How much death and suffering does this guy have on his conscience?
I’m so curious how someone goes from being a professor to a science denier? I simply can’t imagine that journey.
How much death and suffering does this guy have on his conscience?
I’m so curious how someone goes from being a professor to a science denier? I simply can’t imagine that journey.
The suffering is the point.
Also interesting that there can be a giant asshole running a federal agency into the ground and I've never heard of him until now. Gives some scale to the problem. I also wonder what else is going on in government that falls below the widely reportable threshold.
It's like saying that one of the seagulls at the beach is particularly noisy.
Results are fuzzy. He has a nice Malibu compound to go to after this lived experience
I can definitely imagine it. It becomes so much easier to not worry about it when you have a comfortable pillow made out of lots and lots of money to rest your head on.
Death and suffering are “natural.”
These people are all delusional ideologues. If reality does not match the ideology, reality must be wrong.
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1. That's not what ad hominem means. You can legitimately criticize people for their actions. All I see here are people saying his actions are wrong and incongruous with fact-based science.
2. There's nothing whatsoever wrong about asking questions. It becomes wrong when refusing to listen to the answers and dismissing all the ones you don't like because you don't like the person saying them. Ironically, that's ad hominem.
I think there are two parts of this issue. One is does the vaccine work. The other is should the govt prevent people from having it.
Scepticism is healthy, and I don't begrudge you your scepticism. The scientific consensus can be wrong, especially for issues like this where debates get heated.
But I think that's an argument for 'let people do what they want' rather than 'prevent them from doing what mainstream science seems to think is the best action'.
> and as someone that is vaccine skeptical for a number of reasons
Your point of view is not legitimate, and you deserve to be ridiculed wherever you go.
> When did asking for better evidence, or bringing up side effects, or Absolute Risk, suddenly become things that we cannot discuss on HN?
Because vaccine skeptics do not engage honestly on these things, they wouldn’t be vaccine skeptics if they did.
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Vaccine skepticism is on the same level as flat earthism. This is not an insult to your person, but this is the reality of the science. Trading a 0.1 micromort risk once for a 1000 micromort risk over your lifetime is a crazy good deal. Put another way: that's trading ~6 minutes for ~24 days of life. You do that for every vaccine. Some vaccines have worse trades depending on your situation, and some are far better trades.
Look at these stats: https://boxed.github.io/micromort/?q=vaccine&scale=log&sel=v...
Note the LOG scale! You can switch to a linear scale, but then you can't even see there are multiple vaccine adverse risk data points, as they all collapse to one dot compared the the huge risks of the diseases they prevent.
>Trading a 0.1 micromort risk once for a 1000 micromort risk
I think like with that person that found their cancer to have some dna from an mrna vaccine in it the issue is when the prominent messaging is that there is no 0.1 micromort risk. There is no risk whatsoever and everyone who says so is a looney. Immediately you'll have thousands who say i told you so and harden their conviction.
The COVID19 vaccines were the most-discussed vaccines ever. And there was an enormous amount of coverage for the potential side effects. Recommendations were adjusted based on new data.
There was also bad communication on the topic, often when politicians got involved or due to outdated information continued to be repeated. But there certainly was a lot of public discussion about the risks of the vaccines, they were simply vastly outnumbered by the benefits of the vaccines.
It didn't help that the AstraZeneca vaccine was fairly bad all things considered. At roughly 3 micromort according to the latest data it's quite a lot of risk for a modern vaccine actually. Now, compared to getting Covid it's still better. Even for a 10 year old the covid risk is ~20 micromort and we don't recommend vaccines for that group. Which seems a bit bonkers when you consider that trading 20 for 3 is clearly a good choice, it's just that anti-vaccine loonies make politicians scared out of their minds, so they will rather have lots of kids dying than a few kids dying from vaccines.
I suspect the issue is in part also just selfishness.
That 20 is in large part the kid that was brought into the hospital too late if at all. The kid that might have had astma or what have you.
The 3 is potentially yours or one in your family or friend group or community. It is a government mandated death and you might already distrust the gov.
A tragic event vs an authoritarian death inflicted upon you from that perspective.
My grandma is a scientist presumably very familiar with all this stuff but when her partner (not my grandpa) died from a bloodcloth shortly after getting an vaccine she also veered into that territory.
> It is a government mandated death and you might already distrust the gov.
Well.. no. It was a government RECOMMENDED death at the most.
In fact, it's even more stupid. Sweden for example were so deadly afraid of anti-vaxxers that they threw away tens of thousands of doses of AstraZenecas vaccine. The one with 2 deaths per million. At the time it was estimated at 5 per million. Sweden has a population of 10 million. So if we instantly vaccinated the entire population we would see 2 deaths. While this decision to throw away doses was done we lost tens per day. And the government didn't allow those who understood math to take this if they wanted. No. They mandated the deaths. THOSE deaths WERE mandated. For real.
> There is no risk whatsoever and everyone who says so is a looney.
No. Lying about the risks is what got us in this mess. There IS a risk. It's just crazy low. https://boxed.github.io/micromort/?q=vaccine&scale=log These are the real risks. Yellow Fever vaccine is the worst with ~7 micromort risk. That's roughly your baseline risk just by living for 7 hours. It's not a lot, but saying it's zero is false, and lying about shit is how you radicalize people.
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Note that Prasad didn't reject their application: he prevented Moderna from even applying. Prasad overrode a phalanx of FDA career scientists who had studied and approved Moderna's study approach and were ready to review it. He did so suddenly and without warning: the FDA up to that point had not raised any concerns about Moderna's trial protocol. He didn't cite any safety or efficacy issues.
This wasn't the only time he stepped in and overrode experts with seemingly no justification. Just the most prominent example.
I think it's good he's gone.
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> Don't create accounts routinely. HN is a community—users should have an identity that others can relate to.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Is there a similar story behind that huntingtons therapy?
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He's the opposite of data driven. Moderna did in fact include several studies together encompassing over 40 thousand patients over a diverse demographic group. In fact, they designed the study program only after the approval of the FDA was already given for it. It's a perfectly normal drug trial. This guy wanted his name in headlines and so he decided to just go ahead with 'vaccine bad' against the will of literally every expert the FDA employs to make these recommendations.
This guy got fired for a good reason - he's an idiot.
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The toxicity leveled when there is a difference of opinion between scientists is astounding.
This is not a "difference of opinion" and framing it as such is intentionally and egregiously dishonest.
Is it reasonable to describe this as a “difference of opinion between scientists”? Per the OP article:
* it was a Trump political appointee who had made a “shocking” decision to not even review the vaccine
* it was despite the objections of the subject matter experts and career scientists
* it was despite the submitted study results being exactly what the FDA had previously approved
* the vote to go the opposite direction of him was unanimous
I mean sure, you could find an odd scientist who doesn't believe in something that 99.999% of scientists agree on, appoint them as the political head of an agency to overrule the 99.999% of scientists, and call that a “difference of opinion between scientists”, but…
I imagine at some point, after earnestly trying to help the American people with real science, these people get tired of working thankless jobs where they're up against monstrous bureaucracy and just want to do something that benefits themselves and their families. Sadly, and in part because our society rarely rewards beneficial work the way it does exploitation, these people find the path of least resistance to be this kind of journey.
Or perhaps he never did give a fuck?
We take comfort in fantasizing about a black and white world and condemn others without trying to understand what drove them to act this way. If, perhaps, we could understand the underlying causes we could remove them and prevent as much evil from arising in the future. But we first have to admit that cause and effect is real and applies to human behavior.
Cause? We don't care. Effect? We all are sicker and closer to the grave because these ghouls are preying on us. We don't care about the justifications for murdering the collective for personal gain, its just treason to humanity plain and simple.
I 100% agree that this is terrible, they're doing it for personal gain, and its treason against humanity. All I'm saying is there are underlying causes that drive people to do these things. If we can understand them maybe we can change those causes so it doesn't happen again in the future. I think any sensible person would agree that a future with less of these kinds of experiences is better for everyone.
Dude just stop.
This seems a lot more plausible to me