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From: HeartDoc Andrew
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christnet.christianlife
Subject: Breaking pandemic news --> We are 100% certain that MichaelE does **
not** have COVID-19 today (04/07/25) ...
Date: Mon, 07 Apr 2025 11:10:19 -0400
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Michael Ejercito wrote:
> HeartDoc Andrew, in the Holy Spirit, boldly wrote:
>> Michael Ejercito wrote:
>>
>>> https://www.reddit.com/r/LockdownSkepticism/comments/1jsi6wo
a_case_study_in_groupthink_were_liberals_wrong/
>>>
>>> A case study in groupthink’: were liberals wrong about the pandemic?
>>> US political scientists’ book argues aggressive Covid policies such as
>>> mask mandates were in some cases misguided
>>>
>>> J Oliver Conroy
>>> Sat 5 Apr 2025 10.00 EDT
>>> Share
>>> Were conservatives right to question Covid lockdowns? Were the liberals
>>> who defended them less grounded in science than they believed? And did
>>> liberal dismissiveness of the other side come at a cost that Americans
>>> will continue to pay for many years?
>>>
>>> A new book by two political scientists argues yes to all three
>>> questions, making the case that the aggressive policies that the US and
>>> other countries adopted to fight Covid – including school shutdowns,
>>> business closures, mask mandates and social distancing – were in some
>>> cases misguided and in many cases deserved more rigorous public debate.
>>>
>>> In their peer-reviewed book, In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed
>>> Us, Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee argue that public health authorities,
>>> the mainstream media, and progressive elites often pushed pandemic
>>> measures without weighing their costs and benefits, and ostracized
>>> people who expressed good-faith disagreement.
>>>
>>> a book cover with a photo of a sign on a highway reading ‘closed due to
>>> covid-19’
>>> View image in fullscreen
>>> The book cover of In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us.
>>> Photograph: Princeton University Press
>>> “Policy learning seemed to be short-circuited during the pandemic,” Lee
>>> said. “It became so moralized, like: ‘We’re not interested in looking at
>>> how other people are [responding to the pandemic], because only bad
>>> people would do it a different way from the way we’re doing’.”
>>>
>>> She and Macedo spoke to the Guardian by video call. The Princeton
>>> University professors both consider themselves left-leaning, and the
>>> book grew out of research Macedo was doing on the ways progressive
>>> discourse gets handicapped by a refusal to engage with conservative or
>>> outside arguments. “Covid is an amazing case study in groupthink and the
>>> effects of partisan bias,” he said.
>>>
>>> Many Covid stances presented as public health consensus were not as
>>> grounded in empirical evidence as many Americans may have believed,
>>> Macedo and Lee argue. At times, scientific and health authorities acted
>>> less like neutral experts and more like self-interested actors, engaging
>>> in PR efforts to downplay uncertainty, missteps or conflicts of interest.
>>>
>>> It’s a controversial argument. Covid-19 killed more than a million
>>> Americans, according to US government estimates. The early days of the
>>> pandemic left hospitals overwhelmed, morgues overflowing, and scientists
>>> scrambling to understand the new disease and how to contain it.
>>>
>>> Still, Macedo and Lee say, it is unclear why shutdowns and closures went
>>> on so long, particularly in Democratic states. The book argues that in
>>> the US the pandemic became more politically polarized over time, after,
>>> initially, “only modest policy differences between Republican- and
>>> Democratic-leaning states”.
>>>
>>> After April 2020, however, red and blue America diverged. Donald Trump
>>> contributed to that polarization by downplaying the severity of the
>>> virus. Significant policy differences also emerged. Ron DeSantis, the
>>> Republican governor of Florida, moved to re-open physical schools
>>> quickly, which progressives characterized as irresponsible.
>>>
>>> Yet in the end there was “no meaningful difference” in Covid mortality
>>> rates between Democratic and Republican states in the pre-vaccine
>>> period, according to CDC data cited in the book, despite Republican
>>> states’ more lenient policies. Macedo and Lee also favorably compare
>>> Sweden, which controversially avoided mass lockdowns but ultimately had
>>> a lower mortality rate than many other European countries.
>>>
>>> Covid is an amazing case study in groupthink and the effects of partisan
>>> bias
>>> The shutdowns had foreseeable and quantifiable costs, they say, many of
>>> which we are still paying. Learning loss and school absenteeism soared.
>>> Inflation went through the roof thanks in part to lockdown spending and
>>> stimulus payments. Small businesses defaulted; other medical treatments
>>> like cancer screenings and mental health care suffered; and rates of
>>> loneliness and crime increased. The economic strain on poor and minority
>>> Americans was particularly severe.
>>>
>>> Covid policies escalated into culture wars, amplifying tensions around
>>> other social issues. Teachers’ unions, which are often bastions of
>>> Democratic support, painted school re-openings as “rooted in sexism,
>>> racism, and misogyny” and “a recipe for … structural racism”, the book
>>> notes, despite the fact that minority and poor students were most
>>> disadvantaged by remote learning.
>>>
>>> These measures also had a literal price. “In inflation-adjusted terms,”
>>> Macedo and Lee write, “the United States spent more on pandemic aid in
>>> 2020 than it spent on the 2009 stimulus package and the New Deal
>>> combined” – or about what the US spent on war production in 1943.
>>>
>>> a child playing a cello inside her home
>>> View image in fullscreen
>>> A student listens to her music teacher over laptop during a lockdown on
>>> 5 April 2020 in New York City. Photograph: Education Images/Universal
>>> Images Group/Getty Images
>>> Yet of the $5tn that the US Congress authorized in 2020 and 2021 for
>>> Covid expenditure, only about 10% went to direct medical expenses such
>>> as hospitals or vaccine distribution, according to the book; most of the
>>> spending was on economic relief to people and businesses affected by
>>> shutdowns. Ten per cent of that relief was stolen by fraud, according to
>>> the AP.
>>>
>>> The pandemic was an emergency with no modern precedent, of course, and
>>> hindsight is easy. But In Covid’s Wake tries to take into account what
>>> information was known at the time – including earlier pandemic
>>> preparedness studies. Reports by Johns Hopkins (2019), the World Health
>>> Organization (2019), the state of Illinois (2014) and the British
>>> government (2011) had all expressed ambivalence or caution about the
>>> kind of quarantine measures that were soon taken.
>>>
>>> “We take a look at the state of the evidence as it was in early 2020,”
>>> Lee said. “It was clear at the time that the evidence was quite
>>> unsettled around all of this, and if policymakers had been more honest
>>> with the public about these uncertainties, I think they would have
>>> maintained public trust better.”
>>>
>>> They wanted there to be an answer – that if we do X and Y, we can
>>> prevent this disaster. And so they’re kind of grasping at straws
>>> The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security hosted a wargaming exercise
>>> in October 2019, shortly before the pandemic began, to simulate a deadly
>>> coronavirus pandemic; the findings explicitly urged that “[t]ravel and
>>> trade … be maintained even in the face of a pandemic”. Similarly, a WHO
>>> paper in 2019 said that some measures – such as border closures and
>>> contact tracing – were “not recommended in any circumstances”.
>>>
>>> “And yet we did all of that in short order,” Macedo said, “and without
>>> people referring back to these plans.”
>>>
>>> He and Lee also believe there was a strong element of class bias, with a
>>> left-leaning “laptop class” that could easily work from home touting
>>> anti-Covid measures that were much easier for some Americans to adopt
>>> than others. Many relatively affluent Americans became even wealthier
>>> during the pandemic, in part due to rising housing values.
>>>
>>> At the same time, the laptop class was only able to socially isolate at
>>> home in part because other people risked exposure to provide groceries.
>>> Stay-at-home measures were partly intended to protect “essential
>>> workers”, but policymakers living in crisis-stricken major metropolitan
>>> areas such as New York or Washington DC did not reckon with why social
>>> distancing and other measures might be less important in rural parts of
>>> the country where Covid rates were lower.
>>>
>>> Lockdowns were intended to slow Covid’s spread, yet previous pandemic
>>> recommendations had suggested they only be used very early in an
>>> outbreak and even then do not buy much time, Macedo said.
>>>
>>> two people stand next to each other smiling
>>> View image in fullscreen
>>> Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee. Photograph: Courtesy of Stephen Macedo
>>> Policymakers and experts often embraced stringent measures for reasons
>>> that are more political than medical, Macedo and Lee argue; in a
>>> pandemic, authorities are keen to assure anxious publics that they are
>>> “in charge” and “doing something”.
>>>
>>> In strange contrast, policymakers and journalists in the US and
>>> elsewhere seemed to take China as a model, the book argues, despite the
>>> fact that China is an authoritarian state and had concealed the scale of
>>> the outbreak during the crucial early days of the pandemic. Its regime
>>> had obvious incentives to mislead foreign observers, and used draconian
>>> quarantine measures such as physically welding people into their homes.
>>>
>>> When the WHO organized a joint China field mission with the Chinese
>>> government, in February 2020, non-Chinese researchers found it difficult
>>> to converse with their Chinese counterparts away from government
>>> handlers. Yet the WHO’s report was “effusive in its praise” of China’s
>>> approach, the book notes.
>>>
>>> “My view is that there was just a great deal of wishful thinking on the
>>> part of technocrats of all kinds,” Lee said. “They wanted there to be an
>>> answer – that if we do X and Y, we can prevent this disaster. And so
>>> they’re kind of grasping at straws. The Chinese example gave them hope.”
>>> She noted that Covid policymakers might have been better served if there
>>> had been people assigned to act as devil’s advocates in internal
>>> deliberations.
>>>
>>> Lee and Macedo are not natural scientists or public health
>>> professionals, they emphasize, and their book is about failures in
>>> public deliberation over Covid-19, rather than a prescription for
>>> managing pandemics.
>>>
>>> But they do wade into the debate about Covid-19’s origin, arguing that
>>> the “lab leak” hypothesis – that Covid-19 accidentally leaked from the
>>> Wuhan Institute of Virology, rather than spontaneously leaping from
>>> animals to humans – was unfairly dismissed.
>>>
>>> The Wuhan Institute studied coronaviruses similar to the one responsible
>>> for Covid-19, had a documented history of safety breaches, was located
>>> near the outbreak, and is known to have experimented on viruses using
>>> controversial “gain-of-function” methods funded by the US, which involve
>>> mutating pathogens to see what they might look like in a more advanced
>>> or dangerous form.
>>>
>>> If policymakers had been more honest with the public about these
>>> uncertainties, I think they would have maintained public trust better
>>> Perhaps because Trump had fanned racial paranoia by calling Covid-19 the
>>> “China virus” and rightwing influencers were spreading the notion that
>>> it had been deliberately engineered and unleashed on the world by China,
>>> many scientists, public health experts and journalists reacted by
>>> framing the idea of a lab leak – even an accidental one – as an
>>> offensive conspiracy theory. Dr Anthony Fauci and other top public
>>> health figures were evasive or in some cases dishonest about the
>>> possibility of a lab leak, Macedo and Lee say, as well as the fact that
>>> a US non-profit funded by the National Institutes of Health allegedly
>>> funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute.
>>>
>>> Since then, though, the CIA and other US intelligence agencies have
>>> cautiously endorsed the lab leak theory, and the discourse around Covid
>>> has softened somewhat. The economist Emily Oster sparked immense
>>> backlash by arguing against school closures in 2020. Now publications
>>> such as New York Magazine and the New York Times have acknowledged the
>>> plausibility of the lab leak hypothesis, for example, and there is
>>> growing consensus that school closures hurt many children.
>>>
>>> The reception to In Covid’s Wake has been more positive than Macedo and
>>> Lee expected – perhaps a sign that some of their arguments have
>>> penetrated the mainstream, if not that we’ve gotten better as a society
>>> at talking about difficult things. “The reception of the book has been
>>> much less controversial [and] contentious than we expected,” Macedo said.
>>>
>>> cashiers putting groceries in shopping bags
>>> Disposable: what Covid-19 did to those who couldn’t afford to fight the
>>> virus
>>> Read more
>>> Yet the wounds fester and debates continue. Some readers of the New York
>>> Times were furious when The Daily, the newspaper’s flagship podcast,
>>> recently interviewed them, with subscribers arguing that the episode was
>>> not sufficiently critical of their stance. And some coverage of the book
>>> has criticized it for underplaying the danger of the disease.
>>>
>>> Macedo and Lee said that a few of their colleagues have expressed
>>> concern that their critique could fuel political attacks on science – a
>>> worry that crossed their minds too. “Our response is that the best way
>>> to refute criticisms that science and universities have been politicized
>>> is to be open to criticism and willing to engage in self-criticism,”
>>> Macedo said.
>>>
>>> “We need to make sure these institutions are in the best possible
>>> working order to face the challenges ahead. And we think that’s by being
>>> honest, not by covering over mistakes or being unwilling to face up to
>>> hard questions.”
>>
>> In the interim, we are 100% prepared/protected in the "full armor of
>> GOD" (Ephesians 6:11) which we put on as soon as we use Apostle Paul's
>> secret (Philippians 4:12). Though masking is less protective, it helps
>> us avoid the appearance of doing the evil of spreading airborne
>> pathogens while there are people getting sick because of not being
>> 100% protected. It is written that we're to "abstain from **all**
>> appearance of doing evil" (1 Thessalonians 5:22 w/**emphasis**).
>>
>> Meanwhile, the only *perfect* (Matt 5:47-8 ) way to eradicate the
>> COVID-19 virus, thereby saving lives, in the US & elsewhere is by
>> rapidly (i.e. use the "Rapid COVID-19 Test" ) finding out at any given
>> moment, including even while on-line, who among us are unwittingly
>> contagious (i.e pre-symptomatic or asymptomatic) in order to
>> "convince it forward" (John 15:12) for them to call their doctor and
>> self-quarantine per their doctor in hopes of stopping this pandemic.
>> Thus, we're hoping for the best while preparing for the worse-case
>> scenario of the Alpha lineage mutations and others like the Omicron,
>> Gamma, Beta, Epsilon, Iota, Lambda, Mu & Delta lineage mutations
>> combining via slip-RNA-replication to form hybrids like "Deltamicron"
>> that may render current COVID vaccines/monoclonals/medicines/pills no
>> longer effective.
>>
>> Indeed, I am wonderfully hungry (
>> https://groups.google.com/g/sci.med.cardiology/c/6ZoE95d-VKc/m/14vVZoyOBgAJ
>> ) and hope you, Michael, also have a healthy appetite too.
>>
>> So how are you ?
>
> I am wonderfully hungry!
While wonderfully hungry in the Holy Spirit, Who causes (Deuteronomy
8:3) us to hunger, I note that you, Michael, are rapture ready (Luke
17:37 means no COVID just as eagles circling over their food have no
COVID) and pray (2 Chronicles 7:14) that our Everlasting (Isaiah 9:6)
Father in Heaven continues to give us "much more" (Luke 11:13) Holy
Spirit (Galatians 5:22-23) so that we'd have much more of His Help to
always say/write that we're "wonderfully hungry" in **all** ways
including especially caring to "convince it forward" (John 15:12) with
all glory (Psalm112:1) to GOD (aka HaShem, Elohim, Abba, DEO), in
the name (John 16:23) of LORD Jesus Christ of Nazareth. Amen.
Laus DEO !
USENET source:
https://narkive.com/ajXQXbQo.4
Positive control on USENET:
https://groups.google.com/g/sci.med.cardiology/c/7ixdk7t6Bk8/m/xpbS2z7QAAAJ
Suggested further reading:
https://groups.google.com/g/sci.med.cardiology/c/5EWtT4CwCOg/m/QjNF57xRBAAJ
Shorter link:
http://bit.ly/StatCOVID-19Test
Be hungrier, which really is wonderfully healthier especially for
diabetics and other heart disease patients:
http://bit.ly/HeartDocAndrew touts hunger (Luke 6:21a) with all glory
( http://bit.ly/Psalm112_1 ) to GOD, Who causes us to hunger
(Deuteronomy 8:3) when He blesses us right now (Luke 6:21a) thereby
removing the http://WDJW.great-site.net/VAT from around the heart
...because we mindfully choose to openly care with our heart,
HeartDoc Andrew <><
--
Andrew B. Chung, MD/PhD
Cardiologist with an http://bit.ly/EternalMedicalLicense
2028 & upwards non-partisan candidate for U.S. President:
http://WonderfullyHungry.org
and author of the 2PD-OMER Approach:
http://bit.ly/HeartDocAndrewCare
which is the only **healthy** cure for the U.S. healthcare crisis
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