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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

And they haven't stopped agitating. And probably won't stop.

Which makes me wonder: with the degree of weaponization of the internet on the side of the anti-vaxxers will the next pandemic be 'the big one'? Enough people that refuse vaccination and you are looking at an entirely different probable outcome.

Here in NL a small army of foaming-at-the-mouth conspiracy theorists did their utmost to undermine the vaccination campaign with the most outrageous claims and I'm pretty sure that we can chalk up a number of unnecessary deaths to their efforts. They wouldn't be able to tell a virus from a bacterium but that didn't stop them from spouting one nonsense theory after another and organizing (sometimes violent) protests against health care workers and their equipment.

This is a worrisome development.

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There’s a revival of kids not being given other vaccines as well. The knock on effects from the absolute bad faith mess from discourse around vaccines is going to fuck up so much in public health for decades.

I am sympathetic to skepticism when public health officials spent a lot of time lying to avoid having to explain complicated truths. But so many bad faith voices and outright scammers with nonsense vitamins to sell are going to get what they want.

> There’s a revival of kids not being given other vaccines as well.

Yes, the anti-vaxx (and anti-government) sentiment has received an enormous boost from this, time will tell what the damage is but a resurgence of things like Polio is not out of the question.

> I am sympathetic to skepticism when public health officials spent a lot of time lying to avoid having to explain complicated truths.

I'm partially ok with that. They really should give out a double helping of advice: one that is dumbed down for those that lack the necessary background, one that is more on the level for those interested or that do have the necessary background. As it is the dumbed down version is all we've got and the result is that it is too easy to poke holes in it.

At the same time, some of the under-preparedness would have been much harder to deal with without the occasional white lie, it stopped a lot of profiteering and kept some items in supply when otherwise there would have been a run on them.

> But so many bad faith voices and outright scammers with nonsense vitamins to sell are going to get what they want.

Yes, and fwiw I think those people should have gone to jail. We're working on a couple of those cases here NL at the moment and I'm really curious what the outcome will be.

> time will tell what the damage is but a resurgence of things like Polio is not out of the question.

We're about to find out, buddy.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/04/how-polio-silently-spread-in...

Ugh. Ok. Let's hope they manage to contain it and that the anti-vaxx crowd will realize in time what kind of risks they are playing with.

The white lie didn't stop profiteering, it was transparent for anyone watching with their eyes open and only made hoarding worse.

Telling the truth would have resulted in far less supply shocks, instead, half the population willfully ignored the obvious lie by putting their heads in the sand and the other half ratcheted up their preparedness (because the govt clearly lying about everything at this point)

I think in a weird way COVID 19 fell into a strange area of lethality. For those looking at population data, it was horrific, but on a personal level the worst outcomes were rare enough that many people could avoid encountering any deaths or even severe illness in their inner circles.

This made it rather easy to be an antivaxer, since people could just put their heads in the sand and remain blissfully ignorant of the scope of the disease. The deaths were just statistics, as were the benefits of vaccination.

I think in a more severe pandemic, where more people would be losing friends or loved ones, they wouldn't have the luxury of this ignorance and they would be lining up to get a vaccine.

Many young and healthy people still don‘t know anyone personally who died due to covid, nor anyone claiming to have long covid.

Covid was never dangerous to <50/60 year olds.

> Covid was never dangerous to <50/60 year olds.

In the US alone you're talking about 75K people dead under 50.

And over 50 the numbers rise rapidly.

Can't really do much with absolute numbers, they must be per capita and compared to other ailments

The absolute numbers are actually a pretty good rebuttal to a comment that says "never".

If you want to talk about it as a rate that's fine, but the pre-vaccine risk of dying from covid for a healthy person in their 40s or 50s was probably comparable to their lifetime risk of dying in a vehicular collision, it's not a small thing.

Yes, that's very true. But that is also a super dangerous conclusion, that means that effectively until the dead are quite literally piling up in the streets that people will be happy to pretend it isn't real. This ability to deny something as long as it doesn't affect you personally is likely a very handy trait at some times but during pandemics it is going to lead to major trouble.

Or people were managing their own risks. I got vaxxed and followed mandates while they were in place, but as soon as my area relaxed things, I went back to life as normal, as did a majority of people. But I knew and interacted with people who didn’t mask and didn’t get vaccinated, and while I disagree with their risk assessment, I didn’t treat them as outcasts or murderers, nor did I advocate for them to be banned from the public sphere. Fortunately, I live somewhere that is more balanced in their approach, and just had mandates and lockdown to curb earlier waves prior to the vaccines. Which suits my risk assessment and most people where I live. The ones who complain tend to be rather politically motivated to the left, but most of them stopped following recommendations after a while.

I think back to the big controversies over athletes like Kyrie Irving and Novak Djokovic, and I never understood how they were a risk warranting that kind of response. That’s where the anti-anti-vaxxers look authoritarian.

This is just my story, but I had a situation where a close friend's mother died from COVID. Someone else from the social circle, who knew that person well but was antivax, their first response to hearing them pass from COVID was, "but she had diabetes right? And wasn't she overweight? So it wasn't just COVID?".

So it didn't matter if people lost friends or loved ones, the political war has casualties in their minds.

> This is a worrisome development.

Governments are working with private corporations to promote misinformation and silence real information and you’re worried about…anti vaxxers?

I can maybe steel man a utilitarian stance for this position though I’m afraid it’s weak to “surely the lepers won’t eat my face”.

A very eye opening realization I had after 2020 is that the vast majority of people have absolutely zero critical thinking skills, and that applies specially to snobby intellectual circles like academia or this very forum. They are the most indoctrinated people on Earth and it's like talking to a wall.

> promote misinformation and silence real information

"misinformation" and "real information" as rationally believed at the time or only with 20/20 hindsight? It's an important distinction. Also, what about the recommendations that did stand the test of time, or the misinformation about vaccine risks and alternative treatments that was rightly suppressed because it was false and harmful? If this is to be anything but an exercise in anti-authoritarian self-congratulation, people need to own up to their own mistakes as well.

Oops, we suppressed correct info, but it's not our fault, we didn't know it was correct!

Which “real information” was silenced? I sure hope you’re not referring to that farce of an article from ZeroHedge about “weaponized lab-grown covid.” What misinformation was promoted? Are you still on about the first week or 2 when they said masking was ineffective?

Here is some promotion of misinformation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqaN68vBvXQ&t=3

Exactly.

Want to reduce the impact of anti-vax messaging? The government could stop lying and trying to suppress truthful information to start with.

This narrative is analogous to having dropped your ice cream cone on the ground, and being upset at the tyranny of your parents preventing you from continuing to eat it.

Every centralized service will inevitably be goaded into censorship for assorted reasons. Every filter has false positives. Grifters, charlatans, and informational warfare campaigns pumped pure horse shit into our memetic stream (through our own institutions even), driving the signal well below the noise floor. Twitter attempted to filter out the hostile noise to remain useful, necessarily throwing a lot of worthwhile information out in the process.

I've never been a fan of "web 2.0" centralization, and generally believe in free communications via libre software. But spinning this most recent tempest-in-a-teapot as some watershed scandal is ridiculous. Especially in the larger context of Twitter just being bought out by an impotent strongman, who has been marketing it with a brand of "free speech" while censoring per his personal whims.

If these events are really what it took for you to start paying attention to the power centralized companies wield, then congratulations I guess? But litigating what Twitter Past did as exceptional, as if censorship isn't intrinsic to the technical foundation of the whole service, just seems like a denial mechanism that will circle you back to your previous unaware state.

I worry, but also remember that much of the pandemic was just a replay of the Spanish Flu. Distrust in masking, distrust in vaccines, a complaint about the "media" keeping "the truth" from the public.

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