Comment by jollybean | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jollybean | Hacker News Reader

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There's a term for this and it's called 'Public Communications' sometimes into the domain of propaganda.

This is not a 'new' concept it's as old as time and 100% of people with real power have an awareness of this, it's almost a defining feature of an elite class.

Policy should obviously be guided by 'Truth' and we need transparency, at the same time, irrespective of how smart individuals are, as crowds, we act with a lowest-common-demoninator IQ and things need to be communicated effectively.

A great example of 'Truths We Cant't Handle' are vaccination-caused deaths.

All the vaccines cause death, and AZ is particularly tricky. But it's really hard to find exact data on that because it's very well suppressed. I suggest it's probably available with some digging but if you imagine a 'chain of communications' from the doctors, to health officials, to politicians to media, all of whom are ostensibly trying to act in the interest of the 'Public Good' - it's not going to come out.

Bonnie Henry in BC is a great Public Health official, I listen to her communications almost weekly, very smart, generally open, data-driven, smart journalists asking good questions - but they have never broached the subject of 'How many have died form vaccines'. The information is just too explosive. So they don't talk about it. We're learn more about it after the pandemic.

That's ridiculous. Not only are any such deaths carefully tracked, they are massively publicized in mainstream media. The first reported AZ deaths were on the front pages of every newspaper. Might as well have been a presidential election.

Of course vaccine deaths are tracked, I didn't deny that (FYI it's a very difficult thing to make perfect correlation between a vaccine and death, esp. with so many overlapping conditions).

The media has hugely downplayed the issue. Of course they have to do perfunctory reports on public information if it does happen, but it's not something they talk about otherwise.

Dr. Fauci doesn't come on TV and talk about the materiality of vaccine related death.

CNN is not doing their emotive vignettes on the 'Family destroyed by death due to vaccine' and interviews with sobbing family members.

There's obviously no narrative around that, in fact, the narrative is in the opposite direction, i.e. 'Blood Clots Can Happen but the Vaccine Is Still Safe'.

While there is some information about the AZ vaccine, there's scant info about the others, after doing a perfunctory search all I could find were 'The study showed a total of possible 3 deaths from the vaccine during such and such period' without any qualifying data.

The data is obviously being collected but it's not being fully shared and definitely not being communicated other than in a perfunctory way.

I'm guessing that's because both the actual number is very low relative to the number of doses given out and that fewer people have died from the vaccine than would die as a consequence of fearmongering by a particular political party here were there open discussion of that. There are a handful of topics like this where there seems to be near-universal agreement that the best thing for society is to just not poke the bear.

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