Discussion About Other Topics Split Off from Covid Vaccines in Canada

The Quarantine Zone
1

I get it. I’d vax my kid, but there are people out therr who aren’t crazy or ignorant who are thinking, “Ok, this vaccine was rushed through without any trials on children, without any long-term trials it would normally go through. After it was approved they discovered some blood clotting issues. Who knows what we’ll discover five or ten years after vaccination? Who knows what it might do to a child’s developing body after several years? So there is some risk. In the meantime, the risk of Covid for children appears to be very low. I think we’ll wait and see for a bit.”

Add to that general distrust of politicians and public experts who keep trying to manipulate the public by lying to them (such as early on telling them masks aren’t effective because they wanted to save them for health care workers, or saying that the virus isn’t airborne and anyone who says it is is lying, or saying it’s a conspiracy theory to believe it came from a lab in Wuhan and censoring people who say it), and you can understand how even smart but not scientifically educated people can draw the conclusion that for now they are keeping their kid out of it.

There are vaccine hesitant people on both sides of the political fence. One of the biggest moments for fostering distrust on the right was when the public health commumity said that lockdowns were critical, but if you were marching for BLM it was okay. In that moment, large swaths of people on the right simply stopped trusting public health officials, and the paranoid ones saw it as evidence that the whole thing was a political manipulation. It was a huge mistake to politicize the lockdowns in that way.

2

Public experts did not “lie” about these things.

Science relies on the best available information at the time, and when new information becomes available, science changes it’s mind and health experts change their recommendations. Changing advice based on new evidence is not “lying”.

3

When the WHO and CDC said masks were not useful for the public, they lied. They knew at the time that masks were effective, but didn’t want a run on masks by the public. So they lied.

When they originally said it wasn’t transmissable from human to human, they had plenty of evidence that it was. Taiwan had been seeing all kinds of transmissions, but the Chinese government forced the WHO to ignore Taiwan.

They claimed for months that the virus was not airborne when all the evidence we were seeing indicated it was. That led to probably billions spent on ineffective defenses like plexiglass shields, and effective strategies such as improving ventilation and filtering of air were ignored. They pretty much still are, because the political center of gravity is now focused on masks and lockdowns.

While COVID was transmitting around the world, the public health community claimed that travel bans were not necessary and were xenophobic, probably because Trump was one of the first to order them.

When they claimed that public protests over police brutality would not cause Covid spread but that Trump rallies would, a lot of people on the right stopped believing them then and there.

4

This is getting into conspiracy theory territory.

5

That’s quite a mishmash of stuff, don’t you think?

You’re mixing and matching between WHO and CDC (why is the CDC relevant in a discussion about Canadian health authorities, exactly?) and actual Canadian public health officials. You’ve got a point about a couple of the instances - most notably the early mask guidance and the weird reluctance on the part of WHO to admit airborne transmission is going on. But Canadian health officials have been talking about ventilation and the importance of differences between indoors and outdoors, etc. Plexi shields and the like were going up when we were concerned about surface transmission, because that’s the primary mode of transmission for colds/flu and we hadn’t yet learned that covid was different. It wasn’t till months later that we really understood how little transmission was happening via door knobs and the like.

And then some of these you’re not really representing accurately. Travel bans, for example. The public health community said that travels bans were not effective, not that they weren’t necessary. And specifically they were talking about travel bans focused on China, since that’s what people were proposing. And they were right. By the time people were considering Chinese travel bans, it was much too late for Chinese travel bans to have been effective. Almost all imported Canadian cases entered from the US, for example. Banning travel to China would have made very little difference to our first wave. Total travel bans would have been effective right from the start, but that’s not what public health officials were talking about when they said travel bans weren’t effective, because no one was proposing complete travel bans at that time.

And BLM protests? Where there actually any public health officials who said that the protests weren’t transmission risks? Or are you pointing out that some political leaders didn’t enforce public health measures in the context of the BLM protests to the extent that they did against similar gatherings in other contexts? Because one of those things is something a public health officials did, and the other is something politicians did, and those are two rather different things. And Trump rallies in Canada that concerned public health officials? When were these?

You seem to be repeating a lot of American conservative talking points without making mutatis mutandis adjustments for the context of this thread, if you ask me.

6

Yeah, I’m including public health experts around the world, not just in Canada.

For example, 1200 public health professionals signed this letter:

Titled “Open letter advocating for an anti-racist public health response to demonstrations against systemic injustice occurring during the COVID-19 pandemic,” the letter supports the protests because “White Supremacy” is supposedly more dangerous than COVID. Whether you think that’s true or not, I guarantee you most conservatives would not agree, and see this as left-wing political advocacy masquerading as public health. I hear it every day.

Also left unsaid was just how those protests were supposed to end White Supremacy. if you’re going to trade off one public health prevention for another, you better be sure the one you are sacrificing is made up for by the other. Does anyone think those protests did anything to stop White Supremacy? If anything, my opinion is that they made race relations worse and helped pave the way for white identity movements to counter them - a very bad consequence.

In any event, they aren’t the only ones. I remember seeing a picture of a bunch of doctors and nurses holding up a big sign saying, “We support the protests.” And twitter was full of health professionals claiming that the protests were necessary even with COVID, because racial injustice was apparently a larger immediate problem even though Covid had the potential to kill millions or tens of millions in a short period of time. And some who flatly claimed that because many of the protesters wore masks and were outside, there was no consequence for COVID at all.

At this same time, every Trump campaign stop was portrayed as a potential super-spreader event and the worst thing ever. You don’t need to like Trump to understand what that did to his supporter’s view of the credibility of the public health community. They can be completely wrong, even paranoid about it, and it doesn’t change the fact that their hesitancy was given a lot of ammo by this stuff.

You can add to that the first round of vaccine hesitancy from Democrats when it was ‘Trump’s’ vaccine.
Kamala Harris herself expressed skepticism of the vaccines - right until Trump was out of office. Then they became the best thing ever. Maybe that’s one reason why the black community seems to be the most hesitant about getting vaccinated.

People on the right see this stuff, and it either hardens their opposition to vaccines or confuses them as to what to believe, making them skeptical. You can hate Trump with every fiber of your being, and this is still true.

And since Canadian conservatives closely follow American conservatives, that stuff affects them too. I know - I’ve spent a lot of time telling them why they are wrong about the vaccines and why they should take them, and this is the kind of stuff they throw back at me. I wish it was all just conspiracy crap like Bill Gates’ supposed micro-chips, because that’s just stupid and easy to refute (and I have, and convinced people). But this stuff has enough truth to it that it’s hard to combat. And I put the blame squarely on the public health officials who suborned epidemiology to politics and destroyed their moral authority among half the population.

7

No one every said BLM protests “would not cause COVID spread”. In fact, lots of people worried about exactly that.

What they did say was that the risk of COVID spread in largely outdoors gatherings where most people were wearing masks was significantly lower than in indoor gatherings of people who explicitly rejected the notion of wearing masks. Which is of course trivially true, and ultimately supported by the real-world example that BLM protests were not, in fact, super spreader events, as distinctly opposed to several Trump rallies.

They also made the distinction between how necessary a Trump rally was as opposed to the BLM protests. Taking a small risk to protest for changes in racist policy is both qualitatively and quantitatively different from taking a larger risk to do nothing more than fluff Trump’s tiny ego.

But of course you’ll choose to ignore all that in pursuit of your narrative.

8

I mean, at this point you’re literally saying that conservatives don’t trust Canadian public health officials because (a bunch of stuff that happened in the US) and I’m sorry but that’s the very opposite of a compelling argument.

Oh, and your 1200 public health professionals there are just a collection of health workers, not public health officials. A random RN or anesthetist is not a public health official.

9

I’m sorry, @Sam_Stone I’m responding as if you were making these arguments yourself. I do understand that you are representing these are arguments being made by people who are deciding not to vax. But you are representing them as not entirely unreasonable, and I’m afraid that I must disagree. They’re based on a bunch of stuff that is at best misconstrued and at worst misrepresented or outright false.

10

Technically, they still don’t know that masks are effective.

It is known that masks filter out particles. It is known that barrier infection control prevents COVID infection. Masking has been shown to be effective as part of suite of general restrictions. It is postulated that masking may have been effective at just making people stay at home – or for some other reason.

Showing that “masks were effective” would require, not necessarily a double-blind study, but at least some kind of study isolating confounding factors. There has been more research done on masking in the last 2 years that was done in the previous 50 years, and those specific questions still don’t have known answers.

Reporting complex concepts like this to the public is difficult. Even the concept of “useful to the public” is much more complex than a single simple sentence.

11

Absolutely right. Especially when many members of the public think that scientists are “lying” when they change recommendations based on new evidence.

12

Not just American talking points but old American talking points. Some from a year ago. :roll_eyes:

13

But it’s still true today that a lot of people mistrust the CDC on covid. I mistrust the CDC on covid. They and the WHO have a really bad record, especially on the “it’s not airborne” thing.

Re the BLM rallies: at the time I thought they were a bad idea. And the CDC never said “they are fine”. But the data has since proved me wrong. They were outdoors, mostly masked, and turned out to have little impact on the spread. My state opened clinics providing free testing for little who went to the rallies. Lots of participants took advantage of that. They tested positive at the same rate as the population at large. Meanwhile, contact tracing showed that most spread was from indoors social events. That one actually is just a right wing taking point. But i suppose whether or not it’s true, it still hurts the credibility of the CDC.

14

Again, what the everloving f does the CDC have to do with the credibility of Canadian public health officials, such as NACI, Dr. Tam, or the various provincial Chief Medical Officers? If Albertans are ignoring the advice of Dr. Hinshaw because of something said by some CDC official last year, that’s a problem with the critical thinking skills of those Albertans, and not a fault of Dr. Hinshaw.

15

In my opinion, it was a distraction thrown into the thread on Canadian vaccines because the original talking point that Canadian federal and provincial governments badly handled the vaccine rollout had been thoroughly disproven by recent factual evidence.

16

This thread was broken off from the Canadian vaccination thread because, while these posts aren’t relevant to Canada, they seemed interesting in their own right.

17

@puzzlegal is exactly right.

There were complaints that the thread had drifted off topic with discussion about things that were only tangentially related to COVID vaccines in Canada. However, we felt the discussion was genuine and interesting, so we split those posts off. The alternative was to simply shut down the discussion as off topic and a hijack. Which, to be honest, would have been easier for us.

Hope this clarifies our reasoning.

18

How have we gotten to the point where “People believe the stupid lies we tell about you” is considered a failing of the people being lied about?

19

I didn’t say that.

And while i think the CDC has done a lot of things wrong, i don’t think they did anything wrong regarding the BLM protests. But even if they were blameless in that one instance, it’s still a problem for us, as a society, that a lot of people THINK they said something other than what they said.

20

Yes, it is a problem for us that a pack of lies told by liars would actually harm the credibility of an important institution like the CDC.