Has it been determined more substantially that Pfizer and Moderna did not study transmission while the vaccines were in development?
Except of course, the mandates. The main argument for healthy people to get it was to save granny. Except they never bothered to study transmission, which means they lied to get the mandates in place. It's not that they "just didn't know". It's that they knew they were lying when they said mandates were needed to stop transmission.
So now that creates a huge problem moving forward. Who but the most subservient will ever believe anything they say now?
Like the inactivated poliovirus [1]? Sterilising vaccines [2] haven’t been a priority because the subpopulation that enjoys getting measles was historically small.
> OPV produces excellent immunity in the intestine, the primary site of wild poliovirus entry, which helps prevent infection with wild virus in areas where the virus is endemic.
It seems like the polio vaccine actually prevents infection which is not the case for the COVID “vaccine” which is purely therapeutical.
OPV (“o” as in oral) sterilises. IPV (“i” as in inactivated) doesn’t. IPV doesn’t spread vaccine-derived poliovirus, so it’s the more widely-used one. (It comes down to whether the virus is neutralised in the gut or the blood.)
The polio case in Brooklyn was an unvaccinated man getting a vaccine-derived infection from the sterilising OPV [1][2].
[1] https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/exclusives/1010...
I might add that "the science" was consistently wrong about many things during the pandemic.
Here is a collection of scientific gymnastics: https://yesithappened.substack.com/p/a-collection-of-insane-...
"The ongoing Pandemic has solidified my belief that that most people would be better off in this world if they listened less to laypeople who think they know a lot about medicine and instead listened more to people who have graduated medical school and have a whole bunch of framed diplomas and certificates on the walls of their medical office. It's also a good indicator of competence if they have a medical office."
And no I don't think searching the world for the one doctor out of one thousand willing to tell you what you want to hear is really in the spirit of that quote.
One of the biggest problems when a society starts to become intolerant towards dissenting views is that consensus itself starts to become impossible, or at least meaningless.
Most people don't care that much about most issues. Make it sting enough to dissent, and you'll eliminate dissent from all but those willing to choose this hill to die on. But in such a case the lack of dissent becomes meaningless.
If I was a doctor it's unlikely I would be publically expressing anything.
As far as I know I've never been treated by a doctor who goes around publically expressing things on any topic.
When I see a specialist it's usually because I got a referral from a family doctor not because "This doctor has an exciting Twitter feed".
I would guess my doctors have no public twitter feeds at all, not that I've ever checked.
But your question is too vague. In this scenario am I a random "doctor" or am I a nationally regarded expert in the relevant field? And did I run my views past respected colleagues and did they recieve it well or tell me I'm being an idiot?
I think the job of practicing medicine is generally about going to conferences and basing your practice on what the doctors regarded as being in the top of their field suggest.
Just like the job of becoming a doctor is about answering the questions on medical school exams in line with what the teacher told you is true, not "sharing your original views" on how the teacher is wrong.
I was born before social networks existed and reject the implicit framing society works better when everybody debates everything on social media all day. Some things might work well being debated on social media, but not everything.
If you can't convince your colleagues that your "opinions" have value and you have such a high opinion of your judgement relative to the rest of your profession that you insist on broadcasting these "opinions" to the world anyway, chances are you have a high level of confidence and a low level of competence and you aren't a very good doctor.
Especially if these "opinions" are outside your specialty.
I know the notion that a doctor should show intellectual humility may offend an autodidactic who doesn't even think a layperson should show intellectual humility, but so it goes.
If Doctor x is the considered the top cardiologist it's not because he woke up one morning and shouted "I declare myself the top cardiologist."
But the interesting thing about this mold is that there was no bacteria around the areas where the mold had grown. It seemed to have repelled or killed them. He was quite excited by his discovery. But upon sharing his discovery with his colleagues they were largely dismissive. He gave a number of talks discussing the mold, where people were also universally dismissive. And he even managed to get a paper published, where you can guess the response.
This isn't the end of this story of course, though it is for our purposes. It would take more than a decade but of course eventually penicillin would eventually be refined and shaped into the life saving drug that it would rapidly become. The point I want to make with this is rather evident. Had Fleming taken public views into account before expressing himself it's entirely possible we might still live in a world without antibiotics.
And this story is the rule more than the exception for many of the most important discoveries in the progress of humanity. Human progress is heavily decentralized in no small part because the "right" answer often seems wrong at first, and is rarely enthusiastically adopted when it runs contrary to the views of a day. It was none other than Max Planck that remarked, "science progresses one funeral at a time", precisely because of this.
>And no I don't think searching the world for the one doctor out of one thousand willing to tell you what you want to hear is really in the spirit of that quote.
Well there are laymen, and there are knowledgeable skeptics. Conflated the 2 and one get to gleefully brush aside questions by dismissing knowledgeable skeptics as laymen.
If that’s the standard we have to live by after the most devastating pandemic in a century for the most developed country in the world, then there is not going to be any lessons or improvement when the next one hits.
The CDC didn’t (still doesn’t) have a full picture of mode of transmission of the virus (aerosol vs others). They kept saying it’s not airborne when all being said it looks like it is. Their focus on hand washing in retrospection seems like not a productive strategy whatsoever. The whole mask fiasco (first saying it isn’t recommended and then a straight up 180) caused the public in rooted mistrust and then their PR umbrella did a poor job addressing and admitting any failure. Their PR branch effectively did nothing to earn trust of a large swaths of public who didn’t buy into vaccination other than often resorting to name calling and gaslighting the debate further which is absolutely the opposite of what you would want to do in that situation if you really want people to get vaccinated. Many occasions they did slow walk backs and often no oversights on grants and revolving doors setup within these agencies with FDA and other pharma industries. Calling everyone criticizing you “anti-science” is a great way of not learning any lessons for next epidemic. There is a lot we can do better.