Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by yellowapple 1323 days ago
> The silence is truly deafening.

If you're only hearing silence in the vaccination debate (which, mind you, has been raging since before the first SARS outbreak, let alone the current SARS 2: CoV Boogaloo), then you might want to get your ears checked ;)

There is no shortage of medical professionals with all sorts of opinions on whether or not to vaccinate for any manner of disease, COVID included. Sure, the overwhelming majority have reached a consensus in favor of vaccination doing more good than harm (for good reason), but the tiny minority with contrary opinions are not at all being censored (if anything, they're being anti-censored, e.g. by social media posts and your usual gaggle of conspiracy-theory-peddling news outlets).
1 comments
stackola 1323 days ago
> the overwhelming majority have reached a consensus in favor of vaccination doing more good than harm (for good reason)

Do you believe they have all the data needed to make that a final conclusion? Or are most of those medical professionals simply following certain leaders and descission makers? Would that even count as (useful) consensus then?

link
yellowapple 1323 days ago
> Do you believe they have all the data needed to make that a final conclusion?

There is no "final conclusion". There will always be more data. So far the data have rather strongly indicated greater benefit than harm, even among the reports asserting correlations between vaccines and adverse reactions, so it doesn't seem very surprising to see consensus on that among medical experts.

The consensus ain't always right, to be clear. Maybe the small minority of experts asserting more harm than good are onto something. The body of data supporting such assertions is far more lacking, so I wouldn't bet on it.

> Or are most of those medical professionals simply following certain leaders and descission makers?

It's usually the other way around: the "certain leaders and decisionmakers" in the pro-vaccination camp largely lead/decide based on how experts are informing them - and there's certainly no shortage of said experts.

It's a fair bit more varied in the anti-vaccination camp; some such leaders/decisionmakers do defer to experts (and it's simply a case of their pool of experts being in the anti-vaccination camp), but it seems like most instead assume they know better than the experts; they tend to be the sorts of folks who already reject scientific methodology for various reasons, and thus are not inclined to defer to experts informed by said methodology.

link
stackola 1323 days ago
I appreciate the response. I agree with most of what you say.

I still think it's important to point out that in this situation, with a) a lack of primary data and especially b) considering the political and societal implications for publicly disagreeing with the "accepted opinion" consensus might just not be a great measure in this case.

link