4 ms·

Here's why silencing critics is problematic. The powers that be decided that Covid was a virus with a droplet based spread, like the flu, and they silenced dom

Here's why silencing critics is problematic. The powers that be decided that Covid was a virus with a droplet based spread, like the flu, and they silenced domain experts who asserted that Covid was a fully airborne virus, like the measles. The mitigations that were put in place targeted a droplet based spread (washing hands, wiping down surfaces, putting up sneeze guards, staying six feet apart) and were ineffective against a virus you contract by inhaling it as it floats in the air. Unfortunately, it took two years for the truth about Covid to be begrudgingly accepted. > Two years of COVID: The battle to accept airborne transmission https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2022/3/11/two-years-of-covid-the-battle-to-accept-airborne-transmission https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2022/3/11/two-years-of-co...

Obscurity4340 3y ago
Why was it such a politically-driven determination? Why is droplet-based culturally more expedient than airbourne?
- exegete 3y ago
  Different types of mitigations which have different levels of social acceptance. Washing hands is a more socially acceptable mitigation than wearing high quality masks, for example.
- edrxty 3y ago
  I don't think it would be if it wasn't for a bunch of people who decided to start an unrelated holy war against any mitigation of the virus. They caused everyone to become hyper alert for any signs of dissent which has made this whole thing measurably harder to manage.
  - Enginerrrd 3y ago
    A huge component of that was outright lies from the CDC in the beginning. "No one needs a mask" "They might even be harmful" "they require special training" all of which directly contradicted studies they had funded and published from doing contract tracing with SARS, while simultaneously stating they were essential for healthcare workers. All instead of saying "hey look we have a shortage of masks due to some previous mistakes we made which make us look incompetent now, and our healthcare workers need them more." Public health management 101 in any textbook will tell you that maintaining public trust during an epidemic is THE most important thing they could do. Don't blame the people that were paying attention and realized they were full of it. I bought my masks in January because it was clear this was coming. They also silenced any debate about the costs/benefits of various mitigations. Don't even get me started on that one. With an R0 as high as it was, even in the beginning, it was clear to me that even with mitigations you were going to see cases surge beyond hospital capacities. (Bringing the R0 down from 4 to 2.1 would have been a great success, and yet... not that effective in a lot of ways.) Flattening the curve also prolongs the pandemic and deaths of despair were inevitable. This made some sense in the beginning to try and stall for time with the vaccine, but must be weighed against the costs, and there was no reasonable discussion of that at the policy level.
    - kcplate 3y ago
      I think the perfect example of the mismanagement and corruption of the public trust for the pandemic at the CDC was the initial suggestion during the vaccine distribution scheduling meetings was that minorities should be the first in line for these new and experimental vaccines for “social justice” reasons.
      - throwawa14223 3y ago
        Exactly this. I saw that destroy all trust live in the rural mostly white place I live.
        kcplate 3y ago
        Perhaps it did that too, but more importantly it further solidified government health authority distrust within minority communities because of the shadow of Tuskegee is still fresh in a lot of minds about the government willingness to experiment on minorities under the cover “help”.
        kanbara 3y ago
        [flagged]
        Boatfaceing 3y ago
        [flagged]
  - kcplate 3y ago
    That is a “what came first the chicken or the egg?” question. Folks opposed to many of the mitigation efforts would likely describe their attitudes as simply a pushback to what they perceived as an uncharacteristic overly authoritarian approach. Which in a lot of countries people are not just not used to such heavy handed government action. Couple that with very public examples of these same authorities who demanding the compliance and controls then disregarding them…then ice the whole damn cake with contradictory advice and outright lies and you have a pandemic that hard to manage because the folks in charge mismanaged it.
- GeekyBear 3y ago
  There is the phrase "fighting the last war" which describes people who can't let go of old lessons learned when facing something new. In this case, remember that there was a time when people thought bacterial infections, like cholera, or parasitic infections, like malaria, were spread through bad smells in the air. Unfortunately there are scientists who overgeneralize the lesson that bacteria and parasites are not transmitted through the air into a dogmatic belief that nothing can spread through the air, even viruses, and those sorts of people were in charge at the WHO and CDC. > Early in the pandemic, the World Health Organization stated that SARS-CoV-2 was not transmitted through the air. That mistake and the prolonged process of correcting it sowed confusion and raises questions about what will happen in the next pandemic. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00925-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00925-7 It took domain experts two years to force those in charge to accept the truth that infected people do emit Covid into the air when they are just breathing normally, that the Covid they emit floats in the air for hours, and that people who inhale the virus do get infected. Which is why it's unwise to censor everyone who doesn't toe the party line. Not just illegal, unwise.
  - cvccvroomvroom 3y ago
    To be fair, the droplets were down to nanometer size that N95 masks couldn't touch. It was Dunning-Kruger meeting wishful thinking meeting cognitive dissonance. It was more convenient to shout one narrative than dither before generating conclusive evidence. Theoretically, you could don a moon suit and be alright, but 100% lockdown of the world doesn't scale for long, although 4 weeks of a real, absolute lockdown (wasn't meaningfully enforced uniformly in the US) would've been fantastic.
    - GeekyBear 3y ago
      To be fair, a properly fitted N95 mask is infinitely protective against an airborne virus compared to standing six feet apart, washing your hands, wiping down surfaces or wearing one of those paper masks held on by two rubber bands with open sides. However, it is my understanding that the UK's NHS did step up their game and require their equivalent of an N99 mask for frontline medical workers.
- guilhas 3y ago
  Possibly because surgical masks, plexiglass, washing hands, hand disinfectant, surfaces disinfectant... were cheap measures, already under way, but even more useless for airborne virus They possibly wanted the spectacle that people could/were doing something to protect themselves
Guvante 3y ago
Where is evidence that the government suppressed discussion about aerosols? The article you linked about speaks only about believing. Yes they didn't believe it but that is a very different situation. Also I will point out that a huge portion of people believe the lockdowns were ineffective which is the only solve for aerosols. EDIT: I will agree that the origin story was suppressed too much, given the uncertainty and some questions without disinformation in them were removed in the cross fire. But I hadn't heard heavy handed responses to aerosol theories.
- GeekyBear 3y ago
  The government issued categorical statements that Covid was NOT airborne. The government instructed social media platforms to suppress "misinformation" that went against the official party line. The government used extreme threats against platforms that did not comply. > In an interview with MSNBC about anti-vaccine misinformation, White House communications director Kate Bedingfield responded to a question asking if Biden would change Section 230 to make companies “liable for publishing that information, and then open to lawsuits.” Bedingfield responded that “we’re reviewing that, and certainly they should be held accountable.” https://www.theverge.com/22585152/biden-white-house-facebook-vaccine-misinformation-section-230-first-amendment https://www.theverge.com/22585152/biden-white-house-facebook... I personally had a one decade old account banned on one social platform for asserting that Covid was airborne and many posts on other platforms deleted for sharing links that supported the airborne Covid theory as "misinformation". We literally had platforms deleting links to information provided by sites like the New England Journal of Medicine or Nature if they didn't toe the official party line.
  - acdha 3y ago
    > The government instructed social media platforms to suppress "misinformation" that went against the official party line. Do you have any evidence? It certainly is not true for the major platforms like Facebook or Twitter where the aerosol reality was widely discussed - in fact that was an increasingly vocal source of criticism of the WHO and CDC after the scientific evidence consolidated on airborne transmission (say roughly March 2020).

Obscurity4340 3y ago

Why was it such a politically-driven determination? Why is droplet-based culturally more expedient than airbourne?

exegete 3y ago
Different types of mitigations which have different levels of social acceptance. Washing hands is a more socially acceptable mitigation than wearing high quality masks, for example.
edrxty 3y ago
I don't think it would be if it wasn't for a bunch of people who decided to start an unrelated holy war against any mitigation of the virus. They caused everyone to become hyper alert for any signs of dissent which has made this whole thing measurably harder to manage.
- Enginerrrd 3y ago
  A huge component of that was outright lies from the CDC in the beginning. "No one needs a mask" "They might even be harmful" "they require special training" all of which directly contradicted studies they had funded and published from doing contract tracing with SARS, while simultaneously stating they were essential for healthcare workers. All instead of saying "hey look we have a shortage of masks due to some previous mistakes we made which make us look incompetent now, and our healthcare workers need them more." Public health management 101 in any textbook will tell you that maintaining public trust during an epidemic is THE most important thing they could do. Don't blame the people that were paying attention and realized they were full of it. I bought my masks in January because it was clear this was coming. They also silenced any debate about the costs/benefits of various mitigations. Don't even get me started on that one. With an R0 as high as it was, even in the beginning, it was clear to me that even with mitigations you were going to see cases surge beyond hospital capacities. (Bringing the R0 down from 4 to 2.1 would have been a great success, and yet... not that effective in a lot of ways.) Flattening the curve also prolongs the pandemic and deaths of despair were inevitable. This made some sense in the beginning to try and stall for time with the vaccine, but must be weighed against the costs, and there was no reasonable discussion of that at the policy level.
  - kcplate 3y ago
    I think the perfect example of the mismanagement and corruption of the public trust for the pandemic at the CDC was the initial suggestion during the vaccine distribution scheduling meetings was that minorities should be the first in line for these new and experimental vaccines for “social justice” reasons.
    - throwawa14223 3y ago
      Exactly this. I saw that destroy all trust live in the rural mostly white place I live.
      - kcplate 3y ago
        Perhaps it did that too, but more importantly it further solidified government health authority distrust within minority communities because of the shadow of Tuskegee is still fresh in a lot of minds about the government willingness to experiment on minorities under the cover “help”.
      - kanbara 3y ago
        [flagged]
        Boatfaceing 3y ago
        [flagged]
- kcplate 3y ago
  That is a “what came first the chicken or the egg?” question. Folks opposed to many of the mitigation efforts would likely describe their attitudes as simply a pushback to what they perceived as an uncharacteristic overly authoritarian approach. Which in a lot of countries people are not just not used to such heavy handed government action. Couple that with very public examples of these same authorities who demanding the compliance and controls then disregarding them…then ice the whole damn cake with contradictory advice and outright lies and you have a pandemic that hard to manage because the folks in charge mismanaged it.
GeekyBear 3y ago
There is the phrase "fighting the last war" which describes people who can't let go of old lessons learned when facing something new. In this case, remember that there was a time when people thought bacterial infections, like cholera, or parasitic infections, like malaria, were spread through bad smells in the air. Unfortunately there are scientists who overgeneralize the lesson that bacteria and parasites are not transmitted through the air into a dogmatic belief that nothing can spread through the air, even viruses, and those sorts of people were in charge at the WHO and CDC. > Early in the pandemic, the World Health Organization stated that SARS-CoV-2 was not transmitted through the air. That mistake and the prolonged process of correcting it sowed confusion and raises questions about what will happen in the next pandemic. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00925-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00925-7 It took domain experts two years to force those in charge to accept the truth that infected people do emit Covid into the air when they are just breathing normally, that the Covid they emit floats in the air for hours, and that people who inhale the virus do get infected. Which is why it's unwise to censor everyone who doesn't toe the party line. Not just illegal, unwise.
- cvccvroomvroom 3y ago
  To be fair, the droplets were down to nanometer size that N95 masks couldn't touch. It was Dunning-Kruger meeting wishful thinking meeting cognitive dissonance. It was more convenient to shout one narrative than dither before generating conclusive evidence. Theoretically, you could don a moon suit and be alright, but 100% lockdown of the world doesn't scale for long, although 4 weeks of a real, absolute lockdown (wasn't meaningfully enforced uniformly in the US) would've been fantastic.
  - GeekyBear 3y ago
    To be fair, a properly fitted N95 mask is infinitely protective against an airborne virus compared to standing six feet apart, washing your hands, wiping down surfaces or wearing one of those paper masks held on by two rubber bands with open sides. However, it is my understanding that the UK's NHS did step up their game and require their equivalent of an N99 mask for frontline medical workers.
guilhas 3y ago
Possibly because surgical masks, plexiglass, washing hands, hand disinfectant, surfaces disinfectant... were cheap measures, already under way, but even more useless for airborne virus They possibly wanted the spectacle that people could/were doing something to protect themselves

Guvante 3y ago

Where is evidence that the government suppressed discussion about aerosols? The article you linked about speaks only about believing. Yes they didn't believe it but that is a very different situation. Also I will point out that a huge portion of people believe the lockdowns were ineffective which is the only solve for aerosols. EDIT: I will agree that the origin story was suppressed too much, given the uncertainty and some questions without disinformation in them were removed in the cross fire. But I hadn't heard heavy handed responses to aerosol theories.

GeekyBear 3y ago
The government issued categorical statements that Covid was NOT airborne. The government instructed social media platforms to suppress "misinformation" that went against the official party line. The government used extreme threats against platforms that did not comply. > In an interview with MSNBC about anti-vaccine misinformation, White House communications director Kate Bedingfield responded to a question asking if Biden would change Section 230 to make companies “liable for publishing that information, and then open to lawsuits.” Bedingfield responded that “we’re reviewing that, and certainly they should be held accountable.” https://www.theverge.com/22585152/biden-white-house-facebook-vaccine-misinformation-section-230-first-amendment https://www.theverge.com/22585152/biden-white-house-facebook... I personally had a one decade old account banned on one social platform for asserting that Covid was airborne and many posts on other platforms deleted for sharing links that supported the airborne Covid theory as "misinformation". We literally had platforms deleting links to information provided by sites like the New England Journal of Medicine or Nature if they didn't toe the official party line.
- acdha 3y ago
  > The government instructed social media platforms to suppress "misinformation" that went against the official party line. Do you have any evidence? It certainly is not true for the major platforms like Facebook or Twitter where the aerosol reality was widely discussed - in fact that was an increasingly vocal source of criticism of the WHO and CDC after the scientific evidence consolidated on airborne transmission (say roughly March 2020).