Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by smukherjee19 1651 days ago
This is honestly one of my concerns (double-vaccinated with mRNA, no issues and I am not anti-vax).

The thing is, before the COVID-19, the world had barely heard of mRNA vaccines and suddenly there are billions of people vaccinated across the world in 2 years. I have no intention of denying that these vaccines have saved millions, if not billions of lives by preventing hospitalization, death and further overloading of medical systems worldwide.

But still, a skeptic part of my brain can't seem to 100% accept the fact, even though it might be a medical miracle. It's that scratch on your back you can barely not reach, and it stays itchy for days and months.

On the other hand, vaccines that use inactivated or dead viruses to incite an immune response has been known for more than two centuries, whereas this feels... different.

Unfortunately, at the time of writing this, none of the other answers to this question in this thread have been proper responses that directly answer the question, except the one about "changing priorities from do no harm to optimize for least harm" that seems to make most sense.

So, I'd love to have a direct answer, no analogies, no "imagine how worse it could have been without vaccines", no "disease X kills more people than Covid and mortality for mRNA vaccine for Covid is negligible compared to that", no shifting goalposts, no guilt-tripping for being skeptic, just a straight, direct answer to this question of the OP.

1 comments

“…if not billions of lives by preventing hospitalization, death and further overloading of medical systems worldwide.”

No remote way that it saved billions of lives. Covid is nowhere close to that level of mortality. The level of exaggeration that people have allowed themselves to succumb to over Covid is frankly quite alarming.

What can I do to convince them that it is not as bad as they think it is?
Sadly. My guess is that for some people there is nothing you can do to convince them. These people believe what they hear on CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, etc and are too lazy to consider documents and statistics that do not support their favorite news personalities.

It seems that major news sources have decided to suppress any information that disputes the reductive and simplistic storyline that the vaccine and masks are the perfectly effective and only solution.