koenh1

I remember this being mentioned by Charles Peirce as an argument for pragmatism (the philosophical kind): It's a nonsensical question unless you can phrase it in terms where the answer has some practical consequence.

My understanding of this contradiction was that it took time for the medical community to switch from an individual medical perspective to a public health perspective. For preventative measures used by doctors and hospitals the expectation is that they should be proven to be nearly 100% effective because doctors and hospitals are responsible for the wellfare of individuals. But in a pandemic situation even a measure that is only 10% effective would become very compelling if it could lower the reproduction rate to less than 1, not because of the change in probability of infection for individual encounters, but because it has the potential to change the trajectory of the pandemic, which could save many more lives. So there really is no need to assume some conspiracy or lying on the part of the medical establishment: there was a natural progression to a more rational viewpoint.

A similar thing happened with testing: for individual care tests have to be nearly perfectly accurate even though in the early phases of the pandemic, faster less accurate tests might have made a difference if they had been available.