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Comment by qbasic_forever | Hacker News Reader

What's most concerning IMHO is that this appears to be from community spread with no known recent travel history (polio apparently incubates in 7-21 days so they would have caught it in the last few weeks).

Even more troubling is that they were paralyzed which means they were one of the less than 1% of polio cases that turn into a severe event like being paralyzed. The vast majority of cases are asymptomatic or just give you diarrhea.

How many people could be out in the community and spreading it without anyone knowing?

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> How many people could be out in the community and spreading it without anyone knowing?

I wonder whether anyone has checked Rockland county wastewater? This kind of testing recently detected it in London: https://www.science.org/content/article/poliovirus-in-london...

I presume you mean here as an indicator, not a cause?

That's right: wastewater is a good signal for what's happening inside the people upstream

He did travel, to Poland and Hungary. The AP originally had an article claiming no travel, but later updated it.

Vincent Racaniello covers this and other details, recommended: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-5KGHzHTsI

He didn't travel in the last 30 days I read, and the incubation time is shorter than that. I.e. he caught it after coming home.

Vincent has been a very bad source of information for the COVID pandemic. He has famously been against vaccine boosters, and even declared he didn't think he needed one. Even now as the need for second boosters is clear (and the need for first boosters completely justified and verified) he still says they aren't necessary. This is on top of him downplaying every variant like Omicron and saying they wouldn't be a problem (and then they went on to be huge problems). He should not be platformed IMHO.

Based on your opinions, I don't think you should be platformed.

Kind of stinks when it's used against you, doesn't it?

The solution to bad ideas is more ideas, not "deplatforming" or whatever mealy-mouthed word is currently being used to make censorship marketable these days.

So would you consider @dang to be some mealy-mouthed censor when he admonishes and possibly removes content here that goes against community guidelines?

That fully depends on the content of the guidelines.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

My question is simple: is there any speech that should not be tolerated here? Yes, or no?

I am totally fine with banning verbal attacks on others, just like physical attacks are typically banned IRL too.

Basically the same rules can be applied, for example a counter attack in defense is a lighter offense than an unprovoked attack.

I think that this does not particularly limit someone's ability to express their opinions, ideas and beliefs.

Outright incitement to violence against others is easy to recognize as speech not worth tolerating.

But here it gets interesting: hate speech wrapped up as "opinions, ideas, and beliefs". At the risk of downvotes (what ev er), I posit that Fox News engages in high level hate speech (not every minute but enough for it to count).

Case in point: Tucker Carlson's "The Great Replacement" agenda. It's thinly veiled white nationalism -- basically arguing that white people are under attack from non-whites. Yes, it gets discussed by him as "what if" and "how come" but it has an agenda that is prepared to be enforced by violence by those who are spooked by it.

I don't have an answer for how to deal with this, but it is in the end hate speech and is not healthy for society as a whole.

Manner restrictions are different than content restrictions.

There’s speech that doesn’t fit the community’s guidelines in terms of the manner it is expressed, but I don’t believe there are any ideas that should not be tolerated here.

Hitler did nothing wrong.

Do you still stand by your statement? Should that idea be tolerated on this forum?

Sure. Why not? Make a cogent argument for the idea.

I’ll disagree, of course, but in the exceedingly unlikely event that you present a strong argument, it’s still an opportunity to hone my own counter-argument.

Good to see that Godwin [1] holds.

The answer is yes, absolutely.

And I'd happily engage you to try to convince and educate you, in a respectful way, why I believe that's incorrect.

Because that's how we raise ourselves up.

Censoring, reviling, shutting down and abandoning people who hold these sorts of beliefs only serves to reinforce them and drive them into echo chambers of radicalization.

So yes, by all means. Express any thoughts, ideas, opinions or dreams you have.

By actively participating in the marketplace of ideas, we can let the best ones rise, and the worst ones defeat themselves.

Through discussion and debate, not force or cooersion, of which censorship is an insidious form.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law

Why not try something along the lines of:

"We need to kill all the ** to keep our race pure"

Is that speech that should be tolerated? Karl Popper would say no, and I agree with his reasoning.

Context matters in my opinion. If you say this to a person whose jewish family has survived the Holocaust, then I would say this statement is an indirect verbal attack. You could as well say "Your family should have been killed". Verbal attacks are an attempt to hurt people, just like physical attacks are, and therefore in my opinion it is fair to ban them to some extent.

I don't even think this has anything to do with free speech, as in freedom to express your thoughts. The key with free speech is that everyone is entitled to that. Verbal attacks are often an attempt to stop others from expressing their thoughts, so I think they are fundamentally an action against free speech.

That being said, as a German, I don't agree with the German blanket bans of certain expressions. Context and intentions always matter, I think.

I think that I don't agree with this, entirely.

Most, if not all, meaningful speech risks offending someone.

Framing uncomfortable beliefs as attacks grants a form of "victim power" by which anyone can claim to be a victim of your "attack" as a means of shutting down speech.

This isn't a hypothetical, I see the technique used frequently.

I agree that this is a possibility and a risk, but I think that a bit of common sense goes a long way. One of my classmates tried to frame everyone who disagreeed with him as nazi, but nobody fell for it, because it was obvious that he just tried to evade criticism. There also needs to be some leeway - for example a German court has ruled that a public service worker could not be fired for calling his boss an "old asshole", because they've known each other for very long. Context matters.

At a broader level I think the solution is simple. Any person must be able to decide who he/she personally wants to listen to. in forums this can be implemented by a feature that allows you to hide certain people's comments based on your own judgement. At HN and most other forums the moderator or others decide if a person's comments are to be visible to others.

I really have a hard time understanding what the drama is about.

surely they are testing sewage to see if there is more of the polio virus in the drainage. I thought the CDC had started using that a lot more often. On the left you have nuts who think vaccines are unnatural and therefore awful, and on the right you have nuts who say the government is injecting nanites for 5G mind control. It's a crazy world out there.

I mean... the crazy nuts also predict a lot of stuff that ends up being true.

I got vaccinated because "if you get vaccinated, you won't get covid"... and then the narrative changed. 5G (well, every technology from 2g onwards) also enables a lot more precise tracking of users (their location).

If you get the vaccine, you won't get (and this detail is important) the ALPHA VARIANT of covid. And indeed, I'd bet dollars to donuts you did not end up catching Alpha.

The vaccine was never going to be great against variants (though some people did claim it would be just as good with little evidence) and the more removed the variants get (ie, variant of a variant) the less chance those older vaccines have of resisting them.

So it's not exactly that the "narrative changed" so much as that the virus changed and the narrative didn't keep up fast enough.

Pedantic: the alpha variant is B.1.1.7 previously known as the UK variant. The original strain didn’t get a Greek letter

Almost nobody caught Alpha or the original strain the vaccines actually targeted because they had naturally disappeared before the vaccines were even available.

The fact that the virus would change was obvious from the start. Coronaviruses always do mutate fast, it's why nobody bothered making vaccines for then before. The narrative changed not because the emergence of yet another variant was unexpected but because the narrative was always and everywhere whatever would convince people to take shots, not what was true.

You can still get the alpha variant.

For what it's worth, we knew really early that the vaccine reduced severe illness primarily. People continued to be, and still are, inaccurate.

The rampant historical revisionism about vaccines is absurd. It's 1984 level stuff.

The trials didn't even measure "severe illness", so no, we definitely didn't know that by any definition of early. Actually that claim only came to the fore as effectiveness against infection collapsed and a new justification was required.

https://thehill.com/homenews/sunday-talk-shows/553773-fauci-...

> “So even though there are breakthrough infections with vaccinated people, almost always the people are asymptomatic and the level of virus is so low it makes it extremely unlikely — not impossible but very, very low likelihood — that they’re going to transmit it,” Fauci said.

So, very few get it at all, and the ones who get it, can't spread it, even without masks. This (well, similar, from our local agencies) was the info I got when i went to get vaccinated.

I'm going to repeat my claim.

You can still get it.

You are agreeing with me.

If you want people to trust you, you have to be honest. If you make obvious lies then you get caught and trust is destroyed. The CDC repeatedly lied and misled the American public and now is having trust issues leading to people not getting vaccinated like they should.

If you want to be trusted, don't lie.

> if you get vaccinated, you won't get covid

Literally no one reputable ever said this given that original studies showed 95% effectiveness at preventing wild-type Covid…

https://thehill.com/homenews/sunday-talk-shows/553773-fauci-...

So, almost noone vaccinated will get it, and those who do, won't spread it.

So, people literally died, because they though they coudln't get it, and went out, and other people who though they couldn't spread it, spread it around.

> if you get vaccinated, you won't get covid

[…]

> So, almost noone vaccinated will get it

That’s a pretty clear case of moving the goalposts if I ever saw it.

President Biden said it.

I’d like to see a strong new center.

This whole thing is very concerning.

"According to the New York State Health Department, a person was found to be infected by a vaccine-derived poliovirus type 2 (VDPV2), aka revertant polio Sabin type 2 virus."

"Vaccine-associated paralytic polio" (https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/polio/hcp/vaccine-derived-p...) is "a rare adverse event" following immunization with the Oral Polio Vaccine. "The United States exclusively has used IPV since 2000."

I doesn't seem likely that a "young adult" who hasn't travelled outside the US would be exposed to the OPV. Possibly, from some of the other cases mentioned in the CDC article, someone the young adult interacted with had been exposed to it, though.

The original article doesn't mention if the young adult was immunocompromised, which seems like a requirement for a secondary OPV infection.

This does indeed seem like the unfortunate confluence of being exposed to someone shedding the vaccine-strain and community transmission. Which is exceedingly rare in the U.S., but is entirely foreseeable in low vaccination rate enclaves, which are growing more common.

The risk of spread from weakened virus is completely eliminated under a proper vaccination program. You go into a community, vaccinate everyone, and you have zero risk.

The fact the patient was unvaccinated was effectively their "immunocompromise" that allowed the virus to spread to them.

Unfortunately, vaccinating everyone is not actually zero risk. A small proportion of people who recieve the oral polio vaccine develop vaccine-associated paralytic polio which is exactly what it sounds like - full-on paralytic polio caused by receiving the vaccine. It's a rare complication, somewhere around one in a million, but back when polio had been eradicated in most of the world it was the main cause of paralytic polio. So we'd really like to fully eradicate polio and then stop using that vaccine.

This is made harder by another similar but subtly different problem - circulating vaccine-derived polioviruses. They come from the oral vaccine too, but instead of affecting vaccinated people they spread amongst the unvaccinated population and evolve to regain the virulence and high rate of paralyzation of wild polio. It's one of those viruses that was found in New York. This poses a problem for eradicating polio and stopping vaccination, because once you're no longer vaccinating people they can catch and spread the virus from the oral vaccine and it can evolve into something dangerous. The current VDPV problem traces back to an attempt to finally finish eradicating the type 2 poliovirus, which no longer exists in its wild form, by removing it from the oral vaccine and stamping out any subsequent VDPV spread. This failed badly.

Wikipedia states

> A potential, adverse effect of the OPV is its known ability to recombine to a form that causes neurological infection and paralysis.[27] This genetic reversal of the pathogen to a virulent form takes a considerable time (at least 12 months) and does not affect the person who was originally vaccinated. The vaccine-derived attenuated virus is normally excreted from vaccinated people for a limited period. Thus, in areas with poor sanitation and low vaccination coverage, the spontaneous reversal of the vaccine-derived virus to a virulent form and its spreading in the environment can lead to unvaccinated people becoming infected.

Which boils down to no, you cannot get polio from the polio vaccine but potentially some others could get polio from you for a short period a year later if they’re not vaccinated.

A couple of paragraphs up in the Wikipedia article: "Oral polio vaccine results in vaccine-associated paralytic poliomylelitis in about three per million doses". I've also seen one in two million doses quoted elsewhere, but it's somewhere around the one in a million mark. You coupld probably quibble about whether that really counts as getting polio, but it's paralysis caused by infection with poliovirus and there is "no clinical difference between the paralysis caused by wild poliovirus, OPV, or VDPV" according to the CDC's FAQ on the topic so that's not a particularly interesting semantic quibble to me.

But NOT to the person who was vaccinated

One in 200 infections leads to paralysis. So yes it is effectively zero risk compared to non-vaccination.

If you eliminate the unvaccinated population, vaccine-derived infections are a non-issue. Which is how we addressed the problem prior to 1979 - largely due to the fact that everyone saw first had what the virus did and there was no vaccine hesitancy.

But we haven't used weakened virus vaccines for polio in the last 20 years, so it's kinda moot.

> zero risk

* if you live on a spherical planet with spherical people

And cows.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_cow

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