Hacker News Reader

Comment by danaris | Hacker News Reader

> I'd like accurate communication from the beginning.

So you want magic. Got it.

In situations like the one five years ago, perfect understanding of how a new vaccine will interact with a relatively new virus is not going to be available.

Even more, perfect understanding of how good our information is at any given point in time is not always going to be available.

There were definitely some failures to communicate well with the public during that time, but demanding that only definite information be communicated, and then never be contradicted, is asking the impossible.

It also really doesn't help that there are so many people who were (and are) just so scared of everything during that time that any information coming out that wasn't 100% unquestionably positive about any new measure to try to improve things would cause them to shun it forever as too dangerous to try.

View on HN

>>>> “you won’t get sick or spread the disease”

> In situations like the one five years ago, perfect understanding of how a new vaccine will interact with a relatively new virus is not going to be available.

Even five years ago, everyone that has a minimal knowledge about vaccines understood it was an unrealistic claim, because many of the vaccines don't provide that level of immunity. If you have some free time to go down the rabit hole, you can try to count them in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccination_policy_of_the_Unit...

So the questions are:

Is that quote real?

Who said that?

---

I was going to hit the "reply" button, but I decided to look in Goggle and found https://edition.cnn.com/2021/05/21/politics/walensky-comment... Like 10 worse than what I expected.

I think instead of „magic“ what we should have more of is honesty about uncertainty. The public discourse would be much less toxic if people honestly said that they’re not sure about something and that the policy they advocate might fail to deliver. However such rhetoric is immediately exploited weakness and strongly selected against.

Comparing accurate communication with magic is nonsense.

Both in Europe and the US, the government screwed up badly both mask strategic stockpiles and procurement. Therefore, the official message was that “masks don’t work”. After they were finally able to procure masks, they magically started working. That is the real magic, not demanding competence for people whose jobs were literally not fucking this up.

Meanwhile China and South Korea were producing and using masks as was normal.

The second magical part is the gaslighting about the performance of institutions tasked with pandemic preparation and about the exaggerated and incompetent government measures like fining people for going outside, forbidding people from going to work without being vaccinated or mandatorily tested each day, etc.

Vaccine safety issues were consistently downplayed by the media and in internet forums like this one. In the end, the EU-CDC published clear information on the safety of the AstraZeneca vaccine and it was much worse than for mRNA vaccines. One mRNA vaccine was worse than the other.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com