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I'm in complete agreement that we need to do a review of the policies and actions during Covid but starting with we were wrong gets us nowhere. Of course we wer

I'm in complete agreement that we need to do a review of the policies and actions during Covid but starting with we were wrong gets us nowhere. Of course we were wrong but we were also right. It was(is) a completely new experience for the world. It's impossible to be 100% right when all you can do is try to get guidance from similar past experience. Even if we had had the experience we would have gotten some things wrong. It was a an extremely complicated situation that involved millions of individuals with many diverse requirements and needs. Even if we could go back and change decisions there's nothing to say that the results would be any better. Real life is too complicated for such a simple analysis. The good thing is that there will be many reviews detailing our actions and hopefully we will learn from what we did right and wrong.

rossdavidh 4y ago
I mostly agree with your sentiment, but I think the article is pointing out something different than "we were wrong about Covid". For example, this paragraph: "Most of us did not speak up in support of alternative views, and many of us tried to suppress them. When strong scientific voices like world-renowned Stanford professors John Ioannidis, Jay Bhattacharya, and Scott Atlas, or University of California San Francisco professors Vinay Prasad and Monica Gandhi, sounded the alarm on behalf of vulnerable communities, they faced severe censure by relentless mobs of critics and detractors in the scientific community—often not on the basis of fact but solely on the basis of differences in scientific opinion." I think that we have a real problem with a large portion of the population being unwilling to listen when scientists say "we have a problem", and a large part of that problem comes from the attitudes displayed by many scientists (or those quoting them) when faced with disagreement. It was particularly problematic with Covid, because emotions ran so high, but if there is not some sort of mea culpa then we could be faced with a long-lasting rupture, where scientists are considered just one more political player, rather than an objective source of information. When doctors make mistakes, it has been found that a simple apology by the doctor to the patient can significantly reduce the chance of lawsuits. For a similar reason, I think we would greatly benefit from starting with "we were wrong/we handled this wrong" from some prominent members of the scientific community.

rossdavidh 4y ago

I mostly agree with your sentiment, but I think the article is pointing out something different than "we were wrong about Covid". For example, this paragraph: "Most of us did not speak up in support of alternative views, and many of us tried to suppress them. When strong scientific voices like world-renowned Stanford professors John Ioannidis, Jay Bhattacharya, and Scott Atlas, or University of California San Francisco professors Vinay Prasad and Monica Gandhi, sounded the alarm on behalf of vulnerable communities, they faced severe censure by relentless mobs of critics and detractors in the scientific community—often not on the basis of fact but solely on the basis of differences in scientific opinion." I think that we have a real problem with a large portion of the population being unwilling to listen when scientists say "we have a problem", and a large part of that problem comes from the attitudes displayed by many scientists (or those quoting them) when faced with disagreement. It was particularly problematic with Covid, because emotions ran so high, but if there is not some sort of mea culpa then we could be faced with a long-lasting rupture, where scientists are considered just one more political player, rather than an objective source of information. When doctors make mistakes, it has been found that a simple apology by the doctor to the patient can significantly reduce the chance of lawsuits. For a similar reason, I think we would greatly benefit from starting with "we were wrong/we handled this wrong" from some prominent members of the scientific community.