Yeah, the problem is there is a media filter between scientific papers and most people, and it's a really inaccurate lens. I watched it happen over and over, media says one thing, paper says something else. Sometimes it's a partial or cherry picked report, sometimes the claim is stronger than the paper, sometimes it's completely wrong or confused. That's why I started just reading them directly. Have the stuff you hear is just nonsense. There's also a lot of "they" lumped together into one "they". One group may have been wrong about one or more of those things, another group may have been wrong about none. There were as many lockdown solutions as countries or states, all different, all varying degrees of "work," and then a couple dozen studies of what happened. The bottom line is the reality is much more complicated than what you're showing here.
Once you start to pay attention to the research, you start to see trends of reporting. Nexuses of certain people that pop up again and again, or certain reporters, or institutions or groups. I remember seeing one author from a paper publish an op Ed on his own paper, but not mentioning that he was involved - attributed the paper to a different author. Complete conflict of interest and complete bias. Then that paper referred to another of uis papers with a different group. It was a giant circle jerk But if you didn't read the paper carefully you'd never know. That's one thing about the new anti COVID vaxxers - it's like the Kevin bacon game with old school anti vaxxers using the exact same bad science and bad talking points. One degree of separation.
Take that Florida recommendation. It is an example of a really weak study that would not have made it to any decent journal as is. Here's a good thread dealing with some of it.
And here's another
Perhaps most interestingly, bottom line is this from Meyerowitz-Katz: "if we take the results at face value, ignoring the other potential explanations, it seems important to note that vaccines were associated with fewer all-cause and non-cardiac deaths based on the data within the study. In other words, a different press release could've noted "COVID-19 VACCINES ASSOCIATED WITH REDUCED RISK OF DEATH AND NON-CARDIAC DEATH IN YOUNG PEOPLE" and been just as accurate."
In the end my studies are better than your studies is NOT a waste of time! That is 10000000% where the discussion needs to be. It's where these things happen. You get a ton of different work thrown into a big sloshing mess, people argue and fight ("professionally" and sometimes not) and over time the good is sifted from the bad. The frauds and liars and grifters get drowned out from the good studies, and over time you get meta analyses and good reviews and an "answer". Normally this happens out of the awareness of the general public because nobody cares. Here everyone is all in the business, and there's a ton more research happening than normal, and faster, and money flying everywhere so literally everyone is publishing regardless of whether they have any competence. It's been awesome, a total **** show. Now everyone sees the glorious mess happening at 100x speed. It's kinda like capitalism in that it's a chaotic mess but it works better than anything else we have.
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But none of that matters when we've created a political situation where nobody cares about what the studies show because they've been lied to over and over. You're never going to cite a study that's going to change a single mind here.
if that's true, that's damning. If college educated people can't be bothered or expected to engage their brains, then the people who advocate for a top-down approach to discussions like this are right. If people can't be involved enough to make informed decisions off of the best data available - and during COVID things that normally were NOT available were opened - then the idea that we should just listen to experts is probably true. Because what is everyone else going by? You're saying… personal arguments? Feels? That's a really bad way to do just about anything but especially medicine. I hope for better. I actually don't agree with you, I think many people can engage with the facts, and are competent enough to do so. If they won't then it's lost - not just for this but for any political, economic, or scientific topic.
