3 ms·
There is some distinction if you know where to look. “no evidence so far that the disease can be passed through human contact” “No clear evidence Wuhan corona
by comex 5y ago
There is some distinction if you know where to look.
“no evidence so far that the disease can be passed through human contact”
“No clear evidence Wuhan coronavirus can spread before people show symptoms”
“‘No hard evidence’ new coronavirus strain is more transmissible”
“At this time, there is no evidence of human-to-human transmission outside China”
These are all statements that were thought at the time to be plausible, perhaps even likely, but not proven.
In contrast, most of the unqualified “no evidence” claims are for statements that were thought at the time to be false: Covid is airborne; non-N95 masks are effective; Covid came from a lab (still considered doubtful), booster shots are necessary (would still be debatable if not for Omicron).
On the other hand, even the least probable of those statements is still orders of magnitude more probable than “homeopathy works”, so there’s definitely a missing distinction there.
- labster 5y agoSARS-CoV-1 is airborne, so why would an informed person think that SARS-CoV-2 was not likely to be airborne? Masks are effective in original SARS and influenza, so why would an informed person conclude masks would not likely be effective on the new coronavirus? Influenza needs boosters annually due to variants — why would a reasonable person know either way at the beginning that boosters would be unnecessary? I think you drank too much government koolaid in your list of ostensibly false things. Worries about mask shortages, diplomatic relations with China, availability of vaccines in the global south, and inducing people to get vaccinated the first time all led to our governments lying to us and presenting it as science. I don’t think the actions were malicious, but they ended up being both wrong and bad public policy.