[jMyles]

"Trust the science", a refrain we of course heard over and over again used to justify questionable (and often coincidentally highly profitable) interventions during the COVID-19 pandemic, is already a contradiction in terms.

The entire basis for being so enamored with science, as so many of us are, is that it provides a method for establishing facts without needing trust.

Despite the noise to the contrary, we live in a highly literate age, and are a species filled with curiosity and compassion. There's no reason that scientific findings - especially those used to underwrite public policy - cannot be made easy to understand and straightforward to replicate.

[cmiller1]

> justify questionable (and often coincidentally highly profitable) interventions

What interventions might those be? I'm only aware of the interventions that time and time again have been proven to be highly effective that were implemented here, masking, improved guidelines for hygiene, distancing, and vaccination.

[exoverito]

The unprecedented surge in money printing which pushed nearly all asset prices higher, causing major inflation. The mandated vaccines, paid for by taxpayers. Lockdown policies which effectively forced most people under house arrest, sending tech stocks like Amazon, Google, Facebook to all time highs. There was also a clear conflict of interest between companies like Google which benefited from lockdowns, and their content policies which censored criticism of the response to covid. Needless to say it's creepy to have the vast majority of information controlled by a handful of companies.

[someuser2345]

> vaccination.

One of the vaccines was recalled due to causing potentially fatal blood clots: https://www.pfpdocs.com/jj-vaccine-recall

[jMyles]

I mostly mean lockdowns, which were a spectacular failure - they caused both a delay in endemic equilibrium in the low-risk tier and also an increase in household transmission, which put the high-risk tier at increased likelihood of contracting the virus early. This is not even to mention the collateral damage, which is being studied by Suneta Gupta and other epidemiologists here: https://collateralglobal.org/.

Lockdowns were roundly rejected by an enormous chorus of the top experts in relevant fields, and yet somehow the messaging was spun to make it sound like there was significant debate. And of course, no actual data was ever made available by proponents for the rest of us to even consider, let alone replicate. This is what I mean by the "trust the science" message being a contradiction in terms.

Of the interventions you mention: masking was not shown "time and time again" to be highly - or even moderately - effective. The dearth of rigorous study on the matter is bizarre. The Bangladesh study showed no statistically significant effect for cloth masks, and very modest effects for others - certainly nowhere near enough to justify mandates.

I'm not very aware of the literature on distancing - can you provide sources to research which you think shows that it has "time and time again proven to be highly effective"?

Vaccination of course appeared incredible out of the gate, but we now know that there was significant unblinding during phase III, and the real-world results have not lived up to either the safety or efficacy claims. So, while the vaccines are a great achievement, I'm not sure we can draw the conclusions that the scientific method was as rigorously adopted as we might hope in the context of this discussion about the pitfalls of "trust the science" in matters of public policy. Instead, profit seems to have motivated a relatively shoddy series of rollouts. Moreover, the fallout over the disastrous booster approval cost us a number of experts who resigned in protest (obviously Gruber and Krause are the most notable, but there were many others both at FDA and in academia). So I think it still belongs in the 'loss' column as science-based policy goes.

[cmiller1]

Clicked that link, it's full of rightwing conspiracy nonsense, is that the kind of place you usually get your information?

[jMyles]

I admit, I hadn't looked at it in a while, and it has become much busier / flashier. But I don't immediately see anything that I'm able to identify as rightwing conspiracy nonsense - to what are you referring?

(The founders were of course criticized as being too left wing; have they over-corrected?)

[cmiller1]

> Anthony Fauci is finally facing his reckoning

The "founders" of this appear to be a single crank that dedicates all of his time to his hatred of reasonable responses to a disease.

[jMyles]

Your critique... strikes me as hostile and reactionary (and you are fingering others as rightwing?).

> The "founders" of this appear to be a single crank

I presume the "single crank" to whom you refer here is the author of the piece whose headling you've partially quoted, Kevin Bardosh, who is a professor of public health, expert and front-line responder on arbovirus epidemics (the threat of which still loom large), and widely regarded as an up-and-comer in this field.

The actual founders are unassailable - Sunetra Gupta and Carl Heneghan are Oxford powerhouses, among the top minds in the world on the subject matter, and have published many of the most influential and enduring pieces over their decades of professorship. Other than crude trolling, I cannot fathom what might drive you to the conclusion that their are either invisible (per your use of the word "single") or that they lack the expertise required to take the positions they take.

You'll note that the editor in chief (who happens to be a friend of mine) is a professor of epidemiology at Stanford and a senior fellow at The Hoover Institution. In addition to his work at CG, he has also worked closely throughout the pandemic in his publishing and advocacy with professors from the other three of the top 5.

Like... I hate credentialism too, but if that's your angle, it seems bizarre to attempt to smear the top professors at the world's top medical schools as cranks.

As for your quote:

> Anthony Fauci is finally facing his reckoning

...this strikes me as roundly true. Fauci was a respected professional in his field, albeit surely a PITA bureaucrat for those who depend on NIH grants for research (and perhaps already with one strike given his half-assedness and homophobia early in the AIDS pandemic, but that was fashionable then I guess).

He threw it all away in the past 3 years. His response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been almost all wrong at almost every moment. He misinterpreted the significance of the Diamond Princess dataset. He misled the public about the empirical foundations of social distancing. He unambiguously lied to Congress about the presence of gain-of-function research, which he personally greenlit. I mean... that's pretty bad.

He's not going to be sitting at the cool kid's table anymore. And yeah, he is facing a long road of reckoning ahead for what he's done.