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Comment by SnaggyJoker | Hacker News Reader

What fuels the debate more than anything is how easily and quickly the goalposts move in discussion over COVID and the vaccines.

The inconsistency and the blatant suppression of dissenting viewpoints does not help either.

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How do you distinguish moving goalposts from the more charitable reading of "Hey, this is a novel virus and so our guidelines will have to change as we find out more"

I sure remember when the guidelines were that COVID wasn't transmissible through aerosol, only droplets. Then it was revised to include aerosol. Mask warnings also evolved from "not that effective" to "extremely effective". But isn't all of this explainable charitably without invoking suppression?

I would argue because no charity was given to opinions contrary to what Dr. Fauci and the NIH declaired as truth. Perhaps most infamous is Dr. Collins asking for a takedown of the Great Berington declaration. The fact that so little was certain early on about COVID should have been a reason to allow physicians and scientists to discuss and debate policy without fear of having their careers destroyed. Now that we are further out from the pandemic cooler heads will prevail but I fear the damage to the reputation of the health authorities in the US will take a long time to recover.

[1] https://www.statnews.com/2021/12/23/at-a-time-when-the-u-s-n...

Dr. Collins didn't ask for their careers to be destroyed. He asked for a rebuttal (or "take down of it's premises" in his words), which was easy because The Great Barrington Declaration was the most poorly devised policy proposal I had ever seen. I'm not surprised that Dr. Prasad pretends not to understand the difference.

It said that only nursing homes should be quarantined when the vast majority of elderly do not live in nursing homes. It encouraged everyone else to get infected as soon as possible, completely ignoring the fact that vaccines were being developed, which meant that later exposure would be far better than earlier exposure.

One of the signatories of The Great Barrington Declaration actually did try to destroy a Caltech professor's career, but Dr. Prasad pretends the reverse happened. https://mobile.twitter.com/lpachter/status/13770484698655580...

Never take on Lior with anything less than a fully prepared and well-rested army.

It’s just poor communication.

The right way to communicate is say:

“Based on other viruses, we believe masking helps reduce the risk of transmission.”

“Based on initial clinical data we believe vaccination will reduce or possibly eliminate the risk you transmitting the virus to others”

What I’m guessing happened is they thought not being confident in their answer would cause people to not comply.

But the #1 rule of communication (I did some company PR work) is never lie, even by omission. If you lie you’ll eventually get caught and people will never believe you in the future.

There was a messaging lag between countries. You could discern pretty clearly what was doing to happen from whatever happened in Israel as they were roughly half a year ahead and almost simultaneously vaccinated everyone. Based on what happened there with both the initial vaccine and the boosters, you could tell that your local politicians, media and experts where lying and or obfuscating and misrepresenting facts.

> “Hey, this is a novel virus and so our guidelines will have to change as we find out more"

Gee that’s not what I heard at all, what I heard was ‘this is science, and anyone who disagrees or doubts is an idiot and deserves to die and is responsible for killing grandma’

*edit

Oh look here’s the comment where anyone who doubts or disagrees is an idiot:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33258738

I guess we should applaud them for not celebrating the death of anyone who doubts.

> I sure remember when the guidelines were that COVID wasn't transmissible through aerosol, only droplets. Then it was revised to include aerosol. Mask warnings also evolved from "not that effective" to "extremely effective".

And yet the authorities and all the big tech bros were quick to censor anyone who disagreed with the blatant false narratives. Even the WHO took a YEAR to admit to aerosol contamination after the pandemic was everywhere.

Moving goal posts are obvious. They show up with an initial over commit like say, “you don’t need masks” or “the vaccine is sterilizing” that is obviously wrong at the time it occurs, but only on a valid limited data set. This followed by a bunch of backpedaling as that position becomes more and more indefensible as the data becomes overwhelming.

What does "extremely effective" mean? It sounds like 99.99% or something like that. I wasn't aware that any data like that had come out.

Myocarditis is caused by the spike protein present both in covid19 and the vaccine.

1. Myocarditis rate is much higher post infection than post vaccination by about 2X

2. Myocarditis rate post vaccination is 0.02 % . Covid FATALITY rate is 0.3%. Yet we are expected to have "debates" about it

https://www.heart.org/en/news/2022/08/22/covid-19-infection-...

Also, why the hell do we think scientific research needs a so called "debate". Are we trying to become school valedictorians? What is needed is peer review, not debate. Debate is simply a euphemism for validation seeking for confirmation bias on random social forums.

If there was any problem with the peer review, there is cause for complaints. Are we going to hold a debate on whether the proof of fermat's last theorem is actually correct now?

From your own link:

> Among men under 40, there were an estimated four extra cases of myocarditis associated with the first dose of the Pfizer vaccine and 14 extra cases with the first dose of the Moderna vaccine for every 1 million men vaccinated. That risk rose with the second dose for all three vaccines studied and was highest for Moderna's, which had an additional 97 myocarditis cases per 1 million. For unvaccinated men under 40 with COVID-19, there were 16 additional myocarditis cases per million.

which shows that the Moderna second dose is riskier than infection for men under 40? I have to admit I've been really disappointed by the way people have been minimising this. Part of that is being in that group of men < 40 myself (it has always been stratified by age and sex), another part of it is I think we need to be as transparent as possible about all risks in medicine as opposed to giving fuel (and good arguments) that information is being suppressed or charitably ignored because people are panicking.

Myocarditis is not the only risk when you get covid. You can't conclude that the vaccine is more dangerous than getting covid just based on this one effect; covid has many other dangerous effects on some people, such as destroying your lungs.

The chance of healthy young males dying from Covid is close to zero and not 0.3%. I recently had Covid, less than 6 months after the booster and I don’t think it could have been worse than it was. The third shot measurably impacted my fitness metrics, according do my Apple Watch (sharp decline in VO2max, which took months to recover and even pre Covid it was 3 points off)

> 1. Myocarditis rate is much higher post infection than post vaccination by about 2X

Based on which data since reporting of adverse events after vaccination is constantly suppressed by medical professionals? (and reporting of adverse events is anyway very low in the first place)

> 2. Myocarditis rate post vaccination is 0.02 % . Covid FATALITY rate is 0.3%. Yet we are expected to have "debates" about it

Please explain the excess deaths around the globe right now then, if you believe in such numbers.

What do you mean? The goalposts were always clear, and open discussion was always acceptable.

Open discussion was never acceptable, even here on HN. I was quickly downvoted for saying anything against masking and vaccinations. Not even objecting, mere questions elicited this reaction.

Sometimes, heroes will lose karma points when they caution people against best practices. This is the price heroes pay.

"Best practices", like mass vaccination of a group of people for whom the vaccine may have been more risky than the disease?

It was pretty ridiculous. Anyone who’s interacted with health policy at the national level knows it’s just a big power game. Anthony Fauci doesn’t wake up in the morning thinking “what can I do for the American people?”—he wakes up thinking “Todd from the VA was an asshole at that budget hearing. What can I do about that?”

Can you please upgrade your comment from base slander to legitimate critique by providing any reasonable source to help us understand this perspective

So you're admitting that open discussion was accepted. Only people disagreed with what you were saying.

We always were at war with eastasia.

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