Before this debacle I never realized how little people understood about vaccines and herd immunity. We need to increase education about basic science in this country and how and why classic childhood vaccines work. Beefing up science programs in schools would be a good place to start.
Agree so much with your observation. Even with my “advanced” degrees (not in anything related to medicine) until I read Team YLE’s post, I did not know that the flu vaccine waned—I just never connected the dots! It is very hard to try for the first time to convey all the missing, basic information, some of which is quite nuanced, in the midst of a crisis.
Kristen & Katelyn, the "team" you are defending was so convinced that these were near perfect vaccines, they felt they had the moral high ground to bully, harass, and ridicule anyone who questioned the vaccine. Doctors and nurses (among others) lost their jobs. Children were barred from school. The unvaccinated were picked on, called stupid, and were encouraged to be shunned from society.
Where is that apology?
The government literally paid Late Night TV to mock the unvaccinated [1] and circumvented the 1st amendment by pressuring private companies to censor anyone questioning this particular vaccine efficacy. [2]
But no you say? It's the publics fault that they misinterpreted all these "scary big words" like "prevents" and "immunity"?
I'm sorry, but all of this coming from a 3rd year resident is very condescending.
A reminder of the messaging:
Anthony Fauci:
“When you get vaccinated, you not only protect your own health and that of the family but also you contribute to the community health by preventing the spread of the virus throughout the community,” Fauci said. “In other words, you become a dead end to the virus. And when there are a lot of dead ends around, the virus is not going to go anywhere. And that’s when you get a point that you have a markedly diminished rate of infection in the community.”
"Excited to share that updated analysis from our Phase 3 study with BioNTech also showed that our COVID-19 vaccine was 100% effective in preventing #COVID19 cases in South Africa. 100%! "
“We all know already if you get vaccinated, that vaccine will basically prevent you from getting sick with COVID, it will prevent you from going to the hospital with COVID symptoms, prevent you from dying with COVID. Great, good for you.”
“More than 99% of Stanford Health Care employees resisted breakthrough infections after receiving at least one dose of an mRNA-based vaccine for COVID-19, according to researchers at the Stanford School of Medicine.”…” More than 99% of Stanford Health Care employees resisted breakthrough infections after receiving at least one dose of an mRNA-based vaccine for COVID-19, according to researchers at the Stanford School of Medicine.”
Excellent remarks. As you show there was no”mistake” in messaging. The message was, using later jargon “vax and relax.” All you needed was a shot and you were safe from covid in the exact sense that you would not get it and you would not be a vector passing it on to others. This was not true, and experts who should have known better did not disabuse the public of where this was misleading. Indeed, as the epidemic continued all forms of non vax preventions e.g. masks, air filters, were downgraded as at best unnecessary and at worst paranoid. Nope, these were not mistakes and the rush to reinterpret these policies as mistakes is a continuation of the gaslighting by the relevant experts in order to revivify in the public a deference to their expertise they rightly lost.
First of all, thanks for showing everyone what type of person you are.
Second, a few small local news stations covering small events is hardly the slam dunk you think it is. Maybe I didn't hear about it, because it wasn't used very often?
One of the reasons we didn't have a successful coronavirus vaccine despite many attempts the last 20 years, was because the vaccine trials in mice, while showing efficacy in target strain, made the human mice more susceptible to variant strains. [1]
That seems like exactly what happened with our (apparently) rushed covid vaccines. [2]
+1 for using "retard" though in the proper way, I always think of Matt Dillon in Something About Mary. [3]
"My passion is my hobby" :)
______________________
[1] In "The Invisible Siege", by Dan Werb (a fascinating pro Covid Vaccine history of the race to develop SARS vaccines), Ralph Baric discusses this on page 97 (screenshot here) https://imgur.com/a/invisible-siege-by-dan-werb-ZhuZr01
[2] This should be self-evident at this point - that Covid exploded across the globe AFTER everyone was vaccinated, but sure, here is Vermont, which the guest author said would have lower covid on 10/9/21 and still believed the vaccines reduced transmission. Covid would of course explode 10x.
doubling down on wrong? You know very little about vaccines. Most do NOT prevent the spread of disease and some are given AFTER a person in infected. Their success is measured in their ability to prevent serious illness. For that, the covid vaccines were extremely effective and successful!
You haven't shown any credible source that the COVID-19 vaccines somehow accelerated spread. There is no evidence vaccines caused variants to emerge. Delta, which caused a huge amount of disease in the USA, was first detected before vaccines were deployed, and then killed mostly unvaccinated people. https://academic.oup.com/ofid/article/11/3/ofae051/7591274
I don't think vaccines caused the variants, but clearly, the vaccines didn't hamper the variants.
Mice aren't people, but appears that the problems facing Baric's humanized mice were the same problems we faced regardless. Cases exploded, mortality stayed flat, sometimes decreased. sometimes increased.
AND that rushed vaccine had its beginnings a couple of decades earlier during the SARS and MERS pandemics that fizzled before the research was finished. But, it began then. AND the technology behind the mRNA vaccines also was decades in the making and its inventors were just awarded the Nobel prize! Not bad for something you say failed. You don't know what you are talking about.
the vast majority of hospitalizations and deaths are in people not current with their vaccine. Yeah, you know nothing about vaccines or lobotomies. Take your disinformation somewhere else.
I'm as disappointed as you are that more legitimate news organizations weren't interested in exposing the propaganda our tax dollars paid for while framing all this enthusiasm from Hollywood as organic. At least people like Travis Kelce had the decency to wear the Pfizer logo in their ad campaigns.
This does explain I think how Colbert made that embarrassing Vaxscene dance though.
You can go through the 296 pages retrieved via FOIA outlining this nonsense here:
The government employed a media campaign to use influential people to promote the vaccine? The horror!
I'm going to ask this, although I highly doubt you will answer in good faith: if you were a government official tasked with promoting a vaccine that would save lives during a pandemic, would you not do the same?
It wasn’t until I read the transcript of Paul Offit’s med page interview that I fully understood the limitations of vaccine control of COVID (and I’m a physician.) The vaccines were oversold as the only way out of the pandemic.
He said:For short incubation period diseases like SARS-CoV-2 or influenza or respiratory syncytial virus or rotavirus, there what you can do is when you immunize, you can induce antibodies, which will then protect you against mild disease for a while. You'll also induce these memory cells, which will protect you against severe disease because it takes a while to develop severe disease. But, you're not going to be protected against mild disease for long.
I don’t know how we do it, but we need to change the word “efficacy.” I spent months trying to explain to people what it actually means. People think in terms of themselves, not populations.
Scientists seemed incapable of communicating in plain English. The messages we received were confusing and sometimes contradictory. The general public understands 'immunity' to mean 'safe from infection'. Anti vaxxers had a simple, incorrect message that they repeated incessantly. Scientists provided lengthy explanations illustrated with incomprehensible diagrams. Moderna made irresponsible claims. The Canadian public took to the vaccines at a higher rate (and lower death rate) than the American public, but the incessant, incorrect information disseminated by anti vaxxers has led to a situation where politicians and health ministers who obtained the vaccines are now BLAMED for doing so. It is essential to keep accurate, easy to understand information about all vaccines in play to drive out the bad pennies. This has not been done, and here we are.
I think Brandolini's Law also applies here: “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that to produce it." Underfunded & overwhelmed scientists don't always have the time/energy to fight all the bullshit.
It will always be easier and faster to push simplistic, "gotcha" falsehoods. Science, especially immune science, especially especially brand-new-infectious-disease-pandemic science, is nuanced, changing, complicated, and hard to follow.
I agree that scientists need to do a better job communicating (or, best yet, hand off the job to people like Dr J & crew), but I also get frustrated by the belief that if we all just did a better job communicating, we wouldn't be in this mess. There is *a lot* of malice and spite and hatred toward vaccines, public health & higher education that is being deliberately cultivated and spread by those enriching themselves (financially, socially, politically) in the process.
I keep telling my older teens, there’s a gaping work opportunity for left-brained English majors who can handle right-brained science as public health “translators”, if you will. Not marketing-speak or politician-speak, but teams in a pipeline from science outlet to public news, with technical support. Some scientists are good at it (YLE), but it’s a lot to ask someone to be great at both.
This is SUCH a good point! I had a recent conversation with a doctor friend about “patellofemoral syndrome,” and why medical science uses the word “patella,” which ordinary mortals have to look up, instead of “kneecap.” I am not saying by this that technical terminology isn’t useful or needed for professionals, but to the extent it is, we do need competent translators, like Team YLE.
I disagree. Scientists are expected to always be perfectly clear and to have perfect consensus and to never be wrong. Anti vaxxers threw massive amounts of shit around to see what would stick, they didn't really have a consistent message at all. When one thing stopped working they just switched to something else. They were just vocal and tenacious.
Right out of the box they should have explained the difference between effectivity and effectiveness. I knew what that was (do you?) because I was listening to TWIV. But how many people are willing to listen to geeky shit like that?
Then you had the people banging on about free speech. Vaccine misinformation, especially during 2021, was literally equivalent to shouting FIRE! in a crowded movie theater. People were ACTUALLY DYING as a result of it.
I would like to add a 5th bullet point to your list:
ACTUAL scientists should have been at the forefront of this mess and not bullied into silence.
Had our actual scientists, public health officials, and doctors been able to freely express their expertise and knowledge through YEARS of training, I fully believe that we would have not gone through the HELL that we endured (some states more than others. I am in Illinois) The country was LIED to by our POLITICAL scientists and our media, on BOTH sides of the fence, that these vaccines were 'bullet proof' We were TOLD that this was a sure thing; until the charade began to fall apart and then they began to walk it back. I have a healthcare background myself and so much of what we were being told from early on did not make an ounce of sense to me.
Thank you for a great explanation. I hope that in the future your voice and the voice of millions of other professionals are never silenced again.
I have a PhD but am not a political scientist. I agree wholeheartedly with your point abouf politicians controlling the messaging. After years of watching government and the people who run it - part of how America is supposed, acc to the textbooks, work - my conclusion at age 76 is that politicians know only one thing - politicking. Used to be they had to please voters & other politicians. Now, however, they only answer to lobbyists - and some of the biggest lobbyists act for other nations. The others, mainly for corporate & ideological interests. If we cannot keep money out of politics, we can try to keep professional politicians out of politics.
We were extremely fortunate in Chicago to have a Commissioner of Health who started a Facebook Live weekly broadcast with an active chat who explained from the start that no vaccine is 100% effective. Then week after week answered questions and gradually taught us all what the city and citizens needed to do to keep the health care system functional and protect ourselves the best way possible. Dr. Alison Arwady got so many of us and our families through the worst of things with humor, respect, kindness, and laughter. She had haters and trolls too, but never bullied or mocked. It can be done.
While I agree with you somewhat, I will reiterate my point that politics on both sides and the media got in the way and bullied our medical community into either silence or conforming to the narrative. Arwady was under the thumb of Lori Lightfoot and her circus and shenanigans. I am confident that Arwady was pressured to conform to the narrative, even if she didn’t fully believe it. The city of Chicago was responsible for her paycheck.
I do not believe Dr. Arwady was under the Mayor's thumb ever. Lightfoot deferred to her judgement and knowledge frequently during press conferences and always had Arwady with her for those during the pandemic. There was a great one when the Mayor was asked a specific COVID question. She replied something like "I don't know; let's ask Allison; that's what I always do." They worked as a team. We would have been much better off if it had ever occurred to Trump to do similarly with his advisors.
My hot take: When conmen decide April 2020 to get everyone infected and don’t hesitate to vilify scientists and use propaganda to make it happen, your ability to control health communications is nil.
Don’t lockdown society. Lockdowns set expectations that once the vaccines were released, the pandemic would end and people could resume normal life without fear of catching covid.
Look at all the damage that was done by lockdowns, especially to school children through remote “learning.”
Most ppl have pretty minimal science literacy, plus lockdowns were HARD. In our efforts to get people on board, we tended to downplay how very difficult they were. Then we came out of lockdown and people kept getting covid- you have to see how they looked like a failure to them. It’s not that complicated, honestly.
Exactly! If the messaging is, "we can't get out of lockdown until the virus is gone or at least no longer severe," then vaccines being imperfect essentially means "we will be in lockdown forever." That's very difficult for us as human beings to accept, and frankly I don't think we should have to.
So it's not surprising that most of us divided into one of two (incorrect) camps: (a) "anyone who criticizes vaccines is anti-science," or (b) "all COVID measures, including vaccines, are a conspiracy."
"The vaccines were saving hundreds of thousands of lives..."
Again, there's no way anybody can conclude this given the data we have. The clinical trials that were conducted showed no mortality benefit and only lasted a few months.
Conversely, we have no conclusive evidence that the vaccines are killing people, etc.
The mRNA vaccines are experimental therapeutics. They should have been presented to the public as such.
The problem here is not merely exaggerated statements coming from vaccine manufacturers like Moderna that were quoting interim results of Phase III trials which weren't contextualized properly by our health agencies (Why didn't they? Isn't their job to inform the public with accurate information and not just echo what the industry that they are supposed to be regulating is saying about their product?).
The majority of the public doesn't understand what 95% efficacy means (both Pfizer and Moderna claimed approximately 95% with regard to the prevention of symptomatic disease). And it's not just the public. I have asked dozens of my colleagues in medicine if they could explain what vaccine efficacy is and most admitted that they did not know how to.
The public heard "95%" and believed that if they got vaccinated there was a 95% chance they wouldn't get Covid. That is not what that number means. This number means that there is, over just a few months, a 20 times lesser risk of contracting symptomatic Covid if vaccinated. Nobody could know if that number would hold after some time or against other variants that would emerge. We should have expected that number to fall. Moreover, the risk of getting symptomatic Covid if unvaccinated in the trial was very low to begin with (about 1 in 170 in the Moderna Trial). This was never explained to the public in simple terms, or even at all.
There is another problem with how the trials were conducted vs how the results were touted. The FDA made a decision early on with regard to evaluating efficacy. They would only count cases in the vaccinated after 14 days from the second dose. The rationale is that it would take two weeks to "work". They excluded people who got Covid in the six weeks from their first shot to two weeks outside the second.
One could argue that this is a reasonable way of looking at it. But why? As an individual choosing whether or not to get vaccinated why would you ignore the possibility of getting Covid during the ramp up period as part of your calculus? How would you be certain that the Covid you contracted a week out wasn't BECAUSE you got vaccinated? You can't. Trials don't prove causality, they only show correlations.
In any case, people found out very soon that just because you got vaccinated didn't mean you wouldn't get Covid. People talk to each other. Nobody says, yeah, I got Covid. It was terrible. But it was 10 days after my second shot, so let's not count it against the vaccine. As you say, people were confused and angry.
But something very interesting happened. This is the kind of attitude that exploded in social media: "I got Covid after the jab, and I am glad I did because it would have been much, much worse!"
There's no way an individual can know this from their personal experience. It's possible that the shot helped them. It's also possible that it did not. There is also the possibility that the shots made their course worse than it would have been. In the Pfizer trial, 162 unvaccinated got symptomatic Covid compared to only eight in the vaccinated group (95% efficacy). However severe Covid, ie "much, much worse", occurred in 1 of the vaccinated and 9 of the unvaccinated. Also a very impressive 90% efficacy in preventing severe Covid-19.
Notice, however that if you got Covid as an unvaccinated participant, the chance that you would develop a really bad course of the disease was 9 in 162, or 1 out of 18. But if you got Covid after vaccination, the chances you would end up in the hospital was 1 in 8. These are small numbers and it is impossible to conclude much. However antibody dependent enhancement (imperfect antibodies leading to a more severe course of disease) is a real thing. These numbers suggest that this could have been happening in the trial itself. The point here is that if you got sick and still supported the vaccination based on unfounded logic you were lionized. But if you questioned the utility of the vaccine you were shunned.
More with regard to infection rates in the vaccinated...
Unlike our CDC which never published infection rates in the unvaccinated vs the vaccinated during the first year of vaccines (2021), the office of National Statistics in the UK did. By September of 2021 something odd was happening. Some age groups were getting Covid more frequently than the unvaccinated if they were jabbed. This was ignored. But month after month that trend grew. By March of 2022, with Omicron dominating, the risk of getting Covid was, in some age groups 4-5 times higher if your were vaccinated:
(Yes. I know it is from Children's Health Defense, a dangerous antivax misinformation site. I wrote the article while I was their Science Editor)
How is this possible in this group of 35 million people if our CDC continued to tell us that infection rates were lower in the vaccinated? The ONS stopped publishing that metric after March 2022.
It's not just poor communication and setting appropriate expectations. We had large, public health institutions presenting conflicting data. Some of the data which came from official databases showed negative effectiveness. We can swallow the idea that effectiveness wanes, but going negative?? Shouldn't that have raised alarm everywhere? Is this technology which has a short-term benefit be messing with other aspects of our immune system that could not have been detected in trials with brief observational periods?
KP, you say, "We didn’t know if we would get a vaccine in six months or three years, never mind the details about how well it would work..."
I am sorry. We did know. You don't have to be a vaccine expert to know that you cannot promise anything about long term safety in six months, it doesn't matter how big your study is (or how much you want it to be safe). We knew that whatever vaccine was offered up, no matter how impressive the short term efficacy would have unknown long term harms. This should have been a very important concern for public health officials, especially when these products were mandated to remain employed, for most people.
People aren't just dismayed because their expectations were not met. They were forced to comply. They had questions--good ones, ones that have yet to be addressed. These are some of the concerns people in the "antivax" crowd had from the very beginning. None of them were ever addressed, let alone in a respectful manner.
Agreed with everything you wrote. I don’t know that the public expected perfection, but it went from, if you are vaccinated, you can drop the mask and go live your life Covid free to whoops, there are breakthrough infections, to oh, wait, the vaccines were never meant to protect against symptomatic illness.
I agree with you. The public didn't expect perfection as KP implies. I think this is a subtle form of gaslighting. This newsletter is basically a public outreach arm of the CDC. If a reader wishes to understand a little more about what the CDC and NIAID is saying this is a great place to come. However there has never been any critical examination of our agencies of public health here. This continues with this article. "Everybody did the best they could given the situation and what could be known and people are angry because of 'miscommunication'".
The blurb about 100% efficacy in preventing Covid-19 deaths coming from Moderna never got any real traction in the news, at least for very long, yet the author points to this extreme example as a misstep in communication while opening the door to an attack on the vaccine hesitant who were too ignorant to see that claims of a perfect vaccine is impossible.
I have been disappointed in the past year with YLE. I have subscribed for years and I did so b/c YLE gave me a perspective lacking from the messaging from CDC and WHO. I felt I was getting more accurate information, information I could use in my life.
I was initially pleased with the ascension of YLE's founder to the higher ranks of public health. Now, not so much. Surely there are issues of public policy about Covid & other epidemic disorders that can be criticized? I sometimes feel that I'm reading the party line.
In regard to the current post, I understand that the messaging (aka claims made) about Covid mitigation was not very well coordinated - from the beginning. The very worst of that was the lie that masks don't help. (As a philosopher, I will say here that lying differs from bad messaging.) Better to be candid and not manipulative. Better to just assume you're talking to adults and to believe we're willing to pull together and let front line HCWs have masks that can actually prevent transmission. It might also have been a good time to hint that our corporate health care isn't designed for the benefit of the public, health, or health care workers. To shame them into protecting front line workers. You've got to take risks when the opportunity arises. Chaos is always an opportunity. Others make very effective use of this.
Second, scientists are in part to blame for the perception that they deliver objective - even absolute - truth, the facts & only the facts. We've inherited this from at least the early 20th century. Parenthetically, I do not know how many medical professionals (clinicians, not researchers) believe that reality is much more nuanced & much less certain than what they learned in med school. Scientists themselves sometimes seem hyper conscious of the uncertainty of even proven theories and that theories will be corrected and will change - also, unfortunately not very useful in messaging, as we know in re climate "change" ( a term coined by a denier). This may be the fault of public perception and of our educational system, but it will not change on its own.
Myself, I was raised in a household of science. I often waited in my father's lab at a large research university after high school for him to finish up and drive us home. I have kept that faith in the scientific method while, over time, recognizing that scientists are often biased towards the current paradigm and willing to accept grant money that compromises their research. Sometimes in direct opposition to the public wellbeing. Many people - from all over the political spectrum - are increasingly distrustful of science (as well as increasingly distrusting everything, for that matter). This may be past resolving in the current mess in which we find ourselves.
When the children were approved, and lined up, and the first Omicron wave seemed to get everyone- including the children who had just completed their series… the utility of the vaccines for children was doomed. The week of Dec 20, 2021 I came to work in a tidal wave of Covid positive cases and spent the next two weeks just reassuring terrified parents and their children, many of whom had just been vaccinated. At that time the infection was almost croup like and seemed to be concentrated in the school age group (not so many toddlers).
It was also somewhat mild in intensity in my patient population and it was hard when both vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals had similar experiences. That was beyond messaging and mostly experiential.
I have been pleasantly surprised how many parents are still interested in boosting the whole family in the last few weeks. There is some self selection, I am a strong advocate so patients who gravitate towards me may lean that way as well.
My very elderly father just got his vaccine, about 15 days prior to testing positive this week. He woke up the next day and proclaimed in his hoarse voice that he thought it was done after having an extremely rough night. A little memory loss is helpful too LOL. He did look much better. I am grateful I rushed him out for the shot as soon as it was available. It’s hard to imagine it did not help.
I have already shared his story to help demonstrate the “why bother vaccinating”. You see it clicking, like, “ooh, hmmm, I see…”
As usual I find the comments very interesting. Our society seems naive about many things like how unhealthy much of our food has become. Expecting the general public to appreciate nuances of science seems equally naive.
My hope is that someone will address the treatment of drugs particularly ivermectin. A drug used off label for head lice in kids became so toxic prescribers felt threatened with loss of license. The same drug widely distributed in Africa to address river blindness banned from hospital use during COVID? Why?
"Over 300,000 people had died from COVID-19 in the U.S."
It's so ironic that this post is about addressing miscommunication. By December 14, 2020, the day the Pfizer vaccine was rolled out there were indeed, according to the CDC 300,000 Covid-19 deaths. These weren't deaths FROM Covid. These were people who died WITH Covid. There is a huge difference between the two. A positive PCR test around the time of death was a Covid-19 death. Even a suspicion of Covid positivity was used to list Covid as a diagnosis on a death certificate.
We actually do not know how many people have died FROM Covid-19. To know this, every single death would have to go through a systematic review to adjudicate whether or not the virus played a role in the demise. Have we forgotten that many PCR positive cases are asymptomatic? Have we forgotten what the Illinois Director of Public Health said in March, 2020?
"To be clear, even if a person was in hospice care and died from a terminal disease with a positive Covid test they would be counted as a Covid death"
Here's another way we failed in steering public impressions away from fantasy: why didn't we officially state that it is a fallacy for vaccinated individuals to claim that if they hadn't contracted Covid it was because of the vaccine? There is no way to know this on an individual basis. The Pfizer trial which claimed 95% efficacy showed us that vaccinating 20,000 people would prevent 154 cases of symptomatic Covid over a brief period of 6 weeks on average. That means vaccinating about 130 people would prevent a single case. Another way of saying that is that if you were vaccinated there was a 1 in 130 chance that it actually helped you as an individual. Why was no effort made to convey reality around this?
Another massive failure with real world consequences: We found out very soon that the shots didn't prevent infection after a few months, yet we were told that the vaccines would reduce symptoms. Uh-oh. Doesn't that make it harder to know if you were sick but could still infect others? Isn't it possible that the mildly or asymptomatic vaccinated group was driving infection rates? Logic says that if you believe the vaccines reduced symptoms it would have been the "irresponsible" unvaccinated who got ill and quarantined while the vaccinated were out in public unknowingly spreading the disease.
These aren't just failures in communication and setting unreasonable expectations. Our approach was illogical from the beginning and founded on principles that were easily proven invalid from the beginning.
We shut down the world when tens of thousands of clinicians were telling us that it would do far more harm than good.
We mandated a product that had NO long term safety data and protected the vaccine manufacturers from liability.
We enforced vaccination on children and young college students who had the least risk of Covid complications and the greatest risk of danger from known adverse events like myo/pericarditis and the greatest to lose in terms of years of life from any chronic conditions caused by the shots.
We mercilessly attacked clinicians who were successfully treating Covid with repurposed medications that had already demonstrated greater than 50% efficacy in preventing infection, hospitalization and death from Covid. Even if you choose to dismiss the dozens of studies that proved efficacy their own experience validated the use of HCQ and Ivermectin.
Worst of all, any mention of vaccine adverse events would result in immediate attack from all sides. Did you know that doctors on the front line had been reporting devastating reactions from the jabs in their own patients privately? I was part of a physicians group that numbered over 20,000 on FB. Once one or two MDs started reporting things like strokes and neurologic damage immediately after vaccination there was an avalanche of reports of other reactions. None of us felt comfortable going public because of the culture that had been already established with regard to our response. Speaking up meant losing your medical license.
I invite all to read this expose on what doctors on the front lines were saying in private:
Doctors who witnessed these tragedies did the only thing they could do: file reports on VAERS, the safeguard the CDC had put into place decades ago to avert this kind of public tragedy.
In an act of unparalleled hypocrisy the CDC told the public that the VAERS system couldn't be trusted. It's their OWN system.
Kristen and Katelyn, if you are truly interested in restoring trust in the medical orthodoxy you have to go a lot further, otherwise you risk making things worse than they already are. Lack of transparency is what got us here in the first place.
Please proceed to fuck right off with your 'with Covid' horseshit. After seeing multiple friend die, I swear I want to strangle the next person that says this.
I get the science being so well explained explained here. And. I expect a vaccine that performed better than this, because we were told that COVID was over, we could drop precautions and return to pre pandemic behaviors and then we watch the virus mutate and become far more immune evasive than was apparently expected (which felt like yet another narrative change) and it kept circulating year round and reinfections became common (another change in the narrative) and then we dropped every single method in our Swiss cheese approach to reducing infection, we forced infection on school kids and school employees and office workers and vulnerable nursing home and hospital patients, we said masks were of dubious impact and air purifiers aren't necessary, and squandered a billion dollars in long COVID research, and are slow walking gen 2 vaccines, and the promised mild-ening has failed to materialize and people are getting sick with flu-level impacts on each of three infections and counting, and this has been utterly dismal to live through and remember with a brain as yet unclouded by COVID infection.
Before this debacle I never realized how little people understood about vaccines and herd immunity. We need to increase education about basic science in this country and how and why classic childhood vaccines work. Beefing up science programs in schools would be a good place to start.
Agree so much with your observation. Even with my “advanced” degrees (not in anything related to medicine) until I read Team YLE’s post, I did not know that the flu vaccine waned—I just never connected the dots! It is very hard to try for the first time to convey all the missing, basic information, some of which is quite nuanced, in the midst of a crisis.
Gaslighting and Monday Morning Quarterbacking.
Kristen & Katelyn, the "team" you are defending was so convinced that these were near perfect vaccines, they felt they had the moral high ground to bully, harass, and ridicule anyone who questioned the vaccine. Doctors and nurses (among others) lost their jobs. Children were barred from school. The unvaccinated were picked on, called stupid, and were encouraged to be shunned from society.
Where is that apology?
The government literally paid Late Night TV to mock the unvaccinated [1] and circumvented the 1st amendment by pressuring private companies to censor anyone questioning this particular vaccine efficacy. [2]
But no you say? It's the publics fault that they misinterpreted all these "scary big words" like "prevents" and "immunity"?
I'm sorry, but all of this coming from a 3rd year resident is very condescending.
A reminder of the messaging:
Anthony Fauci:
“When you get vaccinated, you not only protect your own health and that of the family but also you contribute to the community health by preventing the spread of the virus throughout the community,” Fauci said. “In other words, you become a dead end to the virus. And when there are a lot of dead ends around, the virus is not going to go anywhere. And that’s when you get a point that you have a markedly diminished rate of infection in the community.”
https://thehill.com/homenews/sunday-talk-shows/553773-fauci-vaccinated-people-become-dead-ends-for-the-coronavirus/
Rochelle Wallensky
“Vaccinated People do not carry the virus”
https://twitter.com/KyleMartinsen_/status/1509206752780238851
Stephane Bancel, CEO of Moderna
“Moderna's CEO said the company's new COVID-19 vaccine may prevent infection for years.”
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-vaccine-last-years-moderna-ceo/
Albert Bourla CEO of Pfizer
"Excited to share that updated analysis from our Phase 3 study with BioNTech also showed that our COVID-19 vaccine was 100% effective in preventing #COVID19 cases in South Africa. 100%! "
https://twitter.com/AlbertBourla/status/1377618480527257606
BMJ and CDC
Covid-19: Moderna and Pfizer vaccines prevent infections as well as symptoms, CDC study finds
https://www.bmj.com/content/373/bmj.n888
Rachel Maddow
“We all know already if you get vaccinated, that vaccine will basically prevent you from getting sick with COVID, it will prevent you from going to the hospital with COVID symptoms, prevent you from dying with COVID. Great, good for you.”
https://www.msnbc.com/transcripts/transcript-rachel-maddow-show-3-29-21-n1262442
Stanford Medicine
“More than 99% of Stanford Health Care employees resisted breakthrough infections after receiving at least one dose of an mRNA-based vaccine for COVID-19, according to researchers at the Stanford School of Medicine.”…” More than 99% of Stanford Health Care employees resisted breakthrough infections after receiving at least one dose of an mRNA-based vaccine for COVID-19, according to researchers at the Stanford School of Medicine.”
https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2021/07/vaccination-against-covid-19-prevents-breakthrough-infections.html
Joe Biden
"Our patience is wearing thin"
https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2021/09/09/biden-message-unvaccinated-americans-patience-sot-lead-vpx.cnn#:~:text=President%20Joe%20Biden%20shared%20a%20message%20to%20unvaccinated%20Americans%20as
____________
[1] https://thepeoplesvoice.tv/bidens-hhs-and-cdc-paid-screen-writers-and-comedians-to-mock-the-unvaccinated/
[2] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/zuckerberg-says-the-white-house-pressured-facebook-to-censor-some-covid-19-content-during-the-pandemic#:~:text=WASHINGTON%20(AP)%20%E2%80%94%20Meta%20CEO%20Mark%20Zuckerberg%20says%20senior%20Biden
Mocking and bullying was definitely a big part of the problem, that’s actually the topic of the next post!
Michael, thank you for the truth. Everything you have posted is 100% true. Nothing is exaggerated.
Excellent remarks. As you show there was no”mistake” in messaging. The message was, using later jargon “vax and relax.” All you needed was a shot and you were safe from covid in the exact sense that you would not get it and you would not be a vector passing it on to others. This was not true, and experts who should have known better did not disabuse the public of where this was misleading. Indeed, as the epidemic continued all forms of non vax preventions e.g. masks, air filters, were downgraded as at best unnecessary and at worst paranoid. Nope, these were not mistakes and the rush to reinterpret these policies as mistakes is a continuation of the gaslighting by the relevant experts in order to revivify in the public a deference to their expertise they rightly lost.
I never heard the term "vax and relax." Where did you hear that?
https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=%22vax+and+relax%22
First of all, thanks for showing everyone what type of person you are.
Second, a few small local news stations covering small events is hardly the slam dunk you think it is. Maybe I didn't hear about it, because it wasn't used very often?
Excellent compendium of propaganda.
No YOU are wrong. The vaccine did retard the spread of the virus, while it was still potent and before the virus mutated! Fauci was right!
One of the reasons we didn't have a successful coronavirus vaccine despite many attempts the last 20 years, was because the vaccine trials in mice, while showing efficacy in target strain, made the human mice more susceptible to variant strains. [1]
That seems like exactly what happened with our (apparently) rushed covid vaccines. [2]
+1 for using "retard" though in the proper way, I always think of Matt Dillon in Something About Mary. [3]
"My passion is my hobby" :)
______________________
[1] In "The Invisible Siege", by Dan Werb (a fascinating pro Covid Vaccine history of the race to develop SARS vaccines), Ralph Baric discusses this on page 97 (screenshot here) https://imgur.com/a/invisible-siege-by-dan-werb-ZhuZr01
[2] This should be self-evident at this point - that Covid exploded across the globe AFTER everyone was vaccinated, but sure, here is Vermont, which the guest author said would have lower covid on 10/9/21 and still believed the vaccines reduced transmission. Covid would of course explode 10x.
https://imgur.com/a/tptVuaR
[3] I almost died from laughter in the theaters at this scene:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkzaOwAmDmA
doubling down on wrong? You know very little about vaccines. Most do NOT prevent the spread of disease and some are given AFTER a person in infected. Their success is measured in their ability to prevent serious illness. For that, the covid vaccines were extremely effective and successful!
Do you have any evidence for these extraordinary claims?
Yes, I updated my comment to include sources.
Mice aren't people.
You haven't shown any credible source that the COVID-19 vaccines somehow accelerated spread. There is no evidence vaccines caused variants to emerge. Delta, which caused a huge amount of disease in the USA, was first detected before vaccines were deployed, and then killed mostly unvaccinated people. https://academic.oup.com/ofid/article/11/3/ofae051/7591274
I don't think vaccines caused the variants, but clearly, the vaccines didn't hamper the variants.
Mice aren't people, but appears that the problems facing Baric's humanized mice were the same problems we faced regardless. Cases exploded, mortality stayed flat, sometimes decreased. sometimes increased.
Taiwan? South Korea? Vermont? Japan? Australia?
What happened?
AND that rushed vaccine had its beginnings a couple of decades earlier during the SARS and MERS pandemics that fizzled before the research was finished. But, it began then. AND the technology behind the mRNA vaccines also was decades in the making and its inventors were just awarded the Nobel prize! Not bad for something you say failed. You don't know what you are talking about.
Yeah and it still didn't work. Which is why people stopped taking them and trashed the surplus of unused vaccines.
Steve in 1949: "You don't think lobotomies work? António Egas Moniz was just awarded the Nobel Prize! You don't know what your talking about"
the vast majority of hospitalizations and deaths are in people not current with their vaccine. Yeah, you know nothing about vaccines or lobotomies. Take your disinformation somewhere else.
You linking to literal propaganda (thepeoplesvoice.tv) tells me you are not a serious commenter. You are not arguing or commenting in good faith.
I'm as disappointed as you are that more legitimate news organizations weren't interested in exposing the propaganda our tax dollars paid for while framing all this enthusiasm from Hollywood as organic. At least people like Travis Kelce had the decency to wear the Pfizer logo in their ad campaigns.
This does explain I think how Colbert made that embarrassing Vaxscene dance though.
You can go through the 296 pages retrieved via FOIA outlining this nonsense here:
https://www.judicialwatch.org/documents/jw-v-hhs-covid-community-corps-september-2021-02315/
The government employed a media campaign to use influential people to promote the vaccine? The horror!
I'm going to ask this, although I highly doubt you will answer in good faith: if you were a government official tasked with promoting a vaccine that would save lives during a pandemic, would you not do the same?
It wasn’t until I read the transcript of Paul Offit’s med page interview that I fully understood the limitations of vaccine control of COVID (and I’m a physician.) The vaccines were oversold as the only way out of the pandemic.
He said:For short incubation period diseases like SARS-CoV-2 or influenza or respiratory syncytial virus or rotavirus, there what you can do is when you immunize, you can induce antibodies, which will then protect you against mild disease for a while. You'll also induce these memory cells, which will protect you against severe disease because it takes a while to develop severe disease. But, you're not going to be protected against mild disease for long.
I don’t know how we do it, but we need to change the word “efficacy.” I spent months trying to explain to people what it actually means. People think in terms of themselves, not populations.
That’s a good point. And people seems self-centric now more than ever. These days it’s ALL “you do you”. Ouch on that public service message.
If anyone is interested, I used these WHO pages and infographics often. https://www.who.int/news-room/feature-stories/detail/vaccine-efficacy-effectiveness-and-protection
Scientists seemed incapable of communicating in plain English. The messages we received were confusing and sometimes contradictory. The general public understands 'immunity' to mean 'safe from infection'. Anti vaxxers had a simple, incorrect message that they repeated incessantly. Scientists provided lengthy explanations illustrated with incomprehensible diagrams. Moderna made irresponsible claims. The Canadian public took to the vaccines at a higher rate (and lower death rate) than the American public, but the incessant, incorrect information disseminated by anti vaxxers has led to a situation where politicians and health ministers who obtained the vaccines are now BLAMED for doing so. It is essential to keep accurate, easy to understand information about all vaccines in play to drive out the bad pennies. This has not been done, and here we are.
I think Brandolini's Law also applies here: “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that to produce it." Underfunded & overwhelmed scientists don't always have the time/energy to fight all the bullshit.
It will always be easier and faster to push simplistic, "gotcha" falsehoods. Science, especially immune science, especially especially brand-new-infectious-disease-pandemic science, is nuanced, changing, complicated, and hard to follow.
I agree that scientists need to do a better job communicating (or, best yet, hand off the job to people like Dr J & crew), but I also get frustrated by the belief that if we all just did a better job communicating, we wouldn't be in this mess. There is *a lot* of malice and spite and hatred toward vaccines, public health & higher education that is being deliberately cultivated and spread by those enriching themselves (financially, socially, politically) in the process.
My sentiments, exactly. Thank you, Janet.
I keep telling my older teens, there’s a gaping work opportunity for left-brained English majors who can handle right-brained science as public health “translators”, if you will. Not marketing-speak or politician-speak, but teams in a pipeline from science outlet to public news, with technical support. Some scientists are good at it (YLE), but it’s a lot to ask someone to be great at both.
It's called a science writer, and it is a known career path. The scientists need to hire more of them when they're dealing with public issues.
Exactly. I can teach someone public health; I cannot teach them to read, think, and write clearly.
This is SUCH a good point! I had a recent conversation with a doctor friend about “patellofemoral syndrome,” and why medical science uses the word “patella,” which ordinary mortals have to look up, instead of “kneecap.” I am not saying by this that technical terminology isn’t useful or needed for professionals, but to the extent it is, we do need competent translators, like Team YLE.
I disagree. Scientists are expected to always be perfectly clear and to have perfect consensus and to never be wrong. Anti vaxxers threw massive amounts of shit around to see what would stick, they didn't really have a consistent message at all. When one thing stopped working they just switched to something else. They were just vocal and tenacious.
Right out of the box they should have explained the difference between effectivity and effectiveness. I knew what that was (do you?) because I was listening to TWIV. But how many people are willing to listen to geeky shit like that?
Then you had the people banging on about free speech. Vaccine misinformation, especially during 2021, was literally equivalent to shouting FIRE! in a crowded movie theater. People were ACTUALLY DYING as a result of it.
I would like to add a 5th bullet point to your list:
ACTUAL scientists should have been at the forefront of this mess and not bullied into silence.
Had our actual scientists, public health officials, and doctors been able to freely express their expertise and knowledge through YEARS of training, I fully believe that we would have not gone through the HELL that we endured (some states more than others. I am in Illinois) The country was LIED to by our POLITICAL scientists and our media, on BOTH sides of the fence, that these vaccines were 'bullet proof' We were TOLD that this was a sure thing; until the charade began to fall apart and then they began to walk it back. I have a healthcare background myself and so much of what we were being told from early on did not make an ounce of sense to me.
Thank you for a great explanation. I hope that in the future your voice and the voice of millions of other professionals are never silenced again.
I have a PhD but am not a political scientist. I agree wholeheartedly with your point abouf politicians controlling the messaging. After years of watching government and the people who run it - part of how America is supposed, acc to the textbooks, work - my conclusion at age 76 is that politicians know only one thing - politicking. Used to be they had to please voters & other politicians. Now, however, they only answer to lobbyists - and some of the biggest lobbyists act for other nations. The others, mainly for corporate & ideological interests. If we cannot keep money out of politics, we can try to keep professional politicians out of politics.
We were extremely fortunate in Chicago to have a Commissioner of Health who started a Facebook Live weekly broadcast with an active chat who explained from the start that no vaccine is 100% effective. Then week after week answered questions and gradually taught us all what the city and citizens needed to do to keep the health care system functional and protect ourselves the best way possible. Dr. Alison Arwady got so many of us and our families through the worst of things with humor, respect, kindness, and laughter. She had haters and trolls too, but never bullied or mocked. It can be done.
While I agree with you somewhat, I will reiterate my point that politics on both sides and the media got in the way and bullied our medical community into either silence or conforming to the narrative. Arwady was under the thumb of Lori Lightfoot and her circus and shenanigans. I am confident that Arwady was pressured to conform to the narrative, even if she didn’t fully believe it. The city of Chicago was responsible for her paycheck.
I do not believe Dr. Arwady was under the Mayor's thumb ever. Lightfoot deferred to her judgement and knowledge frequently during press conferences and always had Arwady with her for those during the pandemic. There was a great one when the Mayor was asked a specific COVID question. She replied something like "I don't know; let's ask Allison; that's what I always do." They worked as a team. We would have been much better off if it had ever occurred to Trump to do similarly with his advisors.
My hot take: When conmen decide April 2020 to get everyone infected and don’t hesitate to vilify scientists and use propaganda to make it happen, your ability to control health communications is nil.
Appreciate the effort though
How to do better next time?
Don’t lockdown society. Lockdowns set expectations that once the vaccines were released, the pandemic would end and people could resume normal life without fear of catching covid.
Look at all the damage that was done by lockdowns, especially to school children through remote “learning.”
Most ppl have pretty minimal science literacy, plus lockdowns were HARD. In our efforts to get people on board, we tended to downplay how very difficult they were. Then we came out of lockdown and people kept getting covid- you have to see how they looked like a failure to them. It’s not that complicated, honestly.
Exactly! If the messaging is, "we can't get out of lockdown until the virus is gone or at least no longer severe," then vaccines being imperfect essentially means "we will be in lockdown forever." That's very difficult for us as human beings to accept, and frankly I don't think we should have to.
So it's not surprising that most of us divided into one of two (incorrect) camps: (a) "anyone who criticizes vaccines is anti-science," or (b) "all COVID measures, including vaccines, are a conspiracy."
"The vaccines were saving hundreds of thousands of lives..."
Again, there's no way anybody can conclude this given the data we have. The clinical trials that were conducted showed no mortality benefit and only lasted a few months.
Conversely, we have no conclusive evidence that the vaccines are killing people, etc.
The mRNA vaccines are experimental therapeutics. They should have been presented to the public as such.
The problem here is not merely exaggerated statements coming from vaccine manufacturers like Moderna that were quoting interim results of Phase III trials which weren't contextualized properly by our health agencies (Why didn't they? Isn't their job to inform the public with accurate information and not just echo what the industry that they are supposed to be regulating is saying about their product?).
The majority of the public doesn't understand what 95% efficacy means (both Pfizer and Moderna claimed approximately 95% with regard to the prevention of symptomatic disease). And it's not just the public. I have asked dozens of my colleagues in medicine if they could explain what vaccine efficacy is and most admitted that they did not know how to.
The public heard "95%" and believed that if they got vaccinated there was a 95% chance they wouldn't get Covid. That is not what that number means. This number means that there is, over just a few months, a 20 times lesser risk of contracting symptomatic Covid if vaccinated. Nobody could know if that number would hold after some time or against other variants that would emerge. We should have expected that number to fall. Moreover, the risk of getting symptomatic Covid if unvaccinated in the trial was very low to begin with (about 1 in 170 in the Moderna Trial). This was never explained to the public in simple terms, or even at all.
There is another problem with how the trials were conducted vs how the results were touted. The FDA made a decision early on with regard to evaluating efficacy. They would only count cases in the vaccinated after 14 days from the second dose. The rationale is that it would take two weeks to "work". They excluded people who got Covid in the six weeks from their first shot to two weeks outside the second.
One could argue that this is a reasonable way of looking at it. But why? As an individual choosing whether or not to get vaccinated why would you ignore the possibility of getting Covid during the ramp up period as part of your calculus? How would you be certain that the Covid you contracted a week out wasn't BECAUSE you got vaccinated? You can't. Trials don't prove causality, they only show correlations.
In any case, people found out very soon that just because you got vaccinated didn't mean you wouldn't get Covid. People talk to each other. Nobody says, yeah, I got Covid. It was terrible. But it was 10 days after my second shot, so let's not count it against the vaccine. As you say, people were confused and angry.
But something very interesting happened. This is the kind of attitude that exploded in social media: "I got Covid after the jab, and I am glad I did because it would have been much, much worse!"
There's no way an individual can know this from their personal experience. It's possible that the shot helped them. It's also possible that it did not. There is also the possibility that the shots made their course worse than it would have been. In the Pfizer trial, 162 unvaccinated got symptomatic Covid compared to only eight in the vaccinated group (95% efficacy). However severe Covid, ie "much, much worse", occurred in 1 of the vaccinated and 9 of the unvaccinated. Also a very impressive 90% efficacy in preventing severe Covid-19.
Notice, however that if you got Covid as an unvaccinated participant, the chance that you would develop a really bad course of the disease was 9 in 162, or 1 out of 18. But if you got Covid after vaccination, the chances you would end up in the hospital was 1 in 8. These are small numbers and it is impossible to conclude much. However antibody dependent enhancement (imperfect antibodies leading to a more severe course of disease) is a real thing. These numbers suggest that this could have been happening in the trial itself. The point here is that if you got sick and still supported the vaccination based on unfounded logic you were lionized. But if you questioned the utility of the vaccine you were shunned.
More with regard to infection rates in the vaccinated...
Unlike our CDC which never published infection rates in the unvaccinated vs the vaccinated during the first year of vaccines (2021), the office of National Statistics in the UK did. By September of 2021 something odd was happening. Some age groups were getting Covid more frequently than the unvaccinated if they were jabbed. This was ignored. But month after month that trend grew. By March of 2022, with Omicron dominating, the risk of getting Covid was, in some age groups 4-5 times higher if your were vaccinated:
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/breakthrough-infections-covid-vaccine-failure/
(Yes. I know it is from Children's Health Defense, a dangerous antivax misinformation site. I wrote the article while I was their Science Editor)
How is this possible in this group of 35 million people if our CDC continued to tell us that infection rates were lower in the vaccinated? The ONS stopped publishing that metric after March 2022.
It's not just poor communication and setting appropriate expectations. We had large, public health institutions presenting conflicting data. Some of the data which came from official databases showed negative effectiveness. We can swallow the idea that effectiveness wanes, but going negative?? Shouldn't that have raised alarm everywhere? Is this technology which has a short-term benefit be messing with other aspects of our immune system that could not have been detected in trials with brief observational periods?
KP, you say, "We didn’t know if we would get a vaccine in six months or three years, never mind the details about how well it would work..."
I am sorry. We did know. You don't have to be a vaccine expert to know that you cannot promise anything about long term safety in six months, it doesn't matter how big your study is (or how much you want it to be safe). We knew that whatever vaccine was offered up, no matter how impressive the short term efficacy would have unknown long term harms. This should have been a very important concern for public health officials, especially when these products were mandated to remain employed, for most people.
People aren't just dismayed because their expectations were not met. They were forced to comply. They had questions--good ones, ones that have yet to be addressed. These are some of the concerns people in the "antivax" crowd had from the very beginning. None of them were ever addressed, let alone in a respectful manner.
Agreed with everything you wrote. I don’t know that the public expected perfection, but it went from, if you are vaccinated, you can drop the mask and go live your life Covid free to whoops, there are breakthrough infections, to oh, wait, the vaccines were never meant to protect against symptomatic illness.
I agree with you. The public didn't expect perfection as KP implies. I think this is a subtle form of gaslighting. This newsletter is basically a public outreach arm of the CDC. If a reader wishes to understand a little more about what the CDC and NIAID is saying this is a great place to come. However there has never been any critical examination of our agencies of public health here. This continues with this article. "Everybody did the best they could given the situation and what could be known and people are angry because of 'miscommunication'".
The blurb about 100% efficacy in preventing Covid-19 deaths coming from Moderna never got any real traction in the news, at least for very long, yet the author points to this extreme example as a misstep in communication while opening the door to an attack on the vaccine hesitant who were too ignorant to see that claims of a perfect vaccine is impossible.
I have been disappointed in the past year with YLE. I have subscribed for years and I did so b/c YLE gave me a perspective lacking from the messaging from CDC and WHO. I felt I was getting more accurate information, information I could use in my life.
I was initially pleased with the ascension of YLE's founder to the higher ranks of public health. Now, not so much. Surely there are issues of public policy about Covid & other epidemic disorders that can be criticized? I sometimes feel that I'm reading the party line.
In regard to the current post, I understand that the messaging (aka claims made) about Covid mitigation was not very well coordinated - from the beginning. The very worst of that was the lie that masks don't help. (As a philosopher, I will say here that lying differs from bad messaging.) Better to be candid and not manipulative. Better to just assume you're talking to adults and to believe we're willing to pull together and let front line HCWs have masks that can actually prevent transmission. It might also have been a good time to hint that our corporate health care isn't designed for the benefit of the public, health, or health care workers. To shame them into protecting front line workers. You've got to take risks when the opportunity arises. Chaos is always an opportunity. Others make very effective use of this.
Second, scientists are in part to blame for the perception that they deliver objective - even absolute - truth, the facts & only the facts. We've inherited this from at least the early 20th century. Parenthetically, I do not know how many medical professionals (clinicians, not researchers) believe that reality is much more nuanced & much less certain than what they learned in med school. Scientists themselves sometimes seem hyper conscious of the uncertainty of even proven theories and that theories will be corrected and will change - also, unfortunately not very useful in messaging, as we know in re climate "change" ( a term coined by a denier). This may be the fault of public perception and of our educational system, but it will not change on its own.
Myself, I was raised in a household of science. I often waited in my father's lab at a large research university after high school for him to finish up and drive us home. I have kept that faith in the scientific method while, over time, recognizing that scientists are often biased towards the current paradigm and willing to accept grant money that compromises their research. Sometimes in direct opposition to the public wellbeing. Many people - from all over the political spectrum - are increasingly distrustful of science (as well as increasingly distrusting everything, for that matter). This may be past resolving in the current mess in which we find ourselves.
When the children were approved, and lined up, and the first Omicron wave seemed to get everyone- including the children who had just completed their series… the utility of the vaccines for children was doomed. The week of Dec 20, 2021 I came to work in a tidal wave of Covid positive cases and spent the next two weeks just reassuring terrified parents and their children, many of whom had just been vaccinated. At that time the infection was almost croup like and seemed to be concentrated in the school age group (not so many toddlers).
It was also somewhat mild in intensity in my patient population and it was hard when both vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals had similar experiences. That was beyond messaging and mostly experiential.
I have been pleasantly surprised how many parents are still interested in boosting the whole family in the last few weeks. There is some self selection, I am a strong advocate so patients who gravitate towards me may lean that way as well.
My very elderly father just got his vaccine, about 15 days prior to testing positive this week. He woke up the next day and proclaimed in his hoarse voice that he thought it was done after having an extremely rough night. A little memory loss is helpful too LOL. He did look much better. I am grateful I rushed him out for the shot as soon as it was available. It’s hard to imagine it did not help.
I have already shared his story to help demonstrate the “why bother vaccinating”. You see it clicking, like, “ooh, hmmm, I see…”
As usual I find the comments very interesting. Our society seems naive about many things like how unhealthy much of our food has become. Expecting the general public to appreciate nuances of science seems equally naive.
My hope is that someone will address the treatment of drugs particularly ivermectin. A drug used off label for head lice in kids became so toxic prescribers felt threatened with loss of license. The same drug widely distributed in Africa to address river blindness banned from hospital use during COVID? Why?
"Over 300,000 people had died from COVID-19 in the U.S."
It's so ironic that this post is about addressing miscommunication. By December 14, 2020, the day the Pfizer vaccine was rolled out there were indeed, according to the CDC 300,000 Covid-19 deaths. These weren't deaths FROM Covid. These were people who died WITH Covid. There is a huge difference between the two. A positive PCR test around the time of death was a Covid-19 death. Even a suspicion of Covid positivity was used to list Covid as a diagnosis on a death certificate.
We actually do not know how many people have died FROM Covid-19. To know this, every single death would have to go through a systematic review to adjudicate whether or not the virus played a role in the demise. Have we forgotten that many PCR positive cases are asymptomatic? Have we forgotten what the Illinois Director of Public Health said in March, 2020?
"To be clear, even if a person was in hospice care and died from a terminal disease with a positive Covid test they would be counted as a Covid death"
Here's another way we failed in steering public impressions away from fantasy: why didn't we officially state that it is a fallacy for vaccinated individuals to claim that if they hadn't contracted Covid it was because of the vaccine? There is no way to know this on an individual basis. The Pfizer trial which claimed 95% efficacy showed us that vaccinating 20,000 people would prevent 154 cases of symptomatic Covid over a brief period of 6 weeks on average. That means vaccinating about 130 people would prevent a single case. Another way of saying that is that if you were vaccinated there was a 1 in 130 chance that it actually helped you as an individual. Why was no effort made to convey reality around this?
Another massive failure with real world consequences: We found out very soon that the shots didn't prevent infection after a few months, yet we were told that the vaccines would reduce symptoms. Uh-oh. Doesn't that make it harder to know if you were sick but could still infect others? Isn't it possible that the mildly or asymptomatic vaccinated group was driving infection rates? Logic says that if you believe the vaccines reduced symptoms it would have been the "irresponsible" unvaccinated who got ill and quarantined while the vaccinated were out in public unknowingly spreading the disease.
These aren't just failures in communication and setting unreasonable expectations. Our approach was illogical from the beginning and founded on principles that were easily proven invalid from the beginning.
We shut down the world when tens of thousands of clinicians were telling us that it would do far more harm than good.
We mandated a product that had NO long term safety data and protected the vaccine manufacturers from liability.
We enforced vaccination on children and young college students who had the least risk of Covid complications and the greatest risk of danger from known adverse events like myo/pericarditis and the greatest to lose in terms of years of life from any chronic conditions caused by the shots.
We mercilessly attacked clinicians who were successfully treating Covid with repurposed medications that had already demonstrated greater than 50% efficacy in preventing infection, hospitalization and death from Covid. Even if you choose to dismiss the dozens of studies that proved efficacy their own experience validated the use of HCQ and Ivermectin.
Worst of all, any mention of vaccine adverse events would result in immediate attack from all sides. Did you know that doctors on the front line had been reporting devastating reactions from the jabs in their own patients privately? I was part of a physicians group that numbered over 20,000 on FB. Once one or two MDs started reporting things like strokes and neurologic damage immediately after vaccination there was an avalanche of reports of other reactions. None of us felt comfortable going public because of the culture that had been already established with regard to our response. Speaking up meant losing your medical license.
I invite all to read this expose on what doctors on the front lines were saying in private:
https://madhavasetty.substack.com/p/how-an-online-physician-community
Doctors who witnessed these tragedies did the only thing they could do: file reports on VAERS, the safeguard the CDC had put into place decades ago to avert this kind of public tragedy.
In an act of unparalleled hypocrisy the CDC told the public that the VAERS system couldn't be trusted. It's their OWN system.
Kristen and Katelyn, if you are truly interested in restoring trust in the medical orthodoxy you have to go a lot further, otherwise you risk making things worse than they already are. Lack of transparency is what got us here in the first place.
Please proceed to fuck right off with your 'with Covid' horseshit. After seeing multiple friend die, I swear I want to strangle the next person that says this.
I get the science being so well explained explained here. And. I expect a vaccine that performed better than this, because we were told that COVID was over, we could drop precautions and return to pre pandemic behaviors and then we watch the virus mutate and become far more immune evasive than was apparently expected (which felt like yet another narrative change) and it kept circulating year round and reinfections became common (another change in the narrative) and then we dropped every single method in our Swiss cheese approach to reducing infection, we forced infection on school kids and school employees and office workers and vulnerable nursing home and hospital patients, we said masks were of dubious impact and air purifiers aren't necessary, and squandered a billion dollars in long COVID research, and are slow walking gen 2 vaccines, and the promised mild-ening has failed to materialize and people are getting sick with flu-level impacts on each of three infections and counting, and this has been utterly dismal to live through and remember with a brain as yet unclouded by COVID infection.