No one should ever listen to these "public health experts" again

[WiseOne]

This makes me ashamed for my profession. The inherent contradictions here are insane.

For starters, why would a virus care about the reason for a mass gathering? They're saying that mass gatherings are safe only if they are for the purpose of protesting racism? But not safe if all you want to do is, say, enjoy a day at the beach, or play basketball in the park?

I'm still super curious about whether these demonstrations/riots will lead to a COVID spike. I had this very conversation last night with an MD/PhD student in my lab. He is guessing it will not cause a spike, because of the effect of being outdoors rather than indoors, and a bit of herd immunity in the population from which the protestors came. If there is no increase in cases, I am DONE with wearing a mask outdoors!!!!

I think I told the story already about being exposed to miliary TB (a highly infectious form that is spread by droplets) and not seroconverting. I was working at a mission hospital in Kenya and the patient was coughing right at me. I didn't have any protective gear at all. The protection was because we were in a large hospital room with something like 40 beds, and lots of wide open windows.

[Kriegsspiel]

I'll leave this here as well.

Now begins the grand effort, on display in thousands of articles and news broadcasts daily, somehow to normalize the lockdown and all its destruction of the last two months. We didn’t lock down almost the entire country in 1968/69, 1957, or 1949-1952, or even during 1918. But in a terrifying few days in March 2020, it happened to all of us, causing an avalanche of social, cultural, and economic destruction that will ring through the ages.

There was nothing normal about it all. We’ll be trying to figure out what happened to us for decades hence.

How did a temporary plan to preserve hospital capacity turn into two-to-three months of near-universal house arrest that ended up causing worker furloughs at 256 hospitals, a stoppage of international travel, a 40% job loss among people earning less than $40K per year, devastation of every economic sector, mass confusion and demoralization, a complete ignoring of all fundamental rights and liberties, not to mention the mass confiscation of private property with forced closures of millions of businesses?

Whatever the answer, it’s got to be a bizarre tale. What’s truly surprising is just how recent the theory behind lockdown and forced distancing actually is. So far as anyone can tell, the intellectual machinery that made this mess was invented 14 years ago, and not by epidemiologists but by computer-simulation modelers. It was adopted not by experienced doctors – they warned ferociously against it – but by politicians.
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[Libertarian666]

This makes me ashamed for my profession. The inherent contradictions here are insane.

For starters, why would a virus care about the reason for a mass gathering? They're saying that mass gatherings are safe only if they are for the purpose of protesting racism? But not safe if all you want to do is, say, enjoy a day at the beach, or play basketball in the park?

I think a lot of the signers are not actually medical professionals but "community organizers" or the like. But any who are medical professionals should be shamed mercilessly for completely abandoning any pretense of being guided by science.

I'm still super curious about whether these demonstrations/riots will lead to a COVID spike. I had this very conversation last night with an MD/PhD student in my lab. He is guessing it will not cause a spike, because of the effect of being outdoors rather than indoors, and a bit of herd immunity in the population from which the protestors came. If there is no increase in cases, I am DONE with wearing a mask outdoors!!!!

I think I told the story already about being exposed to miliary TB (a highly infectious form that is spread by droplets) and not seroconverting. I was working at a mission hospital in Kenya and the patient was coughing right at me. I didn't have any protective gear at all. The protection was because we were in a large hospital room with something like 40 beds, and lots of wide open windows.

I'm glad you weren't infected but I think you must still have been lucky.

[Libertarian666]

I'll leave this here as well.

Now begins the grand effort, on display in thousands of articles and news broadcasts daily, somehow to normalize the lockdown and all its destruction of the last two months. We didn’t lock down almost the entire country in 1968/69, 1957, or 1949-1952, or even during 1918. But in a terrifying few days in March 2020, it happened to all of us, causing an avalanche of social, cultural, and economic destruction that will ring through the ages.

There was nothing normal about it all. We’ll be trying to figure out what happened to us for decades hence.

How did a temporary plan to preserve hospital capacity turn into two-to-three months of near-universal house arrest that ended up causing worker furloughs at 256 hospitals, a stoppage of international travel, a 40% job loss among people earning less than $40K per year, devastation of every economic sector, mass confusion and demoralization, a complete ignoring of all fundamental rights and liberties, not to mention the mass confiscation of private property with forced closures of millions of businesses?

Whatever the answer, it’s got to be a bizarre tale. What’s truly surprising is just how recent the theory behind lockdown and forced distancing actually is. So far as anyone can tell, the intellectual machinery that made this mess was invented 14 years ago, and not by epidemiologists but by computer-simulation modelers. It was adopted not by experienced doctors – they warned ferociously against it – but by politicians.
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He must be new around here.
This was an organized scheme to destroy Western Civilization and replace it with a New World Order.
It looks like we have escaped that fate by the skin of our teeth, but I'm not celebrating just yet.

[Kriegsspiel]

Who must be new?

[Libertarian666]

Who must be new?

The author of that article, who asks how it all happened.

[Kriegsspiel]

That was a rhetorical device. The author is Jeffrey Tucker, anarcho-capitalist and former editor of mises.org.

[Kriegsspiel]

In the face of a novel virus threat, China clamped down on its citizens. Academics used faulty information to build faulty models. Leaders relied on these faulty models. Dissenting views were suppressed. The media flamed fears and the world panicked.

That is the story of what may eventually be known as one of the biggest medical and economic blunders of all time. The collective failure of every Western nation, except one, to question groupthink will surely be studied by economists, doctors, and psychologists for decades to come.

There are those who say that we couldn’t have known these outcomes early on, so even if lockdowns were unjustified later they were still necessary early due to lack of information. That is plainly false. Italy’s alarming number of deaths fanned many of the early fears across the world, but by March 17 it was clear that the median age of Italian deaths was over 80 and that not a single person under 30 had died in that country. Furthermore, it was known that 99% of those who died had other existing illnesses.

A much more rational strategy would have been to lock down nursing homes and let young healthy people out to build immunity. Instead we did the opposite, we forced nursing homes to take COVID-19 patients and locked down young people.

There were, of course, people warning us all along. Among them was as John P.A. Ioannidis of Stanford University School of Medicine, who ranks among the world’s 100 most-cited scientists on Google Scholar. On that pivotal day of March 17 he released an essay titled “A fiasco in the making? As the coronavirus pandemic takes hold, we are making decisions without reliable data” — but it got little attention. Mainstream media was not interested in good news stories or dissenting views. The world instead marched lock step into its man-made calamity.
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