So even if vaccines don't prevent the transmission or protect from infection worse than being severely infected then you might treat them just as a way of making you survive your first infection so that first infection can protect you better from further infections. If we didn't have or use vaccines we'd eventually end up in the same place with nearly all people eventually contracting covid at least once, just with a little more damage.
Research on covid is not done. We need therapies for acute covid. We need a way to treat and prevent long covid.
[0] https://www.pharmacytimes.com/view/study-covid-19-reinfectio...
Brazillian variant of vovid reinfects one in 6 people previously infected with earlier variant: https://www.bmj.com/content/373/bmj.n1353
This is not clear at all - actually the opposite might be the case. Natural immunity focuses on a number of 'markers' that are more likely to change than the spike protein.
As far as I know we don't know yet. Here is a comparison with other vaccines [1].
[1] https://twitter.com/ENirenberg/status/1412865782862725125
https://swprs.org/us-vaccine-deaths-increasing-rapidly/
"the human population, as a result of policy decisions, will continue to have ... large numbers of unvaccinated among us"
You need to rethink this for several reasons:
1. It's logistically impossible for everyone to be vaccinated simultaneously. This is not the result of policy decisions, it's a simple matter of distribution and manufacturing. There will therefore always be large numbers of unvaccinated living alongside the vaccinated for any vaccine. If they don't work given that fact then they are useless and should be abandoned.
2. Prior vaccination campaigns have worked or even wiped out whole diseases, even when there are lots of people who weren't vaccinated. If the new "vaccines" cannot do this then they aren't actually vaccines at all.
3. The idea that vaccines only work if everyone has taken them is entirely unsupported by any evidence or sound biological theory, quite clearly would not meet the definition of a vaccine, and leads inevitably to evil totalitarianism in which people are forced to take an endless parade of injections regardless of whether they're at risk, regardless of the severity of the disease which is being treated and regardless of how many safety protocols were skipped.
Much less BCG or variola (pox).
Viruses like flu and coronaviruses, nigh impossible to eradicate.
1 and 3, sure. And mRNA vaccine is not particularly more dangerous than any other type. The cost-benefit is strongly on the side of vaccination there.
Unfortunately, there is evidence that trials under-state risks. Evidence for this is:
1. Safety notices for the vaccines have been edited post launch to start talking about risks of heart inflammation and other problems, which were not detected by the trials but are now common enough to justify people being warned about them.
2. Drug trials appear to regularly understate the scale of side effects and nobody can figure out why: https://sebastianrushworth.com/2021/07/19/do-drug-trials-und...
Additionally, the trials never formally completed, cannot now complete because the control groups have been vaccinated, and some of them excluded whole groups of people e.g. pregnant women, children and in some cases the elderly!
This leads to an absurd situation in which the US CDC is saying that the vaccine is safe for pregnant women simultaneous with Moderna starting trials in pregnant women (who were previously excluded).
And finally, putting all those problems to one side, the issue is actually relative risks. Even if the risk of a vaccine is low, even if similar to or higher than the risks of the thing it's trying to vaccinate you against, it may not make sense to take it. That is just basic cost/benefit analysis.
mRNA vaccine is not particularly more dangerous than any other type
I don't understand how that is consistent with the data from the various vaccine surveillance systems which show clearly that it's drastically more dangerous. It's also inconsistent with anecdotes that I've been hearing from people around me, of whom a disturbingly large number say that the vaccines made them very sick (i.e. they describe symptoms similar to that of COVID itself).
I read a lot of your other comments so far and I had a suspicion, but this lone comment of yours confirmed it for me. You have some basic internal fear of the vaccine so you've done a bunch of rationalizing to make it seem worse and confirm your own bias.
I've looked at the VAERS data this morning for the US and you have a much higher chance of getting hit by a car and dying, or as is the very prescient case, getting COVID and having more adverse affects from that than an adverse vaccination, but I'm not going to convince you of anything because of that basic fear you have.
a. Not very charitable.
b. Not the simplest possible explanation.
Occam would not approve.
The one source you provide is embarrassingly poorly founded. It takes garbage input sources, obscures even the meager data in them and then decreases the quality of the claims even further with misleading representations. Here's just one example to show explicitly what I'm taking about with my claim. "A recent analysis by researchers at Queen Mary University in London found that even in senior citizens, about 85% of deaths reported to VAERS were definitively, likely or possibly caused by the vaccine." That language implies heavily "85% scary!" when in fact that the claim by the paper is "15% were confirmed to have nothing to do with the vaccine" and as you read further their results show even less than that. I'm just going to go in order through my notes from a critical read of the paper for more background, these are not prioritized or meant to be hard exclusion criteria on their own but rather straws on the camels back. The project this paper was published under is not specialized in this area, making me suspicious that they are qualified for this analysis at all. "PAMBAYESIAN is a 3-year EPSRC funded project to develop a new generation of intelligent medical decision support systems based on Bayesian networks. The project focuses on home-based and wearable real-time monitoring systems for chronic conditions including rheumatoid arthritis, diabetes in pregnancy and atrial fibrillation. The project has the potential to improve the well-being of millions of people." Looking through through the credentials and publication history of all the authors seems to confirm that they may not have the relavant foundation for this work. There is absolutely no statistical analysis anywhere in the paper and the authors acknowledge their data set is what I would call almost but not quite entirely useless "This process is ongoing, as there are 1644 deaths in the dataset that have been reported in patients who had recently received their first or second COVID-19 vaccination, and over 28,000 serious adverse events that did not result in death. This interim results paper presents information on the first 250 reported deaths that have been reviewed and coded by our team. Obviously, these results cannot be generalised as the sample is heavily biased - these were all people vaccinated very early in the programme when only the elderly, those with significant or chronic health conditions and frontline health service staff were being vaccinated." And finally the actual claim that is attempted to be made by the paper authors is "But there are some important findings. that the only patients where a vaccine allergic reaction be ruled out as contributing to death were 34 (14%) who were all either already bedridden, at end of life, and expected to die anyway from a serious comorbid like lung cancer or were on palliative hospice care. We also found that for at least 13 of the 250 deaths (5%), a vaccine allergic reaction was indisputably the most likely direct cause for the symptoms and patient outcomes described." They found 13 very ill people whose deaths, in a third party's interpretation of case notes, were contributed to by an allergic reaction to receipt of the vaccine. 5% of the most delicate people had a normal reaction to receiving any vaccine and because of their extreme poor health or their quality of care were not able to be helped with standard intervention for such a reaction. Shocking stuff that.
I think you should take a serious critical look at this data source swprs.org and how much of things you think you know have been influenced by it.
Firstly, the claims aren't extraordinary. There is a long history of vaccines being suspended for being more dangerous than is worth it, for example here's a CNN archival story about that:
https://edition.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/04/30/swine.flu.1976/ind...
"ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) -- The man who led the response to the 1976 swine flu outbreak is defending the vaccination campaign that led to more deaths than the disease, but says he's sorry for the people killed or sickened ... the program was suspended after at least 25 people died from vaccine reactions"
In 2010 there was another Swine Flu scare but not much was learned: Pandemrix was authorized and sold in Europe but turned out to occasionally create narcolepsy in teenagers. Although rare, swine flu was sufficiently mild that this was much worse for the affected people than actually getting the disease would have been. There was a coverup and the true nature of what happened only came out 5 years later thanks to lawsuits.
So there's nothing odd about the idea that a vaccine may yield more injuries or deaths than it can save. It's happened before.
Now, I've already cited the evidence you require: the data from national vaccine reporting systems. That's the graph at the top of the page I linked. You appear to have simply ignored the graph and then gone off on some other link to a paper you found there, which isn't what I was referring to, and at any rate seems to actually support my point. Multiply the Y axis of the graph by 0.85 if you want - the numbers are still radically higher than the normal expected rate of vaccine side effects. Or don't. But actual government data cannot be handwaved away with an argument of the form, "some random paper looking at the data has some limitations that it openly admits to" because I wasn't basing my point on that paper to begin with.
You made a pretty explicit claim earlier in this thread "The mRNA vaccines are not "adequate": they are being treated by governments as if they aren't working whilst also being significantly more dangerous than every other vaccine programme out there by a long way". Talking about historic or generalized vaccine ROI is different and is a new claim that isn't really on topic. I have no interest in arguing that all vaccines have always been perfect or that you can't have a generalized concern. Your claim that current mRNA vaccines for an ongoing pandemic are not adequate and are dangerous is an extraordinary claim and do need evidence.
Which brings us back to the point. I went into the analysis of the VAERS data because it needs analysis. It is a fairly raw data set meant for usage and analysis by professionals. We pumped millions of data points in to it this year, seeing a spike doesn't mean anything without analysis. How many people out of the population who were vaccinated were expected to be dying of strokes and heart attacks in the same time period? Here's a great write-up that goes into the details: https://medium.com/microbial-instincts/underreporting-and-po...
1. Does it work? In the UK even people who have completed both rounds of vaccination are having restrictions imposed on them. Contact tracing has not been ended there and is now triggering a full blown "pingdemic" that is causing a generalized economic crisis in which supermarket shelves are emptying, port authorities are warning of further supply chain disruptions and TV shows have been knocked off the air. This is incompatible with the idea that vaccines work and very incompatible with the narrative that was previously being sold, that vaccines were a way out and would mark the end of the restrictions.
Hence, governments are acting as if the vaccines are not adequate solutions to the crisis.
2. Are they dangerous? You raise good questions. Unfortunately the article you link to is paywalled. However, I've also read deeper analyses of VAERS data + similar databases from other countries that look at this and conclude:
2a. Background reporting rates for other vaccines are similar to what would be expected normally. There is no evidence that current events are inflating the reporting rate (or decreasing it).
2b. Studies of reporting rates in pre-COVID years have indicated a very high rate of under-reporting. https://www.openvaers.com/images/r18hs017045-lazarus-final-r...
Fundamentally although the Y axis may not be accurate, the trend is hard to ignore. The data has gone vertical in 2021. Once massively increased awareness is excluded as a possibility, I don't see how other conclusions are possible.
At one point it claims the only vaccine to be withdrawn post-approval is for rotavirus. Perhaps he means, in the USA and only after VAERS was set up. There were other vaccines withdrawn post-rollout than that one. The CNN article I cited already is one American example but there are others. Note that "withdrawn" is a slightly vague standard, for example, in the Pandemrix case, German doctors refused to use it in Germany even though it had been approved elsewhere, which in hindsight turned out to be the right call. Does that count as withdrawn: hard to say.
My own views aren't exclusively based on VAERs. I am convinced there must be very widespread under-reporting because of how ideological vaccination has become. The reason I think this is that I keep encountering anecdotes in my daily life from people who had extremely severe reactions to the vaccine but are blowing it off as no big deal. I'm not seeking these anecdotes out. I don't ask people about their vaccines. Yet, I keep hearing about these problems anyway. For example:
Two neighbours of the parents of my partner, who both died after taking the vaccine.
A scientist I know was trying to convince me the vaccines are perfectly safe, then almost in the same breath admitted that it knocked him flat for days and made him so sick he could hardly move. That does not meet my definition of "safe".
A friend told me he'd been walking down the street when he overheard a conversation by a guy on a phone behind him. The guy was saying that someone in his close family had died days after taking the vaccine.
I had a similar experience: I overheard a conversation when people who knew each other bumped into each other near where I was sitting in a park. One of the women had clearly not been seen for a while because of severe reactions to her first dose. She described having high fever, difficulty breathing and being unable to leave her bed for a week. She also said she "thought she was dying".
Outside of daily life, I read a news story a few days ago about a guy whose wife died just days after taking the vaccine. She was perfectly healthy before, early 60s, no signs of any problems.
All this is really quite disturbing. I've never heard such a constant flow of stories about any other vaccine. Also, the symptoms people describe are very similar to actually having COVID itself, which is not a big surprise when you look at how the vaccines work. Actually the most disturbing thing is people's reactions to it. The guy whose wife died stressed in the news story that he's a big supporter of the vaccines, and just wanted people to know that some families are "affected" by it. The women who got so sick she thought she was dying went back for her second shot anyway. The scientist was telling me how perfectly, totally, undoubtably fine mRNA Tech is and how it also made him so sick he couldn't work. The point of the vaccines is to stop people getting sick! But, they've been presented as a moral issue, one of collectivist responsibility, and governments have all committed themselves to vaccines-or-bust. I quite simply do not believe we have anything approaching valid data on how dangerous these things are.
A protein in the Swine Fly virus triggered narcolepsy in some people. You can get exposed to this protein both from the Pandemrix vaccine, and from getting sick from Swine Flu. China didn't vaccinate, but there was a spike in narcolepsy cases in China, from people who were infected by the virus.
https://stm.sciencemag.org/content/7/294/294ra105
https://www.pnas.org/content/113/3/E368.short
The whole point of vaccines is that they are much better than getting the virus itself, and for the classical vaccines that established the reputation of the technique, that's definitely the case. For cases like swine flu and now it seems maybe COVID, it's not at all clear that the vaccines are universally preferable to the disease, especially for the young. For one, COVID is mostly not dangerous to people under the age of 65 or so. For another, the symptoms are often mild. And the symptoms of the vaccine are often quite intense. mRNA vaccines create the same kind of cell death as the disease itself, they aren't just presenting the immune system with inactivated virus and letting it target practice on the vaccine particles: they turn the bodies own cells into target practice. That's a fundamental difference in approach.
When it gets into these sorts of grey zones of a vaccine with strong side effects and a not very deadly virus (for certain risk groups), a repeat of the Pandemrix disaster is not out of the realm of possibility.
The number of ways in which we undertaking a natural experiment in viral evolution has been top-of-mind for me as well. But the greater issue in my view is not that the vaccines are imperfect. All vaccines are somewhat imperfect. On its own, I the mRNA vaccines were probably entirely adequate.
The problem is that the human population, as a result of policy decisions, will continue to have an immediately-adjacent reservoir of infection [0] with whom we are constantly in contact. I speak, of course, of the large numbers of unvaccinated among us. With vaccinated-to-vaccinated chains of transmission, there's a greater chance that a chain of vaccine-resistant variant will die out because the vaccine both reduces the risk of becoming infected [1] and the risk of transmitting infection [2].
But in a heterogeneous population, with large numbers of unvaccinated individuals, those chains of transmission can go on indefinitely, hopping back-and-forth between the two populations. That's a far greater risk here than the issue of a "leaky" vaccine. A vaccine might "leak" a little bit, yet the probabilities of infection and subsequent infection remain so low that all chains of transmission quickly terminate. Instead, we have a situation where the virus can slip into a separate (reservoir) population where it continues unchecked.
That, in my view, is the real risk to furthering infection.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_reservoir
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/p0607-mrna-reduce-ri...
[2] https://sporevidencealliance.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/T...