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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

#371

Post by nradov »

fivea wrote: post #361
nradov wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stop lying. I haven't posted any misinformation. You can literally listen to Dr. Gandhi's own words at the link I posted above. She spoke on the subject at some length, and answered several direct questions from a panel of other physicians.

> Stop lying. I haven't posted any misinformation. You can literally listen to Dr. Gandhi's own words at the link I posted above. Again, google it up. You can't fake this one. You do not need to take my word for it. Just have a shred of honesty and stop cherry-picking stale and debunked myths.

Stop posting misinformation about a serious public health issue. If you have a valid scientific or medical reference then let's see it. Otherwise you can't be taken seriously.

Telling HN users to Google something is just sloppy and intellectually lazy.

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

#372

Post by JetAlone »

ngc248 wrote: post #301
JetAlone wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ahhhh, it's not a town square. It's Mordor, the panopticon. And we're just a horde of orcs wondering when meat's back on the menu.

We are in fact the meat.

Actually, there's a totally apt device in LOTR already: the palantíri.

https://lotr.fandom.com/wiki/Palant%C3%ADri

Except instead of there being only seven, Sauron mass-produced them and now everyone has one, maybe two. Hardly nobody even meets at the Prancing Pony anymore, at least without a palantíri call first.

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

#373

Post by JamesBarney »

rayiner wrote: post #303
muh_gradle wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’m not a right-wing Fauci hater, but I think he’s just not that good at his job. He found himself in a tough situation, having to tell inconvenient truths to a President that had every reason to downplay the virus because he had up to that point a very strong economy and was up for re-election in less than a year. Guess what—that’s a key part of the job for a high level government official. Politics always influence…

You argue Fauci is a wonk, but lots of what he said was obviously wrong at the time.

I think Fauci is hyper political, he's just not optimizing for truth but for institutional staying power. And it worked! America suffered the consequences, but he held onto his job and half the U.S. worships him.

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

#374

Post by Blackstrat »

warning26 wrote: post #26
thehappypm wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Follow the money” “George Soros” “Bill Gates” Etc

It's impressive how quickly people can go from "the WHO was wrong about a thing" to "massive conspiracy headed by a secret cabal that rules the world from the shadows" Where's the bug tracker for humanity?

The WHO was not wrong. They lied, as did Fauci, the CDC, et al. The peer reviewed research, prior to COVID, was clear that masking was not effective against respiratory viruses. When the media starts “canceling” people like Ioannidis and numerous others for questioning the effectiveness of government mitigations, all of which reduced individual freedoms, it isn’t a conspiracy. It’s blatant and unequivocal. Conspiracies are hidden. Look at who made money, e.g. Gates, Fauci. The list of obvious authoritarian actions is endless. None were warranted.

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

#375

Post by autoexec »

netsharc wrote: post #179
xorcist wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But coronavirus specifically does not spread like cigarette smoke. It was one of the models that turned out to be wrong. It is easy to focus on what scientists got wrong about the virus, but it's equally important to point out what was right. In retrospect, the early data about the nature of the virus itself was pretty spot on. Modelling pandemics is really hard, even before this virus, and we've only gotten better.…

A cursory Google early in the pandemic told me that virus particles are smaller than cigarette smoke particles, so paranoid me thought masks aren't bulletproof (it feels like a lot of people think - and I exaggerate - "I'm wearing a mask, I can stand at making-out distance to this other person and I'll be fine."), and why shouldn't the virus be as airborne-transmissible as cigarette smoke? It was also funny how peopl…

> It was also funny how people were screaming about people going to beaches, hey, they're outdoors, if the groups are distant to each other, they'll probably be fine!

The problem with trips to the beach during the height of a pandemic isn't that a couple of people sitting far apart on a beach have anything to worry about. In theory it'd be fine, but people ruin everything.

They swing by multiple houses to pick up a bunch of friends for their day at the beach, drive in from out of town, stop at the store for food and drinks and sun screen, then stop to get gas, then get to the beach and see thousands of other people have decided to do the same thing (see https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-thousands-flock-to-be...) and now you have crowds of people who might as well be at a music festival or motorcycle rally.

Yeah, people (especially those who are making great sacrifices to prevent the spread of a virus and protect their community) are going to be upset at the massive beach parties going on. It's annoying to get left out of a party even when it isn't undermining your efforts to lower the number of infections and deaths in your neighborhood.

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

#376

Post by thehappypm »

Blackstrat wrote: post #374
warning26 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's impressive how quickly people can go from "the WHO was wrong about a thing" to "massive conspiracy headed by a secret cabal that rules the world from the shadows" Where's the bug tracker for humanity?

The WHO was not wrong. They lied, as did Fauci, the CDC, et al. The peer reviewed research, prior to COVID, was clear that masking was not effective against respiratory viruses. When the media starts “canceling” people like Ioannidis and numerous others for questioning the effectiveness of government mitigations, all of which reduced individual freedoms, it isn’t a conspiracy. It’s blatant and unequivocal. Conspiraci…

How did Gates make money?

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

#377

Post by jjeaff »

disambiguation wrote: post #332
fivea wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Case in point: communicating nuance is hard when no one wants to hear it! There is no nuance. The message couldn't be clearer: if you take the vaccine then the odds you'll die from COVID are way lower than if you do not. And reality does not lie: the bulk of COVID deaths come from unvaccinated people. https://www.factcheck.org/2022/04/scicheck-covid-19-data-com... Enough with all this misinformed or disinformed bul…

What did I say that was misinformation? > it's well established that those who contract COVID .. will have a good immunity response for subsequent infections. > those who survive a COVID infection do end up with an immune system that is able to handle COVID. It seems like we're on the same page here.

There is more nuance in your fact that a person who survives a COVID infection has immunity. That nuance is that most people who think they were infected actually did not ever get tested. Additionally, testing for previous infection takes more time and is more costly and adds additional complexity to the cheaper and simpler one step plan of "just go get vaccinated".

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

#378

Post by bradknowles »

fivea wrote: post #316
disambiguation wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Natural immunity works. It's settled science, and has been for some time. Many countries acknowledge it as a valid alternative to the vaccine. But not the USA. There has been no change in policy. Not even a public acknowledgment, let alone an apology for getting it wrong. Is this out of ignorance? malice? Neither, it's simply pragmatic. Reliably testing for prior infections at population scale would be really slow, e…

> Natural immunity works. It's settled science, and has been for some time. What exactly do you mean by "works"? I mean, it's well established that those who contract COVID and didn't died from it will have a good immunity response for subsequent infections. But that is not the point of a vaccine, is it? The point of the vaccine is that it trains your immune system to fight an infection without undergoing the risk of…

Natural immunity will only work if the virus doesn't mutate quickly, and what your immune system learns about the virus can be applied to future infections.

The former is clearly not true with regards to COVID. That is why we have been having waves of high infection rates, as the new variants get quickly distributed widely.

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

#379

Post by disambiguation »

jjeaff wrote: post #377
disambiguation wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What did I say that was misinformation? > it's well established that those who contract COVID .. will have a good immunity response for subsequent infections. > those who survive a COVID infection do end up with an immune system that is able to handle COVID. It seems like we're on the same page here.

There is more nuance in your fact that a person who survives a COVID infection has immunity. That nuance is that most people who think they were infected actually did not ever get tested. Additionally, testing for previous infection takes more time and is more costly and adds additional complexity to the cheaper and simpler one step plan of "just go get vaccinated".

yes .. I cover that a few comments ago -- hence the "noble lie".

i.e let's lie and say natural immunity does _not_ work, that way people are more likely to get vaccinated. It's for their own good, the common folk don't know any better!

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

#380

Post by shapefrog »

throwntoday wrote: post #337
shapefrog wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloth masks do very little > utterly useless. Litterally orders of magnitude.

When the potential downsides are greater than the upside, I would classify it as useless if not outright dangerous.

You seem to be one of those drivers of "popular narrative"
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