Hacker News Reader

Comment by jsnell | Hacker News Reader

There's a very special kind of arrogance going on in all the comment threads about the Covid vaccine suspensions.

These decisions are being made by professionals. They have been trained to do exactly this kind of decision. They have access to the best possible data on both the risks of the vaccine, the risks of Covid in their local context, and the impact these decisions have on the national vaccination schedules.

But everyone in the comments is just absolutely sure that the experts are totally incompetent, and a HN reader with access to Wikipedia is better equipped to know what the right decision is. Why?

View on HN

One obvious reason is that, in all this time, none of these professionals have explained their decision in terms of costs/benefits. So either they are not thinking in those terms or they don't think it is worth sharing the basis for their decisions. Let's see their models.

The official statement from the Danish Health Authority is quite thorough. Perhaps not a model, but there is a lot of nuance and they definitely consider the impact of their recommendation : https://www.sst.dk/-/media/Udgivelser/2021/Corona/Vaccinatio...

Because only the experts that confirm your point of view are right, everyone else is a sham, this is the world we live in right now. Whatever sides we have, they are just as bad. People laugh about anti-vaxers and conspiracies, yet comments that call these decisions political conspiracies are upvoted and promoted.

Surely you must have observed a few bad decisions made by these professionals over the last year? Enough, perhaps, to doubt that they are actually selected for competence, to doubt that their goals align with those of society?

For Germany, the latest AZ decision is not data based. recommending Biontech as a second shot after AZ, without trials and sudies for that, is the opposite of data driven. That's all I can comment on that, because I now nohing about clinical trials.

I do know one or two things about supply chains. And that knowledge tells me, that German authorities have zero idea what they are doing. If there is a vaccination schedule, I doubt there is one, it is not taken into account during these decisions. Because after ever such decision, nobody talks about the impact on the schedule. Seems to be different for Denmark so.

The evidence has consistently shown that the experts have a track record of making terrible decisions that trend towards covering their own asses, and then coming up with The Science to justify their decisions post-hoc.

> These decisions are being made by professionals.

sure, but there are "professionals" on the other side of the debate that say the opposite. thus, discussions will happen.

also, these kinds of bans automatically lead to people across the planet not getting the vaccine due to fear.

case in point: a hard-hit European country got 1.3 million AZN doses. 800k are unused as no one wants to use them. the population would rather wait for the "good" vaccines :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com