11 ms·

I'm so puzzled by some of the comments here. Is it simply because of how the general public was inadequately educated about how vaccines work? Well, why are you

• inter_netuser 5y ago
  Just mass hysteria, encouraged by those that feel they can derive by benefit from it, be it increased attention or more political power, anything really. Fairly typical situation actually, maybe even the default state of the human race. What are the more detrimental things you had in mind?
• throwaway22032 5y ago
  Because those other things haven't been dealt with via massive overbearing state intrusions. Climate change is a far far graver threat than coronavirus. But we're not really doing anything about that. By contrast, it was illegal for people in the UK to visit their friends and family for six months and an enormous propaganda campaign was launched which ensured that even without policing this people were convinced into dismantling society. That's why I'm upset, anyway, because my life was turned completely upside down for something that's actually quite minor in the grand scheme of things, whilst we're leaving the big stuff alone. If we banned fast food it'd be annoying and I'd be pretty pissed off. I don't think we should do it, but it would have a massive impact on obesity rates and add a bunch of quality adjusted life years to the country. But it'd really not be that big a deal compared to stuff like saying "healthy 20 year olds in their prime at near zero risk from this virus are now legally forbidden from dating". I often wonder if people have already forgotten just how hilariously ridiculous 2020 was.
  • ilitirit 5y ago
    > That's why I'm upset, anyway, because my life was turned completely upside down for something that's actually quite minor in the grand scheme of things, whilst we're leaving the big stuff alone. I'm going to be frank - I don't think you care about the bigger stuff that much in comparison. You just care that your life was affected. Just like you don't care that much that some random civilians in another country were killed because of <insert injustice>. Am I wrong? EDIT: I'm not saying I'm any different. But I have experienced the effects of COVID19, so to me it's not a "small" thing. I'm still living with the effects every day.
    • throwaway22032 5y ago
      Yes, completely wrong. I'm not sure how you come to the conclusion that I only care because it affected me. Coronavirus has affected and still does affect me. I know people who have suffered and died from it.
      • ilitirit 5y ago
        No, I said you don't care that much about bigger things in comparison. Think about it - you cared enough about this "small thing" to make a throwaway account. When last did you do that about anything else? In any case, I'm not here to preach. I would just like people to have some honesty and perspective in their opinions and arguments. You're willing to risk the lives of the elderly and people with people with a less-effective immune response if you think the lives of the general population would be "better off"? Just say so. If people feel uncomfortable doing this realise that part of that discomfort is called "cognitive dissonance" (and realise that decision-makers have to do the same thing). Have a serious conversation with yourself before you decide that you need to create anonymous accounts on the internet to air your views.
        • throwaway22032 5y ago
          You've created a strawman of my position. I don't believe in risking the lives of the elderly and those with a less effective immune response, I have friends and family members in those positions.
• thrown_22 5y ago
  >Yes, even the less effective vaccines help against serious symptoms, death, and the overwhelming of health services This is where you overstep. Israel, Portugal and Australia all with 90%+ vaccination rates have their health care systems collapse, this simple fact is hidden by the fact that all 'optional' procedures, like say hip surgery, have been postponed for two years (and getting longer every day).
  • glenngillen 5y ago
    I’d suggest you’ve also overstepped re “health care systems have collapsed”, especially as it pertains to the pandemic. Health care systems run close to capacity with wait times under even normal conditions. Western Australia has had almost negligible covid-related illness and yet it’s healthcare system is still in a precarious state re load. Victoria only announced a code brown and cancelling/rescheduling of elective surgeries a month ago. Meanwhile over the larger two year time horizon our system has apparently collapsed I’ve had a shoulder reconstruction and my wife has two separate surgeries on each of her hands. Our healthcare system is just a mess with unfortunate incentives around what is given priority. The pandemic is just a convenient cover for what is an extended period of under investment and a lack of resources. The same stories about delays in elective surgeries and people waiting years for hip replacements have themselves been central to the narrative even before the pandemic.
    • thrown_22 5y ago
    • ls15 5y ago
      > Health care systems run close to capacity with wait times under even normal conditions. You make that sound like a good idea. Shouldn't there be a buffer in the first place? How can a healthcare system cope with other cases of sudden influx of patients when there was no way to vaccinate against that, such as natural disasters?
      • hajile 5y ago
• voldacar 5y ago
  > Yes, washing hands help against bacteria and other some types of viral infection including COVID19. This is pure conjecture, at least when you try to apply it to covid. There is no evidence that has linked hand-washing to a lesser incidence of sars-cov-2 infection. There isn't even a single case definitvely linked to a fomite even 2 years later, afaik. From day one, this was a respiratory disease that spreads through respiratory droplets which travel through the air. In the context of covid, hand washing is just a ritual that lowers your anxiety and gives you a sense of control over the randomness of the world, much like rain dances or haruspicy were for ancient people.
  • ZoomerCretin 5y ago
    > From day one, this was a respiratory disease that spreads through respiratory droplets which travel through the air. SARS is airborne, not just droplet-borne. https://www.epa.gov/coronavirus/indoor-air-and-coronavirus-covid-19 https://www.epa.gov/coronavirus/indoor-air-and-coronavirus-c...
• throwawaylinux 5y ago
  Are you really puzzled why acute changes to people's lives get attention and response, in some cases more than arguably deeper problems that they've lived with for much longer and are harder to notice the impact of? I see this kind of alleged puzzlement a lot here and on the internet in general. I'm not puzzled by it though, I think it's usually insincere and simply used as a cheap rhetorical device to dismiss people's feelings and reactions without actually making an argument. For the very few people who genuinely don't understand: this is part of the human condition. People aren't "rational" according to a text book. People's happiness and feelings depend hugely on contrasting situations. Whether it is your situation now compared to your situation before, or your situation compared to your neighbor's situation. In many cases this has a bigger impact than the "absolute" situation. And the misunderstanding or disregarding of other people's feelings does not invalidate them.
  • throwaway22032 5y ago
    I agree with this. I think we also need to examine the notion of what is "rational". Even if we were truly rational beings (in the sense of being something like utilitarian happiness maximisers with an omniscient view and amazing central planning), we have value functions that don't solely revolve around "be alive and make more life". My grandmother's response to coronavirus was to continue and crack on with her life as usual. Some of her friends did the same and died. Was this irrational? Her reasoning: we weren't put on this earth to sit indoors staring at the TV. She's still out there rolling the dice every day, it's not like this is a one-and-done. What is the value of a few months of freedom to an 80-year-old?
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • jjeaff 5y ago
      If you are 80 years old and vaccinated against COVID, there are a lot of other things that are more likely to kill you. So she should be out living her life.
    • TheGRS 5y ago
• MathCodeLove 5y ago
  I'm not doubting this statement, but just am curious about the physiological machinations of it, how does a vaccine (especially one designed for a different mutation) help prevent the severe symptoms of the disease? Like whats going on in the body to make that happen?
  • shigawire 5y ago
    Vaccine strengthens your immune response. You get infected. Your body is better able to slow the rapid multiplication of the virus in your body. You have less virus fucking up your insides and thus are less sick.
  • hajile 5y ago
    Quick answer is the last 3 paragraphs. When your body responds to a virus, it creates many kinds of antibodies against its many constituent components. This is why new CDC studies show that natural immunity is far better than the vaccine which creates ONE antibody against one part of the virus (the spike protein). A virus can mutate in a lot of ways, but usually not at the same time. If your body has 50 different antibodies against different parts of Delta, when Omicron comes along with a bunch of changes, you'll get sick while your body develops additional antibodies, but your body will still keep the disease from multiplying too quickly with the antibodies that still work (or partially work). The vaccines force the creation of a specific spike protein either through messenger RNA (pfizer/moderna) or through infection with a different virus (Johnson & Johnson -- for the record, the only two other vaccines like this were emergency vaccines approved for ebola in 2016 and 2019) or a more recent one that delivers attenuated virus (but was denied by the FDA because they "had enough vaccines"). Your body sees a massive jump in these spike proteins and marshals a big immune response that floods your system with antibodies against this protein (myocarditis and some other symptoms are believed to be caused by these antibodies attacking your body's very similar ACE2 receptors). When you catch the disease with all these antibodies flooding your system, they can slow the disease down while your body creates the rest of the antibodies to finish the disease off. Delta had a moderately different spike protein, but the antibodies against the original spike still seem to work at reduced effectiveness which is why so many vaccinated people caught delta. Omicron has an even more different protein that almost completely evades the antibodies which is why everyone is catching it. So why does the vaccine reduce death? I'll say that "with covid" and "from covid" are a real thing (even the great Dr. Fauci has said this on national TV). Not being boosted is also sufficient to get you on the unvaxxed list (among other things). Politics and political pressure on places like the CDC further muddy the waters. That aside, exponential growth is important here. If you are unvaccinated (and aren't one of the 10-15% of people who somehow already have partial immunity), the virus enters your body and begins multiplying. If you have 1,000 viruses in the droplet, they invade cells and become (for example), 10,000 and then 100,000 and then 1M within just three doublings. Now, let's say that the antibodies are just 20% effective. Only 800 viruses can invade creating 8,000 copies. Of those, only 6,400 survive creating 64,000 viruses. On our third round, only 51,200 are left creating 512,000 viruses. After 3 rounds, the vaccinated person has HALF the viruses in their system. They'll still have symptoms, but they will be nowhere as severe. This gives your body a lot more time to create the rest of the necessary antibodies and fight off the disease and prevent severe reactions or death.
• wesleywt 5y ago
  For some reason this has become a political issue rather than a health issue. At the moment Americans are living in an extremely toxic environment where everything is either right or left. Not right or wrong.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• ls15 5y ago
  > What am I missing? What is it that people don't understand about the situation? Why are people so upset about this, but not upset about things that are arguably more detrimental to the livelihood of the entire human race? Even though the facts are mostly true and "known", most people are not fully aware of them. As of today, people are still trying to push mandates (and passports), even though it is clear that vaccines will not end the pandemic. The media and politicians have done A LOT to ideologize the vaccines, instead of decribing them as what they are: a tool for mitigating personal risk. The virus itself never had any ideology at all. Inaccurate preconceptions stick in people's minds and it will take a while until public opinion will reasonably will be in line with science again. They need to peel off all that ideology first.
  • beerandt 5y ago
    Just wait until the general public finds out about the evolutionary/ selective pressures caused by a severity-reducing but non-sterilizing vaccine. The general public won't "trust the science" ever again.
    • ls15 5y ago
      > The general public won't "trust the science" ever again. What does "trust the science" even mean? For many people it seems to mean, trusting what one selected scientist says. For others what the news have to say about science and for others it means analyzing the data themselves. I think that science generally benefits from critical thinking. Suppressing critical thinking seemed to be a recurring scheme of this pandemic.
      • TheGRS 5y ago
        If critical thinking here is a euphemism for loudly objecting to published scientific findings, which I suspect it is, then I disagree.
        • ls15 5y ago
          What about lougly objecting to a biased interpretation of published scientific findings? Of course that requires critical thinking.
• atleta 5y ago
  I don't think it's about education specifically on vaccines on the immune system. I've never been interested in biology. Nor in elementary neither in high school. Actually I pretty much disliked the topic. It was boring, so the information didn't stick and I never liked the process of learning. (Nor did I have to learn anything I was really interested in before going to university. Maybe except for history.) However, since I did learn how science and discovery worked and I always loved systems and understanding how they work, once it became an important topic, I couldn't stop reading up on it and had a lot of a-ha! moments. (Partly because of not learning this in high school, I have to admit.) So not knowing is not the problem. Actually no person on Earth knows everything. Not even the basics. And sometimes, when you listen to people who are in denial, some of them actually do know the basics. (Just think of the antivaxxer doctors...) It's more about not willing to admit the situation. It's also about not knowing what they don't know. Now that's one heck of an important lesson I was taught by my excellent physics teacher in high school. He had this saying "knowledge begins with knowing what you don't know" (or knowing/being aware of your lack of knowledge). Which is likely a way of paraphrasing Socrates. And I see a lot of people are just unaware of this. (Yes, Dunning-Kruger.) More educated and more intelligent people fall for this less often probably, but still some of them do, big time. They'll think that they cannot be wrong exactly because they are smart and are usually right. Or, at least this is how they seem to explain it to themselves. But it's simply a lack of self-reflection and humility and a willingness to accept inconvenient consequences.
• chemmail 5y ago
  People get up in ARMS about banning peanuts. This is the world.