On my second post on this blog dated May 21, 2020 I presented my first impressions about the unprecendent reaction against a medical threat that had been affecting the world for about two months. A year and a half later, it is time to revisit that post to see how well has the test of time treated my views.
What I think I got right
In general terms, I maintain the main theses of the post. The treatment of the Covid crisis has been abysmal at all times from the very beginning and has only resulted in a substantial increase of the number of deaths directly attibutable to the virus. Furthermore, by transforming what should have been a minor to medium health crisis into a huge economical and political global crisis, has caused more indirect deaths that dwarf what the virus would have caused if left alone.
In particular, I completely subscribe what I wrote then:
[Measures to slow the spread of the disease] obscure the real focus of the mitigation measures that have to be adopted, confusing people (and authorities).
A year and a half after writing these words, the public is still confused, and the ahuthorities have gone crazy. So, yes, I'd say that it was spot on. This is still the real issue. Focusing on a quixotic goal such preventing the spread of the disease or prevent infection at all costs are still as stupid as they were then.
- In the first place, because it is not possible
- Even if it were, most probably it is not even desirable
- And in any case, the final decision is fundamentally personal not collective
The same three considerations apply exactly the same now that we have vaccines that are neither capable of preventing the spread nor to protect the vaccinated. Exactly for the same reasons: that neither lockdonws nor vaccines provide a real cure and both have negative side effects. These three points are very important but this post is already too long, so I will relegate them to a future post.
And what I got wrong (or didn't know)
At that time I was mostly concerned with the protection of the vulnerable population, preventing nosocomial infections (infection in hospitals) and shielding care homes.
These were important problems then. I believe that they account for the vast majority of the initial direct deaths caused by Covid, at least during 2020.
As things have turned out, these initial direct deaths have been completely obliterated by indirect deaths and other harms caused by the interventions (and not by the disease), so these issues while still important have been relegated by more pressing issues.
At the time I could not see governments able to maintain the situation for a long time based on the famous phrase which may or may not have been used by Lincoln:
You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time
It looks like the old adage still holds, although not in the way I was hoping for: You can indeed fool some people all the time.
I was convinced that governments would take advantage of the end of the first seasonal wave of the pandemic during the summer (in the Northern hemisphere). They would claim a false victory, attribute it to their leadership and be kept busy hiding the harms caused by their insane intervention, or better yet, blame the public for their lack of compliance with their insane diktats.
So my primary objective was to document the error of these initial measures exclusively from the public health perspective.
I didn't know at that time, although it was already happening, that:
- Influential advisers to governments that have steered the crisis response globally had already decided that massive vaccination would be the only exit route considered for the pandemic
- In consequence, other medical and pharmaceutical interventions (including preventive measures or medication) would be discouraged or actively prohibited
- Social distancing was already proving to be ineffective to even slow the spread of the disease
With respect to the first one, the information was available, but I was not aware of it.
With respect to the second, I suspected that medical procedures being used to treat patients were not adequate, but only because a side effect of any political and bureocratic involvement is the adoption of inadequate and ineffective procedures. That is why my main concern at the time was that governments called-out the crisis as soon as possible, enabling doctors to treat their patients calmly and devise the best treatments, without pernicious external inferences.
I didn't realize that the problem was not the usual polititians and bureocrats doing no good, but rather that they were consciously doing harm.
With respect to the third, it came as a surprise to me that the immense sacrifice imposed to the population in almost all Western countries was completely futile. When I wrote the post I argued that delaying the inevitable was a bad idea. But as I was writing it, the public health authorities had already the data (which of course they did not disclose) that proved that lockdowns did not even delay the rate of infection.
Eventually the data has been made public by independent researchers but unfortunately it has been rather successfully hidden by mainstream media and public agencies. This is a rather surprising outcome that has not yet been explained satisfactorily to my knowledge. The established scientific literature before 2020 did not recommend social distancing measures based on their collateral damages and the difficulty to implement and enforce them, not on their lack of efficacy.
Of course, I had no way of knowing how the crisis would escalate:
- That governments would maintain the crisis after the initial wave had ended
- And the population would comply with the successfully more insane mandates, and still does
- That social distancing measures like lockdowns would be maintained or re-enacted even after they have been completely discredited
- I could never have imagined that crazy measures suchs as cloth masking would be encouraged, even less mandated and that the public would comply
- Governments would create fear-mongering and completely irrelevant test and trace campaigns without collecting the only statistic that matters: i.e. the evolution of the prevalence of the virus in the general population over time
- I did not even consider that vaccines would be developped in the short time required to affect the outcome of the crisis
- Even less, I would have never imagined that once developped, irresponsible massive vaccination campaigns would be carried out. I still have problems trying to understand it
Each of these points, and some others that I have not listed, deserve a whole post (or a series of posts). I don't want to hijack the blog again writting about Covid, but I will add links to these posts, if I decide to do so.
In summary, I think that I got mostly right the public health implications of the Covid pandemic and the initial measures put in place to "control" it, but I badly failed on the political implications. They have turned out to be much, much worse, than anything I could have ever imagined.