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Comment by pkilgore | Hacker News Reader

I flagged it because of the inflammatory title in no way bears the weight of the rather simplistic claim this article writes conspiratorially at length to make:

The evidence that vaccination reduces the severity or decreases mortality of COVID-19 infection is not as strong as the evidence that vaccination prevents COVID-19 infection entirely.

Where are the "damn lies"? We're talking about splitting hairs in the interpretation of twitter posts that evidence does support. It's interesting, but exactly this kind of inflammatory language is what I will always flag on HN, whether it be about COVID or VIM vs. EMACs.

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No, the point is not what you claim. The point is that facts matter and we shouldn’t lie about them, for a variety of reasons.

From the article:

> The person who incorrectly assumes that “with the vaccine, even if I get infected I am less likely to die than I would be without the vaccine,” will be more likely to engage in behavior that risks infection. They may become the “it’s just a flu bro” of the vaccinated.

> If the lack of observed layered protection were made more explicit then people may choose to still wear masks and social distance, to further reduce their exposure in addition to vaccination. They may choose to go to fewer social events. This in turn would reduce the infection rate, and reduce the probability a mutation that evades vaccination finds a host to practice on. (While writing this article, the White House changed its masking recommendation for the vaccinated)

I am not 100% on HN policies regarding flagging / renaming threads, but I do see articles get renamed on a fairly regular basis without getting flagged into dead status first? Is there not a mechanism to suggest a different title without getting it pulled entirely?

I think the click bait title is a good knee-jerk reaction test, and I would suspect a fair number of folks flagged the thread without reading the full article. In the spirit of open discussion and intellectual honesty, this seems like a failure.

A more descriptive title would probably be for the best, though.

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