Hacker News Reader

Comment by MuchoMaas | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand the criticism here. The article is an analysis of messaging from government and media. The small number of scientific and medical claims present in it (such as "people who've taken COVID vaccines still get infected and spread the disease") are all quite uncontroversial.

Is it your contention that only "health experts" and people with MPH degrees are qualified to speak on these matters? Is there some actual excerpt from the article you can point to as evidence of the author supposedly venturing beyond his area of expertise?

View on HN

That's a fair criticism, and I likely overreacted to the article. I concede that I should and would delete it, but I can't any more.

I bristled at the central theme of the article being based on the premise of a verifiably false narrative that "unvaccinated" as a term or vaccine-hesitant or refusal was something novel to COVID. Of course it is not as repeated measles outbreaks clearly demonstrate.

This is exacerbated for me by the repeated use of the term "medical apartheid" which seeks to liken what I personally perceive as minor medical choices and inconveniences with institutionalized racial oppression.

Much of the rhetorical analysis is based on the medical premise that getting vaccinated has no individual or contagion reduction efficacy. Politics aside, this was simply not true (though thanks to variants may be true today). We will never know now if specific variants could have been avoided if people got promptly vaccinated. Models of herd immunity and studies of actual pockets of measles outbreaks clearly demonstrate the "unvaccinated are in fact a dangerous minority" contrary to what the article seems to assert.

Given that the author does more than review the rhetoric for efficacy but seems to take a medical opinion of ground truth, I still feel that the author is not academically qualified to write a piece like this. They are of course free to write whatever opinion pieces they like but opinion pieces have little place in a scholarly journal.

> Much of the rhetorical analysis is based on the medical premise that getting vaccinated has no individual or contagion reduction efficacy. Politics aside, this was simply not true (though thanks to variants may be true today). We will never know now if specific variants could have been avoided if people got promptly vaccinated.

Delta arose in India before widespread vaccination was even available there, and Omicron comes from a sublineage which even predates Delta. So we actually know the answer to the question of whether immune escape variant mutation could have been prevented had fewer people been unwilling to take COVID vaccines -- it could not have. (And all this is setting aside the fact that there is not actually a magical solution to the impossible logistical problem of getting a shot into every person on Earth all at once, to say nothing of animal reservoirs.) This should have been expected given that decades of research prior to Operation Warp Speed had failed to discover durable and effective sterilizing vaccines against coronaviruses. Even with the original strains which predominated at the time the vaccines were introduced it was never studied and not clear whether they could prevent transmission, and many public health authorities and the CEO of Pfizer said so at the time.

And this was all quite clear long before the propaganda and scapegoating campaigns the article is criticizing kicked into gear. The CDC Provincetown study which showed the vaccinated were transmitting quite easily came out in late July. And today, a simple comparison of highly vaxxed jurisdictions to less vaxxed ones suggests that the shots are actually raising the incidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection, which may be why we've stopped hearing so much about the "vaxxed vs unvaxxed" outcomes and increasing numbers of public health authorities are removing the breakdowns from their reporting.

One of the more contagious variants of omicron (BA2.12) came out of central New York and responsible for all sub-variants like BA.2.12.1 which has been the dominant strain in the USA for the last 3 months.

It seems to me that we will never know for sure where any mutation "originated" with certainty only where it was first detected but it also seems clear to me that the fewer people infected the less chance there would be for a mutation.

Andrew Wakefield and Jenny McCarthy would like to have a word about that "new category of social identification that has been naturalized by COVID-19 propaganda and did not exist in the popular imagination prior to the year 2021".

Well this is a semantic and socio-political question and not a scientific/medical one, but ok. Generally, the term there was "antivaxxer" and referred to people who were vocally opposed to vaccines, or in some cases who those hadn't had their children undergo the usual course of routine vaccinations. In a few cases it was even applied more broadly to people who were simply opposed to mandating childhood vaccinations to attend public school, regardless of their own vaccination status. This is all clearly a completely different category from the 2021 incarnation of "the unvaccinated."

> Well this is a semantic and socio-political question and not a scientific/medical one

You submitted an article from the "Journal for the Critical Study of Society", why would you expect medical questions, or medical discussion?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com