3 ms·

Pro-opiate and anti-vax? Niiiice!

hhpindia 5y ago
kragen 5y ago
I'd like to be able to discuss ideas on their merits instead of being confronted with factional applause lights like "anti-vax".
- jjoonathan 5y ago
  Arguments like "clearly fail to control the spread" are low effort Gish Gallops that need to be treated as such. Publicly slugging it out in the weeds grants an optical stalemate to an argument that deserves to lose. Do this a million times in a row and you can launch an entire contrarian movement off vapors -- which is exactly what we have seen.
  - trhway 5y ago
    I don't see any arguments beside cheap meta and labels from your side (which seems to be pretty characteristic of the people pushing the current vaccine campaign). >Arguments like "clearly fail to control the spread" are low effort Gish Gallops that need to be treated as such. The failure to control the spread has been obvious for at least half-a-year for anybody doing simple arithmetic on public numbers (and like others i have commented on that as far back then). Now beside being obvious, it is also confirmed by a proper scientific publication https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02689-y https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02689-y " A person who was fully vaccinated and then had a ‘breakthrough’ Delta infection was almost twice as likely to pass on the virus as someone who was infected with Alpha." "Unfortunately, the vaccine’s beneficial effect on Delta transmission waned to almost negligible levels over time. In people infected 2 weeks after receiving the vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca, both in the UK, the chance that an unvaccinated close contact would test positive was 57%, but 3 months later, that chance rose to 67%. The latter figure is on par with the likelihood that an unvaccinated person will spread the virus."
  - kragen 5y ago
    At first I expected the advent of mass vaccination to end the pandemic, because it only had to drop R by a factor of two or so to drop below the critical percolation threshold, so even a vaccine providing 50% sterilizing immunity would be good enough, and the mRNA vaccines turned out to be even more effective than expected. I turned out to be spectacularly wrong about that; as you may or may not be aware, the pandemic did not end a year ago. It turned out that, unlike vaccines like the smallpox vaccine, the covid vaccines did not provide much sterilizing immunity. Moreover, the virus has become endemic in a number of zoonotic reservoirs, including deer, feral cats, and some mustelids, and vaccinating or exterminating those populations is not realistic in the next few decades. This is not currently a significant source of human outbreaks as far as I can tell, but after the humans reach herd immunity, it will be the only one. Consequently, the cost-benefit tradeoff for covid vaccinations with the currently available vaccines needs to be evaluated with respect to the benefit to the person being vaccinated. I'm glad I'm vaccinated: as an obese 45-year-old man, my risk of death from covid might approach 1%, which is enormously higher than any plausible risks from any of the vaccines I'm familiar with. But that tradeoff is not the same for everyone, and there are populations where the rate of death or permanent harm from a vaccine, though still extremely low, is likely higher than the rate of death or permanent harm from covid itself. The situation would be different if, for example, vaccinating schoolchildren prevented them from infecting and inadvertently killing their grandparents. But it doesn't. So the fact that the existing vaccinations clearly fail to control the spread is extremely relevant to the cost-benefit tradeoff, in particular because it means that there's no valid public-interest argument for requiring people to get vaccinated. Since both the cost and the benefit flow to them individually, they should be able to make the decision individually, except in cases such as small children and comatose patients. This is an argument that deserves rational consideration, not dismissal with mindkiller phrases like "vapors" and "anti-vax". That's the sort of argument, or rather non-argument, that "deserves to lose".
    - gpshead 5y ago
      Bad premise. It is not all about benefit to the person being vaccinated even in a low imputed immunity scenario. The unvaccinated fill up and overwhelm healthcare systems. That disrupts all medical care for everyone. By being vaccinated you are reducing the burden for everybody.
psd1 5y ago
That's straw-manning

I'd like to be able to discuss ideas on their merits instead of being confronted with factional applause lights like "anti-vax".

jjoonathan 5y ago
Arguments like "clearly fail to control the spread" are low effort Gish Gallops that need to be treated as such. Publicly slugging it out in the weeds grants an optical stalemate to an argument that deserves to lose. Do this a million times in a row and you can launch an entire contrarian movement off vapors -- which is exactly what we have seen.
- trhway 5y ago
  I don't see any arguments beside cheap meta and labels from your side (which seems to be pretty characteristic of the people pushing the current vaccine campaign). >Arguments like "clearly fail to control the spread" are low effort Gish Gallops that need to be treated as such. The failure to control the spread has been obvious for at least half-a-year for anybody doing simple arithmetic on public numbers (and like others i have commented on that as far back then). Now beside being obvious, it is also confirmed by a proper scientific publication https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02689-y https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02689-y " A person who was fully vaccinated and then had a ‘breakthrough’ Delta infection was almost twice as likely to pass on the virus as someone who was infected with Alpha." "Unfortunately, the vaccine’s beneficial effect on Delta transmission waned to almost negligible levels over time. In people infected 2 weeks after receiving the vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca, both in the UK, the chance that an unvaccinated close contact would test positive was 57%, but 3 months later, that chance rose to 67%. The latter figure is on par with the likelihood that an unvaccinated person will spread the virus."
- kragen 5y ago
  At first I expected the advent of mass vaccination to end the pandemic, because it only had to drop R by a factor of two or so to drop below the critical percolation threshold, so even a vaccine providing 50% sterilizing immunity would be good enough, and the mRNA vaccines turned out to be even more effective than expected. I turned out to be spectacularly wrong about that; as you may or may not be aware, the pandemic did not end a year ago. It turned out that, unlike vaccines like the smallpox vaccine, the covid vaccines did not provide much sterilizing immunity. Moreover, the virus has become endemic in a number of zoonotic reservoirs, including deer, feral cats, and some mustelids, and vaccinating or exterminating those populations is not realistic in the next few decades. This is not currently a significant source of human outbreaks as far as I can tell, but after the humans reach herd immunity, it will be the only one. Consequently, the cost-benefit tradeoff for covid vaccinations with the currently available vaccines needs to be evaluated with respect to the benefit to the person being vaccinated. I'm glad I'm vaccinated: as an obese 45-year-old man, my risk of death from covid might approach 1%, which is enormously higher than any plausible risks from any of the vaccines I'm familiar with. But that tradeoff is not the same for everyone, and there are populations where the rate of death or permanent harm from a vaccine, though still extremely low, is likely higher than the rate of death or permanent harm from covid itself. The situation would be different if, for example, vaccinating schoolchildren prevented them from infecting and inadvertently killing their grandparents. But it doesn't. So the fact that the existing vaccinations clearly fail to control the spread is extremely relevant to the cost-benefit tradeoff, in particular because it means that there's no valid public-interest argument for requiring people to get vaccinated. Since both the cost and the benefit flow to them individually, they should be able to make the decision individually, except in cases such as small children and comatose patients. This is an argument that deserves rational consideration, not dismissal with mindkiller phrases like "vapors" and "anti-vax". That's the sort of argument, or rather non-argument, that "deserves to lose".
  - gpshead 5y ago
    Bad premise. It is not all about benefit to the person being vaccinated even in a low imputed immunity scenario. The unvaccinated fill up and overwhelm healthcare systems. That disrupts all medical care for everyone. By being vaccinated you are reducing the burden for everybody.

psd1 5y ago

That's straw-manning