You don't want to give people a sense of false hope because it discourages compliance with interventions with known effectiveness, like social distancing.
It's been very disheartening watching so many of our essential institutions toss aside their credibility this last year. I wish I had to words to express how dangerous this is moving forward.
I don't know who else was involved but it certainly wasn't just von der Leyen, this was complete institutional failure.
Probably as well the most effective Brexit propaganda you can imagine.
Of those suppliers, only AstraZeneca acted with bad faith to excuse non-delivery. The other suppliers - having the sense to understand Covid is a global problem, not a national one - didn't.
The UK then used its gamble on an untested schedule - the gap was originally supposed to be weeks, not months - to turn vaccination into a propaganda exercise.
Meanwhile the British variant, which appeared because the UK failed to lock down properly in the first place, is still causing tens of thousands of deaths across the EU.
Institutional failure you say? Indeed it is - on the British side. If the UK had acted rationally and responsibly a year ago, there would have been no need for vaccine nationalism.
Changing the vaccination schedule in the UK, on the other hand, was an informed gamble that - based on what was known about the vaccine at the time - would likely result in much fewer people dying and being hospitalized than sticking to the original, basically arbitrary, vaccination schedule.
Also, blaming AstraZeneca for the EU falling behind the UK in vaccination is 100% pure propaganda. As far as I can tell, at this point their vaccine deliveries to the UK are about as far behind schedule as the ones to the EU, and the UK is a lot more reliant on AZ vaccinations than the EU. The EU just didn't order enough - their initial AZ order was about the same size as the UK one, for a much larger population, meaning they ended up with less production capacity relative to their population than the UK. The reason it seems like the UK vaccination scheme is going to plan is because the UK contract had contractual clauses with teeth requiring AZ to promptly notify them of how much they were actually going to deliver once they had their plants up and running, and the UK's plan was based on the actual delivery schedule. The EU... didn't. At all. I don't think they understand this even now, judging from all the conspiracy theories about how the yield problems are an excuse and AZ are really just sneaking off doses to the UK.
1) What do we want people to do?
2) How do we get them to do it?
The answer to 2 should always be simply explaining the reasoning for 1, even if it would be a little less effective than making up some lie. In the long run this builds trust in the government, instead of reducing it leading to a total breakdown of compliance because they lie all the time.
The most dangerous and insidious thing about this dynamic, IMHO, is that a certain type of smart or self-identified elite person will go along with it, because they, too, believe that you can't just tell the truth to the general public (of which they don't consider themselves a part of course).
Even at the time the CDC gave its guidance, the published evidence to support the general public wearing masks was quite weak. Here is an extract from a systematic review of the published research from shortly after the CDC gave its guidance.
> There is uncertainty about the effects of face masks. The low‐moderate certainty of the evidence means our confidence in the effect estimate is limited, and that the true effect may be different from the observed estimate of the effect. The pooled results of randomised trials did not show a clear reduction in respiratory viral infection with the use of medical/surgical masks during seasonal influenza.
https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD...
So the CDC was faced with a situation where there was minimal evidence for the efficacy of the general public wearing masks and a severe shortage of PPE among medical personnel. In that context, they held back recommending that the general public wear masks.
It wasn't really till May/June that evidence started mounting in support of the general use of masks amongst the public.
So there was no conspiracy, just hard working people trying to do their best in a difficult situation. The world is much more dull than people like to believe.
I don't have any evidence that the CDC was deliberately withholding information (not to say it doesn't exist), but I do have evidence that medical leaders have felt it okay to lie to the public with regards to covid.
> In the pandemic’s early days, Dr. Fauci tended to cite the same 60 to 70 percent... And last week, in an interview with CNBC News, he said “75, 80, 85 percent” and “75 to 80-plus percent.”
> In a telephone interview the next day, Dr. Fauci acknowledged that he had slowly but deliberately been moving the goal posts. He is doing so, he said, partly based on new science, and partly on his gut feeling that the country is finally ready to hear what he really thinks.
> “When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent,” Dr. Fauci said. “Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, ‘I can nudge this up a bit,’ so I went to 80, 85.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/24/health/herd-immunity-covi...
> “We need to have some humility here,” he added. “We really don’t know what the real number is. I think the real range is somewhere between 70 to 90 percent. But, I’m not going to say 90 percent.”
He's not lying, like the rest of us, he doesn't know. Especially, with the advent of the new variants.
Also, it's odd you're pointing out him giving information during an on-the-record interview as evidence that he's lying.
> Dr. Fauci acknowledged that he had slowly but deliberately been moving the goal posts... partly on his gut feeling that the country is finally ready to hear what he really thinks.
From wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie):
> Lying by omission, also known as a continuing misrepresentation or quote mining, occurs when an important fact is left out in order to foster a misconception. Lying by omission includes the failure to correct pre-existing misconceptions.
Dr. Fauci believed that the real range was somewhere between 70 to 90 percent as you pointed out; however, he gave lower estimates to the public because he didn't believe the public was "ready to hear what he really thinks". So not only was he failing to correct pre-existing misconceptions, but he was actively spreading misconceptions about how much of the population he believed needed to be vaccinated. As such, he was lying by omission.
When Dr. Fauci was claiming lower figures: no vaccine had completed clinical trials; variants had not yet emerged; and governments were more willing to implement lockdowns, mask orders, and social distancing restrictions.
If he's guilty of anything, it is misleading the public into thinking he knows what the number is. Nobody knows what the real number is, there are so many confounding factors that it'll take years of research to come up with a decent estimate as to the real herd immunity level of Covid-19 immunisation.
This is a general problem in public scientific messaging. Science deals with uncertainty and nuance, but the fearful public seek certainty and simplicity. People in these positions don't always get the balance right (especially in a crisis), but I wouldn't impune somebody's reputation on that basis.
In addition, crises of different nature have similar structures. The readiness to deal with the structure of crises of different nature can be tested.
The US Surgeon General, CDC, WHO, etc. got on national television and said masks don't work when what they appear to have really believed is that masks DO work, but they wanted to reserve them for healthcare workers. The cost of this dishonesty is that when they flipped the script people were less likely to comply/believe them. And any recommendations they give going forward has to go through the "Are they sacrificing me for the greater good" filter.
When the question of whether COVID is lab generated is brought up, the relevant institutions consistently respond in a dishonest manner. They pretend that "lab generated" means gene editing and they vociferously deny the gene editing hypothesis. But that's not what is being asked. What's being asked about is gain of function research.
These things are categorically different than something like "I think if they closed the borders sooner we would've had less impact." That might fall under "not performed perfectly" and I'm willing to grant a lot of leeway for that category of error under emergency circumstances.
I think this was just a problem of messaging. The science really wasn't there to support the hypothesis that masks could help limit transmission in the community. Even the evidence for their effectiveness in a clinical setting was extremely limited.
There was reason to believe, however, that if they were effective, they'd be more effective in a clinical setting because they'd be used in combination with other PPE, hand washing would be more frequent, and staff were trained on how to wear masks correctly. Clinicians also happened to be putting their necks on the line by knowingly coming into close contact with infected individuals, while the rest of us were hunkered down at home.
Here is an extract from a review of the published literature shortly after the CDC gave its guidance for the community to wear masks:
> There is uncertainty about the effects of face masks. The low‐moderate certainty of the evidence means our confidence in the effect estimate is limited, and that the true effect may be different from the observed estimate of the effect. The pooled results of randomised trials did not show a clear reduction in respiratory viral infection with the use of medical/surgical masks during seasonal influenza. There were no clear differences between the use of medical/surgical masks compared with N95/P2 respirators in healthcare workers when used in routine care to reduce respiratory viral infection. Hand hygiene is likely to modestly reduce the burden of respiratory illness. Harms associated with physical interventions were under‐investigated.
https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD...
> What's being asked about is gain of function research.
I'm glad that we can (seemly) agree that Covid-19 created using genetic engineering. Are you aware of any evidence to suggest that its evolution was guided by deliberate human action?