In better times, the U.S. has, with some humility, owned up to its failures. Commissions have investigated tragedies such as Pearl Harbor and 9 /11. Presidential blue-ribbon panels bulwarked the Social Security program in 1983 and overhauled NASA's space shuttle program after the 1986 Challenger disaster.
Three years into the COVID pandemic, more than 1.1 million people are dead, and millions more are living with long COVID. How did the nation judged most prepared for an epidemic or pandemic in 2019 suffer a death rate so much worse than peers such as Canada, Germany or Japan? These are historic failures, and with the Biden administration and Congress coming to a rare agreement that the national health emergency should now end, we need an honest examination of this tragedy and what led to it.
How can we prevent another pandemic if we will not ask what happened? We need answers for the millions and counting who have been devastated by this disease.
It's unlikely that you can prevent another pandemic. But many other countries have handled the pandemic better than the USA. Most had the same amount of warnings and info from China.
You can try to blame China, but the US is doing it wrong if it's betting and relying on other countries (especially rival countries) to protect the USA from future pandemics.
If Covid-19 had started in Italy, France, Brazil or Mexico instead of China, would the results in the USA really have been better? It sure doesn't look like many countries would have been significantly faster and better at detecting Covid-19 and preventing its spread.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Snotnose on Tuesday February 28, @12:15AM (10 children)
We're too fragmented and, to be honest, more interested in pointing the finger than finding out what went wrong, what went right, and, most especially, WHY.
Which is really sad because I suspect 80% of the country would like to learn these things. But the other 20%, 10% on each side, are going to yell loud enough to make such an inquiry impossible.
I just passed a drug test. My dealer has some explaining to do.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday February 28, @12:31AM (8 children)
>many other countries have handled the pandemic better than the USA. Most had the same amount of warnings and info from China.
Leadership matters.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 28, @02:29AM
Yeah I disagree with his claim that 80% would like to know. Only a minority would like to know. The rest are too busy or occupied with other stuff (putting food on the table, celebrities, guns, "LGBT" in schools, "social media", forwarding fake news, etc).
That's why leadership matters. Most of the herd don't know shit, aren't that interested or still won't know shit despite interest.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by driverless on Tuesday February 28, @05:03AM (6 children)
Yup. Looking in from the outside, you had an incompetent narcissist running, using the word "running" very loosely, a highly polarised and therefore very dysfunctional country where around 50% of the population was ready to believe any random conspiracy theory that came down the track rather than follow the science. Compare that with several African countries which, despite being about as dysfunctional as you'd expect for an African country, did a pretty good job because everyone realised that this was some serious shit that needed addressing rather than yet another excuse for political posturing.
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 28, @05:07AM
Thank God we are finally now getting to investigate Hunter Biden's laptop.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Thexalon on Tuesday February 28, @01:12PM (4 children)
One big reason for this: Africans have been facing major plagues repeatedly in recent decades. Millions of people dead by AIDS. At least thousands killed by Ebola. Their populations do not have to be convinced to take the problem seriously, when odds are quite high that they've had to watch a friend or family member die horribly.
The only kind of country where you could not take a pandemic seriously is one where all the death and despair is invisible, happening to somebody else someplace else. And that's exactly why Europe and the US were among the most vulnerable once the problems started to become clear.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by driverless on Tuesday February 28, @01:27PM (2 children)
Ah, excellent point, anti-vaxxism really is a bit of a FWP. Read a paper a year or two back that pointed out that the closer someone was, in a US study, to direct experience with things like polio, the more likely they were to get vaxxed. My 80-year-old neighbour, who remembers classmates in iron lungs, was pretty much at the head of the queue to get his shot when they became available. The fact that we've mostly eliminated all of the old childhood killers and cripplers means we have the luxury, if you want to call it that, of distracting ourselves with pseudoscience and conspiracy theories rather than saying "I don't want to end up like $victim_I_know, I'll have the shot thanks".
(Score: 3, Informative) by Thexalon on Tuesday February 28, @05:16PM
And it also made a difference based on what was being shown on the boob tube. I understand they were trying to respect everybody's privacy, but imagine if the evening news, every day, had included photos of the people in your area dead from Covid? Like a regular montage of names and smiling photos of them with their dog, and a clear message of "these people died today from Covid". And maybe it would end up taking a really long time when things got really bad in major cities. I'd bet that would have gotten a lot of people to pay a lot more attention than their governor coldly rattling off numbers county by country.
Making it very personal and individual was also a big part of what convinced people to take AIDS seriously. From the AIDS Quilt, to the Reagan's close friend Rock Hudson, to celebrities like Freddie Mercury and Magic Johnson, to sympathetic kids like Ryan White, showing the images of people affected turned a lot of people's minds from "that's something happening way over there to somebody else" to "this could have happened to me or somebody like me or just somebody I like, so I really need to care about it".
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Tuesday February 28, @06:14PM
McConnell also survived polio, but is still a little wishy-washy on definitive action [senate.gov]. I mean, you can't smoke inside anymore because you're exposing others to carcinogens, so ... ?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Gaaark on Tuesday February 28, @09:18PM
Beg to differ: here in Canada, the only person i know of who died from covid is my Dad and brothers barber. BUT, we all heard of the deaths in other countries (shit!, freezer trucks in New York full of bodies for Crisps sake!) and knew this could be serious, so to protect each other, we started wearing masks and got vaccinated.
I think too many Americans only think about themselves and "muh rights" and don't care about others, especially outside their families/loved ones, or are 'too macho' to wear a proper mask. Shit, Americans will make it stupidly ridiculous to access porn, but so easy to own a gun!
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 28, @04:01AM
Was there a USA Formal Reckoning on the Spanish Influenza pandemic (1918–1920)? That doesn't seem to have been handled very well either.
If there was a commission and report it could make interesting reading now--to see how well they understood things at the time. Google spits this paper out as the first hit, from 2009:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2805838/ [nih.gov]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by looorg on Tuesday February 28, @01:29AM (30 children)
> If Covid-19 had started in Italy, France, Brazil or Mexico instead of China, would the results in the USA really have been better?
I doubt it. Nobody wants to admit letting that one out of their lab, accident or not. Most western countries did about the same tho didn't they? They purchased way to many vaccine shots that a significant portion of their population did not want to take. There was the mask thing. Stay at home. Now there will be near endless evaluations of what could have been done better and what went wrong. Most of which will be forgotten when the next pandemic comes around.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by HiThere on Tuesday February 28, @01:41AM (29 children)
You seem convinced that it's a lab accident. This seems unreasonable to me. It's a possibility, but I wouldn't rate it higher than that, and I know of no evidence that would reasonably cause it to be rated higher than that. Most of the claimed evidence for "it *must* have been artificial" is clearly wrong, even if those pushing it don't understand that. That it could have been from the lab is "true based on the evidence available", but could doesn't translate into "This is the strongest possibility".
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mhajicek on Tuesday February 28, @01:49AM
I give it a firm "not enough information."
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 5, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday February 28, @02:04AM (15 children)
What seems unreasonable to me is the department of Energy independently released their conclusion that COVID was a lab release.
I don't doubt that DOE has valuable insights, I do doubt the validity of those insights when they can't convince other more pandemic related groups to join them in their conclusions.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 3, Informative) by khallow on Tuesday February 28, @07:27AM (11 children)
What seemed unreasonable about it? My take is that they were the information source not the investigators. This story [postandcourier.com] claims much of the work came from somewhere in US intelligence:
The story doesn't say what expertise the Department of Energy provided, but it sounds like it was a group effort. Further, we have this:
I think what's killing the natural origin theory is that they have yet to find a good match to an animal virus.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday February 28, @11:01AM (10 children)
Either theory may be right, but when the CDC starts publishing their opposing viewpoints on the sources of fissile material being used to produce North Korean nuclear bombs contradicting DOE conclusions, I will be equally unimpressed.
If CDC has such information, I would welcome it to the discussion, just not trust their independent and contradictory conclusions, nor would I be impressed with them making a big press event out of their opposing viewpoints.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday February 28, @01:55PM (8 children)
DOE had a reason they were involved (sounds like they had some expertise or resources relevant to the situation) and they were using data from US intelligence. And CDC might well have a serious conflict of interest.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday February 28, @02:58PM (7 children)
In today's information age, most agencies of any significant size should have something of value they should contribute to any investigation of significant size. What I don't like seeing is even the appearance of political posturing in large groups of un-elected government employees - these are the kinds of things that lead to un-necessary reassignment of the political appointees at the top, reshuffling and reprioritizing of the rank and file, and a bunch of wasted time (money) in all the administrative shuffle, only to be re-performed 4 to 12 years later.
In other words, I'd rather my DOE and CDC employees spend most of their time on their stated agency goals, rather than playing musical chairs.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday March 01, @06:02AM (6 children)
The catch here is that the CDC's umbrella organization, the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) is accused of funding "gain of function" research at the Wuhan lab that is in turn being accused of creating and accidentally spreading the covid virus. There is a conflict of interest here that can be bypassed by having a different federal organization evaluate the claims. My take is that since this is being investigated at all, much less with such a murky outcome, indicates that Biden wishes to have a relatively open evaluation of the origins of the virus. This might be for public theater (showing he is doing something and maybe some political advantages, and/or because he doesn't trust the DHHS's role in this. Such may immunize him from criticism down the road, especially when considering that almost all of the shenanigans would fall during Trump or Obama's administrations.
This might end up being good dirt on Trump, for example, but it has to look fair and impartial no matter the motive. Having the DHHS investigate its own failings won't do that.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday March 01, @10:43AM (5 children)
My take is: the spin and counter-spin applied to all information released on the subject is so strong that it will be decades before the actual evidence starts to override the "messaging."
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday March 01, @01:03PM (4 children)
Perhaps you ought to ask why actual evidence is so hard to come by? It shouldn't take decades, but rather months. Just collect samples from wildlife in the area, as well as the specimens stored in that Wuhan lab, and see where the disease came from.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday March 01, @02:22PM (3 children)
>It shouldn't take decades, but rather months.
There are a great many things in this world which are not as they should be. You might start with situations like how the "handling" of the Russian population has let them support the invasion of Ukraine without any impactful protests against their conscription, etc.
>Just collect samples from wildlife in the area, as well as the specimens stored in that Wuhan lab, and see where the disease came from.
Easily said, now: if there were any specimens stored in that Wuhan lab that might possibly point to the lab as the source of the pandemic, do you think the persons in control of that lab would have let them continue to be available for analysis, or even exist, beyond the point in time when the Wuhan crematoriums were backing up?
Florida damn near crucified the data tech who was passing unvarnished infection statistics to the public, and Florida is pretty bad, but I'd like to believe that China is even more careful about what information reaches the general public, both domestically and internationally, and probably less concerned about truth, justice and all that jazz.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday March 01, @06:54PM (2 children)
I might start with that, but I won't. There are hundreds of similar things I could "start" with, but I'd rather talk about the subject of the discussion now than die of old age "starting".
In other words, you allege that there's an opaque government holding up things (and possibly destroying evidence) to the point that it'll be at least two orders of magnitude slower to discover a hugely important question "How did covid start?" But I guess that's less important than the optics of alleged, small and irrelevant "political posturing".
Because you'd "like" that a government, that may have killed six million people with sloppy work at a lab, get the opportunity to do it again by hiding what they may have done? This is a very peculiarly worded paragraph. You might want to rewrite that in a way that doesn't sound insane.
Finally, consider that lab and its researchers. If it genuinely released covid by accident, then technically it is the most qualified party to investigate itself by your own logic. It's just that glaring conflict of interest, which you noted above. They likely would just destroy the evidence and conclude it was a natural release. That's the same concern with the CDC and NIH, and thus, IMHO why the DOE is investigating this instead.
And the fact that we can't honestly tell whether it naturally hopped over from an animal reservoir or was created in a lab partially supported by the US's own regulators, should be deeply troubling. This isn't merely a distraction from the small-fry, "DOE shouldn't do covid" optics issue. It's THE story.
And all China had to do was do an open investigation.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday March 01, @07:53PM (1 child)
>you allege that there's an opaque government holding up things (and possibly destroying evidence) to the point that it'll be at least two orders of magnitude slower to discover a hugely important question "How did covid start?"
Hugely important to who? More important than the blame game is the question: what are we doing to do to prevent future problems? Also, I doubt any government had much to do with destruction of evidence, it's the government's hands-off approach that lets the lab destroy the evidence without sufficient oversight to prevent such actions.
>Because you'd "like" that a government, that may have killed six million people with sloppy work at a lab, get the opportunity to do it again by hiding what they may have done?
Nobody likes that, it's just realpolitik. What I would like are effective oversight procedures, transparency in continuous reporting of actvities in progress in labs funded by my tax dollars - regardless of where said labs are located. No transparency, no funding - that would be my approach. Pointing fingers about what "the evidence" points to when the evidence can be both manufactured and destroyed after the fact is an expensive and fruitless game.
>technically it is the most qualified party to investigate itself by your own logic. It's just that glaring conflict of interest
Agreed, they are the most qualified, and the conflict of interest can be overcome with a continuous documentation and sharing of information as-if there were a pandemic being leaked from the lab every day. Not only would that be good for pandemic prevention, but it would also be better for other labs working in the same fields of study.
>IMHO why the DOE is investigating this instead.
Yeah, so the next time a plumber fucks up your toilet, make sure to have an electrician look it over for you because based on that one accident you know that all plumbers have a conflict of interest in the investigation.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday March 01, @11:44PM
If we aren't figuring out how past problems happened, then we're passing over huge, low lying fruit.
And you may well get it. I suspect a huge part of the reason for the last of oversight was because the research couldn't be done in the developed world due to problems and/or regulatory violations that transparency would have found. In other words, regulators working around their own.
The one word obvious rebuttal: fraud. But having said that, you did mention oversight procedures. That would be who would actually do the investigation.
That's fine until all the plumbers are paid by the same business. Then you have conflict of interest for the entire field. That electrician who happens to have a plumber's knowledge of plumbing could be the best independent investigator you could find. Here, the natural origin theory proved to be peculiarly effective [city-journal.org]:
My take is that Fauci wanted this natural origin narrative and had control of enough funding to rope everyone in.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 28, @01:58PM
Ah, the USA - where the DOE publishes covid research and the Department of Agriculture publishes national dietary recommendations.
(Score: 2) by TheGratefulNet on Wednesday March 01, @02:30AM (2 children)
they released 'something' and marked it as low-confidence.
I think that green cheese can still be found on the moon. with low-confidence, but not zero.
see, I can play that stupid game, too.
low confidence: how stupid. dont release things you know will be taken too literally, especially the 30% dumb-asses among us, unless you have something more than 'low' confidence.
what the hell. isn't there any adult around to guide these chillens? hello - hello out there. are there ANY adults left at all?
the dems are the only adults and its been that way for decades, now.
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday March 01, @02:41AM
Even after reaching rock bottom it is still possible to keep digging, some call that character.
https://old.reddit.com/r/WhitePeopleTwitter/comments/11egt0p/florida_republicans_introduce_a_bill_to_eliminate/ [reddit.com]
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday March 01, @06:12AM
In other words, why hasn't China allowed access to its lab and early covid data so that the origin of covid would be definitive?
Without that Chinese openness, everyone else is very limited in what they can deduce about the origin of covid. My take is that if there was a straight-forward pathway from animal reservoir to human, we would have quickly heard about it.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday February 28, @02:13AM (1 child)
The lab accident isn't quite a certainty, but it's close. A number of explanations have been offered that would eliminate the lab accident. But each of them have been debunked. The first six people, miners, got sick in a bat guano mine. In hindsight, it was decided that their treatments weren't right, and that the physicians actually helped the virus to mutate rapidly in the patients. I think four died, two survived - but that's kinda beside the point. Samples of the virus were taken back to Hunan, where research proceeded. Gain of function experiments took place, and papers published on the results. The virus that ravaged the world has those precise gain of funtions, spliced in at the same cleavage sites.
This virus didn't jump from bats to aardvarks, or walruses, or mink, or chickens, or baboons, then jump to humans. That would have been an extremely unlikely scenario.
Occam's razor would slice through all that bullshit even if it were duller than a sledge hammer. The virus was engineered, first accidentally, then intentionally, and it escaped the lab.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 28, @05:10AM
In your opinion. Thanks for that, we all have one of those that are best wiped regularly.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 28, @02:20AM (3 children)
Lab accident or not, what matters more is when something like it happens again will the USA have learned from this thus be better prepared and handle things much better? Or does the USA think it actually did a great job and so do about the same thing again?
I personally don't think the USA did well. The deaths per 1M pop are pretty bad when compared to many other developed countries: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ [worldometers.info]
(I guess we should ignore the countries which are unlikely to have reliable statistics on deaths etc )
The countries that did well, could go "OK we'll do about the same things we did the last time maybe skip the stuff that didn't work well."
The US and UK Gov reminded me of this: https://youtu.be/U7jdJ8vPCl8 [youtu.be]
(Score: 2, Troll) by driverless on Tuesday February 28, @05:09AM (2 children)
I think the US will do worse, and a wish I didn't have to say that. If you look at graphs of political polarisation from the 1950s to today it's been getting worse and worse over time. As Covid showed, people are willing to die in their hundreds of thousands in order to avoid conceding a political point to the other side. Heck, less people died in the Civil War, an actual, you know, war, than died because wearing a mask or getting vaxxed would have meant agreeing with what the other political side was saying (which was in essence just "follow the science"). Hey, we may have lost mom, dad, and my sister, but we made a political point dammit!
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 28, @05:12AM
If you put on a mask now, their deaths will have meant nothing! Never surrender!
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 28, @09:37AM
FWIW I suspect that world average is better than it actually is due to lots of developing/deteriorating countries not having good stat gathering (e.g. missing out thousands of deaths or more). But there are many countries which are likely to have comparable stat gathering that still did better than world average.
Even so, there were people I personally knew actually died of covid-19 in the past few years. Whereas in my entire life I don't personally know of anyone who died of flu. So it was really bizarre to see so many US people going on about "just another flu" when it obviously was not[1]. And many today are even are still claiming it was just a flu. What level of mental incompetence/disability do you need to have to think the thousands working in the hospitals and morgues are all colluding and lying.
[1] "Just another flu" won't have China releasing high death figures, locking down cities and building hospitals within a week or two. If that's not enough heads up for the USA good luck the next time if the next pandemic comes from a DIFFERENT country that doesn't notice it till maybe it gets to China and China notices it (and probably gets blamed for it by the USA 😉). The last I checked, most scientists don't think MERS came from China. So pandemics could start from other places too.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by looorg on Tuesday February 28, @02:40AM (3 children)
I actually don't know. Could have been lab accident, intentional spread, animal market, somehow or some kind of natural animal to human transfer. I'm not sure it really matters tho for how the pandemic was handled or what went down. If anything I guess we have not learned much on that subject during the last couple of years and except finger pointing and hints or points at it. But in some sense I doubt we will ever really know cause if it was a lab accident or leak nobody would want to admit to that, certainly not so considering that millions of people will have died from it. That shit will have been buried deep by now. Paperwork, and possible people, will have been removed. If it was some kind of animal transfer I doubt much will or can be done about that either. It's not like they are going to stop or that we are going to wipe out all the animals. So in that regard I just don't think it matters much. We all did the basic pandemic stuff, vaccines, masks, trying to stay away from sick people. Which I guess is what we'll try to do next time to and it will probably be as successful then as it was now.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 28, @05:15AM (1 child)
I agree. What matters now is that we're prepared for the next one... We are prepared for the next one, right? Guys? Tell me we're prepared for the next one.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 28, @09:18AM
New York just auctioned off $250 million worth of COVID equipment and materials for $500 thousand. So, other than transferring lots of tax payer money to big phara, not really.
(Score: 1) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday February 28, @04:39PM
The intentional release idea made it's rounds. A part of my mind leaned toward believing that, for awhile. Some of the players, or purported players, have made noises about a major population reduction being necessary, which puts the idea within the realm of possibility.
But, given all the data to mull, no, I can't believe that the release was intentional. We'll blame it on shoddy security practices, and a lack of understanding what they were working with. It is far more likely, by several orders of magnitude, that the release was an accident.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Tuesday February 28, @03:47AM (1 child)
More to the point: Whether a virus is artificially created and released into the wild, or evolves naturally in the wild, the main elements of the response remain identical. A lot of the proponents of the lab leak hypothesis seem to think that if we'd, say, bombed the Wuhan virology lab into smithereens, that somehow would solve the problem after thousands of Americans were already infected. Which wouldn't work, because viruses don't work like versions of vampires or werewolves that all die if you kill the original one. Or maybe they think it would be a good idea to try to get into a trade war with the country that manufactures a ridiculous percentage of the stuff the US economy needs to function. Or maybe they think that they can somehow get China to pay a bunch of money towards the impact of Covid, which even if they do wouldn't do anything for the dead people and their families.
Lots of things could have been done differently, but the main problem in my view was that non-doctors who wanted to feel like they were in control of the situation repeatedly decided to overrule or ignore everybody who knew what they were actually talking about. From people who by all appearances truly believed that everybody around them should risk their lives so they could keep their hair appointment, to preachers and faith healers telling their congregations that their religion would protect them completely, to politicians who were more focused on their political futures than on the well-being of their constituents, to business managers who just wanted any excuse to keep the money rolling in (as an example: A yoga studio in my area sent out an email describing themselves as an essential health business that absolutely had to stay open and hold classes like nothing was going on). Far too many people with the power to make important decisions acted without the humility to conclude "I don't really understand the situation, but here's what everybody who does know something about it is telling me to do, so that's what we'll do."
And of course the stage had been set for this particular problem by a couple of decades of anti-vax nonsense which had primed millions of people with the idea that the Only Possible Reason all doctors recommended vaccinations against many diseases was some sort of giant conspiracy involving all doctors but a handful of crackpots and the FDA and every pharmaceutical company in existence including the generics. And there was absolutely no way whatsoever that it was simply that a lot of people had managed to become adults and parents without ever getting over their fear of getting a shot at the doctor's office because it might hurt a bit.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 4, Funny) by driverless on Tuesday February 28, @05:14AM
Hey, it would have worked if the Gazpacho Police had bombed the lab with hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin and Hunter Biden's laptop and then ignited the mixture using the Jewish Space Lasers. Mazel tough!
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Opportunist on Tuesday February 28, @10:09AM (8 children)
1. People are gullible. You need a better educated population.
People in the US (but don't feel singled out, this is even more a global phenomenon than the pandemic itself) are woefully unprepared for a massive propaganda onslaught. The pandemic showcased this perfectly. You had the dangerous mix of bullshit peddlers that wanted to make a quick buck with gullible people, state actors who wanted to cause strife and destabilization and a population that has been told to distrust anything their politicians say, by their politicians themselves, no less, that led to the mess we're in. The key problem here is that the people are completely unable to test information for its veracity. All they ever learned was to believe something. And that's pretty dangerous because...
2. Don't lie. It will bite you in the ass.
At the start of the pandemic, there was the fear that we'll run out of masks for operations if we told people that masks could stop the spread. Because people would instantly go and buy them up (just look what happened to hand sanitizer and, of all things, toilet paper) and hospitals would be out of OP masks, which would be a really bad thing for obvious reasons. So the official statement was to not buy and use masks. Despite knowing already that they would serve in stopping the spreading. Then, when we had enough masks, we told people to wear them to "protect themselves". Which was again not exactly the truth. Wearing a mask protects others in case you're infected, which has a net positive effect on the general health of the population, but given the general attitude of "me first and gimmegimme" the answer would certainly have been "why should I protect someone else if it does fuck all for me?". Both lies were eventually debunked and paraded out by detractors of the Covid measures as "look, they lie about this, so everything they say is a lie". So would it have been better to be truthful? I'd say yes. We're in the time of the internet. You can't tell people a lie and expect them to believe it when they don't already absolutely want to believe it. They will find someone telling them that you're lying and show them how. The only way they will keep believing you is if they WANT desperately to believe you, if they are at least inclined to distrust you (which is pretty much a given if you're "da man"), be prepared to be outed and distrusted.
3. Don't expect your enemies to stand by and let the opportunity go to waste.
You have enemies as a country like the US. These enemies will try to destabilize you in any way possible, and the easiest and cheapest one is to cause your population to distrust, to divide them and to have them fight with each other rather than this enemy. This worked very well in this case. Even better than with many other attempts to do that.
So how to counter this?
You need a population that gets inoculated. Not against some pandemic virus, but against misinformation. The start of that is to not use misinformation yourself, but at the same time you need to give people the ability to spot when they're being used by bullshit peddlers. And no, outlawing them does not work. The only thing you achieve that way is that people now think that it's even MORE trustworthy because you outlaw it.
In a nutshell, the government lost the trust of its people. Gaining that trust back would be the first step, because else the whole shit repeats itself next time. Invariably. If you don't change anything, don't expect a different outcome.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday February 28, @01:01PM (1 child)
Adding to the problem, that was mostly illusionary and used as a religious talisman. There's no actual difference in spread when looking at the numbers, but the faithful will get very mad if anyone points out no miracle occurs by wearing a mask.
Don't forget the wide reports that covid cannot be spread at the correct political protests. The mere presence of the correct memes repels the virus, you see. Isn't magic and religion amazing?
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Tuesday February 28, @06:20PM
First, nothing will STOP the spread, but wearing a mask considerably lowers the CHANCE.
Second, please point me to some of those claims that the "magical meme" stops the spread, I could use a good laugh.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday February 28, @01:23PM (2 children)
And here's the problem with that, as explained by George Carlin: "Living in this country, you’re bound to know, every time you’re exposed to advertising, you realize once again that America’s leading industry, America’s most profitable business is still: the manufacture, packaging, distribution and marketing of bullshit. High-quality, grade-A, prime-cut, pure, American bullshit."
Politicians, businessmen, clergy, nobody who makes their living as a bullshit artist has any interest in a population that understands how to detect and disbelieve it.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Tuesday February 28, @06:01PM (1 child)
Kids should probably be taught detection and disbelief early on. They don't realize that your friends will lie to you, your enemies will lie to you, and that's something that sticks around as people become adults. The universal reality of the Big Lie [jewishvirtuallibrary.org] proves that the human organism doesn't grow out of producing, being fooled by, and adhering to falsehoods, and children need to know this very early on.
Your dog won't lie to you, and your parents usually won't, but that's most of what you can trust without knowing a few pointed questions to ask. Hell, just tell them "Individual statements can be true or false, but credibility is a spectrum. Start at 50%, ask a few questions, and refine that estimate up or down from there based on what and how they answer. Then take that slightly more accurate estimate and do whatever you want with it."
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Tuesday February 28, @06:22PM
If you think your parents won't lie to you, yours were just better at it than mine.
Parents constantly lie to their children. Mostly to get out of arguments or to get them to do something they don't really have good arguments for.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Tuesday February 28, @06:04PM (2 children)
And in the absence of inoculation, herd immunity also works, assuming the unvaccinated population can be surrounded by vaccinated people. You could end up inoculating them via osmosis, in that event.
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Wednesday March 01, @08:20AM (1 child)
That worked in earlier times when the village idiot was surrounded by normal people who told him that he's a crackpot. Today, it's fairly easy for the village idiots from all over the world to assemble and tell each other that they're the only smart people and that their harebrained bullshit is right, heavily supported by the pied piper who benefits from the idiots believing it.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Wednesday March 01, @06:33PM
I guess the smart people need to adapt to the modern fine-grained democratization of communication in the new world order. Just having centralized news organizations fact-check what seems to be effectively a time-honed improvisational act [youtu.be] isn't going to cut it anymore.
(Score: 4, Informative) by VLM on Tuesday February 28, @12:58PM (2 children)
Its kind of a divide and conqueror topic.
Nobody wants to talk about the actual reason for country differences.
There's a classic BMJ medical journal article that leads off with
Then you google for "Japan obesity rate" and the lead google response is
So you put the two quotes together and the USA death rate should be somewhere in the area of 3 to 10 times worse than Japan.
Then you google for the ratio of death between USA and Japan, expecting to see "3 to 10 times worse" in USA based on above. First responses are 3x worse.
Now the problem with the analysis above is it makes sense, is backed by medical research, and does not involve one political party blaming the other party, which will be the only purpose of any "congressional hearing" nonsense. You will eat high carb diet and get really fat and really sick and you will like it and nobody will talk about it because its very profitable for the correct middlemen.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday February 28, @01:29PM (1 child)
I've solidly near the line of overweight or obese, and I didn't get Covid. Why? Because I masked up, got vaccinated, and socially distanced.
Lots of skinny people got Covid. Why? Because they were walking around unmasked and unvaccinated in large crowds like nothing was going on.
In other words, germ theory continued to be proven to be correct.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Funny) by krishnoid on Tuesday February 28, @05:49PM
You were at a higher risk of *death* statistically because of your BMI. You didn't *get* COVID-19 in the first place because you cleared 1st-year undergrad-ish level bars of understanding probability, combinatorics, the germ theory of disease, and basic level mixed-mode (i.e., liquid-in-air aerosol) fluid dynamics.
But you also knew enough to understand the probabilistic contribution of your BMI to your all-cause mortality risk. So your knowledge did double-duty in keeping you alive, providing a natural selection advantage. Time to have more kids, or spread the knowledge around to the ones near you!
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 28, @03:12PM
Australia? China? The government took this pandemic as a way to get rid of trump and see how far they could push people. How much money could be made off of dubious medical devices. All the wrong things.
What did other countries do? Crack down harder? Lie about numbers more? Print more money?
Face it, a real deadly disease would have killed us all.
These critical theory addled morons can keep spouting their bullshit. It's right on time, since now people are throwing the lab theory around again. China may have dropped the ball but it was doing research at OUR behest.
Sorry your great reset was a failure, assholes.