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Comment by sn0w_crash | Hacker News Reader

I've seen many dumb events happen in my lifetime, and there were a few months where large parts of the scientific establishment went into denial mode over COVID.

Note that if you want to claim stuff like this, before you do so, you do an excellent study that can't be trivially refuted (it takes time and effort to steelman a paper and the PR before unleashing it). For example, the paper this article cites is: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34991109/ The article ends with:

"Our findings are reassuring; we find no population-level clinically meaningful change in menstrual cycle length associated with COVID19 vaccination. Our findings support and help explain the self-reports of changes in cycle length. Individuals receiving two COVID-19 vaccine doses in a single cycle do appear to experience a longer but temporary cycle length change."

if the changes exist, but aren't medically important, there is stil a risk that many people will be vaccine-hesistant if they hear this in the news. The medical establishment skirted with hiding some legitimate results for this reason (I think they are re-evaluating whether this is a good idea, for the future).

BTW, similar work by the same team was published in January (7 months ago) and NPR tweeted it, without being banned: https://journals.lww.com/greenjournal/Fulltext/9900/Associat...

here's a tweet from almost a year ago addressing the issue of whether people were being ignored/dismissed: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/health-fitness/body/vaccine-peri... with a bunch of discussion about exactly this.

> It’s really amazing to watch this stuff happen in real-time.

You spelled "horrifying" wrong.

It’s because you can’t have a reasonable discussion in an environment where the antivaxers are violent and hostile. The opposition is forced to put up a brick wall.

The vax is still orders of magnitude safer than catching SARS-COV-2.

There are some sizeable demographics for whom this may not be the case: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4125239

> The excess risk of serious adverse events of special interest surpassed the risk reduction for COVID-19 hospitalization relative to the placebo group in both Pfizer and Moderna trials (2.3 and 6.4 per 10,000 participants, respectively).

That's true, but is not really relevant to sn0w_crash's observations.

It is very relevant. It is because antivaxers created a violent and hostile environment that forces the opposition to become draconian.

Just because you keep repeating this line, it doesn't make it true

Just because you said it isn’t doesn’t make it false either.

On a more serious note, of course it’s true. Blocking traffic, picketing hospitals, calling for the death of medical professionals is violent behavior.

Just to be clear about what actually transpired, traffic was blocked (a minor inconvenience) to protest mandates which were destroying people's livelihoods -- mandates which never had even the slightest scientific justification since they were all implemented well after the CDC Provincetown study in July showed the vaccinated spread COVID quite easily, but which the provax side continued to insist on through the fall and winter in a display of pointless stubbornness.

Most of the hospital protests were also in reaction to mandates for staff, as well as the absolutely psychotic and vindictive policy many of them adopted of refusing to provide transplant surgery to the unvaccinated.

It was a hell of a lot more than mere inconvenient protest. There were assaults at hospitals. Doctors and nurses had to take extra personal security measures. Ambulances were delayed and blocked. Patients were subjected to disruptive noise and din from dawn to late night. Vaccination clinics had bomb threats phoned in, and there were more assaults. Oh, and hospitals were overwhelmed by the non-immunized brainwashed, leading us to the current crisis of quitting, burned-out nurses and doctors, who just can’t take this shit any more.

It was a hell of a lot more than “a minor inconvenience”.

Forces?

The vax doesn't prevent catching it, it only reduces the intensity of it.

You'll catch it anyway but it's safer to catch it with the vax for sure

For all of those items cited the context and purpose of the claim matter, and when those are considered the reactions were reasonable, albeit with varying touches of the knee-jerkiness defensiveness that can happen in response to some clearly naive person jumping to a totally unsupported conclusion and want to make life alter choices about it simply because they like the outcome.

I.e. For Covid origins back in the day there wasn't a lot of info available to make any conclusions, but a lot of people acted like if the thing had leaked out of a lab we could just blame china and somehow that would mean we could go back to normal and also absolve the trump admin of any mismanaged response.

Then with vaccines, they've always been clearly and obviously a net benefit versus remaining unvaxxed yet antivaxxers grab on to any report of rare or mild side effects and act like it's worse than the virus. And they question all the studies that show the vaccine is okay, yet trust poor trash studies on 46 people about horse dewormer.

It's truly amazing to watch this stuff happen in real time, the knots people will contort themselves into, and the myopic analysis they'll swallow just because they wish something something was true.

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