Covid-19 and other pandemics require a coherent response strategy
thelancet.com
thelancet.com
Funny how they always refer to costly lessons learnt but then never state what those lessons were, what was actually learnt from them and what that cost entailed. Just a couple of loose statements and well, it's "The Lancet" so people believe it anyways. Those are smart people and if they say they've learnt costly lessons, it must be true right? Trust the science!
They should be discontinued for all the lies and disinformation regaring Covid, vaccinations, the human immune system etc they spouted in the past two years.
Not to mention helping to bury the lab leak hypothesis.
And we really should have a full cost-benefit analysis of the wins from the lockdowns vs doing nothing. I'm still on board with 2 weeks to flatten the curve, but I don't think anyone has done the work to prove that the 18 month lockdown regime that Australia did was worth it. I think the Australian government assessed around 30k lives saved which, sorry to say, isn't enough to justify throwing away 18 months of everyone's social lives. The rate of change of our death rate 2020-2021 is around 10,000 deaths. These numbers are not impressive enough to justify doing that again.
[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/us-air-fo...
USA made mistake when they pressured Ukraine to give up atomic bombs and when it prioritized Russian interest over interest of other Eastern European nations. But that is history now.
But there is no denying that war is useful for profit and capitalism is always happy to profit.
He wasn’t arguing from specific research, just using his platform for ask for more of what he wanted. If anything, he should have been publicising what the actual science said.
Now when I see the name The Lancet, I just see how science can also be politicised and operate at the whims of big business.
Covid times destroyed trust in so many institutions.
“ Horton’s The Covid-19 Catastrophe: What’s Gone Wrong and How to Stop it Happening Again (2020) has managed to stand out for its sharp polemic (Knight 2020). Horton denounces Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw funding from the World Health Organization (WHO) as a crime against humanity and accuses Boris Johnson of misconduct in public office.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7383067/
Note his book was written in 2020 so before he even had much science, let alone formed a scientifically rigorous view.
Is it right that science at the highest levels is so politicised?
I don’t dispute the negative impact of the pandemic on trust in many institutions. And I won’t speak to the broader world, but Americans’ trust in our institutions has been taking a beaten since long before the pandemic.
Pew Research Center has written about trust in government over time. We seem to be asymptotically approaching some lower bound rather than seeing a sharp drop. [1]
I remember reading about declining trust of Americans in our institutions more broadly but without digging through my notebooks I’m not certain precisely where. My guesses would be either Watt’s “Mortal Republic”, Lukianoff’s “The Coddling of the American Mind”, or maybe Putnam’s “Bowling Alone”. Someone with better recall than I have would probably know.
I think the pandemic is more of a “straw that broke the camel’s back” rather than a fundamental driver of mistrust.
I mostly bring this up because I don’t think focusing on the side effects of public policy with regard to the pandemic will solve the broader and more deep-seated issues about our trust in our institutions.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2022/06/06/public-trust...
When major health officials tell you that a covid vaccine will stop you catching covid and stop transmission, then to find out we were lied to. We might not have known back then, but we shouldn't have been told that unless we knew it to be true.
This was likely out of naivety, but it came from trusted professionals. To me, this highlighted the fact that science is a great process for finding truth, but the weak points will always be the humans.
(and I'm vaccinated, but it's extremely eye opening how all this information is coming out, exactly what the REASONABLE anti vaxxers were warning about. We just don't know the side effects of a new vaccine technology, used on a new virus. It's impossible to declare it to be SAFE (which implies harmless over a long period of time) at day 0. (I'm just quoting Bret Weinstein who definitely isn't an unscientific untrained anti vaxxer).
Can you tell me where you have read this?
The mRNA vaccines did protect more than 90% of the vaccinated against symptomatic infections with the original strain. Then we got new Covid variants where that wasn't the case anymore (Delta and later), but that doesn't mean we were lied to. The situation simply changed.
In Jan 2020 I used HN to get my covid information and used it to preempt the toilet paper shortage(by 2 weeks) with: a 3 month supply of basic foods(stuff we eat anyway so no waste), any type of masks or sanitizers that were wanted, and the same for my vulnerable family members.
My mum is alive today because of my distrust of authority. Which I painfully earned starting at age 8.
So, at points, there were definite lies (including a few well known ones, not related to vaccines), the lies were exposed, and the end result was distrust.
When the vaccines were originally rolled out, they did a great job at preventing infections and transmission. This was clearly seen in the original clinical trials and in early epidemiological data and was reported that way by officials and media outlets. However, it later turned out that COVID is much better at mutating to evade immunity than was originally assumed. While the vaccines stayed highly effective at reducing mortality, vaccinated people could get infected by and transmit the new variants. There was then a concerted effort to re-frame our lack of knowledge about coronaviruses as a deliberate lie by scientists and authorities. The insidious thing is that this strategy is quite hard to defend against. Many people are much more willing to believe in a grand conspiracy, than that we simply didn't know that much about this type of virus.
The issue is the authoritarians pushing the COVID measures had no time for actual science and didn't care about the opinions of the scientists. That was what was so galling about the follow-the-science types - they weren't listening to scientists. They were often actively obstructing any debate where scientists could argue things out in public.
> CDC chief Rochelle Walensky said earlier this week that “vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don’t get sick.”
https://nypost.com/2021/04/02/cdc-walks-back-claim-that-vacc...
They seem to have clarified some time later, but my point still stands. Sloppy wording causes distrust.
Besides the phrase itself is simple Confirmation bias
The world is definitely moving in the more centralisation direction, and has done for a while.
This is like some weird Schrödinger’s cat kind of logic applied to conspiracies to me. A conspiracy doesn’t exist until you look in the box and see it?
"Quick! Everyone do the same thing in a big rush!" is about the dumbest strategy to handle anything. Thankfully cooler heads always prevail, and the panicking hot-heads hyperbolising us into a blind conformity; take notice.
This would give WHO the power to unilaterally declare an emergency and a response that must be enforced by all countries globally, without regard to local context. This is the same WHO that ignored its own experts and declared a monkeypox PHEIC anyway, https://www.science.org/content/article/declaring-monkeypox-...
> The World Health Organization (WHO) today declared the global spread of monkeypox a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC), even though a special advisory committee again declined to recommend the action. This is the first time since the PHEIC system was created in 2005 that the agency has made such a declaration without the panel’s endorsement. “This is big, unprecedented decision-making by the director general,” says Clare Wenham, a global health expert at the London School of Economics who has studied the history of PHEICs.
If the Lancet recommendations were followed, countries would have spent 2022 responding to a "monkeypox emergency", including possible travel restrictions, lockdowns, etc.
> We declare no competing interests.
Other than advocating for W.H.O to override the elected officials and medical professionals of every nation-state?
The Lancet neglected to mention WHO negotiations in progress: (a) modification of existing (2005) international health regulations, and (b) new treaty to grant expanded powers to WHO. More details at http://StopTheWho.com, which is obviously biased, but objective coverage of this important topic is almost non-existent.
> The WHO is currently overseeing negotiations that are designed to convince its 194 member nations to adopt amendments to the International Health Regulations as well as to adopt a legally-binding “Pandemic Treaty.” These agreements, if adopted, would surrender health related sovereignty over to the WHO ... Agreement by a simple majority of the 194 member nations is all that is needed to adopt the amendments .. to an existing agreement.
The best primary sources are WHO videos on the treaty negotiations, which include testimony from the health ministers of every country. WHO site for new pandemic treaty: https://inb.who.int/
EU law journal with some objective analysis of the proposed amendments. https://www.ejiltalk.org/the-far-reaching-us-proposals-to-am...
> If WHO’s powers are extended in this way, is there a need to also answer the question quis custodiet ipsos custodes (who guards the guards?), and to thus set up mechanisms ensuring that WHO complies with its obligations under the IHR and its Constitution, as well as its responsibilities for human rights deriving from customary international human rights law?
If there would be a single authority that can mandate policies around the world, that authority would have so much power that it would necessarily be politized, and would not make decisions based on scientific consensus.