Comment by ohdannyboy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ohdannyboy | Hacker News Reader

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    Can you expand on why you were hesitant because of censorship? ... Have you heard rumors of some problems from vaccination?

It made it more difficult to ascertain what the risks were, I didn't feel our officials were being honest with us (something I still think). Back in early 2021 it was a lot more open to speculation since it was an minimally tested treatment who's delivery method had never been widely deployed on humans before. We still don't know if there's long term effects and there's no way for us to find out until enough time has passed. I didn't want to be part of the initial test group.

    Since covid is so deadly if you get it

I'm relatively young and not in any risk categories, covid does not pose much of a death risk to me. Significant non-deadly outcomes are another story (permanent lung damage, loss of taste, ect). I decided that protection from the latter category (significant non-deadly outcomes) was worth my rather nebulous fears that we'll realize it does some harm over the next decade.

    and there are basically almost no cases of serious health issues with vaccination and furthermore

"Basically almost no" is a difficult term to quantify, but VAERS database does have plenty of entries.

> Significant non-deadly outcomes are another story (permanent lung damage, loss of taste, ect)

Is there credible, non-censorious evidence that the vaccine reduces these particular risks? This is the same argument that we keep seeing: you have to take this vaccine because ${thing that vaccines normally do but this one hasn't been shown to do}. The most egregious example is "provide immunity"/"improve outcomes for anyone around you". I just don't believe a word of it until I see the science.

I don’t know what level of convincing you need, but here in BC, unvaccinated people are about 25x more likely to show up in a hospital than vaccinated people:

https://news.gov.bc.ca/releases/2021HLTH0058-001843

Over the past two weeks:

> After factoring for age, people not vaccinated are 25.8 times more likely to be hospitalized than those fully vaccinated.

(The age correction reflects the fact that vaccines aren’t distributed evenly by age).

Sorry, I just don't believe these numbers. Even mainstream media sources have begun admitting that hospital admission rates are meaningless because they reflect mostly test results from hospital admissions for concerns other than covid symptoms. It is interesting that despite this the unvaccinated are showing up more, but because it is for example plausible that the unvaccinated are just plain leaving their homes more, I think that actual scientific study is needed to explain these numbers.

I recognize that it's ridiculous to be in a situation where I'm rejecting facts; that's a great way to be led completely astray. But that's the world that censorship has created.

What will you believe?

As I said,

> I think that actual scientific study is needed to explain these numbers.

Science is not done in the media. I'm tired of being told that I have to believe the science that's on TV when every single time I investigate it turns out the science says the exact opposite. The non-scientific "facts" in the media are even worse; take those overwhelmed hospitals in Oklahoma and the nationwide overwhelmed poison control centers, which were both bold-faced lies. (In case you've missed the non-retractions, Oklahoma hospitals denied having ivermectin patients and only 2% of calls to poison control had anything to do with covid.)

You dodged the question of what you actually would believe.

You were linked a government study, then said "science is not done in the media"

The only link I see in this thread is a government press release, not a scientific study. The first step is to be able to distinguish those.

That's not a press release, it's a summary of government data, which they source here:

http://news.gov.bc.ca/files/8-31_PHO_modelling.pdf

And here:

http://www.bccdc.ca/health-info/diseases-conditions/covid-19...

You still didn't answer the question of what would you actually believe. It seems like you might just call anything you don't like "the media". Let's see where you get your information.

That link isn't from the media.

Did you miss the first (last) component of the address? "news"? It's a press release, which is a step in the wrong direction from the media. I was attempting to steelman the opposing position by upgrading it to media interpretations of press releases.

I believe you’ve made your point that nothing will reasonably sway you. Even if a “scientific” study is performed (and many are certainly in progress - but science is slow!) you can simply latch on to any flaw in the study to reject the results.

Give me a good explanation of how a 25x effect size can be hand waved away. Even if you consider “leaving their homes more”, I have a tough time believing that you’ll be able to come up with an effect size that large on that basis alone.

As an addendum to this, I’ll point out that several jurisdictions dealing with very severe case loads, including Alberta and Saskatchewan in Canada, have cancelled many elective procedures in favour of putting more COVID patients in their wards. Doesn’t sound like these are “concerns other than COVID symptoms” to me.

Yes, I agree with you. People are so scared by the "scary potential dangers" that aren't happening that they don't take something that reduces their risk of death by massive amounts, 20+x times.

All you "young" people not taking the shot, there are lots of otherwise relatively young people dying every day. Don't die needlessly. Search for stories of people who regretted not taking it on your deathbed. Do you want your mom or dad to live without you?

You're going to make an anecdote-based emotional appeal to an audience whose belief that they're being manipulated has constantly been validated by incompetence, corruption, and censorship?

> I recognize that it's ridiculous to be in a situation where I'm rejecting facts; that's a great way to be led completely astray. But that's the world that censorship has created.

Sounds to me like you're blaming everyone else for something that's completely under your control.

The VAERS database wouldn’t be what I would use for measures. I mean I saw a guy faint like one minute after getting the shot. Side effect? Nope he even said while he was talking to paramedics he spent the whole day freaking out about side effects and then blacked out. Paramedics said they see this all the time, people are scared. However the technology for the vaccines has been around for a few years now and the vaccines all went through rigorous testing. We don’t know the long term adverse affects of COVID, but with the mechanism of the vaccine plus the insanely high number of people who have received them we should feel even more confident in their safety. I mean I get the hesitancy people have. But honestly a lot of people are making decisions based on emotion to not getting the shot, and I think a lot of it is that reason and facts can’t counter emotion (not saying you in particular just a general observation).

Yikes. Rigorous testing? Yet concerned about long term effects of covid itself? With lack of logic like this no wonder we have leaders exploiting the unvaccinated.

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