Covid-19 Discussion

Republicans antivaxxers actually went *against* their tribe leaders in a rare display of defiance to normal political tribe norms (where you pick up the tribe preferences).

De Santis was bragging about being the fastest to vaccinate elders in early 2021.

Trump was bragging about the success of the WARP initiative when the vaccine was delivered in late 2020.

https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/bri...

The two most important republican politicians wrt COVID management had a clear message at the beginning: the vaccine was a crucial step to permanently put covid behind us, and they were on the
frontline of it's development and it's distribution.

That was when democrats were skeptical of those vaccines & worked to delay their us.

https://nypost.com/2022/09/12/it-seems-c...

Then a portion of the republican base *violently rebelled* against that message, democrats started violently imposing absurd mandates (starting with dem-controlled colleges iirc), the tribes switched, and later it was "normal tribal politics".

And now republicans claim the vaccine was dangerous and blame the dems so I guess trump gets the last laugh on that one.

Trump probably had calls on Moderna too.

Pushing for warp speed doesn’t really make up for the undermining he did with mocking masks and social distancing though

The claim was that the division happened because of political tribes, and "some people only cared about their political tribe from the beginning and that was sad".

The opposite happened: a portion of a tribe went in a direction directly opposite of that of it's leaders, who then had to move their own preferences toward those of the people they have a moral and legal mandate to represent, in representative democracy.

Masking is a completely different topic: it never worked against covid, never saved a single life, and the masking discourse was a mockery of science, given the WHO and all other main scientifical bodies had a ton of literature on that up to 2019 and not a single one of them recommended population-wide mask mandates pre-covid.

There was actually the strong idea in literature that only trained professionals, and only in professional settings, were recommended to wear PPE, as badly wore PPE can actually be detrimental to personal and public health.

Some famous individuals in the scientific community then completely subverted all previously accumulate knowledge, went completely crazy about it, inventing a never proven purported efficacy of widespread mask use in all social setting by untrained people, and of course then we divided into political tribes about it.

That discourse moved along political tribes, with the collectivist , anti-freedom tribes favouring violent mandates, and the individualistic, pro freedom tribes being against mandates, as in most aspects of life and society.

I mean even under a "we are absolutely certain masks work" framework, the normal divide would have been against mandates anyway, I hope that at least is clear.

That much was clear when collectivist but pro freedom countries (Nordic countries in Europe, Japan) either never mandated masks or only did that after a long while and only in limited settings and only for brief periods of time

You’re a great writer but there is an absurd amount of material available on the effectiveness of masks in preventing the spread of coronavirus. I implore you to read up because you’re completely wrong

There certainly wasn't any such material when the push to "mask up" started, it actually started with the Czech republic trying it. At the time (march 2020) most public health institutions across the world tried to convince normal people in normal circumstances not to use them.

Later, they claimed that was because PPE was scarce and they wanted to guarantee preferential access to health workers.

But the banal truth is simply that all consolidated scientifical literature pointed to inefficacy of PPE to prevent the spread of airborne viruses except when used in controlled environments by trained professionals .

Then there was a phase where we thought COVID actually spread through droplets, and wasn't truly airborne (approx april-august 2020).

In that period of time there was then a mechanical explanation of a potential protective effect of masks. While that comes very far from being enough to claim efficacy, it was enough to allow to claim that wearing masks could have helped.

But when we understood COVID was truly airborne, (WHO admitted that in October 2020, data was clear before that) then masks ceased to have any justification (using previous, pre-covid, consolidated knowledge collected by hundreds of institutions in decades).

By that time, there was too much political capital committed to the pseudo-religious thought process of "you can do your part to end this crisis" (reality is, as with most epidemics, no you cannot and whatever you do doesn't matter in the slightest), so the countries that mandated masks paid for research to "prove" they were right.

I hope you understand that any research linked to institutions, or financed by people who mandated X before it was absolutely certain X works, cannot be trusted at all to prove X works.

Only people who never recanted pre-covid knowledge are trustable in that sense, that includes editors, peer reviewers, researchers and of course the various health related institutions across the world.

Fraudulent papers on a scale rarely seen before were then published to justify some of the most horrific actions western governments ever took in peace time in history (the house arrest of all minors for months in some countries for example), published with the help of the same people who did those actions.

All that body of fraudulent "science" has to be discarded and it's literally incredible anyone can use those papers as proof of anything.

But even inside that trove of malodorous bullshit, you still have plenty of papers not actually finding efficacy of masks in this or that setting.

Most importantly (for where the debate moved later on) in schools, where we had the "luck" of Spain and Italy mandating masks in school "only" above 6 years old.

So from 3 to 5 children didn't wear masks in schools in those countries, while masks were mandated 6+

If mask efficacy *in protecting others* existed, it would follow that infection rates among adult workers in 3-5y old schools would have been far higher than in all other schools.

They weren't, disproving with certainty ANY efficacy of masks to prevent third party infections.

While that alone doesn't tell you much about the efficacy to protect the wearer, we now know, scientifically, as a certainty (as much as you can have in non replicable science, which isn't too much but is what we have available), that other non trained professionals wearing masks in no way or form protects you.

So any one still claiming that's instead the case is lying, only question is why.

Do u believe covid 19 was dangerous ?
Do u believe its a mistake to use any non threatening tools available to counter an unknown virus ?

21 millions people died in 4 months due to the spanish flu in 1918.

I am not sure what you mean with "non threatening tool" tbh, can you calrify that before i answer? is house arresting people a "non threatening tool"?

While you clarify the second question, i answer the first.

The data necessary to gauge sarscov2 dangerousness came fairly soon, with almost everything we needed being exceptionally clear in september 2020 (and a lot of things, before that).

Notice that in the post you answered here for example, I even clarified why for a couple of months it was not tragicomic nor against scientifical rigour to believe masks could have had some efficacy.

That said, it was almost immediatly obvious that covid posed no threat to the under40 as a cathegory, except perhaps to ultra-frail under 40s, and in many countries (europe and asia especially) up to 60y old women and 50-55y old men. Keep in mind France whites had 0 excess deaths under 50 throughout the pandemic, Italy had 0 excess deaths among under60 women in 2020, 21, 22, and so on.

We didn't know that in march 2020 you say? except Bergamo already had happened (deaths peaked in early march) and those age thresholds were already confirmed! we also had data from the famous "diamond princess" ship which was quarantined in Japan, with more than half of the passengers being over60.

"No threat" not as in "it did absolutely nothing" but as in "it did absolutely nothing worse than other contagious disease we cohabit with, without any NPI and PPE". example: pertussis is far far far worse than covid for a random under40 individual but we don't house arrest people with pertussis, afaik, nor mandate masks to people who live with someone with pertussis when they go out of home, and so on.

So for all those people, life could have literally being lived with 0 changes with absolutely no significant difference in health outcomes, EVEN IF you believe NPIs and PPE have strong effects.

And that was certain, with absolute clarity, in april 2020 already.

As for the rest of the population, details can vary, but let's say that for example no disease we knew before ever did what sarscov2 did in nursing homes / LTCF.

10-30% of the resident population dying in 4-6 weeks in many cases around the world, unprecedented.

So "was covid dangerous"? it was clear almost immediatly that the answer was a clear and resounding NO for approx half of the population, a "not very much" for another 20-40% (depending where you want to put the threshold in terms of life expectancy risk exactly) of the population, and a "at least some, possibly a lot" for the 20-40% remaining.

yes
mask as well

its funny that so many were against the vaccine thinking it can take years to know if the vaccine is dangerous or not but doesnt take much of couple weeks in your opinions to know how far covid 19 is lethal or not.

And again, it isnt just because half the population is safe (meaning not dying) its fine for them.
its was about more then that.
for example it was not lethal for many under condition they had healthcare for example.
hospital cant deal with thousands of people at the same time.
so u had to trickle down the infection rates as much as possible.
u had to slow down the progression of the virus because they knew virus mutation increases as the cases of infection increases, not knowing if the mutation would get worst or not.
etc.

many variables are at play vs a pandemic to know how to deal with it.
fwiw we just might of been lucky the first mutation that occur tone down covid 19 instead of going up and get a more dangerous one.

Mod , we should just transfer those couple last post in covid thread .
Sorry for derail .

Ok so to answer your question, in general i think it's deeply immoral (and should be illegal, constitutionally, in decent countries) to mandate safety measures to people that don't personally gain from them directly, for any health related reason. I completly oppose the idea that a moral justification to violently impose sacrifice on someone to try to help someone else exists, for health especially, and especially when the sacrificed person is a minor or someone who is otherwise legally incompetent.

So once you determine covid is absolutely not a threat to minors, minors shouldn't be forced to do anything, or banned from doing anything, for covid related reasons, as simple as that.

Anything includes all aspects of society with no exception, life for them should have literally been identical in everything, from the moment we determined covid wasn't a significant threat to them.

Remember the definition of threat i am using: something MORE dangerous than OTHER contagious diseases which exist, and we don't mandate NPI/PPE against.

Utilitariansim is moral horror, the abyss which can justify all evil up to and included genocide, and some rights are absolute and *especially* in emergency shouldn't be touched , without exception.

You don't close schools for a disease that doesn't pose a direct , measurable threat to children bigger than other contagious diseases for which we don't close schools, as easy as that.

Now the gravity of other NPIs, for other segments of the population, is lower than the inhuman, disgusting, undefensible things most countries did to children. Especially when it was in the early days. So i am not claiming closing barbers in march 2020 was a crime against humanity. It was a stupid choice.

Now later on, even before vaccines, no NPI mandate made any sense at all. The gravity increases: closing barbers in november 2020 is a far bigger mistake than in april 2020.

Then, after efficacious vaccines existed, and were available for the at risk population willing to take them, all NPI mandate, even the smallest, can be considered a crime against humanity and should have been punished to the maximum possible extent in all jurisdictions (yes i am saying that mandating masks in colleges in late 2021 should have led to the arrest of the people making those decisions, among other things).

That's not only because covid got much less significant after the vaccine existed and was available, for people who wanted to take it (and those who wanted deserve no collective sacrifice for their health), but especially because mandating NPIs when the vaccine was available was the strongest antivax signal possible, an horrendous signal which helped antivaxxers immensely: if the vax exists and it works very well (as all data clearly told us) why the ****ing hell are you still living in a way that isn't identical to what you did before? the purported risk has been minimized to background noise levels for the totality of adults who wanted to protect themselves.

I will never forgive public health officials doing everything they could to weaponize antivaxxing, by denying life could go back to *full, completed, unadulterated normality* the moment you got your 2 doses.

Now to be clear and fair, Biden (and some centrist democrats in some states) had the right intuition and did reason along the lines i wrote above, for most things. However the idiotic, completly useless mask mandate in planes, trains and so on was lifted approx 1 year after is was absolutely obvious it should have been lifted (april 2022).

So my criticism here targets people, especially in education, who kept NPIs in place for minors and college students for far far longer than necessary. A significant portion of self-defined democrats in public healths committed crimes against humanity, lied to their teeth to do so, destroyed trust in public health for generations for anyone who isn't left leaning, and helped antivaxxers more than any rightwing demagogue with a big twitter following could have ever done.

I am sure people who wanted the vax to be ILLEGAL because we didn't wait 4 years existed, and that's a ******ed argument, but you know the fierce debate was about the fact that given we had (reasonably) skipped normal safety procedures, it was indefensible to even suggest to mandate such vaccine in any setting. Not that it was a mistake to let people inoculate it *fully voluntarily*.

In fact to the same extent i am not saying it should have been illegal to social distance even if young , if for some reasons you wanted to wait for more data before feeling safe around covid. I am saying no mandate should have applied to not-at-risk people.

There is a reason i talked about Bergamo.

The reason is that people of all ages were basically left to themselves there, healthcare was non existent for most, and especially for non elders. Hospitals were completly overwhelmed.
Healthcare workers in good faith might have even increased covid damage in the early days (by intubating unnecessarily for example, before we learnt that covid is peculiar and can significantly decrease your oxygen level without that require intubation even if the same levels would require it for other diseases).

Yet not a single person under40 died in excess in march 2020 in that area, do you understand how significant that is?

Which normal safety procedures were skipped?

Can you explain why you believe that's significant? Death rates varied significantly across countries and regions. The < 40 yo death rate in the USA was very low as well, so I'm sure there were months where there were very few deaths. Here are the total < 40 deaths in the USA since the pandemic began:

[CODE]
Age Group % deaths Count of deaths
0-4 years 0.07 846
5-11 years 0.03 325
12-17 years 0.05 586
18-29 years 0.61 7059
30-39 years 1.71 19945[/CODE]

here there is a decent model by J Hopkins

https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/vaccines/tim...

to describe how the procedure got accelerated for the most recent epidemic, but mainly you miss the "phase 4" assessment of possible long term damage (or very rare adverse effects which a phase 3 trial can't capture, when N is 30-40k and the effect is, say, 1 out of 50 or 100k doses).

Which again, to be clear, is ok for me in emergency (and possibly in general), just don't even think to mandate it until it has been on the market for many many years and studied ad nauseam.

Even then i would disagree on mandates for moral reasons (especially for people who didn't gain meaningful risk reductions from it, like previously infected people or young people for covid), but at least the objection about safety would be meaningless.

Phase IV trials are conducted after a drug has been approved and deployed. Why would you classify that as skipping a safety procedure when it's standard operating procedure for the FDA for most drugs?

"Continued oversight stage: After approving a vaccine, the FDA continues to oversee its production and monitor its safety. This includes periodic facility inspections. There are also Phase IV trials, which are optional, ongoing studies to identify uncommon adverse events and long-term complications, as well as to monitor effectiveness. Vaccines are also monitored by various surveillance systems, including the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), which accepts and analyzes reports of possible health problems after vaccination."

Source: https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/what-d...

Just so you know where I stand on this, I've written in this thread for a long time that COVID vaccine administration to children was medically unwarranted and bad public health policy. The risk for serious complications and deaths from COVID-19 in that cohort was incredibly small, while the vaccine risks were materially higher for that cohort vs other age groups. All medical interventions require weighing the risk vs benefit and in this instance the equation said children shouldn't get the vaccine.

the optionality of phase 4 trials is what we are discussing, in most cases it isn't waived, it was for covid vaccines. For one, we don't have a sizeable group of people who never took the vaccine (selected randomly, not biased by personal choices) to use a control group which is a problem (scientifically).

Then there is the fact that both pfizer and moderna got EUA (emergency approval) and full approval only later (reasonably). Yet the mandates started before full approval (!!!!).

Pfizer got full approval on 23/08/21, Moderna on 31/1/22

Many colleges mandated vaccination before those cutoff dates.

Do you agree it shouldn't be legal to mandate the intake of a drug which didn't even get full approval yet?

An optional phase trial is just that - optional. I wouldn't classify deploying a drug before an optional phase trial has been conducted as skipping a safety procedure, esp since it's done on many drugs. And especially true for vaccines, which by design have short half-lives and which, to my recollection, there has never been a vaccine that has demonstrated significant, long-term toxicity after its phase 3 trial approval and deployment.

I didn't agree with the COVID-19 vaccine mandates but the vaccines had been deployed and observed for the duration typically required for full FDA approval. The precise date of the full approval is IMO just a bureaucratic detail.

Not that small of a detail: the state of California explicitly waited until full approval to mandate the vaccine in state colleges, Biden admin waited for the full approval to mandate the vaccine for militaries and so on

The smallness of the detail is how it relates to the actual safety of the vaccine, not whether certain organizations chose to wait for it as part of their own policy.

I feel like there's people that know the basic rules of poker, but have never played, are examining hands after the fact that pros have lost with and telling everyone how bad those pros are.

This is all utter nonsense, for the record.

Masks were not recommended to the public as PPE.

The anti-maskers' lack of ability to understand the difference between masks as PPE and masks as source control will never cease to amaze me. It's really not that complicated, but it brings you guys to your cognitive knees over and over again.