4 ms·

Covid was such an outlier event things were changing daily as they tried new things. I never understood why people got so upset over policies around Covid they

Covid was such an outlier event things were changing daily as they tried new things. I never understood why people got so upset over policies around Covid they were just figuring stuff out as new info came in. Folks expected people to have all the answers to everything but the scientific method is to try something test the results and confirm with further experiment no?

WalterBright 2y ago
That's true, but when we find out that the "trusted scientist" was pushing his opinion as "scientific fact" when he knew otherwise, it's really hard to rebuild trust. Like Fauci with the masks. He knew he was wrong. I'm old enough to remember when the government confidently asserted that butter was bad, eat margarine instead. I ate margarine for decades. Then it turned out the hydrogenated oil is more or less poison. Back to butter for me. We were told eggs were bad, meat was bad, grain is good. All wrong.
- amy-petrik-214 2y ago
  My pet hypothesis is Fauci saw an infectious disease / epidemiologists dream thought experiment. What if every human on the planet self-isolated for XX weeks? If most illnesses (e.g. cold, flu, airbone) die out after X days without a host, presumably a large chunk of communicable transient diseases that have been around forever.. would suddenly no longer exist. My thought is there was a sort of power-drunkness, mix of anxiety, and the blissful joy of doing this naughty experiment on 350 million people. With the best of intentions of course. Of course the problem with it all is one general of medicine. The infectious disease specialist stays in their lane and devises an infectious disease solution. I don't think psychiatrists or economists had much of a say in it. I would speculate there are particular populations such as healthy teenagers, who mostly handle COVID easily with near-zero death rate( HEALTHY teenagers).. where these COVID restrictions caused more damage, psychological and suicide, then the COVID precautions themselves... in order to save the boomer population which did benefit. The other problem, obvious now, is it didn't work. You can't bottle up people, particularly not muricans, a very individualistic culture. The goal was to knock out COVID in a week or two and look how it went.
- FloorEgg 2y ago
  It's funny because you're right about all those examples, and it's reasonable to point to them when explaining a loss of trust in science... But most of them are actually just companies or industries manipulating the public with shitty science for marketing reasons. Kind of a bad apple spoils the batch situation. Also I'm surprised the academic integrity crisis hasn't been mentioned yet... The cheating and plagiarism rates are orders of magnitude worse now than pre pandemic and LLMs
  - M95D 2y ago
    > just companies or industries manipulating the public You forgot lobbying.
  - WalterBright 2y ago
    > actually just companies Are scientists working for the government free from incentives to push bad science?
  - HPsquared 2y ago
    Ah, so no true scientist would do such things.
Am4TIfIsER0ppos 2y ago
Scientists and doctors can go fuck themselves. They forbade us from going for than 1 kilometer from our homes under pain of death (government decree).
- amanaplanacanal 2y ago
  Where was That? Where I lived the biggest issue was that restaurants closed their dining rooms for a while and could only serve takeout.
  - Am4TIfIsER0ppos 2y ago
    France.

WalterBright 2y ago

That's true, but when we find out that the "trusted scientist" was pushing his opinion as "scientific fact" when he knew otherwise, it's really hard to rebuild trust. Like Fauci with the masks. He knew he was wrong. I'm old enough to remember when the government confidently asserted that butter was bad, eat margarine instead. I ate margarine for decades. Then it turned out the hydrogenated oil is more or less poison. Back to butter for me. We were told eggs were bad, meat was bad, grain is good. All wrong.

amy-petrik-214 2y ago
My pet hypothesis is Fauci saw an infectious disease / epidemiologists dream thought experiment. What if every human on the planet self-isolated for XX weeks? If most illnesses (e.g. cold, flu, airbone) die out after X days without a host, presumably a large chunk of communicable transient diseases that have been around forever.. would suddenly no longer exist. My thought is there was a sort of power-drunkness, mix of anxiety, and the blissful joy of doing this naughty experiment on 350 million people. With the best of intentions of course. Of course the problem with it all is one general of medicine. The infectious disease specialist stays in their lane and devises an infectious disease solution. I don't think psychiatrists or economists had much of a say in it. I would speculate there are particular populations such as healthy teenagers, who mostly handle COVID easily with near-zero death rate( HEALTHY teenagers).. where these COVID restrictions caused more damage, psychological and suicide, then the COVID precautions themselves... in order to save the boomer population which did benefit. The other problem, obvious now, is it didn't work. You can't bottle up people, particularly not muricans, a very individualistic culture. The goal was to knock out COVID in a week or two and look how it went.
FloorEgg 2y ago
It's funny because you're right about all those examples, and it's reasonable to point to them when explaining a loss of trust in science... But most of them are actually just companies or industries manipulating the public with shitty science for marketing reasons. Kind of a bad apple spoils the batch situation. Also I'm surprised the academic integrity crisis hasn't been mentioned yet... The cheating and plagiarism rates are orders of magnitude worse now than pre pandemic and LLMs
- M95D 2y ago
  > just companies or industries manipulating the public You forgot lobbying.
- WalterBright 2y ago
  > actually just companies Are scientists working for the government free from incentives to push bad science?
- HPsquared 2y ago
  Ah, so no true scientist would do such things.

Am4TIfIsER0ppos 2y ago

Scientists and doctors can go fuck themselves. They forbade us from going for than 1 kilometer from our homes under pain of death (government decree).

amanaplanacanal 2y ago
Where was That? Where I lived the biggest issue was that restaurants closed their dining rooms for a while and could only serve takeout.
- Am4TIfIsER0ppos 2y ago
  France.