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Comment by libraryatnight | Hacker News Reader

There's nothing woke about vaccines.

You are correct, of course, that vaccination should be completely apolitical. However you can’t deny that covid vaccines have become the favored political bludgeon in the last couple of years.

ONly to those who've made it such... it's a public health concern.

If you're going into the military you're often required to get vaccinated.. nothing different.

I think it's pretty sad when you can be a huge rock star, and die anti-vax and anti-mask with covid, and that's all you'll ever be remembered for. (I'm talking about Meatloaf).

All because some people decided "science" is a political issue. No. It's not. The vaccines work. They save lives. It's stupid not to use them.

For celebrities, it’s really easy to be surrounded by sycophants and not realize how kooky you are. Then their fans ape them blindly. Thus a stupid movement is born.

It felt really good to see Djokovic ejected from AO. What a complete fucking moron.

Regardless of any bludgeoning you might perceive: one's decision to get the vaccine can be entirely apolitical and is a civic imperative.

The GP's failure is a failure to perform their civic duty.

The current Covid vaccines are reasonably effective at protecting the person being vaccinated from dying, but that makes a really poor basis for a mandate - the idea that everyone is obligated to minimise their personal risk of dying only exists in dystopian fiction. Instead, the push for vaccine mandates is based on partisan lies about how vaccinated people don't spread Covid, how it could all be over now and we could have herd immunity if it wasn't for the evil people not getting vaccinated, how all the anti-vaxers in the US are the partisan opponents of the current leader and it's the previous president's fault for not supporting vaccines (when we all saw the same people attacking Trump for pushing for vaccines), and so on.

But everyone is obligated to minimize their risk of dying in most companies!

You don't see people expressing their freedom to do as they please when working with high voltage equipment, chemicals, or anything remotely hazardous. Even when it's only themselves who'd be affected.

Ireland has a 96% vaccination rate amongst adults and about 75% boosted.

Yesterday, the government removed all social distancing and hospitality restrictions.

It's not purely because of the vaccines but they are a major factor.

The risk of deaths and hospitalisations overwhelming the health services have been the primary driver of restrictions and vaccines help massively in preventing this.

But vaccines do lower transmission rates. That’s not a lie.

Not by enough to stop pretty much the entire population being infected, which makes it a very questionable benefit. Mostly they just spread out the period over which everyon gets infected and that has some obvious downsides itself - the effectiveness of the vaccines against both infection and death declines rather too quickly, meaning that delaying infections can in theory lead to more deaths. As I understand it slower spread should make it easier for more infectious and vaccine-evading variants to evolve too since each intermediate step in their evolution has more of a chance to get established and outcompete the existing variant, but vaccination is still sold as a solution to the problem of new variants as well.

So what’s the alternative, then? COVID infections don’t lead to immunity, in fact antibodies fade rather quickly.

I'm pretty happy to see people being filtered out by vaccines.

This guy is on the "top of the food chain", yet to me he is not smart enough to get a vaccine. It's well deserved.

Businesses are bending over backwards for people who choose not to vaccinate, they can choose to test. Vaccinated workers can’t choose not to test.

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