Hacker News Reader

Comment by 323 | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

Those statements were true for the original virus. They are not true for the current variant. And we really can't predict what new variants can do, we could have guessed that new, more transmissible variants are likely to emerge, but we can't predict the future.

So basically anything scientists tell us may or may not be true depending on how the future evolves?

Come on man!

Yes, this is absolutely the case. Public health leadership is flying in the dark about the evolution of the virus.

> Public health leadership is flying in the dark about the evolution of the virus.

And yet, it says that it knows all.

Which reminds me - are eggs good or bad this month?

Certainly the public health leadership never implied that it "knew all", that doesn't make sense. They make it clear they are making suggestions based on the data they have, which is ambiguous. It's not clear why you are setting yourself up for distrusting public health leadership.

I'd love to have a public health leadership that is trustworthy, but it would be foolish to trust them if they're not.

Feel free to point to anyone in the public health leadership who has acknowledged that things might not work as predicted or when they got it wrong.

Remember "15 days to flatten the curve?" Then there's the mask flip-flop (early on, health officials said that ordinary people didn't need masks, possibly because they were trying to avoid hoarding that might interfere with having enough for medical professionals) and they're still overstating the value of typical masks.

Along the same lines is the PHS response to the :Barrington Declaration". It wasn't "hey, what is their data and how did they arrive at their conclusions". It was "How do we discredit those people."

Maybe they were wrong, maybe they were correct, but anyone who says that they're wrong because of who they are is doing politics, not science. Moreover, arguing that they must be evil and discredited because of their conclusion is even worse.

And then there's ever popular "outdoor protests that we like are safe but the ones that we don't like will kill everyone, and that's good because those are bad people".

I am a scientist: yes.

Such a BS cop out. When I was doing my PhD, we were all training to pick apart the science. All challenges well come, as it forced our work to be airtight as possible. That’s why the final process of a PhD is your thesis “defense”.

To somehow claim that we should just shut up and accept what the government says because “its based on science” is silly. Science changes, science is sometimes wrong.

But we should also make clear that science results in policy and policy can be criticized without challenging science.

“Yes, vaccines are effective, but no we shouldn’t force people to take them” is a policy objection, not a scientific objection.

I think it would make sense to provide sources with those quotes from March.

I’m admittedly not from the US so I had different scientists talking about the pandemic, but around here 70% vaccination was never considered enough.

In the pandemic’s early days, Dr. Fauci tended to cite the same 60 to 70 percent estimate that most experts did. About a month ago, he began saying “70, 75 percent” in television interviews. And last week, in an interview with CNBC News, he said “75, 80, 85 percent” and “75 to 80-plus percent.”

In a telephone interview the next day, Dr. Fauci acknowledged that he had slowly but deliberately been moving the goal posts. He is doing so, he said, partly based on new science, and partly on his gut feeling that the country is finally ready to hear what he really thinks.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/24/health/herd-immunity-covi...

https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/90445

"and partly on his gut feeling that the country is finally ready to hear what he really thinks"

When you start doing stuff like that, you stop speaking as a scientist, but as a politician.

Precisely. I'd like the scientific community to begin treating their declarations with the respectful humility science needs. Too often have i been reading headlines such as "The Universe is growing faster than it should" or "How science tells us the Pandemic will end once everyone is vaccinated". .

. .or other such pop science cult rubbish. We do NOT know everything, we merely have "best fit" theories that are taught with the disclaimer that these work under specific conditions that we've observed and we have no way of gaming out all the trillions and trillions of possible outcomes in the real world. Trusting the common man with that level of transparency and then making humble "recommendations" seems a far better approach.

Should we need to ram through a scientific conclusion, lets do so without making obviously uncertain statements such as "The pandemic will end once everyone is vaccinated" since that presumes a LOT.

You're assuming it's the scientists making these grand claims. Unfortunately it's often the case the scientists will make some small claim with lots of caveats, a university press officer will hype it up, the media will then take that and make it into the most attention grabbing headline they can.

This sorta jives with my observations, but from my experience it seems like its the general population journalists that mess things up. There's such little understanding of these complex topics and then journalists try to cram as much info into a small place and pick the things that sound most important to them. Detail gets lost and importance of some aspects overblown. This happens through multiple stages as in a game of telephone from original research all the way to average people reading or watching the news

> headlines such as "The Universe is growing faster than it should" or "How science tells us the Pandemic will end once everyone is vaccinated".

Such headlines are the hallmark of popular science journals, who indeed seem to do damage to the credibility of science by riding the clickbait wave.

> How The Science tells us the pandemic will end once everyone is vaccinated

Fixed it for you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com