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Comment by reenorap | Hacker News Reader

mRNA vaccines are a fantastic technology that were completely oversold by politicians.

The politicians lied to our faces and twisted our arms through mandates and threatened us to believe what they told us, not what we were seeing with our own eyes. I don't think the reaction against mRNA vaccines would have been so strong if they didn't try to force us to take it or if they didn't wage a religious war against those that didn't want to take it.

But I still believe mRNA has a great future ahead of it. I have recently bought a large position (for me) in Moderna because I think it will be able to fulfill the promises that we were told it would.

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What was the horrible lie you were forced to accept, as if O'Brien himself were telling you to?

That the vaccines worked, that natural immunity against COVID didn't exist, that the vaccines were BETTER than natural immunity, etc.

I'm fully vaccinated along with a booster. I was the first person outside of medical professionals that I know that got the COVID vaccine. I got COVID 3 weeks after my booster which is when I was supposed to be the most protected. That's when I came to the conclusion that we were lied to.

My kid got COVID and then he was still forced to get the vaccine because the school district/state forced it. That's because they refused to believe that natural immunity existed or that somehow the vaccine was magically better than natural immunity. This also made me realize how religious this has become because now even the scientists were anti-science.

It took years for them to relent and those several years of religious and anti-science beliefs from scientists and politicians destroyed the trust that people had in them.

> That the vaccines worked

Now I don't know what "worked" means to you. But we've got a shitload of data on covid deaths post vaccine and the numbers are stark. If you can look at those two lines and say "nah the vaccines didn't do anything" then I really don't know what to say.

Vaccine-induced immunity is better because it comes with drastically lower chances of serious illness or death than the actual infection.

There were plenty of studies comparing immunity through infection and vaccination pretty early on. One interesting aspect initially was that it looked like the combination of vaccination and infection was particularly effective. The infection acted like a booster.

I'm not familiar with the exact handling of this in the US, but in general it is difficult to count infection as a replacment for vaccination. There is likely much more variability there, there was less data about this available and the simple tests for COVID are not that reliable. Not impossible, but far more complex than requiring vaccination.

The point is that mandates forcing people, like my son, who already had COVID to take the vaccine were absolutely wrong. And it also exposed him to the possibility of getting myocarditis from the vaccine, which is openly a risk talked about by the CDC now but was denied before.

Natural immunity has been proven time and time again to be much more longer lasting and more effective than vaccination. Once you had COVID, there is no reason whatsoever to force people to get vaccinated. That is simply anti-science.

The point is the COVID you son had and the vaccine are different strains

Yes, exactly. There was no point in getting vaccinated with that vaccine.

The vaccine never stopped you from getting COVID, it just gave you a better response when you got it.

I do not understand why this doesn’t click with people.

This was one of my (as a layperson) irritations with this process. Words matter -- the fact that this was rolled out as a "vaccine" gave a lot of people the initial impression that once they got the shot, they'd be immune. Myself included.

I believe that the word vaccine was misunderstood on a large scale, much to our detriment. I don't know what it should have been called otherwise, but I think the messaging around the mRNA treatments was handled poorly.

> Words matter -- the fact that this was rolled out as a "vaccine" gave a lot of people the initial impression that once they got the shot, they'd be immune.

If you're going to be upset about word choice, the thing to be upset about is that it has no connection to cows at all.

No vaccine grants 100% immunity. Some are more effective than others. It's hard to predict efficacy for a novel type of vaccination for a novel virus and there's no vaccines for other viruses in the same family.

Certainly, this could have been communicated better, but it's not like flu vaccines have 100% efficacy either and they've been around for decades.

Words do matter.

But "every member of the government needs to communicate flawlessly 100% of the time during a once-in-a-century pandemic alongside a never-before-seen social media misinformation environment, even in their internal communication" is just not a bar that we can meet.

Imagine if they didn't call it a vaccine. "Of course this thing won't work, Fauci isn't even willing to call it a vaccine!"

If we're going to go by this, literally every vaccine should stop being called a vaccine. That's not the right answer. The right answer is to not have a population of ignorant people.

That can be a noble goal, but I wouldn't be so hand-wavy about how people understand words and their meanings. I'm firmly in the camp that the mRNA covid vaccine was a wonder of modern science, and on the whole it had net positives for society. Don't misunderstand, it was not rolled out, or messaged perfectly and wasn't without risk that we're likely to wrap our arms around some day in the future.

But we can learn from the experience. And in my view, telling a captive, emotional, and concerned audience "we have a vaccine!" and then not absolutely being a broken record about what that means was a miss.

My point was that there was absolutely nothing different about the covid vaccine in this regard from literally any other vaccine. So I'm not sure why you're putting it into a special bin here.

If the point is that the average person is uneducated and doesn't understand how vaccines work, sure. But if the solution is to use a different word, that new word would need to be applied to every vaccine on the market. And what's the point if that's the case?

Also, I don't recall ever hearing people with actual knowledge claiming it provided a cloak of invulnerability. So again, I'm not sure what those people should have done different. I'd agree that the media distorted scientific truths, but they always do that.

It is/was a vaccine, I think the terminology is correct. It just didn't work effectively because the variants mutated too quickly because you're not supposed to vaccinate in the middle of a pandemic. This cause an explosion of variants and they couldn't make vaccines that tracked the new variants fast enough.

So instead they decided to change the goalposts and said "This vaccine that worked on the variant 2 years ago will still protect from severe symptoms" when in fact it did nothing and people kept getting infected.

It wasn't the vaccine itself it was how it was sold to us by Pfizer, Moderna and the politicians.

This is false and has never been proven. This was the propaganda that was spread after the vaccine was openly no longer working.

What stopped the pandemic was omicron that was so explosively contagious that 98+% of the world got it at the time. After that everyone had natural immunity that caused decreasing symptoms every subsequent time you got infected with a new variant.

Source?

There was a study in 2024 that researched what exactly lead to the sudden decline in Covid deaths [0]:

...suggest that a phase transition in the molecular structure of the COVID-19 spike protein made the virus less likely to cause severe infections.

[0] https://www.springer.com/gp/about-springer/media/research-ne... click on the link directly to the study. It's a .pdf.

> This is false and has never been proven.

You have zero authority to claim such a thing. If you want to try that route, I'd suggest you actually come with something to back up such a line.

And where, exactly, did you get your MD and Phd in epidemiology, Chester?

Please provide actual data supporting your ridiculous claim. You won't because you're talking out of your ass and it smells that way too.

Don't you have some coloring books to fill in or something?

There certainly were stupid comments by politicians on this topic. But I don't think the vaccines were oversold, they did exactly what was claimed initially.

That the virus would mutate this much was not something that scientists could have predicted at that point. I don't mean that it was entirely unexpected, but there simply wasn't any way to forecast how much it would mutate in advance.

The updated vaccines against newer strains still did their job at preventing death and serious illness. But they couldn't prevent infection for the new strains.

Some politicians and parts of the media were quite bad at handling the way the pandemic changed over time. But it was still easily possible to get good information about them.

> That the virus would mutate this much was not something that scientists could have predicted at that point.

The common scientific consensus has always been "Don't vaccinate in the middle of a pandemic" because it would cause more variants. This was one of the things they absolutely violated.

> The updated vaccines against newer strains still did their job at preventing death and serious illness.

No this is not true at all. Most deaths occurred after vaccinations rolled out.

All they had to do is be a little witholding and say that vaccines were prioritized for the very sick and very important people and maybe leak some important asshole in a private conversation saying it was a "good thing" that most people wouldn't be getting it. Just do what the French did to popularize potatoes... post guards on your potato fields and tell people they can't have them.

Instead they took the line of "we know better than you and we're going to force you to do this".

Democrats have a real problem with the "we know what's good for you" attitude.

The vaccine was developed under Warp Speed, a Trump program (one of the very few things I liked from Trump). It was first made available while Trump was still president. I have some empathy for people who think it was oversold but that wasn't solely a Democrat problem.

The vaccine was mostly developed before the pandemic and then was designed in a day or 2 after the virus was isolated and characterized. Then they started testing it for safety and effectiveness.

Warp Speed was about being ready to make lots and lots of it once the testing was complete. It did a lot of good, but they probably should have spent more on it.

How so? The US COVID vaccination response was nothing short of incredible. Even with the knuckledraggers spewing nonesense, the vaccine was ready and widely available in the United States incredibly quickly relative to most of the rest of the world. I had completed my vaccination series (as a in-good-health, 20-something) before my Canadian friends even had the opportunity.

It likely could have been a lot faster for relatively minimal cost.

(Like double what we spent on it would still be relatively minimal and easily would have sped up wide availability in the US and around the world)

The next level up from the Democrats objectively horrible attitude is fascism, which we are currently attempting. I believe Americans have a strong cultural preference to be extreme bullies whenever they can get away with it. So often we are just execrable people who care nothing about others, at all.

Americans have nothing on fascism compared to Europeans, especially what is going on in Britain right now.

Were very many forced to get mRNA? Even those under a vaccine mandate had the option for a non mRNA vaccine from J&J, right?

J&J vaccine was eventually recalled and halted. By then, at least at the time I lived in Los Angeles, many employers and establishments flat out would not accept J&J vaccination proofs under the premise that because there were multiple boosters available for mRNA, it was no longer effective.

Eh, the political problems are also oversold. The original mRNA vaccines showed great efficacy and there was no way to know the virus would mutate so rapidly, or that in doing so it would dull the effectiveness, or that transmission rates weren’t significantly reduced by vaccination, or that the effects of the vaccine would diminish relatively rapidly, etc.

It actually was plausible for a time that vaccines could create herd immunity and thus mass vaccination was highly desirable. You’re retconning today’s knowledge onto politicians of five years ago. Knowing what we know now about the vaccines, yeah, it was a bad move, but it was reasonable at the time.

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