So, I'm not going to tag all the folks I've had disagreements with for *months* now, since December, who didn't believe me that our bungled messaging on post-vaccine transmission was fueling vaccine hesitancy. How many examples have we heard now? I hear this every single day. https://twitter.com/KateGrabowski/status/1359323992990101507

To make it clear, the remedy isn't to give false or unsubstantiated hope, but to get out of the "we don't know" trap when we *do* have some sense of the direction, but need more clarity with data (which we can say), and also to emphasize the real upside!

See what people accuse me of, when I make the most basic point? That I suggested that we "just lie to people", or "express certainty about something we don't know." Exactly the problem that I'm talking about. https://twitter.com/reluctantlyjoe/status/1359333090573881350

So worth dissecting. The fear is "people are gonna wanna.. go wild" if they hear the correct message that we do expect the vaccines to reduce transmission, but we're waiting for more data before relaxing the guidance. So we say "we don't know" when we do. https://twitter.com/reluctantlyjoe/status/1359340516689723394

This is a version of "if we tell people to mask up, they will stop distancing" which I heard from WHO and other experts early on why they didn't like masks. Sociologically it was the wrong guess and it was quickly debunked with data. People going "wild" fear has hampered so much.

One can dismiss these as anecdotes but they're everywhere. Plus, we do have polling that shows transmission as key motivator for vaccines. The person I quoted about our terrible messaging was an infectious diseases epidemiologist/scientist at Johns Hopkins University, by the way.