> Similar for vaccines, just give us the numbers clearly and upfront.
You are aware that literally anyone can go and literally find exactly these numbers, correct?
The trial results are published!
You are aware that literally anyone can go and literally find exactly these numbers, correct?
The trial results are published!
The health and science communicators must improve how they communicate with the public.
They are saying what is generally safe and what is not. Telling people the dry statistics won't help most people. Remember half of all people are below average in IQ. You need to paint with broad strokes if you want to reach most people.
If it helps, substitute health officials and Healthcare with tech CEOs and tech products. Do you trust them when they claim that their products protect your privacy without laying out the evidence?
Providing accurate-in-effect summarized information is a difficult balance to strike.
Ultimately though, if people really care, they should be parsing through study results.
I think there is a fundamental misscommunication going on.
It was unclear what your gripe was.
If a drug manufactuer runs a commercial, they are legally required to include risks and references to relevant information. If a state rep or PR manager does it, they can literally lie as far as I am aware.
Absolutely hate this framing. I care but I don’t have the requisite education to understand what I’m reading. I need it explained by someone who has taken up that specialization.
But to say that because I have walked another path in life that I don’t care?!? Because I have chosen a different specialization?? Deeply insulting AND untrue AND unrealistic. Our society is based on specialization at this point. If we cannot rely on each other for these basic communication tasks, then society must be dead, eh?
That process, by definition, in the perfect case, includes someone summarizing/simplifying concepts.
And that process is extremely difficult to do without bias, summarization being an information-loss activity, etc.
So essentially, you're asking for an impossible standard of communication.
Additionally, I'd point out that the basics^ of biology, immunology, pathology, and epidemiology aren't that complicated, if you're a reasonably intelligent person.
Grasping the basics of mRNA transcription, viral fragment encoding, immune system functioning, and the purpose and effects of various common vaccine adjuvants is ~20 hours of internet research.
Which is one of the reasons it really gets my goat when so many anti-vaccine folks appear not to have made any educational effort before crystalizing their loud opinions.
^ As distinct from the details, which require a lifetime to comprehend
They did explain it! Here's what it sounded like: "We have thoroughly researched these treatments and found them to be generally safe and effective, and well-worth the potential risks for people who fit profile X Y Z, but closer individualized medical consideration is warranted for people who fit profile P Q R."
It's perfectly clear.
Or are you arguing that people need to know the numbers but have no obligation/ability to actually figure out what they mean?
Yet, whenever I try to look up anything with regards to health/medicine, I find dozens of people/orgs repeating the last bit, and the first bits are hard to come across if you dont already know where to look. Its so avoided that im not surprised some people think its intentionally hidden.
Saying something is safe is a declared risk tolerance, it is not actually communicating the risk. It only works if the people you are talking to already trust your judgement.
Taking a complex topic and distilling it into simple, consumable bites that your audience can injest is what communication is. Yet, so much communication takes the easy route of "the public cant possibly understand this, well just say its safe or unsafe".
If you see this as an unavoidable, then I see the breakdown of trust of these institutions to be unavoidable too, as their ability to communicate is too poor.
They publish information at every level of specificity and detail!
Anyone who is actually curious and not just doing this lazy meta-commentary game could find all the information they need at any level of specificity or technicality they want.
A nice example was the EUCDC guidance on AstraZeneca’s vaccine which showed that for young age groups the vaccine was more dangerous than the disease. That allows anyone to make an informed decision for themselves instead of being bullied or emotionally blackmailed “for the greater good”.
Par for the course, I can’t access the actual study from The Lancet and have to settle for second-rate journalist summaries which are typically biased and ultimately worthless.
Here's a step by step guide for you:
1. Google "Pfizer covid vaccine studies CDC"
2. Click top result: https://www.cdc.gov/acip/grade/covid-19-pfizer-biontech-vacc...
3. Scroll to results:
> Outcomes of interest included individual benefits and harms. Indirect effects of vaccination (e.g., societal benefits) were not considered...
> In the Phase II/III RCT, using data on all blinded follow-up (up to 6 months or the unblinding date of March 13, 2021), the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine reduced symptomatic COVID-19 when compared to placebo (vaccine efficacy: 91.1% (95% CI 88.8–93.1%)) (Table 3a). For hospitalization due to COVID-19, 31 events occurred, all in the placebo group. Vaccine efficacy against hospitalization due to COVID-19 was 100% (95% CI 87.6–100%) (Table 3b). Deaths due to COVID-19 were uncommon, one in the vaccine group and six in the placebo group (83% (-39–98%)) (Table 3c). Numbers of SAEs were comparable between the vaccine group and the placebo group across the two RCTs (Phase II/III: 268/21,926 (1.2%) vs. 268/21,921 (1.2%); Phase I: 1/24 (4.2%) vs. 0/6 (0.0%)); there were no cases of vaccine-associated enhanced disease or vaccine-related deaths (Table 3e). Grade ≥3 reactions generally were not uncommon and occurred more frequently in the vaccine than placebo groups (Table 3f).
The reality is none of these "do your own research" or "just asking questions" people are actually curious whatsoever. Curiosity requires more than zero effort. Simply saying you're "doing your own research" and "just asking questions" while regurgitating the last thing you saw on your TikTok feed is super easy and gives you all the same sense of intellectual superiority.
Nobody was was claiming that people cant google.
I dont know why you bring this up as a gotcha when someone said public health communications should share more data.
Please identify what pieces of data are missing for what specific drugs/trials.
Can you find one that even links to the trial results?
Trial results, yes, the literal vaccine recommendation bulletins link to their backing data: https://www.cdc.gov/acip/grade/covid-19-pfizer-biontech-vacc...
Im not claiming data is never presented.
Im not claiming data is never available.
And yes, ACIP regularly puts out commercials and flyers. They are not 50 minutes nor 230 pages long, but they contain all the relevant info someone needs at a glance, and if they wish to go further then they are directed to ACIP resources like the one I listed.
"The government needs to inject knowledge directly into my brain against my will, without curiosity, and despite my lack of background expertise!"
Information being available online does not help the issue of lack of trust in public health officials, and the sentiment that they are lying or playing hide the ball.
This sentiment is a real issue the nation is facing.
The pandemic had several high-profile examples of Public Health officials knowingly misleading and lying to the public. That's going to take a lot of work to undo
> The pandemic had several high-profile examples of Public Health officials knowingly misleading and lying to the public. That's going to take a lot of work to undo
Not really. It had several high-profile examples of public health officials making mostly-reasonably hedged statements under conditions of uncertainty, and then people actually playing game-of-telephone into thinking they said things they didn't say.
Can you provide a few of these "several" examples of public health officials knowingly making false statements?