It’s probably better to give up on covid “misinformation”. All sorts of official groups like the WHO and CDC themselves have been spreading it so it’s almost impossible to come to a consensus on what is and isn’t true.
Some example statements that are controversial would include:
- Covid is not airborne
- cloth masks are ineffective
- covid originated in a lab in wuhan
- omicron is mild
How do you deal with statements like that without pissing off a government group? It’s better to ignore it and some associated conspiracy stuff.
Science had a better idea of what the virus does after a while, and so the guidance was changed. That doesn't make the initial guidance a lie.
I won't defend the WHO (because they clearly did spread some misinformation at times), but the scientific community at large only changed its messaging because their information got better, not because they got "found out" as liars.
"The science" (I really hate that phrasing) doesn't change. Conclusive results require reproducibility. If "the science" changes then the initial findings were not reproducible and thus non conclusive and not "the science". Reproducibility points to a particular conclusion so following the trend shouldnt result in a complete 180 turnaround in provided information (the vaccines prevent the spread -> the vaccines don't prevent the spread). If they didn't have conclusive evidence of their statement they should just say " I don't know, but we are working to find that out". Premature assertions of correctness by the CDC, WHO, and other public health officials based on (now known) incorrect conclusions has done untold damage to their credibility making the public hesitant to trust them regarding any health guidance and in the worst case raising suspicion of malice from those most hurt by their guidance.
You're missing the point of the entire field of "Public Health." It's not to communicate the minutia of peer-reviewed scientific journal articles. That's what academics are for. Public health is more like marketing, but with the goal to reduce harm rather than make profit. And that's OK, and a good thing, and to lambast them for trying to convey a simple, straight-forward message is really just not understanding what the role of public health is.
Great marketing, I can't direct people to WHO guidelines regarding things anymore to a fairly large chunk of population (like I could reliably 5-10yrs ago) without getting laughed at.
The vaccine originally went a long ways towards preventing the spread. The virus mutated enough that the vaccine now pretty much only means reduced severity of infection.
The situation changed, science recognizes this. This is not a case of the original results not being reproduceable!
Well said. Saying Covid is not airborne 2 weeks after discovery, and calling it science, is almost the complete opposite of science. There is no way you could prove reproducibly 2 weeks after discovery that a new respiratory illness is not airborne.
So it’s all politics. Yet they call it science.
As you said, this has caused immense trust loss institutions worldwide. For good reason. It’s a tragedy.
Science is not a gospel and it absolutely does change. In fact that's its main differentiating trait. Your theory that science produces certainty is infantile.
One glaring example would be where CDC Director Rochelle Wolensky said: "Our data from the CDC today suggests that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don't get sick, and that it's not just in the clinical trials, but it's also in real-world data."[1]. That was never true. The science didn't change, this was a false statement when it was made. And it was amplified by everybody from the President of the United States[2] on down to people posting here.
These sorts of lies by people claiming to "trust the science" were then used to silence & censor people who challenged statements like this, and who challenged the idea that there was no potential long term harm despite all of the evidence showing young males in particular were more likely to develop myocarditis from the vaccine than from Covid.
And the so called conspiracy theorists can now say they were right.
It’s super concerning that you’ve basically given legitimate ammo to the most paranoid of society. This shouldn’t be the case. But now it’s going to be twice as hard to convince the fringes of anything coming from authority of anything.
"Science" does not have any ideas about anything. Science is a tool that humans use to learn about the world; it is the human beings who have ideas about things. And, because human beings are fallible, it's generally advisable not to give a small group of them absolute unnacountable power over the speech of everyone else. "If men were angels" and all that
I strongly disagree.
Most of these guidance were not set on scientific grounds to begin with, but based on political grounds. The science was always in the other direction for an unbiased reviewer.
It is good that science ultimately won out, but I think it will be a long time before institutional credibility is restored.
Guidance is normative, not descriptive. Science itself cannot tell anyone what to do. No amount of "science" can tell you how to prioritize your messaging, mask production/distribution, and hospital usage.
Why is it inherently bad that the early pandemic guidance had a political valence? Obviously, no one likes to be misled, but the CDC and WHO were making decisions that would affect billions of people in the absence of any US leadership.
Refusal to accept prior infection immunity. All the high quality data suggested it was good as or nearly as good as vaccines. This also matched the experience with similar viruses, yet policy makers claimed it was not "based on the science"
Infection immunity is as good as or better than vaccine immunity *against that variant*. Unfortunately, there is variant after variant after variant. The vaccine fares better than infection against new variants but at this point neither works well.
There are at least three parts to this. One is the science. The science should have initially been saying "We don't know", and then "We think X, because Y, with Z level of certainty", with Z getting more and more certain as time went on.
Second is the public health aspects of this. They had to say "Do U, V, and W" before the science was clear that those were the correct things to do. (Why "had to"? Because if they said "We can't tell you what to do", first there would have been panic, and second they would have missed a chance to get ahead of it if they guessed right. So they went with their best guess, which is not an unreasonable thing to do.)
But the third thing is politics and reputation. They went with their best guess, but they didn't admit that it was a guess. They wanted everyone to do it, and so they talked like they were certain, even though they didn't have the data to be certain. When some of their guesses were wrong, they took a reputational hit, because they had sounded like they were certain. Then, compounding the problem, even after the evidence started to come in they stuck to their original advice to try to avoid taking the damage to their reputation, and just wound up making themselves look like buffoons. They damaged the reputation of public health for decades by how they handled this.
they lied because they thought there would be a mask shortage, and medical workers needed all the masks they could get. So they told people they dont need masks.
Except they didn’t actually provide decent masks to hospital workers either so they just lied because that’s what politicians do. Back to the original topic though how do you deal with official lies like this when you are big tech? It’s a real murky issue
In most cases you put the masks on the sick. The closest disease we have for comparison is the original SARS and we stopped it because symptoms showed (and could be tested in bulk by thermal cameras) before people were infectious.
Covid has turned into a pandemic because it has the unexpected property of most infection being before symptoms show.
That's a bold opinion, honestly. It seems to me that much of the initial guidance ("masks don't work") was an intentional lie to prevent mask shortages. Do you have evidence otherwise?
That’s all well and good for the scientific community, but the petty bureaucrats at Twitter, the White House, DHS, etc. who were policing “misinformation” on social media are another thing entirely.
>>Science had a better idea of what the virus does after a while, and so the guidance was changed. That doesn't make the initial guidance a lie.
No one has a monopoly on scientific thinking. The people whose tweets were "fact-checked" or removed, and who sometimes even had their accounts banned, could say exactly the same thing about those statements they made that ended up being proven wrong.
We shouldn't apply a hyper-critical lens to the statements of every one, except those deemed scientific experts by the established power structure.
One of the issues with this is not everyone is able to ignore conspiracy stuff, they take misinformation for information, and you get something like "masks don't work". Sort of like saying Fox News is harmless because we recognize it's news entertainment rather than news; there are many who believe it (or other sources) as news.
I think you got tripped up by the double negative. To clarify your response you might repeat your assumptions in whole and don’t rely on the context of what you’re replying to. Restate it all in your own message and words.
I think you have their position backwards. They originally agreed and said "Covid is not airborne", now they disagree. See the links in my other comment.
Correct, I accidentally reversed it. The point of my comment was that there was a period where the WHO said one thing and the CDC said another and they were mutually exclusive. These were the two most prominent health authorities, and there were many more that changed their stances on different days.
What is the single source of truth here? People were banned and deplatformed from social media for "spreading misinformation about COVID".
Quite early on there were indications it was airborne. I distinctly remember a group of researchers making a stink that the CDC wasn’t changing their position in it.
Honestly, I’m a bit amazed that isn’t something we can easily test. I’m no biologist but couldn’t we just take people sick with COVID in a room and have them breathe/talk/whatever with the equivalent of Petri dishes at differing distances?
I think you need to understand that emerging novel viruses take time to understand. We still understand relatively little about covid, and to be upset with Twitter for doing it’s best at a time where emerging information is being blasted around the globe, is misplaced at best. Recommendations evolve as the virus itself does, and as organizations respond to emerging threats.
Some example statements that are controversial would include:
- Covid is not airborne - cloth masks are ineffective - covid originated in a lab in wuhan - omicron is mild
How do you deal with statements like that without pissing off a government group? It’s better to ignore it and some associated conspiracy stuff.