6 ms·

Hold on.. not false statements, not defamation, not calls for violence… but “disinformation.” Except that we find out that many things were disinformation ever

Hold on.. not false statements, not defamation, not calls for violence… but “disinformation.” Except that we find out that many things were disinformation every day. My family is increasingly paranoid after the Pfizer executive said they never tested whether their vaccine prevented transmission to the EU a few days ago. Apparently that is not new information technically speaking, but it is so counter-narrative it boggles the mind (what the hell was “protect Grandma” then? A hopeful wish?). Would I have risked jail for saying that in Turkey, had this law been in place, a year ago?

Tarsul 4y ago
the idea of the vaccine was always to prevent bad effects of infection, not infection as such. However, it usually helps with the latter as well but whatever. However, what the big social media sites really need (instead of laws against disinformation) is downvotes. If the metric is only engagement then enragement is good, but actually it shouldnt (necessarily) be.
- gjsman-1000 4y ago
  I don’t disagree… but like, when the news media (I can quote many politicians and executives when speaking about mandates) says it was necessary for the sake of stopping the spread, why couldn’t Pfizer have sent out a notification saying, “hey, it reduces the effects, stopping transmission is hoped for but not tested, thanks!” It seems very much like they didn’t care that misinformation about how awesome their product is was being spread but I don’t know for certain. It’s especially ugly when so many media stories have “brought to you by Pfizer” on them. I’m not into conspiracy theories but I increasingly get the paranoia. I have no doubt that I would have been prosecuted in Turkey, or possibly even Australia, a year ago.
- Jayschwa 4y ago
  > the idea of the vaccine was always to prevent bad effects of infection, not infection as such. This is false historical revisionism. Biden[1], Fauci[2], and the media sold the public on the vaccine and justified mandates by saying it would stop the spread. Early skeptics were labeled as misinformed conspiracy theorists. It later became self-evident that the vaccine was less effective than originally thought (e.g. everyone I know who got vaccinated, including myself, still got infected). Only then did the goalposts move to "it makes infections less bad". But that is not how it was originally presented. [1]: https://www.whio.com/news/local/exclusive-news-center-7-sits-down-one-on-one-with-president-joe-biden/I4DCECFX4JDDTOC2BMWMB6XTAE/ https://www.whio.com/news/local/exclusive-news-center-7-sits... [2]: https://thehill.com/homenews/sunday-talk-shows/553773-fauci-vaccinated-people-become-dead-ends-for-the-coronavirus/ https://thehill.com/homenews/sunday-talk-shows/553773-fauci-...
  - Izkata 4y ago
    They did, but you're not aware of the earliest parts of this timeline (and it seems like most people aren't, so it makes me really happy people are finally listening): Pfizer's original press release [0] used both "SARS-CoV-2" and "COVID-19", distinguishing between the virus and the disease. The effectiveness they gave was about preventing illness, and they made no claims at all about infection/transmission. This was fairly well known for a month or two, with many articles bringing up that infection/transmission was an unknown [1][2][3]. It was only a month or two into 2021 that the narrative shifted sharply and this original information was memory-holed remarkably hard. The politicians and media were the ones claiming it would stop infection/transmission, but they started that without any new data. They could have had ulterior motives, they could have just been parroting others, or it could have just been plain stupidity - with how often the terms "SARS-CoV-2" and "COVID-19" are used interchangeably, it's hard to rule out that they just didn't understand the press release. [0] https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-detail/pfizer-and-biontech-announce-publication-results-landmark https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta... [1] https://www.washington.edu/news/2020/12/02/covid-19-vaccines-may-not-prevent-spread-of-virus-so-mask-wearing-other-protections-still-critical/ https://www.washington.edu/news/2020/12/02/covid-19-vaccines... [2] https://www.businessinsider.com/who-says-no-evidence-coronavirus-vaccine-prevent-transmissions-2020-12 https://www.businessinsider.com/who-says-no-evidence-coronav... [3] https://www.fredhutch.org/en/news/center-news/2020/12/covid-19-vaccines-transmission.html https://www.fredhutch.org/en/news/center-news/2020/12/covid-...
nurettin 4y ago
> Would I have risked jail for saying that in Turkey, had this law been in place, a year ago? If it is against a government narrative, sure.
terminalcommand 4y ago
The aim is to suppress journalists from spreading corruption scandals and silence whistleblowers and leaks. Basically if you tweet I found this on wikileaks, you'll get jailed first then you will await your trial. Or if you like a whistleblower's tweet, you'll get jailed. The public elections are around the corner, the governing party is losing votes. The economy is in ruins. Corruption scandals pop up everywhere. For example just last week we heard that the address registration system used for voting somehow added unknown foreign persons as residences to people's homes. Or there are tweets of people that they somehow got registered to the governing party as members against their will without any application. This is only visible if you login to e-government and check. The governing party does everything in its power to win the elections. In the last election, they even counted votes without seals to win. In the election before that the opposition won, Erdogan lost. Guess what happened, bombs went off, chaos insued, there was a re-election and Erdogan was elected again. It is a mess really. Wish us luck.
- ianai 4y ago
  I’m so sorry. I fear this happening in my own country sooner than later. This is an example of censorship being bad because the actual censors won’t be who anyone should want deciding those things. Possibly the better outcome would be for individuals to learn to take the internet with a massive grain of salt.
  - terminalcommand 4y ago
    Thank you. The worst part is that this is planned carefully. You don't notice it but they strip away each right you have slowly and gradualy until you can't fight back. It is kind of like 1984 in real life.
simonh 4y ago
>what the hell was “protect Grandma” then? A hopeful wish? It was an accurate assessment of the benefits of the vaccine, which prevents the worst effects and dramatically reduces the risk of death from infection. The vaccine was never intended to prevent initial infection, so they had no reason to delay it's introduction testing for that. My wife's parents are in their late 70s with many health problems and got Pfizer here in the UK in the first wave of vaccinations. They both later got the virus and had barely noticeable symptoms. Sure it's possible that might have happened anyway, but I am confident the chances they would have died or been severely ill were dramatically higher if they hadn't been vaccinated. Still of course even if you had spread disinformation about the virus, misrepresented the facts, claimed that it was supposed to do things it wasn't, falsely implied that it had no value even if you actually knew perfectly well what it was intended to do and that it did it. Even if you knew that spreading such misinformation would be likely to cost lives. Even then, no matter of how low my personal opinion would be of you, no you shouldn't go to jail for that. People listening to such claims have an obligation to educate themselves and come to their own conclusions as adults.
- gjsman-1000 4y ago
  I agree with you but that’s not what I was referring to. I was referring to pressure on young people to get the vaccine to avoid harming the elderly. If we never tested transmission… what was that about? Why not just let the elderly get it and the young risk it if they wanted? What was behind “by getting the vaccine you are protecting others” when all we actually know is that it protects yourself? There’s probably a good answer - but I’m increasingly understanding why some folks are “paranoid.”
  - simonh 4y ago
    The expectation was that because they knew the vaccines reduce the chances of getting symptoms such as coughs associated with transmission, reduced the time people were sick for, and also reduce the viral load in people who got sick, that this would result in a reduced chance that people who caught the virus but were vaccinated would transmit the virus. It was an expectation, yes, not a proven fact but they thought it was worth working on that assumption due to the hoped for benefits. It turns out now, after extensive research on transmission by vaccinated people, that they were correct and vaccination does significantly slow transmission through populations even for the more recent highly infectious variants. >I’m increasingly understanding why some folks are “paranoid.” I really don't, all of this information has been available all the way through. That Pfizer executive was simply being honest, what the vaccines do and how they work and the benefits they offer has been accurately communicated right back from the trials phases. I know this because all through those times I kept myself well informed and followed the literature. It helps that my wife is a Nurse, and also that I'm in the UK where the whole issue was far, far less politicised and the accuracy and consistency of information from the media was actually pretty good. The problem is there was an awful lot of disinformation going around in the US from people either getting partial information and making wild unfounded assumptions, or deliberately fomenting opposition to various policies on political grounds. Nevertheless as I said in my previous post, we're all adults. It's our responsibility to inform ourselves, we can't blame disinformation, some of which is genuinely simply mistaken.
Ekaros 4y ago
I hope we will jail and permanently ban anyone who spread these lies about vaccines from social media and any public office. It is least we can do to fight against their crimes and the evil they did. As society we can't let these monsters go without consequences.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- sethammons 4y ago
  Should we jail those with early calls for masking? What about that Copernicus guy and his earth-is-not-the-center-of-the-universe heretical spew?
- dang 4y ago
  "Please don't fulminate." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
standardUser 4y ago
"My family is increasingly paranoid after the Pfizer executive said they never tested whether their vaccine prevented transmission" Can you explain? I have no idea why this is something you or your family would be paranoid about.
- gjsman-1000 4y ago
  It’s more about how it is extremely counternarrative to how it was marketed and sold. If you had told someone, who had gotten the vaccine, that Pfizer did not know whether you could still pass the virus on to your unvaccinated grandmother, you would have been laughed at. But here we are.
  - standardUser 4y ago
    Why would anyone laugh at that unless they themselves had a laughably simplistic concept of how the field of medicine works? As I recall, the details and limitations of the various vaccines were not hidden and no one was lied to.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - bilvar 4y ago
      What do you mean they were not lied to? Specifically by Pfizer or the US government? Because there are numerous instances where Biden and Fauci said that if you get the vaccine: - You won't get Covid. - You won't transmit Covid to anybody else. - Covid vaccine is / will be super effective against variants. None of those were true after-all. If you're talking about Pfizer fair enough, they didn't outright lie, they lied by omission - as I did not see them coming out to correct those misconceptions. They were more than happy with demand on the vaccine being inflated because of those very misconceptions and raking the profits in.
      - Izkata 4y ago
        > If you're talking about Pfizer fair enough, they didn't outright lie, they lied by omission - as I did not see them coming out to correct those misconceptions. While true, it's even weirder than that: their press release in 2020 was pretty explicit about the effectiveness only being about illness, and news articles at the time regularly mentioned infection/transmission effectiveness was unknown. It took a few months before the mainstream decided it does work on infection/transmission, and they did so without any new studies or evidence.
throwaway290 4y ago
From what I hear you certainly risk prosecution in Turkey if you simply say that you think Turkish economic policy is bad.
- terminalcommand 4y ago
  Or just like or retweet a tweet that says Turkish economic policy is bad.

Tarsul 4y ago

the idea of the vaccine was always to prevent bad effects of infection, not infection as such. However, it usually helps with the latter as well but whatever. However, what the big social media sites really need (instead of laws against disinformation) is downvotes. If the metric is only engagement then enragement is good, but actually it shouldnt (necessarily) be.

gjsman-1000 4y ago
I don’t disagree… but like, when the news media (I can quote many politicians and executives when speaking about mandates) says it was necessary for the sake of stopping the spread, why couldn’t Pfizer have sent out a notification saying, “hey, it reduces the effects, stopping transmission is hoped for but not tested, thanks!” It seems very much like they didn’t care that misinformation about how awesome their product is was being spread but I don’t know for certain. It’s especially ugly when so many media stories have “brought to you by Pfizer” on them. I’m not into conspiracy theories but I increasingly get the paranoia. I have no doubt that I would have been prosecuted in Turkey, or possibly even Australia, a year ago.
Jayschwa 4y ago
> the idea of the vaccine was always to prevent bad effects of infection, not infection as such. This is false historical revisionism. Biden[1], Fauci[2], and the media sold the public on the vaccine and justified mandates by saying it would stop the spread. Early skeptics were labeled as misinformed conspiracy theorists. It later became self-evident that the vaccine was less effective than originally thought (e.g. everyone I know who got vaccinated, including myself, still got infected). Only then did the goalposts move to "it makes infections less bad". But that is not how it was originally presented. [1]: https://www.whio.com/news/local/exclusive-news-center-7-sits-down-one-on-one-with-president-joe-biden/I4DCECFX4JDDTOC2BMWMB6XTAE/ https://www.whio.com/news/local/exclusive-news-center-7-sits... [2]: https://thehill.com/homenews/sunday-talk-shows/553773-fauci-vaccinated-people-become-dead-ends-for-the-coronavirus/ https://thehill.com/homenews/sunday-talk-shows/553773-fauci-...
- Izkata 4y ago
  They did, but you're not aware of the earliest parts of this timeline (and it seems like most people aren't, so it makes me really happy people are finally listening): Pfizer's original press release [0] used both "SARS-CoV-2" and "COVID-19", distinguishing between the virus and the disease. The effectiveness they gave was about preventing illness, and they made no claims at all about infection/transmission. This was fairly well known for a month or two, with many articles bringing up that infection/transmission was an unknown [1][2][3]. It was only a month or two into 2021 that the narrative shifted sharply and this original information was memory-holed remarkably hard. The politicians and media were the ones claiming it would stop infection/transmission, but they started that without any new data. They could have had ulterior motives, they could have just been parroting others, or it could have just been plain stupidity - with how often the terms "SARS-CoV-2" and "COVID-19" are used interchangeably, it's hard to rule out that they just didn't understand the press release. [0] https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-detail/pfizer-and-biontech-announce-publication-results-landmark https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta... [1] https://www.washington.edu/news/2020/12/02/covid-19-vaccines-may-not-prevent-spread-of-virus-so-mask-wearing-other-protections-still-critical/ https://www.washington.edu/news/2020/12/02/covid-19-vaccines... [2] https://www.businessinsider.com/who-says-no-evidence-coronavirus-vaccine-prevent-transmissions-2020-12 https://www.businessinsider.com/who-says-no-evidence-coronav... [3] https://www.fredhutch.org/en/news/center-news/2020/12/covid-19-vaccines-transmission.html https://www.fredhutch.org/en/news/center-news/2020/12/covid-...

nurettin 4y ago

> Would I have risked jail for saying that in Turkey, had this law been in place, a year ago? If it is against a government narrative, sure.

terminalcommand 4y ago

The aim is to suppress journalists from spreading corruption scandals and silence whistleblowers and leaks. Basically if you tweet I found this on wikileaks, you'll get jailed first then you will await your trial. Or if you like a whistleblower's tweet, you'll get jailed. The public elections are around the corner, the governing party is losing votes. The economy is in ruins. Corruption scandals pop up everywhere. For example just last week we heard that the address registration system used for voting somehow added unknown foreign persons as residences to people's homes. Or there are tweets of people that they somehow got registered to the governing party as members against their will without any application. This is only visible if you login to e-government and check. The governing party does everything in its power to win the elections. In the last election, they even counted votes without seals to win. In the election before that the opposition won, Erdogan lost. Guess what happened, bombs went off, chaos insued, there was a re-election and Erdogan was elected again. It is a mess really. Wish us luck.

ianai 4y ago
I’m so sorry. I fear this happening in my own country sooner than later. This is an example of censorship being bad because the actual censors won’t be who anyone should want deciding those things. Possibly the better outcome would be for individuals to learn to take the internet with a massive grain of salt.
- terminalcommand 4y ago
  Thank you. The worst part is that this is planned carefully. You don't notice it but they strip away each right you have slowly and gradualy until you can't fight back. It is kind of like 1984 in real life.

simonh 4y ago

>what the hell was “protect Grandma” then? A hopeful wish? It was an accurate assessment of the benefits of the vaccine, which prevents the worst effects and dramatically reduces the risk of death from infection. The vaccine was never intended to prevent initial infection, so they had no reason to delay it's introduction testing for that. My wife's parents are in their late 70s with many health problems and got Pfizer here in the UK in the first wave of vaccinations. They both later got the virus and had barely noticeable symptoms. Sure it's possible that might have happened anyway, but I am confident the chances they would have died or been severely ill were dramatically higher if they hadn't been vaccinated. Still of course even if you had spread disinformation about the virus, misrepresented the facts, claimed that it was supposed to do things it wasn't, falsely implied that it had no value even if you actually knew perfectly well what it was intended to do and that it did it. Even if you knew that spreading such misinformation would be likely to cost lives. Even then, no matter of how low my personal opinion would be of you, no you shouldn't go to jail for that. People listening to such claims have an obligation to educate themselves and come to their own conclusions as adults.

gjsman-1000 4y ago
I agree with you but that’s not what I was referring to. I was referring to pressure on young people to get the vaccine to avoid harming the elderly. If we never tested transmission… what was that about? Why not just let the elderly get it and the young risk it if they wanted? What was behind “by getting the vaccine you are protecting others” when all we actually know is that it protects yourself? There’s probably a good answer - but I’m increasingly understanding why some folks are “paranoid.”
- simonh 4y ago
  The expectation was that because they knew the vaccines reduce the chances of getting symptoms such as coughs associated with transmission, reduced the time people were sick for, and also reduce the viral load in people who got sick, that this would result in a reduced chance that people who caught the virus but were vaccinated would transmit the virus. It was an expectation, yes, not a proven fact but they thought it was worth working on that assumption due to the hoped for benefits. It turns out now, after extensive research on transmission by vaccinated people, that they were correct and vaccination does significantly slow transmission through populations even for the more recent highly infectious variants. >I’m increasingly understanding why some folks are “paranoid.” I really don't, all of this information has been available all the way through. That Pfizer executive was simply being honest, what the vaccines do and how they work and the benefits they offer has been accurately communicated right back from the trials phases. I know this because all through those times I kept myself well informed and followed the literature. It helps that my wife is a Nurse, and also that I'm in the UK where the whole issue was far, far less politicised and the accuracy and consistency of information from the media was actually pretty good. The problem is there was an awful lot of disinformation going around in the US from people either getting partial information and making wild unfounded assumptions, or deliberately fomenting opposition to various policies on political grounds. Nevertheless as I said in my previous post, we're all adults. It's our responsibility to inform ourselves, we can't blame disinformation, some of which is genuinely simply mistaken.

Ekaros 4y ago

I hope we will jail and permanently ban anyone who spread these lies about vaccines from social media and any public office. It is least we can do to fight against their crimes and the evil they did. As society we can't let these monsters go without consequences.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
sethammons 4y ago
Should we jail those with early calls for masking? What about that Copernicus guy and his earth-is-not-the-center-of-the-universe heretical spew?
dang 4y ago
"Please don't fulminate." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

standardUser 4y ago

"My family is increasingly paranoid after the Pfizer executive said they never tested whether their vaccine prevented transmission" Can you explain? I have no idea why this is something you or your family would be paranoid about.

gjsman-1000 4y ago
It’s more about how it is extremely counternarrative to how it was marketed and sold. If you had told someone, who had gotten the vaccine, that Pfizer did not know whether you could still pass the virus on to your unvaccinated grandmother, you would have been laughed at. But here we are.
- standardUser 4y ago
  Why would anyone laugh at that unless they themselves had a laughably simplistic concept of how the field of medicine works? As I recall, the details and limitations of the various vaccines were not hidden and no one was lied to.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - bilvar 4y ago
    What do you mean they were not lied to? Specifically by Pfizer or the US government? Because there are numerous instances where Biden and Fauci said that if you get the vaccine: - You won't get Covid. - You won't transmit Covid to anybody else. - Covid vaccine is / will be super effective against variants. None of those were true after-all. If you're talking about Pfizer fair enough, they didn't outright lie, they lied by omission - as I did not see them coming out to correct those misconceptions. They were more than happy with demand on the vaccine being inflated because of those very misconceptions and raking the profits in.
    - Izkata 4y ago
      > If you're talking about Pfizer fair enough, they didn't outright lie, they lied by omission - as I did not see them coming out to correct those misconceptions. While true, it's even weirder than that: their press release in 2020 was pretty explicit about the effectiveness only being about illness, and news articles at the time regularly mentioned infection/transmission effectiveness was unknown. It took a few months before the mainstream decided it does work on infection/transmission, and they did so without any new studies or evidence.

throwaway290 4y ago

From what I hear you certainly risk prosecution in Turkey if you simply say that you think Turkish economic policy is bad.

terminalcommand 4y ago
Or just like or retweet a tweet that says Turkish economic policy is bad.