Hacker News Reader

Comment by thedrbrian | Hacker News Reader

Given that survivors have already manufactured a shed load of it can they have a vaccine pass?

That's not a given. How strong an immunity you develop from getting a disease varies widely depending on how your case plays out.

Here's an article I just came across today on this [1]. It is originally from the NYT, but I saw it reprinted in the Seattle Times so that's where I'm linking (and I think their paywall is more lenient).

https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/if-youve-already-h...

How do you make money off of them if you give them a pass? I haven't seen any science at all that indicates vaccines are better than natural immunity. But beware saying that outloud. Other countries acknowledge this and treat natural immunity similar to being vaccinated, but the US will not due to economic interests.

I challenge anyone to show data otherwise before they reflexively down vote.

I really don’t think it’s economic interests, it’s politicizing and moralizing science by people who don’t know enough.

And how do you suppose we figure out who has natural immunity and thus doesn’t have to get vaccinated? Do we trust people to tell us (if they even know for sure that the fever/cough they had a year ago was covid)? That won’t work, I know people who have forged vaccine cards because a talk radio host told them the vaccine will make them sterile or whatever. Only sure fire way would be to first test for antibodies, which requires an additional appointment and test result, followed by the vaccine anyway, if it comes back negative. So that would likely be even more profitable for the drug/health companies.

A record of positive infection. I'm in LA county and they keep a database.

How do you make sure people aren't faking vaccination status, as you say? A positive PCR test on public record is in fact more trustworthy.

That works in places that kept good records, but I have to imagine the vast majority of counties don't have those records. Plus I'm sure many people got infected and stayed home with mild/moderate cases and never got tested (because they knew they had it and/or didn't want to risk spreading to others), so there would be no record for them anyway. Or their cases were so early on in the pandemic that there were no tests available or the ones that were available were very unreliable (I remember the early ones only had ~50% accuracy)

My family had Covid in January 2020. All of the now known symptoms but there were no tests available yet. Our doctor later confirmed it based on symptoms a couple of months later but we were not eligible for tests then. A year and a half later we would certainly have B-cells but antibodies would likely have faded. So what do people in that situation do?

Given that there's significant overlap between COVID symptoms and those of other common winter diseases, you really can't "confirm based on symptoms".

(My son had a bout of severe pneumonia around the same time. We wondered, too. Not COVID, it turns out.)

Therein lies a significant problem with "I don't need the vaccine, I have natural immunity!"

https://www.t-detect.com/

T-detect can apparently read your t-cells, so it would be good for a while I would say.

Get vaccinated. This isn't a political two-sided issue.

Easy, don't excuse people who don't have a verifiable record or from a test with a known high false positive rate. What's so hard about that? Airlines have figured it out, limiting which tests you can use. Why can't public health officials?

> A record of positive infection.

The tests used in most places have significant false positives/negatives on a population level. You may think you were infected when you weren't. With vaccination you know whether you were vaccinated.

Except you don't, because lots of people are faking vaccination status. In fact it's probably less reliable than a positive PCR test. It's extremely common to fake vaccination cards among the anti-vaxx community.

_You_ know whether you've been vaccinated even if you're lying to others about it. Are you presuming now that antivaxxers are convincing themselves they've been vaccinated? I guess it's vaguely plausible.

No I'm suggesting that there shouldn't be a mandate for those who can reliably prove they have had covid.

You're in LA County, so you should be aware of https://myvaccinerecord.cdph.ca.gov/

That's just as trustworthy. Probably more since what it asserts is less variable than how long you maintain antibodies.

No, you can't prove a negative. People can fake vaccine status from other locations. You can't fake a PCR test result in a public DB.

...what are you even talking about with "you can't prove a negative?"

The link I provided "is an electronic vaccination record drawn from the data stored in the California immunization registry."

It doesn't accept user submissions; it only accepts data from recognized health organizations. The website allows you to put in your name and birthdate and get a QR code that can be scanned and will take you back to the website, showing dates you were vaccinated. It requires someone confirming that the QR code is directing them to the correct website, and confirm name and birthdate, but that's far more available to actually check than a PCR test.

Meaning no need to rely on easily faked vaccination cards; you instead ask for a QR code, scan it, and confirm it took you to the government site, with a name and birthdate that matches some government issued picture ID. Still 'beatable', if you have good fake ID for a person who has been vaccinated, but just as good in 'security' as relying on a PCR test (since it's still ultimately pulling from a publicly readable, only privately writeable DB), and probably a better assertion than "PCR test", since it can work for everyone, and tells you the date of vaccination (whereas date of antibodies being detected doesn't tell you anything about whether they still have natural immunity now).

What I mean is that unless you only accept vaccination status if it's in a public database, any one can fake being vaccinated. Many if not most jurisdictions do not record it, and a piece of paper is all you need. And you can't force people to get it again if it's not on record, because the vaccines aren't approved for arbitrary numbers of shots. The anti-vaxx community is rife with fake covid vaccine cards.

So, you can't prove a negative, that being that someone has not been vaccinated. But you can prove that you had covid.

You can prove that you were vaccinated in CA. I've already been in venues that required that if you had a CA driver's license (and required government issued photo ID).

But CA is not the entire world. What do you do with people who got vaccinated elsewhere? What about CA residents that claim they got vaccinated elsewhere? You can't do anything about that. It's a huge gaping hole in the logic.

Your original post said "I'm in LA county and they keep a database."

CA is larger than LA county, so immediately is more effective than what you proposed in your OP.

There are also multiple initiatives to make country-wide databases of vaccination status available via app. Test status? False positives, false negatives, can be done at home, etc, and -still only applies to people who have had COVID-. Everyone without a health issue (that should keep them out of public spaces anyway) can get vaccinated.

This doesn't address anything I said. Please directly address these two points:

1. You cannot prove someone has been vaccinated as the system currently exists. That ship has already sailed. Anyone can opt out by lying that they got vaccinated somewhere that doesn't keep public records. Those mandating vaccinations have have to accept this because vaccines aren't approved for more than 2 (or 3) shots, so you can't force people to get vaccinated again if they don't have a verifiable record. Even if there's a worldwide database rolled out, it's too late, too many people got vaccinated off the record.

2. You CAN prove you've had covid with a high degree of certainty. Recent tests have low false positive rates.

Why let people slip out of the vaccine mandate with an easy lie yet corner those who have already had covid and therefore better immunity than the vaccinated? It's nonsense that ignores reality.

Cheapest way is to donate blood/plasma via the Red Cross.

You do the society a favor, and the app they provide lets you know if you continue to have covid19 antibodies.

So that nobody gets angry, be aware that they've stopped doing this test quite recently. Still good to do: I’ve now done it several times this year, and my first time was selfishly motivated in part by the free antibody test. You could even be doing yourself or a friend a favor, you never know!

In principle, one could get a rapid antibody test and, if negative, get a vaccine a few minutes later.

For vaccines for which the vaccine has few side effects, this is, AFAICT, not usually considered worthwhile — providers seem to prefer giving an extra MMR dose to people with unknown vaccination status for example. For COVID, at least with current vaccines, maybe it would make sense.

(ISTM, based on available data, people who have had COVID ought not to be required to get two doses, but one might be reasonable from a public health perspective.)

> I haven't seen any science at all that indicates vaccines are better than natural immunity.

That statement has multiple issues. What does "better" mean? Where did you look? How do you define immunity (risk, falloff time, etc.). There's a new paper every week comparing how the vaccination and infection responses are different. Generalising to one-dimensional "better" is not going to happen in serious publications.

We're still at the level of (for example) "Therefore, antibody immunity acquired by natural infection or different modes of vaccination may have a differing susceptibility to erosion by SARS-CoV-2 evolution." https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34103407/

There's certainly a lot of research around different responses and they're a single pubmed query away. "But beware saying that outloud" is just FUD.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01442-9

https://www.science.org/content/article/having-sars-cov-2-on...

The study you cite has some major issues. First, it's a proposed benefit based on a hypothetical mechanism, and not empirical data. Second, it does not indicate the likelihood of mutations that would be better treated by the vaccine. Third, it does not indicate how much more effective it would be, just that it's "possible".

Please stick to the topic and facts rather than being sneeringly dismissive. I'm not part of some bloc of anti-vaxxers, and open to changing my mind based on new information. In fact I've had covid AND I'm vaccinated, so the intent of my post is to spark discussion and get more data. Dismissing my post as FUD is ad hominem.

The paper was selected at random, it's not really relevant here, so I haven't read it. The point was that it's an example of levels of comparisons we see studied.

It can't be an ad hominem since I never said anything about you. Your post was FUD because you stated it very loosely and asked for hard data to refute it. You're quite likely right on infection providing better protection, but we neither have a hard confirmation of that (or you'd link it, right?) nor did you provide any support for "But beware saying that outloud." Not only there's ongoing research on differences (as we both provided), many people do say that outloud.

In case you weren't aware, the origin of the term FUD is from Slashdot and stands for "Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt", usually in opposition to facts and indicating an agenda by the commenter. Sounds like an attack on my character rather than the argument itself, which is indeed Ad Hominem. And there was nothing indicating unfounded fear, uncertainty, or doubt in my comments. When probed for sources, I provided them, reputable ones at that.

When I say "beware saying that outloud", it's a pointer to the nature of discussion on covid, which should be obvious to anyone paying attention - and that is that if you counter a prevailing or official narrative, you will be belittled and brushed aside, often without any conclusive data to back it up. The irony is thick.

Personally I'd be worrying about the negative long-term effects of actually contracting COVID-19 [1] [2].

In any case, you're the one making a claim here: can you show the benefits of natural immunity? Can you show the risk vs reward of catching COVID-19, potentially spreading it to thousands, and getting natural immunity rather than just getting a vaccine? Bringing money into it just colors your argument poorly. It's not like getting the vaccine costs you any money personally.

Vaccines seem to provide better immunity than previously being infected [3]. In fact, a lot of research shows that getting a vaccine after being infected actually improves your protection against reinfection [4].

Would you argue in good faith this way about any other vaccine? Measles? Mumps? Anthrax? Ebola?

[1] https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseas...

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/long-term-effects/...

[3] https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/s0806-vaccination-pr...

[4] https://www.news-medical.net/news/20211010/Research-finds-di...

But for the people who've already had it why bother vaccinating them against their will?

They've already run the gambit of heart problems and such, why make them run it again?

"why make them run it again" - the vaccine doesn't have nearly the likelihood nor the severity of complications that COVID has. And it still reduces their likelihood of catching COVID again, and the likelihood of serious symptoms even if they did. And the protections last longer and more predictably than natural immunity does.

We could probably list a thousand things that you could do now to reduce your risks of something. The question is around a mandate, and if the risk reduction is marginal or diminishingly small, why would you mandate it? That's the whole point of this thread.

We mandate lots of those too, since statistics says it is a good idea

So I’d ask the reverse question: if the risk reduction is scientifically demonstrated and quite clear, what responsibility do public officials have towards enforcing the safety of others? When should we let them take that right, and when should we refuse them that power? I won’t claim to know this answer either!

Is there any science to back up anything you're saying?

Bonus points: Studies not funded by pharmaceutical companies.

I shared it elsewhere. Yes - https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v...

There is also this here in the US, acknowledging "Kentucky’s local health departments, disease investigators, and regional epidemiologists; Kentucky Department for Public Health immunization and data team members; Suzanne Beavers, CDC" - https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7032e1.htm

Agreed, but how do we help people understand that ‘not make them run that risk again’ is currently demonstrated to mean getting vaccinated, and that living a normal life is repeating the risk of health issues from re-catching COVID? Their heuristic mental model seem to be getting tricked, by the magnitudes of the numbers involved, into swapping those.

A study in Israel shows the opposite of your link [3]:

https://www.science.org/content/article/having-sars-cov-2-on...

Based on the information in your link, it's a absolutely tiny sample in a very small specific conservative community. I'm really skeptical that they controlled for the unvaccinated cohort that caught covid twice hanging out in anti-vaxxer communities where covid infection was high. The CDC should be embarrassed about using this as evidence.

That oft-cited paper out of Israel isn't yet published, and seems to have some issues on (informal) review: https://twitter.com/DGBassani/status/1431390188924768269

Or from the article you just linked:

> As for the Israel medical records study, Topol and others point out several limitations, such as the inherent weakness of a retrospective analysis compared with a prospective study that regularly tests all participants as it tracks new infections, symptomatic infections, hospitalizations, and deaths going forward in time. “It will be important to see these findings replicated or refuted,” says Natalie Dean, a biostatistician at Emory University.

She adds: “The biggest limitation in the study is that testing [for SARS-CoV-2 infection] is still a voluntary thing—it’s not part of the study design.” That means, she says, that comparisons could be confounded if, for example, previously infected people who developed mild symptoms were less likely to get tested than vaccinated people, perhaps because they think they are immune.

OP was not advocating for purposefully GETTING infected. They were advocating on behalf of those who had already GOT infected (past tense).

There are multiple studies that show previously infected are well protected, and Israel shows 13x better than Pfizer’s

Natural immunity for those who produce antibodies (I think I saw around 30% don't) probably -is- better than the vaccine, in terms of efficacy in preventing COVID again.

However, this is a false dichotomy. First, because the same studies that show this ALSO show that getting vaccinated on top of natural immunity is better still ( https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v... ), second because natural immunity prior to the vaccine implies getting COVID and the extremely high risk of complications (from hospitalization, to long COVID symptoms, to death), and third, because there isn't any data around what happens if you get vaccinated first, then get COVID (i.e., is the combination of natural response + vaccine the same if the order is reversed).

There is no situation where getting vaccinated does not help reduce the likelihood of catching COVID, or suffering serious symptoms.

> better still

Not clear why this is an argument for vaccine mandates when natural immunity is already better than the vaccine alone, and puts individuals in the same or better place as the vaccine.

> second because natural immunity prior to the vaccine implies getting COVID and the extremy high risk of complications

What does this have to do with people who already had covid?

> there isn't any data around what happens if you get vaccinated first, then get COVID

Once again what does this have to do with people who already had covid?

> There is no situation where getting vaccinated does not help reduce the likelihood of catching COVID, or suffering serious symptoms.

If you are already in a state where you are at least as protected as vaccinated people, how is this an argument for mandate for those with natural immunity?

You won't be able to find any data comparing mandates for those who have had COVID vs no mandate having any real effect on the general population because those who have already had it are very well protected.

You can have had the j&j vaccine and be way less protected than natural immunity, and be considered compliant. This is absolutely inconsistent.

Except one can't reasonably opt in to "natural immunity".

Pretty major distinction.

It is absurd to suggest that someone deliberately getting covid is a safer way to get immunity.

It is absurd because I didnt say anything about deliberately getting covid.

One completely unrelated reason is that if you start telling people that they don't need to get vaccinated if they had covid... suddenly everyone who has a cough thinks they don't need to get vaccinated. Then all the anti-vaxxers will just say they had covid...

You saw a lot of this at the beginning of covid... lots of people saying "well I had a bad cough for a little while... maybe I already had it"

You could maybe specify that people who have had covid need a positive test to skirt any vaccine mandates... but any sort added complexity at this scale is going to create a bunch of additional nonsense. People aren't even capable of understanding how to wear masks correctly.

So just get the vaccine so we can all get on with our stupid lives. I get vaccines all the time, this one is free, and in the grand scheme of things if you're right... this is fairly minor when it comes to pharma grifts.

Not getting vaccinated because you don't want to support the pharma industry is like driving your car on the sidewalk because you don't want to support the department of transportation. You're not making a point to anyone, and you're putting a bunch of strangers at risk to do it.

I regularly run into people who claim they had Covid back in fall 2019, and it's vastly more likely that they had the flu.

And not getting vaccinated because you don't want to support the pharma industry misses that they get $20 per shot for the vaccine, but will get thousands per dose of the expensive meds you'll need if you wind up in the ICU.

> they get $20 per shot for the vaccine

Strengthening your argument further, the pharma industry already got $20 per shot for the vaccine.

The government signed a contract for the shots, so if you're letting them go to waste, you're just wasting your tax dollars which went to pharma companies anyways.

Part of me wonders if anyone has run these numbers at big pharma. I would guess that at some point in July, unvaccinated people became the bigger cash cow, since not only did they have to discard that vaccine that Trump had already brought for them and been produced, we have perhaps gone past the point of having done that a second time with the dose that Biden bought and was produced for them. This comes as the percentage of doses in arms drops. And they are also much more likely to end up in the hospital and buying yet even more expensive experimental treatments such as this one. </rant> Sigh.

Moderna, I think, is the only company that gets a large chunk of its income from vaccines. Pfizer has far more lucrative drugs that provide most of their income: they've made tens of billions from Viagra alone.

You are suggesting we mislead people to get them to be vaccinated because they are too dumb to understand. The whole point of this post and comment thread is that it doesn't work.

No, I'm not suggesting misleading anyone. I'm suggesting that a simpler system is easier to understand and leaves fewer ambiguities for compliance and enforcement... especially at national and international scale, where you are dealing with a significant number of very dumb people.

You can tell people that if they had covid they're at less risk because they've built up a resistance, but you can also tell them everyone is required to get the vaccine anyway.

> suddenly everyone who has a cough thinks they don't need to get vaccinated.

But we can do testing.

For the record:

> Earlier estimates that 80% of infections are asymptomatic were too high and have since been revised down to between 17% and 20% of people with infections.[1]

> It’s also unclear to what extent people with no symptoms transmit SARS-CoV-2. The only test for live virus is viral culture. PCR and lateral flow tests do not distinguish live virus. No test of infection or infectiousness is currently available for routine use.678 As things stand, a person who tests positive with any kind of test may or may not have an active infection with live virus, and may or may not be infectious.[1]

[1] https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4851

Testing is less reliable than a shot in the arm, there's literally no reason for the additional complication. Get the shot.

Getting the shot is not reliable at all either. How would we know without testing anyway? As I said in another comment: nursing students got the hepatitis B vaccine, and it turns out they were still not immune after the 2nd shot. How do we know how many people are actually immune without testing? Having vaccinated is not exactly a certainty of anything.

The issue is that natural immunity is highly variable, while vaccine derived immunity is much less so. Some recovered patients have antibody levels 1000x lower than others.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/06/antibody-testing-sug...

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/10/prior-infection-vs-v...

We will never know without an antibody testing. It can be under acceptable levels after having been vaccinated, too.

We have done such studies before with regarding to the hepatitis B vaccine. Most nursing students had no immunity against it after having received two doses of the vaccine.

I think antibody levels should be tied to the mandates. For what it is worth, I am against such mandates.

There's more to immunity than antibodies.

The body doesn’t keep antibodies around months after an infection but it knows how to create the antibodies if reinfection does happen. So of course a freshly vaccinated person will have more antibodies than a person who was infected months ago but that doesn’t mean the vaccine is more effective.

That would create a perverse incentive to get infected to avoid the vaccine. The whole reason we want people to get vaccinated is to reduce the burden that infections cause on our health care system.

Oh, no! Not a perverse incentive!!?

To avoid that, we should definitely sweep basic immunology under the rug and lump all those who've caught and recovered from covid in with the other unvaccinated underclass. They should've thought twice about the ramifications of their actions before deciding catch and recover from covid.

Thank god for these mandates. I can't image how society would function, if at all, if a perverse incentive were to exist. People would want to get sick. COVID parties. It'd be like the days before the vaccines when..

when...

...

I forgot my point. Lock them all up.

And there are, according to the CDC over 160 _million_ of such people in the US: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...

Under the "man dates" all 160M are considered "unvaccinated", even though "science" shows their immunity is longer lasting than that derived from the vaccine, and a lot of them are currently being thrown out of their jobs.

Some people who lack a driver license know how to drive and are quite capable of driving safely. A few of those, I'm almost certain, drive better than most people with a license.

When you need a ride home from the airport, do you want a licensed driver, or an unlicensed one?

It's a bad analogy. The current situation is akin to requiring that the _rider_ is a licensed driver or car will drive into a tree somehow.

I guess you'd take the unlicensed driver, then? Or maybe just ask if they're a good driver? The bureaucracy measures what it measures; if it was useless, you'd ignore it. It isn't perfect (it never is), but it's a simple measure.

Exactly. Or... what about people who cannot get the vaccine for health reasons? Any news on that?

Then they’d need to prove that they were actually infected with covid and recovered. Most European countries have a “recovered” classification of their green pass — it’s not only for those vaccinated. However, it’s probably much easier and quicker simply to get vaccinated than to show evidence you were infected with covid in the past, especially after antibodies have waned.

They don't need to "prove" shit. If you're vaccinated, you're not in danger of dying. Moreover, you will get COVID anyway eventually, with or without the vaccine. It's endemic, and it'll be with us forever.

> And there are, according to the CDC over 160 _million_ of such people in the US

Your link says 120M. Not a big deal, but odd since you linked right to it.

> Under the "man dates" all 160M are considered "unvaccinated",

What? No, only the unvaccinated ones are considered unvaccinated. Are you suggesting that everyone who has been infected is unvaccinated?

> a lot of them are currently being thrown out of their jobs.

Actually, it looks like it's very few. [1][2]

1. Lots Of People Say They'll Quit Over Vaccine Mandates, But Research Shows Few Do. https://www.npr.org/2021/09/29/1041500566/vaccine-mandate-qu...

2. Only a fraction of U.S. health care workers are risking their jobs over vaccinations. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/07/science/covid-us-health-w...

NPR and NY Times [1] are not valid sources of news. They have discredited themselves again and again. As of yesterday they were pushing the narrative that Southwest Airlines is affected by "weather" that no other airline seems to be affected by, for example, while pilots on the ground are flying Gadston flags out of their cockpits and Southwest CEO was backpedaling and saying he's not a fan of "man dates".

CDC says "1 in 4.2 (95% UI* 3.6 – 4.9) COVID–19 infections were reported". Your friendly coronavirus tracker says there were 45,431,167 confirmed cases in the United States. Simple arithmetic shows that there were, therefore, 45,431,167 * 4.2 = 190,810,901 total cases. 120M figure was computed months ago, when there were fewer confirmed cases, but the ratio still holds. Most people had it already. Moreover a lot of people had it _and_ had the vaccine as well. Kids and anyone healthy under 30 aren't at risk. Let's end this charade.

Lest you think I'm an anti-vaxxer, no - I think people 40 years old and older should definitely get vaccinated and I'm vaccinated myself (I have comorbidities). But I also think this must be strictly personal choice, and you _can't_ collect enough safety data over just 9 months, especially if you vaccinate your control groups.

[1] Just a few days ago: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10076925/NYT-report...

What exactly is the reason for the COVID-19 passes?

To reduce the spread in communities.

Can you provide links to studies concluding that the vaccines make the vaccinated significantly reduce transmission as opposed to the non-vaccinated?

Plus, I would like to know if asymptomatic vaccinated do indeed have reduced spread as opposed to asymptomatic non-vaccinated.

Or to put it simply: can you give me studies supporting the claim that vaccinated people are less likely to spread COVID-19, whether asymptomatic or symptomatic vs. non-vaccinated?

---

By the way, does possessing the COVID-19 pass automatically imply that you are less likely to transmit?

Arstechnica did a rather great writeup of this, no paywall - https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/10/prior-infection-vs-v...

> The researchers next looked at a different group of 47 people who had gone a year since a SARS-CoV-2 infection. Of those 47, 26 were still unvaccinated and 21 had received one dose of a vaccine. At that point, the unvaccinated 26 had extremely low levels of neutralizing antibodies against any SARS-CoV-2 variants, particularly delta. Many people had no detectable levels of neutralizing antibody against delta. The vaccinated group, meanwhile, had high levels of neutralizing antibody similar to or above the levels seen in people who were fully vaccinated.

This is entirely normal. The immune system doesn't keep elevated neutralizing antibody levels forever, that is too expensive. The immune system relies on B cells to kickstart neutralizing antibody production if the need arises. How those people would react to a further infection event would be extremely interesting. Do they produce antibodies? How fast? But the researchers didn't look into that.

The linked article is overselling vaccine effectiveness and underplays natural immunity. This is borderline misinformation.

https://www.healio.com/hematology-oncology/learn-immuno-onco...

Why "borderline"? It _is_ misinformation written specifically to advance a narrative.

To reduce the temperature on HN :) Technically the article is correct, alas it reads as a half-truth. Mark Twain had some words for half-truths, but those words won't advance a level-headed conversation.

We will soon need new words for different flavors of misinformation, because the business model for generation of new flavors is proving extremely profitable, far beyond the dynamics of Soviet propaganda that only had a mere dysfunctional state as sponsor. PR agencies can (have already?) incorporate machine learning for real-time message adjustment based on social media tests and sentiment signals. Thanks Smith-Mundt Act! https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-cult-of-the-vaccine-neurot...

> As a student in the Soviet Union I noticed subscribers to what Russians called the sovok mindset talked in interminable strings of pogovorki, i.e goofball proverbs or aphorisms you’d heard a million times before (“He who takes no risk, drinks no champagne,” or “Work isn’t a wolf, it won’t run off into the woods,” etc). This was a learned defense mechanism, adopted by a people who’d found out the hard way that anyone caught not speaking nonstop nonsense could be suspected of harboring original thoughts. Voluble stupidity is a great disguise in a society where silence is suspect.

Never thought of it this way TBH. Proverbs are common in Russia, so it might have been Taibbi's cultural misunderstanding. He's usually pretty astute about things, and he has lived in Russia for a while (and at an interesting time, no less), so he knows the mores and you can trust most of his observations, just not this one.

That said, I can confirm that even in USSR people did very much harbor original thoughts even though quite obviously there was no free press and one could pay dearly for speaking their mind. You just had to be sure that you know everyone you're speaking to really, really well. The KGB had lots of "secret collaborators" embedded within the populace (much like the FBI in the US today), so if you're not careful with your jokes or thoughts, you could easily get 5 years in the labor camp. I predict that the United States will be like that within 10 years or less.

There's even a Soviet joke about this: a judge is heard laughing when exiting the court, and a friend of his asks "why are you laughing?", "The guy on trial told a really funny joke.", "Could you tell it to me?", "No, I can't, I just gave him 5 years in the labor camp for it."

Thanks for sharing your experience. Let's hope the immigrant residents of the USA can help reverse the current trajectory. Those born in America have not seen how the current movie ended elsewhere.

Read "Heart of a Dog" by Bulgakov, or better yet watch the movie. Note that there are several movies under that name, you want the black and white one. The parallels between that and today's United States are plain as a day to see. I'm still stunned that the book got past Soviet government censors somehow. I'm sure US government censors won't make the same mistake when the time comes. It utterly eviscerates wokeness that preceded the Russian revolution of 1917 and intensified after it. Comrade Shvonder in particular is a classical SJW that you could just pluck from there and then and place here and now, and he'd be in his element immediately.

1988 version, directed by Vladimir Bortko?

(Wikipedia lists it as filmed in 'sepia', which could colloquially be called black & white)

Yes, that one. One of the most thought provoking movies you'll ever watch. I'm not sure how well it translates culturally to someone who never lived under an authoritarian communist regime, but it's a masterpiece even if just half the meaning gets through. Basically all works of Bulgakov are wonderful and worth reading.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com