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Comment by hn8788 | Hacker News Reader

That's definitely true for my father. Over the past year he's seen media and government officials go from "masks are useless if you aren't sick" to "if you don't wear a mask you're risking the lives of everyone around you", and "Trump rushing vaccine production could be worse than COVID" to "if you don't get a vaccine, you're going to kill people that can't get vaccinated".

He's got no faith in the government any more, and would rather risk getting sick than try to keep up with whatever narrative is being pushed on any given week.

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It's only a narrative if you choose to believe what you want to while only scraping the surface. Masks were rationed at the beginning until there was supply. There were legitimate concerns about rushing the vaccine under Trump before testing was complete. Then many countries completed testing and approved the vaccine. This was/is basic stuff to anyone who makes an effort to inform themselves.

They were rushed. None of them have FDA approval. The FDA recommended for the JNJ vaccine to be pulled from the market.

Moderna, Pfizer, and J&J vaccines are all FDA approved. J&J was paused for a few days out of an abundance of caution due to an extremely rare (~1 in a million) potential side effect, an ordinary part of postmarketing safety monitoring. The FDA decided that the J&J vaccine was still safe and effective and resumed allowing its sale.

You're actively spreading misinformation, and it's disappointing.

No, the guy is actually correct. The vaccines have emergency use authorizations, not approvals. No credible health expert thinks there's anything wrong with the effectiveness or safety of the vaccines but it's still true that the FDA isn't willing to formally say that the vaccines are safe and effective which is causing a lot of problems even besides causing people to think there's something wrong with the vaccines, see

https://www.slowboring.com/p/vaccine-fda-approve

I've found the FDA's lackadaisical attitude towards vaccine approval pretty puzzling during the whole pandemic. Why couldn't they start analyzing the drug company's testing data even before trials completed? Why couldn't they find people to work full time on reviewing the drug approval applications once they were formally in? Moderna, Pfizer, etc were willing to spend extra money and modify procedures to speed up their data collection process so why wasn't the FDA willing to do the same to go over the data they collected more quickly?

They are approved in the real, English language sense of the word. They are actively monitored for safety. If the FDA did not believe they were safe and effective, they would be withdrawn from the market immediately.

The facts are not misinformation--it's the insinuation that because they are "experimental" or that they are not "approved," they are risky. That is the misinformation.

Same with the "99% survival rate" misinformation meme. Even if the fact were true, the insinuation is that a "99%" survival rate means the virus is no big deal, which is false.

The FDA recommended pausing J&J, not pulling it from the market. And they lifted that pause recommendation back in April.

> The FDA recommended for the JNJ vaccine to be pulled from the market.

They paused it while they investigated a rare side effect, then resumed a few weeks later with a new warning about that.

It's very much on the market (or would be if Emergent wasn't such a fuckup).

The issue is that politicians are better at the art of influence -- it's literally their job. Science is hard for some people to understand, nuanced, and it changes over time. Politicians, on the other hand, know how to harness the power of a strong and definitive statement. To someone who doesn't know better, the arguments that are easier to follow and understand are more believable.

I think it s because people like your father (and mine), expect faith to guide their opinion of a government. But that sounds very silly to me: you can explain it with reason rather than a faith/betrayal fairytale.

The government is made of imperfect employees like you and me, imbued by a mission to transform tax money into social guidance. At first, there were no mask and no knowledge, they chose to avoid a mask rush that would have led nowhere while inventing excuses to explain it, or nobody would follow. But as everyone they slowly learn and as factories start building the masks, they get easier to enforce. It might yet be another mistake, if at an even deeper level masks are non beneficial, and they might yet change their mind.

You can absolutely just accept faith isnt our guide and follow the best effort estimate of the people we pay for producing it. Dont wear the mask when they think it wont work, wear it when they discover maybe actually it might, remove it when ... you get the point.

Nobody knows, the government is not trying to steal our money with vaccines: they already did with taxes.

That "inventing excuses to explain it" erodes trust in institutions, especially when the excuses are pretty transparently garbage.

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