Discriminatory attitudes against the unvaccinated during a global pandemic • Hacker News Board

Re: Discriminatory attitudes against the unvaccinated during a global pandemic

#221

Post by SideburnsOfDoom » Fri, Dec 09, 2022, 10:45 PM UTC

t0bia_s wrote: post #219

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So... Should we ban alcohol, tobacco, cars and force everyone to wear helmets? All of these things that you mentioned are regulated, some more strictly than others. "ban or permit freely" attitude to them is black-or-white, fallacious thinking. None of what you wrote is on topic or refutes anything that I said above.

Actually it does. If we apply mandatory practices in favor of our health, why don't we absolutely abandon things that clearly damage our health? Where are you from?

> Actually it does.

What does what? Be specific.

> why don't we absolutely abandon things that clearly damage our health?

I expect that at least tobacco, will in the long run be permanently abandoned. But how is that relevant?

> Where are you from?

Why do you ask? I'm not in the habit of supplying PII to antagonistic randos in the internet.

Re: Discriminatory attitudes against the unvaccinated during a global pandemic

#222

Post by ls15 » Fri, Dec 09, 2022, 11:43 PM UTC

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #213

ls15 wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt most efficacy claims, because they don't line up with the experiences of most of the people that I know. Most people were vaccinated, most people were boostered, most people contracted covid, many obviousy passed it on. I am not saying that the numbers are wrong, but I am saing that the vaccine was marketed with fancy numbers, that don't mean much in the end, because people get vaccinated, but still get covid…

To be clear what you're saying is that you have stopped disputing the data, but ... oh look over there! hey, who needs data when you have anecdotes?

An estimated 94% of Americans has been infected with SARS-CoV-2.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.11.19.22282525v...

About 69% of Americans have received two doses. Some got more.

https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccinations_vacc-...

This leaves very little room for real transmission/infection benefit. About 6% of people have been saved from being infected, but this is trending southwards and some of them may just have been religious maskers and social distancers, so it is not clear by how much the vaccination contributes to the 6%.

Re: Discriminatory attitudes against the unvaccinated during a global pandemic

#223

Post by epgui » Sat, Dec 10, 2022, 3:19 AM UTC

t0bia_s wrote: post #218

epgui wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and always has been.

Then you are easily manipulated. If you wont confront given information with your real experience, you could easily believe in anything that other says. And covid is exactly this case. How many healthy people died from covid that you personally knew?

I’m not sure if you’re being for real right now, but maybe you should just start by looking at the definition of “anecdotal evidence”. This is just what this is, by definition. I’m not sure what you’re going on about.

Re: Discriminatory attitudes against the unvaccinated during a global pandemic

#224

Post by epgui » Sat, Dec 10, 2022, 3:21 AM UTC

yucky wrote: post #214

epgui wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look up “conditional probability rule”.

I wanted to make sure I corrected your claim that this was anecdotal. It's what the actual data says. Most people dying from Covid now are vaccinated. That doesn't mean nobody should get vaccinated. It doesn't mean everyone should get vaccinated. But saying something isn't true that clearly is, isn't helpful. Trust has been eroded enough by "the experts" already.

No, you’re missing the point in more than one way.

Re: Discriminatory attitudes against the unvaccinated during a global pandemic

#225

Post by epgui » Sat, Dec 10, 2022, 3:23 AM UTC

adamiscool8 wrote: post #105

epgui wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My risk calculus is informed by over 12 years of postsecondary education (and expertise) in the biomedical field, and by deferral to expertise on complex issues.

Well, despite those handicaps, I trust your risk calculus is still as valid for your situation as mine is for me. Why would you not extend the same courtesy to others? I’m reminded of a Carl Sagan quote: > One of the great commandments of science is, “Mistrust arguments from authority.” (Scientists, being primates, and thus given to dominance hierarchies, of course do not always follow this commandment). Too many suc…

There’s a difference between an “appeal to authority” logical fallacy and the “deferral to expertise” heuristic. Look it up.

I can’t believe I have to explain this, but nobody on this earth knows everything: therefore we specialize, and we resort to other experts. That is the reality of being an agent of bounded rationality.

Re: Discriminatory attitudes against the unvaccinated during a global pandemic

#226

Post by chrismcb » Sat, Dec 10, 2022, 3:28 AM UTC

jiggawatts wrote: post #177

disambiguation wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't a good analogy given "people driving the speed limit" can also get and spread Covid and cause extremely negative outcomes. Not wearing a seat-belt is perhaps a more accurate metaphor, given the individual assumes the majority of the risk. Regardless all you're doing here is trying to justify a bad attitude, and proving the GPs point.

Getting COVID while unvaccinated makes you much more sick, and hence much more likely to spread it to other people. This is why China is still under lockdown, and most other (highly vaccinated) countries aren't. In places with no speed limit enforcement, even people that drive slowly are killed more often . How is this difficult to understand? Vaccines, masks, hand-washing, etc... are not just about you!

Personally works love to see the research on that assertion. If you are unvaccinated and get sick, you are more likely to be symptomatic and stay home. On the other hand if you are vaccinated you are more likely to be asymptomatic and socialize and therefore more likely to spread it. Unfortunately I don't know the numbers. How much more likely are you to be asymptomatic if you are vaccinated?

Re: Discriminatory attitudes against the unvaccinated during a global pandemic

#227

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Dec 10, 2022, 5:01 AM UTC

thiht wrote: post #195

barbariangrunge wrote: post #5

I have a friend who is allergic to many vaccines. A bad reaction as a kid led to him needing years of rehab. He's also high risk for Covid. He's pro-vaccine in general I guess I should add, but his doctor told him to not get the covid shots because the risk was too high Whenever I mention that it's cruel to exclude people like him from society, due to vaccine requirements, when people like him are presumably what all…

> I mention that it's cruel to exclude people like him from society Which is exactly why we specifically don't exclude people like him from society. There are obviously exemptions in every sane country. In France there are exemptions for this cases and some people still acted like "BuT wHat AbOUt AlleRgIes", like they cared at all. They just didn't want to get vaccinated.

[deleted]

Re: Discriminatory attitudes against the unvaccinated during a global pandemic

#228

Post by ifyoubuildit » Sat, Dec 10, 2022, 2:04 PM UTC

mindslight wrote: post #70

DoreenMichele wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is that the overwhelming majority (>99%) of people who choose not to vaccinate, do so for bad reasons, which amounts to making an uninformed medical decision, and one that adversely impacts other people in addition to themselves. These people are what the controversy is actually about. I really don't think that's what is going on. I used to be on an antivax list (for unrelated reasons -- I am not an antivax…

Yes, it's important to not deprecate individuals' personal informed good faith opinions in favor of the top-down overprescriptive medical system. But this concern doesn't apply to the main contingent of unvaccinated, either. The sheer majority of the vaccine hesitant have had their head pumped full of nonsense by the anti-American narratives of Fox News and its ilk, then validated by Facebook. The common refrain isn'…

> But this concern doesn't apply to the main contingent of unvaccinated, either.

> The sheer majority of the vaccine hesitant have had their head pumped full of nonsense by the anti-American narratives of Fox News and its ilk, then validated by Facebook

I believe that you honestly believe this, but as a living counter example of what you describe (don't watch infotainment style news for anything but entertainment, made my decision based on available studies), I wonder how you have gone about validating that perception?

Is there a chance that you're assuming the loud cartoon characters you see on social media, or a few of your friends/family/coworkers are representative of the wider population? Does this "main contingent" really make up the bulk of this group? Or are they just the most offensive, and therefore most noticeable?

Re: Discriminatory attitudes against the unvaccinated during a global pandemic

#229

Post by ifyoubuildit » Sat, Dec 10, 2022, 2:14 PM UTC

jltsiren wrote: post #144

adamiscool8 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think this is a complex trade-off at all, precisely for the reasons in your second paragraph. The whole issue boils down to whether we should allow the powers that be a framework to criminalize being an unadulterated human. That path may be less salient in the short-term (particularly in the face of manufactured panic), but it’s far, far more terrifying in the long run.

My comment was not specific to covid vaccines. Vaccines, like other preventative measures, have externalities. Public health debates are often about whether those externalities are significant enough that individuals should be asked / pressured / forced to take actions that may be harmful to them. If you only talk about the effects of a vaccine on the vaccinated individual, you are not really participating in the deb…

Can you give us an overview on what's currently known about the externalities of the covid vaccines? Specifically some quantification of their effect on another persons odds of getting infected/hospitalized/killed/long covid'ed would be particularly helpful.

My understanding is that it is miniscule, but I only see people say things like "well no vaccine is 100% effective" and leave it at that (which I don't see as particularly informative), or the other end of the spectrum "the evil clot shots never did anything but kill people and make money for big pharma" which is of course equally useless.

Re: Discriminatory attitudes against the unvaccinated during a global pandemic

#230

Post by ifyoubuildit » Sat, Dec 10, 2022, 2:35 PM UTC

epgui wrote: post #140

nwiswell wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an issue of semantics. They "prevent" in the sense that they "reduce the risk", not in the sense that they "preclude entirely". Put another way: they prevent some transmission. They do not prevent all transmission. It's not unusual to be sloppy with the definition here. Typically you would say that birth control prevents pregnancy, even though it is not 100% efficacious.

That is correct. As for sloppiness... If there used to be 100 cookies in the cookie jar, and now there are 95, then there's a difference between saying "I did not eat cookies" (the implication is that you did not eat any of the missing 5 cookies) and saying "I did not eat all the missing cookies" (the implication being that you ate fewer than 5 cookies). Saying the vaccines don't prevent transmission is the same as s…

I see this exact back and forth in a lot of threads, but I never see it go to the obvious conclusion. It sounds like you can probably shed some light on this based on your background.

A) they dont prevent transmission

B) they don't prevent _all_ transmission. No vaccine is 100% effective.

C) end of thread

I always wonder, well are these ones 99% effective^? 98% 97%?

It would be a slam dunk if you could just say some number there that is in say the 70s or higher. But everybody stops at "well they aren't 100%" (and you're an asshole/dummy/republican for not getting one). But that leaves about 100 other options for what the efficacy could be.

Obviously it's a moving target and depends on a lot of variables, but as of today, what do we understand to be the quantified benefit to somebody standing next to me if I've gotten vaccinated? And how long will that benefit last?

^ against infection here specifically, and right now, not for any mostly extinct variants