As a connoisseur of respiratory viruses, having spent a decade or two in deep, meaningful relationships with them, I had to laugh when I saw this.
"The science has changed." @DrLeanaWen explains why she supports lifting some pandemic restrictions and thinks the decision to wear a mask should shift from a government mandate to an individual choice. pic.twitter.com/vaiybBBF2b
— Anderson Cooper 360° (@AC360) February 8, 2022
Having been a marketing and sales dilettante for a year or twenty, allow me to say that this is not how the game is played, children. Here are the infection rates for a randomly chosen state since the start of the Wuhan Flu pandemic.
The shape looks like every other airborne virus pandemic ever as it evolves and mutates. Whether it was the seasonal flu of 1976 or the stomach flu of 1998 or the common cold that descends like the fog every winter, that's what airborne viruses do.
Also, virions, the free-floating viruses, are really, really small. Like smaller than a toy poodle small. And that's they way they've been since ... well, since forever. In fact, they're so small that they can float right through a cloth mask. You can look up the width of the gaps in the cloth weave and the size of the virions and figure out that the weave is little more than an orange safety cone in the middle of a four-lane highway to the virions.
Then we get to the at-risk groups. We had that figured out two months or so into this thing. Some viruses go after kids. Those were the ones that I enjoyed when I was a tot. The WuFlu viruses went after the old and the fat. The less fat and old you were, the less risk you had. If you were very young, you wouldn't have known anything was happening if it hadn't been for the Elites screaming at you about ScIEncE. SciEnCE, which, apparently, has now changed.
Right.
The Marketing And Sales Angle
By now, all but the most neurotic of the neurotic wine moms has figured out that the Elites have been lying to them all along. Sometimes, an organization will do this. Sometimes there are good, short-term reasons to lie to everyone. Most of the time, there aren't. In any case, after you've had a good lying session with your customers and they've been screwed out of two years of their lives, their businesses have been ruined and their children traumatized, there are some well-accepted guidelines for recovering whatever trust you can. Here's one good take on it and here's another.
A broad summary looks like this.
- Acknowledge your mistakes.
- Apologize to your customers.
- Listen to their complaints and create a summary of the key points.
- Incorporate the expressed rage into a new approach to everything.
- Get going on having an honest relationship with your customers
as if you actually respect the worthless sacks of filthand treat them with the respect they deserve.
Notice that at no point do you come out with, "the science has changed." That's called "lying some more." At some point in time, you will have to start being honest. Throwing up your hands and figuring that you've burned your credibility to the ground, what could a little more scorn for your customers hurt, is not the answer.
4 comments:
I think the idea about the masks is that virions often travel often travel in water droplets, water droplets that are expelled when you talk or blow your nose or maybe even breath. So while a mask won't stop a free floating virion, it will stop a water droplet. Anyway, I think that's the theory.
The other rumor I've heard is that these virions won't survive in places with a temperature different than human body temperature for very long, which is why you don't really need to worry about free floating virions. Should any escape from you, by the time they travel 6 feet in 72 degree air, they will have expired.
But all that's irrelevant. The masks are stupid and the lockdowns are ridiculous and awful. If Congress wanted to give Pfizer a zillion dollars, they should have just given it to them and not bothered the rest of us with this panic driven stupidity.
A couple of points...
You said “We had that [the risk groups] figured out two months or so into this thing.” It was shorter than that. Goober Noisome shut CA down starting on March 13, 2020. I wrote a post on April 19 which clearly indicated that the best plan would be to avoid infecting those with those same risk factors. [A slight pause while I hoist myself upon my shoulders and parade myself up and down the neighborhood in triumph.... OK, I’m back now.]. Seriously, it took about 5 weeks to have the obvious connection confirmed by data (The ScIeNcE!). Nonetheless, our super smart elites never figured this basic bit of science out.
The other thing I don’t understand why they are saying “the ScIeNcE has changed”. As you point out, it hasn’t. They should say “now that the ViRuS has changed, we no longer need the mandates and restrictions.”
By the way... in San Diego county they have done genetic analysis on just over 4,000 cases that have been identified as Omnicorn. Of those only one (1) has died (in the previous report they’d found over 3,000 cases and had no deaths). So let’s assume that is the death rate. If the entire US Population (330 million) came down with Omnicorn, we’d expect about 82,500 deaths. The last ten recorded years of flu deaths ranged from 12,000 to 61,000. So it seems that Omnicorn is a bad flu, but that’s all it is.
I think that one thing we have learned from the masks/vaccine debacle (or rather, been reminded of, because we really should all know this by now) is that you can't solve a problem by ordering people to change their behavior or do something inconvenient. Pretty much everyone resents being told that they have to change, and at least a quarter of the population resents it to the extent that they will intentionally do the opposite of what you tell them.
And I think we need to remember that this applies to every proposed solution to a social problem that involves telling people that they need to change. It doesn't matter if you are pushing conservative solutions to problems, or liberal solutions to problems. The thing that will stop people from following your solution is the "pushing" part, not whether it is a liberal or a conservative policy.
==As a connoisseur of respiratory viruses, having spent a decade or two in deep, meaningful relationships with them, ...==
I can relate. I suspect that that's what will finally take me out.
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