Trust erosion

 A very good tweet thread on the erosion of trust in media and the public health sector.

1/ Thread. I know I am talking here mostly to the 4 walls, but as an exercise I’ll tweet these thoughts and if you are one of the few to read it, thank you.

We are often told to “trust the science,” but the science of trust is to earn it; you can’t force people to trust you.

— Yossi Gestetner (@YossiGestetner) December 27, 2021

Click for the whole thread.

Since there is a reasonable probability that the tech sensors might take down the thread, here is the unrolled substance, absent the gifs, videos, and links.  

1/ Thread. I know I am talking here mostly to the 4 walls, but as an exercise I’ll tweet these thoughts and if you are one of the few to read it, thank you.

We are often told to “trust the science,” but the science of trust is to earn it; you can’t force people to trust you.  

 

2. In recent years, however, little has been done to earn the public’s trust. For starters, there is no THE science as science is a developing thing. What’s more, to claim “the science is settled” is strange as science as a topic is about constant study.

How can it be settled?  

 

3/ Besides, if you have the numbers, show it. Why do you need to ask for people to trust it? Furthermore, many people “trust” “the” science, but they just distrust your policy solutions to the science and your motives behind ths policies that you want to impose on the public.  

 

4/ Lack of trust-building has been ongoing during the COVID-19 outbreak. For starters, how many times have you seen @ScottGottliebMD referred to in media only or mainly with the impartial-sounding title of “Former FDA Commissioner” without being told that he is on Pfizer’s board?  

 

5/ I don’t mind Scott earning a living and selling books from his past work, but when media - the alleged anchors of truth - propagandize you on such basic stuff, how do you want the public to “trust”? I know that some shows/articles also add that Scott is on Pfizer’s board, 

 

6/ but it’s not on all TV appearances and news articles, and his former work is mostly in the lead. As a “Former FDA Commissioner” you assume that he has different interests or obligations than as a board member of a C19 producer but you keep getting his former tittle, mostly.  

 

7/ Also, @ScottGottliebMD joined Pfizer’s board a few months after leaving his FDA post. Similar goes for Trump’s last FDA commissioner Stephen Hahn who months after leaving his post took a job with the company that “launched Moderna.”

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8/ As humans, the opinion of current senior FDA/CDC staffers on Pharma issues likely gets blurred by the propect of prestigious, publicity-generating, well-paying jobs in Pharma waiting for them within months of leaving government.

Yet you want us to “trust” blindfolded? Please.  

 

9/ In addition to being led by their “Former FDA tittle” and often no mention of their current work, few-if-any TV hosts or news articles tell you how soon after their FDA jobs, Hahn and Gottlieb joined these companies, but “trust” in and by those health reporters is demanded.  

 

10/ Then there is gaslighting that anyone who focuses a minute can see. In the early months of COVID, there was a debate if HCQ helps reduce the impact of COVID if given early. Again, helps reduce impact; not a guarantee/cure, and if given early; not given late. To “debunk” this,  

 

11/ we were flooded with rapid studies that HCQ helps little if given in hospital and therefore let’s LOL at the claim that HCQ can help when given early.

I don’t know if/how much it helps, but did you get the slight of hand? EARLY use got “debunked” by late use studies.

Trust.  

 

12/ Fauci’s agency pulled an early-use study of HCQ in June 2020 because it could not find more than 20 people for the study.

(Read the screen grabs.)

How do you not find more that 20 people? How do you not study this while claiming on TV that it has little use?

Trust.

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13/ Basically, many doctors claimed that if given early it can help; not a cure but can help. Instead of studying it and throwing it at COVID to mitigate its impact FWIW, we got rapid studies about late-use; Fauci’s agency pulled its study; doctors shunned, people’s SM suspended.  

 

14/ Another place of distrust during the COVID-19 pandemic was the encouragement of and response to protests for George Floyd in May-June 2020. For months, we were told that life needs to be slowed down or even shutdown to slow the spread. But when Floyd protests took off,  

 

15/ without distancing and people singing/shouting in close proximity to each other, elected and government officials backed it while kids who are at the lowest age-risk group for COVID suffering were out of schools; patients left alone at hospitals and funerals delayed. 

16/ Fauci who opined about Church singing and other things that needed to stop, was asked about the protests at a Congressional Hearing by @Jim_Jordan in July 2020, but for a sustained five minutes he refused to say that those protests should not happen.

17/ A more egregious instance of trust-busting especially surrounding COVID-19, was the announcement yesterday from the CDC that isolation can be cut from 10 days to 5 in asymptomatic people. The CDC wrote that “the change is motivated by science,” as you can see in the attached:

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18/ Right after seeing the news that it was “motivated by science,” I tweeted “who ran the study? What are the results? Why the change now and not 6-12-18 months ago?”

Well, read the attached of what Fauci admitted today about the change:

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19/ Fauci says “the reason [for the change] is that with the sheer volume of new cases that we are having and that we expect to continue with Omicron, one of the things we want to be careful of is that we don’t have so many people out [of work].”

(Video credit: CNN)  

 

20/ This isn’t just that Fauci’s reasoning (jobs/society) contradicts the CDC’s reasoning (the science that we need to trust).

It’s much worse on many levels. It shows that the allegedly “science-motivated” CDC can change rules and suddenly for economic reasons.  

 

21/ It shows that the for 21 months we were supposed to abide by a rule that could have long been changed if the CDC/Fauci decided that the economy is more important than the risk of spread by asymptomatic people. (Imagine the impact on the elections if this was changed Aug ‘20.)  

 

22/ It shows that those who were shunned & banned for yelling against locking asymptomatic people up for 14 days had a point.

IN FACT: Early in the outbreak, Fauci said that never in such outbreaks were asymptomatic the driver of spread (yet people were banned for saying this)!  

 

23/ Then there is this; fresh today Dec 29, 2021. CDC removes the rule to test at the end of isolation because some people’s PCR can be positive 12 weeks after infection; meaning, that it’s an irrelevant positive. I read of this last year already, but such claims were censored.

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24/ The latest makes you ask why was this not known 6, 12, 18 months ago? Or… maybe it was known yet rules were still kept in place at the levels that they were due to other reasons.

“Oh, conspiracies.”

Name-calling and dismissing glaring confusions doesn’t build trust. 

25/

The reasons for isolation being cut from ten days to five days🔻🔻

CDC Statement Monday: “The change is motivated by science.”

Fauci Tuesday: Society needs to function.

The @CDCDirector Wednesday: Science and because people were anyway ignoring the guidelines.

Trust. 

26/ CDC guidelines now is you can leave quarantine if your “symptoms are resolving” as defined by not having fever for 24 hours; days after saying that only asymptomatic people can leave — a change that had diff explanations why it was made.

H/T @CT_Bergstrom via @disclosetv

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27/ The rapidly-changing rules and the changing reasons are not the only things that bust trust.

The current rule of “symptoms are resolving” was made without the page saying on top that this is a change from the initial release.

(Left original release; right the revised one).

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28/ Another place of trust-busting is the disregard for healthy living in the context of COVID’s impact.

Accounts have been suspended for saying that living healthier is a plus; not a guarantee but a plus. Pre-COVID this was normal talk.

Fauci, 2019:

29/ Did you watch that?

When asked in 2019 how to prevent getting an infectious disease in need of doctor care, Fauci lists healthy living items such as good died/exercise/sleep and avoiding alcohol/smoking.

You get booted off SM for saying it in the context of COVID—19.  

 

30/ Choking off any talk of health in context of helping mitigate the impact of Coronavirus is done despite the fact that an overwhelming majority of COVID deaths were in deep seniors and/or people with other health issues including issues caused or made worse from life choices.  

 

31/ There is also ZERO focus on care once infected.

Of the TWO HUNDRED EIGHTY tweets and retweets from @CDCgov in Dec 2021, NONE mentioned care such as Monoclonal AntiBodies (MAB).

One tweet said what to do if infected with a link that instructed isolation.

Nothing more:

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32/ In September 2020, Fauci said "if you are deficient in vitamin D, that does have an impact on your susceptibility to infection. So I would not mind recommending, and I do it myself taking vitamin D supplements.”

Why dons’t he, @CDCDirector, @CDCgov say or tweet this weekly?

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33/ In the same September 2020 interview, Fauci said that vitamin C is "a good antioxidant… So if people want to take a gram or two at the most [of] vitamin C, that would be fine.”

He rarely says this. Why?

Big Tech has dropped people for pushing the same. Why?

But Trust.

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34/ I want to wind this thread down because it’s long and thank you to all those who read until here and to those who shared it, but let me raise a final gaslighting point that keeps being made by officials and pundits in a way that treats the public as dumb idiots.  

 

35/ Some people oppose vaxx mandates despite taking the vaccines. Others support mandates for adults especially for seniors but reject it for kids. In almost two years of data, 66,234 kids in the US died of all causes; 678 was COVID-related.

That’s 1.02% of children deaths.

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36/ As a counter to rejecting C19 vaccine mandates especially on kids, we are told that “vaccine mandates in schools are nothing new. We have them on Polio, Measles Mumps Rubella (MMR) and on many other things, therefore we can have it on Coronavirus too.”

Wait what?  

 

37/ Most mandated vaccines in schools are for illnesses that mostly impact kids; unlike COVID-19 where kids are less than 0.10% of US COVID deaths (see above chart). Those vaccines were also generally mandated only after years in the field; not less than a year since production.  

 

38/ Another diff is that mandated vaccines are usually a few shots and done. We don’t need a second booster 12 months out without knowing how things will be 18 months out. Yet officials and pundits keep comparing C19 shots to the others as if we can’t see the difference.

Trust.  

 

39/40 In closing, the upside of me talking to the four walls is that I am not relevant enough here to be flagged and tagged for “disinformation” which as this thread shows is slapped onto accounts who share long-standing, documented facts. Substack. —>

Yossi Gestetner | Substack

US Current Events; Focused on Politics and Economics. Click to read Yossi Gestetner, a Substack publication with hundreds of readers.

https://rb.gy/bonvh1 

 

40/40 Don’t expect staff at big media to retweet this the way they do troll tweets by small time accounts who repeat @maddow because if “media” were not mostly propagandists, this thread wouldn’t have samples to show, and COVID-19 rhetoric and rules would be totally different.