I really feel that many of the issues with mRNA vaccines and health studies in general are generalizations like “safe and effective”. Everything has statistical risks and benefits, and we should just share those front and center with people. Eg test results for X mean you have a Y% chance of having X, given your history and symptoms and other results. Here are low cost low risk marginal things you can do to improve statistical significance.
Similar for vaccines, just give us the numbers clearly and upfront.
This bypasses regulators from having to make claims beyond “we reviewed the data and agree with these numbers and feel that this should not be banned.” I do think it would also help to separate something “not banned” and being “required to be covered by insurance” or “required for professions like the military”. I think trying to simplify things makes things worse, because this abstraction is not real.
Yes, but the point of science/health communication sources is to communicate. People aren't going to spend an afternoon figuring out where to find medical trial results, learn how to read them with a bunch of unknown terms, and form a risk tolerance analysis. I know this. You know this. Everyone know this.
The health and science communicators must improve how they communicate with the public.
State public health education and advocacy campaigns.
If a drug manufactuer runs a commercial, they are legally required to include risks and references to relevant information. If a state rep or PR manager does it, they can literally lie as far as I am aware.
> Ultimately though, if people really care, they should be parsing through study results
Absolutely hate this framing. I care but I don’t have the requisite education to understand what I’m reading. I need it explained by someone who has taken up that specialization.
But to say that because I have walked another path in life that I don’t care?!? Because I have chosen a different specialization?? Deeply insulting AND untrue AND unrealistic. Our society is based on specialization at this point. If we cannot rely on each other for these basic communication tasks, then society must be dead, eh?
Turn that around: you're asking for someone to make something understandable to you despite your not having the background to make an informed decision.
That process, by definition, in the perfect case, includes someone summarizing/simplifying concepts.
And that process is extremely difficult to do without bias, summarization being an information-loss activity, etc.
So essentially, you're asking for an impossible standard of communication.
Additionally, I'd point out that the basics^ of biology, immunology, pathology, and epidemiology aren't that complicated, if you're a reasonably intelligent person.
Grasping the basics of mRNA transcription, viral fragment encoding, immune system functioning, and the purpose and effects of various common vaccine adjuvants is ~20 hours of internet research.
Which is one of the reasons it really gets my goat when so many anti-vaccine folks appear not to have made any educational effort before crystalizing their loud opinions.
^ As distinct from the details, which require a lifetime to comprehend
> I care but I don’t have the requisite education to understand what I’m reading. I need it explained by someone who has taken up that specialization.
They did explain it! Here's what it sounded like: "We have thoroughly researched these treatments and found them to be generally safe and effective, and well-worth the potential risks for people who fit profile X Y Z, but closer individualized medical consideration is warranted for people who fit profile P Q R."
That's why they say: "these medicines are found to be safe and effective after thorough study, and for patients who meet X Y Z criteria, they are worth taking, and for patients who meet P Q R criteria, you should consult your doctor."
It's perfectly clear.
Or are you arguing that people need to know the numbers but have no obligation/ability to actually figure out what they mean?
You can just do both. "Here are the reports, here are the numbers simplified, and here is our declared risk analysis.
Yet, whenever I try to look up anything with regards to health/medicine, I find dozens of people/orgs repeating the last bit, and the first bits are hard to come across if you dont already know where to look. Its so avoided that im not surprised some people think its intentionally hidden.
Saying something is safe is a declared risk tolerance, it is not actually communicating the risk. It only works if the people you are talking to already trust your judgement.
Okay so you're upset that people propagate the easy-to-understand information much more thoroughly than the super technical hard-to-understand information?
Im not upset. My critique is that societal health communicators are doing a poor job at communicating risk, and instead fall back on just making the claim that something is safe and everyone should listen to them.
Taking a complex topic and distilling it into simple, consumable bites that your audience can injest is what communication is. Yet, so much communication takes the easy route of "the public cant possibly understand this, well just say its safe or unsafe".
If you see this as an unavoidable, then I see the breakdown of trust of these institutions to be unavoidable too, as their ability to communicate is too poor.
They publish information at every level of specificity and detail!
Anyone who is actually curious and not just doing this lazy meta-commentary game could find all the information they need at any level of specificity or technicality they want.
You are being too patient. Reading this, just look at their contradictory behavior, one one hand they thrice called you lazy, curious, and upset (all ad hominems, attacks on motive), meanwhile they outwardly frame themselves as a steward of science institutional literacy/legitimacy and passive-aggressively "shoulding" everyone else, twisting that expressing any critique is just failing to use "information". There's two reasons someone will act this way, either they are afraid of the antivaxxers (certainly, a serious problem) and think a hostile approach works (it does not), or they have vested interests in the current institutional/bureaucratic order -- which goes back to the problem you were trying to point out. It's the 21st century version of scientism.
“Government must inject information directly into my brain at precisely my literacy and curiosity and intelligence level. Failure to do so is THEIR fault, and not an indictment of my literacy, curiosity, or intelligence.”
No, government must not do any such thing. They must back away, as my literacy, curiosity and intelligence is not their business in the slightest. Nobody owes anything to government, especially trust. But if "government" insists on importance of things they communicate, it is absolutely on them to ensure it is calibrated to everyone's profile. And I still am not obliged to trust them. Once a liar always a liar.
They are saying what is generally safe and what is not. Telling people the dry statistics won't help most people. Remember half of all people are below average in IQ. You need to paint with broad strokes if you want to reach most people.
Claiming that something is safe or not safe is not communicating risk. It is asserting a certain risk tolerance. "We have looked at the numbers and came to the conclusion that X is safe enough to use". This does not work if the people you are communicating with do not already trust your risk judgement.
If it helps, substitute health officials and Healthcare with tech CEOs and tech products. Do you trust them when they claim that their products protect your privacy without laying out the evidence?
It’s trivial to publish these so that they’re both easily available and easy to understand. I’m guessing that’s not the case for the CDC, since you didn’t post any link or guideline.
A nice example was the EUCDC guidance on AstraZeneca’s vaccine which showed that for young age groups the vaccine was more dangerous than the disease. That allows anyone to make an informed decision for themselves instead of being bullied or emotionally blackmailed “for the greater good”.
Par for the course, I can’t access the actual study from The Lancet and have to settle for second-rate journalist summaries which are typically biased and ultimately worthless.
> Outcomes of interest included individual benefits and harms. Indirect effects of vaccination (e.g., societal benefits) were not considered...
> In the Phase II/III RCT, using data on all blinded follow-up (up to 6 months or the unblinding date of March 13, 2021), the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine reduced symptomatic COVID-19 when compared to placebo (vaccine efficacy: 91.1% (95% CI 88.8–93.1%)) (Table 3a). For hospitalization due to COVID-19, 31 events occurred, all in the placebo group. Vaccine efficacy against hospitalization due to COVID-19 was 100% (95% CI 87.6–100%) (Table 3b). Deaths due to COVID-19 were uncommon, one in the vaccine group and six in the placebo group (83% (-39–98%)) (Table 3c). Numbers of SAEs were comparable between the vaccine group and the placebo group across the two RCTs (Phase II/III: 268/21,926 (1.2%) vs. 268/21,921 (1.2%); Phase I: 1/24 (4.2%) vs. 0/6 (0.0%)); there were no cases of vaccine-associated enhanced disease or vaccine-related deaths (Table 3e). Grade ≥3 reactions generally were not uncommon and occurred more frequently in the vaccine than placebo groups (Table 3f).
Sounds like a oppurtunity for health educatation.
99%+ of people dont know they can look in the USPI for this data.
However, it isnt the best and most up to date, which the regulator and FDA would have and are unlikely to share.
100% of people who Google something like "how do we know the covid vaccines are good" would discover that the tool we use to figure that out is called a "clinical trial." Then they can look up "covid vaccine clinical trial results."
The reality is none of these "do your own research" or "just asking questions" people are actually curious whatsoever. Curiosity requires more than zero effort. Simply saying you're "doing your own research" and "just asking questions" while regurgitating the last thing you saw on your TikTok feed is super easy and gives you all the same sense of intellectual superiority.
VAERS is a super early signal self-reported database, why on earth would anyone link to it for public consumption? Should they also link to reddit.com/r/hypochondriac? VAERS should exist and researcher should (and do) pay attention to it, but it's absolutely not anything close to an actual source of actual information.
It is the top Google result for "pfizer COVID vaccine study CDC"
And yes, ACIP regularly puts out commercials and flyers. They are not 50 minutes nor 230 pages long, but they contain all the relevant info someone needs at a glance, and if they wish to go further then they are directed to ACIP resources like the one I listed.
"The government needs to inject knowledge directly into my brain against my will, without curiosity, and despite my lack of background expertise!"
Information being available online does not help the issue of lack of trust in public health officials, and the sentiment that they are lying or playing hide the ball.
This sentiment is a real issue the nation is facing.
The pandemic had several high-profile examples of Public Health officials knowingly misleading and lying to the public. That's going to take a lot of work to undo
Yes, it's a sentiment generated by this "I need information injected directly into my brain attitude, and failure to achieve that is very possibly maybe kinda hinting at something nefarious!"
> The pandemic had several high-profile examples of Public Health officials knowingly misleading and lying to the public. That's going to take a lot of work to undo
Not really. It had several high-profile examples of public health officials making mostly-reasonably hedged statements under conditions of uncertainty, and then people actually playing game-of-telephone into thinking they said things they didn't say.
Can you provide a few of these "several" examples of public health officials knowingly making false statements?
The rushed clinical trials were only done with 122 people and a control group. During the very short trial, 1 person died in the first group, 2 in the other. The “conclusion” was its better to be vaccinated and it protects you better. 12 months later AstraZenica vaccine pulled from market everywhere ….
Yep, those regulated marketing terms could use an update.
Regulators don’t make cures. There’s room to improve on that side of the system.
Especially as emerging approaches seem to be trending more systems-thinking-oriented, eg “this will strengthen your immune system to fight lots of diseases.”
Similar for vaccines, just give us the numbers clearly and upfront.
This bypasses regulators from having to make claims beyond “we reviewed the data and agree with these numbers and feel that this should not be banned.” I do think it would also help to separate something “not banned” and being “required to be covered by insurance” or “required for professions like the military”. I think trying to simplify things makes things worse, because this abstraction is not real.