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Comment by Nursie | Hacker News Reader

Why? A tiny minority of truckers is making a huge fuss over really very little - a vaccine being mandated to cross the border.

In what way will this "not end good for Canada"?

Most likely the blockades will be shut down and everyone else will be able to get on with life.

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A fringe minority wouldn't be greeted by people lining highways and overpasses in freezing cold. [1] It wouldn't raise over nine million dollars in crowd funding, twice. [2] At the very least we're talking about a very large minority. It could even be the (previously silent) majority. And the issue is not just border crossing mandates, but all the rules (often absurd and arbitrary) that piled up over the last two years in Canada. Like curfews and prohibitions on shopping in Quebec. The border requirements were just the last straw that catalyzed a particular group of people to express the growing public discontent.

1 - https://youtu.be/pcGsqLRyKo0?t=67

2 - https://givesendgo.com/FreedomConvoy2022

If you can't even describe the situation accurately, why should anyone care about your take on it?

Respectfully, nine million is fuck all. And no, it doesn't have to be any size of minority at all, just a few loud arseholes, some of whom appear to have openly identified as white supremacists, others of whom have urinated on war memorials - https://metro.co.uk/2022/01/31/war-memorial-urinated-on-by-a...

This doesn't look like public discontent, it looks like a small group of motivated contrarians and their international backers.

You know what looks like public discontent? The public coming together to stop trucks disrupting their lives and their city - https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/battle-of-billings...

And none of this answers the question about how this will "not end good for canada".

and it's mostly the same $9m, after Gofundme refunded everyone.

Of the ~90k GiveSendGo donors, ~35k were from Canada. Population: 36-38m.

The cause that raised 9 million dollars in a few days is a "a tiny minority of truckers [...] making a huge fuss over really very little"... because someone somewhere claims that they've seen a data dump of hacked donation data... and their "analysis" demonstrates that the movement has wide international support. Reddit logic at its finest.

The leaked data has been seen by many news organisations and individuals. I calculated the figures I gave - not "someone somewhere".

Here's one of the top donors confirming their entry was accurate: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/nb-sussex-corne...

Vaccine mandates are a huge deal. You think they aren't a big deal because you ignore all the evidence and testimonies of people who have been injured by them.

"Most likely the blockades will be shut down and everyone else will be able to get on with life."

Except for all people who can't because they got unlucky in the vaccine lottery, like Maddie de Garay:

https://thecovidblog.com/2021/07/08/maddie-de-garay-ohio-13-...

Note: de Garay is a child. Zero benefit from Covid vaccines to her or anyone else. It's bad enough when parents submit their children for medical experimentation like that, but when governments force them to do so it's even worse.

> Zero benefit from Covid vaccines to her or anyone else.

Well I can see you're not interested in things like facts, evidence, science or reality. Never mind then.

You're probably mis-reading my (in fairness badly worded) sentence. I mean there are no medical benefits to vaccinating children, including no benefits of vaccinating her to e.g. her parents or teachers. Not that there are no benefits of vaccines to anyone at all.

The benefits to vaccinating children are less clear relative to the obvious benefits to vaccinating adults, but if the protection rate is on-par with adults, there will be more benefit to vaccinating children than not.

An absolute handful of children have been (possibly; causality unclear) sickened by the COVID-19 vaccine.

About 1,000 children have died of COVID-19 in the US (https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Deaths-Focus-...).

The exact details of why the virus hits children less hard are unclear; one theory is that the primary cause of lung-failure death in adults is a cytokine storm (i.e. the immune system reacting to the virus by attacking too many healthy cells at a rate the body can't repair), and a younger, more naive immune system is less likely to have picked up whatever environmentally-primed triggers COVID-19 aggravates to kick off a cytokine storm.

... but sadly, "less likely" isn't "didn't happen," and if that causality is correct, some thousand unlucky kids have gotten snake-eyes on the immune dice and died of a disease that we can now vaccinate for. That's an order of magnitude more children than the number we even suspect of being sickened by the vaccine.

We should vaccinate those who haven't been vaccinated because the risk balance is pretty clear at this point from the gross numbers we have on under-18 vaccination already.

> About 1,000 children have died of COVID-19 in the US

from your source:

> COVID-19 deaths are those with confirmed or presumed COVID-19

i.e. 1000 children have died with COVID, not of COVID. Big difference.

Name a reliable source for "injury by vaccine mandate".

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