Thread by @SethAbramson

COVID-19 reporting is getting looser, shoddier, and more confusing.

Example: actual number of Americans who will be vaccinated for COVID-19 in 2020: 0.

Vaccination isn't complete until you receive a second injection 21 days after the first, which no one will prior to next year.

Excitement over the vaccine produces misleading reports.

Example: Fauci says "open season" for the vaccine will begin in April—implying that anyone who wants it will be able to get it then.

In fact there's no plan to vaccinate more than a million people—0.3% of Americans—daily.

There's a hyperbolic optimism to much vaccine rhetoric I find unnerving.

Example: Biden has an ambitious plan to vaccinate 100 million people by April 20—which means full efficacy for those vaccinations by May 20. Good! But that's only 30% of America. Herd immunity requires 70%.

When I hear Bill Gates say America will be back to normal this summer, I feel I'm being lied to by someone infantilizing Americans by disrespecting their intelligence. We're adding a quarter of a million new infections daily—and will every day until Fauci's "open season" begins.

In other words, the amount of virus that will be in America when the vaccine begins being received by the general population—which includes the folks most likely to spread the virus and least likely to accept a vaccine for it—is so staggeringly large the Gates timeline is a joke.

I'm thrilled we have a working vaccine. I'm terrified that the hyperbolic rhetoric surrounding it—and the farcical timeline leaders are giving to the public—will cause almost the whole country to let its guard down when we've only reached the end of the beginning of the pandemic.

Anyone who wants to keep themselves and their family and friends and community and nation safe should be quietly excited about this vaccine—while planning for the COVID-19 pandemic to be kicking the living hell out of America for all of 2021. Remain wary of politicians' optimism.

As for media, think about how important it is that it gets its terminology correct: *not one doctor in America* wants anyone who's received only one shot to consider themselves "vaccinated." The vaccination process with Pfizer is a 3-week process. But media ignores that subtlety.

Media and government apparatuses working hand-in-hand during a national emergency would have their messaging down.

We don't.

Instead, we have doctors and media using the word "vaccination" differently and have doctors using metaphors ("open season") that don't reflect reality.

Here's how responsible journalism would represent what's happening: an infinitesimally small percentage of at-risk Americans will begin the COVID-19 vaccination process in 2020 and complete it in 2021. Herd immunity in the US may be unattainable—but at a minimum will take a year.

If you turn on the news, what you will hear, instead, is that America has reached the beginning of the end and that the vaccine is "here." The fact that that is all empty rhetoric inconsistent with the logistics of vaccine deployment takes a backseat to the importance of ratings.

Meanwhile, both political parties have a vested interest in projecting a level of optimism about how quickly we can return to normal that bears no relationship to the hard mathematical realities of vaccine deployment, our growing infection/death toll, or the state of our economy.

*Everyone*—including me—agrees that first responders and the elderly should get the vaccine first. We *also* must understand that these aren't the super-spreaders. The real spreaders will start getting vaccinated at a glacial pace in April or else refuse to be vaccinated at all.

Understand that I'm not trying to be negative. In fact I think that if America can return to normal by mid-2022—a little over 24 months after the virus hit our nation hard—it'll be a wonderful miracle, given that we had a president who basically tried to kill everyone for a year.

Anyone who doubts the basic math and logistics of this thread should feel free to look at how long it took other countries to get the pandemic under control when those countries had an *infinitesimal fraction* of our outbreak, *total community buy-in*, and *competent* governance.

So confusing.

1) "By the summer we'll be way closer to normal than we are now."
2) "For 9 months—starting in the summer—big public gatherings will be restricted."
3) "12 to 18 months [from now] we have a chance—if we manage it well—to get back to normal."