6 ms·

It was researched and the results were beyond poor, which is why you never heard about them. IIRC ~75% of PCR positive samples couldn't have any virus cultured

It was researched and the results were beyond poor, which is why you never heard about them. IIRC ~75% of PCR positive samples couldn't have any virus cultured from them at all. Viral culturing isn't easy, but PCR tests can trigger on destroyed virus, so it's not a surprise that you can't get replicating virus out of many such samples especially at CT>40. But even if you can grow virus, that doesn't mean someone is infectious. To determine that the ground truth is contact tracing and followup. But this showed that many people who were clearly sick with COVID never infected people they were in close contact with. Even within the home, most cases did not transmit, I think. I got direct experience of this when my wife got COVID and was sick for a couple of weeks, I was then quarantined by the government at home but never got sick. How this could happen was never officially explained. This reveals one of the core scientific problems with the epidemiological simulations that were driving policy: they assumed infection is a one-way event i.e. 100% pre-existing susceptibility. I infect you, because I'm sick, you never were when we get close together we roll a dice and if it comes up 3-6 then you get infected too. This isn't how it works in reality. People's immune systems differ significantly and some are just stronger than others. To be infected I have to be infected but you have to be susceptible. The COVID models basically ignored this and assumed a homogenous population. When adjusted to reflect a more realistic heterogeneous population herd immunity thresholds went down a lot: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.27.20081893v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.27.20081893v... This research wasn't merely unnoticed, it was actively suppressed. Journals refused to publish it because, "Given the implications for public health, it is appropriate to hold claims around the herd immunity threshold to a very high evidence bar, as these would be interpreted to justify relaxation of interventions, potentially placing people at risk." https://twitter.com/mgmgomes1/status/1291162358962937857 https://twitter.com/mgmgomes1/status/1291162358962937857

eightysixfour 3y ago
> People's immune systems differ significantly and some are just stronger than others. Just a nit but stronger is a weird term to describe any functioning immune system. Some genetic trade-off that makes one immune system better suited to blocking COVID infection might make it worse at something else. > To be infected I have to be infected but you have to be susceptible. The COVID models basically ignored this and assumed a homogenous population. And the data used to drive those models is going to be a result of a real world average across the population, so that is fine for nation level decision making. Let’s say you’re using data from two traced cases, a case with high susceptibility (HS) family members and one with low susceptibility (LS) family members. The HS case was in contact with 4 family members, 3 of which became infected. The LS case was in contact with 4 family members and 1 became infected. Two infections, 50% transmission rate. That is fine for modeling and policy, unless we have some sort of a test to determine if you are HS/LS which could be used to make more granular policies. All of this is moot considering the the different variants we never reached some magical “herd immunity” anyways.
- mike_hearn 3y ago
  In theory yes. In practice no. The models weren't driven by data in the way you're thinking. Go take a look at their source code if you don't believe me. COVID-Sim had ~150 parameters, virtually all of which were made up guesses. Of the rest they were computed from random things like news reports from Chinese media, friends who happened to work in hospitals, etc. When more data did become available the models were often never updated. I reviewed the code of several models during the pandemic. Beyond having severe bugs, they also frequently used values from January in December or even well into 2021! As more data came in it became clear that the original assumptions were far too pessimistic, but epidemiology doesn't distinguish clearly between assumptions, simulation results and observational data. So they just kept using the old numbers. It got their results in the news and peer reviewers didn't care. > All of this is moot considering the the different variants we never reached some magical “herd immunity” anyways. Well, we don't really know why variants suddenly displaced each other so fast and so completely. It would appear that there's some kind of viral interference, in which you can't be infected with multiple respiratory viruses at once. That doesn't fit with any classical form of germ theory, but the COVID response was based on the assumption of high-school level germ theory being complete, even when collected sample data showed that couldn't be true.
  - eightysixfour 3y ago
    > In theory yes. In practice no. The models weren't driven by data in the way you're thinking. Go take a look at their source code if you don't believe me. COVID-Sim had ~150 parameters, virtually all of which were made up guesses. The parameter’s my region’s epidemiologists were using for their models was certainly being updated as new data became available. I even had a conversation with one of them on Reddit about it. > Well, we don't really know why variants suddenly displaced each other so fast and so completely. It would appear that there's some kind of viral interference, in which you can't be infected with multiple respiratory viruses at once. Eh? It is the same natural selection, competitive process at large scale and in the body. You can be infected with multiple variants.
petre 3y ago
Also there was an outbreak at a Belgian Antarctic base. Incoming personel took PCR tests, tested negative and were also quarantined for 10 days in South Africa. Then they took an additional PCR test 48h before departure. Six days after arrival there was the first Covid case. https://abcnews.go.com/Health/covid-outbreak-belgian-research-station-antarctica/story?id=82051133 https://abcnews.go.com/Health/covid-outbreak-belgian-researc... Of course, certain news outlets like for instance the BBC have failed to disclose these additional details.
- mike_hearn 3y ago
  Interesting. I hadn't heard that one. However it's happened before, in the 1980s. Some researchers who were staying at a British Antarctic base over winter were entirely isolated once the last plane left. Months later they starting coming down with colds, despite none of them being sick originally. Back then epidemiology was a more curious field so this was investigated in some depth. Nobody had opened any new crates or done anything else that could expose fomites. There had obviously been no contact with anyone else. No source for the infection could be identified. In the wake of this there were a couple of hypotheses which have since been forgotten: 1. Transmission from the atmosphere. There's some other work that explored the idea that influenza could travel long distances in the upper atmosphere whilst remaining viable. It's known that SARS-like viruses can float through the air because this is how it spread between apartment blocks in a SARS-1 outbreak in Hong Kong. It's also hard to see how it could have spread on the Diamond Princess except via air ducts. Despite being called SARS-2 though, the possibility of airborne transmission was strongly denied at every point by the WHO and other health agencies, presumably because it would have invalidated the rationale for lockdown. 2. Constant low level infection that our immune systems normally keep suppressed. Then you have a bad day, don't sleep well or something else knocks you off balance and this is enough for the infection to start replicating out of control until the big guns are fired up.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    There are some number of viruses that can remain latent in the human body, it is still being researched if covid can, but it is thought to be the case. >WHAT ABOUT SARS-COV-2? CAN IT UNDERGO VIRUS REACTIVATION? >Research on SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the COVID-19 disease, is still ongoing. Infectious Disease specialists are studying its behavior to figure out if this virus can remain latent in the human body. Early research suggests that the virus may cause a latent viral infection, i.e., people who are believed to be cured of COVID-19 may test positive again due to reactivated virus rather than a re-infection. A person with a reactivated infection can potentially cause virus spread. >COVID “long haulers,” especially previously healthy people who are experiencing long-term symptoms after COVID, are of special interest to scientists. Researchers are trying to figure out whether the continuing symptoms are because their bodies are unable to put the virus into a dormant state. Only time will tell if SARS-CoV-2 is truly a virus that can undergo latent viral reactivation.
gcanyon 3y ago
I've read several of your responses here, and thanks for the info, but I have to say, your tone comes off as "I know better and would have been more sensible if I were in charge." When you're in the heart of an epidemic that's going to kill millions, you err on the side of caution. Quarantining you at home, for example, makes sense when you're dealing with a deadly disease and you don't know enough to know you're not contagious. Again, thanks for the info, but "lessons learned" should generally be left to the people who will have to deal with the next pandemic, especially since (I'm betting) they won't express their lessons learned as confidently as you are.
- mike_hearn 3y ago
  > Quarantining you at home, for example, makes sense when you're dealing with a deadly disease Intuitively yes, in reality no. It was known by March 2020 that quarantines had no effect because of the outcome of trying it on the Diamond Princess, a sealed environment where quarantine could be perfectly enforced. That didn't stop SARS-CoV-2 spreading between cabins and causing COVID apparently at random, i.e. it'd propagated everywhere but not everyone was susceptible. This knowledge was never incorporated into health policy. The same thing had been found during the SARS-1 outbreak in Hong Kong, where it was able to move between apartment blocks separated by a garden on air currents. The quarantine within the origin apartment block didn't work due to airborne transmission, something the WHO denied was possible. It was even known before 2020. Public health planning before this time said clearly not to use mass testing and mass quarantines because they don't work. This was torn up once COVID started. > your tone comes off as "I know better and would have been more sensible if I were in charge." Frustrated, yes, I know how it sounds. The COVID response was deeply flawed from the start, and in ways that were obvious even to outsiders. I was writing about the impossible claims being made for PCR tests and the history of failed epidemic models in Spring 2020, but I don't think I'd have done better if I ran the WHO. That's because the incentives and structures such people operate under are terrible, and apparently overwhelmingly strong. Consider this article from 2010 [1]. Der Spiegel investigated the Swine Flu "mass hysteria" and stated that the world clearly overreacted. Reporting on the WHO, "At any rate, efforts to downplay the risks were unwelcome, and the WHO made it clear that it preferred to base its decisions on a worst-case scenario. "We wanted to overestimate rather than underestimate the situation," says Fukuda." Given everything that happened since I'm really convinced that the right way to handle a pandemic is just to let individuals and their doctors get on with it. Academics and NGOs can make recommendations if they want, but giving these people power is a bad idea. Central health planners are incentivized to maximally over-react, every single time. No lessons are ever learned, and why would any be? They have absolute immunity from accountability and consider interventions to be cost free. That is corrupting. What happened with COVID will happen again. [1] https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/reconstruction-of-a-mass-hysteria-the-swine-flu-panic-of-2009-a-682613.html https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/reconstruction-of...
jmull 3y ago
It's a true tragedy of our time that the CDC, scientific journals, and the media turned to trained epidemiologists for sophisticated pandemic risk assessments rather than random internet guys who find their truth on Twitter. /s
nextaccountic 3y ago
> How this could happen was never officially explained. Maybe you caught Covid but went asymptomatic because your immune system is just better at handling it? (and PCR tests won't detect it because, as this story says, they miss 90% of asymptomatic cases) This is hardly unheard of, unexpected or unexplained.
- bamfly 3y ago
  Yeah, I read that part and was like... but I remember reading & hearing pretty damn early in the pandemic that a fairly high percentage of infections are asymptomatic, and continuing to see that stated periodically and never (that I read or heard) contradicted for the whole rest of the pandemic. And sure enough, most households I know that had Covid roll through (which is, at this point, practically every household of everyone I know) played out like that—it was more common than not for at least one person in the house to never get signs or symptoms. Right? Is that not how it went?
  - mike_hearn 3y ago
    Yes that's how it went. That experience was very common. It was unexpected. The models deployed to justify lockdown assumed 100% susceptibility to COVID-the-disease on the grounds that the virus was "novel". Although they had some crude notion of chance involved in transmission, they didn't have any notion that you could be heavily and repeatedly exposed to the virus and just never catch it at all. When did governments admit that this expectation had been violated, that must be a lot of pre-existing immunity? IIRC, they never did. And what's the official explanation for how that happened? AFAIK there isn't one? There were some attempts at the edges to claim that all these people must have had symptoms, just so mild they didn't notice. But if neither you nor anyone else ever notice you got sick, then you didn't get sick using any conventional definition of sickness because disease is defined as a collection of symptoms.
    - bamfly 3y ago
      Ah, OK, I see the distinction you intended now. Thanks.
Pyramus 3y ago
> I got direct experience of this when my wife got COVID and was sick for a couple of weeks, I was then quarantined by the government at home but never got sick. How this could happen was never officially explained. It seems you have been doing in-depth research about Sars-Cov-2/Covid-19, how did you miss the secondary attack rate/household infection rate? It used to be one of the crucial measures of transmission in early 2020, and has been studied for every variant ever since. What I don't understand is this jump between the complexity of the situation and the simplicity of your conclusions. You go into great length to point out the shortcomings of PCR tests or that 100% susceptibility is an unrealistic modelling assumption, but your interpretations/conclusions are often blanket statements like > This reveals one of the core scientific problems > This research wasn't merely unnoticed, it was actively suppressed. I notice that in your conclusions you tend to lump together very heterogeneous groups, like "scientists", "the media", "government", "the people who run healthcare" - and "they" seem to be responsible for the shortcomings? I find it very puzzling. E.g. scientific consensus is rarely clear-cut, but you will find plenty of papers/opinions arguing for and against something. Same with governments, there are some 200 countries and "they" followed very different policies. Wouldn't it be more convincing to present both evidence for and against a certain hypothesis?
- mike_hearn 3y ago
  I referenced the SAR in the post you're replying to (not under that name). Measuring that it's quite low isn't an explanation of why that happens, or an incorporation of that fact into policy. I get what you mean about consensus but scientific consensus is by definition clear cut, it's supposed to mean 100% agreement. Often something is presented as a scientific consensus when it's really not, rather, people who disagree are being ignored or blocked from publishing. During COVID a lot of things were presented to the public as if it were 100% obvious and agreed with by every specialist, then policy was made on that basis. You couldn't just disagree with government mitigations and ignore them, they were enforced by law and this was justified by the idea that anyone who disagreed with their effectiveness was a misinformation-addled rube who had to be forced for the good of everyone else. People who pointed out data or papers that disagreed with this supposed consensus were fired or banned from social media to try and maintain this illusion of universal agreement. > there are some 200 countries and "they" followed very different policies Did they? I'm pretty sure virtually every (rich) country all imposed mass testing, quarantines, mask mandates, lockdowns and mass vaccinations. Other than Sweden famously rejecting lockdowns, which countries didn't do these things? Policy was globally homogenous because the public health community is global and their methods don't really vary. Tegnell was the exception that proved the rule.

eightysixfour 3y ago

> People's immune systems differ significantly and some are just stronger than others. Just a nit but stronger is a weird term to describe any functioning immune system. Some genetic trade-off that makes one immune system better suited to blocking COVID infection might make it worse at something else. > To be infected I have to be infected but you have to be susceptible. The COVID models basically ignored this and assumed a homogenous population. And the data used to drive those models is going to be a result of a real world average across the population, so that is fine for nation level decision making. Let’s say you’re using data from two traced cases, a case with high susceptibility (HS) family members and one with low susceptibility (LS) family members. The HS case was in contact with 4 family members, 3 of which became infected. The LS case was in contact with 4 family members and 1 became infected. Two infections, 50% transmission rate. That is fine for modeling and policy, unless we have some sort of a test to determine if you are HS/LS which could be used to make more granular policies. All of this is moot considering the the different variants we never reached some magical “herd immunity” anyways.

mike_hearn 3y ago
In theory yes. In practice no. The models weren't driven by data in the way you're thinking. Go take a look at their source code if you don't believe me. COVID-Sim had ~150 parameters, virtually all of which were made up guesses. Of the rest they were computed from random things like news reports from Chinese media, friends who happened to work in hospitals, etc. When more data did become available the models were often never updated. I reviewed the code of several models during the pandemic. Beyond having severe bugs, they also frequently used values from January in December or even well into 2021! As more data came in it became clear that the original assumptions were far too pessimistic, but epidemiology doesn't distinguish clearly between assumptions, simulation results and observational data. So they just kept using the old numbers. It got their results in the news and peer reviewers didn't care. > All of this is moot considering the the different variants we never reached some magical “herd immunity” anyways. Well, we don't really know why variants suddenly displaced each other so fast and so completely. It would appear that there's some kind of viral interference, in which you can't be infected with multiple respiratory viruses at once. That doesn't fit with any classical form of germ theory, but the COVID response was based on the assumption of high-school level germ theory being complete, even when collected sample data showed that couldn't be true.
- eightysixfour 3y ago
  > In theory yes. In practice no. The models weren't driven by data in the way you're thinking. Go take a look at their source code if you don't believe me. COVID-Sim had ~150 parameters, virtually all of which were made up guesses. The parameter’s my region’s epidemiologists were using for their models was certainly being updated as new data became available. I even had a conversation with one of them on Reddit about it. > Well, we don't really know why variants suddenly displaced each other so fast and so completely. It would appear that there's some kind of viral interference, in which you can't be infected with multiple respiratory viruses at once. Eh? It is the same natural selection, competitive process at large scale and in the body. You can be infected with multiple variants.

petre 3y ago

Also there was an outbreak at a Belgian Antarctic base. Incoming personel took PCR tests, tested negative and were also quarantined for 10 days in South Africa. Then they took an additional PCR test 48h before departure. Six days after arrival there was the first Covid case. https://abcnews.go.com/Health/covid-outbreak-belgian-research-station-antarctica/story?id=82051133 https://abcnews.go.com/Health/covid-outbreak-belgian-researc... Of course, certain news outlets like for instance the BBC have failed to disclose these additional details.

mike_hearn 3y ago
Interesting. I hadn't heard that one. However it's happened before, in the 1980s. Some researchers who were staying at a British Antarctic base over winter were entirely isolated once the last plane left. Months later they starting coming down with colds, despite none of them being sick originally. Back then epidemiology was a more curious field so this was investigated in some depth. Nobody had opened any new crates or done anything else that could expose fomites. There had obviously been no contact with anyone else. No source for the infection could be identified. In the wake of this there were a couple of hypotheses which have since been forgotten: 1. Transmission from the atmosphere. There's some other work that explored the idea that influenza could travel long distances in the upper atmosphere whilst remaining viable. It's known that SARS-like viruses can float through the air because this is how it spread between apartment blocks in a SARS-1 outbreak in Hong Kong. It's also hard to see how it could have spread on the Diamond Princess except via air ducts. Despite being called SARS-2 though, the possibility of airborne transmission was strongly denied at every point by the WHO and other health agencies, presumably because it would have invalidated the rationale for lockdown. 2. Constant low level infection that our immune systems normally keep suppressed. Then you have a bad day, don't sleep well or something else knocks you off balance and this is enough for the infection to start replicating out of control until the big guns are fired up.
- pixl97 3y ago
  There are some number of viruses that can remain latent in the human body, it is still being researched if covid can, but it is thought to be the case. >WHAT ABOUT SARS-COV-2? CAN IT UNDERGO VIRUS REACTIVATION? >Research on SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the COVID-19 disease, is still ongoing. Infectious Disease specialists are studying its behavior to figure out if this virus can remain latent in the human body. Early research suggests that the virus may cause a latent viral infection, i.e., people who are believed to be cured of COVID-19 may test positive again due to reactivated virus rather than a re-infection. A person with a reactivated infection can potentially cause virus spread. >COVID “long haulers,” especially previously healthy people who are experiencing long-term symptoms after COVID, are of special interest to scientists. Researchers are trying to figure out whether the continuing symptoms are because their bodies are unable to put the virus into a dormant state. Only time will tell if SARS-CoV-2 is truly a virus that can undergo latent viral reactivation.

gcanyon 3y ago

I've read several of your responses here, and thanks for the info, but I have to say, your tone comes off as "I know better and would have been more sensible if I were in charge." When you're in the heart of an epidemic that's going to kill millions, you err on the side of caution. Quarantining you at home, for example, makes sense when you're dealing with a deadly disease and you don't know enough to know you're not contagious. Again, thanks for the info, but "lessons learned" should generally be left to the people who will have to deal with the next pandemic, especially since (I'm betting) they won't express their lessons learned as confidently as you are.

mike_hearn 3y ago
> Quarantining you at home, for example, makes sense when you're dealing with a deadly disease Intuitively yes, in reality no. It was known by March 2020 that quarantines had no effect because of the outcome of trying it on the Diamond Princess, a sealed environment where quarantine could be perfectly enforced. That didn't stop SARS-CoV-2 spreading between cabins and causing COVID apparently at random, i.e. it'd propagated everywhere but not everyone was susceptible. This knowledge was never incorporated into health policy. The same thing had been found during the SARS-1 outbreak in Hong Kong, where it was able to move between apartment blocks separated by a garden on air currents. The quarantine within the origin apartment block didn't work due to airborne transmission, something the WHO denied was possible. It was even known before 2020. Public health planning before this time said clearly not to use mass testing and mass quarantines because they don't work. This was torn up once COVID started. > your tone comes off as "I know better and would have been more sensible if I were in charge." Frustrated, yes, I know how it sounds. The COVID response was deeply flawed from the start, and in ways that were obvious even to outsiders. I was writing about the impossible claims being made for PCR tests and the history of failed epidemic models in Spring 2020, but I don't think I'd have done better if I ran the WHO. That's because the incentives and structures such people operate under are terrible, and apparently overwhelmingly strong. Consider this article from 2010 [1]. Der Spiegel investigated the Swine Flu "mass hysteria" and stated that the world clearly overreacted. Reporting on the WHO, "At any rate, efforts to downplay the risks were unwelcome, and the WHO made it clear that it preferred to base its decisions on a worst-case scenario. "We wanted to overestimate rather than underestimate the situation," says Fukuda." Given everything that happened since I'm really convinced that the right way to handle a pandemic is just to let individuals and their doctors get on with it. Academics and NGOs can make recommendations if they want, but giving these people power is a bad idea. Central health planners are incentivized to maximally over-react, every single time. No lessons are ever learned, and why would any be? They have absolute immunity from accountability and consider interventions to be cost free. That is corrupting. What happened with COVID will happen again. [1] https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/reconstruction-of-a-mass-hysteria-the-swine-flu-panic-of-2009-a-682613.html https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/reconstruction-of...

jmull 3y ago

It's a true tragedy of our time that the CDC, scientific journals, and the media turned to trained epidemiologists for sophisticated pandemic risk assessments rather than random internet guys who find their truth on Twitter. /s

nextaccountic 3y ago

> How this could happen was never officially explained. Maybe you caught Covid but went asymptomatic because your immune system is just better at handling it? (and PCR tests won't detect it because, as this story says, they miss 90% of asymptomatic cases) This is hardly unheard of, unexpected or unexplained.

bamfly 3y ago
Yeah, I read that part and was like... but I remember reading & hearing pretty damn early in the pandemic that a fairly high percentage of infections are asymptomatic, and continuing to see that stated periodically and never (that I read or heard) contradicted for the whole rest of the pandemic. And sure enough, most households I know that had Covid roll through (which is, at this point, practically every household of everyone I know) played out like that—it was more common than not for at least one person in the house to never get signs or symptoms. Right? Is that not how it went?
- mike_hearn 3y ago
  Yes that's how it went. That experience was very common. It was unexpected. The models deployed to justify lockdown assumed 100% susceptibility to COVID-the-disease on the grounds that the virus was "novel". Although they had some crude notion of chance involved in transmission, they didn't have any notion that you could be heavily and repeatedly exposed to the virus and just never catch it at all. When did governments admit that this expectation had been violated, that must be a lot of pre-existing immunity? IIRC, they never did. And what's the official explanation for how that happened? AFAIK there isn't one? There were some attempts at the edges to claim that all these people must have had symptoms, just so mild they didn't notice. But if neither you nor anyone else ever notice you got sick, then you didn't get sick using any conventional definition of sickness because disease is defined as a collection of symptoms.
  - bamfly 3y ago
    Ah, OK, I see the distinction you intended now. Thanks.

Pyramus 3y ago

> I got direct experience of this when my wife got COVID and was sick for a couple of weeks, I was then quarantined by the government at home but never got sick. How this could happen was never officially explained. It seems you have been doing in-depth research about Sars-Cov-2/Covid-19, how did you miss the secondary attack rate/household infection rate? It used to be one of the crucial measures of transmission in early 2020, and has been studied for every variant ever since. What I don't understand is this jump between the complexity of the situation and the simplicity of your conclusions. You go into great length to point out the shortcomings of PCR tests or that 100% susceptibility is an unrealistic modelling assumption, but your interpretations/conclusions are often blanket statements like > This reveals one of the core scientific problems > This research wasn't merely unnoticed, it was actively suppressed. I notice that in your conclusions you tend to lump together very heterogeneous groups, like "scientists", "the media", "government", "the people who run healthcare" - and "they" seem to be responsible for the shortcomings? I find it very puzzling. E.g. scientific consensus is rarely clear-cut, but you will find plenty of papers/opinions arguing for and against something. Same with governments, there are some 200 countries and "they" followed very different policies. Wouldn't it be more convincing to present both evidence for and against a certain hypothesis?

mike_hearn 3y ago
I referenced the SAR in the post you're replying to (not under that name). Measuring that it's quite low isn't an explanation of why that happens, or an incorporation of that fact into policy. I get what you mean about consensus but scientific consensus is by definition clear cut, it's supposed to mean 100% agreement. Often something is presented as a scientific consensus when it's really not, rather, people who disagree are being ignored or blocked from publishing. During COVID a lot of things were presented to the public as if it were 100% obvious and agreed with by every specialist, then policy was made on that basis. You couldn't just disagree with government mitigations and ignore them, they were enforced by law and this was justified by the idea that anyone who disagreed with their effectiveness was a misinformation-addled rube who had to be forced for the good of everyone else. People who pointed out data or papers that disagreed with this supposed consensus were fired or banned from social media to try and maintain this illusion of universal agreement. > there are some 200 countries and "they" followed very different policies Did they? I'm pretty sure virtually every (rich) country all imposed mass testing, quarantines, mask mandates, lockdowns and mass vaccinations. Other than Sweden famously rejecting lockdowns, which countries didn't do these things? Policy was globally homogenous because the public health community is global and their methods don't really vary. Tegnell was the exception that proved the rule.