A problem is also that both anti-vaxxers and climate change deniers have a tendency to interpret any nuanced discussion as proof that the expert don't know either and therefore it's all a lie. It's an incredibly destructive attitude to any honest discourse.
But you can't negate the fact that we have also been told a lot of bullshit. I remember the same speech in Jan 2022 where the health minister of France explained that covid was dangerous for children and therefore they will mandate vaccinating children, immediately followed by the minister of education explaining that covid isn't dangerous for children, that the number of children hospitalised for covid is less than for rare diseases, and therefore they will keep schools open during the covid wave.
That's exactly my point: if you demand that people only speak absolute truths and take any disagreement as a sign that people are intentionally lying, then you're killing any honest constructive discussion.
Clearly there was a disagreement about the danger it posed to children, and perhaps more importantly: the danger that infected children would pose for the adults around them. Because that's another frequently ignored issue: vaccination is not just about protecting the individual, but about protecting the community.
But that disagreement doesn't mean that someone is lying, and it certainly doesn't mean that everything is bullshit. It means that people disagree. And with a very new disease, that shouldn't really be a surprise to anyone. Now there was clearly also a lot of misinformation from various sources, including sometimes governments, but the only way to deal with that and figure out what's what is honest, open discussion by people who know what they're talking about.
Stop demanding absolutely truths about things we cannot yet know, and instead try to think constructively about what would be the best thing to do considering the lack of information we have to deal with.
And what's bullshit about that? Did you expect French politicians to be all-knowing robots who can never be wrong?
This sounds like a run-of-the-mill political debate that hopefully in the end was decided on the basis of an expert panel. (And no, of course, medical experts are also not infallible. I don't think we have investigated a disease and responded to it as fast as to this one ever before in the history of mankind, so there were bound to be made some wrong or misleading hypotheses.)
>> Did you expect French politicians to be all-knowing robots who can never be wrong?
I would expect government members making decisions to consult expert virologists/epidemiologists first. The fact that they can make two contradictory statements means that either they did not consult any experts, or they consulted different experts, which means there is no consensus among experts on the topic.
Incorrect logic. One of the French politicians could have consulted experts and the other one might not, for instance. That's not uncommon. In other countries that happened all the time, think about Donald Trump musing about injecting bleach to kill the virus. Personally, I'd vote for the politicians who follow expert advise in such matters.
