Public Health "Experts" Did Not "Follow the Science" During the COVID Pandemic: 2024 Edition (Part I)

I know that there were presidential elections in the United States this week and the COVID pandemic seems like a distant nightmare we endured, but the truth is part of me still feels irate about what happened. I am not irate about the virus itself, but rather about how governments and so-called public health "experts" across the world reacted. Aside from "Stay at home" "flatten the curve," or "We're in this together," a popular mantra during the COVID pandemic era was "Follow the science." It was quite the clever linguistic ploy when you think about it. If you were against the face masks that did nothing, did not adhere to the lockdowns we knew were ineffective per pre-pandemic guidance, or spoke out against deleterious school closures, you were branded an anti-science kook. 

It turns out that the government officials and so-called "experts" who were advocating for stricter and stricter public health measurements were the ones not following the science. Yes, I was critical of lockdowns and school closures in 2020. It was in 2021 when I wrote a piece entitled When "Follow the Science" Meant Not Following the Science. You can read it here, but I criticized how "experts" were not following the science when it came to lockdowns, school closures, travel bans, cleaning surfaces, social distancing, restaurant & gym closures, and face masks. 

I want to highlight a few more to illustrate how the fear-mongering and the obsession with COVID-related costs ignored all the costs that stringent COVID policy had on us all. First, I want to point out a video by Umeå University research fellow Dr. Rachel Nicoll on following the real science and some of the highlights illustrated by her article at Daily Sceptic. Second, the U.S. Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations released a report late last month highlighting various moments of COVID misinformation from the U.S. government.  I am going to focus on Dr. Nicoll's comments in the Part and the U.S. House report in Part II.

Natural Immunity. It was annoying to hear during the pandemic about how "unprecedented" was because it was not. As a matter of fact, our previous knowledge on coronaviruses contributed to creating a vaccine so quickly. There were hundreds of coronaviruses prior to the pandemic, the two most famous being SARS and MERS. As Dr. Nicoll points out, about 50 percent of us had pre-existing immunity to COVID from prior common cold coronavirus infections. 

In 2023, I wrote about natural immunity and COVID. I illustrated how the choice to vaccinate was one of individual benefit, not societal. It made the vaccine mandates and vaccine passports unnecessary. Dr. Nicoll brought up other costs related to natural immunity. The public health measures implemented meant that the lack of interaction with others weakened our immune system. It is why we saw an explosion in cold and flu once COVID receded. Instilling fear and anxiety all did not help our immune systems, and nor did staying locked down and being deprived of sunlight and physical activity, the latter of which increased obesity in the U.S. by nearly 10 percentage points.  

COVID is airborne, but experts kept saying otherwise. One of the scientific debates during the pandemic about the nature of COVID was whether or not COVID was airborne. Droplets are larger; are released when you cough, sneeze talk, or breathe hard; and settle rapidly. Conversely, airborne particles become aerosolized, travel longer distances, and can stay in the air for a long time. 

In March 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) claimed that COVID was not airborne and went as far as stating that claims to the contrary were "misinformation." It took WHO until December 2021 to get around to admitting that COVID was airborne. Why so long? Think about it from a policy standpoint. The policy justification for lockdowns, school closures, and travel bans make more sense with a virus transmitted by droplets. Since COVID was an airborne disease, it made zero sense because the virus was going to reach us all eventually; and it pretty much did. My hypothesis is that like other pandemic public health measures, this was not out of concern of public welfare, but greater power. 

PCR Testing. Testing was supposed to be a preventative way of spreading COVID to others. By identifying who had COVID, we could have those individuals isolate while they recover from the illness. There was one problem with these tests. The cycle thresholds for the PCR tests were too high. The high cycle thresholds meant that it was ineffective at determining whether people were actually contagious. After all, you can still have some of the viral genetic material in your system weeks after the period of infection. In other words, these "false positives" unnecessary isolated a whole lot of people. This was especially cumbersome for those who were travelling when receiving their positive PCR test.