Questioning Assumptions

Nathan Algren: I have questions.
Katsumoto: Questions come later.
--The Last Samurai

Adopted from a video posted on social media. Assume the following:

Government is not out to get people.

Pharma companies care about people's health.

There is no global conspiracy to abolish individual liberties.

Now let's reflect on various government 'public health' actions over the past year and a half and their merits. Several questions come to mind that challenge the assumptions above:

1) Why have governments not conducted/published impact assessments on the costs and benefits of lockdowns? Lockdowns can obviously inflict significant harm. Why have there been no formal studies to identify these harms and quantify them?

2) Why haven't the public health models and forecasts that motivated lockdowns, which have been spectacularly wrong from the get go, been reviewed for their methodological problems? I would add another question: Why don't these models include forecasts of economic and social impacts by default?

3) If governments were truly acting in good faith, then why haven't they been changing policies in concert with evolving scientific evidence? There is clearly science that contradicts currently policy choices (e.g., on masking, on the relationship between lockdowns and CV19 mortality, on the capability of PCR tests as an accurate everyday measure of CV19 infections, on the capacity of vaccinated individuals to transmit CV19, etc). Why are officials ignoring it? I would also add this: If there has been no coordinated effort, then why are these policy responses so uniform across countries?

Because answers to these questions challenge the validity of the assumptions stated earlier, it is increasingly difficult for a large group of individuals to dismiss 'conspiracy' and other plausible rival hypotheses.

Building on this and past work, I hope to develop an extended list of questions covering various aspects of the CV19 pandemic (e.g., measurement, data results, vaccines, countermeasures, etc) in upcoming posts.