Article COVID revisionism has gone too far?

[C C]

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/cov...ocid=hpmsn

INTRO: Pandemic revisionism has gone mainstream. More than five years after COVID-19 began spreading in the United States, a new conventional wisdom has taken hold in some quarters: Public-health officials knew or should have known from the start that pandemic restrictions would do more harm than good, forced them on the public anyway, and then doubled down even as the evidence piled up against them.

When challenged, these officials stifled dissent in order to create an illusion of consensus around obviously flawed policies. In the end, America’s 2020 pandemic response undermined years of learning in schools, destroyed countless businesses, and led to any number of other harms—all without actually saving any lives in the process.

These sorts of claims were once largely confined to the political right. No longer. Two recent books by respectable left-of-center authors—In Covid’s Wake, by the Princeton political scientists Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee, and An Abundance of Caution, by the journalist David Zweig—take up versions of this skeptical narrative, each with its own twists.

Both have received rave reviews in publications such as The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, and even the overtly progressive Guardian. The flagship New York Times podcast, The Daily, devoted an episode to an interview with Macedo and Lee. The pair and their work were also featured on PBS NewsHour and CNN.

The books make some valuable points. Some pandemic restrictions remained in place for far too long, especially after vaccines became available, and public-health experts did make several costly mistakes. Their mass support for the George Floyd protests, at a moment when they were otherwise warning against any public gatherings, was particularly damaging to their credibility.

But the broader revisionist narrative—that the people in charge imposed sweeping restrictions that they knew were pointless—is a dangerous overcorrection... (MORE - details)

[Syne]

The Atlantic of course.
These were originally confined to the political right, because that's who saw reality from the beginning.
Fauci (®The Science) literally admitted that he knew certain restrictions were pointless and not supported by any science.

Whether or not politicians and government officials knew they were pointless doesn't really matter, as their motive was clearly a power grab, not public well-being.

[Magical Realist]

all without actually saving any lives in the process.

How could anyone make such a claim? Do they actually know how many lives would've been lost if we didn't wear masks and shut down public places and schools? Are they denying the well-established science behind viral contagion?

[Syne]

all without actually saving any lives in the process.

How could anyone make such a claim?

It's a straw man, that's how.

[confused2]

In the UK we do have actual data .. unfortunately it doesn't directly address some of the points already made. In the UK the number of hospital beds is a known number (about 95,000). While keeping hospital beds free for accident/emergency/illness/cancer doesn't give any indication of how many people would have died from covid without vaccination or treatment it does illustrate the effectiveness of restrictions when dealing with an epidemic. In the tail after (say) Jan 2022 it is said that 75% of admissions were for unvaccinated people (I can check this on request).

[Image: _130081697_line_patients_uk-nc.png.webp]

Edit..
Restrictions were used to bring the number of beds occupied to a very low level. If restrictions had been eased at (say) 5,000 beds occupied it can be seen (from the graph) that the number would have rapidly risen to 10,000, 20,000 .. again. In my opinion the known nature of epidemics ('the science') is well illustrated by the graph.

Edit2..
Looking at failed science .. I don't think there is an actual 'science of stupidity' (perhaps there should be) beyond there are no limits to it.

[Syne]

Restrictions could have been restricted to those with preexisting risk factors.

[Yazata]

I could agree with it, until I got to this:

These sorts of claims were once largely confined to the political right. No longer. Two recent books by respectable left-of-center authors...

That kind of reveals the authors' bias right there.

The books make some valuable points. Some pandemic restrictions remained in place for far too long, especially after vaccines became available, and public-health experts did make several costly mistakes. Their mass support for the George Floyd protests, at a moment when they were otherwise warning against any public gatherings, was particularly damaging to their credibility.

The whole thing was shamelessly politicized. To be a COVID hardliner was to be politically "progressive", to be one of those who put "In this house, we believe in Science" on signs in their yard. While criticism of the lockdowns and full frontal authoritarianism that sought to control when people could leave their homes and what they could do when they did, had to be opposed because any criticism was supposedly politically conservative. So the media, academia and the rest adopted a hard line as a way of affirming their political identity, and their sense of belonging to the supposedly intellectually superior faction.

That's why the BLM riots got a pass from the lockdowns and masking requirements: Because the rioters were perceived as politically left and 'us' rather than 'them'.

But the broader revisionist narrative—that the people in charge imposed sweeping restrictions that they knew were pointless—is a dangerous overcorrection...

Fauci admitted that the six foot social distancing thing wasn't based on scientific evidence, but just kind of appeared. Evidence that masks did any good was ambivalent at best. All of the evidence showed that school age children were at very low risk yet schools remained closed many places for several years and when they reopened kids were forced to wear damp icky masks continually. Why? Because that's what the teachers union wanted, and the teachers union is one of the biggest contributors to the democratic party.

Virologists who disagreed with the wetmarket origin theory suffered severe career damage as they were labeled 'conspiracy theorists'. That question had supposedly been settled by the 'Proximate Origin' paper published in Nature, written by prominent virologists without any new research, despite knowing all about the gain-of-function research (funded in part by the US) at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. They simply didn't want virologists like themselves to be blamed for the epidemic. So their denials became 'The Science'® , the new orthodoxy in which all the rest of us were supposed to have biblical-style faith.

Epidemiologists and physicians who criticized the over-the-top covid response that effectively shut down the world economy and much of social life, and its bare-fisted authoritarianism so corrosive of civil liberties, lost their jobs in universities and hospitals, were banned from the media as spreaders of "disinformation" and in some cases lost their medical licenses. Despite the fact that often as not, in retrospect they turned out to be correct.

The signers of the Great Barrington Declation were attacked, dismissed and suffered career damage. In that regard, I'm pleased to see that Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford professor who helped write the Great Barrington Declaration and received death threats, was banned from social media and was widely dismissed as a dangerous source of "disinformation" (to its credit, Stanford never fired him, though I expect that they were under great pressure from all directions to do so) has been named by President Trump as the new Director of the National Institutes of Health. (Which ironically helped fund the Chinese research that may well have originally created the covid epidemic.)

[confused2]

Did the 6 foot rule reduce the number of people gathered together in (say) a shop? Is reducing the number of people gathered together something you would do if you were trying to control an epidemic? Another option would have been to ask people to 'behave sensibly' .. we can see now (just from this thread) how well that would have worked.

From the OP..

The political right already believes that America’s pandemic response was illegitimate and is using that as a pretext for waging war on the country’s public-health apparatus. If the center and left succumb to the nihilism that runs through both of these books, no one will remain to defend sensible public-health measures the next time a pandemic comes around.