Interesting covid article....
Whiners Corner➕ New Thread↩ Reply to Thread🔎 Search
PosterMessage
That I can only read 1/8 of because of the paywall.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/10/covid-resp...
The gist I get is: sorry we were dicks and did all sorts of shitty things to you out of fear, but you should forgive and forget.

Fuck off.
October 31, 2022, 6 AM ET
Share
In April 2020, with nothing else to do, my family took an enormous number of hikes. We all wore cloth masks that I had made myself. We had a family hand signal, which the person in the front would use if someone was approaching on the trail and we needed to put on our masks. Once, when another child got too close to my then-4-year-old son on a bridge, he yelled at her “SOCIAL DISTANCING!”

These precautions were totally misguided. In April 2020, no one got the coronavirus from passing someone else hiking. Outdoor transmission was vanishingly rare. Our cloth masks made out of old bandanas wouldn’t have done anything, anyway. But the thing is: We didn’t know.

I have been reflecting on this lack of knowledge thanks to a class I’m co-teaching at Brown University on COVID. We’ve spent several lectures reliving the first year of the pandemic, discussing the many important choices we had to make under conditions of tremendous uncertainty.

Some of these choices turned out better than others. To take an example close to my own work, there is an emerging (if not universal) consensus that schools in the U.S. were closed for too long: The health risks of in-school spread were relatively low, whereas the costs to students’ well-being and educational progress were high. The latest figures on learning loss are alarming. But in spring and summer 2020, we had only glimmers of information. Reasonable people—people who cared about children and teachers—advocated on both sides of the reopening debate.

Derek Thompson: School closures were a failed policy

Another example: When the vaccines came out, we lacked definitive data on the relative efficacies of the Johnson & Johnson shot versus the mRNA options from Pfizer and Moderna. The mRNA vaccines have won out. But at the time, many people in public health were either neutral or expressed a J&J preference. This misstep wasn’t nefarious. It was the result of uncertainty.

Obviously some people intended to mislead and made wildly irresponsible claims. Remember when the public-health community had to spend a lot of time and resources urging Americans not to inject themselves with bleach? That was bad. Misinformation was, and remains, a huge problem. But most errors were made by people who were working in earnest for the good of society.

Given the amount of uncertainty, almost every position was taken on every topic. And on every topic, someone was eventually proved right, and someone else was proved wrong. In some instances, the right people were right for the wrong reasons. In other instances, they had a prescient understanding of the available information.

The people who got it right, for whatever reason, may want to gloat. Those who got it wrong, for whatever reason, may feel defensive and retrench into a position that doesn’t accord with the facts. All of this gloating and defensiveness continues to gobble up a lot of social energy and to drive the culture wars, especially on the internet. These discussions are heated, unpleasant and, ultimately, unproductive. In the face of so much uncertainty, getting something right had a hefty element of luck. And, similarly, getting something wrong wasn’t a moral failing. Treating pandemic choices as a scorecard on which some people racked up more points than others is preventing us from moving forward.

Read: You were right about COVID, and then you weren’t

We have to put these fights aside and declare a pandemic amnesty. We can leave out the willful purveyors of actual misinformation while forgiving the hard calls that people had no choice but to make with imperfect knowledge. Los Angeles County closed its beaches in summer 2020. Ex post facto, this makes no more sense than my family’s masked hiking trips. But we need to learn from our mistakes and then let them go. We need to forgive the attacks, too. Because I thought schools should reopen and argued that kids as a group were not at high risk, I was called a “teacher killer” and a “génocidaire.” It wasn’t pleasant, but feelings were high. And I certainly don’t need to dissect and rehash that time for the rest of my days.

Moving on is crucial now, because the pandemic created many problems that we still need to solve.

Student test scores have shown historic declines, more so in math than in reading, and more so for students who were disadvantaged at the start. We need to collect data, experiment, and invest. Is high-dosage tutoring more or less cost-effective than extended school years? Why have some states recovered faster than others? We should focus on questions like these, because answering them is how we will help our children recover.

Many people have neglected their health care over the past several years. Notably, routine vaccination rates for children (for measles, pertussis, etc.) are way down. Rather than debating the role that messaging about COVID vaccines had in this decline, we need to put all our energy into bringing these rates back up. Pediatricians and public-health officials will need to work together on community outreach, and politicians will need to consider school mandates.

The standard saying is that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. But dwelling on the mistakes of history can lead to a repetitive doom loop as well. Let’s acknowledge that we made complicated choices in the face of deep uncertainty, and then try to work together to build back and move forward.
I like you, thanks!

I'd used up my 'free' views...not sure when that happened.

"These discussions are heated, unpleasant and, ultimately, unproductive."

The part of the article that is spot on, IMO, for every conversation here, LMAO.
Absolutely not, Atlantic.

The censorship, lockdowns, arrests, financial devastation, people losing their jobs, "horse paste" and the active campaign to devalue generic treatments in favor of vaccine profits, the creation of a "dirty," "inferior" social class, denied surgeries/transplants, minimization of side effects, believing well-established liars and propagandists over your fellow citizens, the greatest upward transfer of wealth in U.S. history...

People need to feel the sting of this, because that's the only way we don't ever pull this shit again.
^This here.

How convenient, just memory hole and gaslight telling people the vaccine was never tested/intended to stop the spread, just help you not have a serious case. Then why did we fucking shut down everything?

In an ideal world, there would be public crucifixions for this.

"But most errors were made by people who were working in earnest for the good of society."

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! More like earnest good for big pharma and permanent bureaucracies worldwide. How about all the people who got the shot out of fear for losing their jobs and then had complications?
I genuinely feel sorry for those that took the vax. I wish them the best of health.
Parents are still required to take their kids to school and submit them to medical care for other vaccinations. They've been doing stuff like this for over a hundred years now.
Yeah, but those vaccinations work. New York Supreme Court recently ruled the Covid vaccine mandates were unconstitutional because the vaccine didn't prevent transmission nor people getting sick. Government workers that got fired get backpay because of this.
I don't know of any vaccine that directly prevents transmission, unless you are making this statement in the context that the vaccine prevents you from having active symptoms and thereby you don't transmit the virus.

as for the second part of your statement, we will just have to agree to disagree
Then the constitution enforces the existence or reality of vaccination… or is this just the archetypal constitution of our imaginations?
I don't think the point of contention is simply the efficacy of the vaccine, but rather the efficacy of the vaccine juxtaposed with the heavy-handedness of government's response.
Backalleybuttlove wrote:
"But most errors were made by people who were working in earnest for the good of society."

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! More like earnest good for big pharma and permanent bureaucracies worldwide. How about all the people who got the shot out of fear for losing their jobs and then had complications?

You can be a scientist at Pfizer and have full faith in the company's mission and that the only way out of this is with a Speed of Science™ vaccine. But if you didn't buy into all that... well, it reminds me of a Chomsky quote:

"I'm not saying you're self-censoring. I'm sure you believe everything you say. But what I'm saying is if you believed something different, you wouldn't be sitting where you're sitting."
level1nobody wrote:
I don't think the point of contention is simply the efficacy of the vaccine, but rather the efficacy of the vaccine juxtaposed with the heavy-handedness of government's response.

I do not comment on gov't role. We know more now than we did then and clearly some actions were not warranted. My comment was on a re-occurring narrative by some on these boards that repeat a specific fact pattern that is not accurate.
Prelude to Agony wrote:
I'd used up my 'free' views...not sure when that happened.


Delete all cookies from theatlantic.com
Mmmmmmmmmmmmm........... Cookies!!!

-[IBSC]-iLluSiON- wrote:
Because I thought schools should reopen and argued that kids as a group were not at high risk, I was called a “teacher killer” and a “génocidaire.” It wasn’t pleasant, but feelings were high. And I certainly don’t need to dissect and rehash that time for the rest of my days.

It wasn't so much that the school age children were at risk of dying, as much as they could "take it home" to someone with a compromised immune system, whom it could be fatal to. That being infants who haven't developed an immune system yet, and the elderly.

When it ran through my house, Katina and I faired pretty well against it because we had the vaccine. Timothy didn't get it, and was sick as fuck for a couple of weeks.

Had it gotten into our home a year prior, I likely would have been widowed again, as Katina's immune system was compromised because of her open-heart surgery at the end of January 2020. According to her doctors, her immune system wasn't "back to normal" for a good 9 months after the surgery. As her "at home caregiver", I had to be in contact with her. But I was unlikely to be the one to bring it home (as we found out), as I hardly went anywhere, and I took every precaution suggested when I did go out.
Herd immunity, seems to work most of the time and Covid never was the scourge it was made out to be. I lost people to it,we all did.Panic ruled and common sense went out the window.Businesses were destroyed along with the work ethic of people being paid to stay home. I never would have thought that a country could get so fucked up over a virus as this.Lots of money was made as the rich got richer and your rights were trampled on.You are welcome to your opinions but mine will never change about Covid.
^This here.

At least for me Covid sort of broke the left/right paradigm. I just voted here in Israel and voted for the party whose platform is to release the sealed Covid cabinet meetings and end all the mandates and the Covid state of emergency. Everything for the most part has been lifted but there are still some things like medical students have to be vaccinated if they want to do their internships. They probably won't win. But both "right" and "left" had varying forms of mandates, lockdowns, etc. It started with Bibi who boasted about Israel being first to get the vaccine. I was a big Bibi fanboy but his pandering of the vaccine and being in charge when there was all the mandates and lockdowns made him fall from grace with me.

@moose poop, "...agree to disagree" what on the New York Supreme Court case?
https://twitter.com/just_mindy/status/1587148452055629826
End of Thread
RefreshNext Unread
If you wish to reply to this thread, please log in