Hacker News Reader

Comment by enriquto | Hacker News Reader

> Once government officials and scientists gaslight us about what they think they should, how does one know they wouldn't for anything at all they decide to?

For me it was the masks. The masks were my tipping point.

At some point at the beginning of the pandemic they said that the disease was totally not airborne and that masks were useless. I remember vividly president Macron (a person that I respected before that) very serious in TV explaining to all the citizens of the republic that we should not buy nor wear masks. That we should clean our doorknobs and vegetables, wash our hands, and avoid touching our face. If we did that we would be safe, no need of masks.

Just two weeks later, he appeared again on TV announcing that wearing masks was now mandatory. That it was the most important thing to do. Without any correction on the previous statement. Without any explanation of whether the previous statement was wrong due to ignorance or intentionally (to save masks for health personnel). Not only he was a liar "for our own good", he acted as if people hadn't even a two-week memory! An utmost lack of respect.

I found it extremely offensive that a democratically elected president treats the citizens who elected him as little children, and not as adults. I don't believe any of the stupid conspiracy theories, but I have more sympathy for the conspiracists that follow these theories (I am compassionate to them) than for the evil lying politicians.

View on HN

Happened in the UK as well, Boris (and to be fair the WHO) told us masks were counter productive. That they might get you to stand closer to people and touch your face more, increasing your chances of getting Covid.. All presumably to save a mask shortage; But we know, and they should have known, that the public doesn't buy the same kind of masks that our NHS buys and there never was going to be any shortage.

This encouraged examples like; people walking up to you in the supermarket explaining why you should take your mask off. It lead to some number of deaths, probably 10s of thousands in the UK as this policy lasted for six months and it undoubtedly was part of the reason care-homes were hit as hard in the first wave.

Now here we are a year later, and no one has been held accountable, no talk of this in the media, no anger. Not only were we treated like children, we were treated like children by incompetent heartless leaders that got a lot of us killed, and there seems to be no corrective process for this.

> All presumably to save a mask shortage

I don't think so. There seemed to be genuine uncertainty early on in the pandemic about whether masks would be helpful. We didn't know if the virus was airborne and there was a question about whether the masks would actually be helpful. For example, the masks could have had very low benefit but encouraged people to touch their face more.

Whitty in March 2020: "In terms of wearing a mask, our advice is clear: that wearing a mask if you don’t have an infection reduces the risk almost not at all. So we do not advise that. The only people we do sometimes use masks for are people who have got an infection and that is to help them to stop it spreading around."

I think this was a mistake: common sense suggests that they should have had some effect (and the evidence ended up supporting this). But I don't see any evidence for it being deliberate misinformation to avoid pressure on mask sourcing.

I also think that this one mistake should not be held up as the key problem in the pandemic. Public health information in the UK has generally been very good. Most of the missteps in the pandemic were from poor governmental decisions.

> no talk of this in the media

This is absolutely not true. I've seen this issue discussed ad nauseum.

> There seemed to be genuine uncertainty early on in the pandemic

Among the civilian population, perhaps. Not among politicians and health officials. At least Fauci, WHO, and Finnish health authorities HAVE come out afterwards and admitted that they lied about masks to conserve them for health personnel.

> At least Fauci, WHO, and Finnish health authorities HAVE come out afterwards and admitted that they lied about masks

This is not true. I think Fauci etc. admitted that a reason masks weren't recommended early on was partly to conserve masks. That's quite different from the claim that they actively lied about them.

"Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS! They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus"

- Surgeon General, Feb 29, 2020

Please stop spreading misinformation.

I am not spreading misinformation. Please don't throw accusations around.

Previous Surgeon General Jerome Adams is not the same person as Fauci.

I'm not in the USA, but looks like your surgeon general in Feb 2020 was not an ideal choice for the post. He sounds like a political Trump appointee.

Even so, the full tweet read:

"Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS!

They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can't get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!"

...so it sounds like he was quite upfront about the idea that mask use was partly being discouraged to avoid pressure on sourcing masks for medical professionals.

The original point you argued against is if he lied, not if he lied for a good reason.

You can't even keep your own arguments straight.

In grandparent post you stated "There seemed to be genuine uncertainty early on in the pandemic about whether masks would be helpful".

In this post you are stating "mask use was partly being discouraged to avoid pressure on sourcing masks for medical professionals".

So which is it? Were they recommending against mask use because masks are not helpful, or were they recommending against mask use because masks are so helpful that we actually need to conserve them for medical professionals? Which is it?

If you're going to lie, at least make up a consistent story.

> Were they recommending against mask use because masks are not helpful, or were they recommending against mask use because masks are so helpful that we actually need to conserve them for medical professionals?

Masks are clearly going to be more effective when used by trained personnel in a clinical setting. For example, removing masks using gloves and disinfecting hands before touching faces. There isn't necessarily a contradiction here in thinking masks could be effective for medical personnel but not the public. Although, as I have already said, I think they made a mistake.

> If you're going to lie

If you don't have the wit or politeness to enter a discussion without throwing insults around please find another forum to argue on.

This is 1) obviously about supply chain issues, so upfront with the reasons and 2) seems to be genuine about not believing masks are effective in preventing COVID. If that is accurate this is not a lie, because there is no intent to deceive.

Alternatively admitting that makes one look better than admitting “I didn’t know” or even “I was wrong”.

The inability of public health officials to simply say “we got X wrong” when they pivot massively erodes trust; ironically admitting “we were wrong; we know better now” would have done the opposite: it would have increased trust.

> This is not true. I think Fauci etc. admitted that a reason masks weren't recommended early on was partly to conserve masks. That's quite different from the claim that they actively lied about them.

You state that masks "weren't recommended" which indeed would be different from "recommending not to wear masks". However, Fauci didn't merely abstain from recommending masks, he actively recommended people not to wear masks. Yes, he actively lied about it, and he has openly admitted that he has lied about it. Now please stop spreading misinformation.

Perhaps. But we had a pandemic during the Obama/Biden admin, but no stockpile of appropriate PPE, masks, etc. This was, we were told, the pro-science administration.

Pandemics are such a common trope that Hollywood has made multiple (bad) movies revolving around them. Yet it appears we were unprepared for the basics.

What Fauci said or why isn't important. The question we should be asking is: Why were in that position to begin with? We were warned - time and again - and each time that warning was ignored.

This is wrong. The Obama administration did quite a bit to prevent future pandemics and the Trump administration dismantled it all pretty much immediately. Three things come to mind: the pandemic playbook, the pandemic response office, and the public health observers in China that were all recalled under Trump.

I love the reaction you get when you tell people there was literally something created & called “Pandemic Playbook” which was devised because they were expecting a pandemic in the next decade or two.

& what happened to the Pandemic Playbook created by the 44th presidential administration? It was completely discarded by the 45th presidential administration.

What proceeded to happen during the 45th presidential administration? A somewhat predicted pandemic. It’s too bad they didn’t have a playbook that told them step by step how to properly handle it…

And I love when ppl are so sucked into a particular narrative that they ignore the question being asked:

Where were the stockpiles of appropriate equipment? Or did the playbook say such things would fall out of the sky, like manna from heaven?

Fact: The 45th didn't discard them. In fact, the gov bought masks from Facebook and (I think) Google who did have a stockpile (but evidently not for pandemic purposes).

You're loving the playbook but missing the fact that some basic and necessary execution never happened.

…sigh

Feel free to use the search engine of your choice to search “US PPE Stockpile” & read any of the multiple credible articles that come up as the first results of the search. As it was known nearly immediately after COVID started, the stockpiles were mostly depleted - and what wasn’t depleted was mostly expired. This is why you saw pictures and videos of nurses demonstrating their supplied smocks disintegrating into dust as they put them on.

The 45th administration had the responsibility to refresh the stockpiles, and they purposely chose not to. If you’re unaware of this, your snark is a bit funny as you appear to be the one suckered.

Secondly: As for what the government bought after they remembered the stockpile is screwed, also for the small bit of it that was still useable.

“The notion of the federal stockpile was it’s supposed to be our stockpile. It’s not supposed to be states’ stockpiles that they then use,” - Assistant to the President and Senior Advisor, 45th Admin

https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/2020/4/3/21207140/jared-kus...

So much to the point that at least one state had to buy shipments of PPE in secrecy & then guard the distribution of said shipments with their National Guard. Everything not done in secrecy or guarded was being “appropriated” by the Feds, for reasons not hard to imagine given the statement of the aforementioned advisor.

There’s a lot more to it, but I digress.

Somebody here is indeed a sucker - but I do not believe it is I.

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/apr/08/donald-tru...

I won't dispute Trump exaggerated. That's a given.

On the other hand, all I can find are articles on the stockpile being depleted and that even if full there were numerous warning about full not being enough.

So again, a simple question: Why? And why isn't anyone willing to ask why?

We knew this was coming. We even got a warning. And still not even close. But no accountability??

So we had a stockpile that wasn't a stockpile, that wasn't effective? That ran out in no time at all? That's some great spin. Thanks.

I’ll leave anybody who comes across this discourse a simple

Google “Trump administration stockpile budget cuts”

and stop attempting to discuss in good faith with you, who apparently really wants to be right on the internet when they’re completely wrong.

Again, fair. But it still doesn't answer the question:

We were clearly - and across multiple administrations - under prepared...why? And why is no one (read: media) seriously asking why?

That is, again for example, even an undepleted stockpile wasn't going to be enough.

You're confused. Where did I mention "pandemic playbook"? It's a _very_ simple question:

Dear Uncle Sam - Where were the stockpiles of appropriate supplies?

That's it. We can move on to other discussions but let's start with the basics first.

> We were warned - time and again - and each time that warning was ignored.

And at least in the US, their are 1000s of people receiving good money to take that warning seriously. And they still failed.

I heard a story about California preparing for the case of a pandemic in reaction to SARS many years ago (Schwarzenegger in 2006) stockpiling medical gear and building mobile hospitals that could be quickly moved to hotspots as disaster relief. The next governor (Brown in 2011) then cut funding to retain and renew it in an attempt to slim down the states budget.

To be fair, that's not an unreasonable concern for them to have. Masks running out for healthcare professionals would have been an absolute disaster.

This is exactly the problem. No matter what it is not ok for someone to lie for what they perceive is the greater good, but scientists who we thought we could trust show that's exactly what they do and keep doing.

Trust is what our entire society is built upon and the foundation of science.

These people aren’t scientists their doctors acting as public health officials it’s a very different group. These people don’t have much hard data at the start and simply get a lot of things wrong such as the need to keep disinfecting everything.

They also have the dual jobs of keep people alive and keeping society functioning.

No matter what. Really? I'm pretty sure we all have a line we wouldn't cross. No good having a society built on a foundation of science if the planet is destroyed by a nuclear war for example.

If you can lock up the entire population in their homes you can ban the sale of masks to non-medical personnel. It was always an excuse.

BuT hE LiiiEEEEEdddDdDddDdDdd

As far as I know, the advice that wearing a mask doesn't protect you very well from getting Covid has held up pretty good; they're a lot better at protecting everyone else from the mask wearer.

The logical flaw then was that telling people to just wear masks if they're infected doesn't work very well if highly contagious people don't know they're infected, which turned out to be the case. I can see where it might have taken awhile to figure that out, but still the lack of transparency about how these decisions were made and the resulting credibility deficit is a problem.

I think that's largely true of cloth masks, but well fitted N95 (or similar) masks also protect the wearer.

Droplet transmission works via the eyes as well though. Hospital staff wear an N95, full garments, and a face shield for example - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wR25COr2FSs - and also depend on the hospital having adequate ventilation. And it "sort of" works most of the time.

That still implies that the masks are doing something. Of course it's not 100%. And it's worth noting the hospital staff have much greater exposure than the general public.

"the advice that wearing a mask doesn't protect you very well from getting Covid has held up pretty good; they're a lot better at protecting everyone else from the mask wearer."

They're actually no good at anything. You can compare places that were right next to each other and which differed only in mask mandates, or look at the times mask mandates were introduced and removed. Cases don't shift.

See the graphs here, where the numbers from different nearby regions are overlayed on the same graph with the times of mask mandate rule changes:

https://ianmsc.substack.com/p/every-comparison-shows-masks-a...

That's why when you dig into the citations of a paper claiming masks work, you invariably find some invalid evidence, like they'll be citing model outputs as evidence of real-world effects, or they'll cite a study whose CI includes zero, etc.

This is nonsense. You can't do comparisons like that.

For example, mask mandates tend to get imposed when cases are rising, and removed when they fall. To say they have no effect on cases is to confuse cause and effect.

The conspiracy site you link to has no interest in looking at the data dispassionately. There's a reason why we have data science and peer review to investigate these things.

The site I link to isn't a "conspiracy site", it's a blog written by a guy who does lots of data analysis. Please, have you not learned yet that this word is meaningless anyway?

There are lots of cases where mask mandates were not added and removed at the times you claim, which were geographically next to each other, and in which there was no observed difference. There are lots of cases where mask mandates were added and the trend of the case graph didn't change at all. These are evidence against the hypothesis that masks work which was, note, the standard belief prior to mid-2020. That's why public health officials all said mass masking doesn't work. It's because it doesn't.

> The site I link to isn't a "conspiracy site", it's a blog written by a guy who does lots of data analysis.

Those aren't mutually exclusive. Anyone can throw some graphs together on a blog. Why should we trust him over papers that have been peer reviewed by experts in their fields?

It's a series of cherry-picked comparisons. Why is he comparing Germany to Sweden? They don't even share a border. Why not UK to France or Peru to Ecuador? Did he pick those countries because it happens to support his theory?

We don't have to wonder, because he admits it: "Perhaps the clearest example of the delusional political obsession with pretending masks matter is found in Southern California." Oh, great. So why are you showing us the "clearest examples"? Why not a comparison of the other places which aren't as "clear"? How can we determine if it's statistically significant if it's not a systematic study?

There are lots of other problems with that page. He's a crank.

Because the experts aren't really experts and peer review is useless? They routinely publish totally unscientific stuff and peer reviewers don't care, I can list 5 examples off the top of my head.

Why compare Germany and Sweden - because their case curves are virtually the same despite wildly different levels of masking. Because providing counter-examples is how you disprove a hypothesis.

Remember that he doesn't actually need to do lots of statistical analysis of this because mask theory is a total one. It doesn't come with caveats like "sometimes in some countries it works and others it doesn't for <reasons>", it doesn't even come with effectiveness numbers. It's just masks=less COVID. To disprove a theory this simple you only need one counter example. But this guy shows lots. He makes a big pile of graphs not because it's actually necessary to prove the point, but to try and ram it home to people who are in denial about it. There isn't just one counter example, there are a huge number of counter examples, and any one of them is sufficient to invalidate "masks = universal and effective COVID countermeasure" as a belief. That actually is science!

If mask mandate proponents were proposing a very subtle and complex effect where it was expected that sometimes there'd be no impact etc, then yes, the counter-argument would need to be correspondingly complex in return. That isn't the case here though.

>wearing a mask if you don’t have an infection reduces the risk almost not at all.

I remember this, at the time we knew people who were infected (and infectious) could take more than 10 days to show symptoms, and if they didn't wear a mask they could infect hundreds. We also knew that anything less than an N95 wasn't designed to protect the wearer anyway (though as it turns out it does), but rather everyone else from the wearer. So it was really disingenuous of them to suggest your mask doesn't protect you, as they knew its everyone else's mask than protects you..

By the time it hit Italy we knew it was airborne, even if not by official measure, out government and the WHO kept this BS up for months after that.

Maybe we watch different media, as i have seen nothing about this issue. A few articles online, hidden away, nothing proportional to the seriousness of the issue.

> I don't think so. There seemed to be genuine uncertainty early on in the pandemic about whether masks would be helpful.

Just like anything, reality is a bit more complicated. I don't think there was any genuine uncertainty about whether masks were helpful or effective, as we already knew that at minimum COVID-19 was droplet spread due to it being so similar to SARS. The issue was whether or not the public could correctly and effectively use masks, because wearing them properly is important as improper wear can actually /increase/ exposure to capture viral particles on the mask material.

But rather than just be honest and tell people the truth, they chose to spread simple lies.

It took a very long time for the Swedish FHM to say that masks work, so I don't know why everyone assumes that the rest lied to prevent a mask shortage.

Seeing as at the start, it was 100% known that covid spreads for weeks, prior to showing symptoms, that people may never show symptoms and spread, and further that tests did not exist for months, and were in short supply thereafter, any mask policy predicted upon being aware of infection would be negligent, incompetent, and just plain dumb.

> It lead to some number of deaths, probably 10s of thousands in the UK

Is there solid evidence anywhere that masks are important one way or the other? While it is plausible that a mask could prevent an infection in an encounter, I've not yet seen anyone waving something conclusive around that masks prevent infections over the course of a pandemic.

I've managed to avoid the coronavirus for 2 years now and as far as I can tell the future still has me getting COVID in it. I'm still not clear what role the mask is meant to play in that forecast.

No there isn't. The studies touted have serious issues, but because they align to 'consensus' nobody checks, not daring be called some misinformation agent or 'anti-vaxxer.'

They knew this after sars. It's not hard to find the evidence from after then.

It's just a nice visual way to make people feel safer against the thing they're told to fear.

Something to note, is that while it is possible we might all eventually contract COVID (or its variants), there is real benefit in contracting it as late as possible, and not being among the first group that gets it. The vaccines greatly blunt the severity of illness, but even outside of vaccines our treatment regimes are better for the hospitalized.

So if wearing masks pushes your infection date out to when vaccines are available (and you get vaccinated), it is not unreasonable to assume the inverse (that not wearing masks led to earlier infections and thus worse outcomes, and death)

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abi9069

Unfortunately many parts of this paper are beyond me, but this study does appear to find that community level masking has an impact, but it is a study that used actual communities and tracked compliance (and impact of different interventions on encouraging making)

AFAIK, this is the only really good study of mask-wearing. It's large (300k people!), and it's randomised. It tried two kinds of masks, "surgical" and "cloth":

> We used high-quality surgical masks that had had a filtration efficiency of 95% [standard deviation (SD) = 1%]; this is substantially higher than the filtration efficiency of the cloth masks we designed, which had a filtration efficiency of 37% (SD = 6%). These cloth masks had substantially higher filtration than common commercial 3-ply cotton masks, but lower than hybrid masks that use materials not commonly available for community members in low-resource settings (54).

The key result:

> We find clear evidence that surgical masks lead to a relative reduction in symptomatic seroprevalence of 11.1% (aPR = 0.89 [0.78,1.00]; control prevalence = 0.81%; treatment prevalence = 0.72%). Although the point estimates for cloth masks suggests that they reduce risk, the confidence limits include both an effect size similar to surgical masks and no effect at all. (aPR = 0.94 [0.78,1.10]; control: 0.67%; treatment: 0.61%).

It's a shame that even with such a large study, the phenomenon is so noisy that we can't get a strong signal here. But i think the takeaway is that masking has an effect, but it is rather small.

There's a lot more detail in the paper. Including this gem:

> We find no evidence that any of our village-level or household-level treatments, other than mask color, impacted mask-wearing. For mask-color, we see marginally significant differences, small in magnitude. In surgical mask villages, blue masks were more likely to be observed than green (adjusted percentage point difference = 0.03, [-0.00,0.06]), and in cloth mask villages, red more likely than purple (adjusted percentage point difference = -0.02, [-0.04,-0.00]). Text message reminders, incentives for village-leaders, or explicit commitment signals explain little of the observed increase in mask-wearing. Compared to self-protection messaging alone, altruistic messaging had no greater impact on mask-wearing, and twice-weekly text messages and a verbal commitment had no significant effects.

Actually look at the peer review of that study done by Cornell and released this December. When the actual data was analyzed it showed masks had no effect.

Interesting - do you have a link by any chance?

> I've managed to avoid the coronavirus for 2 years now and as far as I can tell the future still has me getting COVID in it. I'm still not clear what role the mask is meant to play in that forecast.

I think a key target was spreading out the infections so that hospitals weren't overwhelmed. And delaying infections until vaccines were available. Imagine if everyone in the country had gotten covid over the first half of 2020.

> This encouraged examples like; people walking up to you in the supermarket explaining why you should take your mask off.

I attended FOSDEM in Brussels in 2020 right at the beginning of February, after COVID was identified, but before the big push of lockdowns in March. I had to transit through Atlanta to get to EU, and had a long layover so left the airport to visit a friend. While I was in the airport and flying, I wore a P100 rated half-mask respirator with cartridge filters the entire time. Recently the TSA and airlines had been experimenting (and now fully implemented) facial recognition for identity verification in US airports rather than handing the TSA your ID. It's supposed to be optional, but I got delayed 20 minutes in an otherwise empty line re-entering Atlanta because the TSA agent on duty wanted to argue with me to take my mask off and how masks were ineffective, and that's what the doctors/CDC (based in Atlanta) said, and how arrogant I was that I thought I knew more than the CDC. I kept my mask on. I didn't get COVID, and in fact still haven't had it at this point (although I'll likely get Omicron) by following common sense precautions and being vaccinated.

The telling people not to wear masks or buy masks was one of the biggest things for me that immediately let me know that the public was being lied to and manipulated. I've made a point of keeping up on the latest research and sharing what I know with family and friends directly, including preparatory advice. I already had a "pandemic prep kit" in my prep supplies, which had plenty of respirators, and I shared them with family and friends early on when they were hard to get. To me, it's utterly obscene how often even /basic/ easily verifiable facts were lied about to the public, masks especially.

Now that this has been politicized as an issue in the US, it's just made it harder. Here I am knowing the government lied consistently throughout the pandemic to everyone and that many of the "precautions" were nonsense, but the entire time advocating masks and vaccines... nobody on any political aisle likes truthful information since their selection of "truth" cannot match with reality.

Note that we are still spending a fortune globally on enhanced cleaning regimes and special anti viral detergents to prevent an airbourne virus getting onto our hands.

As an Asian American, this baffles me a little bit. We knew the virus was airborne since January 2020. It was all over Chinese/Taiwanese/SEA news outlets. I live in New England, Asians here started wearing masks months before others. I remember purposely choosing to go to Asian Supermarkets instead of Stop & Shop for safety back then.

I'm Italian and the events in February and March 2020 made it very clear to me how the anglo press largely just ignores foreign sources. The "debate" about lockdown in the UK mirrored the Italian one almost day by day, with a delay of 3 weeks between here and Italy. Italian sources and discoveries were either ignored or discounted. It was like watching a child "discover" on their own how to start a fire.

If they do that with sources in a relatively easy and popular language, I cannot imagine what they do with complex Asian ones.

... and if Italy learned the lessons from Asian countries, the initial spike in Italy would not have been so devastating.

I think a more fair take would be that most countries did not take COVID19(in particular, the early variants which were much more dangerous) seriously enough until there was a major source of infections in their country, at which point it was obviously too late.

There are some exceptions(in particular, New Zealand, which is in the Anglo world that you malign), but I think in general it is a true statement.

The world tends to respect the anglo press more than the rest, because they work in the world's current lingua franca, they are historically less subject to governmental influence, and effectively report (and affect) the state of the biggest superpower on the planet. In some cases (covid, Judith Miller, etc), it becomes evident that such high respect is often unwarranted. I say this from a place of sadness, not anger. It's not a criticism of anglo countries per se, but of cultural attitudes around certain sectors, inside and outside such countries.

> in particular, New Zealand, which is in the Anglo world that you malign

NZ and Australia largely benefited from their geographical and economic periphery to achieve the level of safety that they did. By the time the virus got there in critical numbers, it had already been taken seriously in the anglosphere as a whole because of the UK debacle. I'm not saying their lockdowns didn't help (they very much did), but it's easier to enforce controls on entrance in far-flung corners of the world rather than around the backbone of the world economy.

That's not it, the problem with Italy was in the way they were treating them and the fact that Italy is mostly old people (after government policies drove out young peoples for decades).

Several Italian doctors criticised the Italian guidelines (in particular about giving corticosteroids) but they were silenced.

We also don't know the real numbers of Asian countries, do you trust the numbers given by the CCP?

Most Asian countries are not China. The standards of reporting in places like Taiwan, Thailand and Singapore are probably better than the west.

> do you trust the numbers given by the CCP?

No less, or more than for the USA.

Even though I usually like to stay away from political topics on here, but it pains me that a country I (used to) love so much, UK, is spiraling deeper and deeper into a void. So much so I have to believe its leadership no longer acts in favour of the country. For reasons unknown to me, however it is long known Brexit was a wanted scenario for Russian geopolitics, as laid out in their textbook: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics

One guy writing a book in 1997 that argues France and Germany should be strongly united in a Union, does not imply anything about the decision of British voters in 2016. You're peddling a literal conspiracy theory there.

Well, if said book is the de facto textbook for their foreign policy students, then yes I would say at least the intent was there to influence things the way they occurred. How much did that effectively take place, now that's a conspiracy theory.

Stop blaming the Russians, they can only exploit the rot if it's already there. It reminds me of Germans blaming everything on the Nazis after WW2 conveniently forgetting they voted for them and cheered them on.

I still blame them for exploiting the rot. I wish they could behave like a normal country instead of trying to destabilize most of the world.

I do believe all superpowers are doing that, US has a long history too to back certain leaders/powers etc.

Thanks for pointing out the book. Terrifying.

Same in France, we mirrored Italy with a 10 days delay or so, yet didn't take advantage of that warning. And that's despite YouTubers all over the place warning about that. I literally watched our government ignoring reality.

From what I can tell, the UK and US press pushed the argument that the UK and US should've learned from Italy primarily because journalists there hated the current governments and wanted to portray them as uniquely incompetent, which meant they had to spin them as worse than Italy even though that was a trainwreck. The problem is that the information coming out of Italy was utter garbage.

For example, Italy was reporting zero cases when the US and UK weren't, and exponential growth is really slow at the start - you don'tt just go from zero cases to hospital collapse in an instant. The only way this makes sense is if Italy was failing to test people hospitalized with Covid symptoms even more totally and completely than even the US, which had an official policy of not doing so for patients without travel from China yet still managed to pick up unlinked cases at a much earlier stage. Which means the information on how Italy ended up this way was useless and not applicable to other countries, and all the hospitalisation and death rates were worthless too - and remember, no other country in the world had Covid spread from China result in the kind of outbreak that Italy experienced, their major outbreaks all seem to have come from Italy. So other countries had no way of knowing whether to expect something more like Italy's experiences or their own prior experiences and also no way of knowing what if anything could prevent this.

The information on how to treat Covid patients from Italy also seems to have been hot garbage. Like, their information and treatment policies around stuff like intubation and ventilators which every other country based their policies on likely outright killed a bunch of people. On the other hand, the UK found the first effective treatment for patients with Covid that was actually confirmed to substantially reduce their risk of dying - yet somehow, you don't hear the press arguing that other countries whose outbreaks happened after the UK's should've been able to do better because they had the UK to learn from like they do with Italy. What they have been doing is comparing the total number of deaths with other European countries (rather than per-capita figures) to falsely make it look like Covid was more deadly here than everywhere else.

In Spain, up until the 8th of march the government was inviting people to go to women's marchs and saying everything was under control.

A guy in charge of the job safety for national police was demoted because he decided to buy and give masks to policeman.

Media affiliated with the government was actively trying to ridicule everyone, calling people alarmists, fascists or whatever insult they came up with. That includes science divulgators, medical personnel, etc. Pretty ugly.

Then, suddenly, the 9th of March we had a very worrysome situation and yadda yadda.

Not to mention the mask thing.

I mean, how in the hell are you going to trust any of this any more? I know I don't. Now if something else happens you have to be very careful, they may be lying to you, or having a combination of lies and stupidity.

I guess this is what happens when the selection of elites is optimized for marketing purposes.

IMO, this is a problem inherent to electoralism. The types of leaders that are best at winning elections tend not to be very good at actually leading. That is why we need to start gradually moving away from this outmodded version of pseudo-democracy. I believe the future of democracy lies in the combination of of deliberative citizens assemblies (such as those that have been taking place in Ireland) and deliberative, consensus-seeking online platforms (such as the vTaiwan project). Elections still have their place, but they should not be the primary mechanism by which we conduct democracy.

> the anglo press largely just ignores foreign sources

As I recall, one of the first things that happened in response to the pandemic was loads of our foreign correspondents either not getting sent in the first place, or getting pulled out.

For something like an earthquake or tsunami, there would be reporters on the ground filing in-person reports within days. Somewhat understandably, nobody wanted to send reporters to outbreak hotspots.

It wasn't until further into the pandemic that journalists decided interviewing randos from their living rooms over skype was good enough.

The UK has been one of the freest countries in terms of restrictions.

I wasn't happy with the restrictions but they never went as crazy as the rest of Europe. Overall I'm glad we had Boris and not someone from the other side who would have been even more draconian - even if having a real conservative would have been better.

Which countries do you have in mind when you say "rest of Europe"? For example, Switzerland (one country I've been following pretty closely) seems have had less strict restrictions than the UK pretty much throughout the pandemic.

(To be clear, I'm not qualified to say which is a better approach, I'm just curious about your comparison.)

Interesting conclusion given by almost every measure the UK restrictions have been more draconian than the rest of europe.

Yep, I (in the UK - no asian heritage) was also aware of this by around February/March 2020 due to posts here on HN. But even otherwise smart and well informed people that I know seemed clueless about these things until many months later.

I think in the case of masks, it is highly plausible there was no deliberate attempt to mislead.

While at the time it seemed pretty clear to me that masks had a high probability of being helpful, there was a dearth of research that would support this conclusion - indeed the very limited research conducted on public mask usage did not seem to support it.

On top of this, I believe a major contributing factor was that many medical experts were used to very stringent mask protocols, and did not seem to consider the obvious differences between a hospital setting (where Covid may be rife) and every day life where it is a medium-to-low risk event, and carried over their belief that anything less than their stringent (and unrealistic protocols for the public) would render them useless.

I saw many regular doctors expressing this belief on Twitter at the time, as well as explaining how mask fitting was a laborious process, and that without this the mask would be useless, or that if you touched the mask while taking it on or off it would be worse than useless.

So, I think it is entirely possible that experts were giving leaders and journalists their honest assessment that masks were useless for the public - no doubt more exuberantly than they would have done if masks were plentiful, but not necessarily dishonestly.

I don't disagree that public messaging is highly manipulated in general, but I think it is more plausible that this particular case was fabricated by flaws in the decision process rather than dishonesty.

Another point on top of yours, at least in the EU, was that there was a plain shortage of masks and every single functioning FFP2+ mask was needed for hospitals and ICUs.

I have often observed discussion on how this might have been a convenient political move in the beginning when the EU had no way to get masks except for waiting on Chinese orders. But that's the realm of conspiracy again.

> I remember vividly president Macron (a person that I respected before that) very serious in TV explaining to all the citizens of the republic that we should not buy nor wear masks.

I don't remember this from Macron, but rather from Véran (Health Minister), but I could be wrong. anyway, at the time this was a more than reasonable request.

Because the very first persons we had to protect were health professionals, and we didn't have enough masks for everyone. (We didn't even have enough for health professionals)

> If we did that we would be safe, no need of masks.

I'll need to check again what he said, because I really don't remember that part, and I remember that the "L’usage du masque en population générale n’est pas utile" made sense to me, precisely because we had to protect health professionals first, which contradicts that part.

> anyway, at the time this was a more than reasonable request. Because the very first persons we had to protect were health professionals, and we didn't have enough masks for everyone.

So that makes it ok for them to lie? I do not agree. And the trust is lost as a result.

They should have explained that we should prioritize masks for health care professionals if that was their reasoning.

I don't see the lie. As I said, I don't remember them ever saying that it was safe without mask. They only said it was not useful.

I would actually say that at the time, it was counter-productive for the general public to wear masks, because it prevented protecting health professionals.

I agree there is a bit of conundrum that "not useful" is not exactly in between "counter-productive" and "useful", and here you could argue that the "not useful" in Véran's mouth meant "doesn't protect". I definitely wouldn't blame you for that, and yes I'm being very nice to them for my interpretation.

The reality is that had they said "yes masks are super important, but it's even more important to give them to health professionals", we'd have seen what we saw with hydroxychloroquine (which is that people who actually needed it couldn't get it), but 10 times worse. Could they have twisted their words 7 times more in their mouth before saying it, so that it's not factually a lie? Yes sure.

Even before the masks, they were presenting "case fatility rates" as "infection fatility rates" (by just calling them "death rate", which everyone understands as risk of death when infected), when there was hardly any test. Of course if you only test people who show up at the ICU, you will get a very high death rate. That was obvious from the outset and I think deliberate disinformation as a scare tactic.

It is not before June that they started admitting that the IFR was way below 1%, when the first serology studies started showing up (though I came to believe that this number is meaningless, you need to look at IFR by age).

Sam Harris invited Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease MD from John Hopkins in early April 2020, and his estimate at that time was around 0.5%. So it's not like the information wasn't there.

Well yes the information was there, I remember clearly that back then, we had the "perfect" measurement (for such an early study that is): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_on_Diamond_P...

14 people out of 2666 died, hence 0.5% death rate (because I don't agree with the estimate that only 700 individuals got it, I saw no good reason not to consider everyone got it, but even without that, it'd give low 2%)

A retrospective on who said what on the matter of death rates would be extremely interesting to pick the ""good"" medias and the ""bad"" ones

I think this is more nuanced.

In the beginning, testing was very sparse and unavailable so it's hard to blame anyone for just looking at the obvious infections. It took a while until we even understood that the majority of cases are asymptomatic and very mild.

The 1% IFR is trueish across all age groups but not so much when you look at specific age groups. You can clearly see it in current German data: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1105512/coronavirus-covi...

You might have an asysmptomatic child with a 0.003% IFR and hand them to your grandparents for caretaking, with a quite high chance of putting them into the ICU if infected. So it's not so easy to deal with like a cold.

Also, variants might change the distribution and death isn't the only negative outcome of a COVID infection. It's a systemic disease affecting all organs which will put a strain on the health systems for a long time to come, especially if it becomes endemic and people will just keep reinfecting themselves year after year. It's too shortsighted to just dismiss it as a cold just because cases are often very mild.

A great number of politicians still don't understand the difference between cases and infections. So you see for instance travel from rich countries in Europe being banned, and rich European countries banning each other, purely because they do enough testing to quantify the number of infections. And when Omicron arrived it was the countries with the highest sequencing capacities that were in the firing line.

The CDC and WHO are still spouting off about cleaning surfaces without, to my knowledge, one single well-documented case of surface transmission.

It's not a long stretch to question if anything the CDC recommends actually comes from caring for public health at all rather than private interests.

The US is becoming more and more the outlier in over-hyped fear and infantalism vs a world moving on.

It is a long stretch

It’s not unscientific to change your mind when presented with new evidence, quite the opposite. It is, unfortunately, unpalatable as a politician to be uncertain, even when the facts demand it. I blame our culture of “leaders always know”.

Politicians will never or very rarely correct their statements. It is for the same reason as football referees. I took up refereeing as a hobby and we were taught very firmly by the ref coach that no matter what decision we take, we stick to it and never change it. Because that is a sign of weakness and will degrade the quality of the game even more than that individual decision.

I'd hope that our elected representatives did not treat us as adversarial football players, but maybe I'm asking to much.

Well people are rooting for the parties as if they were football teams. Especially if there are only few political parties.

I haven't yet given up on society, only on the current generation of shitty leaders.

>For me it was the masks. The masks were my tipping point.

Before covid we knew masks were effective. Doctors obviously wear them during surgery. masks are important when dealing with HIV and such.

So when Fauci and others came out and said masks didn't work. They were knowingly lying. Worse yet, there were instructions on how to turn a tshirts in masks as well as how to produce hand santizers. They took these down.

The correct decision would have been to say exactly the fear, 'we have supply issues, we recommend cutting up old tshirts.' Not only does it prevent spread, it solves all problems.

Then we went a week later and they talked about 'new normal' and '2 weeks to flatten the curve'. Their lying didn't stop. They lost any smidgen of trust they had. Then they came out with emergency approvals to use experimental medicine for something that clearly isn't a vaccine and they are lying and calling it a vaccine? Sorry but this amount of lying should make literally everyone question their motives.

Happened in my country as well. In the beginning of the pandemic when there were a lot of unknowns, authorities made blatantly incorrect statements and decisions and even contradicted one another. People stopped trusting the government, the doctors, the news. Even now they're saying thay vaccines are risk-free which is quite simply factually wrong, they have a favorable risk/benefit ratio but the risks are not null.

No wonder there are conspiracy theories all over the place. News are disinformation, you can't trust anything you read and uncertainty is at an all time high. People no longer trust these authorities but they still need to make sense of the world so they start looking for patterns. Sometimes they see things where there's nothing and sometimes they're right. I have a lot of sympathy for these people.

To be fair, I believe more the criticism about masks and I'm on the side that they're pretty useless. Their first explanation made more sense.

People are certainly reusing them, they keep touching their face to adjust them, they don't respect distancing rules because they have a mask on, a lot of masks are not filtering enough.

On top of this they're annoying.

With the risk of covid being so low, masks are too much of a hassle for me to bother and I wear them only to avoid fines from the totalitarian regime I live in (and I'm certainly not changing them or buying any, I'm still using some I managed to get for free).

Must be really frustrating to be completely wrong about masks.

The alternative is that governing massive democratic countries is incredibly difficult and it requires lies/facades/manipulation to ensure stability. Imagine the largest project you've ever worked on and then imagine scaling it up by many orders of magnitude.

Conspiracy theorists almost always operate in negative space and are unable to stand on their own.

> I remember vividly president Macron (a person that I respected before that) very serious in TV explaining to all the citizens of the republic that we should not buy nor wear masks.

Ah! This one is actually a story of "the lesser of two evils".

You can't really tell people to buy masks where there is none available, and you can't really tell there is nothing to do unless you want to put every one in panic mode. You can't really trust people to act rationally in the presence of a new and unexpected situation that nobody trained for, and you can't tell them that you're also as unprepared as they are for that.

So, handle the situation like you want, there's no way you aren't damaging something. I guess it was easier to take a slight (to medium for some government staff, Olivier Véran) reputation hit and announce it to the press via your health minister, than risk a state-wide panic meanwhile you are fixing the mask situation (remember the stockpile was left in a degraded state and wasn't usable).

If you think of it, the only reason why getting vaccinated is not yet mandatory is because of the next elections in May. You wouldn't risk to alienate ~1/6 voters (again, they are the most motivated ones and they refused to get a shot despite not being allowed in restaurants), if it's not national-security-like important. So I suspect it will become mandatory either when we crossed the threshold where it's really dangerous (500.000 covid case per day, we're currently at 350.000), or after the elections, in june. Whichever comes first. With our current trajectory, you could expect the president or the prime minister to announce it in about two weeks, despite having said differently in previous announcements.

> I guess it was easier to take a slight (...) reputation hit,

Not a reputation hit. A credibility hit. Essentially 100% of what they say now is lies to my ears. If their policy is to lie to me "for the global good", this is the most rational position.

I'd have preferred if they had told the truth as they knew it (the disease is airborne, masks help you to avoid infect people, please leave all masks to health personnel, people who hoard masks will be severely punished).

Precisely this. The occasional manipulation to try and prevent a run on toilet paper or gas stations is not worth a total loss of credibility.

> I'd have preferred if they had told the truth as they knew it

This is perfectly understandable, however, in this situation, the truth or any version of it weren't available. If you tell everyone that masks are the best way to avoid getting infected, but there is none available, then you are creating and invoking the worst case scenario immediately: No masks available for anyone, No idea when you will get shipments, and 60M panicked citizens to manage.

Still, they could have explicitly said two weeks later that they lied for our own good because of the shortage. We know they lied, so they could at least admit it and rebuild some good will.

Still better than living in a post-truth society.

> If you think of it, the only reason why getting vaccinated is not yet mandatory

The vaccine is close to mandatory since June 2021, and is now becoming even more so, that with the negative tests not even counting any more.

I don't really by the election arguments: people who aren't vaccinated already don't vote Macron for the most part, they're already alienated. I'm pretty sure Macron doesn't want their vote, he wants scapegoats.

I also heard there are constitutional hurdles in making the vaccine mandatory (because it's not officially out of test phase yet), as well as that pesky thing about not compensating people who suffer side effects (aside from having regular health care like everyone else).

Your predictions still make sense, though. I'm not sure they're probable, but they're definitely plausible.

> Ah! This one is actually a story of "the lesser of two evils".

Well, there could have been a third route - Buy out the entire supply, then announce that masks help, but they do the most good on the faces of doctors and nurses so the supply of N95 masks has been reserved for them by the government; and those who can sew their own cloth masks are encouraged to do so.

The decisions were made in a hurry, and our politicians aren't doctors or scientists, so some mistakes are to be expected. But there's no denying the early stop-buying-masks announcements were a mistake IMHO.

Same thing happened in the US. It made no sense to everyone and degraded public trust at a critical juncture.

Would it have been different for you if he had elaborated on the reason for the changed policy, and apologized for what he said earlier?

Also, in the first case, did he express it very categorically, or did he say something like "to the best of our knowledge, the virus..."?

In Canada our leaders said the same things, no masks required… as they shipped our stockpiles of PPE to China

No, this didn’t happen.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-ottawa-face...

Yeah, they shipped it because they didn't expect they will need it even when WHO was suggesting that there is a likelihood of cases in other countries...

Isn't this more a failure of the scientific advisors? Surely they would be able to deliver a clear verdict on this (eg. definitely transmitted by aerosol, definitely not transmitted by aerosol, or possibly transmitted by aerosol so urge caution).

What the hell? Our understanding of COVID was literally changing day by day. It would be dishonest to NOT change based on the updated science.

I’m so surprised and disappointed this absolute bullshit shows up on HN.

What exactly did Macron ever do to earn your respect?

Everybody has my respect by default, until they make a major fuck-up like Macron did there.

Maybe he fucked up sooner than that, thus not being worthy of respect at that point. But I'm not interested in politics at all so I missed it.

>Everybody has my respect by default

That's terrible, and doubly so when you apply it to politicians.

So if a stranger comes up to you on the street to ask you the time, do you immediately insult them for being an inferior human not deserving of your respect?

In my opinion, not giving respect to fellow humans by default is the terrible choice.

No, I am neutral to them. Respect is earned. But it is a spectrum, not a binary choice.

>In my opinion, not giving respect to fellow humans by default is the terrible choice.

Not every walking person deserves to be called a "fellow human".

He picked up his english teacher. I'm sure all his mates went crazy when he told them.

French teacher. Not that it makes any difference, though.

Exactly the same thing happened in Spain. +1 to everything you said.

This may be unpopular, but I'm actually fine with polititians manipulating the truth in that scenario (_if_ we accept as a starting point that the shortage of masks was already unavoidable, and the best option for public health was to convince the public to minimise purchases). Part of the job of politicians is to act as a rudder for the general public, and if tragedy of the commons applies to a scenario, a politician doing what they can to counteract that effect, even by deceipt, isn't fundamentally wrong (if it's for a genuinely good cause and the situation didn't have a less distasteful solution). If polititians need to tell us that there is no fuel shortage to avoid a rush that worsens the fuel shortage, so be it. It is (and _should_ be) assumed that polititians are manipulating the truth, the only question is whether they're doing it at a level and for a cause that are acceptable.

I am _much_ less comfortable by similar behaviour in scientists. Science is built on trust and a pursuit of truth, lying is anathema. This is true both within scientific debate, and from the outside, when scientists share their perspective it should be a counter balance to the more flexible interpretation of truth provided elsewhere.

Tldr: Polititians can and should play politics (politics _is_ mostly white lies, or just lies, depending on your cynicism level). Scientists should not, it hurts the reputation of science as a whole.

I get your point. But the long term damage doesn’t justify the lie. That’s a race to the bottom.

And what happens when the scientist and politician is in a hybrid role, like Fauci? Folks don’t trust Fauci because credibility, in general, has been harmed. Q conspiracy theorists thrive in a world of distrust. Chronic distrust of politicians is too high a price to pay to justify the use of the occasional manipulation.

Plus it's simply ineffective. Enough people saw through the lies such that all the masks sold out anyway. I reckon an honest approach and appeal to morality would have seen more masks donated to hospitals than simply telling people that they don't work.

That's a fair point, although in this case drawing attention to the shortage would have made it even more newsworthy, and might have made the few greedy profiteers more fervent in their desire to buy up all stock, even as the average person reduced their buying. Appealing to morality works better when each person gets an approximately equal vote. If one arsehole can counteract the good behaviour of 10, that weakens the honest approach.

Whether it would have actually been worse or better I can't really guess, but I do see your point that it might have worked and definitely wouldn't have weakened public trust the way the dishonest approach did, so yeah, I'll concede that was probably a bad call.

Not only distrust of politicians. I'd say the mainstream media have suffered from a similar loss of trust over the last years because most outlets simply repeat official guidance from the WHO or national agencies.

100%. And for me personally, I think the most powerful discrediting tool is juxtaposition of their changing positions.

It’s very common to see “super cuts“ of the media pulling a complete 180 on positions. Those are super compelling to the public, who are generally in alignment in hating hypocrisy.

The error that the experts and politicians made was that they only considered N95 or surgeon's masks and didn't have the insight to realize that any face covering would reduce transmission if everyone was wearing them.

Plenty of people own scarves and handkerchiefs, and for a while people were making their own masks at home. So the initial message could have been that any face covering helps and that N95 masks need to be reserved for healthcare workers and responders.

Yes, certainly would have been a better angle. I suspect bad/limited data played into that, but it does seem like a fairly obvious direction to go in nonetheless.

a politician doing what they can to counteract that effect, even by deceipt, isn't fundamentally wrong

A politician manipulating the public is an attack on democracy, since democracy relies on having an informed demos. Condoning such behaviour shows how much faith a person has in (true) democracy.

I don't have faith in true (aka direct) democracy. It relies on the average person being well informed enough about everything involved in running the government to make good decisions. It also relies on every person in the country acting in good faith for the benefit of all, which at best you could convince _most_ people to do _most_ of the time.

I do have faith in representative democracy to do _approximately_ the right thing most of the time, or at least minimise how bad the bad results will be.

In other words, I think people are better at deciding who to trust to run the country than they are at actually running the country. Given that, it should be no surprise that I also think there will be situations where the person trusted to run the country will realise that telling the public the whole truth will be a bad idea, because they are better at interpretting that truth than the public is.

Lying to the public is not (imo) a slippery slope that inevitably makes anyone who goes down it a monster. Polititians can be something other than perfectly honest and actually satan, and in fact they must be. I think a perfectly honest polititian would be a bad thing overall, even beyond the fact that their career wouldn't last very long.

Where on that scale they should be is in the end in the hands of the public, via our democratic vote. Certainly I don't support constant lies and hiding of things the public needs to know. But that isn't what we're discussing here, we're discussing a single lie used for a good cause (though I admit it was probably not the best solution to the problem, it was at least a logical concept: convince people who need masks less to not panic buy masks, leading to more masks for people who need them more).

> This may be unpopular, but I'm actually fine with polititians manipulating the truth

Sadly, this not unpopular.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com