[noam_compsci]

Covid debunks all your claims. I’ve taken all my covid jabs and boosters so I’m not coming at this as some alt right antivaxxer, but the systemic and systematic shut down of any dissent against mainstream science and scientific organisations was/is disgusting.

[chrisan]

> Covid debunks all your claims.

No it doesn't.

Maybe something on social media but not a single one of my wife's colleagues at the hospital nor any other scientist would have turned down ivermectin (as an example, there were many other theories besides that one drug) if it had shown any sign of doing good for their patients.

There were routine talking about alternate therapies among the scientists/doctors/researchers about these topics. You can search for the UCSF Covid Grand Rounds on youtube and watch the history of their open discussions as research was routinely presented from all over the globe on the various items.

I code for a living and have no idea about this stuff, but my wife's goal is to make patients better and she would watch the grand rounds (or similar) every time and I'd listen from another room. Not a single alternate treatment wasn't discussed and evaluated.

[felipeerias]

I’ll give you an example.

Until 2020, healthcare authorities in the Western world were were certain that viruses could never remain airborne for extended periods of time.

People who thought otherwise (i.e. Asia) were routinely dismissed as unscientific dunces following some weird cultural habit.

Eventually it turned out that the Western scientists didn’t really have any hard evidence for that belief. It was just an old idea that happened to match with their priors, so they kept parroting it to one another and to the public until the dead started piling in.

[civilitty]

> Until 2020, healthcare authorities in the Western world were were certain that viruses could never remain airborne for extended periods of time.

Did measles not exist before 2020? Where do you people find this crazy shit?

[chrisan]

Source of western healthcare authorities telling the public this?

edit: also the airborness of it was also a repeated topic in the cited grand rounds

[felipeerias]

The WHO only declared COVID-19 to be airborne in December 2021.

There were many articles at the time describing this failure. It’s interesting how quickly it has faded from memory.

I’m on my phone, so this is just an example from a quick search. Again, there are many like this:

“Public health organizations including the World Health Organization (WHO) initially declared the virus to be transmitted in large droplets that fell to the ground close to the infected person, as well as by touching contaminated surfaces. The WHO emphatically declared on March 28, 2020, that SARS-CoV-2 was not airborne (except in the case of very specific “aerosol-generating medical procedures”) and that it was “misinformation” to say otherwise. […]

“The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the United States followed a parallel path […]

“The very slow and haphazard acceptance of the evidence of airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2 by major public health organizations contributed to a suboptimal control of the pandemic, whereas the benefits of protection measures against aerosol transmission are becoming well established.”

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ina.13070

[magicalist]

You said

> Until 2020, healthcare authorities in the Western world were were certain that viruses could never remain airborne for extended periods of time.

There was certainly mainstream belief that covid was limited to droplet transmission (though I remember much discussion of that as well) but the idea that Western medicine didn't think any viruses were airborne is nonsense.

Another comment brought up measles, which is a great example, and known for many decades.

[jquery]

>Until 2020, healthcare authorities in the Western world were were certain that viruses could never remain airborne for extended periods of time.

"Healthcare authorities" are not necessarily scientists, they are professionals. Nor am I aware of them ever making this claim in the first place, at least never in any kind of coordinated way. Please provide a source.

If you're talking about masks for Covid, that was because the Trump administration bungled the mask situation so badly that we were critically short on masks[1]. It was decided that to minimize causalities, focus would be on making sure health care professionals got masks first.

1. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/n95-...

[melagonster]

>It was just an old idea

but it is from the experience of another Corona virus outbreak last time.

Asia just know wearing mask is helpful anyway.

[felipeerias]

But the health authorities in the West did not update their knowledge in view of that evidence. I am familiar with the case of Spain: when the COVID-19 pandemic started, the public healthcare guidelines in Spain still classified coronaviruses as mild viruses, not more severe than the flu.

[brabel]

> Eventually it turned out that the Western scientists didn’t really have any hard evidence for that belief.

Regardless of whether this particular "belief" was actually held by anyone (it probably wasn't as others point out), science is fully based on evidence. If what you say is actually true, what those people claiming that were doing was not science by definition. You cannot claim something which you can't back up with data and plenty of evidence and call what you're doing science.

[spookthesunset]

You were living in an echo chamber if you think that is true. I dare you to question any covid crap in front of your parent or (former) friends and relatives. Wait until they call you every awful thing in the book.

Criticism or intellectual curiosity was absolutely not tolerated.

[bigger_inside]

the scientists are not the problem here, PUBLIC science and public institutional structures were, are, and will be. The media takes a scientist, who has a strong tendency to say "this may work, we can't be sure" and "under some conditions, we believe that it might" and turns it into "we know!"... for institutional media reasons. Some scientists like the attention and are willing to play along, to an extent. Public institutions need "certainty rhetoric" for legal and PR reasons. The reason Ivermectin was so clubbed to death wasn't because it ddn't work, it was because the legal process of emergency certification of the vaccine required that there are no working cures, so that could institutionally not be pursued. No evil intention is needed here; "we want to help and this is a legal hurdle", on the one side, meets "we want to sell this thing and need the certification" on the other.

Scientists will always say "wait a minute, were not sure". Institutions and their structures leave little room for this, so scientists get translated to certainty rhetoric, and the gullible public who often has a quasi-religious view of science swallows it, as that's how the media makes it for them.

[noam_compsci]

> my wife's colleagues

Your wife’s colleagues are not the scientific community at large. Organisations such as WHO and numerous government regulators flat out lied to the public throughout the pandemic.

Take the UK. Our health watchdog swore that masks were not needed and people shouldn’t wear masks at the start of the pandemic. This was specifically to stop hoarding of masks needed in hospitals. 3 months later mask mandates were a legal obligation with fixed penalty notices given for not wearing them.

Take the lab leak theory that WHO and many many governments said was a Hoax. Pretty much widely known to be correct now.

And yes. Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine etc.

Finally. Vaccine safety. There is a lot of evidence that there was not informed consent on the full impact of taking the combine vaccine. Like I said, I took all the doses. I’m not an antivaxxer. But the scientific community destroyed careers of anyone that tried to say otherwise.

[someNameIG]

> Take the lab leak theory that WHO and many many governments said was a Hoax. Pretty much widely known to be correct now.

A possible lab leak was never ruled out, just most of the evidence does not point to it. It was never 10% ruled out during the pandemic and now.

I'm a biologist, have friends who also biologists and work in connected fields. Unless you think a possible lab leak is the same as someone posting "100% proof covid is a CCP bioweapon!!!!)

[pfdietz]

> Pretty much widely known to be correct now.

What? I thought it was widely acknowledged to not be ruled out. But how could it be shown to be correct?

[melagonster]

vermectin and hydroxychloroquine still are not correct treatment of covid-19 now.

[dontupvoteme]

>Maybe something on social media but not a single one of my wife's colleagues at the hospital nor any other scientist would have turned down ivermectin (as an example, there were many other theories besides that one drug) if it had shown any sign of doing good for their patients.

Japan used it and it worked there.

[josephg]

A quick google search disagrees:

https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-439365261885

[rusk]

In my jurisdiction at least it was hijacked for business purposes. I believe that all the lockdown stuff was necessary but after a while certain actors started to take advantage of it, for instance supermarkets selling a broad range of stuff while all regular stores had to stay shut. Hurdur supply chain.

Then there was the stockpiling of PPE, hand sanitizer. The dismissal of masks unless they were “very good” (totally ignoring collective benefit vs individual) and self testing (again ignoring aggregate benefit vs individual). As soon as particular commercial interests got their positions covered these things all of a sudden became “okay”.

Again, like I say the Covid outbreak was real. We did need to do what we could not least to safeguard medical services.

But boy did the schemers go to town once they figured out a way to get rich from it.

Still waiting for that windfall tax on the supermarkets.

[RandomLensman]

Not sure the claim is true in the strong form, but that aside: was the approach wrong as far as policies and social outcome are concerned? Would a more nuanced approach have worked better and by what metric? Just being unhappy about what happened isn't enough for things social.

[lol768]

I think this is a tricky one. Certainly I wasn't particularly impressed with how the science was communicated in a few areas:

- The AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine, and the risk/benefit analysis, particular in younger adult demographics

- The WHO's position on airborne transmission of Covid-19, and the way in which understanding in this area was misrepresented to the public

I took part in a vaccine clinical trial myself, and there was a much more in-depth discussion as to what was known about the candidate vaccination, its side effect profile - and, more importantly, the limits of our knowledge given the small population it had been tested in when I volunteered.

We didn't see much of that nuance during the height of the pandemic.

At the same time though, some may argue that trying to combat misinformation requires over-simplifying some things, such that they can be effectively communicated to the public.

Ref:

https://twitter.com/who/status/1243972193169616898

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00925-7

[kuhewa]

> The AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine, and the risk/benefit analysis, particular in younger adult demographics

This is more of a matter of public health than science though. It would be nice if they were the same thing but it's like asking for people to be perfectly rational and well-informed actors like in those economics models