Decline the 15 Minute Post-Vaccination Waiting Period | Hacker News Reader

Decline the 15 Minute Post-Vaccination Waiting Period

kevin.burke.dev

16 pointskevinburke28 comments

Giving out medical advice like this can be dangerous. There may be lots of other factors that you and I aren't aware of.

Its an interesting thought but be careful urging everyone else to avoid the recommendation.

Thanks, the Surgeon General of the United States was posting on Twitter in March that you shouldn't wear masks, so I'm not sure that arguing from authority is a very compelling argument at this point.

Data about allergic reaction rates, infection rates, and conditions that are ideal for spreading COVID are all public and not in dispute. My argument is a straightforward application of that data to the facts.

Isn't ignoring an authority because they once said something you disagreed with also some other kind of fallacy? Or do you feel so incredibly vindicated about mask-usage (not that mask-wearing is a panacea, it's also complicated) that this gave you the confidence to write a blog post mostly in the imperative mood/without conditions and without any citations? I'm curious.

No, I'm just saying the specific track record of US public health authorities and US government officials with regard to keeping you and your loved ones safe from the coronavirus has been very poor. I would not say that about, for example, public health officials in New Zealand or South Korea, but then they are offering very different advice than public health officials and elected officials in the United States.

The Surgeon General happens to be a pretty easy example, but there are many, many others, at every level of US government.

To be fair, many people were stumbling around with how deadly and contagious COVID-19 actually was, and face masks were getting scarce for actual health workers. Fortunately they are cheap to produce, and the scarcity didn't last long.

You seem to be falling into the Historian's Fallacy[1]. (decision makers of the past viewed events from the same perspective and having the same information as those subsequently analyzing the decision.)

At the time COVID data was sparse and masks were seeing a shortage so that healthcare workers could not get enough to perform their duties. Was this the correct action, perhaps and perhaps not. You may also be correct with your conclusion but your recommendation is not been vetted by healthcare professionals and so there may be very large gaps in your knowledge (unknown unknowns) that make your conclusion seem like a no brainer to you.

Perhaps what you can do is take down the post and share it with a professional to see if it makes sense and if are any issues they see.

Lastly, medical advice comes with legal implications if someone follows it and comes to harm. You may be opening yourself to legal risk.

I know you've got the absolute best intentions, but it's our responsibility in this age of tech to be rigorous with truth and what we choose to broadcast to others.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historian%27s_fallacy

I got mine a few weeks ago in a hall the size of a football field, we were well spaced out. This may apply to more cramped venues but to me it’s a bit dramatic. We have to queue for the vaccine, I have to go to the shop otherwise I don’t eat, you can’t isolate yourself from every little possible exposure, when I observe those who try it’s not long before I notice contradictions.

I agree, if you are being vaccinated in a hall the size of a football field the risk is not very high. I am more concerned looking at e.g. the list of sites at vaccinateca.com that are located inside of grocery stores or drug store chains. Those places are not going to have good ventilation.

> You can call someone on the phone for 15 minutes who can monitor you for side effects. Or, walk back in after 15 minutes, tell the pharmacist you are OK, and then leave.

There is a reason vaccine sites don't do this. When someone has an allergic reaction the response needs to be quick.

The local health department runs pop-up vaccination clinics in concert with the local research hospital. They considered issues like this during planning and they choose not do it.

When someone sitting in the car starts to have an allergic reaction how does a response get there quickly.

Best case the patient is on the phone with a monitor in the clinic. That monitor has to notice there is a problem and inform a responder that there is a problem.

Right away you have a problem. An in person monitor can monitor more people than someone juggling phones. The clinic needs more people. Also, seeing someone get flushed or slump over is easier than noticing, hey NNN stopped responding. The monitors can respond quicker.

Once a monitor informs a responder they have to find the right vehicle in the parking lot, the patient may be slumped over. There's other people sitting in their car. Hell, 25% pf vehicles are white these day. Finding the right car takes a while.

Then they have to get into the car which might be locked or parked in. Only then can they provide care.

What the clinics do instead is keep traffic to a level where they can have people wait safely. Both in terms of waiting space, patient spacing, and availability of monitors. They know how many doses they're getting over time so this isn't hard to plan.

When vaccination throughput needs to go up they open a parallel pop-up that can also keep people safe.

Thanks, but I will trust medical professionals more than a random developer know-it-all on the internet.

Good thought but this is TERRIBLE advice.

Simply ask them to wait for the 15 minutes OUTDOORs

Waiting outside or in your car is not "declining" the waiting period. It's a reasonable thing to do if you're more worried about remaining indoors around strangers. Unless you've got serious mobility problems, there's fundamentally no difference between waiting at the point of vaccination and waiting outside.

If waiting outside, just make sure someone around can see you and get help if you get a serious allergic reaction or something though.

I went with a 90-year-old.

Our wait was in a car with a nurse nearby.

I get my medical advice from people that make great experiences.

My friend who is immunocompromised is getting his first dose tomorrow. They will be drawing blood for anti body test and then give the vaccine. Waiting period of 15 mins to see if any side effects. If there is something serious you go to the ER. It would be best not to be alone if there is that risk

Why are vaccination places making you wait 15 minutes in a small space close to others?

I know there's actual medical professionals that won't get vaccinated and refuse to even give it to others, but those clowns don't run the facility.

So you'd think the waiting areas would be following CDC distancing guidelines.

Because in the US we've outsourced delivery of the vaccine to places like hospitals and pharmacy chains in places like CVS, Walgreens and Safeway. Those places tend not to have the pharmacy close to the entrance, and no windows, which means they are ideal for COVID spread.

At least they're getting the vaccine, so ideally any contagion should have an quicker immune response.

It's not pretty, but man, The Economy thanks you.

Friend just got the vaccine, they asked her to sit in her car and call them if anything happened.

Part of her arm went numb, they said that was normal. It freaked her out a bit and she yelled to someone else waiting in their car, and they said they were quite nauseous.

Seems like a reasonable compromise.

"Not only is this extremely dangerous but it's a huge waste of vaccine." How does a 15 minute wait after an injection waste vaccine?

It takes the vaccine a week to kick in, and waiting 15 minutes in a cramped room with other unvaccinated people maximizes your chance of getting COVID. The worst possible time to get COVID is right before the vaccine kicks in; we've essentially wasted a shot because you got the disease before you got the protection from the vaccine.

Sometimes, people who have easy access (and habit) to write blog posts, etc. forget to ask themselves whether they have some standing or weight to comment on the things that they think during the day. Or responsibility.

Why would I listen to a software developer on whether I should follow medical guidelines in a health crisis, over some source more involved/accountable to the vaccine distribution system?

There's absolutely no consequence for him to give 5 minute advice that he has no accountability for. Will he accept responsibility for advising people to do this?

He might be right, even, but for some reason this morning I got set off irritably by such a person giving others medical advice. So for that, I apologize in advance.

Well, one reason would be I was emailing my friends and family about the efficacy of wearing masks around the same time in March that the Surgeon General of the United States was posting on Twitter that masks don't work and the New York City Mayor was encouraging people to go to movie theaters and bars.

I don't think arguing from authority has a really great track record this pandemic.

The argument on the blog is pretty straight forward, and the data is all public.

He isn't providing medical advice. Waiting outside vs inside based on simple statistics...

All else being equal, you're probably better off taking public health advice from a public health employee over a software developer.

However, if the software developer raises an admittedly good point based on specific, verifiable information (in this case sourced from covid19-projections.com, which sources covidtracking.com, which in turn aggregates data from state public health authorities) which questions the pre-COVID practice of observing a vaccine recipient for 15 minutes, their occupation should not make their point any less valid. This wouldn't be the first time that a well-established best practice turned out to be exactly the wrong thing to do given new circumstances.

The process of evaluating an argument should balance the informative value of the argument-maker's credentials without veering too far into gatekeeping or argument from authority (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority).

The medical field, or at least its public-facing portion, seems to be full of people who are reluctant to propose anything novel if there aren't rock-solid studies justifying it, even when it's clear (even to laypeople) that an analysis of the expected costs and benefits does confidently justify it.[1][2] It's a similar kind of thing to "no one ever got fired for buying IBM". And if you look at the incentives of medical spokespeople, do they actually suffer if they give bad advice? Is Dr. Mike Ryan still executive director of the WHO health emergencies program? His Wikipedia page still says so; its link to the WHO website has rotted.

Given that, it's precisely these guys, outsiders who think they're smarter (or less bound by rules or whatever) than those spokespeople, who are in a position to give us some of these important pieces of advice. Of course, that means you have to take them on evidence/argument rather than on authority. But it seems like the evidence/argument here obviously stands up.

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/30/world/coronavirus-who-masks-r...

[2] https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/02/coronavirus-links-spec... , search for "bungled its coronavirus response pretty egregiously"

Even among qualified people the ones that are so dedicated to the art of pontificating online that they feel compelled to blog about their ideas tend to also be the rabidly absolutist ones who's advice you should take with a grain of salt.

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