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COVID-19
- Thread starter Treetop Flyer
- Start date
Agree with all that. The issue is is when what is right for the whole may not be right for every individual that makes up that whole.
The public discourse has left no room for nuance. It shouldn't be the never ending drum beat from our elected and non-elected officials saying, "get vaccinated and boosted ASAP." It should be, "Please talk to your physician and determine whether or not the benefits of getting vaccinated outweigh the risks of not being vaccinated for you as an individual. If the benefits outweigh the risk for you as an individual, please consider getting vaccinated ASAP as percentage points are the difference between... etc etc."
One wonders whether this sensible approach would have been successfully implemented if the WH hadn’t poisoned that well from the outset. That’s the real tragedy in all of this.
I don't follow. Trump promoted some unpopular and dubious treatments, but I don't recall him down playing vaccinations.
Make you a deal. You answer my question and I'll answer yours. I'll even go first.
I'd create an operation called something like "Warp Speed 2" that leads the charge in creating a new vaccine. I'd encourage the elderly and fat to get in shape and quarantine themselves to whatever degree they feel necessary, along with anyone else who feels the need. I'd encourage folks to use N-95 masks that actually work and educate them on facts like cloth masks do more harm than good, so they need to get actual masks. I'd provide those masks free of charge as soon as the infrastructure existed to make them in sufficient quantities. Once the vaccine was determined to be safe, I'd encourage everyone to get it. I'd get it myself publicly.
I would not try to force people to do anything. I would give them the facts and the means to protect themselves in whatever ways they wanted, and let them make choices for themselves. They would live or die by those decision. I bet we'd get much higher uptake and less conspiracy theory BS, but I guarantee we wouldn't have a fraction of the downside to the existing policies.
The thing is, people dying by natural means like a virus is an unfortunate reality that we cannot escape. It's part of life. What we can do, however, is allow life to not suck for all the people who survive, and allow them to retain their freedoms and thrive. If you can save some small percentage of lives at the cost of dramatically degrading life for everyone else that remains, is that worth it to you? It's not for me.
Spekkio
He bowls overhand.
He stood up Operation Warp Speed, but TDS would have you believe that a bunch of senior cabinet officials and military leaders did this in spite of his orders.
I doubt you're going to find many people that will make the argument that the government's response was effective, consistent, and clearly articulated as it was being executed. Re: Trump and vaccines - IIRC, an issue some had was that they believed it took a significant amount of time for Trump to explicitly endorse getting vaccinated. I'm not saying I agree/disagree with the assessment of how long it took Trump to endorse vaccinations, and I'm not trying to opining on the pro/anti-vaccine debate, just that I remember it being a thing for some people. Just a data point on some people's opinion.
Anyways, you lose credibility on one topic, it likely affects people's perception of your credibility on other topics, even if the topics are unrelated. You're an elected official and you lose credibility, all elected officials will lose credibility with some people, just because they are other elected officials.
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Sigh
*sigh*
Seriously, educate yourself on the process. It's byzantine, for better or worse. The CDC's formal role doesn't kick in until after it is approved by the FDA.
And I guarantee you will not find an official government assertion in the summer of 2020 that the vaccine was going to be 94% effective, from the CDC or anyone else.
Promoting dubious treatments and saying the pandemic is going to end soon is downplaying the vaccine. Why get an "experimental" shot if I can take Ivermectin and Vitamin D and this will all be over next month anyway?
It further confused the messaging coming out of government.
Who cares if the CDC said it? The point they’re making is that the vaccine was advertised to be over 90% effective.
Which it was, in the very beginning. My (oft repeated) question is now that the shot clearly isn't as effective as before, what is being done about it? Or, are we just going to wait until it's completely ineffective to develop an update for new variants, because- up to that point- the Mark 1 Mod 0 shot was "still good enough"? Wouldn't higher effectiveness achieve a good result (R0 < 1) with fewer doses of the shot?
I personally think it's disingenuous to say we don't need an update because the vaccine still works above some murky threshold. You're just asking people do continue doing the same thing and expecting a different result. If there's difficulty producing an update to the shot, just say so. Either way, we can do better than this.
I really, really, really hope we never encounter the scenario I outlined, but if we do, I think we will have crossed the boundary from protect my freedoms to strangers are shot just to be sure. The absolute worst would be if it was like the Spanish Flu, which took young people's lives.
It's a hard thing to imagine, a virus that kills 9% of infected but spreads like Omicron, but it is absolutely possible without even coming from a Wuhan bio lab. This is Omicron's case rate on the right surge. Multiply it by a bunch since no one would have immunity. Maybe 200,000 dead per day? If people went about their lives as normal, but there is no way that would happen.
You wouldn't have to tell people to adopt NPIs while waiting for the vaccines. Remember how many people freaked out when we flew some Ebola patients home from Africa?
My approach would have been to follow the Pandemic Playbook that existed prior Covid-19 hitting. Use the Pandemic 101 approach of NPIs and controls to catch it and drive it down to trackable levels, testing to know where the virus was (you can't control what you don't measure) and contact tracing with local controls to put out fires while waiting for the vaccine. No contradictory messaging from top leadership directly undermining public health efforts. Warp Speed for vaccines was great. Full court pressure on treatments too.
If you wanted to destroy our society, then you would put out contradictory messaging continuously to split the response on politics, you'd not test so you wouldn't have any intel to know what the enemy virus was up to, and you'd half-ass the controls and support of a vaccine so the virus would mill about in the population as long as possible, breeding as many new variants as possible, steadily grinding down the health system so when a serious new variant hit we'd be out of health care Schlitz.
I wonder if our foreign enemies are taking note.
Isn't this what we tried? We locked down, had mando masks, tried contact tracing, tested as much as we could given constraints (including something as simple as folks not going to get tested voluntarily).. except for leaving out the contradictory messaging and perhaps trying harder to test more, what would you do different than what we tried and didn't work?
No, we failed pretty miserably. Yes on the lockdowns (although lesson learned for the next one, close the international air travel), but the testing was a humongous monumental failure. Our first tests were crappy, and we had all of this bureaucracy that got in the way of creating ones that worked. Then we lifted the lockdowns before we had control or knowledge of what the virus was doing. Flying blind. The mask supply chain wasn't ready either. If we had had the same access to KN95s and better that we have now...
We never gave ourselves a fighting chance to wrestle this thing into control. I worry that we won't learn the lessons offered.