I think there's a great deal of misunderstanding about what the processes that go into vaccine trials are. I've seen people talk about all this long-term post-trial monitoring that is getting skipped and then have people who've actually run studies comment and say that's not something they've ever done.

Honestly, people skipping the vaccine don't really "matter" in the near term. We have more than enough people willing to get the vaccine for many, many months, so if people want to risk reaching immunity the hard way that's their choice.

> actually run studies comment and say that's not something they've ever done.

I mean, if that's true, that's really disappointing. Though I find it hard to believe, as I've seen examples of medical papers written from long-term post-vax surveillance. For instance this one from the WHO, finding that they could prevent the deaths of about 500,000 more young girls per year in Africa alone by using a different, more effective, measles vaccine: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4052142/

I particularly like that example as it shows what's at stake: literally millions of lives are saved by vaccinations. Screwing up that with hasty approvals, and misleading the public about how much safety data we have, could lead to literally millions of additional deaths in the future if vaccination rates go down. Health authorities should be thinking about the long term, not just getting through the covid crisis.

Re: nurses specifically, the trials simply didn't enroll people who had already had COVID-19, so they just don't have data on how safe that is. It probably is. But we just don't know yet. There's also little reason to get the vaccine in that case as we're now very confident that immunity after infection is effective and long lasting. Obviously, being exposed to it, many nurses would have been infected already and recovered; if I knew I had been infected already, I would not get vaccinated.

By the way, even if you had been infected, you still benefit from the vaccine. You should still get the vaccine.

Do you have a citation for that?

They performed massive trials, what a lot of people are doing is conflating time to develop a vaccine with time to do trials.

The trials were not abbreviated, they weren't below usual sample sizes.

The only difference is the development time for the vaccine, which is only abbreviated due to the massive advance in development time that new mRNA techniques give us.

The Pfizer trial had about 20,000 people in each arm. That's just not enough data to detect rare side effects at a rate anywhere near high enough to know that the vaccine is safer than covid itself for younger/healthier populations who aren't at risk. For the young, healthy, 0 to 19 age range the infection fatality rate of COVID-19 is around 1 in 2.5 million: https://gh.bmj.com/content/5/9/e003094

Normally that wouldn't be a big problem, as vaccines are usually rolled out relatively slowly, so population wide monitoring should pick up on any issues. But countries are aiming to vaccinate as close to 100% as they can get within a matter of months.