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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

#211

Post by mpyne »

nomel wrote: post #85
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…

The COVID mRNA vaccines have been in testing for more than a calendar year (first studies began, shots-in-arms, in March 2020), and this is not the first mRNA vaccine (the first is for Zika, which is still in development because its study is still waiting to accumulate the data to show its effectiveness).

At some point I can only treat people who still give these lame -- and untrue -- justifications for why they like vaccines, "just not this one", as anti-vax.

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

#212

Post by c-cube »

rcurry wrote: post #69
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…

It’s not irrational for people who aren’t worried about Covid to not worry about it. I didn’t downvote you and I understand your point of view, but you have to take other people’s perspectives into consideration - to me, Covid is a bad flu and I’m not stressing over something that has a much smaller likelihood of killing me than my weekend skydives do.

The vaccine is safer than Covid, by your own metric. How many people did the vaccines kill so far? How many people died of Covid?

Same goes for supposed long-term effects. The vaccines might have some, but it's less likely than the virus itself having long-term effects (it even has a name already: "long covid"). If you're young, covid is also much more dangerous than the flu.

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

#213

Post by grecy »

effie wrote: post #200
grecy wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When did we ever live in age where "facts and science and raw data are used to drive decisions" ? IMHO that was the case from something like the 70s to the 00s, but it could be rose colored glasses. > How do you know this? Without taxes there are no Police. No schools, no publicly funded roads, water, electricity or anything like that (street sweeping, snow clearing, etc.). That's just the very beginning. No EPA. N…

That is a very catastrophic view of the world. Taxes keeping us from destruction... I don't know, maybe they just keep us from evolving the society. Indians were living fine before they ever heard of taxes. They had different organization, but they did have one. The same can happen in the future. A set of local communities with local order based on merit and seniority, without a bureaucracy somewhere far away trying…

I don't disagree with you - and I lived in remote Africa for three years, so I've seen a thing or two - but I also think it's very important to remember that without taxes our lives would be immensely different.

As I mentioned most of the stuff we have now simply wouldn't exist. Would we do other things? sure. But don't imagine we can have this level of luxury and ease.

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

#214

Post by sellyme »

daenz wrote: post #210
sellyme wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The expert you quoted addressed a ~64% drop to mid-February, not an 80% drop. If you have a different source espousing a similar sentiment from the end of February, feel free to share that. The explanation for that is probably largely similar to the explanation for the 49% drop between 20 July 2020 and 12 September 2020. As a reminder, the claim you responded to was addressing the 94% drop from early January to now.

So is 64% drop in the middle of February is not the result of vaccine but then the ending result of an 80% drop by the end of February is? That makes no sense sorry. It's clear you want to rewrite the timeline to show that the vaccine caused the massive drop down to where it is now. So I don't see a point today in this further with you.

> So is 64% drop in the middle of February is not the result of vaccine but then the ending result of an 80% drop by the end of February is? That makes no sense sorry.

It's June.

I don't know why you keep talking about February when the comment you responded to was very explicitly about current case counts.

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

#215

Post by cromwellian »

effie wrote: post #179
cromwellian wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Statistically, people who are not vaccinated contribute to the spread of the virus. The fact that any one person who isn't vaccinated may not be infected is not relevant. You're using the existence of a few exceptions to prove the rule. We know there are a few people who were born immune to the HIV virus. Does that mean it's ok for everyone to assume they have this kind of immunity and not practice safe sex? Crazy.

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

Except that the people who don't get vaccinated overlap with the people who refuse all of the other mitigations -- many antivax people are also anti-mask, anti-social distancing, anti-lockdown, etc.

> 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.

You have no control over which variant you get infected by. If you're not vaccinated, you could get infected first by the Delta variant for example. I mean, you're proposing a quite frankly bizarre process: 1) "natural immunity" vs "vaccine immunity". In many cases, these are identical, for example if you get a vaccine based on a weakened form of the virus. 2) An assumption that "natural immunity" confers some kind of better protection than vaccine immunity. This is unscientific, and in the case of COVID-19, factually wrong.

And that's the point of Linus's rant A lot of antivax people use pseudo-scientific reasoning. It's like you bring the same rigor to pandemic prevention that some quack brings to analysis of GOOP supplements.

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

#216

Post by premium-komodo »

igetspam wrote: post #114
vacjrj wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, I’ll be altruistic once I have recourse. Why must I waive my legal rights?

Your rights end where the rights of another begin. Put putting others at risk, you are potentially denying them the right to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Don't get vaccinated and stay home. I support that. Going out in public as a spreader is not a right and the people you infect should be able to hold you legally liable.

Suppose I think you're putting the lives of others at risk by going outside without having meditated a few thousand hours. All the same arguments apply: getting your meditation card is your path to freedom, be responsible and protect others by doing your meditation, get your free brain scan today, etc.

Or, if you want to be selfish, that's OK -- just stay in your house forever. Keep paying for the infrastructure of the city, of course, but you won't be able to enter any kind of event without having done your meditation, and of course the un-meditated will have to sit separately from the good people.

Sound good? Or is this notion of placing new responsibilities onto others without a vote a power you'd like to keep for yourself, and not for others to wield the same way?

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

#217

Post by ivraatiems »

tandr wrote: post #203
ivraatiems wrote: post #20

I still don't like how rude Linus is. I'll never like how rude Linus is. But his explanation of mRNA is nicely done. Hope somebody reading it learns something and realizes they've been lied to. Maybe even gets vaccinated. That'd be worth a mean email or two.

> how rude Linus is. In general, or you can point exact wording in his letter which you consider "rude", sorry?

In general, but I also think his tone here specifically is rude. There's some ALL CAPS YELLING, implications the person he's responding to is an idiot, etc. This is par for the Linus course.

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

#218

Post by eyelidlessness »

foolinaround wrote: post #206
eyelidlessness wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you know that seatbelts save lives besides those of the people wearing them? That in even minor collisions being untethered to a seat can injure others? The justification for mandatory seatbelt laws is the same as the justification for covid mitigations: you’re protecting more than yourself.

If the driver is not wearing a seatbelt but the passenger is and the car gets into an accident, would the passenger be worse off than if the driver was wearing the seatbelt? If not, this analogy does not stand.

> If the driver is not wearing a seatbelt but the passenger is and the car gets into an accident, would the passenger be worse off than if the driver was wearing the seatbelt?

Potentially, yes. This wasn’t an analogy! I meant it literally. People not wearing seatbelts can injure or kill others in collisions. Their bodies can be projected into others’ and even a waif of a person can be deadly with enough force.

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

#219

Post by squiggleblaz »

effie wrote: post #192
colinmorelli wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The elderly and immunocompromised people you are related to, spend time with, and care about. Or, hell, even those that you don't, but just happen to come in close contact with. Also, nobody said your body is not about you. GP suggested the vaccine is not about you. Indeed, it's not. We vaccinate not to protect ourselves, but to protect society by reducing the spread of disease. The fact that it will also protect you…

> The elderly and immunocompromised people you are related to, spend time with, and care about. Or, hell, even those that you don't, but just happen to come in close contact with. No they aren't, because I can and do limit my risk to such people in other ways. And they can and should limit that risk as well themselves, in other ways than getting others vaccinated. Why? Because the space outside your home isn't some "…

> As a general rule, you are responsible for your health and safety, nobody else is.

This is a stupid proposal for a rule. I call it a proposal, because even a cursory study of the evidence shows it is not a description of general practice, and doesn't reflect the laws that most societies have enacted for themselves.

If it were the actual rule, then you would never be able to eat any food. Most people have the decency to stay home when they're sick, unless they fear for their security by doing so, out of consideration for other people's health. Most people take reasonable measures when making and storing food, even in the absence of laws creating some obligation, because they have consideration for the health of those who will eat it.

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

#220

Post by ilyaeck »

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.

Individuals have rights that come from God? Is that a grant written somewhere? The notion of rights is completely abstract, a relatively recent concept in our particular society. It doesn't exist in nature. Individual humans and other animals have their bodies and minds, desires, ideas and skills, and that's more or less it. The rest are abstractions a la mode that come and go. Now, I sure like to have my rights, but I have no illusions about them being god-given. If the society needs to dispense with that notion in order to survive, it will.
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