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Comment by chris_va | Hacker News Reader

Some class of vaccine hesitancy boils down to miscalculating expected value.

The expected value of getting a vaccine is very high, but people choose not to anyway, presumably due to misinformation or miscalculation.

Lotteries here are exploiting miscalculations of expected value to incentivize behavior (0.1% of saving my life? phaw, but $100 expected value?!).

It feels a bit like patching a security bug with its own vulnerability.

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Exactly this. Dramatic videos of people experiencing adverse events following vaccination make the risk appear much bigger than it is.

COVID-19 being old news makes the risk appear much smaller than it is.

I like how behavioral economics works for vaccination.

Some is the opposite: people know they are safe with or without it, and because there an infinitesimally small risk and very little direct personal benefit for young healthy people and then make the “rational” but myopic choice to not get vaccinated. The benefits are mostly to communities and older people, healthcare and other essential workers. A less myopic self interested rationalist might decide that despite it having a slight risk and negligible direct personal benefit for young healthy people, for the community it’s much better if everyone gets vaccinated, even young low risk people.

I think the problem is more that they don’t understand that it is not a zero sum game of getting vaccinated with a tiny but some chance for adverse side-effects vs going on with life. It is taking a vaccine with 90%+ rate of success with exceedingly small side effects vs having a kind of high chance of getting a virus that has yet again quite a high chance of not being “just a flu” and causing long-lasting (perhaps even for a lifetime) health issues.

Of course we ideally should also take into account the community benefits, but even on a personal level it is a net plus.

Hmmm, here I thought the problem is we rushed a vaccine which would usually take 7-10 years to get approved through, and are now spreading propaganda like "this vaccine is safe", instead of acknowledging the fact that no vaccine or other pharmacological treatment is ever "safe". There is no free lunch. We simply don't know what the long term side effects of the vaccine will be, because we've never been allowed to put mRNA inside humans before. The cat is now out of the bag. We will see in about 6-10 years, what long term damage will result in our organs and long term health outcomes as a result of this mass experiment. Also, I hope you understand that the 90% effectiveness rate you quote, is effectiveness of "treating your symptoms" so they're not so bad as to put you in critical condition inside a hospital. I fear most people who don't do any reading about the vaccines, believe the 90% efficacy number as touted by their medical practitioner, means that they will have a 90% chance that they won't contract the virus. Most of the highly educated people I work with, believe once they have the vaccine they no longer can contract or spread the virus.

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