Hacker News Reader

Almost all of the statements were true. They just needed more context with them.

> "Masks aren't effective"

The point of the (non n-95) masks is not to protect the wearer. They didn't want everybody to cause a run on the n-95 masks for healthcare workers. The cloth masks may not very effective at protecting the wearer.

> "Masks are effective"

Masks are very effective when the infected wear them. Everybody should wear them because they don't know if they're infected or not.

> "Vaccinated don't have to wear masks"

Currently we don't believe vaccinated people. If you get vaccine you don't have to wear a mask.

> "Vaccinated should wear masks"

Unvaccinated people were the first to go everywhere with out masks. That carrot didn't work.. Everybody put them back on.

> "COVID is not airborne"

This could be true!

> "COVID is airborne"

But it catches a ride on water droplets!

> "COVID came from a wet market"

I haven't seen this as part of government messaging

> "COVID came from a lab"

I haven't seen this as part of government messaging

> "If you caught it, you have immunity"

For some amount of time, yes

> "If you caught it, you might not have immunity"

Yep we've got new variants that yo _might_ not be immune to.

> Almost all of the statements were true. They just needed more context with them.

You nailed the issue in the first 2 sentences. All of those things listed are technically true, as long as the context is provided and understood. But when you have the whole situation turn into a bipartisan shitshow, context goes immediately out of the window (both intentionally and unintentionally, just like nuance being lost in twitter discussions). It is you vs. them for everyone emotionally invested into this.

"CDC said COVID is airborne, and if you disagree, you are a science denier and probably a nazi too. No, I am not gonna listen to your 'context'".

"CDC said there is no evidence that COVID came from the wet markets, which means that you claiming that it is possible is a conspiracy theory".

"CDC said that people don't have to wear masks, but now they say people have to wear masks, they don't know what they are doing and are just trying to pacify the population. I don't need context, I am just reciting what CDC said."

Actually looking into the context of the official statements on COVID, there isn't really a contradiction, and their recommendations make sense. But then if you actually absorb the context, then there is no team sports fight to be had, there is no side to cheer and root for, and there are no opponents to defeat who are dumb and wrong (unlike you and your team). The intensity and excitement of the "battle" is positively correlated with willingness to omit context and refusal to consider it.

Except policies don't follow the context. Science says the old are vastly more likely to get severe reactions to Covid but we lock everyone down and still send Covid patients back to nursing homes.

> Except policies don't follow the context. Science says the old are vastly more likely to get severe reactions to Covid but we lock everyone down and still send Covid patients back to nursing homes.

Agreed, this is an issue. But I don't think that "policies tend to disregard context, which leads to poor outcomes, so we should disregard context when arguing about policies too" is a sound approach.

If it ain't in the headline it's "SO CONFUSING"

Your reply is a perfect illustration of what I was talking about in my original comment. I couldn't have come up with a better example even if I tried.

You conjured up a greatly simplified version of what I said, threw away all the context that actually matters, and built it into something that's easy to rally against for someone who is "on your team".

Yes I thought the irony was beautiful

Honestly at this point in the game I have no clue what is factual and isn't. I don't know who the hell to trust anymore.

> The sad thing is many people still hold up the government / bureaucrats / politicians as omnipotent

And so-called "experts"... by which I mean only the ones that say this is the worst thing ever. Any expert in the field with any objections or criticisms to what we've done immediately gets the online equivalent of being letter bombed.

The public health messaging for this whole thing has been absolutely horrific and has only been getting worse. They've managed to cast so much fear, uncertainty and doubt on what are in fact remarkable vaccines... I don't know how they will ever repair their trust or credibility.

Is this really so confusing to most people? I feel like it was pretty clear throughout that the first statement in most cases was: "We expect X is [not] effective based on history, but we aren't certain because this is so new" and the second statement was "Our initial research shows that we were [right / wrong]" followed sometimes by a third statement which is "As more information arrives we were right about Y and wrong about Z".

I agree with you that politicians are afraid to give it to us straight, but I attribute their hesitance not to how they expect the people to respond but how they expect media to respond. You get in a little trouble for being wishy-washy, but you get big trouble for giving a straight, honest well-informed sounding (described this way because its not like the announcers are the ones actually doing the research) detailed response and then finding out some of your details are wrong.

I have been thinking about this a lot, we all hate the way politicians speak (me included) but we made them speak this way because while they may not impress anyone they don't give definitive sound bites that will then be repeated over and over on the news when they happen to be wrong.

The smug confidence when the outlets assert these things is one of the most galling parts:

> Babies and young children study faces, so you may worry that having masked caregivers would harm children’s language development. There are no studies to support this concern.

https://twitter.com/AmerAcadPeds/status/1425857041457942542

There are "no studies" because you can't do studies like that on humans! I guess absence of evidence = evidence of absence now. What about on monkeys?

> The face-deprived monkeys and control monkeys were scanned by fMRI when they were six months old to measure their neural responses to faces and other visual stimuli.

> Control monkeys had face patches by the time they were six months old; the face-deprived monkeys did not. Patches for other visual categories that both sets of monkeys saw equally, such as hands and bodies, were roughly equivalent between the two groups.

https://massivesci.com/articles/facial-recognition-patches-b...

> They think we'll freak out set everything on fire or something at the first hint of bad news.

Could it be that they've used this tactic so often just to get this effect when they so desire it, that now they fear that it will be our only reaction?

It's not just that the CDC/Fauci and the Government have been a major contributor to the disinformation out there, it's that there is a political force running at full power pushing vaccines as the one and only possible solution to COVID-19. Before Trump left the White House, the Democratic party leadership came out against the vaccine. NOw that they're in power again, every signal and message they send is Pro Vaccine and Anti Everything else, and it seems all of SV is ready to help by any means necessary, including a lot of people on HN calling anyone and everyone who even questions the safety or necessity of these vaccines as Anti-Vaxxers. We're rocketing towards a new civil war if you ask me.

> We're rocketing towards a new civil war if you ask me.

The culture war was fabricated by billionaires. Stop listening to their stooges.