Why is there a constant need to justify why vaccines, vaccine research, and anything related to them are inherently a good thing to skeptics but we're also supposed to believe that AI and the major companies proping it up is the future with no scrutiny?
HN is not one person. It is not even one cohesive "we". Here you find people who are AI believers, and AI skeptics. And you find people who are vaccine believers, and vaccine skeptics.
And if you think that HN believes that AI is the future with no scrutiny, you haven't been paying attention.
I'm not a "vaccine skeptic" per se but the fact a novel mechanism for vaccines was hand-waived through the FDA, and essentially forced on everyone in society, is something that has not been scrutinized enough
Except for years of follow-up studies to determine longer term effects, which certainly would have been applied for a novel vaccine, before forcing all of society to use it. Of course you could be fired from your job and be banned from public spaces (except in Florida) instead of taking it, but essentially you had to if you wanted to function in society.
I will keep my laminated "Proof of Vaccination" card for life so we don't forget, wasn't allowed anywhere without it (except Black Lives Matter riots)
Trump was president when the legislation was passed which allowed the vaccine to pass through so rapidly. GP was complaining that it was rushed through under Biden, but it was Trumps legislation that allowed it to happen without emergency powers.
I’d suggest that because the implementation didn't happen on Trump’s watch and the vaccine hard sell, mandates, “stretching” of the truth of efficacy during that period was the primary contributors to much of the distrust, it’s definitely helped contribute to his reelection.
There is certainly no way to know how Trump would have handled that implementation, but we do know how the Biden administration handled it.
It’s true that Trump may well have rolled back the legislation he put in place, who knows?
Efficacy figures are bound to change once you go from a ‘small’ study (in this case hundreds of thousands) to a wider population. The original efficacy claims would have been truly astounding, and they ended up being only very good.
80% efficacy (which it ended up as) should be seen as a medical triumph, and certainly worthwhile in the context of a global pandemic.
> original efficacy claims would have been truly astounding
That’s the problem, the bar was set too high. Things were said like “get the vaccine and you won’t get Covid”, “you won’t be able to spread it if you do get it”, and “you will have a milder case if you do get it”. In short order people realized all of those things were exaggerated and not true. Erodes trust.
> Things were said like “get the vaccine and you won’t get Covid”
Was this actually said, or did they say something like “much less likely to get Covid symptoms”?
Because the science never claimed 100% efficacy, at best they said 94%, which is quite a clear indication that some people would still get symptoms. The efficacy rates and R rates were all over the news at the time.
> “you won’t be able to spread it if you do get it”
Again an absolute that was never claimed by science. If you have milder symptoms it reduces the chance of spreading and reduces the viral load when it does. Even a small reduction in symptoms in the population will greatly help reduce the rate of the virus spreading.
> “you will have a milder case if you do get it”.
This part at least is correct.
There was a lot of confusion and bad science communication at the time, but the vaccines worked the same as vaccines always have. R rates and efficacy rates were talked about at length on mainstream and social media (what else did they have to talk about). The problem is that people heard only what they wanted to hear.
Tons of compilation videos on YT of Biden, other politicos, and much of the leftward leaning media making those very claims in 2021. I’ve seen them, don’t need to again, and don’t want my algorithm results to be filled with that crap by doing a search on your behalf.
People tend to try and excuse it by saying “well, they weren’t the scientists” but the reality is they were the public face of the covid vaccination efforts and their exaggerations and insistence on mandates had a net negative effect on people’s perceptions of the covid vaccine efficacy which has bled into a more general skepticism of public health and other vaccines.
Remember what President Obama purportedly said: “Never underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up”. Applies here.
Politicians always use simple, punchy messaging to get the point across. They do trade accuracy for simplicity, that’s a given.
I personally think “get vaccinated so you don’t get sick and don’t spread it to others” is an acceptable simplification of “get vaccinated so you have less chance of getting severely sick and reduce the risk of spreading it to others”, which is the truth (though I believe the language used was most often closer to the latter than the former).
In any case, they most certainly communicated more detail than you are suggesting. In fact there was a lot of detail.
It’s very hard to buy the notion that Biden was actively misleading that vaccines were going to be 100% effective when in White House briefings the president would hand over to medical staff, who then talked in depth about efficacy rates of less than 100%.
There is nothing acceptable about a message that ends up eroding trust in science and health authorities. Good intentions with poor outcomes hurt more than they help. We shouldn’t excuse it.
As I said clearly, a) that was a personal opinion, b) I don’t believe the message was actually presented in such absolute terms. There may have been poor science communication, which is always a problem, but that is not unusual.
There was and continues to be a huge amount of disinformation and anti-science fear spread around, but the correct information was put out there and if you weren’t getting the right information you need to change your sources.
That’s blaming the reaction instead of the cause. Exactly which sources could someone switch to for accurate information? All were bad. The political and health authorities were overcommitting the efficacy and results of the vaccine program in their communications. They were mandating a vaccine program (where they could) and pressuring for mandates (where they couldn’t mandate themselves) of a vaccine that was not doing what they said it would do. They also were actively attempting to censor information on media and social platforms including accurate information but contrary to their message. Of course the public would become skeptical and a backlash would come when the dust settled.
There is no heresy in looking back and evaluating how things were managed and hope that our authorities learn from their mistakes before God forbid any future health crisis comes our way. What we know from the last one is “Sit down, shut up, and take the medicine and don’t trust your lying eyes” doesn’t work and creates distrust. So let’s not do that again.
They knew the vaccines had substantial side effects before they were released to the public. Those results were put under a 75 year gag order, at least in the US. I'm not sure "hand waving" is the right way to describe what happened, but they certainly could have been more honest with us.
A public health authority's only coin is the extent to which the public finds it credible, and the US public health establishment may never recover from covid.
you really believe that were such a "gag order" to exist the current US government never mind its health secretary would have done an "Epstein" about that and upheld it?
