Muh Muh Muh My Corona (virus)

Maybe ... You're assuming, among other things, that everybody who gets vaccinated had no immunity a priori.

 

Yes. I’m oversimplifying considerably.

 

Israel has vaccinated enough of its population to start doing studies and a preliminary one has strong evidence the vaccinated cannot spread the virus to others. If validated, pretty damn good news.

 

Well, the Germans do have some experience with this.

 

You were saying?

Another New Covid-19 Variant Discovered In L.A. May Be Vaccine Resistant; Strain First Identified In Denmark

 

That doesn't contradict what I said.

This is how modern media works, and it's gross, because it relies on people being ... uncareful readers. At the very best it is negligent journalism, at worst it's intentionally misleading.

The problem circles around words like "may" and "could." Readers see those words and their minds translate it as "I dunno, something close to 50/50?"

But that's not how scientists use them, and the journalists transcribing them take advantage of that. "Could" in scientist-speak can mean anything from "almost no chance of this happening but we haven't specifically designed a study to rule it out yet" to "This is definitely happening but the future is technically not here yet so we can't say for 100% certain that a meteor won't hit the earth tomorrow and make it moot or something."

There is a strain that "could" make the vaccine "less effective."

The average reader sees that and thinks "oh fuck, the vaccine won't work." Now they're scared, and scared people click more.

What it actually means is that there's a very small chance that it could make the vaccine slightly less effective (and given that the vaccines are way, way more effective than we hoped, it would still leave them very effective). It's worth keeping an eye on, but it almost certainly doesn't change anything.

 

There's been some good stuff circulating from scientists the last few days about how we're underplaying vaccines with all this "well, we don't know if it stops spread" talk.

It's the same mistake we made with vaccines and natural immunity. We don't want people to behave in a certain way (Woohoo, I got my vaccine, I'm free to go to the local Cough and Lick party and go wild, suck on it lockdown peasants!) and some leaders and scientists think the best way to do that is to distort public perception with technically true but misleading statements like "Well, we don't know if vaccines stop spread or not."

 

I could write a bunch of different headlines around that variant that are all technically true but lead to very different takeaways:

"New variant in LA may evade vaccine!"

"No evidence that new variant evades vaccine"

"Vaccines untested on new variant found in LA"

"Scientists expect vaccines to still be highly effective on new variant found in LA"

"Scientists say vaccine may be less effective on new variant found in LA"

All of those statements are literally true. But they all make readers feel like the story is very different.

 

Apparently this is real, and considering the logistics challenges a company like Starbucks deals with it could make sense.

 

Disney could put us all in a line and have the country vaccinated by March 1.

 

And they'd be happy to sell you a Fast Pass.

 

Everybody has to agree to wear a MagicBand, and FastPass+ is mandatory.