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