I am not antivax but can we please stop pretending like our government and health authorities didn’t royally screw the pooch as it related to the COVID vaccine communications, mandates, etc…?
People became more anti-vax largely due to the prior administration more than RFKjr.
So there may not be a scientific defense but there damn sure is a backlash because of poor leadership.
Just to be clear as to who you are blaming, because the retconning on this topic makes me feel like I am losing my mind:
> On May 15, 2020, President Donald Trump officially announced the public-private partnership. The purpose of Operation Warp Speed was to coordinate Health and Human Services-wide efforts, including the NIH ACTIV partnership for vaccine and therapeutic development, the NIH RADx initiative for diagnostic development, and work by BARDA.
It doesn’t matter that Biden et al. are pro vaccination and that RFKjr is antivax. What matters is that Biden et al. influenced more antivax attitudes than RFKjr could have ever hoped to in all the time he evangelized it.
That is the real issue. RFKjr is in the position he is as a reaction to bad leadership. Whatever further damage that he manages to do, is still owned by the mismanagement caused by the prior administration.
> RFKjr is in the position he is as a reaction to bad leadership.
This seems like nonsense. Is your theory that the previous administration is perceived by some as having over-reached on COVID-19 vaccines; so the proper response is to install someone with no background in biomedical sciences to blow up vaccine research and implementation and then blame it all on the prior administration … do I have it right?
No, that’s not what I said at all. RFKjr’s public prominence rose much higher in 2021 and 2022 because the previous administration publicly lied about the vaccine’s efficacy. He was the most vocal and well known antivax person in the public space so of course when the public detects obvious bullshit from its leaders it will gravitate to the rebel with the loudest voice.
RFKjr’s popularity rose and he tried to capitalize on it by choosing to run for president as a democrat, then an independent, then throws his support behind Trump…who wins. Trump is a master troll who wants to hurt the opposition and who better to do that as Director of HHS than RFKjr?
Without Biden and Fauci creating the environment of people questioning vaccine efficacy, RFKjr doesn’t get the popularity bump. His position is is due to that bump. He is a reaction to bad leadership.
But we can write a similar narrative about the abjectly poor handling of Covid by Trump (using it as a divisive wedge issue as if he was still campaigning, rather than actually leading), causing the ham-fisted overreactions of traditional government structures trying to restore order. So how does that ping-ponging of blame stop? In reality, government will always be simplistically paternalistic and people have the responsibility to wade through the bullshit and actually analyze for themselves - not to just find one damnable overstepping and then assume an alternative must be perfect.
It's like all of these "conservatives" (how they think of themselves, they obviously are no longer actually conservatives) finally had their "trust the system" broken, but then rather being generally skeptical and trying to think for themselves, their general desire to trust authority figures made them latch on to contrarian "authorities". And it turns out those professional contrarians don't actually like our country very much at all.
The point is they are related. In a normal well-run freedom-respecting society, the leaders would make speeches and statements telling everyone they should get vaccinated, and most everyone would go along with it. There would be small contingents that rejected it for whatever crazy or not crazy reasons, but for the most part humans are social animals and the social default would be to just go do it. But rather than leading during Covid, Trump used it as if it was another campaign issue. He sowed the division and stoked the crazy that validated people's hesitations, and made those not getting the vaccine a much larger contingent than they otherwise would have been. So the bureaucracy, the corporate government, and the incoming administration upped their authoritarianism to try to get people back on board, engaging in the overreactions you're calling out.
The most common response I've heard from people who believe the government lied about the COVID vaccine is that they take issue with the word 'vaccine'. They think it should not have been described as a vaccine since you can still get COVID after getting the vaccine, and the vaccine has a certain timeframe after which it loses efficacy because the virus mutates.
Pointing out that other vaccines have these exact same properties just leads to them claiming all of those are not really vaccines and we need to stop recommending them. In their mind if its not a shot you get once, after which there is no possibility of contracting the disease, it is a hoax.
You can see exactly this train of thought in this thread from some people
Do you think it is more the responsibility of miscommunication under Biden than it is of the people who are actually in power doing the bad things now, Trump and RFK Jr? How long into the future does this excuse hold, by the way?
Trump and RFKjr of course will own their own part of this if public antivax sentiment descends further. However as I have said elsewhere on this thread, I prefer to blame causes more than effects as having the ultimate responsibility.
RFK Jr was antivax long before Biden became president. Antivax sentiment has been widespread for a long time. I'm pretty sure the Bi den administration is not the ultimate cause.
The absolute clusterfuck by Fauci when he lied about masks, lied about vaccine efficacy, and the Biden administration saying being in groups was dangerous unless it was a BLM protest, did far, far more to destroy confidence in the FDA and vaccines than RFK ever did.
I recommend spending some time as a public health official; it helps understand the logic that PH people apply when they make policy. I also recommend reading a bunch about the history of vaccines and the challenges associated with them.
Nope, they don’t get a pass for being incompetent from me just because a job is difficult. I’ll also never accept a “well their intentions were good” type of argument—-If the results suck, the results suck. Our country moved towards antivax mentality in a big way because of how our government handled that pandemic. That’s unforgivable and I am not someone who will blame the effect instead of the cause.
I agree and this is also true in other countries. I'm not sure why this is even a question. The results of the pandemic sucked big time and people lost trust over masks vs. no masks, boosters, lock downs, and many other pseduo-random rules not backed by any real evidence. This loss of trust was broader than just the vaccines.
We don't even seem to be learning in retrospect. I've yet to see one article from health officials to the public about how they could have done better and what mistakes were made.
Our country handled the pandemic nearly the same as other developed countries, but none of them have had such an extreme reaction.
What happened is that our country is extremely polarized and one side picked vaccines, masks, and lockdowns, so the other side took the opposite stance.
Then the vaccine, mask, and lockdown side reacted by leaning farther in (probably a bit too far near the end of things).
On the one side you had people yelling about masks causing them to asphyxiate and on the other you had people wearing masks alone in the car.
I'm sure I was one of the people wearing the mask alone in the car, but that was only because it was easier to leave it on when I left the house than to continually put it on and take it off when I was out running errands. I guess I never found them that uncomfortable.
Like the fact that wearing masks in public is primarily done so that sick people have a mask over their coughing mouth.
But if only sick people had to wear masks, it would single you out as sick, so nobody would wear a mask.
So the solution is for everyone to wear a mask, so a mask isn't a sign of illness.
Of course, this level of thinking requires an IQ of at least 100, which half the population is under.
So "Wear a mask, because masks stop the spread of illness" is used to allude to masks being a tool for protection primarily, rather than a tool of containment.
Was that after the first Fauci lie about them not being helpful or the second lie where he said they were?
Now you are suggesting it was all some form of performative behavior modification theater? It’s no wonder our public trust in our health authorities has decreased.
There a no pieces that don't fit here, except being over the intelligence threshold to understand what was going on.
- He said masks are not effective because they aren't. Surgical masks won't stop much and N95 needs special procedure to use properly. 95% of people clamoring for masks would be healthy unsick people who want protection from the virus, which masks aren't that great at (in general public hands).
- At the time people needed to stay home and medical workers who understand masks and using them properly needed them. There was a huge shortage.
- The number of sick people going out in public, the ones where a mask is very effective (picture a sweatshirt hanging over a garden hose, now spray someone with it) would be very small, requiring very few masks.
- If the public understood that only sick people needed to wear masks -no one would wear a mask- Health officials deeply understand this. You kill your whole program if the public associates masks with being sick.
Fauci had no lies, maybe misteps, but he could not reveal the true motivation of "Wear a mask" (stated in the line abaove) because it kills the whole initiative(as stated in the line above).
So now, lets see who can clear the hurdle:
How do you as a public health communicator get all sick people to wear masks in public?
Fauci was stuck in a game theory problem, and you need some hidden information (which I now revealed) and mild intelligence to understand it
Ahh…so he was playing the long game from the get go. Every word was calculated precisely and even his reputation suffering and the skepticism of science and vaccines were part of the master plan to save America.
Sorry, but I am not going to assume mastery and genius that manifests itself as incompetence. Feel free to call me low intelligence.
There really isn't much genius on his part or some kind of long con.
It's totally understandable that you were not aware that public masking primarily works by masking sick people, and the game theory folly that creates.
It's ok to reassess when you learn new information.
> I am not antivax but can we please stop pretending like our government and health authorities didn’t royally screw the pooch as it related to the COVID vaccine communications, mandates, etc…?
In what way? (Specifically re: screwing the pooch around vaccines, and not other parts of the covid response.)
Lied about its efficacy primarily. Both Biden and Fauci are on record as saying basically “if you get the vaccine you won’t get Covid and can’t give Covid to another person”. People got the vaccine, vaccinated people still got Covid, vaccinated people still spread Covid.
Then, even after it was apparent that the vaccine did not have the advertised benefit, they continued to press its use including mandates for federal employees and the military, encouraged censorship of social media conversation about the vaccine and its efficacy, as well as pressed covid vaccination of healthy children (who were among the least likely in the population to either get or spread the disease).
First, assuming that vaccination would indeed prevent transmission was a good guess based on prior vaccinations. That it didn't work out in this case became apparent over time. There were no lies.
Second, vaccination did reduce both severity of disease in case of infection, and also rate of infection, and thus transmission. Even imperfect reduction of transmissibility (the famous R_0) can mean the difference between a pandemic and fizzling out.
>assuming that vaccination would indeed prevent transmission was a good guess based on prior vaccinations.
It wasn't.
First of all, they didn't need to guess, because immunology already knew that there is a difference between immunity in the mucus membranes (which is where respiratory infection has to be fought) versus in the blood. The latter is where the immune response is generated if you get an intramuscular injection. This turns out to be have been immunology 101, as testified by e.g. immunologist Liliane Schoofs to my government. You will also note subsequent efforts put into a nasal version of the vaccine that wouldn't have this design problem. There were, in fact, lies.
Second of all, the net effect of getting "vaccinated" was that people got a green pass to go out during winter time, sit across each other in bars and restaurants, and breathe each other's air, while explicitly believing they were immune, even though they were not. The argument that this was still a net positive seems preposterous and a form of magical thinking, where the people who got the ineffective shot were still somehow better off, even though they were engaging in far riskier behaviors.
The people who didn't get the shot meanwhile were forced to stay inside unless they were recently tested. So the hypothesis that the shots reduced illness by reducing transmission is likely also false. There is ample evidence now of spike protein being produced far longer than was ever promised in some patients, and also signs of immunodeficiency, which means the shots themselves were also not an unalloyed good.
What this thread mostly shows is that "anti-vax" remains a magical word, a dividing line between the Good People Who Believe Science and the Bad People Who Dismiss it. The actual details of the vaccine science are not known, and the story many people tell in retrospect does not hold up to basic scrutiny. They are willing to admit to individual instances of error, overstatement or deception in the management of COVID, but they are rarely willing to put them all together and see how this radically changes the entire picture.
Because what it looks like is an insane lobbying effort of governments and influencers, enormous amounts of public money being spent on shots we didn't need, a huge propaganda effort to silence any dissent as "anti-vax" and "anti-science", and all this because likely it did escape from a lab, and the people responsible for developing and funding it were terrified of being held accountable, and having their field shut down as the irresponsible LARP it was. Following some of these star virologists (e.g. Marion Koopmans) online is quite hilarious, because it is very obvious none of their excuses hold up.
Here are a bunch of “Nobodies” talking about vaccinated folks not getting sick (or very low chance of getting sick) and not being contagious and spreading the virus. We know now that this was all bullshit.
We all can look back on this time and choose to remember what we want. I am going to remember the government mandating an ineffective vaccine and lying to me about it.
The country is pretty inarguably substantially safer with a covid-vaccinated population than without. The development of those vaccines is a hugely important event in human history.
> a network of prospective cohorts among frontline workers, showed that the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna mRNA COVID-19 vaccines were approximately 90% effective in preventing symptomatic and asymptomatic infection with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, in real-world conditions (1,2)
Are they lying? Is 90% the damning number of ineffectiveness? Also I'm confused, why wouldn't you vaccinate everyone including healthy children? It's like the first thing I would do as a parent. The yearly flu vaccine is more of a gamble than the COVID vaccine and I still get it every year. Why do you want less protection?
I dont. I am not antivax and will not defend that position. What I am arguing here is that our government mandated and oversold (lied about) the effectiveness of the vaccine. Because of that, public attitude started shifting toward an antivax mentality.
> Apparently you've never heard of what a good chunk…
Apparently you haven’t read all of the robust discussion on this thread. This wasn’t a “what came first the chicken or the egg” discussion. It was a “what made eating eggs so popular” discussion.
> Both Biden and Fauci are on record as saying basically “if you get the vaccine you won’t get Covid and can’t give Covid to another person”.
Horseshit, and you know it. Because even you acknowledged elsewhere they said "unlikely".
Then you run around this conversation saying "they said it won't happen", and using weasel words like "basically" to justify your mischaracterization of what they said as absolute claims.
Myself and others have posted compilation videos on here of the prior administration mischaracterizing COVID vaccine efficacy.
However, believe what you want to believe and split hairs on language how you want. Doesn’t change the fact that vaccine trust is down and that trust started falling after the COVID vaccine was released.
Either RFKjr all of a sudden became really good all of a sudden at convincing people of his wacky ideas or something else happened.
Right, I don't understand why these people are constructing these elaborate and convoluted mechanism for which anti-vax rhetoric increased.
It's very simple: if you push more anti-vax talking points and conspiracies, then naturally those ideas will be more popular in the zeitgeist. And, well, the right in general has been doing just that. Two plus two, now there's a lot more anti-vax people.
The twelve people responsible for the bulk of those alternate theories were motivated by the profits to be made from alternative cures (see link in my peer commet and other similar reports).
The Covid vaccine was, and remains, very effective and overall safe.
What it never was, and was never advertised to be, is 100% effective or 100% safe. Because nothing is, even air and water.
I don't know where people's obviously incorrect and unrealistic expectation of the Covid vaccine came from. Well, I can guess: anti-vax rhetoric. But, everyone on Earth should know that of course the Covid vaccine is not magic. Because no vaccines are magic. And no medicines are magic. And no substances are magic.
When people say seatbelts are safe, I don't see gremlins coming out of the woodwork to "erm, akshually" that. But, as soon as someone says the Covid vaccine is safe, suddenly everyone is Helen Keller. This is not your first day on Earth. Please, stop acting stupid.
Overall, yes, having the Covid vaccine lowers your risk of Covid-related bad things. It is effective, full stop. Please don't try to refute this or argue against because I just don't care.
> The Covid vaccine was, and remains, very effective
What is your definition of “effective”?
The public’s definition was “I get the shot and won’t get covid or be able to spread Covid”. I posted a compilation of our leadership saying that very thing too on this thread. Then lo and behold…we find out that not only can you can still get it, the disease is not any milder than when an unvaccinated person gets covid, and you can still spread it.
I will repeat this again because people on HN can’t see the forest through the trees. I am not antivax. I got the vaccine. What I am suggesting is the government overselling the effectiveness contributed to a public shift towards antivax attitudes.
You can put your hand over your ears and pretend it didn’t happen. You can post how “you don’t care” and don’t want a response…but that will not stop the attitude shift.
It was very effective at first, until the virus adapted. Literally every single person I know that has been vaccinated (or not) has had COVID. Sure, they might have had reduced symptoms - but there's no other vaccine commonly used that has such an awful infection rate. You could possibly argue the flu vaccine, but when they actually nail the strain it's quite effective.
Sure, it's quite safe. But don't argue that it's effective. It's an awfully ineffective vaccine and there'd be more pressure for a better one if people stopped repeating that lie. We've figured out that mRNA vaccines targeting just a specific part of a virus are maybe great in an emergency but not great for long-term use. We need something better. People are still dying.
Not so much a large contingent pushing that stuff out, rather a small number that directly profited from "alternative cures" pushed hard and marketed well, which was picked up and echoed by many.
Just 12 People Are Behind Most Vaccine Hoaxes On Social Media, Research Shows
Researchers have found just 12 people are responsible for the bulk of the misleading claims and outright lies about COVID-19 vaccines that proliferate on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
"The 'Disinformation Dozen' produce 65% of the shares of anti-vaccine misinformation on social media platforms," said Imran Ahmed, chief executive officer of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which identified the accounts.
Yeah, that’s fair. I was including downstream, like not just the immediate pushers, but the tv stations, and politicians, and podcasters, that were repeating those claims. But you’re right, it wasn’t really a large group, it was a loud group.
That's the real issue, and it's weird that so few seem to realize it. Sure, they skew Republican because stay-at-home moms tend to skew that way too. As you said though, it all predates both presidents. It was the crunchy parents before COVID, and often times still is.
Sure, although I'd correct that some, in that prior to COVID anti-vax was more a leftist position. It switched political orientation in less than a couple year's time, which is fascinating.
This is true, but leading up to the vaccine, he embraced every stupid conspiracy, related to COVID and before. Remember the bleach and sunshine press conference? A better leader who actually tried to understand the science at a basic level when they have their choice of incredible experts would have been better at communicating to the public from the beginning. He let the horse out of the barn, and that's famously hard to undo.
I am not antivax but can we please stop pretending like our government and health authorities didn’t royally screw the pooch as it related to the COVID vaccine communications, mandates, etc…?
People became more anti-vax largely due to the prior administration more than RFKjr.
So there may not be a scientific defense but there damn sure is a backlash because of poor leadership.