Manufacturing matters, and six years ago, I said that one side effect from the pandemic is that mRNA technology, which had been lab-scale stuff, suddenly had dump-trucks full of money appearing to help them scale their manufacturing.
They apparently settled on the the sequences for the original covid vacs in a weekend. Going from that design to billions of doses is one of the hardest things to do, but once done, will persist. And it is ready to be deployed for the next hundred applications that we find for this.
Flu vaccines is an obvious application, since the prior egg-based manufacturing required about six months lead time and millions of eggs, but nobody wanted to invest in anything better.
> They apparently settled on the the sequences for the original covid vacs in a weekend. Going from that design to billions of doses is one of the hardest things to do, but once done, will persist.
No no. They had a candidate for the vaccine. Scaling manufacturing is hard, sure, but the actual barrier was proving the candidate worked. We conducted (by far) the most time-efficient clinical trials in history to prove the vaccines were safe and effective.
Until that happened, we could not have known the candidate drug was actually correct.
Serious question in good faith: what was the deal with the “calamari” (clots?) the anti-vax crowd kept talking about being found in the veins/arteries of folks who took the Covid vaccine?
> Now an international team, led by Flinders University, have found that in a small number of people, the immune system can accidentally confuse a normal adenovirus protein with a human blood protein termed platelet factor 4 (or PF4).
Seems to have been a legitimate, very rare, side effect
It's worth clarifying that the adenovirus-based (viral vector) vaccines that article is discussing were a completely different technology from the mRNA vaccines.
I am quite curious too. I had heard that, despite arm vascular being very consistent among individuals, it does still vary. And I think for most vaccines I guess it doesn't matter if you hit something other than muscle. Maybe for the mRNA vaccines it does matter? I'm baselessly speculating though. Wish other person hadn't been so vague.
IIRC the vaccines were provably linked to the death of young people who had blood clots they shouldn't have had.
The common argument made is that the vaccine saved more lives than they took, but this is pretty fucked up IMO. It's the trolley problem IRL - if you force someone to get a vaccine and they die as a result, you are responsible for their death. Also, the manufacturers can never be held responsible, because they have legal immunity for the COVID vaccines.
This was passed in response to claims against DPT vaccine and manufacturers stopping production of the said vaccine. Lawmakers feared loss of herd immunity and passed the law. Now vaccine skeptics say this is not enough and claim inability to sue the company directly as an issue - but what they really want is enforce their minority view on the majority by suing companies and ensuring no one has access to vaccines - tyranny of the minority.
Perhaps "vaccine skeptics" say this because the Covid vaccines are not covered under VICP. They're covered under CICP, which is more stringent and has paid out one person $6 million, and a few hundred grand spread out between some dozen others.
My friend who was diagnosed, by multiple doctors in two hospitals with Myocarditis caused by the vaccine has yet to receive any money. It ruined his career.
"Tyranny of the minority" doesn't remotely apply here. No one has the authority to sacrifice one group of citizens to save another group of citizens.
> They're covered under CICP, which is more stringent and has paid out one person $6 million, and a few hundred grand spread out between some dozen others.
This is trying to play both sides. Appeal to emotion without having a rational thought process. Something bad happening is unfortunate and life changing. Then turning around and saying hundred grand isn’t life changing money for people.
What exactly is your remedy here - should people be not asked to provide proof for the harm and paid 10s of millions for every case? People have been asked proof for lesser things and paid even lesser for much bigger harm.
> My friend who was diagnosed, by multiple doctors in two hospitals with Myocarditis caused by the vaccine has yet to receive any money. It ruined his career.
Anecdotal evidence is not evidence of systematic wrongdoing. At least I wouldn’t expect to see on HN but here we are.
It's so sad to see that you are the first one with any kind of source in your comment. The rest are only saying scary stuff and you are supposed to argue with that. They are saying stuff like "my friend died because of the jab" and you come with studies links, which can sound unfriendly. And we are on HN, for fuck's sake.
The articles are fantastic, it's the unscientific claim that the data implies safety that's at issue. You can't post research about the fact that people misinterpret research right? But it's factually true. Most of the people on HN are not trained in doing or reviewing research. And not just on HN. Everyone can purchase an ad that claims to be the arbiter. Everyone can say they represent the consensus.
But the people with more money can buy more ads just like Google can stomp out any competitor, because they control the data channel.
It's a logical problem. Should we start requiring a license to hold an opinion about research? Who would we trust to govern that licensing process?
It's not really so simple as finding a source to back your claim. You need to be able to defend your interpretation of that source.
Bottom line "safety" is subjective. That's the critical argument. Compared to what is it safe?
Vaccine with a guarantee of infection, maybe the vaccine is safer.
Vaccinating everyone? Well, we didn't really study that. How do you study people in larger numbers with a guarantee that they don't get infected?
They didn't. They just assume everyone is infected and that number makes the research look valid and safe.
In fact, it's not.
The average person is more likely to have negative outcomes from vaccine than natural infection combined with non-infection.
So is it safe for someone who won't be infected at all? What about for someone that won't exhibit symptoms?
No. It's far less safe for those people.
300x-30,000x less safe. Depends on your estimation of asymptomatic and uninfected subjects in the real world.
It's more safe for someone in their 70s, with cancer, or whatever. Fine. But say that clearly. Don't try to bury that in summaries that obfuscate what you really studied.
Doing so destroys trust in science.
Not advocating for or against this vaccine platform, though. I'm advocating for laws about what meets and doesn't meet scientific rigor, as are most scientists right now.
In [1] "those who are not vaccinated" is a tiny subset of society that is actually composed of those who are infected, and also symptomatic, and also not vaccinated.
A large portion of society can't be counted because they are asymptomatic. How do you find them to count them? In fact that's nearly everyone. And for those people the vaccine increases their risk by 4/100,000. (More harm than good.)
Society is the trolley problem. The balancing act between individual and collective rights is the lever being thrown every time we pass a law or make a regulation.
I can absolutely empathize though. It really is fucked up to experience it in the extreme. Usually the trade-offs are much more minor or have a big time delay or are more abstract.
Do you apply that same standard to other things, like cars? Do you feel allowing people to drive is also society "killing for the common good"?
After more than eight billion doses of the vaccine, about twenty deaths were causally linked to the vaccine. Five times as many people die every day from traffic in the US alone, many of them children.
What about gun ownership? How many people does that "kill for the common good"?
And by that measure, isn't not vaccinating people an even bigger atrocity? Aren't you also arguing to kill people "for the common good" by not mandating vaccination?
First up, for clarity, I have no issues with COVID vaccines and how they were used in Australia - the very few cases of myocarditis were mild and resulted in no deaths.
Second up, I'm confused by your use of "mandate" and how your government mandates you to remain in that country.
> by your logic, vaccine mandates are perfectly fine because you can leave the country.
Not by my logic, nor that of Dana Scott, Christopher Strachey , Alonzo Church or others.
> I'm rather unlikely to drive into myself while driving my own car.
You can drive into a wall or off a cliff, and yes, injured by own car (or tractor) is an actual not infrequent injury.
> how your government mandates you to remain in that country
I never said that. I said that government inaction is also a mandate; look at the context for my comment.
If you're arguing that leaving the country makes government action (or inaction) acceptable, then by your own logic, all government action (or inaction) is acceptable, which supports my point: vaccine mandates are fine, because by your own logic, if you disagree with them, you can leave the country.
> You can drive into a wall or off a cliff, and yes, injured by own car (or tractor) is an actual not infrequent injury.
You're missing the point I'm making, which is that not driving a car does not mean I won't get run over by other people, which is the actual point I brought up.
To be honest, I'm not quite sure why you're responding to me, since you don't seem to be arguing against anything I actually said?
Yes, I think you are correct in reducing the argument to its basic factors. Yep, its fucked up.
However if we’re going to talk about moral responsibility for vaccine mandates, we also have to consider moral responsibility for non-vaccination leading to spread of a dangerous virus during a pandemic.
If you are going to hold one group responsible for vaccine-related deaths of mandated vaccines, you must also hold the group who refused the vaccine responsible for any deaths of other people who were infected as a result of their vaccine refusal.
Vaccine deaths were real, and very rare. COVID deaths from preventable spread were also real, and much more common. Public policy had to weigh both, not pretend either side of the risk didn’t exist.
> However if we’re going to talk about moral responsibility for vaccine mandates, we also have to consider moral responsibility for non-vaccination leading to spread of a dangerous virus during a pandemic.
that's all nice and dandy except COVID "vaccines" (remember, they had to change vaccine definition for this very reason) did NOT STOP the spread, they were at best protecting some old people, it was completely pointless for young healthy people to risk their lives by taking them
I remember how the vaccine narration/propaganda went - it will protect you from getting infection, it will protect you from symptoms, it will protect you from getting sick, it will protect you from serious symptoms, it will protect you from hospitalization, it will protect you from death, so now basically all they can claim it will protect you from going to hell and you can go to heaven if you use them
> Vaccine deaths were real, and very rare.
so were COVID deaths in people under 50 unless you have some health condition, extremely rare for people under 20-30, yet they pushed down the throat "vaccinesd" to everyone, not just risk groups, which is why vaccine mandates/passes hurt proper useful vaccines for decades ahead
Cowpox was used to vaccinate against smallpox. Cowpox is a less severe infection that stimulates the same immune response as smallpox, but it’s not the same virus.
Inoculation is where a weakened pathogen is introduced to create immune resistance against that same pathogen (see inoculation parties).
Prior to COVID I seem to remember that the point of a vaccine was so that you didn't get the disease at all. That's where the herd immunity argument comes from. If 85-90% of the herd has immunity (immunity meaning you can't catch it at all) then even the people who can't get the vaccine are protected because the susceptible are too spread out for the infection to spread.
Do you see how this absolutely requires not just a lowered infection rate with lowered severity of infection? You need a less than ~10% chance of infection in the vaccinated/otherwise immune for the math to work. If the chances of infection after vaccination are still 80% then there is still a large reservoir of potential carriers and you don't have herd immunity.
For most of history what people expected out of a vaccine was immunity from infection not still getting infected but with less severity.
Yes some diseases were eradicated that way. Not all of them and we keep vaccinating.
Herd immunity means the disease wont cause epidemic, if it comes from elsewhere. It does not mean that no single person will get the disease if he encounters it.
Notably, flu vaccine did not stopped flu entirely, is the most common yearly vaccine and I really never seen anyone claim it 100% stops flu.
Oh, you made a category error, I think. Flu has variants and they sometimes "predict" which variant to prepare for incorrectly, but as far as I am aware the flu vaccine is very effective against the correct strain.
Young people are actually right then in never ever taking any vaccine recommended by public policy ever again. If taking a vaccine is against your personal interest, and nevertheless public policy, that is the consequence.
It is one thing to make a judgement error in the heat of a crisis, it is quite another one to deny afterwards what a huge fuckup it has been.
Let's not forget that Norway was heavily criticized by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and several international health experts for its decision to permanently drop the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine.
For the record, this comment is not arguing against vaccines or their veracity, there seems to have been confusion about that. I am specifically arguing against vaccine mandates.
If someone refuses a vaccine and then passes on a virus to someone else, who dies, isn't that morally equivalent to "forcing" a vaccine on someone, who then dies? Your argument seems to be "people who choose to put others at risk, should be prevented from doing so." This seems like a much stronger argument in favor of requiring unvaccinated people to stay home rather than putting others at risk?
Every death is a tragedy. Harm to one person is not fungible with benefit to another. You can't subtract one from five to get four net lives saved, but you can say that five is more than one. If someone pulls the lever then they have murdered one person and saved five. If someone wants to pull it and I stop them, haven't I murdered five people and saved one?
No, it's not morally equivalent, as one of these is very obviously unintentional and a result of simply living one's normal life, and the other is neither of those things.
It's also somewhat irrelevant since the vaccines do not prevent transmission. At best they lower the chance to some degree and now you're in the weeds of trying to measure something that's too multivariate to measure.
Some people can't take vaccines because of allergic reactions. Other people have weakened immune systems and so the effect of vaccines is low.
For those people, it's the group that protects them. But of course you always have selfish people that only care about themselves. It was nice to see the amount of selfish people was pretty low in my region, and we got about a 80% vaccination rate.
Except COVID "vaccines" did not prevent infecting yourself or someone else, are there still people believing this nonsense? This "vaccine" at best protects you if you are old at risk and it's not good even at doing that comparable with those flu "vaccines".
But the same article has the following quote from the above video, from Bayer's executive Stefan Oelrich:
> “Ultimately the mRNA vaccines are an example for that cell and gene therapy. I always like to say, if we had surveyed two years ago in the public, ‘would you be willing to take gene or cell therapy and inject it into your body?,’ we would have probably had a 95% refusal rate. I think this pandemic has also opened many people’s eyes to innovation in the way that was maybe not possible before.”
So it seems Bayer (or at least, Stefan Oelrich from Bayer), indeed classifies the mRNA vaccines as gene therapy.
If the pandemic had been deadlier and even more infectious like measles or smallpox were, would you still be against mandates? Surely there is a scenario like airborne Ebola or 28 days Later Rage virus that would justify mandates.
I would also be against vaccine mandate if we also had a law where if I could prove you infected me, that would count as assault with a deadly weapon, and all the other laws that determine what I could do when someone assaults me with a deadly weapon would apply.
The polio vaccine is much older and as far as I could find has never had a death attributed to it. COVID vaccines are newer, and their safety profile was not fully understood when they were rolled out.
The only people that really qualify for this is military service people. Everyone else could take weekly covid tests. The rule to require vaccines more generally was pretty quickly struck down.
So you are right. I shouldn't have said "nobody". But also, it's not exactly everyone.
> Also, the manufacturers can never be held responsible, because they have legal immunity for the COVID vaccines.
Since there was basically a soft mandate for it, especially on top of some of the usual official red tape being cut, the manufacturers really wouldn't be the appropriate party to hold responsibility. That'd be the government.
Comparing it to the trolley problem is incorrect. COVID had real potential to kill you, even as a young person. At that point its a matter of risk assessment for yourself. Take a 2% chance of dying, a slightly higher chance of reduced quality of life (long COVID), or take a lottery-winning chance of dying to this blood clot. It is appropriate to do the math correctly to decide if this makes sense, but to claim that scientists and advocates did not do this personal risk assessment math and merely went off the benefits of herd immunity is a lie and anti-vaccine propaganda.
>Comparing it to the trolley problem is incorrect. COVID had real potential to kill you, even as a young person.
I don't think this is correct. If you remove the people with comorbidities, the risk for healthy young people was minuscule, there's way other issues you should concern yourself with at that point, rather than dying from COVID.
Vaccinating young people with something that had the potential of side effects was just dumb, either way you look at it. I'm honestly baffled it was accepted. It seems to be the product of mass hysteria, sustained by greed for profits.
About 17400 people under 20 died of covid. According to this paper https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8875435/ all the people who died from side effects of the covid vaccine were over 22 (its possible that is not exhaustive, but i can't seem to find any examples of confirmed deaths related to the vaccine for children. If there are any i think its likely the number is in the single digits).
So even if the risk of death from covid in kids is small, its still probably at least 1000 times higher than the risk from the vaccine, and possibly much higher.
> something that had the potential of side effects
Literally everything has potential side effects. Clean drinking water? Has side effects (e.g. less vitamin b12 from poop). All choices have consequences.
2% chance of death? A quick google shows it to be around 0.16%, and the deaths seem to be allocated to people who are older or just have other comorbities. I think the scientists in retrospect just didnt want hospitals to get full honestly, since they dont have the capacity for it as it is — atleast here in Canada.
For comparison the death rate from the vaccine is around 0.0001%.
Yes they didn't want the hospitals to get full. That's when the younger healthy people who would have recovered can't get the medical care they need to survive.
You had to have spent covid in a pretty sad friendless hole not to know friends or family who ended up in hospital during the peaks.
Dismissing people like this is part of what fuels the antivax movement. Vaccines are generally effective, but they're not perfect and have side effects, and failing to acknowledge that when someone is asking in in good faith polarizes people and makes it look like someone's trying to hide something.
Those people are going to be polarised regardless. If you don't give them a reason to be polarised they'll invent one because they want to be polarised.
I lost friends during covid who turned into morons like that; so much so that I started to think maybe it is a side effect of the virus. One of them recently moved to the other side of the world 'because Trump is going to nuke us' (he lived in the EU). It is fine to dismiss, ignore and berate morons; they won't change their mind and must have been always like that; just before covid everyone would've laughed in your face so you would not have said any of this out loud. Now I meet a few too many people who point at vapour trails and tell me how their gov is blocking the sun and is poisoning us to keep us dumb. Dismiss and hope they won't procreate.
Good faith isn't enough. I just reread some tweets, and there were multiple people who in completely good faith (from their point of view) were protecting their community by claiming everybody who took a vaccine would be dead by June 2026.
Not saying this about parent, but am absolutely saying it about the vaccine skeptic community in general.
If the barrier to asking a question is zero (i.e. someone without a high school biology education can ask a question and be listened to) but the barrier to answering any question to the community's satisfaction is high (i.e. a full study, on exactly that question, controlled for all variables, that shows a clear result) then the effort asymmetry leads to many unanswered questions.
... which the skeptic community then points to to support the belief that there are many legitimate unanswered questions.
It is okay to dismiss negligible things. People sustain a lot of injuries and die in their bathrooms but it would be insane to both-sides somebody’s campaign against taking shits
It was a nothingburger. It wasn't even a side effect of the mRNA vaccines.
You don't have to care about the people who aren't interested in science. Sure, you have to protect immunocompromised people from those people, and we can do that.
It's hard to tell "dangerous misinformation" from "thing someone made up for tiktok views". The difference is facts and evidence. I'm still waiting to see either.
I really feel that many of the issues with mRNA vaccines and health studies in general are generalizations like “safe and effective”. Everything has statistical risks and benefits, and we should just share those front and center with people. Eg test results for X mean you have a Y% chance of having X, given your history and symptoms and other results. Here are low cost low risk marginal things you can do to improve statistical significance.
Similar for vaccines, just give us the numbers clearly and upfront.
This bypasses regulators from having to make claims beyond “we reviewed the data and agree with these numbers and feel that this should not be banned.” I do think it would also help to separate something “not banned” and being “required to be covered by insurance” or “required for professions like the military”. I think trying to simplify things makes things worse, because this abstraction is not real.
Yes, but the point of science/health communication sources is to communicate. People aren't going to spend an afternoon figuring out where to find medical trial results, learn how to read them with a bunch of unknown terms, and form a risk tolerance analysis. I know this. You know this. Everyone know this.
The health and science communicators must improve how they communicate with the public.
State public health education and advocacy campaigns.
If a drug manufactuer runs a commercial, they are legally required to include risks and references to relevant information. If a state rep or PR manager does it, they can literally lie as far as I am aware.
> Ultimately though, if people really care, they should be parsing through study results
Absolutely hate this framing. I care but I don’t have the requisite education to understand what I’m reading. I need it explained by someone who has taken up that specialization.
But to say that because I have walked another path in life that I don’t care?!? Because I have chosen a different specialization?? Deeply insulting AND untrue AND unrealistic. Our society is based on specialization at this point. If we cannot rely on each other for these basic communication tasks, then society must be dead, eh?
> I care but I don’t have the requisite education to understand what I’m reading. I need it explained by someone who has taken up that specialization.
They did explain it! Here's what it sounded like: "We have thoroughly researched these treatments and found them to be generally safe and effective, and well-worth the potential risks for people who fit profile X Y Z, but closer individualized medical consideration is warranted for people who fit profile P Q R."
Turn that around: you're asking for someone to make something understandable to you despite your not having the background to make an informed decision.
That process, by definition, in the perfect case, includes someone summarizing/simplifying concepts.
And that process is extremely difficult to do without bias, summarization being an information-loss activity, etc.
So essentially, you're asking for an impossible standard of communication.
Additionally, I'd point out that the basics^ of biology, immunology, pathology, and epidemiology aren't that complicated, if you're a reasonably intelligent person.
Grasping the basics of mRNA transcription, viral fragment encoding, immune system functioning, and the purpose and effects of various common vaccine adjuvants is ~20 hours of internet research.
Which is one of the reasons it really gets my goat when so many anti-vaccine folks appear not to have made any educational effort before crystalizing their loud opinions.
^ As distinct from the details, which require a lifetime to comprehend
That's why they say: "these medicines are found to be safe and effective after thorough study, and for patients who meet X Y Z criteria, they are worth taking, and for patients who meet P Q R criteria, you should consult your doctor."
It's perfectly clear.
Or are you arguing that people need to know the numbers but have no obligation/ability to actually figure out what they mean?
You can just do both. "Here are the reports, here are the numbers simplified, and here is our declared risk analysis.
Yet, whenever I try to look up anything with regards to health/medicine, I find dozens of people/orgs repeating the last bit, and the first bits are hard to come across if you dont already know where to look. Its so avoided that im not surprised some people think its intentionally hidden.
Saying something is safe is a declared risk tolerance, it is not actually communicating the risk. It only works if the people you are talking to already trust your judgement.
Okay so you're upset that people propagate the easy-to-understand information much more thoroughly than the super technical hard-to-understand information?
Im not upset. My critique is that societal health communicators are doing a poor job at communicating risk, and instead fall back on just making the claim that something is safe and everyone should listen to them.
Taking a complex topic and distilling it into simple, consumable bites that your audience can injest is what communication is. Yet, so much communication takes the easy route of "the public cant possibly understand this, well just say its safe or unsafe".
If you see this as an unavoidable, then I see the breakdown of trust of these institutions to be unavoidable too, as their ability to communicate is too poor.
They are saying what is generally safe and what is not. Telling people the dry statistics won't help most people. Remember half of all people are below average in IQ. You need to paint with broad strokes if you want to reach most people.
Claiming that something is safe or not safe is not communicating risk. It is asserting a certain risk tolerance. "We have looked at the numbers and came to the conclusion that X is safe enough to use". This does not work if the people you are communicating with do not already trust your risk judgement.
If it helps, substitute health officials and Healthcare with tech CEOs and tech products. Do you trust them when they claim that their products protect your privacy without laying out the evidence?
Sounds like a oppurtunity for health educatation.
99%+ of people dont know they can look in the USPI for this data.
However, it isnt the best and most up to date, which the regulator and FDA would have and are unlikely to share.
100% of people who Google something like "how do we know the covid vaccines are good" would discover that the tool we use to figure that out is called a "clinical trial." Then they can look up "covid vaccine clinical trial results."
The reality is none of these "do your own research" or "just asking questions" people are actually curious whatsoever. Curiosity requires more than zero effort. Simply saying you're "doing your own research" and "just asking questions" while regurgitating the last thing you saw on your TikTok feed is super easy and gives you all the same sense of intellectual superiority.
VAERS is a super early signal self-reported database, why on earth would anyone link to it for public consumption? Should they also link to reddit.com/r/hypochondriac? VAERS should exist and researcher should (and do) pay attention to it, but it's absolutely not anything close to an actual source of actual information.
It is the top Google result for "pfizer COVID vaccine study CDC"
And yes, ACIP regularly puts out commercials and flyers. They are not 50 minutes nor 230 pages long, but they contain all the relevant info someone needs at a glance, and if they wish to go further then they are directed to ACIP resources like the one I listed.
"The government needs to inject knowledge directly into my brain against my will, without curiosity, and despite my lack of background expertise!"
Information being available online does not help the issue of lack of trust in public health officials, and the sentiment that they are lying or playing hide the ball.
This sentiment is a real issue the nation is facing.
The pandemic had several high-profile examples of Public Health officials knowingly misleading and lying to the public. That's going to take a lot of work to undo
Yes, it's a sentiment generated by this "I need information injected directly into my brain attitude, and failure to achieve that is very possibly maybe kinda hinting at something nefarious!"
> The pandemic had several high-profile examples of Public Health officials knowingly misleading and lying to the public. That's going to take a lot of work to undo
Not really. It had several high-profile examples of public health officials making mostly-reasonably hedged statements under conditions of uncertainty, and then people actually playing game-of-telephone into thinking they said things they didn't say.
Can you provide a few of these "several" examples of public health officials knowingly making false statements?
The rushed clinical trials were only done with 122 people and a control group. During the very short trial, 1 person died in the first group, 2 in the other. The “conclusion” was its better to be vaccinated and it protects you better. 12 months later AstraZenica vaccine pulled from market everywhere ….
It’s trivial to publish these so that they’re both easily available and easy to understand. I’m guessing that’s not the case for the CDC, since you didn’t post any link or guideline.
A nice example was the EUCDC guidance on AstraZeneca’s vaccine which showed that for young age groups the vaccine was more dangerous than the disease. That allows anyone to make an informed decision for themselves instead of being bullied or emotionally blackmailed “for the greater good”.
Par for the course, I can’t access the actual study from The Lancet and have to settle for second-rate journalist summaries which are typically biased and ultimately worthless.
> Outcomes of interest included individual benefits and harms. Indirect effects of vaccination (e.g., societal benefits) were not considered...
> In the Phase II/III RCT, using data on all blinded follow-up (up to 6 months or the unblinding date of March 13, 2021), the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine reduced symptomatic COVID-19 when compared to placebo (vaccine efficacy: 91.1% (95% CI 88.8–93.1%)) (Table 3a). For hospitalization due to COVID-19, 31 events occurred, all in the placebo group. Vaccine efficacy against hospitalization due to COVID-19 was 100% (95% CI 87.6–100%) (Table 3b). Deaths due to COVID-19 were uncommon, one in the vaccine group and six in the placebo group (83% (-39–98%)) (Table 3c). Numbers of SAEs were comparable between the vaccine group and the placebo group across the two RCTs (Phase II/III: 268/21,926 (1.2%) vs. 268/21,921 (1.2%); Phase I: 1/24 (4.2%) vs. 0/6 (0.0%)); there were no cases of vaccine-associated enhanced disease or vaccine-related deaths (Table 3e). Grade ≥3 reactions generally were not uncommon and occurred more frequently in the vaccine than placebo groups (Table 3f).
Yep, those regulated marketing terms could use an update.
Regulators don’t make cures. There’s room to improve on that side of the system.
Especially as emerging approaches seem to be trending more systems-thinking-oriented, eg “this will strengthen your immune system to fight lots of diseases.”
I'm not sure this information will sway very many people. I have relatives who are all getting tested for t-cell counts related to mRNA because they are convinced they are the cause of any and all health problems they are facing. It seems like the medical professionals who are administering the tests are at least somewhat responsible for their misapplication.
It's not about swaying individuals. Let people believe their stupid stuff.
It's about swaying investors and regulators. And yeah, we need to make sure we excise our regulators of crazy people, but that's cyclic. And next cycle, we'll get vaccines for a lot more.
Point taken, but it isn't just a matter of individuals, it is a popular movement that has captured a significant part of role of regulators. The research is still valuable, but its lack of influence is not a problem that is safe to dismiss.
Unfortunately, fighting the movement doesn't do anything for anyone. We both agree you need to fix the regulators - that's the thing you can change, and the actions that help there look nothing like arguing with the movement.
The problem with the recent (Tuesday) Supreme Court overturning of Humphreys Executor^ is that it makes Congressionally-intended independent regulatory agencies (read: FDA) much more behold-to and controllable-by any current President.
Which turns "fixing the regulator to use facts" back into "convincing enough people to elect a President who believes in the scientific method."
If you're already at the point of thinking about national politics, you won't have an impact.
If your goal is to get more people vaccinated, the best thing you can do is going to be local. Funding or volunteering at free vaccination drives. Getting vaccination science into your local school curriculum early. Asking your local health department what they are struggling with.
It's important, if one is able, to also push towards supporting a regulatory process that allows vaccines to be researched, productized, tested, approved, and covered by insurers.
All of which the current US administration is actively trying to attack.
I'm normally on the side of Trump et al. simply being incompetent or stupid, but the anti-vax campaign by RFK Jr. at HHS is 100% targeted and coordinated at decreasing by any means available the public's ability to access vaccines.
It's more akin to religion for those anti-science fuckers. (The ends justify any means)
Two things can be true: Big Pharma can be evil, and their products are much better vetted for safety and efficacy than random peptides sourced form mystery factories.
and do you really think a significant percentage of forced vaccination detractors are taking mystery peptides? have there been studies, or are you vibing this guess off snarky reddit comments?
Anecdotally I know several people who would fall in the camp of anti vax but openly use peptides.
And intuitively it makes sense we’re talking about groups of people who are skeptical of main stream institutional health recommendations but trust specific personal sources for medical advice.
I’m vibing but it feels like there is a pretty clear intersection of peptides and the fringe science health community no?
Of course there's a huge overlap, but perhaps more significantly is that RFK Jr. who is in charge of the entire regulatory structure is both an anti-scientific anti-vaxxer and wants to tear down the safety and efficacy regulations around peptides at the same time:
Nobody's used state power to mandate peptides and social media censorship to reports of adverse effects.
As many of us said at the time, the mandates weren't worth the destruction of public trust, especially because the vaccine wasn't even sterilizing.
The next time there's a crisis, resist the urge to use the government to achieve outcomes by brute force. It doesn't work and has generational adverse consequences.
> As many of us said at the time, the mandates weren't worth the destruction of public trust
Public trust was not dissolved by the actions of the government, it was dissolved by propagandists cynically using falsehoods and half-truths to gain power. That's it.
People don't distrust science because of anything scientists did, it's all because of the propagandists and the easily tricked and the political grifters.
All of your accusations are, in the very best possible light, half truths, but in reality they are just lies. I think the rational part of society is tired of treating liars with kid gloves. The pandemic was a traumatic experience for all, and extra social graces were extended for a while for those who impose upon kind and polite people with their weird beliefs, but we've moved past that moment.
I took two doses of mRNA vaccine, I still got covid, the fever, the pains it was horrible, I was in a foreign country alone where I didn't speak the language. I say this because that was the scariest moment of my life, I am thankful to the people who invented them.
I honestly believe it would have been worse had I not taken the vaccine.
would they die if they didn't take the vaxx? plenty people who got vaxx died anyway, plenty people who got COVID died as well, some of them from COVID, most of them were just infected while dying and COVID had really nothing to do with their death, but it was needed to pump those numbers about scary dangerous COVID so govs can go on powertrips while taking pocket money from pharma lobby
The hospitalization of unvaccinated people vs. vaccinated people was 10.5 times higher [1]. Lethality was 7 times higher if you did not take the vaccine [2]. I think we also have to remember that hospitalizations where the reason why a lot of mandates where enacted in the first place. Politicians where afraid that the hospitals would run out of capacity.
At a population level, people who were vaccinated died at lower rates. We have numbers on this stuff. It was pretty easy to find during covid and I imagine you could find it with a quick Google search now if you'd like.
They were never meant to prevent people from getting COVID.
They were meant to prevent people from dying due to COVID.
The fact they were able to tell you they had COVID means it was a resounding success (not dead).
there are literally people in this discussion talking about these vaccines preventing COVID spread, parroting this complete nonsense politicians and "experts" made when they pushed these "vaccines"
You see, this kind of lying and gaslighting is exactly what feeds the distrust in the government and scientific establishment in general public. No number of studies is going to reverse that any time soon.
There are peer-reviewed case reports for both DVT and neuropathy related to Pfizer's mRNA COVID-19 vaccine, but they are consistently described as 'rare' or 'extremely rare' across sources/studies. As a doctor (if you actually are one), you should know better than to perpetuate anecdotal evidence.
Really glad they confirmed this, about 5 years after I was forced to take one at threat of job loss despite 1) already having had natural Covid and 2) working a fully remote job.
They confirmed this when the vaccines were authorized. And as part of every drug, there's continual, ongoing, review of the data to ensure that safety is maintained, and that nothing has changed about the drug and its manufacturing. This is the "phase 4" of a drug, continual ongoing monitoring.
> They confirmed this when the vaccines were authorized
No. They didn’t. They said it.
You were the Phase3 trial. You can probably debate the ethicality, the decisions made, but do not pretend they had 5 year data before deploying to the entire world.
You're aware that most drugs are approved without 5-year data, correct? Why did you draw the line there? Why not wait for 10-year data? What about 20- or 50- or 100-year data?
Have you actually checked any of the referenced studies in that database? They do not say what Malone claims they say.
I just picked one randomly [0]:
> Conclusions and Relevance This systematic review and meta-analysis found low incidence rate and largely favorable early outcomes of COVID-19 mRNA vaccine–associated myopericarditis in adolescents and young adults from a wide range of populations.
I also did a brief dive elsewhere in thread [1]:
> The incidence of pericarditis and myocarditis in the total population exposed to at least one dose of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines was 5/100,000 (CI95%:3 to 8 per 100,000), compared to 70/100,000 (CI95%: 66 to 92 per 100,000) in those who were not vaccinated.
> The incidence of pericarditis or myocarditis in patients with COVID-19 infection was 200/100,000 people (CI95%: 114 to 306 per 100,000).
You may think Malone is a crank, and I will not disagree with you.
The page I linked is a repository that Malone set up for peer-reviewed papers describing MRNA side effects.
Those papers are not authored by Malone, and there are presently over 700 of them on the site.
I believe he did this because authors of those and similar papers have faced political backlash for their scientific contributions. For some reason, many world governments have censored, and advocated censorship of content such as this, and similar content that questions things such as the CoViD-19 point of origin, which for years has been riddled with misinformation.
So you can go ahead an claim that more than 700 peer reviewed papers were all authored by cranks, but my purpose was to point out that the parent article's claims of absolute "safety, effectiveness, and promise" are not unanimously accepted.
The link in the article does not show the study, just a list of references, a summary and the researchers who published it. How many of the researchers who published this study have conflicts of interest? Where is the full study for review?
> The researchers emphasize that, like all vaccines, mRNA vaccines can have side effects. They found that serious adverse events—such as myocarditis, which occurs more frequently in younger males—are rare and consistently outweighed by the vaccines’ protection
reminder to the myocarditis-maxxies, the actual virus causes that too and the 2020-2021 variants caused it worse
if we were all going to drop dead (I think 2 years ago now, I’m waaaaiting!) for whatever the vaccine did, it would apply to a broader population due to covid exposure
> reminder to the myocarditis-maxxies, the actual virus causes that too and the 2020-2021 variants caused it worse
Do you know if the vaccine prevented the virus-induced myocarditis? Cause the vaccine didn't do much to stop people from getting covid, multiple times even.
So many people frame this as either/or, you either had the risk of covid induced myocarditis or you had the (supposed) lesser risk of myocarditis from the vaccine. But if you got the vaccine (x times) and then covid (y times), isn't your risk roughly x + y?
(Personally, I wish researchers would not forgot quite so often that there is a non-mRNA COVID vaccine available in the US. Where's all the analysis of the effects of the Novavax vaccine?)
The myocarditis as caused by e.g. Moderna was affecting teen males and you posted a link to a blog which linked to a study about 70 year old US veterans.
If you're referring to the Mike Kwan paper, he was on (I believe, it was years ago) the Science Vs podcast to debunk claims by the likes of Malone and Rogan regarding his study.
But yes, there are instances of myocarditis from vaccines, but occurance was 4-5/100k as opposed to unvaccinated 200/100k.
Edit: in his words:
> MK: All the cases were hospitalised because we wanted to perform a detailed workup for them
> RR: So they didn't need to be there to, like, keep them alive.
> WZ: No, no, no, no, no, no, no. In fact, he said that that these these patients, they all cleared up with either painkillers[50] like ibuprofen …
> MK: Some of them even not require medications, and they just take a rest, and eventually they recover by themselves, and none of them got severe complications, and no cases of mortality, most importantly. And all of them recover and went back home. And so far, some patients are being followed up around 7 months[51] and they’re very good, no problem, so this is very good news.
I want to empathize with you, plenty of medical professionals used really reductive and inaccurate language that should be rightfully criticized. stopping people from getting covid being one of those things
none of those were goals of the vaccine, so its a fruitless exercise to build on top of
they communicated poorly at all levels the one time society needed them to communicate effectively, and lost the public trust
The goal was to reduce the spread overall, lessen the symptoms for individuals, have your own body fight it faster instead of becoming a factory for it, de-risking cytokine storms
We don’t know the actual numbers as pericarditis and myocarditis can occur asymptomatically, and people truly need to be under very active medical surveillance to detect it
Myocarditis-maxxies will likely never take off as an insult, but vaxmaxxer just might :) Shortness, pronunciation and simplicity all play a role.
Anyway, that statement is actually useless. The moment it became clear that some vaccine increases the risk of myocarditis, several European countries swapped them out for the less risky variants, like any sane person would.
The only people still fighting these windmills are the online kind.
Yes, I've been very excited about that for more than 10 years. It may not pan out, it's far more speculative than infectious disease prevention, but when combined with checkpoint inhibitors, and I fear they may not do the bold thing and do fully personalized therapeutic vaccines, but it does provide a great deal of hope.
If these mRNA vaccines had not been pushed or mandated, more people would probably think they are safe: there will be no need for any of these reviews.
But because they were pushed by the government, many people do not trust them. Sure, they were pushed and mandated for good reasons, but the problem is that a lot of people have already lost trust in the government.
That trust was not lost because of one big decision. It was lost through many small, unrelated government decisions that may not seem noticeable or measurable on their own, but over time, they build up.
I do not know how this trust can be rebuilt but definitely not by publishing more reviews.
I think it’s the opposite. The _distrust itself_ was pushed by those looking to stir up outrage, generate engagement, and turn it into votes.
Case in point: look at all the people who’ve now built their entire political identities atop this unfalsifiable distrust. They’d even distrust “stand further apart” if the wrong person said it.
> I do not know how this trust can be rebuilt but definitely not by publishing more reviews.
This is the crux. Outrage spreads way faster than the boring truth.
> They’d even distrust “stand further apart” if the wrong person said it.
They shouldn’t believe it no matter who says it. The entire concept of “social distancing” was completely made up and had no science behind it. It belongs in the same bucket of nonsense as “mask up between bites.”
Well, I think it’s pretty clear for starters that politicians lie (and yes this holds for both left and right; although indeed some presidents more than others), and that this isn’t helping trust.
Riiight, distrust was "pushed" and is irrational. I guess having a working memory doesn't count? The Tuskegee syphilis study, or the contaminated blood scandals in Europe and Japan, etc... couldn't have anything to do with distrust towards the government's relation with public health, that's for kooks who aren't on the right side of history!
One word, transparency. Being open about the research and outcomes. This is a situation good science communicators can help with.
Engage the skeptics in open debate and address their concerns, not censorship and embarking on cancellation campaigns.
However uncomfortable it seems, the median person in society isn't going to do a thorough literature review to make up their mind, they'll do it based on personal instincts.
I think that can work if you narrow the issue only to medical advice.
But trust is also eroded by completely unrelated things, like “Iraq has WMDs” and other stories pushed by our governments. Or even the recent argument that we need ID to access the internet in order to “protect children.” Sure.
The key point is that for things like vaccines, people need to trust the goverment and the process. Most people are not going to read medical papers. They should rely on government health agencies to tell them what to do.
So when trust is damaged (even by unrelated government decisions), it affects how people respond to medical guidance too.
Take the vax or lose your job. Two weeks to flatten the curve. You are killing grandma. "Lab leak" was a dirty word. The science has settled. A bloody live death count on the news.
It seemed that every conceivable way to pressure, force, guilt trip and coerce people into taking the CV was utilized during covid. Enough that no doubt many people are highly suspicious of any authority henceforth and no amount of research will sway them from that. The trust simply isn't there. Yet.
If the “do their own research” people don’t manage to kill their kids and family through complete and utter idiocy, those kids and family will 99.99999% of the time continue their idiocy.
We should hope they manage to end their idiocy lineage.
> If these mRNA vaccines had not been pushed or mandated, more people would probably think they are safe: there will be no need for any of these reviews.
Hogwash. Wakefield predated anything Covid. And measles vaccines aren't mRNA and people would rather let their children die.
Had Trump and Co called the vaccine part of the second coming, people would be lining up at their churches to get them.
You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.
There wad that kid that died of measles in America and later there was interview with parents. They said basically that. They would change nothing and rather have kid die then get vaccines.
At some point, you have to start believing what people say about themselves and their believes.
And second, yes that is attitude of political actors who spread fear of vaccines to get votes. Overall impact is exactly that and they know.
But by this logic, this is exactly what pro-vax people advocate as well. If a child die right after vaccination, they will still advice people to vaccinate their other kids, because this was just an anomaly?
So are all the pro-vax people maintaining the attitude that they would rather have their kid die or suffer life long than NOT getting the vaccine?
The fallacy in your logic is that you think people reject vaccines because they think the diseases does not have the potential to be dangerous. They do not think that. It is the same reason why you can continue driving despite knowing that accidents can be fatal.
People take a chance, and sometimes they get unlucky. Does not mean that taking the chance was wrong. In the same way you are not wrong if you go out for a pleasure trip in a car and get in a fatal accident.
They did not said they were unlucky. They said that if they knew their kid will die without vaccine, they would still skip vaccine to protect the kid from bigger harm. They said that, not me. That is the problem here, you ignore what they are actually saying while twisting their position into much different and more palatable. It is consistent problem with right wing - insistence on ignoring what they say, push for and advocate, just so that we can pretend they are harmless.
> The fallacy in your logic is that you think people reject vaccines because they think the diseases does not have the potential to be dangerous. They do not think that.
They literally openly say that. Again and again and again. The above couple was saying something else in the interview, because the kid actually died. But if you actually listen to what anti-vaccine politicians and advocates say, they literally say that diseases don't have potential to be dangerous.
> But by this logic, this is exactly what pro-vax people advocate as well. If a child die right after vaccination, they will still advice people to vaccinate their other kids, because this was just an anomaly?
You can do that only if you are intent on twisting conversations and meanings into unrecognizable.
> Does not mean that taking the chance was wrong. In the same way you are not wrong if you go out for a pleasure trip in a car and get in a fatal accident.
You know what, sometimes it IS wrong to take the chance. Just like, if you race in a car in a place where you can kill bystanders and then die off it. Funny, people are quick to blame parents when 12 years old walk to school for not doing full surveillance, people blame parents for not having perfect control of kids socials, but somehow, blaming parents for refusing vaccination is a bridge too far.
I dont think people's motivations are to kill their children, but the opposite.
I think this is the starting point for developing cognitive empathy and an accurate model.
Iraq had WMDs, Hamas beheaded babies and the Western public is completely immune of government-led psyops. Of course there's neither Nazis/Banderites/ultranationalists nor biolabs nor the most corrupt government on the european continent in Ukraine.
> But because they were pushed by the government, many people do not trust them. Sure, they were pushed and mandated for good reasons, but the problem is that a lot of people have already lost trust in the government.
In the case of COVID, the effectiveness of vaccines was quite exaggerated at first[0]. That absolutely didn't help government rebuild the trust.
> I do not know how this trust can be rebuilt but definitely not by publishing more reviews.
At this point, quite sure more reviews will only trigger people's confirmation bias and make those who already don't trust vaccines trust them even less.
Vaccines were very effective against the first variant, and got less effective with later ones. People forget about the timeline. Article mentions the delta variant at which time vaccines were still very effective IIRC. There were some breakthrough cases as the article mentions but that's to be expected with anything short of 100% efficacy.
One's model of "statement made by the POTUS" should be more like 'statement made by mildly likeable (to some segment of the population) boomer dad who probably doesn't know what he is talking about.' It'd be a different thing if a public health official said something like this (and I don't know if they did, but I certainly wasn't left with the impression that it was impossible for me to get vaccinated and still get covid).
The Covid vaccines were and continue to be VERY effective at preventing you from winding up on ECMO.
Yes, you may still get Covid, but you don't die from drowning in your own body fluids anymore.
Of course, this only attends if you got the damn vaccine. All of the Covid deaths around me in the last couple years (7 deaths) were anti-vaxxers. But, hey, we know that reality has a well-known liberal bias.
Apparently they live in a nursing home in 2020 still, because no one else is dying of covid anymore. Especially not young or healthy people within the last few years.
Nearly 50,000 Americans died of Covid in 2024… and 20% of those were under 65 years old. It’s thankfully much better now than at the peak but tens of thousands of people are still dying..
You mean the stuff the whole world got injected with in 2020? Good to know!
Seriously though, I am very pro-vax, but the fact that studies like these come out now is just confirmation that people had the right to doubt the safety of mRNA back then. Many people shamed others for being anti vax but everyone has the right to be careful.
Why would repeating a study now and getting the same result as when it was first measured in 2020 be a reason to doubt the safety?
I’m also pro-vax, so I don’t think it is correct to equate ignoring the preponderance of current evidence (in 2021 or 2026) for vaccine protection as being careful. That just seems the logical fallacy sold by “vax hesitant” and social media influencers to make people feel smart to ignore statistics and “make their own choice based on intuition”
By late 2020, when they got approved, the vaccines were not scientifically proven safe for mainstream use. No other mRNA vaccine had been through all the trial stages, and certainly not those COVID ones.
Could the vaccines have side effects that became visible after 6 months? Yes and we couldn’t have known that they didn’t.
Could the vaccines have side effects on people with rare conditions? Sure, and we couldn’t have known that either.
My point is that in 2020, the decision to approve the vaccines and pretty much force everyone to get it was a risk tradeoff. It was way more risky to let the disease continue spreading and mutate than it was to release the vaccines. mrna vaccines had been in trials and there was no reason to believe they could have been harmful. But the reality is that we just didn’t know. Biology is complex enough that you can’t just assume everything will be fine without proper testing. And what we deem proper testing is a process that these drugs hadn’t gone through.
I happily got vaxed in early 2021, and did it again 4 times , so I was willing to trust the tradeoff.
But ignoring that it was a tradeoff and hiding behind a sign that says “science” is just taking people for dummies.
How large a trial do you want to run to capture "rare conditions"? Millions? Billions of participants? How long do you want to run trials? Years? Decades?
No, it is not about large trials. It is about changing the attitude of medical practitioners and the media that refuse to acknowledge a vaccine could have caused an adverse effect.
I understand that this is to not feed the vaccine hesitancy. But to anyone observing carefully, this is a crucial break in the information chain that can feedback any ill effects of any vaccine back to the creators.
> the attitude of medical practitioners and the media that refuse to acknowledge a vaccine could have caused an adverse effect.
In what alternative group think echo chamber did that happen within?
Here, in the real world, it was acknowledged from the get go that vaccines carried risks and that was why the call went out, from almost the start of 2020, for trial volunteers to find the risks associated with a number of new vaccine variants in the pipelines.
I am talking about a case when there IS some adverse effect, after it happened.
In that case, there is generally an effort from the practitioners that the vaccine could not have caused it, particularly when the said thing is not mentioned in the package insert or in the list of adverse effects from the manufacture.
First step would be to collect data that is trust worthy regarding potential adverse reactions. And for that the barriers that stigmatize such reporting should be removed.
Basically, for starters, doctors should be free to report the events they see without getting labeled "Anti-vaccine doctor" or fear of getting their licence revoked.
When such barriers exist, no one could/should trust the product.
What don't you like about current reporting such as VAERS? Where do you see the barriers there specifically? Do you have examples of doctors getting their licenses revoked for reporting something?
When you got your vaccine, were you told to report at VAERS if you have any problems? Most people does not even know such a thing exists.
Even then the reports from that database is not really considered trust worthy. It is often dismissed with a statement that "anyone can report anything there!"
Who refused to acknowledge there could be adverse effects? I certainly was given information prior to vaccination that outlined possible adverse side effects.
There is a process in place that’s meant to capture a certain number of potential problems. I didn’t make that process. The people who are making drugs safe designed the process. There is never zero risk of a treatment behaving badly, of course but when a drug gets fast tracked and doesn’t go through the regular approval process, it just hasn’t been proven to be safe by the regular standard of what experts deem safe.
Would that large trial have shown the cancerous effect of smoking?
If not, do you then agree that some possible adverse effects were not checked for and could have slipped through?
Don't know. But would standard smaller trials have captured it?
We are kind of back to my initial question that is conceptually unrelated to the vaccine trial: do you need trials to run into millions or billions of participants or into decades if you want to capture certain (rare) things?.
That you believe in any claims of vaccine efficacy made by the manufacturers or the FDA and are more then willing to have them injected into your body?
If you don't believe every developed countries’ medical bodies on vaccines, where do you get your info on this? (As to the ‘pro-vax’ question, I'd define it as someone who is open to listening the medical bodies of every developed country on the planet.)
If the only entity that you can get information from is an entity that is known to lie, you can trust this entity?
It is not that we know for a fact that X is not safe. It is that we have no reason to believe that the powers that can ensure that, does not have an incentive to do it, and a large financial incentive to NOT do it and instead grease a lot of palms and get it mandated.
This is particularly relevant when the cost to grease the palms is minuscule compared to the profit that can be made by the approval.
And it is particularly relavant when the common man cannot any relavant information about it from any other source.
We are sitting ducks here. But people apparently does not notice.
That’s what this article here is about. Yes, FDA is known to make questionable actions, as are other agencies around safety or efficacy of drugs. But here the statistics continue to show they are right about vaccines.
I think your own logic supports the opposite from your conclusions?
I'm saying that every developed country's medical bodies support that these vaccines are safe.
Are you claiming that every developed country's medical bodies do not have an incentive to make the right decisions around vaccines? That they will be too cautious because they are afraid of approving something that turns out to be unsafe, or the opposite that they have no fear of approving something unsafe?
Are there any examples you'd point to of where developed countries' medical bodies approved something unsafe because they were bribed, as you imply is the norm today?
But most importantly, if you think every developed country's medical bodies should not be used as the source of info about safety vs benefits, what should be?
Or what should be the system even if it doesn't exist today?
> is an entity that is known to lie
What are you referring to?
> the common man cannot any relavant information about it from any other source.
The common man is inundated with info about vaccines from other sources, although much of it is misinformation, etc.
>Are you claiming that every developed country's medical bodies do not have an incentive to make the right decisions around vaccines?
It is a question of how aligned the individual's incentives and the incentives of the medical body in question. And often it is extremely misaligned. So that is what is I mean when I said there is "no incentive".
So what do I mean by that?
When such an organization recommend X, it just mean that if everyone follows that recommendation, the population wide metric, that can be immediately measured or that is often measured will show good beneficial result.
So here if people follow the recommendation two things can happen
1. The number of covid deaths will drop. This is something that will show up immediately, because everyone was focused on daily death toll.
2. A substantial number of people will have adverse effects. This is something that can be managed (in terms of public opinion)
So the incentive of the organization end up being favorable to the recommendation despite the very good chance of point 2 happening. With financial incentives, this is just more pronounced...
I'm still unsure if you think there is any other even theoretical approach than trusting developed countries' medical bodies that would have better outcomes, or if you believe the approach I mentioned is the absolute optimal possible one.
Regardless, as far as the statistics about things like how vaccines changed covid deaths, and any change in non-covid deaths, a study of tens of millions of people found a very large drop in covid deaths among the vaccinated... and actually no increase in other cause morbidity either (different study than the OP study). https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
Is the theory that the first COVID vaccines (plus COVID vaccines in subsequent years - boosters) were especially safe and reduced deaths dramatically, but that people who got their first COVID vaccines in subsequent years got something that caused far more deaths than it saved, and that's why 'vaccinated' group results are so good compared to the 'unvaccinated' group?
(I am guessing you have some point you're trying to get to, and that's why you're avoiding questions like whether the process mentioned in my parent comments has the absolute best expected outcomes of any possible or theoretical approach, or what the better approach is if not?)
I mean, if the people in the unvaccinated group got vaccinated, then they are not really unvaccinated, right? So I am wondering if the study only consider "unvaccinated death" if the person was unvaccinated at the time of their death...
It probably means that you take the statistical evidence produced by massive double-blinded placebo-controlled randomized clinical trials as actual evidence
If it is not good enough, then it does not matter if it is the best available. Nature does not give a damn what the best solution humanity can come up with at some arbitrary point in time.
People have rights but they also have the responsibility to be scientifically literate enough to know that analyzing data about the vaccine was prudent regardless of anything and does not suggest their prostration to antivax demagogues was smart.
We synthesise evidence on vaccine components, manufacturing quality controls, and regulatory standards that underpin safety, alongside data from randomised trials, post-authorisation surveillance, and active pharmacovigilance systems.
"synthesize???"
With almost 200 references and the use of "synthesize???" it sound like AI generated slop.
The article is behind a paywall in any case so why so many positive comments about it?
In the end, do facts even matter in politically charged discussions?
This sounds a bit like providing evidence for global warming, gun control or evolution. The "skeptics" just want to remain ignorant. No amount of evidence will change them.
The silver lining about vaccine skeptics, though, is the Herman Cain award[1]. What this means is that conservatives die more than liberals from preventable diseases [2].
This administration literally fast-tracked the original covid vaccines for approval.
Say what you will about the Covid vaccine or Kennedy’s specific motivations (which I disagree with), but choosing to cut government funding for development of wildly profitable pharmaceutical products is a reasonable choice.
My understanding is that vaccine research and production is almost never profitable and depends on government support. Either grants, guaranteed purchases, or both.
Yeah that's called survivorship bias. The ones that make it to market can be wildly profitable to manufacture. Doing all the work to sift through what does and doesn't work to discover new vaccines wouldn't happen without public funding.
No, that’s called pharmaceutical development. That’s the business.
We don’t generally fund Merck’s R&D with federal money. You’ll note the following critical detail from the article:
> That will impact 22 projects being led by major pharmaceutical companies, including Pfizer and Moderna, for vaccines against bird flu and other viruses, HHS said.
We’ve gone so far round the bend with partisanship that straight-up corporate welfare has become a left-wing cause.
No. Pharmaceutical companies love vaccines. They’re relatively easy to make, they’re indemnified against harms, they cannot be generic, and they are wildly profitable. And on top of all of that, they often get mandated by schools, ensuring a captive market.
If the government never funded another study for vaccines, ever, pharma companies would continue to pump them out.
*Pre-mrna* vaccines couldn’t be generic since it was impossible to have an exact copy of a vaccine [1], because they were created from living organisms.
It is not yet clear whether mRNA will be treated like generics.
Also, for the record: very few (no?) vaccines are “mandated” by the federal government. Recommendations are made, and state and local governments do this, mainly through school districts.
Various agencies and the military will, of course, mandate things for their own staff.
That "Vaccines are not profitable" is a misinformation put out there by...I don't know who, but it is out there somehow...
It is really weird that even here in HN where everyone is aware of corporate greed and corruption, corporations becomes the good guys when it comes to vaccines.
Now you might think of bringing up regulators and checks and balances at this point...
But imagine this. If approving a vaccine, or like here, a vaccine technology could unlock 1 Trillion dollars in revenue, imagine how much of that can be paid politicians/regulators/scientists/thought leadrs to act favorably?
How many of those regulators, who are just average human beings, can resist that?
The game to compensate for that is to be to convince gullible investors that your commercially viable fusion plant, or quantum computer, or unrealistic space ambitions are just 5 years away! Invest now or miss out!
The line between research and scamming in an ultracapitalist economy becomes very blurry.
It's not dissimilar to oil & gas (energy) and mineral resources ... the outgoings on exploration are a cash bloodletting that often has no return.
The "win" is occasionally getting a steadily profitable field or lode for multiple decades after the costs of proving and the fun of raising forward capital loans for extraction and processing plant capital.
Not many people know that Trump had a hand in starting the pandemic.
Here's what we know: In 2014, Obama administration halted the so called "gain of function" research because of risk of laboratory accidents. In 2017, the Trump administration restarted this dangerous research. See links below.
Excerpt: [Obama administration] White House announced Friday that it would temporarily halt all new funding for experiments that seek to study certain infectious agents by making them more dangerous. The White House said the moratorium decision had been made “following recent biosafety incidents at federal research facilities.”
Excerpt: [Trump administration] on Tuesday ended a moratorium imposed three years ago on funding research that alters germs to make them more lethal. Critics say these researchers risk creating a monster germ that could escape the lab and seed a pandemic.
So, Trump restarted the dangerous research that Obama had shut down. You may be thinking, what does that have to do with Covid? Covid started in Wuhan, China, right?
It turns out that the Trump administration, through the National Institutes of Health (NIH), provided funding to the EcoHealth Alliance, an American non-profit organization focused on studying emerging diseases. The EcoHealth Alliance, in turn, provided funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China for researching bat coronaviruses. The rest is history.
And then Trump also disbanded the pandemic preparedness team in 2018 just in time for the pandemic. See link below.
Not sure what is partisan about this. Some facts were presented. Not opinions, facts. If you dispute any of the above is factual please back up your assertion with citations.
If the President hires someone who then restarted research that previous admin stopped for being too dangerous, does the President get no part of the blame? The buck stops with the President. If he hired the wrong person--and he has hired plenty of wrong people this time around--he gets the blame for the disasters they cause.
2. There was no gain of function research being funded.
3. The baseless lab leak conspiracy theory is hateful extreme far right Russian disinformation that is very dangerous to our democracy and it has already been debunked by the science and 72 intelligence agencies and CNN. Fauci is a Saint!
4. There was a lab leak and it's Trump's fault and you're still a dangerous conspiracy theorist for having previously questioned "the experts" integrity or the possibility of a lab leak.
> The EcoHealth Alliance, in turn, provided funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China for researching bat coronaviruses. The rest is history.
The WIV is 20km from the Huanan market where the pandemic started. There is no direct evidence linking the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 to laboratory work conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.[0] The evidence for zoonotic origin with multiple spillover events at the Huanan market is overwhelming.
No that was a conspiracy theory fueled by Russian disinformation, the scientists and experts testified that there was no gain of function work being done and debunked it.
You really believe some billionaire oligarchs propaganda corporation over foremost self-proclaimed expert Anthony "I am the science" Fauci? Something an agent of Putin would say.
> Trump one had a sane cabinet that largely controlled his wilder impulses.
This is absurdly revisionist. The first administration’s cabinet/staff was a reality show and a merry go round of people like Anthony Scaramucci and Ryan Zinke. If anything “controlled” it, it was just the chaos of incompetence.
As far as loyalty goes, I suppose it’s worth reminding you that Kennedy was a Democrat, who ran in the Democratic presidential primary, and routinely criticized Trump.
OP is saying Trump has demanded loyalty as a condition of serving in his administration. As HHS Secretary, RFK caved on Roundup, something he famously won a case against as a lawyer[1]. That even lost RFK support from some of his MAHA fans.
Relatively speaking Trump 1.0 had a sane cabinet. Yes, there were some crazies, sure, but relative to the people he has around him now, they seem sane.
It's literally not the same administration. Also yeah he wants private companies to stop "wild" profits while he grifts the nation with crypto, hosting UFC on white house? You have to be stupid or willfully ignorant to think the current administration gives a single f about unchecked profits or the people's general wellbeing.
Right now, we'd be better off if we even had politicians who could manage an actual debate. Seems like we can't get anything other than mudslinging and strongarming right now.
Both economies have massive drug industries and China in particular has advanced manufacturing processes for decades. I suspect they made an economic/risk decision and will be reviewing it in the light of mRNA production lead time.
We're way beyond lysenko. China has no intellectual or political baggage in vaccine theory or bio engineering.
it's actually more difficult to produce inactivated vaccine at mass scale than mRNA vaccine, which is the reason why they were producing mRNA vaccines and not the old school safe tested ones
That's a tremendous amount of misinformation to pack into a single sentence!
There were several companies working on "old school" style vaccines, they take longer to develop!
And at least one of the old school style vaccines proved to be less safe than the mRNA vaccines and was withdrawn from market, precisely because there were safer vaccines out there so there was no reason to let a less safe version be sold, even though it was still far better than nothing: https://www.science.org/content/article/rare-dangerous-side-...
Further, the very concept of "old school safe tested ones" doesn't even make sense with respect to COVID, because there were no COVID vaccines before COVID existed, and every single vaccine must be tested to evaluate safety.
Further, the concept that "its more difficult to produce inactivated vaccine at mass scale" is at best unsupported for the current day, and back in the early day it was 100% false. Mass producing mRNA vaccines was extremely difficult. They were very quick to design and get a prototype, but mass production was a new and very very difficult effort.
And as for "the reason why they were producing mRNA vaccines" is that the "they" there was a company that focused on mRNA vaccines so of course they would work on that. And the advantage of mRNA is that it is able to be designed and engineered with purpose, rather than the random chance of trying to get an inactivated vaccine, which is far more laborious and slow.
It's so weird to come into these threads on HN and have people just pack so much falsehood into so few characters. Such false information should not be left up uncountered, but it's exhausting to even list what's wrong, much less show all the evidence.
Manufacturing matters, and six years ago, I said that one side effect from the pandemic is that mRNA technology, which had been lab-scale stuff, suddenly had dump-trucks full of money appearing to help them scale their manufacturing.
They apparently settled on the the sequences for the original covid vacs in a weekend. Going from that design to billions of doses is one of the hardest things to do, but once done, will persist. And it is ready to be deployed for the next hundred applications that we find for this.
Flu vaccines is an obvious application, since the prior egg-based manufacturing required about six months lead time and millions of eggs, but nobody wanted to invest in anything better.
> They apparently settled on the the sequences for the original covid vacs in a weekend. Going from that design to billions of doses is one of the hardest things to do, but once done, will persist.
No no. They had a candidate for the vaccine. Scaling manufacturing is hard, sure, but the actual barrier was proving the candidate worked. We conducted (by far) the most time-efficient clinical trials in history to prove the vaccines were safe and effective.
Until that happened, we could not have known the candidate drug was actually correct.
> but nobody wanted to invest in anything better.
Not sure if you mean nobody wanted to develop mRNA flu vaccines, but at least Moderna and Pfizer are:
https://www.npr.org/2026/06/18/nx-s1-5863570/flu-vaccine-mrn...
The parent is talking about pre-covid, no one wanted pay the upfront cost to bring mRNA out of the lab.
Serious question in good faith: what was the deal with the “calamari” (clots?) the anti-vax crowd kept talking about being found in the veins/arteries of folks who took the Covid vaccine?
> Now an international team, led by Flinders University, have found that in a small number of people, the immune system can accidentally confuse a normal adenovirus protein with a human blood protein termed platelet factor 4 (or PF4).
Seems to have been a legitimate, very rare, side effect
https://www.flinders.edu.au/research/articles/covid-vaccine-...
It's worth clarifying that the adenovirus-based (viral vector) vaccines that article is discussing were a completely different technology from the mRNA vaccines.
The mRNA vaccines also had a cloth problem (as in, it was extremely rare), that practically disappeared with a change on the application procedure.
Can you elaborate? What was the change?
Not 100% sure but I think it was this: Never inject into a vein. Always inject into a muscle.
Yes, they mandated a test to check if it was being injected into a vein.
Pretty common test as well, pull the plunger back on the syringe if blood comes up you hit a vein.
A lot of drugs have this test, particularly drugs that should be injected in fat or muscle.
I am quite curious too. I had heard that, despite arm vascular being very consistent among individuals, it does still vary. And I think for most vaccines I guess it doesn't matter if you hit something other than muscle. Maybe for the mRNA vaccines it does matter? I'm baselessly speculating though. Wish other person hadn't been so vague.
COVID itself causes blood clots. In fact, pulmonary embolism with blood clots is frequent in COVID patients.
https://health.clevelandclinic.org/should-you-be-worried-abo...
https://www.ejinme.com/article/S0953-6205(20)30349-6/fulltex...
https://ashpublications.org/blood/article/140/Supplement%201...
IIRC the vaccines were provably linked to the death of young people who had blood clots they shouldn't have had.
The common argument made is that the vaccine saved more lives than they took, but this is pretty fucked up IMO. It's the trolley problem IRL - if you force someone to get a vaccine and they die as a result, you are responsible for their death. Also, the manufacturers can never be held responsible, because they have legal immunity for the COVID vaccines.
> Also, the manufacturers can never be held responsible, because they have legal immunity for the COVID vaccines.
There is remedy against vaccine harm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Vaccine_Injury_Compen...
This was passed in response to claims against DPT vaccine and manufacturers stopping production of the said vaccine. Lawmakers feared loss of herd immunity and passed the law. Now vaccine skeptics say this is not enough and claim inability to sue the company directly as an issue - but what they really want is enforce their minority view on the majority by suing companies and ensuring no one has access to vaccines - tyranny of the minority.
Perhaps "vaccine skeptics" say this because the Covid vaccines are not covered under VICP. They're covered under CICP, which is more stringent and has paid out one person $6 million, and a few hundred grand spread out between some dozen others.
My friend who was diagnosed, by multiple doctors in two hospitals with Myocarditis caused by the vaccine has yet to receive any money. It ruined his career.
"Tyranny of the minority" doesn't remotely apply here. No one has the authority to sacrifice one group of citizens to save another group of citizens.
> They're covered under CICP, which is more stringent and has paid out one person $6 million, and a few hundred grand spread out between some dozen others.
This is trying to play both sides. Appeal to emotion without having a rational thought process. Something bad happening is unfortunate and life changing. Then turning around and saying hundred grand isn’t life changing money for people.
What exactly is your remedy here - should people be not asked to provide proof for the harm and paid 10s of millions for every case? People have been asked proof for lesser things and paid even lesser for much bigger harm.
> My friend who was diagnosed, by multiple doctors in two hospitals with Myocarditis caused by the vaccine has yet to receive any money. It ruined his career.
Anecdotal evidence is not evidence of systematic wrongdoing. At least I wouldn’t expect to see on HN but here we are.
>Anecdotal evidence is not evidence of systematic wrongdoing.
The Norwegian country-wide study is evidence enough.
The Norwegian study landed on 4.5 cases per 100k from vaccinations [0].
Unvaccinated occurance was 200 per 100k [1].
[0] https://www.oslo-universitetssykehus.no/en/departments/hjert...
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38262150/
It's so sad to see that you are the first one with any kind of source in your comment. The rest are only saying scary stuff and you are supposed to argue with that. They are saying stuff like "my friend died because of the jab" and you come with studies links, which can sound unfriendly. And we are on HN, for fuck's sake.
The articles are fantastic, it's the unscientific claim that the data implies safety that's at issue. You can't post research about the fact that people misinterpret research right? But it's factually true. Most of the people on HN are not trained in doing or reviewing research. And not just on HN. Everyone can purchase an ad that claims to be the arbiter. Everyone can say they represent the consensus.
But the people with more money can buy more ads just like Google can stomp out any competitor, because they control the data channel.
It's a logical problem. Should we start requiring a license to hold an opinion about research? Who would we trust to govern that licensing process?
It's not really so simple as finding a source to back your claim. You need to be able to defend your interpretation of that source.
Bottom line "safety" is subjective. That's the critical argument. Compared to what is it safe?
Vaccine with a guarantee of infection, maybe the vaccine is safer.
Vaccinating everyone? Well, we didn't really study that. How do you study people in larger numbers with a guarantee that they don't get infected?
They didn't. They just assume everyone is infected and that number makes the research look valid and safe.
In fact, it's not.
The average person is more likely to have negative outcomes from vaccine than natural infection combined with non-infection.
So is it safe for someone who won't be infected at all? What about for someone that won't exhibit symptoms?
No. It's far less safe for those people.
300x-30,000x less safe. Depends on your estimation of asymptomatic and uninfected subjects in the real world.
It's more safe for someone in their 70s, with cancer, or whatever. Fine. But say that clearly. Don't try to bury that in summaries that obfuscate what you really studied.
Doing so destroys trust in science.
Not advocating for or against this vaccine platform, though. I'm advocating for laws about what meets and doesn't meet scientific rigor, as are most scientists right now.
In [1] "those who are not vaccinated" is a tiny subset of society that is actually composed of those who are infected, and also symptomatic, and also not vaccinated.
A large portion of society can't be counted because they are asymptomatic. How do you find them to count them? In fact that's nearly everyone. And for those people the vaccine increases their risk by 4/100,000. (More harm than good.)
Let me know if I've misunderstood.
Link?
The CARES act grants immunity for the set of vaccines associated with COVID.
Society is the trolley problem. The balancing act between individual and collective rights is the lever being thrown every time we pass a law or make a regulation.
I can absolutely empathize though. It really is fucked up to experience it in the extreme. Usually the trade-offs are much more minor or have a big time delay or are more abstract.
I wonder if this is some kind of prisoners dilemma for society and individual choice.
Lots of societies who started with some killing “for the common good” ended in atrocities.
The statistics on men under 25 are still horrific and suggest this was in fact the latter category: atrocity masquerading behind that euphemism.
Do you apply that same standard to other things, like cars? Do you feel allowing people to drive is also society "killing for the common good"?
After more than eight billion doses of the vaccine, about twenty deaths were causally linked to the vaccine. Five times as many people die every day from traffic in the US alone, many of them children.
What about gun ownership? How many people does that "kill for the common good"?
And by that measure, isn't not vaccinating people an even bigger atrocity? Aren't you also arguing to kill people "for the common good" by not mandating vaccination?
Cars and gun ownership were not mandated by the government.
Yes, they are. I'm mandated by the government to live in a country that has cars and gun ownership.
Your government refuses to let you leave the country?
That aside, they also command you to own both a car and a gun?
> Your government refuses to let you leave the country?
This argument also applies to you: by your logic, vaccine mandates are perfectly fine because you can leave the country.
> That aside, they also command you to own both a car and a gun?
The problem isn't me owning a car and gun, the problem is obviously everybody else. I'm rather unlikely to drive into myself while driving my own car.
First up, for clarity, I have no issues with COVID vaccines and how they were used in Australia - the very few cases of myocarditis were mild and resulted in no deaths.
Second up, I'm confused by your use of "mandate" and how your government mandates you to remain in that country.
> by your logic, vaccine mandates are perfectly fine because you can leave the country.
Not by my logic, nor that of Dana Scott, Christopher Strachey , Alonzo Church or others.
> I'm rather unlikely to drive into myself while driving my own car.
You can drive into a wall or off a cliff, and yes, injured by own car (or tractor) is an actual not infrequent injury.
> how your government mandates you to remain in that country
I never said that. I said that government inaction is also a mandate; look at the context for my comment.
If you're arguing that leaving the country makes government action (or inaction) acceptable, then by your own logic, all government action (or inaction) is acceptable, which supports my point: vaccine mandates are fine, because by your own logic, if you disagree with them, you can leave the country.
> You can drive into a wall or off a cliff, and yes, injured by own car (or tractor) is an actual not infrequent injury.
You're missing the point I'm making, which is that not driving a car does not mean I won't get run over by other people, which is the actual point I brought up.
To be honest, I'm not quite sure why you're responding to me, since you don't seem to be arguing against anything I actually said?
No one is "killing" anyone. That is just a gross mischaracterization. Sometimes (like this) we just choose the least bad solution, that's it.
Yes, I think you are correct in reducing the argument to its basic factors. Yep, its fucked up.
However if we’re going to talk about moral responsibility for vaccine mandates, we also have to consider moral responsibility for non-vaccination leading to spread of a dangerous virus during a pandemic.
If you are going to hold one group responsible for vaccine-related deaths of mandated vaccines, you must also hold the group who refused the vaccine responsible for any deaths of other people who were infected as a result of their vaccine refusal.
Vaccine deaths were real, and very rare. COVID deaths from preventable spread were also real, and much more common. Public policy had to weigh both, not pretend either side of the risk didn’t exist.
> However if we’re going to talk about moral responsibility for vaccine mandates, we also have to consider moral responsibility for non-vaccination leading to spread of a dangerous virus during a pandemic.
that's all nice and dandy except COVID "vaccines" (remember, they had to change vaccine definition for this very reason) did NOT STOP the spread, they were at best protecting some old people, it was completely pointless for young healthy people to risk their lives by taking them
I remember how the vaccine narration/propaganda went - it will protect you from getting infection, it will protect you from symptoms, it will protect you from getting sick, it will protect you from serious symptoms, it will protect you from hospitalization, it will protect you from death, so now basically all they can claim it will protect you from going to hell and you can go to heaven if you use them
> Vaccine deaths were real, and very rare.
so were COVID deaths in people under 50 unless you have some health condition, extremely rare for people under 20-30, yet they pushed down the throat "vaccinesd" to everyone, not just risk groups, which is why vaccine mandates/passes hurt proper useful vaccines for decades ahead
Vaccines have always been about preventing the spread of the disease and “the definition of vaccines” has not changed.
This is easy to prove. Simply find a high school biology textbook printed before Covid.
Vaccine the word came from vacca for "cow", and cowpox virus being weakened and injected to prevent cowpox.
MRNA is not weakened virus, it's a spike protein in this case.
Or so that's the argument.
Cowpox was used to vaccinate against smallpox. Cowpox is a less severe infection that stimulates the same immune response as smallpox, but it’s not the same virus.
Inoculation is where a weakened pathogen is introduced to create immune resistance against that same pathogen (see inoculation parties).
I remeber that time too. In fact, vaccines slowed spread and also made symptoms easier on those who caught it anyway.
And that is exactly what was promissed to me.
You are just full of it, that is it.
Prior to COVID I seem to remember that the point of a vaccine was so that you didn't get the disease at all. That's where the herd immunity argument comes from. If 85-90% of the herd has immunity (immunity meaning you can't catch it at all) then even the people who can't get the vaccine are protected because the susceptible are too spread out for the infection to spread.
Do you see how this absolutely requires not just a lowered infection rate with lowered severity of infection? You need a less than ~10% chance of infection in the vaccinated/otherwise immune for the math to work. If the chances of infection after vaccination are still 80% then there is still a large reservoir of potential carriers and you don't have herd immunity.
For most of history what people expected out of a vaccine was immunity from infection not still getting infected but with less severity.
Yes some diseases were eradicated that way. Not all of them and we keep vaccinating.
Herd immunity means the disease wont cause epidemic, if it comes from elsewhere. It does not mean that no single person will get the disease if he encounters it.
Notably, flu vaccine did not stopped flu entirely, is the most common yearly vaccine and I really never seen anyone claim it 100% stops flu.
Oh, you made a category error, I think. Flu has variants and they sometimes "predict" which variant to prepare for incorrectly, but as far as I am aware the flu vaccine is very effective against the correct strain.
Young people are actually right then in never ever taking any vaccine recommended by public policy ever again. If taking a vaccine is against your personal interest, and nevertheless public policy, that is the consequence.
It is one thing to make a judgement error in the heat of a crisis, it is quite another one to deny afterwards what a huge fuckup it has been.
Not "the vaccines" only adenovirus vector based ones and the vaccines were dropped from use pretty quickly once the safety signal was detected.
Let's not forget that Norway was heavily criticized by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and several international health experts for its decision to permanently drop the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine.
For the record, this comment is not arguing against vaccines or their veracity, there seems to have been confusion about that. I am specifically arguing against vaccine mandates.
If someone refuses a vaccine and then passes on a virus to someone else, who dies, isn't that morally equivalent to "forcing" a vaccine on someone, who then dies? Your argument seems to be "people who choose to put others at risk, should be prevented from doing so." This seems like a much stronger argument in favor of requiring unvaccinated people to stay home rather than putting others at risk?
Every death is a tragedy. Harm to one person is not fungible with benefit to another. You can't subtract one from five to get four net lives saved, but you can say that five is more than one. If someone pulls the lever then they have murdered one person and saved five. If someone wants to pull it and I stop them, haven't I murdered five people and saved one?
No, it's not morally equivalent, as one of these is very obviously unintentional and a result of simply living one's normal life, and the other is neither of those things.
It's also somewhat irrelevant since the vaccines do not prevent transmission. At best they lower the chance to some degree and now you're in the weeds of trying to measure something that's too multivariate to measure.
> If someone refuses a vaccine and then passes on a virus to someone else, who dies
Why wasn't that other person vaccinated?
Some people can't take vaccines because of allergic reactions. Other people have weakened immune systems and so the effect of vaccines is low.
For those people, it's the group that protects them. But of course you always have selfish people that only care about themselves. It was nice to see the amount of selfish people was pretty low in my region, and we got about a 80% vaccination rate.
Except COVID "vaccines" did not prevent infecting yourself or someone else, are there still people believing this nonsense? This "vaccine" at best protects you if you are old at risk and it's not good even at doing that comparable with those flu "vaccines".
Not sure why you're using quotes, it IS a legitimate vaccine. Care to elaborate?
The definition of the word "vaccine" was literally changed during the pandemic so the mRNA injections could fit in : https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/word-of-the-year-20...
Some people don't agree they should be called "vaccine", in the traditional sense.
It's gene therapy. Straight from the mouth of a member of the board of directors of Bayer: https://rumble.com/v210gyq-executive-big-pharma-bayer-stefan...?
Here's a better source, with video:
https://x.com/coenvermeeren/status/1537751313932599296
There's also a "Fact Check" article from Routers that says it is a "false allegation that COVID-19 mRNA vaccines are a form of gene therapy":
https://www.reuters.com/article/fact-check/bayer-executives-...
But the same article has the following quote from the above video, from Bayer's executive Stefan Oelrich:
> “Ultimately the mRNA vaccines are an example for that cell and gene therapy. I always like to say, if we had surveyed two years ago in the public, ‘would you be willing to take gene or cell therapy and inject it into your body?,’ we would have probably had a 95% refusal rate. I think this pandemic has also opened many people’s eyes to innovation in the way that was maybe not possible before.”
So it seems Bayer (or at least, Stefan Oelrich from Bayer), indeed classifies the mRNA vaccines as gene therapy.
Fact checks are basically validation of the conspiracy theory by now.
If the pandemic had been deadlier and even more infectious like measles or smallpox were, would you still be against mandates? Surely there is a scenario like airborne Ebola or 28 days Later Rage virus that would justify mandates.
I would also be against vaccine mandate if we also had a law where if I could prove you infected me, that would count as assault with a deadly weapon, and all the other laws that determine what I could do when someone assaults me with a deadly weapon would apply.
In Belgium, the polio vaccine is mandatory, and rightly so.
I'm willing to bet that in the next 20 years, some kid in the western world will suffer the consequences of polio, because of the anti-vax lunatics.
The polio vaccine is much older and as far as I could find has never had a death attributed to it. COVID vaccines are newer, and their safety profile was not fully understood when they were rolled out.
Therefore the COVID vaccines were also not mandatory.
Unless you wanted to keep your job in the medical field or education or had to do lots of travel.
If I remember correctly, it was a pandemic. So yes, everybody contributed, either by getting vaccinated or staying home, your choice.
> but this is pretty fucked up IMO
Pretty much every medication can have bad interactions. There is always a "risk/reward" analysis.
But also, the vaccines linked to those kids deaths weren't the mRNA vaccines, it was the J&J vaccine which got pulled as a result.
I think the point being made here is that the risk decision should be up to the recipient of the treatment.
It always is. Nobody was forced to take the vaccine and when these first rolled out there was a brochure of potential side effects.
For many, they could choose to lose their jobs and let their families go hungry, tantamount to being forced.
The only people that really qualify for this is military service people. Everyone else could take weekly covid tests. The rule to require vaccines more generally was pretty quickly struck down.
So you are right. I shouldn't have said "nobody". But also, it's not exactly everyone.
> Also, the manufacturers can never be held responsible, because they have legal immunity for the COVID vaccines.
Since there was basically a soft mandate for it, especially on top of some of the usual official red tape being cut, the manufacturers really wouldn't be the appropriate party to hold responsibility. That'd be the government.
This was very uncommon. It was also unrelated to mRNA vaccines, it was the AstroZeneca vaccine vaxzevria, and it was based on an adenovirus.
Comparing it to the trolley problem is incorrect. COVID had real potential to kill you, even as a young person. At that point its a matter of risk assessment for yourself. Take a 2% chance of dying, a slightly higher chance of reduced quality of life (long COVID), or take a lottery-winning chance of dying to this blood clot. It is appropriate to do the math correctly to decide if this makes sense, but to claim that scientists and advocates did not do this personal risk assessment math and merely went off the benefits of herd immunity is a lie and anti-vaccine propaganda.
>Comparing it to the trolley problem is incorrect. COVID had real potential to kill you, even as a young person.
I don't think this is correct. If you remove the people with comorbidities, the risk for healthy young people was minuscule, there's way other issues you should concern yourself with at that point, rather than dying from COVID.
Vaccinating young people with something that had the potential of side effects was just dumb, either way you look at it. I'm honestly baffled it was accepted. It seems to be the product of mass hysteria, sustained by greed for profits.
> the risk for healthy young people was minuscule
Arguably so was the risk from the vaccine.
About 17400 people under 20 died of covid. According to this paper https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8875435/ all the people who died from side effects of the covid vaccine were over 22 (its possible that is not exhaustive, but i can't seem to find any examples of confirmed deaths related to the vaccine for children. If there are any i think its likely the number is in the single digits).
So even if the risk of death from covid in kids is small, its still probably at least 1000 times higher than the risk from the vaccine, and possibly much higher.
> something that had the potential of side effects
Literally everything has potential side effects. Clean drinking water? Has side effects (e.g. less vitamin b12 from poop). All choices have consequences.
Why do people keep saying 22? There's more than 22 videos of people suddenly falling to the ground after the vaccine mandates.
Does no one remember? I can't be the only one...
I said the age of the youngest person i could find who died of the vaccine was 22 (and hence not a child), not that there was 22 people.
> falling to the ground
Someone fainting at the sight of a needle (or the injection), is not something i, or most people, would consider a dangerous side effect.
A nice lottery simulator which had me stop playing the lottery
https://perthirtysix.com/tool/lottery-simulator
Oh fun, I won the $330m jackpot after 3.5m tickets, the lesson is apparently lost on me :)
2% chance of death? A quick google shows it to be around 0.16%, and the deaths seem to be allocated to people who are older or just have other comorbities. I think the scientists in retrospect just didnt want hospitals to get full honestly, since they dont have the capacity for it as it is — atleast here in Canada.
For comparison the death rate from the vaccine is around 0.0001%.
Yes they didn't want the hospitals to get full. That's when the younger healthy people who would have recovered can't get the medical care they need to survive.
You had to have spent covid in a pretty sad friendless hole not to know friends or family who ended up in hospital during the peaks.
> pretty sad friendless hole not to know friends or family who ended up in hospital during the peaks.
I am unsure what fallacy this is, but it is pretty offensive.
Nothingburger like pretty much everything that antivaxers talk about
Dismissing people like this is part of what fuels the antivax movement. Vaccines are generally effective, but they're not perfect and have side effects, and failing to acknowledge that when someone is asking in in good faith polarizes people and makes it look like someone's trying to hide something.
Those people are going to be polarised regardless. If you don't give them a reason to be polarised they'll invent one because they want to be polarised.
I lost friends during covid who turned into morons like that; so much so that I started to think maybe it is a side effect of the virus. One of them recently moved to the other side of the world 'because Trump is going to nuke us' (he lived in the EU). It is fine to dismiss, ignore and berate morons; they won't change their mind and must have been always like that; just before covid everyone would've laughed in your face so you would not have said any of this out loud. Now I meet a few too many people who point at vapour trails and tell me how their gov is blocking the sun and is poisoning us to keep us dumb. Dismiss and hope they won't procreate.
I also lost friends during COVID. Some because they suddenly died of cancer in their early 30s.
"vapor trails" - well, if helps you sleep better.
Dismissing people who dismiss the antivax movement like this is part of what fuels the anti-anti-vax movement.
I see you’ve played knifey-spooney before!
Good faith isn't enough. I just reread some tweets, and there were multiple people who in completely good faith (from their point of view) were protecting their community by claiming everybody who took a vaccine would be dead by June 2026.
The problem with this argument is that there are an infinite amount of "crackpot" views that then need to be "acknowledged" and engaged with.
Part of it is the monkey/typewriter problem.
Not saying this about parent, but am absolutely saying it about the vaccine skeptic community in general.
If the barrier to asking a question is zero (i.e. someone without a high school biology education can ask a question and be listened to) but the barrier to answering any question to the community's satisfaction is high (i.e. a full study, on exactly that question, controlled for all variables, that shows a clear result) then the effort asymmetry leads to many unanswered questions.
... which the skeptic community then points to to support the belief that there are many legitimate unanswered questions.
That is exactly my point.
It is okay to dismiss negligible things. People sustain a lot of injuries and die in their bathrooms but it would be insane to both-sides somebody’s campaign against taking shits
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6022a1.htm
It was a nothingburger. It wasn't even a side effect of the mRNA vaccines.
You don't have to care about the people who aren't interested in science. Sure, you have to protect immunocompromised people from those people, and we can do that.
Embalmers all over Western countries keep on pulling them out of people but of course that's all dangerous misinformation and harmful for democracy.
Down votes are expected. I'm sure these people are just sooo anti-vax that they'd fake all this to scare people: https://andrewjchapman.substack.com/p/what-the-embalmers-are...
Don't follow the link if you're screamish.
Squeamish *
Please show me the data. If embalmers all over the world are seeing this, then there surely should be some data, right?
It's hard to tell "dangerous misinformation" from "thing someone made up for tiktok views". The difference is facts and evidence. I'm still waiting to see either.
I really feel that many of the issues with mRNA vaccines and health studies in general are generalizations like “safe and effective”. Everything has statistical risks and benefits, and we should just share those front and center with people. Eg test results for X mean you have a Y% chance of having X, given your history and symptoms and other results. Here are low cost low risk marginal things you can do to improve statistical significance.
Similar for vaccines, just give us the numbers clearly and upfront.
This bypasses regulators from having to make claims beyond “we reviewed the data and agree with these numbers and feel that this should not be banned.” I do think it would also help to separate something “not banned” and being “required to be covered by insurance” or “required for professions like the military”. I think trying to simplify things makes things worse, because this abstraction is not real.
> Similar for vaccines, just give us the numbers clearly and upfront.
You are aware that literally anyone can go and literally find exactly these numbers, correct?
The trial results are published!
Yes, but the point of science/health communication sources is to communicate. People aren't going to spend an afternoon figuring out where to find medical trial results, learn how to read them with a bunch of unknown terms, and form a risk tolerance analysis. I know this. You know this. Everyone know this.
The health and science communicators must improve how they communicate with the public.
Hence things like the US FDA's major statement / CCN standards: https://www.fda.gov/media/184312/download
Providing accurate-in-effect summarized information is a difficult balance to strike.
Ultimately though, if people really care, they should be parsing through study results.
Are government officials, like goveners or their health departments held to similar standards? I think this was the direction of their desire.
Yes. That's the entire multi-stage FDA approval process, including in EUA cases.
no, no it isnt a requirement on what a politican or government employee says or what data accompanys it.
I think there is a fundamental misscommunication going on.
Are you talking about the actions of governors and their state health departments? Or communications?
It was unclear what your gripe was.
State public health education and advocacy campaigns.
If a drug manufactuer runs a commercial, they are legally required to include risks and references to relevant information. If a state rep or PR manager does it, they can literally lie as far as I am aware.
> Ultimately though, if people really care, they should be parsing through study results
Absolutely hate this framing. I care but I don’t have the requisite education to understand what I’m reading. I need it explained by someone who has taken up that specialization.
But to say that because I have walked another path in life that I don’t care?!? Because I have chosen a different specialization?? Deeply insulting AND untrue AND unrealistic. Our society is based on specialization at this point. If we cannot rely on each other for these basic communication tasks, then society must be dead, eh?
> I care but I don’t have the requisite education to understand what I’m reading. I need it explained by someone who has taken up that specialization.
They did explain it! Here's what it sounded like: "We have thoroughly researched these treatments and found them to be generally safe and effective, and well-worth the potential risks for people who fit profile X Y Z, but closer individualized medical consideration is warranted for people who fit profile P Q R."
Turn that around: you're asking for someone to make something understandable to you despite your not having the background to make an informed decision.
That process, by definition, in the perfect case, includes someone summarizing/simplifying concepts.
And that process is extremely difficult to do without bias, summarization being an information-loss activity, etc.
So essentially, you're asking for an impossible standard of communication.
Additionally, I'd point out that the basics^ of biology, immunology, pathology, and epidemiology aren't that complicated, if you're a reasonably intelligent person.
Grasping the basics of mRNA transcription, viral fragment encoding, immune system functioning, and the purpose and effects of various common vaccine adjuvants is ~20 hours of internet research.
Which is one of the reasons it really gets my goat when so many anti-vaccine folks appear not to have made any educational effort before crystalizing their loud opinions.
^ As distinct from the details, which require a lifetime to comprehend
That's why they say: "these medicines are found to be safe and effective after thorough study, and for patients who meet X Y Z criteria, they are worth taking, and for patients who meet P Q R criteria, you should consult your doctor."
It's perfectly clear.
Or are you arguing that people need to know the numbers but have no obligation/ability to actually figure out what they mean?
You can just do both. "Here are the reports, here are the numbers simplified, and here is our declared risk analysis.
Yet, whenever I try to look up anything with regards to health/medicine, I find dozens of people/orgs repeating the last bit, and the first bits are hard to come across if you dont already know where to look. Its so avoided that im not surprised some people think its intentionally hidden.
Saying something is safe is a declared risk tolerance, it is not actually communicating the risk. It only works if the people you are talking to already trust your judgement.
Okay so you're upset that people propagate the easy-to-understand information much more thoroughly than the super technical hard-to-understand information?
Im not upset. My critique is that societal health communicators are doing a poor job at communicating risk, and instead fall back on just making the claim that something is safe and everyone should listen to them.
Taking a complex topic and distilling it into simple, consumable bites that your audience can injest is what communication is. Yet, so much communication takes the easy route of "the public cant possibly understand this, well just say its safe or unsafe".
If you see this as an unavoidable, then I see the breakdown of trust of these institutions to be unavoidable too, as their ability to communicate is too poor.
I think you two disagree on if they actually say that more than what the message should be.
But they are!
They are saying what is generally safe and what is not. Telling people the dry statistics won't help most people. Remember half of all people are below average in IQ. You need to paint with broad strokes if you want to reach most people.
Claiming that something is safe or not safe is not communicating risk. It is asserting a certain risk tolerance. "We have looked at the numbers and came to the conclusion that X is safe enough to use". This does not work if the people you are communicating with do not already trust your risk judgement.
If it helps, substitute health officials and Healthcare with tech CEOs and tech products. Do you trust them when they claim that their products protect your privacy without laying out the evidence?
Sounds like a oppurtunity for health educatation. 99%+ of people dont know they can look in the USPI for this data. However, it isnt the best and most up to date, which the regulator and FDA would have and are unlikely to share.
100% of people who Google something like "how do we know the covid vaccines are good" would discover that the tool we use to figure that out is called a "clinical trial." Then they can look up "covid vaccine clinical trial results."
The reality is none of these "do your own research" or "just asking questions" people are actually curious whatsoever. Curiosity requires more than zero effort. Simply saying you're "doing your own research" and "just asking questions" while regurgitating the last thing you saw on your TikTok feed is super easy and gives you all the same sense of intellectual superiority.
Im not sure what point you are making. Are you opposed to public health agencies sharing science based facts and helping people find the data?
No? My point is the data is all available and always has been.
Some data is, some isnt. Most people dont look for it and public health communications isnt data focused.
Nobody was was claiming that people cant google.
I dont know why you bring this up as a gotcha when someone said public health communications should share more data.
All of the required data is shared.
Please identify what pieces of data are missing for what specific drugs/trials.
Find me a Public health commercial or flyer that links to the VAERS/AEMS/MDR database?
Can you find one that even links to the trial results?
VAERS is a super early signal self-reported database, why on earth would anyone link to it for public consumption? Should they also link to reddit.com/r/hypochondriac? VAERS should exist and researcher should (and do) pay attention to it, but it's absolutely not anything close to an actual source of actual information.
Trial results, yes, the literal vaccine recommendation bulletins link to their backing data: https://www.cdc.gov/acip/grade/covid-19-pfizer-biontech-vacc...
Is that a mass consumption commercial or flyer?
Im not claiming data is never presented.
Im not claiming data is never available.
It is the top Google result for "pfizer COVID vaccine study CDC"
And yes, ACIP regularly puts out commercials and flyers. They are not 50 minutes nor 230 pages long, but they contain all the relevant info someone needs at a glance, and if they wish to go further then they are directed to ACIP resources like the one I listed.
"The government needs to inject knowledge directly into my brain against my will, without curiosity, and despite my lack of background expertise!"
I dont think you are engaging in good faith.
Information being available online does not help the issue of lack of trust in public health officials, and the sentiment that they are lying or playing hide the ball.
This sentiment is a real issue the nation is facing.
The pandemic had several high-profile examples of Public Health officials knowingly misleading and lying to the public. That's going to take a lot of work to undo
Yes, it's a sentiment generated by this "I need information injected directly into my brain attitude, and failure to achieve that is very possibly maybe kinda hinting at something nefarious!"
> The pandemic had several high-profile examples of Public Health officials knowingly misleading and lying to the public. That's going to take a lot of work to undo
Not really. It had several high-profile examples of public health officials making mostly-reasonably hedged statements under conditions of uncertainty, and then people actually playing game-of-telephone into thinking they said things they didn't say.
Can you provide a few of these "several" examples of public health officials knowingly making false statements?
The rushed clinical trials were only done with 122 people and a control group. During the very short trial, 1 person died in the first group, 2 in the other. The “conclusion” was its better to be vaccinated and it protects you better. 12 months later AstraZenica vaccine pulled from market everywhere ….
Which clinical trial are you referring to for which vaccine?
This is not true lol.
Right, the Pfizer trial went way worse, removing people from the study for catching the disease, etc.
Also not true lol
It’s trivial to publish these so that they’re both easily available and easy to understand. I’m guessing that’s not the case for the CDC, since you didn’t post any link or guideline.
A nice example was the EUCDC guidance on AstraZeneca’s vaccine which showed that for young age groups the vaccine was more dangerous than the disease. That allows anyone to make an informed decision for themselves instead of being bullied or emotionally blackmailed “for the greater good”.
Par for the course, I can’t access the actual study from The Lancet and have to settle for second-rate journalist summaries which are typically biased and ultimately worthless.
As demonstrated, the people who struggle with this just don't actually have any actual curiosity. "Par for the course" indeed!
Here's a step by step guide for you:
1. Google "Pfizer covid vaccine studies CDC"
2. Click top result: https://www.cdc.gov/acip/grade/covid-19-pfizer-biontech-vacc...
3. Scroll to results:
> Outcomes of interest included individual benefits and harms. Indirect effects of vaccination (e.g., societal benefits) were not considered...
> In the Phase II/III RCT, using data on all blinded follow-up (up to 6 months or the unblinding date of March 13, 2021), the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine reduced symptomatic COVID-19 when compared to placebo (vaccine efficacy: 91.1% (95% CI 88.8–93.1%)) (Table 3a). For hospitalization due to COVID-19, 31 events occurred, all in the placebo group. Vaccine efficacy against hospitalization due to COVID-19 was 100% (95% CI 87.6–100%) (Table 3b). Deaths due to COVID-19 were uncommon, one in the vaccine group and six in the placebo group (83% (-39–98%)) (Table 3c). Numbers of SAEs were comparable between the vaccine group and the placebo group across the two RCTs (Phase II/III: 268/21,926 (1.2%) vs. 268/21,921 (1.2%); Phase I: 1/24 (4.2%) vs. 0/6 (0.0%)); there were no cases of vaccine-associated enhanced disease or vaccine-related deaths (Table 3e). Grade ≥3 reactions generally were not uncommon and occurred more frequently in the vaccine than placebo groups (Table 3f).
Yep, those regulated marketing terms could use an update.
Regulators don’t make cures. There’s room to improve on that side of the system.
Especially as emerging approaches seem to be trending more systems-thinking-oriented, eg “this will strengthen your immune system to fight lots of diseases.”
I'm not sure this information will sway very many people. I have relatives who are all getting tested for t-cell counts related to mRNA because they are convinced they are the cause of any and all health problems they are facing. It seems like the medical professionals who are administering the tests are at least somewhat responsible for their misapplication.
Information won’t sway someone who’s views aren’t based on information.
What’s the saying?
You cannot reason a person out of a position they did not reason themself into in the first place.
It's not about swaying individuals. Let people believe their stupid stuff.
It's about swaying investors and regulators. And yeah, we need to make sure we excise our regulators of crazy people, but that's cyclic. And next cycle, we'll get vaccines for a lot more.
Point taken, but it isn't just a matter of individuals, it is a popular movement that has captured a significant part of role of regulators. The research is still valuable, but its lack of influence is not a problem that is safe to dismiss.
Unfortunately, fighting the movement doesn't do anything for anyone. We both agree you need to fix the regulators - that's the thing you can change, and the actions that help there look nothing like arguing with the movement.
The problem with the recent (Tuesday) Supreme Court overturning of Humphreys Executor^ is that it makes Congressionally-intended independent regulatory agencies (read: FDA) much more behold-to and controllable-by any current President.
Which turns "fixing the regulator to use facts" back into "convincing enough people to elect a President who believes in the scientific method."
^ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humphrey's_Executor_v._United_...
If you're already at the point of thinking about national politics, you won't have an impact.
If your goal is to get more people vaccinated, the best thing you can do is going to be local. Funding or volunteering at free vaccination drives. Getting vaccination science into your local school curriculum early. Asking your local health department what they are struggling with.
Yes and...
It's important, if one is able, to also push towards supporting a regulatory process that allows vaccines to be researched, productized, tested, approved, and covered by insurers.
All of which the current US administration is actively trying to attack.
I'm normally on the side of Trump et al. simply being incompetent or stupid, but the anti-vax campaign by RFK Jr. at HHS is 100% targeted and coordinated at decreasing by any means available the public's ability to access vaccines.
It's more akin to religion for those anti-science fuckers. (The ends justify any means)
It matters over time. The old kooks die off and are replaced with people who are relatively sane until they find new things to be old kooks about.
Unfortunately a large number of the "kooks" are GenX and younger.
I don't know if you noticed but genX got old when we weren't looking.
Yeh, trust me I know. Tho we're not quite "mass die-off" old yet.
Not in aggregate anyways.
Agreed. Kooks aren't kooks because they're old.
They're kooks because they live in information bubbles that reinforce their batshit ideas.
And we've let Google / Meta do a fine job of poisoning the next generation's intellect in pursuit of ad revenue.
Say what you want about the tenants of Fox, but at least it has a political ethos...
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I think you'll find there's a rational distrust in big pharma
I don't think I'll find that, after investigating the claims I have heard.
Two things can be true: Big Pharma can be evil, and their products are much better vetted for safety and efficacy than random peptides sourced form mystery factories.
The Venn diagram of people who distrust big pharma and the people who uncritically trust the far larger “wellness” industry is a circle.
and do you really think a significant percentage of forced vaccination detractors are taking mystery peptides? have there been studies, or are you vibing this guess off snarky reddit comments?
Anecdotally I know several people who would fall in the camp of anti vax but openly use peptides.
And intuitively it makes sense we’re talking about groups of people who are skeptical of main stream institutional health recommendations but trust specific personal sources for medical advice.
I’m vibing but it feels like there is a pretty clear intersection of peptides and the fringe science health community no?
Of course there's a huge overlap, but perhaps more significantly is that RFK Jr. who is in charge of the entire regulatory structure is both an anti-scientific anti-vaxxer and wants to tear down the safety and efficacy regulations around peptides at the same time:
https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/06/rfk-jr-stacks-fda-pan...
Nobody's used state power to mandate peptides and social media censorship to reports of adverse effects.
As many of us said at the time, the mandates weren't worth the destruction of public trust, especially because the vaccine wasn't even sterilizing.
The next time there's a crisis, resist the urge to use the government to achieve outcomes by brute force. It doesn't work and has generational adverse consequences.
https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/06/rfk-jr-stacks-fda-pan...
> As many of us said at the time, the mandates weren't worth the destruction of public trust
Public trust was not dissolved by the actions of the government, it was dissolved by propagandists cynically using falsehoods and half-truths to gain power. That's it.
People don't distrust science because of anything scientists did, it's all because of the propagandists and the easily tricked and the political grifters.
All of your accusations are, in the very best possible light, half truths, but in reality they are just lies. I think the rational part of society is tired of treating liars with kid gloves. The pandemic was a traumatic experience for all, and extra social graces were extended for a while for those who impose upon kind and polite people with their weird beliefs, but we've moved past that moment.
Truth does matter!
How should the US have pursued WWII if government force weren't an option?
I can't even have this argument again. It's exhausting.
“I won’t put chemicals from big pharma in my body!”
Proceeds to raw dog a bunch of “research chemicals” cause some roided up bro talked about it on a podcast…
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=U7gbFMWZWlo
They’re not vaccines though.
“Science-schmiance”
Shorter lead times in the face of viral mutations will be helpful.
Tailored vaccines for things like cancer are a game changer.
I live in hope of a semi-universal flu+related vaccine.
I live in fear of the measles induced "immune amnesia" effect.
how exactly were the vaccines effective, if every single person i know who got them got covid?
Astounding that this question is being asked (presumably) in earnest after the whole ordeal we went through. Wow.
I took two doses of mRNA vaccine, I still got covid, the fever, the pains it was horrible, I was in a foreign country alone where I didn't speak the language. I say this because that was the scariest moment of my life, I am thankful to the people who invented them.
I honestly believe it would have been worse had I not taken the vaccine.
A million Americans chose death from very effective (preventable) disease instead. That's how.
Did they die?
would they die if they didn't take the vaxx? plenty people who got vaxx died anyway, plenty people who got COVID died as well, some of them from COVID, most of them were just infected while dying and COVID had really nothing to do with their death, but it was needed to pump those numbers about scary dangerous COVID so govs can go on powertrips while taking pocket money from pharma lobby
The hospitalization of unvaccinated people vs. vaccinated people was 10.5 times higher [1]. Lethality was 7 times higher if you did not take the vaccine [2]. I think we also have to remember that hospitalizations where the reason why a lot of mandates where enacted in the first place. Politicians where afraid that the hospitals would run out of capacity.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9459904/ [2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9786706/
At a population level, people who were vaccinated died at lower rates. We have numbers on this stuff. It was pretty easy to find during covid and I imagine you could find it with a quick Google search now if you'd like.
It saved a lot of people and gave COVID time to mutate into a relatively benign form.
They were never meant to prevent people from getting COVID. They were meant to prevent people from dying due to COVID. The fact they were able to tell you they had COVID means it was a resounding success (not dead).
there are literally people in this discussion talking about these vaccines preventing COVID spread, parroting this complete nonsense politicians and "experts" made when they pushed these "vaccines"
> They were never meant to prevent people from getting COVID.
"COVID-19 vaccination will help keep you from getting COVID-19" - https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/97780/
You see, this kind of lying and gaslighting is exactly what feeds the distrust in the government and scientific establishment in general public. No number of studies is going to reverse that any time soon.
They will HELP, they never claimed you would be IMMUNE. it’s in the text you’re citing!
In every public hearing, all pharma execs stated that they never tested and verified that they prevent transmission.
Is the rabies vaccine not effective in your view?
I am a doctor. Pfizer Covid vaccine gave me a left leg DVT plus a peripheral neuropathy. I will never take another mRNA vaccine again.
There are peer-reviewed case reports for both DVT and neuropathy related to Pfizer's mRNA COVID-19 vaccine, but they are consistently described as 'rare' or 'extremely rare' across sources/studies. As a doctor (if you actually are one), you should know better than to perpetuate anecdotal evidence.
You being a doctor matters how? Plenty of idiot antivax doctors out there.
Really glad they confirmed this, about 5 years after I was forced to take one at threat of job loss despite 1) already having had natural Covid and 2) working a fully remote job.
But better late than never I suppose.
They confirmed this when the vaccines were authorized. And as part of every drug, there's continual, ongoing, review of the data to ensure that safety is maintained, and that nothing has changed about the drug and its manufacturing. This is the "phase 4" of a drug, continual ongoing monitoring.
> They confirmed this when the vaccines were authorized
No. They didn’t. They said it.
You were the Phase3 trial. You can probably debate the ethicality, the decisions made, but do not pretend they had 5 year data before deploying to the entire world.
Facts matter.
It's quite odd for a person to assert falehoods while also saying "facts matter."
Dec 11 2020- publication of phase 2/3 trial results, meaning not only was the study fully completed, but it made it through peer review too: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2034577
Dec 11 - 2020: first authorization https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/11/health/pfizer-vaccine-aut...
A rushed phase3 was completed and there was no chance it wasn’t going to be.
You know damn well that wasn’t even remotely the normal process.
It’s ok, you don’t need to pretend anything about Covid was “by the book”.
The facts are not in your side, but you certainly do have a lot of unfounded FUD.
You're aware that most drugs are approved without 5-year data, correct? Why did you draw the line there? Why not wait for 10-year data? What about 20- or 50- or 100-year data?
Do we need 75-year data for Viagra too?
30-year data for aspirin?
What's the logic tree here?
There are credible doctors and scientists who have a different view: https://maloneinstitute.org/reference-project
Have you actually checked any of the referenced studies in that database? They do not say what Malone claims they say.
I just picked one randomly [0]:
> Conclusions and Relevance This systematic review and meta-analysis found low incidence rate and largely favorable early outcomes of COVID-19 mRNA vaccine–associated myopericarditis in adolescents and young adults from a wide range of populations.
I also did a brief dive elsewhere in thread [1]:
> The incidence of pericarditis and myocarditis in the total population exposed to at least one dose of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines was 5/100,000 (CI95%:3 to 8 per 100,000), compared to 70/100,000 (CI95%: 66 to 92 per 100,000) in those who were not vaccinated.
> The incidence of pericarditis or myocarditis in patients with COVID-19 infection was 200/100,000 people (CI95%: 114 to 306 per 100,000).
[0] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/...
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38262150/
I’m confused because you said credible doctors and then linked to one of the biggest cranks on the internet.
You may think Malone is a crank, and I will not disagree with you.
The page I linked is a repository that Malone set up for peer-reviewed papers describing MRNA side effects.
Those papers are not authored by Malone, and there are presently over 700 of them on the site.
I believe he did this because authors of those and similar papers have faced political backlash for their scientific contributions. For some reason, many world governments have censored, and advocated censorship of content such as this, and similar content that questions things such as the CoViD-19 point of origin, which for years has been riddled with misinformation.
So you can go ahead an claim that more than 700 peer reviewed papers were all authored by cranks, but my purpose was to point out that the parent article's claims of absolute "safety, effectiveness, and promise" are not unanimously accepted.
The link in the article does not show the study, just a list of references, a summary and the researchers who published it. How many of the researchers who published this study have conflicts of interest? Where is the full study for review?
The first link in the article goes straight to the study:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
I saw that and described the page you linked. The actual study is gate kept behind a paywall or "institutional access".
"Get full text access - Log in, subscribe or purchase for full access."
> The researchers emphasize that, like all vaccines, mRNA vaccines can have side effects. They found that serious adverse events—such as myocarditis, which occurs more frequently in younger males—are rare and consistently outweighed by the vaccines’ protection
reminder to the myocarditis-maxxies, the actual virus causes that too and the 2020-2021 variants caused it worse
if we were all going to drop dead (I think 2 years ago now, I’m waaaaiting!) for whatever the vaccine did, it would apply to a broader population due to covid exposure
> reminder to the myocarditis-maxxies, the actual virus causes that too and the 2020-2021 variants caused it worse
Do you know if the vaccine prevented the virus-induced myocarditis? Cause the vaccine didn't do much to stop people from getting covid, multiple times even.
So many people frame this as either/or, you either had the risk of covid induced myocarditis or you had the (supposed) lesser risk of myocarditis from the vaccine. But if you got the vaccine (x times) and then covid (y times), isn't your risk roughly x + y?
The comparison of cardiovascular safety with vs without the vaccine is not even close:
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/covid-19-vaccinati...
(Personally, I wish researchers would not forgot quite so often that there is a non-mRNA COVID vaccine available in the US. Where's all the analysis of the effects of the Novavax vaccine?)
The myocarditis as caused by e.g. Moderna was affecting teen males and you posted a link to a blog which linked to a study about 70 year old US veterans.
If you're referring to the Mike Kwan paper, he was on (I believe, it was years ago) the Science Vs podcast to debunk claims by the likes of Malone and Rogan regarding his study.
But yes, there are instances of myocarditis from vaccines, but occurance was 4-5/100k as opposed to unvaccinated 200/100k.
Edit: in his words:
> MK: All the cases were hospitalised because we wanted to perform a detailed workup for them
> RR: So they didn't need to be there to, like, keep them alive.
> WZ: No, no, no, no, no, no, no. In fact, he said that that these these patients, they all cleared up with either painkillers[50] like ibuprofen …
> MK: Some of them even not require medications, and they just take a rest, and eventually they recover by themselves, and none of them got severe complications, and no cases of mortality, most importantly. And all of them recover and went back home. And so far, some patients are being followed up around 7 months[51] and they’re very good, no problem, so this is very good news.
I want to empathize with you, plenty of medical professionals used really reductive and inaccurate language that should be rightfully criticized. stopping people from getting covid being one of those things
none of those were goals of the vaccine, so its a fruitless exercise to build on top of
they communicated poorly at all levels the one time society needed them to communicate effectively, and lost the public trust
The goal was to reduce the spread overall, lessen the symptoms for individuals, have your own body fight it faster instead of becoming a factory for it, de-risking cytokine storms
“Rare”? :)
We don’t know the actual numbers as pericarditis and myocarditis can occur asymptomatically, and people truly need to be under very active medical surveillance to detect it
I believe Thailand did actively monitor some kids and found about 1 in 35 childhood COVID vaccinations.
Myocarditis-maxxies will likely never take off as an insult, but vaxmaxxer just might :) Shortness, pronunciation and simplicity all play a role.
Anyway, that statement is actually useless. The moment it became clear that some vaccine increases the risk of myocarditis, several European countries swapped them out for the less risky variants, like any sane person would.
The only people still fighting these windmills are the online kind.
> if we were all going to drop dead (I think 2 years ago now, I’m waaaaiting!)
Channeling Monty Python:
... I got better
The potential for the technology in cancer treatment is what I find most exciting.
Yes, I've been very excited about that for more than 10 years. It may not pan out, it's far more speculative than infectious disease prevention, but when combined with checkpoint inhibitors, and I fear they may not do the bold thing and do fully personalized therapeutic vaccines, but it does provide a great deal of hope.
If these mRNA vaccines had not been pushed or mandated, more people would probably think they are safe: there will be no need for any of these reviews.
But because they were pushed by the government, many people do not trust them. Sure, they were pushed and mandated for good reasons, but the problem is that a lot of people have already lost trust in the government.
That trust was not lost because of one big decision. It was lost through many small, unrelated government decisions that may not seem noticeable or measurable on their own, but over time, they build up.
I do not know how this trust can be rebuilt but definitely not by publishing more reviews.
I think it’s the opposite. The _distrust itself_ was pushed by those looking to stir up outrage, generate engagement, and turn it into votes.
Case in point: look at all the people who’ve now built their entire political identities atop this unfalsifiable distrust. They’d even distrust “stand further apart” if the wrong person said it.
> I do not know how this trust can be rebuilt but definitely not by publishing more reviews.
This is the crux. Outrage spreads way faster than the boring truth.
> They’d even distrust “stand further apart” if the wrong person said it.
They shouldn’t believe it no matter who says it. The entire concept of “social distancing” was completely made up and had no science behind it. It belongs in the same bucket of nonsense as “mask up between bites.”
> unfalsifiable distrust
Well, I think it’s pretty clear for starters that politicians lie (and yes this holds for both left and right; although indeed some presidents more than others), and that this isn’t helping trust.
Riiight, distrust was "pushed" and is irrational. I guess having a working memory doesn't count? The Tuskegee syphilis study, or the contaminated blood scandals in Europe and Japan, etc... couldn't have anything to do with distrust towards the government's relation with public health, that's for kooks who aren't on the right side of history!
One word, transparency. Being open about the research and outcomes. This is a situation good science communicators can help with.
Engage the skeptics in open debate and address their concerns, not censorship and embarking on cancellation campaigns.
However uncomfortable it seems, the median person in society isn't going to do a thorough literature review to make up their mind, they'll do it based on personal instincts.
I think that can work if you narrow the issue only to medical advice.
But trust is also eroded by completely unrelated things, like “Iraq has WMDs” and other stories pushed by our governments. Or even the recent argument that we need ID to access the internet in order to “protect children.” Sure.
The key point is that for things like vaccines, people need to trust the goverment and the process. Most people are not going to read medical papers. They should rely on government health agencies to tell them what to do.
So when trust is damaged (even by unrelated government decisions), it affects how people respond to medical guidance too.
Take the vax or lose your job. Two weeks to flatten the curve. You are killing grandma. "Lab leak" was a dirty word. The science has settled. A bloody live death count on the news.
It seemed that every conceivable way to pressure, force, guilt trip and coerce people into taking the CV was utilized during covid. Enough that no doubt many people are highly suspicious of any authority henceforth and no amount of research will sway them from that. The trust simply isn't there. Yet.
Time is the only cure.
I’m pretty sure it was lost via billions spent on a sustained propaganda campaign no country was willing to stand up to.
No I don't think they are safe because I still suffer from the damage it did to my heart
> I do not know how this trust can be rebuilt but definitely not by publishing more reviews.
Dear Previous Paragraph,
Couldn't many small published reviews which don't show a noticeable or measurable positive effect on their own build up over time to rebuild trust?
Sincerely, Your Reader
Hopefully at some point the do their own research people will kill themselves off, hopefully before they kill their own kids and family members.
What a depressing response.
If the “do their own research” people don’t manage to kill their kids and family through complete and utter idiocy, those kids and family will 99.99999% of the time continue their idiocy.
We should hope they manage to end their idiocy lineage.
> If these mRNA vaccines had not been pushed or mandated, more people would probably think they are safe: there will be no need for any of these reviews.
Hogwash. Wakefield predated anything Covid. And measles vaccines aren't mRNA and people would rather let their children die.
Had Trump and Co called the vaccine part of the second coming, people would be lining up at their churches to get them.
You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.
> people would rather let their children die.
I see that your are yourself in a position you didn't reason you into.
There wad that kid that died of measles in America and later there was interview with parents. They said basically that. They would change nothing and rather have kid die then get vaccines.
At some point, you have to start believing what people say about themselves and their believes.
And second, yes that is attitude of political actors who spread fear of vaccines to get votes. Overall impact is exactly that and they know.
>They would change nothing..
But by this logic, this is exactly what pro-vax people advocate as well. If a child die right after vaccination, they will still advice people to vaccinate their other kids, because this was just an anomaly?
So are all the pro-vax people maintaining the attitude that they would rather have their kid die or suffer life long than NOT getting the vaccine?
The fallacy in your logic is that you think people reject vaccines because they think the diseases does not have the potential to be dangerous. They do not think that. It is the same reason why you can continue driving despite knowing that accidents can be fatal.
People take a chance, and sometimes they get unlucky. Does not mean that taking the chance was wrong. In the same way you are not wrong if you go out for a pleasure trip in a car and get in a fatal accident.
They did not said they were unlucky. They said that if they knew their kid will die without vaccine, they would still skip vaccine to protect the kid from bigger harm. They said that, not me. That is the problem here, you ignore what they are actually saying while twisting their position into much different and more palatable. It is consistent problem with right wing - insistence on ignoring what they say, push for and advocate, just so that we can pretend they are harmless.
> The fallacy in your logic is that you think people reject vaccines because they think the diseases does not have the potential to be dangerous. They do not think that.
They literally openly say that. Again and again and again. The above couple was saying something else in the interview, because the kid actually died. But if you actually listen to what anti-vaccine politicians and advocates say, they literally say that diseases don't have potential to be dangerous.
> But by this logic, this is exactly what pro-vax people advocate as well. If a child die right after vaccination, they will still advice people to vaccinate their other kids, because this was just an anomaly?
You can do that only if you are intent on twisting conversations and meanings into unrecognizable.
> Does not mean that taking the chance was wrong. In the same way you are not wrong if you go out for a pleasure trip in a car and get in a fatal accident.
You know what, sometimes it IS wrong to take the chance. Just like, if you race in a car in a place where you can kill bystanders and then die off it. Funny, people are quick to blame parents when 12 years old walk to school for not doing full surveillance, people blame parents for not having perfect control of kids socials, but somehow, blaming parents for refusing vaccination is a bridge too far.
> They said that if they knew their kid will die without vaccine, they would still skip vaccine to protect the kid from bigger harm..
They probably didn't. Because what is "bigger harm" than death?
>You can do that only if you are intent on twisting conversations and meanings into unrecognizable.
Eh..what?
> They probably didn't. Because what is "bigger harm" than death?
They literally explicitely did. Ask them what is the bigger harm. Anti-vaccine circles have multiple flavors and interview did not went that deep.
But this "they could not possibly say X, because I disagree with X" is repeated pattern with conservative and right wing movements.
Please provide credible link to the interview. Just curious...
Trump did tell people to get them? It was his opposition saying they wouldn’t trust a vaccine pushed out by Trump. You’ve basically rewritten history.
I dont think people's motivations are to kill their children, but the opposite. I think this is the starting point for developing cognitive empathy and an accurate model.
Again, trust is a huge factor here.
And it all got a nice little push from Russian disinfo, who took the opportunity to discredit governments even more.
Why do you think all the anti-vaxxers all of a sudden got pro-Russian and anti-Ukraine? Coincidence?
Iraq had WMDs, Hamas beheaded babies and the Western public is completely immune of government-led psyops. Of course there's neither Nazis/Banderites/ultranationalists nor biolabs nor the most corrupt government on the european continent in Ukraine.
Who is paying for this psyops in Europe, and who is getting paid? Facts and references please.
> But because they were pushed by the government, many people do not trust them. Sure, they were pushed and mandated for good reasons, but the problem is that a lot of people have already lost trust in the government.
In the case of COVID, the effectiveness of vaccines was quite exaggerated at first[0]. That absolutely didn't help government rebuild the trust.
> I do not know how this trust can be rebuilt but definitely not by publishing more reviews.
At this point, quite sure more reviews will only trigger people's confirmation bias and make those who already don't trust vaccines trust them even less.
[0]: https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-business-health-governm...
Vaccines were very effective against the first variant, and got less effective with later ones. People forget about the timeline. Article mentions the delta variant at which time vaccines were still very effective IIRC. There were some breakthrough cases as the article mentions but that's to be expected with anything short of 100% efficacy.
> In the case of COVID, the effectiveness of vaccines was quite exaggerated at first[0]. [0]: https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-business-health-governm...
One's model of "statement made by the POTUS" should be more like 'statement made by mildly likeable (to some segment of the population) boomer dad who probably doesn't know what he is talking about.' It'd be a different thing if a public health official said something like this (and I don't know if they did, but I certainly wasn't left with the impression that it was impossible for me to get vaccinated and still get covid).
The Covid vaccines were and continue to be VERY effective at preventing you from winding up on ECMO.
Yes, you may still get Covid, but you don't die from drowning in your own body fluids anymore.
Of course, this only attends if you got the damn vaccine. All of the Covid deaths around me in the last couple years (7 deaths) were anti-vaxxers. But, hey, we know that reality has a well-known liberal bias.
> All of the Covid deaths around me in the last couple years (7 deaths)
Where exactly is this?
Apparently they live in a nursing home in 2020 still, because no one else is dying of covid anymore. Especially not young or healthy people within the last few years.
Nearly 50,000 Americans died of Covid in 2024… and 20% of those were under 65 years old. It’s thankfully much better now than at the peak but tens of thousands of people are still dying..
im no forever masker or anything, but this is false. we just now have to live with a slightly elevated death rate due to covid
You mean the stuff the whole world got injected with in 2020? Good to know!
Seriously though, I am very pro-vax, but the fact that studies like these come out now is just confirmation that people had the right to doubt the safety of mRNA back then. Many people shamed others for being anti vax but everyone has the right to be careful.
Why would repeating a study now and getting the same result as when it was first measured in 2020 be a reason to doubt the safety?
I’m also pro-vax, so I don’t think it is correct to equate ignoring the preponderance of current evidence (in 2021 or 2026) for vaccine protection as being careful. That just seems the logical fallacy sold by “vax hesitant” and social media influencers to make people feel smart to ignore statistics and “make their own choice based on intuition”
By late 2020, when they got approved, the vaccines were not scientifically proven safe for mainstream use. No other mRNA vaccine had been through all the trial stages, and certainly not those COVID ones.
Could the vaccines have side effects that became visible after 6 months? Yes and we couldn’t have known that they didn’t.
Could the vaccines have side effects on people with rare conditions? Sure, and we couldn’t have known that either.
My point is that in 2020, the decision to approve the vaccines and pretty much force everyone to get it was a risk tradeoff. It was way more risky to let the disease continue spreading and mutate than it was to release the vaccines. mrna vaccines had been in trials and there was no reason to believe they could have been harmful. But the reality is that we just didn’t know. Biology is complex enough that you can’t just assume everything will be fine without proper testing. And what we deem proper testing is a process that these drugs hadn’t gone through.
I happily got vaxed in early 2021, and did it again 4 times , so I was willing to trust the tradeoff.
But ignoring that it was a tradeoff and hiding behind a sign that says “science” is just taking people for dummies.
How large a trial do you want to run to capture "rare conditions"? Millions? Billions of participants? How long do you want to run trials? Years? Decades?
No, it is not about large trials. It is about changing the attitude of medical practitioners and the media that refuse to acknowledge a vaccine could have caused an adverse effect.
I understand that this is to not feed the vaccine hesitancy. But to anyone observing carefully, this is a crucial break in the information chain that can feedback any ill effects of any vaccine back to the creators.
> the attitude of medical practitioners and the media that refuse to acknowledge a vaccine could have caused an adverse effect.
In what alternative group think echo chamber did that happen within?
Here, in the real world, it was acknowledged from the get go that vaccines carried risks and that was why the call went out, from almost the start of 2020, for trial volunteers to find the risks associated with a number of new vaccine variants in the pipelines.
I am talking about a case when there IS some adverse effect, after it happened.
In that case, there is generally an effort from the practitioners that the vaccine could not have caused it, particularly when the said thing is not mentioned in the package insert or in the list of adverse effects from the manufacture.
Is this a general complaint about the lack of causality inherent in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS)?
It suffers many of the shortfalls of, say, a Haircut Adverse Event Reporting System (HAERS)
How would you suggest to establish causality?
First step would be to collect data that is trust worthy regarding potential adverse reactions. And for that the barriers that stigmatize such reporting should be removed.
Basically, for starters, doctors should be free to report the events they see without getting labeled "Anti-vaccine doctor" or fear of getting their licence revoked.
When such barriers exist, no one could/should trust the product.
What don't you like about current reporting such as VAERS? Where do you see the barriers there specifically? Do you have examples of doctors getting their licenses revoked for reporting something?
>VAERS
When you got your vaccine, were you told to report at VAERS if you have any problems? Most people does not even know such a thing exists.
Even then the reports from that database is not really considered trust worthy. It is often dismissed with a statement that "anyone can report anything there!"
Who refused to acknowledge there could be adverse effects? I certainly was given information prior to vaccination that outlined possible adverse side effects.
There is a process in place that’s meant to capture a certain number of potential problems. I didn’t make that process. The people who are making drugs safe designed the process. There is never zero risk of a treatment behaving badly, of course but when a drug gets fast tracked and doesn’t go through the regular approval process, it just hasn’t been proven to be safe by the regular standard of what experts deem safe.
It’s not very complicated.
trials ok => drug most likely ok
trials not done => we don’t really know.
Operation Warpspeed addressed that by running a very large stage 3 trial. One reason that isn't normally done is the high cost of such a large trial.
Would that large trial have shown the cancerous effect of smoking? If not, do you then agree that some possible adverse effects were not checked for and could have slipped through?
Don't know. But would standard smaller trials have captured it?
We are kind of back to my initial question that is conceptually unrelated to the vaccine trial: do you need trials to run into millions or billions of participants or into decades if you want to capture certain (rare) things?.
What does being "pro-vax" mean?
That you believe in any claims of vaccine efficacy made by the manufacturers or the FDA and are more then willing to have them injected into your body?
If you don't believe every developed countries’ medical bodies on vaccines, where do you get your info on this? (As to the ‘pro-vax’ question, I'd define it as someone who is open to listening the medical bodies of every developed country on the planet.)
So what is the logic here?
If the only entity that you can get information from is an entity that is known to lie, you can trust this entity?
It is not that we know for a fact that X is not safe. It is that we have no reason to believe that the powers that can ensure that, does not have an incentive to do it, and a large financial incentive to NOT do it and instead grease a lot of palms and get it mandated.
This is particularly relevant when the cost to grease the palms is minuscule compared to the profit that can be made by the approval.
And it is particularly relavant when the common man cannot any relavant information about it from any other source.
We are sitting ducks here. But people apparently does not notice.
That’s what this article here is about. Yes, FDA is known to make questionable actions, as are other agencies around safety or efficacy of drugs. But here the statistics continue to show they are right about vaccines.
I think your own logic supports the opposite from your conclusions?
I'm saying that every developed country's medical bodies support that these vaccines are safe.
Are you claiming that every developed country's medical bodies do not have an incentive to make the right decisions around vaccines? That they will be too cautious because they are afraid of approving something that turns out to be unsafe, or the opposite that they have no fear of approving something unsafe?
Are there any examples you'd point to of where developed countries' medical bodies approved something unsafe because they were bribed, as you imply is the norm today?
But most importantly, if you think every developed country's medical bodies should not be used as the source of info about safety vs benefits, what should be? Or what should be the system even if it doesn't exist today?
> is an entity that is known to lie
What are you referring to?
> the common man cannot any relavant information about it from any other source.
The common man is inundated with info about vaccines from other sources, although much of it is misinformation, etc.
>Are you claiming that every developed country's medical bodies do not have an incentive to make the right decisions around vaccines?
It is a question of how aligned the individual's incentives and the incentives of the medical body in question. And often it is extremely misaligned. So that is what is I mean when I said there is "no incentive".
So what do I mean by that?
When such an organization recommend X, it just mean that if everyone follows that recommendation, the population wide metric, that can be immediately measured or that is often measured will show good beneficial result.
So here if people follow the recommendation two things can happen
1. The number of covid deaths will drop. This is something that will show up immediately, because everyone was focused on daily death toll.
2. A substantial number of people will have adverse effects. This is something that can be managed (in terms of public opinion)
So the incentive of the organization end up being favorable to the recommendation despite the very good chance of point 2 happening. With financial incentives, this is just more pronounced...
> What are you referring to?
Any group of human beings.
I'm still unsure if you think there is any other even theoretical approach than trusting developed countries' medical bodies that would have better outcomes, or if you believe the approach I mentioned is the absolute optimal possible one.
Regardless, as far as the statistics about things like how vaccines changed covid deaths, and any change in non-covid deaths, a study of tens of millions of people found a very large drop in covid deaths among the vaccinated... and actually no increase in other cause morbidity either (different study than the OP study). https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
In that study are you aware if they looked at the vaccination status of the expired members in the unvaccinated group during their death?
Is the theory that the first COVID vaccines (plus COVID vaccines in subsequent years - boosters) were especially safe and reduced deaths dramatically, but that people who got their first COVID vaccines in subsequent years got something that caused far more deaths than it saved, and that's why 'vaccinated' group results are so good compared to the 'unvaccinated' group? (I am guessing you have some point you're trying to get to, and that's why you're avoiding questions like whether the process mentioned in my parent comments has the absolute best expected outcomes of any possible or theoretical approach, or what the better approach is if not?)
I mean, if the people in the unvaccinated group got vaccinated, then they are not really unvaccinated, right? So I am wondering if the study only consider "unvaccinated death" if the person was unvaccinated at the time of their death...
It probably means that you take the statistical evidence produced by massive double-blinded placebo-controlled randomized clinical trials as actual evidence
That is not really an evidence unless you yourself eliminate any biases or flaws in the trial methodology.
Even trained professionals fail to do that regularly...
No, not really. The correct claim is "all evidence is imperfect."
But an FDA approved, Phase 3, double-blinded, placebo-controlled randomized trial is the strongest form of evidence that we have for anything at all.
If it is not good enough, then it does not matter if it is the best available. Nature does not give a damn what the best solution humanity can come up with at some arbitrary point in time.
It is absolutely good enough lol. We have effective statistical certainty in the results.
Tell me: how do you know the food you eat is safe? How about the water? The air? Do you take any other medicines?
All of those are less well-understood than the COVID vaccines.
> We have effective statistical certainty in the results.
Only if you blindly trust the entities that is doing the studies.
Seriously, I am not sure how anyone with a couple of brain cells between their ears can do that.
>Tell me: how do you know the food you eat is safe? How about the water? The air?
I don't. But one don't have a choice. But for other things, one certainly do.
No, you really don't need to "blindly trust" the entities doing the studies.
I work in clinical trials. I know how they work. You do not.
>I work in clinical trials. I know how they work. You do not.
Ah, that makes perfect sense.
It is hard for a man to understand something when their salary depends on them not understanding it.
mRNA vaccines and testing of them have been around far longer then 2020
yes but no other mRNA vaccines had completed the various trial phases and got approved.
And we shouldn’t assume that all mRna vaccines are the same. The rna sequence that’s used potentially can matter as well.
People have rights but they also have the responsibility to be scientifically literate enough to know that analyzing data about the vaccine was prudent regardless of anything and does not suggest their prostration to antivax demagogues was smart.
Bruh??
We synthesise evidence on vaccine components, manufacturing quality controls, and regulatory standards that underpin safety, alongside data from randomised trials, post-authorisation surveillance, and active pharmacovigilance systems.
"synthesize???"
With almost 200 references and the use of "synthesize???" it sound like AI generated slop.
The article is behind a paywall in any case so why so many positive comments about it?
In the end, do facts even matter in politically charged discussions?
This sounds a bit like providing evidence for global warming, gun control or evolution. The "skeptics" just want to remain ignorant. No amount of evidence will change them.
The silver lining about vaccine skeptics, though, is the Herman Cain award[1]. What this means is that conservatives die more than liberals from preventable diseases [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Cain_Award
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-026-02474-9
The science doesn't matter to this administration unfortunately: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c74dzdddvmjo
This administration literally fast-tracked the original covid vaccines for approval.
Say what you will about the Covid vaccine or Kennedy’s specific motivations (which I disagree with), but choosing to cut government funding for development of wildly profitable pharmaceutical products is a reasonable choice.
My understanding is that vaccine research and production is almost never profitable and depends on government support. Either grants, guaranteed purchases, or both.
Your understanding is incorrect. All research is unprofitable, by definition. Vaccines are wildly profitable.
Yeah that's called survivorship bias. The ones that make it to market can be wildly profitable to manufacture. Doing all the work to sift through what does and doesn't work to discover new vaccines wouldn't happen without public funding.
No, that’s called pharmaceutical development. That’s the business.
We don’t generally fund Merck’s R&D with federal money. You’ll note the following critical detail from the article:
> That will impact 22 projects being led by major pharmaceutical companies, including Pfizer and Moderna, for vaccines against bird flu and other viruses, HHS said.
We’ve gone so far round the bend with partisanship that straight-up corporate welfare has become a left-wing cause.
Certainly not _all_ of it, but a few billion at least.
for the curious:
https://www.usaspending.gov/search?hash=5ec35bf87ec1fd63d28d...
Yeah, there would be none without government support.
Remember when everyone was contributing spare dimes to fund a vaccine?
No. Pharmaceutical companies love vaccines. They’re relatively easy to make, they’re indemnified against harms, they cannot be generic, and they are wildly profitable. And on top of all of that, they often get mandated by schools, ensuring a captive market.
If the government never funded another study for vaccines, ever, pharma companies would continue to pump them out.
*Pre-mrna* vaccines couldn’t be generic since it was impossible to have an exact copy of a vaccine [1], because they were created from living organisms.
It is not yet clear whether mRNA will be treated like generics.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X1...
The mandate is the government support, it’s a purchase guarantee.
…Which hasn’t changed.
Also, for the record: very few (no?) vaccines are “mandated” by the federal government. Recommendations are made, and state and local governments do this, mainly through school districts.
Various agencies and the military will, of course, mandate things for their own staff.
That "Vaccines are not profitable" is a misinformation put out there by...I don't know who, but it is out there somehow...
It is really weird that even here in HN where everyone is aware of corporate greed and corruption, corporations becomes the good guys when it comes to vaccines.
Now you might think of bringing up regulators and checks and balances at this point...
But imagine this. If approving a vaccine, or like here, a vaccine technology could unlock 1 Trillion dollars in revenue, imagine how much of that can be paid politicians/regulators/scientists/thought leadrs to act favorably?
How many of those regulators, who are just average human beings, can resist that?
> All research is unprofitable, by definition.
The game to compensate for that is to be to convince gullible investors that your commercially viable fusion plant, or quantum computer, or unrealistic space ambitions are just 5 years away! Invest now or miss out!
The line between research and scamming in an ultracapitalist economy becomes very blurry.
It's not dissimilar to oil & gas (energy) and mineral resources ... the outgoings on exploration are a cash bloodletting that often has no return.
The "win" is occasionally getting a steadily profitable field or lode for multiple decades after the costs of proving and the fun of raising forward capital loans for extraction and processing plant capital.
Not many people know that Trump had a hand in starting the pandemic.
Here's what we know: In 2014, Obama administration halted the so called "gain of function" research because of risk of laboratory accidents. In 2017, the Trump administration restarted this dangerous research. See links below.
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/18/us/white-house-to-cut-fun...
Excerpt: [Obama administration] White House announced Friday that it would temporarily halt all new funding for experiments that seek to study certain infectious agents by making them more dangerous. The White House said the moratorium decision had been made “following recent biosafety incidents at federal research facilities.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/19/health/lethal-viruses-nih...
Excerpt: [Trump administration] on Tuesday ended a moratorium imposed three years ago on funding research that alters germs to make them more lethal. Critics say these researchers risk creating a monster germ that could escape the lab and seed a pandemic.
So, Trump restarted the dangerous research that Obama had shut down. You may be thinking, what does that have to do with Covid? Covid started in Wuhan, China, right?
It turns out that the Trump administration, through the National Institutes of Health (NIH), provided funding to the EcoHealth Alliance, an American non-profit organization focused on studying emerging diseases. The EcoHealth Alliance, in turn, provided funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China for researching bat coronaviruses. The rest is history.
And then Trump also disbanded the pandemic preparedness team in 2018 just in time for the pandemic. See link below.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/nsc-pandemic-office-t...
Well, I have to say that this is the most innovative leap of partisan politics I’ve seen so far this year!
Most left-wing critics are still struggling with admitting that Anthony Fauci really did provide funding to EcoHealth, despite ample documentation.
Not sure what is partisan about this. Some facts were presented. Not opinions, facts. If you dispute any of the above is factual please back up your assertion with citations.
The facts are true. Blaming Trump is the innovation.
For the record, I don’t care who gets blamed. I just think it’s a hilarious twist of partisan rhetoric.
If the President hires someone who then restarted research that previous admin stopped for being too dangerous, does the President get no part of the blame? The buck stops with the President. If he hired the wrong person--and he has hired plenty of wrong people this time around--he gets the blame for the disasters they cause.
This is great, speed running the meme.
1. There were no labs.
2. There was no gain of function research being funded.
3. The baseless lab leak conspiracy theory is hateful extreme far right Russian disinformation that is very dangerous to our democracy and it has already been debunked by the science and 72 intelligence agencies and CNN. Fauci is a Saint!
4. There was a lab leak and it's Trump's fault and you're still a dangerous conspiracy theorist for having previously questioned "the experts" integrity or the possibility of a lab leak.
I haven't seen anyone at all dispute that NIH funded EcoHealth lol
> The EcoHealth Alliance, in turn, provided funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China for researching bat coronaviruses. The rest is history.
The WIV is 20km from the Huanan market where the pandemic started. There is no direct evidence linking the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 to laboratory work conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.[0] The evidence for zoonotic origin with multiple spillover events at the Huanan market is overwhelming.
This is just one review.
[0] https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annur...
Fauci knew the then new admin would face a "surprise outbreak" back in 2017: https://rumble.com/v3s83sz-2017-valentines-day-speech.html
Well, no shit. Every administration does. There are several every year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics_and_pandemic...
No that was a conspiracy theory fueled by Russian disinformation, the scientists and experts testified that there was no gain of function work being done and debunked it.
Citation needed. If you are going to say NYT article is wrong we need more than just your words.
You really believe some billionaire oligarchs propaganda corporation over foremost self-proclaimed expert Anthony "I am the science" Fauci? Something an agent of Putin would say.
Nope. Not this administration at all.
Trump 1 was a very different administration.
And Trump himself has publicly backed off what was probably his one major achievement after receiving pushback from his supporters.
You’re splitting hairs.
No, he really isn’t.
Trump one had a sane (terrible, but sane) cabinet that largely controlled his wilder impulses.
This time he went for loyalty above all else.
> Trump one had a sane cabinet that largely controlled his wilder impulses.
This is absurdly revisionist. The first administration’s cabinet/staff was a reality show and a merry go round of people like Anthony Scaramucci and Ryan Zinke. If anything “controlled” it, it was just the chaos of incompetence.
As far as loyalty goes, I suppose it’s worth reminding you that Kennedy was a Democrat, who ran in the Democratic presidential primary, and routinely criticized Trump.
OP is saying Trump has demanded loyalty as a condition of serving in his administration. As HHS Secretary, RFK caved on Roundup, something he famously won a case against as a lawyer[1]. That even lost RFK support from some of his MAHA fans.
1: https://apnews.com/article/maha-glyphosate-rfk-kennedy-trump...
Relatively speaking Trump 1.0 had a sane cabinet. Yes, there were some crazies, sure, but relative to the people he has around him now, they seem sane.
Getting warmer.
Where’s the Kelly and Mattis in the second term?
Kennedy was a Democrat as a spoiler.
The biggest single success from Trump’s first term is the thing his base hates to the point that they booed him over it.
It's literally not the same administration. Also yeah he wants private companies to stop "wild" profits while he grifts the nation with crypto, hosting UFC on white house? You have to be stupid or willfully ignorant to think the current administration gives a single f about unchecked profits or the people's general wellbeing.
Wow, they literally put an antivaccer in charge of the health department.
I'm honestly surprised they didn't put a flat-earther in charge of NASA.
It's a lot harder to claim success with no evidence in the space race than healthcare policy.
There's a minimum level of actual competence needed for that job to not embarrass the Trump admin.
NASA founder and Project Paperclip imported Nazi scientist Werner von Braun's tombstone references Psalms 19:1:
> "The heavens declare the almighty of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork."
This is a thread about the world, not American hubris about its relevance in it
Thanks for the new toll in Hormuz though
What toll?
The one Iran set up that wasn’t there before US engaged in regime change there
If we want to solve that we need to stop enabling career politicians whose only life experience is debating
Right now, we'd be better off if we even had politicians who could manage an actual debate. Seems like we can't get anything other than mudslinging and strongarming right now.
We would be a hell of a lot better off with career politicians than the current batch of grifters and ex-Fox News chuckleheads.
Two most populous countries, China and India, seem to have mainly relied on inactivated vaccines.
Which makes sense as they had less access to new technologies, and scaling issues were very hard in the early days.
But I'm not quite sure how that's relevant to the article...
Both economies have massive drug industries and China in particular has advanced manufacturing processes for decades. I suspect they made an economic/risk decision and will be reviewing it in the light of mRNA production lead time.
We're way beyond lysenko. China has no intellectual or political baggage in vaccine theory or bio engineering.
it's actually more difficult to produce inactivated vaccine at mass scale than mRNA vaccine, which is the reason why they were producing mRNA vaccines and not the old school safe tested ones
That's a tremendous amount of misinformation to pack into a single sentence!
There were several companies working on "old school" style vaccines, they take longer to develop!
And at least one of the old school style vaccines proved to be less safe than the mRNA vaccines and was withdrawn from market, precisely because there were safer vaccines out there so there was no reason to let a less safe version be sold, even though it was still far better than nothing: https://www.science.org/content/article/rare-dangerous-side-...
Further, the very concept of "old school safe tested ones" doesn't even make sense with respect to COVID, because there were no COVID vaccines before COVID existed, and every single vaccine must be tested to evaluate safety.
Further, the concept that "its more difficult to produce inactivated vaccine at mass scale" is at best unsupported for the current day, and back in the early day it was 100% false. Mass producing mRNA vaccines was extremely difficult. They were very quick to design and get a prototype, but mass production was a new and very very difficult effort.
And as for "the reason why they were producing mRNA vaccines" is that the "they" there was a company that focused on mRNA vaccines so of course they would work on that. And the advantage of mRNA is that it is able to be designed and engineered with purpose, rather than the random chance of trying to get an inactivated vaccine, which is far more laborious and slow.
It's so weird to come into these threads on HN and have people just pack so much falsehood into so few characters. Such false information should not be left up uncountered, but it's exhausting to even list what's wrong, much less show all the evidence.
Good thing we got [rest of world] to do the hard science work, and America can just benefit from it instead!