Comment by indymike | Hacker News Reader

Comment by indymike | Hacker News Reader

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> vaccination has become political.

When the concept of vaccination was new, it was political. After a few rounds of stopping really bad disease (smallpox, polio, rabies, etc...), people mostly believed in vaccine because they literally eradicated disease. When COVID hit, I think it benefited from the reputations of successful vaccines of the past, and a lot of people put their faith in public health officials who in the past were the vanguard for eradicating some very dreadful, horrible viral diseases.

After getting couple doses of COVID vax, actually having everyone in my family (who is vaxed) including me get COVID (and some of us get seriously ill), I have a very hard time believing that the COVID vaccination was very effective, especially if you compare it to the vaccinations that have successfully eradicated entire diseases. Millions have shared the same experience my family had.

Yes, desperate times call for sometimes desperate measures, and I like to believe that the COVID vaccine helped blunt the pandemic... but the fact is people get this vaccination and still can get COVID and even die of die of it. This is the source of the cognitive dissonance we see in the body politic right now... and why trust in public health is down substantially.

It seems like you got it in your head that the COVID vaccines would be a able to stop infection entirely, and were disappointed when it didn't for your family. It's not surprising that you did: a lot of the messaging at the time really counted their chickens before they hatched and painted it as a miracle prophylactic. In the real world, vaccines are a population-level tool with a range of outcomes. It's annoyingly hard to communicate that to the masses.

In practice, it turns out that fighting fast-mutating viral respiratory infections is hard to do. Our immune just aren't that great at it, and vaccines can only stack the deck there so much in our favor. I believe that the (observational, hard to rely on) evidence suggests that the covid vaccine reduced the incidence of infection, but only by about 25-50%. And that's good! That doesn't even cover the much more substantial reduction in serious outcomes! A world with the vaccines is unarguably less hostile than that without. But it's not a miracle, and it's always aggravating when people engage in the nirvana fallacy about it.

> It's not surprising that you did: a lot of the messaging at the time really counted their chickens before they hatched and painted it as a miracle prophylactic.

This is exactly the issue. There was so much just bad information out there.

> Our immune just aren't that great at it, and vaccines can only stack the deck there so much in our favor. I believe that the (observational, hard to rely on) evidence suggests that the covid vaccine reduced the incidence of infection, but only by about 25-50%.

I like to think this .

> A world with the vaccines is unarguably less hostile than that without. But it's not a miracle, and it's always aggravating when people engage in the nirvana fallacy about it.

It's really disappointing that attitudes towards COVID vaccines are spreading to other vaccines. It's sad when I hear parents talking about MMR and other proved vaccines using the anti-COVID talking pointes.

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