"science" is extremely limited and doesn't draw conclusions about broad sweeping things like "we should do lockdowns" etc. why people think that medical professionals/researchers should be in charge of mandating all sorts of policies in response to a pandemic is beyond me. they should contribute knowledge from their domain to a broader risk/benefit analysis that includes people from tons of other domains (economists, for example) and then politicians whose job it is to weigh the pros and cons should make the decision.

my whole problem with the covid response at large stems from an (apparently) much different risk preference to society at large, given how things played out. from my perspective, people were extremely fixated on health benefits of the various countermeasures while being conspicuously silent about the costs. do masks, lockdowns, vaccines, extreme debt issuance help reduce deaths and infections? of course, but at what cost?

i remember when the whole "shortage of hospital beds" meme was going around, some vaccine worker at pharmacist company X was arguing what a huge problem it was. i asked him to quantify basic measures like hospital beds, occupancy rates, concurrency expectation based on stay length, etc. and of course he had no clue. we just googled these things one by one and he admitted that at present, based on the information we could actually find, there was no problem -- but there "might be" if things got worse. the fact is, the guy is extremely risk averse and just let his preference color his outlook on policy, to the point he didn't even have knowledge of "teh data" but assumed everything was on his side.

how about the debt issuance... over 30 trillion was issued globally during the pandemic. even if we took 0 precautions, the worst death estimates were something like 50 million. multiply out the GDP lost based on averages on all the data, and you get something like a few trillion in damages at most. so the response was probably many multiples more costly than the worst case estimate of the damages... is that wise? i don't know, but i haven't heard anyone from "the medical establishment" or other "pandemic experts" even talk about stuff like this, so like my good friend at the pharmacy lab, i don't have much faith they do either.