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Comment by lmilcin | Hacker News Reader

When it comes to vaccines, you don't necessarily have to trust government institutions.

If you are normal, adult, educated person you don't need to "trust" the government for everything. You should hopefully be able to think for yourself and be able to evaluate when the story checks out and where it doesn't.

Trust knowledge that has been gathered over decades, statistics and research that has been gathered by many research institutions (unless you can claim all of them are in collusion). Vaccines do work and we desperately need everybody to get vaccinated. Every country that has implemented vaccinations vigorously has seen immediate, large drop in cases. People who are going to hospital at the moment are almost exclusively unvaccinated.

A person or institution or government that shows it is not trustworthy in one area undermines itself in other areas and so it is understandable that it may sow confusion. But you should still have ability to think for yourself and use it to make rational decisons.

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> "You should hopefully be able to think for yourself and be able to evaluate when the story checks out and where it doesn't."

When I was a child, this sort of thinking was taught in grade-school and considered to be an important component of becoming an adult. Ah, how I long for "the good ol' days".

How did they teach it? What class was that in? (Guess it was before my time.)

If I had fifty teachers during my time in public school I'd be surprised if five of them would have been smart enough to teach such a course. None of those taught grade school.

You might not need to trust government institutions in order to be convinced that vaccines in general are effective, you do however need to trust them in order to verify that a specific vaccine is effective and safe. Especially for new vaccines for which we do not have as much data gathered. In addition, the genetic material for the vaccines not being open source (and commonly being patented) stops smaller research labs and individuals from examining them by themselves. Not to mention that even if the vaccine was open source there would still be possible supply-chain attacks, would you for example trust the Chinese government to not secretly conduct experiments on the Uighurs by giving them a modified vaccine? It's not as if human experimentation even in "modern democratic countries" is unheard of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentatio....

Considering that I would not blame minorities (whether racial, religious, or political, especially in countries that have been historically oppressive of them) if they decided to avoid the vaccine.

> You should hopefully be able to think for yourself and be able to evaluate when the story checks out and where it doesn't.

> But you should still have ability to think for yourself and use it to make rational decisons.

Some people ended up distrusting vaccines (whether in general or specific) after following this process. It is not a truth-finding panacea.

Vaccines that have been through clinical trials and approved by the FDA generally work. I’m fully vaccinated, but you have to admit that there’s a difference between the COVID vaccine and other vaccines— not just in terms of development and deployment speed, but also in terms of underlying technology, at least in some cases. Skepticism is a reasonable default stance for most things, emergency measures included.

Everything in life is a tradeoff.

If you remember, vaccines were developed under enormous pressure and every day of delay meant literally tens of thousands of people dying across the world.

So the uncertainties about these vaccines must be weighted against the situation in which they came to be.

Fortunately, the doubt against vaccines seems to be largely unfounded and it is easily evidenced by drops in death rates in all countries that implemented vaccinations.

> Fortunately, the doubt against vaccines seems to be largely unfounded and it is easily evidenced by drops in death rates in all countries that implemented vaccinations.

Wrong on both counts. First of all viral epidemics follow a natural progression. Saying that a drop in [COVID] death rates following vaccine rollout proves their efficacy/safety is like saying that a week of heavy rains after doing a rain dance proves the rain dance did it.

This same mistake has been made in associative studies looking at mask mandates, where many shoddy papers were released that showed a drop in mask-mandate counties while neglecting to account for the fact that cases were dropping everywhere. Monica Gandhi (an HIV researcher whose pro-masking papers have been of consistently poor quality yet are fairly widely cited because they produce the “correct” result) published a study to this effect that she and her team had to later retract because cases later went up. They were just measuring the normal viral epidemic curve and convincing themselves, without real evidence, that it must have been the masks.

As to the other point, the efficacy of the vaccines is real but quite limited. The recent data coming out of Israel especially was something like 33% case reduction, but a much better reduction in hospitalization/death (80-90%). That to me demonstrates that the party line position of “the vaccines are amazingly effective” is simply not true. They’re great for reducing personal risk - although I’d note the Guillain-Barré syndrome, myocarditis, and strokes are pretty concerning - but they don’t do much for slowing the spread. Now frankly we never should have been trying to slow the spread of SARS-2 in the general population - it was always destined to be an endemic respiratory virus, and a mild one at that for most healthy people - but I’m just making the point because the whole narrative has been that we had to lock down “until the vaccine” to save people from getting infected when increasingly it’s looking like everyone has to face the virus one way or another.

So go out and get vaccinated if you want better odds against SARS-2 while taking on some risk from possible side effects of making your cells express a bunch of artificial spike protein throughout your body for a few days, but don’t kid yourself into thinking that any concerns about either the safety or efficacy of the vaccines is baseless.

You are bending facts to fit your opinion.

How do you explain that, even though significant proportion of populations is already vaccinated, new hospitalizations are almost exclusively people who were not vaccinated?

If vaccines were not effective wouldn't it be true that we should see both vaccinated and unvaccinated in hospitals?

While vaccinated people still can get Covid, they have much lower chance of passing it further. In a vaccinated people the virus cannot multiply as much and with lower and shorter presence of the virus in the organism and much less chance of symptoms that aid spreading the virus (like caughing) there is much less chance you infect other people.

The reality is that Covid is now mostly spreading in circles of unvaccinated people and vaccines are effective at stopping spread of the virus.

The vaccines prevent the disease from becoming bad enough to need hospitalization. That's about it. This answers your question about why hospitalizations are mostly unvaccinated people without negating any of the GP's points, which are well stated.

The idea that the vaccine prevents hospitalizations is in fact directly contradictory to the GGPs central argument, which was "that a drop in [COVID] death rates following vaccine rollout proves their efficacy/safety is like saying that a week of heavy rains after doing a rain dance proves the rain dance did it."

It's also worth pointing out that "some risk from possible side effects of making your cells express a bunch of artificial spike protein throughout your body for a few days" is strictly less than that of the virus, because the virus also puts those spike proteins in your body.

And the MRNA vaccines don't have stroke or guillain-barre as side effects. That only applies to the J&J (Janssen) vaccine.

Further, GGPs 33% number is actually 39%, and applies specifically to the delta variant. Against the version of the virus that the vaccines were developed against, it had a far higher rate of infection reduction, which is why people are (reasonably) somewhat concerned about delta, and why vaccination is even more important: because herd immunity is now even harder to achieve.

It also applies to the most commonly used COVID-19 vaccine in the world, Oxford-AstraZeneca. Maybe others I'm less familiar with.

> The idea that the vaccine prevents hospitalizations is in fact directly contradictory to the GGPs central argument, which was "that a drop in [COVID] death rates following vaccine rollout proves their efficacy/safety is like saying that a week of heavy rains after doing a rain dance proves the rain dance did it."

That doesn't follow. My point was simply that making an association does not prove causation. Which is true. Observing that giving someone a vaccine reduces their hospitalization is a separate matter, and one I literally stated in my comment (that they reduce COVID hosps by 80-90%)

> And the MRNA vaccines don't have stroke or guillain-barre as side effects. That only applies to the J&J (Janssen) vaccine.

You're wrong about the guillain-barre. Unfortunately I can't find the study I'm looking for. There is a paper that looked at the rates of Guillain Barre in the mRNA vaccines and found them 4-5x higher than normal ("normal" is a low base rate obviously), and specifically criticized the misleading math/wording coming from Pfizer and the like where they falsely claimed that the Guillain-Barre was not more common.

> Against the version of the virus that the vaccines were developed against, it had a far higher rate of infection reduction, which is why people are (reasonably) somewhat concerned about delta, and why vaccination is even more important: because herd immunity is now even harder to achieve.

This is why getting naturally infected is so important! You get near 100% infection reduction for a couple years and then immunological memory for the rest of your life. You can't beat those numbers with the vaccines, not even close.

BTW:

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.28.21261159v...

If you look at the 6 month Pfizer trial, the vaccines made no difference in all-cause mortality. In fact there was one more death in the vaccine group. (My interpretation is that the vaccines spared some COVID deaths - a small but real amount - but caused more deaths from the side effects of being injected with a massive bolus of spike protein mRNA (acute clotting disorders, stroke, myocarditis, that kind of stuff))

> but also in terms of underlying technology

AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, Sinovac, Sputnik etc all use existing vaccine approaches.

And collectively represent the most widely used vaccines.

Unlike the US, which had lots of people dying every day and so chose Emergency Authorization to get any working vaccine ASAP, New Zealand already had eliminated COVID-19 in their general population, so they did the full (albeit expedited, it's not as though there wasn't impatience) medicines authorization process for the Pfizer vaccine they're using.

They've now put well over a million jabs in arms (New Zealand's population is about 5 million) and are starting their "big" population wide rollout at the end of July. There is no sign of any significant problems.

The very rapid success of the trial programmes is actually because we did such an abysmal job stopping the pandemic. Trials work by comparing people who got the test jab against people who got a placebo. For many diseases it might take several years for enough trial participants to get infected so that you learn anything. For COVID-19 it took only a few months for strong signals to emerge, because, (outside of New Zealand and to some extent a handful of other countries that had control) the virus was everywhere, so very quickly your placebo group began to get infected and sick.

HN deals more with technology. Imagine your project takes six hours to compile. You have ten hypotheses for the cause of an important bug. Will you fix it this week? Probably not right, that's sixty hours just for compiling -- maybe you can leave it overnight and manage two tests per day? But best not to chance it. So you tell management you hope to have a fix "the week after next". Sorry, that's the best you can do.

Now, imagine a new compiler version speeds up builds, and they only take 15 minutes. You can try all ten hypotheses in a morning, get a fix reviewed, go to production and it'll be done by Friday close of business no problem.

Management are suspicious. How can the new compiler make such a radical difference? Surely you've cut some corners, you'd better go back and test it "properly" this time.

In this analogy lay people are suspicious management and the vaccine manufacturers are the developer. Also being completely useless at preventing a predictable respiratory pandemic is somehow a new compiler version. That part of the analogy doesn't work very well. Sorry.

There are two separate ideas here. Believing in the concept of a vaccine as an effective disease prevention mechanism, and believing the current narrative that all demographics need a covid vaccine, the risk reward calculus always shows it does more good than harm, etc (I'm not trying to faithfully summarize, but more make the point that there is a distinct and political covid vaccine push that's not the same as just saying a vaccine works)

I personally had to suspend my mistrust of the government in order to decide it was worth getting vaccinated. A good rule of thumb is that the more someone tries to push you to do something, the more you should question their motives. And governments that have mismanaged and lied about everything else they do, like you say, have no reason to be trusted on this one thing, even if its generally popular.

So it's not surprising that people who do believe that vaccines work (which is really not up for debate) may not agree with the putative urgency of getting this vaccine.

Should just add that I don't really think there is anything we can do about this mistrust this time around. You get credibility by acting like you have people's interests in mind, and like you know what you're doing, so it would take a long spell of that before folks have any real reason to take what we are told at face value.

> A good rule of thumb is that the more someone tries to push you to do something, the more you should question their motives.

It is a rule of thumb. Not a universal law.

I hope you are not questioning the motives for having traffic rules. Or motives of your wife asking you to avoid a particularly dangerous place when coming back from work.

> traffic rules

I think you're probably trying for one of those moral relativism fallacies (why don't we just go around killing people?) but you actually picked a ridiculously easy target that supports my point. How many instances are there of speed limits being set to create speed traps rather than to actually promote safety? Or set based on oil embargoes in the 70s and just left there? Or rules based on nimbyism and not wanting traffic in certain neighborhoods? Or lights timed to catch people at red light cams. This is all off the top of my head, I'm sure I could go on, but we should definitely be skeptical that many traffic rules are made "for our safety" and not for some other agenda, good point!

> How many instances are there of speed limits being set to create speed traps rather than to actually promote safety?

I don't know. How many are there?

Anywhere they don't use lane width for flow control, of imagine.

Consider US58 as it crosses a substantial chunk of Kansas. It passes through many very small towns with a (frequently defunct) retail "strip" that lasts less than a mile. The speed limit typically drops from 65 mph to 35 or even 25 mph while passing through these towns.

Are you suggesting that the fact that neither the towns nor Kansas has altered the lane width in these locations proves that these speed limit changes are nothing but speed traps?

The apolitical government agencies lie a lot less than you are implying.

You also seem to be implying if the government is pushing something than it is safer to do the opposite. Go outside during tornado warnings? Spend all day outside if they forecast extreme heat? Ignore a mandatory evacuation if a hurricane is coming? Keep your seat belt unbuckled? Fly on an unlicensed airline?

Exactly when should you ignore the gov’t and when should you listen?

Also consider that this is not just one country but countries all over the world.

Politics is when people yell at each other about what they ought to do.

You're right that there's a "political" covid vaccine push, in that sense. It's because getting vaccinated is your civic duty. If the risk of complications were 10 times greater it would still be your civic duty. The pandemic - a society-wide threat to public health and social integrity - ends only when everyone has sufficient antibodies to prevent the virus from multiplying out of control - the so-called "herd immunity". It'll keep going until it gets there, so you don't really have a choice - you're getting those antibodies, one way or another. You can do that the easy way - through a vaccine - or the hard way, by catching covid, in which case you'll further strain an already overloaded health system and likely pass it on to someone else, risking their death or permanent injury.

So, yeah - you ought to get vaccinated. In a simpler time, it might have been called "the patriotic thing to do".

Totally bad take. A frequently-touted bioethics claim is that it is the individual taking the risk, so the individual's benefit and outcomes is what matters. Any call for "civic duty" is a violation of bioethics.

Further, if anything about the vaccine push made any sense whatsoever, you might have a better case during these "exigent" circumstances. For instance, insisting people who've already recovered from covid and have robust, longer-lasting immunity also get vaccinated... That should make everyone's eyebrow raise up to heaven. And, since I personally note that strangely aggressive angle, among many others, it makes me even more suspicious of these vaccines.

Then again, I'm healthy, young, get plenty of vitamin D, and have close to zero risk of catching or transmitting covid. So anyone telling me vaccines make sense for me is pretty out-of-touch.

>For instance, insisting people who've already recovered from covid and have robust, longer-lasting immunity also get vaccinated... That should make everyone's eyebrow raise up to heaven

Firstly, vaccine immunity is superior. Secondly - what are you implying with your eyebrow raise? An undisclosed ulterior motive? Short of kooky 5g-microchips-flat-earth-lizard-illuminati trash, what motive could any government have for deliberately compromising the health of their citizens, never mind all countries - including all the great rival superpowers?

> I'm healthy, young, get plenty of vitamin D, and have close to zero risk of catching or transmitting covid

Close to zero risk? I'm skeptical. Unless you live off-grid somewhere and have no personal contact at all, in which case - sure, forget vaccination. But all the youth and vitamin D in the world won't stop you from catching and transmitting it the moment you step into civilization.

So, in case you haven't been paying any attention, the data from the UK and Israel, some of the most heavily vaccinated places on earth, are showing pretty clearly that the vaccines are not long-lasting, and not robust against the delta variant.

Second, you can't prove that "vaccine immunity is superior". That has never once been the case with any vaccine in history, there're no studies that show it, that's just BS parroted by drones.

Third, you don't need to know the motive when the behaviour is suspicious, you just need to know the creepy, suspicious behaviour. If someone is creeping around my house sneakily, repeatedly, I don't need to know exactly what they plan, but I have every right to want them to gtfo my space.

Fourth, another of the super-suspicious things about these vaccines is just how many of the hoi polloi have been programmed to accuse anyone unvaccinated of being wild 5g-magnetic-brain-impant believers. As though there can be no reasonable way to be suspicious of these experimental vaccines that were rushed to market--you have to be an insane person. That drones like you come out and make these stupid accusations every time I mention that the vaccines aren't some obvious lock on canning this virus is really, really suspicious.

Fifth, asymptomatic spread has NEVER been proven. Pre-symptomatic spread has, but not nearly as widely prevalent as we thought. Since I'm in a category of people--not fat, healthy, young, vitamin-d enriched--that basically never gets covid, I can basically never transmit it.

>Since I'm in a category of people--not fat, healthy, young, vitamin-d enriched--that basically never gets covid, I can basically never transmit it.

I'm sorry, we could argue the toss about the other stuff but this is dangerously delusional. You're going to hurt people with that attitude. All of the factors you mentioned just mean you're more likely to survive. They have no bearing on how easily you can catch covid, or pass it on. In the UK, spread is almost entirely driven by the young now.

>dangerously delusional

LOL

"For over 5% of these deaths, COVID-19 was the only cause mentioned on the death certificate. For deaths with conditions or causes in addition to COVID-19, on average, there were 4.0 additional conditions or causes per death."

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm

The #1 additional condition is, you guessed it, obesity.

I'm not fat. I have zero underlying conditions. I am healthier than the vast majority of people. Good bodyfat ratio. Good muscle mass. Really high-quality diet. Zero stress. I don't take any medications.

People like me almost never get sick from covid.

You seem to think that people who never get symptoms also can transmit the disease (so-called asymptomatic spread). This has never been proven to happen. There has been some, much more limited than initially thought, pre-symptomatic spread, but that means that the person doing the spreading without symptoms will get sick in a day or three.

The healthy and young of this world have no observed impact on spread.

You may not take much personal responsibility for your health, and thus may be fat or otherwise at risk. You may have some rare condition beyond your control that puts you at risk. If so, maybe you should take experimental vaccines.

It makes zero sense for people like me, who have taken care of their health and thus have robust immune systems that handle this virus with zero problems and develop robust immunity to it, to take experimental vaccines. You'll have to have some more actual data to back that up, though.

>this is dangerously delusional.

LOL

Says the person suggesting that web devs on HN can't Google Scholar and critical think their way to an overridingly authoritative understanding of medical science (which is nothing compared to being a Node ninja)

>vaccine immunity is superior

Here's proof that's totally wrong: https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-medicine/fulltext/S2666-37...

    Most recovered COVID-19 patients mount broad, durable immunity after infection
    Neutralizing antibodies show a bi-phasic decay with half-lives >200 days
    Spike IgG+ memory B cells increase and persist post-infection
    Durable polyfunctional CD4 and CD8 T cells recognize distinct viral epitope regions

I am vaccinated and sometimes wish I could unvaccinate when I read hogwash like this.

It isn't you civic duty. Herd immunity isn't achievable, that is scientific consensus by now. You should take more care with demands from others. Much more care.

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