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0 pointsquesera3y ago0 comments

To your edit:

There's nothing controversial about saying that it'd be better if the COVID vaccines were better!

The COVID vaccines we have are measurably better than not having a COVID vaccine, and people had worse health outcomes if they believed (acted) otherwise.

Some narratives allow nuance and some do not. Public health communication is a very problematic place for nuance, and the natural nuance of science was weaponized to serve an agenda (which was sometimes blatantly dishonest) -- so avoiding nuance became a pragmatic approach to achieving better outcomes under existing circumstances.

If you felt cancelled for holding out for the complicated nuanced reality, I can sympathize with that feeling. I can also sympathize with those who believed that focusing on the nuance would, broadly, harm people!

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jonhohle3y ago· 1 in thread

Anything other than “trust the science” was eviscerated during the pandemic, as if “trust” had anything to do with science.

I’m hoping at this point we can agree that the efficacy and function of the available vaccines was overstated and the pressure campaign to take it may have been some of the most intense propaganda inflicted on a western nation in recent memory.

queseraOP3y ago

Trust is a social phenomenon. The pandemic was a huge social upheaval.

The best information available was being provided by epidemiologists and doctors and statisticians and researchers. It was messy and contradictory and confusing sometimes, especially in the beginning. Like science.

Other information was being provided by politicians and radio hosts and religious figures and somebody's uncle. It was speculative and invented and delusional and manipulated and dishonest sometimes, according to the whims of famous personalities and media outlets. Like gossip.

Given those options, "trust the science" is a pretty reasonable message.

Not "trust the science to have all the answers immediately and with complete accuracy and no amendments", because that is not science.

More like "trust the science over the gossip".

But I take your point. People don't understand science, so it's very easy for them to feel betrayed when science does its usual messy science things.

And of course there were stochastic parrots on either side.

That said, the "trust the science" parrots had better health outcomes than the "impeach fauci" parrots. This seems unlikely to be a coincidence -- and as a blunt social influence tool, it's reasonable to conclude that "trust the science" was the better choice of intense propaganda, if not as persuasive as we all would have liked.

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