables due to horrible coding style in a 15,000 line C file with hardly any comments and almost all variables being single letter/globally scoped etc. They'd never teamed up with computer scientists even though their simulations were big complex programs, their code had never been peer reviewed because scientists don't do that, and when programmers pointed out their bugs, they tried to claim scientific models don't need to be reproducible anyway.
https://dailysceptic.org/code-review-of-fergusons-model/
https://dailysceptic.org/how-replicable-is-the-imperial-coll...
There was no inquiry of knowledge or productive debate. There was a bunch of amateurs, out of their depth, desperately trying to cover up how inadequate their own research was - and mostly succeeding. The institutions turned out to have no interest in the question of whether their scientists can actually program the models they're proposing, and nothing happened to Ferguson or his team.
That's what science is actually like, in the 21st century. Look too closely and it falls apart.
I think the pro-science side during Covid shot themselves in the foot with zealotry and false sense of certainty. Science , unlike religion, should be amendable. It's supposed to be provisional. A major part of science is debate, the inquiry of knowledge, not just being told to shut-up for the sake of science.