Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwawayacc2 | Hacker News Reader

You don’t really need to silence them. Just ignore them and relegate them to the fringes. “What? More and more people are having heart issues after vaccination? Hogwash! It’s post pandemic stress, nothing special, you’re just being a conspiracy theorist! And we all know conspiracy theorist is just one step away from far right and we don’t listen to nazis here”.

Sounds familiar?

View on HN

They can say all that. The old adage about how to tell if a politician is lying - if their lips are moving - applies.

But the data cannot simply be hand-waved away by politicians, nor easily controlled in the West. Look at what medical experts say when they publish analysis about the data - and you get as near to the truth as you can reasonably hope.

I could imagine a world where no respectable journal would publish a conspiracy theory like 'the vaccine is worse than covid for under-25 males', and no respectable academic would touch the question because it's too radioactive. Academia is politicized. We've already had plenty of cases of medical academics getting hounded off e.g. twitter for supporting non-mainstream positions, questioning vaccine rollout timelines, or entertaining the lab leak.

This happens, it happened with the lab leak hypothesis. It's believable.

I don't believe it to be happening here though. I've not seen any evidence for that. There are plenty of papers examining everything from vaccine rollout strategy, mixing vaccines, dose spacing, side effects for all age groups, etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com