Comment by soultrees | Hacker News Reader

Comment by soultrees | Hacker News Reader

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You’re honestly doing yourself a disservice by using terminology like that. At the time it was a way to generalize a hysterical population in a hysterical time but nowadays, after science has had its time to do it’s thing, multiple studies have come out that have shown there were additional risks with the vaccine itself, also showing it wasn’t everything they had hyped it up to be, and the fact that it was basically forced upon the population as a doomsday cure - people were right to question what was happening.

Now that the dust has settled, people are more willing to come out and say they didn’t take the vaccine or are more honest in their opinions about what happened then, and you would be surprised at the amount of well educated, well respected individuals who decided to wait, or decided to avoid the vaccine but follow all other protocols but were afraid to speak up because of the absolute outrage coming from people who were generalizing everyone as crazy anti-vaxxers.

A functioning democracy needs people who question the official line, even just to stir the conversation. A healthy functioning democracy needs the freedom for people to speak up against, or at least question the official line and during COVID times, we didn’t have that.

Just remember, this us vs them mentality you have in your mind is all fabricated and depending on which “channel” you were tuned in to, all the news was pointed towards hating the other side more. We could all use a reminder to appreciate our many commonalities and not our few differences of our fellow humans.

> A functioning democracy needs people who question the official line

But that's not what's going on. What's going on is people questioning logic itself. At the time, we just had no better options, based on the knowledge so far. This being uncomfortable is a far cry from questioning the 'official line', it's just choosing to respond to feeling rather than logic, which is problematic.

Nobodg felt good about Covid and any of it's solutions. They were merely the least worst. Antivaxxers would do well to understand how logical reasoning works, and stop attributing choice, emotion, officialdom, whatnot, where there is none. It's a classic case of projection: because they think so, doesn't mean it's how everyone thinks.

Not doing the logical thing is always inferior thinking and should be recognised as such.

I dunno, hanging on every word from the group of people who’ve been handling AIDS in Africa with little oversight for the past few decades seems pretty illogical. I can now see why their methods may cause a lot distrust.

You can’t sit around arguing about emergency procedures in the middle of an emergency. That’s not democracy, that’s stalling for disaster.

Sort these things out ahead of time. If you have a problem, that’s when to complain. But people couldn’t be arsed, to the point that a certain future felon cancelled the program meant to deal with things like this.

If by people handling Aids in Africa you mean various church groups preaching abstinence (by number the largest group active on the subject), then yes, they indeed require immensely more oversight.

Please stop picking out the factoids from their contexts; you seem to be missing large parts of the picture.

There is a simple and scientific question: does this "leaked" DNA in COVID vaccines have adverse effects? Enough to revise vaccination policies, vaccine purification, or the vaccines themselves?

No people and no methods are relevant, the only enemy to be concerned with is a virus.

For me, the logic went as follows:

The elderly, the sickly, and the obese were the most at risk.

Being young and healthy, the risk to me was negligible.

The covid vaccines did not prevent transmission, so getting jabbed would not help eradicate the virus.

Because of the limited benefits the vaccine would provide to me and its non-sterilizing nature, I decided not to get vaccinated against covid.

In the end I got covid, was sick as a dog for a few days, then I was fine. I'm happy with my decision. But I would never suggest to anyone who got the covid vaccine that they made the wrong decision, it's an individual choice to make.

I'm not sure what you mean when you say: the vaccines did not prevent transmission. Getting a shot makes it less likely for the virus to reproduce in your body, so any aerosoles you emit will have fewer or no virus content, which is precisely how it helps reduce transmission, does it not?

He means 100% prevention.

But what intervention promises that?

I know, I agree. Maybe the media and scientists set expectations too high? Vaccine == Immune? Not sure.

I'm surprised you two are going on like this as if the purpose of vaccination hasn't been to provide immunization.

It's the first time I meet someone that seems to think immunity is binary, not what it AFAIK is: a fraction, usually quite near 100% but never it.

You are fortunate you did not acquire any of the long covid symptoms.

And yes, it turns out that some people have some innate immunity that we were unable to identify early in the pandemic. But nobody knew if they had that or not.

Your rolled some dice and came up lucky.

> multiple studies have come out that have shown there were additional risks with the vaccine itself

Citation?

You're honestly doing yourself a disservice expecting citations for such obvious helpful information gosh

If you don't want to take the vaccine for the betterment of all then fine, lots of other things you can do to help. Stay home. Mask up. Do more to help stop the spread.

COVID isn't over. And it's because people wouldn't do what was needed to make spaces safe again from such a contagious thing. That is still spreading, disabling, and killing.

I think we’re a little past taking the vaccine being for the betterment of all. Almost everyone I know has had COVID, vaccinated and unvaccinated alike. It may help you get through it easier but the vaccine doesn’t do much to stop the spread. I’ve known two separate families that were all vaccinated and one person brought it home and the rest all got it.

People need to continue their lives. You can’t honestly expect people to “stay home” for 3 years. They need to work, and live. It’s not going away, and nearly everyone has had it by now.

> Almost everyone I know has had COVID

The data certainly leans more towards your experience, but I find that shocking from my own experience. Of the people that I know whether or not they have had it (and obviously knowing positive is easier than negative), only about 50% have had it (and so far I am on the 50% that has not yet tested positive).

> the vaccine doesn’t do much to stop the spread

In fact, studies have shown that vaccines (as well as prior infection) does reduce, but not eliminate, the likelihood of infecting others.

One example: https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2022/12/424546/covid-19-vaccines-p...

> Vaccinated residents with breakthrough infections were significantly less likely to transmit them: 28% versus 36% for those who were unvaccinated. But the likelihood of transmission grew by 6% for every five weeks that passed since someone’s last vaccine shot.

Excuse me if I'm not wowed. As annoying as anti-vaxers as a whole are, the other side where the vaccines are viewed as an absolute panacea might've actually made us even worse off. I feel like there wasn't much of a political push to get better vaccines made because that would be admitting what we have isn't that great.

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