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Comment by gnulinux | Hacker News Reader

> many people hoped was just a one-off thing.

This was never the case. If you didn't understand that COVID is here to stay indefinitely, like flu, after April 2020 I'm sorry but you aren't paying attention. Not to mention, if we follow perfect vaccination around the world, we can eradicate COVID like we eradicated smallpox etc, although this will be a lot harder.

So, I still don't see your point. Yes people need to take yearly vaccines not to die of horrible diseases. That has been the case for the last few hundred years.

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As frequently reported in the last year, only a small niche of the scientific community is optimistic that COVID can be eradicated through vaccination. Smallpox had no animal reservoirs, while COVID does.

> Yes people need to take yearly vaccines not to die of horrible diseases. That has been the case for the last few hundred years.

No, it hasn’t. The only common annual vaccination is for influenza, it was introduced only in recent decades, and, as I mentioned, only half the population or less take it annually.

> No, it hasn’t. The only common annual vaccination is for influenza, it was introduced only in recent decades, and, as I mentioned, only half the population or less take it annually.

You only take flu annually but there are other vaccines you need to take periodically. E.g. tetanus booster every 10 years etc. For example, I'm supposed to take my last HPV vaccine this summer and this is the 3rd shot. I'm 25 and I took approx. one vaccine every year for the last few years. I'm not saying strictly one every 12 months, it's just that it doesn't make sense to be outraged about COVID vax since regular vax is already part of our lives.

Note that aledalgrande’s original post above was speaking specifically about annual vaccination. That is is a completely different league than the common vaccines that require a booster shot every decade or so, and are much easier for people moving around internationally to plan around.

All those vaccines were also tested much more extensively and use techniques which have been widely deployed for much longer than the Covid vaccines.

This is exactly the point. We have decades of evidence for most vaccines and you only need them infrequently. That's a world away from a 6m old vaccine that hasn't been through the normal approval process.

> Yes people need to take yearly vaccines not to die of horrible diseases. That has been the case for the last few hundred years.

This isn't even remotely true. There's a set of vaccines taken in childhood, a few later. And that's it generally.

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