9 ms·

Unfortunately, I don't think any additional evidence will convince vaccine skeptics of the safety of mRNA vaccines

by dalbaugh 10mo ago

add-sub-mul-div 10mo ago
Exactly. The "skepticism" was always the point, always the tail wagging the dog.
- exceptthisthing 10mo ago
  [flagged]
infamouscow 10mo ago
[flagged]
- technothrasher 10mo ago
  > would you behave any different than a skeptic? It is unclear what you mean by "skeptic"? Are you speaking of rational skepticism, or reactionary denial?
  - SideburnsOfDoom 10mo ago
    What if only the second type exists, but they always claim to be the first?
    - cogman10 10mo ago
      The acid test is if when presented with new evidence, someone is willing to change their opinion or if they simply retreat and double down on their skepticism. It can be really hard to abandon a false belief. Especially if you take the time and effort to shore it up with bad data. It starts with recognizing that everyone, including yourself, is wrong about something.
      - SideburnsOfDoom 10mo ago
        > The acid test is if when presented with new evidence, someone is willing to change their opinion or if they simply retreat and double down on their skepticism. My opinion is that on the specific topic at hand of COVID-19 vaccine "scepticism", we are far past the point of rational scepticism being sustainable.
        cogman10 10mo ago
        I agree. 5 years of vaccination of a large portion of the population with no negative signs in sight is long enough. The only vapor keeping this alive is anecdotes from confused people or liars about "vaccine injury".
- estearum 10mo ago
  But the results weren't the opposite. One of the upsides of being evidence-driven is it's harder to paint yourself into a corner and put yourself at high risk of having your entire worldview flipped upside down by run of the mill, predictable scientific results. By and large, consensus views are correct. Only a true idiot would make an identity out of disagreeing with consensus by virtue of it being consensus.
- ericmay 10mo ago
  Yes, but it would depend on the results. The problem is that most people are bad at risk assessment. If COVID-19 vaccine increased their risk of premature death by .0000001% they point to that and say sure not taking my risk! Despite the fact that they'd be at much more risk of dying by getting the disease, or just hopping in their car and driving down the street to get a loaf of bread of whatever. If you showed say, a 1% uptick in mortality that you could attribute to the vaccine, yea that would be a different story. But guess what? We wouldn't* release such a vaccine. * I add an asterisk here because if it was a 1% uptick in mortality you can think of scenarios like a disease which kills you 50% of the time or something around that range as being a worthwhile trade off for a 1% rate.
  - somenameforme 10mo ago
    The thing is people 'on the other side' think exactly the same, but come to different conclusions. For instance what do you think the chances of a healthy 20 year old male with 0 comorbidities of dying from COVID are? And what do you think his chances of suffering a significant case of myocarditis or pericarditis from the vaccine is? By "significant" I mean a case that's significant enough to result in active diagnosis - in other words somebody being diagnosed after a visit to an emergency room, as opposed to passive diagnosis where you assess each vaccinated individual to find cases that would otherwise go undetected. Obviously I'm not comparing apples to apples (side effects from vaccine vs death from COVID) but this again is as explained by your own logic. If we were having a smallpox outbreak (with some strains having upward of 30% mortality rates across all demographics), I'm not going to be concerned about side effects of vaccines short of death. But with the rather low risk profile of people in favorable health/age demographics, the side effects of vaccination become quite relevant. Another issue is that early on it became quite apparent that the vaccines were not stopping people from getting COVID, so it's not like you can really compare vaccine vs covid effects, because the reality is you're probably still going to get COVID (and repeatedly, as it turned out) regardless of vaccination status.
    - ericmay 10mo ago
      Let's start with this question: > For instance what do you think the chances of a healthy 20 year old male with 0 comorbidities of dying from COVID are? Much more likely than dying from the vaccine. Also, and this is very important, at the time the vaccine was developed and released to the general public it was even more unknown what the fatality truly would be. We weren't totally sure as a species how the virus might mutate... maybe it would become more deadly? Maybe it would kill young people specifically even if they were otherwise healthy? Maybe by not getting the vaccine with less risk to you as the healthy 20 year old means you get COVID-19 and get "long COVID" (which I'm not sure is a real thing anyway, but I digress) and sure you didn't die but now your life sucks some. The problem with "the other side"'s line of reasoning is that there was a specific concern with "risk" of the COVID-19 vaccine that didn't translate into practical reality and wasn't being assessed relative to the broader risk of getting COVID-19 itself or other general risks we undertake everyday. Another way you can slice this up is, well, there's no risk of getting the vaccine, but getting sick sucks so even one day of being sick is well worth getting a shot for just to not get sick. "What about the risk" there's no real risk. If you think there's a risk, the risk is higher for getting COVID or whatever. It all comes back to this perceived risk of COVID-19 vaccines (thank you to China, Russia, Iran, etc.) and improper assessment of risk. Relative to getting COVID-19 there was no risk. Relative to the dumb risks people take everyday it is even less risky. The only difference is people are sitting around reading about it on social media and being stupid.
- add-sub-mul-div 10mo ago
  If the results were the opposite they'd be shockingly in conflict with what we've already learned and observed, so yes, we would of course react differently.
- jandrese 10mo ago
  If the results were that getting the COVID vaccine was going to give you a 70% increased chance of death from COVID I would be outraged, and also quite confused as the real life evidence definitely doesn't point in that direction. That's the problem with conspiracy theories, as the evidence piles up against them the counterfactual becomes increasingly ridiculous until you're out in the cold with a bunch of nutjobs.
- exceptthisthing 10mo ago
  [flagged]
  - estearum 10mo ago
    No not really, since there are other studies that answer the question of vaccine safety and effectiveness in the more emergency scenario of <= Nov 1 2021. Spoiler: They were also extremely safe and extremely effective then, too. You can see it unambiguously in county-level excess mortality metrics split by political affiliation in the US. The anti-science right wing political sphere gave us a natural experiment that produced very clear results: lots of people dying before vaccines, then across the board death reduction after vaccines, then a red-blue bifurcation later on, after vaccines were politicized.
    - wizzwizz4 10mo ago
      Do you happen to have the metrics to hand? (Perhaps a visualisation, e.g. graphs?)
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- titzer 10mo ago
  Well blow me down, people being skeptical of a study that defied basically all other Science and goes against our entire understanding of how vaccines and immune systems work? Yeah, of course I'd be skeptical. I'd be interested and I'd read it (!) but yeah, I'd seriously question what was wrong with the study.
- ceejayoz 10mo ago
  > If the results of this specific study were the opposite, would you behave any different than a skeptic? This study supports all the other bits of evidence in the same direction; it's consistent with what we know. Similarly, I'd be somewhat more dubious about even a very well constructed study that declares "there are no people in New York City" than one that found some people there.
- arp242 10mo ago
  And if my grandmother had wheels then she'd be a bicycle. You're still trying to spin it as "but you won't be convinced no matter what!" on a story that demonstrates the exact opposite. This is just a pathetic round-about personal attack questioning someone's integrity using a bizarre hypothetical that's the exact opposite of what was actually found.
- cogman10 10mo ago
  That's a false dichotomy. If the results showed that mRNA vaccines had negative health outcomes, then the obvious next question to ask is "are they worse or better than COVID's health outcomes?". If they are better then yeah, I'll still say take the shot. If the negative outcomes only occur in certain demographics, then I'd say they should limit their exposure to the shot. The most common skeptic position that I've seen (which admittedly isn't all of them) is that the shots should be banned altogether until they can be proven 100% safe for everyone. Very similar to the general vaccine skeptic position. It ends up being a moving goalpost as well. A truth seeking individual realizes that very few things in the world are black and white. They avoid trying to frame things as a black and white. Nobel and villainous framing. If you are truth seeking, you won't try to turn a non-binary evidence into binary thinking.
  - CWuestefeld 10mo ago
    The most common skeptic position that I've seen (which admittedly isn't all of them) is that the shots should be banned altogether until they can be proven 100% safe for everyone. That's not what I've seen. I live in very-red Tennessee. What I see is more like what you said yourself: If they are better then yeah, I'll still say take the shot. If the negative outcomes only occur in certain demographics, then I'd say they should limit their exposure to the shot. The conclusion to this (within my bubble) being: since covid risk to young children is negligible, why the heck are you requiring them to get a shot?
    - stetrain 10mo ago
      Who is requiring children to get the COVID vaccine?
    - cogman10 10mo ago
      > That's not what I've seen. It's common enough that there are state legislatures trying to ban mRNA vaccines all together. [1] > since covid risk to young children is negligible, why the heck are you requiring them to get a shot? Kids spread covid and no vaccine is 100% effective. I've not seen any evidence that the vaccine is dangerous to any age group. There is plenty of evidence that COVID is deadly to the very young, the very old, and a bunch of other people (including those with compromised immune systems). It's exactly the same reason kids should get the flu shot. That said, there's no requirement anywhere for kids to get either. [1] https://www.krem.com/article/news/local/idaho/proposed-idaho-senate-bill-ban-mrna-vaccines-10-years/293-090d7fae-cad4-4a17-979f-f9317bd4e435 https://www.krem.com/article/news/local/idaho/proposed-idaho...
- caconym_ 10mo ago
  People who believe in baseless conspiracy theories have to convince themselves that people who don't are operating in the same epistemic mode, picking and choosing what to believe in order to reinforce their prior beliefs, because the alternative is admitting that those people are operating in a superior epistemic mode where they base their beliefs on most or all of the available evidence (including, in this case, the fact that the """vaxxed""" people they know are all still upright and apparently unharmed after years of predictions to the contrary). Your comment is a manifestation of this defense mechanism. As real evidence piles up that you've been wrong, you retreat into these bizarre imaginary scenarios in which you've been right the whole time, and by projecting that scenario onto others you imagine yourself vindicated. But the rest of us just think you're nuts.
jchw 10mo ago
Personally, I am glad to see it. I definitely got vaccinated as soon as I could, but I was also still nervous as there did seem to be some level of reasonable doubt. I would be happy to see more studies confirm what many consider to be obvious.
- gus_massa 10mo ago
  It's not obvious at all. Many vaccine candidates about previous covirus were rejected because they didn't pass the safetly trial. The "secret" part is that before aproving the vaccine, it has to pass a few trials to prove it's effective and safe. This is discussed too few times.
  - runako 10mo ago
    > before aproving the vaccine, it has to pass a few trials to prove it's effective and safe In case this comment has you temporarily hallucinate like it did me, I just looked and was able to confirm what I remembered: the vaccines did undergo trials for efficacy and safety before being approved.
    - mberning 10mo ago
      I think the part that people doubt is the highly compressed timeline for approval. Hard to anticipate long term effects when something has only been tested for a short period of time. Also during this time the pitch degraded from “you won’t get sick or spread the disease” to “well I still got sick, but it probably would have been worse without the vaccine”. It is actually crazy to think about in retrospect.
      - vkou 10mo ago
        The timelines were compressed because instead of doing all the safety trials one after the other, they were all done concurrently. The only people that puts at risk are the trial participants.
      - runako 10mo ago
exceptthisthing 10mo ago
[flagged]
- lesuorac 10mo ago
  Your argument is what exactly? Covid vaccines are unnecessary because we can just infect everybody with covid and the ones that survive don't need one?
liveoneggs 10mo ago
[flagged]
bilekas 10mo ago
Exactly this. Science and evidence is not high on the list of priorities for most skeptics.
laichzeit0 10mo ago
Unfortunately, this is an observational study and when you get to the confounding part, they kind of shrug their shoulders and say “well, we included a bunch of covariates that should reduce make the bias go away”, but there’s no causal diagram so we have no idea how they reasoned about this. If you’ve read even something layman friendly like Pearl’s Book of Why you should be feeling nervous about this.
- Palomides 10mo ago
  doing a double blind study of a vaccine that seems to work very well for a potentially lethal disease seems morally questionable
  - ekianjo 10mo ago
    > seems to work very well for a potentially lethal disease not lethal for all age groups, we already knew it well before the vaccine was introduced. People may have short memories, the vaccine came almost a year after the disease was out, and we knew very well by then that it did not kill everyone, broadly.
    - majormajor 10mo ago
      > not lethal for all age groups, we already knew it well before the vaccine was introduced. People may have short memories, the vaccine came almost a year after the disease was out, and we knew very well by then that it did not kill everyone, broadly. And the vaccine wasn't trialed or rolled out initially for all age groups. One major reason was because double-blind trials were done first. For instance, here is the enrollment page for a double-blind study from 2020 for those between 18-55: https://studypages.com/s/join-a-covid-19-vaccine-research-study-190759/ https://studypages.com/s/join-a-covid-19-vaccine-research-st... This one was was 18-59: https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT04582344 https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT04582344 with two cohorts: "The first cohort will be healthcare workers in the high risk group (K-1) and the second cohort will be people at normal risk (K-2)" If you look at case rates, hospitalization load, and death rates for summer/fall/winter 2020 pre-vaccine, and compare to the load on the system in summer-2021 and later when people were far more social and active, the economy was starting to recover, then the efficacy of the vaccine was pretty obvious in letting people get out of lockdown without killing hugely more people and overwhelming the healthcare system. And it was tested pre-rollout in double-blind fashion and rolled out in a phased way to the most needy groups first, with monitoring and study of those groups. What, concretely, are you proposing should have been done differently?
drcongo 10mo ago
[flagged]
stackedinserter 10mo ago
I give you this pill that makes you suffer for a year, but you will not die in 4 years. If it's safe to you, then alcohol and smoking are safe too. Edit: OTOH that pill will reduce your chance to suffer even more or even die, which is a good thing ofc
andreygrehov 10mo ago
FDA is imposing stricter vaccine protocols due to children deaths linked to Covid-19 vaccine-related myocarditis [1]. [1] https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/fda-covid-vaccine-children-deaths-b2874915.html https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-polit...
- ceejayoz 10mo ago
  FDA is imposing stricter vaccine protocols due to a long-term anti-vaxxer at the helm of HHS.
- wnevets 10mo ago
  RFK Jr's FDA is imposing stricter vaccine protocols due to children deaths linked to Covid-19 vaccine-related myocarditis.
  - andreygrehov 10mo ago
    Are they lying about the deaths? I'm not following.
    - ceejayoz 10mo ago
      They aren't lying, in the sense that "Hitler provided free food, transportation, and housing to Europe's Jews" isn't technically a lie. They are using a technically correct piece of data to deeply mislead you. Other pieces of data readily available to us reveal the sleight of hand.
      - andreygrehov 10mo ago
        Okay, let's run a proof by contradiction. Assume you're right: VAERS is useless for causality and the 10 deaths are not real or not proven. What possible benefits does RFK Jr. get from dramatically restricting a vaccine using data he knows is meaningless and will be shredded in 24 hours by every fact-checker and cardiologist on HN/Twitter/younameit? If he just wanted to scare people for no reason, the rational move is to keep repeating “VAERS proves nothing” and change zero policy. That costs nothing and keeps everyone happy. Instead he’s taking massive heat, angering the entire medical establishment, and shrinking the childhood schedule. Inventing a fake danger out of junk data brings him zero benefit and enormous political cost. That only makes sense if the internal FDA review actually found something real and alarming.
ekianjo 10mo ago
[flagged]
- jmye 10mo ago
  “Why didn’t doctors listen to my completely unsourced opinion in their field?! I can write computer programs, don’t they know that!” You have absolutely no idea what you saw. Sometimes, it’s ok to not have strong opinions about things you know you’re completely unqualified to understand or diagnose.
rkapsoro 10mo ago
This is the wrong attitude to take to the problem. While I grant there were many who were disposed to be irrational skeptics, lots of skepticism was generated by dishonest messaging, coercive mandates, and punitive limitations on dissenting speech. Institutions took an end-justifies-the-means strategy, and many smelled a rat. Even now, online, you see right wing users continuing to lament over vaccine injuries, and on the left, long COVID. Ironically the injuries are often similar. They are, of course, both right.
- jmye 10mo ago
  > punitive limitations on dissenting speech Rank bullshit or whining that people aren’t forced to associate with others against their will - not sure which basis for your statement is worse.
- jibal 10mo ago
  Completely wrong about the facts. Long COVID is real and not restricted to those on the left. Right wingers constantly "lament" over all sorts of bogeymen, rarely anything from personal experience. Most talk about vaccine injuries is based on misuse of VAERS. > lots of skepticism was generated by dishonest messaging Yes, from right wing media ... which you are echoing. Dead bodies were overflowing and public health officials were acting in good faith to try to deal with it. Right wingers and good faith are complete strangers.
blub 10mo ago
“Doesn’t kill you” is the absolute bare minimum and a very low bar. Because the vaccines were so rushed, it’s still reassuring, but not at all a testament to the safety of mRNA vaccines. The more interesting studies will be about non-lethal adverse reactions. Changes to menstruation, heart problems, lymph node swelling to name just a few.
- jobs_throwaway 10mo ago
  >lymph node swelling you mean immune response? Which vaccines are supposed to induce?
  - blub 10mo ago
    No, severe swelling and pain, which in the case I know about resulted in a hospital visit. More info: https://www.thieme-connect.de/products/ejournals/pdf/10.1055/a-2328-7536.pdf?articleLanguage=de https://www.thieme-connect.de/products/ejournals/pdf/10.1055... Fortunately doctors and medical organizations usually take these matters seriously, unlike the average techbro. A good example is how the vaccination recommendations were changed to avoid Moderna for young men to reduce the risk of heart problems.
sp4cec0wb0y 10mo ago
"Skeptics" is a very kind term for these people. I bet my life if you polled these people, they have not read any material on the matter.
- ohyoutravel 10mo ago
  “Read?” No. But they probably spend hours listening to Joe Rogan and going down a YouTube antivaxxer rabbit hole.
- dionian 10mo ago
  I thought skepticism was a key part of science
  - ceejayoz 10mo ago
    They aren't actually skeptical, though.
  - jibal 10mo ago
    That's why they are criticizing the application of the term to antivaxxers.
tjpnz 10mo ago
Worse it will be used to produce even more disinformation. Most of the stuff I've encountered takes studies like this, misrepresents or outright lies about the findings and includes a link (sometimes working) to the paper which nobody consuming the slop will ever check.
garyrob 10mo ago
It seems like the antivaxxers, and many people in general, seem to just think that whatever they hear from their friends and family and favorite TV talking heads, whether it has any research behind it or not, is automatically and magically true. So that even if the only real research that exists contradicts it, they just assume that the research must be the result of some kind of error or conspiracy. I find that incredibly frustrating and dangerous, but as far as I can see, it's the way it is.
spyrja 10mo ago
[flagged]
- ceejayoz 10mo ago
  > MRNA technologies are not "vaccines" per se. Define vaccine for us. > The results would likely have been much better had they gone with more traditional vaccine formulations. Several non-mRNA vaccinations were produced (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novavax_COVID-19_vaccine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novavax_COVID-19_vaccine remains available, if you want). They did not have better apparent efficacy.
- runako 10mo ago
  > clogging the circulatory system (hence the uptick in myocarditis and such) Do people really believe that the Covid vaccines effectively give people sickle cell? Less snarky -- it has been known for quite some time that infections such as the flu can trigger cardio conditions such as myocarditis. Knowing that, it is unsurprising that people exposed to Covid (vaccinated or not, since a vaccine is never 100% effective) would show similar outcomes.
on_the_train 10mo ago
Yeah maybe forcing people to get them triggered some kind of skepticism, how about that
- blackqueeriroh 10mo ago
  Who forced you to get one? Did they hold you down and shove it in your arm?
  - on_the_train 10mo ago
    No it was more devious, with the thread of economic annihilation and homelessness.
jquaint 10mo ago
Unfortunately, one of the only things that is proven to convince vaccine skeptics is when someone from their community dies of a preventable illness. This is a great book on this topic: https://www.amazon.com/Anti-vaxxers-How-Challenge-Misinformed-Movement/dp/0262539322 https://www.amazon.com/Anti-vaxxers-How-Challenge-Misinforme...
- cogman10 10mo ago
  It seems like even that's not good enough. I have a few skeptics in my family and have had family members die from covid.
  - CrossVR 10mo ago
    For a lot of people these aren't rational beliefs, they're beliefs based on appeals to emotion. They will only rationally re-evaluate those beliefs if you change the kind of media they consume.
  - tedd4u 10mo ago
    For example: Parents of Texas child who died of measles stand by decision to not vaccinate https://abc13.com/post/texas-measles-death-parents-child-died-stand-decision-not-vaccinate/16065046/ https://abc13.com/post/texas-measles-death-parents-child-die...
- Esophagus4 10mo ago
  Another thing that seemed to work is the unvaccinated getting sick themselves. 2/3 of the unvaccinated COVID patients who were admitted to hospital regretted their decision, declared they would promote the vaccine post-discharge, and declared they would get it post-discharge. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8950102/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8950102/
- tedd4u 10mo ago
  Also, what's the overlap here between people who believe a) the unborn have a "right to life" (or forced birth as some others call it, where the parent has no choice but to take the pregnancy to term and give birth), and b) those who think the parents have every right to decide not to vaccinate their children? If you believe (a), shouldn't you believe (not b)? And if you believe (b), shouldn't you believe (not a)?
whynotmaybe 10mo ago
I can understand skepticism, notably from a woman I know that had many unwanted bleeding and it seems she was not alone : https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12407584 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12407584 Although from this study the global vaccine output is positive, the personal one seems negative for a lot of people. Many still got COVID19 and the bleeding issue, but they can't compare to what would have happened without the vaccine. Notably many for whom the basic understanding of "25% lower risk of all-cause mortality" doesn't mean anything. - "What is it ? I had 1 chance to 1 million to die but with the vaccine it's 0.75 to 1 million ?" - "No, out of 22 million vaccinated, 0.4% died but out of 6 million unvaccinated, 0.6% died !"
- magicalist 10mo ago
  > I can understand skepticism, notably from a woman I know that had many unwanted bleeding and it seems she was not alone : https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12407584 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12407584 From that study: > Conclusions > The availability of COVID-19 vaccination was not associated with a change in incidence of medically attended abnormal uterine bleeding in our population of over 79,000 female patients of reproductive age. Additionally, among 2,717 patients with abnormal uterine bleeding diagnoses in the period following COVID-19 vaccine availability, receipt of the vaccine was not associated with greater bleeding severity.
anthem2025 10mo ago
[dead]
trts 10mo ago
you never get a second chance to make a first impression
kypro 10mo ago
I think people throw these accusations around way too broadly. There is a small subset of weirdos who think the Covid/mRNA vaccines contain microchips or were designed kill off some percentage of the population. But I think there's another, much larger group who might care a lot about their health to the point where they don't even drink from plastic bottles, and who when presented with a novel vaccine which was developed and rolled very quickly were hesitant... Rightly or wrongly, I think these health-conscious people were concerned during Covid by mainstream media orgs frequently broadcasting what can only be described as pro-vax "propaganda"[1], and in some cases state compelled vaccination. I'm very pro-vax, but I remember at the time (2021) being a bit torn on what I should do. I was in my twenties and already contracted Covid. Did it really make sense for me to take a vaccine when my risk was so low and there were some reports that young men were suffering from myocarditis post-vaccination? I guess what I'm saying is that I think most reasonable people who may have initially been nervous about the vaccine can look at data like this and feel much more comfortable with the risk profile today. This is exactly the kind of data a lot of people (including myself) wanted when their governments were trying to force them to take these newly developed vaccines. In my mind it's those on the extreme pro-vaccine and extreme anti-vaccine side in 2021-2022 that were the ones lacking critical thought. The reality was that as a society given the absence of long-term data like this, we were taking a calculated risk. Because even if mRNA vaccines slightly increased all-cause mortality that wouldn't mean the vaccine rollout was a bad thing... Similarly chemo probably great for you either and I'm sure people who undergo chemo unnecessarily suffer from increased morality risk. But if you have cancer or if you're in the middle of a pandemic risk calculations change a little. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mq76QSlRiPo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mq76QSlRiPo
- CrossVR 10mo ago
  The problem with the myocarditis risk in young men is that they undergo exactly the same risk from the actual covid infection. And given the fact that it was already obviously going to be endemic it really wasn't much of a calculation. It was basically: You either roll the dice now or you roll the dice when you inevitably get covid.
  - 10mo ago
rich_sasha 10mo ago
Ultimately, natural selection might do it.
xracy 10mo ago
"bUT wE StILl DoN't KnoW tHe LOnG TeRM EffECts oF ThE VacCInES." I swear these folks will be on their death beds 50 years in the future claiming this. There will be no amount of evidence or time that matters to them. Someone can prove me wrong, and tell me exactly what evidence would convince them that the vaccines are safer than the alternative.

Unfortunately, I don't think any additional evidence will convince vaccine skeptics of the safety of mRNA vaccines

add-sub-mul-div 10mo ago

Exactly. The "skepticism" was always the point, always the tail wagging the dog.

exceptthisthing 10mo ago
[flagged]

infamouscow 10mo ago

[flagged]

technothrasher 10mo ago
> would you behave any different than a skeptic? It is unclear what you mean by "skeptic"? Are you speaking of rational skepticism, or reactionary denial?
- SideburnsOfDoom 10mo ago
  What if only the second type exists, but they always claim to be the first?
  - cogman10 10mo ago
    The acid test is if when presented with new evidence, someone is willing to change their opinion or if they simply retreat and double down on their skepticism. It can be really hard to abandon a false belief. Especially if you take the time and effort to shore it up with bad data. It starts with recognizing that everyone, including yourself, is wrong about something.
    - SideburnsOfDoom 10mo ago
      > The acid test is if when presented with new evidence, someone is willing to change their opinion or if they simply retreat and double down on their skepticism. My opinion is that on the specific topic at hand of COVID-19 vaccine "scepticism", we are far past the point of rational scepticism being sustainable.
      - cogman10 10mo ago
        I agree. 5 years of vaccination of a large portion of the population with no negative signs in sight is long enough. The only vapor keeping this alive is anecdotes from confused people or liars about "vaccine injury".
estearum 10mo ago
But the results weren't the opposite. One of the upsides of being evidence-driven is it's harder to paint yourself into a corner and put yourself at high risk of having your entire worldview flipped upside down by run of the mill, predictable scientific results. By and large, consensus views are correct. Only a true idiot would make an identity out of disagreeing with consensus by virtue of it being consensus.
ericmay 10mo ago
Yes, but it would depend on the results. The problem is that most people are bad at risk assessment. If COVID-19 vaccine increased their risk of premature death by .0000001% they point to that and say sure not taking my risk! Despite the fact that they'd be at much more risk of dying by getting the disease, or just hopping in their car and driving down the street to get a loaf of bread of whatever. If you showed say, a 1% uptick in mortality that you could attribute to the vaccine, yea that would be a different story. But guess what? We wouldn't* release such a vaccine. * I add an asterisk here because if it was a 1% uptick in mortality you can think of scenarios like a disease which kills you 50% of the time or something around that range as being a worthwhile trade off for a 1% rate.
- somenameforme 10mo ago
  The thing is people 'on the other side' think exactly the same, but come to different conclusions. For instance what do you think the chances of a healthy 20 year old male with 0 comorbidities of dying from COVID are? And what do you think his chances of suffering a significant case of myocarditis or pericarditis from the vaccine is? By "significant" I mean a case that's significant enough to result in active diagnosis - in other words somebody being diagnosed after a visit to an emergency room, as opposed to passive diagnosis where you assess each vaccinated individual to find cases that would otherwise go undetected. Obviously I'm not comparing apples to apples (side effects from vaccine vs death from COVID) but this again is as explained by your own logic. If we were having a smallpox outbreak (with some strains having upward of 30% mortality rates across all demographics), I'm not going to be concerned about side effects of vaccines short of death. But with the rather low risk profile of people in favorable health/age demographics, the side effects of vaccination become quite relevant. Another issue is that early on it became quite apparent that the vaccines were not stopping people from getting COVID, so it's not like you can really compare vaccine vs covid effects, because the reality is you're probably still going to get COVID (and repeatedly, as it turned out) regardless of vaccination status.
  - ericmay 10mo ago
    Let's start with this question: > For instance what do you think the chances of a healthy 20 year old male with 0 comorbidities of dying from COVID are? Much more likely than dying from the vaccine. Also, and this is very important, at the time the vaccine was developed and released to the general public it was even more unknown what the fatality truly would be. We weren't totally sure as a species how the virus might mutate... maybe it would become more deadly? Maybe it would kill young people specifically even if they were otherwise healthy? Maybe by not getting the vaccine with less risk to you as the healthy 20 year old means you get COVID-19 and get "long COVID" (which I'm not sure is a real thing anyway, but I digress) and sure you didn't die but now your life sucks some. The problem with "the other side"'s line of reasoning is that there was a specific concern with "risk" of the COVID-19 vaccine that didn't translate into practical reality and wasn't being assessed relative to the broader risk of getting COVID-19 itself or other general risks we undertake everyday. Another way you can slice this up is, well, there's no risk of getting the vaccine, but getting sick sucks so even one day of being sick is well worth getting a shot for just to not get sick. "What about the risk" there's no real risk. If you think there's a risk, the risk is higher for getting COVID or whatever. It all comes back to this perceived risk of COVID-19 vaccines (thank you to China, Russia, Iran, etc.) and improper assessment of risk. Relative to getting COVID-19 there was no risk. Relative to the dumb risks people take everyday it is even less risky. The only difference is people are sitting around reading about it on social media and being stupid.
add-sub-mul-div 10mo ago
If the results were the opposite they'd be shockingly in conflict with what we've already learned and observed, so yes, we would of course react differently.
jandrese 10mo ago
If the results were that getting the COVID vaccine was going to give you a 70% increased chance of death from COVID I would be outraged, and also quite confused as the real life evidence definitely doesn't point in that direction. That's the problem with conspiracy theories, as the evidence piles up against them the counterfactual becomes increasingly ridiculous until you're out in the cold with a bunch of nutjobs.
exceptthisthing 10mo ago
[flagged]
- estearum 10mo ago
  No not really, since there are other studies that answer the question of vaccine safety and effectiveness in the more emergency scenario of <= Nov 1 2021. Spoiler: They were also extremely safe and extremely effective then, too. You can see it unambiguously in county-level excess mortality metrics split by political affiliation in the US. The anti-science right wing political sphere gave us a natural experiment that produced very clear results: lots of people dying before vaccines, then across the board death reduction after vaccines, then a red-blue bifurcation later on, after vaccines were politicized.
  - wizzwizz4 10mo ago
    Do you happen to have the metrics to hand? (Perhaps a visualisation, e.g. graphs?)
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
titzer 10mo ago
Well blow me down, people being skeptical of a study that defied basically all other Science and goes against our entire understanding of how vaccines and immune systems work? Yeah, of course I'd be skeptical. I'd be interested and I'd read it (!) but yeah, I'd seriously question what was wrong with the study.
ceejayoz 10mo ago
> If the results of this specific study were the opposite, would you behave any different than a skeptic? This study supports all the other bits of evidence in the same direction; it's consistent with what we know. Similarly, I'd be somewhat more dubious about even a very well constructed study that declares "there are no people in New York City" than one that found some people there.
arp242 10mo ago
And if my grandmother had wheels then she'd be a bicycle. You're still trying to spin it as "but you won't be convinced no matter what!" on a story that demonstrates the exact opposite. This is just a pathetic round-about personal attack questioning someone's integrity using a bizarre hypothetical that's the exact opposite of what was actually found.
cogman10 10mo ago
That's a false dichotomy. If the results showed that mRNA vaccines had negative health outcomes, then the obvious next question to ask is "are they worse or better than COVID's health outcomes?". If they are better then yeah, I'll still say take the shot. If the negative outcomes only occur in certain demographics, then I'd say they should limit their exposure to the shot. The most common skeptic position that I've seen (which admittedly isn't all of them) is that the shots should be banned altogether until they can be proven 100% safe for everyone. Very similar to the general vaccine skeptic position. It ends up being a moving goalpost as well. A truth seeking individual realizes that very few things in the world are black and white. They avoid trying to frame things as a black and white. Nobel and villainous framing. If you are truth seeking, you won't try to turn a non-binary evidence into binary thinking.
- CWuestefeld 10mo ago
  The most common skeptic position that I've seen (which admittedly isn't all of them) is that the shots should be banned altogether until they can be proven 100% safe for everyone. That's not what I've seen. I live in very-red Tennessee. What I see is more like what you said yourself: If they are better then yeah, I'll still say take the shot. If the negative outcomes only occur in certain demographics, then I'd say they should limit their exposure to the shot. The conclusion to this (within my bubble) being: since covid risk to young children is negligible, why the heck are you requiring them to get a shot?
  - stetrain 10mo ago
    Who is requiring children to get the COVID vaccine?
  - cogman10 10mo ago
    > That's not what I've seen. It's common enough that there are state legislatures trying to ban mRNA vaccines all together. [1] > since covid risk to young children is negligible, why the heck are you requiring them to get a shot? Kids spread covid and no vaccine is 100% effective. I've not seen any evidence that the vaccine is dangerous to any age group. There is plenty of evidence that COVID is deadly to the very young, the very old, and a bunch of other people (including those with compromised immune systems). It's exactly the same reason kids should get the flu shot. That said, there's no requirement anywhere for kids to get either. [1] https://www.krem.com/article/news/local/idaho/proposed-idaho-senate-bill-ban-mrna-vaccines-10-years/293-090d7fae-cad4-4a17-979f-f9317bd4e435 https://www.krem.com/article/news/local/idaho/proposed-idaho...
caconym_ 10mo ago
People who believe in baseless conspiracy theories have to convince themselves that people who don't are operating in the same epistemic mode, picking and choosing what to believe in order to reinforce their prior beliefs, because the alternative is admitting that those people are operating in a superior epistemic mode where they base their beliefs on most or all of the available evidence (including, in this case, the fact that the """vaxxed""" people they know are all still upright and apparently unharmed after years of predictions to the contrary). Your comment is a manifestation of this defense mechanism. As real evidence piles up that you've been wrong, you retreat into these bizarre imaginary scenarios in which you've been right the whole time, and by projecting that scenario onto others you imagine yourself vindicated. But the rest of us just think you're nuts.

jchw 10mo ago

Personally, I am glad to see it. I definitely got vaccinated as soon as I could, but I was also still nervous as there did seem to be some level of reasonable doubt. I would be happy to see more studies confirm what many consider to be obvious.

gus_massa 10mo ago
It's not obvious at all. Many vaccine candidates about previous covirus were rejected because they didn't pass the safetly trial. The "secret" part is that before aproving the vaccine, it has to pass a few trials to prove it's effective and safe. This is discussed too few times.
- runako 10mo ago
  > before aproving the vaccine, it has to pass a few trials to prove it's effective and safe In case this comment has you temporarily hallucinate like it did me, I just looked and was able to confirm what I remembered: the vaccines did undergo trials for efficacy and safety before being approved.
  - mberning 10mo ago
    I think the part that people doubt is the highly compressed timeline for approval. Hard to anticipate long term effects when something has only been tested for a short period of time. Also during this time the pitch degraded from “you won’t get sick or spread the disease” to “well I still got sick, but it probably would have been worse without the vaccine”. It is actually crazy to think about in retrospect.
    - vkou 10mo ago
      The timelines were compressed because instead of doing all the safety trials one after the other, they were all done concurrently. The only people that puts at risk are the trial participants.
    - runako 10mo ago

exceptthisthing 10mo ago

[flagged]

lesuorac 10mo ago
Your argument is what exactly? Covid vaccines are unnecessary because we can just infect everybody with covid and the ones that survive don't need one?

liveoneggs 10mo ago

[flagged]

bilekas 10mo ago

Exactly this. Science and evidence is not high on the list of priorities for most skeptics.

laichzeit0 10mo ago

Unfortunately, this is an observational study and when you get to the confounding part, they kind of shrug their shoulders and say “well, we included a bunch of covariates that should reduce make the bias go away”, but there’s no causal diagram so we have no idea how they reasoned about this. If you’ve read even something layman friendly like Pearl’s Book of Why you should be feeling nervous about this.

Palomides 10mo ago
doing a double blind study of a vaccine that seems to work very well for a potentially lethal disease seems morally questionable
- ekianjo 10mo ago
  > seems to work very well for a potentially lethal disease not lethal for all age groups, we already knew it well before the vaccine was introduced. People may have short memories, the vaccine came almost a year after the disease was out, and we knew very well by then that it did not kill everyone, broadly.
  - majormajor 10mo ago
    > not lethal for all age groups, we already knew it well before the vaccine was introduced. People may have short memories, the vaccine came almost a year after the disease was out, and we knew very well by then that it did not kill everyone, broadly. And the vaccine wasn't trialed or rolled out initially for all age groups. One major reason was because double-blind trials were done first. For instance, here is the enrollment page for a double-blind study from 2020 for those between 18-55: https://studypages.com/s/join-a-covid-19-vaccine-research-study-190759/ https://studypages.com/s/join-a-covid-19-vaccine-research-st... This one was was 18-59: https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT04582344 https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT04582344 with two cohorts: "The first cohort will be healthcare workers in the high risk group (K-1) and the second cohort will be people at normal risk (K-2)" If you look at case rates, hospitalization load, and death rates for summer/fall/winter 2020 pre-vaccine, and compare to the load on the system in summer-2021 and later when people were far more social and active, the economy was starting to recover, then the efficacy of the vaccine was pretty obvious in letting people get out of lockdown without killing hugely more people and overwhelming the healthcare system. And it was tested pre-rollout in double-blind fashion and rolled out in a phased way to the most needy groups first, with monitoring and study of those groups. What, concretely, are you proposing should have been done differently?

drcongo 10mo ago

[flagged]

stackedinserter 10mo ago

I give you this pill that makes you suffer for a year, but you will not die in 4 years. If it's safe to you, then alcohol and smoking are safe too. Edit: OTOH that pill will reduce your chance to suffer even more or even die, which is a good thing ofc

andreygrehov 10mo ago

FDA is imposing stricter vaccine protocols due to children deaths linked to Covid-19 vaccine-related myocarditis [1]. [1] https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/fda-covid-vaccine-children-deaths-b2874915.html https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-polit...

ceejayoz 10mo ago
FDA is imposing stricter vaccine protocols due to a long-term anti-vaxxer at the helm of HHS.
wnevets 10mo ago
RFK Jr's FDA is imposing stricter vaccine protocols due to children deaths linked to Covid-19 vaccine-related myocarditis.
- andreygrehov 10mo ago
  Are they lying about the deaths? I'm not following.
  - ceejayoz 10mo ago
    They aren't lying, in the sense that "Hitler provided free food, transportation, and housing to Europe's Jews" isn't technically a lie. They are using a technically correct piece of data to deeply mislead you. Other pieces of data readily available to us reveal the sleight of hand.
    - andreygrehov 10mo ago
      Okay, let's run a proof by contradiction. Assume you're right: VAERS is useless for causality and the 10 deaths are not real or not proven. What possible benefits does RFK Jr. get from dramatically restricting a vaccine using data he knows is meaningless and will be shredded in 24 hours by every fact-checker and cardiologist on HN/Twitter/younameit? If he just wanted to scare people for no reason, the rational move is to keep repeating “VAERS proves nothing” and change zero policy. That costs nothing and keeps everyone happy. Instead he’s taking massive heat, angering the entire medical establishment, and shrinking the childhood schedule. Inventing a fake danger out of junk data brings him zero benefit and enormous political cost. That only makes sense if the internal FDA review actually found something real and alarming.

ekianjo 10mo ago

[flagged]

jmye 10mo ago
“Why didn’t doctors listen to my completely unsourced opinion in their field?! I can write computer programs, don’t they know that!” You have absolutely no idea what you saw. Sometimes, it’s ok to not have strong opinions about things you know you’re completely unqualified to understand or diagnose.

rkapsoro 10mo ago

This is the wrong attitude to take to the problem. While I grant there were many who were disposed to be irrational skeptics, lots of skepticism was generated by dishonest messaging, coercive mandates, and punitive limitations on dissenting speech. Institutions took an end-justifies-the-means strategy, and many smelled a rat. Even now, online, you see right wing users continuing to lament over vaccine injuries, and on the left, long COVID. Ironically the injuries are often similar. They are, of course, both right.

jmye 10mo ago
> punitive limitations on dissenting speech Rank bullshit or whining that people aren’t forced to associate with others against their will - not sure which basis for your statement is worse.
jibal 10mo ago
Completely wrong about the facts. Long COVID is real and not restricted to those on the left. Right wingers constantly "lament" over all sorts of bogeymen, rarely anything from personal experience. Most talk about vaccine injuries is based on misuse of VAERS. > lots of skepticism was generated by dishonest messaging Yes, from right wing media ... which you are echoing. Dead bodies were overflowing and public health officials were acting in good faith to try to deal with it. Right wingers and good faith are complete strangers.

blub 10mo ago

“Doesn’t kill you” is the absolute bare minimum and a very low bar. Because the vaccines were so rushed, it’s still reassuring, but not at all a testament to the safety of mRNA vaccines. The more interesting studies will be about non-lethal adverse reactions. Changes to menstruation, heart problems, lymph node swelling to name just a few.

jobs_throwaway 10mo ago
>lymph node swelling you mean immune response? Which vaccines are supposed to induce?
- blub 10mo ago
  No, severe swelling and pain, which in the case I know about resulted in a hospital visit. More info: https://www.thieme-connect.de/products/ejournals/pdf/10.1055/a-2328-7536.pdf?articleLanguage=de https://www.thieme-connect.de/products/ejournals/pdf/10.1055... Fortunately doctors and medical organizations usually take these matters seriously, unlike the average techbro. A good example is how the vaccination recommendations were changed to avoid Moderna for young men to reduce the risk of heart problems.

sp4cec0wb0y 10mo ago

"Skeptics" is a very kind term for these people. I bet my life if you polled these people, they have not read any material on the matter.

ohyoutravel 10mo ago
“Read?” No. But they probably spend hours listening to Joe Rogan and going down a YouTube antivaxxer rabbit hole.
dionian 10mo ago
I thought skepticism was a key part of science
- ceejayoz 10mo ago
  They aren't actually skeptical, though.
- jibal 10mo ago
  That's why they are criticizing the application of the term to antivaxxers.

tjpnz 10mo ago

Worse it will be used to produce even more disinformation. Most of the stuff I've encountered takes studies like this, misrepresents or outright lies about the findings and includes a link (sometimes working) to the paper which nobody consuming the slop will ever check.

garyrob 10mo ago

It seems like the antivaxxers, and many people in general, seem to just think that whatever they hear from their friends and family and favorite TV talking heads, whether it has any research behind it or not, is automatically and magically true. So that even if the only real research that exists contradicts it, they just assume that the research must be the result of some kind of error or conspiracy. I find that incredibly frustrating and dangerous, but as far as I can see, it's the way it is.

spyrja 10mo ago

[flagged]

ceejayoz 10mo ago
> MRNA technologies are not "vaccines" per se. Define vaccine for us. > The results would likely have been much better had they gone with more traditional vaccine formulations. Several non-mRNA vaccinations were produced (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novavax_COVID-19_vaccine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novavax_COVID-19_vaccine remains available, if you want). They did not have better apparent efficacy.
runako 10mo ago
> clogging the circulatory system (hence the uptick in myocarditis and such) Do people really believe that the Covid vaccines effectively give people sickle cell? Less snarky -- it has been known for quite some time that infections such as the flu can trigger cardio conditions such as myocarditis. Knowing that, it is unsurprising that people exposed to Covid (vaccinated or not, since a vaccine is never 100% effective) would show similar outcomes.

on_the_train 10mo ago

Yeah maybe forcing people to get them triggered some kind of skepticism, how about that

blackqueeriroh 10mo ago
Who forced you to get one? Did they hold you down and shove it in your arm?
- on_the_train 10mo ago
  No it was more devious, with the thread of economic annihilation and homelessness.

jquaint 10mo ago

Unfortunately, one of the only things that is proven to convince vaccine skeptics is when someone from their community dies of a preventable illness. This is a great book on this topic: https://www.amazon.com/Anti-vaxxers-How-Challenge-Misinformed-Movement/dp/0262539322 https://www.amazon.com/Anti-vaxxers-How-Challenge-Misinforme...

cogman10 10mo ago
It seems like even that's not good enough. I have a few skeptics in my family and have had family members die from covid.
- CrossVR 10mo ago
  For a lot of people these aren't rational beliefs, they're beliefs based on appeals to emotion. They will only rationally re-evaluate those beliefs if you change the kind of media they consume.
- tedd4u 10mo ago
  For example: Parents of Texas child who died of measles stand by decision to not vaccinate https://abc13.com/post/texas-measles-death-parents-child-died-stand-decision-not-vaccinate/16065046/ https://abc13.com/post/texas-measles-death-parents-child-die...
Esophagus4 10mo ago
Another thing that seemed to work is the unvaccinated getting sick themselves. 2/3 of the unvaccinated COVID patients who were admitted to hospital regretted their decision, declared they would promote the vaccine post-discharge, and declared they would get it post-discharge. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8950102/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8950102/
tedd4u 10mo ago
Also, what's the overlap here between people who believe a) the unborn have a "right to life" (or forced birth as some others call it, where the parent has no choice but to take the pregnancy to term and give birth), and b) those who think the parents have every right to decide not to vaccinate their children? If you believe (a), shouldn't you believe (not b)? And if you believe (b), shouldn't you believe (not a)?

whynotmaybe 10mo ago

I can understand skepticism, notably from a woman I know that had many unwanted bleeding and it seems she was not alone : https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12407584 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12407584 Although from this study the global vaccine output is positive, the personal one seems negative for a lot of people. Many still got COVID19 and the bleeding issue, but they can't compare to what would have happened without the vaccine. Notably many for whom the basic understanding of "25% lower risk of all-cause mortality" doesn't mean anything. - "What is it ? I had 1 chance to 1 million to die but with the vaccine it's 0.75 to 1 million ?" - "No, out of 22 million vaccinated, 0.4% died but out of 6 million unvaccinated, 0.6% died !"

magicalist 10mo ago
> I can understand skepticism, notably from a woman I know that had many unwanted bleeding and it seems she was not alone : https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12407584 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12407584 From that study: > Conclusions > The availability of COVID-19 vaccination was not associated with a change in incidence of medically attended abnormal uterine bleeding in our population of over 79,000 female patients of reproductive age. Additionally, among 2,717 patients with abnormal uterine bleeding diagnoses in the period following COVID-19 vaccine availability, receipt of the vaccine was not associated with greater bleeding severity.

anthem2025 10mo ago

[dead]

trts 10mo ago

you never get a second chance to make a first impression

kypro 10mo ago

I think people throw these accusations around way too broadly. There is a small subset of weirdos who think the Covid/mRNA vaccines contain microchips or were designed kill off some percentage of the population. But I think there's another, much larger group who might care a lot about their health to the point where they don't even drink from plastic bottles, and who when presented with a novel vaccine which was developed and rolled very quickly were hesitant... Rightly or wrongly, I think these health-conscious people were concerned during Covid by mainstream media orgs frequently broadcasting what can only be described as pro-vax "propaganda"[1], and in some cases state compelled vaccination. I'm very pro-vax, but I remember at the time (2021) being a bit torn on what I should do. I was in my twenties and already contracted Covid. Did it really make sense for me to take a vaccine when my risk was so low and there were some reports that young men were suffering from myocarditis post-vaccination? I guess what I'm saying is that I think most reasonable people who may have initially been nervous about the vaccine can look at data like this and feel much more comfortable with the risk profile today. This is exactly the kind of data a lot of people (including myself) wanted when their governments were trying to force them to take these newly developed vaccines. In my mind it's those on the extreme pro-vaccine and extreme anti-vaccine side in 2021-2022 that were the ones lacking critical thought. The reality was that as a society given the absence of long-term data like this, we were taking a calculated risk. Because even if mRNA vaccines slightly increased all-cause mortality that wouldn't mean the vaccine rollout was a bad thing... Similarly chemo probably great for you either and I'm sure people who undergo chemo unnecessarily suffer from increased morality risk. But if you have cancer or if you're in the middle of a pandemic risk calculations change a little. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mq76QSlRiPo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mq76QSlRiPo

CrossVR 10mo ago
The problem with the myocarditis risk in young men is that they undergo exactly the same risk from the actual covid infection. And given the fact that it was already obviously going to be endemic it really wasn't much of a calculation. It was basically: You either roll the dice now or you roll the dice when you inevitably get covid.
- 10mo ago

rich_sasha 10mo ago

Ultimately, natural selection might do it.

xracy 10mo ago

"bUT wE StILl DoN't KnoW tHe LOnG TeRM EffECts oF ThE VacCInES." I swear these folks will be on their death beds 50 years in the future claiming this. There will be no amount of evidence or time that matters to them. Someone can prove me wrong, and tell me exactly what evidence would convince them that the vaccines are safer than the alternative.