Ah, "the vast majority" other than the ones at the top?

And by the "fringe idea" you mean the one that the virus was a lab leak? That fringe idea?

You sidestepped their point:

"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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_lab_leak_theory

No, they sidestepped the main point about integrity. You don't get to tar your opposition with the actions of a few nutcases.

The "many prominent and credible scientists [who] did support the lab leak hypothesis" faced merciless censoring & blacklisting for it.

The fringe ideas about herd immunity and the Great Barrington Declaration go hand in hand.

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...

uh-huh. All those deplorables.

"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:

https://gbdeclaration.org/why-was-the-declaration-written/

The fact that you're using the word "deplorables" kind of gives away your views here. There's room for debate but going for herd immunity would have been utter insanity to be frank. We know how bad uncontrolled Covid would get from places like Italy early in the pandemic and it wasn't pretty. You're basically saying you'd be willing to accept millions more people in the United States dying of this disease so we can maybe get back to a functional economy in 3 months. And the deaths would increase as we ran out of things like ventilators and asthma medication that we're actually shown to be effective treatments. Your view is incredibly callous.

Wasn’t the point to try to protect the more vulnerable?

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.

The point of masks was always to limit community spread, principally to prevent a situation where hospitals are so full you can't treat regular issues like car crash victims. In practice that means you do try to keep vulnerable people out of the hospital but it's not the main concern if you're goal is to prevent a really bad public health situation.

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.

ah, I see. You have a one-way view of political leanings. Got it. You're not only deplorable if you question "the science," you're deplorable if you use the word "deplorable."

also, skipping over the most egregious thing of all: censoring anyone who suggested lab-leak.

And thanks for illustrating the main point: anyone who dared to question the "settled science" got a Twitter rage mob howling at them and hurling feces like a pack of monkeys. Including some "journalists."

It only seemed like “the vast majority” because to go against the grain, no matter how right you are, would instantly label you an alt-right grandma killing asshole. You’d probably destroy your reputation and career standing up for what you think is right.

I mean hell, there are people right in this post calling dudes horrible grandma killers for stating rational, logical opinions against “everyone”.

I mean how right were they? There's hundreds if not thousands of cases of people "going against the grain" and then dying of Covid. People did die because someone wanted to spread some ignorant ideas about what they thought of the pandemic.