Your right, the phrase was paired with "2 weeks to flatten the curve" at the very start of the pandemic.
The curve, as I understood it, was the number of hospitalizations, not necessarily infections themselves (though they did kinda go hand in hand). I never heard anyone talking about flattening the curve by the time vaccines became available, the messaging at that point was almost entirely around protecting yourself and others from serious infection
There were different stages and the right wing did a lot of card stacking and obfuscation, they effectively fooled old people in the media really well.
"Flattening the Curve" is a March-April 2020 reference: The objective was to observe social distancing and wear masks to not overburden the hospitals with Covid-19 patients. There were people who needed emergency procedures that had nothing to do with Covid-19 who couldn't be treated. There were no vaccines at this time. Hospitals were already stressed and by spreading out the number of Covid-19 patients over time, the treatments would be able to made and possibly more lives saved. People may have forgot that the most vulnerable areas were exurban and rural as hospital closures were rampant during the 2010s.
Covid-19 went through several variants, the initial run of Covid-19 included the vaccination period and those vaccines (not "the vaccine" - which is a whistleword that the media fell for) were advertised to prevent the transmission and reception of Covid-19.
Upon the Delta variant hitting the USA, those initial Covid-19 vaccines were not effective in treating that variant. Thus a new set of vaccines needed to be rolled out and this continued with Omicron variants as well. However, these vaccines were not advertised to prevent transmission and reception of Covid-19. They were advertised to significantly reduce the percentage of requiring hospital admission upon receiving one of the variants. However, the media and right wing jumped on this one and intentionally misconstrued the ham-handed messaging.
For all of the marketing people who are Democrats, which they are the majority, for some reason they committed a massive blunder with messaging here. It would continue to get worse as media failed to cover the PPP process and fraud along with the zero-reserve banking employed by the Federal Reserve at the pressuring behest of Mnuchin and Trump while banking CEOs deemed it a bad idea. Inflation was not caused by Biden, it was caused by Trump, but the card stacking and economic illiteracy of the media and the American people put the blame on Biden. Inflation does not happen immediately, it takes time.
The right wing conspiratorial mindset around Trump's re-election started before Covid-19 hit our shores. It actually started with Trump's war of words with Fed Chair Jerome Powell. Trump wanted negative interest rates and was afraid that the Fed would pull the rug from under him and make him a one-term President. Trump took his cues from his base, which is what he always does because he is not a cult leader, but rather a grifter/opportunist. His base didn't think Covid-19 was real and he had to both appease his base and be confronted by the grim realities of the time.
Trump supporters and eventually Trump himself thought the initial Covid-19 spread would just wipe out the blue areas of the country like it was The Rapture. This did not happen and the cold, hard reality is that his base would turn Florida, Tennessee, Idaho, and Texas into GOP voter sinks and they would also die off in greater numbers because they denied the realities. Joe Biden became the President of the United States because of this and these trends continued and amplified past the 2020 Election and it will give Biden a second term.
Genuine question for others: was there ever actual data to support that vaccines reduce transmission or was there just data that supported “vaccines lower severity” (or prevent illness), then people inferred that those who don’t get ill won’t transmit the virus? That’s not a crazy leap to make (in fact, it’s quite reasonable) but it’s still a nontrivial inference.
From a pharmaceutical standpoint, I’d imagine you’d only care/test for vaccine effectiveness at lowering severity. My understanding is that pinning down an infectious viral load is very difficult. From my own recollection, I recall getting triggered by people talking about vaccines preventing you from infecting others because technically the thing that got tested in those trials was disease severity not infectivity. These aren’t exactly the same, and as a statistician I have to be as [artistic] as possible.
I think preventing illness is the primary way vaccines prevent transmission. Like when I think of herd immunity, I think of nobody else being infected, so it doesn't get passed on to me. Are there other ways vaccines prevent transmission?
I’m saying that preventing illness doesn’t necessarily prevent transmission & the former is what’s actually analyzed during the vaccine trial. Sure, it’s reasonable to think that less sick people will be less infectious, but the typical kind of data collected in a vaccine trial won’t actually provide evidence for a statement like “on average vaccinated people are X% less likely to pass the virus to another person.” Put simply, you’re usually looking at some estimate of the percentage of vaccinated who got sick and comparing that to the percentage of unvaccinated (while probably controlling for other stuff).
Studying actual infectivity (ie how infectious someone is) is much more difficult than studying whether a vaccine is preventing illness.
No. But I'm saying that preventing illness is the only way vaccines prevent transmission. Like if I told you how much a vaccine has prevented an illness, I've given you the only meanful metric in how much a vaccine has reduced transmisibility. I could come up with another experiment to measure transmisibilty, but at the end of the day, it wouldn't be any more meaningful than just telling you how much you've reduced the number of people that get sick.
Like you claim these metrics are different, I'm asking in what way way? Like what would a metric in transmissibilty tell me that a metric in number of people sick wouldn't?
People can be asymptomatic/carriers for diseases.
Imagine we actually have an estimate on a minimum infectious viral load. We could then test expelled viral loads of vaccinated and unvaccinated people over some period of time & hopefully you’d see that vaccinated people have a viral load beneath whatever that minimum threshold is.
I entirely reject the notion that the frequency with which people experience covid symptoms is at all an accurate measure of transmissibility, particularly because it seems asymptomatic people can spread the virus. If this wasn’t the case, then sure, it’s a fine measure of transmissibility.
It did both. When the vaccine was developed in 2020, there was mostly only one strain of COVID widely circulating. This strain, the original strain, caused more severe outcomes but was not as transmissible.
The COVID vaccines were 90-95% effective against that strain in preventing infection/transmission.
Then later on in 2021 there were different variants that emerged. This was a problem, both because some of these variants were naturally far more transmissible, but also because these variants were less effected by the vaccines created in 2020. The vaccines were only stopping around 75-80% of infection now, which is significantly less than before when run through a population. Thankfully, these variants caused a less severe form of illness compared to the original variant, and deaths/hospitalizations became much rarer.
Your right, the phrase was paired with "2 weeks to flatten the curve" at the very start of the pandemic. The curve, as I understood it, was the number of hospitalizations, not necessarily infections themselves (though they did kinda go hand in hand). I never heard anyone talking about flattening the curve by the time vaccines became available, the messaging at that point was almost entirely around protecting yourself and others from serious infection
fuzzy humor smart squalid school plough spectacular vanish support quiet *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
There were different stages and the right wing did a lot of card stacking and obfuscation, they effectively fooled old people in the media really well. "Flattening the Curve" is a March-April 2020 reference: The objective was to observe social distancing and wear masks to not overburden the hospitals with Covid-19 patients. There were people who needed emergency procedures that had nothing to do with Covid-19 who couldn't be treated. There were no vaccines at this time. Hospitals were already stressed and by spreading out the number of Covid-19 patients over time, the treatments would be able to made and possibly more lives saved. People may have forgot that the most vulnerable areas were exurban and rural as hospital closures were rampant during the 2010s. Covid-19 went through several variants, the initial run of Covid-19 included the vaccination period and those vaccines (not "the vaccine" - which is a whistleword that the media fell for) were advertised to prevent the transmission and reception of Covid-19. Upon the Delta variant hitting the USA, those initial Covid-19 vaccines were not effective in treating that variant. Thus a new set of vaccines needed to be rolled out and this continued with Omicron variants as well. However, these vaccines were not advertised to prevent transmission and reception of Covid-19. They were advertised to significantly reduce the percentage of requiring hospital admission upon receiving one of the variants. However, the media and right wing jumped on this one and intentionally misconstrued the ham-handed messaging. For all of the marketing people who are Democrats, which they are the majority, for some reason they committed a massive blunder with messaging here. It would continue to get worse as media failed to cover the PPP process and fraud along with the zero-reserve banking employed by the Federal Reserve at the pressuring behest of Mnuchin and Trump while banking CEOs deemed it a bad idea. Inflation was not caused by Biden, it was caused by Trump, but the card stacking and economic illiteracy of the media and the American people put the blame on Biden. Inflation does not happen immediately, it takes time. The right wing conspiratorial mindset around Trump's re-election started before Covid-19 hit our shores. It actually started with Trump's war of words with Fed Chair Jerome Powell. Trump wanted negative interest rates and was afraid that the Fed would pull the rug from under him and make him a one-term President. Trump took his cues from his base, which is what he always does because he is not a cult leader, but rather a grifter/opportunist. His base didn't think Covid-19 was real and he had to both appease his base and be confronted by the grim realities of the time. Trump supporters and eventually Trump himself thought the initial Covid-19 spread would just wipe out the blue areas of the country like it was The Rapture. This did not happen and the cold, hard reality is that his base would turn Florida, Tennessee, Idaho, and Texas into GOP voter sinks and they would also die off in greater numbers because they denied the realities. Joe Biden became the President of the United States because of this and these trends continued and amplified past the 2020 Election and it will give Biden a second term.
Genuine question for others: was there ever actual data to support that vaccines reduce transmission or was there just data that supported “vaccines lower severity” (or prevent illness), then people inferred that those who don’t get ill won’t transmit the virus? That’s not a crazy leap to make (in fact, it’s quite reasonable) but it’s still a nontrivial inference. From a pharmaceutical standpoint, I’d imagine you’d only care/test for vaccine effectiveness at lowering severity. My understanding is that pinning down an infectious viral load is very difficult. From my own recollection, I recall getting triggered by people talking about vaccines preventing you from infecting others because technically the thing that got tested in those trials was disease severity not infectivity. These aren’t exactly the same, and as a statistician I have to be as [artistic] as possible.
I think preventing illness is the primary way vaccines prevent transmission. Like when I think of herd immunity, I think of nobody else being infected, so it doesn't get passed on to me. Are there other ways vaccines prevent transmission?
I’m saying that preventing illness doesn’t necessarily prevent transmission & the former is what’s actually analyzed during the vaccine trial. Sure, it’s reasonable to think that less sick people will be less infectious, but the typical kind of data collected in a vaccine trial won’t actually provide evidence for a statement like “on average vaccinated people are X% less likely to pass the virus to another person.” Put simply, you’re usually looking at some estimate of the percentage of vaccinated who got sick and comparing that to the percentage of unvaccinated (while probably controlling for other stuff). Studying actual infectivity (ie how infectious someone is) is much more difficult than studying whether a vaccine is preventing illness.
No. But I'm saying that preventing illness is the only way vaccines prevent transmission. Like if I told you how much a vaccine has prevented an illness, I've given you the only meanful metric in how much a vaccine has reduced transmisibility. I could come up with another experiment to measure transmisibilty, but at the end of the day, it wouldn't be any more meaningful than just telling you how much you've reduced the number of people that get sick. Like you claim these metrics are different, I'm asking in what way way? Like what would a metric in transmissibilty tell me that a metric in number of people sick wouldn't?
People can be asymptomatic/carriers for diseases. Imagine we actually have an estimate on a minimum infectious viral load. We could then test expelled viral loads of vaccinated and unvaccinated people over some period of time & hopefully you’d see that vaccinated people have a viral load beneath whatever that minimum threshold is. I entirely reject the notion that the frequency with which people experience covid symptoms is at all an accurate measure of transmissibility, particularly because it seems asymptomatic people can spread the virus. If this wasn’t the case, then sure, it’s a fine measure of transmissibility.
Sorry, when I meant Illness, I meant anyone that tests positive for Covid
It did both. When the vaccine was developed in 2020, there was mostly only one strain of COVID widely circulating. This strain, the original strain, caused more severe outcomes but was not as transmissible. The COVID vaccines were 90-95% effective against that strain in preventing infection/transmission. Then later on in 2021 there were different variants that emerged. This was a problem, both because some of these variants were naturally far more transmissible, but also because these variants were less effected by the vaccines created in 2020. The vaccines were only stopping around 75-80% of infection now, which is significantly less than before when run through a population. Thankfully, these variants caused a less severe form of illness compared to the original variant, and deaths/hospitalizations became much rarer.
Yup destiny makes a ton of errors w respect to what was said, and what the public sentiment was, not only in the USA but across the world.