If the vaccine prevents me from having severe covid to the extent I’m gonna die, I consider it to be worth it. Even if it’s like 90% effective at doing that. Again, we are over thinking this: it’s two fucking shots. Are people REALLY that scared of two fucking pricks? Hell, most of the people complaining about it already are one!
This goes back to the last page when someone brought up the messaging. I can fully see how shifting the goalposts from the promised, "If everyone would just get vaccinated, we could all go back to normal and this would go away," to, "the vaccine is only partially effective, you can still get sick and the efficacy of it wears off greatly by six months, but it will keep you out of the ICU and from dying," would make any hesitant or skeptic people lose their minds and think it's all BS. Sure, the numbers clearly bear out that the smart thing to do is get vaccinated, but changing the messaging so greatly - and not for the better - is really bad press. At a time when the government and media already have compromised credibility.
I have thought about this a bit. Keep in mind the vaccines were released on an extremely accelerated timetable. The amount of testing required that normally goes into drug review was consequently abbreviated. I imagine that while the drug was reviewed for safety, the effectiveness review did not go through the gauntlet of due diligence that they normally would have otherwise. That data only became available after the wide release. I don’t think that’s quite goalpost moving.
Perhaps not for the actual implementation of the drug, but if I go back to ALL the media and science messaging from January to August, the mantra was, "Get a vaccine, they are completely safe and 99% effective." To now say that they're still safe, but only 99% effective for the first two months and it could drop down to 70% after six, and regardless you can still catch the virus and get ill, is way more nuanced and open to discussion. The culture has been so polarized, particularly on the pro-vaccination side. There's very little tolerance for debate or questioning the status quo, so if the science bears out to be different than initially promised all the people who didn't immediately trust the government jump deeper onto the bandwagon because this gives credence to their skepticism. It's a shame the message from the beginning wasn't something like, "These vaccines are similar to the flu shot. We make our best guess based off the active variants, and it will need to be boostered every year to ensure it remains effective and keeps pace with the evolving virus." Selling it as a one-and-done like polio now appears to be inaccurate, and the anti-vaxxers have a field day.
I don't think this is goalpost moving at all... I think (hell, I know) that the models for this shit are very, very complex, and the early ones made some apparently bullshit assumptions, like, oh, I don't know, everyone would want to get the vaccine and it wouldn't be politicized. Once that started to happen, and it became red state / blue state weighted, that fucked up the model. Then throw in time and real world measured results (unless, you know, your state intentionally fucks that up too), then that will cause the model outputs to change as well. Never mind the social media impact, where you have nurses who don't believe in vaccines, and all sorts of other bullshit. Nope, the goal posts didn't change, the fucking field and grandstands morphed into Calvinball.
Just so I can keep up with the anti-vax logic, are we mad that the vaccine's effects last too long, or don't last long enough? Are we worried about the long term side effects, or are we worried that it has no long term effects at all?
Correct. Because those that are thinking they are debating are not informed, and should not be invited to the debate in the first place. If there was a scientific debate around the efficacy of a statin, or an open heart procedure, would you invite in non medical people to that debate? FUCK NO. Because they are not qualified, by a long shot. Any normal citizen that thinks they should be involved in any kind of educated debate around this is a fucking moron with an overdeveloped sense of self-entitlement.
I would if the government mandated that everyone had to have an open heart procedure, regardless of the status of their heart, and then restricted their ability to function in society if they refused. There's debating the efficacy of this particular vaccine which, can we all agree, is showing over time to be less than ideal and will likely require ongoing booster shots to maintain and then there's debating what we're willing to force on the individual. And, by the way, scientists who have expertise in this very thing and either question or express skepticism about the Covid vaccines are routinely deplatformed, demonitized and shunned in the eyes of the media. So if people with whatever the credentials you feel are required to have an opinion are called crazy and silenced, where is the robust back-and-forth needed on complex issues coming from? Again, I'm not suggesting the FDA invite Alex Jones to give a TED talk on vaccines. I am suggesting that there's a packaged message being pushed and anyone who publicly questions it has hell to pay, particularly in the scientific community.
yes, because there are morons who push back with their packaged "I did my own research" and memes and crap. If they had the intellect to read the and understand the studies, they wouldn't be pushing back on it. But they don't, so instead it has to be presented with a neat little bow in bite-sized portions hoping that maybe some of the less hard-line, more vaccine hesitant people will actually listen for the 1000th time it's presented.
Just gonna throw this out there...and I appreciate that what I'm about to say is purely anecdotal and not in any way representative of the ~10% of the entire country that falls into the anti-vax/vaccine hesitant: the three people I know who have refused the vaccine have done EXTENSIVE research. Reading peer-reviewed case studies, watching hours of technical videos on scientific testimony and debates, deep dives into the technology of understanding what's going on with this specific vaccine and viruses in general. Of the three, one is a medical doctor. Like, the amount of effort they've put into making up their mind far surpasses anyone I've seen on the "pro" side, who seem to listen to a bit of CNN or read some articles and call it good. I'm sure the pool of "Jesus will save me from this" or mouth-breathers who don't trust anyone who's been educated passed the sixth grade exist. My personal experience is that those who have chosen not to get vaccinated didn't come to that position from a tinfoil hat perspective.
I'm curious if there's a consensus among the board, because my personal experience is the exact opposite of yours.
That’s rare, then. The overlap area in the Venn diagram of people I know that have the educational background to properly read and contextualize scientific research and that also didn’t get the vaccine on that basis doesn’t exist for me. It’s mostly, “I read/saw something on the Internet and therefore I’m not getting it.” The anti-vax crowd is the most stunning example of the Dunning-Kruger Effect.
Yeah, not that I don't believe you, but I doubt they did. They probably lack the basic understanding required to properly interpret those studies, etc. And even if they did, then they are nowhere near representative of the typical anti-vaxxer. And let's not forget the fact that literally billions of people around the world have had the vaccine by now. Where are the horror stories?
that's kinda where I'm at. To be blunt, it's along intelligence lines. And again, education does not necessarily equal intelligence, as I know a lot of smart people who for a variety of reasons wouldn't/couldn't go to higher ed, and people like nurses who are dumb as a brick. But at a certain point along that intelligence line, and also at a certain point along that political/far-right/conspiracy line, you get into people who are heavily anti-vaccine. At least of people I know, show me someone who is anti-vaccine and I will show you a not very smart person. Kind, maybe, but not very intelligent. They think they're the smartest ones in the room though, which is what makes it hilarious when they're taking livestock medicine from tractor supply.
My cousin was a cancer researcher at Harvard, did his PhD in this shit. He laughs at any non-professional "doing their own research". "99% of the shit they need to read they can't get proper access to, and they lack the training. We had multiple courses in school that taught us how to properly read, write, and interpret scientific studies. Any layman off the street will get it wrong."
Probably it runs the gamut. In my experience... One is adamant that the vaccine isn't as effective as promised, and vehemently objects to the government being able to force him to take it. One is a super nerdy intellectual with a geopolitical interest in almost everything he does; he tends to fixate on a particular subject and do an ungodly amount of research on it to understand it from all sides. The last, as I said, is a doctor who has personally experienced the threats from his College if he were to express any of his views out loud. To my knowledge, none of them are religious and all of them have high-level careers based in either medicine, construction or engineering.
Well, I definitely agree that politics has completely polluted the entire vaccine push. The CDC deliberately overstepping its authority has only made things worse.
But it's not like CNN is reporting on Anderson Cooper's 20 minute foray into the lab to see if he can crack this thing. They're relaying the recommendations of every credible health agency on the planet. The CDC, the NIH, the AMA, the health department of every state, Health Canada, The NHS, etc etc. That "bit of CNN" or "some articles" is representing literally millions of man hours of expertise and an even broader investment in building up the systems that develop expertise.