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Linus Torvalds: Get vaccinated. Stop believing the anti-vax lies

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Re: Linus Torvalds: Get vaccinated. Stop believing the anti-vax lies

#81

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

rektide wrote: post #24
LatteLazy wrote: post #2

Unpopular opinion: watching people struggle and fail or just plain refuse to engage with covid (wear a mask, socially distance, get a vaccine) has really shaken my faith in democracy. I was worried after Trumps election in 2016. But it's not a one-off phenomenon. People just behave randomly, they don't calculate risk, they don't care about facts, they're not even able to be self interested as far as I can tell. Just…

I'd love to know how the rest of the world experienced the anti-societal refuseniks of Covid. In America, we've had their ticket for a long time, a persistent extremely vocal segment of society that refuses to get along, that always has very important opinions on other people's business & how to do things, that seems to have created their own social strata on being anti-societal, anti-cooperative, generally just anti…

Negative viewpoints garner more attention. I was cornered by a proselytizer the other day who, in typical fashion, proceeded to tell me all about what he's against with no mention of what's so great about his club.

Re: Linus Torvalds: Get vaccinated. Stop believing the anti-vax lies

#82

Post by kevinventullo »

vacjrj wrote: post #54
apatheticonion wrote: post #32

I'm genuinely shocked at how many of my colleagues are in the anti-vaxx club. Literally half of my team have said they will not get the vaccine when it's available to them. One citing a podcast which talked about how the vaccine causes programmed cell death and the other because "it's all a bit suspicious". Great guys, intelligent and generally good to be around. I didn't know how to react when I found out.

99.97% survival rate for our demographic. When we can sue should we suffer an adverse reaction, then the cost-benefit analysis may even out. Right now, it’s all but downside.

Presumably the survival rate for getting the vaccine is higher?

Re: Linus Torvalds: Get vaccinated. Stop believing the anti-vax lies

#83

Post by young_unixer »

apatheticonion wrote: post #32

I'm genuinely shocked at how many of my colleagues are in the anti-vaxx club. Literally half of my team have said they will not get the vaccine when it's available to them. One citing a podcast which talked about how the vaccine causes programmed cell death and the other because "it's all a bit suspicious". Great guys, intelligent and generally good to be around. I didn't know how to react when I found out.

What's your definition of anti-vaxx?

To me, anti-vaxx means someone who is positively against vaccines, as in "vaccines give people X, so people shouldn't get vaccines", where X is some undesirable condition, autism, thrombosis, etc.

Being skeptic, but not against vaccines is not anti-vaxx. If someone says "I don't know if vaccines are safe", I don't think that's an anti-vaxx stance.

In fact, if you don't know about biology or virology, the "I don't know if vaccines are safe" is a totally reasonable stance to have, and not getting a vaccine is also a reasonable decision if you're not sure about the safety.

I personally don't know if COVID vaccines are safe, and I still got it, but I understand that I'm taking a risk by getting the vaccine without understanding it, because I figured the risk of not taking it is higher, but my estimation was relatively uninformed.

Re: Linus Torvalds: Get vaccinated. Stop believing the anti-vax lies

#84

Post by doublea »

betwixthewires wrote: post #71
schwartzworld wrote: post #18

Story time: My daughters day care has 2 fulltime employees and a part timer. The fulltime staff are vaxxed, the part-time person isn't, despite having been eligible for a loooooong time. Well, guess who got an asymptomatic covid infection, and then went on to spread it to her entire family, including her infant granddaughter. Luckily, the person who infected her got tested and let her know in time for her to not infe…

Selfish how? You can still carry and transmit the virus with the vaccine. You would've all still caught it whether she was vaccinated or not. Of course, if you're all vaccinated it doesn't matter either way.

This doesn't seem to be the case. At least studies on Moderna/Pfizer have found lower rates of asymptomatic infection/transmission in vaccinated people. Source: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br...

Given how important it is to get the vaccine to as many people as possible, please avoid making this misleading statement in the future.

Re: Linus Torvalds: Get vaccinated. Stop believing the anti-vax lies

#85

Post by nomel »

apatheticonion wrote: post #32

I'm genuinely shocked at how many of my colleagues are in the anti-vaxx club. Literally half of my team have said they will not get the vaccine when it's available to them. One citing a podcast which talked about how the vaccine causes programmed cell death and the other because "it's all a bit suspicious". Great guys, intelligent and generally good to be around. I didn't know how to react when I found out.

Related, this link is immediately below this one, on my feed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27463732

I think it's a little unfair to label everyone "anti-vaxx" who are weary of the emergency approved, no long term testing, first time ever, mRNA vaccines. For those people, encourage them to look into the more conventional Johnson and Johnson vaccine. Even then, I wouldn't consider them anti-vaxx until full FDA approval has completed, at least for the J&J vaccine.

Re: Linus Torvalds: Get vaccinated. Stop believing the anti-vax lies

#86

Post by narrator »

I make all my medical decisions based on what sweepstakes the local hospital chain is offering for getting non-FDA approved experimental use authorization vaccines. Seriously, non-ironically, I literally got an email today telling me they are offering me a chance to win a trip to Disneyland if I get vaccinated!

Dammit! This is America. We are supposed to pay for our medical care and pay A LOT OF MONEY! How dare they offer me free stuff to get vaccinated! I never got offered actual money to get a medical procedure ever in my life. It makes the whole thing smell funny.

That, and I wouldn't be doing it because of any other reason than peer pressure to drink the Kool Aid. Exactly 1 person in my county died of COVID last month. I am just not scared of getting COVID enough to risk the vaccine. Besides, you guys are creating the risk of creating a Marek's disease like variant[1] by all getting a vaccine that doesn't prevent you from getting the disease, but only from getting bad symptoms.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marek's_disease

Re: Linus Torvalds: Get vaccinated. Stop believing the anti-vax lies

#87

Post by eoo »

I understand how mRNA works. I've got a background in both Chem and CompSci and I read https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source...

But I wouldn't use it for the same reason I don't use Bluetooth headsets -- tech is just way too new, and of for some reason there are long term unexpected side effects, we won't know until a decade or two goes by.

PS: I'm vaccinated with the viral vector AstraZeneca one

Re: Linus Torvalds: Get vaccinated. Stop believing the anti-vax lies

#88

Post by textgel »

zuminator wrote: post #75
betwixthewires wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Selfish how? You can still carry and transmit the virus with the vaccine. You would've all still caught it whether she was vaccinated or not. Of course, if you're all vaccinated it doesn't matter either way.

Vaccinated people with asymptomatic infections have a lower viral load and are less likely to transmit the virus to others. https://www.nebraskamed.com/COVID/can-i-still-spread-covid-1...

So still very much transmissible.

Re: Linus Torvalds: Get vaccinated. Stop believing the anti-vax lies

#89

Post by riedel »

COGlory wrote: post #65
63 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As always though, it's not about you, it's about the people around you and the people around them. If we all acted selfishly all the time we'd all die.

How many documented cases of mass, true altruism are there, out of curiosity? I'm in agreeance that people should get the vaccine, but I'm under no illusion that for a normal (selfish) person, the cost-benefit is a little wonky.

Any kind of donation. But getting a 70% for a single thing is hard if it not the absolute social norm. Probably only churches achieve this. But it works for other vaxxines too. but it might take another 10 years given the doubts a new vaxxine might raise. We need people that we trust telling us that this is safe and that they expect this from us to get the cost benefit to work for the 70% . So all please all high karma HN posters: call for people to get vaxxed and put reports of risks in a statistical context...

Re: Linus Torvalds: Get vaccinated. Stop believing the anti-vax lies

#90

Post by landemva »

grecy wrote: post #39
LatteLazy wrote: post #2

Unpopular opinion: watching people struggle and fail or just plain refuse to engage with covid (wear a mask, socially distance, get a vaccine) has really shaken my faith in democracy. I was worried after Trumps election in 2016. But it's not a one-off phenomenon. People just behave randomly, they don't calculate risk, they don't care about facts, they're not even able to be self interested as far as I can tell. Just…

I agree 100% and it's quite scary. We've moved past the "information age" where facts and science and raw data are used to drive decisions, and we're in some kind of "selfish wants" age. I don't know if it's a problem with democracy though - we've known for a long time now if you let regular folk vote on it a huge number would vote for absolutely zero tax and society would fall apart because of it, but they'd go down…

Individual people have rights, which come from God (higher power). Groups and "society" are not able to have rights, as "groups" are an artificial construct.
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