Where did you stand on the lockdowns?

[Zinneke]

Circumstances have pushed my views on this to an extreme. I was strongly against lockdown-style measures by the end of April 2020 and will oppose them categorically when the next pandemic occurs.

I would even support amending state and federal constitutions to bar many of the "emergency" measures that were justified in terms of weeks before dragging on for months. We have seen so many abuses over the past year that I have come to believe that government simply should not have that level of discretion.

Many have said that lockdowns need to be harsh and thorough to be effective. I never want to live under the rule of a government that has the state capacity to enforce lockdowns that are strong enough to work.

You say that yet in a natural disaster you'd probably be the first one begging for a government to save your ass.

[Zinneke]

You say that yet in a natural disaster you'd probably be the first one begging for a government to save your ass.

I have lived through natural disasters. There are a few relevant differences. Most importantly, natural disasters end. States of emergency extended indefinitely are another matter entirely.

I don't see how it differs when it comes to what we are actually debating about : the ability of government to regulate the levels of freedom of its citizens within a strict legal situation whereby their freedoms can restrict other peoples' freedoms.

If your libertarian pipe dream were to realise itself, whether its a hurricane or a pandemic, what exactly is stopping looters in the first case or, in the second case, people infected from not giving a sh**t about infecting you? Ah yes, that evil thing called government. Government is there to regulate freedoms and ensure they come with obligations, like not holding superspreader events during a pandemic.

The way to ensure you don't slip into dictatorship is by having powerful checks and balances, maintaining the democratic exercise throughout and not succumbing to sophistic bollox touted by lockdown sceptics, whether left or right. Nobody in the West had their door welded in.

[deleted by moderator]

[Zinneke]

And for the record I do think the modern western government model overregulates and overcomplicates on a vast array of subjects (partly to make sure their lawyer friends stay in jobs). That data mining and mass surveillance with new technologies is concerning. But when it comes to a worldwide pandemic, people need to be protected by dumber people.

[Zinneke]

I was supportive in March, reluctantly supportive in December. Unconstrained spread of a virus with the severity of Covid in a virgin population would have been, and in the places where it occurred would was, a catastrophe, and sacrificing a month or two of the entire populations lives (and it is important to be clear that is what lockdown means, life without interaction is a form of low level torture) to dampen and ameliorate that spread was the least bad option.

But now we're in August, in almost every western country any adult who wishes to can and mostly have availed themselves of vaccines that are more than 95% effective for a virus with a death rate of about 1% and I wonder if I was too naive. We have open talk of doing this all again in the winter to alleviate seasonal strain on the health service, we have politicians mandating that pupils, who are at almost no risk of complications themselves, wear a mask all day in school at untold cost to their education, we have a life that is far less accountable (it is almost impossible now, for instance, to book a GP appointment) as each professions seize on this chance to make their own jobs easier. I worry that a turbo charging of what happened after 9/11 is under way, where public health bureaucrats take advantage of the populations statistical innumeracy to win the peace, in spite of their demonstrable failure in the heat of crisis, and are empowered to inflict immense pain on the public, most of all those on the margins, the lonely and the young.

I have never understood the people who think there is a major, organized conspiracy from the public health bureaucrats to continue lockdown as long as possible. Are they on the extreme of the lockdown debate due to their overcautious nature? Yeah. Is there an active, provable conspiracy on the same scale as the military-industrial complex? Show. It. To. Me. Bush Jr, Haliburton, and the oil companies all did it in broad daylight. Meanwhile you guys are saying there is a big conspiracy amongst the public health bureaucrats because they somehow profit from this situation. Apart from public visibility they don't, and that public visibility makes them potentially hated by a majority of the population watching!

Show me the bread trail and I'll take the conspiracy seriously.

[Zinneke]

I was supportive in March, reluctantly supportive in December. Unconstrained spread of a virus with the severity of Covid in a virgin population would have been, and in the places where it occurred would was, a catastrophe, and sacrificing a month or two of the entire populations lives (and it is important to be clear that is what lockdown means, life without interaction is a form of low level torture) to dampen and ameliorate that spread was the least bad option.

But now we're in August, in almost every western country any adult who wishes to can and mostly have availed themselves of vaccines that are more than 95% effective for a virus with a death rate of about 1% and I wonder if I was too naive. We have open talk of doing this all again in the winter to alleviate seasonal strain on the health service, we have politicians mandating that pupils, who are at almost no risk of complications themselves, wear a mask all day in school at untold cost to their education, we have a life that is far less accountable (it is almost impossible now, for instance, to book a GP appointment) as each professions seize on this chance to make their own jobs easier. I worry that a turbo charging of what happened after 9/11 is under way, where public health bureaucrats take advantage of the populations statistical innumeracy to win the peace, in spite of their demonstrable failure in the heat of crisis, and are empowered to inflict immense pain on the public, most of all those on the margins, the lonely and the young.

I have never understood the people who think there is a major, organized conspiracy from the public health bureaucrats to continue lockdown as long as possible. Are they on the extreme of the lockdown debate due to their overcautious nature? Yeah. Is there an active, provable conspiracy on the same scale as the military-industrial complex? Show. It. To. Me. Bush Jr, Haliburton, and the oil companies all did it in broad daylight. Meanwhile you guys are saying there is a big conspiracy amongst the public health bureaucrats because they somehow profit from this situation. Apart from public visibility they don't, and that public visibility makes them potentially hated by a majority of the population watching!

Show me the bread trail and I'll take the conspiracy seriously.

....OK?

I did not say and do not think that the public health people operate some shadowy cabal where they try to manipulate the public into doing their bidding, they are merely responding to the same incentives in the same way.  But it is naive to think that they don't profit from this situation because their profit is obvious. Over the course of the pandemic they were suddenly given unprecedented prominence, respect a platform and to some extent power- its difficult to walk away from that and a lot of people can't, you only have to look at  the actions of politicians or celebrities whose careers are on a downward trajectory to see that.

And that was hardly election-winning or celeb popularity was it? In Belgium a Public Health "dictator" was forced to go into hiding with his family as he was hunted down by a fascist maniac, armed to the teeth. But yeah he is accused of wanting to hug the limelight because he has a twitter account and loves to troll his detractors. In other countries like the UK you've seen public officials have their private lives exposed or step down due to burnout.

The idea that they are obsessed with the limelight and lick their lips at a new lockdown so that they can re-occupy your TV screen is actually an insult and it just drives the rhetoric up that puts their lives quite literally in danger. But it became a PIPING HOT TAKE as people tried to realise there was NO SIMPLE SOLUTION to a wicked problem and looked for someone to blame.

[Zinneke]

I was supportive in March, reluctantly supportive in December. Unconstrained spread of a virus with the severity of Covid in a virgin population would have been, and in the places where it occurred would was, a catastrophe, and sacrificing a month or two of the entire populations lives (and it is important to be clear that is what lockdown means, life without interaction is a form of low level torture) to dampen and ameliorate that spread was the least bad option.

But now we're in August, in almost every western country any adult who wishes to can and mostly have availed themselves of vaccines that are more than 95% effective for a virus with a death rate of about 1% and I wonder if I was too naive. We have open talk of doing this all again in the winter to alleviate seasonal strain on the health service, we have politicians mandating that pupils, who are at almost no risk of complications themselves, wear a mask all day in school at untold cost to their education, we have a life that is far less accountable (it is almost impossible now, for instance, to book a GP appointment) as each professions seize on this chance to make their own jobs easier. I worry that a turbo charging of what happened after 9/11 is under way, where public health bureaucrats take advantage of the populations statistical innumeracy to win the peace, in spite of their demonstrable failure in the heat of crisis, and are empowered to inflict immense pain on the public, most of all those on the margins, the lonely and the young.

I have never understood the people who think there is a major, organized conspiracy from the public health bureaucrats to continue lockdown as long as possible. Are they on the extreme of the lockdown debate due to their overcautious nature? Yeah. Is there an active, provable conspiracy on the same scale as the military-industrial complex? Show. It. To. Me. Bush Jr, Haliburton, and the oil companies all did it in broad daylight. Meanwhile you guys are saying there is a big conspiracy amongst the public health bureaucrats because they somehow profit from this situation. Apart from public visibility they don't, and that public visibility makes them potentially hated by a majority of the population watching!

Show me the bread trail and I'll take the conspiracy seriously.

....OK?

I did not say and do not think that the public health people operate some shadowy cabal where they try to manipulate the public into doing their bidding, they are merely responding to the same incentives in the same way.  But it is naive to think that they don't profit from this situation because their profit is obvious. Over the course of the pandemic they were suddenly given unprecedented prominence, respect a platform and to some extent power- its difficult to walk away from that and a lot of people can't, you only have to look at  the actions of politicians or celebrities whose careers are on a downward trajectory to see that.

And that was hardly election-winning or celeb popularity was it? In Belgium a Public Health "dictator" was forced to go into hiding with his family as he was hunted down by a fascist maniac, armed to the teeth. But yeah he is accused of wanting to hug the limelight because he has a twitter account and loves to troll his detractors. In other countries like the UK you've seen public officials have their private lives exposed or step down due to burnout.

The idea that they are obsessed with the limelight and lick their lips at a new lockdown so that they can re-occupy your TV screen is actually an insult and it just drives the rhetoric up that puts their lives quite literally in danger. But it became a PIPING HOT TAKE as people tried to realise there was NO SIMPLE SOLUTION to a wicked problem and looked for someone to blame.

If you think that I'm inciting violence then there's not really much point in continuing this conversation because you're not operating in good faith. You may wish to reflect on the fact that this
embarrassing screed would apply equally to any of the dozens of posts a day on this site criticising politicians.

Not directly, but this whole #discourse on Public Health Bureaucrats installing, either willingly or by accident, a "Sanitary Dictatorship" definitely opens the door to acts of violence, just like the tone Farage and the Brexiteers used with "breaking point" can be linked to Jo Cox (without directly engaging in incitement to violence).  

To be crystal clear though, by new found respect I doesn't just mean access to the media, though that is certainly a motivator for some of them. I mean the way their bosses, their friends and family and colleagues treat them. Its not a unique slander on public health bureaucrats. Professionals, almost irrespective of which field they are in, love to tell outsiders how hard their job is, how necessary their expertise is. Hell, I have done this in my own work. A lot of time we're right. But hell, a lot of time our 'its more complicated than that' is just self aggrandizement.

Well, is that really such a big problem in the grand scheme of things, during a world wide pandemic? They now get to toot their horn that their work over years has allowed them to react to a pandemic, and make precise policy recommendations (emphasis on the last word because the politician ultimately decides these measures).

There are honestly a whole swathes of civil servants and politicians who hug the limelight much more and whose work is far less valuable that Public Health experts.

There's also the "policy window" phenomenon. Sure they want to push through things like healthy living and whatnot during the pandemic, making for example the case that obesity was a genuine issue in tackling this pandemic. That isn't as nakedly cynical as say, the policy window opening after a terrorist attack and immediately the intelligence services trying to get their snouts in the trough.

Overall, the abuse these people are getting for trying to control a wicked problem is just trying to find some human scapegoat. Its an incredibly difficult virus (due to a combination of it being extremely contagious, but not deadly enough scare some, yet still deadly enough to cripple a Western country's medical infrastructure). The way it could have been limited from a human perspective lies solely in the initial phases when the local Chinese bureaucrats lied and the WHO failed to maintain objectivity. The subsequent national policy responses have saved lives.

[Zinneke]

Not directly, but this whole #discourse on Public Health Bureaucrats installing, either willingly or by accident, a "Sanitary Dictatorship" definitely opens the door to acts of violence, just like the tone Farage and the Brexiteers used with "breaking point" can be linked to Jo Cox (without directly engaging in incitement to violence). 

This is absolutely vile stuff. You should be ashamed of yourself.

Well, is that really such a big problem in the grand scheme of things, during a world wide pandemic? They now get to toot their horn that their work over years has allowed them to react to a pandemic, and make precise policy recommendations (emphasis on the last word because the politician ultimately decides these measures).

There are honestly a whole swathes of civil servants and politicians who hug the limelight much more and whose work is far less valuable that Public Health experts.

There's also the "policy window" phenomenon. Sure they want to push through things like healthy living and whatnot during the pandemic, making for example the case that obesity was a genuine issue in tackling this pandemic. That isn't as nakedly cynical as say, the policy window opening after a terrorist attack and immediately the intelligence services trying to get their snouts in the trough.

Overall, the abuse these people are getting for trying to control a wicked problem is just trying to find some human scapegoat. Its an incredibly difficult virus (due to a combination of it being extremely contagious, but not deadly enough scare some, yet still deadly enough to cripple a Western country's medical infrastructure). The way it could have been limited from a human perspective lies solely in the initial phases when the local Chinese bureaucrats lied and the WHO failed to maintain objectivity. The subsequent national policy responses have saved lives.

It's odd to be so patronised by someone who hasn't actually read what I've written. I'm not litigating, and have not really criticised the public health response from March 2020 to March 2021. I in fact explicitly have said that I acceded to the argument for lockdowns then. Your impassioned defence of their actions is completely unnecessary, because I recognise that it really was a wicked problem.

My posts in this thread have all been about the situation as it is today. And today it is no longer a wicked problem. We have an incredibly effective vaccine that is available to everyone who wants it, but a large proportion of the public health industry are trying to pretend it is, and that can not be allowed to happen.

The title of this thread is in the past tense.

what serious public health expert is advocating a 2020 style lockdown next winter in the UK or other heavily vaccinated countries?

[Zinneke]

Not directly, but this whole #discourse on Public Health Bureaucrats installing, either willingly or by accident, a "Sanitary Dictatorship" definitely opens the door to acts of violence, just like the tone Farage and the Brexiteers used with "breaking point" can be linked to Jo Cox (without directly engaging in incitement to violence).  

This is absolutely vile stuff. You should be ashamed of yourself.

You compared public health experts and their non-existant power grab to events after 9/11.

When a virologist ends up being shot dead you and the other so called progressive professional thinkers who badger the anti-expert discourse are the ones who will be ashamed.