I'm playing the devil's advocate and I'm not very comfortable with it, but I think it' valuable to the discussion to do so.

You are oversimplying and again conflating both groups. You assume people made their mind first and then looked for experts' to support which it's not fair to a lot of them.

Let's focus on an specific case. A healthy 25 years old male living in on of those countries. If he's an skeptic and decides to make a data oriented decision, the truth is that his chance of dying or getting a severe infection was really slim and probably comparable to the odds of getting a myocarditis because of it.

Yet the media and the government, at least in my country, did not make any difference between his case and a 60 years old with hypertension. Everyone had to take their shot or be denied his right to go to a pub or restaurant.

One gets myocarditus from covid and even mild cases in healthy young people commonly show damage from covid which isn't true of vaccination. Furthermore its reasonable to suppose that decreasing chance of infection decreases chance of spread which effects your 60 year old with hypertension which probably exists in most exists in most people's peer,friend, or family group and would really rather not die.

Fair enough, but you are comparing a sure event (if you decide to get the vaccine) and a contingent one (getting covid). It's impossible to declare any of both as a clear winner. Furthermore the risk difference is negligible when compared to daily activities (like driving or making the dinner).

One of the problems here, and the source of a lot of trouble it's that sending nuanced messages it's very hard and goverments feared that being cautious could affect negatively to vaccination rates. So they took the simplistic path of presenting the vaccines as a silver bullet for everyone (and they were but in a very varying degree).

I can understand that decision but at the same time, it has thrown a lot of fair "skeptics" under the bus.

There is no reason to believe you can skip the vaccine and the virus indefinitely. Indeed you may encounter it nonetheless.

Your comment is a good summary of the kind of arrogance anyone pointing out problems with the vaccines was facing. When the AZ brain blood clots were discovered, when the Biontech and Moderna heart issues were discovered, etc.

IMO, your attitude is even more harmful than the typical vaccine conspiracy theories, because those are typically easily disproved!

But disguising a dogmatic attitude in the language of science is poisonous for discourse and misuses science itself.

Looking at the benefits and drawbacks of a new vaccine is the most normal thing in the world. And thanks to those that didn’t allow themselves to be bullied by misguided do-gooders is why we have a better understanding of the vaccines and doctors can explain to patients if the vaccine makes sense to them.

This reads as something written at the height of anger and frustration. Unless you’re a vaccine scientist/researcher, and unless you worked on/studied COVID vaccines, you’re parroting the position of experts: both on vaccines and on skepticism of vaccine effectiveness.

Usually, in matters with very personal consequences, I don’t submit anyone’s position to the rigor of, say, a mathematical proof—irrationality is allowed. Most people refusing the vaccine have either died or survived multiple infections. I believe the individual has unquestionable sovereignty over such matter of life and death. Likewise the vaccinated dead, either from COVID infection or vaccine complication.

Overall, it’s really quite simple to understand that different people view this life thing differently and make trade-offs accordingly. It may not favor you, but calling the other sides names or applying a pretend touchstone of intellectualism is the height of intellectual laziness. Given that your position is also the position of the majority, I wonder at all if “intellectually incapable” should be used here. The majority is provably the intellectually incapable.

Re: parroting the positions of experts. How is that distinguishable from taking expert advice precisely. When I have a plumbing problem I take the expert advice of a plumber or a guide written by same unless I have good reason to doubt. Likewise with electricians, doctors and so forth. Given finite time and resources and not being able to bake a pie from scratch by inventing the universe I lean on the reasonable strategy of analyzing and synthesizing what experts have to say on a topic in order to decide on a course of action.

> Most people refusing the vaccine have either died or survived multiple infections.

Most people refusing to wear bulletproof vests into war zones have died or survived being shot at. This says nothing for the strategy whatsoever.

> I believe the individual has unquestionable sovereignty over such matter of life and death.

We were discussing whether there were reasonable antivaxxers who had arrived at their position through commendable means as opposed to ignorant folks who got their medical advice from facebook. People's right to refuse to participate in vaccination is an entirely different question.

> Likewise the vaccinated dead, either from COVID infection or vaccine complication.

It's easy to find millions of people killed by covid. Where can I find the number of people killed by the covid vaccine?

> Overall, it’s really quite simple to understand that different people view this life thing differently and make trade-offs accordingly.

Surely many things are very complicated with no clear answer. This doesn't appear to be one of them. Given the cardiovascular and lung damage apparent in even the majority of mild infections and the potentially progressive nature of repeated infection starting out vaccine naive seems to be a bad strategy for any age and one that could only have been arrived at by failing to attend to reality.

Its not intellectual laziness to attend to the body of work done by experts. It is what one does in fields in which one is not a subject matter expert. One acquires as much information as is available much of it surface level understanding and reads a variety of sources and what other sources say about those sources until you develop enough of an understanding do operate in the relevant space to the degree required to make decisions.

In this way one learns enough about automotive tech to select a good car, to drive it, and to keep it running between visits to the shop.It is entirely normal to do this without learning enough to rebuild the engine much less build or design one from scratch.

If one discovers someone else is commuting in an eastern European sedan of antique vintage which lacks seatbelts or airbags I will happily conclude without being an engineer that they are essentially "bad at picking cars" even if it comes to pass that they have what they believe is a very sophisticated understanding of engineering and can put their death trap together blindfolded.

It turns out that one doesn't need to be an engineer to read analysis that says that these two safety features are highly desirable and that they by choosing dangerous cars have chosen a notably bad strategy for not ending up a meat crayon.

> Given that your position is also the position of the majority, I wonder at all if “intellectually incapable” should be used here. The majority is provably the intellectually incapable.

Ya people are stupid but it doesn't follow that what the majority does is necessarily stupid because the majority does it ergo being a contrarian doesn't perforce make you clever either. Claims should be evaluated on their own merit.

The claim that vaccines are more dangerous than covid seems not only unfounded but unworthy.

> There actually really isn't any difference between the two groups. They differ only in how they articulate the same bad logic.

I think the high number of adverse events, and the weirdness around allergies, and my wife's colleague that was receiving a huge amount of pressure to get a 2nd shot, despite having a severe adverse event, has ruined it for me personally.

> Going with what your emotions proves you are intellectually incapable.

No emotions. The adverse events in any number of journals, and the VAERS reporting data, as passive surveillance which underreports signficantly, convinced me there were issues.

> I respect people with the aptitude and the niche knowledge to break new intellectual ground even if they turned out to be wrong. I do not respect the 1000 idiots following that one fellow into the brush who ignored all the other smart people going the other way and neither should you.

Please don't call anyone idiots here on HN. We read the articles, and the medical journals, and the pros and cons and came to an informed opinion, not including all the noise that was public pressure.

Having had covid, I can definitely say I am happy I did not get vaccinated. If you have a bunch of comorbidities or are old, or you want it just cause, go get it. But don't force those of us that are healthy, with no comorbidities that already did the social distancing to get some therapeutic with a shady safety record and likely negative efficacy. I don't believe we needed to rush these vaccines, or therapeutics, or whatever ineffective thing they are, out the door.

What is really tragic is when I hear about the infants with severe adverse events to these vaccines..........

>Vaccines became broadly available in relatively wealthy countries in 2021 wherein the only reasonable position would have been that vaccination of all groups would decrease net mortality even among those unlikely to die and reduce damage to people's bodies that we were already seeing even with mild infections of otherwise healthy people.

It's not necessarily a reasonable position when the clinical trials themselves showed an unusually large rate of adverse events in vacinees vs the placebos: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X2.... The bad logic is the logic that it's okay to assess the efficiency of a novel therapeutic by the protection it provides against infection rather than by it's overall effect on excess mortality, as such an approach is going to miss any safety signals.

"Vaccines became broadly available in relatively wealthy countries in 2021 wherein the only reasonable position would have been that vaccination of all groups would decrease net mortality even among those unlikely to die and reduce damage to people's bodies that we were already seeing even with mild infections of otherwise healthy people."

That's about the worst case of projection I've seen on HN. Just because that's your position is very far from it being the only reasonable position. There were plenty of sensible people calling for vaccination of the over 50s and other vulnerable classes at the time.

The decision all over the world wasn't bought it was cleanly made all over the world. Doubt isn't a super power and an idiot remains an idiot by definition incapable of parsing a complex choice.