I came to realize that there was a long-standing scientific controversy in the field, and I felt that I had no choice but to get to the bottom of things myself. Although I am not a medical doctor, I hold a PhD in neuroscience and am familiar with critically reading scientific literature. I decided that I would invest as much time as necessary to learn everything I possibly could on the subject. At that point, there was nothing in my life more important than finding out what had really happened to my son.
Definitely a tangent, but attributing that attitude to higher education is like someone attributing a doctor saving their life to an act of god. Like yeah if you squint I guess that’s true.
My experience with higher education has been that of administrators taking advantage of my naivety for profit, elitism towards those not in academia, and dismissal of any ideas that wouldn’t directly result in a grant or a good headline.
I wouldn’t really say that the author’s “mettle” is a result of the same environment.
First off, this was genuinely valuable during the first few months. Gigantic medical institutions were moving at a glacial pace and were making proclamations literally months behind the state of the research. In order to conserve masks, propaganda was put out that masks were only effective if you were a medical professional, and the most common way I saw this rationalised was that the general public was simply too stupid to wear a mask in a sanitary way. So I proceeded to wear a mask in a sanitary way. Then after a few months mask stocks started to pile up so propagandists THEN pronounced that more science was conducted and masks were actually effective for everybody!
That positive outcome aside, what other people saw was that the younger people got, the lower the risks of COVID, and the higher the risks of getting vaccinated. In fact, it seemed from the numbers (This is for the earlier strains of COVID), that for certain populations (young people who lived like hermits, in other words, hacker news readers) it could be on a selfish individual basis, be irrational to get the COVID vaccine. The risk from myocarditis could actually outweigh the risk of COVID itself. It was however, always in the collective interest for as many people to get vaccinated as possible, to reduce the transmission of COVID, and reduce the consequent strain on medical resources and the direct/indirect deaths this caused. Public health institutions did not get into this nuance, because it wasn't in the collective interest, so they just told everybody the vaccine was good for you. I proceeded to get vaccinated, and the main person I held discussions with did not, after both drawing the exact same scientific conclusion. Not every anti-vaccer was stupid, some of them were just massive civil libertarians.
What I saw from people who DIDN'T do their own research is that they were UNIFORMLY misinformed because they tended to either believe institutions who would lie to them whenever it served their purposes (2 weeks to flatten the curve!), or believed whatever podcaster told them about Ivermectin.
Do not perpetuate the myth that the vaccines slowed the spread.
It just turns out that they had far too little data and that in real-world conditions they weren't anywhere near the 90+% claimed effectiveness.
Even so, the latest population-level research still suggests that the vaccines were 50-60% effective at preventing Covid-19 entirely, at least for some months.