I particularly dislike this type of comments, which tell people what to feel and think about a thread, however well meaning it might be. You're in a performative contradiction when you shallowly dismiss the entire thread with an overgeneralization and with that make it definitely less useful.
Yes, this thread is more divided than your usual one, but I personally found useful nuggets of information in the comments, so it is definitely not "nothing worth reading".
Discussion of value-systems are just hopeless, as there's no common ground.
To me heavy disagreement usually makes more interesting of a discussion than mere conformity, and HN is one of the few places where it can take place without bans, kicks, brigades.
I can stand all but the arrogance of projecting one’s perspective as a conclusive “quality” to the entire discussion. It is an insult to the efforts of the well meaning commentators, it is an insult to the intelligence of the readers and their capability on deciding what is relevant or interesting to them on their own.
This, in the context of having a moderation system to filter contents in the first place.
Also common ground is not a geometric mean; eg in an imaged conversation for and against capital punishment, common ground is not killing the convict just a little. It is about showing the work that lead to people to their own conclusions, which usually tend to have more in common than people expect.
Not being conclusive is OK for such discussions, and people have a right to defend their positions, as long as it doesn’t degrade to name calling and other conversation killers.
The most dominant name calling in this thread right now is from people that condemn all participants for not being sophisticated or conciliatory enough. That is the performative contradiction I’ve been talking about.
Maybe some sort of cool-down timer for posters, who are otherwise polite, getting too agitated? Some kind of rate limiting for new comments on a controversial submission?
One person's "asshole" is another person's "passionate".
It boils down to freedom vs. safety, period. It's just that simple.
In a free society, you have to sacrifice safety. The safety people are fine to feel they way they want to feel, but they need to understand that argument is antithetical to American values. America is founded on the ideals of freedom; it was not founded on the ideals of safety.
We have structures to keep you safe from murder, or from breathing cigarette smoke in your workplace. Where your freedom can hurt others, we value finding a middle ground. That's not new.
Vaccines are already mandated in some situations and we don't fight about it. This topic is only controversial because some have found they can profit by turning it into a culture war.
But we're talking about nudging the freedom/safety line a slight bit one way or the other. It's already in the middle. Losing one right doesn't mean that we're not qualitatively as free as we were yesterday.
Remember, nobody is going to change their mind on this issue because of a perfectly worded response in an internet discussion. If you want to change anyone's mind, focus on the people you can speak to in the real world—and have a conversation filled with love and respect. Fear of vaccination is a powerful meme which cannot be countered by deriding the people who are sincerely captured by it. Instead, I suggest you walk them through the statistics and place them into human terms and human context. Show them how to calculate risk of death. Show them how to calculate risk of long term injury.
People have absolutely changed their minds because of internet discussions. Usually it's not one of the participants, though.
How about, rather than assuming people you disagree with are "captured" by "memes", you sit down, treat them like intelligent adults, listen to them and only then consider what to do?
End of argument.
"There is no FDA approved vaccine to prevent COVID-19"
and
"This is an unapproved vaccine"
This was written by Pfizer, May 10, 2021
A vaccine isn't even really medicine, it's science. It is a method of giving your immune system a heads up about a pathogen without exposing you to the actual pathogen. The vaccine doesn't hang around in your body for the "long term". The vaccine material is quickly disposed of by your body. After a few weeks, the only things left inside you is your own immune system, better educated.
There is no single "vaccine material" and pretending there is this single magic completely disappearing thing in all vaccines is disingenuous at best.
Also, just because something disappear from the body does not mean that it will have long lasting impacts (of course that is the point, where the gained immunity is a positive impact, but there could also be negative)
If you want to go down that rabbit hole of "long lasting impacts" then you must equally accept that everything you eat is a risk. Everything you wear against your skin is a risk. Every breath you take. Every move you make. Every bond you break. Risk is everywhere.
Running away from a Komodo dragon carries the risk present in any form of physical activity. It's possible that you might trip, fall, and hit your head in a particularly nasty way. But the fact that running isn't entirely free of risk doesn't mean running away from a Komodo dragon is a bad idea.
I do. That is why I am not going to dictate what you should eat, and why I think that will be very wrong.
But given how extremely well tested it is, given its utterly astonishing and indisputable efficacy, given that the upsides greatly outweigh the risks[0], I have no problem with society applying a bit of societal pressure on people to get vaccinated voluntarily.
[0] Obviously this is the case when talking about known risks, likely but unproven risks, or even unlikely but plausible risks. But it's still true EVEN IF you accepted all of the wacky paranoid nonsense about vaccine safety and their beliefs about "long term risks". I haven't heard any anti-vax argument that makes the vaccine out to be even one tenth as bad as the disease it protects you from.
The problem is that you are essentially imposing your trust in the institutions, onto others.
Trust in "science" is fundamentally different from trust in "scientists". Even though it might make sense to apply societal pressure to mandate trust in "science", it makes no sort of sense to mandate trust in "scientists".
I think it is hard for a lot of people to see or acknowledge the distinction between "Science" and "Scientists" which is causing these debates..
Can you show me the exact number of adverse events observed after, say pfizer covid vaccine, in real world use?
Can you show me the exact number of breakthrough infections observed after, say pfizer covid vaccine, in real world use?
Even if these numbers are available, then it is anyone take if they want to trust the entity that collected this data..
Basically, it always comes down to "trust", if you are not the once who is collecting the raw data and doing the analysis on it.
Also, you would be very wrong is "consensus" cannot be set on a single flawed metric, you would be very wrong as well.
If you want my attention, you'll have to show me evidence that vaccines have caused millions of people to die within weeks and millions more are currently suffering serious long term illness. But you can't show anything like that. You're playing an infantile game of "I demand exact numbers" in order to hide the fact you're asserting phantom dangers while unable to offer any numbers of your own.
Also https://roundingtheearth.substack.com/p/defining-away-vaccin...
Not addressing concerns of people who have suffered adverse effects, does not inspire confidence either..
https://www.c19vaxreactions.com/uploads/1/3/7/7/137732232/le...
All this is being compounded by technology in many different ways. Everyone has the ability to create their own version of Malleus Maleficarum and publish it to the world in an instant. Social media, especially with the lockdowns, has demonstrated the limits of our evolutionary biology. Twitter often reminds me of a very crude form of the Babel fish from THHGTG[0]. It's going to take more than love and respect to overcome the effects of the virus and the response to it.
What I don't understand is this obsession about the vaccination status of strangers. The only time that I felt upset about somebody else's vaccination status was with (our) teachers that said they won't get it. Because kids can't be protected by the vaccine, I think it's justified that the teachers are asked to vaccinate and the manufacturer/gov must compensate them for any side-effects. Other than that everyone has a right to decide what they put in their body. The state of the pandemic does not justify violating this right.
Herd immunity. It's an important part of the efficacy of the vaccination of highly contagious pathogens. It's why smallpox is now just a page on Wikipedia, rather than an existential risk to your life.
Social pressure is an important phenomenon and public opinion can really end up changing a lot over time, and I'm not so sure it's useless to add numbers to your side of an issue and contribute to a sense of societal consensus. It seems very difficult to pick out exactly what kinds of actions move societal opinion over time. E.g. what were the singular actions between the years 2000 and 2015 that were able to shift opinions on gay marriage so dramatically and make it so widely accepted now in America? If everyone that was fighting for this cause over that time had assumed it was hopeless and just given up and gone for a walk instead, it's possible this shift would not have happened.
It's true that if you zoom in, it's hard to believe that some comment arguing on the internet will have any impact. But in aggregate, probably it does make a difference. Hell, a lot of the conspiracy stuff spread over the internet in the first place.
Though the delta variant clearly shows vaccine works but if you get infected you don't die. Even with infection spikes in France or Spain for example you don't see deaths spike.
In the low vaccination countries you see spike in the infections and in deaths.
What should not happen - what cannot happen - is the government or private entities forcing you to be vaccinated, or you lose your means of supporting yourself. It's as un-American as it gets.
Part of being a free society - a truly free society - is that people must be free to make their own choices, even if they're poor choices.
Here in my home country of Australia, a society which arguably has more freedom than in America[0][1][2][3] we require children to be vaccinated in order for them to attend childcare and primary education. This is because most of us recognise that sending our children into an environment which has strong herd immunity to serious disease like measles is itself a form of freedom. We've traded one freedom (which we didn't want anyway) for a much better freedom.
In America, you have the freedom to have your access to quality healthcare determined by your bank balance. And you have the freedom to live in a community where everyone around you has their access to healthcare determined by their bank balance. If that's freedom, I don't want it.
[0] No civil asset forfeiture. No gerrymandering. No capital punishment. Fewer citizens incarcerated. Less student debt. Near-zero medical debt. No PATRIOT Act. Freedom from gun violence. Paid parental leave. Elections held on weekends.
[1] "Conservative" economic freedom? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_of_Economic_Freedom
[2] "Liberal" personal freedom? https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/freest-co...
[3] However you want to slice it, we're freer than you. https://www.prosperity.com/rankings
Says who?
I am one of the, according to you, stupid Americans who loves and demands freedom. I am forced to live in society and I am forced to participate by paying taxes. I don’t want your shot or your schools or your healthcare. I want to be left alone. You may think I am stupid but I think you are too.
I never said "stupid Americans." You have the freedom to misrepresent my words, but you don't have the freedom to actually change what I wrote, which remains published above.
> I am forced to live in society
No, you want to live in society. Society is where the hamburgers are; it's where the Internet is; it's where the houses with pipes delivering an endless bounty of water and electricity are; it's where the Hacker News comments section is. Being part of a society means, to some extent, accepting that many things which affect you every day are outside of your control and will be decided by someone else.
Someone decided that you have to be licensed in order to drive a car. You didn't decide that. Your freedom to drive a car (cars being a product of collective society) along roads (also a product of collective society) is determined by the collective will of society—and enforced by the collective will of society.
> I want to be left alone.
No, you want the benefits of society without being a contributor to it. You're just cherry picking the bits you like without care for long term stability of the whole. Society is fragile. And without it we have far less of the things which—if you're honest with yourself—matter to you far more than your affluent, plushy concept of "freedom."
Ok, so it is not ideal right now, but we should try to move towards the ideal, instead of away from it.
I would assert that most everything that most people actually enjoy in life is directly or indirectly scaffolded by a combination of socialism, capitalism and authoritarianism—and would be made worse by the actual reality of libertarian freedom.
> No, you want to live in society.
You don't know what I want.
> Being part of a society means, to some extent, accepting that many things which affect you every day are outside of your control and will be decided by someone else.
No it doesn't. You have shown zero proof to back up this statement. It is 100% completely possible to have a completely voluntary society. There is no reason force needs to be used to have a society. It even has a name: anarchy.
This is just the way your world view has been shaped by the status quo and where you grew up. Your mind is closed friend. Society doesn't require government.
> No, you want the benefits of society without being a contributor to it.
Again, you don't know me or what I want.
You have the freedom to misrepresent my words, but you don't have the freedom to actually change what I wrote, which remains published above.
> Society doesn't require government.
I never said society requires government. Only that it requires collective decision-making. You could require all collective decisions to require 100% agreement among all members, but then you'd achieve little to nothing.
If it is beyond me to evaluate the product, I would look at people who are capable that I trust, to evaluate it for me.
So this is the basic principle in this context. I should be free to choose who I trust. Just because I trust someone, shouldn't mean you must trust them as well.
But with these mandates, the implication is that every one should trust a certain bunch of people. And that is the freedom of choice that is really being taken away from the people.
You can choose to work somewhere else if your company forces vaccinations. Plenty of jobs and no right to work.
Why belief system? We read leaflets listing what are painkillers made from and what side effects might come out from taking them and yet we don't read leaflets when we take vaccinations. I personally don't know a single person who would read the documentation before taking vaccination. Acting like this is basically committing statement of faith.
Pied Piper to one side. Rodeo clown to the other.
Protect yourself. Don't walk into the trap.
That's the way I see it, anyway.
edit: an example, and a counter-example. Gay marriage is the example: there was never going to be a steady equilibrium reached of roughly half the US opposed and half the US in favor. One side had to win the fight and settle the issue.
On the other hand, abortion seems kind of similar and has in fact been in a fairly steady equilibrium in terms of public support. I think that may be because it's less one issue than two: the right to life of a fetus + bodily autonomy.
Or like "racism is great" vs "racism is awful" vs "this isn't racism".
People don't want to hear this, but does anyone have a plausible alternative that might actually happen? Where a debate like this was resolved sans conflict?
This all needs to be followed up on and both these worrying signs and any follow ups need to be accurately and loudly reported to the public. Instead it all gets brushed under the rug and drowned out with “safe and effective. Safe and effective. Safe and effective”.
While our vaccines were in development, Dr. Fauci described causing ADE as "the worst possible thing you could do" [1] and that you could get a feel for it with animal models, which would be interspersed with human trials. Interspersing the animal models seems incredibly risky to me, and to my knowledge we haven't seen those studies with the vaccines currently in production.
So far, the data does not seem to indicate that we're in big trouble yet -- the vaccines are still effectively preventing death -- but seeing the breakthrough cases gives me pause. I would appreciate if the "establishment" would circle back and address the risk of ADE. Even if it is very unlikely, what is the game plan if new breakthrough strains do start causing this type of response?
Because right now, it seems to me that if humanity puts all its eggs in the vaccine basket, and then ADE occurs with a breakthrough strain, then there is potential for an enormous catastrophe.
[1] https://transcripts.cnn.com/show/sitroom/date/2020-03-26/seg...
different people will have different risk/benefit profiles: should be self evident
that these vaccines are still in fact experimental: all current COVID vaccines are still being distributed under a EUA.
that there is no reproductive toxicity report for these vaccines: I checked on the status of this again, so far this study [1] that will be published next month seems to be all we have. Note that the study is on only 44 subjects, all of them rats. Additionally, please try going to the VAERS database [2] and do a query for “Spontaneous abortion” grouped by year, notice that out of the last 22 years, 48% of such events occurred in 2021 (which we are only about half through). Surely this needs some sort of follow up.
there is data showing that the lipid nanoparticles from this vaccine accumulate in the ovaries: [3], this is in rats, this should be followed up, especially when taken with the context VAERS data above, but the only follow ups I can find are hot takes from non-experts.
the rushed COVID vaccines are responsible for more all-cause deaths than the last 30 years of vaccines combined: [2] again, you can build the appropriate query yourself. I can’t draw a definitive conclusion here, but it’s rather scary that this is being mostly ignored except by right-wing media who are quick to draw their own possibly wrong from-the-hip conclusions.
that people with natural immunity have no evidence based reason to take these vaccines: here’s what The WHO has to say about it [4]. In general it seems when we are about X months past feb 2020, there is evidence that natural immunity works for about X minus 2 months. Which is to be expected as we are collecting data in real time. However the public is being constantly misdirected about this. The party line is that “long term immunity from natural infections is uncertain, but from vaccinations is certain” which cannot be a possible real conclusion because this virus has only been around for less than 2 years, and the vaccines for about half that time. If anything, we obviously know more about the long term immunity from natural infection, than the vaccine. And that WHO report sheepishly admits as much.
that mass vaccination during pandemics create evolutionary pressure for immune escape variants: feel like this should be a no-brainer, but here’s one random article that goes in depth about it [4]
there is now data showing that antibody-dependent enhancement is a real possibility due to these vaccines: there was an NBC report 2 days ago that showed signs that this might be the case, but it got memory-holed [5]. Here’s another symptom of ADE [6]. This (and all the other points) should be talked about, addressed, followed up on. Not condescendingly swept under the rug as conspiracy theories.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8163337/#!po=0....
[2] https://vaers.hhs.gov/data.html
[3] https://byrambridle.com/docs/bio-dist.pdf
[4] https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-vaccines-can-drive-pathog...
[5] https://luis46pr.wordpress.com/2021/07/29/usa-today-deletes-...
[6] https://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2021/07/26/covid-vaccination...
It seems to me that the "condescending sweep under the rug" you identify is motivated by the same reasoning that caused Fauci to declare early on that masks don't work - people need to be manipulated into doing the "right thing", and exposing them to information that might make them not do the right thing is bad, therefore that information must be suppressed.
Then, it was "we don't want people hoarding masks that are more urgently needed by healthcare workers, so tell them masks don't work". Now, it's "we need as many people getting vaccinated as possible, so suppress and cast doubt on all information that might make people hesitate". A few decades ago, this likely would have been effective (although arguably morally reprehensible) public health policy. With the internet, not only does that not work anymore but it actually backfires spectacularly, and our government elites haven't come to terms with that.
I find it at least somewhat reassuring that the biggest unknown potential side effect of the vaccine seems to be around female reproductive health, but the demographic by far most at risk from covid is past their reproductive years anyway. The ADE discussion I know nothing about, but look forward to reading; thanks again for the links.
With regards to reproductive toxicity report, I’m not really sure how to prove the absence of something, but the best study I found is on 44 rats. Let me know if you can do better. Aside from that, the VAERS miscarriage data directly supports the hypothesis that the COVID vaccines do indeed have some sort of effect on reproductive health. Can you provide some other explanation for that data?
The VAERS data also directly supports my statement about there being more deaths due to this vaccine than all the rest of the previous 20 years put together.
I am finding many articles that support the fact that natural immunity is at least as good as the vaccines. Here’s another study if the WHO isn’t good enough for you. https://www.precisionvaccinations.com/natural-immunity-after... please let me know if you find anything to the contrary.
Recent evidence supports ADE, but I agree it’s not something to be concluded just yet. The ADE hypothesis directly explains higher titer rates in vaccinated cases unvaccinated and also the fact that more vaccinated counties in California have higher case rates currently. This needs to be looked into further, but if the deleted NBC article is anything to go by, ADE will instead be memory-holed.
Anything else that you specifically have a problem with?
As far as the miscarriage bit - somewhere between 15-25% of pregnancies end in a miscarriage. 4.4m pregnancies a year, 366k pregnancies a month, 33m women in the us of peak childbearing age, that means that in any given month ~1% of women discover they are pregnant. Most miscarriages happen in the first 12 weeks so we can roughly assume 3% of peak childbearing age women are within their first 12 weeks at any given moment. About 40% of that original group of women has had at least 1 shot, which works out to 2.2m/mo and 73k/day. 3% of 73k means that 2200 first trimester women every day got a shot. Every day, ~400-500 of those women will go on to miscarry at some point within their first trimester. Surely some reasonable percentage of those people will have that happen within a few days - if we say they’re all at the median of 6 weeks along, they have a 17% chance of miscarrying within a week, which means every day you have 7-8 women who get a vaccine shot and miscarry within a week.
This is all obviously an estimation, but the math works. In reality the odds of miscarrying drop as you approach 12 weeks, so if anything, the odds of miscarrying within a week at six weeks is HIGHER than within the following two week.
EDIT:I didn’t even think about the fact that unless you’re getting thr j&j you need two shots, so that’s two chances for a miscarriage within a week, so adjust appropriately .
So for a more like-to-like comparison, let’s look at flu vaccine numbers, which gets administered to about 40% of American adults every year (including women of childbearing age). That would mean over the 20 years before 2021, about 250 million flu shots were administered to women of childbearing age, which is at least 5x more than the ~50 million doses of COVID vaccines given to women of child bearing age (my upper estimate based on your quoted vaccination rate for women of childbearing age times 6 months times 2 doses). However, anywhere between 40%-48% of spontaneous abortions over the last 20 years (depending on your exact query) are from this year. Which to me implies that the COVID vaccines are many times more harmful for reproduction than the flu vaccines, and the harm multiplier only gets bigger considering that there are other vaccines that women of childbearing might get that aren’t just the flu vaccine that I’m not counting.
In any case, there is clearly some debate to be had here, that probably neither of us are really qualified to have. However it is worrying to me that attention doesn’t really get drawn to this and we don’t have many real experts weighing in on what this data means.
https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations?country=OWID_W...
Folks, it’s a good idea to heed dang’s warning at the top of the thread. I’ve read all the comments and can confidently say there’s nothing worth reading here. Just people absolutely convinced of their ideas and principles, shouting past each other. Nothing we haven’t seen on this topic 50 times before.
You’re better off going outside for a walk.