Hacker News Reader

Comment by cultureulterior | Hacker News Reader

That's what they said about masks, and that turned out to be wrong too. Assuming that people are idiots never helps

In UI design, I've found that "idiot" is not that useful a concept. I think its more useful to think through particular thought processes.

A mask is

1. A constant reminder of the presence of the pandemic.

2. Fallible in ways that humans can easily visualise.

Vaccines on the other hand are indistinguishable from magic.

But you have some broad idea if a mask is having some effect (e.g. if your mouth and nose are tightly covered). With a vaccine, the protection or lack thereof is invisible to you and others.

Anyone who's been getting flu vaccines surely has a pretty good idea how ineffective they can be.

Flu vaccines are effective — but the government has to try to predict which specific strains of flu will be active that season. If they mispredict, you might get the flu despite having the vaccine since you got a different strain.

For COVID-19, there is a known set of strains that hopefully won't change. So a vaccine targeted towards that set should work, at least temporarily.

The following is just me speculating: from what I have heard, coronaviruses are called such because of distinctive proteins on the outside of the cell that are hard for the virus to change. If a vaccine elicited an immune response to target such a protein, then it should be effective for all the strains.

My point was not that Covid vaccines will be ineffective, just that people have relatively little faith in flu vaccines right now (although I still get one every year, because better than nothing).

And I think people will see a covid vaccine as more like a flu vaccine than an MMR vaccine.

It's invisible to you until you actually realize it's (partly or fully) ineffective by getting sick. With a mask, you have some general idea well before you'd actually get sick. You can see if someone's wearing a mask properly, but you can't analyze their immune cells and the specific pathogen strains they might be exposed to.

"they" (who?) said that ppe was in short supply and should be reserved for medical personnel.

Well obviously this depends on what you mean by "they". But a leading narrative during the early part of the pandemic was that masks were not good, for various reasons, one of which was that they didn't actually offer protection, but people think that they do, so people will be less careful.

This was so much part of the narrative that there were later pieces about how bad this narrative ended up being, e.g. in the NYTimes.

So for sure, it was a real thing.

Assuming that people will behave responsibly doesn't have a great track record either.

Err, what do you mean? Mask usage in the US is extremely dependent on what municipality you live in, both legally and culturally. I'd say assuming people are idiots would have been very welcome at the start of this. It's a major reason why we are the worst-hit country in the world.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com