Terr_
9 hours ago
To prebuttal a few of the just-sane-enough-to-be-facile claims I've found vexing during COVID:
1. Yes, the COVID treatments we're using today are vaccines. The word has never meant Perfect Forever Invulnerability, we have a 200-year history of things labeled "vaccine" even when it didn't remove all symptoms, cover all strains, or need only one shot, etc.
2. No, the "normal" vaccines "back in your day" do have problems, and there are very good reasons we're pursuing new types like mRNA. For example, live-virus vaccines (containing a weak relative) can sometimes start their own spreading infection, and inactivatived-vaccines (with blended-up chunks of virus) require more doses and can sometimes mis-train your immune system.
taxicabjesus
a minute ago
[delayed]
outworlder
9 hours ago
I don't know where people got the idea that vaccines prevent all infection, transmissions and symptoms. They were never about that. If you can achieve it, fantastic! But not all pathogens are this easy.
Vaccines are not a force field. All they are doing is training your immune system so that it can respond faster if it encounters the actual pathogen (antibody production takes days). Your immune system has to reach the pathogen to fight it, which means you got infected already. If it is destroyed quick enough, you won't notice, but you still got infected.
I really love the XKCD on mRNA vaccines:
title="To ensure lasting immunity, doctors recommend destroying a second Death Star some time after the first."
hodgesrm
6 hours ago
> I don't know where people got the idea that vaccines prevent all infection, transmissions and symptoms. They were never about that. If you can achieve it, fantastic! But not all pathogens are this easy.
Well the COVID vaccines were presented to the public as a panacea that would end the pandemic. While many of the scientific discussions were more nuanced, headlines in the popular press announcing vaccines were close to euphoric in many cases. [0]
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/11/vaccines-...
ralph84
7 hours ago
> I don't know where people got the idea that vaccines prevent all infection, transmissions and symptoms.
The government propaganda when the Covid vaccines were launched said exactly that. Sure, people shouldn’t be so stupid to accept government propaganda at face value, but we know where people got the idea.
Terr_
7 hours ago
> The government propaganda when the Covid vaccines were launched said exactly that.
[Citation Needed]
Give us some links to clear examples, if you're right it should be super-fast and easy. (As opposed to the unfair task of proving a negative.)
ralph84
7 hours ago
Sure.
https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-business-health-governm...
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/05/21/politics/walensky-comment...
barbazoo
7 hours ago
For context, that was in June 2021, in August 2021 he said this:
> Let me be clear: There are cases where vaccinated people do get COVID-19, but they are far less common than unvaccinated people getting COVID-19. And most importantly, their conditions are far less severe.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/20...
Terr_
7 hours ago
So the "government propaganda" is... unprepared statements by individuals being live-interviewed, which were so unusual and against accepted-truth that they provoked immediate and public correction from mainstream news outlets, as well as corrections (or at least distancing) by the rest of the government?
Even a brief look at the context shows those are "exceptions that prove the rule."
I'm sure that for some people those incidents defined "what [they knew] the government said", but that would probably be because they put themselves into media-bubbles which excluded the greater mass of nuanced (and boring) health information, allowing only the "OMG look at this" scornful submissions by their Facebook friends.
ralph84
6 hours ago
> So the "government propaganda" is... unprepared statements by individuals
Yes, when those individuals are the president of the US and the director of the CDC presenting half-truths and exaggerations to further their agenda, that is textbook government propaganda.
Terr_
9 hours ago
I just wish one of the first few panels conveyed that the construction-plans were deliberately-incomplete and only described the outer shell.
Yeah, there's exposition later about the laser not being wired up, but it's a little late in the framing and suggests it could be wired up, as opposed to impossibly absent.
Krssst
6 hours ago
In my understanding the COVID vaccines were quite efficient against infection for the original strain. But then the virus mutated and it lost a lot of that (still a very efficient against ending up in an hospital bed).
Vaccine deniers seem to often forget about the timeline.