It was and still is completely crazy.
The issues you are describing is more the problem that health officials shift the burden of proof depending which assumptions or policies they want to make. Any facts that counter their policies have to be proven by significant evidence. And they often wouldn't look too hard. A fact that supports their conclusion can be assumed until proven otherwise.
It was called a novel virus to indicate that no person already had (acquired) immunity against it. What inference you make from the word "novel" is on you, not on the rest of the world.
So this isn't crazy; it literally happens to many respiratory viruses. Viruses mutate
Why did we decide to throw out everything we knew about viruses for SARS-CoV-2? It's like society discovered "OMG I could catch a virus and die!". Not realizing that virtually nothing was new about SARS-CoV-2. It's just a respiratory virus like any other we've had passed through millions of generations of living beings. Oddly enough the "broader human species" managed to survive and thrive through all of them.
I don't remember anyone ever doing that. I remember them calling it a novel coronavirus, because it is a new coronavirus, at least to us.
Same goes for the T-cell immunity really: it was pretty much a given that the body's normal immune processes still applied to coronavirus, but what was novel was the unscientific community insisting that they couldn't possibly be reinfected and a course of vaccines couldn't possibly give them any benefit to their immune system after they'd been infected (someone should tell all the old people who get flu shots every year!)
What we call the flu is not a single virus that comes once a year. It's different types of virusses each time, and the flu vaccine targets the most likely candidates of that year. So no, you don't generally get REinfected with the flu, because it's a different virus. Some of the virusses that we consider 'the flu' are actually corona virusses, and perhaps covid19 will join that list as it becomes endemic.
There are four other endemic human coronaviruses which typically cause common cold symptoms. Those symptoms are clinically distinct from the flu in most cases.
What medical practitioners call the flu is a small subset of influenza viruses common in humans, each with a high potential for reinfection, including reinfections within a year (as well as constantly evolving variant strains, just like COVID)
what leadership needed to do was identify the dynamic threat--mainly to the elderly & immune deficient--and mitigate for them, not run around screaming like discombobulated chickens promoting throw-everything-against-the-wall safetyism. we could have had highly targeted mitigations and minimal disruption to our lives; instead, we got incessant debates over useless masking, lockdowns, and vaccine mandates.
even including the elderly and immune deficient, over 99% of people get covid and recover just fine. this isn't the black plague by any stretch of the imagination.
No, this one killed more people than anything in US history, more than wars, prior pan-/epidemics, etc. In my lifetime, no 'new virus' has had any sort of similar effect at all, by orders of magnitude.
we don't know yet what steady-state looks like, but note that medical/epidemiological organizations don't generally keep death statistics on colds (caused by rhinoviruses, coronaviruses, etc.) because they're not a significant number. colds can be a contributing factor in death for folks with deficient immune systems, just as it is with covid, but is generally not the sole cause.
again, >99% survive covid just fine. for people with multiple co-morbidities, it's much more serious (whole percentage death rates), but that's because they're teetering on the brink already, and covid (or any number of respiratory diseases, really) can push them over the edge. our mitigations should focus on the aged and unhealthy, not everyone (especially not children).
That's not a good survival rate, though the number sounds big.
> it's much more serious (whole percentage death rates), but that's because they're teetering on the brink already, and covid (or any number of respiratory diseases, really) can push them over the edge. our mitigations should focus on the aged and unhealthy, not everyone (especially not children).
The people at risk are not nearly all "teetering on the brink", nor have they died at this astounding rate from other causes. We could save their lives.
People are dying; and we can save them, and we could have saved many more. Blood is on the hands of the those who stood in the way.
If Trump said the sky was blue, suddenly it would have to be red and if you were a red sky denier you were a racist. We are still dealing with the echoes of this and will be for at least five years.
This is why having a super-polarizing troll in office is inherently bad for society. I think that's true regardless of their stripes. An obnoxious troll from the "left" would be no better in this particular regard.
There's a reason high office leaders need to carry themselves professionally. Class (of the behavioral sort) is not some old fogie cultural superstition. Leaders that carry themselves like Trump actually damage the cognition of the people in their society.
(To be clear: I'm not a Trump supporter and I think that when he was right it was by accident rather than design. However, many media organizations shamed themselves by embracing partisanship and abandoning even the pretence of neutrality).
That said, I do think that Trump's brand was largely about division on social issues. So to that extent he often put at the forefront of his narratives positions that forced you to take a side. E.g., should Kaepernick be fired or not. Etc...
I'd say those aren't the problem so much as the borderline cases where there are true and untrue interpretations of a certain statement, but of course they ran with the most uncharitable possible interpretation because they're convinced Trump is a ruthless dictator in the making.
I think this was one of the issues that the Republicans ran into with the election. They thought that certain stories about Biden would stick and last. They missed that none of these stories last any more. You need a huge volume of stories to paint a narrative over a long period of time.
Someone else mentioned the uncharitable interpretations of things he said. That was earned over years of such statements. It wasn't a new isolated incident.
You're right to such a degree that I distinctly remember my first impression of him being formed by Rush Limbaugh (my dad was a listener) making fun of what a dishonest, sleazy joke of a human being Trump was. Must have been some time in the 90s. His reputation was decades in the making, and at one time that take on him was practically universal. The transformation was fascinating to watch.
Media gas lighting would be if the CDC/FDA/etc said that Ivermectin was effective and the media saying it wasn't or not reporting on it.
"Different websites (such as https://ivmmeta.com/, https://c19ivermectin.com/, https://tratamientotemprano.org/estudios-ivermectina/, among others) have conducted meta-analyses with ivermectin studies, showing unpublished colourful forest plots which rapidly gained public acknowledgement and were disseminated via social media, without following any methodological or report guidelines. These websites do not include protocol registration with methods, search strategies, inclusion criteria, quality assessment of the included studies nor the certainty of the evidence of the pooled estimates. Prospective registration of systematic reviews with or without meta-analysis protocols is a key feature for providing transparency in the review process and ensuring protection against reporting biases, by revealing differences between the methods or outcomes reported in the published review and those planned in the registered protocol. These websites show pooled estimates suggesting significant benefits with ivermectin, which has resulted in confusion for clinicians, patients and even decision-makers. This is usually a problem when performing meta-analyses which are not based in rigorous systematic reviews, often leading to spread spurious or fallacious findings.36"
Furthermore, in good faith I went and randomly looked at one of the studies cited that sourced a reasonable journal: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jmv.27469
The c19ivermectin site misrepresents the results from the study. To quote the actual study: "However, a mortality benefit was not seen with ivermectin treatment before and after PSM (p values = 0.07 and 0.11, respectively). ICU admission, and intubation rate were not significantly different between the groups (p = 0.49, and p = 1.0, respectively). No differences were found between groups regarding the length of hospital stay, ICU admission, intubation rate, and in-hospital mortality."
Additionally the study notes: "The ivermectin group was more likely to have bacterial pneumonia complications compared to the control group (43% vs. 23%, p = 0.02). Eight patients had a pulmonary embolism or deep vein thrombosis in the ivermectin group, and the ivermectin group more frequently received therapeutic anticoagulation therapy than the control group. In addition, 13 patients had acute kidney injury in the ivermectin group."
The website you provided has a very biased take on just the one study I looked at. It's hard for me to take it seriously as an unbiased meta-analysis of ivermectin.
Besides those trials, there are 87! studies from lots of countries. One really good observational study with ~200k participants (120k in the treatment group) from Itaj Brazil for IVM as prophylaxis. Results for propensity matched data were hospitalizations down by 85%, and for non propensity matched 50%. But nobody has written about it. The same goes for Fluvoxamine, which has great data. As does Melatonin and Curcumin. Lots of treatment and prophylaxis options out there.
And yes, i am vaxxed. But I despair at this notion that it is vax or treatment. I chose both.
Reference:
https://www.cureus.com/articles/82162-ivermectin-prophylaxis...
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ivermectin-much-more-t...
Scott also believes the benefit from IVM is because of worm reduction. The Ijatai study with >120k subjects is an area of Brazil with no worms, proving that is transparent nonsense.
Furthermore, the issue isn't the study. It's how they misrepresented the results of the study. Another example, it would be like if you give me a paper and I go to the middle of the paper and it says, "Nazi's saved millions of Jews from the rein of terror of the Hawaiians" -- I'm going to discount the paper because I think the editorializing is misleading. I don't need to read the rest of the paper -- unless you tell me that the section I read was meant to be satire.
This is why credibility matters. If that site was Nature and I looked at one study and there was something wrong with it I might be inclined to look at a few more randomly. But given that people have a finite amount of time, when you present something it better be accurate. And when it is accurate, you'll gain credibility. But if the first thing I look at is misleading -- I don't have a lot of patience to wade through data ... especially when other sources also say that you're representations are biased.
https://journals.lww.com/americantherapeutics/fulltext/2021/...
One of the worst things about Donald Trump was that if he or anyone adjacent to him actually said anything good, it immediately became toxic.
Lets look at this from a parenting perspective. If i have a child who misbehaves often, is it appropriate for me to punish them when they do something good?
Holding the media to the same accountability, if Trump is saying stupid/outrageous/provocative things, then lambast him when he says those things. But if the media lambasts him when he is saying something reasonable, then that is on the media.
I think most of the annoyance I see in the thread is because there was blame being assigned to Trump or even someone on the same stage as him because they were on that stage with him.
>One of the worst things about Donald Trump was that if he or anyone adjacent to him actually said anything good, it immediately became toxic.
So rather than examining an idea based on the merits, ideas were discarded due to the messenger or the who the messenger associated with.
Don't confuse legacy media propaganda with what regular people think. Especially when you hear newspeak.
Trumpists seem to forget that neither their movement nor their President have ever had the support of the American majority, much less of all "regular people." Never even the popular vote.
Neither did Hillary, who won 48% of the popular vote in 2016 to Trump's 46%. Does the fact that not until 2020 did Trump's opponent win a majority of the popular vote invalidate the validity of the opposition until then?
For a much most positive example of how that matters:
“How long did he retire for?“ “Only six months“
vs.
“How long did he go on holiday for?“ “Only six months“
Whether or not you should be "forced" to take it should be based on risk to others in the situation that it is being forced, just like you are "forced" to not speed while driving on a public highway.
I am not sure what the current latest scientific data is but my understanding is that virus and vaccine both reduce the risk of a subsequent infection, spreading the virus if infected and getting severe outcomes requires hospitalization (which reduces hospital capacity). Since this protective effect fades in both circumstances a recent booster would need to be "forced" if not recently having been infected assuming there is no issue with vaccine supply.
I really wish people would stop using this analogy. Driving is a privilege not a right, and you earn that privilege by following the rules.
Living without compulsory medical procedures is a right, not a privilege, so it's the complete opposite case. You need a better analogy.
You have a right to bear arms here in the US that does not mean you can shoot them in a public place because that endangers others. Typically rights have limits when they impose on others rights.
Working is a privilege was well not a right, you have no right to a job at an employer (at least in the US). So the analogy fits as a privilege but it also works as a right since neither are absolute and are typically limited when they effect others around you negatively.
I think the UN humans rights could also be interpreted as I having the right to a safe work environment and conversely if I where forced to work in a common office space with unvaccinated / untested people that would also violate my rights.
Secondly, the very notion that you can have an expectation of not getting infected from someone else is intrinsically untenable. Just try to define what characteristics a pathogen must have before vaccines are mandatory. Why set the bar at COVID's fatality rate, why not the flu? Why not the common cold? Is fatality rate really the right metric? What about number of post infection complications?
Furthermore, what if we say the COVID rate is the cutoff, what if you have comorbidities that increase your chances of death, does that increase the obligation of your workmates to get vaccinated or is that your problem? I think you know which way the rhetoric is going, but these answers are far from obvious.
This whole thing seems like continuum fallacy [1]. Just like everything we must all agree on a cutoff because the real world doesn't have neat black and white thresholds, covid is different from the flu that much is obvious and reaches my threshold for requiring vaccination / testing mandates at least in its current form. Do agree that a disease can be deadly enough to require it? If so what is your threshold before the mandate should be allowed?
I am willing to discuss what metrics would help come to consensus as a society, buts its not like requiring vaccines or other preventative measures for certain activities is some foreign concept.
No we don't. This assumes moral obligations are decided by an evaluation of their consequences, aka consequentialism. This is far from the only type of ethics, and permits problematic inferences (see the "Repugnant conclusion").
For instance, a Kantian would reject entirely the notion that such a cutoff is coherent. People who are trying to compel vaccines are merely using other people for their own ends (herd immunity to get back to normal), rather than treating them as ends in themselves. We should strongly encourage and persuade vaccination, but never compel them by coercive means under this ethics. Universalizing "no vaccination" does not result in a paradox, therefore it is not a moral duty under Kantianism.
There are equally compelling formulations of deontology and virtue ethics under which your sort of consequentialist argument also fails, so I'm just not convinced that it's some kind of inevitability.
So you don't believe a person should be compelled to be vaccinated or otherwise stay away from other people unless tested for infection no matter how contagious and deadly the disease? That is, forced quarantine should never be allowed under any circumstance regardless of disease?
Why should a person be free to infect others through their unabridged freedom yet one should not have the freedom to drive while drunk? People compelling others to travel sober is also using them as a means to their own ends (not being killed by drunk driver) even though they can take their own precautions (seat belts, air bags, safer cars, avoiding certain areas, they themselves not being drunk). No one is forcing anyone to be sober (in the US) just not to drive on public roads. You are not free to do whatever you want in a society with others there are limits put on your personal freedom so as not to endanger others, there is always a valid debate about what those limits should be, no different here, but there have to be agreed limits or nothing works.
What I believe is that the truth is far from obvious, and I'm describing how different ethics reach different conclusions for what is true. Thus, it's far from obvious that the choices you describe are the truth or "moral", so much as convenient and expedient. These are not the same thing.
> Why should a person be free to infect others through their unabridged freedom
Freedom is not unabridged, it simply has different limits under different ethics.
> yet one should not have the freedom to drive while drunk?
I already addressed this in my very first reply to you.
If the vaccine was so good at protecting others, why the hell do vaccinated people still need to wear a mask? How is it even ethical to force people to vaccinate in order to function in society and yet still require them to wear a mask? Seems kind of bullshit to me.
Second, I’ve never really understood why people are all that upset about mask mandates. It’s just clothing. Heck, in winter they are a vast improvement over scarves even without any disease concerns.
(Curiously, last-but-one time I wrote something similar here, someone took so much offence they tried to anonymously wish harm upon me via comments on my blog).
That's a theoretical model. A hypothesis, most likely unattainable. Conveniently so, because it creates the whole lot of scapegoats.
> Second, I’ve never really understood why people are all that upset about mask mandates. It’s just clothing.
It is not. The net is full of accounts of people telling out precisely what is wrong with masks for them. On HN, on reddit, anywhere. If you wanted to understand, you have plenty of material to read. You, most likely, simply couldn't be bothered. That, or we're just different species.
> (Curiously, last-but-one time I wrote something similar here, someone took so much offence they tried to anonymously wish harm upon me via comments on my blog).
I'm sorry to hear that. They shouldn't have done it. However, this comment of yours is very dismissive to the concerns that some people perceive as fight-or-flight matter. Some choose to fight, event in such inappropriate and misdirected way.
“Theoretical model” is a tautology.
And it really should be attainable: We’ve successfully eradicated smallpox worldwide, we are close to doing that with polio, and many other illnesses have been eradicated from certain regions via vaccination programs. This is a thing we can do if we try.
> It is not. The net is full of accounts of people telling out precisely what is wrong with masks for them
What I see is always in one of the following categories:
• People asserting that other people (never themselves) with asthma or similar breathing issues can’t wear them, even though literally everyone I know who has asthma or who uses a CPAP machine is actually fine with masks, to the extent that in many cases they get angry with anti-maskers risking giving them covid. Occasionally I also see anti-maskers also asserting that masks make it difficult for children to learn facial expressions in school, which, while superficially plausible, still seems to fail to against reality.
• People who have decided everything about this is a political meme and not real, like this: https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-photo/anti-mask-pr...
• People claiming that wearing masks lower blog oxygen levels despite all the evidence from e.g. surgeons, furries (two groups I would not have expected to list together before actually doing so).
It may be that all the above categories have totally overwhelmed real personal anecdotes of people who personally are unable to wear masks. I have no doubt, for example, that there is at least one person with no external nose or ear cartilage for a mask to hold against and who for whatever reason has not had plastic surgery. But this is not what I have ever seen. Always one of the above, on every occasion.
Eradicating COVID is not possible because it's in animal reservoirs.
> People asserting that other people (never themselves) with asthma or similar breathing issues can’t wear them
I have had occasions when it became extremely uncomfortable and even triggered an allergic reaction. Universal, effective mask use is not as simple as it's been portrayed.
Furthermore, the evidence that such universal mandates actually work is not as compelling as you think.
> Occasionally I also see anti-maskers also asserting that masks make it difficult for children to learn facial expressions in school, which, while superficially plausible, still seems to fail to against reality.
I don't know what evidence you think proves this claim.
> everyone I know who has asthma or who uses a CPAP machine is actually fine with masks, to the extent that in many cases they get angry with anti-maskers risking giving them covid
Of course they get angry, they're at higher risk and they're scared. They are risking COVID just by going outside. I'm not sure how that translates into an obligation on others to lower their risk. Of course they want others to take those steps, but that doesn't mean those demands are justifiable. If they want to lower their risk, they can take steps to protect themselves, by getting vaccinated, limiting their contact, etc.
> People claiming that wearing masks lower blog oxygen levels despite all the evidence from e.g. surgeons, furries
A properly fitted mask that actually works against COVID absolutely does lower blood oxygen. The whole point is to restrict air flow to prevent aerosolized droplets from passing through. I've measured it myself using a blood oxygen meter while wearing an N95 mask.
Of course poorly fitted masks don't lower blood oxygen, but those also aren't that effective at reducing spread. The comparison to surgeons is disingenuous, they've had years of exposure and training to learn how to operate under such conditions.
Of course.
> And it really should be attainable: We’ve successfully eradicated smallpox worldwide, we are close to doing that with polio, and many other illnesses have been eradicated from certain regions via vaccination programs. This is a thing we can do if we try.
It is a wonderful thing, a blessing, that we were so lucky with eradication of some terrible diseases. Eradication is really a side effect of a vaccination program hitting a sweet spot within vaccine-pathogen space:
- sufficiently strong vaccine, close to sterilizing
- slowly mutating pathogen
- sufficiently scary illness, to the point that high vax uptake is attainable without coercion
- some evolutionary luck
Of the above properties the current virus-vax duo possesses approximately none, so we could try all we wanted and still remain unsuccessful. Trying hard is a necessary, but by no means sufficient condition.
> What I see is always in one of the following categories
That's impressively selective vision on your part.
> People who have decided everything about this is a political meme and not real
They may be real to an extent AND a political meme at the same time. People make different judgements all the time.
> People claiming that wearing masks lower blog oxygen levels
This looks plausible, however I may agree that some people are merely claiming it. But what it all really is - and you'd figure it out if you were willing to see beyond preconceptions - for many it just a clumsy attempt to speak the "rational" language. Because mask-enthusiasts for some reason are not willing to entertain idea that mask wearing is a huge mental burden. I'll spare you of my personal experience, mainly because I don't want it to be dismissed again. I assure you, there are people who share and understand it, and mask-enthusiasts do not have a monopoly on value judgement.
My question is - what needs to happen for our problems to be recognized? People already are killing themselves, some are still hanging by a thread, but may not be for long. I suspect that the answer would be - it does not matter, our problems do not matter. This is fine, I'm learning to leave with it, learning to see the other side as completely different species, with all that follows. And what follows does not look good.
And while sure they could push back your vaccine requirement a few months, that'd require a fair amount of additional overhead and add an additional risk of having gotten a false diagnosis.
It's funny how the pandemic caused people to toss our decades of understandings of viruses out the window because it was politically expedient.
It's always been known that if your immune system allows you to recover from a virus, you will have some level of lasting immunity.