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Comment by CogitoCogito | Hacker News Reader

You don't have the right to simply ignore all the research going into this and be treated seriously.

But I guess believe whatever you want if it makes you feel better.

Fortunately, being forced to believe everything scientists say is neither a law nor a responsibility. And just as well because they routinely contradict themselves or turn out to have been lying. See: the denunciation of the lab leak theory by Daszak and other virologists, which successfully suppressed this obvious common sense idea for a year. So in fact people do have that "right".

Lying? You mean changing their understanding of something new as more information becomes available? That's how science works they use the best info available, and change their understanding as more info becomes available.

No new information came out to prove the lab leak hypothesis. They just lied about it to cover the financing of their gain of function research.

They didn't change their understanding with new information, they asserted with 100% confidence that the lab leak idea was a ridiculous conspiracy theory, back when there was simply no intellectual justification for that assertion whatsoever, whilst lying (yes, lying) in their conflict of interest statement about their actual conflicts of interest. The man who coordinated it all refused to sign his own "open letter" to avoid arousing suspicion!

Even today, in their newest letter, they are still trying to obfuscate the real situation and are certainly not apologizing for their prior stance.

At any rate, this claim that scientists are never dishonest or wrong, they just "update their beliefs" as more information becomes available, is getting very tedious. That's not what they're doing. "Science" is constantly bombarding our political leaders with wildly extreme statements delivered not just with 100% confidence, but the assertion that you aren't even allowed to disagree because it's a "scientific consensus". People read the papers and point out that they're making false assumptions or are otherwise pseudo-scientific, but they're suppressed and ignoring. Then when that "consensus" turns out to have been completely wrong a bunch of apologists appear to explain that scientists can never be wrong by definition.

Well, guess what? If a certain type of person constantly make confident statements as a group and insists reasoned disagreement is illegitimate, then is repeatedly proven to be wrong, all their statements become seen as less reliable. As a group.

>You don't have the right to simply ignore all the research going into this and be treated seriously.

Replace "research" with "stuff a bunch of people you believe say", and the situation will become much more clear.

Don't think that I don't understand the banal point you're trying to make.

Try https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27817926

What point are you trying to make by linking that post? It's not even about the same subject. There may very well be not very much information supporting covid passes for restaurants, but what does that have to do with covid vaccinations? There is an enormous amount of information there.

E.g. here is a point you made that doesn't even remotely apply here:

> If you do an experiment that very few people in the world is able to replicate, because it is hard or due to lack of resources, then the rest of the world have to trust you.

These vaccines have been taken by _millions_ of people. They have been given by many different independent organizations. So yeah this doesn't even apply at all.

> The trust of people should be won, research by research, not authority by authority, and the non-requirement of mandates goes along automatically with that idea.

Essentially all the research points towards the vaccines being much much better than the disease. It's your choice to stick your head in the sand if you so wish, but no one need respect your decision. You're not somehow wise simply due to your being contrarian.

You don't have to respect me. But you have to respect the fact that trust in "science" is fundamentally different from trust in "scientists".

I think this is really a case of self righteous indignation. There are people who truly believe you must take the vaccine, and nothing will convince them otherwise, but more importantly, If you say no you won’t take the vaccine, they take it as a personal attack on their beliefs. In other words: how dare you say no to what I want you to do.

Honestly I don't take it as a personal attack. I just find people unnecessarily forgoing it to be selfish and stupid.

Not trusting private companies that proved many times to be putting their shareholders interests before the public good by forging false research, generating opioid epidemics and bribing politicians and committees is the opposite of being selfish and stupid.

On the contrary being this naive...

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