36 ms·

I was hesitant for a while and the massive censorship was part of it. I got vaccinated in May and have convinced others to get the shot since the side effects,

I was hesitant for a while and the massive censorship was part of it. I got vaccinated in May and have convinced others to get the shot since the side effects, while existent, appear to be minor compared to the reduction in harmful symptoms. Talking to my doctor is what did it for me. He cleared up most of my concerns and pressed me that my remaining concerns were too nebulous to be useful. If he just said "shut up and take it" I wouldn't have. My mother only got vaccinated last month. She and my father are both medical professionals (she's retired and my dad got it early on since he's super high risk). Her main hangup was the lies and coercion. She believed that if the vaccine was actually as great as they're saying they'd be able to make more objective goalposts and win arguments instead of stopping them because the other side is too stupid to make their own decisions. I'm confident there was also some element of "if I get it now I'm telling them their tactics worked."

NotSammyHagar 5y ago
I'm glad you got vaccinated. But... Can you expand on why you were hesitant because of censorship? Because if there were lots of serious problems with the vaccine, they'd be covered in a second on fox news. Meanwhile, a lot of people are hugely influenced by false stories on social media, it's just a fact, with recent examples being things like ivermectin and the 2016 presidential election conspiracies, and don't forget q-anon. Since covid is so deadly if you get it, and there are basically almost no cases of serious health issues with vaccination and furthermore, vaccination is also almost guaranteed to protect you from serious cases, why wouldn't you get it? Have you heard rumors of some problems from vaccination?
- MarcoZavala 5y ago
  You should be stabbed to death you worthless piece of shit.
- crazy_horse 5y ago
  Really devalues the meaning of censorship. Social media platforms broadcasting your views around the world and moderating some of them was not censorship.
  - computerphage 5y ago
    And what exactly is the difference in your mind between "moderating" and "censoring" here? They seem exactly the same to me: both involve some other party deciding what is and is not acceptable to be published.
    - crazy_horse 5y ago
      Censorship is government action. Private companies that allow you to reach millions of people are offering you the ability to use their service. It's not censorship when they don't allow you to use their service (and until today, they haven't stopped much), it's terms of service. If I invite you to my house and you eat my dog's food, I have the right to tell you to leave. The movement wouldn't be what it is today without YT, so this censorship stuff is too much.
      - johnjj257 5y ago
        No that's just govt. Censorship vs regular censorship. Moderation is the exact same thing they can both do it. Just because it isn't the government doesn't mean they aren't censoring. Censorship is NOT just government action.
      - robbrown451 5y ago
        Why do you think censorship must be government action? Is there a definition posted anywhere that says this? I've long seen it used to refer to, for instance, TV network censors. And every online dictionary I can find allows for entities other than government to be referred to as censoring.
      - ipaddr 5y ago
        Censorship is not a government action. It is literally filtering content and anyone can. You can censor yourself, a company could censor a band and change lyrics. They run a platform that practices censorship. It is legal. Trying to say it is okay because they are a private entity doesn't wash and they should be called out. We could even band together and censor them.
      - 5y ago
- destitude 5y ago
  The fact that they completely ignore natural immunity in the USA is enough to be concerned about their motivations.
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    It's being ignored because it's fraught with problems. People think they had COVID in the early pre-testing days, but it was just the flu or a bad cold. (My son was in this realm; severe pneumonia in early 2020, but later testing showed no antibodies.) You'd have restaurants swamped with angry "but I've already had it!" people. Verification is hard; you can't just take word for it, so that means an antibody test, and at that point you might as well have just vaccinated them anyways while they were in.
    - eggy 5y ago
      You're cherry picking from people who think they had it. There are millions who know they've had COVID like myself, and I still have very high antibodies almost 9 months on. I am fit, do not have a comorbidity like obesity, hypertension, diabetes, etc. Remember, over 78% of all hospitalizations involve obesity and other comorbidities, and disproportionately affect much older people. It should be me and my doctor's choice on whether getting the jab is good for me or not. Censorship doesn't address the nuances of the issue. It leads to disenfranchising people. In addition, the vaccine spikes your antibodies, and if your antibodies are currently high, it can lead to more frequent or serious side effects. The 2018 Spanish Flu caused deaths in the young and healthy by having their immune systems go into an overwhelmingly high gear, but older people's weaker immune systems spared them this consequence. I have natural immunity, I am fit, and my risk of a second, severe infection is equal or less to your vaccinated status. After 9 months the vaccine's efficacy is much lower, and doesn't really work well against the variants. There is no long-term data, obviously, on the vaccine yet, since it was only given to the public less than a year ago. Let's see three to seven years from now. Let's remember Pfizer was the company that in 1996 setup a tent near a Doctors without Borders tent and gave an experimental antibiotic drug to 200 children, maybe more, without their parent's consent, and then 10 or 11 of those children died with others suffering other maladies thought to be from the drug. An illegal, immoral drug trial. They packed up their tent, and later back-dated a letter to say they had gone through ethics channels with the Nigerian government. So yeah, let's squash any anti-vaccine talk, because what's good for you is good for everyone. Personally, I am vaccinated with everything but the COVID vaccinations, so I am not antivax, and shouldn't be discriminated against like that. My older children got the vaccine, but me and my wife and our younger children have not, since we all had COVID, and we all have high antibodies. Fake vaccination cards also defeat your "fraught with problems" argument of people think they had it, but didn't argument. There will always be difficulties in sorting this out. That's no reason to go full-in on censorship.
- destitude 5y ago
  "almost no cases of serious health issues with vaccination" how do you think you'd possibly hear about this when you are replying to an article where any anti-vaccine information is censored?
  - cromulent 5y ago
    Well over 2 billion people have been vaccinated. You probably know some of them in real life - you don't need a broadcaster to tell you if there are problems.
  - robbrown451 5y ago
    You really think "any anti-vaccine information is censored"? This policy on YouTube just started, and, last I heard anyway, there are other sources of information other than YouTube. There have obviously been many many sources of information on the internet that allow anti-vaccine information. And, if that information was actually credible, it would have also been available to, for instance, those at YouTube who made this policy. What do you figure their agenda is for covering it up?
- CWuestefeld 5y ago
  Found on a different discussion at TheZvi (https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2021/09/23/covid-9-23-there-is-a-war/#more-22649 https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2021/09/23/covid-9-23-there-is-...): --- start quote #1 --- Thanks to your ongoing efforts, my 40+ year old sibling finally got vaccinated about three weeks before getting infected by her kids. She still had it pretty bad, so I think it’s likely you saved her a trip to the hospital or worse. She was on the brink of getting vaccinated weeks earlier, but “That Guy” had cast enough doubt that a family member talked her out of it. So I’m glad you specifically mentioned him back then. Thanks to our civilization’s shiny new censorship machine it was maddeningly difficult to actually find good counter arguments to his claims, since we’re all supposed to just pretend bad claims don’t exist. So mostly I had to just point to the favorable evidence rather than being able to give a point by point rebuttal. [...] And her family is fox news conservative, so all the tribal hate made it especially hard for her to take their claims seriously. She stayed up all night making her decision, and had 250 browser tabs open by the end. So people do try, and do pay attention. --- end quote #1 --- and later, in response --- start quote #2 --- I had the same experience. I wanted to know whether the “vector vaccines alter your DNA” claims had any truth to them, given that “dna altering virus” is definitely something that exists. As far as I can tell, this is (probably) false, but it was really hard to find any evidence beyond “prof. dr. X says this is a conspiracy theory, now get your vaccine they are safe and effective ™”. It was really frustrating; I’m not surprised that many people feel like they are being tricked. --- end quote #2 ---
  - spywaregorilla 5y ago
    > I had the same experience. I wanted to know whether the “vector vaccines alter your DNA” claims had any truth to them, given that “dna altering virus” is definitely something that exists. As far as I can tell, this is (probably) false, but it was really hard to find any evidence beyond “prof. dr. X says this is a conspiracy theory, now get your vaccine they are safe and effective ™”. It was really frustrating; I’m not surprised that many people feel like they are being tricked. This is a really frustrating perspective to hear. > I heard this bogus claim about something I don't understand and wanted to know if it was true > All I could find was doctors saying it was nonsense > How could I know what the truth was? I suspect it's a common form of reasoning. It's committing so many mistakes all at once. * Refusal to acknowledge that you might be considering nonsense and thus perceiving anyone saying it's nonsense as malicious * Complete refusal or certainty in your inability to do basic research on things that are well documented by many organizations and easy to find BUT STILL SAYING ITS HARD TO FIND * Not just lack of trust, but certainty of distrust for authority figures. Anything they say has negative value. It's far more upsetting to me than hearing people with malicious political agendas being assholes.
- bmarquez 5y ago
  > they'd be covered in a second on fox news I don't know why you assume Fox is anti-vax, Trump took the vaccine and promotes it on Fox News interviews himself. https://www.foxnews.com/media/trump-urges-all-americans-to-get-covid-vaccine-its-a-safe-vaccine https://www.foxnews.com/media/trump-urges-all-americans-to-g...
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    People see the world as us and them. Dem vs Rep. In reality it is those who control and wished to be controlled vs those who wish to remain free. Fox and CNN are two sides of the same coin.
  - ZeroGravitas 5y ago
    Fox News repeatedly highlighted the dangers of covid: https://youtu.be/wmoABTiCpco https://youtu.be/wmoABTiCpco I dont understand why everyone thinks they are fascists.
    - bmarquez 5y ago
      The video shows soundbites of commentators saying illegal immigrants, in crowded conditions, potentially have covid. I don't know if that's correct or not but it has nothing to do with my point that pro-vaccine content does exist on Fox News.
  - longhairedhippy 5y ago
    Have you watched Tucker Carlson? I would be pleased if they charged the man with murder after this is all over. Do you think it's odd he won't answer questions about his own vaccination status?
- ohdannyboy 5y ago
  Can you expand on why you were hesitant because of censorship? ... Have you heard rumors of some problems from vaccination? It made it more difficult to ascertain what the risks were, I didn't feel our officials were being honest with us (something I still think). Back in early 2021 it was a lot more open to speculation since it was an minimally tested treatment who's delivery method had never been widely deployed on humans before. We still don't know if there's long term effects and there's no way for us to find out until enough time has passed. I didn't want to be part of the initial test group. Since covid is so deadly if you get it I'm relatively young and not in any risk categories, covid does not pose much of a death risk to me. Significant non-deadly outcomes are another story (permanent lung damage, loss of taste, ect). I decided that protection from the latter category (significant non-deadly outcomes) was worth my rather nebulous fears that we'll realize it does some harm over the next decade. and there are basically almost no cases of serious health issues with vaccination and furthermore "Basically almost no" is a difficult term to quantify, but VAERS database does have plenty of entries.
  - unanswered 5y ago
    > Significant non-deadly outcomes are another story (permanent lung damage, loss of taste, ect) Is there credible, non-censorious evidence that the vaccine reduces these particular risks? This is the same argument that we keep seeing: you have to take this vaccine because ${thing that vaccines normally do but this one hasn't been shown to do}. The most egregious example is "provide immunity"/"improve outcomes for anyone around you". I just don't believe a word of it until I see the science.
    - nneonneo 5y ago
      I don’t know what level of convincing you need, but here in BC, unvaccinated people are about 25x more likely to show up in a hospital than vaccinated people: https://news.gov.bc.ca/releases/2021HLTH0058-001843 https://news.gov.bc.ca/releases/2021HLTH0058-001843 Over the past two weeks: > After factoring for age, people not vaccinated are 25.8 times more likely to be hospitalized than those fully vaccinated. (The age correction reflects the fact that vaccines aren’t distributed evenly by age).
- boltzmann_brain 5y ago
  > Since covid is so deadly if you get it Please. Median age above life expectancy. (At least where I live). Unless this is a board for 70 year or older seniors, this is utter bullshit.
- blub 5y ago
  You're probably referring to Biontech*, but when I got AstraZeneca the chances of dying from the virus for my age interval was only slightly more than the chance of dying from the vaccine, as calculated by the ECDC. * which as an aside does cause myocarditis and pericardits in particular for young males. This is important because for example in Germany the incidence was 1 case from 17.271 doses for males in the 12-17 age range and in most cases the symptoms appeared after the second dose, which may mean that a booster could also trigger it.
quartus 5y ago
> Her main hangup was the lies and coercion. Can you provide examples of the lies you're referring to?
- avereveard 5y ago
  That "vaccine granted immunity" was a big one, it rapidly became less symptoms, and from that surreptitiously changed again to well you'll still have a week of feeling like shit if you catch covid, but you'll be less likely to die from it. Then there's whatever percent of vaccinated that would have allowed the fabled reopen, we engaged trough most of these metrics, and we're still far from normalcy. Heck my vaccine passport has a very clear, very bold expiry date on it, talk of normalcy are nonsense. Oh and there's that "let's not tell peasants masks are useful as not to cause shortages to professionals." Maybe warranted, given what happened with hoarders and toilet paper, but still definitely a lie. edit: jesus christ look at the mess of downvotes this whole thread attracted, replies included, this place is populated by people more toxic than facebook's and more sensitive than twitter's. and you wonder why the content platform are in full on containment mode. truth is you're bringing your corporate dystopia unto yourself.
  - creaturemachine 5y ago
    The science is evolving, and these differences from a year ago are proof of that. I don't think the vaccine makers were very proud to admit that their wonderdrug wasn't what it was promised to be, but that's the way it is. The only remaining choice for anti-vaxxers in the face of increasingly contagious variants is take the shot or risk death. Your call.
    - cies 5y ago
      > The science is evolving Science got massively oversold. Who did that? Who benefits from that? > The only remaining choice for anti-vaxxers in the face of increasingly contagious variants is take the shot or risk death. Your call. I think if you call anyone hesitant to take these shots an anti-vaxxer, you contribute to making the narative so everything extreme. Many that are "c19 vaccine hesitant" are vaccinating their children on the locally standard schedule. It is just that this c19 vaccine is a bit different: did not yet stand the test of time and it is in many cases a whole new therapy (mRNA therapy's debut). > take the shot or risk death This sounds so dramatic. This choice is everywhere, just not with so much media attention. Diets, traffic accidents, extreme sports, ... I think we should use vaccines only to protect those at risk, and/or those who want protection by it. Once they have the shot it's over. The media is pushing a story that we need to all get vaccinated to protect others. I think, given the research, that this is never going to happen (virus will stay in corners of the world with unvaccinated people, virus will have new variants: virus will stay with us).
Alex3917 5y ago
I also find the censorship to be deeply disturbing, but for me that's counterbalanced by the fact that the arguments against vaccination are so dumb. The best argument is basically, "It's not researched enough and it might kill you." But so what, doing things that might kill you on the basis of limited data is like a basic part of being an adult.
- cromulent 5y ago
  Yeah, over 2 billion people have been vaccinated against C19. It's a pretty good sample size. Probably less people have tattoos.
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    The long term studies are not due until 2024. It would be too early to tell.
    - Alex3917 5y ago
      Have any of the studies released data yet? I was under the impression that even the data from the short term studies wouldn't be released for another couple of years.
    - cromulent 5y ago
      Good point, tattoos have been around for ever. Bad comparison from me. I'm actually excited about the new mRNA tech and the massive boost it got from the money during C19. I think lockdown is toxic to society and risks can be taken on vaccines to open things up. I'm optimistic for humanity and thankful we had a mild-ish pandemic that was fatal for a relatively small percentage, but allowed us to improve our biotech so much in such a short time. This will surely help us next time. This article for example: https://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2021/03/23/novel-vaccines-have-performed-remarkably-quickly-and-well https://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2021/03/23/no...
      - heavyset_go 5y ago
swivelmaster 5y ago
What kind of medical professionals?
- cde-v 5y ago
  Probably chiropractors
- boringg 5y ago
  I picked up on the strangely vague "medical professionals" piece as well. One thing I learned from the pandemic is that not all health/medical professionals are created equal, and that there is a large portion of very specifically trained and fairly uneducated people in the medical community.
  - ohdannyboy 5y ago
    My mom was a RN most of her career then got her masters and went into education. My dad is a nurse practitioner. I didn't specify it explicitly because I didn't think it was relevant -- I was not trying to use vagueness to imply they were medical doctors and use them as a source of authority. All was trying to do was build them up at least a little, they do know more about the body than most people even if they aren't anywhere near experts on what the vaccine does.
    - swivelmaster 5y ago
      It is, unfortunately, a relevant and important point. I've heard of plenty of nurses who got wrapped up in conspiracy theories and completely ignored the experts, but very VERY few doctors or pharmacists. Knowing how to take care of someone who is sick is a far cry from being an expert on vaccines or viruses.
  - sllewe 5y ago
    Just to add some other insight here... My Wife, a ICU RN+CCRN spent most of her 2020 on the COVID floor. It was pretty brutal for her. She has coworkers, of equal status, who experienced pandemic alongside her first hand - who were extremely hesitant to get the vaccine. This includes several months after the initial rollout to staff.
trts 5y ago
There are at least four people close to me who become more entrenched in their anti-vax stance the more this stuff happens. It's so obvious to me how counter-productive these measures are. However I don't suppose increasing vaccination rates are part of the goal of these measures, but just protecting YouTube from having to do moderation or take responsibility for the content on their platform. My mom for example, after many conversations and a great deal of effort on my part to present data and evidence that was free from shaming and judgement, has made two appointments to get vaccinated, and subsequently cancelled them. The second cancellation came after Biden's recent speech blaming unvaccinated people being directly responsible for killing the vaccinated, a nonsensical supposition. This is scary stuff. The moral absolutism that the platforms endorse is creeping into more and more subjective areas, and essentially obliterating any hope of nuance or increased understanding about changing strategies and data.
- oauea 5y ago
  Sorry to tell you, but your mom is an idiot and she is probably going to die. Sucks, but such is life for those people.
- alex504 5y ago
  > Biden's recent speech blaming unvaccinated people being directly responsible for killing the vaccinated, a nonsensical supposition. Can you explain how this is nonsensical? There is quite a bit of data showing that those who are unvaccinated are much more likely to spread the disease.
  - trts 5y ago
    From the speech itself, "only 1 in every 160,000 fully vaccinated Americans has been hospitalized due to covid" According to the most recent data from the CDC (https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/COVIDNet/COVID19_3.html https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/COVIDNet/COVID19_3.html), 960 out of every 160,000 Americans has been hospitalized due to covid (this is across all people regardless of vaccination status). So there is _at least_ a 99% reduction in the rate of hospitalizations for the fully vaccinated, according to the figures he cited. The message he's sending is that even if you are vaccinated, _you're not safe_. Why is this an effective message for persuading those who might still be convinced? Is the overall outcome better than if our political leadership continued to transparently emphasize vaccine safety and outcomes, rather than scoring points with their political base? You convince more people to become vaccinated by being convincing. When you get more people vaccinated, you save more lives. If someone's position is, that it doesn't matter if the overall outcome is worse, because the bad outcomes are more concentrated in selfish/stupid/red-state people, then I simply disagree with that.
oauea 5y ago
Hey, if you want to die, go for it. It's your freedom.
- rkuykendall-com 5y ago
  Unfortunately there's so many of these idiots they're clogging up the hospitals. I don't know why they don't just "do their own research" and die at home.
  - cromulent 5y ago
    https://xkcd.com/2515/ https://xkcd.com/2515/
  - Dma54rhs 5y ago
    For the same reason the body positive types don't, people who drink or smoke etc. Society in general tolerates ones bad decisions.
  - mycoborea 5y ago
    Hey Robert, I see you’re in New York City. Would you be comfortable explaining your comments to the 2/3 of black New Yorkers who are hesitant to get the vaccines?
    - heartbreak 5y ago
      Are you comfortable explaining why black Americans are overwhelmingly stuck with worse schools, worse access to healthcare, and generational poverty?
      - txsoftwaredev 5y ago
        Lack of parenting.
        heartbreak 5y ago
        Today I remembered why I shouldn’t engage with idiots.
Florin_Andrei 5y ago
> because the other side is too stupid to make their own decisions The unfortunate reality is - that is the actual crux of the problem. Maybe say "incapable of making" instead of "too stupid to make", since that makes the scope wider. But that is the long and short of it.
- throwawayjeje 5y ago
  Do you routinely analyze and challenge your own biases? Do you ever wonder if someone you disagree with might be right? It's easy to call someone stupid while ignoring what they are saying. It's hard to charitably hear someone's argument. I'm certainly at fault there. Either way I categorically reject the worldview where a "benign" paternalism protects us from ourselves.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
    > Either way I categorically reject the worldview where a "benign" paternalism protects us from ourselves. That's nice. unfortunately the world as it is is categorically providing practical counterexamples to this.
tomrod 5y ago
Thank you. In my view you did everything appropriate, including seeking out advice from people with training and experience who could help you decide.
corona-research 5y ago
Yeah, your mom shouldn’t trust her expertise. Makes sense she got the poison jab even though she knows it is a huge scam
kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
Does she get flu shots because that has been all about coercion since the ramp up of medical profiteering that started in the 90s. Nevermind that the lethality of influenza precipitously declined in the 40s and isn't a mass killer. Covid is a far more credible threat that shouldn't be ignored so readily.
jackson1442 5y ago
> She believed that if the vaccine was actually as great as they're saying they'd be able to make more objective goalposts and win arguments instead of stopping them because the other side is too stupid to make their own decisions. The problem I see here is that the (I hesitate to call it this) anti-vax "side" has been shifting goalposts since day n-1. If you've ever talked to someone who's shifted goalposts you'll see it's essentially an impossible situation; you can't convince someone who doesn't want to be convinced. If I'm remembering the timeline correctly, it started with the vaccine being rushed and that we were essentially being experimented on. It's been six months since I – and many others – have had their first dose and we're completely fine. Some claimed to be concerned about the long term effects; do you think they know what the long term effects of a serious covid case is? (hint: it starts with a d and ends with "eath") Oh, but it's also not FDA approved. I haven't looked at the numbers, but I bet vaccinations haven't gone up significantly since FDA approval. Obviously it's because the FDA isn't to be trusted, that's a given. At some point it was too hard to get- yes, that's true. However, now you can walk into a Target and decide to get the shot in the middle of a shopping trip! I did that with a Flu shot a few weeks ago and it took about five minutes. In short, you cannot argue in good faith with someone who does not. I don't have a good answer to this – I really wish I did – but that's the reality of the situation.
- eric_b 5y ago
  Eh, everyone has been moving goalposts. First it was "flatten the curve" to prevent hospital overrun. Then at some point it became "no one can ever get covid again" and we did wild things like close schools even if a person so much as got near a person with COVID. I don't think one side has a monopoly on losing trust, behaving badly, or making anti-science decisions.
  - lovich 5y ago
    When did it ever get to no one can ever get Covid again? We tried to “flatten the curve” and still had large spikes. After we got some semblance of control we only kept infections down with lockdowns and other measures. This is a tech based forum, surely everyone here has experience with a boss who complains that he’s paying you when the system never breaks, not knowing that it’s not breaking because of active measures being taken to prevent it
monocularvision 5y ago
My wife’s theory is there would be less hesitancy if the vaccines were being distributed through people’s primary care physicians instead of at mass vaccination sites or Walgreens. People may distrust the media, the government and all sorts of other nebulous groups, but they largely trust their doctor.
- velcrovan 5y ago
  I got vaccinated as soon as I did in large part because I didn't have to deal with my primary care.
  - LudvigVanHassen 5y ago
    There is quite a lot of humor in this statement. ;)
- heartbreak 5y ago
  You can almost certainly get the vaccine from your physician, and you can also call your physician’s office and leave a message asking them whether you should get vaccinated. They’ll call you back.
tshaddox 5y ago
It sounds like both you and your mother have both adopted an epistemology that incorporates the perceived amount of censorship, lies, and coercion performed by proponents of some claim into your discernment of the truth value of that claim. Namely, you both seem to have adopted some level of doubt about pro-vaccine claims because you both perceive that proponents of pro-vaccine claims participate in censorship, lies and coercion, or that those proponents of these claims do not engage in reasonable arguments with their critics. There are two problems with this type of epistemology. The first is that, like all claims, attributes of the people making the claims are not relevant to the truth value of the claim ("fallacy of irrelevance"). The second is more important and more unique to this particular epistemology: the actions you perceive to be conducted by perceived proponents of some claim will vary heavily based on your own behavior. For instance, how do you know that pro-vaccine people "can't win arguments" and instead "stop them because the other side is too stupid"? Or that there is "massive censorship" favoring the pro-vaccine viewpoint? Surely that is just based on your own "media diet." Surely that perception depends heavily on where you spend your time on Twitter, YouTube, cable news, etc. Would you perceive something differently if it were the case that the vast majority of medical and public health experts who are pro-vaccine in fact have engaged in numerous reasonable arguments with critics and have nonetheless come to the same conclusion? Is there ever a point in which litigation of existing criticisms can end so that we can move on to new criticisms?
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  It's unreasonable to ignore these abuses. If the pro-vaccine argument is so persuasive, why must they perpetrate censorship and coercion? Vaccines are widely recommended because they offer enormous benefits. However, they are not without risk or contraindications. People who claim otherwise are spreading misinformation. People are right to be worried about the COVID-19 vaccines. Without proper studies, their risks and benefits are unknown. We're discovering this information by observing what's happening to the humans who took the vaccines after the fact. This is less than ideal, to put it mildly. COVID-19 happens to be a potent enough disease that the potential benefit of these vaccines outweighs the risks. We must still be careful though. It's possible that we'll find that the benefits outweigh the risks only for certain age groups, for example.
skyde 5y ago
when you say "medical professionals" do you mean nurse or doctor ? I have seen a huge amount of nurse refusing to get vaccinated but not so much for Doctor!
skyde 5y ago
I think the data alone is an objective argument. Using basic math (Bayes theorem) I can compute it reduce my chance of death by 668 time and Hospitalization by 116 times. see below: Covid Fact: - proportion on covid death that are unvaccinated p(not(vaccinated) | covid-death ) = 99% - proportion of population this is unvaccinated P(not(vaccinated)) = 14% - proportion of population this is vaccinated P(vaccinated) = 86% Basic math: - Probability of death from covid if not vacinated P(covid-death | not(vaccinated)) = 0.99 * P(covid-death) / 0.14 - Probability of death from covid if vacinated P(covid-death | vaccinated) = 0.01 * P(covid-death) / 0.86 - How many time more likely to die from covid if not vaccinated P(covid-death | not(vaccinated)) / P(covid-death | vaccinated) = 608 Fact: if you are not vaccinated, You are 608 times more likely to die from Covid 19 and you are 116 times more likely to be hospitalized.
somewhereoutth 5y ago
The vast majority of people spend the vast majority of their lives being told what to do, in one way or another. The problem with the vaccines (and lockdowns etc) is that these are new obligations, so making people realise how little control over their lives they actually have (in spite of the 'freedom' retoric so popular in the US).
thatfrenchguy 5y ago
You can’t really get objective goal posts (for herd immunity for example), given how unpredictable the virus and people’s clustering are though?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
lazysheepherd 5y ago
> She believed that if the vaccine was actually as great as they're saying they'd be able to make more objective goalposts and win arguments instead of stopping them because the other side is too stupid to make their own decisions. 1) People ARE too "stupid". "Stupid" here is a placeholder for a larger discussion on biological, antropological, social and psychological evidence. Which all could be summed up as: We are meant to be just smart enough to survive, then some more. Average human capability for evidence evaluation and independent reasoning is quite low. 2) Effort for winning in an unbounded argument space is practically infinite. Debunking bullshit takes several orders of magnitude more resources than coming up with more bullshit. There needs to be a point at which you should disqualify an arguing party as not worthy of further evaluation. That's another way for the other party to "win the argument". In this specific case, pro-vaccine people has long won the argument, and by a mile.

NotSammyHagar 5y ago

I'm glad you got vaccinated. But... Can you expand on why you were hesitant because of censorship? Because if there were lots of serious problems with the vaccine, they'd be covered in a second on fox news. Meanwhile, a lot of people are hugely influenced by false stories on social media, it's just a fact, with recent examples being things like ivermectin and the 2016 presidential election conspiracies, and don't forget q-anon. Since covid is so deadly if you get it, and there are basically almost no cases of serious health issues with vaccination and furthermore, vaccination is also almost guaranteed to protect you from serious cases, why wouldn't you get it? Have you heard rumors of some problems from vaccination?

MarcoZavala 5y ago
You should be stabbed to death you worthless piece of shit.
crazy_horse 5y ago
Really devalues the meaning of censorship. Social media platforms broadcasting your views around the world and moderating some of them was not censorship.
- computerphage 5y ago
  And what exactly is the difference in your mind between "moderating" and "censoring" here? They seem exactly the same to me: both involve some other party deciding what is and is not acceptable to be published.
  - crazy_horse 5y ago
    Censorship is government action. Private companies that allow you to reach millions of people are offering you the ability to use their service. It's not censorship when they don't allow you to use their service (and until today, they haven't stopped much), it's terms of service. If I invite you to my house and you eat my dog's food, I have the right to tell you to leave. The movement wouldn't be what it is today without YT, so this censorship stuff is too much.
    - johnjj257 5y ago
      No that's just govt. Censorship vs regular censorship. Moderation is the exact same thing they can both do it. Just because it isn't the government doesn't mean they aren't censoring. Censorship is NOT just government action.
    - robbrown451 5y ago
      Why do you think censorship must be government action? Is there a definition posted anywhere that says this? I've long seen it used to refer to, for instance, TV network censors. And every online dictionary I can find allows for entities other than government to be referred to as censoring.
    - ipaddr 5y ago
      Censorship is not a government action. It is literally filtering content and anyone can. You can censor yourself, a company could censor a band and change lyrics. They run a platform that practices censorship. It is legal. Trying to say it is okay because they are a private entity doesn't wash and they should be called out. We could even band together and censor them.
    - 5y ago
destitude 5y ago
The fact that they completely ignore natural immunity in the USA is enough to be concerned about their motivations.
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  It's being ignored because it's fraught with problems. People think they had COVID in the early pre-testing days, but it was just the flu or a bad cold. (My son was in this realm; severe pneumonia in early 2020, but later testing showed no antibodies.) You'd have restaurants swamped with angry "but I've already had it!" people. Verification is hard; you can't just take word for it, so that means an antibody test, and at that point you might as well have just vaccinated them anyways while they were in.
  - eggy 5y ago
    You're cherry picking from people who think they had it. There are millions who know they've had COVID like myself, and I still have very high antibodies almost 9 months on. I am fit, do not have a comorbidity like obesity, hypertension, diabetes, etc. Remember, over 78% of all hospitalizations involve obesity and other comorbidities, and disproportionately affect much older people. It should be me and my doctor's choice on whether getting the jab is good for me or not. Censorship doesn't address the nuances of the issue. It leads to disenfranchising people. In addition, the vaccine spikes your antibodies, and if your antibodies are currently high, it can lead to more frequent or serious side effects. The 2018 Spanish Flu caused deaths in the young and healthy by having their immune systems go into an overwhelmingly high gear, but older people's weaker immune systems spared them this consequence. I have natural immunity, I am fit, and my risk of a second, severe infection is equal or less to your vaccinated status. After 9 months the vaccine's efficacy is much lower, and doesn't really work well against the variants. There is no long-term data, obviously, on the vaccine yet, since it was only given to the public less than a year ago. Let's see three to seven years from now. Let's remember Pfizer was the company that in 1996 setup a tent near a Doctors without Borders tent and gave an experimental antibiotic drug to 200 children, maybe more, without their parent's consent, and then 10 or 11 of those children died with others suffering other maladies thought to be from the drug. An illegal, immoral drug trial. They packed up their tent, and later back-dated a letter to say they had gone through ethics channels with the Nigerian government. So yeah, let's squash any anti-vaccine talk, because what's good for you is good for everyone. Personally, I am vaccinated with everything but the COVID vaccinations, so I am not antivax, and shouldn't be discriminated against like that. My older children got the vaccine, but me and my wife and our younger children have not, since we all had COVID, and we all have high antibodies. Fake vaccination cards also defeat your "fraught with problems" argument of people think they had it, but didn't argument. There will always be difficulties in sorting this out. That's no reason to go full-in on censorship.
destitude 5y ago
"almost no cases of serious health issues with vaccination" how do you think you'd possibly hear about this when you are replying to an article where any anti-vaccine information is censored?
- cromulent 5y ago
  Well over 2 billion people have been vaccinated. You probably know some of them in real life - you don't need a broadcaster to tell you if there are problems.
- robbrown451 5y ago
  You really think "any anti-vaccine information is censored"? This policy on YouTube just started, and, last I heard anyway, there are other sources of information other than YouTube. There have obviously been many many sources of information on the internet that allow anti-vaccine information. And, if that information was actually credible, it would have also been available to, for instance, those at YouTube who made this policy. What do you figure their agenda is for covering it up?
CWuestefeld 5y ago
Found on a different discussion at TheZvi (https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2021/09/23/covid-9-23-there-is-a-war/#more-22649 https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2021/09/23/covid-9-23-there-is-...): --- start quote #1 --- Thanks to your ongoing efforts, my 40+ year old sibling finally got vaccinated about three weeks before getting infected by her kids. She still had it pretty bad, so I think it’s likely you saved her a trip to the hospital or worse. She was on the brink of getting vaccinated weeks earlier, but “That Guy” had cast enough doubt that a family member talked her out of it. So I’m glad you specifically mentioned him back then. Thanks to our civilization’s shiny new censorship machine it was maddeningly difficult to actually find good counter arguments to his claims, since we’re all supposed to just pretend bad claims don’t exist. So mostly I had to just point to the favorable evidence rather than being able to give a point by point rebuttal. [...] And her family is fox news conservative, so all the tribal hate made it especially hard for her to take their claims seriously. She stayed up all night making her decision, and had 250 browser tabs open by the end. So people do try, and do pay attention. --- end quote #1 --- and later, in response --- start quote #2 --- I had the same experience. I wanted to know whether the “vector vaccines alter your DNA” claims had any truth to them, given that “dna altering virus” is definitely something that exists. As far as I can tell, this is (probably) false, but it was really hard to find any evidence beyond “prof. dr. X says this is a conspiracy theory, now get your vaccine they are safe and effective ™”. It was really frustrating; I’m not surprised that many people feel like they are being tricked. --- end quote #2 ---
- spywaregorilla 5y ago
  > I had the same experience. I wanted to know whether the “vector vaccines alter your DNA” claims had any truth to them, given that “dna altering virus” is definitely something that exists. As far as I can tell, this is (probably) false, but it was really hard to find any evidence beyond “prof. dr. X says this is a conspiracy theory, now get your vaccine they are safe and effective ™”. It was really frustrating; I’m not surprised that many people feel like they are being tricked. This is a really frustrating perspective to hear. > I heard this bogus claim about something I don't understand and wanted to know if it was true > All I could find was doctors saying it was nonsense > How could I know what the truth was? I suspect it's a common form of reasoning. It's committing so many mistakes all at once. * Refusal to acknowledge that you might be considering nonsense and thus perceiving anyone saying it's nonsense as malicious * Complete refusal or certainty in your inability to do basic research on things that are well documented by many organizations and easy to find BUT STILL SAYING ITS HARD TO FIND * Not just lack of trust, but certainty of distrust for authority figures. Anything they say has negative value. It's far more upsetting to me than hearing people with malicious political agendas being assholes.
bmarquez 5y ago
> they'd be covered in a second on fox news I don't know why you assume Fox is anti-vax, Trump took the vaccine and promotes it on Fox News interviews himself. https://www.foxnews.com/media/trump-urges-all-americans-to-get-covid-vaccine-its-a-safe-vaccine https://www.foxnews.com/media/trump-urges-all-americans-to-g...
- ipaddr 5y ago
  People see the world as us and them. Dem vs Rep. In reality it is those who control and wished to be controlled vs those who wish to remain free. Fox and CNN are two sides of the same coin.
- ZeroGravitas 5y ago
  Fox News repeatedly highlighted the dangers of covid: https://youtu.be/wmoABTiCpco https://youtu.be/wmoABTiCpco I dont understand why everyone thinks they are fascists.
  - bmarquez 5y ago
    The video shows soundbites of commentators saying illegal immigrants, in crowded conditions, potentially have covid. I don't know if that's correct or not but it has nothing to do with my point that pro-vaccine content does exist on Fox News.
- longhairedhippy 5y ago
  Have you watched Tucker Carlson? I would be pleased if they charged the man with murder after this is all over. Do you think it's odd he won't answer questions about his own vaccination status?
ohdannyboy 5y ago
Can you expand on why you were hesitant because of censorship? ... Have you heard rumors of some problems from vaccination? It made it more difficult to ascertain what the risks were, I didn't feel our officials were being honest with us (something I still think). Back in early 2021 it was a lot more open to speculation since it was an minimally tested treatment who's delivery method had never been widely deployed on humans before. We still don't know if there's long term effects and there's no way for us to find out until enough time has passed. I didn't want to be part of the initial test group. Since covid is so deadly if you get it I'm relatively young and not in any risk categories, covid does not pose much of a death risk to me. Significant non-deadly outcomes are another story (permanent lung damage, loss of taste, ect). I decided that protection from the latter category (significant non-deadly outcomes) was worth my rather nebulous fears that we'll realize it does some harm over the next decade. and there are basically almost no cases of serious health issues with vaccination and furthermore "Basically almost no" is a difficult term to quantify, but VAERS database does have plenty of entries.
- unanswered 5y ago
  > Significant non-deadly outcomes are another story (permanent lung damage, loss of taste, ect) Is there credible, non-censorious evidence that the vaccine reduces these particular risks? This is the same argument that we keep seeing: you have to take this vaccine because ${thing that vaccines normally do but this one hasn't been shown to do}. The most egregious example is "provide immunity"/"improve outcomes for anyone around you". I just don't believe a word of it until I see the science.
  - nneonneo 5y ago
    I don’t know what level of convincing you need, but here in BC, unvaccinated people are about 25x more likely to show up in a hospital than vaccinated people: https://news.gov.bc.ca/releases/2021HLTH0058-001843 https://news.gov.bc.ca/releases/2021HLTH0058-001843 Over the past two weeks: > After factoring for age, people not vaccinated are 25.8 times more likely to be hospitalized than those fully vaccinated. (The age correction reflects the fact that vaccines aren’t distributed evenly by age).
boltzmann_brain 5y ago
> Since covid is so deadly if you get it Please. Median age above life expectancy. (At least where I live). Unless this is a board for 70 year or older seniors, this is utter bullshit.
blub 5y ago
You're probably referring to Biontech*, but when I got AstraZeneca the chances of dying from the virus for my age interval was only slightly more than the chance of dying from the vaccine, as calculated by the ECDC. * which as an aside does cause myocarditis and pericardits in particular for young males. This is important because for example in Germany the incidence was 1 case from 17.271 doses for males in the 12-17 age range and in most cases the symptoms appeared after the second dose, which may mean that a booster could also trigger it.

quartus 5y ago

> Her main hangup was the lies and coercion. Can you provide examples of the lies you're referring to?

avereveard 5y ago
That "vaccine granted immunity" was a big one, it rapidly became less symptoms, and from that surreptitiously changed again to well you'll still have a week of feeling like shit if you catch covid, but you'll be less likely to die from it. Then there's whatever percent of vaccinated that would have allowed the fabled reopen, we engaged trough most of these metrics, and we're still far from normalcy. Heck my vaccine passport has a very clear, very bold expiry date on it, talk of normalcy are nonsense. Oh and there's that "let's not tell peasants masks are useful as not to cause shortages to professionals." Maybe warranted, given what happened with hoarders and toilet paper, but still definitely a lie. edit: jesus christ look at the mess of downvotes this whole thread attracted, replies included, this place is populated by people more toxic than facebook's and more sensitive than twitter's. and you wonder why the content platform are in full on containment mode. truth is you're bringing your corporate dystopia unto yourself.
- creaturemachine 5y ago
  The science is evolving, and these differences from a year ago are proof of that. I don't think the vaccine makers were very proud to admit that their wonderdrug wasn't what it was promised to be, but that's the way it is. The only remaining choice for anti-vaxxers in the face of increasingly contagious variants is take the shot or risk death. Your call.
  - cies 5y ago
    > The science is evolving Science got massively oversold. Who did that? Who benefits from that? > The only remaining choice for anti-vaxxers in the face of increasingly contagious variants is take the shot or risk death. Your call. I think if you call anyone hesitant to take these shots an anti-vaxxer, you contribute to making the narative so everything extreme. Many that are "c19 vaccine hesitant" are vaccinating their children on the locally standard schedule. It is just that this c19 vaccine is a bit different: did not yet stand the test of time and it is in many cases a whole new therapy (mRNA therapy's debut). > take the shot or risk death This sounds so dramatic. This choice is everywhere, just not with so much media attention. Diets, traffic accidents, extreme sports, ... I think we should use vaccines only to protect those at risk, and/or those who want protection by it. Once they have the shot it's over. The media is pushing a story that we need to all get vaccinated to protect others. I think, given the research, that this is never going to happen (virus will stay in corners of the world with unvaccinated people, virus will have new variants: virus will stay with us).

Alex3917 5y ago

I also find the censorship to be deeply disturbing, but for me that's counterbalanced by the fact that the arguments against vaccination are so dumb. The best argument is basically, "It's not researched enough and it might kill you." But so what, doing things that might kill you on the basis of limited data is like a basic part of being an adult.

cromulent 5y ago
Yeah, over 2 billion people have been vaccinated against C19. It's a pretty good sample size. Probably less people have tattoos.
- ipaddr 5y ago
  The long term studies are not due until 2024. It would be too early to tell.
  - Alex3917 5y ago
    Have any of the studies released data yet? I was under the impression that even the data from the short term studies wouldn't be released for another couple of years.
  - cromulent 5y ago
    Good point, tattoos have been around for ever. Bad comparison from me. I'm actually excited about the new mRNA tech and the massive boost it got from the money during C19. I think lockdown is toxic to society and risks can be taken on vaccines to open things up. I'm optimistic for humanity and thankful we had a mild-ish pandemic that was fatal for a relatively small percentage, but allowed us to improve our biotech so much in such a short time. This will surely help us next time. This article for example: https://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2021/03/23/novel-vaccines-have-performed-remarkably-quickly-and-well https://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2021/03/23/no...
    - heavyset_go 5y ago

swivelmaster 5y ago

What kind of medical professionals?

cde-v 5y ago
Probably chiropractors
boringg 5y ago
I picked up on the strangely vague "medical professionals" piece as well. One thing I learned from the pandemic is that not all health/medical professionals are created equal, and that there is a large portion of very specifically trained and fairly uneducated people in the medical community.
- ohdannyboy 5y ago
  My mom was a RN most of her career then got her masters and went into education. My dad is a nurse practitioner. I didn't specify it explicitly because I didn't think it was relevant -- I was not trying to use vagueness to imply they were medical doctors and use them as a source of authority. All was trying to do was build them up at least a little, they do know more about the body than most people even if they aren't anywhere near experts on what the vaccine does.
  - swivelmaster 5y ago
    It is, unfortunately, a relevant and important point. I've heard of plenty of nurses who got wrapped up in conspiracy theories and completely ignored the experts, but very VERY few doctors or pharmacists. Knowing how to take care of someone who is sick is a far cry from being an expert on vaccines or viruses.
- sllewe 5y ago
  Just to add some other insight here... My Wife, a ICU RN+CCRN spent most of her 2020 on the COVID floor. It was pretty brutal for her. She has coworkers, of equal status, who experienced pandemic alongside her first hand - who were extremely hesitant to get the vaccine. This includes several months after the initial rollout to staff.

trts 5y ago

There are at least four people close to me who become more entrenched in their anti-vax stance the more this stuff happens. It's so obvious to me how counter-productive these measures are. However I don't suppose increasing vaccination rates are part of the goal of these measures, but just protecting YouTube from having to do moderation or take responsibility for the content on their platform. My mom for example, after many conversations and a great deal of effort on my part to present data and evidence that was free from shaming and judgement, has made two appointments to get vaccinated, and subsequently cancelled them. The second cancellation came after Biden's recent speech blaming unvaccinated people being directly responsible for killing the vaccinated, a nonsensical supposition. This is scary stuff. The moral absolutism that the platforms endorse is creeping into more and more subjective areas, and essentially obliterating any hope of nuance or increased understanding about changing strategies and data.

oauea 5y ago
Sorry to tell you, but your mom is an idiot and she is probably going to die. Sucks, but such is life for those people.
alex504 5y ago
> Biden's recent speech blaming unvaccinated people being directly responsible for killing the vaccinated, a nonsensical supposition. Can you explain how this is nonsensical? There is quite a bit of data showing that those who are unvaccinated are much more likely to spread the disease.
- trts 5y ago
  From the speech itself, "only 1 in every 160,000 fully vaccinated Americans has been hospitalized due to covid" According to the most recent data from the CDC (https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/COVIDNet/COVID19_3.html https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/COVIDNet/COVID19_3.html), 960 out of every 160,000 Americans has been hospitalized due to covid (this is across all people regardless of vaccination status). So there is _at least_ a 99% reduction in the rate of hospitalizations for the fully vaccinated, according to the figures he cited. The message he's sending is that even if you are vaccinated, _you're not safe_. Why is this an effective message for persuading those who might still be convinced? Is the overall outcome better than if our political leadership continued to transparently emphasize vaccine safety and outcomes, rather than scoring points with their political base? You convince more people to become vaccinated by being convincing. When you get more people vaccinated, you save more lives. If someone's position is, that it doesn't matter if the overall outcome is worse, because the bad outcomes are more concentrated in selfish/stupid/red-state people, then I simply disagree with that.

oauea 5y ago

Hey, if you want to die, go for it. It's your freedom.

rkuykendall-com 5y ago
Unfortunately there's so many of these idiots they're clogging up the hospitals. I don't know why they don't just "do their own research" and die at home.
- cromulent 5y ago
  https://xkcd.com/2515/ https://xkcd.com/2515/
- Dma54rhs 5y ago
  For the same reason the body positive types don't, people who drink or smoke etc. Society in general tolerates ones bad decisions.
- mycoborea 5y ago
  Hey Robert, I see you’re in New York City. Would you be comfortable explaining your comments to the 2/3 of black New Yorkers who are hesitant to get the vaccines?
  - heartbreak 5y ago
    Are you comfortable explaining why black Americans are overwhelmingly stuck with worse schools, worse access to healthcare, and generational poverty?
    - txsoftwaredev 5y ago
      Lack of parenting.
      - heartbreak 5y ago
        Today I remembered why I shouldn’t engage with idiots.

Florin_Andrei 5y ago

> because the other side is too stupid to make their own decisions The unfortunate reality is - that is the actual crux of the problem. Maybe say "incapable of making" instead of "too stupid to make", since that makes the scope wider. But that is the long and short of it.

throwawayjeje 5y ago
Do you routinely analyze and challenge your own biases? Do you ever wonder if someone you disagree with might be right? It's easy to call someone stupid while ignoring what they are saying. It's hard to charitably hear someone's argument. I'm certainly at fault there. Either way I categorically reject the worldview where a "benign" paternalism protects us from ourselves.
- SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
  > Either way I categorically reject the worldview where a "benign" paternalism protects us from ourselves. That's nice. unfortunately the world as it is is categorically providing practical counterexamples to this.

tomrod 5y ago

Thank you. In my view you did everything appropriate, including seeking out advice from people with training and experience who could help you decide.

corona-research 5y ago

Yeah, your mom shouldn’t trust her expertise. Makes sense she got the poison jab even though she knows it is a huge scam

kevin_thibedeau 5y ago

Does she get flu shots because that has been all about coercion since the ramp up of medical profiteering that started in the 90s. Nevermind that the lethality of influenza precipitously declined in the 40s and isn't a mass killer. Covid is a far more credible threat that shouldn't be ignored so readily.

jackson1442 5y ago

> She believed that if the vaccine was actually as great as they're saying they'd be able to make more objective goalposts and win arguments instead of stopping them because the other side is too stupid to make their own decisions. The problem I see here is that the (I hesitate to call it this) anti-vax "side" has been shifting goalposts since day n-1. If you've ever talked to someone who's shifted goalposts you'll see it's essentially an impossible situation; you can't convince someone who doesn't want to be convinced. If I'm remembering the timeline correctly, it started with the vaccine being rushed and that we were essentially being experimented on. It's been six months since I – and many others – have had their first dose and we're completely fine. Some claimed to be concerned about the long term effects; do you think they know what the long term effects of a serious covid case is? (hint: it starts with a d and ends with "eath") Oh, but it's also not FDA approved. I haven't looked at the numbers, but I bet vaccinations haven't gone up significantly since FDA approval. Obviously it's because the FDA isn't to be trusted, that's a given. At some point it was too hard to get- yes, that's true. However, now you can walk into a Target and decide to get the shot in the middle of a shopping trip! I did that with a Flu shot a few weeks ago and it took about five minutes. In short, you cannot argue in good faith with someone who does not. I don't have a good answer to this – I really wish I did – but that's the reality of the situation.

eric_b 5y ago
Eh, everyone has been moving goalposts. First it was "flatten the curve" to prevent hospital overrun. Then at some point it became "no one can ever get covid again" and we did wild things like close schools even if a person so much as got near a person with COVID. I don't think one side has a monopoly on losing trust, behaving badly, or making anti-science decisions.
- lovich 5y ago
  When did it ever get to no one can ever get Covid again? We tried to “flatten the curve” and still had large spikes. After we got some semblance of control we only kept infections down with lockdowns and other measures. This is a tech based forum, surely everyone here has experience with a boss who complains that he’s paying you when the system never breaks, not knowing that it’s not breaking because of active measures being taken to prevent it

monocularvision 5y ago

My wife’s theory is there would be less hesitancy if the vaccines were being distributed through people’s primary care physicians instead of at mass vaccination sites or Walgreens. People may distrust the media, the government and all sorts of other nebulous groups, but they largely trust their doctor.

velcrovan 5y ago
I got vaccinated as soon as I did in large part because I didn't have to deal with my primary care.
- LudvigVanHassen 5y ago
  There is quite a lot of humor in this statement. ;)
heartbreak 5y ago
You can almost certainly get the vaccine from your physician, and you can also call your physician’s office and leave a message asking them whether you should get vaccinated. They’ll call you back.

tshaddox 5y ago

It sounds like both you and your mother have both adopted an epistemology that incorporates the perceived amount of censorship, lies, and coercion performed by proponents of some claim into your discernment of the truth value of that claim. Namely, you both seem to have adopted some level of doubt about pro-vaccine claims because you both perceive that proponents of pro-vaccine claims participate in censorship, lies and coercion, or that those proponents of these claims do not engage in reasonable arguments with their critics. There are two problems with this type of epistemology. The first is that, like all claims, attributes of the people making the claims are not relevant to the truth value of the claim ("fallacy of irrelevance"). The second is more important and more unique to this particular epistemology: the actions you perceive to be conducted by perceived proponents of some claim will vary heavily based on your own behavior. For instance, how do you know that pro-vaccine people "can't win arguments" and instead "stop them because the other side is too stupid"? Or that there is "massive censorship" favoring the pro-vaccine viewpoint? Surely that is just based on your own "media diet." Surely that perception depends heavily on where you spend your time on Twitter, YouTube, cable news, etc. Would you perceive something differently if it were the case that the vast majority of medical and public health experts who are pro-vaccine in fact have engaged in numerous reasonable arguments with critics and have nonetheless come to the same conclusion? Is there ever a point in which litigation of existing criticisms can end so that we can move on to new criticisms?

matheusmoreira 5y ago
It's unreasonable to ignore these abuses. If the pro-vaccine argument is so persuasive, why must they perpetrate censorship and coercion? Vaccines are widely recommended because they offer enormous benefits. However, they are not without risk or contraindications. People who claim otherwise are spreading misinformation. People are right to be worried about the COVID-19 vaccines. Without proper studies, their risks and benefits are unknown. We're discovering this information by observing what's happening to the humans who took the vaccines after the fact. This is less than ideal, to put it mildly. COVID-19 happens to be a potent enough disease that the potential benefit of these vaccines outweighs the risks. We must still be careful though. It's possible that we'll find that the benefits outweigh the risks only for certain age groups, for example.

skyde 5y ago

when you say "medical professionals" do you mean nurse or doctor ? I have seen a huge amount of nurse refusing to get vaccinated but not so much for Doctor!

skyde 5y ago

I think the data alone is an objective argument. Using basic math (Bayes theorem) I can compute it reduce my chance of death by 668 time and Hospitalization by 116 times. see below: Covid Fact: - proportion on covid death that are unvaccinated p(not(vaccinated) | covid-death ) = 99% - proportion of population this is unvaccinated P(not(vaccinated)) = 14% - proportion of population this is vaccinated P(vaccinated) = 86% Basic math: - Probability of death from covid if not vacinated P(covid-death | not(vaccinated)) = 0.99 * P(covid-death) / 0.14 - Probability of death from covid if vacinated P(covid-death | vaccinated) = 0.01 * P(covid-death) / 0.86 - How many time more likely to die from covid if not vaccinated P(covid-death | not(vaccinated)) / P(covid-death | vaccinated) = 608 Fact: if you are not vaccinated, You are 608 times more likely to die from Covid 19 and you are 116 times more likely to be hospitalized.

somewhereoutth 5y ago

The vast majority of people spend the vast majority of their lives being told what to do, in one way or another. The problem with the vaccines (and lockdowns etc) is that these are new obligations, so making people realise how little control over their lives they actually have (in spite of the 'freedom' retoric so popular in the US).

thatfrenchguy 5y ago

You can’t really get objective goal posts (for herd immunity for example), given how unpredictable the virus and people’s clustering are though?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

lazysheepherd 5y ago

> She believed that if the vaccine was actually as great as they're saying they'd be able to make more objective goalposts and win arguments instead of stopping them because the other side is too stupid to make their own decisions. 1) People ARE too "stupid". "Stupid" here is a placeholder for a larger discussion on biological, antropological, social and psychological evidence. Which all could be summed up as: We are meant to be just smart enough to survive, then some more. Average human capability for evidence evaluation and independent reasoning is quite low. 2) Effort for winning in an unbounded argument space is practically infinite. Debunking bullshit takes several orders of magnitude more resources than coming up with more bullshit. There needs to be a point at which you should disqualify an arguing party as not worthy of further evaluation. That's another way for the other party to "win the argument". In this specific case, pro-vaccine people has long won the argument, and by a mile.