It reminds me of this recent quote from Cory Doctorow:
>We’ve had massive institutional failures that make people not believe anything. We focus a lot on the technical mechanics of why people don’t believe anything. Ten years ago, my pain specialist wanted me to go on opioids. I did my own research and determined that big Pharma was conspiring to kill people like me and I was right. The fact that I have the same epistemological basis for my healthcare decision-making as anti-vaxxers is undertheorized in rooms like this one. We leave people in an epistemological void.
Source: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/12/reimagining-d...
Essential oils for broken legs.
Preventative medicine, nutrition, etc have an impressive record for everything else. Essential oils may be a rather small part of this.
Many people talk dumb nonsense. Doesn't mean you should pay attention. Next time you have kidney trouble, appendicitis, an infected gal bladder, a blood clot in your aorta, a leaky heart valve or an infected tooth you'll be talking to a yoga mom then?
...have we so soon forgotten the risks and consequences of viral mutation? 2020 and part of 2021 was the world trying to prevent COVID from mutating and following the same trajectory as the 1918 Spanish Flu outbreak.
Institutions fail, and when they do, it's a huge disaster. Absent institutions, the general public also fails, and when they do, it's a huge disaster.
Now, compare the failure rates.
When individuals fail, we seem to think, either "well, they'll get smarter for the next time" or "well, I'm smart, so that won't happen to me" (the famous last words of every mark that walked the earth), yet when institutions fail, the prevailing wisdom seems to be, "institutions always fail"... this despite institutions effectively being composed of individuals, but with systemic checks and balances in place that attempt to mitigate for the failings of both individuals and institutions.
There's a long line of con men, fraudsters, quacks, etc. (let alone strategic/systemic adversaries) cheering in the bleachers, hoping that the public will decide that institutions cannot help and that "doing your own research" is the path to success.
[1]: The term "conspiracy theory" is itself the subject of a conspiracy theory, which claims the term was popularized by the CIA in order to discredit conspiratorial believers, particularly critics of the Warren Commission, by making them a target of ridicule. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_theory#Etymology_an...)
As someone who spent the fall and winter of 2021 checking my email each morning to see if my employer was initiating a mandate, I have a deep & abiding appreciation for all the brave resisters who paid a steep price to put these fascistic mandates on the ashheap of history where they always belonged.
This is because your comment is bog standard disinformation. It tickles the groupthink narrative about "lockdowns", even though "lockdowns" did not exist in the US beyond a few counties in California.
If you could legally leave your home (ie you were not subject to a stay at home order with the force of law), you were not "locked down".
It's like claiming you were a prisoner of war because the theme park was closed for maintenance when you wanted to go.
Wasn't that to prevent over-crowding of hospitals? Were hospitals not over-crowded?
The number of employees in hospitals dropping at the start of the pandemic supports that hospitals were under extra stress.
Also, it's logical to assume that a crowded and understaffed hospital is a bad place to be when there's an airborne disease spreading. Hard to argue against suggesting people do everything can to stay home for two weeks to not get a new under-researched disease in those conditions.
The original comment I was replying to was implying 'two weeks to stop the spread' was a conspiracy.
Nice to see people downvoting me for a reasonable comment, while I can't downvote them. Typical for HN. Feel free to downvote this one.
So as I understand your logic is unvaxed = worse infection = worse heart damage. At this point close to 100% of the western population has had covid. Has there been enough research to know for sure that the unvaxed are at a higher risk for heart damage or are you simply asserting that because it sounds logical?
You're right re 100% infection by now. I had the first two shots (and two infections, one before vaccines were available.) But I did skip the next two, since the bivalent wasn't available yet and evidence re boosting with the same old vaccine was thin. (Antibodies are an indicator not the whole story.) Now I'm scheduled for a bivalent shot. The first vaccine doesn't really help with the new strain, says a recent study. (Google pubmed and you can really dive into the papers, and know more than I about it pretty quickly.)
It should (and I think has) increase distrust in social media and big tech/gov but distrust in pharma? I don't know.
I'm still waiting for everyone to drop dead from vaccine related injuries (I've paid this more earnest attention than most people this glib at least) — most people, I think correctly for the most part, regard the nu-antivax thing that came about during covid to basically be the realm of internet weirdos and agitators.
Which makes me wonder: with the degree of weaponization of the internet on the side of the anti-vaxxers will the next pandemic be 'the big one'? Enough people that refuse vaccination and you are looking at an entirely different probable outcome.
Here in NL a small army of foaming-at-the-mouth conspiracy theorists did their utmost to undermine the vaccination campaign with the most outrageous claims and I'm pretty sure that we can chalk up a number of unnecessary deaths to their efforts. They wouldn't be able to tell a virus from a bacterium but that didn't stop them from spouting one nonsense theory after another and organizing (sometimes violent) protests against health care workers and their equipment.
This is a worrisome development.
The interesting thing to me is not what happened during COVID-19, but during the previous pandemic, the one that wasn't and that was nipped in the bud due to some very fortuitous circumstances and the speedy action of authorities and health care officials in many countries collaborating with unprecedented efficiency:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SARS
COVID-19 had some parameters slightly different, for instance the incubation time was a bit longer allowing it to spread undetected.
There is no reason to make any assumptions about the various parameters of the next pandemic but they could very well be worse than COVID-19 and the way we've dealt with this one makes me quite skeptical about our ability to come through this sort of thing unscathed, especially not if every Tom, Dick & Harry are going to run interference.
We got lucky, twice.
I learned that a lot of people think contrarianism makes them smart, and that even if everything everyone said was true, they felt it necessary to ‘resist’ purely for the sake of it.
I never though that in a pandemic, so many people in so many places would both politicise public health measures and actively side with the virus. But here we are.
Trust has indeed been lost, but it might not be where you think.
Resist what? What contrarianism? Do you think I want to go and kill people to prove I am smart? Or what is your point? Do you think it was fair to lock people in their houses, was it fair not to allow people to go outside and have a walk in the park? Was it normal that the police was out on the streets hunting for people or groups of people?
When my mom got cancer again after 2 years of not being able to get any kind of screening (yeah, that’s not possible, I’m just here spreading misinformation, no one died because cancer was mostly ingnored) and we drove back home (in the EU) having 3 negative pcr tests 3 days in a row, we were sent by the police in home isolation and checked by them every day, like some sort of criminals. But I sided with the virus and still went to see her in her last days, being there when she had her last breath. So you can take your politics, your health measures and let me live my life with the little humanity we were still allowed to have.
It’s easy to act all superior online with your cushy it jobs, belief in science, having food and packages delivered by those pesky Covid deniers while lecturing others online.
> In Bavaria, Germany the first strict lockdown was considered unlawful and extreme compared to the results and the severity of the situation
These are somewhat different, no? A bit of a different scope from the original claim. One region in Germany made a ruling, not sure that means most European countries ruled most measures unconstitutional.
> Resist what? What contrarianism?
Resist public health measures, refuse to close their non-essential businesses, refuse to wear masks, spread nonsense about the vaccines containing microchips so Bill Gates can track you, hold rallies where the message was "covid is a hoax", that sort of thing. You know, the stuff we've had endless news stories about in all sorts of countries.
> Do you think I want to go and kill people to prove I am smart?
You? I have no idea, but clearly there were a lot of people for whom their own self-satisfaction, self aggrandisement, notoriety and even just profit-making was indeed more important than public health. From the short-sighted "masks only stop ill people spreading the diseas and I'm not ill!" to the full on "vaccines kill unborn babies! Buy my supplements!" hucksters.
> Do you think it was fair to lock people in their houses, was it fair not to allow people to go outside and have a walk in the park? Was it normal that the police was out on the streets hunting for people or groups of people?
Of course it wasn't normal. There was a global pandemic in progress. That's the point, these were extraordinary measures because of an unusual threat. Maybe some (perhaps like in Bavaria) were over the top, but in general the idea was to stop the spread of a deadly disease that's now killed about 7 million. I think the question of whether it was 'fair' to keep people inside is more or less irrelevant. Was it justified, is more interesting.
> yeah, that’s not possible, I’m just here spreading misinformation, no one died because cancer was mostly ingnored
Lots of people died and will still die because cancer screenings were delayed. In many places this was simply because the healthcare systems were completely overwhelmed with the numbers of covid patients they had to deal with on top of their normal caseloads. I'm really not sure of your point here - are you saying that your mother wouldn't have died , or wouldn't have been waiting so long for diagnosis if there were no anti-covid measures? Because to me it seems that without the anti-covid measures then European healthcare systems would have been even more screwed for longer than they already were, as even higher covid caseloads dominated.
Unfortunately this is a known consequence in the UK as well, many routine tests and operations postponed as the NHS struggled to keep up.
I'm sorry your mother passed away, that must have been a painful thing to go through, especially with the state of the world at that time. FWIW I would likely have disregarded rules that tried to stop me being with my mother at such a time as well.
In the UK there barely is a constitution, and as much as it does exist, it really only governs how the different parts of the government interact with each other, and how they operate. As such 'unconstitutional' isn't really a thing there, which is one of the reasons I asked.
I am sympathetic to skepticism when public health officials spent a lot of time lying to avoid having to explain complicated truths. But so many bad faith voices and outright scammers with nonsense vitamins to sell are going to get what they want.
Yes, the anti-vaxx (and anti-government) sentiment has received an enormous boost from this, time will tell what the damage is but a resurgence of things like Polio is not out of the question.
> I am sympathetic to skepticism when public health officials spent a lot of time lying to avoid having to explain complicated truths.
I'm partially ok with that. They really should give out a double helping of advice: one that is dumbed down for those that lack the necessary background, one that is more on the level for those interested or that do have the necessary background. As it is the dumbed down version is all we've got and the result is that it is too easy to poke holes in it.
At the same time, some of the under-preparedness would have been much harder to deal with without the occasional white lie, it stopped a lot of profiteering and kept some items in supply when otherwise there would have been a run on them.
> But so many bad faith voices and outright scammers with nonsense vitamins to sell are going to get what they want.
Yes, and fwiw I think those people should have gone to jail. We're working on a couple of those cases here NL at the moment and I'm really curious what the outcome will be.
We're about to find out, buddy.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/04/how-polio-silently-spread-in...
Telling the truth would have resulted in far less supply shocks, instead, half the population willfully ignored the obvious lie by putting their heads in the sand and the other half ratcheted up their preparedness (because the govt clearly lying about everything at this point)
Governments are working with private corporations to promote misinformation and silence real information and you’re worried about…anti vaxxers?
I can maybe steel man a utilitarian stance for this position though I’m afraid it’s weak to “surely the lepers won’t eat my face”.
"misinformation" and "real information" as rationally believed at the time or only with 20/20 hindsight? It's an important distinction. Also, what about the recommendations that did stand the test of time, or the misinformation about vaccine risks and alternative treatments that was rightly suppressed because it was false and harmful? If this is to be anything but an exercise in anti-authoritarian self-congratulation, people need to own up to their own mistakes as well.
Want to reduce the impact of anti-vax messaging? The government could stop lying and trying to suppress truthful information to start with.
Every centralized service will inevitably be goaded into censorship for assorted reasons. Every filter has false positives. Grifters, charlatans, and informational warfare campaigns pumped pure horse shit into our memetic stream (through our own institutions even), driving the signal well below the noise floor. Twitter attempted to filter out the hostile noise to remain useful, necessarily throwing a lot of worthwhile information out in the process.
I've never been a fan of "web 2.0" centralization, and generally believe in free communications via libre software. But spinning this most recent tempest-in-a-teapot as some watershed scandal is ridiculous. Especially in the larger context of Twitter just being bought out by an impotent strongman, who has been marketing it with a brand of "free speech" while censoring per his personal whims.
If these events are really what it took for you to start paying attention to the power centralized companies wield, then congratulations I guess? But litigating what Twitter Past did as exceptional, as if censorship isn't intrinsic to the technical foundation of the whole service, just seems like a denial mechanism that will circle you back to your previous unaware state.
This made it rather easy to be an antivaxer, since people could just put their heads in the sand and remain blissfully ignorant of the scope of the disease. The deaths were just statistics, as were the benefits of vaccination.
I think in a more severe pandemic, where more people would be losing friends or loved ones, they wouldn't have the luxury of this ignorance and they would be lining up to get a vaccine.
I think back to the big controversies over athletes like Kyrie Irving and Novak Djokovic, and I never understood how they were a risk warranting that kind of response. That’s where the anti-anti-vaxxers look authoritarian.
Covid was never dangerous to <50/60 year olds.
In the US alone you're talking about 75K people dead under 50.
And over 50 the numbers rise rapidly.
If you want to talk about it as a rate that's fine, but the pre-vaccine risk of dying from covid for a healthy person in their 40s or 50s was probably comparable to their lifetime risk of dying in a vehicular collision, it's not a small thing.
So it didn't matter if people lost friends or loved ones, the political war has casualties in their minds.
I didn't have to wait at all. There was a noticeable increase in thromboembolic events after COVID-19 vaccination started in my city. Plenty of people were saved by friends in the emergency room.
The problem of course is not the vaccines, it's this insistence that they are risk-free. They are not. There is no such thing as zero risk in medicine. When you claim something false like that and people start to notice events that contradict your words, they will no longer trust you.
This is why the cost benefit analysis must be detailed and presented clearly to people. They should make the choice of their own accord. Trying to impose it on them is how you get "anti-vaxxers" who no longer trust anything you say. I don't blame them.
This is not even a modern phenomenon. Over a century ago there was a revolt in my country over forced vaccination.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine_Revolt
> To eradicate smallpox, Dr. Cruz convinced the Congress to approve the Mandatory Vaccination Law on October 31, 1904, authorizing sanitary brigade workers, accompanied by police, to enter homes and apply the vaccine by force.
This is very dishonest. Nobody is unaware that the vaccines are not perfectly safe — there’s a ton of scientific study trying to determine the exact bounds – but what’s been clear from the data and in most of the public health advice is that they’re far less dangerous than getting COVID.
Are you so sure? "Safe and effective" and similar slogans in other languages were repeated like almost like a mantra, especially in lower-income, immigrant areas of less-fluent English proficiency. And it took me personally meeting someone who developed Guillain-Barre syndrome after COVID vaccination to even begin to question the narrative.
I get that the HN viewership tends to be well-educated and English fluent but there are a lot of people who wouldn't be able to parse the results of a clinical trial or waiver form.
Since the risk of COVID varies wildly by demographics, this leaves open the possibility that the vaccines are a poor risk/reward tradeoff for large numbers of the people it's being recommended to (essentially, everyone over 6 months old). And since they don't prevent COVID infection, "risk of vaccination" vs "risk of a COVID infection" is the wrong comparison to make in the first place.
https://newsroom.heart.org/news/myocarditis-risk-significant...
Of course but that's not what authorities and all kinds of pro-vaccination people were saying at the time. General statements about safety don't inspire confidence. There's a possibility that the vaccines are beneficial for some groups but not others, for example.
Even today in my country they do everything possible to coerce people into vaccination. They come just short of abolishing personal freedom and consent. This is not how things are supposed to be done. People should want to take vaccines because there's data that shows benefit. Losing their trust means they won't even trust the data.
It most certainly was in the United States, starting with the initial vaccine availability notices and the information sheet you were given at the time.
Thromboembolic events are a common side effect of COVID-19, and vaccine roll out often led to infection surges as the sense of normality returned before full immunity.
Given both the vaccine and the virus can cause myocarditis or pericarditis, and given that the only thing they have in common is the spike protein, I'm curious as to where you think I went wrong.
And that cardiac events in both cases are a minor part of the greater effects and dangers of catching the disease.
So it's about not focusing on the wrong things
Do you have a citation or evidence for that statement? Estimates for cardiac vaccine injury are in the 4-5% range. Your statement would imply that 40% of people infected with Covid would have cardiac issues. The evidence in low vaccine rate countries (or Africa) contradict your statement (no where near 40% of the population is getting cardiac issues).
So that is a failure of the same kind of logic that you're trying to employ. You have a virus with a clotting issue and a vaccine with a clotting issue, and they both only share the spike protein, and we know for certain now that isn't the mechanism.
Thrombotic complications are frequent in COVID-19 and contribute significantly to mortality and morbidity
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32857878/
One of the special characteristics of this disease is that it may predispose patients to thrombotic disease both in the venous and arterial circulation.
I'm not sure I believe that.
> The public isn't educated well enough to ascertain the difference.
The public may be uneducated but they're still equipped with brains capable of pattern recognition.
In my country, the public saw young famous people "mysteriously" dying of heart attacks and strokes immediately after getting vaccinated, in some cases not long after tweeting some insults at skeptics. People are watching and they are going to connect dots.
I have a little collection of screenshots of people who suffered such a fate... It's unfortunate really.
As an aside, naming phenomena after priests / politicians like that can't possibly be productive. It's telling the outgroup (people who admire Cain) that they are worthy of contempt instead of addressing their object level concerns and misunderstandings.
This sort of high handed paternalism is exactly the attitude that has destroyed faith in institutions.
> It's obvious the messaging landed on was chosen was to maximize the individual choice to vaccinate as that was reasoned to the best possible outcome for all.
This is inducing people to pick the choice you consider correct. This is unethical in the medical profession. Ethical conduct is to present the facts and let the patient decide. You don't "maximize" any outcome, nor do you "reason" about anything on behalf of the patient. To do so means you are prioritizing concerns other than your patient's best interests and once they figure this out you are done.
If necessary, you can and must use simpler language to help them understand complex concepts. What you cannot do is decide for them in advance and then misrepresent facts in order to manufacture consent for the intervention you favor.
Not really. You'd be surprised how many people believe that. They need to make informed choices. The way to do that is to say "the benefits are X and the risks are Y". If they have trouble understanding X or Y, you do whatever is necessary to help them understand.
What you don't do is say "Oh COVID-19 vaccines? Yeah, go ahead, nothing to worry about, they're completely safe". It's not up to you to determine that they are safe, the patient makes that judgement. One person might consider them safe, another might not.
> since everyone is smart enough to make their own choice
They don't have to be "smart enough" to make choices. Unless they are mentally impaired to the point of dependence on a legal representative, they have the autonomy to decide about any matter regarding their own bodies. Even if they are uneducated. They could refuse it simply because they don't like vaccines or even you personally and it's your duty to respect that.
Unless the patient is literally dying right in front of you, there is no case you could make for overriding their will on any medical treatment, and even that varies by nation.
> so why be upset about it?
Because it's unethical and undermines trust. When you do this, people notice. They immediately stop trusting you and start actively resisting you instead. As is their right.
> when exactly where they lied to if you claim they're smart enough to dissect the nuance?
It's still a lie. Detecting the lie does not somehow invalidate the fact it is a lie.
People who had reasonable questions--like "why do some countries consider recovery from COVID as being equivalent to being vaccinated while the US doesn't" or people who were skeptical that loose-fitting cloth masks that most people wore below their nose did more good than harm--were de-platformed along with the true quacks. Experienced doctors with specific expertise in infectious disease were deplatformed for questioning if it was necessary for healthy young people to be vaccinted.
This, and the fact that social media sites bow to Government pressure for this sort of moderations, is what's alarming to many reasonable people.
Do you have any non-vague examples? I saw those questions debated heavily throughout the pandemic and nobody was “deplatformed” for it.
This makes me curious whether there’s other context important to understanding what happened — and why the complaints about moderation didn’t feature such sympathetic cases rather than the usual suspects.
Jay Battacharya[1][2] of the Great Barrington Declaration fame - is he a usual case? From [3]:
> In October 2020, Collins criticized the Great Barrington Declaration's "focused protection" herd immunity strategy, calling it "a fringe component of epidemiology. This is not mainstream science. It's dangerous. It fits into the political views of certain parts of our confused political establishment." In a private email to Fauci, Collins called the authors of the declaration "fringe epidemiologists" and said that "There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises". The Wall Street Journal's editorial board accused Collins of "work[ing] with the media to trash the Great Barrington Declaration." and of "Shut[ting] Down Covid Debate".
Here's a bit more from the WSJ article[4] mentioned:
> In public, Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins urge Americans to “follow the science.” In private, the two sainted public-health officials schemed to quash dissenting views from top scientists. That’s the troubling but fair conclusion from emails obtained recently via the Freedom of Information Act by the American Institute for Economic Research.
From a recent interview in Unherd[5]:
> And this all began when you joined Twitter in August 2021, many months after you had signed the “Great Barrington Declaration” speaking against lockdowns and calling for an alternative approach to the pandemic.
> That first day in August 2021 when I joined Twitter, apparently Twitter received a number of unspecified complaints about me. It’s not clear, from my time at Twitter headquarters, exactly from who. Their systems are not set up to answer that question very easily, although apparently people are looking into that. And that then induced Twitter to put me on this trends blacklist to make sure that my tweets didn’t reach a broad audience outside of my own network… It took somebody at Twitter — a human at Twitter had to think about it. The setting was then renewed repeatedly through 2021 and 2022.
Maybe deplatforming is not the same as having your Twitter account meddled with but it seems similar enough. There's also Martin Kulldorf[6][7]:
> Was Martin Kulldorff also on the Trends Blacklist?
> He had been, actually. His first placement on the trends blacklist was in July of 2020, when he was advocating for opening schools… He told me that what he was doing on Twitter was: whenever someone was mentioning that schools should close, he would post a link to the Swedish study that showed that when schools had opened in spring of 2020, no children had died and very few teachers had gotten sick relative to other workers in the population. He posted over and over and over, he said, and was more active on Twitter than at any other time. That’s exactly when the trends blacklist was applied on him, in July 2020. And then again, three more times in 2022. Although there was no active trends blacklist for Martin at the moment.
> Is it still active for you?
> It was still active when I was at Twitter. I hope it’s been removed. My tweets seem to go more viral nowadays.
Jay Bhattacharya is Professor of medicine at Stanford University and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He directs Stanford's Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging.
Martin Kulldorff, PhD, is a biostatistician, epidemiologist and (edit: was until 2021) professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Bhattacharya
[2] https://profiles.stanford.edu/jay-bhattacharya
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Collins#NIH_director
[4] https://www.wsj.com/articles/fauci-collins-emails-great-barr...
[5] https://unherd.com/2022/12/what-i-discovered-at-twitter-hq/
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Kulldorff
[7] https://www.dfhcc.harvard.edu/insider/member-detail/member/m...
How did he get into the "usual suspects" box?
> it’s worth remembering that despite lying about the severity of the disease
He wasn't just wrong or mistaken (if he was) or providing a different view, he was lying. That must be how he got into that box. I presume you have some sort of evidence, given such a bold claim?
> pushing myths about herd immunity
Would you care to give an example of that too? As I understand it, he was pushing the conventional line, conventional up until this pandemic, at least.
> Twitter chose not to have their company amplify his voice but his followers and organic discovery were unaffected.
That isn't true. From [1]:
> Actually, it’s a set of tools that include locking users out of searches and preventing some users’ tweets from trending—which is how countless other users discover what’s popular or being talked about on Twitter.
> “We control visibility quite a bit. And we control the amplification of your content quite a bit. And normal people do not know how much we do,” one Twitter employee told us. Two additional Twitter employees confirmed this.
and from the Unherd interview I provided above:
> What I understand is that my Twitter messages can reach people who directly follow me. But they have no chance of being put on a broader visibility setting, so that people who don’t follow me would see my messages.
That means "organic discovery" is severely limited. I wonder if you would consider a hellban to be deplatforming or not.
> I wonder if you would consider a hellban to be deplatforming or not.
I would consider it something which didn’t happen to him. Being blocked from trending based on his history of bad advice may not be something you like but it‘s nowhere near deplatforming unless you’re defining that term as meaning that you don’t get free promotion.
You're being too coy. Which industry and which paper? I'm not sure what's preventing you from being more specific, especially since you were lamenting vague examples earlier.
> unless you’re defining that term as meaning that you don’t get free promotion.
So if you can seemingly access a service but not be provided that service then you haven't been deplatformed? That sounds a lot like being given a telephone and a dial tone but you can only call out to prearranged numbers and meanwhile no one can call in nor find out your number and yet the phone company claims they're not denying you service. In other words, preposterous.
I would say they lumped themselves. Even the worst grifters know how to cloak their schemes in language of "free inquiry" and "skepticism" and so on. If the true skeptics do nothing at all to distinguish themselves from the grifters, that's on them. None of us are mind readers.
How could one make such a distinction? The key is that a true skeptic is not the same as a true believer in some alternative theory. A true skeptic will follow the scientific method - identifying specific flaws, being open to discussion of experiments to resolve open questions, etc. Most importantly, they will apply the same level of skepticism to alternatives or to other topics. A true believer, on the other hand, will push their own theory with weak evidence, weak connections, and no attempt to correct those flaws even as they're relentless in criticizing others. When you look past the whitewash of "all voices [but effectively only their own] deserve to be heard" rhetoric, it's usually not that hard to spot the difference.
Exercise for the reader: apply this method to the many comments here about "thrombo-embolic events" as an argument against vaccines (for any group or generally). How many of the people flinging that newly-learned term around are true skeptics, and how many are just reflexive contrarians?
The ‘signal’ of a people who are genuinely asking questions or voicing concerns is drowned by the ‘noise’ of charlatans, amoral self-publicists and genuine crazies.
The rhetoric from the public about masks being simple and obvious had the same problem on the friends-and-family scale.
A few weeks later an emergency law was passed and you would receive a fine if not wearing them.
Similar situation in many countries.
It's not so much a conspiracy as it is incompetence, desperation and false confidence. These are the people who lead us. Just dumb fallible humans like the rest of us trying to control an impossible situation. It's questionable whether they should be afforded any power to begin with.
Republicans were already anti everything before the pandemic.
I ask because social media was full of that discussion so if there was any censorship it must have been highly ineffective.
And I think some platforms (specifically, I believe YouTube and Twitter, but maybe others) prevented or de-funded etc., content that was contradictory to CDC guidelines.
I was responding factually to the assertion. I didn't state whether I thought it was right or speculate on the motive. On that though:
I agree that medical workers should have received priority for supplies they need, both because they obviously need to be kept healthy to help everyone, and because it seems fair to do so.
I doubt the CDC would base their guidance on that though, although it does say that medical workers need them more, their statements imply that normal people didn't need to wear them to prevent the spread of the disease, which is what the CDC was after, not necessarily stating that it wouldn't help people to wear them, although I think the assertion was also somewhat that it wouldn't help people to wear them. Of course, this changed as they learned more. Even today, I believe this is the state of things, masking helps you somewhat, but it's even more beneficial for the people around you.
That said, I wouldn't approve of the CDC giving false guidance about masks to protect medical workers. Even if medical workers should get priority, and the government had to enforce that, the CDC should be trustworthy, and shouldn't lie, even if it's beneficial.
As told in my Middle Eastern history class, "it's reasonable to be a conspiracy theorist when you've been the subject of countless governments conspiring against you and/or your people -- in fact it would be unreasonable not to be one".
Iranians who claimed the US Government had orchestrated their elections were dismissed as conspiracy theorists, then 47 years later the US said "oh yeah, we totally did that".
Americans who claimed the US Government had lied to them about mask effectiveness, vaccine effectiveness, vaccine safety, lockdown durations, COVID severity, dangers of remote schooling, etc. were dismissed as conspiracy theorists, then 2 years later the US said "oh yeah, we totally did that".
Be a conspiracy theorist. To be anything else is to burry your head in the sand.
It’s very funny to watch.
Conspiracy theorists are not driven by facts or evidence, as a community they have a scatter-gun approach, and then retcon in “see, we were right all along” by claiming a tiny portion of their collective predictions came true, neatly forgetting the rest that didn’t. Often even those they do claim have come to pass have not, and rely on a misinterpretation or exaggeration.
It’s quite funny to watch, a combination of survivorship bias, confirmation bias, wishful thinking and at times downright disingenuousness.
- mask effectiveness: Remember "masks don't work"? Remember "masks work"? (https://www.dailydot.com/debug/fauci-email-masks-dont-work/)
- vaccine effectiveness: Remember "vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don’t get sick"? I know I've gotten sick. Most people I know have too, vaccinated no less. https://nypost.com/2021/04/02/cdc-walks-back-claim-that-vacc...
- vaccine safety: check the list of officially recognized side effects, then ask any woman you know if it affected their menstrual cycle. Or just google it. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/expect/af... (if you choose to go down the "menstrual cycle alterations are minor insignificant events not worth reporting" argument path, pause to consider you perhaps have no idea what you're talking about, and at the very least it'd be nice to have all well studied phenomena regarding covid vaccines side effects documented on the CDC's covid vaccine side effects page)
- lockdown durations: "two weeks to flatten the curve". QED.
- COVID severity: remember when it was faux pas to suggest COVID was "just another cold"? Everyone I know has had it now, they all have said it was basically just a cold.
- dangers of remote schooling: students across America are performing well below where they were at pre-covid, by factors of 25% and more. https://cronkitenews.azpbs.org/2021/08/30/the-results-are-in...
That Fauci email says that masks are primarily to prevent infected people from spreading disease, and a lot of crappy masks are unlikely to do much but prevent some droplets. This was before a lot of the studies were in that showed there was some effect. People can be wrong early on, this is expected.
Later on when the pandemic was really ripping through populations it was all a numbers game, to try to reduce spread by percentage. A lot of people seemed to miss that, and would say stupid things like ‘masks aren’t 100% effective” or “they don’t even protect you! They protect other people”, as if that was smart or meaningful.
> Remember "vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don’t get sick"?
Nope, I’m not American, and it appears neither does your source, because the link that should take you to the original claim goes to some other story.
> vaccine safety
Yeah so you have nothing there either. Anything can affect women’s menstrual cycles. Aircraft travel, dietary changes, stress, all sorts.
> Two weeks to flatten the curve
Was too little too late and a symptom of fucked up, broken American politics.
> remember when it was faux pas to suggest COVID was "just another cold"?
It’s still a really stupid thing to say, sorry bub, excess deaths should show you just how dumb.
> dangers of remote schooling
It’s not exactly surprising that remote schooling is less effective. However saying “dangers of remote schooling” is unnecessarily hyperbolic, and this is a great example of “throwing enough shit at the wall to see if something sticks”
So like I said, you’re claiming a bunch of things that no, the powers that be have not “admitted” to being true, and the rest of the world has not, actually, come to understand, and some things that were just bleeding obvious (remote schooling is less good, we should only rely on it when there are reasons to do so. Like, I don’t know, a pandemic that’s killed about 7 million people worldwide.)
Also this: teen suicides went down for the first time in ages during the pandemic, and has rebounded since.
https://www.nber.org/papers/w30795
Remote-only schooling might have been negative overall, especially for the younger ones, but it's more nuanced than all good vs. all bad. There are better and worse ways to run in-person schooling. There are better and worse ways to run remote schooling. There are positive and negative effects beyond the schools themselves. There are financial and other demands on parents to consider. There are even climate-change considerations. "Dangers of remote schooling" is a shibboleth, not an argument.
P.S. Thank you @Nursie for taking the time to go point by point. Much appreciated.
Here's another: https://news.yahoo.com/cdc-director-data-suggests-vaccinated...
And more: https://twitter.com/ryanstruyk/status/1376925777397186560
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> Anything can affect women’s menstrual cycles [...] It's not really surprising and it's not necessarily serious.
Me: Don't make the mistake of saying fucking with menstrual cycles and covering it up isn't serious, as it will out you as someone who speaks to things they have no clue about
You: aight ima fuckin do it
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Besides that all your points are "your sourced claim is in disagreement with my feelings", which is hilarious coming from the "It’s very funny to watch [people talk about their feelings with no support]" guy.
Also flagging isn't an appropriate response to "this person disagred with me in a civil way" but you do you.
Which you’re still doing.
> Here's another
"Scientist talks about existing data on the original virus, conspiracy theorist uses hindsight and information from variants that didn't even exist at the time to try to paint them as malicious"
> Don't make the mistake of saying fucking with menstrual cycles and covering it up isn't serious, as it will out you as someone who speaks to things they have no clue about
Or it might out you as someone who has no idea, because you haven't provided any evidence that such a thing is serious and has any longer term effects, and all of those other things I've mentioned can cause the same issue, yet we don't scream about how aircraft travel is evil because it can disturb menstrual cycles.
Seriously, your comment on this is about as useful as "In Before XXXX".
> Besides that all your points are "your sourced claim is in disagreement with my feelings"
Your sources don't back up you original claims that the US said "oh yeah, we totally did that". You've stitched together assertions, hyperbole and half-truths.
It's that simple. And it's utterly predictable.
> "Scientist talks about existing data on the original virus, conspiracy theorist uses hindsight and information from variants that didn't even exist at the time to try to paint them as malicious"
In fact, "scientist makes bold claims they don't have the facts to back up. scientist ignores all prior data showing that vaccines don't work like that to overstates the importance of the vaccine to push their agenda that everyone should be vaccinated. scientist presents a false narrative that the vaccine for coronaviruses (such as the common cold) is a one-shot procedure. scientist conveniently forgets to mention that viruses evolve. scientist in public position knowingly lies to constituents to push their agenda. people on the internet say `this is ok, it's for my own good`."
> Or it might out you as someone who has no idea, because you haven't provided any evidence that such a thing is serious and has any longer term effects, and all of those other things I've mentioned can cause the same issue, yet we don't scream about how aircraft travel is evil because it can disturb menstrual cycles.
Please do yourself a favor and talk with an actual woman about how the vaccine affected their cycle compared to airline travel. It's not even on the same page. Or, if that's too much to ask, read one of the numerous studies that institutions other than the CDC have published. If you do go down the "talking to a real woman" approach, I recommend you then tell them how the problem isn't really that serious and even though a huge number of women went out of their day to report (to the CDC) severe pains for months following the jab, it's reasonable for the CDC to leave it completely off of their "known side effect of the vaccine" page. Even better, go around on the street and make a TikTok telling women how you know best. I'd pay money to see that.
That's dangerously wrong. Yes, if you have some rational reason to believe that a conspiracy is the best explanation for a particular thing, even if others don't see it, then go nuts. That's healthy and good IMO. Even laudable. However, "conspiracy theorist" as an ongoing identity or habit is not healthy either for your own reputation or for the well being of those affected by unfounded accusations. Occam's Razor is not burying one's head in the sand.
The basis of my argument is counter example countries such as Denmark. In Denmark, we all got vaccinated, and as soon as a second booster (3rd jab) was available, the government coordinated the distribution with pharmacies to allow administration. The response of the people was so immediate that within a week or so > 80% had at least 2 jabs plus booster. This meant that we could open up immediately, and covid became a thing of the past.
Denmark had a peak at the time, with far far far lower deaths per infection than other countries and previous peaks.
The difference is in communication. The Danish government and the responsible department communicated everything and monitored the situation in a way that allowed quick and nimble responses.
We had free jabs, nobody forced us to get vaccinated, we all did so willingly, we had free testing, and if we didn’t want a jab, we could wear masks and what have you.
The exact same thing happened here in the Netherlands.
The sheer amount of antivaxxine grifters, conspiracy theorists and absolute wackadoodles was way too much. Still is. You've got literally millions of people out there who think every word out of the mouth of Alex Jones is the gospel truth.
All the studies that showed ivermectin's effectiveness against Covid happened to be from countries with low levels of sanitation. The kinds of places where people are likely to suffer from worms without knowing it. If you have worms and Covid, and take deworming medicine, guess what? You're more likely to beat the 'rona. It doesn't mean the ivermectin cured you of Covid.
How do you come to this conclusion when the vaccine's effectiveness against transmission was never demonstrated in controlled trials, and very highly vaxxed jurisdictions like the Bay Area saw huge and persistent waves of cases?
Because there have been many many studies of the effect of the vaccine, in many different countries, by many different groups.
The results are overwhelmingly that the vaccine saves lives.
> saw huge and persistent waves of cases
This is a bad argument.
A vaccine can be useful, and save millions of lives, even if we falsely assume for the sake of argument that it doesn't reduce the amount of people who get infected or transmissibility.
I was prepared with 20 N95 masks (ten years old but carefully sealed for a pandemic.) Which didn't matter because the provincial care workers spread the illness like wildfire through my building (they were seeing clients willy nilly all over the place, with no PPE, and with rules that forbid them from taking a day off with a note from a doctor who's face they'd breathed into. Also with no PPE.)
The vaccination story was a big win; and that was the decision that counted. So science won, and govts got the one key choice right, China aside. Antivaccers, zero.
Anti-vax movements have been around for as long as there have been vaccines. The only thing that "solves" this problem is a new disease and vaccines that completely displaces the old.
Think about it: when was the last time, since the pandemic began, that you heard about autism and the MMR vaccine? that began in the late 90s (with no scientific basis I might add) and persisted for decades. Now no one talks about, thinks about or cares about it anymore. It's completely off the radar.
Covid anti-vax movements will meet the exact same fate come the next major vaccine.
This is the tricky problem. Trusting the marketplace of ideas works if everyone who participates is interested in spending the time needed to evaluate claims.
In my experience, possibly the worst thing that was done was labeling people who argued against forced vaccination as anti-vaxxers, no matter whether they were against vaccines or not. That made a large number of reasonable people very hostile, and reasonably so; they were being declared an enemy.
Why do we have so much compassion for people arguing against forced vaccination, and yet so little compassion for people who were scared of an unknown disease and angry that people were pushing back against the best known way to slow or stop the spread?
Why is the burden of rationality on the latter group? Why don’t they get to be hostile?
I encounter normies talking (inaccurately, lack of nuance, etc) about the "vaccines cause autism" meme on a regular basis.
No worries. The people will forget it just like they forgot the Iraq War, the Avandia drug scandal, the Three Mile island, the Mexican gulf oil leak, Iran-Contra and everything else.
They will vote in the election. The administration will change. And despite the incoming administrations will be staffed fully by the SAME people who staffed the administrations in the past 40 years, the people will think that something has 'changed' because the frontmen of the administration have different faces.
Then rinse and repeat.
To start with, getting fed up with aristocrats would be a revolutionary and progressive thing, not conservative. But it does not seem like there is enough such sentiment in the UK to change things. They still have their royals with veto power, they still have the unelected house of lords with aristocratic, religious and appointed hereditary members and the FPTP system. The house of lords can infinitely send back any bill to the parliament, by the way - which amounts to a total veto power.
I agree with you but historians tend to label Hitler as conservative/right wing as a counter example.
All those standing by the sidelines and criticizing those in the hot seat would no doubt have done a much better job at managing this.
I'm all for learning the lessons (such as the link you posted) but I'm categorically against assigning blame against those that worked their asses off to help mitigate this, as long as the lessons stay learned and we do much better next time.
Obviously not every move deserved the beauty prize but you have to take into account that the WHO does not have the power required to demand that parties follow up on their advice, which makes theirs a highwire act somewhere between medicine and politics. Which means there are bound to be compromises and degrees of supplication that are ultimately not perfect but that at least move the needle (pun intended) in the right direction.
Contrast that with the disinformation barrage that had only one purpose (to destabilize and undermine as much as possible the effort to contain COVID-19). It's pretty easy to criticize, very, very hard to do better.
Welp, that's probably not what people thought about the WHO before Covid, and certainly justifies the decline in trust. Maybe they could rebrand as World Health And Politics Organization.
That would be hopelessly naive then. We do not have a 'world government', every government has complete autonomy on how they deal with healthcare issues, something that I believed to be well known. That's why each government has their own ministry of health and their own way of dealing with health insurance, budgets and so on. The degree to which these things are organized is impressive but in the end if the WHO publishes a guideline you'd be stupid to ignore it but you can if you want. And plenty of countries did.
And no, it should not result in a decline of trust in the WHO who clearly advocated for moving as fast as possible while governments the world over with some very rare exceptions took a 'let's wait and see' approach. If anything it should reduce the confidence that you can solve global issues with local policies.
There are different categories of "mistakes".
In the face of an unprecedented crisis it is understandable that there will be uncertainty in what courses of actions to take, and mistakes will be made.
However, how Taiwan was treated, or declarations by people who have a clear self-interest that the virus could not possibly be a lab leak when it was simply impossible at that time to have done the necessary due diligence one way or abnother were clearly pre-meditated and political in nature and should make any thinking person think twice about what comes out of the WHO/CDC.
These are two of the many CYA and/or turf protecting situations that happened that have significanlty wekend trust in these organizations.
IMHO Covid demonstrated the importance of trust in the system. When people trust the system, and think of the society as something they need to work together to maintain, they tend to come out better. Even after their governments did make many bad decisions.
A little bit of skepticism isn't a bad thing. Teaching kids that politicians can be corrupt isn't bad
What is bad is teaching people that society and govt are inherently corrupt. That's a recipe for disaster
Technocratic autocracy created the issues, but the response is typically "so add more technocratic autocracy".
It's not just those evil billionaires (read, people in the .1 percent whereas being on HN makes you highly likely to be in the 1%) manipulating society, it's Good, Honest, Educated professionals who are making incorrect or reactionary decisions regularly and doubling down when called on it.