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Comment by ars | Hacker News Reader

"82% of Democrats and 72% of Republicans expressed concern that the Covid-19 vaccine approval process would be driven more by politics than by science.

More than 80% of independents, Republicans, and Democrats said they would worry about the safety of a vaccine that was approved quickly."

Wow.

And lest you think this is a Trump thing, the figures are similar in European countries.

A bad COVID vaccine (one that doesn't work), or heaven help us, one that causes harm, could set public healthcare back decades.

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It is a political decision. The kind leaders are supposed to make, the kind they don’t like making.

A leader has to decide on either pushing early and either saving/condemning hundreds of thousand of lives.

Or playing it safe and condemning/saving hundreds of thousands to death while we complete years worth of trials.

Oh because that’s not enough pressure the economy is burning, which will cost many lives as well.

It’s a horrible decision to make anyway you slice it.

Politician is going to be hated no matter what.

If it works, they are bad for taking so long, taking risk. If it goes south...

I think the common understanding of a decision 'driven by politics instead of science' is making the choice in the way that most advantages your own political career, instead of the way that saves lives or the economy.

Aren't those two things essentially the same thing? The best way to advance your career is to make choices that benefit the most people. You're not going to get ahead if your decision fails to save lives or the economy.

The best way to advance your career is to make choices that benefit the most people.

You're not going to get ahead if your decision fails to save lives or the economy.

Is this satire, or simply your first brush with politics?

The subject of the vaccine is a tidy hypothetical example. Approve vaccine (with no actual regard to efficacy or safety). Bolster confidence in the status quo, reopen economy. People feel hopeful, things look up, re-elect current administration. Whoops, turns out the vaccine is actually poison. But it's too late to elect the other guy now, and the administration retains power four more years.

You are, if you manage to blame the other party for sabotaging you.

"political decision" in this context is making a decision to approve something to increase the odds of one candidate winning. It is not "a decision by a politician" but rather "a decision with the primary motivation being political gains only".

Are you sure the polled people interpreted it like that?

I for one read it as politicians pushing for a quick release because the effects of the pandemic are so bad while the risk of side-effects is difficult to predict.

In part.

Politicians pander to their people. Most often by promising take stuff from group A and give it to group B

Killing off your constituents is usually bad for re-election. So mutual self interest.

What you just described is a "policy" decision, one designed to optimize for good results. A "political" decision would be one designed to increase one's support among some sort of collective-decision-making class (voters, in this context). It's sort of the opposite, in context.

“A bad COVID vaccine (one that doesn't work), or heaven help us, one that causes harm, could set public healthcare back decades.”

I see this a lot (and am not jumping on you), do you mind explaining why you feel this way? To me one of the few things that could restore my faith in public health after how this pandemic has been handled is allowing widespread early access to the vaccine with full access to whatever data has been gathered. In flight is fine.

This “hur dur the masses can’t be trusted to make their own decisions” shit has got to stop. It has become clear public health in the US is more politics than health so any sort of management on an individual level gets zero trust from me.

It doesn't even have to be a "bad" vaccine. The FDA has already said that 50% effectiveness would be sufficient, which would put it about on par with the seasonal flu vaccine.

Combined with a high baseline infection rate, and an aggressive testing regime (at least compared to flu/other non-pandemic diseases), there will be a lot of people who get vaccinated and proceed to get sick and test positive.

The real evidence of the vaccine working would be by the herd immunity it creates. But that is a population level effect, and people are terrible at understanding population level effects.

> The FDA has already said that 50% effectiveness would be sufficient, which would put it about on par with the seasonal flu vaccine.

I think it’s difficult to quantify how successful the flu vaccine is. I’ve reviewed the numbers and it’s not clear the general flu vaccine does anything. That being said, targeting specific strains can help (problem with flu is the various strains and ability to mutate so easily).

They make a new flu vaccine twice a year and effectiveness is quantified each time.

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/vaccines-work/past-seasons-estimates...

The problem is correlations. The flu naturally varies in severity by region, age, time, etc.

Even the studies you linked, anything prior to 2010 is suspect by participant counts being way too low. More recent studies appear better, BUT we don’t have anything prior to when vaccines started to compare.

I’m not saying the evidence isn’t there, I am arguing it’s circumstantial - aka not definitive how much it helps. Flu itself varies in severity widely.

I’m honestly convinced the entire flu vaccine program / push is to keep the industry active. This is similar to the DOD spending money on new weapons they don’t need to keep manufacturing going

The NIH is attempting to develop a universal influenza vaccine. A clinical trial is currently underway.

https://www.niaid.nih.gov/diseases-conditions/universal-infl...

My understanding is that while prevent infection using the vaccine is a big goal, the other more important goal is that it triggers a better response in people when they do get sick. Specifically, if you get the vaccine and then go on to catch the virus, your body will fight it better and you will have minor symptoms (and hopefully don't go to the ICU).

I will say that everything I've said is just from what I read. If someone with an actual medical background knows more, I would love to hear it.

That is my understanding as well, but it is entirely irrelevant to the point being made. If someone on the anti-vax margins get the vaccine and proceeds to get sick and test positive, the are more likely to say "the vaccine doesn't work" compared with "I would have gotten more sick if I wasn't vaccinated". You also wont here all the stories of people who got the vaccine and proceeded to not get sick; so there is a sampling bias to hearing about cases where the vaccine doesn't work as well.

The concern here is about the longterm PR of vaccinations, not the technical benefits of the vaccine.

> the figures are similar in European countries.

Do you have a source ?

Do you really believe polls like this are accurate?

No. It's all propaganda

Not sure how this is an ‘only’ Trump thing. Republicans believe D-politics will delay the vaccine so it doesn’t come out before Nov 3rd, and Democrats believe R-politics will prematurely release a vaccine before Nov 3rd.

This country has become so politically cancerous that I wonder if a WW2 style event were to happen (as if Covid isn’t one already) if the country could unite around it, today.

And before you question the thesis, I’ve had the pleasure of listening to a few doctors lament the possibility of having life-saving therapies or vaccines if it helped Trump get re-elected.

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