I am more and more disappointed in HN to constantly devolve into "blame GOP" for everything politics. Before elections, majority of media was singing the opposite tunes of what they are singing now. I will quote all left leaning media to make my point.

Here's CNN in March 2020:

> The timetable for a coronavirus vaccine is 18 months. Experts say that's risky: Eighteen months might sound like a long time, but in vaccine years, it's a blink. That's the long end of the Trump administration's time window for developing a coronavirus vaccine, and some leaders in the field say this is too fast -- and could come at the expense of safety.

https://archive.is/TJhly

Here's Business Insider in Apr 1, 2020:

> Fauci said it will take 12 to 18 months to get a coronavirus vaccine in the US. Experts say a quick approval could be risky. Some experts say reaching that target may be challenging, because vaccines require a lot of testing. One worry is "immune enhancement," normally spotted in animal testing, whereby a vaccine actually weakens a person's response to the virus. Even a year-and-a-half would be staggeringly fast for vaccine development, and some experts have voiced concerns that a vaccine produced on that timeline could hurtle too quickly through safety trials.

https://archive.is/hPiFW

Here's CNN in September 2020:

> Past vaccine disasters show why rushing a coronavirus vaccine now would be 'colossally stupid'. On April 12, 1955 the government announced the first vaccine to protect kids against polio. Within days, labs had made thousands of lots of the vaccine. Batches made by one company, Cutter Labs, accidentally contained live polio virus and it caused an outbreak. More than 200,000 children got the polio vaccine, but within days the government had to abandon the program. "Forty thousand kids got polio. Some had low levels, a couple hundred were left with paralysis, and about 10 died," said Dr. Howard Markel, a pediatrician, distinguished professor, and director of the Center for the History of Medicine at the University of Michigan. The government suspended the vaccination program until it could determine what went wrong.

> From 1955 to 1963, between 10% and 30% of polio vaccines were contaminated with simian virus 40 (SV40).

> "The way they would grow the virus was on monkey tissues. These rhesus macaques were imported from India, tens of thousands of them," medical anthropologist S. Lochlann Jain said. "They were gang caged and in those conditions, the ones that didn't die on the journey, many got sick, and the viruses spread quickly," added Jain, who taught a history of vaccines course at Stanford and is working on a publication about the incident. Scientists wrongly thought the formaldehyde they used would kill the virus. "It was being transferred to millions of Americans," Jain said. "Many believe this issue wasn't adequately pursued," Jain said. Some studies showed a possible link between the virus and cancer. The US Centers for Disease Control website, however, said most studies are "reassuring" and find no link.

> The government launched the program in about seven months and 40 million people got vaccinated against swine flu, according to the CDC. That vaccination campaign was later linked to cases of a neurological disorder called Guillain-Barre syndrome, which can develop after an infection or, rarely, after vaccination with a live vaccine. "Unfortunately, due to that vaccine, and the fact that it was done so hastily, there were a few hundred cases of Guillain-Barre, although it's not definitive that they were linked," Kinch said. The CDC said the increased risk was about 1 additional case of Gullain-Barre for every 100,000 people who got the swine flu vaccine. Due to this small association, the government stopped the program to investigate. "It was kind of a fiasco," Markel said. "The good news is that there never was an epidemic of swine flu. So we were safe, but that shows you what could happen."

> Markel said people's mistrust of the system makes the idea that the FDA would rush this process before late stage clinical trials are complete "colossally stupid." "This is one of the most ridiculous things I've heard this administration say," Markel said. "All it takes is one bad side effect to basically botch a vaccine program that we desperately need against this virus. It's a prescription for disaster." One, the vaccine may not be safe. Two, if it is not safe, people will lose faith in vaccines. Three, if a vaccine doesn't offer complete protection, people will have a false sense of security and increase their risk. Four, if a substandard vaccine gets an EUA, a better vaccine may never get approval, because people would be reluctant to enroll in trials and risk getting a placebo instead of a vaccine.

https://archive.ph/

Last year, scientists were too busy playing politics.

> "... it was scarier to be associated with Trump and to become a tool for racists, so people didn't want to publicly call for an investigation into lab origins."

https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/lab-leak-theory...

It never occurred to these people that claiming the virus came from bats because they eat bats there is the more "xenophobic" thing and not the possible lab leak caused due to poor handling. The next time someone asks us to trust the science, our response should be "okay, but can I trust the scientists?" And if they can be so easily manipulated based on politics, what else are they and the dissenters being silenced on?

I can find several such examples of opposite tunes. But now that the political pendulum has swung to the other side, everything's done a 180. Instead of addressing the hesitance of people due to conflicting messaging, we have devolved into blaming the GOP and Trump for everything.