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06-11-2021

A Letter to Gavin D. Howard

Gavin,

I am writing in response to your post on your blog (https://gavinhoward.com/2021/06/a-letter-to-linus-torvalds/) about your thoughts about the COVID-19 vaccine.

I agree that you are addressing a conspiracy theory. I cannot possibly understand why you are upset, and it may have been the wrong thing to post that reply on your blog.

I don't believe you're a lawyer and so it'd be ill advised to give legal advice. You claim:

Yes, they don’t have FDA approval; they have Emergency Use Authorizations, which means that it is actually illegal to require people to get them.

Which is a claim. You also do not provide a source to back this claim with evidence. This means your claim could just be wrong and the burden of proof is on you to back your claim with evidence. There are of course medical exemptions, however the vast majority of people are fine and do not need to worry.

I'd think that the long term effects of losing your senses of taste or smell (which are documented long term effects of COVID-19 (https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/long-term-effects.html)) would be more concerning than the long term effects of not being vulnerable to such an affliction.

As for your statement that "I personally would like to wait until the vaccines have FDA approval before I get them", the Emergency Use Authorization is an FDA approval. It is a different process in this case because thousands of people needlessly dying from an emergent medical condition constitutes a public health emergency.

Being cautious about new things is probably a good idea a lot of the time, however in this case it may lead to direct, material harm to yourself or people around you. Recall Matthew 22:37-40:

Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

source

Is it loving your neighbor (which is helpfully defined as every other human on the planet) to be a carrier of a virus that could kill or maim them permanently? If you are planning to quarantine indefinitely until you have been vaccinated that would be a different story, however based on your current phrasing this is not your intention.

So, to have you, a programmer, telling other people to doubt the efficacy of our medical research system and tell others to not get vaccinated is a little unnerving. This is scary to me because I also run Linux as one of my main operating systems (and I run it exclusively on servers).

Because I run Linux I undoubtedly have to have faith in your judgement into pulling code into your tree. But it is bad judgement to parrot a line about dubious legal claims, so I am losing faith in your judgement.

In other words, if you have an opinion about something you’re not well-versed in, please do not post it publicly to the internet, rather than an order. And please think for yourself, but think critically about what you are saying. Millions of people have gotten the vaccine worldwide and there hasn't been any major side effects as far as we have recorded.

Linux user since 2010