Civilized said:
SmaptyWolf said:
Civilized said:
SmaptyWolf said:
TheStorm said:
Smapty obviously hasn't realized that he's in over his head yet... now trying to go after Wayland.
Oh boy.
Lol, over my head in your mountain of grade school BS, for sure.
Just like the rest of you have shown over and over, Wayland is clearly not able to debate the memes he regurgitates. In his defense, this stuff you guys are fed is indefensibly dumb and requires a Tucker-level con artist to sell, so I get why all you can really do is violently sputter when someone calls you out.
I don't think you were on the board during the formative stages of the pandemic, but Wayland's one of the good guys Smapty. For years during Covid he took an analytical and data-driven approach to assessing the situation and shared a lot of that data on here.
You may disagree with some of his conclusions around the margins or regarding public policy implications of addressing an evolving and novel virus, but don't confuse him with the meme vomiters on here. He is anything but that.
Gotcha! Well, I'm sorry I missed the data-driven Wayland... apparently I just met the "Australian Fox News meme" and "it's well beyond your mental acuity" Wayland.
I think he just got pissy with the "painting everyone with the same broad brush" flamethrower approach. I guarantee he'll treat you with reciprocal respect if you don't roll him into your basket of Water Cooler deplorables.
I don't speak for Wayland and he can jump in and correct me but his quibbles were mostly and understandably with lack of medical justification for some COVID public policy and, likely even moreso communication (or lack thereof) of drivers for policy being so frequently lacking or inaccurate. This was obviously true on the front end and then as we grew to know more using hindsight and with additional data there was again not sufficient analysis and communication about lessons learned and what we would do differently next time. Basically there appeared to be a near-total lack of accountability for COVID policy and communications shortcomings.
Broadly I agree with Wayland about significant aspects of public policy and communication failings during COVID.
On one hand, we can accurately say that this was a novel, evolving, and very deadly pandemic and the government had the unenviable task of trying to determine and communicate resolution paths in real time using only foresight. All true.
On the other, frequently communicating with the American public in such an opaque manner like we're all a bunch of schoolchildren results in only one outcome, diminished public trust in institutions, which is completely counterproductive. The people that understand the limitations of working knowledge of an evolving situation want the most comprehensive possible information and then will likely make a sound medical decision. The people that rail about their freedom to make their own decisions and want to "do their own research" are not going to be swayed by what the government says regardless. Being clearly talked down to doesn't give the analytical crowd the information that will resonate with them and gives even more ammo to the "do their own research" crowd that the gub'ment can't be trusted.
The public perception of the CDC and other state and federal institutions was significantly harmed during COVID, and much of that harm was preventable and self-inflicted.
That, to me, needs to be one of the greatest lessons learned from COVID - public policy communication transparency is a must, not "even in" a pandemic but "especially in" one.
I hear what you're saying, I just have a completely different recollection of the entire episode.
At the beginning of the pandemic I recall the CDC, Dr Fauci, Governor Cuomo, etc attempting to be very open and candid about what we knew and didn't know, and made science-based recommendations accordingly given limited research.
However it was very clear from the beginning that Trump saw the pandemic as a threat to his political well-being, and set about quickly creating a culture war pushback of people claiming it was all a hoax, just the flu, etc. It was a Republican strategy to discredit the CDC/NIH/etc from the beginning. Trump frequently stood on the podium next to Dr Fauci directly contradicting him (trying to paint rosy pictures about Covid being gone by Easter, etc), they completely co-opted CDC director Birx, and of course trashed every public health recommendation as tyranny.
So our Public Health establishment was put in an impossible situation. And even if they could disregard the entire machine that had been built to discredit them, the fact of the matter is that the job of Public Health isn't just to give you pure science, it's to craft policies that people will
actually follow. If they had told people that no, actually sending your kids to school probably isn't safe, pretty much everyone would have said "**** this" in very short order. Rinse and repeat throughout the pandemic. Science was continuously forced to soften its guidance to figure out the "least harm that people will actually do", especially as things dragged on and even hard core social distancers started whining about quarantine guidance, etc. And then of course few people could understand that the virus was quickly mutating, which meant the rules had to change regularly. The more the CDC tried to be honest about that and change guidance, the easier it was to "discredit" them for being "clueless flip floppers" or whatever.
So yes, they HAD to talk down to you, for the good of everyone. Because honestly, many people
were behaving like schoolchildren, like the pandemic was something that was being done
to them by a mean parent.
Fast forward to today... on one hand you've got the Republican machine who worked 24/7 to discredit our Public Health establishment. They are
still obsessed with trashing Fauci (see Wayland's video above... it always comes back to Fauci). No surprise, conservatives' perception of the CDC and other state and federal institutions was "significantly harmed". That was the goal.
On the other hand, among some of the sane half of the country the perception of the CDC was harmed because I think they had unrealistic expectations of what Public Health was capable of, even under ideal circumstances (which these definitely weren't). I'm definitely one of those people who just wanted the straight science... but if most people would have just ignored it then they would have failed at their job then, too. So instead we got messaging compromises that I also found frustrating... but I understood why their hands were tied.
Sooooo, yeah... I'm sure there are some things they could have done better, especially in hindsight. But man, I actually think Fauci in particular deserves a 50 foot bronze statue for enduring our epic bull**** and getting us through this.
