Oddbean

I mean you just admitted you were minimizing the problem by adding more risk factors. Many people died including otherwise healthy healthcare workers and I would call that a big deal but we can differ on that point.

I’m correctly framing the problem. Covid simply wasn’t that deadly. Certainly not deadly enough to justify the ineffective totalitarian measures used to “fight” it. Compromised people should have voluntarily quarantined and Robust healthy people should have continued their lives as normal. It wouldn’t have damaged the economy, hardly anyone would have died (barely anyone died anyway) and it would have provided better herd immunity for at risk populations. The masks were theatre. The vaccine was ineffective. The plexi glass partitions were total nonsense. I mean if you can’t see all that at this point I can’t help you.

1 says nothing about policy or vaccines or masks etc. You were just simply incorrect about risk factors right off the bat which makes me think it’s a waste of time walking you through some other items. Some of your complaints here are also Monday morning quarterbacking. You didn’t know on day one any of the claims you made here. Nobody did, it took time and research to properly grasp the problem. Pretending that scientists efforts were evil frankly puts a target on my back when we were working very hard to get things right. There is no guarantee one can produce a cure every time and on a short schedule, whether vaccine or drug. Getting treatments out that reduce hospital loads and have the potential to restart the economy would be a big win, even if not a full on cure. Additionally the severity in symptoms reduces over time because of survivorship bias and mutation— many viruses evolve towards being asymptomatic as a means of survival. Saying covid is no big deal now is not very controversial, but the viruses floating now are not the same as before and not infecting the same susceptible population.

riddle me this. why didn't the US govt follow its own pandemic preparedness plan which was researched for best practices such as masks are worthless for coronaviruses and social distancing is not a thing. instead they all got scared and made things up. this isn't hard and you are tripping over yourself to explain their initial freakout choices.

Read the Real Anthony Fauci The scientists were mostly useful idiots, sorry. Some of us knew the face diaper, quarantining, 6ft social distancing, vaccine developed in months, and vaccine passports were bad ideas. Saying “we didn’t know” is cope.

Cope for what? I have nothing to say about science policy because that’s not something I have a background in, but I doubt policy people would want to be cavalier with an unknown virus. Things like the viral origin, effectiveness of the vaccine and severity of covid and if/how it would mutate were unknown. And fyi no scientists I know thought the lab leak was outlandish. Most were like 5050 but you don’t go around accusing people before you know more. You don’t know until you know.

"public" data. 🤣 The CDC doesn't release any data without it being dragged out of them. From the beginning of the academic I wanted to see data similar to what Sweden provided: all cause mortality, vaccine rates, trial data... "Trust the experts bruh"