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Comment by asguy | Hacker News Reader

The point I think you missed in that comparison is the risk analysis: polio has scary implications that are directly in front of you. So do things like ebola, HIV, etc.

People can understand them. When your everyman sees 99% of people doing fine pre-and-post covid, you can't ask them to have the same fear of the disease. It's unreasonable for you to to do so.

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The risk of death if you get polio is much higher than COVID, but the probability of getting COVID is much much higher than it was of getting polio. This makes the overall current risk if dying from COVID roughly 100x the overall risk of dying from polio was in 1952. I realize that, psychologically, a low-probability-high-risk event can seem scarier than a high-probability-lower-risk event, but is it really unreasonable of me to expect people to also be able to make rational assessments of overall danger? Do you really think we're complete slaves to our psychological biases?

> ... is it really unreasonable of me to expect people to also be able to make rational assessments of overall danger? Do you really think we're complete slaves to our psychological biases?

I think that asking a bunch of "chimps with logic" to be rational actors when they're being fomented by propaganda/half-truths/conspiracy theories is unreasonable. At the very least, I believe it will lead to your disappointment.

In my mind, this applies to the people that are hyper pro and hyper against getting vaccinated for covid.

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