7 ms·

When it comes to vaccines, you don't necessarily have to trust government institutions. If you are normal, adult, educated person you don't need to "trust" the

When it comes to vaccines, you don't necessarily have to trust government institutions. If you are normal, adult, educated person you don't need to "trust" the government for everything. You should hopefully be able to think for yourself and be able to evaluate when the story checks out and where it doesn't. Trust knowledge that has been gathered over decades, statistics and research that has been gathered by many research institutions (unless you can claim all of them are in collusion). Vaccines do work and we desperately need everybody to get vaccinated. Every country that has implemented vaccinations vigorously has seen immediate, large drop in cases. People who are going to hospital at the moment are almost exclusively unvaccinated. A person or institution or government that shows it is not trustworthy in one area undermines itself in other areas and so it is understandable that it may sow confusion. But you should still have ability to think for yourself and use it to make rational decisons.

version_five 5y ago
There are two separate ideas here. Believing in the concept of a vaccine as an effective disease prevention mechanism, and believing the current narrative that all demographics need a covid vaccine, the risk reward calculus always shows it does more good than harm, etc (I'm not trying to faithfully summarize, but more make the point that there is a distinct and political covid vaccine push that's not the same as just saying a vaccine works) I personally had to suspend my mistrust of the government in order to decide it was worth getting vaccinated. A good rule of thumb is that the more someone tries to push you to do something, the more you should question their motives. And governments that have mismanaged and lied about everything else they do, like you say, have no reason to be trusted on this one thing, even if its generally popular. So it's not surprising that people who do believe that vaccines work (which is really not up for debate) may not agree with the putative urgency of getting this vaccine. Should just add that I don't really think there is anything we can do about this mistrust this time around. You get credibility by acting like you have people's interests in mind, and like you know what you're doing, so it would take a long spell of that before folks have any real reason to take what we are told at face value.
- lmilcin 5y ago
  > A good rule of thumb is that the more someone tries to push you to do something, the more you should question their motives. It is a rule of thumb. Not a universal law. I hope you are not questioning the motives for having traffic rules. Or motives of your wife asking you to avoid a particularly dangerous place when coming back from work.
  - version_five 5y ago
    > traffic rules I think you're probably trying for one of those moral relativism fallacies (why don't we just go around killing people?) but you actually picked a ridiculously easy target that supports my point. How many instances are there of speed limits being set to create speed traps rather than to actually promote safety? Or set based on oil embargoes in the 70s and just left there? Or rules based on nimbyism and not wanting traffic in certain neighborhoods? Or lights timed to catch people at red light cams. This is all off the top of my head, I'm sure I could go on, but we should definitely be skeptical that many traffic rules are made "for our safety" and not for some other agenda, good point!
    - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
      > How many instances are there of speed limits being set to create speed traps rather than to actually promote safety? I don't know. How many are there?
      - washadjeffmad 5y ago
        Anywhere they don't use lane width for flow control, of imagine.
        PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
        Consider US58 as it crosses a substantial chunk of Kansas. It passes through many very small towns with a (frequently defunct) retail "strip" that lasts less than a mile. The speed limit typically drops from 65 mph to 35 or even 25 mph while passing through these towns. Are you suggesting that the fact that neither the towns nor Kansas has altered the lane width in these locations proves that these speed limit changes are nothing but speed traps?
christophilus 5y ago
Vaccines that have been through clinical trials and approved by the FDA generally work. I’m fully vaccinated, but you have to admit that there’s a difference between the COVID vaccine and other vaccines— not just in terms of development and deployment speed, but also in terms of underlying technology, at least in some cases. Skepticism is a reasonable default stance for most things, emergency measures included.
- lmilcin 5y ago
  Everything in life is a tradeoff. If you remember, vaccines were developed under enormous pressure and every day of delay meant literally tens of thousands of people dying across the world. So the uncertainties about these vaccines must be weighted against the situation in which they came to be. Fortunately, the doubt against vaccines seems to be largely unfounded and it is easily evidenced by drops in death rates in all countries that implemented vaccinations.
  - __blockcipher__ 5y ago
    > Fortunately, the doubt against vaccines seems to be largely unfounded and it is easily evidenced by drops in death rates in all countries that implemented vaccinations. Wrong on both counts. First of all viral epidemics follow a natural progression. Saying that a drop in [COVID] death rates following vaccine rollout proves their efficacy/safety is like saying that a week of heavy rains after doing a rain dance proves the rain dance did it. This same mistake has been made in associative studies looking at mask mandates, where many shoddy papers were released that showed a drop in mask-mandate counties while neglecting to account for the fact that cases were dropping everywhere. Monica Gandhi (an HIV researcher whose pro-masking papers have been of consistently poor quality yet are fairly widely cited because they produce the “correct” result) published a study to this effect that she and her team had to later retract because cases later went up. They were just measuring the normal viral epidemic curve and convincing themselves, without real evidence, that it must have been the masks. As to the other point, the efficacy of the vaccines is real but quite limited. The recent data coming out of Israel especially was something like 33% case reduction, but a much better reduction in hospitalization/death (80-90%). That to me demonstrates that the party line position of “the vaccines are amazingly effective” is simply not true. They’re great for reducing personal risk - although I’d note the Guillain-Barré syndrome, myocarditis, and strokes are pretty concerning - but they don’t do much for slowing the spread. Now frankly we never should have been trying to slow the spread of SARS-2 in the general population - it was always destined to be an endemic respiratory virus, and a mild one at that for most healthy people - but I’m just making the point because the whole narrative has been that we had to lock down “until the vaccine” to save people from getting infected when increasingly it’s looking like everyone has to face the virus one way or another. So go out and get vaccinated if you want better odds against SARS-2 while taking on some risk from possible side effects of making your cells express a bunch of artificial spike protein throughout your body for a few days, but don’t kid yourself into thinking that any concerns about either the safety or efficacy of the vaccines is baseless.
blooalien 5y ago
> "You should hopefully be able to think for yourself and be able to evaluate when the story checks out and where it doesn't." When I was a child, this sort of thinking was taught in grade-school and considered to be an important component of becoming an adult. Ah, how I long for "the good ol' days".
- crummy 5y ago
  How did they teach it? What class was that in? (Guess it was before my time.)
  - jessaustin 5y ago
    If I had fifty teachers during my time in public school I'd be surprised if five of them would have been smart enough to teach such a course. None of those taught grade school.
h_anna_h 5y ago
You might not need to trust government institutions in order to be convinced that vaccines in general are effective, you do however need to trust them in order to verify that a specific vaccine is effective and safe. Especially for new vaccines for which we do not have as much data gathered. In addition, the genetic material for the vaccines not being open source (and commonly being patented) stops smaller research labs and individuals from examining them by themselves. Not to mention that even if the vaccine was open source there would still be possible supply-chain attacks, would you for example trust the Chinese government to not secretly conduct experiments on the Uighurs by giving them a modified vaccine? It's not as if human experimentation even in "modern democratic countries" is unheard of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentation_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentatio.... Considering that I would not blame minorities (whether racial, religious, or political, especially in countries that have been historically oppressive of them) if they decided to avoid the vaccine. > You should hopefully be able to think for yourself and be able to evaluate when the story checks out and where it doesn't. > But you should still have ability to think for yourself and use it to make rational decisons. Some people ended up distrusting vaccines (whether in general or specific) after following this process. It is not a truth-finding panacea.

version_five 5y ago

There are two separate ideas here. Believing in the concept of a vaccine as an effective disease prevention mechanism, and believing the current narrative that all demographics need a covid vaccine, the risk reward calculus always shows it does more good than harm, etc (I'm not trying to faithfully summarize, but more make the point that there is a distinct and political covid vaccine push that's not the same as just saying a vaccine works) I personally had to suspend my mistrust of the government in order to decide it was worth getting vaccinated. A good rule of thumb is that the more someone tries to push you to do something, the more you should question their motives. And governments that have mismanaged and lied about everything else they do, like you say, have no reason to be trusted on this one thing, even if its generally popular. So it's not surprising that people who do believe that vaccines work (which is really not up for debate) may not agree with the putative urgency of getting this vaccine. Should just add that I don't really think there is anything we can do about this mistrust this time around. You get credibility by acting like you have people's interests in mind, and like you know what you're doing, so it would take a long spell of that before folks have any real reason to take what we are told at face value.

lmilcin 5y ago
> A good rule of thumb is that the more someone tries to push you to do something, the more you should question their motives. It is a rule of thumb. Not a universal law. I hope you are not questioning the motives for having traffic rules. Or motives of your wife asking you to avoid a particularly dangerous place when coming back from work.
- version_five 5y ago
  > traffic rules I think you're probably trying for one of those moral relativism fallacies (why don't we just go around killing people?) but you actually picked a ridiculously easy target that supports my point. How many instances are there of speed limits being set to create speed traps rather than to actually promote safety? Or set based on oil embargoes in the 70s and just left there? Or rules based on nimbyism and not wanting traffic in certain neighborhoods? Or lights timed to catch people at red light cams. This is all off the top of my head, I'm sure I could go on, but we should definitely be skeptical that many traffic rules are made "for our safety" and not for some other agenda, good point!
  - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    > How many instances are there of speed limits being set to create speed traps rather than to actually promote safety? I don't know. How many are there?
    - washadjeffmad 5y ago
      Anywhere they don't use lane width for flow control, of imagine.
      - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
        Consider US58 as it crosses a substantial chunk of Kansas. It passes through many very small towns with a (frequently defunct) retail "strip" that lasts less than a mile. The speed limit typically drops from 65 mph to 35 or even 25 mph while passing through these towns. Are you suggesting that the fact that neither the towns nor Kansas has altered the lane width in these locations proves that these speed limit changes are nothing but speed traps?

christophilus 5y ago

Vaccines that have been through clinical trials and approved by the FDA generally work. I’m fully vaccinated, but you have to admit that there’s a difference between the COVID vaccine and other vaccines— not just in terms of development and deployment speed, but also in terms of underlying technology, at least in some cases. Skepticism is a reasonable default stance for most things, emergency measures included.

lmilcin 5y ago
Everything in life is a tradeoff. If you remember, vaccines were developed under enormous pressure and every day of delay meant literally tens of thousands of people dying across the world. So the uncertainties about these vaccines must be weighted against the situation in which they came to be. Fortunately, the doubt against vaccines seems to be largely unfounded and it is easily evidenced by drops in death rates in all countries that implemented vaccinations.
- __blockcipher__ 5y ago
  > Fortunately, the doubt against vaccines seems to be largely unfounded and it is easily evidenced by drops in death rates in all countries that implemented vaccinations. Wrong on both counts. First of all viral epidemics follow a natural progression. Saying that a drop in [COVID] death rates following vaccine rollout proves their efficacy/safety is like saying that a week of heavy rains after doing a rain dance proves the rain dance did it. This same mistake has been made in associative studies looking at mask mandates, where many shoddy papers were released that showed a drop in mask-mandate counties while neglecting to account for the fact that cases were dropping everywhere. Monica Gandhi (an HIV researcher whose pro-masking papers have been of consistently poor quality yet are fairly widely cited because they produce the “correct” result) published a study to this effect that she and her team had to later retract because cases later went up. They were just measuring the normal viral epidemic curve and convincing themselves, without real evidence, that it must have been the masks. As to the other point, the efficacy of the vaccines is real but quite limited. The recent data coming out of Israel especially was something like 33% case reduction, but a much better reduction in hospitalization/death (80-90%). That to me demonstrates that the party line position of “the vaccines are amazingly effective” is simply not true. They’re great for reducing personal risk - although I’d note the Guillain-Barré syndrome, myocarditis, and strokes are pretty concerning - but they don’t do much for slowing the spread. Now frankly we never should have been trying to slow the spread of SARS-2 in the general population - it was always destined to be an endemic respiratory virus, and a mild one at that for most healthy people - but I’m just making the point because the whole narrative has been that we had to lock down “until the vaccine” to save people from getting infected when increasingly it’s looking like everyone has to face the virus one way or another. So go out and get vaccinated if you want better odds against SARS-2 while taking on some risk from possible side effects of making your cells express a bunch of artificial spike protein throughout your body for a few days, but don’t kid yourself into thinking that any concerns about either the safety or efficacy of the vaccines is baseless.

blooalien 5y ago

> "You should hopefully be able to think for yourself and be able to evaluate when the story checks out and where it doesn't." When I was a child, this sort of thinking was taught in grade-school and considered to be an important component of becoming an adult. Ah, how I long for "the good ol' days".

crummy 5y ago
How did they teach it? What class was that in? (Guess it was before my time.)
- jessaustin 5y ago
  If I had fifty teachers during my time in public school I'd be surprised if five of them would have been smart enough to teach such a course. None of those taught grade school.

h_anna_h 5y ago

You might not need to trust government institutions in order to be convinced that vaccines in general are effective, you do however need to trust them in order to verify that a specific vaccine is effective and safe. Especially for new vaccines for which we do not have as much data gathered. In addition, the genetic material for the vaccines not being open source (and commonly being patented) stops smaller research labs and individuals from examining them by themselves. Not to mention that even if the vaccine was open source there would still be possible supply-chain attacks, would you for example trust the Chinese government to not secretly conduct experiments on the Uighurs by giving them a modified vaccine? It's not as if human experimentation even in "modern democratic countries" is unheard of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentation_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentatio.... Considering that I would not blame minorities (whether racial, religious, or political, especially in countries that have been historically oppressive of them) if they decided to avoid the vaccine. > You should hopefully be able to think for yourself and be able to evaluate when the story checks out and where it doesn't. > But you should still have ability to think for yourself and use it to make rational decisons. Some people ended up distrusting vaccines (whether in general or specific) after following this process. It is not a truth-finding panacea.