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Comment by peterclary | Hacker News Reader

Even if you don't care about those people, what about the people who would be affected by them? A would-be bomb-maker might only blow themselves up, or they may kill many in a crowd. Somebody walking around with a deadly pathogen infects and kills others. Children die because their parents believe in anti-vax nonsense. Individual freedom ends at the point at which it causes real harm to other people.

Also, you know who tends to be most in favour of "let stupid people face the consequences of their poor choices"? Those who want to profit from those people and their choices.

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> Children die because their parents believe in anti-vax nonsense

Do we know how many otherwise healthy children caught Covid and died from it?

My impression from the official figures is that in most countries the number is vanishingly small if not zero.

Well, it's CERTAINLY not ZERO... I recall seeing numerous articles about overweight children dying of it, for example

Remember that even polio only put like 1% of its victims into an iron lung

I'm not agreeing nor disagreeing with GP, but I would imagine they would argue that an overweight kid is not "otherwise healthy children."

And I would argue that lives have value even when people have preexisting medical conditions.

I certainly don't disagree with that, and I would imagine there aren't many people who would, but it is not in any way an argument against how many otherwise healthy children died of covid.

If you want to make an argument that an overweight child should still be considered otherwise healthy, that would be a welcome and relevant argument, and also an interesting one.

I am saying that narrowing the discussion to "otherwise healthy children" is a reductive to a silly degree. The point is to protect all children, many of which are not otherwise healthy, or for that matter, may become unhealthy at some point.

> The point is to protect all children

You'd close schools to protect a minority of children with comorbidities from a virus which doesn't threaten the vast majority of children, knowing that school closures will definitely damage all children?

Umm.

Nobody suggested anything of that sort in this entire thread.

Is it really true about "vast majority"? In US, at least, it seems that the number of children with comorbidities such as obesity would actually be pretty high. You could argue that it's still a minority so long as it's under 50%, but I think that closing schools to protect, say, 20% of kids from a virus that can kill them is eminently reasonable.

> I would argue that lives have value even when people have preexisting medical conditions

(Otherwise healthy) school-age children - and younger adults - always faced a very low risk from Covid-19, and we had solid statistical data on this from at least May 2020 onwards.

Maybe we need to look at where our decision-makers get their information, and their incentives?

Again, that's all fine and great. However, many people are not "otherwise healthy" today, and nobody knows who is going to be "otherwise healthy" tomorrow.

Okay, what is the trade-off for ignoring that risk? What's a few extra dead kids, right? They weren’t healthy anyway, it’s just Darwinian.

Much easier just to suspect an unfounded conspiracy instead.

Maybe your username should be “empathyfail”

If you take the percentages from the CDC and multiply them out (and don't fall for the "polio" vs "paralytic polio" sleight of hand), it was way smaller than that - somewhere on the order of 0.01%.

The flu, for example, was always a worse risk than polio, people just became fearful of polio because we found a way to save some lives in a non-ideal way, which became very visible.

Presented as fact without evidence, preemptively dismissing contrary evidence from the most likely source to have the historical data. I'd love to see your sources for the risk of severe lifelong injury or death of polio vs the flu.

So many caveats to this comment...

> "otherwise healthy"

Yeah, not all kids are otherwise healthy. There's kids with Leukemia or whatever that are extremely immunocompromised because of chemotherapy. They have to coexist with anti-vaxxers and, believe it or not, their lives matter too.

> caught Covid

You think the anti-vaxx crazy train starts and stops at Covid? These people have been attacking MMR for much longer than Covid. Children DO die to measles, mumps, and what have you.

In my state it was 2.

The absolute number.

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