https://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2021/08/23/lets_stop_pretending_about_the_covid-19_vaccines_791050.html
This is slightly long, but I found it to be well-written, honest, and pretty balanced, something sorely lacking in most media these days. @biobook what do you think?
I agree that it's well-written, and the author takes a sensible approach. And I agree with
@avromie7 that the main message is that communication about covid has been deficient.
I've criticized this here as well as IRL, especially last year, when we were given only few direct presentations from the CDC and relied mostly on various governors to keep us informed. There were 4 governors we watched on youtube, and I don't want to derail this by mentioning names, but although I appreciated the fact that they were trying to keep us informed, I was often exasperated and yelled at the screen, Stop with the jargon, nobody understands! You neglected to mention the most important point! You need a diagram to make that clear! Just create a simple animation to explain that! etc. It surprised me, because these politicians seemed to have access to top notch professionals able to formulate crystal messages in their ads during the election season, and I would have expected them to see the need for better messaging re:covid.
I just came across another situation where communication was poor, the safety cards in airplane seat pockets. Originally they were mostly text, but to get the message out quickly and unambiguously, they began to rely on pictures. A few years ago, a survey was given to see how well passengers understood these, and the scores ranged from 18-70%. Just one example, a picture of a woman removing high heel shoes near an escape slide (to avoid puncturing it) was interpreted by some people to mean one should remove all clothing before jumping onto that slide. The safety cards have been revised.
My point is that two people hearing the same message can walk away with a very different understanding of it. And because of this, anybody communicating with a large group has to be aware that the audience members vary in how they will be able to understand your message. So I'm sympathetic with the difficulty of clear communication to an especially large and diverse group, in this case, 300 million Americans with different backgrounds, language use, knowledge of science, etc.
One part of the solution is to provide simple, direct instructions that every single American can understand, and then provide more nuance for those able to understand it - on the website and in press conferences that get rewritten by journalists.
The author goes through 8 points where he thinks the experts miscommunicated, and explains how he translates that general message from the experts to advice for the individual patients he sees. His thinking seems rational, and if I disagree with a detail or two, I would consider these in the category of items where reasonable people can disagree because of the lack of data. (I've ignored the 9th point where he castigates the deliberate misinformation in social media. Sure, that's wrong, but this clashes with his overall theme of what the experts did wrong, and sounds to me like it came from an editor wanting to see some blame-the-other-side balance.)
But although I agree with him about poor communication and about the need to vaccinate, do more research on treatment, etc, there are two other aspects of his article where I don't see eye to eye with him. The first is some of the specific instances where he says that the expert advice was not understood. My question to those who have agreed with this- Do you mean that you personally misunderstood them? Or that you feel that your family/friends/Americans failed to understand the details of these messages? The reason I ask is because most of these are topics that were discussed here on DDF, so I would have imagined you yourself knew more about this than the simplified soundbite that some Americans may have relied on.
For example, he starts by saying "Let's stop pretending that the vaccines are 90% effective and that breakthrough infections are rare". But we've been following the effectiveness numbers in Israel since their first release, and have been posting breakthrough infections. These have also been discussed in the weekly White House/CDC briefings.
He says "Let’s stop pretending that it’s rare for vaccinated people to develop severe Covid-19 or die." Those cases were posted here in May, based on cases reported in the news media.
He claims people had an "expectation of bulletproof immunity". Huh? Who?
He says "Let’s stop pretending that a third booster is definitely going to help." We've been following the graphs from Israel every day here, looking at whether or not the data shows that third booster would help.
Do you feel
you were misinformed on these subjects? Or is just that you feel that the CDC should have made this more explicit somehow?
There's a second aspect of his article that I'm not sure I'd agree with, but I'll put that in another post.
