5 ms·
I fully understand that the science wasn’t settled. It was a new disease, and guidance was going to change. What I didn’t expect was the overconfidence and the
by ern 4y ago
I fully understand that the science wasn’t settled. It was a new disease, and guidance was going to change.
What I didn’t expect was the overconfidence and then reversals, without missing a beat, and without acknowledging “hey, we were wrong”. The stuff around masks… first ”they don’t work”, “they make it more likely to get infected”, “people won’t know how to use a mask”, “masks are a superstition” then switching to mask mandates, without admitting that those who expressed those views got it wrong.
The reason I used “mainstream” was to show that these were people in positions of trust. News outlets with editorial controls, public health officials, elected politicians. Or doctors. It happened both on traditional, and social media and IRL. The term was not meant to be pejorative, but descriptive.
Vaccines are similar: there are many clips that show pundits, media figures and public health officials overselling vaccines. Instead of later saying “the preliminary data looked good so we assumed they would stop transmission and infection, but it turns out that these vaccines reduce serious illness and death. We were wrong, but it’s a new disease and we are all learning, that’s how science works” we got “we ALWAYS said that vaccines were meant to reduce illness and death and not infection and transmission”.
Maybe I hate being gaslit more than most. My mother, an intelligent woman who I love and respect, in an effort to spare my feelings as a young child, would try to warp reality: “oh you never had the toy that’s missing”. She probably thought I wouldn’t remember, but did. She continued that pattern throughout my childhood. Whatever the reason, I intensely dislike that sort of manipulation, and I think it’s corrosive.
- SideburnsOfDoom 4y agoI think that your conception of "we" in "hey, we were wrong" is perhaps too monolithic and simplistic. "show pundits, media figures" are mere conduits, they "get the message out" but they are never subject matter experts, you should not assume that they originate any message, have an authoritative truth or do any scientific study at all.
- ern 4y agoA lot of doctors jumped on the anti-mask bandwagon. It wasn’t just pundits and media figures.
- SideburnsOfDoom 4y agoWhat kinds of doctors, that you interacted with: Your GP? Those seen on TV who work in media roles? None of those are the researchers.
- ern 4y agoYou are starting to run into No True Scotsman fallacy territory at this point. Everyone from the Surgeon General of the United States to random GPs on Twitter were vilifying masks.
- SideburnsOfDoom 4y agoThere are a lot of Scotsmen in Scotland, and in my experience they are diverse: I have met socialists and internationalist Europhiles there, and also ethnonationalist racists. Point is, monolithic assertions about "we" or "they" aren't ever completely true. I'm not in the USA, I got onto masks quite early. But I think that we still lag badly in anti-covid ventilation systems, while still over-emphasising hand-washing. Some of the best people on the topic (of our evolving understanding of COVID, not of Scotsmen) have in fact been relative outsiders (i.e. neither medical researchers nor crazed conspiracists). I'm thinking particularly of Zeynep Tufekci on Airborne transmission, e.g. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/07/why-arent-we-talking-more-about-airborne-transmission/614737/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/07/why-arent... https://sils.unc.edu/news/2021/tufekci-lancet https://sils.unc.edu/news/2021/tufekci-lancet