The vaccine misinformation has created entire groups of people irrationally terrified of them. :( And those people are only going to cause more death and suffering because of their ignorance. :(
There's a big difference between intentionally exposing a single consenting person to a modified pathogen for the purpose of giving them resistance and intentionally releasing a modified pathogen into the environment and allowing it to spread by its usual vector to the consenting and unconsenting alike without any regard.
If this were a virus created using gain of function research we would call it a biological weapon. But because the intent is different we're supposed to be excited and accepting of it?
> If this were a virus created using gain of function research we would call it a biological weapon.
Except it's the literal opposite of gain of function: it's the subtraction of function from a pathogen which already exists in the environment and already infects people on a regular basis in the environment, turning it from a deadly killer into something that dies quickly and without reproducing when it meets the human immune system.
People take actions every day that affect others, some negatively and some positively, and don't receive consent for each one. We don't need consent to put exhaust or other harmful chemicals into the air, and those are an explicit negative. Something like this could be a huge positive, potentially saving millions of lives. If the projected benefits to risks are sufficient (and I'm not saying they necessarily are, but if that turned out to be the case based on further testing), there is a point at which it would be worthwhile, despite it not being possible to get individual consent.
Yes, you’re supposed to be excited and accepting of things that save millions of lives, not decry them just because they have vaguely the same shape as something evil.
HN is having a real hard time here with the concept that mass death is actually bad and something that’s nice to prevent.
> One could say that it's the intent which varies between a heart transplant and an Azrec blood sacrifice.
Heart transplants are from consenting donors that have recently diseased, not living victims murdered solely for their organs. Blood sacrifices do not involve taking the heart and saving a live either. So no intent is not the variance there.
> vaccine misinformation has created entire groups of people irrationally terrified
I am terrified of them but I'm fairly certain it's rationalized. The medical community decided it's more important to bully their patients into compliance than to listen to their concerns and work with them. The vaccine absolutely had side effects for some individuals and they were treated very poorly, in particular at the beginning of the pandemic, due to this attitude of "fighting misinformation." Our medical institutions were put to propaganda purposes rather than healthcare purposes and the results were absolutely horrific.
> to cause more death and suffering
This is predicated on the belief that "herd immunity" is valid and universal to all vaccines and that, again, bullying people who are afraid into choices they're not comfortable with is somehow justifiable due to it. As if letting a for profit institution inject random goop into me is a natural thing to _not_ be generally wary or afraid of.
Just because you think you have "the science" doesn't mean you get a free pass on "patient rights."
It’s sad to see this kind of nonsense in a place that so prides itself on rationality. If a bunch of technophiles can’t even accept the idea that vaccination is the first or second most effective medical technology in history (sewers potentially taking the #1 spot) then the whole thing seems completely hopeless.
I’m really not looking forward to the return of measles and polio as common first-world diseases, but that seems to be the trajectory we’re on.
You appeal to rationality then immediately abandon it. The COVID vaccine was not a traditional vaccine and the definitions were changed after it's release to match it. It relied on an entirely novel technology and novel delivery technique that was a part of a military strategy goal for a decade for no practical reason. The goalposts were constantly changed and "boosters" added to measurably diminished returns.
Which is all bad enough, but for people with your sort of "rational" to then decide that vaccines are _all_ uncritically "good," and any questions or any sort of reservations that I've just covered were thus uncritically "bad" and those having them deserved to have their civil rights stripped from them, is what made this a horror.
Finally, we have sanitized water and sewers and we live in first world conditions, the precursors to the diseases you mention are almost entirely absent from our living conditions, and those vaccinations use time tested and proven technologies which haven't ever been in question. Perhaps some of the popular adjuvants are worthy of concern, but in your version of rationality, this is apparently an evil thing to even consider out loud in the presence of the vaunted "technophiles."
You completely fail to maintain rationality in the face of a very narrow and specific critique.
“the definitions were changed after it's release to match it”
Complete horseshit.
This sort of nonsense is what I’m talking about. It’s not that you’re not allowed to criticize. It’s that the critics are full of shit and we’re expected to take it seriously.
You have refused to take any of this seriously. You have a preconceived idea of the world and you are absolutely unwilling to accept any debate or challenge over it. You are acting as a bully and not as a scientist. No wonder you constantly appeal to authority.
Did you not notice that your Newsweek article rates this claim as false?
Definitions are always imprecise anyway. The CDC’s pre-2015 definition of a vaccine wouldn’t have covered the tetanus vaccine, even though it’s a century old and there’s no dispute over whether or not it should qualify as a “vaccine” or not.
I’ve seen two somewhat different complaints around this definition nonsense.
First, there’s the complaint that the original definition used to require that a vaccine contain a dead or inactivated infectious organism, and it was changed because mRNA stuff is the first time something didn’t work that way, and thus it’s not really a vaccine. This is of course completely false. Tetanus doesn’t work this way and there are others from well before the mRNA era.
The other is that the definition used to require a “vaccine” to provide total immunity from infection and now it doesn’t, and this is because the covid vaccines don’t provide total immunity. This is obviously wrong because no vaccine provides total immunity. There are vaccines that provide a lot better immunity than the covid vaccines do, but none that are 100%.
So yes, horseshit. This doesn’t come from preconceived notions of the world, it comes from knowing basic facts about the world. When you read that “they” changed “the” definition in order to push something, your first thought should be to look up what the old one said and see if it was actually an accurate definition. And you should have the basic knowledge to be able to understand when it was clearly deficient.
"Vaccine" is a category of products, each one is unique and the safety and efficacy of one has no bearing on any other. The reason they have such good standing is selection bias. Before COVID, only vaccines that passed years of rigourous testing were used and those are the only ones people know to exist, giving the impression that anything called "vaccine" is safe. That's wrong.
Which currently or previously widely available vaccines are not safe? I can think of one, but I doubt it’s the one you’re thinking of.
“Vaccines” have such good standing because the general idea of improving immunity by exposing the immune system to non-infectious material that closely matches some part of the infectious agent works really well. There’s not much room for things to go wrong unless the material actually turns out to be infectious, as was the case with the dangerous vaccine I mentioned above.
> Which currently or previously widely available vaccines are not safe?
If they were detected as unsafe during testing they wouldn't be available. That's the point. You only know of vaccines that passed the tests, not those that didn't.
> “Vaccines” have such good standing because the general idea of improving immunity by exposing the immune system to non-infectious material that closely matches some part of the infectious agent works really well. There’s not much room for things to go wrong unless the material actually turns out to be infectious, as was the case with the dangerous vaccine I mentioned above.
Infectiousness is not the only risk. Look at polio vaccines causing polio.
If this were a virus created using gain of function research we would call it a biological weapon. But because the intent is different we're supposed to be excited and accepting of it?
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.