4 ms·

Living in Georgia, i have had an inordinate number of discussions with people who are unvaccinated. I will say that while that kind of talking point gets repea

Living in Georgia, i have had an inordinate number of discussions with people who are unvaccinated. I will say that while that kind of talking point gets repeated a lot, deep down, most people know it's not true. The number of people i meet who say that, but really are so ignorant as to believe it when you talk to them in private, is very low. Instead, it's usually because it's socially acceptable to say it. The reason it became acceptable is in large part because of the loss of trust that was caused - go look at all media reports and scientists in the run up to vaccines, and when they started to be distributed. The narrative was 100% "This will end covid by making sure nobody gets sick". Then it suddenly turned out that was not true, and that narrative disappeared and got replaced with the "that won't happen but you should still take it because it helps make sure you don't die" narrative. This has happened with lots of things during covid - claims are made, data later suggests some are correct, some are not, narratives change and adapt, old claims are forgotten, and overall people trust less. I understand this is basically "The scientific method in full view". But that isn't always a good thing :) We aren't built to be socially accepting of this sort of thing, as much as people seem to think that all forms of transparency are uniformly good. It may be a long time before that changes. One of the other major factors is that covid is fairly silent as a killer - it happens mostly behind closed doors (or later on, when "surviving" people discover that lung transplants have an astonishingly low 5 year survival rate, and that lots of lung issues are relatively short-term death sentences). That makes it easy to out-of-sight, out-of-mind it, and humans are very very good at (read newspaper about war, think war is horrible, turn page to the comics and completely place war out of your mind) If covid made people randomly bleed from their eyeballs (IE so that it was hard to not have it be in your face), you would a lot more vaccine uptake, even if the overall death rate was the same.

sfvegandude 4y ago
>"This will end covid by making sure nobody gets sick" I honestly don't remember ever having that impression. Could you point me to some old headlines that were around at the time that gave that impression?
- willcipriano 4y ago
  The president had that impression: https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2021-07-21/ap-fact-check-biden-inflates-jobs-impact-from-his-policies https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2021-07-21/ap-... “You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.”
- taolegal 4y ago
  The unconstitutional vaccine mandate was based on the premise that you're harming others by not getting vaccinated. Remember when Fauci was just making up herd immunity numbers based on the vaccination rate? He later admitted it was made-up and basically a way to motivate people to vaccinate. Notice how no one talks about herd immunity with respect to the vaccine anymore. Also this one where the CDC director said the vaccinated do not carry the virus: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/01/health/coronavirus-vaccine-walensky.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/01/health/coronavirus-vaccin...
  - pwinnski 4y ago
    Herd immunity is most effective when most of a population is immune. Less so when anti-vaxxers ensure we don't reach that point.
    - taolegal 4y ago
      > Less so when anti-vaxxers ensure we don't reach that point Wouldn't most anti-vaxxers have been infected by now & thus have durable immunity based on every protein of the virus vs. a single sub-unit of a protein? For what it's worth most of my vaccinated friends have been infected multiple times, it took me 2.5 years, as I was out and about living my life in crowded public places, to get infected and it went away after 4 days of mild illness.
- DannyBee 4y ago
  Here's a small sampling (first page of google for "vaccine will end pandemic 2020". It's easy to find a lot). Very reasonable news sources (bloomberg, official UN news, the atlantic, etc) "Covid won’t be a pandemic for “a lot longer” thanks to rapid progress in vaccine development, according to Anthony Fauci, the top U.S. infectious disease official." https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-12/covid-won-t-be-pandemic-for-long-thanks-to-vaccines-fauci-says#xj4y7vzkg https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-12/covid-won... "The End of the Pandemic Is Now in Sight A year of scientific uncertainty is over. Two vaccines look like they will work, and more should follow." https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/11/vaccines-end-covid-19-pandemic-sight/617141/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/11/vaccines-... "“This is a time for taking comfort that the end of the pandemic is in sight, but taking care that we do not let down our guard. " https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/12/1080422 https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/12/1080422 https://www.ucihealth.org/blog/2020/12/covid-vaccines-can-end-pandemic https://www.ucihealth.org/blog/2020/12/covid-vaccines-can-en... etc Now, keep in mind, like I said, I understand that a lot of this is 1. Sensationalization of what various scientists said (though there are plenty of stupid quotes that they should not have said) 2. Things that change over time It's also the case that buried deep towards the end of most of them are the typical "there are still unanswered questions" style silliness to make the headlines/etc more defensible when they get called out on it later (IE "well we did say there was uncertainty in two words of one sentence at the end of the article!"). Of course, they also put those in a place in the article that they literally know will not be reached by ~90% of readers. So I think it's fair to say that when it gets presented to tons of people as it has in these headlines/stories, and then a year later, the same places are just giving you a completely different narrative now based on reduction of severity rather than transmission of disease, that definitely makes people trust the narrative, the outlets, and the scientists less. In that, i mostly blame the outlets/media, not the people or the scientists. They know exactly what they are doing. They know exactly what parts of their stories people look at, what they want, etc. To me, the way they operate is as bad for society as facebook/etc, but much more dangerous in practice because they are much more effective at playing both sides - big tech will be regulated, but the media?. Where we are on even considering having media have any form of responsibility or accountability? They are very effective at shifting between arguments. How many industries can you name that have been successful simultaneously arguing things like "the first amendment means we should not have any responsibility or accountability at all on what or how we publish and what it says" and "everyone else should be forced to pay us for what we do decide to publish". You can produce whatever you want with reckless abandon, and everyone else should have to buy it from you. Nice racket if you can swing it.

sfvegandude 4y ago

>"This will end covid by making sure nobody gets sick" I honestly don't remember ever having that impression. Could you point me to some old headlines that were around at the time that gave that impression?

willcipriano 4y ago
The president had that impression: https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2021-07-21/ap-fact-check-biden-inflates-jobs-impact-from-his-policies https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2021-07-21/ap-... “You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.”
taolegal 4y ago
The unconstitutional vaccine mandate was based on the premise that you're harming others by not getting vaccinated. Remember when Fauci was just making up herd immunity numbers based on the vaccination rate? He later admitted it was made-up and basically a way to motivate people to vaccinate. Notice how no one talks about herd immunity with respect to the vaccine anymore. Also this one where the CDC director said the vaccinated do not carry the virus: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/01/health/coronavirus-vaccine-walensky.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/01/health/coronavirus-vaccin...
- pwinnski 4y ago
  Herd immunity is most effective when most of a population is immune. Less so when anti-vaxxers ensure we don't reach that point.
  - taolegal 4y ago
    > Less so when anti-vaxxers ensure we don't reach that point Wouldn't most anti-vaxxers have been infected by now & thus have durable immunity based on every protein of the virus vs. a single sub-unit of a protein? For what it's worth most of my vaccinated friends have been infected multiple times, it took me 2.5 years, as I was out and about living my life in crowded public places, to get infected and it went away after 4 days of mild illness.
DannyBee 4y ago
Here's a small sampling (first page of google for "vaccine will end pandemic 2020". It's easy to find a lot). Very reasonable news sources (bloomberg, official UN news, the atlantic, etc) "Covid won’t be a pandemic for “a lot longer” thanks to rapid progress in vaccine development, according to Anthony Fauci, the top U.S. infectious disease official." https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-12/covid-won-t-be-pandemic-for-long-thanks-to-vaccines-fauci-says#xj4y7vzkg https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-12/covid-won... "The End of the Pandemic Is Now in Sight A year of scientific uncertainty is over. Two vaccines look like they will work, and more should follow." https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/11/vaccines-end-covid-19-pandemic-sight/617141/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/11/vaccines-... "“This is a time for taking comfort that the end of the pandemic is in sight, but taking care that we do not let down our guard. " https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/12/1080422 https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/12/1080422 https://www.ucihealth.org/blog/2020/12/covid-vaccines-can-end-pandemic https://www.ucihealth.org/blog/2020/12/covid-vaccines-can-en... etc Now, keep in mind, like I said, I understand that a lot of this is 1. Sensationalization of what various scientists said (though there are plenty of stupid quotes that they should not have said) 2. Things that change over time It's also the case that buried deep towards the end of most of them are the typical "there are still unanswered questions" style silliness to make the headlines/etc more defensible when they get called out on it later (IE "well we did say there was uncertainty in two words of one sentence at the end of the article!"). Of course, they also put those in a place in the article that they literally know will not be reached by ~90% of readers. So I think it's fair to say that when it gets presented to tons of people as it has in these headlines/stories, and then a year later, the same places are just giving you a completely different narrative now based on reduction of severity rather than transmission of disease, that definitely makes people trust the narrative, the outlets, and the scientists less. In that, i mostly blame the outlets/media, not the people or the scientists. They know exactly what they are doing. They know exactly what parts of their stories people look at, what they want, etc. To me, the way they operate is as bad for society as facebook/etc, but much more dangerous in practice because they are much more effective at playing both sides - big tech will be regulated, but the media?. Where we are on even considering having media have any form of responsibility or accountability? They are very effective at shifting between arguments. How many industries can you name that have been successful simultaneously arguing things like "the first amendment means we should not have any responsibility or accountability at all on what or how we publish and what it says" and "everyone else should be forced to pay us for what we do decide to publish". You can produce whatever you want with reckless abandon, and everyone else should have to buy it from you. Nice racket if you can swing it.