Hacker News Reader

Comment by BoorishBears | Hacker News Reader

If a collapsed lung from a gunshot wound was contagious you sure would.

If having your head split open in a DWI accident was contagious you would.

Like 99% of the arguments against vaccination this isn't nearly as pithy as you think.

After seeing what going through the initial wave of COVID in a medical provider in the ER did to my mother I could not care less about how many loopholes in efficacy people want to tout.

Vaccines help reduce severity in some capacity. If you can be vaccinated (and not everyone can), and you chose not to because you know better, ask your YouTube doctor of choice to patch you up.

Honestly - shame on you for treating self-preservation as some sort of moral judgement against people someone doesn't like. People don't like to risk their lives for people who won't help themselves.

View on HN

You seem to have very strong views on this and I don't but as a natural follow up from your arguments, how do you propose we deal with the obesity crisis under the lens of people who don't self preservate and have all sorts of cardiovascular issues and bring healthcare costs to unbearable highs for everyone else?

To be clear my position is that you should treat everyone, fatties, smokers, antivax, whatever, merely because I don't know when I'm going to find myself in one of the "wrong" groups and I'd like to get treatment then, so I think they should get it too.

The data I saw suggested these people are actually significantly cheaper in total for society since they die so much earlier. YMMV depending on the details of your social system of course.

This is not that complicated:

Is a heart attack going to infect your provider?

Is neck cancer going to infect your provider?

We have a vaccine that significantly reduces the odds of putting our healthcare providers at risk and becoming part of the group of people crippling our ability to provide emergency medical care... if you don't take it not because you're ineligible, but because you've decided you know better, you should not be a priority.

And really this is already how it works. When ICUs get overwhelmed, people with COVID who code might not get resuscitated.

The massively increased risk to the provider combined with the chances of recovery mean you will just die:

https://www.cdha.nshealth.ca/system/files/sites/documents/co...

And I guess saying I have strong feelings supposed to be some backhanded ad hominem? I mean clearly you have strong feelings as well, writing tirades about the "fatties", the difference between us is what I write is based on reality

I understand your point about infectiousness I think it's good and I agree.

My comment was as a follow up to your statement: "Vaccines help reduce severity in some capacity", there's a lot of behaviors that reduce severity in some capacity, and doing those would translate in lots of time savings and less pressure on the healthcare system in the same way as the vaccines do, the vaccines just have the extra "bonus" of being able to infect healthcare workers, so their negative effects compound. But if your argument is about first principles, any sort of self preservation has the same problem. So I was just commenting on that.

You're right the bit about feeling strongly was probably a subconscious dig, sorry about that, but I was amused at the "shame on you" and had a moment of weakness, my bad.

Also I didn't intend much with the fatties, I find it eandearing and have been a fatty myself at times in my life and have many I like, if that offended I'm sorry and I wish I hadn't used the term, but that's life and these are just internet comments.

> People don't like to risk their lives for people who won't help themselves.

That's an entirely reasonable position that I can understand - my advice to those people would be to avoid careers in which they are required to risk their lives for people who won't help themselves.

There's a good reason I'm not a police officer, doctor, fireman, etc. The risk/reward payoff in those careers is far, far too low.

What on earth are you blathering about?

Comparing armed police sent in to deal with possibly armed suspects... firefighters who get sent into infernos... with doctors.

The risks doctors normally face from one patient to another are identical, so it was nonsensical to say they were risking their life for a specific patient. Especially since we've known how to protect from _normal_ bloodborne and airborne pathogens for a long time. The difference is COVID had no vaccine and treatment was limited at the time, it was repeatedly a death sentence.

That's why COVID already forced a rethinking of how far we expect providers to go to save someone: https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIRCOUTCOMES.120.006...

There's a good reason you're not a doctor, let's leave it at that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com