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This isn’t an engineering problem where you can just hit some metric. Trust gets earned informally on person-by-person terms over a long period of time. People

This isn’t an engineering problem where you can just hit some metric. Trust gets earned informally on person-by-person terms over a long period of time. People in St. Louis died / were killed at the direction of the US Army. Frankly, if they decide they don’t trust vaccines that government officials recommend, I can’t tell them their distrust is invalid. They’d be right. For decades, administration after administration has lied to them about what the government did to sabotage their health. The course of action in this specific case that would build rapport would be to plainly tell the public the truth. It’s not rocket science where you have to invent a metric. Keeping the secret allows the government to avoid oversight. So that it can do the same sort of thing again? Because it is doing the same sort of thing right now?

kube-system 2y ago
Yes, as I said, trust is a personal judgement call. However, I doubt anyone who distrusts the damn COVID vaccine because of the story in the OP is not going to be convinced by anything. There's such a ridiculously weak association between those activities that the person is simply ignorant of how the world works. Their personal beliefs may be sincere, but they are not a person worth convincing of anything because they draw their conclusions through superficial means.
- aaomidi 2y ago
  Other than the US using a fake vaccination program to find Osama. I say this as someone who got the vaccine as someone first in the line. I’m pissed at the government doing this, because I can’t blame folks for not trusting the government over this. And what that means is the next pandemic will take so much longer to deal with because of this distrust.
  - kube-system 2y ago
    I absolutely understand why someone might not understand the practical and operational differences between the development of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, and how that chain of command has nothing in common with CIA operations in Pakistan. It's a very explainable opinion, but that doesn't mean it is correct.
    - odyssey7 2y ago
      Begging the question fallacy. If a government agency doesn’t use vaccines as a vector for some ulterior purpose, then it’s nothing like the other time when it used vaccines for some ulterior purpose?
      - kube-system 2y ago
        The pronoun 'it' in that sentence is referring to tens of millions of different people in different centuries. It is absolutely silly to pretend that they're a single actor.
        odyssey7 2y ago
        I assume you mean “the government.” The number of people (not) involved makes no difference. The government should be accountable to its constituents. Refusing to tell us the truth about St. Louis makes that impossible. It should tell us the truth.
        kube-system 2y ago
        Again, you're saying this as if it is a monolith, which it isn't. The information you're asking for isn't something that "the government" as a whole even has, only a very few specific people ever had the information and they're probably dead now. And certainly the CDC/FDA/NIH doesn't have a clue. So distrusting them for something they don't even know about is hand-waving away a whole hell of a lot of nuance here. You might as well say that you're not going to trust anything Tom Brady says until the NFL tells the truth about Nicole Brown's death. Just because someone is a member of a group doesn't mean they're all acting in lock step.
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
    - jacobgkau 2y ago
      If you "understand why someone might not understand," then I don't get how you could also believe someone with an incorrect understanding "is not going to be convinced by anything" or, even worse, is "not a person worth convincing of anything." Your response to conspiracy theorists is to place the burden of proof on them and then ignore them since your understanding transcends theirs? That may work for you as an individual, but on a macro scale, it seems defeatist, and also unhelpful to all sides (since you're neither convincing them to give up unfounded theories, nor increasing safety against actual conspiracies for yourself).
- odyssey7 2y ago
  Consider the perspective of a person whose loved ones died because the US Government sabotaged their health. They might know more about how the world works than you imagine. “not a person worth convincing” — Not worth convincing them to protect their health? Clearly their health was considered expendable by the government when the experiments were carried out. The government should demonstrate that this fact has changed.
  - kube-system 2y ago
    The US government is not some monolith. It's ~3 million different people, under different operational silos, none of whom worked there back when the project in the OP happened. The link between Pfizer/BioNTech and the Manhattan-Rochester Coalition is extremely weak. The severity of anyone's experience has nothing to do with any strength or weakness of that link.
    - odyssey7 2y ago
      If there is no longer anything to hide then government officials should be open and candid about what happened to begin to restore trust. In theory they work to serve us.
      - kube-system 2y ago
        If someone believes that Pfizer/BioNTech and the Manhattan-Rochester Coalition have anything in common that is relevant to their trustworthiness, there's no amount of transparency that can convince them of anything.
        odyssey7 2y ago
        Straw-man fallacy. Obviously you wouldn’t have to be Pfizer to poison someone’s vaccine dose as part of an experiment.
        kube-system 2y ago

kube-system 2y ago

Yes, as I said, trust is a personal judgement call. However, I doubt anyone who distrusts the damn COVID vaccine because of the story in the OP is not going to be convinced by anything. There's such a ridiculously weak association between those activities that the person is simply ignorant of how the world works. Their personal beliefs may be sincere, but they are not a person worth convincing of anything because they draw their conclusions through superficial means.

aaomidi 2y ago
Other than the US using a fake vaccination program to find Osama. I say this as someone who got the vaccine as someone first in the line. I’m pissed at the government doing this, because I can’t blame folks for not trusting the government over this. And what that means is the next pandemic will take so much longer to deal with because of this distrust.
- kube-system 2y ago
  I absolutely understand why someone might not understand the practical and operational differences between the development of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, and how that chain of command has nothing in common with CIA operations in Pakistan. It's a very explainable opinion, but that doesn't mean it is correct.
  - odyssey7 2y ago
    Begging the question fallacy. If a government agency doesn’t use vaccines as a vector for some ulterior purpose, then it’s nothing like the other time when it used vaccines for some ulterior purpose?
    - kube-system 2y ago
      The pronoun 'it' in that sentence is referring to tens of millions of different people in different centuries. It is absolutely silly to pretend that they're a single actor.
      - odyssey7 2y ago
        I assume you mean “the government.” The number of people (not) involved makes no difference. The government should be accountable to its constituents. Refusing to tell us the truth about St. Louis makes that impossible. It should tell us the truth.
        kube-system 2y ago
        Again, you're saying this as if it is a monolith, which it isn't. The information you're asking for isn't something that "the government" as a whole even has, only a very few specific people ever had the information and they're probably dead now. And certainly the CDC/FDA/NIH doesn't have a clue. So distrusting them for something they don't even know about is hand-waving away a whole hell of a lot of nuance here. You might as well say that you're not going to trust anything Tom Brady says until the NFL tells the truth about Nicole Brown's death. Just because someone is a member of a group doesn't mean they're all acting in lock step.
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
  - jacobgkau 2y ago
    If you "understand why someone might not understand," then I don't get how you could also believe someone with an incorrect understanding "is not going to be convinced by anything" or, even worse, is "not a person worth convincing of anything." Your response to conspiracy theorists is to place the burden of proof on them and then ignore them since your understanding transcends theirs? That may work for you as an individual, but on a macro scale, it seems defeatist, and also unhelpful to all sides (since you're neither convincing them to give up unfounded theories, nor increasing safety against actual conspiracies for yourself).
odyssey7 2y ago
Consider the perspective of a person whose loved ones died because the US Government sabotaged their health. They might know more about how the world works than you imagine. “not a person worth convincing” — Not worth convincing them to protect their health? Clearly their health was considered expendable by the government when the experiments were carried out. The government should demonstrate that this fact has changed.
- kube-system 2y ago
  The US government is not some monolith. It's ~3 million different people, under different operational silos, none of whom worked there back when the project in the OP happened. The link between Pfizer/BioNTech and the Manhattan-Rochester Coalition is extremely weak. The severity of anyone's experience has nothing to do with any strength or weakness of that link.
  - odyssey7 2y ago
    If there is no longer anything to hide then government officials should be open and candid about what happened to begin to restore trust. In theory they work to serve us.
    - kube-system 2y ago
      If someone believes that Pfizer/BioNTech and the Manhattan-Rochester Coalition have anything in common that is relevant to their trustworthiness, there's no amount of transparency that can convince them of anything.
      - odyssey7 2y ago
        Straw-man fallacy. Obviously you wouldn’t have to be Pfizer to poison someone’s vaccine dose as part of an experiment.
        kube-system 2y ago