What's most surprising to me is how willing journalists are to completely suspend their disbelief. During covid the authorities loudly proclaimed that vaccines were 99% effective, provided durable immunity (years!), and that vaccinated people would not spread covid themselves.
But what was amazing to me, at the time, that journalists refused to ask basic questions like:
- If the vaccine is brand new, how can we possibly know how many years the protection will last?
- Coronaviruses mutate rapidly, and because of that people are unable to build long lasting natural immunity and because of that we've never been able to create a conventional vaccine for coronaviruses. If RNA vaccines trigger a natural immune response that doesn't provide lasting immunity, just like conventional vaccines, how can we be so sure these new vaccines will be durable in the face of mutations?
- How can we know that vaccinated people are no longer able to spread covid, when we haven't done trials that demonstrate that, because such trials are forbidden (because you can't do trials where you intentionally expose healthy people to a disease).
This is not an angry rant about vaccinations or about covid. I'm vaccinated, it was fine. This is about how journalism fails during a crisis, and how patriotism (i.e. encouraging people to get vaccinated, with truth, lies, whatever it takes) takes precedence over doing their actual job (i.e. informing the people). And government agencies will grab and hold on to power when they're no longer kept in check by real journalists. The annoying kind that asks tough questions.
You describe the "greatest PR coup in human history", but I think the simple explanation is that it's easy to have great PR when journalists do your PR work for free.
I feel like you only need to read the comments below the article to remember why the media has no idea how to report on this. Apparently it is hard to teach people that vaccination could save their life, and that it gives vastly better outcomes than waiting to get COVID “naturally”. And yet we have vast amounts of data to show that.
Besides, why does it feel that many people have an end goal of ‘best antibodies without the benefit of a vaccine’ rather than, say, ‘actually enjoying a disease-free life’?
>Yet when a journalist calls up a scientist and say "What do you think?" and the scientist says "These could have an effect on virulence or transmission or antibody neutralization," somehow that gets translated in to "It's making the virus more virulent"
This has been an incredibly large issue for almost a year now and it's ridiculous. Journalists not understanding the way scientists speak was vaguely understandable ten months ago, but after a year straight of science being the number one news maker in the world it's obvious that the media is just use it as an excuse to scare-monger and increase their clicks.
Literally every day in the last few weeks I've had to explain to someone that vaccines will almost certainly have a profound impact on if people can transmit the virus because the news articles keep taking the "We don't have data yet on how it impacts transmission" and reporting that as the worst case scenario, when in all likelihood it will profoundly diminish people's ability to transmit the virus.
That's not what's being questioned. It's not about the vaccines effectiveness. It's about Trust.
The point being, this type of "science" being published like this (i.e., absolutely no recognition of its bogusness) only widens the trust gap. It only confirms the perceptions of those with questions.
Put another way: Why are so many "journalists" and "scientists" repeatedly going to such extremes based on so little?
Regardless of what you do or don't believe about Covid, the vaccines, etc. this pattern of propaganda should be a concern. In time the pandemic will pass. On the other hand, these type of behavior normalizations tend to persist. No one should be comfortable about such things.
Not only that, but there seems to be a campaign against the press actually informing people about how limited the effectiveness of the vaccine is. The stat that actually matters is the relative reduction in risk of vaccinated people catching Covid-19 compared to unvaccinated - it's what dictates things like whether it's possible to provide herd immunity, and whether events that would turn into superspreading incidents without vaccination still will now. But there's this narrative being pushed that it's wrong and misleading based on nonsense stats like the total percentage of cases which were unvaccinated over a time period that includes a major wave which ended before widespread vaccinations were available, or the absolute risk of someone who's vaccinated catching it (which is worthless as it depends mostly on the prevalence of the virus, and Covid spreads exponentially).
This all seems to be done in order to blame unvaccinated people - and more specifically unvaccinated Republican voters - for the fact that Covid is still spreading and causing deaths and economic damage. (Vaccination rates are also dangerously low amongst black Democrat voters, but of course it'd be politically unacceptable to blame them in the same way). The press keeps pushing the narrative that we could end Covid and all the damage it's doing if not for those evil unvaxxed people, even though this doesn't seem to be borne out by the experience of countries with higher vaccination rates or the scientific evidence.
Well, in salmon30salmon's defence: the mainstream media are completely and utterly missing in action when it comes to COVID.
They only parrot what the gov tells them and investigate nothing these days.
There are countless credible scientists saying that we are getting this incredibly wrong on so many levels yet mainstream media does not mention anything other than government narrative.
When did you see any news coverage of criticism of the "vaccine"? I mean, on a scientific level, not government ineptitude at rolling it out.
Edit: I can't reply for some reason but here's a video talking about the "vaccine"[0] and here's the Great Barrington Declaration[1]. Here is criticism from the BMJ [2] stating that (according to my maths) it's only 19% effective... in addition, it's designed to TREAT the symptoms, not cure you... what kind of vaccine is that?
This is because this institutions, instead of doing their job, engage in "modern journalism" or in lobby for the farma industry. And then when the truth surfaces, their credibility plummets.
Why it is so hard instead of saying "this vaccine is safe" to say " until now there are no reported effects" ?
Ah yes, the venerable journalists at “biznews” hard at work.
Honestly, why do you think anyone here would take the advice of some random Wordpress site?
Also, natural immunity is variable whereas a vaccine gives standard coverage without having to measure everyone to see if they meet some sort of baseline natural immunity level. Additionally, vaccines don’t run the risk of killing you compared to an active Covid infection which very much can! The proposition of natural immunity over fast, effective, safe vaccines is preposterous on its face.
Why would they do that when it's not certain that the vaccine will work against the virus. I would suspect such news promoting hesitancy and people waiting a while longer.
Give me a break. These articles have journalists quoting medical experts speculating on possible and past documented problems resulting from a rushed vaccine process, and the (then factually unjustified) lab leak theory that experts in field also declined to give airtime to because there was no evidence to support it.
It's in no way equivalent or even comparable to what GOP leaders around the country are doing right now. 99 percent of people dying of COVID right now are unvaccinated and for huge numbers of those people it was a choice. That's blood on the anti-vax crowd's hands plain and simple.
Yes, unfortunately it seems a theory or piece of news is memory-holed, banned, or otherwise stigmatized, and then even if evidence and facts show up later, retractions/corrections are rarely made. I remember reading Milan Kundera's "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting", and I cannot help but have weird vibes given the current zeitgeist, censorship, science arguments from authority vs. backing experiments and data, and the attempted mandating actions of the state.
I remember when there was early evidence that the bio-distribution of the vaccine spike was making it to areas other than the injection site and that there were no data to of Pfizer/Moderna bio-distribution found on the internet. A petition by concerned scientists to see this data was file in June 2021[3]. Nobody was accusing that it had not been done, but that the data was not made available for peer review. The people who wrote, blogged, or YouTubed these questions simply saying we should look into this, were silenced by media/big tech.
And now this October, a lab study from Sweden showed that the spike protein (from the virus or vaccine) can make its way into the nucleus of the cell in an in vitro (petri dish vs. in vivo, in clinical subject's bodies) study contrary to current and past hypotheses and evidence, is not at the forefront of the news to at least have other labs verify or falsify this study. It raises the issue of it interfering with DNA repair mechanisms in the cell nucleus. Meanwhile, after a study of less than 3000 children, we are pushing the vaccine on a very low risk group of 5 to 11-year-olds and villainizing parents who either had COVID or willingly took the vaccine and are exercising rational caution. There is no long-term safety data for any of the COVID vaccines, period. So why are news outlets and big pharma able to say things like, "it's 100% safe" without being censored?[4]
This kind of reporting on vaccines is the kind of thing that bugged me even before Covid. It's as if the media likes to keep the 'good' facts out for controversy to continue (obviously I don't think that's what's happening, I'm just blaming incompetence).
It always only takes one number to silence the debate, and it's always missing. E.g. "new mumps epidemic, kills 200, wave of low trust against vaccines to blame". Maybe. Maybe not? You could clear this up instantly by also reporting how many of those dead were unvaccinated, and then it's crystal clear. But that kind of info is never in the story.
> I have a hard time believing you somehow missed fauci or Walenski or ALL of the mainstream media going on for months about the vaccine preventing transmission
I guess I did. Axios has been my primary news source, along with New York Times and The Guardian/Wapo once in a while. Most of the time I just Google my way to the information I'm looking for. I don't consume any TV based news, or Twitter based news or any other such social media news, appart for HackerNews. I also generally went directly to the CDC website, and didn't use retellings from other publications or press conference.
John Hopkins FAQ on the vaccine at the time. It states:
> Although the phase 3 clinical trials are designed to determine whether vaccinated individuals are protected against disease, it will also be important to understand whether vaccinated individuals are less likely to transmit the virus. This is likely but not ensured.
So that's at least one expert source corroborating my impression. I can't remember where I landed when I would have looked this up in 2020, but John Hopkins is a likely place I might have found.
> They had no science backing those claims
While I don't know why I didn't get the impression any official expert source told me it would prevent transmission and you feel many of them did tell you it would. I do still feel I need to make a correction on what you're saying. There's definitely science backing up the idea that vaccines can reduce transmission. It's based on historically observed outcomes from prior vaccines for other diseases, as well as on transmission models around herd immunity.
The idea that the mRna vaccines would for sure prevent transmission had no evidence, but there was scientific based prior for thinking it might at least reduce transmission, specifically of the exact strain it targets.
> The mRNA COVID vaccines need to be withdrawn from the market. No one should get them. No one should get boosted. No one should get double boosted. They are a dangerous and ineffective product at this point.
How is that not "doubting the efficacy of coronavirus vaccines"?
Please, if there is any misinformation in the article, tell us where it is.
IMO a number of high profile politicians and corporate media are also guilty of misinformation.
Eg 'pandemic of the unvaccinated'. This seems to equate no immunity with naturally acquired immunity, and must surely be misinformation, but much of the media is blind to it.
Not the poster you are replying to, but I'll bite, out of curiosity about your thinking...
> Is this offering anything more substantive than you own bias and suspicions?
My take-away from the article is that they found all the bits of the immune system primed for long term protection after covid infections. Which is not entirely unexpected, this is what happens with sars, also.
> Is there any response that could get you to consider that the comment "anything which doesn't make people more fearful must be suppressed" is as harmful or even more harmful than the media itself?
I got pretty fed up the news other day when the front page of the BBC led with the an article about leaked CNN memo and three unnamed employees who were fired for not getting vaccinated, and another about Jennifer Aniston apparently cutting off contact with unvaccinated friends. I felt manipulated. I consider stuff like this to be propaganda, not news. It reminded me that I need better sources for covid information, like statnews.com, to get away from such things.
I'd rather see more facts and less adjectives in the news. I'd rather that politicians justify their actions based on numbers, not vague statements. It doesn't seem like the general public is trusted with the facts, but are rather fed a lot of alarmist information.
I imagine the parent poster's assumption is that it would be front page if this study said that natural immunity expires quickly, but we won't see this good news about long lasting immunity on the front page.
"The avalanche of claims (which could top 100,000 if the government were to admit liability) and their severity has shocked ACC staff to such an extent that a great many staff members are rightfully concerned that they should not be compelled to vaccinate or boost."
"Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has famously told the public that “the Government should be your sole source of information”, in her words all other sources of information especially social media are worthless “grains of salt”."
"the number of people suffering from vaccine injuries is so large, that almost everyone has a few friends, (I have almost a dozen), who have succumbed to serious injury."
"The turning point appears to be the case of a 17 year old girl who died from a stroke immediately following vaccination in September last year. A media hack quickly picked this up and questioned Jacinda Ardern at her press conference. Jacinda immediately and forcefully responded that the medical event was unrelated to vaccination. She described the media questioning as irresponsible. Her reply appeared designed to squash any narrative that could cause vaccine hesitancy.
This strong response, which was probably not based on any proven information about the case, had the unfortunate effect of setting the tone for all government departments—absence of risk from Covid vaccines became an accepted stance and came to dominate government media advertising."
"The Science Media Centre was set up in 2002 to specifically undermine opposition to GM crops by offering courses and talks for media science correspondents given by qualified ‘experts’. A central plank of the Science Media Centre is the idea that there are certain areas of science where there cannot be two sides to an argument."
While the scientific data has been clear (absolute risk reduction of vaccines about 1% for the early strains of the virus) the public discourse seems totally detached from the science.
People are still saying things like "I'd rather get the jab instead of Covid.", which shows that they are not aware of the possibility that they can still get Covid. I think this is the result of a massive bias in the media that did not allow even mentioning the slightest fact that makes the vaccines seem not so awesome.
And we haven't even started to talk about the myocarditis risk for young males.
But what was amazing to me, at the time, that journalists refused to ask basic questions like:
- If the vaccine is brand new, how can we possibly know how many years the protection will last?
- Coronaviruses mutate rapidly, and because of that people are unable to build long lasting natural immunity and because of that we've never been able to create a conventional vaccine for coronaviruses. If RNA vaccines trigger a natural immune response that doesn't provide lasting immunity, just like conventional vaccines, how can we be so sure these new vaccines will be durable in the face of mutations?
- How can we know that vaccinated people are no longer able to spread covid, when we haven't done trials that demonstrate that, because such trials are forbidden (because you can't do trials where you intentionally expose healthy people to a disease).
This is not an angry rant about vaccinations or about covid. I'm vaccinated, it was fine. This is about how journalism fails during a crisis, and how patriotism (i.e. encouraging people to get vaccinated, with truth, lies, whatever it takes) takes precedence over doing their actual job (i.e. informing the people). And government agencies will grab and hold on to power when they're no longer kept in check by real journalists. The annoying kind that asks tough questions.
You describe the "greatest PR coup in human history", but I think the simple explanation is that it's easy to have great PR when journalists do your PR work for free.
reply