Getting a Covid jab is safer than taking aspirin

First, they see the other tribe's worst members making false claims, engaging in fearmongering, or worse.

Then they consider the direct opposite position. In this case, it's "vaccines are dangerous" vs "vaccines are completely safe."

Then, they cherry pick analytical frames which validate the latter position.

And of course, along the way, box themselves into claims they can't possibly make.

And when reality sets in that the truth is actually less clean than either side presents, it further erodes trust in the side of the discussion that is considered the establishment or consensus.

Rinse repeat.

In this case, here's where the merit of the "other team's" view can be drawn from:

- These vaccines have not been deployed long enough, in comparison to other drugs, to make strong claims regarding their long term effects.

- These vaccines have been deployed in a system of unprecedented scope and scale, so this will act as a magnifier on any such long term effects.

- There are valid theoretical mechanisms being discussed for such side effects to emerge in the long term, and clear disincentives to collect data on them in the short term.

- They are in response to a disease which has evidence to support the idea there is a very broad spectrum of potential impacts depending on a person's individual age/BMI/etc.

Therefore, it is unfair to suggest that an individual who sees themselves as low risk to COVID, and potentially exposing themselves to a yet-to-be-fully-understood drug, does not have a valid dilemma in the choice around vaccines. It is a genuine dilemma that we should do our best to help provide the best information around.

For many, the choice is more obvious. For some, less so. But claiming the choice is always obvious is a recipe for the erosion of trust I mentioned since we ought to expect it to be the case that some long term side effects manifest, at which point any person who has allowed themselves to slip into claims falsified by that discovery will have any other things they said of merit bucketed as being untrustworthy.

The cited study [1] does not say that. Those results are specifically for "a fifty-year-old male" (see p. 638), not the general population.

Additionally, the results are from an "aspirin therapy simulation", not real world data [2]. How the researchers ended up with their model parameters, is unknown.

Did the author even read the studies?

[1] https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/abs/10.1377/hlthaff.26.3.6...

[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15590881/

I'm not trying to start an argument over vaccines but it sincerely seems to me like there might be large error bars on the assertion that the risk of death from the vaccine is one in two million. And I expect aspirin is still far riskier than the vaccine so the central headline doesn't change. I'm probably missing something here so would welcome input from others. Hopefully Hacker News is a mature enough place to discuss this with level heads.

EDIT: 2 minutes after posting, first downvote. Maybe my previous sentence was too hopeful?

So the issue with MSM reporting and this specific article is the habitation of publishing without applying basic principles of news literacy first. Editorials and Opinion pieces are all too often confused with stories of fact, and Questions about interests, data, and how conclusions are all often buried or require way too much time to discover and determine or we are asked to take it at face value. I won't say what puppies the MSM have killed but I will say in the last couple of years, they've killed a few publicly; the overton bubble has begun boiling and the Frog is wondering which pot is actually safe at this point. In this article I have to click on 6 or so links and read seperate articles to find out what was proposed here is an opinion piece, then do google searching. I shouldn't have to proove out the authors statement myself.

And that has become a bad habit for many people, and it's infested the education system. The net impact of that is to destroy the capacity of a country to utilize reputation and sound reporting and lets be really honest here, there are institutions that even in this pandemic and well before it have prooven trustworthy.

I would reccomend anyone reading this that REALLY doesn't like what I'm saying to assume I'm full of it but do yourself a favor. Take a news literacy course.