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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

#241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've never seen a Linus rant be a personal attack. He called for someone to be 'retroactively aborted'. > they mistakenly believe that everyone has the right to be treated nicely Everyone should have the right to be treated reasonably nicely, even if they misbehave, unless there's some kind of threat to life or some other extreme that obviously never comes up in the context of software development.

> threat to life You mean like anti-vaxxers dragging down the overall protection rate until there's outbreaks occurring despite everyone else's best efforts and then people die ? Like how 50 Samoan children died because of them? https://www1.racgp.org.au/newsgp/clinical/anti-vaccination-a... Is that what you meant? Or can we not use mean words against anyone even if they threaten our childrens' lives?

> You mean like...

Actually no - the comment in question was in response to… making more system calls than necessary.

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

#242
post #69

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.

Fyi, I think the rate of death (assuming you're over 10 and under 40) for covid is about 0.2% in the west. The chance of dying in a sky dive is about 0.001% I think? So covid is 200 times more dangerous than a skydive.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-se...

That said, I am 100% happy with you making an assessment for your own health. I only start objecting when people (not you) pretend there is no risk or refuse to wear a mask or decline the vaccine because its a conspiracy.

We can go back and forth getting the right risk figure and you may be happy with that risk. That's all personal freedom and good faith discussion. When people refuse the facts, that's when it gets frustrating to me. And I think a very big number are doing just that.

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

#243
post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, you're still a risk.

Risk is quantifiable. It's not a boolean. You are less of a risk for spreading covid19 when you are vaccinated for it.

It's a quantified risk until one disagrees with the belief holder and then it becomes a boolean.

You're less at risk but you're still a risk. Being a risk, no matter how small, has been the excuse for every response to this situation we've had so far and so this is no different.

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

#244

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…

I have a 9mo old in day care. Day care keeps these kids constantly sick regardless of C19 - I just spent two nights on Memorial Day weekend in the hospital with my son due to RSV. Anyways, out of curiosity how did C19 end up effecting the infant? I [was] an LEO and my wife is a health care professional so we have both been vaccinated since the beginning of the year, but I still think about my son with everything star…

> how did C19 end up effecting the infant

I don't think the infant had symptoms, but I'm not sure. My worry with my kids isn't that they'll be sick now, but that 15 years from now we'll be hearing about a whole generation dealing with after effects of covid infections. Brain and physiology changes.

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

#245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I get your point there, and it is valid.

my point in comparing the seatbelt to vaccines was about the passenger being compared to the vaccinated person, who is responsible for his own risk.

Analogies are never perfect, and in this case, it is the first time, the disease has been so politicized on both sides that we need to resign ourselves to potentially never coming to a complete agreement.

Time of course will prove it, but for some, it will be too late.

However, I just think that (even stupid) people are in general selfish for what they care about ( not logical enough for the rest of us) and that in general, they should have agency.

I see it in the same category as regulating alcohol, drugs, etc. In fact, there is unanimous opinion that alcohol is not good for you at all, where there is discussions,even prior to covid, that is often debunked (but not completely in the eyes of some people) that vaccines pose their own risks (see autism, etc ), and also affects people's sensibilities (see usage of aborted fetal cells)

I believe the core issue here more than vaccines is trust. Trust that is lost, and attempts taken to understand why, and solutions to rebuild it.

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

#246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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" shou…

Nice methaphor. 3.75 million is meaningless. I'd rather compare the 3% eaten by sharks to 0.0...1?% slipped and died on the bridge. And I'd rather trust these statistics than the architects (assuming I can trust the ones who collected the data)

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

#247

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.

I wish people wouldn’t conflate not wanting to take this particular vaccine at this particular time with being “anti-vax”. I am vaccinated. I vaccinate my kids and have done so as recently as a few months ago. I believe in vaccines. But I’m not ready for this one yet. When it has gone through the same FDA approval process as would be used for any vaccine I will be first in line. I don’t see why people are so offended…

> I wish people wouldn’t conflate not wanting to take this particular vaccine at this particular time with being “anti-vax”.

I don't think those same people were brave enough to be 'early adopters' and neither were they participating in the clinical trials since they also love immature and untested vaccines so much at the time didn't they? Like everyone else, they were waiting until they got 'approval' from the FDA and other regulators.

Some trials may not even give the full picture of the side effects involved with those vaccines and the risks are also not known yet until widespread adoption happens. Then you can make a decision on which one to take, if you can. In most cases, the risks are very tiny anyway.

> I don’t see why people are so offended by this view. I literally get seen as a crazy person simply for wanting to wait until the same standards have been applied.

The ones resorting to desperation and extreme hatred towards those who wait and want to know the risks later are those who's businesses require humans physically being present and are unable to adapt.

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

#248
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.

What caused the paralysis?!

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

#249
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The goal isn't to entirely eliminate transmission, which is, as you imply, impossible. The goal is to reduce spread to below R=1 for the general population and any substantial subgroups.

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

#250
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So still very much transmissible.

The goal isn't to entirely eliminate transmission, which is, as you imply, impossible. The goal is to reduce spread to below R=1 for the general population and any substantial subgroups.

And without the complete abolition of capacity to transmit the disease you're still a risk to that goal.
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