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Comment by mint2 | Hacker News Reader

Why are anti vaxxers so vocal? Or are there just more of them on HN? On any thread about the virus it seems the first comments are all ones that are negative towards the vaccine.

I don’t really get it, if one thinks the the vaccine is bad then Covid should be mega double plus bad. If one thinks Covid is mild, then vaccines should be like taking a placebo. It doesn’t make sense that there’s a huge fear and resistance to a small subset of virus proteins but a cavalier dismissal of the full blown virus. Why does that make sense?

It’s like being afraid of jogging a mile and being loudly opinionated about hating running but then quickly agreeing to doing a iron man marathon as an of shape individual.

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At the risk of downvotes, not that I care, there are people out there who are exercising their own due caution for their own health reasons, based on individualized specifics. When has there EVER been a one size fits all solution to health, very rarely.

That being said, I dont have social media and I dont see what you see. From where I sit, I see very little of vocal antivaxxers and significantly of the exact opposite - extremely vocal shaming of anyone who has not taken the vax by people who have.

Many of the people I have spoken to, who have not, have experienced in their lives long-term health effects of ill advised medication - much of it from these very same companies. To demand that they take a new medication that has no longitudinal studies associated with it, along with warnings out there, either from the FDAs own website, or from former workers of these vaccine companies, seems cruel.

This does seem to be a situation where a one-size solution of reducing excess body weight is recommended. Much better outcomes for those who have more reasonable BMI. We can't say this because of political correctness, so we focus on less effective mask virtue signalling while stuffing our pie holes.

Why COVID-19 is more deadly in people with obesity—even if they’re young

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/09/why-covid-19-more-de...

Conspiracy types are pretty much always overrepresented on web forums, newspaper comments, etc. This is likely because they often have an evangelising tendency; they need to show the unbelievers The Truth.

Hackernews is primarily a US audience, and the US has a high rate of vaccine hesitancy (about 25%). Even in countries with a low rate of vaccine hesitancy, though, they fill the comments sections. Ireland has 5-10% vaccine hesitancy depending on poll, say, but if you were to try to evaluate it purely based on news website comment sections, you'd assume that it was well over 50%.

I think calling people "anti vaxxers" when many of them are quite pro vaccines, but just anti or hesitant towards this vaccine is part of it. When you insult people and basically call them an idiot for a position that was the mainstream opinion less than a year ago is pretty ridiculous. You probably can't name many politicians or media personalities in the US that were pro vaccine a year ago. When you heard how this vaccine was going to be unsafe due to the speed it was created because Trump was encouraging them to go faster for a better part of a year you can't expect people to just think it is safe.

All of these insults causes people to get defensive and defend their position loudly. If you want people to take the vaccine don't insult them. Don't accuse them of wanting to kill grandma. Don't talk down to them.

For whatever reason covid has caused people to lose their ability to convince people of things. When has insulting people ever caused a change in thinking?

This is one of the first comments i have seen that accurately describes a third category beyond pro-vaccine and "anti vax".

I consider myself to be in this category, as in i know the vaccine helps but am at the same time against it being mandated. This is in part due to the rush to get the vaccines out the door.

Reading a study that some vaccinated got infected changes nothing, when we also know it's a lot harder to get infected when you have taken the vaccine and that your chance of being hospitalized is also a lot smaller.

To see that the governor of New York has been asked to step down is not making me sad, as he wants to mandate vaccines. If you don't then you are practically not part of society, which is the wrong way of approaching things.

> You probably can't name many politicians or media personalities in the US that were pro vaccine a year ago

This is not true. politicians expressed hesitation about rushed vaccines not approved or approved under coercion when not supported by studies. They said they would gladly take one when it was authorized based on science, not politics. This is basically what the current president said in debates and he then took it very shortly after that happened, putting his money where his mouth was.

Please edit your comment so that it doesn’t make an unfounded claim.

I wasn't as clear as I should have been so I think you are missing what I am saying.

I meant to say they were hesitant over the vaccine not that they were anti vaccine.

I never said you couldn't find an example. I said you could not find many. Many of the same people who were hesitant of the vaccine are now the biggest supporters.

Biden and Harris both said if doctors said it was safe they would take it, but they were still pushing doubt about the safety in their statements.

Here are some other examples:

https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/01/health/eua-coronavirus-vaccin...

https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/521672-cuomo-public-sh...

Look up what's happened with Marek's disease. The vaccines are making the disease worse and we have known this would be the outcome for years. These vaccines would not have been approved for livestock use. Obviously herd culling is not an option with people so the vaccines were needed but they certainly should have been limited to the most vulnerable populations until better ones were produced. The efficacy of the vaccines did not meet the thresholds for herd immunity. Since the vaccines do not actually mimic natural immunity the now unfortunate and inevitable outcome is going to be a worse disease.

You left out the crucial part of the statement about livestock approval. -> “because mass slaughter of infected livestock’s prevents viral evolution, a leaky vaccine would not be approved.”

And while you’re right that the evolutionary effect a leaky vaccine can have is something to really pay attention to, the current evolution of more virulent strains has not been caused by vaccinations. The varients so far have arisen due to spread in unvaccinated populations.

And the “vaccines not miming natural immunity” isn’t the issue. It’s that the virus is highly virulent. Even “naturally” immune people in Brazil caught their second wave that was driven by a new strain and that wasn’t due to any vaccinations.

Not to be a critique but do you have any sort of reliable source to show that the increased virulence is actually not being caused by vaccinations? It's also quite possible for the virus to make many mutations and not be classified as an entirely new strain, I just can't see how vaccinations that allow so many breakthroughs wouldn't be contributing to faster and more virulent mutations considering we know that to be true in other cases.

While reinfections have occured everything I have seen is that breakthrough infections in the vaccinated are much much more common than reinfections.

To be fair, folks on both sides are vocal, and rightly so given the magnitude and consequences of this pandemic. Also, we must remember that the spirit of science is to question assumptions and rigorously prove hypothesis.

In case you're unaware, there are legitimate second and third order effects to consider regarding vaccines and the evolutionary dynamics of SARS-CoV-2. Don't take my word for it - here is peer-reviewed research from the brightest minds and top institutions in the world, raising serious concerns about our approach [1].

Excerpts from [1]:

- "The spike protein receptor-binding domain (RBD) of SARS-CoV-2 is the molecular target for many vaccines and antibody-based prophylactics aimed at bringing COVID-19 under control."

- "Such a narrow molecular focus raises the specter of viral immune evasion as a potential failure mode for these biomedical interventions. With the emergence of new strains of SARS-CoV-2 with altered transmissibility and immune evasion potential, a critical question is this: how easily can the virus escape neutralizing antibodies (nAbs) targeting the spike RBD?"

- "Our modeling suggests that SARS-CoV-2 mutants with one or two mildly deleterious mutations are expected to exist in high numbers due to neutral genetic variation, and consequently resistance to vaccines or other prophylactics that rely on one or two antibodies for protection can develop quickly -and repeatedly- under positive selection."

- "The speed at which nAb resistance develops in the population increases substantially as the number of infected individuals increases, suggesting that complementary strategies to prevent SARS-CoV-2 transmission that exert specific pressure on other proteins (e.g., antiviral prophylactics) or that do not exert a specific selective pressure on the virus (e.g., high-efficiency air filtration, masking, ultraviolet air purification) are key to reducing the risk of immune escape"

- "Strategies for viral elimination should therefore be diversified across molecular targets and therapeutic modalities"

[1] Risk of rapid evolutionary escape from biomedical interventions targeting SARS-CoV-2 spike protein (April 2021) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33909660/

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