He has an earlier piece whose point is that the WHO can never be accurate, because they always have to prioritize "sounding trustworthy" over accuracy, and random blogs don't.
Society needs a simple answer. Do this. Do that etc. Put on a mask. Wash your hands. Practice social distancing. Use approved vaccines. Take booster shots etc are pretty simple to follow. Likewise don't take non approved stuff. Easy to understand and simple to follow.
Nuances will likely hurt and confuse the common man. That's why the news and celebs and politicians etc try to keep things simple.
Dr. Fauci knew that a lot of the things he was saying might not be 100% accurate and yet he did it. The reason being that on the whole his message was a net positive effect on the public.
Likewise CNN made fun of Joe Rogan for taking Ivermectin because we don't want general public to experiment with alternative medicine. It's better to just stick to the proven stuff.
Basically, there is no choice here. Or basically two choices: 1. Be 100% accurate and risk confusing people 2. Be strategic about it and for the greater good.
We need a narrative and the cost is accuracy. We need to have more empathy for people who are the decision makers and have to make difficult choices.
It does mean you might have to downplay some things which might be true but will cause more harm than good if emphasized.
I personally can never do that but I won't judge people who are in a situation where every thing they say has a huge impact on our collective future.
Society has been so trained by political theatre and non-stop news channels for single answers that are capable of defying facts due to their non-life threatening nature that if a message isn’t straightforward, succinct, and unchanging then the messenger gets killed the moment it varies. Like politicians with the other side waiting for the slip up.
Except unfortunately science doesn’t work like this because nature can’t be fooled and at the beginning we don’t have as clear facts as we would like to. And the process of zeroing in on clearer and more concise answers is confusing and scares the shit out of the average punter. And the media are excited to be able to have a messenger who continues to vary their message.
It’s all a really sad state of affairs. I think WHO/CDC/Australian governments (really the only relevant one for me) and everyone else could have done a much better job but I feel I know why and how we ended up with such a communications disaster
Agree that Fauci was/is in a tough spot, but I think it's a mistake to conceptualize these decisions as a stage game as opposed to a repeated game. "Lying" or selectively emphasizing truths to achieve a specific outcome is borrowing against future trust in an effort to solve the present problem, and is suboptimal long term.
"Doctors are like monkeys with hammers trying to fix computers. We bang against stuff and will try a lot of things if we don't know what you've got. We may even get it right. But if you have a broken leg, an appendix that needs removal, a clear case of something that can be treated with anti-biotics, then we can perform small miracles."
I don't know enough of the profession to estimate how accurate that statement is but it has colored my view.
In one case it took nearly 2 year to arrive at a correct diagnosis and corrective action, which involved both medication and surgery.
In the other case the person was moving into liver failure, and placed on the transplant list. Luckily a family friend worked for the same healthcare organization as an IT professional, and knew exactly what to do. She marched the patient into the ER, had her sit down in a wheel chair, and made it crystal clear that she was going to be a gigantic PITA until they found out what was killing the patient. Within the day they had a plausible answer, and confirmed it with lab results within the week as I recall.
It shouldn't be this way, but unfortunately in US healthcare it is. Having an uncommon illness is an absolute nightmare, one that destroys entire families finances if not outright killing people.
I wouldn't be any less harsh about my own profession though.
We see the medicine of 200 years ago as barbaric, and I can guarantee that people 200 years in the future will see today's medicine as barbaric. There is simply lots of room for improvement even if improvement has been made in the past, but why should that give us colored views of the whole field?
Especially since most of us -- most readers here do something computer-related, right? -- are ourselves in an (even more rapidly) evolving field of work, where what's "true" is constantly changing.
I hope the lesson that gets learned is to be more honest to the public, and not the opposite.
When Western governments lied to get around supply issues, while distracting people with quasi-religious rituals around hand hygiene, they not only caused preventable deaths among populations at risk, they planted the seed for long term education and trust issues. More than a year later westerners still have terrible understanding of how the virus spreads, terrible mask education, AND mistrust of health authorities.
The antidote to misinformation isn't more misinformation, it's truth.
I don't know what you interpreted as a lie. What I saw was two updates that sparked advisories to curtail surgical mask runs:
* the initial WHO position from between late 2019 to early 2020 on the risk of COVID spread, back when COVID was still the Wuhan epidemic and little was known about it, where they quoted Chinese health officials on how the risk of airborne transmission was deemed low. Therefore, based on those observations, surgical masks and gloves were deemed unnecessary.
* The updated WHO position around early 2020 after airborne transmissions started to be reported and corroborated by multiple sources which caused a supply crunch of surgical masks and gloves which were putting frontline workers in risk.
* a call to the widespread adoption of masks from around mid 2020, whether surgical masks or cloth, when their availability started to not be put into question.
Updating advisories based on new data on a developing problem might be seen as flipfloping in politics, but it's not lying or a bad thing.
I remember this guy. The specific claim was that he does not believe that masks will prevent new infections due to people not socially distancing and wearing them incorrectly, NOT that masks are ineffective. He concedes that the evidence suggests masks themselves work.
I've seen this guy get cited in anti-vaxx circles, using extremely simplified claims. Of course when I bring up the fact that he advocates for social distancing, anti-vaxxers get angry at me.
The damage was already done by the time he started with the qualifications and to this day 100's of thousands, if not millions of people will quote the head of the RIVM (correctly or not) to support their anti-mask (often coupled with anti-vaxx) stance.
And social distancing + masks = better than social distancing without. Even Fauci called him to task about this, his response was that 'he would study their claims' (their claim: that masks do work).
https://nos.nl/artikel/2350709-van-dissel-blijft-erbij-gewon...
When people like Jaap van Dissel cross the official line published by the country it immediately erodes the platform that we all depend on to get through this. From someone in his position one would assume a basic familiarity with the difference between official policy and scientific fact and when it is appropriate to take which viewpoint.
That does not seem to be true. Wikipedia's article on Jaap van Dissel[1] links to a Reuters news article from September 2020[2] where van Dissel is referred to have made the following claim:
> The head of infectious diseases at the Netherlands’ National Institute for Public Health (RIVM), Jaap van Dissel, has argued there is no scientific proof of cloth masks’ effectiveness, and that they might do more harm than good by giving users a false sense of security.
Please note that the criticism refers to cloth mask (not surgical), whose effectiveness has been since then reported to be lower than 40%. Also, the thesis is that relying on an ineffective protection measure does more harm than good as this potentiates the spread of the disease.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaap_van_Dissel
[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-nether...
https://www.trouw.nl/buitenland/mondkapjes-hebben-geen-zin-z...
"‘Mondkapjes opdoen heeft geen enkele zin’"
"putting on a mask is without any sense"
That's exactly what I meant when I wrote that over time he has moved his position. First it was all masks, then cloth masks, then they didn't work because then other measures wouldn't work etc. But he never came out to say he simply got it wrong.
Isn't your source citing the WHO's advisory from early 2020 on how face masks were counterproductive as they convey a false sense of security and thus contribute to violate critical measures such as social distancing and washing hands?
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/who-director-warns-masks-can-...
From the article:
> “Masks can also create a false sense of security, leading people to neglect measures like hand hygiene and physical distancing,” Adhanom said. “I cannot say this enough: Masks will not protect you alone from COVID-19.”
This was a quote from a WHO representative, made two months after your source was published.
Also I note that the WHO representative says 'alone', an important qualification.
The public is comprised of people with vast differences in cognitive ability, education, and scientific training. Most members of the public, even in highly educated countries, are easily fooled by a wide variety of logical fallacies, emotional manipulation, and statistical misdirection.
I’m not implying you meant anything by it. But it should be noted that people here are arguing, and you’re coming down with a sort of correction that could be applied to either side of the argument. You appear to take a side by choosing this comment without any further nuance.
Apologies if it sounds like I’m saying you’re doing something horribly wrong here, I just find this particular dynamic interesting in internet discussions. It happens all the time.
You can pretend there is "nuance" to saying that the common man would be hurt and confused by facts. I see this plainly as calling people morons in a polite manner. Sorry if it hurts your sensibilities that someone would lay bare the underlying meaning of a comment.
Also, please by all means ignore the actual point of my comment, which is, why do people go around correcting a specific comment when that applies to at least one more comment up the chain. Any replies re: "morons" will be ignored.
I think this condescension does more harm than good. The "common man" is plenty smart enough to make decisions for themselves using reasonable judgement. They will make mistakes, but at a similar rate to the experts.
A message of "we're not sure, but this virus seems to be transmitted mostly by air, and we thinks wearing a mask will probably help. We suggest you wear one when reasonably possible" will likely encourage a lot of people to wear masks, while a message of "OMG PANIC AND WEAR MASKS ALWAYS AND YELL AT PEOPLE WHO DON'T" is not likely to.
This is now milked for more than it is worth by those that would like to discredit him but at the same time have probably never held a position of some responsibility towards a populace that is ill equipped to deal with scientific uncertainty.
Pharisees of the modern world. You will be the end of us.
This line of thinking is a feedback loop, averaging down the social expectation closer to the lower bound every year.
Slowing down the BS a bit, increasing free flow of information for a more informed generation following ours, is the only answer.
tl;dr We will become stupider, and less critical-thinking, if we allow it.
Ivermectin is not alternative medicine. Ivermectin used for COVID symptoms is off-label use.
CNN made fun of him because he dared stray from the official narrative and he dared try doing something through his own research rather than doing exactly as the government and media told him to do.
I also love the blinkered trope he continues to roll out that public health doesn’t tell everyone to exercise and not smoke and eat healthily. Which it does constantly, but he can’t see this because he can’t compute that the magnitude of the response to covid drowns out the baseline public health messages that have been in widespread adoption and classroom teaching for 30 years.
As much as he’d like to be, he’s not an independent thinker - him saying ‘I hate tribes’ doesn’t make it so - he’s part of tribes as well
Humans have a very poor track record at actually advancing any "greater good" when they choose option 2. In practice, "the greater good" turns out to be whatever helps those particular humans keep their power and status. That's why option 1 is the only acceptable one.
> We need a narrative and the cost is accuracy.
If this is actually true (I don't think it is), then our civilization is doomed.
> We need to have more empathy for people who are the decision makers and have to make difficult choices.
No, we need to stop thinking that certain people should be given the power to be "decision makers" and tell the rest of us what to do. The only acceptable thing for people in public health positions to do should be your option 1 above.
At the risk of coming across as extremely snobby, that just isn't true at all.
If you think the people who grow our food, make our clothes, build our houses and cars, fix our plumbing and heating and air conditioning when it breaks, run our electrical wiring safely, run the utility plants that provide our power and water and sewage disposal, and do the thousands of other things that are necessary to keep our technological society working, have less intelligence and common sense than you do, you don't come across to me as snobby, just woefully uninformed.
I did not mention any of those folks. The reason you knocked that argument out of the park was because it was made of straw.
Yes, you did. You said "the average human". All of those folks are average humans.
In that case, so are all other humans too. The GP did not mention any specific occupational or educational categories; that was all your own invention.
No. My underlying assumption is that my country (the US) is supposed to be a free country, where people are expected to make their own decisions and manage their own lives. If a significant fraction of people aren't capable of doing that, then, as I said in another post downthread, that's a problem, yes, but it's not a problem that can be fixed by just telling everyone to trust the experts. That makes the problem worse, not better.
That's highly dependent on a bunch of stuff that you can not choose at birth. For some variations of those you are going to find yourself decidedly less free than others.
Agreed that blind trust in experts makes the problem worse - in principle. But with hysteria just around the corner (of which the wishful thinking that a cheap and common cure exists is one exponent) I can see why authorities chose to try to massage the message. Where they wrong? Probably, in the general case, yes. Were they wrong in this case? Possibly, but I would not be too sure of that, taking into account that even the highest levels of politics were actively spreading mis-information against informed scientific consensus. If we actually had trusted the experts things would likely look a lot better. But instead, we outsourced our trust and hence our decision making to committees, politicians and the lens of the media.
The fact that every country acted on its own was yet another confounding factor, if this had been a giant synchronized operation then it likely would have worked out differently as well. Even today we are still seeing giant differences between countries, rather than that the rich countries structurally help the poor.
Meaning, which country you are born in? Yes, of course; that's why I specified which country I was talking about.
My original comment about the poor track record humans have of actually advancing "the greater good" when they think that's what they are doing was meant to be general, however.
> If we actually had trusted the experts things would likely look a lot better.
Which experts are these? From what I can see, with the benefit of 20-20 hindsight, two actions that the world could have taken to drastically reduce the impact of COVID, much more than anything anyone actually did, are:
(1) Stop all international travel, sometime around late January or early February 2020.
(2) Make the vaccines that were discovered in January 2020 available, at least to high risk people (e.g., the elderly, health care workers) in high risk areas, sometime in February or March 2020.
I'm not aware of any "expert" that ever recommended either of those things. Indeed, experts were vociferously recommending against #1.
> Meaning, which country you are born in? Yes, of course; that's why I specified which country I was talking about.
Yeah, because there are absolutely no differences between people at birth within a country.
Unless those years of education and experience translate into actually being able to make better predictions about what to do than you can, they're useless as something to rely on.
Alternatively, what do you do for a living? Do you make decisions that affect others? Or do you provide 100% accurate information in sufficient detail that they can make those decisions individually?
If experts in various fields could be trusted to just tell the truth about what they've found and not try to spin it or filter it, their information would be much more useful. It's precisely because the average person cannot trust experts to just tell the truth about what they've found that it's so hard for average people to get information they feel they can trust.
Also, being an expert in virology, for example, does not make a person an expert in human psychology; but trying to spin or filter your information about virology (or anything else) based on how you think people are going to receive it is a human psychology problem, not a virology problem. And if spinning and filtering scientific information was viewed, as it properly should be, as a matter of psychology, it would be much more obvious how manipulative it is--do you really want so-called psychology "experts" spinning and filtering the information you get based on their model of how human minds work?
In short: your implicit assumption that I, as a non-expert in a given field, can just trust the experts to tell me what to do is wrong--dangerously so. If the decision really matters to you, you take the time to learn enough about the field to at least be able to apply some intelligent common sense.
> How much time are you going to spend on the tens of thousands of other fields that you need to understand in order to make your own decisions?
You don't need to take time to learn tens of thousands of fields in order to apply intelligent common sense to your everyday life decisions, or even to decisions about something like COVID. Intelligent common sense just about viral illnesses in general, which should be common knowledge to any adult in a first world country in the 21st century, should have been enough to tell people in the US, for example, to wear masks and social distance around the end of February 2020, which is when my wife and I started doing it. If it's really true that a majority of the US population is unable to exercise that much intelligence and common sense, then our society certainly has a problem, but "just trust the experts" is not going to solve it, it will make it worse.
> what do you do for a living? Do you make decisions that affect others?
Not in any way that requires me to communicate information to others, no. What I do does affect others, but only in the sense that my work, which is in a technical field, has to be done right in a technical sense.
That said, I should be clear that my comments about what public officials should do are made from the viewpoint of a citizen, not from the viewpoint of an official.
Guess what. If you don't trust the public. Why should the public trust you?
Do you actually get out and talk to people? Most people are ok with nuance. Most things we consume as entertainment, from lowbrow housewives of Atlanta to highbrow pbs space time are full of dizzying nuance and unknowable truths (but not star trek. Star trek no longer has nuance).
Why? Because it makes you feel good to think everyone else is dumber than you?
Why, then, do I keep seeing arguments from people about the vaccines not being perfectly effective?
Can you link to an archived news article saying this?
"And then there were three. U.K. pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca, along with its partners at Oxford University, became on Monday the third team to announce positive late stage trial results for a COVID-19 vaccine. The "AZD1222" vaccine was "highly effective'' in preventing disease, with up to 90% efficacy in patients receiving one of the dose regimens used in trials, AstraZeneca announced." (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-vaccine-oxford-astrazenca...)
PFIZER: COVID VACCINE OVER 90% EFFECTIVE IN EARLY DATA [video] (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CG8U3OWSV4o)
ABC, CBS, NBC.
Last updated July 2021 but the data from multiple studies for multiple strains seems to support the initial claims.
The point is that WHO is a political organization with a political mission that needs science to get it done. While it employs and funds countless great scientists doing meticulous work...the people you will see and hear from at WHO are international politicians.