> At the beginning of the pandemic, health agencies started misrepresenting and overstating the certainty of science, in order to attempt to get more buy-in from the public.
Sure, the mainstream media oversimplified what the scientists were saying. But much of the actual early data was available in open archives, sci-hub, and library genesis. How much of the real science did you read, or did you use the MSM as a placeholder for scientists?
> It started with masks. The studies that we had about masks really were not great, but they did a risk-reward calculation behind closed doors: worst case scenario, the surgical masks don't impact the spread and it changes nothing; best case scenario, we reduce community spread. The problem with this is that if they told the public that this was how they were thinking about the problem, they wouldn't get people wearing the masks, so they overstated their confidence in it when speaking to the public. A good amount of people truly believe that the science was clear. But it wasn't.
It's simple to understand masks when you look at another tech : HVAC filters.
The better the filter (keeping surface area =), the harder it is to breathe. The less filtering the filter, the easier to breathe.
N95's and better were stupidly hard to get hold of early on. But they have a toll on breathing. Again, it's not "maskless" and "heavy filtration". It's a gradient of filtration... And most materials don't have rated filter properties. That's not to say they can't filter - they do. They're just not as good as an N95.
And even surgical masks are there primarily to prevent talking, breathing, coughing, and sniffling from being as impactful to other people.
Anybody in IT would know there's no one solution, and no perfect solution. Everything's a tradeoff, and early on, cloth masks were leaps and bounds better than none at all.
> It continued with tests. It's much better to have a high rate of false positives than to have any rate of false negatives, so they pumped up the cycle count to accomplish this. They later toned it down. To the public, the tests aren't even questioned, most people believe they're pretty accurate, and most people are unaware that they have changed the criteria throughout the last year and a half. They sold it to the public like this because they knew that people would avoid getting tested and staying quarantined if they didn't trust the tests.
A good reason why our testing was so terrible and laggard was because of trump. Elections matter, and his brand of "inject bleach", "take hydroxyclorquine", and continual fall of fake news got a whole hell of a lot of people killed. And he retarded federal government's access to tests, and also severely impacted democratically led states in testing. (citation: https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/did-trump-kushner-igno... )
"Trump has made no secret of his ambivalence about testing. "When you do testing to that extent, you're going to find more people," Trump said in June at an ill-timed rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma. "You're going to find more cases. So I said to my people, 'Slow the testing down, please.'""
"Most troubling of all, perhaps, was a sentiment the expert said a member of Kushner's team expressed: that because the virus had hit blue states hardest, a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically. "The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy," said the expert."
I believe those speak for themselves.
> Lately, it's about the vaccines. There is no serious scientist that believed that the vaccines would prevent COVID from becoming endemic. It was obvious that this was going to be with us for the rest of our lives back all the way in April of last year (or earlier). There are no serious scientists that believe that 2 shots and a booster is going to be the end of it, and yet they're happy to tell us that we "might" need boosters. Do any serious scientists actually believe that? These aren't "breakthrough" cases, because it's not truly a vaccine in the sense that the Polio vaccine was a vaccine. It's a prophylactic. We always knew it was a prophylactic, but they sold it to the public as something else, because people wouldn't get it if they didn't lie.
You only need to study your history about the Kansas Military Base Flu... Errr, the "Spanish Flu". Lasted 2.5 years. Had anti-vaxxers. Had anti-maskers. Had nearly the same groups on both sides saying the same stuff. Cats, dogs, and other mammals could also get and spread it (they even masked their cats and dogs).
And regular Covid is pretty much gone. Now, it's delta and newer greek char variants. That's because people won't limit the spread using reasonable and working methodologies (vaccine, masking, social distancing, limiting group sizes). And those mutations migrate away from the original vaccine's work on the initial Sars-CoV-n19. I'd be reasonably sure my vacc would protect against the original.
> We need to decide if we're okay with science agencies lying to us. Is their purpose to exact change on society, or is their purpose to do good science and tell us honest results? All of the confusion in this article stems from the misrepresentations they sell us.
Scientists aren't lying - you're just listening to the wrong research (protip: main stream media are the usual culprits of lying/oversimplifying/lies of omission).
The vaccines work in varying degrees, primarily keeping people who do happen to get a variant out of the hospital.