Covid-19 Was 'A Preventable Disaster,' WHO-Ordered Report Says

I am curious if that is due to the WHO messaging or just because with thousands of hospitals, the probability of having a stupid manager approaches 1.

I have considered that, and rejected it.

I'm not talking about people who don't really know and genuinely get their information from whatever their TV or internet or friends tell them and they just go along with it but generally live and let live in the face of differing opinions.

I'm talking about the hateful bullying mobs going around attacking people, and the people and corporations who actually look into the information which is quite easy to see those "authorities" are hardly a good source of truth, yet they grovel down on their hands and knees to lick boot.

> Your entire attitude seems to be predicated on the idea that nobody actually knows anything, there's no point listening to "experts" (even putting the quotes around the word is intended to be dismissive), and there's no way to spend time learning more about something.

That's not my attitude.

> Look, you've provided a great list of terrible things that the US (and other) governments have done (though it's necessarily incomplete and mostly rather recent). But in the context of your point, so what?

The context of my point is that journalists, politicians, and other self-proclaimed "experts" are not. It is more the rule than the exception that they are self-interested corrupt liars and manipulators.

I'm not talking about, say, the scientist who develops climate models or the medical researcher developing vaccines. I'm not talking about actual experts.

> What about the experts that know how to build bridges properly? What about the governmental policies that actually result in positive changes? What about the doctors, engineers, designers, architects, farmers who actually do have a better understanding of their fields than an average person?

What about them? None of them are manipulating the populace into going to war, or drumming up their throngs of pathetic subservient bootlickers and brownshirts to attack and bully anybody who questions them. So I'm obviously not talking about them.

> I don't disagree with you about the lamentable actions of our government and the processes/structures that allow them to happen. But I reject the implication that this requires me to just be infinitely cynical about everything.

There was no implication.

Do you believe that people who write (long form articles, books) about a subject have nothing useful to say?

I took a look at your sibling comments, but I don't see any sources linked that suggest cloth masks are so ineffective as to be useless.

Here are a couple studies suggesting they aren't useless (searched "cloth mask aerosol protection" via DDG):

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsnano.0c03252 (effectiveness had a very wide range, depending on weave, thread count, etc.)

https://www.nist.gov/publications/filtration-efficiencies-na...

I get what you're saying in general, that "cloth mask" means many different things, and that those things aren't going to have the same levels of protection, but you seem to be pushing the idea -- without evidence -- that all cloth masks are worse than useless. Science doesn't seem to agree with you?

Yet we've also seen intelligent non-experts rise to the occasion. An entrepreneur like Balaji Srinivasan who was sounding the alarm about how serious this was a month or two ahead of public health officials and was mocked for stepping outside of his lane[0], a programmer/sociologist like Zenep Tufecki who has written a series of important analyses over the last year and who later admitted that she felt like she was risking her career by advocating for masks when all the public health authorities were lined up against it [1], or economist Emily Oster who has done a better job of clear communication to the public about how to balance risks and understand the different levels of certainty we had on any given COVID related topic and published clearer analyses of school safety that many states' policies still flatly ignore.[2]

These are all people who have a wide range of experience and interests but were able to make timely contributions that experts may have been too blinkered to develop.

It's not about tearing down any individual, and I apologize if comment went too far in that direction. But we should be concerned about institutions that reject well-argued analysis of available evidence because its coming from the wrong place, or failing to even consider counterarguments and their full slate of implications. One concept that I recently learned about is the 10th man rule which Israeli intelligence adopted after the surprise attach that led to the Yom Kippur war. Essentially that if there are 10 people in a room and the first nine all express the same opinion, it becomes the duty of the 10th man to argue the opposite case regardless of what he or she believes. There are a lot of 10th men out there who had their opinions or voices excluded for too long.

Whatever it is that filters intelligent arguments from outside of the establishment is something that should be addressed before we need to go through something like this again. We would also do well to find ways to include a role for smart dissenting outsiders in conversations like these early.

[0] https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/2/13/21128209/coronavirus-fe...

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/23/business/media/how-zeynep...

> When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told Americans in January that they didn’t need to wear masks, Dr. S. Vincent Rajkumar, a professor at the Mayo Clinic and the editor of the Blood Cancer Journal, couldn’t believe his ears.

> But he kept silent until Zeynep Tufekci (pronounced ZAY-nep too-FEK-chee), a sociologist he had met on Twitter, wrote that the C.D.C. had blundered by saying protective face coverings should be worn by health workers but not ordinary people.

> “Here I am, the editor of a journal in a high profile institution, yet I didn’t have the guts to speak out that it just doesn’t make sense,” Dr. Rajkumar told me. “Everybody should be wearing masks.”

[2] Articles in various publications + https://explaincovid.org & https://www.qualtrics.com/news/national-covid-education-dash...