Lied about its efficacy primarily. Both Biden and Fauci are on record as saying basically “if you get the vaccine you won’t get Covid and can’t give Covid to another person”. People got the vaccine, vaccinated people still got Covid, vaccinated people still spread Covid.
Then, even after it was apparent that the vaccine did not have the advertised benefit, they continued to press its use including mandates for federal employees and the military, encouraged censorship of social media conversation about the vaccine and its efficacy, as well as pressed covid vaccination of healthy children (who were among the least likely in the population to either get or spread the disease).
First, assuming that vaccination would indeed prevent transmission was a good guess based on prior vaccinations. That it didn't work out in this case became apparent over time. There were no lies.
Second, vaccination did reduce both severity of disease in case of infection, and also rate of infection, and thus transmission. Even imperfect reduction of transmissibility (the famous R_0) can mean the difference between a pandemic and fizzling out.
>assuming that vaccination would indeed prevent transmission was a good guess based on prior vaccinations.
It wasn't.
First of all, they didn't need to guess, because immunology already knew that there is a difference between immunity in the mucus membranes (which is where respiratory infection has to be fought) versus in the blood. The latter is where the immune response is generated if you get an intramuscular injection. This turns out to be have been immunology 101, as testified by e.g. immunologist Liliane Schoofs to my government. You will also note subsequent efforts put into a nasal version of the vaccine that wouldn't have this design problem. There were, in fact, lies.
Second of all, the net effect of getting "vaccinated" was that people got a green pass to go out during winter time, sit across each other in bars and restaurants, and breathe each other's air, while explicitly believing they were immune, even though they were not. The argument that this was still a net positive seems preposterous and a form of magical thinking, where the people who got the ineffective shot were still somehow better off, even though they were engaging in far riskier behaviors.
The people who didn't get the shot meanwhile were forced to stay inside unless they were recently tested. So the hypothesis that the shots reduced illness by reducing transmission is likely also false. There is ample evidence now of spike protein being produced far longer than was ever promised in some patients, and also signs of immunodeficiency, which means the shots themselves were also not an unalloyed good.
What this thread mostly shows is that "anti-vax" remains a magical word, a dividing line between the Good People Who Believe Science and the Bad People Who Dismiss it. The actual details of the vaccine science are not known, and the story many people tell in retrospect does not hold up to basic scrutiny. They are willing to admit to individual instances of error, overstatement or deception in the management of COVID, but they are rarely willing to put them all together and see how this radically changes the entire picture.
Because what it looks like is an insane lobbying effort of governments and influencers, enormous amounts of public money being spent on shots we didn't need, a huge propaganda effort to silence any dissent as "anti-vax" and "anti-science", and all this because likely it did escape from a lab, and the people responsible for developing and funding it were terrified of being held accountable, and having their field shut down as the irresponsible LARP it was. Following some of these star virologists (e.g. Marion Koopmans) online is quite hilarious, because it is very obvious none of their excuses hold up.
Here are a bunch of “Nobodies” talking about vaccinated folks not getting sick (or very low chance of getting sick) and not being contagious and spreading the virus. We know now that this was all bullshit.
We all can look back on this time and choose to remember what we want. I am going to remember the government mandating an ineffective vaccine and lying to me about it.
The country is pretty inarguably substantially safer with a covid-vaccinated population than without. The development of those vaccines is a hugely important event in human history.
> a network of prospective cohorts among frontline workers, showed that the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna mRNA COVID-19 vaccines were approximately 90% effective in preventing symptomatic and asymptomatic infection with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, in real-world conditions (1,2)
Are they lying? Is 90% the damning number of ineffectiveness? Also I'm confused, why wouldn't you vaccinate everyone including healthy children? It's like the first thing I would do as a parent. The yearly flu vaccine is more of a gamble than the COVID vaccine and I still get it every year. Why do you want less protection?
I dont. I am not antivax and will not defend that position. What I am arguing here is that our government mandated and oversold (lied about) the effectiveness of the vaccine. Because of that, public attitude started shifting toward an antivax mentality.
> Apparently you've never heard of what a good chunk…
Apparently you haven’t read all of the robust discussion on this thread. This wasn’t a “what came first the chicken or the egg” discussion. It was a “what made eating eggs so popular” discussion.
> Both Biden and Fauci are on record as saying basically “if you get the vaccine you won’t get Covid and can’t give Covid to another person”.
Horseshit, and you know it. Because even you acknowledged elsewhere they said "unlikely".
Then you run around this conversation saying "they said it won't happen", and using weasel words like "basically" to justify your mischaracterization of what they said as absolute claims.
Myself and others have posted compilation videos on here of the prior administration mischaracterizing COVID vaccine efficacy.
However, believe what you want to believe and split hairs on language how you want. Doesn’t change the fact that vaccine trust is down and that trust started falling after the COVID vaccine was released.
Either RFKjr all of a sudden became really good all of a sudden at convincing people of his wacky ideas or something else happened.
Then, even after it was apparent that the vaccine did not have the advertised benefit, they continued to press its use including mandates for federal employees and the military, encouraged censorship of social media conversation about the vaccine and its efficacy, as well as pressed covid vaccination of healthy children (who were among the least likely in the population to either get or spread the disease).