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Comment by samirillian | Hacker News Reader

My personal theory is that if you're an extrovert, you were more resistant to the quarantine, because you couldn't see your friends, and there's some connection between that and getting the vaccine, like you'd probably already been ignoring the other rules, playing down the whole thing on a subconscious level. Something like that. It makes perfect sense to me in a weird way that's hard to describe the precise causality of, but that somehow sounds more likely than extrovert = narcissist = doesn't believe scientists.

edit, some possible causalities:

- the study was somehow biased to define as extroverted people who ignored quarantine

- extroverts who ignored quarantine were more likely to get COVID, which they believed gave them a similar level of immunity

- my aforementioned moral equivocation, like, if I'm ignoring this it's because people telling me what to do must be wrong, etc.

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Or, introverts are more likely to read rather than take advice from the loud guy at the end of the bar.

I have had every vaccination I could, because I grew up in a country where they really meant something. Ever seen measles in person? You will be running to get every COVID shot you can once you've seen such things. In my observation, people with wide international backgrounds trend away from extroversion.

Well you don't do much for your argument about reading by claiming that seeing measles in person is what convinced you.

one could use this information and argue that introverts are less willing to go against the grain.

I'd doubt that. Extroverts are more socially oriented.

It depends on how you define "grain". What I personally observed during COVID was anti-vaccine people made a bigger noise than the scientific community.

> they believed gave them a similar level of immunity

Believed correctly

> > they believed gave them a similar level of immunity

> Believed correctly

Research disagrees:

https://www.immunology.org/public-information/vaccine-resour...

There is a large strain of "research" that tells public health authorities whatever they want to hear.

Raw case rates normalized by pop size from the UK: vaccinated people were getting COVID at 3x-4x the rate of the unvaccinated by the time they stopped reporting the figures. Natural immunity was actually much better than the vaccine because it developed whole-virus protection to all the proteins not just the spike, so you don't get Hoskin's Effect and variants find it harder to evade.

Lol, for the record, this is why I didn't make a claim one way or the other.

> vaccinated people were getting COVID at 3x-4x the rate of the unvaccinated by the time they stopped reporting the figures.

Citation needed.

https://twitter.com/tlowdon/status/1496894355621113857

This guy documented it really well.

You'll have to sign in to look at his other posts.

Just search "uk infection rates" or some such on his profile.

from:tlowdon uk infection rates

> This guy documented it really well.

Nothing in his analysis is right. First, he uses that infection stats for a variant (Omicron), but the vaccine targeted the origina known to be less effective against it. So technically speaking, assuming that most unvaccinated people were infected (and some died) with other variants by then, they were better prepared against Omicron. Not making and distributing an Omicron-specific vaccine was a logistics issue, not a technical one.

That being said, remember that Omicron turned out to be a relatively less lethal variant, so being vaccinated was a net win, because a percentage of anti-vaccine people died with the original virus, and the Delta variant while trying to gain natural immunisation against it. We can't compare the risks of vaccination and actually getting sick.

Second, he is comparing case numbers (not deaths, or hospitalisations), which won't work, because it only demonstrates that vaccinated people are more likely to go and get tested when they feel sick, and unvaccinated people are less likely as anti-vaccine community (I know that not all unvaccinated people are anti-vaccine) generally don't think that they have a responsibility to keep other people safe.

Even if correct (doubtful), you also get to experience actual disease caused by the virus. Which, sure, for many folks, was mild.

But, for many other folks, it was decidedly not mild at all. The funny thing is you don't hear as much from the latter group of folks - because, extrovert or not, lots of them stopped talking altogether.

>like you'd probably already been ignoring the other rules, playing down the whole thing on a subconscious level. Something like that. It makes perfect sense to me in a weird way that's hard to describe the precise causality of

Yeah I get what you’re saying, something like sunk cost, or inertia, though not exactly, as you say.

To me, leaving aside the positing here of extroversion, I think the strongest correlation was something like an iq test, or critical thinking test.

At the time of the “you must get injected, and if you don’t you’re despicable, and if you refuse we’re going to hold you down and stick it in you” campaign it was entirely clear, if not well before then, that the actual risk of the COVID infection itself to anyone in even reasonably good health was far below being injected with some experimental gene modification thing.

I think most people above a certain iq percentile looking into the method of proposed action that was presumed to be effective, which of course wasn’t, thought “WTF why would I want to experimentally modify my genes in response to this? That seems insane.”

Then there was the outright lying in claims being bandied about. The initial studies in no way showed that it stopped infection, transmission, or death. But that’s all you ever heard.

In December 2020 I saw a short news report from a hospital in France I think covering some of the earliest injections. Somewhere towards the end of that report it was said “It’s a vaccine just like any other vaccine.” WTF I thought, that’s exactly the opposite of what it is, it is a “vaccine” completely different from any other.

Then by July 2021 the buzzwords had shifted to calling things like serious heart issues (any heart issue, is a serious issue) mild. “Oh they’re just having some mild heart issues, no biggie.”

It was a completely egregious, evil abomination all round.

Back to the correlations, it didn’t really follow iq linearly like income or health outcomes or other socioeconomic data tends to, it was more the reserve of the far extents of the bell curve as shown in the mid wit bell curve meme.

Using level of educational attainment as a proxy for iq, not a perfect correlate of course, those with phds were indeed the least likely to fall for the injections among those with post secondary degrees according to the data I’ve seen.

Then a somewhat separate matter was those who were put in the ghastly situation of being made to choose between their livelihoods, or seeing their family, or whatnot, and being injected.

I can see some high iq critical thinkers making tough decisions under that level of coercion.

> it was entirely clear, if not well before then, that the actual risk of the COVID infection itself to anyone in even reasonably good health was far below being injected with some experimental gene modification thing

MRNA doesn't modify genes, that's not how MRNA works at all, it flows downstream from DNA. I would hope the so called high IQ critical thinkers would spend a few minutes on how MRNA, RNA, and DNA work.

The whole thing reads like the Dunning-Kruger effect in action. MRNA is very interesting and works like programming, because the cell's machinery is like a Turing machine protein printer that reads MRNA like the Turing machine tape, so it's extra ironic that on Hacker News we have people with limited idea of how it even works, but are confident that it somehow 'edits genes'. Respiratory viruses are fundamentally bits of MRNA that tell cells to make virus copies. When you have heard of flu or cold viruses editing genes?

How much percentage of people in western countries are in generally good health anyway? See how many more deaths happened in Biden counties vs. Trump's because of people falling for pseudo-scientific misinformation like you.

https://www.npr.org/2022/05/19/1098543849/pro-trump-counties...

So many sad victims of self serving political misinformation.

> Using level of educational attainment as a proxy for iq, not a perfect correlate of course, those with phds were indeed the least likely to fall for the injections among those with post secondary degrees according to the data I’ve seen.

What data have you seen? Even in the self reported survey that was used for misinformation to mislead people like you, 75% of PhDs said they would vaccinate.

https://www.wnct.com/news/north-carolina/fact-check-setting-...

Not to mention 95% of actual medical doctors in a survey. Derek Lowe had great articles on Covid throughout.

The modification is an addition not an edit, if that helps to clarify.

Putting this particular mRNA, a gene, into your body modifies the set of genes in your body, because now there is a new one, and it evokes a response in a way that eating the dna, also genes, of asparagus or a cow does not.

The point stands, at that point, fear mongering aside, the Covid risk profile was pretty well understood, the risk profile of the experimental gene therapy was not.

Regardless of what you want to call it, it turns out to have been a bad idea for reasons of “original antigenic sin”, immune system disruptions due to heightened levels of IgG4 or some other factors leading to injected people becoming more susceptible to the virus, and the host of issues that may or may not be tied to the gene modifying but to the lipid delivery mechanism or something else, heart issues, fertility disruptions, shingles, Guillain–Barré syndrome, etc. etc.

Whatever terminology you want to use the winning move was to not play the game.

Do you know how many countries that once used them have now barred the use of the mRNA injections for at least a portion of their population?

—————

IgG4 Antibodies Induced by Repeated Vaccination May Generate Immune Tolerance to the SARS-CoV-2 Spike Protein https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37243095/

> MRNA doesn't modify genes, that's not how MRNA works at all

You are repeating how the tech works in theory, not how the vaccines work in reality.

In reality, the vaccines can do this. That's because the "process 2" manufacturing that was switched to post-approval scales much better but yields vaccines heavily contaminated with DNA, not just RNA. If you smuggle DNA into cells using the lipid nanoparticle tricks then it can be incorporated into your own DNA yielding never ending spike protein production and immune tolerance.

There's testimony by a scientist who sequenced residue from vials and discovered the problem here, but it was suspected even before that:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEWHhrHiiTY

He says he would no longer take the vaccines knowing what he knows now.

There are a whole bunch of case reports where this appears to have happened. Patients who end up always testing positive for spike protein for example, despite not being infected with SARS-CoV-2.

> The whole thing reads like the Dunning-Kruger effect in action.

It's actually the opposite. Over-educated people constantly confuse the map for the terrain due to a naive belief in the angel-like nature of everyone in the same social class as themselves. Then they assume anyone who disagrees must be misinformed.

The people who are most pro-COVID vaccine are, in my experience, people with degrees who also know very little about it beyond what they've been told by pop sci media and public health authorities. The idea that what they've told might not be true is just inconceivable to them, and the luxury belief of intellectual superiority to the rubes is just too tempting to pass up. People who are skeptical are engaging directly with the collected evidence, not just what theory says that evidence should be.

So, why is this downvoted?

This is the current state of scientific investigation, if you like it or not.

Maybe one of those who has been emotionalised confronted with this information can explain.

Its actually the opposite.

Hard data from Sweden showing lower IQ = more vaccine hesitancy

https://www.news-medical.net/news/20230912/Does-IQ-influence...

Another study https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8133799/

Let's be very clear here though, anybody that actually thought MRNA "experimentally modified genes" was not a high IQ critical thinker.

At least not one with any kind of direct, first, or second order connection to actual current biological | medical research.

That's the kind of crazy largely limited to self assessed high IQ types that never really got out in the wide world and talked to others in other fields.

The modification is an addition, not an edit, if that clarifies things for you.

Injecting mRNA, a gene, into your body modifies the set of genes in your body. Due to the new gene in your body your cells produce a protein they otherwise would not have. The reason anybody ever thought this was a good idea was to mitigate against an overblown risk from infection by a novel virus. People’s wariness toward the virus was understandable though given the many strange questions around it and the bizarre, unprecedented, inhumane, response provoked in many countries.

This whole notion of putting a gene in the body to evoke a response doesn’t haven’t any long track record of understanding behind it, therefore terming it experimental makes sense.

Thus, experimental gene modification.

I’d guess there might be some fancy statistics term to describe the intuitive calculation for some of us high iq critical thinkers that said don’t add on a potentially very large upside of risk onto something for the purposes of possibly mitigating a very small range of downside risk.

And now with all the complications arising from the shots that intuition was clearly correct. Even if all the issues hadn’t become apparent it would still be the right call for those with that limited range of downside risk from the virus to have not tacked on additional unknown risk from the injections.

Do you know how many countries that once used the mRNA injections have now barred their use for some or most of their populations?

mRNA is broken down quickly, it never enters the nucleus, and cannot affect or combine with our DNA in any way to change our genetic code.

> Do you know how many countries that once used the mRNA injections have now barred their use for some or most of their populations?

How many, and how many still ban their use?

Of those that restricted use two years ago in 2021 pending epidemiology results on potential myocardial associations, how many did that because of fears of "gene editing"?

Our genes are not edited nor added to and the point stands - no actual high IQ person with any real world medical exposure direct or second order ever actually thought that such editing (or addition) took place.

That was strictly a social media rumour easily debunked both then and now.

It’s not a rumour, it’s just an issue of semantics you’re debating here.

I’m calling a situation where a new gene is introduced into the body by means of injection and this new gene in the overall body system causes a new behaviour in cells, “experimental gene modification.”

There’s a set of all the genes in your body, then an mRNA injection occurs, now there is a new gene added to the set of all the genes in your body at least temporarily. This new gene is added with the intent to provoke a response.

I’m not saying it alters the genes you are born with from your parents.

Call it experimental gene therapy or something like that if you like, a distinction without much difference I think.

I don’t know about in 2021, the countries I’m talking about were initially fully on board like most western countries, as far as I know. Starting with Denmark, now I think most of Northern Europe and Australia have largely restricted use owing to the “efficacy rate” having settled at somewhere between 0% and -n%. The host of negative side effects and the utter absurdity of ever having mass injected these not well understood, no long term safety data things into healthy populations in the first place.

Probably more countries than that if you have a look around.

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