Comment by mlac | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mlac | Hacker News Reader

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I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but the pharma companies burying some side effects doesn’t help anything.

Here is one example in Pittsburgh with severe side effects [1] (temporary paralysis, loss of fine motor control and a continuously flapping hand). The news did one story and both the person impacted and news station were contacted and told to not run a follow up story or they would have “problems” (this is second-hand info, but I have no reason to distrust the source).

I think transparency is key in a situation like this. Yes we will have side effects, but if we are ever going to get past it, our only hope is very high vaccine compliance. The unvaccinated are causing a drag on the economy, the healthcare system, and the country.

We don’t know if the vaccine side effects impact the same people who are most likely to die from COVID or not, so it’s definitely a decision under uncertainty.

[1] https://www.wpxi.com/news/top-stories/bethel-park-woman-para...

I don’t know why you’re downvoted. The French president clearly decided to manage this crisis by lying a lot, to the point that he says the opposite every two months:

- “Masks are absolutely useless for the general population” in April 2020 => Mandatory in September.

- “There will be no vaccine passport” in May 2021 => Vaccine passport enforced in bars on 01/08/2021.

And so on. Now they want us to take the vaccine, but gave pharma and ministers exemption of responsibility on it. Also, the French govt injected AIDS to 10,000 patients in 1985 and spent 6 years to admit it.

And that was when the press was free!

Ahahhaa, and somehow, you ve got here like a solid 70% of this forum that not only do not question any measure by the governments media and big pharma in the last 18 months, but actively find excuses for any inconsistency and lack of logic for any measure, or the lack of any positive results. These people are mostly phds, bay area engineers, entrepreneurs, highly skilled specialists and scientists mind you. These people work with deadlines, need to show scientific papers, or some working snippet of code, or some working infrastructure at the end of the day. Somehow, they never question the moving deadline for pandemic(2 weeks to flatten the curve) or the abysmal results of vaccination and lockdowns in stopping covid infections and hospitalisations. Covid is truly the afghanistan of the nerds it seems. See you in 20 years.

Excellent point.

I’ve also worked in feminism. None of the scientific results are correct (We often think women have always been oppressed, remembering the right to vote, but disregarding that ILO’s convention on slavery in 1930 excluded men 18-49 - which literally reverses the conclusion about oppression). And yet this scientific field was funded and hyped in 2013-2020.

The common points with Afghanistan and Covid: Every study is slightly wrong enough to lead to an incorrect global picture, and obviously enough that simply reading the studies is enough to find the major flaws; Laws are written in emergency; Actions that are undertaken either amplify the problem or are orthogonal to solving it; Those very actions harm the bystanders in a significant way, enough that it causes major outrage and focalises everyone’s mind.

I wonder to which point they are rotating the topics, whether they have a major cycle on 20 years (otherwise people would get too knowledgeable and able to disprove the sophisms) and a short cycle on 6 years (perhaps election cycle, the swings of the two-party), or whether this is a natural phenomenon emerging from large nations in peace.

Next topic will be something else such as microrobot attacks, so they are not visible but everyone will have to protect themselves.

Science is not static.

I think the downvotes come because I’m saying two unpopular things - the vaccines have known side effects and aren’t perfect (and in some cases the side effects are severe) and that people should still get the vaccine (unless they have a solid medical reason not to).

Neither option is perfect, but at this point I think everyone will get COVID eventually and it’s better for our healthcare system if the population is vaccinated.

The politicization of this has cost the most lives in the pandemic.

I just wish the government, media, and pharma were more transparent on side effects. To be fair, they were for J&J, but 80+ people had paralysis from the other vaccines and this wasn’t really called out as a side effect. That’s enough cannon fodder for conspiracy theorists and anti-vax to hold on to (“what else are they lying to us about!?”) that I think transparency would be better.

This is firmly conspiracy theory territory however.

The vaccine certainly has side effects and there are going to be rare side effects that are severe.

But considering that 209 million people in the United States have gotten the vaccine -- if there were a high rate of serious side effects, there is no way that would be suppressed.

Even a 1% rate would mean there are over 2 million people that would have been affected.

You’re not wrong. I think the vaccine is much less likely to cause harm than the virus, and that it makes sense to get vaccinated.

But statistics don’t matter when you’re the one who wakes up paralyzed after getting the vaccine, and people are terrible at probability. But I think the failure to call that out and say “The vaccine’s not perfect, this is the challenge of our time and we need to take the vaccine to address it - some people will have adverse effects but it will save 100,000s of lives.”

Our circumstances have changed and we’re forced to choose between two outcomes that no one would want to decide on before the pandemic. But this is the reality, and if everyone took the vaccine we’d reduce resources used on hospitalizations and the stress on the healthcare system.

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