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Comment by pwarner | Hacker News Reader

Almost everyone was pretty wrong about COVID, at least at some points in time. But it's very rare for anyone to admit it. I'll admit I was wrong, between sanitizing my hands when it was really in the air, to assuming the vaccines would end it. Lots of mistakes on my end!

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This "everybody was wrong" and "whoopsie!" self-absolution is some of the ugliest and most hypocritical parts of the entire Covid phenomenon. No -- plenty of people were ardently against lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and school shutdowns, but all kinds of pundits and self-selected rule enforcers loudly lambasted and insulted them endlessly.

Many, many lives were permanently affected in multiple, very negative ways, with no chance of returning to pre-covid "normal." The resentment and frustration from individual lives being crushed while the entire ordeal seemingly aligned and advanced corporate interests, is only triggered further by the ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ attitude.

In which way vaccine mandates were the wrong tool to fight Covid?

We should have higher rates of vaccination worldwide, not lower.

I support vaccination and recommend that people follow medical guidelines. But imposing medical procedures on anyone without their informed consent is absolutely immoral. Especially since the COVID-19 vaccines do little or nothing to prevent transmission.

It wasn’t just about preventing transmission - the vaccines dramatically reduced the rate of hospital admissions, which in theory should have allowed the health systems of the world to keep up with fewer infection control restrictions (like lockdowns, masking and social distancing).

I agree that forcing vaccines on people was, at the very least, ethically questionable. OTOH, there was a tremendous amount of misinformation and fear-mongering that would have had an outsized negative effect on the public health response, were vaccines not mandated.

There’s plenty of blame to go around.

Most "misinformation" was pro-vaccine -- that vaccinated people either could not get sick or could not transmit covid or that natural immunity was inferior to vaccines or altogether irrelevant.

"A vaccinated person gets exposed to the virus, the virus does not infect them, the virus cannot then use that person to go anywhere else, it cannot use a vaccinated person as a host to go get more people." -- Rachel Maddow

"When you get vaccinated, you not only protect your own health and that of the family but also you contribute to the community health ... in other words, you become a dead end to the virus." -- Fauci

"If you have had COVID-19 before, please still get vaccinated" -- Rochelle Walensky

Simultaneously I wish some of the people on your side (or the side you're advocating for here, anyway) didn't spend so much energy insulting those of us who wanted to put in a good faith effort not to exacerbate a community-level problem, and actively tried to provoke our anxiety and anger. Granted, that's probably difficult when you feel you're on the defensive. But I think that defensiveness goes both ways, which may partially explain how your side was mistreated. In principle I wanted your arguments to get a fair hearing, particularly on considering the costs of the measures. What made me most defensive is when there was a valid counterpoint to my own ideas, coming from some of the most vile, sadistic people.

Isn't this more of the same? Now, after the fact, claiming you wish all voices had gotten equal attention? It seems quite apparent that the government + media + corporations collaborated for 2+ years to push one singular narrative and to do as much as possible to reduce or silence anyone who questioned it or attempted to demonstrate that it wasn't entirely true.

To be clear I agree with your previous comment that anybody who now proclaims that they were wrong should either have been opposed to marginalizing your view in the moment, or they owe you a mea culpa. They should recognize that somebody's been out there who had the same conclusion this whole time. Depending on the specific point, I might stop short of saying they were "correct" this whole time because you can get to the same conclusion with different reasoning, and some of the reasoning I heard from your side still seems quite off to me.

As for myself though, you can see from an April 2020 comment that I'm a bit of an anomaly. Even though I felt more aligned with "the other side" I was maybe closer to the middle:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22929971

I'm pretty sure I've always, for instance, opposed tech censorship on the subject. Especially during the mid-year riots the way they demonized the anti-lockdown protests by comparison was insane and I recognized it as such then. I could pull up some old tweets if you want.

You do not remember the pictures from NYC?

You believe they were not real?

Sometimes I would love to see how corona would have ripped through your country and killed even more faster without any look down...

> You believe they were not real?

This is a non-sequitur.

It’s possible to believe Covid really did kill a lot of people and simultaneously believe that the lockdowns did not prevent enough deaths to be worth their negative effects.

You can argue like this and I would say:

I think it's valid and was one of the few indications we had.

Additionally to Italy.

It also correlates with the long and huge problem of ICU beds in germany

I was not wrong.

I was at home and isolating while looking at the hospital stats.

I waited for a vaccine and didn't get alpha.

When I did get COVID I already had a shot.

I was wearing an easy to wear mask and washing my hands (as I did before and still do).

The most frustrating thing to me is and was that we still live in a society were we can afford a lockdown but can't make it work.

It's the capitalism who can't handle a pandemic reasonable.

Sanitizing your hands, that must really haunt you.

Pouring alcohol on your hands every day isn’t really a good habit in the long term.

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