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Comment by kiltedpanda | Hacker News Reader

I'm in Canada. I used the term VAERS, but I meant the Canadian equivalent reporting system. In Canada self-reporting isn't permitted - it has to go through a doctor. Then you're subject to doctor's biases as well. In my case, with first onset of chest pain a couple of days after the second dose, his bias led him to hypothesize that it could have been from a latent Covid infection (with zero covid symptoms). That theory was squashed when I caught Covid a few weeks later.

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An American friend of mine in his mid thirties developed cardiac issues after 3 doses of Moderna, but his doctors doggedly attribute it to his mild COVID case (and he is of course happy to believe that rather than that the damage may have been self-inflicted).

That's a major problem. Anything that could possibly be caused by the vaccine, or has an unknown cause, should be reported. You want the raw data without the biases of doctors guessing if something is related or not. Then the data scientists and researchers can clean the data.

Indeed. The extreme version would be to collect data about "all problems, period", and compare the rates of "people who got the vaccine in the last N weeks" against a control group. Like looking at "excess deaths" to estimate the deaths caused by COVID. Picking the right control group might be tricky, though...

Yeah, I looked at doing some analysis for a vaccine related injury. There aren't really any control groups for the mandatory vaccines. The best you can do is try to time box it like you're talking about. Even using groups that may not vaccinate (certain religious sects usually) may have issues with the sampling not being random due to genetics and demographics in those communities.

I wanted to do the time boxing like you suggest, but access to anonymous records with that level of detail and with a sufficient size is not easy to come by (as a lay person for free at least).

Would a peer reviewed study in the European Journal of Heart Failure finding 1 in 35 people suffered heart damage after a Moderna booster shot change his mind?

https://farmersforum.com/one-in-35-people-suffered-heart-dam...

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ejhf.2978

Vaccines are safer than water!

I doubt any medical doctor has claimed that.

Heck, I doubt any have even said that an injection of saline solution is as safe as normal water consumption.

You might be surprised. I've heard a doctor I know personally who is so pro vaccine that they have stated they are absolutely safe (not generally safe) and they wish they could secretly give the vaccine (specifically covid) to kids who's parents decline.

Have you tried prompting them differently? People are a bit like chatGPT and anchor weirdly.

My reason for phrasing the earlier comment that way, and also my guess for that doctors thought process, is that asking the relative risks per million of a saline injection and only when you get that answer following up by asking if any other injection is safer, would get you there, unless they were currently thinking about all the antivax conspiracies, and there's still a chance that just asking about saline injection would cause that thought process directly.

True, this was unprompted and offered up voluntarily.

Yeah this whole thing really brought out the inner SS in some people.

Only in the parallel reality where the SS was famous for trying to prevent a transmissible illness. Given our reality is one where the SS were racist paramilitaries that industrialised homicide, you seem to be regurgitating from the "everyone I disagree with is literally hitler" school of rhetoric.

There was no "trying to prevent a transmissible illness" once the CDC's Provincetown study made it clear in late July 2021 that the vaccines didn't prevent transmission. After that point, it was purely enforcing a purity ritual and loyalty test on people, and was even couched in those terms: "we're not accepting the refusal of this undertested therapeutic from those anti-social anti-vaxxers!"

> the vaccines didn't prevent transmission

Tell me you don't know how vaccines work without telling me you don't know how vaccines work.

Preventing transmission is a nice to have, not a must have. Less serious symptoms (which can include, but are absolutely not limited to, death, not for Covid not for anything else) are the requirement for them to be useful.

> CDC's Provincetown study

Tell me you don't know Baysean statistics etc.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/08/08/cdc-re...

Comments like yours are why I wrote the other day:

"I think people expect cancer cures to be as effective as vaccines really are, while also expecting vaccines (and antibiotics) to be as effective as a Potion of Cure Disease in Skyrim."

Gosh I wonder where they got that idea

"When people are vaccinated, they're not going to get infected" - Fauci

"You're not going to get Covid if you get these vaccinations" - Biden

"Vaccinated people do not carry the virus and don't get sick" - Walensky (Head of CDC)

"There is no variant that escapes the protection of our vaccines" - Bourla (Pfizer CEO)

"Emergency uses of the vaccine have not been approved or licensed by US FDA but have been authorized to prevent COVID-19 in ages 5+." - Pfizer Inc.

> "When people are vaccinated, they're not going to get infected"

> "There is no variant that escapes the protection of our vaccines"

I googled these two then stopped, because you know what results I see? Conspiracy theorists quoting each other. I don't actually see a single reference to any source material to verify the original statements.

To put that another way: https://www.ideatovalue.com/insp/nickskillicorn/2021/04/dont...

> "Emergency uses of the vaccine have not been approved or licensed by US FDA but have been authorized to prevent COVID-19 in ages 5+." - Pfizer Inc.

This I can believe (it's close enough to the docs I can find even though it's not actually a quotation from any of them), but I have no idea why you think this quote is supposed to support your point.

Here you go:

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/04/cnbc-exclusive-cnbc-transcri...

https://twitter.com/i/status/1555369351238537216

"I have no idea why you think this quote is supposed to support your point."

Because it says "authorized to prevent COVID-19 in ages 5+". It does no such thing obviously.

What was the justification for firing people from their jobs or excluding them from public accommodations for not taking a non-sterilizing vaccine?

The USA Today article you link is just a lot of the usual verbal gymnastics that was rolled out at the time: they still work against severe outcomes, sure lots of vaccinated people are getting infected but you have to use Bayesian analysis and compare against the proportion of the base population that was vaccinated, no vaccine is 100% effective so let's pretend these ones are just as good as the ones that are 99% effective, etc.

> just as good as the ones that are 99% effective

How many vaccines do you think are 99% effective? Or even 90%?

The covid vaccine researchers would've been happy if it had only been 50% effective.

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