> Former US president Donald Trump admitted to playing down the risks of the coronavirus to “reduce panic”. The entire premise of this is absurd.
What’s “this”? that this Trump statement actually made any difference?
Covid lesson: trust the public with hard truths
151–160 of 837 posts
Re: Covid lesson: trust the public with hard truths
#152Fauci (and the CDC) lying about masks out of fear it would cause a shortage for healthcare providers burnt a lot of trust quickly. It probably helped the US get into the polarized situation it's in now.
>Fauci (and the CDC) lying about masks out of fear it would cause a shortage for healthcare providers burnt a lot of trust quickly. It probably helped the US get into the polarized situation it's in now.
This confuses me. If the claim that masks "don't work" caused folks to distrust public health authorities, then why are many of the folks who claim to distrust those PH authorities refusing to wear masks?
Re: Covid lesson: trust the public with hard truths
#153Inconsistent PR is just a peek at the giant cesspool of incompetence and corruption that we get when epidemic is managed by people who are better suited to discuss warning labels on cigarets
Re: Covid lesson: trust the public with hard truths
#154The article is discussing the media and government being intentionally vague or even misinformative because they don't trust the public, but it backfires and causes more distrust. The flip side that wasn't discussed is the belittling and censoring of voices that were skeptical of the narratives, which engendered even more distrust. Their strategy of information control backfired, and they doubled down. Now we've got…
> Now we've got a huge swath of US citizens that will never take the vaccine.
They were always not going to do it. The second it became a political issue, their minds were made up. Blaming what was or wasn't done by third parties, government, etc. is completely missing the point.
Re: Covid lesson: trust the public with hard truths
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
Kamala Harris is on record(last summer) saying she wouldn’t take the vaccine if Trump told her to take it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dAjCeMuXR0
Yes, there's a difference between a raging narcissist who can't even seem to tell the truth even if there's nothing to gain from lying and listening to a doctor. But yeah, keep going with the whole "democrats are just as bad as republicans" thing. Seems to be working.
Fauci lied about masks at the start of the pandemic -- the whole world knew the size of the virus and the type of mask you need to wear to protect from it. Apparently only Americans had the genius idea to show some research showing masks are bad for you... Trump, Fauci and the whole bunch lying through their teeth and people still take their sides.... my god...
Re: Covid lesson: trust the public with hard truths
#156The decision to lie to the public about masks fearing an N95 shortage for healthcare workers has been the biggest disaster in many minds.
Ideally the government would have owned up and said:
‘wups we were supposed to be stockpiling these for the last 10 years when this topic came up in a disaster planning scenario (it did), but we didn’t do that and now there is no way we will have enough for many years because industrial supply chains are never operated at We see the reverberation today, with people still wearing cloth masks and governments not stockpiling for the next pandemic (would rather have one extra tank than available supply for every citizen).
Re: Covid lesson: trust the public with hard truths
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
Censorship is not what causes large numbers of US citizens to refuse this vaccine. If the Republicans in leadership positions took this seriously from the start and did not go around casting doubt on vaccination far more people would get the vaccine. If the previous president had not politicized the response to COVID and had simply told his followers to do what the CDC says we would have many millions more people get…
Your partisan comments are so toxic. Try making your point without spewing that Facebook garbage around here.
Agreed, it's especially ridiculous that they said Trump should have been advocating for the vaccine when he did and still does.
Re: Covid lesson: trust the public with hard truths
#158The article is discussing the media and government being intentionally vague or even misinformative because they don't trust the public, but it backfires and causes more distrust. The flip side that wasn't discussed is the belittling and censoring of voices that were skeptical of the narratives, which engendered even more distrust. Their strategy of information control backfired, and they doubled down. Now we've got…
Censorship is not what causes large numbers of US citizens to refuse this vaccine. If the Republicans in leadership positions took this seriously from the start and did not go around casting doubt on vaccination far more people would get the vaccine. If the previous president had not politicized the response to COVID and had simply told his followers to do what the CDC says we would have many millions more people get…
This is exactly what I'm tracking for the 2022 election - is the public able to separate anti-mask/vaxx choice from anti-vaxxing within their minds? Or will the right be tied to anti-vaxxing by proxy?
I'm leaning toward the latter. Most people I talk to think the right is actively pushing anti-vaxxing efforts despite top federal Congressional leadership explicitly encouraging vaccine procurement (and their former POTUS "inventing" the vaccine!).
Re: Covid lesson: trust the public with hard truths
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
Censorship is not what causes large numbers of US citizens to refuse this vaccine. If the Republicans in leadership positions took this seriously from the start and did not go around casting doubt on vaccination far more people would get the vaccine. If the previous president had not politicized the response to COVID and had simply told his followers to do what the CDC says we would have many millions more people get…
no disrespect but i know plenty of liberals who will not get the vaccine. the media turned it into a bi-partisan issue when in all actuality it was a government handling issue in which the rest were used as scapegoats. you remember that they gave themselves raises while the rest of us were told not to go into work. which obviously we are gonna listen if we believe that covid is as dangerous as the scientist were sayi…
> no disrespect but i know plenty of liberals who will not get the vaccine.
Respectfully, those people have been anti-vax for a while now (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/what-do-le...) and were part of the group that were unpersuadable.
But leftist anti-vaxers aren't a majority of current COVID-19 anti-vaxers. Those are politically motivated groups.
Re: Covid lesson: trust the public with hard truths
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
No one said they weren't
They certainly weren't talking about the risks and side effects when telling the entire country the only way to get your life and rights back is to take the vaccine. The message was: get the vaccine, get the vaccine, get the vaccine, do your moral duty
Because the risks of not getting the vaccine are orders of magnitude higher than the risks of getting the vaccine. It's absolutely insane that were still having this conversation at this point.