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Comment by xracy | Hacker News Reader

Nah, Pfizer is a terrible company. Pharmaceutical companies can rot in hell.

But that doesn't change the fact that vaccines save lives.

It's not that I am bending over backwards to defend Pharma. It's that people are bending over backwards to find shitty things in the silver linings of these companies, instead of just complaining about the thunderclouds themselves like the rest of us.

Corporations are big. Companies can be capable of doing shitty things and good things at the same time. If you wanna complain about Opioids, I'm happy to have a conversation about how terrible pharma is.

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> It's that people are bending over backwards to find shitty things in the silver linings of these companies, instead of just complaining about the thunderclouds themselves like the rest of us.

I'm sorry.. but wasn't it the US Government make significant investments in both companies producing this therapy? Wasn't the the US Military that drove much of the initial interest into mRNA therapies in the first place?

Why do we continue to consider these companies as anything other than conduits of government research and funding? When then is it a surprise when these companies don't recognize this that people become offended?

If I'm reading your response correctly you're basically saying "The silver lining that you're talking about wasn't even initiated by these companies, but instead a function of gov't interest/investment."

That sounds about right. I could believe that the only good thing to come out of these companies is the result of the Gov't makes them do things for the people. Profit is not a good motive for a company investing in making people healthy.

>But that doesn't change the fact that vaccines save lives.

Yeah, all fine and good when you have informed consent. I took my life in my own hands by not getting vaccinated for covid after I looked at the mortality age graph, and knew I was fit and healthy and didn't need to worry.

Society at large, however, castigated me, threw me in the same box as a conspiracy theorist, denied me my rights. People acted goddamn stupidly about this subject. I'm angry about this and I won't forgive and I won't forget.

> I'm angry about this and I won't forgive and I won't forget.

Me neither. They attempted an unconstitutional mandate even after promising they wouldn't do it during the election.

I'll never forgive that or forget the social cruelty, scapegoating and illegal breach of limited governance.

I decided not to get the vaccine based on the data. Took me 2.5 years to finally get covid. It was 4 days of fever and feeling lame. I now have immunity based on the entire virus rather than a subunit of a protein that doesn't even exist anymore.

I also (rightly) assumed masks are not effective just observing the spread being very clearly seasonal. And that just being in open air would be far better than any mask could do. Completely disrupting normal life would cause far greater health consequences for general healthy people than covid itself. We ended up not saving the vulnerable and inflicting very real, unnecessary harm on the healthy - the worst of both worlds.

Saving lives is not always about saving your life. You don't live in a vacuum, your decisions affect other people around you.

Where your decisions don't affect people around you, you're absolutely correct. But infectious diseases are not one of those cases.

Are you still, three years after the initial outbreak, continuing this nonsense? None of your talking points make sense and have been repeatedly shattered into the brittle sophistry that they are.

The risk of myocarditis is an existential risk to my being, and one that only a fool would take.

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