I didn't downvote you but if the 12 billion or so COVID vaccine doses issued world wide don't convince you that the vaccine is statistically safe, at least as safe as something as common as paracetamol or aspirin, then what amount of testing would convince you?
The 12 billion or so COVID vaccine doses given also only have a history of ~2 years. If the adverse effects of it were say for instance, minor cardiac damage that resulted in no acute symptoms, but instead an overall reduction in life expectancy by 5 years, the costs of such would not be known for some time. Another side of this is the possible cumulative effects of ongoing covid vaccination boosters that have no long term data.
Finally also the danger of immunological imprinting[1] possibly resulting in less than optimal immune response. The fact these vaccines have little impact on transmissibility means basic evolutional biology theory is at play, driving selective pressures for antigens humans are less capable of mounting defenses against thanks to an already primed imuno response of the original virus' antigens. This is evident with the proliferation of variants and sub variants.
> The 12 billion or so COVID vaccine doses given also only have a history of ~2 years. If the adverse effects of it were say for instance, minor cardiac damage that resulted in no acute symptoms, but instead an overall reduction in life expectancy by 5 years, the costs of such would not be known for some time.
Can you explain how this standard of rigueur leads to anything less than a complete halting of medical research?
The original trials for the Pfizer vaccine were conducted on 46k people (half of which necessary recieved a placebo). At the time of those trials there was no shortage of willing volunteers to take part in the trial, no limit on the amounts of funding available and a considerable appetite to do something. Other trials have to make to with much fewer participants with hundreds to low thousands seemingly typical.
>Can you explain how this standard of rigueur leads to anything less than a complete halting of medical research?
~10 yrs of trials and safety data collecting (Including long term studies) is the historical norm. We've certainly not had a complete halting of medical research from doing that.
My main point though is that with the level of data provided and the fact long term studies have not, and cannot have been conducted in this time frame - the push to mandate (and coercively pressure vaccination uptake through fear of losing your job, or access to regular life things bars, cafes, travel etc.) is unjustified and arguably doesn't even reach the bar for informed consent (with many people getting it under the impression it would prevent contraction and transmission).
The risk of taking action was compared against the risk of not taking action. I imagine most scientists would have loved to have developed this vaccine 10+ years ago and done long term studies, but that wasn’t an option.
It may have been influenced by the bias for action, but the trade off was the death and disruption we saw in 2020-21, compared to a future risk that scientists projected as minimal.
It still seems like a solid decision to me. But if this research shows that millions die from increased myocarditis rates, I think it would have been a bad outcome. Still not sure if that would influence my perception to the process.
I don't blame rushing the vaccines at all. In fact, maybe we should have skipped more steps to get the vaccine to 70+ year olds or people who are obese faster. But let's just be honest, the risk profile for younger people just wasn't high. The data was clear very early on. That was even with underreported numbers. It should have never been mandated and if you were at a decent weight and under 40 you were never at that much of a risk, especially to say something like the flu.
Enforcing vaccination before it's possible to know the long-term effects, for all groups including those at low risk from Covid, was and is a terrible idea. Offering it to the elderly, obese and otherwise-at-risk, where there's a clear and obvious net benefit, was all that should have been done.
I disagree. The information at the time was the vaccine was massively impactful at reducing spread. They got that part wrong, but the decision to require vaccination was rational IMO.
The decision didn't have a great result because the assumptions didn't hold. Good process, bad outcome.
(Not to mention that if everyone had actually just gotten the shot, we might have stalled the viral evolution into the delta + subsequent variants. My understanding is those mutations reduced vaccine transmission efficacy. If people hadn't turned public health into politics, we could have possibly avoided the endemic nature of the virus, which I think we can all agree would have been a far superior outcome versus where we are today.)
And that is where I vehemently disagree. Bad process, bad outcome. Many people lied to make the information appear as you said. The incentives they had to lie should have a lot more scrutiny, rather than being shrugged off, and many of these people should be in jail.
I don't claim any special ability to differentiate lies from inherent complexities in public health communication in a novel situation. However, the claim in early 2021 that the vaccines were both safe and effective, before enough time had elapsed for either to be known, was a bit of a red flag. I don't think you needed much expertise in anything to have reached this conclusion.
I believed at the time (and still believe) the risk/reward ratio still favoured offering the vaccines to at-risk groups. Making it mandatory or de-facto mandatory for all was a colossal clusterfuck. It worked out well for big pharma though, but at what long-term cost?
Isn't the road to hell paved with good intentions? Based on what I know about human nature, especially those who self-select into public health, it seems just as plausible they were overly optimistic. That's not a lie, which requires concrete knowledge that the opposite is true.
I didn't mean to suggest you had any special ability. I was just wondering how you reached that conclusion. Internet text boards are bad at tone, I apologize if it sounded attacking. But I think it's a wide gap between officials lied and someone had a different interpretation and did not exhibit as much caution as I prefer in my p.h. officials.
I am certain people lied about covid. I'm not certain that was the ph officials.
It doesn't convince me because I do not know anyone personally that has had an adverse reaction to aspirin, that didn't also overdose on it. Meanwhile, I know several people that have had adverse reactions to the vaccine ranging from issues with periods, to heart problems, to death.
No one is seriously tracking the adverse reactions, we've handed that off to the companies that produced the vaccines. And doctors are afraid to or don't care to raise concerns either. The vaccines are as statistically safe for me as COVID is for my age and health profile. And the vaccine makes no guarantee that I won't still catch COVID. Why would I double my risk when I've caught COVID, and it was nothing for me.
Just a nurse, this is true. I’ve been running a vaccine clinic. Very few to none are putting in adverse events to the proper place, there are competing data banks to report adverse reactions to (many of which are black boxes, data goes in and nothing comes out), doctors are dismissive, and in the few cases they do admit x,y,z caused by vaccine it is documented lightly.
So why are the companies in the article researching the risks if according to you there clearly are no risks? Do you know better than the manufacturers?
Please try to keep the level of discussion one step above junior school. Otherwise there is no point in us communicating further.
I didn't say there are no risks but those risks must necessarily be very low, as otherwise with a sample size of billions of doses issued even effects in the 1 in a million would be readily identifiable.
Right, so you already have all the answers, it’s a big mystery why the manufacturers are doing this research. A big mystery to you, that is.
Indeed there is no point in communicating further, you made up your mind years ago and you will probably never progress beyond repeating the old talking points. Luckily most of the rest of the world has started to see reality is a bit more nuanced than ‘COVID is doom, vaccine is good’.
>..risks must necessarily be very low, as otherwise with a sample size of billions of doses issued even effects in the 1 in a million would be readily identifiable.
it's by no means easy to identify trends that are worth pursuing for a medical investigation in a varied cohort of a billion people, and poll size is only a single attribute -- this is made even harder during a vacination campaign that is trying to effectively drive the un-vaccinated rates to as close to 0% as possible, making comparative studies even more difficult to establish.
Time/race/status/age/health all matter. You can't just take a look at what conditions that the billions of vaccinated share, that's ineffective for any kind of impact study.
It's my opinion that any 'precise' data is going to come about in years and years once we can establish a generational gap between this event and others so that we can effectively create a cross-generational comparative study.
Yet we managed to publish papers on myocarditis[1] whose incidence rate is reportedly 1900 (or fewer) cases per 190 million individuals. If you look up the numbers that triggered the concerns and walking back of recommendations, they are quite small. There's much we won't know for a long time, but the idea that we can't detect statistically significant trends of concern, much less large ones, is demonstrably untrue.
I agree with you that measuring precisely whether the vaccine was beneficial for 15 year olds or not is difficult.
However, at the same time we have people in sibling comments claiming to know multiple people with conditions ranging from changes to their menstrual cycle to death. This can't possibly be related to the vaccine at anything like the rate people are for some reason inclined to believe.
Personally I found the effects from the 3rd booster almost as bad as COVID itself so I'm unlikely to get another unless there is a compelling reason.
