COVID Skepticism Isn't About Science

Similarly what I have seen from by my friends and acquaintances is.

1. Disease breaks out.
2. Public health authorities/pharmaceutical companies push a new vaccine and claim it is X% effective/prevents the spread.
3. Later it is found to be less effective than initially promised/new variants make it less effective and boosters are now announced as needed.
4. People feel lied to, believing they were originally told vaccine was more effective than evidence shows it is/the fact that restrictions are still in place with the vaccine makes reduces its credibility in their eyes.

Opposition to vaccines comes in various gradings and flavors. I think it's pretty clear that initial vaccination has positive expected value for almost everyone. But it's much less clear if a booster shot can claim the same value proposition: it has a much smaller direct benefit to the bostee, so the argument for it is mostly based on solidarity. Is that enough to make it mandatory?

You can also be pro vaccines but against public policy about them. There has been some amount of goalpost shifting, e.g., in the scope and duration of covid passes. In some places, there was an implicit deal on the table: get vaccinated and you will be allowed to visit restaurants and bars. But a few months later this was changed to requiring recent vaccination (4 months instead of 12). Regardless of whether you think that's a good motivation to get vaccination, the promise has clearly been broken.

This is exactly right. By the time the vaccine became widely available, resistance to public health measures was already baked in and broke down along culture war lines, so nothing else really mattered at that point.

We live in in a roughly Dunbar-sized group. If no one died of Covid in your group but one or two people were hurt by vaccines, you will be scared of vaccines.

Following on from the above:

All the restrictions come to pass as the bureaucrat threatened. You’re angry about your lost social life and your deteriorating mental health and your friends who lost their jobs and your other friend whose cancer treatment has been delayed but there’s nothing you can do about it. You have no political power. You hardly even dare comment on the internet. Every time you try to speak out you are met with abuse or censorship. And you’re worried you might lose your job because once you used your real name when you posted a polite suggestion that maybe the world could have found a better way to handle the virus.*

Then one day you meet a man who also opposes lockdown. You’re having your first pleasant conversation for months when you realise he’s from [Country] Nationalist Party. “Um,” you say. “I thought they were far-right racists.”

Your new friend smiles at you. “That’s just media exaggeration. The woke lefties hate anyone who wants to have a grownup conversation about immigration.”

You aren’t completely happy, but you remember the journalist shrieking insults at you for views you don’t hold. You remember months of every media site and internet commenter acting like ‘lockdown-sceptic’ is a synonym for ‘anti-vaxxer’ and sneering at those terrible people. You have lost all faith that the mainstream media can accurately represent reality, and your previous impressions of the Nationalist Party were based on what you read in the media, so you give your new friend the benefit of the doubt.

You try lurking on Nationalist forums, just to see for yourself. You meet a few Nationalists in real life, thanks to your friend. It’s nice. You can vent about the stupid restrictions and no one calls you names. You can have an illicit beer with friends and it’s so much better than going insane with loneliness. Yes, one of your new friends makes politically incorrect jokes, and sometimes people on those forums have some very odd views, but so what. You don’t call your whole family crazy racists because they have that one uncle over for Christmas (back when you were allowed Christmas.) You feel happy to have found your new tribe.

To be clear, I’m absolutely not arguing for people to join the far right.** I’m warning that an environment which treats questioning the merits of lockdowns as vile heresy is going to drive a lot of otherwise inoffensive people toward the far-right. Some of those people will revert back to the mainstream after Covid. Some of them will be habituated to watching far-right media, will have formed new friendships with far-right people, and will not leave their new filter bubble. A substantial increase in support for the far-right has to have long-term consequences, most of which will be negative. Some of the damage has already been done, but left-wing and centrist institutions could reduce further damage by accepting that reasonable people can debate what is the optimum response to a relatively non-lethal pandemic. 

*You will notice that I’m posting pseudonymously myself, for exactly this reason.

**Before anyone asks, I am a member of the Liberal Democrats, a centrist party, and intend to vote for them at the next election. I’m fortunate that the UK does have one small centrist party which has (weakly, quietly) opposed the worst excesses of the lockdownistas. If my only choice was to vote far-right anti-lockdown or mainstream pro-lockdown I really don’t know what I’d do. 

Freedom is a sacred value for many people as well. 

Even aside the sacred/secular dichotomy, you still need to be able set an exchange rate between different things (mental health, economic damage, hospitalisations, deaths) to establish whether lockdowns are nett negative .

Or you could just state your conclusions without showing any workings like the OP did .

Cost-benefit analyses of lockdowns are hard because on one side you have a bunch of reasonably well-defined positives: preventing deaths, and on the other you have a long tail of weird second-order long-term effects like children learning loss, calcification of social relationships because of masks, politicians getting used to exerting this sort of power over the daily lives of normal people, small business closures and all the second-order effects from that, increased videogame addiction, the dramatic increase of Tinder usage instead of face-to-face flirting, increased depression and suicides, that one study that showed babies born during the pandemic had lost 2 standard deviations of cognitive development compared to babies born earlier (babies are likely more resilient than we think and this loss will be temporary, but still). We've had pandemics and old people dying before, so the overall impacts can be better estimated than the impacts of the lockdowns and measures we've taken in the past 2 years, I think people have drastically underestimated the very long-term and far-reaching effects of these restrictions. 

Yeah, it's overconfident to claim that lockdowns are "almost certainly net negative". This stuff is complicated.

But it's also not certain that lockdowns were "definitely a huge net positive" for older people. For example, for my 90 year old grandmother the life-saving benefits are much larger than for younger people. But the costs of a couple years in lockdown has also been huge for her. She's been persistently depressed, and her health has deteriorated a lot. Presumably from not moving around much any more. She's felt really bad about life since the pandemic started.

Especially given that her statistical risk of dying per year is something like 50% pre-covid, it's not obvious whether this is a good trade-off. It all comes down to details about just how big the mental health costs are and the specific number for mortality reduction from covid.

Many cost-benefit analyses (especially early in the pandemic) compared modelled, not actual, benefits of lockdowns - note that epidemiological models have repeatedly proven overly pessimistic - usually with estimated short-term monetary costs of lockdowns. Generally these cost-benefit analyses ignored non-monetary costs, even though they're huge. They also tended to calculate benefits by comparing lockdowns vs doing nothing, ignoring options like supporting the elderly to isolate themselves while letting everyone else go about their lives. 

We now know that lockdowns had minimal-to-zero benefits in terms of preventing short-term excess deaths: https://www.nber.org/papers/w28930#fromrss  (If you don't have patience to read the paper, just consider Sweden's average-for-Europe performance despite its decision not to lockdown, or the minimal difference between the outcomes of US red states and blue states.) 

So given that the actual factually-demonstrated benefits are statistically indistinguishable from zero (so realistically some small positive), and the costs are immense, I find it hard to claim that a reasonable cost-benefit analysis would support lockdowns. 

Do you have links to any scientifically rigorous cost-benefit analyses that actually take into account all Covid costs, including long-term impacts to health, education and life expectancy? And that also use factual inputs when estimating benefits rather than epidemiological models of dubious accuracy? If you can post links to such high-quality cost-benefit analyses, I will consider updating my views. If not, I hope you will update yours.
 

Funnily enough, I have yet to read a single not-completely-ridiculous cost-benefit analysis that goes this way. We must live in different bubbles.

There has been some evidence both ways, but I think that the best argumentation has been that lockdowns were net-negative by a lot. Dumbledore's Army linked this paper, which is not the same as the one that originally convinced me, but it's also good and I don't have the other link on hand.

In particular, analyses in favor of lockdowns tended to make two errors:

• They compare a lockdown to a hypothetical situation in which there is no mitigation at all, rather than allowing for private, voluntary mitigation.
• They assume that infections which do not occur during the lockdown never occur at all, rather than simply occurring later. Since we never got close to actually eradicating COVID, deaths during lockdown were mostly delayed rather than prevented. (The exception would be the cases where we delayed long enough to get good treatments or vaccines, or where we avoided medical system collapse, but even taking these into account the benefit is still smaller than assumed.)

Most importantly: relying on voluntary isolation allows people to choose their level of risk based on their vulnerability, their risk tolerance, and their ability to bear the costs. This is not perfect (you wind up with some people who would prefer to self-isolate but can't do so for economic reasons), but it's still miles better than forcing the same policy onto everyone.

From earlier this year: Douglas Allen of Simon Fraser University reviews 80 studies, concludes that lockdowns have costs which are 3.6 - 282x more than their benefits. The 3.6 is based on unrealistic extreme assumptions intended to steel-man the case for lockdown. He concludes: “It is possible that lockdown will go down as one of the greatest peacetime policy failures in Canada’s history.”

I repeat my request for you to post links to any high-quality cost-benefit analyses which come to the opposite conclusion.

The miracle of modern filter bubbles!

In practice, your second-tier connectivity has a lot of overlaps so it's not actually the square of the size of your Dunbar-sized immediate group. Additionally, by definition these are people that you don't have direct relationships with, so your knowledge of what's going on with them may be hazy.

Anecdotally, I know about 30 people who have gotten COVID, which includes one hospitalization and no deaths: a statistically average outcome. In my second-tier contacts I know... 4 or 5 deaths? I'm unsure, because the only way I can know about this at all is by hearing "[Person I don't know] from [social activity I don't go to] died of COVID", and this makes it easy to never hear about it and to forget.

This seems like a fully general argument against optional things.

Do you have estimates of the rate at which that happens (and subsequent harms), vs people who don't want to wear masks being forced to do so (and subsequent harms)?

Do you have a link that gives a good summary of the performance of the South Korean CDC equivalent?

Did you miss the second part where I point out that an unmitigated COVID pandemic played out in my brother's town to almost no consequence? "Everyone got COVID and survived" was not a hypothetical scenario.

your local retirement home abruptly lose half of the residents

Even in the 80+ category, the fatality rate is only 15%.

That depends on age and comorbidities. That probability is highly stratified. There are some population where P(hospitalized|covid) is >5%

It is an interesting research idea, but after skimming the paper I don't really trust their methods.

1. If I understand it correctly, then they are adjusting their results based by the deaths from 2020. Contrary to their claim I think it does not make sense to do that to control for seasonality. In 2020 Covid deaths in the US only became an issue by the end of March. And the countermeasures against Covid in 2020 could have changed typical behavioral patterns (e.g. travel) associated with possible deaths.

2. Their analysis methods don't seem to be adequate for this kind of panel data. They are running separate regression models for each month and each age group (table 2) - I don't think this is the way panel data should be analyzed (but I am no expert in that - one could ask someone with a background in econometrics about that).

3. If I understand it correctly, they ran multiple models and for aggregating the predicted vaccine deaths they have picked the submodel supporting their claim, which would be a big red flag from my perspective [see notes to table 3, "If a model using same (not previous) month vaccinations was significant and the equivalent models using previous month was not, then death estimates from those models were used instead (light gray boxes). Similarly, if a model using age-specific vaccination (i.e. doses administered to people >65 yrs) was significant and the equivalent model using all vaccine doses administered was not, then death estimates from those models were used instead (dark gray boxes)"].

4. One problem with their basic approach could be that vaccinations change behaviour and this changed behaviour could lead to deaths (that are unrelated to the vaccines). To control for that one would need e.g. the number of accident deaths (to subtract them from the total numbers before running the analysis).

Possibly, but I doubt the same can be said for the net hedon loss. The great-uncle who died of COVID may have been quite old, but he still probably had a few years ahead of him

In terms of hedons, many old people live in retirement homes under horrendous conditions. Some lose their marbles, I remember one who every day tried to escape while claiming "I have to take care of my goats!" Some forget that their loved ones are dead, only to relearn it and be sad again. Some have chronic pains. Some shit themselves because they can't control their sphincters anymore, then stay in their shit for hours while waiting for the single nurse who has 10 other residents to treat before them because the house is criminally understaffed. Their only joy besides the family's monthly visit is to eat shitty food and watch shitty TV. No, believe me, nobody would spend extra to provide better food for an elderly who might have lost their sense of taste and has no leverage anyway.

There is something like negative hedons. There are things worse than death. Can we be real? The average year of an elderly doesn't have nearly as many hedons as the average year of a young adult.

Not exactly a fair description of what the public health measures have been. What country has been in lockdown for "a year or two" (besides China)?

Is there an end in sight? What country hasn't had covid-related public health measures - especially on entry and exit of the country - for the last year? It may not have been a full lockdown (whatever that means) for most of the time, but public health measures have certainly been in place.

Vaccinating to herd immunity proved impossible

Downvoted for strawmanning. You are ignoring all of jaspax’ actual points while raising the most extreme flat-Earth view that’s vaguely related to what he said and pretending that it’s somehow relevant.