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Comment by boxed | Hacker News Reader

Vaccine skepticism is on the same level as flat earthism. This is not an insult to your person, but this is the reality of the science. Trading a 0.1 micromort risk once for a 1000 micromort risk over your lifetime is a crazy good deal. Put another way: that's trading ~6 minutes for ~24 days of life. You do that for every vaccine. Some vaccines have worse trades depending on your situation, and some are far better trades.

Look at these stats: https://boxed.github.io/micromort/?q=vaccine&scale=log&sel=v...

Note the LOG scale! You can switch to a linear scale, but then you can't even see there are multiple vaccine adverse risk data points, as they all collapse to one dot compared the the huge risks of the diseases they prevent.

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> Vaccine skepticism is on the same level as flat earthism

Their bio: "Christian // Father // Husband // Veteran"

>Trading a 0.1 micromort risk once for a 1000 micromort risk

I think like with that person that found their cancer to have some dna from an mrna vaccine in it the issue is when the prominent messaging is that there is no 0.1 micromort risk. There is no risk whatsoever and everyone who says so is a looney. Immediately you'll have thousands who say i told you so and harden their conviction.

The COVID19 vaccines were the most-discussed vaccines ever. And there was an enormous amount of coverage for the potential side effects. Recommendations were adjusted based on new data.

There was also bad communication on the topic, often when politicians got involved or due to outdated information continued to be repeated. But there certainly was a lot of public discussion about the risks of the vaccines, they were simply vastly outnumbered by the benefits of the vaccines.

It didn't help that the AstraZeneca vaccine was fairly bad all things considered. At roughly 3 micromort according to the latest data it's quite a lot of risk for a modern vaccine actually. Now, compared to getting Covid it's still better. Even for a 10 year old the covid risk is ~20 micromort and we don't recommend vaccines for that group. Which seems a bit bonkers when you consider that trading 20 for 3 is clearly a good choice, it's just that anti-vaccine loonies make politicians scared out of their minds, so they will rather have lots of kids dying than a few kids dying from vaccines.

I suspect the issue is in part also just selfishness.

That 20 is in large part the kid that was brought into the hospital too late if at all. The kid that might have had astma or what have you.

The 3 is potentially yours or one in your family or friend group or community. It is a government mandated death and you might already distrust the gov.

A tragic event vs an authoritarian death inflicted upon you from that perspective.

My grandma is a scientist presumably very familiar with all this stuff but when her partner (not my grandpa) died from a bloodcloth shortly after getting an vaccine she also veered into that territory.

> It is a government mandated death and you might already distrust the gov.

Well.. no. It was a government RECOMMENDED death at the most.

In fact, it's even more stupid. Sweden for example were so deadly afraid of anti-vaxxers that they threw away tens of thousands of doses of AstraZenecas vaccine. The one with 2 deaths per million. At the time it was estimated at 5 per million. Sweden has a population of 10 million. So if we instantly vaccinated the entire population we would see 2 deaths. While this decision to throw away doses was done we lost tens per day. And the government didn't allow those who understood math to take this if they wanted. No. They mandated the deaths. THOSE deaths WERE mandated. For real.

Oh I know but disease is an abstract entity one can't directly address with scorn, to be held liable for direct action, etc. The government is and inaction draws less attention.

Ok? But there was no moral outrage from anyone except me when the Swedish government unilaterally made this medical decision that statistically killed a lot of people. So obviously that idea that the government is held liable isn't really true either.

> There is no risk whatsoever and everyone who says so is a looney.

No. Lying about the risks is what got us in this mess. There IS a risk. It's just crazy low. https://boxed.github.io/micromort/?q=vaccine&scale=log These are the real risks. Yellow Fever vaccine is the worst with ~7 micromort risk. That's roughly your baseline risk just by living for 7 hours. It's not a lot, but saying it's zero is false, and lying about shit is how you radicalize people.

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