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Comment by taeric | Hacker News Reader

Probably true, though most things in life are oversold. Including how well a past infection will help you out. :D

I don't want to demand that we listen to experts, but I do regret people seem to have expected experts to never be wrong. And the current culture has gotten to where admitting a mistake is literally the worst thing you can do for a political stance. :(

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The problem is that some of these policy decisions weren’t “mistakes”, they were deliberate politically motivated decisions.

I'm vaguely curious on which ones you mean. Especially with regards to the vaccines, the data is pretty overwhelming that they were a net good. The charts that were showing hospitalization/deaths of vaccinated versus not were fairly conclusive. Did they live up to some of the initial hype about them? I don't actually know. The pipe dream that many were saying of a sterilizing vaccine were always a distant hope.

I’m mostly talking about the partial lockdowns where only specific categories of businesses or employees were considered essential. Many of these designations were arbitrary at best and politically motivated at worst.

Please cite your sources here. Lockdowns were effective.

1) Lacking a nationalized infrastructure to deliver food, utilities, and healthcare, some businesses are clearly essential

2) It is impossible to have unanimous consensus on what "essential" means

3) In some areas, businesses are not tightly scoped - the primary source of food for a neighborhood may also sell non-food items.

4) Even the definition of "essential" cannot be tightly defined - are manufacturers of spare infrastructure components essential? What about their suppliers? What about the contractor who refills their coffee machine?

Decisions had to be made, and administrators largely made the best decisions with the information available to them.

Programmer logic leads some to the libertarian path. Not everything is a zero sum game. Life is messy and it’s not always governments fault. Getting it right more than wrong saved countless lives. You can’t quantify the amount of lives saved.

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