It wasn't only vaccines. Paxlovid was effective for high-risk unvaccinated elderly to reduce chances of death and severe disease. This community were begging it to be given to young, healthy, fully vaccinated adults with zero evidence that it improves any outcomes for them.
Medicine is extremely complex and generalizations work poorly. Any drug, any vaccine should be judged only on the basis of actual evidence (double-bline RCTs if possible) and not by induction – something like if it worked for flu, it is reasonable to assume it will work for covid.
Even Scott failed in this regard when he wrote his first post about mask effectiveness. The actual evidence showed that masks practically have no effect and the health authorities were right to not recommend them to people before obtaining sufficient evidence.
All these things 1) lockdowns, 2) mandatory masks, 3) vaccine mandates, 4) travel restrictions after covid was already spread locally had no evidence and not only did considerable harm but also unnecessary restricted essential freedoms.
It didn't help that serious people who expressed worries were silenced, even banned from social media. And then only extremist were protesting and that made any objection to masks, lockdowns or vaccine mandates to sound like an extremist (or communist or whatever).
Rationalists really dropped the ball on this one. They didn't win, they lost hard.
komm-nach-unteralterbach
transhumanist libertAryan monarcho-pedo(anti-agecuck)fascist/natsoc + androsupremacist (unironic)
nopie 2yr ago
Let's also not forget that (and this is not my attempt to declare a ruling on the debate overall) Alexandros Marinos has basically written nearly an entire novel at this point owning Siskind on the ivermectin subject, revealing how shoddy his reasoning about it was (with basically zero response).
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Notes -
It wasn't only vaccines. Paxlovid was effective for high-risk unvaccinated elderly to reduce chances of death and severe disease. This community were begging it to be given to young, healthy, fully vaccinated adults with zero evidence that it improves any outcomes for them.
Medicine is extremely complex and generalizations work poorly. Any drug, any vaccine should be judged only on the basis of actual evidence (double-bline RCTs if possible) and not by induction – something like if it worked for flu, it is reasonable to assume it will work for covid.
Even Scott failed in this regard when he wrote his first post about mask effectiveness. The actual evidence showed that masks practically have no effect and the health authorities were right to not recommend them to people before obtaining sufficient evidence.
All these things 1) lockdowns, 2) mandatory masks, 3) vaccine mandates, 4) travel restrictions after covid was already spread locally had no evidence and not only did considerable harm but also unnecessary restricted essential freedoms.
It didn't help that serious people who expressed worries were silenced, even banned from social media. And then only extremist were protesting and that made any objection to masks, lockdowns or vaccine mandates to sound like an extremist (or communist or whatever).
Rationalists really dropped the ball on this one. They didn't win, they lost hard.
Let's also not forget that (and this is not my attempt to declare a ruling on the debate overall) Alexandros Marinos has basically written nearly an entire novel at this point owning Siskind on the ivermectin subject, revealing how shoddy his reasoning about it was (with basically zero response).
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