Time for the scientific community to admit we were wrong about Covid

The science and the math on this haven't changed at all, but that didn't stop antivaxxers from grasping at anything they could find to push people into getting themselves and their children infected as quickly as possible for that sweet "natural protection". If people want to say that science became a "team sport" lets not forget that the team they were playing against was "team virus" and there were a shocking amount of hardcore virus fans pushing for policies and practices that would clearly result in more people getting infected.

No good scientific reason, sure. Political reasons abound. But had Science not presented as much of a unified front as they had, any message of theirs would have been fragmented to oblivion.

It's basic psyops; even children know how to do it-- take a unified front and split it over arbitrary issues. When players on the same team opt for melee between themselves instead of the other team, the opposing interest quietly advances their own goals.

So in his bid to "restore credibility" to Science, he's indirectly advocating for opportunities to get two experts on the same team to publicly disagree (by invoking Diversity), thus making the entire institution look non-credible. He's outright trying to do this himself by publicly acting as though Science has a deserved credibility problem, while also waxing apologetic as a [junior!] member of that team. It's scummy.

Where Science at least tried to act in good faith based on things like evidence and data, they were competing with fabricated/unsubstantiated claims and mockery. They didn't always get it right, but they weren't trying to cause harm/chaos or derive personal benefit through deception. But clearly, it's Science that needs to atone-- we'll just ignore the hostile noncompliance and lack of critical thinking skills demonstrated by everyone else.

Nothing he presents here is helpful; it's apologetic to the point of subversive and would have paralyzed a public-health effort that struggled to cross the finish line already. Trying to derail it with appeals to diversity is contrarian shit-stirring.

"Most of us did not speak up in support of alternative views, and many of us tried to suppress them. When strong scientific voices like world-renowned Stanford professors John Ioannidis, Jay Bhattacharya, and Scott Atlas, or University of California San Francisco professors Vinay Prasad and Monica Gandhi, sounded the alarm on behalf of vulnerable communities, they faced severe censure by relentless mobs of critics and detractors in the scientific community—often not on the basis of fact but solely on the basis of differences in scientific opinion."

I think that we have a real problem with a large portion of the population being unwilling to listen when scientists say "we have a problem", and a large part of that problem comes from the attitudes displayed by many scientists (or those quoting them) when faced with disagreement. It was particularly problematic with Covid, because emotions ran so high, but if there is not some sort of mea culpa then we could be faced with a long-lasting rupture, where scientists are considered just one more political player, rather than an objective source of information.

When doctors make mistakes, it has been found that a simple apology by the doctor to the patient can significantly reduce the chance of lawsuits. For a similar reason, I think we would greatly benefit from starting with "we were wrong/we handled this wrong" from some prominent members of the scientific community.