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Comment by ikrenji | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand this kind of reasoning. You don't think that the 100s of PhDs that worked on this would have accounted for the riskiness of adding a live chickenpox virus vs not adding it? People need to start trusting experts more and do less of "common sense" over-thinking imo.

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I'm in my late 40s, don't remember ever having chickenpox as a child, and I have a choice between getting the chickenpox vaccine now, or waiting til I'm eligible for Shingrix. Having seen friends get Shingles before turning 50 (and boy was it bad), plus watching some of their close family members get chickenpox from contact with them, I kind of want to avoid that stuff. But there's not a ton of expert guidance on whether the right move is to gamble on 50/Shingrix or to get vaccinated now! And when you toss in these dementia concerns, I'm even more confused. I think this would be a different calculation if I was younger, but I honestly don't know what the right move is for someone in my cohort. I decided to wait.

ETA: Someone in comments above points out that the data is still coming in on this question. It looks like the best move is not to ever be exposed to varicella (maybe me?), and the second best move is to be vaccinated with chickenpox, and possibly the ultimate best move is to get Shingrix, but there's a lot of missing data and some timing problems here.

I feel a lot of people think the "experts" are conniving in their offices rubbing their hands together thinking up ways to be diabolical.

To be fair to a lot of people, the "experts" have a long list of goddamn stupid and horrific things in the past to make blind faith in them questionable at best. Most recently, COVID highlighted the elite panic where they thought that lying to people about mask's effectiveness was a good idea to try to conserve them for medical workers for earlier shortages, along with making everyone waste time with obsessive cleaning against a threat they already knew didn't exist. They decided to try to be strategic and all they did was prove that they were willing to lie and thought that they knew better than you. Despite medical ethics including what can be best summed up as "don't lie to your patients, you don't know better than them for what is best for them".

Reputation is hard to build and easy to break, and well every decade there are enough events to break it even before dealing with propagandists and lumping all experts into the same basket. The experts said there were WMDs in Iraq too. Increased transparency combined with a less than stellar history means that institutions have fully earned their cynical reception. Horrifyingly is the damage that such misconduct has wrought, as even when they are actually 100% right this time people have reasons to doubt them.

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