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Comment by dantefff | Hacker News Reader

Looks like they want to reduce population

Vaccines are unpopular with many. I don’t see why the motives have to be more complicated than that.

But, I would say that trying a different approach that acknowledges how patients feel could help rebuild public trust in healthcare institutions. Taking a broader viewpoint, this could save lives.

Vaccines eradicated some of the worst diseases humans had. If thousands of kids were paralyzed by polio vaccines would become very popular again.

The federal vaccine recommendation on polio vaccines is not changing.

Why polio and not others?

Please see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46566754

I think the idea that changing stated recommendations based on the public opinion is a questionable strategy that can just backfire into more distrust and behavior that follows the "true" best practices even less as they look for the 'sensible position between extremes'[1].

There are a lot of examples from the response to COVID: frequent early mixed messages around the effectiveness of masks for preventing infection and transmission not based on the actual understanding of said effectiveness but in order to manage supply shortages, arguable overstatement about the one-time long-term effectiveness of the initial vaccines against infection and transmission and not just severity of disease, overemphasis on ineffective measures like hand hygiene or six-foot-distancing over effective measures like air cleaning and masking based on the perceived willingness of the public to follow them, reduction of the stated duration of contagiousness without evidence of such.

It's one thing if it's genuinely not known what the best practices are, but knowing and misleading can confuse people who are willing to follow them and can further alienate skeptics who may seek out charlatans promising them the "real, unfiltered truth".

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation

Expert opinions are pluralistic, not a monolith, so there’s a judgement call when a policy is written. There is a spectrum of importance when you consider medical interventions. A pluralistic society, including pluralistic opinions among experts, is the norm outside of 1984. It’s just reality.

Policymakers could prioritize more or fewer vaccines, and the reasons to prioritize any particular vaccine would be expected to change over the decades.

Why the CDC isn’t prioritizing more vaccines might be seen as reckless to some. I think it’s a huge mistake that there isn’t a strep vaccine and a universal mandate for that, but it’s clearly not been historically prioritized. Strep has been known for decades to cause mental health conditions in children.

On the other hand, some infections might be better handled by vaccinating around where cases show up, a capability that is possible only now that we have electronic medical records, better tests, the information era, etc. Just-in-time logistics is a huge success story of the modern world.

Opinions of experts are important: expertise requires that opinions should change as the realities do.

An expertise that’s required of a policymaker is to maintain the effectiveness of their institutions by translating expertise into policies that are actually listened to. We have serious warning signs that public trust in healthcare is disintegrating, and that the vaccination campaigns are failing. Policies that are more focused could play out better.

Infants have rights too. It's against the law for a "seatbelt skeptic" not to put their kid in a safety seat.

As you increasingly mandate things that the public thinks are optional, eventually mandates in general start to look unimportant, and eventually you get less safety seat compliance.

If there are some illnesses we can handle with without universal vaccination, then including those vaccines as mandates means you’ll eventually get less compliance for high-priority vaccines too. This is what we’ve seen play out when the public distrusts medical authorities. We live in a democratic society and (not) listening goes both ways.

How many deaths are acceptable to say we can "handle" an illness?

Public health requires over 95% vaccination. There has never been a realistic path to that other than requiring students to be vaccinated to attend school. Without that requirement, even well meaning parents forget or may not make it a priority.

It's not fair for kids and others vulnerable in society to die because certain parents are ignorant.

Are you prepared to jail people who don’t get covid vaccines? If not, then you understand that there are trade-offs and limitations to what public policies will actually be effective in the real world that actually exists.

Edit: added the following.

> Public health requires over 95% vaccination.

This statement, made without qualifiers, shows that you have more room to think about this. For example, we haven’t had anything like 95% immunizations for smallpox or tuberculosis for a long time, yet public health is no worse off for these reasons.

Huh? As I mentioned, it has always been a requirement for students to get vaccinated to attend school. My point still holds that if not for this requirement then we'd be below the critical threshold, whether it's 95% or slightly less.

So, let’s start from the idea that a certain vaccination compliance threshold is needed for each illness that we need to and have the ability to prevent.

And then let’s consider the reality that many parents—enough of them to matter—think there are too many vaccines, so compliance has been eroding.

This is the actual challenge: the medical recommendation might be solid, but a public policy doesn’t work unless people follow it.

Because eroded compliance threatens to undermine those critical thresholds, the public policy’s effectiveness is collapsing.

We can stay the course and watch things collapse, determined that the experts are correct and that the general public cannot be helped, or we can update the policy to be more focused so that we achieve those critical thresholds for the most essential immunizations.

So you're suggesting that in response to misinformation about provably beneficial safety standards, we should erode the standards.

That encourages even more misinformation, and further erosion of public safety.

Ah yes, we’re back to the idea that the public cannot be helped. The answer is that the problem is a different, unsolvable one: presumably due to misinformation, members of the public have opinions that are too strongly held for them to follow policies.

> This is the actual challenge: the medical recommendation might be solid, but a public policy doesn’t work unless people follow it. ... presumably due to misinformation, members of the public have opinions that are too strongly held for them to follow policies.

Right before you posted this, RFK Jr stated that his objectively worse vaccine schedule was weakened so that skeptical people follow it. Whether you were aware of it or not, your arguments merely parroted exactly what he and other anti-vaxxers were heavily spreading on that day.

This is precisely how misinformation spreads, and how anti-vax "influencers" like RFK Jr have a large effect both on you and the public.

- To see how closely your arguments match RFK Jr's, see: https://www.instagram.com/p/DTbrH_zDvqw/

- To see that in actuality Republicans as a group (influenced by prominent anti-vaxxers) dropped from 91% to 78% belief (2016-2025) that vaccine benefits outweigh the risk, see this new Pew study: https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2025/11/18/how-do-americ...

Every disease can be treated without a vaccine. But treatments aren't 100%, and treatments come with their own risk. Taking medicine isn't risk-free, and certainly not necessarily less risky than vaccinations. So, even if you believe it's fine to just treat the disease instead of trying to prevent it, that doesn't mean you skip out on risk. You could have more, just from the medicines alone, not even considering the effects of the disease itself.

There are vast trade-offs that are worth considering beyond what you’ve outlined. I encourage you to think more about this.

Do you intend on elaborating on these, allegedly, "vast" tradeoffs?

It's a bit rich to be talking about tradeoffs when I'm the only one here addressing risk in an honest way.

It's not "free" to treat diseases. The risk of the treatment is something you have to weigh in, in addition to the risk of the disease itself.

Common Kennedy is THE person that worked very actively and hard to turn people against vaccines.

He wanted to make them unpopular, partially succeeded and now is trying to remove them.

Maybe we should bring back leeches if we're just going to ignore medical science and instead just go with the feelings of a misinformed public.

Do you want public advice that is followed (useful) or public advice that is ignored (not useful)?

The ability to have the public accept advice is a capability that has unquestionably eroded. However smart an expert may be, they aren’t helping anyone if people won’t listen when they speak.

Public advice should be as complete and accurate as possible. If there's a recommendation that is unlikely to be followed, then that can be indicated along with the alternate next best suggestion. e.g. "COVID prevention is best with a complete Hazmat suit, but just a mask may provide some benefit"

The job of experts is mainly to provide information and the job of the public is to pay attention to relevant information. If the public decides to ignore advice (e.g. "no level of alcohol consumption is safe"), then that doesn't change what the advice should be.

I appreciate the nuance you’re bringing to this topic.

The child vaccinations schedule is a step further than public advice due to its role in clinical practice and social expectation setting. Policymakers have a job that stands apart from that of both the medical experts and the general public, and the child vaccinations schedule is a policy document, not simply a medical one.

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