[qxxx]

That comment got flagged, probably because HN audience is mostly pro covid vaccine... "trust the science" or whatever.

Initially, the only thing stopping me from getting this vaccine was that people died of blood clots / heart attacks / strokes etc... and these vaccines are more like a Russian Roulette than some remedy. Especially Astrazeneca caused many problems.

And now after months seeing that these vaccines are not any effective and people are getting covid, especially after being vaccinated / boostered I ask myself, WHY should I get it? Why don't they can make a good and working vaccine - probably because they rushed it in few months. I am a developer and a good software needs time. You can still get the software few months earlier, but it will be full of bugs and could cause many problems. I don't want to have these problems in my body.

[fabian2k]

The vaccines are very effective in preventing severe illness and death. That's an enormous success, especially if you consider the speed of development.

The difficulty of developing vaccines varies a lot depending on the characteristics of the virus. For some we still can't manage to do this, others we have fully or mostly eradicated by vaccines already. There are ideas for vaccines that might help to also prevent infection with the newer COVID variants, e.g. the nose spray vaccines. But those have to be funded and developed, and that seems rather slow right now.

[matsemann]

Yes, we know the vaccine wasn't perfect. The question isn't if it's perfect or not, though. It's if taking it has a better outcome than not taking it. This goes for all vaccines. They have side effects. But for those in common use, it's been determined the side effects (although sad for those affected) are better on average than people not taking the vaccine.

[taolegal]

But averages aren't a moral or sensible basis to determine the personal decisions of individuals.

[nathanaldensr]

No, the question is whether individual health choices matter. I believe they do. Numbers are not necessarily the primary decision-making point for many people.

Sorry, authoritarians, but many people do not want to live their lives via what experts tell them to do. This will never change, no matter how much you wish it would.

[matsemann]

No one has said individual health choices doesn't matter, that's a straw man. One can both believe individuals should have a choice in taking it or not, _and_ believe the vaccines is the correct choice.

The only authoritarian thing I will do is to tell you to stop with the name calling of those you disagree with..

[taolegal]

> No one has said individual health choices doesn't matter

The president created an unconstitutional vaccine mandate that violates individual health choices (after saying he had no power or intention of doing that during his campaign), and most of his followers & supporters endorsed it.

That's not name-calling, especially when millions of Americans were threatened against their will to take an unprecedented vaccine (regardless of their risk or antibody status). It's simply ignorant to say that authoritarian impulses were not pervasive. I had a family member say we should just do what China is doing. That means welding people in their houses and rolling out total surveillance and intense police regimentation of public life. I'll never trust them again in the same way. I saw how people act in a true emergency and it's absolutely ugly.

[Tainnor]

> Initially, the only thing stopping me from getting this vaccine was that people died of blood clots / heart attacks / strokes etc...

Basically all of these (exceedingly rare, one should say) side-effects are also associated with a covid19 infection.

[yladiz]

> And now after months seeing that these vaccines are not any effective and people are getting covid, especially after being vaccinated / boostered I ask myself, WHY should I get it?

You’re misunderstanding. The vaccines are effective, just not as effective against the current variant compared to some other variants. You’ll still get protection in general and your symptoms will be reduced if you do get infected with omicron. Vaccines are not a zero-sum game kind of choice, it’s about probability and risk reduction.

[DannyBee]

All things are imperfect. Yes, people have died, had issues, etc. We should not dismiss that (and people do), it is in fact true.

But it is unfortunately normal, and will likely not change for a very very long time, if ever

If you give anything to all ~8 billion people in the world, even basic things like "water", or "sunlight", you will see some percent of them have issues with it.

In fact, the rate of some allergies to sunlight[1] is greater than the rate of issues with covid vaccines.

So it's not really Russian Roulette at this scale any more than "going outside" is. It's simply that humans are all too different to be perfect at giving them anything, and at a scale of almost 8 billion people, everything that can happen, will happen. In that sense it is like building software than runs on 8 billion very very similar but very slightly different platforms.

The rate of issues is right now is already essentially "The best of the best". To use your analogy, these vaccines is already just about the most well tested, bug free software that can exist in this situation

As for the other parts - as others have said, vaccines exist not just to stop disease, but to reduce severity.

https://static.scientificamerican.com/sciam/assets/Image/cov...

The chance you have of dying with covid is a lot less with a vaccine than without one. a lot less. At the point of that chart, if you multiply it out: 120,000 unvaccinated people were dying of covid per week 13,000 vaccinated people were dying 6000 vaccinated + boosted people were dying

You can choose to be one of the 120,000, or the 6000.

I know what I chose :)

That said, one of the things that gets lost in here is that media and others did suggest at the start that vaccines would cause the end of covid by ending transmission (IE nobody would get sick anymore), despite that being mostly a hope of scientists, and not a guarantee. That was wrong, and has caused a serious loss of trust that gets ignored, and causes people who point it out to often feel gaslit.

We will build better vaccines for sure - the same way we try to build better software. I am part of a phase 1 trial of a next generation vaccine that tackles all variants at once (and seems very successful at it).

Waiting for perfect software is a fools errand, the same way waiting for a perfect car is. So i'd suggest not doing that.

The question is always "are you better off with something or nothing".

The answer to that question is very clear.

[1]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3063367/