Comment by runako
4 hours ago
> during this time the pitch degraded from “you won’t get sick or spread the disease” to “well I still got sick, but it probably would have been worse without the vaccine”
This line of thinking is so odd to me. Would you have preferred communications to use inaccurate, outdated points for the sake of consistency?
When honest interlocutors learn more about something, they communicate details more accurately. What would you have suggested they do instead? Keep in mind that Covid-19 was as new to them as it was to the rest of the world, and they were also learning about it in real time.
> Hard to anticipate long term effects when something has only been tested for a short period of time
This also applies to Covid infections in immunologically naive people! The two choices were unvaccinated Covid exposure or vaccinated Covid exposure. It's folly to pretend an imagined third option of zero Covid exposure. Comparing to that fake third option does not make any sense.
I'd like accurate communication from the beginning.
>> “you won’t get sick or spread the disease”
I read that many times. It was a totally unrealistic promise, because not even all the other vaccines do that, even after years of research and improvements. (In particular, here is a big trade off in the inyectable vs oral vaccine for polio.)
Who is the highest ranking person that said it? I guess it was not one of the researchers. Perhaps it was a politician that is probably a lawyer and not a medical doctor, or perhaps a tv show host, or perhaps a random internet commenter. Who hallucinated that?
>> “well I still got sick, but it probably would have been worse without the vaccine”
Actually that was what the trials show before the vaccines were approved. I think they had like 50k persons each. The number of deaths was too small to have a statistical significative result in the death toll. It was enough to have a statistical significative reduction of hospitalizations, like a 60% reduction in old style inactivated virus vaccines to 95% in the new style mRNA vaccines. And remember that hospitalization+ventilator is really bad.