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Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield
Yes. Metrics from experts would be great. The problem is there is disagreement over who is a truly qualified expert, and those who are trotted out as experts often say conflicting things from day to day.
Having Fauci and WHO and CDC people speaking day in/day out destroyed the messaging from the outset. Fauci should have done written releases each week, a brief conference every two weeks, and otherwise stayed off the air.
There were too many voices speaking too frequently and they were wrong an awful lot. Trust was destroyed early and never regained.
Ty wrote, effectively, one should blindly trust the “experts.” But this was a novel virus, and the experts frequently seemed anything but. I think it’s madness to trust anybody claiming know how to handle a novel virus 100%. It’s more prudent to assess where they appear correct and where they’re wrong, or acting politically, or just lying.
Adults soberly assessing situations can and will agree on metrics as guides. But we can’t have that. Because we have a partially dishonest media, a social media establishment that is happy to engage in pushing narratives it prefers, and a lunatic reactive alt-media/social media that traffics in outright fantasy and conspiracy theories.
So no. Don’t just “trust the experts.” If you’ve a brain, you have to research where they’re full of shit, or flawed, and make some decisions for yourself.
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Is it any surprise to you that when there's a pandemic of a brand new diseases, maybe the experts don't have all the answers right away? Adults soberly assessing the situation are going to have a hard time -- it was literally a brand new disease. The idea that an ordinary person is going to "research" (research what?) and make a better decision is silly in those circumstances.
You have a separate set of complaints about how the government lost trust in the first months of the pandemic. Noted. It would be all too easy for me to point to the clowns running the federal government back then, so I won't. The point you make about the media & social media giving people terrible information is exactly right -- but that's where you want people doing their "research" instead of letting public-health officials set policy.
There have always been anti-vaccer kooks, and we did pretty well in spite of them. What's changed in this pandemic, as I was saying the other day, is that conservatives have decided to oppose reasonable public-health measures, not only of any deep principle, but out of oppositional behavior. (Not everyone who doesn't want to get vaccinated is reflecting this, but some of them are surely deciding that the vaccine isn't to be trusted at least in part because there is an organized campaign to push those views.)
The choices are pretty simple: We either let government experts decide, or the government abdicates that role and lets everyone decide on their own what to do based on what their lunatic cousin says on Facebook.
