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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

"two weeks to flatten the curve", "if you get the vaccine you won't get covid", "the vaccine is 95% effective", "the vaccine is 80% effective", "the vaccine is 50% effective", "well you'll still get covid but you won't spread it to others", "well actually you can spread it to others"

and more... "masks serve no purpose" followed by months if not years coercing everybody into going out with a mask.

But the best one, to me, is when we go back at the very root... "You're a conspiracy theorist like those who believe the moon landing was faked if you don't accept that it's a pure coincidence that the outbreak started in a market next to a lab known to do gain-of-function research on modified bat viruses".

That tune changed too and, at least, discussing the lab leak possibility became acceptable.

It's all seriously WTF. I got two Pfizer shots but I always fought for and respected those who didn't want to get the shot.

And with all the evidence out now and all the countries saying: "We don't recommend a fourth shot if you're below this or that age", I certainly don't plan to ever get a third shot.

Covid was mutating, that's why the advice kept changing. Vaccines were 80% effective, than immune escape happened and the vaccines got less effective. At the same time, covid was getting better at spreading, which is why 2 weeks to flatten the curve wasn't enough.

It's not a bad thing for experts to change their opinion as new evidence comes out.

These people also seem to ignore that CIRCUMSTANCES HAVE CHANGED QUITE A BIT over the entire pandemic. Of COURSE recommendations made when the vaccine first came out might need to be modified or updated as more gets learned about possible side effects and how it interacts with different variants.

These people never seem to have a problem with the changes in the polio vaccine over the years, or chickenpox

They also like to yell and scream about how "science can't make up its mind"

Yes, because that's how science works. When new information is acquired, new hypotheses are created and tested.

It wasn't "science" which was changing its mind though – "science" doesn't have a mind – it was the public health authorities. The same authorities would change their recommendations over time, and authorities in different countries were making different recommendations at the same time. In part, this was due to differences in circumstances (across both time and space) around the severity of the pandemic, availability of vaccines, hospital resources, etc. But, another factor was that, despite (at any given point in time) all having largely the same scientific evidence, they sometimes interpreted it in different ways, drew different conclusions from it, differed in the weight they decided to give to individual pieces of evidence, etc. It is legitimate for people to question whether they were interpreting the available evidence correctly – and this is not just a matter of hindsight, even at the time, there were qualified professionals who disagreed with their judgements.

I think this frequent conflation of "science" with "public health authority interpretations of science" is rather misguided – and it isn't just "anti-vax" people who commit that conflation, many "pro-vax" people do the exact same thing. I've always been supportive of vaccination – indeed, I have all my recommended doses of COVID-19 vaccine – but I think the excessive rhetoric which some people use against those who express doubts has been very harmful – it has actually been a major unnecessary setback in the cause of encouraging vaccination.

People were literally fired from their jobs, removed from 30+ year military careers, over the science, only for the science to keep changing.

If science can't make up its mind and this is "how science works," anyone who thinks anything should be mandated based on science should be shot. You can't tell people something, have it directly and deeply affect their personal lives, then tell them something substantially different 2 years later, without people grabbing pitchforks. Your theoretical definition of science is irrelevant and makes popular perception of "science" a whimsical joke.

The military isn't a good example because they already have mandatory vaccines and those were completely supported, it wasn't until the fairly recent anti-vaccine drama (autism/mercury) mixed with the distrust of the establishment promoted by Trump, that military people (or right-wing media) began to turn this into an issue that people cared about.

> that military people (or right-wing media) began to turn this into an issue that people cared about

Historically, the majority of opposition to vaccines has been "left-wing" rather than "right-wing". It was only really with COVID that it suddenly picked up on the right as well. I've had some rather frustrating conversations online with people (mostly Americans it seems) who are utterly convinced that it is fundamentally a "right-wing" phenomenon, and seem to just want to ignore the evidence of its long history among self-identified "progressives":

https://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/health-and-wellness/how-one...

I am not aware of what was the case historically (roughly before I was vaccinated as a kid), but I will point out the switch happened before covid- around 2015- and was fairly partisan. Note that extreme idealogies sort of "wrap around" the political spectrum- another area with extremely low vax rates for some time was Marin, which is highly educated and liberal.

I wonder to what extent any "partisan switch" is primarily a US thing? Here in Australia, while some right-leaning people (especially the "hard" right) have in recent years become "anti-vaccine", I haven't seen any comparable evidence of traditional left-leaning "anti-vaccine" adherents abandoning it

I can think of two people my wife and I know personally who are vocally "anti-vax" – one is a rather conservative Christian, the other is a woman with a long-standing interest in the New Age / Tarot / occult / crystals / psychics / alternative medicine / etc. The first, when we were younger (15–20 years ago), I used to run in his circles a lot, and I never heard anybody say anything remotely against vaccines at any of the churches / youth groups / bible studies / etc we used to attend together. He only started becoming "anti-vax" around when COVID started, and it obviously had a lot to do with US politics (he was a big Trump fan, and so was his church–I'm not sure if they still feel the same way about him now), despite living on the other side of the planet. Even then, he was always primarily "anti-COVID vax" rather than "anti-vax" in general.

Our "New Age" friend, her being "anti-vax" was entirely expected, because "anti-vax" opinions have always been very common among people like her. She became very political about it around COVID, organising protests, etc. It became even more intense when she lost her government job (as an adult vocational education teacher) due to her refusal to be vaccinated against COVID. But, the anti-vax protest movement she became involved in was rather left-leaning, it was all composed of New Age types, hippies, etc, who live in a "hippy area" (the Northern Rivers district of New South Wales). I think if someone like our other friend – a conservative Christian spouting pro-Trump rhetoric – had turned up at one of her protests, she would have run them off.

> Note that extreme idealogies sort of "wrap around" the political spectrum

I don't know if that's really true though. While opposition to COVID vaccination may be one of the very few things these two friends of ours could agree on, I think their reasons for their respective positions are very different. I'm not sure the whole "wrap around" or "horseshoe" thesis is really that useful in understanding why two people from opposite ends of the political spectrum may occasionally end up agreeing on something, even something outside the mainstream.

Yeah, I remember an episode of The Simpsons circa 2016 (so they probably wrote it in 2015) where they call it out as a "liberal" thing.

It's not an unreasonable position, or lacking in common sense, to insist that any new drug, particularly one using new technology that has not been used before, have more than one year of testing before it is made mandatory, regardless of the assurances of scientists.

Furthermore, entering the military requires accepting a predefined list of vaccines and that is understood when entering - but adding new vaccines requires following the USC Code, which if you read, I can fully understand why some would feel very uncomfortable with it, and may feel that their protections against being "guinea pigs" have been ran around, as the USC Code would imply that this should not have happened so easily.

https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCODE-2020-title10/html...

Furthermore, not only did we learn more, but the virus itself mutated substantially over time. There were different efficacy rates given in large part because there were literally different vaccine efficacy rates for different strains of the virus.

The irony of people on this site not getting that.

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