Comment by dekhn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dekhn | Hacker News Reader

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The issue of side effects being downplayed by the media is entirely a response by public health and media to the large amount of disinformation about vaccines. It was a calculus that was identified and decided on quite some time ago- the reasoning being most people need to hear a simple, straightforward and consistent message to be compliant.

The media and public health leadership has to work on a very thin "knife's edge" when communicating with the public. They have to do 10X the work to debunk garbage than the people have to work to dissemination garbage. And then, a reasonable set of people who do have vaccines problems end up in the middle. The symptoms I had when I had combined Flu/Pneumonia were: could not use left arm for a week, felt super-sick and couldn'tr work for a week. I know that's probably better than getitng a bad flu or pneumonia, but my doctor couldn't even care. She was just happy I got vaccinated. i do think that is a problem.

But it's a different problem and raising that and having a rational discussion about it is not something that can happen in a venue like hacker news, or really any social media.

> The issue of side effects being downplayed by the media is entirely a response by public health and media to the large amount of disinformation about vaccines.

That's your personal belief that may or may not be representative of reality.

Another possible belief that one might have, that you can find evidence for in reality, is that side effects are being downplayed in order to push vaccine mandates through as a way of exerting political control and/or profits for certain organizations (e.g. Pfizer, which has done a lot of extremely questionable things in the past, like a lot of large pharma companies).

> the reasoning being most people need to hear a simple, straightforward and consistent message to be compliant.

...and this line only adds more evidence to the second belief, as it's exactly what entities wanting control want - people to be "compliant" for its own sake, regardless of reality, ethics, or reason.

In any case, downplaying the side effects is unethical and obviously wrong.

If downplaying side effects had an overall greater outcome, would it be unethical and "obviously wrong"?

Nothing is truly obviously wrong. In fact many things we think are obviously wrong, aren't. The ethics of these sorts of things are truly nontrivial.

If you're suggesting we have hte vaccine policies we do so that pfizer etc profit, well I doubt I am going to convince you otherwise. I work in pharma, have a pretty good understanding of our leadership's thought patterns, and I think the vast majority of them would more than happily take a business loss if it meant the world became healthier, but they'd rather keep doing their research and development in the meantime.

> If downplaying side effects had an overall greater outcome, would it be unethical and "obviously wrong"?

Well, lets say that I will have the side effects for the rest of my life, or my kid (9y) will. So lying or hiding about the side effects is better for the big picture, and then fuck me/my kid? This is how you breed anti-vaxx and other people against goverment. 'We lied, but it was from your own good, sure, some suffered the consequenses of our lies, but hey, bars are open now, yay'

But if 10 people suffer permanent consequences from Covid because they didn't push vaccines, then are they justified in pushing the vaccines?

Mind you, I'm not claiming that they are justified. Just that pro-vax side of the question is a lot more than "but bars are now open".

I am not against pushing vaccines. But if hiding/lying is the way they are doing, is it worth it? Will the public ever trust them again?

Let's say (as an experiment) we know that 10% of people will have life-long problems if they take the vaccine, BUT hiding this fact means that 90% of the population will probably take the vaccine and thus, 'saving' a lot of people. Is it ok to 'sacrifice' 10% for the remaining 90%? (I know the values are less, but the questions is, where we draw the line where we should 'hide' things or not). I still hope the side effects will go away, but after one month, this has serious implications in my life, and I feel betrayed for not being informed on the side effects correctly. And for sure, I will not have any other boosters, no matter what mandates or what else they will come up with, and right now, I am recommending others not to get the booster after my experience (maybe wrong, but my experience and suffering trumps any 'greater good' that may put my close friends/family at risk)

Unfortunately, I don't think we can have a truly utilitarian discussion about health care policy in the US. Here's the problem in a nutshell: if you propose that we carefully look at the likely outcomes for patients who need surgery and conclude that some will almost certainly die and instead save the resources for a patient who is more likely to survive, your opponent just has to say "death panels" and immediately, the whole debate is shut down.

My general belief is that the US's inability to address its public health costs in a utilitarian manner will ultimately bankrupt the country. Just today I was reading about how stanford spent millions of dollars to speed up a genomic sequencing pipeline to more rapidly identify rare diseases in infants (ostensibly, so they can be sent to the NICU). Problem is, those millions could also have been spent on covid patients, or covid reasearch, or heart disease research and cancer research (those are the two things that kill the most people in the US) and likely had a greater total outcome! Babies who survive and make it to the NICU bear tremendous costs on the health system, both in the NICU and throughout their lives. But, people love babies so we're willing to spend enormous, illogically enormous amounts of money to save them.

I'm actually with you: Tell us the truth about what you're asking us to do. I think anything else is immoral.

And I think that the last sentence of your first paragraph is critical: They had accumulated trust over decades, and they set all of that on fire. Was Covid a big enough emergency to make that worth it? I think not, even if you buy the "it's for the greater good that we mislead people" idea (which I don't). I think what they did was short-sighted, even within that moral framework.

All I was saying is that, if you are in that moral framework, it's not killing people with vaccines in order to open the pubs. It's killing people with vaccines in order to save more people. I still think it's immoral, and I think that because they destroyed their credibility they're killing more people in the long run, but I think you significantly mis-stated their actual moral calculus.

Not many of us are strict utilitarians. Also, people generally don't like being lied to, and I think this kind of pandering will accelerate the erosion of trust in institutions.

On pharma, they are obviously a business, and profits are of course a major consideration. I'm sure many people who work in pharma have other incentives too (like making world a healthier place, as you suggested). However, that certainly doesn't mean the correct framing is to see pharma companies as entirely altruistic.

Yes, it would be wrong because you don't have informed consent and you cannot really prove your assertion that compliance would be higher if adverse information did not get suppressed. In fact I think this had a negative influence on overall compliance for those that became aware of any framing. Neglecting the severe trust issues some have in official channels, this can even mean an overall bad outcome for health if you do not play with open cards.

I agree with your assertion about the medical industry otherwise. Still, dynamics of vaccines propose that their customers buy a minimum amount of dosages for the venture to be profitable. You create countless incentives to apply as much of them as possible and medical reasons slip into the background.

informed consent is for health trials, not approved medical products.

The ends justify the means is right out of the Machiavelli's The Prince. All sorts of bad things have happened for a greater good. With that logic you can pretty much justify anything.

>the reasoning being most people need to hear a simple, straightforward and consistent message to be compliant.

I notice the word "accurate" wasn't included in what people need to hear from their public health professionals.

I think that's the problem.

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