{"id":264529,"date":"2023-02-02T06:30:12","date_gmt":"2023-02-02T06:30:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=264529"},"modified":"2023-02-03T08:37:59","modified_gmt":"2023-02-03T08:37:59","slug":"its-time-for-the-scientific-community-to-admit-we-were-wrong-about-covid-and-it-cost-lives-opinion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=264529","title":{"rendered":"It’s Time for the Scientific Community to Admit We Were Wrong About COVID and It Cost Lives | Opinion"},"content":{"rendered":"

Kevin Bass MS MD\/PhD student, medical school \u2013 NEWSWEEK Jan 30, 2023<\/strong><\/h1>\n

As a medical student and researcher, I staunchly supported the efforts of the public health authorities when it came to COVID-19. I believed that the authorities responded to the largest public health crisis of our lives with compassion, diligence, and scientific expertise. I was with them when they called for lockdowns, vaccines, and boosters.<\/p>\n

I was wrong. We <\/em>in the scientific community were wrong. And it cost lives.<\/p>\n

I can see now that the scientific community from the CDC<\/a> to the WHO<\/a> to the FDA<\/a> and their representatives, repeatedly overstated the evidence and misled the public about its own views and policies, including on natural<\/a> vs. artificial immunity<\/a>, school closures<\/a> and disease transmission<\/a>, aerosol spread<\/a>, mask mandates<\/a>, and vaccine effectiveness and<\/a> safety<\/a>, especially among the young. All of these were scientific mistakes at the time<\/em>, not in hindsight. Amazingly, some of these obfuscations continue to the present day.<\/p>\n

But perhaps more important than any individual error was how inherently flawed the overall approach of the scientific community was, and continues to be. It was flawed in a way that undermined its efficacy and resulted in thousands if not millions of preventable deaths.<\/p>\n

What we did not properly appreciate is that preferences determine how scientific expertise is used, and that our preferences might be\u2014indeed, our preferences were<\/em>\u2014very different from many of the people that we serve. We created policy based on our<\/em> preferences, then justified it using data. And then we portrayed those opposing our efforts as misguided, ignorant, selfish, and evil.<\/p>\n

We made science a team sport, and in so doing, we made it no longer science. It became us versus them, and “they” responded the only way anyone might expect them to: by resisting.<\/p>\n

We excluded important parts of the population from policy development and castigated critics, which meant that we deployed a monolithic response across an exceptionally diverse nation, forged a society more fractured than ever, and exacerbated longstanding heath and economic disparities.<\/p>\n

Our emotional response and ingrained partisanship prevented us from seeing the full impact of our actions on the people we are supposed to serve. We systematically minimized the downsides of the interventions we imposed\u2014imposed without the input, consent, and recognition of those forced to live with them. In so doing, we violated the autonomy of those who would be most negatively impacted by our policies: the poor, the working class, small business owners, Blacks and Latinos, and children. These populations were overlooked because they were made invisible to us by their systematic exclusion from the dominant, corporatized media machine that presumed omniscience.<\/p>\n

Most of us did not speak up in support of alternative views, and many of us tried to suppress them. When strong scientific voices like world-renowned Stanford professors John Ioannidis, Jay Bhattacharya, and Scott Atlas<\/a>, or University of California<\/a> San Francisco professors Vinay Prasad and Monica Gandhi, sounded the alarm on behalf of vulnerable communities, they faced severe censure by relentless mobs of critics and detractors in the scientific community\u2014often not on the basis of fact but solely on the basis of differences in scientific opinion.<\/p>\n

When former President Trump pointed out the downsides of intervention, he was dismissed publicly as a buffoon. And when Dr. Antony Fauci opposed Trump and became the hero of the public health community, we gave him our support to do and say what he wanted, even when he was wrong.<\/p>\n

Trump was not remotely perfect, nor were the academic critics of consensus policy. But the scorn that we laid on them was a disaster for public trust in the pandemic response. Our approach alienated large segments of the population from what should have been a national, collaborative project.<\/p>\n

Continues \u2026<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is a major turnaround given that it appeared in NEWSWEEK, a prime establishment mouthpeice . So while it scrupulously avoids red button issues like depopulation and the impact of mRNA vaccines, it nonetheless signals the death knell of the standard Covid narrative <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39262,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[105,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-264529","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-coronavirus","category-Health"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264529","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/39262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=264529"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264529\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":264548,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264529\/revisions\/264548"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=264529"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=264529"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=264529"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}