[OneEyedRobot]

>the proliferation and promotion of medical misinformation.

I can see that working both ways. The anti-vax folks are never going to believe the 'get vaccinated or you'll die' sort of rhetoric. Better to use real numbers. There's been enough time and cases to make good estimates.

Do masks work very well? What kinds of masks? Where do people actually get COVID (home? bars? schools? hiking in the forest?). What are the actual results from non-vax drugs or treatments? How long are the vaccinations likely to be useful? Did early large-scale vaccination simply cause forced evolution of variants?

There's a shroud of mystery throughout this situation with a need by some people to simply shout down to the masses. None of this is that complicated and medical leadership is some mixture of secretive and incompetent, and I'm not sure what the strongest tendency is.

[Sohcahtoa82]

> Do masks work very well? What kinds of masks? Where do people actually get COVID (home? bars? schools? hiking in the forest?). What are the actual results from non-vax drugs or treatments? How long are the vaccinations likely to be useful? Did early large-scale vaccination simply cause forced evolution of variants?

These questions are always asked in bad faith, if they're even asked at all rather than just taking the word of right-wing talking heads at face value. Anti-vaxxers and COVID deniers don't care what the science says and willfully ignore peer-reviewed studies.

[OneEyedRobot]

>These questions are always asked in bad faith,

I'd say not. I'd genuinely like to know if a cloth bandana has any value, if grocery stores are dangerous, is the mass of people actually better off for an early and hard vaccine regime. It's partly intellectual interest and partly an attempt to guide my own behavior.

Having said that, everyone is too invested in their theories to be skeptical.

[Sohcahtoa82]

> I'd genuinely like to know if a cloth bandana has any value,

https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/2020/08/16/face-masks...

Better than nothing, but there are better options.

> if grocery stores are dangerous

I don't think it's possible to make a concrete answer to that question. The "danger" of any given place is going to just be a placement on a spectrum based on the airflow and how crowded it is. Where the line is to define something as "dangerous" is going to be pretty subjective. It's like showing a white-to-black gradient and asking where "dark grey" ends and "grey" begins.

But in your other post, you said:

> What are the actual results from non-vax drugs or treatments?

This is one where there is very clear scientific consensus, yet people ignore it. Take of course Ivermectin, where it's been proven that while it does somehow kill COVID in vitro, the dosage needed to make it work in vivo is higher than the maximum recommended dose.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7172803/

> How long are the vaccinations likely to be useful?

At the time of the invention of the vaccine, this was unknown, but I've always failed to see how it would be a valid criticism against the vaccine enough to choose to skip the vaccine entirely. Whether it would require a booster after 6 months or if it lasted a lifetime, they were proven to significantly reduce hospitalizations and death from COVID.

> Did early large-scale vaccination simply cause forced evolution of variants?

Anyone with a basic knowledge of microbiology acknowledges how quickly bacteria and viruses can evolve (Hence why doctors always plead for patients to complete their anti-biotic prescriptions and not stop taking them once symptoms subside!). Evolution of variants was inevitable. But if we had achieved 90%+ vaccination rates quickly enough, we could have mostly eradicated it before a variant could have taken hold.

And we totally could have. It's really disheartening to see the graph of COVID cases and deaths this year. From January to July, the number was plummeting as vaccinations were being distributed, but some time around June/July, we reached the point where everyone who wanted a vaccine had one, and it was only the anti-vaxxers that were holding out. Eventually, Delta happened, and cases/deaths have been skyrocketing since the beginning of August.

Of course, over 90% of the people being hospitalized or dying from COVID now are unvaccinated (There's even a subreddit dedicated to anti-vaxxers dying to COVID, https://old.reddit.com/r/HermanCainAward) , but that still isn't convincing them.

At this point, I'm convinced absolutely nothing will convince an anti-vaxxer. Data doesn't matter to them. Peer-reviewed studies don't matter to them. They think the CDC and FDA are corrupt and everything they spout is a lie. If they get COVID, they'll talk about (but not follow through with) suing the hospital for malpractice when the hospital doesn't give them Ivermectin because Joe Rogan told them Ivermectin cures COVID.