[amscanne]

Don't use scare quotes to twist what is being said.

Bad science is pretending or thinking that we know more than we do, just as much as thinking the wrong thing is true. For example, claims about the under or over-effectiveness of masks (and subsequently vaccines) is definitely bad science that erodes public confidence in scientific leaders and organizations.

And the insane vaccine mandate for *children* (not federal, but some states in order to attend school) was absolutely bad science. I'm not opposed to the vacinne, but there was most definitely no evidence to support this requirement. At best, the current science suggests an unclear risk-benefit profile, and the information at the time in no way suggested a profile that justified a full-on mandate. This violated basic medical and ethical principles.

[DiogenesKynikos]

The science on masks and vaccines was not "bad."

Masks turned out to be highly effective if people actually bothered to wear them. Many studies found conflicting results in real-world use, because many people don't wear masks consistently. The correct response to that is to encourage people to wear masks correctly and consistently, not to claim that masks don't work.

The vaccines were initially highly effective against infection and transmission. That was a correct result of the initial studies. What the initial studies could not possibly capture was that the vaccine would become less effective over time at completely stopping infection (because of viral mutation and because antibody titers decrease over time), though they maintained their very high effectiveness at stopping people from getting seriously ill and dying.

> And the insane vaccine mandate for children (not federal, but some states in order to attend school) was absolutely bad science.

It's not insane at all. Schools are some of the most intense centers of viral spread in just about any community. It has long been known that reducing spread at schools is one of the most important measures in controlling a pandemic. The mRNA vaccines have a very good safety profile - the risk of side-effects is tiny. The most serious side-effect of the mRNA vaccines, myocarditis, is actually caused at a higher rate (and with greater severity) by Covid itself.

The scientific community did some amazing work during the pandemic. They almost instantly developed a vaccine that is extremely effective at preventing you from dying of Covid and which has a vanishingly small rate of serious side-effects. That would have been seen as a miracle a few decades ago.

What ruined the response to the pandemic was the politics of it, not the science. One aspect of that was the insane politicization of unalloyed goods like vaccination and masking. The paradox and tragedy of the United States is that despite having the finest scientific community in the world, most of the population is scientifically illiterate and open to manipulation and fear-mongering.

[amscanne]

> Masks turned out to be highly effective if people actually bothered to wear them. Many studies found conflicting results in real-world use, because many people don't wear masks consistently. The correct response to that is to encourage people to wear masks correctly and consistently, not to claim that masks don't work.

I’m not sure what you’re arguing here. The problem wasn’t the masks. It was scientific institutions flip- flopping instead of saying “we don’t know”.

- The CDC first said masks were unnecessary unless you were sick. - The CDC then said masks were strongly recommended, specifically cloth masks. These recommendations led directly to mandates. - The CDC then said cloth masks were mostly ineffective compared to N95.

Masks are common sense, and I think relatively few people were opposed to wearing them. The problem that I have is the translation of low-evidence science directly into policy. This is what I’m calling bad science.

> The vaccines were initially highly effective against infection and transmission. That was a correct result of the initial studies. What the initial studies could not possibly capture was that the vaccine would become less effective over time at completely stopping infection (because of viral mutation and because antibody titers decrease over time), though they maintained their very high effectiveness at stopping people from getting seriously ill and dying.

Initial studies did not test for transmission. People felt like they had been lied to regarding this aspect of the vaccines, as it was cited as the reason for many of the mandates related to vaccines. (After all, if they only affected the individual, what would be the purpose of the mandate?) I think this was more bad communication and bad politics, but it is hard to separate these things.

> It's not insane at all. Schools are some of the most intense centers of viral spread in just about any community. It has long been known that reducing spread at schools is one of the most important measures in controlling a pandemic.

You are over-generalizing and washing away details to argue something you feel should be correct. Yes, schools are often centers of viral spread — but this was never the case for Covid. Good science requires evidence before jumping to conclusions, not merely relying on what has “long been known”. If the vaccine was actually useful and important, they wouldn’t have quietly rolled back mandates a year later: it was quietly rolled back because it was a mistake. I think you are wrong regarding the risk profile, the largest study I’ve seen for children is still unclear: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-47745-z#Sec2 (I do think it’s likely safe, but we never had the science to justify a mandate for school children)

You can argue that the mandate was politics — that’s fine, but in that case they are inextricable. I would agree that a lot of what I’m calling bad science is actually scientific institutions taking positions under enormous political pressures. I still think that science was wielded as the weapon during this time. Which saddens me deeply, as I strongly agree that the vaccines themselves were incredible examples of the miracle of modern science.

I think you’re blaming the wrong people when you say the population is scientifically illiterate. While that’s true, I think that Americans just hate being told what to do, and when there isn’t really justification for it (I.e. the bad science), they’re gonna do the opposite. The lesson shouldn’t be that people are dumb, it should be that trying to force half-baked policies down everyone’s throats will backfire.

[DiogenesKynikos]

> The problem wasn’t the masks. It was scientific institutions flip- flopping instead of saying “we don’t know”.

Actually, this is an area where I would criticize the CDC, though I understand why they did what they did. The first thing is that the US was desperately short on N95 masks, and not even medical staff who were treating Covid patients had reliable access to masks. Public health authorities were afraid of a run on masks (which happened anyways), which would make that situation even worse. The government should have explained the situation to people, appealed to their civic duty (which probably wouldn't work in the US), and taken emergency measures like commandeering stocks of N95 masks from retailers.

The other aspect of this, which one could see as "bad science," was that various studies had found that laypeople don't know how to wear masks properly, so their real-world effectiveness was in doubt. I think the correct response to that is to teach people how to wear them, not to say they don't work. But before the pandemic, there was genuinely dispute in the literature about what the best mask recommendation in a flu pandemic (which was what everyone was planning for) would be.

> Initial studies did not test for transmission.

Initial studies tested for signs of infection. If your chance of getting infected is dramatically reduced (which it was in the first few months after vaccination), then of course you are less likely to transmit the virus. If you don't get infected, you don't transmit.

> Yes, schools are often centers of viral spread — but this was never the case for Covid. Good science requires evidence before jumping to conclusions, not merely relying on what has “long been known”.

It absolutely was the case for Covid, as it is for pretty much every respiratory disease on Earth. In the middle of a pandemic, you don't have time to run a months-long study with thousands of children to determine if schools are centers of transmission. The virus spreads by people breathing near one another. A room full of children running around slobbering on each other is obviously going to be a perfect environment for the virus to spread. One parent gets sick. Their child gets sick. Then all the children get sick. Then all the parents get sick. It's like clockwork, as anyone who has children knows. Waiting for all the studies to come in to confirm the obvious in the middle of a pandemic would be completely irresponsible.

> I think that Americans just hate being told what to do, and when there isn’t really justification for it (I.e. the bad science), they’re gonna do the opposite. The lesson shouldn’t be that people are dumb, it should be that trying to force half-baked policies down everyone’s throats will backfire.

As opposed to what? Telling people not to vaccinate and not to mask? The issue of masks and vaccines were incredibly politicized in the US, and there were all sorts of people cynically using these issues to appear anti-establishment. The US has a long history of paranoid-style politics, and in a pandemic, that's basically poison.

[amscanne]

> Initial studies tested for signs of infection. If your chance of getting infected is dramatically reduced (which it was in the first few months after vaccination), then of course you are less likely to transmit the virus. If you don't get infected, you don't transmit.

You don’t know this a priori, and it turned out that there was significant transmission even when people were asymptomatic. The bad science here was jumping past the evidence and claiming that the vaccines stopped transmission, when there was no data to support that. (It would be fine to say that they “probably reduce transmission” but this does not justify mandates, which is presumably why this well-intentioned-but-not-data-supported jump happened.)

> It absolutely was the case for Covid, as it is for pretty much every respiratory disease on Earth. In the middle of a pandemic, you don't have time to run a months-long study with thousands of children to determine if schools are centers of transmission. The virus spreads by people breathing near one another. A room full of children running around slobbering on each other is obviously going to be a perfect environment for the virus to spread. One parent gets sick. Their child gets sick. Then all the children get sick. Then all the parents get sick. It's like clockwork, as anyone who has children knows. Waiting for all the studies to come in to confirm the obvious in the middle of a pandemic would be completely irresponsible.

Strong disagree! Waiting until there’s evidence is a basic tenant of medical ethics, and has been for centuries. “Do no harm” means that we err on the side of natural outcomes when uncertainty is high, which it certainly was for children. You could argue that the risk profile was high enough for older or less healthy adults to justify the vaccine risk and release strong guidelines (and I would agree with this), but we had a much more limited risk profile for children, who were far less susceptible. We also had no data on how much the vaccine reduced spread, so everything you’re arguing would have been purely assumptions (which is bad science!).

And re: months, the vaccine mandate for children was for schools starting in fall 2021, over a year after the start of the pandemic and 9 months since the vaccine was deployed. There was plenty of time and data already, and I don’t think the evidence justified the mandates for children. I believe that such mandates were actually very unusual globally (so the science was certainly not clear-cut enough to have most of Europe do the same thing).

> As opposed to what? Telling people not to vaccinate and not to mask? The issue of masks and vaccines were incredibly politicized in the US, and there were all sorts of people cynically using these issues to appear anti-establishment. The US has a long history of paranoid-style politics, and in a pandemic, that's basically poison.

I’m not sure why you are disagreeing here, I agree with your general strategy that you laid out above. Tell people how to wear masks, what’s proven to be effective and what isn’t, what we know and don’t know about the vaccines, and appeal to their personal and civic responsibility (take the vaccine to protect yourself and others).

When you lie and manipulate (or base recommendations and policy on assumptions that later turn out to be false), you create more anti-establishmentism and paranoid-politics (which is pretty rational, given the manipulation).

[DiogenesKynikos]

> You don’t know this a priori, and it turned out that there was significant transmission even when people were asymptomatic.

Again, you can't transmit if you're not infected.

> Strong disagree! Waiting until there’s evidence is a basic tenant of medical ethics, and has been for centuries. “Do no harm” means that we err on the side of natural outcomes when uncertainty is high

The "natural outcome" in this case is mass death. We know how respiratory diseases spread. You're arguing that we should have assumed Covid is a magical disease that refuses to spread in the perfect breeding ground - schools - until we did months of studies. That's an incredibly irresponsible attitude to take in the middle of a pandemic that is killing millions of people in the US alone.

> We also had no data on how much the vaccine reduced spread, so everything you’re arguing would have been purely assumptions (which is bad science!).

Science also works with plausibility and theory. In the middle of a pandemic, you have to base many of your decisions on what you know about other, similar diseases, what is scientifically plausible, etc. If we followed your recommendation, we would throw our hands up, do nothing, and let millions of people die, even though we would have a very good idea of what measures would likely prevent that.

> When you lie and manipulate (or base recommendations and policy on assumptions that later turn out to be false), you create more anti-establishmentism and paranoid-politics (which is pretty rational, given the manipulation).

You're letting all the people who deliberately pushed paranoia for their own political gain off the hook, and blaming the people who did the most to fight the pandemic - the scientific and medical community.