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Comment by evandwight | Hacker News Reader

I think you are misinterpreting. They lost faith in medical experts. I don't think hes talking about the US system as a whole but instead trusting the advice that vaccines are safe, masks work, etc. Medical advice.

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Can't blame that on the CDC's pandemic response either. Scientists take money to put out fake studies for dangerous products, medical journals publish absolute trash for cash, doctors take bribes from phrama companies, phamra companies bury evidence that their products are killing people and push for more sales, the FDA bypasses it's own process to push out new dangerous drugs as regulatory capture weakens what little oversight exists, and nobody is being held meaningfully accountable for any of it.

If our entire goal was to erode the trust of the American people in science and medicine we couldn't have done a better job. We lost the game before the pandemic and haven't done a thing to turn that around. The sackler family pays a fraction of their profits and get immunity forever. Stella Immanuel still has a medical license. Corporations continue to put profit over human lives and can poison whole populations with no risk of prison time. It doesn't bode well for the future.

Just so I understand, the one thing about flip flopping on masks cost them to lose faith in all medical experts? Doesn't that seem a little unreasonable? I agree we shouldn't have flip flopped on masks, but I don't think making a whole narrative out of that makes sense.

It's much easier to lose trust than it is to earn it. Lie just once and you can wipe out years of hard-won good will.

Isn't it a bit unreasonable to lie but expect people to still trust you as they did before? This is not some new premise that the authorities got blindsided by; Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. They should have known better than to lie, no matter the motivation for a lie.

I saw the flip flopping on masks and thought it was silly for them to do that. However, I also was not going to not get the COVID shot over that, because, based on my own assessment, getting the shot made sense.

Anyway, I'm just surprised a whole narrative was built around something I would consider really not a huge deal. Folks could buy masks anyway, even without them being recommended (I did). It's not like masks were illegal to buy or something.

Different people have different experiences. Different people have different thresholds for trust. Different people have different prior experiences. Some people have witnessed and been harmed by more lies than others. What does or doesn't seem like an overreaction to you, me, or others is going to be different to one degree or another to every individual. What you judge to be a small inconsequential lie may seem like a much bigger deal to other people who have other experiences and viewpoints. That's why the mask lie was not merely silly, it was flat out idiotic. Those responsible, the liars, assumed that everybody else would have the same tolerance for falsehoods as themselves. That was a myopic assumption to say the least.

(I got vaccinated too, but I have no particular animosity towards those that haven't. They are, if anything, victims of the government's long history of being untrustworthy.)

Yeah, based on what you said, I agree it was idiotic. I personally still don't think it's a hill worth dying on though, but that's just my opinion.

> Folks could buy masks anyway

They couldn't for a while though, and that's an aspect of the whole fiasco that really bugged me personally. The initial claim was that we do not need masks, because they are not effective and because if we all buy them then hospitals will run out, so I did not buy any. Then, we were told that we all must wear masks, and there were none available. I was re-using a disposable mask for several days at a time because I had no idea where to get them. It was really frustrating to see wealthy politicians and celebrities telling everyone to "just wear your mask!" because the rest of us could not find any to wear.

Yeah, fair, I still don't know what them recommending this earlier would've done though. It just would've made the shortage sooner, right? It seems that's what they were trying to prevent. I do get that people don't like that they were lied to though, and then mandates were hard to follow when implemented, if people couldn't acquire masks. The pandemic exposed, and continues to expose, issues with our supply chains. If there was an abundance of masks to start with, I don't think the government would've flip flopped on masks in the first place, but since supplies were what they were, I'm not sure there's a good answer here.

I don't have a good answer either. I understand public health at a national level is about being pragmatic and doing things that actually work, and I can honestly understand if they acted the way they did to try and give hospitals some lead time to stock up before the masses did. But even if this was the case, they have not told us about it, and continue to deny that anyone ever said not to mask up. The tweet[0] from the surgeon general was deleted. The CDC page[1] has been taken down. So not only did they lie, they are now lying about lying, and I'm not going to forget that the next time I'm told to "trust the experts."

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20200229123317/https://twitter.c...

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20200229164715/https://www.cdc.g...

Just wondering, are they currently lying about having made these guidelines before? I haven't heard anything about that myself. I also do remember some news articles saying the government's mask guidelines were so hospitals could stock up (maybe it was once they flip flopped, I forget, it was over a year ago, but I do recall reading that).

I think it's possible they deleted old content to make sure invalid data isn't out there on the web to be cached, linked to, quoted, etc.

However, if they really are lying now (i.e. making current statements) saying that they never flip flopped, then yeah that would be weird.

They never denied saying that they told us not to mask up.

You don't want people linking to obsolete information under the surgeon general's twitter. There is no way to flag a tweet as "for history only ignore the actual advice as what to follow." Meanwhile, the old "don't mask" mandates are in the CDC's website in their archives, which are purposefully hard to find (for similar reasons, to ensure you know you are going to historical and not current publications).

Sorry, I don't have an answer for you. I was just trying to clarify the context with a more charitable interpretation of GP's point.

> Just so I understand, the one thing about flip flopping on masks cost them to lose faith in all medical experts? Doesn't that seem a little unreasonable?

Have you never heard of racism, bias etc? Yes, when a representative for a group does something then that will affect peoples views of that entire group and not just that person. Humans are irrational like that.

Yes I do understand that. I just hope people would put things in perspective and be a bit more rational. I think racism, bias and all that comes from people taking hard line stances on things, possibly things they inherited from their upbringing, political party, etc. If we take a hard line stance on this as well, I don't see what value we are adding. The way I look at the mask guideline was that it was a mistake but it was an evolving situation with the pandemic, so I understand why some of the actions taken, in retrospect, were not ideal.

Trust is irrational by definition: you are trusting somebody is being truthful without any proof. However, refusing trust after it has been broken even once is rational: not only you still don't have any proof but now you have the evidence that that person/entity can lie to you. You might have heard this saying "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me" what do you think it's about?

What you are saying makes sense in a limited context, however, applying it to changing mask guidelines does not make sense to me.

I think rationality is also figuring in all the factors, like an evolving pandemic and supply chain issues, but that's just my opinion.

We were told that Fauci and the CDC speak for the medical establishment. And that if you disagree with them you were anti-science, and Google/Twitter/Facebook would censor you. I still trust my doctor, I long ago stopped trusting the political "doctors."

Generalization from experience isn't irrational or specific to humans. It's a basic part of any cognitive process. Animals are great at generalizing from experience.

The reason there are social taboos against very specific kinds of generalization is because in the past powerful and evil governments have implemented horrible policies on the basis of such generalizations. But that's an argument against letting governments pass such laws, not an argument against any form of generalization about groups of people.

In this case, public health professionals have been observed behaving as a group in very specific and abnormal ways over a long period of time. It is not merely reasonable to generalize about public health at this point, it would actually be irrational not to do so.

Not just that. In the UK the government are claiming that the virus effects everyone equally and yet everyday the deaths are concentrated in the 60+ brackets. Their latest program has them claiming all pregnant women need the vaccine because it's putting them at massive risk of the worst ventilator and yet the figures show just 20 pregnant women in the last 4 months needed the machine and the other 100 people were fully vaxxed.

EDIT:Forgot the bit where the JCVI recommended against vaccinating the under 18s but the government ignored the science because vaccines=good

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/jcvi-statement-au...

And I also forgot the Whitty charts which led to a winter lockdown and 4000 deaths per day. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8908503/Was-lockdow...

And then there's immunity through infection which stopped being a thing in 2020.

> In the UK the government are claiming that the virus effects everyone equally

No they aren't. Some disreputable news sites may imply that, but government representatives have not said this.

I’m going to call bullshit on everything you just said.

> the UK the government are claiming that the virus effects everyone equally

I haven’t heard anyone from the government say that.

> claiming all pregnant women need the vaccine because it's putting them at massive risk of the worst ventilator and yet the figures show just 20 pregnant women in the last 4 months needed the machine and the other 100 people were fully vaxxed.

Here is literally an article from a few days ago that shows 1-in-6 are pregnant women and that the vast majority have NOT had the vaccine.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/oct/11/one-in-...

You know what, forgot it. If this doesn’t prompt you to reconsider your sources, refuting every single point you made won’t either.

No, masks aren't the only thing, it's just that it's somehow become the symbol for the whole thing.

But we've got a whole series of documented lies from Fauci. He's admitted to lying about herd immunity numbers [1]. He's had a whole sequence of confrontations with Rand Paul, first claiming that the USA wasn't funding the research there (we were), and then claiming that it wasn't "gain of function" research (it didn't precisely fit the technical definition, but a common sense parsing of the description is that it's exactly what they were doing).

And right from the start, we've got the WHO lying, apparently to cover China's butt. The WHO demonstrably knew that covid-19 could be transmitted between people, and that it was airborne, yet claimed publicly that it had no evidence of either, and went as far as to praise China's response to the outbreak. [2]

[1] https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2020/12/25/dr-fau... [2] https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/14/asia/coronavirus-who-china-in...

Closing borders is racist. Two weeks to flatten the curve. Don’t mask. Mask. Stay Inside. Trump didn’t close the borders fast enough! Double mask. Protest crowds are not superspreaders. Trump Rallies are superspreaders. School is dangerous, distance learning is good. Go outside, inside is bad. Dems-don’t trust Trump Vaccines. Biden/Pelosi - we can’t mandate vaccination. Dems-you must trust our vaccines, they are effective. Biden/Pelosi- we are mandating vaccines. No mask if vaccinated. School is good, kids don’t get it. Still mask if vaccinated. School is bad, kids are getting it. Vaccine boosters because they are not as effective as we thought.

Did I miss anything?

Edit: added some punctuation for clarity

Ya, people who have problems with dynamic situations (e.g. best practices continually changing via new information coming in) have had real problems with this pandemic. They wanted a static stable unchanging story from the onset, and were very disappointed and anxious when they didn't get that.

But everything you’ve written above is simply condemning authorities because they didn’t have the best solution from the onset.

This wasn’t an evolutionary change of best practices. This was waffling from one extreme to another, then back again. When you do that, people will lose confidence in leadership.

Everything I wrote above condemns authorities not because they didn’t have the best solution from the start, but by all appearances never had a solution at all. Additionally, one party by my observation spent more time trying to exploit the pandemic for political power gains rather than treating it as a problem to solve.

Exactly. The CDC went from masks don't work, to everyone wear masks, to no masks if vaccinated, to wear a mask even if vaccinated. In 18 months.

18 months is a long time. I’m ok with plans changing to find something that works. But again, I understand that a lot of people crave the single right answer from the start.

Can we at least expect a mostly or even somewhat right answer after 18 months?

If we have a dynamic situation, why is it necessary at every step of the way for governments to arbitrarily ban things and then mandate them? Could they not just offer strongly worded advice in line with their levels of confidence?

It is still unclear - and will remain so for some time - if the lockdowns and knee jerk emergency measures were worth the cost.The economic ripple effects have started to appear and we'll have to see how bad it gets.

The changes above weren't caused by "best practices changing via new information", they were caused by political and ideological imperatives.

I mean, seriously. Protests are incredibly deadly. Not BLM protests, those are fine. No, now BLM has run its course protests are illegal again. Obviously that isn't anything based on "new information", and nor have the other changes been so motivated.

Most of these can be blamed on the awful pile of dung that is the modern news media, not actual institutions like the CDC.

Admittedly, very few people go direct to source here, instead only learning about things through the news media.

Closing specific borders because you don't like the people who come through that border is racist. Closing them all probably wouldn't have done enough anyway since it would have to be combined with mandatory and strictly enforced total lockdown to also prevent the spread internally.

We were able to affect the curve. Maybe it would have been flat or even inverted if people actually stayed home for 2 weeks.

They said not to use masks because hospitals needed them. They weren't sure at the time if the masks were effective enough for others to wear them anyway. Later we both got our supplies in order and determined that even cloth masks limit the spread by significantly reducing the radius around you that is dangerous. We said masks weren't needed for the vaccinated because there was solid safety against the original strain. A few months later, the delta strain became a problem because people didn't do enough to stop the virus from spreading, so we had to go back to masks since the vaccine only partially protects against delta.

Protest crowds were certainly dangerous when it came to spreading the virus. However those people were also far more likely to be wearing masks than people at Trump rallies. Also there's a difference between pushing back against people getting murdered by police and people all gathering to hear a politician that they were already going to vote for tell them all the things they wanted to hear.

I don't want to put any more time into this comment, but I think I've made my point that the changes have been logical.

Yes, you have appropriately conveyed all of the political talking points that attempt to tie logic to the illogic behind some of those flippy floppy positions. The changes are only logical when viewed from a political lens. The party behind all that political exploitation of the pandemic I listed never measures it’s success by the outcomes of their policies, only by the virtues behind their intent (Just as you have done here). Perhaps that is how you think to measure success. Me? I measure success by public trust and successful results. The US government and its experts are sorely lacking in both of those areas.

Most of the folks that lost faith during COVID are the ones consuming online rightwing disinformation and also mostly listen to a cable news network and political party that is lying to them for their own political gain.

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