Docs and scientists of letsrun, please read this article and tell me if what he is writing about Covid-19 treatment is fake news

He said that so clowns like you didn't buy up allvthe masks at the same time you were stockpiling all the toilet paper in your bunker, genius.

In March 2020, they still didn't know what this thing was, or how it was spread. We were all wearing gloves. Trump told people not to touch their faces. There wasn't a usprlus of surgical masks floatin around and there was very real risk that hospitals were going to run out of PPE because of panic shoppers.

If your wife didn't understand that, she's not that smart either.

It seems we are at an impasse. You fundamentally distrust Fauci and the govt in general and big business. I agree that the govt and big business have demonstrated time and again to be worthy of scorn, especially the latter. However, in my job I work regularly with public health officials and with the physicians, staff and scientists of our national institute of health, CDC, FDA. Much of the work of the latter agencies is actually done by volunteer outside experts who sit on panels to decide about guidelines or what research is funded or what drugs are approved. Fauci himself does not give out the grants. Regardless, those working in these areas and for these organizations are under paid for their level of training, are very professionally selfless and are committed to the public good. They are understaffed, overwhelmed, make mistakes, and often the science is not as certain as they would like, but I want to assure you this is a bastion of good in the bureaucracy of America.

There also is no doubt that health related public policy and guidelines are informed by multiple forces that include scientific data, economic concerns, practicality, politics and much more. There is a lot of complexity and on top of all this, nothing is static, but things evolve. The govt often does not give the public adequate credit and dumbs the message down because they think the public can’t handle the truth or the complexity. Instead they try to come up with what they believe is the single best and simplest message. You end up with pronouncements like “wear a mask,” or “don’t wear a mask.” It’s easy to poke holes in this approach, and I’m honestly not sure on a masse level if simplicity or nuance is better. Fauci certainly is “guilty” of this fairly standard public health approach.

I was working during those early days of the pandemic. Everybody with even a little knowledge knew that masks reduce the transmission of a respiratory virus. You learn that the first day of medical school. There were also not enough masks, and it was unclear how much virus was circulating in public, how effective different sorts of masks were for this particular virus, and clearly the virus cases would concentrate in the health care setting. All of this led to the messaging that upset you in 2020.

This is well-explained. Although I doubt he has a "wife" who was a "nurse" when this was happening, because she would have understood all of this too.

So we are in complete agreement that he lied to the public. Not once, but over and over.

When someone is selling me something and I catch them in a lie, I take everything I hear from that person with a grain of salt from then on.

You, on the other hand, are willing to overlook the big lie and trust him on everything else he says. Keep in mind that you are trusting a known liar with your life, your spouse's life, and your childrens' lives.

I would again urge you to read The Real Anthony Fauci by RFK Jr.

fisky wrote:

[quote]Wise Old Man wrote:

Agree with you 100%.

I'll admit that he is as good at prevarication and parsing "truths" as Bill Clinton, who until Fauci, was the best I've ever seen.

I would URGE you to read The Real Anthony Fauci by RFK Jr.

You understand that you sound absurd, right. You are literally the dumb uncle from facebook. Look we all have guys (and gals) like you in our families. Some people, when they reach a certain age, their judgement and such just don't function right. Its why seniors are so prone to being scammed.

You sir, have been scammed by shysters.

You are unable to objectively judge things at this juncture in your life. I know it hurts to hear that, but its true. One clue is your constant whataboutism wrt face masks.

You have been told and should be able to easily understand (without having been told) that circumstances and reasons surrounding the mask advice and how it has changed over time.

You also never seem to reveal what you would have preferred from him:

"Wear masks at all times starting march 1, 2020 until further notice"

or

"Dont ever wear a mask, its pointless."

Neither of these are correct of course and the fact is in addition to your senioritis, none of these 3 scenarios would be appealing to you and you are simply bitter (as we all are about a pandemic) but you just a have to have you scapegoat while the rest of us plainly see the medical and research establishment is doing pretty much the best they can in the face of a fluid and deadly situation.

In summary, drop the feigned confusion and performative belligerence about a few weeks of uncertain mask guidance in the face of a massively uncertain pandemic. It really just makes you look sill at this point.

fisky wrote:

fell in love with a clown at a clown show wrote:

He said that so clowns like you didn't buy up allvthe masks at the same time you were stockpiling all the toilet paper in your bunker, genius.

So we are in complete agreement that he lied to the public. Not once, but over and over.

When someone is selling me something and I catch them in a lie, I take everything I hear from that person with a grain of salt from then on.

You, on the other hand, are willing to overlook the big lie and trust him on everything else he says. Keep in mind that you are trusting a known liar with your life, your spouse's life, and your childrens' lives.

I would again urge you to read The Real Anthony Fauci by RFK Jr.

I’ve met and spoken to both RFK Jr and Fauci. The former lives right near my mom in Westchester and you can catch him at the post office in Mount Kisco or the local diner. He’s easy to spot, like an identical twin of his dad. Anyway, if you meet both of them and chat them up about their stuff you would not be recommending a book by RFK slamming Fauci. Enough said…..

fisky wrote:

fell in love with a clown at a clown show wrote:

He said that so clowns like you didn't buy up allvthe masks at the same time you were stockpiling all the toilet paper in your bunker, genius.

So we are in complete agreement that he lied to the public. Not once, but over and over.

When someone is selling me something and I catch them in a lie, I take everything I hear from that person with a grain of salt from then on.

You, on the other hand, are willing to overlook the big lie and trust him on everything else he says. Keep in mind that you are trusting a known liar with your life, your spouse's life, and your childrens' lives.

I would again urge you to read The Real Anthony Fauci by RFK Jr.

But it’s deeper than that. A very liberal friend, who thinks Biden should fire Fauci for several different reasons, sent me the following link, “not a political hack” site according to him:

He accuses Fauci of an Ollie North type of error, not an unforced error, when it came to GoF, which undermines any and all of his credibility.

I have the same reaction as you, Fisky, to hearing Fauci. He may be “credentialed,” although College of the Holy Cross and Cornell wouldn’t be at the top of my list, but he’s a bull$hitter, enabled by his former boss in Collins.

I had no problem wearing a mask by the way, even though I would agree that the cloth ones are next to useless, especially if everyone doesn’t wear them, Now we have the government working on getting KN95 masks to everyone, which, in typical government fashion, will cost billions of dollars and be rolled out well after Omicron has hit almost the entire population.

The masks and distancing were necessary in the very beginning, I would agree, as we were all trying to ascertain what we were dealing with. However, there were also brave doctors back in March of 2020 who knew there were three separate entities to treat, the virus, the inflammation, and the thrombosis, since it’s mostly a thrombotic disease. They had success and were immediately scorned for “off-labeling” meds that actually helped.

Thank you very much for elaborating - I was very much hoping you would! Unfortunately, you've said so much that I would like to respond to, but I simply don't have the time today and then will be out of pocket for the remainder of the weekend. Perhaps I'll be able to next week, but you know how that goes...

In any event, I feel (at least to me) that overall you've done your profession/industry very well in the last several posts. A huge thing (for me) is that you appear to care for and value people, even if they disagree with you or are imperfect creatures. Even though I could be said that I am on "the same side" of the issue as Flagpole, I can hardly speak with him because he seems to old people in such low regard that he cant afford treating someone with dignity who has not "earned" his respect by doing everything right (according to his standards with no regard to people having different gifts, different backgrounds and experiences, etc.). Very short-sighted, imo. In any event, I often see many in the medical field take a similar approach by lazily appealing to their authority / credentials and holding the value of being right as the primary objective rather than authentically helping others or society as a whole. Of course, this is just a running message board, so maybe he is just trolling, but I believe this issue is a rather serious one and should not be messed around with.

Broadly speaking, I feel like you may have some blind spots regarding Fauci, etc. Perhaps it was just coincidental, but it seems like the people you hold in higher esteem are on the left side of the aisle while the ones you have not spoken as highly of are on the right. I myself hold a very dim view of both sides. So, I know (and this has been reinforced by reading your posts) that I have major blind spots as well. Because the issue has been politicized to the degree it has, I find myself not trusting anyone (except personal doctor friends, and even then I trust their intentions more than their expertise), and I have painted the entire medical establishment (in my mind) with a very broad brush. Not only is this unfair (because I am sure there are "good" doctors / scientists besides ones that I personally know (lol)), but I obviously will end up being a very slow to fully advocate for whatever the right side of the argument ends up being.

I can't bring myself to trust Fauci to the level you do simply because I view him more as a political animal than a public servant. That said, again, I've really appreciated the time you've taken here. It has influenced me to reconsider my blanket disapproval stance a bit, and it has given me hope that perhaps I will be able to trust the medical community once again in the future.

Nobody scorned those treating/trying to prevent the inflammatory and thrombotic complications of the severe illness. It was rapidly recognized this was a big part of the problem. Lots of basic and clinical science was undertaken to understand and most effectively deal. In the interim in the absence of great data doctors began to use their judgement and apply therapies that seemed to make sense and past experience. Some of it helped and some of it did not. As data became available and experience shared, the approach was refined, first just expert opinion, then case reports and series, then better observational data and finally prospective data. This is how it works.

Thank you for your kind words. I appreciate them very much. I’m a middle of the road person (my daughters are constantly bashing me for being old school about too much-I have this dream of retiring one day and becoming as asst xc coach at our local HS-my daughters are like “dad, you would not last even one day with the stuff you say you’d be fired before lunch”). I’m sad we’ve ended up so polarized over a health issue. Yes, leading an NIH institute requires political skills and Fauci is NOT infallible. Much of the guidance provided during the pandemic has been off or downright incorrect in the end. Where I disagree with many on this board is as to why. Some say it’s a conspiracy and that those like Fauci knew they were wrong and told us lies for some ulterior motive, like enriching themselves, govt control, just seeing if they could mess with people. This I disagree with, rather seeing the errors as related to inadequate and evolving data, trying to simplify mass messaging for a complex problem, that sort of thing. I don’t have the same forbearance for guys like Kory. I promise you as a person who has written and published many systematic data reviews and meta analyses, that he was well aware that what he was putting out in the public space was garbage. There is a proper method to these things and he violated it.

fisky wrote:

So we are in complete agreement that he lied to the public. Not once, but over and over.

Well no, you absolute imbecile.

#1: it wasn't Fauci that said it; it was Jerome Adams. you know, the Republican Surgeon General.

and what I - and he - said - was that in March 2020, they didn't know enough about the disease to know if masks were effective. And seeing how idiots like you were behaving with toilet paper, if he had recommended masks, you all would have bought them all and started selling them on eBay for $8000 a box. But they needed them for medical staff.

2: that guidance changed by April 2020 once they were able to figure out the spread patterns.

fell in love with a clown at a clown show wrote:

fisky wrote:

So we are in complete agreement that he lied to the public. Not once, but over and over.

Well no, you absolute imbecile.

#1: it wasn't Fauci that said it; it was Jerome Adams. you know, the Republican Surgeon General.

and what I - and he - said - was that in March 2020, they didn't know enough about the disease to know if masks were effective. And seeing how idiots like you were behaving with toilet paper, if he had recommended masks, you all would have bought them all and started selling them on eBay for $8000 a box. But they needed them for medical staff.

2: that guidance changed by April 2020 once they were able to figure out the spread patterns.

+1

Absolute truth.

I've said as much, and at length, on a thread by one of the brojos with a title that called Fauci a liar, and just can't keep repeating it to people who don't care about the truth, anyways.

But good job cutting through the BS and I like your style.

colder and wiser wrote:

This isn't the first time we've seen a link to swprs.org. They've been a slightly upscale misinformation outlet since the beginning.

Ohhh, ok. It's not about the author (highly credentialed immunologist), it's about the link.

Same patterns of denial of anything that doesn't suit your liking.

Excellent post!

Covidiocy wrote:

I have the same reaction as you, Fisky, to hearing Fauci. He may be “credentialed,” although College of the Holy Cross and Cornell wouldn’t be at the top of my list, but he’s a bull$hitter, enabled by his former boss in Collins.

I simply cannot believe that anyone would use where Fauci got his BA in 1962 and an MD in 1966 as a judge of his experience, intelligence, and expertise.

This is everything that is wrong with credential-ism.

Bingo, remember when we were wiping down surfaces obsessively. We simply didn't know a enough.

If anything, we should have swung the pendulum the other way much more aggressively. There's ben strong evidence that COVID is much more airborne and aerosol transmissible than though.

Also there's a bit of a problem with the public misinterpreting "no evidence for masks" as "evidence for no masks"

Flagpole wrote:

3) No one is "talking down to us". Is your ego so fragile that you won't listen to people who are experts in infectious diseases when you are not? If you get on an airplane and the lead mechanic tells the captain that everyone needs to deplane because a part is defective, do you feel talked down to? What makes you think that you have any intellectual say here about what is proper regarding this pandemic? You are not a scientist. You are not a doctor. You are not an immunologist. You are not an epidemiologist. Now, I am none of those things either which is why I respect the opinions of those who are, and I follow the majority advice which in this case is the overwhelming majority. There is no truth that you know that the medical experts (Fauci, etc.) don't know.

I'm glad to hear that many people view Fauci as a brilliant scientist. I suggest he stick to the science then and stay the hell off tv , rather than seemingly appearing on every single tv show possible, often uttering statements he doesn't believe that ultimate erase faith in the CDC.

By talking down, I mean the following. Fauci says he told us not to get masks because he wanted to save them for the healthcare workers which implies we aren't smart enough to be told the truth and then restrain ourselves from buying up the supply With herd immunity, he said he knew the number of vaccinations needed for herd immunity was super high but didn't tell us that real number as we weren't able to handle it. These two things have totally undermined his credibility, permanently in many people's eyes.

We'd be A LOT better off if Fauci had done the following.

1) At the beginning said, "We don't think the public needs masks right now. There are no real robust studies showing cloth masks do much of anything and we want to save the medical-grade masks for the healthcare professionals."

2) When asked about her immunity said, "We really don’t know what the real number is. I think the real range is somewhere between 70 to 90 percent" instead of purposely lying about the number as described below.

"When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent ... Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, "I can nudge this up a bit," so I went to 80, 85. We need to have some humility here .... We really don’t know what the real number is. I think the real range is somewhere between 70 to 90 percent. But, I'm not going to say 90 percent."

414227 wrote:

Even though I could be said that I am on "the same side" of the issue as Flagpole, I can hardly speak with him because he seems to old people in such low regard that he cant afford treating someone with dignity who has not "earned" his respect by doing everything right (according to his standards with no regard to people having different gifts, different backgrounds and experiences, etc.).

Meh.

1) Just because I don't respect a person's decision to smoke doesn't mean I don't treat them with dignity. One of my former bandmates and good friends USED to be a smoker when we played together (good for him that he has stopped), but I never treated him in an undignified way. I DID throw out once in a while that he might consider stopping smoking by saying things like this when he headed out side in the cold to suck on a cancer stick, "Enjoy the frigid temperatures, John, we'll be inside where it's nice and warm."

2) An anti-vaxxer doesn't have a "different gift" that is relevant. There is no gift a person might have that makes it smart to be an anti-vaxxer. I actually HIGHLY value the lives of people, even those of morons who decide to put their lives at risk by not getting vaccinated. THAT is the only reason I care what these morons do. And, they ARE morons.

rojo wrote:

2) When asked about her immunity said, "We really don’t know what the real number is. I think the real range is somewhere between 70 to 90 percent" instead of purposely lying about the number as described below.

Fauci was right though. The number was substantially higher than 70% and communicating communicating 85%, a number well within reasonable confidence intervals, was totally fine. "Aiming high" to ensure a safety margin at the bottom end is sound public policy.