12 ms·

This was originally submitted by 'slowhand09' with a slightly editorialized title: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30059987 https://news.ycombinator.com/it

• lakhim 5y ago
• COGlory 5y ago
  I'm going to hop on this. I am a structural biologist, I study mainly viruses, admittedly not normally mammalian viruses. Recently, I've been involved in a collaboration for developing a new, Covid vaccine. Full disclosure - not mRNA. As part of that, I've been working directly with Covid-19. I'm not a Covid expert, but I am aware enough of the science to spot many obvious falsehoods. I didn't write this article, nor did I rigorously fact check it. But it struck me as at least, mostly reasonable questions around which to foment a discussion. Most of the points in this article I'd be comfortable asking to a room of PhD scientists with expertise on Covid and vaccines. I'd be disappointed to see this flagged.
  • dekhn 5y ago
    If you're at a university, drop this article into the queue at your grad school journal club. Give folks a week to prepare counterarguments. Attend, and see what you think. prediction: this "article" contains 18 invalidating points in the first three paragraphs.
    • inter_netuser 5y ago
  • nostromo 5y ago
    It's worth noting that the author is a PhD biochemist from Rutgers. I have no idea if her concerns have merit, but I don't believe it should be shot down without consideration either.
    • inter_netuser 5y ago
      BBC: “ Scientists not backing Covid jabs for 12 to 15-year-olds”. Link below. UK’s vaccine top advisory body (that refused to recommend the vaccine for 12-15 age bracket) membership: Professor Andrew Pollard, Chair (University of Oxford) Professor Lim Wei Shen, Chair COVID-19 immunisation (Nottingham University Hospitals) Professor Anthony Harnden, Deputy Chair (University of Oxford) Dr Kevin Brown (Public Health England) Dr Rebecca Cordery (Public Health England) Dr Maggie Wearmouth (East Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust) Professor Matt Keeling (University of Warwick) Alison Lawrence (lay member) Professor Robert Read (Southampton General Hospital) Professor Anthony Scott (London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine) Professor Adam Finn (University of Bristol) Dr Fiona van der Klis (National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, Netherlands) Professor Maarten Postma (University of Groningen) Professor Simon Kroll (Imperial College London) Dr Martin Williams (University Hospitals Bristol) Professor Jeremy Brown (University College London Hospitals) Approved government media: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-58438669 https://www.bbc.com/news/health-58438669 What was the risk and is it approved for discussion if the absolute top vaccine experts declined to recommend it and a government funded news media, BBC, reported on that? Is this too fringe to talk about? Is BBC anti-vaxx now? Are these professors anti-vaxxers?
• mint2 5y ago
  Disproving misinformation by those who are making flawed arguments, whether out of ignorance or whatever’s takes far more effort than spouting them in the first place. I glanced over it and it’s clear the author has no idea about statistics or rates. Oh at a time when a few hundred million vaccines were administered there was an uptick in absolute numbers of reported vaccine side effects? Wow! And that happened in the context of a large portion of the population being deathly afraid of the vaccine and anxious about it? If one wants to present an unpopular and not viewed as credible point of view, it’s pretty important not to look completely ignore simple alternative explanations that are unquestionably causing part of the effects one is talking about
  • thehappypm 5y ago
    Same take for me as well. Screams of cherry picking. The stats in favor of vaccines take a sentence to explain (like “of the 1000 people with the vaccine 2 died, vs the 1000 people with placebo, 187 died”). This is a long term rambling wall of text. Another part is how individual doctors mention individual patients who develop problems after the vaccine. Statistically, that is guaranteed to happen. There is a guarantee that someone will have their first heart attack today. The overlap between vaccine doses and heart problems is statistically guaranteed but does not imply causation.
    • 389dsf3479 5y ago
      > The stats in favor of vaccines take a sentence to explain (like “of the 1000 people with the vaccine 2 died, vs the 1000 people with placebo, 187 died”) Are those real numbers? At least according to table S26. Death summary in Blinded Phase (https://www.nejm.org/doi/suppl/10.1056/NEJMoa2113017/suppl_file/nejmoa2113017_appendix.pdf https://www.nejm.org/doi/suppl/10.1056/NEJMoa2113017/suppl_f...) it should be “of the 15184 people with the vaccine 16 died, vs the 15162 people with placebo, 16 died”. Unless I'm mistaken.
    • ripper1138 5y ago
      Numbers are cherry picked on both sides. Read the results and draw your own conclusions!
• landemva 5y ago
  -> ...currently afraid ... of jabs ... will change their mind ... The group who are in good health, who had the Delta variant and can prove it via antigen test results and Dr. letter of recovery, may not be afraid of the jabs. Instead, maybe they think their sterilizing immunity is the logical progression for those in good health and better than non-sterilizing jabs.
  • michaelmrose 5y ago
    I thought the best science was that those who had had covid were actually better off with the vaccination as well. I had also heard pre print suggestion that those who had only acquired omicron without prior vaccination or delta may not have good neutralization of delta. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.13.22269243v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.13.22269243v... This wouldn't seem to bear on what you have said because you were very specific about antigen testing and a doctors letter that you had recovered from covid but people are fantastically bad at making such fine distinctions about things they poorly understand and many who are unvaccinated seemed sure they had had covid even when the illness they proposed was prior to the advent of covid in country. Their logic is in general so bad that they literally changed the date of covid impacting their nation to account for this disparity instead of concluding that their illness back in 2019 was unlikely to be covid. By January 2022 everyone who hasn't vaccinated has "had covid" whether they have actually had it or not and any differential in public policy towards unvaccinated people who have recovered is likely to result in disadvantage for society at large.
    • kodah 5y ago
      I had COVID-19 pre-vaccines and I've received a booster. Ancedotally, I'm the only person I know at this point that hasn't gotten Omicron; though I'm not really sure that's relevant. I also live in the Bay Area, so it's not like I'm not being exposed when I go to the bar.
    • landemva 5y ago
      This CDC statement provides updates to large study. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7104e1.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7104e1.htm 'By early October, persons who survived a previous infection had lower case rates than persons who were vaccinated alone.' Yes - 'you were very specific about antigen testing and a doctors letter that you had recovered from covid'.
• chiefalchemist 5y ago
  > Do you think those who are currently afraid to be vaccinated will change their mind if only we can prevent them... Given the ppl I've spoken with, this is slightly off target assumption. It's not the jab they fear per se. It's the sources (gov + pharma) and the context (heavyhanded hyperbolic data / stats manipulation), and as of late the authoritarian efforts to force the jabs on anyone (above 5 yo) with a pulse. If these people have a fear, it's that given the facts too few others have no fear at all.
• michaelmrose 5y ago
  Why did you vouch for it before actually reading it? Discussion isn't inherently virtuous. The world is literally full of people on average expressing both nonsense and malicious lies designed to manipulate you and chief among the tools for doing so is subtly but substantially wrong pseudo reasonable dialog and repetition. We are inherently inclined to see something that is believed by many sources as more apt to be true all other things being equal. Generally speaking we don't need a greater degree of discussion on the virtues of Nigerian princes we need a spam filter. Now if you instead had read the entire thing and believe his points are substantially correct I couldn't fault you for vouching for it even if I personally don't agree. I do not suggest you can't have your own opinion. Instead i suggest you form it and THEN vouch for what is actually worth reading. Things are mostly flagged for a reason.
  • nkurz 5y ago
    > Why did you vouch for it before actually reading it? I felt I'd read enough of the piece to trust the author's intentions. I liked her "consilience" example, and liked the overview she gave of where she was going. I've finished reading it now, and continue to feel confident that it is a solid piece worthy of discussion. > Discussion isn't inherently virtuous. I may disagree with this, but it depends on how literally we interpret "inherently". I certainly agree that not all discussions are productive, and some can cause more harm than good. But I also believe that understanding is between parties who disagree is practically impossible without discussion. I think the inherent virtue of discussion is that when it stops things often get worse. I'm fairly strongly on the "mistake theory" side of conflict. I think that most people share common meta-goals, but have different strategies for how to get there. I think with more information sharing, conflict can be avoided. The alternative is "conflict theory", where the goals themselves are simply incompatible. I'm hoping this is not the case in the US, as I think that leads to literal civil war. > Things are mostly flagged for a reason. I agree. I think "Some small subset of flagged stories are worthy of discussion" is compatible with "Most flagged stories deserve to be flagged". I commonly flag about 5-10 new stories a day, mostly outright spam. I probably vouch for about 1-2 stories per day that I feel have been wrongly (or unnecessarily) flagged. Of these, some drop off quietly for lack of attention, some are reflagged and disappear, some turn into flamewars, and some generate interesting discussion. I'm sure this story is not "spam", and I'm doing my best to put/keep this one in the category of "interesting discussion". I think this one is (barely) in the last category, and there are some scattered small productive discussions going on. I feel like most people think this story is making a claim that it is not. As I see it, the main claim is that adverse reactions to the vaccine are likely to be underreported. I think this is true. The author believes that as a healthy young woman, the risk of the vaccine to her is greater than the benefit. I'm not sure if she's right here, but I do believe there certainly could be a cutoff age where this could be true. Some people think that publicly acknowledging this possibility needs to be avoided, because it lends credence to "anti-vaxxers". Possibly true, but I think they are already set in their ways. I'm more concerned that the government bodies (and "Science" as a whole) may be unnecessarily burning their credibility for future events by trying to bend the truth to better fit their desired outcome of having everyone take the vaccine. I think they are well intentioned, but don't think the "noble lie" is a good long term strategy. I'd hoped for more discussion on that level, but at least there is some.
• dekhn 5y ago
  I didn't flag this for being heretical; I flagged it for reducing confidence in public health measures. Am I certain everything I believe is true? No. Neither does the public health leadership. However, they are operating in good faith, with overall health in mind, and they aren't intentionally cloaking massive amounts of vaccine reactions with the goal of ... well, I'm not sure what. Yes, some vaccines have side effects, some of which are serious. But we've already determined almost certainly that they are overall safe enough to justify wide use. A data scientist who is an ex-biologist who is quoting line doctors and cobbling bits of social media isn't some powerful truth-finder. They're just muddying the waters and making it harder for the public health establishment reduce mistrust. I also don't think there is any interesting rational discussion that's going to come from posts like this since they don't rise to the level of scientific discussion.
  • injb 5y ago
    > I didn't flag this for being heretical; I flagged it for reducing confidence in public health measures That is literally, exactly what heretics were punished for: reducing confidence in things that were believed to be in the public interest. So if you didn't flag this for being wrong, or at least for being written in bad faith (neither of which you have alleged), then yes you did flag it for being heretical.
    • dekhn 5y ago
      • fileeditview 5y ago
        I am certain there were quite a few people back then saying "the same" about Galileo Galilei. And maybe that the church only had their best interest at heart... to protect them from quacks and heretics. I find your view dangerous. You believe the chances, that his person is "right" are vanishingly small? That's of course a good reason to flag (delete) that article. Why allow an discussion or other to read the piece and have their own opinion. I cannot believe people are saying things like that with a good conscience.
• treis 5y ago
  >it seemed like a reasonable article by a reasonable person No, they're full of shit. They use small to moderate descripencies to argue that everything is wrong. The two that I saw before closing it: (1). The vaccine is less effective than advertised but that doesn't mean it's ineffective. Two doses still provides good protection while two doses plus boosters provides excellent. (2). It's still primarily an epidemic of the unvaccinated. The ~15% of unvaccinated turn into 70-80% of hospitalizations. If the hold outs got vaccinated (and everyone got boosted) we could cut hospitalizations 75-95%
• jsnell 5y ago
  The article is hardcore antivax misinformation, carefully and intentionally crafted to be so, and "coherent" is a very low bar. No matter how good your motives were in posting it, it should be flagged. You've now put the onus on people to either let this superficially convincing thing go unchallenged and have people believe it, or waste their time trying to refute the ever changing arguments made by these bad actors. Please reconsider the second order effects. Like, if you see a creationist proof against evolution that follows the scientific form superficially, do you post it to HN because it deserves to be discussed? I sure as hell hope not. What happened with the AZ vaccine in the Nordic countries is pretty good at showing how tiny effects would be detected by the public health authorities once the vaccines were rolled out to prod, and how the authorities would react to it (hint: not by covering it up to boost foreign big pharma profits, or whatever the conspiracy theory of this week is). The safety of these vaccines, as well as the relative benefits, has been intensly studied by the people who have to make the actual calls. Those are the people we should be listening to, not engaging in a dialogue with malicious crackpots.
  • trembonator 5y ago
    As if the unvaccinated are going to stop the spread of COVID. Misinformation is falling back on your original argument that the vax prevents the spread of COVID.
  • dekhn 5y ago
• ripper1138 5y ago
  My sister was visiting from Korea and mentioned that Moderna is not approved for men under 40 (something like that, don’t quote me on specifics). Then this blog mentions that many European countries have done the same. Ignore anecdotes if you want, but it’s concerning that the US is so stubborn to allow Moderna even for teens and kids now.
• zozbot234 5y ago
  The OP did not seem "reasonable" to me. It's mixing very different arguments in a way that's incredibly confusing, moreover the author seems to have a bias towards underplaying the benefits of mRNA vaccines whilst emphasizing rare adverse reactions and side effects, which in practice are nowhere near the severity of similar reactions following SARS-CoV2 infection. There's nothing wrong with seeking to make "heretical" arguments, but these should call for more caution and striving for accuracy, not less. This article does not usefully contribute to the debate.
• 0x500x79 5y ago
  This is not science, this is heresy, anecdotes, confirmation bias, self-referencing, and regurgitation of political theatre happening across the wold. This article even includes using Facebook responses of people claiming to be part of the "consilience" of vaccine data being incorrect as one of the most egregious examples of proof of "consilience". Some people are saying: "this person is a biologist we should trust them". Please check out their Linkedin, Linkedin posts/resposts, and Twitter and understand this persons background and where this information is coming from.
• raxxorrax 5y ago
  Those that flag it as heretical cannot ever be good custodians of information and I think their negative influence on the willingness to vaccinate is far more extensive than those that might peddle unsubstantiated rumors.