[33ultra]

These downvotes remind me about downvotes 2 years back, when I was here on HackerNews talking about leaky vaccines, vaccination-driven variants of concern, and COVID eventually turning endemic (without or without human intervention), impossible to ever remove.

There are people still on HackerNews right now, who were back then talking about overreactions, and it just being a flu, and that masks promote xenophobia and do nothing. That must weigh really heavy on their mind, or perhaps they got with (vaccination) program, and if you downvote it quickly, it does not exist to bother your own manipulated decision-making gaffe.

Yes, I am saying a horrible thing: you want to mandate a treatment for non-at-risk people, which can give them permanent damage or even cause death. But what is more concerning? Me saying a horrible thing? Or you condemning a pregnant woman to miscarriage, because the message needs to be that the vaccine is 100% safe?

Stuck between censor-happy left, and anti-science right, and both reduce my right and duty to be an informed citizen.

[dwild]

> There are people still on HackerNews right now, who were back then talking about overreactions, and it just being a flu,

What? It just being a flu is an argument that I only seen from anti-vax... never been a thing here but would be happy to be proven wrong.

> and that masks promote xenophobia and do nothing.

Never seen this also, could you show me? The best I have seen in the past was that a mask in the wrong hands do no good, which is true when you need 100x more mask than you got, which was the case at the time.

> you want to mandate a treatment for non-at-risk people, which can give them permanent damage or even cause death.

I'm curious how you define non-at-risk people too? Covid was not a risk for them but vaccine was? That's weird how the virus works ;). Whatever you fear from the vaccine, you can fear the same from the virus... except that from the virus, the numbers are incredibly much worse. Why would we use the vaccine if that wasn't the case? We would be stuck with the exact same issues.

[33ultra]

For sourcing, I'll see if I can muster some time later. But you'd do the same as me: Look at HackerNews discussions starting around February 2020.

Non-at-risk people are young people without co-morbidities or overweight. These have a similar risk profile as for influenza. At-risk people are older people, and since the decisions are made by older people, these decisions mostly favor their own pockets and peace of mind.

There are groups of non-at-risk people, with naturally acquired immunity (because these worked in supermarkets, when older powerful people had the luxury of work-from-home), for which taking the vaccine has more to fear than contracting COVID. For them, taking the vaccine still helps with pressure on hospitals, the at-risk elderly decision-makers, and aiding economic recovery. Helpful. Selfless. We are in this together. But scared into, or mandated into, or forced into taking the vaccine "for their own good".

[monetus]

I get the sense you are strung out. - there are way more lurkers than those who comment - a reminder to try not to extrapolate too much from those who do. Hell, I've found myself in arguments with eugenecists on this site. With the weight of viral worries, the megaphone of a public forum has people nervous, you should expect strong reactions to anything negative about vaccines; people perceive negatives more than positives. Just be honest about what you do and don't know, cite sources that you've tried to understand, and take vitriol in stride. The pregnancy thing for instance - now lurkers have to Google things for themselves and may end up on some save the children propaganda site