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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   12932 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 19, 2025

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Scott briefly observes, "The only thing about COVID nobody talks about anymore is the 1.2 million deaths.

That’s 1.2 million American deaths. Globally it’s officially 7 million, unofficially 20 - 30 million. But 1.2 million American deaths is still a lot. It’s more than Vietnam plus 9/11 plus every mass shooting combined - in fact, more than ten times all those things combined. It was the single highest-fatality event in American history, beating the previous record-holder - the US Civil War - by over 50%. All these lives seem to have fallen into oblivion too quietly to be heard over the noise of Lab Leak Debate #35960381.

Maybe it’s because they were mostly old people? Old people have already lived a long life, nobody can get too surprised about them dying. But although only a small fraction of COVID deaths were young people, a small fraction of a large number can still be large: the pandemic killed 250,000 <65-year-old Americans, wiping out enough non-seniors to populate Salt Lake City. More military-age young men died in COVID than in Iraq/Afghanistan. Even the old people were somebody’s spouse or parent or grandparent; many should have had a good 5 - 10 years left.

Usually I’m the one arguing that we have to do cost-benefit analysis, that it’s impractical and incoherent to value every life at infinity billion dollars. And indeed, most lockdown-type measures look marginal on a purely economic analysis, and utterly fail one that includes hedonic costs. Rejecting some safety measures even though they saved lives was probably the right call. Still, I didn’t want to win this hard. People are saying things like “COVID taught us that scientists will always exaggerate how bad things will be.” I think if we’d known at the beginning of COVID that it would kill 1.2 million Americans, people would have thought that whatever warnings they were getting, or panicky responses were being proposed, were - if anything - understated.1

A better comparison for 1.2 million Americans dying would be the Spanish Flu: An estimated 675,000 Americans died, while the total population was estimated to be round 106,000,000. (The 2020 estimated population was around 331,500,000.)

One problem I have with the online debates about covid policy is there's no clear counterfactual: 2021 deaths were higher than 2020 deaths, which is bad for arguments that containment policies were only protecting the most vulnerable at the expense of the general population, because the most vulnerable had disproportionately died in 2020 and management had improved. It's possible that a different set of policies would have resulted in disproportionately more QALYs lost by lower-risk demographics, due to the non-linear dynamics of disease transmission (don't forget rates of mutation). I don't really care to defend any policy, since there were a lot of avoidable mistakes, but I think the criticism should be more specific and measured.

(Edit: Scott's Lockdown Effectiveness: Much More Than You Wanted To Know, published July 1, 2021 - anyone know if there's been much change in the understanding of NPI effectiveness?)

When has policy ever been about the numbers ? It's about sex appeal.

Utilitarians can be surprisingly blind at times. Covid wasn't sexy. No spectacle, no myth building, no clear narrative. Deaths were slow, honorable & blameless. Ofc people don't care in proportion to the numbers.

No movie or even harrowing video to speak of. Hell, there wasn't even an iconic photo. Statistically, I know the Bengal famine killed a lot of people. But viscerally, my emotions are tied to the photos of piled up bodies, literally (not figuratively) looming vultures and 1st hand stories of families prostituting themselves for food. There is a villain (Churchill). There is intrigue ( what if they hadn't diverted reserves to Australia). There is a story.

Plane crashes are sexier than car accidents, which causes disproportional worry. Tuberculosis, a 'CURABLE DISEASE' !! kills 1.25 million every year. No one cares. Malaria kills 600k every year. Yet, the most visceral image of it is Bill Gates releasing non-viral mosquitoes to a room of white people. Covid is no exception.

The Ukraine war went from being sexy urban warfare 'Hordes of migrants, tanks built up in front of Kyiv, hot women crying and destroyed cities' to more conventional unsexy warfare in the woods. No one cares anymore. Israel and Palestine keep producing visceral imagery at an unheard-of rate, and it stays sexy.

Tragedy has pretty privilege. It's all that matters.

I dislike how he brushes over 'lab leaks'. That should've been the real story, it's more important than all other factors and especially more important than feeling sad about the death toll.

Nothing was learnt from COVID. Literally nothing, gain of function research is still continuing. Everyone knows that gain of function research caused this disaster. But nobody can be bothered to do anything about it, Trump has frozen federal funding into gain of function. A funding freeze is not remotely proportionate for the megadeath machine.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-14711269/ebola-lab-placed-shutdown-halting-disease-research.html

Speaking anonymously, an HHS source revealed that one of the researchers poked a hole in the other's protective equipment during a vicious 'lovers' spat'.

Dr Connie Schmaljohn, the lab's director, was also placed on administrative leave after she allegedly failed to report the incident to other officials.

In a previous incident in May 2018, anthrax may have been accidentally released from the boiler room at one of the labs in Fort Detrick, Maryland, and into a nearby river where people were planting lilypads. No illnesses were reported as a result of the potential release.

This is a BSL-4 lab by the way, America's top people. Wuhan was BSL-3. These doctors have been behaving like clowns with the most dangerous technology on the planet. There's no sign of any professionalism, considering the danger of their work. The acceptable number of lab leaks is zero, it's the same as the acceptable number of accidental nuclear strikes. The AI community seems to care more about bioweapon risk, that's a big part of the whole AI safety rhetoric. But why should anyone care about whether AIs can synthesize bioweapons when the experts are already doing it so carelessly?

This stuff should be done out on South Georgia island near the south pole, or somewhere incredibly remote with a huge mandatory quarantine period, if and only if it's absolutely necessary. Otherwise, anyone who tries to do gain of function, especially with humanized mice like they were doing for COVID (like Daszak boasted about in his tweets) should be treated like Osama Bin Laden, with special forces coming in to shoot them on sight.

The right of scientists to publish cool papers and do interesting research in convenient locations does not come above the right to life, freedom and property for tens, hundreds of millions.

Scott had an extraordinarily in-depth lab leak post in 2024, I'm not sure there was anything more for him to say on the topic unless he'd changed his mind about it. Naturally, saying "everyone knows that gain of function research caused this" is putting it way too strongly: Scott isn't convinced and neither am I. But I think about this very often -

(…) for the first time [this debate] made me see the coronavirus as one of God’s biggest and funniest jokes. Think about it. Either a zoonotic virus crossed over to humans fifteen miles from the biggest coronavirus laboratory in the Eastern Hemisphere. Or a lab leak virus first rose to public attention right near a raccoon-dog stall in a wet market. Either way is one of the century’s biggest coincidences, designed by some cosmic joker who wanted to keep the debate acrimonious for years to come.

…and it does follow that we should probably treat gain-of-function research as if it had caused COVID, because "we can't ever know for certain if it caused COVID, but the two hypotheses are neck-to-neck" is bad enough if we're talking about future caution.

…and it does follow that we should probably treat gain-of-function research as if it had caused COVID, because "we can't ever know for certain if it caused COVID, but the two hypotheses are neck-to-neck" is bad enough if we're talking about future caution.

That's a fair conclusion, but not really Scott's conclusion, and I have to wonder what the underlying motivation is to be so committed that lab leak is wrong when there's more interesting topics to discuss around COVID.

It's unfortunate that this is rarely stated clearly, but I figure the crux is that COVID was a watershed moment for governments, with the backing of a technocratic expert caste, imposing novel restrictions on personal and social freedoms. The narrative the globalist-technocratic complex and its supporters want to prevail is that this was good and necessary - the freedoms are a relic of a more innocent age, somewhere in the class of letting gentlemen scientists enrich uranium in their bedrooms, and in our age of global networks and megacities it is important to endow experts and elected representatives with emergency powers to restrict them according to their superior judgement to protect the people from danger.

This narrative is a lot more compelling if COVID was a natural catastrophe and the official response at least constituted a reasonable attempt to minimise the risk of bad outcomes, than if COVID was a result of irresponsible actions by the same technocrat clique that wants to arrogate itself emergency powers to immamentize its "superior judgement". (See: the old pattern of creating a problem and selling the solution)

Underlying this all is a quiet disagreement about what was even the "problem" - one group of people sees a dangerous disease that society was worryingly incompetent in containing and wonders why it even matters where exactly it came from, while the other sees "free" societies happily going on the North Korea spectrum overnight over a cold and wonders why it even matters how bad the cold was.

I thought the general consensus was that it was a lab leak, even if it can't be proved due to much of the evidence mysteriously disappearing (which is itself a certain signal). This seems to be the position of the US intelligence apparatus. Frankly it should've been obvious back in March of 2020 given the proximity of the lab, the nature of its COVID research and all the anomalous activity going on there.

Anyway, I also agree with your second point.

His post continued to ignore the fact that governments seem to have info that they buried that supports the lab leak (eg Germany).

From the linked post:

Suppose we accept the judges’ decision that COVID arose via zoonosis. Does that mean lab leak was a “conspiracy theory” and we should be embarrassed to have ever believed it? The term “conspiracy theory” is awkward here because there were definitely at least two conspiracies - one by China to hide the evidence, one by western virologists to convince everyone that lab leak was stupid and they shouldn’t think about it. Saar cited some leaked internal conversations among expert virologists. Back in the earliest stage of the pandemic, they said to each other that it seemed like COVID could have come from a lab leak - their specific odds were 50-50 - but that they should try to obfuscate this to prevent people from turning against them and their labs. So the best we can say here is that maybe the conspiracies got lucky on their 50-50 bet, and the thing they were trying to cover up wasn’t even true.

I don't know what more you'd want. He knows perfectly well that disingenuous actors in the China and in the west conspired to cover up anything that could have pointed at a lab leak. Given the nature of the leaked evidence, however, he thinks the bad actors did this in case it turned out to be a lab leak, without themselves being certain.

I don't know what more you'd want.

He told you: an acknowledgment that lab leak was the likely origin of COVID according to various western governments' own assesments. We're not talking about virologist speculations in the early stages of the pandemic. The passage you quoted is a perfect example of Scott doing exactly of what he's being accused of.

Really, really disappointed with that post of his.

-Civil war era US had a tenth of present day US population. Scott surely knows this.

-mostly old people died now so low QALY losses compared to say, Spanish flu.

He knows all this, he's smart, we know this, yet he doesn't say it. Why?

I dislike how he brushes over 'lab leaks'.

Ironically, most of US lab leaker proponents are (probably) brushing over a the fact that covid was not made by the 'bat woman' Shi Zhengli in Wuhan, but was made in a US lab in Montana as part of a project to 'Defuse' bat coronaviruses in wild bat populations by circulating particular strains of viruses in them.

This seems outrageous and is perhaps a coverup of something darker, nevertheless there's fairly compelling evidence for it such as the animals in which covid easily spreads are not typical Chinese lab animals.

This is a complex set of claims which it'd take some serious effort to verify, but it does seem plausible and explains anomalies such as the disclosure of the genome by Shi in early '20 etc.

Anyway on the link there's an entire podcast episode that goes over it in detail.

I've always maintained that responsibility is shared between the superpowers, that's a huge part of why nobody's prepared to accept what happened or do anything. The Chinese have eagerly been saying 'oh it was made in America' and vis versa. But neither is prepared to do anything about it, they want to pretend it never happened lest the enormity of the disaster waft back onto them. Propaganda is all they're willing to do.

This applies especially to the community of experts (that Scott is a member and cheerleader for), full realization would be shattering to their authority. This disaster was made by the experts, whether in China or America or both, it was them.

mostly old people died now so low QALY losses compared to say, Spanish flu

He literally talks about this in the post.

Civil war era US had a tenth of present day US population. Scott surely knows this.

He changed that paragraph from "deadliest" to "highest fatality" when several people in the comments pointed out that the civil war was still more lethal per capita.

During the same period, roughly 15 million Americans died in total. I just really doubt that the average person can notice an ~8% increase in death rate, particularly when most of the people dying aren't people that you're very surprised died. My position remains that basically nothing should have been done other than expediting the vaccination schedule even further for those that would plausibly benefit from it and I've never seen anything that makes me think that position is even slightly wrong.

Maybe the real lesson is that evenly distributed deaths just aren't very noticeable even if they're statistically relevant.

1.2 million people died? You mean the lockdowns didn’t prevent large numbers of deaths?

We should have let the Kung flu burn itself out faster. Lockdown advocates should be stripped of their professional credentials(and if that means ‘no doctors for a few years’ then so be it) and forbidden to work, address the public, or collect social security, and the head honchos executed. The lockdown itself needs to be the subject of a sustained ‘never again’ campaign similar to the Holocaust, and future generations should be guilt tripped endlessly about what their ancestors did.

Sound harsh? ‘Covid was really bad’ apologia is just an attempt to rehabilitate the lockdowns to do it again. I’ll have an objective discussion about it when dr Fauci is executed after a public show trial.

We should have let the Kung flu burn itself out faster.

Did anyplace on Earth achieve herd immunity? What makes you think this was possible? What was to prevent more dangerous mutations from spreading, before herd immunity was reached?

(Also, if you want to annoy the CCP, call it "Sars-Cov-2," not "Kung Flu.")

I don’t care about annoying the CCP, I care about annoying the people that pushed lockdowns on me and mine.

And we have herd immunity now. Some of that might be vaccines but the clear selective pressure on the virus was to become a cold. Faster spread=more generations=it turns into omicron faster.

And we have herd immunity now.

We do not (except perhaps to specific extinct strains, which is mostly practically irrelevant). Herd immunity is a state in which spread has stopped because there are enough immune individuals that an infection chain cannot be sustained within the herd. We have that for measles, excepting a few communities with low vaccine adoption who are being hit. But COVID is now endemic; it continues to spread through the population. It's just far less deadly now, likely because most of those especially susceptible to the disease are either dead or recovered with an immune system now better able to handle the disease. Because COVID doesn't usually harm children greatly, as long as it is endemic we can expect death rates to be low, because children will be first infected when they are at their least susceptible and this will prime their immune system for later infections.

I'm still not 100% convinced that the antigenic imprinting thing didn't transpire with the vaccines -- I've had it exactly once, during the Omicron wave, and don't seem to get it anymore despite the odd known exposure. Which is stark contrast with my (largely rabid vaccine fan) coworkers, who seem to be down with it all winter and still complain about side effects from booster shots.

Granted it's not putting them in the hospital or anything, but they do seem to be uniformly pretty damn sick for several days everytime -- which is worse than my initial natural exposure. Unlikely to get a good study on it, but if anything it seems like kind of the opposite of herd immunity -- I always thought that this was one of the more plausible reasons not to take the vaccine, so I get a nice glow of smugness everytime somebody calls in saying "OMG I can't even move, see you next week".

It really should have been Wuhan Flu.

Except it wasn't a flu, so that would just be incorrect.

Flu is almost always symptomatically indistinguishable from COVID. Not very many people need to know or care about the exact taxonomy of a moderate respiratory infection, and frankly speaking, most doctors don't either. To the minor extent that treatment might differ, we'd mentally just keep that bit in mind. It would hardly be the worst name in the world.

Flu is almost always symptomatically indistinguishable from COVID

My theory is that it was much more widespread in the US than anyone admitted because testing was constrained early on, and a lot of first-wave cases got called flu with no further diagnostics.

I'm not sure why there are so many people insisting that we should have used a more inexact name for this disease just because it fits a certain naming scheme (or geopolitical interest).

There's a clear different memetic impact depending on whether people mentally bucketed covid as 'a new potentially-deadly virus' or 'a new strain of the flu', so that was always an important territory to fight over.

Remember when we all pretended it was a rule not to name diseases after places? That was fun.

Or name them after monkeys because of homosexuals?

Again, I'm not sure why people are insisting on this. Is there something particular gained, apart from - again - the geopolitical interest?

It's difficult to talk about covid deaths without also talking about how the data was recorded.

For example, if someone was in a nasty car accident and died in the hospital. They would be considered a covid related death if they tested positive for covid.

There are other examples I could give (data taken during protests, etc) and we can talk about how often this actually happened but once data becomes suspicious, it's difficult to take it seriously.

We can just count total deaths. A bunch more people died than usual. We don't really tend to miscount how many people died.

The total number of excess deaths is probably the best you can do, but even that isn’t perfect, since it also encompasses deaths from delayed medical treatment, deaths of despair, etc., due to the shutdowns.

presumably, you can just compare deaths across a covid and non-covid period to get a rough estimate of covid deaths. i doubt the policies put in place to fight covid led to a large number of extra deaths in the short term.

Why not? It's prettymuch the largest confounder in human history in terms of widespread behavior modification.

There's enough countries/regions in the world on various points of the infection virulence/lockdown severity scale you should be able to work out a metastudy

For example, if someone was in a nasty car accident and died in the hospital. They would be considered a covid related death if they tested positive for covid.

Does anyone have a citation for a policy of counting everyone who tests positive for covid shortly before death as "a covid related death?" How should causes of death like "two illnesses, one of which is symptomatic covid" or "respiratory distress a positive covid test, but no other clear covid symptoms" have been counted?

I've also felt using it against other historical diseases is outlandish since it's not like somebody was sitting by every single dead body in the Spanish Flu outbreak and doing a genomic test to prove whether or not they'd ever expressed anything

I remember reading an article at the time that said much of the confusion was due to the process used to investigate COVID deaths. Since all COVID cases were being reported to the health department at the time, any death with COVID was reported as a suspected COVID death, keeping in mind that all the health department knew initially was that a. The person had COVID and b. The person died. Since it takes a couple weeks for a death certificate to be issued, stories would come out of someone dying in a car crash who was on the COVID death list. But once the health department had the death certificate, they would then exclude anyone for whom COVID wasn't a contributing factor in their death.

It should be mentioned that the opposite happened, as well. There was a guy out by Philadelphia who crashed his car, was taken to the hospital, and died. He tested positive in the hospital, and was listed as having died from COVID, which cased a minor outrage for being so obviously the "guy who dies in a car accident tests positive and gets counted as a COVID death". Except in this case, they were right, but for the wrong reasons. The guy was sick with COVID, and the accident was actually caused because he lost control of his car after getting into a coughing fit. His injuries from the accident weren't life threatening, and he died of COVID at the hospital. In other words, he died with car accident.

Does anyone have a citation for...

I'm starting to feel like AI use is the new "just google it" for basic factual questions. This says:

  • Deaths from COVID and deaths with COVID were both counted and reported in different places.
  • "However, surveillance and public health reporting sometimes used broader definitions for statistical purposes, such as counting deaths within a certain period after a positive COVID-19 test as "COVID-related deaths," particularly in the UK and some US states."

After all that the citations are the BBC (reporting on the change from "anyone who has ever had COVID, regardless of whether it contributed to their death or not" to "anyone who has had COVID in the past 28 days, regardless of whether it contributed to their death or not"), and Colorado Public Radio ("Deaths from" vs. "deaths with").

Deaths from COVID and deaths with COVID were both counted and reported in different places.

The insistence on this conflation is probably one of the worse policy mistakes of national health authorities during the COVID years, not least because of (a) how upstream it was for justifying later (bad) policies on the basis of risk-severity, and (b) how obvious the implications of this could be to anyone already inclined towards skepticism with even a passing knowledge of statistical smuggling.

There are absolutely valid reasons to be very concerned about a potentially highly mutable pathogen in a population. You can absolutely believe a quarantine model could be necessary to protect at-risk people. But if you want to retain public trust and deference from a high-skepticism, low-trust, and literate population, you cannot smuggle in nakedly bad data to pad your numbers for public, population-level urgency. Too many discontents will read the data categories, recognize the issue, and spread the awareness. And too many people would be able to find examples of systemic incentives to miscount- even at the level of how some medical institutions could get more money for classifying patients as with-COVID. Which validates concerns / lack of trust in medical objectivity.

This was a (predictable) aspect of the pandemic response, as was the circle-the-wagons response and the partisan appeals to trusting the science. Except it was not science when it was being pushed, but Science. And those who insisted on championing The Science, or that people were bad for not believing policy proscribed on the basis of The Science, or even just that others should defer to those with The Science despite any misdirection from the authorities with The Science, have no basis for their own [current statistic] to be believed.

And a consequence of the inflated numbers is that they lost claim for establishing a shared understanding of what a 'true' number of deaths could be. 1.2 millions Americans died of Covid? Why should anyone believe that? How many 'died with' are smuggled into that? Does the argument from excess deaths also give credit for 'deaths saved' in later years from the people who died earlier but not later, or is it a one-way rachet to imply an above-average death rate in the area of scrutiny but not a lower-than-average death rate afterwards?

And why should anyone be concerned, without a baseline of comparison to establish relative rates? Is 1.2 million 1%, 5%, 100% more than expected? Especially if you use 'during Covid' as a span of time. Okay- what was that span of time, and what would be the 'normal' number of deaths during it? And how are you separating [deaths from COVID] from [deaths from COVID policy]?

Without such a baseline, of distinction between the consequences of bad policy and a bad disease, the main reason to defer to someone's statistic is trust. But trust is precisely what is lost when you conflate [with] and [from].

worse policy mistakes

Is it a 'mistake', if it's designed to obfuscate and mislead?

That the same bad actors then use their obfuscation for

justifying later (bad) policies on the basis of risk-severity

I have difficulty seeing these as 'mistakes'.

Wasn't their a rhyming obfuscation with the vaccinated? You did not count as vaccinated and dead unless you died > 2 weeks after your vaccination?

Is it a 'mistake', if it's designed to obfuscate and mislead?

Sure. The phrase 'it was worse than a crime; it was a mistake' comes to mind.

I am all on board that acts and/or policies can both be morally wrong and mistakes in the sense that they do not achieve the ends they were taken to achieve.

Going by Fauci's public statements for why he changed various positions over the course of the pandemic to 'nudge' people into 'better' options, I am fully prepared to believe he was both a bad actor and that he believed doing so would provide a net good on the pandemic outcome.

I think he was generally incompetent in that regards, as I do most people who believe national policy-level lies to be 'white lies' with no bearing on later credibility. I even say this as someone who has a far greater degree of acceptance of state secrets and such than others- part of public credibility is that you need a public's buy in to recognize that you might not share all information, but that what you do share needs to be fundamentally honest/accurate. Failures to maintain this are what lose the trust of those willing to extend tolerance to withholding 'true' information. Fauci's (and other's) technocratic approach to professional credibility is part of why I find him incompetent- he behaved as if the legitimacy and public trust derived from his position, rather than was bestowed by the public he tried to obfuscate and mislead.

People- individually and collectively- have some tolerance for O&M. But it is narrowed, and subject to revocation if abused.

The execution of the Duc d’Enghien was used to further the proximate goal of deterring royalist opposition and consolidating Napoleon’s power, much like COVID data obfuscation was used to justify policies by amplifying risk-severity. Both achieved short-term goals—suppressing dissent or driving compliance.

Both are 'mistakes' that appear to have met their indended near-term goals? Nearly all current year politics eschews the long term.

While you quote an enduring witicism I have difficulty finding an error or fault resulting from defective judgment, deficient knowledge, or carelessness, a misconception or misunderstanding, in either. Traditional markers of mistakes.

That trust in institutions may now be diminished, is only a result of the 'mistake' if the trust had been warrented or well-placed before. The 'mistake' is that the public trusted them to begin with.

The counter factual is Sweden, tge country that didn’t lock down at all. And to my knowledge, they didn’t really do any worse than their near neighbors.

And the reason it’s so hard to get talking about 1.2 million deaths on the radar is just how much the lockdowns cost the rest of us. People thrown into unemployment (and in the USA, it was hard to get unemployment because the systems were overwhelmed) with a small one time “bonus”. Businesses forced out of business because they couldn’t open, but their creditors could still demand payments. Children deprived of important social development because they couldn’t socialize with other kids. Those same kids given zoom classes instead of a real education. People denied the right to socialize, and when one of those 1.2 million people died, they were forced to die alone, with their families huddles around an iPad.

Scatter plots of measures of lockdown strictness versus disease impact tend to look like shotshell patterns. That is, no correlation. The lockdowns were on the close order of completely useless.

Sweden and its neighbours are much less densely populated than most of Europe, meaning the virus generally has a lower transmission rate in those countries. I'm not sure lockdown lessons from Sweden can necessarily be applied to e.g Germany.

The Scandinavian countries have low levels of population density because vast tracts in the frozen north are empty, but that doesn't mean the people are spread out. Excluding city-states, Sweden is the 8th most urban country in Europe. It's significantly more densely populated than Germany by that metric.

You forgot massive self-inflicted economic damage (inflation, shuttered businesses, layoffs) caused by the lockdown ands insane money printing. All for basically nothing other tha our leaders indulging their "don't just stand there, do something!!!" impulse. I think about that every few days and I'm still angry about it. Really fucked up my plans, and I think I got off better than most.

Oh, and the insane powegrabs by literal-whos at all levels of federal, state, and city bureaucracy. Pencil necked losers in gubmint jobs suddenly issuing edicts about what free citizens of republic can and cannot do. And people obeyed. I will never be able to unsee that.

Yes, I remember seeing people spray down their shoes with disinfectant when returning to the house. Or spraying down the table at a shared eating space (because what we really needed is a bunch of people touching the same squirter, squirting down their tape-demarcated part of the table).

There was a shocking level of hysteria.

Certainly Sweden's excess death toll was lower than the European average, which seems like the most damning statistic for the efficacy of lockdowns.

It’s damning for the state enforced lockdowns which most other states were eager to implement. I think a lot of states used it as a compliance test *just how long can we get people to obey arbitrary rules and be shut in their homes without creating a backlash. Rather frightening to now understand that if you make the situation sound bad enough, you can get this sort of thing to go on for a long time. More than a year.

And other states were actually pretty upset that Sweden didn’t go along because it did provide an alternative to arresting people who dared to leave their homes.

Scott's "more than you wanted to know" assessment was that Sweden most likely did worse, albeit by a difficult to quantify margin.

Sweden did do a soft lockdown in the sense that businesses had reduced hours/density or encouraged people to work from home, and restricted the occupancy of certain public facilities like swimming pools. That, and I got the subjective sense that they have much less of a contingent of people who are young and severely unhealthy even compared to countries like Germany.

I mean as compared to much of the rest of the world, and certainly blue tribe areas of America, and as such I think it’s a reasonable counter factual case. They didn’t have to shut down everything, rope off playgrounds or cancel schools. Yes, they limited capacity, but for the most part, you could do what you wanted to.

Sweden did better than any country in Europe on an excess death basis.

I continue to dislike that as the primary metric of doing better during Covid. The important way that Sweden did better is that they engaged in fewer human rights violations, which is much more important to me than how many elderly people passed away of natural causes.

I’m not suggesting that is the primary benefit. But if the stated rationale for the human rights violation doesn’t produce any benefits as evidenced by Sweden, then that’s even stronger argument against those violations.

Anecdotal but am I one of the few who was almost completely unaffected by COVID? I literally knew no one on a first name basis who died. My 90 y/o grandma went on a 8 hour road trip with my positive aunt and was never symptomatic. My hunch is COVID deaths tended to cluster amongst certain groups. My white, Evangelical, smoking and drinking are sins circle faired very well.

Similarly with the great opioid crisis I've never known anyone who has OD'd.

Biggest impact from COVID on me was a positive one, my job became 100% remote and I was able to wear pajamas for weeks at a time.

My white, Evangelical, smoking and drinking are sins circle faired very well.

I think this part should be hyphenated, as otherwise it becomes a garden-path sentence.

My grandpa (late 80s with COPD) died from covid. The superintendant of my workplace got it and died after being publically anti-lockdown. My older cousin and her husband (both obese, and he smokes heavily) got it, but survived, though she was hospitalized.

My parents got it (after being vaccinated). Got weird neurological things a couple weeks later that got blamed on covid, including my stepmom blacking out while driving (and only avoiding swerving into traffic because my dad's cousin was in the passenger seat and grabbed the wheel in time).

I'm fortunate enough that nobody in my extended family outright died of COVID, but it put a family member in the ICU and others were severely sick. It absolutely wasn't a normal year by those standards.

A med student, who happens to be my brother's best friend and also my pupil, lost his dad to a fungal infection following an ICU admission after COVID. On a more extended basis, I certainly saw plenty of people die in the ICU I was responsible for during the worst of the pandemic.

My grandfather died of COVID in his mid 80s but he had had 4 heart attacks, a quadruple bypass surgery and was almost as round as he was tall… it was a miracle he lived that long to begin with….

No.

The closest person I can come up with who died of Covid was a coworker's (middle aged, obese) mother who I'd never met. Otherwise, I knew people who got it, and one who was hospitalized with it (twice, but he was on a "hospitalized every six months" schedule as it was before), but no one dead or seriously injured. As far as I know I never caught it (I took the initial two course vaccine but that's it, didn't make efforts to avoid it, lived with the guy who was twice hospitalized, etc.), and if Covid was indistinguishable from a bad hangover/routine flu-like illness that goes away after a day for a ~30 year old alcoholic (The bars being shut down really was annoying.) with a past history of smoking, that's on it.

I personally knew well 2 people who died of it who really shouldn't have had any obvious comorbidmities. I have a massive social network though - the number of people I know who died of it are far lower than the official stats would suggest.

I also didn't know anyone that died. My octogenarian grandparents got it and were fine.

Opioids on the other hand... well, I was from a poor rural town. A couple old friends that I have very fond memories of apparently got hooked on something and died, although the specifics are murky.

I don't know anyone who died of covid: my mother (in her 50s) got it and was hospitalized, but recovered. My grandmother (in her 90s) got it and didn't even end up in the hospital.

I don't know anyone who died of covid but I did know one guy who dropped dead of a stroke shortly after getting the vaccine.

I know exactly one person who "died of COVID". He was a morbidly obese, diabetic cancer survivor in his 70s with emphysema and COPD who had to regularly undergo dialysis to stay alive. When he passed away, it was shortly after going to the ER for chest pain.

I don't have a direct answer to your question, but I also don't think there's really any way around the fact that Covid was exceptionally deadly when compared to the common flu, and that given what they knew at the time the public health response was somewhat reasonable. That being said, a widespread tailored approach that focused on vulnerable individuals with at least one comorbidity probably would have softened the blow to the global economy, but almost certainly would have killed more people. The blowback to their approach coupled with the political environment was probably unavoidable, but the disgusting behavior of the Western media apparatus made it worse. Every dissenting opinion was met with accusations of racism or conspiracy theory. It was so difficult to wade through all of it at the time because the shear magnitude of manipulation and moral blackmail that was occurring through the media caused me to warp my own perception of what was medically true and what wasn't. The Ivermectin trend I latched onto had me reading all types of studies and meta-analyses that I thought were sufficient enough to support the efficacy of it. It took me a while to emotionally accept the dubious nature of those studies because my hatred of our mainstream and expert class was so deep at the time.

I was less emotionally invested in the lab leak theory although, due to the media's treatment of it, I also ended up digging into it as well. I found myself more fascinated from a curiosity standpoint with the lab leak vs. market origins than my continued efforts at trying to find a grain of truth supporting the efficacy of alternative treatments and prophylactics. Admittedly, this probably had to do with the fact that there no longer seemed to be a light at the end of the Ivermectin tunnel. Overall, I wasn't greatly affected by the lockdowns, or the Pfizer vaccine I took, but I felt and still feel deeply affected by everything the mainstream did outside of that. At the time, I was unable to distinguish between the lies and the medical truths that were being shelled out by the same group of people.

The thing that gets me--and I will admit my loss of facts over the years-- is there's no counterfactual for how effective the vaccines were. I presume the peak numbers would have come down a little, but vs. what? Overall, it doesn't seem to me there's much evidence that the vaccines did anything as the course of the covid outbreak followed every other pandemic just at a different scale. All I get is, "Of course they worked, it's obvious. You're stupid."

The trials presumably produced adequate estimations of the vaccines' effectiveness. I think the problem with public perception was partly that low rates of other infectious diseases created the misconception that sterilizing vaccines are the norm, such that reports that a vaccine "merely" health risks to the recipient by 90% triggered the confirmation bias of anti-vaccine people. (One person repeatedly told me "They changed the definition of 'vaccine.'")

The trials presumably produced adequate estimations of the vaccines' effectiveness.

Against the variant circulating at the time. Which was extinct by the time the vaccines were released.

reports that a vaccine "merely" health risks to the recipient by 90%

Unfortunately we don't even really have enough evidence to quantify conclusively what the 'severity' benefit really was -- the initial trials were underpowered for anything to do with severity/death, and of course were terminated once the companies got their approval. (in that the control arm got real shots)

So there's no RCT to quantify this benefit, and the population-level studies are hopelessly muddled by a mixture of hard to correct for demographic confounders and sheer politics/CW. Plus all the different strains -- it's hard to say for sure, but seems clear that Omicron was very not-severe as compared to earlier strains -- so when a person got Covid is probably even more important than his vaccination status, severity-wise.

"Work" can mean a variety of things. It can be "does this reduce the average persons chance of death". But the version thats needed to justify mandates is a systemic/herd immunity effect that has failed to materialise even in 90%+ vaccinated populations.

Ah, stupid public, thinking 'vaccines make you immune to a virus' just because scientists have been putting exactly that in kids books and shows and songs, and saying it to the UN and African and Afghani warlords for the past 80 years.

If you don't think the establishment were deliberately relying on the public perception of vaccines being viral immunity you are cuckoo.

the establishment were deliberately relying on the public perception of vaccines being viral immunity

Who, specifically, and to what end?

This was the reasoning behind vaccine passports. If you were vaccinated, then you wouldn't be passing on the virus. I lived in a place that required vaccine passports to go entertainment venues. Grocery stores technically didn't require a vaccine passport but if you wanted to take your mask off you needed to show proof of vaccination first. The rationale behind these things is that the vaccinated can't (or are significantly less likely) to be infected and infect others.

These were public policies made by public health professionals. The public health professionals thought the vaccines reduced infection rates and that's why they set the policy the way they did.

I understand not remembering who specifically said it, but why are you acting like the idea is out there that you're literally unable to come up with a motive for it?

Fucking everybody bud. If the zeitgeist position on vaccines wasn't 'they make you immune' the politicians and the media wouldn't have been so cavalier about safety concerns. If your gish gallop needs names, start with Kamala Harris - "The vaccine will prevent you from getting covid."

The closest comparison here is the influenza vaccine, and I don't recall anyone saying that the influenza vaccine makes you immune from influenza.

At least in the US, colloquially they aren't called influenza vaccines, they're called "flu shots." Not sure on the origin of not calling them vaccines but my assumption has always been that it's because they don't reliably immunize against or prevent the flu.

Kamala Harris - "The vaccine will prevent you from getting covid."

Link?

I'm not finding it myself.

The closest I found was here, but it's explicitly about protection from hospitalization and death.

I'm not finding it either, even though I remember watching her say it, and mocking it with my friends so frequently I can remember the exact quote. And when I widened my search it got even better - apparently no US official ever said anything like that!

We are so fucked as a species.

Such purges of the digital past are an increasingly common part of the American electoral cycle.

Maybe you're thinking of Biden? https://youtube.com/watch?v=ciwyYnwYFaQ?si=nEANKgR7xGw6h2Vk

In ancient China, you would have believed a dragon was eating the sun. In your village, people would have made as much noise as possible—beating drums, pounding pots and pans, yelling—to scare the dragon off. When the sun reappeared, you would have sighed in relief. The dragon had flown off, and your village was safe.

It is obvious that they worked. This is how normal people understand things. Didn't we vaccinate everyone? And didn't the pandemic end soon after?

No — we vaccinated everyone and it kept going until Omni happened

We vaccinated, yes, but we also risk-compensated.

They kept track of death rates among the unvaccinated vs vaccinated (vs boosted, etc.), and it definitely looked like you wanted to be in the group whose first exposure to Covid spikes was of the artificial, non-exponentially-reproducing variety. Vaccine effectivity dropped off with time fast enough that there was no way to stop the disease from spreading, but at least we might have somewhat reduced the fatality rate from more of those first virgin exposures.

The obvious problem with those numbers is that this was anything but a Randomized Controlled Trial, and who knows what other differences those population groups had. IIRC I could find the data age-adjusted, but not controlled for anything else. There's a paradox where, if you tell everybody that e.g. square dancers live longer, you may soon find that square dancers really do live longer, not because it's better than other forms of exercise or whatever, but because now all the people who are doing a lot of other things to take care of their health have started square dancing too. Perhaps people who resisted taking a Covid vaccine are more oppositional toward other sorts of public health recommendations too, either with regard to Covid (letting themselves be exposed more easily) or to other contributing factors (obesity, smoking, "toughing out" serious infections, whatever).

The more subtle problem is that it's hard to tell how Covid-19 would have evolved in the presence of a more universally vaccinated population. Death rates fell way off with the Omicron variant, but would the virus inevitably have evolved in the same way at the same speed?

All I get is, "Of course they worked, it's obvious. You're stupid."

Ask if they think the FDA should have allowed the vaccine to be freely distributed and/or sold after it was first invented, in March 2020, without spending the next several months waiting on slow-but-legally-mandated testing methods and FDA approval before they could ramp up production. It's a little hard to get up on a "not trusting the system and taking the vaccine makes you a stupid anti-vaxxer" high horse when nearly half of the US deaths came during a time period when the system would have jailed anyone who gave you the vaccine.

What we needed were expedited Challenge Trials. The first thing I thought was ridiculous is how the virus was dangerous enough that it made sense to shut down everything, but not so important that we could do challenge trials for treatments on volunteers. I know many people who would have willingly been exposed to the virus to test out a treatment/vaccine.

A challenge trail would have shut down a lot of this vaccine effectiveness debate. Isolate a group of 400 people, vaccinate half, expose half of each group to the virus, and record the data. Hard to argue with that, fast results, save a million lives.

Ask if they think the FDA should have allowed the vaccine to be freely distributed and/or sold after it was first invented, in March 2020, without spending the next several months waiting on slow-but-legally-mandated testing methods and FDA approval before they could ramp up production. It's a little hard to get up on a "not trusting the system and taking the vaccine makes you a stupid anti-vaxxer" high horse when nearly half of the US deaths came during a time period when the system would have jailed anyone who gave you the vaccine.

Freely distributed, yes. Tough to say what the minimum level of safety testing should be needed for sales should be.

Ask if they think the FDA should have allowed the vaccine to be freely distributed and/or sold after it was first invented

I think they were wise not to do that. It would have opened up the whole issue of various more-or-less official requirements for getting this vaccine they hadnt pronounced safe yet, and the actually-existing controversy was peanuts compared to what that could have been.

Maybe I'm just feeling sentimental at the moment but I wanted to offer you a more personal 'good job on this comment' than an upvote would have been.

Governments (like all organizations) find it difficult to contextualize and manage risk. Politicians considered that it would present a major threat to their legitimacy if the public were to experience huge widespread deaths, bodies in the street, hospitals overflowing with corpses and unusable for normal functions and deaths in many or most families. This wasn’t even a problem of democracy or relative lack of control of the media, since the CCP made the same judgment.

There were undoubtedly many politicians (Boris Johnson was one) who were at least initially comfortable with letting the cards fall where they would and staying open. But politicians are naturally neurotic, and if you’re the only country that does this (Swedes ostensibly tried but they still had soft lockdown for WFH and in many other parts of the economy too) then you risk your people blaming you for every excess death. In addition, old people vote, and their middle aged children also vote more than the young. Even in China, when sporadic protests happen, they’re disproportionately middle aged and above. In March 2020 the entire global press was begging for lockdowns, and so even were many people in this very community who subsequently changed their minds.

Humans are extraordinarily adaptive and quick to accept radical change in their lives, living standards and identities (as the lifetimes of many people in eg. 20th century Europe show). Most would have been fine either way. The lockdowns were a mistake, but they were probably inevitable given the circumstances.

It also didn't help that most pandemic plans were for "high fatality, moderate infectiousness" diseases rather than "low-except-for-elderly fatality, very high infectiousness." The playbooks got thrown out very early.

I heard a theory somewhere that the reason lockdowns became dogma is because that was what Wuhan did. By the time the virus hit the rest of the world everyone was already primed to think that lockdowns are just what you do when you get a COVID outbreak.

Not to forget being primed before that by loads of disease-related apocalyptic fiction (sure, that stuff generally doesn't show lockdowns as something that works, but there's still indications that they would work if you just locked down earlier and harder).

You can reason by fictional evidence -- apocalyptic fiction, or by real evidence -- historical quarantine for the Black Death, but in both cases proper reasoning by such evidence would only tell you lockdowns can fail to work, not that they can work.

On the other hand, this was probably the first time in history when technological development (mainly the things enabling WFH including studies from home, also tracking etc) would have even allowed movement restrictions like the ones implemented from time to time, which is probably one of the reasons why it was only suggested and then implemented now.

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