My personal theory is that if you're an extrovert, you were more resistant to the quarantine, because you couldn't see your friends, and there's some connection between that and getting the vaccine, like you'd probably already been ignoring the other rules, playing down the whole thing on a subconscious level. Something like that. It makes perfect sense to me in a weird way that's hard to describe the precise causality of, but that somehow sounds more likely than extrovert = narcissist = doesn't believe scientists.
edit, some possible causalities:
- the study was somehow biased to define as extroverted people who ignored quarantine
- extroverts who ignored quarantine were more likely to get COVID, which they believed gave them a similar level of immunity
- my aforementioned moral equivocation, like, if I'm ignoring this it's because people telling me what to do must be wrong, etc.
Or, introverts are more likely to read rather than take advice from the loud guy at the end of the bar.
I have had every vaccination I could, because I grew up in a country where they really meant something. Ever seen measles in person? You will be running to get every COVID shot you can once you've seen such things. In my observation, people with wide international backgrounds trend away from extroversion.
It depends on how you define "grain". What I personally observed during COVID was anti-vaccine people made a bigger noise than the scientific community.
There is a large strain of "research" that tells public health authorities whatever they want to hear.
Raw case rates normalized by pop size from the UK: vaccinated people were getting COVID at 3x-4x the rate of the unvaccinated by the time they stopped reporting the figures. Natural immunity was actually much better than the vaccine because it developed whole-virus protection to all the proteins not just the spike, so you don't get Hoskin's Effect and variants find it harder to evade.
Nothing in his analysis is right. First, he uses that infection stats for a variant (Omicron), but the vaccine targeted the origina known to be less effective against it. So technically speaking, assuming that most unvaccinated people were infected (and some died) with other variants by then, they were better prepared against Omicron. Not making and distributing an Omicron-specific vaccine was a logistics issue, not a technical one.
That being said, remember that Omicron turned out to be a relatively less lethal variant, so being vaccinated was a net win, because a percentage of anti-vaccine people died with the original virus, and the Delta variant while trying to gain natural immunisation against it. We can't compare the risks of vaccination and actually getting sick.
Second, he is comparing case numbers (not deaths, or hospitalisations), which won't work, because it only demonstrates that vaccinated people are more likely to go and get tested when they feel sick, and unvaccinated people are less likely as anti-vaccine community (I know that not all unvaccinated people are anti-vaccine) generally don't think that they have a responsibility to keep other people safe.
Even if correct (doubtful), you also get to experience actual disease caused by the virus. Which, sure, for many folks, was mild.
But, for many other folks, it was decidedly not mild at all. The funny thing is you don't hear as much from the latter group of folks - because, extrovert or not, lots of them stopped talking altogether.
>like you'd probably already been ignoring the other rules, playing down the whole thing on a subconscious level. Something like that. It makes perfect sense to me in a weird way that's hard to describe the precise causality of
Yeah I get what you’re saying, something like sunk cost, or inertia, though not exactly, as you say.
To me, leaving aside the positing here of extroversion, I think the strongest correlation was something like an iq test, or critical thinking test.
At the time of the “you must get injected, and if you don’t you’re despicable, and if you refuse we’re going to hold you down and stick it in you” campaign it was entirely clear, if not well before then, that the actual risk of the COVID infection itself to anyone in even reasonably good health was far below being injected with some experimental gene modification thing.
I think most people above a certain iq percentile looking into the method of proposed action that was presumed to be effective, which of course wasn’t, thought “WTF why would I want to experimentally modify my genes in response to this? That seems insane.”
Then there was the outright lying in claims being bandied about. The initial studies in no way showed that it stopped infection, transmission, or death. But that’s all you ever heard.
In December 2020 I saw a short news report from a hospital in France I think covering some of the earliest injections. Somewhere towards the end of that report it was said “It’s a vaccine just like any other vaccine.” WTF I thought, that’s exactly the opposite of what it is, it is a “vaccine” completely different from any other.
Then by July 2021 the buzzwords had shifted to calling things like serious heart issues (any heart issue, is a serious issue) mild. “Oh they’re just having some mild heart issues, no biggie.”
It was a completely egregious, evil abomination all round.
Back to the correlations, it didn’t really follow iq linearly like income or health outcomes or other socioeconomic data tends to, it was more the reserve of the far extents of the bell curve as shown in the mid wit bell curve meme.
Using level of educational attainment as a proxy for iq, not a perfect correlate of course, those with phds were indeed the least likely to fall for the injections among those with post secondary degrees according to the data I’ve seen.
Then a somewhat separate matter was those who were put in the ghastly situation of being made to choose between their livelihoods, or seeing their family, or whatnot, and being injected.
I can see some high iq critical thinkers making tough decisions under that level of coercion.
> it was entirely clear, if not well before then, that the actual risk of the COVID infection itself to anyone in even reasonably good health was far below being injected with some experimental gene modification thing
MRNA doesn't modify genes, that's not how MRNA works at all, it flows downstream from DNA. I would hope the so called high IQ critical thinkers would spend a few minutes on how MRNA, RNA, and DNA work.
The whole thing reads like the Dunning-Kruger effect in action. MRNA is very interesting and works like programming, because the cell's machinery is like a Turing machine protein printer that reads MRNA like the Turing machine tape, so it's extra ironic that on Hacker News we have people with limited idea of how it even works, but are confident that it somehow 'edits genes'. Respiratory viruses are fundamentally bits of MRNA that tell cells to make virus copies. When you have heard of flu or cold viruses editing genes?
How much percentage of people in western countries are in generally good health anyway? See how many more deaths happened in Biden counties vs. Trump's because of people falling for pseudo-scientific misinformation like you.
So many sad victims of self serving political misinformation.
> Using level of educational attainment as a proxy for iq, not a perfect correlate of course, those with phds were indeed the least likely to fall for the injections among those with post secondary degrees according to the data I’ve seen.
What data have you seen? Even in the self reported survey that was used for misinformation to mislead people like you, 75% of PhDs said they would vaccinate.
The modification is an addition not an edit, if that helps to clarify.
Putting this particular mRNA, a gene, into your body modifies the set of genes in your body, because now there is a new one, and it evokes a response in a way that eating the dna, also genes, of asparagus or a cow does not.
The point stands, at that point, fear mongering aside, the Covid risk profile was pretty well understood, the risk profile of the experimental gene therapy was not.
Regardless of what you want to call it, it turns out to have been a bad idea for reasons of “original antigenic sin”, immune system disruptions due to heightened levels of IgG4 or some other factors leading to injected people becoming more susceptible to the virus, and the host of issues that may or may not be tied to the gene modifying but to the lipid delivery mechanism or something else, heart issues, fertility disruptions, shingles, Guillain–Barré syndrome, etc. etc.
Whatever terminology you want to use the winning move was to not play the game.
Do you know how many countries that once used them have now barred the use of the mRNA injections for at least a portion of their population?
> MRNA doesn't modify genes, that's not how MRNA works at all
You are repeating how the tech works in theory, not how the vaccines work in reality.
In reality, the vaccines can do this. That's because the "process 2" manufacturing that was switched to post-approval scales much better but yields vaccines heavily contaminated with DNA, not just RNA. If you smuggle DNA into cells using the lipid nanoparticle tricks then it can be incorporated into your own DNA yielding never ending spike protein production and immune tolerance.
There's testimony by a scientist who sequenced residue from vials and discovered the problem here, but it was suspected even before that:
He says he would no longer take the vaccines knowing what he knows now.
There are a whole bunch of case reports where this appears to have happened. Patients who end up always testing positive for spike protein for example, despite not being infected with SARS-CoV-2.
> The whole thing reads like the Dunning-Kruger effect in action.
It's actually the opposite. Over-educated people constantly confuse the map for the terrain due to a naive belief in the angel-like nature of everyone in the same social class as themselves. Then they assume anyone who disagrees must be misinformed.
The people who are most pro-COVID vaccine are, in my experience, people with degrees who also know very little about it beyond what they've been told by pop sci media and public health authorities. The idea that what they've told might not be true is just inconceivable to them, and the luxury belief of intellectual superiority to the rubes is just too tempting to pass up. People who are skeptical are engaging directly with the collected evidence, not just what theory says that evidence should be.
Let's be very clear here though, anybody that actually thought MRNA "experimentally modified genes" was not a high IQ critical thinker.
At least not one with any kind of direct, first, or second order connection to actual current biological | medical research.
That's the kind of crazy largely limited to self assessed high IQ types that never really got out in the wide world and talked to others in other fields.
The modification is an addition, not an edit, if that clarifies things for you.
Injecting mRNA, a gene, into your body modifies the set of genes in your body.
Due to the new gene in your body your cells produce a protein they otherwise would not have.
The reason anybody ever thought this was a good idea was to mitigate against an overblown risk from infection by a novel virus. People’s wariness toward the virus was understandable though given the many strange questions around it and the bizarre, unprecedented, inhumane, response provoked in many countries.
This whole notion of putting a gene in the body to evoke a response doesn’t haven’t any long track record of understanding behind it, therefore terming it experimental makes sense.
Thus, experimental gene modification.
I’d guess there might be some fancy statistics term to describe the intuitive calculation for some of us high iq critical thinkers that said don’t add on a potentially very large upside of risk onto something for the purposes of possibly mitigating a very small range of downside risk.
And now with all the complications arising from the shots that intuition was clearly correct.
Even if all the issues hadn’t become apparent it would still be the right call for those with that limited range of downside risk from the virus to have not tacked on additional unknown risk from the injections.
Do you know how many countries that once used the mRNA injections have now barred their use for some or most of their populations?
mRNA is broken down quickly, it never enters the nucleus, and cannot affect or combine with our DNA in any way to change our genetic code.
> Do you know how many countries that once used the mRNA injections have now barred their use for some or most of their populations?
How many, and how many still ban their use?
Of those that restricted use two years ago in 2021 pending epidemiology results on potential myocardial associations, how many did that because of fears of "gene editing"?
Our genes are not edited nor added to and the point stands - no actual high IQ person with any real world medical exposure direct or second order ever actually thought that such editing (or addition) took place.
That was strictly a social media rumour easily debunked both then and now.
It’s not a rumour, it’s just an issue of semantics you’re debating here.
I’m calling a situation where a new gene is introduced into the body by means of injection and this new gene in the overall body system causes a new behaviour in cells, “experimental gene modification.”
There’s a set of all the genes in your body, then an mRNA injection occurs, now there is a new gene added to the set of all the genes in your body at least temporarily. This new gene is added with the intent to provoke a response.
I’m not saying it alters the genes you are born with from your parents.
Call it experimental gene therapy or something like that if you like, a distinction without much difference I think.
I don’t know about in 2021, the countries I’m talking about were initially fully on board like most western countries, as far as I know. Starting with Denmark, now I think most of Northern Europe and Australia have largely restricted use owing to the “efficacy rate” having settled at somewhere between 0% and -n%. The host of negative side effects and the utter absurdity of ever having mass injected these not well understood, no long term safety data things into healthy populations in the first place.
Probably more countries than that if you have a look around.
> got vaccines and boosters as soon as i could simply due to my political identification (i don't care about virus itself
Did you also have any reservations about the safety of the injections,
or just assumed it was safe?
Which of course there was no way of knowing.
Because if you had reservations about safety or anything else but still got it because of the value you saw in it as a “political marker” that is surprising to me.
What is the deal recently with “political markers?” The term itself seems to have even come into far more use recently. Why is it do you think that “political markers” have come to take such precedence for some people?
No i did not have reservations about safety of the injections, i trust clinical studies. People who don't trust double blind, placebo controlled studies simply have a fundamental trust problem because well, if you don't trust those, it's really hard to trust anything at all.
I didn't think vaccines were actually necessary or would help at all because i expected the virus to spread anyway which it did, and i didn't have any specific health issues to make me afraid of the virus (and i was wrong on this, a perfectly healthy guy just a bit older than me who i knew, refused vaccine, got to intensive care with covid, and nearly died). So maybe i dodged a bullet idk.
But in any case, political considerations were main reasons why i took the vaccine - by that point, i was pretty much infuriated with hard-right propaganda and hard-right opinions prevailing everywhere around me.
>Why is it do you think that “political markers” have come to take such precedence for some people?
Because of the culture war. It's a bitch and you have to take part even if you hate the idea. Too many things people on the other end of the spectrum do, repel you too much and you need to distance yourself from them as much as possible - and they usually do it exactly for that purpose. I bet conservatives feel the same about us; it's just that - culture war.
Maybe splitting into two nearly non-intersecting societies, like they had in Netherlands (they had three! google "Pillarisation") is a good thing. They avoided strife simply by having parallel structures - schools, churches, hospitals, theatres, labour unions, and of course political parties - for each, and almost did not communicate with people outside of their group, ignoring each other. Even during WWII Resistance against Nazi occupation was pillarised - separate groups fought against Nazis while ignoring each other. They won't admit it, but pillarisation ended simply because one of the groups - social-democrats - eventually won.
The studies were only placebo controlled for the initial run of a handful of weeks.
After which the controls were given the mRNA injections, eliminating the possibility any study of longer term issues that may arise.
Though now we have come to see quite a few complications arising that weren’t picked up in the initial studies. To the point that nearly all countries where the mRNA shots were used, aside from the USA, have barred their further use from some, or the majority of their populations.
Have you followed any of this?
For those of us who have, I think it’s caused a bit of reevaluation in many things we had assumed to be largely noble endeavors, public health, things involving placebo controlled, double blind studies as you say, etc.
I think some of us have learned that when there are other factors at play such as profit motives, and large scale social engineering and experimenting it pays to look beyond the messaging of political parties when making medical decisions that have the potential to affect the rest of our lives, or suddenly end them.
I guess it would be a kind of hard cognitive dissonance inducing thing to do though, if even “by accident” the people on the other side who’s opinions you find so objectionable that you’re thinking about wars of separation with, turned out to have some valid points that if you had considered them may have in fact saved you some trouble in the form of heart issues, or lowered sperm counts, or period disruptions, or a host of other potential issues.
That's simply not true, studies were placebo-controlled until after administration of approved vaccines have started everywhere. No voices towards giving placebo branch the vaccine started before March 2021 when most vulnerable population and a good chunk of population overall was already vaccinated by "production" vaccine. Some studies eventually gave vaccine to placebo participants (thus ending the trial) in mid-2021, some never did. In any case, vaccine authorisation was in all cases based on studies with proper placebo control.
And no, mRNA vaccines are still in use everywhere in the European Union. Vaccination against Covid in general has been withdrawn from the wide public because it's no longer worth the cost and risks, because everyone today has some level of immunity and today's Covid strains are a lot less dangerous, so it's worth the scoop for only most vulnerable population groups.
Moveover, mRNA vaccines for other viruses are being tested and used after the Covid success and there is no talk about limiting or banning the technology. Your posts looks like some conspiracy theory.
Oops, yeah when I said mRNA shots, I meant the spike protein ones, as those are currently the only ones. I didn’t mean to imply a whole class of products.
I would think if there were to be anymore there would be much more skepticism and questions though, given that so many got these under the pretence of not getting Covid and then they still got Covid and in many cases some unpleasant side effects from the shots to boot.
Is there a study with the control group having not been “uncontrolled” and thus potential for further longer term data?
Vaccine testing never considered probability of asymptomatic infection and never gave any promise about it. They only tested for probability of symptoms, hospitalisation, and death. If someone took vaccine thinking it will make them immune in the sense of avoiding infection altogether it's their problem/misperception.
>If someone took vaccine thinking it will make them immune in the sense of avoiding infection altogether it's their problem/misperception.
Seems a little harsh to blame people themselves for being wrong if simply for the reason of taking at their words authorities like the president of the USA, the head of the cdc, the head of the nih, and many more on down the line.
Detailed results of clinical studies that were used to apply for emergency authorisation of vaccines were widely discussed in all kinds of press of all political leanings. They explicitly stated that there were no studies about probability of asymptomatic infection. IIRC Pfizer study counted as "positive cases" (for both vaccine and control group) the one that had both a positive covid test AND two of the six primary symptoms, or a positive test AND breathing difficulties/reduced blood oxygen levels, as a single sufficient serious symptom. They did not count asymptomatic infections.
Have you considered not basing your life decisions on spite/opposition? I mean, vaccines are great and all, but your reason for taking the covid one is a little amusing.
Liberals tend to be introverted? You know that the "creative" types, the "arts and Hollywood people", are composed of 90%+ liberals right? Introverted, ok...
Possibly related to the links between extraversion and narcissism and the latter groups know-better-than-the-experts approach to science, and indicated vaccine-resistance.
Interestingly I feel like the most militant people i know re: Covid policy are the more narcissistic. “Everyone must do X so that I can feel safe.” I’m not saying this refutes the evidence, just my data point.
No. "Everybody must do X so we are more safe". Given that you're mentioning the evidence, the effectiveness of covid vaccines isn't about feelings. The narcissism is of course in the notion "everyone else will be less safe, because I want to feel more free."
"And extroverts, to their surprise, were 18 percent more likely to refuse the vaccine."
In the US, lots of surveys have shown a 30-35 point gap between Democrats and Republicans for COVID vaccines, though I'm not sure where those numbers landed in the end. So even though 18 points seems like a pretty big spread, it's ignoring the elephant in the room.
I guess the former was expected, while this was a surprise.
Also being a Democrat or a Republican is not a biological trait, and it is strongly affected by the environment, education, family etc. Extrovert vs introvert closer to being left handed vs right handed.
Genuinely curious, do you have a source on introversion/extroversion being biological like handedness?
I always assumed it was more learned. I used to be introverted but that was more due to low self esteem and now I’m more confident and rather extroverted
I am a fairly outgoing introvert. I like people, I can have conversations with ease, I am confident, but after a while my people budget is spent and I need to go somewhere quiet. There's a misconception that "introverted" means "shy", and that couldn't be further from the truth.
I kind of like how certain statistics are observed in relation to a specific culture/country (Canada), a specific vaccine (COVID) in a specific range of years, whence broad conclusions are drawn, which apparently are expected to be universally applicable. Not sure how that implication is made though.
A friend of mine who lives in the US did, on purpose, during the Covid SNAFU, several vaccines he hadn't done in a long time. But he didn't get the COVID vaccine: it was a statement. To anyone saying he was "anti-vax" he'd answer: "I'm not anti-vax, I just had this and that vaccines done".
It was mostly a statement among the many lies of the states, including those saying mask weren't working, then saying they were working and mandatory, then saying HCQ wasn't working (and now it's proven it does work), then saying it was totally impossible the virus leaked from a lab (which is now accepted as a theory that has legs), etc. The lies are just endless.
And he's no dumb guy. Some here have worked for him and he semi-recently did a very nice exit.
You cannot constantly lie to citizens and still expect 100% of them to then follow your wishes.
Yep... also "you won't get ill", "you won't spread it", and gaslighting later to just "there's a slightly lower chance of dying" (and ignoring the "get vacinated so you won't infect grandma")... not to mention how the whole "herd immunity" died down.
Also all four (available here, pfeizer, J&J, moderna and astrazeneca) vaccines are "safe and efective", then a a few people had major issues with astrazeneca, and a girl here died from J&J, and suddenly "we always recommended mrna vaccines", and then after, only pfeizer was recommended.
Would you provide a citation for the claim that only pfizer is recommended? As opposed to, for example, the current CDC recommendation for the protein subunit Novavax vaccine, which is neither pfizer nor mrna?
This was back in the day when we went down from 4 recommended to just 1. After getting J&J + pfeizer booster + covid twice, I stopped following the current recommendations.
I can find you the links to 'not-recommending' (=countries stop using) the astrazeneca, J&J and moderna if you want.
I can also find you the link to CDC director saying that vaccinated people won't get ill and won't spread it.
You can find them yourself. But there is are provisos:
a) HCQ must be given early (~3-4 days or less after symptoms begin) hopefully before the virus has significantly damaged the mouth, throat and lungs. Once the viral damage is done then HCQ efficacy declines rapidly.
b) a zinc supplement is given with HCQ. HCQ helps zinc to enter the cell whereupon the zinc halts/slows viral replication.
c) an antibiotic (e.g., azithromycin) is given with HCQ, not to stop the virus but to halt opportunistic bacterial infections that might otherwise enter tissue damaged by the virus.
So you can see why many hospitalization studies showed HCQ ineffective: those studies waited far too long to use HCQ.
It is claimed that such delays are a technique used in drug trials to discard possible inexpensive drugs and promote other patentable and therefore profitable drugs. See R.F. Kennedy Jr.'s book for details:
An introvert is not some passive person following the trends, extroverts are more likely of that behavior and it is part of what makes extroverts extroverted, the social aspects of life have greater importance to them.
From the extroverts perspective, probably? Introverts and extroverts view conflict differently and what is conflict to one may not be conflict to the other. As an introvert part of life is understanding that what to me is a sincere question and desire to understand will be seen as argumentative by most extroverts outside of the intimate one on one sort of conversation and even then can be touchy.
On the other hand, two extroverts can seem like they are having a nasty dispute to an onlooking introvert, then immediately go get dinner together. Lawyers come to mind in this regard.
And the reverse is true which was my point, both sides see conflict differently. Introverts will generally not see courtroom disputes between lawyers as conflict, they will see it as fulfilling their role as lawyers which is something fairly natural to introverts.
If extroverts were already infected due to statistics of interaction events, maybe they are accidentally following the science that proved they are more immune than someone who was only vaccinated?
Infected only versus vaccinated only was the comparison. It’s 80/20 since you could always compare booster +N as N approaches infinity and argue that an infinite number of boosters is more valuable according to science.
I agree with this article. All my extrovert friends didn't get jabbed. None of them got sick though, shockingly, and were outside throughout the lockdowns.
edit, some possible causalities:
- the study was somehow biased to define as extroverted people who ignored quarantine
- extroverts who ignored quarantine were more likely to get COVID, which they believed gave them a similar level of immunity
- my aforementioned moral equivocation, like, if I'm ignoring this it's because people telling me what to do must be wrong, etc.