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Comment by epgui | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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