And if you think that HN believes that AI is the future with no scrutiny, you haven't been paying attention.
I will keep my laminated "Proof of Vaccination" card for life so we don't forget, wasn't allowed anywhere without it (except Black Lives Matter riots)
There is certainly no way to know how Trump would have handled that implementation, but we do know how the Biden administration handled it.
Efficacy figures are bound to change once you go from a ‘small’ study (in this case hundreds of thousands) to a wider population. The original efficacy claims would have been truly astounding, and they ended up being only very good.
80% efficacy (which it ended up as) should be seen as a medical triumph, and certainly worthwhile in the context of a global pandemic.
That’s the problem, the bar was set too high. Things were said like “get the vaccine and you won’t get Covid”, “you won’t be able to spread it if you do get it”, and “you will have a milder case if you do get it”. In short order people realized all of those things were exaggerated and not true. Erodes trust.
It was a huge miscalculation and damage was done.
Was this actually said, or did they say something like “much less likely to get Covid symptoms”?
Because the science never claimed 100% efficacy, at best they said 94%, which is quite a clear indication that some people would still get symptoms. The efficacy rates and R rates were all over the news at the time.
> “you won’t be able to spread it if you do get it”
Again an absolute that was never claimed by science. If you have milder symptoms it reduces the chance of spreading and reduces the viral load when it does. Even a small reduction in symptoms in the population will greatly help reduce the rate of the virus spreading.
> “you will have a milder case if you do get it”.
This part at least is correct.
There was a lot of confusion and bad science communication at the time, but the vaccines worked the same as vaccines always have. R rates and efficacy rates were talked about at length on mainstream and social media (what else did they have to talk about). The problem is that people heard only what they wanted to hear.
People tend to try and excuse it by saying “well, they weren’t the scientists” but the reality is they were the public face of the covid vaccination efforts and their exaggerations and insistence on mandates had a net negative effect on people’s perceptions of the covid vaccine efficacy which has bled into a more general skepticism of public health and other vaccines.
Remember what President Obama purportedly said: “Never underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up”. Applies here.
I personally think “get vaccinated so you don’t get sick and don’t spread it to others” is an acceptable simplification of “get vaccinated so you have less chance of getting severely sick and reduce the risk of spreading it to others”, which is the truth (though I believe the language used was most often closer to the latter than the former).
In any case, they most certainly communicated more detail than you are suggesting. In fact there was a lot of detail.
It’s very hard to buy the notion that Biden was actively misleading that vaccines were going to be 100% effective when in White House briefings the president would hand over to medical staff, who then talked in depth about efficacy rates of less than 100%.
There is nothing acceptable about a message that ends up eroding trust in science and health authorities. Good intentions with poor outcomes hurt more than they help. We shouldn’t excuse it.
There was and continues to be a huge amount of disinformation and anti-science fear spread around, but the correct information was put out there and if you weren’t getting the right information you need to change your sources.
There is no heresy in looking back and evaluating how things were managed and hope that our authorities learn from their mistakes before God forbid any future health crisis comes our way. What we know from the last one is “Sit down, shut up, and take the medicine and don’t trust your lying eyes” doesn’t work and creates distrust. So let’s not do that again.
A public health authority's only coin is the extent to which the public finds it credible, and the US public health establishment may never recover from covid.
Truly alien. Completely beyond understanding.