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Comment by jleyank | Hacker News Reader

Too many people would rather risk suffering the disease than take the vaccine. These might be the same people criticizing pharma for alleviating symptoms rather than providing cures. mRNA is an interesting means of delivering molecules on-site without mucking about with the body’s general systems. But the ‘Net says drugs are bad so they have funding problems.

Hope such people reconsider their stance when the threat level is high enough. Err, threat to them and theirs as the threat to others isn’t high enough by definition.

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> Too many people would rather risk suffering the disease than take the vaccine.

Apologies for being morbid, but that's what we call a self-fixing problem, isn't it? On a Darwinistic level, people either adopt an effective threat assessment approach or they die.

EDIT: Following up on some of the comments, note that I didn't actually say whether vaccine deniers do or do not have an effective threat assessment approach - I don't know. While I personally do believe in the effectiveness of vaccines, I definitely am not qualified to be making risk decisions for other people, and it's important for me to say this, because I don't want other people to make decisions for me. For example, I don't want others to tell me to not do extreme sports, or not to go out to the wilderness, or not to drink alcohol, etc, regardless of whether society feels that this increases my health risks. I strongly believe that a core part of being free is being able to make these decisions for oneself. I agree that we should have some way of preventing harm to others, but it can't be something that comes at the cost of removing people's bodily autonomy (or even just denigrating people for choosing differently).

Hence my statement about hope…

Not really, those people go to a hospital where there is a duty of care. Hospitals don't get to just say "Nah, not gonna help you" and close the door for people showing up in the ED.

So those vaccine deniers get sick, lose their commitment, go to the ED, get some level of treatment/help/etc, and suck up resources and impact help for the guy who got vaccinated then got hit by someone running a red light....

Also, they will help spread the disease around, chances to hit some less fortunate chaps increasing with every new carrier.

I made a comment that got downvoted and flagged and then dang sent me a nasty gram.

"Chinese bat flu. Deadly enough to be a problem. Not deadly enough to be a solution"

Which is to say it's a real problem. The flu is a real problem, ask any nurse that works in a hospital. With vaccines Covid is 3X worse. But that's not enough carnage to break through most peoples normalcy bias. No ones getting enlightened, instead they'll get angry and lash out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalcy_bias

Unfortunately, one of the key purposes of the vaccine - arguably more important than personal immunity - is reducing the chance of it propagating to other people, and reducing the intensity of the viral load if it does.

If you attend a graduate level CS course on network science, you'll come across network model of herd immunity and mathematical proof of why it is effective. People who developed the model didn't take first amendment into consideration. Otherwise the outcome might have been different.

What does this have to do with anything? Obviously science should be independent from these considerations, but then social policy should not be.

As an extreme example, give me a free weekend and I'll get you a mathematical model of how if we force everyone who ever committed a physically aggressive act to go on beta blockers, then we'll significantly reduce violent crime. But having the math worked out doesn't immediately imply that that's what we should do.

Well the reason herd model does not take first amendment into account is because it wasn't developed by Americans, for a start. My comment was meant to be sarcastic.

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