Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Related: there was also a strong correlation between receiving some vaccinations and not developing dementia during the next five years. This included vaccinations against diseases that people normally do not get. This hints at a reason other than simply „avoided disease“.

Edit: I found the submission. Actually it was a study on influenza vaccination that included a comment about other vaccines: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31899781

I wrote a summary in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31900161



Vaccination may trigger some cascade that has effects beyond the intended immune response... activating processes which in some way clean the brain or filter blood more thoroughly before it passes through the BBB.

The integrated nature of the immune system whatever immediate response vaccination triggers probably


I once had a shoulder / joint problem that had lingered for a couple of weeks. Normal sort of thing that comes up from time to time in training. But I was going out of country and had to get a bunch of vaccines. They loaded me up with like 5 or 6 shots at the visit. Weirdly, after getting a couple of shots in the arm, I noticed that the next day my shoulder issue was totally gone. Could be coincidence, but at the time I got the impression that the extra temporary inflammation gave my body enough of a push to just go in there and fix it.


Makes me wonder if the pain signal was there because the previous repair process failed to fix it and then a new repair stimulant (inflammation) was needed to trigger that fix.


That's what I was thinking. While not recommended, I've heard of people fixing their months-long tendonitis by first acutely pissing it off enough to be unbearable and then all of a sudden it heals.


Could also been the effect of sticking a needle in the area. Acupuncture is a popular treatment for chronic pain.


Sounds a bit like acupuncture? I mean, if you ignore the whole "chi energy" angle. Or whatever woo is meant to be awoken by the needles.

I also had a shoulder problem for well over a year. I think it was a pinched nerve. Went to countless physios, tried pills, stretching, weight training and even acupuncture. Nothing. Not a bit of relief, and some times even more pain.

Then I went on a two week holiday to Sri Lanka. Swam in 30C degree water. Laid on the hot sand. And basically did nothing for the entire two weeks. It wasn't until the plain ride home that I realised I was no longer in pain! I've been pain free ever since.

Sorry.. just realised my little story had nothing to do with vaccines or inflammation.



I think a better contribution to the discussion would be more details or a better source.

https://hms.harvard.edu/news/exploring-science-acupuncture

They found a mapping of neurons that match with how acupuncture determines location, intensity, depth of the needle. Leading to specific neurological firing enabling reduction in inflammation.

Many in our society look at the ancients as stupid because they worshipped gods or spirits. Constantly we’re finding what they discovered and said has evidence according to our “god” of science.

I think throwing away their wisdom is a mistake, we should look at many of their practices like the pyramids, trying to find what they may have seen that we do not. Not throwing it to the wayside because it’s “woo-woo”


Yet, acupuncture claims to fix a wide range of things it doesn’t.

It’s common for old ideas to be associated with accurate information without actually being true. The classical elements Earth, Air, Fire, and Water might map to ice, water, steam, and plasma but they don’t explain the fundamental nature and complexity of all mater.

So no it’s not that the wisdom of the ancients it’s simply an observation by people like us that didn’t actually understand much about how things actually worked. The pyramids are shaped that way because it’s a straightforward way to build something very tall from stones. The complicated bits are all inside, and not that interesting.


The pyramids don’t seem to have been built that shape “just cause”. It appears there’s a huge amount of electromagnetic energy being focused underneath due to its shape[0]

Attributing motive is a careful game, but so is dismissing this as “happenstance”.

I concede though that there surely are parts that seem to just not hold water in our framework of thinking. But perspective, reality, and such are not straightforward. Hence why we need a vast amount of statistics just to say something was caused by a separate action.

I just don’t buy into the idea that we as a civilization have the furthest progress of human knowledge. Many fields we do, but there have been many periods in history where books, scrolls, etc were lost or destroyed. Library of Alexandria for one.

[0] https://phys.org/news/2018-07-reveals-great-pyramid-giza-foc...


First the shape isn’t just because, the shape has that slope because more cost effective shapes failed. They didn’t want another bent pyramid.

As to the radio wave thing, what exact about this do you find surprising? It would be true of any large stone pyramid.


the pockets of where the energy is concentrated lines up perfectly with specific tomb placements.

Not to mention, the typical “how did the pyramids get built with such high precision?”, they obviously had some techniques that we still today aren’t sure of, though some interesting hypothesis have come about.

At what point do we concede maybe there’s something they understood back then that we don’t today. Or something they and us understand perfectly well, but they used “lost” techniques.


They line up because that’s where the holes are, move the holes and they would line up in the new location.

It’s not high precision that caused this anything reasonably pyramid shaped using the same material works. It could also be twice as tall and you just pick a different frequency.


Then physicians/scientists should do what Bruce Lee did with the fighting styles he studied: Keep what works, discard the rest.



I guess the 'data' here is that someone having vaccines just before the same holiday might then attribute the same relief to the injection immune response rather than hot treatment and relaxation.

Hence causation never necessarily equalling causation...


*correlation


There's enough unfounded scares around vaccination as it is. Please do better than write about "activating processes which in some way clean the brain". This is medical version of technobabble.


It sounds like babbling to say 'we teach our immune system to fight diseases by showing them weaker versions'. The immune system is complicated and unless you're talking about things directly in terms of chemistry and protein binding or whatever, you're not talking about it accurately.

Personally, it makes a lot of sense to me that the immune system is responsible for much more than viruses or bacteria. The need for a class of diseases related to an unhealthy one (autoimmune diseases) is proof IMO


> 'we teach our immune system to fight diseases by showing them weaker versions'

This is a simplification of a well researched process which we understand and can read about. What the previous poster wrote was just speculation as far as I can tell, unless someone wants to post some reference about cleaning the brain and blood?


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spleen

"The spleen plays very important roles in regard to red blood cells (erythrocytes) and the immune system. It removes old red blood cells and holds a reserve of blood, which can be valuable in case of hemorrhagic shock, and also recycles iron."


Yes, but what does that have to do with the context here? (I.e. changes triggered by vaccination)


They're speculating, but neither you nor I know if that hypothesis is correct.

Side effects and downstream effects are common across almost all drugs.

It's not absurd or unfounded to hypothesize an explanation for the correlation researchers observed. It could be the case, it could be something else or it could be the case that the correlation means nothing.


I would be skeptical of correlated variables that defy logic.

Butterflies numbers in North America likely have some correlation with dementia in New Zealand, but that does not imply causation.


> I would be skeptical of correlated variables that defy logic.

Does this defy logic? At the worst, I'd say I lack an intuition around it, rather than that it's unintuitive.


Yeah, the knee-jerk response should not be "the correlation is spurious", rather it should be "the causation is different from what the authors would like it to be". (That is, whatever hypothesis they came up with, we should assume it's wrong and tell the authors to go pound sand unless they provide strong evidence otherwise.)

In this case, as others are saying, the explanation that comes to my mind is: "What kind of person gets vaccinated against rare diseases that people don't normally get? Probably one who cares extra about health and has resources to spend on it, and has a proactive and vigilant doctor." Selection bias should always be considered in correlational studies.



We know that an Epstein-Barr-Virus infection is a necessary condition to get MS so it doesn't defy logic that other viruses cause other cell diseases and that vaccines can prevent that


People who seek vaccination may have a higher than average interest in their own health. This may cause them to live longer.


People who get vaccinated are also necessarily not people who are excluded from vaccination for medical reasons (e.g. people with weakened immune systems can't get live virus vaccines).


Isn’t it only recently that the conspiracists have gained so much ground? My whole life until Covid I knew of one person whose parents hadn’t got him routinely vaccinated, everyone in my circle found that very strange and as soon as he was able he did it himself.

I’m having trouble finding information with Google because everything is about Covid now, but as far as I remember routine vaccination rates in e.g. the UK were close to 100%


> Isn’t it only recently that the conspiracists have gained so much ground?

It's always existed to some extent but the anti-vaxxers' attempts to promote the idea that vaccines cause autism really escalated things in the years around 2010, and covid gave them another major opportunity to raise fears and conspiracies.

There's also recently been an increasing (and often well deserved) lack of trust in science and medicine. These professions have refused to police themselves and they've allowed absolute junk to get published in "peer reviewed" journals, allowed corporations to pay for research concluding whatever they want to see in a press release, and they let ineffective and harmful medications be pushed onto the public by doctors who took kickbacks and bribes. The extreme lack of oversight and accountability at every level has made it increasingly difficult for people to trust these institutions and that's made people fearful and incentivized them to try to research things themselves to find out what's safe or best.

This has opened the door for a handful of charlatans and scam artists who seek to profit off of that fear through social media by deliberately misleading people who often don't have the education to know better, which isn't to say that they're not smart or even that they're generally uneducated. It's just that our education system is a joke. One of our two political parties opposes teaching critical thinking skills and casts doubt on even well established science and higher education in general. The average American reads at a 6th or 7th grade level and research papers aren't written for them (some have argued this too is often for petty and self-serving reasons)

Most of the antivaxxers are just people trying to do their best for themselves and their loved ones in an environment where they don't know what's trustworthy. Mixed in with them though are nutjobs and the people who know the movement is bullshit, but want to keep making money and fame off of the scam.

Meanwhile, little has been done to increase trust in science and medicine because of regulatory capture and all the money to be made pushing lies and bad medicine. An increase in antivaxxers and conspiracists is basically inevitable unless this changes.


>The average American reads at a 6th or 7th grade level and research papers aren't written for them (some have argued this too is often for petty and self-serving reasons)

Writing research papers at a 6th grade reading level might be literally impossible.


Which is perfectly fair, and just to be clear I don't think that all research should be written with the masses in mind either. I do suspect that there are things that could be done to make the language used a bit more accessible generally though, and a lot that could be done to improve the literacy of the typical American.


I don't think it's an education thing. I know some very well educated people who are on the anti-vax wagon.

I think it's both and political and belief thing, and not a rational thing, as there are plenty of educated and discerning individuals who have weird beliefs that wouldn't pass any type of smell test.

As for the it being a political thing, I remember a professor who blamed natural disasters on some states legalizing gay marriage as punishment from God/nature/etc, back when that was a political talking point on TV and talk radio. I think they know, rationally, that those types of claims are not grounded in reality, but it makes them feel good to repeat them as if they were anyway. I believe that, for some people, it comes down their perceived political opponents liking vaccines, therefore they themselves will oppose vaccines to spite them, and the rationalizations work backwards from there.


> I remember a professor who blamed natural disasters on some states legalizing gay marriage as punishment from God/nature/etc

It's probably wrong to lump these religious/political views in with the nutjobs, but like you say, it isn't grounded in reality and that's a common thread. You can't reason with them either way, because reason had no part in their views to start with.

I don't think it's unreasonable to question the sanity of anyone who sacrifices the health of themselves or their children just to 'own the libs', but I suspect a lot of it is actually just blind trust in their party who stokes their deepest fears, repeats over and over that the other party is lying/dangerous, and tells them what they want to hear. I doubt very many are knowingly taking up opposing views out of pure spite for the other team, then coming up with excuses for it, but I guess that could be what's happening subconsciously.


You're right it's not about education, it's about stupidity.


Agree on this, there is a wide divergence among those who are a bit sceptical of vaccines. Most people have a high trust in vaccines as they should, but recent developments have made more people sceptical.

The last round of vaccination before covid was for the swine flu where one of the vaccines showed a lot more adverse effects than the others (7x) https://www.contagionlive.com/view/high-rates-of-adverse-eve... Also a lot of people became sceptical when they tried to get the children vaccinated for covid even though there were almost no adverse effects on children from the natural infection. It is possible to be sceptical of one vaccine and not all vaccines.


"Also a lot of people became sceptical when they tried to get the children vaccinated for covid even though there were almost no adverse effects on children from the natural infection."

To prevent the spread. That's why.


> To prevent the spread. That's why.

Based on what evidence?

Isn't it now generally accepted that it doesn't prevent infection or spread and that the trials didn't study either of these variables?


The person I replied to claimed people were hesitant to get the vaccine because it was promoted for children without reason. That was a lie. There was a reason, whether you believe it doesn't matter


That it would prevent spread was itself a lie. That came out of nowhere in the first few months of 2021, when up until that point we knew they hadn't tested for it.

The propaganda worked and that got memory holed hard, until some months ago when people were surprised to learn the testing didn't include infection/transmission.

So some of us knew the whole time, and the push to vaccinate children was all sorts of weird.


And its not even the only reason. roughly half the kids end up asymptomatic but the other half still end up sick. Normally it's not too bad for them, but a small number of them do end up in hospitals, in ICU, or on a ventilator. What parent wants to unnecessarily increase the risk of that for their children? Some kids even end up with long covid, and a (thankfully) very small number end up dead. In the end, vaccines for kids was a great idea and with everything we know now they continue to be recommended.


Not necessarily, a lot of people have avoided flu vaccines for a long time.

Also vaccine hesitancy is a centuries old phenomenon at this point. And the original (retracted) MMR vaccine / autism paper was from like 1998.


You don’t have to do anything to avoid flu vaccines. I “avoid” them because you have to waste precious time and I never get sick and I don’t like the experience of getting shots.


Yeah for sure, I think this is true for a lot of people, so perhaps "avoid" is the wrong word.

I did once calculate how many flu shots you'd have to get to save one human life based on heuristics and data on estimated length of infection chains and R0 for flu. I can't quite remember, but it's something like 100-people-years per life saved. So 10 people for 10 years might save a life by not infecting someone vulnerable. Very approximate.


I mean, they're a mess of "we're gonna guess which...this year", which seems really un-amusing - why can't they produce a series of shots that cover all the variants that they have any idea might be circulating, if they're so dangerous? We have to assume it's "because they're making a calculated risk assessment, weighing the benefits against the cost".

If they guess right, and you get one, and you're exposed sufficiently to be infected, then they could make your infection less unpleasant (death is, after all, the worst case and unpleasant).

"I never get sick" is rolling dice. So is getting a flu shot, but in a different way. In the end, people still have to have the right to make those decisions for themselves (same weighing benefits against costs), with the understanding that if they get something bad enough (not that Ebola is that common in the US, or that there's a vaccine) they might not be savable and/or might be locked in a box to prevent risk to other people.


And who defines what is "bad enough"?


So you don't need life vests because you never drown?


Most people don't wear life-vests on dry land. Severe flu is very, very rare in most healthy people below 60 or 70. It's simply not a real risk, compared to driving to and from work.


Winning the lottery is even rarer and still people play and think they win.

And keeping the life vest metaphor, we are not on dry land, we are on a calm sea but still on the water.


Before COVID, the largest, and growing, anti-vax base were those who thought vaccines caused autism in children. Post-COVID total vaccine "skepticism" became a shibboleth for an order of magnitude more people.

I watched a lot of people that I formerly thought were intelligent make the leap from "COVID vaccines are harmful" to "anything bad that has happened since vaccination became common place is the fault of vaccines". Usually it was just contained to believing vaccines cause autism, but everything under the sun is being blamed on vaccines right now, from people being fat, to allergies, cancer and excess deaths.

To answer your question, there was an undercurrent of anti-vax sentiment in the past, and now it's been mainstreamed and is even dumber than it ever was. I believe you're correct in your assumptions.


Yes same in Canada, but unfortunately politicians here decided to make the issue of vaccinations political so now it’s a divisive topic with more of my friends now questioning even routine vaccinations (whereas before there were none who would)


I agree, I think the politicization of the covid-vaccine, and almost forced vaccination in many countries and places of e.g. people younger that 20-30 years who would stand to get no benefit from the vaccine whatsoever has created an anti-vax sentiment that will now stay with us for quite a while.

Hopefully this skepticism won't spread to the many vaccines for diseases that are much more dangerous than Covid-19.


Having crossed paths with my fair share of anti-vaxxers over the years there's now an element of spite when I ask for the shots.


That seems unhealthy. You should just look out for your own health and not worry about the others




Consider applying for YC's Fall 2025 batch! Applications are open till Aug 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: