How did we get to the point where so many people would rather risk unknown side effects of a free vaccine that hasn't been fully tested? They're putting themselves at unknown levels of risk. /s (sort of)

I find the constant "It's science" and other platitudes to be completely off-putting and it stinks of consensus building.

Further, the total shutdown of anyone that opposes the vaccinations raises so many red flags.

Perhaps the vaccines will turn out to be completely safe, or perhaps they won't. Without any sort of long-term studies, we have no idea which direction things will go.

Edit:

- The 1955 Cutter Incident: "In April 1955 more than 200 000 children in five Western and mid-Western USA states received a polio vaccine in which the process of inactivating the live virus proved to be defective. Within days there were reports of paralysis and within a month the first mass vaccination programme against polio had to be abandoned." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1383764/

- 2017 dengue fever: "The analysis showed that the subset of trial participants who were inferred to be seronegative at time of first vaccination had a higher risk of more severe dengue and hospitalizations from dengue compared to unvaccinated participants." https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/dengue-and-...

Thanks for pointing out the Cutter Incident ... an example of how, at the start, some stumbles - including deaths - are inevitable. (Wyeth too had 'excess deaths'.)

'All five companies that produced the Salk vaccine in 1955—Eli Lilly, Parke-Davis, Wyeth, Pitman-Moore, and Cutter—had difficulty completely inactivating the polio virus."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutter_Laboratories#Cutter_inc...] [https://archive.org/details/cutterincidentho00offi/page/100]

In the long run, the polio vaccines were unquestionably effective. In the US: 58,000 cases in 1952; 5600 cases in 1957. Salk led to Sabin - who did his trial tests in the USSR and Mexico (ethical?) - and by 1964 there were 124 US cases.

[http://www.eds-resources.com/poliotimeline.htm]

What stinks much more to me is consensus-building by people seeking a political advantage. The result has been many more deaths than 70 years ago.

Can you provide a citation for this?

The last stat I saw was from Israel, and it was that vaccinated people who had never had COVID were ~6-7x more likely to be infected than unvaccinated people who had previously been confirmed to have had it in the past.

Vaccination provides 2x better protection than naturally acquired “immunity” - see good data using search: https://www.google.co.nz/search?q=covid+protection+vaccine+v...

“In today’s MMWR, a study of COVID-19 infections in Kentucky among people who were previously infected with SAR-CoV-2 shows that unvaccinated individuals are more than twice as likely to be reinfected with COVID-19 than those who were fully vaccinated after initially contracting the virus. These data further indicate that COVID-19 vaccines offer better protection than natural immunity alone and that vaccines, even after prior infection, help prevent reinfections.” 6 August 2021 - https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/s0806-vaccination-pr...

Before repeating false stats, either look up your references, or provide them. There is a HUGE amount of ongoing misinformation about Covid figures which you cannot help but be aware of. For some reason the recent information from Israel seems to be especially misinterpreted (maliciously or not) - and anything recent referencing Israel is a red flag that it is likely disinformation. https://www.covid-datascience.com/post/israeli-data-how-can-...

It is especially egregious to ask for a citation when you don’t provide one yourself.

> shows that unvaccinated individuals are more than twice as likely to be reinfected with COVID-19 than those who were fully vaccinated after initially contracting the virus

The parent was comparing against vaccinated individuals who never had COVID which is different than the scenario you linked. I'm as pro-vaccine as they come but claiming that they are spreading "false stats" is a bit uncharitable, no?

My apologies, you are entirely correct: I am not comparing same with same.

I have spent some time looking for relevant data, and it is difficult to find, so the parent comment’s number could easily be correct. The parents response is still (Roger) irrelevant to the grand-parent valid point that “They’re putting themself and all peoples that interact with them at serious risk” - the most forgiving reason would be if the GP edited their comment to remove a fact?

Reinfection remains rare: “We know that reinfection is not a common occurrence, at least in the short term with the original variant of the virus as well as some of the other [variants]” - https://www.healthline.com/health-news/can-you-get-delta-var...

Even with the vaccine, you have a high risk of catching the Delta variant because the vaccines are only 40% effective against Delta… However you are far far less likely to get seriously ill, and apparently 2x less likely to spread it on to your family, if you are fully vaccinated and then catch Delta. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/23/delta-variant-pfizer-covid-v...

I also found “The relative risk for PCR positivity was 0.22 (95% CI, 0.17-0.28) for vaccinated individuals and 0.26 (95% CI, 0.21-0.34) for individuals with prior infection compared with no record of vaccination or prior infection” from https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2781112 but that doesn’t really help o_O

The last I saw it prevented 99% of hospitalization.

Can you please link the study? Thanks.

Imo it's okay because there is no expectation of people doing everything they can for other people. You could argue that people that don't go to medical school risk lives of the others.

The problem with this statement is that it says exactly the opposite of what you intended.

The actual rule of the majority - coded into law in the united states, at least - is that vaccination is not required. So the truth is, if you want to live with others, you have to accept that folks around you are spreading covid.

Let me be clear: I'm extremely pro-vaccination and think the anti-vaxers are morons. But I'm also vaccinated, and content that pretty much everyone in this country who wants vaccination (and bears any significant risk) has had the opportunity. For the rest, there's infection. Roughly 0.7% of them will die. I wish people would make better life choices, but it's the rule of the land that people get to make stupid choices. Why fight it?

What if the majority does not want those rules. Will you move to the mountains?

Let's see again when you actually enforce this by law and we can really talk about "rule". You could still argue that you endanger others by not doing 1000 other precautions, like going to medical school so you can use ballpoint pen to open the airway of that guy that chokes on airplane.

In large parts of the world the rules of said majority are that homosexual people are to be stoned to death. Is this really what you support?

The "majority" rule is a made up one, just like most rules.

Free? I take it you pay no taxes?

The people who are worried about the risk of covid can take a vaccine and be safe

there is some evidence that ivermectin has antiviral activity in-vitro, tested on primate cells. Many drugs have effects that are outside of on-label indications, as those are really just for marketing purposes.

Physicians are absolutely free to prescribe things off-label, do so routinely, and in fact in many situations the majority of prescriptions happen to be off-label.

The only concern here is 1) that concentration needed to achieve that effect may potentially be toxic to humans. 2) in-vitro studies mighte be insufficient/weak evidence and may fail in-vivo (happens all the time)

But the argument was that "the vaccines are too unproven so we should not trust them" and the solution is to take a medication that has seen orders of magnitude less testing and is known to be toxic (there are reports of large increases to calls to poison control because of this)?!

Ivermectin has been on the market for decades, it's side effects are well understood. It's used all the time around the world.

Toxic controls was very unfortunate events of people consuming veterinarian formulations designed for animals that weigh 1000+ lbs and overdosing. That means only that there is enough desperate people, and very few physicians willing to supervise the treatment.

I would be far more concerned about it's efficacy and people getting treatment that they think will help, when in fact it does not.

You broke the site guidelines egregiously with that last paragraph. Seriously not cool.

We ban accounts that do that, so please don't do anything like that on HN again—regardless of how wrong other people are, or you feel they are.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: it unfortunately looks like you've been using HN primarily for flamewar. We ban that sort of account as well, so would you please not do that anymore? We're trying for curious, thoughtful conversation here.

Your house, your rules, my apologies.

Ivermectin has been tested and approved for use in humans. It is used to treat parasites and rosacea.

https://www.pdr.net/drug-summary/Stromectol-ivermectin-391.1...

https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/Ivermectin#section...

Don't be a sheep and take the highly safe and effective vaccine, take livestock drugs instead.

But vaccinated people face almost no risk from covid, so it doesn't affect them if people choose to not get vaccinated.

Moreover, the covid vaccines will not eliminate covid from the population, as the data from Iceland clearly shows:

https://twitter.com/eliaseythorsson/status/14240115421950238...

The virus will continue to circulate and impact every one regardless of what percentage of the population gets vaccinated.

tl;dr people who don't get vaccinated are only harming themselves.

But the virus spreads among the vaccinated any way.

Moreover, the global population of unvaccinated will not be meaningfully affected by any one country's decision to mandate vaccination. And the mutation rate is dependent on the size of the global population of virus carriers, not one country's.

So all-in-all, I see very weak justification for such a heavy handed mandate, no matter how useful I think vaccination is.

> But the virus spreads among the vaccinated any way.

At an incredibly reduced rate, and mutations generally do not spread to others.

> Moreover, the global population of unvaccinated will not be meaningfully affected by any one country's decision to mandate vaccination.

I don't see how that's relevant to my original response.

> And the mutation rate is dependent on the size of the global population of virus carriers, not one country's.

I don't follow. Mutations occur irrespective of any human constructs such as nations, countries, borders, etc.

> So all-in-all, I see very weak justification for such a heavy handed mandate, no matter how useful I think vaccination is.

Take the opposite case. Nobody vaccinates, we stop caring. What is the outcome?

Half-assed approaches will only slow, not stop, the pandemic. It's not very hard to think critically about this...

> Take the opposite case. Nobody vaccinates, we stop caring. What is the outcome?

We’ll never know. We have no proper controls. Just because B comes after A does not mean A implies B.

I’m exaggerating (some of our measures seem performative, but it looks like vaccines do a good job preventing severe illness), but places like Sweden would be decent to look at. They’ve had much better outcomes with nowhere near the restrictions.

>>At an incredibly reduced rate, and mutations generally do not spread to others.

It's a fast enough where Iceland is now experiencing its largest wave yet, despite having a nearly fully vaccinated population. And why would vaccination stop mutated strains from spreading?

>>I don't see how that's relevant to my original response.

It's relevant to whether any one country has cause to mandate vaccination.

>>Mutations occur irrespective of any human constructs such as nations, countries, borders, etc.

My point is that - even if vaccination affected the size of the infected population and thus the opportunity for the virus to mutate - one country's decision to vaccinate will not meaningfully affect the global vaccination rate and therefore the global mutation rate.