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There are very real people who have been harmed by side effects from the vaccine. Whether the virus itself would've been more deadly is a question for another

by dannyw 4y ago

There are very real people who have been harmed by side effects from the vaccine. Whether the virus itself would've been more deadly is a question for another time, but if your loved ones were unlucky enough to get myocarditis from the vaccine, and you were silenced on social media, sometimes invisibly like you're being gaslit, and so were the doctors and researchers, it's easier to understand the strong emotional reactions to unnamed large entities colluding with other large consumer facing entities. This also creates a tendency to migrate to communities that share your point of view, creating an echo chamber.

dboreham 4y ago
> a question for another time Why? Surely this is the primary question to ask ahead of time?
peter422 4y ago
I’m sure you mean well, but one of the few things we know for sure is that the virus is way, way, way more deadly than vaccine. If you are going to overlook all those RCTs run all throughout the world with different types of vaccines and huge populations of people, then you really should reflect on your own analysis of the data. I'm not saying the vaccine is perfectly safe, as few things are, but it's obviously, provably, much better to get the vaccine before you get COVID if you care about reducing the overall risks to your health.
- transcriptase 4y ago
  I think the issue is anything except “the vaccine is perfectly safe”, despite being demonstrably false, was until recently considered “misinformation” and a censorable/bannable offence. Now if you want to make the argument that banning facts for the greater good is acceptable that’s one thing, but nobody seems willing to admit they’re in favour of that in so few words.
- lmm 4y ago
  You can prove anything you want with RCTs if you do enough selective reporting. I think the vaccine probably saved more lives than it cost, but I'm a lot less confident because of how much bad-faith covering-up of any counterveilling evidence there's been. (Were vaccine RCTs pre-registered? If they were, how many pre-registered trials were mysteriously stopped or abandoned?)
  - polygamous_bat 4y ago
    > You can prove anything you want with RCTs if you do enough selective reporting. Once you get to claims like these it's really difficult to prove anything anymore. At that point we may as well throw out hands up and start huffing bleach.
    - lmm 4y ago
      It's not like there's a replication crisis on, or we've recently seen promising drugs withdrawn because a couple of misclassified deaths in the RCT meant heart problems went unnoticed...
- at_a_remove 4y ago
  This may even be true, but you're missing a key point. There's a phrase and I think we're going to see a lot more of it surface in the discussions around this in the future. The phrase is "informed consent." Informed consent means knowing the risks. It's why we have little packets of paper with side effects, why that guy on the radio rattles off "may cause ..." at the end of commercials for medicine. Being good for us on a statistical level does not in any way free the people who push whatever on us from the burden of informed consent.
  - transcriptase 4y ago
    It’s telling that this reply and mine below it are being flagged instead of responded to.
  - peter422 4y ago
    The initial safety trials for the vaccines involved tens of thousands and by the time you had the chance to get the vaccine it had been given to millions of people (with any adverse effects tracked). One of the vaccines was pulled off the market for super rare side effects! And at the same time, it was obviously, provably known that the vaccine was better than covid. Did you know covid causes myocarditis too? More often than the vaccine does? If your standard for informed consent is more information that was available for the covid vaccines then I assure you the other health decisions you are making in your life are not meeting that standard. You also aren't the best at evaluating risk. It's very much like being against seatbelt mandates because they sometimes cause injuries in car crashes. Now it is a separate question of whether the current vaccine policy makes any sense, but its a much less impactful question because the policies from 2021 mostly did the job of protecting people.
    - at_a_remove 4y ago
      I know all of those things. It still doesn't matter. Informed consent must happen. We have a long and rich medical history of finding out what happens when that sort of thing is brushed off. "Hey, I'm doing you a big favor" doesn't matter, consent does.
- andrew_ 4y ago
  > one of the few things we know for sure Objectively, with the rate of change and revelation surrounding the vaccine, I'm not sure how anyone can confidently assert that we know anything about it "for sure." We're learning new things about side effects and efficacy quite often at the moment. Current data suggests that the virus is far more deadly for a certain segment of the population but there are significant negative health impacts for other segments of the population, while the feds and pharma are pushing even more vaccine use for demographics which have consistently shown low vulnerability. There's simply too much nuance to make a blanket "we know for sure" statement about this. It's a living, evolving topic.
laserdancepony 4y ago
And the causality of the myocarditis has been attributed to the vaccine by whom? WebMD?
wmf 4y ago
Side effects you say? Obligatory reminder that millions (maybe over 10 million) of anti-vaxers have long covid.
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  That sounds like you're part of the gaslighting. What, no non-anti-vaxxers got long Covid? Don't kid yourself. (And even if you do, don't try to kid us.)
Yhippa 4y ago
> but if your loved ones were unlucky enough to get myocarditis from the vaccine Curious, did this happen to you?
- shingle 4y ago
  It happened to me, and when it did I was met with outright denial of its most likely cause (Pfizer shot a week before) and thinly veiled accusations of being anti-vax for suggesting that. See my previous comment for details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33599919 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33599919

by dannyw 4y ago

dboreham 4y ago

> a question for another time Why? Surely this is the primary question to ask ahead of time?

peter422 4y ago

I’m sure you mean well, but one of the few things we know for sure is that the virus is way, way, way more deadly than vaccine. If you are going to overlook all those RCTs run all throughout the world with different types of vaccines and huge populations of people, then you really should reflect on your own analysis of the data. I'm not saying the vaccine is perfectly safe, as few things are, but it's obviously, provably, much better to get the vaccine before you get COVID if you care about reducing the overall risks to your health.

transcriptase 4y ago
I think the issue is anything except “the vaccine is perfectly safe”, despite being demonstrably false, was until recently considered “misinformation” and a censorable/bannable offence. Now if you want to make the argument that banning facts for the greater good is acceptable that’s one thing, but nobody seems willing to admit they’re in favour of that in so few words.
lmm 4y ago
You can prove anything you want with RCTs if you do enough selective reporting. I think the vaccine probably saved more lives than it cost, but I'm a lot less confident because of how much bad-faith covering-up of any counterveilling evidence there's been. (Were vaccine RCTs pre-registered? If they were, how many pre-registered trials were mysteriously stopped or abandoned?)
- polygamous_bat 4y ago
  > You can prove anything you want with RCTs if you do enough selective reporting. Once you get to claims like these it's really difficult to prove anything anymore. At that point we may as well throw out hands up and start huffing bleach.
  - lmm 4y ago
    It's not like there's a replication crisis on, or we've recently seen promising drugs withdrawn because a couple of misclassified deaths in the RCT meant heart problems went unnoticed...
at_a_remove 4y ago
This may even be true, but you're missing a key point. There's a phrase and I think we're going to see a lot more of it surface in the discussions around this in the future. The phrase is "informed consent." Informed consent means knowing the risks. It's why we have little packets of paper with side effects, why that guy on the radio rattles off "may cause ..." at the end of commercials for medicine. Being good for us on a statistical level does not in any way free the people who push whatever on us from the burden of informed consent.
- transcriptase 4y ago
  It’s telling that this reply and mine below it are being flagged instead of responded to.
- peter422 4y ago
  The initial safety trials for the vaccines involved tens of thousands and by the time you had the chance to get the vaccine it had been given to millions of people (with any adverse effects tracked). One of the vaccines was pulled off the market for super rare side effects! And at the same time, it was obviously, provably known that the vaccine was better than covid. Did you know covid causes myocarditis too? More often than the vaccine does? If your standard for informed consent is more information that was available for the covid vaccines then I assure you the other health decisions you are making in your life are not meeting that standard. You also aren't the best at evaluating risk. It's very much like being against seatbelt mandates because they sometimes cause injuries in car crashes. Now it is a separate question of whether the current vaccine policy makes any sense, but its a much less impactful question because the policies from 2021 mostly did the job of protecting people.
  - at_a_remove 4y ago
    I know all of those things. It still doesn't matter. Informed consent must happen. We have a long and rich medical history of finding out what happens when that sort of thing is brushed off. "Hey, I'm doing you a big favor" doesn't matter, consent does.
andrew_ 4y ago
> one of the few things we know for sure Objectively, with the rate of change and revelation surrounding the vaccine, I'm not sure how anyone can confidently assert that we know anything about it "for sure." We're learning new things about side effects and efficacy quite often at the moment. Current data suggests that the virus is far more deadly for a certain segment of the population but there are significant negative health impacts for other segments of the population, while the feds and pharma are pushing even more vaccine use for demographics which have consistently shown low vulnerability. There's simply too much nuance to make a blanket "we know for sure" statement about this. It's a living, evolving topic.

laserdancepony 4y ago

And the causality of the myocarditis has been attributed to the vaccine by whom? WebMD?

wmf 4y ago

Side effects you say? Obligatory reminder that millions (maybe over 10 million) of anti-vaxers have long covid.

AnimalMuppet 4y ago
That sounds like you're part of the gaslighting. What, no non-anti-vaxxers got long Covid? Don't kid yourself. (And even if you do, don't try to kid us.)

Yhippa 4y ago

> but if your loved ones were unlucky enough to get myocarditis from the vaccine Curious, did this happen to you?

shingle 4y ago
It happened to me, and when it did I was met with outright denial of its most likely cause (Pfizer shot a week before) and thinly veiled accusations of being anti-vax for suggesting that. See my previous comment for details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33599919 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33599919