11 ms·

The Unvaccinated May Not Be Who You Think

18 points by jbegley 5y ago

ifyoubuildit 5y ago
> In fact, that’s exactly why the mandates may be working so well. If all the unvaccinated truly believed that vaccines were that dangerous, more of them would have quit. These mandates may be making it possible for those people previously frozen in fear to cross the line, but in a face-saving manner. I wonder if the author is aware how many families can't afford to miss a paycheck without facing severe consequences (hell, nyt has covered this itself). With that context, the above quote seems more than a little silly.
- cheaprentalyeti 5y ago
  I'm not sure silly is the right word for "We can make you do it, therefore you must really believe it's safe!"
- acdha 5y ago
  It feels like you’re arguing their point from the other direction: people hate admitting being wrong, especially if they’re in a community where most of their friends were also wrong, so it’s hard to say “that stuff my uncle shared about vaccines was rubbish, I should have done this 6 months ago” — it’s much easier to save face in that group to say “I wasn’t going to, but I can’t afford to lose my job”.
  - ifyoubuildit 5y ago
    Sure, some people hate admitting when they're wrong. But I have to imagine that pales in comparison to how much they hate being evicted, risking having their families split up, not being able to afford food or medical care, etc. It just seems oblivious for the author to say that people complied because deep down they knew it was right, when that author's colleagues have written about the actual dangers these people would face if they lost their income.
    - acdha 5y ago
      This sounds like a misunderstanding: the point is that people knew getting vaccinated was right all along but rather than at some point they probably started to accept that their concerns had been overblown — likely supported by seeing so many people around them get vaccinated with no issues — but having taken a strong position earlier increased the psychological weight of formally reversing it. Here's a sentence right before the quote up-thread: > They’ve made bad decisions earlier and now may be frozen, part in fear, and unable to admit their initial hesitancy wasn’t a good idea, so they may come back with a version of how they are just doing “more research.” This kind of decision paralysis can last for ages unless something forces it. Nobody seems to be saying that the consequences of ignoring vaccine mandates aren't real, it's rather quite the opposite: you can come up with hypothetical concerns about any low-probability event but being faced with actually losing something you care about forces that to be put into perspective. It's similar to how a fair number of people worry about air travel but hop on a plane when the alternative is a cross-country drive — rationally looking at crash statistics isn't as effective for those people as the misery factor of a long drive.
      - ifyoubuildit 5y ago
        So this may just be something that we have differing opinions on. If we say (number of compliers) = (people who wanted to save face and needed an out) + (people who are living paycheck to paycheck) + (whatever other reason), my guess is that the last two components would dominate the equation, but that's just my gut. The excerpt you quoted also kind of bothered me because it presupposes that getting vaccinated immediately was the right idea. Just because someone slapped the label "vaccine" on something doesn't mean you should jump to receive it as early as possible. Not everyone wants to be an early adopter, and there's good reason for that.
        acdha 5y ago
        I would characterize the last part a bit differently: many people understandably were hesitant to be the earliest adopters, especially those who had relatively low-risk lifestyles (plenty of 80 year olds were jumping after losing friends), but I think there's a difference between someone who is planning to get it in a few months and someone who takes a public position opposing it. In the latter case, your credibility is on the line and it's very easy to surround yourself with a self-reinforcing bubble of people saying the same things. That acts like a ratchet where at each point it's easier to continue down the path rather than say that was totally overblown.
  - unanswered 5y ago
    > people hate admitting being wrong This is projection. There are multiple modes of approaching communication and not everyone uses the mode where communication is an exercise in one-upmanship.
    - acdha 5y ago
      Can you explain why you think that's projection, or one-upmanship? The point wasn't even about communication but how people rationalize the decisions they make — offering people ways to change without admitting fault is a pretty common strategy in many contexts.
      - unanswered 5y ago
        It's projection because you may hate being wrong, but some people like learning the truth no matter what they believed before. I guess you can continue to deny this kind of person exists; but it doesn't really matter what you think.
        acdha 5y ago
        Note that I said “admitting” — I personally do prefer becoming more correct over time but it's hardly a novel suggestion that most people do not enjoy having to retract a previous public position. This is everywhere in society from casual use of terms like “saving face” to work by psychologists, economists, etc. on how to support people making better choices rather than being ruled by the sunk cost of past decisions. This is why public retractions have such weight: even people who like being right don't enjoy that part of the process. This isn't about treating communication as a contest with only one winner but rather about the subjective feeling of the person making these decisions. Having built it up into a big deal increased the costs of reversal but the mandate changes the dynamic and gives them the option of saying the choice was no longer theirs — if they get vaccinated, that's a better outcome for everyone even if they never admit the bad call.
- bellyfullofbac 5y ago
  If they're truly convinced that vaccine = death, then would they really choose death in combination with the paycheck? I guess in this case the threat of those severe consequences is good enough to make them reevaluate, maybe they'll see that maybe a billion people have been vaccinated with the mRNA vaccines and there hasn't been a mass die-out and in their mind this is how they convince themselves it'll be ok... Some other anti-vaxxers believe in vaccine timebombs (I've seen someone write on FB "Just wait until April 2022 and all the vaccinated will drop dead", just as convinced like the people who believed the world was going to end in December 2012), and I've also read that such timebomb is very unlikely, but hey, if there is such a timebomb, that last paragraph of mine will be very ironic indeed.
  - ifyoubuildit 5y ago
    > If they're truly convinced that vaccine = death, then would they really choose death in combination with the paycheck? I think the title of the article applies here. What proportion of the unvaccinated do you think equate the shot with death? If they're worried about potential long term effects (just for one example, whether you believe they're possible or not), it'd be hard to prioritize that over feeding their kids next week. This may be controversial, but the term "antivaxer" really deserves to be deprecated. It means too many different things to different people. It's a sloppy caricature that leads to sloppy thinking, but we see it being used all over the place.
theandrewbailey 5y ago
> In New York, for example, only 42 percent of African Americans of all ages (and 49 percent among adults) are fully vaccinated — the lowest rate among all demographic groups tracked by the city. Aren't all New York businesses supposed to be checking people for vaccination status? Given that African Americans are the demographic with the lowest vaccination rates, doesn't that policy disproportionately affect them? I thought we weren't supposed to implement systems like that anymore.
- acdha 5y ago
  It’s the difference between your restaurant asking everyone their status versus only asking Black people because they’re statistically more likely to be at risk. Policies which are evenly applied and based on a clear public health benefit aren’t the problem.
  - listless 5y ago
    But the new wisdom is that any policy which disproportionately affects a certain group is racist. That’s the actual definition of anti-racism. https://cssp.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Principles-for-Anti-Racist-Policymaking.pdf https://cssp.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Principles-for-A...
    - bellyfullofbac 5y ago
      See my reply to grandparent post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28878048 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28878048 So if I make a males only club, is it also racist? Nah, that's sexist. Anyone can remove themselves from being negatively affected by this policy, by getting a vaccination. Calling it racist is just misapplying logic.
      - listless 5y ago
        That’s not how the logic is deployed though. The systemic injustices must be taken into account. Tuskegee would be applicable here.
Tycho 5y ago
I’m happy to get the vaccine in ~March 2022 if they are shown to be safe and effective having been deployed for more than one year. At the moment I see rather mixed signals about safety and efficacy.
- acdha 5y ago
  That’s because you’re getting your news from partisan sources who are misleading you for political or financial reasons. The vaccines have been in testing since the spring of 2020 and have repeatedly been shown to be both safe and effective at reducing your risk and ability to spread to others. At this point they’ve been given to a billion people – because of the way vaccines work you’re not making yourself safer by waiting a second year and you are far more at risk from getting COVID in the meantime than any reported side effects.
  - Tycho 5y ago
    No actually it’s because I use my common sense to know that a vaccine that didn’t even begin testing before spring 2020 does not have a long enough track record to assure safety. I don’t care what you heard on your news.
    - acdha 5y ago
      What scientific education and experience is your common sense based on? If you haven't studied this area, why do you feel more qualified to say it's unsafe than the people who have spent their entire careers focused on it? For example, what is the longest recorded delay between a vaccine being administered and a side-effect being observed? Vaccines trigger an immune response but aren't in your body for a long period of time, so you typically see reactions within a few hours or days — the record is something like 6 weeks, so multiple years would be quite the outlier. https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/concerns-history.html https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/concerns-history.... The other key thing to remember is that this isn't some hypothetical question about risks in absolute: your odds of being one of the very few people who have a significant vaccine side-effect has to be weighed against the much higher probability of having significant health impacts from COVID-19. “Neither” is not an option any of us get to pick.
raxxorrax 5y ago
> how we can be led astray. The first thing reporters should adjust is their honesty. Your fears about how a message could be perceived negatively becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy if a lie is detected. That a lie will be detected in today's world is very high, so calming or noble lies carry a lot of risks. Additionally it should quickly communicated what people can and cannot know. If an unknown disease breaks out, nobody knows how dangerous or deadly it is and what helps against it or not. You don't even need a good justification if you enact restrictions as a precautionary measure with clear boundaries for reevaluation if civil rights are affected. I think only high trust countries went through this relatively unscathed. As a side note, emergencies are taken a lot less serious because of disastrous and incompetent anti-terrorism policies. We had emergency legislation throughout the western world for the last decade and a half. > Instead, we need to develop a realistic, informed and deeply pragmatic approach to our shortcomings without ceding ground to the conspiracists, grifters, and demagogues Wrong lesson, you just need to be better sources of information. Trying to silence them is the opposite of a sensible approach. This has been done to a scarily effective degree, people have basically been unpersoned. It did not work, you have a bad result now. That is a fact and needs to be accepted first. I assume when Covid is done, there will be a long discussion about how effective vaccination has been in retrospective. You might want to stay truthful here since it will affect further trust.
- TechBro8615 5y ago
  This comment mostly echoes common talking points (all of which I agree with), but I really like this nugget of insight: > I think only high trust countries went through this relatively unscathed. Off the top of my head that does sound true – I’m thinking of the Nordic countries as usual. I wonder if anyone has tried to quantify this? Maybe by tabulating vaccination uptake against trust in media polls? I do think there is a phenomenon somewhat akin to overfitting happening when you compare any country to the US. The US produces such overwhelming cultural exports that it’s impossible to analyze any other culture without considering the US itself as a background variable. For example, maybe Norwegians have higher trust in media than Americans partially because they see the disaster unfolding in America and want to avoid the same fate. In many ways the US media/political culture has become the reality show of the world. As an aside, it’s bizarre that Americans put any trust in media at all. There are no meaningful qualifications required to become a “journalist” other than the ability to consistently output a few thousand words a month. In fact, in many cases people gravitate to journalism because they don’t know what else to do. That’s certainly what I observed at my college newspaper. Some of them who eventually found a path are now working in industry or otherwise attempting to produce value. But the rest of the highflying newspaper staff? They’re blue check marks on Twitter attracting political bot accounts and being retweeted as the voice of media outlets. I find this amusing in light of my personal knowledge that they’re the last people I’d ever ask for an opinion or advice on any topic. It’s perplexing to me how much we let these reporters shape the conversation in society. For a world of six billion, we sure do have tunnel vision for the opinions of a self-selected, highly connected and decidedly mediocre minority. Next time you read one of these think pieces with a word count in a multiple of 400, take a minute to imagine the Kanban board that just funneled some morsel of a talking point into your brain.
LurkingPenguin 5y ago
> Now, just a few months later, these countries, along with 44 others, have surpassed U.S. vaccination rates. And our failure shows: America continues to have among the highest deaths per capita from Covid. Tying deaths per capita to vaccination rates in such a direct fashion is a bit disingenuous. The US also has high rates of comorbidities known to increase the likelihood of death from COVID, namely obesity and diabetes. Per https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/04/health/obesity-covid-death-rate-intl/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/04/health/obesity-covid-death-ra...: > The report found that every country where less than 40% of the population was overweight had a low Covid-19 death rate of no more than 10 people per 100,000.
- scohesc 5y ago
  If the government _really_ wanted to do something about the effects of the pandemic (now and beyond), they'd be promoting healthy lifestyle living, encouraging exercising, health education, etc. They're not - and I'm not too sure how to feel about it.
ed25519FUUU 5y ago
> The remarkable success of vaccine mandates shows that for many, it is not firm ideological commitments that have kept everyone from getting vaccinated Yes, if you threaten someone’s livelihood they will do things they don’t want to do, even going against their own conscience. Why do people pretend like a mandate is a small thing and not a nuclear weapon? For many people they risk not only losing their job, but their benefits (teachers) or even future job prospects (dishonorable discharge).
- scohesc 5y ago
  I know somebody who's very personal to me who took the vaccine because they were threatened with termination of employment. They live paycheck to paycheck and have a wife and 3 kids to support. They're going to have to live with themselves violating their own personal bodily autonomy because they didn't want their kids ending up on the street. I personally find it morally reprehensible for any level of "seniority"/"authority" (be it employer, government, peers, etc) to use threats of violence (threatening with loss of employment _is_ an act of violence, I'm not swaying on that). I don't like how society has gotten very "us vs. them" in the past couple of decades.
- moistly 5y ago
  > Why do people pretend like a mandate is a small thing and not a nuclear weapon? Why do people pretend like an extraordinarily contagious novel virus that commonly causes long-term organ damage is a small thing and not the next best thing to a bioweapon? Why do people pretend that the healthcare system is not collapsing? Why do people pretend that refrigerator trucks full of corpses wasn’t a thing? Why do people pretend that children’s surgeries aren’t currently being canceled in Saskatchewan and Alberta? Vaccine mandates are, in all reality, “playing nice.” The mandates allow you a number of vaccination choices, you pick the place and time. The “nuclear weapon” is when the state uses its military to enforce compliance: no alternatives, no choices. The choice is between our society having a functioning healthcare system, or having too many people remain unvaccinated.
  - ed25519FUUU 5y ago
    Would you accept a serology test instead of proof of vaccination for these individuals?
quacked 5y ago
> Relentless propaganda against public health measures no doubt contributes to erosion of trust. However, that mistrust may also be fueled by the sorry state of health insurance in this country and the deep inequities in health care — at a minimum, this could make people more vulnerable to misinformation. The cathedral of government and media will never admit that it has done any wrong. It will always claim that it knows best, and then after conflicting information comes out it will rewrite its own history to claim that it already knew. The thought that major U.S. institutions themselves have lost trust among members of the public through incompetence and condescension is unthinkable to them.
- dragontamer 5y ago
  That's cool, because the people I know will never admit they were wrong about hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin. But that's cool. They can refuse the vaccine at this point but they are 0 for 3 now. And the only thing they ever point to is a couple of weeks where some officials didn't want N95 masks to be hoarded and they made a bad call. But they were antimask (and still are antimask) despite using this example. So hypocrisy knows no bounds.
  - quacked 5y ago
    Here are some things that I thought that at the time were called "misinformation", "conspiracy theories", and had "no data to support that claim": Jan. 2020 - The illness in China is much worse than the Chinese are letting on - The Chinese government is disappearing whistleblowers Feb. 2020 - The illness in China will become a global pandemic - The only way to stop the pandemic is to act immediately and enforce full international travel bans, inter-state lockdowns, and invest heavily in virus testing - COVID-19 is far worse than the flu - The illness is already in the US even though there aren't confirmed cases yet Mar. 2020 - People need to withdraw from public life if they can Apr. 2020 - There is a significant chance that the virus was partially studied or modified in a Wuhan laboratory Mar. 2021 - The vaccines clearly lead to side effects in certain cases, including neural effects, heart problems, and interactions with the reproductive system EVERY single time I told people who "trust the science" and "believe the experts" about these topics, it was before any mainstream government or media sources had caught on to these ideas. These ideas, now common knowledge, were derided as misinformation and anyone who believed them were mocked as ignorant at best and deliberately fear-spreading at worst. I am not fully anti-vaccine; I had the first dose of Pfizer and later had my spike antibodies tested. I haven't had any positive COVID-19 tests because I locked down until eventually taking the vaccine. I don't care about the idiots you know, I care that the scientific and political institutions in control of this country are attention-seeking frauds that never take responsibility for making incorrect predictions.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
haspoken 5y ago
https://archive.is/H8TM9 https://archive.is/H8TM9
mdp2021 5y ago
> 71 percent of the vaccinated trust hospitals and doctors “a lot,” for example, while only 39 percent of the unvaccinated do And finally here is the key: ~70% of the vaccinated is trusting, while ~40% of the unvaccinated is - and 40% of individuals stating that trust is already a surprisingly high number, massive badges of systemic "success" probably only valid for regions of high professional selection. So, the important part of the solution is: remember that empowered error that claimed days ago "The hacker will be prosecuted" about a reporter who noticed an institutional website sent around sensitive information in the webpages markup? Those errors are to be removed from active society. People will trust when the empowered will be trustworthy. Otherwise, societal costs will remain massive. The very first step to achieve such hard goal is to call those "errors", empowered inadequate, unacceptable.
charbonneau 5y ago
> Let’s start with what we do know about the unvaccinated > Some key research on the unvaccinated > It may well be that some of the unvaccinated are a bit like cats stuck in a tree What a silly bunch, the unvaccinated

18 points by jbegley 5y ago

> In fact, that’s exactly why the mandates may be working so well. If all the unvaccinated truly believed that vaccines were that dangerous, more of them would have quit. These mandates may be making it possible for those people previously frozen in fear to cross the line, but in a face-saving manner. I wonder if the author is aware how many families can't afford to miss a paycheck without facing severe consequences (hell, nyt has covered this itself). With that context, the above quote seems more than a little silly.

cheaprentalyeti 5y ago
I'm not sure silly is the right word for "We can make you do it, therefore you must really believe it's safe!"
acdha 5y ago
It feels like you’re arguing their point from the other direction: people hate admitting being wrong, especially if they’re in a community where most of their friends were also wrong, so it’s hard to say “that stuff my uncle shared about vaccines was rubbish, I should have done this 6 months ago” — it’s much easier to save face in that group to say “I wasn’t going to, but I can’t afford to lose my job”.
- ifyoubuildit 5y ago
  Sure, some people hate admitting when they're wrong. But I have to imagine that pales in comparison to how much they hate being evicted, risking having their families split up, not being able to afford food or medical care, etc. It just seems oblivious for the author to say that people complied because deep down they knew it was right, when that author's colleagues have written about the actual dangers these people would face if they lost their income.
  - acdha 5y ago
    This sounds like a misunderstanding: the point is that people knew getting vaccinated was right all along but rather than at some point they probably started to accept that their concerns had been overblown — likely supported by seeing so many people around them get vaccinated with no issues — but having taken a strong position earlier increased the psychological weight of formally reversing it. Here's a sentence right before the quote up-thread: > They’ve made bad decisions earlier and now may be frozen, part in fear, and unable to admit their initial hesitancy wasn’t a good idea, so they may come back with a version of how they are just doing “more research.” This kind of decision paralysis can last for ages unless something forces it. Nobody seems to be saying that the consequences of ignoring vaccine mandates aren't real, it's rather quite the opposite: you can come up with hypothetical concerns about any low-probability event but being faced with actually losing something you care about forces that to be put into perspective. It's similar to how a fair number of people worry about air travel but hop on a plane when the alternative is a cross-country drive — rationally looking at crash statistics isn't as effective for those people as the misery factor of a long drive.
    - ifyoubuildit 5y ago
      So this may just be something that we have differing opinions on. If we say (number of compliers) = (people who wanted to save face and needed an out) + (people who are living paycheck to paycheck) + (whatever other reason), my guess is that the last two components would dominate the equation, but that's just my gut. The excerpt you quoted also kind of bothered me because it presupposes that getting vaccinated immediately was the right idea. Just because someone slapped the label "vaccine" on something doesn't mean you should jump to receive it as early as possible. Not everyone wants to be an early adopter, and there's good reason for that.
      - acdha 5y ago
        I would characterize the last part a bit differently: many people understandably were hesitant to be the earliest adopters, especially those who had relatively low-risk lifestyles (plenty of 80 year olds were jumping after losing friends), but I think there's a difference between someone who is planning to get it in a few months and someone who takes a public position opposing it. In the latter case, your credibility is on the line and it's very easy to surround yourself with a self-reinforcing bubble of people saying the same things. That acts like a ratchet where at each point it's easier to continue down the path rather than say that was totally overblown.
- unanswered 5y ago
  > people hate admitting being wrong This is projection. There are multiple modes of approaching communication and not everyone uses the mode where communication is an exercise in one-upmanship.
  - acdha 5y ago
    Can you explain why you think that's projection, or one-upmanship? The point wasn't even about communication but how people rationalize the decisions they make — offering people ways to change without admitting fault is a pretty common strategy in many contexts.
    - unanswered 5y ago
      It's projection because you may hate being wrong, but some people like learning the truth no matter what they believed before. I guess you can continue to deny this kind of person exists; but it doesn't really matter what you think.
      - acdha 5y ago
        Note that I said “admitting” — I personally do prefer becoming more correct over time but it's hardly a novel suggestion that most people do not enjoy having to retract a previous public position. This is everywhere in society from casual use of terms like “saving face” to work by psychologists, economists, etc. on how to support people making better choices rather than being ruled by the sunk cost of past decisions. This is why public retractions have such weight: even people who like being right don't enjoy that part of the process. This isn't about treating communication as a contest with only one winner but rather about the subjective feeling of the person making these decisions. Having built it up into a big deal increased the costs of reversal but the mandate changes the dynamic and gives them the option of saying the choice was no longer theirs — if they get vaccinated, that's a better outcome for everyone even if they never admit the bad call.
bellyfullofbac 5y ago
If they're truly convinced that vaccine = death, then would they really choose death in combination with the paycheck? I guess in this case the threat of those severe consequences is good enough to make them reevaluate, maybe they'll see that maybe a billion people have been vaccinated with the mRNA vaccines and there hasn't been a mass die-out and in their mind this is how they convince themselves it'll be ok... Some other anti-vaxxers believe in vaccine timebombs (I've seen someone write on FB "Just wait until April 2022 and all the vaccinated will drop dead", just as convinced like the people who believed the world was going to end in December 2012), and I've also read that such timebomb is very unlikely, but hey, if there is such a timebomb, that last paragraph of mine will be very ironic indeed.
- ifyoubuildit 5y ago
  > If they're truly convinced that vaccine = death, then would they really choose death in combination with the paycheck? I think the title of the article applies here. What proportion of the unvaccinated do you think equate the shot with death? If they're worried about potential long term effects (just for one example, whether you believe they're possible or not), it'd be hard to prioritize that over feeding their kids next week. This may be controversial, but the term "antivaxer" really deserves to be deprecated. It means too many different things to different people. It's a sloppy caricature that leads to sloppy thinking, but we see it being used all over the place.

theandrewbailey 5y ago

> In New York, for example, only 42 percent of African Americans of all ages (and 49 percent among adults) are fully vaccinated — the lowest rate among all demographic groups tracked by the city. Aren't all New York businesses supposed to be checking people for vaccination status? Given that African Americans are the demographic with the lowest vaccination rates, doesn't that policy disproportionately affect them? I thought we weren't supposed to implement systems like that anymore.

acdha 5y ago
It’s the difference between your restaurant asking everyone their status versus only asking Black people because they’re statistically more likely to be at risk. Policies which are evenly applied and based on a clear public health benefit aren’t the problem.
- listless 5y ago
  But the new wisdom is that any policy which disproportionately affects a certain group is racist. That’s the actual definition of anti-racism. https://cssp.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Principles-for-Anti-Racist-Policymaking.pdf https://cssp.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Principles-for-A...
  - bellyfullofbac 5y ago
    See my reply to grandparent post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28878048 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28878048 So if I make a males only club, is it also racist? Nah, that's sexist. Anyone can remove themselves from being negatively affected by this policy, by getting a vaccination. Calling it racist is just misapplying logic.
    - listless 5y ago
      That’s not how the logic is deployed though. The systemic injustices must be taken into account. Tuskegee would be applicable here.

Tycho 5y ago

I’m happy to get the vaccine in ~March 2022 if they are shown to be safe and effective having been deployed for more than one year. At the moment I see rather mixed signals about safety and efficacy.

acdha 5y ago
That’s because you’re getting your news from partisan sources who are misleading you for political or financial reasons. The vaccines have been in testing since the spring of 2020 and have repeatedly been shown to be both safe and effective at reducing your risk and ability to spread to others. At this point they’ve been given to a billion people – because of the way vaccines work you’re not making yourself safer by waiting a second year and you are far more at risk from getting COVID in the meantime than any reported side effects.
- Tycho 5y ago
  No actually it’s because I use my common sense to know that a vaccine that didn’t even begin testing before spring 2020 does not have a long enough track record to assure safety. I don’t care what you heard on your news.
  - acdha 5y ago
    What scientific education and experience is your common sense based on? If you haven't studied this area, why do you feel more qualified to say it's unsafe than the people who have spent their entire careers focused on it? For example, what is the longest recorded delay between a vaccine being administered and a side-effect being observed? Vaccines trigger an immune response but aren't in your body for a long period of time, so you typically see reactions within a few hours or days — the record is something like 6 weeks, so multiple years would be quite the outlier. https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/concerns-history.html https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/concerns-history.... The other key thing to remember is that this isn't some hypothetical question about risks in absolute: your odds of being one of the very few people who have a significant vaccine side-effect has to be weighed against the much higher probability of having significant health impacts from COVID-19. “Neither” is not an option any of us get to pick.

raxxorrax 5y ago

> how we can be led astray. The first thing reporters should adjust is their honesty. Your fears about how a message could be perceived negatively becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy if a lie is detected. That a lie will be detected in today's world is very high, so calming or noble lies carry a lot of risks. Additionally it should quickly communicated what people can and cannot know. If an unknown disease breaks out, nobody knows how dangerous or deadly it is and what helps against it or not. You don't even need a good justification if you enact restrictions as a precautionary measure with clear boundaries for reevaluation if civil rights are affected. I think only high trust countries went through this relatively unscathed. As a side note, emergencies are taken a lot less serious because of disastrous and incompetent anti-terrorism policies. We had emergency legislation throughout the western world for the last decade and a half. > Instead, we need to develop a realistic, informed and deeply pragmatic approach to our shortcomings without ceding ground to the conspiracists, grifters, and demagogues Wrong lesson, you just need to be better sources of information. Trying to silence them is the opposite of a sensible approach. This has been done to a scarily effective degree, people have basically been unpersoned. It did not work, you have a bad result now. That is a fact and needs to be accepted first. I assume when Covid is done, there will be a long discussion about how effective vaccination has been in retrospective. You might want to stay truthful here since it will affect further trust.

TechBro8615 5y ago
This comment mostly echoes common talking points (all of which I agree with), but I really like this nugget of insight: > I think only high trust countries went through this relatively unscathed. Off the top of my head that does sound true – I’m thinking of the Nordic countries as usual. I wonder if anyone has tried to quantify this? Maybe by tabulating vaccination uptake against trust in media polls? I do think there is a phenomenon somewhat akin to overfitting happening when you compare any country to the US. The US produces such overwhelming cultural exports that it’s impossible to analyze any other culture without considering the US itself as a background variable. For example, maybe Norwegians have higher trust in media than Americans partially because they see the disaster unfolding in America and want to avoid the same fate. In many ways the US media/political culture has become the reality show of the world. As an aside, it’s bizarre that Americans put any trust in media at all. There are no meaningful qualifications required to become a “journalist” other than the ability to consistently output a few thousand words a month. In fact, in many cases people gravitate to journalism because they don’t know what else to do. That’s certainly what I observed at my college newspaper. Some of them who eventually found a path are now working in industry or otherwise attempting to produce value. But the rest of the highflying newspaper staff? They’re blue check marks on Twitter attracting political bot accounts and being retweeted as the voice of media outlets. I find this amusing in light of my personal knowledge that they’re the last people I’d ever ask for an opinion or advice on any topic. It’s perplexing to me how much we let these reporters shape the conversation in society. For a world of six billion, we sure do have tunnel vision for the opinions of a self-selected, highly connected and decidedly mediocre minority. Next time you read one of these think pieces with a word count in a multiple of 400, take a minute to imagine the Kanban board that just funneled some morsel of a talking point into your brain.

LurkingPenguin 5y ago

> Now, just a few months later, these countries, along with 44 others, have surpassed U.S. vaccination rates. And our failure shows: America continues to have among the highest deaths per capita from Covid. Tying deaths per capita to vaccination rates in such a direct fashion is a bit disingenuous. The US also has high rates of comorbidities known to increase the likelihood of death from COVID, namely obesity and diabetes. Per https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/04/health/obesity-covid-death-rate-intl/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/04/health/obesity-covid-death-ra...: > The report found that every country where less than 40% of the population was overweight had a low Covid-19 death rate of no more than 10 people per 100,000.

scohesc 5y ago
If the government _really_ wanted to do something about the effects of the pandemic (now and beyond), they'd be promoting healthy lifestyle living, encouraging exercising, health education, etc. They're not - and I'm not too sure how to feel about it.

ed25519FUUU 5y ago

> The remarkable success of vaccine mandates shows that for many, it is not firm ideological commitments that have kept everyone from getting vaccinated Yes, if you threaten someone’s livelihood they will do things they don’t want to do, even going against their own conscience. Why do people pretend like a mandate is a small thing and not a nuclear weapon? For many people they risk not only losing their job, but their benefits (teachers) or even future job prospects (dishonorable discharge).

scohesc 5y ago
I know somebody who's very personal to me who took the vaccine because they were threatened with termination of employment. They live paycheck to paycheck and have a wife and 3 kids to support. They're going to have to live with themselves violating their own personal bodily autonomy because they didn't want their kids ending up on the street. I personally find it morally reprehensible for any level of "seniority"/"authority" (be it employer, government, peers, etc) to use threats of violence (threatening with loss of employment _is_ an act of violence, I'm not swaying on that). I don't like how society has gotten very "us vs. them" in the past couple of decades.
moistly 5y ago
> Why do people pretend like a mandate is a small thing and not a nuclear weapon? Why do people pretend like an extraordinarily contagious novel virus that commonly causes long-term organ damage is a small thing and not the next best thing to a bioweapon? Why do people pretend that the healthcare system is not collapsing? Why do people pretend that refrigerator trucks full of corpses wasn’t a thing? Why do people pretend that children’s surgeries aren’t currently being canceled in Saskatchewan and Alberta? Vaccine mandates are, in all reality, “playing nice.” The mandates allow you a number of vaccination choices, you pick the place and time. The “nuclear weapon” is when the state uses its military to enforce compliance: no alternatives, no choices. The choice is between our society having a functioning healthcare system, or having too many people remain unvaccinated.
- ed25519FUUU 5y ago
  Would you accept a serology test instead of proof of vaccination for these individuals?

quacked 5y ago

> Relentless propaganda against public health measures no doubt contributes to erosion of trust. However, that mistrust may also be fueled by the sorry state of health insurance in this country and the deep inequities in health care — at a minimum, this could make people more vulnerable to misinformation. The cathedral of government and media will never admit that it has done any wrong. It will always claim that it knows best, and then after conflicting information comes out it will rewrite its own history to claim that it already knew. The thought that major U.S. institutions themselves have lost trust among members of the public through incompetence and condescension is unthinkable to them.

dragontamer 5y ago
That's cool, because the people I know will never admit they were wrong about hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin. But that's cool. They can refuse the vaccine at this point but they are 0 for 3 now. And the only thing they ever point to is a couple of weeks where some officials didn't want N95 masks to be hoarded and they made a bad call. But they were antimask (and still are antimask) despite using this example. So hypocrisy knows no bounds.
- quacked 5y ago
  Here are some things that I thought that at the time were called "misinformation", "conspiracy theories", and had "no data to support that claim": Jan. 2020 - The illness in China is much worse than the Chinese are letting on - The Chinese government is disappearing whistleblowers Feb. 2020 - The illness in China will become a global pandemic - The only way to stop the pandemic is to act immediately and enforce full international travel bans, inter-state lockdowns, and invest heavily in virus testing - COVID-19 is far worse than the flu - The illness is already in the US even though there aren't confirmed cases yet Mar. 2020 - People need to withdraw from public life if they can Apr. 2020 - There is a significant chance that the virus was partially studied or modified in a Wuhan laboratory Mar. 2021 - The vaccines clearly lead to side effects in certain cases, including neural effects, heart problems, and interactions with the reproductive system EVERY single time I told people who "trust the science" and "believe the experts" about these topics, it was before any mainstream government or media sources had caught on to these ideas. These ideas, now common knowledge, were derided as misinformation and anyone who believed them were mocked as ignorant at best and deliberately fear-spreading at worst. I am not fully anti-vaccine; I had the first dose of Pfizer and later had my spike antibodies tested. I haven't had any positive COVID-19 tests because I locked down until eventually taking the vaccine. I don't care about the idiots you know, I care that the scientific and political institutions in control of this country are attention-seeking frauds that never take responsibility for making incorrect predictions.

deleted 5y ago

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haspoken 5y ago

https://archive.is/H8TM9 https://archive.is/H8TM9

mdp2021 5y ago

> 71 percent of the vaccinated trust hospitals and doctors “a lot,” for example, while only 39 percent of the unvaccinated do And finally here is the key: ~70% of the vaccinated is trusting, while ~40% of the unvaccinated is - and 40% of individuals stating that trust is already a surprisingly high number, massive badges of systemic "success" probably only valid for regions of high professional selection. So, the important part of the solution is: remember that empowered error that claimed days ago "The hacker will be prosecuted" about a reporter who noticed an institutional website sent around sensitive information in the webpages markup? Those errors are to be removed from active society. People will trust when the empowered will be trustworthy. Otherwise, societal costs will remain massive. The very first step to achieve such hard goal is to call those "errors", empowered inadequate, unacceptable.

charbonneau 5y ago

> Let’s start with what we do know about the unvaccinated > Some key research on the unvaccinated > It may well be that some of the unvaccinated are a bit like cats stuck in a tree What a silly bunch, the unvaccinated