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Comment by nojokes | Hacker News Reader

I wrote about this opinion piece in more detail here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30172569

I think its arguments are really flawed and not grounded in reality but like I said, I do not think that convalescents should vaccinate but I think they should be highly encouraged to have a booster shot because it about halves the change to become reinfected.

I think that this discussion if previously infected should or should not be vaccinated has generated just too much distraction.

Even in EU, where one, who had PCR test confirmed infection, can get COVID-19 certificate for 6 months (compared to 12 months for double vaccinated, now 9 months), it has given the anti-vaxxers too large platform.

They would not have gained it without this mistake in politics.

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I'm interested in your thoughts about the quality of the authors argument. What I'm decidedly not interested in is this stuff about "the antivaxxers" (whoever that may be to you), and them winning or losing.

At some point, people started losing the plot. The win condition here is not "every single human vaccinated with the current batch of vaccines, and anyone in the way labeled and punished".

That was a potential strategy for achieving the actual win condition of keeping society running. For a variety of reasons, we seem to have wrung the majority of the benefit we can out of that strategy. Now we have to go to the next phase, and it'd be nice to start undoing this bullshit division that's been created among us.

I think that his argument is totally misplaced.

He tries to argue that vaccine mandates are bad because natural immunity after infection is superior.

Honestly, this is ridiculous conclusion. If natural immunity gives about the same or better or not too much worse outcome than vaccines, we should treat it equally. Period.

If somebody gets unlucky and gets infected. Let it be. If they want to have one additional shot, encourage them. If they are afraid to get one, calm them with correct information. But let them decide.

Of course then somebody would claim that we would encourage then people to get infected.

Yes, there would be some people who are stupid enough to try to get intentionally infected. I know that they exists through media and my personal contacts. But this very limited number of bad actors should not affect well behaving majority.

If we made convalescence passports equal to vaccine passports, we could have avoided a lot of unnecessary discussion and divide.

Anti-vaxxers are people who find for some reason that vaccines are bad or somewhat bad and should be avoided and then desperately constructs articles like this to mislead other people and convince them to accept their beliefs.

I touched this topic only because the author tries to convince us that he is not one.

Why is it important? Because their beliefs distract them to view this issue objectively.

For example if two doses of vaccine do not work against new variant, they conclude that vaccines are bad and should be abandoned instead of asking and testing if three doses might work.

I am seeing the same again with omicron. Vaccines do not work, should be abandoned. I am seeing that they still work fairly well, at least against serious illness that requires hospitalization and actually after boosting also against infection but just the virus is everywhere and changes to get it are enormous and this makes it hard to avoid even when vaccinated by three doses (efficacy is around 60% with 3 doses that is about the same as was 2 doses with delta but delta was just much much slower virus (even though I thought that it was fast back then)).

Maybe this doctor really is not one but people who are, are going to use this opinion piece to confuse other people and gain support against vaccination even when it really is the best option that they got at the moment.

This is why I find this aspect also important.

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