Now states are combating such hesitancy by drawing lottery for vaccinated folks.
Like, having this magic, absolutely mind boggling potion that prevents serious illness and death *isn't* already the lottery win of our lifetime??
People in India and elsewhere are dying because of lack of vaccines and here we have educated, first world countries struggle to get their citizens vaccinated.
Unfortunately shaming such people will only push them further into antivax territory.
>Unfortunately shaming such people will only push them further into antivax territory.
Funny that you say that, I had the same thought when buying groceries last week. The cashier started telling me she'll never get it because it's being mandated to cull us and there's some secret database of deaths yada yada yada. Mind you I didn't ask. I felt sorry for her, even worried. She's a kind enough middle aged lady, she's been at the same grocery store for years. Somehow she's convinced that she's privy to some super secret knowledge only to be disclosed to a chosen few. It's like a nigerian email scam or Q thing.
I was a little worried because she could've gotten herself fired for talking like that to the wrong person who would get mad and tell the manager. I just smiled, nodded, spoke in a low tone and said "I used to think so too but THEY want us to think that way because it weakens America if people here keep getting covid while they're over it and starting to beat us economically. Our vaccine works the best so they're spreading propaganda to scare us from getting it" I have no idea if it helped but she at least seemed intrigued that I didn't roll my eyes or scold her.
> Like, having this magic, absolutely mind boggling potion that prevents serious illness and death isn't already the lottery win of our lifetime
A lot of it boils down to people not trusting what they're seeing. Frankly, governments have done the world a disservice by speaking before they really had all the information at the start of the pandemic. In Canada at least an insane amount of what was said turned out to be completely false, or worse harmfully false (ie: no masks, isn't airborne, ect). As a result, lots of people see what looks like the "story changing", and distrust anything coming out of their government, and experts, at this point. I think if we approach the problem with that in mind we might win more people over than telling them "listen to experts", since for the past year and a half experts have been wrong almost as often as they have been right.
> [...] lots of people see what looks like the "story changing", and distrust anything coming out of their government, [...].
Changing and updating our beliefs as evidence comes in is a fundamental ability that underlies numerous activities from scientific research to debugging software to driving on a congested road network. Why is it a problem for public health officials to update and change policy as we learn more about the virus?
Would it really be preferable if policy remained frozen to whatever people thought best on day one?
The problem is that the a large chunk of the population aren't scientist so they don't understand the principles of the scientific method. And they aren't software developers, they don't have the mindset for it. And have you seen the way many people drive? There is a reason why the term "defensive driving" was coined.
I think a good understanding of the scientific method, skepticism and fact checking should be taught in school as early as possible.
The only thing students get is material presented as the truth that they have to faithfully accept. They are almost never taught how to deal with unreliable material. It made sense in the pre-internet age where finding information was the hard part, but now, it is the opposite: too much information. So we should focus more on how to filter it.
We had a "general knowledge" class in college and it was an important part of it. We had to make essays and presentations about random subjects and we were judged by our ability to synthesize and verify information. Copy-pasting was actually encouraged, and long as it was from a good source and presented in a way that isn't misleading.
The unfortunate thing is that we should have done exercises like that in primary school and not wait until college.
> I think a good understanding of the scientific method, skepticism and fact checking should be taught in school as early as possible.
It is taught in schools, and taught young. The people who understand the scientific method have been doing it every year since the sixth grade. They did science fair projects, etc.
I just looked up modern educational standards, and kids are taught in grade six the scientific method and how to execute experiments using it.
The problem is, lots of people suck at school. They didn't care about it and their parents didn't care about it, so they didn't retain anything. There are an awful lot of adults in society that couldn't pass a fifth grade math test.
Yeah it was taught very strangely IMO in my schools. There was always such a goofy focus on the dumbest science fair projects that were probably just as likely to reach a completely wrong conclusion instead of relating the process to the real world and how we as a society continue to learn how the world works in any scenarios newer than Redi’s meat / maggots experiment from 1668!
You don't need to be a scientist to acknowledge that knowledge evolves.
You don't even need to follow a 'scientific method' for that.
The ability to embrace uncertainty is hard to learn, but one that we all should strive for. One that should be praised and lauded.
A politician, leader or CEO making a bad decision on a wrong premis, and publicly acknowledges the mistake (and learns from it), is now often end-of-career. This is toxic. Because such mistakes are a fact of life and the best teacher.
I think the inability to accept uncertainty in the world is, unfortunately, a big reason conspiracies thrive.
Too frightening to grok that a random virus can emerge and maybe kill us all or at least turn society upside down? There’s a conspiracy that makes it an easy “good guys vs. bad guys” story for you.
> Why is it a problem for public health officials to update and change policy as we learn more about the virus?
Because when it comes to persuading hundreds of millions of people, it is often better to be certain than to be right or to flip-flop. That's a fact of leadership, regardless of whether you or I as scientists like it.
Also, they didn't just revise their statements with new information, they actively lied (the no masks thing) in a paternalistic way to deceive people into thinking they didn't need masks (so the masks would stay available for front-line medical staff).
The moment a governor goes in front of cameras saying "no need to hoard toilet paper" is the moment right when everybody rushes and hoards toilet paper. So they tried saying "toilet paper does not work". (Not literally, but I'm using it as a metaphor for masks, obviously.) That strategy backfired a bit, but worked better than outright saying "Don't buy masks cause front-line workers need them". Had they said that then next day front-line workers wouldn't have gotten any.
The only alternative I see is to remove the necessary supplies from the free market and put them under government control so that front line workers get them no matter what the mob does. But in freedom land, the free market is holy, so that doesn't work over there.
> Why is it a problem for public health officials to update and change policy as we learn more about the virus?
That's not the problem. Arrogance is the problem. We were led to believe that X was established scientific consensus one week and ¬X the next. Real science has error bars and confidence intervals. If you're projecting from a small amount of data, the responsible thing to do is to disclose how uncertain your conclusions are.
(Edit: maybe the real science did have confidence intervals; the public communication certainly didn't though.)
Secondly, we had many clear contradictions over the past year. How can it be dangerous to attend an outdoor soccer game but safe to attend a BLM protest? How can it be shamefully unsafe to walk past someone in a corridor without masks and 6ft of social distancing but totally fine to sit and eat in a restaurant for an unbounded amount of time?
Also it really doesn't help public trust when for example Fauci openly admits that he lied to the public about mask efficacy to preserve supplies for hospitals, but of course now you can trust him to be telling the truth on this other thing here.
Public health officials knew perfectly that masks give some protection against viruses in general, it was already known 100 years ago. They lied so that the masks don't get bought up instead of just coordinating the distributions using govenmental channels.
By that logic, who’s to say “things won’t change” again, such that they find there is cause for concern after all?
I’m not saying that’s what I believe, but if you’re admitting that we’re “changing and updating our beliefs as evidence comes in”, that also implies that we didn’t — and may still not — have all the data in front of us to make decisions.
We have to make the best decision for ourselves and the society around us based on the best knowledge we have. Yes science always allows for things to be disproven, but if we follow your logic we’d not use any medicines or treatments. Come on.
Just saying that we can’t be too hard on the folks that are a little hesitant with the vaccine as things evolve. Simply have a bit of empathy, at least for folks that are simply uncertain about how to handle things for themselves and their family (vs. those trying to stop the world from getting vaccinated).
I’m fully vaccinated, but I know some that I wouldn’t consider “antivaxx” but are just not sure about this one for them/their families, and I’m trying not to be judgmental of them.
Yes, nothing. Especially when you see the mortality rate is as low as it has turned out to be; there is very little reason for even 50% of the world to be vaccinated. Why would states be holding lotteries for only the vaccinated? Bizarre incentives if you ask me; dubious and unethical as well, since this is effectively a massive human trial. Most of the people I know that won't be getting a vaccine, feel the risk of serious complications from Covid19 are low for them and their families. Many of them have already had it and found it to have the same effects as all of the previous corona-viruses we've experienced. We have immune systems for a reason (as poor as they've grown in the Western world over the last 80 years or so), and believing that vaccinating against every bug that comes along, seems to be aligned with negative natural selection, which effectively sets us all up for a super bug extinction level event. At the least 50% of the world should stay clear of all vaccines if we want to survive long-term as a species.
I would also like you to consider, that many of the anti-vaxx community, as virologists by profession. Many find the risks associated with vaccines (not just Covid19 but all), as often outweighing the benefits they purport to provide.
My family and I won't be getting the vaccine for many reasons (we have several professional medical practitioners in the family by the way). One being, we know someone directly involved in creating a mRNA-based vaccine at a large gov-funded biotech co.: their job on the project was based on proving that their employer did undertake the burden of attempting to get the compound that surrounds the mRNA bits and keeps them stable inside the solution, to pass through the human or other mammalian system. Here's the kicker, they can't, and everybody in the business knows they can't (at least not yet), as they've been unable to get this compound out of the blood and organs once introduced. It is synthesized largely from plants, so they consider it "natural". :-D But the truth is, we don't have any data on long term exposure and retention of this compound inside of our blood stream, organs, and other tissues. The mRNA-based vaccines would not have passed scrutiny had they not been granted emergency approval, and yes they've been working on them for a decade+.
The problem isn't that our authorities are changing their beliefs based on new evidence coming in. The problem is that our authorities are changing beliefs based on the current political situation, pretending that that reflects shifting evidence and, worst of all, not admitting that they've changed their views.
Let's take the current debate over the "lab leak" hypothesis as an example. A large amount of the evidence, both for and against the lab leak hypothesis dates back to March/April/May of 2020. Yet, when the lab leak hypothesis was raised around that time period, it was immediately and vociferously dismissed by the media as a racist ploy to distract from the government's shambolic handling of the pandemic. When the hypothesis was raised again, this year, it was treated as a serious possibility that deserved a full and thorough investigation.
What changed? It wasn't the evidence -- the evidence has been present all along. What changed was the political environment that suddenly made it possible to speak of a lab leak without sounding like tinfoil-hatted crackpot. As a result, now this previously unmentionable hypothesis is now getting its due consideration by the media.
However, the media isn't admitting that a change occurred. Instead, what the average person is seeing is mainstream media outlets shifting seamlessly from, "The lab leak hypothesis is a racist lie," to "The lab leak hypothesis is a serious allegation that deserves a thorough investigation." It's like the scene from 1984, where the Inner Party representative switches seamlessly mid-speech from discussing the ongoing war against Eurasia to the ongoing war against Eastasia.
We saw a similar phenomenon take place last year over masks. There were warnings about the virus being airborne as far back as January of 2021. As late as March, you had Time magazine saying that wearing a mask was "superstitious behavior" [1]. Over the next two to three weeks, the advice rapidly shifted, from "masks are a sign of unreasonable paranoia" to "masks are mandatory, and anyone not wearing them is putting everyone around them in danger". Was that due to a shift in the evidence? No. As noted above, there was ample warning that the virus was airbone, and many people were taking appropriate precautions even in the absence of official guidance. What shifted was the political environment.
Moreover, then, just as now, no media outlet ever admitted that it had given incorrect advice. There were individual journalists who (to their credit) admitted a certain level of responsibility, but, as far as I know, no major mainstream media outlet has come forward and said, "You know what? We screwed up, and we apologize." Instead , we see silent corrections that rewrite the past without admitting any kind of fault. Heck, just compare the headline on the Time article today [2] to the headline on the archived version. The headline was silently updated with a much more moderate point, and a caveat about changing CDC guidance was added. But there was no formal correction published anywhere that said, "You know that article we printed last week about masks being bogus? Yeah, that was wrong, and we're sorry."
Honestly, after seeing the performance of the media in its handling of the coronavirus pandemic, I'm surprised that more people aren't as cynical about the "official story" as the cashier in the sibling thread.
At the time, i was asking myself why the lab-leak was rejected. I mean, its obviously not human-made, but why couldn't it be a contagion inside the lab from an already made virus.
Now, maybe its reactance, but i believe the zoonose more likely.
Yes, for the record, I believed then (and still believe today) that the virus has zoonotic origins. The primary point of evidence that the lab-leak advocates point to, the fact that the animal reservoir hasn't yet been identified, isn't convincing to me. It took more than a decade to find the animal reservoir for SARS. We still don't know where the animal reservoir is for Ebola.
Similarly, the presence of the "furin cleavage site", which supposedly makes the virus ideal for spreading in humans is less significant than it appears. There are numerous other coronaviruses which have the same feature, and it's plausible that SARS-COV-2 picked up the feature via recombination somewhere on its way to becoming a virus that spread primarily among humans.
But all that is beside the point. The point is that many voices that took on the air of authority during the pandemic changed their view for no reason other than shifts in the broader political climate. It has made people suspicious and frustrated with the experts, which then leads them to embrace crackpot theories peddled by those who (correctly) point out that the authoritative sources in the media have been lying to them.
The solution, as I see it, isn't that the media should get its facts and story right the first time. That's impossible, especially in a fast-changing situation like the early stages of a global pandemic. What the media (and by "the media", I mean major newspapers like the New York Times, and major news outlets, like CNN) ought to be doing is stating clearly when one of their stories contradicts a story that they've published in the past, and stating clearly the reason for the contradiction. "We were wrong about masks, because we misinterpreted a directive to preserve masks for emergency workers as meaning that masks were ineffective," would have gone a long way towards helping convince mask skeptics about the need for masks when the media suddenly reversed its advice.
> But all that is beside the point. The point is that many voices that took on the air of authority during the pandemic changed their view for no reason other than shifts in the broader political climate.
Not only did they take an air of authority, they also actively censored contrary opinions. Twitter, facebook, youtube...
Because, if there was a non-human made virus being studied in a lab which was human-infectious...then that virus would already be out there in the wild unless you'd made a specific effort to eradicate it like we did with smallpox.
"Lab-leak" is non-sensical in all forms which don't begin with "lab evolved/bioengineered" and while not completely implausible, the methodology for selective rapid-evolution of a virus requires the exact same conditions as are trivially recreated in the population and human-animal contact regime of greater China.
> "Lab-leak" is non-sensical in all forms which don't begin with "lab evolved/bioengineered"...
That's exactly the allegation circa March 2020 though: scientists collect various bat-borne coronaviruses (e.g. RaTG13) in Yunnan province around 2013, evolve one of them at the Wuhan Institute of Virology though gain-of-function research, and then due to lax safety protocols end up accidentally leaking an evolved virus in late 2019. For example, see this podcast from a year ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug
> ... no media outlet ever admitted that it had given incorrect advice... Instead, we see silent corrections that rewrite the past without admitting any kind of fault.
As I read this I was overcome with the realization that I have more discipline editing my 2-3 point HN comments--labeling new remarks, striking out original text instead of deleting it outright, and so on--than do professional journalists from the New York Times or Washington Post editing national news stories. Unbelievable... and unforgivable.
Unfortunately in some places they did it when they already knew it was untrue but continued anyway "to prevent panic and shortage of masks supply". Then they turned 180 and made masks obligatory, even outside at all times, which is another extreme.
Governments lied to people on health topics so many times already, so why should people trust them - from cigarettes, through lead gasoline, to saturated fats. We all get the theory of mRNA vaccines, but we tend to oversimplify the most complex system in the universe - the human body. There is evidence that these spike proteins don't just get presented on the surface of the cells but circulate in the bloodstream, cross the brain-blood barrier, and cause myocarditis. So, they are not exactly what we thought about them a year ago. Also, here on HN, several times was hypothesized that a retrovirus could indeed turn the RNA into DNA; although the chance is slim to none when you vaccinate billions, it will happen.
Note: I'm fully-vaccinated with Pfizer, but got severe palpitations for days after the first and second shots (which are symptoms of myocarditis), my wife had the same plus a pretty rapid heartbeat for 3 days, and I also got some never seen before skin issues (extreme dryness of certain areas of the skin.
Fully-vaccinated people still an spread the viruses, just not as well as unvaccinated, and people who went thru the course of the disease probably should not get vaccinated as they get a better protection (immune to more than the spike protein), and should spare the doses for the billions still unvaccinated. The drive to vaccinated people who had COVID-19 was an economical and political, not scientific. Removing the face mask mandate early is also non-scientific, but political and economical. So, why should we blindly trust authorities? The vaccine manufacturers have no liability, their practically have emergency use authorizations, not approvals either.
Using certified masks (like in some European countries), getting adequate Vitamin D3 (along with vitamin K), and zinc with zinc ionophores should have been #1 priority, but this basica and benign prophylaxis has been totally underplayed, which also contributes to the lack of trust in the government.
>Using certified masks (like in some European countries), getting adequate Vitamin D3 (along with vitamin K), and zinc with zinc ionophores should have been #1 priority, but this basica and benign prophylaxis has been totally underplayed, which also contributes to the lack of trust in the government.
I think you nailed it on the head there. Really the number one priority should be to stay the hell out of the medical system. Once you're in the medical system, you know you've fucked up (or just had an accident, whichever). My wife is a triage nurse now after 20 years bedside, and spends her days trying to talk people, who are calling their doctors to get a magic pill, into changing their lifestyles (diet largely) so that they don't require a pill. Most often, these people are not interested in a no-pill solution. They are happy to keep treating the problem, especially since most of them seem to be highly uninformed by the negative long-term health consequences of the meds they're taking.
We have a close friend whose long-term doctor just prescribed her statins, for a flutter which was noted by her Apple Watch. She and her family, has no history of heart or other health issues. Actually, she's in her 60s and has never even had the flu or as much as a cold, until Cov19 got her in Feb. of 2020. They did not draw any blood work, but she had an echocardiagram which came back clean. When she asked the doctor why he would prescribe statins without doing any blood work, or having any other evidence, he said "this has become our standard procedure for anyone reporting a flutter or palpatation, plus those Apple Watches are very accurate!". I shit you not. This is the medical establishment we're all trying to stay healthy despite of.
Statins are overprescribed and cause mitochondrial damage, which then leads to a list of potential chronic diseases and bingo! - now you'll be on Rx till the rest of your life! I blame it on the doctors who just conveniently follow procedures knowing they do more damage than good,although most of them have no choice if they want to keep their job. Due to the complicated coding and billing system, a lot of them don't even have the financial freedom to treat you the way they believe is the best for you.
It turns out that not all things can be known and when giving advice, you go with the best known data...which at times can be wrong. This is literally how science works. We don't always have the liberty to wait for a near certain answer.
And the experts haven't been wrong for a year and a half, the experts were working with bad or incomplete data for a few months. Their advice for the past year, wear masks, socially distance, get the vaccine, has been correct.
If masks and social distancing didn't work, you need to have some idea of why the Flu had its mildest year ever. Also, countless people have demonstrated with pulseox meters that blood oxygen saturation is unaffected by mask wearing, so while those findings are interesting, you are far too quick to draw any type of conclusions that masks don't work and/or are harmful.
A mask isn’t going to hurt you if it doesn’t work. Honestly my 3 year old displays more logic in his thought than this. And before you say it no the virus won’t appear on the mask anymore more so than it would enter your mouth and lungs if the mask wasn’t on.
Does heightened levels of carbon dioxide hurt? Everything we know about heightened levels of carbon dioxide in buildings says, "Yes." Why would masks be any different?
It wrinkles my brain that someone would believe this. Surgeons wear masks for hours, sometimes dozens, while performing operations that require an insane level of concentration and dexterity. They are not harmed because of this.
You have just chosen to believe some idiotic conspiracy theory and are grasping at some vaguely plausible objection to continue holding that belief.
So masks somehow magically concentrate CO2 more than any other gas only outside of operating theaters? Or is this selective gas concentration perfectly normal, and the magic is that it doesn't happen in operating theaters?
The "environment that the masks are designed for" is the same Euclidean 3D space containing the same air as all other environments.
How is this a conspiracy theory? Why jump to that conclusion about this person's perfectly reasonable statement and hypothesis?
Stories of children either passing out or dying because they were required to wear masks during track outdoors. Or hell, walking my normal pace (quite fast), I breathe pretty heavily and the amount of oxygen my body takes in with a mask is markedly reduced versus when I'm not wearing one. It is a stark difference, and one I hope I never have to experience again due to disproportionate government and private business mandates rooted in paranoia around the most absurdly low risk levels for the majority of age groups.
> Stories about children either passing out or dying because they were required to wear masks.
Do you have any citations for these events, because they seem to be absurd misinformation.
The country I'm in (Singapore) has legally required masks in public since last year (as have many other countries) so everyone is wearing masks, and so far, I have not heard of a single case of people suffering due to wearing masks.
In fact, I even wear my mask when I go running and I have never felt any significant issues with breathing, even after hours of vigorous exercise.
If masks could reliably cause breathing issues in any significant way, given the number of people in the world who are wearing masks every day, we should expect a statistically significant number of such cases, not just a few cherry-picked anecdotes.
Heightened levels of CO2 are negligible in a mask. You aren't supposed to wear a mask 24/7. You wear a mask a strategic times like when you are inside, shopping or in a crowd. If you are outside away from people or crowds you don't need to wear a mask. Besides it's obvious that wearing a mask protects others. All you need to do is watch a video of a sneeze with and without a mask on to figure that out.
There's a lot of evidence that masks protect against bacteria, but the jury's still out for viruses. Also, you are correct that people should be strategic, but a lot of people aren't, and they are not changing their masks regularly as they should be.
I'm sorry but you're not making any sense defending your straw man. You're flip flopping your arguments so I can just recursively revert you to my initial answer.
> I think if we approach the problem with that in mind we might win more people over than telling them "listen to experts", since for the past year and a half experts have been wrong almost as often as they have been right.
I was educated to fear more those who are never wrong.
I'm in Canada. I don't like the policy of one dose for everyone first. I believe the right thing to do is to vaccinate the most vulnerable groups with two shots first. So, what I'm doing is waiting until second doses are being offered to my age group before signing up for my first dose. I'm not anti-vax by any means, but that doesn't mean I think the government is doing a superlative job either.
Something I haven't seen discussed is what would have happened if the initial shots went to the 20-35 year old crowd (the ones that are out and about, partying, and have a number of super spreaders in that cohort)? Would that have done more to stop the virus spread then to vaccinate the more vulnerable (but already self isolated) people first? This would never be an option politically, but I'd like to know if it would have had a better shot of stopping the virus spread?
Frankly, governments have done the world a disservice by speaking before they really had all the information at the start of the pandemic.
They were doing the best they could to manage a crisis that it was their job to manage in an unprecedented situation. If people expected them to have perfect answers and solutions, they had unrealistic expectations.
Yeah, I don't get this "lost trust" line, that's like a military commander telling his soldiers to go left, then when gunfire comes from the left, tells them to go right, but the soldiers object to his new order and lose confidence in him because he already said go left.
Their best wasn’t very good. First thing is shut down flights from China. I mean it is a no brainier and I distinctly remember thinking wtf as we all waited and twiddled our thumbs because WHO said it wasn’t a pandemic yet. Yes we know it’s not a pandemic yet which happens to be the optimum time to act decisively so it doesn’t become one. Inexcusable.
Yes, I couldn't get it either. The whole world was watching China in horror fight with the virus and at the same time the planes traveled easily to and from China for a long time as if nothing was happening. As if someone really wanted to invite the inevitable.
This is certifiably untrue. You should take a look at the "traditional" anti-vaxxers, who are a very small minority, and compare them to the recent ones, who are much, much larger.
The archetype of a current anti-covid-vaxxer is one who had no problem getting their kids vaccinated for polio, for DTAP, the chickenpox, and usually had no hesitation about getting the annual flu shot.
These people are categorically different, and much more numerous, than the tinfoil-hat-vaccines-cause-autism crowd.
One should surmise that the motivations are also categorically different, and I think you'll find if you actually speak to them, that distrust of the enormous governmental and institutional pressure is a significant factor.
> The archetype of a current anti-covid-vaxxer [...] usually had no hesitation about getting the annual flu shot.
Really? At least around here, flu vaccination rates aren't very high. I don't have data, but there's plenty of potential for overlap between anti-covid-vaxxers and people who don't get flu shots (most of which are perfectly normal).
Some is the opposite: people know they are safe with or without it, and because there an infinitesimally small risk and very little direct personal benefit for young healthy people and then make the “rational” but myopic choice to not get vaccinated. The benefits are mostly to communities and older people, healthcare and other essential workers. A less myopic self interested rationalist might decide that despite it having a slight risk and negligible direct personal benefit for young healthy people, for the community it’s much better if everyone gets vaccinated, even young low risk people.
I think the problem is more that they don’t understand that it is not a zero sum game of getting vaccinated with a tiny but some chance for adverse side-effects vs going on with life. It is taking a vaccine with 90%+ rate of success with exceedingly small side effects vs having a kind of high chance of getting a virus that has yet again quite a high chance of not being “just a flu” and causing long-lasting (perhaps even for a lifetime) health issues.
Of course we ideally should also take into account the community benefits, but even on a personal level it is a net plus.
Hmmm, here I thought the problem is we rushed a vaccine which would usually take 7-10 years to get approved through, and are now spreading propaganda like "this vaccine is safe", instead of acknowledging the fact that no vaccine or other pharmacological treatment is ever "safe". There is no free lunch. We simply don't know what the long term side effects of the vaccine will be, because we've never been allowed to put mRNA inside humans before. The cat is now out of the bag. We will see in about 6-10 years, what long term damage will result in our organs and long term health outcomes as a result of this mass experiment. Also, I hope you understand that the 90% effectiveness rate you quote, is effectiveness of "treating your symptoms" so they're not so bad as to put you in critical condition inside a hospital. I fear most people who don't do any reading about the vaccines, believe the 90% efficacy number as touted by their medical practitioner, means that they will have a 90% chance that they won't contract the virus. Most of the highly educated people I work with, believe once they have the vaccine they no longer can contract or spread the virus.
> Like, having this magic, absolutely mind boggling potion that prevents serious illness and death isn't already the lottery win of our lifetime??
No, because a lot of people trust their friends or personal gurus more than any scientist or research. It doesn't matter what crap their social bubble is filled with, they can relate more to it.
I would say in 2021, I'm definitely seeing science more as a religion than a practice. The political response to the virus has been eye opening. At least it's more clear now to me, who writes checks to whom, and for which published papers.
Because religions are still dangerous animals, if you would indulge this metaphor. Just because we managed to declaw and tame one (values of Enlightenment supplanting values of Christianity), it does not mean that we can treat all of them imprudently.
I suggest that you are arguing from the point-of-view that "my $ANIMAL is well-behaved and has not and would not hurt anyone". Is that true?
Removing religion completely has been tried in a larger scale experiment in the Soviet Union and the results were very much worse than the most barbaric religions.
When arguing about religion one shouldn't forget that they have a number of good attributes as well.
Otherwise you are just fighting against a straw man and then it is no wonder why you win every single time : )
Besides:
> Just because we managed to declaw and tame one (values of Enlightenment supplanting values of Christianity)
This is putting the cart before the horse.
It wasn't enlightenment that ended blood revenge, brought herbs and fruits and medicine and and and to Europe.
It was monks.
Enlightenment grew out of the fertile soil of literacy and surplus and relative peace and quiet that this created, not the other way around.
> Removing religion completely has been tried in a larger scale experiment in the Soviet Union and the results were very much worse than the most barbaric religions.
What am I supposed to say here? "Good thing I'm not Stalin"? Just because he's against religion, too, does not mean I want to use his methods.
> When arguing about religion one shouldn't forget that they have a number of good attributes as well.
I've heard that often, but that argument isn't very good. When the $ANIMAL mauls the offspring, one does not reminisce about how well it plays fetch, this does not counter-weight or undo the damage.
It is entirely possible to have the good attributes (let's say social cohesion or introspective peace of mind) entirely divorced from the gods-and-religion business (let's say by joining the local ping-pong club or taking up a meditative practice). I posit there is no attribute that uniquely belongs to religion and cannot be had otherwise.
> [monks] ended blood revenge, brought herbs and fruits and medicine and and and to Europe.
That result is a function of smart and persuasive people, not a function of belief in and worship of Yahweh. Mentally substitute the monks for hypothetical missionaries adhering to Voltaire/Smith/Kant &c., we could imagine the result is similar, just without the gods-and-religion business.
> Enlightenment grew out of the fertile soil of literacy and surplus and relative peace and quiet that this created, not the other way around.
I did not say that this fertile soil grew out of Enlightenment. I said that values of Enlightenment supplanted values of Christianity.
> What am I supposed to say here? "Good thing I'm not Stalin"? Just because he's against religion, too, does not mean I want to use his methods.
Maybe you should then extend the same courtesy to us who have religions too then? After all most of us aren't Spanish inquisitors.
> Mentally substitute the monks for hypothetical missionaries adhering to Voltaire/Smith/Kant &c., we could imagine the result is similar, just without the gods-and-religion business.
Yeah and if cats were dogs they would bark.
Mentally substitute Nelson Mandela with Hitler and South Africa wouldn't have a Nobel prize winner.
> I didn't say
No, but you said:
> Just because we managed to declaw and tame one (values of Enlightenment supplanting values of Christianity)
I'm pointing out that the peace
came with Christianity.
There is a vast gulf between what is preached and what adherents do or don't do. Knowing human nature, I think all religions have suffered abuse in the form of having peace on paper, but inciting hate through opportunists.
And as I mentioned to you earlier: non-religious have been even (and is) even worse.
Just because you aren't evil doesn't mean the rest of us will happily accept that you can argue from a position where everything bad a religious person said or did is held against us while simultaneously nothing bad that non-religious people did can be held against you.
Choose one option.
I know this is hard but this isn't young atheists debate club.
We are real humans and some of us have experienced too much good to just let you or others try to tear it apart.
Hmm yes that's a time the catholics created that most don't agree with. It's widely considered a time when evil ruled the religions. And biblically there will be religions that do not follow what is preached. Which is what I said. Nowhere in Catholicism or Christianity does it preach hate or war. Now how people interpret things are up to them.
> Ahlam Tamimi bombing
This would be that one religion preaching that if people don't convert, kill them.
> wars of suppression against Bön
I have not read the Bonop canon, so can't speak for this. This could either be a group not listening to their faith, or yet another preaching hate.
Assume for a minute that you don't believe in God.
Then explain how religion is not used to control (read: enforce moral standards).
God himself throws a temper and kills entire cities when they don't obey him, like any good dad would do, am I right? Murder their kids if they misbehave... (Sodom/Gomorrah).
Cause that’s the whole story right? Both of those cities weren’t destroying humanity at the time right? Have you read the part about cutting off your hand if it causes you to sin? Do you understand that saying your human body is who you are is equivalent to saying your name defines you? Do you understand religion at all other than some minor studying you’ve not really done?
> Assume for a minute that you don't believe in God.
Then explain how religion is not used to control (read: enforce moral standards).
Is this how you also explain laws? As control? What about discipline? Is this also control? Clearly both are. Do you now understand how control != bad? What argument are you trying to make exactly? Anarchy? But you'll also note, in religion it's said you will try to not sin and fail. And always be forgiven. So there's no punishment here. None. So you're arguing against discipline, laws, morality and civilization in general.
Digging into the <60yo cohort, it's shockingly uncommon to find one who wasn't obese.
A year of largely ineffective masking hysteria and not one noteworthy public health figure suggested putting down the donut to reduce the risk of death from COVID-19.
We shuttered gyms and discouraged outdoor activity instead.
What about that broadway actor who was 40 or so, young kid, had his leg amputated spent like 120 days in ICU and didn't make it? Pretty sure he wasn't obese.
At least once a week, I have an adult discussion based on facts and lived truths with antivaxers, many of whom are registered nurses in the US. Why are they labeled antivaxers by society (that's usually my first question). The response generally comes down to the greater society not understanding the negative health outcomes from the routine vaccinations nursing and other hospital staff have to undergo in the US. I'll tell you what a virologist at the Cleveland Clinic told one of these RNs who cannot get the flu or other vaccines anymore, as they now threaten her life (and that of her family's). "First, you are not crazy. You are exactly the type of patient I see day in and day out: A hospital staff member, being treated by non-virology MDs as a nut case (in many cases being dropped by the doctor's office due to lack of adherence to treatment), because you accused the vaccines you take of causing your arteritis or vasculitis. Well, you're correct. You're potentially genetically predisposed, like a substantial chunk of our population, to severely increased risk of vasculitis and ultimately death by organ failure or aneurysm, by receiving any vaccine on a regular basis. You should not get a vaccine, and nobody in your family should receive regular vaccines. Yes, your completely incurable vasculitis is likely caused by the flu vaccines you've been mandated to receive year in and year out by your employer. No, the flu vaccine is not really effective at all when you look closely at the data, especially in the population it purports to be targeting specifically (the old)."
You are guilty of a rhetorical trick. It goes like this. Some expert in ___ holds this position because he knows all about ___ wherein the person is am expert and does indeed hold the belief. The implication is that he holds the belief which is absolutely true but leaves out the fact that the belief is not only a minority position amongst the general population but even more so amongst experts meaning expertise leads one to reject the position.
The flu vaccine very very rarely causes vasculitis and almost all cases resolve favorably. One meta study of the literature identified 65 cases ever.
Meanwhile it's not unusual to see 20-60k annual deaths in the United States.
Statistically not getting a flu vaccination for fear of vasculitis is like not wearing a seat belt in case one wants to escape the car quickly in case one happens to get out quick in case you decide to drive into a lake today.
You have misunderstood the figures on flu vaccinations. It's commonly 30-60% effective at preventing infection. If this was just true about the under 65 it would still mean fewer under 65 able to spread it to 65+ but fortunately it isn't true.
Serious question, how is a vaccine passport any different from a proof of immunization (one common form being the International Certificate of Vaccination or Prophylaxis), which is standard fare for travelling to/from many countries already? We’ve been using these to combat the spread of diseases like yellow fever for years.
Because we don’t force people to get all vaccines to travel. Requiring a vaccine passport for the covid vaccine forces people to get it, which is the real reason people are advocating for it.
We’ve had COVId vaccines for ages? Where you been hiding them?
So as per your wiki article no country is requiring them. So really not sure what you’re talking about. There are absolutely some vaccines required for travel, but COVID is not one of them. Just like influenza and a whole host of other vaccines.
I'm pro the passport thing, at least for travel, so life can go back to normal and I can say fly from UK to Italy and back without 5 pcr tests and 10 days isolating in spite of being basically immune. At least the EU are bringing them in in a couple of weeks and I imagine other countries will follow.
The EU one I think allows for immunity from catching covid so if you are anti vax and want to go that route you can.
Hey great! Then you should be allowed to get one to avoid those tests and the rest of us that doesn't want one should get subjected to the tests. I'm ok with that!
I don't get it, You are immune but you can still spread the virus. What is the difference between allowing someone who is vaccinated and someone who has covid without symptoms.
Vaccinated people are far less contagious for a far shorter time. As a result they represent a far lower risk of bringing the virus in or of helping community transmission once there.
At the time vaccine rollout began we weren’t sure of this effect, but the evidence from places like Israel is showing it pretty well.
It's being introduced to countries where such measures are new and it's being used within borders. The idea is that venue operators for concerts and other events will be checking your vaccination status.
I find that Black Mirror level dystopian personally.
Israel tried a domestic one and it seemed to work ok but had become kind of redundant as they have basically got rid of covid (cases from 8000 a day to 10). It wasn't very enforced - just a bit of paper you could wave to go to the gym etc. They've scrapped it now as no longer needed.
Because people who are in the ICU because they refuse to get vaccinated are costing the taxpayer a shitload of money. I'd be all for "you can stay unvaccinated if you like, but you won't get an ICU bed if you get severe COVID", but that's a heavier hand than a passport.
That's ridiculous. We don't expect people to get flu vaccines before extending medical care. We don't even expect basic sexual hygiene and extend extremely expensive HIV treatments to people who have tempted fate much, much more seriously than skipping a vaccince.
It's a concerning precedent. These rights to travel, to enter a store and so on were never restricted before but now they may be.
What about me, should I risk shot number two now that I've seen a flame heme show up on a routine retina scan just yesterday and am reading that this is one of the things they are seeing increase from the AZ vaccine? Will I be limited in travel and employment if I don't?
Well in my country we don’t care because we’ll just borrow or print more and tax while we’re at it. I can’t count how many times Biden said “not spending enough”. So I guess I misspoke, we do care about how much we spend, but mostly that it’s as large as possible so we can use it as an excuse to increase taxes further.
I am not a lawyer, nor a public health legal expert but I think there is a significant legal difference between COVID and ordinary vaccine requirements because the COVID vaccines are only authorized for emergency use.
I think schools and colleges requiring vaccination are also offering accommodations (distance learning, etc.) to avoid legal fights, while if the vaccines were fully authorized they would not.
> because the COVID vaccines are only authorized for emergency use.
This is only a technical, legal distinction. They have been administered rapidly to a significant fraction of the population; their specific legal status is mostly irrelevant at this point.
They are GA in practice, the release has been cut and people are running it. Paper pushers slapping an ass-covering "beta" on the splash screen are behind the times.
It's already been the case that various countries require certain vaccines to enter, or other health clearances. These kinds of standards and even more exceptional for animals, and ultra protective for plants. Why is this any different? Why wouldn't you want someone protected from bringing a (newly) preventable disease into your country?
I don’t think there’s any central storage for ICVPs today. As far as I know the records are just held by whoever normally holds your health records - the WHO trusts centres to only certify responsibly.
There’s no such thing as HIPPA. It’s HIPAA. And it’s nowhere near as broad in terms of privacy as most people believe - it’s extremely targeted in that regard.
The "magic" from vaccinations comes from vaccinating most of the population so that the epidemic fizzles out. In that scenario it doesn't matter that much whether you personally are vaccinated or not. An unvaccinated person benefits from herd immunity like a vaccinated person does.
From the viewpoint of a healthy young person, the risk/reward ratio of taking a vaccine is bad.
> From the viewpoint of a healthy young person, the risk/reward ratio of taking a vaccine is bad.
Absolutely false. The disease can and does have severe and sometimes long-lasting impacts on young healthy people. The mRNA vaccines don't have any impact worse than a sore arm.
And we aren't getting to a herd immunity level of vaccination if young people are unvaccinated.
> The mRNA vaccines don't have any impact worse than a sore arm.
Lets not go too far with statements like that. People with history of allergic reactions are told to not take it, and the Pfizer–BioNTech mRNA has a rate of about eleven cases per million doses of vaccine administered.
As with any medicine, there are a risk/reward aspect to it. If you take a over-the-counter pain pill there is a small but detectable risk of getting a serious side effect. Most people still take it because the reward out weight the risk.
I would rather go with the carrot then the stick when it comes to getting people vaccinated. Getting a vaccination protects against some of the really unlucky consequences of covid, including permanent injuries like decreased lung capacity. The risk involving the vaccine is to my understanding much lower, so the math comes out in favor of the vaccine.
> People with history of allergic reactions are told to not take it
Then they should not get the vaccine and be shielded by herd immunity. There are also several other illnesses which are not compatible with vaccinations but the number of those people are small. So healthy people should partake in the vaccination as for them, the risk-reward ratio is definitely worth it.
Risk reward ratio is not a decision, it’s an objective measure. It’s a different question what and how can be forced on people, but the issue is clear: healthy people should get vaccinated.
Why don’t we just let the healthy people decide for themselves?
Do you know everybody’s medical condition? Are you a physician or nurse in any way? You’re just regurgitating Fauci’s ramblings without regard to individuals concerns demanding they get the vaccine. How many people do you think you’ve convinced to get the vaccine?
Does a layperson know about how his/her condition is relevant to vaccination? No. They will ask a doctor about that - who will give them an answer whether they can or can’t get the vaccine. And I’m not even living in the US, I’m just not crazy and know that it is the only way to protect ourselves and our community.
> Does a layperson know about how his/her condition is relevant to vaccination?
Hmm, maybe this is what you do, but do you really thing everybody goes to the Dr for everything? Some people are well within the means of deciding for themselves, some not. And when you have the “top” Dr in the nation failing to build trust by opening his mouth before he’s sure then all sane people have is themselves. It’s insane to me how many people blindly trust the vaccine when we have new information nearly weekly about how it effects different cohorts differently. But we’re sure it’s safe right? No, the reality is people don’t care if someone gets the vaccine and dies, “just do your duty”. I’m good.
> The disease can and does have severe and sometimes long-lasting impacts on young healthy people.
The context that we were discussing was "achieved herd immunity, epidemic goes away". In that context the healthy young people do not get any severe and long-lasting impacts, because they don't get the disease at all, thanks to the herd immunity provided by mass vaccinations.
> And we aren't getting to a herd immunity level of vaccination if young people are unvaccinated.
This is true. If you were to say "it's your responsibility to take a vaccine, even though the risk/reward ratio is bad", then that would be an argument that I would respect. However, that's not the argument you're making. You're trying to claim that the risk/reward ratio from a personal standpoint is good, which I disagree with.
> The mRNA vaccines don't have any impact worse than a sore arm.
This is false. I personally know people who have had considerable side effects from the vaccine ("getting sick").
That said, I'm personally taking the vaccine today.
> The mRNA vaccines don't have any impact worse than a sore arm.
This is just logically untrue. The absolute most you can claim is that "these vaccines don't have any impact worse than a sore arm, that we know of, within the 18 month period that they've been available". Neither you nor anyone else can speak to long-term effects until we wait it out and see, nevermind true "unknown unknowns".
But why are we only considering vaccination with regards to herd immunity. Shouldn't we also be including natural immunity from previous covid infection?
Because, for example in Canada, there have been 1.4 million total cases of Covid over the last year which has on multiple occasions stretched particularly ICU capacity to the limit. In a much shorter time period we have administered 27.7 million doses of vaccines. We give more doses every 3 days than we had cases in 14 months. Natural immunity is almost negligible compared to vaccination. Getting to herd immunity levels with actual infection will result in hundreds of thousands of deaths and damage our health (and healthcare system) for decades.
It has been demonstrated that repeated infections are possible and may be common. And there are a large number of variants in the wild that are not hindered by immune systems previously exposed to other variants. Allowing the virus to spread in populations causes even more variants to emerge.
Even vaccines provide reduced protection from new variants. I read today that most effective vaccine only provides a ~70% chance or so of protection from the Delta variant in the UK. Hence the talk of booster shots before the initial vaccines were rolled out.
Herd immunity comes from vaccination. It's not really feasible for it to occur naturally because the virus will continue to mutate and reinfect people indefinitely.
Sure, until the vaccination rate falls below the herd immunity threshold, whereupon outbreaks pretty much immediately occur. This has been seen repeatedly with measles, for example, as it is highly transmissible and it doesn’t take much of a drop in vaccination rates to make outbreaks likely.
Not taking a vaccine if you’re young and healthy is a purely selfish move. Not taking a vaccine should be reserved for only those people who cannot take a vaccine: those who are far too young, or who are immunocompromised. Everyone else should vaccinate to protect the truly vulnerable.
> Not taking a vaccine if you’re young and healthy is a purely selfish move. Not taking a vaccine should be reserved for only those people who cannot take a vaccine: those who are far too young, or who are immunocompromised. Everyone else should vaccinate to protect the truly vulnerable.
I fully agree! So be honest and make that argument! Don't say "taking this vaccine is good for you", be honest and say "taking this vaccine is not necessarily that good for you, but we all have a responsibility to do it, and then we all benefit from herd immunity".
> Not taking a vaccine if you’re young and healthy is a purely selfish move. Not taking a vaccine should be reserved for only those people who cannot take a vaccine…
Why does this always resort to force and control? Do you really not understand how that just turns people off?
Turn people off? Feel free to be turned off, no-one is doing this for fun. The whole point is doing your duty to protect the vulnerable.
It's crazy to me that I see more insane opinions on HN about this than on reddit. Always considered HN a more rational crowd but I'm very disappointed by the users in this thread.
> The whole point is doing your duty to protect the vulnerable.
I wish that was the point, but it's not. You can see in this very thread people who are disingenuously arguing that the personal risk/reward ratio of these vaccines is good, as opposed to arguing for moral duty.
> The whole point is doing your duty to protect the vulnerable.
By potentially harming myself? Who exactly charged me with this duty and was it by my choice?
Do you assume that HN harbors the same groupthink that reddit does? Do you not want discourse? Do you assume all others believe what you believe (that we have some obligation to potentially harm ourselves for the good of the many thing)? That’s exactly what I love about HN, that thing called diversity.
Also your attempt to shame me into alignment of your believes failed.
>> From the viewpoint of a healthy young person, the risk/reward ratio of taking a vaccine is bad.
You are right, all those children 60 years ago shouldn't have gotten the polio vaccine, look at them now, being disabled and whatnot, that vaccine was super risky /s
No way. We need nearly everyone to get the vaccine, with the abstainers purely randomly distributed, in order to reach herd immunity, which we aren't going to reach, so it's going to keep spreading endemically, indefinitely. If you aren't vaccinated, you will inevitably get it, if not this winter, than the next, or the next.
Even for healthy young people, the risk of the vaccine is orders and orders of magnitude less than the risk of the virus. This is true almost by construction, because it's strictly less spike protein.
I disagree with your assessment regarding herd immunity. I expect Finland to reach herd immunity this year, with occasional outbreaks in following years. In this scenario, the risk of an individual contracting the disease is minuscule. That makes the risk/reward ratio of personal vaccination... not that good.
> Thank you, Linus for standing up to the wealth of misinformation out there and holding his ground.
Being a pompous ass might feel good, especially when you think you are (or you actually are) smarter than your opponent, but it won't sway anyone. In fact, it does quite the opposite. If you're seriously trying to convince someone they're wrong, you need to be kind, be patient, and have a calm, productive discussion -- explaining how traditional vaccines work, how mRNA works, how DNA works, and so on.
Yelling at someone on a mailing list will undoubtedly push them further into their comfortable anti-vax bubble. Linus is absolutely wrong to behave this way, but then again, emotional intelligence isn't really his (or HN's for that matter) forte.
Linus is not in the wrong here. You have an anti-vax spouting BS on the Linux Kernel dev list of all places. It's absolutely not the right venue for that. He could have just expelled the idiot from the list. He chose not to do that.
Some people will listen to (perceived) authority. Linus has a large following. It's fair to say that a non-zero number of individuals may be persuaded by his strong stance. I doubt the person that he was replying to will listen to anything, but if anyone else does, it's a win.
If someone is claiming that a person is "shedding" mRNA, the point of education is gone. It's ok if someone says they are unsure about this 'new' technology - you can then sit down with them calmly and explain how all of this works.
However, if they are just parroting anti-vax talking points, they should be shutdown and quick. They have long stopped listening to reason, and are on the "vaccines cause magnetism" territory. They are actively trying to spread even more misinformation. This should be contained just like we contain viruses.
It's not really up for debate. Don't like a particular vaccine? Try to get another one if you can. Don't try to prevent others from getting it based on superstition.
> They are actively trying to spread even more misinformation. This should be contained just like we contain viruses.
It's not really up for debate. Don't like a particular vaccine? Try to get another one if you can.
Here we are again with the force and control. Shutting down “misinformation” means you must be able to define what “misinformation” is. We’ve made mistakes on this many times historically and we still have groups of people running around and saying “shut up and listen”. nothing will get accomplished like this.
> Don't try to prevent others from getting it based on superstition.
> They are actively trying to spread even more misinformation. This should be contained just like we contain viruses.
This is the original definition of "meme" rooted in evolutionary biology. Disinfecting with liberal doses of reason, frequently, and vehemently is certainly warranted.
> If you're seriously trying to convince someone they're wrong, you need to be kind, be patient, and have a calm, productive discussion
I am doubtful someone spreading anti-vax nonsense can be convinced they’re wrong. (Emphasis on spreading, not just believing or questioning.)
What one can do is inhibit the spread of their misinformation. For that purpose, given the stakes, being direct to the point of roughness can be warranted.
You would need to consult with the original poster to be certain of that. What Linus posted included important facts such as the large number of lives saved and the shared nature of viral immunity. You are reacting primarily to tone as if health in a social context is purely about good feelings.
When Linus starts out with "Please keep your insane" - the reader/original poster will enter a defensive mode.
Imagine that internal monologue - "Am I insane? I'm smart? I'm an analytic person. Why is he calling me insane? HE'S the insane one!"
Because Linus thinks this is a logical fight. But it's not.
Information is _not_ all that's needed to be persuaded. And if he really care about the vax effort, his efforts would be focused on pulling others over to the vax side, not drawing the line thicker by belittling comments.
> When Linus starts out with "Please keep your insane" - the reader/original poster will enter a defensive mode
You're assuming the goal is convincing the original poster. Given that goal, you are correct.
The counterargument: OP doesn't matter. Their effect on third parties is key. Reasonably engaging with OP validates their thinking. (Which, to reiterate, is nonsense.) Yes– calm, patient rhetoric has a higher chance of succeeding with them. But it's also likely to leave bystanders neutral or open to OP's arguments. Excoriating OP guarantees they'll hate you. But it increases the chance that third parties get the message.
You're a good soul. You care about OP. We're...well, we're bastards. To us, OP is beyond saving. What matters is the people around her. The people on the internet, who might passively read her drivel and believe it and skip vaccination. There are more of them than there are her, and they–unlike her–didn't choose to be in their position.
Why would you assume belittling and yelling would silence the OP?
It only stands to redirect the effort. They may stop posting on the list, but Linus has done none of the hard work of persuasion, so they will post elsewhere.
Again, he does the movement zero favors. All the privilege in the world to bring someone over, and he pisses it away.
What other options does Linus have by your logic, then?
1) remove the person's comments
2) let the person's comments stand unchallenged
3) engage in a lengthy, potentially endless discussion with this person who is highly unlikely to change their mind
None of these seem like great options.
Linus probably recognizes that he has virtually zero chance of persuading this person's opinion. He probably also recognizes that a reader who comes across these outlandish claims unchallenged may get the wrong impression that these views are somehow being embraced by the community. As such he is absolutely correct in briefly explaining that the vaccines are safe and effective.
And being a pompous ass is kinda Linus' thing. :shrug:
> No it doesn't. The entire history of Western Liberalism—since the Magna Carta onwards—teaches us that censorship is quite literally never the answer.
What do you mean by "works"? Deplatforming seems to work if it's goal is to simply limit the spread of a message. Whether or not that's good or bad is a separate question. Do you think Alex Jones has just as big of a viewership as when he was on Youtube? Are there just as many people who know what Trump was talking about last week, now that he's gone from Twitter? Big platforms give those with followings an opportunity to reach even more people.
> Deplatforming seems to work if it's goal is to simply limit the spread of a message.
Deplatforming seems to work if it's goal is to simply limit free speech and control the narrative. There fixed that for you.
> Alex Jones has just as big of a viewership as when he was on Youtube?
Alex Jones got his youtube viewership from his radio show, he’s still quite active. All this did was prove those that believed him that he’s correct. It will still spread as it did before youtube.
> Are there just as many people who know what Trump was talking about last week, now that he's gone from Twitter?
And how many people you think are upset by this? Do you think that the left can just shut someone like Trump off from the every platform and everything’s just gonna be hunky dory? This one action alone is one of the major contributing factors to this anti vax movement. The left blew the divide up.
> Deplatforming seems to work if it's goal is to simply limit free speech
You're still perfectly free to spew your crazy, you just don't get to stand on my lawn to do so.
Good, old-fashioned conservative value that. You have never had a right to use someone else's infrastructure like this, and hopefully never will, as that is a scary precedent that doesn't respect the rights of creators and owners of such platforms.
So by mentioning conservative value you assume I’m on the right? I don’t agree that someone should be able to give some people a megaphone, but not others.
If it’s my megaphone I’ll do what I like with it, particularly if what you want to do with it is likely to incite violence or spread (for example) dangerous health misinformation during a pandemic.
You seem to be repeating the current right wing grievances. If you’re not on the right then... ok.
> If it’s my megaphone I’ll do what I like with it, particularly if what you want to do with it is likely to incite violence or spread (for example) dangerous health misinformation during a pandemic.
Got it, so if we don’t agree with how something is used we shut it down. Republicans attempted this before with bakeries, so I guess this means it’s ok now?
And the inciting violence thing, you realize that’s a left belief yes?
If it’s my thing and I don’t agree with how you’re using it - 100%. Particularly if you’re (for instance) spreading medical misinformation during a pandemic.
The content being spread should not matter. Humans are not so perfect they’re never wrong. There was even an article recently about youtube removing content of MDs and PhDs doing research on COVID treatments. Yet they were removed for not fitting the mainstream ideas. So when you’re doing new research how do you discern the difference between misinformation and new information when you’re literally on the edge of what’s known? This implies the person doing the removal of content knows more than the SME. Do you see the problem? Not to mention historically it doesn’t work out well for those “burning books”
> No it doesn't. The entire history of Western Liberalism—since the Magna Carta onwards—teaches us that censorship is quite literally never the answer.
There is basically almost no precedent to todays problem of misinformation spread, so historical examples are near useless.
Censorship is a trivial problem to overcome in the modern world contrary to the last century’s vision, one can’t really hide anything on the internet. The censored information itself will be available in some way. What is much more effective in preventing information flow is the other direction, obfuscation or overloading of information.
A great example of it is an older Russian voting fraud, where video footage leaked of a man repeatedly throwing in ballots. It got quickly shared over Twitter with the name of the town in hashtags — there was no chance of censoring that. The solution was to spam twitter with unrelated bullshit with #NameOfTown, effectively putting out the flame.
And unfortunately bullshit like antivaxx, anti-climatechange, and political campaigns do use this technique very effectively to counter the usually more complex scientific arguments. People prefer taking only a few logical steps instead of the whole “we create the replica of parts of the virus by injecting the …”. Unfortunately I don’t know what would be a solution to this. Perhaps better education..
Per your own link, the earliest use of this technique is ~1920, so bringing up the Magna Carta is not too generous. And it is naive to state that the only difference is everyone having a printing press — there are emergent qualities and we have only begun to discover what this new way of communication means on a global scale.
And you’re wrong again, there’s even a story in the Bible about the tower of babel. Same exact thing. When humans, all humans, can communicate easily and quickly it’s dangerous.
How is tower of Babel relevant? It’s about why do we speak different languages. How is anything done in the previous tens of thousands of years similar to ordering a bunch of bots to say what I want? When could an arbitrary algorithm decide what is seen by whom, completely opaque to almost everyone? Yeah sure the Church censored some shit. But that’s not at all similar to youtube/facebook’s algorithm and it’s dishonest to say so.
It’s relevant because the reason the languages were confounded was for the exact same problem we have today. Too many people with a megaphone. Too easy to spread information, good or bad.
Please point to where I’ve mentioned either facebook or youtube. No idea where this is coming from.
This is a good point. Such comments (Linus') are much more for preaching to the choir than to try and change people's minds.
One thing I'd add (or hypothesize anyway) is that in these kind of debates, I don't believe the crux of the disagreement is a misunderstanding of the technical points of why it works. It's more a natural reaction to people being told they have to do something, that causes an adverse reaction in many people (for clarity, being told causes the reaction, I'm not talking about the vaccine). So people end up pushing back, which includes aggressively and sometimes even ridiculously questioning the underlying facts.
The same holds for climate change for example. People get caught, often untenably, in the minutia of the technical arguments, when it has much more to do imo with a debate over wealth redistribution or rolling back standard of living. Decoupling the political aspects about what we should do as a response, from the scientific aspects of cause and effect would go a long way. The problem though would be in that case, politicians would lose the "science tells us" rhetorical device, and actually have to have an adult conversation with their constituents about how we move forward
It's not Linus job to give anti-vax people a platform on a kernel mailing list. It's his job to nip it in the bud and let them know why he will cut them from the list if they keep up the garbage antivax rhetoric.
I agreed with you until the last paragraph, where it seems to me like you just fell into the trap you were warning us about. Not sure if that was your intention, but that's what it looks like.
The first part is definitely true though. Calling somebody an idiot is probably one of the worst ways to get them to agree with you, even if they are spouting idiocy. I won't pretend I have a solution to anti-vax beliefs, but simply calling them stupid won't make them disappear.
Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice. (Greys Law.)
At this point in the pandemic, people really ought to know better, it's assumed they are bad actors. knowing that, It's hard to "be kind, be patient, and have a calm, productive discussion."
Maybe so, but I've observed that attitude to be far more prevalent on the anti-vax side than the pro-science side. You don't really see people who advocate for the vaccine calling anyone who disagrees "sheeple," "NPCs," etc., nor do they whine about downvotes or "being silenced," or misattribute moderation to first amendment violations.
> You don't really see people who advocate for the vaccine calling anyone who disagrees "sheeple," "NPCs," etc
No, the rough equivalents are "anti-vaxxer" or "crazy," there's even an "insane" right at the top of the Torvalds email. And they don't tend to complain about being silenced because that's a treatment they are often advocating for others and rarely if ever see applied to themselves.
Not all vaccines are the same, so pro science and anti vaxx are not always opposed.
I am pro science, but science doesn't claim that all vaccines are safe.
And let's not forget that pharma co's have tried very hard to make vaccines mandatory, to the point of bribing academics and officials, forming unaccountable PR groups, and in the not so distant past they've done truly horrific and inhuman things.
After the lab-leak theory has gained traction recently, after being told for a year by Lancet and politicians and academics that it was "impossible", I would have thought that the idea of there being some "pro-science" monolith would have lost ground.
> I am pro science, but science doesn't claim that all vaccines are safe
Indeed. But science does claim that Pfizer, Moderna, etc COVID-vaccines are safe and you are un-scientific if you claim otherwise. They went through proper trials, and were accepted independently* by many countries.
* not completely independently I’m sure, but my point is that even if you don’t trust your country at all, several other ones decided univocally that it is safe
Claims != science. Any company is free to make any claim they want, and they can offer proof in the form of trials. These trials help us form opinions on the safety of a product, however, the long-term safety profile of novel innovations takes time to verify and trials can be manipulated in many subtle ways.
The FDA and other bodies dictate what kind of testing and certification must happen before allowing the sale of such products. And in very rare cases will offer emergency approval that bypasses quite a lot of the trialing or cut short the standards that must be met.
To claim any treatment is safe and that any skepticism prior to long-term trials is unscientific... flies in the face of all reason.
Did we learn anything from: cigarrettes, Fen-Phen, Valdecoxib (Bextra), Pemoline (Cylert), Bromfenac (Duract), Levamisole (Ergamisol), Rofecoxib (Vioxx), Isotretinoin (Accutane), and many many more.
All of these products were FDA approved, a feat these vaccines are yet to achieve.
The vaccine’s matter is in your body for a day at most. The immune system is known for quite some time, and the immunization do happen. In what way could someone develop a side effect long after the vaccine? Of course medicine is data based, not necessarily about mechanisms, but at a point Occam’s razor has to apply. And either way, we would have seen by now any side effect since it has been injected into many millions for quite some time now.
Long-term effects are just that: long-term. We can't know what long-term effects the vaccines have until they have been used for a long time, even if millions have had them.
> New vaccines usually take 6-7 years to complete clinical trials
Not necessarily. The yearly updated flu shot doesn’t for example. This case is similar, the novel technique itself was in development for a decade now with different parts having been clinically tested.
Have we watched the same Linus for the past few decades?
This is very tame, all things considered, and he does take the time to try and educate the individual on the matter. I for one appreciate him doing this.
He doesn’t need to because as he notes, the virus is waning because better people are getting the mRNA version, not just full blown covid which the non-vaccinated will be getting on random occasions many months or even years from now.
No he is shaming a person who needs shaming, they think they can project their BS without getting fact checked. It doesn't work like that, you are gonna have to have a thick skin if you want STEM people to listen to your anti-vax crap if that's the way you lean, that's life. Being an idiot isn't a protected group.
> explaining how traditional vaccines work, how mRNA works, how DNA works, and so on.
1) You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.
2) Lots of people do not have the brain power to understand vaccines and they will simply follow the herd.
Part of the reason anti-vax gets such a boost is because it is considered an "acceptable" position to follow by "respectable" people like the "natural is the only good stuff" dipshits in Marin county (who regularly give us Measles and Pertussis outbreaks).
Yes, you can try to reason with individuals. However, you also need to make stupid positions socially unacceptable so that the part of the herd who don't have the capacity to understand don't go following people willing to lead them off a cliff.
He actually explain things in details after bashing him, so yeah,..
also it's Linus we're talking about, people used to his direct-and-borderline-rude style already anyway.
I agree that the ideal approach is talking like grown-up, educated people and not just shouting in face, but it also depends on who're you talking to and how firm their belief in something are, too. Some require a good beating with virtual baseball bat a few times for them to start listen.. :p
That person may or may not be s lost cause but in that particular forum, Linus has all the authority he needs. He might have made an antivaxxer an even stauncher antivaxxer but the message is received by hundreds of others. I absolutely agree that this tone isn’t how you persuade someone. It’s not how you’d talk in private. But that’s not what happens here. This is hopefully a net positive despite not persuading the poster he replied to.
I like just getting up and leaving without saying anything as soon as I realize someone's position on this, even if there is social obligations involved. It's a good way to send a signal without any real drama and these people are arrogant and grating to be around anyways
There are a range of anti-vaccine opinions from idiotic (the example Linus quotes) to more reasonable. The way this issue has been handled is emblematic of the way many such political issues are handled: fringe views are promoted and "debunked" while more reasonable views that go against mainstream narratives are ignored. This is amplified by various high profile personalities in the media who shape the views people are presented with, so that all critics of the mainstream narrative appear to be lunatics. Thus stigmatizing anyone who has a more reasonable objection. This is not a new phenomenon but has played out much more frequently over the last year or so.
Also, I got the vaccine, so if you interpret this as some sort of veiled anti-vaccine comment you are part of the problem.
Do you have any examples of such 'reasonable views' that are ignored?
Because I don't. I do see a lot of reasonable objections making headlines or having a large impact. E.g. side effects halting entire campaigns for weeks, or large articles highlighting the dowsides of various vaccines, debates on particle sizes and fluid dynamics on national TV and so on.
"If
you and your family are more protected these days, it's because of all
those other people who made the right choice" I do not understand that from my point of view, what I heard what that vaccine didn't stop you from being contagious to other people.
I'm looking for an educated answer, I'm not anti-vaxx, far from it, I'm just curious about it.
Doesn't stop but reduces a lot. You are about 10x less likely to catch covid with a vaccine and about 2x less likely to spread it if you do.
Also if you compare a population of 100 million people who mostly have that 20x protection with one that doesn't and infect one person the the end result is one or two infections in the first case and about 100 million in the second.
Are "low-risk people" somehow living in an isolated society with only their kind? Or do they also have parents, grandparents, immunocompromised or overweight friends?
The ones who you could argue are at the lowest risk level – those that will have an asymptomatic infection and might not take precautions because they feel fine – are actually presenting the highest risk to every vulnerable person they encounter.
Pretty good chance you never get infected though (or at least don't get infected for a couple of years when there will be more information). Especially if you live in certain areas.
I'm vaccinated but I think it's hindsight bias to say the mRNA vaccines are obviously safe. We had to wait for clinical trials to show that. There has been a great deal of research and development on the delivery of the mRNA, what kind of molecule to wrap it in, for example.
Additionally, and someone correct me if I'm wrong, but with e.g. the Spanish Flu, the morbidity was not from the flu, per se, but the immune response to it (cytokine storm, which I believe is implicated in Covid somewhat, too). If that's the case, could the proteins coded by the mRNA potentially have kicked off such a response? I know we see that it doesn't, but could it have?
They are not "obviously safe". The mRNA vaccines just had an article today that exposed a link to heart inflammation. The AstraZeneca vaccine also has some side effects that didn't show up in their abbreviated trials. I understand why someone would be hesitant to get a vaccine that only has Emergency Use Authorization.
That said, I personally believe that the benefits outweigh the potential side-effects. If I weren't already vaccinated this news would not have have changed my decision to get a mRNA vaccine.
I'm concerned, especially in the tech community, that there is so much aggravation toward a group that wants more data before making a decision that could have long term repercussions. The CDC has a page describing past vaccine safety issues, the most recent being 2013[0]. Errors include unexpected side effects or complicates and manufacturing issues.
The treatment being offered is unlike any other mainstream protocol, has not completed the FDA approval process that every other vaccine that's given to the general population (in the US) has gone through.
Add to that counter-intuitive advice being given by medical professionals. When I was young, I had chicken pox. I was never offered the vaccine that my children have received. However, previously infected people are being urged to undergo this treatment. I could do the primary research to determine _why_ that is the case, or those urging everyone to participate can explain clearly why it's different this time.
I don't like the language chosen, which, to me, obscures the idea that what is being offered is like a yearly flu vaccine or any other dead/disabled/controlled viral vaccine. I've read that there are vaccines for SARS-CoV2 that are similar to what normally comes to mind, but they are not available in my country.
mRNA research is awesome. The technique is very cool, but beyond the theoretical best case scenario, what are the failure cases for these treatments? What if the mRNA is damaged along the way. What if there are unknown issue with the delivery mechanism.
Ultimately, I am the primary income for our family and in a not-at-risk category if I were to get infected. At this time, I've decided that is a safer position for my family. I'm hoping that as FDA approval is granted and longer term affects are well known that I'll be comfortable going forward, but at this point I am not.
I'm not anti-vax, but not keen to be an early adopter for new treatment option when I'm not at danger of what I'm being protected from. There's the additional argument about protecting those that can't be vaccinated, but I'm happy to follow other hygiene protocols that have been used in practice for much longer.
The virus didn't go through the approval process either. We already know it has serious side-effects. It's self-replicating and able to spread to others. It probably wouldn't even pass animal testing.
Why would you take the higher risk of choosing the experimental virus over the experimental vaccine? It seems to me you're holding the vaccine to higher standards as the virus?
I’m treating them the same: minimizing the likelihood of them entering my body.
Also, there is 12 months more data for the virus than the vaccines. Based on available data, I’m not in an at risk group and have been tested every time I’ve knowingly had contact with anyone who has been infected.
> The CDC has a page describing past vaccine safety issues, the most recent being 2013[0].
That most recent one says there was a voluntary recall and no health problems were reported. Doesn't sound too concerning to me to be honest.
And because you mention long term effects a couple times -- how long would be long enough for you to feel okay about the safety of the vaccine, and how did you come up with this number?
The FDA has a process for approving vaccines. It seems to work reasonably well. At this point I have no issue with their process, which should, hypothetically, identify any long term effects. There currently are no preventative treatments for COVID that have completed the FDA approval process. The J&J shot at least uses a method previously used in an approved vaccine, but in that case (Ebola), the calculus probably makes more sense for those in areas prone to outbreaks.
It’s not about an arbitrary time, it’s about following an established protocol that has been used for every single other injection I’ve been given. (I’m currently going through allergy therapy, so I get a fair number of injections every month.)
All the vaccines available in the US have completed the FDA approval process, which was allowed to proceed to later stages before an earlier stage was complete, to accelerate development. The length of time passed from last trial until approval was roughly the same as for most other vaccines, from what I recall.
That is incorrect. They are available for emergency use authorization. The FDA doesn’t designate that status[0].
Only Pfizer, IIRC, has even submitted a request for approval, and that was just last month. Minimally FDA approval takes ≈6 months, but it could also take several years.
As mentioned above, the vaccines being offered in the US are unlike any other that have been approved previously for use in the general population. I don’t think other vaccines (except the Ebola vaccine for specifically J&J) are reasonable analogues.
Eh, my problem is that it's a bit of a tragedy of the commons situation. Yes, of course it's the best case scenario for an individual if 1. we eradicate COVID 2. they don't need to get vaccinated.
The problem is if we allow that sort of mentality to propagate unchallenged, then everyone wants to be one of the select few who take on zero personal risk but see all the benefit of an immunized herd. And then you don't end up with an immunized herd and society loses, tragedy-of-the-commons style.
> the Spanish Flu, the morbidity was not from the flu, per se, but the immune response to it
Sorry for being pedantic, but it’s the same as “you don’t die from being shot, but from the resulting blood loss”.
Also, we did absolutely have clinical trials — only some aspect of it was allowed to begin sooner than it otherwise would have due to the urgency. Also, the mRNA tech was in development for a decade now.
> Sorry for being pedantic, but it’s the same as “you don’t die from being shot, but from the resulting blood loss”.
I think I wasn't clear then.
With the Spanish Flu, the virus took hold in the host and multiplied. As part of the immune response, the body released cytokines, which normally help with the situation. But for reasons I don't understand, the Spanish Flu often prompted a "cytokine storm", which is an uncontrolled and excessive release of these molecules, even after the virus was cleared. Ultimately, it was these cytokines, not the virus, that overwhelmed the body and killed the patient. So what we saw with the Spanish Flu was that younger people with stronger immune systems, died more than older people with weaker ones.
But the relevance here is that the mRNA vaccines inject a ton of mRNA to induce the body to produce Spike protein, a piece of Covid, in order to teach the adaptive immune system to recognize it and produce antibodies. And so my question is, could it have been the case that these Spike proteins would induce a cytokine storm? (We see now that they don't, but I'm not sure that was clear a priori.)
In other words, I think it's important to draw the distinction between the "gun shot" and the "blood loss". With Spanish Flu, a lot of the mortality came from the blood loss. However, with Covid, it appears the "gun shot" does more damage (i.e. patients who die form Covid, continue to have high viral loads; it's not a case that the immune system is what kills them).
> If that's the case, could the proteins coded by the mRNA potentially have kicked off such a response?
Why would they?
And more specifically, why would they cause lung issues? Because that's the main problem with COVID. The virus like to bind to cells that have a specific receptors, with the vast majority contained in lung tissue.
You would expect to see major damage near the injection site if your cytokine storm theory had weight, but not much else.
If there is a mechanism that will cause side effects on mRNA vaccines, then such mechanism will also be presented in the virus. Except it's a localized, self-limited amount, as mRNA cannot replicate. Viruses can.
> If there is a mechanism that will cause side effects on mRNA vaccines, then such mechanism will also be presented in the virus.
You're forgetting about the lipids the vaccine mRNA is put into.
One big reason it took so long to create mRNA vaccines was finding a suitable lipid mix. They need to have a specific property, they need to be electrically charged in a certain way, and pretty much all lipids with that property are extremely toxic.
The equivalent lipids in the virus don't have this problem because they come from the human cell membrane and they use the spike protein to fuse. Since the vaccine doesn't have a spike protein, it needs that special charge property to be able to spill it's mRNA.
The question now is, if it took sooo long to find those lipids, just what the safety margin on them is?
Just for reference, for those that won't read the articles you link to:
The conclusion of the article is that these lipids are safe, with a recommendation for further study. The article is from 2016, no ill effects were found since then
Consider how little is actually injected into the human body (sub milligram dose mixed with saline solution), even if it was toxic, I doubt it would have any effect at this scale.
And btw, there is no difference between lipids we can make and lipids that our cells make. It's the same chemical composition.
While medicine doesn’t work like this, but what is the proposed mechanism from any sort of side effect from the minuscule amount of lipids, probably largely derived from already known substances?
> Except it's a localized, self-limited amount, as mRNA cannot replicate.
Well, hence my question about cytokine storm, since by definition that's an out of control feedback loop prompted by other cytokines and not the underlying virus any more. My question was about whether it's possible that just the spike protein could conceivably have induced that effect.
Good point about the localization of it. Though, I do feel like I read somewhere you see the Spike proteins mostly around the shoulder and in the liver, so it does travel through the blood somewhat.
Also, I was under the misunderstanding that cytokines were part of the adaptive immune system, and hence produced – I think? – in the bone marrow. If that were true, it wouldn't matter so much where the antigens were, since the B/T-Cells (getting confused on which is which) are produced elsewhere and have to make their way there anyway. And if that's the case, they'd be visiting the lungs. And, being adaptive, I thought it was something about the shape of covid and hence the antibodies that kicked off the storm in the lungs, and not necessarily the quantity or prevalence of the antigen in the lungs.
But, turns out it's part of the innate immune system, and seems like cytokines are mostly produced near the infection itself.
Not really, because your muscle where you got shot was mostly producing spike proteins. When you get the virus, it replicates in your lungs, immunity response happens there and if it’s too strong, it can destroy your lung tissue and cause death.
I saw the headline and I thought, "Why do I care what Linus has to say about vaccines? He's just a programmer!"
But then I clicked the link and realized that it was a classic Linus rant! As much as I support codes of conduct and Linus curtailing his asshole behavior regarding technical matters, I think there should be a loophole for anti-vaxxers and other nut jobs who don't care that they might transmit a deadly disease to the immunocompromised or children.
It's a bit disingenuous of you to state that anti-vax people "don't care". Have you actually engaged with any of them? They probably care a lot more than you and me about this stuff, they've just gone to the wrong conclusions.
Also, you generally support Linus curtailing his asshole behavior, but you want to make an exception for anti-vax people? Why? You want them to burrow down harder into their anti-science bunkers? Why? Is that going to make the world a better place somehow? Do _you_ care?
> It's a bit disingenuous of you to state that anti-vax people "don't care". Have you actually engaged with any of them? They probably care a lot more than you and me about this stuff, they've just gone to the wrong conclusions.
Agree.
I know some and at least two are genuinely good people, the kind that would literally and metaphorically take a bullet for for a good cause.
One of them is a qualified nurse, the other an engineer.
I think it is because they have listened to Q.
That is of course bad, but we should ask ourselves: why do good and reasonable people end up there?
Can it be because politicians and media has been caught lying and covering for each other for so long that people don't trust them anymore?
Just yesterday Glenn Greenwald published a detailed walk through of how "Trump used tear gas to remove peaceful demonstrants to take photo in front of church" has been debunked.
It is not the first. That's just another one.
How can people know who to believe?
My latest approach to this has been a very logical one:
say - for the sake of the argument - that doctors and scientists in Europe and US are in the pocket of big Pharma.
If we can agree that Iranian doctors and scientists are not, can we then agree that something else is the reason why Iran still hasn't conquered COVID-19 despite having access to Zink and vitamin D and all the cheap generic pills that are supposed to fix COVID-19 so much more reliably than the vaccines?
(i.e. there are some things one can reasonably believe even if the one who tells it to you are a known liar, but you have to judge.)
Linus rants are bad and he shouldn't do them when it comes to the integrity of the thing he's spent his life working on... but when it's about something We Can All Agree With, Right Guys, then they're good? ok lol
I haven't got one since I've had a positive last year. And I was afraid because it's new technology and too fast in delivery. However as time goes I'm not afraid of it anymore and am planning to get one.
However my country only provide sinovac or AZ. I prefer pfizer biontech or moderna.
Vaccines actually do edit the genetic code, but only of some select B-cells. And so does any other antigen that your body develops antibodies for. The process is very complicated and beautiful, and is pretty much exactly the same as in plenty of other multicellular life forms.
If you've ever wondered what's the "storage format" for all the recipes for all the different antibodies that your body produces, that is how does your body even remember infections from years ago - it's DNA, and the recipes are generated via a massively sped up internal evolution, mediated by T cells. The process of maturing B-cells is kind of similar to machine learning. The matured B-cells are then safely stashed away in the bone marrow. Really remarkable stuff.
(I understand that Linus meant that the vaccine mRNA is not reverse transcribed into the host DNA, and that is of course the case. Also, a side note: the human genome is littered with viral genetic material accumulated over time, god knows if it's for good or for bad, we're still too dumb to answer such questions)
I think this is not a good way of representing things. When you say "vaccines edit the genetic code", most listeners would understand it that the vaccines actively and directly change your genes. This is of course what is not happenig. And as many people claim that mRNA vaccines perform genetic manipulation, I would even claim it is dangerous to say.
I think, the correct way to phrase it is: an immune reaction, be it against a vaccine or an infection is expressed in genetic changes of some cells. But this is how the immune system works, nothing specific to vaccines. Vaccines are just a safe and efficient way to trigger the immune response.
No, vaccines do not rewrite the genome, even in immune cells. The immune cells are constantly rewriting their own genetic code, with or without antigens (vaccines). The vaccines simply cause the cells with an appropriately rewritten code to be selected for, and increase in number.
That feels like a stretch to me. Your statement is a bit like saying a big bag of labelled images edits the ‘code’ of a [neural network] computer program to make it recognise images. But everyday speech means something different by ‘editing code’. The genetic material of the B-cells, used to generate antibodies, does not come from the vaccine which contains genetic material used to generate antigens.
> the human genome is littered with viral genetic material accumulated over time, god knows if it's for good or for bad
In some cases, we know too, e.g. synctin-1 [1] is a viral protein coded by a gene integrated into the primate germ line some 25 million years ago and repurposed by our bodies to facilitate cell fusion in the development of the placenta.
But, I don't think some software systems are far off, particularly if you are a bit more permissive with the boundaries of a "system". I don't know really how to compare such apples to oranges, but the genetic material of a human is just a single gigabyte. Now i know that a gigabyte C++ program is not on par with a gigabyte of DNA, but a terabyte of code? Maybe? We're definitely at the terabytes of code range if you look at the internet as a whole. You can also add the deep ML models, they're easily in the gigabyte ranges.
Of course the complexity in the protein-based lifeform comes from the massive parallelism of the code execution (every single cell and every single ribosome!) and the massive amount of noise that the environment constantly throws at the lifeforms. Compare with the nearly pristine conditions that the sets of customized silicone crystals that we call computers operate in.
Give me volatility and time, and you'll be stunned, eventually. Let's see what's next in this book :)
And it wasn't planned, but evolved. No plan, no developer. Hard to imagine.
> the genetic material of a human is just a single gigabyte
Indeed apples and oranges [*]. As long as we don't know all functions of this molecular machinery (and there is a very good chance we will never know all those functions) all comparisons with programming languages are pure speculations. Some "subsystems" seem to be representable by "programming languages" (as long as one ignores many unknowns and special cases). But the complexity not only happens on molecular level.
> comes from the massive parallelism of the code execution
A very daring comparison.
[*] EDIT: mind that the genetic material e.g. assumes all the laws of physics and chemistry (also those we do not yet know) which are not explicitly encoded.
If there is any choice at all in natural selection, it is only in the choice of the reproductive partner. Apparently, the result of the selection process is not so bad, otherwise we would not have survived. Of course, we still have the chance to go extinct.
>But dammit, regardless of where you have gotten your mis-information from, any Linux kernel discussion list isn't going to have your idiotic drivel pass uncontested from me.
>But dammit, regardless of where you have gotten your mis-information from, any Linux kernel discussion list isn't going to have your idiotic drivel pass uncontested from me.
It's kind of "his house". He isn't going to let someone use his platform to spew something he considers to be not only clearly wrong, but dangerously harmful. If I owned a newsgroup, I might well feel the same.
I'll bite. He says it's crazy conspiracy theories. I have family hospitalized with blood clots after receiving the vax. She's out now, but that hospitalization will lead to a personal bankruptcy. It's not crazy conspiracy theory when your own family starts seeing negative effects. After watching what happened to her, nobody else in my family has any desire to get vaxxed. Nobody in my family is "anti-vax" as we've all gotten vaxed at birth, have voluntarily gotten flu vaccines in the past, etc. It's anti-this-vax, because it is not fully tested, and has caused real harm to people.
I’m sorry your family member had this serious but exceedingly rare reaction to the vaccine, but here’s the thing: when, exactly, do you propose making the call to go ahead and get your family vaccinated? When vaccines are provably 100% safe? Probably not. So how about five nines, 99.999% safe? Well, no, apparently that’s not good enough for you, because that’s roughly what we’ve got. When it comes to fatal reactions to the vaccines, it’s past six nines. And of course, that still means that out of 330 million Americans, we could expect 33 to die from the vaccine! That’s dozens!
Compared to over a half a million dead and still counting from Covid-19.
Again, it sucks that serious, life-threatening side effects from the vaccine are possible, and sucks more than you’ve been personally touched by them. But the chances are still literally orders of magnitude greater that you will suffer serious, life-threatening side effects if you get Covid-19. Including blood clots. More people have been hospitalized by or even died from blood clots caused by Covid than they have from the blood clots caused by the vaccines. By a lot.
About 1 person in 1 million (so 300 americans) will possibly suffer (there is a weak link) GBS, a rare disorder where the immune system begins to attack the nervous system.
More commonly, people suffer allergic reactions (Up to a few hours later) which can be deadly. Allergic reactions aren't rare.
In my personal case, it's 1 in 8 vaxxed that I know personally with bad reaction and accompanying devastating financial consequences.
I also don't really consider the reported thousands dead, tens of thousands of ER visits, and thousands more hospitalized and/or permanently disabled as exceedingly rare. These are CDC numbers from the VAERS database,
Well. "medalerts.org" is the "National Vaccine Information Center", a notorious source of vaccine misinformation, pushing the thoroughly discredited theory that vaccines cause autism, and lately -- surprise -- being widely criticized as one of the worst pushers of Covid-19 misinformation. A substantial amount of their funding comes from Joseph Mercola, which, well, yikes. (Why I say "yikes" is left as an exercise for the reader.)
But VAERS (the "Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System") is from the CDC, right? Great! Except that it's an open database -- anyone can submit a report and there is no verification. While this doesn't make it useless, it does make it ripe for abuse. "One of the main limitations of VAERS data is that it cannot determine if the vaccine caused the reported adverse event," cautions the FAQ on the VAERS website itself. A lot of information back in the vaccines-cause-autism scare days was literally being added to VAERS by personal injury lawyers.
Are you suggesting their information isn't the same as the CDC? Have any proof of it?
>But VAERS (the "Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System") is from the CDC, right? Great! Except that it's an open database -- anyone can submit a report and there is no verification.
Again, do you have any proof that there is a conspiracy to fill the VAERS database with fake data about covid vaccines? Or is this all just a theory of yours?
There's no evidence that what you are saying is true. There is a hospital bill that has to be paid, due to a covid vaccination in my family. That's hard evidence for me that covid vaccines are not safe.
From about the 200 people I've got on my spreadsheet to track this shit (because I'm not a very busy person and it's a nice way to counter antivaxxers), I've got 0 people who have been hospitalized. Most people simply suffer from a strong, but expected, side effect of a vaccine. After all, their immune system is indeed fighting off what it thinks is a serious threat and expending a lot of resources for that.
You get similar (but weaker) side effects from Influenza shots.
If you look at the write-ups on that link, btw, and not simply if the person was hospitalized, you see that most cases simply end up in observation overnight and most suffer rather mild symptoms you'd experience from a strong immune reaction. A lot of cases are marked as "not recovered" but the writeup says "Headache for 45 minutes, gave ibuprofen."
Even better, most of the deaths are labelled as an allergic reaction and in some cases it's 80+ year old people dying.
Linus is responding specifically to the allegations made that the mRNA vaccines change your genes "into a new humanoid race", which I think can reasonably count as a conspiracy theory.
Additionally, I don't believe the mRNA vaccines are the ones linked to blood clots (a big part of mRNA vaccines is that they should be safer and more effective!), but I'm sorry to hear about your family member's hospitalization.
I think vaccination is the best thing we can do cost/benefit wise and recommend it wholeheartedly, but I respect those waiting for more testing if they continue to take appropriate precautions. Good luck to you and yours!
All due sympathy to your family member, but there is potential for serious side-effects in almost every medical intervention. It's true that these vaccines received emergency authorization, so the known unknowns are greater in number than usual, but this vaccine appears to be safer than many commonly prescribed medications. It's as irrational to be anti-vax as it is to be anti-medications. First do no harm does not imply a guarantee against all potential harm in all cases for all people (the world is too complicated to guarantee such a thing).
(I do think Western medicine is slavishly focused on medications and relatively blind to prevention but that's a separate issue)
There's a fund for those harmed by vaccines (sorry, don't remember the name). Your relative should apply for compensation from that fund. (If I understand correctly - and I might not - she won't even have to prove that the vaccine was the cause of the clots.)
That's reassuring from a public health perspective, not so reassuring from an individual perspective. When it comes to one's personal risk, you have a sense of control over not getting COVID, and/or are personally at low risk of severe complications, which can weigh in favor of avoiding a vaccine with extremely rare but serious side effects.
Well, there's a lot of evidence for mRNA transfer between species in other kingdoms; read on about reverse transcriptase[1] that is literally how some viruses spread when they enter the human body. Whether that mechanism still goes on when some of the components are missing, well, we presume it won't happen but there's not enough and definite evidence for that.
And for those who love appealing to authority, I do have bachelor and master degrees in bioscience, unlike Linus and most of the readers here, so :^)
In all of your comments here you're being pretty ridiculous - you've read some books and articles, but are painting stories here in such a credulous fashion that makes me think you haven't actually done much work with cells and viruses. I was a genetic engineer for 20 years and engineered plenty of viruses for therapeutics, including plenty of retroviruses.
The existence of reverse transcriptases in nature does not imply that there's a plausible path to an mRNA vaccine reverse transcription event, even the presence of a known reverse transcriptase in say, an HIV infected cell - they'll have radically different priming systems, etc.
We have plenty enough evidence for core molecular cell biology processes to call out some ideas as radically improbable.
The paper you link to is overexpressing LINE1 on plasmid in HEK293 cells and coinfecting w. sars-cov-2 - not exactly a natural setup! They see some nucleocapsid fragment integration and limited expression, but it's a pretty forced experiment, honestly. Also the whole virus is very different from the mRNA payload of the vaccines. Having a random chunk snagged by an overexpressed retrotransposon is a far cry from a meaningful integration event. Though LINE/Alu transposon integrations are an interesting driver of evolution on million-year timescales.
(and: not a hobby. I was at UCSF, Stanford, and helped start several biotechs. You would have more traction here if you acted a little more thoughtful with those trying to talk to you.)
This is very wrong. You mean nucleotides, not chromosomes – but they don't need to be replicated, so long as the codons are. The custom not-found-in-nature nucleotide is equivalent to a natural one, for all purposes except being detected by the immune system.
The mRNA is at no point transcribed into DNA. I think this is what you meant – but it might help if you researched the mRNA vaccine before posting internet comments!
I don't really understand the science here, so I'm hoping you'll clarify for the lay-people like me.
Setting the technical issues aside, what's the bottom line? I think OP's general point was: "This is not dangerous in the way some people believe it to be dangerous".
Do any of your corrections change that outcome/conclusion in a meaningful way?
(I'm not asking to call your comment into question, but because I don't know how to adapt my understanding based on these two comments).
I think wizzwizz4 only corrected the (quite big) factual problems of the grandparent. But about the claim of “the vaccine can modify our DNA”, I think this reply is great: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27467454
Basically, while there are known mechanisms for mRNAs to getting converted to DNA, these quite complex mechanisms don’t just exist there. And the mRNA injected gets destroyed in ~half an hour. Basically, if there would be a constantly working mechanism for converting mRNA to DNA, our genome would constantly grow significantly since all sorts of mRNAs are constantly created inside cells.
I'm not saying it does happen, neither am I saying it does not happen. There's not enough evidence, that's it. Why is that so hard to grasp?
And there's evidence of it happening in plenty of other contexts, so one wouldn't be crazy to believe that at least, in principle, it could happen here as well.
>There's not enough evidence [to prove it doesn't happen]
What is your idea 'enough evidence'? Do scientists have to gather up every possible reverse transcription gene in the known universe and test them?
In principle, anything can happen. Specific cosmic rays can hit my desktop's memory/CPU in such a way that my computer will display a giant smiley face for the next 10 seconds. After all, cosmic rays are known to corrupt computations in plenty of other contexts.
I can even propose more than 1 possible pathways for that to happen!
>Do scientists have to gather up every possible reverse transcription gene in the known universe and test them?
For sure there could be a more practical way, but even if that's the only option well ... science is rigorous, man. Hence why we still have the theory of evolution and the theory of relativity. If you don't like it and wish to go back to "just believing" ... well, good luck, we won't miss you.
> And there's evidence of it happening in plenty of other contexts,
No, there isn't; “mRNA chromosomes” aren't a thing. The comment you replied to made as much sense as “the server rack isn't duplicated on the hard drive”; there's no evidence of it happening, because no possible real-world event corresponds to those words.
I just looked at each of the papers you cite, and none of them support the claim of mRNA transfer between species. They talk about reverse transcription of RNAs in the same cell. (Which kingdoms - there are only three - are using mRNA for gene transfer?)
The last paper you cite shows that if you reverse transcribe a virus, you can get it to integrate into the genome, which is not very surprising, but it there is no evidence that this has happened in nature. And I have no doubt that people are checking - running PCR on genomic DNA of infected individuals.
It seems that according to these papers, if there was vaccine mRNA in the reproductive tract immediately prior to or immediately after fertilization, then theoretically the spike protein could possibly get integrated into the offspring’s genome. But how could the vaccine mRNA end up in the reproductive tract? Seems unlikely. It’s intramuscular, not in a vein. The implications of sperm-mediated reverse transcription are quite unsavory regardless.
That is one of the dumbest possible interpretations you could make from those references.
The point was to show (to unfamiliar readers) that there exists plenty of mechanisms by which RNA -> DNA could happen, and it has been extensively studied and characterized.
That’s just misrepresenting. While there exists pathways for RNA->DNA, they are a niche occurrence happening on evolutionary timescales. It is not at all applicable to the 30 minutes of mRNA half-life of the vaccine.
And even just playing with the idea of our genome having the spike protein’s gene, it would either just sit there doing nothing (remember it is injected into muscle tissue) or get expressed. The former case would cause no problem (no descendant would inherit it as the gonads are not affected), and the latter would be trivial to see with a continuous immune response.
I think you'll find it's much longer that that for the vaccine. Apparently it hangs around about a week. The mRNA is modified to last longer than natural mRNA.
There is still an awful lot we don't know about cellular biology, so I'm always a bit baffled when people that should know better say that this or that is (virtually) impossible. Fortunately, we're running the largest phase 4 clinical trial in human history, so in 25 years or so we'll have some absolutely great longitudinal data.
mRNA is continuously produced by every living cell in your body. How come then that you don’t get ridiculously many duplicated copies of the created mRNAs, something that only happens at an evolutionary timescale? You have multiple orders of magnitudes more naturally created mRNA, why isn’t there a concern for that?
how do you know what is produced and called "just mRNA" is the exact same kind of thing that is the mRNA in your body? You can test to verify that it has all the characteristics of mRNA. However, you obviously can't 100% confirm that it does not have characteristics that is not in "natural" mRNA, since the list of characteristics mRNA does NOT have is infinite.
What do you mean produced? As in the pharmaceutical factory? You can quite literally have a look at it with an electron microscope, and there are trillion other ways to chemically verify that. Also, we can reprogram bacteria to manufacture any protein for us - molecular biology is very advanced. Why do you feel the need to question very basic “problems” that were more than certainly thought about and solved by the many experts working on it for decades? You can question whether the engineers of a car engine though of heat dissipation but you would find it sort of dumb, wouldn’t you?
Trillion? Did you not read what I said about being able to verify the behaviors you want and not the side effects you don't yet know exist? Are you telling me that electronic microscopes are used in such a way that people actually look into individual massive molecules and... what count the atoms?
This is questioning a new technique that's not tested for more than a year for the purpose of being a vaccine. You can tell me that this is in theory safer than traditional vaccines all you want, but by my dumb logic, theory is just that. Traditional vaccine was tested for multiple generations of humans, this was not. I am not advocating traditional vaccine or anything just maybe, maybe, don't feel so sure about things in a field that has so much we don't know yet. mRNA is code created from convoluted processes not exactly like programming code that human specifically write with limited known behaviors.
So you don’t believe that we can manufacture nucleotide-perfect sequences of RNAs? Than I have to break it for you, we absolutely can, to the point where you can simply order a specific sequence online without much trouble.
I just don’t understand why would you trust a car engine all that much more vs medicine. Do not blindly trust anything, but questioning uncontroversially held beliefs by a whole field is just cocky.
Mechanic is quite simplistic comparing to life science to me. Every single component of the car was built by a spec made by human. We dont borrow components of nature that oporate at a scale we're not fully able to inspect, to produce code we dont fully understand, then claim that the code does exactly what we want and nothing else.
Aside from that, cars were also tested for more than 1 year you know?
The context is a guy claiming the mRNA vaccines will create a “humanoid race” with no evidence and everyone rushing to the other side and saying there’s no situation where exogenous RNA can ever be integrated into the genome, also without evidence. I doubt anything like this occurs with the mRNA vaccines, but you helpfully exposed this dialectic with the links.
>we presume it won't happen but there's not enough and definite evidence for that.
What evidence are you looking for here? Any specific analytical protocol that you have in mind? I am curious to know what you're referring to.
As you know, the body doesn't just tolerate foreign mRNA like that (TLR3, TLR8 activation, RIG-I etc, microrna silencing, etc). So ironically, the vaccine has to first defeat our body's immune response, and then let the immune response work so that we get protected. That being said, the mRNA in the vaccine is structurally different from naturally occurring mRNA in that its been carefully engineered as a delivery platform. I am not intimately familiar with the studies you link to, but we can't just form a causal link because "its rRNA" - you need to evaluate it a bit more in the appropriate context.
I mean, I guess my follow up question is... where does the reverse transcriptase come from? My understanding is that the mRNA, by itself, isn't a retrovirus capable of integrating itself with your DNA. It's not built for it. There's no mechanism for reverse transcription in the mRNA in the vaccines, and the mRNA doesn't go near the nucleus of the cell, instead swimming around in the cytosol until a ribosome picks it up.
It usually comes along with the virus, but there's some in our body as well [1]. Whether they work on the same mRNA targets or not is an open question.
Ok, while Linus so righteously describes the basic molecular biology of RNA, here are some of the less insane questions that he doesn't address:
1) After an injection of mRNA (inside of lipid nanoparticles, if I understand correctly) into the body, which cells will the mRNA enter?
2) The mRNA will cause the synthesis of the spike protein that will be displayed on the surface of these cells and initiate the immune response. Since the cells expressing the spike protein will be treated as infected by the immune system, will it result in the death of these cells? If so – and depending on the answer to the previous question — is this cell death dangerous at all?
3) Following question 2, what are the chances of the development of an autoimmune response?
4) Why do some vaccine recipients seem to develop thrombotic events?
5) Is there a reason to believe that the spike protein itself has cytotoxic properties? If so, is there a reason to believe that the spike protein expressed by the cells transfected with the mRNA can get detached from their membranes and enter the bloodstream? If yes, is there any danger to that?
Edit: I've phrased these questions in the most neutral language of a basic medical immunology textbook, yet, judging by the instant downvotes, I managed to upset someone. I'm not siding with the author of the email to the Linux kernel discussion list; I am merely wondering how much precisely is known about the mechanism of action of mRNA vaccines beyond the basic overview that Linus outlined.
People have been downvote-happy since, roughly, the beginning of the pandemic. And I saw multiple reddits gain a lot of new members during lock down. I haven't seen numbers for HN, but I assume there has been an influx of new people here as well because, wow, is the Eternal September especially bad of late.
You are probably asking questions to which we don't have answers. Someone with medical credentials once told me "You are asking questions they don't have answers for. That's not how medical studies work." and I think people get cranky any time you ask questions the studies aren't designed to answer. For many people, it likely smacks of "You are just being a smartass." and "How dare you make the authorities look dumb!" or something like that.
4) Why do some vaccine recipients seem to develop thrombotic events?
My assumption would be that this is related to the fact that the infection itself seems to cause blood clots and my general impression is that what it does to the blood system is a significant issue and a large part of why it is deadly.
I am not a medical professional. I'm just a random internet stranger who reads and is making conversation on the internet.
> You are probably asking questions to which we don't have answers.
I've been pleasantly surprised by the qualifications of people who post on Hacker News. Who knows; perhaps there's a stray immunologist among the visitors.
What depresses me quite a bit is that discussions in public forums regarding vaccines never seem to move past a high-school science lesson in physiology and cell biology. Which tends to leave people with a rather superficial understanding of what a vaccine does, yet with a high degree of confidence in that they understand how it works.
I can’t answer all your questions, but for the 5th: the spike protein is most definitely cytotoxic and my guess is that they are not at all attached to the membrane (as nor is covid particles remain attached), effectively solving 1 and 2 of your questions. As for the cytotoxicity, they are made in a locally high but overall very low level compared to even a mild Covid case, so the effects of that should be less than what covid would have been. About 4 I read that basically every foreign protein in the blood stream can potentially start platelet aggregation, so there is that.
at some point you just have to embrace the fact that you're going to get downvoted for writing things like this, and all you can do is trust that a nonzero number of people will see the downvotes-without-replies and that that will give them pause to think
If you click on the two previous messages and the two followup messages it is pretty clear that the discussion makes total sense (organizing in-person conferences), and that a moderator stepped in to stop the conspiracy-theory tangent before it devolves into a flamewar.
I am eagerly awaiting my vaccine, however we are all alpha/beta testers. A real concern is about safety of those vaccines as typically they require ~3 years of testing and a single fatality aborts their use.
Would you give alpha version to people you love? Why is this concern downplayed? I understand statistics but we have no clue what could go wrong in an early version of a new technology and no data on long-term impact. It's all a big experiment.
> A real concern is about safety of those vaccines as typically they require ~3 years of testing and a single fatality aborts their use.
Drug development is usually serialized because it's so expensive. Why produce a bunch of drugs if it's going to be thrown away? Operation warp speed said let's just throw money at the problem so we can parallelize as much as possible, knowing that if it doesn't work out (effective, safety) then we as a country just ate the cost of trying. My understanding is the clinical trial parts weren't any different than would normally be done.
AFAIK vaccine safety is usually determinable within a few months. That is to say, if anything bad happens, it'll happen soon and not years later. Because enough months had past with larger and larger groups looking ok, plus extreme effectiveness, then emergency authorization was passed.
You could say emergency authorization is alpha/beta. But that alpha/beta has now been rolled out to hundreds of million of people and the safety profiles haven't changed from the clinical trial modeling. And if the failure probability is all up front, and we've already passed those milestones, then are we really still in alpha/beta territory?
mRNA vaccines are also not a new technology. They've been used for years now.
> Would you give alpha version to people you love?
If the option is an alpha which is passing all the 'unit tests' so to speak, or let them get covid and have far higher risk of dying or permanent disability, I'd for sure choose the alpha.
> I am eagerly awaiting my vaccine, however we are all alpha/beta testers. A real concern is about safety of those vaccines as typically they require ~3 years of testing and a single fatality aborts their use.
I wouldn't say alpha testers and probably not even beta testers. They did clinical trials for these vaccines in 2020 with tens of thousands of volunteers long before these were approved by the FDA and other regulatory bodies! And as I will explain in a second, these clinical trial patients were actually more like beta testers than alpha testers.
The short version is that mRNA vaccines have been around for ~40 years with pretty well identified side-effects and risk profiles. The use of an mRNA vaccine for COVID is a new application of existing technology. One comparison might be the flu vaccine. You get an annual flu vaccine that has <1 year of testing for that specific vaccine because the flu mutates every year. But the underlying technology is the same across all major flu vaccines, so you don't need multiple years of testing to ensure the safety and efficacy of it. You really only need to make sure that certain risk profiles aren't exacerbated and that the efficacy remains within reasonable expectations. In short, the mRNA vaccine that powered the COVID vaccine has already been well-tested, and the testing Moderna, Pfizer, and others did in the last 18 months were more about testing the safety and efficacy of the specific version of the vaccine than the overall technology.
Another comparison for the HN crowd might be that it's more like the difference between the iOS 14 and iOS 15. That is, the vast majority of the OS hasn't changed that much and has been thoroughly tested, and most of the testing is focused on the new features/major changes. You don't need 5 years of testing to uncover every bug in iOS 15 -- one year should be plenty to find the major offenders. When Apple releases iOS 15, they do so basically saying "based on our testing, this is stable enough to be a benefit to >99% of our users and we think you would be best served by upgrading from iOS 14 to iOS 15." They are not promising no bugs at all, but rather saying that the major vulnerabilities and side effects have been patched/mitigated. Similarly, the pharmaceutical companies and the regulatory bodies like the FDA are suggesting "this is safe and effective, with the risk of side effects A, B, C, D..."
(Source: my wife is a microbiologist who works on vaccines for pharma companies)
> mRNA vaccines have been around for ~40 years with pretty well identified side-effects and risk profiles
I'm having trouble reconciling your statement with Wikipedia's claim that the Pfizer vaccine is "the first mRNA vaccine to be authorized for use in humans"
Exactly. The vaccines did not go through the FDA’s typical approval process, they got emergency approval, but the standard approval process is still ongoing. mRNA vaccines have never been used in a large scale setting outside of clinical trials before. Are they safe? Almost certainly. Do we know that for sure yet? No. Do the benefits outweigh the risks? For me, yes.
The technology itself has been around for decades, so it’s not new tech, nor is it an early version. The underlying tech barriers have been worked at for years, and that’s one of the reasons the vaccines were developed so quickly for SARS-CoV-2: very few parts of the an mRNA vaccine need to change to target a specific virus.
Ivermectin and HCQ sure got shut down hard even though recent studies are giving them some credit. If they had been a valid option, emergency use authorisation wouldn't have been granted.
I honestly don't know what to think about all of this. I've seen a lot of censorship and stifling of speech. Reading Fauci's emails also makes me hesitate. I think trust in the experts will really take a hit going forward.
I did get the AZ vaccine a few weeks ago. Yesterday I had a flame heme show up on a retina scan at the eye doc. Was it the vax? Perhaps, the Oxford UK study said these kinds of events are slightly more likely from what they've seen.
Will you share your sources re: "recent studies giving [HCQ and ivermectin] credit"?
I haven't seen anything positive about those drugs in COVID-19 in human patients. For example, the RECOVERY trial showed no benefit (and non-significant numerical harm) for HCQ: https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMoa2022926
There are a lot of studies of varying quality, some of which show benefit for IVM and HCQ. One place to find some of these compiled is https://hcqmeta.com. Beware that they don't say what their study inclusion criteria is, so one has to be more skeptical of studies that have a small N and/or high P value.
The RECOVERY results for HCQ were definitely negative. Personally I'm neutral on its effectiveness, but HCQ proponents would probably say that HCQ's postulated antiviral mechanism is not effective on already hospitalized patients, since most of them would have already cleared the virus by the time they showed up to the hospital.
It's interesting to look at the forest plots on that page and only focus on RCTs, which are labeled. I cannot understand why someone would try to meta-analyze RCTs with observational studies when dozens of each exist. But this really hammers home (despite their misleading summary statistics at the top) that the evidence does not support an effect of HCQ on COVID-19.
Thank you for sharing the link. I do note that this is an observational study of 255 people. It contradicts a randomized trial with 1,561 people in the HCQ-arm alone vs 3,155 receiving usual care (RECOVERY).
When they are studied as a prophylactic or at early stage, they really prove out. I think that trial you referenced was in late stage severe cases, almost feels like they gamed that design to fail.
The study you have cited was entirely confined to 255 patients, all of whom required mechanical ventilation, 70% of whom died by day 90. That's severe COVID, not "prophylaxis."
They are all over the web. But clearly if you take them all in, you come away from it with the impression that he really pushed gain of function research and hid the fact once this took off last spring. Most of what he said in hind sight and with these emails seems to be more about politics and less about science and educating the masses.
The messaging on masks should have been that only n95 or better are worth the time. One email to a friend pretty much said that.
> The messaging on masks should have been that only n95 or better are worth the time
Which is simply rubbish.
Masks of all kinds will prevent transmission albeit with varying levels of efficacy. And most importantly they impact human behaviour in ways which prevent transmission.
Not to mention that N95 masks are more expensive which would have reduced its use by people who are poorer and are far more likely to spread the virus i.e. they are more likely to have multiple jobs, travel further for their job, work longer hours etc.
Ones of all design do help with droplet suppression. They do sweet f all for airborne unless properly fit and of the right rating. Covid for all practical purposes behaves like it is airborne. If you haven't realized this by now, I don't know what to say to convince you.
I did actually. That line you quoted was what they (and most all of us would expect).
The data didn't prove it out though, they report this in their analysis: "We did not find evidence that surgical-type face masks are effective in reducing laboratory-confirmed influenza transmission, either when worn by infected persons (source control) or by persons in the general community to reduce their susceptibility"
is completely relative to the observer. a piece of shitty fabric over your face won't stop n95 levels of transmission but it is better than nothing. To some of us, it's "worth the time" to be less likely to spread even if by a very small margin.
Don't you realize you are quoting the hypotheses or just the preamble?
Read the conclusion, what their study actually found: "We did not find evidence that surgical-type face masks are effective in reducing laboratory-confirmed influenza transmission, either when worn by infected persons (source control) or by persons in the general community to reduce their susceptibility"
>If they had been a valid option, emergency use authorisation wouldn't have been granted.
You don't want to treat a disease (especially with drugs that have their own problems), you want to prevent it from happening in the first place. Vaccines help prevent it, and so would still have gotten authorized.
Agree but these two options weren't given a fair chance by Fauci. He clearly had conflicts of interest. The emergency use authorisation wouldn't have been granted if he had. These are viable alternatives. Quercetin is another one and much more benign.
If a drug had an obvious benefit as you claim, why would the world care what Fauci thinks? I think you need to reconcile your skepticism with a bit more appreciation for the scientists around the world who are also trying to find the solution without intentionally harming people. Fauci is irrelevant in the larger scheme of things.
That being said, absolutely none of those medications you mentioned are targeted drugs. Its not a good idea to take those drugs for years as a prophylactic, especially broad-spectrum drugs. The only reason to use them is if the disease is worse than the side-effects. We know their mechanism of action, and they're well known to interfere with other functions in the body.
Our body already has a targeted defense mechanism and vaccines are the primary means to leverage it.
None of this is correct. Both of these drugs were part of the conversation long before a vaccine was available, and at least withe Ivermectin the proposed usage is as a prophylactic or as soon as you see any symptoms. Not once you are so sick that you need to go to the hospital. To be clear, I'm not giving any medical advice, just clearing up some incorrect statements.
People were promoting two things: (a) that the economy should be fully re-opened because Ivermetctin/HCQ would solve the problem of hospitalisations and (b) that vaccine development was as such unnecessary.
Both were completely wrong. Ivermetctin/HCQ has being actively used around the world for over a year and it has not "solved" the issue of deaths due to COVID.
Hmmm. Gotta say I did not find that article convincing. It just seems like he's skeptical of a paper that makes some wild claims.
The article also assumes that the paper was withdrawn because of some sort of political pressure. But fails to actually point to any real evidence. I think it's more likely that they made extraordinary claims and failed to produce the extraordinary evidence.
Even the term antivaxxer in this case is divisive and kind of presupposes that everyone should be a provaccer. Since we are not going for herd immunity, everyone should assees their own chances before making an informed decision, which in the vast majority of cases will be to vaccinate themselves. But there are specific sideeffects in specific groups that have been documented
I'm old enough that I had measles as a kid, my grandma had polio as a kid wore a leg brace her entire life, rubella and the associated birth defects were a thing in the community - when I was a kid EVERYONE was a pro-vaxxer, they were the medical miracle that were changing people's lives - IMHO the main reason we have antivaxxers today is because we haven't been telling these family stories to our kids
Why not go for herd immunity? maybe we should be releasing (suitably tested) live vaccines
I should have said there are 2 meanings of antivaxer in this context. One is the kooks who are/were against all vaccines and nother is the people who are suspicious of the covid vaccines. Those groups are separate and must be treated differently
Uh, we're definitely going for herd immunity. The bar for that is actually quite close to being met in some countries, including the US (if you combine past infections and vaccinated people).
Absolutely agree with everything Linus says here. But I'm almost equally concerned that there's an awful lot of people on the pro-science bandwagon who don't actually support science, but simply don't tolerate dissent or questioning, and that's unscientific and potentially harmful too.
I scanned most of the Pfizer trial and was wondering why we expected the immunity after the vaccine to last longer than natural immunity. A typical infection can last for several weeks, so your immune system is presumably exposed to the virus for a similar period of time. And after a natural infection I hear 6 months being thrown around as a typical window of immunity. But I was hearing claims of vaccines lasting for years, when they were only in the trials for less than 6 months. Why is this?
Fortunately I know a lot of people in the medical field. I asked a nurse who had been in a COVID ICU ward since this began. No idea, he said. Good question. I asked a few others: same answer. I asked several anesthesiologist friends: they did more med-school after all. Mostly no idea. One suggested that the vaccine might be more targeted and get a more potent response, maybe?
I tried casting a wider net on Facebook, and got a few nastygrams about how I was spreading uneducated FUD. I asked if they knew the answer but I was told to listen to the experts and read the science, whatever that means to these people. One friend did send me a link to a quote by the Moderna CEO that implied they have machines that can count antibody concentrations and they tracked it over time - I had no idea about that, so that was cool.
Eventually someone referred me to their cousin in nursing school who referred me to their brother-in-law who is actually an epidemiologist, and he told me it was a good question and explained all sorts of things about the various types of cells involved in the immune response and how the vaccine delivery invokes a very specific response that is, as one of the doctors suspected, much more targeted at something less likely to change, and how those immune cell types produce longer-lasting immunity. Now I was satisfied and learned something.
But those people in the middle think of themselves as being pro-science but they're really not. And the more they engage with anti-vaxxers the more ammunition anti-vaxxers will think they have and the more they'll dig into their beliefs. It's not good.
There are a LOT of anti-vaxxers who disingenuously couch their advocacy as "I'm only asking questions". It's no surprise when you've seen a 10:1 ratio of bad actors to good (or worse), one might get a little exasperated.
In any case, I've recently been reading Lauren Sompayrac's "How the Immune System Works", and it's a technical overview of the immune system. It's not going to make you into a full blown immunologist, but it will give you the answers to most the questions you ask above, and a framework and vocabulary to begin to understand deeper academic immunology works.
P.S. The immune system is FUCKING AWESOME. There's rarely a page where my mind is not blown.
Edit: I misspelled "Sompayrac"; it is now correct.
I have been accused of it in another context, so I sympathize with your frustration, but this concept is not bullshit. It is important that we have a taxonomy of fallacies and troll tactics because that makes it easier to detect them. Regrettably, it also makes it trivial for bad-faith actors to just accuse everyone they dislike of some named troll tactic. The cure is not to stop using names for bad behaviors. Rather, we should have rigor when accusing someone of bad behavior: do not just name the behavior, but describe why the name fits.
Sure, this is no fun, but this whole discussion exists because trolls exist: can we really expect anything pleasant to come out of that premise.
Even if you know for certain that someone is an anti-vaxxer, disregarding their opinion/question by accusing them of sealioning is a fallacy.
Someone is not a "bad-faith" actor for asking precisely the questions that are hard to answer, even if they're using those questions to support a wrong idea.
If you don't have time to answer their questions, don't answer them. If you do have time, you have a good opportunity to expose the falsehood of their ideology. But don't use ad-hominems like "sealioning".
Sure, there are some stupid questions, or questions that come with a false premise, but that's not the same as discounting good questions because they come from an anti-vaxxer.
I think you misread what I said. Check out the end of the first paragraph, as I think it mostly says the same thing you said.
Yes, just saying someone is "sealioning" is lazy at best, trollish on its own at worse (as I have already said in the previous post). Saying "your argument is fallacious *because* of A, B, and C", is pretty much the only way to deal with a troll (besides just banning them from the platform). In the particular example of sealioning: certainly, never assume bad-faith, but after you briefly explain and give references, it is definitely very important to also explain to the person how sealioning is a dangerous tactic - at best, you helped someone be more resilient to sealioning themselves, at worst you lost some time with a troll.
The one thing I would agree on with you: if you come in on a high horse, you have already lost the discussion, no matter whether you are talking with a troll or not.
> Even if you know for certain that someone is an anti-vaxxer, disregarding their opinion/question by accusing them of sealioning is a fallacy.
1. Labeling someone a "sealion" doesn't even hinge on their opinion. You seem to have missed the entire concept, and instead interpreted it as a generic dismissive.
2. Uh, you don't get to just call something a "fallacy" because you don't like it (though many others are doing the same thing in this thread).
Sealioning is a reference to the specific disingenuous process of spamming the same low-effort, low-brow, easily-answered questions in every last public forum. It's a basic disinformation technique to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt.
My evaluation is that the original usage of the "sealioning" accusation was indeed as a generic dismissive, and its application was dishonest as well; I don't accept the term as a well-founded descriptor of troll behavior in the first place.
If you look at the original comic[1], the sea lion follows the couple around in public, into their house, and even into their bedroom, without permission; that is what makes the sea lion's behavior bad (criminal, in fact). However, "sealioning" in practice refers to people responding to public internet comments with other public internet comments. To treat the latter like the former is dishonest.
Furthermore, the sea lion is objecting to unsubstantiated criticism of his species, which is a form of bigotry. Imagine people searching Twitter for criticism of, say, their race or religion and arguing back at it. I suspect that 90+% of those who complain about "sealioning" would consider that behavior permissible and probably downright virtuous (and would add that the arguing-back need not be scrupulously polite). I'm frankly surprised that "social justice"-associated people managed to decide that objecting to speciesism was worthy of mockery. I think they just really wanted some term of disparagement for their opponents, and happily accepted this one when it appeared without analyzing it too closely.
Come on, really!? In a discussion about how trolls use "I am just asking", you decided that doing the same is a good idea. I am not op, but I have been accused of sealioning in the exact opposite direction: I was defending some curriculum based on ideas from critical race theory.
Edit: Well, as the comment below alluded to, I probably missed a pretty obvious piece of sarcasm... This is certainly funny in hindsight.
One of the difficult parts of text based debate and discussion is that it's impossible to determine from vocal inflection, tone of voice and method of delivery whether someone is genuinely a fool, simply cosplaying as one, being sarcastic or facetious, etc.
Basically, it is now impossible to make a point by attempting to present an absurdly extreme viewpoint in the opposite direction, because too many of us have encountered people who genuinely espouse viewpoints even more extreme. (As well as the exact one you said—no matter what it happens to be.)
If you want to present such a thing sarcastically, you're gonna have to make an explicit indication of your sarcasm (even just a "/s" at the end is usually enough). Otherwise, you're very likely to just be taken as meaning it sincerely.
It is bullshit. It helps to create an atmosphere where you can't ask questions or debate.
I'm entirely pro-vaccines. However, I'm simultaneously entirely in favor of people asking questions, no matter what their intentions are. Their intentions do not matter. You either know your stuff or you do not. It's always better to draw out the eg anti-vaccine types. If something is defensible, then don't be a coward about it, don't be lazy, respond with a decent answer. Put in some effort. Use it as an exercise for your own brain, your own beliefs, your own ability to discuss and debate in an (ideally) civil society. Only the anti-vaccine arguments benefit from not doing that.
The shut-down angle always comes from cowardice and or intellectual weakness. You can tell a lot about someone by whether they're terrified of a discussion. Shut-down attempts are meant to evade personal shame (and more rarely to avoid putting in the time/effort), while preserving an intellectual or moral foundation established by someone else who did put in the effort.
Nearly all shut-down attempts come from weakness. If the position is important, such as vaccines, then that weakness only encourages the skeptics even more. They can practically sense it. The right thing to do is to engage and push back with facts (and or even links, with which all the hidden passive readers can go make up their own minds as to whether they agree or not), even if you don't have all day to argue a topic.
I like your idealism, but there are plenty of tactics that would make even the most knowledgeable person look like a fool, because knowledge and oratory skills are completely separate: my favorite example is the gish gallop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop
This is why good journalists do not invite a "flat earther" and a "nasa scientists" when discussing, e.g., climate change. Because those organizing debates have a responsibility to ensure the debate is based on facts, not on oratory skills.
I don't know what your experience has been, but I would wager good money that nearly every anti-vaccine person I have encountered has nearly zero capacity to have their opinion changed by properly formatted scientific evidence and experts presented in a rational, logical way. They are firmly set in their bubble of conspiracy theory rhetoric. You could literally bring an expert panel of eight virologists and epidemiologists in front of them, face to face, and they would still stick to their position. In summary, a real waste of time.
For some of them, their entire method of operation is to waste your time, troll, and gain acclaim from their own hardcore fan base by doing so.
I'm sorry to say that I have no time and effort left on my part for anything other than low effort mockery and derision of people engaging in infowars/hardcore conspiracy theory stuff.
The only (limited) success I've had moving emotionally-held models of belief is specifically exploring what signals would be present if the competing models were incorrect. By focusing on falsifiability and reconciling it with reality, I've _sometimes_ managed to have my counter-party downgrade their argument from scientific surety to human behavioural expections in some key ambiguous situation.
This presumes that anyone on the Internet owes a troll their time and effort to discern between a fool, an extremist, a shitposter, a troll or a misguided but earnest individual who shares a genuinely held but scientifically false opinion.
There is more at stake in public debates than just the back and forth between troll/skeptic/questioner and someone responding to them.
If you benefit from such a good idea as vaccines and the rather obscenely massive benefit they have delivered to humanity, you have a moral obligation to step up and - even if rarely - throw down in a debate in their favor, when presented with such a tremendous opportunity. It requires the tiniest of efforts compared to the scientists that manage to give us these vaccines across decades of their efforts. Which also doesn't mean a person can't be lazy and free-ride on everyone else that is putting in some group effort to intellectually defend vaccines, of course. There are always free-riders.
The public skeptics and trolls are doing everyone a favor. They're being public about it. They're providing an intellectual and social opportunity that should be taken advantage of, eagerly. It's wonderful that they exist. They provide an opportunity to educate/inform, not specifically the troll or skeptic, rather, everyone else that is reading along. There is no avoiding the consequences of public debate on such important ideas, there is only to engage or give ground to the other side.
That's fine- whether or not their question is disingenuous, it's almost always a reasonable question that has been asked and answered by researchers, or that has been asked and not been able to be answered (e.g. what are the long term effects of mRNA vaccines?).
It's perfectly fine to say, "we don't know what are the long term effects of mRNA vaccines but we can guess they're unlikely to be worse than the long term effects of the thing they're vaccinating against, which you're almost certain to catch sooner or later".
(I’ll admit the numbers in September from the Pew poll are surprising to me)
Granted, you’re further assuming the person asks questions about vaccines. In your description it seems to me that we’re already far away from scientific thinking as a society if the way we can confirm someone is anti-science is by whether they exhibit symptoms of any kind of curiosity. This sounds like what the previous commenter is talking about.
Maybe you’re saying, “people who spread doubt in the form of a disingenuous question frequently do so in a particular social environment I’m a part of.”
There is a major biasing factor; it's trivial to ask a question like "Have you looked at the data in VAERS that shows tens of thousands of adverse vaccine reactions??" It's not so trivial to answer the question in a way that explains how VAERS works, and why this conclusion is incorrect. This is the same with many possible questions.
This specific scenario happens on my local Nextdoor groups all the time. I've answered responded with what I think is pretty clear and concise information, and then seem that same person ask the same question the very next day in a new thread. (And the next day, and the next...) I cannot help but conclude they're not really looking for an answer.
> This specific scenario happens on my local Nextdoor groups all the time. I've answered responded with what I think is pretty clear and concise information, and then seem that same person ask the same question the very next day in a new thread. (And the next day, and the next...) I cannot help but conclude they're not really looking for an answer.
Maybe I'm a jerk, but I'd be inclined to answer the second question with "I answered that yesterday. Why do you keep asking if you aren't going to listen to the answers?" And reply with that every single time they re-asked the question.
But... Nextdoor... does that mean it's your physical neighbors? That might make me hesitate to do so. Or maybe I'd still do something like the same, but worded more gently and politely.
> There are a LOT of anti-vaxxers who disingenuously couch their advocacy as "I'm only asking questions".
And they quickly reveal their bad faith, at which point they can safely be ignored.
Or, if you don't feel like discussing it, it's easy enough to say "I don't know about that, but the anti-vaccine stuff sounds like lies to scare people so I decided to trust my doctor."
If honest questions are met with hostility, while the anti-vaxxers are friendly and "helpful", guess who's going to be more influential?
I agree, and that's why I try to answer questions with friendly answers. It wasn't so much that I was advocating for dismissing the question, I was just trying to explain why experts have gotten really, really tired, and might do so.
(Also: My local county facebook group has no shortage of very vindictive, angry, and seeming inexhaustible anti-vaxxers.)
Why would you expect a nurse in a COVID ward and an anesthesiologist to have strong answers on this question? Vaccinology is laboratory science. My son works in a vaccinology lab; as far as I know, nobody there has been to med school.
I just happen to know a lot of anesthesiologists and they went to all of med school - I didn't. They were easy to ask and know more than me. The first nurse, again, more medical education than me to begin with, was very interested in the science beyond his work and was obviously briefed on the situation at work as it changed. I just figured it might have been more common knowledge than it turned out to be.
My point is more that these people have far more medical education than the average person I interact with on social media, and didn't look down on my question but also wanted to know. People who knew less than them and knew even less than me were mad that I would dare even ask.
It's a little bit like asking a random software engineer on the street on how GPU drivers work internally: they're unlikely to have an actual informed opinion.
Worse, maybe even an ill-informed opinion since they might feel like they should know how GPU drivers work since they're in the industry and start spouting off smart sounding techno-babble. I know a few nurses myself, they're not a good source for medical advice but people trust them anyway. Hell, my mom does clerical work in a hospital, and people ask her for medical advice.
The alternative here is ignoring the software engineer, and instead asking the crazy person on the corner who’s shouting at the sky and wearing his underwear on his head.
Getting the perspective of the software engineer is a reasonable step, and certainly better than basing your beliefs on the rankings of the insane person.
The alternative I was referring to is wherever Enrico Weigelt got his information, which certainly was not a vaccinologist.
Of course, if you have access to a vaccinologist (is this a recognized profession? I checked two dictionaries and neither contain the word), you should ask them. Or you can look up their opinion online [1]. Most will agree what the doctors and nurse said.
I have some more questions (serious), can I have the number of one of these people?
Point being, it's not that straightforward unless there's someone you already know that is willing to share their contact information and they actually have the time to talk to you.
I totally see the point about going for second-best first until you know you have a question worth their time and not something that's obvious. (Although the answer in this case did seem obvious to me as a software person, or at least I'd have guessed they can see the amount of anti-covid-stuff dropping at different rates.)
Yeah I've done that two or three times about different things. One time I got an answer, the other (reporting an outdated page) an automated reply five days later that they're too busy. I don't expect they have time for in-depth questions about research that's not even a month old. Thanks for the tip though!
Except here's the thing: I do know how GPU drivers work internally so assuming I don't when someone wants to know isn't helpful, and I did end up getting referred to a helpful answer by one of the medical friends who had a connection and could make an introduction. I can't believe this is being dismissed as a moronic approach when it actually worked and I just asked in casual conversation with friends - all of whom were actually intrigued by the question as well and wanted to know the answer when I eventually learnt it.
If most of the whole world came to a screeching halt for the better part of a year and the solution turned out to be GPU drivers, I as a software engineer would become intensely interested in understanding them and would not at all be surprised if my less technical friends asked me for some pointers.
In the end, my point was that people who aren't even software engineers were telling me to stop trying to understand GPU drivers because GPU drivers are a solved problem and I should just trust NVIDIA.
But compared to someone who isn't in CS, they'd at least understand that GPUs exist, might be able to speculate on what's needed, and have an idea of who to even ask.
I don't work on operating systems but I had a CS education, so I know enough about the kinds of things it needs to worry about that I could answer about the building blocks of a kernel in a way that I feel would be largely correct.
I think the quality of the speculation you'd get from a random software developer on the design of GPU drivers is, in fact, probably a good model for the quality of vaccinology speculation you'd get from a random anesthesiologist.
But a neat thing about HN is that there are people here who've been to med school and can presumably chime in.
What I can tell you personally is that vaccinology seems to involve a lot of centrifuging of rabbit poop, which is something I don't think they do a lot of in med school.
Probably the person that is producing the vaccine is not the same person that is running the clinical trials and it's not the same person that is calculation the statistics and writing the final paper.
More like asking an microelectronics engineer how 3 phase motors work. She probably took a course in school although it may have been awhile and it's not her specialty.
It's a feature of engineering and scientific education that there is a corpus of knowledge that every person in a discipline (say EE, or medicine) is expected to have learned (if not retained). I imagine all doctors learn quite a bit about the immune system in medical school.
Given that a "random software engineer on the street" may have a CS degree, an MBA, a 6 week bootcamp, or be totally self-taught, the example isn't analogous IMO.
Its actually a perfect example. But for the opposit argument.
A random software engineer has a much deeper understanding about the inner workings of GPU then the average non-software engineer. So its a perfect analogy for asking a nurse about a health related topic. He probably doesn't know much about the immune system but he definetly knows more then the average population.
Really? :D I highly doubt that, as I personally did dabble with a bit of OpenGL and still know jackshit about GPUs. People are likely to overestimate their knowledge on things they know little about.
I think there's a bit of difference between asking a medical professional in person and asking a generalized audience over social media. Asking "do we know if immunity from the vaccine lasts longer" that
A) can come across as a statement in the form of a question (e.g. "no we don't these vaccines are rediculous" etc)
B) even if it doesn't, if you ask that and no one knows and other people see that, it can cause them to have unscientific doubts about vaccines, even if that wasn't intended.
People who went to medical school may not know how to assimilate, read, synthesise and make conclusions about scientific literature. Yes, the average social media person wouldn't either but better ask the scientists.
People think that, but there’s basically nothing in nursing or anesthesia training that’s gonna deal much with the nitty gritty details of vaccines and how they’re developed and tested.
It’s like asking a car mechanic about steel production. Entirely out of their wheelhouse, even if they deal with the steel daily.
(Both could comfortably tell you masks don’t cause hypoxia or pneumonia, though.)
There's also nothing in medical doctor training, as well. Or in fact in most specialist training - e.g. my father-in-law who's an ObGyn couldn't you how an mRNA vaccine works beyond what he learns from reading the same material I can - it's not a relevant part of his training beyond "they work and here's the list you should be giving babies as soon as possible".
Medical professions, the ones you interact with as a patient are essentially highly specialized mechanics for the human body.
It’s a starting point though. How often do you get to your answers immediately without having to go through some dead ends and wrong turns? That’s how learning works.
Everyone seems to be missing the part of the story where I actually got connections and introductions to others in the medical field and got an answer, and the part where an anesthesiologist actually gave me what turned out to be a pretty good guess at the answer because they DO understand biology in general better than me and hey do have to learn a lot about the immune system even if they specialty isn't vaccines.
My point was that the less educated someone is in the medical field in general, the less willing they seem to be to entertain a genuine question, and this is the opposite of being "pro-science". It's only a step above being an anti-vaxxer because they choose better experts to listen to.
> Eventually someone referred me to their cousin in nursing school who referred me to their brother-in-law who is actually an epidemiologist...
This could've happened if their cousin was a car mechanic who had a brother-in-law with an epidemiologist. The nursing aspect of the story was irrelevant to the end result.
Why do you think that? Perhaps they might have access to some paywalled medical journals, but other than that I don't see why they would have a better idea of where to look than an interested and scientifically literate person who hasn't been to medical school or practiced medicine.
In the end, I got my answer because somebody in the medical field made personal introductions until I got an actual expert working in the field. So clearly it's not such a moronic approach.
> But I'm almost equally concerned that there's an awful lot of people on the pro-science bandwagon who don't actually support science, but simply don't tolerate dissent or questioning, and that's unscientific and potentially harmful too.
Dissent to the dominant opinion in any scientific field is always tricky, but that is a self-defense mechanism. Over time opposing viewpoints are integrated into the body of knowledge and may or may not replace or amend it. HOWEVER when we consider anti-vax or flat earth people they are acting in bad faith and their nonsense steals bandwith. It does not reserve respect and kicking them out harshly is a very necessary defense mechanism. Call it a memetic immune response with inflammation.
True. Perhaps dissent is a poor choice of words here, because I was never against the vaccine - I would default to supporting a vaccine. More - I didn't get why everyone was so optimistic about them and asked to know more. Even that was blasphemy to a few people - but ironically not to the people who are medical experts in SOME way.
> but ironically not to the people who are medical experts in SOME way.
The dangerous thing about expertise in a very narrow area (which most medicine is these days) is that is bolsters confidence so much that you imagining yourself an expert in an adjacent area... not realizing that you might be missing very important fundamental knowledge.
You see this often in e.g. Nobel Disease[1], but also in more mundane settings.
I think it's unfair to characterize people who are skeptical about mRNA and liquid nanoparticle technology as anti-vax, but this is what people (including Linus) are doing.
Most people I know are pro-vax, have all their other vaccinations, but are leery of new technology being distributed under the same label. I think that's reasonable. I'm one of these people. I don't plan on taking any mRNA vaccine until we have a few decades worth of safety data on LNPs, although I think the technology and its development is very interesting. [1]
Does the net health benefit provided by mRNA vaccines probably outweigh the consequences of Covid? Probably, even almost certainly. But I'll stick to more conventional biotech for now.
In general, I think the average person hugely overestimates how much we know about biology and how much experts really know - they know 100x more than me, but still 0.00001% of what there is to know. We have a lot of hubris when it comes to science and technology.
Yet people like this who just don't want to inject anything that hasn't been studied for at least a couple of years, don't coach our opinions in anti-vaxx language. Stuff like "new species" is ridiculous and masks the actual rise of surveillance totalitarianism which uses Covid as an excuse.
As far as I’m aware, there is no direct experimental evidence over a long duration as the virus is novel and the vaccines new, but for now we have this: Antibody Persistence through 6 Months after the Second Dose of mRNA-1273 Vaccine for Covid-19[1]
And I think it’s okay to ask questions, that’s how science progresses. I suspect a lot of people on social media are just super wary of vaccine trolls and sea-lioning[2], so unfortunately good-faith questions suffer.
It's also not like this is the first vaccine, or even the first mRNA vaccine. So we have analogs and precedents we can use. My understanding is that was heavily used in the clinical trials before roll out -- an understanding from previous vaccines that if someone majority were to go wrong it would go wrong in the first few months, and not 5+ years later.
every molecule has different effects. Change the wrong amino acid residue in insulin and you get something that hyperactivates IGF-1 pathway and causes cancer, which you won't see in the short term. You can't be sure that any given vaccine won't accidentally activate an oncogene, until you do the study, and such a study would necessarily take years, or decades.
> there's an awful lot of people on the pro-science bandwagon who don't actually support science, but simply don't tolerate dissent or questioning
I think the problem is that its 10-100x as expensive to refute a misinformed statement than it is to make one. So the plea for the small pool of genuinely authoritative / informed people to invest two orders of magnitude more effort patiently and kindly explaining misinformation to people just isn't practical in any meaningful sense.
We don't need to persuade them. They aren't persuadable, and in many cases they aren't there in good faith in the first place. We do need them to stop spreading lies and causing extreme harm to their communities. The most effective way to do that is to teach them that their actions - spreading obvious misinformation - are as offensive as they actually are (in that they actively harm people).
Ever since the pandemic started, useful information was few and far between. I know that numbers scare people, but so much of this is basic risk assessment. The facts are extremely pro-vaccination, but good luck finding them!
For example, the whole thrombosis / Astra-Zeneca issue, which was a big deal here in Germany. Lots of articles and discussions. Everyone was saying "don't use it on young people", but I don't even remember if they came to that conclusion because only young people got thrombosis or because the risk of dying of COVID was so much higher in old people that it trumped all other concerns.
And that's because nobody bothered to even estimate those risks. Given your age, what's your likelihood of catching COVID and getting lasting damage (including death) vs. getting thrombosis from AZ? I'm guessing that based on that, it was probably still a no-brainer to get vaccinated no matter your age.
But I think one of the central issues is the trolley problem. Somehow dying from a virus is okay because it's "natural", while having any sort of potential complication from a vaccine (no matter how unlikely) is much worse because it follows a human decision. If I'm a politician and I pass some law that indirectly (but predictably) kills tens of thousands of people, I'll be fine. If I go out and strangle a single person with my bare hands, I'm in trouble.
9 out of 10 times when someone claims people have been dogmatically unwilling to consider ideas that run counter to scientific establishment, those people were just responding to profoundly insane anti-science ideas (earth is flat, covid is fake,global warming is just the sun etc). Their responses may seem glib, because they don't feel the ideas are deserving of serious discussion, but usually they understand things just fine.
> And the more they engage with anti-vaxxers the more ammunition anti-vaxxers will think they have and the more they'll dig into their beliefs. It's not good.
Isn't there some analogy with the immune system to be made here?
Anti-vaxxers, flat-earthers and the like function like an aggressor. They make bizarre, tiresome, persistent claims, and arguing with them earnestly is like going down a rabbit hole. Like some sibling comment said, anti-science people often dishonestly start their conversations by "asking questions" and wanting you to be "open minded", but spending time and energy on this is usually futile.
After a while, you (the "immune response" in this analogy) start taking the easy way out, no longer answering earnestly, just taking cheap shots at the flat-earther/anti-vaxxer, and just want them to shut up, stop spreading misinformation, and go away.
In the way of all this, the truth and the scientific method get simplified, dumbed down or outright destroyed, much like an out of control immune response may turn against your own body and harm it.
(I'm sure my analogy is flawed, but I kinda like it!)
For the curious who were left a little lacking in an answer to OP's question:
For simplicity's sake, your immune system has two main things of concern here: antibodies and memory cells (B and T). Antibodies are the short-term "find and kill invaders" proteins. They're looking for a particular antigen to attack and do so well, but they don't last very long. Memory cells are basically blueprints which stick around for much longer than the antibodies (some studies indicate for decades), so that if your body ever encounters those same antigens again it recognizes them much faster and starts pumping out the antibodies much faster as well.
So, why would a mRNA vaccine result in better long-term protection than COVID-19 itself? Well, the thinking here is that because an mRNA vaccine in this case only results in the creation of the singular spike protein, the antibodies created to fight off the invader are very focused, as they're only ever going to be looking for that one protein. In the same way, the memory cells your body creates will also be very focused. Your immune system post-vaccine is therefore very well adapted at targeting that particular protein/antigen (could be an amino acid that is part of the protein).
Meanwhile an immune system fighting off actual COVID-19 might be creating antibodies and memory cells that are targeting slightly different antigens, as the overall coronavirus has 29 different proteins your immune system could be looking at to find antigens. This could result in a little bit more "overlap". e.g. You have two antibodies each keyed to a different antigen. They both find the same sars-cov-2 target and bind to their two respective sites. They're now doing "redundant work". Additionally, any antibody which is targeting an antigen that is not the spike protein is probably going to be less effective (the spike protein was targeted for the vaccine because it accounts for most of the outer surface area of the virus, which obviously makes it the best target for antibodies which must "bind" to something).
tl;dr: mRNA vaccines might be more effective than natural immunity because they are creating tools which attack only the most targetable of sars-cov-2's proteins – the spike protein. Natural immunity might give a more "diverse" response, but this is unneeded and could actually hinder secondary response if it is creating tools which are less effective.
The big problem with "natural" infection and response is that you have no idea what your body locked onto and made you immune to.
For example, my mother-in-law had measles 4 times. Her immune system clearly doesn't lock to the same piece as everybody else's.
For Covid, most of the time the lock point is the spike protein, but sometimes it's not. And sometimes it's different pieces of the spike protein. Some of which mutate quite quickly.
So, your immune system is spending a lot of energy "training" to lots of different pieces of the virus. That's what it's supposed to do.
But it's specificity isn't anywhere near as good as the vaccine which is engineered to give you a response to exactly what seems to be the most relevant chunk of the spike protein.
Of course, if the virus mutates that spike protein area, the specificity is useless. However, if that section of the spike protein mutates, the virus also gets a lot less problematic as it seems like it won't be able to bind to the ACE receptors.
I think part of the problem is that the science keeps changing as we find out more. Were masks going to help with Covid? No, then yes, then kind of drifting back toward maybe no.
Are RNA vaccines going to work without having many side effects? From what we know now, yes. We may learn something from trying it large-scale, though. (Just today there was this article on HN about men suffering unexpected levels of heart complications.)
This leads to people who are "pro science" but have out-dated science. And many people, even those who want to "follow the science", have run out of time and energy to keep following the science. So they treat "science" as frozen in time, not as a process.
And then you have people with vested interests and/or political angles. That includes the vaccine makers, and at times may include the CDC.
All in all, sorting out the science has become a real bear on this particular issue. People get tired, and freeze at the position the science supported when they gave up tracking.
I get what you're saying, but the logical conclusion of all this is that no one can know anything at all unless they're an expert in that specific thing. But that's why we have experts in the first place - so that we can determine what is most likely to be true without necessarily needing to deeply understand it first hand. So sure, perhaps there's some small chance that the vaccines don't work the way they're supposed to or the earth is flat. But "expert consensus is X" is a pretty good heuristic for "X is correct." And while I'm not defending random trolls on Facebook, this does happen to be a pretty sensitive subject right now because there is a pretty significant proportion of the population who won't get the vaccine precisely because they don't believe in expertise.
The average pro-science person on Facebook primarily is approached by an anti-science person looking for public confrontation. I didn't see your post, but I'd imagine looking around you could find many questions similar to yours being asked in bad faith. While I agree your question _isn't_ bad faith, the surface level hallmarks are there. Question about the expedited testing process, context includes a reason to worry about safety if there isn't a scientific answer, then concluded by anecdotes of stumped medical professionals as if to give credibility to the concerns. I'm aware that a close read of this post shows you have a genuine question, but I can also see why it blends in well in a sea of "But we don't know the vaccine is safe" posts.
You are right, not tolerating questioning is unscientific and harmfull. Asking questions is the one way how you can learn things and also, I find it extremely useful for myself to answer scientific questions. Becauses it forces yourself to review the matter at hand, sort out your own thoughts about the problem and refine them to a point where you can deliver a satisfying answer. Often enough that leads to deeper insights.
I am not a doctor, but some observations from my side, what might be reasons for a different behavior of vaccinations vs. an actual infection. One point, that the vaccine is very targetted, you already listed. Then, the vaccine doesn't make you sick. Suffering through the infection might impact the ability of your immune system to build up long-term immunity. I read some article which claims that getting sick of measels does give you good immunity, but lowers your immunity against other diseases for up to two years. Also, the numbers of the time span of acquired immunity of both the vaccinations and getting infected by Covid are varying a lot. Recently I saw some claims that the infection does give you some reasonable long-term immunity.
> I scanned most of the Pfizer trial and was wondering why we expected the immunity after the vaccine to last longer than natural immunity. A typical infection can last for several weeks, so your immune system is presumably exposed to the virus for a similar period of time. And after a natural infection I hear 6 months being thrown around as a typical window of immunity. But I was hearing claims of vaccines lasting for years, when they were only in the trials for less than 6 months. Why is this?
Because the science on the immunity of coronaviruses is very poorly understood because previously they gave us the sniffles for 2 weeks and didn't cause the worldwide economy to shut down so nobody studied them well enough.
And studies had been done which seemed to showed that immune waned after 6-24 months with common cold coronaviruses.
More recent studies have now found that while people will get reinfected with HCoV-229E that immunity to an individual strain seems to be very durable/permanent and that on a scale of years the virus eventually mutates to achieve escape immunity and reinfects:
Note that was published as a preprint back in Dec 2020, so They(tm) didn't have this article back last summer when the question of reinfection was first raised.
6 months of immunity after natural infection was what was _guessed_ by some cautious immunologists last summer, based on the prior studies of coronaviruses. With better studies and with more time spent studying the only coronavirus that actually matters it looks pretty confident that its going to be more like years. The vaccines produce stronger results measured by neutralizing antibody titers so we _guess_ that they'll be more certain to hit those kinds of timelines. We still don't understand how long it'll take for this virus to achieve escape immunity, but the safer money is on the idea that it'll become endemic, but second time around those with natural or vaccine immunity won't be anywhere nearly as severely affected (e.g. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6530/741)
If you have academic curiosity about that vaccines that's fine, but it is irresponsible to be voicing that in a way that could discourage people from getting a vaccine in the middle of a global health emergency.
Qualified people agree that the vaccines save lives. People should get them. Unqualified people expressing their curiosity about the details is something like the guy in the backseat of a crashing car loudly wondering how brakes work. It's an interesting question, but now is not the time for it. If you aren't helping, keep it to yourself. And if you don't have any relevant knowledge or background in a related field, you should assume you aren't helping.
I see what you mean and was wondering the same myself, but I'm not convinced it's really for the best to say we should not be asking questions and apply self-censorship as a general rule during some period that lasts multiple years.
Most of the times I've seen those ~6 months numbers being quoted, they were lower bounds. We have 6 months of data saying that immunity lasts at least this long.
One reason to expect that immunity might last a long time is that people infected by Sars-Cov-1 still have plenty of antibodies 10 years later.
That said, when it comes to reinfections there is the big problem of variants of the virus. Immunity against one variant might not protect fully against another variant. It's very possible that we'll need to get yearly COVID vaccines, similarly to Influenza. But right now, it's still too soon to worry about that; we're still trying to get everyone vaccinated for the first time.
Why are you expecting your nurse and anesthesiologist friends to answer questions about mrna technology and then taking it to mean something when they can't answer? That's like reading a paper about an advancement in compiler parsing technology asking an average Software Developer who has spent the last 3 years of his career doing React apps to answer detailed and specific questions about ambiguities in the said paper?
This reminds me of my aunt who calls me about random issues she is having with her Samsung tablet and then is shocked when I can't solve her problem when I "do computers" all day.
I didn't take it to mean something that they didn't know answer. But as relative experts in the medical field, they considered it a good and valuable question.
I was contrasting this with keyboard experts who berated me for asking but know even less. The former are pro-science. They have studied. They didn't know. They valud the question.
Others knew less and didn't even see why it was a valid thing to wonder about. Instead of any scientific answer, they regurgitated garbage.
The thing is, any random person can be a genuine skeptic by simply having a lack of expertise in the subject. It’s much more interesting to hear from s skeptic that is more than a layman, otherwise we’d just be inundated with skeptics.
So my hypothesis is that groups of experts, or expert-adjacent, that are used to dealing with the public pelting them with questions and then ignoring them anyways, will be prone to shooting down smart, good faith questions too.
Here's an analogy most people here should respond to: a family member asks, "you know about computers, why isn't my [insert some app or website] working?"
Now, most of the time, do you think that they actually want the details? Even if many possible explanations leap to mind automatically, maybe it's some weird application that you've never heard of, and you really don't want to take the time at that moment to go figure it out for them. But generally, they're not asking for you to layer on the jargon and actually explain the nitty gritty details of why something isn't working, they just want you to make it work. Very seldom, sometimes that person really wants to absorb some real knowledge and learn. But that's not the common case by far.
So if most of us here are "computer people" to the lay public, then people working in many disparate fields of medical work are lumped together as "human body fixing people". Try to perspective take on what kinds of questions they usually get and from whom they usually get them.
For a large portion of the population, there is not much will to learn deeply about things. For them, science is surface level, and not much different from faith. We still need those people to "believe" in science even if they're never going to work hard to understand it, because the human animal hasn't changed that much in the past few thousand years, and people who are curious enough today to become scientists may well have been burned at the stake as witches by the same kind of people who are reflexively dogmatic today, and those doing the burning would have felt just as justified about protecting the public safety.
I get irritated with it too sometimes, and increasingly some entities like corporations are trying too hard to turn the act of science into a PR battle. It's extremely corrosive, because a lot folks know just enough to nod their heads at something that sounds good without checking whether it's a company pushing some really flaky "science" or real, solid research.
So please, ask smart questions, but also be careful where you sow doubt. Sometimes it's better to just hit the books if you really want to know something. We're not going to reach a state any time soon where everyone that claims to love science is actually going to love the act of methodically analyzing and questioning everything. We're probably going the other direction lately.
> and was wondering why we expected the immunity after the vaccine to last longer than natural immunity.
In the case of Pfizer and Astra Zeneca, the simple answer is that it is the second dose which presents a second challenge to the immune system which is designed to stimulate the longer protection, I'm quite surprised that none of your medical friends said that.
That leaves the question of how the single-dose jabs fair, and the honest answer is, I don't know.
If you read Linus's post then it seems that no mRNA sequence (not necessarily a vaccine) can ever do harm when injected into the body, but I doubt that is the case. I hope someone who is knowledgeable about the subject can explain whether that is true or not.
Natural mRNA sequences tend to contain uracil, which the immune system is not a fan of (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S152500161...). The innate immune system generally attacks extracellular mRNA because of this. The mRNA in vaccines are specially modified to bypass the immune system and be taken into cells, at which point they will be translated into spike proteins and be expressed on the cell’s surface. In conjunction with an adjuvant, the immune system will recognize this as a threat and begin producing antibodies.
It’s certainly possible that mRNAs could do harm: they could code for protein sequences that might disrupt cellular function, increase cancer risk (e.g. by disrupting DNA repair or even causing mutations), etc. The spike protein is none of these things - it just gets expressed on the cell’s surface - so the risk from the vaccine is low. And, crucially, once the mRNA runs out, no more protein will be produced: mRNAs are degraded after protein translation. This serves to generally limit the amount of lasting impact that an mRNA vaccine could possibly have.
Sure there is potential for harm. Most mRNAs just tell your cells how to make certain proteins, and there are tons of harmful proteins. You could be instructing your cells to make potent poisons, or instructing them to make all of the proteins necessary for an entire functional virus.
But the person he's responding to is citing methods of harm that aren't realistic.
I only got that he was arguing it won't make permanent changes to our genome, which was the claim he was replying to, and he's correct. The spike protein is damaging to cells when present at all, but still very apparently much less dangerous when exposed via vaccine than an actual infection. And, as you know, cells die and get replaced all the time. I think people who are aware of it sometimes gloss over how the spike protein does some damage simply because they don't want to stoke unreasonable fears.
No, he said that (in general) mRNA is flushed from your system within days and that (in specific) these vaccines don't permanently alter your DNA. That's nowhere near claiming that "mRNA can't ever do harm."
It is unclear to me (having just re-read Linus's post) where you see the claim that an mRNA cannot do harm. He says it cannot be incorporated into the genome, which is true of the Covid vaccine RNAs but not necessarily true in general (one could inject the RNA of a retrovirus). But the Covid19 vaccine mRNA simply makes the spike protein and (I'm sure they checked) does not get incorporated into the genome.
TL;DR you heard claims of vaccines' prophylactic effect lasting for years, from somewhere unnamed, and you correctly heard from people in the medical field that no one has any idea of how long it'll last, we're barely 6 months into have a sizable cohort to analyze this with in the US, which itself is far ahead of most of the world. Another massive factor is we have no idea how fast the virus will mutate.
Edit: oh, the irony of going -3 for this comment on this article...what's wrong people, lay it on me
> Another massive factor is we have no idea how fast the virus will mutate.
Sorry, what? We've been sequencing and tracking variants and lineages reliably since the pandemic started. This is very well travelled science. We've seen multiple notable variants arrive already, something that was predicted form the very early days of the pandemic and that surprised no one in the field.
Literally reality is the opposite of what you're saying. The virus is in fact "mutating" in more or less exactly the way that virologists would have expected, given decades of research on the subject.
One of the weirdest angles that the anti-vax/anti-mask crowd tend to take is to somehow argue that covid-19 is simultaneously "just a disease"/"not that bad" and that it's somehow some crazy unpredictable thing that defies the expectations of all of science. And both are wrong!
It's a very conventional novel disease behaving the way novel diseases do. There's a "global pandemic" among some species or another every few years (e.g. 90% of the pacific sea stars disappeared to a novel virus like 15 years ago and they're just now recovering). And that's bad, and requires action!
We have a fairly good idea about how it will mutate actually. COVID is probably one of the most heavily studied and sequenced viruses ever, and a lot of research has been published on likely mutagenic pathways.
The media as always has sensationalized every new strain found and their behaviour is cause for concern, but researchers have not been sounding the alarm over possible vaccine escape - the evidence points to the spike protein being highly conserved, and the mRNA vaccine antibodies have remained effective.
We do have a fairly good idea, but certainly not enough to describe it's exact relationship to exactly how long we can except vaccines to last, to OP's concern :)
I don't think the media has sensatialized any of the strains, and I am equally unconcerned as you. I expect I may need a booster in a year, probably in reality two, but one is safer under uncertainty.
Do you have anything on the Astra-Zenaca vaccine and how well it works against the do called "South-African" variant. There was a story that they'd stopped a trial because the results were so bad. Do we have any harder data?
Yes, Astra-Zeneca has been shown to be repeatedly poor against variants, a big story in the UK right now is whether the increase in cases and sense of being behind the US is due to gov't overly committing to a shoddy vaccine, or if it's variants burning through unvaccinated populations.
The picture isn't nearly as rosey as OP makes it sound, unfortunately: sort of a gish gallop about knowing the rate at which we can expect buffer overflows in C, but in reply to a comment noting we don't have an ETA for ending security vulnerabilities, so they unintentionally implied the picture is good.
The mRNA vaccines (Pfizer and Moderna) have both shown excellent (though in some cases reduced) efficacy against all strains [1], and the protein regions they target have not shown substantial alteration against antibody binding affinity (fun fact: this is "easy" to test - you give people the vaccine, isolate the antibodies in their blood, then test them against COVID in a petridish - so monitoring and change discovery is quick because you're not dependent on finding infected patients). The linked paper is notable, because while efficacy is effected, in tests the antibodies still ultimately inactivate the entire viral sample: no survivors means no natural selection criteria.
Given the widespread of COVID-19, the emergence of strains which do not successfully alter targetable regions for vaccines means that those regions are not easy (read: lead to reduction in fitness) to change. Similarly, the spike protein displays suboptimal binding to ACE receptors (tested by producing modified ACE receptors which have better binding) but there's been little field emergence towards a superior binding motif in any of the faster spreading strains [2], which implies again an evolutionary blockade or dead-end to improvements in that dimension.
Finally, antibody studies have found that in people who have had COVID, long term antibody production sets up in the bone marrow - this was recent research, but thats important because the basis of long term immunity is the development of immunological complexes which keep some antibody circulating. This is a hallmark of most long-lived immunities, and is for example one of the desired (though difficult to induce) end states of a potential mRNA HIV vaccine. [1]
Taken together (and again: you can also just go read what epidemiologists and microbiologists are publishing, plenty is out there) - the consensus opinion at the moment is that COVID-19 immunity is long-lived based on established science from decades of previous experience with vaccinating against viral diseases.
You gish gallop'd me through the floor by answering, yet again, as if I claimed something I hadn't. You should be ashamed for yourself, the very intent you had to better inform people was defeated by you.
You know most of the world isn't getting mRNA vaccines, and even if we quibble over 'most', it has nothing to do with your original nonsense, that somehow we know exactly when boosters for mRNA will be needed.
You don't have to do anything at all that might assist anyone else. But without support it's just like "your opinion, man." ;-) And difficult for anyone to act on in any meaningful way.
Jump to the 5 min mark. Dude explains some other stuff that works but is being suppressed.
For reference, I’m pro vaccine, but not one that hasn’t been tested for 10 years. Especially not for a disease that has a 99.99% survival rate in my age range. I’m appalled that anyone with an opinion (who’s educated!) can’t share that opinion, they’ve been banned.
For reference, I have a minor in bioengineering and read papers on this stuff. My wife works in genetics and I’ve assisted on and off. This virus and the vaccines are still active areas of research and what the NIH, CDC, WHO, etc act as fact is in fact just an unproven and likely correct in some and incorrect in other respects for virtually everything — from origin of disease to vaccines. We haven’t had enough time to study.
That being said, stop talking about vaccines when you’re developing the Linux kernel
I too have degrees in bioengineering, and I'm interested: given the function of an mRNA vaccine, by what mechanism do you think it would be possible for the cure to be worse than the disease in this case? Said another way, if you are guaranteed to either get COVID-19 or an mRNA vaccine, would you really prefer to get COVID-19? If so, what are you worried about in the vaccine that SARS-CoV-2 does not have?
Additionally, that guy saying "there are great alternative treatments but they've been suppressed!" doesn't mean it's true. I've seen neither evidence of this effectiveness nor evidence of suppression of this effectiveness, so not really sure what you expect people who care about demonstrable facts to do with that information.
I’ve had covid19, wasn’t a big deal, more mild than the flu I had the year prior. In fact, half the people I know got covid19. The only people I know who ended up in the hospital were a couple of family members who were vaccinated.
Regarding the mechanism. Inflammation, we are not 100% sure where and what cells the mRNA is injected into and the spike proteins themselves have risk. Further, you’re training the body to attack these proteins... in the case of the second shot, those proteins are being produced inside your cells and being released, are we sure you won’t have an autoimmune response? We know the second shot reports the highest rate of issues. Where do spike proteins accumulate after they’re created? Etc etc
I’m not saying I know, I’m saying for most vaccines we wait 10 years because there’s the unknowns. Covid19 has very minimal risks and for those under 35 it’s less risky than the flu. In contrast based on VARES data your more likely (in that age range) to be hospitalized and die from the vaccine (depending on confounding factors)
If you talk about these alternative drugs on social media your posts will be removed. Try it, post how you should try one of these drugs alongside of the vaccine.. that’s suppression.
What exactly do you think is happening when you get SARS-CoV-2? Do you think your cells are not taking viral mRNA and using it to make proteins? That is exactly what a virus does – it hijacks certain parts of your body that don't know any better to do its bidding. That protein is going to be produced by your body whether you get the virus or you get the vaccine. The difference is that with the vaccine the spike protein is all your body is producing (and a limited amount at that), while with the real virus your body is contending with 29 proteins that can work together in concert.
I recently learned that one can "durably" (aka for months) alter the expression of it's genes though epigenetic changes. This can be induced by some peptide drugs such as bromantane and is a very interesting biohack/pharmacological mechanism of action.
I read this headline and immediately asked myself, why don't you create an account and ask these people WTF do we care what Linus thinks about that? Then I read his post. It is actually a well reasoned response to another post on LKML. Now I created an account to say I agree with Linus, understand why post is popular, but I think the headline is a bit "click-baity". Although it did make me create an account.
"get vaccinated" should probably be heard by that person but it's still really not as easy as in Germany to get vaccinated as it might be in some other countries. I look at the UK/US/Canada (many parts of the EU) like they are on a different planet, because they are slowly going back to normal for months now, while I still can't get vaccinated here, even though I want to since the start of the year. The prioritization of old and sick people has just been lifted 4 days ago and the state I live in says that I still can't get an appointment until the mid of the month. And even then I should not get my hopes up to get an appointment quickly, as the vaccination centers have allocated their supply for second shots for the whole of June. Right now it seems likely that my employer will actually be quicker in getting a vaccine for me than my government. Actually off-topic, but it annoys me pretty much every day and I felt invited to rant by Linus assuming it's just that easy here.
> I think you are in Germany, and COVID-19 numbers are going down. It's spreading a lot less these days, largely because people around you have started getting the vaccine
The official position of the government here in The Netherlands is that you can still spread the virus after being vaccinated [1]. If I recall correctly, this has been the official position internationally since the beginning.
Also, cases went down sharply during the same period last year in all Europe thanks to the weather and without vaccines. In the UK, which has a much higher vaccination rate than the EU, cases are currently rising.
Unrelated question here - how are people actually consuming mailing lists like this? I always find these links difficult to read and have always assumed there much be some superior format, alternative typefaces for one.
The person who posted the vaccine misinformation had undergone some personal loss for which he blames the medical system. While this doesn't excuse spreading misinformation, it helped me understand where his desire to sow doubt in organised medicine could have come from: https://patientsafetymovement.org/advocacy/patients-and-fami...
Why is this anymore relevant than Banksy’s opinion on Rust in the Linux kernel?
It’s really annoying how many people think that because they are competent at a limited subset of discrete mathematics that people should care what they think about subjects where they are basically ignorant.
The way I like to think about it (not sure how accurate this is) is that mRNA is like a letter sent by your DNA. mRNA vaccines forge your DNA's handwriting and write a letter that looks like it came from your DNA, but didn't.
>it is a bad judgment call to parrot a line about experimental medical treatments
You do realize that medical science has been doing vaccines for a while now. Really, there's no reason to think that there are any long term side effects to the covid-19 vaccine. Medical scientists aren't reinventing the wheel with covid-19. They already have blue prints from other corona viruses to work off of. There's nothing experimental going on here.
It's also sad that when they actually need treatment in hospital the society (public health insurance) will still pay for the stupidity . They should at least be charged for it.
A good, no nonsense reply! The world is complicated. There are so many people who want the vaccine and can't access it and other people who do have access to the vaccine and don't want it.
I was surprised to discover one genuine anti-vax fact: if you're diabetic and you're taking a certain drug, you must be very careful before taking the COVID vaccine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26953326
That's not really anti-vax, but an acquaintance died a couple weeks after getting vaccinated due to diabetes complications, and I've always wondered if this was the cause.
I don't think I should post this without pointing out that I'm strongly pro-vax, though. It was just surprising.
I didn't even think of this before but now that i read this, i'm curious too. So basically Linus say mRNA vaccine does not change your genetic but then he proceed to say that it does exactly that to fight foreign proteins and it's ok because your cell's mRNA do that anyway. Do you see the difference?
I guess there is a reason to raise concerns about the novelty of the technique, if this is indeed the first time artificial mRNA is used on the general public.
> but then he proceed to say that it does exactly that to fight foreign proteins
No he doesn’t say that and is not true. mRNAs are “commands”. They encode proteins — each triplet (of nucleotides) on it will translate to one protein building block. They are semi-stable and are actively destroyed in the cell so they can only produce a few protein molecules. So injecting mRNA will give a temporary command to the cells to produce this protein so that the body can learn to defend agains them once they are released from cells.
This is what he said and he could be wrong but I'm not making up anything
> that the mRNA vaccines do is to add a dose their own specialized sequence that then makes your normal cell
machinery generate that spike protein so that your body learns how to recognize it... your body now knows how to
recognize and fight off a new foreign protein
So what happens if some faulty proteins are created from this process, any chance they then be used to build new cells and cause disorders?
I'm not on the "change genetic" argument anymore as I'm not sure what even defines that, just trying to understand the risks here.
What Linus writes is accurate, you may have misunderstood him. A dose of mRNA is transported to a few cells, and these cells temporarily gets the command to create spike proteins. These proteins will be transported outside your body and be recognized by the immune system. There is no need to constantly create them as the immune system can learn from this alone.
And it is temporary because mRNA is constantly degrading — it is a must otherwise a cell would have no way to stop manufacturing a protein after giving out a command.
It's not low, it's basically non-existent. It's perhaps just a needlessly defensive way of saying so in the video, since there are biologically a way for mRNA to turn into DNA. But it has an effect only on an evolutionary timescale.
The past year has been very instructive (and slightly scary) in revealing the sheer staggering depths of lack of scientific knowledge, and respect for the scientific process, among a vocal but aggressive small percentage of the population. These people truly have no idea of how much education is involved in getting a doctorate level degree in virology, epidemiology or genetics.
I will only respond to people who are serious. There is a section of the pro-vax crowd that is indeed scratching their head as to why there are some apparently intelligent people that they know are anti-vaxers. IMHO, they deserve an explanation.
Hopefully I come across as someone intelligent and sane.
I’ve already been diagnosed with covid and it was fine, a little worse than an average cold. Why should I take a vaccine and risk side effects for a disease with a 99.9% survival rate, when I’m not even bothered by it? Doesn’t make sense to me.
You are the lucky person who only has a little symptom. The vaccine is for stopping the transmission so that the unlucky people won't get and die from COVID. Then the economy and the world can go back to normal.
I hate to be a pedant, but covid-19 is the disease. SARS-CoV-2 is the virus. Sure, "Covid-19 virus" is in the vernacular, but when you're fighting misinformation, it doesn't help to then use misnomers.
I don't know much about Linux, but if you are too quick to say something off topic cannot be discussed at all and even trying to discuss it is a bannable offense, that tends to kill conversation and interfere with getting people to participate, to get along well enough to get things done, etc.
If you think it might be a little inappropriate to care much about a programmer's endorsement of a vaccine, here's an actual famous doctor saying "for God's sake don't take this thing".
Ok, I'll bite.
I was willing to assume he might have some legitimate concern.
A quick Google hoever reveals he was a Covid denier from the start.
There is plenty of evidence that the pandemic is real. Why should the oppinion about the risk of the cure of someone who denied the risk of of the pandemic, be relevant?
How does a credentialed person go off the rails so badly??
Robert W. Malone _claims_ to be the inventor of mRNA vaccines and on his web site there's a long explanation of how he had the patents first and so on (https://www.rwmalonemd.com/mrna-vaccine-inventor) but I can't find ANY reference to him being the inventor of mRNA vaccines other than pages and bios that he has written himself. So I'll take it with a pinch of salt thanks.
Seems pretty clear after some legwork. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_vaccine Robert Malone was first to the scene developing RNA vaccines, Katalin Karikó "attempted to solve some of the main technical barriers to introducing mRNA into cells" and "solved one of the key technical barriers by using modified nucleosides to get mRNA inside cells without setting off the body's defense system." Because the powers that be ie Media, Academia favor and cover Katalin she may be nominated for the Nobel even. Malone to date goes unacknowledged in most cases just like we've seen so often in so many discoveries. Katalin herself supposedly agreed that she made improvements on the works of others but news stories rarely if ever reveal the "others". Perhaps sooner rather than later, credit and acknowledgements will come.
In a interview (few years back), Linus mentioned that he read many books related to Genes and medical science related to that! He supposed to be expert in that domain too!
Sure, I will trust doctor Linus with this. And by the way, this email has been penned by a certain Enrico. After needless lockdowns and masks mandates you still think many millions of better educated people than this guy. There’s a shot for you… mine
RNA can conceivably alter human DNA? How, you might ask, given that human cells don’t use reverse transcriptase? Because due to ancient viral infections there’s a LINE-1[1] gene that codes for it. So it can’t be ruled out that RNA ends up encoded as DNA.
This is the most appropriate tone you can use to deliver a message to anti-vaxxers, which is the only one they understand. We need more Linuses.
I have engaged many anti-vaxxers in different tones, and a polite tone usually does not resonate with them much because "political correctness" is perceived as a lack of authenticity.
Profanity and emotion resonates more with them, because that is the way you talk to people you trust.
> The half-life of mRNA is a few hours. Any injected mRNA will be all gone from your body in a day or two.
Can someone with more knowledge comment on whether this is true for components of the vaccine that aren't just the mRNA bits? I am not sure, but I assume there are various other components that form the delivery vehicle for the vaccine, stabilize it for storage, and so on. What are the actual mechanisms for those to be 'gone from the body'?
The first four are various lipids, used to build the lipid nanoparticles. The body can get rid of those the same way that it would get rid any other lipid.
The remaining excepients are just some salts and sugar.
The lipid nanoparticle is just lipids. Unless you happen to have an allergic reaction to the specific components you should worry a lot more about eating a cheeseburger and what eliminates all those chemicals from your system.
The mRNA delivery system is about as close to "nothing" as you can get.
I think that's kind of irrelevant, since those bits aren't the part that were causing concern. Nobody's worried that the part that stabilizes it for storage is going to "create a new humanoid race". That's purely based on (a misunderstanding of) the mRNA.
I wasn’t asking out of that same motivation. I was just wondering how true it is that the body gets rid of all the components of the vaccine and simply retains the benefit of antibodies with no “vaccine remnants”.
But Linus is not a doctor or biologist, so no expertise to speak of. And the infection rate dropped to almost zero last summer as well, no vaccine in sight at the time.
Now states are combating such hesitancy by drawing lottery for vaccinated folks.
Like, having this magic, absolutely mind boggling potion that prevents serious illness and death *isn't* already the lottery win of our lifetime??
People in India and elsewhere are dying because of lack of vaccines and here we have educated, first world countries struggle to get their citizens vaccinated.
Unfortunately shaming such people will only push them further into antivax territory.