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Comment by slashtom | Hacker News Reader

People become statisticians and scientists overnight when it comes to COVID-19 Vaccines.

The science is very simple, get the shot and you reduce the likelihood of hospitalization or death. It's more effective for those with co-morbidities or those older in the age brackets.

I am not sure why this was politicized to death the way it has been. The mandates early on were to curb the hospitalizations / deaths that was occurring. Really the mandate should have been for people with co-morbidities or in the upper age bracket but you know what, people are stupid and everyone thinks they're healthy, so instead of being nuanced they applied it to everyone.

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> The mandates early on were to curb the hospitalizations / deaths that was occurring.

The first vaccine was very efficient against infection by the original variants. So it was not useful only for people with co-morbidities. Then we got Omicron and a loss of efficacy against infection (but still useful to reduce severeness).

My issue is that it was already known that you can't vaccinate against a corona virus. Why we were convinced this time would be different was insane to me. They used to call them "mutations". But they came up with a new word "variants". Plus there were past attempts to come up with vaccines for SARS and MERS which all failed. This was no different. I wished they had leveled with everyone about this rather than scare the shit out of people.

It was politicized because the hall monitors and moral busybodies (we all remember who they were and what they were like before the pandemic too) tried to force people to pick between getting it or starving.

I think the issue is that most people don't have co-morbidities and most people aren't old. So when you're told to get the vaccine, and it turns out you're actually worse off due to potential heart complications, it feels like a betrayal. By the way, it is.

Part of this, I believe, was hedging bets in the fog of war that was a global pandemic. Part of it was just raw incompetence.

I am genuinely curious as someone who got every shot and booster. Do I actually benefit from this one? My understanding is the last one I did not statistically benefit from.

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