Post by millring on Jan 14, 2024 8:30:15 GMT -5
As a guy living inside the Beltway, feeling the sense of crisis, trying to decide what to do in some situation room in the White House with people who had data that was incomplete, we weren’t really thinking about what that would mean to Wilk and his family in Minnesota a thousand miles away from where the virus was hitting so hard. We weren’t really considering the consequences in communities that were not New York City or some other big city. The public health people—we talked about this earlier, and this is a really important point—if you’re a public health person and you’re trying to make a decision, you have this very narrow view of what the right decision is, and that is something that will save a life, doesn't matter what else happens. So you attach infinite value to stopping the disease and saving a life. You attach a zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people’s lives, ruins the economy, and has many kids kept out of school…This is a public health mindset, and I think a lot of us involved in trying to make those recommendations had that mindset, and that was really unfortunate.
www.furtherup.net/p/francis-collins-is-not-sorry-enough?fbclid=IwAR1f14x0Os4Bi_8OXvmW0t6_KFZImiP-bspLAYqY-WxfOaHULptMOtKK1pY
This is my problem with those who are now insisting that we all need to accept this admission, absolve Collins and move on. As Dr. Vinay Prasad notes in his analysis, we’re not just talking about a single tragic slip here, like an experienced neurosurgeon who makes one fatal error and loses a patient on the table. It’s more like a neurosurgeon confessing that he was never really a neurosurgeon at all. Perhaps he cut open a watermelon, once or twice, then upon cutting open a person was shocked to find that “whoa, there’s a lot of stuff in there!”
Perhaps that sounds harsh. But if you watch the whole dialogue carefully, you’ll see that Collins can’t even allow this partial confession to stand without rewriting history, casting himself as a tragic hero. Later in the dialogue, he makes some acknowledgement of the difficulty in balancing the concerns of the physically vulnerable with those of the economically or psychologically vulnerable. But he follows this up by framing the health professionals as basically soft-hearted and the economic professionals as basically hard-hearted. Speaking as a health professional, he says he finds it “hard to contemplate a circumstance where you say it’s okay to let some people die in order to preserve some economic benefits,” although no doubt some economists could make a “spreadsheet” telling you “the monetary value of a life.” He just has a hard time with all that, “because I swore the Hippocratic Oath, and to be able to say well, that was just sort of conditional on it being okay economically is a very hard thing to do.”