There is a War, and the WHO, FDA and CDC, and most similar agencies abroad, and most elected officials, are not on our side of it. Instead they focus mostly on getting in the way, protecting their power and seeking to avoid blame on a two week time horizon.
Can I get an explanation of this? This is my first time reading about Covid on LessWrong (I’m new). My general impression (with no investigation or research) was that the WHO and CDC were doing a reasonable job in trying to figure out what was going on and giving reasonable advice on how to reduce the negative impacts of Covid. Am I under the wrong impression?
You are under the wrong impression. They are doing neither of these things (although many of the individual things CDC says are reasonable).
The explanation is mostly example after example over the course of two years, as documented in weekly posts. There are definitely some big highlights. I think it would be a good exercise to let others summarize the case here rather than me.
Could you (or others) provide one or two particularly egregious examples where “Governments Most Places Are Lying Liars With No Ability To Plan or Physically Reason. They Can’t Even Stop Interfering and Killing People”? Maybe just one or two weekly posts to look at?
Clearly these organizations made mistakes, some significant. I think even if 50% of their decisions were mistakes, the wording here is not really supported. You claim these organizations “Can’t Stop Killing People” Exceptional claims require exceptional evidence.
“The FDA, having observed and accepted conclusive evidence that booster shots are highly effective, has rejected allowing people to get those booster shots unless they are over the age of 65, are immunocompromised or high risk, or are willing to lie on a form. The CDC will probably concur. I think we all know what this means. It means war! …”
“So, set Merck aside for now and consider Pfizer’s Paxlovid. In the past 30 days, more than 37,000 people died of COVID in the United States, according to the CDC . Over the next 35 days, Paxlovid could prevent tens of thousands of avoidable deaths. But instead, the FDA won’t immediately let Pfizer sell a drug it knows to be lifesaving. ”...”
So if studies generally suggest masks are effective, and the CDC wasn’t deliberately lying to us, why are they recommending against mask use? …[He goes on to give some possible reasons.]
“An attempt at a “good faith” interpretation of the new testing guidelines, that you ‘do not necessarily need a test’ even if you have been within 6 feet of a known positive for fifteen minutes, is that the CDC is lying. That they are doing the exact same thing with testing that was previously done with masks. …”
Here was the CDC’s explicit reasoning on not requiring a test, quote from the Washington Post article:
“Walensky said the agency decided not to require a negative test result after people had isolated for five days because the results are often inaccurateat that point in an infection. PCR tests — those typically performed in a lab which are around 98 percent effective — can show positive results long after a person is no longer infectious because of the presence of viral remnants,she said. It remains unclear how well rapid, at-home tests determine someone’s ability to transmit the virus in the latter part of their infection, she added.”
This is standard government thinking. We can’t use PCR for the sensible reason that it will stay positive long after infectiousness. We can’t use rapid tests because we don’t know how accurate they are in this particular situation, so instead we’re going to (1) not run experiments to find out, experiments remain illegal and (2) instead not run any tests at all, which is known to be about 50% accurate. I call heads.
Can I get an explanation of this? This is my first time reading about Covid on LessWrong (I’m new). My general impression (with no investigation or research) was that the WHO and CDC were doing a reasonable job in trying to figure out what was going on and giving reasonable advice on how to reduce the negative impacts of Covid. Am I under the wrong impression?
You are under the wrong impression. They are doing neither of these things (although many of the individual things CDC says are reasonable).
The explanation is mostly example after example over the course of two years, as documented in weekly posts. There are definitely some big highlights. I think it would be a good exercise to let others summarize the case here rather than me.
Could you (or others) provide one or two particularly egregious examples where “Governments Most Places Are Lying Liars With No Ability To Plan or Physically Reason. They Can’t Even Stop Interfering and Killing People”? Maybe just one or two weekly posts to look at?
Clearly these organizations made mistakes, some significant. I think even if 50% of their decisions were mistakes, the wording here is not really supported. You claim these organizations “Can’t Stop Killing People” Exceptional claims require exceptional evidence.
Other than that, great post.
These are a couple posts I came up with in a quick search, so not necessarily the best examples:
Covid 9/23: There Is a War
Covid 11/18: Paxlovid Remains Illegal
Face Masks: Much More Than You Wanted To Know (SSC post written when CDC was still telling people not to wear masks)
Covid 8/27: The Fall of the CDC
CDC Changes Isolation Guidelines
ETA: https://twitter.com/robertwiblin/status/1463748021011681285
“The US CDC in an article updated in October 2021 is still telling people not to wear N95 masks, even though they are in abundant supply and vastly more effective than the cloth masks they seemingly recommend.
Absolutely disgraceful: https://cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-sick/about-face-coverings.html″
What do you mean by “it would be a good exercise”?