It depended on the day of the week. Sometimes it was slow the spread, sometimes it was to prevent getting covid, other times it was to reduce the severity if you got it.
Various people gave their hopefully somewhat informed opinion at the time to different members of the media, who reported on it with different levels of accuracy, attributing often undue levels of confidence to it. And that quickly mutated into "the media's trusted sources can confirm that the experts definitely know the vaccine will have exactly these effects and will be effective for these specific cases"
I think it's worth questioning what influence there was in which narratives did or didn't get pushed, but I also think it's worth keeping in mind that the media is also just... fallible.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33736959
I understand if some random chiropractic from alabama says something, that the data is probably questionable... but the director of CDC does carry some authority.
If if _we don't know something_, isn't mandating that something (vaccines in this case) somehow a bad thing? On one side... "take this, and you won't get sick"... who is responsible when that person gets sick? Or infects grandma? Or actually gets a clot?
That said, a doctor never says “you won’t get sick”. Medicine is never certain, the human body is too complex to generalize and say “this will cure you 100% sure, no bad reactions possible”. There’s always a chance that something will go wrong. Clinical essays are what makes possibility go down, but it is never 0.
If you want absolutes, go to a priest. They will give you an absolute that matches your own pre assumptions and if it turns out wrong later, well God wanted it this way, He works in misterious ways.
That's not bad communication it's an outright false statement.
My point was specifically about the expectation of fail proof medicine. It doesn’t exist.
But in my country (slovenia), at the height of pressure to get vaccinated, if you were a young girl/woman (15-24 age bracket), the "96%" from above turned to "you'll probably still get covid, you'll still spread it, if you do, not one girl in your age bracket died yet because of or even with covid, but one girl died due to the vaccine... but, if you don't take the vaccine, you'll have to get tested every 48 hours or you'll be unable to go to work (oh, no testing center in your village, and you're not allowed to take the bus to the closest test location without a test)".
It’s choosing between that and … “a girl who died in Slovenia”. How are those two things equivalent?
Even if you can spread COVID, if the effects in your body are lowered, chances are that you will remove the virus it from your body earlier (it can dedicate more resources to winning the battle instead of … breathing), so you will be effectively less contagious.