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It’s pretty hard for Joe Bloggs to workout who you trust in 2021.
We’re lied to all the time by politicians and government, then when they want us to comply, we’re just supposed to go along with it?
I’m not arguing against the fact that getting the vaccine is probably the right path to take. I am arguing that if governments want people’s trust, they need to earn it, doing this to Assange is doing the opposite and does things like prolonging the pandemic, it fuels mistrust.
Does anyone have a quantifiable number. I'm again, not doubting what you're saying, but I hear a lot of "thousands of scientists are vetting the medicine etc".
Are they really ?
I think about this with open source software too, I run Linux, but I do actually wonder sometimes how much "vetting" is really going on.
>Aren't scientists at the various drug companies "independent" from each other, given that vaccines are mostly zero-sum and so drug companies have strong financial incentives to invalidate their competitors' tech?
Vaccines are very much not zero game. They are largely interchangable in that governments are under severe pressure to get something / anything into peoples' arms if it means quelling the masses and shaking off COVID-19. We are seeing countries mixing and matching for the double dose vaccines, not to mention every country approving at least two vaccines for usage. If this were zero-game, then governments would seek to only buy the most effective vaccine and do everything possible to secure supply.
As a phramaceutical, choosing to pick holes in your competitors' products may increase your market share temporarily, but will bring scrutiny from your competitors and overall decrease confidence in vaccines. As an example of the prisoner's dilemna, the best way to maximize everyone's share is by just focusing on your own product.
>Aren't governments independent from drug companies, given that rolling out an unsafe vaccine would be political suicide?
At the absolute highest levels, sure. But at the level of the faceless beaurocrats actually making decisions, it is very much a revolving door between industry and government (oversight bodies in particular). Governing body (decision maker) one day, lobbying on behalf of drug makers the next.
>Aren't the scientists who actually work for the government regulators independent from the governments themselves, given that they aren't political appointees and have nothing to gain politically from getting a bunch of people to take an unsafe vaccine (and presumably are motivated by public health, given their career path)?
Same as previous, and it is also very easy for there to be conflicts of interest... even if we assume ample competence in scrutnizing the pretty pamphlets drug makers try to deceive with. There are many ways drug makers can subtly introduce bias or error into their trials. Well intentioned oversight bodies could still be deceived and later have to recall products they have approved (many drugs are recalled after data about effectiveness and side-effects appear from actual use in the population).
>Aren't the academic scientists doing COVID-related research and peer-reviewing COVID-related publications independent from all of the above?
Same as previous, wrt. source of money for studies and journals themselves. We have also seen people acting out of self-interest when their entire field was pulled into question (scientists working in the field of gain of function publishing letters and articles clearing their field of all doubt without substantiative arguments made, e.g. the origins of the virus).
Anyway, when using Google to find information on the topic, top of the search results are news articles from Reuters about the fact it's a known problem, but it's ok.
Do you know who is on the board at Pfizer ? The CEO of Thompson Reuters! James C Smith [1]
I'm the same, not really into pedaling conspiracies, but this definitely feels like a conflict of interest, and it would also disincentive people to speak out, I'm sure someone in his position could make a high-profile persons life difficult if he wanted too.
[1] https://www.pfizer.com/people/leadership/board-of-directors/...
1. what are the side effects of the vaccine? 2. what are the side effects of infection with the virus?
In addition, there is the question of what is the probability of the corresponding side effects of vaccination and infection.
All study data that I know of say that serious side effects are 5 - 8 times more likely to occur with an infection with the virus.
In addition, one would have to ask how likely it is that one will be infected with the virus. Here, one can only base ones thinking on mathematical models. At present, it does not look as if we will be able to achieve herd immunity worldwide. That would mean that sooner or later everyone who is not vaccinated would be infected with the virus.
This from the peer reviewed studies I have searched and read via pubmed in the last few months.
This is like asking “what incentive does the government have to keep up the airport security theatre?”.
To play up the pandemic, increase the FUD, rule by fear and panic, keep the population permanently locked down, restricted, controlled, … a lot of very juicy incentives for a lot of politicians.
I recommend https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ as a starting point.
Note that nowhere did I mention YouTube videos, celebrities, or talk radio blowhards.
Simple understandings of biology and medicine should inform you that taking a vaccine to the worst pandemic in living memory is the right course of action.
I really don’t know why I’m paying taxes half the time.
Do your own research, and trust that person to understand the things that would take too long for you to learn, then make your choice.
I would never let the government do my thinking for me, for free or for pay. They aren't good at it.
If you're not in the field, it's pretty hard to know who to trust or what is real.
Luckily, we all have brains, and can use them to understand things from first principles. Listening to other people thoughts about what you should be doing is generally stupid. They aren't you, and they have themselves to look after.
Also, no freaking idea why you tangented from vaccines, to taxes, to fake media generation, but unless you pick a topic we are done here.
I’m not sure this is a reasonable strategy. 2 years ago, the “worst pandemic in living memory” was some annual flu. Did you take the vaccine against that?
If you are normal, adult, educated person you don't need to "trust" the government for everything. You should hopefully be able to think for yourself and be able to evaluate when the story checks out and where it doesn't.
Trust knowledge that has been gathered over decades, statistics and research that has been gathered by many research institutions (unless you can claim all of them are in collusion). Vaccines do work and we desperately need everybody to get vaccinated. Every country that has implemented vaccinations vigorously has seen immediate, large drop in cases. People who are going to hospital at the moment are almost exclusively unvaccinated.
A person or institution or government that shows it is not trustworthy in one area undermines itself in other areas and so it is understandable that it may sow confusion. But you should still have ability to think for yourself and use it to make rational decisons.
When I was a child, this sort of thinking was taught in grade-school and considered to be an important component of becoming an adult. Ah, how I long for "the good ol' days".
Considering that I would not blame minorities (whether racial, religious, or political, especially in countries that have been historically oppressive of them) if they decided to avoid the vaccine.
> You should hopefully be able to think for yourself and be able to evaluate when the story checks out and where it doesn't.
> But you should still have ability to think for yourself and use it to make rational decisons.
Some people ended up distrusting vaccines (whether in general or specific) after following this process. It is not a truth-finding panacea.
If you remember, vaccines were developed under enormous pressure and every day of delay meant literally tens of thousands of people dying across the world.
So the uncertainties about these vaccines must be weighted against the situation in which they came to be.
Fortunately, the doubt against vaccines seems to be largely unfounded and it is easily evidenced by drops in death rates in all countries that implemented vaccinations.
Wrong on both counts. First of all viral epidemics follow a natural progression. Saying that a drop in [COVID] death rates following vaccine rollout proves their efficacy/safety is like saying that a week of heavy rains after doing a rain dance proves the rain dance did it.
This same mistake has been made in associative studies looking at mask mandates, where many shoddy papers were released that showed a drop in mask-mandate counties while neglecting to account for the fact that cases were dropping everywhere. Monica Gandhi (an HIV researcher whose pro-masking papers have been of consistently poor quality yet are fairly widely cited because they produce the “correct” result) published a study to this effect that she and her team had to later retract because cases later went up. They were just measuring the normal viral epidemic curve and convincing themselves, without real evidence, that it must have been the masks.
As to the other point, the efficacy of the vaccines is real but quite limited. The recent data coming out of Israel especially was something like 33% case reduction, but a much better reduction in hospitalization/death (80-90%). That to me demonstrates that the party line position of “the vaccines are amazingly effective” is simply not true. They’re great for reducing personal risk - although I’d note the Guillain-Barré syndrome, myocarditis, and strokes are pretty concerning - but they don’t do much for slowing the spread. Now frankly we never should have been trying to slow the spread of SARS-2 in the general population - it was always destined to be an endemic respiratory virus, and a mild one at that for most healthy people - but I’m just making the point because the whole narrative has been that we had to lock down “until the vaccine” to save people from getting infected when increasingly it’s looking like everyone has to face the virus one way or another.
So go out and get vaccinated if you want better odds against SARS-2 while taking on some risk from possible side effects of making your cells express a bunch of artificial spike protein throughout your body for a few days, but don’t kid yourself into thinking that any concerns about either the safety or efficacy of the vaccines is baseless.
How do you explain that, even though significant proportion of populations is already vaccinated, new hospitalizations are almost exclusively people who were not vaccinated?
If vaccines were not effective wouldn't it be true that we should see both vaccinated and unvaccinated in hospitals?
While vaccinated people still can get Covid, they have much lower chance of passing it further. In a vaccinated people the virus cannot multiply as much and with lower and shorter presence of the virus in the organism and much less chance of symptoms that aid spreading the virus (like caughing) there is much less chance you infect other people.
The reality is that Covid is now mostly spreading in circles of unvaccinated people and vaccines are effective at stopping spread of the virus.
It's also worth pointing out that "some risk from possible side effects of making your cells express a bunch of artificial spike protein throughout your body for a few days" is strictly less than that of the virus, because the virus also puts those spike proteins in your body.
And the MRNA vaccines don't have stroke or guillain-barre as side effects. That only applies to the J&J (Janssen) vaccine.
Further, GGPs 33% number is actually 39%, and applies specifically to the delta variant. Against the version of the virus that the vaccines were developed against, it had a far higher rate of infection reduction, which is why people are (reasonably) somewhat concerned about delta, and why vaccination is even more important: because herd immunity is now even harder to achieve.
That doesn't follow. My point was simply that making an association does not prove causation. Which is true. Observing that giving someone a vaccine reduces their hospitalization is a separate matter, and one I literally stated in my comment (that they reduce COVID hosps by 80-90%)
> And the MRNA vaccines don't have stroke or guillain-barre as side effects. That only applies to the J&J (Janssen) vaccine.
You're wrong about the guillain-barre. Unfortunately I can't find the study I'm looking for. There is a paper that looked at the rates of Guillain Barre in the mRNA vaccines and found them 4-5x higher than normal ("normal" is a low base rate obviously), and specifically criticized the misleading math/wording coming from Pfizer and the like where they falsely claimed that the Guillain-Barre was not more common.
> Against the version of the virus that the vaccines were developed against, it had a far higher rate of infection reduction, which is why people are (reasonably) somewhat concerned about delta, and why vaccination is even more important: because herd immunity is now even harder to achieve.
This is why getting naturally infected is so important! You get near 100% infection reduction for a couple years and then immunological memory for the rest of your life. You can't beat those numbers with the vaccines, not even close.
BTW:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.28.21261159v...
If you look at the 6 month Pfizer trial, the vaccines made no difference in all-cause mortality. In fact there was one more death in the vaccine group. (My interpretation is that the vaccines spared some COVID deaths - a small but real amount - but caused more deaths from the side effects of being injected with a massive bolus of spike protein mRNA (acute clotting disorders, stroke, myocarditis, that kind of stuff))
AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, Sinovac, Sputnik etc all use existing vaccine approaches.
And collectively represent the most widely used vaccines.
They've now put well over a million jabs in arms (New Zealand's population is about 5 million) and are starting their "big" population wide rollout at the end of July. There is no sign of any significant problems.
The very rapid success of the trial programmes is actually because we did such an abysmal job stopping the pandemic. Trials work by comparing people who got the test jab against people who got a placebo. For many diseases it might take several years for enough trial participants to get infected so that you learn anything. For COVID-19 it took only a few months for strong signals to emerge, because, (outside of New Zealand and to some extent a handful of other countries that had control) the virus was everywhere, so very quickly your placebo group began to get infected and sick.
HN deals more with technology. Imagine your project takes six hours to compile. You have ten hypotheses for the cause of an important bug. Will you fix it this week? Probably not right, that's sixty hours just for compiling -- maybe you can leave it overnight and manage two tests per day? But best not to chance it. So you tell management you hope to have a fix "the week after next". Sorry, that's the best you can do.
Now, imagine a new compiler version speeds up builds, and they only take 15 minutes. You can try all ten hypotheses in a morning, get a fix reviewed, go to production and it'll be done by Friday close of business no problem.
Management are suspicious. How can the new compiler make such a radical difference? Surely you've cut some corners, you'd better go back and test it "properly" this time.
In this analogy lay people are suspicious management and the vaccine manufacturers are the developer. Also being completely useless at preventing a predictable respiratory pandemic is somehow a new compiler version. That part of the analogy doesn't work very well. Sorry.
I personally had to suspend my mistrust of the government in order to decide it was worth getting vaccinated. A good rule of thumb is that the more someone tries to push you to do something, the more you should question their motives. And governments that have mismanaged and lied about everything else they do, like you say, have no reason to be trusted on this one thing, even if its generally popular.
So it's not surprising that people who do believe that vaccines work (which is really not up for debate) may not agree with the putative urgency of getting this vaccine.
Should just add that I don't really think there is anything we can do about this mistrust this time around. You get credibility by acting like you have people's interests in mind, and like you know what you're doing, so it would take a long spell of that before folks have any real reason to take what we are told at face value.
You also seem to be implying if the government is pushing something than it is safer to do the opposite. Go outside during tornado warnings? Spend all day outside if they forecast extreme heat? Ignore a mandatory evacuation if a hurricane is coming? Keep your seat belt unbuckled? Fly on an unlicensed airline?
Exactly when should you ignore the gov’t and when should you listen?
It is a rule of thumb. Not a universal law.
I hope you are not questioning the motives for having traffic rules. Or motives of your wife asking you to avoid a particularly dangerous place when coming back from work.
I think you're probably trying for one of those moral relativism fallacies (why don't we just go around killing people?) but you actually picked a ridiculously easy target that supports my point. How many instances are there of speed limits being set to create speed traps rather than to actually promote safety? Or set based on oil embargoes in the 70s and just left there? Or rules based on nimbyism and not wanting traffic in certain neighborhoods? Or lights timed to catch people at red light cams. This is all off the top of my head, I'm sure I could go on, but we should definitely be skeptical that many traffic rules are made "for our safety" and not for some other agenda, good point!
I don't know. How many are there?
Are you suggesting that the fact that neither the towns nor Kansas has altered the lane width in these locations proves that these speed limit changes are nothing but speed traps?
You're right that there's a "political" covid vaccine push, in that sense. It's because getting vaccinated is your civic duty. If the risk of complications were 10 times greater it would still be your civic duty. The pandemic - a society-wide threat to public health and social integrity - ends only when everyone has sufficient antibodies to prevent the virus from multiplying out of control - the so-called "herd immunity". It'll keep going until it gets there, so you don't really have a choice - you're getting those antibodies, one way or another. You can do that the easy way - through a vaccine - or the hard way, by catching covid, in which case you'll further strain an already overloaded health system and likely pass it on to someone else, risking their death or permanent injury.
So, yeah - you ought to get vaccinated. In a simpler time, it might have been called "the patriotic thing to do".
It isn't you civic duty. Herd immunity isn't achievable, that is scientific consensus by now. You should take more care with demands from others. Much more care.
Further, if anything about the vaccine push made any sense whatsoever, you might have a better case during these "exigent" circumstances. For instance, insisting people who've already recovered from covid and have robust, longer-lasting immunity also get vaccinated... That should make everyone's eyebrow raise up to heaven. And, since I personally note that strangely aggressive angle, among many others, it makes me even more suspicious of these vaccines.
Then again, I'm healthy, young, get plenty of vitamin D, and have close to zero risk of catching or transmitting covid. So anyone telling me vaccines make sense for me is pretty out-of-touch.
Firstly, vaccine immunity is superior. Secondly - what are you implying with your eyebrow raise? An undisclosed ulterior motive? Short of kooky 5g-microchips-flat-earth-lizard-illuminati trash, what motive could any government have for deliberately compromising the health of their citizens, never mind all countries - including all the great rival superpowers?
> I'm healthy, young, get plenty of vitamin D, and have close to zero risk of catching or transmitting covid
Close to zero risk? I'm skeptical. Unless you live off-grid somewhere and have no personal contact at all, in which case - sure, forget vaccination. But all the youth and vitamin D in the world won't stop you from catching and transmitting it the moment you step into civilization.
Here's proof that's totally wrong: https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-medicine/fulltext/S2666-37...
Most recovered COVID-19 patients mount broad, durable immunity after infection
Neutralizing antibodies show a bi-phasic decay with half-lives >200 days
Spike IgG+ memory B cells increase and persist post-infection
Durable polyfunctional CD4 and CD8 T cells recognize distinct viral epitope regionsSecond, you can't prove that "vaccine immunity is superior". That has never once been the case with any vaccine in history, there're no studies that show it, that's just BS parroted by drones.
Third, you don't need to know the motive when the behaviour is suspicious, you just need to know the creepy, suspicious behaviour. If someone is creeping around my house sneakily, repeatedly, I don't need to know exactly what they plan, but I have every right to want them to gtfo my space.
Fourth, another of the super-suspicious things about these vaccines is just how many of the hoi polloi have been programmed to accuse anyone unvaccinated of being wild 5g-magnetic-brain-impant believers. As though there can be no reasonable way to be suspicious of these experimental vaccines that were rushed to market--you have to be an insane person. That drones like you come out and make these stupid accusations every time I mention that the vaccines aren't some obvious lock on canning this virus is really, really suspicious.
Fifth, asymptomatic spread has NEVER been proven. Pre-symptomatic spread has, but not nearly as widely prevalent as we thought. Since I'm in a category of people--not fat, healthy, young, vitamin-d enriched--that basically never gets covid, I can basically never transmit it.
I'm sorry, we could argue the toss about the other stuff but this is dangerously delusional. You're going to hurt people with that attitude. All of the factors you mentioned just mean you're more likely to survive. They have no bearing on how easily you can catch covid, or pass it on. In the UK, spread is almost entirely driven by the young now.
LOL
"For over 5% of these deaths, COVID-19 was the only cause mentioned on the death certificate. For deaths with conditions or causes in addition to COVID-19, on average, there were 4.0 additional conditions or causes per death."
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm
The #1 additional condition is, you guessed it, obesity.
I'm not fat. I have zero underlying conditions. I am healthier than the vast majority of people. Good bodyfat ratio. Good muscle mass. Really high-quality diet. Zero stress. I don't take any medications.
People like me almost never get sick from covid.
You seem to think that people who never get symptoms also can transmit the disease (so-called asymptomatic spread). This has never been proven to happen. There has been some, much more limited than initially thought, pre-symptomatic spread, but that means that the person doing the spreading without symptoms will get sick in a day or three.
The healthy and young of this world have no observed impact on spread.
You may not take much personal responsibility for your health, and thus may be fat or otherwise at risk. You may have some rare condition beyond your control that puts you at risk. If so, maybe you should take experimental vaccines.
It makes zero sense for people like me, who have taken care of their health and thus have robust immune systems that handle this virus with zero problems and develop robust immunity to it, to take experimental vaccines. You'll have to have some more actual data to back that up, though.
LOL
Says the person suggesting that web devs on HN can't Google Scholar and critical think their way to an overridingly authoritative understanding of medical science (which is nothing compared to being a Node ninja)