That’s what happens when you burn a lot of good faith.
Nobody that listened to public health experts ever "hated" masks. But initially, they didn't rush out to buy masks because the advice was to prioritise isolating the infected, social distancing for everyone else and clean hands to avoid [overestimated risk of] contact transmission, and not to rely on masks to protect you from infected people because there was no evidence they would offer that protection (the only masks they had reasonable confidence might work were far too limited in supply to stop it on a population level)
The recommendation changed (pretty quickly, based on stronger evidence of aerosol transmission and asymptomatic transmission and COVID being sufficiently widespread to make altogether avoiding contagious people unrealistic) to suggesting that although social distancing was recommended because cloth masks alone were insufficiently effective at preventing infection, masks were better than nothing and so on a population scale wearing them in public places would slow infection rates. At this point - even though I'd already had the infection - I started wearing a mask to the supermarket because apart from it being logical, it was also required to enter. It wasn't much of an imposition, and subsequent evidence largely supports the reduced transmission risk.
I think the question works better in reverse. When was it you switched from being angry at the CDC for telling you not to bother with the masks because they couldn't altogether prevent infection so you were better off avoiding people with COVID altogether to being angry at the CDC for recommending masks in public places to somewhat reduce risk of infection? What was the scientific evidence that lead you to change your mind?
In Asia they were using masks from the start, just like they did with the original SARS.
But with this second SARS doctors/WHO were saying that surgical masks had no effect and that Asians don't know what they're doing.
Then, masks not only had no effect, they were bad for you.
Then, all of a sudden masks were good. Cloth masks were good too. And you had doctors showing you how to make masks out of t-shirts.
Then masks were so good you had to wear them by force.
Then cloth masks had no effect. Then surgical masks had no effect. Only N95 and above were good.
It was absolute roller coaster, and with every turn (excused with “the science has changed”) doctors were hammering a nail into the coffin of public acceptance of science.
This is not only backwards, it is hilariously so: Aerosol transmission was only partially accepted a year or more after the mask push. People still resist it even now. The whole reason masks were supposed to work was the assumption that it was entirely droplet transmission.
The people who believed it was aerosol spread that first year were the ones against masking, because the virus is too small to be stopped by cloth masks.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
Not all aerosol particles are the same size, and particles don't have to be smaller than holes they pass through for a grid of fibre to obstruct a significant proportion of them. The change in guidance wasn't a conclusion masks were a panacea, they were a reflection that even a small degree of protection was better than no protection in a situation where existing measures weren't slowing its spread fast enough.
The people who were against masking on principle by and large didn't care what degree it reduced it by, because they just didn't want to be told to wear masks.
That said, I absolutely agree 'normal' people were pushed to the limit in a way that made them look for anything that made sense of what was happening around them.
Back in the day that kind of crazy was relegated to the dark corners of the Internet and you had to explicitly seek it out.
Nowadays social media apps that claim to make it easier to connect with your family/friends will happily push these in front of you, knowing that getting you deep into that rabbit hole is likely to net them more "engagement".
The net result is that naive but well-meaning people who originally just wanted to keep in touch with friends/family got sucked deep into this bullshit.
And you attack conspiracy theorists who turned out to be right about a number of aspects of the pandemic?
So your comment applies to the establishment voices who straight up lied to the public and some people like yourself seemed to believe the liars. Lol!
You are reading too much into things just to confirm your viewpoints you have barely grazed.
I always wonder what people mean when they talk about "the news" or "the media". I don't watch any of the 24/7 cable stuff (I last had cable in 1999), but I get the impression its what actually drives the perception of whatever this unitary entity is believed to be thinking/scheming at any moment. So I'm somewhat blind/deaf to a lot of this zeitgeist, though I understand that like any media, they long ago cracked the code that negative engagement is more profitable, and so yes, scaremongering is part of the job, and so I tend to avoid it.
That said, I knew people who died from Covid, the latest just a few weeks ago. When my parents, who aren't young anymore got it, I was pretty fearful for them.
It's not "dogma" to "sterilize" some fringe idiocies, just implying that is often pretty much helping that sewer just fester under our noses.
I remember reading about how Lenin dealt with opposition. He never argued with them on public, as it could damage his image and undermine his dogma. Instead, he ferociously attacked the opponent himself: demonized him, called him names, and later got rid of him.
I've heard similar comparisons to dictators from flat-earthers, that tells me a lot. I get the impression you wish you'd be oppressed, demonized, instead of ridiculed. But the latter is all it deserves, a laugh in the face and the door shut.
This is a story as old as time.
While there is a massive difference in evidence supporting these two sides, as I have a mere GCSE grade C in biology, I necessarily have to just have faith in the research methods and licensing regimes that made my 4 Covid jabs and humpteen others.
Not unadulterated faith, but I do have faith, and it is only faith. I can't do a double-blind replication even if I wanted to.
It's really smart to distrust vaccine providers and public health authorities. Having blind faith in them is bad. You don't need a credential to see that, you just have to observe that they constantly make strong claims in favor of vaccines that they later walk back when it's too late, without any consequences whatsoever.
Because medicine is generally useful and functional.
Because doctors studied at the same university that taught me much of my profession.
Because nations in economic dispute with each other, nations with territorial disputes, even nations at war with each other, still all agree that the vaccines are a good idea.
I have no issue with traditional vaccination, but this is nothing like a vaccination. They wouldn't have needed to change the definition of vaccination if it was.
They wouldn't need to push this 24/7 on every possible platform if it worked as promised. They wouldn't have to tell us that these super rare side effects that every one of my colleagues is experiencing is super rare and nothing to be concerned about.
If you find your opinions align with the mindless masses, perhaps you are among them.
and the virus will turn your body into a spike protein factory regardless
and there is no primer site on the mRNA for RT to operate
if it was that easy for random bits of floating mRNA to integrate itself into your DNA then we'd never make it to the point of being born
The parent comment said "...it's not possible..."
It demonstrably is possible, and has happened before in the genetic record of humans.
integrase is not produced by human cells, it is simply not present in the cell
the mRNA produced by the vaccine does not have the primer site for reverse transciptase to attach
if somehow RT did produce cDNA: it would not have the primer site for integrase to attach
this stuff is taught to 16 year olds
the probability of all of the above happening by random chance is as close to 0 as it is possible to get
and saying "hahaha, so IT IS POSSIBLE THEN, so it is gene therapy!!!" is the level of reasoning and debate one would expect from a small child
Can we agree that it is not gene therapy and it is also possible for the vaccine to modify your genome in specific cases?
yes
> and it is also possible for the vaccine to modify your genome in specific cases?
possible in the same sense as winning the lottery 10 times in a row
or suddenly quantum tunneling through the entire surface of the earth and popping out the other side
I guess fair, it's just the underlying cause for both the faith and your gross misunderstanding of high-school biology that's the same.
Also, normal people are absolutely terrible about probability.
Combined, I therefore suspect it's "I know they're normally right, but not about this."
It's truly bizarre to _radically_ disagree, especially as a layperson.
People working in some fields often suffer the "It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It"
Example: I have Hashimoto's Disease. All endocrinologists I went to, wouldn't help me, some of them burned a lot of my money trying to prove I had diabetes or other disease that could lead to expensive treatment (one insisted I had cancer, despite every test for cancer she asked for, returning negative). In the end to get treatment I got help from an Ophthalmologist, that even explained to me some things I didn't knew about the disease.
Example 2: when I was having some mental issues, all psychiatrists kept giving me random meds that were recently patented and expensive, and refused to let me get Ritalin, that was cheap because generic version of it exists. In the end the solution was ritalin. To get the ritalin I went to a psychiatrist that inherited lots of wealth and focused treating poor people, I suspect that psychiatrist in particular is the only one not getting dinners, parties and other "marketing events" from manufacturers. (I also in one point of my career worked in a software company that one project was make an app for the pharma client sales team track all the "gifts" given to doctors...)
1) There is no way to quantify how likely this is from personal stories. If your experience is 1 in 100 event, you are doing more harm sharing it than not sharing it if 1 in 10 becomes too suspicious to follow diagnosis.
2) We really don't know. Either things happened as people say, or they doctor shopped until received a misdiagnosis and mismedication they wanted.
3) Readers can't use your example in their personal life because they are different. They may read what you said and go doctor shopping and googling until they are misdiagnosed and mismedicated.
You should not blindly trust doctors, and get second opinion of things seem wrong, but sharing medical stories in the internet is misses the information needed for it to be usable.
Sharing personal story likes this is the reason the internet being a wonderful place. It should always be recommended as long as it is truthful, and doesn’t involve explicit agenda of spamming out other experience or information.
> It should always be recommended as long as it is truthful,
That's the point. You never know.
The sharer should always be truthful. But also the reader should assume things might not be as it seems, trying to verify it on their own. But that is different than recommending everyone to not share anything.
There are two separate recommendations to be made: one for the writer, and one for the reader.
Who am I? Some rando on the Internet, but I correctly assessed that the vaccines wouldn't prevent transmission, carried a non-zero risk of side effects - sometimes extremely serious, that natural immunity would provide far greater protection, that vaccination was unnecessary for children and younger adults, that there would no benefit to lock downs, and that masks were pointless.
We have been proven correct about every single one of these things, and every health official who promoted these ideas has been proven completely incorrect
No, you haven't.
> natural immunity would provide far greater protection
false
> vaccines wouldn't prevent transmission, carried a non-zero risk of side effects
"Prevent" and "non-zero" are weasel words, that sentence as written is true of literally every treatment and prophylactic in existence forever.
But it does reduce the risk of transmission even in the case of prisoners sharing a cell.
And the risks of side effects are much, much lower than the risks of those effects from the actual illness.
> that there would no benefit to lock downs, and that masks were pointless.
False on both counts.
Lockdowns were there to reduce the secondary consequences from running out of capacity. Several places ran out of capacity to handle the dead, let alone the living. I still don't understand how we were able to get short of medical oxygen, but that happened in some places too.
Masks likewise, reduce the transmission rate. Not eliminate, reduce. That's not pointless.
> that vaccination was unnecessary for children and younger adults,
Weasel phrasing, "unnecessary" can mean anything. But, I will try to interpret generously as possible: Sure, lots of kids and young adults won't die, they'll only get sick for a few weeks, with unknown long term damage.
(I'm sorry to any readers that this comment is not adding anything materially useful to the wider discussion)
(Apart from anything else, I know that raising the other party's heart rate is a terrible way to change their minds).
With that adjustment, I think you can go from "weasel words" to "Your perspective might be flawed..."
Apologies, if this comes off as patronising.
Thanks for checking; don't worry, it wasn't.
> false
True: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2203965
> vaccines wouldn't prevent transmission,
The vaccines were never tested to prevent transmission: https://www.hitc.com/en-gb/2022/10/12/pfizer-vaccine-not-tes...
-- and indeed they do not prevent transmission, or infection for that matter. Many many people, from Joe Biden to my own mother have been injected and boosted 5-times over, and still got a COVID infection. The vaccines simply don't work very well.
> And the risks of side effects are much, much lower than the risks of those effects from the actual illness.
You can't make a blanket statement about risk, especially when so little was know about the risk of side effects across the population.
For people like us, and the large number of people who have had COVID, we know what the risk of a COVID infection is, and in our case - as with most other people who are in good health, and not extremely elderly, it's a very mild condition.
On the other hand, health officials continue to deliberately downplay the significance of side effects, which we now know includes non-negligable risk of life threatening heart dissease and Bell's Palsey.
> Lockdowns were there to reduce the secondary consequences from running out of capacity.
That was the claim, certainly. But as we predicted, this never actually happened anywhere in the world - not even in places where people live in poverty, and healthcare is virtually non-existant.
> Several places ran out of capacity to handle the dead, let alone the living. I still don't understand how we were able to get short of medical oxygen, but that happened in some places too.
A lot of that stuff turneded out to be fabricated, but it spooked a lot of folks.
Sweden never locked down, and their outcomes were better than most of the rest of Europe:
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...
> Masks likewise, reduce the transmission rate. Not eliminate, reduce. That's not pointless.
They don't though. Scarecly anyone wore the kind of mask that could possibly make any difference. It was security theatre to calm the masses. All a cloth mask does is redirect your breathe out the sides. It doesn't filter anything.
> Sure, lots of kids and young adults won't die, they'll only get sick for a few weeks, with unknown long term damage.
My kids have never had any COVID symptoms at all since we were first infected March 2020. So in our case (and millions like us), it's actually not unknown. I wouldn't even know if they had had the disease a dozen times over already - I hope they have, because it help further fortify their natural immunity.
Over and over the claims of the expert class have been proven wrong. They claimed to know things that they couldn't possibly have known, and continue to lie and deflect to this day.
Because it's an inevitable thing when people are less ill. It's dishonest to demand testing something like "people coughing less spread less" and then use that to pad the rest of your weak arguments with that - like the last sentence about efficacy (straight after the anecdotal).
> Sweden never locked down, and their outcomes were better than most of the rest of Europe
Emphasis on the "were".
> Scarecly anyone wore the kind of mask that could possibly make any difference. It was security theatre to calm the masses. All a cloth mask does is redirect your breathe out the sides. It doesn't filter anything.
Whose fault is that when the good practices could have been followed but were not? Should have beaten them with a baton? Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
> I hope they have, because it help further fortify their natural immunity.
Yikes. The old adage about "what doesn't kill you" should end with "leaves scars" as it's definitely not so cut and dry to only "make you stronger".
> Over and over the claims of the expert class have been proven wrong. They claimed to know things that they couldn't possibly have known, and continue to lie and deflect to this day.
They have been far less wrong than the rest. That is how the process is supposed to work - new evidence comes to light, opinion changes. It's not an ancient belief system based on a book. It's a fundamental misunderstanding of science to expect random sentences (where most nuance has been filtered out from) to be irrevocably true.
There are going to be improvements, better ways to apply the same principles, changes in the underlying assessments, things change. Framing it as the reason why some opposing stance is correct is extremely dishonest and grossly wrong.
The context of this is that there were voices calling for coercing vaccination. My mother-in-law lost her job because she refused to have it. The sole justification offered was that the experts claimed to know that it would protect other people. Except they never knew that - it was guesswork, and we now know that the vaccines don't prevent transmission.
For example this linke @grjdiofgeriov shared:
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2116597 "Although vaccination still lowers the risk of infection, similar viral loads in vaccinated and unvaccinated persons who are infected with the delta variant call into question the degree to which vaccination prevents transmission."
>> Sweden never locked down, and their outcomes were better than most of the rest of Europe
> Emphasis on the "were".
Not just were - they continue to be now. Their all-cause mortality has been far lower from start to finish, and they never had any kind of COVID-related crisis.
Equally, if you look across the world, there is simply no correlation between COVID policy and outcomes. None of the intereventions made any significant differentce.
> Whose fault is that when the good practices could have been followed but were not? Should have beaten them with a baton? Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Even with perfect practices, it wouldn't have made much difference. The virus was airbourne, endemic, and highly transmissible. In the same way, I can still smell a bonfire half a mile away mask or no mask.
It was purely security theatre. "Something must be done. This is something"
>> I hope they have, because it help further fortify their natural immunity.
> Yikes. The old adage about "what doesn't kill you" should end with "leaves scars" as it's definitely not so cut and dry to only "make you stronger".
No - not yikes. Their symptoms from COVID were zero. No scars. Nada. Nothing at all.
> It's a fundamental misunderstanding of science to expect random sentences (where most nuance has been filtered out from) to be irrevocably true.
I agree entirely, and this wouldn't have been a problem if governments hadn't used these half-baked ideas as a reason to coerce people to lock down, wear masks, or receive experimental medical treatments.
> They have been far less wrong than the rest.
Not at all. Again and again, the @realjhol model was far more accurate than the Imperial College model. Many such cases. Sad to see my alma mater fail so badly.
Did you forget to switch to a sockpuppet account?
-> personal experience: I survived only because I was able to get an ICU bed at the right time as did millions more in my country. Millions more didn't because the health systems were overwhelmed.
It's hard to take your argument in good faith when you offhandedly say stuff like this -> "A lot of that stuff turneded out to be fabricated, but it spooked a lot of folks."
Look at the hell china is going through right now and the hell we went through(India). The wounds are still deep and fresh, loved ones dying because they can't get a bed, or oxygen. Bodies rotting because crematoriums couldn't handle load and cities ran out of firewood.
I think there is room for discussion about the merits and demerits of various public/social policies around the pandemic without reducing it to a binary point of view and making it evidence based instead of offhandedly invalidating the pain and suffering of millions over the last few years as "fabricated".
There's no evidence to support this assertion, and plenty of evidence to the contrary e.g. Sweden.
> It's hard to take your argument in good faith when you offhandedly say stuff like this -> "A lot of that stuff turneded out to be fabricated, but it spooked a lot of folks."
But a lot of what spread around was fake:
https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/health/health-problems/cor...
https://www.opindia.com/2021/04/nypost-fake-news-people-dyin...
https://www.concordmonitor.com/Burning-bodies-Mass-graves-Ec...
https://nypost.com/2022/05/27/kamloops-mass-grave-debunked-b...
https://reason.com/2020/04/10/no-nyc-is-not-running-out-of-b...
> Look at the hell china is going through right now
The hell is of the chinese governments own making. A Zero COVID policy cannot possibly work.
Like all your other assertions this one feels self serving for your point of view when a rudimentary google search provides references to the alternative.
Consensus on efficacy of lockdowns flattening the curve with relevant bibliography.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02823-4
N of 1 as in what worked in Sweden (ranked 3rd in the global healthcare index and has a population lower than some cities in india) does not in any way shape or form meaningfully imply what would be good for the rest of the world (though it might certainly inform it)
I wasn't referring to the presence of fake/false/sensational/agenda driven narratives or your allusion to them, I was referring to your following offhanded assertions.
" Lockdowns were there to reduce the secondary consequences from running out of capacity.
That was the claim, certainly. But as we predicted, this never actually happened anywhere in the world - not even in places where people live in poverty, and healthcare is virtually non-existant."
Also read the citations. They make a lot of uncited assertions (worthless), and then their primary evidence is Flaxman et al, it's a joke paper. Read it, they made a model that predicted 3 million deaths and when it didn't happen said lockdowns were the reason. Their methodology is wack. They had to hide Sweden from some of their graphs because it broke their model, they had to claim that shutting major sport/music events was magically effective in Sweden but nowhere else because their model just assigned all the reduction to whatever the last government decision happened to be. Google for it to find more criticism of their methods. Nature do admit the paper was criticized but don't tell you the type of problems.
You don't know me and that is fine. In early January 2020 I predicted the entire pandemic, including the mask lie(before they lied), the supply run (My entire family picked off full shelves), the effort from people, the vaccine issues, and the aftermath.
If I followed what you suggested, I would be without my mother. So maybe, just maybe, you are wrong.