Quote (fender @ 1 Nov 2022 00:19)
that's such a moronic thing to say, lol. even if it were right, which it isn't, it's the ONE thing that matters the most on which the "hawks" were right: preserving human life.
in reality though, you predictably manage to overlook a crucial "detail" that all covid "sceptics" conveniently ignore these days, which is that the "hawks" (in many nations barely so) - and the silent majority listening to reason, science, and cautions (to which you allegedly belong iirc) - prevented a complete collapse of the healthcare system early on, which could easily have resulted in even more devastating consequences both in terms of casualties as well as economic damage as a consequence thereof. the fact that science deniers and anti-vaxxers now feel in a position to claim the economic damage, precautions, and minor inconveniences were all simply unnecessary, is based upon an incredibly flawed premise.
just to inb4 the typical dishonest retort to that: no, that does NOT mean the "hawks" were therefore right on everything, and that the pandemic couldn't have been handled any better. it does not mean that with the benefit of hindsight, economic damage, communication errors, and social division could not have been prevented to a certain degree. however, it does mean that your simplistic and biased take about covid sceptics getting "most things right, apart from the one minor thing that saved countless human lives" is peak hackery.
Nobody was really against the initial lockdown and precautions back in spring 2020. The split between covid hawks and doves only emerged afterward, when the hawks wanted to keep things locked down and pursue pipe dreams like a 'no covid strategy' while the other side argued that the social and economic cost of continuing these policies for too long would no longer be "worth it" and that living with the virus was both inevitable and feasible.
The doves were absolutely correct that lockdowns and school closures were no longer necessary or justifiable during the winter 2020/21, just as they were right that stuff like tying access to transport and venues to vaccine passports and mandates was never justified. And since the first Omicon wave in Q1/2022, covid is effectively nothing more than a regular respiratory virus and doesn't justify any special treatment or precautions (e.g. mandatory isolation for asymptomatic patients, mask mandates, etc.) anymore - yet the covid hawks still can't let it go and still fight kicking and screaming against a full return to normalcy.
In hindsight, the predictions of the covid sceptics proved correct far more often than the predictions of the covid hardliners. Similarly, it's clear in hindsight that our handling of covid represented an unnecessarily large transfer of life time and life opportunities from young to old. And, most importantly: the big issue on which the covid sceptics were wrong - the efficacy of the vaccines in preventing death - mostly affected their own well-being while the errors and misjudgements of the covid hardliners inflicted huge amounts of avoidable damage on others. I couldn't give less of a fuck if some fat, uneducated hillbilly dies from covid because he considered the vaccine a "snake oil", but it does bother me when children lose one precious year of their education and youth, or when small businesses were driven into bankruptcy.
This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Nov 1 2022 04:27am