People in the control branch were told they were controls so that they had the option to get the newly-authorized vaccine for real. Standard practice for trials that go well.
I think it's standard practice for therapeutics, but not for vaccines?
The emergency use authorization seemed absolutely like the appropriate course of action given the circumstances.
This sort of claim can’t be made on that basis because a lot of people do not produce antibodies after infection.
Paper: “Predictors of Nonseroconversion after SARS-CoV-2 Infection” – https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/27/9/21-1042_article
Abstract: “Not all persons recovering from severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection develop SARS-CoV-2–specific antibodies. We show that nonseroconversion is associated with younger age and higher reverse transcription PCR cycle threshold values and identify SARS-CoV-2 viral loads in the nasopharynx as a major correlate of the systemic antibody response.”
Please note that this was already known when the study which is taken to show that people are imagining long COVID was published.
It’s not a good study.
Quite a bit of research has been done since then which further pins down the fact that long COVID is very real and how to diagnose it with biomarkers, which turn out to correspond very well with people saying that a SARS-CoV-2 infection messed them up.
Please also consider how harshly judgemental it appears when someone accuses a large number of people of imagining or making up a severe and disabling condition. You have to be very certain.
Also using steroids like dexamethasone were a later advent in treating covid that helped a lot. (They should have been standard of care right away like they would have been for any other respiratory illness).
These early follies increased the perceived need for a vaccine then and today still; risk : benefit analysis for the vaccines consider worst possible scenarios for covid, which include defunct practices like high PIP ventilator use and forgoing of common first-line treatments
The time frames for the graphs are not the beginnings of covid (EoY 2021). By that time the initial standards of care had improved to the steroid treatments (I can't say specifically which ones, because I do not know, but I do know they were generally the standard of care at that time).
The risk benefit analysis of the vaccine vs the disease is ultimately something that's impossible to do at this point, because it's impossible to be impartial to whatever side you think is riskier. In general, I think a disease is just always going to be riskier than a vaccine. Anything you say about the vaccine could be true of the disease as well until we have complete information about the disease.
I think for a lot of people COVID isn't "real". They don't know anyone who died. Or if they do they were old, and/or it happened in the hospital far away from whatever their personal reality is.
Believe me when I tell you the risk associated with the vaccine is nothing compared to what he went through. I fully believe had he been vaccinated he'd still be here today.
Sorry for your loss, but there’s no way you could know that. The very same logic you would require you to espouse the belief that any person who received a vaccine and died, died because the vaccine.
You don't get a choice about COVID getting into your body, and that is far worse than whatever possible long term effects of the vaccine might be.
There may be concerning long term effects, but keep persepcive, the worst possible case is still better than the known case of COVID. And of course long term studies on COVID are also still in progress with all signs pointing to even more bad effects of COVID coming out in the coming years.
The most common outcome of Covid is feeling bad for a couple of days (up to a week), and then moving on with life across all age groups. This has always been the case.
However, when you are talking about populations of 10s of millions in low risk age ranges, it's 10,000's of preventable deaths!
Even if you don't care about the deaths (it's their choice to die; whatever), note that for every death, there are 10-100 long covid cases that are pulling resources from the health care system indefinitely.
The vaccine seems to cut those by about 90% too. Why should we waste tax dollars on medicare and welfare for anti-vaxxers?
Why should we waste tax dollars on medicare and welfare for anti-vaxxers?
Not in young age groups its not. Those 10k at risk of Covid death are at significantly higher risk of death from other causes too. If we stratified by more than age you'd see significantly reduced IFR among all age groups in the group without comorbidities. Quit lumping all people together, this is the age of big data and we should be using it to enhance lives not subjugate with blithe renderings.
You seem certain of this, but the vaccines are new enough that we can't possibly have long term data to even evaluate.
Bodies are complicated, even more than software systems. I've been in enough SEV reviews where the root cause was seemingly innocuous to know that I can't anticipate with much confidence that any particular change won't result in some cascading failure scenario. This is why we have test environments. Luckily in software it's extremely rare for a change to take years to manifest bad behavior, but not so in medicine.
I'm no biologist, but an obvious question to ask is if the spike protein by itself, which the vaccine will produce, has different impacts than the spike protein coupled to the virus envelope. It's certainly smaller, will it be able to pass through areas where the whole virus package wouldn't? What about the end of the spike that would otherwise be attached to the envelope, will it have an effect?
You can't naively draw a Venn diagram of virus and vaccine impacts where the vaccine impacts are fully a subset of the virus impacts.
You don't get a choice about COVID getting into your body, and that is far worse than whatever possible long term effects of the vaccine might be.
And I only mean that as it relates to specific demographic cohorts, not overall. If I were elderly, diabetic, immunocompromised etc. I don't think I'd hesitate. But the data I've seen on my demographic cohort is a toss-up at best, or even shows the vaccine to be riskier.
You don't know that, because we don't know what the "long term effects of the vaccine" actually are.
Well... if you think that there's a case for an emergency use authorization, then you kind of can't wait to determine long-term risks. If there's a Covid epidemic threatening to kill millions of people in 2019, you can't wait for a study of long-term consequences that terminates in 2027. You have to decide with the information you have in 2019.
Was there a case for an emergency use authorization? Covid did in fact kill millions of people, so arguably yes.
> ... and certainly before any mandates.
Yeah, there I'm with you.
Sure, except for the 20+ million lives they saved:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3... https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2022/06/covid-19...
> The erosion of trust in the institutions that are supposed to protect consumers has alone done exponentially more damage than the virus it self.
Source needed. Reading these comments, one would think nobody ever died of COVID. One would think we didn't have hospitals crammed to the gills with them.
There is no reason to expect 20 million people in the United States would have died if we had taken a european approach to vaccination approvals.
Excess mortality is higher now than during Covid https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-are-excess-deaths-hi...
There is evidence of statistical lies perpetuated to benefit big pharma.
- The extreme false positive rate of COVID testing
- Blindly combining "of" and "with" Covid cases for cause of death based on those same broken tests.
- Influenza, pneumonia magically took a couple of years off during Covid
- PCR testing cycles at extreme highs
The entire pool of data of Covid deaths has been poisoned. There is no interest in accuracy. But there does seem to be extreme interest in protecting the liability and profits of the pharma companies that coerced unproven, untested, ineffective "cures" that do not prevent infection, spread, or reduce symptoms.
I'm glad I only got the J&J shot way back when it came out and avoided 3+ rounds of Pfizer or Moderna primary and boosters.
Excess mortality is higher now because we're in the middle of a massive rebound of all the other respiratory illnesses (that were stopped by widespread masking and record flu vaccination last year). Also Covid is still around. Omicron has partially "escaped" the updated vaccines (which you should take anyway).
Source for the respiratory illness spike:
https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/11/southeast-us-has-hit...
Interesting analysis of the UK's excess mortality published in the BMJ: https://www.bmj.com/content/379/bmj.o2524
> Surprisingly, mortality rates in 2022 for most of the 10 leading “underlying” causes of death such as heart disease, stroke, and lung and colorectal cancer have been similar to previous years, or lower than expected. An exception is the rate for “symptoms, signs, and ill defined conditions” (mostly deaths resulting from old age and frailty) which has consistently been higher than expected and also caused the most excess deaths, but not enough to explain the overall excess.4
> However, the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities’ (OHID) analysis of deaths by “any mention” on the death certificate—rather than just the “underlying cause” of death—shows a substantial excess, in particular, of deaths from cardiovascular diseases and diabetes since April,6 prompting an investigation by the Department of Health and Social Care. Growing evidence suggests that covid-19 increases the risk of cardiovascular problems even months after infection,7 which could in part be driving excess deaths. Covid-19 itself remains the sixth leading cause of death, causing 200-400 deaths weekly—a reminder that this virus remains a threat for the foreseeable future.
> Another possibility is that people may not be receiving the care they need from an NHS that was already overstretched pre-pandemic and is now coping with unprecedented backlogs of care and pressures on emergency services. This “crisis” situation has an adverse impact on all patients, but a lack of timely care can be especially life threatening for people with acute cardiovascular problems.
> ONS analysis shows about 3300 excess deaths occurred during the heatwaves experienced in England and Wales between June and August, mostly in older people.8
> ONS also notes that excess deaths can occur following periods when deaths were lower than average, ie, “mortality displacement.”5 Could some of the excess deaths since April reflect the lower ASMRs in early 2022?
I'm also curious about why there's such a difference in relative excess death rates between the US and UK. Currently in the US the weekly death rates are far below what they were in 2020-2021: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
Meanwhile for the US and European countries, Covid death and excess death numbers are pretty close.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/10/world/europe/covid-russia...
> Excess mortality is higher now than during Covid
When did Covid disappear? This year, every week at least 2000 people died of Covid in the US.
> - Influenza, pneumonia magically took a couple of years off during Covid
Have you heard of mask mandates? How do you think they affect the spread of Influenza?
So those tools developed in one tenth of time of the normal tests aren't perfect. Hardly shocking. All tests have intervals of confidence attached, because Science is not magic. Some people never really understood this.
> Blindly combining "of" and "with" Covid cases for cause of death based on those same broken tests.
Either you have a test that works or don't. If they detected covid most of the cases when people had it and failed in the rest, they work. Much better than having no tools at all.
It does not matter if you die directly by a disease or by the sequels of the disease. If people were not dying from covid, this still leads us with the problem that people were dying more often than in normal years. How do we explain it?
If something was proven between 2019 and 2022 is that overreacting saves lives and ignoring the problem kills people. Being conservative and overzelous in the middle of a new unknown pandemic was the correct way to manage it.
> Influenza, pneumonia magically took a couple of years off during Covid
Easily explainable when almost everybody was using masks and social distance in those two years and a proof that masks worked, at least partially.
> PCR testing cycles at extreme highs
I'm unsure about what you want say with that. PCR testing needs to chase an organism that is mutating at extreme highs so they need to change at a high pace. This is how virology works. The tests have a caducity time also, as any other sophisticated chemical reactive used in a lab. "But, but, they got rich!". Yep. A company developping a product in high demand, earn lots of money normally. So what?
> and profits of the pharma companies that coerced unproven, untested, ineffective "cures" that do not prevent infection, spread, or reduce symptoms.
To start, vaccines never claimed to prevent infection.
About spread. Too litle, too late and one step forward, two backward. Negationists and agents actively promoted the disease and deliberately created chaos. People was videotaped deliberately coughing in the face of other after tearing off their masks. The same people were videotaped later directing the mass to commit a coup and trying to sell information from the capitol to Russian agents. None of them where found linked with pharma companies (and is very unlikely that a pharma company would lobby for convincing people to reject pharma products).
Maybe is not really fair to blame pharma for this while forgetting the cultists.
Vaccines really reduced symptoms and saved people. This is true. Is not difficult at all to spot the benefits if you look at the data. Is proven empirically that most of the zillions of people that received the vaccines didn't developped serious collateral effects and died less than the people that rejected them. There are dozens of notorious antivacs videotaped bragging about the "inoffensive" disease, actively trying to caught it and realizing too late that were dying by covid. I agree that the main cause of death here should be stupidity, not covid.
210,000 to 448,000 Americans die every year to preventable medical errors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preventable_causes_of_death#An...
This is more people than COVID kills in the same time period, but strangely there's no panic about that. No mandates. No significant steps from any authorities to do anything about it. Perhaps because there's no money in that, unlike pushing a remedy for something that's not as significant as people feel.
Humans are messy, can't hold all knowledge about everything in their heads at all times, and error prone. Unless you replace them entirely you're not going to be able to eliminate medical errors.
Also, many hospitals view things like infection control or antimicrobial stewardship as cost centers, and they're not doing nearly as much as they can.
The anti-arthritis medications I take cause terrible side effects.
These options are still better than the underlying problems. Throwing out pithy feel good quotes doesn't capture the nuance of the line that doctors walk when trying to treat illnesses. "Do no harm" is the ideal. In reality it's to do less harm than the disease.
They fortunately can tolerate a few degrees higher core temperature than the hornet - it can't be good for the bees but if your lifespan is 60 days.
"Professor John Ioannidis of Stanford University, quotes an infection fatality rate (IFR) for Covid of 0.00-0.57% (0.05% for under 70s), far lower than originally feared and no different to severe flu [3]. This paper is published on WHO’s own Bulletin but ignored by UK mainstream media."
The public health measures were unjustified. We only ever should have protected seniors, rather we displaced ICU occupancy into long tern care homes. Mad world
At the time, he wrote (https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-a...):
> Some worry that the 68 deaths from Covid-19 in the U.S. as of March 16 will increase exponentially to 680, 6,800, 68,000, 680,000 … along with similar catastrophic patterns around the globe. Is that a realistic scenario, or bad science fiction? How can we tell at what point such a curve might stop?
It did exactly that.
We really sacrificed the term "vaccine" on the altar of pharma profits with this one. It's at best an ineffective flu shot that only targets one virus. (Most flu shots target several.) They literally never even tested to see if it would stop the spread - which vaccines do - then lied and told us it would.
And here's why they'll try to do it again in the future:
>We're Living Through the Greatest Transfer of Wealth From the Middle Class to the Elites in History
https://www.newsweek.com/were-living-through-greatest-transf...
There is no credible epidemiologist who wouldn't call the COVID-19 vaccines a vaccine.
And there are a number of vaccines with limited reduction in transmission but effectiveness against more severe outcomes.
https://www.heart.org/en/news/2022/08/22/covid-19-infection-...
The anti-vax stance is similar to the claims that tightly regulated nicotine vapes are worse than high tar cigarettes. (Except that you can just choose to not smoke, of course.)
I see the argument here in this thread that the vaccine isn't really preventing you from getting covid at this point (which is probably largely true) but shouldn't being vaccinated mean that you'll have a lower viral load and shorter duration of illness?
The mRNA vaccines work by causing the spike protein to multiply in your cells. Yes, the mechanism is different - the virus copies itself and the spike protein just happens to be part of the virus, whereas the vaccine mRNA just causes the spike protein itself to be copied. Note that with the vaccine, you're getting a massive number of cells "infected" all at once, equivalent to quite a bit of virus self-replication. So the result is the same, a lot of spike protein floating around and doing damage. The main difference in result is that with the mRNA, there is an upper bound to the number of cells which can be infected (and which therefore have to be eliminated by your immune system), whereas with the virus there is effectively no upper bound. But that doesn't translate at all into a difference of how much damage the spike protein produced by X infected cells produces, and it doesn't mean that the number of infected cells with mRNA is significantly less than the number of infected cells you would have gotten with a successfully-fought-off infection. So it could do just as much damage.
Reverse-transcriptase enzyme in liver cells in a lab has been shown to convert the mRNA vaccines into DNA. While it's unclear if it would actually be a permanent change to cells, DNA is a lot more stable than RNA and could hang around a lot longer than expected, and result in a lot more spike protein than expected.
A) The general method of action of the vaccines is that the mRNA enters a cell (generally dendritic cells), the cell transcribes it into the spike protein, then the cell detects something off about the proteins and presents them on their cell wall for the immune system to respond to. The proteins aren't just "free floating" unless your immune response is
B) The likelihood of an immune response to an active infection never doing the same thing with cells that contain partially constructed virons / viron components, or achieving the same effect by breaking down full virons, is basically zero. So it's almost certain that an active infection would have "free-floating" proteins in some capacity as well.
covid vaccines are always present in the bloodstream after injection, even if injected intra-muscularly
an early study in japan showed only ~25% of the vaccine stays at the injection site
Also their dataset had 13% covid positive rate. So ideally we should multiply the non vaccinated risk by 13%.
[0] https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA....
Wait, what? As in people should just take it as a prophylactic for heart disease, without even taking covid into consideration? It seems like this would be shouted from the rooftops if it were true.
Absolutely terrible reporting in that link - instead look at the paper: https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA....
In men younger than 40 years, we estimate an additional 4 and 14 myocarditis events per million in the 1 to 28 days after a first dose of BNT162b2 and mRNA-1273, respectively; and an additional 14 , 11 and 97 myocarditis events after a second dose of ChAdOx1, BNT162b2, and mRNA-1273, respectively. These estimates compare with an additional 16 myocarditis events per million men younger than 40 years in the 1 to 28 days after a SARS-CoV-2–positive test before vaccination. [ChAdOx1 == AstraZeneca, BNT162b2 == Pfizer, and mRNA-1273 == Moderna]
The risk of vaccine-associated myocarditis is consistently higher in younger men, particularly after a second dose of mRNA-1273, where the number of additional events during 28 days was estimated to be 97 per million people exposed. An important consideration for this group is that the risk of myocarditis after a second dose of mRNA-1273 was higher than the risk after infection.
> The risk of vaccine-associated myocarditis is consistently higher in younger men, particularly after a second dose of mRNA-1273, where the number of additional events during 28 days was estimated to be 97 per million people exposed. An important consideration for this group is that the risk of myocarditis after a second dose of mRNA-1273 was higher than the risk after infection.
That's from the study you linked; for the group most at risk of vaccine myocarditis, the vaccine was associated with a higher risk than the virus. In this study, this was true for Moderna, with Pfizer being about equivalent risk to the virus (albeit without considering that the risk of infection remains after vaccination). However, there have been other studies that found this to be true for all mrna vaccines.
So to answer your question, its technically true, but only if you dilute the at-risk group by including the entire population.
Earlier in pandemic 196k post Covid patients were monitored a year... "We did not observe an increased incidence of neither pericarditis nor myocarditis in adult patients recovering from COVID-19 infection."
i.e. I would think that number has significant survivorship bias.
Also, can you imagine losing a child to something that was preventable? You can play numbers and statistics all day, but we're talking about children's lives.
You're probably not a parent? But for reference, go find examples of people who are parents that have lost children to some cause, and see what they're doing now? I would bet 9/10 times they're trying to prevent that from happening to others.
Children are not dying from covid. So there is no need to vaccinate them unless they are in a high risk category.
The NY Times reported "For children without a serious medical condition, the danger of severe Covid is so low as to be difficult to quantify."
And it would be just as backed up as if I were to say "Children are not dying from covid vaccines."
there are plenty of comments here that speak to the general age recommendation other countries have provided, but i have yet to see people connect the other MAJOR group of people that should, by all means, totally, 100% consider getting their nth vaccination -> anyone with a comorbidity! if you are a young man with diabetes, the risks you face from the vaccine vs a covid infection are no longer as murky.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33480849 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29221924#29223881
There are 31 reports of death following Covid-19 vaccination for children 5-12, and ‘10.9 million US children ages 5-11 have received at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine’ as of 11-2-22. This is 2.84 deaths per million. Again, VAERS notoriously undercounts.
https://openvaers.com/covid-data/mortality
https://www.aap.org/en/pages/2019-novel-coronavirus-covid-19...
When you say "VAERS notoriously undercounts", I think you're probably referring to the flu vaccine (where we would have historical data), but I don't think it's fair to say that would be true for the Covid vaccine.
Specifically because at the onset of this new vaccine, people are much more likely to report that a death happened after a covid vaccine. There is a segment of the population that has never trusted the covid vaccine, so they are a lot more likely to report a death after vaccination of a loved one. Also as the vaccine is new, there's probably a lot more data gathering around it because scientists would definitely like to know if the vaccine causes death. Lastly, it's an event you're much more likely to have talked to with your loved ones before you passed away, than with the flu vaccine.
My family knows I got a covid vaccine. My family has no idea about my flu vaccine status.
Lastly, and most importantly, the numbers for those are not intrinsically linked. There's not actually any implied causal link in any of those numbers "VAERS Covid/Flu Vaccine Reported Deaths by Days to Onset all Ages". They are all just correlated. If you want to look for a causal link you'd have to compare against the total number of people who got vaccines on that day. And then compare against total number of deaths for the whole population.
Adverse events from drugs and vaccines are common, but underreported.
Although 25% of ambulatory patients experience an adverse drug event,
less than 0.3% of all adverse drug events and 1-13% of serious events
are reported to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Likewise, fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported. Low
reporting rates preclude or slow the identification of “problem” drugs
and vaccines that endanger public health. New surveillance methods for
drug and vaccine adverse effects are needed. Barriers to reporting
include a lack of clinician awareness, uncertainty about when and what
to report, as well as the burdens of reporting: reporting is not part
of clinicians’ usual workflow, takes time, and is duplicative.
Sensitivities ranged from 72% for poliomyelitis after
the oral poliovirus vaccine to less than 1% for rash
and thrombocytopenia after the MMR vaccine.
And regarding the protestation that correlation does not imply causation, it’s not on me to prove that the treatment is harmful, and otherwise it’s safe and thus administered—-it’s on you to prove that it confers an all cause mortality benefit. I am aware of no evidence to suggest that such a benefit obtains in children, and suggest that this dearth of evidence explains the failure to approve the vaccines for children in many European countries.
As well as explaining confounding variables that your reference doesn't take into account for what that means. None of your sources are accounting for how politically embroiled this vaccine is, and how much of a difference that would make in who/what gets reported.
Just in case, I will make this point. If you had a loved one get a covid vaccine, and then die 20 days later, would you report it to VAERS?
So... what you're saying is that the vaccine is not better than the virus? Because that is the simplest and best explanation for this observation.
Knowing what I know now, were a family member to die 20 days after a vaccination I would certainly submit a VAERS report, but I find this question incredible: are you really disputing multiple studies that conclude that VAERS underreports adverse events by appealing to your nebulous feeling that family members surely would not neglect to file a VAERS report after the death of a family member?
Does the fact that only a tiny minority of the population even knows VAERS exists provoke doubt?
How about what HHS has this to say about the matter (https://vaers.hhs.gov/data/dataguide.html):
“Underreporting" is one of the main limitations of passive
surveillance systems, including VAERS. The term, underreporting
refers to the fact that VAERS receives reports for only a small
fraction of actual adverse events. The degree of underreporting
varies widely.
As for the insulting claim that no standard of proof would convince me that the vaccine is better than the virus: all I require is a sufficiently powered RCT with a genuine placebo in the control, full disclosure of patient level data, and all cause mortality as the primary endpoint. It baffles me that you don’t demand the same.
https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2021-052273
https://doi.org/10.1111%2Fijpo.12920
To be clear, I am not telling anyone to avoid vaccination for themselves or their children. Vaccination is a good option for the vast majority of patients. Talk to your doctor.
And ironically, school closures and lockdowns during the pandemic actually increased the rate of childhood obesity. The purported "cure" was not only worse than the disease, it actually made the disease worse by placing children at greater risk.
https://www.cureus.com/articles/107920-increased-incidence-o...
It seems like I'm getting a continual -2 on votes for all of my arguments just cause I'm coming off as "pro-vaccine". So it doesn't actually seem to matter what appeals I make.
Also though, I don't really believe I'm changing anyone's mind on this. I'm just inviting people consider the humanity of things like "child deaths". Which, is much easier to consider as a number than it is as an actual concept.
I don't really have time to cross reference all your different comments, but when you post a comment that is just appeal to emotion, I tend to mention it.
In all honesty, I will say that pointing out rhetorical styles is probably the least constructive internet discussion you can have. Mostly because even if you can point to a logical fallacy, doing so doesn't negate the underlying argument unless you can actually explain it.
Now if your argument is "what's the harm?, why not vaccinate everyone?" my answer would be we don't actually know what the harm might be to these kids later in life. No one does. Probably no harm, I guess? Maybe a 3/1,000,000 chance of harm? no one knows.
Early on, the goal was to reach herd immunity while we still had vaccines that were fairly effective at reducing transmission against the variants we had had, before they mutated.
But also, I don't know how familiar you are with gov't messaging. But the more widespread you make a message, the less nuanced you can make it. People at large don't take nuance very well, and people at large are bad at evaluating circumstances. So if you give them a message like "People over the age of 65 should get 3 doses, and people over 30 should get 2 doses, etc." You're going to end up with most of the people not knowing what to do.
To add to that, you have people "doing their own research" who have no idea what the requirements for actual peer-reviewed research is, screaming from the rooftops that you can't trust anything coming out of anyone's mouth. And they will latch onto any piece of nuance and tear it to shreds.
Now, I still think that American institutions have done a bad job communicating, but considering they were undermined at every step of the process, I'm inclined to believe that it's more reasonable for them to give a blanket across-the-board recommendation than it is to destroy their own goal by adding confusion of "nuanced recommendations".
What age groups does this affect?
I think I have condition Y so I should go get vaccinated, but I have conflicting information on that from multiple doctors. Should I get vaccinated?
Also, in the US people often take advertised medications to their doctors and ask if they should take it, rather than doctors recommending things to people.
Finally, there are large segments of the population that don't consult doctors for varying reasons.
You wanna try and make that message simpler?
The mRNA vaccines weren't even tested for transmission during the early trials. It was impossible to make educated statements about reaching herd immunity through mass vaccination without any data. This did not stop people from introducing mandates in some places, even after it became clear that herd immunity will not be reached, which goes a little beyond bad communication.
In hindsight, that was incorrect, but you can't criticize a decision made with limited information with perfect information, and pretend like you would've seen the perfect information at the time. It is reasonable to assume that viruses would be subject to herd immunity, because it's been true for the vast majority of viruses we've interacted with in the past.
I can absolutely criticize handwavy low knowledge / high impact decisions afterwards, because that's what they were and that was clear to many at that time already. Consensus wasn't reached based on knowledge, but based on power.
Luckily I came to that conclusion early during the pandemic, so I don't feel compelled to defend unethical decisions now.
In converse: we should have skipped phase 3 trials (effectivity) and should have started vaccination after safety was approved.
If anything the vaccination campaign has shown that sometimes acting fast can be tremendously helpful.
Since my dad had his health go so poorly after the vaccine, I decided to not risk it, specially considering my existing conditions.
It was an emergency.
At the time the vaccine got authorized, we were in a middle of a pandemic, millions of people with no immunity were getting sick, and we couldn't stop the spread even with heavy restrictions. It was clear that we will all have some immunity eventually. The point of the emergency use of vaccine was to give people immunity in a way that wasn't as bad at getting sick. Wait too much, and the vaccine would have been mostly useless. It was a game of how much uncertainty we allow vs how much more deaths if we do nothing. And I think the (fairly conservative) bet saved millions, maybe we could have saved a bit more if we actually vaccinated people before the end of phase 3.
We are now in the end game, and the rules have changed. We are now almost all immunized in one way or another, the virus is now optimized for immune escape instead of raw speed, thankfully making it less deadly in the process. Because of that, the way we approach vaccination needs to change too. We can't compare today's situation with the beginning of 2021.
The fact that this research is just now being done ought to be enough to immediately revoke the FDA emergency use authorizations and pull the product from the shelves.
The covid vaccines have been a complete and utter disaster at every level. The erosion of trust in the institutions that are supposed to protect consumers has alone has done exponentially more damage than the virus it self.
We now have victims of vaccine injury so scared of societal backlash they don't speak out, and doctors so scared of losing their license/job they ignore the evidence in front of them.