21 symptoms of bad public health thinking

From A checklist for COVID policy by Vinay Prasad.  The subheading is How to know someone's brain is working.

A rundown of what most people in the empirical and evidentiary community have been saying since April 2020.  At every step of the way through Covid-19, our public health leaders have almost uniformly always made the wrong decision by ignoring past experience, then existing policies, the emerging data and the experience in other developed countries.  From January to March, there is plenty of lattitude for forgiveness owing to an uncertain assessment of the threat and a sparsity of contemporary data.  From April to June, the evidence was becoming available and matched past experiences.  After June 2020, there was not much excuse for the bad choices made.

He lists 21 items:

These were issues that were not just obvious in retrospect but at the time. A simple test for who knows what they're talking about.

It is astonishing how many government institutions are continuing to double down on bad policies which are now known without doubt to be unwise and ineffective.

Anyone espousing any of the 21 items should be suspect as not having an empirical or evidentiary focus.