I have seen no evidence for either of these claims, other than assertions. If you have some, please provide citations.
1. https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
We do already have long-term data. You would see side effects for a vaccine within six months, and we have been administering it for much longer than that.
The vaccines are safe.
I used to be a close follower of the pharma industry, and you're making it seem like FDA trials happen on molecules and formulations somewhat related to the proposed formulation and then are, like, transitively approved on that hand-wavey basis. This is totally wrong.
For reasons that should be obvious to any engineer that's worked on any kind of even moderately complex system, the molecule that is tested and trialed is the molecule that goes to production.
You don't test "the technology" and then some unrelated other vaccine and then say, there we go, this one's safe.
You test the actual formulation that will go to production. This can't have happened for this yet. The trials are still underway. Unknown risk.
I dunno if you're misinformed or a troll, but that's dangerous stuff to be putting out there.
Vaccines are amazing life-saving tech, and they're safe because of our cultural technologies (FDA trials for e.g.) that make them safe. You can't take all the safety gear out and still get the same safety rating. Doesn't make sense, lol.
In some areas of medicine we can afford to move slowly and we absolutely should - but when it comes to the flu we don't have that luxury.
But there are many parts of this vaccine that is shared with previous ones and the mechanics have been tested thoroughly. The science is the same. There's just no credible reason for those with normal immune systems to delay.
"This can't have happened for this yet. The trials are still underway. Unknown risk."
That's just simply untrue. The trials completed. Read the link.
Please stop spreading misinformation during a deadly pandemic.
Moderna's FDA trial: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04470427 Estimated Study Completion Date: October 27, 2022
Pfizer's FDA trial: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04368728 Estimated Study Completion Date: May 2, 2023
JnJ's FDA trial: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04505722 Estimated Study Completion Date: January 2, 2023
You are saying that I am putting people, or society, at risk simply by stating the simple, 100% true fact that these vaccines are not through FDA Phase 3 trials.
The implication of this is you believe it is best if people are NOT given informed consent, that they are kept in the dark, and told lies about the status of these vaccines, because doing so will encourage more people to take them.
I'm sorry, man, but that is just awful, terrible stuff.
Coursera has a course on bioethics, you may want to inform yourself before you engage in discussions about medicine, because you are totally operating in an evil way.
I just think you're taking issue with silly things, overblowing the risks and trying to make other people scared. That's seriously messed up.
Be truthful. You've decided not to take it no matter what. Now you're back-filling reasons not to. If you truly were about your ethics, you'd stop trying to make others afraid because you are.
I have said zero about the safety of the vaccines. I have only stated the unassailable fact that they have not completed phase 3 trials.
How is telling the facts about the status of the vaccines spreading doubt?
I have taken plenty more vaccines than you, I'm sure, I'm not some anti-vaccine nutcase. I love medical technology, I love vaccines. I also love bioethics. I wish more people, like you, did too.
You say I'm afraid, and you couldn't be further from the truth. I'm more well-informed about covid than most people I interact with on a daily basis, and I live in a state that values individual autonomy, so we've experienced basically zero impact on our daily lives because of covid. Some folks used to wear masks, most folks didn't. Everything remained open, save a brief closure of our bowling alley, now thankfully back open.
I walk around without any fear whatsoever and all my local fellows seem to as well. Nobody talks about covid or really cares much about it all. Very few are vaccinated.
Life is fine.
Others are more scared. Others, like you, are trying to hide information about the vaccines. That sucks.
I hope your life improves, friend!
You know nothing about me.
Strange you think we should all be as subservient as you were when you were a Marine. I mean, I get it, I want our armed forces to have a solid CoC that can be relied upon, but pushing it to the point where you have to obey orders to take random needles without any informed consent seems a bridge too far for me. Stranger still is you seem to think this is how we should operate in the civilian world.
The vaccines are safe.
There are lots of things we do see and we should worry about. The problem is that we can't tell right away if it's just noise, if it's a potentially rare side-effect. Then you have the problems like Myocarditis, which are clearly caused by the vaccine, which we hand-wave away with speculative "the benefits still outweigh the risk" scenarios:
https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Scree...
this is not handwaving, this is the foundation stone of modern medicine.
Speculative scenarios based on predictive factors that you could just fudge until the result looks "right" to you, those are the essentially quackery.
We have now had two separate rare-but-serious side effects of different Covid vaccines: the CVT issue with J&J, and the myocarditis issue with the mRNA vaccines in children. It's disingenuous to suggest that the vaccines are "safe" merely because they've been widely administered; even the question of what "safe" means is a far more nuanced question than you're presenting. For children, in particular, two-dose vaccination with the mRNA vaccines is probably a poor risk/benefit profile. We didn't know that until we started dosing enough kids to see the rare side effects.
The phase 3 trials were not powered to detect rare side effects, which is part of the reason that they're still classified as emergency use, and not fully approved.
I am an advocate for vaccination, but it's not right to ignore these issues.
Safe is always relative. If you don't think the vaccines are safe enough, then please also be consistent and don't engage in equally unsafe activities, e.g. don't drive a car, exercise regularly, eat healthily, don't encourage your girlfriend/wife/daughter/friend to take the contraceptive pill or, even worse, get pregnant, also do not take a large number of other drugs etc.
Again, from what we know today, it is safer to vaccinate your kids then driving them around in a car. Even when the risk/benefit profile is even/negative, absolute risk is super low.
...and if it were choice between vaccinating kids and driving them places, then this example would be relevant.
We don't approve drugs simply because they're less risky for a target population than some other selection of risky things.
> Even when the risk/benefit profile is even/negative, absolute risk is super low.
Yes. So is the benefit.
These vaccines are very, very unlikely to give anyone a hard time. Nothing's without risk, but even for the unlucky that doesn't even sound that bad.
As soon as my son is eligible, he's getting it, too.
The chances that a child will experience anything other than extremely minor illness from Covid is also very rare. The current numbers are teetering on the edge of implying that children are at more risk from the vaccine than from the virus.
My definition of the word "safe" includes the rational weighing of risks vs. benefit for a target population. Is it worth it to put kids at risk from myocarditis that exceeds their risk from Covid, just to reduce population-level Covid stats and reduce the marginal risk to the elderly? I don't know, but it's not a question to simply ignore.
Child deaths attributed to vaccines [2]: 0. We can break this down further: 3 deaths from blood clots attributed to adenovirus vector vaccine, none in children. 616 reports of myocarditis[3], 393 confirmed, none fatal.
[1]: https://downloads.aap.org/AAP/PDF/AAP%20and%20CHA%20-%20Chil...
[2]: https://covid-101.org/science/how-many-people-have-died-from...
[3]: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/ad...
Moreover, you're implicitly using a biased selection of data to make this argument. Want more children to die of myocarditis? Keep doing the same thing we're doing now. It will happen. We've been vaccinating kids for a fraction of the time they've been getting Covid.
I will say this for the benefit of others: regarding the CDCs numbers, in particular, they've used the incorrect counter-factual (no doses vs. two doses), and substantially mis-represented the rates of myocarditis in children.
https://medium.com/@wpegden/weighing-myocarditis-cases-acip-...
I've been mortified to see the CDC spreading this kind of mis-calculation so widely. It's simply unconscionable.
This is true by medicinal standards, but it's also a sleight-of-hand. The AstraZeneca vaccine had a rare side-effect that was right on track to kill more young women in Europe than the virus itself. That's why it was banned. By that standard, I could argue the viral infection is also safe - for young women at least.
1. https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/news/covid-19-vaccine-astrazene...
It isn't false, though the blanket "it was banned" statement lacks context:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford%E2%80%93AstraZeneca_COV...
> It is generally advisable to get Moderna/Pfizer if they're available and you're a young woman but the chance of mortal thrombosis is around 5 per one million.
No, the risk for anyone to develop a lethal thrombosis is roughly 5 per million. The chances are much higher for younger women, to the point where it exceeds the risk to die of COVID.
It's not even close, for women age 20-29 the risk of fatal thrombosis is 1:250k, while Covid is somewhere around 1:25k [1]. That's a whole order of magnitude.
The risk/benefit ratio of AZ vaccine is only poor when the risk of exposure is very low [2].
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2918-0/figures/2
[2] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
I have yet to find a source that gives the risk for that cohort.
> ...while Covid is somewhere around 1:25k
Even if it's an order of magnitude higher, the risk of a actually getting a PCR-confirmed infection is an order of magnitude lower.
Again, Germany: 28 deaths of women in that age group over the course of the pandemic[1], including all potential co-morbidities that may tilt the risk in favor of vaccination.
> The risk/benefit ratio of AZ vaccine is only poor when the risk of exposure is very low.
This is comparing "ICU admissions" against "Serious harms due to the vaccine". Utter nonsense. Why not compare mortality? Probably because it wouldn't look too good...
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1105512/coronavirus-covi...
The data is publicly available for many countries, e.g. here for the UK:
[1] Report on adverse reactions until 16 Jun 2021 https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/coronavirus-covid...
[2] Vaccination statistics https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas...
Check the table with reports and fatalities by age, and the paragraph interpreting the data. Together with [2] you can calculate the fatality rate for the 20-29 group. In the end you'll end up with a fatality rate for women age 20-19 in the range of 1:150k-300k (quick back of the envelope calculation).
> Even if it's an order of magnitude higher, the risk of a actually getting a PCR-confirmed infection is an order of magnitude lower.
The source I posted is a metastudy, computing IFR based on seroprevalence from many different countries, so PCR tests have nothing to do with it.
I really can't, because there is no information on which age group got which vaccine. The AstraZeneca vaccine has been restricted in the UK for under-30-year-olds as early as April.
Here is a study (Italy) that estimates the risk-reward ratio (fatalities caused vs. prevented) is unfavorable for the entire below-30 age group, including males:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.07.21256826v...
> The source I posted is a metastudy, computing IFR based on seroprevalence from many different countries, so PCR tests have nothing to do with it.
This is true, but PCR tests is how we count actual infections and deaths. When calculating the risk of getting infected, IFR alone doesn't help me, I need PCR tests as a metric of how many infections are actually occuring.
Alternatively, I could use seroprevalence: Assuming that seroprevalence is 10% (way higher than in your somewhat outdated source), then over the course of the pandemic, assuming IFR in our cohort is 1:25K, then the absolute risk was 1:250K - roughly on par with the "vaccine fatality" scenario. This is just an example to show that the numbers aren't clearly in favor of the vaccine.
The vaccines (being administered now) are safe.
Yes, if it was a wide-spread problem. The side-effect that killed AstraZeneca wasn't widespread, it was extremely rare, and it was caught because it was such an unlikely combination of symptoms. Yet, this extremely rare side-effect was enough to make the vaccine more dangerous than the virus - to young women at least.
In a year, when all the facts are collected and processed, we'll see how much trouble the Pfizer vaccine really caused in terms of Myocarditis. Then we'll scramble to make up numbers on how many infections must've been prevented by the vaccine to make it all worthwhile.
...like COVID in young people?
It's true that Myocarditis often goes unnoticed and undiagnosed. That's what makes it dangerous. It's a leading cause of cardiac arrest in young people. If you actually do get diagnosed with Myocarditis, it's not necessarily a mild case. That's what makes me suspect the cases being reported now are just the tip of the ice berg.
I am extremely healthy, have a great diet, and as a farmer, I get plenty of time soaking up vitamin D, a potent inhibitor of covid. The vaccine doesn't make any sense for me to take.
Normal disclaimer, I am a huge, huge believer in vaccines, and am probably more vaccinated (due to travel and other circumstances) than nearly everyone reading this comment. I believe bar none vaccines are the medical technology that has saved the most lives in our history as a species. Big fan of vaccines.
But, vaccines are made safe via clinical trials and long-term studies. These vaccines are wholly new in type, were rushed to market, have liability waivers for those pushing them, and to make things even worse, the manufacturers aren't collecting followup data about adverse events in any kind of systematic way (as they would during a normal phase4). So it seems to me the playbook that gave us generations of safe vaccines that saved billions of lives has been thrown out the window.
No thanks!
https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-covid-vaccines-idU...
They have filed for full authorization for a reason. These vaccines have enough data backing their safety for full approval.
Please do not spread misinformation, especially misinformation about healthcare during a deadly and dangerous pandemic. Lives are at stake.
Moderna's FDA trial: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04470427 Estimated Study Completion Date: October 27, 2022
Pfizer's FDA trial: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04368728 Estimated Study Completion Date: May 2, 2023
JnJ's FDA trial: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04505722 Estimated Study Completion Date: January 2, 2023
Study completion date does not mean phase 3 trial completion date.
“ However, these dates do not mean clinical trials will continue for this long, and instead reference continued safety monitoring after the vaccine has been approved and rolled out, which is standard practice within the industry”
https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta...
Get a clue. Lives are at stake. Vaccination will save them. The majority of people dying now are dying because they made the choice not to get vaccinated.
It is clear that I'm correct. The vaccines are still in phase 3 clinical trials, as reported by clinicaltrials.gov, the source of truth for such questions.
Estimated Study Completion Date literally means the date that the Phase 3 trial study is estimated to be completed, at which point FDA goes through the process of approving or not approving the treatment.
The vaccines have been released due to an EUA (Emergency Use Authorization). I'm guessing you're not aware of this, even though it's clearly elucidated even in your own link.
It seems you think that the actual, you know, "study" part of Phase 3 trials is just some unnecessary bureaucratic technicality thing? As someone well acquainted with the world of pharma, I assure you it is not. It seems you think they just jab the 40k or so participants, watch them a few minutes, and then the Phase 3 trial is completed save for some paperwork. I assure you, that is not the case.
Phase 3 serves a very specific, important purpose: Identifying any long-term safety issues with medical treatments prior to their authorization for widespread adoption in the USA. The reason Phase 3 exists is because it has very often been the case that promising treatments turned out to not be so promising after long-term study.
One of the foundational, bedrock principles of bioethics is "informed consent". That is, the people undergoing medical treatment, especially experimental medical treatment, must have full information about the risks and potential benefits of treatment. You are spreading misinformation which may lead others to misunderstand the current state of the covid vaccines. They are not through phase 3 trials. According to every other situation when treatments not approved through the normal FDA process are administered, they are called "experimental" (e.g., my grandma, prior to her death, was given the option to take drugs that were currently in phase 3 of FDA trials for treating her ailment, and she was told, accurately, that she could elect this experimental drug, which often is authorized for terminal patients--but they are given INFORMED consent--i.e., told they are experimental and the safety risks are not fully understood).
Please, please stop violating bedrock principles of bioethics. These vaccines are still not through phase 3 trials. This is just a plain fact and you shouldn't lie to people to increase their likelihood of taking these vaccines.
Regardless of whether you think the vaccines are safe, they are quite clearly effective.
Is that what you're implying?
To directly answer your question: I do not think the ethical calculations change one single iota based on any other outside calculation.
You should never misrepresent or elide any relevant information from people when they're about to make a decision about their health (or, hey, ever, in any situation).
It seems you're thinking if we were honest with people about the status of the vaccines, they'd be less likely to take them.
Like, here's the messaging I think is appropriate: Hey, we have some limited safety and efficacy data about these vaccines. The limited, phase 2 information shows that we think they're safe and effective, however, these vaccines have nowhere near the testing and trials that normal vaccines have prior to authorization. As well as lacking phase 3 long-term study, we eliminated animal studies and animal toxicity studies for some inexplicable reasons, so we're flying a bit blind. But we're in the midst of a deadly pandemic. The risk is yours to take.
I think the majority of people would still take the vaccines.
I think you think we should lie to the masses because they're too stupid to handle the truth.
I think that's evil.
The point of principles is to practice them when it's hard, not when it's easy. If you abandon them when it's convenient or during an emergency, you don't really have any principles.
You think you are smarter and more thoughtful about this than the experts who debated it in the open for hours upon hours to decide it was safe and should be available to everybody.
You said earlier you were safe because of your vitamin D levels. The science on the protective nature of vitamin D to COVID is not clear at all. But you claimed it as fact because you want it to be true. You want the vaccines not to be safe so you make up thresholds and then tell us you are being honest by saying the vaccine doesn’t cross them. Why do you trust all the other vaccines the FDA has approved, but not this one that the FDA says is safe and effective. Do you trust them or not? Or do they lie sometimes when you disagree and tell the truth when you agree?
It seems like you're claiming anything that gets an EUA, regardless of FDA trial status or outcome, is "safe".
That would imply you believe FDA Phase 3 trials are irrelevant, and that safety, particularly long-term safety, is easy to assess without doing any long-term safety studies.
That's quite a strange position to take, but OK, you can take it.
I trust the FDA, however. It's strange to be arguing with somebody who doesn't trust the FDA, but here we are. I trust them, and they think long-term safety trials for pharmaceuticals are really important. You seem to disagree. That's fine.
I agree that the vaccines show good safety profiles for older patients in the short term. The younger the cohort it's administered to, the greater the number of adverse events occur, however, which is worrying, because it's the opposite for covid. But still, they look reasonably safe for the 18+ crowd, in the short term.
You seem to think they're perfectly safe in the long-term based on no studies. That's a cool, if strange, way of magical thinking. I think differently, and I seek data and trustworthy sources for my medical information.
For what it's worth my doctor also recommended I don't get the vaccine, for the same reasons I've laid out here.
The OP is throwing around giant misleading statements like "potent inhibitor", while chiding others for incorrectly stating tiny details.
The vaccine is a "potent inhibitor" of COVID, and we all have the data to prove it. There is no other substance, other than monoclonals, which would meet that standard.
The latest meta analysis indicates that ivermectin is also a fairly potent inhibitor, although the evidence is weaker.
There is one medium sized almost randomized trial that shows a strong result. I'm not interested in small retrospective studies. There are 50 retrospective studies that show HCQ is an amazing drug against covid.
Clearly since there is little downside to given vitamin D to people who have low levels, it can and probably should be done, but that is very far from proving that it is a "potent inhibitor" of covid. There also is a clear bias for the person who makes that site since they also want it to be true. Maybe they don't look as hard for studies which disprove what they want. It isn't an overwhelming case.
There is more than enough evidence for a big RCT to actually confirm, but given the safety considerations and low expense it probably makes more sense to just dose everybody and hope it works. But I don't see how you could make grand claims with this evidence.
Super, super strange that we'd take less-than-typical studies of novel vaccines, and then quibble the evidence on something created by nature that we know is easy to get, easy to dose, very safe, etc.
It's like someone wants to make some profit or something.
Do you believe the evidence for their effectiveness is equal?
The evidence about coronavirus is quite, quite clear. There may be long-term severe effects of covid, just like there may be severe deleterious long-term consequences of the vaccines. So you must calculate your risk-benefit ratio and use that to elect whether to take the vaccines or not. For those that are worried about experimental vaccines, I absolutely encourage them to get more fresh air and sunlight--in fact, almost everyone would benefit in many ways from getting outside in the sun, getting fitter, and avoiding prolonged "lock downs" in their houses. (To boot, covid has never been observed in the scientific literature to be transmissible outdoors.)
Here's a peer-reviewed study from the Lancet from this month that shows just how short-term irrelevant covid is to those under age 40 who are reasonably healthy: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landia/article/PIIS2213-8...
For those under the age of 60, obesity is far and away the thing that makes covid dangerous, and if you're under age 40 and are not obese, the death rate is too low to be measured.
So from that, it seems clear to me: If you're under age 60, get fit (I already am, and getting fitter and fitter every day, which is oddly something never mentioned by the higher-ups at CDC or Pfizer or wherever, which is curious, wouldn't you say?). Get outside.
Effectiveness of the vaccine is irrelevant to me personally because for all people like me covid has thus far posed a risk profile similar to that of driving. Novel vaccine technology presents a totally unknown level of risk, and we've already observed plenty of healthy, young people get all sorts of negative outcomes from it. Plus, again, totally unknown long-term safety profile.
I'm curious why you're so against any kind of solution for covid that doesn't involve novel vaccines.
https://www.narcolepsy.org.uk/resources/pandemrix-narcolepsy
In fact, there are many, many vaccine-related long-term injuries that are well-studied and were totally not detected until well after the fact.
In fact, there's an entire medical school textbook about it, if you want to really know, published by Wiley, called Vacines and Autommunity: https://www.amazon.com/Vaccines-Autoimmunity-Yehuda-Shoenfel...
The corporate press does everything possible to make it seem to the common person that vaccines are the very single medical technology that has zero side-effects and zero long-term safety issues, but that couldn't be further from the truth.
(Wiley is not some crazy conspiracy theory crap, they make legitimate textbooks for colleges everywhere.)
Not to mention, the question itself is biased. You should really ask, Is there any example of an entirely new medical technology (really, three, if you consider the LNP) which post-deployment caused long-term safety issues?
And that would be a resounding yes.
And, please again note, even knowing all I do about all those things and the dangers of vaccines, I still am more vaccinated than you, having taken, e.g., rabies vaccine, even knowing the not-insignificant risks involved.
However, there was a risk I'd catch and be injured by rabies.
There's almost zero risk I'll be injured by covid, lol.
I mean, as well, look at the injuries being caused by the vaccines: They happen to people like me, young and healthy. Covid only hurts the fat people my age. Why would I take the side of the risk that hurts people like me?
I said show me one where the onset is hidden until after 6 months. The narcolepsy link above was concentrated in the first 6 months after the shot. At least try me with the dengue vaccine and ADE so I could explain why that is different.
Hundreds of millions of people have taken the vaccines and we know with huge amounts of power the side effects and their (incredibly tiny) probabilities. It is beyond uncommon for a hidden side effect to only appear later, especially with something like a vaccine. It produces an antibody response and goes away. If that antibody response is going to cause problems it generally happens sooner than later when there are the most antibodies.
I, like you, didn’t want to be the first person to take the vaccine. But at this point the safety record shows it is one of the safest, if not the safest, vaccine ever produced. Hopefully you don’t get COVID in the meantime of this point becoming clear to you.
Please stop fear mongering and repeating falsehoods that have been proven time and time again to be incorrect.
https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-vaccine-monitor...
https://www.pfizer.com/science/coronavirus/vaccine/about-our...
“ This trial began July 27, 2020, and completed enrollment of 46,331 participants in January 2021. On November 18, Pfizer and BioNTech announced that, after conducting the primary efficacy analysis, their mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccine met all of the study’s primary efficacy endpoints. On December 2, 2020, the Medicines & Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) in the U.K. authorized the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use, marking the first Emergency Use Authorization following a worldwide Phase 3 trial of a vaccine to help fight the pandemic. Shortly after on December 11, 2020, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authorized the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use.”
Key words: met all of the studies efficacy endpoints, (Phase 3 is primarily designed to find EFFICACY), following a worldwide phase 3 trial
EUA does not equal still in Phase 3. Not even remotely correct.
https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta...
Key word: CONCLUDES
Your previous comments point to the long development of other vaccines as a mark against COVID-19 vaccines. Surprise surprise, a vaccine developed during a pandemic gets pushed to the front of the line and has full priority, no issues with funding, etc. The speed at which it was passed is not a slight against it, considering it was able to still make it through Phase 1, 2, and 3, and then ultimately gain EUA. Again, not because it was rushed, it still had to go through all other testing other vaccines had, if anything full approval was delayed so they could get 6 months of additional EFFICACY data.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2021/04/29/covid-19-vaccine-myth...
The current data we have shows the vaccines are very safe to a high degree of certainty. If you had created a bar beforehand, they’d have met it. But you can always keep moving the goalposts.
All the other vaccines I have been administered had at the minimum a decade of widespread use following their phase 3 trials (and as an aside, their phase 3 trials were much longer studies than these covid vaccines are projected to be).
I've never taken a drug released under EUA.
I investigated every vaccine I took and assessed the risk/benefit ratio and elected to take them. In general, I love vaccines, and I love the medical establishment that gave me the option to elect them! However, the medical establishment seems to have thrown away the playbook on these particular vaccines. The point is, I could examine the risks of those vaccines, and since their administration was not politicized, the data was totally trustworthy. And since most were out of patent, the financial incentive to manipulate data just wasn't there. I could be reasonably informed of the risk. Since these have not completed phase 3 trial, much less have decades of history in widespread use, I have basically no long-term safety data with which to inform my decision. So, precautionary principle tells me: No, thanks!
The risk to benefit ratio is the only thing that matters to me, as I believe it should to others. My likelihood of serious impairment from covid seems very low to me, just like it seems very low to children, for instance. Further, the ratio changes every single day: The more people who get vaccinated, the lower my risk gets, as does the risk for every other unvaccinated person, making the ratio, as more get vaccinated, skew towards not getting the vaccine.
That sounds like hell.
My Canadian friends seem to think that's what their country has turned into, and on just about every front, not just vaccines.
But, they are still OK, because they know we're never given any challenge to great for our spirits to overcome.
In other words, those who value individual freedom might want to avoid Canada for its over-boarding groupthink and overtly collectivist mentality.
Socialism and socialized healthcare frequently gets painted as being anti-freedom but I think that the lack of socialized healthcare infringes more effectively on individual freedoms than the presence of it. In the case of vaccinations - encouraging widespread vaccination (and there is currently and probably will never be a mandate) allows more of the population to act freely. Canada is only behind on vaccinations (and, in total doses administered we're now actually tied) due to the fact that we don't have domestic production facilities which resulted on our dose orders being delayed until America dealt with their domestic population. I don't think that's unfair and I've been pretty critical of the LPC that failed to build out domestic production facilities early into the pandemic but - eh, we work with what we've got.
I think you are projecting what you view as two options in America - either communism or individual freedoms - onto the rest of the world. That is a myopic approach to take when considering all the cultures and governments in the world.
...while ostracized for defending your self-interest?
I'm not saying one is strictly better than the other. It's a tradeoff. As they say in New York: "If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere". The corollary of that might be: "If you can't make it here, move to Canada".
As a person who lived 20 years in Canada and 14 in the USA, I'll take the USA every day of the week--and for the past year I've paid for my own health insurance directly.
Canada's healthcare system is run by bureaucrats who prioritize many items ahead of citizen health.
Here's one example: A family member is a police officer. While I was visiting home, in Ontario, he was hit with some insane shoulder-related pain. This is one tough guy and he was reduced to tears--some kind of nerve damage or something.
The hospital in Canada told him he needed an MRI. And that it would take between 4 and 6 months til there was an available slot. They gave him a prescription for strong opiates to manage the pain during his wait.
I drove him over the border to Buffalo, shelled out $500, and he had his MRI in less than half an hour. The drive was longer than the wait in the radiology clinic.
There are tradeoffs in every situation. I think Canada's healthcare system is better in one exact way: Nobody's bankrupted of their financial wealth due to healthcare. But many many many Canucks are bankrupted of their actual health, their time, their human wealth, due to healthcare.
What happens if you're poor and don't have anyone to turn to for the $500? Will it take the same time to get a free MRI as it does in Canada? Can you get it fro free at all in the US? (Real question, I don't know how it works and am curious)
The TL;DR is that you may be able to get it for free, but there's a very large proportion of the population that fails to qualify for medicaid and also won't have the financial stability to float $500 out of pocket and, if they happened to get one, wouldn't be able to afford any follow up treatment.
But I totally agree that the US system is an absolute breeze if you've got money to spare.
There are many many people who have confirmed positive COVID tests. At least excuse those.
>I think it's a little irresponsible to society to give anyone an out on getting vaccinated.
I think it's irresponsible to require people who most science points to having better protection naturally, to also have to get a vaccine. From this point of view, 2 dose vaccine still have less protection than natural antibodies. Maybe we should require the vaccinated to keep getting more vaccine shots until science shows they're at par with natural antibodies, lowest hanging fruit and all...
The virus is a moving target and what was true of the alpha variant may not be true of delta or downstream. I guess it depends on what you mean by excuse. If you mean allow people to say go on a cruise with a positive covid test as opposed to a vaccination record that seems tentatively reasonable. If you mean allow workers at an old folks home to opt out based on a prior positive test that is unreasonable. If it makes you even possibly slightly less likely to kill the old folks you should get the jab.
The real problem is the grey area created by such a rule. There are probably multiple times as many people who think they have had covid compared to those that have actually had covid that have never been tested. I know people in the US who had an illness in 2019 who are sure they had covid. If you give them an opening they wont let it go. It will surely get ugly.
> If you mean allow workers at an old folks home to opt out based on a prior positive test that is unreasonable. If it makes you even possibly slightly less likely to kill the old folks you should get the jab.
Where is the line drawn? Maybe it would be more effective for people with 2 doses to get a third? What science is there showing antibodies + 1 shot is more marginal protection than 3 shots?
I don't believe that it's firmly established that natural immunity is as good as 2 shots or natural immunity + 1 shot.
We bought more than enough doses to vaccinate everyone and downsides are small.
Consider a population of 10 million with natural immunity. Let us suppose that vaccination with Pfizer will kill between 0 and 1.
Suppose that 1% would fall ill and 1% of those die. That is 1000 preventable deaths.
It needn't be very much of a difference just 1/100th of 1% to vastly outweigh the risk of a very safe vaccine.
Why would we do that when the vaccines are safer than the actual disease and effective enough to contain the spread?
It seems like we should be optimizing for vaccinating as much of the (non-antibody) population up to a level where the spread of the virus is contained rather than maximizing resistance in the population with antibodies. There must be a threshold at which the low hanging fruit becomes “people without antibodies” rather than “people with fewer antibodies”. I’m not sure it matters if the antibodies are from the vaccine or infection.
> I’m not sure it matters if the antibodies are from the vaccine or infection.
I'm not entirely sure either. There is some research that since the vaccine is just the spike protein, while natural immune response was to the entire virus, that the natural immune response is more comprehensive.
The study provides evidence that immunity triggered by SARS-CoV-2 infection will be extraordinarily long-lasting. Adding to the good news, “the implications are that vaccines will have the same durable effect”, says Menno van Zelm, an immunologist at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.
Yes, but don't just take their word for it. Confirmed clinical test should be the bar. I fear if the "you don't need a vaccine if you've had it" narrative gains traction, even if it is undeniably true, it's going to result in the anti-vaxxers lying about having already had the virus, to manufacture another excuse for themselves. If we've learned anything in the last year, it's that any system that relies on people to pinky-swear they're telling the truth will be exploited by a small but significant minority of people.
We don't actually know this. We know it's less dangerous to them thus far. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-56696907 https://www.statesman.com/story/news/politics/politifact/202...
We are not a collective. We do not have these types of arbiters who will police and decide what is best for everyone. We are a nation of individuals and if you cannot trust people to "pinky-swear" on this matter then how can you trust them to do anything? Including vote on anything? Or reason? Who will make all the decisions for them?
Florida and other states have not had mandates and they’re doing fine per the data.
Reinfection studies from a few months ago demonstrated that natural immunity is roughly 50% effective for people aged 65 or over. And that's the age group most likely to experience negative outcomes from covid-19, it's seems prudent to go ahead and recommend vaccinations for this age group, regardless of previous infection.
Then there's the elephant in the room: so few people have been tested that it really difficult to know who has had it. Anyone who has had a cold in the past 18 months is going to claim they had covid, regardless of whether they tested positive or not. It would be easier to vaccinate this group than it would be to perform a test for covid antibodies.
If covid hadn't become a political shit-show, I'd agree with you. But at this point, I think it's a little irresponsible to society to give anyone an out on getting vaccinated.