It is (unfortunately) time to revisit COVID
With some distance between us and the days of watching a color-coded map hoping for the day that it finally ends, many people have kind of a queasy feeling about how the years of 2020-2022 went. I coped at the time by becoming (as you’ll see) obsessed with synthesizing information. It turned out to be of very little relief and made me feel crazy.
It all feels pretty far away but the echoes of a truly insane few years have lead to sticky changes. A huge rise in alternative media, a fragmentation of how people see the world, changes like zoom and remote services enshrined, a huge rise in uber-eats and doordash, persistent inflation, and importantly, a loss of trust in public health / media / government at large. The loss of trust is important, negative, and costly for society. If you can’t trust the news, universities or trust what the government says, who can you trust?
Living in a society without trust turns into pure self-interest, no coalitions can form, and it leads families and friend groups to operate independently of the government. Coordination with a government is necessary for any social program, public works, keeping the peace. After COVID (to me), if the government is trying to do any big project it feels potentially hostile, and like the government is operating completely independently of the citizens who ostensibly make it up. The relationship has to go both ways. Prior to COVID I was a pretty standard Massachusetts NPR listening, NYT reading liberal who voted for Hillary and thought Trump was on his way to jail. After it, I read the NYT as I would a Soviet paper, wondering who benefits from them publishing this information right now? What’s the angle?
I’m not sure what accountability looks like, and whose feet need to be held to the fire. But until we get some answers from the people in charge of policy at the time, and some of them are permanently fired from government roles, the fragmentation will continue. I feel like more people just can tell the vibe is off right now, and I personally think a lot of is downstream from living through COVID. Pulled the curtain back a bit and it’s a mess back there. There are things from people on every end of the political spectrum to be outraged about.
To pre-empt my long list of grievances: I will say that often the response of policy makers to this information is to say “yeah it’s easy in hindsight but we didn’t have the information at the time”. With the exception of certain vaccine characteristics this is just not true. Mortality information which demonstrated the risk was largely only to elderly people was available immediately with the Diamond Princess COVID outbreak. The linked podcast from March 2020 with a Hopkins epidemiologist basically nailed it at that time. Information on transmissibility was available immediately as well, which meant scientists knew everyone would get COVID eventually. Information on natural immunity should have been held as something obvious, to be disproven. Other policy, like lockdowns, masks, social distancing were all directly in contradiction to pandemic guidance and studies written before COVID.
Some things that I want accountability for:
The origins of COVID
o This was a bad sign immediately into the pandemic. Scientifically it was clear from the date of the first sequence of COVID being released that it was plausible it was the result of laboratory experiments. Funding the research which could have produced it was a personal favor from Fauci to his scientist friend Peter Daszak. This kind of research has long been considered too dangerous to fund. The lab in Wuhan had previously submitted a grant application describing experiments introducing elements to bat coronaviruses to make them more infectious. A similar element is what distinguishes COVID-19. It was rejected by DARPA because it was too risky. Ostensibly, they did the project anyway as is common in academia.
o Behind the scenes, scientists consulting Fauci expressed this concern. Then there’s some missing emails, recently uncovered to be scientists deliberately avoiding FOIA scrutiny, some phone calls, and the very same scientists turn around 180 and say its baseless it came from a lab. Soon they win millions of dollars in grants awarded by the government body Fauci manages.
o Youtube accounts who bring this up are banned, tweets deleted. A huge campaign to label it a conspiracy theory was undertaken. I honestly believe that Fauci would not have been such a force in COVID if he hadn’t been trying to put a band aid on a pandemic, he believed he had a role in causing. If you forget about how the lab leak theory was treated watch this video:
The flip flop on masks, and… masks.
o Early during COVID Anthony Fauci ridiculed the idea of average people wearing medical masks. This was consistent with the CDC assessment of the literature of the utility of masks. They were not a new idea, they had been studied for use in hospitals during flu season, as had N95 masks. In studies, the masks had effects so small they were hard to measure and were recommended against. There are years of literature backing up the claim.
o Within a month or two there was a total reversal. He claims that the first statement against masks was him being deceptive so people wouldn’t buy masks so healthcare workers could get them. But he was recommending cloth masks to regular people, which wouldn’t compete with healthcare. Just really strange. I think he was honest to start, then dishonest, and again about being dishonest. What happened here?
Masks
o Related to that flip flop… Why did masks become so central to COVID policy? There was never good evidence for surgical masks, the very few randomized trials in COVID for them were not promising, and some of the rules around them were clearly deranged. Remember going into a restaurant, putting on your mask walking to the table, and taking it off when you sat down?
o 2 year olds in daycare in California had to wear masks all day, except when they lie down to nap for one hour, right next to each other. For years they had to do that. Anyone watching a 2 year old sucking on a dirty mask knew this was insane. It’s a huge indictment of the public health establishment that it was policy.
o It’s demoralizing for anyone to have to participate in a practice so obviously stupid as walking to a table in a mask, and I’m pretty confident that most people realized it and started to wonder about how they were coming up with these policies.
Long COVID
o When young people started to realize that COVID wasn’t a danger to them, long COVID appears. It comes as a nebulous blob. Sometimes people who don’t get very sick from COVID find themselves perpetually tired, dizzy, headaches. That sounds shitty. This sounded kind of plausible, but a clever study killed the idea in my mind. What they did was:
§ Ask people if they had COVID.
§ Then if they were experiencing long COVID and to quantify their symptoms.
§ Then, they tested their blood to see if they actually had gotten COVID.
§ What it found was that people who had COVID, but didn’t know it, didn’t have long COVID symptoms.
§ People who didn’t have COVID, but thought they did had long COVID symptoms. As did people who had it, and knew they had it.
o This strongly indicates that there’s a psychological origin to long COVID, a judgement which is consistent with other studies which find highest risk factors for long COVID to be anxiety and depression. Ironically, breathless reporting on Long COVID by the media likely willed it into existence. If the idea wasn’t invented and spread widely, people really wouldn’t have experienced it. Psychosomatic illnesses have a long history, and real symptoms but the origin is not biological as far as science knows.
o Now running up on 2 billion dollars have been spent by the government to research Long COVID, they haven’t turned up anything useful. It’s because they think they’re studying something they’re not. Will they ever just admit it? Will the media ever come out with a mea culpa?
Lockdowns
o This was truly an extreme measure and people often forget the extent of it. Every bar was closed. Every restaurant was closed. Mom and pop retail stores, closed. For a long time. Going somewhere meant facing scorn, like do you really need to go to the park right now? Don’t you care about grandma? California actually tried to institute a policy that you couldn’t go more than 20 miles from home. California viciously enforced fining businesses who didn’t comply.
o There was never any strong evidence that these policies would decrease COVID fatalities overall. Prior existing pandemic guidance recommended against it. Sweden was a rare country which did not close businesses in that time, and it ended up with the lowest excess mortality rate in the entire world. It’s hard to argue with that data, at least in telling you that shutting down society overall didn’t have a clear impact on saving lives.
o Isolating people in their homes for years has had huge negative impacts. Non-COVID related deaths, drug overdoses, shootings went way, way, way up in young people in that time. The increase in these deaths is much higher than COVID deaths in young people. I lost a close friend to an overdose during this time. I talk about this a bit in another essay I wrote.
The racial justice protest exception to lockdowns
o I went to the George Floyd protests in New York. If you remember this was during peak COVID hysteria. Everything was dangerous, going outside was taking a risk of your own life or others. It was immoral. But on a dime, there’s massive protests with 1000’s of people side by side, touching. Public health changes it’s mind and says that this protest is ok, but a protest against lockdown is dangerous. It made no sense and I imagine a lot of people could see it. The media coming back a year later to dump on conservative coded events was rich. Anyone who remembered the heel-turn now would never believe another word they said because it was obviously COVID was being used as a political cudgel.
The vaccine rollout timing
o People do realize that the vaccine being announced right AFTER Trump lost the election wasn’t an accident, right? Pfizer was asked to delay by public health figures, deliberately, because they didn’t want to give Trump the victory. This is all well documented. In October: Pfizer could have submitted the vaccine for approval, as they generated the data required for the clinical trial. Instead, they decided to increase the amount of data they needed, for no legitimate reason.
o It was delayed for a couple weeks at a time when ~5,000 people were dying a week. Conservatively, the vaccine reduced mortality for the most at risk (old, non-infected people) by ½. That means that thousands of lives were lost because of this little stunt, at a time where the vaccine hadn’t been escaped by new variants. They bragged about it at the time.
Natural immunity
o For a long time there was a campaign to forget that the human immune system exists. The media pretended the concept of “natural immunity” was a conspiracy theory. Of course, it was not. Natural immunity just refers to infection acquired immunity. It was obvious from the start, studies on reinfection after COVID had been circulating for months were one off cases. Mathematically there should have been hundreds to thousands of reinfections if we didn’t form immunity. Some scientists noticed this and tried to make the case that we should let people who aren’t at risk get and form immunity to COVID. They were not well received.
o Obviously we do form immunity, and would, as we have with every virus in history. How did the Spanish flu end, the 1912 flu, etc? All the same way. They got less deadly because people got immune, and now circulate as the common cold. How did COVID end? The same way.
o Eventual studies comparing the vaccine granted immunity with infection acquired immunity settled on infection acquired immunity being about 15x more potent than vaccine acquired immunity for preventing symptomatic illness. This was never broadly acknowledged, and instead a pivot to “hybrid immunity” was made. There are still no randomized studies which show a benefit to getting the vaccine after having had COVID other than a transient reduction in mild infections. People have surely looked, and there’s probably not even a benefit for the oldest people.
o There was a mask off moment with this when the vaccines had just rolled out, and were allotted with no consideration of prior COVID. That’s crazy. People who needed the vaccine and were at risk, couldn’t get it because it was scarce. A 24 year old nurse who already had COVID, could get it. I imagined that the public denials of infection acquired immunity were a political position to discourage people from getting COVID. That leaves two ugly options
§ If they knew that infection acquired immunity was potent, the prioritization scheme made a deliberate choice to let people die to keep up appearances.
§ If they didn’t know it was potent, they are completely incompetent to govern health policy decisions and the incompetence lead to avoidable deaths
The vaccine rollout prioritization:
o I got the vaccine basically as soon as it was out. It was still scarce, and I got it before old people. I was convinced by the clinical trials but honestly hadn’t looked critically enough at them. I was 25, exercise daily, but because my science was “essential work” I could get it, so I did. At the same time, a 60 year old at home couldn’t get it.
o The calculus with COVID was every 7 years in age doubles your mortality. The 60-year-old had a 32x higher risk than me. The meaning of this is hard to convey, but I‘ll try.
§ Imagine you’re driving in a car and you blow through a 4-way stop at 60 mph and go “woo, that was a thrill.” You’re fine, but don’t want to do it again.
§ Now as a 60-year old you have to do it 31 more times. Maybe one of those ends in a fiery disaster.
§ If the vaccine works as it looked at that time, the 60-year-old only has to do it 4 more times. It’s not ideal but better than the alternative.
o There were additional measures to prioritize distribution by race. These were struck down as unconstitutional pretty quickly. And thank god they were. The vaccine eventually turned out to have more side effects and less efficacy than expected, imagine the long-term trust issues of having mass rolled it out to minorities before white people. I’m reminded of this clip in Fauci in the hood. The best part about it was the regular people he talked to were more intuitively correct than Fauci:
School closures:
o US policy to keep young people out of school during COVID was completely unnecessary. After Summer 2020 the data was out that having schools open didn’t lead to more community COVID spread, and teachers were no more likely than the general population to contract COVID. In many parts of the country schools remained closed for another year. The US was unique in this regard, opening up schools far later than the rest of the world.
o It seems to me to have been a political project, as the American Teachers Association turned on a dime about re-opening schools when Trump said that after summer 2020 all schools should open. I’ll leave it to parents to describe how much of an impact this had on their kids.
The vaccine approvals and mandates for young people
o The second dose of the vaccine should not have been approved for people under 30. Much of the benefit and few of the risks are captured in the first dose. A booster should not have been approved for anyone under 40. This is no longer a controversial position as it is policy in many European countries. Denmark now doesn’t give any COVID vaccine to people under 50.
o Instead, anyone 2 or older could get basically as many shots as they could take. The FDA did this not for scientific reasons, but because they wanted a simple message. Americans would be too dumb to understand why a 3 year old doesn’t need it, but a 65 year old does, so says the FDA.
o People on the vaccine approval committee actually resigned over this issue. Paul Offit, who was very bullish on vaccines and mandates even, quit, as he believed that the booster was a net negative for young people. The FDA also proceeded to get rid of other critics who were slowing the transition from Emergency Use (EUA) to full approval to enable the mandate.
Clearly, a controversial approval wouldn’t be mandated. But…
o I had a bad reaction to the first shot. It wasn’t until years later that I found stories of people who had the same reaction. The PEG in the shot rapidly dehydrated me, as someone who drinks a ton of water I don’t retain as much. I got very dizzy, couldn’t see, and almost passed out in the CVS. I was not eager to get the second dose. I did because I would’ve been kicked out of my university, right after winning a fellowship. The cost to me was too high and I wasn’t that sure about my stance anyway.
o I did not get the booster. At that point I said “enough.” Crystal clear data was coming out that said I shouldn’t get it. My university responded by threatening to disenroll me constantly. They didn’t allow me to use facilities like the gym anymore. They removed my wifi access on campus. A person with less hostility towards being coerced, would’ve been coerced. I threatened to sue them, I researched drawing blood to get a troponin baseline to sue the school if I got myocarditis from the booster. They moved on eventually and didn’t disenroll me but to act as if there wasn’t a campaign that said you’ll lose your job unless you get this shot is revisionist history.
Myocarditis and the gaslighting around it
o We eventually realized that there’s some percentage of young men who get heart damage in response to the COVID vaccine. There seemed to be a deliberate misunderstanding campaign to frame the question as COVID is worse than the vaccine. Which, it is, for most groups.
o Not young men. Study after study compared myocarditis rates after COVID versus myocarditis rates after vaccine in the bulk population. It’s true that heart damage risk for a 55 year old woman was much worse than the vaccine, but for young men specifically the risk of heart damage from the vaccine was about 20x higher. Because the papers refused to disaggregate the age / sex groups this information would be hidden in the supplemental data of papers.
o Moreover, the studies never quantified how much of the COVID risk was decreased by the vaccine. They assumed that the myocarditis from COVID couldn’t happen if you were vaccinated. No one knows if that’s true. I don’t understand why academics would do this and why the media wouldn’t report on it honestly.
The vaccine mandates, passports, and messaging
o When the vax was approved, there was a rapid coercive movement to force everyone to get it. In LA county to get a haircut, to go to the mall, to work, to go bowling, you had to show a vaccine card. Businesses who didn’t enforce this would be punished by the state.
o The unvaccinated were blamed as spreading a disease and “killing people.” It was advocated they be locked in their home. At one point 1/3 of people thought the unvaccinated should have their child taken away. Calls to deny them medical care abounded. If this sounds unbelievable please take a look at this compilation of news coverage from the time.
o At the time I called this fascism to a friend and they thought I was crazy. They argued fascism is characterized by having a boogey man to blame. I didn’t have this response on hand but a group of people blamed for spreading a disease, excluded from getting haircuts, from working, being viewed as dumb and dirty, and made a scapegoat for government policy seems like a boogey man to me. The unvaccinated were literally described as a pandemic. People cheered on and mocked their deaths and it was described as necessary.
The online censorship campaigns to amplify COVID risk and protect the vax
o The details of this are honestly hard to sus out. There were some shady government cutout organizations, working with academic centers, which would report thousands of tweets, facebook posts, google searches. Policies were in place to suppress any information critical of the vaccine. It made it incredibly difficult to find information other than what the government who failed in all the above ^^^ was putting out. In the background the government was pushing for suppressing true information which they judged would lead people to the wrong conclusions.
o A good example of this was Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford professor who conducted a study on the mortality of COVID. After posting his study, which demonstrated the risk from COVID was about 2x the flu, on twitter he was shadowbanned. This information was true, and eventually affirmed later in other studies. He published the preprint in Nov 2020, when it would have been useful information for people to know. The Biden admin was influencing this by directly contacting twitter to deamplify the study. This was the subject of a recent supreme court case (Murthy v. Missouri), where the supreme court just punted on deciding whether the government should be able to talk to tech companies to ask if they can remove posts. A disappointing ruling for me.
o The policy that was advocated and enforced on twitter for example, lead to suppressing posts which described true information of vaccine side effects. Imagine getting myocarditis, trying to post about it on twitter and getting the posts so suppressed that no one sees them. Thats enough to make someone crazy I’m sure. The driving philosophy here is that the government knew better. Clearly, given the incompetence on display it did not.
o As a young man who had two doses of the vaccine, then got COVID, the answer to “should I get a booster now?” is unilaterally no. This is information you could not find on google at the time.
o Recently, information about a covert US government influence campaign to discredit the Chinese vaccine in the Phillipines came out, reported by Reuters. At the same time the government was pushing to censor anti-vax messaging for the US market they were running an anti-vax campaign elsewhere. They used some of the same criticisms as were used in the US, like how could you possibly develop a vaccine this fast.
The attempt to manufacture a COVID domestic extremism narrative by the FBI:
o Some people may remember that the governor of Michigan was the target of an attempted kidnapping by anti-COVID restriction extremists. The true story basically boils down to FBI agents forming a group, recruiting a few morons, then the FBI agents planning and making steps towards executing that plan, morons in tow, then arresting the morons. Then they shut up the informants they used because them detailing their involvement in the plot would mess up the FBI’s case. The case was already messed up because of the obvious entrapment and some of the defendants were acquitted for this. On retrial I’d expect all of them to be acquitted since the evidence that the FBI was suppressing relevant information just came out a few months ago. Why did the FBI do this?
IN CONCLUSION: I don’t really know what to make of all this. The mistakes and hubris all feel organic to me, just a bunch of competing interests caught in an amplifying echo chamber. Whatever guardrails we are supposed to have against this sort of systemic failure have broken down, apparently. Maybe it’s always been this bad. Maybe the response would have been totally different without Twitter / facebook. It definitely would’ve been different without Zoom which allowed the upper class to continue to get paid. Huge amounts of money were transferred to big companies, and the pharmaceutical industry. It feels like we got scammed. The people who were supposed to act as guardrails against mistakes like these, scientists, media, government officials, all just kind of blew it.