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Why the WHO took two years to say Covid is airborne

nature.com

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Re: Why the WHO took two years to say Covid is airborne

#281

Post by disambiguation »

geysersam wrote: post #273
titzer wrote: post #183

Governments who "didn't want to create a panic" just flat-out lied. They broke the public trust and did incalculable, permanent damage to societies' ability to react to crises in the future. It was self-serving, short-sighted, and frankly, the worst possible outcome. They clearly did not avoid a panic, did not avoid massive consequences, but, in the long run, deliberately injected distrust, hatred, and fear, deepenin…

> And yet political leaders will face no consequences. What consequences should they face? They are democratically elected. If the handling was indeed as terrible as you suggest I am sure they'll face the consequences in the next election.

Collins and Fauci are not elected, though Collins had the decency to step down (after holding the longest tenure ever of an NIH director).

Re: Why the WHO took two years to say Covid is airborne

#282

Post by muh_gradle »

disambiguation wrote: post #281
geysersam wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And yet political leaders will face no consequences. What consequences should they face? They are democratically elected. If the handling was indeed as terrible as you suggest I am sure they'll face the consequences in the next election.

Collins and Fauci are not elected, though Collins had the decency to step down (after holding the longest tenure ever of an NIH director).

I didn't know Collins has resigned until I read this. What problems do you have with Fauci and Collins? I am just curious and am reading more and not trying to be aggressive about this. It seems to me like they were the sole rational voices during the Trump administration.

Re: Why the WHO took two years to say Covid is airborne

#283

Post by muh_gradle »

optymizer wrote: post #33

I was the first in our office to go permanently WFH in February of 2020, three weeks before our offices closed, because I recognized that SARS-Cov-2 would be a huge problem, when pretty much everyone was in the 'just a flu/cold' mode. Here's the news that did not pass my bullshit detector: 1. Virus is not airborne (as initially claimed). I thought the water droplets claims were true for a while until I saw how fast i…

> 2. CDC (I believe) was claiming that N95 masks won't help as much as other masks. Later it turned out they just didn't want to create scarcity for N95 masks because hospitals need them.

People have already wrote a lot about this, but one of my biggest frustrations was with how slow the CDC was to recommend masks in general. Waiting on what should have been an obvious recommendation was a large contributor.

Re: Why the WHO took two years to say Covid is airborne

#284

Post by programmarchy »

AbrahamParangi wrote: post #278
programmarchy wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facts are carefully constructed human artifacts, not ideal platonic forms. Since they are usually formed by a consensus, or at least the appearance of a consensus, they are inherently political. The scientific method will tend to produce facts which are "eventually consistent" with reality, but since humans are involved, it's not a guarantee, especially in the short term.

If you lose the perspective that “a single reality exists and we all share it- regardless of the degree to which we actually understand it” then you’re lost to science. What your doing is no longer science and is in fact just politics.

Personally, I do believe in a universal reality. Tangentially, I also believe that cannot be justified by an autonomous epistemology. But to the point, humans make mistakes, have biases and incentives, and do not always tell the truth. Science is a human affair. Because of this, politics is present in science and even intrudes upon the processes of conducting the scientific method. Ignoring this "heresy" will only compound the issue, and further erode trust in our institutions. The remedy is more honesty, not less.

Re: Why the WHO took two years to say Covid is airborne

#285

Post by disambiguation »

muh_gradle wrote: post #282
disambiguation wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Collins and Fauci are not elected, though Collins had the decency to step down (after holding the longest tenure ever of an NIH director).

I didn't know Collins has resigned until I read this. What problems do you have with Fauci and Collins? I am just curious and am reading more and not trying to be aggressive about this. It seems to me like they were the sole rational voices during the Trump administration.

As GP states, they engaged in "noble lies" in order to drive vaccine adoption.

- flip flopping on mask policy

- surface transmission

- vaccine efficacy

- herd immunity

- natural immunity

- gain of function

I'm not going to argue whether or not this was best course of action, because there's no way to know what the alternate reality would look like.

It is however an interesting revelation about the character of our leaders.

In their mind, the ends justify the means, in so far as they unilaterally define both the ends and the means. Who knows what else they lie about for the "greater good".

Re: Why the WHO took two years to say Covid is airborne

#286

Post by spookthesunset »

gurkendoktor wrote: post #239
Traubenfuchs wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fauci, who can probably be seen as the US government, lies: https://slate.com/technology/2021/07/noble-lies-covid-fauci-... > have been quite good at communicating in the middle of a global pandemics Have they? It's a horrible back and forth, not based on any evidence. New rules are announced and rescinded a week later (e.g. Germany not ending quarantine of infected after all this week). During lockdowns, people were…

Agree with everything you said, but want to add one more point: I have made my peace with all of these bureaucratic failures. Maybe a certain amount of contradiction and chaos is part of living in a democracy. The scary part is that at the same time there has been an authoritarian push to crack down on "disinformation", you know, like the lab leak theory, or the conspiracy theory that vaccination will become mandator…

Yup. It is kind of a massive engineering failure. Everybody was doing exactly what they were incentivized to do. Everybody thought they were doing the right thing. But combined they drove the train right off the track. There was nothing in place to throw the brakes on and tell society to chill the fuck out. No amount of data or leadership could fix it.

The worst part is anybody who dared point this out was met with fierce vitriol, shaming and general hatred. We were all just expected to fall in line and those who asked questions got shunned by society.

In the first month or so it would have been possible for a good leader to chill things out. But eventually the thing grew legs of its own and nobody could put an end to it. Society would just have to wear itself out and one by one come to its senses. Two years later we are just now truly coming to our senses.

Unfortunately it will take quite some time for this event to be remembered for what it truly was: the first true mass hysteria of the internet age.

Re: Why the WHO took two years to say Covid is airborne

#287

Post by spookthesunset »

rayiner wrote: post #276
titzer wrote: post #183

Governments who "didn't want to create a panic" just flat-out lied. They broke the public trust and did incalculable, permanent damage to societies' ability to react to crises in the future. It was self-serving, short-sighted, and frankly, the worst possible outcome. They clearly did not avoid a panic, did not avoid massive consequences, but, in the long run, deliberately injected distrust, hatred, and fear, deepenin…

> And yet political leaders will face no consequences. To the contrary they will be rewarded.

We will see in November what happens in the states. Personally I expect a bloodbath…

Re: Why the WHO took two years to say Covid is airborne

#288

Post by spookthesunset »

nradov wrote: post #255
traceroute66 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Japan, actively promoted the airborne nature of COVID-19 early on Yes, but Japan is a leader in airborne disease prevention. I mean, if you visit Japan during a "normal" winter season you will observe two things: 1) Widespread mask-wearing in public spaces 2) Japanese not turning up to work to cough and splutter all over their colleagues Both the above never happened in the West. It was hard enough to get your aver…

The reality is we still don't know why Japan had a relatively low death rate. The factors you mentioned aren't sufficient to account for the difference relative to similar countries. Lower obesity was surely a factor but there's something else going on. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/12/22/japan-covid-...

Could also be artifacts if testing and labeling. Perhaps they weren’t testing everything with a pulse. Perhaps they weren’t (mis)labeling hospital patients who tested positive but were in the hospital for Covid as a “Covid hospitalization”

It will take decades and much cooler heads to determine the winners and losers. Trying to claim the winners and losers right now is a fools errand.

Re: Why the WHO took two years to say Covid is airborne

#289

Post by dgellow »

dgellow wrote: post #195
titzer wrote: post #183

Governments who "didn't want to create a panic" just flat-out lied. They broke the public trust and did incalculable, permanent damage to societies' ability to react to crises in the future. It was self-serving, short-sighted, and frankly, the worst possible outcome. They clearly did not avoid a panic, did not avoid massive consequences, but, in the long run, deliberately injected distrust, hatred, and fear, deepenin…

Which governments specifically? Also, you say that they failed to avoid panic but where have you seen some? From what I’ve seen some governments said a few incorrect or misleading things at a time where we had a lot of uncertainty and contradictory information. And then corrected once information became better. Overall western governments (I’m mostly familiar with Western Europe and the US) have been quite good at co…

Given responses I got I guess I have way lower expectations than most.

Yes we’ve seen a lot of fuck up, but given the insane circumstances things have been communicated and handled way better than I would have expected. Of course you will have a lot of contradictory or stupid decisions when you have to adapt that fast to a rapidly spreading, deadly virus that blocks your entire hospital system. The scale of the problem was insane.

Re: Why the WHO took two years to say Covid is airborne

#290

Post by spookthesunset »

sirspacey wrote: post #2

A powerful reminder that “science” and “scientists” don’t say anything. There are organizations & researchers. They don’t speak with one voice, or have the same threat assessment, and they respond to different incentives. It would be a gift to humanity to move beyond the antiquated idea that there are “FACTS” - static statements of truth that require no context or qualification. Not only does context matter, it matte…

Also facts alone cannot determine a course of action. What actions we do are a combination of facts and social values. You cannot “follow the science” to a course of action, especially a myopic focus on a small subset of science to the exclusion of literally everything else.

Our myopic focus on Covid to the almost literal exclusion of everything else had a disastrous outcome. Government refused to balance Covid against other problems in society. And the result is the mess we will be cleaning up for quite some time.

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