The pandemic was an opportunity to do real science: randomized, placebo controlled trials with large sample sizes, long-term follow-up, and adversarial scientific teams.
Instead, the few RCTs that were run showed concerning results (e.g. higher all cause mortality in the Pfizer vaccine group), and there was no long-term followup.
Lockdown, masking, and social distancing studies were even worse. People fought -- and continue to fight -- over low quality, correlational, and confounded studies.
If force is going to be used, then it should at least be paired with well-run RCTs.
The pandemic was a failure to use science. Worse, science was weaponized, and now a large part of the populace conflates science with Scientisim. I sympathize.
Science has been misused as a weapon in the past, but, as the primary tool to implement totalitarianism, its use in the pandemic was ominous.
It isn't just the pandemic. Science is weaponized in the campaign to slow climate change — I offered examples in the post. It was weaponized in the nuclear winter campaign.
It's hard to prevent science from being politicized when it is largely funded by government. Two years ago it was in the interest of climate change researchers to produce results that implied a large cost of carbon. At the moment the opposite may be true.
We don't have a reliable mechanism by which ordinary people can distinguish the results of objective scientific research from propaganda pretending to be science.
The only solution I can see, in our present political system, is to have an elite that both is and deserves to be trusted. I think we once had an elite that was trusted, am not at all sure it deserved to be — In the 1930's the NYT published Walter Duranty's denial of the Ukraine famine. In the 1980's authoritative sources recommended switching from butter to stick margarine on little evidence, which turned out to be lethal advice.
The only alternative I see is eliminating all government funding of science. Of course there have to be exemptions for core government functions, like the military, and that opens up scads of loopholes. But don't pay for the Hubble or James Webb Telescopes, Martian rovers, and university research.
Americans donate twice as much as the next two closest countries, 3 times as much as the next two (Wikipedia has a list from 2016). They will donate to science that doesn't waste their money. A Mars rover would only be a couple of bucks per working adult; it will be funded. Studying Peruvian hummingbirds on cocaine will not be.
Charitable organizations would do most of the major donating, and independent auditors will scrutinize their donations. Some nonsense will always slip through, but nothing on the scale of government funding.
And the overhead rate will vary all over and be noted.
Terence Kealey, a British academic, has a book, _The Economic Laws of Scientific Research_, arguing that government funding of research does not, on the historical evidence, increase the rate of progress in the area funded. He also has interesting ideas on why it is in the interest of firms to hire people who spend part of their time on basic research.
Scientists did not have to participate in the weaponization. Some did not; some signed the Great Barrington Declaration. Some scientists need to think long and hard about their personal behavior during the pandemic.
How could you prevent that from happening? Control over trusted sources of information is valuable; how do you make it more valuable to people who want truth than to people who want support for their views?
It would go part of the way. But academics have an incentive to publish something novel to get hired and promoted. Something false is more likely to be novel than something true, and if you try hard enough it is often possible to get what looks like evidence for a false theory. That's the origin of the replication crisis in psychology.
> Politicization may have been inevitable but the particular linkages were not. Trump pushed for vaccine development and use but somehow vaccine became a left/right issue the other way around. In the early days restrictions on movement were supported by the right, opposed by the left. Later, when the issue shifted from restrictions on international travel to lockdowns, that flipped.
I think the particular linkages were inevitable, and even Trump couldn't override them.
In any case what happened is that once it became clear that the disease wasn't as dangerous as initially feared the right defaulted to supporting freedom and the left to supporting safety and managerialism.
It's neither impossible (just currently) nor immoral. I for one look forward to a future benevolent AI dictator. It won't happen in our lifetime nor our childrens, maybe never, but it's certainly possible at some point. Not sure your immorality angle, outside anarchy we will always have an overlord, it's just a question of degrees of input by the chattel on them.
Why do you think these things? As for the immorality part, compelling other people unjustly is immoral. Dictators throughout history have compelled other people unjustly.
The thing is a benevolent dictator isn't doing so unjustly hence why when anyone says this they use that specific qualifier. We all bow to a sovereign, the best we can hope for is benevolence and a future AI can provide that.
Not really because you will never have a benevolent democracy or any sort of representative government because of the public choice theory problem. History is chalked full of benevolent unitarian authorities, the problem is they often aren't consistently throughout their entire rules nor are their children. That has always been the point of representative governments, not aiming high as people seem to think but aiming to do damage control via a low bar of "well at least we can throw the bums out occasionally without violence" or along the lines the Pope "they don't last long, we only elect them old so they self limit".
"You will never have a benevolent democracy" doesn't prove the existence of benevolent dictators, nor address the oxymoron that dictators by definition are usurping freedom; that is not benevolent.
Or the government, et al, knowing from the beginning that the China flu, while serious and would produce moralities and morbidities as had past influenzas, aided and abetted by the media and monied interests purposely and willfully lied willing to sacrifice any and many for monetary gain and lock step control of the populace.
What's the time period now for conspiracy theories to be found true? Two weeks? Hopefully the above is fanciful, wild, crazy, whispers in the night, monsters 'neath the bed and will stay such, but... ;-)
I doubt that non-Covid health outcomes would have been better in the UK without lockdowns; there's no realistic set of policies where UK hospitals wouldn't have been overwhelmed by Covid given the lack of excess capacity.
It was very hit-or-miss. Some hospitals (including at least one local one where I live) was laying off employees for lack of need. Covid hit different places at different times, and with different levels of severity.
I think it's reasonable to say that some UK hospitals would have been very full, maybe overwhelmed. Others would not have been.
The whole point is that there was never a cost-benefit analysis to tell if overcrowded hospitals would have caused more death than the lack of treatment for other medical needs. Cost-benefit analysis is very important for making policy decisions.
David Bernstein of the Volokh Conspiracy wrote a book, "Classified", about how the absurd US government racial and ethnic classifications came about and how they have been used and abused. The original definitions expressly said they were not to be used scientifically. The book has a chapter on how the vaccine testing wasted several months testing them on the different racial and ethnic political categories per FDA mandate, which was medically meaningless, along with some estimates of deaths which could have been avoided had the vaccines not been so unnecessarily delayed.
I spent a few minutes googling for this, but only found generic book reviews.
Much more concerning, to me, was during the initial rollout when the government wanted to give the vaccine to racial minorities regardless of their risk profile. Old people and those who were immune compromised should have gotten the first go at it. I think they ended up backing down, but initial plans were for healthy minorities to get the vaccine on the opening tier, despite that making no sense from a community perspective and likely delaying the end of the pandemic for months (at the cost of many thousands dead).
Canada did prioritize racial minorities for the vaccine rollout. Ethnicity is not something that is listed on an ID or in a database, so creative work-arounds were used.
The northern provinces have large indigenous populations, so they received the vaccine months ahead other Canadians, in early March of 2021. Google "Dancing for joy: Canadian celebrates Covid-19 vaccination with Bhangra dance on frozen lake" if you want to see what was amplified by the Canadian media at the time.
The black and brown population was prioritized through organizing "vaccine clinics" in areas where they dominate the demographics. To avoid runs on these by other ethnicities, the media censored reporting, and "community resources" such as mosques and churches were used to advertise these. In addition you had to show ID showing you were resident in the area.
These groups were vaccinated months ahead of the over 75 population, largely concentrated in urban care homes, and due to the history of immigration in Canada, mostly white.
A white 50yo such as myself had the choice between AstraZeneca in May, or mRNA in late summer.
I thought this was quite a big deal at the time, "your government will discriminate against you and your family just because of the colour of your skin, protect and serve preferred ethnicities first".
Yes, that sounds quite bad from a trust in government perspective. Worse in your example, as many of the minorities in Canada live in remote areas where social distancing and preventing spread are far more realistic than in urban areas. At least in the US urban cores tend to be major concentrations of minorities.
And the US could have handled this much better just by simple hidden measures. It would have taken nothing to do the vaccine rollouts in those urban cores. People wanted and needed it more there already, it was easier to handle the logistics, and it would have involved no explicit "we're prioritizing for political ends"-type statements.
Huge missed opportunity that further erodes my trust in experts, or "experts" as it may be.
The thing is while you are correct, I don't think the overwhelming US population agrees and definitely not the policy makers. Many places still have COVID policies in place for example, here in today Hawaii doctors are still masking, medical facilities still force mask patients and visitors, people are still force quarantined if positive, jobs require COVID vaccinations including government proof of current boosters, and businesses still are running those plexiglass shields that were known to be infective day one, etc.
The skuttlebutt is generally "Biden and our local DNC politicians saved America if it wasn't for their policies, COVID would have been worse!!" with the proof in the pudding. Now sure that narrative fall flat in certain segments or parts of the country, sure but not in most. Remember even most Republicans and red states implemented those policies fully throated and many never walked it back.
I'm still waiting for my governor to issue an apology for creating a 24 hour curfew that only applied on Easter and telling the police to arrest anyone who went to church that day. Accountability is the fix here which is why it won't happen, in fact the opposite was proven channelling Goebbels that Americans will voluntarily and full throatedly given up their rights with the drop of a dime. I expect next time to be worse.
The pandemic was an opportunity to do real science: randomized, placebo controlled trials with large sample sizes, long-term follow-up, and adversarial scientific teams.
Instead, the few RCTs that were run showed concerning results (e.g. higher all cause mortality in the Pfizer vaccine group), and there was no long-term followup.
Lockdown, masking, and social distancing studies were even worse. People fought -- and continue to fight -- over low quality, correlational, and confounded studies.
If force is going to be used, then it should at least be paired with well-run RCTs.
The pandemic was a failure to use science. Worse, science was weaponized, and now a large part of the populace conflates science with Scientisim. I sympathize.
Science has been misused as a weapon in the past, but, as the primary tool to implement totalitarianism, its use in the pandemic was ominous.
It isn't just the pandemic. Science is weaponized in the campaign to slow climate change — I offered examples in the post. It was weaponized in the nuclear winter campaign.
It's hard to prevent science from being politicized when it is largely funded by government. Two years ago it was in the interest of climate change researchers to produce results that implied a large cost of carbon. At the moment the opposite may be true.
We don't have a reliable mechanism by which ordinary people can distinguish the results of objective scientific research from propaganda pretending to be science.
The only solution I can see, in our present political system, is to have an elite that both is and deserves to be trusted. I think we once had an elite that was trusted, am not at all sure it deserved to be — In the 1930's the NYT published Walter Duranty's denial of the Ukraine famine. In the 1980's authoritative sources recommended switching from butter to stick margarine on little evidence, which turned out to be lethal advice.
The only alternative I see is eliminating all government funding of science. Of course there have to be exemptions for core government functions, like the military, and that opens up scads of loopholes. But don't pay for the Hubble or James Webb Telescopes, Martian rovers, and university research.
Americans donate twice as much as the next two closest countries, 3 times as much as the next two (Wikipedia has a list from 2016). They will donate to science that doesn't waste their money. A Mars rover would only be a couple of bucks per working adult; it will be funded. Studying Peruvian hummingbirds on cocaine will not be.
Charitable organizations would do most of the major donating, and independent auditors will scrutinize their donations. Some nonsense will always slip through, but nothing on the scale of government funding.
And the overhead rate will vary all over and be noted.
Terence Kealey, a British academic, has a book, _The Economic Laws of Scientific Research_, arguing that government funding of research does not, on the historical evidence, increase the rate of progress in the area funded. He also has interesting ideas on why it is in the interest of firms to hire people who spend part of their time on basic research.
Scientists did not have to participate in the weaponization. Some did not; some signed the Great Barrington Declaration. Some scientists need to think long and hard about their personal behavior during the pandemic.
Unfortunately, both Lancet and Nature have become politicized rags.
Scientific American even more so.
How could you prevent that from happening? Control over trusted sources of information is valuable; how do you make it more valuable to people who want truth than to people who want support for their views?
I imagine a lot of their income comes from government-funded partisan "research". Getting rid of that would go a long way towards restoring sanity.
It would go part of the way. But academics have an incentive to publish something novel to get hired and promoted. Something false is more likely to be novel than something true, and if you try hard enough it is often possible to get what looks like evidence for a false theory. That's the origin of the replication crisis in psychology.
Wouldn't cutting away all that government support pull the rug out from under psychology and other fields which have so much excess research?
All pre-pandemic roads leading to Chapel Hill, North Carolina:
https://jimhaslam.substack.com/p/revisiting-ralph-barics-early-lies
> Politicization may have been inevitable but the particular linkages were not. Trump pushed for vaccine development and use but somehow vaccine became a left/right issue the other way around. In the early days restrictions on movement were supported by the right, opposed by the left. Later, when the issue shifted from restrictions on international travel to lockdowns, that flipped.
I think the particular linkages were inevitable, and even Trump couldn't override them.
In any case what happened is that once it became clear that the disease wasn't as dangerous as initially feared the right defaulted to supporting freedom and the left to supporting safety and managerialism.
Since benevolent dictatorship is both impossible and immoral, maybe we should go down the road your father recommended in Free to Choose.
It's neither impossible (just currently) nor immoral. I for one look forward to a future benevolent AI dictator. It won't happen in our lifetime nor our childrens, maybe never, but it's certainly possible at some point. Not sure your immorality angle, outside anarchy we will always have an overlord, it's just a question of degrees of input by the chattel on them.
Why do you think these things? As for the immorality part, compelling other people unjustly is immoral. Dictators throughout history have compelled other people unjustly.
The thing is a benevolent dictator isn't doing so unjustly hence why when anyone says this they use that specific qualifier. We all bow to a sovereign, the best we can hope for is benevolence and a future AI can provide that.
In other words, "benevolent dictator" is an oxymoron.
Not really because you will never have a benevolent democracy or any sort of representative government because of the public choice theory problem. History is chalked full of benevolent unitarian authorities, the problem is they often aren't consistently throughout their entire rules nor are their children. That has always been the point of representative governments, not aiming high as people seem to think but aiming to do damage control via a low bar of "well at least we can throw the bums out occasionally without violence" or along the lines the Pope "they don't last long, we only elect them old so they self limit".
"You will never have a benevolent democracy" doesn't prove the existence of benevolent dictators, nor address the oxymoron that dictators by definition are usurping freedom; that is not benevolent.
Or the government, et al, knowing from the beginning that the China flu, while serious and would produce moralities and morbidities as had past influenzas, aided and abetted by the media and monied interests purposely and willfully lied willing to sacrifice any and many for monetary gain and lock step control of the populace.
What's the time period now for conspiracy theories to be found true? Two weeks? Hopefully the above is fanciful, wild, crazy, whispers in the night, monsters 'neath the bed and will stay such, but... ;-)
I doubt that non-Covid health outcomes would have been better in the UK without lockdowns; there's no realistic set of policies where UK hospitals wouldn't have been overwhelmed by Covid given the lack of excess capacity.
It was very hit-or-miss. Some hospitals (including at least one local one where I live) was laying off employees for lack of need. Covid hit different places at different times, and with different levels of severity.
I think it's reasonable to say that some UK hospitals would have been very full, maybe overwhelmed. Others would not have been.
The whole point is that there was never a cost-benefit analysis to tell if overcrowded hospitals would have caused more death than the lack of treatment for other medical needs. Cost-benefit analysis is very important for making policy decisions.
David Bernstein of the Volokh Conspiracy wrote a book, "Classified", about how the absurd US government racial and ethnic classifications came about and how they have been used and abused. The original definitions expressly said they were not to be used scientifically. The book has a chapter on how the vaccine testing wasted several months testing them on the different racial and ethnic political categories per FDA mandate, which was medically meaningless, along with some estimates of deaths which could have been avoided had the vaccines not been so unnecessarily delayed.
I spent a few minutes googling for this, but only found generic book reviews.
Much more concerning, to me, was during the initial rollout when the government wanted to give the vaccine to racial minorities regardless of their risk profile. Old people and those who were immune compromised should have gotten the first go at it. I think they ended up backing down, but initial plans were for healthy minorities to get the vaccine on the opening tier, despite that making no sense from a community perspective and likely delaying the end of the pandemic for months (at the cost of many thousands dead).
Canada did prioritize racial minorities for the vaccine rollout. Ethnicity is not something that is listed on an ID or in a database, so creative work-arounds were used.
The northern provinces have large indigenous populations, so they received the vaccine months ahead other Canadians, in early March of 2021. Google "Dancing for joy: Canadian celebrates Covid-19 vaccination with Bhangra dance on frozen lake" if you want to see what was amplified by the Canadian media at the time.
The black and brown population was prioritized through organizing "vaccine clinics" in areas where they dominate the demographics. To avoid runs on these by other ethnicities, the media censored reporting, and "community resources" such as mosques and churches were used to advertise these. In addition you had to show ID showing you were resident in the area.
These groups were vaccinated months ahead of the over 75 population, largely concentrated in urban care homes, and due to the history of immigration in Canada, mostly white.
A white 50yo such as myself had the choice between AstraZeneca in May, or mRNA in late summer.
I thought this was quite a big deal at the time, "your government will discriminate against you and your family just because of the colour of your skin, protect and serve preferred ethnicities first".
Yes, that sounds quite bad from a trust in government perspective. Worse in your example, as many of the minorities in Canada live in remote areas where social distancing and preventing spread are far more realistic than in urban areas. At least in the US urban cores tend to be major concentrations of minorities.
And the US could have handled this much better just by simple hidden measures. It would have taken nothing to do the vaccine rollouts in those urban cores. People wanted and needed it more there already, it was easier to handle the logistics, and it would have involved no explicit "we're prioritizing for political ends"-type statements.
Huge missed opportunity that further erodes my trust in experts, or "experts" as it may be.
The thing is while you are correct, I don't think the overwhelming US population agrees and definitely not the policy makers. Many places still have COVID policies in place for example, here in today Hawaii doctors are still masking, medical facilities still force mask patients and visitors, people are still force quarantined if positive, jobs require COVID vaccinations including government proof of current boosters, and businesses still are running those plexiglass shields that were known to be infective day one, etc.
The skuttlebutt is generally "Biden and our local DNC politicians saved America if it wasn't for their policies, COVID would have been worse!!" with the proof in the pudding. Now sure that narrative fall flat in certain segments or parts of the country, sure but not in most. Remember even most Republicans and red states implemented those policies fully throated and many never walked it back.
I'm still waiting for my governor to issue an apology for creating a 24 hour curfew that only applied on Easter and telling the police to arrest anyone who went to church that day. Accountability is the fix here which is why it won't happen, in fact the opposite was proven channelling Goebbels that Americans will voluntarily and full throatedly given up their rights with the drop of a dime. I expect next time to be worse.