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Comment by mark_l_watson | Hacker News Reader

I agree that there is so much variation in people’s reaction to the vaccine. My 99 year old Dad had very little negative reaction. I felt shitty for one day after my second vaccination. My Dentist has been missing about 1/3 of work days, periodically feeling very poorly for a few days. Most of my friends and family had just mild reactions.

I am in general skeptical about some vaccines, especially loading infants up on many vaccines all at once. However, with COVID-19, I think the general risk is worth keeping the global economy from complete collapse (if that is even possible).

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My understanding is that this "reaction" is just immune response, and since you likely have a strong immune system than your father you saw a stronger reaction, both of which would likely be less deleterious than if your father contracted COVID directly.

Keep in mind that a runaway immune response is also what kills covid patients.

> However, with COVID-19, I think the general risk is worth keeping the global economy from complete collapse (if that is even possible).

We could simply reopen the economy at any point. There are more than enough counterexamples around to demonstrate that lockdowns do not eliminate Covid-19, and that a lack of lockdowns does not lead to endless piles of dead bodies in the streets. Lack of sufficient vaccination is not what is keeping the economy closed -- its usefulness in driving forward certain agendas is. The vaccines aren't even promising anything close to 100% effectiveness, particularly not among the highest risk groups (who were excluded from the clinical trials).

"We can go back to normal soon if everyone just does this one thing" has been the carrot dangled in front of people's noses to get them agreeing to measures of dubious effectiveness since the start of the pandemic. If the virus mutates in the fall and winter and boosters have to be rolled out again, we'll either "have to" shut the economy back down until everyone gets shots in their arms again (in which case these vaccines are a poor preventative against economic damage) or we'll accept the need to live with some amount of endemic Covid spread (in which case it was certainly not lack of vaccines keeping us from reopening).

> There are more than enough counterexamples around

Citation needed.

Lockdowns do not eliminate Covid-19: UK, California, New York, France, hell even Japan. Also pretty much the entirety of pre-Covid epidemiological science.

Lack of lockdowns does not lead to mass death: Sweden, Florida, South Dakota, vast portions of the Global South.

I guess it depends on your definition of "mass deaths"

The US has 500k deaths so far, I consider that pretty massive.

Lockdown _did_ eliminate covid in New Zealand, so there are examples both ways.

It's pretty clear that there's a spectrum of lockdowns and their effectiveness. Personally I would rather you all stayed home for 2 weeks rather than sacrifice my grandparents for the economy.

The lockdowns in much of the western world were pretty weak overall. So many caveats and exceptions. It was "lockdown except for that which is _too_ inconvenient for my voting base"

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5... found "Rapid border closures, full lockdowns, and wide-spread testing were not associated with COVID-19 mortality per million people.". https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2020.6043... found "Stringency of the measures settled to fight pandemia, including lockdown, did not appear to be linked with death rate."

The lockdowns didn't help your grandparents at all, all they did was destroy the lives of many young people and business owners, and plunge over a hundred million people worldwide into extreme poverty: https://apnews.com/article/lifestyle-health-ap-top-news-addi....

> Personally I would rather you all stayed home for 2 weeks rather than sacrifice my grandparents for the economy.

If you think the life of your grandparents is worth more than a hundred million people in poor countries being able to put food on their table, you're incredibly selfish.

The US didn't have a lockdown and the economy wasn't ruined by shelter in place. It was ruined because nobody wants to go to a restaurant if they might get sick - this would've happened even without public health restrictions.

Luckily, CARES aid was so effective it actually reduced poverty.

California effectively did not lock down; both state and county public health orders Constitutionally rely on enforcement by county sheriffs, most of whom did not (and many of whom very publicly announced they would not) enforce the (therefore, purely notional) orders.

Of course, never a true Scotsman nor a true lockdown. The worst spread and the highest seroprevalence are all in California's urban areas which locked down most stringently.

> The worst spread and the highest seroprevalence are all in California’s urban areas which locked down most stringently.

LA, Sacramento, and every Bay Area County Sheriff publicly announced a focus on “education and voluntary compliance”; virtually all the urban Southern California Sheriffs aside from LA County publicly annouced outright non-enforcement policies (some asserting that the orders were unconstitutional), as did the Sheriffs the counties with the major San Joaquin County cities.

The “most stringent lockdowns” weren’t anything like lockdowns.

Aside from the components that were directly within state or other non-sheriff’s authority to enforce (like the alcohol service components which could be enforced directly by state Alcoholic Beverage Control), there was no enforced lockdown essentially anywhere in the State, and this was publicly announced and widely reported in the media, so people were aware of the nonenforcement.

Minor late correction: “San Joaquin County” should have been “San Joaquin Valley”. (Or, since Sacramento was addressed elsewhere, it could have been in broader context “counties with the other significant Central Valley cities.”)

None of those places had lockdowns of the style Italy did.

Travel restrictions are working for AU/NZ/Japan/Korea along with restricting indoor gatherings when necessary. They didn't work for NYC because they didn't restrict European travel.

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