I don't understand how this happened. The C.D.C. literally has a manual on how to communicate effectively during an outbreak:
https://emergency.cdc.gov/cerc/ppt/cerc_2014edition_Copy.pdf
"Throughout this book, six principles of effective crisis and risk communication are emphasized:
1. Be First: Crises are time-sensitive. Communicating information quickly is almost always important. For members of the public, the first source of information often becomes the preferred source.
2. Be Right: Accuracy establishes credibility. Information can include what is known, what is not known, and what is being done to fill in the gaps.
3. Be Credible: Honesty and truthfulness should not be compromised during crises.
4. Express Empathy: Crises create harm, and the suffering should be acknowledged in words. Addressing what people are feeling, and the challenges they face, builds trust and rapport.
5. Promote Action: Giving people meaningful things to do calms anxiety, helps restore order, and promotes a restored sense of control.
6. Show Respect: Respectful communication is particularly important when people feel vulnerable. Respectful communication promotes cooperation and rapport."
You can say that again!
> 1. Be First: Crises are time-sensitive. Communicating information quickly is almost always important. For members of the public, the first source of information often becomes the preferred source.
Fauci saying masks don’t work before he said the opposite.
> 2. Be Right: Accuracy establishes credibility. Information can include what is known, what is not known, and what is being done to fill in the gaps.
Instead of saying they didn’t have enough information about outdoor transmission, they threw out the 10% number as a random CYA. See above about the first number being sticky.
> 3. Be Credible: Honesty and truthfulness should not be compromised during crises.
Fauci saying masks don’t work, and also the 10% number being thrown out there without caveating that it’s a wild ass guess.
> 4. Express Empathy: Crises create harm, and the suffering should be acknowledged in words. Addressing what people are feeling, and the challenges they face, builds trust and rapport.
Fauci berating people for being upset that their lives are being shut down by government orders.
> 6. Show Respect: Respectful communication is particularly important when people feel vulnerable. Respectful communication promotes cooperation and rapport.
Instead of respect, we got demonization of half the country.
I don't think this is entirely fair. I'd invite you to at least listen to what local public health officials were dealing with:
https://khn.org/news/article/public-health-officials-year-of...
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/736/the-herd
A significant and vocal portion of the country thinks its okay to bully and berate officials.
Anna Maria Barry-Jester: "People are not willing to be governed," at least not by officials who ask them to make sacrifices for their neighbors. And as a result, the officials, trying to govern us are quitting in droves. Since the beginning of the pandemic, nearly 250 public health officials working in communities all over the US have left their jobs, many because of threats and political pushback.
Nearly one in six Americans now lives in a community that has lost its local health department leader during the pandemic, officials like Mimi and Gail. It's the largest exodus of health officials in US history.
Also, some nursing schools have seen record applications, suggesting people actually want to help. You provide no scale for that 250 public health officials.
https://son.rochester.edu/newsroom/2020/record-breaking-enro...
It would be interesting to know why the CDC was chosen as the mechanism for this policy.
But NPR reveals some bias in a couple of instances. For example, they describe how the health officials had to rescind the order prohibiting people from being on the beach because it was impossible to enforce. An unasked question is whether an order to close beaches might have engendered skepticism of public health officials' judgement.
> “We don’t want people from higher-impact counties who maybe haven’t done as good a job as Santa Cruz has to come in and spread that virus,” Hart said. “In ordinary times, we love people coming in, right? Our economy is driven on tourism and agriculture. We want people here during normal times. This is not a normal time. So we don’t want those folks here from Sacramento or other areas,” Hart said.
> The law breakers have been all ages, but a few whom deputies caught were teens who gathered in a car near the beach and passed around a bong, Hart said.
https://santacruzlocal.org/2020/04/09/authorities-close-sant...
Maybe the officials should have left the beaches open and tried a message like "it's okay for Santa Cruz locals to go to the beach, but this thing spreads through the air in enclosed spaces, so please everyone take your own cars or drive with the windows open, and we don't want people from outside communities coming here and spreading the virus."
I believe health officials were generally operating in good faith. That doesn't mean they were always correct. I'd like to ask what they were thinking when they closed the beaches, but I don't think it was a simple calculation.
> I don't think this is entirely fair. I'd invite you to at least listen to what local public health officials were dealing with...
~Half the country was ~demonized (or more importantly: perceive themselves to have been demonized), or they were not. Whether it was ~justified is certainly relevant, but it has no bearing on the fact, and more importantly: the second order behavior that will result from that fact, perhaps for several years.
The CDC guidelines seem to have been written in a way that is mindful of this complexity, but it seems they were not followed for some reason (do you point your critical eye at these shortcomings, and with the same enthusiasm and scrutiny as you point it at the members of your outgroup?), which will likely have some negative consequences, most of which we will be completely oblivious to (not to worry though: we'll imagine plenty of others, and consider these imaginations to be reality).
> A significant and vocal portion of the country thinks its okay to bully and berate officials.
And whose fault is that, comprehensively and accurately? Is the suboptimal behavior of black people in inner city ghettos purely their fault? Should they just work hard and pull themselves up by their bootstraps? INB4: That's different! That's whataboutism! That is not comparable! Mother nature decides how reality unfolds, based on recursive causality far beyond our ability even conceive of, let alone measure and understand. You and I can only decide (to whatever degree we have free will) how we shall conceptualize the situation, and then how we shall act. One can perceive it simply, with a high level of confidence in the correctness of one's biased guesses, or one can exert effort to perceive it more accurately, closer to how it really is: unknown. Just as the people in the article have chosen a way to perceive reality (my guess: low complexity, high confidence), so too do you and I choose a way - and based on such choices, reality unfolds according to the laws of the universe - our respective agreement with how this is, is not a requirement.
Or, “I’ll do the job when it’s easy but when it’s hard, gosh I’m trying my best why won’t people just do what I say.”
The reason they’re saying it is pretty obvious to me - a lot of people that just had a cold in the past year think they had COVID. I had a friend that thought he had it twice before he actually did. Also if you didn’t get very sick you might not have had enough of an immune response to get all that immune.
If they explained that, it would be fine. Instead they’re basically doing misinformation of their own. My mother-in-law is concerned that I’m not getting the vaccine. I had COVID bad in December, and I have autoimmune issues so I’m not going to poke the proverbial bear unless I need to.
She also thinks that you’re only immune for three months if you actually got infected, but that’s the media’s fault. They ran all those stories about antibodies only lasting a few months without going in to details about memory T cells or the like.
It's also wrong regardless. "Three months" came from studies that only lasted three months / were early in the pandemic, and actually meant "at least three months".
There are newer ones now that say "at least 8 months", and even that is several-months old news.
Donald Trump had Covid19 and was later vaccinated and has the best medical care in the world. Do you think his doctors would have done so if they didn’t believe it was medically justified?
Except that he wasn't seen taking the vaccine. AFAIK, he's only once even mentioned it.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-covid-19-vaccine-january-...
https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/01/politics/trump-melania-vaccin...
He didn't appear in a PSA with former presidents:
https://www.abc4.com/coronavirus/watch-former-u-s-presidents...
Donald Trump is about the last person on earth I would point to as someone whose actions and motivations should be viewed as straightforward. He's been pumping the vaccines and trying to take credit for them ever since they were approved, and his making a big show of getting the vaccine can easily be viewed in that light.
There is definitely a lot more than 80. My impression is that the mRNA vaccines are more effective than natural immunity.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/can-you-get-covid-tw...
I don't think this is true:
https://theconversation.com/why-you-should-get-a-covid-19-va...
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/covid-reinfection...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27102006
> For previously infected people with autoimmune issues there is miniscule upside and some potentially significant downside to getting the shots.
I wasn't addressing that portion of AuryGlenz's comment. Obviously if you have an underlying condition, you should take that into account. The C.D.C. addresses autoimmune conditions here:
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/recommend...
> Donald Trump is about the last person on earth I would point to as someone whose actions and motivations should be viewed as straightforward. He's been pumping the vaccines and trying to take credit for them ever since they were approved, and his making a big show of getting the vaccine can easily be viewed in that light.
He didn't make a big show of it. He made no show of it at all. I'm not appealing to his judgement. I'm appealing to the judgement of his doctors.
Also, I’m far from an expert but wouldn’t the vaccines only produce antibodies for the spike protein as opposed to an actual infection producing antibodies for the spike protein and the virus itself?
I don't think that's true, certainly not to the point of “well established.”
Here's another source:
Which produces a stronger immune response: a natural infection or a vaccine?
The short answer: We don’t know. But Covid-19 vaccines have predictably prevented illness, and they are a far safer bet, experts said.
Vaccines for some pathogens, like pneumococcal bacteria, induce better immunity than the natural infection does. Early evidence suggests that the Covid-19 vaccines may fall into this category. Volunteers who received the Moderna shot had more antibodies — one marker of immune response — in their blood than did people who had been sick with Covid-19.
In other cases, however, a natural infection is more powerful than a vaccine. For example, having mumps — which can, in rare cases, cause fertility problems in men — generates lifelong immunity, but some people who have received one or two doses of the vaccine still get the disease.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/05/health/covid-natural-immu...
I am also not an expert, so my first link is to someone who is (an immunologist). She cites various sources for why she recommends still being vaccinated. Of course, while she is A doctor, she isn't your doctor.
What I think is that a lot of people posting here are certain they are right, while what most doctors seem to be saying is: "we're not certain, but vaccination is low risk and provides reliable immunity."
Now, those doctors aren't your doctors. They're making a general recommendation. Your doctor, knowing your specific health history, will likely be able to make a more informed recommendation.
Ultimately this is a cost/benefit analysis. There seems to be less benefit to being vaccinated for people who have previously been infected vs those who haven't. You need to weigh that smaller benefit against the risk of vaccination. If the risk of harm from vaccination is smaller than the risk of re-infection, isn't it still worth getting vaccinated?
Anyway, hacker news comments aren't medical advice and I am highly skeptical of folks posting here with such certainty about matters outside their expertise, especially about an emerging disease.
An I correct in remembering the CDC taking its talking points from the Chinese officials who had a vested interest in spreading disinformation and falsehoods about where and how the virus started?
I have the board game "pandemic" which came out some years before COVID, and I remember thinking about how cool the CDC was, as though it was one of the few agencies that had its shit somewhat together (the only other which springs to mind is NASA though no doubt NASA also has its share of mismanagement). Boy was I wrong.
Effectively, they're in-house politicians who serve the (PR) interests of elected politicians.
Actual independent health professionals aren't the ones doing the communication; and have been generally forbidden from doing so.
A less charitable/borderline hostile take: Biden is extremely likely to not run for re-election (due to his health), and has some extremely ambitious legislation he is pushing which will cement his legacy. He and his advisers don't believe they will maintain control of the House of Representatives in 2022, and are justifying many of these changes with the crisis of the pandemic. If the pandemic doesn't appear to be a crisis, the odds of this legislation being passed are lower.
Probably the most frustrating part of all of this is the fact that the April job's numbers (1 million jobs predicted, actual was a 1/4 of that) were hand-waved away with "people can't work when their kid's schools are shut", as if the administration hasn't helped justify schools remaining closed in certain states. (I live in Colorado, a blue state, and our schools have been open since January with no issues, as opposed to Oregon, where they are still closed.)
But his presidency broke so many people's brains that folks like yourself immediately read into any criticism of Biden as being motivated due to somebody being 'on the other side'.
I really don't care for the childish game of red blue sectarianism.
Complex topics require nuanced discussion. But instead it turns into the most base instinct form of information filtering, where folks look at who you are friends with or who you follow on Twitter and immediately dismiss any opinion you have based on that. It's incredibly low brow and anti-intellectual and I can't believe it's become such a popular form of debate on the left, like it already was on the right.
The things Trump did and said regarding the pandemic were so consistently and profoundly idiotic, they made the bumbling bureaucrats around him look like sages. And his empty threats and blustering emboldened them, and amplified the worst of the covid scolds in opposition.
Everything we can fault Fauci for is equally on Trump's head.
This is false. I live in Oregon and my kid's school has been open since February. Both our elementary school and middle school are dealing with a minor COVID-19 outbreak too and they're small schools in a very wealthy city (median household income is over 110k), so I question the authenticity of your "no issues" comment regarding Colorado schools.
EDIT: just checked, our local high school has more than double the cases of our elementary and middle school combined. Yeah I'm really doubting the "no issues" part, but I guess "issue" is relative
I'm sorry, but this is part of the misinformation. Of course there are positive cases of COVID in schools, and of course high schools (my son is a freshman) have higher rates. This is explained by the science, which clearly shows that high school age groups have dramatically higher rates of transmission.
It's more about the risks. All of the teachers in Colorado were prioritized for vaccines. They are all vaccinated in my county (Jefferson County, which has almost 600,000 residents). Which leaves the bigger question: What's the risk to the students, and to the people they can spread it to?
To the students, the data clearly shows that it's minimal, unless they have comorbidities.
According to the CDC's latest data, here: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#demographics
350 people between ages 5-17 have died of COVID in the US. This age group represents 16.3 percent of the US population, or roughly 56 million people.
You were correct that I was wrong about Oregon. My brother's kids are still out of school because his wife is terrified of them catching covid, and she kept them remote. They are ages 5 and 7, respectively. She's been one of the most extreme overreacters in the pandemic. She lived like a shut in for 8 months, and she's healthy and in her 30s.
Now onto the question of the danger the kids pose to the public by spreading covid to their families or vulnerable people.
At this point, the majority of Americans over 60 are vaccinated. Vulnerable people were prioritized. Which is why you aren't seeing news reports of droves of people dying in Colorado as a result of schools being opened.
All of these decisions represent trade-offs, but too many in the US public seem to not understand relative risk. I am safer if I wear a helmet when I drive my car than otherwise, but I'm not going to, for the same reason you don't.
"Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it."
There's one trick they can do to regain trust—move their website, publications, datasets, press releases, *everything* to git (https://breckyunits.com/how-to-fix-the-cdc.html).
I wish they came out and said:
"We understand we will constantly make mistakes and bad actors will constantly try to influence us. To counter that, we will make it painless for people to fork and correct. Every change will be open, attributable and signed."
I'm talking about a full executive order, and I had a lot of expertise and was being tasked with helping agencies, including the VA and DOE, open up their data. HHS was also part of this.
I was immediately blocked in all of these agencies with foot-dragging, and a complacent, "I couldn't give a fuck" attitude. They didn't care about enacting the order, because unlike me, they all knew that there would be no consequences for not doing so. They didn't do it, and there were no consequences.
I voted for Obama twice, but one of the things I noticed about his administration was that they weren't willing to strike fear into the hearts of bureaucrats who undermined their objectives. Another executive program he pushed, for properly integrating military health systems with the VA's health systems, was also actively ignored by the VA, with zero consequences. That experience was the final straw for me to leave and join the private sector, and get out of DC permanently.
It's the presidency -- just playing favorites carries a lot of weight. Or even threatening to cockblock anything they're looking to do for the next 8 years, by swinging party support.