Coming Clean
coryzue.com
coryzue.com
It was in fact deadlier for milennia.
It's still not "settled".
And it means that the response as it was might have been a deadly mistake.
edit: but as of now we just don't know.
I do not think this was researched at all.
It is a call for more communication and understanding of different opinions.
Since I’ve posted it this article got flagged and unflagged multiple times, the first flag appeared within minutes (i.e. the user pressing the button did not even have a chance to read the article).
I wonder what made people so aggressive and short-tempered about different points of view recently.
It's a poorly argued rationalization for antisocial behavior from someone with a bad case of engineer's disease.
> Since I’ve posted it this article got flagged and unflagged multiple times, the first flag appeared within minutes (i.e. the user pressing the button did not even have a chance to read the article).
You don't have to eat the whole apple to know it's bad.
> I wonder what made people so aggressive and short-tempered about different points of view recently.
It might have something to do with the ongoing pandemic. I'm really not interested in yet another article from someone who's too precious to be vaccinated.
+ You don‘t want to see or understand another viewpoint,
+ You did not even read the piece before flipping into hating it,
+ You hold a quite irrational emotional view on other people’s private health decisions (how come?),
+ You don’t dare to post under your real account,
+ You still believe „others“ to be antisocial.
I wish people like you would finally go back to Reddit, which seems to align more with your emotional frequencies and your intellect. You might find the aggressive narrow-minded echo chamber you seek there.
This community, in contrast, has always existed for intellectually curious people.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
The message in your profile implies that the account is using HN primarily for political and ideological battle. That's not allowed, and we ban accounts that do it, regardless of their politics or ideology, because it's not what this site is for and it destroys what it is for. So please don't do that either. More explanation here:
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
> I looked at the global picture and thought, well it’s clear that the vaccines aren’t stopping the spread of disease. It looks like getting vaccinated is moving towards becoming more of a personal health decision than a public health necessity
Vaccination reduces hospitalization by 96% [0], which is a public health necessity.
I don't have time to share all the instances I saw of this magical thinking, but they're in there.
[0] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanam/article/PIIS2667-19...
I read this as "I thought crossing my fingers would help me avoid getting sick, going against the general advice in basically all countries in the world, and for some weird reason it didn't work!".
Just because you manage to find figures that confuse you, or back up your previously held beliefs, you get to say "the experts don't agree"? Your inability, as an engineer - not a medical professional, to make sense of seemingly conflicting data, gives you the right to proclaim that?
"I’m worried that if we don’t get off this path soon, it’s going to get harder and harder to turn back. And I don’t want to see where that ends up. At the end of the day we’re all just trying to do our best." - what if you're the problem?
Sometimes I think intelligence is mostly about the ability to rationalize your decisions.
> Or perhaps at a minimum we’ll recognize natural immunity is at least as good as these vaccines?
Yes, for some months, and then it decades. And that's the only thing that you can save from the article.
> The vaccines continued to do great at preventing hospitalizations and deaths, but there was now no doubt that they weren’t going to contain the spread.
Ditto. So you have a duty to get vaccinated. Everything else, all your hours reading papers[0], this wall of text, all your excuses, are a way to easy your conscience. You are selfish, and you put yourself in front of your community.
I'm probably biased: I come from North Italy, I've seen the army removing corpses from hospitals 'cause they were just too many: I've seen what the virus can do if it finds the right conditions, and I've a lot of friends working in hospitals. This winter has been way better, and the strain on the health system way lower.
If you don't do your part, you care more about yourself[1] than about the society around yourself. It is only right if the society answers in the same way, and cut you out.
[0] is that useful in any way? I cannot say I understand papers that are not from my field, but here the author seems to be able to read papers from a totally different field without problems
[1] Better: you care more about what you think is _safer_ for yourself. Not what actually is. To avoid an almost null risk in the future, you put your community at risk
Degrades? Surely it does.
What about the one from any one of the vaccines? It does just the same.
> I come from North Italy
Mismanagement and ignorance produces heroes and corpses. This is a long-known fact.
I'm sorry, but Italy fucked it up just as bad if not worse as NYC, in the beginning.
This has nothing to do with any particular virus, vaccines, community or duty. Just incompetence.
Please accept that maybe people might know better how to actually care about their community.
Please accept that some perhaps don't.
https://coronavirus.ohio.gov/wps/portal/gov/covid-19/dashboa...
This fellow is obviously highly intelligent. Intelligence doesn’t automatically give a person good ideas any more than a big engine makes you a good driver. I have met extremely intelligent people who think we faked the moon landings, that the Earth is only 6000 years old, and so on. It’s a big reason I am not on board with the cult of IQ.
If I vaccinate now, then I will be encouraging vaccine mandates in the future.
It really comes across as "if anyone tells me what to do, I'm going to do the opposite because if I comply they can tell me what to do again in the future." I get that this mindset is prevalent, but I have no idea where it comes from. Anyone with a similar outlook on life have a chance to shed some light on it? Was there a pivotal event or a series of situations that accumulate? Having not gone through that, it's hard to relate.
(1) Political policy is largely outside of an individual's control.
(2) Political policy is more likely to be proposed when it is more favored by the masses (less backlash).
(3) Opposite of (2), political policy is less likely to be proposed if it seems less favorable to the masses, even if those in power think it's a good outcome.
(4) Legislatures take perceived public opinion into account when deciding to propose policy.
Then, if you believe a vaccine mandate is likely to be accepted in the current political climate, and you are against a vaccine mandate (due to bodily autonomy or something), then you may not want to contribute to perceived mass support by contributing to higher vaccine numbers, even if you support the vaccine itself.
I truly can't understand why a COVID vaccine mandate, and only a COVID vaccine mandate, is suddenly tyranny.
[0] https://africacdc.org/disease/yellow-fever/
[1] https://www.governing.com/now/the-long-history-of-mandated-v...
However, there is one difference that I can tell that is pretty major from all other vaccine requirements that I can think of. The talk around a covid vaccine mandate is one that would impact everything about normal societal life. All other vaccine requirements I am aware of are generally tied to the things you mentioned, but once you are an adult that isn't in the military or going to certain countries, you basically never have any vaccine check. Tying the mandate to school would make it most similar to other vaccine requirements, but that would also be applying the requirement to the least vulnerable group.
I have not managed to wrap my head around this one either. As a society we've been mandating vaccines for almost a century now. Whatever your opinion on vaccine mandates, that ship sailed before most of us were born.
In the US the Covid vaccine “mandate” is not actually a public mandate, as there is no mandate to specifically vaccinate every American. It’s basically the federal government blackmailing some employers through regulation to mandate vaccination as a condition of employment by creating punitive costs to the employer that can’t be eliminated without forcing their employees to vaccinate.
I honestly think it would have been less controversial if it had been a public mandate…everyone gets vaccinated—or like the ACA mandate, your hit with a tax penalty. The problem is to do that and for it to survive legal muster, they would need to have it come up through Congress as a law.
How it went down is simply shady and folks don’t like it when their government is shady.
The problem is that the U.S. is a Federalist system where states are supposed to take the lead on public health, and national coordination is hard with a divided Federal government.
Because it’s been framed to be completely political—in us vs them terms and messaging around that framing has been specifically targeting a group of people (the them) previously described as “deplorable” by the authority and those that support the authority (the us). If you are going to create classes via authoritarianism, you are going to create resistance.
For reference, they seem to be:
- Medical procedures [should not] be forced onto people without an impenetrable foundation of evidence to support them
- Vaccination status should not limit people's ability to dine in restaurants and board planes with impunity[1]
- No one should be shamed for not being vaccinated
Part of me wonders what they author thinks would be an "impenetrable foundation of evidence", but if it's written similarly, we may never know.
1. This was difficult to tie back to vaccines directly. It seemed to be based on an idea that rational actors should be able to make individual choices.
Politically I've been dealing with this for decades as a libertarian - whether talking to someone from the blue tribe or from the red tribe, I always end up being othered because even though I mostly agree with where they're coming from, I don't accept the blind spots buttressing their Party's business-sponsored Kool Aid.
For Covid in the US, the authoritarianism was really kicked into overdrive by Trump's decision to reject reality and expert opinions, deny there was any problem that needed addressing, and politicize what would otherwise be common sense like wearing a respirator to protect yourself. Once such a big lie became a mainstream political rallying cry, the authoritarian cards had been dealt and were here to stay.
At this point I'm too burnt out to deal with extra sources of uncertainty (including just rolling the dice by choosing to get Covid). Vaccination status is a good first pass at telling if someone has been taking the pandemic seriously. Perhaps if I had a good friend who was unvaccinated I'd inquire about their respirator usage and exposure profile (it might even be lower than vaccinated people sending their kids to municipal daycare!). But really any extra exposure is unnecessary at this point, so apart from visiting older family and the like I'll hole up for the winter and revisit in the spring when casual meetings can occur in open air. This pulling back is of course a general response to social breakdown, and I do hope that breakdown stops at some point.
So, not getting vaccinated is not just a personal choice, and i’m not sure the risk of dying is the same as the risk of being hospitalized. And assesing risks of getting one disease over another fails to take into account it is a new disease and is an addition to existing risks, not an either/or situation.
If the unvaccinated also refuse hospital treatment, maybe they can claim it’s a personal choice
IMO, the author makes a compelling case for why vaccines should be mandatory: people significantly underweight the negative societal externalities of not getting vaccinated.
Described in this Nature piece, where the first few paragraphs are about Malone. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02483-w
What vaccination - and really, the mRNAs specifically - provided was a policy option that wouldn't have been there in a past time: put a shot in everyone's arm ASAP and then lower restrictions in hopes of restoring the economy quickly. And like with every new tech, many of us were quite eager to jump on board and get on with it, while this person was prepared to question that. By their own testimony they otherwise didn't doubt the virus or other restrictions.
What the pandemic as a whole accomplished was a pop quiz on societal fitness. It tested things that hadn't been tested in a long time. The sense of "nothing is normal anymore" is related to this, because we've just been asked if our norms are any good, actually. And the particular frenzy of the USA suggests that no, they aren't, not in this instance. South Africa has been subjected to such tests much more frequently in its recent history - and it did not really have the same policy option since it was a latecomer to vaccination. It stands to reason that it would embrace a more measured approach.
What he meant is checking your personal risk of covid hospitalization and death based on age / preexisting conditions / BMI.
The former equals your risk of blocking an ICU bed.
If you still haven’t estimated your personal risk profile you can do so with this calculator from Oxford (afaik based on data from the more dangerous / less transmissible alpha variant, not on omicron which seemingly is taking over now): https://qcovid.org/
If you are elderly or obese, also check the risk of a 20yo or 39yo with normal weight and no preconditions. Given the mild covid cases they’ve got, it seems the author assessed his risk pretty well.
The concern about precedent is ridiculous. The precedent was already set hundreds of years ago; we aren't breaking new ground here with vaccine mandates
False. GP comment and mine are not remotely comparable. GP comment has all of the failures I described - handwavy, lacking in value, condescending. Mine points out those specific problems with that comment - which the GP failed to do for the article - and avoids its specific mistakes.
Yours, too, is handwavy, lacking in value, inaccurate, and anti-intellectual.
Statements like:
> To dig into the particulars is to acknowledge some form of legitimacy.
and
> we're under no obligation to accept any of it before discarding.
...are some of the most anti-intellectual, anti-discussion, close-minded, tribal content that I have ever seen on HN.
Accusations of being a "throw away account" aren't even accurate - I made this account almost three months ago and have made hundreds of comments using it. This is my account. Unless you mean "anonymous" - in which case your account also applies.
...not that that observation would have been relevant to the discussion anyway. It does not matter whether I use a throwaway account, as long as I'm not breaking the HN rules or abusing the platform (which I try very hard to avoid).