> The problem of course is not the vaccines, it's this insistence that they are risk-free. They are not.

This is very dishonest. Nobody is unaware that the vaccines are not perfectly safe — there’s a ton of scientific study trying to determine the exact bounds – but what’s been clear from the data and in most of the public health advice is that they’re far less dangerous than getting COVID.

> Nobody is unaware that the vaccines are not perfectly safe

Are you so sure? "Safe and effective" and similar slogans in other languages were repeated like almost like a mantra, especially in lower-income, immigrant areas of less-fluent English proficiency. And it took me personally meeting someone who developed Guillain-Barre syndrome after COVID vaccination to even begin to question the narrative.

I get that the HN viewership tends to be well-educated and English fluent but there are a lot of people who wouldn't be able to parse the results of a clinical trial or waiver form.

At least in the city I live in, extensive outreach efforts were made to educate people. Now, you can always find people who are misinformed but I would worry more about billion dollar media empires pushing unfounded fears of vaccination than innocent misunderstanding.

> far less dangerous than getting COVID

Since the risk of COVID varies wildly by demographics, this leaves open the possibility that the vaccines are a poor risk/reward tradeoff for large numbers of the people it's being recommended to (essentially, everyone over 6 months old). And since they don't prevent COVID infection, "risk of vaccination" vs "risk of a COVID infection" is the wrong comparison to make in the first place.

They do prevent infection - not as effectively against the later variants but still notably - and the side effects which the right-wing media is stoking are indeed more common and more severe from an unvaccinated case of COVID than getting vaccinated:

https://newsroom.heart.org/news/myocarditis-risk-significant...

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36419861/

It's so odd that Israel found no significant increased risk of myocarditis from SARS-CoV-2 infection in a very large study conducted before vaccines were in widespread use: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35456309/

> they’re far less dangerous than getting COVID

Of course but that's not what authorities and all kinds of pro-vaccination people were saying at the time. General statements about safety don't inspire confidence. There's a possibility that the vaccines are beneficial for some groups but not others, for example.

Even today in my country they do everything possible to coerce people into vaccination. They come just short of abolishing personal freedom and consent. This is not how things are supposed to be done. People should want to take vaccines because there's data that shows benefit. Losing their trust means they won't even trust the data.

> Of course but that's not what authorities and all kinds of pro-vaccination people were saying at the time.

It most certainly was in the United States, starting with the initial vaccine availability notices and the information sheet you were given at the time.

> There was a noticeable increase in thromboembolic events after COVID-19 vaccination started in my city. Plenty of people were saved by friends in the emergency room.

Thromboembolic events are a common side effect of COVID-19, and vaccine roll out often led to infection surges as the sense of normality returned before full immunity.

Those events also happened in patients reporting full isolation.

They're also caused by Covid infection. Which makes sense, if the spike proteins produced by the vaccine cause these issues, then so do the spike proteins produced by the virus.

That logic is most likely simple, elegant and wrong.

Welp, I'm open to clarification.

Given both the vaccine and the virus can cause myocarditis or pericarditis, and given that the only thing they have in common is the spike protein, I'm curious as to where you think I went wrong.

Where you went wrong is getting it backwards. The vaccines are orders of magnitude less likely to cause cardiac problems than the virus itself, for fairly obvious medical reasons.

And that cardiac events in both cases are a minor part of the greater effects and dangers of catching the disease.

So it's about not focusing on the wrong things

> The vaccines are orders of magnitude less likely to cause cardiac problems than the virus itself, for fairly obvious medical reasons.

Do you have a citation or evidence for that statement? Estimates for cardiac vaccine injury are in the 4-5% range. Your statement would imply that 40% of people infected with Covid would have cardiac issues. The evidence in low vaccine rate countries (or Africa) contradict your statement (no where near 40% of the population is getting cardiac issues).

The vaccine induced thrombotic thrombocytopenia caused by the adenovirus vaccines turns out to be due to PF4 binding to the adenovirus capsid and has exactly nothing to do with the spike protein, even though that is the only common factor between the vaccines and the virus. But it turns out that the clotting problems are totally separate.

So that is a failure of the same kind of logic that you're trying to employ. You have a virus with a clotting issue and a vaccine with a clotting issue, and they both only share the spike protein, and we know for certain now that isn't the mechanism.

A quick search finds literally dozens of articles in medical journals like these:

Thrombotic complications are frequent in COVID-19 and contribute significantly to mortality and morbidity

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32857878/

One of the special characteristics of this disease is that it may predispose patients to thrombotic disease both in the venous and arterial circulation.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33719953/

Which doesn't tie the problem to the spike protein or relate it to the vaccines.

Oh, it wasn't clear that that is what you meant. Thanks for elaborating in a sibling comment.

How are you supposed to communicate 1 in 10^7 chance of anything happening versus communicating it's risk-free. The public isn't educated well enough to ascertain the difference. College-educated members of society sure, but what about the rest? Health messaging has to be broadly applicable. Most people won't have an issue, so it's simplest to convey this idea.

> 1 in 10^7 chance

I'm not sure I believe that.

> The public isn't educated well enough to ascertain the difference.

The public may be uneducated but they're still equipped with brains capable of pattern recognition.

In my country, the public saw young famous people "mysteriously" dying of heart attacks and strokes immediately after getting vaccinated, in some cases not long after tweeting some insults at skeptics. People are watching and they are going to connect dots.

I have a little collection of screenshots of people who suffered such a fate... It's unfortunate really.

You’re suffering from confirmation bias just as much as /r/HermanCainAward. There are 8 billion people in the world, there will be plenty of examples of any theory you can come up with.

In my country the vaccination was by prescription. People who wanted to be vaccinated would sit down for 3 minutes with a doctor who would tell them their probability of complications if they got Covid vs adverse events if they got the vaccine, given their sex and age bracket. (Well, not much was known for the first shot, but by the second shot side effects were well known.) Then if they consented they would be administered the vaccine. 80% of the population consented. This is how you do responsible public health communication.

As an aside, naming phenomena after priests / politicians like that can't possibly be productive. It's telling the outgroup (people who admire Cain) that they are worthy of contempt instead of addressing their object level concerns and misunderstandings.

Sorry, are you suggesting that people without a college education are too ignorant to make judgements about their own health and that it's therefore ok to lie to them?

This sort of high handed paternalism is exactly the attitude that has destroyed faith in institutions.

That's exactly what they are suggesting, unfortunately. I was about to reply to another comment but I think it was deleted. I think what I wrote is important enough to post here anyways.

> It's obvious the messaging landed on was chosen was to maximize the individual choice to vaccinate as that was reasoned to the best possible outcome for all.

This is inducing people to pick the choice you consider correct. This is unethical in the medical profession. Ethical conduct is to present the facts and let the patient decide. You don't "maximize" any outcome, nor do you "reason" about anything on behalf of the patient. To do so means you are prioritizing concerns other than your patient's best interests and once they figure this out you are done.

If necessary, you can and must use simpler language to help them understand complex concepts. What you cannot do is decide for them in advance and then misrepresent facts in order to manufacture consent for the intervention you favor.

If people are as indeed as smart as you and your parent commenter say they are, then they will understand there doesn't exist any risk-free medical procedure. Having to remind of them of that fact is the kind of patronizing you both seem to be rallying against, after all. The argument could evolve further to say, the messaging doesn't matter at all, since everyone is smart enough to make their own choice, so why be upset about it? Or, stated in other words, when exactly where they lied to if you claim they're smart enough to dissect the nuance? I guess the ultimate terminus of this discussion is the interpretation of what it means to characterize the vaccine as safe.

> Having to remind of them of that fact is the kind of patronizing you both seem to be rallying against, after all.

Not really. You'd be surprised how many people believe that. They need to make informed choices. The way to do that is to say "the benefits are X and the risks are Y". If they have trouble understanding X or Y, you do whatever is necessary to help them understand.

What you don't do is say "Oh COVID-19 vaccines? Yeah, go ahead, nothing to worry about, they're completely safe". It's not up to you to determine that they are safe, the patient makes that judgement. One person might consider them safe, another might not.

> since everyone is smart enough to make their own choice

They don't have to be "smart enough" to make choices. Unless they are mentally impaired to the point of dependence on a legal representative, they have the autonomy to decide about any matter regarding their own bodies. Even if they are uneducated. They could refuse it simply because they don't like vaccines or even you personally and it's your duty to respect that.

Unless the patient is literally dying right in front of you, there is no case you could make for overriding their will on any medical treatment, and even that varies by nation.

> so why be upset about it?

Because it's unethical and undermines trust. When you do this, people notice. They immediately stop trusting you and start actively resisting you instead. As is their right.

> when exactly where they lied to if you claim they're smart enough to dissect the nuance?

It's still a lie. Detecting the lie does not somehow invalidate the fact it is a lie.

There's a difference between a national public health messaging and a 1:1 discussion with your physician, and I don't think you're reasonably distinguishing between the two. No politician would spend 60 minutes discussing how they'll do Big Goal X and here's the 40-point plan. Read the fact sheet if you want the details or talk to your doctor. I got a fact sheet and had to wait for my vaccine, so plenty of time to read and ask questions or change my mind. And your points about the forcing of vaccination, I don't recall any instance of forced covid vaccine injections. Yes, in a parent comment you linked to something terrible that happened in the 1900s. Lots of terrible things happened in history.

There are people who have taken 2nd mortgages on their homes to send money to Trump for his “stop the steal” grift. People are too ignorant in general.

We shouldn't lie but 99% of college grads are either nominally or practically innumerate, a probability alone isn't enough