But it is. The best population-level guidance (now) is early exposure. We told people to do the opposite. The result was a lot more kids with anaphylaxis-level allergy. (I don't know if this increased the total number of people who died. That'd be an interesting question, but given that we reversed the guidance, I assume from a public health perspective people now believe the original guidance was exactly the wrong thing to do.) The best you can say is this was the best we knew at the time, but it's exactly wrong.
> What we did know is not exposing children to a trigger of anaphylaxis would prevent them from dying from anaphylaxis, so, similar to many dangers, the most logical course of action is to remove the risk altogether.
I think you mean that it's intuitive, but I don't think it's logical, for exactly the reason that it turns out not to be a good idea. It's based on a wrong model of how the world works. Yes, that wasn't known. But I feel like we have to account for the fact that we might not know everything. (Admittedly, this drives me particularly nuts because I think this fallacy pervades so much public health advice, especially for kids.)
Like I said above, I get that people need to make recommendations in the face of uncertainty. But I feel like when we find that we've recommended the exact opposite of what was good (i.e., exactly flipped the previous guidance) with such severe consequences, it seems appropriate to step back and look at our methodology to ask if something went wrong or if there's something we can do to improve it?