Hacker News Reader

Comment by empath75 | Hacker News Reader

> and would prevent spreading.

It was _never_ claimed that it would "prevent" the spread of the disease or that it would even prevent _you_ from catching it. If you thought that, you weren't reading anything. It was always claimed that it lowered the likelihood of catching it and _most importantly_ reduced the severity of the disease if you did catch it.

If anything, what you should mistrust is your own ability to read and comprehend.

View on HN

>It was _never_ claimed that it would "prevent" the spread of the disease or that it would even prevent _you_ from catching it.

This is an easily disprovable statement.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKf8dVxOy0s

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1139513946631676

https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2021/05/16/sotu-walensky...

There's plenty more, just google "covid vaccine prevents spread"

Ah, I see that it wasn't just the Netherlands, then; even the CDC director.

Do you think these politicians and administrators knew they were lying when they said that?

They weren't lying, they just weren't being pedantic. It does limit the spread, it just doesn't prevent it "completely". Only someone looking for a reason to be upset would interpret what they said literally.

I’m sorry, but a press conference televised to everyone in a country that disrupts the default programming, every week, when most people were watching, by a government official about a novel virus that’s spreading around the world and the medication for it… and I shouldn’t take it literally?

What moment in the world would be a better moment to be as clear and pedantic as possible, with as little reason to doubt as possible? And when is it better to keep the talking point open to even the most “dumb” questions, even if it’s over and over again?

To be clear again, I’m Dutch and was watching the Dutch news.

Whichever of the many sides you believe, they dropped the ball there. They should’ve been informed and should’ve informed us correctly. They didn’t.

You're right. They should have spoken more directly, and with greater attention to the words literal meanings. The issue was too important to be imprecise with the language.

Still, in English when someone says "seatbelts prevent automobile accident related deaths" it doesn't mean that ALL automobiles will magically cease to crash once you've buckled up, nor does it mean that your odds of death fall to zero. It only means that SOME deaths will be prevented.

I really don’t care; they should have known the truth. And if they didn’t, they should have informed us on that, too.

The whole issue to me is that they acted like the authoritative figure who you could trust. Turns out, we could not. So why should I trust them from now on? They damaged it, and didn’t try to “fix” it. They just called everyone that asked questions conspiracy theorists, combining everyone into one word “wappie”. The officials did. They actually used that word multiple times on TV.

So I don’t know if they knew, but it’s besides the point.

Very clever of you to post videos so that people won't actually check what they said.

I wasn't talking about what I read, I was talking about what they said on TV. I'm going to find the original clips soon (at work at the moment), but I clearly remember Hugo de Jonge telling us all, on national television, that we would be protected by the vaccine, and would stop the spreading of it. I'm not the only one that heard it.

I'm SPECIFICALLY talking about the Dutch news coverage here - I have no experience with others.

So this:

> It was _never_ claimed that it would "prevent" the spread of the disease or that it would even prevent _you_ from catching it.

Is just not true; they told our entire country on television.

The scientists never claimed that, but a lot of government officials and politicians did.

And, the government officials and politicians got a lot more press with their dogmatic-but-false claims than the scientists did with their hedged-but-more-true ones.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com