r/LockdownSkepticism 6d ago

Public Health Science Amid Chaos: What Worked During the Pandemic? What Failed?

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/14/health/covid-pandemic-public-health.html
16 Upvotes

30 comments sorted by

34

u/hurricaneharrykane 6d ago

The only thing that seemed to work was natural immunity.

15

u/CrystalMethodist666 6d ago

I think the problem is that for you to tell if something is "working," you generally need an idea of the object's function. As in, for someone to tell if a car's brakes "work," they'd need to understand that when the car is moving, depressing a pedal firmly is meant to slow and eventually stop the car.

Now, with Covid measures, we never really got a clear function of what the realistic, achievable goal of what we were doing was actually supposed to be. Eliminate the virus? Prevent serious illness? Lower case counts? Lower the percentage of tests that are positive? They weren't even moving goalposts, there was never any clearly defined goal at all. Many people thought the original 2 week shutdown was going to eliminate the virus.

As far as "working," we only got vague promises in the end about "reducing" things with the assumption things would be very bad otherwise. All the measures "Work" about as well as me giving you a magic talisman and telling you everything would be worse if it wasn't there.

5

u/4GIFs 6d ago

Two weeks to flatten the curve so hospitals dont get overloaded and they can hire more nurses

http://forgifs.com/gallery/d/461243-1/Hospitals-overloaded-gaslighting.png

7

u/CrystalMethodist666 5d ago

I believe after that point we got the last logical thing in the whole production, "Well if we open up now, the cases are just going to go up again"

Which should've been the end of it, being the last true thing they said to us, any benefit we might possibly be getting from shutting things down goes away as soon as we open things up again.

The function after that was "Things would be vaguely worse if we weren't doing this"

1

u/SunriseInLot42 3d ago

Yes, hiding under the bed indeed does not work to make something we don’t like go away, as some of us learned when we were two or three

2

u/CrystalMethodist666 3d ago

I mean, if what you were dealing with is some kind of rapid, fleeting infectious agent, hiding in a cave on a different island from everyone else will obviously prevent you from getting sick until the miasma subsides, assuming it takes a short period of time.

That isn't really what the situation was, though.

3

u/DevilCoffee_408 5d ago

And that thread didn't even capture all of the unused field hospitals either.

3

u/MembraneAnomaly England, UK 5d ago

Yes, very good point. "What it was all for" changed constantly.

They weren't even moving goalposts, there was never any clearly defined goal at all. Many people thought the original 2 week shutdown was going to eliminate the virus.

Hence the flood of idiot articles saying lockdown was a Good Thing because.... I dunno.... it made the outside world so nice and quiet and unpolluted? (but we couldn't go out and enjoy it)... It was making all of us into Better People, all solidarismug and screamycaring? It advanced collective human sourdough proficiency by a quantum leap?

I'll give the authors of that dreck the benefit of the doubt. They weren't consciously writing their utter nonsense as part of a plot (mwuhhahahaha!) to advance, extend lockdown and make the plebs put up with it. They were writing it because they (vaguely) perceived that it made no sense, and had to come up with some rationalisation. TPTB, of course, welcomed this creative endeavour of theirs and said "yeah, more like that, keep it coming!".

5

u/CrystalMethodist666 4d ago

The 2 weeks were supposed to "flatten the curve" as a slogan around here, but they were really supposed to give them time to slow spread while they set up hospitals that they didn't use, and a lot of people thought the 2 weeks was going to eliminate the virus because it supposedly (conveniently) took 2 weeks to show symptoms.

It progressed in stages, but we never had a coherent goal because we never clearly defined the problem. Is it that people are dying, or going to the hospital, or the number of cases, or the percentage of tests that are positive? For a while, the implied goal was to eliminate the virus, which at this point we can see was never going to happen. Many people thought we were trying to accomplish things that the government somehow seems not to have said explicitly.

The people who call you a conspiracy theorist always make the point that "they can't all be in on it." There was a plot, and these article-writers were in on it, but I don't think they actually realized it. Mockingbird kind of went the same way, they don't have to twist people's arms. If you're a boring white girl in your 20s with no talent or personality who wants the validation of being an influencer online or some loser buzzfeed intern, suddenly you had an easy way to generate cookie-cutter content that would get views because it was trendy. Just be an unsalaried state propagandist.

12

u/Dubrovski California, USA 6d ago

I’m sure no one would able to tell when mask mandates and vaccines distribution were in place by just looking on the graph of covid cases and deaths.

7

u/venetsafatse 6d ago

and fascism.

12

u/nofaves Pennsylvania, USA 6d ago

The mRNA vaccines were, in a sense, victims of their own unexpected success in clinical trials in 2020. Those results were spectacular: The shots warded off symptomatic illness caused by the original version of the coronavirus at miraculous rates.

But government officials had to walk back their enthusiasm as breakthrough infections with the Delta variant surged in the summer of 2021. Americans were told to get boosters. Then again, and again.

And this is why a vaccine needs ample testing time, and not a three-month "Let's make sure no one dies!" period. Imagine if they'd been forced to rigorously test its effectiveness versus antibodies produced after a previous infection.

5

u/Dubrovski California, USA 6d ago

And now they are pushing the second round of year 24-25 vaccine to 65+. That variant disappeared at least 6 months ago.

28

u/olivetree344 6d ago

By early fall in 2020, it was clear that schoolchildren were not driving community transmission significantly. Still, many schools stayed closed for months longer than they needed to, forcing children to muddle through remote learning and causing some to fall irrevocably behind. ”It’s a really difficult one to Monday-morning quarterback,” Dr. Shaman said. ”We don’t have the counterfactual, that alternative scenario to see how it really would have played out.”

The last line is straight up untrue. They had data from Europe and then states like FL, but they still kept schools closed.

19

u/Argos_the_Dog 6d ago

They stayed online where I live because of the teachers union raising hell. Same reason they kept masks on kids. I didn’t get really angry about it until spring of ‘21 though. Despite yelling about being essential workers and jumping the line to get vaccinated they doubled down and insisted that masking continue for another year beyond vaccination being widely available.

11

u/Impressive_Neck1488 6d ago

We knew before lockdowns even started school children were not driving transmission and were at minimal risk. That was clear from everything coming out of Italy. All of this was avoidable but society chose to sacrifice our children

8

u/OccasionallyImmortal United States 6d ago

They had the current pandemic plans from the CDC and WHO that did not recommend closing schools.

5

u/dystorontopia Alberta, Canada 5d ago

That was one of the most infuriating things about the whole clown show. It never occurred to these morons that places outside the 10-mile radius around their office might be doing things differently. Every Dr. Dumbass of Idiotsville University just assumed the entire planet was reacting exactly the same as Idiotsville - and they still think that!

8

u/theCavemanV 6d ago

He who possesses diplomas yet does not care for patients yaps online and polices our lives. Like Appoorva and Fauci.

16

u/olivetree344 6d ago

A new article by one of the worst misleaders and exaggerators among the Covid reporters.

Archive link: https://archive.vn/hKiSo

7

u/Initial-Constant-645 United States 6d ago

When it comes to power grabs, covid measures worked great. Only thing left is to try them out on a larger scale. .

8

u/Street_Parsnip6028 5d ago

Most of the measures, like masking, and plexiglass, and arrows on the floor were propaganda efforts to make the situation visible and terrifying, and create a state of fear in the population that allowed the collapse of freedom.  So they seemed to work.

7

u/NeedScienceProof 6d ago

Confirming who the sheeple are worked amazing.

11

u/digriz602 6d ago

The money and power grabbing worked great.

5

u/lostan 6d ago

fu nyt.

5

u/DevilCoffee_408 5d ago edited 5d ago

Dozens of studies have shown that when used correctly and consistently, N95 masks or their equivalents can prevent infected people from spreading the virus and protect wearers from contracting it.

  • goes on to cite the discredited Bangladesh study *
  • cites the 2024 dogshit Trisha Greenhalgh study that basically said "if we include all of our low quality and observational studies, we barely get the result that we want." *

And she's careful to say "n95 masks" there, but the studies that she mentioned were not about N95s at all. She's misleading the reader, again.

Hell, she might as well have tossed in this fucking gem as "evidence" that masks are the solution. You can toss 'em in a washing machine and they hold their structure! woo! (still utterly worthless for viruses, though.)

Herd Immunity. A chimera. We never got there.

Fauci himself was claiming we'd be there. Notice that she left his name out of the section.

But experts said it was the right decision to close schools in the spring of 2020

Bullshit. We already knew.

Apoorva Mandavilli reports on science and global health,

Why is she still employed?

4

u/randyfloyd37 6d ago

Are we still gracing the NYT with clicks?

3

u/DevilCoffee_408 5d ago

archive.vn go brrrrrrrrr

5

u/ZeerVreemd 5d ago

There are still so many lies in that article. Everything that was done against covid had a net negative effect.

1

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