Comment by frafra | Hacker News Reader

Comment by frafra | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I think that we have a misunderstanding, so I am going to stress what I replied to: "the vaccines (falsely) claimed they would make me: immune" -> they weren't supposed to, they were developed based on another criteria. This is a problem of miscommunication in my opinion, as people sold vaccines as a way to reach immunity or herd immunity. People took bets and made guesses on something hard to model and predict. We like to give people news as they are 100 % sure, making simplification, even for good reasons. Scientific research and understanding does not work like this. Reality and complex, and if we have had a better approach at explaining the current scientific consensus regarding the COVID pandemic, including confidence levels, and lack of understanding or to make reliable predictions and such, science as a whole would probably not have suffered in terms of popularity and general trust.

So because I said that "the vaccines" themselves made the claims at immunity, you are interpreting that as false, based on the notion that the approval was not contingent on them providing immunity. This does not seem like a misunderstanding to me. It sounds like the painfully obvious interpretation of "Authority figures representing scientific institutions, with credentials, promoted these vaccines, claiming they would grant immunity." I think the only way you don't interpret it that was is if you are trying to obfuscate things (perhaps to yourself because recognizing corruption in scientific institutions is a direct attack to some people's egos and identities).

That's right. There is no authority principle in science, and a representative of an institution/agency of US saying that something "should be strong enough to", does not mean that the "science" said "it is going to be like this", especially given the so many unknown variables that come into play. That is one of the common misunderstandings. People make mistakes, and we have plenty of people with credentials that made bad predictions. The vaccines worked as intended, thought. The criticism should be targeted elsewhere. My personal opinion is that in many countries there hasn't been a good communication, and being an expert on a field doesn't qualify someone to be good at explaining things to the wide public.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com