Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

To be fair, he never said that his wife's problems had anything to do with vaccination. Even with modern (science-based) medicine, stuff sometimes Goes Wrong, and that can of course be devastating to the people concerned. It's probably a good idea not to put too much blind faith in what a medical doctor tells you – second opinions are generally available – but if you consider the alternatives to modern science-based medicine you will quickly find out that there really aren't any that on the whole are anything near as successful.

As far as adverse vaccine side effects are concerned, there may be some underreporting going on but personally I don't think that this happens enough to make a significant dent in the risk/benefit ratio (as I said in my other message, a 3.5-order-of-magnitude difference in fatality rates is hard to beat). When you're talking about adverse vaccine side effects, it's also worth remembering that pretty much anything bad that happens to you after a vaccination may be (and often is) written up as an adverse side effect. There doesn't have to be an obvious cause-effect relationship. In principle, if you step out of the doctor's office after your vaccination and get hit by a car in the road, that can go into the database as an adverse side effect of your vaccination.

Finally, different countries operate their own separate tracking systems for adverse vaccine reactions. Since these all agree that the risks of vaccination are vanishingly small, there must be a global conspiracy going on where doctors and public-health organisations everywhere collude in playing down vaccination side effects, and that becomes progressively more unlikely the bigger the conspiracy needs to be.

So, people, get vaccinated. It's really quite safe and it helps protect you and the people around you from all sorts of nasty, debilitating, and possibly lethal diseases, including nasty diseases that we don't know how to make better once you actually have them.

Note: you can avoid this step in the future by logging into your LWN account.