Gallup: Far Fewer in U.S. Regard Childhood Vaccinations as Important

David Szweda, no doubt that what you say is true. My point, though, is that in the materials my wife and I were handed for childhood vaccinations, as well as the COVID vaccinations, and my view was that in those materials, the risks and side effects were downplayed.

Another point of reference is that when Gardasil came out for HPV, public health officials were pushing it for kids as young as ten or twelve, despite the fact that they only knew it worked for five years, and the median age of first sexual experience was 16 or 17, and of course if a person decides not to have sex as a minor, it's pretty much a moot point anyways.

Long and short of it is that there is a certain amount of evidence that public health officials have been listening to each other talk about how great their vaccines are, they've forgotten how to present the evidence to people who have to be persuaded, and are therefore resorting (a la Biden re: COVID vaccines) to compulsion instead. Since public health efforts require good will from the public, it's a bad move.

The perspectives on this topic alternately frustrate and fascinate me. We seem to have lived through a completely different couple of years.

I guess, among other things, it goes to show the power of narratives. We all have them, but they doesn’t mean they’re all equally factual.

A lot is generalized about human rights abuses and Fauci/government dishonesty, etc. It would be interesting to see a list of the verifiable facts, though I’m not really all that interested in human rights abuses outside the U.S. They have different legal contexts.

I’m just not a suspicious guy, I guess? I’ve never expected humans to get everything right or tell the truth all the time, especially in government and politics. So, the wrongs I’m aware of in all that didn’t really move the needle much in the distrust direction. I’m not one say that a person who has devoted his life to the study of this or that is guaranteed to be right on the topic. It’s just a probably estimate there.

If he occasionally gets condescending/arrogant and tells people what he thinks is good for them vs. telling them the truth, that drops his ethos score, yes. But it’s just too unsurprising to, again, move the needle very much. People can always file claims in the “well, maybe” file and research them—if the claim even makes any practical difference.

There were things I heard from CDC and Fauci et al. in those days that I immediately thought, “Well, very possibly not true, but the action to take here still makes sense either way.”

As for the definition of vaccine…

It seems that my arguments on that point, and the counters, add up to Yes, they were vaccines, and no, there was no deceit in calling them that. As for efficacy claims, I just don’t know where people got their info, so I can’t speak to that other than to say that the sources I was reading gave effectiveness estimates that still hold up pretty well today. So I have no reason to see myself as having been lied to on that. The politicians were very sloppy, of course. There are almost always better places to get information. (Not that I hate politicians, really, but they are good at what they are good at, and not so good at a lot of other things. I always saw Fauci as a serous medical professional turned suddenly politician, so… yes, taking the rhetoric with doses of sodium chloride was indicated.)

In every pre-covid definition you provide, the goal of the vaccine is to produce or bolster immunity, which is of course the state of not being responsive or susceptible to a disease. If you’re immune to something, it doesn’t affect you, right? That is clearly not exactly the same thing as “stimulating the body’s immune response.” If anyone reads through the definitions carefully, all references to “immunity” as an effect, as opposed to the intent of the treatment, are gone.

To bolster is to make something stronger.

The post and pre-covid definitions are the same in that regard. Though the definitions pre- and post- covid don’t use the term ‘bolster,’ the gist is the same. Vaccines were initially, continued to be through the pandemic, and are today a method of stimulating the immune system to increase immunity against a pathogen.

There is no substantively new definition.

What happened was that when the Covid vaccines came out, they (1) met a population that was already widely unaware of how vaccines fundamentally work, and (2) a political environment that immediately began to distort what was being claimed for the new vaccines—aggressive straw-manning, (3) (I assume: I didn’t actually see this) some actual exaggerating of effectiveness by people who weren’t well informed, likely politicians and celebrities.

Remember back a couple of years ago when we were having this debate here on SI and some of us were simply saying that each person should have the right to make a choice about whether or not to get the vaccine and we were accused of being Trumpers for having that position? Remember how I pushed back and pointed out how ridiculous that was because Trump himself was pushing the vaccine? Let us not forget who made this into a political issue!

I can’t speak for anyone else on that topic, but I’ve always affirmed that Trump accomplished some good things during his tenure, including “Operation Warp Speed” (along with SCOTUS appointments, federal abortion policy, some economic policy stuff, and kudos for effort at least on southern border control).

Sorry, but “We’ve been patient. But our patience is wearing thin. And your refusal has cost all of us.” when coming from the office of the president is not advocacy. That’s a veiled threat.

Sometimes we forget that politicians talking are politicians talking. It seemed like obvious blather to me. What was he going to do when his patience ran out? Get really angry? Why would anyone not personally loyal to him care if he’s angry? It was dumb, but that’s pretty much Presidential rhetoric for you.

If it had been Trump, he would have at least made a specific threat, like “I’ll have you deported!” … but still empty words.

(A wistful digression: Oh for the days when in situations like that, a President would appeal to love of fellow man, love of country, courage, and various other non-partisan motivations. Reagan would have. Probably both Bushes would have.)

And yet a few years ago when we were having this debate here on SI, someone said that there were zero side effects and zero chance of side effects. The narrow minded bias was scary.

I missed that, I guess. What I remember is that everybody knew there were common mild side effects and occasional more severe ones.

“If they don’t acknowledge that one gets sore after this vaccination, I wonder what else they’re not telling me.”.

I remember soreness being listed specifically among the things to expect after vaccination. I think I recall even seeing fever as a possibility. Unfortunately, Internet Archive Wayback machine for pages like this one, doesn’t seem to be working.

What I know for sure is that if you got the vaccine in the summer of 2021, you had to sit in a waiting area for 15 minutes to see if you would go anaphylactic. It was well known, well publicized that adverse reaction was a possibility—and so watching for it for a period of time was SOP (from CDC, I think… unless we only did that in Wisconsin?)

I personally participated in V-Safe when I got my first shot, which is a CDC system for people to report any adverse outcomes from Covid vaccine. The system texted me several times after the shot to ask how I was doing and asked about specific side effect symptoms.

The efforts from health professionals in trying to be as safe as possible were actually extraordinary, as was the mobilization to distribute vaccine quickly.

Information from politicians was quite a bit sloppier, of course.

I did write an article on the topic in 2021… I don’t know if that’s what a few of the posts in this thread referred to, or if it was something else. But it’s here: A Few Good Reasons for Christians to Back COVID Vaccination

I think it still holds up pretty well, overall.

5. Serious side effects have been few.

News of COVID vaccine experiences have followed a pattern well known in the news business: “If it bleeds, it leads.” There isn’t much drama in saying “most people who get the vaccine feel the expected mild side effects.” So, the alarming exceptions get all the attention, stick best in memory, and get passed around social media most.

This bit was followed by a fair amount of detail on the then-current state of known side effects, including links to NGO websites that summarized information and/or tracked side effect data. Some of those are still active.