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Comment by spookthesunset | Hacker News Reader

Gee who could have predicted that shutting down the entire industrialized world for 1.5 years could result in some pretty nasty stuff happening. Remember, all of this second and third order effects have negative health consequences for everybody involved. Odds are incredibly good we will shorten the lives of many more people from the lockdowns and our panic fueled reaction than covid ever did.

Our reaction to covid will go down in history as the single worst public health / public policy fuck-up ever. We drove the train right off the track in a fit of media and politically fueled hysteria. Any dissent, criticism or objections were ridiculed, ostracized, bullied, shamed and censored. It's been nothing but the worst of human behaviour on display since March of 2020. We will be paying the price for a very long time.

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Do you have any stats or research to back up your analysis or is this just a gut feeling?

If we are doing gut feelings, I have to say I also saw the worst of humanity. I saw a political party politicize masks. This put my family in danger for political gain and I don’t see myself forgetting that anytime soon.

As to specifics, what would you have done differently?

You mean the US surgeon general Jerome Adams announcing by twitter that masks weren't effective, and later deleting [0]?

0.https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/29/health/face-masks-coronavirus...

Here is my take on masks. Of course they work, to varying degrees. I don’t need a government official to tell me that.

My take on official gov statements is that they cannot always be taken a face value. It would be naive to do so, especially in a time of crisis. If I recall correctly, this was at a time when masks were in very short supply and I took this as misinformation to keep medical providers from having to re-use masks.

However, there were all kinds of missteps during the pandemic and keeping the public “calm” seemed to be a major priority for the previous administration.[0] This could have been part of that. But I readily admit that this is all speculation.

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/17/white-house-abandoned-plan-t...

> this was at a time when masks were in very short supply and I took this as misinformation to keep medical providers from having to re-use masks.

Which has to be one of the biggest ever public health blunders. Now people are thinking “what are they lying about now?” They have severely harmed their credibility in everything now and made it 1000X harder to combat misinformation. No one can read and understand enough data about everything to avoid having to rely on experts a lot and our public health experts either made a huge PR blunder by mouthing off publicly when they didn’t have enough data or they’re liars about their initial opposition to masks or their subsequent support for them. Neither scenario helps the public to believe them about vaccines etc. In a civilized age they would all resign in disgrace.

It's one thing to make a mistake, but the stupid thing is to refuse to change even after you know it's a mistake.

“shutting down the entire industrialized world for 1.5 years” is a bit of an exaggeration?

Wearing a mask was soo tough lol. Now getting a shot is the next idiotic discussion. If everybody just got it, this would be like a mild flu and nobody would care. It’s funny how wrong the anti-mask etc people were. Possibly wrong 3-5 times on big issues throughout the past 1.5 years.

I'm pretty sure shutting down the economy was the goal, not a side effect. Covid was just a pretext.

Why would anyone want to do that?

To orchestrate another wealth transfer

'Another'? When was the most recent one?

2008 financial crisis, presumably.

Comments like these always make me roll my eyes. There's no grand conspiracy to shut down the world in order to help the rich get richer. Sure, that may be an unintended effect, but to suggest that was the goal all along is ridiculous.

To prevent another, scarier 2008 in a relatively humane way.

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