Coronavirus: Thread

[grarpamp]

Those Who Chose Shaming Over Science

https://brownstone.org/articles/those-who-chose-shaming-over-science/

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/apr/04/pandemic-shaming-is-it-helping-us-keep-our-distance
https://www.npr.org/2020/12/19/948403401/epidemiologist-on-why-pandemic-shaming-isn-t-working
https://www.vox.com/22245094/gaysovercovid-pandemic-shaming
https://www.history.com/topics/middle-ages/black-death
https://sites.krieger.jhu.edu/iae/files/2022/01/A-Literature-Review-and-Meta-Analysis-of-the-Effects-of-Lockdowns-on-COVID-19-Mortality.pdf
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3291415/
https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/pdf
https://globalnews.ca/news/3678277/loneliness-even-unhealthier-than-obesity-should-be-a-public-health-priority-researcher/
https://www.bbc.com/news/education-60197150
https://blogs.worldbank.org/developmenttalk/intergenerational-mortality-tradeoff-covid-19-lockdown-policies-low-and-middle
https://www.businessinsider.com/cdc-director-data-vaccinated-people-do-not-carry-covid-19-2021-3
https://www.cnbc.com/video/2022/02/04/ignoring-the-economy-is-a-big-mistake-says-harvards-stefanos-kales.html
https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/10.1377/hlthaff.20.3.288

For the first many decades of my life I don’t recall anyone calling me
a selfish idiot, much less a sociopath or a mouth-breathing Trumptard.
All that changed when Covid rolled in and I expressed, ever so
gingerly, a few concerns about the lockdown policies. Here’s a
sampling of what the keyboard warriors threw back at me:

    Enjoy your sociopathy.

    Go lick a pole and catch the virus.

    Have fun choking on your own fluids in the ICU.

    Name three loved ones that you’re ready to sacrifice to Covid. Do
it now, coward.

    You went to Harvard? Yeah, right, and I’m God. Last I checked,
Harvard doesn’t accept troglodytes.

>From the earliest days of the pandemic, something deep inside me—in my
soul, if you will—recoiled from the political and public response to
the virus. Nothing about it felt right or strong or true. This was not
just an epidemiological crisis, but a societal one, so why were we
listening exclusively to some select epidemiologists? Where were the
mental health experts? The child development specialists? The
historians? The economists? And why were our political leaders
encouraging fear rather than calm?

The questions that troubled me the most had less to do with
epidemiology than with ethics: Was it fair to require the greatest
sacrifice from the youngest members of society, who stood to suffer
the most from the restrictions? Should civil liberties simply
disappear during a pandemic, or did we need to balance public safety
with human rights? Unschooled in the ways of online warriors, I
assumed the Internet would allow me to engage in “productive
discussions” about these issues. So I hopped online, and the rest was
hysteria.

Village idiot, flat earther, inbred trash, negative IQ… Let’s just say
that my thin skin got the test of a lifetime.

And it wasn’t just me: anyone who questioned the orthodoxy, whether
expert or ordinary citizen, got a similar skinburn. In the words of
one community physician, who for obvious reasons shall remain
anonymous: “Many doctors including myself, along with virologists,
epidemiologists and other scientists, advocated a targeted approach
and a focus on the most vulnerable cohorts of patients, only to be
dismissed as anti-science, tin foil hat kooks, conspiracy theorists,
antivax and other equally colorful disparaging labels.”

Early in the game I decided I wouldn’t respond to such insults with
more insults—not because I’m especially high-minded, but because
mudslinging contests just leave me angry and it’s not fun to walk
around angry all day. Instead, I took the shaming on the chin (and
still walked around angry).

The Shame Game

The shaming impulse asserted itself right from the start of the
pandemic. On Twitter, #covidiot began trending on the evening of March
22, 2020, and by the time the night was over, 3,000 tweets had coopted
the hashtag to denounce poor public health practices. When CBS News
posted a video of spring breakers partying in Miami, outraged citizens
shared the students’ names in their social media networks, accompanied
by such missives as “do not give these selfish dumbfucks beds and/or
respirators.”

In the early days of the pandemic, when panic and confusion reigned,
such indignation could perhaps be forgiven. But the shaming gained
momentum and wove itself into the zeitgeist. Also: it didn’t work.

As noted by Harvard Medical School epidemiologist Julia Marcus,
“shaming and blaming people is not the best way to get them to change
their behavior and actually can be counterproductive because it makes
people want to hide their behavior.” Along similar lines, Jan Balkus,
an infectious disease specialist at the University of Washington,
maintains that shaming can make it harder for people to “acknowledge
situations where they may have encountered risk.”

If shaming “covidiots” for their behavior doesn’t accomplish much, you
can be sure that shaming people for Wrongthink won’t change any minds.
Instead, we heretics simply stop telling the shamers what we’re
thinking. We nod and smile. We give them the match point and continue
the debate in our own heads.
Gloves Off

For two years I’ve been that person. I’ve smiled politely while
dodging insults. To put my interlocutors at ease, I’ve prefaced my
heterodox opinions with disclaimers like “I dislike Trump as much as
you do” or “For the record, I’m triple-vaxxed myself.”

Just today, I’ll allow myself to drop the pandering and call it as I see it.

To everyone who dumped on me for questioning the shutdown of
civilization and calling out the damage it inflicted on the young and
the poor: you can take your shaming, your scientific posturing, your
insufferable moralizing, and stuff it. Every day, new research knocks
more air out of your smug pronouncements.

You told me that without lockdowns, Covid would have wiped out a third
of the world, much as the Black Death decimated Europe in the 14th
century. Instead, a Johns Hopkins meta-analysis concluded that
lockdowns in Europe and the US reduced Covid-19 mortality by an
average of 0.2%.

What’s more, long before this study we had good evidence that anything
less than a China-style door-welding lockdown wouldn’t do much good.
In a 2006 paper, the WHO Writing Group affirmed that “mandatory case
reporting and isolating patients during the influenza pandemic of 1918
did not stop virus transmission and were impractical.”

You told me that social interaction is a want, not a need. Well, yes.
So is good food. In truth, social isolation kills. As reported in a
September 2020 review article published in Cell, loneliness “may be
the most potent threat to survival and longevity.” The article
explains how social isolation lowers cognitive development, weakens
the immune system, and puts people at risk of substance use disorders.
And it’s not like we didn’t know this before Covid: in 2017, research
by Brigham Young University professor Julianne Holt-Lunstad determined
that social isolation accelerates mortality as much as smoking 15
cigarettes per day. Her findings splashed the pages of news outlets
around the world.

You told me we need not worry about the effects of Covid restrictions
on children because kids are resilient—and besides, they had it much
worse in the great wars. Meanwhile, the UK saw a 77% increase in
pediatric referrals for such issues as self-harm and suicidal thoughts
during a 6-month period in 2021, in relation to a similar stretch in
2019. And if that doesn’t shake you up, a World Bank analysis
estimated that, in low-income countries, the economic contraction
ensuing from lockdown policies led 1.76 children to lose their lives
for every Covid fatality averted.

You told me that vaccinated people don’t carry the virus, taking your
cue from CDC director Rachel Walensky’s proclamation in early 2021,
and we all know how well that aged.

You told me I had no business questioning what infectious disease
experts were telling us to do. (I’m paraphrasing here. What you
actually said was: “How about staying in your lane and shutting the
eff up?”) I got my vindication from Dr. Stefanos Kales, another from
Harvard Medical School, who warned of the “dangers of turning over
public policy and public health recommendations to people who have had
their careers exclusively focused on infectious disease” in a recent
CNBC interview. “Public health is a balance,” he said. Indeed it is.
In a 2001 book called Public Health Law: Power, Duty and Restraint,
Lawrence Gostin argued for more systematic assessments of the risks
and benefits of public health interventions and more robust protection
of civil liberties.

So yeah. I’m upset and your finger-wagging posse left me alienated
enough that I had to go looking for new tribes, and in this quest I’ve
been rather successful. I have found more kindred spirits than I could
ever have imagined, in my city of Toronto and all over the world:
doctors, nurses, scientists, farmers, musicians, and homemakers who
share my distaste for your grandstanding. Epidemiologists, too. These
fine folks have kept me from losing my mind.

So thank you. And get off my lawn.