I hate having to be skeptical of this stuff, because the consequences of skeptics being accurate are even more horrifying than the pandemic. This is so challenging because when you look at each number he uses, and then compare it to its base rate, you can see why hesitancy levels are 30-50% in regions of developed countries. If you are among that cohort of people in your region who are not vaccinated, should you get it? Yes, and especially if you have co-morbidities or work with people who do. We need to seriously consider what the consequences of a controversial vaccination plan that requires 90% compliance for it to succeed are going to be if/when it fails. (I would even posit that number is closer to 70%)
If you talk to hesitant people, and there are a lot of them, the reason is a mistrust of the people leading the effort and managing the pandemic. Why mistrust? Many reasons, but the most challenging one is because of numbers that don't pass a smell test coupled with apopleptic ad-hominim aggression directed against anyone who questions them. This all but guarantees a 20%+ rejection rate from people who just dig in because they do not make health or other decisions based on fear and shame. There will be a defiant group of about 5-10% who you just can't reach at all, so if your plan needs them, you will need a new plan.
Calling people hesitant is patronizing and was probably the stupidest PR move of all time and the committee responsible for it will have to live with those consequences.
But instead of arming people with a litany of whataboutisms, I would say this to an unvaxed person: given your objections, how does getting the shot prevent you from resisting or even fighting a battle you percieve you need to fight against these authorities you do not trust? Polite euphemisms aside, let's call it what it is, because that's the crux of it.
If it does, you need to just act now and literally overthrow your governments in the next few weeks, but if you aren't going to act today and do that, then get a shot, and use the time to figure out how to depose these people that you do not trust in good time. If, as many hesitant people believe, there might be long term harm to them, your long term still involves a conflict to replace these people, but risk from hypothetical side effects still nets out of that equation.
My rationale to the so-called hesitant would be this: get the shot, and then use the time to organize and support your revolts against untrustworthy leaders and institutions, because once you are vaccinated, you can draw from the ranks of others who were also forced into it. Use this to unite people to your causes against untrustworthy authorities, because your skepticism comes directly from people using this to divide you. Take that from them, and then commit to organizing and scaling the change that has to come. Having the shot gives you skin in the game with the people you are going to need on your side.
This issue isn't the main battle, but I will absolutely support efforts to ensure trustworthy people get into positions of authority after this.
I'm glad you mentioned evil, because that's the conversation that isn't being had, and it's the personal belief factor that is driving a lot of private decisions. For us to spout talking points about noisy data just talks around these deeply held beliefs, and I think the only hope is from addressing those directly.
I happen to have some rare professional insight into how evil this all may get, but if it's as bad as I suspect, a small risk of rare side effects is really the least of your worries on that time horizon, and you can't do anything about it if you are on the target list.
If that's on your radar you need to know that doing nothing is not fighting evil. If you are going to fight, get out there and do it, but if you aren't going to do that now, then I'm recommending you take the benefits of a vaccine with some known risks and some unknown ones, keep your family and social connections who will otherwise write you off and isolate you when it counts, and then fight or continue to do nothing when you are ready.
Dismissing someones beliefs as conspiracy theories has never once convinced anyone of anything, so addressing how to effectively navigate a world with a belief is much more logical.
I don't think the reason to take it is scientific. Literally nobody who didn't invent it has taken it as the result of their own emperical research and discovery. I'm saying this vaccine is not the hill to die on. There will be plenty of other opportunity for that.
I don't really see this as a hill I'm dying on. More than half my friends are not taking it. My work doesn't care. I don't live in a dystopian city with vaxxine passports. My life, actually, has not been negatively affected at all by not taking this shot, other than the internet ridicule. So I don't really agree with your argument; it's not like I'm ruining myself.
There are many reasons people choose not to get the vaccine. What evidence do you have that the main issue is a distrust of authority?
The main authority on this, the FDA has not even officially approved the vaccine and likely won't for quite awhile. For some people it is logical to ask why other vaccines require 10year+ trials and for this a few months was sufficient.
While personally, I think the risk of the virus greatly outweighs the risk of getting the vaccine, I do not think we should force that choice on everyone. Either the FDA is ridiculously over-conservative in their other trials, or this one is extremely rushed. Can't have it both ways.
The FDA is ridiculously over conservative because of litigation, settlement, and insurance costs. They're not doing another thalidomide.
My premise is that the facts we choose for our opinions are for support of an underlying belief, and that this underlying belief is that the people running things are full of shit, if not deceptive. I can't change someones mind about that (and wouldn't try), but I'm addressing that concern directly vs. getting a shot.
I'd note that the FDA didn't do the first thalidomide. Thalidomide is one of the first big FDA success stories; it was rejected, despite being approved by numerous other countries and pressure from the manufacturer and politicians at the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Oldham_Kelsey
Having been through an FDA process in a prior startup (although far from central at it; my role was at the outskirts), I can say the FDA is not ridiculously over-conservative. We did human pilots in another country, which was less bureaucratic. The processes there were both faster and more conservative in terms of safety. Doctors would look over our data and protocols and make reasonable decisions.
The FDA process took a long time, but wasn't all that effective at guaranteeing safety either. There was a ton of process.
I think you're attributing far too much rationality to an administrative government process.
Anecdotally, my experience is that the main reason is distrust of authority. It's usually warranted distrust too. Authorities aren't trustworthy.
To answer your question:
(1) Most vaccines don't have 10+ year trials. A year is not even the fastest; the flu on 1957-1958 has a vaccine developed in 4 months.
(2) Most medical trials are slower since everything is done sequentially, since there is no rush. You can do an animal trial, a first-in-man, a small group, then a medium group, and so on. It's a better way to go.
(3) This vaccine has had over 3 billion doses administered. It's far better studied and validated at this point than the vast, vast majority of medical trials.
If you believe "the risk of the vaccine greatly outweighs the risk of getting the virus," can you provide any back-of-the-envelope numbers to back up that statement? From my perspective, the virus already killed half a million Americans, and likely brain-damaged millions. We have enough data on the vaccine to know it doesn't do that.
I am unvaccinated and probably will remain so for this particular vaccination. I don't truly believe that the risk of the vaccine outweighs the risk of the virus to me. It's more that I weigh the risk of covid at around zero, and the risk of vaccine at a question mark.
I cannot trust the institutions pushing this vaccine at all. At worst, I trust the opposite of what they say about anything politicized. But let's just say I don't trust them. In the absence of a trusted authority, I can only make this decision based on my own research. Unfortunately I am not qualified to interpret the data meaningfully, and I truly believe that if there was data suggesting that the vaccine was equally dangerous to the virus, it would be suppressed.
What remains is essentially a total vacuum of information. I then have to make decisions based on intuition and the error bars I perceive. What I expect is that the publicized covid numbers are better or equal to the reality, and the vaccine danger is worse or equal. The publicized numbers for covid give me essentially a zero risk of any problems, because I am young, fit and healthy. The real numbers are going to be even better. Meanwhile, the vaccine problems don't seem to be fewer for young people, but just kind of random. I also know what to expect from a respiratory virus, because I've had those a number of times. I have no idea what to expect from a MRNA vaccine, whether there could be problems that appear years later, etc, and I cannot trust any authority that says there is no risk.
There is also the aspect of direct action. If I get covid, darn that sucks but people get sick and that's life. If I get some bad side effects from an untrusted injection, I did that to myself and it will feel mentally much worse. All of this is to say, I don't care at all if I get covid, because I'll be fine. I won't inject myself with an untrusted medicine to avoid that.
It might not be a big deal if you get COVID but it would suck to be the immunocompromised individual (or a friend/family relation to the individual) who might get COVID from you.
That person would presumably be vaccinated, thus they wouldn't get the virus from him. Why does everyone talk about how the vaccine works, but then use this argument against people that don't want to get the vaccine?
Immunocompromised might not be able to get a vaccine because the mechanism for vaccines is the immune system, which tends not be be working so great in the immunocompromised.
Yep, that would suck for them. Anyone who is fearful of getting covid should get the vaccine. If they get vaccinated and I still end up transmitting it to them, then that sucks, but again, people get sick and that's life. I'm willing to acknowledge my selfishness in this matter.
I empathize with most of what you wrote, but there are two errors:
"I also know what to expect from a respiratory virus, because I've had those a number of times."
No one whom I know who has had COVID describes it like any normal respiratory virus, and it attacks multiple systems. I'm terrified of brain damage, and before-and-after MRIs shows brain damage in >10% of people who contract COVID19.
"If I get covid, darn that sucks but people get sick and that's life"
And if you kill a loved one by sharing COVID19? Or give them brain fog? That's not something I could live with.
The deeper argument, though, is about herd immunity. If we don't stop the spread, really bad things happen.
I'll mention: Do you use proper masks? N95 and proper nanofiber masks are widely available, and appear to do more to stop the spread than the vaccine. They're also risk-free.
>And if you kill a loved one by sharing COVID19? Or give them brain fog? That's not something I could live with.
The odds of this are far less than the odds of me killing my wife by taking a drive with her. In the same way that I can live with the risk of driving a car with her in it, I can live with this risk. Of course if that actually happened I would feel terrible, in both cases. But life is about weighing risks, and for now I'm comfortable with the risk of remaining unvaccinated.
No, I don't wear masks. That's a different ethical discussion. I don't feel or accept a moral burden for potentially spreading a virus in any case. I wouldn't walk about while sick of course, or have uninformed sex if I had an STD, but if I'm asymptomatic and end up accidentally giving someone an illness in the course of normal life, sorry, but that's just life. People who spread the flu accidentally are not immoral people, whether they get the flu shot or not. Likewise here.
Your numbers are way off, as is your moral compass. I hope I never meet you, or anyone like you. To use your driving analogy, the way I respond to your message is if someone told me they drove around drunk and high, without headlights, and without really doing any car maintenance, and didn't accept any moral responsibility if they hit someone because car accidents happen, and sorry, that's life.
As a baseline number, about a half-million Americans died of COVID already. For comparison, there were about 40k car deaths in the US. For someone like yourself, taking no precautions, the odds of catching COVID19 are way more than 10x of a fatal car accident.
The more critical problem is a systemic one. If no one takes precautions, nearly 10 million people in the US will die. If everyone does, virtually no ones needs to die. It's like polluting or littering.
And COVID19 isn't flu. The flu doesn't leave a quarter of people with brain fog 9 months later.
The amount of cognitive dissonance here is intense.
>I can only make this decision based on my own research.
>Unfortunately I am not qualified to interpret the data meaningfully,
You do your own research but admit that you are unqualified to do that research.
> and I truly believe that if there was data suggesting that the vaccine was equally dangerous to the virus, it would be suppressed.
You believe institutions are untrustworthy yet somehow all of them are able to perfectly coordinate to suppress data.
>The publicized numbers for covid give me essentially a zero risk of any problems, because I am young, fit and healthy.
Nothing about your youth or fitness reduces your risk of transmitting this virus.
>I also know what to expect from a respiratory virus, because I've had those a number of times.
It's clear you either do not know nor desire to know how to protect yourself and others from respiratory viruses. This is a new virus that seems like it jumped to us from bats.
>There is also the aspect of direct action. If I get covid, darn that sucks but people get sick and that's life. If I get some bad side effects from an untrusted injection, I did that to myself and it will feel mentally much worse. All of this is to say, I don't care at all if I get covid, because I'll be fine.
You live in a society. Delta is looking to have an R0 of 4-9, that means if you are infected, on average, you will infect 4-9 new people with the virus. If you are infected and suffer long-term damage to your brain and lungs that makes you unable to work, you will qualify for disability, which is paid for by everyone.
> Nothing about your youth or fitness reduces your risk of transmitting this virus.
This one surprised me. Doesn't the length of time you are symptomatic, and the viral load you're carrying, affect how likely you are to transmit the virus to others? That was my understanding, along with young fit people having shorter, milder bouts.
Not sure about the exact answer but wanted to note:
> Doesn't the length of time you are symptomatic... affect how likely you are to transmit the virus to others?
Infected people transmit the virus for a number of days prior to when they first (or ever) show systems.
Edit: following up, I found a recent study[1] that used a pretty extensive contact tracing effort to find
> Most transmission events occurred during the pre-symptomatic phase (59.2%). SARS-CoV-2 susceptibility to infection increases with age, while transmissibility is not significantly different between age groups and between symptomatic and asymptomatic individuals.
Your likelihood to become infected does depend on your age, but once you are infected your likelihood to transmit the virus is the same as everyone else's.
> No one can deny that it would be very hard, almost impossible at this stage to admit the existence of a problem should one be identified.
On the contrary, publications would salivate at the prospect of dropping a bombshell like this. People love reading and watching salacious, outrageous coverups and how they unravel.
You would need a multi-national conspiracy with various state and private actors coordinating and suppressing information about negative effects of the vaccine for it to be at a scale "equally dangerous" to the extent of the deaths and injuries caused by actual infection.
And it's not like we have no data about negative side effects. We have data on side effects: getting them is literally a handful in a million chance and they're manageable when they occur[1].
- less than 18 years old. For everyone older, all countries in the world have come to the conclusion that vaccination is safer than staying without vaccination.
- only considering yourself and not the risk that you are part of the reason it spreads.
What lies at the foundation of all this is your distrust and I would suggest you consider how to deal with that. If you can't trust the media and governments (and you actually should trust them to a large part), how about following role-models or friends? Or best how about following data and science? If a whole nation such as Israel goes for a vaccine such as Pfizer don't you think they do their homework?
Up until December we had the Pres/VP candidates saying they would not take any vaccine that Trump endorsed. Then they won, and were faced with convincing everyone to take those very vaccines. Do you believe them now, or then?
That’s out of context, the VP said she would take a Vaccine endorsed by medical professional not the president. It was and attack on Trumps trying to reduce red tape / rush things depending on perspective, not any specific or hypothetical vaccine.
It’s perfectly reasonable to agree or disagree with rushing vaccine deployment even further, but don’t attack a straw man.
Thanks. Anecdotally I've noticed that most people around me who refuse the vaccine more or less follow your argument, but you articulated it very well.
We humans certainly suffer from omission bias, it was probably safer in our selection environment.
Our everyday life is full of cases where we do dangerous stuff which we don't feel as dangerous because, everybody is doing that, since forever, so yeah you know some things may be dangerous but c'mon, it's not that bad, you don't want to miss out on life by being the only crazy person who doesn't get in a car or something.
When something totally new happens like covid vaccines, it's hard to get the right intuitions, and probably each will have their own, using their own biases.
My personal rules of thumb are:
1. I don't trust authorities to pull off a major conspiracy (and hide the data of bad vaccine effects).
2. I don't trust governments ability to effectively coordinate among themselves to pull off a conspiracy
3. I don't trust journalists to obey to the conspiracy; money in media is about attention grabbing, if there were serious side effects they would have ridden the tide (and probably even inflated it)
4. I personally know a few people who died of covid; I don't know anybody that had serious side effects of vaccines. Even if the media is hiding the problem, I would expect it to be visible in my direct experience (as it was for covid)
I don't take issue with your conclusions, but I do with your arguments. I think precision and correctness are important, since a lot of vaccine skepticism comes from people making incorrect arguments.
> 1. I don't trust authorities to pull off a major conspiracy (and hide the data of bad vaccine effects).
I do trust the authorities to be incompetent enough not to collect such data.
> 2. I don't trust governments ability to effectively coordinate among themselves to pull off a conspiracy
I do trust governments to engage in groupthink. That's kind of like the idiot's version of coordinating a conspiracy.
In the process, I trust authorities to "message" and dishonestly manipulate information going out in ways which appear coordinated.
Groupthink is indeed a real problem, but if you really believe all it takes is groupthink to hide severe side effects (possibly deaths) of vaccines that would compete in magnitude with covid causalities, you should entertain the possibility you're engaging in a groupthink of another polarity.
I mean, sure. Governments have been and will be dishonest and lying and have been and will be again caught red handed. They also have been and will be accidentally right about various things.
If whatever a government says is always the opposite of true, then it would be super easy to have certainties! I wish that were true. Unfortunately I don't think that works that way.
I don't think OP's logic requires side effects of vaccines to be anywhere close to COVID19 causalities. It's a personal decision.
Without vaccines, at present, my risk of COVID19 would be marginal at best:
- I live in an area with a high vaccination rate, and a low incidence rate
- I take pretty strong precautions, including proper masks (which are probably more effective than vaccines), and pretty strong social distancing, which I can do working from home.
I'm vaccinated, but if I wasn't, my odds of catching COVID19 would be nominal at best.
That's different than, for example, a retail worker.
If I didn't believe vaccines were perfectly safe, OP's decision wouldn't be crazy. I am a general-purpose nerd, and I know enough biology to make an informed decision without relying on political authority figures. If that wasn't the case, I might make the same decision as OP.
Now, I can do the math on why, if many people make the same decision as OP, we'll have a serious problem, but again, most people (not OP specifically) can't do math.
> I take pretty strong precautions, including proper masks
Will you take this strong precautions forever?
I may be wrong (because what do I know?), but my assumption is that COVID will become endemic and sooner or later we'll all get it. I don't know that for sure, I didn't spend a lot of time following the numbers and reading right and left about this topic. I just can't devote significant time into doing a "proper study" of the matter. So, instead I'm going to apply my personal heuristic, like everybody else.
In my previous comment I shared my personal heuristics about "can the government effectively hide the dangers of the vaccine?"
Here I'll respond to whether I believe it's rational to not get vaccinated because other people will be vaccinated and the problem will go away without me risking it:
From what I could see, COVID seemed to be very transmissible; despite strong social distancing and lockdowns the contagions kept going. The only way to stop it would be to either doing a prolonged and airtight global lockdown (hard to implement) or to have a vaccination rate that exceeds the herd immunity threshold.
And this vaccination level has to be maintained throughout the world, or else we have to lock down travel in perpetuity, which is again, IMO hard to implement.
Currently we do observe regional variation in covid spread; my intuition is that a lot that can be attributed to the "reverse tinkerbell effect": we're avoiding travel, in some cases forbidding travel, testing people who travels; we cannot reach the conclusion that if you live in an area where vaccination level is high you're going to be fine; as soon as travel resumes you'll encounter unvaccinated people more often.
As I said, I don't know; it's just a heuristic. I think it's possible that I'll catch covid in the next few years. Let's put a generously low probability of 0.1%. Then let's attach a generously low probability of having serious problems if I do catch it, again 0.1% (probably higher than that, but lets be generious). With those number I'd have a chance of one in a million to get severe problems of covid in the near future.
There have been 3.4 billion doses of vaccine administered so far; if 1 in a million of them had severe side effects, that would mean 3.4 million people would be affected; I think somebody would have noticed. This is why I was focusing on addressing whether the governments can actively hiding this problem. That's the main counterarguments I hear to my heuristic about pros/cons of getting the vaccine now, namely that there are indeed million of people who're suffering from the vaccine but we don't know about them because the government is lying (I find this hard to believe; I cannot rule that out logically, but my credence in that proposition is quite low)
I think I will take strong precautions forever, if needed.
I think COVID19 spread because, at every point, people said "It can't be that bad," and it turned out it was. Our response was characterized by wishful thinking.
People can and do catch COVID19 multiple times, and that will only increase as it mutates. Let's start with your assumptions and go one level deeper:
1. COVID19 is highly transmissible
2. COVID19 will become endemic
3. You'll be exposed to COVID19 multiple times
With vaccine breakthrough rates of 5% for the original, and perhaps 20% for delta, and more with growing mutations, you'll catch COVID19 multiple times. Each time, you'll lose a little bit of gray matter in the brain, and sustain other damage. By the time you're old, you'll be a drooling, exhausted zombie idiot.
This makes a lot of additional assumptions, a key one being that breakthrough and brain damage are random events (as opposed to e.g. at-risk individuals), but it is a plausible scenario. We can argue about whether it's 20% odds or 80% odds, but it's definitely not 5% or 95%.
From my perspective, social distancing, masking, and similar just aren't that bad relative to even a moderate risk of the alternative. Proper masks are $2 (ones that filter down to <300nm), mildly uncomfortable, and more effective than vaccines. If we assume independence, proper mask+vaccine+modest social distancing reduces odds of infection to be infinitesimal. I don't believe in independence, but they certainly reduce R0 below 1. Why not?
To be clear, it's not that I think people are dying en masse from vaccines and being covered up. What I'm mainly concerned about are permanent side effects and long term dangers.
Now, regarding long term side effects, there are a lot of "alternative news" sources, and random internet anecdotes, which claim relatively common heart problems following vaccination, and some stories of healthy people dying a few days later, though these deaths can't be explicitly linked to a vaccine necessarily. These sources are not more trustworthy than the mainstream media, but if the 2020 election has shown anything, it's that the media is willing to die on the hill for their narrative. These alternative sources are the same sort that were correct about Russiagate and other such media nonsense. So I can trust neither side, and there is at least some fringe evidence that the vaccines are worse than we know.
About long term effects appearing, I can't know if this is possible, and I can't trust anyone who says they do know, since it has been so politicized. There are actually medical doctors who say it could be dangerous in this way, so again, I can't know whether they're crackpots or if a large number aren't just fearful for their jobs and such. If you were a researcher right now and you had some evidence to believe this vaccine could be dangerous long after the injection, I find it hard to believe you could get your message out to any credible mouthpieces at this point.
If, in a couple of years, everything is still fine, then I may relent and get the jab. But right now there is just no way to trust it without trusting institutions which have proven themselves liars.
I'd like to disagree, but I can't. What I can say is:
1) I know enough about molecular biology to tell you the vaccine is safe. You pick up novel stuff all the time. In abstract, we don't know a pebble in your backyard doesn't have some odd chemical which will end humanity, but the odds of that are astronomically low. There just isn't any voodoo in the vaccine.
2) In this case, the claims from "alternative news" are nonsense. With hundreds of millions of doses of vaccine administered, there will be instances of virtually everything happening after the vaccine. That's not to say they're always nonsense -- I read a variety of media -- but in this case, they are.
3) Doctors who fear vaccines are crackpots.
4) You're absolutely right about institutions lying. You're not only right about researchers not being able to get a message out contradicting the party line, but worse, their career would be destroyed. It's the story of the boy who cried wolf.
One amazing thing about this vaccine is that it is basically open-source. We can look at the genetic code so you know exactly what is going into your body if you choose to take it. This guy does an amazing job of breaking it down in detail: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source...
I agree the CDC has done a terrible job of representing science and establishing trust, but the virus is less politicized in other countries. Look at what those health institutions with better track-records are recommending.
That may be a reasonable decision as an individual. I disagree because I think the risks from the vaccines are near zero (not actually, but near), while here in the UK most hospital admissions now are young people so clearly the risk to them is not at all zero. Still, you'll probably be fine.
The problem with that calculation though is that it doesn't take into account the increased risk to other people. If you do catch it you'll become a vector for infecting other people, some of which might be a lot more vulnerable or less lucky than yourself. Even if you only pass it on to other younger people, the odds of someone having a bad reaction still go up with infections.
Still, it hasn't passed the standard testing to show that it is safe and efficacious. That's why it is only allowed under EAU for the moment.
It has not passed the testing that a vaccine needs to have, to be FDA approved. Especially long-term effects testing, which I guess is us now. I doubt the tests will ever be completed now since the makers can already sell every dose they can make.
That said, I'm not too worried about the safety of the vaccine, but I certainly understand people who are.
I meant to say risk of virus greatly outweighs the risk of the vaccine. But I still disagree that we should force that choice on everyone.
1) Did that 1957-58 vaccine use existing tech? My understanding is that other RNA vaccines and therapies were already under FDA trials with ~10 year time-frames since the method is new.
2) Why is sequential better, because it is considered safer?
3) Yes, short-term we know it is extremely safe. But there are zero people that have had the vaccine much over 1 year. Long-term effects are unlikely but it's just not scientifically correct to say that this vaccine is better studied than any other just because of the number of doses administered. Duration matters a lot.
> 1) Did that 1957-58 vaccine use existing tech? My understanding is that other RNA vaccines and therapies were already under FDA trials with ~10 year time-frames since the method is new.
Our scientific knowledge in 1957 was limited at best. The double-helix was discovered just a half-decade before. Today, we understand in-depth most of the mechanisms of action involved. There just isn't a comparison here. The COVID19 vaccine is far safer than what we put together in 1957, no question.
> 2) Why is sequential better, because it is considered safer?
It's safer to the original research subjects, but not to the general public. For general safety, you don't find out more by going slowly. You generally learn strictly more from a human study than an animal one, and you learn more from a large study than from a small one.
The point of an animal study before first-in-man is to not endanger a human subject. Small groups come before big ones to pick off things which might e.g. harm 10% of subjects. And so on. The decision was made to skip that step, slightly raising the risk of the subjects, in order to save millions of lives.
Part of that is we had pretty darned good reason to believe the vaccine was safe, and part of that was the grave risk.
> 3) Yes, short-term we know it is extremely safe. But there are zero people that have had the vaccine much over 1 year. Long-term effects are unlikely but it's just not scientifically correct to say that this vaccine is better studied than any other just because of the number of doses administered. Duration matters a lot.
Not so much:
- We have historical evidence. Do you know of any vaccine in the history of mankind which had long-term effects not visible the first few months? I don't.
- We understand mechanisms of action pretty well at this point. Your body gets all sorts of junk thrown at it all the time -- random polens, plastics from your water bottle, randomly mutating cold viruses, and so on. There just isn't any reason to believe a new vaccine is any more dangerous than a random bug bite. Indeed, we understand the stuff going into the vaccine a lot better than we do a random bug.
Here's the thing to consider though: The vaccine codes only for the spike proteins of the virus. You can look up the RNA strands within the vaccines and their translation to protein, it's a relatively short segment of RNA. RNA has a very short lifetime itself.
If you do get exposed to Covid, your cells will be exposed to those very same spike proteins and more. Thus the vaccine should theoretically be much safer than being exposed to Covid itself.
This guy is not the creator of mRNA vaccines, he’s just a guy who did something slightly related with mRNA forty years ago, and is now trying to ride the wave to money. I think it’s fair to say the vaccine was rushed, but that’s because we have been having the second largest pandemic of the century. More Americans are dead from this than died in WW2.
I didn’t downvote you. I do wish we had a longer trial period, and I don’t like taking something that hasn’t been through the full duration trials. Here is what convinced me:
- we now have more than a billion vaccinations done globally, with no mass surge of negative side effects.
- virtually every politician in every party has gotten vaccinated. Including most of the people telling you not to get vaccinated.
- the vaccine produces way fewer antibody targets than the actual virus, so I would expect that if there was a long term negative effect from the spike produced by the vaccine, we would get that or worse from the virus.
- the virus is really contagious and seems to be mutating toward being more contagious over time.
- thus, you’re probably going to get it, which means one way or the other you’re probably going to make a lot of antibodies to spike protein no matter how you slice it.
> the vaccine produces way fewer antibody targets than the actual virus
This is not necessarily true. It depends. People in my family who took the vaccine and had visible side efects (headaches, fever) for a day or two have more antibodies than other acquaintances who got hospitalized with the disease.
Higher antibody levels and more antibody targets aren't the same thing.
The mRNA vaccines cause one protein from the virus to be present, so you get antibodies against that specific protein. More traditional vaccines use dead/weakened virus, which will trigger production of antibodies against multiple parts of the virus.
There’s nothing in there that’s an attack, but wow, you are an asshole. There is a good faith engagement and persuasion in there, and you respond with this?
> This guy is not the creator of mRNA vaccines, he’s just a guy who did something slightly related with mRNA forty years ago, and is now trying to ride the wave to money.
He seems to give plenty of time to people who don't seem to have any money to offer. I don't know what evidence you have to support any of your claims. For all you know he is a really good, concerned person, why assassinate someone's character like that?
If one can't attack the arguments, it's easier to attack the person I guess?
Just Google his name. You are using polite words, but not engaging in good faith. It’s not worth wasting my time further with you. I guess I should have checked your history to see that you’re a dedicated vaccine denialist.
I listened to an interview with the head of the German regulatory body overseeing recommendations for vaccinations. He said that we have never seen side effects of all vaccinations beyond 2 to 3 months. Compare with sinuous venous trombosis risk which was uncovered despite being a 1 in 100,000 risk.
They're looking at a century's worth of other vaccines and noting that the side effects present early on, not years later.
The stuff in vaccines gets broken down or excreted by the body; it doesn't linger in your system for years. mRNA, for example, breaks down in minutes/hours.
You're getting downvoted because your post is the standard antivax trope of "just asking questions", which is ultimately FUD.
What you're actually doing is completely discounting possible long term effects from the choice to do nothing. Nobody has been a Covid-19 survivor for 3, 5 or 10 years, nor do we know the big picture epidemiological impact of unchecked Covid for 3, 5, or 10 years.
The only data we have is necessarily from the present. And here and now, it seems to indicate that getting vaccinated is a prudent thing to do.
Maybe neither option is great? Have you ever considered that possibility?
It's funny because your post really offers nothing new, just another opinion of your own.
I've said before, I'm not an anti-vaxxer, I've taken vaccines before and if the Pfizer vaccine proves safe longer term, we know more about reported heart problems in younger males, I won't need to mix and match vaccines and have booster shots and all that type of rot, then yeah, I'll likely participate.
I'm just not prepared to jump right in because Internets tell me they feel it's safe to do so.
What's actually wrong with that? I don't see the issue?
I don't know how I've implied that any option was "great" ?
My post is pointing out that your previous framing is discounting the possible effects from doing nothing, while emphasizing the possible effects from doing something. This is not scientific.
In general you seem to be attaching a high weighting to not taking the vaccine, including repeating common logical fallacies. Most likely you've gotten that from the "Internets", so it's fallacious to invoke it as if it's some singular party instructing you to do something. The Internet is generally malicious noise, it's up to you to pull signal out of it.
At the basic level, there is no "all that type of rot". I got two shots, had cold symptoms for a day on the first one, and was otherwise fine. It has allowed me to reduce my Covid precautions substantially, and has drastically increased my quality of life. If there end up being variants that require boosters, then I can make another decision to get those or not.
I wasn't chomping at the bit for the vaccine since it was announced, rather I too figured I'd wait and see what the larger scale effects were. But by the time spring rolled around I had considered 6 months enough time to shake out most unknown unknowns at scale.
What's you're deal then? You just feel strongly I should take the vaccine?
Where I live, what I do for work has really made no impact on my quality of life, so I don't give a fish about the virus or the vaccine.
It's funny to me that you say you deliberated, then you took it, and now I'm being "unscientific" for deliberating in the same way. But somehow you've made the scientific choice because you felt 6 months was long enough to wait. Not very scientific ?
I'm not going to argue that you, Internet Stranger, should get the vaccine. I will tell my friends they need to be vaccinated if they want to hang out.
I respect people's right to make their own informed decisions, but not to repeat disinformation. I've pointed out exactly how your framing is unscientific for privileging one option ("do nothing") above the rest, but you keep brushing past that.
I shared my story in the hopes that you would see there are deliberate decisions by the people getting vaccinated as well, not just the "Internets". Six months of time felt like a reasonable period of caution to me. If you wanted to wait a year or a "little longer", I wouldn't say we disagree. But rather you're putting forth reasoning that implies needing to wait 10 years which might as well be forever.
If you yourself really don't come into contact with other people - ie you live alone, work at home, get groceries delivered, and don't visit friends - then sure, continue on isolating. But for the vast majority of people this path is inapplicable, and for them your incorrect framing is actively harmful.
If we’re planning on vaccinating the entire population of the human race I think it would’ve been better give the vaccine to the most vulnerable and at least have a 3 year study done and focus on treatments in the meantime before giving it to younger people.
I’ve read good things about Ivermectin for example, where’s the rushed controlled clinical trial of that ? A drug we do know is safe, cheap and widely available ?
Also if you look into it, there are actually valid questions being asked such as, what causes heart inflammation and attacks? Why isn’t that more understood. How was it missed in initial trials ? What is the mechanism causing that? [1]
Doesn’t seem right we should give young otherwise healthy men heart troubles ?
This guy is the self-proclaimed "creator of mRNA vaccines," in the same way that there is a certain self-proclaimed "inventor of email" with whom we're all familiar. His role in the development of the technology that eventually became mRNA vaccines appears, however, to be relatively minor, and it lies decades in the past.
It would be fair to say he would have a pretty solid grasp on the basic concepts behind the medicine, probably more than most people in the comments sections of the internet :)
You are worried about the long term effects of a mRNA vaccine that has passed clinical trials and was already tested on >10M people, but not about viral RNA spreading in your community? I guess we'll se the effects of the vaccines in 3…10y. Until then I'm getting a third shot if I must, because I'd really want to be there maybe having this conversation in the next decade.
The vaccine is new, but the mRNA delivery system has been in the pipeline for decades, with other treatments actively undergoing the normal, slow FDA process[1].
Why is it okay to destroy someone's house with axes and water when it's on fire but otherwise it's illegal? There's clearly inconsistency by the fire department here.
Seriously, what other course of events do you propose should have happened? Vaccines couldn't have been developed before Covid-19 existed. Should we have just pretended that mRNA technology didn't exist, in favor of traditional approaches of making vaccines, and then rushed approval on those? It seems like that alternative has actually been explored by other countries and they're nowhere near as effective.
I think the FDA's normal process is extremely flawed and would like to see more expedited trails that allow early-opt-in and continually expanding test groups that ramp up in size as efficacy and safety is proven.
It's criminal that the FDA has effectively sat on mRNA tech for decades while watching people who could have benefit from it die. The FDA deemed mRNA tech unsafe to give to much smaller groups of people already directly affected with various mRNA treatable diseases yet now after a few months of testing they have amazingly deemed it safe to give to to the entire world. The risk calculus just isn't consistent.
The way you worded your proceeding comment made it sound as if you would have preferred the FDA to not approve the Covid mRNA vaccines, as opposed to preferring easier approvals for other mRNA tech in general.
To extend my quip, the people who could benefit from it each have their own little fire and are being systematically ignored.
Clinical trials take long because they are evaluating long term side effects. They didn't deem it unsafe to give to smaller groups of people, in many cases the company withdrew it from consideration because earlier uses were centered on oncology - taking pieces of patients' cancer cells and attempting to get the body to fight them immunologically - and they weren't able to obtain a clinically significant impact. Running a long term clinical trial is an expensive proposition.
You're being downvoted because vaccination is not a new thing. mRNA vaccines are new but take 10 min to learn how they work. There is literally nothing left in your system that could impact you in "3,5 or 10 years."
> it was rushed and the longer term implications are certainly still not fully understood.
It was not rushed.
We have 250 years of experience with vaccinations and when their side effects happen. And longer with viruses and their autoimmune effects.
After a day or three the vaccine is completely gone from your system, all that remains is the immune effects, the possible side effects are all autoimmune conditions. Those autoimmune conditions will either manifest in 90 days or they will not. There's nothing that hangs around in your body for 3 years and then randomly pops up. By running a trail for 6 months post-injection you will be guaranteed to capture all the side effects from a vaccine study. This is the same with virus triggered autoimmune effects which either pop up in 3 months or they don't (and I've actually had viral pericarditis that affected me about 4-6 weeks after I recovered from a bad cold).
Most of them will run longer, because they don't have a massive worldwide pandemic and they need to prove efficacy so they need enough people in the control group to get infected and that takes time. They were able to speed run the efficacy side of things because so many people were getting infected (we were worried at one point that the virus would largely disappear in Summer 2020 and negatively affect the vaccine trials).
Traditional vaccines: Expose the immune system to an inactivated pathogen. The immune system stochastically learns to target a number of proteins specific to the pathogen.
Genetic vector vaccines: Expose a small number of cells to genetic material that instructs them to create a specific protein chosen by the vaccine developer. The immune system then learns to target this specific protein. The pathogen is under no obligation to continues to produce this specific protein, especially in face of the selection pressure produced by the genetic vector vaccines themselves. We are already talking of booster shots to tackle mutations, 6 month since we started large scale deployment. It's only going to get worse.
Open questions:
* Which protein(s) to chose.
* Why a single protein, rather than a mosaic.
* Is the protein(s) choice generic, or should it be personalized to a specific individual protein spectrum.
* What is the long term prognosis for world scale populations.
Cold fact: We have <1 years of world scale experience with genetic vector vaccines.
We have hundreds of years of experience with viral genetic vectors. There's a whole subfield of rheumatology dealing with autoimmune conditions triggered by viruses.
The mRNA vaccines are just a single protein not the whole virus and it never gets assembled so its using considerably less cellular machinery than a real virus would.
We've literally studied this shit for hundreds of years, and we're using less moving parts that would happen with a real infectious virus.
>Those autoimmune conditions will either manifest in 90 days or they will not.
Source? For the long term autoimmune effects of these vaccines, that is.
No? Well that's because that information is unavailable because it hasn't been studied long term hence it can't be known.
There are no long term studies. Hence the reluctance of many to get vaccinated. So that quoted statement can probably be banished to the world of pseudoscience for now. Or post your sources from subjects unrelated to the COVID vaccine that make you think that.
> 2. Vaccine side effects show up within weeks if at all
> That is not to say that there have never been safety issues with vaccines. But in each instance, these have appeared soon after widespread use of the vaccine began. "The side effects that we see occur early on and that's it," Goepfert said. In virtually all cases, vaccine side effects are seen within the first two months after rollout.
That is citing the director of the University's Vaccine Research Clinic.
Sorry, I said "source" when I should have specified "medical study". Your link reads more like marketing towards vaccination fence sitters than actual science. That isn't your fault though, there just isn't science to share. Why? Because we don't have future traveling time machines.
There is something quite amazing about your link however. The piece (about long term side effects from vaccines) notes the polio vaccine from the 1950s. It somehow omits mentioning Simian Virus 40, the cancer causing virus that was found in the polio vaccine. This vaccine was given to 100 million children and its estimated that 10% to 30% of those doses were contaminated.
I'm sure the doctors assured their parents back then that there were no side effects and certainly laughed off any mention of long term side effects. The price to be paid for trust in these vaccines? Their children growing up to develop brain cancer in their 50s and 60s, decades after they were assured how safe they were.
No, its difficult to find studies on something which is literally textbook knowledge.
And nice whataboutism to switch the topic to a vaccine incident from the 1950s, combined with a brand new account, I'm pretty sure I'm arguing with a bot. Have a nice life.
If you talk to hesitant people, and there are a lot of them, the reason is a mistrust of the people leading the effort and managing the pandemic. Why mistrust? Many reasons, but the most challenging one is because of numbers that don't pass a smell test coupled with apopleptic ad-hominim aggression directed against anyone who questions them. This all but guarantees a 20%+ rejection rate from people who just dig in because they do not make health or other decisions based on fear and shame. There will be a defiant group of about 5-10% who you just can't reach at all, so if your plan needs them, you will need a new plan.
Calling people hesitant is patronizing and was probably the stupidest PR move of all time and the committee responsible for it will have to live with those consequences.
But instead of arming people with a litany of whataboutisms, I would say this to an unvaxed person: given your objections, how does getting the shot prevent you from resisting or even fighting a battle you percieve you need to fight against these authorities you do not trust? Polite euphemisms aside, let's call it what it is, because that's the crux of it.
If it does, you need to just act now and literally overthrow your governments in the next few weeks, but if you aren't going to act today and do that, then get a shot, and use the time to figure out how to depose these people that you do not trust in good time. If, as many hesitant people believe, there might be long term harm to them, your long term still involves a conflict to replace these people, but risk from hypothetical side effects still nets out of that equation.
My rationale to the so-called hesitant would be this: get the shot, and then use the time to organize and support your revolts against untrustworthy leaders and institutions, because once you are vaccinated, you can draw from the ranks of others who were also forced into it. Use this to unite people to your causes against untrustworthy authorities, because your skepticism comes directly from people using this to divide you. Take that from them, and then commit to organizing and scaling the change that has to come. Having the shot gives you skin in the game with the people you are going to need on your side.
This issue isn't the main battle, but I will absolutely support efforts to ensure trustworthy people get into positions of authority after this.