I often wondered what kind of outrageous and offensive comment might be hidden behind the portentous "[flagged]" marker. Well, now I know it can be something completely reasonable, inoffensive and civil.
"Every professional knows the discomfort and fallout that go along with having to deliver bad news."
This may be different in other places, and discussing differences in vaccine portrayal/media discussion of vaccines may be quite interesting. But without the context your comment may read somewhat vague or alarmist.
Yes that's changed now with the rollouts to children and the boosters. They realized people will take anything if it's called a vaccine even if the trials were a joke, and even if they say we have to try it out on the public to see what happens. But that's very new.
My bottom line was that I was hoping the vaccines would help, but we would have to see just how much. I was prepared to be disappointed. I still am - but also hopeful we can keep up and progress toward herd immunity with boosters and updated vaccines. It still seems like the best strategy on the table.
To be clear, there were also people taking the stance of "don't talk the vaccines down too much or people won't go out and get their shots", but overall German society enjoys being critical and poking holes into things too much for that. It just causes Streisand effect outcomes.
When I look at the US, I feel like a lot of the political dialog becomes overly simplified and binary. You're either pro or con something, on both sides you pare down your message to a single sentence, complexities be damned, etc. And the distrust generated as a result is immense.
"We know for sure it's very, very good, 94 percent, 95 percent in protecting you against clinically recognizable disease, and almost a 100 percent in protecting you for severe disease."
We know for sure it has 95% protection against disease. As recently as July the world was being told that the vaccines can prevent COVID-19:
https://cdn.pfizer.com/pfizercom/2021-07/Preprint_Post_Hoc_P...
"remains highly efficacious in preventing COVID-19"
"has been authorized for emergency use by FDA under an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) to prevent Coronavirus Disease 2019"
Clearly those statements were wrong and they didn't realize it, despite presenting these claims with extremely high levels of confidence. There certainly wasn't any notion of "we have no idea, gotta try to find out lol".