It will be over by summer where I live. His words mean nothing to me.

He's high if he thinks I'm wearing a mask in Texas in the summer

So another year of this?

I think I'm about to just check out of all social media so I can make it through it.

I'm off all platforms but this one.

there's no way that if this thing is still in progress going into late fall that Anthony Fauci is going to take his foot off the gas heading into cold/flu/covid season

It is so frustrating because here in NM, we can't just refuse to wear a mask unless we just never go anywhere. We have to choose whether we have to put our young kids in masks for acrobatics/dance classes or just take them out altogether. Not fair to the kids.

Stop worrying about this stuff. Nobody can predict the future. You guys are looking for reasons to wring your hands and be angry at something.

As of right now, the trends in cases, hospitalizations, and deaths are going the right way. We're getting 1.5mm shots in arms per day and that pace will increase with the approval of the J&J vaccine.

Nobody can predict is how low cases/hospitalizations/deaths get after a significant percentage of our population gets vaccinated + infected.

Nobody can predict is how new variants may affect cases, hospitalizations and deaths months from now.

Nobody can even predict how many people ultimately electing to get a vaccine. Last I checked, only 50% of the country even wanted one. My guess is sometime in April the problem will not be vaccine supply but getting people to sign up -- whether the issue is vaccine hesitancy or systemic problems in getting certain people vaccinated (can't get off work to get a vaccine, can't get transportation, don't know how to sign up, etc.). But, it's just a guess. Just stay safe, get the vulnerable people in your life vaccinated, and see how it plays out.

three things are clear to me:

1. people end the pandemic. not professional political actors.
2. it'll be gradual at first and then a preference cascade.
3. the preference cascade will likely be independent of further tech developments.

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Stop worrying about this stuff. Nobody can predict the future. You guys are looking for reasons to wring your hands and be angry at something.

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then why is Fauci moving the goalposts again? why not let the spring play out? why further demoralize?

gotta say i'm pretty concerned with how inept our public health messengers are at messaging to the public.

I just don't see why it matters, cone. You post about this multiple times every day, but it's just unproductive hand-wringing. Use that energy to write to your elected leaders and let them know how you feel. 3,000 people are dying every day of COVID right now and your top concern is whether mask mandates will be lifted in the spring, summer or fall? Who cares? Nobody can see the future.

If cases, hospitalizations, and deaths are super low in the spring and 100mm people have been vaccinated, then I'm guessing there will be a lot of relaxing of mask laws, especially in Republican States. If stuff is going up, due to new variants or unsuccessful vaccination campaigns, then the masks will probably stick around. It's all just guess work.

My grandma is in the ICU with covid, my aunt who drove her to the hospital just had to go the ER last night with COVID. I just can't imagine why mask wearing is the top concern for so many people. I understand it's an annoyance, but I think it would be reasonable to rank it down the list of concerns when compared against widespread death and hospitalization. As those numbers improve, of course mask mandates will get greater scrutiny and be addressed as neccessary.

cone said:

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Stop worrying about this stuff. Nobody can predict the future. You guys are looking for reasons to wring your hands and be angry at something.

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then why is Fauci moving the goalposts again? why not let the spring play out? why further demoralize?

gotta say i'm pretty concerned with how inept our public health messengers are at messaging to the public.

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1. Who cares what Fauci predicts, after he literally says it's very difficult to predict?

2. It is reasonable to assume the job of a public health messenger is to set conservative expectations to the general public. It is easier to broadcast worse-case scenarios and adjust when things are playing out better than expected, than to assume best-case scenarios happen and push things back. Things that he says carry more tangible weight than some random talking head on TV, because organizations and people make decisions off his statements that have real impact.

I don't think that public health officials have been as bad at messaging as the general public has been bad about understanding how scientists talk. People like Dr. Fauci talk a certain way that scientists do, which the lay person struggles to translate. For example, Dr. Fauci may strongly believe something based on his past experience, but he would say matter of factly that he does not know something or can't predict something, because he hasn't' seen high enough quality evidence. To the lay person that may seem duplicitous, but to a scientist it seems like responsible communication.

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3,000 people are dying every day of COVID right now and your top concern is whether mask mandates will be lifted in the spring, summer or fall?

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personally, i happily where my n95 everywhere i go in public. so no skin off my back. i support it.

but the constant demoralization of the public by bureaucrats and public-facing elites throughout the crisis

yeah, i'll wring my hands over that. it's a big f'ing problem, now and later.

but i'll take your lecture about how i'm not taking all this seriously in the proper polite way.

cone said:

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3,000 people are dying every day of COVID right now and your top concern is whether mask mandates will be lifted in the spring, summer or fall?

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personally, i happily where my n95 everywhere i go in public. so no skin off my back. i support it.

but the constant demoralization of the public by bureaucrats and public-facing elites throughout the crisis

yeah, i'll wring my hands over that. it's a big f'ing problem, now and later.

but i'll take your lecture about how i'm not taking all this seriously in the proper polite way.

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You're choosing to be demoralized. I'm not demoralized.

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1. Who cares what Fauci predicts, after he literally says it's very difficult to predict?

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wait

so you're saying the most famous public health official in the country can say whatever he wants and we should all not give a f because why should we take him seriously if he places a caveat at the end

so either he's being supremely irresponsible in his rhetoric or we're arguing here in complete bad faith about his position of authority on the matter

HotardAg07 said:

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cone said:

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3,000 people are dying every day of COVID right now and your top concern is whether mask mandates will be lifted in the spring, summer or fall?

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personally, i happily where my n95 everywhere i go in public. so no skin off my back. i support it.

but the constant demoralization of the public by bureaucrats and public-facing elites throughout the crisis

yeah, i'll wring my hands over that. it's a big f'ing problem, now and later.

but i'll take your lecture about how i'm not taking all this seriously in the proper polite way.

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You're choosing to be demoralized. I'm not demoralized.

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this is gaslighting

like saying that a politician's rhetoric doesn't affect the public mood/morale

did we live through the last four years together?

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I don't think that public health officials have been as bad at messaging as the general public has been bad about understanding how scientists talk.

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Fauci copped to a noble lie about masks, specifically N95s (one that we're now gently trying to walk back, specifically on the N95 issue)

plus he copped to moving the messaged goalposts on herd immunity based on polling numbers

he's been abjectly terrible at this

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To the lay person that may seem duplicitous, but to a scientist it seems like responsible communication.

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i'll post this again

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/james-meigs/elite-panic-vs-the-resilient-populace/

cone said:

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1. Who cares what Fauci predicts, after he literally says it's very difficult to predict?

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wait

so you're saying the most famous public health official in the country can say whatever he wants and we should all not give a f because why should we take him seriously if he places a caveat at the end

so either he's being supremely irresponsible in his rhetoric or we're arguing here in complete bad faith about his position of authority on the matter

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I think people like yourself would benefit from trying to understand why a public health official like Dr. Fauci would say what he says and do your own critical thinking about what the situation is. And actually, if it's causing you so much demoralization, I wouldn't even seek to read statements from Dr. Fauci unless you're the kind of person that likes to hate watch CNN/Fox News just to get mad at the things they say.

I figure that when Dr. Fauci gets asked to make an impossible prediction like when mask wearing is going away, he probably has to consider the full range of possibilities and give a conservative answer towards the end of the range, so that businesses, government organizations, etc. don't plan around some overly optimistic assessment only to be disappointed.

I figure that Dr. Fauci has to consider all of the things that we don't know today

• How fast vaccination can ramp up
• How many people will be willing to take vaccines
• How effective are we at delivering vaccines in hard to reach people/areas
• What impact various variants will have
• How effective will vaccines be against the variants
• Will we have variant boosters/vaccines
• How much immunity will be conferred by the 90mm people who have already been infected
• How much will vaccination prevent transmission
• How much will prior immunity prevent transmission
• How much will prior immunity prevent infection by other, new strains
• How many new strains will there be that have not been discovered
• How will people's behavior adapt over time to covid restrictions while we wait for people to get vaccinated

In the end, what Dr. Fauci says won't matter to a whole lot of Republican Governors if things are looking worlds better in the Spring and Summer. It might not matter to alot of business leaders who wont' want to enforce mask mandates in their businesses, or might want to enforce them regardless if mandates were lifted.

There's a whole lot of stuff that's impossible to predict, so again, why are you wringing your hands so much every single day about mask mandates?

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why are you wringing your hands so much every single day about mask mandates?

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what?

do you have me confused with another poster named cone?

i'm the guy treating my n95s with methylene blue

i'm good to go on masking

just wondering why Fauci keeps moving the goalposts if his guidance moves markets. what changed between his summer and late fall return to normalcy prediction? is it the variants? is it the vaccine glut we'll likely see this spring?

and how reasonable is a return to normalcy prediction heading into cold/flu season? if he's being so prudent, how reasonable does this sound to you?


[Cone - Wrong forum for this thread, thus it will be locked. Feel free to post your thoughts on Fauci over on the Politics forum. - Staff]

I heard him say on the PODCAST-19 podcast by 538 that he was worried that we would require a higher herd immunity threshhold would be required (75-80%) than previously envisioned (60-70%). At the time, I understood that to be because of the higher transmissibility variants that are predicted to be widely circulating by the spring. As you know, herd immunity threshhold is a function of the R0, and the B.1.1.7 has been demonstrated to be ~50% more transmissible than the original strains. B.1.1.7 was introduced in the US recently and has been gaining prevalence.