> 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.
> 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).
> 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.
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.