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Comment by bserge | Hacker News Reader

I'm just going to write it: There's always going to be a minority that's shafted by the medical community, we don't matter as long as the majority benefits (fair enough imo, except I can't do shit even if I sign up to absolve everyone of responsibility and take it all on myself).

There will be side effects, they will be dismissed by doctors, people will be marginalized, called uneducated morons and pushed towards more radical communities.

It won't stop until a critical mass of people realize this is no better than treating people differently for being gay.

Right now, the pharma/medical industries are all-powerful. Can't do anything significant without them involved, and if your doctors turn out to be idiots with a degree, well you're shit out of luck, especially in Europe, where the holy universal healthcare can not be questioned.

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This is a gross oversimplification and simply a dramatic response to a small problem. Yes - pharma companys do make money from these vaccines. Yes - that creates a conflict of interest.

But Im not so sure what you expect will happen here? Of course there are side effects? Every medical treatment on earth - literally since humanity started - has had side effects. The question is if those side effects are justifiable in comparison to the prevented harm to society.

And if you ask me, the prospect of millions of dead people due to, or related to covid makes a pretty huge load of side-effects tolerable if you see it like that.

> There will be side effects

Everything in life has side effects. Everything in life has trade offs. It's not about the lack of side effects or even their magnitude or severity, it's about balance: do they help more than they harm?

The most innocent substance out there, water, can kill you. And I don't mean drowning.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_intoxication

Many of the arguments people make about modern medicine are:

A) uninformed

B) not made in good faith

Modern medicine is serving us quite well, so any counter argument better be rock solid.

I'd be curious what your specific complaint is and how you back it up.

In the United States, "modern medicine" is sometimes a jobs project or wealth transfer scheme. Sometimes people are helped.

I found a neat link a year ago about how the medical system happily pays for fabulously-expensive interventions, but won't pay for things patients actually need: "Which Interventions Can Be Paid For: The Explanatory Power of 'Prasad’s Law'"- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21728864

The grand parent post wasn't commenting about the US, it was commenting about Europe:

> Right now, the pharma/medical industries are all-powerful. Can't do anything significant without them involved, and if your doctors turn out to be idiots with a degree, well you're shit out of luck, especially in Europe, where the holy universal healthcare can not be questioned.

Where such abuses are rarer. The US healthcare system is broken, at least keep an eye on what other countries are doing. If say, Iceland, Germany, Italy, Japan start vaccinating, maybe it's time to get vaccinated ;-)

I'm hearing people asking "what if there are some horrible side-effects 10 years down the road?" which appears to be a reasonable concern.

However, we don't know the side-effects 10 years down the road for COVID-19. I, for one, am far less concerned about potential vaccine side-effects than I am about known lung scarring and whatever potential side-effects could emerge from COVID-19.

And the long term effects for 10+ year periods can't really be evaluated.

Otherwise all modern life would screech to a halt. For example, please stop using all new tech products developed in the last 10 years. And all the things developed with new materials science in the last 10 years.

We'd be back to the stone age. For these cases we measure short term effects and we extrapolate based on similar materials, structures, etc.

Please elaborate about what you said regarding Europe. There are many radically different health systems in Europe. NHS can't be compared at all to the Greek health system for example.

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