Long covid, and greater impact on certain individuals were well known by that point. Just saying "let 'er rip, go natural immunity" isn't the responsible move. Perhaps you're ok with the risks for you, but faulting a health officer for taking a different more conservative position is hardly a reasonable opinion.
"Long covid" is not defined. There is no test. There is no objective signature. Literally anyone can claim that they have it, and not be wrong. I'm not saying it doesn't exist, but I'm telling you that we have no idea how prevalent "it" is, and we don't have any idea how "it" compares to the consequences of other common respiratory illnesses. We've simply never bothered to look, and uncontrolled studies where someone enumerates a long list of things that happened after Covid, in a large group of people, are not evidence of those things being caused by Covid.
Said differently: if you have a nearly ubiquitous illness, how can you say anything about causality regarding anything that follows?
So what we have here is a pile of questionable research, a large group of people who are scared and demanding that action be taken, and politicians who are more than willing to "take action" by pushing aside, censoring, and otherwise bullying the scientists who stand in the way of their actions.
okay, well, others with relevant qualifications are saying it DOES exist, so since nobody seems to be saying it doesn't, I guess we can go with their expert conclusions.
where did you read this?
Pretty much anything public health people say on the topic of COVID turns out to be wrong on close inspection. It's really astounding. Even very basic things like getting an actual clinical definition of COVID itself (let alone long COVID) turns out to be impossible, which is why the official definition governments use is "got a positive on a COVID test". That's not actually a disease symptom but COVID isn't defined by symptoms any more than long COVID is.
The reason this happens is that public health is an authoritarian collectivist concept - the government will make decisions for the collective good even if individuals must suffer as a consequence. The entire culture of that space is dominated by a mindset that says, "we will obtain compliance by making scientific sounding claims, because people respect science and will follow it". That's why COVID research is so full of conflicting and nonsensical claims.
Do you think we all have the memory of goldfish? In the height of the pandemic people were saying natural immunity was insufficient to prevent further infection to the degree that would matter the few who were talking about the "cost of natural immunity" (or any other sort of level headed adult discussion about tradeoffs) were ridiculed as enabling the anti-vaxers.
>Perhaps you're ok with the risks for you, but faulting a health officer for taking a different more conservative position is hardly a reasonable opinion.
This is a two way street. If you get to be conservative about natural immunity the other guys get to be conservative about the vax.
I feel like everywhere I look in the anti-COVID-vax community, no one reckons with the fact that their position gets others sick, and those people might die. Even this article focuses strongly on children not needing masks or vaccines, mentioning not at all kids getting others sick.
Some cites:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33721405/
https://hms.harvard.edu/news/children-spread-covid-19
https://ufhealth.org/news/2021/uf-study-sheds-light-roles-ch...
Most blatant examples:
- Masks are not protective
- The vaccine prevents infection (entire basis for mandates)
- There is no evidence for lab leak
- Natural immunity is not as effective as vaccine immunity
- the virus is not spread via aerosols