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Comment by akira2501 | Hacker News Reader

I doubt people are willing to be bullied into shutting down their businesses and fully putting their lives and children's educations on hold because white coat wearing talking heads on TV told them it would only take two weeks.

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Can you tell me specifically which experts said it would only take two weeks?

> Can you tell me

Anthony Fauci, the entire CDC, and even the White House presented that as an initial timeline. When "the lockdowns" started that was the official position. After they were in place it quickly slipped to three weeks, then we don't know, then "long enough to flatten the curve" or maybe "until everyone gets a booster."

> specifically which experts

Let's not devolve to senseless parsimony over this topic again. All of this is well documented and if you actually wanted to know you could have easily found it yourself.

> Anthony Fauci, the entire CDC, and even the White House presented that as an initial timeline. When "the lockdowns" started that was the official position. After they were in place it quickly slipped to three weeks, then we don't know, then "long enough to flatten the curve" or maybe "until everyone gets a booster."

Your timeline makes no sense. Fauci or anyone would not have been talking about boosters for _years_ after lockdowns started. Booster of what? No vaccine existed.

Here you go:

https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/articles/15-days-slow-s...

https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/st...

https://www.npr.org/2020/03/30/822448199/how-15-days-became-...

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/16/covid-a-year-later-trumps-15...

In no uncertain terms, your obtuse dismissal of history that most of us here literally witnessed with our own eyes is appalling.

Everyone in a position of power, including Trump and Fauci, fucked up because everyone wanted to use covid for political ends. Noone is going to trust the government, Trump or otherwise, the next time and for good reason.

Those undercut the claim, not support it: there’s no promise that it’ll be over, only a request to slow the rate of spread. Moreover, that was not a promise from medical experts but from a presidential candidate running for re-election arguing that the economy was doing so well that it made up for the other problems with his administration.

>that was not a promise from medical experts

What part of Fauci (and many others) being a member of the Coronavirus Task Force do you not understand?

The part where Fauci didn’t say the things you claim he said?

First, the task force never said what you’re claiming – slowing the rate of growth is not the same as over – but also, surely you’re not under the impression that he somehow outranked the president on that task force?

What political ends?

For Trump it was chiefly about winning re-election in the face of absolute adversity.

For everyone else, it was namely about getting rid of Trump but also attempting to normalize the regulation of speech and assembly, commerce, and healthcare and expanding the powers of the Executive Branch at both Federal and State levels to limits unprecedented at the time.

Covid should not have been politicized, regardless where you are on the spectrum.

> For everyone else, it was namely about getting rid of Trump but also attempting to normalize the regulation of speech and assembly, commerce, and healthcare and expanding the powers of the Executive Branch at both Federal and State levels to limits unprecedented at the time.

This is an enormous claim to toss out without support. You’d need to start by establishing what you’re even referring to since, for example, speech was not regulated and it’s unclear why people who wanted to get rid of Trump would have given him “unprecedented” power so you’d want to explain that theory a bit more.

> In no uncertain terms, your obtuse dismissal of history that most of us here literally witnessed with our own eyes is appalling.

And yet your links do not contain the word "booster" anywhere in the text (in the npr one the word appears in headlines it wants me to read next, but they're _way_ later in timeline as I expected).

So, what is appalling about what I said then?

Surely you can find a quote of Fauci saying this?

Hint: You cannot.

You’ll find Trump and his appointed Surgeon General (who is also the ONLY person in authority who said concretely “masks don’t work” instead of “we don’t know if masks work,” which was true)

That specific duration, two weeks, was an official policy from the CDC and the White House https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/articles/15-days-slow-s.... Here's the US Surgeon General talking about it: https://youtu.be/HK2ypT2xweA?t=129

As we can see in the video, the experts knew from the get-go that 15 days wouldn't be enough. But they named the policy/slogan that way anyway in the hope that it would improve cooperation "oh it's just 15 days, we can all do it!".

I think it's fair to say that the population shouldn't take such slogan as being absolute during an evolving unprecedented situation. But it's also fair to say that the experts (or at least the politicians) were being deliberately misleading and, rightly or wrongly, some people felt duped/lied to once they realized that.

Calling them dumb for feeling duped by an official slogan isn't helping anyone. Let's agree that things could/should have been communicated better and let's all learn from it so that history doesn't repeat itself.

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