We had a pandemic that might have been caused by pandemic preparedness funding. Increasing pandemic preparedness funding isn’t the most straightforward lesson to draw from that.
We have some increased technical capacity and knowledge, e.g. on how to manufacture mRNA vaccines, but there’s very large swaths of people who have learned the opposite lesson that pandemics aren’t real & vaccines don’t work, or that the whole thing was orchestrated and governments shouldn’t be trusted[4].
The fact that governments failed massively is a key learning from the pandemic. One of my most memorable experiences was when I was wearing my FFP2 mask in public transportation in Berlin which was legally required at the time and the security personal in public transportation was exempt from the requirement of wearing FFP2 masks and was wearing surgical masks.
While hospitals have regular training to make sure that it’s staff wear FFP2 masks properly, there was no public education from the government of how to wear FFP2 masks properly no places where you could go to test whether you are wearing your FFP2 mask properly but a legal requirement that everyone wears FFP2 masks.
In the US, the NIH stopped believing in the importance of science and thus didn’t fund any trials to see what you need to do to make community masking work successfully. Somehow, the policy position in the US ended to be that everyone should wear a cloth mask and people didn’t let non-NIH studies of community masking affect their habits very much.
If you have the government LARPing a pandemic response, the fact that the government shouldn’t be trusted is the right learning. The key question you should ask if what you could do so that the next time the government isn’t LARPing but actually has a decent pandemic response.
If you have the government LARPing a pandemic response, the fact that the government shouldn’t be trusted is the right learning. The key question you should ask if what you could do so that the next time the government isn’t LARPing but actually has a decent pandemic response.
I don’t blame politicians as much as the infectious disease experts they listened to. These experts were slow to recognize that aerosols were the primary mode of transmission and failed to drop support for stuff that was of dubious value such as surgical masks and lockdowns in favor of the widespread use of respirators. Some of the most prominent experts even badmouthed respirators just like they badmouthed regular masks earlier in the pandemic.
The only defense against some of this kind of failure of expertise that I can think of is something I like to call a “thinking-things-through” form of analysis and is a retort to the “but you’re not an expert” argument. For some subjects like advanced math or physics, most people won’t be able to do this kind of analysis. But there are other kinds of expert claims that are much easier to evaluate such as the claim that masks could promote viral transmission due the potential for more “face-touching” or that masking could provide a false sense of security and lead to risky behavior or that masks offer decent protection (even though aerosols act like smoke and smoke can get past masks since they have huge gaps which well-fitted respirators don’t). In other words, if an expert tells someone to jump off a cliff to cure a headache, any rational person should be able to reason that that’s obviously bad advise. Of course, experts are still needed, but this can act as a check against at least some of their claims and perhaps weaken the groupthink that some experts can fall into.
We had a pandemic that might have been caused by pandemic preparedness funding. Increasing pandemic preparedness funding isn’t the most straightforward lesson to draw from that.
The fact that governments failed massively is a key learning from the pandemic. One of my most memorable experiences was when I was wearing my FFP2 mask in public transportation in Berlin which was legally required at the time and the security personal in public transportation was exempt from the requirement of wearing FFP2 masks and was wearing surgical masks.
While hospitals have regular training to make sure that it’s staff wear FFP2 masks properly, there was no public education from the government of how to wear FFP2 masks properly no places where you could go to test whether you are wearing your FFP2 mask properly but a legal requirement that everyone wears FFP2 masks.
In the US, the NIH stopped believing in the importance of science and thus didn’t fund any trials to see what you need to do to make community masking work successfully. Somehow, the policy position in the US ended to be that everyone should wear a cloth mask and people didn’t let non-NIH studies of community masking affect their habits very much.
If you have the government LARPing a pandemic response, the fact that the government shouldn’t be trusted is the right learning. The key question you should ask if what you could do so that the next time the government isn’t LARPing but actually has a decent pandemic response.
I don’t blame politicians as much as the infectious disease experts they listened to. These experts were slow to recognize that aerosols were the primary mode of transmission and failed to drop support for stuff that was of dubious value such as surgical masks and lockdowns in favor of the widespread use of respirators. Some of the most prominent experts even badmouthed respirators just like they badmouthed regular masks earlier in the pandemic.
The only defense against some of this kind of failure of expertise that I can think of is something I like to call a “thinking-things-through” form of analysis and is a retort to the “but you’re not an expert” argument. For some subjects like advanced math or physics, most people won’t be able to do this kind of analysis. But there are other kinds of expert claims that are much easier to evaluate such as the claim that masks could promote viral transmission due the potential for more “face-touching” or that masking could provide a false sense of security and lead to risky behavior or that masks offer decent protection (even though aerosols act like smoke and smoke can get past masks since they have huge gaps which well-fitted respirators don’t). In other words, if an expert tells someone to jump off a cliff to cure a headache, any rational person should be able to reason that that’s obviously bad advise. Of course, experts are still needed, but this can act as a check against at least some of their claims and perhaps weaken the groupthink that some experts can fall into.