Comment by skissane | Hacker News Reader

Comment by skissane | Hacker News Reader

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> The problem is the massive leaps of logic being made by people who have (quite wrongly, based on available evidence) become convinced that the vaccines are a greater threat to healthy people than the virus is.

In some cases, it may well be true that the vaccine is a greater risk than the virus. For example, in Australia, the official recommendation is that healthy people under 30 not receive a fourth dose of COVID-19 vaccine, since Australian health officials believe the risk from vaccine side effects (such as myocarditis) in that age group outweighs the risk of COVID-19 itself. [0] Furthermore, for healthy people in the 30-49 age group, the official Australian position on fourth doses is "permitted but not recommended", since it is unclear if the risk of COVID-19 is greater than that of the vaccine. This is different from the recommendations made by a number of other countries (US, UK, Canada, Singapore), but it appears Australian health authorities weigh the risk of vaccination side effects versus the risk of COVID-19 differently than they do.

[0] https://www.smh.com.au/national/why-you-won-t-get-another-co...

Denmark doesn’t recommend COVID vaccines anymore to anyone under 50 who is not at risk or work in health sector [0].

> People aged under 50 are generally not at particularly higher risk of becoming severely ill from covid-19. In addition, younger people aged under 50 are well protected against becoming severely ill from covid-19, as a very large number of them have already been vaccinated and have previously been infected with covid-19, and there is consequently good immunity among this part of the population.

———

[0]: https://sst.dk/en/English/Corona-eng/Vaccination-against-cov...

While I think it is certainly fair to talk about the policies of other countries, I don't think just because another country has a different policy necessarily dictates that policy is better or worse.

Additionally, I think it's very easy to see something like "Denmark doesn't recommend the vaccines to anybody under 50" and conflate that it means that Denmark doesn't think vaccines were ever beneficial to people under the age of 50 (which is the leap in logic you often see on anti-vax sites). But that isn't the case. What was good health policy in 2021 is different from good health policy now, because we have way more information about the virus, better and more effective drug to treat it, new variants, etc.

Two things can be true at the same time: The vaccines are (on net) incredibly beneficial to people and the population as a whole, and yet at the present time there are certain specific populations of people whose optimal number of doses might be fewer than others.

> While I think it is certainly fair to talk about the policies of other countries, I don't think just because another country has a different policy necessarily dictates that policy is better or worse.

Sure. But if a person is aware that other countries have different policies, that gives them a legitimate reason to question whether the policy of their own country is correct. If a person looks into the matter, and decides not to follow the recommendations of their own government, because they think some other country's government is more likely to have got it right, such a person isn't necessarily being irrational/irresponsible/etc, nor would it necessarily be irrational/irresponsible/etc for them to share their conclusion with others.

> and conflate that it means that Denmark doesn't think vaccines were ever beneficial to people under the age of 50 (which is the leap in logic you often see on anti-vax sites)

Yes, many people do seem to conflate these two claims:

(1) "for healthy children and young people, the safety risk of additional doses of the vaccine currently outweighs the risk of COVID-19"

(2) "for healthy children and young people, the safety risk of any dose of the vaccine has always outweighed the risk of COVID-19"

While claim (1) is disputed, some highly respected medical experts agree with it; the same cannot be said for claim (2).

However, I think this conflation goes in both directions – some people who want to defend (2) do so by conflating it with (1); but conversely, some people attack (1) by conflating it with (2).

Some people can't distinguish reasonable scepticism about vaccinations from unreasonable scepticism.

Yeah, I agree completely.

It also is difficult position for health agencies to be in, because they want to make clear guidelines to prevent confusion, but there are gray areas. For example, it's completely possible that:

(a) The benefits outweigh the risks of a 4th shot for any age group

or

(b) The risks outweigh the benefits of a 4th shot for some or all age groups [not because the risk are high, but the benefits so low]

AFAIK, there aren't any super high quality studies anywhere in the world that have robust data on the 4th shot in particular for all age groups. So one health agency might guess one way, another health agency might guess another way. Reasonable people can disagree. The CDC got a little bit ahead of the science when they were initially recommending the 3rd shot, but in the long run it was proven to be a good gamble that no doubt saved thousands of lives. But now maybe that same logic is a mistake for the 4th shot.

But regardless of the CDC's recommendations, most people seem to have figured out the cost/benefit for themselves: The vast majority of people in the US have 2 shots, a little under half have the booster, and very few have the 4th shot. Most people probably have made the right choices for themselves given the various risks and benefits for them personally.

I trust that when I drive over a bridge it won't collapse.

But I cannot say I know that the bridge won't collapse.

Knowledge is a true and justified belief. But trust is not a justification - quite the opposite. If you had a justification, you wouldn't need trust.

Trust whomever you want, on whatever basis you want, but that's fundamentally not reason or rationality, it's just an argument from authority [1]. No statement becomes more true just because someone said it, regardless of who they are.

I'm not saying it's easy or even possible to do in practice. Science is insanely complex. But let's not confuse trust for rationality, not least of which because it brings to the fore the very real need for institutions that are worthy of our trust.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority

> Trust whomever you want, on whatever basis you want, but that's fundamentally not reason or rationality, it's just an argument from authority [1]. No statement becomes more true just because someone said it, regardless of who they are.

A statement can become more likely to be true just because someone said it, depending on the nature of the statement and the person making it. For example, my brother is an oncologist. If I had some health concern about cancer, I would certainly be asking for his opinion. His opinions on that topic are not guaranteed to be correct, but as an oncologist, they are significantly more likely to be correct than that of the average person.

One problem with the frequent popular invocation of claimed "fallacies", such as "argument from authority", is many of them are only strictly speaking fallacious when used as purely deductive arguments, but real world human reasoning isn't purely deductive, it involves a great deal of induction and abduction as well. There is nothing inherently wrong with an "argument from authority" as an inductive or abductive argument.

> Knowledge is a true and justified belief. But trust is not a justification - quite the opposite. If you had a justification, you wouldn't need trust.

One can estimate the conditional probability P(proposition X is true|agent A says that X is true) based on observations of what kinds of things agent A (or other significantly similar agents) has said in the past, and how many of them turned out to be true or false. You can then use that conditional probability estimate to inform your own decision as to how much credence to give to proposition X. That is both trust and justification.

I was not aware of abduction before today, thank you!

I think we may agree in practice if not in theory. I did have the Hume-an problem of induction explicitly on my mind. It would be quite fair to say my epistemology is quite conservative.

> One problem with the frequent popular invocation of claimed "fallacies", such as "argument from authority", is many of them are only strictly speaking fallacious when used as purely deductive arguments,

There's a fallacy for that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_fallacy

You could do some theoretical calculations about bridges yourself, inspect for cracks, and prove from first principles that the bridge is in fact safe; it's not some complicated biological process.

Isn't your citing Wikipedia, in itself, an appeal to authority? Why should we accept Wikipedia as an authority on which arguments are fallacious and which are rational?

(Also, that wiki page mentions that many authors don't see it as a fallacy.)

I'm just citing it for the context of the argument both for and against appeal to authority being fallacious and irrational, not that Wikipedia is the final arbiter of what's rational or not. It's more to say that my position is not novel than anything else. Indeed, to be consistent I would need to say that I don't care how many authors do or don't see it as a fallacy :)

> While I think it is certainly fair to talk about the policies of other countries, I don't think just because another country has a different policy necessarily dictates that policy is better or worse.

Other countries compared to who? Not everyone here is from the same country as you :)

I don't think anyone is making a value judgment based on where the policy is from.

The change in policy by Denmark very likely comes down to the risk of overloading their ICU's with a naive covid population. When covid first arrived everyone was susceptible to covid and the long tail of poor outcomes was enough to plug up the hospitals (and primarily the ICU's).

Now, much of the population has become either naturally or through vaccination much less susceptible to poor outcomes from a covid infection, and this is especially true of younger people.

So the response to covid was never really about the health of the population as much as it was about the health of the hospitals. The risk to the hospitals is now much lower and therefore the reasonable vaccination effort has now changed.

> For example, in Australia, the official recommendation is that healthy people under 30 not receive a fourth dose of COVID-19 vaccine (...)

It should be stressed that this guidance explicitly refers to a fourth dose of a vaccine. I feel it's disingenuous to use this example to try to refute the OP when the problem lies in people taking massive leaps of logic such as going from "it's ok to take 3 doses of a vaccine but the benefits of a fourth might not justify it" to "don't get vaccinated ever because you will die".

> "it's ok to take 3 doses of a vaccine but the benefits of a fourth might not justify it"

That's not what the Australian health authorities are saying. They aren't just saying that "the benefits of a fourth might not justify it", they are saying "(for healthy young people) the health risks of the fourth dose likely outweigh the health benefits"–your rephrasing ignores that safety risk aspect.

In my mind, there are three different positions here:

(1) "Vaccines are perfectly safe, and anyone who even mentions death or serious injury caused by vaccination is just being an alarmist"

(2) "Everyone who took the deadly COVID vax is about to drop dead! Just watch!"

(3) "Vaccines have real safety risks, some people have died from vaccination, and it is certain that more people will die from them in the future. However, sometimes, the risk of death or disability from the disease the vaccine is intended to prevent, is going to be significantly higher than the risk of death or disability from the vaccine. Whether or not that is true in any particular case is going to vary depending on the particular disease, its current prevalence, availability of treatments for it, etc; whether the disease or the vaccine poses the greater health risk will vary across time, place, disease and vaccine; our estimates of those respective risks are always going to be imperfect, evolving, and open to informed disagreement; generally we should trust the public health authorities to make that judgement for us, but they are not infallible, and it can be legitimate to doubt or question their judgement in any particular case"

I see myself as defending (3), whereas what some other people in this conversation are saying seems to me to be closer to (1), and also encouraging the fallacious conflation of (3) with (2).

There is actually a (4) also, which we can see evidence for in a paper such as [1] in the paper Efficacy and effectiveness of covid-19 vaccine - absolute vs. relative risk reduction

Summarized: The Covid vaccines have real safety risks for which there is a body of evidence, that taken in totality, leads one to believe that the temporal and Absolute Risk Reduction of =< 0.85% is not worth the adverse events. Given the suppression of data around the true adverse events, and the time limited protections from the vaccines, it should be used sparingly after the patient is fully informed of the risks, and minimal protections provided. Given the uniqueness of each patient's medical situation though, patients are in the best position to decide if their comorbidities are sufficient to merit the risks of these vaccines. Similarly to the Nordic countries, any younger person without severe comorbidities < 50 should not take the vaccine, but they should be able to make their own decision fully informed of the risks and limited protection, and without any type of coercion.

I don't believe that all Covid vaccines share the same risks since the microgram dosing of the MRNA vaccines vary greatly, and the Novavax vaccine [2] [3] is coming onto the scene, unfortunately with a few of the same adverse events as the MRNA vaccines though

[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14760584.2022.2...

[2] https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/novavax-covid-vaccine

[3] https://us.novavaxcovidvaccine.com/hcp

> That's not what the Australian health authorities are saying. They aren't just saying that "the benefits of a fourth might not justify it", they are saying "(for healthy young people) the health risks of the fourth dose likely outweigh the health benefits"–your rephrasing ignores that safety risk aspect.

This is a red herring.

It's irrelevant if anyone feels that the 3rd or 4th or 5th dose of Pfiser's increases health risks. The problem is the misrepresentation of these findings. You cannot in good faith jump from "a residual number of people experience health issues when taking the 4th or 5th dose of Pfiser's vaccine" to "do not take any vaccine at all ever or you'll die" specially when they deny that COVID poses a threat and already killed over 6million people.

You're talking about health concerns of taking a vaccine when not taking the vaccine poses a far greater threat, and somehow that's left out of the equation. That's the problem: the disingenuous misrepresentation of the problem.

I’ve been watching the vaccine discussions on HN these years and one can see that too many people are stuck fighting vaccination windmills from days gone by, while downplaying vaccine risks which by now are established and continue to be investigated as this publication shows.

Meanwhile many EU countries have understood that heart problems are a real risk and have adjusted recommendations accordingly. They’ve also stopped obsessing about vaccinating people.

The vaccination crusade’s dead folks, please stand by for the next pandemic.

So you argue that you should increase the risk of death or disability by COVID by not vaccinating. Got it.

It’s the paradox of intelligence: smart people are more prone to fight tooth and nail, and do all kinds of mental gymnastics, rather than to admit that they too have been misled. People of average or below average intelligence tend to accept it much more easily.

I don’t know if there’s already a name for this phenomenon…

Would love to see the incidence of this by IQ. My intuition says it spikes in slightly smarter-than-average folks.

This is the so-called "midwit" meme.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/iq-bell-curve-midwit

In my experience smart people are also far more likely to create elaborate self-reinforcing systems of belief that are detached from reality.

Any moron can understand the idea of a round Earth and stuff orbiting around it. It takes a genius to comprehend the sublime intricacies of ether vortex theory which explains how a flat Earth can still permit satellites to stay airborne over the plane.

I've met an extremely intelligent person who was convinced we never landed on the Moon and that Stanley Kubrick faked the whole thing and left clues to this in his production of The Shining. I've also met one who thinks the Nazis invented anti-gravity and are hiding the technology to this day in underground bases in Antarctica and South America.

That sounds a lot more like creativity than capacity to reason logically, or a number of other facets of intelligence. That's probably part of the issue, which properties of 'intelligence' we are talking about.

There are also a lot of crazy and intelligent people. I certainly know so many, it almost becomes a correlation.

Actually, the Nazi's hid on the moon wit their anti-gravity tech:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1034314/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0

(which is an entertaining movie if you haven't seen it).

Were they convinced, or are you convinced that they were convinced? The Kubrick thing is an old joke (which usually ends by saying he insisted on filming "on location" for the sake of authenticity)

They were convinced.

I don't either. Personally speaking, after watching the effects of disinformation campaigns over the last 7 or so years -particularly regarding Covid and vaccinations I am pretty much 1,000% unwilling to listen to any "skepticism" simply because I don't trust the source that anyone is getting their information from.

The only reasonable course I can see is to not take any chances and vaccinate early and vaccinate often.

Why would you trust the source on the side that's telling you something new, but not the side that's skeptical of it?

"Misled" is a stupid word for "we constantly learn more and should be adapting our positions."

There is zero evidence for a "haha i told you you were being misled" position. You are performing either foolish or disingenuous logical gymnastics to equate something like "adjusted recommendations accordingly" with "it was intentionally misleading the whole time."

Show me a place where people haven't adjusted their behavior as the virus has evolved, more time has passed creating more data, vaccination rounds have been administered, death rates have evolved, and exposure/infection has happened. It ain't here in liberal California, so is there any such strawman place you're arguing against in the US? Go out on the street and look around and observe that people are being rational and adapting over time instead of keeping up your silly little "haha i'm smarter than you you fell for a hoax" keyboard battle.

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