Hacker News Reader

Comment by psychometry | Hacker News Reader

Most people who fall under "health care workers" don't have a medical degree. Many, including techs and nursing assistants, don't have a bachelor's degree either. So, that population isn't really all that different from the general U.S. population in many ways.

Among physicians and medical researchers with PhDs, though, you'll find very little resistance to vaccines.

View on HN

Strange how the medical system trusts these people enough to parrot the mantra of "this vaccine is safe and effective", let alone actually administer it!

Are you dumb? It takes almost no training to administer a vaccine compared to developing it.

I'm reluctant to leverage such language, but this is an appeal to authority. And there's tons of historical evidence that authorities failed to produce their predicted end without regard to their field, specialty, education, politics, etc... So to acede to this solely on the basis that the "intelligentsia" has is perhaps just as blind a means as a coinflip. And there is of course a plenitude of arguments about how politicized this has all become, vested interests, the bandwagon, what someone might call drinking the Kool-Aid. Not to mention at this point in history we're dealt with so much information that unless your specialization is intersecting with, let's say, molecular biology, you're not particularly well suited to make a judgement call. So all these physicians, whose practice is far removed from the infinitesimal nuances of the field may not be wholly capable of assessing the finer nuances, so they trail the authorities that dictate the policy to people ever further removed. And the whole of the field isn't unanimously pressing for vaccination either, there are fringe elements that are duly skeptical who do lay within your "physicians, medical researchers with PhDs" milieu [1]. Not to mention we need a control group, how will the vaccinated gloat if they've nobody to tell "I told you so..."? And, as an example, recently there was paper published showing indications that antibiotics can cause developmental abnormalities due to alterations within the gut-brain axis which alters gene expression. Penicillin was discovered in 1928, 93 years ago, and we're just now finding out that might carry adverse effects when deployed in the young, a practice long unquestioned [2]. That's just an example to wrap your head around. And there's a litany of legitimate philosophical questions that haven't been asked because we're so well conditioned to being dragged along by technology rather than taking the reigns ourselves, and that's where my predominate concerns lie.

[1] https://www.geertvandenbossche.org/ [2] https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2021.102797

> I'm reluctant to leverage such language, but this is an appeal to authority.

Then so was the comment it was responding to

Let's dissect this: >I think it's notable that there is substantial resistance to vaccines even among health care workers.

So here, the poster asserts that they find it notable, as in worthy of remark, that within the domain of healthcare people are opting out. The poster does not make any conjecture or assertions aside from that, the poster does not lean on any position nor support one from the authority of the "healthcare worker" mosaic. Instead, the poster very simply states that it is remarkable that that cohort chooses to remain unvaccinated without any further context.

The proceeding post moves to make assertions and stratify the cohort into classes, and implicitly posits the superior decisionmaking of the educated, arguing at what is in actuality a phantasm, as the parent did not postulate anything whatever. I suspect he projected some archetype onto the parent, hazarded induction, and argued with an appeal to authority in an attempt to make a point that needn't be asserted in the context.

Oh look a 6 hour old account splitting hairs and playing semantic games.

I have real work to do.

But GP is right about what I intended. I don’t mean to question the safety or efficacy of the vaccine. I only mean to suggest it’s a difficult problem to solve when even the health care profession, which I would style as more familiar/comfortable with administration of life saving treatments, seems to be struggling with uptake.

The comment you’re replying to was also using the appeal to authority fallacy. Parent was just clarifying that the group as a whole might not be well informed, but the more educated subset is less vaccine hesitant.

It's important to recognize the difference between deductive and inductive logic. Much of academia, from lit reviews to citations to the way people are trained and educated, is inherently based upon appeal to authority. Appeal to authority is a logical fallacy only insofar as you're considering purely deductive logic, in the sense that a statement "X believes Y, therefore Y" is not formally valid. That doesn't mean the beliefs of authorities in a field are not valid informally as pieces of evidence.

Whether or not medical consensus has been more predictive than a coin flip historically is an empirical claim. I have no idea if it's true, but that seems doubtful. It's particularly interesting to cite penicillin as an example of medical authorities being wrong. Child mortality has dropped more than a hundredfold in the United States since the invention of penicillin. Not that penicillin is solely responsible for that, but I have to question whether possibly negative developmental effects you are trying to cite here really offsets the negative effects of children having potentially deadly infections. I had a severe case of pneumonia when I was 5 and would have died if not for antibiotics. Death is surely the worst possible negative developmental effect.

You're putting words in my mouth. I said as blind as a coinflip.

And you've managed construe a total misapprehension of my intended point. A fairly simple medicine that has been deployed for a very long period of time, very well studied and understood, can still generate novel information. My point wasn't to squeeze mortality rates or make positions on the use and importance of penicillin, simply to evince readers the point there are still unknown unknowns, in practice, of something that's been widely proliferated for nearly a century.

No, it's more the reverse, and it has validity. "Look, even medical professionals have concerns" is a soundbite that loses a lot of its weight when you realize that in some cases, you are looking at MAs with 20 weeks of schooling, LPNs, or even CNAs (who could have had as few as 85 hours of schooling) as "medical professionals" - they can have opinions, validity, concerns - but holding them up as medical professionals worthy of higher merit to their concern has varying degrees of flimsiness.

This isn't to knock those concerns. But while neither an MD, an LPN, or a layperson is an epidemiologist, we should be exalting the opinions of them by virtue of their authority. Not because you _need_ to be an epidemiologist to have a valid opinion, but because the above buys you no more merit, in and of itself.

Have to jump in here, that last sentence really erks me.

This thread was about people perceiving a new vaccine, as one not tested enough.

This is vastly different from someone which has resistance to vaccination overall.

I am quite concerned that such mislabelling of people, could lead to disaster.

So we are down the rabbit hole of the credentials fallacy, no one can be creditable or have valid concerns / issues unless they have a MD or PhD?

No, but we expect people who are trained in a certain area of expertise to have well-informed opinions on issues within that area of expertise. We don't ask phlebotomists which vaccines we need. That would be silly. We do ask our doctors that question, and they nearly all say we should get this vaccine and the vast majority have received it themselves.

No, the inverse.

We shouldn't treat the opinions of a CNA who might have had as few as 85 hours of education as "the opinions of a medical professional" - -that- is entirely valid. Their opinions can be credible, and they can have valid concerns, but they're not held higher because they have a cert or license or degree.

There's nothing more useless than a person who does nothing but point out "logical fallacies" instead of thinking critically about an issue. That's you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com