So it’s been a few days since my covid and flu shots (Wednesday), and so far no adverse effects that I can tell. How protective the shots are, is a separate question, but I don’t regret getting them.
As to the “government control” etc., I don’t want to get involved in a discussion as it strikes me as political, which in my experience is rarely productive. All I’ll say on that subject is that - without specifying which side of the argument is which - certain strains of argument involve conspiratorial patterns of thinking, which I don’t happen to subscribe to in general. It is my opinion that you have to look at things from a probability point of view. How probable is it, that a conspiracy is afoot, since that would require thousands of people with ill intent - how plausible so many “evil” people all happen to work for the government? And even if they do, and it is so that these evil or misguided officials exist, fine, granted - then it would require a conspiracy of thousands, and with thousands of people, how likely is it that such a plan would not leak out - highly unlikely I’d say… people can’t keep a secret between just 2 participants, how likely is it that thousands are on code with zero leaks? Smh.
In general, there’s no reason to look for devious malice where simple incompetence is far more plausible. Health policy involves tens of thousands - yes, you will have a huge number of mistakes and incompetents. Have you ever worked for any organization larger than 100 people? Mistakes and incompetence are an inevitability. Incompetence explains missteps far more plausibly than a devious conspiracy involving tens of thousands on code evildoers.
And let’s be reasonable - a sudden massive new pandemic with people dying. It is unreasonable to expect perfect actions from ANY institution or government - you are in a land of uncertainty, so are you really going to harshly judge the response to such a highly urgent crisis that has so many unknowns. There you sit with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, and say this mistake was made and this and this and this. Golf clap. How wise of you. Of course there will be mistakes, how could there not be?
And just because someone says “gee you should have done X instead of Y” and it indeed transpires that it would’ve been better to do X - consider that you just got lucky, you had as little ground to pick X as Y. You were lucky, not good.
They did the best with the info they had. They had to make guesses, and sometimes they guessed wrong. “Shouldn’t have closed schools, kids don’t get covid” - and early in the pandemic how did we know that kids didn’t get covid? Better safe than sorry. Imagine they kept schools open and thousands of kids died - can you imagine the scandal?? The same folks who are screaming today would be screaming “MURDER!! HOW COULD YOU NOT PROTECT KIDS!!!UNO!”. It was the safe choice. It was wrong. But who knew ahead of time, and which was the safer action - which had a bigger downside in case of guessing wrong? If you guessed wrong and closed schools, you delayed education, bad but far better than guessing wrong and having thousands of kids dead. You choose the lesser of risks, and yes, you might get it wrong, but consider the downsides of being wrong in both scenarios. And you claim instead that they knew but thought “heh, let’s close the schools and have kids disadvantaged, ha, ha, ha, I’ll twist my evil mustache!”… how plausible is that? Which is more plausible - they went for “safety” and were wrong, or they intentionally wanted to harm kids’ education, small business, big business and people’s lives? Again, Occam’s razor - what is more plausible? Conspiracy theories usually die cut down by Occam’s razor. Do you really think there are thousands of officials who dream of nothing more than harming small business and kids? Do you think that politicians of either party are not highly sensitive to the outcry from closed businesses? If they do so, they feel forced by the circumstances. Often they consult specialists in the field, but what do you do when the specialists all conflict? You go with the consensus of expert advice, and yep, sometimes it transpires to be wrong - doesn’t mean they’re intentionally being evil, FFS! Lockdowns and masks, well, how could they know what course of action was right? Some states tried this, others that. Some went by historical precendence - in the huge influenza pandemic of early 1900’s, the cities which locked down and masked up, emerged economically advantaged over those that did not. This time it wasn’t so, but how could they have known ahead of time? They went with the best guess based on historical precedent. Sadly they were wrong - that doesn’t involve evil intent.
That said, were there some egregious sins? Yes. In fact masks - but not as people seem to remember them. I see folks’ historical memory of just a few years is badly flawed. Because the reality is that IN THE BEGINNING Fauci and others LIED about masks. Yes, I used the word LIED. They meant well, but they LIED, intentionally - one of the few instances of such behavior - they thought they lied for a good cause, but lying to the public by health officials is ALWAYS wrong, and that was a terrible, terrible mistake, because you undermine trust which is super hard to recover. Fauci said “don’t wear masks as they are not effective” - THAT WAS THE FIRST policy recommendation. Not “do wear masks”, but “do NOT wear masks” - people who don’t remember this, remember it WRONG. Why? Because Fauci and others were afraid that there would be a run on masks and not enough would be left for doctors and health workers. Remember, there was a mask shortage at the start, so to prevent mass demand, Fauci and others LIED about the effectiveness of masks. Only later did they change their tune - and then officials ran with it and made mandates to the effect “you MUST mask up”. Btw., masks DO work, especially N95 ones, if you look at studies that say “work” and “don’t work”, the consensus is pretty clear that masks work (not perfectly, but well enough to use in practice).
But hey, believe what you want, I know perfectly well that I’m not convincing anyone who believes whatever they believe. I don’t tell you to believe anything - I just give you a helpful tip - whenever you think about some conspiracy, always think deeply about plausibility. How plausible is this, vs that scenario. Which is more likely, from knowing how the world works. And then you’re more likely to reach the truth. YMMV.
