Flabbergasted at how much speculative worrying there is out there against current/future variants making our vaccines completely “ineffective” (I’ll easily take a bet against that) when the real issue is we have AMAZING vaccines that DO work, but not enough of them for the world!
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Replying to @zeynep
Hard to blame people for worrying given the alarmism that’s rampant in clickbait coverage and among some high-follower Twitter accounts...
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Replying to @notdred
I’m really at a loss what to do. Not blaming people. It’s in the news, it’s coming from (otherwise well-credentialed) experts. And seems the (many) who know better don’t openly pushback because parts of pandemic/expert social media has become so cliquish and hostile? Not sure.
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Replying to @zeynep
It's a tough one to be sure. I think the best that can be done is to keep trying to call it straight and hope that the message breaks through. At some point reality becomes undeniable.
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I hope so. I read tweet Crotty had about some awesome vax number we had. First comment was basically we are going to cause ADE and an escape mutant. I don’t know where all this comes from but it’s every single thread some far out worry.
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And I worry it's exacerbating the biggest risk, which is that not enough people get vaccinated. It would be perverse if the fear that vaccines don't work well enough against variants means that not enough people get vaccinated for them to work well against variants.
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Most of the time when I get a reply like this, the replier refers to EFD. So I'm forced to conclude that he's driving a huge part of the conversation here. He has the reach and he makes more noise than anybody.
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I have come to the same conclusion. Over and over again that particular "expert" (who is actually not well-credentialed in terms of infectious disease) has referred to variants as completely "escaping" immunity. Antibody neutralization is not synonymous with functional immunity.
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Replying to @angie_rasmussen @notdred and
That part is certainly true. That said, I'm not highlighting others (point isn't to create social media pile-ons) but I've seen versions of: completely escaping/useless/renders ineffective pretty broadly claimed, on TV/media/here (by credentialed folks).
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I have too, but I have to say most virologists/immunologists/vaccinologists/ID epis/ID physicians I've seen take pains to get this right. They can be misquoted, which is also a problem. It's hard to explain that PRNT50 assays don't translate to functional immunity.
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zeynep tufekci Retweeted WebMD
Yeah. Example of what many ordinary people are seeing. I mean, sure, let's not let this @#!! freely explore the full fitness landscape through an unchecked epidemic—and we have boosters in the works—but what on earth? (It comes from an ill-sampled survey).https://twitter.com/WebMD/status/1377417935703052292 …
zeynep tufekci added,
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I especially loathe the trend of polling a non-random sample of (insert experts here) and presenting it as if it's a reliable forecast of what's to come. Certainly new variants are a possibility, but that's not set in stone. We can do something about that!
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Replying to @angie_rasmussen @zeynep and
This would be much more productive if we focused messaging on the actions we can take to mitigate the risk of new variants emerging: reduce transmission, increase immunization.
2 replies 1 retweet 36 likes - Show replies
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