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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

#171

Post by sellyme »

young_unixer wrote: post #83
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…

> 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

That's not really a stance, that's just a statement of fact. The problem comes when people assume that this statement of fact about their knowledge imparts any information about vaccine safety.

I'm broadly of the opinion that someone who "do[es]n't know about biology or virology" should:

A) keep their opinions on biology and virology to themselves, and

B) listen to the people who do know what they're talking about when their decisions will affect others.

It's all fine and well to make decisions based exclusively on your incomplete personal understanding when it only affects you, but that's not the case with vaccination.

> and not getting a vaccine is also a reasonable decision if you're not sure about the safety.

Imagine you're standing at the edge of a river. There's a bridge to cross the river, but it looks a little rickety and you're not too sure it's safe. Alternatively, you could try to swim across the river.

Now imagine that you've just seen 3.75 million people get eaten by sharks trying to swim across the river, and there's a team of architects who have inspected the bridge telling you that it's safe to cross.

I would not describe anyone who tries to swim as behaving reasonably.

NB: throughout this comment "you" is used as a generic third-party pronoun to describe any individual, not you personally.

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

#172

Post by siloamx »

Xunjin wrote: post #158
siloamx wrote: post #109

Dear Linus, you're not a doctor. Coronaviruses are known from about 70-ties. They cause about 40‰ illness cases similar to flu. It is a known fact. It is also known fact they can easily attack their previous host too. That's why no coronavirus vaccines were injected since 70-ties. Technology barrier was not the issuse. There were also no vacciness during SARS and MERS. It is also known fact that about 80% of people h…

No sign of illness doesn't mean can't mutate/evolve, also it's not about only stoping the viruses to spread, it's all about saving lives from the 10ish% whom develop mild to severe symptoms. Seriously, how can you deny the numbers ?! In my country, Brazil, lost almost 500k lives... I'm not even doing the math about indirect deaths because our health system is on the edge since the beginning of this pandemic. As a per…

In Poland 3x more people died because the lack of medical care (non-Covid-19 cases) after the lockdown last year. Covid-19 deaths are statistical margin in my country. Paralysis of medical care was far more lethal.

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

#173

Post by betwixthewires »

ViViDboarder wrote: post #153
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.

If you’re vaccinated you’re less likely to even catch and, therefore, carry and transmit the virus though.

well, not exactly, you are still as likely to get it if you are in contact with it, you just carry a lower viral load and shed the virus less. It does reduce transmission, but that's not it's main selling point. It's main selling point, especially with regard to everyone getting vaccinated, is that everyone will get sick eventually and if you do get vaccinated you're much less likely to suffer symptoms.

So that still leaves my point: if you're vaccinated why do you care if someone else isn't? And if you aren't but you think everyone should be, why aren't you?

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

#174

Post by doublea »

betwixthewires wrote: post #116
doublea wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Misleading? You're agreeing with me here. You can still carry and transmit it. You said it, I said it, I don't see the problem. I don't think it is important to get the vaccine to as many people as possible. I think it is important to get the vaccine to those who think they should take it, especially vulnerable people like elderly people and people with comorbidities. Please don't tell me what to say, I'll say whatev…

You didn't claim it was possible, you claimed it was a certainty:

> You would've all still caught it whether she was vaccinated or not

I will continue to call you out as long as you continue to purposely misinform people.

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

#175

Post by vmception »

booblik wrote: post #22
markiyan wrote: post #19

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/cdc-heart-inflammation-case...

This is just proving that even the slightest suspicion of a semiserious side effect is being thoroughly investigated, as opposed to the anti-vaxer propaganda claims.

Exactly, and the medical community keeps going out of their way to not communicate with the public in the way the public would understand

The translation of this is “hey here is a potentially additional side effect that we didnt notice in our trials, lets do more trials so we can simply list the side effect or not since we are doing full clinical trials anyway”

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

#176

Post by siloamx »

siloamx wrote: post #172
Xunjin wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No sign of illness doesn't mean can't mutate/evolve, also it's not about only stoping the viruses to spread, it's all about saving lives from the 10ish% whom develop mild to severe symptoms. Seriously, how can you deny the numbers ?! In my country, Brazil, lost almost 500k lives... I'm not even doing the math about indirect deaths because our health system is on the edge since the beginning of this pandemic. As a per…

In Poland 3x more people died because the lack of medical care (non-Covid-19 cases) after the lockdown last year. Covid-19 deaths are statistical margin in my country. Paralysis of medical care was far more lethal.

*Compared to the same month in previous years.

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

#177

Post by beprogrammed »

landemva wrote: post #90
grecy wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But God is an artificial construct.

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

#178

Post by sellyme »

lvs wrote: post #43
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.

Well, I'm afraid I have to disagree that I'm not at all shocked about this level of ignorance brewing within the tech community. These people are very susceptible to snake oil health claims about things like nutrition, "nootropics" and the faux medicine of infinite dilution. So why wouldn't they also be susceptible to misinformation about real biotechnology?

> and the faux medicine of infinite dilution

You and I are clearly hanging out in very different tech communities if you're finding people who believe in homeopathy.

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

#179

Post by effie »

cromwellian wrote: post #6
nvoid wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want people to be able to calculate risk for themselves rather than have GOVT decide what risks people can and can't take. If one doesn't deem it risky to themselves, perhaps because they are in their 20s and the average age of covid mortality is 80, then it is up to them and it is their personal freedom to choose what to/not do. If you are 90 and have 5 more years left to live, then my all means, stay indoors. Or…

When you calculate the risk for "yourself", you're not actually just making a decision for yourself, you're making a decision on the health of those around you, because the existence of a viable breeding ground for the disease keeps it active in the population, and capable of mutating, and escaping vaccines. Besides, the government isn't even forcing you in the sense of "you're going to go to jail if you don't do thi…

> the existence of a viable breeding ground for the disease keeps it active in the population, and capable of mutating, and escaping vaccines.

You assume that when a person does not get a vaccine, that person is helping to get more people infected. But that does not always happen; many people have natural immunity and in case they are nevertheless infectors, they are quite less effective at infecting others, similar to how vaccinated people seem to be so; and such non-vaccinated person can limit their infecting risk to others in various other ways, such as by wearing a mask in close encounters with strangers and by limiting such contacts.

It is not true that getting vaccinated is the only way to help limit the spread of COVID-19.

There is another issue, that many people do not want the vaccine, but they do want natural immunity. Those people actually want to get infected, by a weak variant of the disease, and let the nature do its process and get natural immunity.

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

#180

Post by dboreham »

eoo wrote: post #87

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 o…

Was the comment about Bluetooth headsets ironic?
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