You wrote: "Misinformation is a huge challenge, but proactive communication is even more critical. We can’t just put out fires but need to prevent them." So are you advocating for more of the censorship that was done on social media regarding COVID 19 issues? The kind of censorship that was done to factual statements which were censored …
You wrote: "Misinformation is a huge challenge, but proactive communication is even more critical. We can’t just put out fires but need to prevent them." So are you advocating for more of the censorship that was done on social media regarding COVID 19 issues? The kind of censorship that was done to factual statements which were censored merely because they cast doubt on public health policies and goals? That happened. And many of us don't like it. I don't think factual statements can be considered misinformation.
"Trusted messengers are everything." and then the next bullet point: "You will get things wrong. Own it." CDC director Walensky said if you get COVID shots you will not get COVID. A long time later we found out she knew that was not true when she said it. When questioned by a congressional committee about this she said something like "well, it was mostly true at the time." That's not owning it. That's lying. It's a good thing she resigned. As you know by now, the public want's the whole truth, not something that is "mostly" true.
What about the continued mandates for COVID shots? Some colleges require them, some don't. Some health care workers have mandates, some don't. I don't see you writing anything about COVID shot mandates and if they should continue. These mandates are public health policies that have a great effect on people's lives.
"CDC director Walensky said if you get COVID shots you will not get COVID" Actually the full quote is this: "And we have -- we can kind of almost see the end. We`re vaccinating so very fast, our data from the CDC today suggests, you know, that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don't get sick, and that it's not just in the clinical trials but it`s also in real world data."
The CDC pointed out three days later that this was a oversimplification and did not, in fact, reflect the CDCs official position based on the available data.
Personally, I'm more inclined to pay attention to statements based on facts collected by actual scientists and epidemiologists who have made it their lives' work to study medicine as opposed to the kind of quackery practiced by your boy Joseph Mercola, your crystal-gazer Ana Maria "Do you know that your spirit and physical body are light?" Mihalcea, former physician Meryl Nass (license pulled for pushing loony anti-vax conspiracies) and the other snake-oil peddlers in whom you place so much faith.
Yeah, one thing that would really help would be if during press conferences and interviews, public officials would be more disciplined about answering questions by doing one of the following:
1. Giving a phone number.
2. Stating that they already answered that question
3. Delegating
4. Ending the press conference/interview
5. In the case of anything where health is involved, it's OK to tell people to talk to their doctors
Something I encountered was the number of practicing primary care docs who were not up-to-date on COVID-19. Case in point, my own PCP. Early on he listened patiently when I rattled on the topic. Within 2 months, I was getting email requests for information on pandemic topics from him, and I know now that he shared a fair bit of what I sent with colleagues and internal medicine residents in his program. Educating the docs is a team sport. It's unlikely a busy provider will have/take the time to gather the latest Public Health info and be able to immediately integrate them into practice. They need to cultivate their info sources (and he found the university's info sources tainted by state politics; 'nother story) for factual information they can use.
Of note, sending him info didn't require the translation I should have employed for the public. I could use jargon and if he didn't get it, he'd call or email a question.
They do, but the time necessary to read the volume of data available is the problem. I've not looked in a couple months, but last time I did look, I'd archived over 3000 articles and read over 10k. But that's a trivial amount of the over 350k articles out on the subject.
It's the role of public health professionals to make the information available to as wide an audience as possible. The messaging is usually different for different groups. I can do pretty well, one-on-one with patient and family for a medical or surgical case. I can do fine explaining that same case to a friend/colleague "in the business". I have to modify the message for, say, a friend of the family (assumes I have permission to speak to them from the patient and/or family as appropriate) who might be an engineer... or a kindergarten teacher. Same thing with Public Health information. You really need to prepare the message for the audience you're addressing, and in a lot of ways, public health failed that test. We tried, too often, to simply state the facts and expect everyone to have our level of expertise in what we were describing. The words sounded a lot like English, but they didn't necessarily mean what you thought they meant because Those Words we were using might have a general and broad meaning in casual conversation and a more explicit and even nuanced meaning when we employed them in our work. Simply put, all too often, we talked in shorthand and others attempted to interpret what we said, but didn't really understand.
Can I give this 42 Likes so we do get this important topic addressed? (If it has been please let us know). What is our current understanding of the impact of (a) Covid vaccines and (b) Natural infection on reducing transmission? (with the various key nuances in that question) If (a) is negligible, what's the rationale for *requiring* vaccination for work or school?
Oy. First, vaccines represent probably the best way to avoid serious disease and death. The first vaccines, and I'm primarily talking about the mRNA vaccines, were focused on ancestral-strain SARS-CoV-2. Since then, however, we've seen significant variation in the virus' RNA sequences, and evasion of initial immunity. The bivalent boosters were found to be effective and some research has suggested they provide protection for up to 6 months. The next round of boosters will be monovalent (against a single variant) and targeted toward the prevalent variant of Omicron at the time they lock in vaccine composition. This should, again, provide some degree of preventive immunity for a short period, and a longer period of prevention of serious disease and death.
Naturally or disease acquired immunity is also likely to reduce the incidence of serious disease and death. Studies on the duration of said immunity are all over the timescale, but most I've seen of late suggest protection for at least 6 months.
Neither vaccine-acquired nor naturally-acquired immunity is sterilizing at this stage, meaning it will not stop the virus completely, and thus, while it may reduce transmission by decreasing viral load that can expose someone else, neither will eliminate transmission.
COVID-19 still has the potential for infecting, and reinfecting people. Each subsequent infection carries an increased risk of death or serious disease. Also, there are indications that multiple infections can predispose someone to acquiring Long COVID, something we're still sorting out but which has affected a sufficiently large group to be considered real, if somewhat diverse. Studies world-wide suggest that 5-40% of the population (depends on country statistics) suffer Long COVID after infection. This results in often debilitating symptoms, and can have an adverse effect on work/school. A review of the literature suggests vaccinated people are less likely to acquire Long COVID than those who were not vaccinated. So arguments can be made to reduce severity of the disease and to reduce the incidence Long COVID, mandating vaccination is still a reasonable idea.
You wrote: "Misinformation is a huge challenge, but proactive communication is even more critical. We can’t just put out fires but need to prevent them." So are you advocating for more of the censorship that was done on social media regarding COVID 19 issues? The kind of censorship that was done to factual statements which were censored merely because they cast doubt on public health policies and goals? That happened. And many of us don't like it. I don't think factual statements can be considered misinformation.
"Trusted messengers are everything." and then the next bullet point: "You will get things wrong. Own it." CDC director Walensky said if you get COVID shots you will not get COVID. A long time later we found out she knew that was not true when she said it. When questioned by a congressional committee about this she said something like "well, it was mostly true at the time." That's not owning it. That's lying. It's a good thing she resigned. As you know by now, the public want's the whole truth, not something that is "mostly" true.
What about the continued mandates for COVID shots? Some colleges require them, some don't. Some health care workers have mandates, some don't. I don't see you writing anything about COVID shot mandates and if they should continue. These mandates are public health policies that have a great effect on people's lives.
"CDC director Walensky said if you get COVID shots you will not get COVID" Actually the full quote is this: "And we have -- we can kind of almost see the end. We`re vaccinating so very fast, our data from the CDC today suggests, you know, that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don't get sick, and that it's not just in the clinical trials but it`s also in real world data."
This was said off the cuff on the Rachel Maddow show. Full transcript here: https://www.msnbc.com/transcripts/transcript-rachel-maddow-show-3-29-21-n1262442
The CDC pointed out three days later that this was a oversimplification and did not, in fact, reflect the CDCs official position based on the available data.
Personally, I'm more inclined to pay attention to statements based on facts collected by actual scientists and epidemiologists who have made it their lives' work to study medicine as opposed to the kind of quackery practiced by your boy Joseph Mercola, your crystal-gazer Ana Maria "Do you know that your spirit and physical body are light?" Mihalcea, former physician Meryl Nass (license pulled for pushing loony anti-vax conspiracies) and the other snake-oil peddlers in whom you place so much faith.
Yeah, one thing that would really help would be if during press conferences and interviews, public officials would be more disciplined about answering questions by doing one of the following:
1. Giving a phone number.
2. Stating that they already answered that question
3. Delegating
4. Ending the press conference/interview
5. In the case of anything where health is involved, it's OK to tell people to talk to their doctors
Something I encountered was the number of practicing primary care docs who were not up-to-date on COVID-19. Case in point, my own PCP. Early on he listened patiently when I rattled on the topic. Within 2 months, I was getting email requests for information on pandemic topics from him, and I know now that he shared a fair bit of what I sent with colleagues and internal medicine residents in his program. Educating the docs is a team sport. It's unlikely a busy provider will have/take the time to gather the latest Public Health info and be able to immediately integrate them into practice. They need to cultivate their info sources (and he found the university's info sources tainted by state politics; 'nother story) for factual information they can use.
Of note, sending him info didn't require the translation I should have employed for the public. I could use jargon and if he didn't get it, he'd call or email a question.
A lot of state libraries offer access to databases and electronic resources/journals to physicians licensed by their state
They do, but the time necessary to read the volume of data available is the problem. I've not looked in a couple months, but last time I did look, I'd archived over 3000 articles and read over 10k. But that's a trivial amount of the over 350k articles out on the subject.
They're lucky to have you as a patient. I think my takeaway is to have a doctor whose patients are doctors
It's the role of public health professionals to make the information available to as wide an audience as possible. The messaging is usually different for different groups. I can do pretty well, one-on-one with patient and family for a medical or surgical case. I can do fine explaining that same case to a friend/colleague "in the business". I have to modify the message for, say, a friend of the family (assumes I have permission to speak to them from the patient and/or family as appropriate) who might be an engineer... or a kindergarten teacher. Same thing with Public Health information. You really need to prepare the message for the audience you're addressing, and in a lot of ways, public health failed that test. We tried, too often, to simply state the facts and expect everyone to have our level of expertise in what we were describing. The words sounded a lot like English, but they didn't necessarily mean what you thought they meant because Those Words we were using might have a general and broad meaning in casual conversation and a more explicit and even nuanced meaning when we employed them in our work. Simply put, all too often, we talked in shorthand and others attempted to interpret what we said, but didn't really understand.
Can I give this 42 Likes so we do get this important topic addressed? (If it has been please let us know). What is our current understanding of the impact of (a) Covid vaccines and (b) Natural infection on reducing transmission? (with the various key nuances in that question) If (a) is negligible, what's the rationale for *requiring* vaccination for work or school?
Oy. First, vaccines represent probably the best way to avoid serious disease and death. The first vaccines, and I'm primarily talking about the mRNA vaccines, were focused on ancestral-strain SARS-CoV-2. Since then, however, we've seen significant variation in the virus' RNA sequences, and evasion of initial immunity. The bivalent boosters were found to be effective and some research has suggested they provide protection for up to 6 months. The next round of boosters will be monovalent (against a single variant) and targeted toward the prevalent variant of Omicron at the time they lock in vaccine composition. This should, again, provide some degree of preventive immunity for a short period, and a longer period of prevention of serious disease and death.
Naturally or disease acquired immunity is also likely to reduce the incidence of serious disease and death. Studies on the duration of said immunity are all over the timescale, but most I've seen of late suggest protection for at least 6 months.
Neither vaccine-acquired nor naturally-acquired immunity is sterilizing at this stage, meaning it will not stop the virus completely, and thus, while it may reduce transmission by decreasing viral load that can expose someone else, neither will eliminate transmission.
COVID-19 still has the potential for infecting, and reinfecting people. Each subsequent infection carries an increased risk of death or serious disease. Also, there are indications that multiple infections can predispose someone to acquiring Long COVID, something we're still sorting out but which has affected a sufficiently large group to be considered real, if somewhat diverse. Studies world-wide suggest that 5-40% of the population (depends on country statistics) suffer Long COVID after infection. This results in often debilitating symptoms, and can have an adverse effect on work/school. A review of the literature suggests vaccinated people are less likely to acquire Long COVID than those who were not vaccinated. So arguments can be made to reduce severity of the disease and to reduce the incidence Long COVID, mandating vaccination is still a reasonable idea.