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It's a shame that the mainstream has adopted the term "anti-vaxxers" to describe people who don't want to get a COVID vaccine. Many of my friends and colleagues

• jimbob45 5y ago
  There's no legitimate reason to doubt the safety or the efficacy of these vaccines such that the benefits of immunity don't vastly outweigh the reason. You seem like you're trying to normalize some midpoint between vaccine acceptance and anti-vaxxing to radicalize individuals here. Reddit went ahead and banned anything resembling your post to avoid anti-vaxx wolves amongst sheep. I hope HN does the same here too. Edit: I’m okay with all the anti-vaxxers in this thread. I think you’re all arguing in good faith and I’m more than happy to compare information with you. You’re all to be commended for engaging in the marketplace of ideas. It’s just the guy I was replying to that I think is a bad-faith actor trying to perniciously sway otherwise moderate people to his side by misrepresenting his initial position on the topic to be more moderate than it actually is.
  • desine 5y ago
    Telling people their concerns are not valid also does not help
  • mwint 5y ago
    Wait, did you just argue that there is zero room for dissent?
    • geofft 5y ago
      That is generally how arguments about claims of fact work, yes. If you genuinely believe that, say, the earth is round, then your position isn't going to be that the earth is probably round but there are valid reasons to believe otherwise, or that you can have the opinion that the earth is flat, or whatever. It's fundamentally not a matter of opinion, and part of your belief is that it isn't a matter of opinion.
      • TrevorJ 5y ago
        What you are describing is explicitly not science. It's dogma.
      • mwint 5y ago
        I find this specific example a bit amusing. Remember when authority thought the earth was at the center of the solar system, and that was a fact and there wasn’t room for dissent? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_affair > Heliocentric books were banned and Galileo was ordered to abstain from holding, teaching or defending heliocentric ideas. Sounds familiar. I don’t say that vaccines are bad, or unhealthy. I do say that banning one side of the conversation, even if they’re crazy, is a great way to end up on the wrong side of history.
        • geofft 5y ago
          That's my point exactly. Do you think Galileo thought there was room for dissent about whether the earth moved? Did he famously say "Eppur si muove, forse"? There's no room for dissent. There's room for argument, and by all means we should argue about it and not ban one side of the conversation. But only one of the sides can be right.
          • hermitdev 5y ago
            What do you think argument is, but dissent? Science doesn't progress if there isn't dissent. If there is no dissent from the status quo, there's no reason to do any research. Galileo also thought the orbits of the planets were circular, but he was wrong about that. It doesn't matter what he thought or said at the time. Newton's laws of motions worked well... until they didn't and Einstein gave us something better. We also don't think Einstein is 100% correct, either, because relativity breaks down in some important corner cases. But it's the best explanation we have at the time. Science is fundamentally built upon the principle of falsifiability. Without falsifiability all you have is belief and dogma. It's also why there's a fundamental difference between a scientific theory and a scientific law. Your "argument" that we should all just shut up and walk the line is, ironically, the true anti-science position.
  • ErikVandeWater 5y ago
    > There's no legitimate reason to doubt the safety or the efficacy of these vaccines such that the benefits of immunity don't vastly outweigh the reason. This doesn't apply to all age groups, even if you trust the FDA implicitly. The vaccines are not approved for children under 12 because the proven benefits do not exceed the risks. The benefit of the vaccine slides dramatically with existing health and age; 12-17 year olds that are healthy will receive virtually no benefit from the vaccine.
    • geofft 5y ago
      Are there actually concrete risks to children, or is this a political pressure thing (if the vaccine hurts children, then it will blow up badly in the FDA's faces if they approve it, so they're being hesitant)? That is, are the "risks" real scientifically-documented complications (either from a clinical trial, or from solid arguments about mRNA vaccines and children), or are the "risks" just unknown-unknowns and a lack of sufficient data? I don't trust the FDA. I believe they're subject to a bunch of nonsense political pressures. I believe they employ a bunch of good people trying to do the best job they can within a US federal bureaucracy and all the confines of that (including the inability to compete on salary with the private sector for skilled/experienced candidates). I have no reason to believe they're more competent than, oh, the DoD. So my distrust of the FDA doesn't extend to believing that they approve the vaccine, it's because they really want to implant microchips in us, but it absolutely extends to believing that if they don't approve the vaccine, it may well be for reasons entirely unrelated to its scientific merit.
      • benmmurphy 5y ago
        if a child does not have an existing health issues the risk of covid itself is so low that even if the vaccine had no complications the cost of the vaccine itself would probably outweigh the individual benefits conferred to the child. it's very difficult to justify a medical intervention when the risk is so low. if you are taking a more utilitarian view then it is certainly better to be sending vaccines that would be given to children to other countries that currently have a shortage of vaccines for at risk groups. the UK had a vaccine committee that authored a report on the benefit and risks of giving a vaccine to children. they concluded the benefits outweigh the risks but the benefits are so small that it is impossible to justify taking action. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/jcvi-statement-september-2021-covid-19-vaccination-of-children-aged-12-to-15-years/jcvi-statement-on-covid-19-vaccination-of-children-aged-12-to-15-years-3-september-2021 https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/jcvi-statement-se...
  • risedotmoe 5y ago
    Well good thing this isn’t reddit. I’m not sure why you would ever use reddit as an example on what good moderation looks like.
  • lhorie 5y ago
    I mean, they're still working on getting data on efficacy/safety on children, it's not like they have years of data to point to. I can kinda understand why some people might be wary, even when faced with extremely rare odds of complications; mechanically it seems very similar to the sort of belief that leads people to play lottery games, despite the obviously low odds of winning. What the GP is saying is that us-vs-them rhetorics have a tendency to make parties illogically double down on doubts (not just with vaccines, but with literally every topic under the sun). If one wants to claim the intellectual higher ground, not taking this phenomenon into account seems like a pretty big blind spot, especially if we're on the topic of method efficacy.
  • question000 5y ago
    Truly anti-vaxx behavior is a mental illness. They are being a danger to themselves and others and should be locked up. I just want to live. This is not a political argument. People who purposely spread deadly diseases are criminals. It's just the same as firing a loaded gun at someone and pretending you don't know what a gun is. I don't care about what argument you're making anymore if I'm ending up shot either way.
• daveslash 5y ago
  Re >> "This makes them defensive about being insulted, thereby reinforcing their existing opinions." This is often the same mechanism that reinforces actual anti-vaxxers... and other beliefs that many of us would consider "out there" (e.g. Birtherirm, the Big Lie, etc...)
  • rejectedandsad 5y ago
    This is the coddling of the American mind, unfortunately.
• babyshake 5y ago
  Do these people have criteria for what evidence it would take for them to consider mRNA vaccines to be safe? I see a lot of FUD but nothing that seems to define what would invalidate or confirm these concerns.
  • pkphilip 5y ago
    The mRNA vaccines have been out for about a year or so. What evidence is there to indicate that it is safe even in the medium term (>2yrs) let alone long term?
    • frumper 5y ago
      In 2009, researchers conducted the first-ever trial on cancer immunotherapy using mRNA-based vaccines in human subjects with metastatic melanoma. The results of the trial showed an increase in the number of vaccine-directed T cells against melanoma (Weide et al., 2009). https://the-dna-universe.com/2021/04/15/the-history-of-mrna-applications/ https://the-dna-universe.com/2021/04/15/the-history-of-mrna-...
    • lamontcg 5y ago
      Because autoimmune reactions to antigens either show up in 3 months or they don't. Vaccines are tiny and you don't take them chronicially. They aren't like medicine. The bad side effects are entirely your body attacking itself. And there's a well-studied branch of medicine dealing with that. There's no autoimmune disease which emerges only >2 years after exposure to an antigen. In all of medicine that phenominon doesn't exist in order for to happen after an mRNA vaccine.
  • seattle_spring 5y ago
    No. The previous criteria was FDA approval, but the goalposts predictably moved once that happened.
  • angelzen 5y ago
    A 20 year track record that the virus doesn't eventually mutate to bypass the narrow protection offered by mRNA vaccines, and subsequent infections aren't worse compared with natural immunity gained after an initial infection. In particular when first infection occurs early in life, like is the case for other human coronaviruses that subsequently become an afterthought.
• notriddle 5y ago
  Then use a viral vector COVID-19 vaccine instead?
  • pattrn 5y ago
    Absolutely. A lot of my friends who were hesitant about Pfizer and Moderna did just that.
  • TrevorJ 5y ago
    It seems as if the single-shot viral vector is not universally considered adequate to be considered 'vaccinated'.
• rejectedandsad 5y ago
  Why should we coddle these peoples delusions?
• goda90 5y ago
  How much scientific evidence for mRNA vaccines being safe and effective would need to be gathered for continued concern and hesitancy to count as "anti-vaxxer" thinking?
  • ycombinete 5y ago
    For me? A couple of years. There have been plenty of “safe” new medicines that revealed horrific side effects a long way down the line. I was vaccinated with Sinopharm 6 months ago, preferring the older vaccine technology; now I’m being vaccinated with Pfizer, because I need to travel to countries which don’t accept Sinopharm. I’m still uncomfortable with MRNA vaccines, and feel a bit like a beta tester.
    • anoonmoose 5y ago
      For example? I'd prefer one from my lifetime (30-40 years)
      • ycombinete 5y ago
        Thalidomide
        • cygx 5y ago
          That happened in the 50s and was uncovered in the 60s...
          • anoonmoose 5y ago
            And the US FDA quite famously rejected it at the time
          • ycombinete 5y ago
            What’s your point?
            • 5y ago
• whatshisface 5y ago
  I think the issue with being hesitant about mRNA vaccines is that they're probably not as bad for you as an mRNA virus. The mRNA virus will definitely inject mRNA into you to make your cells do its evil bidding, and it is fairly unlikely that the vaccine, which only injects one part of the virus' mRNA into some cells, could somehow be worse than the virus, which injects everything in the vaccine plus mRNA encoding several other proteins, and replicates boundlessly to boot. The mRNA that Pfizer puts in to the lipid nanoparticles isn't even as dangerous as the virus's equivalent - the version of the spike protein it encodes is mutated at a point to prevent it from making the conformal change that wrenches membranes open.
  • hammock 5y ago
    What about the 100+ million in the US with natural immunity to the mRNA virus? Edit: 40+ million Edit 2: perhaps it is 100+ million when counting estimated unreported cases- I do recall getting this 100+ number from the CDC itself
    • rejectedandsad 5y ago
      The vaccine generalizes better without the annoyance to deathly consequences of actually contracting the virus.
      • mikeyouse 5y ago
        A recent study had a great chart: https://www.nejm.org/na101/home/literatum/publisher/mms/journals/content/nejm/0/nejm.ahead-of-print/nejmoa2110475/20210824/images/img_xlarge/nejmoa2110475_f4.jpeg https://www.nejm.org/na101/home/literatum/publisher/mms/jour... (Figure 4 here: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2110475 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2110475) For essentially all 'side effects' of the vaccine - you're substantially more likely to experience them if you get Covid. Not only is the notion of avoiding the vaccine to avoid the side effects misguided, it's actively increasing your chances of getting those very same side effects.
        • 5y ago
• r00fus 5y ago
  I'm not surprised. When your unvaccinated loved ones die or get sick because large portions of the population are choosing to not get vaccinated, it becomes a visceral response. Vax hesitancy has a social cost. This is part of the price to pay. That it's not "totally efficient" is debatable.
  • hammock 5y ago
    >Vax hesitancy has a social cost What is the social cost, if there is evidence that this vaccine doesn't prevent infection and/or transmission?
    • notriddle 5y ago
      If.
    • Izikiel43 5y ago
      Hospitals not overrun?
      • hammock 5y ago
        Fair point. An overrun issue can be mitigated if a) hospitals would not dismiss unvaccinated staff thereby leading them to be understaffed (an unstaffed bed = not a bed, which is one reason why hospitals "don't have enough beds"), and b) US medical staff would accept more of the treatment options available in other countries (Japan, India, etc) such as ivermectin.
        • dbt00 5y ago
          Unvaccinated staff get sick and die, and staff members of all sorts of vaccination status can get sick and miss work, and also transmit the disease to at risk loved ones.
          • nradov 5y ago
            I would encourage everyone to get vaccinated if they can, but vaccinated people can still transmit the disease to others. There is probably some reduction in risk but the magnitude is unclear. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/effectiveness/why-measure-effectiveness/breakthrough-cases.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/effective...
• swader999 5y ago
  It goes further, the media labels those opposed to vaccine passports as anit-vaxxers, many of which have had these shots.
• mehphp 5y ago
  > Many of my friends and colleagues have concerns about mRNA vaccines I'm curious if you know why?
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• devwastaken 5y ago
  They're not actually fine with other vaccines, they're "okay" with it because they had them as a baby without a choice. If they didn't, they would fight against it today. Same will be with COVID vaccines. It was the same with influenza. All it takes is their political party (fox news) to put out some dishonest material about other vaccines, and somehow people become self educated experts on mercury in vaccines. Wrong people deserve to be told their wrong. They're not going to stop just because you're letting them be idiots.
  • TrevorJ 5y ago
    >They're not actually fine with other vaccines, they're "okay" with it because they had them as a baby without a choice. This sort of thinking is designed to "other" people and shut down debate. You don't speak for other people, stop pretending to. Further, it's intellectually dishonest to pretend that if you have skepticism about these vaccines specifically you must secretly be anti all vaccines.
    • devwastaken 5y ago
      They speak for themselves. I hear it every day. You can almost see the cognitive dissonance turning gears in their brain when you ask them how they know the vaccines they got we a kid are safe in comparison to COVID. They don't actually believe or know about vaccines. In 20 years it will be the same thing with COVID as it was with influenza and any other vaccine.
      • TrevorJ 5y ago
        This is a strawman argument. Two of the most covid vaccine hesitant groups are healthcare workers and PhD's. I'm not sure those folks are the ones with cognitive dissonance here. To be clear: I'm not arguing that the people hesitant about the covid vaccine are right. But I see no actual data that would indicate that a significant portion of these people are anti vaccine in general.
  • hammock 5y ago
    >All it takes is their political party (fox news) Have you seen the data on which demographics are unvaccinated? You would be surprised
• hvocode 5y ago
  Oh come on. Even before the pandemic your typical anti-vaccine person also wasn’t universally against all vaccines. They usually had some subset that represented their favorite rationale for not getting it: those containing substances they don’t like, those developed with a process that had a fetal cell line somewhere nearby, those given in clusters in early childhood instead of spread later on, etc. Anti-mRNA vaccine sentiment is just another instance of the same thing. Sorry if they feel sad for having that label, but it’s the same behavior.
  • nomoreplease 5y ago
    If they aren’t universally against all vaccines, then why is the term “anti-vaxxer” applied in deragatory ways? I was under the impression it meant they were afraid of all Portions of what you mentioned seem like reasonable concerns to the average layperson
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• YossarianFrPrez 5y ago
  The Johnson and Johnson shot is not an mRNA vaccine, is freely available, and undergoing the same vetting process as the mRNA vaccines. The reason people are being labeled as "anti-vaxx" is because there aren't a lot of reports of the "anti-mRNA" crowd lining up to get the J-and-J shot.
  • pattrn 5y ago
    I know quite a few people who got J&J due to their hesitancy about Pfizer and Moderna. It's anecdotal, I know, but so are all of my personal experiences :) .
    • scotu 5y ago
      sure, but nobody is going around calling them anti-vaxxers, right?
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • YossarianFrPrez 5y ago
      That's a valid response to being mRNA hesitant. But my impression is that those people aren't being called "anti-vaxx." The concern I share with many other people is not as much about people who prevaricate about mRNA and get J&J, but about those who are armchair quarterbacking their way into believing things like science / all scientists are corrupt, we have no expert / collective knowledge of the various mechanisms by which vaccines work, there is a nebulous "they" that don't want you to know things, etc.
  • bondarchuk 5y ago
    We will see what happens when Sinopharm and/or Valneva become available in the EU. J&J is not mRNA but it's also not an old style inactivated virus vaccine. As far as I can tell viral vector vaccines are just a little bit older than mRNA, having only been used against ebola since a few years ago (2018?).
  • tzs 5y ago
    > The Johnson and Johnson shot [...] is freely available It may be more accurate to say was freely available. It has become hard to get in many places in the US. [1] https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/once-all-the-rage-the-johnson-johnson-covid-19-vaccine-has-all-but-disappeared/ https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/once-all-the-rage-...
• dxf 5y ago
  The Johnson and Johnson and AstraZenica vaccines are not mRNA; they are a more traditional "standard" vaccination (adenovirus vector). Are your friends willing to get one of those?
  • pattrn 5y ago
    Some of them did just that. (I've said this a few times -- not sure if it's considered spam to keep posting the same thing on different threads. Sorry if that's the case!)
  • SkyMarshal 5y ago
    > they are a more traditional "standard" vaccination (adenovirus vector) Are viral vectored vaccines “more traditional” and “standard”? They’re relatively new too aren’t they? It’s a genetically engineered virus that injects its DNA into the cell nucleus which instructs the cell DNA to produce mRNA that instructs the cell to produce virus spike proteins. By comparison, mRNA vaccines at least skip the cell nucleus step and inject mRNA directly into the outer cytoplasm, no need to interact with the DNA in the nucleus. It seems the only really traditional and standard vaccines are the inactivated virus ones like Sino that inject dead viral material. Those are the type we’ve been using for decades.
• scotu 5y ago
  I'd like to know their stance on the J&J vaccine since it's not mRNA
• UncleMeat 5y ago
  The anti-vaxx movement has always had folks like this. Even freaking Andrew Wakefield only claimed that the MMR vaccines were bad and was personally involved in marketing an alternative. IMO, "I don't hate all vaccines" is just ideological cover. Regardless of your opinion of other vaccines, resistance to the Covid vaccines is foolishness. End of story.
• 1MachineElf 5y ago
  I can count the number of times I've been sick in the past 10 years on one hand. I've only had a few vaccines during that time. I take supplements that benefit my immune system, call it a day, and that seems to have done well enough. Oddly enough, the people in my life who are vocal about getting vaccines and booster shots on a regular basis all get sick much more frequently than I do. It's the same situation with my girlfriend. Both of us rarely get sick and we are apparently more confident in our immune systems than this relatively vocal group of people. I don't think our lifestyle choice makes us deserving of the "anti-vaxxers" slur and the animosity that comes with it. It's not like I'm on social media posting evil "anti-vaxxer" content. It was actually a 2014 broadcast on WPFW 89.3 that made me aware of facts that many seem to be ignorantl of or actively suppress: - The similarities between 19th/20th century recorded symptoms of polio sickness and similar symptoms of lead/arsenic poisoning. - Lead/arsenic pesticides were used on crops back then, lead contaminated many things ingested by people, and people did in fact get paralyzed as a result of these things. - Polio was declared an infectious disease on a very flawed experiment where spinal fluid from a paralyzed cadaver was injected into a monkey that subsequently became paralyzed. - The resulting vaccines from this research resulted in more paralysis and deaths. - Many scientists believed toxins were the cause of polio, but their voices were suppressed by the US government when national vaccine trials began in the 1950s. - The government-approved polio vaccines caused paralysis and deaths. One would be correct in saying that the foundations for government-run vaccine programs are shaky at best. The fact that 100 years later, researchers are still trying to nail down the polio virus, might make one wonder that the elusiveness of a solution is a product of a made-up problem. Yes, polio viruses have been "identified", but no one can say for sure how many of of those who were paralyzed before were the result of poisoning vs. a random virus. Then you have Bill Gates experimenting on India's people with his polio vaccine investments - is an equal amount being invested to research toxins as the cause of polio-like symptoms there too? Anyways, please excuse me for waiting a some months to get my COVID vaccine. I suppose it's been enough time to watch the antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE) risk play out. Next week I'm due for my 2nd Moderna shot. My girlfriend already has hers due to a questionable job requirement. Don't fault me for feeling uneasy about it, seeing how in Japan last month, Moderna doses were found to be contaminated.
  • 5y ago
• b0sk 5y ago
  You are against (anti-) taking a vaccine (-vaxxer). (The concern is just some internet dude on Facebook claiming he's discovered something really evil about Big Pharma)
  • chrismcb 5y ago
    There is a huge difference between not wanting to take one vaccine versus not wanting to take any vaccine.
  • pattrn 5y ago
    That definition doesn't make sense. If someone doesn't like steak, it doesn't make them anti-meat, and if someone doesn't like mint flavor ice cream, it doesn't make them anti-ice cream. That's the entire problem with the word -- its old definition meant anti-all-birth-vaccines (which made more sense). This new definition conflates people who are anti-all-vaccines with people are anti-just-COVID-vaccines.
• lenkite 5y ago
  (Fully vaccinated). I am so glad my nation doesn't use an mRNA vaccine. mRNA vaccines have side-effects that are currently still under investigation. https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/eu-drugs-regulator-looking-new-possible-side-effects-mrna-vaccines-2021-08-11/ https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...