U.S. public health agencies aren't ‘following the science,’ officials say
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Sure, let's critically evaluate the guidance put forward by our public health institutions, but quoting a statement from Norway's equivalent institution without the backing evidence doesn't make the US "wrong". If the evidence available on the efficacy of vaccines for kids is so ridiculously wide that it goes from -99% to +370% risk of infection, then surely Norway is _also_ drastically overstating its case when it says (about kids) "previous infection offers as good of protection as the vaccine against reinfection" esp since it _also_ seems like the protective effect of prior infection is both uncertain and changing.
How about flatly declaring that guidance was "wrong" about school closures because minority and poor kids did markedly worse at math? Obviously these decisions are complex trade-offs, and one can't conclude that the choice was "wrong" simply by pointing out one of the costs.
How about quoting a CDC scientist, who cannot possibly have strong evidence when making the prediction "CDC guidance worsened racial equity for generations to come. It failed this generation of children." Generations to come? Show us the data that lets this scientist predict the far future with such confidence.
I get that it's deeply unnerving when these institutions make sweeping recommendations based on less firm data than we would normally demand. But not recommending anything, or not taking decisive action because of the limited data would _also_ have been irresponsible. When schools first closed, we didn't know a lot of things, but it would have been pretty reckless if agencies said "well this is putting a lot of people in the hospital and spreading fast, but we don't have the data to give definitive guidance yet, so you're on your own. Depending on the range of things your communities choose, maybe in a few months we'll have the evidence to say something."
The protective effect of prior infection is not uncertain, nor is it changing. There have been dozens of papers now, all saying the same thing: natural infection is at least as protective (if not more so) than even 3 doses of the current vaccines. If you are hearing otherwise, you are being misinformed. Full stop.
Here's the latest paper in a long line of consistent evidence, last week in the NEJM:
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2203965
> No discernable differences in protection against symptomatic BA.1 and BA.2 infection were seen with previous infection, vaccination, and hybrid immunity. Vaccination enhanced protection among persons who had had a previous infection. Hybrid immunity resulting from previous infection and recent booster vaccination conferred the strongest protection.
Norway is saying what it is, because we know that most people -- vaccinated or previously infected -- will eventually get re-infected. But even if you are re-infected, you will be well-protected against severe illness.
What I don’t understand is how vaccination and boosting using an mRNA vaccine that contains only spike protein from the original SARS2, and which is almost completely evaded by the BA.4 and BA.5 variants, can confer protection against severe illnesses caused by those variants.
What is the biochemical process that provides that protection?
EDIT: Is this protection just a happy mantra, or is it actually that there is no protection against the new variants, but the intensity of the disease from them is far less than from the original variant (and our treatment is getting better)?
At a very high level, this is the explanation: the spike protein in Omicron has many differences from the vaccine strain spike, but it's still largely the same protein. The immune system is chopping up the protein into chunks, and T- and B-Cells are specializing to recognize those chunks. This kind of immune response (the "cellular immune response") is slower to ramp up than the antibody response that many people have fixated on, but it's a much more robust defense mechanism; B- and T-Cells are very good at providing generalized antigen recognition. There have been at least 2-3 papers I'm aware of where labs have directly demonstrated that vaccinated people are producing robust immune responses to Omicron proteins.
I'd have to dig these up again, and they're not exactly comprehensible by non-specialists, but the executive summary is that we have laboratory and clinical and epidemiological data that the vaccines are still very effective against severe disease.
What the vaccines don't do anymore, is protect against infection. That was probably never a realistic goal for a respiratory virus, but it's definitely not practical with a vaccine that produces antibodies that target a very old spike protein.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009286742...
Here's another:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04460-3
> Between 70% and 80% of the CD4+ and CD8+ T cell response to spike was maintained across study groups. Moreover, the magnitude of Omicron cross-reactive T cells was similar for Beta (B.1.351) and Delta (B.1.617.2) variants, despite Omicron harbouring considerably more mutations. In patients who were hospitalized with Omicron infections (n = 19), there were comparable T cell responses to ancestral spike, nucleocapsid and membrane proteins to those in patients hospitalized in previous waves dominated by the ancestral, Beta or Delta variants (n = 49). Thus, despite extensive mutations and reduced susceptibility to neutralizing antibodies of Omicron, the majority of T cell responses induced by vaccination or infection cross-recognize the variant.
I may have read a third, but I can't find it easily, and these two should be more than enough to back up what I wrote / get you started.
It makes a kind of intuitive sense: if you make your own body produce some key portion of the virus, maybe your immune system gets tricked into thinking it's not such a big issue?
"Response" is many different things. The vaccine boosts response b/c you have antibodies, so it's much less likely that your body has to do a hail mary las ditch (cytok storm).
> why so many governments have stopped publishing the case rate breakdowns by vax status.
But there's enough data out there to have a clear picture: vaccines or previous infections won't protect you from being infected by the recent strains (BA.2.75, BA.5, etc) but will protect you from severe disease or dying. Maybe it can be improved by nasal vaccines (what happened to those?) but who knows...
> It makes a kind of intuitive sense: if you make your own body produce some key portion of the virus, maybe your immune system gets tricked into thinking it's not such a big issue?
This one is completely off the mark. For starters, not all vaccines have your "body produce part of the virus", yet all help to prevent severe cases and death.
That said there are conflicting studies: “This report details the findings of a case-control evaluation of the association between vaccination and SARS-CoV-2 reinfection in Kentucky during May–June 2021 among persons previously infected with SARS-CoV-2 in 2020. Kentucky residents who were not vaccinated had 2.34 times the odds of reinfection compared with those who were fully vaccinated (odds ratio [OR] = 2.34; 95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.58–3.47).” https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7032e1.htm?s_cid=mm...
The nuances are complicated. False positives are a real concern for people avoiding vaccination. People that survive the first infection without vaccination are a meaningfully different population than the vaccinated population. Similarly people that get vaccinated after infection have received vaccination more recently etc.
But also, it was just methodologically flawed -- they didn't bother to correct for the bias that people who were vaccinated after infection in early 2021 were probably behaving differently than those who had not been vaccinated at that time.
If you're going to cite an old MMWR article as "evidence" against the now overwhelming pile of papers demonstrating that the immune system works pretty much as we expect from immmunology 101, don't forget that in early 2022 they released this much better, much larger (N=1.1M people) cohort study, which dramatically showed the opposite of what you're claiming. Prior infection obviously provided robust protection against Delta, on par with the vaccines:
Shocker. Why did we have to learn this again? How were the policies that diverged from the immunology 101-based position justified? This should be our starting point and we should not base policies on the opposite conclusion without good evidence to the contrary.
Saying a study is garbage when you disagree with the results is not how evidence based medicine works. Unless there was actual fraud or gross incompetence, every study should provide something of value.
Hypothetically, if vaccination provides enhanced short term protection for people after catching COVID which also provides short term protection then recommending waiting X months after getting COVID to get vaccinated is one option. Alternatively, if post COVID vaccination did absolutely nothing then you could recommend skipping it, ignoring false positives.
1) in retrospect it was obviously incorrect, and
2) even at the time, a reasonable scientist could have concluded that it was flawed
I don't generally call papers "flaming garbage", but some are so egregiously, transparently awful -- at the time of publication -- that saying otherwise is dishonest. That MMWR study was one.
Long covid, and greater impact on certain individuals were well known by that point. Just saying "let 'er rip, go natural immunity" isn't the responsible move. Perhaps you're ok with the risks for you, but faulting a health officer for taking a different more conservative position is hardly a reasonable opinion.
"Long covid" is not defined. There is no test. There is no objective signature. Literally anyone can claim that they have it, and not be wrong. I'm not saying it doesn't exist, but I'm telling you that we have no idea how prevalent "it" is, and we don't have any idea how "it" compares to the consequences of other common respiratory illnesses. We've simply never bothered to look, and uncontrolled studies where someone enumerates a long list of things that happened after Covid, in a large group of people, are not evidence of those things being caused by Covid.
Said differently: if you have a nearly ubiquitous illness, how can you say anything about causality regarding anything that follows?
So what we have here is a pile of questionable research, a large group of people who are scared and demanding that action be taken, and politicians who are more than willing to "take action" by pushing aside, censoring, and otherwise bullying the scientists who stand in the way of their actions.
okay, well, others with relevant qualifications are saying it DOES exist, so since nobody seems to be saying it doesn't, I guess we can go with their expert conclusions.
Do you think we all have the memory of goldfish? In the height of the pandemic people were saying natural immunity was insufficient to prevent further infection to the degree that would matter the few who were talking about the "cost of natural immunity" (or any other sort of level headed adult discussion about tradeoffs) were ridiculed as enabling the anti-vaxers.
>Perhaps you're ok with the risks for you, but faulting a health officer for taking a different more conservative position is hardly a reasonable opinion.
This is a two way street. If you get to be conservative about natural immunity the other guys get to be conservative about the vax.
Most blatant examples:
- Masks are not protective
- The vaccine prevents infection (entire basis for mandates)
- There is no evidence for lab leak
- Natural immunity is not as effective as vaccine immunity
- the virus is not spread via aerosols
I feel like everywhere I look in the anti-COVID-vax community, no one reckons with the fact that their position gets others sick, and those people might die. Even this article focuses strongly on children not needing masks or vaccines, mentioning not at all kids getting others sick.
Some cites:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33721405/
https://hms.harvard.edu/news/children-spread-covid-19
https://ufhealth.org/news/2021/uf-study-sheds-light-roles-ch...
where did you read this?
The paper you linked shows effectiveness of previous infection alone at 46%, 3 vaccine doses at 52% (and slightly above the upper end of the confidence interval for infection only), and previous infection and 3 doses at 77%. When I looked for earlier studies, the first one that popped up was this one from Sept 2021, which finds that previous infection gives a 90% reduced risk re-infection.
This seems to be consistent with what has been reported more popularly; in 2020-2021 it seemed that the immune benefit from a previous infection could last several months, and that this informed the timing on when boosters were recommended. Whereas now it seems it's significantly easier to be re-infected with an omicron variant relatively soon after a previous infection.
The finding of 90% in late 2021 vs <50% now does sound like the protective effect of prior infection _is_ changing.
Look a Figures 1, 2 and 4, and you'll see clearly that protection against severe disease remains quite robust. Protection against severe, critical or fatal Covid-19 due to any Omicron infection is shown at 91% (95% CI 60-100) after prior infection (Figure 2D).
> You are going to get Covid multiple times in your life, regardless of your vaccination or infection status.
Yeah but whether you expect to get it once every couple years or multiple times a year is meaningful to what living in a post-covid world looks like.
Earlier your very firm statement did not qualify the unchanged protective effect as being limited to severe, critical or fatal disease, and I think you're moving goalposts.
> The protective effect of prior infection is not uncertain, nor is it changing.
> The protective effect of prior infection is not uncertain, nor is it changing. There have been dozens of papers now, all saying the same thing: natural infection is at least as protective (if not more so) than even 3 doses of the current vaccines.
I was saying that natural infection is equivalent to vaccination -- if not better. Then, in the same comment, I explicitly said that none of this will prevent re-infection:
> Norway is saying what it is, because we know that most people -- vaccinated or previously infected -- will eventually get re-infected. But even if you are re-infected, you will be well-protected against severe illness.
Did people originally overstate the claim that vaccination would prevent infection? Absolutely. Do we now know this to be untrue? Again, absolutely. You're going to be re-infected multiple times in your life. Cannot be helped.
But it's still true that infection and vaccination offer at least equivalent levels of protection. So if you're concerned about the protection of "natural immunity" -- by whatever standard -- then I have bad news for you: the vaccines are no better.
This claim is directly contradicted in the paper you linked:
> The effectiveness of previous infection alone against symptomatic BA.2 infection was 46.1% (95% confidence interval [CI], 39.5 to 51.9).
...
> The effectiveness of three doses of BNT162b2 and no previous infection was 52.2% (95% CI, 48.1 to 55.9).
GP is citing a part of the paper where they show...that natural infection is statistically indistinguishable from 3 doses. QED.
Pandemics are hard. If the CDC doesn't present a unified public voice, then a large chunk of the population will latch on to the people they agree with, and no policy would be effective. So I can understand how it came to this.
Ultimately we need someone we can trust running that org (I'm not taking a position here). And not everyone is going to trust them and they will be blamed for any mistakes. Sometimes there isn't time to do the science, so it ends up being an educated guess at maximizing reward vs risk. It's not a position I would want to hold.
They are still pushing for vaccine mandates for children that will not change anything materially.
The same applies to mask mandates. The only studies I have seen only show a marginal impact on preventing infections. At the same time we are told new variants (omicron) are many times more contagious that the variants the masks were not really stopping in the first place. Mask mandates have become a similar security theatre than bugging old ladies with their liquids at airport security.
The problem is that on insisting on measures that even laymen can tell are bullshit, they are undermining the credibility they will need the day there is something that needs to be done that will make a difference.
Credibility takes decades to build and minutes to lose. Look at Ukraine. No one believed the US intelligence when they claimed Putin was serious about invading, because of the bullshit they pushed 20 years earlier with Iraq.
I don't really understand this thinking. Yes, covid deaths in the under 18 group are a drop in the bucket compared to covid deaths in other age groups. But that's only because covid had such a massive toll in other age groups. We're still talking over a thousand deaths in the under 18 group, tens of thousands of hospitalizations, and many many more who had symptoms that persisted beyond a month. Even knocking those numbers down by half would be significant.
And, re masks, the general scientific consensus at this point is that yes, masks do have an effect on transmission rates, and the quality of the mask matters in how much of an impact is seen. Mandates also have an impact, although it depends on how much the mandate actually impacts behavior. It's not security theater, but some mandates will be much more effective than others.
And I'll note - US public health authorities did, in my view, lose some credibility on masks. But for different reasons than you mention. Statements early on saying masks weren't necessary for general use I think did a lot of harm. Personally, I can understand - evidence was weaker for general population usage at the time, and there was a dire shortage of even surgical masks for healthcare workers. So, I get that they wanted to avoid even more shortages for healthcare workers, but this original messaging really hurt later on when masks were being recommended. My second complaint is that, once the supply was there for surgical masks (and then for N95 and equivalents), public health authorities were really slow to push better masks, and only meekly did so.
> Credibility takes decades to build and minutes to lose. Look at Ukraine. No one believed the US intelligence when they claimed Putin was serious about invading, because of the bullshit they pushed 20 years earlier with Iraq.
Lots of us who were entirely skeptical of US intelligence re Iraq found US intelligence re Putin's intent to invade entirely believable and plausible.
>No one believed the US intelligence when they claimed Putin was serious about invading
I don't know from where you draw this conclusion, considering his track record of doing it previously in Ukraine in 2014, and Georgia before that, and given his moving of an entire army to the border, and subsequently issuing threatening ultimatums to the world they knew the world would never subjugate themselves to
"Ultimately we need someone we can trust running that org (I'm not taking a position here)"
Or, those organizations should just be scrapped. There's no fundamental reason a CDC must exist. Sweden's CDC boiled down to one man, and his entire policy response was to tell people to chill out. The country was rewarded with better outcomes than most other places - lower COVID mortality than the European average, less economic damage, way less damage to the fabric of society and so on.
Given the CDC's performance it's pretty clear it has no idea how to control diseases and isn't even institutionally capable of maintaining a very basic, grandmother level understanding of respiratory diseases (natural immunity exists, seasonality is important, not actually everyone will get ill simultaneously, etc).
Go read the Wikipedia page for Dr. Makary; he's a well published and awarded researcher, not a partisan hack like your comment makes him out to be. It's distressing to me that in America "he/she supports a different party than I do" is enough reason to cast doubt on an entire career of great work.
> If he was affiliated with a Democratic governor, somehow I don't think it would be brought up with the same implication.
It would be, but from the other side (e.g. Dr Fauci anyone?)
I think they had good intentions behind them and may have been necessary from certain points of view, but there are questions about their legality and continue to be challenged and some overturned.
All policies have good intentions. Whether it's that nobody is the villain in their own story or that the worst tyrannies are those done for the sake of their victims, having good intentions really doesn't count for much.
Not necessarily. You can have the data and you can have bad data. You can selectively ignore the good data to come to a drastically different decision and conclusion. Motivated thinking political or otherwise can bias the data that you select.
For example, let's take just this single paragraph:
> As of February, 75% of children in the U.S. already had natural immunity from prior infection. It could easily be over 90% of children today given how ubiquitous Omicron has been since then. The CDC’s own research shows that natural immunity is better than vaccinated immunity and a recent New England Journal of Medicine study from Israel has questioned the benefits of vaccinating previously infected persons. Many countries have long credited natural immunity towards vaccine mandates. But not the U.S.
First, there's this statement: "The CDC’s own research shows that natural immunity is better than vaccinated immunity." The linked study, reading through it, makes a different claim. The study showed that completion of a course of primary vaccination PLUS having had a prior Covid infection led to reduced severe outcomes more than just having had the primary course of vaccination alone. And even there, the CI (0.27 (0.09–0.84)) on the first scenario overlaps with the CI for vaccination alone.
It would be notable if this showed that prior infection alone conferred better protection than vaccination alone, which is the author's claim. This study doesn't show that. It shows infection plus vaccination confers better immunity than vaccination alone. And, well, that's what basically any expert would have predicted as the most likely result.
The second linked study (the NEJM one) gets closer, but largely only looks at infection rates (it does have some commentary on severe covid-19 rates, but this isn't adjusted for any confounders). It's most useful as a study on how immunity against infection wanes since the last immunity-conferring event, although it allows for some cross comparisons, such as comparing infection rates for natural immunity alone vs 2 doses alone vs 3 doses alone vs hybrid immunity. Possibly the biggest caveat is that the rate of testing for the different cohorts wasn't adjusted for:
> Although differences in testing rates among cohorts and among subcohorts within specified cohorts were observed, their overall magnitude was relatively small. The rate of PCR testing was typically lower in the recovered, unvaccinated cohort than in the other cohorts, so the level of protection in this cohort as compared with that in the two-dose cohort may have been overestimated.
So, it makes it harder to directly compare across cohorts. But, even assuming the cross comparison does hold up if you did correct for testing rates, there are a couple of things to call out in this study. First, three doses had significantly better numbers than two doses. However, the three-dose cohort was new at the time of this study, so this cohort only has results for the very first time slice, and that time slice doesn't exist for the natural immunity scenario, so we can't directly compare them. Second, this study also seems to show, with respect to immunity, that infection followed by vaccination is better than infection alone.
Third, and most notably given this piece's commentary, is vaccination after natural immunity has waned. The study linked explicitly ends with this sentence in its discussion section:
> We found that protection against the delta variant waned over time in both vaccinated and previously infected persons and that an additional vaccine dose restored protection.
Let's look back at the wording in the original piece:
> a recent New England Journal of Medicine study from Israel has questioned the benefits of vaccinating previously infected persons
It is telling that a study that ends by recommending a dose of vaccine to restore waning natural immunity is used to "question the benefits of vaccinating previously infected persons" in this piece.
Now, there's a reasonable debate around how previous infection should be counted w.r.t. to immune status. E.g. one can make a reasonable case that documented prior infection plus a single dose should count as "fully vaccinated." Or, that hitting a minimum threshold on an antibody test should count as documentation of immunity. Etc. But, that's not what the piece is arguing - it misrepresents both of the studies linked in this one paragraph, and then puts forward a conclusion that is unsupported by either study. If anything, both studies provide evidence that is quite supportive of getting vaccinated at some point after infection, yet you'd never know that if you just read the paragraph from this piece.
Pieces like this one are frustrating because they have the veneer of legitimacy - written by someone in the field, linking studies, etc. It takes a lot of time to really dive in to understand whether or not the claims being made are supported. And even then, it often takes broader knowledge of the state of research in the field. It's easy to cherry pick research that supports a bias while simply leaving out competing research.
Ultimately, this piece does not come off as a good faith review of the scientific evidence.
It's complicated.
- did you make a reasonable decision with the information available at the time, but later evidence showed that another decision would likely have had better outcomes?
- did you make a poor decision which missed or disregarded information available when you made the choice?
- did you make a choice which was appropriate for your declared aims at the time, but now priorities have changed?
These decisions _are_ complex. That doesn't mean we can't find fault and demand improvement. But I think it's not constructive to merely highlight the negative outcomes; we have to find better processes which would make smarter choices next time.
If you made a trade-off that folks of a certain political persuasion believe was the wrong trade-off, but most people and most qualified experts believe was a reasonable trade-off? That's the job.
Thats a bit outdated information. Yes, some cloth mask doesnt protect you. A correctly worn N95 however does offer a ~99%+ protection against contracting COVID. Once they are available in enough numbers to go to non medicinal personal as well, which they have been for years at this point, personal protection does absolutely work.
With that said, I do agree with the proposal that if a kid has already had covid then why vaccinate them if the general consensus is that the vaccines only provide limited protection for a few months. All for vaccinating high risk people and I am vaccinated against covid with a booster from when they first came out but will not get another booster now that I have already had Covid. Omicron in general for most people is no worse than the flu, unpleasant but bearable. I fully understand the rush to vaccinate adults in the beginning when Delta was raging and we had limited understanding of the virus. Luckily Omicron is dominant now it seems to be much less damaging. This is not to downplay the very real consequences and deaths that do occur still from Covid. At this point in time my whole family has had it and I have accepted it as endemic and moved on.
Flu in the US kills around 12k to 50k per year, with a particularly bad year every few decades getting up to maybe 80k. Omicron killed somewhere between 150k and 250k in the US in less than a year, and that was with free vaccines that were highly effective against death easily available to pretty much everyone who was not a young child.
That doesn't sound like no worse than the flu to me.
Flu numbers typically are a small sample size and extrapolated based on respiratory-like illness admissions in hospitals nationwide.
You know you have to substantiate such a wild claim, right? Nobody is counting patients with broken arms that happen to have Covid as Covid patients.
In March 2022 (this year), sleuthing by members of the public into inflated pediatric death counts resulted in the CDC deleting 72k alleged covid deaths, blaming a coding error for the overcount: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/24/cdc-coding-err...
In one county in Colorado, a coroner pointed out that 2 of 5 covid deaths were actually due to gunshot wounds: "Grand County Coroner Raises Concern On Deaths Among COVID Cases" (Dec 2020): https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/grand-county-covid-dea...
The way that a "covid case" or alleged "covid death" has been counted may have improved over the past 2 years, but 70+ thousand purported covid deaths were just admitted to have been illusory a few months ago and there most definitely have been significant financial incentives for hospitals to claim a particular patient had covid and further incentives for specific treatments (remdesivir, placing them on a vent, etc.).
https://www.businessinsider.com/covid-patients-nyc-hospitals...
Let me also point out that this wasnt some grand failure. We were in a situation in which what ever information we could get was really helpful. But you have to be aware, that there is not magic box somewhere that spits out perfect information. All data collection has its limitations, its why we still know very little about long covid. Because getting that data is incredibly difficult, especially at scale.
Someone with COVID could well be in hospital for weeks if not months and if things get serious they could end up taking a bed in the ICU.
It would be highly unlikely to see someone in ICU with just a broken arm.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-01453-0 relating to the study https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-01840-0
> Omicron in general for most people is no worse than the flu, unpleasant but bearable.
But covid is different because it is under the spotlight and faces more scrutinity. And the disctinction as covid being the main cause, a comobidity or a unrelated pathology was never clearly made since the beginning of the pandemic.
"Then they ignored natural immunity. Wrong again. The vast majority of children have already had Covid, but this has made no difference in the blanket mandates for childhood vaccines. And now, by mandating vaccines and boosters for young healthy people, with no strong supporting data, these agencies are only further eroding public trust."
What the fuck is "natural immunity" when we have had 5 variants of omnicron and infection doesn't provide immunity to the other variants?
The real crime IMO, is that... U.S. Public Health Agencies Aren't ‘Following the Science,’... the science of how we could actually reduce spread and decrease the 350~ DEATHS per day adding to the more than 1 Million dead already.
It still provides a very high degree of protection against severe disease, which is already vanishingly rare in children without comorbidities. And is also all you get from the vaccines, along with all their attendant known and unknown risks.
Also, a bit of perspective: we vaccinate children for many illnesses that would result in comparatively "small" numbers of pediatric deaths (lower than Covid even!). The reason is that even rare pediatric deaths, if preventable, are terrible given the life-years lost. And there HAVE been FAR too many pediatric Covid deaths by our modern standards for pediatric infectious diseases. If Covid only affected kids, the absolute numbers of deaths would be a very worrisome thing. Second, the possibility of long-term complications from even non-fatal illnesses. For pediatric COVID, MIS-C and potential super antigen links to the recent spread of pediatric hepatitis are more than sufficient to meet that bar.
Finally - there was no safety signal seen in the 5-12 year old pediatric vaccines that have been given out to millions for ~year already, and no signal in the under 5 trials as well. The myocarditis risk primarily seems in teenage and older groups and linked to puberty/adolescent hormones.
There may be contrarian voices in the FDA and CDC as there will be in any large organization. But to believe their voices over the consensus requires a heavy dose of motivated reasoning and not engaging with some basic facts about the goals of pediatric vaccines and the ways vaccine trials work. There's a reason every pediatrician parent I know was first in line to get their kids vaccinated.
Let's see your numbers of <6 years and <8 etc.
> If Covid only affected kids
In all age groups, it affected children the least.
'In total, 540,305 people were tested for SARS-COV-2 and 129,704 (24.0%) were positive. In children aged <16 years, 35,200 tests were performed and 1408 (4.0%) were positive for SARS-CoV-2, compared to 19.1%–34.9% adults.' https://adc.bmj.com/content/105/12/1180
https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Deaths-Focus-...
More kids have died in the same period from drowning in America.
https://www.aamc.org/news-insights/how-are-covid-19-deaths-c...
A few months ago, the CDC quietly cut the covid death toll by 72k: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/24/cdc-coding-err...
People who died for any reason within weeks of a positive covid test result were being counted as covid deaths, even gunshot victim: https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/grand-county-covid-dea...
The loosey-goosey way covid deaths have been counted in the USA, inflating the death toll, seems to be an area of curiously selective collective amnesia.
> An elderly man arrived at Atlanta’s Emory University Hospital Midtown last month so stricken with advanced cancer that it could take his life within months ... Was his death caused by COVID-19? ... Yes, Auld says: “While he was very weak and frail from his underlying cancer, his death was undoubtedly accelerated and precipitated by COVID-19.
With enough amplification from drown child's noses some virus fragments might be found. But vaccines won't help with drowning or car crashes, which each kill more children.
I am an emergency physician in an area extremely hard-hit by COVID. I'm fully aware of what "they" are counting, and certainly tired of these kinds of bad-faith speculations by un- and misinformed onlookers.
> More kids have died in the same period from drowning in America.
Absolutely -- and every one of those is also a largely preventable tragedy.
And even for the rest, becoming a severe covid case isnt a lottery. Risk groups are a very real thing.
Now I'm curious. What is the reasoning behind pediatric flu shots? Is it dangerous to the child?
Children younger than 5 years old–especially those younger than 2– are at higher risk of developing serious flu-related complications. A flu vaccine offers the best defense against flu and its potentially serious consequences and also can reduce the spread of flu to others. Getting vaccinated against flu has been shown to reduce flu illnesses, doctor’s visits, missed work and school days, and reduce the risk of flu-related hospitalization and death in children.
> "Why are they embarrassed? In short, bad science.
The longer answer: that the heads of their agencies are using weak or flawed data to make critically important public health decisions. That such decisions are being driven by what’s politically palatable to people in Washington or to the Biden administration. And that they have a myopic focus on one virus instead of overall health."
So can we finally stop blaming the general public for the ongoing narrative that simply doesn't pass the smell test?
Meanwhile, in Brazil, two doctors are trying to invent their own mRNA vax. And if they do they're promising to give it away...because The First World Healthcare Industrial Complex is more concerned about money over saving lives? And the media and political powers are silent?
Too much of the past couple+ years has been a shit show. If it's not negligence then it's intentional. Neither is good.
| "Then they ignored natural immunity. Wrong again. The vast majority of children have already had Covid, but this has made no difference in the blanket mandates for childhood vaccines. And now, by mandating vaccines and boosters for young healthy people, with no strong supporting data, these agencies are only further eroding public trust."
“In the current study, most COVID-19 cases among students and staff were acquired from the community and approximately 10% of cases were acquired within school. The researchers found that for every 100 community-acquired cases, school districts with mandatory masking had approximately 7.3 cases of in-school infections, while optionally masked districts had 26.4 cases of in-school infections. In other words, school districts with optional masking had approximately 3.6 times the rate of in-school COVID-19 cases when compared to schools with mandatory masking. These data also show that mandatory masking was associated with a 72% reduction of in-school COVID-19 cases, compared to districts with optional masking.”
From Pediatrics:
https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/149/6/e20220...
I don’t know that masking in schools was the best idea. In my limited purview I think it was a good idea in our child’s school, because things seemed to go well overall. I was responding to the GP who appears to think it’s idiocy to even countenance the idea because there are no studies, when there are, and that it’s so wrong that it’s a form of superstition.
That argument doesn't make any sense. Why would masks have to be worn correctly 100% of the time, otherwise it's theater?
If a type of mask works well at 100% use, it probably also works pretty well at 85% use.
And before you tell me “oh it’s just a minor inconvenience”, no it’s not. It may be for you, but I hate that I have to breathe my stale exhalation, hate that I can’t hear people wearing masks clearly, hate that I can’t see peoples facial expressions when they speak, hate that I get out of breath wearing them. Added to this sometimes is a self-righteous attitude from some mask wearers who can’t tell a virus from a bacteria. These are the questions that should be asked and answered, but asking such questions suddenly labels you as an anti-science moron which is very ironic.
Edit: oh and forgot to mention that I hate how much masks (reusable cloth masks are a placebo) add to an already horrible trash situation. Funny no one cares much about this.
...sure? We should balance that no matter what the effectiveness is.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abi9069
First, note that this wasn't studying in the context of a mask mandate - in the sample villages, masks were distributed, and people were recommended to wear masks when around others. In practice, this brought mask usage up to 42% on average, as compared to 13% in control villages. So, even in this context where the majority of people weren't wearing masks, they still saw an effect in the cloth mask villages. They also saw a larger effect in the surgical mask villages.
Thread from one of the study authors: https://twitter.com/Jabaluck/status/1433036923610742789
It is worth noting that the effect was smaller and the sample size for cloth mask villages smaller than for surgical mask villages, so the confidence is lower than for surgical masks. But with that said, note this from the study author:
> We find a clear and large statistically significant impact on COVID symptoms. We find an imprecise zero for serologically confirmed COVID. The most likely interpretation is that cloth masks reduce COVID, but not as much as surgical masks.
https://twitter.com/Jabaluck/status/1433227618497728514
Now, was the effect relatively small for cloth masks? Yes. But given the results here, plus results we have from mechanistic studies of cloth masks, a reasonable conclusion is something along the lines of: cloth masks have some effect on transmission, albeit a relatively small effect. Other types of masks are better.
Additionally, if the assumption of "the types of masks worn by the vast majority of school children" is correct, then studies showing that mask mandates in schools had an effect on transmission would suggest some efficacy for cloth masks.
Two relatively large-scale observational studies: https://twitter.com/roby_bhatt/status/1502244997764157442
That said, I'm endlessly disappointed that there wasn't a consistent, strong push for people to upgrade from cloth to surgical once supplies of surgical masks were no longer an issue. And mask sizing was also an issue - there are so many masks out there that are oversized for kids. Imagine if the federal government had coordinated with schools across the country to ensure supplies of kid sized surgical masks at every school. Alas.
For example, it is obvious now that vaccines do not prevent one from getting COVID and spreading COVID. Yes - vaccines definitely make having COVID like a mild fly: I got it just now and I was just a little sick for a couple of days.
But they still claim that vaccines are preventing the spread.
And then the approach is really bad: instead of running “viagra style” commercials on TV for vaccinations they decided to go with heavy handed mandates and requirements. I bet a couple of Steph Curry and Tom Brady commercials about vaccination will do wonder.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-booed-al...
https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/20/politics/donald-trump-booster...
https://thehill.com/changing-america/enrichment/arts-culture...
Meaning we did not have any - zero - nada - none - commericals on TV for vaccinations. And many many crypto ones.
That's sad your country didn't see the need to advertise. In the US we had tons of them.
The fact that vaccines make you less likely to become infected in the first place and also they make the disease shorter means that vaccines also reduce transmission.
"Duration of Shedding of Culturable Virus in SARS-CoV-2 Omicron (BA.1) Infection" (see "Figure 1. Viral Decay and Time to Negative Viral Culture."): https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2202092
"There were no appreciable between-group differences in the time to PCR conversion or culture conversion according to vaccination status"
The figure (specifically Fig1D and Fig1E of https://www.nejm.org/na101/home/literatum/publisher/mms/jour...) speaks for itself.
I would rather the authors soft-pedal the alarming results and get published than not get published at all. Just as I approve of POWs appearing to collaborate by sitting for media interviews that may, on the surface, make their captors seem humane and then blinking "T-O-R-T-U-R-E" in Morse code.
Ignoring the charts and clutching at that line of text still requires one to accept that vaccinated and boosted persons didn't clear covid any faster than unvaccinated persons, which completely contradicts the vaccine-pushers' dogma that the adverse effects and deaths occurring in younger demographics (especially but not solely among younger males) post-vax are worth it, on balance, because the shots reduce spread to and hence deaths among more vulnerable groups.
Sure they will say “we never said it will stop transmission” but it was never clearly worded as that. Of course, since they wanted mandates.
care to provide evidence of significant figures saying this?
To me that's the real story - the demonstration of what amounts to a loss of legitimacy.
(FWIW shutdowns did not bother me much, I got the two mandatory vaccines my jurisdiction required for air travel but refused the boosters, I generally wear masks in public because better safe than sorry.)
Or differently put, if you have absolutely unrealistic expectations and deferred any critical thinking to another party, you are putting said party in a very very difficult situation. And if they not just lack the backbone to tell you this, but start pretending to be that competent and certain to match your expectations, it can become very dangerous.
[1]: https://www.fda.gov/drugs/development-resources/table-surrog... "Table of Surrogate Endpoints That Were the Basis of Drug Approval or Licensure"
Closing schools and masks have been gone in my area has been over for a while so the article seems to be mixing timelines in a way that is hard to follow.
"The rest of the world has accepted the endemic nature of Covid and moved on, but the U.S. is an int'l outlier, still pushing mass testing & chasing down every case." [0]
I'm not sure what inverse universe he lives in given that we barely do any official testing, and contact tracing never even got off the ground.
His retweets are also all the other well known covid-minimizers - including the infamous Jay Bhattacharya.
[0] https://twitter.com/MartyMakary/status/1546533258187390977
"Pushing mass testing" LOL in what universe? I guess they shipped out a second wave of those mediocre home tests recently but not that many of them and only if you asked. Otherwise you just go get tested at a doctor's office or urgent care if you start to feel terrible, if you want to, just like with the flu, so you know exactly how careful you and others in your household need to be about hanging out around old folks. In fact, one of the ones we recently did was a combo test for both Covid and flu.
Anything beyond that's coming from employers, not the government, and most of them aren't doing much anymore and haven't been for a while.
My intuition is that people underestimate the impact of forcing kids and toddlers to wear masks.
What I observe is that for folks without kids, life has gotten back to normal, but somehow everything related to kids is still over cautious.
Other countries with excellent control: New Zealand, Iceland, Taiwan, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.
Here in Italy there's still a mask mandate on public transport, which is not uniformly enforced even, but that's it.
Testing is way safer at this point than two doses against a strain that hasn't been dominant since late 2020. Lots of people are getting sick anyways even if they are vaccinated from other strains they aren't protected against, yet we discriminate against anyone who decided not to get the shot for religious reasons, or who can't get it for medical reasons.
The world will look back on these years as collective insanity.
What?! No one wants to go back to the office because it fucking sucks to commute, not because of vaccine mandates. I would even like to see evidence that many tech companies have strict mandates or are enforcing them; worst I’ve heard is that non vaccinated staff have to test weekly at Stanford. Most companies will probably be less strict than there.
I'm a biochemist, and I can assure you that scientists have been dismayed at the collective insanity since around March 2020, but we're definitely not dismayed at the same things as you are.
Any scientist who isnt deeply ashamed of this should really get the money for their degree back.
Pretending that vaccines are in any way safer then or as safe as actual tests is simply horrific.
There was never a discussion of the pros and cons, and it's simply a decision of the preschool management, as the county and state have dropped it a while ago. It's just an example of how the children are rarely a considiration.
There was SO MUCH discussion of the pros and cons.
I promise. You may not have seen it, but it was in so many places.
Social media and mainstream media saw it fit to censor dissenting voices --not those of quacks, we can mostly all agree on minimizing the voices of quacks but shutting down medical professionals and medical academics and so on is very concerning.
The only people they allowed to be wrong about the pandemic were govt officials. They could get it wrong and right it as many times as necessary.
Those same social networks are de-ranking and blocking dissenters against the escalation of war against Russia in Ukraine. This is categorically different and a major escalation in censorship that most people are not realizing. It's very scary.
It makes more sense now that several USA politicians have had "unscripted" moments in which they admitted that we are at war with Russia. [0][1] It will make even more sense when someone admits we have had "special forces" killing civilians in Donbas for years. As in, if we're at war, even if we don't dare declare it and even if most Americans would vote against it despite constant corporate media gaslighting, it is in some sense "disloyal" for pacifists to complain about war.
The censorship made no sense in February when we all pretended that the whole thing was totally unprovoked Russian aggression and we were just sad witnesses. At that time, the censorship just proved that something stunk about the war-media story.
[0] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/04/26/ukra-a26.html
[1] https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/04/ukraine-nato-rus...
~ Noam Chomsky
Yea Russia shouldn't have escalated the war.
What a bizarre idea.
But I think Russian plants should be allowed to post. They're obvious, and I think they do more harm to Russia than benefit.
We're the West. We thrive on freedom that would make Russian tyrants squirm. We can handle some dissent, even as we (figuratively) tear them apart.
Even if you're okay with all of that, the US is not trying to help Ukraine win, it's trying to make the war as long and as expensive as possible for Russia. The US is sacrificing Ukrainian lives to harm Russia.
No I don't agree with censoring _any_ voices - precisely because of this issue. The decentralized market of ideas will address the "quacks" in the room, as I don't trust any central authority to do that for me.
If a centralized authority wields power in a way that creates negative consequences, you don't give them _more_ power, or just hope that they'll do the right thing.
– John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (https://www.utilitarianism.com/ol/two.html)
But on _short_ timescales, during an emergency when people are emotional, and in a context where media can benefit from amplifying a message whether or not it's true ... we've seen enough people believe some harmful stuff, and sometimes require extra medical attention because of it.
I'm not saying censorship alone is an answer -- but the marketplace of ideas is not functioning as you describe.
>I'm not saying censorship alone is an answer -- but the marketplace of ideas is not functioning as you describe.
Honestly, neither is curated news. At the time of this poll, 41% of people who identified as Democrats believe that if someone caught covid, their chance of hospitalization was 50% or higher. The actual number is 1-5%. Massive amounts of Republicans and Independents also believed this as well. You assume a fair, pure and incorruptible curator, which doesn't exist. Censorship isn't the answer.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/18/briefing/atlanta-shooting...
It'll magically take care of itself? Based on what evidence?
For example, we didn't need the Vatican, a king, or some other central committee to tell us that the sun was the center of our solar system - eventually the data and market of ideas exposed the best & correct ideas.
The best disinfectant for bad ideas is more sunlight - not coverups.
Tools that have been painstakingly engineered to exploit bugs in the human brain's OS.
Name one time in the entirety of recorded history when "the decentralized market of ideas" did anything of the sort.
This is literally how most scientific progress is made.
Aaron Swartz warned bout this a lot. It was like his main thing.
The way it’s framed now, you’d think officials were weighing a 1% fatality rate against lockdowns. That’s silly. Before the vaccines were prepared and distributed, mutation was the much higher threat.
A good summary with links is here: https://www.the-scientist.com/features/counting-the-lives-sa...
> On a more positive note, Ferguson and other researchers at Imperial College London published a model in Nature around the same time estimating that more than 3 million deaths had been avoided in the UK as a result of the policies that were put in place.
3 million people is ~5% of the entire UK population. Even using the high end of COVID IFR estimates (2%, from northern Italy), it would have required everyone in the UK to get COVID twice with no natural immunity to reach that kind of death toll.
Also:
> The most effective measure, they found, was getting people not to travel to work, while school closures had relatively little effect.
That article appears to agree with this one.
Looks like the article on the-scientist summarized the relevant study incorrectly. The study itself posits 3.1 million deaths averted across 11 countries in Europe, not just in the UK:
> We find that across 11 countries 3.1 (2.8–3.5) million deaths have been averted owing to interventions since the beginning of the epidemic.
A bit concerning though that the second paragraph in the the-scientist article made such a significant mistake in summarizing the research.
You would also have to consider people who cannot be treated for other diseases (e.g. appendicitis), compound effects on the number of available beds due to doctors and nurses being sick, etc.
“Researchers at Johns Hopkins University have concluded that lockdowns have done little to reduce COVID deaths but have had “devastating effects” on economies and numerous social ills.”
https://sites.krieger.jhu.edu/iae/files/2022/01/A-Literature...
Exactly as we would expect to find in the output of ideologically-driven academics working far outside of their own fields.
In other words, someone is always going to jump up and down for your attention, willing to spew bs (sometimes mixed with fact), to slow you down and delay you. Being able to ignore it and focus on real issues is important.
If you filter something as bullshit, you should at least be able to say why it is bullshit, outside of just who wrote it.
It goes into how Democrats get mired in reacting / reading / responding to everything, when detractors are acting in bad faith to consume their time / fill the airwaves and media.
I recommend the book. It's great, short, and applicable far outside Democrats / politics.
They (we) did. A list containing children under 12 who got vaccinated is at the center of a data breach this very week.
There was also an uptick in deaths among young school-age children, which was somewhat 'offset' by lower deaths in the 12+ age-ranges. Vaccinating children doesn't do nothing, but with a small effect focusing on small at risk groups might be wise.
Things have been substantially better for my wife and I since we started Paxlovid. Our seven year old is feeling fine, and our three year old who is disabled and tends to get sick fairly often has a fever and slept for a day straight and had the world's worst diarrhea. Her doctor (who almost exclusively sees disabled kids like her) seems completely unconcerned about it and said to just treat it like any other illness, push fluids and give her Tylenol and Ibuprofen alternately to keep her fever down.
CDC might be wrong here but they will never admit. Never.
Mostly, they are good people wanting to do good work, but imo, public health agencies have become a para-intelligence services with explicitly political aims. There is a network of academics who see health and health information as a policy lever, and they have been out in force leveraging it through public health agencies during the pandemic.
I think they have discredited themselves over travel bans, vax passports, the objectively insane and poisonous rhetoric about the "hesitant," and arbitrary mandates with no accountability for those who enforced them. I don't think they can be trusted to be arbiters of science for people with a basic statistical reasoning skills and a belief in the existence of truth. The article articulates a more general and relevant sentiment, which is that the medical establishment has forfeited its public trust.
Many, if not most of the epidemiologists at the CDC hold M.Ds, and I can speak from personal experience that many have disdain for both political parties
For example there is a lot of frustration at how the media is making a giant scare about Monkeypox, when it is isolated to certain communities and can be prevented with the smallpox vaccine which we already have stockpiled.
> they operate as surveillance organizations with the same kind of secrecy culture as intelligence work
This is blatantly false - the CDC publishes almost everything it does. Mostly boring statistics, reporting, investigating claims
>public health agencies have become a para-intelligence services with explicitly political aims
Really?
>I think they have discredited themselves over travel bans, vax passports, the objectively insane and poisonous rhetoric about the "hesitant,"
You should visit the CDC's public museum in Atlanta - I think you will see all the good that vaccines and antibiotics have done for the world. Little else in medicine matters, comparatively, in terms of increased lifespans around the globe
I read parent as talking about things that happened during covid. Do the measures around covid deserve the same kind of reverence that things like penicilin (why are antibiotics relevant in this thread anyway?) or the first vaccines do?
I have 12 years of postsecondary education in life science (medicine, health sciences, biochemistry and cancer/cell bio research at the graduate level) and this is completely, unequivocally false.
Sorry you couldn't do more with your background, but epidemiologists in public health just need a master's, and often just an undergrad with some stats skills. Many even have PhD's, but in policy areas, and not life sciences. There was not a single microscope let alone a biolab in the municipal public health units who were responsible for pandemic response and policy advice. Hospitals? Sure. But the people who were making pandemic policy were absolutely not analyzing samples.
I would go so far as to say that epidemiologist has become like software engineers and architects, but for public policy. They are teaching epidemiology in cultural studies programs. The real thing is as rigorous as infectious disease research, but if we are being unequivocal - the policy people are hacks.
This is the same partisan complaint no matter the topic. Everything is a nail since all you have is this one hammer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Sense
It certainly has populist appeal, and is consciously used to evoke same.
Why does this matter? Because most of the articles claims are based on "spoke to us" quotes from anonymous staffers which cannot be independently verified. So it falls to the reputation of those publishing and their journalistic integrity/process, and at that point I leave it to you to make up your own mind.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bari_Weiss#2017%E2%80%932020:_...
I understand the argument you're making, and it's not an obvious call, but I think it comes with more downside than upside, at least for HN. It's a trope of tribal internet argument (I mean in general—not talking about you here) to follow a "DAG of shame" in which you hop from any node to the most shameful associated thing, with the intention of discrediting the node from which you started. The problem is that each of those hops loses a lot of information, and one ends up in places that aren't particularly relevant, like whatever that university project is.
What's bad about this for HN is that it makes threads more generic, predictable, and repetitive. It also polarizes discussion along the most intense axis. All of this makes discussion less interesting and more inflammatory.
So while it's not an obvious call (more like 60-40 than 80-20) I think we're better off as a community to resist the habit of replacing topic X with the biggest or most shameful other-topic-Y that the dots connect to. It's not that there's no value in it, but it's the wrong move, given what we're trying to optimize for (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).
It's possible to give fair hearing without opening the door to bullshit once the bullshitter is known and demonstrated. Editorial voice is significant, as HN's own moderation strives toward and demonstrates.
Following standard ideological grooves to discredit the other tribe's sources is not acting from specialist knowledge in any case. The only specialty at work in such discussion is the specialty of internet battle. That's ultimately just a way to turn every thread into a boring, if intense, flamewar.
One of the things that follows from HN's core principle of intellectual curiosity (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...) is the principle of diffs (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...). Diffs are what's interesting. This is the positive formulation of the principle that repetition is bad for curiosity (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...).
For topics that burn hot, like political/ideological ones, this "diff" principle implies that discussion is most interesting (and therefore best for HN) when people don't take the obvious path from their own initial position—that is, when they don't repeat the reaction that they've had most often before. That is a hard thing to ask on the hottest topics, which tend to melt into a few (well, two) monolithic piles of tar. But I think it follows from the principle.
Here's another thing that I think follows, and is even harder to swallow. To the extent that someone has strong political/ideological views, if they're not seeing articles on HN that they strongly disagree with, at least semi-regularly, then there's probably something wrong with HN*.
That isn't always great for community spirit because it only takes a few disagreeable data points before the mind starts to defend itself with a "this place sucks" reaction (and there are people on all ideological sides who develop such reactions). I wrote about this here, if anyone wants to read more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098.
* To ward off one common misunderstanding: that is not a Goldilocks argument for split-the-difference centrism! It's an argument for unpredictability. Since centrism is just as predictable as other ideologies, it should encounter just as much to be put off by.
That's a fine principle. By extension, it should also be fine for commenters to note facts about sources. You are right that internet discussion can be derailed by the DAG of association, but internet discussion based solely on "what does the article say?" is naïve, amounting to borderline sealioning.
Part of critical thinking and reading is understanding the POV of the author(s) and publisher(s), and considering their motivations and incentives.
I don't think the DAG-of-shame game really has to do with curiosity about facts. It has to do with tarring ideological enemies. Maybe they deserve it, maybe they don't, but it's not the quality of discussion we want here.
Rather than an ambiguous phrase like "noting facts about sources", I think we're better off applying the clearer distinction between curious conversation and ideological battle. There's a binary distinction between those two things (as binary as these things can get), and we know which one we want on this site.
Moreover, one destroys the other, so it needs to be actively moderated. I don't just mean what moderators do, but the general sense of dampening excesses and avoiding extremes. We want a culture of moderation on HN—not for its own sake, but because curiosity only flowers in a temperate climate.
(By the way, I'm not disagreeing ideologically with any of the comments that I'm objecting to here. This is about discussion quality and attempting to organize the site around one specific value: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor....)
No, if you look in the site guidelines you'll see that they say "Most" stories on certain themes are off topic, and that word is there intentionally. It allows for exceptions, especially when there's either something interestingly different about a story, or some significant new information to discuss.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
For past explanations about how we think about this in terms of political topics, see https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so.... There are lots of links there to where I've explained this in detail. If anyone has a question that I haven't answered there, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.
Stories drawn from the arts, like music and also literature and painting, or more generally from history, archaeology, you name it, are most welcome here as long as they offer something of intellectual curiosity. So if HN commenters are pushing back on a story just because it's about e.g. music, that would be bad. (But if it were a gossipy story about a famous musician, say, that would be different.)
Sex is its own special case in all things, so we would have to talk about that separately.
If the comment opened with something like "I stopped reading at commonsense.news because Bari Weiss is bad", that'd be a different matter, but they have a substantive critique of the actual article.
Given the weak sourcing, it feels like this article, in particular, flunks the "divisive subjects require more thought and substance" test.
I loathe Bari Weiss, so, grain of salt on all this.
"You wear funny hats so you're not a credible expert on waffle irons" would be an ad hominem.[1]
Noting the reputation and past history of a speaker or source, or noting well-known rhetorical red flags (http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/sophist_refut.1.1.html) is what we'd now call a strong Bayesian prior. It's not a proof that a source, speaker, document, or publication is wrong, but it's a fairly strong grounds for suspecting that might be the case.
https://www.thoughtco.com/ad-hominem-fallacy-1689062
And in a world in which asymmetric costs favour bullshit, it's a useful and often necessary approach.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini's_law
________________________________
Notes:
1. In practice, "funny hats" might well be references to non-Western clothing (see The Little Prince for a fictional illustration), or speech, or gender, or religous affiliation (religious exclusion was common in top US universities well into the 1970s). It's still practiced in many regards. What this ignores is the specific capabilities or validity of claims or methods.
An argument against the idea was almost presented (anonymous staffers whose quotes cannot be independently verified) but was let down by its conclusion (it falls to the reputation.)
There was nothing in OP's argument that contradicted the claims that were made other than those that go against the reputation of the author, ergo even if they are valid, they are definitely _ad hominem_.
There are a lot of valid scientific reasons to criticize the CDC's approach to the COVID pandemic, including their own publications[1]. One could also point to the different paths taken by other OECD nations with respect to children and see that the CDC diverged sharply, but presented no data to justify those policies.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/eis/field-epi-manual/chapters/Communicat...
if you replace witch with "unreliable source", a thing that does exist, it would be a more intellectually honest rephrasing
if you used it as a stand-in for "unreliable source", it would be a more intellectually honest rephrasing, as that is the actual objection here, and your attempt to reframe an unreliable source as "oh people just disfavor them" obviously disregards their unreliability, as well as ignores why the source is disfavored (because it is not reliable)
But such intellectual dishonesty is discouraged on HN, so one shouldn't.
For example people in the thread are calling her an anti-vaxer even though she’s on the record encouraging people to get vaccinated.
She certainly learned a lot at the NYT.
That doesn't sound like something she would say, and I've never encountered her making that claim. I'm pretty sure she got vaccinated and has encouraged other people to do so as well. She does seem skeptical of the ability of the vaccines to prevent infection by newer variants. To some degree, that's probably true right?
It's in the wikipedia article linked by the GP. To help you out -
In September 2021, concerning COVID-19, she tweeted an article by Glenn Greenwald which argued that proof of a negative test is far more meaningful than proof of a vaccine, contradicting experts who argue that testing is insufficient and should be considered temporary to allow more time for vaccine hesitancy issues to be addressed.
Assuming she hasn't deleted her tweet:
https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/1440687368957095940
She said she was like Galileo here: https://www.ft.com/content/5d840a5c-fa0c-4d08-9574-59f0d3e8c...
If you want people interacting with other people without tranmitting COVID, what she is is absolutely correct. She said that proving you’re currently negative is more accurate that just asking for vaccine status. This is scientifically correct since people can get reinfected and spread the disease regardless of vaccine status. I just got reinfected with COVID this past week after 3 shots plus prior infection in January. So vaccines do NOTHING in terms of preventing infection anymore. Of course, it protects from serious symptoms but that’s not what they were talking about. It was in the context of effectiveness of vaccine mandates for preventing spread, which it doesn’t.
You are the one spreading disinformation at this point.
> You are the one spreading disinformation
Crossing into personal attack will get you banned here regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are, so please don't do that.
Your comment would be much better without those bits.