The short answer to those who were for masking, social distancing, and lockdown.
DOING NOTHING WOULD HAVE BEEN DRAMATICALLY PREFERABLE!
Lockdowns were NOT common sense measures. They were hysterical reactions out of fear. Here are 15 of just some of the reasons why it was not common sense.(I’m not including all the reasons we have NOW to see they were a bad idea.)
The long answer:
FRIEND WRITES IG COMMENT TO ME:
"If you challenge the scientific community you should have an alternate solution to the problem. Simply throwing your hands in the air doesn’t sound like a well informed argument. What is the solution? Do nothing isn’t one."
MY RESPONSE
1/First, this isn’t “Mark against the scientific community.”
This is one subcommunity of scientists who agreed with the narrative the media and politicians were pushing, and those same scientists thereby became the “experts” in their stories, and represented “The Science.”
2/Another huge community of scientists worldwide were against this since the start. But their story didn’t fit the narrative of “an altogether novel and dangerous virus that we should do anything and everything including violating civil rights en masse in order to stop.”
3/I am associated with several organizations of scientist who have been opposing this from the start. Just because CNN tells you “experts say” doesn’t mean “experts say.” It’s bullshit.
4/As for where the responsibilities are...
For those proposing altogether novel, draconian, civil rights quashing interventions, what was required was to provide a cost-benefit analysis, including the obvious potential for devastating side effects.
They did no such analysis.
5/Instead, they misapplied the Precautionary Principle, saying “We have to do something out of precaution!”
But the Precautionary Principle is that the burden of evidence is on those proposing the new, untested policy.
6/Lockdowns, mandatory masking, social distancing, etc. WERE the new, untested policies. …AND were explicitly recommend AGAINST as of 2019. They were enacted by panic, copy-catting other nations & states, and CYA (to be seen as doing something).
7/Not only did they not do the utility calculus on both sides of the equation, they pretended that we live in China, where there are no civil rights.
The first two principles for medicine are
(1) Do no harm.
(2) Obtain consent.
Both were violated.
8/The harms have in fact been massive. And obvious. I was shouting against it on social media since March 10 of 2020, along with like-minded colleagues on the Left, Center and Right.
9/And — worse — the interventions have been shown to not even have narrowly worked. Their ONLY effect was the devastating side effects, to health (short and long term lockdown deaths) and livelihoods (crashed economies).
10/The responsibility is not on me to say what else we should have done.
DOING NOTHING WOULD HAVE BEEN DRAMATICALLY PREFERABLE!
11/But there WERE obvious things to do.
The infection fatality rate ranges from 0.0002% for <18 years old (which is many times safer than flu) to 5% or even more for those pushing 80+ with comorbidities (which is potentially several times worse than the average flu).
12/end
That’s four or so orders of magnitude variation, and so there is absolutely no reason to overturn society, because the folks in danger are painfully obvious.
Focused protection of THOSE individuals was all that was needed.
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