Tweet [1]
… is from page 55 of Gigi Foster’s, Paul Frijters’s, and Michael Baker’s 2021 book, The Great Covid Panic [2]:
The desperate need by authorities and their advisors to be seen to have made the right call no matter what course of action they took undermined our ability to learn what was going on and consider appropriate responses. It is very difficult to publicly change your mind and backtrack on something once you make a pretence of certainty in the first instance. Covid politicians felt the need to exude utter and complete confidence in the measures they were taking, thereby making true deliberations impossible at a broader societal level going forward. This made their societies, our societies, slow learners and slow adapters.