My thoughts on "following the science"

I don't think that's the case, rather the intrusiveness of the mitigation is more or less proportional to the risk.

As a society, the US has implicitly accepted an average of about 30k deaths annually with the public health policy of recommending the flu vaccine, some precautions around clusters of vulnerable persons, and little else. As a society, we've also made the implicit decision that 10x that number of deaths requires more aggressive mitigation. The response is proportional to the risk and uncertainty.

The argument of eternal "maximum risk avoidance" seems to be contradicted by the loosening and tightening of the guidelines and restrictions over the course of the last two years.

Obesity is a bit different in that it isn't contagious. To be fair though there has been public health messaging on this as long as I can remember. I suspect a lot of the partisans playing this argument are the same as were mocking Michelle Obama's healthy eating initiatives 5-10 years ago.

With regard to alcohol, one is free to drink one's self into an early grave, but strict regulations on drunk driving where one's freedom to do so is a clear and present danger to the rest of society.

There are plenty of examples of society accepting individual risks while simultaneously operating under the principle of mitigating societal impact.

You know, it really baffles me how most people can actually acknowledge that the government and media lie constantly, but yet they'll still believe the stuff they tell them when it comes to covid. I'd guess the guise of "health" works well as a manipulation tactic. People figure the govt and media must be telling the truth and have their best interests in mind if they attach the concept of your "health" to the propoganda and orders. Nope, they don't actually care about your health--at least not as much as they care about their own paycheck and status. Time to wake up.

Monkeys Skyping wrote:

maybe delete this? wrote:

If our new policy is going to be "if we can mitigate risk, we are obligated as a society to do so by mandating and/or prohibiting certain behaviors," that would represent a fundamental change in the way we live our lives.

I don't think that's the case, rather the intrusiveness of the mitigation is more or less proportional to the risk.

Intrusiveness. That's a word I hadn't brought up yet, but, yes, if we decide not to default to maximum risk avoidance, that's the discussion we'll need to have. We'll need to discuss intrusiveness vs dead grandmas. It may be uncomfortable, but I don't want to gloss it over. I'm not an expert, but the level of intrusiveness of a rule is often considered in other areas of public policy. However, in my experience, attempts to discuss intrusiveness are often cut down by people wielding weaponized dead grandmas.

I agree with everything else you said about the other things. They're not all the same. That's why I don't think "follow the science" is an adequate answer to any of those questions.

maybe delete this? wrote:

That's why I don't think "follow the science" is an adequate answer to any of those questions.

"The science" just tells us we have about 10x as many dead grandmas under the social protocols we've followed in the US, that'd we'd have more dead grandmas (with a wide uncertainty range) had we not followed said protocols, and that we as a society have found some lesser number of dead grandmas to be socially acceptable in the past and probably will again in the future.

My interpretation of "follow the science" isn't a call to shutdown dissenting opinions based on the facts, it's a plea to cut out dissenting opinions that are based on counterfactual arguments.

For example, to argue that having 55% of covid cases in vaccinated persons of an otherwise homogeneous population that is 90% vaccinated implies that vaccines aren't effective isn't a difference of opinion, it's simply wrong.

Why are the unvaxxed dying at such high rates? Maybe we SHOULD follow the science. Excerpts follow...

I: ARBITRARY DECREES: SCIENCE-FREE MEDICINE

Medicines were available against COVID—inexpensive, safe medicines—that would have prevented hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations and saved as many lives if only we’d used them in this country. But Dr. Fauci and his Pharma collaborators deliberately suppressed those treatments in service to their single-minded objective—making America await salvation from their novel, multi-billion dollar vaccines.

... America’s Doctor, apparently preoccupied with his single vaccine solution, did little in the way of telling Americans how to bolster their immune response. .... He never took time during his daily White House briefings from March to May 2020 to instruct Americans to...and to maintain adequate vitamin D levels (“Nearly 60 percent of patients with COVID-19 were vitamin D deficient upon hospitalization, with men in the advanced stages of COVID-19 pneumonia showing the greatest deficit”);32 or to diet, exercise, and lose weight (78 percent of Americans hospitalized for COVID-19 were overweight or obese).

Kennedy Jr., Robert F. . The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health (Children’s Health Defense) (p. 51-61). Skyhorse. Kindle Edition.

And there are many more examples of Dr. Fauci failing to follow accepted medical practices in the 30 pages on this topic. I didn't pick the most egregious. I picked the ones that were shortest to cut and paste. Buy the book. Demand that the doctors telling you to "follow the science" actually, you know, follow the science! Share this book with your Facebook and other social media friends. Tell your running buddies about it.

This book now has a 95% 5-star rating. It's #1 on Amazon. It's $2.99!!!! The #1 top review is titled

"The Details Exposed in this Book Will Likely Lead to Fauci's Resignation."

BUY THE BOOK.....

https://www.amazon.com/Real-Anthony-Fauci-Democracy-Childrens-ebook/dp/B08X5YWRRP/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

fisky wrote:

Medicines were available against COVID—inexpensive, safe medicines—that would have prevented hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations and saved as many lives if only we’d used them in this country.

Like, what? Chloroquine? Ivermectin? Vitamin-D?

Time to talk about something else this is over....