I'm glad in hindsight more people are willing to see the problems of groupthink in this period, but I do hope they look inward and hold themselves responsible too, and maybe next time not defer to authority and demonize others so willingly.

Based on the reactions I got from people I knew and respected, the last two years showed me exactly how shit like the holocaust went down. How ordinary people like you or me can be filled with so much fear and propaganda that they willingly sent their fellow humans to their demise with a smile on their face. We got incredibly lucky that things didn’t escalate to violence.

I mean for Christ sake, we have phone numbers people could call to rat out their neighbors family birthday party. We had police kicking kids and arresting people for using a playground. All it would have taken was some “expert” or politician to give permission to harm those “selfish grandma killers” and it would have been a whole different thing. People I thought I knew and respected completely lost their damn minds. Many have yet to recover.

What these “experts” did to society is beyond the pale. Humans may have fancy shiny tools and “science” but we are fundamentally the same superstitious creatures as those who came before us 10’s of thousands of years ago.

Yes, violence was largely avoided. But it was still an extremely harmful period of time.

It should be a constant reminder to each of us that we are not special and we are not different - we could and very well may be whipped into a similar frenzy someday.

The scariest thing I learned during the last two years is how many people are willing to throw me, you, and everyone (including themselves!) under the bus in order to avoid even mild, temporary inconvenience, or to simply virtue-signal their contrariness to their clan.

And the US treated these attackers with kid gloves. There were pretty much no enforcement of any of the things the complainers were complaining about: No consequences for ignoring stay-at-home mandates. Few localities actually enforced business closures. Masking was up to individual businesses to enforce, resulting in little compliance. Throughout the pandemic, I could drive 50 miles in any direction from my city and find people out and about, maskless, businesses open, no measures being taken at all. The only thing that was actually enforced were school closures, and that's only because schools are run by the government.

Those two years ushered in this new era of consequence-free mass civil disobedience. And it wasn't even in service of anything--just performative contrariness.

I guess intelligence agencies also learned the sad answer to the question "If there were a grave threat to society, is it possible to use PsyOps to get society to ignore or even prolong it?" But then again, I suppose our reaction to Climate Change has already answered that question.

Faulty modeling thought Covid was a super deadly highly contagious disease that would kill 4% of those who caught it. It only took a month or so before real world data proved that model to be wildly wrong. But did we celebrate Covid wasn’t as bad as we thought? Did we end the destructive mandates because hospitals weren’t flooded with people on respirators in the hallway?

Nope. Instead our “experts” never mentioned the “strong flu”-like IFR and the very steep age stratification of Covid and doubled down on the stupidity.

The models were wrong. Covid wasn’t nearly as horrific as what was predicated. But here we are 2.5 years later and a ton of people still believe Covid is the modern Black Plague. The experts, whose job it is to clearly convey the actual risks of Covid, failed absolutely miserably at their most important job.

I’ve said this here before, but my elderly father couldn’t get a bed at a hospital when he broke his hip because they were out of beds. Our medical system was under a massive strain. We’ll be paying the price for a long time because people got burned out, I expect.

I live in the Bay Area which was the epicenter for "covid caution". I have not worn a mask in months. We have not had anything resembling a lock down in well over a year. The fact that you are being obtuse about the current state of affairs to support your partisan narrative is all I need to know about your motivations.

I'm traveling for work next week. My work requires me to have proof of vaccination and wear a mask anytime I am around others.

On topic of this particular subthread: This is how my country (I'm Czech) handled the Nazis and Soviets.

You rediscovered how people respond to a totalitarian regime that's beyond their powers to dislodge: they comply ostensibly, but the compliance is only a show "for the authorities", a circus, and everybody knows (except perhaps your "single digit percentage").

Reinhard Heydrich, the Reich's installed "protector" of Bohemia and Moravia, was so frustrated by this attitude he reportedly called Czech's "the smiling beasts", unable to break them. We eventually assassinated him.

Anyway, I just wanted to say your comment and its implications doesn't read as you probably intended it to read.

You should also note that if restrictions remain in place when your area - the bay area - is free of them, that perhaps the bay area wasn't the place most caught up in the hysteria. If you are assuming the bay area is as bad as it got you need to recalibrate.

Downplaying, denial, misinformation, exaggeration, victim complexes, persecution complexes, every stop was pulled out, every tactic was tried.

Like when Ron DeSantis was called a murderer for opening Florida's beaches (when it was well established that outside activities were extremely safe), or when parents advocating for schools to open were called white supremacists (when the predictable result of closing schools was that poor and minority students suffered most)?

The scariest thing I learned during the last two years is how many people are willing to throw me, you, and everyone (including themselves!) under the bus in order to avoid even mild, temporary inconvenience

Meanwhile, I learned how many people are willing to have governments literally lock everyone in their homes because of their inability to do any sort of rational risk assessment or cost-benefit analysis.

Lockdowns, and the labeling of society into "essential" and "non-essential", occurred nearly everywhere with no debate at all.

The most basic freedoms guaranteed to us - the freedom of movement, association, free speech - were taken away from hundreds of millions of people who had literally no say in the matter.

What world were you living in where these restrictions were only nominal? They literally roped off certain sections of businesses preventing people from buying non-essential products. It was everywhere.

"Politicized" is a funny word. When people talk about "democratizing" something, it is all "everyone's voices must be heard!" and "we all come together!" and sunshine and rainbows.

But when ordinary citizens and their duly elected representatives try to use the political process to effect policy—supposedly the essence of "democracy," as I was taught in grade school… "How dare you politicize this issue! Stupid peasants, don't you know you are supposed to blindly follow every diktat of our unelected expert class! The nerve, to think government is supposed to be responsive to your desires"

If ordinary citizens and their duly elected representatives are all clambering to remove those limits during times of turmoil, we absolutely have a right to decry politics crossing a line it was never meant to cross.

My take is that in the (maybe distant) past, facts and observable events were beyond the line that politics should cross. If anyone could observe something was happening, then politics had no business stepping in and distorting that reality. We could all see that people were dying of COVID. It was indeed real, and an observable crisis. But politics stepped in and crossed the "reality distortion line" and it became a valid political opinion to deny reality and fight the messengers of that reality. In their view, reality was political, and we should just ignore COVID and act, and that would somehow produce a different reality where COVID didn't exist. A quote from the Bush administration, widely believed to be from Karl Rove, summarized this politicization of facts:

    "The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [...] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do'."

The "public health experts" are not angels of God, infallible messengers of Reality itself come down from Heaven to deliver the Gospel Of The Science to an unworthy populace. They are fallible human beings, they made many mistakes and their priorities don't always align with everyone else's. The inalienable rights of man, as re-affirmed in the First Amendment, give everyone the right to worship whomever they wish however they wish; I am therefore free to deny Saint Anthony of Bethesda's divinity as loudly and publicly as I desire.

As for the movie, I haven't seen it, but I enjoyed this review of it: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/movie-review-dont-look...

Cloth masks and social distancing did not seem to slow the spread. Some people who got fully vaxed and boosted got sick and are still getting sick. None of that stuff effectively protected people, and it caused harms. Those with at-risk medical conditions (maybe you) should take care of themselves by isolating to avoid those busses.

Since day 1 this thing was 99% killing older people or people with 3 or 4 comorbidities. Dont try to turn it into the black plague now.

Behind every comment is an actual person with a valid opinion. I may not agree with it, but perspective is key.

Some have said you learn the most listening to a critic/skeptic

And then there was this plan from 2019: "Providing lethal aid to Ukraine would exploit Russia’s greatest point of external vulnerability. But any increase in U.S. military arms and advice to Ukraine would need to be carefully calibrated to increase the costs to Russia of sustaining its existing commitment without provoking a much wider conflict in which Russia, by reason of proximity, would have significant advantages." - Overextending and Unbalancing Russia https://web.archive.org/web/20190601000000*/https://www.rand...

1) "We need a no fly zone over Ukraine

and somehow not connecting the dots to that meaning

2) NATO jets shooting down Russian jets

which in turn leads to

3) A hot war with between nuclear powers

something that hasn't happened outside of a few border skirmishes between India and Pakistan

The question is: what public health policies will minimize harm according to some set of metrics, and what will those metrics be?

The harms you describe are real. But you offer no way to quantify these harms against the harms that may have occured without the policies you are objecting to.

Gina Carano was fired from Star Wars for making that same comparison - not even denying COVID, just saying, "the holocaust happened because people turned against their neighbors".

A few hours of lecture about the Cambodian genocide should be sufficient though. We need to focus more on the Holocaust specifically; that's the important genocide and the rest can safely be treated as footnotes in history.

/s

He appears to be surmising that we're becoming very impulsive in quashing whatever thought appears to impede our immediate policy goals--not that it is the Holocaust in and of itself that is special. (He even goes through the effort of explicitly highlighting it as entirely feasible for a populace to fall to!)

I have watched many films on the holocaust, and they were quite sad, and tragic.

However, I did not truly understand some of the why until I happened across the German Revolution of 1918–1919 [1] ; organizations, and elites, that played significant roles in the Revolution were the very same that were proscribed with the rise of the Nazis.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Revolution_of_1918%E2%8...

Everyone would take up the exact same position they had, there will be a little attrition either side. Rabble on the internet all day long.

FEAR was made into a VIRTUE. The good people were afraid and did what they were supposed to do. The bad people vote wrong and we don’t listen to them anyhow. Same thing if we play it back.

The problem with both is we're talking "sides" and not "what should we do based on what we know?" There were far too many politicians involved, and they were all more concerned with appearing to be doing something on our behalf than actually acting in our best interests.

Consider why fear was made into a virtue. You said it, “our best interests“, then look at the lens of Covid, and define that. Who got to say with that exactly was? Can you see any scenario where “Considering who the virus effects, doing nothing special is our best long term approach” would have come out of the government and media?

There may be an argument that if Covid was either more deadly or less deadly it would have had less of an effect.

Mine Safety Health Administration advice was to stay home when sick and then business as usual. I was on mine sites when others were locked at home double-masked with fear. Nobody was masked on mine sites because it restricts visibility and is unsafe. Do you think MSHA is a fringe group?

OSHA tried to mandate masks and shots. It was ridiculous to watch the disparity in responses and fear.

MSHA sites are dangerous yet are safe. The OSHA approach was incorrect.

It takes an incredible amount of privilege to support the Covid mitigations. Consider that not a single person who enacted them missed a single paycheck because of the mandates. I imagine that holds true to most of the people cheering those mandates on or calling them “minor inconveniences”. A lot of privilege needs to be checked here.

What kinds of unknowns would justify, in your mind, those sorts of policies?

So what do you think your threshold is? If a new airborne transmitted disease with a 30% kill rate showed up, would centralized public health policies be OK?

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-...

Precisely which groups would be isolated from "young people", and which would not, and on what basis? Do you judge the 44k deaths in the 40-49 cohort (likely parents of older children, along with teachers of many children) to be acceptable? Do you believe that an increase in their death count due to leaving children unrestricted would also be acceptable? Just how would not locking down kids work?

Absolutely disgusting how many so-called “smart rational” people dismissed it… as if Covid was literally the only thing that mattered and anybody who pointed it out was nothing more than a Fox News watching selfish asshole.

To this day people will defend letting people die alone in a hospital or nursing home with only some crappy video conference as a substitute for real human contact.

It takes a special kind of monster to support the crap we did to the elderly. There are a worryingly large set of people I used to respect that turned out to be monsters.

That's exactly the dehumanizing language that was used about people who were skeptical of lockdowns and other dissidents.

I think they were normal people who were overcome with fear and placed too much trust in authority. Weak-minded, perhaps, but that doesn't make them monsters.

So I ask again, what would the circumstances have to be for "letting the at risk people decide for themselves" to be an unacceptable policy? What fatality level, transmission mechanism or whatever would have to be present for you to accept that some sort of centralized public health policy was required?

1M americans died of COVID-19. That's a real threat, too. So the difference with Ebola is not really to do with the "reality" of the threat, but the manner and rapidity of death, along with the fatality rate.

> If policy makers have to artificially restrict individual rights, it indicates that policies are being implemented based on a single variable

I do not see how you can draw this conclusion.

I agree with you, but we did worse actually.

Some states actually sequestered covid positive patients, and covid suspected cases at nursing homes with highly at risk populations.

We know who covid kills: People with advanced age and multiple comorbidities. The same type of folks you find at nursing homes.

Those governors that did that - in my mind they are guilty of murder.

For those of you that want to fact check this, I will save you the trouble.

https://nypost.com/2020/07/08/cuomo-sent-6300-covid-19-patie...

https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/coronavirus/9000-covid-patie...

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/five-governors-cuomo...

https://www.clickondetroit.com/news/local/2020/06/16/michiga...

https://www.mlive.com/public-interest/2020/04/whitmer-orders...

https://www.nj.com/opinion/2020/05/murphy-administration-ign...

   FLATTEN THE CURVE

> All it would have taken was some “expert” or politician to give permission to harm those “selfish grandma killers” and it would have been a whole different thing.

That's quite the leap, and frankly reads as self-affirming speculation (e.g. I was right, and the proof is in this fantasy).

"The Post originally described Cotton’s remarks as “debunked” and a “conspiracy theory” in a February 2020 article. But last week, The Post rewrote the article’s headline, softening “conspiracy theory” to “fringe theory” and noting that scientists have “disputed” it rather than “debunked” it."

[1]"The media called the ‘lab leak’ story a ‘conspiracy theory.’ Now it’s prompted corrections — and serious new reporting." Washington Post, 6/10/21

Unfortunately, this is a common tactic. Walking back a previous wrong assertion allows one to frame it as a virtue--"we corrected ourselves!"--in order to avoid talking about the original vice of being a copy-and-paste propaganda organ for the state.

There seems to be a very tight integration between the government and the major media, and this is a real problem. It's not surprising, as a journalist that is a burr in the saddle of government power soon finds it difficult to talk to government entities. But it is a problem if there really is no journalistic independence. In recent years, journalists seem to be little more than Twitter researchers. Complete randos from the Internet, some of whom were clearly a little bit mad, got closer to the actual truth than the "trusted experts."

https://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/reports-publications/...

Readers aren't parsing sentences this closely and comparing to previous statements.

Unless they come out with an editorial statement apologizing then they aren't really serious about their own involvement in censorship on behalf of those in power.

Damage done.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/02/16/tom-cotto...

If the Lancet Covid Commission is now claiming it is one of the foremost theories, then it is not fringe.

[1] https://theintercept.com/2022/05/19/covid-lab-leak-evidence-...

https://fee.org/articles/we-failed-danish-newspaper-apologiz...

From April 2: "The prime suspect is ‘natural’ transmission from bats to humans, perhaps through unsanitary markets. But scientists don’t rule out that an accident at a research laboratory in Wuhan might have spread a deadly bat virus that had been collected for scientific study.”"

Couple that with the admission from Cotton: "Now, we don’t have evidence that this disease originated [from the lab]"

Numerous experts in the field backed up the idea that the virus was engineered or came from a lab.

Even Cotton followed up with further clarification of his original tweets.

"I am pleased to hear you now distinguish between possibility virus was engineered bioweapon (which can be dismissed) and possibility virus entered human population through lab accident (which cannot--and should not--be dismissed)" - From Feb 16, 2020 (referenced in Feb 17, 2020 in Washington Post.

This timeline covers it well: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/05/25/timeline-...

Is it bad that people update their thinking when new evidence presents itself? No.

But that doesn't mean people who pushed an idea without evidence should be lauded. A broken clock is right twice a day, after all.

Yeah, and same if you discussed it on HN.

It was a very interesting time to practice independent-mindedness, and get vivid demonstrations on how rare it is.

Yes, that's anecdata, so make of it what you will.

It happened here fairly often. Though less frequently here than most other places online during that time.

Seriously. What do you think is going to happen when there's a worldwide pandemic and people with (in some cases) utterly opposing views on what is safe and advisable as public health policy?

I pointed out the existence of differing viewpoints being silenced, was shouted down, and you follow this up with mockery?

2. I followed up the mockery with a serious point that you have not responded to.

Censorship? What the OP means by censorship is not what I mean by censorship. Were heterodox ideas etc. surrounding COVID-19 severely criticized? Yes. Were they even limited or deleted from social media? Yes. Were they still published in blogs? In various traditional media? Yes. Could you encounter them on cable news? Yes. Was anyone tried or even arrested for promoting or distributing such ideas? No.

That's not the way we treat the announcement of a lemonade stand, but it's also not what I consider censorship in any meaningful way.

There is an alternate universe where they didn’t test everybody that breathed and don’t publish daily death counts. The only way you’d know there was a pandemic was an uptick in “wash your hands” signs in the restroom. Otherwise it would have been “just that thing going around”.

The last time we had an equivalent pandemic they held Woodstock. No shutdowns. No masks. No hysterical blowhards tweeting about the end of the world on twitter. People just got on with life.

Does this make me a selfish asshole? Perhaps. But I personally think the people screaming to mask up and shut it all down are the true selfish ones. The expect everybody to massively disrupt their lives in order to appease their fear and anxiety. Especially when those mitigations had no prior evidence they’d work and not even a whiff of a stated off-ramp or end goal.

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1968-pandemic.htm...

> The estimated number of deaths was 1 million worldwide and about 100,000 in the United States.

Uh, "equivalent pandemic". I don't think so.

[ EDIT: Oh, and also: https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-woodstock-pande... ]

The use and abuse of raw data has been a hallmark of the last 2.5 years. Whatever number makes Covid sound worse is the number that gets published and spread. Anything suggesting it isn’t as bad as predicted is buried as a conspiracy or “not peer reviewed”.

World population has grown by a factor of 2.3 since 1968. That would suggest a "population adjusted" death count of 230,000 for the 1968 "equivalent pandemic", a number less than 1/4 of COVID-19's US numbers.

US population has grown by a factor of 1.65 since 1968.That would suggest a "population adjusted" death count of 165,000 for the 1968 "equivalent pandemic", a number less than 17% of COVID-19's US numbers

Society is “group think”. Try paying rent in bottle caps, and telling your boss to go fuck themselves when they ask for something. Fear of unemployment and homelessness make that unlikely.

City to city, coast to coast, group think and fear keep us from having serious conversations about consumerisms impact on the environment; don’t touch my capitalism click clack

The difference is that’s group think you’ve been conditioned since birth to believe is as immutable as the orbit of the planets.

If we all “group thought” more bicycles and fewer cars were more appropriate that’s what we’d produce. It’s unjustifiable belief to make it sound as if you’re a truly free agent unaffected by group think and fear of alternatives.

My example would be one of the scientists on President Biden's Covid advisory council being interviewed on PBS and pointing out that cloth face masks were not effective against an airborne virus, but n95 masks offered some real protection.

https://www.pbs.org/wnet/amanpour-and-company/video/do-masks...

I, personally, saw people demand that links to that interview be removed as "disinformation".

I see the concerns. He did qualify a few sentences earlier about the effectiveness of cloth masks is that there is some protection but it's small. Fine, but he was imprecise with his language later on.

People want to (and did) latch on to the quotable portion that they are not effective (read: zero difference from no mask), which is demonstrably false.

With an airborne virus you have to be able to filter the air people are breathing and a cloth face mask that isn't even fitted tightly to the face just cannot do that. This is why you need an n95 mask or better fitted tightly enough to your face to create an air seal.

For example, the Measles also has an airborne spread and the OSHA requirements for medical professionals mandate gloves, eye and face protection, and respiratory protection.

https://www.osha.gov/measles/control-prevention

Note that Flu levels hit record lows globally while Covid continued to spread like wildfire.

>CDC says seasonal flu cases hit record lows around the world

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/cold-and-flu/cdc-says-seasona...

If that's the case, be demonstrable then. Given the physical size of the virus vs the size of holes in say, a cotton mask, combined with the infection rates for the strictest masking areas, I would say your statement is demonstrably false.

The problem was a lot of these people that came on TV/radio weren't actually doing anything but being the same thing as Tucker Carlson in just "asking questions" in a provocative way but not actually testing hypotheses or doing research.

If you watched something like the UCSF Grand Rounds of Covid you would have seen all the research/questions/hypotheses presented and discussed regularly. They are all on youtube.

There will be no "chilling effect" in the scientific community for a long time because the actual practicing scientists/doctors acted as they should have and did the things you claimed to not have been done.

because of the business model of TV channels. outrage sells.

From "hug a chinese" to "masks don't help" one day, and "mandatory masks" the next.

I'm not that old or fat to be in any risk groups, so I got vaccinated to protect my (old) parents... and back then it was "get vaccinated and you won't get it, not spread it" (plus herd immunity), and not long after: "yes, you can get it, you can spread it, but chances of death are marginally lower"

Then one discusson on /r/conspiracy about something unrelated, and bam, banned from most of the from page subreddits.

The fact that people keep citing this ridiculous claim is evidence of why this "contradiction" was necessary. People are too selfish and panicky to respond rationally to "although masks are useful, we need current masks for healthcare workers, so please don't go buy any". That message is 4 times as long as the attention span of the average American. As such, it got consolidated into the much more brief (but not strictly accurate) "you don't need to wear masks" until such time as the supply chain could cope.

This was a rational and intentional decision, not a contradiction.

It was a shortsighted error that will forever cost them credibility. Not worth it. They should have just contacted the handful of major retailers that could have delivered N95 masks into the hands of most Americans and asked (or even ordered) them to pull the stock. That's it. Problem solved.

All they did in the end was demonstrate that they cannot be trusted to tell the truth and that's not what you want if you're trying to manage a pandemic or any public health crisis. Outright lying because they didn't want to risk treating the American public like adults was such a massive failure I don't think they will ever recover fully from it.

But we should still ban people who say otherwise? The first "otherwise" (nutjob conspiracy theorists telling you to wear a mask, no matter what fauci says) or the second "otherwise" (nutjob conspiracy theorists saying that masks are useless)? Which ones should we ban then?

I mean... doing what a youtubeing prepper nutjob said and did, has proven to be safer for you, than following what Fauci (and other local equivalents) say... or you'd atleast have masks, disinfectant and a basement full of toiletpaper and MREs at home, while those listening to Fauci wouldn't.

How can we "trust the science", when "the science" has clearly lied to us? What else is "science" lying about right now?

When the pandemic happened, and I had multiple P100 masks from asbestos removal, I felt pretty comfortable.

....Until I tried to wear them in everyday life. It is even worse than being at a construction site, wearing one of those monstrosities all day

Well I'm glad they're lying to my face for good reason

This was a rational and intentional decision to lie, not a contradiction.

Which is exactly what you would expect to happen as we get new data on anything new. The fact that people were excepting the medical community to have prophetic knowledge about a novel virus barely a month after it had been confirmed speaks more to the American public's poor understanding of the scientific process.

Side note, but just a reminder that Fauci NEVER said "masks don't work", as much as this gets repeated on social media. He said that they prevent infected people from spreading it to others and did not recommend that everyone wear them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRa6t_e7dgI

And when further data came out about asymptomatic transmission, the recommendations changed.

Side note 2: "hug a chinese" and "vaccinated people don't spread COVID" were both from politicians, not the medical or scientific communities. I found plenty of blogs, podcasts, and YouTube channels from actual epidemiologists and virologists (such as "this week in virology") who did not say such things. Unfortunately Americans don't really care enough to distinguish between "science communicated by politicians" and "science communicated by scientists". After 2020 and watching as people working in relevant fields - like the podcast above, or "your local epidemiologist" - just got straight-up ignored by COVID deniers, I'm not even sure most of the public even knows how to look up "communication by scientists"...

I don't expect them to know everything. I do expect them to acknowledge when they don't know everything, rather than bouncing from one end of unwarranted certainty to the other.

I mean sure... but a CDC director is a "scientific" authority, not just some local redneck mayor of a hick town

https://www.msnbc.com/transcripts/transcript-rachel-maddow-s...

( > CDC Director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky is interviewed )

> our data from the CDC today suggests, you know, that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don`t get sick, and that it`s not just in the clinical trials but it`s also in real world data.

When and where was this the message? I'm not doubting you, I just got most of my covid info from going to blogs then reading the abstracts of papers they linked to, and I remember the efficacy being in the 80% to 90% range for the initial strain. Even smallpox vaccines only had around 95% efficacy. There's no good reason for a journalist to report that any vaccine is 100% effective.

> "This is a pandemic of the unvaccinated," Biden said in the full interview. "The unvaccinated. Not the vaccinated, the unvaccinated. That’s the problem. Everybody talks about freedom and not to have a shot or have a test. Well guess what? How about patriotism? How about making sure that you’re vaccinated, *so you do not spread the disease to anyone else."* (*emphasis mine*)

https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2...

> The vaccines that we have against COVID are incredibly effective vaccines. And people have seen the results from the clinical trials of, you know, anywhere in the 80 percent range, 90 percent range of efficacy. But that doesn't mean that 100 percent of people, 100 percent of the time are going to be protected against disease. There is no vaccine that provides that level of protection for any disease. So we do expect in any vaccine program that there will be rare, but there will be cases of disease among people who were fully vaccinated and certainly among some people who were partially vaccinated. This doesn't mean that the vaccines aren't working. It doesn't mean that there's something wrong with the vaccines. What it does mean is that not everybody who receives vaccines has 100 percent protection

To me, that means that chances of not getting covid are 80-90%, so out of 100 vaccinated people, only 10-20 will get covid... which was a "good enough" risk reduction for me.

also

https://www.msnbc.com/transcripts/transcript-rachel-maddow-s... (interview with CDC Director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky )

> And we have -- we can kind of almost see the end. We`re vaccinating so very fast, our data from the CDC today suggests, you know, that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don`t get sick, and that it`s not just in the clinical trials but it`s also in real world data.

Anecdotally I've found if I just say something relatively unbacked or 'stupid sounding' that the mainstream can easily attack to make my argument sound dumb, I don't get the ban/removal. It's only when you present a factual argument, and especially if you start winning people over, that reddit is especially quick to ban you.

I've noticed this same progression on HN. If I lose the debate due to not enough facts/persuasion, then people tend to leave it at that and rest satisfied they put an idiot in their place -- why would they want that comment removed when it can stay there as a head on a spike. If I introduce facts but they are unpopular, it will get downvoted to hell and people seem satisfied with that. However, if I actually start winning people over then my comment gets flagged, because we can't allow the wrong view to 'win.'

  "It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."

Reddit's anti-evil team is not evil-capitalism, it's AI wokeness run amok: https://www.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/u374pf/reddits_...

One could interpret it as 'I got permabanned and made to feel bad afterwards for upvoting an unpopular opinion one time' or 'I got permabanned after upvoting an unpopular opinion for the 1000th time during an ongoing raid feud.' I presume the truth lies somewhere between those extremes.

Edit: Adding sources to spite the Dow voter for merely stating a fact.

Him saying: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fKWwEkBZjhM

An article: “ Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), was now pushing to expand prescription.”

https://www.spin.com/2015/10/aids-and-the-azt-scandal-spin-1...

"attacks on me are, quite frankly, attacks on science"

- Dr. Anthony Fauci, 2021

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/09/fauci-blasts-preposterous-co...

In context his statement was a bit more nuanced. But I don't think it's healthy for a bureaucrat to try to personify a process. Taking political opposition personally is seldom productive.

I believe in the scientific method, and I also know there is a distinct possibility that a statement I make today, based on what we know today, may be incredibly wrong. Dr. Fauci's statements are frightening because they lack intellectual humility, and they remind me of a comic book phrase, rather than a statement by a leading physician or researcher.

Would we expect anything different from Judge Dredd? [1]

[1] https://youtu.be/miVoe7U6Lx4?t=30

https://www.forbes.com/sites/carlieporterfield/2021/06/09/fa...

Truth (and therefore science) is the most powerful tools we have to hold corrupt tyrants and authoritarians who would rule us to account. It's not ta all disturbing or surprising to me to see the ruling government/corporate power structure censor and bully and attack anybody questioning their authority. This is what these people do, it's their nature.

What was disturbing to me was how many self-proclaimed people of science, brave resisters of government and corporate abuse, and fighters for rights and freedom immediately turned into government apologists and bullies.

Correct, but those checks and balances don't come from reaching your hand into the fringe theory hat, grabbing whichever one is most convenient, and proudly demanding that policy should give it equal weight to consensus science.

Blame the administration at the time. Judging by comments here, it seems like the current government is a bit more open about things.

I blame the whackos for poisoning the well. (Let's also include well-meaning MDs and bio-related fields who don't actually know about epidemiology)

And even if you were an appropriately credentialed expert, if you weren't in a position to make policy decisions before the pandemic, then why would you suddenly expect to have influence during a crisis? That only happens in movies.

"I think this is incorrect" is answered with "how prestigious are your credentials?" instead of "what are your reasons?".

Prestigious credentials should rest on the foundation of good reasoning, not the other way around.

When the building is on fire and the firefighters are yelling at you to get out, but Bill from the copy room is like "wait nooooo smoke is good for your personal aura," it is perfectly fine to question someone based on credentials alone.

Can you distinguish between political and scientific epidemiologists?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22671660

[2] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/eci.13222

https://doi.org/10.1093/ije/dyab010

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...

Remind me again what were the deaths predicted?

Here is a proper 20-20 hindsight analysis: https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/what-the-heck-happened-to-j... mostly about this paper: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.14.20062463v...

The numbers he found were completely inconsistent with other well known numbers at the time. He didn’t shit-test his analysis against reality, instead he published bullshit science, ironically enough given his most cited paper.

This is the analysis I previously referred to that was shit: https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-a...

I recall he ignored conflicting information from other sources[1], he was jumping to conclusions based on the thin Diamond Princess information, and I felt he was politically advocating for more scientific delay. Resulting in articles like: https://www.dailywire.com/news/stanford-professor-data-indic...

He doubled down. Was badly wrong. Unfortunately it is still a political topic, especially in the US, so it is hard to have a sensible conversation about it.

[1] his article was on the 17th March and the WaPo article I referenced talked about Berano on the 23rd March - I haven’t checked whether he should have known the Berano facts publically. https://archive.ph/https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/euro...

The point is that Ioannidis had a pattern of behaviour of writing obviously biased rubbish during that time.

In his example, firefights are authorities... In regards to smoke and fire. Yeah I'm gonna trust what they have to say, both over what Bob has to say about smoke being good for my aura, and over anything that an irrelevant authority, like the town mayor, has to say.

Likewise back in February 2020 I found really great authorities on virology, a podcast with a rotating panel of 5+ virologists and people with other relevant phds, plus a doctor who headed up a COVID ward in NYC and started giving weekly clinical updates.

Naturally this resulted in me being called a sheeple who just did whatever the mayor (in the example in question) told him rather than following Bob, who must be true in saying smoke is good for me because he's wearing a lab coat and YouTube is censoring him.

Why does that sound so familiar?

Whatever, guess I'll just defer to authority.

A panel of authority figures is no excuse to stop thinking. They can be misled and corrupt like any others. All people need to think for themselves and question authority now more than ever.

No. Go to a podcast search engine and type in "virology". Go to duck duck go and look up "epidemiologist blog". Go to your library and search for books on immunology.

>A panel of authority figures is no excuse to stop thinking

Careful not to skip into straw man territory.

Thinking for yourself isn't mutually exclusive with educating yourself on a topic, which is best done by learning from people with relevant expertise. Doing something like a thesis defense requires a crazy amount of both thinking for yourself, AND years of studying from experts. I suspect that if you went to write a thesis on astrophysics, you'd put a lot of effort into studying from authorities. Though I would love to see someone go for a thesis defense with work based purely on "thinking for themselves".

>Whatever, guess I'll just defer to authority.

I cannot emphasize enough the difference between "authority" and "authority with expertise in a specific area." If your car engine needs fixing, I'm willing to bet money that you'll end up deferring to an authority one way or another. Unfortunately, when a topic becomes politicized, people quickly fall into black-and-white thinking and false dichotomies pretty quickly

A short video that sums up that last three years of scientism by the establishment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSZMtSPX3iE

The loonies were a very small set of people. They were used to tarnish the reputation of anybody who was even a wee bit skeptical of what society was doing. Just because somebody thinks closing schools for more than a year and a half is a bad idea doesn't make them a loony conspiracy theorist. Just because somebody thinks the harms of the mandates were worse than any benefit they provided doesn't make them a loony. 99% of all people were in the "non-loony" bucket. 1% were actual loonies, but according to "the experts" the whole set of skeptics are grandma killing loonies spreading "dangerous nonsense".

By the way, multiple times I've been accused of spreading "dangerous nonsense" by linking to state dashboards that clearly demonstrate how age-stratified covid is. Apparently linking to public datasets is now "misinformation".

Crazy crazy crazy...

As an under the age of 30 person, Covid is a small threat. But asking questions about a government mandated vaccine that was rushed through testing in an unprecedented manner labels you a loony. Questions like who is going to be liable for the inevitable even if small bad reactions? Not big pharma, they were absolved in the contract of all liability. If they were so confident and if this is so safe that I don’t have to worry about it as a citizen why did the lawyers ensure that they wouldn’t be liable?

What about the precedence of liberty this sets? In a series of weeks the government removed nearly all agency overnight and everyone complied. There was no real debate on pros and cons of the total lockdown.

The ineffectiveness of masks other than n95 when changed out daily. Which nobody had.

I have friends that still won’t consider the vanity fair article or lab leak theory as anything other than conspiracy.

Oh yea and the ever falling efficacy of the vaccine itself.

But let’s check cress to make sure I’m a dr.

Not only was there no debate, but even dissent was discouraged or even outlawed. No gatherings larger than 10 people allowed. Hard to rally against losing your freedom of movement when you can't leave your house.

[0]: https://www.persuasion.community/p/why-im-losing-trust-in-th... - the original report is at https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/acip/meetings/downloads/slides-... with the quote on slide 31

The standards were political from the start.

The anti-lockdown protests, on the other hand were encouraged by... A few cops looking bored. Which is strange, because COVID has been the #1 killer of police officers since the pandemic started.

https://nleomf.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/2021-EOY-Fatal...

Vaccination rates among LEOs were much lower than those other professions, which, unsurprisingly, resulted in substantially more serious illnesses and deaths.

How did you know this? What information did you use to determine that a 30 year old? How did you know to trust it? Did your view on this change in March 2020 vs March 2022 as more data and studies were introduced?

The JHU site provided metrics and details of fatality rates for ages based on comorbidities and weight, among other variables

> What information did you use to determine that a 30 year old?

I referenced the JHU site

> How did you know to trust it?

The JHU data was based on the best available data at the time, and was regularly updated.

> Did your view on this change in March 2020 vs March 2022 as more data and studies were introduced?

I've heard various things about whether or not the JHU data was negative enough or positive enough, but as far as a top line for mortality, it seemed accurate given the data at the time.

In retrospect, the fatality numbers may have been too high, but, that may also have been as a result of improving therapeutics, and recognition that some of the early responses such as putting patients on higher pressure ventilators was contraindicated.

This is further complicated by variant types which have different amounts of lethality.

But how did you decide that JHU was presenting accurate data?

Do you have a PhD in virology?

Are you a medical doctor?

Are you a biomedical engineer?

The worst types of credentialism!

You're doing the exact thing you decry in your post by painting "the experts" with a broad brush and scare quotes as being unreasonable and hyperinflammatory in their rhetoric. Not everyone who was for school closings and lockdowns was calling their opponents "grandma killing loonies". People need to stop arguing from the extreme.

The people doing this might be the minority, but they were the ones holding the microphone for the last 2.5 years. Nobody else got a voice.

So in other words, 99% of the people were in the non-loony bucket, and you're focused on the 1% that yelled at you?

I could turn your statement around. As a teacher, I've been called a child abuser by a person I know in real life for wanting teachers to have a safe working environment. The people doing this may be the minority, but they were the ones holding the microphone.

So I really fail to see how what you're doing now in your second post is different from what you decry in your first.

In most cases the actual classroom teachers that I talked with didn't even support those policies. It was the teacher's unions which did most of the damage.

The "keep schools open" crowd often floated a false dichotomy where the option was between schooling as normal or closed schools. Schooling as normal was never a realistic option for many districts with missing faculty and staff. They would say "kids are not susceptible to covid, therefore schools are safe" without any concern about teachers who in fact died due to covid, as happened in my district.

Today we're facing a national teacher shortage where those who would have thought about teaching are steering clear of the field, and those currently in it are looking to get out asap. The rhetoric you're displaying here is a large part of the reason why.

Maybe not, but it's what they did do.

For some reason, people mix up intentions and consequences all the time. The intentions may have been good; the consequences were not.

I've found that people who are not teachers and who have no idea what it's like to run a school are very quick to pass judgement when it comes to this issue. Usually digging a little deeper it's very easy to find this quickness to blame stems from various political viewpoints rather than any expertise or knowledge about the situation on the ground. Most people I've found blaming teachers like this don't even have any kids in school.

Anyway, teachers are the ones on the front line right now trying to fix the problems that children face today due to the pandemic, so please spare me your moralizing about how teachers are abusers and conspired to inflict collective punishment on children. What are you doing to fix the problems?

Person you replied to never said that. Could have been like my kid's school, where the kid/teacher missed a couple weeks but other than that the teachers that didn't die or whatever eventually came back and taught the kids in class in person.

>showstopping complications.

Well somehow they weren't as my county got hit worst than most and yet somehow my kid still got schooled, just through a private school. Didn't stop the show for those willing to keep the show going.

>Most people I've found blaming teachers

I definitely don't blame teachers in general. My kids teachers were great. Awesome people. The ones that gave up, and said well thinsg are challenging and I might die or whatever, well that's fine I don't blame them either. Go on and find another profession or whatever, you're not a slave. But I salute the ones who stuck around like my kid's teacher who was willing to adapt and overcome to keep things going so my child didn't get so far behind.

>abusers

The person you replied to never said teachers are "abusers."

It almost sounds like you're arguing against some other person you have beef with, rather than the person who replied to you. Either way I don't know what to tell you. My kid, and her teacher kept going on through COVID in person somehow, so I guess they proved the impossible can actually happen. We lived in our alternate reality where it is possible, and you lived in one where it was a 'showstopper.'

The problem children face today aren’t because of the pandemic. They are entirely the fault of peoples reaction to Covid. Covid didn’t close schools in blue states and then force them to wear masks. Humans did.

And when I have a kid, I will be homeschooling.

Please don't assume.

Also, I was briefly a bus driver for a school district during COVID. I was disgusted by how the school buses were run, refusing to allow students to board without masks, requiring masks on the drivers when that affected the amount of oxygen to the brain. It was a mess.

People in my district tried to protest, including me, but the police refused to let them into school board meetings, which is illegal in my state.

If anything, what you're saying feels like you telling me to believe you and not my "lying" eyes.

> Very few people died.

It takes very few deaths to throw a school and even a district into disarray. In my post history I post about 40 teachers dying in Georgia during a short period of time, whose median age was 46. What kind of effect do you think that has on other teachers, the students, and the district? Outsiders who want to argue from political positions don't want to talk about those realities. Instead they fall back to aggregate statistics like "very few died" that minimize the sheer tragedy of the situation.

IMO society could tolerate an extremely high number of deaths if it means putting their children on the best foot. Hell we tolerate a pretty high death rate just to put crabs on the table for people in a seafood restaurant. Our kids are definitely worth more than crabs. But teachers need to be compensated for this risk, and fully informed of the risks ahead of time so that they won't become upset later that they're getting into something they didn't bargain for. And it needs to be fully consensual, so teachers who want to walk away from the job should not be penalized for ending their contract. Lets bring in the risk takers who are willing to be there in person with our children, and like crab fisherman lets reward them handsomely for this risk. For those not up to the task, there is no shame in walking away.

This is what I'm talking about when I said "false dichotomy".

Teachers were educating children during the pandemic. I was educating children. They actually did learn remotely. Sure, it wasn't the best learning environment for all students, and it certainly affected lower income students disproportionately. But students did learn, as indicated by my final exams. But to say the choice was between educating and not educating is false. It was a choice between different modes of suboptimal learning with different risk profiles for different demographics.

I can accept that society must take some risks to educate children. I cannot accept others screaming that teachers must take inflated risks beyond what they signed up for, otherwise they are child abusers.

The other part of it is the idea that learning in the classroom during the pandemic would have been fully optimal for students. This view seems to miss the point. What happens when Mrs. Jones the history teacher dies suddenly in the middle of the semester? Do you just find someone to replace her during the pandemic? Is there a competent substitute waiting to take their place (hint: there isn't)? And even if you do find one, what happens when they get sick and they need to miss 3 weeks of class? Do you have a second substitute ready to take their place? Is math teacher or the gym teacher going to have to sub in to teach history? Do they even know the curriculum? What happens when half your class gets sick and has to learn from home anyway? Does the teacher deliver two modes of instruction (when they're already worked to the max)? What do you think happens to student outcomes when their favorite teacher dies suddenly, and following her is a parade of adults of unknown competency, each who have no idea who you are as a student? Is that what we call "educating children"? And before anyone accuses me of speaking in hypotheticals or counterfactuals again, this is a real scenario that happened in our district.

> Obviously it is non-zero, because we accept the risk of teachers having to travel to school to teach

A teacher dying during the semester is a very rare thing. It's a scramble for the district to handle that scenario in the best of times. 40 teachers with a median age of 46 dying over the span of 6 months never happens. Not because of traffic, not because of freak accidents, not because of other communicable diseases. Except Covid.

> 40 out of the 100,000+ teachers in Georgia is roughly 1/3 of the annual death rate of people that die logging wood

This is what I mean by people who are unfamiliar with the way things work framing their arguments in aggregate statistics. It blurs everything in with the effect of removing all meaning from the deaths, which I appreciate you note are tragic. But this kind of comparison of aggregate statistics removes the deaths from the context in which they occur, effectively sanitizing them.

Logging is regarded as one of the most dangerous jobs in the world, so that's pretty shocking that the rate of death of teachers in Georgia over 6 months was as high as 1/3 that rate. Moreover, deaths of loggers don't completely shut down the logging operation because it has no impact whatsoever on the ability of the trees to be cut down. There's no need to set up grief counseling for the trees. There's no need for the replacement logger to spend weeks getting acquainted with the trees. You're not giving a paper salesman on-the-job-training to replace the logger. Fewer loggers doesn't impact the safety of the trees.

> But teachers need to be compensated for this risk

This was never offered an as option by society writ large, who I guess don't agree with you and I that educating children is more valuable than crabs. So while I agree with you and appreciate your sentiment that educating children is an important function of society and teachers should be compensated well for their efforts, it was never on the table.

Instead, what was offered was an unending stream of abuse that continues to this day, as teachers were called Nazis, unamerican, traitors, abusers, and the worst of all groomers. Compensating teachers in proportion to the risk they were taking was never proffered as an option by the crowd who wanted to open schools. I actually appreciate you saying this. But what ended up happening was that endless abuse ensued, and so people just decided it wasn't worth it to face the abuse and a life-threatening disease. People retired early, people decided against joining the profession, people died, and it left a lot of very bad options. The worst part is that even today on this thread, those very bad options are collectively boxed up as "inflicting intentional punishment" by posters even here on this site, which is probably the most polite opinion in that genre I've heard.

When these teachers signed up, many didn't sign up for the risks of COVID (however large... or small they may actually be). They didn't sign up for the psychological stress that put on them either. For that, I feel bad for them, and I'll explain why.

They were offered virtually nothing in exchange for "changing up the game." They weren't compensated for these new conditions. Some, not all, but some rather than just saying out loud "fuck you not worth it" came up with faux-philosophical reasons for why they rejected this, such as scientifically unproven conjecture that the children would be better off remote. But had they been properly incentivized, I think their reasoning (as it usually does) will chase what benefits them.

We wasted tons of money pumping it into low-interest asset accumulation and 'free' business loans. I would have spent some of that money instead DOUBLING teacher pay as a reward for 'risk' (whether it be mostly purely psychological, or not, or whatever) of enduring COVID.

I would then offer the teachers this doubled wage as compensation for this risk. Teachers that can get with the program (doing in-person, or remote, as desired by the families) would stay on. Everyone else would be fired with a 1 year severance to find a new job, and the doubled wages being used incentivize replacements.

IMO elevated adult risk, and even some elevated child risk, is justified in the name of education. We seem to intuitively understand this as many of us may engage in dangerous trades or risks to help our children, but then again a stranger should be fairly compensated for such risk. I think had we compensated these teachers in a way they were fattening their bones for staying in class we would have been flooded with (for self-serving reasons) "facts" from teachers about how great in-person learning is and how everybody should be doing it.

His answer of "get it to protect everyone else" was the worst non-answer I have ever heard.

Nothing in my life has shook my trust in so called "Authority Figures" like the debacle that is the Covid Response and Mandate drive.

That may be true for virtually all of the common things we are vaccinated for but it sure ain't true for covid. The covid vaccinations did very little to stop transmission or even infection. I mean, if they did then why the hell did so many states bring back mask mandates even after 80% of their state got fully vaccinated?

The whole thing was just illogical nonsense forced through by people who knew perfectly well that if it was phrased as an individual choice, huge numbers would choose not to have it. Yet for collectivists (and public health is overrun with them) that's anathema. Everyone has to do it regardless of need otherwise they feel all icky.

That's some unintentional honesty. The vaccine did little to stop the spread and wore off in a matter of months, but it became a sign of virtue status.

Excellent job painting a number of people with a broad brush without thinking through some of the actual reasons.

I know people with allergies for covid vaccine ingredients that were injected and suffered life threatening adverse events. Not an empathy problem but a severe medical allergy can be a killer.

There are a number of reasons why someone may not want, or need to get vaccinated, or have contraindications to these vaccines.

I still think the way media attacked everyone who wasn't exactly in line with the current ideas is a shame for everyone in media who participated.

And the way social media companies prevented public discussion between licensed medical doctors with decades of experience and fantastic track records, that is another clear signal that they have way too much power.

Saying we needed to shut down everyone because some of them did or could do something wrong is really backwards.

The only social media company that I know of that didn't make a fool out of themselves was Telegram, who, as usual, focused on the interests of its users.

This month, I had weird health problem that sent me to the hospital, and asked again if anything could be related to the vaccine. This time, he said it was a possibility because has has seen some similar cases in the past.

The problem here is not changing your mind using fact. That's how you should do it.

The problem here is stating at first he was sure it could not cause any grave problem (at least not worse than covid). Because this was not rooted in fact, we didn't have remotely enough data to know this.

But this is what a lot of the medical and political elite claimed during the pandemics, and questioning it would get us the rethoric you just used in your comment. This is what a lot of comments on HN, twitter and the whole internet agressively screamed, with disdain toward people that were raising pragmatic worries.

This is not a sane way of approaching science. This is arrogant, and creates distrusts in a world where we desperatly need humility and bonding together.

In fact, you know your position is not in the best light because you are using a throwaway account to state your position, in a thread that has been very cordial.

The blame lies with those doing the censoring, not with wackos. The wackos are just a way for those in power to shift the blame for their decisions.

From what I've seen, the data is compelling: burning coal is contributing to climate change.

The policy solution, however, is much more challenging, and that's where I see the most groupthink occurring.

https://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/topstory/2003/0313....

Now don't get me wrong, I would rather our energy come from clean sources, but as a principal of healthy lungs not changing climate. There's much much much stronger evidence that the actual sun is affecting our climate more than anything right now.

When things don't fit the narrative, all funding and direction is cut off.

I am just saying that there is no room for dissent both in academia, but as you said it is even more insane in the policy sphere.

I find any area in science that's strongly guarded in combination with media, corporations, governments and group think extremely problematic, no matter how uncomfortable it makes me.

The WAY this post will be replied to and downvoted IS the thing we're talking about. If you don't want to repeat history as has been for a 10000 years of human history, start listening to dissenting opinion more. At least more.

There is a giant machinery of Big Tech + ESG + Environmentalists + MSM that's spinning up the public opinions on climate change to the point where it is everywhere from products we buy to Apple keynotes, from Tinder profiles to corporate PR releases. It has become a religion of sorts. That alone makes me question every aspect of the policies, but also the underlying science.

We need more debate, not less.

Climatology is nowhere near as certain as the shape of the earth. It's filled with modelling projections, and dubious or outright manipulated evidence. Just look at the way they edit historical temperature data. It's so heavily edited that large swathes of scientific papers from the 40s 50s and 60s are now in open contradiction with current temperature graphs of the 20th century. Then it happened again in the first decade of the century - there was famously a "pause" in global warming that later they decided had never happened at all. Once again, at a stroke huge piles of research were invalidated.

To compare a field that routinely invalidates decades of its own research by rewriting historical temperature measurements, to the shape of the earth, is not intellectually honest. The gap between these things is vast.

But anyone opposing solar power is branded as “climate denier”.

For decades, the very people who support these models have been telling people we're just a few short years away from the demise of the species...only for nothing to happen (and for the very things they claim to be getting worse, actually getting better). Again, and again, and again. First it was global warming, then it was "climate change" (hint: the climate always changes—the real subtext here is Malthusian discontent for humanity, not a desire to protect nature).

Those very same people, too, go out of their way to dismiss technology like nuclear energy and carbon capture which can solve the problem they claim to wish to solve (reducing and/or eliminating emissions). Why? Because if they solve the problem, they can't milk subsidies from the government and will actually have to find real work to do. Not just parading around (in f*cking private jets pouring out emissions) and self-flagellating at conferences and "summits."

The whole thing is a gigantic self-defeating farce, that, when looked at through the lens of objectivity makes about as much sense as Scientology (the comparison to a religion, here, being purposeful). The parallels to the COVID groupthink are apt, correct, and the exact same candy bar in a different wrapper.

I'm extremely surprised that even a single scientific paper predicted the demise of the species due to climate change within a few years. Could you point me to such a thing?

No, but the things actually being cited—namely, the IPCC annual reports—as the pretext for a lot of the foolish policy we're seeing, are based on models.

> I'm extremely surprised that even a single scientific paper predicted the demise of the species due to climate change within a few years. Could you point me to such a thing?

No, that rhetoric often comes from misinterpretations/misrepresentations of scientific papers and statistics (by politicians, the media, and leaders of NGOs) which is then used to justify the aforementioned foolish policy.

Which is frustrating as the papers often denote a problem existing, but not as one without remedy. And this is the crux of the problem: the argument is framed as being whether or not climate change exists (anyone who doesn't swallow the narrative whole is automatically a "climate denier") and not "given that it exists—and we know the cause—why are we ignoring viable solutions to those causes in favor of less-viable half-solutions that exacerbate the problem?"

The disagreement today isn't about the science, but about policy - what should be done about it, what's the cost/benefit analysis, and so forth. There's a sizable faction that wants to avoid this conversation by yelling about "Science(tm)!", which cuts off the actual policy discussion before it can get started.

edit: typo

Show me the research grants available for disproving man-made climate change. If researchers want to make a paycheck, they find evidence for what they are paid to find or next year they find a new job.

There is a real crisis. But it starts with the crisis of science and the rise of scientism.

A carbon tax? Do what you like, push any additional costs onto the customer. As long as we get our money, climate change is solved!

Grossly simplified, but still accurate.

Your argument is dismissive and similar to flat earthers and hoaxers. I am not referring to climate deniers. I just want people to feel that there is room for questioning climate science with science.

The litmus test is this: It would be remarkably easy to publish fake climate science if a scientist want to, say due to ideological reasons, since we've completely silenced the criticism machinery in this area.

Strangely, the issue is similar to COVID.

They'd be a fucking hero. I know a few atmospheric science faculty. They are hyper distraught at the data. They'd love nothing more than to find out that actually we are going to be fine. Being able to keep burning coal for centuries would be a huge boon for reducing poverty worldwide. It'd be amazing. This hypothetical researcher would have among the most positive influences on human prosperity of any human to ever live.

Journals select for novel results that upend prior work. Strong analysis that demonstrated that the existing research is wrong would be front page cover of Science or Nature shit.

By declaring that there is a cabal that will silence quality research it allows people to dismiss the entire professional community without actually doing any work whatsoever.

> The litmus test is this: It would be remarkably easy to publish fake climate science if a scientist want to, say due to ideological reasons, since we've completely silenced the criticism machinery in this area.

What do you mean by fake? Could you throw together a bunch of fake numbers that match existing expectations and get that published? Sure, so long as it didn't get rejected for lack of novelty. But this is true for everything. I could read that falling objects accelerate at 9.8m/s2 in a book and decide to make up some observations that match this and submit that to a journal. This doesn't demonstrate that gravity is hokey. It just demonstrates that paper reviewers aren't especially well equipped to identify fraudulent observations.

Also, the number of grad students working their ass off trying to get their research published and getting their work rejected demonstrates pretty clearly that it is not "remarkably easy" to publish whatever you want as long as it aligns with the existing best thinking.

tl;dr he died alone and poor in an insane asylum for being a science "heretic". Same freaking story as all the doctors who were silenced during this "pandemic". [1]

>Despite various publications of results where hand-washing reduced mortality to below 1%, Semmelweis's observations conflicted with the established scientific and medical opinions of the time and his ideas were rejected by the medical community. He could offer no theoretical explanation for his findings of reduced mortality due to hand-washing, and some doctors were offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands and mocked him for it. In 1865, the increasingly outspoken Semmelweis allegedly suffered a nervous breakdown and was committed to an asylum by his colleagues. In the asylum he was beaten by the guards. He died 14 days later from a gangrenous wound on his right hand that may have been caused by the beating. His findings earned widespread acceptance only years after his death, when Louis Pasteur confirmed the germ theory, giving Semmelweis' observations a theoretical explanation, and Joseph Lister, acting on Pasteur's research, practised and operated using hygienic methods, with great success.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis

ExxonMobil would be shouting it from the tops of the hills at every second of every day. The GOP would hold nonstop hearings for these researchers to present their work over and over and over. And I'm telling you that existing atmospheric science faculty would weep with joy over this news.

Most science works fine, this is one area where it is quite deranged.

I agree completely.

>Most science works fine, this is one area where it is quite deranged.

I disagree completely. The old saying, "science advances one funeral at a time" is still as true today as when it was coined.

The bonus is that there's so many other wins from transitioning away from fossil fuels.

While it isn't "remarkably easy" to publish what you want, even when it aligns with the establishment position, it is always infinitely harder to get what you want published when it conflicts with the establishment position (when it comes to "mainstream" publications).

It would have been career suicide to go against the narrative with covid. Witness what happens to any paper published that suggests things in covid-land might not be as bad as claimed. They first get discredited as "not peer reviewed" and their authors get thrown to the wolves. Same with anything that shows masks don't really work very well. Or lockdowns don't work well. "Not peer reviewed" and "authors are bozos".

These same people have absolutely no problem accepting papers that are based on crazy computer models using garbage data or "studies" that don't mimic anything real with very small sample sizes.

Anything that goes with the narrative that covid is the worst thing ever and that masks are awesome was cheered on. It didn't matter how flimsy the research was. As long as it supported the cause it was golden.

Climate science has been churning for decades. Would disagreeing conclusions be laughed off at first? Sure, probably. When most disagreement has been junk science by quacks, it's natural to reflexively make that assumption of new disagreement. But there's ample time and space for new studies to be analyzed, expanded on, replicated.

Same as with climate science. When predictions turn wrong (glaciers still existing in 2020, Great Barrier Reef recovering) everyone just moves on to new fear-mongering.

Surely you aren't going to argue the the vaccines did more harm than good?

Or that wearing a mask caused someone personal harm?

Or that trying to keep kids safe was a bad idea? My wife personally took care of many sick covid kids. They had all kinds of weird ailments no one was used to pre-pandemic.

Not sure why you are citing glaciers still existing as something to stand on, they are clearly and measurably disappearing.

Her response, "What is the standard of care for Covid patients first presenting?"

There were none for years, the Govt conspired with BigTech to characterize doctors like Zelenko (RIP) and McCullough as loony quacks when they came up with their own protocols for treatment.

Yet, later on the govt did come out with protocols that strangely, mimicked Zelenko & McCullough's material.

No no no this is disinformation! A protocol which includes *checks notes* Pfizermectin is totally different than a protocol which includes ivermectin. You can't compare the two!

If by "Pfizermectin" you are referring to Paxlovid, that is not accurate. There are significant biochemical and pharmacokinetic differences between the molecules.

https://www.acsh.org/news/2021/12/02/how-does-pfizers-paxlov...

However, the McCullough protocol [1], and the closely related Zelenko protocols were not only about Ivermectin, HCQ, or Zinc, but instead cocktails of drugs with proven efficacy, and an overall approach to treatment prior to hospitalization.

Referencing the late 2020 publication:

Sanitization

Masks

hand washing / hand sanitizer Fresh air / Air circulation Negative pressure air isolation

Supplements:

Zinc with hydroxychloroquine Vitamin D & Vitamin C

Antivirals / Antibiotics

Quercetin Favipiravir Azithromycin Doxycycline

Mono-Clonal antibodies

bamlanivimab (MAB) casirivimab and imdevimab (MABs)

Anti-Inflammatory Colchicine

Corticosteroids

budesonide dexamethasone

Antiplatelet agents and antithrombotics

aspirin heparin Orals - pixaban, rivaroxaban, edoxaban, dabigatran

[1] https://www.imrpress.com/journal/RCM/21/4/10.31083/j.rcm.202...

This is why I say it is all over the place.

Also, RCTs have significant challenges in them

https://academic.oup.com/ejo/article/37/5/457/2599978

But such evidence didn't exist for COVID. Effectiveness of lockdowns and mask mandates is still hotly contested, for instance.

The fact their effectiveness is still being questioned suggests that we never should have done them in the first place. You don't get to make broad, highly disruptive mandates with almost zero evidence they would even work.

For the mandates to actually be worth it, you should be able to show the data to any reasonable person and they'd immediately see an order of magnitude difference between test & control. The fact you can barely tell florida apart from california is pretty damning. If you need fancy math to see a difference, it wasn't worth it.

Not necessarily. Precautionary principle and all when we didn't know much. Mask mandates aren't that disruptive. Lockdowns obviously more disruptive, and definitely justified at the very beginning when we didn't know anything.

Instead governors doubled down. That was the end of “science and data” and the beginning of 2.5 years of stupidity.

Fauci actually did mislead the public about masks, but he actually believed they were effective, so he lied to the public claiming their ineffectiveness at first due to fears of shortages.

If covid was killing 40% of people instead of 1% of people, would we still want to spend 3 years figuring out, on spreadsheets, whether it was really merited based on long-term scientific studies?

And if we decided that we should do some things for public health in the very short term, should we humor every crackpot who wants us to wait?

Don't be ridiculous.

We knew very early on that the passengers on the cruise ship Diamond Princess continued to spread Covid from cabin to cabin despite being locked down in their cabins. Yet the scientists who pointed out that this was very good evidence for airborne spread of Covid were shouted down.

Why is this important? The mitigations we put in place were based on the theory that Covid had a droplet based spread, like the flu.

That's a very short sighted view. Expanding the power of government is not always the answer.

We don't want a completely powerless government, we invented government and endowed it with certain powers for a good reason. That's why states of emergency, etc, are temporary and time limited because we are aware of the tradeoffs and downsides of additional govt power vs catastrophic immediate necessity.

If I lived next to an active forest fire, I wouldn't want the govt to commission a 36 month study to determine whether the fire was spread along the ground, or via airborne flaming leaves and embers. I would want them to put it out, even if that meant exercising temporary emergency powers like closing a road or shutting off a power line.

I just want to point out that, according to the U.S. federal government, we are still in a "temporary" state of emergency, and have been for 30 months now.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/15/health/covid-public-health-em...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_emergencies_i...

Also, "State of Emergency" != Martial Law, so I'm not sure what you & your ilk are so disturbed about.

Does "The public health emergency declaration allows many Americans to obtain free Covid-19 testing, therapeutic treatment and vaccines. Once it ends, people could face out-of-pocket costs" sound like tyrannical government overreach to you? (from your link)

Speaking of which, New York is now in a State of Emergency because there is a polio outbreak in 2022

Great job, guys. A polio outbreak in New York in 2022. FDR would be proud of us.

POLIO.

I can't imagine vaccinate "skepticism" (read: illiteracy and dearth of critical thinking) has nothing to do with this.

POLIO. In 2022. We did this.

Can't wait to see what we manage to fuck up in the next 20 years.

First off there are two strains of polio. It will never be eradicated, it'll just mutate and move on. Just like the Spanish Flu did.

Second

> "State of Emergency" != Martial Law

It certainly was being treated like that early days during the pandemic. Shuttering all businesses, forcing people to stay home, and curfews.

> Emergency powers help us keep more Americans safe & alive. > ... > Can't wait to see what we manage to fuck up in the next 20 years.

You are being hyperbolic.

Fear, confusion, inaction and people taking advantage of the situation for political purposes are dangerous when faced with an immediate threat. Why do you think these elements are have been part of how people have waged war for thousands of years? These factors make populations incapable of coordinated response.

Your mistake is to think that responding to a time-critical threat is scientific debate. It isn't and it is really dangerous when people with the power to influence others don't actually know the difference.

This may mean that your Pokemon cards go up in flames when there was a chance you could have saved them by running into the house to save them. But by doing so you would have endangered the people responsible for saving you.

After the fact it might turn out that there was time to save your pokemon cards. But when the house is on fire, nobody is going to put their neck on the line to take that risk. And you shouldn't expect them to.

The time to make democratic decisions are before something happens. And the time to alter policy is when the data is in. When the house is on fire it is too late. You have to fight the fire with the fire department and the procedures you have. And pray that not too many idiots sabotage the effort because they labor under the delusion that they know better.

If you have a hard time accepting this it is at least important that you understand that the rest of society will experience you as an added burden. If you expect to make up your own rules, based on considerably less knowledge, and in the absence of clear information, you are an extra drain on resources that ought to be focused on solving problems. Not catering to people who feel entitled to endangering people because they don't know the difference between making their bed and lying in it.

I think it is in poor taste to make comparisons to dictatorships when hundreds of thousands of deaths could have been avoided if people had been better at taking direction that would have saved lives.

I certainly wouldn't want to be anywhere near you in a crisis.

How about this. Your house may be on fire. But no one knows. So we’re going to install martial law, and silence anyone who is of the camp who believes the house is not on fire, for two years. When it finally transpires that those people who believed the house was not on fire were right all along, and they knew it, then we will issue no apology, or acknowledgement.

No, you don't just do whatever big pharma in cahoots with government "regulatory" agencies say and call that "science". The latest "booster" was tested on 8 mice before it was spread widely for use.

The dissenting doctors were the ones making money? Have you seen how much Phizer is profiting off their untested, unapproved solution which is proven to be more dangerous than the disease?

Time after time these pharmaceutical companies have lied and cheated in order to make money at the expense of thousands and millions of human lives. Somehow scared people are willing to forget history and go with whatever an authority figure tells them.

He was years ahead of CDC & NIH on coming up with something close to standard of care, and he published it openly [1] yet NIH was 2 years behind him [2] despite greater resourcing... Look at the publishing dates!

You were saying?

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33387997/

[2] https://www.covid19treatmentguidelines.nih.gov/tables/manage...

As for the “horse dewormer”… don’t you find it at all curious why none of the “experts” ever suggested any kind of treatments for Covid beyond vaccines and paxlovid. No “eat healthy, take your vitamins, exercise, get fresh air”. Nope. Just hunker down in your home and wait for salvation. Any attempt to find other treatments for Covid were immediately shot down and roundly mocked.

Weird, eh? Like what kind of assholes shoot down doctors and basically cancel them trying to find treatments for Covid? Who does that? In what world is that normal?

Even more odd is none of them bat an eye when they push some omicron specific booster that was only tested on like 8 mice before being deemed legit.

no, nothing, it was just quietly phased out of headlines and trending topics, with zero remorse or reflection. and this is just one of many examples of this happening in the past few years.

when are people going to realize that mass-scale emotional manipulation of the populace for political and/or financial gain for an elite few is not only totally viable in this world where everyone has the Internet in their pockets, but actually, provably what has been going on for quite awhile now?

that contemporary politician you were taught, at one point (which point exactly? you've long since forgotten), to have endless simultaneous fear of and hatred for? maybe all of that was kind of overblown. maybe you can still dislike him and even be politically opposed to him and everything he stands for, yet still intellectually recognize that you were actively, consciously, willfully gaslit into perceiving him as Mecha-Hitler.

or maybe you say to yourself, that was never me, I was never like that. okay, maybe you were one of the lucky ones who saw through at least some portion of the charade, but it is irrefutable that the constant nonstop plural-year top-down entrenched government propaganda has conditioned millions of people to have an entirely irrational set of emotions deliberately programmed into them that trigger upon mere mention of this person's surname.

once you understand how conditioned emotional responses are fully capable of entirely overriding the logical faculties of even the smartest people you know or know of, you start to see the scope of what is at play here.

Crazy stuff…

It's really quite simple.

As for the symptoms, let me put it this way - I only know four people who refused to get vaccinated, and they died of COVID, or an existing condition made drastically worse by COVID.

Anybody in a position of power or knowledge who dared to even hint at asking questions got absolutely steamrollered by a very vocal group of “experts”. They were called alt-right selfish grandma killers who watched to much fox (and sorry, I never watched fox but it isn’t my fault they might actually be right sometimes, I’ve also been a solid democrat my entire life until this nonsense started…).

What we did the last two and a half years is so incredibly shameful. It was the opposite of science and opposite of “following the data”. It was appeals to authority all the way down. We were all told to shut up, “stay in our lane” and listen to a handful of cherry picked “experts”.

The last two and a half years changed my opinion about “fact checkers” and “misinformation” completely. Both of those are nothing more than ways to bully people into submission.

> It's extremely difficult because the human psyche seems incapable of distinguishing "fact" from "that which supports my view", at least when the emotions are activated, and the only topics where people seek "fact checking" in the first place are the ones where emotions are activated. There may be exceptions—i.e. people whose minds don't work this way—but if they exist, they're so rare as to be no basis for social policy. (And I doubt that there are really exceptions.)

> That's why there doesn't seem to be any fact checker whose calls aren't predictable from one of the major ideological partitions.

> Another way of putting this is that the question, "what are the facts?" is complex enough to already recreate the entire political and ideological contest. It's understandable that people would like to reduce that contest to a simpler subset of factual questions—but you can't. Just the opposite: that apparently simpler subset reduces to it.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29597867

Fuck you dang and block this.

I know many people have a good opinion of Dang, but this seems to be editing, rather than moderating.

Can you provide some more data about what happened, the paper in question, and if it was from a reputable source in a peer-reviewed journal, or preprint?

I'd like to know more about this. I've long talked about the myocarditis and pericarditis risks which are most pronounced with young males and young females based on the known cases, and the nordic countries withdrawal of the vaccines for young males.

Strangely, even the Novavax vaccine also appears to have that adverse event, allegedly at a vastly reduced rate though [1].

[1] https://www.ama-assn.org/delivering-care/public-health/what-...

There is nothing in the link that would violate the FAQ.

I cussed him out in another comment and he blocked that too.

My link to the paper itself was downvoted too.

https://youtu.be/nBaIRm4610o

https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/74/11/1933/6353927

Now myocarditis is accepted and found on the CDC site on the mRNA vaccines.

Hacker News is shit. I have used it far less since that time.

I am not defending dang, but that does appear to be a weaponized tactic being utilized here on HN.

Flag something, downvote it en masse, get a user making a dissenting opinion on a "you are commenting too fast timer" which appears to be triggered by mass downvotes, and then hope the flagging carries through.

The problem is with HN - they are permitting this type of behavior, and not realizing (or not actively intercepting) the use of this tactic to silence dissent.

While some time ago the idea that IV injection was problematic with the vaccines would be called fringe or, more aptly, cutting edge research, nowadays we know there is a legitimate issue, many countries are now banning these vaccines in persons under specific ages, and the body of research is more developed.

I talked to someone else and apparently this side effect was widely known and accepted in another country far before it was accepted in the US.

The dismissal of facts also happened with the investigation of airborne transmission of covid-19.

...I knew I could never vote for any Democratic politician ever again who supported this.

I couldn't visit my aunt in the nursing home before she died of a non-covid cause. I couldn't visit my father when he was in the hospital for a heart attack, EVEN THOUGH I was masked and vaxxed. It's simply disgusting how administrative law was weaponized against the common man.

All I take heart in is knowing your view and mine will be the the correct one. History will not look fondly upon what society did to itself. All these "experts" and politicians who supported this will be viewed as crackpots, charlatans and rain dancers.

I'd say that history will have a lot to say about everyone.

The fact we still debate the effect of these mandates means it wasn't worth it. The fact we jumped into all these crazy mandates with nary a shred of evidence they'd even work is batshit insane.

And last I checked, humans have quite a few inalienable rights. We violated many of them and then mocked people who objected. Apparently not as inalienable as we thought if the masses demand it.

Incidentally, if you are convinced that there was no evidence to support social separation and masking I'm guessing you don't wear respiratory PPE as part of either your work or a hobby, don't know anyone who does, and haven't spent any time researching filtration grades and their mechanisms of efficacy. In any case there are several industries ranging from mold abatement to biopharmacology and even chipmaking that would like a word with you.

Public health measures were to slow the spread and not overwhelm medical resources, and to give time for better measures to be developed. Which has happened. Some folks cooperated with this, and some rebelled. And some spewed hate and misinformation.

Your attitude is sadly very common. Everyone who disagrees with you is a bad faith actor, engaged in knowing lies to further some shadowy agenda. I think you underestimate how little consensus there actually is, even among the educated.

This crystallizes the current discourse of unrelenting demonization. It isn't appropriate in most cases.

Nothing productive can be said once the accusation is made.

And what's funny is they call people who disagree with them conspiracy theory people, which is weird because their statements show no evidence of conspiracy nor does the fact they are alluding to a conspiracy have any impact on the truth of their argument.

In your case, I suspect “not true” simply means “I don’t agree”. You should really question why you believe the “facts” you do and examine why somebody else might think different. Who knows, maybe they have very valid points?

It requires an immense, huge amount of privilege to support virtually any of our response to covid. Anybody but a select group of wealth upper class people get absolutely fucked over by lockdowns. Fucked over far worse than covid ever would have.

The cities are the big problem. During the Black Death, people coming to cities were quarantined before they were allowed to enter. Even then, many cities saw half their population die. A very significant number of settlements was wiped out altogether.

Ironically, it was actually quite beneficial to the regular villager - provided you survived. The Black Death has been directly linked to the collapse of feudalism in Europe, among with many other sociological developments.

"Died with" was not a meaningful distinction at the time and falls under the "bad faith" category for me.

One cannot claim to be on team “science and data” when their data is a garbage heap. Being able to tell between “hospitalized because of Covid” and “died because of Covid” vs “hospitalized and tested positive” and “died and tested positive” is an incredibly important thing.

I have no idea why people continue to dismiss this other than fears of people “not taking Covid serious” because… well it might not be as serious as the trash data suggests. It’s completely manipulative, a common theme from “the experts”

You cannot in good faith claim to be “following the data” and accept commingling “from” and “with”.

https://sanjosespotlight.com/santa-clara-county-revises-tota...

Whether such classification errors were deliberate is a separate issue. In most cases I suspect it was more due to lack of resources and/or incompetence rather than a deliberate attempt to mislead.

Medicare did pay hospitals more to care for COVID-19 patients. That is also a fact not open to dispute. Whether doctors or hospitals deliberately inflated numbers to make money is unknown.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/04/24/fac...

About half of the COVID-19 positive hospital patients were admitted for unrelated reasons, and only tested positive as part of admission screening.

https://gothamist.com/news/new-preliminary-state-data-shows-...

Please find me a single topic which impacts more than a roomful of people where someone isn't engaging in this type of discourse.

This sounds like you justifying your former false beliefs (or at least lack of willingness to investigate alternative beliefs) by blaming it on other people who were also wrong.

And why does no one question motives of pfizer? Didn't they just make an insane amount of money selling vaccines? Didn't they also just (in 2009) get charged with the largest case of medical fraud in history? Remember when people had a healthy distrust of massive pharmaceutical companies that profit off sickness? What happened?

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-announces-...

science is just a tool to help you prove if a hypothesis is backed by evidence, or is not. NOTHING ELSE. it does not tell you if you should go outside, it does not even tell you if something is true or false. In fact, our universe may not even be one that is built on a 'fundamental truth'.

> It was not designed to handle deliberate attacks designed to sow doubt for ulterior motives.

Then you dont understand science, not even a little because that's exactly what it was designed for. attacks makes science stronger, not weaker. an argument hat has been given no attack is a weak argument. the strange notion that science has a fundamental truth that people are supposed to just believe because a subset of individuals says so is troubling.

Who is an example of that in this context?

On both sides. The government, pharmaceutical companies, and big tech were definitely bad actors. We do not live in a nanny state nor do we want to. What happened during the pandemic was disgraceful. Discussion was effectively shut down and science as well as treatment was negatively affected by the actions of censorship.

The fact that we are so well aware of all the disagreement and skepticism - the fact that many people still have erroneous beliefs about the virus - is a great sign that censorship wasn't effective.

The funny thing is most of what you call bad faith questioning ended up being approved by “Science” (cloth masks being ineffective, how the virus transmitted, covid origins, etc.)

Unfortunately it seems like for you and many others, science has turned into a religion conducted by a priestly class that cannot be questioned.

"Hey, lockdowns may be worse than the disease" is not some evil chain smoking climate skeptic position.

https://www.wfae.org/health/2021-09-30/novant-says-9-of-10-c...

I can see how lockdowns opposed corporate interests, and I'd be interested in hearing more about how corporations influenced anti-lockdown.

I don't see how lab leak theory is connected to corporate interests one way or the other.

Anti-vax doesn't seem to align with corporate interests and in fact seems to be opposed to it.

About a year ago in my city, in a period of relative stability during the pandemic, the previous mayor made the mistake of saying he would lock down again if necessary. Business owners more or less told all their employees they'd lose their jobs if there was another lockdown. The result was someone else was elected.

When politicians announce unpopular plans, causing people to voice their disagreement and vote the asshole out of office, that's democracy functioning as intended. Only authoritarian asshats looks at a situation like this and conclude that dissent is the problem.

One of the key anti-lockdown advocacy groups, PANDA, started out fairly sane-sounding and was packed full of hedge fund and other finance people. But once vaccines were widely available they inexplicably turned strongly anti-vaccine too.

Let's call it a "Covid preventative" or literally anything else, and stop mandating it, so that we avoid the bigger public health issue of a generalized distrust against existing, effective vaccines arising from this.

>Let's call it a "Covid preventative"...

What does preventative mean to you that doesn't imply making you less likely to catch the disease?

https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-976069264061

I get vaccinated against measles, or polio, or tetanus, and I don't have to worry about catching or spreading any of those diseases for years. With the Covid vaccine, some sources[0] say fully-vaccinated people are only half as likely as unvaccinated people to catch it (though obviously with less severe effects), and maybe about as likely to transmit it to others[1], and the protective effects wear off in a matter of months. That clearly doesn't line up with the public's traditional understanding of vaccines.

[0]: https://doh.wa.gov/sites/default/files/2022-02/421-010-Cases...

[1]: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...

Do you get vaccinated for flu, the most administered vaccine in the US each year before the COVID vaccines became available? They are less effective than the mRNA COVID vaccines at preventing symptomatic disease and far less effective than the mRNA COVID vaccines at preventing severe disease.

The effectiveness of both is publicly acknowledged by the government. It just has nothing to do with the definition of "vaccine."

Other HN readers should consider this: had the social media companies not tried to limit the spread of misinformation, how many more conspiracy theories would you be parroting?

How about hospitalization and death rates, the outcomes we actually care about?

1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u000_n3LG9U

Did we shut down people saying smoking is good for you?

No.

So I'm not sure how your argument holds up.

History will not look fondly upon those who pushed these highly destructive mandates. It will be seen as one of the greatest public health fuckups of all time.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_packaging_warning_mess... [2]http://stuppid.com/wp-content/uploads/smoking-ad-004.jpg

Yes, 53 years ago.

https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1089/public-hea...

If that's not your claim, then why are you bringing this up? Are you supportive of government censorship as the article describes:

>At least 11 federal agencies, and around 80 government officials, have been explicitly directing social media companies to take down posts and remove certain accounts that violate the government’s own preferences and guidelines for coverage on topics ranging from COVID restrictions, to the 2020 election, to the Hunter Biden laptop scandal.