[jMyles]

Well put. Though I suspect that the overwhelming majority of the sentiment to which you are referring is being carried by bots and not real humans.

It's a difficult time to be empirically-driven, though hopefully we will come out better for it.

[toss1]

You think that having no public health measures is data driven? Go read some data. Seriously. Or, just go to pre-1950s graveyards and gather data on how many dead children there were before public health measures. Or look at the data on how the public health measures ran extinct a strain of flu so it is no longer being included in the vaccine formula.

[jMyles]

I don't see anybody advocating for no public health measures - perhaps you might consider that the views of others are as nuanced as yours.

> Or, just go to pre-1950s graveyards and gather data on how many dead children there were before public health measures.

Indeed! But this doesn't mean that every measure undertaken was reasonable or evidence-based. Germane to the thread at hand: at the height of the polio epidemic, some states sprayed DDT in a bizarre and mistaken belief that it was likely to reduce transmission of the virus. As with lockdowns and masks and surface 'disinfectants' and other unproven measures today, this happened over the objection of a chorus of experts who had already begun to unearth the fecal-oral route of transmission of polio.

Yes, in retrospect, this seems silly and trivial. But at the time, it must have been very frustrating to spend your life (or even your hobby time, as I do) studying public health only to have a hairbrained idea with no empirical basis become the framework on which policy was decided.

> Or look at the data on how the public health measures ran extinct a strain of flu so it is no longer being included in the vaccine formula.

I... presume you are talking about the B/Yamagata lineage of Influenza B?

Nobody knows why this lineage disappeared, and anybody who claims to is trying to sell you something or influence you.

One exciting prospect is that it is the result of viral interference, a phenomenon frequently observed but not yet understood, and potentially the basis of future immune therapy.

In any case, the disappearance of a particular lineage of Influenza B or of H3N2 (which of course is the current endemic influenza, but began as an epidemic subtype in the 1960s) is not an overall public health win or loss; it just means that other lineages (in this case, B/Victoria) will present the endemic strains in future years unless B/Yamagata re-emerges.