> You don’t know this a priori, and it turned out that there was significant transmission even when people were asymptomatic.
Again, you can't transmit if you're not infected.
> 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
The "natural outcome" in this case is mass death. We know how respiratory diseases spread. You're arguing that we should have assumed Covid is a magical disease that refuses to spread in the perfect breeding ground - schools - until we did months of studies. That's an incredibly irresponsible attitude to take in the middle of a pandemic that is killing millions of people in the US alone.
> 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!).
Science also works with plausibility and theory. In the middle of a pandemic, you have to base many of your decisions on what you know about other, similar diseases, what is scientifically plausible, etc. If we followed your recommendation, we would throw our hands up, do nothing, and let millions of people die, even though we would have a very good idea of what measures would likely prevent that.
> 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).
You're letting all the people who deliberately pushed paranoia for their own political gain off the hook, and blaming the people who did the most to fight the pandemic - the scientific and medical community.
Again, you can't transmit if you're not infected.
> 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
The "natural outcome" in this case is mass death. We know how respiratory diseases spread. You're arguing that we should have assumed Covid is a magical disease that refuses to spread in the perfect breeding ground - schools - until we did months of studies. That's an incredibly irresponsible attitude to take in the middle of a pandemic that is killing millions of people in the US alone.
> 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!).
Science also works with plausibility and theory. In the middle of a pandemic, you have to base many of your decisions on what you know about other, similar diseases, what is scientifically plausible, etc. If we followed your recommendation, we would throw our hands up, do nothing, and let millions of people die, even though we would have a very good idea of what measures would likely prevent that.
> 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).
You're letting all the people who deliberately pushed paranoia for their own political gain off the hook, and blaming the people who did the most to fight the pandemic - the scientific and medical community.