Comment by PKop | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PKop | Hacker News Reader

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Not taken the vax if your health and age profile didn't merit it, given the unknown unknowns and lack of long term testing, which many people highlighted endlessly for the past year or so.

Public concessions exactly to your point that long term testing takes time, and assertions to the contrary that tere are no risks of x, y, z were blatant sophistry intended to silence legitimate criticism. These vaccines were mandated at threat of loss of careers for crying out loud...people are still getting fired for not taking them long after covid is any sort threat whatsoever or where there can be plausible deniability about claims the vaccines actually prevent contracting covid etc.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29003019

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29004097

(lot of "trust the experts", "you sound like one of the ignorant rubes" type of replies at those links, devoid of any sort of critical thinking, blindly trusting authorities without any acknowledgement to potential downsides outweighing limited upside of vax for many cohorts)

I work in healthcare and life sciences, I am vaxed, and I can say I fully believe you are correct.

I have to attest and show my vax cards to keep my job or get a new one and - of all things - we had to show vax cards to go to a behind the scene animal encounter at a zoo. Does the vaccinne stop us from catching it or from giving it to others? There is no evidence, yet, that it does.

Am I having to weasel word my post here in the concern that my account will be banned from hacker news even though this is literally what I do for a living? Yes. Yes I am.

With all due respect, not knowing your exact position, working in healthcare may not be more relevant to the topic the same way an average software dev would have a hard time fixing a deep-lying race condition in the database software.

Healthcare is a huge field, an orthopedic surgeon’s opinion for example should hardly matter over that of a virologist.

Life science projects doing comparative outcome analysis between different patient groups that have different medication or behaviors.

We ban accounts for breaking the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), not for being wrong or having a minority or contrarian view. If you present your contrarian view in a substantive, respectful, curious way and avoid flamewar tropes, you should be fine.

That's not easy, though. The temptation to lash out at users representing the majority view is really high (edit: especially when one notices them posting aggressively or with lazy arguments, which is always easy to do when speaking for a majority view). It looks to me like you're succumbing to that a bit—though not so much that we would moderate or ban you.

It's a hard problem. When people feel surrounded and picked on (and may be surrounded and picked on), they have a tendency to lose it (I'm not talking about you here) and go into fulmination, wake-up-sheeple rants, and so on. Then we moderate or ban them, because protecting the container is more important than rightness or wrongness on $topic. Inevitably they conclude that we banned them because of their views, which is usually not so. (I say 'usually' because nothing is 100% true about moderation and because there exist genuinely extreme cases, which have to be handled differently.)

Past explanations about this if anyone wants to read more:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

Thank you for the explanation. I have nothing but respect for the work and community you have built here.

edit - I read through the links you posted. My publicly stated concern was likely unfair and I apologize. I will be better.

Unknown unknowns are also true of covid. We are only beginning to see and document the effects of long covid.

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