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Comment by nuerow | Hacker News Reader

> That your mind equates speaking freely to poking a bear says a lot.

Yes, it does speak volumes on the problem the US is facing with its authoritarian, anti-intellectual, proto-fascist political movements. The science community should be free from persecution just because extremists have a hard time dealing with inconvenient info.

> What makes you feel safe?

Personally I feel safe when I don't have terrorists threatening me and my family with violence and murder just because I pointed the fact that vaccines work. It seems academia shares this opinion with me.

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>vaccines work

Which ones? The covid-19 ones? Their efficacy is waning at best. Multiple nations with >80% vaccination rate were still dealing with outbreaks last I checked. And before you talk mortality/hospitalization rates, those are down across the board, and clearly would have gone down regardless.

Science is being attacked by both sides. When I say they are being cowards, I mean that they have let 100 years of knowledge go out the window. Efficacy of masks was well understood pre-2020, and a vaccine actually stopped you from getting a virus pre-2020. Try stating that cloth masks do nothing but embolden people to partake in more risky behavior. And that perhaps it was a bad idea to rush out a vaccine given what we know about doing that (see: dengue fever). When scientist are too scared to admit ADE is a real possibility, they have put their paycheck before the safety of humanity.

The current covid vaccines are some of the most efficacious vaccines we have ever had. Even with efficacy waning due to variants, they are still very effective.

And no, not all vaccines prevent infection. It has long been well understood in immunology that some vaccines do not prevent infection but rather poor outcomes.

The vaccine reduces level and length of infectivity by anywhere between 50% and 80% depending on which study and which variant.

The anti COVID vaccine rhetoric is directly responsible for the lives of hundreds of thousands. And it may yet lead to many more.

Then why are they not working in places with high vaccination rates? Take Israel for example.

Oh, it would have been much worse if they weren’t vaccinated?

I guess we’ll just have to take the experts word for it...

Except that Israel study of like 2 million people showed that natural immunity was something like 7-16x more effective than the vaccine.

Hmm...

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