Comment by egypturnash | Hacker News Reader

Comment by egypturnash | Hacker News Reader

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The finding may be linked to a partisan divide. Rural areas often swing Republican, and Republicans have consistently been among the most resistant to vaccination across many surveys. In the latest KFF data, 29 percent of Republicans reported that they would “definitely not” get vaccinated.

At this point I am like, okay, fine, just stay out there on your tractor with your new covid variants and don't come into the city; maybe if enough of these anti-vax Republicans die off to change the voting profiles of all these intensely gerrymandered districts and make Fox News' ratings fall off a cliff then we can actually have some nice things.

The last five or so years have really exhausted my patience with trying to convert, educate, or understand these people, and if they wanna do things that will increase their risk then I am just gonna throw up my hands and say "have fun with your sneezing parties, stay the fuck out of my city, see you next life".

I await my downvotes from angry Trumpies.

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One factor that makes this really difficult is: exactly as much as you believe you are right, so do they believe that they are right. And as exasperated as are you with them, so too are they with you.

I don't like to think this way either, but Darwin may end up needing to be the ultimate decider. Along the way though, we all will suffer, as our economy and healthcare systems do not get to discriminate.

Perhaps more local politics would be better. Trying to get 330 million people to agree on everything is doomed to failure.

The irony here is that when blue cities in red states pass liberal laws at the local level, the state legislatures aggressively work to countermand the cities.

Yeah, that doesn't sound right (states overruling cities). There should be as little imposed from top-down as possible.

Some people value the community more than the individual, some the opposite. It is a big problem that people can't respect each other.

Without those tractor yokles, the cities would starve. It takes a lot of different sorts of people to make the world go round.

Sure about that? Given that TFA is about the US, consider how much of our food supply is driven by giant agribusiness.

I know quite of a few of these people and I’m consistently surprised at how little is understood about their motives from comments like this. People pretend like they’re some alien race immune to logic. If that’s what you want to believe about your countrymen than that’s on you.

Which is a shame because there’s things we could do to change vaccine rates among these groups. For example find alternatives to aborted fetal stem cells for testing and research (or worse, ingredients).

I'm vaccinated, but it's also remarkable to me that people think that not taking a drug developed on an emergency use basis with no long term studies is somehow irrational or ridiculous. Some reasons are clearly silly, but being nervous about being a guinea pig for a new medical treatment is surely reasonable. I got it because I decided it made sense for me, but I still feel some anxiety about it and definitely am not going to judge other people for feeling the same way.

The mRNA vaccines are expected to achieve full FDA approval over the next few months. For all of the people claiming the EUA as their reason to avoid these shots, how many of them do we believe are going to suddenly change their tune when this happens? In contrast, how many will find some new excuse?

Totally fair, and there's certainly a lot of irrational skepticism. Nonetheless, this is people's health. They're allowed to be protective of it, and it's still true that we have no long term studies because they simply haven't existed long enough.

I'm not saying you're wrong but the feeling about being a guinea pig feels to me like it must be rooted in either ignorance or disinformation because while this whole thing is definitely sped up (pipelining), there have been trials with a lot of people that were the actual guinea pigs.

No one picked up the blood clot issue in the trials. What other long term issues could come up? Being skeptical is rational.

I have a close friend who runs clinical trials for a biotech company. This is her area of expertise. She has had entire trials cancelled when 1 person has died from the drug. So the tact they are taking with AZ and J&J is a lot more lenient than normal. Not that I disagree with it, but understand that there are drugs that have been cancelled for less than what these drugs are exhibiting.

The risk of a blood clot after the vaccine (which may or may not be causally linked) appears to be about 20 per million.

The risk of randomly dying from a fall in a given year appears to be on the order of 120 per million. The most likely way to fall and die if you are in decent health is probably from a ladder.

Therefore I feel like owning a ladder is probably (conservatively) on the order of five times as dangerous as getting the vaccine every year.

Also, Covid killed on the order of 1600 people per million in the US in the past year. I just don't understand what risk-reward calculation people think they are doing.

There is the problem of unknown unknowns that makes it hard to define the risk of experimental medical intervention.

The risk calculations you are attempting to make have important variables that are undefinable.

The blood clot issue was completely unexpected after the clinical trials. Who’s to say that more issues won’t come up as time goes on? You don’t know if the blood clot issue will get worse over time or new things crop up. That’s the problem with short clinical trials, many of the long term effects aren’t found.

>Who’s to say that more issues won’t come up as time goes on?

I don't think I was saying that they wouldn't.

My estimate was based on pessimistically assuming there is a new issue every year. That could be because of a new vaccine or because of delayed issues uncovered with the existing ones.

If the companies involved and US government were confident that speeding development of the vaccines presented no additional risk, they would not have requested and been granted immunity from legal action due to potential issues.

>with no long term studies

Covid also doesn't have long term studies determining its safety. On the contrary, it seems like some people have serious consequences that don't go away, even though they survive.

People keep repeating that the death rate for younger people is very low, as though death is the only bad thing that can happen.

Furthermore, it sounds plausible to me that as people get vaccinated, before reaching "herd immunity", the virus is going to be forced to evolve to get nastier and infect younger people more severely. So maybe millions of people being vaccinated is actually increasing the urgency. There have been some reports supporting this theory, that severe cases in young people are rapidly increasing coincident with most of the elderly getting their shots.

I’m afraid I will need references for the ingredients comment.

(Genuinely) Help me understand the logic arriving at the conclusion that it's a bad idea to get vaccinated.

The general logic behind these people is that they have lost almost all faith in the main stream news. Its so bad that if you trust the news right now, then you are most likely left leaning or moderate. This culminates in a general distrust of what the news reports and now that the news is reporting that the vaccines are safe - which statistically is true - these people are tired of being lied to and are being skeptical of a quickly developed vaccine based on newer technology.

So in that population of people that distrust the news, there will be crazies that will never take the vaccine and there will be varying levels of reasonable people who decide to wait on taking the vaccine while weighing their own personal risk level with the risk of taking a quickly developed vaccine with no long term studies behind it. The longer we wait, the more of these people will decide taking the vaccine is less risky than getting covid as more studies come out, especially once the FDA promotes it from emergency approval to full authorization (which requires 6 months of data). Some of these people will of course wait longer than full authorization, they may want to wait a year or longer depending on how must they mistrust the news, its unfortunate but its going to take decades for these people to regain trust in the main stream news and the crazies I don't think will ever trust the news again.

Its not just about the vaccination. If the end product is developed unethically, what avenues do you have to protest against those methods? Choosing not to buy or support the product is the most fundamental economic freedom we've got.

Here's an example that used to be farther removed from today's social touchstones: Premarin. Premarin is manufactured by keeping mares continuously pregnant in stalls for the continuous collection of their urine. Should you be free to protest those methods by avoiding the product? Should a pharmacist be free to avoid stocking those products entirely if it conflicts with their ethics?

Before she passed away, my grandma boycotted premarin for those reasons. That was decades ago, before transitioning became more common. Now it's more of a hot button topic, since premarin is one of the commonly prescribed drugs for transitioning women in addition to post-menopausal women. Should a pharmacist still be allowed to avoid stocking those products?

They always have the option of not working in the field.

Depending on how licensing is done, it may not be unreasonable to expect people to make the decision about whether they want to work in a profession with state requirements for service before they enter the profession.

Of course it's messier if the requirements change after they have invested the time to become licensed, but it isn't that different, they shouldn't enter the regulated profession if they want autonomy.

Closely related: Should an engineer be obligated to work on weapons projects? How about weaponized machine inference?

Individual practitioners within their field should have some level of autonomy, especially when it comes to ethics. I'm not willing to yank that away from someone just because their ethics disagree with mine. Same thing with consumers.

Some of the reasons for avoiding GMO foods are absolutely bonkers in my opinion, but I still believe in the right of consumers to make their own choices. How would the pharma landscape change if prescription drugs were obligated to carry a label that they were developed and tested with human fetal tissue or cell cultures?

Product safety requirements are imposed on engineers. If they don't like them, the option is to not offer products.

(this examines the obligations and loss of autonomy more than the ethical disagreement, but there's literally no remedy for someone that believes antilock brakes are unethical, we'd tell them to pound sand. The analogy would be better if that person existed, but I think it still works okay.)

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