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Comment by fivea | Hacker News Reader

> Does this mean COVID is over?

When I took my first jab, the local clinic handed out a flier explaining in no uncertain terms that:

a) the current batch of vaccines work by giving our immune system a workout to be able to experience a COVID infection as either totally unnoticed or at most a mild case,

b) the current batch of vaccines does not nor did ever guaranteed you won't contract and spread COVID,

c) even with all shots we still need to practice basic higiene and health precautions like wearing a mask, wash hands, and social distance.

We're talking about pre-Delta times. This has been widely known from the start.

How come antivaxxers are the only ones repeating cynical comments on how the initial batch of vaccines, which we all are lucky to have but are still at the level of being better than nothing, would be a silver bullet?

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> the current batch of vaccines does not nor did ever guaranteed you won't contract and spread COVID

Guarantee, no. But the thought was that it would greatly reduce the risk of spreading the disease, such that once a sufficient number of people were vaccinated herd immunity would kill off the virus and end the pandemic. We're now two years in with a 73% vaccination rate in the US (not counting those with natural immunity), with even higher rates elsewhere; still no end in sight.

If vaccines aren't going to end the pandemic, then something else needs to. Will a pill that reduces the lethality of the disease by 89% be enough that we can finally put this to rest and go back to normal? If not that, then what?

I thought the vaccines reduced the lethality quite a bit. Do we know how vaccinated/no pill compare to unvaccinated/pill?

> But the thought was that it would greatly reduce the risk of spreading the disease, such that once a sufficient number of people were vaccinated herd immunity would kill off the virus and end the pandemic. We're now two years in with a 73% vaccination rate in the US (not counting those with natural immunity),

This was very clearly and openly discussed when the vaccines first came out: vaccines would help reduce spread and with a high enough rate that would end the pandemic but that we’d need relatively high vaccination rates to stop something which can spread this easily.

This was correct and the data suggests that it could have worked but we never seriously tried it. As of today, 61% of Americans have been vaccinated. That is far, far below the 90+% threshold used in those first messages — and that was before Delta and the Omicron delivered both higher spread and reduced effectiveness to make the problem harder.

The other thing to remember is that the pandemic ending doesn’t necessarily mean complete eradication. If, as appears to be the case, vaccination and medications significantly reduce the risk of serious illness and/or long COVID, that will probably be enough to get it down to the level of, say, influenza.

That’s not what was messaged to the general public from our leaders. The narrative went from “the vaccinated cant get infected” to “the vaccinated won’t really transmit it”, so “its clearly the unvaccinated who are the problem” to “well it turns out vaccinated people can get and transmit Covid just as well as unvaccinated”.

And if vaccines wouldnt “end” Covid why so much discussion on R values and “herd immunity”. The messaging around that went silent pretty quickly when it was clear that wasn’t happening with Covid.

And the only reason the narrative changed is because it was plainly obvious to the general public things weren’t going as planned.

But I get it, you cant predict how a new infectious disease will pan out, but holy shit has the PR messaging ever been terrible.

But then I wonder if that was intentional? Would the public ever have gone along with all this if the government was honest and said “we’ll continue to have restrictions for the next 5 years”?

I think the CDC was being pragmatic. They recognized that Americans were fatigued after a year. Asking people to still mask and social distance even after vaccinating is a lot to ask for even if it would technically get the virus under control sooner by catching those breakthrough cases too. The prospect of normalcy would increase vaccine acceptance, and then we would hopefully reach herd immunity by vaccine as demonstrated by cases falling off a cliff. Unfortunately unvaccinated people took off their masks and then Delta happened.

So the CDC lied and now that lie is coming back to bite them when people doubt what they say going forward?

And please, Delta was starting to circulate before the vaccine was widely available outside the US and Europe.

But that’s exactly what I’m talking about. The unvaccinated make a good scapegoat for the failure to properly message.

If they promote very cautious behavior (keep sheltering in place, wear masks) people will throw the catch phrase of "Trust the science!" back at them and demand why the vaccine has not solved the pandemic. If they loosen up on recommendations and something bad happens and they have to take a step back people say they are being capricious.

Or they could just be honest and stop claiming a solution they don’t even know will work?

It’s classic PR rule #1 - don’t lie because the lie will eventually catch up to you. It’s better to say you don’t know.

IMO the errors that cost 800,000 Americans their lives were made last year.

The President publicly denied the seriousness of the situation. The CDC didn't want to use a foreign test and made their own but they were all contaminated and always read positive. There was minimal contract tracing of travelers. The Surgeon General told Americans not to wear masks saying using masks incorrectly would harm them.

Haven’t most of the deaths happened this year? Sure we may have started off wrong but clearly we could have course corrected? Or are Americans too stupid to understand the risks and trade offs?

With exponential growth early decisive action is needed. Isn’t course correction lying? :)

The problem was that it was politicized hard early on. Now you have roughly a third of the country who’ve been told that public health measures are an unpatriotic plot, and a lot of belligerence had been encouraged. The rhetoric around this made it a very clear party loyalty test and lots of people rose to that challenge.

How many people are willing to admit that they were so wrong for the better part of two years and many thousands of people died who wouldn’t have? That’s very close to admitting that those same people weren’t just lying about one thing.

I’ve spent months in 4 different countries since Covid hit and it’s politicized everywhere.

Not sure how you can force people to stay at home, kids out of school, then hand out billions in relief (or not in one country) and not have it be political?

I was specifically thinking about the politicization of protection and treatment. The economic impact was definitely always going to be a debate but basic safety measures like masks and vaccination didn’t used to be a strongly partisan issue (think about how American doctors historically leaned Republican for tax reasons).

Different countries matter less in the internet era, too. In the English-speaking world, the Murdoch media set the message in the US & UK, of course, but these days that spreads quickly outside of national borders and it was easy to see those messages jump to other language communities on social media. This was especially accelerated by the early recognition of certain risk factors which were compatible with the strong man posturing common to a lot of right-wing ideology.

> I've spent months in 4 different countries since Covid hit and it’s politicized everywhere.

There's a world of difference between criticizing a government for imposing a lockdown at 10pm instead of 11pm or enforcing a 80% occupancy limit instead of 50%, and attacking basic public health measures like taking a vaccine based on sheer lunacy and conspiracy theories.

> Unfortunately unvaccinated people took off their masks and then Delta happened.

That's a CNNesque statement right there.

I don't watch sensationalist cable news. What do you mean exactly by CNNesque?

I don't know, the idea that the spread of the Delta variant can be attributed to the "unvaccinated", whose morality is so low that they also happen to often be "anti-mask" as well. This is the kind of scapegoating i would imagine CNN do (I'm being unfair here, CNN would probably add a bit of Russian disinformation as well for good culture war mesure.)

I'm ready to change my mind tho if you back your statement with facts.

The spread of Delta is because that variant is more infectious and there is a reservoir of unvaccinated people. The CDC said vaccinated people can take off their masks. They did not say everyone can stop masking. Masking immediately dropped from 75% to 25%. We are not at 75% vaccine coverage even today.

Measles is an example of another highly infectious moderately deadly disease. Wherever we don’t have 97%+ vaccine coverage we have outbreaks.

Even today with the questions about Omicron’s degree of immune escape there’s theoretically a solution available to use. If 95% of people masked we could get spread under control in 6-10 weeks. But masks are a dirty word and public health campaigns have ceilings to adoption.

No. Delta was around before there was even enough vaccine for countries other than the US and Europe. It was completely unavoidable.

And since it’s clearly the fully vaccinated have only a reduced, not eliminated risk of infection and transmission, we could still get another variant.

Covid isn’t the measles.

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