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Comment by JohnJamesRambo | Hacker News Reader

My Dad has a big divot out of his arm from the vaccine gun when he joined the army. Everyone got a vaccine and that is how it was because the decision was science-based and not up for discussion. Same for when I went to school. Kid not vaccinated? You aren’t going to school. Somehow that got eroded by madness.

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My dad told me about getting his polio vaccination during the public health drives of the 1960s. They did an entire grade school in a single day. And there were parents who were furious about it at the time. No progress happens without protest.

But personally, I'm pretty damn thankful for their sacrifice so that we live in a largely polio-free world today.

I'm not sure when "what you can do for your country" got so small that people aren't willing to take the minuscule risk of vaccination side effects in order to gift the substantial benefit to their neighbors. Used to be, selfishness like that made you an asshole.

> science-based and not up for discussion

You realize this is a contradiction, right?

Science can be conclusive.

Sure, everyone was positive about a millenium ago that everything rotated around the Earth. It was not even up for debate, even among scientists.

We all know how that turned out.

That's a selective reading of scientific history.

What about the rest of our modern scientific knowledge base? Gravity. Electromagnetism. Chemistry. Biology. There are entire swathes of disciplines that are well nailed down by results, and used daily as though they were fact. Because they work reliably.

So I'm going to call BS on the idea that science can't be conclusive because of the definition of the scientific method. It's arguing in bad faith to point at the 1% and ignore the 99%.

Even when it's conclusive, it should never become "not up for discussion". That's the realm of blind faith.

Individual studies might be conclusive about a particular thing, but as a whole, science by definition isn't conclusive.

> Everyone got a vaccine and that is how it was because the decision was science-based and not up for discussion.

And that's exactly what GP was stating, which is why parent's quip against an out of context quote was unreasonably pedantic.

How is this being downvoted? The objective of science is to further knowledge with study and revise conclusions.

Science is always up for discussion. A lot of people like making appeals to authority and calling that "science".

I say this as someone who is vaccinated and encourages others to be so as well.

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