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Comment by CrossVR | Hacker News Reader

The problem with the myocarditis risk in young men is that they undergo exactly the same risk from the actual covid infection. And given the fact that it was already obviously going to be endemic it really wasn't much of a calculation. It was basically: You either roll the dice now or you roll the dice when you inevitably get covid.

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some people might like to quantify the risks that may or may not be associated with both in order to make informed decisions

unfortunately that line of reasoning was so censured that people started weaponizing it

I assume that you mean "censored" and not "censured" (different thing), but it was not, in fact, censored. It was entirely in the open.

However, the information was definitely not distilled effectively for the average layperson. I remember thinking at the time that the CDC was seriously ham-handed when it came to communicating with the general public. I even initially blamed the Trump administration, but when the Biden administration took over, they did not improve communication either. My conclusion since then is that the CDC is dominated by academic types--which is largely appropriate given their mission--but that they also put academic types in PR roles, which was a disaster.

No. Questioning the dominant narrative was in fact censured.

I believed in the lab leak theory so for me getting the vaccine was a no brainer. I could get infected by one of two things developed in a lab, only one of which had clinical trails on humans. I went with the clinically tested option.

perfectly understandable and you’ve described a reasonable decision-making process

any reasonable person should be able to recognize that the alternative hypothesis was not an equally accepted decision

many people chose severe penalties rather than participate in a sudden worldwide field trial of mRNA vaccination by indemnified pharmaceutical companies, and in some parts of the world were not even given that choice.

We were also subjected to a sudden worldwide field trial of a novel coronavirus, so it makes sense that it requires a similar response to combat it. I think in any other decade this would've been celebrated as a major scientific achievement.

If the moon landing happened today people would just be cynical about it just being an arms race with the Soviet Union to develop better ICBMs. This is of course true, but it doesn't make the achievement any less impressive.

this doesn’t address my point

again, it is perfectly valid to use this line of reasoning

but we aren’t acknowledging that the alternative hypothesis was not at all tolerated and was heavily penalized for a great many people

Hardly. I heard this “questioning the dominant narrative” over and over again. Disagreement is not censure. As far as I am aware, the only people who faced any penalties at all were doctors who went so far outside the realm of evidence-based medicine that they caused demonstrable harm and therefore had their licenses revoked. Which is good.

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