It’s Time for the Scientific Community to Admit We Were Wrong About COVID and It Cost Lives. By Kevin Bass.
As a medical student and researcher, I staunchly supported the efforts of the public health authorities when it came to COVID-19.
I believed that the authorities responded to the largest public health crisis of our lives with compassion, diligence, and scientific expertise. I was with them when they called for lockdowns, vaccines, and boosters.
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.
Yeah, we pointed that out in real time.
We excluded important parts of the population from policy development and castigated critics, which meant that we deployed a monolithic response …
Our emotional response and ingrained partisanship prevented us from seeing the full impact of our actions on the people we are supposed to serve. We systematically minimized the downsides of the interventions we imposed — imposed without the input, consent, and recognition of those forced to live with them. In so doing, we violated the autonomy of those who would be most negatively impacted by our policies: the poor, the working class, small business owners, Blacks and Latinos, and children. These populations were overlooked because they were made invisible to us by their systematic exclusion from the dominant, corporatized media machine that presumed omniscience.
Most of us did not speak up in support of alternative views, and many of us tried to suppress them. When strong scientific voices like world-renowned Stanford professors John Ioannidis, Jay Bhattacharya, and Scott Atlas, or University of California San Francisco professors Vinay Prasad and Monica Gandhi, sounded the alarm on behalf of vulnerable communities, they faced severe censure by relentless mobs of critics and detractors in the scientific community — often not on the basis of fact but solely on the basis of differences in scientific opinion.
When former President Trump pointed out the downsides of intervention, he was dismissed publicly as a buffoon. And when Dr. Antony Fauci opposed Trump and became the hero of the public health community, we gave him our support to do and say what he wanted, even when he was wrong.
Trump was not remotely perfect, nor were the academic critics of consensus policy. But the scorn that we laid on them was a disaster for public trust in the pandemic response. Our approach alienated large segments of the population from what should have been a national, collaborative project. …
Pandemic policy was created by a razor-thin sliver of American society who anointed themselves to preside over the working class — members of academia, government, medicine, journalism, tech, and public health, who are highly educated and privileged.
From the comfort of their privilege, this elite prizes paternalism, as opposed to average Americans who laud self-reliance and whose daily lives routinely demand that they reckon with risk. That many of our leaders neglected to consider the lived experience of those across the class divide is unconscionable.
The problem was not people’s ignorance of the facts, it was the organized antagonism and censorship against anyone presenting data that was contradictory to the mandate agenda. This is setting aside proclamations like those from the LA Times, which argued that mocking the deaths of “anti-vaxxers” might be necessary and justified. After two years of this type of arrogant nonsense it’s hard to imagine people will be willing to pretend as if all is well.
The active effort to shut down any opposing data is the root crime, though, and no, it can never be forgotten or forgiven.
People are still livid…
It was the left:
One cannot help but notice that the timing of the Atlantic’s appeal for passive forgetfulness and now this op-ed mea culpa coincides with the swiftly approaching end of the COVID emergency declarations, amid a growing political backlash to the last two years of meaningless lockdowns and mandates, and Democrats were instrumental in the implementation of both. A large swath of the population sees one party as the cause of much of their covid era strife.
Perhaps the mainstream media is suddenly realizing that they may have to face some payback for their covid zealotry? “We didn’t know! We were just following orders!” It all sounds rather familiar.
All that authoritarianism looks particularly wrong when they also got it technically wrong. And resulted in a lot of unnecessary deaths. And is continuing to do so.
hat-tip Stephen Neil
