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Comment by GeekyBear | Hacker News Reader

Here's why silencing critics is problematic.

The powers that be decided that Covid was a virus with a droplet based spread, like the flu, and they silenced domain experts who asserted that Covid was a fully airborne virus, like the measles.

The mitigations that were put in place targeted a droplet based spread (washing hands, wiping down surfaces, putting up sneeze guards, staying six feet apart) and were ineffective against a virus you contract by inhaling it as it floats in the air.

Unfortunately, it took two years for the truth about Covid to be begrudgingly accepted.

> Two years of COVID: The battle to accept airborne transmission

https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2022/3/11/two-years-of-co...

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Where is evidence that the government suppressed discussion about aerosols?

The article you linked about speaks only about believing.

Yes they didn't believe it but that is a very different situation.

Also I will point out that a huge portion of people believe the lockdowns were ineffective which is the only solve for aerosols.

EDIT: I will agree that the origin story was suppressed too much, given the uncertainty and some questions without disinformation in them were removed in the cross fire. But I hadn't heard heavy handed responses to aerosol theories.

The government issued categorical statements that Covid was NOT airborne.

The government instructed social media platforms to suppress "misinformation" that went against the official party line.

The government used extreme threats against platforms that did not comply.

> In an interview with MSNBC about anti-vaccine misinformation, White House communications director Kate Bedingfield responded to a question asking if Biden would change Section 230 to make companies “liable for publishing that information, and then open to lawsuits.” Bedingfield responded that “we’re reviewing that, and certainly they should be held accountable.”

https://www.theverge.com/22585152/biden-white-house-facebook...

I personally had a one decade old account banned on one social platform for asserting that Covid was airborne and many posts on other platforms deleted for sharing links that supported the airborne Covid theory as "misinformation".

We literally had platforms deleting links to information provided by sites like the New England Journal of Medicine or Nature if they didn't toe the official party line.

> The government instructed social media platforms to suppress "misinformation" that went against the official party line.

Do you have any evidence? It certainly is not true for the major platforms like Facebook or Twitter where the aerosol reality was widely discussed - in fact that was an increasingly vocal source of criticism of the WHO and CDC after the scientific evidence consolidated on airborne transmission (say roughly March 2020).

Given your phrasing of "Coronavirus is political" my guess is the aerosol anecdote isn't the whole story.

Feel free to give actual examples as I said originally.

All you have to do is ask anybody who dared to question the narrative. I had several accounts banned for stating "misinformation" on what would later become fact.

It is easy to dismiss everything you hear from folks like me if you went right along with the government / media narrative. The actual truth is they lied their fucking heads off and worked tirelessly to suppress valid dissent by painting people who went against as alt-right grandma killing conspiracy kooks.

It will happen to you someday too. And you will never be able to let go of the deep sense of betrayal.

Well said. And lots of 'commenters' here popping up with the usual 'please give precise examples, also it would be lovely if you could dox yourself too?'

Like, we all watched it happen. It wasn't 1945, it was two years ago. And these things pop up in every comment section and try and make you seem insane.

Not really well said. More conspiratorial thinking that relies on this vague narrative boogeyman. Oooohhh, The Narrative! So scary... around every corner, waiting in the shadows to pounce! Beware of the dastardly narrative.

When there's a deadly virus spreading around, I'm not worried about The Narrative. I'm worried about dying. If the consensus is that rubbing my belly and tapping my head at the same time is going to keep me healthy, that's what I'm going to do. I'm not going to automatically reach for the "Well, that's just the narrative that the Belly Rubbing Head Tapping Illuminati WANTS you to think!" line of reasoning.

> I'm not worried about The Narrative. I'm worried about dying.

The narrative was to implement mitigations that could not be effective against an airborne virus, like wiping down surfaces, staying six feet apart and washing hands.

They pushed disposable masks that weren't capable of filtering the air you breathe instead of the bare minimum of a properly fitted N95 mask which can filter the air as long as it's fitted tightly enough to your face to prevent air leakage around the sides.

The false narrative that was put in place did result in more deaths than mitigations effective against an airborne virus would be.

If you are worried about dying, you should definitely be concerned about the government suppressing “misinformation” that turns out to be true, which could have shaped policy and individual choices early in the pandemic.

I don't mean dox yourself.

I mean if that was happening on a reasonable scale then there would be stories about it.

There were many stories about disagreements.

There were stories about subtle disagreements leading to bans.

I am just saying "if people got banned en mass for saying aerosol where is the proof".

I don't like anecdotes because people interpret their words by intent and so will assume what they meant to say is why they were punished.

"I don't know why there is a mask mandate it is completely ineffective" as a hypothetical. Is that someone saying that aerosol viruses need more effective masks? I could see someone claiming that.

Is that what they wrote? Not at all.

Moderation tends to be context free and unless people are willing to do a similar mental process they won't necessarily know why they got banned.

I don't think the poster above should do that analysis. I think feeling betrayed and wanting to leave when it happens is a perfectly reasonable response from them.

I just don't plan on listening to anecdotal evidence of bans from individuals on that kind of thing.

Why was it such a politically-driven determination? Why is droplet-based culturally more expedient than airbourne?

Different types of mitigations which have different levels of social acceptance. Washing hands is a more socially acceptable mitigation than wearing high quality masks, for example.

I don't think it would be if it wasn't for a bunch of people who decided to start an unrelated holy war against any mitigation of the virus. They caused everyone to become hyper alert for any signs of dissent which has made this whole thing measurably harder to manage.

A huge component of that was outright lies from the CDC in the beginning. "No one needs a mask" "They might even be harmful" "they require special training" all of which directly contradicted studies they had funded and published from doing contract tracing with SARS, while simultaneously stating they were essential for healthcare workers. All instead of saying "hey look we have a shortage of masks due to some previous mistakes we made which make us look incompetent now, and our healthcare workers need them more."

Public health management 101 in any textbook will tell you that maintaining public trust during an epidemic is THE most important thing they could do.

Don't blame the people that were paying attention and realized they were full of it. I bought my masks in January because it was clear this was coming. They also silenced any debate about the costs/benefits of various mitigations. Don't even get me started on that one. With an R0 as high as it was, even in the beginning, it was clear to me that even with mitigations you were going to see cases surge beyond hospital capacities. (Bringing the R0 down from 4 to 2.1 would have been a great success, and yet... not that effective in a lot of ways.) Flattening the curve also prolongs the pandemic and deaths of despair were inevitable. This made some sense in the beginning to try and stall for time with the vaccine, but must be weighed against the costs, and there was no reasonable discussion of that at the policy level.

I think the perfect example of the mismanagement and corruption of the public trust for the pandemic at the CDC was the initial suggestion during the vaccine distribution scheduling meetings was that minorities should be the first in line for these new and experimental vaccines for “social justice” reasons.

Exactly this. I saw that destroy all trust live in the rural mostly white place I live.

Perhaps it did that too, but more importantly it further solidified government health authority distrust within minority communities because of the shadow of Tuskegee is still fresh in a lot of minds about the government willingness to experiment on minorities under the cover “help”.

That is a “what came first the chicken or the egg?” question. Folks opposed to many of the mitigation efforts would likely describe their attitudes as simply a pushback to what they perceived as an uncharacteristic overly authoritarian approach. Which in a lot of countries people are not just not used to such heavy handed government action. Couple that with very public examples of these same authorities who demanding the compliance and controls then disregarding them…then ice the whole damn cake with contradictory advice and outright lies and you have a pandemic that hard to manage because the folks in charge mismanaged it.

There is the phrase "fighting the last war" which describes people who can't let go of old lessons learned when facing something new.

In this case, remember that there was a time when people thought bacterial infections, like cholera, or parasitic infections, like malaria, were spread through bad smells in the air.

Unfortunately there are scientists who overgeneralize the lesson that bacteria and parasites are not transmitted through the air into a dogmatic belief that nothing can spread through the air, even viruses, and those sorts of people were in charge at the WHO and CDC.

> Early in the pandemic, the World Health Organization stated that SARS-CoV-2 was not transmitted through the air. That mistake and the prolonged process of correcting it sowed confusion and raises questions about what will happen in the next pandemic.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00925-7

It took domain experts two years to force those in charge to accept the truth that infected people do emit Covid into the air when they are just breathing normally, that the Covid they emit floats in the air for hours, and that people who inhale the virus do get infected.

Which is why it's unwise to censor everyone who doesn't toe the party line. Not just illegal, unwise.

To be fair, the droplets were down to nanometer size that N95 masks couldn't touch.

It was Dunning-Kruger meeting wishful thinking meeting cognitive dissonance. It was more convenient to shout one narrative than dither before generating conclusive evidence. Theoretically, you could don a moon suit and be alright, but 100% lockdown of the world doesn't scale for long, although 4 weeks of a real, absolute lockdown (wasn't meaningfully enforced uniformly in the US) would've been fantastic.

To be fair, a properly fitted N95 mask is infinitely protective against an airborne virus compared to standing six feet apart, washing your hands, wiping down surfaces or wearing one of those paper masks held on by two rubber bands with open sides.

However, it is my understanding that the UK's NHS did step up their game and require their equivalent of an N99 mask for frontline medical workers.

> a properly fitted N95 mask is infinitely protective against an airborne virus

People keep saying "airborne" as if that's the only route of transmission, but we know there are three routes - droplets in the eyes, air that you breathe, and fomites that you eat.

Eyes and mouth are significant, and there's some evidence that these are more important than airborne transmission.

The swiss cheese model does not say "use masks, ignore the rest, you'll be okay". It says "here's a package of measures and if you use all of them you reduce the risk".

> People keep saying "airborne" as if that's the only route of transmission

No. I am saying "airborne" as in the WHO issued a blanket statement that Covid was NOT airborne and the domain experts who asserted that it did indeed spread that way were crackpots.

Does the WHO's statement, "FACT: #Covid19 is NOT airborne", ring a bell?

> there's some evidence

Feel free to provide it.

Most infections were not from "airborne" transmission, but from fomites and particles.

It's always weird when people say "show me the evidence" as if it's a win. You don't know what you're talking about, and now you want me to do extra work for you? No. Maybe do the work before you leap into the conversation.

> Most infections were not from "airborne" transmission

Restating false information is not "proof".

Even the White House has now explicitly stated the new scientific consensus that Covid is primarily airborne and started talking about the sorts of mitigations that can be successful when you finally admit how the virus is spreading.

>The most common way COVID-19 is transmitted from one person to another is through tiny airborne particles of the virus hanging in indoor air for minutes or hours after an infected person has been there. While there are various strategies for avoiding breathing that air – from remote work to masking – we can and should talk more about how to make indoor environments safer by filtering or cleaning air.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/ostp/news-updates/2022/03/23/lets...

https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2022/04/08/the-dunning-k...

Dunning Kruger is autocorrelation and does not replicate

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I am a bot

Possibly because surgical masks, plexiglass, washing hands, hand disinfectant, surfaces disinfectant... were cheap measures, already under way, but even more useless for airborne virus

They possibly wanted the spectacle that people could/were doing something to protect themselves

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