Earlier in the summer, we lifted mask mandates “because the vaccines were preventing disease”, and regardless of the technical facts behind that decision, the perception was reality for the general public. Now they are trying to walk that back to “vaccines prevent serious disease” in the face of delta breakthroughs but the baseline had already been set.
Not to mention the fact that experts continue to pedantically stick to their definition of serious disease as “needed oxygen in the hospital”, once again out of touch with the layperson’s opinion that a week of debilitating sickness at home followed by a month of weakness until full recovery seems pretty “serious” and something people do not want. Boosters are appealing because laypeople don’t want any serious-by-their-definition disease and experts seemingly are incapable of acknowledging or understanding that, let alone their part in creating confusing messaging (partly to appease a 3rd set of people who ironically don’t really want to hear from them at all).
Public health officials need to understand that their primary job is managing public perception of a situation first and foremost. They can go push their glasses up and pedantically spout off technical corrections behind closed doors as much as they want, but in public they have to connect and empathize with normal humans.
Part of this probably comes from medicine’s continued promulgation of their air of expertise (read: superiority) that they’ve affected for a long while, but things like compassion and bedside-manner at lower importance. I worked in medicine and studied public health, and this status-over-all-else attitude was one of the reasons I left.