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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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I actually DO have a degree in public health. Plus have been working in a large academic health center throughout the pandemic, standing up telemedicine practices in weeks that should have taken years, dealing with massive staffing shortages due to illness, opening a vaccination center, yo-yoing with regs regarding vaccination mandates, and doing the daily work of supporting a practice with well over 1500 providers with hundreds of daily patient encounters in clinical and hospital settings.
The interventions that work in public health are the interventions that most people actually will follow. And with respiratory diseases, they always go back to the same thing well over 100 years: wash your hands, stay home when you're sick, wear a goddamned mask, get vaccinated if one comes out. It's been pretty consistent this entire time, aside from the initial masking confusion.
Human beings can be selfish assholes who are terrible at assessing risk, which goes both ways. There are the overly cautious that are practically agoraphobic at this point making visitors quarantine for three days (It used to be a 10!) take a PRC test and verify vaccination before agreeing to an outside lunch of no more than 30 minutes at distance of ten feet. They twitch the entire time. Then, there are the cavalier idiots who have had Covid 3 times and probably killed their grandmother back during Delta, but it could have been church, so why feel guilty? and surely Omicron gave them natural immunity so blathering on about the vaccine makes no sense now. They go to funeral after parties.
Most people are somewhere in the middle. They follow the rules that make sense, ignore the ones that are ridiculous, and seek guidance from trusted sources when they're not sure.
The problem, of course, is "trusted source" has become for some people a perversion. For better or worse, the internet has totally destroyed universal messaging, and public health people were caught off guard because it never occurred to them that there'd be active sabotage of their efforts. They should have known better, because this anti-vax bullshit has been bubbling up for years. OTOH, who the hell would have thought that the White House, would be actively working against public health?
So we end up with dipshits like Joe Rogan becoming "trusted sources", and well regarded researchers like Dr. Hotez having to repel the internet mob because somehow he's supposedly underpants gnome-ing himself rich through vaccine development in the third world.
