6 ms·

Getting a Covid jab is safer than taking aspirin

26 points by shankarro 5y ago

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
hypertele-Xii 5y ago
Well, at least I'm consistent - I avoid taking aspiring needlessly just as I avoid pointless vaccination. The mental circuitry feels the same in both cases - Strong belief that the body will successfully defend itself. I mean, what was the point of all that evolution if it couldn't?
- th0ma5 5y ago
  The fact that your immune system will overreact to the virus is probably the main reason to be vaccinated.
  - adventured 5y ago
    > The fact that your immune system will overreact to the virus It's not a fact, first of all. Second, the vast majority do not suffer that reaction or anything remotely close to it. For the majority Covid is equivalent to getting a mild cold, or less. Now that's actually a fact, derived from the rather enormous trove of data we have on outcomes at this point.
    - th0ma5 5y ago
      Cytokine storm is one of the major contributors to death from the disease. From my reading then is pretty much the definition of your immune system overreacting and starting to destroy your body. The immune system generally walks a line between being absolutely worthless and killing you. Edit: Oh I see my use of the word will is leading you astray. "Will" as in that your immune system will be overreacting if you are a case that results in death.
      - hypertele-Xii 5y ago
        > The immune system generally walks a line between being absolutely worthless and killing you. And that's your strong belief which steers you towards getting vaccinated. See, in my mind, my immune system is highly effective. Not only did it protect me through all the big "scary" diseases the media went on and on about like swine flu, avian flu, etc., but it has also flawlessly protected every single one of my ancestors since billions of years ago. The only thing I've been hospitalized for was salmonella. Fun times (not).
gfodor 5y ago
I don't understand how ostensibly smart people keep making the same error, time and time again. First, they see the other tribe's worst members making false claims, engaging in fearmongering, or worse. Then they consider the direct opposite position. In this case, it's "vaccines are dangerous" vs "vaccines are completely safe." Then, they cherry pick analytical frames which validate the latter position. And of course, along the way, box themselves into claims they can't possibly make. And when reality sets in that the truth is actually less clean than either side presents, it further erodes trust in the side of the discussion that is considered the establishment or consensus. Rinse repeat. In this case, here's where the merit of the "other team's" view can be drawn from: - These vaccines have not been deployed long enough, in comparison to other drugs, to make strong claims regarding their long term effects. - These vaccines have been deployed in a system of unprecedented scope and scale, so this will act as a magnifier on any such long term effects. - There are valid theoretical mechanisms being discussed for such side effects to emerge in the long term, and clear disincentives to collect data on them in the short term. - They are in response to a disease which has evidence to support the idea there is a very broad spectrum of potential impacts depending on a person's individual age/BMI/etc. Therefore, it is unfair to suggest that an individual who sees themselves as low risk to COVID, and potentially exposing themselves to a yet-to-be-fully-understood drug, does not have a valid dilemma in the choice around vaccines. It is a genuine dilemma that we should do our best to help provide the best information around. For many, the choice is more obvious. For some, less so. But claiming the choice is always obvious is a recipe for the erosion of trust I mentioned since we ought to expect it to be the case that some long term side effects manifest, at which point any person who has allowed themselves to slip into claims falsified by that discovery will have any other things they said of merit bucketed as being untrustworthy.
- th0ma5 5y ago
  I feel like you're trying to hedge the argument and being fair to both sides but honestly one side is wrong and you're just going to have to decide which one it is.
  - gfodor 5y ago
    False. It could very well turn out that mRNA vaccines specifically have long term side effects with other medications or underlying conditions we do not yet understand, which would, for example, warrant the choice of not using them in children, who present low risk to COVID. This may not mean not vaccinating overall, but it could determine which vaccine to choose from the selection of mechanisms. Not mRNA vaccines in general, but this specific mRNA vaccine, which causes your body to synthesize this specific protein. edit to respond to your deleted comment: the falsifiable claim you made is that one side is right and the other is wrong, when it could be both sides are wrong for different reasons. and I was eagerly vaccinated in February, given COVID was plausibly a life-threatening illness to me given underlying lung damage.
sleavey 5y ago
It's worth noting that the risk of death stated for AstraZenica in this article, one in two million, surely relies on proper and rigorous reporting of the causes of deaths. As a thought experiment, let's say someone aged 65 happens to die one month after having received the first dose of the vaccine. Are we sure that the local coroner will check whether the vaccine had anything to do with their death if there is some more "obvious" cause of death like an underlying health condition? Are we sure to the level of one in two million? It would only take 18 misattributed deaths to make that risk 10x higher. I'm not trying to start an argument over vaccines but it sincerely seems to me like there might be large error bars on the assertion that the risk of death from the vaccine is one in two million. And I expect aspirin is still far riskier than the vaccine so the central headline doesn't change. I'm probably missing something here so would welcome input from others. Hopefully Hacker News is a mature enough place to discuss this with level heads. EDIT: 2 minutes after posting, first downvote. Maybe my previous sentence was too hopeful?
- th0ma5 5y ago
  Yes it is very true that not very many people understand risk enough to effectively compare it amongst other risks.
  - splistud 5y ago
    And it is also true that no one can effectively compare risks when the assumptions can not yet be relied upon
- CorrectHorseBat 5y ago
  And what about the other way around? What is the chance that a 65 year old randomly dies of something that could be misattributed to the covid vaccine. It would only take 2 misattributions for the risk to be zero.
  - sleavey 5y ago
    Indeed, and that doesn't change my point (though I'm not accusing you of saying that it should). Do we believe accuracy in such accounting - at least in Australia - is error-proof to at least one in a million? Could it be 10x better or worse? 100x? Where's the line? I actually have no idea where you would even begin to work out the accuracy of such a number. For aspirin too, for that matter.
pepperberg 5y ago
The author's argument is based on the assumption that taking aspirin results "in around one death per 10,000 people". The cited study [1] does not say that. Those results are specifically for "a fifty-year-old male" (see p. 638), not the general population. Additionally, the results are from an "aspirin therapy simulation", not real world data [2]. How the researchers ended up with their model parameters, is unknown. Did the author even read the studies? [1] https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/abs/10.1377/hlthaff.26.3.636 https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/abs/10.1377/hlthaff.26.3.6... [2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15590881/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15590881/
TheBobinator 5y ago
There's been a push politically to get people to take what are experimental vaccinations. There's not enough data or evidence to conclusively proove they are safe or effective; taking one is a speculative move by definition. It's not that people are vax or anti-vax, it's that they want to know it's safe and effective and there's no data to back that up right now. Just on the face of it you aren't going to turn out vaccines on a dime, we have stories like the Emergent factory in Baltimore throwing out millions of bad vaccines and we know some made it to market out of that factory. Even if the design is sound the implimentation has yet to be conclusively prooven out. VAERS is currently showing close to 10k deaths from the vaccine and everyone is saying that number is understated. Non-medical Speculators are looking at death and maming rates from Nov20 - Jan21 for the vaccine and projecting high\low bounds and finding the current number is the low bound and the high bound is at around 100k deaths and 250k mamings with many more hospitalizations. I'm seeing physicians saying they're understated as much as 5x. The core issue here is VAERS is just like the positivity rates, not everything gets reported and that's historical fact. And you don't have to rely on me for that you can just hit the DB here yourself for direct queries and look at it yourself, heck you can spider the site into a db yourself and go poking. https://www.medalerts.org/vaersdb/index.php https://www.medalerts.org/vaersdb/index.php If you need to look at specifics, each case is on a seperate webpage ergo you can use the "site:" switch on google on that page to do specific keyword matching and get better numbers. And none of the above makes any sense BTW if the data has been maliciously modified, which is a good question to ask. How actually trustable is VAERS? Complicating the matter further on making any kind of decision, there's a process for early treatment of COVID that is effective at quarantining and extinguishing the virus. Most doctors are not going to advise an experimental vaccine over a treatment. This was largely pushed by a group of doctors internationally lead by Dr. Peter McCullough. The current health system is not providing treatment instructions with testing results in most states so if you get a positive result you're told to go home and hope it isn't a death sentance. Pete's youtube where he details his peer reviewed treatment plan is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQrqq94AtPI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQrqq94AtPI What that group has been doing is forming Christian non-profit orgs and raising small dollar capital to setup treatment centers to prescibe drugs with activist doctors and staff in various states, and that has been working. Per McCullough's testimony infront of Texas's HHS Committee, the treatment plan is 85% effective. Net on net, that is what has caused the decline in covid in the US was the discovery of an effective early in-home treatment via a combination of drugs. By giving people a treatment plan where they can quarantine at home and not bring them into the hospital, they reduce spread as almost all of the spread is from symptomatic patients, not asymptomatic. The reduction in cases happened in December and has been durable. This site has consolidated data on each state although it is no longer being updated. https://covidusa.net/ https://covidusa.net/ If you really want to deep-dive COVID-19 and how the virus works go here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqVIlj2NlRA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqVIlj2NlRA The lesson I think everyone needs to learn here is the problem with pandemics is people get hysterical and you have to have trial and error which leads to deaths to learn anything. That hysteria then pollutes data sources. For me this has been one big exercise in realizing the mainstream media does not know what it's talking about and is not trustworthy. They jump to whatever conclusions they are told to way too quickly without asking hard questions first because kids are taught to trust news brands rather than have news literacy in school. Thus they habitually just trust the same brands over and over on a massive scale and it's a nasty habit. I've found that activist organizations and professional orgs and newsletters tend to provide higher quality information a lot of the time, but before I really spend time on them, I background check them. Case in point. Looking at the article specifically, it provides no hard numbers of deaths from aspirin vs deaths from vaccines and is a prime example of haphazard muckraking. You've got links to reuters and abc or the WHO (who are now disgraced in many people's eyes). This is the exact kind of thing we did back in the 1900's with advertising heroin and elixers and I'm not saying that out of hyperbole. Replace the word "vaccine" or "aspirin" with heroin then try to disproove the article on it's merits and links. It's a pure he-said she-said article. End of the day you have to choose who you're going to trust, I trust people with track records.
TheBobinator 5y ago
Was going to go back and edit my (now flagged) post in this thread since after seeing a few videos of the MSM my subcutical vitriol didn't sit well after a thought hit me. Figure'd I'd post this. Feel free to flag it too, these opinions are my own and not that of HN, I own them. So the issue with MSM reporting and this specific article is the habitation of publishing without applying basic principles of news literacy first. Editorials and Opinion pieces are all too often confused with stories of fact, and Questions about interests, data, and how conclusions are all often buried or require way too much time to discover and determine or we are asked to take it at face value. I won't say what puppies the MSM have killed but I will say in the last couple of years, they've killed a few publicly; the overton bubble has begun boiling and the Frog is wondering which pot is actually safe at this point. In this article I have to click on 6 or so links and read seperate articles to find out what was proposed here is an opinion piece, then do google searching. I shouldn't have to proove out the authors statement myself. And that has become a bad habit for many people, and it's infested the education system. The net impact of that is to destroy the capacity of a country to utilize reputation and sound reporting and lets be really honest here, there are institutions that even in this pandemic and well before it have prooven trustworthy. I would reccomend anyone reading this that REALLY doesn't like what I'm saying to assume I'm full of it but do yourself a favor. Take a news literacy course.

26 points by shankarro 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Well, at least I'm consistent - I avoid taking aspiring needlessly just as I avoid pointless vaccination. The mental circuitry feels the same in both cases - Strong belief that the body will successfully defend itself. I mean, what was the point of all that evolution if it couldn't?

th0ma5 5y ago
The fact that your immune system will overreact to the virus is probably the main reason to be vaccinated.
- adventured 5y ago
  > The fact that your immune system will overreact to the virus It's not a fact, first of all. Second, the vast majority do not suffer that reaction or anything remotely close to it. For the majority Covid is equivalent to getting a mild cold, or less. Now that's actually a fact, derived from the rather enormous trove of data we have on outcomes at this point.
  - th0ma5 5y ago
    Cytokine storm is one of the major contributors to death from the disease. From my reading then is pretty much the definition of your immune system overreacting and starting to destroy your body. The immune system generally walks a line between being absolutely worthless and killing you. Edit: Oh I see my use of the word will is leading you astray. "Will" as in that your immune system will be overreacting if you are a case that results in death.
    - hypertele-Xii 5y ago
      > The immune system generally walks a line between being absolutely worthless and killing you. And that's your strong belief which steers you towards getting vaccinated. See, in my mind, my immune system is highly effective. Not only did it protect me through all the big "scary" diseases the media went on and on about like swine flu, avian flu, etc., but it has also flawlessly protected every single one of my ancestors since billions of years ago. The only thing I've been hospitalized for was salmonella. Fun times (not).

gfodor 5y ago

I don't understand how ostensibly smart people keep making the same error, time and time again. First, they see the other tribe's worst members making false claims, engaging in fearmongering, or worse. Then they consider the direct opposite position. In this case, it's "vaccines are dangerous" vs "vaccines are completely safe." Then, they cherry pick analytical frames which validate the latter position. And of course, along the way, box themselves into claims they can't possibly make. And when reality sets in that the truth is actually less clean than either side presents, it further erodes trust in the side of the discussion that is considered the establishment or consensus. Rinse repeat. In this case, here's where the merit of the "other team's" view can be drawn from: - These vaccines have not been deployed long enough, in comparison to other drugs, to make strong claims regarding their long term effects. - These vaccines have been deployed in a system of unprecedented scope and scale, so this will act as a magnifier on any such long term effects. - There are valid theoretical mechanisms being discussed for such side effects to emerge in the long term, and clear disincentives to collect data on them in the short term. - They are in response to a disease which has evidence to support the idea there is a very broad spectrum of potential impacts depending on a person's individual age/BMI/etc. Therefore, it is unfair to suggest that an individual who sees themselves as low risk to COVID, and potentially exposing themselves to a yet-to-be-fully-understood drug, does not have a valid dilemma in the choice around vaccines. It is a genuine dilemma that we should do our best to help provide the best information around. For many, the choice is more obvious. For some, less so. But claiming the choice is always obvious is a recipe for the erosion of trust I mentioned since we ought to expect it to be the case that some long term side effects manifest, at which point any person who has allowed themselves to slip into claims falsified by that discovery will have any other things they said of merit bucketed as being untrustworthy.

th0ma5 5y ago
I feel like you're trying to hedge the argument and being fair to both sides but honestly one side is wrong and you're just going to have to decide which one it is.
- gfodor 5y ago
  False. It could very well turn out that mRNA vaccines specifically have long term side effects with other medications or underlying conditions we do not yet understand, which would, for example, warrant the choice of not using them in children, who present low risk to COVID. This may not mean not vaccinating overall, but it could determine which vaccine to choose from the selection of mechanisms. Not mRNA vaccines in general, but this specific mRNA vaccine, which causes your body to synthesize this specific protein. edit to respond to your deleted comment: the falsifiable claim you made is that one side is right and the other is wrong, when it could be both sides are wrong for different reasons. and I was eagerly vaccinated in February, given COVID was plausibly a life-threatening illness to me given underlying lung damage.

sleavey 5y ago

It's worth noting that the risk of death stated for AstraZenica in this article, one in two million, surely relies on proper and rigorous reporting of the causes of deaths. As a thought experiment, let's say someone aged 65 happens to die one month after having received the first dose of the vaccine. Are we sure that the local coroner will check whether the vaccine had anything to do with their death if there is some more "obvious" cause of death like an underlying health condition? Are we sure to the level of one in two million? It would only take 18 misattributed deaths to make that risk 10x higher. I'm not trying to start an argument over vaccines but it sincerely seems to me like there might be large error bars on the assertion that the risk of death from the vaccine is one in two million. And I expect aspirin is still far riskier than the vaccine so the central headline doesn't change. I'm probably missing something here so would welcome input from others. Hopefully Hacker News is a mature enough place to discuss this with level heads. EDIT: 2 minutes after posting, first downvote. Maybe my previous sentence was too hopeful?

th0ma5 5y ago
Yes it is very true that not very many people understand risk enough to effectively compare it amongst other risks.
- splistud 5y ago
  And it is also true that no one can effectively compare risks when the assumptions can not yet be relied upon
CorrectHorseBat 5y ago
And what about the other way around? What is the chance that a 65 year old randomly dies of something that could be misattributed to the covid vaccine. It would only take 2 misattributions for the risk to be zero.
- sleavey 5y ago
  Indeed, and that doesn't change my point (though I'm not accusing you of saying that it should). Do we believe accuracy in such accounting - at least in Australia - is error-proof to at least one in a million? Could it be 10x better or worse? 100x? Where's the line? I actually have no idea where you would even begin to work out the accuracy of such a number. For aspirin too, for that matter.

pepperberg 5y ago

The author's argument is based on the assumption that taking aspirin results "in around one death per 10,000 people". The cited study [1] does not say that. Those results are specifically for "a fifty-year-old male" (see p. 638), not the general population. Additionally, the results are from an "aspirin therapy simulation", not real world data [2]. How the researchers ended up with their model parameters, is unknown. Did the author even read the studies? [1] https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/abs/10.1377/hlthaff.26.3.636 https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/abs/10.1377/hlthaff.26.3.6... [2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15590881/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15590881/

TheBobinator 5y ago

There's been a push politically to get people to take what are experimental vaccinations. There's not enough data or evidence to conclusively proove they are safe or effective; taking one is a speculative move by definition. It's not that people are vax or anti-vax, it's that they want to know it's safe and effective and there's no data to back that up right now. Just on the face of it you aren't going to turn out vaccines on a dime, we have stories like the Emergent factory in Baltimore throwing out millions of bad vaccines and we know some made it to market out of that factory. Even if the design is sound the implimentation has yet to be conclusively prooven out. VAERS is currently showing close to 10k deaths from the vaccine and everyone is saying that number is understated. Non-medical Speculators are looking at death and maming rates from Nov20 - Jan21 for the vaccine and projecting high\low bounds and finding the current number is the low bound and the high bound is at around 100k deaths and 250k mamings with many more hospitalizations. I'm seeing physicians saying they're understated as much as 5x. The core issue here is VAERS is just like the positivity rates, not everything gets reported and that's historical fact. And you don't have to rely on me for that you can just hit the DB here yourself for direct queries and look at it yourself, heck you can spider the site into a db yourself and go poking. https://www.medalerts.org/vaersdb/index.php https://www.medalerts.org/vaersdb/index.php If you need to look at specifics, each case is on a seperate webpage ergo you can use the "site:" switch on google on that page to do specific keyword matching and get better numbers. And none of the above makes any sense BTW if the data has been maliciously modified, which is a good question to ask. How actually trustable is VAERS? Complicating the matter further on making any kind of decision, there's a process for early treatment of COVID that is effective at quarantining and extinguishing the virus. Most doctors are not going to advise an experimental vaccine over a treatment. This was largely pushed by a group of doctors internationally lead by Dr. Peter McCullough. The current health system is not providing treatment instructions with testing results in most states so if you get a positive result you're told to go home and hope it isn't a death sentance. Pete's youtube where he details his peer reviewed treatment plan is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQrqq94AtPI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQrqq94AtPI What that group has been doing is forming Christian non-profit orgs and raising small dollar capital to setup treatment centers to prescibe drugs with activist doctors and staff in various states, and that has been working. Per McCullough's testimony infront of Texas's HHS Committee, the treatment plan is 85% effective. Net on net, that is what has caused the decline in covid in the US was the discovery of an effective early in-home treatment via a combination of drugs. By giving people a treatment plan where they can quarantine at home and not bring them into the hospital, they reduce spread as almost all of the spread is from symptomatic patients, not asymptomatic. The reduction in cases happened in December and has been durable. This site has consolidated data on each state although it is no longer being updated. https://covidusa.net/ https://covidusa.net/ If you really want to deep-dive COVID-19 and how the virus works go here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqVIlj2NlRA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqVIlj2NlRA The lesson I think everyone needs to learn here is the problem with pandemics is people get hysterical and you have to have trial and error which leads to deaths to learn anything. That hysteria then pollutes data sources. For me this has been one big exercise in realizing the mainstream media does not know what it's talking about and is not trustworthy. They jump to whatever conclusions they are told to way too quickly without asking hard questions first because kids are taught to trust news brands rather than have news literacy in school. Thus they habitually just trust the same brands over and over on a massive scale and it's a nasty habit. I've found that activist organizations and professional orgs and newsletters tend to provide higher quality information a lot of the time, but before I really spend time on them, I background check them. Case in point. Looking at the article specifically, it provides no hard numbers of deaths from aspirin vs deaths from vaccines and is a prime example of haphazard muckraking. You've got links to reuters and abc or the WHO (who are now disgraced in many people's eyes). This is the exact kind of thing we did back in the 1900's with advertising heroin and elixers and I'm not saying that out of hyperbole. Replace the word "vaccine" or "aspirin" with heroin then try to disproove the article on it's merits and links. It's a pure he-said she-said article. End of the day you have to choose who you're going to trust, I trust people with track records.

TheBobinator 5y ago

Was going to go back and edit my (now flagged) post in this thread since after seeing a few videos of the MSM my subcutical vitriol didn't sit well after a thought hit me. Figure'd I'd post this. Feel free to flag it too, these opinions are my own and not that of HN, I own them. So the issue with MSM reporting and this specific article is the habitation of publishing without applying basic principles of news literacy first. Editorials and Opinion pieces are all too often confused with stories of fact, and Questions about interests, data, and how conclusions are all often buried or require way too much time to discover and determine or we are asked to take it at face value. I won't say what puppies the MSM have killed but I will say in the last couple of years, they've killed a few publicly; the overton bubble has begun boiling and the Frog is wondering which pot is actually safe at this point. In this article I have to click on 6 or so links and read seperate articles to find out what was proposed here is an opinion piece, then do google searching. I shouldn't have to proove out the authors statement myself. And that has become a bad habit for many people, and it's infested the education system. The net impact of that is to destroy the capacity of a country to utilize reputation and sound reporting and lets be really honest here, there are institutions that even in this pandemic and well before it have prooven trustworthy. I would reccomend anyone reading this that REALLY doesn't like what I'm saying to assume I'm full of it but do yourself a favor. Take a news literacy course.