I feel this way about the vaccine. “95% effective at preventing infection” etc etc. I really believed it would stop transmission which we also know now is not true. Should have been more skeptical.
And before you say “that was before variants” remember that wasn’t the messaging. The message was “it’s safe and effective and protects others” and also “employer: based on what the CDC says take the vaccine or lose your job”
A lot of damaged trust in institutions these last few years.
It did lower transmission. Multiple studies confirmed this.
> remember that wasn’t the messaging
Yes, it wasn’t, because it’s generally considered bad practice to attempt to predict the future, and if they had you’d be complaining about them attempting to predict the future.
> the message was “it’s safe and effective and protects others”
All of the data agrees with this statement.
> A lot of damaged trust in institutions these last few years
The damage and trust lost was caused more by opportunistic politicans and mentally ill people than anything done by "institutions" assuming you mean Pfizer.
>I feel this way about the vaccine. “95% effective at preventing infection” etc etc. I really believed it would stop transmission which we also know now is not true.
The messaging was always that it would reduce the severity of the infection, not that it would stop transmission.
Manufacturers, CDC, etc. were explicitly clear about the difference between preventing infection and preventing severe illness upfront. If you heard, "How can you be so cruel? Take it for grandma," and went along with it thinking that that meant transmission is prevented, then you received that "message" from someone who - for lack of a better phrase here - was not an "official" messenger and/or was speaking out of ignorance, and you then opted to read no further into the accuracy of that statement yourself.
There are countless videos out there of officials touting that "the vaccinated do not transmit covid" but not that the goalposts have shifted, we're supposed to forget all about it.
Does "officials" mean the manufacturers and the bodies that approved the vaccines for use? Or does it mean politicians who spoke out of ignorance and/or opportunism?
when talking about mistrust, lying politicians are a fair target. There has been a lot of that going around this pandemic. If the argument is that the politicians lied but the CDC, WHO and other bodies did not... well I don't know what to tell you, they definitely did get caught lying. repeatedly.
The fact that people turn to sophistry in defense of valid criticisms is evidence enough that people were mislead. Never mind whether it was intentional or out of ignorance. 95% effective at what? Preventing death? Preventing serious disease? Preventing spread? Preventing variants? The truth has come out and it was far from "95% effective" at anything.
The first large peer-reviewed clinical trial published in NEJM in Dec 2020 had around 43,000 subjects and in that population there was about a 95% reduction in cases vs placebo. Over time, it is clearer that the effectiveness with respect to the all-cases end-point is less. But that appears to be less a function of lying and more a function of the incremental way in which biomedical science asymptotically approaches the truth through iterative study and better understanding of confounding variables etc.
It’s not sophistry to point out that someone has unrealistic expectations.
Furthermore, you can’t ask yourself a bunch of questions and then ignorantly answer them all with “no” when vaccine efficacy studies set a clear definition of “effective”.
> vaccine efficacy studies set a clear definition of “effective”.
Those definitions changed after it became clear that the original definitions -- those on the basis of which the vaccines were authorized, and people pressured into obtaining them -- were not met.
If anyone had unrealistic expectations, it was policy-makers.
It doesn't matter. What matters is that we don't see the number 100 anywhere, so one shouldn't pretend that anyone said the vaccine is 100% effective at anything with regard to prevention. If you decide to pretend someone did say that, it's not their fault.
Is honest discussion what you're trying to do? Did you expect to change the original poster's mind with a line-by-line list asserting the opposite of their own assertions? I find such posting kind of rude personally and almost never read such posts.
I would say what NIH put out may have been "propaganda". But propaganda for a good reason: Saving the civilization. Think Will Smith/I am a Legend. So far we know that vaccines did very little harm and very much saved lives. And they saved lives because many people believed what NIH was saying. In other words they made a good effort in good faith.
Of course if they go too inaccurate they will lose their credibility which is not good. So why would they do so, I think they didn't.
Certainly there was great cause for concern and need for prudence in the early days of the pandemic, but COVID-19 was never an end-of-the-world scenario. Your appeal to I am Legend reinforces the parent's argument.
>So far we know that vaccines did very little harm and very much saved lives. And they saved lives because many people believed what NIH was saying. In other words they made a good effort in good faith.
You are begging the question: did the benefits outweigh the cost?
To answer this, we need good data, unencumbered scientific debate, and time. There is reason to suspect at least some of the data and processes used to authorize vaccines were of poor quality, or perhaps even subverted; it is hopefully clear that scientific debate is more restricted than usual; and, we have not had time to observe any long-term effects of vaccines, especially on populations for which the risk of COVID-19 is extremely small (e.g. children).
There is a vast middle-ground between anti-vaxxer and vax-maximalist that a reasonable and prudent person can occupy.
>Of course if they go too inaccurate they will lose their credibility which is not good. So why would they do so, I think they didn't.
You are presupposing that our institutions are rational actors, and that they are acting deliberately. Institutions can fail to perform their essential functions without malice. A conspiracy is not required for a more-dangerous-than-COVID vaccine policy to have taken place.
Whether or not this actually happened is a matter of nuanced debate.
> You are begging the question: did the benefits outweigh the cost?
Certainly a retrospective is needed, I assume somebody is doing it. But even if it turned out that benefits did not outweigh the cost, that was unknowable at the beginning of the pandemic.
Therefore it was prudent and wise to err on the side of caution. Hindsight is 20-20. We know and knew that vaccines work. Vaccines save lives. That fact has not changed because of Covid has it?
In the US > 1 million people died because of Covid. Most of them unvaccinated. Without vaccines it could have been millions more deaths. And with less anti-vaccine propaganda, and better pro-vaccine propaganda, it would probably been many fewer deaths.
So rather than simply pondering (and suggesting) the question of whether "benefits outweighed the cost" we need to also consider the alternative-cost. How many more would have, or could have, died without the vaccines?
>So rather than simply pondering (and suggesting) the question of whether "benefits outweighed the cost" we need to also consider the alternative-cost. How many more would have, or could have, died without the vaccines?
Agreed. But you are not actually speaking to my point. My point is that you cannot assert the vaccines were net-positive at this time.
I think there is clear evidence about the benefits of Covid vaccines and very little evidence of their negative effects. There are both of course but the scientific and medical communities must provide their recommendations after weighing on the pros and cons.
Now of course I could neglect their advise, and adopt your, or anybody else's advise instead, if you have one. Would that make much sense to me? Who's advise should I follow? Those who suggested that "injecting bleach" might kill the virus. I think I BETTER follow the advise of the established medical and scientific community.
I can't prove to you they are 100% correct all of the time. But it makes rational sense to me and everybody to follow their advise, rather than any random layman's advise out there.
The clear evidence about benefits of Covid-vaccines to me is that most of the million+ people who died of Covid were unvaccinated and many more millions of people who were vaccinated did not die or get seriously ill.
So how many millions of people did get bad side-effects from the vaccine? I haven't seen that number, was it in the millions?
But millions of people did get bad "side effects" (they died) from following the advise of those who told them to be afraid of the vaccine, to treat the pandemic as a "democratic hoax".
1. Actual rewards in gov for success. In the public sector, the smartest people try nothing new and do not innovate because that would be a dumb thing to do, as you are punished for failure and not rewarded for success.
Someone who delivers a big win should get a big bonus. The problem is that when that has happened, some article will get written and managers will get in trouble over it.
2. Tolerance for missteps, delays, and schedule changes.
I spend 2 weeks fixing a hard to solve bug for my private sector unicorn? No big deal. Maybe talk about it a bit in retro and move on.
In my public sector job? At least three meetings on why we missed the sprint goal. Why? As someone above wants to cover their ass on missing the sprint goal. And we will write up a several page doc on why we missed the sprint goal.
Someone takes a chance on a much cheaper contractor and it doesn't work out? They can't be dragged to meeting after meeting having to defend it. That is how you get people hiring IBM for failed project after failed project, because at least they can say "IBM is the standard practice."
Back to the idea that public servants are indeed servants to the public, and their entire purpose is to spend the public's money in a way that benefits the public.
I've heard horror stories on HN which would justify your cynicism, and agree that corruption is a problem. See also issues with police and accountability.
You might be surprised, however, at what percentage of federal bureaocracy does see themselves as civil servants.
The culture shift can be done. And it is well worth it, for everyone's sake. Corruption represents a Nash equilibrium, once rooted it is very hard to remove.
That's why I'm defending government workers here. We want good, effective government. This requires good, effective people to carry out the work. Making this respectable and letting those people do their job is pretty key to getting that good government.
The principles aren't so different from managing a team of software engineers. Would you enjoy working (in software) in a company where sales and marketing was always blaming the engineers, and HR was always calling the engineers lazy, and management was constantly shifting priorities while blaming engineers for not hitting targets, etc...
So why create the same environment for government workers? Why not treat them with the same professional respect you'd expect/hope for in your job?
And why not call out the politician as the a*hat when he insults the people trying to get the job done?
The major news outlets are just mouth pieces for the intelligence communities. Many of us learned that with the Iraq war. Others learned it with Palestine, Russiagate. The rest will learn it soon enough.
Legalization isn't like fixing climate change or curing cancer. It is literally just a question of getting enough voters and politicians to agree that the current laws are stupid. A 79-year-old President signing this pardon is actually a huge step in forming that consensus.
Voters already agree the laws need to change. It's congress holding us back against the will of the people who elected them. Republicans have already spoken out against this pardon.
Well, that's to be expected. If it was The Orange Man who'd done this, you can take an educated guess at who'd be speaking out against it. Congress is a middle school playground.
This was not symbolic. There are thousands of people for whom this action is the farthest thing from symbolic. Thousands of people who will be released from cages and able to see their families again. This pardon is absolutely making a difference in a lot of people's lives. If the justice department reschedules the drug, and other states pardon their prisoners as he's asked them to then the impact will be much much greater.
I haven't tried setting up PiHole yet. Does it "break" any of the interwebz for me in the way client-side ad blockers sometimes can? Any pitfalls I need to be aware of?
I use pi-hole and am grateful for it, but it breaks lots of online commerce sites (e.g. Amazon) in ways that irritate my wife, who then comes to me to file her grievances and tech support request.
This is AFAICT because it blocks "sponsored product placement" type ads — which are indeed ads, but which some users are deriving value from (at least so they think), and want to see.
(Luckily the admin dashboard makes it fairly easy to deal with these, but usually I "don't have time" right then and just disable it for x minutes.)
Ublock origin is the best here, since it blocks trackers and ads while still allowing you to temporarily click to bypass the screen that stops you from visiting a tracker (eg. a marketing shortlink or ad that you actually are interested in).
Exactly. I have pi-hole and maybe one every month I have to go to the web interface and click the link to disable blocking for five minutes while I use some kind of shady software.
If it's something I use often I might spend the time to look through the logs and work out the correct domain to unblock.
But there are also handy "disable for 10s/30s/5m" functions which just let me get on with my day.
We’re already seeing a huge disparity between states, with strong enforcement of social distancing NOT correlating with a reduced death rate. The point is we don’t fully know yet what the best policy will be.
By leaving it up to the states, we’re creating a distributed system where there can be failure without bringing down the whole country.
It's entirely possible that it doesn't have a huge effect on the death rate, though. It almost seems like there are two seperate but linked sets of outbreaks: one in the general population with a low death toll, and one in places like nursing homes and hospitals with a high death toll. Social distancing measures targeting the general population don't appear to have so much effect on the other, more deadly spread.
That depends on which social distancing measures you're referring to. The results of contact tracing indicate that large indoor gatherings such as concerts, nightclubs, and sporting events do cause a lot of virus transmission. But there has never been any direct evidence that closing beaches and parks has a significant effect.
> social distancing NOT correlating with a reduced death rate.
The point is to reduce the infection rate so that the total number of hospitalizations (Covid19 or otherwise) does not exceed the healthcare system's capacity. I doubt your uncited claim here is comparing apples to apples.
> The idea of a container approach is to always start from a pristine state. So you define the configuration that your database server needs to have, and you launch it, in this precise state each time. This makes your infrastructure predictable.
I’ve tried this before, but there’s still a lot of overhead maintained the pristine state. For example troubleshooting why a python package won’t run, you end up I installing and upgrading a lot of other packages. You’re not sure if that helped or it was something else — now what? You’ll spend time wondering if you want to carry your changes over or deal with the drift.
And before you say “that was before variants” remember that wasn’t the messaging. The message was “it’s safe and effective and protects others” and also “employer: based on what the CDC says take the vaccine or lose your job”
A lot of damaged trust in institutions these last few years.