I do care about the elderly. Lost a great person to Covid, spent 93 years on this earth just to die alone in a hospital with no visitors, still pisses me off. F that. BTW, the place she was staying at when she got Covid was following the " guidelines " and she still got it and died alone. Some science there.SmaptyWolf said:hokiewolf said:except when they sad they were following science when they weren't following science I.e mask mandates and the 6' rule which were not based on the science that was presented after the mandate is made.SmaptyWolf said:It's fascinating how we all lived through the same experience in alternate realities.hokiewolf said:Forced vaccination is what has created this conspiracy mess. Additionally, not having a cohesive message as to why the govt recommends action. Neither of those two things worked out with Covid and sowed seeds of populism we have today.SmaptyWolf said:So if the next pandemic is the Bird Flu, and it actually does kill 50% of the people it infects, you think our lesson should be don't take kids out of school? And definitely don't wear a mask while we're developing vaccines that your employer will probably really want you to take? Got it!ncsupack1 said:
Mask and trying to force vaccines may not be the best idea. Taking kids out of school….closing businesses…that's a start
I remember very clearly when Covid first arrived here Trump made it very obvious that he saw the pandemic as a huge threat to his political survival. You really don't remember Trump on stage week after week, actively contradicting Fauci and the CDC in an effort to downplay things? Our scientific community was put in the impossible situation of managing a novel pandemic and a hostile administration, so yes, the messaging was often contradictory, both because our understanding evolved rapidly, and because Trump was working against them to turn a pandemic into a culture war. He clearly succeeded.
So yeah, no. There's only one giant black hole responsible for the populism we have today, and it ain't the CDC.
The point is, mandates don't work. Make strong suggestions, put out guidance, but don't mandate things.
Masks (and distancing) are in fact based on science. But yeah, high quality scientific studies take a long time, so in the fog of war of a brand new virus we often had to rely on health experts' best guesses, especially when the virus itself was rapidly evolving (which causes mitigations that worked three months ago to no longer work). You just chose to see their best guesses as highly nefarious for some reason.
The bottom line is we got very lucky. You were howling about your personal freedom long before we understood how deadly this virus actually was, and before we had a vaccine to get us where we are now. Even so we lost over a million people, and how much you guys didn't care about protecting our (particularly elderly) countrymen during that time was pretty striking.
At some point your obsession with personal freedom above all else is going to bite us. Remember WW2? A whole bunch of people were forced to go to Europe and get their asses shot off by Nazis. Sometimes a society's survival actually does depend on "mandates" getting everyone on the same page.