It Was Never About A Virus

And people who pushed for it and are now walking back from it can go and screw themselves:

In April 2020, with nothing else to do, my family took an enormous number of hikes. We all wore cloth masks that I had made myself. We had a family hand signal, which the person in the front would use if someone was approaching on the trail and we needed to put on our masks.  Once, when another child got too close to my then-4-year-old son on a bridge, he yelled at her “SOCIAL DISTANCING!”

These precautions were totally misguided. In April 2020, no one got the coronavirus from passing someone else hiking. Outdoor transmission was vanishingly rare. Our cloth masks made out of old bandanas wouldn’t have done anything, anyway. But the thing is: We didn’t know.

(Sidebar: your excuse is a poor and unverifiable one. But do continue. Your callous sanctimony and shrieking paranoia have been a boon to ... no one but you.) 

I have been reflecting on this lack of knowledge thanks to a class I’m co-teaching at Brown University on COVID. We’ve spent several lectures reliving the first year of the pandemic, discussing the many important choices we had to make under conditions of tremendous uncertainty.

Some of these choices turned out better than others. To take an example close to my own work, there is an emerging (if not universal) consensus that schools in the U.S. were closed for too long: The health risks of in-school spread were relatively low, whereas the costs to students’ well-being and educational progress were high. The latest figures on learning loss are alarming.  But in spring and summer 2020, we had only glimmers of information. Reasonable people—people who cared about children and teachers—advocated on both sides of the reopening debate.

Another example: When the vaccines came out, we lacked definitive data on the relative efficacies of the Johnson & Johnson shot versus the mRNA options from Pfizer and Moderna. The mRNA vaccines have won out. But at the time, many people in public health were either neutral or expressed a J&J preference. This misstep wasn’t nefarious. It was the result of uncertainty.

Obviously some people intended to mislead and made wildly irresponsible claims. Remember when the public-health community had to spend a lot of time and resources urging Americans not to inject themselves with bleach? That was bad. Misinformation was, and remains, a huge problem. But most errors were made by people who were working in earnest for the good of society.

(Sidebar: no, they weren't.) 

Given the amount of uncertainty, almost every position was taken on every topic. And on every topic, someone was eventually proved right, and someone else was proved wrong. In some instances, the right people were right for the wrong reasons. In other instances, they had a prescient understanding of the available information.

The people who got it right, for whatever reason, may want to gloat. Those who got it wrong, for whatever reason, may feel defensive and retrench into a position that doesn’t accord with the facts. All of this gloating and defensiveness continues to gobble up a lot of social energy and to drive the culture wars, especially on the internet. These discussions are heated, unpleasant and, ultimately, unproductive. In the face of so much uncertainty, getting something right had a hefty element of luck. And, similarly, getting something wrong wasn’t a moral failing. Treating pandemic choices as a scorecard on which some people racked up more points than others is preventing us from moving forward.

(Sidebar:  ... say the people who advertised their jabs and masks on Instagram. But, please, I'm carrying on instead of letting you wriggle your way out of this.)

We have to put these fights aside and declare a pandemic amnesty. We can leave out the willful purveyors of actual misinformation while forgiving the hard calls that people had no choice but to make with imperfect knowledge. Los Angeles County closed its beaches in summer 2020. Ex post facto, this makes no more sense than my family’s masked hiking trips. But we need to learn from our mistakes and then let them go. We need to forgive the attacks, too. Because I thought schools should reopen and argued that kids as a group were not at high risk, I was called a “teacher killer” and a “génocidaire.” It wasn’t pleasant, but feelings were high. And I certainly don’t need to dissect and rehash that time for the rest of my days.

Moving on is crucial now, because the pandemic created many problems that we still need to solve.

(Sidebar: like how people lost opportunities, family members, businesses. Trivial things like that.) 

Student test scores have shown historic declines, more so in math than in reading, and more so for students who were disadvantaged at the start. We need to collect data, experiment, and invest. Is high-dosage tutoring more or less cost-effective than extended school years? Why have some states recovered faster than others? We should focus on questions like these, because answering them is how we will help our children recover.

(Sidebar: or telling them that Karen-Mum is a huge freak.) 

Many people have neglected their health care over the past several years. Notably, routine vaccination rates for children (for measles, pertussis, etc.) are way down. Rather than debating the role that messaging about COVID vaccines had in this decline, we need to put all our energy into bringing these rates back up. Pediatricians and public-health officials will need to work together on community outreach, and politicians will need to consider school mandates.

(Sidebar: not neglected - were turned away at the door.) 

The standard saying is that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. But dwelling on the mistakes of history can lead to a repetitive doom loop as well. Let’s acknowledge that we made complicated choices in the face of deep uncertainty, and then try to work together to build back and move forward.

Some people killed themselves because of these lockdowns.

How do you move on from that?

Alberta's new premier is doing something "un-Canadian":

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has made it clear she won’t tolerate any more mask mandates for students in the province’s school system because of the harmful effects she says masking has on children.

“The detrimental effects of masking on the mental health, development and education of children in classroom settings is well understood, and we must turn the page on what has been an extremely difficult time for children, along with their parents and teachers,” Smith wrote in a statement released Oct. 29.

“Our government will not permit any further masking mandates of children in Alberta’s K-12 education system.”

Smith’s statement was in response to an Alberta Court of King’s Bench ruling issued three days earlier finding that the previous provincial government’s order last winter to lift mask mandates for schools was “unreasonable.”

She also directed the justice minister to assess the court ruling and asked other government officials to keep her “alert” to any changes that undermine the government’s authority on the matter.

“I have directed our Justice minister to assess whether an appeal of Thursday’s Kings Bench Court decision is appropriate,” Premier Smith wrote in her statement.

“[I] have instructed our government’s ministers of Justice, Health and Education to alert me to any legislative or regulatory changes that may be necessary to reaffirm or clarify our government’s full authority with respect to this and other health and education matters.”

Also "un-Canadian" - this:

A group of 19 doctors and health experts is calling on Quebec’s college of physicians and public health director to provide COVID-19 vaccine information that is “neither promotional nor propagandist” so as to ensure parents who provide consent for their children can give “free and informed consent.”

The group, consisting of doctors, scientists, and pharmacists, co-signed an open letter to the Collège des médecins du Québec (CMQ) and Institut national de santé publique du Québec (INSPQ) on Oct. 19, emphasizing that those organizations must provide “truthful, factual, complete, and clearly expressed information” on the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines so that parents can make an informed decision on whether or not to let their kids to take the shots.

“For the choice to be informed, all available information (potential benefits and harms, risks, uncertainties) must be provided and conveyed in language that is understandable,” said the letter in French, which was also addressed to Quebec’s Health Minister Christian Dubé and to Dr. Marie-Claude Roy, president of the Association of Pediatricians of Quebec (APQ).

The letter, which stated the need to “go back to science” concerning the vaccination of children, was sent on behalf of the signatories by Réinfo Covid Québec, a collective group of doctors and care providers from the biomedical professions who seek to address concerns about the “current health crisis.”

Remember that this:

The federal court judge who rejected the four travel vaccine mandate lawsuits citing “mootness” last week has released her rationale for doing so a few days later on Oct. 27, saying there is “no important public interest” to justify hearing the cases.

“The Applicants have substantially received the remedies sought and as such, there is no live controversy to adjudicate,” Justice Jocelyne Gagné wrote in her decision, due to the mandates and other public health measures having been repealed.

“There is no important public interest or inconsistency in the law that would justify allocating significant judicial resources to hear these moot Applications.”

Gagné also said the court should not prevent or dictate future government actions.

(Sidebar: ... says the highest court in the land that does, indeed, set law.)

Comes from the same poisonous tree as this:

Mandatory listing on Canada’s sex offender registry is, for some offenders, an unjustified infringement on their liberty that is not rationally connected to the goal of investigating or preventing sexual crimes, the Supreme Court ruled Friday.

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Automatic lifetime listing in the case of multiple sexual offences is similarly “overbroad,” the court decided in striking down both laws to permit discretion by sentencing judges.

Oh, my:

Ever since the Chinese city of Wuhan was identified as ground zero for the COVID-19 pandemic, a contingent of scientists have suspected that the virus could have leaked from one of the WIV’s complex of laboratories. The WIV is, after all, the venue for some of China’s riskiest coronavirus research. Scientists there have mixed components of different coronaviruses and created new strains, in an effort to predict the risks of human infection and to develop vaccines and treatments. Critics argue that creating viruses that don’t exist in nature runs the risk of unleashing them.

The WIV has two campuses and performed coronavirus research on both. Its older Xiaohongshan campus is just 8 miles from the crowded seafood market where COVID-19 first burst into public view. Its newer Zhengdian campus, about 18 miles to the south, is home to the institute’s most prestigious laboratory, a biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) facility, designed to enable safe research on the world’s most lethal pathogens. The WIV triumphantly announced its completion in February 2015, and it was cleared to begin full research by early 2018.

Like many scientific institutes in China, the WIV is state-run and funded. The research carried out there must advance the goals of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). As one way to ensure compliance, the CCP operates 16 party branches inside of the WIV, where members including scientists meet regularly and demonstrate their loyalty.

Week after week, scientists from those branches chronicled their party-building exploits in reports uploaded to the WIV’s website. These dispatches, intended for watchful higher-ups, generally consist of upbeat recitations of recruitment efforts and meeting summaries that emphasize the fulfillment of Beijing’s political goals. “The headlines and initial paragraphs seem completely innocuous,” Reid says. “If you didn’t take a close look, you’d probably think there’s nothing in here.”

But much like imperfect propaganda, the dispatches hold glimmers of real life: tension among colleagues, abuse from bosses, reprimands from party superiors. The grievances are often couched in a narrative of heroism — a focus on problems overcome and challenges met, against daunting odds.

As Reid burrowed into the party branch dispatches, he became riveted by the unfolding picture. They described intense pressure to produce scientific breakthroughs that would elevate China’s standing on the world stage, despite a dire lack of essential resources. Even at the BSL-4 lab, they repeatedly lamented the problem of “the three ‘nos’: no equipment and technology standards, no design and construction teams, and no experience operating or maintaining [a lab of this caliber].”

And then, in the fall of 2019, the dispatches took a darker turn. They referenced inhumane working conditions and “hidden safety dangers.” On Nov. 12 of that year, a dispatch by party branch members at the BSL-4 laboratory appeared to reference a biosecurity breach. ...

Vanity Fair and ProPublica downloaded more than 500 documents from the WIV website, including party branch dispatches from 2017 to the present. To assess Reid’s interpretation, we sent key documents to experts on CCP communications. They told us that the WIV dispatches did indeed signal that the institute faced an acute safety emergency in November 2019; that officials at the highest levels of the Chinese government weighed in; and that urgent action was taken in an effort to address ongoing safety issues. The documents do not make clear who was responsible for the crisis, which laboratory it affected specifically or what the exact nature of the biosafety emergency was.

The interim report also raises questions about how quickly vaccines were developed in China by some teams, including one led by a military virologist named Zhou Yusen. The report called it “unusual” that two military COVID-19 vaccine development teams were able to reach early milestones even faster than the major drug companies who were part of the U.S. government’s Operation Warp Speed program.

Can we stop trading with China now?