Comment by aww_dang | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aww_dang | Hacker News Reader

As a layman who is generally skeptical of media promotions, 91% sounds wonderful. According to a recent study 100% of young teenagers found it effective. On face value the marketing sounds good.

However, I wouldn't be interested personally. If after long term use these vaccines prove to be everything they are promised to be _and_ coronvirus remains an issue, I would gladly take it. As it is I am relatively healthy and not at risk.

Reasonable people can disagree on the trustworthiness of media, government and technocrats.

Ultimately, trust is earned. It is up to the individual to decide for himself. Attempts to scare people into vaccination or mandate use don't help the sale. Trust has been lost. Until this has been addressed, the optics surrounding the promotion of these vaccines can appear as hard sell, urgency, "act now while supplies last" scare techniques.

I know many here are convinced. Hopefully this gives some insight into the skeptical view. Tinfoil or microchip implants don't play a role.

> However, I wouldn't be interested personally. If after long term use these vaccines prove to be everything they are promised to be _and_ coronvirus remains an issue, I would gladly take it. As it is I am relatively healthy and not at risk.

if you get the coronavirus you put other people at risk. Risk of death, in fact. shrugging off covid as not your problem is actually unethical.

>...you put other people at risk. Risk of death!

Without knowing anything about my situation, you jump to the furthest extreme. Please understand how this speaks exactly to my point.

I'd love to hear how this analysis does not apply to your situation.

Unless you withdraw from society, it will unfortunately remain an issue

> you jump to the furthest extreme

But that's exactly what not getting a vaccine for a very contagious disease does. In a population there will be people who can't take the vaccine for medical reasons or it was ineffective for some reason. But, if the whole population takes the vaccine that can, herd immunity is still achieved and those people end up protected. By not taking the vaccine when you medically can, you're putting others in the community at risk.

Much like prior to covid, we were seeing an uptick in measles outbreaks because of antivaxers. Not only did the antivaxers put their kids at risk, but also kids in the groups I mentioned earlier.

> https://www.cbsnews.com/news/measles-outbreak-anti-vaccinati...

Measles vaccines are established and effective. The objections to general vaccination are not analogous to concerns about a new, untested vaccine.

Sure, but if you get in a car you put other people at risk. And CO2 emissions mean that if you breathe you put other people at risk. The question then becomes how much risk is intolerable and it isn't clear that a single person vaccinating and free-riding is actually providing some appreciable level of risk.

Besides, there are ways of mitigating that risk. He could just prep at home and wait out the two weeks. It won't be the end of the world.

> Sure, but if you get in a car you put other people at risk.

Last I checked, car wrecks aren't self-replicating, mutating, exponential-growth deadly diseases.

And so? HIV/AIDS is a self-replicating, mutating, exponential-growth deadly disease and there is a non-zero probability that you carry the virus right now. But I'm not going to ask you to stop having sex.

It still boils down to total risk vs threshold. After all, breathing exposes us to atmospheric-CO2-driven climate change risk which has a small probability of being an extinction-level event.

You can't give AIDs to people by being in the same room with them.

Stop trying to reason using bad analogies. You keep coming to bad conclusions.

Ah, but it's not an analogy. Each time I comment I narrow the scope of your opposition. That is progress. Already you have shrunk it significantly, with each comment yielding more modifiers that diminish the space you cover. With sufficient effort, I could constrain it to the size of a pea, and then we will both be faced with the fact that situations that applying so many restrictive modifiers is akin to adding epicycles. Then it will be obvious that my original statement is correct: it is about aggregate risk.

But perhaps that is best left as an exercise for the reader.

If people collectively opt to take some risk, then ethically that's fine. Your car and CO2 emission examples both include reciprocation: everyone benefits and takes risk more or less equally. The problem comes when you participate in putting others at risk when they don't want to reciprocate.

For example, what if 90% of people on a flight would prefer for the 10% of unvaccinated-by-choice people not to be present on the flight at all? They would presumably be fine if the airline put on special "unvaccinated" flights for unvaccinated-by-choice people - except that probably wouldn't be viable as a business model. Since there isn't reciprocation, why should the vaccinated people be forced to be put at risk by you?

What if, instead of flights, we were talking about access to your local grocery store?

No, that's just tyranny of the majority. Just because you've decided to assume CO2 risk doesn't mean I have to consider it ethical (being carbon neutral). It's obviously ethically untenable that just because you guys have decided human extinction is okay, I have to accept that.

By not taking the vaccine if available, you are effectively offering up your body as another potential host within which for the virus to mutate.

Not only that, as a (likely asymptomatic) carrier to help that chain of infections keep going and spreading.

The advice provided suggests that vaccines may not prevent infection, only reduce the risk of death.

I'm pro-vaccine, and I got my first dose nine days ago, but the media drumbeat that those who already had the infection should get vaccinated anyway, and continue to wear masks, is definitely cause for suspicion.

It's a very strange position not predicated on the available science. People who are wary of the vaccine are likely reacting to the obvious anti-scientific message.

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