loved this episode!!! excellent discussions all around - especially the AH situation. holy shit i was shocked by the responses from the heterodox community - people I started following BECAUSE I was so sick of the #metoo-ification of our culture in recent years. but my god, the cognitive dissonance with huberman was too much - like have we all just abandoned being able to hold 2 thoughts at once - yes he's helped a ton of people get focused on living healthier lives, AND his personal behavior is appalling and concerning and maybe deserves some level of discussion? like maybe a teaching moment? anyone??
also loved the comment about AH on Lex's podcast - two uncommitted bachelors (whether voluntary or involuntary) expounding on what makes a great relationship. lol!! so many dudes who are so prominent in this sphere are NOT in committed relationships with women, but as you say, claim that all men should aspire to the trad-wife-life nonsense. rules for thee, not for me 🙃
anyway, THANK YOU ladies for such a refreshing, emotionally mature viewpoint on all of this.
Right-o! Like 'women who don't marry and have kids and play tradwife are immoral and destined for misery but when we do it it's totally cool.' Use your brains, guys.
Not to be snarky, but Is she an epidemiologist? I tend to disagree with those who were “right all along” retrospectively in disease, and I have a very simple comparison.
There’s a very old protocol for transmissible disease, something as to the effect of “isolate, identify, treat, prevent”. Certainly it’s not always followed.
I’ve been immersed in two brand new disease epidemics in my lifetime, and with both a huge number of both armchair doctors and medical groups made pronouncements which were laughably poor in retrospect.
With HIV, the AMA announced it would be over by end 1989 or so and armchair doctors said it was an overblown conspiracy. In reality, about 40 million are dead and counting from HIV, and we still can’t vaccinate for it, only suppress the virus in active infections.
The armchair doctors who decided that HIV was a conspiracy and advised literally do nothing in response are pretty much dead as well as their advisees and a number of people as collateral damage.
Amusingly about when PrEP was announced further suppressing HIV, COVID began its world tour, and sure enough we had economists and medical charlatans (I cannot state otherwise) like Jay Bhattacharya announce that it was already burned out in April of 2020 as we watched the death tallies.
He later signed later a declaration that no efforts were really necessary to prevent spread. Well, Jay was not an epidemiologist, though he and a few others were skewered by a few people who were.
Until COVID was well understood as an epidemic, I find keeping children out of schools was a prudent response to avoid spreads among children but certainly also adults, Certainly after the botched deployment of testing under the early response of the Trump administration, it certainly got very focused attention when the ill were dying in NYC and being stored in cooled semi-trailers.
I’m not an epidemiologist but I do have substantial training in biology, and molecular biology along with neurobiology and cognitive science.
Children being in schools around others is crucial to learning. We know they react to whole humans speaking in front of them far better than a screen. I could talk about the pervasive, severe damage going on by children having access to and using cellphones.
I don't think you need to be an epidemiologist to have realized that kids were not at serious risk and that shutting down schools was harmful and unnecessary... But broadly (speaking for myself, here), it is simply never ok to lockdown/take away people's rights and freedoms on account of a virus (or anything). Viruses, flus, colds happen. This is part of being alive. We have rights for a reason and we need to protect those rights.
I like your writing so I have to quell the snark, but do you have children? They are notorious for transmitting anything circulating at school directly home as fast as possible. I’m led to understood this by friends who are parents, as I am quite the non-reproductive gay.
My Niece who had the luxury of sending her children to a private school with semi-residential setting (week, not weekend) during Covid, well even with that it was in 2021 the “which student had a parent with Covid week” which sent everyone home.
Throughout history communicable diseases have inevitably resulted in those cycles - isolate-identify-treat-prevent.
My irritation with COVID was that 1) exit criteria for epidemic isolation wasn’t clearly identified - we lacked incentives and because of that 2) it dragged on beyond what I calculated was pre-March 2020 baseline transmission.
I built a curve-fitting statistical model in good old Excel based on a group of self-fitting equations, including differential equations of spread (of actually Marketing “buy-in” spreads) and by 15 April, I had calculated the “red/blue” state flip (July 5th as I recall) and became close to 95% accurate for death and infection levels 6 months out.
3) There were many stupid things done. California has phone app exposure tracking but it requires around 90%+ compliance to be useful. Waste of time.
3) "Vaccination Certificates” were also bullshit.
If you were vaccinated, in theory why should you care? And if you weren’t why would you go to high-risk public situation. That died a zombie idea of death - it inconvenienced people who protected themselves and gave no benefit to the unvaccinated.
5) The vaccine distribution was mind-numbingly bad. Having to go online and register - plus address and ethnicity? And wait poised for the scare allocation to materialize? I wrote an app to hammer all registration sites within a 25 mile radius every 5 seconds and text me when a date was found. I snagged vaccinations for friends usually within an hour, often same-day. They should have sent first-come-first-serve tickets based on birth year-month. They can send campaign announcements tailored to a demographic but they can’t assign vaccination locations based on birthdate, verified by ID?
Like Harriet the Spy I take notes on.dumb things. Absent concrete disease data, isolation was prudent and legal in a health crisis, but not without exit criteria. That was my observation; and logic, based on math and research.
I was relaying Jennifer's views, and yes, she does have children. That said, I agree with her and there is ample evidence that kids were set back quite substantially on account of the school closures. And I think parents are very accustomed to their kids bringing home germs, yes. It's part of the deal, as I understand it. The notion that any of us could have some avoided exposure to Covid was silly to begin with, but of course if you were elderly, obese, or had other comorbidities, I think it's fair to attempt to protect yourself, but you can't stop the world from going round in the process.
I understand your view but imagine that the opposite was found, that children were infected the first time without symptom, but the 2nd time it became lethal, because of antibody-dependent enhancement, (ADE) which happens with Dengue hemmorhagic fever.
It can be a problem with Zika (remember that new virus which destroys fetal brains) and with RSV (early vaccines caused a worse reaction upon natural infection). HIV may operate as a ADE virus.
There are several respiratory viruses which can have ADE - like the flu. Remember SARS? MERS? (Early 2000's) - they are related to COVID and were observed in animal models to create ADE.
I rember discussion at the beginning of COVID that nonsymptomatic infection may result in more severe COVID on reinfection by a variant via ADE. Children were thought to be mostly asymptomatic.
So you can see the fear that children which had asymptomatic infections could boomerang. We now understand that is not true for COVID and its variants.
(It also is an amusing variation on the idea that vaccinations are an unalloyed blessing. Sometimes the antibodies produced by weak vaccines allow viruses which bind to the antibody to be absorbed like a Trojan horse into immune cells and become quite virulent.)
So, I understand her view and I share then feeling that by end 2021 all major infectious paths had been traversed for COVID and children were not developing ADE. That should have been an immediate exit criteria for remote schooling but it went on too long.
Hmmm I mean none of this has much of anything to do with my view, honestly, which is that a virus is not a reason to take away people's rights and freedoms. I mean, no Covid wasn't lethal to kids. It just wasn't. It was dangerous to people who were unhealthy, old, and had compromised immune systems. Whether children are asymtomatic or not has nothing to do with my view on lockdowns, which should not have happened period, and can never happene again.
loved this episode!!! excellent discussions all around - especially the AH situation. holy shit i was shocked by the responses from the heterodox community - people I started following BECAUSE I was so sick of the #metoo-ification of our culture in recent years. but my god, the cognitive dissonance with huberman was too much - like have we all just abandoned being able to hold 2 thoughts at once - yes he's helped a ton of people get focused on living healthier lives, AND his personal behavior is appalling and concerning and maybe deserves some level of discussion? like maybe a teaching moment? anyone??
also loved the comment about AH on Lex's podcast - two uncommitted bachelors (whether voluntary or involuntary) expounding on what makes a great relationship. lol!! so many dudes who are so prominent in this sphere are NOT in committed relationships with women, but as you say, claim that all men should aspire to the trad-wife-life nonsense. rules for thee, not for me 🙃
anyway, THANK YOU ladies for such a refreshing, emotionally mature viewpoint on all of this.
Right-o! Like 'women who don't marry and have kids and play tradwife are immoral and destined for misery but when we do it it's totally cool.' Use your brains, guys.
1000000%
Not to be snarky, but Is she an epidemiologist? I tend to disagree with those who were “right all along” retrospectively in disease, and I have a very simple comparison.
There’s a very old protocol for transmissible disease, something as to the effect of “isolate, identify, treat, prevent”. Certainly it’s not always followed.
I’ve been immersed in two brand new disease epidemics in my lifetime, and with both a huge number of both armchair doctors and medical groups made pronouncements which were laughably poor in retrospect.
With HIV, the AMA announced it would be over by end 1989 or so and armchair doctors said it was an overblown conspiracy. In reality, about 40 million are dead and counting from HIV, and we still can’t vaccinate for it, only suppress the virus in active infections.
The armchair doctors who decided that HIV was a conspiracy and advised literally do nothing in response are pretty much dead as well as their advisees and a number of people as collateral damage.
Amusingly about when PrEP was announced further suppressing HIV, COVID began its world tour, and sure enough we had economists and medical charlatans (I cannot state otherwise) like Jay Bhattacharya announce that it was already burned out in April of 2020 as we watched the death tallies.
He later signed later a declaration that no efforts were really necessary to prevent spread. Well, Jay was not an epidemiologist, though he and a few others were skewered by a few people who were.
Until COVID was well understood as an epidemic, I find keeping children out of schools was a prudent response to avoid spreads among children but certainly also adults, Certainly after the botched deployment of testing under the early response of the Trump administration, it certainly got very focused attention when the ill were dying in NYC and being stored in cooled semi-trailers.
I’m not an epidemiologist but I do have substantial training in biology, and molecular biology along with neurobiology and cognitive science.
Children being in schools around others is crucial to learning. We know they react to whole humans speaking in front of them far better than a screen. I could talk about the pervasive, severe damage going on by children having access to and using cellphones.
But, as for COVID, I just disagree.
I don't think you need to be an epidemiologist to have realized that kids were not at serious risk and that shutting down schools was harmful and unnecessary... But broadly (speaking for myself, here), it is simply never ok to lockdown/take away people's rights and freedoms on account of a virus (or anything). Viruses, flus, colds happen. This is part of being alive. We have rights for a reason and we need to protect those rights.
I like your writing so I have to quell the snark, but do you have children? They are notorious for transmitting anything circulating at school directly home as fast as possible. I’m led to understood this by friends who are parents, as I am quite the non-reproductive gay.
My Niece who had the luxury of sending her children to a private school with semi-residential setting (week, not weekend) during Covid, well even with that it was in 2021 the “which student had a parent with Covid week” which sent everyone home.
Throughout history communicable diseases have inevitably resulted in those cycles - isolate-identify-treat-prevent.
My irritation with COVID was that 1) exit criteria for epidemic isolation wasn’t clearly identified - we lacked incentives and because of that 2) it dragged on beyond what I calculated was pre-March 2020 baseline transmission.
I built a curve-fitting statistical model in good old Excel based on a group of self-fitting equations, including differential equations of spread (of actually Marketing “buy-in” spreads) and by 15 April, I had calculated the “red/blue” state flip (July 5th as I recall) and became close to 95% accurate for death and infection levels 6 months out.
3) There were many stupid things done. California has phone app exposure tracking but it requires around 90%+ compliance to be useful. Waste of time.
3) "Vaccination Certificates” were also bullshit.
If you were vaccinated, in theory why should you care? And if you weren’t why would you go to high-risk public situation. That died a zombie idea of death - it inconvenienced people who protected themselves and gave no benefit to the unvaccinated.
5) The vaccine distribution was mind-numbingly bad. Having to go online and register - plus address and ethnicity? And wait poised for the scare allocation to materialize? I wrote an app to hammer all registration sites within a 25 mile radius every 5 seconds and text me when a date was found. I snagged vaccinations for friends usually within an hour, often same-day. They should have sent first-come-first-serve tickets based on birth year-month. They can send campaign announcements tailored to a demographic but they can’t assign vaccination locations based on birthdate, verified by ID?
Like Harriet the Spy I take notes on.dumb things. Absent concrete disease data, isolation was prudent and legal in a health crisis, but not without exit criteria. That was my observation; and logic, based on math and research.
I was relaying Jennifer's views, and yes, she does have children. That said, I agree with her and there is ample evidence that kids were set back quite substantially on account of the school closures. And I think parents are very accustomed to their kids bringing home germs, yes. It's part of the deal, as I understand it. The notion that any of us could have some avoided exposure to Covid was silly to begin with, but of course if you were elderly, obese, or had other comorbidities, I think it's fair to attempt to protect yourself, but you can't stop the world from going round in the process.
I understand your view but imagine that the opposite was found, that children were infected the first time without symptom, but the 2nd time it became lethal, because of antibody-dependent enhancement, (ADE) which happens with Dengue hemmorhagic fever.
It can be a problem with Zika (remember that new virus which destroys fetal brains) and with RSV (early vaccines caused a worse reaction upon natural infection). HIV may operate as a ADE virus.
There are several respiratory viruses which can have ADE - like the flu. Remember SARS? MERS? (Early 2000's) - they are related to COVID and were observed in animal models to create ADE.
I rember discussion at the beginning of COVID that nonsymptomatic infection may result in more severe COVID on reinfection by a variant via ADE. Children were thought to be mostly asymptomatic.
So you can see the fear that children which had asymptomatic infections could boomerang. We now understand that is not true for COVID and its variants.
(It also is an amusing variation on the idea that vaccinations are an unalloyed blessing. Sometimes the antibodies produced by weak vaccines allow viruses which bind to the antibody to be absorbed like a Trojan horse into immune cells and become quite virulent.)
So, I understand her view and I share then feeling that by end 2021 all major infectious paths had been traversed for COVID and children were not developing ADE. That should have been an immediate exit criteria for remote schooling but it went on too long.
Hmmm I mean none of this has much of anything to do with my view, honestly, which is that a virus is not a reason to take away people's rights and freedoms. I mean, no Covid wasn't lethal to kids. It just wasn't. It was dangerous to people who were unhealthy, old, and had compromised immune systems. Whether children are asymtomatic or not has nothing to do with my view on lockdowns, which should not have happened period, and can never happene again.