‘We suppressed our scientific imagination’: four experts examine the big successes and failures of the COVID response so far

[Arnie Pye]

Not a brilliant article but might be of interest to some. I liked some of the comments.

Title : ‘We suppressed our scientific imagination’: four experts examine the big successes and failures of the COVID response so far

Link : https://theconversation.com/we-supp...-failures-of-the-covid-response-so-far-178705

Andrew Lee, Professor of Public Health, University of Sheffield

Most governments didn’t get their pandemic responses right. The initial response needed to be decisive, rapid, transparently communicated and delivered at scale. Often it wasn’t.

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

Twaddle from Greenhalgh as usual.
Any idiot knew it was sensible to wear a mask.

 

[Wonko]

Many did not,.....

 

[rvallee]

We initially assumed the pandemic would be solved by evidence-based medicine – a school of research dominated by the search for generalisable truths

When your paper tiger is actually a wet paper tiger. Anyone familiar with EBM should have understood that it's a useless paradigm by itself, to think that EBM would be a useful tool here shows everything wrong with EBM. The rabid insistence of people braying about not having RCTs while the worldwide crisis was happening said it all. Talk about having a plan that never deviates from contact with reality.

Reminds me of Futurama's Zapp Brannigan, whose brilliant plan was simply to throw wave after wave of soldiers to die until the killer bots reached they max kill count. If you don't mind all the deaths, it was a success. For Zapp.

Although if the worst they'd done is made an ass out of you and me, sadly that is not even close to capture the range of harmful consequences unleashed by this reckless dogmatic trust in a failed paradigm.

 

[MEMarge]

Some good comments:

"Sheena Cruickshank, Professor in Biomedical Sciences, University of Manchester

Immunological discoveries have been critical in the fight against COVID. By and large they wouldn’t have happened without the cooperation of scientists across disciplines and nations – nor without help from the public worldwide. Scientific collaboration has been one of the major successes of the pandemic.

Early access to the coronavirus’s genetic code, coupled with our knowledge of other members of the virus’s family (such as Mers and Sars), enabled work on vaccines to start quickly. Knowledge that the virus used its spike protein to enter our cells then gave us an initial target for vaccines.

Decades of experience in vaccine development, together with investment from governments and the pharmaceutical industry, as well as the participation of hundreds of thousands of volunteers in clinical trials, then enabled vaccine development to be fast-tracked to an astonishing degree. On vaccine development, the world got it right.

Understanding the immune response to COVID has helped us work out why some groups (such as the elderly) are much more vulnerable to severe infection. National studies have used their size and breadth to identify biomarkers that correlate with protection or severe disease in COVID, which can improve patient outcomes and inform new treatments."

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

Some good comments:

All fair enough but I don't suppose anyone mentioned the likelihood that the pandemic itself was the results of such collaboration.

Even if it wasn't, we know that practices were sufficiently lax for it to have been a real possibility. The negligence of the scientific community is unarguable here - whether or not the virus did actually get out of the lab.

 

[Sean]

The failure on basic mask recommendations from day one still stuns me.

It is one thing to say at the start that aerosol transmission has not yet been established. Quite another to say therefore we should take no precautions against it until proven otherwise.

It is an airborne and highly infectious agent, FFS. Of course aerosol transmission is a serious a priori possibility.