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Comment by yardie | Hacker News Reader

I got the vaccine and a lot of my coworkers have not.

I made the mistake of telling them the results. It was 2x 3-days of me bitching and moaning about a sore arm and just feeling aches while the innoculation worked its magic. Since TFG convinced a lot of Americans the virus is no worse than a light flu somehow my achy arm is way worse than any flu. So now the vaccine is not worth taking because those 6 total days of achiness are worse than being in ICU.

It's that fucking dumb.

In hindsight I should have kept my mouth shut and said everything was fine.

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Dear god no... if your sense of morality requires lying, you need to reevaluate some things. Thank you for not lying.

I don’t think not telling them was even close to lying. If you can imagine going a little hard at the gym and feeling it the next day. Then telling your colleagues how hard you worked out. And then your colleagues takeaway is exercise must be dangerous since it hurts.

Besides a sore arm for about 24 hours I really had no other side effects from Pfizer. After the second shot my arm got sore a bit closer to the time of injection, but overall pain was lower.

I felt worse the day after my yearly flu shot in 2020.

To be fair, I was completely out of commission for a day after the second shot. I could barely get out of bed, and was achy everywhere.

But I'd totally do it again if it's necessary to keep my immunity.

I had the same experience after my second vaccination (Pfizer), but feeling sick for one day isn't a big deal.

As I got my first shot, the nurse told me the 2nd one was worse. But like you, I found the cost-benefit analysis compelling, and they likely assumed if I got the first one, I'd probably be a repeat customer.

If someone is TFG (had to look up that abbreviation), talking about the side effects was nowhere near table stakes for their degree of concern and FUD. Had you said nothing, I strongly believe they still wouldn't have anyways.

I was out for a day after the first shot and was for two after second shot.

My wife requires care and those days were difficult when we both were sick. I had to take paracetamol on last night to clean and cook.

I assume someone dependent on day wage would think twice and possibly would not choose the best option for the comfortable one.

> Since TFG convinced a lot of Americans...

TFG?

Apparently it’s “the former guy,” used to refer to Trump

Is it some kind of Voldemort "he who shall not be named" nonsense?

Apparently it also stands for "Too Far Gone" (as it too nutty to convince of the truth), which sort of made sense in the sentence, but not as much as Trump.

Wait, didn't tfg fast track it and said it would be here by end of 2020 while NYT and others were certain it wouldn't be here until Nov 2023? [0]

Harris said she wouldn't trust the vaccine? [1]

Things seem to be moving very fast. Anyone else have trouble keeping up who's on what side of every issue? Not too long ago people were arguing about the politics of a bean producer. Weird time to be alive

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/30/opinion/coron...

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/05/politics/kamala-harris-not-tr...

There was a legitimate concern in the fall of 2020 that the FDA would rush the vaccines out prematurely for political reasons. That did not happen, thanks largely to the integrity of FDA Commissioner Hahn, who insisted we follow the science. A major reason this concern was legitimate is that the CDC was compromised in similar ways, with testing slow-walked, communications altered, among other things [1].

Regarding the vaccine timeline, Trump deserves major credit for Operation Warp Speed. To a large extent, we got lucky - the mRNA vaccines are really good, while others (CureVac) did not fare so well.

[1]: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/covid-19-was-always-goi...

> Wait, didn't tfg fast track it and said it would be here by end of 2020.

Yes, but he also downplayed the pandemic leading a large number of his followers to believe that COVID is no more threatening than a mild flu.

If you believe that COVID is no worse than a mild flu then there is no more reason to get COVID vaccine than there is to get a flu vaccination. Only about half of Americans get an annual flu vaccination.

It's code language to work around censorship, like antivaxxers calling themselves non-dancers and worrying that the dancer's glitter can rub in and make them sick.

35 million people in the US have tested positive with Covid. Additional millions likely had it and weren't tested. What percentage of those tens of millions that caught Covid do you believe would up in the ICU versus having light flu symptoms, or no symptoms at all?

People are downvoting you because you’re saying something in bad faith, knowing full well you can just punch into Google and go down this specific thread of argument all you want. But to keep this on topic, being on the “don’t deal with it” side of a public health crisis is a great example of the limits of contrarianism - it’s always bad faith to be a contrarian in that context, but not all contexts. So you do you!

Why are you assuming he's saying it in bad faith? How is pointing out actual facts being a contrarian?

Indeed, contrarian to what, exactly?

Telling that you're being downvoted by HN community for asking a legitimate question.

The CDC has estimates for the data you asked for here: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...

In the USA, by March 2021, there were 114.6 million estimated total infections, 5.6 million estimated hospitalizations, and 17.5 million estimated asymptomatic infections.

That predicts approximately 1 in 3 Americans were infected with the virus. These numbers make sense to me, and I can show this with back of the napkin math. A few global studies estimated the average infection fatality rate to be between 0.4-0.7%. Using a 0.6% death rate and the reported 600k deaths in the USA, that gives 600,000 / 0.6% = ~100 million infected in the USA. So the CDC numbers look alright.

If 600k Americans died (that was the likely understated number back in Juneish?) then the death rate is way above 1%.

So yeah, a lot. Go google "2021 life expentancy us" and see.the shithole.we are in, even if a lot of other dearh causes went down (like driving)

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