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Comment by simplotek | Hacker News Reader

> For example, in Australia, the official recommendation is that healthy people under 30 not receive a fourth dose of COVID-19 vaccine (...)

It should be stressed that this guidance explicitly refers to a fourth dose of a vaccine. I feel it's disingenuous to use this example to try to refute the OP when the problem lies in people taking massive leaps of logic such as going from "it's ok to take 3 doses of a vaccine but the benefits of a fourth might not justify it" to "don't get vaccinated ever because you will die".

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> "it's ok to take 3 doses of a vaccine but the benefits of a fourth might not justify it"

That's not what the Australian health authorities are saying. They aren't just saying that "the benefits of a fourth might not justify it", they are saying "(for healthy young people) the health risks of the fourth dose likely outweigh the health benefits"–your rephrasing ignores that safety risk aspect.

In my mind, there are three different positions here:

(1) "Vaccines are perfectly safe, and anyone who even mentions death or serious injury caused by vaccination is just being an alarmist"

(2) "Everyone who took the deadly COVID vax is about to drop dead! Just watch!"

(3) "Vaccines have real safety risks, some people have died from vaccination, and it is certain that more people will die from them in the future. However, sometimes, the risk of death or disability from the disease the vaccine is intended to prevent, is going to be significantly higher than the risk of death or disability from the vaccine. Whether or not that is true in any particular case is going to vary depending on the particular disease, its current prevalence, availability of treatments for it, etc; whether the disease or the vaccine poses the greater health risk will vary across time, place, disease and vaccine; our estimates of those respective risks are always going to be imperfect, evolving, and open to informed disagreement; generally we should trust the public health authorities to make that judgement for us, but they are not infallible, and it can be legitimate to doubt or question their judgement in any particular case"

I see myself as defending (3), whereas what some other people in this conversation are saying seems to me to be closer to (1), and also encouraging the fallacious conflation of (3) with (2).

There is actually a (4) also, which we can see evidence for in a paper such as [1] in the paper Efficacy and effectiveness of covid-19 vaccine - absolute vs. relative risk reduction

Summarized: The Covid vaccines have real safety risks for which there is a body of evidence, that taken in totality, leads one to believe that the temporal and Absolute Risk Reduction of =< 0.85% is not worth the adverse events. Given the suppression of data around the true adverse events, and the time limited protections from the vaccines, it should be used sparingly after the patient is fully informed of the risks, and minimal protections provided. Given the uniqueness of each patient's medical situation though, patients are in the best position to decide if their comorbidities are sufficient to merit the risks of these vaccines. Similarly to the Nordic countries, any younger person without severe comorbidities < 50 should not take the vaccine, but they should be able to make their own decision fully informed of the risks and limited protection, and without any type of coercion.

I don't believe that all Covid vaccines share the same risks since the microgram dosing of the MRNA vaccines vary greatly, and the Novavax vaccine [2] [3] is coming onto the scene, unfortunately with a few of the same adverse events as the MRNA vaccines though

[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14760584.2022.2...

[2] https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/novavax-covid-vaccine

[3] https://us.novavaxcovidvaccine.com/hcp

> That's not what the Australian health authorities are saying. They aren't just saying that "the benefits of a fourth might not justify it", they are saying "(for healthy young people) the health risks of the fourth dose likely outweigh the health benefits"–your rephrasing ignores that safety risk aspect.

This is a red herring.

It's irrelevant if anyone feels that the 3rd or 4th or 5th dose of Pfiser's increases health risks. The problem is the misrepresentation of these findings. You cannot in good faith jump from "a residual number of people experience health issues when taking the 4th or 5th dose of Pfiser's vaccine" to "do not take any vaccine at all ever or you'll die" specially when they deny that COVID poses a threat and already killed over 6million people.

You're talking about health concerns of taking a vaccine when not taking the vaccine poses a far greater threat, and somehow that's left out of the equation. That's the problem: the disingenuous misrepresentation of the problem.

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