“Despite the categorization of pregnancy as a high-risk condition for severe COVID-19, hospitalization, and mortality, pregnancy remains an exclusion for participation in vaccine trials. The Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine (SMFM) and other leading organizations, including the National Academy of Medicine, have consistently advocated for the inclusion of pregnant and lactating women in vaccination trials, particularly when the following criteria are met: (1) pregnancy poses increased susceptibility to or severity of a disease; (2) the best approach to protect the infant is through passive placental antibody transfer, which provides the most efficient and direct protection to the newborn before an infant can be vaccinated, and (3) there is an active outbreak.”
“In general, SMFM strongly recommends that pregnant women have access to COVID-19 vaccines in all phases of future vaccine campaigns, and that she and her healthcare professional engage in shared decision-making regarding her receipt of the vaccine. Counseling should balance available data on vaccine safety, risks to pregnant women from SARS-CoV-2 infection, and a woman’s individual risk for infection and severe disease. As data emerge, counseling will likely shift, as some vaccines may be more suitable for pregnant women. mRNA vaccines, which are likely to be the first vaccines available, do not contain a live virus but rather induce humoral and cellular immune response through the use of viral mRNA. Healthcare professionals should also counsel their patients that the theoretical risk of fetal harm from mRNA vaccines is very low.”
[1]: https://www.smfm.org/covidclinical
[2]: https://s3.amazonaws.com/cdn.smfm.org/media/2591/SMFM_Vaccin...
1. HN is a mostly technical forum, with a technically inclined user base.
2. Statistics show that there are less women working in Tech than men [1,2]. This can be translated in interest in Tech.
3. Only a fraction of those women would be on HN, and only a fraction of them would be pregnant.
4. One more data point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5520342
You can therefore safely assume that it's a very tiny number, which can not explain the NO responses of this poll.
[1] https://www.womentech.net/en-fr/women-technology-statistics
[2] https://www.isemag.com/2020/10/telecom-the-latest-stats-on-w...
You could create a poll if you doubt it, I trust my gut :)
If you’re in the 0.1% of the population with severe allergies, you should skip most vaccines. Herd immunity is a thing, and (most — probably these) vaccines will protect you by making the people around you stop spreading it.
If you’re in this category, you’d have already been told so by your doctor.
Also, most people carrying epi-pens don’t know full severity of their allergies since there is no way to test it.
The poll’s intent is to understand why one would not want to take it, not whether they should. The government already makes that choice for you. See “People with allergies should avoid the vaccine.”
Will you quit drinking alcohol?
1. Why do many people say no?
2. Well it isn’t recommended for the pregnant [therefore either a large proportion of hn is pregnant or the vaccine is generally bad]
3. [not many people on hn are pregnant so] do you also refuse alcohol because that is bad for the pregnant?
4. [I think you’re suggesting that pregnant people often drink alcohol so I put it to you that] in my experience pregnant people don’t drink alcohol.
5. This comment
Yes alcohol should be avoided if pregnant. Smoking as well. Cat litterboxes can pose a risk.
Many other products are removed because of unknown risks.
Bullshit.
I'm honestly unaware of where the 70% number came from (I may simply have missed it), but he, alongside former Council of Europe Parliament chair Wolfgang Wodarg jointly filed a document with the EMA urging that a large-scale roll-out of the vaccine be delayed until further trials could be ran on it which accounted for pregnancy [5].
His primary concern was that it would impact placental development.
Michael Yeadon worked with Pfizer between 1995, and 2011 where he was the Chief Science Officer, and Vice President of the company's R&D division focused on allergy and respiratory illness [0].
In 2011, Pfizer decided to narrow its focus down to five distinct areas of research, and closed down Yeadon's lab [1, 2].
Yeadon, along with two other colleagues secured venture funding from Pfizer's investment fund, and license from Pfizer to continue their research as an independent company called Ziarco, which continued to operate until it was purchased by Novartis in 2016 in 2016[3, 4]
Since cashing out, Yeadon has operated as a research consultant [0].
Yeadon is notably a lock-down skeptic, and has made claims that London has long since reached herd-immunity. He's a biochemist, not a virologist. I don't know how correct he is or isn't. But his history suggests that he's not someone who's opinion on pharmaceuticals should be taken lightly. Wodarg has similarly suggested that the COVID pandemic is overhyped. Wodarg's a politician with some medical education. I don't know that he's anywhere near authoritative.
[0] https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-yeadon-3818613/
[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/kent/hi/people_and_places/newsid...
[2] https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Pfizer-narrows-its-f...
[3] https://drug-dev.com/ziarco-pharma-acquires-pfizer-drugs-sec...
[4] https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2017/03/15/turnin...
[5] https://dryburgh.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Wodarg_Yeado...
Honestly this whole poll post should be shut down. The amount of misinformation being shared is astounding.
Also, ballpark 20% of Americans already had the disease, and the benefit for them (while still there) is lower. Also pregnancy. So multiple reasons why 10% is probably not crazy. For what it was worth, I was also a bit confused by the order, as I think they randomize it or something and almost tapped the wrong one.
Really? I know multiple people who genuinely believe this. Yes you'll always get some constant of random picks, but you also have to understand that our social circles hugely limit us from representative samples of the population's opinions. The only people I know who have actually been in crazy cat lady houses were because they worked as repairmen, since there you'll get a sample of the population which needs their furnace looked at sometimes
Rates of COVID reinfection remain vanishingly small.
From what I read, Corona-virii are in general slow to mutate and infected people should be immune for a longer time. Also, not to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but this idea that a vaccine should neatly work in a way that it would be recommended to take it on every season smells of a pharma PR submarine.
any other reasons?
If I'm not mistaken, some countries like France still remember such vaccines that went wrong. Russians have zero trust in their government and its Sputnik vaccine.
I will get the vaccine eventually, but I don't mind not being in front of the queue.
1. This is an mRNA vaccine and is the first of it's kind to be widely offered. This appears to be different than the rest of the vaccines out there for other illnesses.
2. There isn't a perceived benefit for many people: the vast majority of people won't get sick or be impacted in any way.
3. It apparently doesn't stop people from getting or becoming transmissions vectors. So, if you get the vaccine and it makes you less sick, then you may take "riskier" actions than if you were to get it and actually have some symptoms. (IOW, why take it?)
4. Some people can't take it due to allergy concerns?
This is just what I've found in my online research.
From what I've seen this is not established at all. They are careful to say that they don't have conclusive proof that the people who were in their study were not ever contagious - but that doesn't mean that they were contagious either.
They have simply called out that further studies will be needed before we can say whether and to what degree.
I am not sure if asymptomatic transmission has been confirmed or not. I kept hearing that if you didn't have symptoms then you couldn't transfer it, but given the uptick in cases, it wouldn't seem like that is the case.
It's been confirmed, from early experience e.g. with the Diamond Princess and USS Theodore Roosevelt. It seems to be rare.
But paucisymptomatic transmission -- transmission before symptoms have manifested in people who will eventually be symptomatic -- is much less rare. So just quarantining people with symptoms doesn't work.
The definition you give is for presymptomatic not paucisymptomatic (the latter is basically having trivial/mild symptoms that don’t raise complaints), but transmission in both cases is a significant risk, much more so than true asymptomatic transmission.
2. It's really curious to see people saying, on the one hand, that they're uncertain about a vaccine because of some unexpected long-term impacts, and then saying on the other hand that they're unconcerned about unexpected long-term impacts from a brand new and as-yet-poorly-understood disease. There are still a lot of question marks about covid-19 and researchers are still discovering far more "quiet" impacts in apparently healthy individuals, including blood clots and pericarditis.
2a. Overall though I'm in favor of anybody avoiding this vaccine that wishes to. The disease would continue to disproportionately affect the populations of people who believe it's a hoax, or believe it's not a serious health risk, or believe it's a conspiracy, or believe the vaccine is a conspiracy, or believe that vaccines in general are conspiracies -- and we could do with fewer of those people.
3. As two other people have already pointed out, the researchers have only been cautious about not stating something that they don't know to be factual. It's funny: when researchers are cautious, people read too much into it and draw bad conclusions, and that leads to the kinds of research press releases that other people then criticize for making statements unsupported by evidence. Researchers have repeatedly stated in various media that there's no reason for them to expect people to be infectious after taking the vaccine, they merely haven't tested for this specifically.
4. The people they're talking about here are the sort that need to carry an epi-pen with them wherever they go. If you are one of those people, then yes, at this time there's an uncertain amount of risk associated with these vaccines. The situation is still developing and there should be better information available as the vaccines are distributed.
Your post is insightful, but it could really do without the inflammatory death-wishing in 2a.
Multiple social issues throughout 2020 have together completely exhausted my usual compassion and optimism towards people. 300,000 Americans and 1.6 million people worldwide are dead but many millions more still don't see this as a public health emergency. Moreover, beleaguered medical workers have been harassed everywhere online and fist fights and other assaults have been reported across the country that were started by wearing a mask. And then there's the cyclopsian intersection in the venn diagram of "people who are aggressively anti-mask" and "people who are unconcerned with or even violently opposed to the health and safety of anybody outside their tribe".
From an entirely pragmatic standpoint, the freedom to choose one's own destiny is arguably the most important human right. All of the information necessary to protect yourself and those around you from this disease is now widely available. Most people who wish to minimize their risk of exposure can do so, with the notable exception of the many medical workers who have been, not asked, but demanded, to put themselves at risk in the service of people who believe those same medical workers are part of some vast conspiracy.
So, I'm asking honestly here, to you or whoever else: convince me to care about the plight of terrible people.
There's good reason to ignore the nutjobs and focus on the rational opposition, steel-manning our foe so to speak. It makes our thinking more clear and our arguments stronger.
Even bothering to oppose the insane elements by definition does not convince anyone of anything, since no sane person on either side agrees with the insanity. All it does is momentarily make us feel superior, but it's a fleeting and counterproductive endeavour.
On the other hand, people are of course free to have a healthy scepticism about a new-form of vaccine, and I will happily respect that.
It is on the same level of the viewpoint that the vaccine is unicorn blood.
Doesn't that concern ironically mean we should take the Russian one?
Bill Gates would only pollute the Moderna one, if those theories factored in geopolitics at all.
(I also know someone else under 45 who got it, and was symptomatic.)
There have been more than a few cases with people losing taste/smell, heart and lung damage that may be permanent, and other nasty effects that we are still learning about, truly heartbreaking stuff when it is young people who were training for or attempting to become high performance athletes their entire lives just to have it stripped away because of this virus.
"The authors observed that neither symptoms nor blood investigations were predictive of organ impairment.
“Causality of the relationship between organ impairment and infection cannot be deduced, but may be addressed by longitudinal follow-up of individuals with organ impairment,” the authors said."
The paper took 201 people who self-reported as long Covid sufferers, and found that 66% of them had something that could be characterized as "organ impairment" when a whole-body MRI scan was conducted. It's not at all clear that this would differ significantly from any random group of people whom you stick in a whole-body MRI scan (let alone a group of people who had recently recovered from any other viral illness). Which is why we don't do them.
Thus far, ~all such "long Covid" research has been anecdotal and/or uncontrolled. The evidence quality is quite poor.
Vaccinated people can spread the virus on a (there's a better term for this) surface level, which is why it's still important for them to wear masks and wash hands.
Hypothetical example of how it can spread: an infected person sneezes on a vaccinated person right in the face. That vaccinated person then rubs his face all over an non-vaccinated person. Really high chance the non-vaccinated person is infected.
I also want to emphasize that a vaccinated person that came in contact with the corona virus is far less contagious than an asymptomatic person.
i think you are looking for "disease vectoring"
Also there is an aspect of if you are young and healthy your risk of serious effects from covid is low. Even if your risk of problems from the vaccine is low, if your risk of serious effects from the disease that the vaccine treats is also very low then why bother taking any action.
In short, you should not be injecting things into your system unless you really need them.
what exactly would you call phase 3 trials for the various vaccines that were done on thousands/tens of thousands of people?
As much as you trust each of the (5?) vaccines, you yourself can not know for certainty.. there is some doubt. You may judge that that uncertainty and risk is minimal and well worth taking the vaccine, another completely rational person may decide that it is not worth the risk.
The point of my post was that there is real and legitimate risk, be it ever so small. Anyone who pretends there is zero risk to the vaccine is misrepresenting the truth and doing a disservice in the effort of persuading rational adults that vaccine delivery is being lead in an honest and forthright way.
i find this "better the devil you know" mindset really weird when the "devil you know" is an extremely infectious virus that has killed _three hundred thousand_ americans (not to mention more worldwide), and thousands more by the day.
these hypothetical vaccine side effects that have not come up during any of the trials that have been going on for _months_, across thousands and thousands of participants, would have to be pretty insanely bad in order to outweigh the negatives of millions more people contracting the actual virus.
But you have to acknowledge that there are huge incentives for the drug manufacturers to have a successful test and a healthy scepticism until they have been truly independently verified isn't unwarranted.
Also a pure, as tested, vaccine doesn't magically appear for your inoculation, there is manufacturing, and delivery, and other potential contamination points along the way. It means what goes into your system isn't necessarily what has shown to be safe; not a huge risk, but a risk nonetheless.
It would have made me feel better if you had started out your reply by saying.. "yes there are risks to this vaccine, but..". That way I would know we're working from the same starting point and I could trust that your views are calm and considered, and that you accept the reality that there is indeed risk to taking a foreign substance into your bloodstream.
Many of us know people who have had Covid, and it wasn't a very big deal. Even fat old Donald Trump shrugged it off in a few days; granted he had the best medical care possible. That's not to diminish the loss of loved ones that have surely been taken by Covid. But it can make one question the statistical importance of Covid in the larger scheme of things.
Again, i'm not really arguing with your points, just that they need to be presented with honesty, we shouldn't put a religious halo around vaccines; we should be clear about the risks too.
Regardless, for some rich people those treatments _are_ available. And that may well lead them to the completely rational choice of avoiding the risks associated with a vaccine.
Everyone is different, and can arrive at different decisions completely rationally.
The vaccines have been tested in 30-40,000 people each. The typical serious side effects for vaccines are something like 1 in a million or 1 in a few hundred thousand. Even if the vaccine had an usually high level of side effects, odds are it's still far, far less harmfull than contracting the actual disease.
And again, my main point is that we should be honest about the risks and not pretend they're zero.
I'm not in the risk group, and I would take the vaccine right now if it was offered to me. Even in the worst case the potential risks are below what a real COVID-19 infection would entail.
I'm not trying to talk you personally out of getting the vaccine, I don't think it will turn you into a zombie or some foolishness. I'm just asking you to understand that it is a rational decision for some people to arrive at a different answer.
And the risk is actually almost entirely age-dependent, the other risk factors weren't that significant in studies.
But that says absolutely zero about any single individual. Each individual, regardless of age group, can have more or less susceptibility than their age group. It is an _individual's_ health and other risk factors that decide the outcome for that individual -- not their membership in an age category. Therefore, each individual must decide their own risk tolerance and remediation plan.
0-19 years: 0.00003
20-49 years: 0.0002
50-69 years: 0.005
70+ years: 0.054
So only age 50+ have at least 0.5% chance to die from COVID-19. These numbers also include everyone in that age range, e.g. the obese, diabetic, immunocompromised. If you know you are healthy, your odds are better. As a healthy 27 year old and something of a fitness fanatic, my odds appear to be 99.98% of surviving at minimum. Due to the reasons I just mentioned, in addition to being on the younger end of the 20-49 age range, my odds are actually quite a bit better than 99.98%, although I don't know the exact number. I'll roll those dice over a vaccine that has been rushed, and will get the vaccine some years in the future if no problems emerge.
Source: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...
But – excuse me for putting this bluntly – it is obviously very selfish. If everybody calculated their risk like you do, the result would be that the pandemic drags on for a few years, a lot of preventable deaths happen + probably a terrible economic downturn. You have the choice to sacrifice a little bit (meaning a tiny chance of vaccine complications) of your own health for the greater good – or you can slack of others doing it for you. Because that's what's going to happen, most people voting "yes" on this thread are making the same calculation you are but deciding to sacrifice a little bit of their own health.
- The rushed nature of the vaccines. “Fastest approved vaccine” is not re-assuring if you don’t understand what trade was made for that accelerated timeline.
- “I’ll just stay isolated until it dies off”
- “I don’t trust western medicine”
- “I don’t trust the FDA or big pharma”
- “I don’t care if I get covid . People at risk can take the vaccine”
Don’t forget how many people don’t even take the flu shot.
The specifics of the Moderna vaccine took 2 days once they had the genome of the virus. But there was an awful lot of work done before then.
From there, the process of developing the vaccine is training the body to fight blobs that function like COVID does.
The first shot introduces some COVID-shaped blobs, and your body develops some antibody factories to fight them, and keeps some around just in case the scary blobs come back.
The second shot introduces some more blobs, and your body reacts by producing even more antibody factories. “Trick me twice, shame on me”, in nature.
The hard work was building the database. Which was only possible because of the genome project and cell project.
https://globalnews.ca/news/7492076/moderna-coronavirus-vacci...
- "These are the first mRNA vaccines ever released. We don't yet know the long term effects."
It ignores all of the hard work over literal decades that has gone into the work of developing mRNA-based medicine (gRPC and protobufs), which was developed literally for situations like Covid-19 (polyglot services communicating over network interfaces).
Yes, mRNA is basically magic from a distance. So is all of modern technology. But it’s built on and hardened by iterative experiments, not conjured from thin air.
That's a funny comparison from a UK perspective where the flu shot isn't even offered to the general population (only the elderly, vulnerable or those whose work in healthcare or similar). I'd say there is much more reason to take the COVID vaccine than the flu shot.
Most companies offer the flu jab to their employees for free, and otherwise it's like a tenner to save yourself the risk of 2/3 days of feeling horrible.
That said, I don’t get the flu every year (iirc, I’ve had it twice in the past 20 years).
Having recovered completely from such an infection, I should be fine without it, and vaccines generally don't feel great and are not, in fact, without risk.
I think vaccines are a wonderful technology, to be clear. I'll get one for COVID only if it's standing between me and, say, getting on an airplane or entering a foreign country, which, let's be real: it probably will. States see like a state, after all; you can't just be immune to infection, you have to be legibly immune.
Where did you get the information that it was several years?
Others should be fine for months:
To whom it may concern: vaccines simulate the process triggered in the immune system by recovery from infection. They don't float around in your body for years: they create immunity the same way the disease itself does. More or less: obviously you don't get sick!
Which is great, I hadn't been that sick in ten years, it was pretty awful. Please get vaccinated if you haven't gotten COVID. If you have, well, maybe you want to do it just in case? I do not.
A lot of misinformation out there...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19802-w
"There was a low repositive rate in recovered COVID-19 patients in Wuhan. Results of virus culturing and contract tracing found no evidence that repositive cases in recovered COVID-19 patients were infectious, which is consistent with evidence from other sources."
Same paper also states that asymptomatic cases are much less likely to be infectious.
There's probably been a few reinfections, and some decent documentation of a couple. If you repeat an experiment millions of times on diverse individuals, you can expect some variation.
So reinfection actually is possible.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
There are vaccines that cause better immune response than the disease it protects against.
Tetanus is the most well-known example here. That's why it makes sense to vaccinate you even after potential exposure.
It's not a good example of something to which people develop natural immunity, because if you are infected, you'll probably die, and even if not, suffer life-changing injury.
- have very likely immunity or at least a much better response the next time
- despite having been exposed to it the first time having had super mild symptoms so I don’t need protection from a non threat
- coronaviruses mutate a lot slower and people who had sars-cov-1 still had a t-cell immunity even 10 years after their infection and there is little reason to believe that sars-cov-2 couldn’t be similar
Given that I won’t be offered the vaccine for a long time I luckily don’t have to decide and know that I won’t have it at least until enough production testing was done.
It might be that weaker cases give less immunity. If you were exposed to smaller amounts of the virus in the first case.
Getting it early and getting immunity works great for fairly mild things like chicken pox, which is less likely to leave permanent/long term damage. But not for something where so many people report that they've still never fully recovered from even months later.
My wife didn’t get off so “easy”, she coughed for about five months straight until one day she just finally stopped coughing.
Edit, here ya go: https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-12-covid-survivors-immun...
> Worldwide, there have been less than 30 cases of known re-infection among COVID-19 survivors, although more are suspected. Experts said the numbers would likely be much higher if most people had not developed immunity.
> "I think that tells us that there's some level of immunity after you've recovered from the primary infection," Wherry said. "We don't know how durable that is."
It's hard to read even this article as anything but "It seems there is a high level of immunity, but we don't know for sure, so let's be careful."
I don't know any reason to say otherwise, except if you are afraid people will get infected voluntarily for immunization.
My insurance covered the cost of all my testing as it was done in conjunction with a televisit with my GP. I hear that it is available for approximately $60 if you just pay retail for it. If you give blood at your local blood bank, many are offering the antibody test as an incentive to donate.
For the record, vaccines are not a controversial topic in my country like they seem to be in the USA. Kids are vaccinated at school, I received numerous vaccines during my life, some of them totally optional and quite expensive, which I paid for anyway, because it felt like a safer way to be. And of course I do not think vaccines are an evil plan of Bill Gates to... I'm not even sure what the crazy conspiracy theory about that is supposed to be, but I'm pretty sure there is some.
But I am a crazy conspiracy theorist in a sense that I firmly believe that COVID-19 is hugely overhyped. Of course, I'm scared and ashamed of saying that, because nowadays this seems to be a stronger version of saying "Hitler did nothing wrong", but you are asking about "why no", so here we are.
Basically, it's a trade off between reasons to do it and reasons not to (as always).
Is there a reason to avoid doing it? Well, yes. Basically, expectation that everyone should do it is that reason: the topic is insanely hot, and it's never a good thing. This is a huge business opportunity for every pharmaceutical company that gets to push their vaccine right now, and this is some hastily cooked shit you expect me to take. Some of these vaccines are quite a novelty, which is not a bad thing on its own, but this is unlike most vaccines I have ever taken, which are basically decades old and literally millions of people have taken them before me. Maybe it's totally safe, maybe it isn't. No couple-months-long trial will ever answer that.
Is there a reason to take it? Well, sure. Like there is a reason to take a flu vaccine. Which I don't do, because there are new mutations every year, and there are countless more versions of "common cold". Yes, people die of that, and it's never a pleasant experience, and I live in a cold climate, where this is a very common seasonal thing, but it's just how things are. It's ok. And I'm not going to elaborate on all "Hitler did nothing wrong" thing, because what I've said so far is more than enough to trigger someone, but, well, I know people that had been sick with COVID-19. I contacted them in person when they were already sick, and it just so happens that neither of us was wearing any mask. I wasn't really a responsible citizen all the time. It doesn't seem that the stakes are much higher than with a flu. For some of people it seemed to be more like a really light version of a common cold.
So there's a little of "no" vs a little of "yes" and it just so happens that "no" overweights quite confidently.
Maybe it is fair to say that I should've voted "I'll wail", because this "no" isn't final. But then no "yes" is final either, anything can happen, the last year should've taught us that if anything. And I don't have any specific date I have to wait for. The point is, currently I'm not going to do that, and I hope it stays this way.
I've read your concerns and take the gravest possible offense to this. It's not just about the new coronavirus, but what comes next. Tools like crispr are now within the means of the nuclear boyscout, who can unleash an airborne pathogen upon humanity that performs genetic engineering at scale. All that's required is the will to do so. Stuff like that frightens me far more. If the reaction to this new coronavirus is what's needed to help humanity prepare, then we're likely to be far safer and healthier down the road.
If only the global attention and resources that have gone into the covid crisis could be channelled into the many equally, or more serious issues affecting humanity and the planet today (e.g poverty, oppression, war, over population, pollution, tuberculosis etc.). But they are not the new hot shiny problem, just our boring, faulty and irreplaceable legacy system.
Information on contagion: https://medical.mit.edu/covid-19-updates/2020/10/exposed-to-...
The thing about the flu is that you develop symptoms earlier, so the window of oportunity for unknowing transmission is shorter (on average). From what we know at this time, it's a less deadly disease than COVID-19. And it mutates quickly, with each season bringing new strains. I think if it was possible to erradicate it completely through vaccination that would be something worth considering, too. Nobody likes that it exists.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/symptoms/flu-vs-covid19.htm
https://bgr.com/2020/10/21/coronavirus-death-rate-vs-flu-cdc... (sourced)
The vaccine, while probably fine, seems like more of a wildcard to me. It seems like a low-probability lottery ticket to bad news, whereas COVID seems like a lower-probability lottery ticket to bad news.
(Of course, the government may force the issue. I hope not, though. My body, my choice and all that.)
(The same reason I usually get a flu shot: it's not that I can't withstand the flu, it's that there are those around me who might not withstand it. I don't want to be responsible for having passed that on to someone.)
Many things we selfishly do endanger others. Ever driven a car?
But honestly, in my gut, I don't feel like I'm endangering people. I'm doing the thing that I think will most likely make me healthy, and that will most likely result in best outcomes for others, too.
I may have some bias here because the only 2 times I've gotten the flu as an adult are the two times I got the the flu shot, like you're supposed to do. So maybe that's just coincidence, but my operating theory now is, no more flu shots until I get the flu again. If I do, then I'll reconsider.
Yes, and I take various precautions when doing so to reduce the risk to those around me. But, driving a car gets me from point A to B. There's a trade-off. Near as I can tell from the available data from studies on the new vaccines, the risk and consequences of getting COVID outweigh the risks and consequences of getting the vaccine, perhaps by several orders of magnitude.
The number of both cases & deaths have reached nation-wide highs, and basically all states are seeing upticks in prevalence, likely to be made worse by Christmas. The tests on the vaccines have shown it to be effective, and have had minimal side-effects (I've heard some reports of non-life-threatening allergic reaction, and 1 more serious case that is being investigated. There were 43,000 people in the Pfizer study alone, I think. That is significantly better than the confirmed COVID-19 case rate. https://www.statnews.com/2020/11/09/covid-19-vaccine-from-pf...)
> I may have some bias here because the only 2 times I've gotten the flu as an adult are the two times I got the the flu shot, like you're supposed to do. So maybe that's just coincidence, but my operating theory now is, no more flu shots until I get the flu again. If I do, then I'll reconsider.
It's just coincidence:
> studies show that flu vaccination reduces the risk of flu illness by between 40% and 60% among the overall population during seasons when most circulating flu viruses are well-matched to the flu vaccine.
i agree the flu shot is probably coincidence, but at least until/if i get the flu w/o it, i'm going to be guided by my first-hand experience for now. if i get the flu again, i will do more research and reconsider.
It's quite dangerous if a lot people don't get that the covid vaccines also aren't proved (and are unlikely) to contain transmission. Risk is folks think that we will not longer need to care about hygiene, masks, isolation, quarantine and tracing once most people have been vaccinated.
This directly contradicts the CDC:
> Getting vaccinated yourself may also protect people around you, including those who are more vulnerable to serious flu illness, like babies and young children, older people, and people with certain chronic health conditions.
I don't know the actual science here - but they could very well have zero evidence that it protects others and still correctly say that getting the flu vaccine may protect others.
I would take a vaccine (only Pfizer or Moderna) and the associated risks over the experience I'm having now 10/10.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and...
Of primary importance, COVID-19 appears to be easily and completely cleared by the human immune system and does not appear to become latent by settling in immune privileged areas or by integrating itself into the human genome or body in any other way (like Epstein-Barr, Herpesvirus, HIV, etc.)
Outside of the mainstream media and in the medical research literature COVID-19 has been thought to be easily "curable" since early on in the pandemic. In my opinion there appeared to be more uncertainty around the FDA and the rapid development timelines than there ever was around whether or not an effective and complete treatment could be developed.
A severe infection or cytokine storm may obviously cause lasting damage. I do not mean to suggest that everyone will be off the hook in the future!
A better way to state my point was to say that other diseases can cause exactly the same types of cell damage, and having, say, reduced lung function or some neuropathy going forward after a COVID infection are not themselves new and novel medical problems.
I have had COVID despite my best attempts to do everything possible not to contract it. For complete transparency here, I have a strongly vested interest in knowing the truth of this matter. I agree that there is not a strong consensus yet. Sorry I do not have great references at hand to share right now either.
We know both the virus and the vaccine will be out of your system within a short period of time. So any long term effects would have to be derived from what happens while they're in your system. The vaccine generates a few proteins, which your immune system learns to fight off in short order. The virus generates similar proteins, but continues to replicate many times over, attacking your cells and triggering a much more severe immune response as it goes.
So while there are unknown long-term risks for both, I think it is pretty safe to say the number of vectors for long term consequences are much more numerous with the virus.
I absolutely cannot agree more strongly that the long term consequences of any of the COVID vaccines will be far fewer than those of the virus itself.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/concerns-history....
From a personal perspective, no, because my age-based health risk, and my local community transmission rates approach zero, so vaccination has negligible upside at this point in time and space for me.
I might see data that could change either perspective and my willingness to be vaccinated. Also if I need to travel internationally I may be willing or forced to do so.
When I'm afforded the option to get the vaccine, I'll make an assessment of risks based upon data we have at that time vs the risks of contracting COVID.
If I had to make that decision today, I'd take the vaccine. But by the time I'll likely be able to get it in February or so, we'll have millions more data points that I'll be able to consider.
Now I agree the process was quicker than usual, that it brings up a lot of questions. But it's the studies we should question, the efficiency, the long term effects. The way it's sold and "advertised" is just equally as dramatic as the disease it's trying to stop, in my opinion.
It varies by region but where I'm from, back in April-ish, we were sold: "just two weeks of lockdowns and the virus will die out! everything will be back to normal!". So we did. Businesses shut down, transit basically stopped running, our downtown core was a wasteland. Everyone parroted "stay safe, stay home" back and forth at each other and sat at home for a few weeks. It sucked, everyone had a bad time, lots of busineses had to go out of business, but we all were told it was for the greater good and it'll be worth it. And... it didn't do shit.
Now here we are again. Odds on, in a few months, it'll be either "turns out this vaccine doesn't protect you as well as we thought", or "turns out it only protects you for six months", or "turns out the virus mutated so the vaccine isn't effective at all anymore"? In exchange for, what, testing not only a new vaccine, but a whole new method of vaccination on yourself? Whether that's worth it to you or not is a personal choice, but "it will literally save lives and end [the disease]" is firmly TBD.
And also, can you back your claims that the spring lockdowns "didn't do shit"? That's not at all what the numbers show.
- it was just only the beginning of a massive sh*tstorm, not just "2 weeks of lockdown and we'll be ok"
- the lockdown in April was to mitigate as much as possible the first wave
- a second wave would almost definitely arrive in the winter (hello! it's here! we're in lockdown again, pretty much as planned)
- nothing will be back to normal before we get the vaccine, and even then, it would take months if not years for it to be a thing of the past, and that until then we'd have to do our best to follow the guidelines.
You can't compare scientific proof that something works vs. a government decision taken to "mitigate things".
The spring lockdown helped free beds in hospital and ultimately it saved thousands if not millions of lives worldwide. Period. This is UNDENIABLE.
Also, maybe if some people weren't so doubtful that these decisions were for their own good and stopped throwing tantrums about their "fundamental right to breathe air", we wouldn't have had a second wave at all. Maybe.
If it was a rushed vaccine to prevent you from becoming a zombie you wouldn't need to sell it.
If it was a vaccine for the common cold you would need to sell it.
One of the reasons the vaccine for COVID-19 was produced so quickly is not because of some sort of conspiracy, like they had the antidote all along or something. It's just that when there's a real buck to make, it becomes a race between these big pockets companies.
That's one side of it and I don't know enough to cover every aspect of it. Also, it's just my opinion of course and how I see this.
Edit: I'm doubtful about a zombie vaccine being given for free. Most likely in a Walking Dead type scenario, where the economy would completely go down, there wouldn't be any financial incentive to keep the searches going, and no money to back up the researches either. So we'd be scr*wed I think. :o)
It's both sad and funny to me that this is the reaction people are having.
If I were in an at risk group I might have a different perspective, but as it stands I’m happy to wait and see how it goes. If I end up never having to take it, even better.
Yeah, you're an anti-vaxxer.
I think that this vaccine is a choice, and once it's readily available it is still a choice. If you choose not to get it, you are accepting the possibility that you might get COVID and die. Once the vaccine becomes available to my age group and health demographic, the people that actually need it will have been given the option to make their choice as well.
Most people in this thread seems to be forgetting that second part.
Yes, but, given my age/health, wouldn't the people already at risk already have been offered the vaccine? And if they opted against it, they also made their choice?
And for the people that are unable to get the vaccine for whatever reason, isn't that a scenario in which I feel it's either me putting my safety at risk instead of them putting theirs?
I am sympathetic towards people that are allergic or for whatever other reason cannot get the vaccine, but in the same way that they opted to not take the vaccine to protect their health, is that not exactly what I'm suggesting? I do not feel the vaccine is verified safe and am attempting to protect my health?
Curious what you think.
A better approach to the safety of the vaccine is to ask whether it's safer to take it or to abstain, and who bears the risk in each case. I accept that the numbers won't be the same for everyone: they depend on age, sex, gregariousness, medical condition, culture, job, and perhaps (I don't know) ethnicity. However, people I know who've had Covid-19 say it's brutal: even if it doesn't kill you, it can give you a really rough time. I know of four friends of friends who've died of it, including one in his twenties. And let's not forget long Covid, which can strike at any age. Set against that the clinical trials that the vaccine has undergone, with trials halted if even one person became seriously ill. Finally, there seems to be at least a reasonable possibility that being vaccinated will reduce a person's ability to infect others.
All in all, any of the leading vaccines available in the West look like a better bet, for me and the people around me, than just crossing my fingers and hoping.
Should I take it now or wait? There seems little doubt that vaccines will be refined over the coming years. A vaccine taken in 2023 will probably be safer, and certainly better understood, than one taken in 2021. But someone who waits two years has endured two extra years' risk of suffering, spreading and possibly dying from Covid. You would have to think that vaccines are much more dangerous than I do for that to be a reasonable trade-off.
> I think that this vaccine is a choice, and once it's readily available it is still a choice. If you choose not to get it, you are accepting the possibility that you might get COVID and die.
Generally, a whole lot of the reasons why we take vaccines is to provide collective protection. E.g. it's not critical that I be vaccinated for pertussis because of my own risk of whooping cough.
> But we've bounded the risk to be much, much less than COVID in almost all populations.
Are you sure? And by sure I mean, there is enough data to prove this statement to be true? How?
> Generally, a whole lot of the reasons why we take vaccines is to provide collective protection.
This makes, sense, but is "collective protection" a right now thing? Or is collective protection the goal of a vaccination program over the course of 5-10 years? If the latter is true, is the stance of "I will wait 1-2 years until there is actual data" even at odds with this idea?
Reasonably sure. Even looking at the low death rate 25-34 population, deaths have been about 4 per 100,000 population with only 15% infected so far; a natural trek to herd immunity will presumably kill 6-12 more per 100k. There will be even greater amounts of morbidity and hospitalization, too, than outright death.
Compare to ~22000 dosed in trials; two of the vaccinated died from causes that don't look related to the vaccine, and four of the placebo group died. This mostly lets us exclude a high death rate from the vaccine. Several in the placebo group ended up hospitalized from severe COVID; none in the vaccine group ended up hospitalized from COVID or vaccine related side effects.
Indeed, the entire judgment call made in emergency use authorization is exactly that: the benefits of the vaccines appear to conclusively outweigh the risks.
> This makes, sense, but is "collective protection" a right now thing? Or is collective protection the goal of a vaccination program over the course of 5-10 years?
It's a "right now" thing. We can get all the way there in 6 months, and get significant benefit in 3 months. To be clear, the former doesn't mean "cases knocked down to zero", but instead infections knocked down by >95%.
How frequently are vaccine side effects measured 1-3 years out? How frequently do vaccines present side effects on the 1-3 year timeframe?
> Indeed, the entire judgment call made in emergency use authorization is exactly that: the benefits of the vaccines appear to conclusively outweigh the risks.
Had that judgement call not been made in one of the least competent governments in US history, I think it might carry more weight, no?
> the benefits of the vaccines appear to conclusively outweigh the risks.
I would challenge this statement in that I don't believe it possible to fully understand the risks yet. Is 22000 over ~three months the normal amount of time a vaccine trial runs (I am asking somewhat rhetorically, in that we've heard time and time again that this is not the case)
Basically never: negative effects are overwhelmingly weighted to close to administration. This could, of course, always be the first vaccine to really do this. Indeed, most childhood vaccine trials have been about a year long.
Much more interesting / troublesome is what immunogenicity is at 1 years / 3 years / 5 years. That's why vaccines have failed at the end of their trials: efficacy isn't durable enough, not that too many people get side effects 2.5 years in.
There's a fair chance we'll find that these vaccines don't offer great long term protection. So far protection seems to be holding up OK... But that's next year's problem.
> Had that judgement call not been made in one of the least competent governments in US history, I think it might carry more weight, no?
We have plenty of other competent regulators making the same choice, and the review process followed seems reasonable. The pressure from the top to speed it up further is yucky, I admit.
> I would challenge this statement in that I don't believe it possible to fully understand the risks yet.
Well, sure. We can't know exactly the probability that it will turn us all into vampires a year from now. We can't exactly know the risks from letting COVID-19 doing its thing unimpeded, either. But the former risk looks pretty small and the latter risk looks pretty big, and it's not like we've not studied both pretty extensively.
Really? We've got a lot more data on COVID than we do on the vaccines.
Sure, but we don't know much about long-term morbidity tied to COVID infection, or exactly how many people it will get in the end. Even if I've got it all wrong--- the vaccine is riskier than our current data implies in the age 24-30 group, and fewer people from age 24-30 will get it because things burnt themselves out earlier-- what about the risks of long-term morbidity from COVID-19 infection in this group? Even that alone dwarfs likely vaccine risks. A whole lot of people are getting hospitalized, and even only 5% of them ending up with some degree of long term disability is daunting.
There's big error bars all around, but they largely don't overlap, and COVID has profound downside risks.
I would say the same about the vaccines though. It seems like a lose/lose but one of which has a much greater sample.
At risk populations have the same choices I have. I will choose to wait because I am not at risk. The risk level is obviously a factor that should play a part in making an individual's choice.
Now, for the people that _cannot_ get the vaccine for whatever reason, ultimately my decision is definitely more selfish, in that I am taking precautions in favor of my own safety as opposed to theirs. I guess I don't think this is unreasonable though?
For the same reason I never got a rabies vaccine until having to work in close proximity with rabid animals. Up until that point, my chances of dying from rabies were pretty slim to none.
Likewise, my chances of severe complications, death, or even experiencing any symptoms at all are slim to none. The at risk people around me will be likely vaccinated, so i'm not putting them at risk.
Now, the rabies vaccine came with some known risk, a bit higher than others, hence why it's only given to people who request it or need it.
This covid vaccine is brand new, rushed, the manufacturers are legally exempt from liability for damages the vaccines cause most places in the world and it's a mostly new technology not really tested or used before.
There are potential side effects, these side effects are potentially long term and severely debilitating and despite being a low risk, it's still a higher risk for me than experiencing anything terrible from covid.
So, why put myself at some unknown risk from some unknown thing over something that, is more than likely not, going to cause me severe problems?
Get it for the sake of other people. Someday the tables may be turned and you'll be hoping others make a sacrifice for you.
Why does it even matter either way? 3% of the population is severely at risk from this. 3%.
If those 3% of people are vaccinated, then why does it even matter if anyone else is?
And lastly because it’s really fucking dumb to skip it because “I’ll only kill 3% of my friends and family.” Don’t be a nitwit. Get the fucking vaccine.
They can't all be. A significant chunk of the people at risk are also immunocompromised, which means the vaccine will be counter indicated and they rely on the disease not reaching them.
In order for the disease not to reach them, you need herd immunity.
Also, do you want to have a normal life again? Take the damn vaccine. We won't get to looser restrictions without achieving herd immunity, and herd immunity needs 60 percent of people, not the 3 percent at risk.
"I'll let others get it and be part of the 40 percent who want to have a normal life ASAP but won't do anything to contribute to that" is the most selfish shit.
This entire exercise in waiting for the vaccine was so we could get there.
Your risk perception is way off. Like orders of magnitude off. You're also assuming the risks of catching COVID are known and minor, but the risks of a vaccine are unknown and possibly off.
In reality it's the inverse. We have well over a hundred years of research into how vaccines interact with our bodies, as well as similar knowledge of things like manufacturing safety, injection best-practices, etc. While the exact mechanism of the mRNA vaccines is new to vaccines, it's been studied very closely in tens of thousands of people over several years (there have been several mRNA vaccines in the pipeline, but due to less immediate advantages their approval is slower going). It's mechanism is new for vaccines, but well understood.
COVID on the other hand is a virus where some of the immediate, worst effects are known and feel safer. But that's completely not true. The immediate effects we know are very dangerous (As a 39yr old male, I stand a 1/2000 chance of dying if I get the disease) and you're not factoring the risk of unknown long-term effects, which are unknown. It's entirely possible that damage done from the virus could have long-term hidden consequences that we won't know for many years.
So then you're left with your risk of catching the virus. Of course, this varies greatly based on behavior and region. You may feel safe, and you may indeed be relatively so, but of the hundreds of thousands of people who found out they tested positive today I'm willing to bet a good chunk of them felt just as safe as you.
In France, in Marseilles, they studied all people who died from covid in the hopsital during the first episode. They calculated the Charlson score for each patient. What they found is that very large majority of people who died have a low life expectancy and all expect 2 patients have one or more co-morbidities (cancer, diabetes, etc).
So if you are healthy then you real risk is below the average of the same age group.
Except, I don't care if I test postive or not. If I get sick enough i'll go to the hospital i'll deal with it the same as I would any other disease that puts me in the hosptial. Until then, i'll keep doing what i've doing wearing a mask when I need to and respectfully maintaining distance from people.
It's not known with any kind of certainty which carries more risk of long term side effects. Or aggregate harm if you want to look at it that way.
The vaccines do seem to reduce risk of severe Covid, across age groups (One didn't have any severe disease in the vaccine group).
Q: Does all medicine go through a rigorous efficacy testing that is certified by the FDA?
A: Yes.
Q: Do vaccines?
A: No.
Q: Why?
A: It would be unethical.
This is surprising to people who don't know how vaccines are made.
edit: removed hyperbole
It's not been done once by modern western medicine because it would be unethical by modern medical practices to intentionally infect a person.
Please explain how would your proposal be any more valid than a proper controlled study where you do the treatment on portion of your participants and wait how it works out for them.
If you give 40,000 people a random mix of placebo and vaccines and then monitor whether or not they contract the target disease, you get an indication of efficacy by comparing the vaccinated group to the placebo group.
It likely would have been good to do challenge trials with the vaccine groups (to speed up the testing). It would of course not be nice to do it with the placebo group.
But you are plucking a single evidentiary standard out of some dark place and then asserting that it is the only useful one. Of course it is not, and Phase 3 vaccine trials are well designed to provide clear evidence of effectiveness. Go look up the Pfizer result going around on the memes if you don't believe that.
Arguably, releasing your subjects into an environment full of live virus, such as the United States, is a kind of challenge study, which rapidly delivers efficacy data. This is why approval could happen so much faster than usual for these vaccines.
It's never been done that I have seen.
Edit: removed hyperbole
There have even been studies where the vaccine that you get in the control arm of the study is the vaccine against Meningitis and then after a year or two they do give you what ever vaccine you had not received yet. (Sorry, forgot against which disease the vaccine under test was protecting.)
And of course there is double blind studies where you get three injections, one of which is saline, two are active. They are given a few weeks apart, you don't know the order and they check antibody level in the blood every week.
Scientific method require each person be equally exposed to the virus under strict lab conditions.
Keep in mind that even under strict lab conditions your results would never be 100% certain.