Covid Culture Shifting
May 3, 2022
“How to Change Your Mind About COVID-19” by the Atlantic
In the spring of 2020, as Americans continued to proclaim their excitement for basketball games and parades, an ER doctor named Dylan Smith watched in dismay. Was everyone else ignoring reality? That March, New York City hesitated to close its schools during the city’s first COVID wave. Smith was horrified. A major pandemic was arriving, and softening its blow would require closing schools, which he believed was the best way to protect kids. “There were a lot of suggestions that kids would be these super–carrier vectors,” he says, “where they would come home and they would infect Mom and Dad and Grandma and Grandpa, and they would infect teachers at school.”
Now, two years later, Smith has changed his mind. He thinks schools should’ve reopened much sooner—by early 2021 at the latest. In other words, Smith admits to rethinking one of his positions on COVID-19, an act that sometimes feels as risky as telling 17th-century Florentines that Earth revolves around the sun. Not everyone will agree with Smith’s reassessment. But maybe we can learn something from his willingness to do it.
Smith started having second thoughts about school closures in the fall of 2020. Unlike in the early days, his hospital, by that point, had plenty of tests. Kids didn’t seem to be getting very sick from COVID, and they appeared to have no greater risk of spreading it than everyone else. “This idea that kids were going to be these crazy vectors was no longer being borne out,” he says.
Then, he began to see kids come into the hospital with mental-health emergencies at alarming rates. Kids were having panic attacks and trying to kill themselves; some were saying they were stressed out because they couldn’t see their friends. What he saw mirrors national trends: 37 percent of high schoolers have experienced poor mental health during the pandemic, according to a CDC survey.
But as in other parts of the country, pediatric psych wards in Northern Virginia were so full that the kids would remain in the ER for three or four days while the doctors tried to find an open psychiatric bed. “They were just sitting in an ER room,” Smith told me. A social worker would stop by each day to check on them, and someone would roll a TV console from room to room. In the summer of 2020, he started to see younger and younger kids involved in shootings and stabbings. (Gun violence among kids younger than 17 spiked nationally in 2020.)
It’s hard to know what to chalk all of these issues up to—the ennui of Zoom school; less structure and supervision; the pandemic that, in teenage years, has seemed to grind on forever. But Smith noticed that movie theaters and restaurants were opening back up. Schools seemed more important. After vaccines became widely available in 2021, Smith didn’t see any further justification for school closures. When people expressed doubts about school reopenings, he made his opinion clear: The science supported it.
Many of us have updated our beliefs about COVID at some point in the past two years, even if we haven’t said so publicly. Perhaps you started out worried that the coronavirus was easily transmitted via surfaces, then you discarded that fear upon further evidence. Maybe you are a major infectious-disease specialist who at first thought that young, healthy people didn’t need boosters, then decided they should get them after all. Maybe you committed the ultimate noble flip-flop: You overcame your skepticism of vaccines and opted to get vaccinated.
The words ultimate noble flip-flop links to an article titled “The Tucker Carlson Fans Who Got Vaxxed”. This article offers no scientific support for these so-called vaccinations for covid. This article continues,
Confessing that we’ve changed our opinion is hard, and not only because we don’t like feeling stupid, or looking stupid, or being exiled from certain circles of Twitter. “If I admit I’m wrong, then I have a harder time relying on my own judgment every time I make a decision or have an opinion,” says Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania and the author, most recently, of Think Again. “I’m admitting that my convictions about the world are often incorrect, and that that makes the world a little bit scarier to live in.”
People get especially rigid in frightening and unpredictable situations. The pandemic has made many of us “seize and freeze in order to restore that sense of control,” Grant told me. The restaurants that are still using QR codes rather than paper menus—ostensibly for COVID reasons—are perhaps practicing a little terror management alongside their cost cutting.
Tenelle Porter, a psychologist at UC Davis, studies so-called intellectual humility, or the recognition that we have imperfect information and thus our beliefs might be wrong. Practicing intellectual humility, she says, is harder when you’re very active on the internet, or when you’re operating in a cutthroat culture. That might be why it pains me—a very online person working in the very competitive culture of journalism—to say that I was incredibly wrong about COVID at first. In late February 2020, when Smith was sounding the alarm among his co-workers, I had drinks with a colleague who asked me if I was worried about “this new coronavirus thing.”
“No!” I said. After all, I had covered swine flu, which blew over quickly and wasn’t very deadly.
A few days later, my mom called and asked me the same question. “People in Italy are staying inside their houses,” she pointed out.
“Yeah,” I said. “But SARS and MERS both stayed pretty localized to the regions they originally struck.”
Then, a few weeks later, when we were already working from home and buying dried beans, a friend asked me if she should be worried about her wedding, which was scheduled for October 2020.
“Are you kidding?” I said. “They will have figured out a vaccine or something by then.” Her wedding finally took place this month.
Smith talks like an ER doctor, giving you just enough information but not so much that it might slow him down. He’s 30 and has one of those apathetic buzz cuts that busy guys get. In our Zoom calls, his cat, Bucky, would periodically yowl in the background.
One thing that allows people like Smith to talk so openly about changing their mind is a loose attachment to their opinions. “Don’t let your ideas become part of your identity,” said Grant, the organizational psychologist.
For instance, at one point in our interview, I pointed out to Smith that teen mental health had been declining since before the pandemic. If anything, the pandemic has accelerated a teen-mental-health crisis that was already in motion. “So we’re applying causation where there was already a trend?” he asked. “That’s a valid point. People are going to choose the interpretation that fits with either their preconceived notions and their priors or is convenient to the position they want to hold.” Ultimately, he decided, if global crises and social media were already shredding teen mental health, the pandemic has “magnified the salience” of those two things.
Here, he’s using science-speak: acknowledging the contradicting evidence, evaluating the claim, and coming to the best conclusion you can under the circumstances. His is an attitude born of the emergency room, where you don’t always have a patient’s full test results before you have to treat them. He’s not saying it was wrong to close schools in 2020, just that as we accumulated more evidence and developed vaccines, the evidence pointed in the opposite direction.
According to Grant, the best way to keep an open mind in an unclear situation is to do just this: Think like a scientist. (The other, lesser ways to think are like a “preacher, prosecutor, and politician,” which are what they sound like.) The writer Julia Galef calls this “the scout mindset,” as opposed to the “soldier mindset.” The scout and scientist mindsets are approximately the same thing: “The motivation to see things as they are, not as you wish they were,” she writes in her eponymous book.
Thinking like a scientist, or a scout, means “recognizing that every single one of your opinions is a hypothesis waiting to be tested. And every decision you make is an experiment where you forgot to have a control group,” Grant said. The best way to hold opinions or make predictions is to determine what you think given the state of the evidence—and then decide what it would take for you to change your mind. Not only are you committing to staying open-minded; you’re committing to the possibility that you might be wrong.
Because the coronavirus has proved volatile and unpredictable, we should evaluate it as a scientist would. We can’t hold so tightly to prior beliefs that we allow them to guide our behavior when the facts on the ground change. This might mean that we lose our masks one month and don them again the next, or reschedule an indoor party until after case numbers decrease. It might mean supporting strict lockdowns in the spring of 2020 but not in the spring of 2022. It might even mean closing schools again, if a new variant seems to attack children. We should think of masks and other COVID precautions not as shibboleths but like rain boots and umbrellas, as Ashish Jha, the White House coronavirus-response coordinator, has put it. There’s no sense in being pro- or anti-umbrella. You just take it out when it’s raining.
Understanding when to abandon beliefs and when to recommit to them can help us ride out this pandemic and prepare for the next one. In a pandemic, we need “to be continually discovering and learning new things,” Porter told me. Still, she added, in a moment of intellectual humility: “I don’t know that we have hard data on that.”
Though people often deride those who change their mind as hypocrites, Grant and others think it’s a mark of integrity. It’s a sign that you’re not committed to an idea; you’re committed to the truth.
Smith didn’t publicly advocate for schools to reopen for in-person learning. He’s on Twitter, but he has few followers and rarely tweets. The only person who called him on his about-face was his wife. “I remember when you said that schools should close down and that people are being idiots for not closing schools down,” she told him.
“Yeah,” he said, evaluating the evidence. “You’re right.”
October 27, 2022
“Actor Tim Robbins Just Admitted The Truth About ‘Safe And Effective’ Covid Vaccines: ‘I Bought Into It. I Demonized People. I Was Guilty Of Everything That I Came To Understand Was Not Healthy’” by The Gateway Pundit
October 28, 2022
CNBC complains that “Americans Are Over Covid” in their piece “Americans Are Over Covid — But Covid's Not Over You” wherein they write,
We hear it all the time: Americans are done with Covid. But the pandemic keeps reminding us: Covid isn’t done with you. It’s a message the Biden administration and the CDC needs to be sending…so why aren’t they?
The Washington Examiner states,
The pandemic, of course, is over. It has been for some time. The only people who have not returned to normal life are COVID-panicked liberals who will continue masking and quarantining until the end of time and children who have the displeasure of living under authoritarian Democrats in cities such as New York City.
“The last of the Covid vaccine mandates” by Politico
Once touted by federal and state officials as essential to ending the Covid-19 pandemic, vaccine mandates are fading away.
October 31, 2022
“LET’S DECLARE A PANDEMIC AMNESTY - We need to forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about COVID” by the Atlantic
In April 2020, with nothing else to do, my family took an enormous number of hikes. We all wore cloth masks that I had made myself. We had a family hand signal, which the person in the front would use if someone was approaching on the trail and we needed to put on our masks. Once, when another child got too close to my then-4-year-old son on a bridge, he yelled at her “SOCIAL DISTANCING!”
These precautions were totally misguided. In April 2020, no one got the coronavirus from passing someone else hiking. Outdoor transmission was vanishingly rare. Our cloth masks made out of old bandanas wouldn’t have done anything, anyway. But the thing is: We didn’t know.
I have been reflecting on this lack of knowledge thanks to a class I’m co-teaching at Brown University on COVID. We’ve spent several lectures reliving the first year of the pandemic, discussing the many important choices we had to make under conditions of tremendous uncertainty.
Some of these choices turned out better than others. To take an example close to my own work, there is an emerging (if not universal) consensus that schools in the U.S. were closed for too long: The health risks of in-school spread were relatively low, whereas the costs to students’ well-being and educational progress were high. The latest figures on learning loss are alarming. But in spring and summer 2020, we had only glimmers of information. Reasonable people—people who cared about children and teachers—advocated on both sides of the reopening debate.
Another example: When the vaccines came out, we lacked definitive data on the relative efficacies of the Johnson & Johnson shot versus the mRNA options from Pfizer and Moderna. The mRNA vaccines have won out. But at the time, many people in public health were either neutral or expressed a J&J preference. This misstep wasn’t nefarious. It was the result of uncertainty.
Obviously some people intended to mislead and made wildly irresponsible claims. Remember when the public-health community had to spend a lot of time and resources urging Americans not to inject themselves with bleach? That was bad. Misinformation was, and remains, a huge problem. But most errors were made by people who were working in earnest for the good of society.
Given the amount of uncertainty, almost every position was taken on every topic. And on every topic, someone was eventually proved right, and someone else was proved wrong. In some instances, the right people were right for the wrong reasons. In other instances, they had a prescient understanding of the available information.
The people who got it right, for whatever reason, may want to gloat. Those who got it wrong, for whatever reason, may feel defensive and retrench into a position that doesn’t accord with the facts. All of this gloating and defensiveness continues to gobble up a lot of social energy and to drive the culture wars, especially on the internet. These discussions are heated, unpleasant and, ultimately, unproductive. In the face of so much uncertainty, getting something right had a hefty element of luck. And, similarly, getting something wrong wasn’t a moral failing. Treating pandemic choices as a scorecard on which some people racked up more points than others is preventing us from moving forward.
We have to put these fights aside and declare a pandemic amnesty. We can leave out the willful purveyors of actual misinformation while forgiving the hard calls that people had no choice but to make with imperfect knowledge. Los Angeles County closed its beaches in summer 2020. Ex post facto, this makes no more sense than my family’s masked hiking trips. But we need to learn from our mistakes and then let them go. We need to forgive the attacks, too. Because I thought schools should reopen and argued that kids as a group were not at high risk, I was called a “teacher killer” and a “génocidaire.” It wasn’t pleasant, but feelings were high. And I certainly don’t need to dissect and rehash that time for the rest of my days.
Moving on is crucial now, because the pandemic created many problems that we still need to solve.
Student test scores have shown historic declines, more so in math than in reading, and more so for students who were disadvantaged at the start. We need to collect data, experiment, and invest. Is high-dosage tutoring more or less cost-effective than extended school years? Why have some states recovered faster than others? We should focus on questions like these, because answering them is how we will help our children recover.
Many people have neglected their health care over the past several years. Notably, routine vaccination rates for children (for measles, pertussis, etc.) are way down. Rather than debating the role that messaging about COVID vaccines had in this decline, we need to put all our energy into bringing these rates back up. Pediatricians and public-health officials will need to work together on community outreach, and politicians will need to consider school mandates.
The standard saying is that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. But dwelling on the mistakes of history can lead to a repetitive doom loop as well. Let’s acknowledge that we made complicated choices in the face of deep uncertainty, and then try to work together to build back and move forward.
August 11, 2022
“CDC Eases Recommendations for Quarantine, Social Distancing, and Other Restrictive Measures Against Covid-19” by Jim Hoft for The Gateway Pundit
August 13, 2022
“CDC Quietly Drops Vaccine-Status Discrimination – Finally Admits Their Vaccines Do Not Prevent Anyone from Getting or Spreading the Virus” by The Gateway Pundit
August 17, 2022
“CDC Director Rochelle Walensky Admits Major Covid-19 Mistakes — Plans to Restructure the Agency Calling it a “Reset”” by Jim Hoft for Gateway Pundit
September 12, 2022
“New Zealand drops mask and vaccine mandates in sweeping Covid changes” by The Guardian
September 13, 2022
“And Just Like That, After Terrorizing Her Country, Authoritarian New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern Drops Mask and Covid-19 Vaccine Mandates” by Jim Hoft for The Gateway Pundit
September 14, 2022
“Denmark Bars Covid Vaccines for Almost Everyone Under Age 50” by Jim Hoft for The Gateway Pundit
September 18, 2022
“President Joe Biden: The 2022 60 Minutes Interview” by 60 Minutes on Youtube
At 4:49, Biden is asked if the pandemic is over and he says that it is.
September 19, 2022
“President Biden: "The pandemic is over" | 60 Minutes” by 60 Minutes on Youtube
“Biden Says the Pandemic Is Over. But at Least 400 People Are Dying Daily” by Sheryl Gay Stolberg for the New York Times
September 26, 2022
“Canada to remove all COVID travel restrictions from Oct 1” by Reuters
“Canada Removes All COVID Border Requirements for All Travelers Including Proof of Vaccination and Suspends Plane and Train Mask Requirements” by Jim Hoft for The Gateway Pundit
“COVID-19: Masks not mandatory in UAE from September 28” by UAE Health
September 30, 2022
“Australia ends Covid isolation rule as it moves beyond 'emergency phase'“ by The BBC
This regards a change that would take effect on October 14.
October 1, 2022
“Sweden Removes Recommendation on General Vaccination Against COVID-19 for Ages 12 to 17” by The Gateway Pundit
October 26, 2022
“School Closures Were a Failed Policy - America's pandemic learning losses are real. We need to see that reality clearly to do better next time” by the Atlantic
In “For those still trying to duck covid, the isolation is worse than ever” The Washington Post takes the position that,
it’s time to throw caution to the wind and masks in the garbage. . .
The available vaccines and medicines have made things safe enough, for enough people, that we can finally close the book on 2020 and start partying — or, at least, living — like it’s 2019 again.
October 27, 2022
“Biden still clings to his deliberate COVID contradictions” by The Washington Examiner
This piece states,
The pandemic, of course, is over. It has been for some time. The only people who have not returned to normal life are COVID-panicked liberals who will continue masking and quarantining until the end of time and children who have the displeasure of living under authoritarian Democrats in cities such as New York City.
October 28, 2022
CNBC complains that “Americans Are Over Covid” in their piece “Americans Are Over Covid — But Covid's Not Over You” wherein they write,
We hear it all the time: Americans are done with Covid. But the pandemic keeps reminding us: Covid isn’t done with you. It’s a message the Biden administration and the CDC needs to be sending…so why aren’t they?
“The last of the Covid vaccine mandates” by Politico
Once touted by federal and state officials as essential to ending the Covid-19 pandemic, vaccine mandates are fading away.
November 2, 2022
“Kari Lake: “I Want To Have A Commission To Investigate COVID And How It Was Handled In Arizona” – Suggests Criminal Charges (VIDEO)” by The Gateway Pundit
November 15, 2022
“‘SafeBlood’ Hardliners Want to Set Up Unvaccinated Blood Banks” by Vice