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Comment by ren_engineer | Hacker News Reader

Interesting study from Carnegie Mellon and Pitt found that the most vaccine "hesitant" group are people with PhDs and they are the only group that has actually increased in hesitancy to get the shot over the last few months

https://www.cmu.edu/dietrich/news/news-stories/2021/july/cov...

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As others are pointing out, this is a wild misreading of a study that actually showed all education levels becoming less hesitant. PhD's quite obviously held constant modulo sampling error, and that's exactly how it's described in the paper:

The relevant chart is on page 27 of the paper here: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.20.21260795v...

Also note that they call out the weird results with PhD's as an outlier without an explanation (other education metrics show less hesitancy with more education monotonically), and call for further research.

To wit: you're spinning like crazy here trying to make this data say something its authors expressly disclaim.

You're going to get downvoted into oblivion but as a PhD, who has also worked in manufacturing, I have a number of reasons to remain skeptical about the vaccines. I won't repeat them here because everyone has pretty much made up their mind one way or the other.

For what it's worth, I did end up getting vaccinated recently (J&J, not mRNA-based) after quite a few unpleasant conversations with my spouse that I was endangering our children on the presumption that unvaccinated people more easily spread the virus. This assertion has been thrown into doubt, however, by the CDC's Barnstable study [1] suggesting viral numbers between vaccinated and unvaccinated are similar (among people tested). Consequently, I'm just staying home these days.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7031e2.htm

> This assertion has been thrown into doubt, however, by the CDC's Barnstable study [1] suggesting viral numbers between vaccinated and unvaccinated are similar

I'm a little horrified that you cite your academic credentials and then misread that conclusion so badly. Viral load and infectiousness are equivalent between vaccinated and unvaccinated INFECTED PEOPLE in that study, not overall. The vaccinated are, obviously, much less likely to get sick in the first place.

Your wife was right and you were wrong, basically.

Yes much less likely sick, but that by itself does not mean much less likely getting infected. The recent data from U.S. and Israel show that vaccinated people get infected easily too.

That's just wrong. Why do people keep claiming this? Consensus immunity for Pfizer against delta is still in the 60-80% range, which while less than the 95% measured against earlier variants is vastly higher than the unvaccinated. (Though to be fair this is hard to measure against the confounding background that the vaccinated tend to be better at other mitigation strategies too.)

Even the Israel data you cite, which is an outlier, measured 39% effectiveness, which is STILL twice as good as being unvaccinated.

Those 80% and higher efficacies are against symptomatic COVID and hospitalization. Not against getting infected and getting infectious. This efficacy was high initially, but is reported to be decreasing, and currently at 40% for Pfizer [1]:

[1] https://www.axios.com/coronavirus-vaccines-pfizer-moderna-de...

That study is still an outlier. But I repeat, because you don't seem to understand the point: even if it's that low, and even if transmissibility is completely unaffected, it means that an unvaccinated person will spread TWICE AS MANY CASES as a vaccinated one. That's the difference between a pandemic and a contained endemic disease right there.

Get. Your. Vaccine.

40% efficacy for preventing spreading is quite poor. There are other strategies of similar or better efficacy for preventing spreading like limiting contact with people, using masks, vitamin D, being on ivermectin. If you were a marketing department of a pharma company selling vaccines for preventing spreading, you would not be very convincing.

I'm sorry your family had to go through that. Your wife meant well, but I think overreacted and wasn't very rational. Young children are the most resilient group against COVID, even without vaccination. Most of them don't even have symptoms.

my wife has a phd in a relevant field, and only just got her first dose last week. she still is not sure if it was a good idea or not.

I don’t believe you. Gonna check your comment history - guessing you take the contrarian position on every single covid-related topic.

Edit: yep, lol. To clarify,I don’t think your wife does not have a phd in some field related to pharmaceuticals, I think the two of you are hesitant because you are socially conservative and/or general covid contrarians.

Only part of the story

> Generally, COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy was higher among young (ages 18-24), non-Asian people, and less educated (≤ high school diploma) adults, and those with PhDs, with a history of a positive COVID-19 test, not worried about serious illness from COVID-19 and living in regions with greater support to Donald Trump in the 2020 election.

Hah, guess who can't read properly...

No, their hesitancy didn't increase, every other group's decreased, making the hesitancy percentage among PhDs (since it remained mostly constant) to be the highest by May.

To put it in 5th grader terms, if Alan had $30, Beth had $20 and Charlie had $15 at the beginning of the year, and Alan"s and Beth's savings decreased to $13 and $5 but Charlie's only decreased to $14 by May, Charlie is now the richest of the group.

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