If covid was killing 40% of people instead of 1% of people, would we still want to spend 3 years figuring out, on spreadsheets, whether it was really merited based on long-term scientific studies?
And if we decided that we should do some things for public health in the very short term, should we humor every crackpot who wants us to wait?
Don't be ridiculous.
We knew very early on that the passengers on the cruise ship Diamond Princess continued to spread Covid from cabin to cabin despite being locked down in their cabins. Yet the scientists who pointed out that this was very good evidence for airborne spread of Covid were shouted down.
Why is this important? The mitigations we put in place were based on the theory that Covid had a droplet based spread, like the flu.
That's a very short sighted view. Expanding the power of government is not always the answer.
We don't want a completely powerless government, we invented government and endowed it with certain powers for a good reason. That's why states of emergency, etc, are temporary and time limited because we are aware of the tradeoffs and downsides of additional govt power vs catastrophic immediate necessity.
If I lived next to an active forest fire, I wouldn't want the govt to commission a 36 month study to determine whether the fire was spread along the ground, or via airborne flaming leaves and embers. I would want them to put it out, even if that meant exercising temporary emergency powers like closing a road or shutting off a power line.
I just want to point out that, according to the U.S. federal government, we are still in a "temporary" state of emergency, and have been for 30 months now.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/15/health/covid-public-health-em...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_emergencies_i...
Also, "State of Emergency" != Martial Law, so I'm not sure what you & your ilk are so disturbed about.
Does "The public health emergency declaration allows many Americans to obtain free Covid-19 testing, therapeutic treatment and vaccines. Once it ends, people could face out-of-pocket costs" sound like tyrannical government overreach to you? (from your link)
Speaking of which, New York is now in a State of Emergency because there is a polio outbreak in 2022
Great job, guys. A polio outbreak in New York in 2022. FDR would be proud of us.
POLIO.
I can't imagine vaccinate "skepticism" (read: illiteracy and dearth of critical thinking) has nothing to do with this.
POLIO. In 2022. We did this.
Can't wait to see what we manage to fuck up in the next 20 years.
First off there are two strains of polio. It will never be eradicated, it'll just mutate and move on. Just like the Spanish Flu did.
Second
> "State of Emergency" != Martial Law
It certainly was being treated like that early days during the pandemic. Shuttering all businesses, forcing people to stay home, and curfews.
> Emergency powers help us keep more Americans safe & alive. > ... > Can't wait to see what we manage to fuck up in the next 20 years.
You are being hyperbolic.
Fear, confusion, inaction and people taking advantage of the situation for political purposes are dangerous when faced with an immediate threat. Why do you think these elements are have been part of how people have waged war for thousands of years? These factors make populations incapable of coordinated response.
Your mistake is to think that responding to a time-critical threat is scientific debate. It isn't and it is really dangerous when people with the power to influence others don't actually know the difference.
This may mean that your Pokemon cards go up in flames when there was a chance you could have saved them by running into the house to save them. But by doing so you would have endangered the people responsible for saving you.
After the fact it might turn out that there was time to save your pokemon cards. But when the house is on fire, nobody is going to put their neck on the line to take that risk. And you shouldn't expect them to.
The time to make democratic decisions are before something happens. And the time to alter policy is when the data is in. When the house is on fire it is too late. You have to fight the fire with the fire department and the procedures you have. And pray that not too many idiots sabotage the effort because they labor under the delusion that they know better.
If you have a hard time accepting this it is at least important that you understand that the rest of society will experience you as an added burden. If you expect to make up your own rules, based on considerably less knowledge, and in the absence of clear information, you are an extra drain on resources that ought to be focused on solving problems. Not catering to people who feel entitled to endangering people because they don't know the difference between making their bed and lying in it.
I think it is in poor taste to make comparisons to dictatorships when hundreds of thousands of deaths could have been avoided if people had been better at taking direction that would have saved lives.
I certainly wouldn't want to be anywhere near you in a crisis.
How about this. Your house may be on fire. But no one knows. So we’re going to install martial law, and silence anyone who is of the camp who believes the house is not on fire, for two years. When it finally transpires that those people who believed the house was not on fire were right all along, and they knew it, then we will issue no apology, or acknowledgement.
No, you don't just do whatever big pharma in cahoots with government "regulatory" agencies say and call that "science". The latest "booster" was tested on 8 mice before it was spread widely for use.
The dissenting doctors were the ones making money? Have you seen how much Phizer is profiting off their untested, unapproved solution which is proven to be more dangerous than the disease?
Time after time these pharmaceutical companies have lied and cheated in order to make money at the expense of thousands and millions of human lives. Somehow scared people are willing to forget history and go with whatever an authority figure tells them.
He was years ahead of CDC & NIH on coming up with something close to standard of care, and he published it openly [1] yet NIH was 2 years behind him [2] despite greater resourcing... Look at the publishing dates!
You were saying?
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33387997/
[2] https://www.covid19treatmentguidelines.nih.gov/tables/manage...