There is a difference between "malice" and "intentional misinformation".
Authority figures are not accurately representing risks and rewards of different actions and have deliberately shaped their messaging to achieve outcomes.
Direct from the horse's mouth: https://twitter.com/cdcgov/status/1233134710638825473 "CDC does not currently recommend the use of facemasks to help prevent novel #coronavirus. Take everyday preventive actions, like staying home when you are sick and washing hands with soap and water, to help slow the spread of respiratory illness." from 27 Feb 2020.
They weren't saying this because they thought face masks were ineffective, they said this because they were worried about supplies for healthcare workers. (obvious by reading subtext)
This is a repeated pattern. Making recommendations and sharing "facts" omitting important details in order to push for an unshared outcome.
Nobody is properly sharing how risks have changed, nobody is making premeditated decisions about which risks will be associated with which mitigating actions. The goalposts are constantly shifting to match present feelings instead of setting limits based on reason and sticking to them.
The censorship problem comes in when publishers are half-way committing to a narrative which changes by the week, failing to shut down people who are just saying things a subset wants to hear in order to get money and actively shutting down others who are actively trying to engage in reasonable debate.
The fundamental problem is this:
People have different risk tolerance and different priorities when it comes to personal risk, and individual actions affecting the community. These differences in this case are ultimately fairly small but getting blown out of proportion because it's profitable to get people upset.
It is all a moot point now and nobody seems to be able to articulate or admit it yet.
There is very little community protection left available by vaccinating. Vaccinated people can carry and spread the disease, the new variants are a lot less deadly, and a sizable proportion of the population already has natural immunity from getting the actual virus (~75M confirmed cases in the US for ~330M population, with estimates that there may have been as many as 4x as many cases which went uncounted)
It's over, we lost, the outcome we have is what we got and there is very little leverage to change it at this point because the vast majority of what was going to happen has already happened and the prevention tools we have are mostly ineffective at curbing spread.
Ok then, why is it bad to prioritize healthcare workers, who put their lives on the line in the face of a new unknown disease? That was only for a very short while. I think the behavior of people rushing to buy toilet paper shows that, indeed, had the CDC promoted masks at that point, it would have prevented nurses and doctors from getting the most basic protection while exposing themselves to infection to an incomparable degree.
It's not bad to prioritize healthcare workers, there are plenty of levers the CDC and governments have to do so.
It is bad to prioritize healthcare workers by sculpting messages i.e. manipulating the population.
A message for Feb 2020: "Masks will likely help curb infection for you and transmission for others, masks are most important for healthcare workers and the medically vulnerable, wearing them when you're around people is a good idea, but we need to make sure they get into the hands of people who need them most first"
They essentially decided to borrow against future trust in order to achieve a desired near term outcome. That may have been the option which led to the fewest deaths, or maybe vaccination rates would be ?% higher if they hadn't undermined their own credibility. It was (and still is) impossible to know, but I don't think thats the kind of call we want scientists to be making.
If lies slow down the progress of society and progress continues curing disease and saving lives - there isn't an argument as to whether you save move lives, obviously you save more lives with trust if we agree on the axioms that trust is necessary for progress and that progress will increasingly save lives over time.
> They weren't saying this because they thought face masks were ineffective, they said this because they were worried about supplies for healthcare workers.
This doesn't pass the smell test because governments could easily have banned the private sale of masks.
Many governments have used their powers to confine us to home arrest without a trial and they expect us to believe they couldn't have confiscated all the masks?
While protecting the supply of masks may have been part of the point, the CDC also believed (along with much of the medical community) that masks did little against viruses because of old research. It took quite a bit of scientific discussion and bickering for them to revise that opinion.
I largely agree with the rest of your points - particularly the outcome we have found ourselves in. Barring the emergence of some horrific new variant (Imagine Omicron with 10x the fatality rate), this is just another bug we can no longer avoid without effectively destroying our existing society - time to move on and live with it.
Our whole family had mild delta two months ago, even then we are now finishing quarantine after everyone catching omnicron. Neither vaccines or previous infection seem particularly effective at stopping re infection. The virus seems significantly different to previous iterations meaning it might as well be a different virus altogether.
It felt like a medium flu for the adults and just bounced off the kids.
It’s malice when the CDC again and again lied that natural immunity to covid was inferior to naive vaccine immunity, even cherry picking data to prove their point. Only recently after dozens and dozens of papers having had refuted their narrative has the CDC changed its official position on natural immunity, not that it ever got media attention.
Authority figures are not accurately representing risks and rewards of different actions and have deliberately shaped their messaging to achieve outcomes.
Direct from the horse's mouth: https://twitter.com/cdcgov/status/1233134710638825473 "CDC does not currently recommend the use of facemasks to help prevent novel #coronavirus. Take everyday preventive actions, like staying home when you are sick and washing hands with soap and water, to help slow the spread of respiratory illness." from 27 Feb 2020.
They weren't saying this because they thought face masks were ineffective, they said this because they were worried about supplies for healthcare workers. (obvious by reading subtext)
This is a repeated pattern. Making recommendations and sharing "facts" omitting important details in order to push for an unshared outcome.
Nobody is properly sharing how risks have changed, nobody is making premeditated decisions about which risks will be associated with which mitigating actions. The goalposts are constantly shifting to match present feelings instead of setting limits based on reason and sticking to them.
The censorship problem comes in when publishers are half-way committing to a narrative which changes by the week, failing to shut down people who are just saying things a subset wants to hear in order to get money and actively shutting down others who are actively trying to engage in reasonable debate.
The fundamental problem is this:
People have different risk tolerance and different priorities when it comes to personal risk, and individual actions affecting the community. These differences in this case are ultimately fairly small but getting blown out of proportion because it's profitable to get people upset.
It is all a moot point now and nobody seems to be able to articulate or admit it yet.
There is very little community protection left available by vaccinating. Vaccinated people can carry and spread the disease, the new variants are a lot less deadly, and a sizable proportion of the population already has natural immunity from getting the actual virus (~75M confirmed cases in the US for ~330M population, with estimates that there may have been as many as 4x as many cases which went uncounted)
It's over, we lost, the outcome we have is what we got and there is very little leverage to change it at this point because the vast majority of what was going to happen has already happened and the prevention tools we have are mostly ineffective at curbing spread.