Vaccines Are A Billion Miracles

Michael Siegel

Michael Siegel is an astronomer living in Pennsylvania. He blogs at his own site, and has written a novel.

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63 Responses

  1. Jaybird
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    says:

    As someone who fought to the front of the line to get vaccinated, and get multiple boosters, including the bivalent booster, and now is enjoying the benefits of Novavax (ask your doctor if Novavax is right for you), I just want to say that I deliberately switched to Novavax from the mRNA shots because of the whole overpromise/underdeliver thing that they had going on.

    Like, to the point where official definitions were changed. (Note: Experts said that the changes to the official definition of vaccination was normal.)

    I am not anti-vax by any stretch of the imagination… but I do get how someone might think “the leadership was not being straight with us” when it comes to this whole vaccination thing during the pandemic. Everything from the J&J shot getting pulled temporarily to how the AZ shot was handled to promises walked back… Like Buffet says: “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.”

    I see how harm was done to the reputation. And I say that as someone whose upper arm has all kinds of punctures.Report

    • Damon in reply to Jaybird
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      says:

      I get a yellow fever vaccine, I don’t get yellow fever if exposed to the disease.
      I get a Tetanus vaccine, I don’t get tetanus if exposed to the disease.
      I get a Covid vaccine, I can still get Covid.

      Do we see the problem?

      Vaccine: “a substance used to stimulate immunity to a particular infectious disease or pathogen”
      Immunity: “a condition of being able to resist a particular disease especially through preventing development of a pathogenic microorganism or by counteracting the effects of its products”

      You can argue all you want that a vaccine doesn’t guarantee you won’t get the disease, but that’s not really the populace’s view. The covid vaxs demonstrated that one group was playing fast and loose with the conventional understanding. If only they had been honest.Report

      • Jaybird in reply to Damon
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        says:

        Marchmaine made a good point a few weeks back: We should bring back the term “inoculation”.Report

      • Chip Daniels in reply to Damon
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        says:

        “If only they had been honest.”

        Then, what?
        Imagine they had been perfect and never made any mistakes, then what? Who would have changed their behavior, and how?

        I mean, both you and Jay got vaccinated regardless, so who are we even talking about?Report

        • Jaybird in reply to Chip Daniels
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          says:

          Imagine they had been perfect and never made any mistakes

          What does this entail?

          The shots working the way they promised they would? If that’s our definition of perfect, I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t have a problem.

          The promises being something more in line with what the shots actually accomplished? If that’s our definition of perfect, it seems to me we’d still have some problems but they’d be smaller in scope.

          What do you mean by “imagine they had been perfect”?Report

          • Chip Daniels in reply to Jaybird
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            says:

            I mean exactly what you meant by “the whole overpromise/underdeliver thing that they had going on.”

            And I mean exactly what you meant by “the leadership was not being straight with us” when it comes to this whole vaccination thing during the pandemic. Everything from the J&J shot getting pulled temporarily to how the AZ shot was handled to promises walked back.”

            That’s what I mean.Report

            • Jaybird in reply to Chip Daniels
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              says:

              Okay, so if the mRNA shots had done exactly what had been promised, we’d be much better off.Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to Jaybird
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                says:

                Who would have behaved differently?

                I mean, you and Damon have already told us you got the shots anyway, so how would things have played out differently?

                The reason I ask is that the people who are anti-vax, didn’t arrive at their position because of any bad behavior or mistakes by the government.
                They started out with a dark conspiratorial mindset and went searching for some way to manifest it.

                So no matter what the FDA/ WHO/CDC/ Etc. did or didn’t do, I can’t see how we would be in any different place than where we are right now.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Chip Daniels
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                says:

                Chip, my statement is about the harm done to the reputation of the authorities in charge of this thing.

                Asking “what would you have done differently?” isn’t the right question.

                We’re in a weird counter-factual place.

                Like, there’s something that’s going to happen in the future.

                The authorities will make a pronouncement.

                There will be people who:

                1. Do everything that they are told.
                2. Are skeptical about what they are told but mostly comply
                3. Refuse to believe anything that they are told and performatively do the opposite

                We want more people in 1 than in 2 and more people in 2 than in 3 and we want shaming to work on the 2s even if it doesn’t work on the 3s.

                And if the reputation of the authorities has been damaged by miscalculations on their part, then that means that there will be more 2s that could have been kept as 1s and more 3s that could have been kept as 2s.

                AND THAT’S BAD.Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to Jaybird
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                says:

                Again, who are we talking about?

                Not you or Damon, that’s clear.
                Not the anti-vax nuts because they aren’t operating from a place of rational skepticism.

                Is there any evidence that the rise in anti-vax sentiment was caused by the actions of these agencies?

                From what I can see, it is driven mostly by partisan politics; If you hate Joe Biden and love Trump, you are more likely to jump on the anti-vax crazy train.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Chip Daniels
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                says:

                Is there any evidence that the rise in anti-vax sentiment was caused by the actions of these agencies?

                Was caused by? Nah.
                Contributed to? Yeah.Report

        • Damon in reply to Chip Daniels
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          says:

          “Imagine they had been perfect and never made any mistakes, then what?”
          First off, I don’t believe this was a “mistake”. I believe it was intentional, whether that intention stemmed from a desire to do good or not, is irrelevant. Again, there is documentation that people in the administration LIED. Intentionally. These are public servants. I expect public servants to be honest. If they had been honest, we might then not had employer mandated vaccination, or as long a shutdown as we did, or kids at home for so long. Thanks to this fiasco, everything that comes out of any administration is now suspect.Report

      • CJColucci in reply to Damon
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        says:

        While I’m sure there was some loose talk somewhere — there always is — I never had the impression that the COVID vaccine would prevent me from getting COVID at all. Instead, it was always my understanding that it would reliably mitigate the symptoms, making COVID an annoyance rather than a crisis. And so it proved to be.Report

        • Jaybird in reply to CJColucci
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          says:

          The loose talk was not in the garage around the poker table but, like, coming from Biden.

          The AP had a fact-check about it and everything.Report

          • CJColucci in reply to Jaybird
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            says:

            Golly, I was unaware that everything was hunky-dory on that front until June 2021. My admittedly increasingly dysfunctional memory was that people were screeching about lies and misleading statements and over-promising in, oh, 2020.Report

            • DensityDuck in reply to CJColucci
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              says:

              “I didn’t, therefore no-one did”

              OK BoomerReport

            • Jaybird in reply to CJColucci
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              says:

              Yeah, my criticism was on the whole “overpromise/underdeliver” thing.

              “We did the best we could with the information we had at the time and we didn’t do anything wrong, given what we knew at the time!” is one of the things that I’m saying is contributing to some of the problems and skepticism today, yes.Report

              • Philip H in reply to Jaybird
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                says:

                You do realize that 1) that is an honest statement and 2) that’s how science works?Report

              • KenB in reply to Philip H
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                says:

                Three years ago: “We have to follow all the CDC guidelines to the letter! They’re the experts, who are you to question them! Anyone who doesn’t follow them is literally killing people!”

                Today: “Well of course they made some mistakes, science isn’t perfect!”

                It’s not the scientific process that’s being criticized, it’s the many loud schoolmarms who took the original guidelines as if inscribed on stone tablets and are not now engaging in self-reflection about their past behavior.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Philip H
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                says:

                1) That *IS* an honest statement!
                2) Science would be closer to “Our hypotheses, which we sold as theories, turned out to have been falsified. Here’s what we’ve learned for next time.”

                It is very much *NOT* “We didn’t do anything wrong, given what we knew at the time.”Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to Jaybird
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                says:

                “skepticism”
                See, I’m not seeing any skepticism, either in your comments, or in the general public at large.

                I’m seeing a tremendous surge in gullibility and magical thinking and superstition from the anti-vax folks who are increasingly indistinguishable from just run of the mill conservatives.

                Like Ron DeSantis telling people that getting boosters increases your chance of getting Covid. You can’t describe this as skepticism. You can call it ignorance or malice, but not skepticism.
                He is a fervent believer, not a skeptic.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Chip Daniels
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                says:

                I’m sure you don’t.

                You also didn’t see the big deal in politicians not following their own mask mandates. “You know that *YOU* need to wear a mask, right?”

                Don’t try to see things how you see them.
                Try to see things how others might see them.Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to Jaybird
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                says:

                You’re pivoting to an irrelevant issue, instead of addressing the subject.

                You’re just demonstrating your own reflexive hostility towards authorities which you don’t like, and trying to assign it to other people, none of whom seem to share it.

                Who shares Jaybird’s view, other than just you?Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Chip Daniels
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                says:

                It’s not “authorities I don’t like”. Are you seriously unable to translate what I said into something that I agree that I meant?

                I’m beginning to suspect that the fault isn’t mine, here.

                Do you want the topic to be your perspective or discussions of shifts in degrees of trust or what?Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to Jaybird
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                says:

                You keep dodging the question.

                Who are these people who have “skepticism”, other than you?

                Why should any of us think they exist in any numbers worth discussing?Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Chip Daniels
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                says:

                Who are these people who have “skepticism”, other than you?

                Remember when I talked about the three groups of folks out there?

                The ones who move from Group #1 to Group #2 are the skeptical ones.

                It’s not definitive but we can probably use the increasing number of antivaxxers as a proxy for measuring who has moved from Group #2 to Group #3.Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to Jaybird
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                says:

                What makes you think we can use the “increasing number of antivaxxers” as a proxy?

                The surge in antivax sentiment seems most likely driven by partisan bias by conservatives.
                And they re very demonstrably NOT “skeptical” but gullible and credulous of the most outlandish claims like eating horsepaste.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Chip Daniels
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                says:

                Because I’m measuring change in position over time.Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to Jaybird
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                says:

                Does it strike you as odd that antivax sentiment used to be roughly equally split between liberals and conservatives, but now has a sharp partisan split?

                This looks less like healthy skepticism, and more like motivated reasoning.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Chip Daniels
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                says:

                Odd? Not really. It strikes me as a fairly predictable outcome of making the whole vaccination thing partisan.

                I’m sure you remember this: “Harris says she wouldn’t trust Trump on any vaccine released before election”

                It’s similar. People want to get a win and, barring that, deny their opponents one.

                “But vaccines are too important to politicize!”
                “Yeah.”Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to Jaybird
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                says:

                Well this just seems to confirm that the rise in antivax sentiment has nothing to do with what the agencies did or didn’t do, since it is driven more by partisan posturing.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Chip Daniels
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                says:

                Yeah, the increasing polarization is entirely due to the other side.

                If only we could destroy them.Report

              • Kazzy in reply to Jaybird
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                says:

                Maybe quote her actual words: ““I will say that I would not trust Donald Trump” on the reliability of a vaccine, Harris said. The California senator, however, added that she would trust a “credible” source who could vouch that a vaccine was safe for Americans to receive.”

                It wasn’t the vaccine she wouldn’t trust; it was Trump’s word alone on it.Report

      • Philip H in reply to Damon
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        says:

        I get a yellow fever vaccine, I don’t get yellow fever if exposed to the disease.
        I get a Tetanus vaccine, I don’t get tetanus if exposed to the disease.

        That’s not technically biologically true. Both the Yellow fever and tetanus pathogens will enter your body in those scenarios – you just won’t suffer any symptoms. Those inoculations don’t create a magical invisible barrier.Report

        • Marchmaine in reply to Philip H
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          says:

          And yet we don’t mandate Tetanus or Yellow Fever vaccines.

          These are very good vaccines that you should take if you’re potentially at risk for Tetanus (I am) or Yellow Fever (I am not). They protect *you* and we don’t mandate them to stop the spread of Tetanus or Yellow Fever.

          This sub-thread is missing the main driver, which were the mandates. The mandates were not necessary and, I don’t know why exactly, they became a sort of scissors or wedge issue where both sides were wrong.

          Team Blue doubled and tripled down on mandates and Team Red veered into weird anti-vaccine (un-)rationalizations. We still had excellent uptake on the vaccines, especially among the folks who really benefit from them 65+.

          Mandating covid vaccines for people under 40 rather than making them available for everyone took on a weird political power-play that was bad public policy, and IMO was in fact actually driven to punish ‘the other team.’ Masks and Vax became tokenized well beyond their ‘scientific’ value for public policy — especially with regards children. Whom to blame? Blame the dynamics of power… those who had it used it to make the others submit, at least symbolically. And reversing that, the others recklessly rebelled… beyond even what was good for them.

          As for my priors, my family was vaccinated in 2020 (including my grade school kids) but only I and my wife (50+) have had boosters in 2021, and only I have had the most recent booster in 2023.Report

          • InMD in reply to Marchmaine
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            says:

            It’s the Trump distortion field. The way team blue talks about it you’d think the federal agents and agencies they’re constantly defending didn’t answer to… Donald Trump. The way team red talks about it you’d think the federal agents and agencies they’re constantly castigating didn’t answer to… Donald Trump.Report

            • Marchmaine in reply to InMD
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              says:

              True… it’s further complicated by the fact that the Bureaucracy itself has its own agendas — and that remains in place between both presidencies.

              Masks/Lockdowns/Vax Dev are Trump/FDA/CDC/Fauci etc.
              Masks/Lockdowns/Vax Deploy are Biden/CDC/FDA/Fauci etc.Report

              • InMD in reply to Marchmaine
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                says:

                For sure. Also add in a dose of agencies that usually operate in obscurity not being ready for the spotlight plus no baseline public sense of how seriously to take what they say and this is what you get.

                Like the CDC makes plenty of scientifically sound recommendations. But who among us actually lives our lives according to them?

                There was and remains a huge void for all manner of partisan politics and culture war nuttery to fill.Report

          • Michael Cain in reply to Marchmaine
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            says:

            Some of this is because we generally lack recent experience with epidemics of truly serious diseases. We got rid of smallpox by mandating vaccinations. We’ve nearly gotten rid of polio by mandating vaccinations. We made good progress on eradicating measles by mandating vaccinations, but by that time the memories of smallpox and polio were fading away and we let people get away without vaccinating their children. Covid-19 is a poor candidate for eradication because (a) it mutates readily and (b) there are animal reservoirs.Report

            • Marchmaine in reply to Michael Cain
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              Right… but that’s Damon’s original point. Lots of things we call Vaccines prevent the thing being Vaxxed against. That’s a good thing.

              JB’s point about overpromise/underdeliver is that Coronavirus — as we were all told by the science teams — is a cold/flu virus and we ‘inoculate’ against fast mutating seasonal ubiquitous viruses (e.g. endemic) to reduce personal exposure.

              The scientific expectation, therefore, was for inoculation for harm reduction, not eradication. There’s a bank-shot argument to be made for mandates was that if no one got vaccinated, then hospitals might get overrun… but vaccine uptake was very good (especially in the beginning) and hospitals were fine… the bank-shot wasn’t warranted.Report

          • Kazzy in reply to Marchmaine
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            says:

            Just out of curiosity… what governments mandated vaccines and for whom?Report

            • Jaybird in reply to Kazzy
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              says:

              Here’s a press release where the DOD rescinded the vaccine mandate.Report

            • Marchmaine in reply to Kazzy
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              says:

              There are multiple layers to that… let’s just bracket ‘healthcare workers’ and *not* count those mandates. Let’s also exempt the US Military which does invasive and marginally necessary things to it’s members all the time.

              -Over 20 states required all State Employees.
              -Dozens of municipalities required non-healthcare employees.
              -Municipalities required proof of vaccination for entry into Restaurants/Bars, gyms and entertainment venues.

              Example, Key to NYC pass:
              https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/nyc-becomes-first-major-u-s-city-mandate-vaccination-proof-n1275807

              Executive order 14043 mandated all Executive Agency employees (and contractors 14042)

              The Covid Action Plan (Sept2021) required all corporations greater than 100 employees to require vaccinations or continuous testing plus masking for all employees vis OSHA regulations by Jan 4, 2022.

              This one was eventually struck down by SCOTUS as overreach in Jan2022. And, as far as I can tell, the last Fed Vax Mandate wasn’t lifted until May2023.

              And that’s not including all of the ‘soft’ we’re just following CDC guideline ‘mandates’ among private institutions and businesses.

              Are we thinking that Vaccine Mandates were not serious public policy debates in late 2021 and flowing into 2022?Report

              • Kazzy in reply to Marchmaine
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                says:

                Thank you.

                “Are we thinking that Vaccine Mandates were not serious public policy debates in late 2021 and flowing into 2022?”

                Not one bit. But I think it is important to note what did and did not happen vis a vis so-called mandates. There were undoubtedly lots of ways that people were pressured and/or incentivized into getting vaccinated, with various consequences for not doing so. But I think we should also recognize that there were no legal mandates insofar as anyone suffered legal or monetary consequences at the hands of any government as the result of not getting vaccinated. No one was jailed or fined nor had the threat of jail or fine. Different levels of government put in different requirements for different groups of people and/or different venues.Report

              • Marchmaine in reply to Kazzy
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                NPR: Thousands of workers are opting to get fired, rather than take the vaccine

                And just so we all remember what the Oct 2021 narrative was:
                “Their resistance has stirred great condemnation and controversy. Many view unvaccinated workers as a potential risk to the workplace. And overwhelmingly, workers have accepted and even embraced the science showing vaccines protect not only you but those around you.

                Which includes an active link to the CDC which has been updated since 2021 to NOT show that vaccines protect those around you.

                So, through a quirk of the internet, the NPR validation link no longer validates the thing they are validating… but it survives with current benefit of protecting YOU.

                https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/vaccine-benefits.htmlReport

            • Michael Cain in reply to Kazzy
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              says:

              From memory…

              Colorado mandated Covid-19 vaccination for health care workers. Denver mandated Covid-19 vaccination for city employees and school teachers. Colorado State University mandated that students, faculty, and staff at two of their campuses be vaccinated for Covid-19.

              Most of them had medical and religious exemptions, but those required filling out and filing paperwork. IIRC, the only way out of the healthcare mandate was 100% work from home.Report

      • Michael Cain in reply to Damon
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        says:

        I get a yellow fever vaccine, I don’t get yellow fever if exposed to the disease.

        The WHO reports that the yellow fever vaccine is 99% effective, and that there are regularly small numbers of breakthrough cases. The Covid-19 mRNA vaccines are 95% effective, and there are correspondingly more breakthrough cases. The current version of the mumps vaccine is 96% effective, but breakthrough cases are very rare simply because (almost) everyone gets vaccinated and exposure is very rare.Report

    • Burt Likko in reply to Jaybird
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      says:

      A thought: we have a lot of media portrayals of scientists, doctors, and people in related disciplines. They can be portrayed in any number of moral lights and with all manner of personalities, but it seems pretty rare to see them portrayed as both well-intentioned and fallible. (Often it’s useful dramatically to have an antagonist make a mistake.) So people don’t have a strong model of scientists saying “This is the best we can do right now and it might not turn out to be right later on based on stuff we have no way of knowing just yet. But it’s still the best advice we can give based on what we do know.” Maybe it’s just that this is simply too nuanced a message under any circumstances or any media model, but I believe that how the lay public sees science portrayed in fiction lends itself to particular kinds of mental models that are often not congruent with reality.Report

      • Jaybird in reply to Burt Likko
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        says:

        I would *LOVE* if we could have authorities say stuff like “This is the best we can do right now and it might not turn out to be right later on based on stuff we have no way of knowing just yet. But it’s still the best advice we can give based on what we do know.”

        The problem is that the followup policies have to have similar… what would be the term… humility?

        If the policies based on this (accurate!) assessment are draconian (people losing jobs if they don’t follow the recommendations, etc), it’ll reduce trust in the following iterations of the iterated game.Report

        • Michael Cain in reply to Jaybird
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          says:

          Most people hate those sorts of answers. Consider just masks… “We know that wide-spread public mask wearing slows the spread of some viruses, it may help slow Covid-19. But you’ll have to do it right. N-95 or K-95 or disposable surgical masks. Nose and mouth. Men, no more facial hair than a mustache because it ruins what seal there is. Don’t wear the same mask for more than a couple of days. If you have to, have multiple masks and cycle them often enough that each gets completely dry for a day or two before you use it again. OTOH, if y’all do masks widely, there will be in effect a run on masks. Workers who need them for dust protection and surgeons who need them to reduce infection risks in both directions won’t have any either. The supply chain for most of those masks runs through China, whom we expect will stop exports, so this advice will be increasingly impractical for weeks/months.”Report

          • Jaybird in reply to Michael Cain
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            says:

            Oh, yeah. I remember talking about the Nature article that said that single-layer-t-shirt masks were worse than nothing! Masks became a totem.

            (And then when prominent politicians started not following their own freakin’ mandates? Katy, bar the door!)

            But if I wanted to have a mask mandate work and work well, I’d have the AD Council figure out which celebrities have recently gotten a DUI and the judge gave them “Community Service” and I’d put those celebs in a commercial where they talk about N-95 and K-95 masks and what to look for and *HOW TO WEAR IT PROPERLY*.

            Hell, one of the bonehead moves that Trump made was the MyPillow guy had N-95 masks for sale and Trump didn’t at least *NOD* toward them. Made in America, washable, reuseable.

            But, of course, insufficient masks used improperly ain’t that much better than no masks at all and, wouldn’t you know it, we all ended up with no masks at all by… what was it? The 2022 Superbowl? I think that that was when they kept showing people in the skyboxes not wearing them.Report

            • InMD in reply to Jaybird
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              I think that stuff matters but I think the bigger influence on behavior/attitudes is what peoples personal experiences with the things were. If masking is something that only impacts you in 15-20 minute increments, while you run into a store or whatever, it’s a pretty limited burden and it’s strange that people have such an issue with it. On the other hand, if your experience is having to wear it all day in some public facing job or conditions that are otherwise less than comfortable to begin with it becomes a big ask.

              I fell into that former group, and don’t think I ever wore one for more than an hour at a time (maybe at a doctors appointment) and usually it was less than 15 minutes. For a lot of other people though that was not the norm. Which, when you look at the (in)effectiveness of mass masking in practice, is what causes you to ask what we were actually achieving with it. Probably not much.Report

            • Michael Cain in reply to Jaybird
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              says:

              But, of course, insufficient masks used improperly ain’t that much better than no masks at all…

              There was one case where a woman was using a homemade multiple-layer mask religiously, never washed it and never let it dry thoroughly. It became a breeding ground for the Legionnaires disease bacteria, which killed her.

              My father worked for an insurance company and for years was a field safety engineer. At dinner he used to rail about Americans who would routinely risk their life because doing something the right way was inconvenient.Report

              • Philip H in reply to Michael Cain
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                My father worked for an insurance company and for years was a field safety engineer. At dinner he used to rail about Americans who would routinely risk their life because doing something the right way was inconvenient.

                The number of people killed at railroad crossings going around the gates would seem to bear this out.Report

          • Chip Daniels in reply to Michael Cain
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            says:

            But this theory- that anti-mask and anti-vax sentiment is driven by confusion or skepticism or bad behavior by public health agencies- seems completely unfounded.

            It is driven almost entirely by partisan motivated reasoning, starting with the Trumpists desire to wish away the pandemic or treat it as a PR problem.

            Thus the conservative hatred for mandates.

            If we could re-run the timeline, changing the public health agencies behavior but keeping Trump’s behavior the same, we would have exactly the result we have now.Report

      • DensityDuck in reply to Burt Likko
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        says:

        “[P]eople don’t have a strong model of scientists saying “This is the best we can do right now and it might not turn out to be right later on based on stuff we have no way of knowing just yet. But it’s still the best advice we can give based on what we do know.””

        I don’t think we needed a “strong model” of that. I think we needed people actually saying that. Instead we got people telling us that the science was settled and there was definitely only one way to do things and to suggest it might change was to suggest that the scientists were wrong and that meant you were a science denier, that you thought you knew better. Instead of “this is the best we got”, criticism was met with snarky cartoons about middle-aged white men suggesting they could fly the plane better than the pilot.

        Also, “it seems pretty rare to see [doctors in media] portrayed as both well-intentioned and fallible” have you like ever watched any medical drama TV show ever because that kind of thing happens all the time, “sympathetic characters A and B disagree about a patient’s treatment” is like Stock Plot Number 3 in that kind of show.Report

  2. Pinky
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    says:

    “Well, for example, he tends to memorize dialogue from movies or Youtube videos and then repeat it in conversation when it’s no entirely appropriate.”

    So, you’re saying that Monty Python causes autism? (I hope you don’t mind a mild joke about a serious subject.)Report

  3. Mike Schilling
    Ignored
    says:

    Further update for 2024: anti-vax sentiment is no longer most prevalent among liberal parents.Report

  4. Jaybird
    Ignored
    says:

    There was apparently a closed-door Fauci meeting with Congress a couple of days ago.

    I don’t know anything about “The Foundation for Economic Education” but the name itself tells me that they’re probably anti-socialist which means that they’re right-wing and, yep, reading the article I clicked on has a handful of editorializing phrases in the article.

    That said, if Fauci did, in fact, have this meeting and did make some of the confessions the articles said he made…

    Anyway, here’s from the middle:

    Or take the unintended consequences of the coercive vaccine policies Fauci advocated and governments initiated at the federal, state, and local levels. Fauci, who privately told officials that “it’s been proven that when you make it difficult for people in their lives, they lose their ideological bulls*** and they get vaccinated,” conceded that the coercive vaccine policies he advocated likely increased vaccine hesitancy. (The evidence suggests he is probably right.)

    Keep your eyes open for a public hearing. Maybe we’ll get this stuff without some light editorializing.Report

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