Hacker News Reader

Comment by ta8645 | Hacker News Reader

I find it disheartening how many people speculate about possible long term side effects of exposure to Covid, even in asymptomatic cases. Yet those same people seemingly have no reservations about injecting a brand new drug into their veins.

View on HN

It's a simple choice really; being infected with Covid means your body creates thousands of antibodies to fight the virus. Some of those will likely go on and attack your own cells and cause post-covid symptoms. The vaccines only present part of one protein, so not as many antibodies created, less scope for after effects. Key will be seeing when Pfizer and Moderna release their safety data for their testing cohorts. If the effects are minimal, getting the vaccine is a no-brainer.

Even if you could guarantee that there are no unintended consequences to this drug that was developed over a weekend, which you can't, you must still put a great deal of faith in the motives, incentives, and competence of an entire supply chain.

This is not without risk.

There are a lot of unknowns with this brand new vaccine, yet many of us have personal examples of people in our lives shrugging off a bout of Covid with ease. It's not a completely irrational choice to wait for a few years before taking this vaccine.

Viruses destroy your cells. Their "purpose" is to do damage to your body. Vaccines don't. If they damage your body it's by accident.

That doesn't really make sense. The two things are quite different. How vaccines work and how COVID works are apples and oranges. Do vaccines have potential side effects? Yes. And of course we don't know them. But let's be honest...most of us regular people aren't getting any of these for quite some time. They are going to go to people on the front line and most at risk first.

If you're a front line worker, like a doctor or nurse in a hospital, your chances of getting real COVID with real damage are very high. The long term effects of that are known to be bad. So any long terms effects of the vaccine are more than likely to be way way less dangerous. Also vaccine is, so far, not lethal which makes it a way better option.

Eventually we, the general population, will learn more about these potential side effects of the vaccines and start to gain access to said vaccines. Until then let's not go all anti-vaxxer and pretend we think vaccines give you autism.

> let's not go all anti-vaxxer and pretend we think vaccines give you autism

I agree with most of what you said, but equating rational skepticism with anti-vaxxer paranoia is a bit of a dick move.

Any drug should be approached with great caution, and we should be willing to see its faults even when we're primed to strongly wish for relief from the grip of Covid lockdowns.

Especially when the "gold standard" PCR procedure has a 97% false positive rate.

This is asserting that the number of incorrectly positive results is equal to ALL truly negative test takers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_positive_rate).

>> Citation needed <<

Why bother giving citation if I am going to be downvoted anyway? But, here you go.

https://www.wral.com/coronavirus/are-nc-s-coronavirus-case-n...

https://www.portugalresident.com/judges-in-portugal-highligh...

(NYT) https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/29/health/coronavirus-testin...

https://en.yna.co.kr/view/AEN20200429007051320

This goes both ways, there are plenty of people who don't take covid serious but fear the health-consequences of vaccines.

There's probably a name for the phenomenon. If not, let me propose "The duality of Hans"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com