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Comment by ghoward | Hacker News Reader

I am not vaccinated and at this point, do not plan to be. Yes, I accept that I will become a second-class citizen in a country where the Bill of Rights exists.

Here is a non-comprehensive list of my reasons: https://gavinhoward.com/2021/07/my-thought-process-regarding... .

The relevant part to you might be the part that talks about how I believe that what is best for the individual is actually best for society, especially since society pays if something goes wrong because the pharma companies accept no liability.

So yes, you can go ahead and push to make me a second-class citizen, and call me selfish while pushing such tyranny, and I will still not get any vaccine.

I have decided that my line against tyranny is being experimented on medically. Where's yours?

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So basically your line against tyranny lands in exactly the same place where 5 year old puts it when mom offers him a hat in cold autumn evening and refuses to give him desert later if he doesn't put it on.

Can't you choose a hill to die on to be something less dangerous? Like veganism or something?

We are just finding out that vaccinated people still spread the virus, so getting vaccinated only protects the person who is vaccinated, which means that all of the arguments about how the unvaccinated are going to hurt people is only true if vaccinated people do too.

We knew vaccinated people might spread the virus and official sources didn't make any claims that they don't until research was done that indicated that vaccinated people spread the virus way less than the uncaccinated.

So basically what you wrote is false. Except that vaccinated people also might hurt people. It's just way less likely than dor unvaccinated.

Same way as drunk driver has higher probability of hurting someone then sober driver, but sober driver might hurt someone too. Despite this we still have a strong stance against drunk driving. Which is reasonable.

Whether it is reasonable depends on how much more likely a drunk or unvaccinated person is likely to hurt people. We have good numbers on drunks. We do not yet have good numbers on unvaccinated people.

Also, you may not have heard it, but I heard all over the place from "experts" that vaccinated people would not spread the virus.

At least few times less, up to few dozen times less. Like you said we don't know precisely how much. Drunk driver is around 13 times more dangerous as sober one. [0]

So what if some people are wrong? They are being corrected. Many places didn't allow vaccinated to ditch the masks. And I think nowhere they encouraged them to take unnecessary risk.

[0] https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://...

It seems the CDC recently said that the viral load in vaccinated people is the same as unvaccinated [1] so...

[1]: https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/experts-back-cd...

Even if vaccinated people just as easily infect other people as unvaccinated they'd still spread the virus less because they themselves are less likely to get infected with the virus.

This is the kind of confused weak thinking that causes new infections to rise at 150%

Of course vaccination radically reduces the ability of the vaccinated to spread Covid, 90% of them never get it. Sure of the other 10% that might get it some do and wow they can spread it. By the time you get past the IFs vaccination is astoundingly successful but the more vaccinated that are exposed to the unvaccinated the more of those 10% WILL get infected. This seems crystal clear to me and actually I'm surprised at how low the rate of "breakthrough" cases are (I think I heard < 1% but fact check).

It is not necessarily correct that 90% of vaccinated people won't get the virus; they might be asymptomatic because that is what the vaccine is meant to do: help your body fight the virus. It doesn't stop them from catching it.

Also, your comparison is bad.

It's more like a mother giving her son a winter hat, and he refuses it because he knows he doesn't need it, and his mother does not give him dinner. Because that is where we seem to be headed: refusing to let people work so that they can have the basic necessities, just like dinner is for a child.

Of course he "knows". Kids who don't want a hat always "know" they don't need a hat.

Even if that was dinner. They'll eventually get some dinner even if they adamantly refuse a hat. Or they can just wear a hat even if they "know" they don't need it. Sometimes cooperation is worth more than sticking to what you believe is true.

And sometimes, it is not. I am accepting the consequences of becoming a second-class citizen. If you still disagree with my choice, then what you desire is control, not cooperation.

Of course I disagree. Your decission puts other people health at risk for no benefit to you or anyone else.

My desire is not control just education of people so they can avoid stupid decisions like the one you made.

Somebody framed vaccine as a freedom issue and you happily agreed to accept this framework and internalize it.

For me freedom of not taking a vaccine is same as freedom to avoid drinking unsweetened, unflavored water. I mean, sure, you can, but why in the world would you want to? The only result is increasing probability of harm for you, your loved ones and possibly other people.

And even if you want it, why would you put it on your freedom banner? Why not something less harmful? Like freedom to avoid eating meat?

Because once the freedom to make medical choices is taken away, a line has been crossed that can be easily crossed in the future in a far worse way.

But at this point, you should know that your line of "no benefit" is absolutely false. Also, assuming the vaccines are all benefit is false. Every medical treatment has risks; failure to recognize that is the first thing that tells me someone did not actually think about vaccines. That goes for health officials too.

For all intents and purposes, apart from covid, the vaccine (Pfizer, Moderna) is no different than injecting yourself with very small amount of saline.

Geting stung by any insect is orders of magnitude more dangerous.

So avoiding vaccine is of no practical benefit to anyone.

Despite billions vaccinated there's no clear evidence that any onserved adverse medical outcome registered after vaccination has greater prevalence in vaccinated than in general population.

If you want to fight for freedom of medical choices then fight for the right to abortion because there is no other case where a person is lawfully compelled to risk their health for benefit of other human.

That's way more clear cut case of limiting somebody's medical choices (by refusing a procedure in this case) for benefit of only another human.

Limiting peoples medical choices is pretty bad when you think about it as being compelled to a procedure or being refused a procedure for ideological reasons. But what's worst in this are ideological reasons not the limitation itself. We are routinely limited in out medical choices for practical reasons like the cost of the procedure or harmfulness of it and we are sort of fine with that.

Your inability to have you kidney cut out to sell it is a limit on your medical choices but most people find it reasonable given harm to you and to society caused by such procedure.

Freedom of choice is a great thing to strive for but it's only as realistically possible as long as people won't use that freedom to make excessively stupid choices.

Freedom is not absolute thing. It's just a worthwhile goal to aspire to when practical.

I agree that freedom is not an absolute. However, the freedom the be stupid, as you say, should not be taken away just because you think it is stupid.

I'm assuming you simply did not read my blog post where I lay out my reasons. Using CDC data, I found that the vaccines would not be equivalent to injecting saline. I have the data and the calculations. If you read it, you can disagree and say that I am wrong, but you can't just arbitrarily declare my reasoning wrong because my reasoning is based on what is important to me.

However, because you haven't even read my blog post, it appears that your are arguing in bad faith, so I do not need to engage further with you.

I am not arguing with bad faith. I'm just not ascribing higher value to your anslysis than to hundreds of others made by experts in the field of epidemiology, vaccinology and scientific medicine.

Just because you can find some data, take them out of context and arrive at results that are sufficiently scary for you it doesn't explain why should I prefer your layman analysis to results obtained by experts in the field, some of whom spent lifetimes to acquire specialist knowledge to derive information and the understanding from that data.

I'm gonna read your blog now. I read so many erroneus things about this pandemic and vaccine that I might read one more. After all it's still long road ahead of us.

...

You start by misjudging risk of covid. You don't have a 10% chance of getting covid, but almost 100% chance. Delta variant is effectively as infectious as smallpox and nearly everybody had it before vaccines for it.

You disregard completely what happens if you survive covid. Recent research shows that you can see reduction in gray matter in the brain of people who survived covid. Especially in the region of the brain that processes smells and tastes but not only. Also in areas involved with memory. Damage is similar regardless of symptoms. No damage was noticed in the same research in people who didn't get infected with covid yet.

Next you assume that risk of heart inflammation is zero in unvaccinated. Which is not true. It's roughly as probable for unvaccinated as what your calculation for vaccinated show. It's incredibly rare so it's really hard to establish if vaccine increases the risk, decreases it or has no influence.

Then you talk about people dying after vaccines again with silent assumption that people who didn't take the vaccine are immortal for the period that past since others got vaccinated. People die all the time for many, many rare reasons. When you observe closely such a large group some people will certainly die for various reasons.

Then you just throw a bunch of concerns randomly.

You claim vaccines cause other problems. But none (except allergy) could be proven by science so far despite billions vaccinated.

We don't know long term effect of vaccines. Sure, but we can say that of any new thing. So if that was a dealbreaker we wouldn't have agriculture yet. We have to estimate long term effects and people most able to do that all over the world are pretty confident we are safe.

Then you are concerned about vaccine influence on fertility. Which again comes only from misinformation. The only thing vaccine opponents tried to invoke, to make that connection is complete made up nonsense that even if it was true it would have any chance of any effect only in females during pregnancy. No nore ttoubles pregnancies were noticed in vaccinated women.

Next a concern about allergies (I'm allergic myself). In rare cases (few per million) vaccine can trigger anaphylactic shock in people who are prone to getting such shocks. This is very rarely fatal or leading to any further issues. Despite its rarity staff that does the vaccinations is aware of that and standard recommendation is to stay put for 15 minutes after you got a vaccine so they can help you in this rare event. This is potentially fatal and I think one person died because of it nation wide. You can check youself how many people prone to anaphylactic shocks dies from bee stings or accidentally ingesting peanuts or other alergens yearly.

Then you are talking about Delta variant and diseases becoming less deadly over time.

It's true for diseases that kill so many hosts before they can spread that it affects their ability to spread. Since covid kills comparably so few people it's in no danger of breaking infection chains by killing hosts. So it can easily afford to bump up its mortality by few percents and still spread just as well. It is just pure chance if it will get more or less harmful to us with time.

The only thing we can do is to rob the virus of opportunities to mutate. And we can do that only by reducing the number of infections and their length and severity.

Vaccine helps with that because vaccinated people are less likely to get infected or have severe infection where virus overruns whole body and replicates in way more cells (having more opportunities to mutate) than in mild infection.

Then we are back to mistrusting mRNA tech even though more knowledgable people seem to trust it.

I can tell you why I trust it more than other more traditional vaccine technologies. It's superbly clean. It makes your cells produce just one protein for limited time and in limited number of cells. Exactly the same protein that will also flow freely in your body in all the wrong places for a long time when you contract covid.

If there were any long term effects not caused by covid, just the vaccine it would have to be a miracle.

Then you express healthy dose of mistrust towards government and pharma which should not make you reject them wholesale, but rather make you look closely at their results which look fairly decent so far when it comes to covid vaccine.

Then you raise a very bizzare concern. If covid vaccine is not safe for people with allergies why would it be safe for other people? You can ask the same question about peanuts, eggs, dairy and literally thousands of harmless or beneficial things people can be severly allergic to and die when exposed to them.

Then you point out that many people already had covid which is regrettably true. However we need all the immunity we can get. Immunity is lasting but it's not 100%. People who had covid can get infected again (at least 1% cases), and Lambda variant happily infects people who already had covid (1 in 6). Vaccine most likely boosts your immunity after you had covid same way second and third dose of the vaccine boost immunity gained from first shot (as we deduce from raising levels of antibodies among other things).

That pretty much concludes vaccine related part of your blogpost. Next you just speak about societal reactions to people who ... well, we already talked about that. Who make the choices that make other people question if the limits of freedoms were drawn in the right place and whether maybe they should be little narrower.

I am sad to inform you that I haven't found a single original argument in your blog post. All of those I encountered before and research thoroughly till I understood that they are wrong and why they are wrong. That's why I could take the vaccine with complete peace of mind. My elderly mother and her partner got vaccinated too and now I'm way less anxious about my health and their health and lives. As for the pandemic I think it's going to be a close call and I just hope that masses of unvaccinated people won't be the thing that lands us on the wrong side of the edge between lasting safety and truely lethal pandemic caused by more deadly and infectious strain.

Btw covid vaccine hesitancy is in large part a result of general vaccine hesitancy which is direct result of scam ran by Andrew Wakefield. If you are interested in the subject I can recommend youtube movie about vaccines made by HBomberGuy.

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