Having spent a good chunk of my life in Canada and the US, a list that has Canada as more democratic doesn’t make any sense to me. In the end, it’s just a random mix of different measurements, weighted to tell whatever story you want to tell.

You don’t know this a priori, and it turned out that there was significant transmission even when people were asymptomatic. The bad science here was jumping past the evidence and claiming that the vaccines stopped transmission, when there was no data to support that. (It would be fine to say that they “probably reduce transmission” but this does not justify mandates, which is presumably why this well-intentioned-but-not-data-supported jump happened.)

> It absolutely was the case for Covid, as it is for pretty much every respiratory disease on Earth. In the middle of a pandemic, you don't have time to run a months-long study with thousands of children to determine if schools are centers of transmission. The virus spreads by people breathing near one another. A room full of children running around slobbering on each other is obviously going to be a perfect environment for the virus to spread. One parent gets sick. Their child gets sick. Then all the children get sick. Then all the parents get sick. It's like clockwork, as anyone who has children knows. Waiting for all the studies to come in to confirm the obvious in the middle of a pandemic would be completely irresponsible.

Strong disagree! Waiting until there’s evidence is a basic tenant of medical ethics, and has been for centuries. “Do no harm” means that we err on the side of natural outcomes when uncertainty is high, which it certainly was for children. You could argue that the risk profile was high enough for older or less healthy adults to justify the vaccine risk and release strong guidelines (and I would agree with this), but we had a much more limited risk profile for children, who were far less susceptible. We also had no data on how much the vaccine reduced spread, so everything you’re arguing would have been purely assumptions (which is bad science!).

And re: months, the vaccine mandate for children was for schools starting in fall 2021, over a year after the start of the pandemic and 9 months since the vaccine was deployed. There was plenty of time and data already, and I don’t think the evidence justified the mandates for children. I believe that such mandates were actually very unusual globally (so the science was certainly not clear-cut enough to have most of Europe do the same thing).

> As opposed to what? Telling people not to vaccinate and not to mask? The issue of masks and vaccines were incredibly politicized in the US, and there were all sorts of people cynically using these issues to appear anti-establishment. The US has a long history of paranoid-style politics, and in a pandemic, that's basically poison.

I’m not sure why you are disagreeing here, I agree with your general strategy that you laid out above. Tell people how to wear masks, what’s proven to be effective and what isn’t, what we know and don’t know about the vaccines, and appeal to their personal and civic responsibility (take the vaccine to protect yourself and others).

When you lie and manipulate (or base recommendations and policy on assumptions that later turn out to be false), you create more anti-establishmentism and paranoid-politics (which is pretty rational, given the manipulation).

I’m not sure what you’re arguing here. The problem wasn’t the masks. It was scientific institutions flip- flopping instead of saying “we don’t know”.

- The CDC first said masks were unnecessary unless you were sick. - The CDC then said masks were strongly recommended, specifically cloth masks. These recommendations led directly to mandates. - The CDC then said cloth masks were mostly ineffective compared to N95.

Masks are common sense, and I think relatively few people were opposed to wearing them. The problem that I have is the translation of low-evidence science directly into policy. This is what I’m calling bad science.

> The vaccines were initially highly effective against infection and transmission. That was a correct result of the initial studies. What the initial studies could not possibly capture was that the vaccine would become less effective over time at completely stopping infection (because of viral mutation and because antibody titers decrease over time), though they maintained their very high effectiveness at stopping people from getting seriously ill and dying.

Initial studies did not test for transmission. People felt like they had been lied to regarding this aspect of the vaccines, as it was cited as the reason for many of the mandates related to vaccines. (After all, if they only affected the individual, what would be the purpose of the mandate?) I think this was more bad communication and bad politics, but it is hard to separate these things.

> It's not insane at all. Schools are some of the most intense centers of viral spread in just about any community. It has long been known that reducing spread at schools is one of the most important measures in controlling a pandemic.

You are over-generalizing and washing away details to argue something you feel should be correct. Yes, schools are often centers of viral spread — but this was never the case for Covid. Good science requires evidence before jumping to conclusions, not merely relying on what has “long been known”. If the vaccine was actually useful and important, they wouldn’t have quietly rolled back mandates a year later: it was quietly rolled back because it was a mistake. I think you are wrong regarding the risk profile, the largest study I’ve seen for children is still unclear: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-47745-z#Sec2 (I do think it’s likely safe, but we never had the science to justify a mandate for school children)

You can argue that the mandate was politics — that’s fine, but in that case they are inextricable. I would agree that a lot of what I’m calling bad science is actually scientific institutions taking positions under enormous political pressures. I still think that science was wielded as the weapon during this time. Which saddens me deeply, as I strongly agree that the vaccines themselves were incredible examples of the miracle of modern science.

I think you’re blaming the wrong people when you say the population is scientifically illiterate. While that’s true, I think that Americans just hate being told what to do, and when there isn’t really justification for it (I.e. the bad science), they’re gonna do the opposite. The lesson shouldn’t be that people are dumb, it should be that trying to force half-baked policies down everyone’s throats will backfire.

You seem to be saying that people are indeed malicious and just lying about believing vaccines cause harm (for what purpose?), but I do believe they are just misinformed and have strongly-held-but-incorrect beliefs.

Bad science is pretending or thinking that we know more than we do, just as much as thinking the wrong thing is true. For example, claims about the under or over-effectiveness of masks (and subsequently vaccines) is definitely bad science that erodes public confidence in scientific leaders and organizations.

And the insane vaccine mandate for *children* (not federal, but some states in order to attend school) was absolutely bad science. I'm not opposed to the vacinne, but there was most definitely no evidence to support this requirement. At best, the current science suggests an unclear risk-benefit profile, and the information at the time in no way suggested a profile that justified a full-on mandate. This violated basic medical and ethical principles.

It seems identical to me: soft corruption and bad science shaping government policy. Annoying and bad, but also hopefully temporary (but may do damage in the meantime). I agree that it happens with all governments. Has everyone forgotten the sea of bad science that was COVID policy? Thank god they arrested that paddle-boarder!

Just to use your example: YouTube is filled with talented writers and storytellers, who would have never been able to share their content in the past. *And* the traditional media complex is richer than ever.

I don’t think average quality matters. Just what you want to consume.

If anything, I’d be more open to the opposite argument. Media is so much richer and more engaging that it actually makes our lives worse. The quality of the drugs is too high!

I would love to be "well-informed", but how can I get there with hearsay?

> Neither is “wouldn’t the GMH cite higher numbers?” - how would you confirm that 1/3 of people in your city are still alive if people are scattered, communication is down, and an unknown number of people have fled?

Once again, the 68k figure is not confirmed! This is already an estimate. The figure for confirmed identifies is much lower, around ~35k. So this is a totally false argument. I'm not saying the estimate is wrong, I'm just saying that if there was a reason for the estimate to be 1/3 of people in Gaza, that's what they would say.

More explicitly: 64,718 killed + 163,859 injured =~ "more than 200,000 people"

I don't understand what basis you (and other commenters) have to suggest that these estimates are all wrong, you merely say "we have good reason". What reason?

> The current official toll is 64,718 Palestinians killed in Gaza and 163,859 injured, since the start of the war on 7 October 2023

You may have been misled by the headline “X killed or injured”.. those are two different things, and we’re talking about the number killed.

I don’t know if those numbers are accurate (the article about the IDF solider claims it is), but I’m not even questioning that. The GP is claiming that an order of magnitude more people have been killed than even GMH claims.

Only 34,344 of the GHM estimate are confirmed identities. The rest of either missing but presumed dead or gross adjustments. They are open about using "media reports to assess deaths in the north of Gaza".

The Lancet study published in January 2025 estimated 70,000 as of October, 2024. This is higher than the GHM estimate, but I can't find anything close to your 200k estimate.

So you may believe in your estimates, but they are many multiples larger than any other credible source that I can find... so it's odd to wave these figures around without any sources, links, etc.

So it’s not a hold-up, but definitely a form of robbery.