Day 849: The First Casualty of COVID is Duty

Vinay Prasad blogs at length about the pushback he got for taking the (actually) rational and scientific position on matters of COVID, rather than adopting pop-sci stupidity about masking children, closing schools, boosting the healthy, giving Moderna to anyone under 40, etc., etc.:

I'm trying not to use the word stupid to describe the people who hold the view that it helps. Instead, I will put it this way. I no longer respect any actual scientist who tells me that that it makes sense to make 2-year-olds wear a cloth mask in daycare except for the two hours they all nap together side by side. Anyone who believes that policy actually slows viral spread can be safely ignored.

But what can I do about bad policy? I thought about it, and slowly over the course of a year advanced a series of articles in places like Medpage today, and the Atlantic on this issue. I tweeted against the AAP when they said deranged things like there is no evidence that kids need to see faces.

This earned me great professional pushback, and headache. But you can't focus on that, you must focus on your duty. My duty, as a professor whose life is the arbitration of evidence, is to encourage people to use their rational, evidence-based medicine skills in pursuit of policy recommendations that benefit people. I can't be dissuaded if a bunch of people who aren’t thinking clearly decide to engage in mob Twitter.

Though the occasion of his post is obvious now, it goes unmentioned so we should note for posterity that armed guards hired to protect schoolchildren instead stood by at a school shooting in Texas this past week.

Massachusetts cases were up a fifth of a percentage point on Friday.