Comment by marvin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by marvin | Hacker News Reader

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> I am actually somewhat concerned of the lifetime cumulative risk of specifically Covid-19 vaccinations. Particularly if it becomes standard practice to get a new booster every 6 months for the rest of your life

I think it's valuable to have this public debate in general, and also regarding the quarantine measures. Quarantine measures have been criticized as something of a ratchet that doesn't have anything to do with disease, but rather with authorities controlling the population.

And I guess in some locales that criticism has strong merit. But in my locale, all the extraordinary laws enacted to mandate social distancing, quarantines and so on were rolled back this spring, triggering a big Covid wave that turned out to be (in line with health authority expectations) relatively harmless due to vaccinations and previous exposure. Some businesses struggled with their headcount for a few weeks, but within reason. And the laws weren't re-instated. So I recently caught covid along with seven others at a small party, where someone was coughing without covering their mouth all night and of course no one considered wearing a mask. But this is now all in line with official policy. Literally forbidden one year ago, on multiple counts, in principle punishable with jail but generally fines.

So I do think it's important to follow up on these arguments. It's always a cost-benefit judgement, and it's ultimately a democratic, political question. Not something that can be decided by a bureaucrat. I've always figured that everyone getting booster shots every six months for 30 years sounded almost parodically excessive, but certainly there have been a few voices demanding that.

> relatively harmless due to vaccinations and previous exposure

This year's dominant strain was significantly less lethal/debilitating for unvaccinated people as well.

The restrictions are still reasonable in hindsight, especially in places like Canada where hospital capacity was quickly overwhelmed in all waves leading up to and until this Spring.

Restrictions obviously can't create a world with "COVID zero" but it can slow down the infection rate so that hospitals can still treat other emergencies (although, again, in Canada it was barely enough). Kinda hard to run a hospital as usual if you have 30 people per day rolling in and they never leave.

This year's COVID waves are quite harmless also to unvaccinated people. It's because Omicron is less dangerous, not because of vaccination, but of course public health authorities will ignore this and claim victory. What else can they do? Public health is a dangerous concept by construction because the social costs of them admitting they were wrong are so high.

when surmising that the only reason someone hasn't "admitted" they were wrong (and assuming you are right), is fear of the social costs, it's always good to take a step back and see if you are actually the one unable to admit being wrong, for the same reason

What social costs? I'm a nobody on the internet. Although outside of HN I've posted things about COVID and the failures of public health, they had little impact because I'm not a part of that community. As a consequence:

1. I have no career in public health or academia to defend.

2. If I was wrong (I'm not) then it might hurt my standing a bit, but lots of people on the internet have opinions on random topics that other people think are wrong and they still manage to get jobs, create products, get customers etc.

3. Likewise, being right also doesn't help my career or life very much.

Contrast this to people like Ferguson or Fauci:

1. Their entire professional existence hinges on the perception that they are experts in disease.

2. If they were wrong (they are) then it'd not only hurt their standing a bit, but cause hundreds of millions or billions of people to hate them viscerally due to the staggering costs of what they insisted on. It would also destroy their self-esteem and result in them knowing that they'd done evil things, making them some of the most notorious people in history.

3. In contrast, if they were right, they .... get to keep their current jobs, salary and social status, more or less.

Frankly if I did work in public health it'd be very hard to imagine ever admitting to mistakes either. Public health operates through government force and COVID policies in particular involved forcing people to do things harmful to themselves at great cost to themselves, against their will. You have to believe you made the right calls if you're in that position, it's the corrupting influence of power. If you didn't you'd immediately quit in shame and never show your face in polite society again, so the only ones that survive in that world are the merciless ones who can never admit they are wrong. Which is exactly what we see!

>What social costs?

this would be a good question to ask the experts you are accusing of dishonesty, so they have the opportunity to come up with a similarly defensive response based on equally plausible denials

take your example of Fauci for example - he's admitted mistakes, and has not lost the trust of most Americans like your premise claims (save for a minority who thinks mistakes, something all humans commit, are a sign of weakness).

so already we know the "social costs" for him that you're talking about as an example, are far overblown

indeed, most Americans understand the trade-offs that we made during the pandemic based on what we knew for sure at the time (not what internet people were claiming without trustworthy, peer-reviewed studies).

"he's admitted mistakes, and has not lost the trust of most Americans"

Has he? Which mistakes? I've never seen him admit any of the actual big mistakes like:

- Lockdowns didn't work (now the position of the German government's official enquiry).

- Masks don't work either.

- Deliberately lying about scientific topics to try and manipulate behaviour wasn't a good idea (he's admitted doing this to the New York Times, twice!)

- The vaccines were massively oversold.

Even Bill Gates has admitted the latter, but I don't recall Fauci ever doing so.

As for not having lost the trust of most Americans, maybe so, but that's just a testament to the shocking level of propaganda he benefits from. He's certainly lost the trust of anyone paying attention. The man is a self-confessed serial liar: he lied about masks, and he lied about herd immunity thresholds, both times making scientific claims about supposedly medical facts and then later changing his position, saying he was just trying to manipulate people's behavior. This is all on the record. Anyone who continues to believe this man about anything is certainly an idiot - fool me twice, right?

It sounds like you've already made up your mind on most of these things, and don't want to be convinced. For example, the U.S. never had an actually-enforced nationwide lockdown, and many conservative politicians and their supporters actively worked to make such a plan fail before it could even happen.

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