Linus Torvalds: Get vaccinated. Stop believing the anti-vax lies
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My daughters day care has 2 fulltime employees and a part timer. The fulltime staff are vaxxed, the part-time person isn't, despite having been eligible for a loooooong time.
Well, guess who got an asymptomatic covid infection, and then went on to spread it to her entire family, including her infant granddaughter. Luckily, the person who infected her got tested and let her know in time for her to not infect all our children.
Get vaccinated. Some people are allergic or may have real medical exemptions. Everyone else who passes on the opportunity are shortsighted and selfish.
I don't think the infant had symptoms, but I'm not sure. My worry with my kids isn't that they'll be sick now, but that 15 years from now we'll be hearing about a whole generation dealing with after effects of covid infections. Brain and physiology changes.
https://www.nebraskamed.com/COVID/can-i-still-spread-covid-1...
You're less at risk but you're still a risk. Being a risk, no matter how small, has been the excuse for every response to this situation we've had so far and so this is no different.
It lowers risk. Just like you do when you put on a seatbelt in your car.
60-80% reduced probability of transmission is huge. Sure, you're going to want to be careful not to go to a rave and then get on an airplane before visiting your immunocompromised relative for whom vaccination is contraindicated, and you might want to watch infection rates in your community, and perhaps even take other measures. But that's approaching an order of magnitude reduction in risk.
Given how important it is to get the vaccine to as many people as possible, please avoid making this misleading statement in the future.
I don't think it is important to get the vaccine to as many people as possible. I think it is important to get the vaccine to those who think they should take it, especially vulnerable people like elderly people and people with comorbidities. Please don't tell me what to say, I'll say whatever I want thank you very much.
> You would've all still caught it whether she was vaccinated or not
I will continue to call you out as long as you continue to purposely misinform people.
Alright, I misspoke. You could've all still caught it whether she was vaccinated or not.
For you to attribute malintent claiming I'm purposefully misleading people is a bit ridiculous. All I'm doing is having a discussion on the internet with people and sharing my personal viewpoints. Quit telling people to shut up just because you disagree with them. With an arrogant mindset like that its not surprising that you think it is your place to make people get medical treatments against their will. Call me out some more.
Also not a single one of you has answered my initial question, "selfish how?"
So that still leaves my point: if you're vaccinated why do you care if someone else isn't? And if you aren't but you think everyone should be, why aren't you?
> We are still learning how well vaccines prevent you from spreading the virus that causes COVID-19 to others, even if you do not have symptoms. Early data show that vaccines help keep people with no symptoms from spreading
Source: COVID-19 Key Things to Know About COVID-19 Vaccines https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/keythings...
Reducing the spread means reducing risk to people who cannot get the vaccine due to Heath reasons. It also means the virus is less successful in spreading and therefore less mutation.
I don't think so. Can you point me to some studies for the above.
I believe you will catch it, and if vaccinated, you will have a milder reaction to the disease
In this way, it should just be considered a terrible version of the common cold, and each person should take appropriate steps to protect themselves ( either before the event such as boosting immunity, reducing comorbidities, just not going to high risk areas or at the event - social distancing, masking, etc )
If someone wants to drive without a seatbelt, or ride a motorcycle without a helmet, that's on them, though I feel for the people having to clean up brains from the pavement. But when you're a carer you absolutely do have an obligation to reduce risk for your wards.
If you have to make a sudden swerve to avoid an accident it is easier to maintain control if you are belted in. If you aren't belted in the the swerve can cause your whole upper body to move to the side relative to the steering wheel which can easily interfere with your steering turning a swerve that you would have been able to recover from into a swerve in which you completely lose control.
Literally half of my team have said they will not get the vaccine when it's available to them. One citing a podcast which talked about how the vaccine causes programmed cell death and the other because "it's all a bit suspicious".
Great guys, intelligent and generally good to be around. I didn't know how to react when I found out.
Even if you grant that computer scientists are more intelligent than the norm, I find that doesn't help very much. Often, I encounter some computer nerd who has constructed a crystalline tower of logic that's resting on a rickety foundation of evidence and experience.
On the other hand, we don't know what long-term side-effects the mRNA vaccines have (besides a much lower death-rate and potential herd-immunity... which is why I got vaccinated) and there are definitely articles [2] which point out that it's not always benign to humans.
[1] https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/dishonest...
You and I are clearly hanging out in very different tech communities if you're finding people who believe in homeopathy.
I'm in agreeance that people should get the vaccine, but I'm under no illusion that for a normal (selfish) person, the cost-benefit is a little wonky.
Perhaps a fair comparison would be if we required those who do not wish to get vaccinated to have a relevant medical degree to prove that they know what they're doing?
Agree with this statement as such.
Except that you do not have a right to force others to do anything that they are not in agreement with. You have a right to protect yourself and stay home. I support that. ( Just putting it the way opposite to how you have phrased it )
> Going out in public as a spreader is not a right
Anyone out in public could be a spreader, vaccinated or not. The science is not as clear yet. You should protect yourself.
> the people you infect should be able to hold you legally liable
Why only for Covid-19?
- Asking the tiny fraction of the population who are immunocompromised to remain locked down until the safety of vaccines has been empirically verified?
- Or asking healthy humans to take an experimental vaccine with no recourse should they suffer adverse effects?
The moral thing to do is protect idiots from their own stupidity because we value their lives still, but recently I'm questioning that.
Then why can’t I sue should I have an adverse effect?
The definition of experimental has no relation to the ability to be sued.
When is the vaccine safe and no longer experimental, according to you? We have now given over 2 billion vaccine doses around the world.
Being selfish and risking others?
Being kind and not holding others hostage because you don't believe in science?
Also, nobody said your body is not about you. GP suggested the vaccine is not about you. Indeed, it's not. We vaccinate not to protect ourselves, but to protect society by reducing the spread of disease. The fact that it will also protect you is of course great as well. This is nothing new, and has been the same for every other vaccine.
No they aren't, because I can and do limit my risk to such people in other ways. And they can and should limit that risk as well themselves, in other ways than getting others vaccinated. Why?
Because the space outside your home isn't some "safe space" where you won't ever get infected. As a general rule, you are responsible for your health and safety, nobody else is. There are other people with different health strategies out there, even people who are not afraid to get infected.
> We vaccinate not to protect ourselves, but to protect society
Society changes, and it does not need protection via compulsory vaccines, except the 1984 kind. People and their rights need protection.
This is a stupid proposal for a rule. I call it a proposal, because even a cursory study of the evidence shows it is not a description of general practice, and doesn't reflect the laws that most societies have enacted for themselves.
If it were the actual rule, then you would never be able to eat any food. Most people have the decency to stay home when they're sick, unless they fear for their security by doing so, out of consideration for other people's health. Most people take reasonable measures when making and storing food, even in the absence of laws creating some obligation, because they have consideration for the health of those who will eat it.
When you go out in the street or to a pub, there is no expectation and no rule that everybody is completely sterile.
Your health is primarily your responsibility, not other random people's you may encounter.
This is like saying people should be able to drive on the opposite side of the road.
My understanding is that vaccination is supposed to reduce the severity of the covid-19 disease, if you were to contract it. It does not prevent you from the viral infection itself.
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/vaccine-q-a-can-a-f...
I'll admit that this does nothing for high-risk groups that can't safely vaccinate for one reason or another, but I don't see that as a good reason to try to encourage someone to do it that isn't comfortable.
and the hospitalization rate of catching the virus are much higher than the death rate for 20 year olds. death rates drop off halving roughly every 8 years. hospitalization rates only half roughly every 16 years. so as a 20 year old you run ~1/200th of the risk of death as an 80 year, but you run 1/13th the risk of hospitalization compared to an 80 year old. that is still very non-zero.
there's literally no downside for any age group to getting the vaccination. even with 12-18 year old kids the risk of hospitalization and MIS-C is around 1-in-12,000 and the rate of side effects from the vaccines are much lower.
not to mention that we don't know how often the real virus triggers things like type 1 diabetes in kids and things that they'll carry around for the rest of their lives (which we expect to happen because other viruses cause them, and SARS-CoV-2 against completely naive immune system with no inherited T-cells is almost certain to be worse).
"Great" and "intelligent" only to the extent that you have actually tested their civic maturity and intelligence, you mean. Democracy is in trouble because education has become a narrowing of the understanding, not an expansion of reason and civic principles.
Meanwhile, the pandemic of ignorance is a lucrative resource for ludicrous discourse.
I remember when anti-vax meant multi level marketing, crystal healing yuppies or home schooling ruby ridge bible thumpers refusing to get their kids the MMR shot. The definition has significantly relaxed, to the point where just saying "yeah I'm not really worried about this one, I don't think I want to do it" is anti-vax. Lots of people would like to continue making their own medical decisions using their own risk assessment.
To me, anti-vaxx means someone who is positively against vaccines, as in "vaccines give people X, so people shouldn't get vaccines", where X is some undesirable condition, autism, thrombosis, etc.
Being skeptic, but not against vaccines is not anti-vaxx. If someone says "I don't know if vaccines are safe", I don't think that's an anti-vaxx stance.
In fact, if you don't know about biology or virology, the "I don't know if vaccines are safe" is a totally reasonable stance to have, and not getting a vaccine is also a reasonable decision if you're not sure about the safety.
I personally don't know if COVID vaccines are safe, and I still got it, but I understand that I'm taking a risk by getting the vaccine without understanding it, because I figured the risk of not taking it is higher, but my estimation was relatively uninformed.
Then they should also avoid all medications, since similarly to vaccines they probably don't have a deep enough understanding of biochemistry and pharmaceuticals.
In the end, trust in medical interventions is based on trust in the institutions that produce them, the individuals that administer them, and to some degree the public statistics around their efficacy, because it's not really possible to know exactly what the outcome will be in your individual case.
oh, but they do avoid medications. At least I do and am lucky to be able to. ( I'll make an exception for this vacine though )
> trust
Trust is a desparate last resort measure. Avoid it if you can.
Eh - after hundreds of millions of doses I think it's functionally equivalent most of the time. It's not a huge surprise to me - I've worked with otherwise intelligent people and then find out they're deeply religious or even creationist.
Sure strictly speaking "I don't know if vaccines are safe" is different - but in practice there's not some deep level of analysis going on, people that don't like vaccines are just falling into cognitive bias and using motivated reasoning to dress it up.
People are wildly inconsistent and many people believe insane things. Critical thinking and accuracy are not the strength of most of general humanity. Even those in favor of the vaccines didn't arrive there from reading about them for the most part - they just picked a tribe.
Thankfully there's a small percentage of humanity that's pretty good at accuracy and they're working to save the rest of us.
In raw numbers, the vaccines are many times safer than flying or driving, yet there still remains this irrational response to the vaccine.
In reality, people scared of the vaccine should really be more concerned about the many other things found in their day to day life that have a better chance of killing them.
That's not really a stance, that's just a statement of fact. The problem comes when people assume that this statement of fact about their knowledge imparts any information about vaccine safety.
I'm broadly of the opinion that someone who "do[es]n't know about biology or virology" should:
A) keep their opinions on biology and virology to themselves, and
B) listen to the people who do know what they're talking about when their decisions will affect others.
It's all fine and well to make decisions based exclusively on your incomplete personal understanding when it only affects you, but that's not the case with vaccination.
> and not getting a vaccine is also a reasonable decision if you're not sure about the safety.
Imagine you're standing at the edge of a river. There's a bridge to cross the river, but it looks a little rickety and you're not too sure it's safe. Alternatively, you could try to swim across the river.
Now imagine that you've just seen 3.75 million people get eaten by sharks trying to swim across the river, and there's a team of architects who have inspected the bridge telling you that it's safe to cross.
I would not describe anyone who tries to swim as behaving reasonably.
NB: throughout this comment "you" is used as a generic third-party pronoun to describe any individual, not you personally.
I think it's a little unfair to label everyone "anti-vaxx" who are weary of the emergency approved, no long term testing, first time ever, mRNA vaccines. For those people, encourage them to look into the more conventional Johnson and Johnson vaccine. Even then, I wouldn't consider them anti-vaxx until full FDA approval has completed, at least for the J&J vaccine.
At some point I can only treat people who still give these lame -- and untrue -- justifications for why they like vaccines, "just not this one", as anti-vax.
> which is still in development
Correct. There have been no long term studies, no MRNA vaccines have been fully approved, and the COVID vaccine is the first MRNA vaccine to be given to the general population.
I am vaccinated. I vaccinate my kids and have done so as recently as a few months ago. I believe in vaccines.
But I’m not ready for this one yet. When it has gone through the same FDA approval process as would be used for any vaccine I will be first in line.
I don’t see why people are so offended by this view. I literally get seen as a crazy person simply for wanting to wait until the same standards have been applied.
No, an EUA is not the same thing as the normal FDA approval process. And even if it was, I personally would want more results about long-term effects before I got it.
Why are these parts of the normal FDA process more convincing than the fact that millions of real people have already taken the vaccine with high efficacy and minimal side effects?
I tried to do some research and found this:
> People think there is a difference in data quality between approval under emergency use authorization, but there really isn’t, he said. “The only real difference is the length of follow-up for efficacy,” he said. Covid vaccines: What full FDA approval means for you
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/18/covid-vaccines-what-full-fda...
If true it would suggest that we just don’t know how long they are effective for and not that there is some more rigorous side effects testing.
The point will hopefully be moot though as full approval may come second half of this year.
The process the vaccines are going now is updating their rolling submissions to cover all the data since the EUA. What the EUA gave them was really the ability to do the paperwork for general, and start scaling the factory before the phase 3 trials where complete.
source: https://vaccine.unchealthcare.org/science/vaccine-approval/w...
There is a great diagram there that shows the processes.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/sa...
The risk from infection isn't super high for me, but the risk from the vaccines is considerably lower, even with the relative lack of long term information (I got my first shot in late March, when there was roughly 10 months of data from the first rounds of the trials).
The choice we have to make is trade a certainty of mass-deaths (either we continue destroying the economy (and many people die) or we let the virus spread (and many people die too)) for a tiny probability of bad side effects for a minority of people.
I can't see any logic under which it makes sense to refuse the vaccine.
The fact that something is not yet fully approved doesn't mean it's harmful. It also depends on what other vaccines are available. You can have a fully approved vaccine that is more harmful than the newer much better vaccine which is still in the process of being approved (but which is already looking extremely promising). The harm could be in the red tape.
I don't think those same people were brave enough to be 'early adopters' and neither were they participating in the clinical trials since they also love immature and untested vaccines so much at the time didn't they? Like everyone else, they were waiting until they got 'approval' from the FDA and other regulators.
Some trials may not even give the full picture of the side effects involved with those vaccines and the risks are also not known yet until widespread adoption happens. Then you can make a decision on which one to take, if you can. In most cases, the risks are very tiny anyway.
> I don’t see why people are so offended by this view. I literally get seen as a crazy person simply for wanting to wait until the same standards have been applied.
The ones resorting to desperation and extreme hatred towards those who wait and want to know the risks later are those who's businesses require humans physically being present and are unable to adapt.
It's the propaganda of the big pharma mafia that tickles your narcissism so you get a kick out of feeling like superior for being 'one of the good guys' who is not against the vaccines.
On the one hand you have know-it-all anti-vaxxers. And just as bad are the people who are know-it-all pro-vaxxers. Both groups have a toxic attitude and mindset of "I know the absolute truth without any doubt and the other group just needs to be educated".
The first thing anyone with an unbiased critical-thinking mindset should notice is the fact that if vaccine safety was such an obvious no-brainer, and given that vaccines are meant to benefit the recipient, it would not take this much effort and force to get people to accept it. It would not remain a controversial issue for this long.
Any topic that is so clear-cut and obvious will not remain controversial for this long. The average person has no special interest or benefit in being "anti-vaccine". If the pro-vaccine folks were so convincing it wouldn't need this much force and effort to convince the other group to take the life-saving drug.
Pro-vaccine people need to drop the self-righteous attitude and treat the opposing group as equals. Instead all they do is belittle and mock them.
And if the only answer you arrive at is "well because those people are stupid .. misinformation ... disinformation ... and they need to be educated" you need to stop and re-evaluate yourself and leave just a tiny bit of room for the possibility that you may be wrong instead of taking a "I'm absolutely right without any doubt" stance.
And yet you're no doubt familiar with the concept of Flat Earthers, so this is clearly false.
And then there’s the immunity through exposure https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.07.21256823v... https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.01.21258176v... Hell even in this thread someone has tried the won’t someone think of the children outrage by talking about spread to a grandchild. Well that chart up there shows youngsters in the uk have nothing to fear.
But his explanation of mRNA is nicely done. Hope somebody reading it learns something and realizes they've been lied to. Maybe even gets vaccinated. That'd be worth a mean email or two.
That's the short of it. I've never seen a Linus rant be a personal attack. Every time, he's pointing out that someone who ought to know better is being dangerously stupid to the detriment of a great many others.
Some people take offence at this -- even if they're not the target of Linus' ire -- because they mistakenly believe that everyone has the right to be treated nicely by others irrespective of their bad behaviour.
He called for someone to be 'retroactively aborted'.
> they mistakenly believe that everyone has the right to be treated nicely
Everyone should have the right to be treated reasonably nicely, even if they misbehave, unless there's some kind of threat to life or some other extreme that obviously never comes up in the context of software development.
Oof, if I was that person I'd be taking a good hard look at myself, he's rarely wrong.
This is the comment in question[1]. Linus obviously could have gone & seen who the original author was. And this is not a defense. But the person he was talking shit about was no longer around. He was talking about some old code, that some other maintainer was having to deal with, in some shitty crap ass situation that everyone was stranded in, ships smashing against the shore, &c.
While again I'd emphasize the "not a role model" aspect, I again can empathize with how batshit upside down the rest of the world seemed at this point. But overwhelmingly yeah, this is a not good look, this is really discouraging to hear. Which is sad, because, you know, typically when Linus is hammering it out, giving a big corporation the middle finger or what not, it's like: thank god, a decent human being (who is not easily ignorable like the rest of us) is finally saying it true.
But it's still an incredibly uncool way to phrase it all. Worst possible form of sound byte to be able to relay & parrot around.
But think about it: They hired him specifically for his personality, because he's a cash cow, and then... what? Fired him for it? Did they not listen to his wildly popular show on the previous channel he was on? Did they not know what they were getting themselves into? Did they somehow miss the fact that he was available for hire only because his previous channel fired him?
Who is to blame here? The idiot that got a big cat as a pet, or the cat for being a wild animal?
PS: Jeremy Clarkson being fired from Top Gear is a similar situation. He's a fantastically entertaining TV personality precisely because of his personality.
I strongly believe that people like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and Linus Torvalds are necessary. You can't convince everyone to play along nicely with kind words alone. Sometimes you have to knock some heads together, and the type of people that do that, well... they're the type that will happily knock heads. It's a package deal.
You mean like anti-vaxxers dragging down the overall protection rate until there's outbreaks occurring despite everyone else's best efforts and then people die? Like how 50 Samoan children died because of them? https://www1.racgp.org.au/newsgp/clinical/anti-vaccination-a...
Is that what you meant?
Or can we not use mean words against anyone even if they threaten our childrens' lives?
Actually no - the comment in question was in response to… making more system calls than necessary.
And when you're dealing with things that endanger lives, I have no room for politeness, myself.
I rarely feel this way, but I wish I had the grace and patience and fortitude to express this the way Linus Torvalds did.
That was your politicians and your choice. My family went to Florida last November because it was open w/o masks.
Don't play the pretend guilt trip about lockups, when nearly all healthy people recover and then have the antibodies. NY politicians forced known C19 carriers into long term care for elderly, causing mass death in this older vulnerable population. Indictments pending??
If I got infected I probably wouldn’t have been in much danger other than a yucky cold that made me feel crappy (but I don’t know that, it could have been quite worse). I stayed home to ensure I wasn’t spreading it to people who wouldn’t be so fortunate, or to people who have no choice but to be out in the world but might spread it to their family who might not be so fortunate.
No pretend, no trip, yes guilt. The people who kept the infection pipeline going kept killing people and kept millions of other people inside and isolated from the people we love because we’re not that selfish.
That’s an accounting of the cost associated by not locking things down.
What we have yet to see is what the economic impact is. However, the city of San Francisco has a budget surplus right now since economically we did better than expected.
Summary:
Miami-Dade: 18,474 cases and 238 deaths per 100k population San Francisco: 4,214 cases and 63 deaths per 100k population
He must be doing something right, because 30 years after its first release Linux isn't just thriving, it is dominating the world.
And on the side he also managed to release another little something which we now know as git.
There is no personal invective in his message. He only attacked the message, not the messenger.
I feel it's actually less rude and more just straight facts.
In general, or you can point exact wording in his letter which you consider "rude", sorry?
The one thing I'll add which has been skirted around and some commenters have 'skirmishly' mentioned is the amount of distrust for authority, which IMO can be well-placed. The amount of deceitfulness conducted by the state on various matters, important and trivial, over the past several decades (though probably for all of human history - but come to light (due to the internet)) has fostered this mistrust. The list of lies or misinformation is extensive; the wars, the bailouts, the disregard for communities, the deportations: the policies; in essence the corruption and ulterior motives of the state is and has been questionable. Thus, the backlash against the vaccine(s) is understandable and I partly feel it within me too.
Also, to make a rational decision you have to have a lot of the main pros and cons, but what we have been supplied with are just extreme incorrect cons and/or extreme & well-placed pros - there has not been any balanced adult 'conversation' (i.e., a balanced cost-benefit assessment geared towards the individual) which in its absence is unscientific and fairly illiberal. That's my 2 cents.
Edit: I've never had a comment sink so fast. Cest la vie. I'm sort of glad other people think human civilisation is working. Maybe my depression just has me jaded.
This will probably get downvoted/flagged but I wanted to say it.
Besides, the government isn't even forcing you in the sense of "you're going to go to jail if you don't do this." There's forcing you in the sense of "You can't fly on this plane if not vaccinated." Private businesses could refuse you service, like "You're not coming into this movie theater unless you're vaccinated or wearing a mask." Can't libertarians decide who to associate with and if they don't want to associate with non-vaccinated, isn't that their right?
Governments force lots of things in democracies. Education is forced for example. Truancy is illegal. You as a parent cannot make a decision to never educate your child in many countries.
You assume that when a person does not get a vaccine, that person is helping to get more people infected. But that does not always happen; many people have natural immunity and in case they are nevertheless infectors, they are quite less effective at infecting others, similar to how vaccinated people seem to be so; and such non-vaccinated person can limit their infecting risk to others in various other ways, such as by wearing a mask in close encounters with strangers and by limiting such contacts.
It is not true that getting vaccinated is the only way to help limit the spread of COVID-19.
There is another issue, that many people do not want the vaccine, but they do want natural immunity. Those people actually want to get infected, by a weak variant of the disease, and let the nature do its process and get natural immunity.
> It is not true that getting vaccinated is the only way to help limit the spread of COVID-19.
Except that the people who don't get vaccinated overlap with the people who refuse all of the other mitigations -- many antivax people are also anti-mask, anti-social distancing, anti-lockdown, etc.
> There is another issue, that many people do not want the vaccine, but they do want natural immunity. Those people actually want to get infected, by a weak variant of the disease, and let the nature do its process and get natural immunity.
You have no control over which variant you get infected by. If you're not vaccinated, you could get infected first by the Delta variant for example. I mean, you're proposing a quite frankly bizarre process: 1) "natural immunity" vs "vaccine immunity". In many cases, these are identical, for example if you get a vaccine based on a weakened form of the virus. 2) An assumption that "natural immunity" confers some kind of better protection than vaccine immunity. This is unscientific, and in the case of COVID-19, factually wrong.
And that's the point of Linus's rant A lot of antivax people use pseudo-scientific reasoning. It's like you bring the same rigor to pandemic prevention that some quack brings to analysis of GOOP supplements.
It is a personal responsibility of the participants. When people have natural (no rubber) sex it is none of anybody else's business to control how they do it, except if there is intentional spreading of disease. You have to prove bad intent to harm or spread disease, then you are right that intervention is justified. Without that, forcing condoms on everybody having sex is an autocratic policy that should have no place in civil democratic society. You can politely suggest getting tested and using condoms though.
> Except that the people who don't get vaccinated overlap with the people who refuse all of the other mitigations -- many antivax people are also anti-mask, anti-social distancing, anti-lockdown, etc.
That may be. Reasonableness of these positions depends highly on actual local health situation. These people are not always wrong as you seem to imply.
> bizarre process: 1) "natural immunity" vs "vaccine immunity"
It's simple: natural immunity is something you get without powerful interests being in control; vaccine is subjecting your health into hands of some other party. Some people do not want to their health to be controlled by powerful interests/institutions in general, some just in case of vaccines. It's perfectly valid and respectable personal stance. It does not matter whether it's scientific, almost no society is run by science, scientists or scientific consensus. We use rather political process and respect individual freedoms even if those are unscientific (religion, refusing transfusion, refusing vaccines, etc.)
You're welcome to die in ignorance if you want. But the rest of society is free to ostracize you. Businesses can deny you access. Schools can deny your kids entry. And through the political process, can restrict your interactions in other ways.
Your "freedom" stops when you run up against *my freedom" to have a diseased lunatic close enough to spread their disease to me.
I was just listening to NPR's Freakonomics discussion of the Cialdini's the science of persuasion, and in that book, he talks about people who will reactively rebel again anything, even if they know they are wrong and it is against their interests, purely because it limited my choice.
In other words, how dare you tell me I can't drink poison, I'll do it because you don't have the right to tell me what to do.
This childish attitude precisely describes your attitude in the previous posts where you admit to doing things even if scientifically wrong. This sums up to a T, the problem with reactionary conservativism. It isn't about doing what's right, what's ethical, what's scientifically correct, what's efficient, it's about "elites can't tell me what to do!" Hence you get stupid shit like people deliberately making the exhaust of their trucks put old huge clouds of black smoke, because it's a finger to the face of everyone else who says that exhaust pollution is bad.
The temper tantrum of the anti-maskers, the anti-vaxxers, is largely such a childish overreaction.
Not "whatever restrictions". For example, you cannot announce "only white people". And similarly should be that you cannot announce "only vaccinated people". It is a very similar thing, rejecting group of people based on fear of interacting with them because they are different.
> In other words, how dare you tell me I can't drink poison, I'll do it because you don't have the right to tell me what to do.
And that should be the allowed and accepted thing to do. I don't want some institution to decide which substances are OK to drink and which are forbidden. In some cases, that poison may save your life. Whether a chemical is a medicine or poison often depends on details of the situation, for example health status, tolerance and dosage.
> It isn't about doing what's right, what's ethical, what's scientifically correct, what's efficient, it's about "elites can't tell me what to do!"
What's right and what is ethical and what's scientifically correct can be very different for different people. Some like you believe that is determined by authorities (medical, scientific, government) and some like me don't, we prefer to make our own minds.
Once you talk about things like being contagious and infecting others, personal freedoms must be balanced against societal well-being.
Where that balance lies is, of course, where the debate should be. Ignoring one side and focusing solely on the other is unproductive in my opinion.
"Do what you want to yourself, but leave the rest of us out of it" is the definition of freedom.
That said, any actual calculation of the risks should send people flocking to be vaccinated. But you do you. Just please don't vote.
No, your freedom ends where my starts. If you are propagating a deadly desease it's not about individual freedoms anymore, this is the same as deciding your personal risk is fine with running red lights at intersections; we don't accept that as a society.
Edit: although, my question doesn't address your concern about personal risk. But the laws don't address personal risk, they address the public risks caused by your actions. If you don't care about public risks, then my question is a non sequitur.
The justification for mandatory seatbelt laws is the same as the justification for covid mitigations: you’re protecting more than yourself.
If not, this analogy does not stand.
Potentially, yes. This wasn’t an analogy! I meant it literally. People not wearing seatbelts can injure or kill others in collisions. Their bodies can be projected into others’ and even a waif of a person can be deadly with enough force.
my point in comparing the seatbelt to vaccines was about the passenger being compared to the vaccinated person, who is responsible for his own risk.
Analogies are never perfect, and in this case, it is the first time, the disease has been so politicized on both sides that we need to resign ourselves to potentially never coming to a complete agreement.
Time of course will prove it, but for some, it will be too late.
However, I just think that (even stupid) people are in general selfish for what they care about ( not logical enough for the rest of us) and that in general, they should have agency.
I see it in the same category as regulating alcohol, drugs, etc. In fact, there is unanimous opinion that alcohol is not good for you at all, where there is discussions,even prior to covid, that is often debunked (but not completely in the eyes of some people) that vaccines pose their own risks (see autism, etc ), and also affects people's sensibilities (see usage of aborted fetal cells)
I believe the core issue here more than vaccines is trust. Trust that is lost, and attempts taken to understand why, and solutions to rebuild it.
If one's actions were only risky to themselves, then I would agree with you. However, that is not the case with a pandemic.
> Forcing/mandating mask wearing in democratic countries does more damage to democracy.
Frankly, politicizing mask wearing, fake news, lies and proud ignorance does more damage to democracy than anything else. If everyone would have worn masks from the beginning, we would be in a very different place right now.
Maybe try getting some real education on infectious diseases. Incubation periods during which you can be contagious, and the generally non-zero latency between becoming symptomatic and highly contagious and getting positive test results back and getting into isolation mean your proposed strategy is stupid.
https://fox8.com/news/coronavirus/cleveland-doctor-tells-ohi...
https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/prevention-c... https://lessonsfromthecrisis.substack.com/p/the-experts-can-...
Then the next article goes on about some topic you don't know, and suddenly you have this nagging suspicion that... hey... maybe they're bullshitting about this too!
That observation doesn't just apply to news media.
In my own industry, I'm constantly up against peers and colleagues who are highly paid, highly educated consultants. Customers turn to these people for "expert" advice. Most of it is something they picked up in the 1990s that is now thoroughly outdated. The other half is them jumping on board with the latest fad, typically badly.
But I have this perspective because I can recognise the bullshit and errors in my own industry.
Just like the way I now watch the news much more critically, I am now similarly critical of other professionals such as doctors or lawyers.
That said: Go get vaccinated! I'm getting my shot next week, which is the earliest I could possibly get it.
Don't make assumptions.
HN moderation has failed to prevent the platform from being politicized and split up into rightthink and wrongthink, predominantly by allowing political and emotional shitposts that are behind a thin veil of "tech" related topics backed by HN's nebulous "Guidelines." It's just a mirror image of society itself so if things have devolved here for you, I assure you, things out there are much worse than they appear to be. Such is the price of diversity. You're never going to get to the bottom of an agreement on anything, and for every thing you think is going to improve things, others will say how it will make it worse. Good luck.
It's social programming. These people have been raised by their media, their politicians, their tribe, to be like this, to behave like this, to assume always it's other people, it's other forces that are responsible, that are causing problems. Their dogma is that they are good people, their wants are correct, and others are bad. This isn't "people just behave randomly". This is deliberate. This is overt & obvious, a persistent problem, a persistent anti- everyone else faction of America, that has caused a royal stink my entire life.
We've moved past the "information age" where facts and science and raw data are used to drive decisions, and we're in some kind of "selfish wants" age.
I don't know if it's a problem with democracy though - we've known for a long time now if you let regular folk vote on it a huge number would vote for absolutely zero tax and society would fall apart because of it, but they'd go down chanting how free they are because they're not paying tax.
I wonder if it's a lack of education about critical thinking, or maybe just a few decades of being told we can have whatever we want, making (most/some) people very entitled and self-centred.
I'm locked in a quarantine hotel for 14 days right now (entering Australia) and I'm live vlogging it across social media. I'm getting a TON of comments from people who are outraged that this is a violation of my rights, etc. etc. It doesn't occur to them that I had to agree to this quarantine long before I could even book a plane ticket, and I personally think it's a very good protective measure and I'm happy about it. Their outrage about what is happening to me is apparently more relevant and important than my own thoughts about what is happening to me.
People seem to think their own personal rights are more important than the rights of society as a whole.
But if those individuals want to live among other people, they must obey by the rules and behave in a manner that is acceptable for all, and doesn't infringe on anyone else's rights.
Although "god" created us without any clothes (if you believe in that kind of thing), you can't walk down the street right now naked. You can't take food from the store because you're hungry (or even pick it off a tree a-la Eve) and you can't even just sleep wherever you want.
Individual rights are not the be all and end all when you live in a society.
If you don't like it, you're perfectly free to go live extraordinarily far away in the wilderness and never have anything to do with society. I lived in the Yukon. I know quite a few people doing that. It's a perfectly valid option. They hunt their own food, grow their own vegetables and go into town at most once every six months. They despise it.
When did we ever live in age where "facts and science and raw data are used to drive decisions" ? I don't know of such age. Both West and East are driven by ideologies and powerful people whims for a long time.
> zero tax and society would fall apart because of it
How do you know this? Society is a very general concept, why would it fall apart just because of different economics? Instead of taxes, the government could just print more money, or we could completely change the government so it works on donations instead of taxes. It is hard to predict what would happen, society falling apart is one of them, but not the only one. Structural change of society does not mean it has to fall apart.
IMHO that was the case from something like the 70s to the 00s, but it could be rose colored glasses.
> How do you know this?
Without taxes there are no Police. No schools, no publicly funded roads, water, electricity or anything like that (street sweeping, snow clearing, etc.). That's just the very beginning.
No EPA. Nobody making or enforcing any kind of order. Nobody even making sure the food for sale is some kind of food. I think it's safe to say without taxes society as we know it would fall apart very rapidly. Sure, would there be LaMOE's (Last Man On Earth) defending their Idaho ranch with all their guns... but in the broader sense everything we know today would stop.
Indians were living fine before they ever heard of taxes. They had different organization, but they did have one. The same can happen in the future. A set of local communities with local order based on merit and seniority, without a bureaucracy somewhere far away trying to direct people's lives.
As I mentioned most of the stuff we have now simply wouldn't exist. Would we do other things? sure. But don't imagine we can have this level of luxury and ease.
Same goes for supposed long-term effects. The vaccines might have some, but it's less likely than the virus itself having long-term effects (it even has a name already: "long covid"). If you're young, covid is also much more dangerous than the flu.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-se...
That said, I am 100% happy with you making an assessment for your own health. I only start objecting when people (not you) pretend there is no risk or refuse to wear a mask or decline the vaccine because its a conspiracy.
We can go back and forth getting the right risk figure and you may be happy with that risk. That's all personal freedom and good faith discussion. When people refuse the facts, that's when it gets frustrating to me. And I think a very big number are doing just that.
Democracy is inherently fragile; it only succeeds when you have a well-educated electorate interested in the good of the country as a whole, and a large enough percentage of the population with enough wealth that such things are maintainable.
Unfortunately for us in the states, the past several decades have been ones of increasing partisan bickering, and a loss of a collective sense of civic duty.
Median incomes have not kept up with the cost of living for close to 50 years, now, putting the squeeze on even having enough time to think about these things.
The zeitgeist on the internet isn't helping, and I think Sort by Controversial ( https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/ ) is less fictional by the day.
These things are all bad news. That doesn't mean we're doomed, and I'm not fatalistic. There are lots of people who care, too.
And there is a lot of work to be done to shore up the foundations of our country. When I was younger, I lived in countries that did not have a functional civic apparatus. I do not want to see that here.
I disagree with the bit after the semicolon quite strongly. I described my alternative opinion elsewhere in this thread. Democracy has survived very well without sufficient education; it works because it means representatives from the whole community can negotiate an outcome that addresses their actual concerns. For this to work, you need representatives of the whole community and the ability to negotiate, both of which are hard to find in the current US for various reasons. The representatives need to be motivated to find a negotiated settlement that address their core concerns at least, which is impossible under ideological parties where promotion is predicated on purity. But these conditions aren't very hard to reach, and certainly much easier than the idea of a well-educated electorate. (PS: No one has a "core interest" of, say, emitting carbon into the atmosphere. Everyone who has an interest in that could be migrated to other areas: coal miners want respectable and well-paid work; mine owners want the value of their investments to remain. This means that once negotiated settlements are possible, those which are needed but not well understood are possible too, even with poorly educated electorates.)
As to the bit before the semicolon, I guess someone must've done studies. Is democracy more stable or less stable than alternative constitutions? How do you even measure stability? Obviously the US hasn't been stable for the whole time since the constitution was written, but it was even able to recover after it lost its footing. I think that alone demonstrates that democracy can be robust (not everyone could vote, but I think the ways in which the US was a democracy were sufficiently clear that it would be wrong to attribute it to some alternative style).
As best as I can tell, the reason democratic processes have produced the best government in history isn't because the electorate is making well-reasoned assessment of various policy options.
It's because it provides a relatively quick feedback cycle, and because people can vote according to their interests and the wounds of previous policy will get treated. The way to keep it safe from abuse by far right extremists ("populists") is to have broad-based parties that reflect economic classes and which can provide direct connections between the different parts of the community and the political system.
Parties based on ideology are less capable of compromise so they're less responsive to genuine needs. A business-owners party and a workers party can agree to free trade or protectionism, mandatory public holidays or freedom of contract: the agreement can be believed to be a win for both sites that makes everyone stronger. But, say, a business-libertarian party can only concede it didn't have the power to force both free trade and freedom of contract, and can't call the law they got through an agreement. Ideology is also something that is interesting to fewer people, so they will have narrower bases, more subject to whim and fancy.
Democracy isn't perfect, but is there a better system? It seems like everything that is better than democracy done now is just democracy done better. Do you think it would be better to adopt a Saudi-style absolute monarchy or a PRC-style party state?
If someone felt that they were mis-treated in the past by the government or by say a university bureaucracy, they are more likely to be anti-vax; because appealing to authority has no meaning or relevance to the way they process and assign weights to the information that they rrceive.
Of course more positive views of 'Authority' will lead to a different, more pro-vax position.
Curious if this matches with what others are seeing.
I think politics is a big factor too, honestly. Misinformation flows through echo-chambers and everything becomes partisan.
If a person excessively distrusts authority, they are vastly more likely to have a poor interaction with authorities. For instance, a person who believes the government is trying to trick everyone into subjugating ourselves to them by getting and using birth certificates and drivers licences is going to have a very poor interaction with the police and perhaps the courts. (I don't mean to say that everyone in some class are Sovereign Citizens, but that at one extreme you have Sovereign Citizens, and you have people who are more or less like them in between them and the person whose mistrust legitimately started from an interaction with authorities.)
I wouldn't want to use those experiences as the basis for concluding that an antivaxxer is antivax because of their previous poor interactions. Both events are caused by the original distrust.
If we know who's had poor runins with the law and we're trying to find the antivaxxers, then yes, I think this is a useful place to look. But it's just a correlation, not an explanation.
Consequently, I want to place much less weight on your reasoning:
>If someone felt that they were mis-treated in the past by the government or by say a university bureaucracy, they are more likely to be anti-vax; because appealing to authority has no meaning or relevance to the way they process and assign weights to the information that they rrceive.
(Also, I'm not convinced of your argument even with these objections resolved. A lot of people seem to distrust the government because they view it as associated with one party, even when their preferred party is in charge. This distrust seems somewhat confected. And in America, distrust of government is a widespread ideology/mindset, even embedded into the culture. Neither of these forms of distrust are rational or understandable (over)reactions to trust-forming interactions.)
The sanitary, risk adverse nature of the modern world genuinely repulses me.
I want to kill this overprotective beaurocracy in its cradle.
It seems stupid, and it is. But it's the only vote I get. I'm playing my hand. Disaster Socialism needs to be DOA next crisis.
My MIL just died as a result of her second Pfizer shot. It was a rare side-effect that's happened to less than 100 people in the US, according to another person in my neighborhood who I found out had the same thing as my MIL happen to him, who is more informed than they normally allow a patient to be, purely due to the fact that his heart tissue is being used by Mayo Clinic.
Both him and my MIL went into cardiac arrest a few hours after their 2nd shot, while suffering a fever from the shot. He is 35, healthy, and fit, with no heart issues. My MIL was early 60's, no heart issues detected after a week of doctors testing her while she was on life support. He was in Colorado. She was in Omaha at Nebraska Medicine, which is a solid hospital.
Her death was not investigated "thoroughly" at all. The team eventually reported it to the VAERS system and stated to us that their opinion was that it was vaccine induced. They did nothing beyond that. The only reason her case is now being investigated is because when I got back to Colorado, a neighbor heard my story and introduced me to another neighbor, the 35 year old, who went through it a month ago. He survived because he was young. His case was being thoroughly investigated, but nobody did shit for my Mother in Law. I had to contact the researchers myself and point them to the hospital in Nebraska to initiate anything.
It was sheer luck that I encountered this guy, and that he happened to be in comms with researchers on his case. In both cases, the doctors gaslit both families for days, ignoring and dismissing any connection with the vaccine, until they eventually arrived at no explanations after test after test.
My experience is an anecdotal data point, but based on it, I have ZERO confidence that the majority of cases like my MIL are being investigated. The doctors were clearly getting pressure, likely from their employers and especially from licensing boards, to not talk about it. The lack of curiosity was the most shocking part for my family and the 35 year old's family. Our experiences in 2 different hospitals in 2 states were shockingly similar in how horrifying they were.
At this point, the researchers have found that the team in Nebraska didn't conduct nearly as many tests as they did, and their research into her case is being hampered due to this. Because she was on life support for over a week and a half after the initial incident, and we had to remove her from life support and let her suffocate, an autopsy isn't useful. They needed samples taken initially, but the ones that should have been taken weren't.
This is a long reply, but I wrote it because I think your trust in our health institutions is misplaced in the face of the social and cultural pressures for this vaccine.
Realistically it would create vaccine hesitancy in some percentage of people that heard about the story. I already had to talk my dad into getting his booster in a few months because after he heard he became concerned about getting it.
For this reason and probably more structural reasons nobody in media is willing to report it. Unfortunately there are certain media members who are hungry for the story but these are not the kinds of groups we want to talk to. They will simply use the story to fuel their silly vaccine conspiracy theories they push.
The Mayo clinic folks will eventually publish their research paper that includes both cases. We have no idea when that will be but they are committed and legally bound to provide the final copy to my friend.
Trust in health institutions is very much misplaced. The science is good, after decades of refinement, but the people are often egotistical and imminently fallible.
Do not trust doctors. Do your own research. Trust scientists, but verify.
The translation of this is “hey here is a potentially additional side effect that we didnt notice in our trials, lets do more trials so we can simply list the side effect or not since we are doing full clinical trials anyway”
In this case, Linus is responding specifically to Enrico Weigelt, who is making the claim that the COVID vaccines are a "generic human experiment that basically creates a new humanoid race (people who generate and exhaust the toxic spike proteine, whose gene sequence doesn't look quote natural)."
Linus' email is directed wholly towards Enrico.
If you don't want to, then you don't want to. I understand that not everyone will want to. My work understands that, as does the hospital near work, and both have contingency plans for when someone who works there does not want to get vaccinated (and no, it's not "fire them").
Enrico didn't say "I don't want to", he effectively said "I don't want to, and here's why…" and then put forward a reason that Linux (and I, and I imagine many others) believe wholeheartedly to be untrue.
Yeah the whole nonsense about the vaccine cresting a new genome is ridiculous, it's sad that some people are buying it. Apparently even Mark Zuckerberg fell for it for a short while early on.
But I wouldn't use it for the same reason I don't use Bluetooth headsets -- tech is just way too new, and of for some reason there are long term unexpected side effects, we won't know until a decade or two goes by.
PS: I'm vaccinated with the viral vector AstraZeneca one
This seems odd.
that's exactly the bullshit that he's calling out.
the mRNA is gone in days, all that remains is the immune response.
we have hundreds of year of experience at understanding the kinds of autoimmune side effects that can happen after a viral infection or a vaccine. they either surface in under 90 days or they don't.
5 years from now we're not going to have a sudden outbreak of side effects.
if it did it would upset the entire discipline of rheumatology.
once 3 months go by after your vaccination anything that happens to you after that has nothing to do with the vaccination.
Wouldn't you be interested in adopting a new headset with Bluetooth v5 given that you know of v4 (and it's minor pain points?)
Cases were going down significantly in the USA before the mass rollout of the vaccine. 100% guarantee that people forget that unpleasant fact.
Sources: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/02/14/why-coronav... https://abc7news.com/covid-cases-in-us-johnson-and-vaccine-c... https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/02/why-covid-...
Since the vaccine, the ups stopped.
This is what I'm talking about. People want to rewrite history to make it seem like we were all screwed until the vaccine showed up. No, experts were talking about how cases were going down drastically and it wasn't the cause of vaccine.
This is a very vague statement, so let's put some numbers onto it:
Total US vaccination rates exceeded 1% on January 2nd 2021. The US 7-day rolling average case count peaked on January 11th 2021. At that point, 2.7% of the population was vaccinated, and 632,000 people were being vaccinated every day (again, 7-day rolling average).
Cases were almost certainly going to trend down (albeit to a lesser extent) anyway, but I would argue that mass rollout was concurrent with a ~94% drop in case count.
That's the former director of the CDC. Do you disagree with his assessment?
The comment you initially replied to said "these days", which in the context of a rapidly changing pandemic I don't really consider to include "4 months ago".
The explanation for that is probably largely similar to the explanation for the 49% drop between 20 July 2020 and 12 September 2020.
As a reminder, the claim you responded to was addressing the 94% drop from early January to now.
It's clear you want to rewrite the timeline to show that the vaccine caused the massive drop down to where it is now. So I don't see a point today in this further with you.
It's June.
I don't know why you keep talking about February when the comment you responded to was very explicitly about current case counts.
Dammit! This is America. We are supposed to pay for our medical care and pay A LOT OF MONEY! How dare they offer me free stuff to get vaccinated! I never got offered actual money to get a medical procedure ever in my life. It makes the whole thing smell funny.
That, and I wouldn't be doing it because of any other reason than peer pressure to drink the Kool Aid. Exactly 1 person in my county died of COVID last month. I am just not scared of getting COVID enough to risk the vaccine. Besides, you guys are creating the risk of creating a Marek's disease like variant[1] by all getting a vaccine that doesn't prevent you from getting the disease, but only from getting bad symptoms.
And it only serves to divide people more.
I love DARPA but they are the ones who invented the mRNA vaccine approximately 10 years ago. No one knows the long-term effects. Plus we live in a society where they openly lie to us over meaningless things, then you question them and they say, "Questioning me is questioning science."
There's a lot of problems here that have nothing to do with politics. It has to do with power and the influence of the state when it feels justified to manage its population.