vinay prasad
The inimitable Vinay Prasad:
Post-COVID we need to seriously talk about setting restrictions. But not on people. We need to place restrictions on public health and things done in the name of public health. We cannot allow individuals who are poor at weighing risk and benefit and uncertainty to coerce human beings, disproportionately the young and powerless (waiters/ servers) to participate in interventions that have no data supporting them, for years on end.
“Most science is not credible. It’s not true; it’s not believable; it’s not useful; it’s not actionable; it’s done to inflate careers, and often [for] for-profit entities. People who are anxious and afraid and are concerned ... are likely to err in science. People who believe human beings are omnipotent, [that] we’re so powerful we can shape the natural world to our whims and desires, are much likely to make errors because the truth is the world is very complicated and we’re very small. And even though we think we’re so powerful and have a lockdown we may very modestly change human interactions in a space and we’re unlikely to sustain those interaction[s], those changes over time. So it’s very likely to be a very small effect and in the universe of things people have dreamed about for centuries, most of those things didn’t make us better off. They hurt us. They often were self-inflicted wounds.”