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Comment by joshuahughes | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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