4 ms·

I always try to use HIV as my point of reference for COVID-19. We got off lucky by that measure. So maybe my pessimism is unfounded, but I really wish we had le

I always try to use HIV as my point of reference for COVID-19. We got off lucky by that measure. So maybe my pessimism is unfounded, but I really wish we had learned more lessons from HIV.

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
From what I understand, HIV is fairly difficult to transmit, requiring an exchange of infected body fluids. This makes it deeply traumatic because the people you're most likely to infect will be people extremely close to you. To some extent this is true of almost any transmissable disease, but HIV added the twist that infection is very, very unlikely to happen between two individuals that are not physically intimate with each other. In this sense, HIV doesn't seem like a particularly good model for anything like a coronavirus pandemic. Aerosol transmission just totally changes almost every aspect of the resulting pandemic. What lessons do you wish we had learned from HIV?
- mulvya 5y ago
  > From what I understand, HIV is fairly difficult to transmit, requiring an exchange of infected body fluids. Fauci didn't think so in 1983. "But if ''nonsexual, non-blood-borne transmission is possible, the scope of the syndrome may be enormous,'' writes Dr. Fauci of the National Institutes of Health in an editorial to be published Friday in the Journal of the American Medical Association." https://www.nytimes.com/1983/05/06/us/family-contact-studied-in-transmitting-aids.html https://www.nytimes.com/1983/05/06/us/family-contact-studied...
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - throwaway210222 5y ago
    The "if" changes the meaning of his statement significantly.
    - mulvya 5y ago
      Innumerably many valid statements of the form 'if P then Q' can be generated. But dissemination of one by a govt. scientist in a prominent medical journal, however, indicates that they think it likely enough to be true.
      - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
        Or it means that they think that were it to be true, it would calamitous, and thus we'd better think and work really hard to establish whether that is the case. And in 1983, it was not known if it was the case.
- krrrh 5y ago
  I’m not who you’re asking but I wish we had learned that a robust debate is necessary and we shouldn’t just assume tha Anthony Fauci has read the latest research. https://www.econlib.org/great-moments-in-epidemiology/ https://www.econlib.org/great-moments-in-epidemiology/ He did enormous damage in 1983 by speculating about casual transmission of HIV within households even though he admitted to not having read the paper. He was slow to get up to speed on aerosol transmission this time around. The comment at the bottom of that page also contains this gem from Oprah Winfrey in 1987: > Research studies now project that one in five—listen to me, hard to believe—one in five heterosexuals could be dead from AIDS at the end of the next three years. That’s by 1990. One in five. It is no longer just a gay disease. Believe me. Obviously that never happened. I was 12 that year and this sort of stuff terrorized us, even though it was based on highly dubious modeling, plus belief by public health officials in the promulgation of nobel lies. I think we should have learned that groupthink and motivated reasoning can lead to all sorts of ancillary damage not just to psychological health, but to reduced trust in institutions, heightened political polarization, massive misallocation of resources, and putting focus on the wrong places. We should have learned that being honest about what is known and what isn’t known and placing trust in the public leads to the public placing trust in public health authorities when it really matters. Credibility is extremely important to maintain, and protecting and encouraging a robust debate is paramount to discovering the truth and making better decisions.
  - spankyspangler 5y ago
    This goes to all politicians and "experts" and journalists. The slavish subservience to authority and desperate clamor to lick boot sickens me. I mean, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, the gun running and drug smuggling and interventions in South and Central America, banking corruption and laundering, the subprime crash, the Panama Papers, Congressional insider trading, corporations paying no taxes while politicians clutch pearls and wring hands about how they're using legal loopholes so there's nothing they can do about it, intelligence agencies spying on congress and on citizens, fabrications of stories about collusion with Putin, the list is endless. And yet again, like clockwork, once again the "experts" and "journalists" know what is best for us and once again the followers are all falling over themselves to prove their devotion by putting on their big shows of faith, and denouncing and bullying all the heretics and traitors who dare to ask questions. I have to laugh if it wasn't so sad. For some stupid reason I had some hope, but after seeing it all play out again it seems like old Dick Cheney could come and start talking about Iran and WMDs or denounce the next Gaddafi, and Fox and the NYT and all those other "trusted experts" would duly start regurgitating their lines, and pretty soon everyone would fall in line and anyone who didn't want to go to war (read: send others to war) would be un-American traitors.

I always try to use HIV as my point of reference for COVID-19. We got off lucky by that measure. So maybe my pessimism is unfounded, but I really wish we had learned more lessons from HIV.

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago

From what I understand, HIV is fairly difficult to transmit, requiring an exchange of infected body fluids. This makes it deeply traumatic because the people you're most likely to infect will be people extremely close to you. To some extent this is true of almost any transmissable disease, but HIV added the twist that infection is very, very unlikely to happen between two individuals that are not physically intimate with each other. In this sense, HIV doesn't seem like a particularly good model for anything like a coronavirus pandemic. Aerosol transmission just totally changes almost every aspect of the resulting pandemic. What lessons do you wish we had learned from HIV?

mulvya 5y ago
> From what I understand, HIV is fairly difficult to transmit, requiring an exchange of infected body fluids. Fauci didn't think so in 1983. "But if ''nonsexual, non-blood-borne transmission is possible, the scope of the syndrome may be enormous,'' writes Dr. Fauci of the National Institutes of Health in an editorial to be published Friday in the Journal of the American Medical Association." https://www.nytimes.com/1983/05/06/us/family-contact-studied-in-transmitting-aids.html https://www.nytimes.com/1983/05/06/us/family-contact-studied...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- throwaway210222 5y ago
  The "if" changes the meaning of his statement significantly.
  - mulvya 5y ago
    Innumerably many valid statements of the form 'if P then Q' can be generated. But dissemination of one by a govt. scientist in a prominent medical journal, however, indicates that they think it likely enough to be true.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
      Or it means that they think that were it to be true, it would calamitous, and thus we'd better think and work really hard to establish whether that is the case. And in 1983, it was not known if it was the case.
krrrh 5y ago
I’m not who you’re asking but I wish we had learned that a robust debate is necessary and we shouldn’t just assume tha Anthony Fauci has read the latest research. https://www.econlib.org/great-moments-in-epidemiology/ https://www.econlib.org/great-moments-in-epidemiology/ He did enormous damage in 1983 by speculating about casual transmission of HIV within households even though he admitted to not having read the paper. He was slow to get up to speed on aerosol transmission this time around. The comment at the bottom of that page also contains this gem from Oprah Winfrey in 1987: > Research studies now project that one in five—listen to me, hard to believe—one in five heterosexuals could be dead from AIDS at the end of the next three years. That’s by 1990. One in five. It is no longer just a gay disease. Believe me. Obviously that never happened. I was 12 that year and this sort of stuff terrorized us, even though it was based on highly dubious modeling, plus belief by public health officials in the promulgation of nobel lies. I think we should have learned that groupthink and motivated reasoning can lead to all sorts of ancillary damage not just to psychological health, but to reduced trust in institutions, heightened political polarization, massive misallocation of resources, and putting focus on the wrong places. We should have learned that being honest about what is known and what isn’t known and placing trust in the public leads to the public placing trust in public health authorities when it really matters. Credibility is extremely important to maintain, and protecting and encouraging a robust debate is paramount to discovering the truth and making better decisions.
- spankyspangler 5y ago
  This goes to all politicians and "experts" and journalists. The slavish subservience to authority and desperate clamor to lick boot sickens me. I mean, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, the gun running and drug smuggling and interventions in South and Central America, banking corruption and laundering, the subprime crash, the Panama Papers, Congressional insider trading, corporations paying no taxes while politicians clutch pearls and wring hands about how they're using legal loopholes so there's nothing they can do about it, intelligence agencies spying on congress and on citizens, fabrications of stories about collusion with Putin, the list is endless. And yet again, like clockwork, once again the "experts" and "journalists" know what is best for us and once again the followers are all falling over themselves to prove their devotion by putting on their big shows of faith, and denouncing and bullying all the heretics and traitors who dare to ask questions. I have to laugh if it wasn't so sad. For some stupid reason I had some hope, but after seeing it all play out again it seems like old Dick Cheney could come and start talking about Iran and WMDs or denounce the next Gaddafi, and Fox and the NYT and all those other "trusted experts" would duly start regurgitating their lines, and pretty soon everyone would fall in line and anyone who didn't want to go to war (read: send others to war) would be un-American traitors.