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Comment by SuoDuanDao | Hacker News Reader

To have autonomy over their own medical decisions.

Ah. So I took your use of the word "want" more literally than you seem to have intended it. I "want" everyone to get the vaccine. You seem to be specifically calling out the desire to "compel" which I am much more ambivalent about. (I'd probably be in favour of "incentivising" with a careful eye on unintended blowback).

But the phrase "finger waggers" is just divisive and raises the temperature. I'd strongly suggest you moderate such phrasing on HN.

Fair enough. As I mentioned elsewhere, the same people I'm referring to were trying to shame anyone who wore a mask in the early days of the pandemic, with no gain in self-awareness since. I consider that type of unreflective desire to compel dangerous to democracy and opposing it something of a civic duty, I can get a bit overzealous when speaking against it.

You can have your medical decisions. You just aren't allowed to act irresponsibly and potentially infect people.

So by that logic, if the vaccine makes me more likely to have a 'walking case' of the virus, I shouldn't be allowed to get it unless I'm high-risk, right?

The vaccine doesn't make you more likely to have a walking case, it still provides substantial protection. It doesn't provide as much protection as hoped against that variant.

It is a good argument for the vaccinated to continue to wear masks when mixing with the unvaccinated.

Really? It used to be pretty common for people to go to work sick. The flu is serious for many people.

There are numerous other instances of near willful infection of others.

Education and intelligence are necessary for achieving autonomy. In general, it's hard to take claims for "autonomy" seriously when so many people's decisions seem to be arrived at by uncritically following social media.

That cuts both ways. I remember the finger-waggers - for weeks - mocking people who chose to wear a mask in the early days of the pandemic, with the same tone of smug superiority they today reserve for people who choose not to. I'm a lot more worried about those types of people than the type who arrive at what look to me like sillier conclusions but don't seek to impose them on everyone.

I agree on the priority, but the latter types are ultimately still imposing the consequences of their decisions onto others - their extended families when they want to visit, their friendships where they can't help but pushing the nonsense into every conversation, public spaces if they're not actually continuing to wear a mask and social distance, institutions that are going back to business as usual (eg schools), etc.

I'm all for making one's own decisions and going against the grain (eg wearing a mask at the start of the respiratory pandemic). I'm just saying that the dissent seems to consist of very few well-reasoned viewpoints, and a whole lot of herd following and outright nonsense.

Unfortunately, when places like the world's largest video site censor debates between different medical professionals on the topic, it's hard to be confident how rare those well-reasoned viewpoints actually are.

Even without the censorship, the non well-reasoned narratives would still drown out the well-reasoned ones. The social media hypothesis that many opinions could be distilled down into useful information has been a failure.

So I'm speaking locally based on the people that I know personally who have bought into the "skepticism", and they don't seem well-reasoned at all. For example, one sent me a video saying that Covid is caused by 5G and asked my opinion (thank goodness for small things). I responded with corrections of specific technical claims in the video, only to have them fall back to relativism because "nobody can know". Ultimately the manipulation and conviction in the video won out over scientific facts. It's like the new dark ages.

Also, there are also Internet forums with a higher signal to noise ratio than effortless-publishing mass-media, and I do believe that if there were anything worthwhile it would gain momentum.

To be quite honest: I'm not comfortable with my current education level regarding the vaccine considering the pretty aggressive censorship everyone has been doing with information on it.

I agree, which is why I don't feel terribly autonomous with respect to my decision to get vaccinated. The best I could do was wait several months to see if anything major shook out as they scaled up.

But the autonomy applies to the decision process, and not the specific choice. Choosing the contrary conclusion is just as non-autonomous.

I don't quite understand the "censorship" argument. Of course governments and public health officials are going to push the most effective tools we have to save as many lives as possible.

What is censorship in this case? Not spreading debunked or poorly-supported claims?

True censorship would've been something like keeping hush the rare blood-clotting incidents with J&J. But there are so many studies across so many countries that are freely available to read and be informed by.

Even the claims of twitter/other social media censoring don't hold water for me. Extraordinary claims should require extraordinary proof imo

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