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Comment by mcguire | Hacker News Reader

"Most of the points in this article I'd be comfortable asking to a room of PhD scientists with expertise on Covid and vaccines."

How about discussing those points with a roomful of non-PhD, non-scientists, with no particular knowledge of medicine in general?

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I think its important we have the same conversations in public as we do behind closed doors in academia. Especially when we are asking people to inject medicine in their bodies.

Are you wanting to invite the public as spectators or participants?

If they get injected they are participants already.

They're participants in society but not the scientific community. They're not even part of a study. What makes their opinions on the science worth entertaining? Do you think John and Jane Q Public should be involved in network architecture because they have phones? Or civil engineering of bridges because sometimes they drive over one? I cannot find th logic in these arguments.

This is exactly what the article [that you didn't read] talks about.

The end user can usefully participate in the network architecture debate if enough of their messages are vanishing. If the expert then says: "oh, but 1 in 2680 is rare" other professionals may adjust their opinion about them personally.

If they then go on a crusade to get the exchange scrubbed from the record it would make them more credible to you?

Their doubts are worth entertaining because their health and freedom is directly on the line. They correctly suspect they are being fed only specific information and all counter discussion is getting labeled as "misinformation" by what is supposedly the Fourth Estate.

If I drive across a bridge I should have the right to question the competency and the trust being put in the engineers. If something looks like a crack, I would ask detailed questions and I hope my fellow citizens would do the same. Can you really not find the logic, in good faith?

Should we cut off people below certain h-index?

What’s yours?

Are you part of the scientific community? If not, I'd ask you defer to my opinion on this matter, thanks.

When the public is discussing if we should mandate vaccines or not, and at what age, and in order to do what activities... including important activities like receiving an education... yes, you need to have these conversations outside of the ivory tower.

Should we let the uninformed masses make decisions based on wild speculation? Should non experts get to weigh in in the technical merits of your field? What value do people with no prior knowledge and no expertise add to scientific discussions?

One weird trick tried by the JCVI, the UK’s vaccine top advisory body, that refused to recommend the vaccine for 12-15 age bracket.

Their membership:

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Professor Andrew Pollard, Chair (University of Oxford)

Professor Lim Wei Shen, Chair COVID-19 immunisation (Nottingham University Hospitals)

Professor Anthony Harnden, Deputy Chair (University of Oxford)

Dr Kevin Brown (Public Health England)

Dr Rebecca Cordery (Public Health England)

Dr Maggie Wearmouth (East Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust)

Professor Matt Keeling (University of Warwick)

  Alison Lawrence (lay member)

Professor Robert Read (Southampton General Hospital)

Professor Anthony Scott (London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine)

Professor Adam Finn (University of Bristol)

Dr Fiona van der Klis (National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, Netherlands)

Professor Maarten Postma (University of Groningen)

Professor Simon Kroll (Imperial College London)

Dr Martin Williams (University Hospitals Bristol)

Professor Jeremy Brown (University College London Hospitals)

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Can you spot the unwashed, uninformed, idiots-by-definition, masses here? The result might surprise you.

[0] https://www.gov.uk/government/groups/joint-committee-on-vacc...

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