15 ms·

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

243 points by yawaramin 5y ago

LatteLazy 5y ago
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 noise. Sometimes the noise seems to get louder. But that's all I can see. Edit: I've never had a comment sink so fast. Cest la vie. I'm sort of glad other people think human civilisation is working. Maybe my depression just has me jaded.
- nvoid 5y ago
  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 don't and spend your last years with your family rather than dying alone in some care home that you are locked in and can't leave... Forcing/mandating mask wearing in democratic countries does more damage to democracy. This will probably get downvoted/flagged but I wanted to say it.
  - cromwellian 5y ago
    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 this." There's forcing you in the sense of "You can't fly on this plane if not vaccinated." Private businesses could refuse you service, like "You're not coming into this movie theater unless you're vaccinated or wearing a mask." Can't libertarians decide who to associate with and if they don't want to associate with non-vaccinated, isn't that their right? Governments force lots of things in democracies. Education is forced for example. Truancy is illegal. You as a parent cannot make a decision to never educate your child in many countries.
    - effie 5y ago
      > 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.
      - cromwellian 5y ago
        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.
  - jjnoakes 5y ago
    The personal freedom to make choices for one's self should absolutely be up to the individual - but only insofar as those choices only affect the individual making them. Once you talk about things like being contagious and infecting others, personal freedoms must be balanced against societal well-being. Where that balance lies is, of course, where the debate should be. Ignoring one side and focusing solely on the other is unproductive in my opinion.
  - LatteLazy 5y ago
    Your conflating your right to risk yourself (declining a vaccine) with your right to risk others (refusing a mask mandate). Those are very different things. "Do what you want to yourself, but leave the rest of us out of it" is the definition of freedom. That said, any actual calculation of the risks should send people flocking to be vaccinated. But you do you. Just please don't vote.
    - nvoid 5y ago
      My bad, I'm not talking about vaccines here. More replying to this general comment about people that don't comply with governmental decree. Leaving out the fact that GOVT was saying at the start of the pandemic that masks do little to protect you or others and they made a u-turn on that, the real way to let people keep their freedom is to let people decide the risks they want to take. If you are old, fat or otherwise ill, don't go outside if you think you might die? I sounds harsh but don't impinge on my freedom to not have to wear a mask because you can't go for a jog once in a while.
  - lazyant 5y ago
    > it is their personal freedom to choose what to/not do No, your freedom ends where my starts. If you are propagating a deadly desease it's not about individual freedoms anymore, this is the same as deciding your personal risk is fine with running red lights at intersections; we don't accept that as a society.
  - picardythird 5y ago
    Do you wear a seatbelt in the car?
    - nvoid 5y ago
      Yes but no because it is the law. It should be law that car companies provide a seat-belt but not that I wear one. Your one sentence straw-man wont suffice here. Again, it's all about personal risk. I could go climb a cliff face with a rope or I could do it without. I don't need GOVT to tell me not to do the latter.
      - kokanee 5y ago
        Honest question: where is the line? I assume you do want there to be some laws regarding public health and safety. On a spectrum of health/safety violations from terrorism, to murder, to assault, to reckless driving, to spreading a virus during a pandemic, to harassment, to causing a noise complaint - where should the line between legal and illegal be? Edit: although, my question doesn't address your concern about personal risk. But the laws don't address personal risk, they address the public risks caused by your actions. If you don't care about public risks, then my question is a non sequitur.
      - eyelidlessness 5y ago
        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.
        foolinaround 5y ago
        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.
        5y ago
  - V__ 5y ago
    > If one doesn't deem it risky to themselves If one's actions were only risky to themselves, then I would agree with you. However, that is not the case with a pandemic. > Forcing/mandating mask wearing in democratic countries does more damage to democracy. Frankly, politicizing mask wearing, fake news, lies and proud ignorance does more damage to democracy than anything else. If everyone would have worn masks from the beginning, we would be in a very different place right now.
    - nvoid 5y ago
      I agree with your second comment but not so much the first. Infectious disease control 101: Lock up the infected people but leave the healthy alone. Or else you may have a dwindling economy due to excessive spending, people too scared to work and a rapidly inflating currency... I may sound like an armchair epidemiologist but given that there are so many proclaimed 'experts' out there, the bar can't be thaaat high?
      - wtallis 5y ago
        > Infectious disease control 101: Lock up the infected people but leave the healthy alone. Maybe try getting some real education on infectious diseases. Incubation periods during which you can be contagious, and the generally non-zero latency between becoming symptomatic and highly contagious and getting positive test results back and getting into isolation mean your proposed strategy is stupid.
  - seattle_spring 5y ago
    Comments like this one explain why I run into so many people blaring music through bluetooth speakers when I go hiking.
- cromwellian 5y ago
  You've got doctors, presumably educated people who actually learned how DNA, RNA, works, telling lawmakers that vaccines cause people to be interfaced with 5G towers, like what, an X-Men techno-virus? I mean WTF, how can professionals be so INSANE? And it's not just this person, there are lots of QAnon idiots spreading this mindvirus all over the net. https://fox8.com/news/coronavirus/cleveland-doctor-tells-ohio-lawmakers-covid-19-vaccine-can-leave-people-magnetized-interfaced-with-5g-towers/ https://fox8.com/news/coronavirus/cleveland-doctor-tells-ohi...
  - the8472 5y ago
    People notice that government officials and the media can be intentionally misleading even when that's well-intended and may later pull a "we have always been at war with oceania". Once that lesson is learned "alternative sources" are a lot easier to believe. https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/prevention-cures/502890-fauci-why-the-public-wasnt-told-to-wear-masks https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/prevention-c... https://lessonsfromthecrisis.substack.com/p/the-experts-can-stay-wrong-longer https://lessonsfromthecrisis.substack.com/p/the-experts-can-...
  - jiggawatts 5y ago
    You know how when you watch the news and they talk about something that you have first-hand experience of? You instantly realise that they have no clue what they're talking about! Half the article is gibberish, the other is a willful misunderstanding. Then the next article goes on about some topic you don't know, and suddenly you have this nagging suspicion that... hey... maybe they're bullshitting about this too! That observation doesn't just apply to news media. In my own industry, I'm constantly up against peers and colleagues who are highly paid, highly educated consultants. Customers turn to these people for "expert" advice. Most of it is something they picked up in the 1990s that is now thoroughly outdated. The other half is them jumping on board with the latest fad, typically badly. But I have this perspective because I can recognise the bullshit and errors in my own industry. Just like the way I now watch the news much more critically, I am now similarly critical of other professionals such as doctors or lawyers. That said: Go get vaccinated! I'm getting my shot next week, which is the earliest I could possibly get it.
- deadite 5y ago
  >Edit: I've never had a comment sink so fast. Cest la vie. I'm sort of glad other people think human civilisation is working. Maybe my depression just has me jaded. HN moderation has failed to prevent the platform from being politicized and split up into rightthink and wrongthink, predominantly by allowing political and emotional shitposts that are behind a thin veil of "tech" related topics backed by HN's nebulous "Guidelines." It's just a mirror image of society itself so if things have devolved here for you, I assure you, things out there are much worse than they appear to be. Such is the price of diversity. You're never going to get to the bottom of an agreement on anything, and for every thing you think is going to improve things, others will say how it will make it worse. Good luck.
  - nvoid 5y ago
    Tl;dr a reminder that you are on the internet
  - DeliriumTrigger 5y ago
    You have to stop digging if you can't crawl out of your twisted mind anymore :(
- rektide 5y ago
  I'd love to know how the rest of the world experienced the anti-societal refuseniks of Covid. In America, we've had their ticket for a long time, a persistent extremely vocal segment of society that refuses to get along, that always has very important opinions on other people's business & how to do things, that seems to have created their own social strata on being anti-societal, anti-cooperative, generally just anti-. It's social programming. These people have been raised by their media, their politicians, their tribe, to be like this, to behave like this, to assume always it's other people, it's other forces that are responsible, that are causing problems. Their dogma is that they are good people, their wants are correct, and others are bad. This isn't "people just behave randomly". This is deliberate. This is overt & obvious, a persistent problem, a persistent anti- everyone else faction of America, that has caused a royal stink my entire life.
  - jiggawatts 5y ago
    There's a great quote from some movie that's stuck in my mind. I'm paraphrasing slightly, because my memory is fuzzy, but it goes something like: "Wow, it's so wonderful to see how you've all expressed your unique individuality by dressing exactly alike."
  - betwixthewires 5y ago
    I really like this comment, but I'm having a hard time picking out which group you're referring to. Are you talking about the people who "lose faith in democracy" because other people make their own decisions for themselves (however risky those decisions are), or the ones who think it is their duty to run around making decisions for others?
  - kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
    Negative viewpoints garner more attention. I was cornered by a proselytizer the other day who, in typical fashion, proceeded to tell me all about what he's against with no mention of what's so great about his club.
- grecy 5y ago
  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 chanting how free they are because they're not paying tax. I wonder if it's a lack of education about critical thinking, or maybe just a few decades of being told we can have whatever we want, making (most/some) people very entitled and self-centred. I'm locked in a quarantine hotel for 14 days right now (entering Australia) and I'm live vlogging it across social media. I'm getting a TON of comments from people who are outraged that this is a violation of my rights, etc. etc. It doesn't occur to them that I had to agree to this quarantine long before I could even book a plane ticket, and I personally think it's a very good protective measure and I'm happy about it. Their outrage about what is happening to me is apparently more relevant and important than my own thoughts about what is happening to me. People seem to think their own personal rights are more important than the rights of society as a whole.
  - effie 5y ago
    Those are quite some assumptions you make there. When did we ever live in age where "facts and science and raw data are used to drive decisions" ? I don't know of such age. Both West and East are driven by ideologies and powerful people whims for a long time. > zero tax and society would fall apart because of it How do you know this? Society is a very general concept, why would it fall apart just because of different economics? Instead of taxes, the government could just print more money, or we could completely change the government so it works on donations instead of taxes. It is hard to predict what would happen, society falling apart is one of them, but not the only one. Structural change of society does not mean it has to fall apart.
    - grecy 5y ago
      > 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. Nobody making or enforcing any kind of order. Nobody even making sure the food for sale is some kind of food. I think it's safe to say without taxes society as we know it would fall apart very rapidly. Sure, would there be LaMOE's (Last Man On Earth) defending their Idaho ranch with all their guns... but in the broader sense everything we know today would stop.
- lvs 5y ago
  I don't know why you're being downvoted, but I suspect it proves your point.
- rcurry 5y ago
  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.
  - c-cube 5y ago
    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.
  - LatteLazy 5y ago
    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-sex-demographics/ 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.
- Baeocystin 5y ago
  For what it's worth, you aren't alone. Democracy is inherently fragile; it only succeeds when you have a well-educated electorate interested in the good of the country as a whole, and a large enough percentage of the population with enough wealth that such things are maintainable. Unfortunately for us in the states, the past several decades have been ones of increasing partisan bickering, and a loss of a collective sense of civic duty. Median incomes have not kept up with the cost of living for close to 50 years, now, putting the squeeze on even having enough time to think about these things. The zeitgeist on the internet isn't helping, and I think Sort by Controversial ( https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/ ) is less fictional by the day. These things are all bad news. That doesn't mean we're doomed, and I'm not fatalistic. There are lots of people who care, too. And there is a lot of work to be done to shore up the foundations of our country. When I was younger, I lived in countries that did not have a functional civic apparatus. I do not want to see that here.
  - squiggleblaz 5y ago
    > Democracy is inherently fragile; it only succeeds when you have a well-educated electorate interested in the good of the country as a whole, and a large enough percentage of the population with enough wealth that such things are maintainable. I disagree with the bit after the semicolon quite strongly. I described my alternative opinion elsewhere in this thread. Democracy has survived very well without sufficient education; it works because it means representatives from the whole community can negotiate an outcome that addresses their actual concerns. For this to work, you need representatives of the whole community and the ability to negotiate, both of which are hard to find in the current US for various reasons. The representatives need to be motivated to find a negotiated settlement that address their core concerns at least, which is impossible under ideological parties where promotion is predicated on purity. But these conditions aren't very hard to reach, and certainly much easier than the idea of a well-educated electorate. (PS: No one has a "core interest" of, say, emitting carbon into the atmosphere. Everyone who has an interest in that could be migrated to other areas: coal miners want respectable and well-paid work; mine owners want the value of their investments to remain. This means that once negotiated settlements are possible, those which are needed but not well understood are possible too, even with poorly educated electorates.) As to the bit before the semicolon, I guess someone must've done studies. Is democracy more stable or less stable than alternative constitutions? How do you even measure stability? Obviously the US hasn't been stable for the whole time since the constitution was written, but it was even able to recover after it lost its footing. I think that alone demonstrates that democracy can be robust (not everyone could vote, but I think the ways in which the US was a democracy were sufficiently clear that it would be wrong to attribute it to some alternative style).
- squiggleblaz 5y ago
  > 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. As best as I can tell, the reason democratic processes have produced the best government in history isn't because the electorate is making well-reasoned assessment of various policy options. It's because it provides a relatively quick feedback cycle, and because people can vote according to their interests and the wounds of previous policy will get treated. The way to keep it safe from abuse by far right extremists ("populists") is to have broad-based parties that reflect economic classes and which can provide direct connections between the different parts of the community and the political system. Parties based on ideology are less capable of compromise so they're less responsive to genuine needs. A business-owners party and a workers party can agree to free trade or protectionism, mandatory public holidays or freedom of contract: the agreement can be believed to be a win for both sites that makes everyone stronger. But, say, a business-libertarian party can only concede it didn't have the power to force both free trade and freedom of contract, and can't call the law they got through an agreement. Ideology is also something that is interesting to fewer people, so they will have narrower bases, more subject to whim and fancy. Democracy isn't perfect, but is there a better system? It seems like everything that is better than democracy done now is just democracy done better. Do you think it would be better to adopt a Saudi-style absolute monarchy or a PRC-style party state?
panny 5y ago
Old Linus is not okay when discussing terrible patches, but doubleplusgood when discussing anti-vax. I bet if he lashed out at vaxxers we would already hear calls for his head.
- adgjlsfhk1 5y ago
  How dare people be mad at me for kicking pupies! No one is mad at the anti-animal cruelty people! It's censorship and the nanny-state (also PC culture or some bullshit like that).
schwartzworld 5y ago
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 infect all our children. Get vaccinated. Some people are allergic or may have real medical exemptions. Everyone else who passes on the opportunity are shortsighted and selfish.
- russian-hacker 5y ago
  Those shaming others into participating in a clinical trial are naive at best and evil at worst.
- scrapcode 5y ago
  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 starting to go back to normal here in the Midwest.
  - schwartzworld 5y ago
    > 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.
- betwixthewires 5y ago
  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.
markiyan 5y ago
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/cdc-heart-inflammation-cases-ages-16-24-higher-than-expected-after-mrna-covid-19-2021-06-10/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us/cdc-heart-inflammation-case...
- booblik 5y ago
  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.
  - JPKab 5y ago
    I"m not an anti-vaxxer at all, and despite what I'm about to tell you, I do think the COVID vaccine is a good idea for most people. My MIL just died as a result of her second Pfizer shot. It was a rare side-effect that's happened to less than 100 people in the US, according to another person in my neighborhood who I found out had the same thing as my MIL happen to him, who is more informed than they normally allow a patient to be, purely due to the fact that his heart tissue is being used by Mayo Clinic. Both him and my MIL went into cardiac arrest a few hours after their 2nd shot, while suffering a fever from the shot. He is 35, healthy, and fit, with no heart issues. My MIL was early 60's, no heart issues detected after a week of doctors testing her while she was on life support. He was in Colorado. She was in Omaha at Nebraska Medicine, which is a solid hospital. Her death was not investigated "thoroughly" at all. The team eventually reported it to the VAERS system and stated to us that their opinion was that it was vaccine induced. They did nothing beyond that. The only reason her case is now being investigated is because when I got back to Colorado, a neighbor heard my story and introduced me to another neighbor, the 35 year old, who went through it a month ago. He survived because he was young. His case was being thoroughly investigated, but nobody did shit for my Mother in Law. I had to contact the researchers myself and point them to the hospital in Nebraska to initiate anything. It was sheer luck that I encountered this guy, and that he happened to be in comms with researchers on his case. In both cases, the doctors gaslit both families for days, ignoring and dismissing any connection with the vaccine, until they eventually arrived at no explanations after test after test. My experience is an anecdotal data point, but based on it, I have ZERO confidence that the majority of cases like my MIL are being investigated. The doctors were clearly getting pressure, likely from their employers and especially from licensing boards, to not talk about it. The lack of curiosity was the most shocking part for my family and the 35 year old's family. Our experiences in 2 different hospitals in 2 states were shockingly similar in how horrifying they were. At this point, the researchers have found that the team in Nebraska didn't conduct nearly as many tests as they did, and their research into her case is being hampered due to this. Because she was on life support for over a week and a half after the initial incident, and we had to remove her from life support and let her suffocate, an autopsy isn't useful. They needed samples taken initially, but the ones that should have been taken weren't. This is a long reply, but I wrote it because I think your trust in our health institutions is misplaced in the face of the social and cultural pressures for this vaccine.
ivraatiems 5y ago
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.
- rektide 5y ago
  The world has always seemed far ruder & far more off-base. In every circumstance. Linus isn't always a good role model for how to behave, but it is enormously relieving sometimes, in a world that feels batshit insane, to hear someone else processing-out-loud their strong reactions.
  - jiggawatts 5y ago
    Most people prefer to be lied to by someone pleasant than have their stupidity accurately and bluntly laid bare. That's the short of it. I've never seen a Linus rant be a personal attack. Every time, he's pointing out that someone who ought to know better is being dangerously stupid to the detriment of a great many others. Some people take offence at this -- even if they're not the target of Linus' ire -- because they mistakenly believe that everyone has the right to be treated nicely by others irrespective of their bad behaviour.
    - antiterra 5y ago
      Honest and direct feedback is one thing, belittling people for not fully understanding an edge case can be counterproductive. Linus is also not immune to mistakes, and he admits to having a general lack of understanding of the emotions of others.
    - chrisseaton 5y ago
      > 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.
DoreenMichele 5y ago
Basically the same piece (maybe different source) and much more discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27466374 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27466374
apatheticonion 5y ago
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.
- lvs 5y ago
  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?
  - COGlory 5y ago
    Computer scientists are phenomenal at understanding human-created systems. They are remarkably worse at understanding non-human created systems, from what I can tell (as a structural biologist). "Tech" (whatever that nebulous word means - basically the people lampooned in 'Silicon Valley) are perhaps one of the most gullible groups of people ever, maybe because they are so focused on a combination disruption (thinking outside the box) and marketing.
    - sidlls 5y ago
      They're phenomenal at understanding a narrow slice of human-created systems at that (those pertaining to computing, typically).
    - neilk 5y ago
      Computer scientists are good at understanding computers. Sometimes. That's pretty much it. Even if you grant that computer scientists are more intelligent than the norm, I find that doesn't help very much. Often, I encounter some computer nerd who has constructed a crystalline tower of logic that's resting on a rickety foundation of evidence and experience.
archsurface 5y ago
Seriously? Linus's opinion on covid? Pull up your socks, people.
deleted 5y ago
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devchips09 5y ago
I know a PhD in intelligence community that argued with me not to get the vaccine. He's not a biologist and stupid people work for intelligence agencies, but to wash away all criticisms of mRNA vaccines as misinformed lies is false. And it only serves to divide people more. I love DARPA but they are the ones who invented the mRNA vaccine approximately 10 years ago. No one knows the long-term effects. Plus we live in a society where they openly lie to us over meaningless things, then you question them and they say, "Questioning me is questioning science." There's a lot of problems here that have nothing to do with politics. It has to do with power and the influence of the state when it feels justified to manage its population. https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2017-02-06a https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2017-02-06a
betwixthewires 5y ago
But what if I don't want to? I'd call the idea that people's decision not to is predicated on an anti vax worldview similar in substance to a frivolous conspiracy theory.
- CaliforniaKarl 5y ago
  I think you are conflating a person and people. In this case, Linus is responding specifically to Enrico Weigelt, who is making the claim that the COVID vaccines are a "generic human experiment that basically creates a new humanoid race (people who generate and exhaust the toxic spike proteine, whose gene sequence doesn't look quote natural)." Linus' email is directed wholly towards Enrico. If you don't want to, then you don't want to. I understand that not everyone will want to. My work understands that, as does the hospital near work, and both have contingency plans for when someone who works there does not want to get vaccinated (and no, it's not "fire them"). Enrico didn't say "I don't want to", he effectively said "I don't want to, and here's why…" and then put forward a reason that Linux (and I, and I imagine many others) believe wholeheartedly to be untrue.
  - betwixthewires 5y ago
    Well then we have a sensational misleading title on our hands. Yeah the whole nonsense about the vaccine cresting a new genome is ridiculous, it's sad that some people are buying it. Apparently even Mark Zuckerberg fell for it for a short while early on.
IvyMike 5y ago
'Nother thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27466374 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27466374
princevegeta89 5y ago
I love this guy and his temperament. He's one of those hard-core perfectionists
narrator 5y ago
I make all my medical decisions based on what sweepstakes the local hospital chain is offering for getting non-FDA approved experimental use authorization vaccines. Seriously, non-ironically, I literally got an email today telling me they are offering me a chance to win a trip to Disneyland if I get vaccinated! Dammit! This is America. We are supposed to pay for our medical care and pay A LOT OF MONEY! How dare they offer me free stuff to get vaccinated! I never got offered actual money to get a medical procedure ever in my life. It makes the whole thing smell funny. That, and I wouldn't be doing it because of any other reason than peer pressure to drink the Kool Aid. Exactly 1 person in my county died of COVID last month. I am just not scared of getting COVID enough to risk the vaccine. Besides, you guys are creating the risk of creating a Marek's disease like variant[1] by all getting a vaccine that doesn't prevent you from getting the disease, but only from getting bad symptoms. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marek's_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marek's_disease
eoo 5y ago
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-code-of-the-biontech-pfizer-vaccine/ 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 one
- LilBytes 5y ago
  Alright, I'll take the bait. Why don't you use Bluetooth headsets? This seems odd.
- lamontcg 5y ago
  > we won't know until a decade or two goes by. that's exactly the bullshit that he's calling out. the mRNA is gone in days, all that remains is the immune response. we have hundreds of year of experience at understanding the kinds of autoimmune side effects that can happen after a viral infection or a vaccine. they either surface in under 90 days or they don't. 5 years from now we're not going to have a sudden outbreak of side effects. if it did it would upset the entire discipline of rheumatology. once 3 months go by after your vaccination anything that happens to you after that has nothing to do with the vaccination.
- vnkatesh 5y ago
  The technology in its current form has been available since 2005. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_vaccine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_vaccine Wouldn't you be interested in adopting a new headset with Bluetooth v5 given that you know of v4 (and it's minor pain points?)
- dboreham 5y ago
  Was the comment about Bluetooth headsets ironic?
gigatexal 5y ago
Such a well written (scathing, and satisfying) takedown of the anti-vaccine position.
siloamx 5y ago
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 has no signs of illness after the contact with the virus. Don't panic. Stop spread the propaganda. Vaccination won't stop spreading the virus. Peope are not the only host for Sars-Cov-2. Go back to school.
- Xunjin 5y ago
  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 person who have relatives that work on the public health, stop being this naive and stupid. PS: I'm sorry HN guidelines/rules.
  - siloamx 5y ago
    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.
    - siloamx 5y ago
      *Compared to the same month in previous years.
    - Xunjin 5y ago
      What caused the paralysis?!
- greesil 5y ago
  Are you a doctor?
beprogrammed 5y ago
Got to love Linus. I feel safe about the kernel as long as he remains its head.
shrubble 5y ago
My personal view is that vax vs anti-vax views are shaped by the person's relationship with 'Authority' in the past. If someone felt that they were mis-treated in the past by the government or by say a university bureaucracy, they are more likely to be anti-vax; because appealing to authority has no meaning or relevance to the way they process and assign weights to the information that they rrceive. Of course more positive views of 'Authority' will lead to a different, more pro-vax position. Curious if this matches with what others are seeing.
- sterlind 5y ago
  That matches what I've seen. An acquaintance of mine who's native was very distrustful of the vaccine and got angry when our state allocated early doses to Indian tribes, saying they were testing it on them (they've since calmed down.) Though on the other hand, a tribal elder I work with was extremely stoked to get the vaccine as soon as possible. I think politics is a big factor too, honestly. Misinformation flows through echo-chambers and everything becomes partisan.
- squiggleblaz 5y ago
  > My personal view is that vax vs anti-vax views are shaped by the person's relationship with 'Authority' in the past. If a person excessively distrusts authority, they are vastly more likely to have a poor interaction with authorities. For instance, a person who believes the government is trying to trick everyone into subjugating ourselves to them by getting and using birth certificates and drivers licences is going to have a very poor interaction with the police and perhaps the courts. (I don't mean to say that everyone in some class are Sovereign Citizens, but that at one extreme you have Sovereign Citizens, and you have people who are more or less like them in between them and the person whose mistrust legitimately started from an interaction with authorities.) I wouldn't want to use those experiences as the basis for concluding that an antivaxxer is antivax because of their previous poor interactions. Both events are caused by the original distrust. If we know who's had poor runins with the law and we're trying to find the antivaxxers, then yes, I think this is a useful place to look. But it's just a correlation, not an explanation. Consequently, I want to place much less weight on your reasoning: >If someone felt that they were mis-treated in the past by the government or by say a university bureaucracy, they are more likely to be anti-vax; because appealing to authority has no meaning or relevance to the way they process and assign weights to the information that they rrceive. (Also, I'm not convinced of your argument even with these objections resolved. A lot of people seem to distrust the government because they view it as associated with one party, even when their preferred party is in charge. This distrust seems somewhat confected. And in America, distrust of government is a widespread ideology/mindset, even embedded into the culture. Neither of these forms of distrust are rational or understandable (over)reactions to trust-forming interactions.)
daenz 5y ago
>It's spreading a lot less these days, largely because people around you have started getting the vaccine Cases were going down significantly in the USA before the mass rollout of the vaccine. 100% guarantee that people forget that unpleasant fact. Sources: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/02/14/why-coronavirus-cases-are-dropping/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/02/14/why-coronav... https://abc7news.com/covid-cases-in-us-johnson-and-vaccine-coronavirus-usa-america-today/10354482/ https://abc7news.com/covid-cases-in-us-johnson-and-vaccine-c... https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/02/why-covid-19-cases-are-falling-so-fast/618041/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/02/why-covid-...
- alisonkisk 5y ago
  Cases "went down" (and also up) 3 times due to wave effects. Since the vaccine, the ups stopped.
  - daenz 5y ago
    The cases from January 9th to February 23 represent an 80% reduction in cases, from 250,000 to 55,000. Where are these "waves"? Do you mean when it went from 60,000 to 70,000 from March to April? This was down from 250,000 in early Jan. This is what I'm talking about. People want to rewrite history to make it seem like we were all screwed until the vaccine showed up. No, experts were talking about how cases were going down drastically and it wasn't the cause of vaccine.
- sellyme 5y ago
  > Cases were going down significantly in the USA before the mass rollout of the vaccine. This is a very vague statement, so let's put some numbers onto it: Total US vaccination rates exceeded 1% on January 2nd 2021. The US 7-day rolling average case count peaked on January 11th 2021. At that point, 2.7% of the population was vaccinated, and 632,000 people were being vaccinated every day (again, 7-day rolling average). Cases were almost certainly going to trend down (albeit to a lesser extent) anyway, but I would argue that mass rollout was concurrent with a ~94% drop in case count.
ipspam 5y ago
Anyone that wants the vaccine can have it, I won't judge them. That's not my business. The sanitary, risk adverse nature of the modern world genuinely repulses me. I want to kill this overprotective beaurocracy in its cradle. It seems stupid, and it is. But it's the only vote I get. I'm playing my hand. Disaster Socialism needs to be DOA next crisis.
ghoward 5y ago
My reply to Linus: https://gavinhoward.com/2021/06/a-letter-to-linus-torvalds/ https://gavinhoward.com/2021/06/a-letter-to-linus-torvalds/ .
- ghthor 5y ago
  This is what I dont understand about how people are acting about this. These medical companies are making a fortune from this and there is hard evidence from previous court cases that they dont have our best interests at heart. People wouldn't be taking this vaccine id the media hadn't been lying to then and spreading fear for a whole year. It's all infuriating.
  - ghoward 5y ago
    It is an unfortunate thing that fear is such a strong driver.
mehta_rohan 5y ago
beast mode on
normalasnorfolk 5y ago
I haven't got the vaccine as yet, but I've been very recently summoned to get one by the national health body. I think the biggest deciding factor for me is... Doing research - and, tbh, finding time to understand the intricacies of human biology and how particular vaccines work is difficult/time consuming. The one thing I'll add which has been skirted around and some commenters have 'skirmishly' mentioned is the amount of distrust for authority, which IMO can be well-placed. The amount of deceitfulness conducted by the state on various matters, important and trivial, over the past several decades (though probably for all of human history - but come to light (due to the internet)) has fostered this mistrust. The list of lies or misinformation is extensive; the wars, the bailouts, the disregard for communities, the deportations: the policies; in essence the corruption and ulterior motives of the state is and has been questionable. Thus, the backlash against the vaccine(s) is understandable and I partly feel it within me too. Also, to make a rational decision you have to have a lot of the main pros and cons, but what we have been supplied with are just extreme incorrect cons and/or extreme & well-placed pros - there has not been any balanced adult 'conversation' (i.e., a balanced cost-benefit assessment geared towards the individual) which in its absence is unscientific and fairly illiberal. That's my 2 cents.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

243 points by yawaramin 5y ago

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 noise. Sometimes the noise seems to get louder. But that's all I can see. Edit: I've never had a comment sink so fast. Cest la vie. I'm sort of glad other people think human civilisation is working. Maybe my depression just has me jaded.

nvoid 5y ago
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 don't and spend your last years with your family rather than dying alone in some care home that you are locked in and can't leave... Forcing/mandating mask wearing in democratic countries does more damage to democracy. This will probably get downvoted/flagged but I wanted to say it.
- cromwellian 5y ago
  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 this." There's forcing you in the sense of "You can't fly on this plane if not vaccinated." Private businesses could refuse you service, like "You're not coming into this movie theater unless you're vaccinated or wearing a mask." Can't libertarians decide who to associate with and if they don't want to associate with non-vaccinated, isn't that their right? Governments force lots of things in democracies. Education is forced for example. Truancy is illegal. You as a parent cannot make a decision to never educate your child in many countries.
  - effie 5y ago
    > 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.
    - cromwellian 5y ago
      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.
- jjnoakes 5y ago
  The personal freedom to make choices for one's self should absolutely be up to the individual - but only insofar as those choices only affect the individual making them. Once you talk about things like being contagious and infecting others, personal freedoms must be balanced against societal well-being. Where that balance lies is, of course, where the debate should be. Ignoring one side and focusing solely on the other is unproductive in my opinion.
- LatteLazy 5y ago
  Your conflating your right to risk yourself (declining a vaccine) with your right to risk others (refusing a mask mandate). Those are very different things. "Do what you want to yourself, but leave the rest of us out of it" is the definition of freedom. That said, any actual calculation of the risks should send people flocking to be vaccinated. But you do you. Just please don't vote.
  - nvoid 5y ago
    My bad, I'm not talking about vaccines here. More replying to this general comment about people that don't comply with governmental decree. Leaving out the fact that GOVT was saying at the start of the pandemic that masks do little to protect you or others and they made a u-turn on that, the real way to let people keep their freedom is to let people decide the risks they want to take. If you are old, fat or otherwise ill, don't go outside if you think you might die? I sounds harsh but don't impinge on my freedom to not have to wear a mask because you can't go for a jog once in a while.
- lazyant 5y ago
  > it is their personal freedom to choose what to/not do No, your freedom ends where my starts. If you are propagating a deadly desease it's not about individual freedoms anymore, this is the same as deciding your personal risk is fine with running red lights at intersections; we don't accept that as a society.
- picardythird 5y ago
  Do you wear a seatbelt in the car?
  - nvoid 5y ago
    Yes but no because it is the law. It should be law that car companies provide a seat-belt but not that I wear one. Your one sentence straw-man wont suffice here. Again, it's all about personal risk. I could go climb a cliff face with a rope or I could do it without. I don't need GOVT to tell me not to do the latter.
    - kokanee 5y ago
      Honest question: where is the line? I assume you do want there to be some laws regarding public health and safety. On a spectrum of health/safety violations from terrorism, to murder, to assault, to reckless driving, to spreading a virus during a pandemic, to harassment, to causing a noise complaint - where should the line between legal and illegal be? Edit: although, my question doesn't address your concern about personal risk. But the laws don't address personal risk, they address the public risks caused by your actions. If you don't care about public risks, then my question is a non sequitur.
    - eyelidlessness 5y ago
      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.
      - foolinaround 5y ago
        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.
        5y ago
- V__ 5y ago
  > If one doesn't deem it risky to themselves If one's actions were only risky to themselves, then I would agree with you. However, that is not the case with a pandemic. > Forcing/mandating mask wearing in democratic countries does more damage to democracy. Frankly, politicizing mask wearing, fake news, lies and proud ignorance does more damage to democracy than anything else. If everyone would have worn masks from the beginning, we would be in a very different place right now.
  - nvoid 5y ago
    I agree with your second comment but not so much the first. Infectious disease control 101: Lock up the infected people but leave the healthy alone. Or else you may have a dwindling economy due to excessive spending, people too scared to work and a rapidly inflating currency... I may sound like an armchair epidemiologist but given that there are so many proclaimed 'experts' out there, the bar can't be thaaat high?
    - wtallis 5y ago
      > Infectious disease control 101: Lock up the infected people but leave the healthy alone. Maybe try getting some real education on infectious diseases. Incubation periods during which you can be contagious, and the generally non-zero latency between becoming symptomatic and highly contagious and getting positive test results back and getting into isolation mean your proposed strategy is stupid.
- seattle_spring 5y ago
  Comments like this one explain why I run into so many people blaring music through bluetooth speakers when I go hiking.
cromwellian 5y ago
You've got doctors, presumably educated people who actually learned how DNA, RNA, works, telling lawmakers that vaccines cause people to be interfaced with 5G towers, like what, an X-Men techno-virus? I mean WTF, how can professionals be so INSANE? And it's not just this person, there are lots of QAnon idiots spreading this mindvirus all over the net. https://fox8.com/news/coronavirus/cleveland-doctor-tells-ohio-lawmakers-covid-19-vaccine-can-leave-people-magnetized-interfaced-with-5g-towers/ https://fox8.com/news/coronavirus/cleveland-doctor-tells-ohi...
- the8472 5y ago
  People notice that government officials and the media can be intentionally misleading even when that's well-intended and may later pull a "we have always been at war with oceania". Once that lesson is learned "alternative sources" are a lot easier to believe. https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/prevention-cures/502890-fauci-why-the-public-wasnt-told-to-wear-masks https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/prevention-c... https://lessonsfromthecrisis.substack.com/p/the-experts-can-stay-wrong-longer https://lessonsfromthecrisis.substack.com/p/the-experts-can-...
- jiggawatts 5y ago
  You know how when you watch the news and they talk about something that you have first-hand experience of? You instantly realise that they have no clue what they're talking about! Half the article is gibberish, the other is a willful misunderstanding. Then the next article goes on about some topic you don't know, and suddenly you have this nagging suspicion that... hey... maybe they're bullshitting about this too! That observation doesn't just apply to news media. In my own industry, I'm constantly up against peers and colleagues who are highly paid, highly educated consultants. Customers turn to these people for "expert" advice. Most of it is something they picked up in the 1990s that is now thoroughly outdated. The other half is them jumping on board with the latest fad, typically badly. But I have this perspective because I can recognise the bullshit and errors in my own industry. Just like the way I now watch the news much more critically, I am now similarly critical of other professionals such as doctors or lawyers. That said: Go get vaccinated! I'm getting my shot next week, which is the earliest I could possibly get it.
deadite 5y ago
>Edit: I've never had a comment sink so fast. Cest la vie. I'm sort of glad other people think human civilisation is working. Maybe my depression just has me jaded. HN moderation has failed to prevent the platform from being politicized and split up into rightthink and wrongthink, predominantly by allowing political and emotional shitposts that are behind a thin veil of "tech" related topics backed by HN's nebulous "Guidelines." It's just a mirror image of society itself so if things have devolved here for you, I assure you, things out there are much worse than they appear to be. Such is the price of diversity. You're never going to get to the bottom of an agreement on anything, and for every thing you think is going to improve things, others will say how it will make it worse. Good luck.
- nvoid 5y ago
  Tl;dr a reminder that you are on the internet
- DeliriumTrigger 5y ago
  You have to stop digging if you can't crawl out of your twisted mind anymore :(
rektide 5y ago
I'd love to know how the rest of the world experienced the anti-societal refuseniks of Covid. In America, we've had their ticket for a long time, a persistent extremely vocal segment of society that refuses to get along, that always has very important opinions on other people's business & how to do things, that seems to have created their own social strata on being anti-societal, anti-cooperative, generally just anti-. It's social programming. These people have been raised by their media, their politicians, their tribe, to be like this, to behave like this, to assume always it's other people, it's other forces that are responsible, that are causing problems. Their dogma is that they are good people, their wants are correct, and others are bad. This isn't "people just behave randomly". This is deliberate. This is overt & obvious, a persistent problem, a persistent anti- everyone else faction of America, that has caused a royal stink my entire life.
- jiggawatts 5y ago
  There's a great quote from some movie that's stuck in my mind. I'm paraphrasing slightly, because my memory is fuzzy, but it goes something like: "Wow, it's so wonderful to see how you've all expressed your unique individuality by dressing exactly alike."
- betwixthewires 5y ago
  I really like this comment, but I'm having a hard time picking out which group you're referring to. Are you talking about the people who "lose faith in democracy" because other people make their own decisions for themselves (however risky those decisions are), or the ones who think it is their duty to run around making decisions for others?
- kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
  Negative viewpoints garner more attention. I was cornered by a proselytizer the other day who, in typical fashion, proceeded to tell me all about what he's against with no mention of what's so great about his club.
grecy 5y ago
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 chanting how free they are because they're not paying tax. I wonder if it's a lack of education about critical thinking, or maybe just a few decades of being told we can have whatever we want, making (most/some) people very entitled and self-centred. I'm locked in a quarantine hotel for 14 days right now (entering Australia) and I'm live vlogging it across social media. I'm getting a TON of comments from people who are outraged that this is a violation of my rights, etc. etc. It doesn't occur to them that I had to agree to this quarantine long before I could even book a plane ticket, and I personally think it's a very good protective measure and I'm happy about it. Their outrage about what is happening to me is apparently more relevant and important than my own thoughts about what is happening to me. People seem to think their own personal rights are more important than the rights of society as a whole.
- effie 5y ago
  Those are quite some assumptions you make there. When did we ever live in age where "facts and science and raw data are used to drive decisions" ? I don't know of such age. Both West and East are driven by ideologies and powerful people whims for a long time. > zero tax and society would fall apart because of it How do you know this? Society is a very general concept, why would it fall apart just because of different economics? Instead of taxes, the government could just print more money, or we could completely change the government so it works on donations instead of taxes. It is hard to predict what would happen, society falling apart is one of them, but not the only one. Structural change of society does not mean it has to fall apart.
  - grecy 5y ago
    > 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. Nobody making or enforcing any kind of order. Nobody even making sure the food for sale is some kind of food. I think it's safe to say without taxes society as we know it would fall apart very rapidly. Sure, would there be LaMOE's (Last Man On Earth) defending their Idaho ranch with all their guns... but in the broader sense everything we know today would stop.
lvs 5y ago
I don't know why you're being downvoted, but I suspect it proves your point.
rcurry 5y ago
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.
- c-cube 5y ago
  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.
- LatteLazy 5y ago
  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-sex-demographics/ 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.
Baeocystin 5y ago
For what it's worth, you aren't alone. Democracy is inherently fragile; it only succeeds when you have a well-educated electorate interested in the good of the country as a whole, and a large enough percentage of the population with enough wealth that such things are maintainable. Unfortunately for us in the states, the past several decades have been ones of increasing partisan bickering, and a loss of a collective sense of civic duty. Median incomes have not kept up with the cost of living for close to 50 years, now, putting the squeeze on even having enough time to think about these things. The zeitgeist on the internet isn't helping, and I think Sort by Controversial ( https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/ ) is less fictional by the day. These things are all bad news. That doesn't mean we're doomed, and I'm not fatalistic. There are lots of people who care, too. And there is a lot of work to be done to shore up the foundations of our country. When I was younger, I lived in countries that did not have a functional civic apparatus. I do not want to see that here.
- squiggleblaz 5y ago
  > Democracy is inherently fragile; it only succeeds when you have a well-educated electorate interested in the good of the country as a whole, and a large enough percentage of the population with enough wealth that such things are maintainable. I disagree with the bit after the semicolon quite strongly. I described my alternative opinion elsewhere in this thread. Democracy has survived very well without sufficient education; it works because it means representatives from the whole community can negotiate an outcome that addresses their actual concerns. For this to work, you need representatives of the whole community and the ability to negotiate, both of which are hard to find in the current US for various reasons. The representatives need to be motivated to find a negotiated settlement that address their core concerns at least, which is impossible under ideological parties where promotion is predicated on purity. But these conditions aren't very hard to reach, and certainly much easier than the idea of a well-educated electorate. (PS: No one has a "core interest" of, say, emitting carbon into the atmosphere. Everyone who has an interest in that could be migrated to other areas: coal miners want respectable and well-paid work; mine owners want the value of their investments to remain. This means that once negotiated settlements are possible, those which are needed but not well understood are possible too, even with poorly educated electorates.) As to the bit before the semicolon, I guess someone must've done studies. Is democracy more stable or less stable than alternative constitutions? How do you even measure stability? Obviously the US hasn't been stable for the whole time since the constitution was written, but it was even able to recover after it lost its footing. I think that alone demonstrates that democracy can be robust (not everyone could vote, but I think the ways in which the US was a democracy were sufficiently clear that it would be wrong to attribute it to some alternative style).
squiggleblaz 5y ago
> 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. As best as I can tell, the reason democratic processes have produced the best government in history isn't because the electorate is making well-reasoned assessment of various policy options. It's because it provides a relatively quick feedback cycle, and because people can vote according to their interests and the wounds of previous policy will get treated. The way to keep it safe from abuse by far right extremists ("populists") is to have broad-based parties that reflect economic classes and which can provide direct connections between the different parts of the community and the political system. Parties based on ideology are less capable of compromise so they're less responsive to genuine needs. A business-owners party and a workers party can agree to free trade or protectionism, mandatory public holidays or freedom of contract: the agreement can be believed to be a win for both sites that makes everyone stronger. But, say, a business-libertarian party can only concede it didn't have the power to force both free trade and freedom of contract, and can't call the law they got through an agreement. Ideology is also something that is interesting to fewer people, so they will have narrower bases, more subject to whim and fancy. Democracy isn't perfect, but is there a better system? It seems like everything that is better than democracy done now is just democracy done better. Do you think it would be better to adopt a Saudi-style absolute monarchy or a PRC-style party state?

panny 5y ago

Old Linus is not okay when discussing terrible patches, but doubleplusgood when discussing anti-vax. I bet if he lashed out at vaxxers we would already hear calls for his head.

adgjlsfhk1 5y ago
How dare people be mad at me for kicking pupies! No one is mad at the anti-animal cruelty people! It's censorship and the nanny-state (also PC culture or some bullshit like that).

schwartzworld 5y ago

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 infect all our children. Get vaccinated. Some people are allergic or may have real medical exemptions. Everyone else who passes on the opportunity are shortsighted and selfish.

russian-hacker 5y ago
Those shaming others into participating in a clinical trial are naive at best and evil at worst.
scrapcode 5y ago
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 starting to go back to normal here in the Midwest.
- schwartzworld 5y ago
  > 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.
betwixthewires 5y ago
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.

markiyan 5y ago

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/cdc-heart-inflammation-cases-ages-16-24-higher-than-expected-after-mrna-covid-19-2021-06-10/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us/cdc-heart-inflammation-case...

booblik 5y ago
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.
- JPKab 5y ago
  I"m not an anti-vaxxer at all, and despite what I'm about to tell you, I do think the COVID vaccine is a good idea for most people. My MIL just died as a result of her second Pfizer shot. It was a rare side-effect that's happened to less than 100 people in the US, according to another person in my neighborhood who I found out had the same thing as my MIL happen to him, who is more informed than they normally allow a patient to be, purely due to the fact that his heart tissue is being used by Mayo Clinic. Both him and my MIL went into cardiac arrest a few hours after their 2nd shot, while suffering a fever from the shot. He is 35, healthy, and fit, with no heart issues. My MIL was early 60's, no heart issues detected after a week of doctors testing her while she was on life support. He was in Colorado. She was in Omaha at Nebraska Medicine, which is a solid hospital. Her death was not investigated "thoroughly" at all. The team eventually reported it to the VAERS system and stated to us that their opinion was that it was vaccine induced. They did nothing beyond that. The only reason her case is now being investigated is because when I got back to Colorado, a neighbor heard my story and introduced me to another neighbor, the 35 year old, who went through it a month ago. He survived because he was young. His case was being thoroughly investigated, but nobody did shit for my Mother in Law. I had to contact the researchers myself and point them to the hospital in Nebraska to initiate anything. It was sheer luck that I encountered this guy, and that he happened to be in comms with researchers on his case. In both cases, the doctors gaslit both families for days, ignoring and dismissing any connection with the vaccine, until they eventually arrived at no explanations after test after test. My experience is an anecdotal data point, but based on it, I have ZERO confidence that the majority of cases like my MIL are being investigated. The doctors were clearly getting pressure, likely from their employers and especially from licensing boards, to not talk about it. The lack of curiosity was the most shocking part for my family and the 35 year old's family. Our experiences in 2 different hospitals in 2 states were shockingly similar in how horrifying they were. At this point, the researchers have found that the team in Nebraska didn't conduct nearly as many tests as they did, and their research into her case is being hampered due to this. Because she was on life support for over a week and a half after the initial incident, and we had to remove her from life support and let her suffocate, an autopsy isn't useful. They needed samples taken initially, but the ones that should have been taken weren't. This is a long reply, but I wrote it because I think your trust in our health institutions is misplaced in the face of the social and cultural pressures for this vaccine.

ivraatiems 5y ago

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.

rektide 5y ago
The world has always seemed far ruder & far more off-base. In every circumstance. Linus isn't always a good role model for how to behave, but it is enormously relieving sometimes, in a world that feels batshit insane, to hear someone else processing-out-loud their strong reactions.
- jiggawatts 5y ago
  Most people prefer to be lied to by someone pleasant than have their stupidity accurately and bluntly laid bare. That's the short of it. I've never seen a Linus rant be a personal attack. Every time, he's pointing out that someone who ought to know better is being dangerously stupid to the detriment of a great many others. Some people take offence at this -- even if they're not the target of Linus' ire -- because they mistakenly believe that everyone has the right to be treated nicely by others irrespective of their bad behaviour.
  - antiterra 5y ago
    Honest and direct feedback is one thing, belittling people for not fully understanding an edge case can be counterproductive. Linus is also not immune to mistakes, and he admits to having a general lack of understanding of the emotions of others.
  - chrisseaton 5y ago
    > 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.

DoreenMichele 5y ago

Basically the same piece (maybe different source) and much more discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27466374 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27466374

apatheticonion 5y ago

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.

lvs 5y ago
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?
- COGlory 5y ago
  Computer scientists are phenomenal at understanding human-created systems. They are remarkably worse at understanding non-human created systems, from what I can tell (as a structural biologist). "Tech" (whatever that nebulous word means - basically the people lampooned in 'Silicon Valley) are perhaps one of the most gullible groups of people ever, maybe because they are so focused on a combination disruption (thinking outside the box) and marketing.
  - sidlls 5y ago
    They're phenomenal at understanding a narrow slice of human-created systems at that (those pertaining to computing, typically).
  - neilk 5y ago
    Computer scientists are good at understanding computers. Sometimes. That's pretty much it. Even if you grant that computer scientists are more intelligent than the norm, I find that doesn't help very much. Often, I encounter some computer nerd who has constructed a crystalline tower of logic that's resting on a rickety foundation of evidence and experience.

archsurface 5y ago

Seriously? Linus's opinion on covid? Pull up your socks, people.

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devchips09 5y ago

I know a PhD in intelligence community that argued with me not to get the vaccine. He's not a biologist and stupid people work for intelligence agencies, but to wash away all criticisms of mRNA vaccines as misinformed lies is false. And it only serves to divide people more. I love DARPA but they are the ones who invented the mRNA vaccine approximately 10 years ago. No one knows the long-term effects. Plus we live in a society where they openly lie to us over meaningless things, then you question them and they say, "Questioning me is questioning science." There's a lot of problems here that have nothing to do with politics. It has to do with power and the influence of the state when it feels justified to manage its population. https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2017-02-06a https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2017-02-06a

betwixthewires 5y ago

But what if I don't want to? I'd call the idea that people's decision not to is predicated on an anti vax worldview similar in substance to a frivolous conspiracy theory.

CaliforniaKarl 5y ago
I think you are conflating a person and people. In this case, Linus is responding specifically to Enrico Weigelt, who is making the claim that the COVID vaccines are a "generic human experiment that basically creates a new humanoid race (people who generate and exhaust the toxic spike proteine, whose gene sequence doesn't look quote natural)." Linus' email is directed wholly towards Enrico. If you don't want to, then you don't want to. I understand that not everyone will want to. My work understands that, as does the hospital near work, and both have contingency plans for when someone who works there does not want to get vaccinated (and no, it's not "fire them"). Enrico didn't say "I don't want to", he effectively said "I don't want to, and here's why…" and then put forward a reason that Linux (and I, and I imagine many others) believe wholeheartedly to be untrue.
- betwixthewires 5y ago
  Well then we have a sensational misleading title on our hands. Yeah the whole nonsense about the vaccine cresting a new genome is ridiculous, it's sad that some people are buying it. Apparently even Mark Zuckerberg fell for it for a short while early on.

IvyMike 5y ago

'Nother thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27466374 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27466374

princevegeta89 5y ago

I love this guy and his temperament. He's one of those hard-core perfectionists

narrator 5y ago

I make all my medical decisions based on what sweepstakes the local hospital chain is offering for getting non-FDA approved experimental use authorization vaccines. Seriously, non-ironically, I literally got an email today telling me they are offering me a chance to win a trip to Disneyland if I get vaccinated! Dammit! This is America. We are supposed to pay for our medical care and pay A LOT OF MONEY! How dare they offer me free stuff to get vaccinated! I never got offered actual money to get a medical procedure ever in my life. It makes the whole thing smell funny. That, and I wouldn't be doing it because of any other reason than peer pressure to drink the Kool Aid. Exactly 1 person in my county died of COVID last month. I am just not scared of getting COVID enough to risk the vaccine. Besides, you guys are creating the risk of creating a Marek's disease like variant[1] by all getting a vaccine that doesn't prevent you from getting the disease, but only from getting bad symptoms. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marek's_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marek's_disease

eoo 5y ago

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-code-of-the-biontech-pfizer-vaccine/ 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 one

LilBytes 5y ago
Alright, I'll take the bait. Why don't you use Bluetooth headsets? This seems odd.
lamontcg 5y ago
> we won't know until a decade or two goes by. that's exactly the bullshit that he's calling out. the mRNA is gone in days, all that remains is the immune response. we have hundreds of year of experience at understanding the kinds of autoimmune side effects that can happen after a viral infection or a vaccine. they either surface in under 90 days or they don't. 5 years from now we're not going to have a sudden outbreak of side effects. if it did it would upset the entire discipline of rheumatology. once 3 months go by after your vaccination anything that happens to you after that has nothing to do with the vaccination.
vnkatesh 5y ago
The technology in its current form has been available since 2005. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_vaccine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_vaccine Wouldn't you be interested in adopting a new headset with Bluetooth v5 given that you know of v4 (and it's minor pain points?)
dboreham 5y ago
Was the comment about Bluetooth headsets ironic?

gigatexal 5y ago

Such a well written (scathing, and satisfying) takedown of the anti-vaccine position.

siloamx 5y ago

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 has no signs of illness after the contact with the virus. Don't panic. Stop spread the propaganda. Vaccination won't stop spreading the virus. Peope are not the only host for Sars-Cov-2. Go back to school.

Xunjin 5y ago
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 person who have relatives that work on the public health, stop being this naive and stupid. PS: I'm sorry HN guidelines/rules.
- siloamx 5y ago
  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.
  - siloamx 5y ago
    *Compared to the same month in previous years.
  - Xunjin 5y ago
    What caused the paralysis?!
greesil 5y ago
Are you a doctor?

beprogrammed 5y ago

Got to love Linus. I feel safe about the kernel as long as he remains its head.

shrubble 5y ago

My personal view is that vax vs anti-vax views are shaped by the person's relationship with 'Authority' in the past. If someone felt that they were mis-treated in the past by the government or by say a university bureaucracy, they are more likely to be anti-vax; because appealing to authority has no meaning or relevance to the way they process and assign weights to the information that they rrceive. Of course more positive views of 'Authority' will lead to a different, more pro-vax position. Curious if this matches with what others are seeing.

sterlind 5y ago
That matches what I've seen. An acquaintance of mine who's native was very distrustful of the vaccine and got angry when our state allocated early doses to Indian tribes, saying they were testing it on them (they've since calmed down.) Though on the other hand, a tribal elder I work with was extremely stoked to get the vaccine as soon as possible. I think politics is a big factor too, honestly. Misinformation flows through echo-chambers and everything becomes partisan.
squiggleblaz 5y ago
> My personal view is that vax vs anti-vax views are shaped by the person's relationship with 'Authority' in the past. If a person excessively distrusts authority, they are vastly more likely to have a poor interaction with authorities. For instance, a person who believes the government is trying to trick everyone into subjugating ourselves to them by getting and using birth certificates and drivers licences is going to have a very poor interaction with the police and perhaps the courts. (I don't mean to say that everyone in some class are Sovereign Citizens, but that at one extreme you have Sovereign Citizens, and you have people who are more or less like them in between them and the person whose mistrust legitimately started from an interaction with authorities.) I wouldn't want to use those experiences as the basis for concluding that an antivaxxer is antivax because of their previous poor interactions. Both events are caused by the original distrust. If we know who's had poor runins with the law and we're trying to find the antivaxxers, then yes, I think this is a useful place to look. But it's just a correlation, not an explanation. Consequently, I want to place much less weight on your reasoning: >If someone felt that they were mis-treated in the past by the government or by say a university bureaucracy, they are more likely to be anti-vax; because appealing to authority has no meaning or relevance to the way they process and assign weights to the information that they rrceive. (Also, I'm not convinced of your argument even with these objections resolved. A lot of people seem to distrust the government because they view it as associated with one party, even when their preferred party is in charge. This distrust seems somewhat confected. And in America, distrust of government is a widespread ideology/mindset, even embedded into the culture. Neither of these forms of distrust are rational or understandable (over)reactions to trust-forming interactions.)

daenz 5y ago

>It's spreading a lot less these days, largely because people around you have started getting the vaccine Cases were going down significantly in the USA before the mass rollout of the vaccine. 100% guarantee that people forget that unpleasant fact. Sources: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/02/14/why-coronavirus-cases-are-dropping/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/02/14/why-coronav... https://abc7news.com/covid-cases-in-us-johnson-and-vaccine-coronavirus-usa-america-today/10354482/ https://abc7news.com/covid-cases-in-us-johnson-and-vaccine-c... https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/02/why-covid-19-cases-are-falling-so-fast/618041/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/02/why-covid-...

alisonkisk 5y ago
Cases "went down" (and also up) 3 times due to wave effects. Since the vaccine, the ups stopped.
- daenz 5y ago
  The cases from January 9th to February 23 represent an 80% reduction in cases, from 250,000 to 55,000. Where are these "waves"? Do you mean when it went from 60,000 to 70,000 from March to April? This was down from 250,000 in early Jan. This is what I'm talking about. People want to rewrite history to make it seem like we were all screwed until the vaccine showed up. No, experts were talking about how cases were going down drastically and it wasn't the cause of vaccine.
sellyme 5y ago
> Cases were going down significantly in the USA before the mass rollout of the vaccine. This is a very vague statement, so let's put some numbers onto it: Total US vaccination rates exceeded 1% on January 2nd 2021. The US 7-day rolling average case count peaked on January 11th 2021. At that point, 2.7% of the population was vaccinated, and 632,000 people were being vaccinated every day (again, 7-day rolling average). Cases were almost certainly going to trend down (albeit to a lesser extent) anyway, but I would argue that mass rollout was concurrent with a ~94% drop in case count.

ipspam 5y ago

Anyone that wants the vaccine can have it, I won't judge them. That's not my business. The sanitary, risk adverse nature of the modern world genuinely repulses me. I want to kill this overprotective beaurocracy in its cradle. It seems stupid, and it is. But it's the only vote I get. I'm playing my hand. Disaster Socialism needs to be DOA next crisis.

ghoward 5y ago

My reply to Linus: https://gavinhoward.com/2021/06/a-letter-to-linus-torvalds/ https://gavinhoward.com/2021/06/a-letter-to-linus-torvalds/ .

ghthor 5y ago
This is what I dont understand about how people are acting about this. These medical companies are making a fortune from this and there is hard evidence from previous court cases that they dont have our best interests at heart. People wouldn't be taking this vaccine id the media hadn't been lying to then and spreading fear for a whole year. It's all infuriating.
- ghoward 5y ago
  It is an unfortunate thing that fear is such a strong driver.

mehta_rohan 5y ago

beast mode on

normalasnorfolk 5y ago

I haven't got the vaccine as yet, but I've been very recently summoned to get one by the national health body. I think the biggest deciding factor for me is... Doing research - and, tbh, finding time to understand the intricacies of human biology and how particular vaccines work is difficult/time consuming. The one thing I'll add which has been skirted around and some commenters have 'skirmishly' mentioned is the amount of distrust for authority, which IMO can be well-placed. The amount of deceitfulness conducted by the state on various matters, important and trivial, over the past several decades (though probably for all of human history - but come to light (due to the internet)) has fostered this mistrust. The list of lies or misinformation is extensive; the wars, the bailouts, the disregard for communities, the deportations: the policies; in essence the corruption and ulterior motives of the state is and has been questionable. Thus, the backlash against the vaccine(s) is understandable and I partly feel it within me too. Also, to make a rational decision you have to have a lot of the main pros and cons, but what we have been supplied with are just extreme incorrect cons and/or extreme & well-placed pros - there has not been any balanced adult 'conversation' (i.e., a balanced cost-benefit assessment geared towards the individual) which in its absence is unscientific and fairly illiberal. That's my 2 cents.

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