Please make your substantive points without flamebait and name-calling.

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

What name calling though? There is exactly one word in his post that even qualifies as an unsubstantiated value judgement: "disgusting". It's appeared in 12,263 comments.

If Nature and CDC are flamebait, we're done man, we're just done.

"Murderous" also counts, in this context.

The comment would have been much better without the first sentence, which was obvious flamebait. We've already had enough vaccine flamewars and covid flamewars to last a lifetime.

The risks of Covid to children is, as you say, extremely low. The risk of the Pfizer vaccine to children is even lower.

Right now those "individuals with an underlying complex disability" are not allowed to get vaccinated because the vaccine has not been approved for young children, even with an emergency use authorization.

I think the parents of children with disabilities that make Covid more potentially dangerous for them ought to be allowed to vaccinate their child. Do you disagree?

I'm okay with approving it for kids but mandating is a whole different story.

I think we're at the point where public mandates are doing more harm than good. I am disappointed that there are so many people pushing back against simple approval of an effective vaccine because they are worried about an unnecessary mandate being imposed.

Indeed. Even this panel discussed that they must keep in mind that what they are voting on is whether to release it for optional use not mandatory use. Unfortunately they have no bearing on whether the government bodies decide to mandate it.

I will say, requiring 12 year olds to have a vaccine passport to enter public places (as is the case in much of Western Europe) is as cyberpunk-dystopian as things get, given the hospitalization numbers. A clear result of lobbying.

Even having it for adults is quite dystopian to me! If the vaccine is voluntary then businesses should not force others to have it.

Edit: I’d also add of course government entities or government-owned institutions such as schools! I’ve heard that some public high schools in California will require a vaccination card!, which, in my opinion, is quite extreme.

> I’ve heard that some public high schools in California will require a vaccination card!, which, in my opinion, is quite extreme.

Do you have children? Public schools have had vaccination requirements going back to the middle of the 19th Century. If you live in California, starting before kindegarten students are required to be vaccinated against polio, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, varicella, Haemophilus influenzae, measles, mumps, and rubella. They also recommend Hep B and meningococcal vaccines but the latter are only required for college students.

https://www.shotsforschool.org/k-12/

This is true in most of the civilized world because vaccines have changed those diseases from something my parents' generation knew as the reason why the neighbor kid died or was crippled for life to something you learn about in history class.

> Do you have children? Public schools have had vaccination requirements going back to the middle of the 19th Century.

No, I’m a teenager. I didn’t know vaccination requirements were that strict/common. I vaguely remember being asked about it maybe in elementary school but right now I’m in high school and I wasn’t asked any of that to enter (for context, I go to a private high school in Mexico).

This might be of interest: note that the first U.S. government vaccine mandate was in 1777, which George Washington required smallpox inoculation for the soldiers, and the first school mandate was in 1855:

https://www.historyofvaccines.org/timeline/all

I would suspect that you would probably have heard about this in a public school and it's also possible that this was handled by your parents without you being aware of it. It's very routine here — my son would have no idea this had happened since his doctor's office sends the records directly to the school nurse.

Wouldn't the analog of George Washington intentionally exposing his soldiers to small pox be more similar to getting covid on purpose?

There was a few centuries of experience with smallpox inoculations in China when the Europeans adopted the practice so it was known that the cases produced that way would be less severe on average — something like an order of magnitude fewer people dying from inoculation than contracting it naturally.

There's an interesting chart here showing what that looked like in Boston with the death rate falling off as inoculations picked up in the 1700s and then significantly dropping when the first vaccines were used in 1800:

https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/special-edition-on-infect...

Interesting thanks!

My wife's an AP biology teacher so we've talked about this a fair amount over the years since she's found the history is often a good hook for students.

If you want another interesting bit of history, the Balmis expedition in 1803 is fascinating, too. Smallpox was a huge problem in the New World so Jenner's discovery that cowpox protected against smallpox was of enormous interest but they didn't have an easy way to transport since the trip took longer than the 10-12 days someone would be contagious.

They ended up taking a 22 orphans and infecting them with cowpox two at a time using a sample of the pus from the previous pair, which worked well enough to reach Mexico via the Canary Islands and Puerto Rico, and then from Mexico they repeated the process with 25 new orphans all the way to the Philippines.

https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/41/9/1285/278013

Wow good thing they had a plentiful supply of orphans! Bleck! Haha thanks!

Yeah, that one hit me with a nice case of culture shock, too — imagine going to a modern IRB saying you wanted to try an new experimental treatment on poor kids and getting the response “great idea, they should be grateful for the food!”

Every kid already has a vaccine card. This is one ore row on it.

A lot of hyperbole for something that’s been here for the better part of a century.

Yes, but I'd consider it extreme for businesses and other entities who do not need that personal information ask for it, I also have some sort of vaccination record but I rarely take it out or show it to someone.

Businesses should not be forced to do business with someone they don't want to do business with.

Fair enough, but couldn’t a ban on people who do not have the vaccine be considered as discrimination ? Since when does an ice cream shop ask you if you already had your flu shot ?

Discrimination by itself is perfectly legal. I can refuse to do business with redheads, or vegans, or people whose name is Bob. Discrimination based on certain specific categories is illegal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_group

Wow, I did not know that. I honestly don't know how to make a counterargument to this.

Covid-19 is not the flu.

It is also not measles or mumps, and arguably much closer to the flu than the aforementioned.

Some vaccines confer life time immunity and others reduce severity.

But won't herd immunity become a thing with covid-19 ?

Nothing in this article talks about a vax passport. We haven't even done that for adults, much less children.

Who is we? The King County area in Washington USA is starting to enforce presenting proof of vaccination to enter businesses: https://kingcounty.gov/elected/executive/constantine/news/re...

Missed the "or a negative test" bit?

The whole "or a negative test" thing is clearly going away. It was added to make the pill easier to swallow at first; but governments (again, at least in Western Europe) seem to be getting a bit desperate to increase vaccination rates, and are making tests very very cost prohibitive (50€ per test, and you need a new test every 2-3 days), and are likely to remove that option altogether at some point. A pretty obvious slippery slope in hindsight: governments never let a crisis go to waste.

By your numbers, which I haven't checked, COVID-19 killed more children than the flu, which we vaccinate for?

Ignoring the fact that one reason we vaccinate is to reduce spread, like our kids grandparents and great-grandparents.

I encourage everyone to get vaccinated if they can but it does little to reduce spread.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02689-y

Our kids' grandparents and great-grandparents were vaccinated months ago if they wanted to be.

The difference is the control aspect. As far as I know, you won't be labeled as a second class citizen for not getting a flu shot.

Oh yawn it’s already required for school. So yeah “second class citizen” indeed.

I don't know where you are coming from, but there are many contexts in the US that required a flu vaccine in the past. And of course other vaccines.

The goal posts will move wherever it's convenient for antivax crowd.

That's interesting -- can you cite an example of when there was a national US flu vaccine mandate? What about a local mandate?

IIRC, there have not been federal or local government flu mandates although there were local government mandates for things like smallpox in school kids (but not for the entire population).

For example, here is a 2009 policy position from OSHA saying that it does not mandate flu vaccines[1]:

However, although OSHA does not specifically require employees to take the vaccines, an employer may do so.

But if I missed an example of a historical flu mandate, I'd love to hear it.

[1] https://www.osha.gov/laws-regs/standardinterpretations/2009-...

I did a very rudimentary google search and see that the federal government requires a bunch of vaccines including influenza and Covid-19[1] for obtaining a visa. The CDC publishes a "menu" of state hospital vaccination laws[2]. Those sound like they both clearly fit "many contexts in the US that required a flu vaccine" the parent mentioned.

[1] https://www.uscis.gov/tools/designated-civil-surgeons/vaccin...

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/phlp/docs/menu-shfluvacclaws.pdf

Did I mention OSHA? I gather you don't like the particular policy, but that wasn't my point and I didn't know what context GP was concerned about. Other people were talking about Europe.

Also, for the OSHA rules, they allow for a testing.

I don't know anything about this, can someone provide context on why this post is getting so downvoted, the sources they are providing look very reliable

How do these sources support vaccination being "murderous"? Saying it's only a bit worse than the flu is also a bit odd in this context, given the CDC recommends flu vaccinations for "everyone ages six months and older"? "reliable sources" should also support the argument being made.

Death is only one measure of difficulty. Long COVID is real and it affects kids too. It's estimated [1] that millions have symptoms that have lasted many months (1 out of 3 infected)

[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...

because kids not dying of covid misses the point, they can still spread it, plus those kids that have complex underlying conditions due need the vaccine and this would allow them to get it.

Calling this vaccine "murderous" should earn plenty of downvotes, given that it has killed precisely no one despite a few hundred millions doses going out so far.

You are asserting a massive conspiracy that would involve countless doctors, researchers, public health officials and virtually the entirely of the media across a hundred different countries.

And the evidence you provide is a website I could make in a weekend.

kids tend not to die from covid, but they can spread it, this is in fact a point the article makes. The point of the vaccine for kids is it would primarily prevent spread of covid to other more vulnerable people, but it would also protect some kids who were vulnerable to do underlying conditions.

Unfortunately so does vaccinated people (some studies says it lower the transmission rate, others say they don't). The vaccines are not the firebreak that people think they are.

It's not about public health. It's about control.

To what specific end and what is your evidence?

I do not know the specific end. History does not give me comfort on this subject though. Someone else asked me the same question you did on my comment though, and I responded with links, please take a look at that response since it's a sizable one with plenty of sourced claims in it. If you will only read it if I share the same information in a reply here as well, do let me know and I'm happy to do so! I just want to redundant information wherever possible in a comment tree.

And if the vaccine requirements end in 6 months, like the mask mandates and most other measures did where I live several months ago, will you take that as sufficient evidence that there is not a massive conspiracy?

Because I recall many voices saying that masking would never end, lockdowns would go on forever, and other very dramatic things, all as supposed proof that some shadowy figures were trying to "control" us. Yet, as conditions changed, those policies changed, and control was demonstrable and undeniably loosened (to the dismay of those shadowy figures, I'm sure).

I've heard "two more weeks" and "a few more months" multiple times now. And in fact, in the case of the extremely strict lockdown processes in Australia, they've extended them before.

If you peg it to # of cases rather than how many people have antibodies (FROM ANY SOURCE, given the links I provided as evidence on the efficacy of antibodies from past infection)...you can arbitrarily keep delaying the lockdowns and finding new justifications for more and more invasive processes.

No, no more six months. Based on what the scientists were saying for the entire last year about antibodies for 60 to 70 percent of the population resulting in endemic covid, Victoria and the broader USA have exceeded that. I haven't looked into western European countries yet to see what their antibody counts are estimated to be, but if they have similar antibody levels (from vaccination OR past infection), then these mandates should be dismissed immediately.

In what way?

You must live somewhere without mandates.

To be fair, I think it's less about control than about naked populism- vaccine mandates, and many other covid measures are wildly popular. It's basically mob rule. Liberal democracy is supposed to have built in protections for this, but when they get ignored, all bets are off. Right wing populists ignoring liberal democratic norms was the big fear a few years ago, and now it has swung far to the left.

There is some element of control as you say, but I think it's more in the "show you're a member of our religion" sense than in the government or corporate control sense. This is a war people are waging on themselves.

Who is in charge of our governments and corporations? If it's comprised of the people attempting to make it about their religious zeal on this subject, then I consider that no different than it being a government or corporation ploy for more power.

Because at the end of the day, it's the biggest stakeholders in a corporation that will love the power to force people out of having bread if they don't comply with increasingly invasive protocols.

If that's the case, it's even worse than a power grab.

What's the quote about abusive power done on behalf of the abused, and not ever having a reason to stop?

> Imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever?

It's way worse than a power grab. People always are more comfortable believing there is some "other" that is responsible for evil, and all we have to do is defeat them. There isn't, it's us

Just two quick thoughts. First, the 60-70% went out the window with Delta. Second, Australia has a well-documented history of being an unusually heavy-handed democracy.

If you don't take the most repressive Western regime as your starting point, you may find a much more measured variation of responses, and most of those measures have now been abandoned. The last I checked, proponents of authoritarianism don't usually just drop their repressive policies, yet that is the crystal clear pattern we observe throughout the developed world.

You just proved I'm right. In your other comment, you said "is 6 more months fine?"

And I said that they'll always find reasons to extend their magical new powers. And yet here we are, someone doing that for them by buying into the strain fear-mongering DESPITE the fact that the antibodies from past covid or from vaccination are effective against Delta. Source again:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-27/previous-...

And with both populations having antibodies (from any source) in large excess of Fauci's 60-70 percent estimate, pegged as of May 2021 at over 80% of the population...it's time to end the mandates. Source again:

https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article25398704...

I'm not going to mince words over which Western European country may be more polite than Australia as if that detracts from my arguments about what's happening. Australia is turning into a dictatorship at this rate. That is not hyperbole. Look at the links I shared more closely. This is in a western democracy, and we have no shortage of "useful fools" who will gladly parrot the same rhetoric in America or Canada or Europe if they can.

The political rhetoric coming out of Australia and New Zealand could be written by any authoritarian government any time in history.

There is a possibility it will get worse, unless the people of Australia and New Zealand choose to be very brave. Non-violence across the board, but there needs to be a massive outpouring before it's too late. Before the authorities just bribe the college students with free stuff - students don't have a long enough memory to see the risks of what is happening. Therefore the adults and the parents will need to be very brave and stand against the rhetoric.

The way the mass media tries to pit "unvaxxed vs vaxxed" and tries to label the unvaxxed is so dishonest, and it will prime inexperienced minds (who are already overly-zealous due to programming and doom-scrolling) to just go with whatever the State says. History does not bode well if this happens.

If this and not acknowledging natural immunity doesn't show people at this point it's not about saving lives and stopping the spread then I don't know what will.