I was wrong. We in the scientific community were wrong. And it cost lives.
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. All of these were scientific mistakes at the time, not in hindsight. Amazingly, some of these obfuscations continue to the present day.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya
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Academic freedom at Stanford is clearly dying. It cannot survive if the administration fails to create an environment where good-faith discussions can occur outside of a framework of ideological rigidity and the false certainties that ideologues—and governments—wish to impose on us. Stanford missed the opportunity to sponsor COVID policy forums and it deplatformed dissenting voices. Several prominent faculty exploited this environment, engaging in actions that directly violated basic academic norms.
One of the checks and balances on rampant bad scientific research is to continuously assess how new ideas fit into the framework of the bigger picture. A new piece of information may seem perfectly reasonable and well-documented, but the domino effect of its implications gives you another way to test its validity. When multiple lines of seemingly rock-solid evidence contradict one another, that’s a good sign that something is wrong, even if you don’t yet know why. Whenever a thread seems out of place, it’s time to pull on that thread until you can figure out what exactly is going on.
…”Trusting the science” is not (and never has been) about trusting results or trusting experts. Trusting the scientists is what got us into this mess. For science to function properly, we must NOT trust the scientists. Instead, we must trust in the messy self-correcting process that allows truth to boil to the surface even if every participant in that process is flawed.
“Science is the belief in the ignorance of the Experts”
— Richard P. FeynmanScience is the relentless competition between measurable pieces of evidence, the ruthless gauntlet of debate, the willingness to question even the most “obvious” of assumptions, and the humbleness to test and retest any and all assumptions against hard evidence, most especially when those assumptions are our own.
https://www.juliusruechel.com/2022/01/who-do-you-trust-if-you-cant-trust.html
Dr. Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH, is a board-certified cardiologist who has testified before committees of the US and Texas Senate regarding the treatment of COVID-19 and management of the ongoing pandemic.
Backup mirrors:
Prof Bhattacharya said: “If lockdown was a primary driver of good Covid outcomes Florida would have come out far worse. It is no good to say that it did not have variants – Florida had the Alpha and Delta variant. Lockdowns don’t protect against coronavirus. And they certainly have collateral harm. Children have suffered, especially poor children. Unemployment mental health all the harm is hard to ignore and it is very hard to find any benefit to lockdown measures.”
https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1457984/lockdown-britain-protected-rich-working-class
Lockdowns will be seen as the “single biggest public health mistake” in history, a Stanford professor has warned.
…”Almost from the very beginning, lockdown was going to have enormous collateral consequences, things that are sometimes are hard to see but are nevertheless real.”
A year ago, there was no evidence that lockdowns would protect older high-risk people from Covid-19. Now there is evidence. They did not.
With so many Covid-19 deaths, it is obvious that lockdown strategies failed to protect the old. Holding the naïve belief that shutting down society would protect everyone, governments and scientists rejected basic focused protection measures for the elderly. While anyone can get infected, there is more than a thousand-fold difference in the risk of death between the old and the young. The failure to exploit this fact about the virus led to the biggest public health fiasco in history.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor at Stanford University Medical School, recently said that COVID-19 lockdowns are the “biggest public health mistake we’ve ever made…The harm to people is catastrophic.”
“I stand behind my comment that the lockdowns are the single worst public health mistake in the last 100 years. We will be counting the catastrophic health and psychological harms, imposed on nearly every poor person on the face of the earth, for a generation.
At the same time, they have not served to control the epidemic in the places where they have been most vigorously imposed. In the US, they have – at best – protected the ‘non-essential’ class from COVID, while exposing the essential working class to the disease. The lockdowns are trickle down epidemiology.“
A study evaluating COVID-19 responses around the world found that mandatory lockdown orders early in the pandemic may not provide significantly more benefits to slowing the spread of the disease than other voluntary measures, such as social distancing or travel reduction.
Background and Aims
The most restrictive non‐pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) for controlling the spread of COVID‐19 are mandatory stay‐at‐home and business closures. Given the consequences of these policies, it is important to assess their effects. We evaluate the effects on epidemic case growth of more restrictive NPIs (mrNPIs), above and beyond those of less restrictive NPIs (lrNPIs).
Methods
We first estimate COVID‐19 case growth in relation to any NPI implementation in subnational regions of 10 countries: England, France, Germany, Iran, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, South Korea, Sweden, and the US. Using first‐difference models with fixed effects, we isolate the effects of mrNPIs by subtracting the combined effects of lrNPIs and epidemic dynamics from all NPIs. We use case growth in Sweden and South Korea, two countries that did not implement mandatory stay‐at‐home and business closures, as comparison countries for the other 8 countries (16 total comparisons).
Results
Implementing any NPIs was associated with significant reductions in case growth in 9 out of 10 study countries, including South Korea and Sweden that implemented only lrNPIs (Spain had a non‐significant effect). After subtracting the epidemic and lrNPI effects, we find no clear, significant beneficial effect of mrNPIs on case growth in any country. In France, e.g., the effect of mrNPIs was +7% (95CI ‐5%‐19%) when compared with Sweden, and +13% (‐12%‐38%) when compared with South Korea (positive means pro‐contagion). The 95% confidence intervals excluded 30% declines in all 16 comparisons and 15% declines in 11/16 comparisons.
Conclusions
While small benefits cannot be excluded, we do not find significant benefits on case growth of more restrictive NPIs. Similar reductions in case growth may be achievable with less restrictive interventions.
- Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health.
- Keeping these measures in place until a vaccine is available will cause irreparable damage, with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed.
- We know that vulnerability to death from COVID-19 is more than a thousand-fold higher in the old and infirm than the young.
- COVID-19 is less dangerous for children than many other harms, including influenza.
- All populations will eventually reach herd immunity.
- Our goal should therefore be to minimize mortality and social harm until we reach herd immunity.
- Adopting measures to protect the vulnerable should be the central aim of public health responses to COVID-19.
- Those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal.
- Simple hygiene measures, such as hand washing and staying home when sick should be practiced by everyone to reduce the herd immunity threshold.
- Young low-risk adults should work normally, rather than from home.
- Restaurants and other businesses should open.
- Arts, music, sport and other cultural activities should resume.
https://unherd.com/2020/10/covid-experts-there-is-another-way/
Stanford University study founds antibodies in 50 to 85 times more people than previously thought in Santa Clara County, California. Covid-19 lethality of 0.12% to 0.2% which is in the range of severe influenza.