I am saying this because of such statements:
> From a societal standpoint, he said people who skip the vaccine could compromise the safety of others.
> I hear everyone saying deciding to get vaccinated is an individual choice, but the calculus in that choice is twofold — one is to vaccinate yourself and the other is protect others. I think we have a responsibility to protect our communities.
It is absolutely disgusting to appeal to emotions and shame to make me have something injected into me that has not been extensively studied and of what we have literally no clue with regarding to its long-term effects[1] especially given that I have an immunologic autoimmune disorder.
In any case, what happens to those who cannot get the vaccine passport due to not being able to get the vaccine due to health reasons? Nobody seems to talk about this, or at least I am not informed on this.
[1] On top of that, recent evidence seems to be piling up about their serious adverse effects that are coming to light now. I am expecting more to come.
But this is a discussion of fact, not an appeal to emotions.
> we have literally no clue with regarding to its long-term effects
Except we have a great deal of information on the long term effects of vaccination, from studying many vaccines. It's quite wrong to say we have no idea.
Are you talking about mRNA vaccines? How many people have gotten such a vaccine before the COVID-19 vaccines and when?
Are you? You seemed to be talking about all vaccines.
> How many people have gotten such a vaccine before the COVID-19 vaccines and when?
I don't have the exact figures but if you search for human mRNA trials, they seem to go back about 10 years.
The stats I can find are here - https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas...
AFAICT they don't give a lot to work with, thought the 18-54 crowd do now make a large proportion of hospital intake than earlier in the pandemic.
The ONS - https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...
Report that "The proportion of deaths involving COVID-19 has been highest in those aged 75 years and over throughout the pandemic, however, this proportion has been lower since the start of January 2021. This likely reflects the impact of vaccinations."
And we have the independent reporting that hospitalisations are now mostly among the under-45 and unvaccinated groups, and that as a result there is less pressure on the intensive wards - https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/covid-hospital-adm...
So I would say the claim that "most people getting into hospitals now with severe Covid are young and unvaccinated" is probably overstated.
Plus they do not get that new vaccines (I am not referring to vaccines using the same technology as the previous ones, I thought that was obvious) usually take 10-15 years (!) to develop. How long did it take to develop this one with a tech that has not yet been used on humans? Months?
This is outdated info, vaccines don't typically take that long any more, and there was a bit of a head-start here due to the work on SARS and MERS.
> How long did it take to develop this one with a tech that has not yet been used on humans?
Which tech are you talking about? And which vaccine? J&J and AZ, for instance, are more 'traditional' and based on adenovirus.
I was talking about the mRNA vaccines. When was the first time that any mRNA vaccine has been approved for human use?
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To the down-voters of my previous comment:
This is the source of my claim: https://www.historyofvaccines.org/content/articles/vaccine-d...
Or take a look at https://www.uchicagomedicine.org/forefront/coronavirus-disea... which says:
> The process of getting a vaccine approved for use in the general public is no picnic and can take several years
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If you know it differently, let me know. Please consider that I was not referring to seasonal flu vaccines and the like.
In fact, currently, no coronavirus vaccine is fully approved by the FDA, but three (or more by now?) were given emergency use authorization by the agency.
Plus, I did say the word "develop", but I was thinking about the whole process, my bad.
> When was the first time that any mRNA vaccine has been approved for human use?
Approved for widespread use? Certainly, this is the first, but that doesn't mean we don't have useful data on the likely effects.
Particularly this table calls out some of the trials that were completed or ongoing at the time - https://www.nature.com/articles/nrd.2017.243/tables/2
I imagine the cancer vaccine trial wasn't successful, as the current mRNA vaccines are indeed the first to enter public use.
Yeah, but you see how non-reassuring it is. :P
I imagine it didn't proceed as the treatment wasn't effective, rather than because everybody died from the vaccine. And if there were problems with the vaccine itself, then I would think that knowledge would feed into the design/implementation of future iterations of mRNA vaccines.
So yeah, that's what I take from that. I find the existence of a decade of trials of the tech, and the approval of these two vaccines after a bunch of their own trials, and the ongoing monitoring of outcomes, to be fairly reassuring.
That said, I got the AZ vaccine, because that's what I was offered!
Which two? If it is still the case, Pfizer and Moderna were not approved at all by the FDA. They were given emergency use authorization only by the agency. As I said before, the whole approval process takes years, unless they are authorized for emergency use, as it is the case with COVID-19 vaccines.
You have to realize that they did not have their own "bunch" of trials. It would have taken years to properly go through the process. We are studying them now, some time passed since first vaccinations, hence why there is emerging information about side-effects.
> You have to realize that they did not have their own "bunch" of trials.
Yes, they did. Sorry but this is where you veer into outright misinformation. There have been trials ongoing for a while. The specific two mrna vaccines you are concerned about have had trials, with phase 1/2 reporting last summer and phase 3 interim reporting starting late last year. Your own link above puts these at the end of the process, and your other link says development can take years, not that it must or always does.
Are all trials complete? No, they aren't. But to state they haven't had trials is incorrect.
So in summary -
The tech has been studied for 30 years.
Human vaccine trials using it started 10 years ago.
Trials have taken place and have reported, though phase 3 is ongoing and will continue to report (this is not the same as it not happening, there has already been useful clinical data).
We now also have several months of data from worldwide rollout, with multi-hundred-million doses administered, all of which is continuing to make these things look incredibly safe.
That's not enough for you? Do you need some sort of an absolute guarantee of safety handed down by god himself, amidst a raging pandemic?
There's no reason to think that there should be long term health consequences to these. We have lots of data saying short/mid term consequences are rare and mostly very mild, we have a fair body of data going back ten years which leads us to expect that mRNA vaccines are not long term dangerous as a category (or they would not be given their emergency authorisation)... at this point I think the judgement needs to be that any long term consequences that might appear are far less likely to be a problem than covid itself, yes, even for those age groups affected by pericarditis/myocarditis.
By the way, the "I would be willing to bet" is what I am talking about. We do not know, we can bet and all. All my comments started because I know that many people excluded the possibility that there could be any potential side-effects that may manifest a year from now or so. I am not talking against vaccination, just that we should not exclude this possibility. That really is all there is.
One could also argue that there's the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 will trigger an epidemic of extreme early-onset Alzheimer's in people who are currently suffering from long COVID. I don't think this is likely either, but I would argue it's significantly more so than an abstract unknown unknown about mRNA vaccine side effects surfacing in the future.
These mRNA vaccines are safe for children? How on earth would you know that if the vaccines have only been studied on a handful of healthy kids for a couple of months. Does nobody understand the amount of time needed to do this kind of study properly and thoroughly?
I'd also love some scientific studies that prove that the following claims are true, because as far as I know they aren't:
"No chance of wiping it out without everyone vaccinated."
"It's like wearing seatbelts, but for other people."
"Variants develop primarily in unvaccinated people"
"The main goal of all these actions is to end the pandemic in just a few years."
"In the UK, most people getting into hospitals now with severe Covid are young and unvaccinated"
Oh and I expect to be thoroughly downvoted for this because, you know, group think and all.