Time and time again, from the lockdowns/restrictions to the forced masking to the forced shots to the censorship to pretty much everything in between, the "expert consensus" from the medical, political, and mass media communities was wrong.
Even worse than being wrong, so many of the ideas that were deemed "correct" by "expert consensus" often ended up being overtly harmful, and caused far worse outcomes and far more problems than were already being dealt with at the time.
In hindsight, we can see that correct and useful information tended to come from the "fringe voices" that were drawing upon much wider and diverse knowledge and experience, while correct and useful information tended to not come from the highly-centralized and highly-controlled "experts".
Haven't you personally dealt with any situation in which you have to take a decision based on incomplete information? That was covid for most part of it. You could compare it with a bet, and some bets look retrospectively "bad" (although we have no way to check, don't we?)
There were also plenty of "fringe voices" with ideas that were proven wrong over time, so not sure how you imagine "someone" would have selected "the right ones".
The mRNA shots were not tested at all for transmissibility yet we were told they prevented transmission.
Thank goodness some people have a memory longer than 2 weeks.
Data that has come out since does seem to indicate it lowers transmission.
But I'm unclear if you're trying to say that this turned out to be false (the reduction in transmission), or that you're pointing out how some policies were driven by claims that didn't yet have strong enough evidence backing them up?
You can't retroactively justify a lie. If I think Bob is in jail and I tell you he's not in jail, it doesn't matter later if he turned out never to have been in jail.
The claims that were being made, and being used to push policy, were at the time something that hadn't even been tested.
If we're saying that reduction in transmission is a lie, well that might be false, as data now seem to indicate it does cause reduced transmission.
But if we're saying people claimed that they ran a trial specifically to investigate the effect on transmission, when no such trial took place, than I agree, this would be a lie.
Now I never felt like "official" sources said there were trials about transmission conducted and that proved massive reduction in transmission. But I can believe maybe there was one somewhere.
I do agree though that policies were made with claims that had sometimes poor evidence or incomplete data and experimentation. And we should all wonder and discuss what could have been done policy wise that would have been better. Was acting fast on low confidence better than waiting for high confidence? Would more educating and less regulating have had better results? Etc.
I can believe some people said or published articles saying that it would reduce transmission, I'm not sure they'd all claim it was from evidence that it did, as opposed to just inference that it would.
I'm interested where you feel you were led to believe it would?
I also find the word "truth" in your sentence a bit confusing, do you mean that you actually read from "official" publications that trials about transmissions had been conducted even when they hadn't? Or do you just feel like there were claims of reducing transmission made, and you later realized their rationale didn't even include trials specific to transmission?
I feel this is important. Because someone could have claimed it will reduce transmission, and based their reasoning on how pior vaccines typically have that effect, or how logically if it prevents infection or major infection, it should lower re-transmission. Or other rationales.
This wouldn't really be a lie, even though it could turned out to be wrong.
I have a hard time believing you somehow missed fauci or Walenski or ALL of the mainstream media going on for months about the vaccine preventing transmission. There was even the famous Rachel Maddie “it stops, with every vaccinated person”.
So if public health officials didn’t believe it stopped transmission why attempt (and fail) to implement a mandate through OSHA?
I guess I did. Axios has been my primary news source, along with New York Times and The Guardian/Wapo once in a while. Most of the time I just Google my way to the information I'm looking for. I don't consume any TV based news, or Twitter based news or any other such social media news, appart for HackerNews. I also generally went directly to the CDC website, and didn't use retellings from other publications or press conference.
By curiosity, I pulled up this archive from October 2020: https://web.archive.org/web/20201027130822/https://coronavir...
John Hopkins FAQ on the vaccine at the time. It states:
> Although the phase 3 clinical trials are designed to determine whether vaccinated individuals are protected against disease, it will also be important to understand whether vaccinated individuals are less likely to transmit the virus. This is likely but not ensured.
So that's at least one expert source corroborating my impression. I can't remember where I landed when I would have looked this up in 2020, but John Hopkins is a likely place I might have found.
> They had no science backing those claims
While I don't know why I didn't get the impression any official expert source told me it would prevent transmission and you feel many of them did tell you it would. I do still feel I need to make a correction on what you're saying. There's definitely science backing up the idea that vaccines can reduce transmission. It's based on historically observed outcomes from prior vaccines for other diseases, as well as on transmission models around herd immunity.
The idea that the mRna vaccines would for sure prevent transmission had no evidence, but there was scientific based prior for thinking it might at least reduce transmission, specifically of the exact strain it targets.
This is what chatGpt thinks was the CDC statement in early 2021:
> In early 2021, the CDC indicated that while COVID-19 vaccines were highly effective at preventing severe illness, the ability of vaccinated individuals to transmit the virus, particularly the delta variant, was still under study. Vaccinated people could carry viral loads similar to unvaccinated individuals, but these would diminish quickly. The CDC differentiated between "breakthrough infections" (vaccinated people testing positive) and "breakthrough disease" (symptomatic cases), noting that both were uncommon. However, exact rates were unclear, leading to updated guidance for vaccinated individuals to be tested and mask up after exposure, especially in high-transmission areas. CDC's program focused on real-world vaccine effectiveness, including against variants and over time
Edit:
I also checked if ChatGPT knows if Fauci ever stated that vaccine would prevent transmission, this is what it had to say:
> Dr. Anthony Fauci initially stated on February 4, 2021, that there was insufficient data to confidently claim that vaccines prevent the transmission of COVID-19. However, by February 17, 2021, he referenced new studies indicating that vaccines might reduce transmission. Fauci cited research showing that vaccinated individuals had significantly reduced viral loads, suggesting a lower likelihood of transmission. Studies supported the idea that the lower the viral load, the lower the chance of virus spread. Fauci highlighted the public health implications, suggesting that vaccination could diminish the outbreak's dynamics
Do with that as you will, it's ChatGPT, not a thorough research into the historical archives, but its better than nothing.
But sure, it says:
> Vaccine mandates were primarily advocated to decrease severe COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations, protect healthcare systems, ensure safer public spaces, and aim for herd immunity. This approach was favored even when the effect of vaccines on transmission was not fully known, as the overall public health benefits were clear.
I also explicitly challenged it and asked what's the point of mandating healthy individuals to get vaccinated if they weren't sure it would reduce transmission and it said:
> 1. Prevent severe disease: Even healthy individuals can suffer severe effects from COVID-19, although the risk is lower.
> 2. Reduce the burden on healthcare: Preventing illness in healthy individuals helps maintain healthcare capacity for all.
> 3. Mitigate the risk of variants: High vaccination rates can reduce the chance of new, potentially more dangerous variants.
> These benefits were considered to outweigh the uncertainties regarding transmission at the time mandates were discussed.
Please paste snippets and links to archives or other indicators that may show that when vaccines first arrived expert said it would prevent transmision without any basis for their claims. I'm totally willing to believe it, and I'm sure some did, but it also looks like there were experts and official sources that explicitly said that wasn't a sure thing. So at least I know I'm not crazy for having had that impression.
And you have to recognize, there's a lot of revisionist history and false representation going around too. I'm sure some people would have told others that experts and officials said something and they actually never said that. This probably happened a lot, which can make it feel to people experts and officials said something even when they never did.
Also, if it helps you swallow what I'm saying, I want to point out that I'm not a fan of vaccine mandates for the same reasons that I'm pro-choice. I believe people should have autonomy over their bodies.
There is no truth to your word calculator copy pasta. It’s in total bullshit and anyone who has used any of these “ai” tools for any length of time for anything important knows how poor the responses really are.
I’m not trying to convince any one of anything. If you process the same information that I did and come to the conclusion you should boooooost then go for it.
He's not claiming that the vaccines don't reduce transmission at all, as best as I can tell.
You get vaccinated, you won't get ill, won't spread the virus, herd immunity, end of covid. At a time, this was the one and only acceptable truth, and everything else, from low efficiency of vaccine, sideffects, "you'll nfect grandma, even if you're vaccinated", "there will never be herd immunity" was considered a fringe conspiracy theory.
Choosing and promoting ideas is different from straight up censorship, shaming and worse.
If you would say "some people decided on one singular truth ...", then I will answer "maybe you should complain to them" (and I would find this positive). I found discussion during covid between such people (that have decided on a singular truth, either side) completely pointless. For me it was always a question of "what to do at that moment in time based on the known information", so more like "what did you found out last", not about "what is THE truth".
If you take all fringe hypothesis and claims posted online, you'll find time and time again that so many of them are wrong, and not just by a margin, but often times ridiculously far off.
And you'll find that a lot of more "official" claims were right.
It leaves us with some of the outliers, where fringe claims were right and "official" claims were wrong.
Now someone would need to tally them up and all to actually see how often. But that impression you have seems to be misjudging this.
The other issue in your judgement in my opinion is that you're focusing entirely on this particular event. But the expert process was being interfered with, due to the extensively political nature of it, and the strong pressures from everyone else to get answers before it's possible to do so with high confidence.
And finally, the only basis we're even using to assess which ones were "right" or "wrong" after the fact is a form of consensus, and primarily an "expert consensus" that has simply had more time to settle.
This isn't something you should do, because it is not sensible. If you ask 10,000 people what two plus two equals, then write out a list of all of the unique answers you get, 99% of them will be wrong.
Even if, much later, those same experts realize they were wrong, and it turned out one of those fringe conclusions online was actually right.
To take an obvious example, the debate on the impact of sex and physical ability. It's obvious that males have an advantage over women on most physical tasks. I can't find a single event with an objective comparable scoring (e.g. how fast you finished, how high you jumped etc) where males don't outperform at every level by a significant degree. For instance, high school boy records beat pretty much all female world records in track [0]. And this is fine. We adapt societally by having women's leagues. And every scientist would admit this up until maybe 5 years ago. But now there is a growing "scientific consensus" that really it's some other societal effect.
Humans knew this to be true for thousands of years, but in the last 5 years we're beginning to upturn that for some reason. So maybe some deference to the past is warranted. If thousands of years from now the "consensus" still says sex doesn't really matter, then I'll grant you that. But for now the "scientific consensus" doesn't make something true
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/to-understand-sex...
The rest of your post is insane, "War on Christmas"-style. No one reputable is claiming men and women are biologically equivalent in all things.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/trans-girls-belon...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/hormone-levels-ar...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/to-understand-sex...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sex-redefined-the...
If I might summarize, they mostly argue that hormonal arguments towards unfair advantages in certain sports understate the already existing disparities in hormonal distribution in a given sex. That a given trans athlete might be less hormonally advantaged than a cis woman who competes uncontroversially.
The latter articles are even less supportive of your point, and mostly discuss the uncontroversial point that binary biological sex is an incomplete model of humanity as a whole.
These are reasonable and evidence-based discussions to have.
Why does sex have to be a complete model of humanity? It's real and useful. For instance as a male I don't bother getting mamograms. Sex tells you more about predisposition of health conditions than any other factor apart from maybe age and weight. Let's not pretend it doesn't exist
This is a common straw man. No trans advocate I've heard pretends that sex doesn't exist. Indeed, what would be the point of medically transitioning if one thought sex wasn't real? Instead it seems like trans opponents like to pretend that sex is the only thing that exists or that gender identity and expression do not exist.
Additionally, sex is more complicated than a binary m/f - the obvious examples of intersex individuals or androgen insensitivity[1] come to mind. So yes, sex exists, it's not a binary state, and it's connected to but not fully descriptive of gender identity.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Androgen_insensitivity_syndrom...
"It turns out that when transgender girls play on girls’ sports teams, cisgender girls can win. In fact, the vast majority of female athletes are cisgender, as are the vast majority of winners. There is no epidemic of transgender girls dominating female sports. "
"The Olympics have had trans-inclusive policies since 2004, but a single openly transgender athlete has yet to even qualify."
etc.
If trans people have such an obvious advantage why aren't they dominating every single category of every single strength-involving event?
Because there are fewer of them competing. Not every man is more athletic than every woman, but the most athletic men are more athletic than the most athletic women.
If me, as a man, tries competing in a women's weightlifting competition, I wouldnt do well, but I wouldn't do well in the male category either. But if you take competitive male athletes and have them compete against females, they will be incredibly competitive.
In fact, the difference between male and female athletic performance is so stark that even the most elite female athletes are at a disadvantage compared to teenage boys: https://boysvswomen.com
Because there aren't that many trans women who compete in women's sports.
Neither of your quotes is close to a good argument. If you want to answer this question empirically, look at statistics (race times, lbs lifted, etc) and women's competitions where trans women competed.
[1] https://www.aafp.org/pubs/afp/issues/2021/0215/p203.html
[2] https://www.usada.org/spirit-of-sport/education/use-performa...
Athletes who dope don't always dominate, but it still gives them an unfair advantage. Same as when males compete in women's events.
That said, in some women's sporting leagues these males are actually dominating - see https://shewon.org for a list of the many hundreds of women who have been denied their place on the podium by trans-identifying male athletes.
In the past, we were generalizing and that created falsehoods. Now we're able to be much more precise to the actual true reality.
It's also true that social factors play a role. We've never properly accounted for that, so it's much more true today to caveat with the fact that we don't know how much social factors play a role. It's probably not the most influential factor, but it's probably a part of the equation.
And that's if the article isn't locked or otherwise restricted!
Turns out, "fringe" thing that was definitely not true was true. Was the consensus better? Doesn't seem so, and it's not an isolated instance.