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> What you’re arguing here is not that Fauci was doing science Well, sure. He was doing his job as a government employee, and right then the job wasn’t to do s

by veidr 2y ago

> What you’re arguing here is not that Fauci was doing science Well, sure. He was doing his job as a government employee, and right then the job wasn’t to do science and spend the next five years doing a comprehensive study on the virus. It was to make policy recommendations based on science in the sense of “drawing on his many years in the field, and decades of science around the transmissions mechanisms of other, similar diseases” and then to make a guess, yes. All scientists do this, often. Your chemistry teacher in high school made you wear googles when you were mixing liquids even though she didn’t have a paper in Nature definitively showing that the stuff you were mixing that day was even that bad to splash into your eye. > What you seem to be arguing here is that science wasn’t of any use for making decisions, because the process is too slow. No, you are arguing that, by insisting that rigorous multi-year studies unequivocally demonstrating the efficacy of masks, specifically with regard to this novel coronavirus that nobody had seen before, would be the only “science” based way to come up with a recommendation, and anything else is “pulling ideas out of thin air”. I am arguing that all the science around viral transmission generally, influenza, bird flus, mask densities, aerosol spread of saliva and particles, etc. — although yes, not as good as a solid peer reviewed study delivered by scientists from the future who showed up in a time machine — generally is, and I think was in this case also was, of considerable use. It’s an emergency. Millions of people are dying. It’s spread across the whole world. All any human being can do in that situation is form a hypothesis based on similar, but not perfectly similar, previous experiences. And I think it is obvious to anybody not being intentionally obtuse that the people we want making those guesses, based on the science around other seemingly-similar diseases, are the experts who know the science around those previous diseases, and the efficacies of various methods of prevention, etc., rather than some random guy like me who’s good at writing software and making omelettes, but not familiar with any of the scientific literature around viruses. And then yeah, obviously modify those guidelines and recommendations (or sure, even laws) as the scientific process continues and better data becomes available.

mike_hearn 2y ago
> I am arguing that all the science around viral transmission generally, influenza, bird flus, mask densities, aerosol spread of saliva and particles, etc ... All any human being can do in that situation is form a hypothesis based on similar, but not perfectly similar, previous experiences. Yes, it's understandable why you believe that Fauci and other public health officials must have been basing their rules on prior experience. That's what reasonable people would do, it's what reasonable people would expect others to do. Unfortunately, what we're saying and even what Fauci is clearly saying in this transcript is that they didn't do this. To repeat: yes, we want scientists to give their best advice (with reasonably accurate confidence ratings) based on their prior experience even if there's no time to do an in depth study right away. That's exactly why people are mad. Public health people said that's what they were doing - relying on their knowledge of the past to inform the present - but it wasn't. If you review the pre-COVID science on respiratory viruses (like I did) you'll find that what it said was: 1. Lockdowns won't work. SARS-1 could move between buildings on air currents. People have been observed to spontaneously get a cold even when entirely isolated and with no exposure to anyone else who was sick or any contaminated objects (see [1] for an example). 2. Border controls won't work. 3. There's no evidence masks would work (so in science we assume the null hypothesis of no effect). 4. Vaccines also won't work. Coronaviruses mutate too fast and evolve beyond any immunity. 5. Scientists don't understand the epidemiology of respiratory illness and can't model them successfully. 6. Past coronavirus pandemics ended when the virus mutated into a more infectious but less serious form. The literature was very depressing. Nothing worked and nobody understood why not. In other words: there's a fundamental theoretical gap and no pre-existing understanding of any value, also, no time to try and obtain that new understanding. Therefore science was of little use during COVID. People like Fauci, who are paid nice salaries because they claim to be scientific, are very strongly incentivized to not conclude this. It's the old saw about getting a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it. People want to hear that the experts have it all under control. They don't want to hear "the scientific understanding to date can't help us". Yet, that's what true scientists should have said. [1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/epidemiology-and-infection/article/an-outbreak-of-common-colds-at-an-antarctic-base-after-seventeen-weeks-of-complete-isolation/1D3A49463583D06CEACE1CCF9C1A25B4 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/epidemiology-and-inf...

by veidr 2y ago

mike_hearn 2y ago

> I am arguing that all the science around viral transmission generally, influenza, bird flus, mask densities, aerosol spread of saliva and particles, etc ... All any human being can do in that situation is form a hypothesis based on similar, but not perfectly similar, previous experiences. Yes, it's understandable why you believe that Fauci and other public health officials must have been basing their rules on prior experience. That's what reasonable people would do, it's what reasonable people would expect others to do. Unfortunately, what we're saying and even what Fauci is clearly saying in this transcript is that they didn't do this. To repeat: yes, we want scientists to give their best advice (with reasonably accurate confidence ratings) based on their prior experience even if there's no time to do an in depth study right away. That's exactly why people are mad. Public health people said that's what they were doing - relying on their knowledge of the past to inform the present - but it wasn't. If you review the pre-COVID science on respiratory viruses (like I did) you'll find that what it said was: 1. Lockdowns won't work. SARS-1 could move between buildings on air currents. People have been observed to spontaneously get a cold even when entirely isolated and with no exposure to anyone else who was sick or any contaminated objects (see [1] for an example). 2. Border controls won't work. 3. There's no evidence masks would work (so in science we assume the null hypothesis of no effect). 4. Vaccines also won't work. Coronaviruses mutate too fast and evolve beyond any immunity. 5. Scientists don't understand the epidemiology of respiratory illness and can't model them successfully. 6. Past coronavirus pandemics ended when the virus mutated into a more infectious but less serious form. The literature was very depressing. Nothing worked and nobody understood why not. In other words: there's a fundamental theoretical gap and no pre-existing understanding of any value, also, no time to try and obtain that new understanding. Therefore science was of little use during COVID. People like Fauci, who are paid nice salaries because they claim to be scientific, are very strongly incentivized to not conclude this. It's the old saw about getting a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it. People want to hear that the experts have it all under control. They don't want to hear "the scientific understanding to date can't help us". Yet, that's what true scientists should have said. [1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/epidemiology-and-infection/article/an-outbreak-of-common-colds-at-an-antarctic-base-after-seventeen-weeks-of-complete-isolation/1D3A49463583D06CEACE1CCF9C1A25B4 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/epidemiology-and-inf...