7 ms·

Covid-19 and other pandemics require a coherent response strategy

38 points by seydor 4y ago

fuckyah 4y ago
[flagged]
- cies 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - braingenious 4y ago
    I do not mean to sound flippant here, but what businesses does Mr. Fauci operate/own in his capacity as a businessman? I admittedly have very little knowledge of his private life and was under the impression that he was a public employee.
    - ihatepython 4y ago
      Yeah he's not really a businessman. Perhaps it would be better to describe him as an affiliate marketer.
      - braingenious 4y ago
        Don’t affiliate marketers have to provide individualized links to make sure they get a cut of a particular sale? Does he operate a blog that does that?
    - cies 4y ago
      if you invest 10M+ you are a business man in my opinion: https://nypost.com/2022/01/15/dr-faucis-financial-disclosure-shows-10-4m-in-investments/ https://nypost.com/2022/01/15/dr-faucis-financial-disclosure...
      - braingenious 4y ago
        That article says he’s invested in mutual funds. He’s a businessman invested in business? Why isn’t he more anti-lockdown if they are bad for business?
- braingenious 4y ago
  Can you point out what about lockdowns caused so many deaths in the US? I haven’t found that on your watch site.
roenxi 4y ago
We've come out of COVID and are staring down the barrel of WWIII. There is a land war in Europe with US guns shooting Russian soldiers. A senior fellow in the US Air Force just predicted war with China in the next 2 years [0]. If that sort of war breaks out, all of this focus on COVID will look like small biscuits compared to what the world might be facing. We should certainly do something differently next time. And we really should have a full cost-benefit analysis of the wins from the lockdowns vs doing nothing. I'm still on board with 2 weeks to flatten the curve, but I don't think anyone has done the work to prove that the 18 month lockdown regime that Australia did was worth it. I think the Australian government assessed around 30k lives saved which, sorry to say, isn't enough to justify throwing away 18 months of everyone's social lives. The rate of change of our death rate 2020-2021 is around 10,000 deaths. These numbers are not impressive enough to justify doing that again. [0] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/us-air-force-general-predicts-war-china-2025-memo-rcna67967 https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/us-air-fo...
- snshn 4y ago
  [flagged]
- qaz_plm 4y ago
  Why are Russian soldiers being shot with US guns?
  - watwut 4y ago
    Because they invaded Ukraine and are comiting the genocide there. Ukraine keeps asking for help and US did actually provided them guns. US are the good guys here.
    - flandish 4y ago
      Profit. It’s profit. It always is. US guns got there first. For profit. Modern wars “helped” by the US are always about using humans for profit.
m0llusk 4y ago
We made it through the worst of COVID-19 without such a strategy, so "required" seems like an overstatement. Lack of political unity also appears to make a coherent international response strategy difficult and unlikely at best. This problem is well illustrated by this thread of comments. Fragmentation and finger pointing will likely result in a dynamic range of changing approaches. For all of the problems of fragmentation it does have some advantages when dealing with unknowns.
- seydor 4y ago
  We don't know if we made it through (the virus always mutates; there are long term effects) Besides the phrase itself is simple Confirmation bias
walterbell 4y ago
> We recommend that WHO, as part of the PHEIC assessment process, also decides on an optimal response strategy, for example elimination [e.g. Zero Covid], suppression [e.g. mobility restrictions], or mitigation. This would give WHO the power to unilaterally declare an emergency and a response that must be enforced by all countries globally, without regard to local context. This is the same WHO that ignored its own experts and declared a monkeypox PHEIC anyway, https://www.science.org/content/article/declaring-monkeypox-an-international-emergency-who-chief-rejects-expert-panels-advice https://www.science.org/content/article/declaring-monkeypox-... > The World Health Organization (WHO) today declared the global spread of monkeypox a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC), even though a special advisory committee again declined to recommend the action. This is the first time since the PHEIC system was created in 2005 that the agency has made such a declaration without the panel’s endorsement. “This is big, unprecedented decision-making by the director general,” says Clare Wenham, a global health expert at the London School of Economics who has studied the history of PHEICs. If the Lancet recommendations were followed, countries would have spent 2022 responding to a "monkeypox emergency", including possible travel restrictions, lockdowns, etc. > We declare no competing interests. Other than advocating for W.H.O to override the elected officials and medical professionals of every nation-state? The Lancet neglected to mention WHO negotiations in progress: (a) modification of existing (2005) international health regulations, and (b) new treaty to grant expanded powers to WHO. More details at http://StopTheWho.com http://StopTheWho.com, which is obviously biased, but objective coverage of this important topic is almost non-existent. > The WHO is currently overseeing negotiations that are designed to convince its 194 member nations to adopt amendments to the International Health Regulations as well as to adopt a legally-binding “Pandemic Treaty.” These agreements, if adopted, would surrender health related sovereignty over to the WHO ... Agreement by a simple majority of the 194 member nations is all that is needed to adopt the amendments .. to an existing agreement. The best primary sources are WHO videos on the treaty negotiations, which include testimony from the health ministers of every country. WHO site for new pandemic treaty: https://inb.who.int/ https://inb.who.int/ EU law journal with some objective analysis of the proposed amendments. https://www.ejiltalk.org/the-far-reaching-us-proposals-to-amend-the-international-health-regulations-at-the-upcoming-75th-world-health-assembly-a-call-for-attention/ https://www.ejiltalk.org/the-far-reaching-us-proposals-to-am... > If WHO’s powers are extended in this way, is there a need to also answer the question quis custodiet ipsos custodes (who guards the guards?), and to thus set up mechanisms ensuring that WHO complies with its obligations under the IHR and its Constitution, as well as its responsibilities for human rights deriving from customary international human rights law?
francis-io 4y ago
Step 0 needs to be rebuilding trust in scientists. Anyone with half a brain and a memory that can go all the way back to 2020 remembers the lies told to the world. When major health officials tell you that a covid vaccine will stop you catching covid and stop transmission, then to find out we were lied to. We might not have known back then, but we shouldn't have been told that unless we knew it to be true. This was likely out of naivety, but it came from trusted professionals. To me, this highlighted the fact that science is a great process for finding truth, but the weak points will always be the humans.
- throwawayqsd 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - AxelAm 4y ago
    You are not on Reddit.
- cloutchaser 4y ago
  And we're at the tip of the iceberg. Even the mainstream media is now covering that the mRNA shots increase the risk of stroke substantially. What else are we going to find out? (and I'm vaccinated, but it's extremely eye opening how all this information is coming out, exactly what the REASONABLE anti vaxxers were warning about. We just don't know the side effects of a new vaccine technology, used on a new virus. It's impossible to declare it to be SAFE (which implies harmless over a long period of time) at day 0. (I'm just quoting Bret Weinstein who definitely isn't an unscientific untrained anti vaxxer).
  - gorgabal 4y ago
    I have not heard of this. It has not been covered on the news in my country that I know of. Can you tell me where you have read this?
- skrause 4y ago
  > When major health officials tell you that a covid vaccine will stop you catching covid and stop transmission, then to find out we were lied to. The mRNA vaccines did protect more than 90% of the vaccinated against symptomatic infections with the original strain. Then we got new Covid variants where that wasn't the case anymore (Delta and later), but that doesn't mean we were lied to. The situation simply changed.
bsaul 4y ago
Some people really put all their effort trying to make the worst conspiracy theorists nightmare come true. It's as if they're doing it on purpose, it's just crazy..
- cloutchaser 4y ago
  There are a group of people who will use any excuse to centralise control. You can call this a conspiracy, or the illuminati or the WEF or whatever. It doesn't matter what you call them. Right now there's more of these people in positions of power than the ones who resist this. The world is definitely moving in the more centralisation direction, and has done for a while.
- kcplate 4y ago
  > Some people really put all their effort trying to make the worst conspiracy theorists nightmare come true This is like some weird Schrödinger’s cat kind of logic applied to conspiracies to me. A conspiracy doesn’t exist until you look in the box and see it?
benjaminwootton 4y ago
The editor at The Lancet Richard Horton was extremely vocal in his views over Covid and skewed quite political. He wasn’t arguing from specific research, just using his platform for ask for more of what he wanted. If anything, he should have been publicising what the actual science said. Now when I see the name The Lancet, I just see how science can also be politicised and operate at the whims of big business. Covid times destroyed trust in so many institutions.
- ramraj07 4y ago
  What did he say that was against actual science? Do you have any citations?
  - benjaminwootton 4y ago
    I didn’t say he was anti-science, but I don’t believe he should be saying stuff like this as the editor of a prestigious scientific journal: “ Horton’s The Covid-19 Catastrophe: What’s Gone Wrong and How to Stop it Happening Again (2020) has managed to stand out for its sharp polemic (Knight 2020). Horton denounces Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw funding from the World Health Organization (WHO) as a crime against humanity and accuses Boris Johnson of misconduct in public office.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7383067/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7383067/ Note his book was written in 2020 so before he even had much science, let alone formed a scientifically rigorous view. Is it right that science at the highest levels is so politicised?
    - doesnotexist 4y ago
      [flagged]
      - weberer 4y ago
        He never advocated injecting bleach.
        4y ago
detrites 4y ago
They had a coherent response strategy, this in itself was and still is an ongoing failure by multiple metrics. One thing that saved us was the few areas that bucked the "coherence", yet achieving similar or better results. "Quick! Everyone do the same thing in a big rush!" is about the dumbest strategy to handle anything. Thankfully cooler heads always prevail, and the panicking hot-heads hyperbolising us into a blind conformity; take notice.
- slaw 4y ago
  It took very long time for cooler heads to prevail. I thought that the whole covid fearmongering would end in a month and not take years.
SentientAtom 4y ago
You mean not prioritizing the at-risk demographics, or projecting the economic consequences of printing Trillions, or using the populace as a test case for subsidized drugs is not a coherent response strategy?
kukkeliskuu 4y ago
China has policies based on coherent response strategy, but I think most of us would still have chosen our policies that are based on less coherent response strategies. If there would be a single authority that can mandate policies around the world, that authority would have so much power that it would necessarily be politized, and would not make decisions based on scientific consensus.
BurnGpuBurn 4y ago
From the article: "based on the costly lessons learnt during the COVID-19 pandemic". Funny how they always refer to costly lessons learnt but then never state what those lessons were, what was actually learnt from them and what that cost entailed. Just a couple of loose statements and well, it's "The Lancet" so people believe it anyways. Those are smart people and if they say they've learnt costly lessons, it must be true right? Trust the science! They should be discontinued for all the lies and disinformation regaring Covid, vaccinations, the human immune system etc they spouted in the past two years. Not to mention helping to bury the lab leak hypothesis.
- maeil 4y ago
  Ironically enough one of the costliest lessons actually learned during the pandemic has been that The Lancet simply can't be trusted.
bigtex 4y ago
I would recommend first to negate the opinions of any the people who got everything wrong, specifically Neil Ferguson. His predictions were so wrong that in the future no one should take him seriously.

38 points by seydor 4y ago

fuckyah 4y ago

[flagged]

cies 4y ago
[flagged]
- braingenious 4y ago
  I do not mean to sound flippant here, but what businesses does Mr. Fauci operate/own in his capacity as a businessman? I admittedly have very little knowledge of his private life and was under the impression that he was a public employee.
  - ihatepython 4y ago
    Yeah he's not really a businessman. Perhaps it would be better to describe him as an affiliate marketer.
    - braingenious 4y ago
      Don’t affiliate marketers have to provide individualized links to make sure they get a cut of a particular sale? Does he operate a blog that does that?
  - cies 4y ago
    if you invest 10M+ you are a business man in my opinion: https://nypost.com/2022/01/15/dr-faucis-financial-disclosure-shows-10-4m-in-investments/ https://nypost.com/2022/01/15/dr-faucis-financial-disclosure...
    - braingenious 4y ago
      That article says he’s invested in mutual funds. He’s a businessman invested in business? Why isn’t he more anti-lockdown if they are bad for business?
braingenious 4y ago
Can you point out what about lockdowns caused so many deaths in the US? I haven’t found that on your watch site.

roenxi 4y ago

We've come out of COVID and are staring down the barrel of WWIII. There is a land war in Europe with US guns shooting Russian soldiers. A senior fellow in the US Air Force just predicted war with China in the next 2 years [0]. If that sort of war breaks out, all of this focus on COVID will look like small biscuits compared to what the world might be facing. We should certainly do something differently next time. And we really should have a full cost-benefit analysis of the wins from the lockdowns vs doing nothing. I'm still on board with 2 weeks to flatten the curve, but I don't think anyone has done the work to prove that the 18 month lockdown regime that Australia did was worth it. I think the Australian government assessed around 30k lives saved which, sorry to say, isn't enough to justify throwing away 18 months of everyone's social lives. The rate of change of our death rate 2020-2021 is around 10,000 deaths. These numbers are not impressive enough to justify doing that again. [0] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/us-air-force-general-predicts-war-china-2025-memo-rcna67967 https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/us-air-fo...

snshn 4y ago
[flagged]
qaz_plm 4y ago
Why are Russian soldiers being shot with US guns?
- watwut 4y ago
  Because they invaded Ukraine and are comiting the genocide there. Ukraine keeps asking for help and US did actually provided them guns. US are the good guys here.
  - flandish 4y ago
    Profit. It’s profit. It always is. US guns got there first. For profit. Modern wars “helped” by the US are always about using humans for profit.

m0llusk 4y ago

We made it through the worst of COVID-19 without such a strategy, so "required" seems like an overstatement. Lack of political unity also appears to make a coherent international response strategy difficult and unlikely at best. This problem is well illustrated by this thread of comments. Fragmentation and finger pointing will likely result in a dynamic range of changing approaches. For all of the problems of fragmentation it does have some advantages when dealing with unknowns.

seydor 4y ago
We don't know if we made it through (the virus always mutates; there are long term effects) Besides the phrase itself is simple Confirmation bias

walterbell 4y ago

> We recommend that WHO, as part of the PHEIC assessment process, also decides on an optimal response strategy, for example elimination [e.g. Zero Covid], suppression [e.g. mobility restrictions], or mitigation. This would give WHO the power to unilaterally declare an emergency and a response that must be enforced by all countries globally, without regard to local context. This is the same WHO that ignored its own experts and declared a monkeypox PHEIC anyway, https://www.science.org/content/article/declaring-monkeypox-an-international-emergency-who-chief-rejects-expert-panels-advice https://www.science.org/content/article/declaring-monkeypox-... > The World Health Organization (WHO) today declared the global spread of monkeypox a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC), even though a special advisory committee again declined to recommend the action. This is the first time since the PHEIC system was created in 2005 that the agency has made such a declaration without the panel’s endorsement. “This is big, unprecedented decision-making by the director general,” says Clare Wenham, a global health expert at the London School of Economics who has studied the history of PHEICs. If the Lancet recommendations were followed, countries would have spent 2022 responding to a "monkeypox emergency", including possible travel restrictions, lockdowns, etc. > We declare no competing interests. Other than advocating for W.H.O to override the elected officials and medical professionals of every nation-state? The Lancet neglected to mention WHO negotiations in progress: (a) modification of existing (2005) international health regulations, and (b) new treaty to grant expanded powers to WHO. More details at http://StopTheWho.com http://StopTheWho.com, which is obviously biased, but objective coverage of this important topic is almost non-existent. > The WHO is currently overseeing negotiations that are designed to convince its 194 member nations to adopt amendments to the International Health Regulations as well as to adopt a legally-binding “Pandemic Treaty.” These agreements, if adopted, would surrender health related sovereignty over to the WHO ... Agreement by a simple majority of the 194 member nations is all that is needed to adopt the amendments .. to an existing agreement. The best primary sources are WHO videos on the treaty negotiations, which include testimony from the health ministers of every country. WHO site for new pandemic treaty: https://inb.who.int/ https://inb.who.int/ EU law journal with some objective analysis of the proposed amendments. https://www.ejiltalk.org/the-far-reaching-us-proposals-to-amend-the-international-health-regulations-at-the-upcoming-75th-world-health-assembly-a-call-for-attention/ https://www.ejiltalk.org/the-far-reaching-us-proposals-to-am... > If WHO’s powers are extended in this way, is there a need to also answer the question quis custodiet ipsos custodes (who guards the guards?), and to thus set up mechanisms ensuring that WHO complies with its obligations under the IHR and its Constitution, as well as its responsibilities for human rights deriving from customary international human rights law?

francis-io 4y ago

Step 0 needs to be rebuilding trust in scientists. Anyone with half a brain and a memory that can go all the way back to 2020 remembers the lies told to the world. When major health officials tell you that a covid vaccine will stop you catching covid and stop transmission, then to find out we were lied to. We might not have known back then, but we shouldn't have been told that unless we knew it to be true. This was likely out of naivety, but it came from trusted professionals. To me, this highlighted the fact that science is a great process for finding truth, but the weak points will always be the humans.

throwawayqsd 4y ago
[flagged]
- AxelAm 4y ago
  You are not on Reddit.
cloutchaser 4y ago
And we're at the tip of the iceberg. Even the mainstream media is now covering that the mRNA shots increase the risk of stroke substantially. What else are we going to find out? (and I'm vaccinated, but it's extremely eye opening how all this information is coming out, exactly what the REASONABLE anti vaxxers were warning about. We just don't know the side effects of a new vaccine technology, used on a new virus. It's impossible to declare it to be SAFE (which implies harmless over a long period of time) at day 0. (I'm just quoting Bret Weinstein who definitely isn't an unscientific untrained anti vaxxer).
- gorgabal 4y ago
  I have not heard of this. It has not been covered on the news in my country that I know of. Can you tell me where you have read this?
skrause 4y ago
> When major health officials tell you that a covid vaccine will stop you catching covid and stop transmission, then to find out we were lied to. The mRNA vaccines did protect more than 90% of the vaccinated against symptomatic infections with the original strain. Then we got new Covid variants where that wasn't the case anymore (Delta and later), but that doesn't mean we were lied to. The situation simply changed.

bsaul 4y ago

Some people really put all their effort trying to make the worst conspiracy theorists nightmare come true. It's as if they're doing it on purpose, it's just crazy..

cloutchaser 4y ago
There are a group of people who will use any excuse to centralise control. You can call this a conspiracy, or the illuminati or the WEF or whatever. It doesn't matter what you call them. Right now there's more of these people in positions of power than the ones who resist this. The world is definitely moving in the more centralisation direction, and has done for a while.
kcplate 4y ago
> Some people really put all their effort trying to make the worst conspiracy theorists nightmare come true This is like some weird Schrödinger’s cat kind of logic applied to conspiracies to me. A conspiracy doesn’t exist until you look in the box and see it?

benjaminwootton 4y ago

The editor at The Lancet Richard Horton was extremely vocal in his views over Covid and skewed quite political. He wasn’t arguing from specific research, just using his platform for ask for more of what he wanted. If anything, he should have been publicising what the actual science said. Now when I see the name The Lancet, I just see how science can also be politicised and operate at the whims of big business. Covid times destroyed trust in so many institutions.

ramraj07 4y ago
What did he say that was against actual science? Do you have any citations?
- benjaminwootton 4y ago
  I didn’t say he was anti-science, but I don’t believe he should be saying stuff like this as the editor of a prestigious scientific journal: “ Horton’s The Covid-19 Catastrophe: What’s Gone Wrong and How to Stop it Happening Again (2020) has managed to stand out for its sharp polemic (Knight 2020). Horton denounces Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw funding from the World Health Organization (WHO) as a crime against humanity and accuses Boris Johnson of misconduct in public office.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7383067/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7383067/ Note his book was written in 2020 so before he even had much science, let alone formed a scientifically rigorous view. Is it right that science at the highest levels is so politicised?
  - doesnotexist 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - weberer 4y ago
      He never advocated injecting bleach.
      - 4y ago

detrites 4y ago

They had a coherent response strategy, this in itself was and still is an ongoing failure by multiple metrics. One thing that saved us was the few areas that bucked the "coherence", yet achieving similar or better results. "Quick! Everyone do the same thing in a big rush!" is about the dumbest strategy to handle anything. Thankfully cooler heads always prevail, and the panicking hot-heads hyperbolising us into a blind conformity; take notice.

slaw 4y ago
It took very long time for cooler heads to prevail. I thought that the whole covid fearmongering would end in a month and not take years.

SentientAtom 4y ago

You mean not prioritizing the at-risk demographics, or projecting the economic consequences of printing Trillions, or using the populace as a test case for subsidized drugs is not a coherent response strategy?

kukkeliskuu 4y ago

China has policies based on coherent response strategy, but I think most of us would still have chosen our policies that are based on less coherent response strategies. If there would be a single authority that can mandate policies around the world, that authority would have so much power that it would necessarily be politized, and would not make decisions based on scientific consensus.

BurnGpuBurn 4y ago

From the article: "based on the costly lessons learnt during the COVID-19 pandemic". Funny how they always refer to costly lessons learnt but then never state what those lessons were, what was actually learnt from them and what that cost entailed. Just a couple of loose statements and well, it's "The Lancet" so people believe it anyways. Those are smart people and if they say they've learnt costly lessons, it must be true right? Trust the science! They should be discontinued for all the lies and disinformation regaring Covid, vaccinations, the human immune system etc they spouted in the past two years. Not to mention helping to bury the lab leak hypothesis.

maeil 4y ago
Ironically enough one of the costliest lessons actually learned during the pandemic has been that The Lancet simply can't be trusted.

bigtex 4y ago

I would recommend first to negate the opinions of any the people who got everything wrong, specifically Neil Ferguson. His predictions were so wrong that in the future no one should take him seriously.