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Comment by downandout | Hacker News Reader

I think it's less about people being against the vaccine and more about people being against the mandates. One giant issue with them is that they completely ignore natural immunity, which over 30% of the country now has and studies show is drastically better than the vaccine, but without the dangerous side effects.

If the mandates were rational, they would be centered around antibody tests.

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Just a small correction: natural immunity is not without side effects - it is just that the side effect price of the natural infection is already sunk cost for those who had the disease.

Yes, I should have said “without the additional” side effects of the vaccine, but I assumed everyone would understand that part of it. But you are right that I should have been more specific, because someone else responded saying that I was overlooking the effects of COVID itself. So apparently not everyone did understand that. People in these debates tend to assume that anyone questioning mandates is automatically a COVID denier because the issue has become political. Two things can be true at once: COVID can be dangerous, and the mandates can be flawed.

Of course COVID itself is dangerous. But once you have had it and survived it, the science shows that you have far better immunity than the vaccine delivers. The mandates do not take this into account. That is all I was trying to say.

> But once you have had it and survived it, the science shows that you have far better immunity than the vaccine delivers.

This isn't clear at all, e.g. "Reduced Risk of Reinfection with SARS-CoV-2 After COVID-19 Vaccination" at https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7032e1.htm?s_cid=mm...:

> Among Kentucky residents infected with SARS-CoV-2 in 2020, vaccination status of those reinfected during May–June 2021 was compared with that of residents who were not reinfected. In this case-control study, being unvaccinated was associated with 2.34 times the odds of reinfection compared with being fully vaccinated.

That is a very small and seemingly cherry picked (by the CDC) study that does not correlate with much larger studies. The study I was referring to came out of Israel, where the vaccination rate is very high and involved far more people. In fact, natural immunity delivered 27x the protection that the vaccine does.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/study-covid-recovery-gave-isra...

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v...

>That is a very small and seemingly cherry picked (by the CDC)

And this is also a very significant factor to resistance to the mandates - it's beyond obvious this whole issue is more political than scientific at this point.

Think I'm exaggerating? Good luck finding the actual "approved" vaccine. The only ones that I can find within three states of me are all the emergency use versions - so more games being played. Why would anyone be suspicious when stuff like this is still going on? Yet the suspicious people who would like more information are the irrational ones? Good grief.

Here's a very rational question. This technology has been in development since the late 80's. If it is unquestionably safe, then why haven't any of these manufacturers completed formal FDA approval before now?

There are very rare "dangerous" side effects to the vaccines.

There have been ~180 million vaccinations in the US and approximately 16,000 deaths shortly after receiving it, along with over 75,000 hospitalizations [1]. That implies the odds of dying from the vaccine are 1 in 11,250, and odds of serious complications requiring hospitalization are 1 in 2,400. The odds of a healthy 35 year old dying from COVID are 1 in 2,700.

So the odds of serious, possibly permanent injury, or death, from the vaccine are slightly higher than the odds of dying from COVID for those 35 and younger. I realize that you will now dispute VAERS numbers, but they are the closest thing we have to accurate data on this.

[1] https://openvaers.com/

> approximately 16,000 deaths shortly after receiving it [...] That implies the odds of dying from the vaccine are 1 in 11,250

No it doesn't. The website you link to even specifically states "Reports are not proof of causality".

Yes, I am aware. However, this is the best data we have. Otherwise healthy people dying or being hospitalized shortly after receiving the vaccine, of internal causes, does not necessarily prove causality but it is certainly an indicator of it. We don’t understand the vaccine well enough to know all of the ways in which it injures people, so we have to go by the numbers. This is why we normally test these things for a decade before approving them.

According to your own statistics...

Odds of dying shortly after vaccine (for all agree groups?): 1 in 11,250

Odds of healthy 35 year old dying from covid: 1 in 2,700

So a healthy 35 year old is 4x more likely to die from covid than vaccine.

Yes, but the odds of hospitalization after vaccination (which might include permanent, life-altering injury from it) or death is 1 in 2,400. Which is precisely what my comment said.

I agree that natural immunity should count the same as a full vaccine.

> studies show is drastically better than the vaccine, but without the dangerous side effects

Because they're the dangerous main effects ffs.

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