Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by ithkuil | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

ithkuil

> In this particular case, the potential for harm from the vaccine is quite low (this is borne out by the data),

Which is why a common anti-vax argument is sow doubt about the harmful effects.

I noticed a few options:

a) conspiratorial: "the government is lying about side harm"

b) anecdotal: "I personally know at least 3 people who couldn't walk after the vaccine. Do you call me a liar?"

c) hyper-skepticism: "how can we know if it long term side effect? Yes it's proven safe for X months, but what about in Y month? what about Y years?"

I found it hard to defuse such positions with "just more data". They seem to be memes (crafted or just evolved?) that resist quite strongly to data.

View on HN

It seems to me very reasonable to worry about long-term outcomes when we are talking about vaccinating every man woman child. Maybe its got precedence but damn if its not worrying, and honest skepticism ought to be treated with respect not derided.

I'm not deriding the honest worry. Nobody can know with certainty anything about the future.

I'm worrying about the paralyzing effects of a meme that says that since it's technically possible for an adverse affect to happen at an arbitrary point in the future, we cannot consider an option to curb the effects of a known problem we have right now.

Often I'm accused of dismissing the possibility of adverse effects like if I knew with certainty that they can't happen. How could I? Nobody knows. That's not the point. The point is to make a guess and take balanced risks. We take risks all the time, about everything.

What's so special about vaccines that causes such widespread reaction? Is it because people feel forced to take them? Is it something about the way they work that triggers such a reaction in people that often (anecdotally) don't care about things like effects of second hand smoke?

(Genuine questions)

I will try to answer your questions from my point of view.

It appears "off" that there is no nuance to this vaccination strategy. It seems especially odd to advocate for vaccinating children who stand to benefit very little personally. I had planned to get vaccinated but have been pretty concerned by the totalitarian vibes I've been getting lately. So I guess I've decided to let my civics slide to match. I will get the vaccine for my own personal benefit (if I deem it so) and I expect that is basically what's motivated everyone else anyway. So far I've not seen a clear benefit to me. According to this page https://19andme.covid19.mathematica.org/ these are my stats:

"probability of catching COVID-19 through community transmission in a week is 0.027%" "If you get sick from COVID-19, the risk of hospitalization is 1.3% , the risk of requiring an ICU is 0.67% , and the risk of not surviving is 0.053%"

If I tell the calculator I'm vaccinated then most those stats go down by 2 which is good but my threshold for action is on an absolute scale and staying unvaccinated does not trip the sensor.

I choose to live life in rural America in some part to avoid such calamities. As an unvaccinated person I am less of a risk to other people person than a vaccinated person in da big city.

To me personally the main issue has little to do with vaccines and more to do with frankly unnecessary (in some cases) overreach. I'm not saying overreach has happened already, but recent overtures are quite alarming to me.

What would be your risk threshold (hypothetically speaking, if we could know it) that would make it for you a no-brainer to just take the vaccine assuming that you taking it would encourage other people who do fall in a higher risk bracket to also take it?

Would 0.0001% risk be acceptable for you, hypothetically, as a civic duty?

I'm not even assessing the risk of the vaccine in my judgement.

I'm saying the apparent risk of the disease to myself and from me to others is not above the necessary level to stir an action from me.

I'm probably going to get the vaccine if I see some sense of nuance to the guidance. Such as reasonable advice properly and publicly discussing the relative risk/rewards for our various demographics. The current attitude that I'm confronted with in my day-to-day is "wow what a dumb fuck hes hurting himself and everyone around him", for me the stats say otherwise.

I'm pulling a different angle into the equation: an altruistic angle. Are you a priori not interested in participating in an effort that would require an action from you (and possibly also a risk) unless you're directly beneficiary of such action?

I'd assert that in such an experiment I would already be doing my part to reduce the impact of covid mainly due to where I live and minorly by my choices of how I live. The extra utility of that vaccine is effectively lost on me when that is figured in. When there is 0 utility then any altruistic action is nothing more than signaling. If I could be convinced there is serious utility for others by getting vaccinated then of course I would get it. Nobody seems willing to put real numbers to this, its simply "DO IT EVERYONE!"

Lets say there are only 2 reasons to get the vaccine:

1) To protect yourself

2) To protect all those you care for.

I'm not worried about 1 due to the apparently very low likelihood I will have some terrible personal covid outcome.

I'm not worried about 2 due to the apparent very low likelihood of even catching covid.

Are those stats based on the alpha variant (COVID-classic) or the delta variant (new and improved)? Also worth considering that rural areas are underserved wrt to healthcare, and typically experience worse outcomes under the same disease burden.

Your risk of catastrophic illness from COVID may be low - keeping in mind that population level statistics are not very good predictors of individual outcomes - but significantly higher than zero. Vaccination would reduce catastrophic risk to just about zero, with very little cost to you both in terms of risk and time/money. I guess what I am failing to understand is what possible benefit you are getting out of not getting vaccinated.

The way I see it, you can eliminate catastrophic risk to yourself (and reduce it for others) at very little personal cost, but are choosing not to for seemingly no benefit.

Submitting to what I see as overreaching propaganda when my own county has reached herd immunity is stupid plain and simple. Whoever thought of the idea to "blame the unvaccinated" as a strategy lost my cooperation because the stats say our rural community already succeeded.

Why isn't the guidance a bit more tailored?

"If your community is below herd immunity ur gonna have bad time mmmkkk, especially if you have comorbidities"

Instead in popular media it seems to be edging towards:

"Vaccinate the babies in the womb!!! Its the only way to be sure!!!"

Now the above is absurd today but 2 years ago if someone told you where we'd be today would you have believed them?

Vaccinating every man woman child was not the original bargain. A renewed discussion is needed with a clean slate. I don't think we even have an agreed set of goals anymore nor common modelling which explains the choices.

Reasonable skepticism should not be derided. But I would say (a) the skepticism is borderline, and (b) poor decision making is what is being derided.

So why is the skepticism borderline? Well we have over 100 years of data showing that vaccines I’m general are safe and effective. The safety and effectiveness of vaccines has drastically improved during that century - especially in the last 20 years. mRNA vaccines is a new platform, but all the preclinical and clinical data tee have shows they are safe and effective, and if we were going to see long term effects (which would be related to abnormal inflammatory / immune) response; it is highly likely we would have seen some indicator by now. Which specific long term effects are people even worried about?

And this brings us to why it is a poor decision. SARS-COV2 rewires your innate immune response, and has been observed to cause abnormal inflammatory/ immune responses that cause to death and long term disability with alarming frequency. So it seems like extremely poor judgement to be worried about long term effects from the vaccine more than the virus. The first concern is largely unsupported by the data, while the second is unquestionably supported by the data.

Yes we have plenty of data about past vaccines:

https://www.chop.edu/news/long-term-side-effects-covid-19-va...

"The history of vaccines shows that delayed effects following vaccination can occur. But when they do, these effects tend to happen within two months of vaccination: ...<some examples>"

Whenever I show this kind of info to my family/friends that are against vaccines the response follow the three categories I posted earlier above.

I categorically do not want to make fun of anybody. I really want to understand either:

a) what's wrong about my understanding of the safety of this vaccination campaign (i.e. can really the world governments conspire so efficiently to hide the real data, or other arguments above)

Or is it just a big identity politics problem, where we all think we engage in a rational discussion while each of us has already taken a stance that we cannot be moved out with arguments? (I'm putting myself into question too)

b) how can I understand and reach my family members and friends and engage in a discussion that is not shut off quickly by one of the aforementioned unfalsifiable positions

Reply on news.ycombinator.com