It was absolutely taboo. If you tried to bring it up you were shouted down as a far right conspiracy theorist, or racist.

Mashup of clips from the news: https://youtu.be/zl-X-Lgrlf0

Jon Stewart was the first to call this into question publicly, which was brave at the time. Watch Colbert push back on Stewart’s line of reasoning: https://youtu.be/sSfejgwbDQ8

Honestly questioning anything covid-related was taboo at that time, including the vaccines and masks. Please note, I am not making any claims about either of them, other than it was taboo to question anything “official sources” stated.

It's honestly disgusting we're having a discussion about this and you're still "Please note, I am not making any claims about either of them, other than it was taboo to question anything “official sources” stated. "

My dad died of ALS this year (a few months ago) and it was 100% from his vaccine and multiple boosters. All his symptoms started in 2021 shortly after his first shot. And I'm fucking angry as hell.

Very sorry about your Dad, but you have no evidence vaccination was related to his ALS. Hundred of millions of people were vaccinated in short period of time, and there is obviously a group of people who were always going to develop ALS within that time frame. Given the large n of the first group, overlap was inevitable. Temporal proximity doesn't establish causation when there's an overlap.

Give it time. About two years, from now on...

There is tentative evidence that COVID vaccines may rarely trigger onset of ALS in susceptible individuals - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10035647/

It is possible you are right and it was just a coincidence - but it is also possible that the vaccine was the trigger for ALS to develop. We don’t have enough evidence yet to confidently say

Based on all available evidence, it is probable I am right. We have no evidence of increased rate of incidence of ALS, which you would expect to see given how many people were vaccinated.

You linked to a single case report. It does not establish any type of causal link at all. That single person was most likely going to develop ALS at the time whether he had been vaccinated or not.

> We have no evidence of increased rate of incidence of ALS, which you would expect to see given how many people were vaccinated.

What data do we have on the incidence of ALS between 2019 and now?

Even pre-2019, there appears to be a slight increase in incidence of ALS over time, although not statistically significant [0] – which could mean the increase isn't real, but could also mean it is real but studies thus far have lacked the statistical power to confirm it.

So, if it is true that ALS incidence is increasing anyway, the question then must be–has the rate of increase accelerated since 2019? I'm not aware of any published data on that topic. Furthermore, there is also some evidence that COVID-19 infection can be a trigger for onset of ALS in susceptible individuals, [1] so even if there is some pandemic-associated acceleration in incidence increase, it may be difficult to disentangle to what extent it is due to infection versus vaccination.

> You linked to a single case report. It does not establish any type of causal link at all.

A case report – even a single one – is evidence. Only weak evidence, but even weak evidence is evidence. Certainly not strong enough to establish anything - but a single case report is enough to increase the epistemic probability, even if only by a little bit. Establish is more systematic review of multiple high quality studies territory, which is at the opposite end of the strength of evidence spectrum from case reports.

I think we are likely talking about something with a rather small effect size. With a sufficiently small effect size, something can be entirely real but also impossible in practice to statistically demonstrate.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6735526/

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8441768/

Or it could be the mRNA vaccine the guy got, neither of us know. Definitely getting deja vu to covid times though with this feeling of not even being sure what you could possibly gain by telling someone their dead dad could have just been coincidentally dead from ALS... to make sure the "warp speed" mRNA vaccines stay beyond discussion?

So we should just let people spread baseless and dangerous vaccine misinformation? In order for the best idea to win, weak ideas must be challenged with rational thought.

You seem to be comfortable letting the parent state the vaccine was the cause, but uncomfortable with anyone challenging them on that. If “neither of us know”, why are comfortable with the former but not the latter?

because one guys dad died

As the other commenter said, I'd like to add an example because I think it's worth it adding this to the discussion given that you are angry about a death in your family.

Just imagine, there are - to pick an example - new cancer cases (or anything really) every single day. Therefore, the vaccination will coincide with the diagnosis perfectly for a pretty large number of people.

But as should be obvious, that is not because of the vaccine. For there to be no diseases exactly following vaccinations there would have to be a stop of all disease for a week or two for anyone getting vaccinated. Now that would be an outlier.

If you want to see if a disease cold be because of vaccination you would at the very least have to show that among those getting vaccinated statistically significantly more people get the disease than normal.

Just remember, normal life and normal things - including all kinds of diseases - go on all the time. Vaccinations take place in this context, not "outside the environment" (to use a quote from a famous sketch).

I understand how people have been obsessing over vaccination for a while, but the things are not infallible and I highly doubt some guy on the internet feels better that his dad is dead now that you've absolved pharmaceutical companies of any responsibility. Given enough big coincidences I imagine everyone stops giving the media, government and big business the benefit of the doubt no matter how politically expedient it may be to hand wave away.

What are you saying? It has nothing to do with what I wrote. Please remain constructive - and respond to what I actually wrote, not to imagined slights. Thank you. And the "hand wave" is what you are doing - read what I wrote, it is normal to have many such things coincide in timing. Timing alone is not proof of anything, since it is completely normal and expected with a constant stream of new disease. You have to show a (statistically) significant rise in numbers - as a first step, that alone still would not be proof either. Others have pointed that out too.

Given the scale of both normal disease occurrence and of the vaccination campaign, it is expected and normal for a very large number of people to get sick after vaccination - simply due to chance.

If you read into that purely statistical statement a claim of vaccinations not having any side effects than you need to read what I wrote, not what you think I wrote. One has nothing to do with the other, and I'm only addressing the one thing. Of course you can have problems due to vaccination, but you can not "hand-wave" any single random event into that category, especially when it's obvious you fail to even consider the large amount of "normally sick" cases that are bound to happen simply by random chance of them occurring all the time either way.

Wow, I already liked Stewart but really respect him to have the stones to bring that up. He doesn't fall into the left or right dichotomy.

He is extremely far left but had a new show coming out and needed to generate a bit of hype

"extremely far left" by US standards, sure .. otherwise pretty moderate middle of the road.

By which standards? Every country is different, even within Europe there are much more conservative countries than the US.

> "extremely far left" by US standards, sure .. otherwise pretty moderate middle of the road.

Globally the world is right of the US on most issues, but you're probably pretending that the rest of the world is just Europe.

Unsurprisingly, Americans generally evaluate American media by American standards.

He's never run for political office or anything like that so most of what we can glean is from his shows, which for sure attack the right more than the left but don't advance their own policy proposals.

The most overt stuff he has done politically is the late 2000s rally with Colbert which was very middle-of-the-road decorum-focused Democrat in tone, I don't think there's a lot of evidence for him being "hard left". If I had to guess, I think he'd be more in line with the Obama / Biden type camp than Sanders.

> He doesn't fall into the left or right dichotomy.

I am a fan of Jon Stewart, but the fact that I have never heard someone on the right-wing claim that Jon Stewart is non-partisan while I hear it frequently from mainstream democrats should tell you something about the veracity of the claim.

Lots of people thinking you are an idiot does not mean you can't say it. I saw plenty of people saying things about vaccines, masks, ivermectin.

But yes, when hundreds of thousands of people are dying globally, I think patience for those things wears thin in a personal capacity.

But I would seriously question whether something is really 'taboo' if ~half of the country is watching media outlets where they ask these questions regularly, which is the case in the domestic US.

It is exactly the attitude you are still exhibiting that was the problem. “We’re in a crisis, no time to ask questions. Fall in line or you’re a far right conspiracy theorist/idiot.”

It is a legitimate opinion and not censorious that if you are going and telling people to take ivermectin for covid you are legitimately harming people.

Having that attitude is not "a problem", having opinions on dumb stuff people say is not censorious.

This new interpretation that freedom of speech means freedom from having people criticize you is novel.

yes it was taboo in the media and even on hacker news. if you mentioned it then you were literally laura ingraham

We had like 1000s of threads about it for month maybe even years with rather "active" discussions and nothing was banned. If people don't engage with you or your theories it's either that they don't find it interesting or feasible or you are presenting it wrong. ie. the how is as important as the what.

The fun thing about claims about Hacker News opinion is that you can actually fact check it on Algolia. [0]

Most of it is either people saying that we can't know whether the lab leak is true or not and people who are claiming persecution on "Reddit/the Media/etc" because "they" are keeping the lab leak theory from being discussed.

[0]: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=33&prefix=true&qu...