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.
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.