Chicken vaccine makes its virus more dangerous (2015)

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/tthis-chicken-vaccine-makes-virus-dangerous

by monort • 5 years ago

47 17 5 years ago

This article will get flagged, of course, but it is an instance of an interesting phenomenon: the number of (often crypto) vaccine-skeptical articles being posted and upvoted on HN indicates there is a significant contingent here that is vaccine-skeptical. However, despite that, you rarely see vaccine-skeptical comments.

An interesting dynamic.

michaelmrose2• 5 years ago

Contextually being skeptical of Mderna or Pfizer is usually more indicative of a political statement than a skeptical mind.

The risk of covid and the vaccination are now sufficiently well understood that being anti vaxx is just nonsensical.

If a sufficient contingent doesn't vaccinate most of the unvaccinated population will eventually get it. Up to 1% will die and most of the rest will experience substantial negative effects. For example the majority of asymptomatic cases have some damage to the lungs.

The same contingent who have the least to worry about as far as covid also have the least to worry about as far as vaccination side effects.

Everyone is at best choosing to have greater than average chance of lung damage and some substantial fraction of 1% chance of death to avoid a substantial chance of feeling poorly for one day and a chance of death that is so low it's difficult to calculate.

If I asked you to pick from a table full of revolvers one of which contained one bullet and half of which contained blanks that could still hurt you and fire at your temple or stub your toe I assume you could make the right choice.

Calculate the odds for yourself and do the same here.

a_conservative2• 5 years ago

The risk of covid and the vaccination are now sufficiently well understood that being anti vaxx is just nonsensical.

What process do you use to evaluate how well risks are understood by experts?

cochne• 5 years ago

It is not a vaccine skeptical article.

lm28469• 5 years ago

It's more like 90%+ of people aren't buying the """vaccine-skeptical""" bs and downvote """vaccine-skeptical""" bsers to oblivion.

You could be skeptical 9 months and 3b+ vaccinated people ago, as I was, now it's just ridiculous. The vast majority of people either don't care or are actively pro vaccines, you feel like a minority because you are part of one.

Also, remember that any platform, HN included, is prone to being used by people attempting to sow discord/misinformation, that might explain why a lot of what you call "vaccine-skeptical articles" are posted while the vast majority of commenters have a different opinion.

And finally, I find it funny how any "XXX cure cancer on mice" is raided by "on mice..." comments but somehow you expect that we take this chicken vaccine article as an argument to be vaccine skeptical, even though it has nothing in common with the current situation at all besides containing the word "vaccine"

rich_sasha• 5 years ago

I'm not anti-vac in any shade, but I do find it interesting. Things like this should give us pause for thought, it is the first time in world history we are trying to control a new virus with vaccines. Could we end up in the same place?

Sounds like no, but I'd find comfort in knowing someone actually thought about it, as opposed to waved their hands over it and said "nah, anti-vaxxer nonsense".

gibba9992• 5 years ago

I'm vaccinated and think vaccines should be mandatory -- so I'm pretty extreme pro-vax -- but I do think we're mismanaging vaccines.

A lot of what we're doing seems to be analogous to an incomplete course of antibiotics.

I was pretty optimistic about vaccine+N95 masks+modest social distancing. On the other hand, mixing vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals with no protection seems like a recipe for vaccine-resistant strains.

What's interesting is the hypothesis that strains will become resistant to vaccines by becoming more virulent -- where unvaccinated people die in droves, while vaccinated ones have a "normal" infection.

atonse• 5 years ago

I read this thinking what probably many think reading this, which is "wow is this the parallel to vaccine hesitancy somehow causing the delta variant to dominate" – but so far the more obvious reason for what's sadly looking to be another spike worldwide, has just been vaccine hesitancy, something that doesn't exist with chickens.

Wowfunhappy2• 5 years ago

This article is quite interesting, but I don't think it's particularly applicable to COVID-19. COVID-19 doesn't kill the vast majority of the people it infects, and when it does, it happens several weeks later, when they aren't spreading the virus anyway.

And while the vaccines are "leaky", they appear to make people much less likely to spread the virus, not more.

psychedelican• 5 years ago

The point is that a virus is a brute-force mechanism. This introduces a probability (even a low one) that a virus might "choose" to become more nasty in order to elicit a response from a "vaccinated" population.

Vaccinated is in quotes because many of the current vaccines are, admittedly, therapeutics rather than vaccines. The classical definition of a vaccine is something that prevents infection entirely. The current politicized definition of vaccine is something that decreases mortality / symptoms for a specific disease.

We know that these vaccines are "leaky", and now it's just up to random chance to determine whether or not this will lead to a scenario like the chickens. I believe the chance is very low, but it's there.

gibba9992• 5 years ago

Where did you get that definition of a vaccine?

Few vaccines, historically, worked perfectly.

Chicken vaccine makes its virus more dangerous (2015)

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