No doubt this will be the case for some. So, you've found a logical flaw in people's stated reasons for not wanting a vaccine. How does that help anything? In these kinds of debates, the actual goals or beliefs of both sides often differ from what they say.
For example, the government being able to tell you what to do, vs. it not.
People end up locking in to trivialities like approval or some study, but they just obscure the real debate. Doing more to get the tradeoffs we are making into the open, and talk plainly about what people are being asked to do, why, and what their rights and options are, is much more valuable IMO than trying to find clever flaws in the reasoning of either side. Flaws are there, and obvious, but generally not central to anyone's core thesis, and almost certainly not going to sway anybody. They just let people score cheap shots against their opponents and pump up their own supporters.
Not that this is a silver bullet that automatically leads to peace and harmony, but it's a step in the right direction.
A lot of things, but just the top two would be enough:
1) Being able to sue. If you can sue J&J for baby powder, should be able to sue Pfizer for vaccines if anything goes wrong.
2) Falsifiability in government actions. Many rights have been taken away (some permanently) by saying "we just need to do this and then it will all be over" like "a few weeks to flatten the curve", "the last lockdown", and "x% vaccinated and we'll be back to normal".
But when they don't work, the people are blamed, more rights are taken and more restrictions imposed. It's never that the actions were wrong.
I expect something like if "70% of people are vaccinated then we expect no more than 5000 cases per day" and if the statement turns out to be false there will be no more vaccine impositions because it clearly will have turned out to be wrong.
If something doesn't work you shouldn't double down.
You cannot, with 100% accuracy, model a virus that is mutating in a population that includes the entire planet. We have things we know worked in the past, we try them, and we then modify our next move based on the results. We don't say "well we got that one wrong so now we're just not going to try anything". If every scientist took the approach you're suggesting we'd still be eating raw meat and living in caves.
Why is suing vital? What's insufficient about the existing National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program? https://www.hrsa.gov/vaccine-compensation/index.html (I'm genuinely unfamiliar with any flaws it might have)
> Many rights have been taken away (some permanently)
What rights have been permanently removed? For that matter, what RIGHTS have been even temporarily suspended?
I could say I have a right to breathe air and someone would probably come around and tell me I'm wrong, but most people have some intuition for what a "natural" right is, and bristle when something encroaches on those.
If you experience severe enough side-effects from the vaccine to warrant a lawsuit, then you are still entitled to sue for compensation. The only thing that has changes is the entity who you are suing.
The Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program makes this process much easier than a traditional lawsuit, as you merely have to convince a judge that your symptoms were likely caused by the vaccine. If they agree, you get paid.
If you sued Pfizer, then you'd probably be in a class action, going up against some of the best lawyers in the world, in a case that would drag out for a decade or more, likely have no real say in the case strategy, and would just have to accept whatever agreement the class representative agrees to.
I know not everyone has the same set of restrictions on them, so I'm genuinely trying to understand if I'm missing something about how other areas are behaving. I know Australia is at the "papers, please" curfew stage, and that definitely bothers me a lot, but I haven't heard of anything like that in the USA.
Maybe the slope into authoritarianism is actually slippery.
Max compensation is $250k. Life insurance values my life far more. Documents are under seal. Payouts are paid by the tax payer, not the manufacturers. Cases are heard by HHS and defended by DOJ (more taxes footing the bill). HHS has repeatedly refused to add certain injuries to their compensation tables even after CDC directed research indicates that such injuries have been proven to be causal (eg: motor tics in those that received thimerosol containing vaccines). Most cases now go years before any decision is made when the original stated purpose of the program was speedy settlements (6 months or less). The only expert witnesses that might be allowed to speak in secret vaccine court will likely be the scientists that were paid to design the vaccine in question by industry. Doctors that have testified against industry in this court (and others like it in other nations) have had their careers destroyed by retaliatory tactics.
I find it quite funny and sad that you need to ask “what’s wrong with this special, secret court?” What’s NOT wrong with a special, secret court designed to protect a massive industry? NO PRODUCT CLASS should be protected in this manner.
I do think that given my own evaluation of the risks and rewards, the NVICP is perfectly sufficient for my own needs, but I can certainly see how one would be opposed to this on a systemic level, or if you believe the risk-reward ratio skews differently
How do you reach this conclusion?
At a max $250k per life, paid through a secret court with the deck stacked against the plaintiff, it doesn't appear to be sufficient for anyone's needs.
Yeah, there's a tiny risk that I'll end up in a situation where I get screwed over, but I'm significantly more likely to suffer harm from Covid.
Your own calculations will vary, of course - this is just the math given my own risk factors.
The quantity of money required to support my family in the event of my death is not affected by the odds of my death.
Whether I'm the perfect image of health or an obese, chainsmoking, binge drinker, the mortgage bill is always the same amount.
Well, I feel like the latter is a much better deal, even if it's still not ideal.
Understanding that base fear will help bridge the divide between groups.
- Fear, hesitancy about potential long term risks.
- Resistance to government mandating a vaccine (freedom, low trust in government, other options not being considered)
- Resistance to the cultural paradigm of "un-vaccinated = bad/deplorable person"
- Belief that the risk of COVID is already low (at least for them)
It is literally a carrot/stick routine. Do what I want? Get a carrot. Don't do what I want? I'll beat you with the stick of public shaming.
This site is the only public forum I've seen reasoned debate on. Everywhere else and debate/dissent are actively shut down. Any information that conflicts with the seeming narrative is made to disappear.
For example, major hospital/health orgs that have stated in the past that masks don't slow viral spread have removed that data in the complete absence of randomized, controlled trials showing that masks actually work. In fact, meta studies have routinely shown that masks don't work to prevent viral spread [0].
[0]https://www.city-journal.org/do-masks-work-a-review-of-the-e...
I posted in an /r/NFL thread saying that asking every single QB if they are vaccinated, and then frothing at the mouth when they decline to answer, is mostly nothing but a witch hunt.
I received a permanent ban with the message from the mod "anti-vaxx moron". I'm not anti-vaxx, and I'm not a moron, but this is generally concerning behavior about the state of discussion surrounding Covid and the censorship taking place online. You aren't allowed to have an opinion that isn't "Vaxx up and mask up and harass anyone who doesn't".
You can verify that they and a few other websites changed the definition by checking archive.org
I'm not sure I'd feel more comfortable with the mRNA stuff being called something different, though.
I'm low risk, I wear a.mask everywhere, always, I rarely leave the house, my "city" has less than 500 people in it, and I have disinfectant and UV lights for deliveries. I go out in the very early morning or very late night, once a month to go shopping. I "work from home". My wife cannot be vaccinated at this time, either. Just a couple more data points.
People are bad at optimizing for low and long term risks, but doing something knowing it's bad for you is different than being anxious about what unknown effects a treatment might have.
By the time group 2 catches up (because years have gone by of the vaccine not causing widespread problems) the threat is gone. Meanwhile the animosity has not truly been diminished because the first group will feel the second is responsible for insert issue pertaining to millions of people willingly not getting vaccinated that caused them pain/suffering.
It's almost like many people are "worried" about "long term effects" as just a smoke-screen to run out the clock on the issue...
A recent study (last week) came out showing after three months it starts wearing and you need to get another vaccine. You will have different people at various levels of vaccines shots (1 to 3 and by Jan you could need a fourth). What being vaccinated means based on the number of shots and where you are in the wearoff cycle makes the vac vs unvac divided not based on reality. If you had one shot got a side effect and decided not to get the next shot where does that person fit?
The two groups(Those opposed to vaccination due to potential long term effects and those in favor of vaccination immediately) cannot come to a meeting of the minds. Both sides see a potential existential threat that they're prioritizing that makes them diametrically opposed to the other point of view ("if you don't get the vaccine today you're actively spreading the plague" vs "if I get the shot, my blood will clot and I'll be sterile"). The truth is somewhere in the middle.
The whole issue with vaccination is that of threat perception. Everyone is building hypothetical models for the future based, mostly, on personal feeling and enough data points from experts to justify that feeling.
Again: There are a number of people who feel that the threat of the virus is less than the threat of the vaccine and are thus using whatever means presently available to them to justify to others why they believe that, just as there are people who feel that the virus is a greater threat than the cure.
I think that statement captures the divide. The belief that the experts have been shutdown in favour of topdown policies means trusting a select few experts who have used top down politices to shutting down discussion and threaten careers for those who do not tow the line. How do you get past that one side has total faith in the current crop of acceptable experts and the other sees them acting in favour of someone else's agenda thus has little faith in those experts.
Which is why I said that you can't bridge this gap. This is the point where "polite discourse" to try and convince people ends. There's no conversation to be had to convince someone to get the vaccine if they're in this line of thought, you can only mandate it with some sort of penalty in place for non-compliance. They are aware that there is a risk in existing unvaccinated, but they see a larger risk elsewhere in the potential side effects.
How do you convince someone something will or won't happen in the future when it represents an idea completely contrary to their worldview? I don't know, and if I did I'd be too rich to post on HN.
When it comes to the vaccine, I got the first shot (Moderna) and had such a terrible week following it that my doctor was fairly convinced I probably already had COVID. Everyone I know had a much stronger reaction to the second shot than to the first, so I've opted to remain partially vaccinated.
With Delta in full swing, I'm now reconsidering that, but am making arrangements in advance to be out of work for another week or two, as that's my expectation going in.
All of that said, the folks I know who are unvaccinated have either already had COVID, so they're just trusting their immune system, or they are in a relatively low-risk group, and are concerned about long-term vaccine side-effects. All of them are fully vaccinated in all other regards, just not with COVID. Make of that what you will, but very few of them fall into the caricatures I see bandied about in the comments here.
Incidentally, I'm also concerned about long-term side effects, but I figure at this point, we'll have to solve that problem as a society, if they ever show up enmasse.
Counter-anecdata: everyone I know (in the UK[1]) had a much milder reaction to the second than the first - first one knocked most people out for a day or two; second one was half a day in the worst cases, couple of hours in the main.
[1] Which means AZ or J&J, I think, not Moderna. But it's anecdata, it's never going to be 100% helpful.
But diseases don’t work like this. If you get sick, you will get others sick. If you get very sick, you will occupy a hospitable bed. Given current hospital utilization rates, this could well end in a sick person being turned away.
Given the societal costs, it seems fair to me to ask for a stronger justification than “I don’t think the virus will hurt me”
In fact, everything you do outisde of your workhours is your personal risk, so it needs to be banned I guess.
Sounds fine to me. I am blind and can not do most of the fancy recreational activities you sighted people are so fond of. So why should I care. In fact, I should immediately start a petition that makes your lifes more dull and miserable. But guess what, no. Thats not my thing. I am not an asshole.
We do outlaw almost every sort of behavior that risks OTHERS safety.
>Almost every sport except chess bears a risk comparable to what you say above.
I'm not aware of any sport which is mandatory, as far as I know everyone participating is doing so willingly.
>And most recreational activities also bear a risk that you might have an accident, which could put some stress on the people working at the hospital.
Again, I'm not aware of any recreational activity that is a required activity. I'm also not aware of any that are participated in by so many people that is simultaneously so risky that we have an issue with ICU beds. Can you name one? We have mountains of data showing that covid outbreaks stress hospital systems and are in fact doing that right now. I'm not aware of any evidence that sports or recreational activities do the same, but I'm open to learning.
>Heck, the helicopter pilot could crash while they bring you to safety, so you implicitly killed them.
The helicopter pilot voluntarily signed up to be a helicopter pilot, nobody forced him to do so.
>Sounds fine to me. I am blind and can not do most of the fancy recreational activities you sighted people are so fond of. So why should I care. In fact, I should immediately start a petition that makes your lifes more dull and miserable. But guess what, no. Thats not my thing. I am not an asshole.
Well, you're comparing recreational activities that carry low risk and have 0 history of causing an issue with ICU beds, to a disease which has an extremely high transmission rate, and is provably causing issues with ICU beds. So it makes your arguments seem rather silly.
Do you claim you receive substantial benefits from not getting a shot? Because I claim society gets substantial benefits from you getting vaccinated.
You’re trying to make this a binary thing, but we live in a society where collectively we try to make small trades in liberty for collective benefit.
I do expect you not to drive 60MPH in front of my house where my children play. I do not expect you to give up tennis.
I am willing to retract my retarded claim if you do the same.
And driving slower almost certainly takes more of your time every year than getting a shot. Both measures save other people’s lives. I don’t think you have a leg to stand on here.
And yes, of course, with a different situation, my decision might be different. If covid were as harsh as our media and government claimed at the beginning of the first lockdown, I would certainly get a shot. However, it turned out the media and government have overstated the danger, apparently to achieve compliance. This sort of lie (we were told "everyone will know someone who died") was my wakeup call. I was originally mislead and expected a deathrate of 1%. As it turns out, almost only the elderly die, and the deathrate (including the elderly) is around 0.1%. Wrong order of magnitude for real panic on my side.
Regarding side-effect-free - not sure anyone ever claimed that? I understand that the relative risk is very low when compared to the risks associated with the disease itself - even for those that might expect milder symptoms from covid. I think people (myself included) are just really really bad at assessing these kind of risk/reward equations - I don't think we have the right tools for it, and our assessments are polluted by our personal history/culture/biases (in every direction).
I can't agree with your assessment of overstating the danger - the full hospital wards and large death numbers at the height of the pandemic before vaccines are enough reasons for me to accept that the costs are high enough for the small risk/inconvenience I'd pay personally.
I also know personally people in public health and can vouch for the sincerity of their (very) educated advice. If anything they have been consistently critical of governments being too slow to accept their recommendations (due to political pressures). I'd feel foolish for thinking I would know better than they who have spent their entire career in this area. I know that's an appeal to authority which isn't always warranted - but I'm comfortable with landing on that side of the fence.
To be fair, this is what the vaccines do.
Well the main feature of the vaccine over the actual virus is that the vaccine doesn't give you covid. The vaccine doesn't cover all of the multitude of compounds your body might recognize on the virus, but it covers enough for most people to build a better immune response to the actual virus than nothing. There is the issue that the viral strains are mutating and so over time so that a recently-vaccinated person today will probably do worse than a recently-vaccinated person 6 months ago, but there's not really much you can do about that.
I never said that humanity couldn't survive without a vaccine. Clearly we can. We also can survive with rotten meat and with poor shelter and with rampant war and famine. Sure a larger portion of us would die, but humanity would certainly survive.
Anyway my point was that when you're infected with a virus, your body basically builds up the ability to recognize certain proteins that the virus expresses and uses that to fight it off. It takes time to build up the ability to fight it off. The vaccine exposes you to basically the same proteins so that your body is able to identify and fight off the virus more quickly after infection. So really the vaccines are just priming your immune system so that it can better do its job.
I'm not really sure what your point is. We shouldn't try to help those with weaker immune systems survive? How far should we take this? Should we as a society not make an effort to help the physically disabled, the old, the blind, etc. survive? Looking to the wild, basically no members of those groups survive. Is that what we should aim for?
If my ability to make a living will be held hostage based on my vaccination status, or if https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/4980 gets passed, I will change my mind and get the vaccine just so I can gtfo of here.
What the question your parent poses can do is get to the root of the objection your conversation partner has. "What would make you change your mind" forces the conversation in the direction of uncovering the true source of the disagreement. It helps to avoid talking about "symptoms" or issues that you might find important but are not important to your partner. It helps avoid talking past each other. It helps identify what issues are important to the other person.
If there is nothing that will change one's position, it's not worth engaging because the outcome is set.
Sounds like you should take a look at Street Epistemology. It is a modern version of the Socratic method that asks questions similar to that. The goal is not to make your interlocutor change their mind necessarily, but instead to explore the reasons for the beliefs they hold and whether they may be sufficently justified or not.
I hope that this latest change sways some people but I don't think it will be a lot.
Unless you’re dealing with an extraordinary individual or the issue is relatively trivial then you won’t be told sufficient reasons. A lot of what motivates us is deep down and dumb and we rarely want to admit it even if we’re aware of it which is even rarer. I find that examining reasons to change my own mind is much more fruitful because it’s harder to lie to myself albeit still far too easy.
This is a good example of what I was talking about. You don’t trust big pharma? Most people who say that will still pop some ibuprofen etc when they get a headache so really they do trust big pharma when it suits them. The real reason is deeper down.
On the other hand, any time I see a pharmaceutical ad for some new wonder drug, my incientive-caused-bias hackles are immediately raised.
Clearly Ibuprofen is a product of big pharma, therefore if it were merely distrust of big pharma then using it and all other ordinary drugs like it would be out of the question. Additionally, there are big lobby interests for products and services we all use all the time. Why make exceptions for them? Not trusting big pharma is post-facto rationalization as reasonable caution evaporated sometime before the first 500 million people got vaccinated. No, there are simpler underlying reasons like being disproportionately afraid of the vaccine vs the virus or not feeling any risk and not caring about the risk of others etc.
Im sure it’s involved to some degree but I don’t think anyone has sufficient data to know by how much. It could be insinuated that the demonization of the unvaccinated and the call for the use of force against them is an expression of narcissism by the vaccinated who are frustrated that their “genius” is being ignored. Both accusations have equal plausibility and lack of data.
These are too sophisticated reasons. More realistic renditions might be “that other tribe gets vaccinated loudly therefore I won’t” and “I’m strong, only the weak get vaccinated.” Of course the same in-group dynamics etc motivate the vaccinated and we’d be lying to ourselves if we thought our actions are purely rational and charitable.
For me number one would be: if the CDC starts tracking re-infection rate in the non-vaccinated, and puts that data front and center as key KPIs on all their releases.
Yes, so we can deduce remaining susceptible.
The basic model in a pandemic is SIR. Susceptible, Infected, Recovered. Vaxed is a secondary factor.
We live in crazy land when I have to explain why we should be tracking Susceptible (computable when you know number infected and reinfection rate). (not to pick on you, just speaking about general trends I'm seeing)
Imagine if in computing someone asked, "why should we measure RAM usage?"
It's like, the very very basics.
Without that, you cannot accurately model and forecast the pandemic. And you can see for yourself how poorly the CDC is still modeling this when they said "vax work great! no masks!" and then "shit! vax don't work as great as we said, masks back on!" It's like they are pretending that natural immunity without a vax does not exist. One of the very basics in epi, both theoretically and empirically from mountains of data. It's crazy town, I tell you.
At the individual level you should know this to make the proper conditional decisions. There is scant benefit to be had from the vax if you were infected and recovered naturally (and yes, I've read the Kentucky study, and if that's someone's main argument they're a moron).
The moment you start talking about techniques you've already objectified the person across you to something to be finessed over, and as such less than a full person.
So many of our recent social-media extremized public debates escalate to the point of denying or diminishing the other side's personhood. They are an "obstacle" to overcome for some greater purpose, and thus we "must" manipulate, coerce or the very least impress conclusions down their throats.
The meta-context is that today we are all more psychologically fragile and the breadth of data points we have to reconcile gets wider (in no small part thanks to engagement metrics optimizations). We all turn into fanatics of some sort or other, fueled by this anxiety, including that of self-doubt. At no point we are incentivized to participate in the process of rationality together, we're only incentivized to willfully assert our own conclusions.
I see most of the "resistance" as an acting out as a protest for having been left out of this process, including having been honored in anxieties. Notice I have said nothing about the truth value of conclusions, nor am trying to draw a false equivalency of "all-sides-ism", because the sense of participation, or lack thereof, is orthogonal to the truth of content, but hurts just as much when neglected.
We've forgot how to be a fellowship of people who share similar fates and see each other as such, we've turned into mere proposition debating machines.
There's nothing about any sort of technique that is inherent to objects and not people. Techniques are something used to achieve a goal, and if a person is involved in that goal, there's nothing wrong with using that sort of verbiage.
>thus we "must" manipulate, coerce or the very least impress conclusions down their throats.
You've made any attempt to change someone's mind out to automatically be something that's naturally evil. Ridiculous.
That’s what turning a person to an object is; to reduce them to something to achieve your goal over/with/through.
> You've made any attempt to change someone's mind out to automatically be something that's naturally evil. Ridiculous.
Ridiculousness is originating from your misframing which ignores the condition of participation vs instrumentalization I’ve laid out.
To give an example to non-objectifying persuasion; people pay money to get their own minds changed through therapy and it still takes years with no guaranteed success. This is obviously not “evil” (at least not inherently) because it is participatory and comes from a place of love and growth and alleviation of suffering.
Because it's not like they live in a representative democracy, right?
I agree, engaging people is a good way to go. I don't know any anti-vaxxers personally, so I have to actively work to remind myself they might not all have the same reasons as the ones I know impersonally (who all happen to be full of misinfo, like Eric Clapton, et al.).
There are no silver bullets that lead to peace and harmony, obviously, but a greater understanding of each other is good for many reasons.
It boils down to a really muddy mix of small things that all sum up to a decision against it.
For instance, I'm not the risk group and, due to being super medically conservative for _everything_ (to a fault!), I tend to not take medical interventions I don't strictly require.
I think that the vaccines are overwhelmingly safe from an absolute risk perspective, but among the least safe things we've deployed into wide usage from a relative risk perspective. It's tough for me to convince myself to take an intervention I don't need. Stack onto this things like the PREP act, guaranteed orders, big pharma's history, this being the first mRna vaccine to get through Phase III, and more hesitancy gets added on my side. As data from other countries rolls in, the efficacy side is also interesting, but that's a different topic.
Finally, there's just general disposition. Whether lockdowns, restrictions, or vaccinations, people seem to fall into one of two groups: those who favor public heath above all else, and those who favor personal liberty above all else. Due to some wrongthink, I fall into the latter camp. The behavior of those in the former camp pushes me away from my medically hesitant "wait and see" position, into one of, frankly, staunch dismissal out of pure curiosity to see how willing society is to marginalize those who made a 'wrong' medical decision.
Also, do keep in mind the premise here is that if enough of us get vaccinated as fast as possible, we can, among possibly other things, stop the spread of the disease, stop variants from forming and also lighten the load of hospitals so they can treat more people, including those without COVID. I'm all for curiosity, but is it worth it in this case? Also, you can still observe other peoples' behaviors if you get the vaccine. Even if you want to just observe the people you're close with interact with you directly, you can get it and not tell them.
I'm not sure what you mean? I have no control over how another group chooses to discriminate.
>is there someone you trust with a credentialed medical opinion you can talk to about this instead, like your family physician?
There's this presumption that people who are making the 'wrong' choice are simply uninformed or haven't sought 'qualified' medical advice. It's a bit condescending tbh.
To answer the question directly, yep. I've spoken to my doctor about it. We'll probably talk about it again next time I go in for blood work. His recommendation is his recommendation.
You said you were less likely to get the vaccine because of how people in an out group were behaving. That's what I mean.
The issue is that the behavior of this other group isn't benign. It comes with a very real "comply or else", which already affects my ability to participate in society due to a particular transient medical choice. It's a tough sell that medical decisions are best made under threats of harm (legal, livelihood, societal participation, etc..).
I think it's fairly natural when someone tries to coerce you into something to reject it on principle alone. There's big difference from "you should stop eating so much McDonalds because of downstream effects on the medical system" and "you WILL stop eating McDonalds or we will take away your autonomy to do so." I will not be forced into medical decisions by a mob threatening harm. If/when I get the vaccine, it will because my view of the risks/need ticked in favor of it (in theory anyways).
Eric Clapton took both doses. He suffered some severe adverse reactions. What’s the misinfo?
I haven't had the second jab. I've had nothing but pressure from almost everyone I know to get the second shot, and am still on the fence.
Instead, they are treated as if they are a threat. As if they are the ones who are overstressing the health care systems. When often instead they are the frontline workers these systems depend on. Many give care in nursing homes and at hospitals (in the case of nurses, a large percentage of whom still refuse the vax).
How many health care resources does the average unvaxxed healthy 26 year old consume? A lot less than the chronic smoker, the morbidly obese, the elderly, etc.
I'm sorry that people in your family are being treated like a threat. Can you elaborate on that? I also feel for those if there are issues at work, and I really think US should mandate paid leave to take the vaccine (at a minimum), but that's another discussion. :)
This report details the findings of a case-control evaluation of the association between vaccination and SARS-CoV-2 reinfection in Kentucky during May–June 2021 among persons previously infected with SARS-CoV-2 in 2020. Kentucky residents who were not vaccinated had 2.34 times the odds of reinfection compared with those who were fully vaccinated
I understand that you believe that unvaxxed are where the mutations happen. Do you have any peer reviewed studies showing this to be the case? We know from experience with antibiotics that the opposite is true. Humans devise a treatment, the pathogen encounters that treatment, then mutates to circumvent it. Of course I'm a layman so if anyone knows why the opposite would be the case for COVID-19 or viruses in general, I'm happy to be educated on the matter.
I do believe the carrot works better than the stick, but I don't think this goes as far as being "treated like a threat".
I understand that you believe that unvaxxed are where the mutations happen.
I didn't say this and this is not my full belief :( . Mutations can happen at any new infection (including breakthrough infections, yes). So, the premise is to reduce new infections as much and as fast as possible. I think we're on the same page that vaccination greatly reduces your chance of infection (even more than having previously been infected before). Getting the most people vaccinated, as fast as possible, is the most efficient way to achieve that.
Overall, though, you've gotten pretty far away from the original question, "Well, what would it take for you to change your mind [to get the vaccine]?"
I will continue to disagree with your one size fits all prescription. It would be trivial to allow an antibody test in lieu of vaccination.
Responding to your edit: I already answered the original question. Allow an antibody test to prove immunity. Stop demanding vax as if it's the only way to acquire immunity.
It's quite funny to me how presumptuous covid vaxx advocates are. They seem to be saying, "you're going to have to relent eventually. What do I need to say to speed that up?". As if there aren't people who will listen to what they have to say yet continue to refuse and have perfectly valid reasons to do so.
That's not an answer to the original question. That's an excuse to not take the vaccine, and I've already addressed how these two things aren't the same.
If 999/1000 of vaccinated people were uninfected while only 998/1000 unvaccinated (but recovered) people were uninfected that would amount to that 2x improvement.
When you look at the error bars on those numbers (due to the ridiculously low statistics of the study) the conclusion becomes even more suspect.
Frankly a study involving less than a thousand participants is pretty poor justification to strip others of their rights.
"The key to unlock NYC" just reeks of cheesy marketing department brainstorming doesnt it?
All that being said, I don't think scare mongering about social credit systems is helpful in this discussion. Most I've talked to who support vax pass are resolutely opposed to China-style social credit systems and I believe such a system would be difficult to implement in the U.S.
I've been living normally without lockdowns or masks for about 18 months now. So has the rest of my country Sweden. So excuse me if I'm not running around fearing for my life anymore. I'm pretty much convinced we all have natural antibodies by now.
What convinced you? Because the upward trend of new cases worldwide (including Sweden) doesn't convince me.
A vaccine that (1) did not use cell lines from aborted fetuses at any point in its discovery, development, testing, or production, and that (2) has been studied for 10 years to determine long-term safety and efficacy like we would do with any other vaccine.
What would it take to change your mind?
In general terms, I would need the society at large to get off the moral high horse and engage in an honest cost/benefit analysis of all covid measures.
Isn't it hypocritical that people accuse the young not taking the vaccine of being selfish, while hoarding the vaccines away from vulnerable people in poorer parts of the world?
It can only hypocritical if it is the same people making both arguments.
That said, I'm absolutely getting _my_ booster as soon as I'm eligible. That isn't hypocritical; at that point the decision was made and if I don't take the booster it won't be sent to sub-Saharan Africa.
This line of thought leads to the sentence immediately following the one you quoted: if there are a large percentage of people who were hesitant due to sincere safety concerns, the mountain of data showing that the vaccines are low-risk will translate into more of them getting vaccinated but if they're motivated by factors which are not affected by scientific data then the primary mechanism for ending the pandemic will be the kinds of requirements which are made possible by full approval. That either gets people vaccinated or removes them from many contexts where they pose risk to everyone else.
Right now there are a lot of concerns raised about vaccine safety on political and social media. Some of those are devout anti-vaccination activists but I believe that they are still a relatively small fraction of the hesitant. When not being vaccinated comes with a direct personal cost we'll see how sincere those beliefs are.
I have a friend in this group. There was no logical reason to not get vaccinated, her parents just kept regurgitating all the blatantly false conspiracy theories they were reading on the internet. The amount of times I heard "I'd get it if Bill Gates weren't involved, he's trying to track us" made my head spin.
Now work is requiring it to stay employed, so she's getting it. I'm both sad that's what it took, and happy that it was enough to overcome irrational fear mongering on the world wide web.
Telling someone you'll fire them if they don't get a shot isn't quite holding them down and jabbing them but it's not really a free personal choice either. Many people aren't in a position to just hop down the street into a new job.
This. One hundred times, this. I realize in many regards they already tell us what to do, and that does not make the next time more palatable.
Is government regulatory authority really the "real debate"? That too seems like an projected excuse, trivially proven by the fact that the same people who are most invested in the libertarian framing are the ones who believe a secret government agent has been working for the last four and a half years to extrajudiciously round up pedophiles and liberals.
I'm not saying that's what you think. Maybe you're a pure libertarian. But a whole ton of people on "your side" of this debate are quite clearly not serious about regulatory overreach.
FWIW, that's not even close to true among the Libertarians I know. And as a Libertarian myself, I know quite a few. The set of people who "believe a secret government agent has been working for the last four and a half years to extrajudiciously round up pedophiles and liberals" may include a few actual Libertarians, but I would posit that most of the so-called "Libertarians" in that group have only the thinnest grasp on what the Libertarian perspective is about, probably haven't read/studied Libertarian ideology extensively (or anything else for that matter), and are merely repeating a few superficial talking points they heard somewhere that may - by happenstance - align with Libertarian perspectives.
But a whole ton of people on "your side" of this debate are quite clearly not serious about regulatory overreach.
Those people sound more like the fringe of the "Tea Party" movement... populist, anti-establishment and perhaps "anti government" only in the sense that they don't like the current government. But these aren't, by and large, people who have rational, well-reasoned, comprehensive arguments for the need to reduce the size and scope of government across the board.
YMMV, of course.
Yes, but obviously that's not a representative sample. My point was that the population of genuine libertarians for whom this seems like a first principles argument is dwarfed by the general population of Q-adjacent social conservatives who are happy to adopt libertarian framing but really just want the government to do what they want.
Gotcha. Yes, agreed. Which is unfortunate. :-(
Obviously there are exceptions. Some people can objectively look at the situation and come to the conclusion that there are good reasons to start on both sides, and it really depends on your priorities. But those people are not part of the noise, it is the people who are desperate to feel part of a group who are the loudest.
For me the major issue with the vaccine is the extremely fast track from inventing it to getting it out the door.
An FDA approval will not change my mind on the safety of the vaccine, only time can do that.
By that i mean that we need more time to assess the long-term effects, something that many pro-vaccine people seem unwilling to accept. That is unfortunate.
You seem to be saying that the only issue is a question of time. Be specific: how much time? Will you say a specific number? “I will accept an mRNA-based vaccine if it has been around, and proven safe, for x years.”
Until it makes it into Debian stable repositories.
I think the part that seem hypocritical is that people that I know don't apply the same rigor in other parts of their life. They use recreational drugs that are sourced from who knows where with no clinical trials and a high percentage of adverse reactions even amongst our small community.
What's the alternative?
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/08/20/1029628...
> and the rate of serious cases among unvaccinated people in <<the under-60 crowd>> (3.2 per 100,000)
So .18% for the most at-risk portion of the unvaccinated. This is the latest data on Delta from the most vaccinated country in the world.
Besides that, just their overall fatality rate beats your numbers, let alone serious cases.
And at the same time not forcing everyone to take the vaccine.
As an example Denmark will reach about 75% vaccinated without any mandates, though a Corona passport will be in effect until October 2021.
That is one of the better ways of handling it in my opinion.
And on top of that, countries like Denmark have much higher levels of social trust than countries like the US.
BTW, if you /don't/ get the vaccine, you'll still almost-certainly get covid antibodies eventually, via contracting the virus. As a reminder, the virus itself has not been FDA approved, and is known to have both short and long-term harmful side effects. The vaccine is many orders of magnitude safer than the virus.
However, I think most of us would agree that literally vaccinating people by force would be wrong. So I also don't think it's unreasonable to be at least a bit discomfited when some combination of government at multiple levels and employers make it harder for unvaccinated people to earn a living and participate in society. Even if at the end of the day I approve of many of those requirements--for example I need to prove vaccination status to go to a planned industry event next month which seems very reasonable--I certainly take no joy in such coercion and recognize that it is further polarizing.
Sure it's just "consequences" but those consequences are such that it's also not really a choice.
I am sick and tired of people believing that their "rights" are more important than public health. I would very much wish that people would recognize this for themselves, but I don't see anything inherently wrong with forcing people to comply if they don't. We've done this for decades already; for example, many/most/(all?) school districts in the US require certain vaccinations[0] for children, else they are not permitted to go to school (and in many places, not sending your children to school, without other arrangements, is illegal, so they are de-facto forced to comply, absent allowed religious/medical exemptions).
Sure, you might say that the scope of some of these new and proposed vaccination rules around COVID go much further, but I don't see a material difference. If we haven't been up in arms about requirements around childhood vaccinations, I don't think we can reasonably be upset about businesses requiring their employees to be vaccinated against COVID.
At this point my patience with the vaccine "hesitant" is gone. Unless you have a valid medical reason, if you are refusing to get vaccinated, you are actively inviting great harm on the health of your community, and that needs to stop. I do agree that literal vaccination by force would be going too far. But I am absolutely thrilled that my city requires vaccination for many indoor activities right now, and requires employees at those indoor businesses to be vaccinated, and that many private businesses are implementing their own vaccination requirements. It's the right thing to do, full stop.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/imz-managers/laws/state-reqs.ht...
You're quite underestimating how quickly sweeping away humans' rights for "the greater good" turns bad. I'm sure China is justifying the Uyghur camps with your exact sentence.
Here's some history... Basically, the US Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed that states can take strong measures under the 10th Amendment, and the Commerce Clause can be used for federal interventions.
https://www.americanbar.org/news/abanews/publications/yourab...
[on edit: ALSO, wtf: vaccine refusal isn't a human right... In fact, ensuring vaccination helps satisfy Article 25 of the UN Declaration.]
In this case what is coercion or "consequences" of choosing to say no to the vaccine, will turn into something entirely different.
Here is one example on the subject of contact tracing for Covid and how it can be abused:
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-israel-seeks-to...
Let me ask you this one thing: if I have antibodies already, do you consider that a valid medical reason?
To be honest, if not, then I feel like you are not arguing in good faith.
I wouldn't be surprised to see that Denmark does the same, and more, if vaccinations number don't reach the thresholds needed to prevent healthcare systems from collapsing.
And you should know that Denmark is far from as "laissez faire" as many Americans imagine. For example even before Covid they were enforcing some very harsh social measures targeting self-isolating communities, in order to maintain social cohesion, for example.
We are way past the time frame for long-term effects to manifest themselves for a corona-like vaccine.
Your priors have to be absolutely outrageous if based on the currently available data you think the risks are even within an order of magnitude.
Of course, but it's a lot worse when a cure causes issues. The point of medicine is to "first, do no harm".
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/08/20/1029628...
b) Isn't that "per 100,000 inhabitants", not "per 100,000 who catch the disease"?
People who argue against vaccines don't seem to think enough about that aspect.
No need to double up on the unknown risks of you already have immunity.
https://www.uab.edu/reporter/resources/be-healthy/item/9544-...
"This is particularly true of the mRNA vaccines. mRNA degrades incredibly rapidly. You wouldn't expect any of these vaccines to have any long-term side effects. And in fact, this has never occurred with any vaccine."
I wouldn't really call that "soon after it is administered".
And the same is also true for covid's long term effects. I'm still reading new articles/conclusions about those effects.
The median delay between vaccination and the onset of narcolepsy in that case was 42 days. Not nearly the four years magic number that sharken was waiting for. I would call that soon after it is administered. Far more people are well beyond that period after the Pfizer-Biontech vaccination than were ever administered Pandemrix.
> And the same is also true for covid's long term effects
Those long term effects are visible soon after infection. Both of your examples seem to be in support of my point.
In this context it is not as relevant how long the median time is for side-effects to show, but rather how long it takes before the vaccine is no longer used.
When you said "visible" I assumed you mean visible to the OP - but you meant visible in general. So you are not wrong, but as we can see from the case of Pandremix, a median of 42 made it take two years before the usage of the vaccine was stopped.
There are a lot of reasons why it would probably be different in the case of covid (e.g. more media presence from the beginning) but in general, you cannot directly compare thus number (like the 42 days) with the 4 years of the OP.
You could argue that the same could be happening with COVID vaccines, but I think that is unlikely given the unprecedented level of worldwide scrutiny on these.
In the case of Pandremix, the vaccine was continued to be used for 2 years or so after the first cases of narcolepsy became visible.
- Phase 3 trials for Pfizer not complete until May 2023: (https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04368728) - Control group(s) were given vaccines after 14 days: (https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/02/19/9691430...) - Pfizer generates 1.9bn in revenue off of 100m doses, just in the USA alone, creating a massive revenue loop for them that governments cannot get out of due to predatory contracts (https://www.fiercepharma.com/pharma/pfizer-eyes-higher-covid...) - Pfizer's incredibly predatory, leaked, contract (https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20616251-albanian-pf...)
It has been clear for a while now that the Pfizer vaccine works and is safe. Just because Pfizer has chosen to keep collecting data doesn't make that there is any doubt about that. This is also why control groups have been given the option to get vaccinated too. It would be highly questionable to prevent them from getting vaccinated when we know that some of them might die without the vaccine.
And Pfizer doesn't "make" 1.9b of 100m doses. They might have 1.9b in revenue but producing the vaccines isn't free. And 1.9b is a tiny drop in the bucket compared to the savings we have already seen thanks to the vaccine.
Yes, except there is an established process for quantifying "clear for a while now" and it involves sufficient time and control groups. That process isn't being followed and it is concerning for a number of reasons, including the effect of political pressure on expedited drug approvals in the future now that this precedent is being set. The elected leaders capable of bringing such political pressure to bear are invested in the very companies which stand so much to gain by relaxing the time-tested regulatory approval process. This is bad science and bad governance.
Many drug and vaccine approvals in the past have been done before the trial has run its full course. Many drug and vaccine trials have given the placebo group the real drug once safety and efficacy is clear - before the end of the trial.
This is not new, and frankly I’m a little surprised to see such conspiracy theories on HN.
Note the date on this article - this was back in February of this year: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/02/19/9691430...
Don't denigrate a perfectly valid criticism of deviations from historical norms of drug validation and approval by calling it a "conspiracy theory".
Continued assignment of subjects to placebo is unethical, once there is good evidence to support the efficacy of the trial therapy.
Unfortunately (or fortunately) since there was such strong evidence to prove the efficacy, it became unethical for the continued assignment of placebo.
https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIRCHEARTFAILURE.111...
Here's an article on the ethics of a placebo-controlled trial in the first place. It's complicated.
https://acrpnet.org/2018/12/06/ethical-deliberations-on-usin...
Anyway none of your comments actually address the science involved. A few factoids without any context is not useful.
Garasdil was approved by the FDA in 2006 and, as this press release shows [0], continued running studies into it as a condition of the approval. They conceded that full results could not be available before approval; “While the study period was not long enough for cervical cancer to develop, the prevention of these cervical precancerous lesions is believed highly likely to result in the prevention of those cancers.”
From what I can gather, the Phase III study participants continued to receive follow-up checks for at least a decade.
[0]https://web.archive.org/web/20091019080918/https://www.fda.g...
[0] https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-appr...
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/fast-track-drug-approval-design...
The completion date was changed multiple times since April 2020 and they clearly appended booster trials to the existing trials and pushed back the dates.
It truly is that simple.
[0] https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-health-941fc...
I feel like people keep forgetting the definition of "public health crisis."
Time is lives. And economic dollars.
The standard process is designed around limiting harm. Not rapid delivery. Not maximizing good.
In times of business as usual, that's fine. In times of public health crises, it's not.
If we'd rapid approved HIV / AIDS treatments in the 1980s, the world as a whole would have been better.
1. The FDA requires six months of clinical data to establish safety before FDA approval. The normal requirements for FDA approval absolutely were followed
2. With longer-term studied it's not like we don't know anything about them until it's complete. Data is released on a rolling basis so we know how the results of the studies so far, and (surprise!) data so far say it's safe.
Evidence?
> Transparency advocates have criticised the ... (FDA) decision not to hold a formal advisory committee meeting to discuss Pfizer’s application for full approval of its covid-19 vaccine ... Kim Witczak ... a consumer representative on the FDA’s Psychopharmacologic Drugs Advisory Committee, said the decision removed an important mechanism for scrutinising the data ... "The public deserves a transparent process, especially as the call for boosters and mandates are rapidly increasing. These meetings offer a platform where questions can be raised, problems tackled, and data scrutinised in advance of an approval" ... She warned that without a meeting “we have no idea what the data looks like.”
“It is already concerning that full approval is being based on 6 months’ worth of data despite the clinical trials designed for two years,” she said. “There is no control group after Pfizer offered the product to placebo participants before the trials were completed. “Full approval of covid-19 vaccines must be done in an open public forum for all to see. It could set a precedent of lowered standards for future vaccine approvals.”
... Joshua Sharfstein ... former FDA deputy commissioner during the Obama administration, said that advisory committee meetings were more than just a way of receiving scientific input from outside experts. “It’s also an opportunity to educate the public about the important work that the FDA has done reviewing an enormous amount of data about a product,” he told The BMJ. “It’s a chance for questions to be asked and answered, building public confidence."
Yes the vaccine has been proven to be safe for most adults in the short-term. But blanket statements like this over-simplify the reality of the situation.
People need to be aware that for certain sub-populations (eg pediatrics & pregnant women), there is insufficient scientific evidence - in terms of clinical trials and longitudinal studies - to conclude that the benefits of vaccination always and universally outweigh the risks.
Until consensus has been established in the scientific literature - and even after that - everyone should be making their own decisions based on personal risk evaluation with the consultation of doctors and other medical professionals.
There is, of course, an INCREDIBLE amount of EVIDENCE for all of these things being safe (including the vaccine). There has simply never been a 100% complete full evaluation of safety to the rigorous standards of an academic paper.
But it's really important to understand that we know TONS of things without having that rigor, and we don't hold the vast majority of our life to that standard.
Heck, we outright know that driving IS dangerous, ridiculously so compared to taking a vaccine, but we still allow that.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC300808/
:D
While we are not QUITE as clearcut as parachutes, this is still an area where we can reasonably conclude that the vaccine is vastly safer than being unvaccinated.
Somewhere between our two points is an optimal middle ground. The holy grail of exclusively evidence based interventions is lofty no doubt, and we'll have to do the best with what we know right now, but to aim for anything less is quite difficult to defend.
I don't need an academic, peer-reviewed study to tell me that using this site is safe. I don't need one to tell me that masks are safe. It's NICE to have such things, and I'm NOT opposed to them, but they are also NOT necessary for day-to-day reasoning.
I do think we should continue vaccine trials, because we might uncover subtle risks. But until we do, we are in fact at a point where we can conclude that the vaccine is significantly safer than going unvaccinated. What we expect to find going forward is small refinements like "X group should prioritize Y vaccine", not "Y vaccine is in fact more dangerous than Covid"
> we are in fact at a point where we can conclude that the vaccine is significantly safer than going unvaccinated
You keep coming back to "vaccinated versus unvaccinated" rhetoric and using irrelevant logical reasoning to argue that we should hastily generalize safety results to these sub-populations without citing any scientific literature supporting your claim.
The reality of the situation is a lot more complex, and it's obvious you're neglecting these nuances because for example, you fail to acknowledge how immunity acquired through natural infection is a major factor in the tradeoffs of vaccinating these understudied sub-populations.
I'm open to further debate, but I won't continue responding if you continue to raise the same unsupported arguments.
I never argued for "hasty" or "generalization."
Simple question: which sub-population are you talking about? Please exclude any sub-population where a statistically significant sample of vaccinated individuals already exists, unless your concern is limited solely to long-term side effects.
If you are concerned about long-term side effects, please cite at least one scientific study explaining why you are concerned about that PARTICULAR sub-group being vulnerable to that PARTICULAR side effect - we wouldn't want to waste time if you can't cite any scientific literature supporting your claim
(P.S. I've only made a single comment about vaccinated -vs- unvaccinated, so you might have me confused with someone else in this thread)
> Given that COVID-19 disease is far milder in the majority of children than in adults, the risk–benefit of a pediatric SARS-CoV-2 vaccine must be carefully weighed [0]
> The prognostic significance, long-term implications and mechanism of this myocardial injury needs to be studied further, especially as vaccination efforts are rolled out to younger children. [1]
> While the safety, immunogenicity, and efficacy data for the 4 authorized vaccines are reassuring so far, none of these vaccines has been systematically studied in pregnant and breastfeeding people [2]
> it is important to remain transparent about the lack of information, acknowledge concerns, and support those who decide to defer vaccination until more data are available [2]
[0] SARS-CoV-2 vaccine testing and trials in the pediatric population: biologic, ethical, research, and implementation challenges (Feb 2021) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41390-021-01402-z
[1] COVID-19 Vaccination-Associated Myocarditis in Adolescents (August 2021) https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/pediatrics/ea...
[2] SARS-CoV-2 Vaccination During Pregnancy: A Complex Decision (April 2021) https://academic.oup.com/ofid/article/8/5/ofab180/6220034
What are you advocating for? Your own Source Two backs me up here - we have plenty of reason to conclude that Covid is the bigger risk despite the lack of studies. It's right there in the "Conclusion" section.
Emphasis on "likely" - the authors do not conclude with any certainty, they're speculating based on the available evidence, just like you.
I guess your personal threshold for "plenty of reason to conclude" is lower than mine, and that's okay - to each their own.
But it's very clearly spelled out in the sources I cited: currently there is limited evidence demonstrating the safety and benefit profiles needed to conclude that every child and every pregnant woman should be vaccinated.
I see your point that more research is better, but given the current uncertainty you still have to decide whether Covid or Vaccine is the bigger risk, and all the science says that Covid is the bigger risk.
I'm honestly not sure where we disagree.
2. New data shows that the vaccine is indeed safe for pregnant women and it's not recommended that everyone 12 and older get a vaccine.
https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/s0811-vaccine-safe-p...
For pregnant women the current data is that vaccination is conclusively necessary because they cannot possibly hope to avoid COVID-19 infection when giving birth and while pregnant are much more likely to be severely impacted by COVID-19.[1]
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/spec...
Yes just about any symptomatic illness is going to lead to hospitalization and complications during pregnancy.
I understand how the language on the CDC page you cited may lead you to believe that vaccines are conclusively recommended, but take a look at this page from the CDC [1] (updated August 11th) for a more balance appraisal. They say that evidence about the safety is "limited" but "early data" is reassuring. Almost all of the links on the page you cited are to ongoing trials. It's a misrepresentation of science to say that the recommendation to vaccinate pregnant women is conclusive.
And if we're trading anecdotes, my wife's OBGYN advised her not to get vaccinated yet, because it's unclear what the long-term risks are for mother and baby, and because it's unclear if vaccination provides any additional benefits for mothers who have acquired immunity through natural infection.
If you can provide any citations to primary sources supporting your claim that vaccination is conclusively recommended I would appreciate it - I'm keeping an open mind here.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/recommend...
Your proposition is "a virus many times deadlier then the flu in a target group who have more serious outcomes from anything, what could go wrong?"
And your evidence is: "well for someone who currently has effective natural immunity.."
[1] https://www.health.gov.au/sites/default/files/documents/2021...
But that’s not what’s being communicated.
Those of us who got that vaccine first were encouraged to remain in, though, which I did. Though that may change depending on mandate/passport stuff, since for official purposes, I'm still considered unvaccinated. There have been a number of other issues like this that have come up, for example:
https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2021/08/13/vaccine-passp...
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/covid-1...
It really depends on what your definition of “safe” is. The vaccines have stated side effects, some of which can severe. The side effects are relatively rare, but non-zero.
The other component is time. We’ve proven that the vaccine is mostly safe…for at least a year out. After that, we have no data.
You don’t have to look that far back to find things that were deemed safe at one time have disastrous consequences years down the line. Cigarettes, asbestos, etc.
Cigarettes and asbestos are not vaccines and are thus evaluated totally differently (and at a totally different point in time). In past vaccines monitoring, bad things happen right away versus long term:
“Serious side effects that could cause a long-term health problem are extremely unlikely following any vaccination, including COVID-19 vaccination. Vaccine monitoring has historically shown that side effects generally happen within six weeks of receiving a vaccine dose. For this reason, the FDA required each of the authorized COVID-19 vaccines to be studied for at least two months (eight weeks) after the final dose. Millions of people have received COVID-19 vaccines, and no long-term side effects have been detected.” [1]
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/sa...
Re: things like Tylenol, the difference is we have a ton of long term data on that, and the interactions with things like alcohol or other drugs are well known.
The fact that the FDA made a point to say that the vaccine was studied for eight whole weeks is worrisome, for something that most of the population will be forced or at least coerced into taking.
> Five years after Vioxx's launch, Merck withdrew the drug from the market. By that time, Merck had sold billions of dollars of the drug worldwide.
[1]: https://www.npr.org/2007/11/10/5470430/timeline-the-rise-and...
Great example.
Nothing here is an indictment of vaccines per se. However, it is legitimate to have concerns over a process the rules stated at the outset were thrown out, possibly for personal profit and political motivations.
Also, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28280087 for a link to an articulate consideration of a number of concerns regarding this approval.
True.
> Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine generated $7.8 billion in revenue in the second quarter[1].
Note that with Pharma, there is a fixed cost up front. After that, the marginal cost is relatively small and every extra dose prints money.
Also, there are people in other countries who are being called back for a fourth dose right now.
[1]: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/pfizers-covid-19-vaccine-g...
There are going to be some people and even large swathes of some countries that are never going to get vaccinated. If everyone took safety and science seriously, there probably would still be a control group in place. There were probably numerous people in the control group that had little to no risk of death nor complications even if they caught the virus and had to be quarantined. Ultimately, the vaccines will never meet the "gold standard" that Fauci and others applied to all other potential treatments.
Also, if vaccines become mandatory, the systems in place to address vaccine damage and liability need to be reformed. The excuse about scary yet isolated incidents having a disproportionate impact on vaccine adoption rates would no longer be valid.
Moderna was approved on December 18, 2020.[0]
Moderna phase 3 trial started on July 27, 2020.[1]
IE, the control group was offered the vaccine more than five months after the trial began. This is before completion of the trial (Oct 2022 for Moderna, IIRC), which is an issue, but this "14 day" as written seems to be suggesting that it was 14 days after the trial began, when it's actually five month.
Additionally, when a treatment proves to be highly effective, it's normal and appropriate to start providing that treatment to the control group early, because leaving them to die or otherwise suffer an illness is considered unethical. This isn't something unique to the COVID vaccines.
[0] https://www.fda.gov/coronavirus-disease-2019-covid-19/modern...
[1] https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/07/phase-3-...
Moderna was not "approved" on December 18. Your own source says it was "authorized for emergency use".
This is not limited to the medical field, I was once downvoted on an HN comment until I edited it to state that I wasn't supporting Trump, because people were reading it that way.
It's funny you mentioned this because my original comment was something along the lines of:
"""
2016-2020: "I hate Trump, but..."
2021: "I got the vaccine, but..."
"""
But I erased that and wrote my comment above because I thought it had a lower chance of being downvoted.
I think his goal was to make it clear that he was not an anti-science or conspirationist himself.
20 bucks? Cheep! Hopefully this drives up vaccine investment.
From a quick Google, it seems that Phase III trials are about comparing a new treatment to existing alternatives, rather than monitoring side-effects. Perhaps the testing simply can't be complete before 2023, since it involves checking long-term immunity? In this case, the FDA may have approved the vaccine because they are confident that the risk of negative side-effects is sufficiently small, and that the vaccine gives some benefit - even if testing hasn't established exactly how much.
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jun/28/alzhei...
Also to be fair it's not like they just rushed it out the door. There are probably very few things on the market (short of fully approved pharmaceuticals) that have been through more testing than these "rushed" vaccines.
edit: https://www.fda.gov/vaccines-blood-biologics/vaccines/emerge...
We can do better than guilt by association. It's a very weak argument, and turns more people away from potential vaccination. In fact insulting the remaining audience is worse than preaching to the choir, because it even turns away people who were previously 100% on one's side.
A drug should be approved once it is very likely causing more good than harm. But obviously that doesn't mean you should stop researching that drug.
What's happening here makes perfect sense. We have more than enough information to conclude that it is extremely likely that the vaccine helps a lot and causes little harm. However if there are any rare side effects then we'd still like to know that, therefore it is a good thing that the patients in the trials are still being observed for anything unusual.
Err, that sounds really scary and wrong to me. Seems to me that a drug should be approved when all the side effects are known, results are well characterized among a large sample set over a sufficiently long time frame, and it is determined that the drug is "safe" in the absolute sense.
It may be the case that we are better off taking a vaccine in a pandemic _even though we are not 100% sure it is safe_ due to the opportunity cost, and that's what emergency authorizations are for.
Even if the FDA really did their due diligence here, it will not convince anyone who was not already convinced; it is obvious that they were going to approve it no matter what, because the political fallout of not approving it after so many people have taken it would permanently destroy what trust remains in the US public health system.
How long is sufficient? How large of a test group is sufficient?
In the "absolute" sense, there is no known drug that is safe. That is extremist thinking that only serves to muddy the waters of the actual debate, which should be: "how safe is safe enough?"
> we are not 100% sure it is safe
Note that "100% sure" does not mean "100%" safe. So how much safety do you need a 100% assurance for? How do you quantify the safety?
> that sounds really scary
How does this not just describe life in general? And how does that help policymaking? I don't think our species would have made it to the agricultural revolution if that was the overriding force for anything.
> it will not convince anyone who was not already convinced
This also strikes me as a poor consideration for any policymaker, as they likely know that at the onset to any such policymaking. This adds nothing new or interesting to the debate.
The biggest reason is: J&J's biggest advantage early on was how much cheaper it is. One shot, simpler manufacturing process (which they've screwed up several times anyway, granted), it would be the one to get widely distributed because the cost-per-fully-vaccinated individual is far lower.
The issue is, the government is paying for all this, and they write blank checks. CVS administers a Pfizer/Moderna; insurance or the government refunds (I'm told) $50. They administer a J&J, they get (again, hearsay) $10. Vaccination clinics are actively incentivized to stock the most expensive vaccines, because the profit per vaccine is higher. So, some have stopped stocking J&J (which, coincidentally, is the one vaccine I've heard many anti-vax people say they'd actually consider, as its kinda-sorta-not-really-but-good-enough more traditional. at least one person i've talked to has said 'well, i'd get the J&J, but the closest clinic that has it is 30 minutes away, so i just haven't gotten around to it').
[0]https://www.cms.gov/medicare/covid-19/medicare-covid-19-vacc...
Traditional flu jabs apparently [0] cost the NHS £5-8 (<$11) per dose; the Astrazeneca Covid-19 vaccine seems in-line with that charging $2-5 non-profit for the duration of the pandemic [1]. But I don't know how comparable that is to Pfizer's given that the latter's different, newer (mRNA) tech AIUI? (Perhaps that's a disservice to the researchers at AZ/Oxford, I don't know.)
[0] - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/01/17/nhs-attempts-sav...
[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/11/covid-19-vacci...
Pfizer has also been strong arming small, Latin American countries, to the tune of trying to get military assets as "collateral" (https://www.pharmaceutical-technology.com/news/company-news/...)
Weren't extremely generous provisions like that offered by the US government last year in order to jumpstart vaccine development and production ASAP?
Wouldn't this be standard language in any contract? If I buy a widget and they ship it to me, if it gets damaged in transit, or lost in transit I still have to pay the producer, I then go after the delivery company (and/or their insurance) for compensation.
If something arrives (late, if I care) damaged, or not at all, from Amazon or whatever, I tell them and they refund me or ship a replacement.
May I ask why? I've had two shots without much hesitation but this whole booster thing came out of nowhere and gives me "fool me twice" vibes. I understand getting a flu shot every year to target new strains but this would be the exact same shot as 8 months ago.
If you keep a tab on the news you might have seen antibody level from covid vaccines drops significantly over time. Actually same is true for people already have covid; natural protection wanes off within few months.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/flu-survi...
You are correct the flu shot targets different strains, but the H1N1 strain has been part of the annual flu shot since 2009 simply because it has continued to circulate. So just like you get an H1N1 shot every year (to boost your antibody levels), you will likely get a COVID shot every year to boost those antibodies.
For others, it seems that with Pfizer the antibody level drops over time.
It also shows vaccination is effective, but we don’t know the half life of it.
So the CDCs stance is to vaccinate even if you have a natural immunity, because the vaccine _might_ do better. But that doesn’t seem to naturally follow.
It wouldn’t bother me if companies weren’t considering forcing you to vaccinate to keep your job, even if you have a natural immunity. These stances have real world consequences. You are asking people to trigger their immune system, something complex and not fully understood. Companies are taking these recommendations and using them as policy, forcing the recommendations as corporate laws. If you are going to force this on people, the way you are communicating isn’t how you do it.
What makes you think I have the power to force anyone to anything?! I honestly don't care how I communicate or what you think of what corporations should do. I am personally tired of all these lazy ignorant rants while society is suffering and the medical community is doing their best.
Second, Pfizer’s vaccines in terms of value produced are worth trillions. Even making $10 billion is completely worth it.
In terms of what we as a society should value and pay for, I would rather us pay a lot of money to Pfizer to develop life saving vaccines than 100’s of billions for ads or weapons.
I actually would like for Pfizer to have made even more money than they are making now.
I saw some conspiracy theory that said this weeks ago and just shook my head at how ridiculous that would be. At least it seemed like a conspiracy theory because my view of control group was apparently something else.
Emergency use authorization, for a vaccine that was never tested on humans, and both Pfizer and Moderna eliminated the control groups?
What the hell!? There must be… other or new control groups right? You can’t really have phase3 trials and reference nothing for control can you? What will they reference?
What conspiracy theory?
StatNews[1]:
> Pfizer and BioNTech speed up timeline for offering Covid-19 vaccine to placebo volunteers
> Pfizer and its partner BioNTech plan to offer their Covid-19 vaccine to any clinical trial volunteer who received placebo by March 1, several months earlier than initially planned.
and NPR[2]:
> Long-Term Studies Of COVID-19 Vaccines Hurt By Placebo Recipients Getting Immunized
> Tens of thousands of people who volunteered to be in studies of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines are still participating in follow-up research. But some key questions won't be easily answered, because many people who had been in the placebo group have now opted to take the vaccine.
[1]: https://www.statnews.com/2021/01/01/pfizer-and-biontech-spee...
[2]: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/02/19/9691430...
Imagine you volunteered for a very experimental trial for the greater good and then were told that you were given a placebo and now cannot receive a vaccine for several years and will have to be more cautious. You can see in the article that a volunteer from the trial is strongly advocating for giving the participants access to vaccines.
Obviously this complicates the statistical analysis (you can try to use a double-blind crossover study to get some statistical power out of this, but clearly the messaging gets more complicated), but I'm not seeing anything about a "14 day" timeline.
It's also worth noting that any study participant can just freely choose to break the study and go in and get vaccinated (lowering the measured efficacy of the vaccine)_whenever they want. Giving them a concrete date is a good alternative to that.
In this specific situation, they would have been condemning through a choice to not treat, a fraction of the control group to die.
At the time they dissolved the control group, the fatality rate in control and placebo were the same. By their very own data they did not have a strong case that they would be "condemning...a fraction of the control group to die.". One would have to make a leap. A plausible leap, but a leap nonetheless.
Let's assume though that the fatality rate across the population for COVID was 1%, a very high number, to be conservative. So in that case you'd expect ~150 preventable fatalities in the control group. We now have ~that many fatalities, in a single state (Massachusetts), from COVID-19, in people who were "fully vaccinated".
You can do the math and extrapolate that there are now orders of magnitude more deaths from "breakthrough infections" than might have been in the placebo control group. If we had known that the efficacy of these vaccines was going to fall significantly, might some of those deaths have been prevented? I think there's an argument to be made there.
Now we have statisticians scrambling over themselves with complex methods to figure out what the hell is going on, when we could have had the gold standard which would be quite simple to interpret, if we had kept those control groups.
Now some argue it would have been completely impractical to maintain that control group amidst a mass vax campaign (I think we should have tried, regardless). I think there's room to debate that. But in that case I think we need a vast upgrade to our data infra, because giving up the placebo control group was a huge loss (for truth and science, at least).
That doesn’t actually seem right though. You have control groups at least through all phases of trials to make sure “the treatment works”. That’s literally the point of the control.
Especially now that we know the vaccines don’t completely work to stop infection or prevent symptoms or spread.
I’m all for the vaccines, but it seems crazy that they didn’t even wait until phase3 was over for a new type that has never been tested on humans before.
If the argument is “the control petiole were at risk”, they should have been told their vaccine was placebo and ask for volunteers to remain in control, seems like flat out offering them real shot defeats the point, doesn’t it?
It seems you can force people to get a vaccine in the middle of a pandemic. France is dealing with massive unrest [0] and are hemorrhaging medical staff [1] because they mandated vaccines for medical professionals (which doesn't make sense, the vaccine doesn't prevent a person from spreading the virus [2]).
[0] https://spectator.org/french-health-pass-riots/
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/we-have-rights-french-h...
[2] https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2021/08/06/cdc_direc...!
"Information is not yet available about potential long-term health outcomes."
For example, one could question the potential for autoimmune conditions due to the way the mRNA vaccine works and how the immune system typically targets multiple proteins on the cell. There's no data or studies our there about this longterm possibility or even the incidence of autoimmune antibodies produced by vaccination. This likely isn't a problem for the elderly since it can take years or decades to present/progress, and their value proposition is different than for younger people. It starts to get more questionable as the value proposition changes dramatically in the youngest age groups. The question of vaccinating one's child for covid is certainly a topic with a diverse set of opinions and very little data to perform a thorough longterm cost/benefit analysis.
We already know Covid can cause autoimmune issues in some patients, so are you saying the effect you describe is just a subset of these, or different?
So all I'm saying is that the value proposition for an individual is based on the risks associated with vaccination or infection, and that the decision for people in age groups with the lowest known (short term) risks associated with infection have lower known benefits putting more emphasis on the unknown (longer term) risks or benefits. So for someone over 70 with about a 5% IFR, it's easy to say there is more benefit than risk because it's easy to see if a serious side effect is happening at a 5% rate or higher and the time horizon for longterm issues developing is limited by natural lifespan. With the quality of the VAERS data and the much longer time horizon, it's more difficult to discern a benefit for someone with an IFR of .002%. Of course we can't even look at the rates of many of the side effects to compare something other than IFR because the data data quality doesn't allow for that level of sensitivity.
Edit: why downvote?
Other coronaviruses have, but mRNA vaccine technology is about 15 years old - that's how long it's been in development and studied. Long term effects are in fact, known. But if you were concerned about that, you could take J&J or Astrazeneca, both of which are based on adenovirus vector technology and has existed since the 1980s - the clotting side effect is both rare and treatable.
re: Graves disease - [1] is literally a risk of getting COVID-19.
You are engaging in some both-sideism FUD and misrepresenting the technology of vaccines while pretending a brand new novel disease is some well-understood thing.
[1] https://www.healio.com/news/endocrinology/20210519/covid19-m...
"You are arguing "we don't know what'll happen with vaccines" as though you do know the long term risks of COVID-19."
I'm saying that the longterm effects are not known for either.
"Other coronaviruses have, but mRNA vaccine technology is about 15 years old - that's how long it's been in development and studied."
Do you have some links for this? The mRNA technology was used a little differently in the past from what I saw. Most of the research I saw were attempts to correct genetic issues, not trigger immune responses against the proteins created. Not to mention, the OP article even has the FDA stating that they don't know the longterm effects of vaccination, so it seems my statement is consistent with the expert opinion.
"But if you were concerned about that, you could take J&J or Astrazeneca, both of which are based on adenovirus vector technology and has existed since the 1980s - the clotting side effect is both rare and treatable."
It's a similar mechanism, right? You're just using a virus to carry the genetic material, which also involves an extra transcription step in the cell (what is theorized as causing mutations in the spike and thus the stroke/clotting issues). Still quite different from the traditional inactive or protein based ones.
Have either technologies been used in a wide scale way (1M+ people) on the timeframes you mention?
"You are engaging in some both-sideism FUD and misrepresenting the technology of vaccines while pretending a brand new novel disease is some well-understood thing."
First off, it's not FUD. I'm not fear mongering. There's no doubt expressed about known things. Sure, there is uncertainty about both sides, but even the experts acknowledge this in a similarly objective way (ie I lack the motive behind FUD). My statements have been objective about how one may be approaching the decision. Where have I misrepresented vaccine technology? I am not saying covid is well known - in fact, your statement contradicts your other statement about "both-sidism FUD" since I can't possibly be claiming it's well understood and simultaneously claim fear, uncertainty, and doubt about it.
If you read it, you can see the discussion is about how people might be approaching a decision with a mix of fairly well known short term data and relatively little known long term data, and how the value proposition changes.
https://www.euronews.com/next/2021/05/27/why-are-aztrazeneca...
https://www.europeanpharmaceuticalreview.com/news/155536/bre...
I don't fully understand what you mean by "the data quality doesn't allow for that level of sensitivity" - we have already had two instances where very rare side effects of Covid vaccines were recognised - blood clotting for AZ and myocarditis for Biontech.
You wrote, and that's what my question was hinting at:
> "one could question the potential for autoimmune conditions due to the way the mRNA vaccine works"
What do you mean by that? What is specific about the mRNA mechanism that could lead to autoimmune issues?
Sure. So those two issues are not only rare in relation to the vaccine, but also rare in the general population. In fact the clotting issue is occurring at the same rate as in the general population - 5 per 1M people. The types of stuff that will slip through the cracks will be things that are similarly rare in vaccines, yet more common in the general population and tend to be dismissed as unrelated without concrete evidence of that. For an example, take strokes in patients under 30. You have a general occurrence of about 5K per 1M. In order to show a significant difference, you would need a much higher number of cases reported. I believe there's some research being done about some covid vaccines potentially increasing stroke risk, just as covid has been suggested as doing this. I actually know someone who was hospitalized with a stroke between their first and second dose, and it wasn't reported.
This can be especially hard if even the fairly rare adverse events that have previously known relation to vaccines are being reported as little as 12% of the time. Keep in mind that these two events are listed in the packet inserts and are required by law to be reported by the medical professional and are still being massively under reported. What chance do we have of actually catching the rare events that have statistical "cover" of a large bed of naturally occurring incidents in the general population?
https://gnigh-66270.medium.com/vaers-underreporting-and-the-...
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33039207/
"What is specific about the mRNA mechanism that could lead to autoimmune issues?"
This is just a theory. The immune system generally codes off of multiple proteins. If we are exposing a spike protein on a cell wall, then there's a possibility that the immune system may code off of the proteins normally found on our cell in addition to the intended partial spike protein. There's no data that I could find on pre vs post vaccination autoimmune antibody levels. So it seems nobody is looking at this. Even then, little is known about the relation of those antibodies and actual development of autoimmune conditions.
No, blood clotting occurred at roughly 1.5-2x the rate, so ~1 per 100k. Look at the data from the UK, Germany or Norway, which raised the rare side effects independently with the EMA [1].
No doubt that underreporting is a real issue, but how is it different to Covid or any other drug/disease? Wouldn't you agree that underreporting is lowest in a pandemic?
> "This is just a theory."
How likely do you think your theory is? Have you spoken to a medical professional or an immunologist about your theory?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embolic_and_thrombotic_events_...
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-56594189
"No doubt that underreporting is a real issue, but how is it different to Covid or any other drug/disease? Wouldn't you agree that underreporting is lowest in a pandemic?"
I don't think it's significantly different. The emergency use order did carry additional reporting requirements, but it also opened it up to be administered by people who would not normally administer vaccines and would not likely be familiar with VAERS, and in some cases patients doesn't know who administered it to contact them to file the report. If you couple this with the massive increase in vaccines administered, I think the number of unreported events are higher now, but the rate is likely similar to before. That's just my guess based on the reasons above and my own experiences. Why do you think it would be lowest now?
"How likely do you think your theory is? Have you spoken to a medical professional or an immunologist about your theory?"
I'm not sure how likely it is. I feel like it depends mostly on the individual, like most autoimmune diseases do. I did discuss this with a doctor and they said that it is a reasonable question and theory that appears not to have any studies looking into either side of it. It's possible we won't know for years or decades, especially since we don't even know how autoimmune antibodies levels lead to disease in general.
"(4) The number of these cases after vaccination with COVID-19 AstraZeneca is statistically significantly higher than the number of cerebral venous thromboses that normally occur in the unvaccinated population. For this purpose, an observed-versus-expected analysis was performed, comparing the number of cases expected without vaccination in a 14-day time window with the number of cases reported after approximately 1.6 million AstraZeneca vaccinations in Germany. About one case would have been expected, and seven cases had been reported."
UK vaccine safety report up to 11 Aug 2021 [2]:
"The overall incidence after first or unknown doses was 14.9 per million doses."
German safety report up to 31 Jul 2021 [3, in German], cf. table 7,8:
Women: 1.462 cases per 100k doses Men: 1.305 cases per 100k doses
Can't find the numbers for Norway, they initially reported the highest number per 100k.
> I'm not sure how likely it is.
Do I understand correctly that there is no mechanism specific to how the mRNA vaccines work? The effect you describe ("we are exposing a spike protein on a cell wall") is far more common in Covid due to how the abundance of expression of the spike protein, correct?
[1] https://www.pei.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/EN/newsroom-en/hp-ne...
[2] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/coronavirus-covid...
[3] https://www.pei.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/DE/newsroom/dossiers...
"Do I understand correctly that there is no mechanism specific to how the mRNA vaccines work?"
No. Covid does not add a spike protein to an existing cell. It replicates an entire covid cell. So you have covid virus with a spike and a bunch of other covid proteins if you have covid. Or you have a human cell with a partial spike and all the normal human cell proteins. The immune system usually codes off of, or attacks, multiple proteins. It's possible the immune system will identify the spike and some of the normal cell proteins. A similar sort of mimicry is theorized to occur when the proteins in a virus are similar enough to a human protein.
https://www.nytimes.com/1996/12/31/science/virus-s-similarit...
Natural immunity is a thing, just like it always has been. I've heard all of the arguments about why nobody wants to widely acknowledge it, but I just can't agree with them.
Some chance of high probability of damages, vs full chance of low probability of damages.
This is why numbers are important... Fuzzy equation members like 'some', 'high' and 'low' are inadequate for this decision making.
Chances of infection given behavioural patterns, to be defined, × probability of damages post-infection, given demographics etc., to be defined¹
vs
100% for the chance of vaccination, × probability of damages post-vaccine (post 1 week, post 1 month, post 3 months etc.), given demographics etc., to be defined.
Probably you meant that according to available data, the probability of damages post-vaccine seem very low. Some people are concerned because those numbers do not seem to match the anecdotal they have around, so they would like to have better data - because some possible consequences are much more than nuisances. I say, if some entity kept an active monitoring ongoing, of the adverse side effects, much stronger reassurances - or less hesitance owing to confusion - could be given. I could only find passive monitoring around - USA, Europe, Australia, Canada etc.
¹The vagueness is such that in the context of this line, the last article I read mentioned values between 2.3% and 40%.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2034577
Now you can debate the meaning of "safe". And you can make decisions based on anecdotes. And you can say it would be nice to have better data. But that is true for most things in life. Most people go to restaurants and drive their cars on roads with reviewing far less evidence that their car and restaurant they are going to are truly safe.
I know I wouldn’t want to work in person at any place that didn’t have a vaccine mandate. Once vaccines are approved for children, I think people’s options should be to either vaccinate their child or homeschool them, since if I had children I wouldn’t want them exposed to the unvaccinated. The federal and state governments forcing everyone to get the shot would be a step too far for me, but I’m very much in support of it being hard to be a part of society if you refuse to take one of the most basic steps to protect other people in it.
>it being hard to be a part of society if you refuse to take one of the most basic steps to protect other people in it.
there are a huge number of diseases you can knowingly spread with far more severe long term consequences while still being 'part of society'. frankly i do not think free and democratic societies can survive while trying to also fulfill the moral compunction not to let anyone die ever from transmittable illness, it is simply at odds with our biology. we, like all mammals are walking bags of filth and disease and no amount of indefinite containment will ever change that reality.
For the vaccines we do have, public schools in most states already require vaccination. Almost every state already requires that children in public schools have the DTaP, IPV, MMR, Varicella, and HepB vaccines to enter Kindergarten. And I would personally have no problems spreading those and the flu shot as a requirement in the same vein as I stated above either.
We are indeed mammals that are walking bags of filth, but we also have minds that we can use to help deal with that fact. We can’t indefinitely contain, and we can’t completely stop transmittable illness. But coronavirus is one of the handful of diseases we now have a tool to deal with, and not taking advantage of that tool to stop needless death and waste is a massive dereliction of duty to one’s fellow man. This isn’t about “not letting anyone die ever from transmittable illness,” this is about a specific dangerous disease that we have invented a tool to help stop.
On an individual level, maybe sure, but on a population level, enough people are getting sick to cause medical systems to collapse. I live in a G7 country where people are dying at home since they can't get a hospital bed.
Now it's true that chance is probably somewhere around 0.3% assuming you don't live in an area where hospitals are out of ICU beds and vents. But it's your _life_ at risk.
(I'm going from memory and may be a little off on the age ranges, but covid is heavily weighted towards the elderly while influenza is not)
What reasonable limits are, and above that at what point the government should step in and say your actions are too dangerous to your fellow man (or if government should have that power at all) are of course very hard lines to draw.
Flu vaccine? Smoking cessation? Hand washing? Race/gender/religion sensitivity training?
These seem like pretty basic steps. Should we bar entrance to society based on these?
It is a firable offense to not wash your hands if you work in a restaurant.
It is a mandate at most companies to take sensitivity training.
Restaurants can reject you for not wearing covered shoes and a suitable jacket.
The recent NYC mandate for example is specifically about attending indoor venues on Manhattan island - restaurants and theatres and such.
Alternative perspective, why should the unvaxed kids be forced into homeschooling? Maybe the parents of vaxed kids should be given the option of putting their vaxed kid in a school that has a mix of vaxed and unvaxed kids, or to homeschool? Given the general demographics of the unvaxed I'd say that's far more likely to happen then a school vax mandate. They would never get away with turning away a bunch of African-American kids going to some of the strapped inner city schools. Food for thought.
An alternative that could happen is vaxed / unvaxed kids in separate classes or schools. Though that wouldn't be possible everywhere.
As for the poor schools, you're right - we have to leave those open.
While I'm a big fan of people having a choice, due to the large amount of misinformation out there people are dying. We have people in my country that could have gotten the vaccine but didn't because of Facebook conspiracies and are now refusing oxygen in hospitals because they're afraid their lungs will explode - due to Facebook conspiracies.
There's no good reason for the majority * of people to avoid the COVID vaccines. They're making a dumb decision.
* Of course there are exceptions, but it's a small percent
Is this still true if unvaccinated takes a hospital bed away from someone else or increases insurance costs to everyone else due to more expensive care?
Those under the FDA do not have that social constraint (free healthcare), to others it is a reality (with responsibilities etc.). And in a way, like in the context of insurance, different personal histories are relevant. Job related health consequences? Unforeseeable consequences? Jamesdean consequences? Not the same.
The whole reality is now completely dystopian. We have people calling for denying healthcare to people who took “my body, my choice” as a right, because they voluntarily chose to not take the vaccine. However, these same people would be completely appalled by the idea of letting a drug addict die on the street from overdose, even though it is also a result of their voluntary choice to take drugs. The very same people who call for denying people things like a right to eat at a restaurant or get groceries without vaccine passport, claim that requiring ID to vote is a violation of civil rights, and all that despite the fact that black Americans are least vaccinated group in US. Total insanity.
I'm not aware of any grocery stores requiring a vaccine passport, but in general, the bar for a private business allowing customers in should be a lot more malleable fluid that voting restrictions.
It's not a contradiction of principles to point this out even if poor black people are among the lowest vaccination groups.
No, that’s very much false. For example, Georgia offers free voter identification card, and yet its new voter ID laws were called “new Jim Crow” by prominent politicians. This is issue purely for partisan reasons, and the eagerness to introduce vaccine IDs while shunning voter ID shows it pretty clearly.
> I'm not aware of any grocery stores requiring a vaccine passport, but in general, the bar for a private business allowing customers in should be a lot more malleable fluid that voting restrictions.
The problem here is that the businesses are not introducing these restrictions out of their own initiative, but they rather are following government regulations. As a result, it is government which is requiring ID to enter a restaurant, but not requiring it for voting, and suggesting it’s actually private businesses enforcing it is just trying to shift the blame.
This decision is a referenced legal precedent cited for masking mandates, stay at home mandates, etc etc. The case -stemmed- from someone protesting being fined, but both the decision, and the ramifications, intentionally, are far further reaching than that.
Yes, it is not a precedent for going door to door and forcibly vaccinating people. No one is advocating for that. What people -are- advocating for is withholding the privileges of society from any who choose not to get vaccinated, and there is a lot of precedent allowing for that. There is, as you note, even precedent for -punitive- actions from the state for failing to have it done.
So if you want to get technical, sure, there is no way to force people in the US to get vaccinated, just like there is no way to force people in the US to do anything; there is only carrot and stick measures to try and coax people to do something. If that was the point...um, okay, but that also isn't arguing against anything that was said. The original post was about taking hospital beds away from those who catch COVID who chose to be unvaccinated, and not letting their COVID bills go to insurance; that isn't forcing them to get vaccinated, that's just introducing new punitive measures for not getting vaccinated.
You are misrepresenting the case. The extent of the penalties was implied here, because the case was about upholding or rejecting particular state law, which listed the specific penalties involved.
> This decision is a referenced legal precedent cited for masking mandates, stay at home mandates, etc etc. The case -stemmed- from someone protesting being fined, but both the decision, and the ramifications, intentionally, are far further reaching than that.
Wrongly so. See https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3906452
There's a lovely bit in the Wikipedia article where it cites the decision. While it is not, obviously, the entire case, I feel it stands pretty well to show that the court was setting broader precedent than that one particular law. Certainly, it is very hard to say "this law is okay because (reason)" without also saying "(reason) is a good criteria to make laws from". At that point it's only a question of extent; there are laws and court precedents to prevent them from being arbitrary, oppressive and unreasonable, but, again, this case still clearly allowed for punitive penalties for non-compliance, in exactly this situation.
>> Wrongly so.
Citing an opinion by a single assistant professor of an unheard of law school that says he doesn't believe this case should be used as precedent doesn't do anything to disprove my statement that it HAS been used as precedent (a statement of historical fact that I made), nor does it really strike me as particularly compelling that it SHOULDN'T be used as a precedent (a statement of opinion that maybe you assumed I was implying, but which nevertheless is immaterial to the argument being made).
Edit:
Obesity source: 1. https://www.axios.com/bmi-obesity-severe-risk-factors-covid-...
2. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/08/covid-cdc-study-finds-roughl...
BaSeLeSs BrO ScIeNcE
You were saying something mate? CDC is bro science?
And the current vaccines have not ended the pandemic, if they had there wouldn't be a need for a booster shot.
Moreover, is covid the only disease on the planet now? Those overweight people are at higher risk of dying of other diseases too, or do you think its okay for them to die of cancer, heart attack etc but just not okay to die of covid
You stay happy with your biannual booster shots ( and at the same time cry here on HN, twitter etc ) and I'll take care of my health and follow that strategy.
For those of us who got the vaccine, we’re still having to take precautions because of the delta variant spikes, largely from people who didn’t get a vaccine. Where is our choice?
But not smoking in your car or at home. There are tons of American parents who hotbox their kids with cigarette or marijuana smoke on a daily basis which not only harms them with second hand smoke but increases their chances of smoking themselves by an astronomical factor.
Parents legally harm their children constantly by setting bad diet patterns (child obesity), or substance abuse patterns just to name a few ways. Should we make that illegal and have the state raise those kids?
You are also strawmanning to assume that laws that punish bad parenting would immediately skip to the state raising the kids.
All laws restrict freedoms to protect the wider society. This isn't a novel concept. Not being able to murder is a freedom deprived of you. The question of "should any freedom that could possibly be abused to harm others be eventually outlawed" is obviously "No". Law is not the only tool to encourage better behavior.
But passing laws to outlaw any of your examples doesn't mean we're saying "Yes" anymore than outlawing murder does. Those are just specific laws. The question is "which freedoms should be restricted to prevent individuals from harming others". Your original framing of the question makes it an all or nothing case, but its not.
The state does deprive people of rights to raise their kids if they're really awful parents. That does not mean that making smoking in a car with kids illegal guarantees that this would be the associated punishment.
Comparing choosing to drive drunk with not choosing to take a particular action that has an infinitesimally small probability of directly causing tragedy are not remotely comparable.
We’re in a tech forum do I really need to explain this? The probability of an individual hard drive failing is small. If you’re building a gaming rig, you don’t need to worry about it, if you’re building a data center that small probability becomes a problem.
How can you possibly believe those choices aren’t having an effect when we are living the consequences of those actions? The number of cases are going up, younger people are dying, hospitals are filling to capacity.
While I'm all for 'personal choice', I feel like COVID cases should be de-prioritized for ICU access.
Literally hundreds of renowned virologists and epidemiologists, that's who.
The way the discourse has evolved in the past two years is unbelievable. You see people deride fundamental concepts of democracy like freedom, the right to protest, and bodily autonomy.
If the vaccines are effective, then the only people at risk are those that refuse to get it. Everyone is subject to the consequences of their autonomous choice alone.
The same is true for potential long term negative effects of the vaccines. Those that refuse to get it are subject to the potential long term effects of COVID, if they get it. And those that get the vaccine are guaranteed to be subject to the long term effects of having done so.
Either you believe the vaccines work or you don't. The variants dominated highly vaccinated places like the UK and Israel, so don't blame the unvaccinated for bringing it about. The selective pressure applied to the virus by leaky vaccines is far greater than natural immunity.
Vaccines aren't a binary 100% or 0% effective tool, it's somewhere in the middle. If my 10 coworkers all get the vaccine, it reduces the probability of me contracting the virus, even if I got vaccinated myself. There is a communal aspect to the vaccine that you are missing here.
Leaky vaccines work the same way antibacterial soap did to create MRSA. They leave enough virus present to mutate to evade the mechanism originally intended to fight against it, so only the most robust mutations remain.
You do know that there's a ton of investment going into curing Covid, right? But you can't just "magic" a cure out of thin air.
> Among 3410 total cases of suspected but unconfirmed COVID-19 in the overall study population, 1594 occurred in the vaccine group vs. 1816 in the placebo group. Suspected COVID-19 cases that occurred within 7 days after any vaccination were 409 in the vaccine group vs. 287 in the placebo group.
Why are there suspected but not confirmed cases of COVID-19? The document doesn't say. But here's what we know: not all participants received PCR tests to confirm their status, only those that presented some set of symptoms.
Smelly analogy is smelly. You're talking about the difference between very specific behaviors being prohibited versus blacklisting half of the population from participating in society with vaccine mandates (many of whom are black, by the way). It's not even close to a valid comparison.
I get the sense that the overlap of people who are pro-mandatory-vaccine and pro-choice is pretty high, being that they are both liberal positions. "My body, my choice" is just fine for women's reproductive rights, even if it meant taking away a baby's chance to live. All of a sudden "my body, my choice" doesn't sound so good?
I got both of my shots but I am so tired of people blaming anti-vaxxers. Give me a vaccine good enough that I don't have to worry about it. Today, I'm literally going to get a COVID test despite having both my vaccine doses. Why? Apparently my government isn't capable of providing useful guidance to keep me safe. We keep hearing about masks, but the mandate got dropped and there was never any talk about mandating the clearly superior KN95 or N95 masks.
Anti-vaxxers have been consistent from the beginning that they're not getting vaccinated. You know whose position keeps changing? FDA & CDC. Whether it's how effective the vaccine is, what the side effects are, do we need to wear masks, how much social distancing is required, whether or not a booster is useful...
You and everyone else blaming anti-vaxxers are letting the government redirect blame for its own failures.
> Anti-vaxxers have been consistent from the beginning that they're not getting vaccinated. You know whose position keeps changing? FDA & CDC. Whether it's how effective the vaccine is, what the side effects are, do we need to wear masks, how much social distancing is required, whether or not a booster is useful...
> You and everyone else blaming anti-vaxxers are letting the government redirect blame for its own failures.
Science adapts and adjusts based on new information.
The lack of willingness to adapt when confronted with new evidence has an unfortunate name.
Lifting the mask mandate was a political move, and it was a poor one. Not pushing KN95/N95 when it was basically guaranteed to be increased protection was a poor move. Taking us out of lockdown, and failing to reinstate the lockdown, was a political move. Also a poor choice.
You're over here talking about science. Half of these decisions are being made based on politics. Wouldn't surprise me if the vaccine approval were also.
Not every government out there is super abusive.
The alternative is that they're all crazy (and/or malicious), and that's a <<very>> difficult thing to prove. So difficult that the simpler explanation is that they are following scientific processes, slightly mixed with politics and also... full of mistakes because we're all human.
> The alternative is that they're all crazy (and/or malicious), and that's a <<very>> difficult thing to prove.
You don't have to assume the government is crazy or malicious. People are tired of lockdowns, they're tired of COVID, they're tired of wearing masks. Businesses, like restaurants, have been put in a tough spot. I get all that. So do our government officials.
That doesn't mean that there isn't room to criticize government for its mistakes. We already knew there were anti-vaxxers before the pandemic started.
> So difficult that the simpler explanation is that they are following scientific processes
They are _trying_ to. They're not. Lifting the lockdown just because things got better for a bit was a fucking stupid idea, and we're paying the price for that.
You would have been much better off maintaining the lockdown for some period and letting restaurants and other struggling businesses figure out how to pivot.
And for gods sake, the stupid shit like OSHA suspending vaccine side effect reporting requirements is just playing into the hands of anti-vaxxers (https://www.osha.gov/coronavirus/faqs#vaccine).
:-))
What I'm saying is that if large groups of people, of different dispositions, intentions, cultures, etc. all over the world are doing mostly the same thing, then that means that there are some forces in play that they all can't really control. In this case those forces are social.
that’s a very different comparison to something like going to a private business
what about driving drunk on your own land away from anyone
Governments regulate comings and goings of people to and from private businesses all the time. We don't allow people under 21 to go to bars or people under 18 to go to strip clubs, for example.
>what about driving drunk on your own land away from anyone
If you wanna walk around on your own land away from anyone without getting vaccinated and/or while having covid? Have at it.
You're welcome to choose not to get vaccinated, and not to go to any such employers, colleges, etc.
Regardless, your argument doesn't make any sense. If anyone -- vaccinated or not -- has COVID, they should be required to stay home. If an unvaccinated person does not yet have COVID, we should push them to get vaccinated, because then they will be much less likely to get the disease, and if they do get it, serious illness or hospitalization will be vanishingly unlikely.
Vaccination also reduces the "breeding ground" for mutations. At this point it's critical that we slow down the creation and spread of new variants that might do a better job of getting around our existing vaccines.
2 Shots of vaccine to end covid -> Most Americans will have to take booster shots -> Booster shots may not be one time thing
This is why getting spread under control is so important: each time the virus replicates there’s a chance of a new advantageous mutation making the problem harder. Wearing masks and vaccination are how we break that cycle.
The vaccine hesitant's tendency to move the goalposts when their reason du jour for refusing vaccination is invalidated is based on misinformation and unfounded fear. The exact opposite of good reasons to change your mind about something.
It would have been entirely possible for Fauci et. al to say "The vaccine data appears to show 95%+ efficacy, but we will be waiting to lift lockdown mandates be sure". That kind of messaging shows both a respect for science and a commitment to everyone's health. However, it was an unpopular political decision, so mandates were lifted.
This isn't the first time they've changed their course after making a decision prematurely. To the vaccine hesitant, why is this FDA approval any different? There's massive political pressure to approve these vaccines.
I care because humanity has been screwed over by this virus for a year and a half now, and the virus could be completely controlled by now in any country with a sufficient vaccine supply. But it's not, because people refuse to do their part in helping to take care of their community. That's disgusting and unforgivable to me. The blame for any COVID-related death that occurs in the US now falls squarely on the shoulders of the unvaccinated.
Other people are much more leaning towards frowning upon the partytime people "let us hug and stay together and forget about it all". Those other people believe that if people had been careful, the damages would have been minimal. Using some of your words,
«the virus could be [...] controlled by now in any country with a sufficient» carefulness in the population.
Demonizing unvaccinated people is the language of an abuser: "Look what you're making me do to you." The way out of abuse isn't ever to comply with the abuser's demands.
See how silly that sounds?
Also, the comparison is nonsense. If someone drinks and drives, they did intake something into their system which made them a risk to others. What you want is the reverse. Everyone is by default a risk to the society, and only if the get a biannual shot from the latest and greatest experimental medicine, you deem them no danger to society. You are trying to outlaw the human condition. There are people who think this is a big deal and needs to be opposed. I agree.
Making it a stance about personal freedoms is often used but it detracts discussion about facts of approved vaccinations, positive or negative they may be.
Meanwhile in Japan: people living freely their lives with no lockdowns, no forced vaccination, no vaccine pass. Another model is possible but the Western governments are addicted to their power trip.
70% is enough for the original Covid. Covid moved the goalposts to Delta which needs different numbers. This is not experts moving the goalposts, this is Covid changing on us - as was always expected to happen and why experts said we don't know what % is required until Israel showed 70% was enough for the original Covid strain.
It was probably updated once we found out more about Covid-19 Alpha, and later for Delta.
What changed was whether the surrounding people were receptive to infection and capable of spreading it.
Herd immunity happens when a disease can't spread because all people surrounding the infected person have enough immediate immunity to stifle its progress. Delta seems to be able to spread to people in the gap before the immune system recognises it, so it may be something that can't be stopped by herd immunity.
Other models are certainly possible, but only work in places where people have higher trust in their government, and think about collective welfare over their own individual selfishness. Unfortunately, people in the US (and much of the West) care too much about "mah lib-ur-tee" than doing their part to help keep their neighbors healthy.
Also I think your focus on Japan is a little weird; they went through their own bad time with COVID, and even consider the recent case of the large flare-ups surrounding the Olympics.
We have all known people who will double down on their arguments after being proven wrong because they've gone too far. This could give them an out.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/06/08/th...
Just like reducing cholesterol does not lower heart attacks.
Read more about that here: https://medium.com/@petilon/cholesterol-and-statins-e7d9d8ee...
I like Gary, but on the issue of cholesterol is more complex than he portrays.
It is absolutely the case that LDL-C is correlated with heart disease at the population level. It is absolutely the case that LDL-P is correlated with heart disease at the individual level. Beyond the correlation, there is considerable mechanism of action evidence that small particle lipoproteins are the driver of atherosclerosis.
The primary issue with statins / LDL is that they are prescribed based on LDL-C, which is not appropriate at the individual level and are thus considerably over proscribed. LDL-C only matters at the population level, not individual. When lowering LDL-C for the population, you will only see small benefits since most people get little to no benefit from the drug.
However, people with high LDL-P will absolutely see a benefit from statins. You need only look at the FH groups to see this.
This should be posted to the front page of the site. I get so tired of seeing comments pointing out some flaw in an institution and concluding that the institution is therefore useless. It really is lazy thinking.
So it’s not 20%. It’s a third.
I think it was a big mistake not to keep that as some kind of trial but my primary reason for that is because it encourages faulty conflations like yours. The message we should take from this is that the problem was NOT following the standard process rather than drawing any conclusions about the process which wasn’t followed.
That story was all over the headlines not because it was normal. It was in headlines, and in the front of your mind, because it was the exception that proves the rule. That’s not typical.
Regardless, the FDA approval was mostly about assessing safety of the drug in controlled trials and follow-ups. Likewise, the vaccine studies were rigorous examinations of safety and an in-depth search for warning signs that might indicate problems in small populations. The correct interpretation of this approval is to see that it has been thoroughly examined for safety in the field.
Finally, we already have mountains of evidence that the vaccine is effective. That much is not in question after administering an incredible number of doses globally and observing the outcomes. Proving efficacy was the least of the FDA’s concerns at this point.
It was in the headlines because it is normal, and some people were trying to improve the system but they failed. There are tons of existing drugs that have been approved based on surrogate endpoints, e.g. iirc the entire class of statin drugs.
Looks like NYC Public Schools are going to mandate all staff be vaccinated (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/23/nyregion/nyc-schools-empl...). I would expect most hospitals/health care organizations to pretty quickly mandate it as well.
There is very little incentive for a large organization to take on the added costs of allowing a large percent of their staff/members to remain unvaccinated now.
And despite all the stories/articles about the desperate, angry anti-vax people, they are really just a small minority who are good at being noisy, and the rest of us are becoming increasingly impatient with them.
Maybe you are not talking about "me" but I guess I couldn't tell from your comment.
There is of course also the issue that mandates come with legal liability for consequences that manufacturers are seemingly not liable for. However, when you mandate or pressure your employees, you are violating several laws, let alone fundamental human rights, and you are also not just taking responsibility for the effects/impacts but you are unnecessarily grabbing hold of that liability when it is not at all necessary. It is kind of mind boggling that we are facing a situation where people, companies, and organizations are increasing their legal risks by purposefully taking on legal liabilities they would not have by doing nothing.
I know someone with a totally inexplicable, debilitating, possibly neurological issue (but no one can tell her after ~5 months) that started with the injection. She chose to submit herself to the experimental treatment and is therefore personally liable even if it kills her. The manufacturers have been given immunity, but that liability will be taken on by employers that choose to mandated/coerce the injections.
I don't think people, organizations, and corporations are taking that into account adequately and are rather mindlessly rushing to grab the legal liability bag that the manufacturers were exempt from.
It's rather irrational and actually quite insane. I cannot make sense of why it is happening. One guess is that it is the effects of moral hazard after decades of nearly zero consequences for the administrative and ruling class. There are never consequences, so why not jump in head long that has never produced meaningful consequences and also in most casts has been quite profitable. Of course you would sycophantically rush to be the most obsequious to the system.
Nothing else makes any sober sense to me.
I'm vaccinated and everyone I know is, but I cringe a bit at the tolerance of what seems authoritarian to me. If I were to wager, things get better once antiviral treatments improve and when data analysis gets better, not when "full compliance" happens. To me it's clear that there is a seasonal nature, but it varies based on latitude/climate/time of year. For whatever reason it seems taboo to mention this. Anyone wanting to prove a point about masks/vaccines working or not working often compares one region/climate to another.
nice use of the oxford comma btw.
This is not new: only the most libertarian fringes reject the idea that living in a society comes with obligations. We avoided millions of life-altering diseases with vaccination and politicizing medical care is going to go down in history as the worst move since the CIA decided to use public health workers as a cover story.
The best argument for treating COVID more seriously is that we have a better understanding of influenza’s long-term effects. In both cases, however, I’d argue that it makes sense to require vaccination simply to reduce the impact on childcare and education: even if dying from the flu is relatively low-risk, it’s stressful and disruptive when it rips through a class and vaccination is quite cheap in comparison.
A more apt comparison is Covid to Influenza. You don't need flu shots to attend school.
You mean other than that?
The answer, of course, is no because living in a society requires moderating your behavior when it affects other people. Those real examples also notably did not turn into the slippery slopes you’re trying to scare people with because public support isn’t unconditional – as we’ve seen, there are very real limits to what they can require and it involves significant public debate. Where real authoritarians do cause problems, it’s a misattribution error to say those problems are because they have health codes rather than correctly recognizing that an authoritarian government will manifest in all kinds of areas.
If you want to drink and drive, go for it, just don't do it anywhere public. If you want to be unvaxxed, fine, just don't go anywhere public.
So they're not even all that good at providing the one thing companies may argue is necessary to go back-to-work; stopping spread. Similar with cruise lines and airplanes requiring it. Yes, the vaccines are very good at saving peoples' lives, but industry doesn't care about that, and it alone is not a good enough reason to mandate it.
You say everyone needs to get vaccinated so we can protect the people who can't get the vaccine or for whom it doesn't work. I have very bad news for you; the vaccine won't help. You can still get COVID, and you can still spread it to your four year old. I can still get it and spread it to my immunocompromised sister. It sucks. That's the reality we live in.
There are a lot of assumptions in that counterargument that people will hope you don't examine, for example, the assumption that the probability of a covid transmission ending in harm crosses the same probability threshold if, say, drunk driving ending in harm. I say it doesn't. And since the stakes are so high with what we're talking about allowing the government to do, the burden of proof is on needing to prove the individual's likelihood for serious harm being high.
You do realize that drunk driving is illegal, right? Do you think drunk driving should be legal because it's "unlikely" to cause harm to others?
> I say it doesn't.
628k confirmed deaths in the US from COVID. 37.8M confirmed infections. That's a death rate of 1.66%.
In 2016, 10,497 people died from drunk driving. 1 million people were arrested in 2016 for drunk driving. That's a rate of 1.0497%. So COVID is literally more dangerous than drunk driving.
Drunk driving stats: https://www.cdc.gov/transportationsafety/impaired_driving/im...
Imagine we're bottling soda in plastic bottles. There's an X% chance that a bottle explodes during the process. We also know if we over-fill a plastic bottle with CO2 the start it makes it slightly more elastic, and empirically it reduces that rate by Y%. We're not really sure why they were exploding, but we know that stretching them works.
Do you care about the other parts of the bottling process?
* Millions of COVID cases were never counted in those statistics; people who never got tested, due to being asymptomatic, low-symptomatic, having poor access to testing due to a vulnerable socioeconomic status, catching it before tests were widely available, and the natural rate of false-negatives due to self-swabs. It is very likely that, actually, the official statistics don't capture the majority of total COVID cases. This isn't a clerical rounding error; the real denominator in that death rate is somewhere 2x-10x lower than published, and we'll never know exactly where. [1] [2]
* This situation has not improved since the beginning of the pandemic. While testing is far more widely available now, the secondary issue of non-sterilizing vaccine immunity is now in play; the vaccines are by-and-large "leaky", but tend to result in far less severe, oftentimes even asymptomatic, infection. Many of these people are not getting tested, but are still getting COVID, and thus the count is underreported. Or, maybe they do get tested, and it comes back positive, but should that test actually be included in the overall COVID death rate? After-all, because the vaccines are good at reducing the chance of death, the COVID they have isn't quite the same as the COVID an unvaccinated individual would have. I don't know, but its a valid question which the broad statistics do not care about; its COVID, its included in the aggregates.
* Here's an interesting fact most people don't know about: testing sites, of course, gather data about the patient before a test. One of those pieces of information is: are you vaccinated, when were you vaccinated, which vaccine. Pretty basic stuff. Except, the systems CVS and Walgreens (two of the largest testing providers in the US) used to gather this data, for many months early in the vaccination cycle, did not ask this, or did not ask for all three pieces of information. It was only within the last month that Walgreens started asking for all three.
* Let's continue down this path of "fun reporting": I had COVID four weeks ago. The first question everyone asks is: Oh, you got a positive test, which variant was it? I've been asked this dozens of times, which makes me think many people don't generally realize: the nasal swabs cannot determine the variant. In fact, states do not run variant tests on every swab! Generally, they run variant tests in aggregate on a statistically significant subset of swabs, then report the data in a range of once a week, to once a month.
* Many state reporting agencies are actually really bad at differentiating between "positive tests" and "positive individuals". In other words, the most "responsible" citizens, those who get tested at the start, then once or even twice at the end of the 10 days, are in many jurisdictions actually screwing up the statistics.
* Many deaths were counted in those statistics. Oftentimes, over-counted, at least in the context you're using those statistics in (what is COVID's death rate?). First world hospitals, having pretty excellent access to these tests as the pandemic entered its teenage stage, entered a pattern of testing every admittance, even for symptoms unrelated to COVID. If they were positive, and they died for any reason, COVID was, of course, listed on their chart; it then got counted as a comorbidity, not the true cause of death. State reporting agencies still count it as a COVID death; they don't discriminate.
* But, of course, many deaths were undercounted; especially those who died before seeking medical care, or before testing was widely available.
* And that's not taking into consideration tertiary deaths caused by the state pandemic response, not COVID itself; millions of people delayed seeking regular and even urgent medical care due to fear of the virus. Many of these cases were not even at the behest of the patient, but rather due to medical offices delaying appointments or moving to virtual appointments, which offer a far lower standard of care. The impact to generalized mental health, social development of children, adolescents, and young adults, socioeconomic development of young adults, and many other facets of our society, will continue to be studied for the rest of our lives. Let's say it turns out that a broad, authoritarian lockdown saved a million lives, but it is also directly or indirectly traced to 20 million new cases of clinical depression; is a lockdown a good idea? Even with hard numbers like that its actually not obviously clear one-way or the other, and the worst part is: the people making these decisions never have the numbers. They're always acting on intuition; it takes years to even realize that this possibility even exists, at any magnitude, and we never know the true numbers. Did you know suicide is the 10th leading cause of death? Did you know that social isolation increases rates of clinical depression, which is positively correlated with suicide? Quarantine saved lives; how many did it cost? How many will it cost? But we're super duper sure it was the right call... right?
* Drunk driving is far, far, far more common than the arrest rates would suggest. Like, its actually insane how common drunk driving is. Cops are not gods. They do not catch everyone. One million people were arrested in 2016 for drunk driving; its likely that 50 million+ people drove above the legal limit in that same year, multiple times each.
This is just me, outlining the uncertainty of our world. Because here's the kicker, here's the Topic Of Choice: We should mandate vaccinations. You sure? Are you absolutely certain, beyond any doubt, knowing how much we don't know, that its actually the right call for our society?
You've thought through the medical consequences. There probably won't be any en mass, sure. What about social ones? We've got a nation of tens of millions of people who don't want to be vaccinated, where personal freedoms run deep for all its pros and cons, and you so strongly believe that our society will be Better if we force these people to undergo a medical treatment they don't want. Do you actually think this is such an easy decision? That there wouldn't be social consequences? That the mandate would go out, and everyone will forget that the government just shit all over their perceived freedoms (whether or not those freedoms are legitimate is irrelevant; they believe they have them, we live in a democracy, and there are 500 million+ guns in America).
The world is very, very complicated. You're making broad, authoritarian suggestions based on an unbelievably erroneous analysis of data, yet you were totally convinced you're right. The people in charge are totally convinced they're right. No one is right. No one has access to all the information. We live in a very complex, very scary world where even the most equipped, powerful, rich states cannot have even 2% of the information they need to make the right decisions.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-18272-4
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221137972...
Yeah, so I went with the stats we did have data for. I didn't speculate since I'm not omniscient and that's ignorant at best, disingenuous at worst. Both COVID cases and deaths are under-reported.
> Drunk driving is far, far, far more common than the arrest rates would suggest. Like, its actually insane how common drunk driving is. Cops are not gods. They do not catch everyone. One million people were arrested in 2016 for drunk driving; its likely that 50 million+ people drove above the legal limit in that same year, multiple times each.
The link I gave called out that 111M people self-reported drunk driving. That's an unreliable stat, so I went with the arrest rate which is a known quantity.
I wasn't "convinced" of anything. I chose the closest stats that we can get, which are definitely NOT perfect. What real-world data is "perfect"? Only when systems are self-reporting is data even close (e.g. latency, HTTP status counts, etc) and even those can be wrong due to log loss, servers failing, networks failing, etc.
You work with the data you have, and try to make informed decisions, instead of wildly guessing.
Also vaccine requirements aren’t anything new, so is the concern here that they’re mandating vaccines or this specific vaccine due to how new it is? If the latter, then what’s your bar for acceptance?
You've introduced a new assumption though: that a unvaccinated person has and transmits covid. You must apply the probabilities to that initial assumption as well. Probability of having covid * probability of transmitting covid * probability that the person you transmit to has series harm done.
>Also vaccine requirements aren’t anything new
This is an argument that I've also seen but think appeals to "well we've been doing something similar already." I don't think that justification holds much water, especially in this time period where we are questioning a lot of foundational social assumptions.
To your direct question about bar for acceptance, I think people can generally establish a good bar, but they have to be given accurate probabilities, and those have been hidden from us in favor of vague fear mongering.
See for example https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/unvaccinated-america-in...
There’s a pretty stable “never” population at 14%, and you see that as time goes on the hesitants have been gradually been getting won over.
I’m sure some in the “never” camp are using “it’s not been approved” as their current first-line given reason. But I think you need to break down the groups a bit more. There are genuinely people who are not fundamentally anti-vax that are just nervous about how fast the vaccines were developed or scared about what having “RNA” in the vaccine means (I don’t share these concerns but I understand where they come from). Some of these people will at the margin be persuaded by things like full approval.
Maybe some. But, while I don't really like governments and big employers wielding sticks in this case, you'll probably see even more people decide that they're not hesitant enough about vaccines to lose their jobs or be excluded from a lot of activities.
And while those sort of requirements could be implemented before full approval, a lot of organizations apparently wanted the additional air cover.
For 20 year-olds, kind of the opposite currently. Costs very little to use this choice as a political signaling gesture. But if the cost increases, as you say, behaviors will change and people will change their position. Talk is cheap, it’s easy to say “never” when it costs you ~nothing to do so.
But in short, I do strongly agree that mandates will be more persuasive than just approval alone. But I think full approval will still be beneficial in places that won’t make mandates.
Exactly. I've had more vaccines than most people ever will because of my time in the military. I'm good with it, I think it was smart given the circumstances. The question isn't "are traditional vaccines OK?" (yes) but "do I trust other people's ability to modify my DNA without error?" Of that I'm far less certain.
There is no vaccine that's based on people's ability to modify your DNA, so no need to worry about that. (I wonder how the idea that they do still keeps floating around...)
What is it, day 600 something of "just two weeks" to stop the spread? Oh wait, that's just the _other side's_ fault for not following the rules as well as you did.
From where I sit, it seems like a lot of people are having a hard time admitting that shutting down the world's economy may have been the wrong choice, hindsight.
All those field hospitals that were stood up in 2021 across the US have been torn down because they were not needed.
I don't know about you, but it looks more to me like all we are seeing is the breakdown of crony-capitalism. It's not a coincidence that the vaccines are some of the most profitable medical products ever produced.
> Some experts have estimated that full approval might convince just five percent of those who are unvaccinated to get shots.
And there's zero evidence supporting that premise. The US has historically been superior to Europe when it comes to vaccinations for example (look at Europe's long history of bad measles outbreaks). It's the difference between garbage propaganda slung at the US and reality. In reality the US has a tremendous long-term track record of making and utilizing vaccines, which is also why the US didn't disregard developing and distributing vaccines for this pandemic, and in fact was one of the world leaders in both categories.
I don't think this is a decision they made lightly.
Several small startups I’ve talked to are already requiring proof of vaccination. But it’s legal and insurance demanding it, not their team. And these are for _fully remote_ positions. I suspect FAANG is finding itself in a similar position.
Tin foil hat: I’m starting to suspect someone (gov? Pharma?) is leaning on insurance companies to in turn pressure the industry to mandate vaccination.
> Walk away from a job because of it
It’s starting to seem like you’ll be free to not vaccinate in the U.S., but it’s more than walking away from a job. If insurance requires it, you’ll have to find a company that has an insurance company willing to float you an exemption for non-protected class reasons; it’s not clear how much the market is going to allow for that.
BTW: I’m vaccinated. I left my job not to avoid vaccination, but because they thought they could remove my agency.
I want to know when insurance companies will start adjusting rates.
Note that they're NOT mandating/requiring vaccination (which may turn out to violate constitutional rights here) -- it's still the customer's choice -- but you're gonna pay more, just like if you smoke tobacco.
As mandates increase, I anticipate a wave of fake vax cards, as the ones in the USA are simple and trivially easy to forge.
Regarding your comment. I know several people who have already quit, many looking for new jobs and many who have shored up their finances. Many who have had the vaccine have explicitly stated they would never get their kids vaccinated. So there's also that...
I also know probably 10 families who have up and moved to Texas and Florida in 2021.
Here's follow up studies in specified in the letter:
4. Study C4591009, entitled “A Non-Interventional Post-Approval Safety Study of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine in the United States,” to evaluate the occurrence of myocarditis and pericarditis following administration of COMIRNATY. We acknowledge the timetable you submitted on August 21, 2021, which states that you will conduct this study according to the following schedule:
- Final Protocol Submission: August 31, 2021
- Monitoring Report Submission: October 31, 2022
- Interim Report Submission: October 31, 2023
- Study Completion: June 30, 2025
- Final Report Submission: October 31, 2025
5. Study C4591021, entitled “Post Conditional Approval Active Surveillance Study Among Individuals in Europe Receiving the Pfizer-BioNTech Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Vaccine,” to evaluate the occurrence of myocarditis and pericarditis following administration of COMIRNATY. We acknowledge the timetable you submitted on August 21, 2021, which states that you will conduct this study according to the following schedule:
- Final Protocol Submission: August 11, 2021
- Progress Report Submission: September 30, 2021
- Interim Report 1 Submission: March 31, 2022
- Interim Report 2 Submission: September 30, 2022
- Interim Report 3 Submission: March 31, 2023
- Interim Report 4 Submission: September 30, 2023
- Interim Report 5 Submission: March 31, 2024
- Study Completion: March 31, 2024
- Final Report Submission: September 30, 2024
6. Study C4591021 substudy to describe the natural history of myocarditis and pericarditis following administration of COMIRNATY. We acknowledge the timetable you submitted on August 21, 2021, which states that you will conduct this study according to the following schedule:
- Final Protocol Submission: January 31, 2022
- Study Completion: March 31, 2024
- Final Report Submission: September 30, 2024
7. Study C4591036, a prospective cohort study with at least 5 years of follow-up for potential long-term sequelae of myocarditis after vaccination (in collaboration with Pediatric Heart Network). We acknowledge the timetable you submitted on August 21, 2021, which states that you will conduct this study according to the following schedule:
- Final Protocol Submission: November 30, 2021
- Study Completion: December 31, 2026
- Final Report Submission: May 31, 2027
8. Study C4591007 substudy to prospectively assess the incidence of subclinical myocarditis following administration of the second dose of COMIRNATY in a subset of participants 5 through 15 years of age. We acknowledge the timetable you submitted on August 21, 2021, which states that you will conduct this assessment according to the following schedule:
- Final Protocol Submission: September 30, 2021
- Study Completion: November 30, 2023
- Final Report Submission: May 31, 2024
9. Study C4591031 substudy to prospectively assess the incidence of subclinical myocarditis following administration of a third dose of COMIRNATY in a subset of participants 16 to 30 years of age. We acknowledge the timetable you submitted on August 21, 2021, which states that you will conduct this study according to the following schedule:
- Final Protocol Submission: November 30, 2021
- Study Completion: June 30, 2022
- Final Report Submission: December 31, 2022
10. Study C4591022, entitled “Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine Exposure during Pregnancy: A Non-Interventional Post-Approval Safety Study of Pregnancy and Infant Outcomes in the Organization of Teratology Information Specialists (OTIS)/MotherToBaby Pregnancy Registry.”
- Final Protocol Submission: July 1, 2021
- Study Completion: June 30, 2025
- Final Report Submission: December 31, 2025
11. Study C4591007 substudy to evaluate the immunogenicity and safety of lower dose levels of COMIRNATY in individuals 12 through <30 years of age.
- Final Protocol Submission: September 30, 2021
- Study Completion: November 30, 2023
- Final Report Submission: May 31, 2024
12. Study C4591012, entitled “Post-emergency Use Authorization Active Safety Surveillance Study Among Individuals in the Veteran’s Affairs Health System Receiving Pfizer-BioNTech Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Vaccine.”
- Final Protocol Submission: January 29, 2021
- Study Completion: June 30, 2023
- Final Report Submission: December 31, 2023
13. Study C4591014, entitled “Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 BNT162b2 Vaccine Effectiveness Study - Kaiser Permanente Southern California.”
- Final Protocol Submission: March 22, 2021
- Study Completion: December 31, 2022
- Final Report Submission: June 30, 2023
People are seriously writing here that they think if people are being fired, that pressure will "hopefully change their minds". Are you aware how cruel you are? You wish someone to loose their income just because they dont have the same opinion then you? When did this happen? When did we start to produce people like this? When did we stop to care? Did I really miss this wave of right-wing-minded people hiding on the left side?
They've always been there but Covid and the ensuing hysteria has brought the authoritarians out of the woodwork. They're loud and proud right now.
> Did I really miss this wave of right-wing-minded people hiding on the left side?
Authoritarianism isn't unique to one side of the aisle and this comment speaks to the decades of FUD being spread by those on the left that anyone who isn't lockstep with the progressive agenda is "literally hitler".
The political status of this website requires me to disclaimer. I expect even with the disclaimer I will be attacked regardless. If not downvoted to the point that my words are hidden. Which isn't much of a prediction because this post is already downvoted.
>This is so weird and frightening, I dont know what to say. Things said and claimed by all sides in the past 1 1/2 years have made me really stop believe in humanity.
Political status/motivation. I wouldn't let it damage your position in humanity.
>People are seriously writing here that they think if people are being fired, that pressure will "hopefully change their minds". Are you aware how cruel you are? You wish someone to loose their income just because they dont have the same opinion then you? When did this happen? When did we start to produce people like this? When did we stop to take?
Don't go on reddit and look at this. They are cheering as antivaxxers are getting covid and dying. They are ecstatic to see people losing their jobs because of vaccination status. 6% of people cant get the vaccine but they dont care.
The point is that vaccination is still not mandatory, but vaxed people behave towards unvaxed as if it were.
But whats most devastating about all of this is that it made anxious people go fully nuts and break out of their protective shell. I have an axious mother, so I know a bit or two about how anxiety can have bad effects on the people surrounding the anxious. Most of these people were able to "hide" most of their issues and be mostly functioning humans. The pandemic has changed them into little political activists, and has destroyed most of their remaining true social connections. I cant be bothered to spend time if over-anxious people anymore. Life is too short.
TBH I'm pretty disappointed to see the commentary on HN cite reddit and wikipedia as often as they do.
I will say that we should have focused more on treatments instead of vaccines and then had a more traditional vaccine built on proven technology. Then we could have gotten everyone protected at the same time, stopping the variants.
This is a misconception actually. It really just depends. It is fair to say that if a virus is more deadly in a shorter time period it is less likely to become more contagious, but it isn't necessarily true.
Especially with viruses like COVID-19 which are spreadable before symptoms start.
https://www.fda.gov/drugs/postmarket-drug-safety-information...
Or point out that the 737 MAX had approval from another federal agency.
We simple can't be sure, it is personal risk management. Requiring the vaccine is silly because vaccinated people can still spread it (especially Delta), perhaps even spread it more since their symptoms aren't as severe and they are far more willing to mix with large crowds.
"In addition, a growing body of evidence suggests that mRNA COVID-19 vaccines also reduce asymptomatic infection and transmission."
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br...
Secondly, children have a very low risk, the flu is more dangerous to them than Covid.
Thirdly, assume that the growing body of evidence is correct . The vaccinated coworker who has a new Tinder date every week and mixes with large crowds in clubs will still be a higher risk than a reclusive, un-vaccinated, masked individual.
The overlap between antivaxers and masks does not work that way.
"In general (and I don't mean you), parents have had zero regard for others being infected with the flu for as long as I can remember. I've gotten the worst flu of my life (coughing for months) from a visiting parent with an infected child (the parent knew it and did not tell)."
So this is about revenge? I really have no clue what you point is.
"Secondly, children have a very low risk, the flu is more dangerous to them than Covid."
The number of children with severe symptoms is growing.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/more-kids-are-hospitalized-with...
"FDA set to grant full approval to Pfizer vaccine without public discussion of data": https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n2086?s=09
Expecting the public to have confidence in these vaccines is demanding a level of subservience and blind faith that most reasonable people are unwilling to provide.
>Interested persons may present data, information, or views, orally or in writing, on issues pending before the committee.
https://www.fda.gov/advisory-committees/advisory-committee-c...
Or maybe just stick with the fact that it isn't very effective. [1]
[1] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.06.21261707v...
> Both vaccines were highly effective during this study period against SARS-CoV-2 infection (mRNA-1273: 86%, 95%CI: 81-90.6%; BNT162b2: 76%, 95%CI: 69-81%) and COVID-19 associated hospitalization (mRNA-1273: 91.6%, 95% CI: 81-97%; BNT162b2: 85%, 95% CI: 73-93%). However, in July, the effectiveness against infection was considerably lower for mRNA-1273 (76%, 95% CI: 58-87%) with an even more pronounced reduction in effectiveness for BNT162b2 (42%, 95% CI: 13-62%). Notably, the Delta variant prevalence in Minnesota increased from 0.7% in May to over 70% in July whereas the Alpha variant prevalence decreased from 85% to 13% over the same time period.
Given that both Pfizer and Moderna have virtually no side effects why wouldn’t you get it at these efficacy rates, even if lower?
Not to mention your article was about infection not hospitalization. If you do that it makes even less sense.
It makes perfect evolutionary sense. Loads of variations appear in every infected individual. The most effective version takes over and is most likely to be passed on to others.
Most vaccines are so effective that the virus never gains a foothold. With the mRNA vaccines, people still get sick. You get tons of mutations and the original strain is no longer the most efficient because of the vaccine. so now there's tons of room for variants to form which work around the vaccine. Once an effective bypass happens, it takes off and you instantly get a new strain, but more resistant.
At the current rate, we're only a few short jumps away from a completely ineffective vaccine.
2. You linked to an old version that says "However, in July, the effectiveness against infection was considerably lower", in the current version the same sentence reads "In July, vaccine effectiveness against hospitalization has remained high"
That's generally how the media describes the papers that respectively go against, or with the narrative they're trying to push.
It also does seem like the approval process may be influenced by political pressure to remove barriers to hesitancy or to support vaccine mandates. My understanding is that the approval timeline here is faster than any previous one. Did the FDA really review the over 300,000 pages submitted for this approval and scrutinize it to the extent necessary? Maybe. But from the outside it seems suspiciously quick based on relative terms.
By looking at other vaccines historically and seeing that side effects tend to happen in the first few weeks.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/expect/af...
> Vaccine monitoring has historically shown that side effects generally happen within six weeks of receiving a vaccine dose.
But I do not believe that this is valid at all, being that this is the very first mRNA vaccine.
>By looking at other vaccines historically and seeing that side effects tend to happen in the first few weeks.
I feel like what you are saying is basically like someone asking "How do we know that self driving cars will be safe on the road" and you responding with, "well obviously by looking at the history of cars, we have been doing them for a century!"
"Other vaccines historically" work on fundamentally different principles. We can not use that data to assume that mRNA vaccines are going to work the same way.
"mRNA vaccines have been tested in humans since 2011"
So barely 10 years. A study on a dozen or so participants, all white, college aged men with largely identical diets. I guarantee you that not one participant in the 2011 study was pregnant. (Btw, I looked at your reference. A Bush era press release was less manipulative. There wasn't a single peer-reviewed reference. All press releases and from interested parties)
Compare that with other vaccine technologies for which we have centuries of data, and inoculation in general for which we might have a thousand years worth of safety data.
Or did we forget about all the inconvenient facts about drug testing? We appear to have forgotten all the research done about regulatory capture and all the ineffective and unsafe pharmaceuticals the FDA approves.
But, nvm. #BelieveTheScience and de-platform anyone who asks inconvenient questions. And let's compartmentalize away the replication crisis modern science is going through.
Also, for some of us 10 years is not very impressive at all. "It's not new, nRNA has been around since the 90s!" is a massive value judgement for the word "new". Not all of us work developing webpages with 3 month old technology stacks!
I don't think a society can be as "advanced" as Star Trek. Societies are hard. To abuse CS terminology, they're NP-hard (or harder?). Star Trek seems to have only external threats, all internal problems are solved. The most boring problem a real society has is that of production and it is definitely NP-hard (see Hayek?). Star Trek has not only solved that at galactic scales, but has solved much hard problems than production.
Nor I don't think Star Trek is advanced in the sense that I would consider it "progress" vs. just change. I view Star Trek as the propaganda reel of (not for, of) a techo-distopia. Vulkans and that Data android fellow freak me out more than the Klingons whose society, while brutal, I can understand. I see more humanity in a Klingon because I can see a human society degenerating into the Klingons'. I don't see any humanity in Vulcans.
Btw, their technology bores me. Their tech is either impossible (warp drives). Surpassed (communicators). Or fraught with angels-dancing-on-pins philosophical questions (the "beam me up scotty" machines)
So, with the caveat that you used ST as an example and I'm definitely not a Trekkie, let me address your question:
No, I don't.
Biological systems are far more complicated than any system mankind has made. Every "cure" or therapy is really a very good whack-a-mole with hopefully lots of statistical information to back it up.
Take blood. It has hundreds, if not thousands, of components. Some are in pg/dL level of concentrations (that's 10^-12g / 100ml). See this chart [1]. How can we every really understand all the interactions among those various components?
That is not to say that I'm a bio-luddite (I am, but that's besides the point). Take penecillin. It's brutal on the body, but is one of the most important discoveries in human history. It has saved millions, if not billions, of lives. Im very grateful for penicillin, and yet, what an illustrative example! We gave too much penicillin with too much abandonment. So now, we have anti-biotic resistant bacteria. And, almost 90 years after it's first discovery we're finally starting to understand it's role in the havoc in our gut flora.
Btw, gut flora is another, fascinating, example of how complicated bio-systems are. We're evolved to depend on a symbiotic relationship with a gut flora that we've destroyed over the last 70 years of anti-biotics and cheap sugar.
So, while I think ab-initio methods (what Star Trek does) can inform and accelerate drug discovery (I worked on that briefly in my PhD), ultimately, no, I don't think we can ab-initio drugs through the whole pipeline (need-->development-->safety_evals-->approval).
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7c/Referenc...
mRNA's short half-life - on the matter of a few dozens of minutes - and pre-existence in our bodies helps us not worry too much about the differences in delivery mechanism.
"We think based on biochemistry that mRNA acts like this, and we hope it does that, and we think it probably does the other" doesn't carry much weight here. The probability of any element of that chain of logic being wrong is too high.
I'm not saying that testing wasn't done. I'm saying "eh, it's probably OK, mRNA looks pretty safe" is not a useful contribution to this sort of discussion.
Barring a time machine, the "is it safe ten years from now" cannot be answered conclusively today. We're left to use other available evidence to make a risk analysis, like "mucking with the immune system tends to have effects that show up fast" and "what do we know about mRNA in the body, especially when delivered by viruses?". There's a risk to inaction, too.
We don't look at evolution and go "welp, can't test evolving humans from microbes, so we must avoid drawing any conclusions".
So go get vaccinated! If you trust the vaccine that it works, and that it's safe, go get it. I certainly have urged people I know who are high-at-risk and don't share my ethical concerns about them to get the vaccine.
If they're safe and effective, get vaccinated!
If they're safe and not effective, or lossy effective, we have very big problems and vaccinating the hold outs will not change anything
People who avoid the vaccine are akin to people who don't wear seat belts because they might drown if their car falls into the water.
Because of e and f, I think the risk of a vaccine is much lower. By now, we see very small risks for serious short and mid term effects. We know how long the mRNA survives in the body (I don't think we know that from the COVID virus, that could potentially hide for a very long time, as other viruses demonstrate), virtually eliminating direct long-term effects. What remains are the unkown unknowns. Can it trigger something? Sure, we have observed that in other vaccines. But it is very, very rare, not only that vaccine can cause it, but also that if the vaccine can cause it, one is affected. Additionally: It is very likely that a COVID infected person would have a similar risk -- much of the immuno-response is the similar to a vaccination (but maybe broader). Since I assume a close to 100% prob to get infected at some point if unvaccinated, it's not an additional risk.
To explain the last point a little: A way you can construct a long term effect goes like this: If the presented spike protein is close enough to a natural,i.e. normally expressed, protein, the antibodies could affect both, and potentially destroy an important body function. That risk, I think, is actually higher with a full infection, since the antibodies learn not only the spike protein, but potentially more of the virus, so there is more chance of similarity with something else. In any case, as far as we know, the chance for something is remote.
RE approval process: What calms my mind there is that all countries for which I normally trust the approval process gave their OK, including those which went with a different strategy, or where it was less of a political issue. While it's possible that they all got corrupted by political pressure, that's less likely.
I'm talking about the mRNA vaccines. Others are more complex. They are also more studied though so your objection seems to be to the mRAN ones.
If a doctor is recommending you don't take it based on their experience and expertise, it carries a bit more weight than "something you read on facebook". And if you can't trust doctors now, who may even be your own doctor, why would you trust anyone else, or "some other doctor"?
This is not something that can be resolved by bullying or mandates. It can only be resolved by open dialogue and debate between the two sides, which thus far, has been prevented.
Censorship and stifling of debate only hardens the opinions of either side.
It also makes no sense - many areas have massive resistance, no matter what has been thrown at them - proving the fear of "if we let them talk freely they'll influence others and go off and do whatever they want!" isn't founded. Basic human psychology, along with experience, shows the reverse has proven true.
If you stop people who are suspicious of something from being able to talk about what they're suspicious of, they get even more suspicious of it.
Certainly, there is no other time in history widespread censorship has resulted in anything other than widespread division, suspicion and ultimately, violence.
If employers mandate based on this approval, it will likely just result in mass walk-outs.
Minds are not won by force.
Your second claim is massively untrue: all of the information is public and actual medical doctors overwhelmingly support vaccination and bend over backwards trying to help patients understand it (note that most of the high profile objectors either aren't real MDs and/or are speaking far outside of their area of expertise). The problem is that many people are defining “open dialogue” as meaning that untrue statements they make need to be taken as seriously as the consensus of the scientific community.
The first is rather debatable: mandates have been highly effective everywhere they've been tried because they shift the cost calculation to “do I feel strongly enough about this that I'm willing to give up something I like?”.
It's not possible to have anything remotely resembling a "debate" in such a climate.
Mandates have not been effective. Nothing that's been done can be said to have been "effective". We are apparently in an even worse place now, even with vaccines, than we were last year.
In reality though, we aren't.
The pathology of the virus is well-understood, as are the mechanisms to defeat it. But we're not allowed to talk about it.
It'd all be over in weeks if we were - as we saw in India recently, in all provinces but the one that stuck with the dogma.
I think a huge factor will be how many employers, colleges, etc. are now willing and legally able to require vaccination. It’s one thing to say you trust something you read on Facebook more than your doctor and quite another to walk away from a job because of it.