Time for the scientific community to admit we were wrong about Covid

https://www.newsweek.com/its-time-scientific-community-admit-we-were-wrong-about-coivd-it-cost-lives-opinion-1776630

15 15 3 years ago

Headline too long for HN: It's Time for the Scientific Community to Admit We Were Wrong About COVID and It Cost Lives | Opinion

rossdavidh2• 3 years ago

"We made science a team sport, and in so doing, we made it no longer science. It became us versus them, and "they" responded the only way anyone might expect them to: by resisting."

An uncommonly wise interpretation of how the other side (of any controversy) thinks.

giraffe_lady• 3 years ago

I'm going to give it another decade before I try to come to any firm conclusions.

adg001• 3 years ago

Interesting op-ed. I support the remark about how the scientific community made science a team sport – for no good scientific reason.

However the claim "[the approach] was flawed in a way that undermined its efficacy and resulted in thousands if not millions of preventable deaths" is not demonstrated in the article. Conversely there were countries (e.g. Italy) where the epidemiological distribution of SARS-CoV-2 and the determinants (e.g. risk factors such as young and old people living together in the same households) were costing lives, that if regarded in the thousands would be grossly underestimated.

jstarfish• 3 years ago

I support the remark about how the scientific community made science a team sport – for no good scientific reason.

No good scientific reason, sure. Political reasons abound. But had Science not presented as much of a unified front as they had, any message of theirs would have been fragmented to oblivion.

It's basic psyops; even children know how to do it-- take a unified front and split it over arbitrary issues. When players on the same team opt for melee between themselves instead of the other team, the opposing interest quietly advances their own goals.

So in his bid to "restore credibility" to Science, he's indirectly advocating for opportunities to get two experts on the same team to publicly disagree (by invoking Diversity), thus making the entire institution look non-credible. He's outright trying to do this himself by publicly acting as though Science has a deserved credibility problem, while also waxing apologetic as a [junior!] member of that team. It's scummy.

Where Science at least tried to act in good faith based on things like evidence and data, they were competing with fabricated/unsubstantiated claims and mockery. They didn't always get it right, but they weren't trying to cause harm/chaos or derive personal benefit through deception. But clearly, it's Science that needs to atone-- we'll just ignore the hostile noncompliance and lack of critical thinking skills demonstrated by everyone else.

Nothing he presents here is helpful; it's apologetic to the point of subversive and would have paralyzed a public-health effort that struggled to cross the finish line already. Trying to derail it with appeals to diversity is contrarian shit-stirring.

quantified• 3 years ago

How different was this from most science? "Science advances one funeral at a time" was coined in recognition of us vs them long ago. And large expensive fundamental science like astrophysics and particle physics are very much team sports. "Tribe sports" might be the real distinction.

And long covid's effect is one we have yet to reckon with. I'll take the shots and masks, and avoid giving you impotence and long brain fog.

marstall• 3 years ago

"I can see now that the scientific community from the CDC to the WHO to the FDA and their representatives, repeatedly overstated the evidence and misled the public about its own views and policies, including on natural vs. artificial immunity, school closures and disease transmission, aerosol spread, mask mandates, and vaccine effectiveness and safety, especially among the young."

Don't see any support for any of these points in the article.

ZeroGravitas• 3 years ago

I was with them when they called for lockdowns, vaccines, and boosters.
I was wrong.

Well thanks for the update, contrarian medical student writing op-eds in Newsweek, but I think you're wrong about that being wrong.

Wait, it gets worse, this guy has full blown brain worms:

When former President Trump pointed out the downsides of intervention, he was dismissed publicly as a buffoon. And when Dr. Antony Fauci opposed Trump and became the hero of the public health community, we gave him our support to do and say what he wanted, even when he was wrong.

felixgallo• 3 years ago

There is actually science on this topic: https://record.umich.edu/articles/lockdowns-saved-lives-but-...

TLDR: we were right about lockdowns and so forth, and the scientists did a good job at preventing excess death and reduction in quality of life, even when you take the significant economic costs into account. But it's open to debate, and it's not clear that this is always the right move.

lamontcg• 3 years ago

Article cites https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7032e1.htm as evidence of scientists being wrong about natural-vs-"artificial" immunity but it shows that vaccination prevented infection better than natural immunity.

The actual virus has genes in it which specifically try to depress the expression of MHC and evade the human immune system (because the actual virus really doesn't want the human immune system to stop it). The vaccine naturally doesn't include any such countermeasures. Plenty of studies show failure to form humoral responses to natural infection, particularly with mild infection.

autoexec• 3 years ago

It wouldn't matter if "natural infection" did give you better protection against reinfection anyway because the vaccine provides protection against death and severe illness while getting infected without being vaccinated greatly increases those same risks. You'd have to be a fool to risk death, serious illness, and long term (if not lifelong) consciousness over the risk of having a sore arm for a day just to get a bump in protection against a possible reinfection in the future, especially when spreading the virus is what leads to variants which can evolve to evade those same defenses.

The science and the math on this haven't changed at all, but that didn't stop antivaxxers from grasping at anything they could find to push people into getting themselves and their children infected as quickly as possible for that sweet "natural protection". If people want to say that science became a "team sport" lets not forget that the team they were playing against was "team virus" and there were a shocking amount of hardcore virus fans pushing for policies and practices that would clearly result in more people getting infected.

WheelsAtLarge• 3 years ago

I'm in complete agreement that we need to do a review of the policies and actions during Covid but starting with we were wrong gets us nowhere. Of course we were wrong but we were also right. It was(is) a completely new experience for the world. It's impossible to be 100% right when all you can do is try to get guidance from similar past experience. Even if we had had the experience we would have gotten some things wrong. It was a an extremely complicated situation that involved millions of individuals with many diverse requirements and needs. Even if we could go back and change decisions there's nothing to say that the results would be any better. Real life is too complicated for such a simple analysis.

The good thing is that there will be many reviews detailing our actions and hopefully we will learn from what we did right and wrong.

rossdavidh2• 3 years ago

I mostly agree with your sentiment, but I think the article is pointing out something different than "we were wrong about Covid". For example, this paragraph:

"Most of us did not speak up in support of alternative views, and many of us tried to suppress them. When strong scientific voices like world-renowned Stanford professors John Ioannidis, Jay Bhattacharya, and Scott Atlas, or University of California San Francisco professors Vinay Prasad and Monica Gandhi, sounded the alarm on behalf of vulnerable communities, they faced severe censure by relentless mobs of critics and detractors in the scientific community—often not on the basis of fact but solely on the basis of differences in scientific opinion."

I think that we have a real problem with a large portion of the population being unwilling to listen when scientists say "we have a problem", and a large part of that problem comes from the attitudes displayed by many scientists (or those quoting them) when faced with disagreement. It was particularly problematic with Covid, because emotions ran so high, but if there is not some sort of mea culpa then we could be faced with a long-lasting rupture, where scientists are considered just one more political player, rather than an objective source of information.

When doctors make mistakes, it has been found that a simple apology by the doctor to the patient can significantly reduce the chance of lawsuits. For a similar reason, I think we would greatly benefit from starting with "we were wrong/we handled this wrong" from some prominent members of the scientific community.

yucky• 3 years ago

Some of his points are correct, but it's an opinion piece written by a med student. Not exactly groundbreaking.

GuB-42• 3 years ago

Scientists admit they were wrong all the time, read the papers instead of reading third hand news reports. In fact, well researched "we are wrong" papers will get much more visibility and citations than simple confirmation, so scientists are encouraged to write them.

The fun thing about COVID is that because of the emergency situation the general public got exposed to the messiness of the scientific process, so we get a lot of these "scientists were wrong!". Well, yes, and not only it is a normal part of the scientific process, but if you read the papers, you may realize that the "wrongness" is very relative.

Also realize that scientists are not policymakers, they give suggestions in their field of expertise. For example, health scientists may say lockdowns are very effective at limited the spread of Covid-19, but they don't consider the economic consequences, it is not their job. On the other hand economists will only consider the economic consequences, and sociologists will study how restrictive rules will affect the population. The conclusions will be obviously different, but the job of policymakers is to sort it out and act accordingly.

Time for the scientific community to admit we were wrong about Covid

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