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Comment by belter | Hacker News Reader

From a purely scientific point a view, there is no reason for the post above (from ajay-b) to be downvoted.

It's often really tough to make the call on whether someone is genuinely asking and when they're seeding doubt (people going back and forth on a topic makes something seem under debate) or even plain trolling and trying to waste other's time (since it's so much quicker to ask the question than to adequately answer it). This particular case is a pretty plain question, I'm more speaking of the general case.

What might also be worth to realize that the illusory truth effect is a thing, i.e. "the tendency to believe false information to be correct after repeated exposure." "[A 2015] study suggested that the truth effect can influence participants who actually knew the correct answer to begin with, but who were swayed to believe otherwise through the repetition of a falsehood." (From Wikipedia.) I can understand why one might choose to downvote such a "genuine" question when it's easy to find that the answer is "no" (it's mentioned on the COVID-19 misinformation Wikipedia page).

>the tendency to believe false information to be correct after repeated exposure.

Like when someone say "vaccines are safe and effective", "vaccines are safe and effective", repeatedly, when the statement itself is very wrong because of the generalisation of "vaccines"...

Anything they're likely to get in a rich country will be safe and effective. Can't speak for places like Egypt of course, but you make it sound as if there is real risk involved for people on HN which there generally is not.

>Anything they're likely to get in a rich country will be safe and effective.

Can you show me a rich country where all vaccine AEFIs are strictly reported and followed up and serious ones investigated?

If not, then I am not sure how you can make that claim.

Because this hypothesis has already been shown to be false numerous times.

And the GP was asking a question, not stating it as a fact.

A question that would take 2-3 minutes of Googling to answer. I did not downvote that question, but I still think it didn't have any place here.

No it really wouldn’t, some vaccine candidates including for MERS and SARS have exhibited ADE (a phenomenon that isn’t well understood to begin with) in some animal models. It so far hasn’t been observed in humans with any of the approved COVID vaccines but it doesn’t mean that it can’t happen either with some new mutation or in some rare cases with existing variants.

In general if you Google this without a pretty in depth understanding of biology and immunology you’ll go down a rabbit hole that would just reinforce your current position.

Asking a question shouldn’t be downvoted and even if you haven’t you shouldn’t excuse this behavior.

This is discussion forum. People here are supposed to be curious, thoughtful, and scientifically minded.

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