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The article is discussing the media and government being intentionally vague or even misinformative because they don't trust the public, but it backfires and ca

The article is discussing the media and government being intentionally vague or even misinformative because they don't trust the public, but it backfires and causes more distrust. The flip side that wasn't discussed is the belittling and censoring of voices that were skeptical of the narratives, which engendered even more distrust. Their strategy of information control backfired, and they doubled down. Now we've got a huge swath of US citizens that will never take the vaccine.

WhisperingShiba 5y ago
And thats a good thing too. Don't reward poor behavior with compliance.
- neogodless 5y ago
  It's trivially easy to understand that getting a vaccine that benefits you, as well as the people around you, is good for the people around you, much more so than it is good for someone you're protesting against. And not getting the vaccine is potentially bad for you, and those around you, much more so than it is bad for anyone you're protesting against. The vaccine helps your body fight the virus, and reduce the spread of the virus in your local community. That should be the key point in deciding if you get a vaccine.
  - andrewclunn 5y ago
    That's just the thing though, isn't it. Is the vaccine good for you and the people around you? Since we know asymptomatic carriers are a thing, does getting the vaccine protect those around you? Are you even able to get reliable reporting on the side effects (of various shots) and what groups are likely to be at risk for them? Assuming a disagreement about reality is a disagreement about values is a great way to straw man without knowing it.
- jjwiseman 5y ago
  That's got real "I'm not taking the safe, free, incredibly effective vaccine to own the libs" energy.
  - WhisperingShiba 5y ago
    I knew it was controversial when I posted it, and I know this comment will be too. That's not my energy at all, but I do think poor behaviors yield rightfully earned distrust and consequences. I was 100% on board with at home testing every 3 days schemes, mask wearing (even though I doubt the efficacy of most masks), but having compulsory medical procedures with a relatively untested, proprietary technology is where I draw the line.
    - PeterisP 5y ago
      I'm omitting the "compulsory" part, however, the "medical procedures with a relatively untested, proprietary technology is where I draw the line." is simply ridiculous. I'm fairly certain (some exceptions do exist) that you have had many proprietary drugs and medical procedures which have been far less tested than Covid vaccines. I mean, pretty much all new medicine is proprietary; and the vaccines have now been injected in billions of people for a long time and we have observed the results. I can accept the argument "this is where I draw the line" if and only if in pre-Covid you would have refused most of what doctors would prescribe you. If you want to draw a line between pre-Covid modern prescription drugs (all proprietary, many also with weird new tech, all tested on far less people than the vaccines) and the current vaccines, you're going to need a substantially different argument than "medical procedures with a relatively untested, proprietary technology". Heck, even simply saying "I don't believe that such procedures should be compulsory ever for any reason" would be a much more reasonable argument than that.
      - Clubber 5y ago
        >I'm omitting the "compulsory" part, however It's intellectually dishonest to chop up what he says, even though you admit it, to make it easier to argue against.
- cortesoft 5y ago
  This is such a silly mentality. Deciding to not do something that should be done just because someone who is incompetent tells you to is the definition of cutting off your nose to spite your face. You aren't 'punishing' those in power by not taking the vaccine. You are punishing every other person in society.
  - encryptluks2 5y ago
    Even though vaccinated are still transmitting and catching it? Seriously, who am I punishing.. if you want it then get it. According to your logic that is how to prevent COVID except when it isn't.
outime 5y ago
What’s more interesting is that most of these people will survive this episode (given the known mortality data) and thus will “win” the debate (from their point of view) and will never ever trust the government (or health authorities) again. That’s the biggest downside in reality, and regaining the trust is going to be extremely complicated.
- nverno 5y ago
  But the upside is that hopefully the govt/health authorities will learn a lesson and be better in the future. Id say in these situations any fallout is always the govt's fault since it is there to serve the people- a case of the customer is always right.
  - tablespoon 5y ago
    > But the upside is that hopefully the govt/health authorities will learn a lesson and be better in the future. But there's only so much they can do. Sowing distrust has proven to provide short-term self-benefit to many powerful interests (e.g. political factions, partisan media). Even if the health authorities have a perfect strategy, those interests will find an opening to subvert it (e.g. portraying initial confusion as lying).
    - Jensson 5y ago
      In a multi party system sowing distrust in an opposing party doesn't help your party, it mostly helps parties adjacent to that party. So then the goal becomes to be as trustworthy as possible to the public rather than make the public hate the enemy. It really solves many of these issues.
      - tablespoon 5y ago
        > In a multi party system sowing distrust in an opposing party doesn't help your party, it mostly helps parties adjacent to that party. So then the goal becomes to be as trustworthy as possible to the public rather than make the public hate the enemy. It really solves many of these issues. Does it through? I suppose what I had in mind wasn't so much narrowly-focused electioneering, but broader and somewhat sloppy gesticulations towards an ideological tendency. For instance, if there were two left-wing parties, a Rush Limbaugh could get both of them by encouraging his listeners to distrust the "left."
rob_c 5y ago
Not just US, I would say there's a large number of very well educated people even in well off countries who have a large amount of hesitation toward this mainly due to information handling and lack of transparency. (Yes there is a very vocal anti-vax nut job crowd, but frankly that will always be there, and is always different to those who object to policy decisions on moral grounds of their failings and the deaths that poor policy leads to) The only nice message for "please take a vaccine for something that won't kill you "is "please take it to stop it killing others". Given the USA seems to treat getting ill as a personal failing that will destroy your life and society turns it's back on you I'm not shocked that it would fall on deaf ears.
- djrogers 5y ago
  I don't think it's an issue of seeing illness as a personal failing - that's just dismissive and an unhelpful characterization. People I know that choose to not get vaccinated yet are largely resistant to the 'do it for others' push because we've been told that the vaccine is so effective that the 'others' should be safe anyway, unless they've chosen not to get the vaccine too. That leaves these people with a risk assessment based solely on their own health, age, etc.
  - gremIin 5y ago
    What government group said that the non-vaccinated were safe anyway? Do you have a single source?
    - InvaderFizz 5y ago
      I suggest you reread the parent post. I think you have inverted the message.
  - native_samples 5y ago
    Well, it's worse than that. The "for the good of society" messaging has been very unstable, even moreso than normal for public health messaging. It's been a mix of: the elderly will take the vaccines because they're at high risk and then life can go back to normal. Then it became all adults need to take it to build herd immunity (the concept that in 2020 was supposedly some sort of a-scientific conspiracy theory), then it became life won't go back to normal even with high vaccination rates, then passes were introduced that have an exception for testing i.e. they look like an attempt to stop spread of the virus, but then it became clear that vaccines don't stop the spread yet the passes remained the same or even had the testing exemption removed. Then it became something about hospital capacity but they started firing healthcare workers en-masse, then it became all teenagers need to take it to stop schools closing and/or to protect their mental health (UK justification), but schools closing is itself a government/union policy, now Pfizer is trialling vaccines for babies. So who knows what the justification for that will be. But, we can be sure they'll find one. It's been less than a year and that's not even all the changes in vaccination messaging, just the ones related to why everyone has to take it even if they don't personally want to. I'm honestly not sure I even got them all. That's been combined with very strong messaging that anyone who doubts the perfect omniscient competence of the public health establishment are crazy loons who need to be purged from society, with some of the nastiest and most aggressive tactics deployed by western governments against their own peoples for a long time. Really don't see a way to recover trust in vaccination after the rollercoaster messaging over this year. There's no consistency anywhere which strongly implies the collectivist goal is chosen, then scientific-sounding justifications are invented to justify it. By next week this comment will be out of date and more stuff will need to be added to the list.
swader999 5y ago
How can there be informed consent with censorship?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
zarkov99 5y ago
It is hard to understate the damage. The loss of national cohesion, the exacerbated division caused by the "choose your own reality" consequences of no longer having trustworthy institutions. And maybe worse of all, the self-fulfilling nature of distrust. When you do not trust someone, and they know it, they have no incentive to behave in a trust-worthy manner. It will take a long time to dig the country's self-image out of the hole dug during the pandemic.
- ska 5y ago
  > The loss of national cohesion, It may be you have the causality backwards here.
  - creato 5y ago
    Like pretty much everyone in this thread, who are at the very least failing to acknowledge the fact that this is a feedback loop. I'd be a lot more willing to acknowledge the notion that the media and government are so terrible if the alternatives that most people have chosen to trust instead weren't so laughably bad sources in comparison. This isn't people making an informed judgement about what sources to best trust, it's people being caught in a wave of bullshit and not actually thinking about anything. A lot of the comments here in this chain are just part of the wave.
    - zarkov99 5y ago
      Vetting an information source can be extraordinarily difficult in this day and age, at least for those looking for more than confirmation of their world views. There is an ocean of well funded, profession disinformation out there. Telling BS from fact is barely doable for the technical elites who gather in this forum and it certainly cannot be expected from the average citizen. This is why the corruption of our sense making institutions and the unavoidable loss of trust is so devastating to the fabric of our culture. This is a very big deal and blaming the stupid rubes that believe obvious BS (to us smart people anyway) might feel good but its not just missing the point, it is actually making things worse.
  - 5y ago
JumpCrisscross 5y ago
> the belittling and censoring of voices that were skeptical of the narratives, which engendered even more distrust What are examples of this? Most of the U.S. was quite loose about lockdowns and mask requirements until their specific geography got hit. (For example, I summered in the Smoky Mountains June of 2020. Compared to New York, it was as if nothing had happened. The tone changed by December, after the South had its wave.) To the extent there was belittling, it was around the promotion of treatments, a set of claims that has always been tightly regulated. (Also, the early, intentional miscommunications around the efficacy of N95 masks, which was horrible.)
- yCombLinks 5y ago
  An example that jumps to mind is all of the media and academics that opposed the theory that the virus was a lab leak in china, primarily because Trump espoused the view. As much as Trump deserved ridicule, that was a perfectly valid theory.
  - musicale 5y ago
    Pretty much. https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-medias-lab-leak-fiasco https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-medias-lab-leak-fiasco https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-inside-the-fight-to-uncover-covid-19s-origins https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-...
  - adamiscool8 5y ago
    Another that was roundly mocked was Trump's idea about bringing "UV light inside the body" as a treatment. Lo and behold a year or so later.. [0] >Ultraviolet light treatments introduced into the tracheas of five critically ill COVID-19 patients appeared to be safe and associated with a reduction in the respiratory load of SARS-CoV-2—the virus responsible for COVID-19—in all but one patient, according to a study conducted by Cedars-Sinai. [0] https://www.cedars-sinai.org/newsroom/reduced-viral-loads-seen-in-covid-19-patients-treated-with-uva-light/ https://www.cedars-sinai.org/newsroom/reduced-viral-loads-se...
    - 5y ago
hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
In my opinion the biggest example of this was the poor mask guidance early on in the pandemic that was subsequently reversed. Zeynep Tufekci had a very good piece in the NYT on this: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/opinion/coronavirus-face-masks.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/opinion/coronavirus-face-... The real fear was that there would be a run on masks by the public, making them unavailable for hospital use. Also, at the time, there wasn't clear evidence of the effectiveness of masks by the public (although there was some evidence with earlier respiratory infections that mask use by the public is beneficial). But instead of just saying that, the message from the vast majority of public health officials (and media types like Sanjay Gupta) was that "masks don't work for the public". It's not hard to go back to March 2020 and find lots of videos to this effect. This all spectacularly backfired a couple months later when health officials told everyone to wear masks. And what made me slightly angry was that many officials tried to say something like "well, we have new data now". Which was somewhat true, but also conveniently swept over the fact that there was never data that said "masks don't work for the public", but health officials didn't have a problem saying that in public earlier.
- hyperpallium2 5y ago
  If there was a run on toilet paper, wouldn't there be a run on masks? But seems securing masks for hospital use - compulsory acquisition or paying above market rates - would be a better solution.
- pbourke 5y ago
  > The real fear was that there would be a run on masks by the public, making them unavailable for hospital use. Ironically the run on masks had begun months earlier. I snagged a box of N95 construction masks in late Jan 2020, and they were totally gone everywhere by early Feb
- skocznymroczny 5y ago
  I'm not convinced by that narrative. I think there is still limited proof that masks make any noticeable difference. But the public demanded mask mandates (unlike things like vaccines this is very noticeable so for many people it gives them a peace of mind that something is being done), so the officials delivered. But to save face, they invented a story how they always knew masks work great, but didn't want people to do a run on masks.
Mikeb85 5y ago
With how governments have behaved I absolutely understand why people would distrust them and to be honest, I have absolutely zero trust in government right now too. They put politics and driving wedges between people to further entrench their positions (a bunch of provinces and our feds all called snap elections during Covid) over honesty and people. Even now instead of trying to assuage the fears of the vaccine hesitant, they just demonise and threaten them. Personally, the only trust I have is that a bunch of PhDs making vaccines care about solving a hard problem, so I got the vaccine. Not that I was ever worried about Covid itself, I had Covid during wave 1, had contact with a bunch of Covid positive people in wave 2 without contracting it again, etc...
- zionic 5y ago
  >They put politics and driving wedges between people to further entrench their positions The current vice president of the united states when on tv in 2020 telling the world she wouldn't take "trumps rushed vaccine".
  - larkost 5y ago
    This is a complete mischaracterization, and bordering on a lie at this point. She was very specific about not taking it because President Trump said so (rightly, given Trump's history of promoting improving treatments). But you don't have to take my work for it, read her's: "If Dr. Fauci, the doctors, tell us that we should take it, I'll be the first in line to take it. But if Donald Trump tells us we should take it, I'm not going to take it." Only by omitting the first line can you argue that she was going to refuse the vaccine. And that is exactly what many Right-wing outlets have been doing, and that is a lie.
    - ars 5y ago
      Your characterization is even more misleading than theirs. Do you seriously think Trump created the vaccine himself and it didn't go through the FDA and scientists or anything else? The mere existence of the vaccine should be enough for her but no if Trump said something she won't take it.
at_a_remove 5y ago
And there has been this background ambient energy of "Big Pharma is evil, the Sacklers ..." (which I find rather scapegoaty for the Sacklers in particular) which just immediately ran afoul of "You should definitely trust in these vaccines produced by Big Pharma, the ones we have been telling you are so greedy/evil/incompetent." Then you have some discussion of what "gain of function" means and ... Well, the distrust the American public has in Science! has been earned over decades. The ever-changing food pyramid (according to the whims of whatever lobbying group), reefer madness scares leading cannibis to be Schedule I of all things (harmful, of no utility), cigarettes are healthy, we need to put these forever chemicals into your sofas so you don't catch on fire (oh well they don't work but we are leaving them in), thalidomide, diethylstilbesterol ... And all of it has been sold with a pat and a don't worry your pretty head about it. COVID-19 is just another photon in the background radiation of Science We Tell You To Trust. It's a shame, my BS was in a hard science, but when I run into skeptics, well, they've learned it and we've earned it.
- Griffinsauce 5y ago
  > the ones we have been telling you are so greedy/evil/incompetent." I haven't seen any claims of incompetency, only of greed (to the lev of being evil) - is that an actual theme or did you just lump that in? It's a significant different in this context.
- mindslight 5y ago
  Is this not the same pattern that happens to every human endeavor though, and not just science? Business interests step in and market themselves as good faith experts creating enlightened progress, when really they're con artists trading on the reputation of the real experts to sell harmful products. The same problem happens in the tech world with two decades of "don't be evil" and messaging about the fantastic future, culminating in the Big Tech dystopia. The whole time it has been obvious they've been building a massive humanity-crushing surveillance/control machine. But up until recently, even on HN, the prevailing groupthink has been to unquestioningly drink the corporate kool aid. "It's hard to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it" Technologists, scientists, etc themselves aren't the problem. The real problem is that our society encourages con men at every turn - from the individual rejection of boring experts (filled in by charismatic charlatans), to advertising (since everything is relative, fraud is fine), to the utter lack of punishment after a con blows up ("white collar crime"). We've put business expedience above honesty, essentially equating morality with profitability, with the result being that every institution has become hollow.
betterunix2 5y ago
Censorship is not what causes large numbers of US citizens to refuse this vaccine. If the Republicans in leadership positions took this seriously from the start and did not go around casting doubt on vaccination far more people would get the vaccine. If the previous president had not politicized the response to COVID and had simply told his followers to do what the CDC says we would have many millions more people getting the vaccine (and for the matter, hundreds of thousands of people would still be alive). Don't let the Republicans off the hook. This should never have been a political issue, but Republican leaders at every level of government made this political and continue to politicize the pandemic.
- kansface 5y ago
  I don’t even know how to respond to this. The nicest thing I can say is that your comment is both entirely ahistorical and highly indicative of why Republicans don’t trust the CDC.
- complianceowl 5y ago
  Your partisan comments are so toxic. Try making your point without spewing that Facebook garbage around here.
  - ajvs 5y ago
    Agreed, it's especially ridiculous that they said Trump should have been advocating for the vaccine when he did and still does.
  - gravity13 5y ago
    Is it really partisan to point out that Republicans took anti-vaxxing to be practically their identifying feature?
    - mensetmanusman 5y ago
      Most anti-vaxxers I know are far left, and most republicans I know have all the other historic vaccines for school and travel, but are more suspicious of the Covid ones due in part to the lack of discussion about natural immunity in the US context (most of them who already had covid don’t want to get the vaccine since they do t think it is worth their time).
SquishyPanda23 5y ago
> The flip side that wasn't discussed This has been discussed ad nauseam. Nature isn't a foreign policy magazine, so it's not really the greatest place for advising how the US should respond to a disinformation campaign. But communicating about healthcare policy seems to be reasonably in its area of expertise. > The flip side that wasn't discussed is the belittling and censoring of voices that were skeptical of the narratives, which engendered even more distrust The disinformation campaign was allowed to got on essentially unchecked for a long time because it was politically sensitive to speak publicly about it. As we started to get more confirmation that it was being funded by foreign governments (e.g. [0]), pushback against the disinformation became stronger. > Their strategy of information control backfired, and they doubled down. Now we've got a huge swath of US citizens that will never take the vaccine. I am highly skeptical there is any evidence for the causality you are implying here. A disinformation campaign like this is an attack on Americans by a foreign military. People may reasonably disagree about how it should be handled, but at some point citizens have a right to defend their country from attacks. [0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/russian-disinformation-campaign-aims-to-undermine-confidence-in-pfizer-other-covid-19-vaccines-u-s-officials-say-11615129200 https://www.wsj.com/articles/russian-disinformation-campaign...
- spookthesunset 5y ago
  What is disinformation? Who gets to decide?
  - SquishyPanda23 5y ago
    The people running the disinformation campaign usually decide.
jasonlaramburu 5y ago
>censoring of voices that were skeptical of the narratives Much of what you describe as 'censoring' was focused on stopping the promotion of false cures eg Hydroxychloroquine, Ivermectin, H2O2 nebulization etc. This type of speech is already highly regulated, as most people lack the capacity to 'do their own research' regarding a drug's safety or efficacy.
- notahacker 5y ago
  And of course the promotion of quack cures (including at the highest levels of government and some of the highest profile media personalities) came before some media outlets decided to censor some of them. Nobody honestly believes that everybody would have ignored the likes of the last POTUS or Joe Rogan if Facebook et al had amplified that message rather than deleting or fact checking it
- ajvs 5y ago
  Highly regulated how? There was no censorship on people recommending alternative health treatments online until COVID-19 came. Additionally ivermectin is not a cure, it instead has proven effectiveness in attenuating the duration and severity of symptoms. That the scientific studies demonstrating this are not allowed to be even discussed on major social media platforms is a red flag.
- timr 5y ago
  > Much of what you describe as 'censoring' was focused on stopping the promotion of false cures eg Hydroxychloroquine, Ivermectin, H2O2 nebulization etc. HCQ, while it has been bourne out that it doesn't work, was a perfect example of miscommunication and "protective censorship" breeding public mistrust: the initial papers that cast doubt on HCQ were based on fabricated data. Based on this initial bit of false data and (a strong helping of the stupidest kind of politics) the media jumped head-first into censorship and ridicule. The clinical trials for HCQ were halted (ugh). And then they were shown to be basing that on fabricated data. It was an utter disaster: https://www.science.org/content/article/two-elite-medical-journals-retract-coronavirus-papers-over-data-integrity-questions https://www.science.org/content/article/two-elite-medical-jo... Subsequently, while I don't personally believe that Ivermectin works, we're still waiting for clinical trials to complete. Let's keep a tighter grip on our horses, please.
fortuna86 5y ago
> Now we've got a huge swath of US citizens that will never take the vaccine. They were always not going to do it. The second it became a political issue, their minds were made up. Blaming what was or wasn't done by third parties, government, etc. is completely missing the point.
AnimalMuppet 5y ago
> Now we've got a huge swath of US citizens that will never take the vaccine. Some never will. But it's been less than two years. If they started telling the truth, the real truth, the hard truths, and kept at it, consistently, for two or five or ten years, at least some of them would come around. Oh, yeah, and if you stopped trying to manipulate and force them. Treat people like grown-ups, even when they disagree with you, even when you think they're wrong, even when you think the data proves they're wrong. In case you[1] haven't noticed, people aren't robots that will do what you want. They are fiercely independent, and they resent being forced into something, and they will fight you just because you're trying to force them, whether or not what you're trying to get them to do is a good thing. [1] "You" here does not refer to you, gentle reader. It refers to the "you" in authority who think that they can force people to get vaccinated without it backfiring spectacularly.
- mattgreenrocks 5y ago
  Fully agree. One of the best takes I read on this argued that the public health institutions failed the US because they were so intent on forcing outcomes ("don't buy masks") rather than, as you said, simply saying hard truths and giving guidance. People can tell when they're being talked down to, and there's been a lot of that since this started. I don't even think anyone's doing it maliciously, they're just really, really bad at PR. Now, I think there are plenty of people who over-corrected for this and love endlessly nursing a grudge against Evil Big Government. That's on them.
  - SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
    Genuinely asking: how does this compare with other safety mandates like seatbelts? Those were also government mandated and highly unpopular for the exact same reasons.
    - aakresearch 5y ago
      Seat belt mandates: - Have accumulated evidence of well quantified effectiveness, however small. - Have no practical downsides, even speculative. - Practically are not 100% enforceable, and therefore are not 100% adhered too. Technical means of enforcement (like beeping) are lame and easily bypassed, at least for now. - Are related to a man-made activity of reasonably increased danger and, importantly, licensed. Someone may choose not to participate in such activity (driving), with relatively low downsides. Public health mandates are, effectively, an attempt to license the mere existence. - Do not have religious symbolism attached to it. No one is ever yelled on by strangers for not having a seatbelt fastened. No one has a sticker on their facebook photo saying "proudly wearing my seatbelt". - Seatbelts are "reversible", i.e. you don't wear them for life. You are not forced to have seatbelt mounting points implanted in your body. You cannot "un-vaccinate", though, if it ends up a bad decision.
Pxtl 5y ago
Yes, it's clearly the mainstream media and politicians fault that they had to hedge some of their bets because they're unsure about certain details and the public freaks out when they have to change their statements when facts change or become more concrete. Totally their fault. And not the fault of the vast network of extremists spreading FUD. Totally not those people's fault.
Pxtl 5y ago
> The flip side that wasn't discussed is the belittling and censoring of voices that were skeptical of the narratives, which engendered even more distrust Oh yeah, a group of people pushing ideas that got thousands upon thousands of people killed and jammed up ICUs leading to necessary surgeries being postponed by vomiting out a sewage-pipe of bad-faith arguments and disinformation. It's clearly not okay that we were derisive to those statements. I mean, look how well politely ignoring conspiracy theorists for a decade worked out. That totally had no unforeseen consequences, right?
NoblePublius 5y ago
You’ve got a huge swath of america who doesn’t want the vaccine because they either have superior natural immunity already OR understand that the virus poses little-to-no-risk to them or their family. Covid is essentially equal to the flu in terms of mortality for people under ~55 and children are virtually immune from serious Covid illness.
- remarkEon 5y ago
  >Covid is essentially equal to the flu in terms of mortality for people under ~55 and children are virtually immune from serious Covid illness. Previously this would've been "COVID misinformation", but it isn't anymore as the NYT said it this morning. I'd quibble a bit about natural immunity being "superior" but honestly who knows anymore. FTA: >For children without a serious medical condition, the danger of severe Covid is so low as to be difficult to quantify. [1]https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/12/briefing/covid-age-risk-infection-vaccine.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/12/briefing/covid-age-risk-i...
  - NoblePublius 5y ago
    More children have died in car crashes in 2021 than have ever died of Covid
r3trohack3r 5y ago
> Now we've got a huge swath of US citizens that will never take the vaccine I suspect it's more than just "the vaccine" (assuming "the" refers to the covid vaccines); it's an overall regression in the trust of health officials that will take decades to rebuild. We had a pretty well built system of trust for health officials. Everything from a standard set of vaccines being a requirement at schools to CDC guidance being taken fairly seriously. There were folks who distrusted this system, but it was (at least I felt like it was) _fringe_. The COVID response put all of these systems in the spotlight. It made a lot of people who previously trusted the system ask questions they never bothered to ask before. They may have asked these questions about how COVID was handled, but these are _general questions_ about the trustworthiness of the official health channels. The doubt that was sown isn't isolated to COVID. Regardless of where you personally stand on any of this, the way "official" channels handled the pandemic burned trust for a large portion of the population. Fixing this is going to be a long road.
- jimkleiber 5y ago
  I think what frustrates me is not that we would doubt the trustworthiness of these institutions, I think it's a pretty common ebb and flow of trust, but how so many people seem to try to convince so many other people to distrust these institutions. The "they're lying to you, they're gonna take everything from you" rhetoric which doesn't necessarily create the doubt or fear but seems to amplify it, driving society further apart. In a way, I agree a lot with the original article in that one of the best ways to flip the switch and rebuild trust is to lead with trust...of people's intentions and abilities. This year has challenged me and I think so many of us in how to not only trust our institutions but our friends, neighbors, and family. I hope that we recognize it's ok to doubt and that most of us have no idea what we're doing, we're trying our best to get by, including those who frustrated me with their arguments to distrust others. It may be a long road and yet, super clichély, it starts with some of us taking the first step.
  - r3trohack3r 5y ago
    "they're lying to you ... rhetoric" I think it depends on the definition of rhetoric you are using, and how you've framed the argument. Not everyone who said "they're lying to you" also said "they're going to take everything from you" I think the point of this article is that official health channels _were_ being dishonest - through their use of rhetoric, lying by omission, etc. Saying official health channels were dishonest during COVID doesn't fit the common definition of "rhetoric." Official health channels were playing a trolley game and didn't trust the public to be "in on the game." Without knowing the game, you don't know which set of tracks you are standing on. If you know a trolley is coming, and the official channels have demonstrated they are being dishonest, you should not trust them when they tell you "switch to this track, we promise we aren't sending any trolleys down it." At best, you are the lucky group being put on the life boats. At worse, you are the smaller of two statistics. Some of the trolley games I saw early on, where I personally lost trust in these channels: --- What they said: this isn't a pandemic. The game: this is a pandemic, but we don't want to cause a rush on supplies. If you weren't buying supplies in preparation for the imminent lockdown, you were standing on the wrong set of tracks and the official health channels lied to you. --- What they said: the public doesn't need masks for this pandemic The game: we need to make sure hospitals have masks Masks worked to reduce the spread of COVID under specific circumstances. You should have been wearing one during the early days of the hockystick. If you didn't go out and buy a few early on, you were standing on the wrong set of tracks and the official health channels lied to you. --- Trust is earned, not given. You don't earn my trust by sending trolleys barreling down the tracks at my friends and family.
chaostheory 5y ago
You forgot to mention masks. Early in the pandemic, US health authorities were adamant that masks weren't needed. Only months later did they later admit that it was done due to the mask shortage for medical professionals. https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/19/health/face-masks-us-guidance/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/19/health/face-masks-us-guidance... https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/04/10/829890635/why-there-so-many-different-guidelines-for-face-masks-for-the-public https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/04/10/8298906... https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/who-changes-covid-19-mask-guidance-wear-one-if-you-n1226116 https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/who-changes-covid... Is it a surprised that trust in Western public institutions are at a low?
bothandeach 5y ago
Trust the public with hard truths is exactly right. Thats what China did and Trump did not IMO
electrondood 5y ago
Are we just going to ignore all of the anti-vax disinfo then? That seems like a far more significant factor than "the government didn't give the public the complicated version from the start."
kcplate 5y ago
I think one of the best examples of the US government shooting itself in the foot during this pandemic was when it was released in the press that some in the CDC advocated to prioritize minorities for vaccination for social justice reasons. A quick to market vaccine based on new technology, and some woke bureaucrat doesn’t seem to connect that that message would be heard as “they want to test it on us again”.
wolverine876 5y ago
> Their strategy of information control backfired, and they doubled down. Now we've got a huge swath of US citizens that will never take the vaccine. These people have free choice, and they are making a bad one. They aren't victims; they are the problem, infecting their neighbors and allowing a pandemic to spread. Much more significantly, I'm not sure how we can omit the overwhelming messaging from a certain political segment of society, and is spread by leading news outlets, governors, members of Congress, the prior administration in the White House, and very many influencers in every domain. The messaging claimed the the pandemic wouldn't happen, that the virus is inconsequential ('like the flu'), the vaccines are dangerous, etc. That omission is a standard rhetorical technique of that political segment, which is to always attack - always keep your opponents on the defensive. If your theory was true, we'd see vaccine denial across society. Instead, AFAIK, there's a very strong correlation between political beliefs and vaccine denial. These people clearly, IMHO, choose politics over health and they have what they choose - they have their political movement, at the cost of health - their own, and millions of others. Again, they aren't victims; they make their choices, and are responsible for the consequences.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
75dvtwin 5y ago
> Now we've got a huge swath of US citizens that will never take the vaccine Not only 'the vaccine' (meaning Covid-19) vaccine. Trust to CDC is lost, trust to FDA is lost, trust to Executive orders on health policies is lost. Trust to major news networks, trust to health pundits -- is lost. On top of that, of course, trust for non-health related 'institutions' (eg FBI, CIA, NSA, FISA courts) -- is lost. Everything from here on coming from the above institutions -- will be viewed with skepticism and distrust. Hell, probably trust in legitimacy of election process is lost too. Will see, I guess. My point about the article -- is that fails to consider the whole system in a country like US... No longer will western politicians be able to point out to authoritarian dictatorships -- from the point of moral authority. The "Whatabout-ism" is now 'normalized', and will continue be normal discourse of international politics for a very long time. Historians 200 years from now 2016-2022 will have to be calling this as a 'Period of Pundits & Institutions loosing people's trust' for many of English-speaking countries.
wesleywt 5y ago
I think you got this wrong. It was vague and inconsistent messaging from a leader who was skeptical of the science. Then made the pandemic into a personal attack on him. Now his followers will not take the vaccine.
laurent92 5y ago
But I have a question: Why did all governments have exactly the same behavior? Was there a handbook saying “talk to your citizen like dumb children” that was somehow mandatory reading before purchasing the vaccine? Why the coordinated action? Erratic behavior doesn’t explain it to me — it was far from random, all particles went the same way.
- raxxorrax 5y ago
  > Why the coordinated action? In politics, if you do the same as other countries, you have a lot of support to justify said action without much effort. If you do it like Sweden you are bombarded with criticism. So the easy option is to copy from your neighbor. Especially in times when the press tends to shield their favorite candidates from accountability. You don't even need to defend yourself, others do that for you.
thepangolino 5y ago
I also have serious doubt about those who took the vaccine now. Would they have ratted on Anne Frank after a similar propaganda campaign that made them take the vaccine?
- encryptluks2 5y ago
  They wouldn't have ratted her out, they'd parade her dead body around celebrating.
eptcyka 5y ago
I don't think a discussion here is valid without taking into account the meddling of foreign powers. Troll farms have had a massive impact here.
raxxorrax 5y ago
Exactly. All this banning of alleged misinformation backfired. To be honest, we can be glad of that even if there a now acute negative repercussions. Not because of misinformation, because of censorship attempts.
maxerickson 5y ago
I don't think we can make a lot of assumptions about counterfactuals. There's a bunch of people primed to act out regardless of how well the messaging is handled.
thephyber 5y ago
It’s worth pointing out that: (1) there is always a huge swath of people that will “never” take a new vaccine. It has only gotten bigger since social media allowed the unwashed masses to bypass the old gatekeepers. (2) the top health officials in the USA have all been threatened (death threats against their person and their families). This very likely clouds the lessons they could learn from the past / years. (3) “Hard truths” are complicated and require an audience willing to understand nuance. We have a fractured media environment that frequently doesn’t carry the entire quote and media consumers that frequently don’t click beyond the clickbait headline. We have people en masse trusting their health decisions to superstition who join in chants to fire/arrest/kill health officials. While the mask guidance of Feb 2020 could have been better communicated (it seems clear to me the calculus involved more than what was publicly stated), it also seems naïve to me that simply telling the truth would have solved any of these issues.
maceurt 5y ago
Never taking the vaccine and I suggest everyone else not to either. It has not gone through any of the rigorous scientific studies that any other required vaccine in modern US history had to go through. And its about time people stopped voting and started taking real action against the blatant disregard for the Constitution and the American people that this Government has. We are the ones should be holding our government accountable, and we have failed because we are too afraid of Violence. And lets be clear when a person breaks a law the police officer uses adequate force to arrest him and if he keeps resisting then it can sometimes be violent force. Its legal and righteous. People wonder why the Jewish people didn't stand and fight against Hitler when they had the chance? They were frogs in boiling water unable to know they were dead before it was too late, and right now the melting pot of our country is getting mighty warm. Our ancestors fought and died for the rights we have given up because our refusal to go into the streets and fight. Enough talk, go out there and take back what is yours. If you tolerate injustice by refusing to take action you are the same as the one who would be applying that injustice. The only way for us to take back our rights is for everyone to fight, you want to talk about duty with vaccine? You have a duty for your countryman to stand with him to defend the rights you deserve, need, and cherish. Whether you care or not is irrelevant, because you not fighting damns everybody else who does since this War requires every human who calls themselves an American. Get your ass in the streets right now and fight. Not a figure of speech, march down your city and tear down anything and everything that infringes on your rights. And for the people who I know are thinking about the repercussions or social stigma, then fuck you. Our rights are worth every single ounce of pain and suffering a human could be inflicted with. Without Rights our Life is meaningless.

WhisperingShiba 5y ago

And thats a good thing too. Don't reward poor behavior with compliance.

neogodless 5y ago
It's trivially easy to understand that getting a vaccine that benefits you, as well as the people around you, is good for the people around you, much more so than it is good for someone you're protesting against. And not getting the vaccine is potentially bad for you, and those around you, much more so than it is bad for anyone you're protesting against. The vaccine helps your body fight the virus, and reduce the spread of the virus in your local community. That should be the key point in deciding if you get a vaccine.
- andrewclunn 5y ago
  That's just the thing though, isn't it. Is the vaccine good for you and the people around you? Since we know asymptomatic carriers are a thing, does getting the vaccine protect those around you? Are you even able to get reliable reporting on the side effects (of various shots) and what groups are likely to be at risk for them? Assuming a disagreement about reality is a disagreement about values is a great way to straw man without knowing it.
jjwiseman 5y ago
That's got real "I'm not taking the safe, free, incredibly effective vaccine to own the libs" energy.
- WhisperingShiba 5y ago
  I knew it was controversial when I posted it, and I know this comment will be too. That's not my energy at all, but I do think poor behaviors yield rightfully earned distrust and consequences. I was 100% on board with at home testing every 3 days schemes, mask wearing (even though I doubt the efficacy of most masks), but having compulsory medical procedures with a relatively untested, proprietary technology is where I draw the line.
  - PeterisP 5y ago
    I'm omitting the "compulsory" part, however, the "medical procedures with a relatively untested, proprietary technology is where I draw the line." is simply ridiculous. I'm fairly certain (some exceptions do exist) that you have had many proprietary drugs and medical procedures which have been far less tested than Covid vaccines. I mean, pretty much all new medicine is proprietary; and the vaccines have now been injected in billions of people for a long time and we have observed the results. I can accept the argument "this is where I draw the line" if and only if in pre-Covid you would have refused most of what doctors would prescribe you. If you want to draw a line between pre-Covid modern prescription drugs (all proprietary, many also with weird new tech, all tested on far less people than the vaccines) and the current vaccines, you're going to need a substantially different argument than "medical procedures with a relatively untested, proprietary technology". Heck, even simply saying "I don't believe that such procedures should be compulsory ever for any reason" would be a much more reasonable argument than that.
    - Clubber 5y ago
      >I'm omitting the "compulsory" part, however It's intellectually dishonest to chop up what he says, even though you admit it, to make it easier to argue against.
cortesoft 5y ago
This is such a silly mentality. Deciding to not do something that should be done just because someone who is incompetent tells you to is the definition of cutting off your nose to spite your face. You aren't 'punishing' those in power by not taking the vaccine. You are punishing every other person in society.
- encryptluks2 5y ago
  Even though vaccinated are still transmitting and catching it? Seriously, who am I punishing.. if you want it then get it. According to your logic that is how to prevent COVID except when it isn't.

outime 5y ago

What’s more interesting is that most of these people will survive this episode (given the known mortality data) and thus will “win” the debate (from their point of view) and will never ever trust the government (or health authorities) again. That’s the biggest downside in reality, and regaining the trust is going to be extremely complicated.

nverno 5y ago
But the upside is that hopefully the govt/health authorities will learn a lesson and be better in the future. Id say in these situations any fallout is always the govt's fault since it is there to serve the people- a case of the customer is always right.
- tablespoon 5y ago
  > But the upside is that hopefully the govt/health authorities will learn a lesson and be better in the future. But there's only so much they can do. Sowing distrust has proven to provide short-term self-benefit to many powerful interests (e.g. political factions, partisan media). Even if the health authorities have a perfect strategy, those interests will find an opening to subvert it (e.g. portraying initial confusion as lying).
  - Jensson 5y ago
    In a multi party system sowing distrust in an opposing party doesn't help your party, it mostly helps parties adjacent to that party. So then the goal becomes to be as trustworthy as possible to the public rather than make the public hate the enemy. It really solves many of these issues.
    - tablespoon 5y ago
      > In a multi party system sowing distrust in an opposing party doesn't help your party, it mostly helps parties adjacent to that party. So then the goal becomes to be as trustworthy as possible to the public rather than make the public hate the enemy. It really solves many of these issues. Does it through? I suppose what I had in mind wasn't so much narrowly-focused electioneering, but broader and somewhat sloppy gesticulations towards an ideological tendency. For instance, if there were two left-wing parties, a Rush Limbaugh could get both of them by encouraging his listeners to distrust the "left."

rob_c 5y ago

Not just US, I would say there's a large number of very well educated people even in well off countries who have a large amount of hesitation toward this mainly due to information handling and lack of transparency. (Yes there is a very vocal anti-vax nut job crowd, but frankly that will always be there, and is always different to those who object to policy decisions on moral grounds of their failings and the deaths that poor policy leads to) The only nice message for "please take a vaccine for something that won't kill you "is "please take it to stop it killing others". Given the USA seems to treat getting ill as a personal failing that will destroy your life and society turns it's back on you I'm not shocked that it would fall on deaf ears.

djrogers 5y ago
I don't think it's an issue of seeing illness as a personal failing - that's just dismissive and an unhelpful characterization. People I know that choose to not get vaccinated yet are largely resistant to the 'do it for others' push because we've been told that the vaccine is so effective that the 'others' should be safe anyway, unless they've chosen not to get the vaccine too. That leaves these people with a risk assessment based solely on their own health, age, etc.
- gremIin 5y ago
  What government group said that the non-vaccinated were safe anyway? Do you have a single source?
  - InvaderFizz 5y ago
    I suggest you reread the parent post. I think you have inverted the message.
- native_samples 5y ago
  Well, it's worse than that. The "for the good of society" messaging has been very unstable, even moreso than normal for public health messaging. It's been a mix of: the elderly will take the vaccines because they're at high risk and then life can go back to normal. Then it became all adults need to take it to build herd immunity (the concept that in 2020 was supposedly some sort of a-scientific conspiracy theory), then it became life won't go back to normal even with high vaccination rates, then passes were introduced that have an exception for testing i.e. they look like an attempt to stop spread of the virus, but then it became clear that vaccines don't stop the spread yet the passes remained the same or even had the testing exemption removed. Then it became something about hospital capacity but they started firing healthcare workers en-masse, then it became all teenagers need to take it to stop schools closing and/or to protect their mental health (UK justification), but schools closing is itself a government/union policy, now Pfizer is trialling vaccines for babies. So who knows what the justification for that will be. But, we can be sure they'll find one. It's been less than a year and that's not even all the changes in vaccination messaging, just the ones related to why everyone has to take it even if they don't personally want to. I'm honestly not sure I even got them all. That's been combined with very strong messaging that anyone who doubts the perfect omniscient competence of the public health establishment are crazy loons who need to be purged from society, with some of the nastiest and most aggressive tactics deployed by western governments against their own peoples for a long time. Really don't see a way to recover trust in vaccination after the rollercoaster messaging over this year. There's no consistency anywhere which strongly implies the collectivist goal is chosen, then scientific-sounding justifications are invented to justify it. By next week this comment will be out of date and more stuff will need to be added to the list.

swader999 5y ago

How can there be informed consent with censorship?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

zarkov99 5y ago

It is hard to understate the damage. The loss of national cohesion, the exacerbated division caused by the "choose your own reality" consequences of no longer having trustworthy institutions. And maybe worse of all, the self-fulfilling nature of distrust. When you do not trust someone, and they know it, they have no incentive to behave in a trust-worthy manner. It will take a long time to dig the country's self-image out of the hole dug during the pandemic.

ska 5y ago
> The loss of national cohesion, It may be you have the causality backwards here.
- creato 5y ago
  Like pretty much everyone in this thread, who are at the very least failing to acknowledge the fact that this is a feedback loop. I'd be a lot more willing to acknowledge the notion that the media and government are so terrible if the alternatives that most people have chosen to trust instead weren't so laughably bad sources in comparison. This isn't people making an informed judgement about what sources to best trust, it's people being caught in a wave of bullshit and not actually thinking about anything. A lot of the comments here in this chain are just part of the wave.
  - zarkov99 5y ago
    Vetting an information source can be extraordinarily difficult in this day and age, at least for those looking for more than confirmation of their world views. There is an ocean of well funded, profession disinformation out there. Telling BS from fact is barely doable for the technical elites who gather in this forum and it certainly cannot be expected from the average citizen. This is why the corruption of our sense making institutions and the unavoidable loss of trust is so devastating to the fabric of our culture. This is a very big deal and blaming the stupid rubes that believe obvious BS (to us smart people anyway) might feel good but its not just missing the point, it is actually making things worse.
- 5y ago

JumpCrisscross 5y ago

> the belittling and censoring of voices that were skeptical of the narratives, which engendered even more distrust What are examples of this? Most of the U.S. was quite loose about lockdowns and mask requirements until their specific geography got hit. (For example, I summered in the Smoky Mountains June of 2020. Compared to New York, it was as if nothing had happened. The tone changed by December, after the South had its wave.) To the extent there was belittling, it was around the promotion of treatments, a set of claims that has always been tightly regulated. (Also, the early, intentional miscommunications around the efficacy of N95 masks, which was horrible.)

yCombLinks 5y ago
An example that jumps to mind is all of the media and academics that opposed the theory that the virus was a lab leak in china, primarily because Trump espoused the view. As much as Trump deserved ridicule, that was a perfectly valid theory.
- musicale 5y ago
  Pretty much. https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-medias-lab-leak-fiasco https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-medias-lab-leak-fiasco https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-inside-the-fight-to-uncover-covid-19s-origins https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-...
- adamiscool8 5y ago
  Another that was roundly mocked was Trump's idea about bringing "UV light inside the body" as a treatment. Lo and behold a year or so later.. [0] >Ultraviolet light treatments introduced into the tracheas of five critically ill COVID-19 patients appeared to be safe and associated with a reduction in the respiratory load of SARS-CoV-2—the virus responsible for COVID-19—in all but one patient, according to a study conducted by Cedars-Sinai. [0] https://www.cedars-sinai.org/newsroom/reduced-viral-loads-seen-in-covid-19-patients-treated-with-uva-light/ https://www.cedars-sinai.org/newsroom/reduced-viral-loads-se...
  - 5y ago

hn_throwaway_99 5y ago

In my opinion the biggest example of this was the poor mask guidance early on in the pandemic that was subsequently reversed. Zeynep Tufekci had a very good piece in the NYT on this: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/opinion/coronavirus-face-masks.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/opinion/coronavirus-face-... The real fear was that there would be a run on masks by the public, making them unavailable for hospital use. Also, at the time, there wasn't clear evidence of the effectiveness of masks by the public (although there was some evidence with earlier respiratory infections that mask use by the public is beneficial). But instead of just saying that, the message from the vast majority of public health officials (and media types like Sanjay Gupta) was that "masks don't work for the public". It's not hard to go back to March 2020 and find lots of videos to this effect. This all spectacularly backfired a couple months later when health officials told everyone to wear masks. And what made me slightly angry was that many officials tried to say something like "well, we have new data now". Which was somewhat true, but also conveniently swept over the fact that there was never data that said "masks don't work for the public", but health officials didn't have a problem saying that in public earlier.

hyperpallium2 5y ago
If there was a run on toilet paper, wouldn't there be a run on masks? But seems securing masks for hospital use - compulsory acquisition or paying above market rates - would be a better solution.
pbourke 5y ago
> The real fear was that there would be a run on masks by the public, making them unavailable for hospital use. Ironically the run on masks had begun months earlier. I snagged a box of N95 construction masks in late Jan 2020, and they were totally gone everywhere by early Feb
skocznymroczny 5y ago
I'm not convinced by that narrative. I think there is still limited proof that masks make any noticeable difference. But the public demanded mask mandates (unlike things like vaccines this is very noticeable so for many people it gives them a peace of mind that something is being done), so the officials delivered. But to save face, they invented a story how they always knew masks work great, but didn't want people to do a run on masks.

Mikeb85 5y ago

With how governments have behaved I absolutely understand why people would distrust them and to be honest, I have absolutely zero trust in government right now too. They put politics and driving wedges between people to further entrench their positions (a bunch of provinces and our feds all called snap elections during Covid) over honesty and people. Even now instead of trying to assuage the fears of the vaccine hesitant, they just demonise and threaten them. Personally, the only trust I have is that a bunch of PhDs making vaccines care about solving a hard problem, so I got the vaccine. Not that I was ever worried about Covid itself, I had Covid during wave 1, had contact with a bunch of Covid positive people in wave 2 without contracting it again, etc...

zionic 5y ago
>They put politics and driving wedges between people to further entrench their positions The current vice president of the united states when on tv in 2020 telling the world she wouldn't take "trumps rushed vaccine".
- larkost 5y ago
  This is a complete mischaracterization, and bordering on a lie at this point. She was very specific about not taking it because President Trump said so (rightly, given Trump's history of promoting improving treatments). But you don't have to take my work for it, read her's: "If Dr. Fauci, the doctors, tell us that we should take it, I'll be the first in line to take it. But if Donald Trump tells us we should take it, I'm not going to take it." Only by omitting the first line can you argue that she was going to refuse the vaccine. And that is exactly what many Right-wing outlets have been doing, and that is a lie.
  - ars 5y ago
    Your characterization is even more misleading than theirs. Do you seriously think Trump created the vaccine himself and it didn't go through the FDA and scientists or anything else? The mere existence of the vaccine should be enough for her but no if Trump said something she won't take it.

at_a_remove 5y ago

And there has been this background ambient energy of "Big Pharma is evil, the Sacklers ..." (which I find rather scapegoaty for the Sacklers in particular) which just immediately ran afoul of "You should definitely trust in these vaccines produced by Big Pharma, the ones we have been telling you are so greedy/evil/incompetent." Then you have some discussion of what "gain of function" means and ... Well, the distrust the American public has in Science! has been earned over decades. The ever-changing food pyramid (according to the whims of whatever lobbying group), reefer madness scares leading cannibis to be Schedule I of all things (harmful, of no utility), cigarettes are healthy, we need to put these forever chemicals into your sofas so you don't catch on fire (oh well they don't work but we are leaving them in), thalidomide, diethylstilbesterol ... And all of it has been sold with a pat and a don't worry your pretty head about it. COVID-19 is just another photon in the background radiation of Science We Tell You To Trust. It's a shame, my BS was in a hard science, but when I run into skeptics, well, they've learned it and we've earned it.

Griffinsauce 5y ago
> the ones we have been telling you are so greedy/evil/incompetent." I haven't seen any claims of incompetency, only of greed (to the lev of being evil) - is that an actual theme or did you just lump that in? It's a significant different in this context.
mindslight 5y ago
Is this not the same pattern that happens to every human endeavor though, and not just science? Business interests step in and market themselves as good faith experts creating enlightened progress, when really they're con artists trading on the reputation of the real experts to sell harmful products. The same problem happens in the tech world with two decades of "don't be evil" and messaging about the fantastic future, culminating in the Big Tech dystopia. The whole time it has been obvious they've been building a massive humanity-crushing surveillance/control machine. But up until recently, even on HN, the prevailing groupthink has been to unquestioningly drink the corporate kool aid. "It's hard to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it" Technologists, scientists, etc themselves aren't the problem. The real problem is that our society encourages con men at every turn - from the individual rejection of boring experts (filled in by charismatic charlatans), to advertising (since everything is relative, fraud is fine), to the utter lack of punishment after a con blows up ("white collar crime"). We've put business expedience above honesty, essentially equating morality with profitability, with the result being that every institution has become hollow.

betterunix2 5y ago

Censorship is not what causes large numbers of US citizens to refuse this vaccine. If the Republicans in leadership positions took this seriously from the start and did not go around casting doubt on vaccination far more people would get the vaccine. If the previous president had not politicized the response to COVID and had simply told his followers to do what the CDC says we would have many millions more people getting the vaccine (and for the matter, hundreds of thousands of people would still be alive). Don't let the Republicans off the hook. This should never have been a political issue, but Republican leaders at every level of government made this political and continue to politicize the pandemic.

kansface 5y ago
I don’t even know how to respond to this. The nicest thing I can say is that your comment is both entirely ahistorical and highly indicative of why Republicans don’t trust the CDC.
complianceowl 5y ago
Your partisan comments are so toxic. Try making your point without spewing that Facebook garbage around here.
- ajvs 5y ago
  Agreed, it's especially ridiculous that they said Trump should have been advocating for the vaccine when he did and still does.
- gravity13 5y ago
  Is it really partisan to point out that Republicans took anti-vaxxing to be practically their identifying feature?
  - mensetmanusman 5y ago
    Most anti-vaxxers I know are far left, and most republicans I know have all the other historic vaccines for school and travel, but are more suspicious of the Covid ones due in part to the lack of discussion about natural immunity in the US context (most of them who already had covid don’t want to get the vaccine since they do t think it is worth their time).

SquishyPanda23 5y ago

> The flip side that wasn't discussed This has been discussed ad nauseam. Nature isn't a foreign policy magazine, so it's not really the greatest place for advising how the US should respond to a disinformation campaign. But communicating about healthcare policy seems to be reasonably in its area of expertise. > The flip side that wasn't discussed is the belittling and censoring of voices that were skeptical of the narratives, which engendered even more distrust The disinformation campaign was allowed to got on essentially unchecked for a long time because it was politically sensitive to speak publicly about it. As we started to get more confirmation that it was being funded by foreign governments (e.g. [0]), pushback against the disinformation became stronger. > Their strategy of information control backfired, and they doubled down. Now we've got a huge swath of US citizens that will never take the vaccine. I am highly skeptical there is any evidence for the causality you are implying here. A disinformation campaign like this is an attack on Americans by a foreign military. People may reasonably disagree about how it should be handled, but at some point citizens have a right to defend their country from attacks. [0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/russian-disinformation-campaign-aims-to-undermine-confidence-in-pfizer-other-covid-19-vaccines-u-s-officials-say-11615129200 https://www.wsj.com/articles/russian-disinformation-campaign...

spookthesunset 5y ago
What is disinformation? Who gets to decide?
- SquishyPanda23 5y ago
  The people running the disinformation campaign usually decide.

jasonlaramburu 5y ago

>censoring of voices that were skeptical of the narratives Much of what you describe as 'censoring' was focused on stopping the promotion of false cures eg Hydroxychloroquine, Ivermectin, H2O2 nebulization etc. This type of speech is already highly regulated, as most people lack the capacity to 'do their own research' regarding a drug's safety or efficacy.

notahacker 5y ago
And of course the promotion of quack cures (including at the highest levels of government and some of the highest profile media personalities) came before some media outlets decided to censor some of them. Nobody honestly believes that everybody would have ignored the likes of the last POTUS or Joe Rogan if Facebook et al had amplified that message rather than deleting or fact checking it
ajvs 5y ago
Highly regulated how? There was no censorship on people recommending alternative health treatments online until COVID-19 came. Additionally ivermectin is not a cure, it instead has proven effectiveness in attenuating the duration and severity of symptoms. That the scientific studies demonstrating this are not allowed to be even discussed on major social media platforms is a red flag.
timr 5y ago
> Much of what you describe as 'censoring' was focused on stopping the promotion of false cures eg Hydroxychloroquine, Ivermectin, H2O2 nebulization etc. HCQ, while it has been bourne out that it doesn't work, was a perfect example of miscommunication and "protective censorship" breeding public mistrust: the initial papers that cast doubt on HCQ were based on fabricated data. Based on this initial bit of false data and (a strong helping of the stupidest kind of politics) the media jumped head-first into censorship and ridicule. The clinical trials for HCQ were halted (ugh). And then they were shown to be basing that on fabricated data. It was an utter disaster: https://www.science.org/content/article/two-elite-medical-journals-retract-coronavirus-papers-over-data-integrity-questions https://www.science.org/content/article/two-elite-medical-jo... Subsequently, while I don't personally believe that Ivermectin works, we're still waiting for clinical trials to complete. Let's keep a tighter grip on our horses, please.

fortuna86 5y ago

> Now we've got a huge swath of US citizens that will never take the vaccine. They were always not going to do it. The second it became a political issue, their minds were made up. Blaming what was or wasn't done by third parties, government, etc. is completely missing the point.

AnimalMuppet 5y ago

> Now we've got a huge swath of US citizens that will never take the vaccine. Some never will. But it's been less than two years. If they started telling the truth, the real truth, the hard truths, and kept at it, consistently, for two or five or ten years, at least some of them would come around. Oh, yeah, and if you stopped trying to manipulate and force them. Treat people like grown-ups, even when they disagree with you, even when you think they're wrong, even when you think the data proves they're wrong. In case you[1] haven't noticed, people aren't robots that will do what you want. They are fiercely independent, and they resent being forced into something, and they will fight you just because you're trying to force them, whether or not what you're trying to get them to do is a good thing. [1] "You" here does not refer to you, gentle reader. It refers to the "you" in authority who think that they can force people to get vaccinated without it backfiring spectacularly.

mattgreenrocks 5y ago
Fully agree. One of the best takes I read on this argued that the public health institutions failed the US because they were so intent on forcing outcomes ("don't buy masks") rather than, as you said, simply saying hard truths and giving guidance. People can tell when they're being talked down to, and there's been a lot of that since this started. I don't even think anyone's doing it maliciously, they're just really, really bad at PR. Now, I think there are plenty of people who over-corrected for this and love endlessly nursing a grudge against Evil Big Government. That's on them.
- SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
  Genuinely asking: how does this compare with other safety mandates like seatbelts? Those were also government mandated and highly unpopular for the exact same reasons.
  - aakresearch 5y ago
    Seat belt mandates: - Have accumulated evidence of well quantified effectiveness, however small. - Have no practical downsides, even speculative. - Practically are not 100% enforceable, and therefore are not 100% adhered too. Technical means of enforcement (like beeping) are lame and easily bypassed, at least for now. - Are related to a man-made activity of reasonably increased danger and, importantly, licensed. Someone may choose not to participate in such activity (driving), with relatively low downsides. Public health mandates are, effectively, an attempt to license the mere existence. - Do not have religious symbolism attached to it. No one is ever yelled on by strangers for not having a seatbelt fastened. No one has a sticker on their facebook photo saying "proudly wearing my seatbelt". - Seatbelts are "reversible", i.e. you don't wear them for life. You are not forced to have seatbelt mounting points implanted in your body. You cannot "un-vaccinate", though, if it ends up a bad decision.

Pxtl 5y ago

Yes, it's clearly the mainstream media and politicians fault that they had to hedge some of their bets because they're unsure about certain details and the public freaks out when they have to change their statements when facts change or become more concrete. Totally their fault. And not the fault of the vast network of extremists spreading FUD. Totally not those people's fault.

Pxtl 5y ago

> The flip side that wasn't discussed is the belittling and censoring of voices that were skeptical of the narratives, which engendered even more distrust Oh yeah, a group of people pushing ideas that got thousands upon thousands of people killed and jammed up ICUs leading to necessary surgeries being postponed by vomiting out a sewage-pipe of bad-faith arguments and disinformation. It's clearly not okay that we were derisive to those statements. I mean, look how well politely ignoring conspiracy theorists for a decade worked out. That totally had no unforeseen consequences, right?

NoblePublius 5y ago

You’ve got a huge swath of america who doesn’t want the vaccine because they either have superior natural immunity already OR understand that the virus poses little-to-no-risk to them or their family. Covid is essentially equal to the flu in terms of mortality for people under ~55 and children are virtually immune from serious Covid illness.

remarkEon 5y ago
>Covid is essentially equal to the flu in terms of mortality for people under ~55 and children are virtually immune from serious Covid illness. Previously this would've been "COVID misinformation", but it isn't anymore as the NYT said it this morning. I'd quibble a bit about natural immunity being "superior" but honestly who knows anymore. FTA: >For children without a serious medical condition, the danger of severe Covid is so low as to be difficult to quantify. [1]https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/12/briefing/covid-age-risk-infection-vaccine.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/12/briefing/covid-age-risk-i...
- NoblePublius 5y ago
  More children have died in car crashes in 2021 than have ever died of Covid

r3trohack3r 5y ago

> Now we've got a huge swath of US citizens that will never take the vaccine I suspect it's more than just "the vaccine" (assuming "the" refers to the covid vaccines); it's an overall regression in the trust of health officials that will take decades to rebuild. We had a pretty well built system of trust for health officials. Everything from a standard set of vaccines being a requirement at schools to CDC guidance being taken fairly seriously. There were folks who distrusted this system, but it was (at least I felt like it was) _fringe_. The COVID response put all of these systems in the spotlight. It made a lot of people who previously trusted the system ask questions they never bothered to ask before. They may have asked these questions about how COVID was handled, but these are _general questions_ about the trustworthiness of the official health channels. The doubt that was sown isn't isolated to COVID. Regardless of where you personally stand on any of this, the way "official" channels handled the pandemic burned trust for a large portion of the population. Fixing this is going to be a long road.

jimkleiber 5y ago
I think what frustrates me is not that we would doubt the trustworthiness of these institutions, I think it's a pretty common ebb and flow of trust, but how so many people seem to try to convince so many other people to distrust these institutions. The "they're lying to you, they're gonna take everything from you" rhetoric which doesn't necessarily create the doubt or fear but seems to amplify it, driving society further apart. In a way, I agree a lot with the original article in that one of the best ways to flip the switch and rebuild trust is to lead with trust...of people's intentions and abilities. This year has challenged me and I think so many of us in how to not only trust our institutions but our friends, neighbors, and family. I hope that we recognize it's ok to doubt and that most of us have no idea what we're doing, we're trying our best to get by, including those who frustrated me with their arguments to distrust others. It may be a long road and yet, super clichély, it starts with some of us taking the first step.
- r3trohack3r 5y ago
  "they're lying to you ... rhetoric" I think it depends on the definition of rhetoric you are using, and how you've framed the argument. Not everyone who said "they're lying to you" also said "they're going to take everything from you" I think the point of this article is that official health channels _were_ being dishonest - through their use of rhetoric, lying by omission, etc. Saying official health channels were dishonest during COVID doesn't fit the common definition of "rhetoric." Official health channels were playing a trolley game and didn't trust the public to be "in on the game." Without knowing the game, you don't know which set of tracks you are standing on. If you know a trolley is coming, and the official channels have demonstrated they are being dishonest, you should not trust them when they tell you "switch to this track, we promise we aren't sending any trolleys down it." At best, you are the lucky group being put on the life boats. At worse, you are the smaller of two statistics. Some of the trolley games I saw early on, where I personally lost trust in these channels: --- What they said: this isn't a pandemic. The game: this is a pandemic, but we don't want to cause a rush on supplies. If you weren't buying supplies in preparation for the imminent lockdown, you were standing on the wrong set of tracks and the official health channels lied to you. --- What they said: the public doesn't need masks for this pandemic The game: we need to make sure hospitals have masks Masks worked to reduce the spread of COVID under specific circumstances. You should have been wearing one during the early days of the hockystick. If you didn't go out and buy a few early on, you were standing on the wrong set of tracks and the official health channels lied to you. --- Trust is earned, not given. You don't earn my trust by sending trolleys barreling down the tracks at my friends and family.

chaostheory 5y ago

You forgot to mention masks. Early in the pandemic, US health authorities were adamant that masks weren't needed. Only months later did they later admit that it was done due to the mask shortage for medical professionals. https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/19/health/face-masks-us-guidance/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/19/health/face-masks-us-guidance... https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/04/10/829890635/why-there-so-many-different-guidelines-for-face-masks-for-the-public https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/04/10/8298906... https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/who-changes-covid-19-mask-guidance-wear-one-if-you-n1226116 https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/who-changes-covid... Is it a surprised that trust in Western public institutions are at a low?

bothandeach 5y ago

Trust the public with hard truths is exactly right. Thats what China did and Trump did not IMO

electrondood 5y ago

Are we just going to ignore all of the anti-vax disinfo then? That seems like a far more significant factor than "the government didn't give the public the complicated version from the start."

kcplate 5y ago

I think one of the best examples of the US government shooting itself in the foot during this pandemic was when it was released in the press that some in the CDC advocated to prioritize minorities for vaccination for social justice reasons. A quick to market vaccine based on new technology, and some woke bureaucrat doesn’t seem to connect that that message would be heard as “they want to test it on us again”.

wolverine876 5y ago

> Their strategy of information control backfired, and they doubled down. Now we've got a huge swath of US citizens that will never take the vaccine. These people have free choice, and they are making a bad one. They aren't victims; they are the problem, infecting their neighbors and allowing a pandemic to spread. Much more significantly, I'm not sure how we can omit the overwhelming messaging from a certain political segment of society, and is spread by leading news outlets, governors, members of Congress, the prior administration in the White House, and very many influencers in every domain. The messaging claimed the the pandemic wouldn't happen, that the virus is inconsequential ('like the flu'), the vaccines are dangerous, etc. That omission is a standard rhetorical technique of that political segment, which is to always attack - always keep your opponents on the defensive. If your theory was true, we'd see vaccine denial across society. Instead, AFAIK, there's a very strong correlation between political beliefs and vaccine denial. These people clearly, IMHO, choose politics over health and they have what they choose - they have their political movement, at the cost of health - their own, and millions of others. Again, they aren't victims; they make their choices, and are responsible for the consequences.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

75dvtwin 5y ago

> Now we've got a huge swath of US citizens that will never take the vaccine Not only 'the vaccine' (meaning Covid-19) vaccine. Trust to CDC is lost, trust to FDA is lost, trust to Executive orders on health policies is lost. Trust to major news networks, trust to health pundits -- is lost. On top of that, of course, trust for non-health related 'institutions' (eg FBI, CIA, NSA, FISA courts) -- is lost. Everything from here on coming from the above institutions -- will be viewed with skepticism and distrust. Hell, probably trust in legitimacy of election process is lost too. Will see, I guess. My point about the article -- is that fails to consider the whole system in a country like US... No longer will western politicians be able to point out to authoritarian dictatorships -- from the point of moral authority. The "Whatabout-ism" is now 'normalized', and will continue be normal discourse of international politics for a very long time. Historians 200 years from now 2016-2022 will have to be calling this as a 'Period of Pundits & Institutions loosing people's trust' for many of English-speaking countries.

wesleywt 5y ago

I think you got this wrong. It was vague and inconsistent messaging from a leader who was skeptical of the science. Then made the pandemic into a personal attack on him. Now his followers will not take the vaccine.

laurent92 5y ago

But I have a question: Why did all governments have exactly the same behavior? Was there a handbook saying “talk to your citizen like dumb children” that was somehow mandatory reading before purchasing the vaccine? Why the coordinated action? Erratic behavior doesn’t explain it to me — it was far from random, all particles went the same way.

raxxorrax 5y ago
> Why the coordinated action? In politics, if you do the same as other countries, you have a lot of support to justify said action without much effort. If you do it like Sweden you are bombarded with criticism. So the easy option is to copy from your neighbor. Especially in times when the press tends to shield their favorite candidates from accountability. You don't even need to defend yourself, others do that for you.

thepangolino 5y ago

I also have serious doubt about those who took the vaccine now. Would they have ratted on Anne Frank after a similar propaganda campaign that made them take the vaccine?

encryptluks2 5y ago
They wouldn't have ratted her out, they'd parade her dead body around celebrating.

eptcyka 5y ago

I don't think a discussion here is valid without taking into account the meddling of foreign powers. Troll farms have had a massive impact here.

raxxorrax 5y ago

Exactly. All this banning of alleged misinformation backfired. To be honest, we can be glad of that even if there a now acute negative repercussions. Not because of misinformation, because of censorship attempts.

maxerickson 5y ago

I don't think we can make a lot of assumptions about counterfactuals. There's a bunch of people primed to act out regardless of how well the messaging is handled.

thephyber 5y ago

It’s worth pointing out that: (1) there is always a huge swath of people that will “never” take a new vaccine. It has only gotten bigger since social media allowed the unwashed masses to bypass the old gatekeepers. (2) the top health officials in the USA have all been threatened (death threats against their person and their families). This very likely clouds the lessons they could learn from the past / years. (3) “Hard truths” are complicated and require an audience willing to understand nuance. We have a fractured media environment that frequently doesn’t carry the entire quote and media consumers that frequently don’t click beyond the clickbait headline. We have people en masse trusting their health decisions to superstition who join in chants to fire/arrest/kill health officials. While the mask guidance of Feb 2020 could have been better communicated (it seems clear to me the calculus involved more than what was publicly stated), it also seems naïve to me that simply telling the truth would have solved any of these issues.

maceurt 5y ago

Never taking the vaccine and I suggest everyone else not to either. It has not gone through any of the rigorous scientific studies that any other required vaccine in modern US history had to go through. And its about time people stopped voting and started taking real action against the blatant disregard for the Constitution and the American people that this Government has. We are the ones should be holding our government accountable, and we have failed because we are too afraid of Violence. And lets be clear when a person breaks a law the police officer uses adequate force to arrest him and if he keeps resisting then it can sometimes be violent force. Its legal and righteous. People wonder why the Jewish people didn't stand and fight against Hitler when they had the chance? They were frogs in boiling water unable to know they were dead before it was too late, and right now the melting pot of our country is getting mighty warm. Our ancestors fought and died for the rights we have given up because our refusal to go into the streets and fight. Enough talk, go out there and take back what is yours. If you tolerate injustice by refusing to take action you are the same as the one who would be applying that injustice. The only way for us to take back our rights is for everyone to fight, you want to talk about duty with vaccine? You have a duty for your countryman to stand with him to defend the rights you deserve, need, and cherish. Whether you care or not is irrelevant, because you not fighting damns everybody else who does since this War requires every human who calls themselves an American. Get your ass in the streets right now and fight. Not a figure of speech, march down your city and tear down anything and everything that infringes on your rights. And for the people who I know are thinking about the repercussions or social stigma, then fuck you. Our rights are worth every single ounce of pain and suffering a human could be inflicted with. Without Rights our Life is meaningless.