Smithsonian Magazine recently had an article entitled "Six Lessons We’ve Learned From Covid That Will Help Us Fight the Next Pandemic." The items listed as "lessons learned" from COVID-19 are:
(1) "We need to rapidly scale up testing."
(2) "We need to leverage data more effectively."
(3) "We need to seek out a diversity of voices."
(4) "We need to continue making big bets on vaccines."
(5) "We need to actively crowd out bad information."
(6) "We need to infuse public health communication with vulnerability."
I rather doubt whether any of these statements list any of the most important lessons that should be learned from the COVID-19 fiasco. Item #3 sounds like something rather promising, but it is basically neutralized by Item #5. The explanation of Item #5 gives us some language that indicates that the author has failed to learn one of the biggest lessons we should have learned from the COVID-19 fiasco, which is: don't demonize people you are trying to persuade to take a particular action.
An article at the Yale Medicine web site lists these "lessons of COVID-19," none of which is any of the chief lessons of the pandemic:
Lesson 1: Masks are useful tools.
Lesson 2: Telehealth might become the new normal.
Lesson 3: Vaccines are powerful tools.
Lesson 4: Everyone is not treated equally, especially in a pandemic.
Lesson 5: We need to take mental health seriously.
Lesson 6: We have the capacity for resilience.
Lesson 7: Community is essential—and technology is too.
Lesson 8: Sometimes you need a dose of humility.
We already knew before the pandemic that masks are useful tools during a pandemic, and that vaccines are powerful tools; and most of the other items are platitudes.
Reading about ten different articles after doing a Google search for "lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic," I can find no sign that our authorities have learned some of the main lessons that should be learned from the COVID-19 fiasco. Below is my list of some of the lessons that should have been learned.
Lesson #1: Don't recklessly experiment with the genomes of lethal viruses in laboratories lacking the highest possible security measures, and don't fund foreign experimentation with lethal viruses.
We still don't know whether the COVID-19 vaccine originated from some purely natural event or as a leak from a laboratory that was recklessly experimenting with virus genomes. Referring to Intelligence Community elements (IC elements) such as the CIA, a US government document stated that "four IC elements and the National Intelligence Council assess with low confidence that the initial SARS-CoV-2 infection was most likely caused by natural exposure to an animal infected with it or a close progenitor virus," but that another intelligence community element concluded with higher confidence ("moderate confidence") that "the first human infection with SARS-CoV-2 most likely was the result of a laboratory-associated incident, probably involving experimentation, animal handling, or sampling by the Wuhan Institute of Virology." A US Senate report favored the lab leak hypothesis. But the origin of COVID-19 is still an unanswered question. As long as there is still a large chance that COVID-19 arose from a lab leak, the supreme lesson that must be drawn from the COVID-19 fiasco is a lesson to take every measure to minimize the chance that any genetic laboratory will release a pathogen in the future. All signs are that the scientific community has failed to heed this lesson. Apparently nothing has been done to improve security at gene-splicing labs, or to reduce the chance of future pandemics arising from scientific experimentation.
Lesson #2: Pay the greatest attention to important-seeming novel phenomena, rather than ignoring such phenomena or trying to minimize their importance.
In the US we had the most enormous failure to pay attention to COVID-19 when it was spreading in January and February 2020. In a January 27, 2020 interview on Fox News, Anthony Fauci stated this about coronavirus spreading in the United States (at the 1:42 mark): "The risk right now in the United States is really low." Rather than raising a loud-and-clear alert to the graveness of the threat, Fauci said that in the interview "I'm saying don't worry, and don't be afraid." He failed to alert the public health system to the coming danger on January 27 in any kind of noticeable way that would attract attention. By mid-February it should have been all the more clear to any forward-thinking epidemologist that the United States faced a grave peril from coronavirus. On January 30, 2020, the World Health Organization had officially declared coronavirus a "global health emergency." But Fauci predicted on February 3, 2020 that there would be a "dampening down" of US coronavirus cases. And in a February 17, 2020 interview with USA Today, Fauci suggested that coronavirus was nothing much to worry about in the US. In the USA Today article from February 17, we read: "Fauci doesn't want people to worry about coronavirus, the danger of which is 'just minuscule.' " In a February 13, 2020 statement, the CDC issued an extremely weak statement about coronavirus that failed to attract much of any attention, saying nothing more alarming than this vague assertion: "There will likely be additional cases in the coming days and weeks." By February 26, 2020 the CDC had detected evidence that coronavirus was spreading in the US. But rather that issuing a very strongly-worded "scream bloody murder" warning that people would pay attention to, the CDC issued a mild-sounding statement failing to alert anyone of a grave public threat.
A failure to pay attention to many types of novel important-seeming phenomena has been the most gigantic failure of most of the scientific community for a very long time. For more than two hundred years there have occurred a wide variety of paranormal phenomena, phenomena which are of very great importance in assessing such basic questions as whether humans have a soul or whether the human mind is purely the product of the brain. For two hundred years the policy of mainstream professors has been essentially "just ignore anything that doesn't fit in with my view as to how reality works." There have been disastrous intellectual and moral results of such a failure to pay attention to phenomena, with generations of people getting wrong ideas about the nature of themselves and other humans. But at least such failure to study things did not produce any medical disasters. Finally in the year 2020 the nation ending up paying for our scientist's long habit of being inattentive to important-seeming novel phenomena. While our scientists were "asleep at the switch," COVID-19 spread all over the country between January and April 1, 2020. But no lesson has been learned here. The "ignore important-seeming novel phenomena" principle still seems to prevail in academia, where professors continue to ignore a host of important psychical phenomena they should be paying very great attention to.
Lesson #3: When extremely important public health advice is to be presented to the public during a pandemic, make sure it is presented by figures of maximum credibility and consistency who have no record of error on the topic they are speaking about.
When a pandemic occurs it is of the utmost importance to have the government's message being delivered by advocates of the highest credibility. If you want people to be wearing face masks and you want people to be taking vaccines, then the officials urging such things on our TV screens should be figures with the highest credibility and figures with an unblemished record of competence relating to the pandemic they are talking about. But during 2020 and 2021 the dominant TV spokesman on these topics was Anthony Fauci.
By May of 2020 Fauci's credibility on COVID-19 had been severely damaged by at least two problems (I won't mention a third big issue that is widely discussed):
(1) Fauci's failure to properly alert the public about COVID-19 during early 2020, as shown by the statements of his I quoted above.
(2) The bad advice about wearing face masks Fauci gave during March 2020, when he stated, "There's no reason to be walking around with a mask," at a time when COVID-19 was spreading like wildfire in New York City.
The US television coverage about COVID-19 during 2020 and 2021 seemed to be dominated by the appearances of Anthony Fauci. Changing my channel between the 6:30 evening news on ABC, CBS and NBC during 2020 and 2021, I would often seem to see Fauci on all three programs. It quickly became evident that Fauci was a polarizing figure who many millions did not trust, and polls showed that fewer than 50% of Republicans trusted him. But it seemed that whenever the main television networks wanted to interview a government official, it was most often Anthony Fauci showing up on our TV screens. We also often saw a surgeon general who had changed his advice about whether we should wear masks.
The US airwaves should have been presenting us public health authorities who had always taught the same thing about COVID-19, and who had an unblemished record of advising us correctly on this topic. As you can see here, the death rate of about 332 per 100,000 in the US ended up being several times greater than in most of the world's countries, suggesting a massive failure of the government to persuade sufficiently.
Lesson #4: Don't demonize people whose behavior you are trying to change.
Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in the 2016 election, but lost the electoral college vote to Donald Trump. Part of the reason she lost was a big political mistake she made, referring to people supporting Trump as a "basket of deplorables." When you are trying to change the behavior of people (whether it is getting them to vote a particular way or to wear a face mask or get a vaccine shot), it makes no sense to demonize such people. Doing such a thing will backfire, making it less likely than ever that their behavior will be changed. In the mainstream's attempt to get people to wear masks and take vaccines, endless examples of demonization attempts occurred, in which various demeaning insults were hurled by authority figures at those people whose behavior such authority figures were trying to change. This was very bungled politics.
Nowadays the term "anti-science" is a demonization term. The term is not correctly applied to people reluctant to take vaccines. Science with a capital S means facts established by observation. Science with a lower S means the process of determining truth through systematic efforts such as observation, experimentation and classification. A person who chooses not to take a vaccine he should be taking is a person who may be guilty of an ethical error, but it is groundless to call such a person "anti-science." Similarly, it is groundless to call a person who chooses not to purchase some particular technological product "anti-technology," and it groundless to call a person who declines to have some particular operation "anti-medicine." Nowadays many people in the medical and scientific communities are being extremely careless in throwing around the demonization term "anti-science" towards people who disagree with them on scientific topics, often applying such a term to people who are pro-science in the sense of being supporters of attempts to establish truth using observations and experiments.
Lesson #5: When new pandemics are getting started, we need all the watchdogs and "eyes and ears" we can get, without such sources becoming "sleeping watchdogs" because of follow-the-leader timidity.
The failure of the press at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic was enormous. There was a failure by newspaper authorities, television authorities and internet information sources that could have alerted the US to enormity of the peril it faced in February and March 2020. In general such sources acted like "sleeping watchdogs" as our national house was invaded, maybe because of some timidity about "going out on a limb" by raising concerns that had not yet become "common wisdom." The post here documents the failure of one major science publication (the online Quanta Magazine) to properly alert the public to the COVID-19 peril in the spring of 2020. The post here documents the failure of another major science publication (the online version of The Scientist Magazine) to properly alert the public to the COVID-19 peril in the spring of 2020. The lesson for the watchdogs of the press is simple: as soon as you smell smoke, start barking loudly.
Lesson #6: Don't forget that "never" can be much worse than "late."
There's an old expression "better late than never," and it applied during the COVID-19 pandemic. Millions chose to wait until quite a few millions had taken their COVID-19 shots, to make sure there wasn't any side effect showing up massively. Once many millions had got their COVID-19 shots with few reported serious side effects, the "wait and see" rationale was gone, and there was little rationale for not getting a shot. Too many of the "wait and see" thinkers ended up never getting a vaccine. A "wait and see" rationale does not justify a "never" course of action.
Lesson #7: Don't pretend to understand things you don't understand, and don't make knee-jerk dismissals of reasonable hypothetical explanations while unfairly characterizing supporters of such explanations.
Perhaps the biggest blunder of today's scientists is their very frequent claims to understand things that they do not understand, such as the origin of human minds, the origin of adult human bodies, and the origin of mankind. COVID-19 gave us many further examples of such a tendency. For example, soon after COVID-19 appeared scientists immediately started making claims that they knew COVID-19 had a purely natural origin, at a time when they did not actually know how COVID-19 originated. Our scientists made knee-jerk dismissals of a reasonable hypothesis of a lab leak origin for COVID-19, while unfairly painting anyone supporting such a hypothesis as a "conspiracy theorist." The hypothesis of a lab leak origin was not actually a conspiracy theory, but a theory of human error and overconfidence. A lesson we should draw from such a thing is: don't rule out reasonable hypothetical explanations of something while making mudslinging stereotype caricatures of reasonable people suggesting such explanations. That is very much a lesson our professors and experts have yet to learn; for they continue to haughtily dismiss many a reasonable hypothesis while making mudslinging stereotype caricatures of those presenting such ideas (the post here discusses one of many examples I could give of such behavior).
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