This is great news! I think people forget how anti-skin cancer protocols even as simple as applying suntan lotion weren't as popular as recent as 50-60 years ago. Lots of "sun children" of the 50s and 60s are now feeling the repercussions of only applying baby oil and are getting hit with lots of melanoma.
What’s funny is before the 50s and 60s everyone knew you should cover up and women wore bonnets. That too much sun was bad for you.
Laura Ingalls Wilder of Little House fame (I mention this a lot as I read these to my children as an adult, and they’re a fascinating look at 1880s America) has lots of places where her mother says “put on your bonnet! Don’t get too much sun!”. We act like people in the past were ignorant but people in the 50s and 60s were just a very special type of arrogant, all of Chesterton’s fences were torn down during that time period.
They thought too much sun was bad for you because back then tanned skin was considering a mark of being poor and pale skin was a mark of being wealthy since rich people didn’t have to work outside.
They also had puritanical Victorian notions of modesty and covering up.
There was no knowledge linking sun exposure to cancer or negative health effects. People in the past indeed were ignorant on many things.
Or rather, linked to completely wrong negative health effects that were just “common knowledge” thus requiring no actual evidence like:
People with light skin should always wear a hat that fully covers the head/face in tropical/equatorial climates (okay, good so far) or else the powerful sun rays will penetrate the skull (?) causing brain damage that will make you go insane (!?!?)
Victorians may have inadvertently protected themselves against excess mortality due to melanomas with their pith helmets, but it’s pretty hard to argue they were actually “correct” with modern hindsight considering the entire chain of reasoning was wrong.
(For example, you see this in Kipling’s writing where he’ll randomly include an ominous case of some guy who forgot/lost his hat and promptly had to be committed to an insane asylum, as one does).
Unless you are albino (which is a large set of other problems) being in the sun all day will develop enough of a tan that you won't sunburn. There might be a problem in spring, but by summer time most people will have spent enough time outdoors that they wouldn't sunburn. I've always been the lightest person in town (a tie in Stockholm) and I can spend all day outside without any sunscreen and I won't burn on the parts of my body normally not covered (my arms), but other parts would burn in a few minutes (If I took off my hat or shirt...)
As someone from Britain with Scottish ancestry I don’t really tan at all. The melanin in my skin clumps in freckles, severely limiting its effectiveness at blocking UV. I can spend time outside in a t-shirt during the long summer evenings in Britain/Scandinavia but will burn during the midday sun. Living in California now the sun is stronger for longer so I just cover up.
San Francisco is at a southern European latitude. It’s a lot worse in the tropics.
I don't know about that. I'm a fairly tanned individual, but where I live, in Texas, if I spend all day in the sun, I'm getting sunburned bad everywhere.
That "if" makes me understand that spending all day in the sun is not something you normally do. I've been told by others who live in Texas that you can build up tolerance and spend all day in the sun.
Naturally darker skin does not automatically provide sunburn protection. It is spending time in the sun that adds the missing part that provide that protection. I don't know how this differs from dark skin, but I've seen it myself.
Note that my claims are only about sunburn. The article/topic is skin cancer which may well have different factors from sunburn.
Are you paying for my mid life crisis? Otherwise my boss expects me back in the office before I could build up the needed tolerance (I'm expecting this to take a month) such that I'd expect to spend all day in the sun without burning.
Black people who spend all their time indoors or covered up will get sunburned if they go outside. If that black person gradually increases their sun exposure they can (in a few weeks) reach the point where they can be outside without sunscreen and they will not get sun burned.
Note that I'm making no claims on how natural sunburn resistant affects skin cancer.
Increased melanin provides some protection against burns, but it doesn’t make you immune. There’s also the aspect of UV damage without burns, which is still harmful and is not affected by melanin levels.
that's his point. anyone can get sunburned, and almost anyone can prevent sunburn through gradual exposure. except albinos, who are especially susceptible.
melanin is also not the only factor in preventing sunburn/cancer. there are many repair pathways and genes, which are present to differing levels in various populations.
The same is true for me, a white person of northern European heritage. If I have a few weeks and time to work at building up a tan, I can get to the point where I won't burn. I did this during the pandemic when I was home all day. I would go out and lie in the sun, starting at 15 minutes, turn over, go another 15 minutes, and go back inside. Increased the time as my skin darkened. Felt nice, never burned.
This is an illusory statistic because "black people" isn't a real category. People who self-identify as "black" have a wide-range of skin tones. Even a moderate bit of brown completely eliminates the risk of sunburn. You can have two "black" parents and be lighter skinned than the average southern Italian.
I say this from experience. I am a black person who is not particularly dark skinned, and have only had the slightest sunburn once in my life, after I had been working in a field for 16 hours straight in full sun under clear sky detasseling corn. When I got back to camp, the back of my neck seemed slightly sensitive, which was unusual. It was fine the next morning, and never peeled at all. I did the same for 2 weeks, and this was the only time I felt this. This was the worst sunburn (if it was one) that I've gotten in 50 years of life. I've spent plenty of time outside, and plenty of time inside being a code monkey and never going outside. I've never worn sunscreen.
I've never met a black person as brown as a paper bag who ever got a sunburn, at least that I know of. My dad is pretty pale, I think I would have heard about it.
I’m overwhelming white ancestry but with some remnant traces of melanated ancestry (> 1%) and I tan very easily. I’ve been mistaken for hispanic or Black before during the summer. My mom is much darker than me.
We both get sunburns. My even darker grandmother got sunburns. My Black friends get sunburns. I am not sure that you are correctly correlating your experience with actual facts about the sunburn resistance offered by melanin.
As a counterexample, my bestie is "brown as a paper bag", and he was convinced he couldn't get a sunburn, up until he did.
Unrelated, he also swore he couldn't get poison ivy, until he literally rolled in it to prove it to me. I found the aftermath more amusing than he did.
This is silly.... most of the world didn't live in england.
All cultures (including mine), have a way to warn kids, or adults for not to stay too long in the sun.
From normal sunburn, to feeling light-headenes/fainting due to heat excaustion, etc.
In the winter was the opposite. (stay in the sun to get some sunlight and not get sick).
So, they knew, and had nothing to do with 'class'. Also, they knew some sun was good/beneficial, especially during the winter.
Pale beauty is a phenomenon across geography. What correlation a society works out is largely lost in the cycles of avoiding the sun being a relative luxury until you get expensive air travel.
Again... you are confusing second order effects, with the primary reason.
We have an old saying "te rafte pika e diellit", may you get a spot, sun spot, aka cancer from the Sun.
People knew excessive sun is unhealthy.... if you could you avoid it during the summer. It was not necessary to make you look 'rich'. Ability to avoid it, meant you were rich. And people wanted to be pale, because you look rich, that is a second order effect, that came because of the original reason (aka, too much sun is unhealthy).
The correlation looks right so all people who have rituals like telling their children not to look poor really understand and later communicate the truth? Is this true for religious stigmas related to food too?
I think you are retro analyzing and presuming individual intelligence because this collective result looks right to you. Really, some people understand some risks and many people who can follow taboos they can afford are not exactly sure what they would learn first hand and what part is superstition.
They were no dumber then than in 2026, but they fundamentally had much less access to information. How much do you trust the medical advice of an uneducated person in 2026?
"Hm, whom to trust, a person who went to university and follow-on education for nigh a decade, oorrrrrrrrrr.... something someone posted on Facebook that just so happens to confirm what my own ignorance told me was likeliest?"
I don't think that was because of UV exposure or anything related. Look at Bedouin tribes even today. They wrap up head to toe, man and woman and child alike, not to avoid tanning but because prolonged exposure to direct infrared will fry you like an egg.
I grew up in the same general region as Wilder, and we sought shade not to avoid sunburn. We were all chestnut brown by the end of summer anyway. It's because the direct sunlight on an August afternoon was brutally hot, and you wanted as little of it to hit your skin as possible.
> before the 50s and 60s everyone knew you should cover up and women wore bonnets. That too much sun was bad for you.
I'd say partly true, mostly false. As sibling comment mentions, much of this was driven by fashion and class etc. and not from some fundamental understanding of damaging UV exposure.
Furthermore there was research that was trendy at the time called "heliotherapy" [0] where all sorts of diseases were believed curable by sun exposure, including smallpox, TB, etc.
In retrospect, I wonder if there was a measurable effect on sun exposure creating vitamin D => immune system recovery, especially if the patient were otherwise not outside much?
Like, I doubt that fixing a vitamin D deficiency is going to cure you of smallpox or TB, but could imagine a path where it helped at least.
> We act like people in the past were ignorant but people in the 50s and 60s were just a very special type of arrogant,
I’d be curious to know if tetraethyllead in gasoline has anything to do with people from that time being cavalier about exposure to the sun, or if the science was just not there to make the connection between sun exposure and skin cancer.
We developed creams that stopped sunburn, but were still great at getting you cancer. A lot of the ads from 70s and 80s talked about how they stopped UVB but let the tanning UVA through! So yes, they didn't burn, but the long term cancer rates exploded, along with all the skin aging.
So it's not that they ignored the all knowledge. I blame most of it on the rather detrimental tech advancement. Like cigarettes with filters: now safer (except you can smoke more now, and the cancer risk is still a disaster)
technically UVB is much more tanning than UVA. UVA tans for a short amount of time. UVA penetrates much deeper into the skin though and has few benefits (UVB stimulates Vitamin D synthesis).
That's the right thing for the wrong reason, which can actually significantly forestall figuring out what's actually going on.
Scurvy is like that. They figured out that if you give sailors a ration of fresh fruit juice they don't get scurvy - this works because the fresh fruit juice has Vitamin C and Scurvy is just Vitamin C deficiency. But they didn't know why it worked - why would a cow, a mango, a lettuce, and indeed basically everything else have a chemical in it that humans can't synthesize ? That's crazy. Except, nope, that's really what's going on. At some point an ancestor deleted the synthesis pathway for this chemical, their offspring weren't bothered because fresh literally everything has the chemical anyway, so the deletion stuck around.
At the same time ships get quite a lot faster, travel across the Atlantic is now rapid enough that even if you deliberately abstained from Vitamin C you wouldn't get scurvy, your body hoards many chemicals it needs (a few must be made "fresh" but most can be hoarded) and only develops issues when the hoarded ascorbic acid is exhausted after a few weeks. But they don't know that, and so when they swap a working solution (store fruit, squeeze the juice out, drink fresh juice) for a non-working solution (squeeze the juice, preserve that, drink preserved juice) the apparent results do not change.
Until they do something more extreme. Go to Antarctica, which is incredibly hostile to life anyway, and then stay there for months. Despite your magic preserved fruit juice you get scurvy. The juice wasn't magic, and eventually you will figure out it was the freshness which was magic and from there that there really is a chemical found in cows, mango, lettuce and basically everything alive which we cannot synthesize. Ascorbic acid, Vitamin C.
In many places covering up is just not enough because of Rayleigh scattering. I don't think this vaccine eliminates need for sunscreen. You'd still feel extremely uncomfortable/pain after 15 minutes in places like Australia even if you don't get melanoma.
+1. Also, just to call out, it doesn't need to be _warm_ for you to need sunblock. Even when it's cooler / cloudier out there you can still get skin damage. Look for UV rating rather than temperature. Conversely, it being hot doesn't imply high-UV either.
I didn't know about the UV index or what it meant until like three years ago. It blows my mind I went that long without understanding. It was actually wonderful to learn that I could just see if I needed sunblock based on a 0-10 scale.
We never wore sunscreen as kids because we didn't burn. I probably have had three sunburns in my life. Learned once I became an adult that that wasn't sound logic...
I think the Apple Watch or the Weather app or something finally taught me UV index about the same time. Has this information always been readily available? Similarly mind blown about it.
This was my experience. Years ago I travelled to New Zealand in what would be their spring time. We stayed in Wanaka but also travelled around Twizel, Tekapo etc.
Although it was pretty sunny with clear blue skies, the air temperature was fairly chilly (shirt, jumper and fleece cold - and I'm Scottish so used to cold weather) and I started to burn. I was warned about this, and the probability of high UV exposure at altitude by the locals and family, and was advised to apply a high factor sunblock whilst roaming around the higher elevations of New Zealand's South Island, which I did.
I got the worst sunburn of my life while skiing in Colorado. I wasn’t wearing goggles or anything on my face, and the sun plus the reflection off the snow was brutal. I didn’t notice it when I was out there, but the next morning I wasn’t able to open my eyes. Lesson learned.
I’ve always wondered about this. I have fair skin, and I tend to burn somewhat easily in very sunny environments like the beach.
However, I’ve never gotten so much as a whisper of sunburn / suntan / anything on an actually cloudy day where sun wasn’t hitting me directly. Is the damage a different type that’s imperceptible? Or is this a public health comms strategy where they assume people will see a single cloud in the sky and decide it’s fine to skip sunscreen, so they talk about how you should slather yourself with sunscreen 24/7, even if the sun is obscured?
I think the point is just about temperature. I've experienced this out on lakes in the northern US for example. It's sunny but not like a tropical beach, and maybe even a little chilly. But you'll definitely get burnt without sunscreen
People who are new to skiing/snowboarding are often surprised that their faces get sunburned, because of course it's cold and so how could they get burned
My mother always covered up and always made us kids cover up. She still died of melanoma. Sun may increase the risk, but sun cream doesn't make it impossible. Cancer has no friends.
Well done to the drug researchers. I have my fingers crossed someone else gets to avoid this
skin grows/regenerates at a rapid pace, which means mutations (mistakes in DNA replication) are naturally likely to happen there than in slow-growing tissue. skin cells and the immune system are constantly self-surveying and nipping these in the buds, under normal conditions. but there are things that can affect this process.
a recent study of 2 million people in ontario showed that both high-sun and low-sun exposed people had higher risk of melanoma than people with moderate exposure.
another explanation is that as much as you can try to cover up, occasionally you may slip up, and going from extreme low-exposure to intense sun is especially bad, because your repair pathways are not primed, skin is untanned, etc..
in conclusion, extreme low or high sun exposure is bad. at the beginning of the summer you should gradually exposure yourself, and then exposure yourself daily but not overly, for the rest of the year.
there is also that anything that blocks UV (sunscreen, windows, etc) by definition blocks UVB first and then UVA, and UVA is the one that penetrates most deeply and has few benefits
No this is insane news, the world is crazy and dumb. Must be all these LLMs. Stock up more than 150%, based on totally unpublished data and an X post...
- The flashy 49% figures are from the old 157 only patient Phase 2, not this Phase 3 trial. The phase 2 was open label, had only 50 controls, and its randomization was disrupted. Meaning 9 patients were reassigned and the final 37 were no longer randomized.
Its primary RFS result was p=0.053 two-sided, with the 95% CI crossing 1. It also used an unusually permissive one-sided alpha of 0.10, and much of the later "confirmation" is just longer follow up of those same 157 patients...
- This phase 3 news so far is nothing more than a press release. They have not published hazard ratio, or confidence interval, their event counts or survival curves.
- They met the endpoint as used in the press release means nothing, until they publish the actual 3 data, so my money is at the end this will be a kind of marginal effect that researchers will struggle to reproduce for years
Another type of study that will take 2 to 3 years to validate or dismiss, in the meanwhile stock is up 150%....
150% increase is because it started from a low point. Moderna's stock lost 94% value after Covid. Stock price speaks to investors' enthusiasm, there is no algorithm.
> This phase 3 news so far is nothing more than a press release.
Can you find a case where a press release after phase 3 was later proven wrong? They do have the data, and most likely the data is positive. They're talking about FDA's approval as soon as late 2027, which is fairly soon.
Do you know what would be more dramatic than stock gaining 150%? that'd be the stock crashing if the press release turned out to be wrong. Follow the money if you are skeptical. See who's selling.
> The flashy 49% figures are from the old 157 only patient Phase 2, not this Phase 3 trial.
There are 1,100 patients in phase 3. More evidence that they're pretty confident.
>> Can you find a case where a press release after phase 3 was later proven wrong?
Galera Therapeutics, Actimmune, leronlimab, roxadustat, tivozanib, aducanumab, tebipenem are all examples of Phase 3 massive failures.
>> This is great news.
Looking forward to the stock market reacting with the same level of due diligence show here, when the actual science data is published...in a still not announced distant future... :-)
the stock is up 150% because if Moderna has indeed cured cancer, the stock is worth many magnitudes more than that. It's presumably based on the probability this report is indeed as promising as it is at face value. If Moderna had announced "we are 100% sure cancer is cured" the stock would've gone up much more
These are patients who had melanoma surgically removed, and IF the unpublished data of phase 3 turn out to be true... you are looking at having improved survival rates after 2 to 3 years on 5 to 10% plus of the patients. That is ALL this still unknown announcement MIGHT mean.
For what it's worth, AFAICT Moderna and other such high-tech biopharma stocks are way too sensitive to the news cycle and not nearly enough to scientific fundamentals, so I took the opportunity of having it up 150% to sell mine off.
> Cutaneous melanoma (CM) accounted for around 331,700 cancer cases globally in 2022
> An estimated 267,353 (95% uncertainty intervals [UI]: 242,818, 278,638) CM cases were UVR attributable globally in 2022
UVR = Ultraviolet radiation
Cutaneous melanoma (CM) is the vast majority of melanoma cases in the US at least:
> The percentages of melanomas that were cutaneous, ocular, mucosal, and unknown primaries were 91.2%, 5.2%, 1.3%, and 2.2%, from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9781962/
tl;dr ~80% of Cutaneous melanoma cases are attributable to UV exposure.
Please be careful and charitable in reading others' words, especially as they relate to scientific topics.
OP did not say that melanoma has no sun exposure risk but that it is lower than the risks associated with other cutaneous cancers (e.g., SCC and BCC) and it would seem that's true based on the very short search I performed.
Yes, but OP said that in response to a comment attributing melanoma to sun exposure, in a conversation where nobody had brought up SCC or BCC. It's still a misleading comment, in my opinion.
> Yes, but OP said that in response to a comment attributing melanoma to sun exposure, in a conversation where nobody had brought up SCC or BCC.
In a thread about a trial for a melanoma drug, which has nothing to do with the discussion of sunscreen. Sunscreen was brought up because it is a culture-war topic, the fact that melanomas are not as associated with sun exposure was brought up as the standard opposite-side reply to a culture-war topic.
Clearly your unrelated accusation was brought up to silence the other side and accuse them of dishonesty. Your follow-up is to accuse them of some conversational violation (mentioning something that wasn't brought up) which doesn't exist.
It's fine to see debate, but this is not debate. At most, consistent daily sunscreen use is associated with a 30-50% reduction in melanoma, and some of the ingredients in US sunscreens are themselves associated with cancer.
What would be helpful is a link to a study showing a general reduction in melanomas during a general increase in the use of sunscreen. I'd be able to point that out to friends who questioned me about the efficacy of using it.
edit: that one sentence reply is already trying to snowball into a pile on. Now to mention this fact has become "bizarre." Can't wait until it becomes "unhinged."
I think the problem is that it takes 30 years for the effects to start showing.
This data [1] shows incidence of melanoma by the age of 30 dropping by half in Australia, presumably as a result of a sun safety campaign that started in the late 80s (not just encouraging sunscreen but also more shade, hats, covering up, etc.). Yet melanoma rates here in general increase but it’s more and more skewed towards the older.
You're confusing me with u/addisonl. Please check usernames before accusing people of trying to "silence the other side."
To quote a blog post I wrote on why we can be confident sun exposure causes cancer: "Green et al. (2011) conducted a 10-year study (n=1621) in Nambour, a town in Queensland, Australia. Participants were randomly assigned to daily or discretionary sunscreen application. After 10 years, 11 melanomas were found in the daily group and 22 in the discretionary group."
But you should read the full post for more context on why we have much better data than randomized controlled trials, and why correlation studies on this subject are nearly useless due to the impossibility of finding reliable proxy variables: https://hedonicescalator.substack.com/p/contra-byrnes-on-uv-...
Saying "some of the ingredients in US sunscreens are themselves associated with cancer" is meaningless without more specificity. As the meme goes, this HackerNews comment is known to the state of California to cause cancer: the bar for something to be "associated with cancer" is incredibly low. Are there any particular chemicals or chemical classes you were worried about?
And I will remind you that, in contrast, we are 100% sure that sunlight causes cancer. We know exactly what kinds of DNA damage it creates (chiefly cyclobutane pyrimidine dimers, which I discuss in my blog post) and we can find cancer-causing mutations in melanoma samples directly downstream of that damage (C->T mutations, for example, ones that disable the key p53 tumor suppressor gene). We know how this shit works! Are there some sunscreen formulas that might be dangerous? Possibly, I don't have them all memorized, but the solution is to find a different brand... not to instead expose yourself to one of the best-studied carcinogens around.
>Clearly your unrelated accusation was brought up to silence the other side and accuse them of dishonesty. Your follow-up is to accuse them of some conversational violation (mentioning something that wasn't brought up) which doesn't exist.
the comment you are replying to is HedonicEscal8r's first comment in this comment chain.
>that one sentence reply is already trying to snowball into a pile on
no... it is correcting your comment that is accusing HedonicEscal8r of having multiple comments in this chain. HedonicEscal8r was not the one to make the comment that you describe as an "unrelated accusation" to "silence the other side".
common courtesy would be to say "oops, i didn't read the usernames, my bad" instead of accusing someone else entirely of "trying to snowball into a pile on" for calling you out on the mistake.
pessimizer misattributes a comment to someone who didn't write it. i mention it, get accused of "piling on", and then get downvoted. hn can be so fucking weird.
By pointing out that it is true using a reference?
> the reply
The reply misunderstood the first comment and went on to discuss something a)interesting but b) not germane to whether melanoma is the skin cancer with the highest sun exposure risk.
I have no idea what you mean by context as this small discussion is quite self-contained. Think of this as making sure everyone realizes two homophones actually are distinct words.
> Cutaneous melanoma (CM) accounted for around 331,700 cancer cases globally in 2022
> An estimated 267,353 (95% uncertainty intervals [UI]: 242,818, 278,638) CM cases were UVR attributable globally in 2022
UVR = Ultraviolet radiation
Cutaneous melanoma (CM) is the vast majority of melanoma cases in the US at least:
> The percentages of melanomas that were cutaneous, ocular, mucosal, and unknown primaries were 91.2%, 5.2%, 1.3%, and 2.2%,
from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9781962/
Your reading comprehension is way off. The article says "Each year in Australia, up to 420 people are diagnosed with acral or mucosal melanomas. They affect people of all ethnic backgrounds, and are the most common forms of melanoma in people with very dark skin."
That is a discussion of specific subtypes of melanoma. You've turned that into a general statement about melanoma:
> not all skin cancers are caused by sun exposure, and this is more true for Melenoma which occur both more frequently in darker skinned people and in place where there is little sun exposure.
These are "Two rare ... forms of melanoma" not "melanoma as a whole." The article does not say melanoma as a whole is more frequent in darker-skinned people and in places with little sun exposure. Those two subtypes are.
> BCC ... can cause significant local tissue damage if left untreated. Most cases are linked to chronic sun exposure, especially in fair-skinned individuals.
> While it often remains localized at first, SCC can invade deeper tissues and, in some cases, metastasize to lymph nodes or other organs. Risk factors include cumulative sun exposure, a history of sunburns, and immunosuppression.
> While not all skin cancers can be prevented, effective sun protection and healthy habits can greatly reduce your risk for basal cell carcinoma, squamous cell carcinoma, and melanoma.
That does not support "most skin cancers are not a big deal"
"Whilst some studies reported an association with improved survival ... others did not find any significant association, and some even reported worse outcomes in patients whose tumors showed regression"
You seem to have read this as "melanoma just goes away and the problem is gone" rather than "the primary tumor can recede, and in that case survival odds are somewhat better by a few percentage points (but actually worse for Stage III patients!)"
"Melanoma is one of the deadliest forms of skin cancer, with more than 330,000 new cases diagnosed worldwide in 2022."
Saying melanoma is the deadliest forms of skin cancer is not revealing anything and is a scare tactic. In 2022, there were approximately 60,000 deaths worldwide due to melanoma. A rare cancer with 18% death rate is not high compared to the others. The deadliest cancers include lung cancer, pancreatic cancer, liver cancer, colorectal cancer, and breast cancer. These cancers have the lowest survival rates and account for a significant number of cancer-related deaths.
But I will wait for the upcoming complications and the worse 5 year all cause mortality rate in these patients.
Question for you: what is the goal of these comments? What is it would you like people to do or think differently after reading what you've written?
I'll go first: my hope is that someone who has read what I've written will be more likely to take seriously something suspicious they see on their skin rather than ignore it as unimportant, and be more inclined to take seriously protection from sun exposure when possible
My goal is to 1) not reward these companies by over inflating phase 3 clinical trial outcomes and 2) to not fear a skin cancer diagnosis and 3) not live your life in a bubble while polluting the world with sunscreen.
Sun exposure does not cause skin cancer. It only increases the risk of skin cancer in some people. Look at the ROI on people's behavior and it makes no sense. Are we actually causing more damage by using all this sunscreen and the plastic bottles it comes in and lowering everyone's vitamin D levels?
Sunscreen was widely used in the 70's and skin cancer rates keep going up. It's useless.
There are truths in there, but you seem to be looking only for evidence that supports your beliefs (and misreading evidence against your beliefs) instead of tailoring your beliefs based on evidence. Additionally you make blanket, definitive assertions like "sun exposure does not cause skin cancer" which no one should be listening to
Multiple things can be true at the same time:
1. Skin cancer can be successfully treated if found and removed early
2. Vitamin D is healthy and necessary, but at the same time too much sun exposure is harmful. That harm depends on different factors (like skin tone)
3. Some kinds of sunscreen might be problematic or bad for the environment, but there are different kinds of sunscreen (mineral-based, reef-safe)
4. There are multiple ways to mitigate sun exposure, not just sunscreen (avoid peak UV times, wear sun-protective clothing). Mitigation doesn't mean "complete avoidance"
5. Sun exposure is not the only cause of skin cancer, but it is a cause of skin cancer and a common one at that
I did not say that the sun does not increase the risk of skin cancer. I did say it does not cause skin cancer. Do you understand the distinction I’m making? “Cause” can only be determined when the event has already happened. And even in the case of the sun causing someone’s skin cancer, it is not the only variable.
Yes, however the trial succeeded. But by "how much", is not yet released. This trial was not against placebo, but the already existing, and effective Keytruda treatment.
My dad died 30 years ago after it spread to his liver. He was in the study at duke for what is today the standard treatment line for immunotherapy. I hope he was able to help. He died 9 months after his diagnosis.
Enjoy the time you have with him now and be grateful for all the years you've had. Nothing is going to make the loss of a parent "OK" and it will hurt no matter if you see it coming like you are or it's a surprise.
Immune therapy is hit or miss. Friends lung cancer was exquisitely sensitive to it. Stage 4 to no sign of disease. Another friend with melanoma immune therapy didn't seem to help at all.
Melanoma is usually completely resistant to traditional cancer drugs. So that sometimes immune therapy works is very welcome.
Sadly it didn't. And it also lead to extreme bleeding in the brain metastasis that we had to stop it. Switched to BRAF/MEK inhibitors and that looked good for a few months until it didn't anymore.
Huge, uplifting, news, hope the study will bear further fruit. Considering that 90% of all clinical trials fail, it's good to read about a truly promising one for once.
I got my first one at age 27. A third just got removed. Living with the constant mole vigilance of that is rough, but I am glad I've learned to identify them. I think knowing the ABCDEs of it should be more widely spread, as removing a mole is a much nicer alternative to having to take margins in a highly mobile place.
Yes, mRNA vaccines are promising for many but not all cancer types, and there are many ongoing clinical trials. There's also a lot we yet don't know about how to design them.
One of the leading problems is that we don't know how to pick the right neoantigens (mutant cancer proteins) which can trigger the optimal immune response.
Moderna used a simple heuristic, "how likely is this antigen to show up on the cell surface?" which makes sense, since an antigen has to show up on the cell surface for the immune system to see it. But there's so much missing from this model, and we just don't have enough data. Failures in clinical trials of mRNA vaccines may well be caused by this problem. (Yes, this is a good problem for AI, if we can get enough data).
mRNA is a general technique for targeted cancer therapy. It's the message RNA containing the instructions from a gene to create a specific protein. It's much easier to work with, reprogrammed, manufactured, and delivered. There're a number of approaches to use mRNA against cancer cells. One is using cancer related antigens, similar to the vaccine approach. mRNA is programmed to generate the antigen proteins in the body, which are attached to the cancer cells. The body's T-cells can then attack the tagged cancer cells.
The problem now is finding the correct antigens targeting the cancer cell type. Cancer cells are similar to health cells. You don't want to program a mRNA to generate antigen proteins that target health cells, which causes autoimmune problems.
This is not quite correct. An mRNA vaccine that creates healthy antigens will fail because it won't do anything, not because it will trigger autoimmune issues. Your cells are already covered in normal antigens, and your immune system already knows to not attack them. It is true that it is difficult to find the right antigens to target, but the reasons for that are more complicated.
Individualized immune cancer therapy has been touted as the next big thing for half a century. It's nothing new, and with few exceptions, such as skin cancer, has failed to yield much. scientists, for decades, have tired to harness the immune system to attackcancer and it almost never works.
Those few exceptions have been monumental in how they've changed cancer treatment. Skin cancer has been particularly well treated with immunotherapy, but other cancers have also benefited from the exact same research and drugs (as it turns out, the specific mutations the immunotherapies like Keytruda target express in other cancers). The reason skin cancer gets so much attention is because it's one of the most commonly diagnosed and treated cancers. (Colon is more common, I believe, but it often doesn't get detected. Get your colonoscopies folks).
It has moved fast enough that I've heard from multiple oncologists that the all 5 year survivability numbers are dated because the treatments are newer than the studies.
We've come a LONG way in a very short period in terms of cancer treatment. It still sucks, but not as much as it once did.
Non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) treatment has been revolutionized by the checkpoint inhibitors (as well as some other drugs targeting specific mutations).
I don't like words like "revolutionized" as they set wrong expectations.
For non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) treated with immune checkpoint inhibitors (such as pembrolizumab, nivolumab, or atezolizumab), median overall survival typically ranges from about 10 to 20 months in advanced stages as opposed to 10-12 months for standard chemotherapy treatments.
That's great news especially as they would likely be better tolerated. Bt let's please not call living a handful of months longer as a 'revolution'.
> Individualized immune cancer therapy has been touted as the next big thing for half a century. It's nothing new, and with few exceptions, such as skin cancer, has failed to yield much. scientists, for decades, have tired to harness the immune system to attackcancer and it almost never works.
"Almost never" is doing a lot of work. You may be aware that most drugs fail over the course of development and human trials?
Anyway, checkpoint inhibitor therapy is a massive boon to oncology and was only brought into widespread use over the past 15 years.
Every cancer is different. Immunotherapy is highly effective, even curative, for some cancers. For my cancer, chemotherapy is curative, while other cancer's just shrug chemotherapy off like it's nothing.
Having a plethora of drugs and treatments is vital because cancer is not "one thing". Each type of cancer will respond better to some treatments than others.
Personalized mRNA vaccines are in fact, extremely new, and only made possible by recent advances across multiple fields. This comment reveals a total lack of basic understanding on this topic.
I believe the comment was talking specifically about immunotherapy rather than personalized mRNA. But I'd agree it's still misinformed as immunotherapy has been a game changer across multiple cancers.
u/danjl was originally asking about "this class of drugs", which is more reasonably interpreted as referring to personalized mRNA vaccines rather than the much broader concept of (personalized or not) immunotherapy.
The comment is wrong because it's stupid. Just because we've known that personalized immunotherapy was a promising idea for a long time, and have been trying it with the limited tools we had (CAR T being the poster child, and while an incredible advancement for blood cancers and many other diseases, it is notoriously dangerous and expensive), does not mean we had the technology to accomplish it. Today's results are only possible because of recent advancements in multiple fields, and to respond with "they've tried immunotherapy for decades" is profoundly ignorant. You may as well say, "scientists have been trying to cure cancer for years."
> This comment reveals a total lack of basic understanding on this topic.
My thoughts as well, Keytruda alone has been a miracle to many many people at this point (quoting GP: "scientists, for decades, have tired [sic] to harness the immune system to attack cancer and it almost never works."), I frequently get ads for local CAR-T centers (unthinkable a little over a decade ago)
Many people, including myself, often take pot-shots at "big pharma." But, this just seems like a win-win, for the org and humanity. They believed in their tech, rode it out, and we all came out the better for it.
I don't know if that counts as the same "trick" or not as it's another antiviral vaccine. Not that I disagree with you.
I read that this mRNA flu vaccine can be more effective then the regular annual flu shot, simply because the time to create it is shorter, therefor the guess at what strains will circulate that year is more accurate.
> Well it did give more than a couple million people myocarditis as a side effect, so there's that.
You are absolutely incorrect with the thrust of your comment. This is a great opportunity to find out where you heard that, and ignore that source going forward.
The largest study I can find has 536k subjects. It shows that mRNA vaccinated vs. non-vaccinated people who had COVID had myocarditis >10x more often, and it was a worse long-term form.
Would love to see a source for this, but I'm assuming you don't have one and are just spreading FUD due to your political beliefs...
Closest thing I could find was a little over 15,000 people in Europe who got myocarditis (also includes pericarditis: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10746454/). Out of millions (hundreds of millions?) that received the vaccine. Please stop doing what your doing. It's pretty shit.
Yes, and it's worse than that for the parent commenter, the unvaccinated population also got some cases of myocarditis - often after Covid. And they got myocarditis at a higher rate than the vaccinated.
Thank you for making that point. This is the truth. This whole conversation drives me nuts, because all the data is now available. The increase in risk for myocarditis in non-vaccinated people is staggering! (>10x higher risk!)
Example study:
> 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 study monitored a total population of 536,448 people. This is real data.
I mean, the question is almost always about whether it's economical or not, right? Whether you can find diseases it's efficacious to treat with this mechanism, and prove it (trials are expensive).
> not really a huge win. It's going to cost taxpayers significancy and may not improve survival much or total life expectancy . The stock is way overextended. It's a long way from anything that can be used on patients, assuming it even works well enough to be a commercial success. History has shown this is seldom the case. I would short it if wasn't so expensive and risky to do so.
Buddy, this is a phase 3 trial. This is about as close as you can get to "anything that can be used on patients" without already being approved.
It is clear that you don't have experience in this area.
I wish people would find a decent source for these stories in order to post them on here instead of sending us to a tweet. I'm not on Twitterx and it's a mini nightmare on a mobile browser
I think the "expected value" was priced in, but regardless of the result, this trial would move the stock price towards that direction.
Biotech is one of the very very very few areas of the stockmarket where specialist knowledge generates alpha.
Trolling through random biotechs, learning about their tech, and investing in the most promising applications of that tech in the most impactful areas is something that happens somewhat on publicly traded markets. With tech, most of that happens pre-IPO.
Even if you were to optimally price in all available information you still have uncertainty of what will actually happen. i.e. A 1 dollar coin flip has an expected value of 50c before it’s thrown and it will collapse either to zero or to one after the uncertainty is resolved.
It was priced in, the share price prior to the news being released was taking into account a probability measurement of the trial succeeding or failing. You can’t price in both options of a binary outcome simultaneously, so part of the equity price was functionally equivalent to a call option on the outcome of the drug trial that only resolved after the trial results are announced.
It’s similar to the situation where a company puts out a public offer to buy another company at say, $50 a share on a day that the acquisition target is trading at $40/share.
If the stock of the target company is trading at $46/share, the market is pricing in the probability of the acquisition not happening. If the market knew the acquisition would happen with 100% certainty, the price of the target company shares would be equal to the buyout share price offer. You can assume the risk of the acquisition not happening by purchasing shares at $46, and if it does end up going through, you earn $4 a share from assuming that risk.
Ever since I first heard of them a decade ago, it seemed that mRNA therapeutic vaccines were going to be the next wave of massive improvements in care. It's taken a bit longer than I had expected, and it's not that mRNA is the only way to make these sorts of vaccines, it's just so much better than the alternatives.
My father has gastric melonama and pretty much last few days left — does someone with knowledge know if this vaccine can be of any help? Or any registry available?
Deepest sympathies, and I'm no oncologist - but I think that'd be like trying to patch the hull of the Titanic after her stern has lifted out of the water. So many cascading failures are in motion by then that saving him really isn't possible.
I for one would like to see the data rather than a press release. Is this even serious? A press release with no link to outside twitter?
I feel like everything companies, and presidents, say now is directly geared to triggering AI trades.
The only thing they are looking at with this drug is people living one more month over existing drugs.
THIS IS NOTHING.
"The median PFS (progression-free survival) for KEYTRUDA was 5.5 months (2-week group) and 4.1 months (3-week group) compared to 2.8 months for ipilimumab (HR 0.58, P<0.00001 for the KEYTRUDA groups vs. ipilimumab,"
The median PFS (progression-free survival) for KEYTRUDA was 5.5 months (2-week group) and 4.1 months (3-week group) compared to 2.8 months for ipilimumab (HR 0.58, P<0.00001 for the KEYTRUDA groups vs. ipilimumab, 95% CI, 0.46-0.72 for 2-week group and 0.47-0.72 for 3-week group, respectively). The estimated 6-month PFS rates for the KEYTRUDA and ipilimumab arms were 47.3 percent, 46.4 percent and 26.5 percent, respectively. One-year OS for KEYTRUDA was 74.1 percent (2-week group) and 68.4 percent (3-week group) compared to 58.2 percent for ipilimumab (HR 0.63 [95% CI, 0.47-0.83, P=0.00052] for the 2-week group and HR 0.69 [95% CI, 0.52-0.90, P=0.00358] for the 3-week group). At the time of analysis, median overall survival was not reached in any treatment group.
1. That's not what progression-free survival means.
2. I don't think AI was mentioned once in this press release.
3. This drug was approved for trial in 2014, so if it had something to do with deep learning, that would actually be a massive announcement.
4. The paragraph immediately following the one you clipped talks about Overall Response Rate (ORR) and throughout the release they discuss Overall Survival (OS).
5. This is not "NOTHING" in statistical terms, but even more so to people with melanoma.
1. That's not what progression-free survival means.
I was not pointing to PFS as OS.
2. I don't think AI was mentioned once in this press release.
I did not say it was. I said it was written FOR AI trading algorithms to read and invest on.
4. The paragraph immediately following the one you clipped talks about Overall Response Rate (ORR) and throughout the release they discuss Overall Survival (OS).
Someone noted this was an earlier study. The newest study does not even have data out and yet here we are, investing on a press release.
5. This is not "NOTHING" in statistical terms, but even more so to people with melanoma.
You are talking to someone whose father died of pancreatic cancer. "Pancreatic cancer has a higher mortality rate compared to melanoma, with an estimated 52,740 deaths from pancreatic cancer in 2026, while melanoma has a significantly lower death rate. Additionally, the 5-year relative survival rate for pancreatic cancer is only 13.7%, compared to higher survival rates for melanoma."
What they did for my father was worse than nothing.
Yes every cancer is different, responds to different therapy, and with different survival rates. However, cancer treatment, as a whole, works. Oncologists do not prescribe incredibly intense treatments like chemotherapy out of nowhere. Chemotherapy is often not curative. Instead, it's used to both prolong life and improve quality of life.
Dying from late-stage cancer is often painful and miserable. It might be shocking, but getting just a few more months from chemo can provide a greater quality of life. Keyword can. Every oncologist is different with different recommendations, and they explain the risks very concretely. There is always an option to refuse treatment, but bear in mind it's not just about how quick you die. It's also about how much that dying sucks.
They told my father Chemo woudl add six months on his six month estimated lifespan. He died in two months cause the chemo blocked his liver. My sister in law was a chemo nurse and begged him not to get it. He died on loads of morphine. His last words were "It's all a scam!"
Talk to a chemo nurse? I've gotten two different chemo regimens. Yes, I know chemo has a risk because all medicine has a risk. I'm sorry for what happened to your father, but that doesn't fucking mean chemo is a scam. It saves lives, I should know.
A friend's sister beat colon cancer over ten years ago but now is having liver problems that took a while to pin down. They warned her she'd probably die in a couple years from the cancer without Chemo, but would have this risk long term and it recently showed up.
Interjecting with a fact. Moderna described the neoantigen immunogenicity prediction algorithm they used to design the vaccines as “a deterministic machine learning (ML) algorithm,” so it may be a small neural network or more traditional algorithm, probably not deep learning.
Sorry--I was unclear. I was specifically responding to the OP's "CEOs these days want to join the AI hype wave" claim. My point was that the "hype wave" OP is referencing is really about deep learning, not what we think of as traditional statistical learning. Even the dedicated medical AI startups of that era, like BenevolentAI, were still doing traditional ML in 2014. So if Moderna really was trying to join the "AI hype train" and announce a deep learning result with this treatment, they'd be announcing that they successfully trained a deep neural network for drug discovery 12 years ago.
No it isn’t. They did a test with great specificity and got undeniable P values. Now they can refine the action and start saving people. This is a huge, huge win.
you're also looking at a different, older study. Keytruda is a little strange in that it has a very long tail in survivorship, works best in certain cases, and median PFS isn't a really great metric.
According to Gemini, Moderna uses machine learning to speed up sequence selection and mRNA optimization. After all, this is not a mass-produced vaccine, but a personalized one.
>Postscript: Our Secretary of Health and Human Services of course cancelled $500 million in mRNA vaccine R&D contracts (22 different programs) last year, and cited a pile of misinformation (and cluelessly misunderstood research citations) to justify it. Our Director of the National Institutes of Health was apparently just fine with this decision and cited mRNA vaccines’ alleged failure to “earn public trust” as one of his reasons, along with public statements that “the mRNA platform is no longer viable”. I have a number of suggestions for each of these individuals and their supporters about how they might spend the rest of their day, and will be glad to send details if they contact me.
So they added $30B market cap for a drug that would do by my napkin estimate about ~$7B average annual sales for 20 years as a front line treatment. Based on that alone, $30B in added market cap isn't enough. How much would you pay for $150B in high margin revenue?
But even more is the validation of this new custom MRNA novel cancer treating platform. If you take this data result to be a 'proof of concept', the expected value of the rest of their pipeline is suddenly worth a lot more.
Of course, this is all assuming the data is accurate and the drug gets approved, neither of which are 100% guaranteed.
People were assured that COVID vaccine mRNA would disappear within days and the spike protein would short-lived. Yet Yale-led researchers later detected circulating S1 and full-length spike as late as 709 days after vaccination.
They also left the public in the dark about the risk of vaccine-associated myocarditis, especially in young males, many of whom experienced permanent heart tissue damage.
That is a massive gap between what the public was told and what later evidence found. If a technology makes your cells produce a biologically active protein, regulators should establish where it goes, how long it can persist, and what prolonged exposure does before mass deployment.
> People were assured that COVID vaccine mRNA would disappear within days and the spike protein would short-lived
which is still the case, even in the Yale study.
> That is a massive gap between what the public was told and what later evidence found.
there is an even larger gap between basic epidemiology and what the public understands.
Hard science is difficult to communicate on a good day, on a global pandemic with quacks getting tons of airtime and multiple labs finding conflicting results (due to speed to publish and bad experimental parameters) I would say that was communicated by health experts was surprisingly valid and accurate.
+1 the public health apparatuses' actual statements were impressively correct even if you don't account for the underlying uncertainty at the time.
Where public health officials "failed" was not having a megaphone loud enough to drown out the game of telephone that most people (as these comment threads consistently show) were actually hearing information through.
Simplest example: People will say that public health officials told them "masks don't work." But no! Only one person did, and that was USSG Jerome Adams (who wasn't credible nor a major player to begin with). What public health officials said was "we do not know if masks work," which is a more nuanced but completely accurate statement.
> : People will say that public health officials told them "masks don't work." But no! Only one person did
I think Fauci might have had a statement early.
But tbh every other scientist said the opposite, every doctor said the opposite.
If I am not wrong he later admitted that he said it to gain time for the goverment to adquire enough for basic needs like hospitals.
And that is the kind of error that erodes public trust and it was bad advice shared because the american public cannot be trusted to prioritise medical professionals being stocked and because the american gov was unprepared.
But one bad statement, in march of 2020, done for the wrong reasons due to an unprepared goverment voted in by selfish people who cannot be trusted to help others does not deny that the UK had great advice the entire time, so did China, and Spain and Italy and most of the other initial hotbeds. They said "we dont have enough n95 for everyone, please social distance until they are availeble" instead of "masks are not needed".
Despite that, he was the face of a pandemic plan in a goverment alergic to facts and led by a dude who recommended injecting bleach so in that situation, he did as much as you can and is still paying for it.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
Good to know proposing proper safety research, longitudinal studies, and testing of completely novel technologies before they are emcouraged to be administered into the populace of the entire worldwide human population is considered in such a way.
We don't care what the topic is or what your position is; you just have to observe the guidelines. All-caps words/phrases/sentences are specifically banned because they make the comments ragey and hostile, and make your argument seem weaker. A phrase “I don't give a flying fig if you all die from that hideous nasty crap” breaks multiple guidelines and is almost worthy of an instant ban, but I'm hoping you might be persuadable to try harder to use the site as intended. It isn't difficult, and if your points don’t hold up without that kind of aggression, they’re probably not strong points.
Also, please don't try to reframe what is plainly egregiously abusive commenting as reasoned argumentation. That’s obviously game-playing, not honest dialogue. This site is only a place where people like to participate because others make the effort to raise the standards rather than drag them down. Please only comment here if you intend to participate earnestly.
What? The Yale study is where the almost two year figure came from. Are you just making things up? Did you read what I wrote, or anything in the study?
> The Yale study is where the almost two year figure came from
yes, the figure that a small sample of people had long period of protein in them. But most people they looked at had none, which was what they expected.
The average time of it was not contested, the long tail was.
My comment was not even that hard to read, makes me wonder what kind of other information you have misread to come to your conclusions
> They also left the public in the dark about the risk of vaccine-associated myocarditis, especially in young males, many of whom experienced permanent heart tissue damage.
Not true. This was correctly disclosed in the trial results as a super super super tail risk.
Once they realized that the (minuscule) risk could be even further mitigated by simply spacing out the booster schedule, they adjusted that (Feb 2022).
What's more, they found that myocarditis risk was higher in the unvaccinated population after infection. This information didn't get to the so-called "skeptics," who willfully ignored data that didn't fit their conspiracy theory.
I also get a kick out of people only looking for side effects they think of as side effects, since they are what people think of as side effects for completely different types of technologies.
>In men younger than 40 years old, the number of excess myocarditis events per million people was higher after a second dose of mRNA-1273 than after a positive SARS-CoV-2 test (97 [95% CI, 91–99] versus 16 [95% CI, 12–18]).
From your own study you linked. The first comment I ever posted on HN was regarding a similar study where there was no control group whatsoever for unvaccinated people.
I can’t get over the sunk cost reaction to this vaccine. No one who was not immunocompromised should have ever taken it. Period.
And this is just regarding your study.
Remember how the AstraZeneca vaccine (it was called the “Oxford vaccine” before that bad PR) was taken off the market instantly after reports of blood clots.
Can you clarify that? It saved 100K+ lives even by incredibly conservative estimates, and allowed life to returned to normal at least a year earlier than otherwise.
I can't speak for other people but I was upset to enter a medical era where bureaucrats were forcing medical decisions on me. I was forced to get it or lose my job despite 1) working remotely, 2) having already had Covid and 3) being healthy and not at risk of Covid death but being the largest risk for myocarditis.
It's about protecting each other, basic empathy. Doing the bare minimum to and taking miniscule risk to protect the lives of people around you. Sorry that's hard to understand.
It is 'hard to understand' if you get harmed in the process. Hence the jokes about 'doing it for grandma', or 'screwing yourself over with lifelong complications for someone who's already 80.'
Truly, it's the same moralizing appeal-to-emotion but with a different target ("you care about grandma, right? you wouldn't want her to die, right?"). I've always felt it was strange that the argument was (and still is!) largely blindly supported on HN, like haven't we heard this one before?
Americans are so silly. Resentful of being told to do anything for their own good or the good of others because of “individual liberty”, yet so willing to lick the boot of the police state and corrupt crony capitalists. Good news for you is that Elon went in and set the bureaucrats straight, so enjoy your diarrhea and glass in your food.
You got RFK because half the population thought they were unique snowflakes who could not abide by the same simple rules as everyone else. The price he'll extract is significant impacts on health, wealth and well-being.
Vaccines that have a large impact on transmission and infection are there not just for you but for your community.
The covid shots were good against hospitalization and death in older folks, but they were not great at preventing infection or transmission (despite what you may have gleaned from the speakers blaring ads in every public setting for all that time).
You can fall back to the "flooding the hospitals" argument, that works a little better here.
You're misinterpreting data here. You are conflating the fact that the clinical trials didn't measure infection/transmission (which is very hard to do in a clinical trial) with the distinct claim that they didn't reduce transmission in reality.
The vaccines were extremely effective at reducing transmission during the first waves of COVID, where such an intervention was most valuable. And due to viral growth dynamics, even small reductions in transmission yield big net outcomes.
Later waves made the vaccine much less effective at reducing transmission, but still highly effective at reducing hospital utilization which is (despite your snarky aside), extremely valuable. Fatality rates doubled when ERs hit full capacity.
All I'm saying is if you sum up the time (between vaccine release and today) that a person was strongly protected from covid infection and transmission, it's a relatively small portion of that time.
Thats my pushback against gp's argument that you have to give this thing to your young kids to protect me.
I suspect that you and GP and GGP are talking about different time scales.
Vaccinating your children for COVID during peak COVID was the right thing to do both for them and for the adults they interact with.
Vaccinating your children for COVID today is much lower ROI for them and anyone around them.
Vaccinating your children in general is very much the right thing to do, both for them and for anyone around them.
I struggle to think of a decision or conversation where the relevant metric is "what % of time from vaccination until today were you protected" and I doubt that's what GP was discussing either.
> Vaccinating your children in general is very much the right thing to do, both for them and for anyone around them.
Isn't this kinda like saying medicating your children in general is very much the right thing to do?
Like it's obviously one of those things that everyone expects you to just agree with directionally, but the actually correct answer is no, there is no in general. All drugs have a context where they make sense. E.g. you're probably not vaccinating your kids for rabies, unless you live in an animal sanctuary or something. MMR, sure.
It actually seems pretty questionable to me that it was ever a net benefit to your average young kid to get the covid shots.
No there actually is in general and it's the same exact way in which there's generally good guidance for medicating your children: they're called evidence-backed guidelines.
The contexts in which drugs make sense is captured by the clinical guidelines.
And sure, it is arguably questionable whether there was ever a net benefit to an average young kid to get a COVID vaccine. However that is a distinct claim from "it never made sense to give kids COVID vaccines." There was certainly a point in time in which a logical interpretation of the information available at the time indicated that kids should get vaccinated. The risks were (correctly) understood to be near-zero and the benefits were (arguably incorrectly) understood to be significant.
Someone who, in early 2021, decided against vaccinating their children was making a decision that was not indicated by the best-available information at that time.
Someone who bets on Red doesn't get to claim they were "correct" in betting on Red even if Red comes up, and certainly not if Green comes up (arguably neutral outcome).
This is the "nobody got fired for buying IBM" argument. It works in a world where you have trustworthy institutions and its safe to just outsource your decision-making to the authorities.
Your interpretation of events might be that a collective of all well meaning people just got it wrong, and that's your right. A lot of people ended up with different conclusions, like the machine did what it does and made a lot of money, the truth be damned.
Not really. It's the "making decisions based on best-available evidence is good, even if every once in a while it leads you astray."
You're more than welcome to read the evidence they use to create their policies. If you have evidence that is of higher quality than that which "the authorities" are using, then you should depend on that!
But... you almost certainly don't have higher quality evidence than they do. That's the fundamental problem.
If you think that you do, then you too could actually make a fuckton of money with that information. But again: you don't have superior information.
I don't think people even got it wrong. They got it correct with the information available, and they for the most part got it right even in retrospect.
I did read a lot of evidence available at the time. It's why I opted to skip the vaccine for myself given that I had already recovered shortly before the shots were available. That decision was very at odds with authoritative guidance at the time. You'd think I was a damn leper, yet that decision seems to have held up pretty well.
I also frequently tested before any gatherings, and avoided contact when I had any kinds of symptoms, test or not. I saw plenty of people figure they had gotten the shots so why not go out with the sniffles?
"Best information" and what was blasted out of the TV or considered "common sense" at the time I think have quite a bit of daylight between them.
What gives you the idea that a low-risk person opting not to get the vaccine is "at odds with authoritative guidance?" Yes, I would bet that it made you feel like a leper, but that's because people (correctly) think that it signals something about your attitude toward the rest of society. Not sure that can be pinned on public health authorities. People who hold open the door to the cold are assholes and frequently treated as such.
Answer: no. Go get tested, and if positive, don't gather.
Yes, agreed that people were listening primarily to a game of telephone and vibes and not actually reading any of the linked PDFs or listening to the actual words spoken by actual public health officials firsthand, and then they (like you are now) were confused about what the actual guidance said.
I misspoke, right at rollout when supplies were short, they did say you could wait. Once they had enough to sell, everyone who didn't jump in line was a grandma killer.
> Yes, I would bet that it made you feel like a leper, but that's because people (correctly) think that it signals something about your attitude toward the rest of society. ... People who hold open the door to the cold are assholes and frequently treated as such.
This is asinine. There was never any indication in the data that a previously recovered person posed any kind of heightened threat to anyone else, and by testing and isolating like I was, I was doing likely the best you could possibly do for the folks around me.
Also, I made the choice with my doctor's agreement.
> by testing and isolating like I was, I was doing likely the best you could possibly do for the folks around me.
Short of vaccination yes, you were. But also people have no way to actually trust anything you say, whereas even saying that you aren't vaccinated (again, correctly) indicates quite a lot about some combination of your information, selfishness, or care for others.
For example, if you had gone around thinking or saying "I'm not vaccinated because prior infection protections me (and therefore you)" you would have been wrong. That's why people's alarm bells go off when you go around saying that you're not vaccinated.
This entire conversation is a validation of their heuristics. You're acting like public health authorities said X and then they didn't, or acting like there's no evidence of Y when there is, and then saying "see I didn't get vaccinated!" is exactly what everyone was cuing into: this is almost certainly either a confused or selfish person, or both.
You might consider reading the actual Kentucky study (as I did at the time) and looking at the limitations. This and the one in October are exactly the kind of shit that would get published and then reports like your link would way overstate what they were actually capable of showing.
Eventually things calmed down enough that studies could actually be published showing the efficacy of a prior infection without risking careers.
You're misunderstanding btw, I didn't go around telling anyone but my closest friends and family. I wasnt about to out myself as a heretic when the likely biggest propaganda campaign in history was going on (pandemic of the unvaccinated, etc). It was mostly in hn threads on studies like the ones you posted where I would say anything about it.
And yes, all studies have limitations, especially observational studies done in the middle of an emergency.
Here's your claim: "There was never any indication in the data that a previously recovered person posed any kind of heightened threat to anyone else"
That is quite obviously false.
If you believe there was superior data available at the time, please share it. Otherwise, yes that is exactly what the data showed (imperfect as all data is).
> Eventually things calmed down enough that studies could actually be published showing the efficacy of a prior infection without risking careers.
Like which studies? (Not that more recent studies could've possibly time-traveled to inform your decision-making in the past, of course).
A reasonable prior (which my doctor ascribed to) was that immunity after recovery from an infection with a coronavirus would be pretty durable and effective, and you can find plenty of reporting to support the effectiveness early on.
To believe otherwise would take some solid evidence, and maybe the Kentucky study is enough to convince you, but it was not enough to convince me (or apparently my doctor, though we didn't talk about that).
It even said this: Finally, this is a retrospective study design using data from a single state during a 2-month period; therefore, these findings cannot be used to infer causation.
So maybe "any indication" was too strong. How about any convincing indication?
There were others as well, I was following this very closely because it seemed pretty important to not be wrong, and all of the messaging was very insistent.
The study you linked is evidence that prior infection reduces the rate of reinfection. Yes, this would be surprising if it were not true.
Your prior claim was that prior infection is equivalent to or superior to vaccination (i.e. relying on prior infection was not "heightened risk"). That was, and remains, completely false.
"Conclusions: Naturally acquired immunity confers stronger protection against infection and symptomatic disease caused by the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, compared to the BNT162b2 2-dose vaccine-indued immunity."
During May–November 2021, case and hospitalization rates were highest among persons who were unvaccinated without a previous diagnosis. Before Delta became the predominant variant in June, case rates were higher among persons who survived a previous infection than persons who were vaccinated alone. By early October, persons who survived a previous infection had lower case rates than persons who were vaccinated alone."
"That was, and remains, completely false."
Would you like to amend your claim? You might have an argument if you stick to "could have been false for short periods of time after people were freshly vaccinated", but otherwise that's pretty indefensible.
You are again misunderstanding the data and its relevance to what we're talking about.
The vaccine protection was not superior for a short period after vaccination. It was superior for the initial variant. We've already established the vaccines became much less effective at reducing transmission in subsequent waves. You've just shared an article that says the Delta wave evaded vaccines for transmission. Yes, that's correct.
How on earth could the Delta variant's evasion have informed your decision not to get vaccinated?
By my "that was and remains false", I am saying it was not only apparently false at the time, but it has been confirmed to be actually false retrospectively as well.
OK, so I think I understand your position now: I made a single decision early on in the pandemic that I wasn't going to get vaccinated, and somehow your links from late 2021 (ie weak evidence that didn't even exist when I was deciding) were sufficient evidence that my one decision was obviously and completely wrong.
In reality, it was a continuous decision: does the totality of evidence coming out suggest I should go get the shots today? And it never definitvely got to that point, and over time the decision became better supported, not less.
You seem to understand the evidence differently. I'll grant you that maybe at some point early on I could have bought a couple months where I would have had a marginally lower chance of infection. This would have had no appreciable effect on the people around me in the grocery store. We'll have to agree to disagree otherwise.
I don’t disagree with your assessment of your individual contribution to overall risk.
The problem is that if everyone decided the same way, then it absolutely would have produced a gigantic difference.
So we’re back to the fundamental point of this being a (true) indicator of someone’s selfishness or attitude toward their neighbors.
Me individually choosing to dump my trash into the local drinking reservoir doesn’t have any appreciable effect on others. There’s a reason, nonetheless, that it’s frowned upon.
So if I don't do a thing that has no appreciable benefit for me or the people around me, I'm being selfish, because if everyone who was in a different context did the same thing, this would somehow produce a gigantic difference?
You dumping your trash in the local drinking reservoir would probably have a couple orders of magnitude more of an impact on others than me not vaccinating after recovery (depending on what's in your trash).
Ah, one of those "everybody knows" argument that is on the level of "everybody knows that Napoleon was short".
It's not completely wrong but it ignores important context. The part you are leaving unsaid is that the vaccine reduced transmission even if it didn't prevent it completely. 80% reduction is a significant amount.
Wearing masks on top of that was the sensible thing to do.
Uh, THAT'S the part you're going to try to challenge me on? You lived through 2020, right? Even people in this very website were supporting mandatory vaccinations. Where if you didn't get vaccinated, you couldn't keep your job or academic prospects, leave your house, or even go to most social gatherings.
I cannot believe the people that supported such measures at the time now turn around and say "well, we didn't literally pin you to the ground and force you to take it. So therefore, it was completely voluntary and you're responsible for your own choices and we can't be held responsible whatsoever."
Yes, that is. Are there other bald-faced lies I should be focusing on instead?
The vaccine wasn't "forced on everyone". Pointing to specific people for whom it was forced isn't "everyone". Nor does the existence of people supporting mandatory COVID vaccines imply "vaccines were forced on everyone".
Well in that case, yeah sorry requiring it to participate to civilized society to any significant degree is essentially no different than flat out forcing it upon people.
If the alternative is living in the woods not being able to go outside, that is obviously not a realistic compromise.
You're not wrong, at least in the USA - but it really shouldn't be. The polarisation was ginned up for various bad reasons, including political gain. It's deadly culture war nonsense.
"Polarizing" is a word that kind of applies, especially if one is trying to be polite, but really it's one of the most politically disinformed issues in a long long time.
A bunch of grifters pushed fear, uncertainty, and doubt for personal gain, at the expense of the health of the nation. I try not to blame people who got tricked, but at some point we need to treat people like adults who are responsible for their own actions, and hold them accountable for the harm they perpetuate by believing BS and acting on it.
A democracy cannot function when its members are low-functioning, and when bad information dominates. Those who spread disinformation, relish the conspiracy and disinformation because it makes them feel special emotionally, and wallow in the mess of it, are hurting us all.
I don't recall it being as polarizing outside of the US, where there was a larger group of anti-vaxxers to begin with. But that might be my "outside US" bubble.
There is a legitimate discussion of what can be mandated you do to your body.
However, that discussion was largely side-tracked by the massive amount of disinformation (eg, "Plandemic") that circulated online. There are people who to this day swear that COVID-19 was just like the flu and simultaneously claim that the vaccine spike proteins have killed around 20M people. Not just crackpots, but people with reach, like Brett Weinstein on Joe Rogan's podcast.
> There is a legitimate discussion of what can be mandated you do to your body.
But we have already protocols and frameworks on public health.
Also plenty of other medical choices are taken with way less input of experts (see abortion discussions for example)
Not sure, the midst of a global crisis, with almost universal scientific approval is the time to have a long discussion on bodily autonomy on countries like america where 50% of people cant read at a 6th grade level.
> There is a legitimate discussion of what can be mandated you do to your body.
There is a legitimate discussion (dating back at least to Typhoid Mary (1) ) on excluding people from public spaces when they refuse to take basic public health measures. Taking a vaccine for a spreading deadly pandemic is one of those measures.
Doing something so violently anti-social is not simply a "bodily autonomy" issue, and framing it only as such is deeply misguided in a way that seems particular to some USA norms.
I got the covid shot and every booster. I have no qualms about mRNA messing me up, and I think it was a tremendous life saver. As stated, there was also a ton of misinformation floating around, and people believed that misinformation.
The thing is most of those people made rational objections. The problem is their reasoning was based on false information. They didn't see it as being anti social as they thought the drug was a boondoggle, untested, and that covid wasn't serious. I disagree with all of it, but it is important to understand why they objected, and not just saying they are selfish or antisocial.
> The thing is most of those people made rational objections. The problem is their reasoning was based on false information.
This is how Typhoid Mary understood her status:
> It did not take Mary long to react to this suggestion. She seized a carving fork and advanced in my direction. ... Mallon's refusal was based on her belief that she was not infected. ... To stop her struggles, he had to sit on her chest for the journey.
And yet, locking her up over her objections her was itself a rational decision. This is the debate.
I'm not saying that this kind of intervention is appropriate today, just that her "rational objections" were not be-all and end-all of the situation.
Why is it more "important to understand why she objected"? Isn't it far more important to understand that she infected? The thing is, a virus doesn't care what you believe, or your political stripe. To a pathogen, you're a mass of warm cells, nothing more. Human beliefs are irrelevant to a virus, so why centre them?
Stopping the spread of e.g. measles depends on vaccinating just about everybody, that's statistics and epidemiology. At the end, that is what determines if there will be an outbreak. Cutting people slack on that because they choose to believe nonsense is not helpful and will not work. Actions matter more than beliefs, voluntary or not.
> her "rational objections" were not be-all and end-all of the situation.
I hope this is not what you think my position is.
If you want to change someone's mind, you need to understand it. If someone believes false information, and if they are driven my emotion due to everything they've heard, then giving them a bullet list of facts will not change their mind 95% of the time.
You've probably heard of the term "steel manning" when arguing with someone. If you cannot state the other person's argument in a way that they agree with, then you are just talking past each other. If you can state their position as well or better than they can, now you in a better position to change their mind.
If your goal isn't to change their mind, then go ahead, just keep calling them stupid and making no progress with them.
Given a population of people, you should aim to change some peoples minds. Indeed in a democracy it is important to get a majority or plurality in agreement.
But you cannot hope to change everyone's minds, and so that should not be a goal. A system that depends on that won't work. Typhoid Mary is a counterexample.
In other news, your barber thinks you need a haircut.
Until there is a proven net overall health benefit to this therapy, I wouldn't waste much ink on it. Also, can someone please tell me how one controls the dose for an mRNA therapy ?
If you actually had melanoma (a very aggressive type of skin cancer) you would be glad for one more chance of maybe still being alive a few years from now.
Cancer treatment is different. We have a high tolerance for side effects because many cancers are aggressive and deadly. It's a risk-analysis. If your odds of dying from cancer in the next year are 50%, and the drugs have a 25% chance of killing you, then the drugs are worth it.
In actuality, even extremely aggressive therapies like high-dose chemotherapy with stem-cell transplant have shockingly low risk of death. Less than 5%. Bear in mind, that's for a therapy that literally wipes out all of your bone marrow. You know, the part of your body that produces your blood? Your body stops making blood and your immune system. And yet, we've gotten the death rate as low as it is.
See my comments below on Vioxx - even the manufacturers admitted covid shots caused myocarditis in young men - why are you so sure this new therapy won't cause the same issues, or worse ?
Covid itself has a higher risk of myocarditis than the covid vaccine.
And even if it did, it doesn't matter. You didn't read my comment at all. There are cancer treatments which can kill you outright, I know because I've received them. I think maybe you don't understand what cancer is. We can be very aggressive with the treatments. We have much, much bigger fish to fry than a small risk of myocarditis.
As there is no safety data available on this new drug, what makes you say it is safe ? Pre 2020 it took an average of 10 years to release a new vaccine - why do you think it took that long ?
Radiation dose, for example, is precisely measured - we know exactly how much radiation the body is exposed to during therapy. mRNA products work by making our cells produce the desired protein/drug. There is no way of controlling how many cells are producing the drug and for how long they are producing it - ergo there is no way of controlling the dose. I hate to break it to you but they have found people producing spike protein over 3 years after getting the covid shot.
This is great news! I think people forget how anti-skin cancer protocols even as simple as applying suntan lotion weren't as popular as recent as 50-60 years ago. Lots of "sun children" of the 50s and 60s are now feeling the repercussions of only applying baby oil and are getting hit with lots of melanoma.
What’s funny is before the 50s and 60s everyone knew you should cover up and women wore bonnets. That too much sun was bad for you.
Laura Ingalls Wilder of Little House fame (I mention this a lot as I read these to my children as an adult, and they’re a fascinating look at 1880s America) has lots of places where her mother says “put on your bonnet! Don’t get too much sun!”. We act like people in the past were ignorant but people in the 50s and 60s were just a very special type of arrogant, all of Chesterton’s fences were torn down during that time period.
No I think you’re looking at this wrong.
They thought too much sun was bad for you because back then tanned skin was considering a mark of being poor and pale skin was a mark of being wealthy since rich people didn’t have to work outside.
They also had puritanical Victorian notions of modesty and covering up.
There was no knowledge linking sun exposure to cancer or negative health effects. People in the past indeed were ignorant on many things.
Or rather, linked to completely wrong negative health effects that were just “common knowledge” thus requiring no actual evidence like:
People with light skin should always wear a hat that fully covers the head/face in tropical/equatorial climates (okay, good so far) or else the powerful sun rays will penetrate the skull (?) causing brain damage that will make you go insane (!?!?)
Victorians may have inadvertently protected themselves against excess mortality due to melanomas with their pith helmets, but it’s pretty hard to argue they were actually “correct” with modern hindsight considering the entire chain of reasoning was wrong.
(For example, you see this in Kipling’s writing where he’ll randomly include an ominous case of some guy who forgot/lost his hat and promptly had to be committed to an insane asylum, as one does).
They were too busy dying from typhoid, cholera, "consumption" (TB + other lung diseases) and probably lung cancer caused by all the coal / asbestos.
Only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_Dogs_and_Englishmen_(song)
Pretty sure a bad sunburn sucked back then as much as now, and was something one tried to avoid.
Unless you are albino (which is a large set of other problems) being in the sun all day will develop enough of a tan that you won't sunburn. There might be a problem in spring, but by summer time most people will have spent enough time outdoors that they wouldn't sunburn. I've always been the lightest person in town (a tie in Stockholm) and I can spend all day outside without any sunscreen and I won't burn on the parts of my body normally not covered (my arms), but other parts would burn in a few minutes (If I took off my hat or shirt...)
It's bizarre that you cite being outside at 60 degrees latitude as evidence related to high UV exposure.
That's like a resident of Porto saying most people don't get frostbite walking around outside in winter...
I've been outside at lots of different latitudes. I don't live in Stockholm, but I've been there.
As someone from Britain with Scottish ancestry I don’t really tan at all. The melanin in my skin clumps in freckles, severely limiting its effectiveness at blocking UV. I can spend time outside in a t-shirt during the long summer evenings in Britain/Scandinavia but will burn during the midday sun. Living in California now the sun is stronger for longer so I just cover up.
San Francisco is at a southern European latitude. It’s a lot worse in the tropics.
The same thing happens to me - I call it a low-res tan because it's all pixelated.
I don't know about that. I'm a fairly tanned individual, but where I live, in Texas, if I spend all day in the sun, I'm getting sunburned bad everywhere.
That "if" makes me understand that spending all day in the sun is not something you normally do. I've been told by others who live in Texas that you can build up tolerance and spend all day in the sun.
Naturally darker skin does not automatically provide sunburn protection. It is spending time in the sun that adds the missing part that provide that protection. I don't know how this differs from dark skin, but I've seen it myself.
Note that my claims are only about sunburn. The article/topic is skin cancer which may well have different factors from sunburn.
Fascinating. Now come and try that on the Arabian peninsula and see how you get on
Are you paying for my mid life crisis? Otherwise my boss expects me back in the office before I could build up the needed tolerance (I'm expecting this to take a month) such that I'd expect to spend all day in the sun without burning.
I don’t think this is correct, Black people still get sunburns
Black people who spend all their time indoors or covered up will get sunburned if they go outside. If that black person gradually increases their sun exposure they can (in a few weeks) reach the point where they can be outside without sunscreen and they will not get sun burned.
Note that I'm making no claims on how natural sunburn resistant affects skin cancer.
Increased melanin provides some protection against burns, but it doesn’t make you immune. There’s also the aspect of UV damage without burns, which is still harmful and is not affected by melanin levels.
that's his point. anyone can get sunburned, and almost anyone can prevent sunburn through gradual exposure. except albinos, who are especially susceptible.
melanin is also not the only factor in preventing sunburn/cancer. there are many repair pathways and genes, which are present to differing levels in various populations.
The same is true for me, a white person of northern European heritage. If I have a few weeks and time to work at building up a tan, I can get to the point where I won't burn. I did this during the pandemic when I was home all day. I would go out and lie in the sun, starting at 15 minutes, turn over, go another 15 minutes, and go back inside. Increased the time as my skin darkened. Felt nice, never burned.
This is an illusory statistic because "black people" isn't a real category. People who self-identify as "black" have a wide-range of skin tones. Even a moderate bit of brown completely eliminates the risk of sunburn. You can have two "black" parents and be lighter skinned than the average southern Italian.
I say this from experience. I am a black person who is not particularly dark skinned, and have only had the slightest sunburn once in my life, after I had been working in a field for 16 hours straight in full sun under clear sky detasseling corn. When I got back to camp, the back of my neck seemed slightly sensitive, which was unusual. It was fine the next morning, and never peeled at all. I did the same for 2 weeks, and this was the only time I felt this. This was the worst sunburn (if it was one) that I've gotten in 50 years of life. I've spent plenty of time outside, and plenty of time inside being a code monkey and never going outside. I've never worn sunscreen.
I've never met a black person as brown as a paper bag who ever got a sunburn, at least that I know of. My dad is pretty pale, I think I would have heard about it.
I’m overwhelming white ancestry but with some remnant traces of melanated ancestry (> 1%) and I tan very easily. I’ve been mistaken for hispanic or Black before during the summer. My mom is much darker than me.
We both get sunburns. My even darker grandmother got sunburns. My Black friends get sunburns. I am not sure that you are correctly correlating your experience with actual facts about the sunburn resistance offered by melanin.
As a counterexample, my bestie is "brown as a paper bag", and he was convinced he couldn't get a sunburn, up until he did.
Unrelated, he also swore he couldn't get poison ivy, until he literally rolled in it to prove it to me. I found the aftermath more amusing than he did.
Sensitivity to poison ivy can change over time. Your friend may have been correct about his past experience.
https://www.fs.usda.gov/t-d/pubs/htmlpubs/htm07672313/index....
It was explained to me that there are people who react to it, and people who don’t react to it yet.
That's the thing about traditions and Chesterton's fences, you don't need to know why they work for them to work.
People were aware of heatstroke and sunstroke before the Victorians. There's biblical references to heatstroke and even in Roman and Greek texts.
This is silly.... most of the world didn't live in england.
All cultures (including mine), have a way to warn kids, or adults for not to stay too long in the sun. From normal sunburn, to feeling light-headenes/fainting due to heat excaustion, etc.
In the winter was the opposite. (stay in the sun to get some sunlight and not get sick).
So, they knew, and had nothing to do with 'class'. Also, they knew some sun was good/beneficial, especially during the winter.
Pale beauty is a phenomenon across geography. What correlation a society works out is largely lost in the cycles of avoiding the sun being a relative luxury until you get expensive air travel.
Again... you are confusing second order effects, with the primary reason.
We have an old saying "te rafte pika e diellit", may you get a spot, sun spot, aka cancer from the Sun.
People knew excessive sun is unhealthy.... if you could you avoid it during the summer. It was not necessary to make you look 'rich'. Ability to avoid it, meant you were rich. And people wanted to be pale, because you look rich, that is a second order effect, that came because of the original reason (aka, too much sun is unhealthy).
The correlation looks right so all people who have rituals like telling their children not to look poor really understand and later communicate the truth? Is this true for religious stigmas related to food too?
I think you are retro analyzing and presuming individual intelligence because this collective result looks right to you. Really, some people understand some risks and many people who can follow taboos they can afford are not exactly sure what they would learn first hand and what part is superstition.
Still very much the case in East Asia.
The idea that humans were basically retarded prior to about 1901 is a little hubristic
They were no dumber then than in 2026, but they fundamentally had much less access to information. How much do you trust the medical advice of an uneducated person in 2026?
actually depends on the age and life experience of the advisor - if it's an old woman I'd be inclined to listen to what she may want to say.
A young MD full of himself? I may be a bit sceptical about his know-it-all attitude.
How much do you trust the medical advice of a doctor in 2026?
how is that remotely comparable?
"Hm, whom to trust, a person who went to university and follow-on education for nigh a decade, oorrrrrrrrrr.... something someone posted on Facebook that just so happens to confirm what my own ignorance told me was likeliest?"
I don't think that was because of UV exposure or anything related. Look at Bedouin tribes even today. They wrap up head to toe, man and woman and child alike, not to avoid tanning but because prolonged exposure to direct infrared will fry you like an egg.
I grew up in the same general region as Wilder, and we sought shade not to avoid sunburn. We were all chestnut brown by the end of summer anyway. It's because the direct sunlight on an August afternoon was brutally hot, and you wanted as little of it to hit your skin as possible.
Bedouins are literally being chargrilled from both sides, the worse sun on Earth and a mostly perfectly infrared accumulator below them
> before the 50s and 60s everyone knew you should cover up and women wore bonnets. That too much sun was bad for you.
I'd say partly true, mostly false. As sibling comment mentions, much of this was driven by fashion and class etc. and not from some fundamental understanding of damaging UV exposure.
Furthermore there was research that was trendy at the time called "heliotherapy" [0] where all sorts of diseases were believed curable by sun exposure, including smallpox, TB, etc.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_therapy#History
In retrospect, I wonder if there was a measurable effect on sun exposure creating vitamin D => immune system recovery, especially if the patient were otherwise not outside much?
Like, I doubt that fixing a vitamin D deficiency is going to cure you of smallpox or TB, but could imagine a path where it helped at least.
When I got chickenpox in the 80s my grandma made me sit out in the sun to heal it faster. Heliotherapy lives on!
> We act like people in the past were ignorant but people in the 50s and 60s were just a very special type of arrogant,
I’d be curious to know if tetraethyllead in gasoline has anything to do with people from that time being cavalier about exposure to the sun, or if the science was just not there to make the connection between sun exposure and skin cancer.
We developed creams that stopped sunburn, but were still great at getting you cancer. A lot of the ads from 70s and 80s talked about how they stopped UVB but let the tanning UVA through! So yes, they didn't burn, but the long term cancer rates exploded, along with all the skin aging.
So it's not that they ignored the all knowledge. I blame most of it on the rather detrimental tech advancement. Like cigarettes with filters: now safer (except you can smoke more now, and the cancer risk is still a disaster)
> We developed creams that stopped sunburn, but were still great at getting you cancer.
I thought you were going to talk about the ingredients in the cream were carcinogenic themself.
technically UVB is much more tanning than UVA. UVA tans for a short amount of time. UVA penetrates much deeper into the skin though and has few benefits (UVB stimulates Vitamin D synthesis).
That's the right thing for the wrong reason, which can actually significantly forestall figuring out what's actually going on.
Scurvy is like that. They figured out that if you give sailors a ration of fresh fruit juice they don't get scurvy - this works because the fresh fruit juice has Vitamin C and Scurvy is just Vitamin C deficiency. But they didn't know why it worked - why would a cow, a mango, a lettuce, and indeed basically everything else have a chemical in it that humans can't synthesize ? That's crazy. Except, nope, that's really what's going on. At some point an ancestor deleted the synthesis pathway for this chemical, their offspring weren't bothered because fresh literally everything has the chemical anyway, so the deletion stuck around.
At the same time ships get quite a lot faster, travel across the Atlantic is now rapid enough that even if you deliberately abstained from Vitamin C you wouldn't get scurvy, your body hoards many chemicals it needs (a few must be made "fresh" but most can be hoarded) and only develops issues when the hoarded ascorbic acid is exhausted after a few weeks. But they don't know that, and so when they swap a working solution (store fruit, squeeze the juice out, drink fresh juice) for a non-working solution (squeeze the juice, preserve that, drink preserved juice) the apparent results do not change.
Until they do something more extreme. Go to Antarctica, which is incredibly hostile to life anyway, and then stay there for months. Despite your magic preserved fruit juice you get scurvy. The juice wasn't magic, and eventually you will figure out it was the freshness which was magic and from there that there really is a chemical found in cows, mango, lettuce and basically everything alive which we cannot synthesize. Ascorbic acid, Vitamin C.
In many places covering up is just not enough because of Rayleigh scattering. I don't think this vaccine eliminates need for sunscreen. You'd still feel extremely uncomfortable/pain after 15 minutes in places like Australia even if you don't get melanoma.
Everybody who's not been raised in a bubble knows the sun burns
It's only recently that we had space for completely retarded ideas like "staying in the sun doesn't hurt you" or "sunscreen causes cancer"
> It's only recently that we had space for completely retarded ideas like "staying in the sun doesn't hurt you" or "sunscreen causes cancer"
but, what if staying in the sun isn't binary?
and, what if everyday products did cause cancer? https://www.health.harvard.edu/cancer/cancer-concerns-from-e...
the idea that any amount of sun is bad for you is what is retarded
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-026-48477-4
https://imgur.com/a/site-specific-melanoma-risk-by-occupatio...
+1. Also, just to call out, it doesn't need to be _warm_ for you to need sunblock. Even when it's cooler / cloudier out there you can still get skin damage. Look for UV rating rather than temperature. Conversely, it being hot doesn't imply high-UV either.
I didn't know about the UV index or what it meant until like three years ago. It blows my mind I went that long without understanding. It was actually wonderful to learn that I could just see if I needed sunblock based on a 0-10 scale.
We never wore sunscreen as kids because we didn't burn. I probably have had three sunburns in my life. Learned once I became an adult that that wasn't sound logic...
I think the Apple Watch or the Weather app or something finally taught me UV index about the same time. Has this information always been readily available? Similarly mind blown about it.
In Australia in at least the 00s, possibly the 90s, I remember it being reported during the weather forecast on the 6pm nightly news.
But Australia has always had a famously robust sun health education programme
This was my experience. Years ago I travelled to New Zealand in what would be their spring time. We stayed in Wanaka but also travelled around Twizel, Tekapo etc.
Although it was pretty sunny with clear blue skies, the air temperature was fairly chilly (shirt, jumper and fleece cold - and I'm Scottish so used to cold weather) and I started to burn. I was warned about this, and the probability of high UV exposure at altitude by the locals and family, and was advised to apply a high factor sunblock whilst roaming around the higher elevations of New Zealand's South Island, which I did.
I got the worst sunburn of my life while skiing in Colorado. I wasn’t wearing goggles or anything on my face, and the sun plus the reflection off the snow was brutal. I didn’t notice it when I was out there, but the next morning I wasn’t able to open my eyes. Lesson learned.
I’ve always wondered about this. I have fair skin, and I tend to burn somewhat easily in very sunny environments like the beach.
However, I’ve never gotten so much as a whisper of sunburn / suntan / anything on an actually cloudy day where sun wasn’t hitting me directly. Is the damage a different type that’s imperceptible? Or is this a public health comms strategy where they assume people will see a single cloud in the sky and decide it’s fine to skip sunscreen, so they talk about how you should slather yourself with sunscreen 24/7, even if the sun is obscured?
The damaging part of sunlight is the UV (Ultraviolet) spectrum. This penetrates clouds more easily than the visible-spectrum light.
So sun obscured != low UV. It will block some of it though.
Or your behavior is different on a cloudy day? More covered in clothes, not sitting still in the sun at the beach all day etc.
I’ve gotten visibly sunburned on cloudy/foggy days, where it was completely overcast. You may have gotten lucky.
IIRC, certain types of hazy high clouds can actually make the UV exposure worse. Personally, I got the worst sunburn of my life on a cloudy day.
I think the point is just about temperature. I've experienced this out on lakes in the northern US for example. It's sunny but not like a tropical beach, and maybe even a little chilly. But you'll definitely get burnt without sunscreen
People who are new to skiing/snowboarding are often surprised that their faces get sunburned, because of course it's cold and so how could they get burned
And snow makes it worse by reflecting.
Geography has a lot to do with it as well. Proximity to the equator, altitude, etc.
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My mother always covered up and always made us kids cover up. She still died of melanoma. Sun may increase the risk, but sun cream doesn't make it impossible. Cancer has no friends.
Well done to the drug researchers. I have my fingers crossed someone else gets to avoid this
skin grows/regenerates at a rapid pace, which means mutations (mistakes in DNA replication) are naturally likely to happen there than in slow-growing tissue. skin cells and the immune system are constantly self-surveying and nipping these in the buds, under normal conditions. but there are things that can affect this process.
a recent study of 2 million people in ontario showed that both high-sun and low-sun exposed people had higher risk of melanoma than people with moderate exposure.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-026-48477-4
https://imgur.com/a/site-specific-melanoma-risk-by-occupatio...
a possible explanation is that UV light stimulates repair pathways within the skin, which boosts the baseline level of repair.
Enhancement of UVB-induced DNA damage repair after a chronic low-dose UVB pre-stimulation
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S15687...
another explanation is that as much as you can try to cover up, occasionally you may slip up, and going from extreme low-exposure to intense sun is especially bad, because your repair pathways are not primed, skin is untanned, etc..
in conclusion, extreme low or high sun exposure is bad. at the beginning of the summer you should gradually exposure yourself, and then exposure yourself daily but not overly, for the rest of the year.
There's also the effect that sunscreen makes you spend more time in the sun than if you didn't use sunscreen because you think you're "protected".
You are saying that, even if you wear sunscreen and avoid sun burn, the UV exposure will still potentially lead to skin cancer?
I'd like to see the primary research backing that up. Or be told how I misinterpreted your statement.
Yes, 100%. It's the same reason that my kids are able to tan through the same sunscreen application regimen that leaves me pale.
Source: My Mohs surgeon. And 3 skin cancer surgeries (so far).
there is also that anything that blocks UV (sunscreen, windows, etc) by definition blocks UVB first and then UVA, and UVA is the one that penetrates most deeply and has few benefits
My parents were nudists. So I spent a bunch of 60s % 70s getting sunburn. I bet that even baby oil would have cut some of that down.
>> This is great news...
No this is insane news, the world is crazy and dumb. Must be all these LLMs. Stock up more than 150%, based on totally unpublished data and an X post...
- The flashy 49% figures are from the old 157 only patient Phase 2, not this Phase 3 trial. The phase 2 was open label, had only 50 controls, and its randomization was disrupted. Meaning 9 patients were reassigned and the final 37 were no longer randomized. Its primary RFS result was p=0.053 two-sided, with the 95% CI crossing 1. It also used an unusually permissive one-sided alpha of 0.10, and much of the later "confirmation" is just longer follow up of those same 157 patients...
- This phase 3 news so far is nothing more than a press release. They have not published hazard ratio, or confidence interval, their event counts or survival curves.
- They met the endpoint as used in the press release means nothing, until they publish the actual 3 data, so my money is at the end this will be a kind of marginal effect that researchers will struggle to reproduce for years
Another type of study that will take 2 to 3 years to validate or dismiss, in the meanwhile stock is up 150%....
150% increase is because it started from a low point. Moderna's stock lost 94% value after Covid. Stock price speaks to investors' enthusiasm, there is no algorithm.
> This phase 3 news so far is nothing more than a press release.
Can you find a case where a press release after phase 3 was later proven wrong? They do have the data, and most likely the data is positive. They're talking about FDA's approval as soon as late 2027, which is fairly soon.
Do you know what would be more dramatic than stock gaining 150%? that'd be the stock crashing if the press release turned out to be wrong. Follow the money if you are skeptical. See who's selling.
> The flashy 49% figures are from the old 157 only patient Phase 2, not this Phase 3 trial.
There are 1,100 patients in phase 3. More evidence that they're pretty confident.
This is great news.
>> Can you find a case where a press release after phase 3 was later proven wrong?
Galera Therapeutics, Actimmune, leronlimab, roxadustat, tivozanib, aducanumab, tebipenem are all examples of Phase 3 massive failures.
>> This is great news.
Looking forward to the stock market reacting with the same level of due diligence show here, when the actual science data is published...in a still not announced distant future... :-)
the stock is up 150% because if Moderna has indeed cured cancer, the stock is worth many magnitudes more than that. It's presumably based on the probability this report is indeed as promising as it is at face value. If Moderna had announced "we are 100% sure cancer is cured" the stock would've gone up much more
Nobody is talking about curing cancer here.
These are patients who had melanoma surgically removed, and IF the unpublished data of phase 3 turn out to be true... you are looking at having improved survival rates after 2 to 3 years on 5 to 10% plus of the patients. That is ALL this still unknown announcement MIGHT mean.
I was being hyperbolic, but reading the comment back it doesn't really come across that way.
For what it's worth, AFAICT Moderna and other such high-tech biopharma stocks are way too sensitive to the news cycle and not nearly enough to scientific fundamentals, so I took the opportunity of having it up 150% to sell mine off.
melanoma , unlike the others, has a much weaker link to sun exposure. its why melanoma often appear in areas with no sun exposure
Misleading comment.
From https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ijc.35463
> Cutaneous melanoma (CM) accounted for around 331,700 cancer cases globally in 2022
> An estimated 267,353 (95% uncertainty intervals [UI]: 242,818, 278,638) CM cases were UVR attributable globally in 2022
UVR = Ultraviolet radiation
Cutaneous melanoma (CM) is the vast majority of melanoma cases in the US at least:
> The percentages of melanomas that were cutaneous, ocular, mucosal, and unknown primaries were 91.2%, 5.2%, 1.3%, and 2.2%, from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9781962/
tl;dr ~80% of Cutaneous melanoma cases are attributable to UV exposure.
Please be careful and charitable in reading others' words, especially as they relate to scientific topics.
OP did not say that melanoma has no sun exposure risk but that it is lower than the risks associated with other cutaneous cancers (e.g., SCC and BCC) and it would seem that's true based on the very short search I performed.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5742376/
Yes, but OP said that in response to a comment attributing melanoma to sun exposure, in a conversation where nobody had brought up SCC or BCC. It's still a misleading comment, in my opinion.
> Yes, but OP said that in response to a comment attributing melanoma to sun exposure, in a conversation where nobody had brought up SCC or BCC.
In a thread about a trial for a melanoma drug, which has nothing to do with the discussion of sunscreen. Sunscreen was brought up because it is a culture-war topic, the fact that melanomas are not as associated with sun exposure was brought up as the standard opposite-side reply to a culture-war topic.
Clearly your unrelated accusation was brought up to silence the other side and accuse them of dishonesty. Your follow-up is to accuse them of some conversational violation (mentioning something that wasn't brought up) which doesn't exist.
It's fine to see debate, but this is not debate. At most, consistent daily sunscreen use is associated with a 30-50% reduction in melanoma, and some of the ingredients in US sunscreens are themselves associated with cancer.
What would be helpful is a link to a study showing a general reduction in melanomas during a general increase in the use of sunscreen. I'd be able to point that out to friends who questioned me about the efficacy of using it.
edit: that one sentence reply is already trying to snowball into a pile on. Now to mention this fact has become "bizarre." Can't wait until it becomes "unhinged."
I think the problem is that it takes 30 years for the effects to start showing.
This data [1] shows incidence of melanoma by the age of 30 dropping by half in Australia, presumably as a result of a sun safety campaign that started in the late 80s (not just encouraging sunscreen but also more shade, hats, covering up, etc.). Yet melanoma rates here in general increase but it’s more and more skewed towards the older.
1. https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/cancer/cancer-data-in-austra...
You're confusing me with u/addisonl. Please check usernames before accusing people of trying to "silence the other side."
To quote a blog post I wrote on why we can be confident sun exposure causes cancer: "Green et al. (2011) conducted a 10-year study (n=1621) in Nambour, a town in Queensland, Australia. Participants were randomly assigned to daily or discretionary sunscreen application. After 10 years, 11 melanomas were found in the daily group and 22 in the discretionary group."
But you should read the full post for more context on why we have much better data than randomized controlled trials, and why correlation studies on this subject are nearly useless due to the impossibility of finding reliable proxy variables: https://hedonicescalator.substack.com/p/contra-byrnes-on-uv-...
Saying "some of the ingredients in US sunscreens are themselves associated with cancer" is meaningless without more specificity. As the meme goes, this HackerNews comment is known to the state of California to cause cancer: the bar for something to be "associated with cancer" is incredibly low. Are there any particular chemicals or chemical classes you were worried about?
And I will remind you that, in contrast, we are 100% sure that sunlight causes cancer. We know exactly what kinds of DNA damage it creates (chiefly cyclobutane pyrimidine dimers, which I discuss in my blog post) and we can find cancer-causing mutations in melanoma samples directly downstream of that damage (C->T mutations, for example, ones that disable the key p53 tumor suppressor gene). We know how this shit works! Are there some sunscreen formulas that might be dangerous? Possibly, I don't have them all memorized, but the solution is to find a different brand... not to instead expose yourself to one of the best-studied carcinogens around.
>Clearly your unrelated accusation was brought up to silence the other side and accuse them of dishonesty. Your follow-up is to accuse them of some conversational violation (mentioning something that wasn't brought up) which doesn't exist.
the comment you are replying to is HedonicEscal8r's first comment in this comment chain.
>that one sentence reply is already trying to snowball into a pile on
no... it is correcting your comment that is accusing HedonicEscal8r of having multiple comments in this chain. HedonicEscal8r was not the one to make the comment that you describe as an "unrelated accusation" to "silence the other side".
common courtesy would be to say "oops, i didn't read the usernames, my bad" instead of accusing someone else entirely of "trying to snowball into a pile on" for calling you out on the mistake.
pessimizer misattributes a comment to someone who didn't write it. i mention it, get accused of "piling on", and then get downvoted. hn can be so fucking weird.
The criticism and correction were polite, helpful, and appropriate.
The original comment is misleading. Your reply is bizarre, and seems to deliberately misread the original comment, the reply, and the context.
The criticism was both impolite and against HN rules.
The reply was reiterating HN rules, as well as adding data supporting the original statement.
> misread the original comment
By pointing out that it is true using a reference?
> the reply
The reply misunderstood the first comment and went on to discuss something a)interesting but b) not germane to whether melanoma is the skin cancer with the highest sun exposure risk.
I have no idea what you mean by context as this small discussion is quite self-contained. Think of this as making sure everyone realizes two homophones actually are distinct words.
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Article: "two forms of rare melanoma are not caused by exposure to the sun.."
> Most skin cancers are not a big deal, and even Melanomas can vanish on their own
PSA: don't take medical advice from internet comments
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> This also means that you are likely to get melenoma form something other than the sun.
Quantifiably false statement. Incredibly dangerous misinformation to spread—shame on you.
From https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ijc.35463
> Cutaneous melanoma (CM) accounted for around 331,700 cancer cases globally in 2022
> An estimated 267,353 (95% uncertainty intervals [UI]: 242,818, 278,638) CM cases were UVR attributable globally in 2022
UVR = Ultraviolet radiation
Cutaneous melanoma (CM) is the vast majority of melanoma cases in the US at least:
> The percentages of melanomas that were cutaneous, ocular, mucosal, and unknown primaries were 91.2%, 5.2%, 1.3%, and 2.2%, from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9781962/
Your reading comprehension is way off. The article says "Each year in Australia, up to 420 people are diagnosed with acral or mucosal melanomas. They affect people of all ethnic backgrounds, and are the most common forms of melanoma in people with very dark skin."
That is a discussion of specific subtypes of melanoma. You've turned that into a general statement about melanoma:
> not all skin cancers are caused by sun exposure, and this is more true for Melenoma which occur both more frequently in darker skinned people and in place where there is little sun exposure.
These are "Two rare ... forms of melanoma" not "melanoma as a whole." The article does not say melanoma as a whole is more frequent in darker-skinned people and in places with little sun exposure. Those two subtypes are.
Let's also quote from https://wasatchdermatology.com/blogs/basal-cell-vs-squamous-...
> BCC ... can cause significant local tissue damage if left untreated. Most cases are linked to chronic sun exposure, especially in fair-skinned individuals.
> While it often remains localized at first, SCC can invade deeper tissues and, in some cases, metastasize to lymph nodes or other organs. Risk factors include cumulative sun exposure, a history of sunburns, and immunosuppression.
> While not all skin cancers can be prevented, effective sun protection and healthy habits can greatly reduce your risk for basal cell carcinoma, squamous cell carcinoma, and melanoma.
That does not support "most skin cancers are not a big deal"
> Melanomas can vanish on their own
Your link does not support that statement https://www.nature.com/articles/s41379-021-00870-2
"Whilst some studies reported an association with improved survival ... others did not find any significant association, and some even reported worse outcomes in patients whose tumors showed regression"
You seem to have read this as "melanoma just goes away and the problem is gone" rather than "the primary tumor can recede, and in that case survival odds are somewhat better by a few percentage points (but actually worse for Stage III patients!)"
5-year relative survival rates for melanoma skin cancer is 95%. That is all that matters.
https://www.cancer.org/cancer/types/melanoma-skin-cancer/det...
The study data is not out yet, I thought it was, so I will wait untiul it is to comment further.
But saying in the press that:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-20/melanoma-drug-cancer-...
"Melanoma is one of the deadliest forms of skin cancer, with more than 330,000 new cases diagnosed worldwide in 2022."
Saying melanoma is the deadliest forms of skin cancer is not revealing anything and is a scare tactic. In 2022, there were approximately 60,000 deaths worldwide due to melanoma. A rare cancer with 18% death rate is not high compared to the others. The deadliest cancers include lung cancer, pancreatic cancer, liver cancer, colorectal cancer, and breast cancer. These cancers have the lowest survival rates and account for a significant number of cancer-related deaths.
But I will wait for the upcoming complications and the worse 5 year all cause mortality rate in these patients.
Question for you: what is the goal of these comments? What is it would you like people to do or think differently after reading what you've written?
I'll go first: my hope is that someone who has read what I've written will be more likely to take seriously something suspicious they see on their skin rather than ignore it as unimportant, and be more inclined to take seriously protection from sun exposure when possible
My goal is to 1) not reward these companies by over inflating phase 3 clinical trial outcomes and 2) to not fear a skin cancer diagnosis and 3) not live your life in a bubble while polluting the world with sunscreen.
Sun exposure does not cause skin cancer. It only increases the risk of skin cancer in some people. Look at the ROI on people's behavior and it makes no sense. Are we actually causing more damage by using all this sunscreen and the plastic bottles it comes in and lowering everyone's vitamin D levels?
Sunscreen was widely used in the 70's and skin cancer rates keep going up. It's useless.
There are truths in there, but you seem to be looking only for evidence that supports your beliefs (and misreading evidence against your beliefs) instead of tailoring your beliefs based on evidence. Additionally you make blanket, definitive assertions like "sun exposure does not cause skin cancer" which no one should be listening to
Multiple things can be true at the same time:
1. Skin cancer can be successfully treated if found and removed early
2. Vitamin D is healthy and necessary, but at the same time too much sun exposure is harmful. That harm depends on different factors (like skin tone)
3. Some kinds of sunscreen might be problematic or bad for the environment, but there are different kinds of sunscreen (mineral-based, reef-safe)
4. There are multiple ways to mitigate sun exposure, not just sunscreen (avoid peak UV times, wear sun-protective clothing). Mitigation doesn't mean "complete avoidance"
5. Sun exposure is not the only cause of skin cancer, but it is a cause of skin cancer and a common one at that
I did not say that the sun does not increase the risk of skin cancer. I did say it does not cause skin cancer. Do you understand the distinction I’m making? “Cause” can only be determined when the event has already happened. And even in the case of the sun causing someone’s skin cancer, it is not the only variable.
https://www.ajpmonline.org/article/S0749-3797(20)30092-1/abs...
My argument is that higher vitamin D will help a person’s life more than any increase of risk of skin cancer one would get from exposure to the sun.
"Alcohol causes hangovers" is a true statement.
"Alcohol does not always cause hangovers" is also true.
"Some people don't get hangovers from alcohol" is also true.
"Some hangovers are not caused by alcohol" is also true.
"Alcohol does not cause hangovers" is a false statement.
So it is with UV radiation from the sun and skin cancer.
I knew HN was geriatric, but damn
Substantially better link:
https://www.merck.com/news/merck-and-moderna-announce-phase-...
Still no actual Phase 3 data presented.
Yes, however the trial succeeded. But by "how much", is not yet released. This trial was not against placebo, but the already existing, and effective Keytruda treatment.
I believe both were done with Keytruda. Control was Keytruda without the mRNA treatment.
So this should answer the question of "how much better is this with the best we currently have".
We're in the dark ages of "effective" at the moment. But now we're starting to get there.
This content is geo/IP fenced
Hope this helps:
https://archive.ph/SQQ97
My father is currently dying of malignant melanoma with brain metastasis...
I wish this treatment was available a few years ago.
My dad died 30 years ago after it spread to his liver. He was in the study at duke for what is today the standard treatment line for immunotherapy. I hope he was able to help. He died 9 months after his diagnosis.
Enjoy the time you have with him now and be grateful for all the years you've had. Nothing is going to make the loss of a parent "OK" and it will hurt no matter if you see it coming like you are or it's a surprise.
Remember to breathe.
Immune therapy didn't help? Darn.
Immune therapy is hit or miss. Friends lung cancer was exquisitely sensitive to it. Stage 4 to no sign of disease. Another friend with melanoma immune therapy didn't seem to help at all.
Melanoma is usually completely resistant to traditional cancer drugs. So that sometimes immune therapy works is very welcome.
Sadly it didn't. And it also lead to extreme bleeding in the brain metastasis that we had to stop it. Switched to BRAF/MEK inhibitors and that looked good for a few months until it didn't anymore.
That is devastating. How are you doing?
Coping. It's been a long process. When I saw his first diagnosis (he was diagnosed very late) I read the papers and knew that his chances are slim.
It's hard seeing him like this. 63 years old. Going from completely functioning to non-verbal in 3 months fucks you up
I'm so sorry to hear that, but thank you for sharing your story to highlight the importance of this!
Huge, uplifting, news, hope the study will bear further fruit. Considering that 90% of all clinical trials fail, it's good to read about a truly promising one for once.
I got my first one at age 27. A third just got removed. Living with the constant mole vigilance of that is rough, but I am glad I've learned to identify them. I think knowing the ABCDEs of it should be more widely spread, as removing a mole is a much nicer alternative to having to take margins in a highly mobile place.
Agreed. As a reminder here are the ABCDE arguments to get extra worried about a mole.
Asymetrical (shape of the mole)
Border (irregular? Unclear delimitation?)
Color (has it multiple colors?)
Diameter (has it a >6mm diameter? An indicator that it might start vertical growth iirc)
Evolution (has it changed recently?)
Will this targeted approach be beneficial to other cancer types? Is there any data or theory about this class of drugs as a more general therapy?
Yes, mRNA vaccines are promising for many but not all cancer types, and there are many ongoing clinical trials. There's also a lot we yet don't know about how to design them.
Here's a great blog post on this, "How to build a cancer vaccine, and whether they will work this time": https://www.owlposting.com/p/how-to-build-a-cancer-vaccine-a...
Here's the blog post I wrote on personalized mRNA vaccines: https://hedonicescalator.substack.com/p/did-paul-conyngham-r...
One of the leading problems is that we don't know how to pick the right neoantigens (mutant cancer proteins) which can trigger the optimal immune response.
Moderna used a simple heuristic, "how likely is this antigen to show up on the cell surface?" which makes sense, since an antigen has to show up on the cell surface for the immune system to see it. But there's so much missing from this model, and we just don't have enough data. Failures in clinical trials of mRNA vaccines may well be caused by this problem. (Yes, this is a good problem for AI, if we can get enough data).
mRNA is a general technique for targeted cancer therapy. It's the message RNA containing the instructions from a gene to create a specific protein. It's much easier to work with, reprogrammed, manufactured, and delivered. There're a number of approaches to use mRNA against cancer cells. One is using cancer related antigens, similar to the vaccine approach. mRNA is programmed to generate the antigen proteins in the body, which are attached to the cancer cells. The body's T-cells can then attack the tagged cancer cells.
The problem now is finding the correct antigens targeting the cancer cell type. Cancer cells are similar to health cells. You don't want to program a mRNA to generate antigen proteins that target health cells, which causes autoimmune problems.
This is not quite correct. An mRNA vaccine that creates healthy antigens will fail because it won't do anything, not because it will trigger autoimmune issues. Your cells are already covered in normal antigens, and your immune system already knows to not attack them. It is true that it is difficult to find the right antigens to target, but the reasons for that are more complicated.
Individualized immune cancer therapy has been touted as the next big thing for half a century. It's nothing new, and with few exceptions, such as skin cancer, has failed to yield much. scientists, for decades, have tired to harness the immune system to attackcancer and it almost never works.
> and with few exceptions
Those few exceptions have been monumental in how they've changed cancer treatment. Skin cancer has been particularly well treated with immunotherapy, but other cancers have also benefited from the exact same research and drugs (as it turns out, the specific mutations the immunotherapies like Keytruda target express in other cancers). The reason skin cancer gets so much attention is because it's one of the most commonly diagnosed and treated cancers. (Colon is more common, I believe, but it often doesn't get detected. Get your colonoscopies folks).
It has moved fast enough that I've heard from multiple oncologists that the all 5 year survivability numbers are dated because the treatments are newer than the studies.
We've come a LONG way in a very short period in terms of cancer treatment. It still sucks, but not as much as it once did.
Non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) treatment has been revolutionized by the checkpoint inhibitors (as well as some other drugs targeting specific mutations).
I don't like words like "revolutionized" as they set wrong expectations.
For non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) treated with immune checkpoint inhibitors (such as pembrolizumab, nivolumab, or atezolizumab), median overall survival typically ranges from about 10 to 20 months in advanced stages as opposed to 10-12 months for standard chemotherapy treatments.
That's great news especially as they would likely be better tolerated. Bt let's please not call living a handful of months longer as a 'revolution'.
> Individualized immune cancer therapy has been touted as the next big thing for half a century. It's nothing new, and with few exceptions, such as skin cancer, has failed to yield much. scientists, for decades, have tired to harness the immune system to attackcancer and it almost never works.
"Almost never" is doing a lot of work. You may be aware that most drugs fail over the course of development and human trials?
Anyway, checkpoint inhibitor therapy is a massive boon to oncology and was only brought into widespread use over the past 15 years.
Every cancer is different. Immunotherapy is highly effective, even curative, for some cancers. For my cancer, chemotherapy is curative, while other cancer's just shrug chemotherapy off like it's nothing.
Having a plethora of drugs and treatments is vital because cancer is not "one thing". Each type of cancer will respond better to some treatments than others.
Personalized mRNA vaccines are in fact, extremely new, and only made possible by recent advances across multiple fields. This comment reveals a total lack of basic understanding on this topic.
I believe the comment was talking specifically about immunotherapy rather than personalized mRNA. But I'd agree it's still misinformed as immunotherapy has been a game changer across multiple cancers.
u/danjl was originally asking about "this class of drugs", which is more reasonably interpreted as referring to personalized mRNA vaccines rather than the much broader concept of (personalized or not) immunotherapy.
The comment is wrong because it's stupid. Just because we've known that personalized immunotherapy was a promising idea for a long time, and have been trying it with the limited tools we had (CAR T being the poster child, and while an incredible advancement for blood cancers and many other diseases, it is notoriously dangerous and expensive), does not mean we had the technology to accomplish it. Today's results are only possible because of recent advancements in multiple fields, and to respond with "they've tried immunotherapy for decades" is profoundly ignorant. You may as well say, "scientists have been trying to cure cancer for years."
> This comment reveals a total lack of basic understanding on this topic.
My thoughts as well, Keytruda alone has been a miracle to many many people at this point (quoting GP: "scientists, for decades, have tired [sic] to harness the immune system to attack cancer and it almost never works."), I frequently get ads for local CAR-T centers (unthinkable a little over a decade ago)
This appears to be a potentially huge win for health. The market has Moderna up 153% at time of writing, which is some sort of validation I suppose.
Related stories:
https://www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/merck-and-modernas-per...
https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/merck-moderna-say-m...
https://www.wsj.com/health/pharma/moderna-merck-vaccine-succ...
For a while (like a year+ ago), the shares were trading around cash value. But they were burning through cash. Happy it’s worked out for them!
Many people, including myself, often take pot-shots at "big pharma." But, this just seems like a win-win, for the org and humanity. They believed in their tech, rode it out, and we all came out the better for it.
Often the case with big pharma. I for one will never join in on the populist backlash against those that make livesaving pharmaceuticals for us.
Yeah, this is a win. US pricing for insulin and asthma inhalers, not so much.
oh nice. If it goes up another 100% I may not lose money on this stock anymore.
And if it doubles after that, I may even beat a passive S&P 500 investment.
You know many stocks have done better than the SP500, right?
invest only in the ones that are going to go up - why didn't i think of that?!
I am in fact aware that some of my stock investments have beaten the market while others have underperformed the market.
MRNA, as it happens, is the latter.
That says more about you than Moderna:
https://totalrealreturns.com/n/MRNA,SPY
MRNA has vastly outperformed the market since IPO.
I mean, this appears to be validation of mRNA in general, right?
Saving a couple million people in the pandemic wasn’t validation enough?
100%. What I meant to say was that this proves that it wasn't somehow a one trick pony.
There is also a mRNU flu vaccine now: https://www.modernatx.com/ir-insights-mflusiva
I don't know if that counts as the same "trick" or not as it's another antiviral vaccine. Not that I disagree with you.
I read that this mRNA flu vaccine can be more effective then the regular annual flu shot, simply because the time to create it is shorter, therefor the guess at what strains will circulate that year is more accurate.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41701031/
But it is yet more validation. mRNA technology is here, get used to it.
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> Well it did give more than a couple million people myocarditis as a side effect, so there's that.
You are absolutely incorrect with the thrust of your comment. This is a great opportunity to find out where you heard that, and ignore that source going forward.
The largest study I can find has 536k subjects. It shows that mRNA vaccinated vs. non-vaccinated people who had COVID had myocarditis >10x more often, and it was a worse long-term form.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49363659
Couple million myocarditis? Do you have a reputable source for that (sorry, RFK Jr doesn’t count)
Would love to see a source for this, but I'm assuming you don't have one and are just spreading FUD due to your political beliefs...
Closest thing I could find was a little over 15,000 people in Europe who got myocarditis (also includes pericarditis: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10746454/). Out of millions (hundreds of millions?) that received the vaccine. Please stop doing what your doing. It's pretty shit.
> Please stop doing what your doing
Yes, and it's worse than that for the parent commenter, the unvaccinated population also got some cases of myocarditis - often after Covid. And they got myocarditis at a higher rate than the vaccinated.
Thank you for making that point. This is the truth. This whole conversation drives me nuts, because all the data is now available. The increase in risk for myocarditis in non-vaccinated people is staggering! (>10x higher risk!)
Example study:
> 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 study monitored a total population of 536,448 people. This is real data.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38262150/
That's just spreading ignorance.
> The incidence of pericarditis and myocarditis in patients exposed to mRNA COVID-19 vaccines was lower than in those who were not vaccinated
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38262150/
I mean, the question is almost always about whether it's economical or not, right? Whether you can find diseases it's efficacious to treat with this mechanism, and prove it (trials are expensive).
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> not really a huge win. It's going to cost taxpayers significancy and may not improve survival much or total life expectancy . The stock is way overextended. It's a long way from anything that can be used on patients, assuming it even works well enough to be a commercial success. History has shown this is seldom the case. I would short it if wasn't so expensive and risky to do so.
Buddy, this is a phase 3 trial. This is about as close as you can get to "anything that can be used on patients" without already being approved.
It is clear that you don't have experience in this area.
I wish people would find a decent source for these stories in order to post them on here instead of sending us to a tweet. I'm not on Twitterx and it's a mini nightmare on a mobile browser
Contrary to popular belief, twitter/x is completely fine.
I listened to a great podcast on this just a month ago - too bad that I thought all of this would obviously be priced in already… https://virological.podigee.io/51-21-cancer-vaccines-how-the...
I think the "expected value" was priced in, but regardless of the result, this trial would move the stock price towards that direction.
Biotech is one of the very very very few areas of the stockmarket where specialist knowledge generates alpha.
Trolling through random biotechs, learning about their tech, and investing in the most promising applications of that tech in the most impactful areas is something that happens somewhat on publicly traded markets. With tech, most of that happens pre-IPO.
Even if you were to optimally price in all available information you still have uncertainty of what will actually happen. i.e. A 1 dollar coin flip has an expected value of 50c before it’s thrown and it will collapse either to zero or to one after the uncertainty is resolved.
It was priced in, the share price prior to the news being released was taking into account a probability measurement of the trial succeeding or failing. You can’t price in both options of a binary outcome simultaneously, so part of the equity price was functionally equivalent to a call option on the outcome of the drug trial that only resolved after the trial results are announced.
It’s similar to the situation where a company puts out a public offer to buy another company at say, $50 a share on a day that the acquisition target is trading at $40/share.
If the stock of the target company is trading at $46/share, the market is pricing in the probability of the acquisition not happening. If the market knew the acquisition would happen with 100% certainty, the price of the target company shares would be equal to the buyout share price offer. You can assume the risk of the acquisition not happening by purchasing shares at $46, and if it does end up going through, you earn $4 a share from assuming that risk.
I don't believe the efficient market hypothesis. However even if you do, new information has arrived and that will affect the price.
Hard to price in the political factors now involved in Moderna's success or lack of success.
Ever since I first heard of them a decade ago, it seemed that mRNA therapeutic vaccines were going to be the next wave of massive improvements in care. It's taken a bit longer than I had expected, and it's not that mRNA is the only way to make these sorts of vaccines, it's just so much better than the alternatives.
I'm very very excited to see what comes next.
My father has gastric melonama and pretty much last few days left — does someone with knowledge know if this vaccine can be of any help? Or any registry available?
Deepest sympathies, and I'm no oncologist - but I think that'd be like trying to patch the hull of the Titanic after her stern has lifted out of the water. So many cascading failures are in motion by then that saving him really isn't possible.
How are BioNtech's trials doing?
Are these two companies the ones to cure cancer (for the rich, being that these therapies require custom bio engineering).
I for one would like to see the data rather than a press release. Is this even serious? A press release with no link to outside twitter?
I feel like everything companies, and presidents, say now is directly geared to triggering AI trades.
The only thing they are looking at with this drug is people living one more month over existing drugs.
THIS IS NOTHING.
"The median PFS (progression-free survival) for KEYTRUDA was 5.5 months (2-week group) and 4.1 months (3-week group) compared to 2.8 months for ipilimumab (HR 0.58, P<0.00001 for the KEYTRUDA groups vs. ipilimumab,"
https://www.merck.com/news/keytruda-pembrolizumab-mercks-ant...
The median PFS (progression-free survival) for KEYTRUDA was 5.5 months (2-week group) and 4.1 months (3-week group) compared to 2.8 months for ipilimumab (HR 0.58, P<0.00001 for the KEYTRUDA groups vs. ipilimumab, 95% CI, 0.46-0.72 for 2-week group and 0.47-0.72 for 3-week group, respectively). The estimated 6-month PFS rates for the KEYTRUDA and ipilimumab arms were 47.3 percent, 46.4 percent and 26.5 percent, respectively. One-year OS for KEYTRUDA was 74.1 percent (2-week group) and 68.4 percent (3-week group) compared to 58.2 percent for ipilimumab (HR 0.63 [95% CI, 0.47-0.83, P=0.00052] for the 2-week group and HR 0.69 [95% CI, 0.52-0.90, P=0.00358] for the 3-week group). At the time of analysis, median overall survival was not reached in any treatment group.
1. That's not what progression-free survival means.
2. I don't think AI was mentioned once in this press release.
3. This drug was approved for trial in 2014, so if it had something to do with deep learning, that would actually be a massive announcement.
4. The paragraph immediately following the one you clipped talks about Overall Response Rate (ORR) and throughout the release they discuss Overall Survival (OS).
5. This is not "NOTHING" in statistical terms, but even more so to people with melanoma.
1. That's not what progression-free survival means.
I was not pointing to PFS as OS.
2. I don't think AI was mentioned once in this press release.
I did not say it was. I said it was written FOR AI trading algorithms to read and invest on.
4. The paragraph immediately following the one you clipped talks about Overall Response Rate (ORR) and throughout the release they discuss Overall Survival (OS).
Someone noted this was an earlier study. The newest study does not even have data out and yet here we are, investing on a press release.
5. This is not "NOTHING" in statistical terms, but even more so to people with melanoma.
You are talking to someone whose father died of pancreatic cancer. "Pancreatic cancer has a higher mortality rate compared to melanoma, with an estimated 52,740 deaths from pancreatic cancer in 2026, while melanoma has a significantly lower death rate. Additionally, the 5-year relative survival rate for pancreatic cancer is only 13.7%, compared to higher survival rates for melanoma."
What they did for my father was worse than nothing.
Yes every cancer is different, responds to different therapy, and with different survival rates. However, cancer treatment, as a whole, works. Oncologists do not prescribe incredibly intense treatments like chemotherapy out of nowhere. Chemotherapy is often not curative. Instead, it's used to both prolong life and improve quality of life.
Dying from late-stage cancer is often painful and miserable. It might be shocking, but getting just a few more months from chemo can provide a greater quality of life. Keyword can. Every oncologist is different with different recommendations, and they explain the risks very concretely. There is always an option to refuse treatment, but bear in mind it's not just about how quick you die. It's also about how much that dying sucks.
They told my father Chemo woudl add six months on his six month estimated lifespan. He died in two months cause the chemo blocked his liver. My sister in law was a chemo nurse and begged him not to get it. He died on loads of morphine. His last words were "It's all a scam!"
Sorry, you have no idea. Talk to a chemo nurse.
Talk to a chemo nurse? I've gotten two different chemo regimens. Yes, I know chemo has a risk because all medicine has a risk. I'm sorry for what happened to your father, but that doesn't fucking mean chemo is a scam. It saves lives, I should know.
Huh? How would chemo "block his liver"? Do you mean that he had a liver metastasis that the chemo didn't help with?
Chemotherapy can damage many organs including the liver. See "Organ Damage" on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemotherapy
A friend's sister beat colon cancer over ten years ago but now is having liver problems that took a while to pin down. They warned her she'd probably die in a couple years from the cancer without Chemo, but would have this risk long term and it recently showed up.
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My interpretation of "triggering AI trades" is about tricking AI into buying stock, not tricking people into buying AI stocks.
Interjecting with a fact. Moderna described the neoantigen immunogenicity prediction algorithm they used to design the vaccines as “a deterministic machine learning (ML) algorithm,” so it may be a small neural network or more traditional algorithm, probably not deep learning.
Sorry--I was unclear. I was specifically responding to the OP's "CEOs these days want to join the AI hype wave" claim. My point was that the "hype wave" OP is referencing is really about deep learning, not what we think of as traditional statistical learning. Even the dedicated medical AI startups of that era, like BenevolentAI, were still doing traditional ML in 2014. So if Moderna really was trying to join the "AI hype train" and announce a deep learning result with this treatment, they'd be announcing that they successfully trained a deep neural network for drug discovery 12 years ago.
No it isn’t. They did a test with great specificity and got undeniable P values. Now they can refine the action and start saving people. This is a huge, huge win.
you're also looking at a different, older study. Keytruda is a little strange in that it has a very long tail in survivorship, works best in certain cases, and median PFS isn't a really great metric.
Some say that mRNA therapies are getting better and better on a wider range of tumor types, anybody from the industry can confirm ?
According to Gemini, Moderna uses machine learning to speed up sequence selection and mRNA optimization. After all, this is not a mass-produced vaccine, but a personalized one.
A comment from Derek Lowe:
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/merck-and-moderna-...
>Postscript: Our Secretary of Health and Human Services of course cancelled $500 million in mRNA vaccine R&D contracts (22 different programs) last year, and cited a pile of misinformation (and cluelessly misunderstood research citations) to justify it. Our Director of the National Institutes of Health was apparently just fine with this decision and cited mRNA vaccines’ alleged failure to “earn public trust” as one of his reasons, along with public statements that “the mRNA platform is no longer viable”. I have a number of suggestions for each of these individuals and their supporters about how they might spend the rest of their day, and will be glad to send details if they contact me.
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Yeah while a positive step, I do not understand a 90% stock increase.
So they added $30B market cap for a drug that would do by my napkin estimate about ~$7B average annual sales for 20 years as a front line treatment. Based on that alone, $30B in added market cap isn't enough. How much would you pay for $150B in high margin revenue?
But even more is the validation of this new custom MRNA novel cancer treating platform. If you take this data result to be a 'proof of concept', the expected value of the rest of their pipeline is suddenly worth a lot more.
Of course, this is all assuming the data is accurate and the drug gets approved, neither of which are 100% guaranteed.
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See it as $60B value total among Moderna and Merck for the success of the trial, not 150% increase.
Oh yeah? Show me your discounted cash flow analysis.
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Why?
People were assured that COVID vaccine mRNA would disappear within days and the spike protein would short-lived. Yet Yale-led researchers later detected circulating S1 and full-length spike as late as 709 days after vaccination.
They also left the public in the dark about the risk of vaccine-associated myocarditis, especially in young males, many of whom experienced permanent heart tissue damage.
That is a massive gap between what the public was told and what later evidence found. If a technology makes your cells produce a biologically active protein, regulators should establish where it goes, how long it can persist, and what prolonged exposure does before mass deployment.
https://news.yale.edu/2025/02/19/immune-markers-post-vaccina... https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.02.18.25322379v...
> People were assured that COVID vaccine mRNA would disappear within days and the spike protein would short-lived
which is still the case, even in the Yale study.
> That is a massive gap between what the public was told and what later evidence found.
there is an even larger gap between basic epidemiology and what the public understands.
Hard science is difficult to communicate on a good day, on a global pandemic with quacks getting tons of airtime and multiple labs finding conflicting results (due to speed to publish and bad experimental parameters) I would say that was communicated by health experts was surprisingly valid and accurate.
+1 the public health apparatuses' actual statements were impressively correct even if you don't account for the underlying uncertainty at the time.
Where public health officials "failed" was not having a megaphone loud enough to drown out the game of telephone that most people (as these comment threads consistently show) were actually hearing information through.
Simplest example: People will say that public health officials told them "masks don't work." But no! Only one person did, and that was USSG Jerome Adams (who wasn't credible nor a major player to begin with). What public health officials said was "we do not know if masks work," which is a more nuanced but completely accurate statement.
> : People will say that public health officials told them "masks don't work." But no! Only one person did
I think Fauci might have had a statement early.
But tbh every other scientist said the opposite, every doctor said the opposite.
If I am not wrong he later admitted that he said it to gain time for the goverment to adquire enough for basic needs like hospitals.
And that is the kind of error that erodes public trust and it was bad advice shared because the american public cannot be trusted to prioritise medical professionals being stocked and because the american gov was unprepared.
But one bad statement, in march of 2020, done for the wrong reasons due to an unprepared goverment voted in by selfish people who cannot be trusted to help others does not deny that the UK had great advice the entire time, so did China, and Spain and Italy and most of the other initial hotbeds. They said "we dont have enough n95 for everyone, please social distance until they are availeble" instead of "masks are not needed".
Despite that, he was the face of a pandemic plan in a goverment alergic to facts and led by a dude who recommended injecting bleach so in that situation, he did as much as you can and is still paying for it.
Masks might work but you have to take them off at some point to change them. Or blow your nose, from all of those dead skin cells.
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Take it from someone who has read all of said emails: no, they don't prove that.
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Finally someone said it! This is exactly why we need to be REMOVING VIAGRA FROM THE MARKET!
There were NO longitudinal studies!
NOTHING looked at psychological effects!
REMOVE VIAGRA TODAY!
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Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Good to know proposing proper safety research, longitudinal studies, and testing of completely novel technologies before they are emcouraged to be administered into the populace of the entire worldwide human population is considered in such a way.
We don't care what the topic is or what your position is; you just have to observe the guidelines. All-caps words/phrases/sentences are specifically banned because they make the comments ragey and hostile, and make your argument seem weaker. A phrase “I don't give a flying fig if you all die from that hideous nasty crap” breaks multiple guidelines and is almost worthy of an instant ban, but I'm hoping you might be persuadable to try harder to use the site as intended. It isn't difficult, and if your points don’t hold up without that kind of aggression, they’re probably not strong points.
Also, please don't try to reframe what is plainly egregiously abusive commenting as reasoned argumentation. That’s obviously game-playing, not honest dialogue. This site is only a place where people like to participate because others make the effort to raise the standards rather than drag them down. Please only comment here if you intend to participate earnestly.
“Even in the Yale study”
What? The Yale study is where the almost two year figure came from. Are you just making things up? Did you read what I wrote, or anything in the study?
> The Yale study is where the almost two year figure came from
yes, the figure that a small sample of people had long period of protein in them. But most people they looked at had none, which was what they expected.
The average time of it was not contested, the long tail was.
My comment was not even that hard to read, makes me wonder what kind of other information you have misread to come to your conclusions
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> They also left the public in the dark about the risk of vaccine-associated myocarditis, especially in young males, many of whom experienced permanent heart tissue damage.
Not true. This was correctly disclosed in the trial results as a super super super tail risk.
Once they realized that the (minuscule) risk could be even further mitigated by simply spacing out the booster schedule, they adjusted that (Feb 2022).
Nobody was "left in the dark"
What's more, they found that myocarditis risk was higher in the unvaccinated population after infection. This information didn't get to the so-called "skeptics," who willfully ignored data that didn't fit their conspiracy theory.
https://www.heart.org/en/news/2022/08/22/covid-19-infection-...
I also get a kick out of people only looking for side effects they think of as side effects, since they are what people think of as side effects for completely different types of technologies.
What?
>In men younger than 40 years old, the number of excess myocarditis events per million people was higher after a second dose of mRNA-1273 than after a positive SARS-CoV-2 test (97 [95% CI, 91–99] versus 16 [95% CI, 12–18]).
From your own study you linked. The first comment I ever posted on HN was regarding a similar study where there was no control group whatsoever for unvaccinated people.
I can’t get over the sunk cost reaction to this vaccine. No one who was not immunocompromised should have ever taken it. Period.
And this is just regarding your study.
Remember how the AstraZeneca vaccine (it was called the “Oxford vaccine” before that bad PR) was taken off the market instantly after reports of blood clots.
One can go on endlessly.
Let's assume that it's correct that "no one who was not immunocompromised should have ever taken it." (It's not, but let's assume that it is)
Was this knowably true in Q1 2021?
Can you please share the specific, contemporaneously available information that made this knowably true?
If you can't, then it's not "sunk cost" infecting someone else's thinking, it's hindsight bias infecting yours.
It was already recommended that healthy young men get the Pfizer vaccine instead of the Moderna vaccine.
I'm not sure why you're bringing the non-mRNA AstraZeneca vaccine into this. Keep your conspiracy theories straight.
again. over how long.
What?
the risk of heart issues.
Inspired me to reread some old papers on mRNA, miRNA, siRNA, RNAi from 15+ year ago. There went the day.
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> (and yes, I have a background in this)
Care to share what that is exactly?
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> For all the hate I have for the COVID vaccine
Can you clarify that? It saved 100K+ lives even by incredibly conservative estimates, and allowed life to returned to normal at least a year earlier than otherwise.
I can't speak for other people but I was upset to enter a medical era where bureaucrats were forcing medical decisions on me. I was forced to get it or lose my job despite 1) working remotely, 2) having already had Covid and 3) being healthy and not at risk of Covid death but being the largest risk for myocarditis.
> I was upset to enter a medical era
Did we enter a new era or where you not paying attention or affecting you before?
Reminds me of the old adage of:
Q: "Why is no one speaking about this?"
R: "Is no one talking about this, or are you just 20 and its the first time you are hearing about it?"
Is that when you entered that era? Or did you enter it when you were a newborn in the hospital, or a kid entering school?
Because, it is always all about you...
Clearly his issue is not understanding its actually all about 'grandma'.
It's about protecting each other, basic empathy. Doing the bare minimum to and taking miniscule risk to protect the lives of people around you. Sorry that's hard to understand.
It is 'hard to understand' if you get harmed in the process. Hence the jokes about 'doing it for grandma', or 'screwing yourself over with lifelong complications for someone who's already 80.'
"Think about grandma" was the covid version of "somebody think of the children"
Truly, it's the same moralizing appeal-to-emotion but with a different target ("you care about grandma, right? you wouldn't want her to die, right?"). I've always felt it was strange that the argument was (and still is!) largely blindly supported on HN, like haven't we heard this one before?
That's the definition of a personal decision.
I might decide to shit on your front porch every morning. It is the definition of a personal decision.
> I was upset to enter a medical era where bureaucrats were forcing medical decisions on me
We've been in that era your whole life.
Americans are so silly. Resentful of being told to do anything for their own good or the good of others because of “individual liberty”, yet so willing to lick the boot of the police state and corrupt crony capitalists. Good news for you is that Elon went in and set the bureaucrats straight, so enjoy your diarrhea and glass in your food.
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You got RFK because half the population thought they were unique snowflakes who could not abide by the same simple rules as everyone else. The price he'll extract is significant impacts on health, wealth and well-being.
Except that your children are still vectors for getting others sick. Vaccines are there not just for you but your community.
Vaccines that have a large impact on transmission and infection are there not just for you but for your community.
The covid shots were good against hospitalization and death in older folks, but they were not great at preventing infection or transmission (despite what you may have gleaned from the speakers blaring ads in every public setting for all that time).
You can fall back to the "flooding the hospitals" argument, that works a little better here.
You're misinterpreting data here. You are conflating the fact that the clinical trials didn't measure infection/transmission (which is very hard to do in a clinical trial) with the distinct claim that they didn't reduce transmission in reality.
The vaccines were extremely effective at reducing transmission during the first waves of COVID, where such an intervention was most valuable. And due to viral growth dynamics, even small reductions in transmission yield big net outcomes.
50% - 70% reduction in transmission: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2116597
Later waves made the vaccine much less effective at reducing transmission, but still highly effective at reducing hospital utilization which is (despite your snarky aside), extremely valuable. Fatality rates doubled when ERs hit full capacity.
All I'm saying is if you sum up the time (between vaccine release and today) that a person was strongly protected from covid infection and transmission, it's a relatively small portion of that time.
Thats my pushback against gp's argument that you have to give this thing to your young kids to protect me.
I suspect that you and GP and GGP are talking about different time scales.
Vaccinating your children for COVID during peak COVID was the right thing to do both for them and for the adults they interact with.
Vaccinating your children for COVID today is much lower ROI for them and anyone around them.
Vaccinating your children in general is very much the right thing to do, both for them and for anyone around them.
I struggle to think of a decision or conversation where the relevant metric is "what % of time from vaccination until today were you protected" and I doubt that's what GP was discussing either.
> Vaccinating your children in general is very much the right thing to do, both for them and for anyone around them.
Isn't this kinda like saying medicating your children in general is very much the right thing to do?
Like it's obviously one of those things that everyone expects you to just agree with directionally, but the actually correct answer is no, there is no in general. All drugs have a context where they make sense. E.g. you're probably not vaccinating your kids for rabies, unless you live in an animal sanctuary or something. MMR, sure.
It actually seems pretty questionable to me that it was ever a net benefit to your average young kid to get the covid shots.
No there actually is in general and it's the same exact way in which there's generally good guidance for medicating your children: they're called evidence-backed guidelines.
The contexts in which drugs make sense is captured by the clinical guidelines.
And sure, it is arguably questionable whether there was ever a net benefit to an average young kid to get a COVID vaccine. However that is a distinct claim from "it never made sense to give kids COVID vaccines." There was certainly a point in time in which a logical interpretation of the information available at the time indicated that kids should get vaccinated. The risks were (correctly) understood to be near-zero and the benefits were (arguably incorrectly) understood to be significant.
Someone who, in early 2021, decided against vaccinating their children was making a decision that was not indicated by the best-available information at that time.
Someone who bets on Red doesn't get to claim they were "correct" in betting on Red even if Red comes up, and certainly not if Green comes up (arguably neutral outcome).
This is the "nobody got fired for buying IBM" argument. It works in a world where you have trustworthy institutions and its safe to just outsource your decision-making to the authorities.
Your interpretation of events might be that a collective of all well meaning people just got it wrong, and that's your right. A lot of people ended up with different conclusions, like the machine did what it does and made a lot of money, the truth be damned.
Not really. It's the "making decisions based on best-available evidence is good, even if every once in a while it leads you astray."
You're more than welcome to read the evidence they use to create their policies. If you have evidence that is of higher quality than that which "the authorities" are using, then you should depend on that!
But... you almost certainly don't have higher quality evidence than they do. That's the fundamental problem.
If you think that you do, then you too could actually make a fuckton of money with that information. But again: you don't have superior information.
I don't think people even got it wrong. They got it correct with the information available, and they for the most part got it right even in retrospect.
I did read a lot of evidence available at the time. It's why I opted to skip the vaccine for myself given that I had already recovered shortly before the shots were available. That decision was very at odds with authoritative guidance at the time. You'd think I was a damn leper, yet that decision seems to have held up pretty well.
I also frequently tested before any gatherings, and avoided contact when I had any kinds of symptoms, test or not. I saw plenty of people figure they had gotten the shots so why not go out with the sniffles?
"Best information" and what was blasted out of the TV or considered "common sense" at the time I think have quite a bit of daylight between them.
That's just not true.
Here's the authoritative guidance on the rollout: https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/103787/cdc_103787_DS1.pdf
What gives you the idea that a low-risk person opting not to get the vaccine is "at odds with authoritative guidance?" Yes, I would bet that it made you feel like a leper, but that's because people (correctly) think that it signals something about your attitude toward the rest of society. Not sure that can be pinned on public health authorities. People who hold open the door to the cold are assholes and frequently treated as such.
Here's the guidance on whether vaccinated people with sniffles should go out in public: https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/105629
Answer: no. Go get tested, and if positive, don't gather.
Yes, agreed that people were listening primarily to a game of telephone and vibes and not actually reading any of the linked PDFs or listening to the actual words spoken by actual public health officials firsthand, and then they (like you are now) were confused about what the actual guidance said.
I misspoke, right at rollout when supplies were short, they did say you could wait. Once they had enough to sell, everyone who didn't jump in line was a grandma killer.
> Yes, I would bet that it made you feel like a leper, but that's because people (correctly) think that it signals something about your attitude toward the rest of society. ... People who hold open the door to the cold are assholes and frequently treated as such.
This is asinine. There was never any indication in the data that a previously recovered person posed any kind of heightened threat to anyone else, and by testing and isolating like I was, I was doing likely the best you could possibly do for the folks around me.
Also, I made the choice with my doctor's agreement.
> There was never any indication in the data that a previously recovered person posed any kind of heightened threat to anyone else
Nope, also not true.
There actually was plenty of evidence of exactly this even by August 2021: https://www.healio.com/news/infectious-disease/20210806/cdc-...
Then found again in October: https://www.healio.com/news/infectious-disease/20211029/covi...
> by testing and isolating like I was, I was doing likely the best you could possibly do for the folks around me.
Short of vaccination yes, you were. But also people have no way to actually trust anything you say, whereas even saying that you aren't vaccinated (again, correctly) indicates quite a lot about some combination of your information, selfishness, or care for others.
For example, if you had gone around thinking or saying "I'm not vaccinated because prior infection protections me (and therefore you)" you would have been wrong. That's why people's alarm bells go off when you go around saying that you're not vaccinated.
This entire conversation is a validation of their heuristics. You're acting like public health authorities said X and then they didn't, or acting like there's no evidence of Y when there is, and then saying "see I didn't get vaccinated!" is exactly what everyone was cuing into: this is almost certainly either a confused or selfish person, or both.
You might consider reading the actual Kentucky study (as I did at the time) and looking at the limitations. This and the one in October are exactly the kind of shit that would get published and then reports like your link would way overstate what they were actually capable of showing.
Eventually things calmed down enough that studies could actually be published showing the efficacy of a prior infection without risking careers.
You're misunderstanding btw, I didn't go around telling anyone but my closest friends and family. I wasnt about to out myself as a heretic when the likely biggest propaganda campaign in history was going on (pandemic of the unvaccinated, etc). It was mostly in hn threads on studies like the ones you posted where I would say anything about it.
So why did you claim to be treated like a leper?
And yes, all studies have limitations, especially observational studies done in the middle of an emergency.
Here's your claim: "There was never any indication in the data that a previously recovered person posed any kind of heightened threat to anyone else"
That is quite obviously false.
If you believe there was superior data available at the time, please share it. Otherwise, yes that is exactly what the data showed (imperfect as all data is).
> Eventually things calmed down enough that studies could actually be published showing the efficacy of a prior infection without risking careers.
Like which studies? (Not that more recent studies could've possibly time-traveled to inform your decision-making in the past, of course).
A reasonable prior (which my doctor ascribed to) was that immunity after recovery from an infection with a coronavirus would be pretty durable and effective, and you can find plenty of reporting to support the effectiveness early on.
To believe otherwise would take some solid evidence, and maybe the Kentucky study is enough to convince you, but it was not enough to convince me (or apparently my doctor, though we didn't talk about that).
It even said this: Finally, this is a retrospective study design using data from a single state during a 2-month period; therefore, these findings cannot be used to infer causation.
So maybe "any indication" was too strong. How about any convincing indication?
Meanwhile you had things like this demonstrating that prior infection was pretty damn protective as early as late 2020: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2034545
There were others as well, I was following this very closely because it seemed pretty important to not be wrong, and all of the messaging was very insistent.
The study you linked is evidence that prior infection reduces the rate of reinfection. Yes, this would be surprising if it were not true.
Your prior claim was that prior infection is equivalent to or superior to vaccination (i.e. relying on prior infection was not "heightened risk"). That was, and remains, completely false.
That's not quite my claim, but its close enough.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9047157/
"Conclusions: Naturally acquired immunity confers stronger protection against infection and symptomatic disease caused by the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, compared to the BNT162b2 2-dose vaccine-indued immunity."
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7104e1.htm
"What is added by this report?
During May–November 2021, case and hospitalization rates were highest among persons who were unvaccinated without a previous diagnosis. Before Delta became the predominant variant in June, case rates were higher among persons who survived a previous infection than persons who were vaccinated alone. By early October, persons who survived a previous infection had lower case rates than persons who were vaccinated alone."
"That was, and remains, completely false."
Would you like to amend your claim? You might have an argument if you stick to "could have been false for short periods of time after people were freshly vaccinated", but otherwise that's pretty indefensible.
You are again misunderstanding the data and its relevance to what we're talking about.
The vaccine protection was not superior for a short period after vaccination. It was superior for the initial variant. We've already established the vaccines became much less effective at reducing transmission in subsequent waves. You've just shared an article that says the Delta wave evaded vaccines for transmission. Yes, that's correct.
How on earth could the Delta variant's evasion have informed your decision not to get vaccinated?
By my "that was and remains false", I am saying it was not only apparently false at the time, but it has been confirmed to be actually false retrospectively as well.
OK, so I think I understand your position now: I made a single decision early on in the pandemic that I wasn't going to get vaccinated, and somehow your links from late 2021 (ie weak evidence that didn't even exist when I was deciding) were sufficient evidence that my one decision was obviously and completely wrong.
In reality, it was a continuous decision: does the totality of evidence coming out suggest I should go get the shots today? And it never definitvely got to that point, and over time the decision became better supported, not less.
You seem to understand the evidence differently. I'll grant you that maybe at some point early on I could have bought a couple months where I would have had a marginally lower chance of infection. This would have had no appreciable effect on the people around me in the grocery store. We'll have to agree to disagree otherwise.
I don’t disagree with your assessment of your individual contribution to overall risk.
The problem is that if everyone decided the same way, then it absolutely would have produced a gigantic difference.
So we’re back to the fundamental point of this being a (true) indicator of someone’s selfishness or attitude toward their neighbors.
Me individually choosing to dump my trash into the local drinking reservoir doesn’t have any appreciable effect on others. There’s a reason, nonetheless, that it’s frowned upon.
So if I don't do a thing that has no appreciable benefit for me or the people around me, I'm being selfish, because if everyone who was in a different context did the same thing, this would somehow produce a gigantic difference?
You dumping your trash in the local drinking reservoir would probably have a couple orders of magnitude more of an impact on others than me not vaccinating after recovery (depending on what's in your trash).
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Maybe you should hang out with a different "everybody" if they systematically believe untrue things
Ah, one of those "everybody knows" argument that is on the level of "everybody knows that Napoleon was short".
It's not completely wrong but it ignores important context. The part you are leaving unsaid is that the vaccine reduced transmission even if it didn't prevent it completely. 80% reduction is a significant amount.
Wearing masks on top of that was the sensible thing to do.
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Who is "they" ? And are they in the room with you now?
What are the reasons for the hate of the COVID vaccine?
Mostly that it was forced unneccessarily on everyone, even those who did not benefit from it, if I had to guess.
Forced on everyone? That's a thing that didn't happen.
Uh, THAT'S the part you're going to try to challenge me on? You lived through 2020, right? Even people in this very website were supporting mandatory vaccinations. Where if you didn't get vaccinated, you couldn't keep your job or academic prospects, leave your house, or even go to most social gatherings.
I cannot believe the people that supported such measures at the time now turn around and say "well, we didn't literally pin you to the ground and force you to take it. So therefore, it was completely voluntary and you're responsible for your own choices and we can't be held responsible whatsoever."
Yes, that is. Are there other bald-faced lies I should be focusing on instead?
The vaccine wasn't "forced on everyone". Pointing to specific people for whom it was forced isn't "everyone". Nor does the existence of people supporting mandatory COVID vaccines imply "vaccines were forced on everyone".
Well in that case, yeah sorry requiring it to participate to civilized society to any significant degree is essentially no different than flat out forcing it upon people.
If the alternative is living in the woods not being able to go outside, that is obviously not a realistic compromise.
Also a thing that didn't happen.
Do you have an allergy to the truth or something? Or maybe a difficulty distinguishing your paranoid delusions from reality.
In my state there were multiple instances of the police literally being called to people just hanging out outdoors.
It's hilarious you try to deny our lived history, we have a thing called memory.
Uh huh. Why should I believe this any more than your hallucination about "everyone"? You've demonstrated a complete lack of cognitive quality control.
Probably one of the most polarizing issues of the last 5 years.
You're not wrong, at least in the USA - but it really shouldn't be. The polarisation was ginned up for various bad reasons, including political gain. It's deadly culture war nonsense.
"Polarizing" is a word that kind of applies, especially if one is trying to be polite, but really it's one of the most politically disinformed issues in a long long time.
A bunch of grifters pushed fear, uncertainty, and doubt for personal gain, at the expense of the health of the nation. I try not to blame people who got tricked, but at some point we need to treat people like adults who are responsible for their own actions, and hold them accountable for the harm they perpetuate by believing BS and acting on it.
A democracy cannot function when its members are low-functioning, and when bad information dominates. Those who spread disinformation, relish the conspiracy and disinformation because it makes them feel special emotionally, and wallow in the mess of it, are hurting us all.
> A democracy cannot function when its members are low-functioning, and when bad information dominates.
A discussion as old as time. Plato considered voting a skill, and if you were shit at it, then you shouldnt be voting
I don't recall it being as polarizing outside of the US, where there was a larger group of anti-vaxxers to begin with. But that might be my "outside US" bubble.
I don't know how things were in the US, but it was polarizing in Europe too.
People were holding protests. I know two friends who refused to get the vaccine and downloaded forged documents to be admitted into bars and clubs.
Very anecdotal, but after we went out together they both contracted Covid and had a high fever, while I luckily remained healthy.
Oh it was, actually still is - our right wing party is still talking about this stuff regularly...
And, critically, a malignant narcissist in the highest office.
Probably disinformation.
There is a legitimate discussion of what can be mandated you do to your body.
However, that discussion was largely side-tracked by the massive amount of disinformation (eg, "Plandemic") that circulated online. There are people who to this day swear that COVID-19 was just like the flu and simultaneously claim that the vaccine spike proteins have killed around 20M people. Not just crackpots, but people with reach, like Brett Weinstein on Joe Rogan's podcast.
> There is a legitimate discussion of what can be mandated you do to your body.
But we have already protocols and frameworks on public health.
Also plenty of other medical choices are taken with way less input of experts (see abortion discussions for example)
Not sure, the midst of a global crisis, with almost universal scientific approval is the time to have a long discussion on bodily autonomy on countries like america where 50% of people cant read at a 6th grade level.
> There is a legitimate discussion of what can be mandated you do to your body.
There is a legitimate discussion (dating back at least to Typhoid Mary (1) ) on excluding people from public spaces when they refuse to take basic public health measures. Taking a vaccine for a spreading deadly pandemic is one of those measures.
Doing something so violently anti-social is not simply a "bodily autonomy" issue, and framing it only as such is deeply misguided in a way that seems particular to some USA norms.
1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Mallon
> In 1907, she was forcibly quarantined at the Riverside Hospital
I got the covid shot and every booster. I have no qualms about mRNA messing me up, and I think it was a tremendous life saver. As stated, there was also a ton of misinformation floating around, and people believed that misinformation.
The thing is most of those people made rational objections. The problem is their reasoning was based on false information. They didn't see it as being anti social as they thought the drug was a boondoggle, untested, and that covid wasn't serious. I disagree with all of it, but it is important to understand why they objected, and not just saying they are selfish or antisocial.
> The thing is most of those people made rational objections. The problem is their reasoning was based on false information.
This is how Typhoid Mary understood her status:
> It did not take Mary long to react to this suggestion. She seized a carving fork and advanced in my direction. ... Mallon's refusal was based on her belief that she was not infected. ... To stop her struggles, he had to sit on her chest for the journey.
And yet, locking her up over her objections her was itself a rational decision. This is the debate.
I'm not saying that this kind of intervention is appropriate today, just that her "rational objections" were not be-all and end-all of the situation.
Why is it more "important to understand why she objected"? Isn't it far more important to understand that she infected? The thing is, a virus doesn't care what you believe, or your political stripe. To a pathogen, you're a mass of warm cells, nothing more. Human beliefs are irrelevant to a virus, so why centre them?
Stopping the spread of e.g. measles depends on vaccinating just about everybody, that's statistics and epidemiology. At the end, that is what determines if there will be an outbreak. Cutting people slack on that because they choose to believe nonsense is not helpful and will not work. Actions matter more than beliefs, voluntary or not.
> her "rational objections" were not be-all and end-all of the situation.
I hope this is not what you think my position is.
If you want to change someone's mind, you need to understand it. If someone believes false information, and if they are driven my emotion due to everything they've heard, then giving them a bullet list of facts will not change their mind 95% of the time.
You've probably heard of the term "steel manning" when arguing with someone. If you cannot state the other person's argument in a way that they agree with, then you are just talking past each other. If you can state their position as well or better than they can, now you in a better position to change their mind.
If your goal isn't to change their mind, then go ahead, just keep calling them stupid and making no progress with them.
Given a population of people, you should aim to change some peoples minds. Indeed in a democracy it is important to get a majority or plurality in agreement.
But you cannot hope to change everyone's minds, and so that should not be a goal. A system that depends on that won't work. Typhoid Mary is a counterexample.
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On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer, based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution.
heh, touché! :)
/me shakes head in disbelief and closes the tab
There are a zillion news sources for this: OP what would possess you to pick the (largely dead) right wing Musk-owned Twitter ("X" )?
Has more posts than HN, yet would you describe this platform as 'dead'?
In other news, your barber thinks you need a haircut. Until there is a proven net overall health benefit to this therapy, I wouldn't waste much ink on it. Also, can someone please tell me how one controls the dose for an mRNA therapy ?
If you actually had melanoma (a very aggressive type of skin cancer) you would be glad for one more chance of maybe still being alive a few years from now.
not if you dropped dead from a heart attack after your therapy. Are you familiar with vioxx ? https://www.npr.org/2007/11/10/5470430/timeline-the-rise-and...
IF you dropped dead a decade later, it would be a fantastic trade-off.
Vioxx was a long-term problem. Having that problem instead would be a great trade-off relative to untreated melanoma.
Cancer treatment is different. We have a high tolerance for side effects because many cancers are aggressive and deadly. It's a risk-analysis. If your odds of dying from cancer in the next year are 50%, and the drugs have a 25% chance of killing you, then the drugs are worth it.
In actuality, even extremely aggressive therapies like high-dose chemotherapy with stem-cell transplant have shockingly low risk of death. Less than 5%. Bear in mind, that's for a therapy that literally wipes out all of your bone marrow. You know, the part of your body that produces your blood? Your body stops making blood and your immune system. And yet, we've gotten the death rate as low as it is.
See my comments below on Vioxx - even the manufacturers admitted covid shots caused myocarditis in young men - why are you so sure this new therapy won't cause the same issues, or worse ?
Covid itself has a higher risk of myocarditis than the covid vaccine.
And even if it did, it doesn't matter. You didn't read my comment at all. There are cancer treatments which can kill you outright, I know because I've received them. I think maybe you don't understand what cancer is. We can be very aggressive with the treatments. We have much, much bigger fish to fry than a small risk of myocarditis.
A successful phase 3 trial means that the drug is actually effective, not just safe. That's what they test in phase 3.
As there is no safety data available on this new drug, what makes you say it is safe ? Pre 2020 it took an average of 10 years to release a new vaccine - why do you think it took that long ?
How does one control the dose for anything? Why are you worried about mRNA vaccines in particular?
Radiation dose, for example, is precisely measured - we know exactly how much radiation the body is exposed to during therapy. mRNA products work by making our cells produce the desired protein/drug. There is no way of controlling how many cells are producing the drug and for how long they are producing it - ergo there is no way of controlling the dose. I hate to break it to you but they have found people producing spike protein over 3 years after getting the covid shot.
Spike proteints: new production or residual fragments?
Citation on the spike protein production?
Phone cancer is way worse and more prevalent than skin cancer. And it looks and acts the same. Let me know when they find a cure.