Um, no. Wrong. The Great Barrington Declaration was not put out by a bunch of "random morons." Yet Francis Collins said it needed a quick and devastating takedown. Someone with scientific integrity would have said your first quote, not that.
And by the "fringe idea" you mean the one that the virus was a lab leak? That fringe idea?
"Fringe ideas like this idea that we could have reached herd immunity in 3 months would have killed literally millions of people that didn't have to die. Especially true considering how quickly we were able to develop a vaccine."
Also, many prominent and credible scientists did support the lab leak hypothesis.
The "many prominent and credible scientists [who] did support the lab leak hypothesis" faced merciless censoring & blacklisting for it.
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/521159-dozens-of-publi...
The Great Barrington Declaration was indeed the actions of a few nutcases and was not supported by science. Furthermore, many signatories were venturing way out of their lane/expertise along with, likely, a majority that were not even real/certainly not remotely close to being an expert:
"While the authors' website claims that over 14,000 scientists, 40,000 medical practitioners, and more than 800,000 members of the public signed the declaration, this list—which anyone could sign online and which required merely clicking a checkbox to claim the status of "scientist"—contains some evidently-fake names, including: "Mr Banana Rama", "Harold Shipman", and "Prof Cominic Dummings". More than 100 psychotherapists, numerous homeopaths, physiotherapists, massage therapists, and other non-relevant people were found to be signatories, including a performer of Khoomei—a Mongolian style of overtone singing—described as a "therapeutic sound practitioner". An article in The Independent reported that the false signatures put claims about the breadth of support in doubt. Bhattacharya responded by saying that the authors "did not have the resources to audit each signature," and that people had "abused our trust" by adding fake names."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Barrington_Declaration#S...
"not supported by science" -- i.e. the Establishment didn't like them.
Instead of looking at the fake names, how about we look at the non-fake ones?
Like Jay Bhattacharya, Sunetra Gupta, and Martin Kulldorff. Are they nutcases, too?
And your fake name issue actually IS addressed in here:
Realise that we solidly failed to do this with all our masks and measures.
I’m not at all convinced that by those who argue it was not possible to apply focused protection. We spent so much on unfocused protection. What if we took those resources — or even just a fraction of them — and redirected them to those at most need.
Masks and social distancing absolutely had an effect on the situation, and the main reason we had to do unfocused solutions as you call them is because people infected with Covid did not always have symptoms, and it was extremely contagious. If algae is exponentially covering a pond, it covers half the pond the day before it covers the whole pond. The exponential nature of infection is really hard to reason about and I think people like you really aren't understanding that at the time, with no vaccines, the only way to protect the most vulnerable was to reduce community spread. You also don't have a magic eight ball telling you who might get hospitalized. We had really fit people dying in two weeks. There was no way to tell who was and wasn't vulnerable.
also, skipping over the most egregious thing of all: censoring anyone who suggested lab-leak.
I mean hell, there are people right in this post calling dudes horrible grandma killers for stating rational, logical opinions against “everyone”.
In the pandemic, those in charge were asserting that Covid was a virus with a droplet based spread (like the flu) and were shutting down domain experts who asserted that Covid was a virus that was fully airborne (like the measles).
> Aerosol researchers started warning that "the world should face the reality" of airborne transmission in April 2020. Then in June, some claimed that it was "the dominant route for the spread of COVID-19".
In July, 239 scientists signed an open letter appealing to the medical community and governing bodies to recognize the potential risk of airborne transmission.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jvchamary/2021/05/04/who-corona...
Because they were only willing to accept a theory that was incorrect and ignored domain experts, those in charge were pushing mitigations that could never be effective against a virus you caught by breathing.
No amount of hand washing, wiping down surfaces, putting up sneeze guards, or staying six feet apart can possibly protect you from breathing in a virus that floats in the air.
This was the biggest failure of the pandemic, and it took two years for the truth to start being begrudgingly accepted.
https://qz.com/it-took-two-years-for-the-who-to-admit-covid-...