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Comment by estearum | Hacker News Reader

You are again misunderstanding the data and its relevance to what we're talking about.

The vaccine protection was not superior for a short period after vaccination. It was superior for the initial variant. We've already established the vaccines became much less effective at reducing transmission in subsequent waves. You've just shared an article that says the Delta wave evaded vaccines for transmission. Yes, that's correct.

How on earth could the Delta variant's evasion have informed your decision not to get vaccinated?

By my "that was and remains false", I am saying it was not only apparently false at the time, but it has been confirmed to be actually false retrospectively as well.

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OK, so I think I understand your position now: I made a single decision early on in the pandemic that I wasn't going to get vaccinated, and somehow your links from late 2021 (ie weak evidence that didn't even exist when I was deciding) were sufficient evidence that my one decision was obviously and completely wrong.

In reality, it was a continuous decision: does the totality of evidence coming out suggest I should go get the shots today? And it never definitvely got to that point, and over time the decision became better supported, not less.

You seem to understand the evidence differently. I'll grant you that maybe at some point early on I could have bought a couple months where I would have had a marginally lower chance of infection. This would have had no appreciable effect on the people around me in the grocery store. We'll have to agree to disagree otherwise.

I don’t disagree with your assessment of your individual contribution to overall risk.

The problem is that if everyone decided the same way, then it absolutely would have produced a gigantic difference.

So we’re back to the fundamental point of this being a (true) indicator of someone’s selfishness or attitude toward their neighbors.

Me individually choosing to dump my trash into the local drinking reservoir doesn’t have any appreciable effect on others. There’s a reason, nonetheless, that it’s frowned upon.

So if I don't do a thing that has no appreciable benefit for me or the people around me, I'm being selfish, because if everyone who was in a different context did the same thing, this would somehow produce a gigantic difference?

You dumping your trash in the local drinking reservoir would probably have a couple orders of magnitude more of an impact on others than me not vaccinating after recovery (depending on what's in your trash).

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