"... closing borders, restricting travel, ending home quarantine, ending religious exemptions, and imposing rigorous vaccine mandates (and, yes, brief but rigidly enforced shutdowns and mask mandates if testing data suggest that they will keep local hospitals from being overwhelmed—not to please teachers unions)" This is chillingly frank and should be a warning that the most authoritarian covidians have learned nothing except to do what they did last time, but harder, in the event of a new pandemic. It is vital that people like Donald McNeil have no power over us moving forward. I fear they still do.
I would question the numbers of deaths. Early on, I was told or I read that if someone died and that person had Covid, that no matter what the person had actually died of, it was to be recorded as death from Covid. I'm not certain that's a factual piece of data but it warrants consideration when numbers are thrown around.
As a veteran of the Battle of Hue in Vietnam, I was very frustrated by the misinformation then and for many years after. An historian friend told me to wait 50 years for the truth to come out and it did in 2017, Mark Bowden's book Hue.
In other words, we will have to wait for at least 50 years for the truth to come out about COVID.
It is hard to take McNeil serious when his first substantive points about the Covid response are to mischaracterize and dismiss the positions in the Great Barrington declaration. It was not to just "let the virus rip through the population", although that is essentially what happened anyway. It was, once we understood who was at highest risk, to protect those more rigorously than people not at serious risk from Covid. And they did subsequently provide some recommendations on how to do that, though not in the 1 page statement that was the declaration, but in the FAQs about how the principles might be implemented.
I've felt sorry for Mr. McNeil because of the way he was defamed and fired at the NY Times. But his letter does much to relieve me of the burden of that sympathy. His disparagement of the Great Barrington authors deliberately overlooks both their collective expertise and the fact that pretty much everyone on planet earth acknowledged at that point that we had much to learn about covid. While it is nice that he knew Mr. Henderson, competing claims (and here I include Mr. Nocera) of "I knew him better so I know what he'd say" is a silly, not to say stupid, way to discuss an important issue.
This is ridiculous. How many times do these people have to lie with quotes like the "absurd idea advanced in the Great Barrington Declaration that we should have just let the virus rip through the population." Donald - no one in that letter advocated for a "let it rip" strategy. These kind of spurious, defamatory and reckless take downs are what got us into this Us vs. Them mentality. It's what turned people against Collins and Fauci and it's also the opposite of a persuasive argument. I don't think the McNeils of the world are trying to persuade or enlighten - they're just trying to assuage their guilt by demonizing their opposition. It's the most pathetic way to advance your ideas.
First response seems to be highlighting credentials and authority to win the point. Second response focused on facts that support his point. One tragedy was that public health authorities focused only on one statistic: covid death count (seemingly with a fungible definition of a covid death). Another tragedy was public health officials purposefully suppressing open debate on social media, which resulted in less trust.
Another is, they didn't do RCTs (randomized controlled trials) to test effects of different policies. They could've had different policies for nearby communities to see if, for example, N95 mask mandates make a difference or not, similar to the Bangladesh study (but better). But no one did that. Instead, the CDC kept publishing studies in their own journal with completely ridiculous methodological designs and then yelling every week that masks work.
This debate is a 'breath of fresh air,' and it should have been occurring during the pandemic. A great mistake was trusting public health 'experts' and then censoring their opponents. In the rearview mirror we clearly see the mistakes made by the 'experts', e.g. closing schools, lockdowns for young adults, mandating vaccines for those who had recovered from Covid, all of which The Great Barrington Declaration warned against. Censoring opposing views in science is deadly!
It’s as though you refuse to accept that the vaunted experts didn’t make a great mistake at all. They knew that The Great Barrington a declaration was correct, and that is why they censored and squelched it as well as belittled the renown scientists who wrote it.
"... closing borders, restricting travel, ending home quarantine, ending religious exemptions, and imposing rigorous vaccine mandates (and, yes, brief but rigidly enforced shutdowns and mask mandates if testing data suggest that they will keep local hospitals from being overwhelmed—not to please teachers unions)" This is chillingly frank and should be a warning that the most authoritarian covidians have learned nothing except to do what they did last time, but harder, in the event of a new pandemic. It is vital that people like Donald McNeil have no power over us moving forward. I fear they still do.
My biggest fear is that all of the draconian methods that were applied last time will be the exact correct response the next time.
I would question the numbers of deaths. Early on, I was told or I read that if someone died and that person had Covid, that no matter what the person had actually died of, it was to be recorded as death from Covid. I'm not certain that's a factual piece of data but it warrants consideration when numbers are thrown around.
As a veteran of the Battle of Hue in Vietnam, I was very frustrated by the misinformation then and for many years after. An historian friend told me to wait 50 years for the truth to come out and it did in 2017, Mark Bowden's book Hue.
In other words, we will have to wait for at least 50 years for the truth to come out about COVID.
I'm not sure I can wait that long...but I sure do want to live to see that day.
It is hard to take McNeil serious when his first substantive points about the Covid response are to mischaracterize and dismiss the positions in the Great Barrington declaration. It was not to just "let the virus rip through the population", although that is essentially what happened anyway. It was, once we understood who was at highest risk, to protect those more rigorously than people not at serious risk from Covid. And they did subsequently provide some recommendations on how to do that, though not in the 1 page statement that was the declaration, but in the FAQs about how the principles might be implemented.
WE KNEW WHO WAS AT HIGHEST RISK BEFORE THE DISEASE REACHED OUR SHORES.
The Chinese may have lied about a lot of things, but they were honest about who the disease killed from day one.
I've felt sorry for Mr. McNeil because of the way he was defamed and fired at the NY Times. But his letter does much to relieve me of the burden of that sympathy. His disparagement of the Great Barrington authors deliberately overlooks both their collective expertise and the fact that pretty much everyone on planet earth acknowledged at that point that we had much to learn about covid. While it is nice that he knew Mr. Henderson, competing claims (and here I include Mr. Nocera) of "I knew him better so I know what he'd say" is a silly, not to say stupid, way to discuss an important issue.
This is ridiculous. How many times do these people have to lie with quotes like the "absurd idea advanced in the Great Barrington Declaration that we should have just let the virus rip through the population." Donald - no one in that letter advocated for a "let it rip" strategy. These kind of spurious, defamatory and reckless take downs are what got us into this Us vs. Them mentality. It's what turned people against Collins and Fauci and it's also the opposite of a persuasive argument. I don't think the McNeils of the world are trying to persuade or enlighten - they're just trying to assuage their guilt by demonizing their opposition. It's the most pathetic way to advance your ideas.
First response seems to be highlighting credentials and authority to win the point. Second response focused on facts that support his point. One tragedy was that public health authorities focused only on one statistic: covid death count (seemingly with a fungible definition of a covid death). Another tragedy was public health officials purposefully suppressing open debate on social media, which resulted in less trust.
Another is, they didn't do RCTs (randomized controlled trials) to test effects of different policies. They could've had different policies for nearby communities to see if, for example, N95 mask mandates make a difference or not, similar to the Bangladesh study (but better). But no one did that. Instead, the CDC kept publishing studies in their own journal with completely ridiculous methodological designs and then yelling every week that masks work.
This debate is a 'breath of fresh air,' and it should have been occurring during the pandemic. A great mistake was trusting public health 'experts' and then censoring their opponents. In the rearview mirror we clearly see the mistakes made by the 'experts', e.g. closing schools, lockdowns for young adults, mandating vaccines for those who had recovered from Covid, all of which The Great Barrington Declaration warned against. Censoring opposing views in science is deadly!
It’s as though you refuse to accept that the vaunted experts didn’t make a great mistake at all. They knew that The Great Barrington a declaration was correct, and that is why they censored and squelched it as well as belittled the renown scientists who wrote it.