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Comment by Tarsul | Hacker News Reader

the idea of the vaccine was always to prevent bad effects of infection, not infection as such. However, it usually helps with the latter as well but whatever.

However, what the big social media sites really need (instead of laws against disinformation) is downvotes. If the metric is only engagement then enragement is good, but actually it shouldnt (necessarily) be.

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I don’t disagree… but like, when the news media (I can quote many politicians and executives when speaking about mandates) says it was necessary for the sake of stopping the spread, why couldn’t Pfizer have sent out a notification saying, “hey, it reduces the effects, stopping transmission is hoped for but not tested, thanks!” It seems very much like they didn’t care that misinformation about how awesome their product is was being spread but I don’t know for certain.

It’s especially ugly when so many media stories have “brought to you by Pfizer” on them. I’m not into conspiracy theories but I increasingly get the paranoia. I have no doubt that I would have been prosecuted in Turkey, or possibly even Australia, a year ago.

> the idea of the vaccine was always to prevent bad effects of infection, not infection as such.

This is false historical revisionism. Biden[1], Fauci[2], and the media sold the public on the vaccine and justified mandates by saying it would stop the spread. Early skeptics were labeled as misinformed conspiracy theorists. It later became self-evident that the vaccine was less effective than originally thought (e.g. everyone I know who got vaccinated, including myself, still got infected). Only then did the goalposts move to "it makes infections less bad". But that is not how it was originally presented.

[1]: https://www.whio.com/news/local/exclusive-news-center-7-sits...

[2]: https://thehill.com/homenews/sunday-talk-shows/553773-fauci-...

They did, but you're not aware of the earliest parts of this timeline (and it seems like most people aren't, so it makes me really happy people are finally listening):

Pfizer's original press release [0] used both "SARS-CoV-2" and "COVID-19", distinguishing between the virus and the disease. The effectiveness they gave was about preventing illness, and they made no claims at all about infection/transmission.

This was fairly well known for a month or two, with many articles bringing up that infection/transmission was an unknown [1][2][3]. It was only a month or two into 2021 that the narrative shifted sharply and this original information was memory-holed remarkably hard. The politicians and media were the ones claiming it would stop infection/transmission, but they started that without any new data.

They could have had ulterior motives, they could have just been parroting others, or it could have just been plain stupidity - with how often the terms "SARS-CoV-2" and "COVID-19" are used interchangeably, it's hard to rule out that they just didn't understand the press release.

[0] https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta...

[1] https://www.washington.edu/news/2020/12/02/covid-19-vaccines...

[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/who-says-no-evidence-coronav...

[3] https://www.fredhutch.org/en/news/center-news/2020/12/covid-...

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