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Comment by Erem | Hacker News Reader

How do you distinguish moving goalposts from the more charitable reading of "Hey, this is a novel virus and so our guidelines will have to change as we find out more"

I sure remember when the guidelines were that COVID wasn't transmissible through aerosol, only droplets. Then it was revised to include aerosol. Mask warnings also evolved from "not that effective" to "extremely effective". But isn't all of this explainable charitably without invoking suppression?

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I would argue because no charity was given to opinions contrary to what Dr. Fauci and the NIH declaired as truth. Perhaps most infamous is Dr. Collins asking for a takedown of the Great Berington declaration. The fact that so little was certain early on about COVID should have been a reason to allow physicians and scientists to discuss and debate policy without fear of having their careers destroyed. Now that we are further out from the pandemic cooler heads will prevail but I fear the damage to the reputation of the health authorities in the US will take a long time to recover.

[1] https://www.statnews.com/2021/12/23/at-a-time-when-the-u-s-n...

Dr. Collins didn't ask for their careers to be destroyed. He asked for a rebuttal (or "take down of it's premises" in his words), which was easy because The Great Barrington Declaration was the most poorly devised policy proposal I had ever seen. I'm not surprised that Dr. Prasad pretends not to understand the difference.

It said that only nursing homes should be quarantined when the vast majority of elderly do not live in nursing homes. It encouraged everyone else to get infected as soon as possible, completely ignoring the fact that vaccines were being developed, which meant that later exposure would be far better than earlier exposure.

One of the signatories of The Great Barrington Declaration actually did try to destroy a Caltech professor's career, but Dr. Prasad pretends the reverse happened. https://mobile.twitter.com/lpachter/status/13770484698655580...

Never take on Lior with anything less than a fully prepared and well-rested army.

It’s just poor communication.

The right way to communicate is say:

“Based on other viruses, we believe masking helps reduce the risk of transmission.”

“Based on initial clinical data we believe vaccination will reduce or possibly eliminate the risk you transmitting the virus to others”

What I’m guessing happened is they thought not being confident in their answer would cause people to not comply.

But the #1 rule of communication (I did some company PR work) is never lie, even by omission. If you lie you’ll eventually get caught and people will never believe you in the future.

> I sure remember when the guidelines were that COVID wasn't transmissible through aerosol, only droplets. Then it was revised to include aerosol. Mask warnings also evolved from "not that effective" to "extremely effective".

And yet the authorities and all the big tech bros were quick to censor anyone who disagreed with the blatant false narratives. Even the WHO took a YEAR to admit to aerosol contamination after the pandemic was everywhere.

There was a messaging lag between countries. You could discern pretty clearly what was doing to happen from whatever happened in Israel as they were roughly half a year ahead and almost simultaneously vaccinated everyone. Based on what happened there with both the initial vaccine and the boosters, you could tell that your local politicians, media and experts where lying and or obfuscating and misrepresenting facts.

> “Hey, this is a novel virus and so our guidelines will have to change as we find out more"

Gee that’s not what I heard at all, what I heard was ‘this is science, and anyone who disagrees or doubts is an idiot and deserves to die and is responsible for killing grandma’

*edit

Oh look here’s the comment where anyone who doubts or disagrees is an idiot:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33258738

I guess we should applaud them for not celebrating the death of anyone who doubts.

Moving goal posts are obvious. They show up with an initial over commit like say, “you don’t need masks” or “the vaccine is sterilizing” that is obviously wrong at the time it occurs, but only on a valid limited data set. This followed by a bunch of backpedaling as that position becomes more and more indefensible as the data becomes overwhelming.

What does "extremely effective" mean? It sounds like 99.99% or something like that. I wasn't aware that any data like that had come out.

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