Lyman Stone@lymanstoneky
Vaccine effectiveness did not diminish. Today, years later, life expectancy has still CONTINUED to rise more in the high-vax states vs pre-COVID life expectancy. Masks are complicated since elites didn't even agree-- early on "elites" (Fauci, etc) were extremely ANTI mask!That was in response to: Michael Brendan Dougherty@michaelbd
Eh… Vaccines had a huge impact when first released but it diminished dramatically over time as the disease evolved and the effect required timing them perfectly, yet elite opinion dug in against evidence. Elites got surgical masks very wrong. Prolonged school closures were really disastrous. Masking toddlers was preposterous, and they remained masked longest in many US states. So was the month of “Racism os spreading faster than the virus.” And the whole balance of elite reputation hinges on whether the lab leak happened and how many are implicated.
Which was in response to Claire Lehman quoting Tyler Cowen in the Free Press
A lot of people do not want to admit it, but when it comes to the Covid-19 pandemic the elites, by and large, actually got a lot of things right. Most importantly, the people who got vaccinated fared much better than people who did not. We also got a vaccination in record time, against most expectations. Operation Warp Speed was a success. Long Covid did turn out to be a real thing. Low personal mobility meant that "lockdowns" were not the real issue. Most of that economic activity was going away in any case*. Most states should have ended lockdowns sooner, but they mattered less than many commenters have suggested. Furthermore, in contrast to what many were predicting, those restrictions on our liberty proved entirely temporary.
That is part of a larger discussion with Rob Henderson about elites and experts over at FP
Tyler distinguishes between elites and experts - where they are allied and where they are separate.
And Peggy Noonan weighs in at WaPo about elites and Trump, reminding us that he is a response to what has been deteriorating in America, not the cause of it. I grew tired of her a decade ago or more, but this was sent to me and it is better than I expected.
I have liked all the above in general on a variety of topics. I have written things similar to each of them on the matter of elites in general and covid in specific. But if you press me, I think more highly of Stone and Cowen.
*I think he means that because of the disease itself slowing the economy, the additional restrictions by governments were not as severe as they are now portrayed.
3 comments:
It's so weird that people are still pretending to debate about mask effectiveness and what we've "learned", when we still know exactly what we knew before: N95 masks, properly fitted and frequently changed, can be pretty effective against transmitting respiratory viruses, but their effectiveness drops almost to zero unless you are really careful about fitting them and change them frequently. And cloth masks are pure theatre.
Pretty brash of Lehman to claim the "elites" were "right" to support operation warp speed, when they were pretty uniformly against it until after the election.
Maybe I just missed it, but I never heard any assessment of relative risks from the powers-that-be at the time. All was "This is the law and the prophets". And the claim that chloroquine was both dangerous and useless was weird--there hadn't been significant testing of the (quite common) drug yet. (I gather that it actually _isn't_ useful for the purpose, but they couldn't have known that at the time--unless the Chinese had given them unpublished results?)
To put the kindest interpretation on it, perhaps they were afraid that any hint of less than 100% confidence in their directives would lose them all confidence-- and so they didn't dare talk about the details. Not getting things right the first time goes with the territory.
James gets at what damaged them most in my eyes: the 100% flat assertion that these were “safe and effective,” rather than a balanced adult discussion of relative risk.
I spent a lot of time trying to work out the latter, with no help from the experts. I finally picked Johnson & Johnson over the mRNA ones, but that one got pulled from the market over thrombosis risks that emerged.
Some scholars have found that Pfizer was significantly more risky than other options.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.04.25.25326460v1.full
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