Hacker News Reader

Comment by szopa | Hacker News Reader

This article may be unnecessarily alarmist: https://twitter.com/BallouxFrancois/status/13240857614493040...

Is it alarmist? The article is mostly covering the action of the Danish government, which has decided to cull all the minks.

The action may be alarmist but that's another story.

To me, the important part of the article is that this strain may have rendered the vaccines useless, thus delaying immunisation of humans. If it says that, and that is not true, then it is alarmist, no?

It is a statement from the Prime Minister of Denmark in the press conference explaining that the government is culling the minks.

The Prime Minister is being alarmist, but quoting people verbatim generally isn’t; they are covering the facts of the event, including the fact that the person in charge and responsible for the newsworthy event said this statement. The AFP is not reporting whether the statement is true or false.

This author agrees https://mobile.twitter.com/firefoxx66/status/132409515198431...

It seems that they may have changed their mind a bit after the newest information have been released. The thread ended up with 58 parts.

I would wait until the Danish health authorities actually publicate their findings. This is not a statement made by pseudo-scientists. While I don't know his credentials I don't see why I should trust him more than Statens Serum Institut. So I guess the question is if Denmark is alarmist or if this person is the opposite.

Arguably so should the Danish government, because SSI has not said anything in particular about this decision.

They did publish a statement last week regretting they didn't properly mail the mink farmers to ask them about how Covid was going, but said that this failure wasn't important for the monitoring or spread of the disease. If they then knew anything about mink order 66 coming, that's some poker face.

The director of the center of infectious diseases at SSI Kåre Mølbak was at the press conference, so it is clear I think that while they have not written and published their findings they gave shared them with the government.

If it's alarmist, how come the Denmark government is taking such extreme measures?

Because they were alarmed? Governments are not immune to disinformation themselves and can experience pressure from a population rallied by falsehoods.

Dane here. This is the danish health authorities' recommendation.

If anyone thinks our government kills off >1000 farms and declares serious lockdown of a good part of our nation (no moving in and out of these counties, no going to work etc.) in a spur of the moment overreaction because of some Facebook sillyness, it is frankly getting insulting.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com