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Comment by OrvalWintermute | Hacker News Reader

I asked a highly credentialed, very aged, pediatrician why I should get my toddler with no comorbidities vaccinated with a novel type of vaccine having significant known side effects, for a disease having a fatality rate something like 1 in 5 or 10 million.

His answer of "get it to protect everyone else" was the worst non-answer I have ever heard.

Nothing in my life has shook my trust in so called "Authority Figures" like the debacle that is the Covid Response and Mandate drive.

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"To protect everyone else" is not a non-answer, it's the actual real answer. You may not like it but that doesn't change the fact that that's how vaccines (at a societal level) work.

Uh but this vaccine didn't stop or even reduce transmission. The idea that you had to do it for other people never made any sense even to begin with. If the vaccine worked it wouldn't matter what other people did, because you'd be protected by it, right? And don't talk about people who can't take it for some reason because mysteriously, getting medical exemptions turned out to be impossible throughout the vaccine mandate period even for people who had severe reactions to their first shot.

The whole thing was just illogical nonsense forced through by people who knew perfectly well that if it was phrased as an individual choice, huge numbers would choose not to have it. Yet for collectivists (and public health is overrun with them) that's anathema. Everyone has to do it regardless of need otherwise they feel all icky.

> You may not like it but that doesn't change the fact that that's how vaccines (at a societal level) work.

That may be true for virtually all of the common things we are vaccinated for but it sure ain't true for covid. The covid vaccinations did very little to stop transmission or even infection. I mean, if they did then why the hell did so many states bring back mask mandates even after 80% of their state got fully vaccinated?

It is true for vaccine that have been long tested and are really effective for certain set of _serious_ diseases. It’s not true for Covid were those vaccines are new, not effective (because no vaccine is effective for those kind of diseases), do not prevent people for catching and spreading the disease, and we are talking about a disease with a very low mortality rate.

Unless mass vaccination lowers R0 below 1 (hint: it doesn't) thet merely slow the spread, not prevent it. "Everyone else" is still going to get it.

That's almost the same type of response the actual Typhoid Mary had to being told to quarantine and stop preparing food for people. It didn't affect her so it couldn't be real and fuck everyone else. If you think taking any step that has a marginal effect on you in protection of society will count as the "worst non-answer" then you should be afraid of authority figures because you are engaging in the type of society damaging behavior they are charged with mitigating

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