The health care system is heavily subject to licensing of various kinds, and academia is heavily defined by grant funding. If just a tiny handful of people in the government decide the healthcare system will say X, then it will say X.
That would point toward the business interests of actual provider organizations (like hospitals) or insurers, who have different incentives from each other and very different incentives from individual healthcare providers, who also have very different interests (and are very different people on a variety of dimensions) from those in academia who are "heavily defined by grant funding."
Perhaps you could share a concrete example of what you mean, because right now we're talking about 4 or 5 completely distinct, individually gigantic industries that all interact to produce "the healthcare system" and its behaviors.
For example, during COVID there were doctors who lost their license to practice because they disagreed with the government stance on vaccines. Therefore, the remaining doctors spoke with one voice. The government used them as sock puppets, in effect. Whether you agree with this policy or not, it is an example in which the healthcare system became one system that "said" things in concert.
Can you share some examples of these doctors? AFAIK the only doctors who lost their licenses are those who created fake medical documentation or who shared verifiably false medical information. Not for "disagreeing" with the government stance on vaccines.
I don't know if you lived in a different timeline than me, but I remember a lively debate throughout the entirety of COVID. Consensus (and evidence) was overwhelmingly on one side, sure, similar to how consensus is that you should go to the hospital if you get a heart attack. And yeah, if a doctor advises someone against that despite strong clinical evidence that the patient is best served by going to the hospital, they'll jeopardize their license.
Can you give some examples?
>He said the 6-foot guideline “sort of just appeared” and wasn’t based on any data, and that such a study would be difficult to do. He also said he didn’t recall any studies about masking young children, but said the guideline was the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s decision.
https://oversight.house.gov/release/hearing-wrap-up-dr-fauci...
Making up arbitrary rules and then enforcing them saying "trust the science" is not coming from a place of honesty. Especially when combined with the deletion of emails.
First the strong rebuttal: "Verifiably false information at time of sharing" in this case would mean you have evidence that Fauci knew distance played no role in infection rates, or that a distance other than 6 feet was better, and put out information suggesting 6 feet was correct anyway. You have no evidence of this, of course, because this is not what happened.
The more general rebuttal is that you are revealing exactly the type of "can't be trusted with details" that kneecapped public health communications throughout COVID.
The question is why Fauci selected 6 feet instead of 4, 5, 7, 8 or even 6.1, 6.148, or even 6.489598365983 feet.
The reality is that there's no real reason to select any of these over any other. There's a continuous curve of difficulty of adherence and a continuous curve of transmission reduction.
Any specific number would have been "arbitrary", but very obviously a clear guideline is better than a completely non-actionable "stay as far away as you reasonably can."
This is like hauling out the guy who set interstate speed limits at 60mph and not 59 or 59.5 or 59.84846898 and then blasting him for selecting the "arbitrary" 60 miles per hour.
Does that make sense to you?
Does that make sense to you?
There's not "a lack of information." The information is there's a continuous curve of transmission. You could have complete information and you would still need to pick an "arbitrary" point.
> it is 6ft and that's the science, follow the rules or don't enter public spaces
Link to which guidance you feel most closely stated this. I have never seen any guidance from CDC, NIH, FDA, or anywhere else that resembles this.
"Can you show me where?"
"No, but there's less trust now, ergo the government did it!"
Another hypothesis for you: You were peppered with bullshit from non-government sources so thoroughly and so frequently that you abdicated your responsibility to understand what's true and what's not.
This is, of course, the goal of such information campaigns.
In theory, I buy the argument that the government should be able to successfully overcome the 24/7 bullshit machine that you plugged yourself into, but I personally struggle to imagine a good/safe/non-authoritarian way for it to achieve that.
So I'm left with the conclusion that we each bear some amount of responsibility to try to counteract the game of telephone when it comes to understanding matters of personal or national importance, and you (like many other perfectly fine/smart/honorable people) failed to meet that obligation. Not really a personal critique given you didn't know the game you were playing and how proactive you needed to be in it, but here we are, and I'd recommend a high-agency look at how you chose to find and interpret information. The institutions were not the problem here.
Can't see how this goes wrong!
There are three options:
1. Fauci knew the correct answer to some degree of accuracy and picked a rounded off version.
2. He didn't know the correct answer but thought he did.
3. Fauci didn't know the correct answer, was aware he didn't know, and he made one up in order to sound knowledgeable.
You're arguing what happened is (1). What actually happened is (3), which we know because he admitted it.
Social distancing had no effect, and this was known early on. There is no known distance curve that correctly models SARS-CoV-2 transmission in the real world, largely because it spreads via aerosol clouds as well as droplets. The data for this was available nearly from the start because:
1. SARS-1 acted this way, as do other coronaviruses. Outbreaks of SARS-1 could be found spreading between apartment buildings on the wind.
2. The outbreak on the Diamond Princess cruise ship showed cases appearing all over the vessel at random, even though everyone was confined to quarters. There was no physical contact in that case and it made no difference whatsoever.
Social distancing had no visible effect anywhere it was tried. What did work was high quality air cleaning equipment, as found on planes - places that remained remarkably infection free despite everyone being much closer than 6ft together.
> Social distancing had no visible effect anywhere it was tried.
> Our search identified 172 observational studies across 16 countries and six continents, with no randomised controlled trials and 44 relevant comparative studies in health-care and non-health-care settings (n=25 697 patients). Transmission of viruses was lower with physical distancing of 1 m or more, compared with a distance of less than 1 m (n=10 736, pooled adjusted odds ratio [aOR] 0·18, 95% CI 0·09 to 0·38; risk difference [RD] −10·2%, 95% CI −11·5 to −7·5; moderate certainty); protection was increased as distance was lengthened
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
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Can you explain step by step how "SARS-1 could be found spreading between apartment buildings on the wind" and "the Diamond Princess cruise ship showed cases appearing all over the vessel at random" are evidence that standing close to someone is equal risk to standing further away from them?
This would be great evidence against the claim "if you are more than 6ft away, you will not get sick," and your airplane example would be great evidence against the claim "if you are fewer than 6ft away, you will get sick," but neither of these claims were ever made.
So what happened: activists went directly to the head of Cochrane and demanded the review be disowned, which it was, despite it having been signed off on by the org previously and there being no scientific problems identified with the study. That's how they manufacture consensus in the healthcare system: top down orders from corrupt leaders who suppress beliefs and evidence that makes them look bad. They do this because it works. After all, look at this thread. People say, look at all the evidence! Look at the consensus! They can't all be wrong!
Yet a system that concludes both yes and no simultaneously isn't worth anything. The institutions of science failed during COVID, and frankly are failing most of the time hence the replication crisis. It's not specific to masks or social distancing. We can play that game for any claim you want to make about COVID, or many other topics. Science is broken.
> explain ... evidence that standing close to someone is equal risk to standing further away from them?
There are two components to this:
1. There's a threshold value beyond which a non-immune person becomes infected and that viral load in the exposure over that doesn't matter much. Given that viruses replicate that's not surprising.
2. That a sick person can emit infectious aerosols that can hang around in the air for long periods and travel long distances e.g. via air ducts.
The intuition you're working from is that SARS-CoV-2 viruses are created in the body, that they travel only in large droplets that fall to the ground quickly due to gravity, and that risk of infection is linear in dose. Thus, being far away from an infected person should reduce the risk linearly. That's the idea the "professionals" used to justify their policies, but it's based on a model that's too far from reality to be useful. It might work for a hypothetical spherical-cow type person standing on a perfectly empty and flat 2D plane, with no air movements. It doesn't work for real world scenarios with complex layouts and complex movements of people, which is why when you look at the behavior of the virus in real settings like the Diamond Princess or jet liners the results are completely different to what the model would predict.
What you said is that Fauci had no reason to believe that social distancing would be helpful and knew that it wouldn’t be helpful.
I just linked to very clear reason to substantiate his beliefs. Regardless of whether you agree with it or not, and even regardless of whether this view ended up actually being correct, this evidence existed.
It is empirically, obviously true there was reason to hold this belief.
> Yet a system that concludes both yes and no simultaneously isn't worth anything
I see that you’ve never heard of science… which concludes: “we don’t know yet” on most questions most of the time. The reality is we didn’t have high certainty on most of these questions and even still they’re open for debate. But we have to make decisions in the presence of uncertainty all the time! Even the decisions that ended up being wrong during COVID (of which there were plenty) were well within the aperture of reasonability given the conditions they had to be made under.
None of this gets even close to the threshold of the government propagating verifiably false information. Not even in the same ballpark.
> Such papers aren't worth much.
Lol. “How am I so confused about what’s going on?! Must be the institutions’ fault!”
But there's nothing to speculate about here. Fauci explicitly told us the idea of social distancing "just appeared", which is easy to confirm just by looking carefully at the timelines. There was no evidence that led to the policy, it was just invented out of thin air. Not my claim: his. And then because academia is corrupt they promptly produced reams of papers claiming it worked great, although real world evidence showed it didn't. You can read these papers for yourself to see how motivated the reasoning is.
> The reality is we didn’t have high certainty on most of these questions
That's correct! There was uncertainty because there was no evidence these policies worked, which is why people got pissed off when they were presented as 100% dead cert things that only crazy Anti Science People could doubt. At no point did public health officials say, well, this might help or it might not so we'll leave it up to the citizens to decide what to do. Everything was 100% critical and had to be forced via law overnight because Science™.
You're trying to excuse what they did by saying they had to make decisions, but they didn't. They could have simply admitted they didn't know, done nothing and left it to individuals and their doctors to decide what to do for themselves. They chose instead to impose policies on the whole world by force, justifying it by claiming they were doing solid science when in reality the policies "just appeared".
No, he told us the number 6 "just appeared," as compared to the numbers 5 or 7.
> You can read these papers for yourself to see how motivated the reasoning is.
Please link to said papers.
Again, you're just wrong on all the facts. There are plenty of good reasons to have defaulted to social distancing. Not only was this logical at the time, but all evidence still points to it having been the correct decision in retrospect. I know you're in the habit of simply dismissing countervailing evidence, i.e. you've decided to give up on yourself, but there is literally centuries of evidence behind social distancing.
The fact that people caught COVID while far away from each other literally isn't even a dent in this body of evidence. And I don't mean that because it's weak evidence against it, but that it's not even evidence against it. Nothing about the social distancing hypothesis suggests one cannot get sick at a distance.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2966666/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1929395/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2808319/
Thank you for providing all of your evidence (none). It is illustrative for other readers.
Your choice of papers is an example of this problem in action:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2966666/ - it's about school closures+flu, but people got upset about school closures because unlike flu COVID overwhelmingly affected the very old and very sick, so it didn't make sense to close schools to protect kids. It's also the kind of analysis that's likely to be P-hacked.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1929395/ - a mortality report on Asian flu. What point are you trying to make with this paper? If it's about school closures again, it gives attack rates of 59% for asian flu in schools, but attack rate for SARS-CoV-2 in schools was measured at more like 4% (again, with mild cases that didn't endanger the kids). You can't reduce infectiousness and impact by 10x+ and say they're the same.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2808319/ - SARS-1 this time, which is at least a coronavirus! But it's also one that had very different mortality/spread profiles to SARS-CoV-2 (I don't personally think it should have been called SARS-2 because of this difference, even though they're closely related otherwise). It's an observational regression analysis again, so low quality evidence, but what it shows is that even for SARS-1 where quarantine was more effective the number-needed-to-quarantine was uselessly high, with 7.5 infected needed to be quarantined to eliminate just one case. That's completely unworkable especially as social distancing isn't even close to the same thing as an actual quarantine. This paper is the sort of analysis that led to the pre-2020 WHO recommendations against quarantine and travel restrictions for RV epidemics, and supports what I'm saying: they could easily have known social distancing wouldn't work, and probably did know.
I have just linked to basis to believe exactly that.
Sure, it may have turned out that COVID-19 would be totally different (though it didn't -- we now know empirically social distancing was helpful here too), but even if it had, clearly there was evidence to assume from the start that distance from infected person would be a component of infection rate.
> the things these systems "say" are emergent phenomena ... Consensus was overwhelmingly on one side ... [those who disagree] jeopardize their license
Rephrased, it's not happening and it's good that it's happening.
Pick your side: either you want agreement in the healthcare system to be trusted because it's the result of many independent decisions pointing in the same direction, or you want a system that punishes dissent. You can't try to claim the benefits of the first whilst cheering on the second.
Arguing in bad faith is one thing, but I suspect you might even be tricking yourself!
Again: pick your side. Advice motivated by career-ending penalties for non-compliance cannot be said to be an emergent phenomenon.
How many allow their doctors to relay verifiably false medical information with their patients? Roughly zero.
Is this because there's some big conspiracy of all 60 licensure boards getting together to suppress information, or is it because each of them has independently reached the self-evident conclusion that licensees spreading false information destroys the credibility of the profession?
Emergent phenomena, amigo.
By all means, try and wordsmith your way out of these facts. It doesn't work. Trust in the medical profession has dropped through the floor, and it will keep falling further for as long as responses like yours are common in discussions of it.
As for your 60 number, those are mostly state level boards, who have a monopoly over licensing in that state. If a doctor gets struck off in a state they could move to another, lose all their customers and home, and try to start again, but in practice those boards don't approve doctors who were struck off in another state regardless of reason. So in reality it's not much different to having one. The wider argument is of course silly, akin to arguing that if two dictators happen to make the same decision their countries aren't dictatorships because all decisions are emergent phenomena arising from the wisdom of the crowds.
You seem to be continuing to put words into other people's mouths.
> You can read emails where people were given their top-down orders.
This is literally not true (I've read the emails)
> The synchronized flipflops on masks alone was enough to destroy many people's belief in doctors and public health.
One man's "synchronized flipflop" is another's "appearance of new evidence and tradeoffs."
> You can read meeting notes and journal reviews where people say that whilst claim X is true it would cause people to stop following government orders so it should be suppressed.
Can you link me to this?
> You can read interviews with public health officials who say they organized conspiracies to lying
Can you link me to this?
> akin to arguing that if two dictators happen to make the same decision their countries aren't dictatorships
No, it's like arguing that if two dictators happen to make the same decision, it doesn't mean they are acting in coordination with one another. Which is obviously true.
All I see in this thread is someone confidently asserting that he needs to be trusted with the truth despite reflexively dismissing data that doesn't fit his priors and, apparently, believing that it's unreasonable to assume that being physically closer to a person with a respiratory virus produces a higher risk of infection than standing further away. (I find that you're never far from truly insane opinions in convos with these "just a skeptic" types)
You have done a fine job of demonstrating the loss of trust in the profession though, I'll give you that! It is almost entirely (not entirely, but almost entirely) due to people who have simply decided to be confidently wrong and, when asked for examples or sources over and over and over again, fail to produce them.
You obviously have a right to form your own opinion on all of this stuff, but demonstrably don't have the capability to do it. Many such cases!