In simple terms, I asked you to put up or shut up, and your response was "no u." If you had an actual point, you should have been more than happy to have been asked to expound upon it.
The two previous zoonotic coronavirus outbreaks, SARS and MERS, had case fatality rates of nearly 10% and over 30% respectively. Before we had reliable clinical data to the contrary, it was reasonable to respond to the very real possibility that COVID had, or very quickly would develop similar lethality.
This risk led to a collaborative effort to sequence the COVID-19 virus and to develop vaccines as quickly as possible. In conjunction with this, there are very large studies evaluating existing drugs using in silico and in vitro efforts to try to find functional bindings. Subsequent to plausible candidates being identified, case studies and then RCTs were conducted on an expedited basis to further qualify candidates.
The result was multiple vaccines that had very high efficacy (the mRNA and a few adenovirus based ones) and several vaccines that exhibited much lower efficacy.
In parallel with this constructive work, there were quite a few charlatans who misconstrued limited clinical evidence or who simply started rumors based on nothing. From this we got people touting inaction, bleach inhalation, hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin and other bogus treatments with no effect on the disease and variable levels of lethality of the treatment.
Your turn now. You said that promising avenues were willfully ignored. Provide some examples.
EUA can only be used when no alternative treatment exists. As such, there was a huge coordinated effort to both discredit potential treatments ("horsey paste ahaha!!") or to just not study them. Any alternative would have meant no EUA, meaning no big vaccine contracts. We choose a path that favored the manufacturers, at the expense of alternative treatments. Treatment avenues were ignored.
0% liability for vaccine manufacturers, yet the public message that it's 100% safe. How is it possible for those two to exist and not cause cognitive dissonance? If it's 100% safe, then the manufacturers don't need any protection, and if they have 0% liability, then they have deemed that there exists a financial risk that they are not comfortable with. Otherwise it would have been "this is 100% safe and we back it by the life of our organization." Avenues to reinforce the public trust were ignored.
Why did the CDC stop tracking breakthrough infections in 2021? Shouldn't this be considered very important information to understand how our tools and the virus are performing? We're choosing to discard data instead of vacuuming it all up. Why? Relevant data was ignored.
We didn't try to take the debate, or even much acknowledge tradeofs. These were written of as "allow grandma to die", but if we accept that the period of 18-24 is crucial for adults to find themselves, then we essentially cut 1/3 of that time, which may have several decades of life impact, to add (maybe) a few more years to grandmas life.
I am not saying it wasn't the right choice. I am saying that anybody who disagreed were not offered a chair at the decision table (or zoom room), but were actively bullied and called science deniers. Needless to say that doesn't make them want to hear our arguments either.
Then there is the entire: no mask, masks maybe, masks are essential but you don't have to wear one that isn't made from simple cloth.
Finally it seemed to me that the WHO was more concerned with making sure China didn't get insulted than to deal with the dicease. Anywhere else it would have been called China flu, and there wouldn't have been a debate over it. Suddenly we had to talk about how this was not Chinas fault and we even had these stupid "hug a Chinese person" campaigns in the beginning.
How many kids are without one of their parents now because of covid? It's a global emergency, there is no option that allows people to pretend nothing is happening.
What I remember is Fauci saying that to be fully effective, protective needs to be fitted and fit-tested and that due to limited supplies, PPE supplies with high levels of protection (i.e. N95 and above) should be reserved for medical staff in order to keep hospitals functioning. There were also numerous experimental studies testing how much reuse of N95 masks was viable.
As supplies became more available, he moderated this position and recommended protective equipment for anybody likely to be exposed.
On March 8, 2020, Fauci said "there's no reason to be walking around with a mask," according to Reuters
https://www.newsweek.com/fauci-said-masks-not-really-effecti...
Spare me the excuses about PPE supplies-- even cloth masks would have helped, especially for original SARS-COV-2. Even if he had been concerned about supply issues (the popular excuse you suggest), he could have not lied to the public about effectiveness and asked (not to mention have the President order) for medical grade masks to be reserved for healthcare workers.
For me an example would be the early “masks don’t work” rhetoric, but then simultaneously also telling the public not to buy masks because healthcare workers need them.
The early recode article mocking Silicon Valley for avoiding contact early on and “panicking” because it was “just the flu” and concern was anti-China racism.
Later on the repeated stories pushed by MSM about the lab leak hypothesis being a “conspiracy theory” when it remains if not the most likely source, still a probable one.
Science is about testing a hypothesis, updating, and discussing tradeoffs honestly - often “believe in science” types are not about science at all, but about authority and political partisanship/cognitive bias.
The tragedy is this erodes trust. Then when something important is actually true like the vaccines are very effective and people should take them they lie about that too (zero risks, 100% effective, etc.) vs. being honest about it (very effective, but not 100%, risks are rare and better on net than contracting disease etc.)
The dishonesty makes it easy for more harmful conspiracy to arise because they’ve lost trust of the public (for good reason imo). Most people that think independently outside of consensus will do it poorly.
“Believe in science” was used to defend the (wrong) stuff in my comment, it’s a proxy for believe authority or believe media.
If we want people to understand the value of science we should share the evidence and explain what the hypothesis is with the nuance and uncertainty present rather than patronizingly play 3D-chess because we assume the public is too dumb to know what’s good for them.
Some people and institutions did this, but most did not.
Science as an institution is no stranger to this kind of bullshit either: radical mastectomy and halsted’s “theories” of cancer, skinner and behaviorism (really all of psychology due to the replication crisis), mendel’s peas being ignored for 40yrs, phrenology, etc. When it becomes believe the authority instead of about the evidence bad things happen.