Have you had a COVID-19 vaccination?

[Grace]

It would be interesting to see how the early Christians wrote about their brethren being used as human torches.

The discussion is on covid, it's affects on people and those in power who dictated the rules in dealing with it. This is irrelevant to the discussion, unless you are suggesting that Christians were persecuted, tortured and killed during the pandemic.

[Josh]

So let me get this straight:

- It was created in a lab and was a lab leak, after all (NY Times)

- Fauci just made up the 6 foot rule which had no basis in science

Is there any reason we should continue to trust public health "authorities" and "experts"?

[Soloist]

It would be interesting to see how the early Christians wrote about their brethren being used as human torches.

The discussion is on covid, it's affects on people and those in power who dictated the rules in dealing with it. This is irrelevant to the discussion, unless you are suggesting that Christians were persecuted, tortured and killed during the pandemic.

Often in any of our dialogues we tend to discuss what someone says. You made it relevant and that’s why it ended up there.

In the grand scheme of things, nothing our government did in terms of lockdowns was that horrible.

I objected to several things they did and there is comparison to the ancient church as the Christians of the time would bring plague victims in.
Compared to dumping victims in the street… or burning Christians…

[Ken]

So let me get this straight:

- It was created in a lab and was a lab leak, after all (NY Times)

- Fauci just made up the 6 foot rule which had no basis in science

Is there any reason we should continue to trust public health "authorities" and "experts"?

No, actually you don't appear to have any of those things "straight"

The NYT article is the same scientist making the same lab leak arguments that she has been making for a couple of years. It is mostly speculation because the Chinese have not been forthcoming about this. There are equally compelling arguments in the other direction made by equally qualified scientists. The only ones who possibly know the truth are the Chinese government and they aren't saying. In any event, we know it came from China as the result of Chinese negligence. Knowing the actual origin wouldn't have changed a single thing about pandemic policy in the US or anywhere else.

And no, you are wrong on your second point too. Fauci didn't just make up the 6 foot rule. It came out of the CDC and Trump's CDC director at the time was Robert Redfield. Fauci was director of NIAID which is part of NIH. Social distancing does have a basis in science. The 6 ft. rule was never characterized as a precise threshold for stopping the virus. But rather a reasonable threshold for avoiding exposure to aerosol droplets and one that was easy to remember and estimate. At the beginning of the pandemic it was scientifically reasonable based on knowledge that existed in the early months of the pandemic. As the pandemic progressed, both our knowledge and the virus itself evolved. That is how science works. COVID is one of the most studied diseases on history. It would be shocking if our understanding of the disease didn't change over the course of the pandemic.

You are free to believe what you want. You can go back to bloodletting and believing that diseases are caused by miasmata if you want to reject modern germ theory and the science of infectious diseases. There are plenty of charlatans on YouTube who will tell you what you want to hear.

[Josh]

And no, you are wrong on your second point too. Fauci didn't just make up the 6 foot rule. It came out of the CDC and Trump's CDC director at the time was Robert Redfield. Fauci was director of NIAID which is part of NIH. Social distancing does have a basis in science. The 6 ft. rule was never characterized as a precise threshold for stopping the virus. But rather a reasonable threshold for avoiding exposure to aerosol droplets and one that was easy to remember and estimate. At the beginning of the pandemic it was scientifically reasonable based on knowledge that existed in the early months of the pandemic. As the pandemic progressed, both our knowledge and the virus itself evolved. That is how science works. COVID is one of the most studied diseases on history. It would be shocking if our understanding of the disease didn't change over the course of the pandemic.

Ken, did you read the Washington Post article? Fauci said in front of Congress that the 6 foot rule was not based on science.

I mean, I guess you can go ahead and argue Fauci is wrong and that he actually did base it on science, and for some reason he is now claiming he didn't, but that's quite a bizarre position for you to stake out...

[Ernie]

And no, you are wrong on your second point too. Fauci didn't just make up the 6 foot rule. It came out of the CDC and Trump's CDC director at the time was Robert Redfield. Fauci was director of NIAID which is part of NIH. Social distancing does have a basis in science. The 6 ft. rule was never characterized as a precise threshold for stopping the virus. But rather a reasonable threshold for avoiding exposure to aerosol droplets and one that was easy to remember and estimate. At the beginning of the pandemic it was scientifically reasonable based on knowledge that existed in the early months of the pandemic. As the pandemic progressed, both our knowledge and the virus itself evolved. That is how science works. COVID is one of the most studied diseases on history. It would be shocking if our understanding of the disease didn't change over the course of the pandemic.

Ken, did you read the Washington Post article? Fauci said in front of Congress that the 6 foot rule was not based on science.

I mean, I guess you can go ahead and argue Fauci is wrong and that he actually did base it on science, and for some reason he is now claiming he didn't, but that's quite a bizarre position for you to stake out...

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/06/0 ... g-00161287

Fauci also tried to refute a claim by Republicans that the 6-foot social distancing rule that kept many businesses and schools closed in the first years of the pandemic was not based on science.

He said when he testified in January during a closed-door session with the Covid panel that the measure “just appeared,” he was referring to the lack of a clinical trial demonstrating its validity.

Fauci added that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention introduced the measure based on knowledge at the time about how far droplets containing the virus could travel from one person to another.

[Ken]

And no, you are wrong on your second point too. Fauci didn't just make up the 6 foot rule. It came out of the CDC and Trump's CDC director at the time was Robert Redfield. Fauci was director of NIAID which is part of NIH. Social distancing does have a basis in science. The 6 ft. rule was never characterized as a precise threshold for stopping the virus. But rather a reasonable threshold for avoiding exposure to aerosol droplets and one that was easy to remember and estimate. At the beginning of the pandemic it was scientifically reasonable based on knowledge that existed in the early months of the pandemic. As the pandemic progressed, both our knowledge and the virus itself evolved. That is how science works. COVID is one of the most studied diseases on history. It would be shocking if our understanding of the disease didn't change over the course of the pandemic.

Ken, did you read the Washington Post article? Fauci said in front of Congress that the 6 foot rule was not based on science.

I mean, I guess you can go ahead and argue Fauci is wrong and that he actually did base it on science, and for some reason he is now claiming he didn't, but that's quite a bizarre position for you to stake out...

That isn't what he said. Ernie already answered. But he said it wasn't based on clinical data which for obvious reasons was unavailable. And would probably be impossible to generate with any sort of large scale study because there are too many uncontrollable variables. He never said it wasn't based on science. Science is much more than just clinical data.

For example, Washington had markedly lower COVID death rates than Ohio. Was that because Washington had more strict social distancing? Stricter masking policies? Higher vaccination rates? A less obese population? Longer school closures? More restrictions on group gatherings like churches? Any or all of the above? Even with careful study, how much can you disentangle all of those different variables and attribute which combination of measures lead to much lower death rates in Washington compared to Ohio?

It would frankly be impossible to do a large-scale study in which you isolated out just the 6' social distancing rule from everything else (vaccines, masking, lockdowns, etc.) There are just too many moving parts.

That doesn't, however, mean that social distancing has no scientific basis. Clearly it does. Standing 100 meters away from someone is clearly safer than standing 6 inches away from them. Is 6 ft the magic perimeter within which you are at risk and outside of which you are safe? Of course not. It was was never sold as such. This is not a threshold sort of issue. Your risk diminishes the further away you get based on all kinds of different variables from air circulation to time of exposure. But you can't come up with 575 different distances based on a complex matrix of circumstances. You have to pick one easily understood and usable distance.

Where things probably went wrong with a lot of COVID policy is that measures taken as temporary measures in the early months of the pandemic when vaccines were unavailable and we were trying to minimize hospitalizations and deaths until people cold get vaccinated tended to become permanent long after vaccines were universally available. There was too much inertia there. But that was nationwide, and not the decision of one person like Fauci.

[Josh]

Let's repeat the headline from the Washington Post.

In the pandemic, we were told to keep 6 feet apart. There’s no science to support that.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2 ... o-science/

In a congressional appearance, infectious-disease expert Anthony S. Fauci characterized the recommendation as “an empiric decision that wasn’t based on data.”

Please clarify where you think this journalist is getting it wrong:

“It sort of just appeared, that six feet is going to be the distance,” Fauci testified to Congress in a January closed-door hearing, according to a transcribed interview released Friday. Fauci characterized the recommendation as “an empiric decision that wasn’t based on data.”

(His choice of words is a funny one, since "emperic", a synonym for "emperical", means "based on, concerned with, or verifiable by observation or experience rather than theory or pure logic." But he then says that the decision wasn't based on data - i.e., not based on, concerned with, or verifiable by observation (which you admitted above, that it would be too hard to actually test these ideas out) or experience, but was instead just based on (unproven) theories.)

[Ken]

Let's repeat the headline from the Washington Post.

In the pandemic, we were told to keep 6 feet apart. There’s no science to support that.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2 ... o-science/

In a congressional appearance, infectious-disease expert Anthony S. Fauci characterized the recommendation as “an empiric decision that wasn’t based on data.”

Please clarify where you think this journalist is getting it wrong.

Vast amounts of science is empirical and theoretical. Just because a decision isn't based on clinical data does not mean it isn't scientific. Do you need clinical data to convince you it isn't safe to dive headfirst into a wood chipper? Or can you make an informed scientific decision about the risks of doing so without seeing some clinical study that measures how many people die by jumping into wood chippers?

Virtually the entire field of ecology is based on observation not clinical studies. As is astronomy and areas like quantum mechanics and theoretical physics. That doesn't mean they aren't scientific.

[Ken]

Let's repeat the headline from the Washington Post.

In the pandemic, we were told to keep 6 feet apart. There’s no science to support that.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2 ... o-science/

In a congressional appearance, infectious-disease expert Anthony S. Fauci characterized the recommendation as “an empiric decision that wasn’t based on data.”

Please clarify where you think this journalist is getting it wrong:

“It sort of just appeared, that six feet is going to be the distance,” Fauci testified to Congress in a January closed-door hearing, according to a transcribed interview released Friday. Fauci characterized the recommendation as “an empiric decision that wasn’t based on data.”

(His choice of words is a funny one, since "emperic", a synonym for "emperical", means "based on, concerned with, or verifiable by observation or experience rather than theory or pure logic." But he then says that the decision wasn't based on data - i.e., not based on, concerned with, or verifiable by observation (which you admitted above, that it would be too hard to actually test these ideas out) or experience, but was instead just based on (unproven) theories.)

In the absence of a vaccine, there are really only three scientifically valid ways of preventing the spread of a disease from one person to another:

1. Social distancing
2. barriers (masking, PPE)
3. ventilation

High-level isolation wards for highly contagious diseases such as Ebola use all three methods to prevent the spread of disease. This is not new. Every pandemic since the origin of germ theory has fought the spread of disease using these three mechanisms. And all three are based on science.

The question is how does one translate the scientific tools used in high level isolation units to be generally applicable across an entire country with a population that is only going to grudgingly cooperate. You have to simplify it down. Which is exactly what they did. Did they get it exactly right? Based on what we knew about COVID during the early months of the disease they probably did a fairly reasonable job. We weren't going to retrofit ventilation systems across America in a month or two. So that meant distancing and barriers were the only available tools absent a vaccine. Were 6 ft distances and surgical masks the most optimal solution? Probably not. But they were the most practical at the time and were measurably better than doing nothing. Which was frankly not an option. Absent government recommendations, people were going to take measures into their own hands and there would have been lots more mass hysteria and ridiculous stuff happening.

The main valid criticism wasn't the measures they recommended back in March 2020. But rather that it took so long to revise them after vaccines were universally available. Because getting vaccinated was vastly more effective than masking and 6' distancing.