421–430 of 442 posts
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Lambda was detected in August 2020, vaccination in Peru started in Feb 2021.
Yes, but I was commenting on your point about "many cases" not so much about the vaccination.
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Groupthink is indeed a real problem, but if you really believe all it takes is groupthink to hide severe side effects (possibly deaths) of vaccines that would compete in magnitude with covid causalities, you should entertain the possibility you're engaging in a groupthink of another polarity. I mean, sure. Governments have been and will be dishonest and lying and have been and will be again caught red handed. They al…
I don't think OP's logic requires side effects of vaccines to be anywhere close to COVID19 causalities. It's a personal decision. Without vaccines, at present, my risk of COVID19 would be marginal at best: - I live in an area with a high vaccination rate, and a low incidence rate - I take pretty strong precautions, including proper masks (which are probably more effective than vaccines), and pretty strong social dist…
Will you take this strong precautions forever?
I may be wrong (because what do I know?), but my assumption is that COVID will become endemic and sooner or later we'll all get it. I don't know that for sure, I didn't spend a lot of time following the numbers and reading right and left about this topic. I just can't devote significant time into doing a "proper study" of the matter. So, instead I'm going to apply my personal heuristic, like everybody else.
In my previous comment I shared my personal heuristics about "can the government effectively hide the dangers of the vaccine?"
Here I'll respond to whether I believe it's rational to not get vaccinated because other people will be vaccinated and the problem will go away without me risking it:
From what I could see, COVID seemed to be very transmissible; despite strong social distancing and lockdowns the contagions kept going. The only way to stop it would be to either doing a prolonged and airtight global lockdown (hard to implement) or to have a vaccination rate that exceeds the herd immunity threshold.
And this vaccination level has to be maintained throughout the world, or else we have to lock down travel in perpetuity, which is again, IMO hard to implement.
Currently we do observe regional variation in covid spread; my intuition is that a lot that can be attributed to the "reverse tinkerbell effect": we're avoiding travel, in some cases forbidding travel, testing people who travels; we cannot reach the conclusion that if you live in an area where vaccination level is high you're going to be fine; as soon as travel resumes you'll encounter unvaccinated people more often.
As I said, I don't know; it's just a heuristic. I think it's possible that I'll catch covid in the next few years. Let's put a generously low probability of 0.1%. Then let's attach a generously low probability of having serious problems if I do catch it, again 0.1% (probably higher than that, but lets be generious). With those number I'd have a chance of one in a million to get severe problems of covid in the near future.
There have been 3.4 billion doses of vaccine administered so far; if 1 in a million of them had severe side effects, that would mean 3.4 million people would be affected; I think somebody would have noticed. This is why I was focusing on addressing whether the governments can actively hiding this problem. That's the main counterarguments I hear to my heuristic about pros/cons of getting the vaccine now, namely that there are indeed million of people who're suffering from the vaccine but we don't know about them because the government is lying (I find this hard to believe; I cannot rule that out logically, but my credence in that proposition is quite low)
The article purposefully conflates numbers to tell a narrative. I am talking only about EU, and at that southern EU which is where I've been following the numbers closely. Delta variant has been acting for up to 1 month in some regions, and as described in the article yes cases are up very quickly. However, the article says: > COVID deaths [...] And if you think Europe or the US will be spared This is not reflected a…
I wonder if it’s also misleading to only say that young adults have a rise in cases (due to less vaccination) and be fearful of that. The overall hospitalization and death is still lower (I think I read another article that talked about either in California or NY) because they’re better at handling covid. We need to present the hospitalization / death by age range for vaccinated and unvaccinated which if anyone has a…
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Covid discussion has become equivalent to politics. Most people have strong opinions on the matter, these opinions usually correlate strongly to their favorite political party's stance, and few people have the experience or knowledge to evaluate scientific information rationally. It's a recipe for uninformed debate. On top of that, in the US, the previous president was so politically polarizing that literally any sta…
It certainly feels like hangover from the Trump times, and yes, it's insanely political and quite hysterical. Now, people overcompensate, if there is any questioning or hesitancy to take the vaccine, ask questions about origins etc you might be a...Trump guy, or a nut and so you need to be told by the Non-Trump guys what' up, by being downed. It's Kind of like Post-Trum-Stress-Disorder, PTSD. It's really quite fascin…
As a reader of HN for several years now, it blows my mind how polarized we all are on this issue. Something smells here, you're not allowed to question anything without being down voted to oblivion, one way or another. Why?
I've noticed this is not U.S. specific, so it is not a political polarization in the traditional sense. The broader world-wide phenomenon, visible also here, is that most people got divided into two camps: 1) "COVID-19 is so dangerous that we must restrict freedoms", "the other camp is a harm to society's health" 2) "COVID-19 is not that dangerous, mortality below 2% (or even lower depending on how it is calculated)…
That sounds somewhat overly deterministic. The situation is always evolving and you can’t predict what will really happen especially with new variants etc. Of course you may argue that no variant will ever be so dangerous as to warrant lockdowns in a country whose population is largely vaccinated, but a problem as this article pointed out (accurately or with exaggerations) is that if a large portion of the population refuses to be vaccinated, how things will play out doesn’t seem certain.
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Vaccination means you don't need to limit exposure so much, which reduces selection for casual transmissibility. It also means the existing un-mutated virus has far less of an opportunity to "experiment" and mutate further.
> It also means the existing un-mutated virus has far less of an opportunity to "experiment" and mutate further. You seem to be ignoring the time variable. If wide-spread vaccination slows the spread, then the spread lasts longer, unless and until the virus is totally eradicated.
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Mutations are random, but the factors that result in a mutation leading to improved reproductive success are not. An organisms environment helps select for beneficial mutations.
I get that. I just don't see why an environment where half the people are vaccinated would lead to worse outcomes, even if mutations take place that can bypass the vaccine's protections.
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I don't think OP's logic requires side effects of vaccines to be anywhere close to COVID19 causalities. It's a personal decision. Without vaccines, at present, my risk of COVID19 would be marginal at best: - I live in an area with a high vaccination rate, and a low incidence rate - I take pretty strong precautions, including proper masks (which are probably more effective than vaccines), and pretty strong social dist…
> I take pretty strong precautions, including proper masks Will you take this strong precautions forever? I may be wrong (because what do I know?), but my assumption is that COVID will become endemic and sooner or later we'll all get it. I don't know that for sure, I didn't spend a lot of time following the numbers and reading right and left about this topic. I just can't devote significant time into doing a "proper…
Now, regarding long term side effects, there are a lot of "alternative news" sources, and random internet anecdotes, which claim relatively common heart problems following vaccination, and some stories of healthy people dying a few days later, though these deaths can't be explicitly linked to a vaccine necessarily. These sources are not more trustworthy than the mainstream media, but if the 2020 election has shown anything, it's that the media is willing to die on the hill for their narrative. These alternative sources are the same sort that were correct about Russiagate and other such media nonsense. So I can trust neither side, and there is at least some fringe evidence that the vaccines are worse than we know.
About long term effects appearing, I can't know if this is possible, and I can't trust anyone who says they do know, since it has been so politicized. There are actually medical doctors who say it could be dangerous in this way, so again, I can't know whether they're crackpots or if a large number aren't just fearful for their jobs and such. If you were a researcher right now and you had some evidence to believe this vaccine could be dangerous long after the injection, I find it hard to believe you could get your message out to any credible mouthpieces at this point.
If, in a couple of years, everything is still fine, then I may relent and get the jab. But right now there is just no way to trust it without trusting institutions which have proven themselves liars.
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I am unvaccinated and probably will remain so for this particular vaccination. I don't truly believe that the risk of the vaccine outweighs the risk of the virus to me. It's more that I weigh the risk of covid at around zero, and the risk of vaccine at a question mark. I cannot trust the institutions pushing this vaccine at all. At worst, I trust the opposite of what they say about anything politicized. But let's jus…
I empathize with most of what you wrote, but there are two errors: "I also know what to expect from a respiratory virus, because I've had those a number of times." No one whom I know who has had COVID describes it like any normal respiratory virus, and it attacks multiple systems. I'm terrified of brain damage, and before-and-after MRIs shows brain damage in >10% of people who contract COVID19. "If I get covid, darn…
The odds of this are far less than the odds of me killing my wife by taking a drive with her. In the same way that I can live with the risk of driving a car with her in it, I can live with this risk. Of course if that actually happened I would feel terrible, in both cases. But life is about weighing risks, and for now I'm comfortable with the risk of remaining unvaccinated.
No, I don't wear masks. That's a different ethical discussion. I don't feel or accept a moral burden for potentially spreading a virus in any case. I wouldn't walk about while sick of course, or have uninformed sex if I had an STD, but if I'm asymptomatic and end up accidentally giving someone an illness in the course of normal life, sorry, but that's just life. People who spread the flu accidentally are not immoral people, whether they get the flu shot or not. Likewise here.