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Comment by dnautics | Hacker News Reader

I advocate getting vaccinated (I am myself) but if people don't want to put foreign substances into their bodies, we should respect their choices, especially since the long-term risk profile is unknown (we are pretty sure it's safe, but who can know?)

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We can. There have been hundreds of millions of doses administered and we are keeping track of the side effects.

there are some things you can't know without time travel. what happens after having the vaccine for 5 years? 10? The immune system is strange. There are very few mRNA vaccines that have been deployed to date. Can you be sure you aren't, for example, at elevated risk for something like MS? You can't. Again, I say this as someone who made the choice to get the vaccine. The worst thing about conspiracy theories is that some of them are true. If you don't like people being "anti-science", then the one thing you CANNOT do is shove scientifically irresponsible stuff down their throat in the name of expediency.

Cars and certain power plants dump toxic chemicals into the air and occasionally the water supply. Society doesn't give anyone the option to opt out of putting these known toxins in their bodies because we can't. Society either has electricity & cars, thus poisons everyone, or it doesn't. The best we can do is work to mitigate the negative impacts.

We are at the the point where society needs people to receive a vaccine, or it will stop functioning. How much are you willing to personally sacrifice so that someone near you has the option to avoid getting a couple of shots that a billion other people have already received?

Factories can't run at full capacity until people are vaccinated. Our food supplies, specifically meat, are at risk until people are vaccinated. We are going to keep this society of scarcity until ~90% of people are willing to get two shots.

your assumption is that threatening mandatory compliance is better than voluntary compliance. Humans are irrational and sometimes resist doing the right thing when force them to. Surely you have had the experience that being forced to read a book for school has ruined it, or resisted doing something you wanted to do just because your parent made you do it. If instead you work harder to get assent and consent, your vaccination rate might be higher than if you threaten to hammer it in. Especially in a society where voluntary compliance and resistance to authority is in its social DNA, like the united states.

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