Hacker News Reader

Comment by jfengel | Hacker News Reader

A fact that has essentially nothing to do with the safety or efficacy of the COVID vaccine. There has been a deliberate ideologically-driven campaign to undermine that trust.

Ask a COVID anti-vaxxer to explain their position, and it will almost immediately include at least one outright falsehood. Not a "difference of opinion" or "interpretation" or "risk tolerance", but just an outright lie. And correcting that will not result in any reconsideration of their stance.

Most people don't really understand any of the vaccines they're taking, but they put their trust in a medical system that has largely justified that trust. Some people have suddenly decided to disagree with the entire scientific and medical establishment, seeking out specific individuals for their ideological agreement.

There is a large difference in trust, but it's not founded in science. It's founded in a bias, and that's dangerous.

View on HN

How about "I'm not taking some experimental rushed bullshit by large pharma corps who have a solid track record of doing shady shit"?

Because the actual human beings that I talk to face to face have this opinion, and not the crazy 5g nanobots nonsense the social media companies and journalists make sure you see that paints your fellow countrymen in some deranged light.

Is this meant to contradict the OP? I count at least three falsehoods in this sentence alone.

Is this meant to be a snooty response to troll for a reply instead of an actual engagement based on your non elaborated assertions?

> experimental

mRNA vaccines may be fairly novel, but the technology is not new. And there are other, more conventional COVID vaccines out there.

> rushed

How can this argument be made today? The Emergency Use Authorization no longer applies to mRNA vaccines: they're fully approved, and billions of people have been vaccinated.

> bullshit

And this is just offensive, given the efficacy of COVID vaccines with regard to preventing death and serious illness. Big pharma may be greedy, but they've also saved millions of lives during this pandemic.

> Is this meant to be a snooty response to troll for a reply instead of an actual engagement based on your non elaborated assertions?

Yes, because arguing on forums and social media is completely pointless. If you ever win a debate with someone, they will simply vanish from the discussion instead of copping to it, and someone new will take their place. Besides, everyone knows all the arguments already. Reciting them just feels like a ritual at this point.

(One that I still feel like observing, alas, because people who blithely dismiss COVID vaccines really piss me off. I hope that the actual human beings that you talk to face to face with don't really believe that COVID vaccines are "bullshit," regardless of whether they choose to get vaccinated or not.)

> > rushed > How can this argument be made today? The Emergency Use Authorization no longer applies to mRNA vaccines: they're fully approved

Ok so let’s remove the responsibility exemption from pharma contracts, right? Oh you have an excuse not to do it? It’s the only drug in history that has this exemption.

I trust new things with care, people have a habit of lowballing the side-effects. Many people don’t trust GMO for that reason. I don’t trust a vax that is less than 2 years old, made while governments imposed a defense-confidential seal on the entire process. Governments have admitted to lie to control populations during the last 2 years.

You want trust? Levy the 70-year secret on the way my govt managed Covid, I want to know whether the press was mandated to publish propaganda, and I want to know whether doctors are under duress. The weekly minister meetings have been public since 1945 in France, except for Covid: Levy that. If you have nothing to lie, you have nothing to hide.

This operation displays absolutely no sign of trust on any aspect. I DON’T say that the vaccine isn’t safe. I just say that you aren’t offering trustworthiness guarantees around it. It’s a leap of faith, and I won’t take this leap of faith for the camp that was repeatedly mistaken during the last 2 years.

The bottom line is that trust in these institutions is gone not as a result of the media and fearmongering, but the actual controversies, behaviors, and profit motives of these institutions.

As a result, people don't trust the powers that be telling them to get vaxxed or they will die/ lose their job/ be treated as a second class citizen/ be jailed/ etc. These are the things that make people rebel, not fall in line.

The rate of serious adverse effects is literally a full order of magnitude higher for the COVID-19 vaccines than for the flu shot or the longstanding childhood inoculations like MMR. The difference you see in trust is because of an establishment that appears to have become so biased it undermines itself by not openly acknowledging fact.

> ideologically-driven campaign to undermine that trust

I love how pro-vax always have this big Russian conspiracy theory in their mind, ala “a CAMPAIGN must have done that”.

When in fact, it’s the consequences of your own actions. A succession of our doctors/govts saying things as they are proven, then saying the opposite is true, that blew my mind.

My president said we should “go to the theater to fight Covid”. Then 10 days later he locked down everyone because Covid was spreading.

If it wasn’t a lie, it was at least people in position of power saying things without having checked them. Repeatedly. Relentlessly. To convince us of behaving. Ask them, they’ll say they were right to lie to the population, otherwise we wouldn’t have accepted to do x or y. “Covid doesn’t spread in waves” said Facebook’s truthcheckers in April 2020.

We’ve been lied to. Repeatedly. Relentlessly. Today, the vaccine is good for us. We’re sure! No side effect!

Well I ain’t taking advice from the camp who have a proven track of lying, and, when asked, they say they do this for crowd control. They’re not even apologetic about it.

They do not check their sources before speaking up. “Masks are not useful” said my government in May 2020.

Whatever they are saying, I’ll do the opposite, for my own safety. And it’s not an alt-right collusion, it’s just that the vax camp is spewing bullshit all day long.

I don't think this is a Russian conspiracy theory. I think it's an American conspiracy theory.

The Russian troll farms don't seem to invent things from whole cloth. They're most effective at nudging Americans to exaggerate the differences we make for ourselves. It's hard to tell how effective they actually are. For all I know we'd do the same without them cheering us on.

I love the “it hasn’t been tested!” argument… when a billion people have taken it!

Just how big a sample size do you want!?

We're actually at over _5 billion_ people vaccinated against COVID now.

If you believe some of the people on Hacker News though, there should be millions of people injured or killed by the vaccine by now.

My question, where are they?

Where are these millions of people injured or killed by the vaccine?

I've seen quite a few COVID deniers insist that the millions of dead are piling up somewhere, and that fact is being covered up by the gummint. They'll often cite a YouTube video, perhaps of a doctor telling them about all the autopsies he's doing riddled with blood clots.

I hadn't realized that we'd vaccinated over 70% of the world, but various sources back up that number. I had assumed it would take a lot longer to reach outside the developed world. The sheer number of denialists on a web site full of well-educated techies often fills me with despair, but the idea that we've made a decent crack at immunizing poor people is a rare bright spot. Thank you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com