3 ms·

Jay just retweeted something a few hours ago that says: "Fauci and @CDCDirector et al have actively participated in the greatest public health catastrophe in t

Jay just retweeted something a few hours ago that says: "Fauci and @CDCDirector et al have actively participated in the greatest public health catastrophe in the last hundred years—and maybe ever." I can assure you the argument that the person is making is neither measured, reasonable, nor accurate. I think you are giving him more credit than he deserves in terms of his nuanced arguments.

eddsh1994 4y ago
Playing devils advocate, what was a worse public health catastrophe in the last 100 years?
- MereInterest 4y ago
  That’s the wrong question to be asking. It pre-supposes that the “participated in” phrasing is accurate, when “actively fought against” would be more accurate.
- peter422 4y ago
  Well, for one, the US response to the AIDS epidemic. Also calling it a catastrophe is just begging the question. Maybe every country in the world should have been more prepared to deal with a novel respiratory virus causing a global pandemic, but they weren't, and in retrospect the primarily US-led response of making a vaccine using a new technology in one year and vaccinating a large percentage of the world in the next year is nothing short of astounding. The issue with arguing that the CDC lost a lot of public trust is much more nuanced, and well, maybe it did, but that has a lot more to do with external factors that have nothing to do with the CDC (such as political leadership) and not much to do with what the CDC itself did. And this isn't to say the CDC did everything right, or even did a "good" job. But they certainly didn't do a catastrophically bad job.
- bozhark 4y ago
  aids
yonaguska 4y ago
Time is proving him right, and you wrong. And I sincerely hope that I'm wrong about this.
- glasss 4y ago
  Trying to learn about this conversation. What is it that is being proved true?
  - ethanbond 4y ago
    That hindsight is at least marginally closer to 20/20 than foresight. Lotta people just continue on operating from the assumption that we knew the severity of COVID upfront which… we didn’t. It was very severe and it appeared even more so (as is well within the bounds of possibility of a novel pathogen).
  - haldujai 4y ago
    It’s so hard to talk about this without being labelled a “vaccine denier”. We all knew the initially claimed protection rates were overstated, it was acknowledged as a limitation in the initial study protocol but ignored by politicians and media. For the validation trials, due to the time / resource requirements (we didn’t have PCR capacity) testing for seroconversion/positivity was only done on symptomatic patients and not at a routine time interval. This type of testing is well known to result in overestimating treatment effects (you’re missing all the people who didn’t self declare symptoms and get tested by not having strictly adhered testing intervals) and there’s zero doubt “94% protection” was an overestimate (even by the original Pfizer study authors). By how much, we’re not sure, and we absolutely needed something in a time of uncertainty and it was the right decision at the time given available resources and pandemic pressures. As evidence has accumulated, we’re realizing the vaccine effects and COVID mortality (particularly post Delta) are vastly overstated. I have not seen a CT chest with the “cardboard lung” appearance of COVID-19 pneumonia or ECMO patients since December/Jan 2022, and I was reporting inpatient chest imaging in the largest ECMO center in Ontario at multiple points during the pandemic. The “sniff test”, suggested things were changing (like population drift with a ML model). And the issue with the vaccine rollout is we went back to “science based medicine” rather than the currently accept “evidence based medicine” where lab tests like neutralization assays were being extrapolated into clinical outcomes. Medicine moved away from this type of reasoning for a reason, you really need to look at higher level outcomes to know what’s actually going on. You can rationalize many treatments on a scientific level (as was done for anti malarial drugs at some point) but it usually ends up invalid. What’s being proven true now, is that we overestimated both COVID mortality due to confounding effects of co-admission (how many inpatients are there BECAUSE of COVID not with it) as well as the effectiveness of vaccines, particularly at later stages in the pandemic. They probably worked well for COVID 1.0 up to Delta at preventing serious illness but that quickly dropped. I don’t buy the evidence to support current vaccination recommendations with the bivalent (esp. young and healthy), and you can see many institutions have dropped that requirement (only the initial 2 dose series was ever mandatory at my place)
jMyles 4y ago
The statement that he retweeted, that you seem to be taking as discrediting, strikes me as entirely plausible. The actors in question have tarnished their otherwise somewhat respectable careers over this, and indeed it has been a public health catastrophe of 100-year proportions.
- boppo1 4y ago
  >somewhat respectable careers Only somewhat? I was under the impression Fauci et. al. were regarded as extremely competent.
  - jMyles 4y ago
    Yeah I think he was regarded as competent as far as institute directors go (which of course isn't saying much). But it's not his competence that is at issue here, so much as his moral compass, and his lacking commitment to continuing education. The most obvious marks on his record, prior to covid, were the ire he drew from gay men during the AZT fiasco (I imagine you've seen this photo, for example: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EapU2PGWsAAvxfb?format=jpg&name=small https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EapU2PGWsAAvxfb?format=jpg&name=...), and his role in supporting rather recklessly thought-out gain-of-function research (from, eg, CambridgeWG and co). No response that NIAID has ever given provides the appearance that Fauci is personally committed to continuing education sufficient to respond to CambridgeWG's critiques, and frankly, his understanding seems to be closer to the level of amateurs like me (although his purse strings have little in common :-) ). I think it's fair to say that he has always been a controversial figure, a friend to pharma and defense profiteers, and often a media darling. He has made funding decisions which have led to wonderful discoveries and deserves a great deal of credit for those. But I don't think he's particularly notable for any groundbreaking epidemiological research or insight. And, although it may still be taboo to say it, he has spent and squandered whatever respect he may have had left with his colleagues. Even those who may have agreed with his bizarre public health policy advocacy seem to agree that he got into a horrific conflict of interest from which he was unable to escape except by resignation. So it's not necessarily a matter of competence.
spookthesunset 4y ago
There is nothing inaccurate about that statement. If it sounds emotional, it’s because it is. I invite you to publicly speak out against the narrative and see how it feels. Nothing is more exciting than your own friends and family calling you a horrible, alt-right grandma killer and wishing an agonizing Covid death. All because you had the audacity to look at publicly available data and come to a different conclusion than “The Experts”. If anything this persons tweet is far more measured than it needs to be.

eddsh1994 4y ago

Playing devils advocate, what was a worse public health catastrophe in the last 100 years?

MereInterest 4y ago
That’s the wrong question to be asking. It pre-supposes that the “participated in” phrasing is accurate, when “actively fought against” would be more accurate.
peter422 4y ago
Well, for one, the US response to the AIDS epidemic. Also calling it a catastrophe is just begging the question. Maybe every country in the world should have been more prepared to deal with a novel respiratory virus causing a global pandemic, but they weren't, and in retrospect the primarily US-led response of making a vaccine using a new technology in one year and vaccinating a large percentage of the world in the next year is nothing short of astounding. The issue with arguing that the CDC lost a lot of public trust is much more nuanced, and well, maybe it did, but that has a lot more to do with external factors that have nothing to do with the CDC (such as political leadership) and not much to do with what the CDC itself did. And this isn't to say the CDC did everything right, or even did a "good" job. But they certainly didn't do a catastrophically bad job.
bozhark 4y ago
aids

yonaguska 4y ago

Time is proving him right, and you wrong. And I sincerely hope that I'm wrong about this.

glasss 4y ago
Trying to learn about this conversation. What is it that is being proved true?
- ethanbond 4y ago
  That hindsight is at least marginally closer to 20/20 than foresight. Lotta people just continue on operating from the assumption that we knew the severity of COVID upfront which… we didn’t. It was very severe and it appeared even more so (as is well within the bounds of possibility of a novel pathogen).
- haldujai 4y ago
  It’s so hard to talk about this without being labelled a “vaccine denier”. We all knew the initially claimed protection rates were overstated, it was acknowledged as a limitation in the initial study protocol but ignored by politicians and media. For the validation trials, due to the time / resource requirements (we didn’t have PCR capacity) testing for seroconversion/positivity was only done on symptomatic patients and not at a routine time interval. This type of testing is well known to result in overestimating treatment effects (you’re missing all the people who didn’t self declare symptoms and get tested by not having strictly adhered testing intervals) and there’s zero doubt “94% protection” was an overestimate (even by the original Pfizer study authors). By how much, we’re not sure, and we absolutely needed something in a time of uncertainty and it was the right decision at the time given available resources and pandemic pressures. As evidence has accumulated, we’re realizing the vaccine effects and COVID mortality (particularly post Delta) are vastly overstated. I have not seen a CT chest with the “cardboard lung” appearance of COVID-19 pneumonia or ECMO patients since December/Jan 2022, and I was reporting inpatient chest imaging in the largest ECMO center in Ontario at multiple points during the pandemic. The “sniff test”, suggested things were changing (like population drift with a ML model). And the issue with the vaccine rollout is we went back to “science based medicine” rather than the currently accept “evidence based medicine” where lab tests like neutralization assays were being extrapolated into clinical outcomes. Medicine moved away from this type of reasoning for a reason, you really need to look at higher level outcomes to know what’s actually going on. You can rationalize many treatments on a scientific level (as was done for anti malarial drugs at some point) but it usually ends up invalid. What’s being proven true now, is that we overestimated both COVID mortality due to confounding effects of co-admission (how many inpatients are there BECAUSE of COVID not with it) as well as the effectiveness of vaccines, particularly at later stages in the pandemic. They probably worked well for COVID 1.0 up to Delta at preventing serious illness but that quickly dropped. I don’t buy the evidence to support current vaccination recommendations with the bivalent (esp. young and healthy), and you can see many institutions have dropped that requirement (only the initial 2 dose series was ever mandatory at my place)

jMyles 4y ago

The statement that he retweeted, that you seem to be taking as discrediting, strikes me as entirely plausible. The actors in question have tarnished their otherwise somewhat respectable careers over this, and indeed it has been a public health catastrophe of 100-year proportions.

boppo1 4y ago
>somewhat respectable careers Only somewhat? I was under the impression Fauci et. al. were regarded as extremely competent.
- jMyles 4y ago
  Yeah I think he was regarded as competent as far as institute directors go (which of course isn't saying much). But it's not his competence that is at issue here, so much as his moral compass, and his lacking commitment to continuing education. The most obvious marks on his record, prior to covid, were the ire he drew from gay men during the AZT fiasco (I imagine you've seen this photo, for example: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EapU2PGWsAAvxfb?format=jpg&name=small https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EapU2PGWsAAvxfb?format=jpg&name=...), and his role in supporting rather recklessly thought-out gain-of-function research (from, eg, CambridgeWG and co). No response that NIAID has ever given provides the appearance that Fauci is personally committed to continuing education sufficient to respond to CambridgeWG's critiques, and frankly, his understanding seems to be closer to the level of amateurs like me (although his purse strings have little in common :-) ). I think it's fair to say that he has always been a controversial figure, a friend to pharma and defense profiteers, and often a media darling. He has made funding decisions which have led to wonderful discoveries and deserves a great deal of credit for those. But I don't think he's particularly notable for any groundbreaking epidemiological research or insight. And, although it may still be taboo to say it, he has spent and squandered whatever respect he may have had left with his colleagues. Even those who may have agreed with his bizarre public health policy advocacy seem to agree that he got into a horrific conflict of interest from which he was unable to escape except by resignation. So it's not necessarily a matter of competence.

spookthesunset 4y ago

There is nothing inaccurate about that statement. If it sounds emotional, it’s because it is. I invite you to publicly speak out against the narrative and see how it feels. Nothing is more exciting than your own friends and family calling you a horrible, alt-right grandma killer and wishing an agonizing Covid death. All because you had the audacity to look at publicly available data and come to a different conclusion than “The Experts”. If anything this persons tweet is far more measured than it needs to be.