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Comment by CryptoPunk | Hacker News Reader

By that same logic, research showing the dangers posed of COVID, or the efficacy of vaccines, should be taken with a grain of salt.

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That is correct. Usually it is better to wait and see if the results are corroborated by different research teams, preferably in different countries.

Right, and we should definitely not assume long-COVID exists without compelling, reproducible evidence. Much policy around COVID is now based on the assumption that long-COVID is a significant public health threat and justifies extremely heavy handed and disruptive interventions and policies, respectively.

This is despite no large randomized controlled studies proving that it is exists as a widespread phenemenon, and nothing in the pathophysiology of COVID to suggest it would create the kind of pervasiveness of long-term complications that many media stories have sounded the alarm about.

In practice there is the bureaucratic state ratchet. Everything that favors their policies is taken as gospel on the whimsiest of the evidence. "My aunt's gardner third cousin works in an ER, they are seeing mountains of children in ICUs". Everything counter their policies must be proven via large RCTs. Regulatory capture functions in the same way, creating a sea of red tape that somehow large incumbents are not subject to, but have significant relative costs for smaller upstarts.

It's all about that magical word that's 7 letters long...

Safety.

People want to be safe, and the governments obliging them. You can't be in danger if you don't leave your house right?

Edit: I can't count apparently - I'm blaming it on long-covid!

Everything should be looked at with the lens of scepticism in science/research. That is why reproducibility is important. You need to be able to convince yourself of some fact you’ve read to doing the analysis yourself.

The dangers of coved and the efficacy of vaccines are a reproducible analysis.

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