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Comment by llmslave | Hacker News Reader

Vaccines benefit the population, at the expense of the individual

This study demonstrates that it benefits the individual (and therefore the population).

No it doesn’t. I’m not trying to make a point about vaccines, just that the study is a population study and so shows benefits on average to a population.

If the vaccine killed 1/100 people (again I don’t believe this but it’s the internet) but made the other 99 immune to dying over the 4 years, it would look really good on average even if it was directly responsible for the deaths of 1%.

1% mortality would be setting off sirens during this kind of trial

Yes, a 1% mortality either way would. Yet for some reason we're focused on just one of the possibly results of the decision tree

Well, if say the vaccine gave 1/100 fatal lung cancer then a population study would show a decrease in covid deaths and an increase in lung cancer deaths though.

It's only the case if the vaccine gave everybody slightly higher chances of dying from everything that it could hide in the weeds.

So in this specific example we can see from Table 2 that deaths/1 million are just lower for everything in the vaccinated so it's not the case that it lowered one kind of death drastically at the expense of another.

Don't those 99 enjoy being alive despite all of the things that would have killed some of them had they not taken the vaccine? If "some" is at least 1%, that sounds like an individual benefit to me.

If you take the vaccine, you have a lower chance of dying over those 4 years. You also have an infinitely higher chance (specifically 1% vs 0%) of dying from the vaccine, but that doesn't change the previous sentence.

This comment helps me understand how folks see "your taxes will go up $10k but you won't pay $20k in health insurance premiums" as a hit to the pocketbook.

But this ignores the other counterfactual (what would happen to the 1/100 people had they not received the vaccine).

Explain how? there is a right answer but you'll probably not get it by relying exclusively on the reported data.

Not getting measles, polio, etc… seems like a pretty big benefit to the individual.

Vaccines benefit both! Not dying or even really getting sick from preventable but horrific diseases is a huge benefit to the individual!

As a young person with a healthy immune system, there was 0 benefit of injecting something that was given immunity from liability.

For vaccines like the measles vaccine where it can entirely stop the spread in a vaccinated population this can be true until enough people think this way that measles starts spreading in your vicinity.

But with Covid-19 vaccination wasn't able to eliminate its spread so it mostly is about protecting yourself rather than protecting others.

How? Not dying from preventable diseases seems like a pretty good deal for the individual.

Is the personal expense not dying or getting less sick or something?

If you really missed the personal "benefit" of mortality or morbidity there are many ways you could make up for that.

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