6 ms·

I guess we were hearing different messages? I thought the vaccine message was "get vaccinated so you won't die when you get it."

by mig39 4y ago

vinyl7 4y ago
It depended on the day of the week. Sometimes it was slow the spread, sometimes it was to prevent getting covid, other times it was to reduce the severity if you got it.
- sdiacom 4y ago
  I think a big part of it is that COVID has become an attention point in our lives, it entirely dominated the media cycle for months. There's something everyone wants to hear about and _we just don't know that much about it_, so the media increasingly plays telephone with itself in an attempt to report anything. Various people gave their hopefully somewhat informed opinion at the time to different members of the media, who reported on it with different levels of accuracy, attributing often undue levels of confidence to it. And that quickly mutated into "the media's trusted sources can confirm that the experts definitely know the vaccine will have exactly these effects and will be effective for these specific cases" I think it's worth questioning what influence there was in which narratives did or didn't get pushed, but I also think it's worth keeping in mind that the media is also just... fallible.
  - ajsnigrutin 4y ago
    I mean... if the director of CDC says it directy... you cannot blame misreporting, and someone in that position should know the level of confidence to use when saying such stuff. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33736959 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33736959 I understand if some random chiropractic from alabama says something, that the data is probably questionable... but the director of CDC does carry some authority. If if _we don't know something_, isn't mandating that something (vaccines in this case) somehow a bad thing? On one side... "take this, and you won't get sick"... who is responsible when that person gets sick? Or infects grandma? Or actually gets a clot?
    - otikik 4y ago
      I agree that there has been bad communication and wrong communication. That said, a doctor never says “you won’t get sick”. Medicine is never certain, the human body is too complex to generalize and say “this will cure you 100% sure, no bad reactions possible”. There’s always a chance that something will go wrong. Clinical essays are what makes possibility go down, but it is never 0. If you want absolutes, go to a priest. They will give you an absolute that matches your own pre assumptions and if it turns out wrong later, well God wanted it this way, He works in misterious ways.
      - refurb 4y ago
        "our data from the CDC today suggests, you know, that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don`t get sick, and that it`s not just in the clinical trials but it`s also in real world data." That's not bad communication it's an outright false statement.
        otikik 4y ago
        You are going over an already covered point. I said “bad and wrong communication”. My point was specifically about the expectation of fail proof medicine. It doesn’t exist.
        refurb 4y ago
        Well then we agree there.
      - ajsnigrutin 4y ago
        Of course it's not certain and 100%... i'm too lazy to find our local propaganda now, but when i got it, the numbers were in the rage of 96% efficacy (for not getting it and not transmitting it) with minimal chances of side effects. But in my country (slovenia), at the height of pressure to get vaccinated, if you were a young girl/woman (15-24 age bracket), the "96%" from above turned to "you'll probably still get covid, you'll still spread it, if you do, not one girl in your age bracket died yet because of or even with covid, but one girl died due to the vaccine... but, if you don't take the vaccine, you'll have to get tested every 48 hours or you'll be unable to go to work (oh, no testing center in your village, and you're not allowed to take the bus to the closest test location without a test)".
- Nitramp 4y ago
  The message absolutely depended on time. But that's because the virus mutated, and the vaccine went from preventing illness and lowering spread rates to only preventing severe illness.
Buttons840 4y ago
My point was that should not be the message. Promising people the vaccine will save them is a false hope, people look around and find someone who got vaccinated but still died and now the trust is broken. Instead, tell people about the trial control group vs treatment group, let people see that there is risk on both sides, but that the treatment group was ultimately better off. Use minimal interpretation. I'd like to see so much focus on the trial outcomes that the number of people who died in both groups is a household fact that families talk about.
- thinkmcfly 4y ago
  Just give angry religious zealots a crash course in genetics and epidemiology, its so easy! Why isn't the CDC doing this? /s
  - Buttons840 4y ago
    Presumably more people are getting sick and dying in the control group. People can understand "more people dead" even without taking a genetics course.
    - logicchains 4y ago
      >Presumably more people are getting sick and dying in the control group. In the Pfizer mRNA vaccine clinical trial there were actually more deaths in the vaccine group than the control group, but the sample size wasn't large enough to draw any conclusions from this.
    - gcanyon 4y ago
      Right now more people are getting sick and dying more often in areas with lower vaccination rates. That information has been available for well over a year, and yet the vaccination rates haven't increased. What makes you think people don't understand, rather than that they just won't be convinced?
    - jfengel 4y ago
      You'd be surprised. The data is overwhelming, and this group of highly trained techies still contains many who call the COVID vaccines "clot shot". There is nothing so obvious that people cannot fail to understand if sufficiently motivated.
throwaway0x7E6 4y ago
because there were a lot of different, often contradicting messages
ajsnigrutin 4y ago
> DR. ROCHELLE WALENSKY, CDC DIRECTOR > And we have -- we can kind of almost see the end. We`re vaccinating so very fast, our data from the CDC today suggests, you know, that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don`t get sick, and that it`s not just in the clinical trials but it`s also in real world data. https://web.archive.org/web/20210402002315/https://www.msnbc.com/transcripts/transcript-rachel-maddow-show-3-29-21-n1262442 https://web.archive.org/web/20210402002315/https://www.msnbc...
- Krssst 4y ago
  In April 2021 the original strain was still dominent if I record well, against which the vaccines were much more effective against getting COVID.
  - ern 4y ago
    It was pretty clear that vaccines had been oversold early on. The opposite happened with masks, where the experts pooh-poohed them, then backtracked. It was quite eye-opening how fast the mainstream narratives were rewritten. (I have had 4 doses by the way, I'm not going to cut my nose to spite my face: knowing that vaccines were oversold is not the same as believing they're useless).
    - rjzzleep 4y ago
      I didn't know that my heart pain was related to the vaccine until I noticed the same pain during the third shot. The Moderna CEO is at least honest enough to say by now it should be treated the same as a flu vaccine. If you want to you can get your yearly dose and if you don't up to you. Pfizer on the other hand was actively whining about how they created too many doses and how they can't milk it any more. If it was up to me I wouldn't have gotten the third one, but the fact that they've intermingled it with travel restrictions when it does not in fact prevent spread is quite infuriating. It seems that people have also forgotten that the antibodies compared to other vaccines(which can be in decades for hepatitis for example) fade rather quickly and that if you got infected quite far out from your last shot, and were only mildly symptomatic it might not actually have been the vaccine that protected you but rather your own immune system and the fact that the whole thing isn't as deadly anymore.
dimitrios1 4y ago
That was the updated messaging from DNC HQ because the first one was clearly wrong.

I guess we were hearing different messages? I thought the vaccine message was "get vaccinated so you won't die when you get it."

by mig39 4y ago

I guess we were hearing different messages? I thought the vaccine message was "get vaccinated so you won't die when you get it."

vinyl7 4y ago

It depended on the day of the week. Sometimes it was slow the spread, sometimes it was to prevent getting covid, other times it was to reduce the severity if you got it.

sdiacom 4y ago
I think a big part of it is that COVID has become an attention point in our lives, it entirely dominated the media cycle for months. There's something everyone wants to hear about and _we just don't know that much about it_, so the media increasingly plays telephone with itself in an attempt to report anything. Various people gave their hopefully somewhat informed opinion at the time to different members of the media, who reported on it with different levels of accuracy, attributing often undue levels of confidence to it. And that quickly mutated into "the media's trusted sources can confirm that the experts definitely know the vaccine will have exactly these effects and will be effective for these specific cases" I think it's worth questioning what influence there was in which narratives did or didn't get pushed, but I also think it's worth keeping in mind that the media is also just... fallible.
- ajsnigrutin 4y ago
  I mean... if the director of CDC says it directy... you cannot blame misreporting, and someone in that position should know the level of confidence to use when saying such stuff. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33736959 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33736959 I understand if some random chiropractic from alabama says something, that the data is probably questionable... but the director of CDC does carry some authority. If if _we don't know something_, isn't mandating that something (vaccines in this case) somehow a bad thing? On one side... "take this, and you won't get sick"... who is responsible when that person gets sick? Or infects grandma? Or actually gets a clot?
  - otikik 4y ago
    I agree that there has been bad communication and wrong communication. That said, a doctor never says “you won’t get sick”. Medicine is never certain, the human body is too complex to generalize and say “this will cure you 100% sure, no bad reactions possible”. There’s always a chance that something will go wrong. Clinical essays are what makes possibility go down, but it is never 0. If you want absolutes, go to a priest. They will give you an absolute that matches your own pre assumptions and if it turns out wrong later, well God wanted it this way, He works in misterious ways.
    - refurb 4y ago
      "our data from the CDC today suggests, you know, that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don`t get sick, and that it`s not just in the clinical trials but it`s also in real world data." That's not bad communication it's an outright false statement.
      - otikik 4y ago
        You are going over an already covered point. I said “bad and wrong communication”. My point was specifically about the expectation of fail proof medicine. It doesn’t exist.
        refurb 4y ago
        Well then we agree there.
    - ajsnigrutin 4y ago
      Of course it's not certain and 100%... i'm too lazy to find our local propaganda now, but when i got it, the numbers were in the rage of 96% efficacy (for not getting it and not transmitting it) with minimal chances of side effects. But in my country (slovenia), at the height of pressure to get vaccinated, if you were a young girl/woman (15-24 age bracket), the "96%" from above turned to "you'll probably still get covid, you'll still spread it, if you do, not one girl in your age bracket died yet because of or even with covid, but one girl died due to the vaccine... but, if you don't take the vaccine, you'll have to get tested every 48 hours or you'll be unable to go to work (oh, no testing center in your village, and you're not allowed to take the bus to the closest test location without a test)".
Nitramp 4y ago
The message absolutely depended on time. But that's because the virus mutated, and the vaccine went from preventing illness and lowering spread rates to only preventing severe illness.

Buttons840 4y ago

My point was that should not be the message. Promising people the vaccine will save them is a false hope, people look around and find someone who got vaccinated but still died and now the trust is broken. Instead, tell people about the trial control group vs treatment group, let people see that there is risk on both sides, but that the treatment group was ultimately better off. Use minimal interpretation. I'd like to see so much focus on the trial outcomes that the number of people who died in both groups is a household fact that families talk about.

thinkmcfly 4y ago
Just give angry religious zealots a crash course in genetics and epidemiology, its so easy! Why isn't the CDC doing this? /s
- Buttons840 4y ago
  Presumably more people are getting sick and dying in the control group. People can understand "more people dead" even without taking a genetics course.
  - logicchains 4y ago
    >Presumably more people are getting sick and dying in the control group. In the Pfizer mRNA vaccine clinical trial there were actually more deaths in the vaccine group than the control group, but the sample size wasn't large enough to draw any conclusions from this.
  - gcanyon 4y ago
    Right now more people are getting sick and dying more often in areas with lower vaccination rates. That information has been available for well over a year, and yet the vaccination rates haven't increased. What makes you think people don't understand, rather than that they just won't be convinced?
  - jfengel 4y ago
    You'd be surprised. The data is overwhelming, and this group of highly trained techies still contains many who call the COVID vaccines "clot shot". There is nothing so obvious that people cannot fail to understand if sufficiently motivated.

throwaway0x7E6 4y ago

because there were a lot of different, often contradicting messages

ajsnigrutin 4y ago

> DR. ROCHELLE WALENSKY, CDC DIRECTOR > And we have -- we can kind of almost see the end. We`re vaccinating so very fast, our data from the CDC today suggests, you know, that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don`t get sick, and that it`s not just in the clinical trials but it`s also in real world data. https://web.archive.org/web/20210402002315/https://www.msnbc.com/transcripts/transcript-rachel-maddow-show-3-29-21-n1262442 https://web.archive.org/web/20210402002315/https://www.msnbc...

Krssst 4y ago
In April 2021 the original strain was still dominent if I record well, against which the vaccines were much more effective against getting COVID.
- ern 4y ago
  It was pretty clear that vaccines had been oversold early on. The opposite happened with masks, where the experts pooh-poohed them, then backtracked. It was quite eye-opening how fast the mainstream narratives were rewritten. (I have had 4 doses by the way, I'm not going to cut my nose to spite my face: knowing that vaccines were oversold is not the same as believing they're useless).
  - rjzzleep 4y ago
    I didn't know that my heart pain was related to the vaccine until I noticed the same pain during the third shot. The Moderna CEO is at least honest enough to say by now it should be treated the same as a flu vaccine. If you want to you can get your yearly dose and if you don't up to you. Pfizer on the other hand was actively whining about how they created too many doses and how they can't milk it any more. If it was up to me I wouldn't have gotten the third one, but the fact that they've intermingled it with travel restrictions when it does not in fact prevent spread is quite infuriating. It seems that people have also forgotten that the antibodies compared to other vaccines(which can be in decades for hepatitis for example) fade rather quickly and that if you got infected quite far out from your last shot, and were only mildly symptomatic it might not actually have been the vaccine that protected you but rather your own immune system and the fact that the whole thing isn't as deadly anymore.

dimitrios1 4y ago

That was the updated messaging from DNC HQ because the first one was clearly wrong.