I lived in the US for most of the past decade and a half so I understand how and why this thing has been politicized. I also understand the allure of anti-establishment thinking in the low carb community.
Anti-establishment is one thing. But anti-science is quite another.
I have already lost respect for one particular low carb expert who’s ranting about how the response to covid has been a gigantic overreaction.
Now, I’m quite happy to stipulate that a range of different policies are justifiable – everything from elimination to suppression to the much more lax suppression strategy of a country like Sweden that is commonly called “herd immunity.” But the fact is that even the conspiracy theorists’ precious Sweden has a 50 person limit to gatherings, and they’ve issued strong guidelines to a highly compliant population, leading to a 70% decline in foot traffic in the city center. So not even Sweden thought it a good idea to just let this thing “run its course.”
It was very clear that, had we let the virus just run, it would have been an unmitigated global disaster. You can post the occasional rant from some YouTuber, or some outlier doctor, but then you’re less like a Tim Noakes and more like a climate skeptic or a flat earther. And it’s fine if you don’t believe in a round earth or in climate change, but then you can’t claim to care much about science and I have no idea why you would keep a low carb diet.
The thing about keto is, it works. The thing about believing that lockdowns are an overreaction is that, well, just wait till a few weeks after your state prematurely comes out of lockdown and talk to us then. It’s not evidence-based policy, it’s politics.
I don’t know how to end this except to say: I have no political agenda. Personally I think it’s clear that Taiwan won covid-19, but then they never even had a lockdown. As for every other country, I think Sweden has a point when it says that you can’t evaluate its approach until a year or 18 months from now, but they’re running a very dangerous experiment, the outcome of which is completely uncertain and could be different if it were implemented in different countries.
Lockdowns DO make sense; we’ve had phenomenal success with them for centuries and even millennia, and to argue that the health authorities are out of their minds to implement lockdowns is to engage in pseudoscience. Temporary lockdown is a perfectly reasonable strategy for cutting the legs out from under an uncontrolled epidemic. Along with masks, mass testing, good hygiene, and a range of other measures, lockdown is a critical tool in our arsenal against this thing.