The real fear was that there would be a run on masks by the public, making them unavailable for hospital use. Also, at the time, there wasn't clear evidence of the effectiveness of masks by the public (although there was some evidence with earlier respiratory infections that mask use by the public is beneficial).
But instead of just saying that, the message from the vast majority of public health officials (and media types like Sanjay Gupta) was that "masks don't work for the public". It's not hard to go back to March 2020 and find lots of videos to this effect. This all spectacularly backfired a couple months later when health officials told everyone to wear masks.
And what made me slightly angry was that many officials tried to say something like "well, we have new data now". Which was somewhat true, but also conveniently swept over the fact that there was never data that said "masks don't work for the public", but health officials didn't have a problem saying that in public earlier.
People will listen to a reasonable, nuanced discussion. They won't listen to someone who hates them.
The answer to masks being uncomfortable is to have a reasonable discussion about when masks are really necessary and which masks are good (N95), meh (surgical), or useless (cloth) and help people find more comfortable masks, take more breaks, etc. Not the Reddit way of putting up videos on the front page of their 109 year old grandma wearing a cloth mask over her oxygen mask for 5 seconds and mocking anyone who grumbles about how wearing a mask for an entire 12-hour factory shift is uncomfortable is a weak loser... missing the fact that they grumble because they're actually wearing a mask.
If we focused more on helping people comply with rules and explaining things calmly and rationally and being clear about what we do and don't know and took much softer approaches, this wouldn't be so bad.
There are still people willing to listen out there, though. But not a lot of people are interested in actually talking.
humility is missing in your thrust to convince others of your correctness.
If I was running things, I would tell people that they have no power to punish anyone whatsoever and design the Covid rules with that in mind, making them focused entirely on helping people instead of controlling them.
to be fair, i agree that we should avoid punishing people for making different risk calculations, and resultant choices, because as a population, it's advantageous to have a variety of strategies employed simultaneously to any potential catastrophe. folks who are trying to coerce a singular "right" approach are literally wrong in their meta-approach.
however, the phrasing of your initial comment fails to recognize that a range of responses could be entirely valid, and suggests 'helping' people find the one right and true way. the better phrasing and intention is to admit that many approaches can simultaneously be valuable, and focus less on being right. being humble is recognizing that no one of us (or even a group) ever has perfect and complete information, and that we should act compassionately and acceptingly towards our fellow humans in light of this truth.
yes, we should share information with each other, but we should also accept that people will actualize that information differently because we're each touching different parts of the elephant[0] and are acting in accordance with our different senses.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant
How effective do you believe your approach would be? An unenforceable rule is merely a suggestion, and one which relies on responsible and informed decision-making to be followed.
If anything, the current state of affairs shows that ignorance and irresponsible behavior runs rampant, and we're seeing reckless idiots putting everyone around them at risk.
I suspect that depends on what someone means by the word "help."
N-95 masks have filters that (IIUC) are fine enough to block most SARS-Cov2 containing droplets from being inhaled.
Other masks do not have such filters.
However, that's not the rationale for encouraging widespread masking. Since many COVID infections are asymptomatic and transmission is certainly possible for those who are pre-symptomatic, the rationale is that non-N95 masks don't protect the wearer, but rather those around the wearer, as they trap some (more or less, depending on the materials in such a mask) SARS-Cov2 containing droplets, making an infected person less likely to infect others.
So, if by "help" someone means "this will help keep me from being infected by others," then that argument is correct.
However, if by "help" someone means "this will help keep me from infecting others, and with widespread use of masking, help others from infecting me" then that argument is specious.
You should really cite something to back up your claim that non-N95 masks don't help.
Is this actually true in the today's world of social media and 24x7 news cycle? I honestly can't think of anywhere (of any popularity) that still engages in nuanced discussion. Probably because people don't tune in.
The victim argument is standard rhetoric, but they can choose to do what they want. For one thing, I haven't seen much hate at all. Could you give examples of it on a significant scale? Some leaders expressing hate? Mostly, I see resignation.
The Herman Cain Award focuses mainly on reporting cases of individuals who are eggregiously contrarian and even hostile in their self-righteous militance opposing basic health and safety measures who end up falling victims of their own actions.
If anything, the subreddit documents causes and effects, and showcases the expected risks and consequences of this sort of attitude.
Actually there was plenty of data saying that masks don't work for the public.
For example, https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
And there are many others - that was just an easy one I found today. Some similar studies even showed an increase in flu transmission among the subject population wearing masks.
There were plenty of articles (such as the Tufekci one you cite) at the time explaining that normal folks don't know proper mask discipline, such as how to fit masks and avoid fomite transmission.
In this situation with limited supply it makes sense to preserve masks for skilled people who are facing numerous likely transmission sources, especially on the front line of providing health care.
The new data was that fomite transmission is not a strong vector for COVID19, that even modest mask technology is a good source transmission interrupter, and that the contagion window is well in advance of active symptoms.
This new data meant that the flu based studies were not representative.
In short, they could have pretended that the public is not stupid and just told the damn truth.
Claiming the masks are useless to the public but critical for healthcare workers made no sense. I mean, I think most people would accept that putting just about anything in front of your gaping virus-spewing face holes would have some benefit. Health agencies have pushed for things like the vampire cough/sneeze for ages to reduce the spread of all kinds of things, although the crook of your elbow is hardly a panacea.
I think either way we'd have ended up with a bunch of dumb or selfish people who refused to put a mask on, and there were already plenty of people distrustful of the CDC and WHO but they sure didn't do themselves any favors.
In fact, eventually they did something like this. The Surgeon General of the United States produced a video showing how one could make a quick-and-dirty mask with a t-shirt and rubber bands... dated April 4 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PI1GxNjAjlw
But err on the side of caution for a new form of virus isn't that hard to convey. It was the hobby enforcers of rules that did the most damage in my opinion, with badly sourced data. People should focus to adjust their own behavior accordingly instead of that of others.
If supply for masks was critical, this should be communicated as well. There would be a run on masks, but it shouldn't be a problem to set aside contingency supplies for hospitals. This is what they should have focused on.
... (a year of arguing and studies ensues while a pandemic of a new and not-well-understood virus spreads out of control) ...
> The new data was that ... even modest mask technology is a good source transmission interrupter, and that the contagion window is well in advance of active symptoms.
A wasted year and all that rigamarole just to figure out what Asian societies have known for decades, and common sense untainted by politics should easily conclude. Masks are a cheap and easy way of reducing airborne transmission.
The US and other Western countries that botched this really need to learn a few things:
- how to learn from other societies that have more recent experience with certain things like airbone pandemics than we do.
- how to do better cost-risk-benefit analysis. Masks are an extremely cheap, easy and minimally invasive means of mitigating potentially serious and vastly more costly systemic bio-risks.
This NIH attitude, and notion that we have to spend a year doing studies to figure out what a little back-of-the-napkin risk analysis shows and other societies already know from first-hand experience, is absurd.
"we have to spend a year doing studies to figure out what a little back-of-the-napkin risk analysis shows"
Both risk analysis and the studies proved wrong. The real world data is the ground truth here, because that's what the policies were designed to affect.
San Francisco issued a mask mandate on April 17, 2020.
So that delay was mid February to mid April.
So help me out here since you say it three times.
Where is that "wasted year"?
I don't think it's a huge stretch to say that having some conflicting data on the effectiveness of masks to reduce the spread of flu is not the same as having data on the effectiveness of those same masks to reduce the spread of a novel virus.
Throw in distinctions between types of masks, estimates for how well people will use/handle/fit them, and things get very complicated very quickly. Distinctions like that can seem like splitting hairs, but they matter and it makes messaging difficult. I totally get why they wanted to keep supplies for healthcare workers and how hard it would be educate everyone on all the factors, but they really could have handled it better and been more honest.
https://www.ijidonline.com/article/S1201-9712(08)01008-4/ful...
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/epidemiology-and-inf...
I am not saying what the right messaging move was/would have been. But all I do know is that no matter what, masks were going to get run on. I also know that, at least from an American perspective, no matter what the government told people to do, there was going to be a contingent of people that would do the exact opposite because we are a stubborn and distrustful people.
Right, but you have to start somewhere. The reason we are distrustful is because past experience with the US government has taught us to be distrustful. The first time the US government applies this idea to trust the people and give truthful information, it probably won't go super well. People will still doubt and mistrust. Trust is built over time, not just by saying "yeah, we've been lying forever now, but trust us, we're going to start telling the truth now".
The answer shouldn't be "well, the people aren't going to trust us anyway, so we shouldn't bother being truthful". That's just self-fulfilling the lack of trust, and perpetuates the problem.
Someone else pointed out that telling the truth can also allow you to use social pressure to get what you want. As you point out, telling people "masks don't work so don't bother hoarding them" didn't work; people still hoarded them and there was a shortage. And people who hoarded early could later put on a smug grin and say, "yeah, I knew what was going on from the start and did the right thing". If the government had instead said "masks can help, but we need to reserve the supply for hospitals and first responders", then you create social stigma around hoarding masks. It won't stop hoarding 100%, but it can help. At least you probably won't be worse off than the shortages we ended up having anyway, and, meanwhile, you've taken a step that increases trust. And you paint the hoarders as anti-social and selfish.
The messaging was crude, obvious, untrue, and ultimately self-defeating. It only takes a small minority of people to buy up everything, especially small, cheap, lightweight objects sold in quantity packaging.
That only works in a society with a certain baseline of trust, accountability, and empathy. If you remember 2019, things were already hyper-partisan, a large minority of the population was in a cult of disinformation, and the media was reeling from the shift away from print and moving towards a clickbaiting 24-hour news cycle.
Now think of masks; a non-household item that a small percentage of households carried. Even if people were reasonable and only bought an amount to cover their needs, that would have introduced hundreds of millions of new buyers for that item.
Americans are this way because the government continually gives them a reason to. The lying through the pandemic, the Iraq war, it just goes on.
This is why I don't know what the right answer is on the messaging. The US government, and nearly every government, has a history of lying to people. The other side of the coin though is that during those early months, and well into lock down, everything was up in the air about the virus, how it transmitted, and how to fight it. If I was in the position of how to convey that information to people, in the most honest way possible, I don't know if I would have done a better job (or fucked it up even more).
It's built into the American ethos and the documents founding the republic itself. Having lived in multiple countries it's clear the US government doesn't necessarily lie more than others (often less!), it's just that American start with the premise "The government is probably lying to me".
Some proportion of those people are disaster preppers that bought a ton of masks, just like the toilet paper people.
* Solvents-- IPA, methylated spirits etc.
* Nitrile/Latex Gloves
* Respirators (the kind used for painting)
To add to this, there were several mask runs in late 2019 and early 2020 in China, HK, Taiwan etc. People were buying out entire inventories of masks to sell online.
By the time the pandemic became a problem in the US, there was already a global PPE shortage, and people were doing the same thing that happened in other countries, where they'd buy up supplies of PPE just so they could sell it for profit online.
This one small thing lost the public's trust?
Not the fact that cops used to pull me over for no reason because I lived in a poor neighborhood? Not the fact that my family member's lives were ruined because of tiny drug-related infractions? Not the fact that we went on a pointless 20+ year war for no reason (just the one within my lifetime)? Really. Wearing a mask is the breaking point here?
How easy are people's lives? They have everything going for them except they have to wear a mask so THEN they lose faith in the system.
Fucking spare me.
If our entire goal was to erode the trust of the American people in science and medicine we couldn't have done a better job. We lost the game before the pandemic and haven't done a thing to turn that around. The sackler family pays a fraction of their profits and get immunity forever. Stella Immanuel still has a medical license. Corporations continue to put profit over human lives and can poison whole populations with no risk of prison time. It doesn't bode well for the future.
>Americans were skeptical about the "lone gunman" theory almost immediately after Kennedy was killed. In a poll conducted Nov. 22-27, 1963, Gallup found that 29% of Americans believed one man was responsible for the shooting and 52% believed others were involved in a conspiracy. A majority of Americans have maintained that "others were involved" in the shooting each time Gallup has asked this question over the past 50 years, except December 1966, when exactly half of Americans said someone in addition to Oswald was responsible.
It’s just such a great virtue signal that people keep clinging to it.
For me, I had issues with 3M products, but once I switched to Honeywell, I haven't had any issues. In addition to being more comfortable, I have an easier time getting a better seal with Honeywell masks. I think this is in part due to the fact that they have more substantial gaskets.
Higher end masks also tend to work better for me. If you are having trouble with disposable N95 masks, look into N99 or P100 masks or upgrading to a silicone mask. I personally find the Honeywell RU8800 to be very comfortable and I don't have any issues wearing it even on long hikes. This is especially useful when it is smoky.
Another benefit of silicone masks is that it is trivial to test the seal with your face. Poor fit is a common problem with disposable masks and is often cited as a reason why they are ineffective for normal people. Based on my anecdotal experience, roughly 90% of the people I have seen wearing disposable particulate masks in public are obviously wearing them incorrectly. It seems like it would be worth reading the instructions when your safety is on the line.
Personally I've found n95 mask's with head straps more comfortable than cloth masks with ear straps.
The mask guidance made perfect sense in this light. For the overall benefit of the society, masks were prioritized for health care professionals rather than the general public, in the face of limited supply. But of course wearing a mask improves your individual survivability so you should wear one even if public health officials tell you not to.
The same thing is currently happening with booster (third) shots. For the pandemic to ease worldwide, it is deemed more important to send vaccines to poorer countries with low vaccination rates rather than using them as third shots in rich countries. But if you want to maximize your own chances, of course you should get a third shot.
Public health officials deal with the whole population. You deal with a population size of one. It's a net win for them if their health policy reduced disease by a large proportion in one half of a population but increased it slightly in a different half. It's game over for you if you happen to be on the wrong side.
Importantly, I am NOT arguing that health officials should have changed their guidance in early 2020, I'm arguing they should have changed their messaging. "It's vital that people don't go out and buy masks because if you do hospitals will run out of masks and then we're all screwed" is very different from "masks worn by the public don't work".
No, that wasn't the real fear.
> But instead of just saying that, the message from the vast majority of public health officials (and media types like Sanjay Gupta) was that "masks don't work for the public". It's not hard to go back to March 2020 and find lots of videos to this effect.
This was the real fear. They were telling you then what they really believed. (And there was plenty of evidence supporting it.) The statements now to the effect that they were lying all along for the greater good reflect the idea that it's better to be perceived as an evil genius than as a buffoon. They do not reflect reality.
Compare https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/14/a-failure-but-not-of-p... :
> A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog post on face masks. It reviewed the evidence and found that they probably helped prevent the spread of disease. Then it asked: how did the WHO, CDC, etc get this so wrong?
> I went into it thinking they’d lied to us, hoping to prevent hoarders from buying up so many masks that there weren’t enough for health workers. Turns out that’s not true. The CDC has been singing the same tune for the past ten years. Swine flu, don’t wear masks. SARS, don’t wear masks. They’ve been really consistent on this point.
The medical professional community still continues to blunder here!
Exhibit A:
“Ah! Its affecting young people!”
Like the 1918 flu?
“What no, people in their 50s and 60s!”
The public doesnt call this young by any colloquial definition, so why would you say that the one time the public needs communication from you?
Exhibit B:
“Let’s reduce potential strain on ICUs!”
yeah sure I’ll stay home for that and put dating on hold during the prime of my life for a bit
“Let’s make sure nobody gets COVID ever!”
Ehhhhhh …. and now mitigation detractors all have ammunition to ignore every mitigation measure because it doesnt work 100%
I don't know anyone who defended that at the time or now. On the other hand, I don't know anyone who thought masks wouldn't work well either. Everyone I knew ignored that.
That's a pretty poor example since people had already decided covid wasn't even as dangerous as the flu.
The recipient of the highest civilian award in the US said this to his 15 million audience.
>"It looks like the coronavirus is being weaponized as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump," Limbaugh said Feb. 24 on his radio show. "Now, I want to tell you the truth about the coronavirus … I’m dead right on this. The coronavirus is the common cold, folks."
>"The drive-by media hype up this thing as a pandemic," Limbaugh continued.
Most popular cable channel said this about Covid while Covid was raging in Wuhan and Italy:
Your citing quotes from the beginning of the pandemic. Hah, ever noticed how situations evolve and grow? Dubya didn't react when he heard about a plane hitting the first WTC tower because like everyone else, his aides probably evaluated it as an accident and not the start of an attack.
And sure, Limbaugh got awarded "the highest civilian award", but from a president who's a scumbag to a lot of other human beings. Biden also has this award, in your reality is Biden as honourable as Limbaugh? Or maybe Biden's medal wasn't worthy of him because it was "scumbag" Obama who awarded it to him?
Uhh, I am saying the opposite. I am just pointing out the misinformation spread which has nothing to do with CDC mask advice.
"Then there is the infamous mask issue. Epidemiologists have taken a lot of heat on this question in particular. Until well into March 2020, I was skeptical about the benefit of everyone wearing face masks. That skepticism was based on previous scientific research as well as hypotheses about how covid was transmitted that turned out to be wrong. Mask-wearing has been a common practice in Asia for decades, to protect against air pollution and to prevent transmitting infection to others when sick. Mask-wearing for protection against catching an infection became widespread in Asia following the 2003 SARS outbreak, but scientific evidence on the effectiveness of this strategy was limited.
"Before the coronavirus pandemic, most research on face masks for respiratory diseases came from two types of studies: clinical settings with very sick patients, and community settings during normal flu seasons. In clinical settings, it was clear that well-fitting, high-quality face masks, such as the N95 variety, were important protective equipment for doctors and nurses against viruses that can be transmitted via droplets or smaller aerosol particles. But these studies also suggested careful training was required to ensure that masks didn’t get contaminated when surface transmission was possible, as is the case with SARS. Community-level evidence about mask-wearing was much less compelling. Most studies showed little to no benefit to mask-wearing in the case of the flu, for instance. Studies that have suggested a benefit of mask-wearing were generally those in which people with symptoms wore masks — so that was the advice I embraced for the coronavirus, too.
"I also, like many other epidemiologists, overestimated how readily the novel coronavirus would spread on surfaces — and this affected our view of masks. Early data showed that, like SARS, the coronavirus could persist on surfaces for hours to days, and so I was initially concerned that face masks, especially ill-fitting, homemade or carelessly worn coverings could become contaminated with transmissible virus. In fact, I worried that this might mean wearing face masks could be worse than not wearing them. This was wrong. Surface transmission, it emerged, is not that big a problem for covid, but transmission through air via aerosols is a big source of transmission. And so it turns out that face masks do work in this case.
"I changed my mind on masks in March 2020, as testing capacity increased and it became clear how common asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic infection were (since aerosols were the likely vector). I wish that I and others had caught on sooner — and better testing early on might have caused an earlier revision of views — but there was no bad faith involved."
"I’m an epidemiologist. Here’s what I got wrong about covid."(https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/04/20/epidemiolo...)
When asked do masks stop the spread of the virus, the answer is factually no, and people then go and spread that about like masks do nothing. People don't want to listen to "No, masks don't stop the spread entirely but provide an x% reduction in airborne particles" because they've already zoned out
The CDC never really said that "masks don't work for public" [0]. Some other health officials and media did. Now, if you relied on the CDC for information everything would be more or less fine. The two things that make this situation worse is - (1) An ever-changing landscape of information and (2) "Whom to listen to?" problem. We are not good at (1) itself, because we are terrible at updating our priors. Then, you throw in (2) in the mix and there's mass confusion.
Zeynep Tufkeci can say that "oh tell the truth" but there's no guarantee that her version of communication would play better than what we have.
https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volum...
From a now-deleted tweet from February 29 2020
https://web.archive.org/web/20200229123317/https://twitter.c...
> @Surgeon_General
> Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS!
> They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!
From a now-deleted webpage
https://web.archive.org/web/20200229164715/https://www.cdc.g...
> CDC does not recommend that people who are well wear a facemask to protect themselves from respiratory diseases, including COVID-19.
The techno-utopia is awesome.
If you're treating the government as a solitary nebulous entity, then accountability goes out the window. It's important to keep the individuals that make up the government accountable and responsible, as President Biden has with Jerome Adams, who is no longer the Surgeon General. Accountability is also why Fauci still serves as the NIAID Director of the NIH.
> Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS! They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus
The CDC's main page had much more nuanced advice (as of late March 2020) [1]:
> Wear a facemask if you are sick... If you are NOT sick: You do not need to wear a facemask unless you are caring for someone who is sick (and they are not able to wear a facemask). Facemasks may be in short supply and they should be saved for caregivers.
I agree that the distrust that we are currently seeing has many different sources. It is hard to have consistency when many different organizations are communicating their own messages based on different views of the problem. Even if you could fix that messaging, it would not have addressed the issue of deliberate disinformation.
However, statements like that tweet from the Surgeon General were indefensible based on evidence and clearly damaging to public discourse. Not to mention being nonsense: why would we prioritize masks for health care providers if they weren't effective?
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20200302023223/https://twitter.c... [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200325234207/https://www.cdc.g...
And in hindsight, we now know that Covid is most contagious just as symptoms first appear.
Ironically the run on masks had begun months earlier. I snagged a box of N95 construction masks in late Jan 2020, and they were totally gone everywhere by early Feb
But seems securing masks for hospital use - compulsory acquisition or paying above market rates - would be a better solution.
Simon says we don’t have masks, so science finds masks useless.
Simon says wear masks, so science finds masks important.
It says “We’ll lie to your face just for the lols”. Also, my government inoculated AIDS to 10,000 patients in 1985 and took 6 years to admit it. This science, is not science. It’s very diligently pruned for political profit, and it works.
So “I’ll take my vaccine in 6 years” is a reasonable answer in a former communist state.
I just cannot wrap my head around being so upset that a public official lied you're willing to sever friendships, familial ties, and sacrifice your career because you refuse to follow sane and frankly manageable guidelines to prevent the spread of COVID-19. It's not even that the messaging is currently or has been conflicting now. It's like carrying a grudge for years over the smallest of infractions. Are people so bored, they have nothing going on other than to get in a big tizzy about having to wear a mask?
My life has been far more impacted by university security towing my car back when I was 19 and me using a credit card to get it back. Leaving me with debt I couldn't afford for the next year or so. I clearly remember my parents, and all adults in my life, telling me to "suck it up" when I complained how unfair it was. I believe I was far more justified using the parking space at a place I paid 6 grand a semester to attend than any of those adults are now to enter private property for free without wearing a mask.
Why is it only during a global pandemic, with millions of lives on the line, do these same people all of a sudden care about the tiniest bits of hypocrisy and unfairness of our society? Of all the things to be upset about, they choose the one thing that has been proven since mid-2020 to SAVE lives? I literally cannot wrap my head around it. Just wear the fucking mask! Not wearing a mask is such a weird hill to die on...
As a point of order we can't treat "manageable guidelines" as a monolith as there have been a ton of "guidelines" and rules imposed over the last three years that were dubious, farcical, or overly intrusive. Like supermarkets cordoning off the greeting card aisle because social gatherings like parties were prohibited. Or gyms being told not to play music above a certain BPM because more intense exercise could enable Covid to spread more easily [1]. Going to the beach alone can get you arrested, but standing in a crowded Costco is acceptable. And so on. There's a lot more to the resentment and outrage than people simply being upset at the inconvenience of wearing a mask.
Plenty of small business owners and restaurateurs had their livelihoods destroyed because the government went back and forth on restrictions and enforcement.
[1] South Korea to ban music over 120bpm in gyms, in response to Covid spike : www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20210712000804
My counter-argument is that, at the time, given our resources and our understanding we had to take wide scale measures and a lot of compromises were made and negotiations happened between people, institutions, governments, etc. so that we wouldn't just shut down everything. I believe most of the time these oddities and weirdness are consequences of those compromises and it's still the case.
Sometimes it's easy to frame things like that and sometimes it's not (especially when the measures is only put in place for 3 days or a week. Eg when they asked people to sit alone next to train windows, rather than all next to each other or when they cordoned off books in supermarkets so bookstores that just reopened could have clients). I don't know how far off the mark I am.
The media's addiction to "scare articles" as well as the government's willingness to promote noble lies puts a lot of weight towards covid risk being heavily propagandized. On top of that, complying with government orders simply because you're afraid is a dangerous way to live.
The scariest thing is how quickly propaganda can convince people others are not worth of life. The cheering of unvaccinated covid deaths is abhorrent.
I like to study history and I recall an interview with a German who lived during the holocaust. He was asked if he thought the holocaust could ever happen in the US and replied that it could happen anywhere, it's just it wouldn't necessarily happen the same way as it did in Germany. If it ever happened in the US, it would be its own unique flavor of holocaust. It was pretty chilling. People don't even realize the moral road they are traveling when they praise deaths for political "gotchas"; I guess that's what makes going down that road so easy.
> we take the average population totals over the relevant periods for each population (March 1, 2020-Aug. 9, 2021 for the unvaccinated population and Dec. 15, 2020,-Aug. 9, 2021, for the vaccinated population). The adjusted population of vaccinated people comes to 83 million and 295 million for the [un]vaccinated population
330 million Americans, less 83 million vaccinated Americans equals 247 million unvaccinated people, not 295 million.
They are also deliberately ignoring CDC estimates.
> CDC epidemiologists estimate that the actual number of hospitalizations may be 1.8 times higher than the reported number.
The rage over masks (and things like "CRT") is being intentionally stoked to win elections. The plan is to make it an us vs them issue. Again, it's intentional and cynical.
If you stoke rage about mask wearing (and vaccines) you can position yourself as also being a valiant anti-mask/anti-vax candidate and win elections on this issue.
Even this argument ignores nuance.
The vaccines in these schedules are mandated for 2 reasons
1. The diseases they treat directly impact their population in a major way in large numbers
2. Immunization not only prevents the negatives impacts of 1, but also prevent the spread.
As an exmaple for #2. Take Pertussis and TDAP. Even adults that have children will often get a booster. The reasoning is sound there, you reduce the chance of transmitting pertussis to an infant. This is especially true for premature babies that may not have had the chance to get the anitbodies from the mother, assuming she got a booster during pregnancy.
As of right now. COVID-19 has a pretty small impact on children directly ( hospitalization rates at their peak were like 1.9 per 100k for under 18 [2]) . And even nationally its much smaller than any of the diseases used to compare it to (like Measles which has pretty severe complications in like 30% of those that contracted it, regardless of age [1])
AND the vaccine isnt particularly proven to reduce spread [3]. To add insult to injury, CDC specifically stopped even recording breakthrough infection rates unless they were severe as of May 1, 2021.
So it would make sense to question a vaccination mandate for those under 18...
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/pubs/pinkbook/meas.html [2] https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/COVIDNet/COVID19_3.html [3] https://context-cdn.washingtonpost.com/notes/prod/default/do....
Philosophically speaking, It's one thing for the government to say you must be vaccinated to attend public school. It's quite another thing for them to say you must be vaccinated to enter a privately-owned gym.
I'm trying to stoke awareness of how oxygen is known to be toxic, how ventilation is known to be harmful, and how patients' oxygen levels can be improved by using the antidote to oxygen toxicity that has been mostly forgotten by Science™ [0]. Sometimes patients benefit from a little extra oxygen, but it's a very fine line between helpful and too much.
Would I win an election? Maybe an anti-mask/anti-vax candidate will just adopt my term, and point out the harm being done: Medical Hyperventilation causes the deterioration supposedly being treated.
[0] https://www.taxiwars.org/2021/06/folly-medical-hyperventilat...
Why doesn't everyone see things clearly for what they are. If its obviously 'the plan' .
It's rare, but some of us developed actual health issues from the mask itself, be it the reduced airflow or excess humidity from trapped exhalation. I didn't make the connection for myself until this spring when the mandate was lifted and my problems completely went away.
So, I have no intention of wearing masks ever again, regardless of mandates.
It's not just a grudge or being stubborn when people are asking you to actively hurt yourself.
The more you push, the more resistance there is. Doesn't matter how right you are and how wrong they are.
What covid highlighted like thermonuclear blast is how many people in general population are weird, naive, paranoid and basically... dumb, for the lack of better words. Also how internet amplifies the good and the bad equally.
200 years ago it would be just some random quiet weird dude that you don't have desire to talk to, today its a self-proclaimed patriot who thinks got the ultimate truth in contrary to general population. In their own echo chambers, this spirals into some pretty weird crowd mechanics.
There is no win of argument. There is no going back. In this regard we moved a bit back to the middle ages. And yes, politicians fucked up pretty big time, almost every single one.
You say “ The more you push, the more resistance there is. Doesn't matter how right you are and how wrong they are.”
That applies a ton to a bunch of ”pro mitigation” people out there who absolutely refuse to look at the data and science. Both strongly show that covid “badness” is very strongly correlated with age to the extent that the median age of death is higher than the average human life expectancy. Kids are almost completely unaffected by covid.
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/5/19-0994_article
I think the single study that supported cloth face coverings of no particular standard of performance was a mechanistic study that depends on the belief that respiratory illness spread is a direct function of the distance water droplets of an arbitrary threshold size travel from a simulated sneeze. Which, of course, is so obviously true it needs no supporting evidence.
Except it turned out to be false, the primary mode of transmission for sars-cov-2 is aerosols that can spread throughout a room (hence the need for good ventilation), not droplets that quickly fall to the ground (which was what social distancing and masking was predicated on).
Then you have some discussion of what "gain of function" means and ...
Well, the distrust the American public has in Science! has been earned over decades. The ever-changing food pyramid (according to the whims of whatever lobbying group), reefer madness scares leading cannibis to be Schedule I of all things (harmful, of no utility), cigarettes are healthy, we need to put these forever chemicals into your sofas so you don't catch on fire (oh well they don't work but we are leaving them in), thalidomide, diethylstilbesterol ...
And all of it has been sold with a pat and a don't worry your pretty head about it. COVID-19 is just another photon in the background radiation of Science We Tell You To Trust.
It's a shame, my BS was in a hard science, but when I run into skeptics, well, they've learned it and we've earned it.
If we split apart what the power structures say is "Science" and what Science actually is, we find the same dynamic as been since time immemorial. A priestly class with their guarded knowledge, meted out to us poor rubes in oversimplified commandments. A monk class whose esoteric studies are hidden from view, filed away in the annals of religious letters, Scientific journals, dissertations in libraries...the like.
What a time to live in though! The internet and YouTube and open access journals--Science has never been more accessible and understandable, animated, and illustrated, like it is now!
But we are in a wash of disinformation and misinformation and lying and rage, too.
Yes, the power structures are coming unglued. But Science is about truth. If only we could get our pants on and coax the crazies off the ledge.
> it has been sold with a pat and a don't worry your pretty head about it.
It's because we are treating grown adults like unruly children, dumbing everything down to the least common denominator, at times striking them with an iron rod, at times bending over backwards because Biology class was boring in highschool and the last thing we can afford in the age of distraction is to be boring!
No! We should make Science fun! If we are going to treat people like kids because they don't know Science then at least make it fun for them to catch back up! We should get people excited about discovering and learning new things again, the way a Carl Sagan could. Instead of threatening, we should be seducing and luring people into the terrifying prospect of finally figuring out how shit works.
I haven't seen any claims of incompetency, only of greed (to the lev of being evil) - is that an actual theme or did you just lump that in? It's a significant different in this context.
Of course, then you read about Diethylstillbesterol, and your faith in american public scientists is once again crushed.
The same problem happens in the tech world with two decades of "don't be evil" and messaging about the fantastic future, culminating in the Big Tech dystopia. The whole time it has been obvious they've been building a massive humanity-crushing surveillance/control machine. But up until recently, even on HN, the prevailing groupthink has been to unquestioningly drink the corporate kool aid. "It's hard to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it"
Technologists, scientists, etc themselves aren't the problem. The real problem is that our society encourages con men at every turn - from the individual rejection of boring experts (filled in by charismatic charlatans), to advertising (since everything is relative, fraud is fine), to the utter lack of punishment after a con blows up ("white collar crime"). We've put business expedience above honesty, essentially equating morality with profitability, with the result being that every institution has become hollow.
The only nice message for "please take a vaccine for something that won't kill you "is "please take it to stop it killing others". Given the USA seems to treat getting ill as a personal failing that will destroy your life and society turns it's back on you I'm not shocked that it would fall on deaf ears.
People I know that choose to not get vaccinated yet are largely resistant to the 'do it for others' push because we've been told that the vaccine is so effective that the 'others' should be safe anyway, unless they've chosen not to get the vaccine too. That leaves these people with a risk assessment based solely on their own health, age, etc.
The "for the good of society" messaging has been very unstable, even moreso than normal for public health messaging. It's been a mix of: the elderly will take the vaccines because they're at high risk and then life can go back to normal. Then it became all adults need to take it to build herd immunity (the concept that in 2020 was supposedly some sort of a-scientific conspiracy theory), then it became life won't go back to normal even with high vaccination rates, then passes were introduced that have an exception for testing i.e. they look like an attempt to stop spread of the virus, but then it became clear that vaccines don't stop the spread yet the passes remained the same or even had the testing exemption removed. Then it became something about hospital capacity but they started firing healthcare workers en-masse, then it became all teenagers need to take it to stop schools closing and/or to protect their mental health (UK justification), but schools closing is itself a government/union policy, now Pfizer is trialling vaccines for babies. So who knows what the justification for that will be. But, we can be sure they'll find one.
It's been less than a year and that's not even all the changes in vaccination messaging, just the ones related to why everyone has to take it even if they don't personally want to. I'm honestly not sure I even got them all. That's been combined with very strong messaging that anyone who doubts the perfect omniscient competence of the public health establishment are crazy loons who need to be purged from society, with some of the nastiest and most aggressive tactics deployed by western governments against their own peoples for a long time.
Really don't see a way to recover trust in vaccination after the rollercoaster messaging over this year. There's no consistency anywhere which strongly implies the collectivist goal is chosen, then scientific-sounding justifications are invented to justify it. By next week this comment will be out of date and more stuff will need to be added to the list.
In my personal life, I was deeply affected by the guidance that was given by authorities on 9/11 re: evacuation. The decision made by the police was pragmatic “we don’t know the downside of evacuation, which creates more problems as the situation at ground level is bad”, but killed more people than it saved. I have a close friend who is alive today because he chose to ignore the instructions, and has suffered from survivors guilt for not taking more people with him.
My way of handling that is that I get well acquainted with my buildings and evacuation procedures, and get myself and my people out if anything happens, and don’t care about the PA. It’s a selfish position that may create more hazards to others, but that’s my position.
I think antivax and hesitancy is a similar attempt to address risk, but with an impact that mostly affects others. The same industry that gave you opioid addiction gives you a vaccine. The vocal anti-everything people are able to pull on that string of doubt.
The Grenfell Tower fire in London is another example of this. If you look at the official timelines for the fire; when the fire was reported, when the fire spread, when the fire started killing people, one thing becomes clear: if building evacuation had begun when the fire was reported, then few if any would have died.
Official instructions for people living in London highrises was, and to my knowledge still is, to stay put. The building only had one staircase and everybody rushing for it might have caused a stampede... except that was bad advice even so. The fire was called in at 0:54 and isn't known to have spread to another unit until 1:15, more than twenty minutes later. If a building wide fire alarm had triggered an evacuation at 0:54, there would have been plenty of time to get virtually everybody out through that single staircase. The first reports of people trapped by smoke arrived by 1:30, nearly 40 minutes after the fire was called in; 40 minutes after the general evacuation could have begun. A general evacuation was not called until 2:47, nearly two hours after the fire was called in. Two hours too late.
My two take-aways from this: I have a lot more trust in American fire codes, particularly an appreciation for the importance of running general evacuation drills twice a year (the whole building clears out easily in five minutes.) And secondly, that I would never trust the British government's recommendations in an emergency; I would look out for myself instead and evacuate immediately, damn the consequences.
Given that the vaccine doesn't work to stop transmissions, I'd reckon this was just another way for the "experts" to further loose trust with the public.
Nothing is perfect, but vaccination reduces transmission significantly:
> Two studies from Israel, posted as preprints on 16 July, find that two doses of the [Pfizer] vaccine ... are 81% effective at preventing SARS-CoV-2 infections. And vaccinated people who do get infected are up to 78% less likely to spread the virus to household members than are unvaccinated people.
[0] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.09.28.21264260v...
Or the experts who say a natural response to covid is better and that they'll be sued for saying this publically after the reddit "I know science mob" is through with them?...
Frankly it was about capacity. If enough get critically I'll we go into triage and kill oaps by prioritising treatment. The fact the vaccine is linked with less severe symptoms proves it would statistically save lives. The crowd insisting children get vaxed are just hypochondriacs or those who fail to understand statistics. (Or those refusing to share vaccines with the at risk in foreign countries who will almost certainly die compared to have to take time off school...)
And if the vaccine actually was a complete vaccine at the same efficacy of wet vaccine from other diseases then transmission would drop and we wouldn't be talking about boosters, catching it after vaccination and frankly the estimates of total hospitalisation rates due to covid were about as reliable as a chocolate tea pot.
There is something specific to the US here.
Why should most of London be at a higher vaccination rates than Oxford or Cambridge city centres? There is clear hesitancy here of some small groups that live near universities and make up <5% of the population. (Source ONS UK stats)
Those institutions just spent years getting called deep state by half the country, systemically racist by the other half and in the pockets of entrenched and moneyed interests by both. Color me shocked that nobody trusts them.
The same people who were so happy a year and change ago to earn cheap internet virtue points trotting out tropes about about how the noble FAA has been neutered by Boeing and the revolving door are complaining that people don't trust the CDC. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
This is a feedback loop. The lower the expectations from these institutions (government, academia, etc.) the less they have to lose by behaving poorly and the more they will behave poorly. It will get worse until it gets so bad it starts getting better.
It is hard to overstate the damage.
It may be you have the causality backwards here.
I'd be a lot more willing to acknowledge the notion that the media and government are so terrible if the alternatives that most people have chosen to trust instead weren't so laughably bad sources in comparison.
This isn't people making an informed judgement about what sources to best trust, it's people being caught in a wave of bullshit and not actually thinking about anything. A lot of the comments here in this chain are just part of the wave.
Some never will. But it's been less than two years. If they started telling the truth, the real truth, the hard truths, and kept at it, consistently, for two or five or ten years, at least some of them would come around.
Oh, yeah, and if you stopped trying to manipulate and force them. Treat people like grown-ups, even when they disagree with you, even when you think they're wrong, even when you think the data proves they're wrong. In case you[1] haven't noticed, people aren't robots that will do what you want. They are fiercely independent, and they resent being forced into something, and they will fight you just because you're trying to force them, whether or not what you're trying to get them to do is a good thing.
[1] "You" here does not refer to you, gentle reader. It refers to the "you" in authority who think that they can force people to get vaccinated without it backfiring spectacularly.
One of the best takes I read on this argued that the public health institutions failed the US because they were so intent on forcing outcomes ("don't buy masks") rather than, as you said, simply saying hard truths and giving guidance.
People can tell when they're being talked down to, and there's been a lot of that since this started. I don't even think anyone's doing it maliciously, they're just really, really bad at PR.
Now, I think there are plenty of people who over-corrected for this and love endlessly nursing a grudge against Evil Big Government. That's on them.
- Have accumulated evidence of well quantified effectiveness, however small.
- Have no practical downsides, even speculative.
- Practically are not 100% enforceable, and therefore are not 100% adhered too. Technical means of enforcement (like beeping) are lame and easily bypassed, at least for now.
- Are related to a man-made activity of reasonably increased danger and, importantly, licensed. Someone may choose not to participate in such activity (driving), with relatively low downsides. Public health mandates are, effectively, an attempt to license the mere existence.
- Do not have religious symbolism attached to it. No one is ever yelled on by strangers for not having a seatbelt fastened. No one has a sticker on their facebook photo saying "proudly wearing my seatbelt".
- Seatbelts are "reversible", i.e. you don't wear them for life. You are not forced to have seatbelt mounting points implanted in your body. You cannot "un-vaccinate", though, if it ends up a bad decision.
I suspect it's more than just "the vaccine" (assuming "the" refers to the covid vaccines); it's an overall regression in the trust of health officials that will take decades to rebuild.
We had a pretty well built system of trust for health officials. Everything from a standard set of vaccines being a requirement at schools to CDC guidance being taken fairly seriously. There were folks who distrusted this system, but it was (at least I felt like it was) _fringe_.
The COVID response put all of these systems in the spotlight. It made a lot of people who previously trusted the system ask questions they never bothered to ask before. They may have asked these questions about how COVID was handled, but these are _general questions_ about the trustworthiness of the official health channels. The doubt that was sown isn't isolated to COVID. Regardless of where you personally stand on any of this, the way "official" channels handled the pandemic burned trust for a large portion of the population.
Fixing this is going to be a long road.
In a way, I agree a lot with the original article in that one of the best ways to flip the switch and rebuild trust is to lead with trust...of people's intentions and abilities.
This year has challenged me and I think so many of us in how to not only trust our institutions but our friends, neighbors, and family. I hope that we recognize it's ok to doubt and that most of us have no idea what we're doing, we're trying our best to get by, including those who frustrated me with their arguments to distrust others.
It may be a long road and yet, super clichély, it starts with some of us taking the first step.
I think it depends on the definition of rhetoric you are using, and how you've framed the argument. Not everyone who said "they're lying to you" also said "they're going to take everything from you"
I think the point of this article is that official health channels _were_ being dishonest - through their use of rhetoric, lying by omission, etc.
Saying official health channels were dishonest during COVID doesn't fit the common definition of "rhetoric."
Official health channels were playing a trolley game and didn't trust the public to be "in on the game." Without knowing the game, you don't know which set of tracks you are standing on. If you know a trolley is coming, and the official channels have demonstrated they are being dishonest, you should not trust them when they tell you "switch to this track, we promise we aren't sending any trolleys down it." At best, you are the lucky group being put on the life boats. At worse, you are the smaller of two statistics.
Some of the trolley games I saw early on, where I personally lost trust in these channels:
---
What they said: this isn't a pandemic.
The game: this is a pandemic, but we don't want to cause a rush on supplies.
If you weren't buying supplies in preparation for the imminent lockdown, you were standing on the wrong set of tracks and the official health channels lied to you.
---
What they said: the public doesn't need masks for this pandemic
The game: we need to make sure hospitals have masks
Masks worked to reduce the spread of COVID under specific circumstances. You should have been wearing one during the early days of the hockystick. If you didn't go out and buy a few early on, you were standing on the wrong set of tracks and the official health channels lied to you.
---
Trust is earned, not given. You don't earn my trust by sending trolleys barreling down the tracks at my friends and family.
> I think the point of this article is that official health channels _were_ being dishonest - through their use of rhetoric, lying by omission, etc.
What I meant by "they're lying to you and going to take everything from you" rhetoric was more about the litany of TV commercials and certain TV hosts that seem to pepper their sentences with very emotionally loaded words that imply evil intent or almost a malicious indifference to not just actions by the CDC but by so many institutions in society. I think I just feel so frustrated and overwhelmed by a constant hum I hear of "the world is out to get you."
That being said, I strongly agree with you that many parts of the US Federal Government, including parts of the CDC, communicated in a way that would lead people to distrust them, either through lies of omission, flat out lies, false certainty, or conflicted messaging across the people and organizations. I agree with the article in that, especially about the masks, many people in the government did not openly express the uncertainty of the situation and trust in the citizens to not only to be kind to each other but to have the ability to adapt and maintain solidarity throughout. I much more appreciated the way that, from what I remember, the New Zealand Prime Minister asked citizens for their help, instead of just telling them what to do or not do (I could be wrong on that, can't find the video at the moment).
---
I appreciate your point about the trolley games. In looking back, maybe one of the reasons I didn't lose a lot of trust in the CDC was because I had other sources around the world, namely a friend in Hong Kong, who was strongly warning me about it and giving me instructions on how to stay safe, from masking, to disrobing in the garage, to washing the grocery bags, etc. I recognize not everyone was as lucky and some people have suffered grave consequences as a result.
Regarding those examples, I think I remember the CDC communicating those differently. Perhaps I'm misremembering, I don't think I ever got the impression they never called it a pandemic. Maybe in Jan and Feb, but I think once the WHO declared it a pandemic and around the time the NBA and NCAA basketball closed, I'm pretty sure the CDC was also calling it a pandemic.
I just found this article[1] from Feb 26, 2020, entitled "Covid-19: Why won't the WHO officially declare a coronavirus pandemic?", in which it says:
> The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says the covid-19 virus already meets two of its three criteria for a pandemic: it spreads between people, and it kills.
> The third is that it has to spread worldwide. The virus is now in 38 countries – and counting – on nearly all continents, and those are just the ones we know about. How much more worldwide does it need to be?
It makes me wonder whether the CDC itself even has the authority to declare a pandemic, since it doesn't operate worldwide.
I also found an article[2] talking about how a meme was going around Facebook saying the CDC removed the word "pandemic" from its site, which I don't remember happening and which the article seems to strongly dispute with many links:
> We rate this claim as FALSE. The meme is wrong. The COVID-19 outbreak, though often described that way, is still a pandemic and has been since March 11.
Regarding the wearing of masks, yes, I mostly agree that even if these orgs didn't outright say "you don't need masks" (as the Surgeon General did in a tweet)[3], they still advised them only for people who were working in hospitals, taking care of people who were sick, or who were experiencing symptoms themselves. At least up until April 3, 2020, when the CDC recommended all people wear masks in public[4] (although Trump said he would not).
> What they said: the public doesn't need masks for this pandemic
> The game: we need to make sure hospitals have masks
So yes, I think from the end of February (maybe earlier) until beginning of April, the CDC didn't recommend wearing masks for the general public and those who were in the hard hit areas at those times could have been really hurt and/or killed as a result and I wish they had communicated more clearly and openly about this. I don't necessarily agree the game was explicitly "we know the masks work for the public and yet we are worried people will hoard them so we will lie to them and tell them only hospital workers need them." I think it was a concern they would run out of PPE for hospital workers and I also think they were unsure how well masks would help the general public, mostly because they didn't seem to know covid-19 transmitted as asymptomatically as it has.
---
I guess I just often see trust as a choice. Do I believe that they knew with strong certainty that a mask would help me and chose to lie to me because they didn't trust that I would not hoard them? Do I believe that they were quite scared about hospitals not having PPE, confident that the virus only spread through symptomatic infection, and unsure if masks would actually help people without symptoms?
At the end of the day, I'll almost never certainly know. I guess I just choose to believe the latter because it helps me rebuild trust in them and feel a little safer going forward.
[1]: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2235342-covid-19-why-wo...
[2]: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/09/18/fac...
[3]: https://web.archive.org/web/20200303020926/https://twitter.c...
[4]: https://www.fastcompany.com/90612519/seriously-people-stop-b...
Personally, the only trust I have is that a bunch of PhDs making vaccines care about solving a hard problem, so I got the vaccine. Not that I was ever worried about Covid itself, I had Covid during wave 1, had contact with a bunch of Covid positive people in wave 2 without contracting it again, etc...
https://coronavirus.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-PhDs-are-the-m...
Don't really care about the opinions of any random PhD (I know a few, most know their field and little else).
What are examples of this? Most of the U.S. was quite loose about lockdowns and mask requirements until their specific geography got hit. (For example, I summered in the Smoky Mountains June of 2020. Compared to New York, it was as if nothing had happened. The tone changed by December, after the South had its wave.)
To the extent there was belittling, it was around the promotion of treatments, a set of claims that has always been tightly regulated. (Also, the early, intentional miscommunications around the efficacy of N95 masks, which was horrible.)
For me, taking ivermectin and having it clear up my long covid almost instantly was great. Then weeks later witnessing this coordinated take down was a real turning point for me. Hard to trust anything now.
Ever tried to express even the smallest amount of criticism? People you know in real life will rip you apart and call you very horrible things.
The gaslighting and level of sanctimonious nonsense has been out of this world.
I’ve been called “dangerous” for merely posting screenshots of public health department data.
People are nuts!
Its why governments often abuse fear for political means. Its rocket fuel for propaganda.
>Ultraviolet light treatments introduced into the tracheas of five critically ill COVID-19 patients appeared to be safe and associated with a reduction in the respiratory load of SARS-CoV-2—the virus responsible for COVID-19—in all but one patient, according to a study conducted by Cedars-Sinai.
[0] https://www.cedars-sinai.org/newsroom/reduced-viral-loads-se...
The human mind is the most amazing phenomenon, simultaneously so amazingly capable yet so silly.
Don't let the Republicans off the hook. This should never have been a political issue, but Republican leaders at every level of government made this political and continue to politicize the pandemic.
> If the previous president had not politicized the response to COVID and had simply told his followers to do what the CDC says we would have many millions more people getting the vaccine (and for the matter, hundreds of thousands of people would still be alive).
You are accusing Trump of politicizing COVID while ignoring Andrew Cuomo, who at the beginning of the pandemic, used COVID, and the fact he was not Trump, for his political advantage, and the media gushed and was happy to give him more airtime than Trump, despite the fact it was obvious from the very beginning that New York State's handling was much worse than Trumps.
I think you can blame a lot on Trump and repubs with regards to protocols, level of concern, being actively anti-mask, etc but it takes a very selective memory to act like Trump wasn't 1000% on board with the vaccine.
Examples:
- Past vaccine disasters show why rushing a coronavirus vaccine now would be 'colossally stupid' By Jen Christensen, CNN Updated 11:34 AM EDT, Tue September 01, 2020
- CNN: The timetable for a coronavirus vaccine is 18 months. Experts say that's risky By Robert Kuznia Updated 2:14 PM EDT, Wed April 01, 2020
- Here's where we stand on getting a coronavirus vaccine By Holly Yan, CNN Updated 1:45 PM EDT, Mon June 08, 2020
- With big talk and hurled insults, the gloves come off in the race for the coronavirus vaccine By Elizabeth Cohen, CNN Senior Medical Correspondent Updated 7:00 AM EDT, Wed May 27, 2020
> (CNN)Ethicists and physicians are concerned that, amid a desire to put an end to the Covid-19 pandemic, developers of drugs and vaccines have become overly enthusiastic about the chances their products will work.
https://www.gov.ca.gov/2020/10/27/western-states-join-califo...
https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/03/politics/white-house-fda-coro...
https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-business-mark-meadow...
Moreover, Gov. Newsom's statements did not say that the vaccines were unsafe; he simply said that he was establishing an independent panel of scientists to evaluate the same evidence that the FDA evaluated. At no point did he say that people should seek ivermectim or hydroxychloroquin or that people should just rely on natural immunity.
Even if Newsom did the wrong thing here, it is a far cry from the Republicans, who have pushed the narrative that people should feel no specific obligation to get vaccinated because of "freedom." Trump has stood before crowds of vaccine-hesitant supporters and said, "Get the shot if you want to." Republican governors have echoed that sentiment. The results speak for themselves: Democrats have higher vaccination rates and Democrat-leaning areas have lower infection and lower hospitalization rates compared to Republicans.
> "Get the shot if you want to."
That is exactly what any sane person should say. Trump is pro-vaccine. He has unequivocally said he has had it and thinks it's a good idea. He's just anti-mandate. You can be pro-vaccine (as in you believe others should get it), while being against a mandate. This is insanity. The expectation that one must believe that the government ought to require a vaccine in order to not be anti-vax is quite the shift of goal posts.
you cannot censor someone you disagree with and expect them to be okay with it. you make them a slave to your narrative, and if they become slaves, they will push to make you a slave as well by whatever means necessary. see texas abortion bans. it’s what Gandhi said, “an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind” or a more modern version would be “that which we resist, persist”. this is common knowledge, when push comes to shove, the shoved push back. but the problem is, we end up in a loop, where both parties lose more and more of their civil liberties to PWN their perceived enemy. it’s odd that a lot of adults don’t understand this basic concept.
down vote all you want, it doesn’t make it any less true
No disrespect, just statistics [1].
Democrat:Republican ratio among is about 3:5 among the unvaccinated (and about 2:1 among the vaccinated).
>you make them a slave to your narrative, and if they become slaves, they will push to make you a slave as well by whatever means necessary
With all due respect, the example you gave of that is the behavior of the Republican party (abortion bans in Texas). I can provide many more examples from that side, and it seems to be disproportionately popular with people who support that party.
I don't see this happening with non-Republican supporters.
I also have an issue with "you make them a slave to your narrative". The enslaving effect of abortion bans is easily understood; but in which way was Texas "enslaved" by anything Biden's administration did to do that?
It really seems like you're drawing a false equivalence here, because as far as I can see, it's less eye-for-an-eye and more one of the parties going wild with poking eyes out, and getting hurt and offended by the "narrative" of anyone wearing glasses.
[1]https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/poll-finding/kff-co...
Is 3:1 big enough to say that there, perhaps, is a problem?
[1]https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/27/briefing/covid-red-states...
Respectfully, those people have been anti-vax for a while now (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/what-do-le...) and were part of the group that were unpersuadable.
But leftist anti-vaxers aren't a majority of current COVID-19 anti-vaxers. Those are politically motivated groups.
The profit-motive is at odds with the nobler pursuit of science and companies like Monsanto, Exxon, Dow Jones are on the wrong side of history. Unfortunately, distrust of “big pharma” mutates into a suspicion of science in general – and the medical sector in particular. There also isn’t a catchy phrase to describe “big holistic/wellness/organic”.
When people (regardless of political persuasion) give up trying to understand the complexities of reality and instead, look for easy answers that appeal to them on an emotional level, they leave themselves vulnerable to all sorts of wacky ideas (many of which can be traced back to good old-fashioned anti-Semitism like George Soros and a shadowy cabal controlling the world).
George Monbiot recently published an article about this issue from a European perspective: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/22/leftwi...
Article from last year from an Australian perspective: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/05/wellne...
Anecdotally, the liberals I know seem much more open to the science behind the COVID vaccine and I don't know any of them who didn't get the shot.
> the reason why blockchain (primary crypto) technology took last year was because of the censorship issues.
Not sure I understand your point here. I think crypto is being adopted for other reasons considering that the most popular cryptos are pseudo-anonymous anyway. Is it because you think crypto can't be shut down? That is a larger discussion and I would say Bitcoin and Ethereum are less likely to be shut down, at least by the US (since in general it seems like they aren't considered to be securities), but I don't think we can expect that of the entire crypto ecosystem.
In general though, I'm not sure what your main point is. Are you saying that both sides of US politicians are at fault here? If so, I don't disagree.
However, I also think the post you were responding to was pointing out that conservative politicians carry some of the blame here and have been pushing these agendas for their own power play, which I'd also agree with.
Anecdotally, most people only know others who view things very closely to themselves.
And what does “take this serious” actually mean? This is a values thing. A lot of people justifiably get upset that the government wants them to put their entire life on hold indefinitely for a virus they aren’t concerned with. Life isn’t meant to survive. It’s meant to be lived. Life is very short and so far a non trivial amount of it has been spent on this. There is way more to life than a myopic fixation on exactly one single illness.
Congress ≠ the Republican leadership ≠ at least one member of the Republican leadership, or GOP members aligned therewith, enough to overcome dis- or non-trust of the rest.
“Congress” as an institution usually polls really badly when compared to individual politicians in their own districts, because Congress consists of 535 members, 532 of which the person answering the poll had no say in electing and represent people with different interests living elsewhere, and (usually) approximately half of which represent the least preferred of the two major parties, who usually have the power to at least block legislation (thanks to either split between the partisan majority of the House and Senate or, failing that, the Senate filibuster.)
Trust of either party leadership, and particularly voter’s own members of Congress, tends to be much higher than that of Congress as a whole.
They want "their side" to be correct on this issue. They don't trust masks because masks were chosen by "the other side". They don't trust vaccines (despite being pushed by Operation Warp Speed by Mr. Trump) because someone else became president and started pushing vaccines.
It was historically liberals who hated vaccines, not conservatives. Conservatives were the ones making lynch mobs to forcibly vaccinate people (still an ugly history there but... seriously. The entire political world has flipped upside down).
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This isn't about the message. Its 100% about who trusts who, and who trusts what. This is a problem of ethos, not of facts or logos.
I've talked with them. Some of them believe as you say. Others don't. I think you're doing a lot of pigeonholing; the reality outside defies the neat discrete classification favored in internet conversations.
https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/20...
If people are only listening to sound bites, they aren't really listening. I think most people are staring to realize that politicians are self serving. The reality distortion field is finally starting to wear off.
When shit hits the fan, like COVID, people listen though, they listen very carefully. The current crop of politicians have forgotten how to be leaders though and go through their same ole sound-byte-and-finger-point-for-reelection trope they've grown accustomed to getting them reelected. I think it will cause a few waves in the next few elections, especially as COVID draws out over the next few years.
I'm leaning toward the latter. Most people I talk to think the right is actively pushing anti-vaxxing efforts despite top federal Congressional leadership explicitly encouraging vaccine procurement (and their former POTUS "inventing" the vaccine!).
Get back to me when Trump gets on stage at some rally and says, "Anyone who thinks the vaccine makes them magnetic is a moron." Republicans are free to call it a Trump vaccine if they are saying, "Real Patriots do what their country needs, and getting the Trump Vaccine is what we need Real Patriots to do." If that is what it would take to convince people to get the shot I have no objection. Unfortunately I am not seeing that happen; instead what I see are non-committal statements, shouts of "freedom!" and Republican governors preventing local leaders from imposing mask or vaccine mandates in their states.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/aug/22/donald-trump...
...which makes the politics behind it all the more unusual.
Partisan politics aren't a good idea when forming public health policies. Nor is fear. Especially the fear being used for political gain.
The most enlightening aspect of the whole COVID debacle was just how bad politicians are with science. Democrats criticised vaccines just for political reasons. Republicans did also.
As for censorship, that never leads anywhere good. If the public discourse cannot openly mock bad content because it has already been "disappeared" then we are not better off.
I'm just hoping this pandemic doesn't cause a meltdown into outright authoritarianism. We've already seen what nazism and communism did and I'd rather not have society try either of them again.
How would it do that? Government didn't asked people about either of those. And if anything the people responsible for Iraq war will benefit from antivaxers votes.
These same people are hyper-credulous of extremist wingnuts who manipulate them, just not centrist/progressive politicians and news media. They're only "skeptical" of the mainstream.
When it's climate-change on the table instead of COVID, they will behave the same, actively sabotaging necessary measures to protect the habitability of the Earth.
When your grandkids ask you why your generation doomed them, what will you tell them?
The downside is that it may cause other negative outcomes that are equally bad. There is a balance, as distrust can go too far.
But there's only so much they can do. Sowing distrust has proven to provide short-term self-benefit to many powerful interests (e.g. political factions, partisan media). Even if the health authorities have a perfect strategy, those interests will find an opening to subvert it (e.g. portraying initial confusion as lying).
Worry about government's inability to learn and improve based on past mistakes, also complacency. It's not hard to imagine 100 years from now, popular presidential guy spearheading the next great pandemic, calming the subjects down with the great medical advancements they had since today and how well prepared they are. Until nature, as it always does, disregards everything and does its own thing unchallenged.
This will be geographically--and, over time, economically--isolated.
Nearly 80% of American adults and over ¾ of eligible Americans have taken at least one dose of a Covid vaccine [1]. In the 65+ population, the figure is 95%. This simply isn't a big group of people, noisy as they may be. (Caveat: the group of people who are philosophically against vaccine mandates, but will get vaccinated anyway, is larger.)
[1] https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccinations_vacc-...
On the one hand, you might assume the rate of pandemics is proportional to the size of the human population; more people, more hosts for mutating viruses, greater odds of one mutating to a pandemic-causing disease. There have been roughly 400 billion person-years lived since the last pandemic, but given the larger populations, we'd expect to accumulate another 400 billion person-years by around 2070.
On the other hand, you might assume the rate of pandemics is proportional to the size of the animal populations humans interact with. More animals to breed the viruses, more interactions to pass along the next candidate pandemic. In this case, we might expect more than a century for the next pandemic, since the next century isn't expected to be nearly as kind to animal populations.
(Obviously the situation is more complicated than an either-or, and has many contributing factors, and is stochastic in any case.)
It is also worth remembering that for decades we have been carefully monitoring the spread of infectious diseases to prevent major pandemics from forming. There was no political controversy surrounding those efforts prior to COVID19, not in the US or anywhere else.
Downside for whom?
Speaking from Melbourne, Australia here, it certainly preserved life and (in the long run) the economy until vaccines came along (the rollout of which has been terribly bungled, but that's a different story.)
Much of what you describe as 'censoring' was focused on stopping the promotion of false cures eg Hydroxychloroquine, Ivermectin, H2O2 nebulization etc. This type of speech is already highly regulated, as most people lack the capacity to 'do their own research' regarding a drug's safety or efficacy.
HCQ, while it has been bourne out that it doesn't work, was a perfect example of miscommunication and "protective censorship" breeding public mistrust: the initial papers that cast doubt on HCQ were based on fabricated data. Based on this initial bit of false data and (a strong helping of the stupidest kind of politics) the media jumped head-first into censorship and ridicule. The clinical trials for HCQ were halted (ugh). And then they were shown to be basing that on fabricated data. It was an utter disaster:
https://www.science.org/content/article/two-elite-medical-jo...
Subsequently, while I don't personally believe that Ivermectin works, we're still waiting for clinical trials to complete. Let's keep a tighter grip on our horses, please.
Yes, "people are dying" is the favored rallying cry for any number of poorly considered, knee-jerk reactions to unfortunate events.
It's a big country. People die from lots of things every day, including a staggering number of people who die from overdoses from innocuous medications. A surprising number of these people poison themselves with supplements in the name of "healthy living" (leading to thousands of ED visits a year), but we don't seem to be eager to leap to censorship and ridicule for that problem:
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/harmful-effects-of-suppl...
We don't change the parameters of science because of a few cherry-picked examples, and we shouldn't engage in censorship of factual information because "people are dying".
Supplements are regulated in the US as foods, not drugs. If the makers of these supplements claim they treat, cure or diagnose any disease the claims can be censored.
>we shouldn't engage in censorship of factual information
Most of what was said about fake covid cures was not factual and/or exaggerated. The case could certainly be made that many of those promoting said solutions stood to benefit commercially and politically from spreading the false information (including many senior politicians).
It's not 'censorship of factual information' for a private service to choose to put health warnings against or delete fact free claims of HCQ as a miracle cure. Indeed "healthy living" supplement hucksters are ridiculed and kicked off platforms on a regular basis, even when some of the claims they make about "healthy living" have a tenuous connection to fact.
We don't change the parameters of science to pretend that people insisting that a pandemic isn't a threat because self-administering a moderately dangerous drug is effective prophlaxis are presenting "factual information" because the people doing so are supporters of politicians rather than pill vendors.
All of which is tangential to my original point which is that "HCQ is a miracle cure" became a meme entirely divorced from the tentative (and probably manipulated) evidence of therapeutic benefit well before attempts to shut it down or the Surgisphere "study", so I can't imagine why more blame is apportioned to them than the public figures making evidence-free claims about it from the very beginning.
Brilliantly parodied in this music video: https://youtu.be/eXWhbUUE4ko
The original claims of HCQ's effectiveness against Covid came from doctors in China, early in 2020. At least, these were the first reports I was aware of.
Commercial speech (e.g., advertising) about drugs is highly regulated, but speech of ordinary citizens (who don't have a financial interest in the drugs being discussed) isn't regulated by the government since it is protected by the First Amendment.
Additionally ivermectin is not a cure, it instead has proven effectiveness in attenuating the duration and severity of symptoms. That the scientific studies demonstrating this are not allowed to be even discussed on major social media platforms is a red flag.
Not only 'the vaccine' (meaning Covid-19) vaccine. Trust to CDC is lost, trust to FDA is lost, trust to Executive orders on health policies is lost.
Trust to major news networks, trust to health pundits -- is lost.
On top of that, of course, trust for non-health related 'institutions' (eg FBI, CIA, NSA, FISA courts) -- is lost.
Everything from here on coming from the above institutions -- will be viewed with skepticism and distrust.
Hell, probably trust in legitimacy of election process is lost too. Will see, I guess.
My point about the article -- is that fails to consider the whole system in a country like US...
No longer will western politicians be able to point out to authoritarian dictatorships -- from the point of moral authority.
The "Whatabout-ism" is now 'normalized', and will continue be normal discourse of international politics for a very long time.
Historians 200 years from now 2016-2022 will have to be calling this as a 'Period of Pundits & Institutions loosing people's trust' for many of English-speaking countries.
Previously this would've been "COVID misinformation", but it isn't anymore as the NYT said it this morning. I'd quibble a bit about natural immunity being "superior" but honestly who knows anymore.
FTA:
>For children without a serious medical condition, the danger of severe Covid is so low as to be difficult to quantify.
[1]https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/12/briefing/covid-age-risk-i...
A quick to market vaccine based on new technology, and some woke bureaucrat doesn’t seem to connect that that message would be heard as “they want to test it on us again”.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/19/health/face-masks-us-guidance...
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/04/10/8298906...
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/who-changes-covid...
Is it a surprised that trust in Western public institutions are at a low?
Erratic behavior doesn’t explain it to me — it was far from random, all particles went the same way.
In politics, if you do the same as other countries, you have a lot of support to justify said action without much effort. If you do it like Sweden you are bombarded with criticism. So the easy option is to copy from your neighbor.
Especially in times when the press tends to shield their favorite candidates from accountability. You don't even need to defend yourself, others do that for you.
Our ancestors fought and died for the rights we have given up because our refusal to go into the streets and fight. Enough talk, go out there and take back what is yours. If you tolerate injustice by refusing to take action you are the same as the one who would be applying that injustice. The only way for us to take back our rights is for everyone to fight, you want to talk about duty with vaccine? You have a duty for your countryman to stand with him to defend the rights you deserve, need, and cherish. Whether you care or not is irrelevant, because you not fighting damns everybody else who does since this War requires every human who calls themselves an American. Get your ass in the streets right now and fight. Not a figure of speech, march down your city and tear down anything and everything that infringes on your rights. And for the people who I know are thinking about the repercussions or social stigma, then fuck you. Our rights are worth every single ounce of pain and suffering a human could be inflicted with. Without Rights our Life is meaningless.
(1) there is always a huge swath of people that will “never” take a new vaccine. It has only gotten bigger since social media allowed the unwashed masses to bypass the old gatekeepers.
(2) the top health officials in the USA have all been threatened (death threats against their person and their families). This very likely clouds the lessons they could learn from the past / years.
(3) “Hard truths” are complicated and require an audience willing to understand nuance. We have a fractured media environment that frequently doesn’t carry the entire quote and media consumers that frequently don’t click beyond the clickbait headline. We have people en masse trusting their health decisions to superstition who join in chants to fire/arrest/kill health officials.
While the mask guidance of Feb 2020 could have been better communicated (it seems clear to me the calculus involved more than what was publicly stated), it also seems naïve to me that simply telling the truth would have solved any of these issues.
And not getting the vaccine is potentially bad for you, and those around you, much more so than it is bad for anyone you're protesting against.
The vaccine helps your body fight the virus, and reduce the spread of the virus in your local community. That should be the key point in deciding if you get a vaccine.
Assuming a disagreement about reality is a disagreement about values is a great way to straw man without knowing it.
I was 100% on board with at home testing every 3 days schemes, mask wearing (even though I doubt the efficacy of most masks), but having compulsory medical procedures with a relatively untested, proprietary technology is where I draw the line.
I can accept the argument "this is where I draw the line" if and only if in pre-Covid you would have refused most of what doctors would prescribe you. If you want to draw a line between pre-Covid modern prescription drugs (all proprietary, many also with weird new tech, all tested on far less people than the vaccines) and the current vaccines, you're going to need a substantially different argument than "medical procedures with a relatively untested, proprietary technology". Heck, even simply saying "I don't believe that such procedures should be compulsory ever for any reason" would be a much more reasonable argument than that.
You aren't 'punishing' those in power by not taking the vaccine. You are punishing every other person in society.
They were always not going to do it. The second it became a political issue, their minds were made up. Blaming what was or wasn't done by third parties, government, etc. is completely missing the point.
And not the fault of the vast network of extremists spreading FUD. Totally not those people's fault.
Oh yeah, a group of people pushing ideas that got thousands upon thousands of people killed and jammed up ICUs leading to necessary surgeries being postponed by vomiting out a sewage-pipe of bad-faith arguments and disinformation. It's clearly not okay that we were derisive to those statements.
I mean, look how well politely ignoring conspiracy theorists for a decade worked out. That totally had no unforeseen consequences, right?
These people have free choice, and they are making a bad one. They aren't victims; they are the problem, infecting their neighbors and allowing a pandemic to spread.
Much more significantly, I'm not sure how we can omit the overwhelming messaging from a certain political segment of society, and is spread by leading news outlets, governors, members of Congress, the prior administration in the White House, and very many influencers in every domain. The messaging claimed the the pandemic wouldn't happen, that the virus is inconsequential ('like the flu'), the vaccines are dangerous, etc. That omission is a standard rhetorical technique of that political segment, which is to always attack - always keep your opponents on the defensive.
If your theory was true, we'd see vaccine denial across society. Instead, AFAIK, there's a very strong correlation between political beliefs and vaccine denial. These people clearly, IMHO, choose politics over health and they have what they choose - they have their political movement, at the cost of health - their own, and millions of others. Again, they aren't victims; they make their choices, and are responsible for the consequences.
This has been discussed ad nauseam. Nature isn't a foreign policy magazine, so it's not really the greatest place for advising how the US should respond to a disinformation campaign. But communicating about healthcare policy seems to be reasonably in its area of expertise.
> The flip side that wasn't discussed is the belittling and censoring of voices that were skeptical of the narratives, which engendered even more distrust
The disinformation campaign was allowed to got on essentially unchecked for a long time because it was politically sensitive to speak publicly about it. As we started to get more confirmation that it was being funded by foreign governments (e.g. [0]), pushback against the disinformation became stronger.
> Their strategy of information control backfired, and they doubled down. Now we've got a huge swath of US citizens that will never take the vaccine.
I am highly skeptical there is any evidence for the causality you are implying here.
A disinformation campaign like this is an attack on Americans by a foreign military. People may reasonably disagree about how it should be handled, but at some point citizens have a right to defend their country from attacks.
[0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/russian-disinformation-campaign...