Logistics-wise, it’s easier to get someone to come into the doctors for blood work every 3 months for testing (as required for prep) than once a month for a shot.
However, from reading the article, I do think there’s a convenience factor at play related to the struggles of taking pills daily.
Note though, the article mentioned a trial of _women_ where truvada and one-shot prevention effectiveness were compared and the one-shot was deemed 89% more effective.
A quick search explains _why_ this might be the case for women. Basically, it takes more truvada to get rid of the disease in vaginal and cervical tissue than it takes for rectal tissue.
Also, doctors have been recommending a different drug, Descovy, for prep instead of Truvada. This isn’t due to effectiveness but side effects I believe. I guess if one experienced side effects though, they would be less likely to continue taking the medicine.
I'm not sure about this one but subcutaneous and intramuscular injectables are pretty easy to self-administer. I self-inject once a week myself.
https://www.poz.com/drug/cabenuva seems to suggest it is intramuscular (administered in the buttocks, which is not hard to do by oneself) but requires a healthcare provider. Not sure why, there might be storage requirements and such.
I think people would rather prefer to take a pill than give themselves an injection. It doesn’t matter if it’s “easy” or not. There’s the “ick” or “ahhh needle” or “breaking skin” factor at play.
Even if you self-inject and find it easy, I’m sure you’re not saying it’s easier and less of a hassle than taking a pill lmao.
In what way is it easier besides you saying that it’s easier? You have a hard time swallowing pills I guess? Or do you remember to take injections more because they stand out more in your mind than pills do?
EDIT: Not sure why this is getting downvoted. Since when on HN is it acceptable for someone to say “I think this way so it must be a fact” without providing an explanation? Even when it comes to subjectivity, there’s an expectation that people share why they believe in their opinion, right?
I swear I dislike this site and the people who use it more and more every week.
I'm pretty sure that "easier" is a subjective determination. But no, I don't have a hard time swallowing pills. It's just that doing something once a week is easier than having to remember to do something everyday. The injections are also more effective for me, as they are here. And finally there's an aesthetic aspect to plunging a needle into one's muscle that I appreciate.
Yes, it’s subjective to some extent, hence why I asked in what way is it easier beside you just saying that it is? I left out “to you” but I thought the HN community was a bit smarter than that. Even if you had said “it’s easier to me. Full stop,” I still would have written the same reply...
All you said was “it’s easier” in your original point. You obviously felt the need to clarify yourself in your most recent comment. So clearly your first comment was lacking information. There was no reason to downvote me just because you felt my original comment made you look stupid.
FWIW, even though “easy” is subjective, there’s still a consensus to be considered. For example, finding piercing your skin with a needle to be an asthetically-pleasing act does not fit that consensus...
Something that _does_ fit the consensus is that taking a pill every day is a hassle.
It’s disgusting that I’m being downvoted when the main point in my great-great-grandfather post was explaining about the effectiveness of the trial mentioned in the article.
Not whether some random Internet weirdo prefers to inject themself...
He edited his comment to say “(for me)” after I had replied.
Also, if you click damnyou@‘s comment history, you’ll clearly see that he loves using the phrase “in fact” without supporting his assumptions. I didn’t deserve to be downvoted.
You didn’t edit your comment minutes afterwards. It was at least 1 hour afterwards.
And sorry if you actually do prefer those gender terms. But honestly, it sounds like you’re just making shit up. I’m assuming you’re just a young white kid. I’ve met many of you in the tech industry who act like that. “Oh, I said something stupid and fucked up, let me pretend to be ‘woke’”. People like you exhaust me.
Ok... and 10.6 million use birth control pills according to the CDC.
Also, just because something appears convenient doesn’t mean that it actually is.
Have you looked up how many women use one of those invasive contraceptive implants?
Technically, a woman only has to get a new implant once every 4 years+. But have you not read the horror stories about the implants becoming dislodged and causing internal bleeding and severe damage?
You seem to be implying that IUDs are much less popular than the pill. That is not the case. They are just behind the pill in popularity.
Also, people on PrEP already need to do regular bloodwork, so needles and appointments are already involved every few months. Doing an appointment every 2 months instead of every 3 and not needing to take a daily pill as well is a huge win in level of effort.
I'm not quite sure what your point is. Mine was that millions of people choose from a variety of treatment options and that there's no clear evidence that a pill is vastly preferred to an injection or even some more invasive delivery method. I think my link about birth control usage just shows that the more options, the better. Presumably we'll cover the at-risk population better if there are more good options.
I think this is a wonderful thing and that we should spread the word when these new treatments are available so that more people know they have options if they like the sound of occasional injections but don't like daily pills or vice versa.
If there were 4 adults (and not 2 adults and 2 kids) with that amount of extra weight in the minivan, then you would see that they would be cutting it extremely close or be over for the maximum recommended amount of weight.
Besides, it’s not just the pounds that matter. Would you rather be hit by 200 pounds of hardness/sharpness/person bouncing to-and-fro or not be hit at all during a car crash cause that 200 pounds, whether object or person, was secured?
Doing it once and not being properly prepared does make you a reckless person. To use an exaggerated example like you did, would you go skydiving without taking a class ahead of time? Would you go without a parachute? Would you go without a backup?
Stop being facetious just to prove your point, please.
Going skydiving, with a class, with a parachute, with a backup, is still dangerous.
Climbing a mountain with good equipment and a buddy is still dangerous.
Being "properly prepared" is only relevant inside a context. You can't look at just preparation when deciding if something is too dangerous. The actual risk numbers are the important thing here.
If I'm driving 100 miles, and I do something sloppy that doubles my risk of dying in a car crash, the actual danger I face is less than the danger of skydiving just once with perfect prep. If it's also a special occasion where I'm going to get a huge amount of enjoyment out of it... the risk seems okay.
Even if we're focused just on car safety, we should be far more upset when someone buys a car without top-tier safety ratings than about some one-off trip like this.
Being able to point at some specific danger, like a battery on the floor, is just bikeshedding. What matters is the risk per day/month/year, and most of that risk is invisible.
In my 30 years of life, I’ve never read an article, seen a TV show, watched a movie, read a book, heard a conversation, etc where the idea about wearing helmets in cars was even discussed.
I’ve never even heard a comedian joke about it.
Who is opposing this? Are you saying there’s opposition just because it’s a thing that doesn’t exist?
So that does open the question about whether suppression of this lifesaving technology has been something intentional on the part of automotive companies and enthusiasts (see: "jaywalking") or if it's the other way, that making road safety issues about only cycling helmets is an attempt to de-legitimize that mode and blame victims.
I’m not sure why you read GP’s comment as virtue signaling. Sure, those examples you gave sound like virtue signaling. I dislike that sort of people probably more than you. Maybe it was his italicized “terrified” comment. I guess you were thinking “Seriously? This terrifies you?”
But GP is talking about something more serious. Maybe read their comment again. He literally said he saw someone die due to a similar situation.
Your OSHA comment sounds like you have a chip on your shoulder about something.
If it helps you process things better or at least put things in a different perspective, how would you feel if someone said they were _terrified_ that the kids weren’t wearing seatbelts? Would your response be slightly different?
Your comment just shows how stubborn you are to prove a point.
At least I gave you the benefit of the doubt and seriously reflected about both yours and GP’s viewpoints.
I wasn’t talking specifically in this article context. It was a completely made up hypothetical situation yet actually does happen in real life resulting in deaths. According to a quick search when typing in “seatbelt deaths”, Google says in 2017 that ~33% of vehicle deaths in the U.S. were or could have been prevented if seatbelts were worn. That’s tens of thousands of people, _each year_.
What if you saw a drunk driver get into a car headed for the highway? Same response? “Oh, no you’re just exaggerating, he only lives 5 blocks down the street, he’ll be ok”.
You’re complaining about one extreme where people overreact over safety. Yet, you exist at the other extreme, telling people that they’re overreacting just to fit your narrative. Terrible.
EDIT: I see that the most recent comment was from a Dylan. I thought I had been replying to “throwaway”. Are you two the same person? It’s even more funny thinking that someone was so annoyed by someone talking about safety that they had to make a throwaway to complain lmao.
I disagree, as someone who observed this site as well as everything else, I can tell you at least for me my prior was heavily influenced by the shift in tone, sentiment, and desperation I observed there relative to the usual din of more front-facing social media grifters.
Oh, I think that’s just a convoluted way of saying you lived in a bubble.
It was quite clear that this was going to happen. No one on my timeline is shocked at all. In fact, I’ve been complaining about these deplorables since 2013 (even before the phrase was coined).
What bubble are you referring to? Saying it was obvious now doesn't say anything about having good predictive ability. My recollection is up until about Monday, most people were asleep on this. And then around Tuesday the zeitguest was this was going to be a dumb clown show. The number of people claiming that violence was inevitable and the capitol was going to be stormed, outside of the obvious circles, was in my experience marginal.
I wasn’t trying to offend you. Everyone lives in a bubble or several.
My timeline consists mainly of 80% American minorities and 20% graduates from elite US universities (with some overlap between the two groups obviously). What about yours? No one on my timeline was surprised. And if they were, they were privileged white people (no offense just being honest when talking about Harvard/MIT grads).
These insurrectionists complained all year about wearing masks. Some of them even shot retail workers because they were so upset. How could you not see this coming?
It’s sort of hard for me to tell based on your comments. Do you live in the U.S. and where about? I could see how one would be surprised if they lived abroad and only used mainstream social media to gauge what’s going on.
But if you’ve lived in the U.S. and read any of the think pieces in mainstream newspapers or even popular Medium articles over the last 4 years, you would have likely learned about the surge in domestic terrorism committed by white supremacists. There were so many articles, especially this past year in the summer. How could you not have read any of them?
Well, I do know that those sort of articles get downvoted on HN and don’t surface to the top. I’m not sure why articles with titles like “FBI confirms a surge in domestic terrorism” aren’t important to HN. (That was sarcasm.)
I literally had a conversation with dang@ the other day about this, and he didn’t believe me.
I live in the US. The specific thing I am talking about here is a) the expectation the protest would turn violent and b) the expectation that the protestors would storm the capitol. This thread is already too deep and I'm getting a bit burned out on responding to everything here, but in general my own bubble (point taken, no offense intended) implied the former was unlikely (through the eyes of centrist Republicans) and the latter was a fever dream but never actually could manifest in reality.
Oh, I see. My bubble was well aware of how violent these people are and were going to be. I mean, they like guns. They talk about killing people all of the time. They look and sound crazy. These are the people whose ancestors (adults and children) had picnics while watching men being hanged in the early-to-mid 20th century.
And my bubble was well aware that they were going to storm the Capitol because protestors often try to get past the police barricade and the police were going to go easy on them.
Note: I wasn’t downplaying that visiting sites like the one you mentioned was helpful. I do that from time to time as well to troll them but also to get the full perspective.
> I mean, they like guns. They talk about killing people all of the time. They look and sound crazy.
Nonsense, you've built a straw man. Maybe you've been hanging around 4chan too much and assuming that a subset of swamp creatures from the low parts of the internet represent the millions of Americans who support the President, but I assure you the overwhelming majority of conservatives are nice, hard-working people.
30+ people died as a direct result of the media-condoned protests over the past summer, led by blm/antifa and associated groups. Did your bubble predict that? Do you think those killings, burnings, lootings, violent behaviors were justified? If so, why is it ok for one group to protest in such a manner, but not the other?
Shouldn't we as a society, especially including the mainstream media, have a strict and principled standard that we apply?
daniel957, the point of a discussion website is to have discussion. If you'd like, we can talk about my comment and try to see if we can find any agreement or not.
It is true that 30+ people died, some of them from police, some, of them from being shot and murdered (chop/chaz/portland), some by other means. It doesn't change the fact that many people died as a direct result of ongoing chaos and anarchy that was largely dismissed as justifiable by the most prominent news organizations and pundits (cnn, nyt, wapo). Two wrongs don't make a right, we need to disavow all violent protests across the board and stop with double standards.
No, your comment was just inappropriate. dang@ is the moderator.
And I don’t have discussions with delusional people. I wrote a super long reply to someone else as you clearly saw. But they weren’t talking like brainwashed people.
But if you did want to delete your comment instead of being passive aggressive, please do so.
daniel957, I deleted my comment because of YOUR passive aggressive response to whistle to the moderator. Nothing I said was threatening, harassing, or otherwise outside the scope of a discussion on a very sensitive topic in this country.
This is a public discussion platform and not a one-sided filter bubble. Many people will have different perspectives and it is indeed healthy to listen to and consider them, even if you disagree.
For whoever downvoted me, calm down! dang@ and I had a conversation over the weekend on a different post about the HN community. I didn’t leave a comment today about it.
I asked him to show me data that confirms that the HN community is not what I think it is. I partially believe this is why he added the link in his comment since he added a similar link in his reply to me over the weekend.
And his comment today was basically what I said in the other post. The HN community is going to behave themselves on the millionth hate post about Electron or Amp urls. But they’re going to show their asses on these sort of posts.
dang@ basically agreed with me but then said “But still, no the community is fine.” You can’t use silly Electron posts to prove that point.
You were clearly the issue in the other thread.