Discriminatory attitudes against the unvaccinated during a global pandemic | Hacker News Reader

Discriminatory attitudes against the unvaccinated during a global pandemic

nature.com

71 pointstokai221 comments

I have a friend who is allergic to many vaccines. A bad reaction as a kid led to him needing years of rehab. He's also high risk for Covid. He's pro-vaccine in general I guess I should add, but his doctor told him to not get the covid shots because the risk was too high

Whenever I mention that it's cruel to exclude people like him from society, due to vaccine requirements, when people like him are presumably what all these rules were meant to protect, a little mob came together to denounce the idea and say that he absolutely should never be allowed in public again.

Almost everybody was safe from covid -- it was a handful of high risk people who we were trying to protect. In theory. But instead, all the low risk people wanted to throw the high risk people under the bus to save themselves.

Eg, healthy people couldn't go to movie theatres, but my grandma's care home had outbreak after outbreak, with no resources spared to isolate people like her. Or an other friend who was high risk, but worked in retail -- zero resources available to keep her away from all the sick people (this was back before everyone was quadruple vaxed).

It was disgusting

I'm deadly allergic to eggs, and the only flu vaccine easily available to me is made with eggs, so I don't take it.

There are many other medically valid reasons to not take a vaccine. There are even some (a very small number) of people whose religious convictions are a valid reason to get an exemption.

The issue is that the overwhelming majority (>99%) of people who choose not to vaccinate, do so for bad reasons, which amounts to making an uninformed medical decision, and one that adversely impacts other people in addition to themselves. These people are what the controversy is actually about.

Anyone bullying people who have medical issues is a bad person and needs to chill.

More importantly, their uninformed medical decision disproportionally hurts the minority groups you called out above.

It's not the vaccinated population who I'm concerned about, but those who have legitimate medical reasons to not take the vaccine.

Agreed.

I really don't think that's what is going on.

I used to be on an antivax list (for unrelated reasons -- I am not an antivaxxer) and these were people with serious health problems and loved ones with serious health problems who had been treated terribly by extended family, the medical system, etc. and they were desperate to be heard by someone who believed them that "This vaccine is a real and serious problem for me/my loved ones!" and the "nutters" were the only ones giving them any support.

I didn't get a proper diagnosis for my condition until my mid thirties. I was treated like a hypochondriac before that, among other things.

Not everyone is fortunate to know what their medical issue is yet. Many people who have real issues with vaccines simply don't know a good means to argue for their right to use their own best judgement, make their own medical decisions and try to take care of themselves and they turn to whatever "support" systems they can find, which aren't always a good means to achieve their ends.

Yes, it's important to not deprecate individuals' personal informed good faith opinions in favor of the top-down overprescriptive medical system. But this concern doesn't apply to the main contingent of unvaccinated, either.

The sheer majority of the vaccine hesitant have had their head pumped full of nonsense by the anti-American narratives of Fox News and its ilk, then validated by Facebook. The common refrain isn't one of not being able to get vaccinated for any specific medical concern. Rather in the best case it falls back to ambiguous FUD, and often involves group identity and not giving in to those other people.

And yes, it sucks that the legitimately unvaccinated can get lumped in with those adding to a public health problem as some misguided political statement. As a libertarian, I'm personally quite frustrated at the damage they've done to the general concept of freedom. But that's all the more reason to call it out for the anti-rationality that it is, rather than letting them continue to burn goodwill towards legitimate good faith points by hiding behind them in bad faith.

> But this concern doesn't apply to the main contingent of unvaccinated, either.

> The sheer majority of the vaccine hesitant have had their head pumped full of nonsense by the anti-American narratives of Fox News and its ilk, then validated by Facebook

I believe that you honestly believe this, but as a living counter example of what you describe (don't watch infotainment style news for anything but entertainment, made my decision based on available studies), I wonder how you have gone about validating that perception?

Is there a chance that you're assuming the loud cartoon characters you see on social media, or a few of your friends/family/coworkers are representative of the wider population? Does this "main contingent" really make up the bulk of this group? Or are they just the most offensive, and therefore most noticeable?

I mean, I can’t speak for the other commenter, but there are a ton of papers studying the interaction of political beliefs and both generally anti-science views as well as opposition to public health guidance.

I think we're not quite on the same page. The comment I was responding to mentioned "the unvaccinated" and "the vaccine hesitant", I'm assuming specifically with respect to covid vaccines.

I know a lot of people immediately translate that to "anti-science" or "antivax" (a word that I really think has lost all usefulness on account of everyone having a different set of people in mind when they use it), and/or conservative/republican/maga whatever, but again, as a living counter example of that, that translation doesn't happen in my head, and it makes me do a double take when I see it.

So my question for parent wasn't "do conservatives/republicans/infotainment viewers exist in large numbers?". It was "how many of the unvaccinated/vaccine hesitant are the sort of people that make it onto your radar?" Obviously you can't miss the crazy uncles on your social feeds, or the cartoon characters that pundits love to cash in on, and it's easy to think the world is nothing but those people.

What you don't see are the people like me that are desperately hoping the topic doesn't come up in conversation because it's basically the equivalent of bringing up abortion when you're around the water cooler.

In my age+health cohort, the known and documented risks of the vaccines outweigh the known risks of COVID-19, but you assume “bad reasons” because it’s not a religious objection or medical contraindication. What makes your risk calculus any more valid than mine?

I would go so far as to say it’s anti-science to lump 99% of the vaccine rejectors as “uninformed”. I’d venture the average mechanistic knowledge of these products is higher than in the rejectors than in the vaccinated set.

You have a 1/100000 chance of a usually minor condition. Some have a 1/10 chance of dying from COVID.

It's your right to avoid the vaccine. It's also moral to prevent you from mixing with the elderly.

Good point, and now that we know the vaccines don't prevent transmission, the same goes for the vaccinated I suppose.

They do prevent transmission. God, I wish misinformation would not spread so easily.

(Edit: I'm a biochemist, merely relaying a consensus position, in my area of expertise, and getting downvoted. Nice.)

If we're being specific, they reduce transmission, they don't wholesale prevent it.

My frustration is people will look at "decreases mortality by xx%" or "decreases spread by y%" and conclude that it's not worth taking even when the risks are slim to non existent.

Hacker News is a place where we talk about billion dollar industries that are built on someone doing something 2% better than the other guy, but all that reason goes out the window when it comes to healthcare and it's killing hundreds of thousands of people.

That is correct.

In January, the director of the CDC said:

"...what they can’t do anymore is prevent transmission. So if you're going home to somebody who has not been vaccinated, somebody who can't get vaccinated... I would suggest you wear a mask in a public indoor setting"

https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/cdc-director-covid-...

This is an issue of semantics. They "prevent" in the sense that they "reduce the risk", not in the sense that they "preclude entirely".

Put another way: they prevent some transmission. They do not prevent all transmission.

It's not unusual to be sloppy with the definition here. Typically you would say that birth control prevents pregnancy, even though it is not 100% efficacious.

That is correct.

As for sloppiness... If there used to be 100 cookies in the cookie jar, and now there are 95, then there's a difference between saying "I did not eat cookies" (the implication is that you did not eat any of the missing 5 cookies) and saying "I did not eat all the missing cookies" (the implication being that you ate fewer than 5 cookies). Saying the vaccines don't prevent transmission is the same as saying they prevent 0% of transmission, which is completely false.

I see this exact back and forth in a lot of threads, but I never see it go to the obvious conclusion. It sounds like you can probably shed some light on this based on your background.

A) they dont prevent transmission

B) they don't prevent _all_ transmission. No vaccine is 100% effective.

C) end of thread

I always wonder, well are these ones 99% effective^? 98% 97%?

It would be a slam dunk if you could just say some number there that is in say the 70s or higher. But everybody stops at "well they aren't 100%" (and you're an asshole/dummy/republican for not getting one). But that leaves about 100 other options for what the efficacy could be.

Obviously it's a moving target and depends on a lot of variables, but as of today, what do we understand to be the quantified benefit to somebody standing next to me if I've gotten vaccinated? And how long will that benefit last?

^ against infection here specifically, and right now, not for any mostly extinct variants

Far from accurate. This is NOT the consensus

Can you explain exactly how it’s moral to prevent an otherwise healthy person from mixing with the elderly (who are free to be vaccinated and wear PPE if they feel at risk) in public settings, unless they will accept a medical intervention with a 1/3000 risk of a serious adverse event to themselves?

This is one of the reasons why individualism and public health are fundamentally at odds.

Ethical questions become easier if you assume that all actions are intentional and made with full knowledge of the consequences. Unfortunately real people are biological organisms that may shed pathogens wherever they go. Your mere presence may be enough to harm other people, without your intention or knowledge.

Should we as a society allow people to endanger bystanders, if the known preventative measures cause more harm than good to the person taking them? Or should we require everyone to follow the best practices, if the benefits to the society sufficiently outweigh the harm to the individual?

I don’t think this is a complex trade-off at all, precisely for the reasons in your second paragraph. The whole issue boils down to whether we should allow the powers that be a framework to criminalize being an unadulterated human. That path may be less salient in the short-term (particularly in the face of manufactured panic), but it’s far, far more terrifying in the long run.

My comment was not specific to covid vaccines.

Vaccines, like other preventative measures, have externalities. Public health debates are often about whether those externalities are significant enough that individuals should be asked / pressured / forced to take actions that may be harmful to them. If you only talk about the effects of a vaccine on the vaccinated individual, you are not really participating in the debate.

Can you give us an overview on what's currently known about the externalities of the covid vaccines? Specifically some quantification of their effect on another persons odds of getting infected/hospitalized/killed/long covid'ed would be particularly helpful.

My understanding is that it is miniscule, but I only see people say things like "well no vaccine is 100% effective" and leave it at that (which I don't see as particularly informative), or the other end of the spectrum "the evil clot shots never did anything but kill people and make money for big pharma" which is of course equally useless.

Everyone I know with the vaccine has still gotten (and presumably spread) COVID. Many of them multiple times. So you can't make this statement anymore, it's false.

That's a nice testimonial, but you do realize that anecdotal evidence is one of the weakest forms of evidence, right?

Let me try this then - https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/23/vaccinate.... The data shows that the majority of Covid deaths are from vaccinated people now. Better?

By a wide margin, of all the COVID deaths total, most of them were unvaccinated. COVID deaths in August were slightly more among the vaccinated, but there were relatively few total deaths in August, and most of the population is vaccinated. It remains true that if you are unvaccinated, you have a higher chance of dying of a COVID infection.

Look up “conditional probability rule”.

I wanted to make sure I corrected your claim that this was anecdotal. It's what the actual data says. Most people dying from Covid now are vaccinated. That doesn't mean nobody should get vaccinated. It doesn't mean everyone should get vaccinated. But saying something isn't true that clearly is, isn't helpful. Trust has been eroded enough by "the experts" already.

No, you’re missing the point in more than one way.

So personal experience is now anecdotal?

Yes, and always has been.

Then you are easily manipulated.

If you wont confront given information with your real experience, you could easily believe in anything that other says. And covid is exactly this case. How many healthy people died from covid that you personally knew?

I’m not sure if you’re being for real right now, but maybe you should just start by looking at the definition of “anecdotal evidence”. This is just what this is, by definition. I’m not sure what you’re going on about.

Isn't definition of anecdotal "less relevant"?

No.

Ok, what is the definition of "anecdotal" in this case? Funny?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anecdotal_evidence

Seriously, why bother commenting if you haven't got that far.

Dude.

My risk calculus is informed by over 12 years of postsecondary education (and expertise) in the biomedical field, and by deferral to expertise on complex issues.

Well, despite those handicaps, I trust your risk calculus is still as valid for your situation as mine is for me. Why would you not extend the same courtesy to others? I’m reminded of a Carl Sagan quote:

> One of the great commandments of science is, “Mistrust arguments from authority.” (Scientists, being primates, and thus given to dominance hierarchies, of course do not always follow this commandment). Too many such arguments have proved too painfully wrong. Authorities must prove their contentions like everybody else.

There’s a difference between an “appeal to authority” logical fallacy and the “deferral to expertise” heuristic. Look it up.

I can’t believe I have to explain this, but nobody on this earth knows everything: therefore we specialize, and we resort to other experts. That is the reality of being an agent of bounded rationality.

> a little mob came together to denounce the idea and say that he absolutely should never be allowed in public again.

Emphasis on "little", I suppose? This sounds like a strawman. I don't think many would have argued that someone with a legitimate medical reason to not get vaccinated should be excluded from anything.

How would it even come to be known? If I was allergic to a vaccine and someone asked me about my vaccines I would say "I have taken every vaccine I am able to" or something like that.

Exclusion of the willingly unvaccinated is possible and widespread mainly because such people are surprisingly vocal and bring up the topic without prompting.

Very few argued that, but it's what happened. Recall that COVID unvaccinated non-citizens still may not enter the USA for any reason.

False. Children, people traveling for emergencies, and anyone medically unable to take the vaccine may travel to the U.S. without it.

It sounds good, but I can tell you from experience that getting the exception on medical grounds is quite difficult, even with pretty incontrovertible reasons. Doctors were very much pressured to not put their career on the line and would rather sweep you under the rug.

One of the exceptions from the vaccine requirement listed on https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/travelers/proof-of... is: "Persons with documented medical contraindications to receiving a COVID-19 vaccine"

I've never encountered anyone who was able to get a formal medical exemption even when their doctors told them not to take the second shot due to severe reaction, so in practice this condition doesn't mean anything.

Have you tried to enter the US as a non-citizen recently? You have to complete an attestation form, with a long list of exceptions from the vaccination requirement. The things that get reported in the news are simplified, while the reality is complicated and messy.

>I don't think many would have argued that someone with a legitimate medical reason to not get vaccinated should be excluded from anything.

That was not my experience at all. New York, notably had no medical exceptions for entering businesses, at least for a while. I live in another major city and had to take steps to figure out how the heck I was going to get food if the same policy came into place.

> Whenever I mention that it's cruel to exclude people like him from society, due to vaccine requirements

I know that I’ve only advocated for people who are voluntarily unvaxxed, but medically eligible, face increased scrutiny. I would never suggest anything of the sort for your friend. That’d be like discriminating against someone who requires a wheelchair or cannot see.

I think that's reasonable. It's a shame this viewpoint was almost totally absent from the discussion over the last few years. Incredibly disappointing.

> Whenever I mention that it's cruel to exclude people like him from society,

Your friend was at higher risk from COVID due to to their medical condition. It might be cruel to ask them to reduce their social interaction, but many medical conditions are like that. Their feelings don't change the problem or reduce the risk. It does does not seem to be completely unfounded.

I think there is a difference between asking someone to reduce their social interaction and forcing them to reduce their social interaction

> there is a difference between asking someone to reduce their social interaction and forcing them

Is there a difference? In what sense? What distinction is a virus going to make? A virus doesn't see that difference in motivation, it just sees warm cells. What difference would this distinction make to the epidemiology and public health? None.

If you're going to argue the ethical "personal freedom" sense only, then like with smoking in public and my personal freedom to not inhale second-hand smoke, you're going to have to take into account the ethical dimension of saving lives and not transmitting disease to innocent bystanders. In both cases we breath the same air.

A "personal freedom only" approach to public heath when we breath the same air is, and always will be, laughably unworkable: it's simply a category error, the wrong tool. If the COVID pandemic hasn't made that clear then I don't know what will.

So... Should we ban alcohol, tobacco, cars and force everyone to wear helmets?

Sometimes is just better to not pretend that we are immortal. We forget how to live under the hood of fear from death.

> So... Should we ban alcohol, tobacco, cars and force everyone to wear helmets?

All of these things that you mentioned are regulated, some more strictly than others. "ban or permit freely" attitude to them is black-or-white, fallacious thinking.

None of what you wrote is on topic or refutes anything that I said above.

Actually it does. If we apply mandatory practices in favor of our health, why don't we absolutely abandon things that clearly damage our health?

Where are you from?

> Actually it does.

What does what? Be specific.

> why don't we absolutely abandon things that clearly damage our health?

I expect that at least tobacco, will in the long run be permanently abandoned. But how is that relevant?

> Where are you from?

Why do you ask? I'm not in the habit of supplying PII to antagonistic randos in the internet.

Is it relevant in reasons of excessive deaths. Even in much higher numbers than covid has.

I'm not asking for your adress, just country. To connect history and politics with your statement.

> I'm not asking for your adress, just country.

Yet you asked a very different question, where are you _from_.

> To connect history and politics with your statement

Ah yes, the old "You're mired in your specific history, but I'm objective" nonsense. GTFO.

I'd assumed that such people got medical exemptions in most countries:

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/nhs-covid-pass#if-you-are-unable...

But maybe all the people respondng to your comments online where from nations that didn't do this.

> I have a friend who is allergic to many vaccines. A bad reaction as a kid led to him needing years of rehab. He's also high risk for Covid. He's pro-vaccine in general I guess I should add, but his doctor told him to not get the covid shots because the risk was too high

Has your friend asked another doctor for a second opinion?

It is unlikely that anyone who is allergic to prior vaccines would be allergic to the mRNA vaccines. There is no such thing as a broad spectrum vaccine allergy, there's just allergies to the individual components. If they were allergic to eggs and the flu vaccine they can safely get an mRNA vaccine.

My wife is in a similar boat. I'm vaccinated, she is not. We are both very "pro vaccine." But when she was a child she was hospitalized and had a near death experience due an allergic reaction. Our family doctor, the same doctor that recommended that everyone else in our family get vaccinated, told her to err on the side of caution and take other precautions.

Why should she not trust the doctor that knows our family medical history and has taken care of all of us for, in the case of our children, their entire lives?

In other words, let's say a different doctor DID give a second opinion. Why would / should she trust that opinion more?

> Why should she not trust the doctor that knows our family medical history and has taken care of all of us for, in the case of our children, their entire lives?

Because that sounds ridiculous. Unless the allergen that caused your wife's allergic reaction is in the vaccines then there's no additional risk.

Consult with an actual immunologist specialist who has a deep understanding of the physical mechanisms behind allergies and can properly weigh the risks from the prior allergic reaction and the risks posed by vaccines.

The idea that your GP somehow is better informed than a specialist through having been with you all your lives is very poor logic.

> Almost everybody was safe from covid -- it was a handful of high risk people who we were trying to protect.

Just on that point, it’s also worth considering what happens when hospitals are overwhelmed.

> I mention that it's cruel to exclude people like him from society

Which is exactly why we specifically don't exclude people like him from society. There are obviously exemptions in every sane country.

In France there are exemptions for this cases and some people still acted like "BuT wHat AbOUt AlleRgIes", like they cared at all. They just didn't want to get vaccinated.

What surprised me the most was just how vicious and cruel the people in my life could be towards the unvaccinated. It went beyond mere schadenfreude. Many of my otherwise tolerant and empathetic friends eagerly ate up any and all news about anti-vaxxers suffering or even outright dying.

I don't know how much of this was a result of them getting caught up in the social media bandwagon (Twitter, r/HermanCainAward) or because this was the most significant and close to home "us vs. them" situation in our lives up until this point.

When someone gets in a horrific crash because the were driving 50 over the speed limit, do you feel sorry for them?

Or do you say that they "got what they deserved" not just for being individually reckless, but also for selfishly putting other people on the roads in danger?

Ask yourself: Before COVID, in 2019, if you saw an 18 year old's car wrapped around a tree on the news clearly due to excessive speeding, did you lament their predicament? Did you say "they had an individual right to drive as fast as they thought they could handle", or did you laugh and say that they got what they deserved?

Be honest in your response.

Your example elides the fact that the vaccine situation was about risk-benefit analysis in many people's minds.

A more appropriate example might be a situation where someone ran their car off the road because they perceived (possibly incorrectly) some danger that they were attempting to avoid.

And quite possibly ploughing into a crowd of pedestrians in the process.

nah in this case all those pedestrians have an anti-car force field

At the risk of really straining the metaphor, one of the arguments is that not all the pedestrians are able to be fitted with those force fields. The force fields are also not 100% full-proof, although they can help reduce the impact.

Let's extend the metaphor even further, when you turn on the force field many people get hurt or sick sometimes even for days.

So then you heckle the pedestrians without a forcefield for not getting one? That is what we are talking about here, why would you do that?

Dropping the metaphor, absolutely not looking to heckle those who cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons (those pedestrians unable to be fitted with forcefields).

The wilfully unvaccinated (the "ran their car off the road because they perceived (possibly incorrectly) some danger that they were attempting to avoid" group) are making it harder for those that are medically unable and those with chronic health concerns as the less virus circulating the less risk for the more vulnerable among us. While this generates feeling of ill-will within me, I personally am not advocating the heckling of anyone.

My, "not 100% full-proof, although they can help reduce the impact," analogy was addressing that while it is still possible to catch COVID even if you are fully vaccinated, it is less likely and usually the severity will be less than it will have been otherwise if you do catch it.

The vaccines were never sterilizing. The best estimates I've seen for transmission attenuation are around 15%, primarily due to shortening the duration of being a carrier, with an additional small effect for viral load reduction.

Fifteen percent transmission attenuation is a huge contrast to the public health messaging during much of the vaccination campaign, which was that vaccination would invariably protect the vulnerable. It never did, and public health experts knew it.

Is 15% better than zero? Sure. But to claim that vaccination would protect others is and was a total lie, or if you want to be more charitable, only 85% of a total lie.

And what's worse in my opinion is that we're harassing a minority in society over something that seems much less significant (at this point) than the truly beneficial things (universally - not just covid, and that address things that certainly cost the healthcare system much more) like vitamin D sufficiency, regular exercise and healthy diet.

Sources?

Here's mine for Victoria, Australia: https://n.actionsack.com/covidbaseau/status/1570919765191053...

"When 45% of deaths and 30% of hospitalisations are from a (unvaccinated) group which makes up less than 5% of the adult population, the vaccine is clearly doing its job."

I think a distinction needs to be made between rationalizing tragedy through a sense of cosmic justice and hiding cruelty behind a personal sense of righteousness.

That 18 year old in your example may very well have 'gotten what they deserved', but I would still lament that their life was cut short. I certainly wouldn't feel a smug sense of satisfaction that I'm still alive because I drive the speed limit. I wouldn't share the experience or seek validation on social media.

I would be okay with 'making an example of him' but only in a matter of fact way meant to educate others. Those driver's ed videos that show real life crash footage do not mock the victims when they seek to educate people.

This isn't a good analogy given "people driving the speed limit" can also get and spread Covid and cause extremely negative outcomes. Not wearing a seat-belt is perhaps a more accurate metaphor, given the individual assumes the majority of the risk.

Regardless all you're doing here is trying to justify a bad attitude, and proving the GPs point.

Getting COVID while unvaccinated makes you much more sick, and hence much more likely to spread it to other people.

This is why China is still under lockdown, and most other (highly vaccinated) countries aren't.

In places with no speed limit enforcement, even people that drive slowly are killed more often.

How is this difficult to understand?

Vaccines, masks, hand-washing, etc... are not just about you!

Personally works love to see the research on that assertion. If you are unvaccinated and get sick, you are more likely to be symptomatic and stay home. On the other hand if you are vaccinated you are more likely to be asymptomatic and socialize and therefore more likely to spread it. Unfortunately I don't know the numbers. How much more likely are you to be asymptomatic if you are vaccinated?

Wearing sealt-belt still wont protect you from possibly killing anyone.

When I was growing up, they counted anyone who got vaccinated against something as a "success." So if 80 percent got vaccinated for X, they bragged about that.

These days, we count anyone who didn't get vaccinated as a failure and bellyache about that 20 percent that "won't cooperate" and malign them as problem children who don't have a good reason for their choices.

It's a dramatic change in attitude and it's very scary stuff because people are increasingly fine with "We shall just force the minority to get vaccinated and make their lives hell if they continue to resist." It's really, really scary stuff and most people don't seem to recognize how and why it's scary stuff.

In my view it's tantamount to abuse, because ultimately what it does is erodes trust.

If you're shouting at someone to do something over and over again, eventually they just stop listening to you and try to get away from you.

The correct way is to explain to them the reasons that you feel it's good for them, or for those around them, and then let them make the decision.

Otherwise you're acting as a parent. You're not treating them as an equal.

I'm sure that some people will take issue with my specific use of the term "abuse", but it meets the definition as far as I can tell.

It even goes down to the point that people (who disagree) just stop talking about it completely because they're always walking on eggshells.

People flip out, tell you you can't go to XYZ or do XYZ, etc. It's just like, okay, whatever man, I'll say whatever you want me to say for an easy life. Doesn't mean I believe it or trust you.

> The correct way is to explain to them the reasons that you feel it's good for them, or for those around them, and then let them make the decision.

The problem is, at least for many societies, that we don't operate on "you get to choose, but you have to live with the consequences". If you choose not to get vaccinated because you want to avoid becoming a walking 5g transmitter programmed by Bill Gates, and you get sick and need emergency care, you're not going to be denied because you made the choice and knew the risk, which has implications for everyone else, because emergency care is limited etc etc.

You're not understanding my point.

Shouting people down, restricting their movements, trying to put them out of a job etc. is abusive behaviour.

It works if the force is sufficient enough. That doesn't make it right.

Sure, and I wasn't a fan of the approaches they used, but I do understand them.

The alternative is either to accept their willful ignorance that will have life-threatening impact on third parties that weren't willfully ignorant, or to cut them off from societal institutions for anything that follows from their decisions.

At least in Germany, that was the debate, and the folks who didn't want to get vaccinated didn't favor living with the consequences either. It's pretty much why we have mandatory retirement programs, because we don't trust the population at large to make smart decisions and we don't want them to rely on society after the consequences of their decisions manifest.

I'd love to go further into this but I feel that the attitude I expressed in my first post is coming into play here.

I'll give you a short description, I guess.

You're throwing around terms like "willful ignorance".

It may not be conscious on your part, but that's patronising behaviour, and I don't feel a sense of goodwill there.

I'd love to be able to elaborate further and enter into a proper discussion but I'm just tired.

What term would you prefer for something that just looks ignorant and no other explanation is given for why the person does it even after information has been shared with them?

There are many people much more educated than you in this field of study that chose not to be vaccinated. Are they ignorant or is it you?

Leaving this decision up to individuals avoids the worst case scenario, which is species extinction because we acted like lemmings.

I'm sure there are good reasons to not be vaccinated. Those generally publicly shared (Bill Gates, UN-chips, 5g, radical degrowth by chemical neutering etc etc) were not among them.

And it's like with most things. When 99% of weightlifters tell you that you cannot lift a metric ton, you'll probably want to listen to them and not the 1% who say you do, just because they can lift more weight than you.

You are ignoring that those "many" are a tiny minority among the educated. Cranks are always among us.

A lack of trust and confidence in the information provided and the motives of those prescribing the action?

Possibly, but many of them jumped straight into theories that were very 'out there', so I'm not sure how much of it was because of some considerations vs pure tribal instincts.

When you abuse someone they'll say anything in order to get you to go away and stop. What they actually believe becomes immaterial.

You wanted them to get vaccinated. You failed to convince them that it was in their best interests. So you started attempting to force them. You tried to remove them from friends and family, to prevent them from finding work, to prevent them from accessing escape hatches such as travel. You posted adverts - "get vaccinated to avoid lockdown". The list goes on. Do what I say, or I'll punish you.

All of this is still raw and visceral in my mind. It's not fading.

They didn't want that. So they banded together and started grasping onto anything that would allow them to simply say -

"No."

That might be no to the vaccine. It might be no to one way systems. It might just be "no" to forced isolation. Ultimately, they said no.

You may feel that in the jumbled nonsense they expressed to you, in anger, as a substitute for a boundary, ignorance was expressed. But ultimately you wouldn't recognise their boundaries, you saw them only as an extension of yourself to be manipulated at will.

That's patronising, regardless of the terminology used.

The unvaccinated played the good role of scapegoat. “Our policy won’t be effective unless 90% people vaccinate” “Only 85% vaccinated, so this wave is because of THEM, they are killing YOUR grandmother.”

It helped channeling public anger at something. It’s textbook Machiavel, I was surprised people didn’t see through that, I wish people read more ;)

Basically every nation already uses force to deter certain forms of socially problematic behavior.

If you habitually litter, for example, you'll receive a fine. If you don't pay that fine, you're going to end up with a bench warrant. There is an implicit threat of force. Same for graffiti, smoking in public places, etc.

Vaccine uptake is not actually compulsory under threat of force, and in that sense I have trouble seeing the "dramatic change in attitude".

"Do this or you will be unemployable" doesn't sound like force to you?

> doesn't sound like force to you?

Not by the state, no. And withholding a job offer is certainly not force. We generally accept that there are a lot of things that will make you unemployable, like having a swastika on your forehead. It's up to the business owner / recruiter / whatever to determine what the reasonable rejection criteria are. If there's a reason someone can't get vaccinated, like an allergy, I'd consider it a moral obligation for the prospective employer to take that into account.

FWIW (anecdata): my (large) company never mandated vaccines at any point, and neither did any of the companies where my friends work. And I'm in California, so I doubt there was really any place in the US where it made you truly unemployable (with the possible exception of frontline healthcare workers), even if some people were "forced" to change jobs.

> If there's a reason someone can't get vaccinated, like an allergy, I'd consider it a moral obligation for the prospective employer to take that into account.

It depends on the job. If someone can't get vaccinated; and they also want to work with other medically vulnerable people; then they're in the same position as someone who is legally blind and wants to drive a taxi-cab. i.e. While they may want to do it, and it might hurt their feelings to deny them this, it is inadvisable to everyone involved for them to make the attempt. A virus doesn't see our reasons, it just sees warm unvaccinated hosts.

I do agree, it depends on the job. I can tell you that this kind of litmus test was not being applied though in many cases.

But the virus sees unvaccinated and vaccinated hosts, so these scenarios are not comparable. A person with full vision can see 100% of the street, while a blind person sees 0%. We cannot even quantify the vaccine's level of protection against transmission with some certainty, but it is certainly not 100% vs 0%. To me it looks more like 51% vs. 49%.

> while a blind person sees 0%

For most blind people this is not correct.

Fair point. Near 0%.

The legal standard for blindness in the US is 20/200 vision, i.e. someone with "ideal" 20/20 vision sees with the same acuity from 200 feet away as a legally blind person can from 20 feet away. It's really a misconception that most blind people can't see anything, they just aren't able to operate a car safely, have trouble reading signs, etc., and crucially that this is not something that can be fixed with glasses, contacts, surgery, et cetera. (I am not allowed to drive my car without my glasses, but because the glasses work, I am not legally blind).

The glasses are really quite an apt analogy to the transmission rate with a COVID vaccine. It's not that you can't transmit, but your risk of doing so is several times lower. Nor is it the case that I couldn't drive my car without my glasses, but it's a lot safer if I wear them, so it's required by law.

Personally I like that requirement. Yes, it's theoretically a restriction on my rights, but I like the idea that other people on the road are also subject to that restriction; it makes me safer. Same goes for the vaccine.

> It's not that you can't transmit, but your risk of doing so is several times lower.

Is that really the case? Even for the early variants, the reduction of transmission risk was <= 23%

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2116597

You might want to read that abstract again because you did not understand it. It says the transmission ratio is 0.50 (i.e., 2x better) vs unvaccinated with two doses of BNT162b2 (that's the Pfizer vaccine, the other one is a research vaccine). As we know now, booster doses are necessary for Delta, and reduce that figure well below 0.50.

Furthermore, looking at the main data table in the paper, two-dose BNT162b2 vaccination reduces your odds of contracting Delta (as opposed to transmitting it, once you've already caught it) to 0.19 versus an unvaccinated index. Taken together, you can see how those two factors make a person a much less effective spreader of COVID in their community.

The 7-23% figure you are citing is how much reduction in transmissions rate is explained due to viral load differences between Alpha and Delta.

Just wondering: when you read that it only produced a 23% benefit, you didn't have any immediate doubts that couldn't possibly be correct?

I doubt most efficacy claims, because they don't line up with the experiences of most of the people that I know. Most people were vaccinated, most people were boostered, most people contracted covid, many obviousy passed it on. I am not saying that the numbers are wrong, but I am saing that the vaccine was marketed with fancy numbers, that don't mean much in the end, because people get vaccinated, but still get covid and pass it on, potentially multiple times. I can get behind the argument of reducing the risk of severe illness, but all the arguments about protecting others do not make any sense to me when there is such a blatant lack of guarantees. Forbidding blind people to drive a car is a much more straight-forward measure.

To be clear what you're saying is that you have stopped disputing the data, but ... oh look over there! hey, who needs data when you have anecdotes?

An estimated 94% of Americans has been infected with SARS-CoV-2.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.11.19.22282525v...

About 69% of Americans have received two doses. Some got more.

https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccinations_vacc-...

This leaves very little room for real transmission/infection benefit. About 6% of people have been saved from being infected, but this is trending southwards and some of them may just have been religious maskers and social distancers, so it is not clear by how much the vaccination contributes to the 6%.

It was due to an executive order, so I don't know how much more 'by the state' you can get.

Just because you didn't see it happen doesn't mean it didn't happen. I saw it happen, and I saw it happen to a lot of people at lot of different companies.

OK, so you're talking about 14043 specifically.

No, that is not force. You don't have a right to work for the Federal Government, and the Federal Government does not have a right to require you to work for them.

14043 just says you can't work for the feds anymore if you've voluntarily chosen not to get a vaccine (exemptions available for legitimate religious and medical reasons). It doesn't say "you are unemployable now". That's silly.

I don't work for the Federal government. The order(s) were very broad and reached far far down the chain so as to effect as many people as possible.

It applies to anyone paid with federal money. That's constructively the same as being employed by the government. Again, free association cuts both ways... If you don't have to work for the government, why should the government be obligated to employ / pay you?

That is the opposite of force.

Federal money is our money. They don't make money, they take ours.

Right, yeah, so the implication of XO 14043 being that the 80% of people who are voluntarily vaccinated are not down with the government taking their money in order to pay it to people who are voluntarily unvaccinated.

The majority of Covid deaths now are from people who are vaccinated. It's time we stop pretending to have an excuse to treat others poorly because they're not part of the "in group". It's just authoritarianism and a lot of people are super comfortable with it when it's used against "the others".

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/23/vaccinate...

That's actually even more argument why it's important to reduce your risk of passing on the virus, then: because it can kill even vaccinated people.

Anyway, from the article you linked, here's the punchline:

> Unvaccinated people over the age of 5 had about 8 times the risk of dying from a coronavirus infection than those who received a booster shot.

Yeah, so more deaths among vaccinated people is merely a product of the fact that more people are vaccinated

"Our data from the CDC today suggests that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don't get sick, and that it's not just in the clinical trials, but it's also in real-world data." ~Director of CDC

Sorry, the trust is gone. They lied on purpose. The only question that matters now is, how do they ever get it back? It's gonna take a LONG time.

Totally unrelated to the question of whether vaccines are efficacious or not.

If I was from Germany or the UK, why would I even care what the CDC said? The study linked at the top of this thread finds this effect across all developed nations.

> These days, we count anyone who didn't get vaccinated as a failure and bellyache about that 20 percent that "won't cooperate" and malign them as problem children who don't have a good reason for their choices.

Well, because most of those didn't... and so 99% of people that decided to not get vaccinated screwed over the 1% that couldn't

Historically there was never a vaccine with only 80% adoption rate, in the U.S at least. Anyone would have considered that a failure for the polio vaccine. All the major vaccines are 90% coverage or better, or at least they did until recent years.

It's a bit strange here in Canada. 92% of the population in my province has had at least one COVID shot. And disproportionately many who haven't, are children. And we can probably exclude a couple percent of people who are genuinely medically advised against getting it, and the hyper-needle-phobic. So we're talking... about 1 - 4% of the adult population maybe, who could realistically be called antivaxer? They are irrelevant socially, politically, epidemiologically. But at least with the slice of media I consume, everyone seems quite concerned about them.

When I was growing up, you had to get your vaccines to go to school or join the military or participate in many aspects of society and anti-vaxers were seen as a fringe minority.

I don't think conflating childhood vaccines with the Covid vaccines is fair, to be honest.

Which of those vaccines still resulted in most of the recipients still getting infected like we see with Covid?

You can't compare the MMR type vaccines to Covid, they're not remotely similar in efficacy.

Yeah, you got immunized.

Except those were vaccines that weren't used in such a rushed manner.

I imagine I'm somewhat older than you. "Antivaxer" was not a term I knew as a child. That came later.

That the term didn't exist would suggest it was a fringe belief, wouldn't it? This isn't something where I have a lot of knowledge of history, but I do follow the scientific skepticism movement a bit, and they would probably place the modern pre-covid vaccine denial movement as starting with a discredited paper by Andrew Wakefield in the early 90's that suggested that vaccines were causing greater incidences of autism. I certainly remember at the time that it was seen as a fringe belief and actually not particularly associated with one one end of the political spectrum or other. I think the modern analog would be the flat earth movement. It's certainly clear to me that this has changed though.

People giving serious credence to 'the flat earth movement' is always a bit of a tell for me. There is no genuine 'flat earth movement'. There are a collection of people who enjoy pretending to believe in a flat earth, with some of them seeing how far they can 'rationally' take their denial that the world is round. It's an exercise in defending a non-defensible belief for fun and winding (earnestly literal) people up.

I'm aware of what a sophist is, but I doubt flat earth is actually a subject they'd have any fun trying to argue because it's too absurd on its face. Do you think Scientology is also a group joke? What about Mormonism - they have their own astronomical hangups (planet Kolob)?

> because it's too absurd on its face

I'd suggest its absurdness is exactly what appeals to the people who like to 'argue the case'. I'm not a big Terry Pratchett fan, but my understanding is that his books are set on a flat earth and he has some fun in the books in 'explaining' how this flat earth 'works' (explanations which are of course, playfully absurd). I'm not calling Pratchett a flat earther here but simply suggesting the same 'fun in nonsense' motivation is in operation with flat earthers, while they go further with their nonsense by maintaining that they are being 'absolutely serious'.

Re Scientology and Mormonism - both have are an ideology and have an agenda. (Stating this neutrally; I'm personally not interested in or sympathetic to either religion but some ppl find value in those two ideologies and the values/aims they seek to promote.) Flat Earthism doesn't have any ideology or agenda, as far as I am aware. So the absurd narrative explanation they concoct is harmless (and indeed, I think this is partly why they chose it - it's not harming anyone to 'promote' the idea of a flat earth).

I actually am a big Pratchett fan and have read all the novels in his Discworld universe, some several times. It is a comedic fantasy world, yes, but it's mainly a setting in which he can build a parodic analog of the modern world. The geography of the world doesn't come up much in the stories.

Much of my thinking on the subject comes from Steven Novella and his blog

https://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/behind-the-cur...

> Another powerful aspect of the film has a similar (but much smaller, in my opinion) climactic moment, but runs in the background throughout the film – the echochamber effect of being in such a movement. The subjects of the film are overwhelmed with confirmation bias, from themselves and each other. They also have the mentality of being in a small beleaguered group, and trying to change the world.

> The underlying motivations for any particular belief are also varied. This film did do a good job of showing a variety of people who have come to the Flat Earth community from different places, for different reasons, and have varying roles to play. The result is a complex mix with no single or simple solution.

He also goes into some of the lengths and surprising expense they go to and rationalizations used to maintain their beliefs. They did not seem like sophists to me, but perhaps it's all just an ever more elaborate joke.

As soon as a new subset of people have been designated as part of the outgroup, they are basically fair game for everybody to get their kicks in¹. And boy howdy do people love some fully justifiable carnage.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33802663

It’s frightening how easily the framing of a very individual risk assessment with collectivist “do the right thing for everyone” messaging can prompt discriminatory attitudes. The threshold to trigger this herding behavior is far lower than I would have thought pre-pandemic, as is the ease with which fear engineering can enhance credulity and dismantle higher order thinking at scale. These triggers also reward a sense of complacency towards fundamental rights, and it seems likely more of these mass cognitive warfare experiments will be seen to intentionally probe for exploits of our current system.

some of the things I heard people say: "It angers me that people like this are able to vote" "why should I have to share restaurant space with someone who doesn't care about others"

I thought it was mostly an online phenomenon wherein medical professionals were entertaining the idea of refusing medical care to the unvaccinated, right up until I heard it repeated by a friend of mine who is a nurse admin.

I kinda get it: they're intentionally and knowingly hurting others (those with legitimate medical reasons they can't get the vaccine). I saw some folks who did not get vaccines (I know this because they called those of us who got vaccines "sheep" and other derogatory terms) conspicuously cough near others.

> "they're intentionally and knowingly hurting others" this is an unproven claim, one that was never actually tested. and quite honestly, its very clear the 'vaccine' does not prevent spread, nor even you getting it.

"but it lowers the chances of death!"

Ok... so why are you mandating others getting it because 'hurting others'.

how's everyone else from the control group doing these days? things were never really that bad, discrimination-wise, here in South Dakota, but what was/is it like everywhere else?

(edit: wow I thought we were, as a collective, Largely Over It now—guess that's not the case! I'm glad things aren't as bad as they are in this thread where I live! one has to wonder though: how long will this deep-seated emotion-based discrimination go on for?)

Two doctors told me the vaccine may not be safe for someone with my rare condition (There's a list of medications and interventions as long as my arm that I can't take because they could literally kill me).

In spite of this, neither doctor was initially willing to put their opinion on paper so I could keep my job because of the immense pressure on them to get everyone vaccinated. Thank God, the specialist I saw came back in the room with a change of heart and wrote me the letter.

Interacting with society during this whole time felt quite upsetting. It really felt as if society in general would rather see me risk dying as long as it kept them safer.

Being forced to go into my personal medical history to justify my choices was a weird experience.

I really feel for people who've had to deal with that sort of thing for longer than the brief period of time I have.

> Being forced to go into my personal medical history to justify my choices was a weird experience.

Try having a non-visible disability. It's a pretty common thing, actually. It even kinda falls in the same category - one of the workplace duties is to be vaccinated, and you have extenuating circumstances which require an affordance since you can't meet that duty.

School teachers, for a very long time, were required to be vaccinated against TB. There's a long history of requiring vaccinations if you work or are exposed to other vulnerable folks.

Yeah, I definitely realize many people have had to deal with this sort of thing longer than I have. It was certainly eye-opening.

I'm in Canada, near Vancouver. It's mostly back to normal now, but for a long time:

* couldn't visit restaurants

* couldn't fly/take a train/take a ferry

Still can't:

* Visit my grandparents at their retirement home

* Visit the USA

The general opinion as that you should be vaccinated, but it mostly doesn't come up now. The government is currently passing legislation so they can better mandate vaccination to medical professionals as well as suppress dissenting opinions by those professionals.

Based on the words and actions of the federal government, i've definitely felt like a second class citizen.

Most homes for the elderly here require flu vaccinations for all staff, and some even require flu vaccines for visitors.

Why is that okay?

New flu vaccines are developed annually because it’s a seasonal illness, which makes them just as “experimental” or “novel” as many COVID vaccines such as AstraZeneca that aren’t using mRNA technology.

Why is suddenly everyone up in arms about something they were fine with before?

When you can answer this honestly you’ll start to understand the problem.

The AstraZenica and Johnson and Johnson vaccines both use a relatively novel delivery mechanism (a couple viral vector Ebola vaccines were approved in 2019-2020).

The Novavax subunit vaccine is at least an older approach, but assembling the protein fragments onto a particle is a new thing.

I can't comment to staff, but I've never seen a retirement home or similar that required any kind of vaccination for visitors. Not to say they don't exist, but certainly they weren't part of a normal lived experience here.

The rate of adverse events seen with the flu shots is a full order of magnitude lower than the COVID-19 vaccines. People are partially up in arms because there is a continued conflation of two very different safety profiles.

The rate of adverse outcomes for COVID is several orders of magnitude higher than for the seasonal flu.

Not in all age+health cohorts.

in the interest of inclusivity & getting a more complete picture, a followup question: is anyone still continuing to get more "boosters" or whatever? are those still being released? or, if not, at what point did you stop? the second shot? third? fourth? did you ever take/are you still taking one of those non-injectable covid medications?

I'm so out of the loop about this stuff because it hasn't affected my life in any way in months, so this is me genuinely asking to see where people are at with this stuff. I have a feeling that many people got the initial shot and maybe one booster thereafter but since then haven't kept up… but this is just an assumption, and a pretty big one at that. no idea about the non-injectables whatsoever.

Uptake of the boosters in the US is low.

The one released this fall is targeted more closely at post-Omicron strains (dominant in most of 2022). Something like 15% of the country has gotten it, and only ~1/3 of the more vulnerable older folks. There's studies coming out regularly demonstrating that it is more protective against currently circulating virus than the initial vaccine.

Covid deaths are still in the hundreds per day. Deaths continue to be concentrated in high risks groups and the risk of dying once infected continues to be higher among the unvaccinated.

A lot of people are holding off until some months after their last covid infection on the advice of medical professionals. Classic case of data being easy to misread even with the best intentions.

Reported infections per day have been between 50,000 and 100,000 a day for months. If you assume that represents a medium fraction of cases, it accounts for like 20 million people not getting bivalent boosters (100,000 * 3 * 60 = 18,000,000). There's more than 250 million people that haven't gotten the booster.

So everyone on HN feels like the unvaccinated are part of an oppressed caste? I really don't understand the comments I am reading here. There are large groups of people who are unvaccinated by choice, not because of genuine health concerns. A friend of mine is unable to get vaccinated due to serious health concerns, and she is furious that do many people refuse to get it, as it continues to prevent her from living a normal life.

As someone who has a vaccine and all the available boosters. They are absolutely maligned and their freedoms were unreasonably restricted.

It was during a pandemic and in many (all?) countries, an active health crisis which resulted in literally millions of dead (what are we at now, 6 million?). All of us had our freedoms restricted at various levels - lockdowns, travel restrictions, work rules, masks, vaccines. Some of us understood the (potential) gravity of the situation and accepted that, knowing nobody was doing it for fun. Others threw fucking tantrums and refused to follow even elementary rules. It's easy to say in retrospect that some things were unreasonable, but in the middle of a pandemic it's probably better to overreact than underreact. Failing to comprehend that, and the incapability of the smallest of gestures from so many people made me a) despair for humanity in the face of the upcoming crisis such as climate changes and the Russian invasion of Ukraine; b) have very little respect or sympathy for those people. They made the choice to ignore the majority, i make the choice to not give a shit about them or their freedoms

Shame is you might actually get what you are asking for.

Edit: Morally why would someone be obligated to pay attention to the majority? Morality isn't up for mob rule.

> Edit: Morally why would someone be obligated to pay attention to the majority? Morality isn't up for mob rule

During a pandemic and public health crisis? It absolutely is.

That isn't how morals work. If your moral changes because of the demands of a mob, or a time of crisis you do not have a moral, you were always flexiable.

> I really don't understand the comments I am reading here.

Selection bias. The people who were/are affected by the mandates are still very upset. Everyone who got the vaccine doesn't care and has moved on with their lives.

It's worth highlighting that there is an "absence of evidence" of discrimination the other way except in Germany and the US. I think a lot of people are skipping over the fact that in the US the contempt goes both ways, overlapping to a significant degree with discriminatory attitudes or behaviors tied to factors other than vaccine status. Those who are quick to discriminate in very tangible ways themselves don't get to cry victim the one time they're the one on the receiving end of an unfriendly look.

Individuals lost their jobs, were ostracized from their communities, attacked and vilified for not getting the vaccine… Truly a cruel period in American history.

This one should not be flagged.

@dang: can this be unflagged?

The discrimination was IMO, little different to a community facing a common disaster, to that of someone feeling safe, didn't care or not their problem who elected to sit back refusing to contribute to the effort to overcome the disaster, even if it was something simple and not much of a task, like keeping an eye out for an arsonist doing nature a favour and burning dead dry forest who didn't care if some had built right up in amongst it.

In regard to covid-19, complicating the simple discrimination issue were the many dogs in the fight not to vaccinate against covid-19 - those I'm aware of, most pulling the strings were part of a privileged exclusive small demographic. The noisiest were the group IMO were the "Here, all you've gotta do is take this cheap little pill and keep on working, no worries ... " Sadly many who were unable to be reassured by their doctor that their medical condition would not interact with the new vaccines, started grasping for "bad to vaccinate" straws

I feel most of the population around my way understood some people were going to be unable to be vaccinated. There were concerns that some people even if they did get vaccinated, due to medical issues would not be greatly protected. However at the end of the day, as I once read, it's good to have a practice run before the real thing.

With this pandemic, it became to hard to explain to the public being vaccinated against the fast mutating coronavirus wasn't just about saving time and money spent in hospital wards, but if most of the community that could vaccinated, it significantly removed "run time" for covid-19 to recombine whilst it was inhabiting in a human body, and re-emerge as a new threat -- it was already hard enough to ask people to vaccinate if they could to save hospitals from being run over, something I found quite frankly, shocking.

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