So first off, I’d like to note that the lab leak theory is just such. Jay was so thoughtful and measured that I was surprised to hear him go from ‘I think the lab leak theory is more likely true’ to speaking of it as if it was settled. There are data that support both lab leak and crossover from probably bats, maybe via some intermediate species. (Check out data on the rates of Covid-19 in migratory birds, for example). If we want to be scientific about it, we have to hold open the possibility that either is possible.
As for school closures, apparently that was from a previous plan to deal with swine flu circa 2010 that got dusted off. Coronavirus isn’t the flu, so it wasn’t the right approach but *usually* kids are little cootie factories that do go around spreading infections around the community. It was a reasonable assumption, even if it did turn out wrong.
Another thing I haven’t heard much about, is that normally the CDC, not NIH, would have lead communications. In the beginning, the representative from the CDC made some announcement that this Covid thing could be serious, and was promptly silenced. It was my understanding at the time that Fauci became the face because he was more politic in his answers and more amenable to the Trump administration’s preferred messaging. There were mistakes all over the place on that front (ie messaging, including semi hysterical press coverage).
I have to say, from my perspective the problem was the terrible communication. From at first saying we didn’t need masks (which people heard as ‘masks don’t work’) to saying you can use a ripped up tee shirt or bandana as a mask (not if you want it to do anything) to the fact that it was spread through aerosols not just droplets (which was known for months before it was widely reported in the media) to what the vaccine would and would not do and so on. People somehow thought they needed to wash their groceries and mail! Think the fight against misinformation became the priority as conspiracy theories took over, to a large degree in my option, because the public messaging was so completely without nuance and also afraid to acknowledge that guidance was really changing over time.
I would love to see a thorough review of stuff that went wrong. I’d put at the top of the list a failure to get n95 masks out to people who needed them right away, a lack of testing (regular large scale testing could have allowed schools to open safely right away) and our society’s idiotic prioritization of keeping bars open at the expense of schools. A lot could have been improved if activities had just moved outside/opened a window. Somehow politics just bowled right over reason.
Couldn't agree with you more about the overall, critical misstep in public messaging. But it's hard for me to believe they could have done much-much better without hindsight.
How do you communicate critical pandemic information to millions of people in THIS political environment in an election year? Under THAT president? It had to be painfully tricky.
The pandemic was so sudden and life-altering. I will never forget when they cancelled March Madness, the NBA playoffs, Wimbledon, and then the *Olympics*. I fear the public's reaction if we have another moment like that any time soon. If we think conspiracy theories are off the charts now--and they are--imagine what they would look like then.
Of course, mistakes were made; that was more or less inevitable. I recall a moment early on when an American and Korean doctor were interviewed simultaneously on CNN: They unexpectedly butted heads about masks. It was surreal; the Korean doctor held the more mandatory position.
Only weeks later, the US shifted toward the Korean's position. That's how touch-and-go it was.
People were dying and the world was reacting at every level in real time.
How does that justify shutting down science? Covid-19 was a new disease, and that provides a good reason to perform scientific testing. There were a series of issues for which Fauci asserted that he was sure of the answer, and he tried to prevent scientific research on those topics. Here are some examples:
1. Some scientists, including Jay Bhattacharya, said that covid-19 seemed to be much worse for the elderly. Fauci denied this, and he called people who believed it "fringe scientists".
2. Fauci thought that the spread of covid-19 would be so limited that contact tracing could be used. When others, such as Jay Bhattacharya and John Ioannidis, tested people to determine if Fauci was right, Fauci and the MSM denounced them.
3. Fauci asserted that cloth masks would be effective in preventing the spread of covid-19, and he blocked funding to test this. When a Danish study found that cloth masks were not effective, Fauci and the Biden Administration tried to block these results from being communicated on social media. Since that time, Wolensky and Jha have promoted several fraudulent studies on masking, which have been debunked by Vinay Prasad, Marty Makary, and others.
4. Fauci and Wolensky asserted that anyone who was vaccinated for covid-19 would not get covid-19. Information released via the Freedom of Information Act indicates that Fauci and Wolensky knew that this was not true, but they knew that the MSM would support their position.
5. Fauci, Wolensky, and Peter Hotez asserted that immunity acquired by getting covid-19 was less than one would get from being vaccinated. This was shown to be untrue by Monica Gandhi, Vinay Prasad, and Francois Balloux
I could provide many more examples. Fauci and his allies have tried to block scientific information to cover-up Fauci's incompetence and his politicizing of the pandemic.
I don't think anything justifies shutting down science.
That said, I would love to hear Jay and others like him in a public conversation with colleagues they respect, but who disagree.
I don't recall Dr. Fauci being quite as doctrinaire as you describe, but even if he was, it might speak to the dilemma of being a public health messenger in a polarized political environment.
Unless Fauci was in fact acting in bad faith (which is a hell of an accusation), what other options did he have, practically speaking? If I am the authority figure for the nation in a moment like that, I would think the worst thing I could do is be consistently vague or confusing, especially in an environment rife with people who think I am part of some vast conspiracy.
Oh I agree! Just feel they could have done better. An example, once they knew the virus was aerosolized, I heard *once* a person explain aerosols could be thought to move like cigarette smoke. People have an intuitive sense of how smoke fills a room, and how important ventilation is etc. Another was an article in Washington Post (and no where else) where they broke down what made an effective cloth mask, that you couldn’t see light through it and that if you inhaled/exhaled deeply you couldn’t feel much air movement outside the mask. They also said two layers of tight woven cotton and one of a non woven with some more specifics of materials… back when people were still wearing bandanas and gaiters. Messaging like that would not have been hard, but would have added a lot of clarity.
The Chinese government's cover up activity, destruction of evidence and persecution of truth tellers at home tell you all you need to know about the source of the virus. There is no surer sign of guilt than destruction of the evidence.
Well, I have heard a lot about this but it need not be nefarious. It could be bureaucrats not wanting to be in trouble (especially in China!) and leaders not wanting to be embarrassed could all just be PR gone wrong. I certainly don’t know. I believe in focusing on the things we absolutely can know and can have control over, regardless of the cause of the epidemic American policy makers and communications experts failed in in a long list of ways.
"Stupid" is the only word I can think of to describe the positions of the left on Covid from then to now.
Leak vs. crossover is an arguable point. I think it's hard to argue crossover with Patient Zeros working for the Wuhan Institute, but it's not entirely impossible and if someone is really married to the point, I'm not going to pry it from them.
But from the very beginning, the messaging, from media, from science communicators (i.e. media with fancier degrees) and from politicians on the left was "this thing is catastrophically dangerous". When we had first developed a test for Covid-19, due to low numbers of tests, we were testing the hospitalized and the dead. What we found was that ~5% of those tested died. All well and good so far. But then the media used that figure to distort the narrative. It wasn't "5% is the upper bound of fatality" it was "we're barely testing anyone and we're already seeing 5%, it could be much worse!" which is absolute horseshit to anyone with half a brain. You don't need a degree to understand why 5% is the ceiling and not the floor. If you have a degree and you're pushing the narrative that it's the floor, you're a bad, bad person.
Then there was the thing with kids. We knew, from the jump, that it was bad for the old, for the immuno-compromised and for the obese. We also knew that it was not bad for the young and the healthy. You couldn't look at hospitalization rates and fatalities and think that there was any sense in shutting down schools or masking children. I don't care if the idea was a hold-over from a previous pandemic, the data was so glaringly obvious that again, you'd either have to be stupid or very, very bad to support that.
The mask thing was another example. Dr. Fauci came out and said that the reason he initially told people they didn't need to wear masks was because he was worried that the supply of masks would be consumed by the general population and not go to front line workers who needed them more. He lied because he felt that if he told the truth, people would not do what he wanted. That is, and I sound like a broken record here, the logic of a bad, bad man. Telling people only what you want them to hear in order to manipulate them into doing what you want is not a moral good and it is not the way any free and open society should be run. In the light of that, I think it becomes obvious that those first two points were also a case of people who knew better lying to the public in order to evoke the response they wanted. They felt that they should be the ultimate authority. It was and it is the purest of hubris. The intelligentsia is not always right - in fact the progressives of a century ago are a perfect example of this and share a great deal in the broadest senses with the progressives of today. A fascination with separating people by race, an iron-clad self-assurance that their view of science is definitive, a lot of Marxism and by extension a lot of authoritarianism. Beyond the intellectual elite sometimes getting things wrong, you've created the hydra of distrust. Not just in the people who saw through the lies at the time, but when it comes out that we've been lied to, even people who believed are going to be less trusting the next time. Or perhaps I'm overestimating people - after all, we're a mere two decades out from Jr.'s Iraq war and somehow the public was fooled all over again by obvious lies.
As far as bars vs. schools, well, here's a more salient comparison. How about the poor vs. the laptop class. The former will never financially recover from the effects of the lockdowns, their lives have been made measurably worse, their every outcome tainted by what was a minor inconvenience for the hand-wringing privileged trying to tell the poor that the sacrifices were necessary for the safety and convenience of said privileged. I work(ed) in a bar. My savings, such as they were, were entirely wiped out. I'm in my 40's and there is now no hope of ever retiring. My life was destroyed, not by Covid, which made me mildly ill for 2 days, but by a year plus of economic havoc. I didn't voluntarily GIVE that, it was taken from me. I will bear my grudge until the day I die, probably at work.
Michael, I’m sorry you were impacted by Covid policy so much. Sorry if what I said sounded like an attack. Where I live the governor changed rules so that restaurants could do take out cocktails and I think it helped a lot with businesses staying open, though I’m sure they still had less business than before. And it was totally different all across the country.
I can’t disagree with most of your arguments, though I admit I have a different perspective. The one thing I would point out is that though kids didn’t get sick much (except with preexisting conditions like obesity) they, especially the older ones, were still able to transmit the virus to old sickly members of their family/community.
Where I live, they did a school survey and mostly it was rich whites that wanted to go back. Those who needed it least. I wish the efforts were focused on those who needed the help, not just those who were over it. The Asians almost entirely chose to stay virtual in 2021, and black families also supported staying home. I talked to a (black) nurse aid helping a neighbor, and she indicated support for staying virtual because it meant she didn’t have to worry about getting sick from her kids and thus not get paid. I don’t know how common that was, but I heard the concern about being sick = not being able to work A lot from people. My point is just some people who supported virtual school might not be obvious.
I am very disappointed that many of the problems in society that became stark haven’t been sufficiently been addressed. Hopefully, we will just get hoards of tutors and get kids back up to where they ought to be. Maybe get everyone some paid sick leave and some other social safety net kinds of things.
So first off, I’d like to note that the lab leak theory is just such. Jay was so thoughtful and measured that I was surprised to hear him go from ‘I think the lab leak theory is more likely true’ to speaking of it as if it was settled. There are data that support both lab leak and crossover from probably bats, maybe via some intermediate species. (Check out data on the rates of Covid-19 in migratory birds, for example). If we want to be scientific about it, we have to hold open the possibility that either is possible.
As for school closures, apparently that was from a previous plan to deal with swine flu circa 2010 that got dusted off. Coronavirus isn’t the flu, so it wasn’t the right approach but *usually* kids are little cootie factories that do go around spreading infections around the community. It was a reasonable assumption, even if it did turn out wrong.
Another thing I haven’t heard much about, is that normally the CDC, not NIH, would have lead communications. In the beginning, the representative from the CDC made some announcement that this Covid thing could be serious, and was promptly silenced. It was my understanding at the time that Fauci became the face because he was more politic in his answers and more amenable to the Trump administration’s preferred messaging. There were mistakes all over the place on that front (ie messaging, including semi hysterical press coverage).
I have to say, from my perspective the problem was the terrible communication. From at first saying we didn’t need masks (which people heard as ‘masks don’t work’) to saying you can use a ripped up tee shirt or bandana as a mask (not if you want it to do anything) to the fact that it was spread through aerosols not just droplets (which was known for months before it was widely reported in the media) to what the vaccine would and would not do and so on. People somehow thought they needed to wash their groceries and mail! Think the fight against misinformation became the priority as conspiracy theories took over, to a large degree in my option, because the public messaging was so completely without nuance and also afraid to acknowledge that guidance was really changing over time.
I would love to see a thorough review of stuff that went wrong. I’d put at the top of the list a failure to get n95 masks out to people who needed them right away, a lack of testing (regular large scale testing could have allowed schools to open safely right away) and our society’s idiotic prioritization of keeping bars open at the expense of schools. A lot could have been improved if activities had just moved outside/opened a window. Somehow politics just bowled right over reason.
Looking back, it's kind of dizzying, isn't it?
Couldn't agree with you more about the overall, critical misstep in public messaging. But it's hard for me to believe they could have done much-much better without hindsight.
How do you communicate critical pandemic information to millions of people in THIS political environment in an election year? Under THAT president? It had to be painfully tricky.
The pandemic was so sudden and life-altering. I will never forget when they cancelled March Madness, the NBA playoffs, Wimbledon, and then the *Olympics*. I fear the public's reaction if we have another moment like that any time soon. If we think conspiracy theories are off the charts now--and they are--imagine what they would look like then.
Of course, mistakes were made; that was more or less inevitable. I recall a moment early on when an American and Korean doctor were interviewed simultaneously on CNN: They unexpectedly butted heads about masks. It was surreal; the Korean doctor held the more mandatory position.
Only weeks later, the US shifted toward the Korean's position. That's how touch-and-go it was.
People were dying and the world was reacting at every level in real time.
How does that justify shutting down science? Covid-19 was a new disease, and that provides a good reason to perform scientific testing. There were a series of issues for which Fauci asserted that he was sure of the answer, and he tried to prevent scientific research on those topics. Here are some examples:
1. Some scientists, including Jay Bhattacharya, said that covid-19 seemed to be much worse for the elderly. Fauci denied this, and he called people who believed it "fringe scientists".
2. Fauci thought that the spread of covid-19 would be so limited that contact tracing could be used. When others, such as Jay Bhattacharya and John Ioannidis, tested people to determine if Fauci was right, Fauci and the MSM denounced them.
3. Fauci asserted that cloth masks would be effective in preventing the spread of covid-19, and he blocked funding to test this. When a Danish study found that cloth masks were not effective, Fauci and the Biden Administration tried to block these results from being communicated on social media. Since that time, Wolensky and Jha have promoted several fraudulent studies on masking, which have been debunked by Vinay Prasad, Marty Makary, and others.
4. Fauci and Wolensky asserted that anyone who was vaccinated for covid-19 would not get covid-19. Information released via the Freedom of Information Act indicates that Fauci and Wolensky knew that this was not true, but they knew that the MSM would support their position.
5. Fauci, Wolensky, and Peter Hotez asserted that immunity acquired by getting covid-19 was less than one would get from being vaccinated. This was shown to be untrue by Monica Gandhi, Vinay Prasad, and Francois Balloux
I could provide many more examples. Fauci and his allies have tried to block scientific information to cover-up Fauci's incompetence and his politicizing of the pandemic.
I don't think anything justifies shutting down science.
That said, I would love to hear Jay and others like him in a public conversation with colleagues they respect, but who disagree.
I don't recall Dr. Fauci being quite as doctrinaire as you describe, but even if he was, it might speak to the dilemma of being a public health messenger in a polarized political environment.
Unless Fauci was in fact acting in bad faith (which is a hell of an accusation), what other options did he have, practically speaking? If I am the authority figure for the nation in a moment like that, I would think the worst thing I could do is be consistently vague or confusing, especially in an environment rife with people who think I am part of some vast conspiracy.
Oh I agree! Just feel they could have done better. An example, once they knew the virus was aerosolized, I heard *once* a person explain aerosols could be thought to move like cigarette smoke. People have an intuitive sense of how smoke fills a room, and how important ventilation is etc. Another was an article in Washington Post (and no where else) where they broke down what made an effective cloth mask, that you couldn’t see light through it and that if you inhaled/exhaled deeply you couldn’t feel much air movement outside the mask. They also said two layers of tight woven cotton and one of a non woven with some more specifics of materials… back when people were still wearing bandanas and gaiters. Messaging like that would not have been hard, but would have added a lot of clarity.
The Chinese government's cover up activity, destruction of evidence and persecution of truth tellers at home tell you all you need to know about the source of the virus. There is no surer sign of guilt than destruction of the evidence.
Well, I have heard a lot about this but it need not be nefarious. It could be bureaucrats not wanting to be in trouble (especially in China!) and leaders not wanting to be embarrassed could all just be PR gone wrong. I certainly don’t know. I believe in focusing on the things we absolutely can know and can have control over, regardless of the cause of the epidemic American policy makers and communications experts failed in in a long list of ways.
"Stupid" is the only word I can think of to describe the positions of the left on Covid from then to now.
Leak vs. crossover is an arguable point. I think it's hard to argue crossover with Patient Zeros working for the Wuhan Institute, but it's not entirely impossible and if someone is really married to the point, I'm not going to pry it from them.
But from the very beginning, the messaging, from media, from science communicators (i.e. media with fancier degrees) and from politicians on the left was "this thing is catastrophically dangerous". When we had first developed a test for Covid-19, due to low numbers of tests, we were testing the hospitalized and the dead. What we found was that ~5% of those tested died. All well and good so far. But then the media used that figure to distort the narrative. It wasn't "5% is the upper bound of fatality" it was "we're barely testing anyone and we're already seeing 5%, it could be much worse!" which is absolute horseshit to anyone with half a brain. You don't need a degree to understand why 5% is the ceiling and not the floor. If you have a degree and you're pushing the narrative that it's the floor, you're a bad, bad person.
Then there was the thing with kids. We knew, from the jump, that it was bad for the old, for the immuno-compromised and for the obese. We also knew that it was not bad for the young and the healthy. You couldn't look at hospitalization rates and fatalities and think that there was any sense in shutting down schools or masking children. I don't care if the idea was a hold-over from a previous pandemic, the data was so glaringly obvious that again, you'd either have to be stupid or very, very bad to support that.
The mask thing was another example. Dr. Fauci came out and said that the reason he initially told people they didn't need to wear masks was because he was worried that the supply of masks would be consumed by the general population and not go to front line workers who needed them more. He lied because he felt that if he told the truth, people would not do what he wanted. That is, and I sound like a broken record here, the logic of a bad, bad man. Telling people only what you want them to hear in order to manipulate them into doing what you want is not a moral good and it is not the way any free and open society should be run. In the light of that, I think it becomes obvious that those first two points were also a case of people who knew better lying to the public in order to evoke the response they wanted. They felt that they should be the ultimate authority. It was and it is the purest of hubris. The intelligentsia is not always right - in fact the progressives of a century ago are a perfect example of this and share a great deal in the broadest senses with the progressives of today. A fascination with separating people by race, an iron-clad self-assurance that their view of science is definitive, a lot of Marxism and by extension a lot of authoritarianism. Beyond the intellectual elite sometimes getting things wrong, you've created the hydra of distrust. Not just in the people who saw through the lies at the time, but when it comes out that we've been lied to, even people who believed are going to be less trusting the next time. Or perhaps I'm overestimating people - after all, we're a mere two decades out from Jr.'s Iraq war and somehow the public was fooled all over again by obvious lies.
As far as bars vs. schools, well, here's a more salient comparison. How about the poor vs. the laptop class. The former will never financially recover from the effects of the lockdowns, their lives have been made measurably worse, their every outcome tainted by what was a minor inconvenience for the hand-wringing privileged trying to tell the poor that the sacrifices were necessary for the safety and convenience of said privileged. I work(ed) in a bar. My savings, such as they were, were entirely wiped out. I'm in my 40's and there is now no hope of ever retiring. My life was destroyed, not by Covid, which made me mildly ill for 2 days, but by a year plus of economic havoc. I didn't voluntarily GIVE that, it was taken from me. I will bear my grudge until the day I die, probably at work.
Michael, I’m sorry you were impacted by Covid policy so much. Sorry if what I said sounded like an attack. Where I live the governor changed rules so that restaurants could do take out cocktails and I think it helped a lot with businesses staying open, though I’m sure they still had less business than before. And it was totally different all across the country.
I can’t disagree with most of your arguments, though I admit I have a different perspective. The one thing I would point out is that though kids didn’t get sick much (except with preexisting conditions like obesity) they, especially the older ones, were still able to transmit the virus to old sickly members of their family/community.
Where I live, they did a school survey and mostly it was rich whites that wanted to go back. Those who needed it least. I wish the efforts were focused on those who needed the help, not just those who were over it. The Asians almost entirely chose to stay virtual in 2021, and black families also supported staying home. I talked to a (black) nurse aid helping a neighbor, and she indicated support for staying virtual because it meant she didn’t have to worry about getting sick from her kids and thus not get paid. I don’t know how common that was, but I heard the concern about being sick = not being able to work A lot from people. My point is just some people who supported virtual school might not be obvious.
I am very disappointed that many of the problems in society that became stark haven’t been sufficiently been addressed. Hopefully, we will just get hoards of tutors and get kids back up to where they ought to be. Maybe get everyone some paid sick leave and some other social safety net kinds of things.