Believing in experts

[GMDino]

(07-01-2023, 09:31 PM)michaelsean Wrote: My problem is “best science at the time.”  That doesn’t make it good science. It doesn’t mean it went through any of the rigors. It sounds more like a hypothesis. Best science should have already been proven. Honey has been used to treat wounds for a long time. 1000 years ago it was used. That was the best science at the time because it had been repeated over and over and found to be useful. It was actual science albeit not in the way we think of it today. Bleeding someone did not work, but in today’s age someone would call it the best science of the day because the current experts thought it worked.

A lot of things we did during Covid seemed like guesswork. Perhaps surprisingly I found the vaccines to be the least problematic, and got them. I got them mainly because I wanted us to get back to normal, but I wasn’t at all concerned about getting them.

Agreed.  that's why I had added the caveats about what they went through with reviews and testing.  Covid is unique in that we truncated all of that.  And that's why I added that we might be wrong and it might take 20 years to find that out.

Some of the things we did/suggested during covid were similar to what we did during the Spanish Flu 100+ years ago.  People resisted them then too but over a century we found that they were good suggestions to help slow the rate of infection.

Mask are another example.  How much did they help?  In other countries it is normal to wear masks during flu season or if you yourself are sick and in public.  In America it became a political football about "Freedom".  As Millhouse said above we did some things differently and had different results mostly based on cultural difference from country to country.