Ladies and gentlemen, I present you "
The Lancet Commission on lessons for the future from the COVID-19 pandemic".
The Lancet is a highly respected, peer-reviewed medical journal, which has existed for almost 200 years.
Given its impeccable credentials, I was cautiously optimistic in my expectations of The Lancet to provide a fair and practical analysis of mistakes dealing with COVID. I was hoping to see a deep dive into both mistakes of over-cautiousness (mostly on the left) and under-cautiousness (mostly on the right).
The piece is extremely long. The reading is not particularly light, either. It would take quite some time to get through. I read about a third of it, before I closed it in frustration. I could not have been more disappointed in the piece.
The entire paper was of a single note. The "mistakes" and "lessons for the future" can be summed up as follows:
More restrictions are better, and all governments not being as restrictive as possible ended up killing people.
Seriously. That was the entire first third of the paper, and it was clear the tone wasn't changing at any point later on. The most mind-boggling thing is that the paper even chided governments for easing restrictions in 2022, in the age of the much weaker Omicron. Even though Omicron's danger level has a similar profile to the flu, this paper repeatedly makes the point that our return to normal life has been a huge mistake, and is killing people.
At no point does it ever give any governments a hard time for being TOO restrictive. The more restrictive and locked down, the better!
This paper was not written from a purely scientific position, either. It's not like it's simply a hard number analysis of COVID deaths and how more restrictions would have affected it, while conceding that shaping pandemic public policy requires many input factors besides the danger of the disease. It does not at all make such a concession. Instead, it reads as an obnoxious left-wing opinion piece, chiding governments around the world (especially the US) for its COVID-era permissiveness.
Yuck.
This would be the equivalent of writing a 100,000 word research paper on how we could save over 40,000 lives per year lost in auto accidents, by simply mandating all vehicles are hard-wired to go no faster than 15mph. Indeed, making such a modification to a 15mph max speed WOULD save about 40,000 lives per year, but that would be a ridiculously stupid thing to mandate, for obvious reasons. But that's essentially what this paper is doing. It is completely ignoring various factors regarding COVID polciy:
- Likely non-compliance rates from the population regarding long term restrictions/lockdowns, especially in authority-questioning countries like the US
- Massive societal harm caused by long term restrictions and lockdowns
- Devastating economic impacts caused by long term restrictions and lockdowns
- The lack of necessity for such lockdowns in the age of Omicron, which is killing very few non-elderly people, and now profiles much like seasonal influenza
This paper was peer reviewed and published without anyone batting an eye. Shows what an echo chamber the academic peer review process has become.
Furthermore, it throws the WHO under the bus and blames them for a lot of the deaths. In response, the WHO posted a rebuttal:
https://www.who.int/news/item/15-09-...-19-commission
But who cares? The WHO's problem is that they're now controlled by China, so they won't say or do anything which would piss off the Chinese government. And that's a big problem on its own.
There is a lot to learn from our response to COVID. Mistakes were made on both sides. None of us had faced a real major pandemic in our lifetime, so it's understandable that the response was flawed. However, in order to do it right next time, we need a realistic assessment willing to criticize both sides, not one trying to browbeat the public from a biased pulpit.
Is the scientific community willing to let go of their hatred of Republicans and
go back to unbiased research? Sure doesn't seem like it.