Covid lesson: trust the public with hard truths

The article is discussing the media and government being intentionally vague or even misinformative because they don't trust the public, but it backfires and causes more distrust. The flip side that wasn't discussed is the belittling and censoring of voices that were skeptical of the narratives, which engendered even more distrust. Their strategy of information control backfired, and they doubled down. Now we've got a huge swath of US citizens that will never take the vaccine.

How about the biggest dishonesty - lack of admission that not everyone is at the same risk and that lockdowns have significant irreversible costs for low risk individuals and for society? Young children are not getting critical development years back. Healthy 20 somethings only have limited time to date, party and have fun before being saddled with adult responsibilities forever. Most of shattered local businesses are not coming back. While pandemic was not the only reason for BLM and Jan 6 riots, all the young men not being kept busy and receiving stimulus checks to support unproductive activities was certainly a contributing factor - and the fallout permanently damaged trust we have in each other. What of all the deaths of despair - suicides and drug overdoses? Mixed cancer diagnoses because people were scared to go to see doctor? Plummeting birth rates?<p>All of this adds up to the fact that optimum precautions for an obese 70 year old guy is not a same as for a healthy 19 year old woman, and individuals should have a role in deciding what&#x27;s right for them. While vast majority should take a vaccine, there may be a small group for whom it&#x27;s a reasonable choice to hold off. Say you are a 19 year old healthy make and your risk from serious vaccine side effects is largest while your risk from COVID-19 is smallest. Plus, you already recovered from COVID during the time Delta variant was common. Are you really bonkers for making a decision either way?<p>Above all, society must not sacrifice its young for those of us who had a chance to live for quite a bit already.

The author is completely right in that the government at least in the US attempting to downplay, mislead or &#x27;avoid panic&#x27; absolutely destroyed any credibility and is still suffering from it. Most people are not stupid, if provided with all available information as well as clear statements regarding the reliability of that information and just a clear message saying &quot;hey this is new and we have no idea, we are making our best guess&quot; people will make decent choices. Unfortunately the US decided to torpedo its credibility, and all sides decided to turn it into a political issue which a pandemic should very much not be. All politics all the time and the US is now crippling itself. In the absence of real honest leadership people turned to the loudest voices of the media. Once the people distrust the government and think they are lying its very hard to appeal to their logic again. I am very much not a fan of Bush II but he did it right after 9&#x2F;11. What he did after though is a topic for another day.

Here’s something funny about the discourse around distrust of the government. The problem is often framed as a being about the distrust per se: “<i>we</i> want the public to trust the goverment but they don’t. Why is that?” But this provokes the question: how trustworthy is the government, objectively speaking?<p>At first it might seem like there is a hidden premise: yes, the government is trustworthy. But there’s also another alternative: that’s besides the point.<p>Are Corn Flakes <i>really</i> healthy? Well that’s not a concern for the marketing department. But it is their concern if people don’t think that Corn Flakes are healthy.<p>So, the funny part: the discourse around distrust-of-government might betray a manipulative agenda. The talking heads <i>want</i> people to trust the government but they don’t seem concerned with whether or not it is rational to trust the government. But any honest assessment of trust has to compare two things:<p>1. How much the thing is trusted<p>2. How trustworthy it is (by some standard)<p>How rational (1) is is based on how much it differs from (2) -- there is no way to assess trust in a vacuum (without (2)).<p>The old phrase “manufacture of consent” comes to mind.

Dick Thaler, who won a Nobel prize in econ, wrote a book called Nudge (see: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Nudge_(book" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Nudge_(book</a> for more info), which I&#x27;d bet good money Fauci and the entire public policy elite have read and internalized.<p>The book is basically about how the ruling class should think about structuring policy and messaging to create the outcomes they desire--&quot;choice architecture&quot;. Thaler&#x27;s work describes how public policy &quot;experts&quot; should frame their messaging such that us sheep submit to their will.<p>Notably, nothing in the book is about how to make public policy to benefit the actual people--the built-in assumption is that our rulers have the unique ability to see the future that is best, and this book simply describes how to achieve that future. Honesty is not a consideration in itself--it is only one factor among many in considering second- and third-order consequences of particular messaging techniques and policy actions.<p>Our (that is, the peoples&#x27;) &quot;best interests&quot; don&#x27;t factor into their thinking one single iota.<p>If anyone thinks any of this pandemic crap has anything to do with helping people, at least as far as the rulers go, I feel so sorry for them.

Kind words, but possibly too late, and they won&#x27;t change anyones mind. Authorities have forfeited public trust by co-ordinating to decieve people, censor them, and then reward others who publicly expressed their contempt for their fellow citizens, just to maintain the leverage. I do not see the path to reconciliation yet. Destroying millions of businesses and then doubling down by attacking guarantees of freedoms (speech, movement, association, bodily integrity, etc.) will not be remembered as having been justified or proportionate.<p>People without a lot of dignity and integrity have underestimated what the impact of their deception has been, because, really, I don&#x27;t think they were equipped to apprehend it. I know some of them personally, and they became strident promoters of narrative-right-or-wrong because of their impostor syndromes, anxiety, depression, and self loathing. They thought that by renouncing their remaining dignity and denouncing their neighbours, they could find redemption in compliance.<p>What surprises me most is that the rhetoric in public forums has not spilled over into significant coordinated mutual violence yet. It&#x27;s all still in the provocateur stage. Whether that materializes as a pervasive low-level long term conflict over decades like The Troubles in Ireland, or accelerated conflict like that which occurred in Bosnia in the 90s, the inflection point on the path toward outcomes analogous to those appears to have already passed and I believe we&#x27;re into a period of managing consequences.<p>At this point, the only meaningful action is to find a way to mitigate the effects of western civil conflict, and then by extension, the total world war that results as other countries rush into the power vaccuum western domestic instability creates. Maybe the article recognizing the deception will give some of these people an out where there is still a way to turn it around, but if I were a betting man, I&#x27;d find a way to get long potable water.<p>Dark times.

Honestly this is a pretty hand-wavy article from a respected journal and I think represents the kind of thing we need less of, not more of<p>His actual research is pretty sparse and comparing the Danish government to every other government glosses over any number of correlation&#x2F;causation issues.<p>Yet it gets cited and quoted and everyone jumps on it as confirmation of everything they believed before they read it.<p>People need to start questioning the articles that they _agree_ with. If nothing in the article challenges your beliefs, if nothing in the research or conclusions surprise you or makes you consider things differently in any way, than it deserves more skepticism, not less.<p>A whole lot of sites are generating a whole lot of clicks and making a whole lot of money by the simple process of validating their audiences beliefs. It is unimaginably destructive.

Sweden also trusted the public, they had many times more deaths than the surrounding countries (Finland, Norway, Denmark), and closer to mainland Europe.<p>You simply can&#x27;t compare countries. Some countries have different levels of trust of their governments, different customs, different densities, different borders, etc... Most of Denmark by population is a small island, and by their culture, people tend to keep their distances. It is also a rather rich, homogenous country with a good welfare program. The policy to &quot;trust the public with hard truths&quot; may (or may not) be good for Danemark, maybe not for another country.<p>I live in France. We are not Danes. We don&#x27;t trust our government, and anything is ground for protests. We can also panic, I noticed it first hand. So we have a part of the population panic buying toilet paper while the other part is protesting, and while I don&#x27;t particularly like our government, I kind of sympathize with them, we are not making it an easy task. Ah and we are famously anti-vax too. We are also a well connected country, at the center of western Europe, so of course we have more cases, and I don&#x27;t thing &quot;telling the hard truth&quot; would have changed anything. We do have a decent welfare system though.<p>So, I&#x27;d like to say that &quot;trusting the people&quot; is a good strategy, but really, it depends on the people in question, and many other factors. Every country is doing its best with what it has, even if it doesn&#x27;t look like it, and we can&#x27;t generalize.

WSJ has a commentary piece in today&#x27;s paper that is similar but also important. The jist I get out of it is that science is ever evolving and there is no &quot;trust the science&quot;, as it just gives us data and is not an absolute truth. Science can provide varying levels of certainty on given part of a subject, but running around and invoking science for policy decisions is a bad plan when there isn&#x27;t solid data backing it.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wsj.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;partisan-science-antiscience-facts-misrepresentation-fauci-lancet-lab-leak-11633960740" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wsj.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;partisan-science-antiscience-fa...</a><p>Mirror: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;GwRw1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;GwRw1</a>

The decision to lie to the public about masks fearing an N95 shortage for healthcare workers has been the biggest disaster in many minds.<p>Ideally the government would have owned up and said:<p>‘wups we were supposed to be stockpiling these for the last 10 years when this topic came up in a disaster planning scenario (it did), but we didn’t do that and now there is no way we will have enough for many years because industrial supply chains are never operated at &lt;10% capacity without government subsidies(wups #2). Make cloth masks work in the mean time but they are 10x less effective than masks with built in static charged fibers, so the best you can do is socially distance and keep your activities out doors when you can.’<p>We see the reverberation today, with people still wearing cloth masks and governments not stockpiling for the next pandemic (would rather have one extra tank than available supply for every citizen).

Fauci (and the CDC) lying about masks out of fear it would cause a shortage for healthcare providers burnt a lot of trust quickly. It probably helped the US get into the polarized situation it&#x27;s in now.

Right now the CDC continues on its crusade against natural immunity, despite the dozens of studies proving otherwise. It’s understandable how public health policy has it pitfalls, but completely dismissing elementary biology is another shot in the foot.

Hard truths and politics aren&#x27;t compatible because there&#x27;s too much incentive misalignment. People in power have no reason to tell the truth because it&#x27;ll get them fired, and the reason for that is most people don&#x27;t even want the truth anyhow, it triggers some form of pain. The path of least resistance inevitably seems to be lying in some form.

Well-meaning manipulation of the public is common, and nearly always a terrible idea, because even the relatively uneducated are still pretty good at applying their intuition and seeing that a narrrative doesn&#x27;t make sense.<p>Once they&#x27;ve damaged that trust, you end up with these 2 equally stupid polarized positions:<p>A: &quot;I will do the opposite of whatever the established authorities say&quot;<p>B: &quot;It&#x27;s, like, sad that, like, some people don&#x27;t Science&quot;

One of the variant ideas I was stuck on was when the government and CDC decided (pre-Delta) to tell everyone that masks weren&#x27;t required in stores if you were vaccinated.<p>Part of the justification was that they thought it would create incentive for the unvaccinated to get vaccinated, since the carrot was that they could stop wearing masks afterward.<p>Regardless of whether that had the desired effect or not, it seemed to be another example of being too clever by half, rather than just sticking with what the data itself suggested.

From CDC&#x27;s Crisis and Emergency Risk Communication (2018):<p>1. Be First<p>2. Be Right.<p>3. Be Credible.<p>4. Express Empathy.<p>5. Promote Action.<p>6. Show Respect.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;emergency.cdc.gov&#x2F;cerc&#x2F;ppt&#x2F;CERC_Introduction.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;emergency.cdc.gov&#x2F;cerc&#x2F;ppt&#x2F;CERC_Introduction.pdf</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;emergency.cdc.gov&#x2F;cerc&#x2F;manual&#x2F;index.asp" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;emergency.cdc.gov&#x2F;cerc&#x2F;manual&#x2F;index.asp</a>

As a grown man, I have never been treated more like a child than during this pandemic. And that infuriates me.

Edit: before you downvote this, read it? I&#x27;m not an anti-vax nutcase.<p>They didn&#x27;t trust the public with their actual thinking at any point during Covid. The guidance was initially &quot;don&#x27;t wear a mask, it will make it worse because you&#x27;ll infect yourself with your hand&quot; to &quot;we&#x27;ll just lock down for 3 weeks and then back to normal&quot; to &quot;we have to flatten the curve to avoid overwhelming hospitals&quot; to the current policy of basically 0 covid tolerance.<p>Why would they initially tell us to not wear masks? The generous answer is that they were afraid that a run on masks would make them unavailable to medical professionals who as far as we knew at that point needed them to survive. The uncharitable answer is that the people giving advice are imbeciles who hadn&#x27;t even read the national plan to respond to respiratory pandemics.<p>The most ridiculous part of our COVID response, at least where I am in the USA, is that we have a very detailed national plan that tells policy makers exactly how to respond to such an event. It was made following SARS (another coronavirus), and it is very good, and you can even read it online! It was completely ignored of course.<p>(You can find an up to date version here, originally published in 2011: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cms.gov&#x2F;files&#x2F;document&#x2F;covid-pandemic-plan.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cms.gov&#x2F;files&#x2F;document&#x2F;covid-pandemic-plan.pdf</a> )<p>My daughter&#x27;s school just went back to 100% at-home via zoom because &#x27;too many children had positive covid tests&#x27;. How many had positive tests? What is the threshold or flow-chart for this decision defining what &#x27;too many&#x27; means? Was this decision made with guidance or following guidelines given by public health experts operating under the umbrella of a national (or state, or county, or even school district) strategy? Hah! As if anyone would answer any of these questions! The answer is that &#x27;too many&#x27; cases of covid means they close the schools &#x27;for awhile&#x27;. The part that concerns me isn&#x27;t just the lack of transparency, it is that behind the lack of transparency there is nothing there, it&#x27;s just a non expert going with their gut or responding to pressure from hysterical parents.<p>If we want to &#x27;trust science&#x27; that starts with &#x27;consulting scientists&#x27;!

Thanks for posting. It&#x27;s a terrible shame society has torn itself apart before we could learn the (to some) obvious lesson, but at least maybe this will inform policy in the future...<p>That or governments are now more terrified of people losing their minds and so feel they should be even more controlling in their fear response as a knee jerk reaction....<p>Either way, in the UK we failed to save about 67% of those who could have been saved through bad practice and even worse policy...

I think the other hard truth that citizens don&#x27;t get entrusted with, is that we don&#x27;t really know how to deal with a pandemic in the modern globalized world.<p>Sure, some countries had plans and scenarios made before, but nonetheless got caught with their pants down. E.g Switzerland doing a nationwide epidemic simulation back in 2013, identifying serious flaws in preparedness, but not acting on it at all.<p>And even if, it would most likely not have panned out as neatly as predicted.<p>We haven&#x27;t dealt with a situation like this before, so things are going to be messy. Opinions changing as more information comes in, not necessary the most effective measure being taken, coordination among countries not working, people fighting for attention etc. I reckon it&#x27;s going to take a couple years of analysis to be able to look back and with more certainty say what would have been the optimal way to deal with it for different regions and what the right tradeoffs might have been.

&gt; Covid lesson: tell the truth.<p>Thanks for sharing this novel concept, in a scientific journal no less.

When people with money start to pay for fake vaccine certificates is the time for majority to ask why they pay for not getting something, that is given for free. Or like - everyone should take our vaccine - me:no i did&#x27;t took it yet :), Like - Coke is a poison to sell, not to take. - guess who&#x27;s remembered for saying that.

OC cites Denmark as role model.<p>What&#x27;s their citizen&#x27;s level of trust in their institutions?<p>Does Denmark have a thriving media ecosystem profiting from inciting distrust, outage, division?<p>For the US, UK, Aus, I cannot imagine any increase in collectivism, social trust, esteem for the greater good while Murdock, Koch, Zuck, Dorsey, and so many others, remain utterly opposed.

The response in the USA was so comically bad!<p>“Well there’s no research to support that spitting in each other’s mouths is a bad idea, so I could not advise against it”<p>That’s not a real quote, but typifies the ludicrously moronic vein of thinking that was doled out as public advisory.<p>It was intentionally obtuse, with not even a vague resemblance of insight or good judgement.

As almost everything that is written now, almost-post-pandemic, the survival bias isn&#x27;t disregard.<p>When images come from China welding building&#x27;s doors, everybody shouted. When government in Brazil said to skip the Carnival to avoid the covid from tourists, lots complained.<p>Now, looking back, is easy to say that one specific opinion was the best and would be perfect, had it been followed. Just remember those million other opinions that were terrible and be thankful that the worst ones weren&#x27;t followed.

Inconsistent PR is just a peek at the giant cesspool of incompetence and corruption that we get when epidemic is managed by people who are better suited to discuss warning labels on cigarets

While this thread is mostly a US centric discussion I wonder if Australia isn&#x27;t a better case study for this topic. Seems like things are pretty intense there.

There are still many people - especially in the US - who are concerned about (or adamantly opposed to) receiving the COVID-19 vaccine. While this is often framed as a conservative-vs-liberal issue within the US, that doesn&#x27;t line up with the data. Vaccination rates seem to correlate more strongly with a group&#x27;s trust in the government. Conservatives do tend to have less trust in the government than liberals, but the difference is even more pronounced when comparing affluent groups to historically marginalized groups - regardless of political leanings.<p>Trust is hard to earn and easy to spend. But it is an invaluable resource for a government to have. Hopefully we learn that some day.

The evidence says that during disasters ppl come together and help each other during disaster while state and business institution act in an at best obstructionist and at worst predatory way. So why do ppl in power believe the exact opposite? The simple explanations are that it&#x27;s a delusion they actually hold, or a lie they project and either way it serves as a justification for the systems they benefit from.

While I appreciate the articles thrust, I think any article which compares any other country to America fails to recognize that a weirdly high percentage of Americans seem to have a distinct distrust in government.<p>It was exaggerated in this pandemic because the person whom that group has come to place a lot of trust in (Trump) was telling them that they shouldn&#x27;t listen to anyone but him, and that everything was fine.

You would think they would have learned from the war on drugs propaganda

What are the hard truths?

My local government seems to be dedicated to the opposite: instilling panic about Covid, particularly with rules around protecting children (who are effectively immune from serious illness and transmit the virus less than adults).

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SIDE-ISSUE ALERT!<p>The article ends with the statement &quot;The author declares no competing interests&quot;. I think this is very poor phrasing, as it&#x27;s ambiguous: does it mean &quot;The author has not declared any competing interests&quot;, or &quot;The author has positively declared that there are no competing interests&quot;?<p>(To be clear, I am not for a moment suggesting any hidden interests on the part of the author, and I think his point is both correct and important. It&#x27;s only the wording that I dislike.)

One problem is there really is some risk with the vaccine. At a population level its best if everyone takes the vaccine - there are huge benefits, but unfortunately a small minority gets hurt. Its best if everyone else gets vaccinated except for me. Of course when everyone wants to be that exception the vaccination doesn&#x27;t stop community spread so people get sick.<p>The problem is the hard truth of &quot;take the risk because society benefits&quot; doesn&#x27;t work in an American me-first mentality.

I agree with the sentiment of this article, but I&#x27;m noticing that some folks can&#x27;t determine fact from fiction even when presented with data that supports the facts or makes them irrefutable. No amount of logic, facts, or transparency will be enough for these folks, and while I can appreciate a skeptic, some of these people are beyond basic help and need professional guidance.

You know who doesn&#x27;t try to hide this stuff from people?<p>Bad actors. Conspiracy theorists, scammers, straight up liars.<p>So you&#x27;ve got on one hand &quot;the experts&quot; who are being vague and seemingly not wanting to tell you anything, and then on the other hand you&#x27;ve got the crazies who will tell you whatever you want to hear.<p>It&#x27;s something that is increasingly frustrating me about the vaccines. The vaccines have become a political battle. You&#x27;ve got the president saying absolutely ridiculous things like &quot;we are losing our patience with the unvaccinated&quot;.<p>I got phone calls <i>immediately</i> after that speech from my conservative friends and family members pissed off <i>at me</i> (who is on a different political quadrant than they are), wanting to know if I was &quot;losing my patience&quot; with them, and explaining how they are NEVER going to take the vaccine. How they now see this as an important idealogical battle that they want to win.<p>Conservatives are sharing videos like this one: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?app=desktop&amp;v=TSZMtSPX3iE&amp;feature=youtu.be" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?app=desktop&amp;v=TSZMtSPX3iE&amp;feat...</a><p>Where it&#x27;s Dr. Fauci starting off saying &quot;The vaccine is 100% safe and 100% effective!&quot; (a lie, obviously), and as the video continues that number goes down and down and down.<p>It was the same last year when he said that we needed something like 70 or 80% antibody presence to reach herd immunity, but then was quoted in a more private interview saying that was basically a white lie, and that we wouldn&#x27;t be in the clear until nearly 100%. THAT got shared among the conservative spaces, and basically erased ANY credibility that Fauci had going forward.<p>--<p>I wish they would just say: Covid sucks. Yes, it almost certainly leaked out of a lab in China.<p>Yes it was gain of function research. Yes this is the worst industrial disaster in the history of the planet.<p>Yes we did say masks didn&#x27;t work. It was a lie to keep the masks available for doctors.<p>Yes the vaccines do have dangers associated with them, but for many people that danger is probably less than the danger of covid.<p>Yes there are alternative treatments that show some effectiveness in cohorts, but not in RCTs.<p>No we don&#x27;t know why.<p>We aren&#x27;t sure if the lockdowns are actually effective, but we think it&#x27;s worth it to try them.<p>We aren&#x27;t sure if the masks are actually effective but we think it&#x27;s worth it to try them.<p>The vaccine is available to you and free if you want it. This is a huge privilege you get because you live in the richest country in the world. Basically your access to the vaccine is an example of how kickass the USA is.<p>Just stop freaking lying to people. It&#x27;s making the problem 100x worse!

Disappointed to see so much bald-faced lying in the comments. I really don’t understand why the most egregious liars aren’t given the boot.

Denmark, the country where they dissect exotic animals at the zoo in front of children. Yes, they now how to deal with a political storm. They handled Covid very well with a good result so far. Congratulations for that! What happened in US was plain ignorance and had nothing to do with trying to come the masses. Yes, I am saying that Trump is a moron.

Mask policy has always been consistent with the available data. They work but the effect is limited. This is why we have focused on multiple mitigation strategies. The problem we have is that because masks are not 100% effective people have decided that no masks are acceptable. Same flawed logic about vaccines.

There is another element alluded to in the article, which is to communicate uncertainty of outcomes.<p>There is a large segment of the population - and I&#x27;m assuming the size can vary by country - who do not deal well with uncertainty and will latch onto a person giving a clear and uncertain message, even if factually incorrect.

Thank you all for one of the most calm, reasonable, and rational discussions I have seen in the past two years.

I feel the discussions i. the thread are of better quality and more informative than this ignorant opinion piece. All he seems to claim is that if governments had trusted the public they would have locked down sooner.<p>The headline make this sad little piece seem more interesting than it actually is.

I&#x27;ve shared this story multiple times, because it was such a poignant example of what can go wrong when truth becomes secondary to an agenda:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28411734" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28411734</a>

Part of the long-term program to breed out distrust of authority.<p>It doesn&#x27;t affect elites, who can choose sensibly without trust, because they have time, training and access to information.

The lede is buried here, the reason the US is not cohesive is entirely due to the former president who continues to this day to support and spur the anti-vax movement.

So what were the lies? I guess I just stop not see it.<p>Surely we can agree there is a difference between lying and jist being wrong.

Wow an entire thread full of civil opposing opinions and discussions. I feel sanity has returned.

&gt; Former US president Donald Trump admitted to playing down the risks of the coronavirus to “reduce panic”.<p>The entire premise of this is absurd.

TlDr: Trust engenders trust

COVID lesson: <i>Never</i> trust the high-priesthood of professional science with political decisions.

Even before Covid, the scientific and medical community, understandably so, decided that continuing dialogue with anti-vaxxers and vaccine hesitant wasn&#x27;t worth the effort. Communicating the risks of vaccines, however negligible, seems to be seen as enabling the nutjobs. It&#x27;s unfortunate. I think COVID may force the educated folks to reexamine their communication strategies and hopefully lead us to a place where anti-vax sentiment shrinks to a negligible level.<p>Edit: Not surprising this is being downvoted. Anytime I suggest anything less than crucifying anti-vaxxers or sending them to a leper colony the HN crowd freaks out. It&#x27;s that exact sort of sentiment that got us into the mess where a significant portion of the country refuses to get vaccinated. Don&#x27;t hurt your arm patting yourselves on the backs folks. Your dismissive attitude towards less educated people has the practical effect of killing folks.