I guess we were hearing different messages?
I thought the vaccine message was "get vaccinated so you won't die when you get it."
I thought the vaccine message was "get vaccinated so you won't die when you get it."
> And we have -- we can kind of almost see the end. We`re vaccinating so very fast, our data from the CDC today suggests, you know, that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don`t get sick, and that it`s not just in the clinical trials but it`s also in real world data.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210402002315/https://www.msnbc...
TLDR: We knew the mRNA vaccines were effective at preventing serious disease in late 2020. We didn't know for sure (publicly) if the mRNA vaccines reduced transmission rates until mid 2021, as more research concluded. Mid 2021 is when it was demonstrated that mRNA vaccines reduce transmission of the variants of SARS-CoV-2 at the time. As SARS-CoV-2 continues to mutate, more research needs to be done.
Delta was named at the end of May 2021 and started to become the dominant strain worldwide in the following months. As shown in the chart under ”Prevention” (and described in the linked pages), Delta significantly reduced vaccine effectiveness against infection and symptomatic disease, though not against severe disease.
However, it’s also true that vaccine effectiveness, regardless of variant, significantly declines over the months following the dose - again, much less so for severe disease than for any symptomatic disease.
It was quite eye-opening how fast the mainstream narratives were rewritten.
(I have had 4 doses by the way, I'm not going to cut my nose to spite my face: knowing that vaccines were oversold is not the same as believing they're useless).
The Moderna CEO is at least honest enough to say by now it should be treated the same as a flu vaccine. If you want to you can get your yearly dose and if you don't up to you. Pfizer on the other hand was actively whining about how they created too many doses and how they can't milk it any more.
If it was up to me I wouldn't have gotten the third one, but the fact that they've intermingled it with travel restrictions when it does not in fact prevent spread is quite infuriating.
It seems that people have also forgotten that the antibodies compared to other vaccines(which can be in decades for hepatitis for example) fade rather quickly and that if you got infected quite far out from your last shot, and were only mildly symptomatic it might not actually have been the vaccine that protected you but rather your own immune system and the fact that the whole thing isn't as deadly anymore.
To be clear, are you saying that this is bad? "mainstream" and "rewritten" are loaded words usually deployed as insult.
But the scientific process is one of learning from reality, and admitting past errors, so isn't an increase in knowledge a good thing?
Admitting past errors without also acknowledging the current knowledge is just as fallible is nothing but empty words. It's also a very rose tinted interpretation of what has been happening. The messaging has always been "These are this week's truths. They are absolute truths, and we'll enforce these truths at gunpoint, for these truths are infallible, and The Science is settled."
What I didn’t expect was the overconfidence and then reversals, without missing a beat, and without acknowledging “hey, we were wrong”. The stuff around masks… first ”they don’t work”, “they make it more likely to get infected”, “people won’t know how to use a mask”, “masks are a superstition” then switching to mask mandates, without admitting that those who expressed those views got it wrong.
The reason I used “mainstream” was to show that these were people in positions of trust. News outlets with editorial controls, public health officials, elected politicians. Or doctors. It happened both on traditional, and social media and IRL. The term was not meant to be pejorative, but descriptive.
Vaccines are similar: there are many clips that show pundits, media figures and public health officials overselling vaccines. Instead of later saying “the preliminary data looked good so we assumed they would stop transmission and infection, but it turns out that these vaccines reduce serious illness and death. We were wrong, but it’s a new disease and we are all learning, that’s how science works” we got “we ALWAYS said that vaccines were meant to reduce illness and death and not infection and transmission”.
Maybe I hate being gaslit more than most. My mother, an intelligent woman who I love and respect, in an effort to spare my feelings as a young child, would try to warp reality: “oh you never had the toy that’s missing”. She probably thought I wouldn’t remember, but did. She continued that pattern throughout my childhood. Whatever the reason, I intensely dislike that sort of manipulation, and I think it’s corrosive.
I'm not in the USA, I got onto masks quite early. But I think that we still lag badly in anti-covid ventilation systems, while still over-emphasising hand-washing.
Some of the best people on the topic (of our evolving understanding of COVID, not of Scotsmen) have in fact been relative outsiders (i.e. neither medical researchers nor crazed conspiracists). I'm thinking particularly of Zeynep Tufekci on Airborne transmission, e.g.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/07/why-arent... https://sils.unc.edu/news/2021/tufekci-lancet
You can access the clinical trial protocol by googling it. They never regularly tested patients in the trial, only when they were symptomatic. There is no clinical trial data to prove a reductions in infection or transmission.
If this was some non-mandatory voulountary vaccine.. sure, test one thing, then another,.... If you were put in a position where you were effectively forced to get it (or else you'd eg. lose your job), such things should be tested first.
Vaccines suffer from their effectiveness. For comparison with covid, measles killed only a few hundred each year (in the US). Vaccination to the level of herd immunity was required to reduce that number; if only half the population were vaccinated, we'd see half those deaths. Covid is still killing roughly the same number of people each day as measles killed in a year, yet people resist getting vaccinated. It's objectively stupid.
To your exact point, your employer should be entitled to set the safety protocols that are necessary to ensure the health of their workforce.
Various people gave their hopefully somewhat informed opinion at the time to different members of the media, who reported on it with different levels of accuracy, attributing often undue levels of confidence to it. And that quickly mutated into "the media's trusted sources can confirm that the experts definitely know the vaccine will have exactly these effects and will be effective for these specific cases"
I think it's worth questioning what influence there was in which narratives did or didn't get pushed, but I also think it's worth keeping in mind that the media is also just... fallible.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33736959
I understand if some random chiropractic from alabama says something, that the data is probably questionable... but the director of CDC does carry some authority.
If if _we don't know something_, isn't mandating that something (vaccines in this case) somehow a bad thing? On one side... "take this, and you won't get sick"... who is responsible when that person gets sick? Or infects grandma? Or actually gets a clot?
That said, a doctor never says “you won’t get sick”. Medicine is never certain, the human body is too complex to generalize and say “this will cure you 100% sure, no bad reactions possible”. There’s always a chance that something will go wrong. Clinical essays are what makes possibility go down, but it is never 0.
If you want absolutes, go to a priest. They will give you an absolute that matches your own pre assumptions and if it turns out wrong later, well God wanted it this way, He works in misterious ways.
That's not bad communication it's an outright false statement.
My point was specifically about the expectation of fail proof medicine. It doesn’t exist.
But in my country (slovenia), at the height of pressure to get vaccinated, if you were a young girl/woman (15-24 age bracket), the "96%" from above turned to "you'll probably still get covid, you'll still spread it, if you do, not one girl in your age bracket died yet because of or even with covid, but one girl died due to the vaccine... but, if you don't take the vaccine, you'll have to get tested every 48 hours or you'll be unable to go to work (oh, no testing center in your village, and you're not allowed to take the bus to the closest test location without a test)".
It’s choosing between that and … “a girl who died in Slovenia”. How are those two things equivalent?
Even if you can spread COVID, if the effects in your body are lowered, chances are that you will remove the virus it from your body earlier (it can dedicate more resources to winning the battle instead of … breathing), so you will be effectively less contagious.
Instead, tell people about the trial control group vs treatment group, let people see that there is risk on both sides, but that the treatment group was ultimately better off. Use minimal interpretation. I'd like to see so much focus on the trial outcomes that the number of people who died in both groups is a household fact that families talk about.
There is nothing so obvious that people cannot fail to understand if sufficiently motivated.
So, 3/4 vaccines went from safe to "clot shots" in just a few months.
> Simonovič presented the composition of the five-member commission, namely, three doctors (neurologist, infectologist and vascular specialist), a pharmacologist and Zoran Simonovič, a representative of the epidemiological profession. The commission reviewed the medical records of a 20-year-old patient who developed thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome following vaccination. The documentation included a treatment procedure as of the admission to the Clinical Department of Neurology in Ljubljana and a health record obtained from the patient’s personal doctor.
> The commission confirmed thrombosis with thrombocytopenia or vaccine-induced immune thrombotic thrombocytopenia. All criteria were met for the fulfilment of the diagnosis. Upon examining the medical records before the vaccination, the commission established that no conditions had been identified in the patient that could indicate problems after vaccine administration. “The commission unanimously assessed that there was a direct link between the vaccination with Janssen Johnson & Johnson and the tragic complication, i.e. the onset of the syndrome”, said Simonovič.
That said they also lost track of or dropped 500-1000 people from that 40,000 sample.
Multiple people died over the course of the efficacy study for the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine, and yet they completed the study: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2034577
In general, what you claim would seem both surprising and impractical to me. There are many studies on very seriously ill groups, where the death of a large portion of participants is expected.
You realize people die all the time? Even when participating in clinical trials?
In the Pfizer mRNA vaccine clinical trial there were actually more deaths in the vaccine group than the control group, but the sample size wasn't large enough to draw any conclusions from this.
It was a massive cock-up by the government.