More on Vaccine Side Effects | Hacker News Reader

More on Vaccine Side Effects

blogs.sciencemag.org

45 pointshprotagonist88 comments

I would have noded and approved this article 24 hours ago.

Now vaccination is about to be made de-facto mandatory in France (with a snarky timing that will prevent some people from getting all their shots before restrictions pop in.) ; and I know that I'm going to be a bit less receptive, because of the tension between "this is sane science" and "this is a terrible bet on the future from a politician that got a lot of things wrong in the past."

That will probably last only for a few days ; I suppose I'll be back on the "let's trust science and hope for the best" _team_ in a few days. The cognitive dissonance is not particularly pleasant.

And I hate being forced into a _team_.

> with a snarky timing that will prevent some people from getting all their shots before restrictions pop in.

It's not mandatory, unless you consider restaurants and travel to be necessities one needs ( and you can still use a test in lieu of a vaccine certificate, and tests are still free)

The full extend of the restrictions is still to be announced / debated, but the first echo indicates that even going to the mall for grocery shopping, to the pharmarcy for medecines or to the hospital for doc appointment might be restricted.

Tests should not be free anymore sometimes in automn.

That's why I meant by "de facto".

Plus, we're talking about "restaurants" and "bars" in France. That borders on "necessities" ;)

To be honest, my biggest issue is the timing, though time will tell if it was necessary (playing catch-up with an exponential, once again...)

As you said, details are yet to be debated, but i highly doubt grocery shopping will be on the list of restricted activities.

For the rest, PCR tests for free until the autumn will give plenty of time for everyone to get their two doses. It's not that complicated nor time consuming to take one every few days, it just requires anticipation. ( And btw did they specifically say PCR? I don't recall.. Antigen tests are quicker and might be an easier way out )

The timing is very short indeed, bordering on the unfeasible. I think that they're right in the approach, and maybe if they had given more time people would have been more relaxed and said to themselves they'll go get vaccinated once they're back from vacation, which might be too late to avoid trouble and new curfews, closings, etc.

I could maybe agree if the restrictions were put in the winter, but not in the summer.

People have already booked their vacation, and now they need to do a PCR every 2 days to take a train, enjoy restaurants ? That's insane !

To get the "pass sanitaire" you need: first shot -> wait 3 weeks -> second shot -> wait 2 weeks. That's more than a month !

The problem is Delta seems to have much bigger R so you are basically forced to act now as each hour counts. An alternative would be restrictions for everybody - and this would be a much worse choice for a variety of reasons.

Time will tell, the goal is ostensibly to avoid a UK-style 4rth wave, trying to catch it early on this time.

PCRs are valid for 72 hours and free. If I weren't vaccinated I'd prefer to get a swab in my nose every 2-3 days and do the stuff i want over nobody doing anything in public ( if the Delta variant is left unchecked, we're probably looking at new curfews or lockdowns) in the not so distant future.

> People have already booked their vacation

Booking vacations in the middle of a global pandemic and massive restrictions ... seems a tad ... reckless.

Also, why would you do all that planning and not get a vaccination. Like, in all their planning, it didn't occur to someone that, hospitality places might start requiring proof of vaccination?

Service workers are people too. They want to earn a wage, while keeping themselves and their families safe. And given the labor shortages, these people have a lot more influence over their working conditions than they've had in the past.

> It's not mandatory, unless you consider restaurants and travel to be necessities one needs

Have you ever been to France?

Most in the cities live in tiny flats with insufficient space for gathering and dining. The bistro/brasserie/cafe is largely considered an extension of one's own living room.

Travel is also a normal part of life verging on necessity. Families travel for multiple weeks every summer. France even has a nationwide peer-to-peer lodging rental arrangement that predates Airbnb and Vrbo by decades: https://gitelink.com/

> The cognitive dissonance is not particularly pleasant

It's not unexpected though, is it? Certain personality types, and to a large extent certain cultures, reflexively push back when forced to do something, even if it's a Good Idea or something they'd do or have already done anyway.

While that reflex may have downsides (like the current situation with vaccines), from a societal standpoint, it's a strong check against abuse of power.

I've been like that in my natural setting, meaning whole childhood and well into maturity. Meaning even mostly cool stuff in school was hated with passion, took me quite some time to find my way back to it (ie biology, geography, chemistry, native language).

Its a stupid emotional knee-jerk reaction. Happy to got over it over time. Maybe those potential benefits only manifest on large-enough scale of population, don't know and don't want to try.

Science, on the other hand, has practically never failed me (since I also understand probability and downsides).

The problem these days, from my perspective, large enough population was lured into 'alt-science' which is not science at all. It works on emotional level, so no rational argument will persuade them, in contrary. That's a dark path to take, and the longer one goes on it, the harder is to ever get back.

There is no benefit to civilization that I can see, I hope to change my mind on this over time. Just a potential rift across most of the world (maybe apart from places like China, which benefits greatly from the self-inflicted mess western countries are in).

This is exactly correct. The modern assumption by certain ideologies that evil doesn't exist is at the root of this. Yes, there are people that will lie, use their credentials, use existing seemingly impartial processes, use psychological tricks, etc. to trick you and control you. Yes, these people exist! So many people are very, very naive, having never seen real evil. Evil has become abstracted--a meme. Do we have roving bands of mercenaries looking to kill us and take our stuff here in the United States? No, and in some ways, that's become a bad thing. People don't know how to identify real evil anymore!

Agreed. However, the "evil" people are capitalizing on the pandemic in a very different way than the "good" people are.

> Do we have roving bands of mercenaries looking to kill us and take our stuff here in the United States?

Maybe not where you live. But roving militias are a thing across the midwest. Some dismiss them as bored guys cosplaying freedom fighters, but they are out there and are actively conspiring to hurt people. They just aren't taken seriously yet because they haven't actually hurt too many people.

Pushing back on a good idea just because it's compulsory is not logical. It's like pushing back on seat belt laws. Seat belts are almost universally considered a good idea. They save lives of the wearer who doesn't want to turn into a hamburger during a crash, and protects the people around them who have one less projectile to worry about. There are almost no down-sides to seat belt use. Yet, I know people (even in my own family) who to this day refuse to wear them, simply because They Aren't Going To Let The Man Tell Them What To Do. It seems like just a childish and immature reason to not do something when the upside overwhelms the downside.

> It seems like just a childish and immature reason to not do something when the upside overwhelms the downside.

You pretty much nail the issue: when it's 100% obvious that the upside of the policy (hopefully much less hospitalizations and death amound old people) overwhelms the downside (unhopefully more adverse side effects amoung the much younger general population), then the decision will be rational.

At the moment, I claim it's not entirely irrationnal (although clearly pessimistic) to at least feel a bit uneasy.

> "And I hate being forced into a _team_."

you're not being forced onto a team. no one is making you identify with a party or group. you're doing that to yourself by buckling to whatever social pressures you perceive around you. you can simply stop buckling and still hold the same beliefs.

and science is not a team. that's politization talking. science is a process for generating a working body of knowledge, a body that asymtoticallly approaches truth but is not (yet) truth. for any given subject (medicine, for instance), it can even be very far from the truth and still be the best we have (so far).

this is exactly the perniciousness of partisanship in a nutshell. forget parties and sides. reach your own independent conclusions first (and continuously), and act on that, rather than succumbing to identitarianism.

The discussions I have had today sor far (this one included) have felt very "two sided".

Whereas I'm a tad ambivalent about the situation.

I suspect the decision will have a good (from the authorities point of view) effect on vaccine procrastinators, a bad but manageable effect on die hard antivaxxers, and a terrible, unpredicable and underestimated effect on the people who where hesitant, but will have to get their jab to keep their job.

Time will tell if it was worth it. That's what I hate - having to pick a side on what's the best outcome based on a relatively short span of data (every days gets us farther from the vaccine "bad surprise", but 6+ months of hindsight stills leaves me freightenned, sorry ! Not gonna lie.)

I'm not going to protest and ask for anyone's head yet. I wrote my Mom to express reasonable doubt and practical concerns, but beyond that I will of course bow to the decision of the democratically elected body.

That does not make conversation will concerned loved friends and loved ones any simpler.

objectively so far, both covid and vaccines have tiny risk of death (<0.1%), though one tiny is an order of magnitude or two larger than the other.

with that said, it’s generally ok for people under uncertainty to reach different conclusions (assuming relative independence) based on the same data. it’s not ok for some people to try to clobber the conclusions of others under uncertainty, which is what vaccinations being mandated effectively does.

when the uncertainty can be bounded objectively to being really tiny with high confidence (which may take many years, even decades), then a mandate might make sense (e.g., mmr vaccines for kids). but absent that high confidence, this one sounds premature.

Couldn't you just set fire to a few tyres after getting vaccinated ?

Ironicaly, the "reward" for beating the epidemic (if we ever manage to) will be a currently suspended pension reform.

So I suspect we'll get thz burnt tyres then (and I would not be surprised if "quasi mandatory" vacciation acts as a background reason for people anger - much like the yellow jacket movement was ostensibly about taxes on gas, and unofficially about speed limitation changes.)

It was nice of Macron to exempt law enforcement from the vaccine mandates and pension "reforms," wouldn't want to have any of the country's police forces crossing the barricades to the other side.

> And I hate being forced into a _team_.

Maybe you would like to be able to shit on the street, but there are laws against it because it would be unhealthy and probably also because people would find it "indecent". I know that not be able to shit in the street limits your freedom and forces you to be on the non-shiters team. But, I think that it is for the good of society.

Maybe vaccination is different, and then we can discuss that. But just to say that you do not want to live in a society with rules seems quite extreme.

And sorry for the shitty example, but I was trying to find something not yet politicized.

I like the process the author walked through. I'll paste one of the paragraphs.

"So as the CDC link shows, the choice is clear: mass vaccination does indeed have rare side effects, but mass infection with the coronavirus (which is the only other choice) is absolutely worse. And to reiterate a point that’s been made many times, the faster we can vaccinate people, the lower the chances we have of encountering a new variant form that will make everything even worse. We have to get as many doses out to the world as we possibly can, as quickly as we can."

I am mostly on board with the vaccine, going to get my 2nd shot soon. But I do have a worry; This is setting a precedent where instead of treating disease now, we will preemptively vaccinate. It actually seems morally wrong to not take these steps to preemptively vaccinate. But will all these new vaccinations cause a virus to adapt to be more viral, similarly to how antibiotics has the potential to make bacteria resistant?

The big issue with bacterial resistance to antibiotics is that there's a quite limited number of antibiotics, sometimes ~one that works without terrible side effects, so resistance is a _big_ deal.

Vaccines don't work like that, there's an effectively unlimited number of vaccines, because they're tailored to the virus. It's still a problem if a virus mutates around your vaccine, but you're not worse off for trying.

I am not a virologist, but it doesn't seem to make common sense to me that we're safer if we let a virus spread and just treat it, instead of vaccinating. The more of the virus that's out there, spreading and multiplying, the greater the opportunity for problematic mutations to develop/spread.

That also assumes that there's a good treatment, and sufficient capacity to treat everyone quickly, otherwise there's really not a choice there.

> But will all these new vaccinations cause a virus to adapt to be more viral, similarly to how antibiotics has the potential to make bacteria resistant?

Maybe, but it's not a big deal.[1]

[1] https://www.pnas.org/content/115/51/12878

Awesome thanks for the paper!

> This is setting a precedent where instead of treating disease now, we will preemptively vaccinate

This isn't setting any precedent. Polio, tetanus, hepatitis A/B, rubella, measles... Quite a lot of diseases where vaccination is the preferred method versus better treatment.

Given that covid is entirely treatable in 99.9+% of cases (read the studies & physician anecdotes who have been treating it effectively since last March), it makes more sense to me to take the path of being proactive, healthy, and unvaccinated until it reaches Approved status. To each their own.

This is a very naive take on the risks of infection. Just because you survive doesn't mean you're getting out unscathed[1], and it's also a pretty entitled take on access to health care. If everyone followed this advice we'd be looking at full ICUs and a lot of people asphyxiating in hospital hallways again.

Concern trolling about the approval status is also just that. The risks are pretty well known at this point and approval is a forgone conclusion. If hundreds of millions of healthy vaccinated people aren't enough proof of safety for you, then final FDA approval won't be, either.

[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

It’s only easily treatable while there is spare health system capacity. When the system is overwhelmed they’re only going to treat a select amount of people who need treatment.

It seems like the mortality rate is far higher than 0.1% according to the actual data (not anecdotes): https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality

Obviously this data is only for confirmed cases, so there may be far more unreported cases in the wild, but your made up number of 99.9+% is still pretty clearly wrong.

Also, given that you can be have covid, and be asymptomatic, there's actually no way to know if you are healthy (unless you're getting tested regularly). If you're infected, but asymptomatic, you're spreading the virus and you're part of the problem.

There's no other way I can say this: you absolutely suck at risk analysis. The worst effects of COVID are much more common -- and much worse -- in the general population than the worst effects of any of the common vaccinations available in the US. Your opinion here contradicts all available scientific facts.

Sorry, but you're just plain wrong.

Once your hospitals are overwhelmed the deathrate went through the roof, you should catch up with recent news from India & South East Asea. https://www.reuters.com/world/india/indias-covid-death-rate-...

Literally nothing is going to change between now and when the mRNA vaccines get approved. Probably a month or two to go at this point.

Given that 0.2% of the U.S. population has died of COVID, this argument seems a bit outdated.

Quanta Magazine [1] has an interesting article about how vaccines can help pathogens evolve to be more virulent, a particularly interesting part:

> After the parasites circulated through 21 rounds of vaccinated mice, Barclay and Read studied them and compared them to malaria parasites that had circulated through 21 rounds of unvaccinated mice. The strains from the vaccinated mice, they found, had grown far more virulent, in that they replicated faster and killed more red blood cells. At the end of 21 rounds of infection, these more quickly growing, deadly parasites were the only ones left.

As a sibling mentioned, it doesn't appear to be as bad as bacterial resistance, or at least different in a nuanced way.

From what I've read there is a difference between vaccinating _before_ a pandemic and vaccinating _during_ a pandemic. With the safer preference being to vaccinate before a pandemic to avoid immunological escape.

[1] https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-vaccines-can-drive-pathog...

> This is setting a precedent where instead of treating disease now, we will preemptively vaccinate

That has been the general approach for over a century, yes, particularly for diseases without effective treatments.

> But will all these new vaccinations cause a virus to adapt to be more viral, similarly to how antibiotics has the potential to make bacteria resistant?

No particular reason to think so, and it hasn’t happened before. We don’t have super-smallpox, say.

> mass vaccination does indeed have rare side effects, but mass infection with the coronavirus (which is the only other choice) is absolutely worse.

This may be a true statement on a population level, but you have to be more careful for specific sub-populations. For boys under age 18, in particular, it's looking quite likely that avoiding the second dose is a smart risk/benefit calculation:

https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/second-opinions/93340

Likewise, it makes no sense for a younger (healthy, non-obese...) woman to get the J&J or AZ vaccines, so in certain countries, it makes no sense for young women to get vaccinated. The messaging here is far too blunt.

Oddly, the one blunt, true message that doesn't seem to get transmitted is that the bad effects of this virus are largely eliminated by vaccinating those over 65.

>So as the CDC link shows, the choice is clear: mass vaccination does indeed have rare side effects, but mass infection with the coronavirus (which is the only other choice) is absolutely worse.

Not sure I agree that it's so easily quantifiable or justifiable. The loss of life due to the virus is tragic, but has been mostly the old and infirm. The vaccination side effects have been rare, but mostly affecting the young and healthy. They're also only a year out in a massive rollout of new biotechnology. New, not in terms of time, but in terms of scale - the mRNA concept has been in labs for 20 years, but it's only been in labs. It's reasonable to suspect that there may be other side effects that have not yet manifested.

I'm glad we have the vaccines available for those who need them, and those who want them to feel safer. But if feels hubristic to state with such certainty that mass roll-out, including to children, is guaranteed to be better.

>The loss of life due to the virus is tragic, but has been mostly the old and infirm.

Why do the old and infirm deserve to die?

>the mRNA concept has been in labs for 20 years, but it's only been in labs

mRNA therapies have been in clinical trials for over a decade now[1].

1. https://www.clinicaltrialsarena.com/comment/evolution-mrna-v...

I didn't state that the old and infirm deserve to die. I stated that the young seem to be more prone to these side effects, and that quantifying these two against each other is problematic.

Yes, clinical trials tend to be done in labs. I'm speaking colloquially here. A clinical trial of a few thousand is not nearly the same as a global push to vaccinate everyone from teenage years up.

>I didn't state that the old and infirm deserve to die.

When the few-in-a-million chance of complications for the young and fit are more tragic than the 610x rate of horrible, suffocating, isolated death of the old and infirm[1], you're making space for eugenics.

1. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/investi...

>you're making space for eugenics.

With an ability to reach that long, you should be a boxer or basketball player.

Everything in this life is a compromise, a finding of balance between trade offs. I'm not about to support mandating that teenagers get a novel medical treatment. There are risks. You can cite whatever studies you want telling me it's safe, it does not matter. We are still finding new side effects of these vaccines. The trend has not plateaued, or dropped off, which implies that there may be more to be discovered in the future.

There are countless ways we can reduce the death, suffering, and pain in this world, but we must balance them against the ideals we have of personal freedom, responsibility, and trust. You would save more lives making breathalyzer lockouts mandatory in all new cars, or outlawing consumption of alcohol in restaurants and bars. You would save more lives by outlawing cigarettes nationwide. You would save more lives by outlawing backyard swimming pools. But these are not battles against your perceived political enemies on the internet, so you say nothing. You wait until some crazy anti-science (probably right-wing) nutjob posts in a covid thread that maybe we're moving a bit too fast on things, and you leap to accusations of cleaning the gene pool.

So the fact that we as world do a really bad job at vaccinating in countries with lower income will ultimately assure that new strains show up that are even more resistant against the vaccine?

Is there any data if we are even fast enough? I mean some people are closer to their third shot than others getting their first in developing countries.

> So the fact that we as world do a really bad job at vaccinating in countries with lower income will ultimately assure that new strains show up that are even more resistant against the vaccine?

Exactly what would be the feasible logistical plan to put a shot in the arm of every single person on the entire planet at nearly the same time in order to (supposedly) forestall the evolution of new variants? Is there any historical precedent for this having been accomplished in the past with a virus as endemic as SARS-CoV-2? One which can also hide out and mutate in animal reservoirs?

It mutates at a much lower rate than flu. And despite that, flu shots sill make sense even with animal resevoirs, holdouts, etc.

Do they completely eliminate influenza the way that it's being claimed the Covid vaccines would, if only uptake were high enough?

Flu has about one base pair RNA mutation between each viral generation (cell to cell), coronavirus's with rna the length of the current one aren't possible without an error correction mechanism, and as a result of having that they have about only one base pair mutation between each host transmission (person to person).

I don't know the answer to your question, but it seems much harder with flu due to more rapid variation.

That may be the least of our worries. In the wealthy countries that now have universal access to free vaccines, we're seeing large populations that can't crack 50% of people vaccinated. So, even if we had an infinite supply of vaccines we could beam down from space to anyone on the planet who wanted it, we'd still run into the problem of too many people not wanting it.

What bums me out the most is that it doesn't seem like it's even ok to ask why some people don't seem to want it and to figure out if they can be convinced.

I'm sure some folks have ideological opposition but it seems like a lot of the discussion is about how they're bad people for not doing what they're told to or supposed to want to. I don't feel like I have ever convinced anyone of anything by arguing to them that they're wrong. Most of the time when you change someone's mind it's by listening deeply and figuring out what they really mean or really want rather than what they're saying.

I'm sure I've missed something important but I can't shake the feeling that the vaccine debate is just another battle in the growing war of political polarization.

Yep it's depressing here in Ontario -- while the overall vaccination rates are pretty good (nearing 70% of total pop for first dose and 50% for fully) the vaccination rates of people aged 12-39 are pretty bad at 68% for first dose and for 12-29 only 66% and the supply of vaccines is starting to pile up.

Meanwhile 95% of seniors 70+ have been first dosed (and 82% fully).

Basically young people aren't getting it at the same rate as the elderly, and not because it's not available. Daily first dose rates have plummeted as the supply has increased.

> Basically young people aren't getting it at the same rate as the elderly, and not because it's not available.

Wow, it's as though they have an entirely different risk calculus from the elderly.

If you're thinking about only yourself, sure.

Perhaps they're a parent concerned with staying healthy to take care of their family. More to the point, if we're acknowledging that young people's concerns about risks from the vaccine exceeding those of the virus are legitimate, but should be set aside for the sake of protecting those at greater risk, it would be the first vaccine in history people were expected to receive on such terms.

Does Canada offer universal sick leave? Can young people afford to miss two days of work if they have fatigue after dose 2?

Yes, after a lot of lobbying, as of Apr 29 Ontario now has 3 days paid sick leave for vaccination, vaccination related illness, and COVID itself:

https://www.ontario.ca/page/covid-19-worker-income-protectio...

That said, symptoms are milder the younger you are is what I've seen. My 13 year old and the kids of all our friends had at most a headache and mild fatigue after dose 2.

My wife and I (45/46) were knocked on our ass for two days for both our AstraZeneca (1st) and Pfizer (mixed regimen 2nd) doses.

I'm hearing a lot of people say that even if you get the vaccine, you can still get covid. Is that true?

95% effective does not mean 100% effective.

If you're vaccinated, it's rare to get it. If you get it, it's likely to be mild or completely asymptomatic.

Basically no one who's been vaccinated has died.

> Basically no one who's been vaccinated has died.

It's better to be precise as the topic is quite sensitive[0]:

> Unvaccinated 48-year-old man and vaccinated man in his 80s succumb as daily cases keep rising

[0] https://www.timesofisrael.com/coronavirus-deaths-reported-in...

More than 99% of people who die from COVID are unvaccinated.

> Basically no one who's been vaccinated has died.

Somebody dying 15 minutes after receiving the so-called vaccine is quite a coincidence. The problem is twofold. Anybody who died while having Covid was diagnosed as a Covid death, even if they already had terminal cancer or was involved with a fatal accident. Anybody who died after receiving a covid vaccine is treated as if the vaccine had no effect on their health. There needs to be a transparent audit on how these number came about. Autopsies need to be released as well. The opponents of the vaccines see glaring contradictions & obvious manipulation of the data.

https://www.bitchute.com/video/MLl3YTV70iYC/

The other major issue is that vaccine manufacturers & pushers are exempt from legal liability. They could introduce a genocidal poison & no court of law would be able to touch them.

That's true for every vaccine against any disease. There is always a chance that the vaccine could fail or wear off for a variety of reasons. Historically this usually happens at a very low rate, but occasionally the probability of failure becomes large enough to recommend booster shots.

A major source of problems in vaccine-relate discussions is using binary language. Immunity is not a binary true/false state! Vaccines do not change a Boolean state, they greatly reduce the probability of getting the disease.

yes, I got the vaccine and then COVID afterwards. Outside of losing taste and smell for ~3 days, it was completely asymptomatic though

Yes, people who get the vaccine can get covid, but the illness is heavily mitigated and death rate is reduced to almost zero. Anecdotally (and I'm not a doctor) it seems that with the vaccine, immune system reacts to the initial infection in your nose and prevents it from spreading to your lungs and blood vessels (which causes a lot of damage there e.g. for some relatives who got covid last year), but you still may get some local symptoms around nose and (AFAIK) can infect others because of that.

I recently got both my Pfizer shots.

1st one was super simple and easy... not even a sore arm.

2nd one, 3 weeks later was a different story. approx 15 hours after the shot I woke up from a decent nights sleep feeling like i'd been hit by a truck.

everything ached, muscles, joints, eyeballs even my teeth hurt. Migraine like headache that triggered painful spikes with light and sound or head movements. At lunch time I dragged my sorry arse out of bed to make a meal and nearly passed out in the kitchen. If I hadn't laid down on the kitchen floor I might have seriously caused injury to myself. I was super nauseous and light headed, my heart felt like it was fluttering out its last. about 20 mins after laying down i crawled to the couch for an hour then went back to bed.

the next day I felt a lot better, was still achy and fuzzy headed but much much better. The third day I was almost normal again and now a week later I'm just fine.

Worse side effect I've ever had, but I still count it as totally worth it.

I wish I could get skeptics to believe this kind of evidence. I've had deeply frustrating conversations that went along the lines o

Them: The vaccines are more dangerous than the virus!

Me: No they aren't. There's very few cases of severe side effects. Blood clots with AZ are about the worst we've seen, though GBS is always a small risk with vaccinations.

Them: No, the vaccines are super dangerous. People have gotten really sick from them.

Me: No they haven't. Where did you hear this?

Them: Yes they have.

Repeat ad nauseum.

Unfortunately, there's a solid contingent of people who get their "news" from Facebook conspiracy groups and use social media to reinforce bad information in their bubbles. Getting to them is proving damn near impossible...

It's a problem with interpreting risk and control. Allow me to explain:

1. People think (wrongly) that they can control catching the virus. They can wear a mask, keep their distance, etc. This gives them a false sense of security and control. They think that if they do catch covid, they're unlikely to get really sick from it.

2. People (righly) think that they have very little control over what their bodies do after they get a vaccine.

3. People (wrongly) think that very serious side effects are more common than they are.

Those all combine to an incorrect belief that they are better off without getting vaccinated. It's not an absurd sequence of beliefs. It's wrong. But it's easy to see how a lot of people become skeptics.

Point 1 and 3 can both be remedied by increasing awareness. At least in my neck of the woods, official communication has been pretty poor. What's especially lacking is communication aimed at people who are not very science-literate.

When I got my first shot, there was almost zero information about potential side effects. Two weeks later, I developed a huge rash near the injection site. Being somewhat intelligent, I was able to look this up and figure out that it was no big deal. If someone who is already skeptical were to experience this, I imagine they would be very disinclined to get their second shot.

Yup, all great points, though I'm a lot more skeptical that #1 and #3 can be addressed with better awareness.

The problem is that for every PSA from the government, message from a doctor, or conversation with a trusted friend or loved one, there's a hundred posts on <insert social media platform here> that are designed to appeal to folks looking for a reason not to take the vaccine. It's basically a fight against an at-scale, technology-assisted gish gallop.

Add in things like the primacy effect and it's incredibly difficult to deprogram people once they've internalized bad information.

I think in some cases either people are stupid or are just unreasonably scared.

I discussed this with a family member when AZ side effects started appearing on the news. I tried showing him the numbers (millions of inoculations, few “vaccine-related” deaths) but even presented with “The chances of getting sick with a vaccine are 0.00005%” (I don’t remember the exact number) he would not budge.

I told him “The chances of getting the virus + the chances of dying are hundreds of times higher.”

Nothing.

He just says “my friend got covid and he’s fine” and “that person on the news died from the vaccine.”

Stats and logic don’t work on some people.

Haha, multiple European countries have halted administration of the AstraZeneca vaccine in people under 60 because they can't be sure that the benefits outweigh the risks, and you still have people fretting that "these darn skeptics just won't listen to Stats And Logic!"

This whole line of argument that "the population-wide risks of the virus are outweighed by the (publicly acknowledged) population-wide risks of the vaccine" is extremely innumerate when addressed to a non-elderly, healthy person without co-morbidities. Your family member's instinct that his risks may be higher from the vaccine might be entirely in line with the reality.

> Your family member's instinct that his risks may be higher from the vaccine might be entirely in line with the reality.

Based on the VAERS data, this is probably the case for anyone under the age of 60.

It is definitely the case for anyone under the age of 30.

But everyone gets similarly bludgeoned with population-level data to convince them to make an individual-level decision. If you want to call them selfish, go for it. But they're not stupid.

They halted it because they have a choice now, not because the vaccine is worse than COVID. Did you read the article? Probably not because you’re spouting the same nonsense as antivaxers. Look at the stats and remember this is a pandemic: Your choice affects others. The reality is that you’re just selfish.

Edit: Rereading some articles about the stop reminded me that the stop was a political decision more than anything. In short they’d rather slow down vaccination a bit to avoid scaring the population with numbers they don’t understand and off of the vaccines altogether.

It was akin to “shooing the ghost away” so the kid stops being scared.

The problem with statistics is that it's very easy to lie using the statistics. Those who control the information are able to craft whatever statistics they want & nobody can audit the numbers or the counting because the information is simply not made available to the public. The only way to get the actual numbers to the public is for a whistle-blower to come forward, to the risk of that whistle-blower's career or life.

We are back to trusting the mechanic who says we need to replace the entire engine. Want to get a second opinion? Well, you can only get a second opinion from another mechanic that the mechanic approves of. All other mechanics are censored & have their licenses stripped from them.

The medical industry has been caught lying to the public, saying for years there are no adverse affects due to vaccination. Now that there too much public evidence, the medical industry wants to continue to control the conversation with their statistics that are probably fabricated or P-hacked.

There is no legal liability for vaccine manufacturers or pushers. If Dr. Mengele were alive today, he could do what he did to the Jews without any legal consequences by calling his "treatment" a vaccine.

> Them: The vaccines are more dangerous than the virus!

Children under age 14 are between 6.8 and 17 times less likely to die of Covid-19 than the seasonal flu or pneumonia. And here we are, trying to preemptively vaccinate them against a disease that they are not particularly susceptible to. I'm not sure if the vaccine is more dangerous but if it were, I doubt it would be making headlines.

The argument could be made that vaccinating children helps to protect vulnerable adults, and that them shouldering the risks from vaccination are for the public good, but that's not what the media and government are selling. They are intentionally distorting the facts to make the virus seem more dangerous than it actually is, overstating "long covid" and other pseudoscience, understating the risks, such as blood clots and cardiac conditions, and not being forthright about the risks of vaccinating young people.

My question is: Why not be honest with people? It sounds a lot like the guidance from Early-2020 when the CDC was telling us that masks were not effective in preventing COVID-19 transmission, which they backpedaled by saying they did spread misinformation, but it was "for the protection the supply of PPE for healthcare workers". Why should I trust a government agency that believes lying is OK if it's in the best interest of the government? Why would they be telling the truth now if they have a track record of misrepresenting the facts?

Not dying from Covid does not imply not being susceptible to the disease - it has a sufficiently large proportion of bad long term effects so that we would want to prevent everyone, including children, from getting sick with Covid even they aren't likely to die from it.

Death rate is not the only measure, and it's not the proper measure in this case.

E.g. a recent Norwegian study (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01433-3) had roughly half of young (16-30) people with mild covid (non-hospitalized) still showing harmful effects six months afterwards; so the covid risks/consequences are much worse than any currently known vaccine side-effects even for mild covid in young people. Heck, we're even seeing long-term problems for some people for whom the initial infection was asymptomatic - this is a nasty, risky disease to get, not comparable to diseases that just put you out of work for some time and you're fine if it doesn't kill you.

> there's a solid contingent of people who get their "news" from Facebook conspiracy groups and use social media to reinforce bad information in their bubbles. Getting to them is proving damn near impossible...

I think it's a bit unfair that the ones that are cautious towards the vaccines are default labeled as "news" from Facebook conspiracy groups. I've joined a couple side effect groups myself to read what other people have been experiencing (and these people CHOSE to get vaccinated, one or both doses!) so they're looking to join support groups. I join support groups for other reasons all the time and I don't consider my own experiences "conspiracy".

For sure there are the fringe groups but just because it's not documented in a clinical trial ran by a giant corporation doesn't mean they aren't true. This goes the same for the metoo movement, it's as if saying what these women are scared of or what they're experiencing aren't real because there isn't "evidence" that it happened (and of course you have the real ones that make up fake stories too).

I personally know 3 people that have and are still experiencing side effects from their shots in Jan through March. 1 went deaf in one year (she's still running through a lot of tests with the doctors to find out why), one continues to have swollen ankles, lymph nodes, brain fog (again, running a lot of tests as well to find alternative cause, nothing so far), and one (local doctor at the emergency hospital)'s alopecia came back.

The first two are now seriously questioning now (months later) why the doctors aren't looking at the possibility that the vaccine may have triggered it. They've instantly ruled it out right away.

> I think it's a bit unfair that the ones that are cautious towards the vaccines are default labeled as "news" from Facebook conspiracy groups.

You seem to have missed the part where they made specific claims about dangerous side effects or major adverse events, but when pushed for sources or evidence, demurred.

It's clear they formed an opinion based on very bad information. Where did that information come from? I think the answer is obvious.

As for the rest, honestly, you have three pieces of anecdata, none of which align with any other reported adverse events from the vaccines. I'd be a little surprised if the doctors did explore that theory before ruling out more traditional avenues of investigation first.

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