remember covid?

"Remember the rule that we should all stay at least six feet apart? “It sort of just appeared,” Fauci said during a preliminary interview for the subcommittee hearing, adding that he “was not aware of any studies” that supported it."

Was anyone really walking around thinking "Well, thank God someone did the research the last time we had a global pandemic to find the optimal distance was 6 feet and not 7.8"?

Is this in today's Sunday NYT?

Nah, the article is from a year ago.

Mistakes were made during the first Trump administration's handling of the pandemic; the lies told weren't big enough and internal NIH records indicated a lack of transparency.

They learned things from the experience and will rectify these problems this time by only telling big lies and not keeping any records.

No. It doesn't mention "Trump" so wouldn't be allowed.

Good point, but the dateline is "March 16, 2025, 6:00 a.m. ET", and yet no Donald. Maybe that's the solution - do not speak the name, for it might summon him.

This is well after the deadline for the Sunday paper. Maybe it'll be in the Monday NYT.

Joe

The first page contains "March 16, 2025, 6:00 a.m. ET" and a Google search on the title "We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives" results in

Opinion | We Were Badly Misled About Covid The New York Times

Ed

Oops, got my date from this related one by her on the same topic:

Ahh. I'll look that one up, for the comparison.

Joe

It's a click-bait title, she mostly just talks about what she wants to talk about (seems to be catching the "I am being silenced"-bug as many people with an audience of millions tend to) and uses weasel words like "Some public health officials..." without actually naming names or calling anyone specific out.

Likely because the evidence "we were badly misled" doesn't amount to much and so if she puts what she wants to say too late in the op ed nobody's going to read that far.

Soooo she's still an Ivy League academic. NYT is still the NYT

My bad actually there's a text message from Kristian Andersen and Dr. Morens. So old news about two people

My bad actually there's a text message from Kristian Andersen and Dr. Morens. So old news about two people

"Trust the science" actually means "Trust the scientists" which is not at all the same thing.

Kristian G. Andersen probably regrets that one text he sent where he vaguely supported the lab leak hypothesis, I guess it doesn't matter how many thousands of times he later says variants of "I thought that for a bit but realized I was being stupid" after that, conspiracy theorists will treat that one time he said something that they like as God's truth and evidence of a cover-up, not evidence of an academic being stupid which does happen sometimes but isn't nearly as interesting.

Thinking multiple things at the same time or changing one's mind does happen but "experts" seem to almost always be punished for that kind of flip-flopping, unlike being a politician where saying things like "I was a Communist, that is until I realized I hated Communism" or "I was for the war, before I was against it" seems to be some kind of rite of passage to the big time.

Perhaps it's just the optics of it looking like the flip was done covertly rather than the kind of clearly self-serving flip-flopping politicians tend to do out in the open, the latter's a more honest kind of lying I guess.

In electronic design, it's useful to stay confused and change your mind a lot, in the early design stages. Stagger around the infinite solution space. But then you have to switch to the brutally disciplined, make no mistakes implementation mode. Not many people are comfortable doing both.

In electronic design, as in hard sciences like math and physics, you eventually find out if you were right. In the soft and fuzzy studies, you may never know.

In the case of covid, it was politically forbidden to insult the Chinese by suggesting the lab leak idea, even though it was about

The bulk of the evidence seems to be from early 2020, it must have been a suck to be one of the like, five people working in a capacity for the first Trump administration who felt "politically forbidden" to say pretty much any nonsense that came to mind.

The rewards surely would have been lavish for speaking out then but I guess the threat of the Woke Mob Assassins was too much to reckon with for the academics in question.

It doesn't. Scientists disagree quite a lot, and people trained in science are trained to read the literature and make up their own minds about the relative merits of what has been published.

John Larkin is notorious for trusting what the climate change denial propaganda machine has to say about the science involved.

The "scientists" who can be bribed to say what suits the climate change denial propaganda machine, aren't even vaguely trustworthy, and Anthony Watts - who John Larkin quotes a lot - hasn't even had any kind of scientific training.

The people who like to push that lab leakage theory about the origin of Covid-19 don't know much about science, but do have a political agenda.

The bulk of the evidence has been concealed or destroyed by the guilty parties.

Do you believe Kristian G. Andersen, David Morens, Fauci et al had some evidence highly supportive of the Chinese lab-leak hypothesis, evidence which no one else was or is capable of discerning independently?

There's a train of thought among some academics like the author of the article that if virologists just let well enough alone and didn't bring strange bat viruses back to the lab to study, they would never pose any risk to humans.

Of course, to believe the idea that they don't pose any risk in the wild you kind of have to be a lab-leak conspiracy theorist to begin with.