For many people, it's more than just a jab, it's 1-3 days of being quite unwell.
I have no underlying health conditions, but I've been bedridden by my 2nd shot and booster shots, with a high fever, fatigue, dizziness, and aches for at least 48 hours. My partner who is immuno-compromised is worse off, generally being very ill for 1-2 weeks after each jab. Her case is somewhat different though, as her situation is just all round unfortunate.
I'm not saying I won't continue to comply with all health advisories for vaccination or other public safety measures, and I'm not saying vaccines aren't worth it for society. But it's not "just" a jab.
This is why the company I work for will give you up to three paid days off after getting a vaccine shot. Feeling bad after the shot should not be a reason to not get it.
The pro vaccination camp has been more annoying than the antivaxers - at least the nutjobs are easy to filter out, it takes soo long to wade through the bullshit when it's veiled as facts.
Until it isn't. Then what are you going to do? Probably nothing except suffer debilitation for life or death (~20,000 that have been reported to VAERS, so probably substantially more).
I saw less than half that number — 8099 — on the VAERS site.
And this is for a disease which has killed 821,335 Americans after infecting 51 million.
So if it’s absolutely perfectly safe and there is a roughly 5% chance of getting infected with Covid while waiting for the vaccine to take effect, it would look like this.
Not sure where you get that number. Also, the numbers for VAERS entry are very probably not even in the ballpark of all injuries because doctors don't often advertise VAERS or even enter patient data there. Why would they, it's basically extra work they don't get paid for.
I had a family friend that shot himself in a hunting accident. Drove himself to the hospital bleeding, didn't make it 24 hours. Tested positive for Covid. Labeled covid death.
I get that it can be a serious disease for some, but it's rare unless you're already in poor health. The response to Covid and vaccine insanity has been ultra overblown.
> The response to Covid and vaccine insanity has been ultra overblown.
Last year the UK ran short of mortuaries and body bags.
On several occasions, hospitals have been unable to meet demand in various different ways, from beds (meaning staff for them rather than literally beds), to oxygen.
> I had a family friend that shot himself in a hunting accident. Drove himself to the hospital bleeding, didn't make it 24 hours. Tested positive for Covid. Labeled covid death.
My condolences.
But it works both ways: If he’d had a recent vaccine instead of a covid infection, that would be listed on VAERS as correlated to the vaccine, from what I gather.
Most of the case (>99.9%), it's very likely just a temporal correlation rather than real causation. Even without vaccine, thousands of healthy people die every day without any prior sign and vaccine doesn't change that.
At my restaurant we save money by never cleaning the kitchen. No one should coerce me into doing something where it is not necessary. Cleaning wastes my time and money and it's my freedom to not clean! No one should take that freedom away in a free country!
So they were checking every morning when you were taking your company car that you had no alcohol in your blood? How did that work? Your boss was waiting at the door?
The reason why drunk driving is so dangerous is because of the choices of past governments to make implicit subsidies for cars and urban planners making car dependent suburbia.
Our choices are already constrained before we even realize it and yet people chose to die on the vaccination hill.
You're talking about employment where the employer makes much much of off your labor than you will ever receive, and you are powerless to demand your fair share. Yet instead, a safe workplace is the coercive part?
If you don't want to be coerced, you had better not be an employee with wages. Go out there and start your own business.
It’s hilarious to see HN flip from “I dream of a future where no one has to work and fall under the yoke of greedy employers” to “just get injected with this drug and be thankful you have a job; don’t get it and you deserve to starve”.
The vaccines are the magic future where a small bit of technology prevents disease and death.
> don’t get it and you deserve to starve
It's not by chance that you have to make up ridiculous words and put them in my mouth to attempt to criticize the comment, either in this part where I quoted you, or in the weird assertion about no one having to work.
> The vaccines are the magic future where a small bit of technology prevents disease and death.
That's the part I've found so disappointing about this: a couple of decades of development and we have a massive breakthrough in our ability to rapidly create and update vaccines which precisely target near-arbitrary targets. Seeing what would have been a sci-fi technology when I was a kid being the target of so many conspiracy theories must be incredibly disappointing to all of the actual medical experts who worked so hard on this.
Those medical experts should look at themselves for why people react this way.
An absolute refusal to accept any legal liability for harms done by the product, whilst simultaneously insisting it's perfectly safe? Check.
Claims that anyone worried about long term effects is a crazy malicious person when Moderna was failing to progress beyond animal trials due to multi-dose toxicity as recently as 2017? Check. [2]
Fanatical insistence on forced vaccination, even when the logical basis for mandates has been invalidated by equal infectiousness? Check. [1]
Constantly shifting claims about effectiveness, invalidated within months yet all presented with absolute confidence? Check.
Insistence that nobody look at the database of injuries and papers which do so should be retracted, despite it existing specifically to be analyzed? Check.
A million different non-vaccine explanations for the sudden spike in public heart attacks, none of which are remotely plausible? Check.
We could go on for many pages of this. The medical/public health establishment has consistently wrecked their own credibility and acted in untrustworthy, suspicion-raising ways. They don't then get to make a sad face and say "but sci fi". Let us know when Pfizer/Moderna can be taken to court for injuries and deaths caused by their sci-fi tech, and interest will grow.
HN used to be firmly anti-FBI/CIA and pro-Assange. Something flipped that around such that the FBI and CIA are Real American Heroes and Assange is some sort of Russian asset. The NSA is still a bit of a bogeyman here, but even that may not hold.
HN is also filled with people who were OccupyWallStreet or AntiWar types who now bloviate endlessly on portfolio management and advocate for the invasion of Iran/Syria/Russia/China/etc.
And don't even get me started on the cypherpunks, the phrack guys, etc. There might be one or two of them left who aren't actively wiping their asses with the CAM or Hacker Manifesto daily.
I suspect that evolving from eating Ramen and reading zines in a communal hackerspace to being paid $400k/yr to analyze the click habits of a billion people changes a person.
The anti-war/free love/hippie/flower power boomers did precisely the same thing, of course. Money and status will always kill lofty ideals. Always.
It hadn't occurred to me that this might lead a whole bunch of people, who didn't previously, to regard the employment relationship as fundamentally coercive. Hm. I'm now torn on this.
I have no underlying health conditions, but I've been bedridden by my 2nd shot and booster shots, with a high fever, fatigue, dizziness, and aches for at least 48 hours. My partner who is immuno-compromised is worse off, generally being very ill for 1-2 weeks after each jab. Her case is somewhat different though, as her situation is just all round unfortunate.
I'm not saying I won't continue to comply with all health advisories for vaccination or other public safety measures, and I'm not saying vaccines aren't worth it for society. But it's not "just" a jab.