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Notes -
Yes, I was trying to get at the disconnect between what the science says and what the media/public believe the science says. That oversimplification of how vaccines work has resulted in a lot of bad policy and people feeling lied to and writing things like (quoting the original post in this thread):
which is based on a misunderstanding of what vaccines do, albeit one that was justifiably common before we had an easy way to check for infection separate from disease.
I'm really unclear from listening to TWiV how long scientists have known this / how wide-spread the knowledge was. The scientists on TWiV maintain they have been saying that all along (and, obviously, their episode history is public so they've pointed to instances of them saying it in 2020).
The following are all different possibilities:
The politicians/media lied to us, knowing vaccines wouldn't stop transmission,
Their science advisors told them vaccines would stop transmission because that was the scientific consensus,
[...] but their science advisors should have known better,
[...] there's no reasonable way their science advisors could have been expected to know better but actually new science later showed that was wrong.
I think we're unlikely to have a productive conversation if we can't agree on which of those (or possibly some other option I haven't listed; that certainly isn't an exhaustive list) worlds we live in. TWiV seems to be saying that (3) is accurate. (And TWiV appears to be a group of appropriately qualified experts to be making such claims.) (EDIT: Or to be less consensus building-y, at least be having a discussion about which world we live in.)
More options
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