A university president makes a case against cowardice

What are you referring to?

He is making a stink about Covid vaccine requirements during a period where hospitals were overflowing and bodies were being stacked in refrigerated trailers.

Vaccines were a miracle. The state medical examiner converted one nearby university’s arena to a temporary morgue at one point in 2020. It’s mind boggling that people were and still are in denial about how bad it got before large parts of the population started getting vaccinated

Are we living in the same world? I had a child born about that time which was one of the few ways to actually get into a hospital. When I went in the fucking place was barren. A bunch of medical professionals shaking in their shoes waiting for something that never came. I knew then and there I knew i was being sold a lie and the news was carefully orchestrating snippets of misrepresented footage. And then went about my business as normal.

> I knew then and there I knew i was being sold a lie and the news was carefully orchestrating snippets of misrepresented footage. And then went about my business as normal.

It’s extremely poor reasoning to rely on your individual anecdotal experience of your hospital visit to conclude that there is a global conspiracy on a massive scale. Was all the footage of overflowing hospitals and makeshift morgues fabricated?

Fwiw, I went to a Boston hospital in April or May of 2020 to get tested for a Covid exposure and they kept non-covid patients quite separate. They relocated entire offices to different buildings to avoid cross-exposure. They don’t want to put Covid patients near people giving birth or their infants for obvious reasons. Also our emergency department had a million signs up telling people who had certain respiratory symptoms to go to a different location (which I went to and was indeed much busier).

…But I didn’t base my belief on the things I was hearing from literally every source on that experience. I did it because that many people simply can’t coordinate a lie on that scale that convincingly. Skepticism is good, but respectfully and in my opinion, believing it was all a hoax requires a great deal of arrogance and gullibility.

For inexplicable reasons I was about the only one there with free reign of the hospital. They seemed so starved of guests and happy someone was there for good reasons that the hospital didn't stop me from walking around most the hallways, so I did. Small town hospital with few enough security that they all knew who I was.

There was so much bad data and propoganda coming in at the beginning thar ultimately the only thing I could depend on was what I personally investigated. I'm not using it to sign off on a research paper.

> Small town hospital

And you generalized this to the world as a whole? I admit I don’t have a citation for this, but I’d be shocked if small towns didn’t have markedly slower spread rates than cities. I feel like this was brought up frequently during the pandemic.

> There was so much bad data and propoganda coming in at the beginning thar ultimately the only thing I could depend on was what I personally investigated.

How and which things did you decide were propaganda and bad data?

Perhaps so but I ultimately use data I collected to make my own choices in my own environment, not to force choices upon you. If you had different data I would not judge you for acting differently.

No one exists alone in a society. People who ignored the overwhelming evidence of the pandemic’s severity were more likely to spread the disease to other people because of their poor judgement.

The evidence being peddled by our state health director at the time to justify lock downs was largely computerized projections that were not based on overwhelming evidence and were ultimately wildly wrong even without vaccines.

Sorry, I’m not an expert in the field, but are computerized projections not the norm in disease spread modeling?

I don’t really feel like continuing this argument, so the last thing I’ll say is that I don’t know how else experts are supposed to have made decisions at the time. Makeshift morgues were opening to handle the overflow of bodies. They acted on the evidence they had at the time, and readjusted recommendations as new evidence came to light. This is part of why social distancing protocols changed so much during the first year of the pandemic.