Weber Shandwick provides PR for Moderna and Pfizer, while staffing the CDC | Hacker News Reader

Weber Shandwick provides PR for Moderna and Pfizer, while staffing the CDC

disinformationchronicle.substack.com

108 pointsqwertyuiop_109 comments

Url changed from https://disinformationchronicle.substack.com/p/weve-unlocked..., which points to this.

who seem to have tossed aside all caution and critical thinking when it comes to medical interventions that get labeled “vaccines.”

So... this is an antivax substack?

(I think this is being taken as a glib dunk, but I'm really asking: is there a way to write that sentence and not be an antivax person? "The mRNA vaccines are not really vaccines because they're not sterilizing", or something like that, is a core antivax talking point.)

I read through a few paragraphs of weird rants before I gave up. No mention of the cdc from what I saw there.

Huh? I see CDC mentioned 26 times.

The link was changed to a different post on the same substack.

Is there no middle ground between being pro-vax and anti-vax? What about vax skeptical or vax agnostic? Seems to me that anti-vax definition is overally broad for its highly negative connotations.

There's a ton of middle ground. I'm just suggesting this substack does not appear to occupy any of it.

I don't even see the quote you claim comes from the article. What I read in the article is about conflicts of interest between media and federal bureaucracy, a problem regardless of the safety and efficacy of the vaccine.

Presumably you don't see the direct quote I made from the article because Dan changed this story to point to a different article, on the same site.

I would theoretically posit "maybe".

However in real world, it has been my positively overwhelming experience that "vax skeptic" is anti-vax but clever enough to try to hide it, and take the spiteful stance of "I'm not saying anything, I'm just asking (extremely leading questions with clear strong agenda)".

If true legit "vaccination skeptics" exist who somehow, have not found over abundance of data to make up their mind but still feel they have interesting opinion to share, they are low enough of a percentage to be safe to assume against.

I would put it similarly to "round-earth agnostic". If in 2022 you have not made up your mind yet on whether Earth is round - what are you waiting for? What criteria or info do you feel is outstanding? How are you meaningfully differentiating yourself from flat-earther-in-disguise?

This is not to say that questions should not be asked or that debate is not healthy and necessary and that we should take things on faith. But it's hard to convincingly be vaccination-undecided in 2022 - it feels like it would take large amount of effort and possibly some internal naivette.

Put it in a different way - the default scientific consensus is "vaccines save lives". It's what you're taught in schools and repeatedly told by all reliable medical personnel across governments and countries and continents and religions. It feels like it takes some substantial amount of effort to get yourself into "vaccination skeptic / agnostic" realm, which I would not consider the neutral stance on this topic.

My 100 Croatian lipa :)

There are different classes of vaccine, I can be convinced of some while holding skeptical views towards others.

Sure, but I personally wouldn't call that "vaccine (in general sense) skepticism".

I would be surprised if anybody took a completely blanket approach that every vaccine ever made for any purpose under every circumstance is a Good Thing(tm) and totally worked out.

It's an interesting question because almost every single person I've met who is against the mRNA vaccines has all of their other vaccinations and if they have kids, they do too. So why are we calling people like that antivax?

That's like saying anybody who is nervous around pitbulls hates dogs.

No. Someone else asked if there wasn't some middle ground between absolute reverence for the new vaccines and "anti-vax". And, indeed there is. But you're not occupying it when you're calling them, in effect, "so-called vaccines".

>But you're not occupying it when you're calling them, in effect, "so-called vaccines".

Can I ask why you're using quotes for something I never said?

Follow up question, why do you suppose this sort of dishonesty is needed to make your point if the truth is on your side?

I'm not quoting anybody ("in effect"), and, in particular, wasn't talking about anything you said. I'm talking about the article author (the "you" in my sentence above). Dial it back. You asked me a question, and I answered it. This is in the guidelines: assume good faith.

OK, maybe I read your response wrong. But then the response doesn't really follow. The main argument against the mRNA vaccine was in fact the lack of long term testing. Now we know they were right because Pfizer has acknowledged never having tested against transmission, which was really the stated goal of mandates.

So the people you're calling antivax aren't actually antivax. They were anti-mandate, and with good reason as it turns out.

No, that's not the main argument here. You're responding to me, not the other way around, and the point I made is that this post implies that the mRNA vaccines aren't even vaccines. That's a pure anti-vax talking point. It isn't part of the middle ground.

Not really. Every other vaccine has been tested to determine how it impacts transmission. Except this one. So yes, it's different.

No, that's not true in any sense.

Ah, the same tactics from Iraq II. Embed the journalists in order they develop empathy for the troops protecting them (and hope they slant the reporting enough).

This is in the least, a conflict of interest.

I think that's the opposite of what's implied here. They're implying CDC is being infiltrated by the people is is supposed to be regulating. In your example, the troops were not being infiltrated by journalists to circumvent the armies control over journalists.

The point is nepotism, not a point for point identical situation. The problem is that groups are cross pollinating in a situation that should be independent and by its nature adversarial a lot of the time.

What is happening is collusion. This collusion is legal too; no amount of laws on conflicts of interest will fix this.

Better they don't embed journalists, and nobody is reporting from the front lines?

Some would argue that propaganda is worse than nothing. Depending on your objectives, of course.

> "The first casualty when war comes is truth" - Hiram W Johnson

Yes.

There is plenty of coverage of Ukraine and we aren’t getting the Iraq war’s fake-but-looks-real coverage that was actually misleading propaganda.

> is plenty of coverage of Ukraine and we aren’t getting the Iraq war’s fake-but-looks-real coverage that was actually misleading propaganda

You don’t see a small handful of enabling technologies that came to market between the Iraq War and Ukraine?

That’s a good point. But the absence of this tech doesn’t mean we have to have propaganda.

> To ensure public trust, CDC must provide accurate, science-based evidence on vaccines,” Kulldorf said. “They have failed to do so.”

This didn’t prove anything about them failing to do so. This is just a bunch of assumptions into conflicts of interests with zero actual evidence.

I say this as someone as fully vaxxed and boosted -- they really did mess up some weird things in the beginning, especially on masking?

Masking seems like a normal way to prevent respitory diseases. It is still advised if someone wants full protection.

Right, that is my point. The CDC should clearly the whole time have been "Go ahead and mask, it can't hurt. Even a bandana or whatever if we're worried about the good ones for doctors"

That was NOT what they did.

And even if they did that, that's ok - CDC made a mistake. However, some people - not necessarily you - draw the conclusion to be "haha, look ... CDC makes mistakes we can't trust them!! Down with experts!".

It's a bad mistake though. Like, really bad. Like, that gave the anti-maskers SO MUCH FUEL.

> The CDC should clearly the whole time have been "Go ahead and mask, it can't hurt. Even a bandana or whatever if we're worried about the good ones for doctors"

This is wrong for a couple reasons. First, it would have led to a run on masks, which were already in short supply for medical professionals. My girlfriend is a physician at a major east coast hospital and has been treating patients with COVID from day 1. People don't seem to want to accept how dire the lack of PPE was for them. Intubating a patient with COVID isn't on the same level as walking past someone in the supermarket. The situation was dangerous. To add to this, even if we somehow equipped everyone with a properly fitted N95, the average American would amaze you with their inability to use it effectively. On multiple occasions I've seen adults in crowded airports lower their masks to sneeze, for example.

Absent clear evidence to the contrary, I strongly suspect the strategy of knowingly lying about (or recklessly getting wrong) the core concept of "whether or not masks work to prevent airborne disease" is the greater long term harm if you're the agency that's supposed to "make public declarations about diseases."

It would seem to me that credibility would be paramount. Perhaps mitigate the mask thing with something weaselly like "At this time, we believe a gaiter or a bandanna is sufficient so don't go buying them up." That little white lie strikes me as much better than "masks don't work y'all" -- which emphatically was the message they put out.

Technically the Surgeon General played a big part in muddying messaging on masking [1], but the CDC takes full responsibility for the PCR fiasco.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200301001854/https://twitter.c...

If anyone is curious, the new yorker had an amazing piece of long-form reporting on the earlier days of the pandemic, written near the end of 2020 [1]. Section 14 is about masks in particular.

It goes into the history of the CDC, what the pandemic playbook looked like in terms of "public relations" and how (and why!) it failed spectacularly in March/April of 2020.

The answer is complicated and not straightforward.

My read has been that, from a technical perspective, we knew exactly what policy and PR responses were appropriate, but executive politics leaked-in and delayed/prevented those appropriate responses.

Pandemic response is supposed to be led by the CDC and supported by state, federal, local government officials. What we saw, instead, was politicians trying to lead and control the narratives, to disastrous effect.

In my mind, it wasn't a party-affiliated error, but an ego-affiliated error. The biggest offenders were Cuomo [2], Pence, and Trump.

[1]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/01/04/the-plague-yea...

[2]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/04/seattles-leade...

The quote is so dumb it makes my head hurt. The CDC dies not regulate the marketing of vaccines - i.e. the claims about safety and effectiveness the manufacturer is allowed to make. That falls under the statutory authority of FDA who requires any claims of safety and effectiveness to be backed by evidence.

Generally the people who talk about “no evidence of safety and effectiveness” have no idea who CDER / CBER are, no idea what an IND is, no idea how clinical trials are done, and no idea of how the FDA does postmarket surveillance / monitoring. Basically they are not informed enough to have a well reasoned opinion or argument.

Somebody not even being able to name the correct federal agency - which is not obscure insider knowledge - is a sure sign they are a crank who does not know what they are talking about.

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