Hacker News Reader

Comment by stainablesteel | Hacker News Reader

your response tells me everything though, you think one thing is "rightly viewed as an unacceptable position", neither nuance or complexity is allowed, my original paragraph spoke on tradeoffs, on nuance itself. if you don't address that then you yourself are dogwhistling, how are you better than the strawman you paint of RFK?

regarding the anti-semetic bit, not only did you completely avoid the main point of what was being said by both RFK and me, which is the potential for ethnic targeting, you've quoted his statement yourself with "there is an argument...", its not "i support the idea that...". its like people can't even speak hypotheticals without baseless accusations coming around every corner, what's the point of dialogue if we act like this? let's just settle presidential elections in a wrestling ring.

View on HN

I think the issue is that the "I'm just asking questions!" technique is used to express opinions without taking responsibility for them.

When anxiety-producing questions keep getting "asked" by a politician when they already have rigorous, data-backed answers, they are being used as a political tool, disguised as skepticism or genuine scientific inquiry.

taking responsibility for a question? yeah that's ridiculous

as a human being, you're allowed to have discussion on topics in order to flesh them out.

There are questions where looking for nuance detracts rather than add to the conversation. The earth is round, there is no need for nuance there. Similarly, vaccines work and have been proven to be better than not getting vaccinated in every single case in the last, say, 20 years. Adding nuance to that only serves to muddy the waters.

The same sort of thing happens with hypotheticals. Sure, they are important and not every hypothetical should be read as an affirmation. But then there are cases like OJ Simpsons "If I had done it" - where the hypothetical framing is such an obvious fig leaf that it's ridiculous to pretend. And saying "there's an argument that" in the middle of a discussion about bio weapons, bringing up highly disputable facts like the supposed ethnic differences in Covid-19 effects, and then not spending even another second to acknowledge that there is 0 evidence for this supposed hypothetical - that all brings it to a level where it's comical not to recognize what was actually being said.

> The earth is round, there is no need for nuance there.

Clearly there is _some_ need for nuance there since the Earth isn't exactly a sphere. Even calling it an oblate ellipsoid isn't a perfect model. There is nuance everywhere, and clearly some models are more wrong than others; modeling the Earth as flat is much less accurate than a sphere, which in turn is less accurate than the somewhat flattened spheres common today, which in turn is less accurate than whatever the true shape of the Earth is.

But the takeaway from that shouldn't be creating a dogma that "the Earth is round" and moving on, just to own the guys that claim its flat (who are by and large just trolling you).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Figure_of_the_Earth

even if a vaccine has passed all the required clinical trials for america's FDA to certify it, if and when you release it on a population you can still find things to be wrong with it, or effects its having that weren't understood. this is how all of medicine works, to try and dismiss the complexity of biology is a detraction from honesty itself. long term safety studies of vaccines, especially those given in early childhood, need to be used to determine that they don't cause harm, worse than the disease they're meant to prevent, 10-20 years down the line.

can you explain what i've detracted from this conversation? the nuance is appropriate. the complexity belongs as a natural part of the conversation.

your oversimplifications are more dangerous than the so called "detractions" that you haven't given a proper example of.

Why do you keep implying that such studies are not already being done? Most vaccines we use are by now decades old, and adverse effects of all medicines, especially serious adverse effects, are reported, there is a whole system for this.

Vaccines, by and large, have proven to be some of the safest medicine we take. Will the mRNA vaccines prove different? I hope not, but it is of course relatively early in their existence. But thing like the MMR vaccines and the polio vaccine have been administered on a huge scale for decades, and all the possible data has been collected - they are effective and safe.

RFK has suggested they're locked in bureaucratic problems, which I agree with, because of regulatory capture.

and you keep framing things as if i'm saying all vaccines are terrible, that's insane, i've not said that once. and you also want to argue this laser-focussed agenda on whether ALL vaccines are good or bad, but we're literally MAKING them bad by going after the livelihoods of people who don't want to get it. and there are vaccines, much like other drugs, that have been recalled before. you have every right to be skeptical. otherwise we're not living in a free society.

there's literally people being denied life-saving surgeries because they haven't gotten a covid vaccine. it should be your choice whether you get vaccinated or not. someone in canada needed a kidney transplant, and had multiple brothers as compatible donors willing to give one to him, but he was denied the right to a surgery all over a covid vaccine.

is this what vaccines are supposed to be? something you hang over other people's heads in order to passive aggressively kill them for their beliefs? getting covid and gaining immunity offers all the same herd immunity (better, even) than you would get from a vaccine. there's no moral high-ground for denying someone life-saving surgery anymore and we're still playing this stupid game.

literally 8 years ago i would be arguing every point you're trying to make, but after being in the pharmaceutical industry for longer than that, after watching clinical trials of drugs i've contributed to myself, i know the flaws of this system. i'm not a moron and i'm not a lunatic. there is a lot to be worried about and if RFK wants to raise these issues in the federal political arena, i'm willing to believe it will bring benefit to the flaws i've become familiar with.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com