The response to COVID should be thoroughly investigated, but this page just seems like a partisan hackjob. The framing is clearly intended to get maximum partisan impact, not to find the truth.
This page is a summary of the testimony which is clearly trying to pick quotes and/or frame things to make Fauci and Democrats look bad. FWIW I agree that eg. children shouldn't have been required to wear masks in school, but I don't trust whoever wrote this to write a neutral or fair summary from the full set of facts we know (which no one will read directly because it would be thousands of pages).
> children shouldn't have been required to wear masks in school
Historically children were required to get vaccinated before attending public schools. Having large groups in close proximity for long periods is a serious disease transmission risk. With COVID the children themselves had minimal risk but the community was at risk from them.
~1,220,000 people died with the precautions we took. That doesn’t mean 1,220,000 people would have died with fewer precautions or that more couldn’t dramatically lower that number.
Public heath is complicated, but we traded roughly a million American lives for freedom. Suggesting we should have done less is a difficult stance for me to support even as doing dramatically more would have been extremely painful.
Red states are more rural which slowed spread initially, but overall you see a higher death monthly rates in Red states after the first wave ~July 2020 not just after vaccination became available.
It’s not just state policies. The first wave in 2020 hit most densely populated and thus Blue counties hardest, but the second wave in 2020 and every wave after that hit the least populated and most Republican areas hardest.
Cross-checking the list with population density figures per state gives a very different outlook. I went through a very cursory look and skipping the "purple" states I got:
New Jersey is #1 after DC, Mississippi is #33.
New York is #8, South Dakota is #46.
Massachusetts is #3, Louisiana is #26.
Connecticut is #4, North Dakota is #47.
Illinois is #12, Arkansas is #35.
Only getting to New Mexico it breaks down since Alabama has a higher pop. density but Albuquerque has 2x the pop. of Huntsville and pretty much 3x the pop. density.
To be clear I’m glad we don’t live in the kind of totalitarian state that would have been required for such extreme measures, but …
Keeping deaths to ~1/4 million would have been theoretically possible from extreme social distancing until total mandatory vaccination of the population was achieved.
I’m rather glad we didn’t go down that route, but it’s worth remembering when we opened things up it was with full knowledge that people would die from those choices.
This isn't a math problem, it's not a stats problem. Realizing this abstraction of numbers is an error of reification. What's really worthy of consideration is the holistic picture which as of yet can not be resolved due to the ineradicable complexities of the evolving circumstances. The protocol to which we were subjected wrought untold damage and it's unclear in the long run whether the effects which evolved will have ultimately saved any lives.
For instance the current geopolitical regime is certainly informed, in part, by the economic and political effects which originated as a consequence of and during COVID and shutdown mandates. And these economic effects have also affected policy and personal behaviors. It's a whole Pandora's box, and we won't be able to measure it with any meaningful resolution for... Probably decades... And even then there will be conflation because attributing overdose deaths to economic issues emanating from shutdown policies five years after the fact isn't a trivial argument to make, but nonetheless isn't an impossibility when considering actual human circumstances.
And then considering what may have occurred on the obverse, where actually minimal intervention was taken, is also impossible to surmise. But I don't think it's unrealistic to have a meaningful boon. It may be the case that in spite of all the intervening circumstances that mortality would have ultimately been comparable due to the half-hearted nature which may have just been a collosal disruption. e.g. we hit a saturation point which lead to peak mortality and policy failed to modify the consequent mortality in the range beneath it.
And yet another where minimal, targeted interventions a la the Great Barrington Declaration were deployed.
And since nobody acts in isolation in a globalist society it will be yet more difficult to ascertain.
So bandying about mortality numbers, I think, is insufficient when there have been so many consequences which have evolved from COVID policies, many of which are qualitative and difficult to quantify but have considerable meaning outside the silly abstractions we conjecture carry so much meaning.
Large scale impact doesn’t automatically imply net positive or negative impact.
Less pollution in 2020 will have positive health effects for decades to come vs significant economic harm which is where the uncertainty comes in. If we don’t know if the impacts are positive or negative we must default to looking at the net effect we can measure and add error bars around it for the things we can’t calculate.
They used the term "New Normal" from day 1. Conspiracy theory is just a derogatory term to belittle opposition.
They gaslit us on so many topics throughout the years.
They have went back on their statements on Ivermectin
They have went back on their statements on efficacy of the jabs - starting from 99% effective down to 10% - indicating
they never had any tangible data to support their claims
They said that the jabs were about stopping transmission, then gaslit saying they never said that despite hundreds of hours of recording saying otherwise
Fauci admitted the 6 ft distancing had no science / data behind it.
Should I bring forth the damage caused by thrusting stage 2 ventilators on people?
What about the damage from vaccines with myocarditis and GBS?
You can call me a conspiracy theorist all you want, but the official narratives are more riddled with inconsistencies than the "conspiracies" were
Now back to your original question of can we dispense with the data that is knowingly bad - yes.
Comorbidities were enough to do that, along with false attribution. Ofcourse these topics were heavily censored, creating even more discourse.
> They have went back on their statements on efficacy of the jabs - starting from 99% effective down to 10% - indicating they never had any tangible data to support their claims
I can buy that they never had tangible data. But can you point me to a source for them claiming only 10% effective?
This borders on intellectual dishonesty on your part. They’re saying the vaccines, with their effectiveness around the original quoted numbers were ineffective against a new variant.
There are hundreds of other articles detailing ineffectiveness of the vaccines and lowering efficacy. It is well known that the institutions also changed the narrative to say that vaccines were never about "transmission"
I've seen a 2 minute long video showing the declining percentages mainstream media claimed on the vaccine over the course of 3 months. Perhaps this one particular article was dishonest however.
Your original statement was that they lied about the effectiveness. The article you presented to back that up was about how the effectiveness was different for a different strain. So either you didn't read the article, didn't understand it, or were being dishonest.
Are you denying the blatant/overt censorship? Many scientists were censored by institutions. This is well known and documented. The twitter files even made this apparent on congress floor, where silicon valley knows more about science than accredited doctors.
I'm saying that you haven't provided anything to back up your conspiracy theories. "I've seen videos", "the twitter files". None of this substantiates your original claims, and are pretty typical of conspiracy theorists.
“Dr. Fauci repeatedly played semantics with the definition of “gain-of-function” research in an effort to avoid conceding that the NIH’s funded this dangerous research in China”
There is so much BS editorializing here. Also is there any research that shows that masking actually impaired learning? I didn’t see any listed, just claims that there were studies.
It seems that the policies of maintaining a 6-foot distance and masking for children were not based on scientific data. Please correct me if I am misinterpreting this testimony.
You are. When there's an active pandemic killing thousands (would become a million, just in this (outlier bad at responding to it) country), "science" doesn't require having a peer-reviewed ten-year old study that has been published in Nature and survived challenges.
In such circumstances, just being familiar with the latest related science, and the fundamental concept of science, qualifies you to take your best (informed) guess. Making kids wear masks made sense in absence of data that showed it wasn't effective, because it's been so effective with other, similarly airborne-transmissible diseases.
> The “6 feet apart” social distancing recommendation forced on Americans by federal health officials was arbitrary and not based on science.
Again, "we could wait to conduct studies whether 4 feet is good enough, or 9 feet is required; or we could take our best shot since thousands of people are dying each day", and base our decisions on scientific data previously collected, in extremely similar pandemic/transmissible-disease contexts, even if it might imperfectly match the present scenario.
> "science" doesn't require having a peer-reviewed ten-year old study that has been published in Nature and survived challenges.
It does. That sort of requirement is why people respect science and wanted to rely on it in the first place.
What you're arguing here is not that Fauci was doing science, as he clearly wasn't - pulling ideas out of thin air isn't science. What you seem to be arguing here is that science wasn't of any use for making decisions because the process is too slow.
That might well be correct. But in that case there was no basis for governments to do anything at all, as the question wasn't in the political realm either (nobody had campaigned on it in an election for example). Which means they should have just left individual citizens to their own devices.
You probably won't like that conclusion, but the alternative is to destroy the meaning of the word science. If it isn't a deliberative process in which you do what's needed to establish reliable world models then it's nothing at all, and there's no reason anyone should care what "scientists" say as they are little more than witchdoctors.
No, it's not as binary as you're making it. You can have a science-based estimate. Even though you don't have a rigorous, peer-reviewed study to prove it, it's still based on as much science as you can get your hands on.
But it's still an estimate, and saying "trust the science" as if the science was settled is going too far the other direction.
I don't have a problem with people doing the best they could with what they knew. I object, on one hand, to the claim of certainty, and on the other hand, to the rejection of best estimates as being purely unscientific.
Nobody disagrees with any of that. The reason we reject their best estimates is because they weren't scientific. At all. In any way. Not even a little bit.
We've all read the transcript but to repeat it:
Majority Counsel: “Do you recall when discussions regarding, kind of, the at least a 6 foot threshold began?”
Dr. Fauci: “You know, I don’t recall. It sort of just appeared. I don’t recall, like, a discussion of whether it should be 5 or 6 or whatever. It was just that 6 foot is—”
Majority Counsel: “Did you see any studies that supported 6 feet?”
Dr. Fauci: “I was not aware of studies that in fact, that would be a very difficult study to do.”
It's not obvious how this could be any clearer. He states unambiguously that it wasn't a best estimate based on science, whether contemporary or pre-existing. Science doesn't even get a look in here. He didn't even know where the number came from. It became global policy but nobody can figure out why or how. He even seems to reject the idea that the question can be answered scientifically at all.
> What you’re arguing here is not that Fauci was doing science
Well, sure. He was doing his job as a government employee, and right then the job wasn’t to do science and spend the next five years doing a comprehensive study on the virus. It was to make policy recommendations based on science in the sense of “drawing on his many years in the field, and decades of science around the transmissions mechanisms of other, similar diseases” and then to make a guess, yes. All scientists do this, often. Your chemistry teacher in high school made you wear googles when you were mixing liquids even though she didn’t have a paper in Nature definitively showing that the stuff you were mixing that day was even that bad to splash into your eye.
> What you seem to be arguing here is that science wasn’t of any use for making decisions, because the process is too slow.
No, you are arguing that, by insisting that rigorous multi-year studies unequivocally demonstrating the efficacy of masks, specifically with regard to this novel coronavirus that nobody had seen before, would be the only “science” based way to come up with a recommendation, and anything else is “pulling ideas out of thin air”.
I am arguing that all the science around viral transmission generally, influenza, bird flus, mask densities, aerosol spread of saliva and particles, etc. — although yes, not as good as a solid peer reviewed study delivered by scientists from the future who showed up in a time machine — generally is, and I think was in this case also was, of considerable use.
It’s an emergency. Millions of people are dying. It’s spread across the whole world. All any human being can do in that situation is form a hypothesis based on similar, but not perfectly similar, previous experiences. And I think it is obvious to anybody not being intentionally obtuse that the people we want making those guesses, based on the science around other seemingly-similar diseases, are the experts who know the science around those previous diseases, and the efficacies of various methods of prevention, etc., rather than some random guy like me who’s good at writing software and making omelettes, but not familiar with any of the scientific literature around viruses.
And then yeah, obviously modify those guidelines and recommendations (or sure, even laws) as the scientific process continues and better data becomes available.
> I am arguing that all the science around viral transmission generally, influenza, bird flus, mask densities, aerosol spread of saliva and particles, etc ... All any human being can do in that situation is form a hypothesis based on similar, but not perfectly similar, previous experiences.
Yes, it's understandable why you believe that Fauci and other public health officials must have been basing their rules on prior experience. That's what reasonable people would do, it's what reasonable people would expect others to do.
Unfortunately, what we're saying and even what Fauci is clearly saying in this transcript is that they didn't do this.
To repeat: yes, we want scientists to give their best advice (with reasonably accurate confidence ratings) based on their prior experience even if there's no time to do an in depth study right away. That's exactly why people are mad. Public health people said that's what they were doing - relying on their knowledge of the past to inform the present - but it wasn't.
If you review the pre-COVID science on respiratory viruses (like I did) you'll find that what it said was:
1. Lockdowns won't work. SARS-1 could move between buildings on air currents. People have been observed to spontaneously get a cold even when entirely isolated and with no exposure to anyone else who was sick or any contaminated objects (see [1] for an example).
2. Border controls won't work.
3. There's no evidence masks would work (so in science we assume the null hypothesis of no effect).
4. Vaccines also won't work. Coronaviruses mutate too fast and evolve beyond any immunity.
5. Scientists don't understand the epidemiology of respiratory illness and can't model them successfully.
6. Past coronavirus pandemics ended when the virus mutated into a more infectious but less serious form.
The literature was very depressing. Nothing worked and nobody understood why not. In other words: there's a fundamental theoretical gap and no pre-existing understanding of any value, also, no time to try and obtain that new understanding. Therefore science was of little use during COVID.
People like Fauci, who are paid nice salaries because they claim to be scientific, are very strongly incentivized to not conclude this. It's the old saw about getting a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it. People want to hear that the experts have it all under control. They don't want to hear "the scientific understanding to date can't help us". Yet, that's what true scientists should have said.
This is a slippery slope. These policies had a vast affect on the lives of millions of people. Business were shut down. Schools were closed. People were instructed to stay in their homes for years. Simply saying, "Well, we made our best guess," is absolutely not acceptable. When the government curbs human rights, they have an obligation to weigh and justify the costs with scientific evidence.
What is your suggested approach when there is no (reliable) scientific evidence for any course of action and not enough time to gather such (reliable) evidence? Note that not taking any action is also a decision that, in your framework, requires supporting evidence.
Not taking action doesn't require supporting evidence, and insickness didn't propose a framework in which it does. There is at any moment an infinite number of things you could choose to not be doing. You can't collect evidence for not doing those things, as the amount of evidence required would also be infinite.
Not taking any action is also a decision, and it has to be justified like anything else that will affect the health and lives of millions of people.
You don't need to collect evidence for everything you choose not to be doing, all you need is evidence that the status quo is not worse than any other (known) alternative.
In any case, my point was that you can't make decisions based on evidence when you are faced with a new situation for which there is no (reliable) evidence. In these cases some other approach is needed.
You're saying that random bureaucrats deserve unmitigated police power. That's authoritarian and despotic.
In fact, average people have the ability and humility to do basic ground-level checks that authorities and academics almost never do - a simple ability to step back and say "does any of this even make sense in the context of my own life and what I'm observing?"
All of this "advanced" knowledge of supposed-experts often clouds their judgment and just equips them with sophisticated reasoning ability to give themselves undeserved confidence in their own self-deception, grave errors and misunderstandings.
"The best science we have available during this medical emergency suggests that increasing distance reduces transmission for similar diseases, so we are going to recommend people maintain a 6-foot distance."
to
"unmitigated police power [...] authoritarian and despotic."
The 6-foot "rule" was only a recommendation, not a law. You were entirely free to ignore that recommendation. Not sure where the police are coming in to this?
The 6-foot distance was revealed as a fiction several years ago. [1] The rules for child masking in other countries demonstrates fairly well that there was not a strong scientific basis.
The article doesn't conflict with what I stated. It's a probabilistic estimate based on the prior that COVID spread like flu. The further you go the less your chances of catching. Because you can't convey probability effectively to public (you confuse them), you convey an arbitrary number.
I don't think you're misinterpreting the testimony but I do think you're drawing too strong of a conclusion. The fact that one official couldn't remember a scientific basis during a 14 hour interview doesn't mean there wasn't one.
Between flip-flopping reccomendations, ineffective mandates, and functionally shutting the whole country down, I find it hard to believe someone believes the measures taken during the pandemic were "minimally invasive" or "common sense".
At times, public discourse felt more like some war between political factions than a country dealing with an inconvenient highly-infectious virus.
I will never forget the cult-like fanatacism surrounding the virus and vaccines from my peers during that time (went to an extremely liberal high school). Its even more insane how quickly those people just stopped caring entirely after lockdown ended and the news cycle moved onto the next Biggest Thing Ever, of the week.
People are free to make their own decisions on the basis of unscientific thinking. The issue is when decisions are made for you, and you’re told there is a scientific basis, and there isn’t.
Terrific false dichotomy — bravo. The post I was responding to was critiquing the prior post on the grounds that people make decisions without a scientific basis all the time. My point was that people are free to make these decisions, but that governmental mandates should be held to a higher standard.
I of course would not have said that we could have reduced covid infections by following the steps you suggest. But governmental mandates need to take into account both sides of the ledger. If having kids in school could have prevented massive learning loss and not resulted in significant additional deaths/hospitalizations, then that's something worth considering.
Ok so you admit that social distancing and masks help reduce the spread of covid-19. That’s great to hear.
What do you and Jim expect to learn from a scientific study? That 12 feet is better than 6 feet?
I’d like to hear from each of you what you hope to learn, and why you think it would have been worth intentionally infecting people with covid-19, as that’s what would be required for a conclusive scientific study.
> What do you and Jim expect to learn from a scientific study? That 12 feet is better than 6 feet?
I don't know anyone named Jim, nor am I saying we need to have definitive studies before giving out guidance. However, if we are going to give out guidance that ends up requiring schools to space out kids' desks in a way that makes it impossible for many of them to open, I think that guidance should either be grounded in science or admitted to be a best-guess. This is about transparency and honest, which are especially important when the government issues mandatory rules that upend life as we know it.
Reduced, no. The best available evidence is that it would have made no difference either way. Sad and depressing but that's where the data takes you. This is physically possible for any virus that can spread long distances on air currents including through air ducts, as SARS-CoV-2 can (just like its predecessor SARS-1). As it's not possible to be outside 24/7 nor to wear a mask inside 24/7 regardless of mask type, the chance of not being exposed fairly quickly is pretty low. The epidemiology of airborne respiratory viruses is not the same as measles.
The best evidence of this is still the nearly controlled experiment that happened on the Diamond Princess cruise ship early on, which was completely ignored afterwards due to what it showed.
I mean I honestly don’t know how there are people still repeating this lie that masks didn’t or don’t work.
Hundreds of thousands of people spent days in our hospitals. If PPE was not effective, every doctor and nurse in the country would have been sick by week 2.
Doctors and nurses did get sick. There were plenty of reports in the very early days about doctors dying of COVID, or mass absences of nursing staff. Then they got immunity and went back to work.
Masks had no effect. This isn't a lie. Look at any graph of cases from any country you care to pick, then try and draw a line where mask mandates were added or removed. You won't be able to, because even when a whole population was forced to start wearing a mask overnight there was no inflection in the graphs. The point of everyone wearing masks was to slow down the growth in those graphs, or even put it into reverse. Yet nothing happened. This is absolute proof that they did not work.
That's why the argument for masks always ends up relying on invalid lab studies using mannequins, or self-reinforcing models that just prove their own assumptions, or arguments of the form "people just didn't wear the right kind of masks". When you look at what was actually tried, the ground truth data doesn't show any effect.
The fact that you can't see where mask mandates went into effect isn't an indictment of masks — it's about the effectiveness of mandates. People were already wearing masks before the mandates, and people who were dead-set against masks continued not wearing them after the mandates were in effect.
Regarding doctors and nurses, they are trained in how to wear PPE and are much more likely to do so appropriately than civilians or (especially) children. PPE can be effective against COVID, but probably 1-5% of civilians wore masks according to protocols. Wearing a mask incorrectly might help, but AFAIK there are zero studies on this.
These findings indicate that countries with high levels of mask compliance did not perform better than those with low mask usage.
There are literally no correlations anywhere to be found. No impact on case numbers (the goal!) and no link between compliance and outcomes. That's because masks cannot stop an aerosolized gas from entering the body, it just goes through or around them. Aerosolized agents can also enter you via the eyeballs, which is why real gas masks also protect the eyes:
This sort of thing is why masks have no effect and at first health officials said that. They were right. But governments wanted to do something, and that was something, so public health "scientists" swiftly fell into line and overnight "the science" was suddenly saying the opposite.
Given that there were absolutely no widespread studies at that point, they had to go on priors. And the 6 ft guidelines was based on the belief that if COVID spread mainly through droplets (which was the most likely theory at that point). The children aspect was again based on limited information available at that point.
With all the data now, we see that COVID affected older and less healthier population. They had no idea at that point, conclusively so always erred on the side of caution. All this house investigation is a Republican witch-hunt.
Whether a question is valid and worthy of exploration has nothing to do with whether the listener deems the intention behind it to be "correct". The preposterous notion that certain questions are part of a sinister "'Just asking questions' rhetorical device" and must be ignored long ago became, like "dogwhistle", the first resort of those that don't want the statement/question dealt with at all.
He should not be punished for the 6ft guidelines or the mask mandates (I agree that it's better to be safe than sorry). However, Fauci did promote the idea that the lab leak theory was a racist conspiracy theory, and he denied that the NIH was funding gain of function research in China.
And what the general population doesn't get about public health officials is they are only concerned with "how to save lives", "how to stop the spread" and "how to not overwhelm the health system".
Given the choice of widespread admittance of children to hospitals vs inconveniencing them with masks, they'd always choose the latter option. With the benefit of hindsight, there are always things to blame but this investigation is a hackjob.
None of the findings here are surprising. Covid was a real special time in politics because you could see politics impacting decisions on a daily basis.
It seems that basically across all aspects of Covid (masking, social distancing, biz closures, school closures, lockdowns, etc...) you got one answer if you listened to mainstream media and the govt but a completely different answer if you looked at the underlying evidence.
Probably my "favorite" (ie the one that drove me the most crazy) was the school closures. From the very start you could skim the daily case numbers and see that worldwide, kids made up a small percentage of those infected and an even smaller percentage of those that died. Nevertheless though you always got the same narrative from leaders about the dangers of Covid to kids.
Any pushback on the official narrative and the usual response was "well you're not a doctor so what do you know" which drove many people insane because for things like school closures, you didn't need anything above a basic understanding of statistics to see that the official narrative was complete BS.
I'm honestly really glad that moment in time is behind us.
The school decisions were absolutely some of the worst decisions, especially with the number of professionals dedicated to child health and welfare begging for the exact opposite.
You have to understand how bad COVID posts make HN users look . I've saved quite a few screenshots over the past 4 years. They don't want to be reminded of how badly they got the phenomenon wrong and how much damage it caused millions of people.
Here's a good one from 11/20 discussing preprint data on Pfizers shot.
The problem is that that kind of data is not being recorded, and certainly not published. My country purposefully did chose not to record official numbers of the actual vax state of death. No one properly collects data on myocarditis etc. Selective science (just like selective moderation) is a plague
I've seen data but I don't catalogue everything and much of it doesn't come from established sources.
So one must look for evidence of conspiracy elsewhere. NYU Langone releasing commercials a year after mass mRNA inoculation featuring children with myocarditis would be one example of non-data evidence of something awry.
