“It’s Time for the Scientific Community to Admit We Were Wrong About COVID and It Cost Lives”

“As a medical student and researcher, I staunchly supported the efforts of the public health authorities when it came to COVID-19. I was wrong. We in the scientific community were wrong. And it cost lives.”

It’s Time for the Scientific Community to Admit We Were Wrong About COVID and It Cost Lives

It’s Time for the Scientific Community to Admit We Were Wrong About COVID and It Cost Lives | Opinion

By: Kevin Bass, MS MD/PhD student, Medical school, Newsweek, January 30, 2022:

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As a medical student and researcher, I staunchly supported the efforts of the public health authorities when it came to COVID-19. I believed that the authorities responded to the largest public health crisis of our lives with compassion, diligence, and scientific expertise. I was with them when they called for lockdowns, vaccines, and boosters.

I was wrong. We in the scientific community were wrong. And it cost lives.

I can see now that the scientific community from the CDC to the WHO to the FDA and their representatives, repeatedly overstated the evidence and misled the public about its own views and policies, including on natural vs. artificial immunity, school closures and disease transmission, aerosol spread, mask mandates, and vaccine effectiveness and safety, especially among the young. All of these were scientific mistakes at the time, not in hindsight. Amazingly, some of these obfuscations continue to the present day.

But perhaps more important than any individual error was how inherently flawed the overall approach of the scientific community was, and continues to be. It was flawed in a way that undermined its efficacy and resulted in thousands if not millions of preventable deaths.

What we did not properly appreciate is that preferences determine how scientific expertise is used, and that our preferences might be—indeed, our preferences were—very different from many of the people that we serve. We created policy based on our preferences, then justified it using data. And then we portrayed those opposing our efforts as misguided, ignorant, selfish, and evil.

We made science a team sport, and in so doing, we made it no longer science. It became us versus them, and “they” responded the only way anyone might expect them to: by resisting.
children in masks

We excluded important parts of the population from policy development and castigated critics, which meant that we deployed a monolithic response across an exceptionally diverse nation, forged a society more fractured than ever, and exacerbated longstanding heath and economic disparities.
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Our emotional response and ingrained partisanship prevented us from seeing the full impact of our actions on the people we are supposed to serve. We systematically minimized the downsides of the interventions we imposed—imposed without the input, consent, and recognition of those forced to live with them. In so doing, we violated the autonomy of those who would be most negatively impacted by our policies: the poor, the working class, small business owners, Blacks and Latinos, and children. These populations were overlooked because they were made invisible to us by their systematic exclusion from the dominant, corporatized media machine that presumed omniscience.

Most of us did not speak up in support of alternative views, and many of us tried to suppress them. When strong scientific voices like world-renowned Stanford professors John Ioannidis, Jay Bhattacharya, and Scott Atlas, or University of California San Francisco professors Vinay Prasad and Monica Gandhi, sounded the alarm on behalf of vulnerable communities, they faced severe censure by relentless mobs of critics and detractors in the scientific community—often not on the basis of fact but solely on the basis of differences in scientific opinion.

When former President Trump pointed out the downsides of intervention, he was dismissed publicly as a buffoon. And when Dr. Antony Fauci opposed Trump and became the hero of the public health community, we gave him our support to do and say what he wanted, even when he was wrong.

Trump was not remotely perfect, nor were the academic critics of consensus policy. But the scorn that we laid on them was a disaster for public trust in the pandemic response. Our approach alienated large segments of the population from what should have been a national, collaborative project.

And we paid the price.

The rage of the those marginalized by the expert class exploded onto and dominated social media. Lacking the scientific lexicon to express their disagreement, many dissidents turned to conspiracy theories and a cottage industry of scientific contortionists to make their case against the expert class consensus that dominated the pandemic mainstream. Labeling this speech “misinformation” and blaming it on “scientific illiteracy” and “ignorance,” the government conspired with Big Tech to aggressively suppress it, erasing the valid political concerns of the government’s opponents.

And this despite the fact that pandemic policy was created by a razor-thin sliver of American society who anointed themselves to preside over the working class—members of academia, government, medicine, journalism, tech, and public health, who are highly educated and privileged. From the comfort of their privilege, this elite prizes paternalism, as opposed to average Americans who laud self-reliance and whose daily lives routinely demand that they reckon with risk. That many of our leaders neglected to consider the lived experience of those across the class divide is unconscionable.

Incomprehensible to us due to this class divide, we severely judged lockdown critics as lazy, backwards, even evil. We dismissed as “grifters” those who represented their interests. We believed “misinformation” energized the ignorant, and we refused to accept that such people simply had a different, valid point of view.

We crafted policy for the people without consulting them. If our public health officials had led with less hubris, the course of the pandemic in the United States might have had a very different outcome, with far fewer lost lives.

Instead, we have witnessed a massive and ongoing loss of life in America due to distrust of vaccines and the healthcare system; a massive concentration in wealth by already wealthy elites; a rise in suicides and gun violence especially among the poor; a near-doubling of the rate of depression and anxiety disorders especially among the young; a catastrophic loss of educational attainment among already disadvantaged children; and among those most vulnerable, a massive loss of trust in healthcare, science, scientific authorities, and political leaders more broadly.

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VMS

1 year ago

As an initial response, a short lock-down is needed until a VALID assessment is made of the real danger of the assault. This applies to planes hitting the World Trade Center and the Pentagon where no one initially knew the exact extent of the attack, and it apples to a virus, where no one knew its exact lethality and transmissibility. After a few weeks, it was apparent that the virus was only inconvenient (as is a bad cold or mild flu) for the majority of the population, and that the elderly and those with certain underlying inflammatory conditions bore the brunt of hospitalizations and deaths (which were still a relatively low percentage of those infected). At that point, it should have been this latter group of people that voluntarily isolated and had their food and medicine delivered to their homes.

Once the initial emergency is over, and the hospitals are relieved of the initial overwhelming assault, it should have been back to business as usual with hard data, correctly analyzed to back up the decision. If the overcautious wanted to continue to isolate, that is their prerogative, but those that wanted to go out, should have been able to do so without coercion from the government.

Does anyone remember the do-nothing one-way markings on the aisles of the supermarkets, and stand on the “X” at the checkout to ensure six-foot distancing because a governmental ignoramus thought that would be a good way to stop the spread of a virus? Even the Roadrunner is smart enough not to stand on the “X!”

8

JoeyJ

1 year ago

There were at least three other objectives that are not mentioned in this mea culpa:

1) Reduce the population of the world to around 500 million.
2) Demonstrate how easy it is to control the masses by claiming a pandemic.
3) Make Big Pharma rich beyond the dreams of avarice.

You guys weren’t just wrong; you were evil. And God knows how many people are walking around with damaged hearts and the “Suddenly” disease ready to pop up and start killing them tomorrow.; or next month; or a year from now; or ??

12

Staff Sgt Chaos

1 year ago

Reply to  JoeyJ

Right on Joey, right on.

8

Snowedin

1 year ago

Most people who are not indoctrinated know that they were wrong and purposely spread the virus to kill as many people as possible.

6

dabooh

1 year ago

The whole Covid Emergency was a huge fraud. It was designed to get people’s DNA onto a computer database (P.C.R. Tests scraped samples of genetic material).
This DNA is now being sold and marketed for profit by unscrupulous corporations & Big Tech.

5

idareu2

1 year ago

I want an apology from someone. I guess this will have to do. Still pureblood.

2

D

R.G.

1 year ago

“I was wrong. We in the scientific community were wrong. And it cost lives.”

Yes, Kevin Bass with all those letters after your name, you were wrong. And stupid. With all your years in school, you didn’t learn that a tiny 400 um virus can pass through an N95 / P100 as easy as a mouse can walk through the St. Louis Gateway Arch. No common sense.

3

D

R.G.

1 year ago

“We in the scientific community were wrong. And it cost lives.”

Yes, the author was wrong but he is just a hapless, unknowing follower. A simpleton. A useful idiot. Too harsh? Not nearly harsh enough, considering the cost of the “pandemic.”

But the medical communíty knew. They conspired. They created the biological warfare intentional “accidental” release.

1

Bill krumholz

1 year ago

Reply to  R.G.

Where are the Nienberg laws when you need them?

1

cowboybob

1 year ago

uhhh no….you get no do over on this one….mainly because it was the furthest thing from an honest mistake in all of human history. It was a concerted effort to shutdown the economy with the ridiculous lockdown even though it was apparent that it was clearly all contrived after little more than a week of hype. It also conveniently allowed the 2020 US election to be stolen. The injections were understood very early on to have no benefit and in fact it were causing more harm than the virus itself. People died not from “The Science being wrong”, but from a coalition of political/corporate tyranny, greedy pharma, and medical/public health organizations that all enrichened themselves on the bodies of innocent citizens. And let’s save the depopulation fans behind the curtain for another discussion (but lets just start with; they should swing too). Critical thought remains absent by anyone in the “mainstream” authority.

Nice try, but the entire medical industry along with their cohorts at the WHO,CDC, FDA and other foreign alphabet organizations has lost ALL credibility with this scam. There should be Serious consequences for all involved at all levels. All those killed (and still dying) by the “vaccine” have been murdered and all participates are accomplices. No way to sugar coat that. Chew on that for a while and let us know what if anything qualifies giving a pass on this crime against humanity. I’m thinking there isn’t one iota of evidence to support your plea for “amnesty”.

On the plus side, those that did not subject themselves to the experiment should prosper and be able to pick up the pieces once all the perps who actually took the jab (and not the saline which I expect many did in high places, or we’d have seen more of them develop “SADS” by now) expire….the world will be a better place.

1