Exactly. It’s quite an unfair criticism, and it keeps being applied retroactively to thinks like masking, lockdowns, etc. It’s like people expect a government to have completely knowledge from day 1 of a new virus and all of its mutations across all of time.

Throw in politicization of it, tons of non-mutual “facts” going around, a heap of anecdotes, and you’ve got a communications nightmare.

The problem is that if you communicate to the public at the level of normal scientific certainty -- with all the methodological and statistical caveats -- it's very hard to generate the moral authority needed to push sweeping mandates on a population.

Political and scientific leaders knew this, and they made a decision to exaggerate the level of confidence they had or should have had in several of these matters. No one seriously expected leadership to have complete knowledge from day 1, but that's not the criticism. Nor is the criticism that facts change on the ground in fast-moving situations. Of course they do.

The criticism is that they knowingly overstated their factual case at the time so that they could implement their chosen strategies, even to the point of suppressing legitimate scientific dissent, and are now unconvincingly trying to use "facts on the ground change", "science learns over time", and "of course we couldn't have been expected to know everything" as excuses for those decisions.

If you're making very confident policy-guiding assertions to the public on behalf of Science (TM), and when you're right, it's evidence of how great Science is, and when you're wrong, it's because Science is a process of continual revision and uncertain information, that creates a bit of moral hazard. It works internally in science, where there are no consequences for being wrong other than wasted time, but not in the real world where there are real consequences for being wrong.

I agree overall, but I do think the CDC should’ve known better with masking, at least not to discourage it like they did originally in spite of lots of experience in Asia.

Discouraging is one thing, but they discouraged with a false made up reason (masks don't work). Supposedly their real motivations were: if we say to use masks, then people will just distance less and spread more; and healthcare workers need the masks that do work right now. It would have been better if they simply admitted the true reasons at the time.

Remember that in the beginning there was an enormous shortfall of the masks that were known to be effective in preventing respiratory disease. The CDC (and others) were very worried about medical personnel not being able to get them, very justifiably in hindsight. Just imagine how much worse the (already bad) panic buying of masks would have made it if the CDC had told everyone to mask up.

We absolutely did not know that cloth masks would help. We (incorrectly) thought that anything less than a N95 mask would not help at all, and so that is what was communicated. Since then we have done a lot of science and have learned that while N95 masks are a lot better than, say, double-layered cloth masks, the latter are still much better than nothing in slowing down infection rates.

We also were very focused on the effects for the wearer of masks. We were not focused on the effects of a possible spreader wearing the masks. Part of this was that all of the previous pandemics had diseases that people were symptomatic when they spread the disease. With Covid-19 we have a disease the mostly spreads when people are a-symptomatic. So the potential spreaders are the ones who most need to be wearing masks, and since we can't tell them apart, we need everyone in masks.

All of these things are things we learned along the way. Harping on the CDC (or others) for not knowing them is just wrong. For some of the references here please see:

https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwu...

No, it's absolutely right to harp on the CDC for this. If you intentionally tell a lie to people in order to manipulate them into doing something for what you think is the greater good, you set your own reputation on fire. The truth about what you did will come out, and for everything you say from that point on to pretty much a generation of people, everyone will constantly second-guess whether you are once again telling a lie to serve what you might think is some greater good. Getting a semblance of that reputation back is a slow and painful process.

Haven't the horrors of history given enough examples? The ends do not justify the means. Lies like this have most definitely already backfired hard. Anyone who thinks they are some special elite who is entitled to lie to the public for the greater good is wrong, evil, and unfit to hold any sort of power.

> It’s like people expect a government to have completely knowledge from day 1 of a new virus and all of its mutations across all of time

No, that's not what is being said. In the case of boosters, the communication (c|sh)ould have been "we're gonna give booster. For now we think only immunocompromised people will need them, but we can't really rule out other options. Further research will tell us whether other categories, or perhaps the whole population, could need it, although this does not seem the case at the moment."

Of course there's multiple problems with this: you don't sound on top of things, media will extract the most definitive quote from it anyway, hard to imagine the worst case scenario, etc. But it does seem that most government are messing up the communication badly (either sounding very paternalistic, blaming the citizens, never showing uncertainty despite the situation, changing measures before the previous ones can show an effect, etc.), at least for what I would consider a good, mature way to communicate with citizens. I'm no expert, tho.

Reposting what I wrote in another thread:

I like to say "I believe in science". However, what I've seen in the last 2 years is only science by name and by fiat.

We've been fed wrong information after wrong information "for our own good", which has caused the population to lose confidence as the article perfectly explains.

This is terrible, as trust and confidence take a long time to build. Now we have a wonderful new technology (mRNA vaccine) that could be helpful against many ailments, but that the population has learned to fear.

The root cause seem to be the government desires to cover their own mistakes (ex: the masks being inefficient: because they didn't have enough at first, how hands washing was so important... for airborne virus (!!!): because air filtration was too expansive, how the old vaccine is so important against omicron: because they haven't adapted the vaccine so hey let's give a 3rd, a 4th shot and so on, sending people known to have covid in retirement homes full of vulnerable people: because they hadn't built adequate facilities...)

I believe in science, but I can hardly blame people who now subscribe to weird ideas: in their defense, they have noticed some of the lies so in a Bayesian setting they have adjusted their priors: by default they now distrust every official message, and unfortunately for them they may not have the proper scientific knowledge to better adapt their probability distributions.

I seriously hope there will be official inquiries about a level of mismanagement that borders criminal negligence, and that will have cost human lives.

The foundation of science is skepticism, not belief. Nullius in verba.

The root cause seem to be the government desires to cover their own mistakes (ex: the masks being inefficient: because they didn't have enough at first

This isn't what the government said. The government said that masks were inefficient at preventing the wearing from contracting Covid, which is true to this day. They didn't want people to hoard masks at everyone else's expense, especially healthcare workers.

This announcement of "we're going to have boosters (probably)!" (August 2021) seems to cover this quite well: https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/s0818-covid-19-boost..., as does the then-published first version of general booster info page: https://web.archive.org/web/20210821000645/https://www.cdc.g... (later iterations via https://web.archive.org/web/20210715000000*/https://www.cdc.... )

What would you improve in the message sent? To me it seems the parts you ask for are pretty much there?

Two things to note: I'm not in the US, so my comments are based on the communication standards of IT and NL, which I follow more closely.

While in NL the scientific advice and communication has been simply ridiculous (mandatory masks introduced at the end of last year, with still the idea that "science doesn't know if they work, but we are gonna make them mandatory" from the government, and "we're against that, they don't work" from the head of the CDC-equivalent), in Italy it does contain the cautious wording that I advocate for.

However, this is the official communication that is written in "legalese" and not passed through the people by means of interviews and press releases. The media of course bears a lot of responsibility for the dilution of the message, chasing scoops and making headlines that leave no space for doubt; but the communication of the government to the public ends up using similar headlines, which I see as the problem in this case.

Given that you know all the downsides of "wishy washy" communication, as well as the downsides of "overly certain sounding" communication...

isn't the rational thing to do to start ignoring some of the "meta-policy" framing and just treat it as "this is the best idea people have at the time, but I expect it's subject to change."

Truthfully, we should be more open to all sorts of policy changing over time. Every other entity in the world is expected to evolve.

I don't know all of either :)

And I'm open to policy changes as well.

I'm just disappointed by the (as I said in another reply, Italian or Dutch) governments treating people like kids, washing away the complexity and nuances in communication with the public, expecting them not to understand that they don't have all the answers and that decisions might change in light of new (possibly even contrasting) information. Is that wishy washy, or treating the population as adults? For me it's the latter.

It does, however, assume a certain degree of scientific literacy that is lacking in many people (including politicians?), so maybe that's an answer for why it's not like that.

In the beginning I feel like communication was very much about how they’re learning more and don’t much yet. That was pounced on for its non-information, and the uncertainty was ignored in the great mask debates in early 2020.

I don’t think you can be wishy washy, and the lack of respect for science and science education in the US certainly doesn’t help.

> For now we think only immunocompromised people will need them, but we can't really rule out other options

Oh no no no.

This is probably the absolute worst possible wording. Any time a government agency has had to chance their stance on something, they get accused of lying.

They have to be careful with how to present preliminary information. If they state anything "may" be true, then news outlets will treat it as true, and then hells breaks loose when they discover it was wrong.

Of course, if they wait until they're absolutely certain of something, then until then, they get accused of incompetence and of doing nothing, while some news outlets just make up bullshit.

>In the case of boosters, the communication (c|sh)ould have been "we're gonna give booster. For now we think only immunocompromised people will need them, but we can't really rule out other options. Further research will tell us whether other categories, or perhaps the whole population, could need it, although this does not seem the case at the moment.

Could have? Yes. Should have? $20 says 90% of the population simply ignore communication worded this way, and that "GET BOOSTER NOW, YES YOU" is more effective.

It's also true that most governments have not been very clear about what they actually wanted to achieve or perhaps more accurately have changed the goals over time. There's a big difference between eliminating COVID vs coping, for example.

To be fair Delta is a very different beast from Omikron.

The virus is mutating so the government strategy has to adapt too. Elimination was an option for a while.

Elimination stopped being an option the moment the first infected carrier left Wuhan on an international flight.

Not necessarily; the first few carriers don't seem to have successfully seeded outbreaks, in general it takes a few attempts to get a disease like Covid established, and almost all countries seem to have stopped it spreading directly from China including closely-linked ones like Taiwan but also places like the UK and US. As far as I can tell something just went really badly wrong in Italy that no-one is interesting in examining too closely, and when this spread Covid to other countries it was spun as proof the other countries had screwed up and failed.

Temporary local eradication was an option for a while, before delta: see Australia and New Zealand.

However these countries were always going to have to open up and accept the virus eventually as it became endemic in the rest of the world. They were just delaying the inevitable. As it happened, the evolution of the virus made the decision for them. However if Delta had not happened they would still have had to make the decision to open up at some point, probably after a significant proportion of the population was vaccinated.

It's easy to blame changing science. Science always changes.

But let me ask you this. Are we going to need a fourth shot / second booster in 2022? I'd say it's almost certain. Find me a public health authority who is saying this in the United States. I can't.

There's some legitimately changing facts. But there's also nonsense, like health officials saying masks don't help with a respiratory disease, that has nothing to do with changing facts.

incorrect. during unpredictable situations it makes it MORE important to be consistent in communication.

consistent communication could have been: boosters are recommended, we'll open them to relevant age groups in the future.

though honestly they should have opened boosters to everyone in september and called it done. we knew then everything we needed to know. which are:

1. risks of the boosters. 2. average declines in protection.

The impossibility of this is embedded in your opening paragraph.

> during unpredictable situations

Unpredictable: adjective - "not able to be predicted"

> it makes it MORE important to be consistent in communication

Consistent: adjective - "unchanging in nature, standard, or effect over time"

If you wish to deliver a message that is accurate during a time that cannot be predicted and actively changes, you cannot do so and remain consistent without starting to misrepresent the truth.

If you wish to deliver a message that is consistent during a time that cannot be predicted and actively changes, you cannot do so and deliver current/accurate information.

In essence, your options are:

1. Be accurate/informative, but the message will change as the situation changes.

2. Be consistent, but the message either a) cannot contain any meaningful guidance or b) will be wrong

it all depends on what particular detail wasn't able to be predicted. in this case the need for boosters.

we knew by late june boosters would be needed. so all messaging after june should have been consistent. it wasnt.

what wasn't predictable was when precisely we needed to issue boosters and to whom. because we simply didn't have the data on that until around september. However since september it was very predictable that we needed them for the holiday season. I got mine in early november because it was fucking obvious. omicron wasn't 100% assured but it was in the news and most sound bites were 'more contagious'.

its entirely possible to be consistent in the face on unpredictable events.

1. outright say 'we don't currently have the information needed yet check back later' or 'worst case scenario would be X, we're going to start with those assumptions'

2. repeat step 1 until you have the data or know you never will

3. once data is acquired adjust statements.

this is being consistent and clear. another example of this is masking and viral spread.

1. assume worst case for viral spread (airborne)

2. message masks are necessary until more is known about how the virus spreads.

3. if results come back disproving airborne spread, say so.

instead we got:

1. masks not necessary. virus doesn't seem to be airborne.

2. OOPS VIRUS IS AIRBORNE.

the first case is consistent, assume worst case and then ease restrictions. the 2nd case is completely inconsistent.