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I experience similar things. Frankly, I think the media has put so many weird labels on people who choose not to vaccinate that after the lockdowns, the vaxed

I experience similar things. Frankly, I think the media has put so many weird labels on people who choose not to vaccinate that after the lockdowns, the vaxed people found a sort of sensation in talking to non-vaxed people. It felt like in a zoo. "So, you are not vaxed because you are afraid of the pain?" The actual reason for most, which is "I have decided to risk an infection to let my immune system do its job" is never really talked about because I mostly end up terminating the conversation because it has this distinct derogatory tone from the ohter side.

CogitoCogito 5y ago
> The actual reason for most, which is "I have decided to risk an infection to let my immune system do its job" To be fair, this is what the vaccines do.
- mlang23 5y ago
  Come on. If humanity were unable to survive without the help of artificial vaccines, we would never be here.
  - CogitoCogito 5y ago
    > Come on. If humanity were unable to survive without the help of artificial vaccines, we would never be here. I never said that humanity couldn't survive without a vaccine. Clearly we can. We also can survive with rotten meat and with poor shelter and with rampant war and famine. Sure a larger portion of us would die, but humanity would certainly survive. Anyway my point was that when you're infected with a virus, your body basically builds up the ability to recognize certain proteins that the virus expresses and uses that to fight it off. It takes time to build up the ability to fight it off. The vaccine exposes you to basically the same proteins so that your body is able to identify and fight off the virus more quickly after infection. So really the vaccines are just priming your immune system so that it can better do its job.
    - netmonk 5y ago
      You are wrong or tartuffe. Vaccines focus only on Spike protein. And beside turning your cells into a toxin (spike) factory there are lot of other concerns. Any medical drugs is defined by a specific calibrated quantity and a locality to achieve a specific effect, cure,heal , or prevent a disease. Traditionals vaccins comply with this definition. Injecting in a specific area, a calibrated quantity of weakened virus to train immune system to recognise and fight this specifcic virus is ouite safe and achieve the target on most peoples. RNA technology is quite different as far as what is injected is the recipe for human cells to produce a protein in order for them to be released into blood as foreign body to train immune system to identify associated virus. There is no way to control the specific and calibrated quantity of this production. Also there is no control about impacted area with the fact that produced proteins in a random quantity can migrate everywhere in the body. Also for the produced protein to exit the cell there is several mechanism with observed risk that the protein sticks on the surface of the cell turning it into a foreign cell (to be destroyed) from immune system perspective. So basically calling such technology "vaccin" is a lie. And adverse events are more likely to be far more massive than safe traditionals vaccins. Not talking about injections conditions where basic health checkup to judge if the future jabbed is in optimal health conditions to be injected are not done. Not talking about countries such as Israel where those products did not demonstrated the marketed level of protections.
      - netmonk 5y ago
        Interesting To get minused on this comment when all informations contained are scientifically accurates.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - myko 5y ago
    The thing is many humans did not survive to get us here. I think this is a key point a lot of the antivax crowd doesn't see.
    - mlang23 5y ago
      How would you feed the world, if all these people had survived?
      - CogitoCogito 5y ago
        > How would you feed the world, if all these people had survived? I'm not really sure what your point is. We shouldn't try to help those with weaker immune systems survive? How far should we take this? Should we as a society not make an effort to help the physically disabled, the old, the blind, etc. survive? Looking to the wild, basically no members of those groups survive. Is that what we should aim for?
- the-rc 5y ago
  Yeah, what does the vaccine do that the virus doesn't? There's a lot the latter does that the former doesn't. That's the part I don't get.
  - CogitoCogito 5y ago
    > Yeah, what does the vaccine do that the virus doesn't? There's a lot the latter does that the former doesn't. That's the part I don't get. Well the main feature of the vaccine over the actual virus is that the vaccine doesn't give you covid. The vaccine doesn't cover all of the multitude of compounds your body might recognize on the virus, but it covers enough for most people to build a better immune response to the actual virus than nothing. There is the issue that the viral strains are mutating and so over time so that a recently-vaccinated person today will probably do worse than a recently-vaccinated person 6 months ago, but there's not really much you can do about that.
yojo 5y ago
The part of this argument that feels shaky to me is it ignores externalities. If it were possible to risk an infection with no impact on others then yes, the conversation is over. But diseases don’t work like this. If you get sick, you will get others sick. If you get very sick, you will occupy a hospitable bed. Given current hospital utilization rates, this could well end in a sick person being turned away. Given the societal costs, it seems fair to me to ask for a stronger justification than “I don’t think the virus will hurt me”
- mlang23 5y ago
  So following your argument, we would also need to outlaw every sort of risk-taking behaviour. Almost every sport except chess bears a risk comparable to what you say above. And most recreational activities also bear a risk that you might have an accident, which could put some stress on the people working at the hospital. Heck, the helicopter pilot could crash while they bring you to safety, so you implicitly killed them. In fact, everything you do outisde of your workhours is your personal risk, so it needs to be banned I guess. Sounds fine to me. I am blind and can not do most of the fancy recreational activities you sighted people are so fond of. So why should I care. In fact, I should immediately start a petition that makes your lifes more dull and miserable. But guess what, no. Thats not my thing. I am not an asshole.
  - yojo 5y ago
    The required changes to liberty are substantially different. Giving up your hobbies means making a major change to your life. Getting two shots takes a cumulative 2ish hours. Do you claim you receive substantial benefits from not getting a shot? Because I claim society gets substantial benefits from you getting vaccinated. You’re trying to make this a binary thing, but we live in a society where collectively we try to make small trades in liberty for collective benefit. I do expect you not to drive 60MPH in front of my house where my children play. I do not expect you to give up tennis.
    - mlang23 5y ago
      Yes, my "substiantial benefit" is not exposing my system to an artificially created addiction/dependency on fabricated meds. What you seem to ignore is the long term effect of going down that path as a society. If the death rate in my age group were higher, believe me, I would take a shot. But since I am statistically not really at risk, I prefer to not make myself dependent on vaccination to survive.
allannienhuis 5y ago
I'm honestly curious if you would apply this reason to other types of infections? or is it something about covid and the covid vaccine that has the risk/reward ratio tilted in favor of not vaccinating for it? When I do my own assessment, I look at the tremendous success of the vaccines (efficacy and low serious side-effect rate) and compare it to the risk and consequences of getting the disease, it seems a very easy call for me. So I'm really curious what you are evaluating differently - what am I missing?
- mlang23 5y ago
  For one, I am not sure about the side-effect-freeness. In fact, the covid vaccine is the first vaccine I know where a high percentage of people I know who have got the shot also were ill for a few days. So this is new for me. I have got a lot of vaccines around 15 years ago for a travel gig, and didn't have side-effects from a single one of them. So this is new, me having to accept that the vaccine might take me out for a few days. And yes, of course, with a different situation, my decision might be different. If covid were as harsh as our media and government claimed at the beginning of the first lockdown, I would certainly get a shot. However, it turned out the media and government have overstated the danger, apparently to achieve compliance. This sort of lie (we were told "everyone will know someone who died") was my wakeup call. I was originally mislead and expected a deathrate of 1%. As it turns out, almost only the elderly die, and the deathrate (including the elderly) is around 0.1%. Wrong order of magnitude for real panic on my side.
  - allannienhuis 5y ago
    Thanks for your thoughtful reply. I appreciate you didn't have to take the time to reply to a random stranger on the internet :) Regarding side-effect-free - not sure anyone ever claimed that? I understand that the relative risk is very low when compared to the risks associated with the disease itself - even for those that might expect milder symptoms from covid. I think people (myself included) are just really really bad at assessing these kind of risk/reward equations - I don't think we have the right tools for it, and our assessments are polluted by our personal history/culture/biases (in every direction). I can't agree with your assessment of overstating the danger - the full hospital wards and large death numbers at the height of the pandemic before vaccines are enough reasons for me to accept that the costs are high enough for the small risk/inconvenience I'd pay personally. I also know personally people in public health and can vouch for the sincerity of their (very) educated advice. If anything they have been consistently critical of governments being too slow to accept their recommendations (due to political pressures). I'd feel foolish for thinking I would know better than they who have spent their entire career in this area. I know that's an appeal to authority which isn't always warranted - but I'm comfortable with landing on that side of the fence.

CogitoCogito 5y ago

> The actual reason for most, which is "I have decided to risk an infection to let my immune system do its job" To be fair, this is what the vaccines do.

mlang23 5y ago
Come on. If humanity were unable to survive without the help of artificial vaccines, we would never be here.
- CogitoCogito 5y ago
  > Come on. If humanity were unable to survive without the help of artificial vaccines, we would never be here. I never said that humanity couldn't survive without a vaccine. Clearly we can. We also can survive with rotten meat and with poor shelter and with rampant war and famine. Sure a larger portion of us would die, but humanity would certainly survive. Anyway my point was that when you're infected with a virus, your body basically builds up the ability to recognize certain proteins that the virus expresses and uses that to fight it off. It takes time to build up the ability to fight it off. The vaccine exposes you to basically the same proteins so that your body is able to identify and fight off the virus more quickly after infection. So really the vaccines are just priming your immune system so that it can better do its job.
  - netmonk 5y ago
    You are wrong or tartuffe. Vaccines focus only on Spike protein. And beside turning your cells into a toxin (spike) factory there are lot of other concerns. Any medical drugs is defined by a specific calibrated quantity and a locality to achieve a specific effect, cure,heal , or prevent a disease. Traditionals vaccins comply with this definition. Injecting in a specific area, a calibrated quantity of weakened virus to train immune system to recognise and fight this specifcic virus is ouite safe and achieve the target on most peoples. RNA technology is quite different as far as what is injected is the recipe for human cells to produce a protein in order for them to be released into blood as foreign body to train immune system to identify associated virus. There is no way to control the specific and calibrated quantity of this production. Also there is no control about impacted area with the fact that produced proteins in a random quantity can migrate everywhere in the body. Also for the produced protein to exit the cell there is several mechanism with observed risk that the protein sticks on the surface of the cell turning it into a foreign cell (to be destroyed) from immune system perspective. So basically calling such technology "vaccin" is a lie. And adverse events are more likely to be far more massive than safe traditionals vaccins. Not talking about injections conditions where basic health checkup to judge if the future jabbed is in optimal health conditions to be injected are not done. Not talking about countries such as Israel where those products did not demonstrated the marketed level of protections.
    - netmonk 5y ago
      Interesting To get minused on this comment when all informations contained are scientifically accurates.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- myko 5y ago
  The thing is many humans did not survive to get us here. I think this is a key point a lot of the antivax crowd doesn't see.
  - mlang23 5y ago
    How would you feed the world, if all these people had survived?
    - CogitoCogito 5y ago
      > How would you feed the world, if all these people had survived? I'm not really sure what your point is. We shouldn't try to help those with weaker immune systems survive? How far should we take this? Should we as a society not make an effort to help the physically disabled, the old, the blind, etc. survive? Looking to the wild, basically no members of those groups survive. Is that what we should aim for?
the-rc 5y ago
Yeah, what does the vaccine do that the virus doesn't? There's a lot the latter does that the former doesn't. That's the part I don't get.
- CogitoCogito 5y ago
  > Yeah, what does the vaccine do that the virus doesn't? There's a lot the latter does that the former doesn't. That's the part I don't get. Well the main feature of the vaccine over the actual virus is that the vaccine doesn't give you covid. The vaccine doesn't cover all of the multitude of compounds your body might recognize on the virus, but it covers enough for most people to build a better immune response to the actual virus than nothing. There is the issue that the viral strains are mutating and so over time so that a recently-vaccinated person today will probably do worse than a recently-vaccinated person 6 months ago, but there's not really much you can do about that.

yojo 5y ago

The part of this argument that feels shaky to me is it ignores externalities. If it were possible to risk an infection with no impact on others then yes, the conversation is over. But diseases don’t work like this. If you get sick, you will get others sick. If you get very sick, you will occupy a hospitable bed. Given current hospital utilization rates, this could well end in a sick person being turned away. Given the societal costs, it seems fair to me to ask for a stronger justification than “I don’t think the virus will hurt me”

mlang23 5y ago
So following your argument, we would also need to outlaw every sort of risk-taking behaviour. Almost every sport except chess bears a risk comparable to what you say above. And most recreational activities also bear a risk that you might have an accident, which could put some stress on the people working at the hospital. Heck, the helicopter pilot could crash while they bring you to safety, so you implicitly killed them. In fact, everything you do outisde of your workhours is your personal risk, so it needs to be banned I guess. Sounds fine to me. I am blind and can not do most of the fancy recreational activities you sighted people are so fond of. So why should I care. In fact, I should immediately start a petition that makes your lifes more dull and miserable. But guess what, no. Thats not my thing. I am not an asshole.
- yojo 5y ago
  The required changes to liberty are substantially different. Giving up your hobbies means making a major change to your life. Getting two shots takes a cumulative 2ish hours. Do you claim you receive substantial benefits from not getting a shot? Because I claim society gets substantial benefits from you getting vaccinated. You’re trying to make this a binary thing, but we live in a society where collectively we try to make small trades in liberty for collective benefit. I do expect you not to drive 60MPH in front of my house where my children play. I do not expect you to give up tennis.
  - mlang23 5y ago
    Yes, my "substiantial benefit" is not exposing my system to an artificially created addiction/dependency on fabricated meds. What you seem to ignore is the long term effect of going down that path as a society. If the death rate in my age group were higher, believe me, I would take a shot. But since I am statistically not really at risk, I prefer to not make myself dependent on vaccination to survive.

allannienhuis 5y ago

I'm honestly curious if you would apply this reason to other types of infections? or is it something about covid and the covid vaccine that has the risk/reward ratio tilted in favor of not vaccinating for it? When I do my own assessment, I look at the tremendous success of the vaccines (efficacy and low serious side-effect rate) and compare it to the risk and consequences of getting the disease, it seems a very easy call for me. So I'm really curious what you are evaluating differently - what am I missing?

mlang23 5y ago
For one, I am not sure about the side-effect-freeness. In fact, the covid vaccine is the first vaccine I know where a high percentage of people I know who have got the shot also were ill for a few days. So this is new for me. I have got a lot of vaccines around 15 years ago for a travel gig, and didn't have side-effects from a single one of them. So this is new, me having to accept that the vaccine might take me out for a few days. And yes, of course, with a different situation, my decision might be different. If covid were as harsh as our media and government claimed at the beginning of the first lockdown, I would certainly get a shot. However, it turned out the media and government have overstated the danger, apparently to achieve compliance. This sort of lie (we were told "everyone will know someone who died") was my wakeup call. I was originally mislead and expected a deathrate of 1%. As it turns out, almost only the elderly die, and the deathrate (including the elderly) is around 0.1%. Wrong order of magnitude for real panic on my side.
- allannienhuis 5y ago
  Thanks for your thoughtful reply. I appreciate you didn't have to take the time to reply to a random stranger on the internet :) Regarding side-effect-free - not sure anyone ever claimed that? I understand that the relative risk is very low when compared to the risks associated with the disease itself - even for those that might expect milder symptoms from covid. I think people (myself included) are just really really bad at assessing these kind of risk/reward equations - I don't think we have the right tools for it, and our assessments are polluted by our personal history/culture/biases (in every direction). I can't agree with your assessment of overstating the danger - the full hospital wards and large death numbers at the height of the pandemic before vaccines are enough reasons for me to accept that the costs are high enough for the small risk/inconvenience I'd pay personally. I also know personally people in public health and can vouch for the sincerity of their (very) educated advice. If anything they have been consistently critical of governments being too slow to accept their recommendations (due to political pressures). I'd feel foolish for thinking I would know better than they who have spent their entire career in this area. I know that's an appeal to authority which isn't always warranted - but I'm comfortable with landing on that side of the fence.