> I remember when I got vaccinated, and "science said", that I won't get covid or be able to spread it after the second shot (94% or whatever the number was for not getting it at all).
The 90-95% number was always for preventing severe disease. No one listened to the details, it seems.
> Some of us also remember the health authorities promising herd immunity (and end of lockdowns) after X% get vaccinated.
Herd immunity was a key argument of the anti lockdown folks; the people responsible for the Great Barrington Declaration regularly claimed it was almost here. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02948-4
"Despite widespread critique, the idea keeps popping up among politicians and policymakers in numerous countries, including Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States. US President Donald Trump spoke positively about it in September, using the malapropism “herd mentality”. And even a few scientists have pushed the agenda. In early October, a libertarian think tank and a small group of scientists released a document called the Great Barrington Declaration. In it, they call for a return to normal life for people at lower risk of severe COVID-19, to allow SARS-CoV-2 to spread to a sufficient level to give herd immunity."
Fauci and others openly noted they didn’t know the exact amount of immunization needed to reach it - numbers given were openly stated to be an estimate - and we never hit the 80-90% numbers often speculatively thrown around. Variants then made things worse.
Yes, that's what you do when there are a lot of unknowns. You make an educated guess, based on the available information.
Some were wrong, like discouraging masking. Others were correct. Getting them all correct would've required a time machine.
IT folks should understand this pretty well. "Reboot your computer, it might help" is a recommendation based on weak knowledge, made with a wealth of experience behind it.
Weak evidence calls for more research not mandates in a free nation. If I wasn't sure if my prescription for fixing your computer would cause data loss or some other harm I might recommend you hold off or that we explore other options.
This thinking is great when you're not in an emergency. Less so when things are time-critical. Inaction has its own risks; in your analogy, rebooting and not rebooting have a risk of data loss, and our educated guess is that rebooting is the safer choice.
A more accurate analogy would be a cold call from an non-reputable source demanding you download and install a nightly patch which fixes a feature you don't have installed. And when you say NO! They contact your employer on linkedin and demand they fire you.
No experts were giving statements that this was a sterilizing vaccine. The strongest claims on this front made were that the vaccines appeared in studies to reduce transmission of the original strain, by a hard-to-determine amount.
Around 10 comments in this thread and not one remembers or points out that 94% effectiveness was for OG covid or whatever was circulating at the time. Then came delta, then came omicron. It's a different virus now (both in severity and ability to evade the vaccine).
Right, that is my point. The CDC should clearly the whole time have been "Go ahead and mask, it can't hurt. Even a bandana or whatever if we're worried about the good ones for doctors"
And even if they did that, that's ok - CDC made a mistake. However, some people - not necessarily you - draw the conclusion to be "haha, look ... CDC makes mistakes we can't trust them!! Down with experts!".
> The CDC should clearly the whole time have been "Go ahead and mask, it can't hurt. Even a bandana or whatever if we're worried about the good ones for doctors"
This is wrong for a couple reasons. First, it would have led to a run on masks, which were already in short supply for medical professionals. My girlfriend is a physician at a major east coast hospital and has been treating patients with COVID from day 1. People don't seem to want to accept how dire the lack of PPE was for them. Intubating a patient with COVID isn't on the same level as walking past someone in the supermarket. The situation was dangerous. To add to this, even if we somehow equipped everyone with a properly fitted N95, the average American would amaze you with their inability to use it effectively. On multiple occasions I've seen adults in crowded airports lower their masks to sneeze, for example.
Absent clear evidence to the contrary, I strongly suspect the strategy of knowingly lying about (or recklessly getting wrong) the core concept of "whether or not masks work to prevent airborne disease" is the greater long term harm if you're the agency that's supposed to "make public declarations about diseases."
It would seem to me that credibility would be paramount. Perhaps mitigate the mask thing with something weaselly like "At this time, we believe a gaiter or a bandanna is sufficient so don't go buying them up." That little white lie strikes me as much better than "masks don't work y'all" -- which emphatically was the message they put out.
I think you are missing the claim. Originally we were told masks were not necessary and didn't work. We later learned that it was because they lied to prevent shortages.
That claim lasted a couple months at most, as more data came in about how it was primarily spread by aerosols in the air rather than snot on door knobs they changed their policy, that's how science works, and how fox news doesn't work.
>That claim lasted a couple months at most, as more data came in about how it was primarily spread by aerosols in the air rather than snot on door knobs they changed their policy, that's how science work
I think you should read the post you were replying to. The post says they messed up at the beginning of pandemic. They never claimed it was long term.
You seem to be agreeing so I am not sure what your point even is.
Also, if they don't know something they should be claiming it is a fact when it comes to medical/scientific issues. Maybe do some research before making the claim. If somebody asks about masks then say we are looking into it.
>and how fox news doesn't work.
I don't know what Fox is saying, but if they say the government messed up on masks and that masks don't prevent all transmission (we were also told by the government if we just masked the pandemic would be over) then they are accurate.
I think GP is referring to the very early days (March 2020 to maybe May or so) when they were advising against the general public masking. Based on what I read afterwards, it sounds like the idea was that they were worried that the higher end PPE would end out getting bought out by people who were worried (which given the outages on things that in seem pretty unrelated like toilet paper), so they discouraged masking for the general public at first to ensure supply for places like hospitals that needed it most. After a few months, they probably had more confidence in the availability in equipment, so they flipped the recommendation. I remember being surprised by this, since masking was never really something that I had done before or seen my friends and family do, but from reading a bit it seemed clear that it was the right thing to do, so I adapted. I suspect that the bad faith arguments against masking would still have been made if they hadn't first recommended not masking, but it certainly didn't help with getting the general public on board. I'd imagine that a certain segment of the population was not going to follow the recommendations no matter what, and the segment that did properly mask obviously would have even if the messaging had been to mask from the start (or if they didn't say anything about masking until they started recommending it), but I don't have a strong sense of how many people "in the middle" were swayed due to the fact that they at least appeared to have an inconsistent message on this.
I only watch the pbs news hour and remember Fauchi talking about masks at this time. He never claimed they didn’t work and always pointed out it was about preserving the supply.
I suspect other news outlets didn’t give their viewers the full story. But, I’ll never know because I can’t stand most of the news.
From a quick search of news at the time, it does seem like it was a bit more nuanced than I remembered, but probably still confusing enough for the average person that they wouldn't really know what was best. I found this PBS article from the end of March 2020 (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/should-you-wear-mask-in-...), which showed a spectrum of recommendations:
> “Seriously people – STOP BUYING MASKS!” Surgeon General Jerome Adams wrote in a February 29 tweet. “They are not effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk.”
> Earlier in the day, Dr. Anthony Fauci, infectious disease chief at the U.S. National Institutes of Health, had told CNN that once there are enough masks, there might be “some very serious consideration” about broadening the mask recommendations.
> For now, the advice posted on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s website: “If you are NOT sick: You do not need to wear a face mask unless you are caring for someone who is sick (and they are not able to wear a face mask).”
The first quote makes it clear that the concern is about the supply for healthcare, but saying "they are not effective in preventing the general public from catching coronavirus" probably did not make it easier to convince people to wear masks a couple months later; regardless of the technical meaning behind it, I think most people would read that and boil it down to just remembering "masks don't help" without the context behind it. On the other hand, while the final quote doesn't go as far as saying they don't help, it doesn't give the context about the priority in conserving masks for healthcare facilities, so it seems likely some people would find it confusing later when the recommendation changed without context for why. Ideally, people would be getting information from a variety of sources, see some form of all three quotes above and understand the whole picture, but it seems like a losing strategy to rely on this; it seems like having more cohesive messaging around this would have been more effective, but that's hard to do even in a vaccuum, let alone in a high pressure situation with a bunch of people who probably never had had to collaborate this heavily before.
> “In fact, there’s some evidence to suggest the opposite,” he added, noting risks from an improperly fitted mask or touching the face while taking it off or putting it on.
it's hard to remember what our state of mind was back then. Hillary Clinton wrote a book in 2015 as she was preparing to run for president. She dedicated a chapter to PPE and was very interested in funding research into helping doctors get PPE on and off more safely. Those were the learnings taken from the Ebola outbreak where taking off your PPE improperly could get you infected.
We know know that Covid isn't really transmitted by touching your face so much as from the arousals that we breath. But, back then, people were still in the Ebola mindset of "don't touch your face."
If anyone is curious, the new yorker had an amazing piece of long-form reporting on the earlier days of the pandemic, written near the end of 2020 [1]. Section 14 is about masks in particular.
It goes into the history of the CDC, what the pandemic playbook looked like in terms of "public relations" and how (and why!) it failed spectacularly in March/April of 2020.
The answer is complicated and not straightforward.
My read has been that, from a technical perspective, we knew exactly what policy and PR responses were appropriate, but executive politics leaked-in and delayed/prevented those appropriate responses.
Pandemic response is supposed to be led by the CDC and supported by state, federal, local government officials. What we saw, instead, was politicians trying to lead and control the narratives, to disastrous effect.
In my mind, it wasn't a party-affiliated error, but an ego-affiliated error. The biggest offenders were Cuomo [2], Pence, and Trump.
The quote is so dumb it makes my head hurt. The CDC dies not regulate the marketing of vaccines - i.e. the claims about safety and effectiveness the manufacturer is allowed to make. That falls under the statutory authority of FDA who requires any claims of safety and effectiveness to be backed by evidence.
Generally the people who talk about “no evidence of safety and effectiveness” have no idea who CDER / CBER are, no idea what an IND is, no idea how clinical trials are done, and no idea of how the FDA does postmarket surveillance / monitoring. Basically they are not informed enough to have a well reasoned opinion or argument.
Somebody not even being able to name the correct federal agency - which is not obscure insider knowledge - is a sure sign they are a crank who does not know what they are talking about.
Ah, the same tactics from Iraq II. Embed the journalists in order they develop empathy for the troops protecting them (and hope they slant the reporting enough).
I think that's the opposite of what's implied here. They're implying CDC is being infiltrated by the people is is supposed to be regulating. In your example, the troops were not being infiltrated by journalists to circumvent the armies control over journalists.
The point is nepotism, not a point for point identical situation. The problem is that groups are cross pollinating in a situation that should be independent and by its nature adversarial a lot of the time.
This is a ridiculous take. Vaccines have long been our most effective weapon against infectious disease, especially viruses. The CDC screwed up a number of things in the last few years, but vaccination is a vital tool for protecting the whole community with very few downsides.
> these so-called “vaccines” don’t stop transmission like the vaccines you’re thinking about
Like the inactivated poliovirus [1]? Sterilising vaccines [2] haven’t been a priority because the subpopulation that enjoys getting measles was historically small.
> OPV produces excellent immunity in the intestine, the primary site of wild poliovirus entry, which helps prevent infection with wild virus in areas where the virus is endemic.
It seems like the polio vaccine actually prevents infection which is not the case for the COVID “vaccine” which is purely therapeutical.
The vaccine isn’t therapeutic, it just doesn’t confer total immunity like some vaccines, mostly because COVID mutates frequently. Are you thinking of the monoclonal antibody treatment?
> seems like the polio vaccine actually prevents infection
OPV (“o” as in oral) sterilises. IPV (“i” as in inactivated) doesn’t. IPV doesn’t spread vaccine-derived poliovirus, so it’s the more widely-used one. (It comes down to whether the virus is neutralised in the gut or the blood.)
The polio case in Brooklyn was an unvaccinated man getting a vaccine-derived infection from the sterilising OPV [1][2].
This recent firestorm about whether or not the vaccine was studied prior to release to measure its effectiveness at transmission seems like it stemmed from a single comment in the European Union's inquiry.
Has it been determined more substantially that Pfizer and Moderna did not study transmission while the vaccines were in development?
I would think that couldn’t occur in the beginning. Most clinical trials are simply about safety and effectiveness for the individual. Transmission is a very difficult thing to study, especially in a clinical trial, and time was of the essence. I doubt it was a goal post for anyone, and we just needed something to stem risk of hospitalization and death. Vaccines did provide exactly that and still do.
I substantially agree with you but would contend that effectiveness should have included transmissibility. If it is the case that it was not studied, it does seem that some of the messaging and assumptions about vaccine mandates and/or passports is questionable. I maintain, however, a lot of skepticism that transmissibility wasn't studied initially based on this one quote about "moving at the speed of science."
Except of course, the mandates. The main argument for healthy people to get it was to save granny. Except they never bothered to study transmission, which means they lied to get the mandates in place. It's not that they "just didn't know". It's that they knew they were lying when they said mandates were needed to stop transmission.
So now that creates a huge problem moving forward. Who but the most subservient will ever believe anything they say now?
Not really, being anti science like most of the "critics" of the vaccines were is what should get you booted. The CDC did fine with what they had to work with to be honest. The vast majority of the people I saw being critical of the vaccines had no basis other than "I don't trust this!" and they had zero proof. 99% were hacks on twitter or far right wing "news" outlets like Fox news which have lost all credibility.
Calling people "anti-science" is something of a canard, a trick of speech designed to belittle and demean anyone who questions the validity of current research.
I might add that "the science" was consistently wrong about many things during the pandemic.
"The ongoing Pandemic has solidified my belief that that most people would be better off in this world if they listened less to laypeople who think they know a lot about medicine and instead listened more to people who have graduated medical school and have a whole bunch of framed diplomas and certificates on the walls of their medical office. It's also a good indicator of competence if they have a medical office."
And no I don't think searching the world for the one doctor out of one thousand willing to tell you what you want to hear is really in the spirit of that quote.
A question for you. Imagine you're a doctor and after extensive research and your own medical experience and praxis, you conclude that, for instance, vaccination is probably a less than optimal choice for individuals under the age of 40. How comfortable would you feel publicly expressing this?
One of the biggest problems when a society starts to become intolerant towards dissenting views is that consensus itself starts to become impossible, or at least meaningless.
Most people don't care that much about most issues. Make it sting enough to dissent, and you'll eliminate dissent from all but those willing to choose this hill to die on. But in such a case the lack of dissent becomes meaningless.
I assume by "publically expressing" you mean not saying things to friends over a beer but posting things online or that will go online in some fashion.
If I was a doctor it's unlikely I would be publically expressing anything.
As far as I know I've never been treated by a doctor who goes around publically expressing things on any topic.
When I see a specialist it's usually because I got a referral from a family doctor not because "This doctor has an exciting Twitter feed".
I would guess my doctors have no public twitter feeds at all, not that I've ever checked.
But your question is too vague. In this scenario am I a random "doctor" or am I a nationally regarded expert in the relevant field? And did I run my views past respected colleagues and did they recieve it well or tell me I'm being an idiot?
I think the job of practicing medicine is generally about going to conferences and basing your practice on what the doctors regarded as being in the top of their field suggest.
Just like the job of becoming a doctor is about answering the questions on medical school exams in line with what the teacher told you is true, not "sharing your original views" on how the teacher is wrong.
I was born before social networks existed and reject the implicit framing society works better when everybody debates everything on social media all day. Some things might work well being debated on social media, but not everything.
Doctors are supposed to be providing the public with medical advise in line with the standards of their profession, not sharing "opinions" on medical matters whatever the hell that is supposed to mean.
If you can't convince your colleagues that your "opinions" have value and you have such a high opinion of your judgement relative to the rest of your profession that you insist on broadcasting these "opinions" to the world anyway, chances are you have a high level of confidence and a low level of competence and you aren't a very good doctor.
Especially if these "opinions" are outside your specialty.
I know the notion that a doctor should show intellectual humility may offend autodidactics who doesn't even think a layperson should show intellectual humility, but so it goes.
To attempt to force a populace to discard their own intellect and intuition in favor of simply listening to the 'experts' (who are always self appointed) is the dream of every psychopathic authoritarian who has lived.
The story of penicillin is an interesting one. As the first antibiotic, it's without doubt single most important medical discovery in modern times. It was discovered by Alexander Fleming in 1928. He left a number of samples of a bacteria to culture while on holiday. One of his petri dishes had been inadvertently exposed and when he returned it had grown a bluish green mold.
But the interesting thing about this mold is that there was no bacteria around the areas where the mold had grown. It seemed to have repelled or killed them. He was quite excited by his discovery. But upon sharing his discovery with his colleagues they were largely dismissive. He gave a number of talks discussing the mold, where people were also universally dismissive. And he even managed to get a paper published, where you can guess the response.
This isn't the end of this story of course, though it is for our purposes. It would take more than a decade but of course eventually penicillin would eventually be refined and shaped into the life saving drug that it would rapidly become. The point I want to make with this is rather evident. Had Fleming taken public views into account before expressing himself it's entirely possible we might still live in a world without antibiotics.
And this story is the rule more than the exception for many of the most important discoveries in the progress of humanity. Human progress is heavily decentralized in no small part because the "right" answer often seems wrong at first, and is rarely enthusiastically adopted when it runs contrary to the views of a day. It was none other than Max Planck that remarked, "science progresses one funeral at a time", precisely because of this.
I don't think the moral of the Alexander Fleming story is the medical community should abolish the FDA and medical malpractice laws so every doctor can do whatever and say whatever any more than the moral of "science progresses one funeral at a time" is we should fire every scientist who is older than thirty.
>"The ongoing Pandemic has solidified my belief that that most people would be better off in this world if they listened less to laypeople who think they know a lot about medicine and instead listened more to people who have graduated medical school and have a whole bunch of framed diplomas and certificates on the walls of their medical office. It's also a good indicator of competence if they have a medical office."
>And no I don't think searching the world for the one doctor out of one thousand willing to tell you what you want to hear is really in the spirit of that quote.
Well there are laymen, and there are knowledgeable skeptics. Conflated the 2 and one get to gleefully brush aside questions by dismissing knowledgeable skeptics as laymen.
> The CDC did fine with what they had to work with to be honest.
If that’s the standard we have to live by after the most devastating pandemic in a century for the most developed country in the world, then there is not going to be any lessons or improvement when the next one hits.
The CDC didn’t (still doesn’t) have a full picture of mode of transmission of the virus (aerosol vs others). They kept saying it’s not airborne when all being said it looks like it is. Their focus on hand washing in retrospection seems like not a productive strategy whatsoever. The whole mask fiasco (first saying it isn’t recommended and then a straight up 180) caused the public in rooted mistrust and then their PR umbrella did a poor job addressing and admitting any failure. Their PR branch effectively did nothing to earn trust of a large swaths of public who didn’t buy into vaccination other than often resorting to name calling and gaslighting the debate further which is absolutely the opposite of what you would want to do in that situation if you really want people to get vaccinated. Many occasions they did slow walk backs and often no oversights on grants and revolving doors setup within these agencies with FDA and other pharma industries.
Calling everyone criticizing you “anti-science” is a great way of not learning any lessons for next epidemic.
There is a lot we can do better.
There’s really no functional difference between malice and incompetence, or even between evil and weakness. The problem is when incompetent people are given power to force their erroneous beliefs upon other, more rational, people.
There's always a risk with any medication you put in your body. Do we know with 100% certainty that the vaccine provides enough benefit to a 6 month old to justify the risk? I don't know.
I will at least give CDC.gov credit because now they are listing four possible "serious adverse events" (plus death is mentioned as well) here:
The risk of myocarditis is 11 times higher for unvaccinated individuals getting COVID than it is for people receiving the vaccine[0]:
“In a detailed analysis of nearly 43 million people, the risk of myocarditis in unvaccinated individuals after COVID-19 infection was at least 11 times higher compared to people who developed myocarditis after receiving a COVID-19 vaccine or booster dose, according to new research published today in the American Heart Association’s flagship, peer-reviewed journal Circulation. This analysis included data from England’s National Immunization database for people ages 13 and older who received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine between December 1, 2020 and December 15, 2021 in England.”
It’s an interesting argument. Here is a paragraph from the article:
“In men younger than 40 years, we estimate an additional 4 (95% CI, 2–6) and 14 (95% CI, 5–17) myocarditis events per million in the 1 to 28 days after a first dose of BNT162b2 and mRNA-1273, respectively; and an additional 14 (95% CI, 8–17), 11 (95% CI, 9–13) and 97 (95% CI, 91–99) myocarditis events after a second dose of ChAdOx1, BNT162b2, and mRNA-1273, respectively. These estimates compare with an additional 16 (95% CI, 12–18) myocarditis events per million men younger than 40 years in the 1 to 28 days after a SARS-CoV-2–positive test before vaccination.”
At those numbers the vaccines are causing myocarditis more than covid, but only in young men and not causing a lot more.
If you lump in the multitude of other things covid causes, I’m still picking the vaccine as the lesser evil.
There is a large case study. South Africa, which is much younger than America, ignored the omicron wave. How are they suffering from the 11x higher risk of myocarditis now? Rhetorical question.
You should have gotten the vaccine as well, you are 10x more likely to die from covid than from the flu and highly likely to get long covid. Even if you have a low chance of dying from it you still have a extremely high likelihood of passing it on to someone it can easily kill and as a member of society you owe it at least a little bit if you receive its benefits. Also what does being male have to do with any of this? You do you though, but there is almost 0 danger in getting the vaccine and tons of danger in not getting it. Downvote if you like, but that's the science of it and I will always side with science rather than online speculation and conspiricists.
I mean, I haven’t looked into it and tbh I wouldn’t be that surprised if it DOES correlate to a higher risk. But I’m willing to bet we are talking insanely low risks but people will always know someone directly or through 6 degrees who had this happen so therefor it’s an evil plot!!111
16 cases per million higher if I read correctly. I.e. you take on a 1:50000 chance of an “event” that likely isn’t even close to deadly, but the benefits vastly, vastly outweigh that risk.
I have a friend who worked at a prestigious hospital as a receptionist. Her and her coworkers got vaccinated and after talking figured out the regularity and flow of their periods was thrown out of wack afterwards. Before it had been regular and consistent. Now several months ago research was released saying this was a side effect. It took over 2 years for the scientific community to validate a blatant side effect which these women recognized in the first months. It does make me wonder how long it will take for subtler effects of these fast tracked vaccines to be recognized as more than just anecdotes.
who seem to have tossed aside all caution and critical thinking when it comes to medical interventions that get labeled “vaccines.”
So... this is an antivax substack?
(I think this is being taken as a glib dunk, but I'm really asking: is there a way to write that sentence and not be an antivax person? "The mRNA vaccines are not really vaccines because they're not sterilizing", or something like that, is a core antivax talking point.)
Is there no middle ground between being pro-vax and anti-vax? What about vax skeptical or vax agnostic? Seems to me that anti-vax definition is overally broad for its highly negative connotations.
I don't even see the quote you claim comes from the article. What I read in the article is about conflicts of interest between media and federal bureaucracy, a problem regardless of the safety and efficacy of the vaccine.
However in real world, it has been my positively overwhelming experience that "vax skeptic" is anti-vax but clever enough to try to hide it, and take the spiteful stance of "I'm not saying anything, I'm just asking (extremely leading questions with clear strong agenda)".
If true legit "vaccination skeptics" exist who somehow, have not found over abundance of data to make up their mind but still feel they have interesting opinion to share, they are low enough of a percentage to be safe to assume against.
I would put it similarly to "round-earth agnostic". If in 2022 you have not made up your mind yet on whether Earth is round - what are you waiting for? What criteria or info do you feel is outstanding? How are you meaningfully differentiating yourself from flat-earther-in-disguise?
This is not to say that questions should not be asked or that debate is not healthy and necessary and that we should take things on faith. But it's hard to convincingly be vaccination-undecided in 2022 - it feels like it would take large amount of effort and possibly some internal naivette.
Put it in a different way - the default scientific consensus is "vaccines save lives". It's what you're taught in schools and repeatedly told by all reliable medical personnel across governments and countries and continents and religions. It feels like it takes some substantial amount of effort to get yourself into "vaccination skeptic / agnostic" realm, which I would not consider the neutral stance on this topic.
Sure, but I personally wouldn't call that "vaccine (in general sense) skepticism".
I would be surprised if anybody took a completely blanket approach that every vaccine ever made for any purpose under every circumstance is a Good Thing(tm) and totally worked out.
It's an interesting question because almost every single person I've met who is against the mRNA vaccines has all of their other vaccinations and if they have kids, they do too. So why are we calling people like that antivax?
That's like saying anybody who is nervous around pitbulls hates dogs.
No. Someone else asked if there wasn't some middle ground between absolute reverence for the new vaccines and "anti-vax". And, indeed there is. But you're not occupying it when you're calling them, in effect, "so-called vaccines".
I'm not quoting anybody ("in effect"), and, in particular, wasn't talking about anything you said. I'm talking about the article author (the "you" in my sentence above). Dial it back. You asked me a question, and I answered it. This is in the guidelines: assume good faith.
OK, maybe I read your response wrong. But then the response doesn't really follow. The main argument against the mRNA vaccine was in fact the lack of long term testing. Now we know they were right because Pfizer has acknowledged never having tested against transmission, which was really the stated goal of mandates.
So the people you're calling antivax aren't actually antivax. They were anti-mandate, and with good reason as it turns out.
No, that's not the main argument here. You're responding to me, not the other way around, and the point I made is that this post implies that the mRNA vaccines aren't even vaccines. That's a pure anti-vax talking point. It isn't part of the middle ground.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 199 ms ] threadSo, yeah.
The 90-95% number was always for preventing severe disease. No one listened to the details, it seems.
Herd immunity was a key argument of the anti lockdown folks; the people responsible for the Great Barrington Declaration regularly claimed it was almost here. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02948-4
"Despite widespread critique, the idea keeps popping up among politicians and policymakers in numerous countries, including Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States. US President Donald Trump spoke positively about it in September, using the malapropism “herd mentality”. And even a few scientists have pushed the agenda. In early October, a libertarian think tank and a small group of scientists released a document called the Great Barrington Declaration. In it, they call for a return to normal life for people at lower risk of severe COVID-19, to allow SARS-CoV-2 to spread to a sufficient level to give herd immunity."
Fauci and others openly noted they didn’t know the exact amount of immunization needed to reach it - numbers given were openly stated to be an estimate - and we never hit the 80-90% numbers often speculatively thrown around. Variants then made things worse.
They gave estimates - stated as such - based on existing knowledge about disease and vaccines.
Some were wrong, like discouraging masking. Others were correct. Getting them all correct would've required a time machine.
IT folks should understand this pretty well. "Reboot your computer, it might help" is a recommendation based on weak knowledge, made with a wealth of experience behind it.
Here, I'll link to what Fauci was saying; "might slow", "looming question", "early studies": https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/looming-question-...
No experts were giving statements that this was a sterilizing vaccine. The strongest claims on this front made were that the vaccines appeared in studies to reduce transmission of the original strain, by a hard-to-determine amount.
This didn’t prove anything about them failing to do so. This is just a bunch of assumptions into conflicts of interests with zero actual evidence.
That was NOT what they did.
This is wrong for a couple reasons. First, it would have led to a run on masks, which were already in short supply for medical professionals. My girlfriend is a physician at a major east coast hospital and has been treating patients with COVID from day 1. People don't seem to want to accept how dire the lack of PPE was for them. Intubating a patient with COVID isn't on the same level as walking past someone in the supermarket. The situation was dangerous. To add to this, even if we somehow equipped everyone with a properly fitted N95, the average American would amaze you with their inability to use it effectively. On multiple occasions I've seen adults in crowded airports lower their masks to sneeze, for example.
It would seem to me that credibility would be paramount. Perhaps mitigate the mask thing with something weaselly like "At this time, we believe a gaiter or a bandanna is sufficient so don't go buying them up." That little white lie strikes me as much better than "masks don't work y'all" -- which emphatically was the message they put out.
I think you should read the post you were replying to. The post says they messed up at the beginning of pandemic. They never claimed it was long term.
You seem to be agreeing so I am not sure what your point even is.
Also, if they don't know something they should be claiming it is a fact when it comes to medical/scientific issues. Maybe do some research before making the claim. If somebody asks about masks then say we are looking into it.
>and how fox news doesn't work.
I don't know what Fox is saying, but if they say the government messed up on masks and that masks don't prevent all transmission (we were also told by the government if we just masked the pandemic would be over) then they are accurate.
I suspect other news outlets didn’t give their viewers the full story. But, I’ll never know because I can’t stand most of the news.
> “Seriously people – STOP BUYING MASKS!” Surgeon General Jerome Adams wrote in a February 29 tweet. “They are not effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk.”
> Earlier in the day, Dr. Anthony Fauci, infectious disease chief at the U.S. National Institutes of Health, had told CNN that once there are enough masks, there might be “some very serious consideration” about broadening the mask recommendations.
> For now, the advice posted on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s website: “If you are NOT sick: You do not need to wear a face mask unless you are caring for someone who is sick (and they are not able to wear a face mask).”
The first quote makes it clear that the concern is about the supply for healthcare, but saying "they are not effective in preventing the general public from catching coronavirus" probably did not make it easier to convince people to wear masks a couple months later; regardless of the technical meaning behind it, I think most people would read that and boil it down to just remembering "masks don't help" without the context behind it. On the other hand, while the final quote doesn't go as far as saying they don't help, it doesn't give the context about the priority in conserving masks for healthcare facilities, so it seems likely some people would find it confusing later when the recommendation changed without context for why. Ideally, people would be getting information from a variety of sources, see some form of all three quotes above and understand the whole picture, but it seems like a losing strategy to rely on this; it seems like having more cohesive messaging around this would have been more effective, but that's hard to do even in a vaccuum, let alone in a high pressure situation with a bunch of people who probably never had had to collaborate this heavily before.
it's hard to remember what our state of mind was back then. Hillary Clinton wrote a book in 2015 as she was preparing to run for president. She dedicated a chapter to PPE and was very interested in funding research into helping doctors get PPE on and off more safely. Those were the learnings taken from the Ebola outbreak where taking off your PPE improperly could get you infected.
We know know that Covid isn't really transmitted by touching your face so much as from the arousals that we breath. But, back then, people were still in the Ebola mindset of "don't touch your face."
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200301001854/https://twitter.c...
It goes into the history of the CDC, what the pandemic playbook looked like in terms of "public relations" and how (and why!) it failed spectacularly in March/April of 2020.
The answer is complicated and not straightforward.
My read has been that, from a technical perspective, we knew exactly what policy and PR responses were appropriate, but executive politics leaked-in and delayed/prevented those appropriate responses.
Pandemic response is supposed to be led by the CDC and supported by state, federal, local government officials. What we saw, instead, was politicians trying to lead and control the narratives, to disastrous effect.
In my mind, it wasn't a party-affiliated error, but an ego-affiliated error. The biggest offenders were Cuomo [2], Pence, and Trump.
[1]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/01/04/the-plague-yea...
[2]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/04/seattles-leade...
Generally the people who talk about “no evidence of safety and effectiveness” have no idea who CDER / CBER are, no idea what an IND is, no idea how clinical trials are done, and no idea of how the FDA does postmarket surveillance / monitoring. Basically they are not informed enough to have a well reasoned opinion or argument.
Somebody not even being able to name the correct federal agency - which is not obscure insider knowledge - is a sure sign they are a crank who does not know what they are talking about.
This is in the least, a conflict of interest.
> "The first casualty when war comes is truth" - Hiram W Johnson
There is plenty of coverage of Ukraine and we aren’t getting the Iraq war’s fake-but-looks-real coverage that was actually misleading propaganda.
You don’t see a small handful of enabling technologies that came to market between the Iraq War and Ukraine?
Like the inactivated poliovirus [1]? Sterilising vaccines [2] haven’t been a priority because the subpopulation that enjoys getting measles was historically small.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio_vaccine
[2] https://www.niaid.nih.gov/research/vaccine-types
> OPV produces excellent immunity in the intestine, the primary site of wild poliovirus entry, which helps prevent infection with wild virus in areas where the virus is endemic.
It seems like the polio vaccine actually prevents infection which is not the case for the COVID “vaccine” which is purely therapeutical.
OPV (“o” as in oral) sterilises. IPV (“i” as in inactivated) doesn’t. IPV doesn’t spread vaccine-derived poliovirus, so it’s the more widely-used one. (It comes down to whether the virus is neutralised in the gut or the blood.)
The polio case in Brooklyn was an unvaccinated man getting a vaccine-derived infection from the sterilising OPV [1][2].
[1] https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/exclusives/1010...
[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12931339/
Has it been determined more substantially that Pfizer and Moderna did not study transmission while the vaccines were in development?
Except of course, the mandates. The main argument for healthy people to get it was to save granny. Except they never bothered to study transmission, which means they lied to get the mandates in place. It's not that they "just didn't know". It's that they knew they were lying when they said mandates were needed to stop transmission.
So now that creates a huge problem moving forward. Who but the most subservient will ever believe anything they say now?
I might add that "the science" was consistently wrong about many things during the pandemic.
Here is a collection of scientific gymnastics: https://yesithappened.substack.com/p/a-collection-of-insane-...
"The ongoing Pandemic has solidified my belief that that most people would be better off in this world if they listened less to laypeople who think they know a lot about medicine and instead listened more to people who have graduated medical school and have a whole bunch of framed diplomas and certificates on the walls of their medical office. It's also a good indicator of competence if they have a medical office."
And no I don't think searching the world for the one doctor out of one thousand willing to tell you what you want to hear is really in the spirit of that quote.
One of the biggest problems when a society starts to become intolerant towards dissenting views is that consensus itself starts to become impossible, or at least meaningless.
Most people don't care that much about most issues. Make it sting enough to dissent, and you'll eliminate dissent from all but those willing to choose this hill to die on. But in such a case the lack of dissent becomes meaningless.
If I was a doctor it's unlikely I would be publically expressing anything.
As far as I know I've never been treated by a doctor who goes around publically expressing things on any topic.
When I see a specialist it's usually because I got a referral from a family doctor not because "This doctor has an exciting Twitter feed".
I would guess my doctors have no public twitter feeds at all, not that I've ever checked.
But your question is too vague. In this scenario am I a random "doctor" or am I a nationally regarded expert in the relevant field? And did I run my views past respected colleagues and did they recieve it well or tell me I'm being an idiot?
I think the job of practicing medicine is generally about going to conferences and basing your practice on what the doctors regarded as being in the top of their field suggest.
Just like the job of becoming a doctor is about answering the questions on medical school exams in line with what the teacher told you is true, not "sharing your original views" on how the teacher is wrong.
I was born before social networks existed and reject the implicit framing society works better when everybody debates everything on social media all day. Some things might work well being debated on social media, but not everything.
If you can't convince your colleagues that your "opinions" have value and you have such a high opinion of your judgement relative to the rest of your profession that you insist on broadcasting these "opinions" to the world anyway, chances are you have a high level of confidence and a low level of competence and you aren't a very good doctor.
Especially if these "opinions" are outside your specialty.
I know the notion that a doctor should show intellectual humility may offend autodidactics who doesn't even think a layperson should show intellectual humility, but so it goes.
If Doctor x is the considered the top cardiologist it's not because he woke up one morning and shouted "I declare myself the top cardiologist."
But the interesting thing about this mold is that there was no bacteria around the areas where the mold had grown. It seemed to have repelled or killed them. He was quite excited by his discovery. But upon sharing his discovery with his colleagues they were largely dismissive. He gave a number of talks discussing the mold, where people were also universally dismissive. And he even managed to get a paper published, where you can guess the response.
This isn't the end of this story of course, though it is for our purposes. It would take more than a decade but of course eventually penicillin would eventually be refined and shaped into the life saving drug that it would rapidly become. The point I want to make with this is rather evident. Had Fleming taken public views into account before expressing himself it's entirely possible we might still live in a world without antibiotics.
And this story is the rule more than the exception for many of the most important discoveries in the progress of humanity. Human progress is heavily decentralized in no small part because the "right" answer often seems wrong at first, and is rarely enthusiastically adopted when it runs contrary to the views of a day. It was none other than Max Planck that remarked, "science progresses one funeral at a time", precisely because of this.
>And no I don't think searching the world for the one doctor out of one thousand willing to tell you what you want to hear is really in the spirit of that quote.
Well there are laymen, and there are knowledgeable skeptics. Conflated the 2 and one get to gleefully brush aside questions by dismissing knowledgeable skeptics as laymen.
If that’s the standard we have to live by after the most devastating pandemic in a century for the most developed country in the world, then there is not going to be any lessons or improvement when the next one hits.
The CDC didn’t (still doesn’t) have a full picture of mode of transmission of the virus (aerosol vs others). They kept saying it’s not airborne when all being said it looks like it is. Their focus on hand washing in retrospection seems like not a productive strategy whatsoever. The whole mask fiasco (first saying it isn’t recommended and then a straight up 180) caused the public in rooted mistrust and then their PR umbrella did a poor job addressing and admitting any failure. Their PR branch effectively did nothing to earn trust of a large swaths of public who didn’t buy into vaccination other than often resorting to name calling and gaslighting the debate further which is absolutely the opposite of what you would want to do in that situation if you really want people to get vaccinated. Many occasions they did slow walk backs and often no oversights on grants and revolving doors setup within these agencies with FDA and other pharma industries. Calling everyone criticizing you “anti-science” is a great way of not learning any lessons for next epidemic. There is a lot we can do better.
We have learned a ton about treating and preventing this disease, and vaccines are still the right answer for preventing mass public infection.
But are you saying that's what the CDC is doing?
Then the right thing to do is to not pretend to be competent. Especially when speaking from a position of authority.
Fauci continues to present the vaccine as 100% safe without mentioning possible negative outcomes.
There's always a risk with any medication you put in your body. Do we know with 100% certainty that the vaccine provides enough benefit to a 6 month old to justify the risk? I don't know.
I will at least give CDC.gov credit because now they are listing four possible "serious adverse events" (plus death is mentioned as well) here:
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/sa...
But you have to go out of your way to find that. And nobody knows the long term risks but that's not mentioned.
Then listen to the news at 6, or the latest Fauci interview, and you'll only hear that "COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective".
Are you _really_ sure about the statement you make?
“In a detailed analysis of nearly 43 million people, the risk of myocarditis in unvaccinated individuals after COVID-19 infection was at least 11 times higher compared to people who developed myocarditis after receiving a COVID-19 vaccine or booster dose, according to new research published today in the American Heart Association’s flagship, peer-reviewed journal Circulation. This analysis included data from England’s National Immunization database for people ages 13 and older who received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine between December 1, 2020 and December 15, 2021 in England.”
0: https://newsroom.heart.org/news/myocarditis-risk-significant...
“In men younger than 40 years, we estimate an additional 4 (95% CI, 2–6) and 14 (95% CI, 5–17) myocarditis events per million in the 1 to 28 days after a first dose of BNT162b2 and mRNA-1273, respectively; and an additional 14 (95% CI, 8–17), 11 (95% CI, 9–13) and 97 (95% CI, 91–99) myocarditis events after a second dose of ChAdOx1, BNT162b2, and mRNA-1273, respectively. These estimates compare with an additional 16 (95% CI, 12–18) myocarditis events per million men younger than 40 years in the 1 to 28 days after a SARS-CoV-2–positive test before vaccination.”
At those numbers the vaccines are causing myocarditis more than covid, but only in young men and not causing a lot more.
If you lump in the multitude of other things covid causes, I’m still picking the vaccine as the lesser evil.
https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.122.0...
Nothing is ever 100% perfect - no medicine or vaccine. However, transmission in vaccinated individuals is orders of magnitude lower than unvaccinated.
Somehow, people got it into their heads that vaccines = immunity! With 100% success!!!!
And, no? What?
I haven’t figured out where they got it from.
It didn't.
I mean, I haven’t looked into it and tbh I wouldn’t be that surprised if it DOES correlate to a higher risk. But I’m willing to bet we are talking insanely low risks but people will always know someone directly or through 6 degrees who had this happen so therefor it’s an evil plot!!111
Lol. Oh my god. You literally made me LOL.
It’s fucking amazing.
Men under 40 have significantly higher risk of myocarditis from the mRNA vaccines than from Covid itself.
For many cohorts it’s higher than rate of any permanent side effect from Covid itself.
Myocarditis is typically permanent.
So you’re wrong, and dangerously so by actively misleading young men to do a dangerous thing.
So... this is an antivax substack?
(I think this is being taken as a glib dunk, but I'm really asking: is there a way to write that sentence and not be an antivax person? "The mRNA vaccines are not really vaccines because they're not sterilizing", or something like that, is a core antivax talking point.)
However in real world, it has been my positively overwhelming experience that "vax skeptic" is anti-vax but clever enough to try to hide it, and take the spiteful stance of "I'm not saying anything, I'm just asking (extremely leading questions with clear strong agenda)".
If true legit "vaccination skeptics" exist who somehow, have not found over abundance of data to make up their mind but still feel they have interesting opinion to share, they are low enough of a percentage to be safe to assume against.
I would put it similarly to "round-earth agnostic". If in 2022 you have not made up your mind yet on whether Earth is round - what are you waiting for? What criteria or info do you feel is outstanding? How are you meaningfully differentiating yourself from flat-earther-in-disguise?
This is not to say that questions should not be asked or that debate is not healthy and necessary and that we should take things on faith. But it's hard to convincingly be vaccination-undecided in 2022 - it feels like it would take large amount of effort and possibly some internal naivette.
Put it in a different way - the default scientific consensus is "vaccines save lives". It's what you're taught in schools and repeatedly told by all reliable medical personnel across governments and countries and continents and religions. It feels like it takes some substantial amount of effort to get yourself into "vaccination skeptic / agnostic" realm, which I would not consider the neutral stance on this topic.
My 100 Croatian lipa :)
I would be surprised if anybody took a completely blanket approach that every vaccine ever made for any purpose under every circumstance is a Good Thing(tm) and totally worked out.
That's like saying anybody who is nervous around pitbulls hates dogs.
Can I ask why you're using quotes for something I never said?
Follow up question, why do you suppose this sort of dishonesty is needed to make your point if the truth is on your side?
So the people you're calling antivax aren't actually antivax. They were anti-mandate, and with good reason as it turns out.