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Comment by alexmcc81 | Hacker News Reader

Thanks you for this thoughtful response. I chose to be vaccinated and unfortunately have suffered serious consequences like a very small number of other people will statistically. It's been pretty disheartening to see that sharing anything negative about vaccines, even those warned about by medical officials, leads to very negative reactions from people (being told to shut up, being censored/downvoted online etc). I honestly no longer discuss why I'm sick or why I can't do certain things with friends or co-workers.

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That is awful to hear. I unfortunately think this entire debacle will leave a lasting distrust of our medical providers and institutions. Vaccine hesitant are already distrustful, and I believe in the coming months/year as more stand up to the censorship of these real issues, a growing number of vaccinated will feel mislead and lied to (whether justified or not). The only recovery path I can see is the return of a strong level of informed consent between patient and provider, and big tech getting out of the healthcare game.

A good first step might be making sure the population is educated sufficiently to identify and weigh the risks between a 1 in 1,000,000 side effect, the disease the vaccine protects against, and the pure bullshit peddled by fear mongers.

Right now, we have people in the US who still believe that Covid is no worse than a bad case of the flu. All the evidence (at least for the pre Omicron variants) suggests that the reality, as viewed by death rate, is orders of magnitude more bleak.

I'm just an anecdote, but I've had COVID. It was less than a bad case of the flu. To pretend that it affects everyone equally and that they're all the worst thing ever is malpractice. Risk communication should always have been striated by age/comorbidity and let people make decisions from there.

I'm a very similar anecdote. Yes, covid sucked, but it was a mild 48hr illness in my experience. (And in the experience of dozens of my friends.)

It's quite incredible that the GP can complain on the one hand about "the pure bullshit peddled by fear mongers" and then — without apparently recognising the irony — goes on to peddle fear themselves.

Congrats to you and your friends.

Unfortunately that's not the case for hundreds of thousands of your compatriots and millions of your fellow humans.

Conflating fear mongering around vaccines with very few cases of serious side effects (none of which are contagious) with "fear mongering" around the virus itself which has caused literally millions of deaths and untold post-infection issues for millions more is what's really quite incredible.

You don't actually know how common vaccine side effects are, because standard practice is to assume anything that happens >7 days after a vaccine isn't caused by it. This was the standard used in the trials for example. But from the paper:

"the mean time to onset of symptoms [for VITT] after vaccination is 8 days ... The mean time to onset of symptoms after vaccination [for auto immune hepatitis] is 13 days, ranging from 4 to 26 days"

etc. The trials had many other problems like smartphone apps for reporting side-effects that had a fixed list of 'expected' side effects, without any free-form input field to enter new ones. It's clear when you look into the details here that nearly the entire medical system is strongly biased against any findings of side effects and sets things up carefully to let them make such claims, regardless of common sense or what you might expect ethically.

Surely we can deduce whether there are meaningful numbers of serious side effects by looking at past years in population data - especially in populations that have high vaccination rates. If rates have increased markedly, then there's obviously something to investigate. But as noted elsewhere, the rates seem to be 'in line' with pre-vaccine rates for a fair few side effects in a given population. They just get more press now because of the focus on health issues in the media and the hysteria around "vaccine injuries"

You'll get no argument from me that reporting standards leave a bit to be desired. The trials are the trials - they could be improved, sure - but side effect reporting didn't end with trials. Plenty of governments kept tabs on side effects post vaccine once they were being widely administered

But again, you don't know what the true current side effect rate is because it's not being measured honestly. There's a dropbox for people to write in and say they were injured:

https://openvaers.com/covid-data/mortality

which isn't nothing but all such reports are dismissed as coincidences or trolling. That's very unlikely to be the case, but even if you accept that argument, it means governments are forcing the entire population to take brand new drugs on the back of "drug firms assure us there are no long term side effects where long term means more than a week", which beyond being incredibly dishonest, would also be incredibly risky. Asteroids crashing into Earth or nuclear wars have nothing on governments forcing everyone to take a dangerous substance because they blindly trusted the makers.

I’ve had it to, after I was vaccinated. The thing is, you don’t know ahead of time how it will affect you. There are lots of examples of 30 something, fit, athletic even, people with no preexisting conditions, getting very sick and hospitalized, dying, or ending up with long COVID.

Beyond that, many people who are sick with it won’t quarantine themselves for 10 days or wear masks and end up infecting others —- assuming they even know they’re infected.

So this attitude of “well it was no big deal for me” does nothing to attenuate the risk downwards for others.

There’s a hell of a lot of selfishness going on by people who just don’t want to be inconvenienced by behavioral changes to protect others.

> There are lots of examples of 30 something, fit, athletic even, people with no preexisting conditions, getting very sick and hospitalized, dying, or ending up with long COVID.

These are anecdotes that stand out specifically because of their rarity. This is why we need what the other poster said - Data striated by age and gender.

While true, there are also examples with vaccine reactions.

There's a hell a lot of selfishness going on by people demanding perfect security and therefore whole industries to be shut down.

I am vaccinated and get tested at least 3 times a week because I still have contact to others, but the selfishness doesn't just affect on position in this debate.

Even if it's true that Covid most direly affects people in certain cohorts (and I think it's fairly clear that this is the case), the behavior of everyone is still a matter of public health for the reason that people in low-risk cohorts can pass the disease on to people in high risk cohorts.

Part of the "public" part of public health is that sometimes it's necessary to take actions as an entire population to limit the risk to a subset of people with higher risks.

I recognize that there are many factors besides dying of Covid at play here. A lot of people have certainly suffered economically, among a great many other affects, as a result of both Covid and the response to it.

I'm not trying to oversimplify here, but it's also not as simple as "let everybody make the best decision for themselves based on the available data". Which I'll point out we (mostly) didn't have in March and April of 2020.

> All the evidence (at least for the pre Omicron variants) suggests that the reality, as viewed by death rate, is orders of magnitude more bleak.

Dr. Rochelle Walensky, Director of CDC was actually in an interview recently where she said 75% of Covid deaths occurred in people with 4 co-morbidities.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pa7N-iNkaUE

This statement begs the question of what percentile of deaths occurred with no co-morbidities at all. In my mind at least, I don't know enough about the death rate to inform if its bleak or not judging as a healthy 41 year old without complicating medical factors.

I was looking at the CDC data for that claim, it looks to me like many of those "co-morbidities" referenced appear to be sepsis, respiratory failure, heart failure, and co-infections:

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm?fb...

Most of those sound like they would have been caused by COVID. So, were they probably a fairly normal 41 year old, until they were in the hospitalized for COVID, developed complications, and died. Or is there more to the model here?

Even more confusingly, about half of the US population is obese, but it is only mentioned in a small percentage of death reports (up to about of quarter in the younger populations). Taken naively, this would seem to imply that being obese actually strongly protects from death. But I suspect that it is instead simply not being listed in the causes of death in most cases.

To answer my own question two weeks later, it turns out that number quoted on GMA was specifically the percentage of vaccinated people (https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/covid-deaths-4-comorbiditi...). Her statement had no relevance to an unvaccinated person, as the grand-parent's comment was asking about.

This saddens me greatly.

I'm continually amazed at the arrogant, ignorant, and down right "head in the sand" nature that has swept across the minds of the land. Worse is that "their thoughts are not theirs". They are being taught to hate you because your truth is inconvenient.

I wish you the best recovery possible.

Good luck with any compensation. I hear it's even harder to get compensated through the countermeasure program than the regular vaccine program.

Yep, a lot of people are unaware that this is covered by a separate, wildly different program. The coverages are outlined here:

https://www.hrsa.gov/cicp/cicp-vicp

CICP only covers severe physical injury or death, has a 1 year filing limit, only covers related reimbursement (not pain and suffering), and is eligibility is an administrative decision (not a judicial one).

If "information is surprise" (Claude Shannon, 1948, https://plus.maths.org/content/information-surprise), we should be celebrating rather than censoring surprising information signals from living human outliers.

I relate. After my vaccination I had about 2 months of severe pains in my gut. I only told a few people because I really believe in the power of the vaccine and know people will twist my own words.

Hopefully you reported to VAERS. People need to report potential events so that the data is present to do statistical analysis on. It's a shame how terrible the data currently is with all the under reporting.

VAERS is garbage in, garbage out. There is no curation since it is self reported, you may as well mine Reddit comments or Twitter to get the same data.

Yep, and yet it's the data the government uses for identifying issues...

This is true of COVID "cases" and deaths as well.

Not really. Can have all cause mortality data from every year that tells us excess deaths. If we see a spike of 400k excess deaths for 2020 and 2021, then it’s pretty obvious how many to attribute to the virus.

Additionally, if someone is pCR positive, symptom positive, and dies from a cytokine storm, that’s pretty strong evidence.

But we don’t even need the latter. Excess deaths tell us approximately how many the virus killed, period, QED. There’s no denying COVID killed 10x more than the worst flu since 1918.

"Can have all cause mortality data from every year that tells us excess deaths."

Well, sort of for n-order impacts, but not for direct numbers. To do that the other variables have to stay the same, which clearly isn't the case with the affects of lockdown and medical system strains (increased drinking, drug use, mental health strains, etc; less preventative care and access to medical care, etc).

If the virus is indirectly killing people by overwhelming the healthcare system, i’d attribute the deaths to the virus.

Additionally I think we could look at countries whose health systems are bad or non-existent as a proxy to see excess deaths.

Are you trying to defend the notion that COVID isn’t any worse than the flu?

I’d say that as a balancing effect, the social distancing and masking of anything, has reduced deaths from other viruses in these last two years and so excess deaths might be undercounted. (Flu positivity is way down, and only 700 deaths recorded flu positive in 2020-2021 vs 22,000-39,000 in previous two years)

"Are you trying to defend the notion that COVID isn’t any worse than the flu?"

Nobody in this chain has suggested it. The person you responded to said that covid cases and death stats are garbage in garbage out. I would largely agree considering the underreporting of asymptomatic cases as well as the lack of distinction between causative and non-causitive hospitalizations and deaths.

The very argument you are making about possibly fewer deaths from other things supports my argument - the data doesn't exist to cover all the variables and some of the data is garbage. There is a huge difference between direct and n-order deaths, both for covid and other things. We could compare either one so long as we are all on the same page, but what's the point? The conversation was about data quality and not about lethality.

Do you think the data about excess deaths is less reliable than VAERS? On the one hand, we have actual factual data possibly with an unproven (but highly likely) correlation and on other hand, we have VAERS which can simply be spammed by anyone.

This feels like you are trolling at this point. Nobody said they are less reliable. The excess deaths weren't even a point in this discussion until you brought it up. The other commenter specific mentioned covid cases and deaths.

You mention "factual data". The excess death numbers are estimates, per the CDC. They are approximate and could be changed as new information comes to light, etc. No problem with that, but not exactly facts as far as attributing a hard death count.

The issue with the VAERS data isn't people "spamming" it. It's that legitimate potential events are not reported. The purpose of VAERS is to provide early warning. This means people are supposed to report events that don't have a different proven cause. Noise from coincidental events could then be removed using population baseline occurrence. I'd the data simply isn't there, then it's not very useful for that purpose. I believe they also perform some cursory validation with the provider before accepting/confirming it, but I could be wrong.

There clearly is some curation because reports appear in the database in batches. Reports can be self reported but don't have to be.

Regardless, even if everything you say is true, what it means is that governments deliberately run useless post-trial safety monitoring mechanisms. Which is terrifying and terrible. Putting all humanities eggs in one basket, literally.

I'm sorry to hear that. We need your voice. There are people who still haven't gotten "vaccinated" and are under pressure to do so. By speaking up you might be able to save someone else from what you're going through. Please don't let people shut you down. Your personal experience is the gold standard of scientific and clinical evidence. Any pushback you get is irrational and based on fear and ignorance.

> By speaking up you might be able to save someone else from what you're going through.

Exactly how? By not getting vaccinated? By making sure the risk of side-effects from the vaccine is lower than the risk of getting the disease? How can you weigh these risks? You can say, by doing statistics. You need to be able do estimate conditional expectations, the more granular the conditions, the better. For example you start with the unconditional expectation of having a severe outcome from Covid vs from the vaccine. The vaccine wins hands down. Then you do expectation conditional on age. The FDA and CDC did that when issuing their approval, and making the recommendations for various age groups. For more granular conditions, the CDC maintains the VAERS database [1], where every adverse event linked to a vaccine is tabulated. For example, let's say the CDC analyses this data set and concludes that for people with kidney stones the vaccine's side-effects outweigh the benefits. The CDC will issue the appropriate recommendation.

How exactly do you think someone's "voice on the internet" will result in people making better informed decisions, vs people actually listening to the CDC recommendations?

[1] https://vaers.hhs.gov/

I hope your situation will improve eventually. Are you at least getting compensated?

Someone else, but my guess would be no. It's not too difficult to get compensated if your injury is on the list of known injuries. This being a new vaccine, there is not a lot of history to have produced a robust list.

If it's not on the list, you have to prove that it was more likely than not caused by the vaccine. You have to provide the theory for the underlying mechanism that caused it. So if it's really rare, you're screwed because there likely hasn't been much if any research on it. Then it will take a minimum of 3 years to into a courtroom because the government has left the vaccine courts severely understaffed.

Dealing with something similar in my family. I believe it's an autoimmune autonomic dysfunction issue brought on by multiple simultaneously administered vaccines. This presented a few days after vaccination and the doctors didn't even report it to VAERS! They had no explanation of the cause yet didn't care to report it as a possible event simply because it's not required by law or "I'm not the primary care physician".

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