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Comment by nsguy | Hacker News Reader

This is partly why I said science isn't truth. Science evolves. And the virus evolved.

I don't recall any scientist promising Covid would be eradicated by the vaccines or that nobody would get sick. Even diseases for which really effective vaccines have been available for some time have not been eradicated. I'm pretty sure the scientific consensus at the time was not exactly "the spread would cease". There was some talk about herd immunity and what that means.

Another problem is that experts aren't always the greatest communicators and the science is hard to communicate.

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You'd be unwelcome on a lot of social media platforms back in 2020-2021 for those vaccine conspiracies you're spreading. The issue is, all that was true for the entire pandemic. The science didn't "evolve" on the vaccines, where we ended up was the most likely outcome from the start. The scientists knew that, but the people who trusted experts didn't manage to figure it out. They were too busy panicking to listen to anyone.

I agree public health officials in certain countries did a poor job. For the most part they were medical professionals who aren't necessarily experts (though some of them were and some countries had expert advisers to set policy). There were many unknowns and it wasn't clear what to optimize for.

Public health is tricky and you might be faced with various dilemmas getting people to potentially do something that might not be beneficial for them as individuals for the (supposed?) sake of the community. Supposedly one reason why masks were not recommended, despite their sort of obvious effect on respiratory diseases, was to prevent a run on masks that are needed by medical teams. Is this sort of white lie ok? Would telling the truth result in a higher toll for medical professionals? This isn't simple. What I mind more is the sort of doubling down on the obviously wrong advice when the shortages weren't there any more, which seems to be an ego thing.

I think the science was decent and there was access to most of it. There were real gaps in terms of where the virus was going to go and the new vaccines. What was lacking was not really science but rather common sense and maybe what we may call engineering. Science is too slow to react to emergencies.

Clearly the pandemic was a traumatic event for humanity with long term consequences, including erosion of trust.

> I agree public health officials in certain countries did a poor job. For the most part they were medical professionals who aren't necessarily experts (though some of them were and some countries had expert advisers to set policy). There were many unknowns and it wasn't clear what to optimize for.

That is a bold claim you might want to walk away from. 3 posts ago you were holding up vaccine conspiracy theorists as people who, and I quote, "Despite overwhelming evidence they stick to their version of "reality", they never seek counter-evidence, they believe everyone but them is part of a ploy to hide the real reality from everyone. They don't trust experts or scientists.".

Now a few posts later you're suggesting that That the public health officials aren't experts in public health and that their policies were not based on settled science.

When you are insulting a large group of people who's position was, basically, "we don't think public health officials are doing a good job, we aren't satisfied with the evidence you're showing us and we want freedom to make our own decisions" it is probably a mistake to suggest that the public health officials were doing a bad job, often not experts and caught lying with the purpose of stopping people acting in their own best interests. It makes the conspiracy-minded theorists seem pretty reasonable.

Of course in the pandemic, this is the point where people who were claiming to be following science bought up the fact that the vaccine was certain to stop transmission of COVID and it was basically advocating in favour of murder to say otherwise. Turns out that was not the case so they've had to stop doing that.

Maybe it's a bit too strong. I do think there was a real problem with having medical professional in charge when their discipline and expertise were not the perfect match to the real world problems we were facing.

Their policies might have been based on "settled science" (e.g. research on respiratory diseases from the 70's) but I think that wasn't really the appropriate way to handle things as the pandemic developed. It might have been appropriate for day 1 but officials IMO lacked the ability to adapt to the changing reality.

The actual policies varied a lot between countries which is why I qualified my statement.

At the end of the day, you can be critical without being conspiratorial. I'm open to new information that supports the idea that the way health officials handled the pandemic was optimal but given that different jurisdiction gave conflicting advice so that seems counter evidence.

There are many specific examples that come to mind. If we can't critique the response then there's not going to be any learning. Experts and science are not perfect.

Again, point taken and maybe I'm a bit too strong, but that's what I'm trying to get at.

EDIT: i.e. I've no issue with people that are being critical after examining the evidence. These people are not conspiracy theorists and that process is a healthy part of making progress in science and policy. That's not the same thing as people saying Bill Gates put 4G chips in the vaccines or some other mysterious behind the scenes forces or conspiracies.

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