The Greatest Hopium Deals of the Covid-19 Pandemic
These people were often wrong when talking about the pandemic. Wrong predictions, impotent countermeasures. Are you still being tricked into a delusional hope?
What is this thing you sold me? Hopium? It feels good.
In the span of two years, the world has drastically changed. Many people have died, and those who haven’t are certainly stressed out. Businesses have collapsed, and it would be a massive understatement to say that supply chains are extremely strained.
In such dire circumstances, it is tempting to take the optimistic mindset and hope for a better outcome. But when hope is short-lived like the dopamine hit of a heroin addict, it is hopium — an addictive drug for people despairing about their future.
Hope is not the same as hopium. We can find a real sense of hope if an optimistic claim is supported by early evidence or a strong theoretical basis. But the complexity of the pandemic has shown us that it is hard to get the facts right, and the consequences of our errors can be extreme. It is no surprise then, that hopium has truly flooded the streets.
How do we know if we are being sold hope or hopium? It’s an important question to ask when we are trying to navigate this pandemic. If we think that the pandemic will be largely over by a certain date and it isn’t, our life plans might go up in smoke. And if we think that the virus is becoming irrelevant and we later catch it, we might turn out to be wrong and get seriously hurt.
Is it hopium or not? Examples of claims that did not age well.
There have been numerous examples of incorrect claims from the media and public figures. Were those claims reasonable to make, given the available information at the time? (Avoid hindsight bias!) Or were these hopium deals? You be the judge.
Example 1: No clear evidence of human-to-human transmission (Jan 14, 2020).
On January 23, 2020, Wuhan would go on to have its first lockdown.
Example 2: Covid-19 is NOT airborne (Feb 11, 2020)
The World Health Organisation did not specify the transmission route of Covid-19 as “airborne”, instead favouring the droplet theory of transmission.
Which they’ve now backtracked, placing droplet transmission BEHIND airborne transmission.
Here is another tweet from March 29, 2020, where the WHO denies airborne transmission. Notice how there’s no mention of masks or ventilation, which are now standard countermeasures against transmission in 2022.
Why did they make this claim in the first place? Did they have some sort of evidence?
Example 3: The virus will disappear in the summer
The virus will be eliminated in one summer? Most people didn’t fall for this one.
Example 4: Trump calls the end of the pandemic, February 26, 2020.
Nobody believed this. There are too many similar examples. Here is a timeline documenting the finest hopium deals from the Donald himself. How’s that for the Art of the Deal?
Example 5: Little to no evidence of major transmission in schools
I never understood why people thought that viruses would suddenly stop with the kids at school. And why did people suddenly forget about this (not relevant in Jan 2022)? Did hopium come with amnesia as a side-effect? It is plausible, considering some more recent findings…
Here’s a Reddit thread from a student in NYC describing the chaos. And here’s a video of US students leaving school. Over a year later, it turns out that schools are messed up.
And the possibility of returning to normal school life is still floated to this day, with a group of doctors releasing an “advocacy toolkit” to help schools to reopen. Is this hopium?
Example 6: Vaccines will end the pandemic
After the 2020 presidential election, Joe Biden pressed on with Trump’s vaccine plan, in an attempt to return the country to normal. On March 11, 2021, Biden announced vaccine eligibility for all Americans, a plan that, as stated at the time, “puts the nation on a path to get closer to normal by July 4th.”
By July 4, Biden addressed the country.
“This year, the Fourth of July is a day of special celebration, for we are emerging from the darkness of years; a year of pandemic and isolation; a year of pain, fear, and heartbreaking loss.” — Remarks by President Biden Celebrating Independence Day and Independence from COVID-19
And right after, the Delta variant ripped through the country.
The Biden administration was all-in on the vaccine strategy. They even allowed the vaccinated to stop wearing masks.
Vaccinated Americans could take their masks off with little to no risk of spreading the virus, she said. — From the New York Times article.
The Biden team thought the vaccine would prevent transmission. Needless to say, the plan did NOT end the outbreak in the USA. Then they went on to say this:
For the unvaccinated, you’re looking at a winter of severe illness and death for yourselves, your families, and the hospitals you may soon overwhelm. — From a White House Press Briefing, Dec 17, 2021. (Prior to imminent Omicron outbreak, not Delta)
Signs of hopium withdrawal, perhaps?
The USA was not alone in relying on vaccines. Australia relied on vaccines to get out of their Delta outbreak, which had overwhelmed the covid-zero strategy supported by contact-tracing/lockdown. At the time, the government relied on the “Doherty modeling”, which informed a multi-stage plan to end the lockdown, while leaving a manageable number of cases and hospitalisations. This required vaccination targets of 70-80% to safely open up. The original report was released on August 3, 2021. Five months later, Omicron arrives and we seem to have amnesia.
“Emergence of ‘vaccine escape’ variants will require re-evaluation of targets and associated requirements for public health measures.” — From the original August 3 report.
Did Australia safely open up? The government failed to anticipate a more transmissible Omicron variant and didn’t secure a supply of rapid tests in response to warnings. Rapid tests quickly fell into a massive shortage. Hospital capacity couldn’t keep up, with staff leave being cancelled and non-urgent care postponed or canceled. And if that doesn’t sound extremely bad, then I’d actually agree. One reason why it hasn’t been worse is because of self-imposed lockdown.
“Many people in self-imposed isolation cited as motivation not wanting to add to the strain on the health system and its capacity to provide care to those that need it.”
Politicians keep putting all their faith in a strategy based around a vaccine, which to be fair, was highly effective against earlier variants. But why was an eventual failure surprising? Vaccine escape is not a secret. Is it a hopium-fuelled bet against evolution?
Example 8: The virus is getting milder over time
I’m going over some theory here, because people frequently invoke science on this issue.
It is a common belief that pathogens evolve to be milder. The belief is that it is counter-productive for a virus to kill a patient and prevent its own transmission to new hosts. This is the avirulence hypothesis, and it seems to make sense to a lot of people. However, this narrative is incomplete. A more plausible evolutionary theory that I’ve come across is the virulence-transmission trade-off hypothesis. It is important to note that this was the idea that displaced the avirulence hypothesis. But somehow, this has only been whispered, instead of being widely recognized in the public discourse.
The trade-off hypothesis simply states that virulence is a consequence of increased intra-host replication via the exploitation of a host’s resources. Increased intra-host replication is an evolutionary benefit only if does not jeopardize the virus’ ability to jump across hosts (inter-host transmission). Hence, the optimal virus balances evolutionary benefits and costs, maximizing overall transmissibility with an intermediate level of virulence (ie. very sick, but not enough to suddenly drop dead). Given the speed of COVID-19 spread, I’d say that we are nowhere near the point where an increased virulence of COVID-19 would harm its ability to jump between hosts. And this is problematic, as this would suggest that COVID-19 is on a trajectory of greater virulence.
I’m sure the true picture is more complex than this. Even the evidence for the trade-off hypothesis is mixed. In addition, it’s hard to know how virulence will evolve when factoring in past infections and vaccines. This issue deserves more research and discussion than the hopium being sold by politically-motivated individuals with an agenda.
What has the real-world data shown so far?
People claimed that Omicron was a step towards mildness, and that is true in some sense. But Omicron is only a step down from Delta. People have forgotten that Delta was a massive step up from Alpha and the ancestral virus in Wuhan. In the bigger picture, we could still be on the uptrend. In addition, we have to remember that evolution is ultimately a random process in the short-term. Omicron doesn’t fully invalidate a prediction that the virus will evolve towards greater (intrinsic) virulence.
Example 8: [insert current wave] will be the end of the pandemic.
I’ve heard this “herd immunity” claim multiple times during this pandemic, and I’m sure we will continue to hear it in the future. I‘m not putting all my hopes on it. None of the previous waves led to sufficient herd immunity, and evolution exists. We already know people are getting re-infected and new variants have constantly shown up, evading immunity.
There are so many more examples of poorly-aged predictions/things we just forgot (is Hydroxycholoquine and Ivermectin still a thing?). It’s too hard to compile all of them, especially when these predictions were made by large groups of small-time commentators.
Was it all hopium? Or were people being reasonable, and getting bad luck?
Staying Clean From Hopium
A drug addict does not keep track of the number of times they have taken drugs in the past. They are only focused on getting their next fix. Similarly, we seem to be re-writing history and forgetting about all the past errors, while clinging onto questionable claims (usually about the near future) in a desperate attempt to free us from the pandemic. As we continue on this perilous journey, it is important to stay clean from hopium.
Who are the hopium dealers?
Anyone can be a hopium dealer. Even you and me. It doesn’t require a sinister motivation. In fact, it’s not even clear what is and isn’t hopium. Some recreational drugs are used medically too (eg. methamphetamines).
But there are some common places to find hopium.
- Hopium dealers are everywhere on the “streets” of social media. These people are most commonly in places such as Facebook and Twitter. These people are usually ordinary people, who get their product from thin air, or from dubious “authority figures”, or “credential flashers” (eg. someone who puts MD in their profile but has a horrible track record of predictions).
- “Credential flashers” are major hopium dealers. These people are harder to identify because they tend to blend in with real experts, who also have credentials. A similar group of hopium dealers is the political agitators, who are also highly active on social media and derive prominence from drumming up outrage amongst their followers. You can try to check their track record, but this is an inconvenient and long process.
- Public political figures will also sometimes sell hopium. It’s tough for them because there’s constant political pressure on them. They have limited budgets to work with, and they are surrounded by various lobby groups advocating for different plans. It’s hard to convince the public to follow their chosen strategy unless the authorities are confident in its success. Also, it’s just how politics works. Broken promises. No surprises there.
- Basically, anyone who forgets about evolution is dealing some quality hopium.
The real-world consequences of hopium
It’s frustrating to sort through hope and hopium. Sometimes people eventually turn out to be wrong, but their predictions were reasonable with the limited information available to them. And sometimes over-optimistic claims will turn out to be right, out of sheer luck. Either way, we shouldn’t gamble on where the pandemic is going. If we do, we face the possibility of reacting too late, instead of proactively preventing/preparing for dire circumstances. Being reactive is a big deal. It messes up supply chains and creates shortages of urgent resources. And it seems like people already know this, as there is demand for comprehensive long-term strategies to control outbreaks. Covid policy is getting politically contentious, and I fully expect future elections (in many countries) to be decided primarily on pandemic policy.
We need to avoid hopium. In the meantime, we will have to just protect ourselves and wait patiently for a better solution. And you don’t have to personally start a hopium war, as I’m sure you are already too tired of this shit.
There is hope.
(New generation of vaccines, new therapeutics against covid, better masks, more advanced countermeasures against airborne pathogens.)
