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Comment by tomashertus | Hacker News Reader

Damn, I'm worried whether Russia’s response will prioritise containing the pathogen or containing the embarrassment. You can’t patch a public-health incident with a press release.

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I suspect it will be similar to the current American regime's past handling of COVID: a lot of skilled people wanting to do the right thing, but having to fight an unnecessary uphill battle against the administration that was more interested in perception, economics, and politics than lives.

...did you live through the same COVID? Do you not remember when the top researchers colluded to repeatedly bald-faced lie to their peers and the public about the likely origins of the virus?

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/scientists-behind-paper-...

user: howunfortunate created: 35 days ago

Is your implication that COVID was intentionally created in an American bioweapons lab with the goal of creating something both highly deadly and highly transmissible for use in future conflicts?

I see how this could be confusing for you. Note that we're discussing the response to a potential crisis.

Literally nothing in parent comment would suggest that, no.

I mean we are talking about the successor state to the one that botched the Chernobyl response, it's not hard to imagine a repeat

I'm not sure the public health establishment didn't do more harm than good during COVID, especially with all the politically expedient flip-flopping on masking: First claiming it was unnecessary as a white lie to protect supplies for front-line workers, then promoting cloth masks despite evidence not being able to establish it statistically significantly slows spread, and then insisting on masking children in their formative years who had already been vaccinated or otherwise gained natural protection against COVID.

Remember all the theater around wearing your mask to your restaurant table and then taking it off for your entire meal in an enclosed room with dozens of other people? Or shutting down public parks and beaches but excusing BLM protests because they agreed with their politics?

The Trump admin was cartoonishly inept but the public health experts did plenty to kill their own credibility as well.

States and people that listened to the public health establishment saved hundreds of thousands of lives: https://batten.virginia.edu/research/how-state-policies-impa...:

> If all states had imposed restrictions similar to those used in the 10 most restrictive states, excess deaths would have been an estimated 10% to 21% lower than the 1.18 million that actually occurred during the 2-year analysis period; conversely, the estimates suggest counterfactual increases of 13% to 17% if all states had restrictions similar to those in the 10 least-restrictive states. The estimated strong vs weak state restriction difference was 271 000 to 447 000 deaths, with behavior changes associated with 49% to 79% of the overall disparity.

Well then there's this meta-analysis (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11127-024-01216-7) that suggests that may not be the case. Honestly, you can find a paper to back up whatever you want to claim.

The paper you linked also doesn't take into account economic impacts, which aren't negligible, and lead to deaths of despair, drug abuse, unaffordable housing, etc.. They also admit the school closures were ineffective and unnecessary and we've seen the mental health and educational impacts on kids and now young adults that had those years taken from them.

Keep in mind also that the favorite phrase of the COVID era was "abundance of caution." That's itself a tacit admission that they knew their recommendations went too far and they weren't putting enough weight on the secondary effects.

> Our meta-analysis finds that lockdowns in the spring of 2020 had a relatively small effect on COVID-19 mortality and is consistent with the view that voluntary changes in behavior, such as social distancing, played an important role in mitigating the pandemic

I find it strange you bemoan the public health establishment's credibility when your own source shows that people following its guidelines played a greater role in saving hundreds of thousands of lives than legal mandates.

Social distancing in an infectious disease pandemic is obvious and people would have done that regardless. My point is that the specific advice of the public health establishment was nonsensical (don't wear masks, actually do wear masks and cloth is fine, don't go to parks or beaches but political protests are fine if we're sympathetic to the cause, wear a mask when you walk to your table but not at your table, natural immunity isn't as good as a vaccine, and on and on). It was ridiculous and a big reason public trust in institutions is at an all time low.

Your "point" is soundly refuted by the available evidence including the very evidence you cite.

> but excusing BLM protests because they agreed with their politics?

I had forgot about that. God what a ridiculous time, my county judge Clay Jenkins in Dallas would drive around yelling at people walking their dogs to get inside. He was overjoyed with his little hobby authoritative regime. During the pandemic, I met him at a fundraiser once where, gasp, no one was wearing masks (it was very fancy). I was going to ask him about it but my wife's friend who was putting it on just asked me to leave.

Sensible people living in sane societies understand the benefit of clear and simple rules that don't require a vast corpus of reference material to adjudicate.

It’s not nearly as black and white as you lay out. Despite evidence of immunity after contracting COVID, the prior administration continued to pursue a vaccination mandate through OSHA. Additionally arbitrary rules and limitations such as the 6’ rule were routinely parroted by public health authorities and state governments. That’s in addition to what another commenter pointed out about the mask flip flopping.

Immunity after contraction… what? Vaccines are designed to reduce symptoms and have never been a guarantee of immunity. They can reduce transmission in the populace too and make it survivable for at-risk people. You’ve been huffing some bad media friend.

Yeah well I got Covid before I was able to get the vaccine and I was just fine. And yet the admin still tried to force me to get the vaccine despite my body building antibodies (aka immunity) against the virus, protecting me.

Most likely both. Just recently Russia had already contained the embarrassment of announcing there was a foot-and-mouth disease in cattle (so they don’t have to declare even a sporadic outbreak), but they also eradicated all the cattle to both contain and cover it up. Most likely, the same thing - containing, but under a different (less unsavory-sounding) pretense.

Who will be Russia’s Li Wenliang

Take a guess, will Putin prioritize the safety of humans or his own pride? He’s literally waging a war that is based on his warped divine feeling of pride for Rus

Alternatively, that's just an excuse, and he's waging a war because the existential threat to his autocratic kleptocracy by even a modestly successful, somewhat democratic neighboring state with significant inter-country exchange of people and ideas.

Worse yet, this is contained but Putin will use it to argue against foreign actors weakening him further because 'think of the consequences`. I hate how paranoid this timeline has made me.

you should consume less internet -- will make you feel a bit better

> I hate how paranoid this timeline has made me

Ever wonder what a country waging a grinding siege war could do with a plague lab?

That’s keeping me up. Threaten nukes and deploy the plague to show you aren’t kidding.

There was a news story yesterday about the Ukrainian government using drones to airlift medicine to occupied territories that have been cut off from pharmaceutical supply chains (the occupation forces said they would figure it out, but didn’t)

> Ever wonder what a country waging a grinding siege war could do with a plague lab?

There's a reason the US and Soviets were largely willing to get rid of the stuff - it's fairly useless geopolitically, because you mostly can't target it.

That’s only if you care about nation states.

Viruses and bacteria don't care about nation states

Your reassurance relies on strategic calculus of the 20th century, arrived at by a much less cynical leadership, in both cases.

It can definitely be targeted: behind enemy lines, or in the occupied territory with selective access to antibiotics. Population migration can be enforced coercively too.

This is the same regime pulling stunts like this [0] and threatening nuclear war, absolutely would not be surprised.

[0] https://www.occrp.org/en/news/putins-chef-sends-bloody-sledg...

Russians don't do disasters by halves, so we should prepare ourselves for the worst outcome.

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