Hacker News Reader

Comment by chiefalchemist | Hacker News Reader

> The government could have spent the last 18 months encouraging people to lose weight, stop smoking, drinking, and eating fast food.

Instead, the "solution" did the opposite. But worse, kids stayed inside, didn't exercise, put on (likely more) weight, didn't share illness (read: weakened immune system) and then those kids were ordered back to school in that highly vulnerable state.

The solution? The jab. With absolutely not acknowledgement or recognition they were prepped to be put in harns way.

This isn't a conspiracy theory. This is what happened and continues to happen. Unfortunately, such observations and analysis get marginalized as being a Covid denier or anti-vax. That doesn't make sense.

View on HN

If you seriously think the government could have made us all lose weight in the last 18 months... they’ve been running anti obesity campaigns for decades and failing while obesity grows every year.

BTW covid is plenty dangerous to non obese as well.

The vaccine shot actually works well and is incredibly easy to use compared to a grueling year long weight loss and sustaining it for a lifetime, for most people.

Obesity is a critical risk factor.

https://www.wfae.org/health/2021-09-30/novant-says-9-of-10-c...

https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-3742#f1-M203742

https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/obesity-and-covid-19.html

https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/early/2021/07/21/bjsports-2021-...

Look at your cdc link and it proves my point. I never said obesity wasn’t a risk factor, just that covid is plenty dangerous to the non obese as well.

“ More than 900,000 adult COVID-19 hospitalizations occurred in the United States between the beginning of the pandemic and November 18, 2020. Models estimate that 271,800 (30.2%) of these hospitalizations were attributed to obesity.6”

This is from your link - even if the government put everyone in concentration camps and forced them to lose weight, it would do nothing for the other 70%

Meanwhile vaccines are about 80-90% effective against hospitalization and death.

> Meanwhile vaccines are about 80-90% effective against hospitalization and death

And falling. Remember how people were parading around 95%?

Just like ‘99% of people in hospital are unvaccinated’. While now in some areas it’s ‘70% vaccinated’.

Vaccines are not a magic bullet and delaying covid using measures that make people fat is not a smart move. Not to mention stealing 1.5% of peoples lifetime to delay a disease that less than 1% would die from.

Obesity hasn’t changed that much. Around 70% of Americans were overweight or obese before the pandemic. Diet is the most important factor in weight gain or weight loss. And except for a few dumb months at the beginning, parks and outdoor areas are open for recreation. I’ve been running 4x a week for the whole pandemic without issue where I live, nothing stopped people from exercising if they wanted to follow the health advice that they’ve been hearing for decades.

Vaccines aren’t a magic bullet. But they’re the most cost effective item we have. You cite some irrelevant statistics but appear to agree with my statement that the vaccines remain more than 80% effective against death.

The vaccine costs less than $100 and takes about an hour of time to do. There is no way to lose weight that cheaply or quickly and as a result people continue to ignore government advice and health campaigns urging them to do so.

Moreover, losing weight does not stop you from catching or spreading COVID at all, whereas the vaccines have been shown to reduce transmission.

I did not say anything about your statement ‘that the vaccines remain more than 80% effective against death’ apart from that being down from the claim it was 95% effective. And dropping.

But from the typical ‘I endured lockdown just fine’ tripe it’s clear what you think:

I have no problems with restricting others from doing things I don’t care about and I think it’s fine to force others to adopt my position. Because I think I know better than them.

And those first few months of peoples basic human rights being taken away based on ideas that clearly were never going to work? Oh, they were just a few dumb months. Pfft who cares. We’re over that now, there’s a new battle to fight. Who thinks about these measures that were going to be the end-all solution? There’s a new measure that’s going to be the end-all solution. To force on others because clearly we know what’s best for them.

> Vaccines aren’t a magic bullet.

That's not what the narrative says. It's earier (and popular) to say "it's a pandemic of the unvaxinated" than to tell the truth. That is, diet, lifestyle and personal health matter. They impact day to day heatlth, and they impact your ability to recover from unplanned health challenges (e.g., car accident, Covid, etc.)

The idea that there is zero connection between diet + lifestyle and health is completely unscientific. To promote / deny that during a pandemic is insane.

> More than 900,000 adult COVID-19 hospitalizations occurred in the United States between the beginning of the pandemic and November 18, 2020. Models estimate that 271,800 (30.2%) of these hospitalizations were attributed to obesity.6”

Hospitalization is a deceptive metric. What's more important is: long term hospitalizations, as well as higher use of treatment (e.g., ICU).

That's that data needed. This other stat - like so many Covid stats - is too high level. The Devil is in the details.

Remember the swiss cheese model? Or lockdowns to manage the curve? Those 30% could be reduced. Also whatever percentage had bad cases because of vitamin D deficiency. Yet no messaging on staying healthy at all...

Because since not everyone can improve their immune function, nobody should, right? Messaging otherwise would be ableist or give people an idea that they could do something aside from hunkering down, and that's more important than reducing hospitalizations and saving lives...

if they have been running pro-vaccine campaigns, thats very welcome..

It is the coercion / loss of livelihood and other threats, that are getting people up in arms (figuratively, and who knows, someday in real life)

Imagine if various establishments used a weight/health card where one is scored on some heuristic, and allowed access.

Just look at intellectuals like Noam Chomsky's prescriptions on how to treat the unvaccinated...

> It is the coercion / loss of livelihood and other threats, that are getting people up in arms (figuratively, and who knows, someday in real life)

People were up in arms and fearmongering over the vaccine since 2020. This isn’t about coercion - there’s a reason the same people typically don’t get vaccinated themselves. If they believed in the effectiveness of the vaccine they’d be vaxxed themselves (like Republican Governors and Fox News tv hosts).

I personally know someone who thought the vaccine had a good chance of killing me and other acquaintances who took it, all because he read some random posts on the net.

This is a straw man.

It’s perfectly possible to be for vaccinations and against mandates.

I never said it wasn’t possible, in fact I gave some examples of people who are - politicians and tv hosts who have gotten vaxxed.

Most people don’t fall into that category though. The “people” who are up in arms usually cite stuff like the vaccines rewriting DNA, being unsafe, untested, Nuremberg violations, “did my own research” and a hundred other reasons they found online to claim the vaccine is unsafe or ineffective.

> I personally know someone who thought the vaccine had a good chance of killing

This is the straw man

Reply on news.ycombinator.com