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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.




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