The lockdowns resulted in inflation, and caused a lot more poverty and deaths worldwide since. And retarded the normal development of many children.
And we still don't know what kind of long term damage the vaccine caused. My friend that trusted the science, and took every booster, only stopped when she got myocarditis.
And that's before you take into account things like BLM rallies being encouraged during COVID while less politically correct gatherings were banned or decried as "super spreader events." [1]
[1] https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/06/04/public-hea...
As far as the speed of revisions, my memory is the initial advice to wash your hands so much faded within months, as well as the wash your groceries advice. It took the US some time to notice how effective masks were in Japan, and push for masking. And now good air filtration for public spaces is gaining momentum, even as the deaths from COVID declined.
And you aren't a bit alarmed anytime a novel virus hits an immunologically naïf population, well you should be.
This is highly euphemistic. We were explicitly lied to for our own good, over and over again. Including about masks being ineffective early on (to save them for healthcare providers), about ventilators, about the effectiveness of the vaccine, about the vulnerability of normal populations as compared to older ones, the plausible origins of the virus itself, etc. It was over and over again. And again--that's without the injection of left-wing politics as noted in my previous comment.
> As far as the speed of revisions
We had kids out of schools for years. An entire generation is now significantly behind comparable cohorts, and the only reason we even stopped is because the opposition eventually made it untenable. We forced many small businesses to fail and gave out interest-free loans to many others that never need to be paid back. People were forced to get vaccinated or lose their jobs.
I feel like our response to COVID-19 (at least in the US) is like a litmus test for how well one accepts authoritarianism. If one lived through that as an adult, I don't know how one would trust what the medical establishment says next time around, except to trust that it's what they want the unwashed masses to think.
Were outcomes worse than they otherwise would have been? That’s an impossible question to answer. Are there serious studies on the impact of public health interventions?
And saying it was likely made in a lab in China is kind of censored to this day. I think partly because the science community doesn't want to take flack for doing risky stuff and killing millions.
Nobody did that. They prevented you from working with me
Nobody here or there was forced to get a vaccine. But if you refused it was right to shun you
Freedom is about more than the individual. We as a group should be free from the consequences of individual actions
It would have made more sense if the vaccines actually stopped catching it and transmission but they don't really, they mostly just seem to reduce the harm when you catch it. In terms of not spreading it to others you are better isolating than relying on the vaccines - I've had that as a practical issue with my late 80s mum who I visit. Although I've had 4 jabs I've still had it caught it twice since, and have avoided giving it to her by testing if I feel ill and staying away. Which is kind of to say some of the politicians views on it were heavy handed and a bit iffy scientifically.
-- Karl Marx
It’s like they watched Office Space and thought they’d “Milton” everyone.
> Freedom is about more than the individual.
The individual is what it starts with.
As far as the China lab goes, there were plenty of scientific papers that studied the China leak theory, though I personally don't know what they found.
There was also dumb stuff like social media suppressing mention of covid, even to this day youtubers use euphemisms to refer to that period.
To me it seems perfectly understandable how people who aren't actually involved in science might mix up The Science and actual science after all the political nastiness of those years, especially when we add on top all of the awful pop science reporting from the past decades.
For example here restaurants were open, but they had to close at 19. So instead of spreading the clientele over more hours, they were always 100% full.
Also, they CUT ⅔ of public transport rides, so they were incredibly overcrowded. People with real jobs that can't be done from home still had to go to work. BUT they put stickers on the floor telling people to keep distance. Also hired people to be at crowded stops to spray hand sanitizers on who wanted it, and tell people to keep distance (while seeing them having to push their way in).
In general all the restrictions were about the "having fun" stuff, but not about the "go to work" stuff. Even companies had no obligation to let people who could work from home stay at home. Some companies kept having their offices full.
Oh and let's not forget the recommendations of staying home if you so much as sneezed. But you wouldn't get paid. How did they expect people to pay their rent?
I could go on for hours with this. The bullshit measures that were marketed as "what the scientists are telling us to do" did a lot of harm to the trust that the general population puts into science.
Many examples exist where a misguided belief in scientific 'facts' (usually a ropey hypothesis, with seemingly 'damning' evidence), or a straight up abuse of the scientific method, causes direct harm.
Suspicion is often based on facts or experience.
People have been infected with diseases without their knowledge.
People have been forced to undergo surgical procedures on the basis of spurious claims.
People have been burnt alive in buildings judged to be safe.
And look at Boeing.
No one has a problem with science itself per se. Everyone accepts the scientific method to be one of our greatest cultural achievements.
But whether one is "less bright", or super smart, we all know we as humans, are prone to mistakes, and are just as prone to bend the truth, to cover up those mistakes.
There's nothing plebeian about this form of suspicion. In fact, the scientific method relies on it (peer review).
This is just wrong and naive. You can be happy if a majority of people agree to this.
But if you're not a pedant, I essentially mean that most parents will vaccinate their children, many passengers will book flights, and a majority of the citizens in a population do respect their officials (etcetera).
And I think if you were to dig deeper than this, and test that hypothesis with... well... a scientific experiment of some kind, the result would probably support it.
But a good number of people will naturally question the outcome!
The speaker was a psychology researcher from UK who flew here for that, and the talk was about conspiracy theories. When they introduced her they stated that she wouldn't accept any questions from the audience.
This was received with boos and shouts that it was not real science.
She then proceeded to bundle all the conspiracy theories together. Going from "the government is doing something bad" to "earth is flat".
After that talk I can really believe that the bullshit conspiracy theories are made up and spread artificially so that anyone that comes up with any conspiracy theory can be shushed as a crazy person.
But… in reality conspiracies do exist. One can make a theory and then test if it's true (or get killed/imprisoned by the government while trying).
Yes, that’s exactly what they are, upfront, allegations of a conspiracy. And some of them are correct,
If I recall correctly, the Flat Earth Society was originally concieved as a prank intended to lampoon actual conspiratorial groups (I.e. Nasa faked the moon landing, JFK was a mob hit etc)
But through some combination of timing, convimcing execution, and media interest coincidentally developing in the same direction resulted in the supreme irony of an unserious sham cult spawning an unironic counterpart community which rapidly outgrew and ultimately succeeded it.
We used to forcibly quarantine people in their homes at gunpoint for measles. Smallpox? Even crazier.
Hell, we didn’t even shut down international travel until well after it was plainly obvious it had spread well past the point it would matter.
They intuit that some parasitic entity or entities has latched on to Science and is co-opting it for it's own gain to achieve it's own purposes which run counter to the interests of the people.
The heavy handed Covid response and censorship is a prime example of that.
The whole system has been corrupted and therefore it is not possible to have a de-facto assumption of good faith of the actors.