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Scientists and doctors that warned about the health costs of lockdowns on children were cancelled. We really need to set up a Ministry of Ministry of Truth. /s

Scientists and doctors that warned about the health costs of lockdowns on children were cancelled. We really need to set up a Ministry of Ministry of Truth. /s On a serious note, can we ask how we got here? Why were lockdowns so unquestionably pushed? > No sooner had we convinced the Trump administration to implement our version of a two-week shutdown than I was trying to figure out how to extend it. Fifteen Days to Slow the Spread was a start, but I knew it would be just that. I didn’t have the numbers in front of me yet to make the case for extending it longer, but I had two weeks to get them. However hard it had been to get the fifteen-day shutdown approved, getting another one would be more difficult by many orders of magnitude. Dr Birx from her book. But she's far from the only one to blame.

mhh__ 4y ago
1000 kids across 35 countries, versus the thousands dying every day in some single countries at the time. Warning is one thing, being needlessly contrarian while conveniently not having to make a decision yourself is another.
bandyaboot 4y ago
> Scientists and doctors that warned about the health costs of lockdowns on children were cancelled. Can you cite a few examples?
- ghastmaster 4y ago
  https://gbdeclaration.org/ https://gbdeclaration.org/ The Great Barrington Declaration specifically mentioned physical health of children. It did not specify this particular type of situation though. However, in this article the main author of the declaration did specify: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/06/27/lockdown-social-distancing-could-make-immune-system-weaker-says/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/06/27/lockdown-social-... Here are the "cancelled" articles: https://reclaimthenet.org/facebook-deletes-epidemiologists-behind-the-great-barrington-declaration/ https://reclaimthenet.org/facebook-deletes-epidemiologists-b... https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2020/10/13/big-tech-censors-the-great-barrington-declaration/ https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2020/10/13/big-tech-censors...
  - bandyaboot 4y ago
    I was thinking it would be something along the lines of speaking engagements getting cancelled due to outside pressure. Sounds like there were some cases of them getting censored. Facebook and the like should be more transparent about the reasoning behind those decisions.
catchclose8919 4y ago
> can we ask how we got here? - most people have a stupid bias towards "doing something, anything, doesn't matter if it doens't work" - politicians and "thought leaders" and "experts" amplify this bias to bewildering extents of stupidity (mostly for selfish reasons, is something goes wrong and they "did nothing" they destroyed, if they do something wrong but it was "the established best thing to do at the time" they can just say "oops, we were wrong, but now we've learned from it, we all learn from our mistakes and grow") - so we get the shitshow we have/had! And doing some simple experiments to establish faster that eg. masks work was only very very late done - "not a priority to do stupid pseudo-science pseudo-experiments now, let our scientists focus on the important things". Our effor to "control" (lockdown) or "prioritize" (oh no, there won't be any masks left for healthcare workers if everyone buys them) or "efficientize" ("let's not have thousands of independent vaccines and do wasteful overlapping studies") or "be ethical" (oh now, forget that we have ~100k pople offering themselves as volunteers for proper but faster vaccines testing, we can't just put them at risk to accelerate the process) turned everything to shit. It's kind of obvious that if we want antifragility towards pandemic we need less-coordinated responses, more divergent thinking and more organically-organized common sense approaches even when the evidence for them is still lacking. ...instead we picked the technocratic-authoritarian playbook and our plan for a potential future even worse pandemic is to double down harder on the same path (wtf).
anthony_romeo 4y ago
> Why were lockdowns so unquestionably pushed? If memory serves me right, early on in the pandemic, the health care systems of a number of countries and cities (e.g. Italy, NYC) were completely overwhelmed by infected individuals with severe respiratory illnesses, many of whom needed several days of ventilator treatment to survive. Many aspects of society in these areas ceased to function because of the effects of the virus itself (and the effective collapse of the health care system). Support for government mandates grew out of a desire to mitigate the effects of the virus. In the US, after a pretty devastating March 2020, government mandates were largely left to the states, meaning that states/cities more strongly affected by COVID were able to choose stronger mitigation strategies and vice-versa. After we learned more about the virus, after a vaccine was developed & released, and after the virus mercifully mutated into a less lethal version of itself, the likelihood repeating the same sort of shock on the healthcare system dropped. Many states had already lifted their restrictions in 2020, and states that were hit harder early (e.g. NY, CA) gradually lifted their restrictions throughout 2021. I interpret Dr. Birx's quote to suggest that she believed that "fifteen days" time was not enough time to slow the spread, and that this was the largest span of time for which she was able to obtain authorization. The later expansion to "thirty days to slow the spread" suggests that Dr. Birx was correct. I'll also note that, the following month, the President of the United States suggested that citizens should "LIBERATE MICHIGAN!" of their mask mandates and business restrictions. From this, your claim that mask mandates were "unquestionably pushed" seems inaccurate to me. On the contrary -- the first year of the pandemic was a perpetual deliberation on the effectiveness of mitigation strategies. Lockdown strategies continue to be debated despite lockdowns being basically nonexistent in most of the US now.

mhh__ 4y ago

1000 kids across 35 countries, versus the thousands dying every day in some single countries at the time. Warning is one thing, being needlessly contrarian while conveniently not having to make a decision yourself is another.

bandyaboot 4y ago

> Scientists and doctors that warned about the health costs of lockdowns on children were cancelled. Can you cite a few examples?

ghastmaster 4y ago
https://gbdeclaration.org/ https://gbdeclaration.org/ The Great Barrington Declaration specifically mentioned physical health of children. It did not specify this particular type of situation though. However, in this article the main author of the declaration did specify: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/06/27/lockdown-social-distancing-could-make-immune-system-weaker-says/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/06/27/lockdown-social-... Here are the "cancelled" articles: https://reclaimthenet.org/facebook-deletes-epidemiologists-behind-the-great-barrington-declaration/ https://reclaimthenet.org/facebook-deletes-epidemiologists-b... https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2020/10/13/big-tech-censors-the-great-barrington-declaration/ https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2020/10/13/big-tech-censors...
- bandyaboot 4y ago
  I was thinking it would be something along the lines of speaking engagements getting cancelled due to outside pressure. Sounds like there were some cases of them getting censored. Facebook and the like should be more transparent about the reasoning behind those decisions.

catchclose8919 4y ago

> can we ask how we got here? - most people have a stupid bias towards "doing something, anything, doesn't matter if it doens't work" - politicians and "thought leaders" and "experts" amplify this bias to bewildering extents of stupidity (mostly for selfish reasons, is something goes wrong and they "did nothing" they destroyed, if they do something wrong but it was "the established best thing to do at the time" they can just say "oops, we were wrong, but now we've learned from it, we all learn from our mistakes and grow") - so we get the shitshow we have/had! And doing some simple experiments to establish faster that eg. masks work was only very very late done - "not a priority to do stupid pseudo-science pseudo-experiments now, let our scientists focus on the important things". Our effor to "control" (lockdown) or "prioritize" (oh no, there won't be any masks left for healthcare workers if everyone buys them) or "efficientize" ("let's not have thousands of independent vaccines and do wasteful overlapping studies") or "be ethical" (oh now, forget that we have ~100k pople offering themselves as volunteers for proper but faster vaccines testing, we can't just put them at risk to accelerate the process) turned everything to shit. It's kind of obvious that if we want antifragility towards pandemic we need less-coordinated responses, more divergent thinking and more organically-organized common sense approaches even when the evidence for them is still lacking. ...instead we picked the technocratic-authoritarian playbook and our plan for a potential future even worse pandemic is to double down harder on the same path (wtf).

anthony_romeo 4y ago

> Why were lockdowns so unquestionably pushed? If memory serves me right, early on in the pandemic, the health care systems of a number of countries and cities (e.g. Italy, NYC) were completely overwhelmed by infected individuals with severe respiratory illnesses, many of whom needed several days of ventilator treatment to survive. Many aspects of society in these areas ceased to function because of the effects of the virus itself (and the effective collapse of the health care system). Support for government mandates grew out of a desire to mitigate the effects of the virus. In the US, after a pretty devastating March 2020, government mandates were largely left to the states, meaning that states/cities more strongly affected by COVID were able to choose stronger mitigation strategies and vice-versa. After we learned more about the virus, after a vaccine was developed & released, and after the virus mercifully mutated into a less lethal version of itself, the likelihood repeating the same sort of shock on the healthcare system dropped. Many states had already lifted their restrictions in 2020, and states that were hit harder early (e.g. NY, CA) gradually lifted their restrictions throughout 2021. I interpret Dr. Birx's quote to suggest that she believed that "fifteen days" time was not enough time to slow the spread, and that this was the largest span of time for which she was able to obtain authorization. The later expansion to "thirty days to slow the spread" suggests that Dr. Birx was correct. I'll also note that, the following month, the President of the United States suggested that citizens should "LIBERATE MICHIGAN!" of their mask mandates and business restrictions. From this, your claim that mask mandates were "unquestionably pushed" seems inaccurate to me. On the contrary -- the first year of the pandemic was a perpetual deliberation on the effectiveness of mitigation strategies. Lockdown strategies continue to be debated despite lockdowns being basically nonexistent in most of the US now.