This study was released in June, so this may be a repost, but I just found out that one of my friends is a fan of Emily Oster and this is the void I must scream into.
It was deliberate. England, the US and Canada used kids to infect people and get closer to "herd immunity". They knew schools were going to spread the disease, so the lied about it being safe and got everyone to go back to normal. Meanwhile all the rich people private schools put in air filtration and air quality monitors.
Honestly I think that's giving them too much credit. Unless you have proof, it's entirely within reason that our governments just figured they needed to get "back to normal" because
is more of an issue than millions of people dying/being disabled. Especially when you consider that all the info points to herd immunity not actually being possible.There have been emails released from the UK where some officials admitted that's what they wanted, and evidence in canada that the head of covid response knew it was spreading in schools while saying it's safe. Everyone knew it would spread in schools because it's airborne. In the US we dropped mask requirements in the fall right before the first omicron wave, and they only started recommending them again after people were panicking, and as soon as it was over the official line was we can go back to normal because we have an "immunity wall" from vaccines and infections.
There have been emails released from the UK where some officials admitted that's what they wanted
If you have a source for this, I'd love to read it. If not, no worries, I believe you.
I got it from here: https://nitter.net/Em_Lickspittle/status/1572835670191906816#m
I guess it probably isn't good proof, but it aligns with their actions and what they knew vs. what they were telling the public.
Im pretty sure there was more i found from the uk, but i can't track it down.
Here's what was revealed in canada: https://www.capitaldaily.ca/news/henry-stanwick-covid-school-exposures-emails
https://www.straight.com/ovid-19-pandemic/living/study-coauthored-by-dr-bonnie-henry-documents-colossal-increase-in-covid-19-in-metro
That's a much more credible explanation than an adult human being actually believing that kids wouldn't spread the disease to everyone they came in contact wtih.
I feel like that’s incredibly obvious because that’s true for most contagious diseases
Emily Oster deserves to be burned at the stake for the deaths she’s responsible for
The U.S. murdered 4.5 million people in the “war on terror.” Emily Oster has killed more people than 9/11. Emily Oster should suffer >4.5 million deaths.
Don’t mind me, I’m just doing data-driven analysis.
That's what happened with me. My whole family was super diligent about mask wearing and basically avoiding civilisation for like 2 years. All it took was one fucking week of school after they lifted mandatory masking and we all got sick and I ended up in the fucking hospital. Thanks for that.
Haha, I hate this!
If only there was some kind of government policy or economic policy we could've tried to avoid relying on children to take proper precautions.
Nobody wanted to go to school or work and it's really shitty that some people convinced themselves that we had to for the sake of society's function. Or of course, personal personal desire for treats and profits.
A strong response in 2019, including two weeks of paid time off for every person in the US, could've prevented so much of what we're looking at now.
Heaps of countries basically had a good lockdown and then had no COVID until delta. Imagine going through most of 2020-2021 with no COVID fears as you did it right from the start.
Remember all those pictures from China where people were rocking out at water parks and concerts because they had a real, functioning country?
I remember seeing the pictures of food and care supplies delivered directly to their homes. It's really fucking sad to think about: looking at the people in other countries and wishing you lived in a place that would tap into resources when a disaster happened.
The propaganda machine is so strong here in the US. You actually believe in social contracts to be upheld by a country that to this day has never offered reparations for slavery.
Of course a country that fought so hard to exploit people would never turn around and then give back.
China held out for THREE FUCKING YEARS while the rest of the world enforced a "Spit directly in to a strangers mouth" policy for the glory of Grandfather Nurgle. THREE YEARS.
Her wikipedia has a COVID-19 section. She is a think tank head who pushed super hard for school reopening and making masks optional in public. Her credentials for these were she is a liberal economist who graduated from Harvard and taught at the Chicago School of Economics. Her research was at least on "Economics and Health" but she also wrote a book with a section contesting fetal alcohol syndrome's causal sensitivity which was widely panned by anyone who knew anything about it.
Atlantic writer who led the drumbeat on reopening schools. An economist who pretends she’s an authority on public health. Takes money from the Cato Institute to write things that appeal to liberals.
https://proteanmag.com/2022/03/22/motivated-reasoning-emily-osters-covid-narratives-and-the-attack-on-public-education/
https://citationsneeded.medium.com/episode-162-how-the-data-driven-label-sanitizes-cruel-austerity-politics-9a0e471f12b5
Oh, was she the monster that started calling for amnesty or some shit?
To kind, and she'd just spread plague in the Gulag. We need to confine her in a biohazard level four facility and interrogate her about the plans of the Death Guard for the invasion of Terra.
A Great Unclean One who acts as Herald of the Plague for Grandfather Nurgle, may he liberally spread his blessings among us.
my country's public health agency spent the first year of the pandemic insisting that children couldn't spread covid
I came here to say that so so many news articles keep saying that COVID isn't dangerous for children, and the scientific literature had debunked this so hard is embarrassing.
Public schools (and buses, and auditoriums, and stadiums, and so on and so on) are petri dishes.
I'm not surprised. Children are usually a major disease vector in a lot of airborne diseases.
It's okay though, kids can't catch covid, and if they catch covid they can't spread covid, and at any rate they won't be harmed by covid. You can trust me I'm a government official!
HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAATE
Or the very fucked up one that's happening right now - Kids won't suffer any long-term effects from covid.
[he/him] Study makes a lot of sense, not here to comment on that... Been reading what some people have said here on Emily Oster, and I cannot agree, although I can understand how you may have reached that conclusion. I sincerely feel from she is making an earnest attempt to bring people the best facts we have on an issue, and help them make their own decision. Sorry for wasting your time. She has changed the way I try to frame my decision making so I couldn't not look into what everyone was saying, and I couldn't not say what I found cus this was stressful.
People I know who have been pregnant, and especially those who have had difficult pregnancies, have found Oster's book Expecting Better to be a breath of fresh air. But the individualistic approach to personal risk assessment completely falls apart when it comes to contagion, and Oster's work on Covid has gotten people killed. From a critique published not long after the vaccine rollout:
Part of the reason that COVID-19 has been such a massive crisis in the United States is a focus on technocratic, individual-level, consumer-choice responses at the expense of centrally planned collective action to reduce transmission (i.e., emphasis on individual choices to wear a mask and “maintain social distance,” instead of short but comprehensive shutdowns of non-essential businesses and activities with social support). This hyper-individualistic focus is common in economics, in epidemiology, and in many of the quantitative social sciences whose tools and expertise have been marshaled to respond to the pandemic—the article is just a particularly extreme example.
Analogies and metaphors are indispensable, especially in a time of global public health emergency, for communicating science to laypeople and scientists alike. However, as mathematician Norbert Wiener warned, “the price of metaphor is eternal vigilance.” While the unvaccinated-kid-as-vaccinated-grandparent analogy communicates one essential truth (low risk to most individual children), it omits another, equally essential truth—a high risk of transmission to others.
I agree with you, every individual making individual choices that are best for them breaks down in the context of a global pandemic, 100%. I do think you miss something though. We all can, do, and should apply a scaled up version of the same framework.
How many additional covid deaths we are willing to tolerate in exchange for something else will vary by person. We vote/act politically to attempt to move towards our preferred outcome. Chosing 0 deaths is likely too costly in other ways to be acceptable for most, and choose to have no restriction with no available protections would likely cause too many deaths to be acceptable to most people. We make similar choices as a society in other contexts. We, for example, have not banned cars dispite the benefits this might bring. Too many people enjoy the benefits of cars too much to accept this trade off.
I cannot blame her for being focused on individual impacts when she had specialized in this from her books. She did call out other individual risks in making this decision. I do think it could be considered a fair criticism to at least not call out the sociatal risk when talking about individual choices in that article.... Just not one where it's fair to say it makes her so evil Satan would be uncomfortable with her in hell. I think it can be hard for us to remember what we knew and where we were back in March 2021.
She seems pretty suspicious just off of her covid "work." She's written most her books about children, actually has children too, and we're expected to believe she actually believed that schools wouldn't be covid hotspots? How'd she change the way you frame decision making anyways?
From what I've read on what people have linked here, she attempted to determine how bad it would be for children spcifficly in aggregate, which is a different question with a potentially different answer.
For decion making, I usused to assume that I could just gather enough facts, and then a single right decision would emerge. And if others made different decisions, they were wrong. We should all try to gather accurate information, but we could still make different decisions or conclusions, and knowing this has helped me to not get decision paralesis at times, and has helped me understand and accept people making other choices than I did at times. One example would be sleep training your child. I will plan to do this, others will not. They are not bad parents for making that choice.
Emily Oster
She's earnestly attempting to spread the bountiful gifts of her lord Nurgle, Grandfather of plagues. Ia! Ia!
JE Goldman Sachs University Professor of Economics and International and Public Affairs at Brown University,
Jesus fucking christ you're taking advice from people Satan wouldn't let in to Hell.
