Hacker News Reader

Comment by version_five | Hacker News Reader

It saddens me to see that all the top comments on these posts are just some empty populist yelling, variations on "good, after all, there's a war going on". And counterpoints end up being strawmen about vaccines not working anyway. Whatever your end conclusion about whether this is a good move, it's a complex issue that balances a lot of things and is worthy of serious discussion. Instead we get basically an online newspaper comments section filled with shallow or nonexistent points. It's like covid turns everyone toward the lowest forms of debate. HN probably had the most sensible discussions of any site on the internet, so if this is happening here, I can only guess how others are discussing it.

I do wonder if tech people are more prone to seeing things in black and white and advocating technological "fixes" over societal compromises, but that's just my speculation.

View on HN

It's not actually very complex, and in fact for public schools was already a settled issue. It's only become controversial because of rising anti-vaxx sentiment and conspiratorial thinking.

Just because something has become a flashpoint issue doesn't mean it's complex. Gay marriage was also controversial for a long time, despite being quite straightforward.

How did almost every human in all sorts of varying societies fail to understand something quite straightforward for almost the entire duration of human existence?

Homosexual marriage is not straight forward: https://www.kirkdurston.com/blog/unwin

It's not that complex. These people also acted like masks were an affront to their liberties. It's not about the facts, they're delusional.

Disclaimer: this is not legal or medical advice, but an encouragement to read the research for yourself and accumulate an understanding of the issues for your decision making. If you know any good studies or criticisms, please add them.

Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) and Biologics License Application (BLA) description: https://blog.petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/2021/06/15/whats-the....

There are already lawsuits challenging EUA vaccine mandates. They’d be moot, though, after FDA approval, since the Supreme Court has upheld states’ vaccination mandates (cf. Jacobson v. Massachusetts)

Some issues around BLA/FDA approval: First, a BLA has some implications. It would likely force the FDA to revoke EUAs to all other candidates (one of the conditions for an EUA is that no other viable approved treatments exist. Some of the controversy around ivermectin and off label use is related to this condition). This would impede development of other treatments, current and future.

Second, the history of SARS-cov vaccines is promising, but incomplete. Many previous trials showed good progress (high antibody titre levels, etc.), but tended to fare poorly on later virus challenges. eg https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

Third, sometimes, side effects might not be sufficiently analyzed until well after authorization, eg “Dengvaxia”: a dengue fever (R0=65, CFR=20-30%) vaccine that was extensively used in the Philippines in 2017-8, but later showed evidence of increasing risk of disease severity on the uninfected and now carries that warning: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6214489/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dengue_vaccine

Hayes et al. outlines some of the issues particular to SARS. Again, VAED is a known pitfall: https://childrenshealthdefense.org/wp-content/uploads/Haynes...

Finally, Breslow (https://blog.petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/2021/02/18/employer-...) suggests mandates aren’t legal: previous CDC and FDA guidance have consistently advised against mandatory use of EUA vaccines, and courts would probably continue to defer to those agencies. In April 2020, Dr. Amanda Cohn, the executive secretary of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, reiterated that “under an EUA, vaccines are not allowed to be mandatory. Therefore, early in the vaccination phase individuals will have to be consented and cannot be mandated to be vaccinated” (page 56, https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/acip/meetings/downloads/min-arc...) In addition, the EEOC June 28, 2021 update (https://www.eeoc.gov/wysk/what-you-should-know-about-covid-1...), Section K in particular, defers to CDC and FDA guidance on EUA vaccine use and practices.

What are the complexities of the issues at play? It seems pretty straight forward that there is a global pandemic, and that there is a vaccine which significantly prevents the spread of the disease as well as ameliorates the worst symptoms. Requiring people to have the vaccine seems pretty straight forward, especially when "an exceptions process for those who cannot be vaccinated for medical or other protected reasons" exists.

>Whatever your end conclusion about whether this is a good move, it's a complex issue that balances a lot of things and is worthy of serious discussion.

Ok, so why don't you start the "serious discussion" instead of just complaining? What exactly "complex" about it?

All 50 states, DC, and Puerto Rico have immunization requirements for enrollment in public schools and many private schools and daycares have similar requirements. On the federal level the military has all sorts of immunization requirements and USCIS have immunization requirements for visa/green card applicants.

As a result the vast majority of adults are vaccinated against a whole host of infectious diseases so companies don't usually find it urgent to implement their own policies - vaccine preventable illnesses simply aren't an issue in American offices.

We, as a society, have overwhelmingly accepted immunization requirements as a general concept - there's not really much to discuss.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com