HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

An absurd response that has no place on hacker news.

I recommend this video on why vaccines are significantly better than the alternatives.

https://youtu.be/zBkVCpbNnkU

⬐ IndySun

Aimed at doubters and non-scientists but very well-done (like all of their videos).

It's much, much lower: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBkVCpbNnkU

Related: very informative video from Kurzgesagt: "The Side Effects of Vaccines - How High is the Risk?" [1]

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBkVCpbNnkU

⬐ Townley

This is an unhelpful contribution to the narrative that vaccines are unsafe. Consumers who don't have time or medical training shouldn't feel uneasy about vaccination except in unlikely circumstances (in which case they're much better off getting advice from doctors and not YouTube), and seeing a video called "How High is the Risk?" adds to that uneasiness in ways that directly harm public health.

EDIT: See comment below. As the video intends, I mistook it to be anti-vaccination propaganda, when it's the opposite. I have minor concerns about non-forthright information campaigns, but apologize for jumping the gun.

⬐ slig

I'm not sure I get what you mean. Did you watch the video? Obviously the title was chosen deliberately to grab attention from people that believe in the antivax conspiracy.

⬐ Townley

I hadn't: I jumped the gun thinking that you were sharing 10 minutes of anti-vaccination propaganda, and offering up ammunition for people who think "Well those guys over there say otherwise, so who knows?" My apologies for that.

My point was that planting the poison pill of "Are vaccines dangerous?" is itself dangerous, and despite the video's good intentions might still apply here.

As a popular video, it'll appear in sidebars more than it'll be watched. I worry that in that capacity, it'll maybe snare a bunch of no-vaccination believers in the honeypot, but will plant the safety question into the minds of many more.

My concern is tempered by the understanding that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation knows what it's doing here, but the choice to make an informative campaign clandestine strikes me as an odd one with potential negative side effects.

⬐ schoen

Kurzgesagt is a channel that makes engaging explainer videos about all sorts of topics. It is run by a design consultancy in Germany. Most of the videos on the channel are not on topics chosen by sponsors, but a few are.

In an article at

https://medium.com/@Kurzgesagt/kurzgesagt-sponsorships-on-yo...

Philipp Dettmer, the founder of the channel, explains that he insists on editorial independence when accepting sponsorships to create videos on specific topics (including in this case, with the Gates sponsorship). This seems to suggest that the Gates Foundation did not choose how the video would be titled or promoted on YouTube, just that it entered into an agreement that it would sponsor the creation of an engaging video about vaccine risks and benefits.

I don't know if anyone at the Gates Foundation specifically thought about the question of whether simply mentioning this topic in a certain way would encourage some viewers to think that the risks were worse than they are. Even if so, it's not clear that they would have a veto according to their sponsorship agreement.

(The article also indicates that people can also hire the team behind Kurzgesagt to make videos to a customer's specifications. In this case, those videos don't appear on the Kurzgesagt YouTube channel.)

⬐ MichaelApproved

Here's a video from Penn & Teller's Bullshit show. It's less than two minutes and illustrates the statistical risks pretty well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhk7-5eBCrs