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mRNA vaccines are a fantastic technology that were completely oversold by politicians. The politicians lied to our faces and twisted our arms through mandates

by reenorap 11mo ago

mRNA vaccines are a fantastic technology that were completely oversold by politicians. The politicians lied to our faces and twisted our arms through mandates and threatened us to believe what they told us, not what we were seeing with our own eyes. I don't think the reaction against mRNA vaccines would have been so strong if they didn't try to force us to take it or if they didn't wage a religious war against those that didn't want to take it. But I still believe mRNA has a great future ahead of it. I have recently bought a large position (for me) in Moderna because I think it will be able to fulfill the promises that we were told it would.

voidnap 11mo ago
Were very many forced to get mRNA? Even those under a vaccine mandate had the option for a non mRNA vaccine from J&J, right?
- joshuamcginnis 11mo ago
  J&J vaccine was eventually recalled and halted. By then, at least at the time I lived in Los Angeles, many employers and establishments flat out would not accept J&J vaccination proofs under the premise that because there were multiple boosters available for mRNA, it was no longer effective.
colechristensen 11mo ago
All they had to do is be a little witholding and say that vaccines were prioritized for the very sick and very important people and maybe leak some important asshole in a private conversation saying it was a "good thing" that most people wouldn't be getting it. Just do what the French did to popularize potatoes... post guards on your potato fields and tell people they can't have them. Instead they took the line of "we know better than you and we're going to force you to do this". Democrats have a real problem with the "we know what's good for you" attitude.
- sgc 11mo ago
  The next level up from the Democrats objectively horrible attitude is fascism, which we are currently attempting. I believe Americans have a strong cultural preference to be extreme bullies whenever they can get away with it. So often we are just execrable people who care nothing about others, at all.
  - reenorap 11mo ago
    Americans have nothing on fascism compared to Europeans, especially what is going on in Britain right now.
- deeg 11mo ago
  The vaccine was developed under Warp Speed, a Trump program (one of the very few things I liked from Trump). It was first made available while Trump was still president. I have some empathy for people who think it was oversold but that wasn't solely a Democrat problem.
  - maxerickson 11mo ago
    The vaccine was mostly developed before the pandemic and then was designed in a day or 2 after the virus was isolated and characterized. Then they started testing it for safety and effectiveness. Warp Speed was about being ready to make lots and lots of it once the testing was complete. It did a lot of good, but they probably should have spent more on it.
    - OkayPhysicist 11mo ago
      How so? The US COVID vaccination response was nothing short of incredible. Even with the knuckledraggers spewing nonesense, the vaccine was ready and widely available in the United States incredibly quickly relative to most of the rest of the world. I had completed my vaccination series (as a in-good-health, 20-something) before my Canadian friends even had the opportunity.
      - 11mo ago
tgv 11mo ago
What was the horrible lie you were forced to accept, as if O'Brien himself were telling you to?
- reenorap 11mo ago
  That the vaccines worked, that natural immunity against COVID didn't exist, that the vaccines were BETTER than natural immunity, etc. I'm fully vaccinated along with a booster. I was the first person outside of medical professionals that I know that got the COVID vaccine. I got COVID 3 weeks after my booster which is when I was supposed to be the most protected. That's when I came to the conclusion that we were lied to. My kid got COVID and then he was still forced to get the vaccine because the school district/state forced it. That's because they refused to believe that natural immunity existed or that somehow the vaccine was magically better than natural immunity. This also made me realize how religious this has become because now even the scientists were anti-science. It took years for them to relent and those several years of religious and anti-science beliefs from scientists and politicians destroyed the trust that people had in them.
  - Klonoar 11mo ago
    The vaccine never stopped you from getting COVID, it just gave you a better response when you got it. I do not understand why this doesn’t click with people.
    - zucked 11mo ago
      This was one of my (as a layperson) irritations with this process. Words matter -- the fact that this was rolled out as a "vaccine" gave a lot of people the initial impression that once they got the shot, they'd be immune. Myself included. I believe that the word vaccine was misunderstood on a large scale, much to our detriment. I don't know what it should have been called otherwise, but I think the messaging around the mRNA treatments was handled poorly.
      - reenorap 11mo ago
mattmaroon 11mo ago
Eh, the political problems are also oversold. The original mRNA vaccines showed great efficacy and there was no way to know the virus would mutate so rapidly, or that in doing so it would dull the effectiveness, or that transmission rates weren’t significantly reduced by vaccination, or that the effects of the vaccine would diminish relatively rapidly, etc. It actually was plausible for a time that vaccines could create herd immunity and thus mass vaccination was highly desirable. You’re retconning today’s knowledge onto politicians of five years ago. Knowing what we know now about the vaccines, yeah, it was a bad move, but it was reasonable at the time.
fabian2k 11mo ago
There certainly were stupid comments by politicians on this topic. But I don't think the vaccines were oversold, they did exactly what was claimed initially. That the virus would mutate this much was not something that scientists could have predicted at that point. I don't mean that it was entirely unexpected, but there simply wasn't any way to forecast how much it would mutate in advance. The updated vaccines against newer strains still did their job at preventing death and serious illness. But they couldn't prevent infection for the new strains. Some politicians and parts of the media were quite bad at handling the way the pandemic changed over time. But it was still easily possible to get good information about them.
- reenorap 11mo ago
  > That the virus would mutate this much was not something that scientists could have predicted at that point. The common scientific consensus has always been "Don't vaccinate in the middle of a pandemic" because it would cause more variants. This was one of the things they absolutely violated. > The updated vaccines against newer strains still did their job at preventing death and serious illness. No this is not true at all. Most deaths occurred after vaccinations rolled out.

voidnap 11mo ago

Were very many forced to get mRNA? Even those under a vaccine mandate had the option for a non mRNA vaccine from J&J, right?

joshuamcginnis 11mo ago
J&J vaccine was eventually recalled and halted. By then, at least at the time I lived in Los Angeles, many employers and establishments flat out would not accept J&J vaccination proofs under the premise that because there were multiple boosters available for mRNA, it was no longer effective.

colechristensen 11mo ago

All they had to do is be a little witholding and say that vaccines were prioritized for the very sick and very important people and maybe leak some important asshole in a private conversation saying it was a "good thing" that most people wouldn't be getting it. Just do what the French did to popularize potatoes... post guards on your potato fields and tell people they can't have them. Instead they took the line of "we know better than you and we're going to force you to do this". Democrats have a real problem with the "we know what's good for you" attitude.

sgc 11mo ago
The next level up from the Democrats objectively horrible attitude is fascism, which we are currently attempting. I believe Americans have a strong cultural preference to be extreme bullies whenever they can get away with it. So often we are just execrable people who care nothing about others, at all.
- reenorap 11mo ago
  Americans have nothing on fascism compared to Europeans, especially what is going on in Britain right now.
deeg 11mo ago
The vaccine was developed under Warp Speed, a Trump program (one of the very few things I liked from Trump). It was first made available while Trump was still president. I have some empathy for people who think it was oversold but that wasn't solely a Democrat problem.
- maxerickson 11mo ago
  The vaccine was mostly developed before the pandemic and then was designed in a day or 2 after the virus was isolated and characterized. Then they started testing it for safety and effectiveness. Warp Speed was about being ready to make lots and lots of it once the testing was complete. It did a lot of good, but they probably should have spent more on it.
  - OkayPhysicist 11mo ago
    How so? The US COVID vaccination response was nothing short of incredible. Even with the knuckledraggers spewing nonesense, the vaccine was ready and widely available in the United States incredibly quickly relative to most of the rest of the world. I had completed my vaccination series (as a in-good-health, 20-something) before my Canadian friends even had the opportunity.
    - 11mo ago

tgv 11mo ago

What was the horrible lie you were forced to accept, as if O'Brien himself were telling you to?

reenorap 11mo ago
That the vaccines worked, that natural immunity against COVID didn't exist, that the vaccines were BETTER than natural immunity, etc. I'm fully vaccinated along with a booster. I was the first person outside of medical professionals that I know that got the COVID vaccine. I got COVID 3 weeks after my booster which is when I was supposed to be the most protected. That's when I came to the conclusion that we were lied to. My kid got COVID and then he was still forced to get the vaccine because the school district/state forced it. That's because they refused to believe that natural immunity existed or that somehow the vaccine was magically better than natural immunity. This also made me realize how religious this has become because now even the scientists were anti-science. It took years for them to relent and those several years of religious and anti-science beliefs from scientists and politicians destroyed the trust that people had in them.
- Klonoar 11mo ago
  The vaccine never stopped you from getting COVID, it just gave you a better response when you got it. I do not understand why this doesn’t click with people.
  - zucked 11mo ago
    This was one of my (as a layperson) irritations with this process. Words matter -- the fact that this was rolled out as a "vaccine" gave a lot of people the initial impression that once they got the shot, they'd be immune. Myself included. I believe that the word vaccine was misunderstood on a large scale, much to our detriment. I don't know what it should have been called otherwise, but I think the messaging around the mRNA treatments was handled poorly.
    - reenorap 11mo ago

mattmaroon 11mo ago

Eh, the political problems are also oversold. The original mRNA vaccines showed great efficacy and there was no way to know the virus would mutate so rapidly, or that in doing so it would dull the effectiveness, or that transmission rates weren’t significantly reduced by vaccination, or that the effects of the vaccine would diminish relatively rapidly, etc. It actually was plausible for a time that vaccines could create herd immunity and thus mass vaccination was highly desirable. You’re retconning today’s knowledge onto politicians of five years ago. Knowing what we know now about the vaccines, yeah, it was a bad move, but it was reasonable at the time.

fabian2k 11mo ago

There certainly were stupid comments by politicians on this topic. But I don't think the vaccines were oversold, they did exactly what was claimed initially. That the virus would mutate this much was not something that scientists could have predicted at that point. I don't mean that it was entirely unexpected, but there simply wasn't any way to forecast how much it would mutate in advance. The updated vaccines against newer strains still did their job at preventing death and serious illness. But they couldn't prevent infection for the new strains. Some politicians and parts of the media were quite bad at handling the way the pandemic changed over time. But it was still easily possible to get good information about them.

reenorap 11mo ago
> That the virus would mutate this much was not something that scientists could have predicted at that point. The common scientific consensus has always been "Don't vaccinate in the middle of a pandemic" because it would cause more variants. This was one of the things they absolutely violated. > The updated vaccines against newer strains still did their job at preventing death and serious illness. No this is not true at all. Most deaths occurred after vaccinations rolled out.