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squeedles 11 hours ago [-]
Manufacturing matters, and six years ago, I said that one side effect from the pandemic is that mRNA technology, which had been lab-scale stuff, suddenly had dump-trucks full of money appearing to help them scale their manufacturing.
They apparently settled on the the sequences for the original covid vacs in a weekend. Going from that design to billions of doses is one of the hardest things to do, but once done, will persist. And it is ready to be deployed for the next hundred applications that we find for this.
Flu vaccines is an obvious application, since the prior egg-based manufacturing required about six months lead time and millions of eggs, but nobody wanted to invest in anything better.
estearum 9 hours ago [-]
> They apparently settled on the the sequences for the original covid vacs in a weekend. Going from that design to billions of doses is one of the hardest things to do, but once done, will persist.
No no. They had a candidate for the vaccine. Scaling manufacturing is hard, sure, but the actual barrier was proving the candidate worked. We conducted (by far) the most time-efficient clinical trials in history to prove the vaccines were safe and effective.
Until that happened, we could not have known the candidate drug was actually correct.
helsinkiandrew 9 hours ago [-]
> but nobody wanted to invest in anything better.
Not sure if you mean nobody wanted to develop mRNA flu vaccines, but at least Moderna and Pfizer are:
The parent is talking about pre-covid, no one wanted pay the upfront cost to bring mRNA out of the lab.
TimXare 10 hours ago [-]
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swingboy 10 hours ago [-]
Serious question in good faith: what was the deal with the “calamari” (clots?) the anti-vax crowd kept talking about being found in the veins/arteries of folks who took the Covid vaccine?
Torn 10 hours ago [-]
> Now an international team, led by Flinders University, have found that in a small number of people, the immune system can accidentally confuse a normal adenovirus protein with a human blood protein termed platelet factor 4 (or PF4).
Seems to have been a legitimate, very rare, side effect
It's worth clarifying that the adenovirus-based (viral vector) vaccines that article is discussing were a completely different technology from the mRNA vaccines.
marcosdumay 8 hours ago [-]
The mRNA vaccines also had a cloth problem (as in, it was extremely rare), that practically disappeared with a change on the application procedure.
moralestapia 8 hours ago [-]
Can you elaborate? What was the change?
Sammi 40 minutes ago [-]
Not 100% sure but I think it was this: Never inject into a vein. Always inject into a muscle.
atomicnumber3 7 hours ago [-]
I am quite curious too. I had heard that, despite arm vascular being very consistent among individuals, it does still vary. And I think for most vaccines I guess it doesn't matter if you hit something other than muscle. Maybe for the mRNA vaccines it does matter? I'm baselessly speculating though. Wish other person hadn't been so vague.
M95D 6 hours ago [-]
COVID itself causes blood clots. In fact, pulmonary embolism with blood clots is frequent in COVID patients.
IIRC the vaccines were provably linked to the death of young people who had blood clots they shouldn't have had.
The common argument made is that the vaccine saved more lives than they took, but this is pretty fucked up IMO. It's the trolley problem IRL - if you force someone to get a vaccine and they die as a result, you are responsible for their death. Also, the manufacturers can never be held responsible, because they have legal immunity for the COVID vaccines.
thisisit 8 hours ago [-]
> Also, the manufacturers can never be held responsible, because they have legal immunity for the COVID vaccines.
This was passed in response to claims against DPT vaccine and manufacturers stopping production of the said vaccine. Lawmakers feared loss of herd immunity and passed the law. Now vaccine skeptics say this is not enough and claim inability to sue the company directly as an issue - but what they really want is enforce their minority view on the majority by suing companies and ensuring no one has access to vaccines - tyranny of the minority.
LMYahooTFY 7 hours ago [-]
Perhaps "vaccine skeptics" say this because the Covid vaccines are not covered under VICP. They're covered under CICP, which is more stringent and has paid out one person $6 million, and a few hundred grand spread out between some dozen others.
My friend who was diagnosed, by multiple doctors in two hospitals with Myocarditis caused by the vaccine has yet to receive any money. It ruined his career.
"Tyranny of the minority" doesn't remotely apply here. No one has the authority to sacrifice one group of citizens to save another group of citizens.
thisisit 6 hours ago [-]
> They're covered under CICP, which is more stringent and has paid out one person $6 million, and a few hundred grand spread out between some dozen others.
This is trying to play both sides. Appeal to emotion without having a rational thought process. Something bad happening is unfortunate and life changing. Then turning around and saying hundred grand isn’t life changing money for people.
What exactly is your remedy here - should people be not asked to provide proof for the harm and paid 10s of millions for every case? People have been asked proof for lesser things and paid even lesser for much bigger harm.
> My friend who was diagnosed, by multiple doctors in two hospitals with Myocarditis caused by the vaccine has yet to receive any money. It ruined his career.
Anecdotal evidence is not evidence of systematic wrongdoing. At least I wouldn’t expect to see on HN but here we are.
BoingBoomTschak 6 hours ago [-]
>Anecdotal evidence is not evidence of systematic wrongdoing.
The Norwegian country-wide study is evidence enough.
croon 1 hours ago [-]
The Norwegian study landed on 4.5 cases per 100k from vaccinations [0].
It's so sad to see that you are the first one with any kind of source in your comment. The rest are only saying scary stuff and you are supposed to argue with that. They are saying stuff like "my friend died because of the jab" and you come with studies links, which can sound unfriendly. And we are on HN, for fuck's sake.
rho138 4 hours ago [-]
Link?
Waterluvian 10 hours ago [-]
Society is the trolley problem. The balancing act between individual and collective rights is the lever being thrown every time we pass a law or make a regulation.
I can absolutely empathize though. It really is fucked up to experience it in the extreme. Usually the trade-offs are much more minor or have a big time delay or are more abstract.
cryptoegorophy 7 hours ago [-]
I wonder if this is some kind of prisoners dilemma for society and individual choice.
zmgsabst 8 hours ago [-]
Lots of societies who started with some killing “for the common good” ended in atrocities.
The statistics on men under 25 are still horrific and suggest this was in fact the latter category: atrocity masquerading behind that euphemism.
InsideOutSanta 7 hours ago [-]
Do you apply that same standard to other things, like cars? Do you feel allowing people to drive is also society "killing for the common good"?
After more than eight billion doses of the vaccine, about twenty deaths were causally linked to the vaccine. Five times as many people die every day from traffic in the US alone, many of them children.
What about gun ownership? How many people does that "kill for the common good"?
And by that measure, isn't not vaccinating people an even bigger atrocity? Aren't you also arguing to kill people "for the common good" by not mandating vaccination?
LMYahooTFY 6 hours ago [-]
Cars and gun ownership were not mandated by the government.
InsideOutSanta 6 hours ago [-]
Yes, they are. I'm mandated by the government to live in a country that has cars and gun ownership.
defrost 6 hours ago [-]
Your government refuses to let you leave the country?
That aside, they also command you to own both a car and a gun?
InsideOutSanta 6 hours ago [-]
> Your government refuses to let you leave the country?
This argument also applies to you: by your logic, vaccine mandates are perfectly fine because you can leave the country.
> That aside, they also command you to own both a car and a gun?
The problem isn't me owning a car and gun, the problem is obviously everybody else. I'm rather unlikely to drive into myself while driving my own car.
defrost 6 hours ago [-]
First up, for clarity, I have no issues with COVID vaccines and how they were used in Australia - the very few cases of myocarditis were mild and resulted in no deaths.
Second up, I'm confused by your use of "mandate" and how your government mandates you to remain in that country.
> by your logic, vaccine mandates are perfectly fine because you can leave the country.
Not by my logic, nor that of Dana Scott, Christopher Strachey , Alonzo Church or others.
> I'm rather unlikely to drive into myself while driving my own car.
You can drive into a wall or off a cliff, and yes, injured by own car (or tractor) is an actual not infrequent injury.
InsideOutSanta 5 hours ago [-]
> how your government mandates you to remain in that country
I never said that. I said that government inaction is also a mandate; look at the context for my comment.
If you're arguing that leaving the country makes government action (or inaction) acceptable, then by your own logic, all government action (or inaction) is acceptable, which supports my point: vaccine mandates are fine, because by your own logic, if you disagree with them, you can leave the country.
> You can drive into a wall or off a cliff, and yes, injured by own car (or tractor) is an actual not infrequent injury.
You're missing the point I'm making, which is that not driving a car does not mean I won't get run over by other people, which is the actual point I brought up.
To be honest, I'm not quite sure why you're responding to me, since you don't seem to be arguing against anything I actually said?
Sammi 30 minutes ago [-]
No one is "killing" anyone. That is just a gross mischaracterization. Sometimes (like this) we just choose the least bad solution, that's it.
36 minutes ago [-]
wbl 10 hours ago [-]
Not "the vaccines" only adenovirus vector based ones and the vaccines were dropped from use pretty quickly once the safety signal was detected.
jansan 8 hours ago [-]
Let's not forget that Norway was heavily criticized by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and several international health experts for its decision to permanently drop the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine.
KiwiJohnno 7 hours ago [-]
Yes, I think you are correct in reducing the argument to its basic factors. Yep, its fucked up.
However if we’re going to talk about moral responsibility for vaccine mandates, we also have to consider moral responsibility for non-vaccination leading to spread of a dangerous virus during a pandemic.
If you are going to hold one group responsible for vaccine-related deaths of mandated vaccines, you must also hold the group who refused the vaccine responsible for any deaths of other people who were infected as a result of their vaccine refusal.
Vaccine deaths were real, and very rare. COVID deaths from preventable spread were also real, and much more common. Public policy had to weigh both, not pretend either side of the risk didn’t exist.
Markoff 6 hours ago [-]
> However if we’re going to talk about moral responsibility for vaccine mandates, we also have to consider moral responsibility for non-vaccination leading to spread of a dangerous virus during a pandemic.
that's all nice and dandy except COVID "vaccines" (remember, they had to change vaccine definition for this very reason) did NOT STOP the spread, they were at best protecting some old people, it was completely pointless for young healthy people to risk their lives by taking them
I remember how the vaccine narration/propaganda went - it will protect you from getting infection, it will protect you from symptoms, it will protect you from getting sick, it will protect you from serious symptoms, it will protect you from hospitalization, it will protect you from death, so now basically all they can claim it will protect you from going to hell and you can go to heaven if you use them
> Vaccine deaths were real, and very rare.
so were COVID deaths in people under 50 unless you have some health condition, extremely rare for people under 20-30, yet they pushed down the throat "vaccinesd" to everyone, not just risk groups, which is why vaccine mandates/passes hurt proper useful vaccines for decades ahead
teamonkey 6 hours ago [-]
Vaccines have always been about preventing the spread of the disease and “the definition of vaccines” has not changed.
This is easy to prove. Simply find a high school biology textbook printed before Covid.
watwut 5 hours ago [-]
I remeber that time too. In fact, vaccines slowed spread and also made symptoms easier on those who caught it anyway.
And that is exactly what was promissed to me.
You are just full of it, that is it.
msandford 16 minutes ago [-]
Prior to COVID I seem to remember that the point of a vaccine was so that you didn't get the disease at all. That's where the herd immunity argument comes from. If 85-90% of the herd has immunity (immunity meaning you can't catch it at all) then even the people who can't get the vaccine are protected because the susceptible are too spread out for the infection to spread.
Do you see how this absolutely requires not just a lowered infection rate with lowered severity of infection? You need a less than ~10% chance of infection in the vaccinated/otherwise immune for the math to work. If the chances of infection after vaccination are still 80% then there is still a large reservoir of potential carriers and you don't have herd immunity.
For most of history what people expected out of a vaccine was immunity from infection not still getting infected but with less severity.
auggierose 6 hours ago [-]
Young people are actually right then in never ever taking any vaccine recommended by public policy ever again. If taking a vaccine is against your personal interest, and nevertheless public policy, that is the consequence.
It is one thing to make a judgement error in the heat of a crisis, it is quite another one to deny afterwards what a huge fuckup it has been.
cedws 8 hours ago [-]
For the record, this comment is not arguing against vaccines or their veracity, there seems to have been confusion about that. I am specifically arguing against vaccine mandates.
fwipsy 7 hours ago [-]
If someone refuses a vaccine and then passes on a virus to someone else, who dies, isn't that morally equivalent to "forcing" a vaccine on someone, who then dies? Your argument seems to be "people who choose to put others at risk, should be prevented from doing so." This seems like a much stronger argument in favor of requiring unvaccinated people to stay home rather than putting others at risk?
Every death is a tragedy. Harm to one person is not fungible with benefit to another. You can't subtract one from five to get four net lives saved, but you can say that five is more than one. If someone pulls the lever then they have murdered one person and saved five. If someone wants to pull it and I stop them, haven't I murdered five people and saved one?
LMYahooTFY 6 hours ago [-]
No, it's not morally equivalent, as one of these is very obviously unintentional and a result of simply living one's normal life, and the other is neither of those things.
It's also somewhat irrelevant since the vaccines do not prevent transmission. At best they lower the chance to some degree and now you're in the weeds of trying to measure something that's too multivariate to measure.
BoingBoomTschak 6 hours ago [-]
> If someone refuses a vaccine and then passes on a virus to someone else, who dies
Why wasn't that other person vaccinated?
koonsolo 5 hours ago [-]
Some people can't take vaccines because of allergic reactions. Other people have weakened immune systems and so the effect of vaccines is low.
For those people, it's the group that protects them. But of course you always have selfish people that only care about themselves. It was nice to see the amount of selfish people was pretty low in my region, and we got about a 80% vaccination rate.
Markoff 6 hours ago [-]
Except COVID "vaccines" did not prevent infecting yourself or someone else, are there still people believing this nonsense? This "vaccine" at best protects you if you are old at risk and it's not good even at doing that comparable with those flu "vaccines".
thiht 5 hours ago [-]
Not sure why you're using quotes, it IS a legitimate vaccine. Care to elaborate?
But the same article has the following quote from the above video, from Bayer's executive Stefan Oelrich:
> “Ultimately the mRNA vaccines are an example for that cell and gene therapy. I always like to say, if we had surveyed two years ago in the public, ‘would you be willing to take gene or cell therapy and inject it into your body?,’ we would have probably had a 95% refusal rate. I think this pandemic has also opened many people’s eyes to innovation in the way that was maybe not possible before.”
So it seems Bayer (or at least, Stefan Oelrich from Bayer), indeed classifies the mRNA vaccines as gene therapy.
auggierose 6 hours ago [-]
I wish there was a vaccine against opinions like yours. Yes, I would make it mandatory.
koonsolo 7 hours ago [-]
In Belgium, the polio vaccine is mandatory, and rightly so.
I'm willing to bet that in the next 20 years, some kid in the western world will suffer the consequences of polio, because of the anti-vax lunatics.
cedws 6 hours ago [-]
The polio vaccine is much older and as far as I could find has never had a death attributed to it. COVID vaccines are newer, and their safety profile was not fully understood when they were rolled out.
koonsolo 5 hours ago [-]
Therefore the COVID vaccines were also not mandatory.
jasonvorhe 3 hours ago [-]
Unless you wanted to keep your job in the medical field or education or had to do lots of travel.
koonsolo 18 minutes ago [-]
If I remember correctly, it was a pandemic. So yes, everybody contributed, either by getting vaccinated or staying home, your choice.
goatlover 7 hours ago [-]
If the pandemic had been deadlier and even more infectious like measles or smallpox were, would you still be against mandates? Surely there is a scenario like airborne Ebola or 28 days Later Rage virus that would justify mandates.
ActorNightly 6 hours ago [-]
I would also be against vaccine mandate if we also had a law where if I could prove you infected me, that would count as assault with a deadly weapon, and all the other laws that determine what I could do when someone assaults me with a deadly weapon would apply.
tbrownaw 7 hours ago [-]
> Also, the manufacturers can never be held responsible, because they have legal immunity for the COVID vaccines.
Since there was basically a soft mandate for it, especially on top of some of the usual official red tape being cut, the manufacturers really wouldn't be the appropriate party to hold responsibility. That'd be the government.
throwaway5752 10 hours ago [-]
This was very uncommon. It was also unrelated to mRNA vaccines, it was the AstroZeneca vaccine vaxzevria, and it was based on an adenovirus.
cedws 10 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Sabinus 9 hours ago [-]
A tiny fraction of infants react to infant vaccinations.
But the harm those children experience is a infintesimal fraction of the harm all children would feel if there were no infant vaccinations.
It's a trade off but it's one that must be made. The parents whose child died did the best thing they could do. Until we can screen for the infants that will react, vaccinations are the best choice.
idontwantthis 8 hours ago [-]
It's a false trade off because without vaccines, the kids that would have died from vaccines are still in danger!
logifail 7 hours ago [-]
> the kids that would have died from vaccines are still in danger
Except that we knew by May 2020 (possibly even earlier) that the data showed that the young and otherwise healthy were at extraordinarily low risk from Covid.
I still recall a conversation with child#2 after one of his school friends was at home quarantining after testing positive for Covid.
I asked my son if he knew if his friend was feeling better...
"Daddy, he's not poorly, he's just got Covid".
teamonkey 6 hours ago [-]
Kids spread the virus, whether they’re at risk of dying or not. Vaccines reduce the chance of them spreading it by reducing the symptoms and the time that they they’re infectious.
The main benefit of vaccines is that they reduce the transmission of disease. This aspect saves more lives than individual protection.
logifail 6 hours ago [-]
> Vaccines reduce the chance of them spreading it [..]
"Citation needed"...
Covid vaccination did not reliably or durably block SARS-CoV-2 transmission, especially after Omicron and as immunity waned.
The overall VE [Vaccine Effectiveness] of the complete primary series against infection with any SARS-CoV-2 variant was 70.7%. VE was lower for Omicron, at 26.1%, than for pre-Omicron strains, at 77.0%. Over time, VE against infection by any variant decreased from 68.9% to 38.9% after 6 months.
defrost 6 hours ago [-]
Leaving aside the linked study is looking at vaccine effectiveness WRT infection rather than transmission, ...
Low effectiveness still agrees with the point made above about reducing chances of spread and transmission.
A reduction is still a reduction, even if is not a 100% total and full stop.
logifail 5 hours ago [-]
> A reduction is still a reduction, even if is not a 100% total and full stop
The advice I was given from our family doctor was that having had an utterly mild case of (actual) Covid, as I had (two separate times!), during the pandemic, was significantly better in protecting against both future infection - and subsequent transmission - than any protection I could have gained by vaccination.
YMMV. I suspect this is down to those who have had mild Covid pre-vaccination and those who have not.
Some of us didn't even know we had had Covid until afterwards, others think the vaccine saved them from an untimely death/hospitalisation.
teamonkey 4 hours ago [-]
If you’ve had Covid twice then you’ll have had the antibodies in your system, however there were several strains and getting boosters to maximise resistance was important.
Remember that you caught Covid twice, because your body’s immune system was still not strong enough to make you asymptomatic the second time. You likely caught Covid several times but several of those times you were asymptomatic.
It’s incorrect to say that catching the virus gives you “better” protection than a vaccine. The vaccine teaches your immune system how to react to the virus without the damage and long-term effects caused by actually having the virus. This makes future infections much less severe and you are less likely to spread the virus to others when you catch it.
Worth restating because of all the misinformation out there: a vaccine will not prevent you from catching a virus, it cannot do that. It trains your immune system to fight the virus so that when you catch it your immune system can fight it immediately and symptoms are much less severe (ideally asymptomatic, but that is not guaranteed), so that you have less chance of passing it on.
logifail 4 hours ago [-]
> It’s incorrect to say that catching the virus gives you “better” protection than a vaccine.
> however there were several strains and getting boosters to maximise resistance was important
Our family doctor said the opposite: "your antibody count is so high [from recent infection] there is no point you having a vaccine/booster".
<shrug> I listened to Dr F (2004) and to our family doctor. YMMV.
teamonkey 6 minutes ago [-]
That’s what Dr Fauci said for seasonal flu in 2004.
Yes you will have antibodies from being exposed to one strain of flu. You won’t for the next strain.
Catching COVID carried a far greater risk because although symptoms can be mild in many cases it can kill vulnerable people and it spreads incredibly quickly. At the peak of the pandemic, hospitals were being overrun by people sick with the virus, which affected everyone’s access to care. Vaccines helped prevent the spread of new strains to vulnerable people and reduced pressure on the hospitals.
blub 6 hours ago [-]
The Covid vaccine was not recommended in Germany and other EU countries for children. The risk of the vaccine was higher than the benefit for them.
It think the guidance was more nuanced for teens, but for kids it was very clear.
The vaxmaxxer vs. antivaxxer - like most culture wars - is a US phenomenon.
logifail 7 hours ago [-]
> It's a trade off but it's one that must be made
At the latest by May 2020, we knew that Covid risk was extremely stratified by age and underlying health conditions.
To be very clear: this does not mean the virus was harmless to everyone else, but treating the population as if risk were evenly distributed was bad analysis, and policy built on that assumption was deeply flawed.
What I would have wanted was a more honest debate about how to protect the old, the frail, and those with major risk factors while also minimising the social, educational, economic, and indirect medical harms caused by restrictions. Yes, that is hard! Policy is supposed to deal with hard problems, not pretend that trade-offs disappear because they are uncomfortable.
Instead, much of the public discussion collapsed into a useless binary: "lock down harder and longer" versus "let it rip". With hindsight, both look far too crude for the actual problem we faced.
zoul 9 hours ago [-]
They did the best for society, not for their child. Yes, vaccines are the best choice, there is no doubt about that. But the society in question must take much better care of those who sacrifice so much for the whole.
Sabinus 8 hours ago [-]
No, they did the best for their child. They had no way of knowing their child would react before they gave the vaccine. The harms and risks of illness prevented by vaccination are far greater than the harms and the risks of adverse reaction.
Herd immunity arguments can make that calculation more fuzzy but the herd can't tolerate many people opting out and still give group cover. So after a certain amount of people, choosing not to vaccinate is seriously risking illness. Society is built to handle those types of collective action problems. The moral case is still clear IMO.
qsera 9 hours ago [-]
> it's a trade off but it's one that must be made.
It is a trade off that is fair to the individual and to the society IF the society live up to its end of the bargain and had come up with a method of producing the vaccines without the profit maxxing incentive.
Sabinus 8 hours ago [-]
Well regulated markets are extremely productive.
If there is another country on Earth that produces better vaccines via a better system I'm all ears but this sounds like unrealistic DemSoc complaining to me. Expand Medicare widely. Make private insurance extremely optional. The other Western democracies seem to manage this pretty well.
qsera 8 hours ago [-]
I am not even in US.
And what I said is in a global context.
nxc18 9 hours ago [-]
Seatbelts and airbags sometimes kill people, too. Sometimes people die in unlucky ways.
cedws 9 hours ago [-]
Healthy children and young adults were at very little risk from COVID though. Seatbelts are a safety measure that applies almost uniformly across age groups.
estearum 9 hours ago [-]
Yes, they were at low risk. They were actually at far lower risk of harm from the vaccines.
It was and remains statistically correct to vaccinate young people.
ta8903 7 hours ago [-]
Should we really be using words like "correct" for something like this? It's just a tradeoff, you could say it's a better solution optimizing for fewer dead people, but it is in no way a morally superior solution. You could just as easily argue that not vaccinating at all and letting COVID spread would be a better solution for a nation since COVID overwhelmingly killed old and unhealthy people who are otherwise a drag on the economy.
cedws 9 hours ago [-]
Yes, but the crux of my original point was not about absolute number of lives saved or lost. It was about the trolley problem and mandates.
estearum 9 hours ago [-]
But the trolley problem doesn't make sense here. The statistically correct thing to do, in nearly all cases for nearly all people, both for themselves and for their community (separately!), was to get vaccinated.
cedws 8 hours ago [-]
It does though. A government mandate is the same as pulling the lever, it’s trading who lives and who dies. Even if more people survive as result, just like in the original trolley problem, the one who pulls the lever becomes responsible for the exchange.
I’m not even arguing the government shouldn’t pull the lever, I just want people to be held accountable for the lives lost as a result, and for the families to be treated with compassion.
bawolff 7 hours ago [-]
> just like in the original trolley problem, the one who pulls the lever becomes responsible for the exchange.
That is a conclusion you can have, but you're speaking like its the official correct conclusion, which isn't really true.
The reason the trolly problem is so popular is because there isn't an agreed upon answer and different people come to different conclusions about it. Some people would agree that by pulling the lever you become morally responsible in a way you aren't if you take no action. Other people think you are morally culpable either way.
InsideOutSanta 7 hours ago [-]
The one who decides not to pull the lever is just as responsible, and killed a lot more people.
estearum 8 hours ago [-]
Ah I see, I missed that way up the thread you were scoping this to vaccine mandates.
airstrike 9 hours ago [-]
Healthy individuals spread the disease to others, ultimately killing more people than the infinitesimal odds from getting vaccinated at the height of the pandemic
bsder 9 hours ago [-]
> Healthy children and young adults were at very little risk from COVID though.
People repeat this but there is no validation of this.
Sure, children and young adults mostly weren't at risk of dying. It is not at all clear that there are not bad side effects from getting an active Covid infection. We're still crunching the data.
We're just now beginning the process of correlating virii and bad latent effects many years later. HPV -> Cervical Cancer. Epsetin-Barr -> MS. And, of course the one we have known about for a while: Chicken Pox -> Shingles.
renw0rp 8 hours ago [-]
My cousin died in 2021 at the age of 28 after AstraZeneca vaccine. Quite unfortunate, they starter increasing the age group of people receiving that vaccine literally days after he got it. His parents obviously are obviously still struggling with it and will never really accept it.
InsideOutSanta 7 hours ago [-]
I don't have to imagine, I lost relatives to people who didn't get vaccinated. A lot of people did. Probably literally billions.
bawolff 8 hours ago [-]
> Imagine if you had lost a son or daughter due to this
And imagine if you lost a son or daughter due to not doing this.
You are making a choice either way. If the opposite choice was made there are different consequences. Its not like you can opt out of consequences by not choosing.
voxl 8 hours ago [-]
Comparing it to the trolley problem is incorrect. COVID had real potential to kill you, even as a young person. At that point its a matter of risk assessment for yourself. Take a 2% chance of dying, a slightly higher chance of reduced quality of life (long COVID), or take a lottery-winning chance of dying to this blood clot. It is appropriate to do the math correctly to decide if this makes sense, but to claim that scientists and advocates did not do this personal risk assessment math and merely went off the benefits of herd immunity is a lie and anti-vaccine propaganda.
natureiskino 8 hours ago [-]
>Comparing it to the trolley problem is incorrect. COVID had real potential to kill you, even as a young person.
I don't think this is correct. If you remove the people with comorbidities, the risk for healthy young people was minuscule, there's way other issues you should concern yourself with at that point, rather than dying from COVID.
Vaccinating young people with something that had the potential of side effects was just dumb, either way you look at it. I'm honestly baffled it was accepted. It seems to be the product of mass hysteria, sustained by greed for profits.
bawolff 7 hours ago [-]
> the risk for healthy young people was minuscule
Arguably so was the risk from the vaccine.
About 17400 people under 20 died of covid. According to this paper https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8875435/ all the people who died from side effects of the covid vaccine were over 22 (its possible that is not exhaustive, but i can't seem to find any examples of confirmed deaths related to the vaccine for children. If there are any i think its likely the number is in the single digits).
So even if the risk of death from covid in kids is small, its still probably at least 1000 times higher than the risk from the vaccine, and possibly much higher.
> something that had the potential of side effects
Literally everything has potential side effects. Clean drinking water? Has side effects (e.g. less vitamin b12 from poop). All choices have consequences.
andrei_says_ 8 hours ago [-]
A nice lottery simulator which had me stop playing the lottery
Oh fun, I won the $330m jackpot after 3.5m tickets, the lesson is apparently lost on me :)
mrmuagi 8 hours ago [-]
2% chance of death? A quick google shows it to be around 0.16%, and the deaths seem to be allocated to people who are older or just have other comorbities. I think the scientists in retrospect just didnt want hospitals to get full honestly, since they dont have the capacity for it as it is — atleast here in Canada.
7 hours ago [-]
elp 6 hours ago [-]
For comparison the death rate from the vaccine is around 0.0001%.
Yes they didn't want the hospitals to get full. That's when the younger healthy people who would have recovered can't get the medical care they need to survive.
You had to have spent covid in a pretty sad friendless hole not to know friends or family who ended up in hospital during the peaks.
8 hours ago [-]
wetpaws 10 hours ago [-]
Nothingburger like pretty much everything that antivaxers talk about
dehrmann 10 hours ago [-]
Dismissing people like this is part of what fuels the antivax movement. Vaccines are generally effective, but they're not perfect and have side effects, and failing to acknowledge that when someone is asking in in good faith polarizes people and makes it look like someone's trying to hide something.
latentsea 9 hours ago [-]
Those people are going to be polarised regardless. If you don't give them a reason to be polarised they'll invent one because they want to be polarised.
anonzzzies 6 hours ago [-]
I lost friends during covid who turned into morons like that; so much so that I started to think maybe it is a side effect of the virus. One of them recently moved to the other side of the world 'because Trump is going to nuke us' (he lived in the EU). It is fine to dismiss, ignore and berate morons; they won't change their mind and must have been always like that; just before covid everyone would've laughed in your face so you would not have said any of this out loud. Now I meet a few too many people who point at vapour trails and tell me how their gov is blocking the sun and is poisoning us to keep us dumb. Dismiss and hope they won't procreate.
jasonvorhe 2 hours ago [-]
I also lost friends during COVID. Some because they suddenly died of cancer in their early 30s.
"vapor trails" - well, if helps you sleep better.
mullingitover 9 hours ago [-]
Dismissing people who dismiss the antivax movement like this is part of what fuels the anti-anti-vax movement.
shermantanktop 6 hours ago [-]
I see you’ve played knifey-spooney before!
Freedom2 9 hours ago [-]
Good faith isn't enough. I just reread some tweets, and there were multiple people who in completely good faith (from their point of view) were protecting their community by claiming everybody who took a vaccine would be dead by June 2026.
Schiendelman 10 hours ago [-]
It was a nothingburger. It wasn't even a side effect of the mRNA vaccines.
You don't have to care about the people who aren't interested in science. Sure, you have to protect immunocompromised people from those people, and we can do that.
jrflowers 9 hours ago [-]
It is okay to dismiss negligible things. People sustain a lot of injuries and die in their bathrooms but it would be insane to both-sides somebody’s campaign against taking shits
The problem with this argument is that there are an infinite amount of "crackpot" views that then need to be "acknowledged" and engaged with.
ethbr1 1 hours ago [-]
Part of it is the monkey/typewriter problem.
Not saying this about parent, but am absolutely saying it about the vaccine skeptic community in general.
If the barrier to asking a question is zero (i.e. someone without a high school biology education can ask a question and be listened to) but the barrier to answering any question to the community's satisfaction is high (i.e. a full study, on exactly that question, controlled for all variables, that shows a clear result) then the effort asymmetry leads to many unanswered questions.
... which the skeptic community then points to to support the belief that there are many legitimate unanswered questions.
munksbeer 35 minutes ago [-]
That is exactly my point.
nn43tzl 10 hours ago [-]
[dead]
jasonvorhe 2 hours ago [-]
Embalmers all over Western countries keep on pulling them out of people but of course that's all dangerous misinformation and harmful for democracy.
Sammi 29 minutes ago [-]
Please show me the data. If embalmers all over the world are seeing this, then there surely should be some data, right?
phendrenad2 40 minutes ago [-]
It's hard to tell "dangerous misinformation" from "thing someone made up for tiktok views". The difference is facts and evidence. I'm still waiting to see either.
mchusma 9 hours ago [-]
I really feel that many of the issues with mRNA vaccines and health studies in general are generalizations like “safe and effective”. Everything has statistical risks and benefits, and we should just share those front and center with people. Eg test results for X mean you have a Y% chance of having X, given your history and symptoms and other results. Here are low cost low risk marginal things you can do to improve statistical significance.
Similar for vaccines, just give us the numbers clearly and upfront.
This bypasses regulators from having to make claims beyond “we reviewed the data and agree with these numbers and feel that this should not be banned.” I do think it would also help to separate something “not banned” and being “required to be covered by insurance” or “required for professions like the military”. I think trying to simplify things makes things worse, because this abstraction is not real.
estearum 9 hours ago [-]
> Similar for vaccines, just give us the numbers clearly and upfront.
You are aware that literally anyone can go and literally find exactly these numbers, correct?
The trial results are published!
xboxnolifes 3 hours ago [-]
Yes, but the point of science/health communication sources is to communicate. People aren't going to spend an afternoon figuring out where to find medical trial results, learn how to read them with a bunch of unknown terms, and form a risk tolerance analysis. I know this. You know this. Everyone know this.
The health and science communicators must improve how they communicate with the public.
Sammi 26 minutes ago [-]
But they are!
They are saying what is generally safe and what is not. Telling people the dry statistics won't help most people. Remember half of all people are below average in IQ. You need to paint with broad strokes if you want to reach most people.
s1artibartfast 9 hours ago [-]
Sounds like a oppurtunity for health educatation.
99%+ of people dont know they can look in the USPI for this data.
However, it isnt the best and most up to date, which the regulator and FDA would have and are unlikely to share.
estearum 9 hours ago [-]
100% of people who Google something like "how do we know the covid vaccines are good" would discover that the tool we use to figure that out is called a "clinical trial." Then they can look up "covid vaccine clinical trial results."
The reality is none of these "do your own research" or "just asking questions" people are actually curious whatsoever. Curiosity requires more than zero effort. Simply saying you're "doing your own research" and "just asking questions" while regurgitating the last thing you saw on your TikTok feed is super easy and gives you all the same sense of intellectual superiority.
smallstepforman 8 hours ago [-]
The rushed clinical trials were only done with 122 people and a control group. During the very short trial, 1 person died in the first group, 2 in the other. The “conclusion” was its better to be vaccinated and it protects you better. 12 months later AstraZenica vaccine pulled from market everywhere ….
estearum 8 hours ago [-]
This is not true lol.
s1artibartfast 8 hours ago [-]
Im not sure what point you are making.
Are you opposed to public health agencies sharing science based facts and helping people find the data?
estearum 8 hours ago [-]
No? My point is the data is all available and always has been.
s1artibartfast 7 hours ago [-]
Some data is, some isnt. Most people dont look for it and public health communications isnt data focused.
Nobody was was claiming that people cant google.
I dont know why you bring this up as a gotcha when someone said public health communications should share more data.
blub 6 hours ago [-]
It’s trivial to publish these so that they’re both easily available and easy to understand. I’m guessing that’s not the case for the CDC, since you didn’t post any link or guideline.
A nice example was the EUCDC guidance on AstraZeneca’s vaccine which showed that for young age groups the vaccine was more dangerous than the disease. That allows anyone to make an informed decision for themselves instead of being bullied or emotionally blackmailed “for the greater good”.
Par for the course, I can’t access the actual study from The Lancet and have to settle for second-rate journalist summaries which are typically biased and ultimately worthless.
peyton 9 hours ago [-]
Yep, those regulated marketing terms could use an update.
Regulators don’t make cures. There’s room to improve on that side of the system.
Especially as emerging approaches seem to be trending more systems-thinking-oriented, eg “this will strengthen your immune system to fight lots of diseases.”
doginasuit 11 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure this information will sway very many people. I have relatives who are all getting tested for t-cell counts related to mRNA because they are convinced they are the cause of any and all health problems they are facing. It seems like the medical professionals who are administering the tests are at least somewhat responsible for their misapplication.
tomesco 10 hours ago [-]
Information won’t sway someone who’s views aren’t based on information.
binarycrusader 10 hours ago [-]
What’s the saying?
You cannot reason a person out of a position they did not reason themself into in the first place.
Schiendelman 10 hours ago [-]
It's not about swaying individuals. Let people believe their stupid stuff.
It's about swaying investors and regulators. And yeah, we need to make sure we excise our regulators of crazy people, but that's cyclic. And next cycle, we'll get vaccines for a lot more.
doginasuit 8 hours ago [-]
Point taken, but it isn't just a matter of individuals, it is a popular movement that has captured a significant part of role of regulators. The research is still valuable, but its lack of influence is not a problem that is safe to dismiss.
Schiendelman 35 minutes ago [-]
Unfortunately, fighting the movement doesn't do anything for anyone. We both agree you need to fix the regulators - that's the thing you can change, and the actions that help there look nothing like arguing with the movement.
idiotsecant 9 hours ago [-]
It matters over time. The old kooks die off and are replaced with people who are relatively sane until they find new things to be old kooks about.
cmrdporcupine 9 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately a large number of the "kooks" are GenX and younger.
epistasis 11 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
javea71 10 hours ago [-]
I think you'll find there's a rational distrust in big pharma
epistasis 10 hours ago [-]
I don't think I'll find that, after investigating the claims I have heard.
babypuncher 10 hours ago [-]
Two things can be true: Big Pharma can be evil, and their products are much better vetted for safety and efficacy than random peptides sourced form mystery factories.
mullingitover 9 hours ago [-]
The Venn diagram of people who distrust big pharma and the people who uncritically trust the far larger “wellness” industry is a circle.
vlian2088 10 hours ago [-]
and do you really think a significant percentage of forced vaccination detractors are taking mystery peptides? have there been studies, or are you vibing this guess off snarky reddit comments?
ianm218 9 hours ago [-]
Anecdotally I know several people who would fall in the camp of anti vax but openly use peptides.
And intuitively it makes sense we’re talking about groups of people who are skeptical of main stream institutional health recommendations but trust specific personal sources for medical advice.
I’m vibing but it feels like there is a pretty clear intersection of peptides and the fringe science health community no?
quotemstr 10 hours ago [-]
Nobody's used state power to mandate peptides and social media censorship to reports of adverse effects.
As many of us said at the time, the mandates weren't worth the destruction of public trust, especially because the vaccine wasn't even sterilizing.
The next time there's a crisis, resist the urge to use the government to achieve outcomes by brute force. It doesn't work and has generational adverse consequences.
RandomLensman 9 hours ago [-]
How should the US have pursued WWII if government force weren't an option?
idiotsecant 9 hours ago [-]
I can't even have this argument again. It's exhausting.
api 10 hours ago [-]
“I won’t put chemicals from big pharma in my body!”
Proceeds to raw dog a bunch of “research chemicals” cause some roided up bro talked about it on a podcast…
Well cited doesn't mean very much outside of the context of peer reviewed work.
This book pushes Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine as "miracle cures", thanks to that idea my relatives also have a stockpile of both.
LastTrain 10 hours ago [-]
I have a simple rule. If a person spews complete bullshit I no longer trust them.
epistasis 11 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
manwe150 10 hours ago [-]
Having read it, he does cite something for almost every claim. Although almost every source also contradicts his conclusions on some basic, logical, statistical, mathematical, or humane level, if you bother to fact check them. So it’s quite hard to quantify what it means to say it has good citations.
lettergram 11 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
shakna 11 hours ago [-]
RFK's reliance on terrain theory, disproved continually since some five hundred years ago, does much to assist in citations - it is common to cite bad science as evidence where we need to improve public comprehension.
I don't approve of the downvoting and flagging, if there's anywhere on the internet that conspiracy ideas can be constructively pushed back on it should be here.
That being said you're not making very detailed defences of RFK's book and ideas. Can you be more specific on some ideas or claims from his book that you believe in and how they're supported?
steve-atx-7600 10 hours ago [-]
“Science-schmiance”
vlian2088 10 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
ggm 10 hours ago [-]
Shorter lead times in the face of viral mutations will be helpful.
Tailored vaccines for things like cancer are a game changer.
I live in hope of a semi-universal flu+related vaccine.
I live in fear of the measles induced "immune amnesia" effect.
z3ratul163071 8 hours ago [-]
how exactly were the vaccines effective, if every single person i know who got them got covid?
phendrenad2 36 minutes ago [-]
It saved a lot of people and gave COVID time to mutate into a relatively benign form.
boruto 6 hours ago [-]
I took two doses of mRNA vaccine, I still got covid, the fever, the pains it was horrible, I was in a foreign country alone where I didn't speak the language. I say this because that was the scariest moment of my life, I am thankful to the people who invented them.
I honestly believe it would have been worse had I not taken the vaccine.
antoniojtorres 7 hours ago [-]
Astounding that this question is being asked (presumably) in earnest after the whole ordeal we went through. Wow.
dopa42365 8 hours ago [-]
A million Americans chose death from very effective (preventable) disease instead. That's how.
nesarkvechnep 8 hours ago [-]
Did they die?
Markoff 6 hours ago [-]
would they die if they didn't take the vaxx? plenty people who got vaxx died anyway, plenty people who got COVID died as well, some of them from COVID, most of them were just infected while dying and COVID had really nothing to do with their death, but it was needed to pump those numbers about scary dangerous COVID so govs can go on powertrips while taking pocket money from pharma lobby
davidhalter 51 minutes ago [-]
The hospitalization of unvaccinated people vs. vaccinated people was 10.5 times higher [1]. Lethality was 7 times higher if you did not take the vaccine [2]. I think we also have to remember that hospitalizations where the reason why a lot of mandates where enacted in the first place. Politicians where afraid that the hospitals would run out of capacity.
At a population level, people who were vaccinated died at lower rates. We have numbers on this stuff. It was pretty easy to find during covid and I imagine you could find it with a quick Google search now if you'd like.
fivetenpen 8 hours ago [-]
They were never meant to prevent people from getting COVID.
They were meant to prevent people from dying due to COVID.
The fact they were able to tell you they had COVID means it was a resounding success (not dead).
bad_username 8 hours ago [-]
> They were never meant to prevent people from getting COVID.
You see, this kind of lying and gaslighting is exactly what feeds the distrust in the government and scientific establishment in general public. No number of studies is going to reverse that any time soon.
jasonvorhe 2 hours ago [-]
In every public hearing, all pharma execs stated that they never tested and verified that they prevent transmission.
antoniojtorres 6 hours ago [-]
They will HELP, they never claimed you would be IMMUNE. it’s in the text you’re citing!
7 hours ago [-]
Markoff 6 hours ago [-]
there are literally people in this discussion talking about these vaccines preventing COVID spread, parroting this complete nonsense politicians and "experts" made when they pushed these "vaccines"
root_axis 8 hours ago [-]
Is the rabies vaccine not effective in your view?
8 hours ago [-]
declan_roberts 10 hours ago [-]
Really glad they confirmed this, about 5 years after I was forced to take one at threat of job loss despite 1) already having had natural Covid and 2) working a fully remote job.
But better late than never I suppose.
epistasis 10 hours ago [-]
They confirmed this when the vaccines were authorized. And as part of every drug, there's continual, ongoing, review of the data to ensure that safety is maintained, and that nothing has changed about the drug and its manufacturing. This is the "phase 4" of a drug, continual ongoing monitoring.
SV_BubbleTime 9 hours ago [-]
> They confirmed this when the vaccines were authorized
No. They didn’t. They said it.
You were the Phase3 trial. You can probably debate the ethicality, the decisions made, but do not pretend they had 5 year data before deploying to the entire world.
Facts matter.
epistasis 9 hours ago [-]
It's quite odd for a person to assert falehoods while also saying "facts matter."
You're aware that most drugs are approved without 5-year data, correct? Why did you draw the line there? Why not wait for 10-year data? What about 20- or 50- or 100-year data?
Do we need 75-year data for Viagra too?
30-year data for aspirin?
What's the logic tree here?
yieldcrv 11 hours ago [-]
> The researchers emphasize that, like all vaccines, mRNA vaccines can have side effects. They found that serious adverse events—such as myocarditis, which occurs more frequently in younger males—are rare and consistently outweighed by the vaccines’ protection
reminder to the myocarditis-maxxies, the actual virus causes that too and the 2020-2021 variants caused it worse
if we were all going to drop dead (I think 2 years ago now, I’m waaaaiting!) for whatever the vaccine did, it would apply to a broader population due to covid exposure
ifyoubuildit 10 hours ago [-]
> reminder to the myocarditis-maxxies, the actual virus causes that too and the 2020-2021 variants caused it worse
Do you know if the vaccine prevented the virus-induced myocarditis? Cause the vaccine didn't do much to stop people from getting covid, multiple times even.
So many people frame this as either/or, you either had the risk of covid induced myocarditis or you had the (supposed) lesser risk of myocarditis from the vaccine. But if you got the vaccine (x times) and then covid (y times), isn't your risk roughly x + y?
amluto 9 hours ago [-]
The comparison of cardiovascular safety with vs without the vaccine is not even close:
(Personally, I wish researchers would not forgot quite so often that there is a non-mRNA COVID vaccine available in the US. Where's all the analysis of the effects of the Novavax vaccine?)
blub 6 hours ago [-]
The myocarditis as caused by e.g. Moderna was affecting teen males and you posted a link to a blog which linked to a study about 70 year old US veterans.
croon 1 hours ago [-]
If you're referring to the Mike Kwan paper, he was on (I believe, it was years ago) the Science Vs podcast to debunk claims by the likes of Malone and Rogan regarding his study.
But yes, there are instances of myocarditis from vaccines, but occurance was 4-5/100k as opposed to unvaccinated 200/100k.
Edit: in his words:
> MK: All the cases were hospitalised because we wanted to perform a detailed workup for them
> RR: So they didn't need to be there to, like, keep them alive.
> WZ: No, no, no, no, no, no, no. In fact, he said that that these these patients, they all cleared up with either painkillers[50] like ibuprofen …
> MK: Some of them even not require medications, and they just take a rest, and eventually they recover by themselves, and none of them got severe complications, and no cases of mortality, most importantly. And all of them recover and went back home. And so far, some patients are being followed up around 7 months[51] and they’re very good, no problem, so this is very good news.
yieldcrv 10 hours ago [-]
I want to empathize with you, plenty of medical professionals used really reductive and inaccurate language that should be rightfully criticized. stopping people from getting covid being one of those things
none of those were goals of the vaccine, so its a fruitless exercise to build on top of
they communicated poorly at all levels the one time society needed them to communicate effectively, and lost the public trust
The goal was to reduce the spread overall, lessen the symptoms for individuals, have your own body fight it faster instead of becoming a factory for it, de-risking cytokine storms
OrvalWintermute 8 hours ago [-]
“Rare”? :)
We don’t know the actual numbers as pericarditis and myocarditis can occur asymptomatically, and people truly need to be under very active medical surveillance to detect it
zmgsabst 8 hours ago [-]
I believe Thailand did actively monitor some kids and found about 1 in 35 childhood COVID vaccinations.
blub 6 hours ago [-]
Myocarditis-maxxies will likely never take off as an insult, but vaxmaxxer just might :) Shortness, pronunciation and simplicity all play a role.
Anyway, that statement is actually useless. The moment it became clear that some vaccine increases the risk of myocarditis, several European countries swapped them out for the less risky variants, like any sane person would.
The only people still fighting these windmills are the online kind.
antonvs 10 hours ago [-]
> if we were all going to drop dead (I think 2 years ago now, I’m waaaaiting!)
Channeling Monty Python:
... I got better
vlian2088 10 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
api 11 hours ago [-]
The potential for the technology in cancer treatment is what I find most exciting.
epistasis 11 hours ago [-]
Yes, I've been very excited about that for more than 10 years. It may not pan out, it's far more speculative than infectious disease prevention, but when combined with checkpoint inhibitors, and I fear they may not do the bold thing and do fully personalized therapeutic vaccines, but it does provide a great deal of hope.
snootypoot 11 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
hack1312 11 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
weikju 11 hours ago [-]
Just a much narrower definition of humanity than what we’re thinking.
jimbob45 11 hours ago [-]
Until HIPAA is gone, we’ll never be able to make use of enough data to truly make a difference for those last two.
I’m confused because you said credible doctors and then linked to one of the biggest cranks on the internet.
anonymousiam 5 hours ago [-]
You may think Malone is a crank, and I will not disagree with you.
The page I linked is a repository that Malone set up for peer-reviewed papers describing MRNA side effects.
Those papers are not authored by Malone, and there are presently over 700 of them on the site.
I believe he did this because authors of those and similar papers have faced political backlash for their scientific contributions. For some reason, many world governments have censored, and advocated censorship of content such as this, and similar content that questions things such as the CoViD-19 point of origin, which for years has been riddled with misinformation.
So you can go ahead an claim that more than 700 peer reviewed papers were all authored by cranks, but my purpose was to point out that the parent article's claims of absolute "safety, effectiveness, and promise" are not unanimously accepted.
willmadden 10 hours ago [-]
The link in the article does not show the study, just a list of references, a summary and the researchers who published it. How many of the researchers who published this study have conflicts of interest? Where is the full study for review?
optionalsquid 3 hours ago [-]
The first link in the article goes straight to the study:
We synthesise evidence on vaccine components, manufacturing quality controls, and regulatory standards that underpin safety, alongside data from randomised trials, post-authorisation surveillance, and active pharmacovigilance systems.
"synthesize???"
With almost 200 references and the use of "synthesize???" it sound like AI generated slop.
The article is behind a paywall in any case so why so many positive comments about it?
This administration literally fast-tracked the original covid vaccines for approval.
Say what you will about the Covid vaccine or Kennedy’s specific motivations (which I disagree with), but choosing to cut government funding for development of wildly profitable pharmaceutical products is a reasonable choice.
lokar 11 hours ago [-]
My understanding is that vaccine research and production is almost never profitable and depends on government support. Either grants, guaranteed purchases, or both.
timr 11 hours ago [-]
Your understanding is incorrect. All research is unprofitable, by definition. Vaccines are wildly profitable.
baronvonsp 11 hours ago [-]
Yeah that's called survivorship bias. The ones that make it to market can be wildly profitable to manufacture. Doing all the work to sift through what does and doesn't work to discover new vaccines wouldn't happen without public funding.
timr 10 hours ago [-]
No, that’s called pharmaceutical development. That’s the business.
We don’t generally fund Merck’s R&D with federal money. You’ll note the following critical detail from the article:
> That will impact 22 projects being led by major pharmaceutical companies, including Pfizer and Moderna, for vaccines against bird flu and other viruses, HHS said.
We’ve gone so far round the bend with partisanship that straight-up corporate welfare has become a left-wing cause.
quinnjh 10 hours ago [-]
Certainly not _all_ of it, but a few billion at least.
Yeah, there would be none without government support.
Remember when everyone was contributing spare dimes to fund a vaccine?
timr 11 hours ago [-]
No. Pharmaceutical companies love vaccines. They’re relatively easy to make, they’re indemnified against harms, they cannot be generic, and they are wildly profitable. And on top of all of that, they often get mandated by schools, ensuring a captive market.
If the government never funded another study for vaccines, ever, pharma companies would continue to pump them out.
no-name-here 9 hours ago [-]
*Pre-mrna* vaccines couldn’t be generic since it was impossible to have an exact copy of a vaccine [1], because they were created from living organisms.
It is not yet clear whether mRNA will be treated like generics.
The mandate is the government support, it’s a purchase guarantee.
timr 11 hours ago [-]
…Which hasn’t changed.
Also, for the record: very few (no?) vaccines are “mandated” by the federal government. Recommendations are made, and state and local governments do this, mainly through school districts.
Various agencies and the military will, of course, mandate things for their own staff.
qsera 8 hours ago [-]
That "Vaccines are not profitable" is a misinformation put out there by...I don't know who, but it is out there somehow...
It is really weird that even here in HN where everyone is aware of corporate greed and corruption, corporations becomes the good guys when it comes to vaccines.
Now you might think of bringing up regulators and checks and balances at this point...
But imagine this. If approving a vaccine, or like here, a vaccine technology could unlock 1 Trillion dollars in revenue, imagine how much of that can be paid politicians/regulators/scientists/thought leadrs to act favorably?
How many of those regulators, who are just average human beings, can resist that?
antonvs 10 hours ago [-]
> All research is unprofitable, by definition.
The game to compensate for that is to be to convince gullible investors that your commercially viable fusion plant, or quantum computer, or unrealistic space ambitions are just 5 years away! Invest now or miss out!
The line between research and scamming in an ultracapitalist economy becomes very blurry.
defrost 9 hours ago [-]
It's not dissimilar to oil & gas (energy) and mineral resources ... the outgoings on exploration are a cash bloodletting that often has no return.
The "win" is occasionally getting a steadily profitable field or lode for multiple decades after the costs of proving and the fun of raising forward capital loans for extraction and processing plant capital.
petilon 11 hours ago [-]
Not many people know that Trump had a hand in starting the pandemic.
Here's what we know: In 2014, Obama administration halted the so called "gain of function" research because of risk of laboratory accidents. In 2017, the Trump administration restarted this dangerous research. See links below.
Excerpt: [Obama administration] White House announced Friday that it would temporarily halt all new funding for experiments that seek to study certain infectious agents by making them more dangerous. The White House said the moratorium decision had been made “following recent biosafety incidents at federal research facilities.”
Excerpt: [Trump administration] on Tuesday ended a moratorium imposed three years ago on funding research that alters germs to make them more lethal. Critics say these researchers risk creating a monster germ that could escape the lab and seed a pandemic.
So, Trump restarted the dangerous research that Obama had shut down. You may be thinking, what does that have to do with Covid? Covid started in Wuhan, China, right?
It turns out that the Trump administration, through the National Institutes of Health (NIH), provided funding to the EcoHealth Alliance, an American non-profit organization focused on studying emerging diseases. The EcoHealth Alliance, in turn, provided funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China for researching bat coronaviruses. The rest is history.
And then Trump also disbanded the pandemic preparedness team in 2018 just in time for the pandemic. See link below.
Well, I have to say that this is the most innovative leap of partisan politics I’ve seen so far this year!
Most left-wing critics are still struggling with admitting that Anthony Fauci really did provide funding to EcoHealth, despite ample documentation.
petilon 11 hours ago [-]
Not sure what is partisan about this. Some facts were presented. Not opinions, facts. If you dispute any of the above is factual please back up your assertion with citations.
timr 11 hours ago [-]
The facts are true. Blaming Trump is the innovation.
For the record, I don’t care who gets blamed. I just think it’s a hilarious twist of partisan rhetoric.
petilon 11 hours ago [-]
If the President hires someone who then restarted research that previous admin stopped for being too dangerous, does the President get no part of the blame? The buck stops with the President. If he hired the wrong person--and he has hired plenty of wrong people this time around--he gets the blame for the disasters they cause.
stinkbeetle 6 hours ago [-]
This is great, speed running the meme.
1. There were no labs.
2. There was no gain of function research being funded.
3. The baseless lab leak conspiracy theory is hateful extreme far right Russian disinformation that is very dangerous to our democracy and it has already been debunked by the science and 72 intelligence agencies and CNN. Fauci is a Saint!
4. There was a lab leak and it's Trump's fault and you're still a dangerous conspiracy theorist for having previously questioned "the experts" integrity or the possibility of a lab leak.
estearum 9 hours ago [-]
I haven't seen anyone at all dispute that NIH funded EcoHealth lol
> The EcoHealth Alliance, in turn, provided funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China for researching bat coronaviruses. The rest is history.
The WIV is 20km from the Huanan market where the pandemic started. There is no direct evidence linking the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 to laboratory work conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.[0] The evidence for zoonotic origin with multiple spillover events at the Huanan market is overwhelming.
No that was a conspiracy theory fueled by Russian disinformation, the scientists and experts testified that there was no gain of function work being done and debunked it.
petilon 11 hours ago [-]
Citation needed. If you are going to say NYT article is wrong we need more than just your words.
stinkbeetle 11 hours ago [-]
You really believe some billionaire oligarchs propaganda corporation over foremost self-proclaimed expert Anthony "I am the science" Fauci? Something an agent of Putin would say.
9 hours ago [-]
adjejmxbdjdn 11 hours ago [-]
Nope. Not this administration at all.
Trump 1 was a very different administration.
And Trump himself has publicly backed off what was probably his one major achievement after receiving pushback from his supporters.
timr 11 hours ago [-]
You’re splitting hairs.
TylerE 11 hours ago [-]
No, he really isn’t.
Trump one had a sane (terrible, but sane) cabinet that largely controlled his wilder impulses.
This time he went for loyalty above all else.
timr 11 hours ago [-]
> Trump one had a sane cabinet that largely controlled his wilder impulses.
This is absurdly revisionist. The first administration’s cabinet/staff was a reality show and a merry go round of people like Anthony Scaramucci and Ryan Zinke. If anything “controlled” it, it was just the chaos of incompetence.
As far as loyalty goes, I suppose it’s worth reminding you that Kennedy was a Democrat, who ran in the Democratic presidential primary, and routinely criticized Trump.
jancsika 10 hours ago [-]
OP is saying Trump has demanded loyalty as a condition of serving in his administration. As HHS Secretary, RFK caved on Roundup, something he famously won a case against as a lawyer[1]. That even lost RFK support from some of his MAHA fans.
Relatively speaking Trump 1.0 had a sane cabinet. Yes, there were some crazies, sure, but relative to the people he has around him now, they seem sane.
DANmode 9 hours ago [-]
Getting warmer.
ceejayoz 10 hours ago [-]
Where’s the Kelly and Mattis in the second term?
Kennedy was a Democrat as a spoiler.
Sabinus 10 hours ago [-]
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api 12 hours ago [-]
The biggest single success from Trump’s first term is the thing his base hates to the point that they booed him over it.
altmanaltman 10 hours ago [-]
It's literally not the same administration. Also yeah he wants private companies to stop "wild" profits while he grifts the nation with crypto, hosting UFC on white house? You have to be stupid or willfully ignorant to think the current administration gives a single f about unchecked profits or the people's general wellbeing.
snootypoot 11 hours ago [-]
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11 hours ago [-]
dogwalker5000 12 hours ago [-]
Wow, they literally put an antivaccer in charge of the health department.
wrs 10 hours ago [-]
I'm honestly surprised they didn't put a flat-earther in charge of NASA.
jasonvorhe 2 hours ago [-]
NASA founder and Project Paperclip imported Nazi scientist Werner von Braun's tombstone references Psalms 19:1:
> "The heavens declare the almighty of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork."
Sabinus 9 hours ago [-]
It's a lot harder to claim success with no evidence in the space race than healthcare policy.
There's a minimum level of actual competence needed for that job to not embarrass the Trump admin.
zulux 11 hours ago [-]
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yieldcrv 10 hours ago [-]
This is a thread about the world, not American hubris about its relevance in it
Thanks for the new toll in Hormuz though
nxm 10 hours ago [-]
What toll?
yieldcrv 9 hours ago [-]
The one Iran set up that wasn’t there before US engaged in regime change there
petterroea 12 hours ago [-]
If we want to solve that we need to stop enabling career politicians whose only life experience is debating
xboxnolifes 11 hours ago [-]
Right now, we'd be better off if we even had politicians who could manage an actual debate. Seems like we can't get anything other than mudslinging and strongarming right now.
TylerE 11 hours ago [-]
We would be a hell of a lot better off with career politicians than the current batch of grifters and ex-Fox News chuckleheads.
snootypoot 12 hours ago [-]
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nn43tzl 10 hours ago [-]
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stefanwlb 10 hours ago [-]
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nn43tzl 10 hours ago [-]
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nn43tzl 10 hours ago [-]
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z3ratul163071 8 hours ago [-]
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snootypoot 12 hours ago [-]
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asteroidburger 11 hours ago [-]
Looking forward to reading about it in The Lancet or another respected medical publication.
snootypoot 11 hours ago [-]
do those exist anymore? any publication that accepted the revised definition of natural immunity during the global push for this untested gene therapy mrna injection seems to be discredited. i remember when natural immunity went from being a normal concept to a right wing conspiracy theory.
Sabinus 9 hours ago [-]
Shouldn't we all by dying from myocarditis or sterile or mind controlled or gay by now according to the conspiracy narratives around COVID?
Weren't the lockdowns supposed to go on forever and usher in the WEF Davos future? What happened to that?
TacticalCoder 12 hours ago [-]
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jleyank 12 hours ago [-]
They had done safety and effectiveness testing before deployment back then. These are retrospective studies using a real large dosing and placebo population.
The closest to “untested drug matter” that existed was the antibody cocktail that might have kept Trump alive.
lokar 12 hours ago [-]
They did all the normal steps in the US. It was faster because they had the full attention of the FDA (so zero admin delays), and they did some parts in parallel, risking wasting money if things did not work out.
The mRNA approach already had years of work prior to COVID, and was already reviewed for safety.
Terr_ 11 hours ago [-]
> years of work prior to COVID
It's worth highlghting the importance of years of basic science-research and testing, all little pieces which were mostly there when we finally needed them, work that was always under-threat from people saying "what use is this, why would we ever need that?" (For which the pandemic is an implicit answe the pandemic answered: "Stuff like this!")
Among many of those collective small contributions that create a practical and effective outcome, one example of work thankfully done in advance:
> But the thing is, our vaccine is only generating the spikes itself, and we’re not mounting them on any kind of virus body. It turns out that, unmodified, freestanding Spike proteins collapse into a different structure. If injected as a vaccine, this would indeed cause our bodies to develop immunity.. but only against the collapsed spike protein. And the real SARS-CoV-2 shows up with the spiky Spike. The vaccine would not work very well in that case.
> In 2017 it was described how putting a double Proline substitution in just the right place would make the SARS-CoV-1 and MERS S proteins take up their ‘pre-fusion’ configuration, even without being part of the whole virus. This works because Proline is a very rigid amino acid. It acts as a kind of splint, stabilising the protein in the state we need to show to the immune system. The people that discovered this should be walking around high-fiving themselves incessantly. Unbearable amounts of smugness should be emanating from them. And it would all be well deserved.
The world was lucky the omicron mutation chose virulence over lethality - it could outcompete the older, more “effective” strains. This coupled with vaccines, isolation and antivirals (and treatment changes) kept the count down.
A different roll of the mutation dice might have made a sars that spread easily. That would have thinned out the middle aged folks.
petilon 12 hours ago [-]
You do what you have to do when people are dying in droves due to a pandemic and morgues are running out of room.
ses1984 12 hours ago [-]
That’s fake news. I had covid and I was fine.
/s
thin_carapace 11 hours ago [-]
people indeed were dying in droves. based on the study in sweden the vast majority of those deaths (>90%) were in the age bracket of 70 plus. aged care is already a massive issue thanks to money making being more important than having families and being human - our aging population could have been addressed here. obviously the immunocompromised and the elderly did benefit alongside pharma execs. still this seems like a 'protect the kids' type of excuse. why should I be happy that swathes of the youth had to sacrifice their bodies just so that their grandparents could live a few more years of luxury ? I'm saying this because I know multiple people that were affected negatively by coronavirus vaccines and they were all young.
netsharc 12 hours ago [-]
They did zero trials before those billions of doses! None! Straight from the lab into your veins!
/S
SV_BubbleTime 9 hours ago [-]
There wasn’t a single successful phase3 trail of any mRNA vaccine in human or animal before the Covid vaccines were deployed.
No /s
netsharc 5 hours ago [-]
There also was never a successful manned landing on the moon before Apollo 11 did it..
mndrpemndrpe 9 hours ago [-]
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wopwops 9 hours ago [-]
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nikolay 10 hours ago [-]
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_heimdall 10 hours ago [-]
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epistasis 10 hours ago [-]
> Even during the pandemic response it was eventually acknowledged that early claims of vaccines preventing infection or even spread weren't supported by the trials.
To the very best of my knowledge this is just misinformation. If you have a citation here, please provide it.
_heimdall 10 hours ago [-]
Is your concern with what the studies tested or whether it was acknowledged?
I can find you links, though it will be directly to the original studies done for the covid vaccines. The studies were well written and clearly called out their methodology. The problem was with how the studies were interpreted and explained to the public, not with the studies themselves.
_heimdall 10 hours ago [-]
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defrost 8 hours ago [-]
The issue specifically is:
early claims of vaccines preventing infection or even spread weren't supported by the trials.
Who made such stupid claims and __why__? My own recollection, from Australia watching the US, was the the US political administration of the time turned any scientific based discussion into a complete shit show - many images of cowered CDC employees sucking their faces in while Trump v1.0 babbled on about bleach and sunlight.
From my first free of politics encounters with world class epidemiologists in 1980 or so I've not heard one claim that any vaccine had a 100% efficacy rate for both disease prevention and for eliminating spread - it has _always_ been a numbers game, like seat belts, of statistical reduction.
Your own link agrees:
Conclusions: A two-dose regimen of BNT162b2 conferred 95% protection against Covid-19 in persons 16 years of age or older.
95% protection is pretty good, but for all manner of reasons it's unusual to expect any vaccine to prevent 100% of all infections across millions of people or animals.
Typically, in educated countries, phrases such as "prevent infection and spread*" are understood to mean that in the same manner as "seat belts prevent death and injury*"
( * exceptions expected )
_heimdall 2 hours ago [-]
Okay got it, I didn't expect that was what you were taking issue with. At least in the US, we were constantly being told by our government leadership that we all needed to take the vaccine to stop the spread.
Fauci, for example, claimed very early on that we needed herd immunity and would get thee with around a 60% vaccination rate. He both knew that number was too low for the hypothesis of herd immunity, raising it as time went on, and that herd immunity requires a treatment to prevent transmission, implying the vaccines were known to do that (they weren't).
More egregiously there was a political push, picked up by the media as well, that basically boiled down to an argument that anyone refusing the vaccine is actively killing old people and children. They would go so far as to say unvaccinated people shouldn't be allowed into hospitals for care for unrelated health conditions.
All that to say, my point was simply that this review paper seems to be making claims that would require research I never saw happen. Sadly the pay wall means I can't read their full claims, but even the overview of their results seem dubious.
vfclists 9 hours ago [-]
Where are the citations supporting your view that the vaccines were effective at preventing infection?
The paper I shared actually doesn't support the claim of preventing infection.
The trials showed a minimal risk of adverse responses to the injection itself and what appeared to be a reduced rate of symptoms. The trials didn't cover impact on infection rates at all, that would have required proactively testing every participant for infection which wasn't done. The trials only followed self reported symptoms, meaning all the study can indicate is a correlation with reduced symptomatic infection.
defrost 2 hours ago [-]
The paper linked shows a reduced rate of COVID in the pool of people that received a vaccine candidate compared to the pool that received a placebo:
A total of 43,548 participants underwent randomization, of whom 43,448 received injections:
21,720 with BNT162b2 and
21,728 with placebo.
There were 8 cases of Covid-19 with onset at least 7 days after the second dose among participants assigned to receive BNT162b2 and 162 cases among those assigned to placebo;
BNT162b2 was 95% effective in preventing Covid-19
Again, no vaccine ever really 100% prevents infection - what they do is reduce the number and severity of cases. Vaccines are literally created to increase the human bodies ability to fight off infection - efficacy varies by age and many other factors.
estearum 9 hours ago [-]
You can look up the clinical trial results
diego_moita 10 hours ago [-]
In the end, do facts even matter in politically charged discussions?
This sounds a bit like providing evidence for global warming, gun control or evolution. The "skeptics" just want to remain ignorant. No amount of evidence will change them.
The silver lining about vaccine skeptics, though, is the Herman Cain award[1]. What this means is that conservatives die more than liberals from preventable diseases [2].
You mean the stuff the whole world got injected with in 2020? Good to know!
Seriously though, I am very pro-vax, but the fact that studies like these come out now is just confirmation that people had the right to doubt the safety of mRNA back then. Many people shamed others for being anti vax but everyone has the right to be careful.
manwe150 10 hours ago [-]
Why would repeating a study now and getting the same result as when it was first measured in 2020 be a reason to doubt the safety?
I’m also pro-vax, so I don’t think it is correct to equate ignoring the preponderance of current evidence (in 2021 or 2026) for vaccine protection as being careful. That just seems the logical fallacy sold by “vax hesitant” and social media influencers to make people feel smart to ignore statistics and “make their own choice based on intuition”
d--b 9 hours ago [-]
By late 2020, when they got approved, the vaccines were not scientifically proven safe for mainstream use. No other mRNA vaccine had been through all the trial stages, and certainly not those COVID ones.
Could the vaccines have side effects that became visible after 6 months? Yes and we couldn’t have known that they didn’t.
Could the vaccines have side effects on people with rare conditions? Sure, and we couldn’t have known that either.
My point is that in 2020, the decision to approve the vaccines and pretty much force everyone to get it was a risk tradeoff. It was way more risky to let the disease continue spreading and mutate than it was to release the vaccines. mrna vaccines had been in trials and there was no reason to believe they could have been harmful. But the reality is that we just didn’t know. Biology is complex enough that you can’t just assume everything will be fine without proper testing. And what we deem proper testing is a process that these drugs hadn’t gone through.
I happily got vaxed in early 2021, and did it again 4 times , so I was willing to trust the tradeoff.
But ignoring that it was a tradeoff and hiding behind a sign that says “science” is just taking people for dummies.
RandomLensman 9 hours ago [-]
How large a trial do you want to run to capture "rare conditions"? Millions? Billions of participants? How long do you want to run trials? Years? Decades?
qsera 9 hours ago [-]
No, it is not about large trials. It is about changing the attitude of medical practitioners and the media that refuse to acknowledge a vaccine could have caused an adverse effect.
I understand that this is to not feed the vaccine hesitancy. But to anyone observing carefully, this is a crucial break in the information chain that can feedback any ill effects of any vaccine back to the creators.
defrost 7 hours ago [-]
> the attitude of medical practitioners and the media that refuse to acknowledge a vaccine could have caused an adverse effect.
In what alternative group think echo chamber did that happen within?
Here, in the real world, it was acknowledged from the get go that vaccines carried risks and that was why the call went out, from almost the start of 2020, for trial volunteers to find the risks associated with a number of new vaccine variants in the pipelines.
qsera 7 hours ago [-]
I am talking about a case when there IS some adverse effect, after it happened.
In that case, there is generally an effort from the practitioners that the vaccine could not have caused it, particularly when the said thing is not mentioned in the package insert or in the list of adverse effects from the manufacture.
defrost 6 hours ago [-]
Is this a general complaint about the lack of causality inherent in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS)?
It suffers many of the shortfalls of, say, a Haircut Adverse Event Reporting System (HAERS)
RandomLensman 7 hours ago [-]
How would you suggest to establish causality?
qsera 6 hours ago [-]
First step would be to collect data that is trust worthy regarding potential adverse reactions. And for that the barriers that stigmatize such reporting should be removed.
Basically, for starters, doctors should be free to report the events they see without getting labeled "Anti-vaccine doctor" or fear of getting their licence revoked.
When such barriers exist, no one could/should trust the product.
RandomLensman 5 hours ago [-]
What don't you like about current reporting such as VAERS? Where do you see the barriers there specifically? Do you have examples of doctors getting their licenses revoked for reporting something?
qsera 4 hours ago [-]
>VAERS
When you got your vaccine, were you told to report at VAERS if you have any problems? Most people does not even know such a thing exists.
Even then the reports from that database is not really considered trust worthy. It is often dismissed with a statement that "anyone can report anything there!"
RandomLensman 7 hours ago [-]
Who refused to acknowledge there could be adverse effects? I certainly was given information prior to vaccination that outlined possible adverse side effects.
d--b 9 hours ago [-]
There is a process in place that’s meant to capture a certain number of potential problems. I didn’t make that process. The people who are making drugs safe designed the process. There is never zero risk of a treatment behaving badly, of course but when a drug gets fast tracked and doesn’t go through the regular approval process, it just hasn’t been proven to be safe by the regular standard of what experts deem safe.
It’s not very complicated.
trials ok => drug most likely ok
trials not done => we don’t really know.
RandomLensman 8 hours ago [-]
Operation Warpspeed addressed that by running a very large stage 3 trial. One reason that isn't normally done is the high cost of such a large trial.
lixtra 7 hours ago [-]
Would that large trial have shown the cancerous effect of smoking?
If not, do you then agree that some possible adverse effects were not checked for and could have slipped through?
RandomLensman 7 hours ago [-]
Don't know. But would standard smaller trials have captured it?
We are kind of back to my initial question that is conceptually unrelated to the vaccine trial: do you need trials to run into millions or billions of participants or into decades if you want to capture certain (rare) things?.
vfclists 9 hours ago [-]
What does being "pro-vax" mean?
That you believe in any claims of vaccine efficacy made by the manufacturers or the FDA and are more then willing to have them injected into your body?
no-name-here 9 hours ago [-]
If you don't believe every developed countries’ medical bodies on vaccines, where do you get your info on this? (As to the ‘pro-vax’ question, I'd define it as someone who is open to listening the medical bodies of every developed country on the planet.)
qsera 9 hours ago [-]
So what is the logic here?
If the only entity that you can get information from is an entity that is known to lie, you can trust this entity?
It is not that we know for a fact that X is not safe. It is that we have no reason to believe that the powers that can ensure that, does not have an incentive to do it, and a large financial incentive to NOT do it and instead grease a lot of palms and get it mandated.
This is particularly relevant when the cost to grease the palms is minuscule compared to the profit that can be made by the approval.
And it is particularly relavant when the common man cannot any relavant information about it from any other source.
We are sitting ducks here. But people apparently does not notice.
no-name-here 8 hours ago [-]
I think your own logic supports the opposite from your conclusions?
I'm saying that every developed country's medical bodies support that these vaccines are safe.
Are you claiming that every developed country's medical bodies do not have an incentive to make the right decisions around vaccines? That they will be too cautious because they are afraid of approving something that turns out to be unsafe, or the opposite that they have no fear of approving something unsafe?
Are there any examples you'd point to of where developed countries' medical bodies approved something unsafe because they were bribed, as you imply is the norm today?
But most importantly, if you think every developed country's medical bodies should not be used as the source of info about safety vs benefits, what should be?
Or what should be the system even if it doesn't exist today?
> is an entity that is known to lie
What are you referring to?
> the common man cannot any relavant information about it from any other source.
The common man is inundated with info about vaccines from other sources, although much of it is misinformation, etc.
qsera 7 hours ago [-]
>Are you claiming that every developed country's medical bodies do not have an incentive to make the right decisions around vaccines?
It is a question of how aligned the individual's incentives and the incentives of the medical body in question. And often it is extremely misaligned. So that is what is I mean when I said there is "no incentive".
So what do I mean by that?
When such an organization recommend X, it just mean that if everyone follows that recommendation, the population wide metric, that can be immediately measured or that is often measured will show good beneficial result.
So here if people follow the recommendation two things can happen
1. The number of covid deaths will drop. This is something that will show up immediately, because everyone was focused on daily death toll.
2. A substantial number of people will have adverse effects. This is something that can be managed (in terms of public opinion)
So the incentive of the organization end up being favorable to the recommendation despite the very good chance of point 2 happening. With financial incentives, this is just more pronounced...
> What are you referring to?
Any group of human beings.
no-name-here 2 hours ago [-]
I'm still unsure if you think there is any other even theoretical approach than trusting developed countries' medical bodies that would have better outcomes, or if you believe the approach I mentioned is the absolute optimal possible one.
Regardless, as far as the statistics about things like how vaccines changed covid deaths, and any change in non-covid deaths, a study of tens of millions of people found a very large drop in covid deaths among the vaccinated... and actually no increase in other cause morbidity either (different study than the OP study). https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
qsera 2 hours ago [-]
In that study are you aware if they looked at the vaccination status of the expired members in the unvaccinated group during their death?
no-name-here 2 hours ago [-]
Is the theory that the first COVID vaccines (plus COVID vaccines in subsequent years - boosters) were especially safe and reduced deaths dramatically, but that people who got their first COVID vaccines in subsequent years got something that caused far more deaths than it saved, and that's why 'vaccinated' group results are so good compared to the 'unvaccinated' group?
(I am guessing you have some point you're trying to get to, and that's why you're avoiding questions like whether the process mentioned in my parent comments has the absolute best expected outcomes of any possible or theoretical approach, or what the better approach is if not?)
qsera 1 hours ago [-]
I mean, if the people in the unvaccinated group got vaccinated, then they are not really unvaccinated, right? So I am wondering if the study only consider "unvaccinated death" if the person was unvaccinated at the time of their death...
estearum 9 hours ago [-]
It probably means that you take the statistical evidence produced by massive double-blinded placebo-controlled randomized clinical trials as actual evidence
qsera 7 hours ago [-]
That is not really an evidence unless you yourself eliminate any biases or flaws in the trial methodology.
Even trained professionals fail to do that regularly...
katbyte 9 hours ago [-]
mRNA vaccines and testing of them have been around far longer then 2020
d--b 9 hours ago [-]
yes but no other mRNA vaccines had completed the various trial phases and got approved.
And we shouldn’t assume that all mRna vaccines are the same. The rna sequence that’s used potentially can matter as well.
add-sub-mul-div 10 hours ago [-]
People have rights but they also have the responsibility to be scientifically literate enough to know that analyzing data about the vaccine was prudent regardless of anything and does not suggest their prostration to antivax demagogues was smart.
vfclists 9 hours ago [-]
Bruh??
alex1138 10 hours ago [-]
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tlogan 9 hours ago [-]
If these mRNA vaccines had not been pushed or mandated, more people would probably think they are safe: there will be no need for any of these reviews.
But because they were pushed by the government, many people do not trust them. Sure, they were pushed and mandated for good reasons, but the problem is that a lot of people have already lost trust in the government.
That trust was not lost because of one big decision. It was lost through many small, unrelated government decisions that may not seem noticeable or measurable on their own, but over time, they build up.
I do not know how this trust can be rebuilt but definitely not by publishing more reviews.
foltik 9 hours ago [-]
I think it’s the opposite. The _distrust itself_ was pushed by those looking to stir up outrage, generate engagement, and turn it into votes.
Case in point: look at all the people who’ve now built their entire political identities atop this unfalsifiable distrust. They’d even distrust “stand further apart” if the wrong person said it.
> I do not know how this trust can be rebuilt but definitely not by publishing more reviews.
This is the crux. Outrage spreads way faster than the boring truth.
atomicUpdate 8 hours ago [-]
> They’d even distrust “stand further apart” if the wrong person said it.
They shouldn’t believe it no matter who says it. The entire concept of “social distancing” was completely made up and had no science behind it. It belongs in the same bucket of nonsense as “mask up between bites.”
huijzer 9 hours ago [-]
> unfalsifiable distrust
Well, I think it’s pretty clear for starters that politicians lie (and yes this holds for both left and right; although indeed some presidents more than others), and that this isn’t helping trust.
BoingBoomTschak 6 hours ago [-]
Riiight, distrust was "pushed" and is irrational. I guess having a working memory doesn't count? The Tuskegee syphilis study, or the contaminated blood scandals in Europe and Japan, etc... couldn't have anything to do with distrust towards the government's relation with public health, that's for kooks who aren't on the right side of history!
krmboya 9 hours ago [-]
One word, transparency. Being open about the research and outcomes. This is a situation good science communicators can help with.
Engage the skeptics in open debate and address their concerns, not censorship and embarking on cancellation campaigns.
However uncomfortable it seems, the median person in society isn't going to do a thorough literature review to make up their mind, they'll do it based on personal instincts.
tomkarho 7 hours ago [-]
Take the vax or lose your job. Two weeks to flatten the curve. You are killing grandma. "Lab leak" was a dirty word. The science has settled. A bloody live death count on the news.
It seemed that every conceivable way to pressure, force, guilt trip and coerce people into taking the CV was utilized during covid. Enough that no doubt many people are highly suspicious of any authority henceforth and no amount of research will sway them from that. The trust simply isn't there. Yet.
Time is the only cure.
katbyte 9 hours ago [-]
I’m pretty sure it was lost via billions spent on a sustained propaganda campaign no country was willing to stand up to.
guywhocodes 8 hours ago [-]
No I don't think they are safe because I still suffer from the damage it did to my heart
jancsika 9 hours ago [-]
> I do not know how this trust can be rebuilt but definitely not by publishing more reviews.
Dear Previous Paragraph,
Couldn't many small published reviews which don't show a noticeable or measurable positive effect on their own build up over time to rebuild trust?
Sincerely,
Your Reader
Larrikin 9 hours ago [-]
Hopefully at some point the do their own research people will kill themselves off, hopefully before they kill their own kids and family members.
bananakilp 9 hours ago [-]
What a depressing response.
If the “do their own research” people don’t manage to kill their kids and family through complete and utter idiocy, those kids and family will 99.99999% of the time continue their idiocy.
We should hope they manage to end their idiocy lineage.
bsder 9 hours ago [-]
> If these mRNA vaccines had not been pushed or mandated, more people would probably think they are safe: there will be no need for any of these reviews.
Hogwash. Wakefield predated anything Covid. And measles vaccines aren't mRNA and people would rather let their children die.
Had Trump and Co called the vaccine part of the second coming, people would be lining up at their churches to get them.
You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.
qsera 9 hours ago [-]
> people would rather let their children die.
I see that your are yourself in a position you didn't reason you into.
watwut 5 hours ago [-]
There wad that kid that died of measles in America and later there was interview with parents. They said basically that. They would change nothing and rather have kid die then get vaccines.
At some point, you have to start believing what people say about themselves and their believes.
And second, yes that is attitude of political actors who spread fear of vaccines to get votes. Overall impact is exactly that and they know.
qsera 4 hours ago [-]
>They would change nothing..
But by this logic, this is exactly what pro-vax people advocate as well. If a child die right after vaccination, they will still advice people to vaccinate their other kids, because this was just an anomaly?
So are all the pro-vax people maintaining the attitude that they would rather have their kid die or suffer life long than NOT getting the vaccine?
The fallacy in your logic is that you think people reject vaccines because they think the diseases does not have the potential to be dangerous. They do not think that. It is the same reason why you can continue driving despite knowing that accidents can be fatal.
People take a chance, and sometimes they get unlucky. Does not mean that taking the chance was wrong. In the same way you are not wrong if you go out for a pleasure trip in a car and get in a fatal accident.
watwut 3 hours ago [-]
They did not said they were unlucky. They said that if they knew their kid will die without vaccine, they would still skip vaccine to protect the kid from bigger harm. They said that, not me. That is the problem here, you ignore what they are actually saying while twisting their position into much different and more palatable. It is consistent problem with right wing - insistence on ignoring what they say, push for and advocate, just so that we can pretend they are harmless.
> The fallacy in your logic is that you think people reject vaccines because they think the diseases does not have the potential to be dangerous. They do not think that.
They literally openly say that. Again and again and again. The above couple was saying something else in the interview, because the kid actually died. But if you actually listen to what anti-vaccine politicians and advocates say, they literally say that diseases don't have potential to be dangerous.
> But by this logic, this is exactly what pro-vax people advocate as well. If a child die right after vaccination, they will still advice people to vaccinate their other kids, because this was just an anomaly?
You can do that only if you are intent on twisting conversations and meanings into unrecognizable.
> Does not mean that taking the chance was wrong. In the same way you are not wrong if you go out for a pleasure trip in a car and get in a fatal accident.
You know what, sometimes it IS wrong to take the chance. Just like, if you race in a car in a place where you can kill bystanders and then die off it. Funny, people are quick to blame parents when 12 years old walk to school for not doing full surveillance, people blame parents for not having perfect control of kids socials, but somehow, blaming parents for refusing vaccination is a bridge too far.
qsera 2 hours ago [-]
> They said that if they knew their kid will die without vaccine, they would still skip vaccine to protect the kid from bigger harm..
They probably didn't. Because what is "bigger harm" than death?
>You can do that only if you are intent on twisting conversations and meanings into unrecognizable.
Eh..what?
what 9 hours ago [-]
Trump did tell people to get them? It was his opposition saying they wouldn’t trust a vaccine pushed out by Trump. You’ve basically rewritten history.
s1artibartfast 9 hours ago [-]
I dont think people's motivations are to kill their children, but the opposite.
I think this is the starting point for developing cognitive empathy and an accurate model.
Again, trust is a huge factor here.
koonsolo 4 hours ago [-]
And it all got a nice little push from Russian disinfo, who took the opportunity to discredit governments even more.
Why do you think all the anti-vaxxers all of a sudden got pro-Russian and anti-Ukraine? Coincidence?
jasonvorhe 2 hours ago [-]
Iraq had WMDs, Hamas beheaded babies and the Western public is completely immune of government-led psyops. Of course there's neither Nazis/Banderites/ultranationalists nor biolabs nor the most corrupt government on the european continent in Ukraine.
koonsolo 20 minutes ago [-]
Who is paying for this psyops in Europe, and who is getting paid? Facts and references please.
raincole 9 hours ago [-]
> But because they were pushed by the government, many people do not trust them. Sure, they were pushed and mandated for good reasons, but the problem is that a lot of people have already lost trust in the government.
In the case of COVID, the effectiveness of vaccines was quite exaggerated at first[0]. That absolutely didn't help government rebuild the trust.
> I do not know how this trust can be rebuilt but definitely not by publishing more reviews.
At this point, quite sure more reviews will only trigger people's confirmation bias and make those who already don't trust vaccines trust them even less.
Vaccines were very effective against the first variant, and got less effective with later ones. People forget about the timeline. Article mentions the delta variant at which time vaccines were still very effective IIRC. There were some breakthrough cases as the article mentions but that's to be expected with anything short of 100% efficacy.
One's model of "statement made by the POTUS" should be more like 'statement made by mildly likeable (to some segment of the population) boomer dad who probably doesn't know what he is talking about.' It'd be a different thing if a public health official said something like this (and I don't know if they did, but I certainly wasn't left with the impression that it was impossible for me to get vaccinated and still get covid).
9 hours ago [-]
bsder 9 hours ago [-]
The Covid vaccines were and continue to be VERY effective at preventing you from winding up on ECMO.
Yes, you may still get Covid, but you don't die from drowning in your own body fluids anymore.
Of course, this only attends if you got the damn vaccine. All of the Covid deaths around me in the last couple years (7 deaths) were anti-vaxxers. But, hey, we know that reality has a well-known liberal bias.
qsera 9 hours ago [-]
> All of the Covid deaths around me in the last couple years (7 deaths)
Where exactly is this?
atomicUpdate 8 hours ago [-]
Apparently they live in a nursing home in 2020 still, because no one else is dying of covid anymore. Especially not young or healthy people within the last few years.
mikeyouse 7 hours ago [-]
Nearly 50,000 Americans died of Covid in 2024… and 20% of those were under 65 years old. It’s thankfully much better now than at the peak but tens of thousands of people are still dying..
linzhangrun 11 hours ago [-]
Two most populous countries, China and India, seem to have mainly relied on inactivated vaccines.
epistasis 11 hours ago [-]
Which makes sense as they had less access to new technologies, and scaling issues were very hard in the early days.
But I'm not quite sure how that's relevant to the article...
ggm 10 hours ago [-]
Both economies have massive drug industries and China in particular has advanced manufacturing processes for decades. I suspect they made an economic/risk decision and will be reviewing it in the light of mRNA production lead time.
We're way beyond lysenko. China has no intellectual or political baggage in vaccine theory or bio engineering.
Markoff 6 hours ago [-]
it's actually more difficult to produce inactivated vaccine at mass scale than mRNA vaccine, which is the reason why they were producing mRNA vaccines and not the old school safe tested ones
wetpaws 10 hours ago [-]
[dead]
tencentshill 11 hours ago [-]
Good thing we got [rest of world] to do the hard science work, and America can just benefit from it instead!
They apparently settled on the the sequences for the original covid vacs in a weekend. Going from that design to billions of doses is one of the hardest things to do, but once done, will persist. And it is ready to be deployed for the next hundred applications that we find for this.
Flu vaccines is an obvious application, since the prior egg-based manufacturing required about six months lead time and millions of eggs, but nobody wanted to invest in anything better.
No no. They had a candidate for the vaccine. Scaling manufacturing is hard, sure, but the actual barrier was proving the candidate worked. We conducted (by far) the most time-efficient clinical trials in history to prove the vaccines were safe and effective.
Until that happened, we could not have known the candidate drug was actually correct.
Not sure if you mean nobody wanted to develop mRNA flu vaccines, but at least Moderna and Pfizer are:
https://www.npr.org/2026/06/18/nx-s1-5863570/flu-vaccine-mrn...
Seems to have been a legitimate, very rare, side effect
https://www.flinders.edu.au/research/articles/covid-vaccine-...
https://health.clevelandclinic.org/should-you-be-worried-abo...
https://www.ejinme.com/article/S0953-6205(20)30349-6/fulltex...
https://ashpublications.org/blood/article/140/Supplement%201...
The common argument made is that the vaccine saved more lives than they took, but this is pretty fucked up IMO. It's the trolley problem IRL - if you force someone to get a vaccine and they die as a result, you are responsible for their death. Also, the manufacturers can never be held responsible, because they have legal immunity for the COVID vaccines.
There is remedy against vaccine harm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Vaccine_Injury_Compen...
This was passed in response to claims against DPT vaccine and manufacturers stopping production of the said vaccine. Lawmakers feared loss of herd immunity and passed the law. Now vaccine skeptics say this is not enough and claim inability to sue the company directly as an issue - but what they really want is enforce their minority view on the majority by suing companies and ensuring no one has access to vaccines - tyranny of the minority.
My friend who was diagnosed, by multiple doctors in two hospitals with Myocarditis caused by the vaccine has yet to receive any money. It ruined his career.
"Tyranny of the minority" doesn't remotely apply here. No one has the authority to sacrifice one group of citizens to save another group of citizens.
This is trying to play both sides. Appeal to emotion without having a rational thought process. Something bad happening is unfortunate and life changing. Then turning around and saying hundred grand isn’t life changing money for people.
What exactly is your remedy here - should people be not asked to provide proof for the harm and paid 10s of millions for every case? People have been asked proof for lesser things and paid even lesser for much bigger harm.
> My friend who was diagnosed, by multiple doctors in two hospitals with Myocarditis caused by the vaccine has yet to receive any money. It ruined his career.
Anecdotal evidence is not evidence of systematic wrongdoing. At least I wouldn’t expect to see on HN but here we are.
The Norwegian country-wide study is evidence enough.
Unvaccinated occurance was 200 per 100k [1].
[0] https://www.oslo-universitetssykehus.no/en/departments/hjert...
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38262150/
I can absolutely empathize though. It really is fucked up to experience it in the extreme. Usually the trade-offs are much more minor or have a big time delay or are more abstract.
The statistics on men under 25 are still horrific and suggest this was in fact the latter category: atrocity masquerading behind that euphemism.
After more than eight billion doses of the vaccine, about twenty deaths were causally linked to the vaccine. Five times as many people die every day from traffic in the US alone, many of them children.
What about gun ownership? How many people does that "kill for the common good"?
And by that measure, isn't not vaccinating people an even bigger atrocity? Aren't you also arguing to kill people "for the common good" by not mandating vaccination?
That aside, they also command you to own both a car and a gun?
This argument also applies to you: by your logic, vaccine mandates are perfectly fine because you can leave the country.
> That aside, they also command you to own both a car and a gun?
The problem isn't me owning a car and gun, the problem is obviously everybody else. I'm rather unlikely to drive into myself while driving my own car.
Second up, I'm confused by your use of "mandate" and how your government mandates you to remain in that country.
> by your logic, vaccine mandates are perfectly fine because you can leave the country.
Not by my logic, nor that of Dana Scott, Christopher Strachey , Alonzo Church or others.
> I'm rather unlikely to drive into myself while driving my own car.
You can drive into a wall or off a cliff, and yes, injured by own car (or tractor) is an actual not infrequent injury.
I never said that. I said that government inaction is also a mandate; look at the context for my comment.
If you're arguing that leaving the country makes government action (or inaction) acceptable, then by your own logic, all government action (or inaction) is acceptable, which supports my point: vaccine mandates are fine, because by your own logic, if you disagree with them, you can leave the country.
> You can drive into a wall or off a cliff, and yes, injured by own car (or tractor) is an actual not infrequent injury.
You're missing the point I'm making, which is that not driving a car does not mean I won't get run over by other people, which is the actual point I brought up.
To be honest, I'm not quite sure why you're responding to me, since you don't seem to be arguing against anything I actually said?
However if we’re going to talk about moral responsibility for vaccine mandates, we also have to consider moral responsibility for non-vaccination leading to spread of a dangerous virus during a pandemic.
If you are going to hold one group responsible for vaccine-related deaths of mandated vaccines, you must also hold the group who refused the vaccine responsible for any deaths of other people who were infected as a result of their vaccine refusal.
Vaccine deaths were real, and very rare. COVID deaths from preventable spread were also real, and much more common. Public policy had to weigh both, not pretend either side of the risk didn’t exist.
that's all nice and dandy except COVID "vaccines" (remember, they had to change vaccine definition for this very reason) did NOT STOP the spread, they were at best protecting some old people, it was completely pointless for young healthy people to risk their lives by taking them
I remember how the vaccine narration/propaganda went - it will protect you from getting infection, it will protect you from symptoms, it will protect you from getting sick, it will protect you from serious symptoms, it will protect you from hospitalization, it will protect you from death, so now basically all they can claim it will protect you from going to hell and you can go to heaven if you use them
> Vaccine deaths were real, and very rare.
so were COVID deaths in people under 50 unless you have some health condition, extremely rare for people under 20-30, yet they pushed down the throat "vaccinesd" to everyone, not just risk groups, which is why vaccine mandates/passes hurt proper useful vaccines for decades ahead
This is easy to prove. Simply find a high school biology textbook printed before Covid.
And that is exactly what was promissed to me.
You are just full of it, that is it.
Do you see how this absolutely requires not just a lowered infection rate with lowered severity of infection? You need a less than ~10% chance of infection in the vaccinated/otherwise immune for the math to work. If the chances of infection after vaccination are still 80% then there is still a large reservoir of potential carriers and you don't have herd immunity.
For most of history what people expected out of a vaccine was immunity from infection not still getting infected but with less severity.
It is one thing to make a judgement error in the heat of a crisis, it is quite another one to deny afterwards what a huge fuckup it has been.
Every death is a tragedy. Harm to one person is not fungible with benefit to another. You can't subtract one from five to get four net lives saved, but you can say that five is more than one. If someone pulls the lever then they have murdered one person and saved five. If someone wants to pull it and I stop them, haven't I murdered five people and saved one?
It's also somewhat irrelevant since the vaccines do not prevent transmission. At best they lower the chance to some degree and now you're in the weeds of trying to measure something that's too multivariate to measure.
Why wasn't that other person vaccinated?
For those people, it's the group that protects them. But of course you always have selfish people that only care about themselves. It was nice to see the amount of selfish people was pretty low in my region, and we got about a 80% vaccination rate.
Some people don't agree they should be called "vaccine", in the traditional sense.
https://x.com/coenvermeeren/status/1537751313932599296
There's also a "Fact Check" article from Routers that says it is a "false allegation that COVID-19 mRNA vaccines are a form of gene therapy":
https://www.reuters.com/article/fact-check/bayer-executives-...
But the same article has the following quote from the above video, from Bayer's executive Stefan Oelrich:
> “Ultimately the mRNA vaccines are an example for that cell and gene therapy. I always like to say, if we had surveyed two years ago in the public, ‘would you be willing to take gene or cell therapy and inject it into your body?,’ we would have probably had a 95% refusal rate. I think this pandemic has also opened many people’s eyes to innovation in the way that was maybe not possible before.”
So it seems Bayer (or at least, Stefan Oelrich from Bayer), indeed classifies the mRNA vaccines as gene therapy.
I'm willing to bet that in the next 20 years, some kid in the western world will suffer the consequences of polio, because of the anti-vax lunatics.
Since there was basically a soft mandate for it, especially on top of some of the usual official red tape being cut, the manufacturers really wouldn't be the appropriate party to hold responsibility. That'd be the government.
But the harm those children experience is a infintesimal fraction of the harm all children would feel if there were no infant vaccinations.
It's a trade off but it's one that must be made. The parents whose child died did the best thing they could do. Until we can screen for the infants that will react, vaccinations are the best choice.
Except that we knew by May 2020 (possibly even earlier) that the data showed that the young and otherwise healthy were at extraordinarily low risk from Covid.
I still recall a conversation with child#2 after one of his school friends was at home quarantining after testing positive for Covid.
I asked my son if he knew if his friend was feeling better...
"Daddy, he's not poorly, he's just got Covid".
The main benefit of vaccines is that they reduce the transmission of disease. This aspect saves more lives than individual protection.
"Citation needed"...
Covid vaccination did not reliably or durably block SARS-CoV-2 transmission, especially after Omicron and as immunity waned.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39971395/
Low effectiveness still agrees with the point made above about reducing chances of spread and transmission.
A reduction is still a reduction, even if is not a 100% total and full stop.
The advice I was given from our family doctor was that having had an utterly mild case of (actual) Covid, as I had (two separate times!), during the pandemic, was significantly better in protecting against both future infection - and subsequent transmission - than any protection I could have gained by vaccination.
YMMV. I suspect this is down to those who have had mild Covid pre-vaccination and those who have not.
Some of us didn't even know we had had Covid until afterwards, others think the vaccine saved them from an untimely death/hospitalisation.
Remember that you caught Covid twice, because your body’s immune system was still not strong enough to make you asymptomatic the second time. You likely caught Covid several times but several of those times you were asymptomatic.
It’s incorrect to say that catching the virus gives you “better” protection than a vaccine. The vaccine teaches your immune system how to react to the virus without the damage and long-term effects caused by actually having the virus. This makes future infections much less severe and you are less likely to spread the virus to others when you catch it.
Worth restating because of all the misinformation out there: a vaccine will not prevent you from catching a virus, it cannot do that. It trains your immune system to fight the virus so that when you catch it your immune system can fight it immediately and symptoms are much less severe (ideally asymptomatic, but that is not guaranteed), so that you have less chance of passing it on.
An expert in the field would appear to disagree:
Dr F: "the best vaccination is to get infected"
https://www.c-span.org/clip/washington-journal/user-clip-pre...
(00:50)
> however there were several strains and getting boosters to maximise resistance was important
Our family doctor said the opposite: "your antibody count is so high [from recent infection] there is no point you having a vaccine/booster".
<shrug> I listened to Dr F (2004) and to our family doctor. YMMV.
Yes you will have antibodies from being exposed to one strain of flu. You won’t for the next strain.
Catching COVID carried a far greater risk because although symptoms can be mild in many cases it can kill vulnerable people and it spreads incredibly quickly. At the peak of the pandemic, hospitals were being overrun by people sick with the virus, which affected everyone’s access to care. Vaccines helped prevent the spread of new strains to vulnerable people and reduced pressure on the hospitals.
It think the guidance was more nuanced for teens, but for kids it was very clear.
The vaxmaxxer vs. antivaxxer - like most culture wars - is a US phenomenon.
At the latest by May 2020, we knew that Covid risk was extremely stratified by age and underlying health conditions.
To be very clear: this does not mean the virus was harmless to everyone else, but treating the population as if risk were evenly distributed was bad analysis, and policy built on that assumption was deeply flawed.
What I would have wanted was a more honest debate about how to protect the old, the frail, and those with major risk factors while also minimising the social, educational, economic, and indirect medical harms caused by restrictions. Yes, that is hard! Policy is supposed to deal with hard problems, not pretend that trade-offs disappear because they are uncomfortable.
Instead, much of the public discussion collapsed into a useless binary: "lock down harder and longer" versus "let it rip". With hindsight, both look far too crude for the actual problem we faced.
Herd immunity arguments can make that calculation more fuzzy but the herd can't tolerate many people opting out and still give group cover. So after a certain amount of people, choosing not to vaccinate is seriously risking illness. Society is built to handle those types of collective action problems. The moral case is still clear IMO.
It is a trade off that is fair to the individual and to the society IF the society live up to its end of the bargain and had come up with a method of producing the vaccines without the profit maxxing incentive.
If there is another country on Earth that produces better vaccines via a better system I'm all ears but this sounds like unrealistic DemSoc complaining to me. Expand Medicare widely. Make private insurance extremely optional. The other Western democracies seem to manage this pretty well.
And what I said is in a global context.
It was and remains statistically correct to vaccinate young people.
I’m not even arguing the government shouldn’t pull the lever, I just want people to be held accountable for the lives lost as a result, and for the families to be treated with compassion.
That is a conclusion you can have, but you're speaking like its the official correct conclusion, which isn't really true.
The reason the trolly problem is so popular is because there isn't an agreed upon answer and different people come to different conclusions about it. Some people would agree that by pulling the lever you become morally responsible in a way you aren't if you take no action. Other people think you are morally culpable either way.
People repeat this but there is no validation of this.
Sure, children and young adults mostly weren't at risk of dying. It is not at all clear that there are not bad side effects from getting an active Covid infection. We're still crunching the data.
We're just now beginning the process of correlating virii and bad latent effects many years later. HPV -> Cervical Cancer. Epsetin-Barr -> MS. And, of course the one we have known about for a while: Chicken Pox -> Shingles.
And imagine if you lost a son or daughter due to not doing this.
You are making a choice either way. If the opposite choice was made there are different consequences. Its not like you can opt out of consequences by not choosing.
I don't think this is correct. If you remove the people with comorbidities, the risk for healthy young people was minuscule, there's way other issues you should concern yourself with at that point, rather than dying from COVID.
Vaccinating young people with something that had the potential of side effects was just dumb, either way you look at it. I'm honestly baffled it was accepted. It seems to be the product of mass hysteria, sustained by greed for profits.
Arguably so was the risk from the vaccine.
About 17400 people under 20 died of covid. According to this paper https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8875435/ all the people who died from side effects of the covid vaccine were over 22 (its possible that is not exhaustive, but i can't seem to find any examples of confirmed deaths related to the vaccine for children. If there are any i think its likely the number is in the single digits).
So even if the risk of death from covid in kids is small, its still probably at least 1000 times higher than the risk from the vaccine, and possibly much higher.
> something that had the potential of side effects
Literally everything has potential side effects. Clean drinking water? Has side effects (e.g. less vitamin b12 from poop). All choices have consequences.
https://perthirtysix.com/tool/lottery-simulator
Yes they didn't want the hospitals to get full. That's when the younger healthy people who would have recovered can't get the medical care they need to survive.
You had to have spent covid in a pretty sad friendless hole not to know friends or family who ended up in hospital during the peaks.
"vapor trails" - well, if helps you sleep better.
You don't have to care about the people who aren't interested in science. Sure, you have to protect immunocompromised people from those people, and we can do that.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6022a1.htm
Not saying this about parent, but am absolutely saying it about the vaccine skeptic community in general.
If the barrier to asking a question is zero (i.e. someone without a high school biology education can ask a question and be listened to) but the barrier to answering any question to the community's satisfaction is high (i.e. a full study, on exactly that question, controlled for all variables, that shows a clear result) then the effort asymmetry leads to many unanswered questions.
... which the skeptic community then points to to support the belief that there are many legitimate unanswered questions.
Similar for vaccines, just give us the numbers clearly and upfront.
This bypasses regulators from having to make claims beyond “we reviewed the data and agree with these numbers and feel that this should not be banned.” I do think it would also help to separate something “not banned” and being “required to be covered by insurance” or “required for professions like the military”. I think trying to simplify things makes things worse, because this abstraction is not real.
You are aware that literally anyone can go and literally find exactly these numbers, correct?
The trial results are published!
The health and science communicators must improve how they communicate with the public.
They are saying what is generally safe and what is not. Telling people the dry statistics won't help most people. Remember half of all people are below average in IQ. You need to paint with broad strokes if you want to reach most people.
The reality is none of these "do your own research" or "just asking questions" people are actually curious whatsoever. Curiosity requires more than zero effort. Simply saying you're "doing your own research" and "just asking questions" while regurgitating the last thing you saw on your TikTok feed is super easy and gives you all the same sense of intellectual superiority.
Nobody was was claiming that people cant google.
I dont know why you bring this up as a gotcha when someone said public health communications should share more data.
A nice example was the EUCDC guidance on AstraZeneca’s vaccine which showed that for young age groups the vaccine was more dangerous than the disease. That allows anyone to make an informed decision for themselves instead of being bullied or emotionally blackmailed “for the greater good”.
Par for the course, I can’t access the actual study from The Lancet and have to settle for second-rate journalist summaries which are typically biased and ultimately worthless.
Regulators don’t make cures. There’s room to improve on that side of the system.
Especially as emerging approaches seem to be trending more systems-thinking-oriented, eg “this will strengthen your immune system to fight lots of diseases.”
You cannot reason a person out of a position they did not reason themself into in the first place.
It's about swaying investors and regulators. And yeah, we need to make sure we excise our regulators of crazy people, but that's cyclic. And next cycle, we'll get vaccines for a lot more.
And intuitively it makes sense we’re talking about groups of people who are skeptical of main stream institutional health recommendations but trust specific personal sources for medical advice.
I’m vibing but it feels like there is a pretty clear intersection of peptides and the fringe science health community no?
As many of us said at the time, the mandates weren't worth the destruction of public trust, especially because the vaccine wasn't even sterilizing.
The next time there's a crisis, resist the urge to use the government to achieve outcomes by brute force. It doesn't work and has generational adverse consequences.
Proceeds to raw dog a bunch of “research chemicals” cause some roided up bro talked about it on a podcast…
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=U7gbFMWZWlo
They’re not vaccines though.
This book pushes Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine as "miracle cures", thanks to that idea my relatives also have a stockpile of both.
There are, unfortunately, many examples of your doing this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47756136 (April 2026)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47745846 (April 2026)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47053228 (Feb 2026)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46755775 (Jan 2026)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46605417 (Jan 2026)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46522898 (Jan 2026)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45988414 (Nov 2025)
This is not a comment about any of your views on vaccines or anything else. But you can't post like this regardless of what your view is on any topic.
Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here.
That being said you're not making very detailed defences of RFK's book and ideas. Can you be more specific on some ideas or claims from his book that you believe in and how they're supported?
Tailored vaccines for things like cancer are a game changer.
I live in hope of a semi-universal flu+related vaccine.
I live in fear of the measles induced "immune amnesia" effect.
I honestly believe it would have been worse had I not taken the vaccine.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9459904/ [2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9786706/
"COVID-19 vaccination will help keep you from getting COVID-19" - https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/97780/
You see, this kind of lying and gaslighting is exactly what feeds the distrust in the government and scientific establishment in general public. No number of studies is going to reverse that any time soon.
But better late than never I suppose.
No. They didn’t. They said it.
You were the Phase3 trial. You can probably debate the ethicality, the decisions made, but do not pretend they had 5 year data before deploying to the entire world.
Facts matter.
Dec 11 2020- publication of phase 2/3 trial results, meaning not only was the study fully completed, but it made it through peer review too: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2034577
Dec 11 - 2020: first authorization https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/11/health/pfizer-vaccine-aut...
Do we need 75-year data for Viagra too?
30-year data for aspirin?
What's the logic tree here?
reminder to the myocarditis-maxxies, the actual virus causes that too and the 2020-2021 variants caused it worse
if we were all going to drop dead (I think 2 years ago now, I’m waaaaiting!) for whatever the vaccine did, it would apply to a broader population due to covid exposure
Do you know if the vaccine prevented the virus-induced myocarditis? Cause the vaccine didn't do much to stop people from getting covid, multiple times even.
So many people frame this as either/or, you either had the risk of covid induced myocarditis or you had the (supposed) lesser risk of myocarditis from the vaccine. But if you got the vaccine (x times) and then covid (y times), isn't your risk roughly x + y?
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/covid-19-vaccinati...
(Personally, I wish researchers would not forgot quite so often that there is a non-mRNA COVID vaccine available in the US. Where's all the analysis of the effects of the Novavax vaccine?)
But yes, there are instances of myocarditis from vaccines, but occurance was 4-5/100k as opposed to unvaccinated 200/100k.
Edit: in his words:
> MK: All the cases were hospitalised because we wanted to perform a detailed workup for them
> RR: So they didn't need to be there to, like, keep them alive.
> WZ: No, no, no, no, no, no, no. In fact, he said that that these these patients, they all cleared up with either painkillers[50] like ibuprofen …
> MK: Some of them even not require medications, and they just take a rest, and eventually they recover by themselves, and none of them got severe complications, and no cases of mortality, most importantly. And all of them recover and went back home. And so far, some patients are being followed up around 7 months[51] and they’re very good, no problem, so this is very good news.
none of those were goals of the vaccine, so its a fruitless exercise to build on top of
they communicated poorly at all levels the one time society needed them to communicate effectively, and lost the public trust
The goal was to reduce the spread overall, lessen the symptoms for individuals, have your own body fight it faster instead of becoming a factory for it, de-risking cytokine storms
We don’t know the actual numbers as pericarditis and myocarditis can occur asymptomatically, and people truly need to be under very active medical surveillance to detect it
Anyway, that statement is actually useless. The moment it became clear that some vaccine increases the risk of myocarditis, several European countries swapped them out for the less risky variants, like any sane person would.
The only people still fighting these windmills are the online kind.
Channeling Monty Python:
... I got better
The page I linked is a repository that Malone set up for peer-reviewed papers describing MRNA side effects.
Those papers are not authored by Malone, and there are presently over 700 of them on the site.
I believe he did this because authors of those and similar papers have faced political backlash for their scientific contributions. For some reason, many world governments have censored, and advocated censorship of content such as this, and similar content that questions things such as the CoViD-19 point of origin, which for years has been riddled with misinformation.
So you can go ahead an claim that more than 700 peer reviewed papers were all authored by cranks, but my purpose was to point out that the parent article's claims of absolute "safety, effectiveness, and promise" are not unanimously accepted.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
"synthesize???"
With almost 200 references and the use of "synthesize???" it sound like AI generated slop.
The article is behind a paywall in any case so why so many positive comments about it?
Say what you will about the Covid vaccine or Kennedy’s specific motivations (which I disagree with), but choosing to cut government funding for development of wildly profitable pharmaceutical products is a reasonable choice.
We don’t generally fund Merck’s R&D with federal money. You’ll note the following critical detail from the article:
> That will impact 22 projects being led by major pharmaceutical companies, including Pfizer and Moderna, for vaccines against bird flu and other viruses, HHS said.
We’ve gone so far round the bend with partisanship that straight-up corporate welfare has become a left-wing cause.
for the curious:
https://www.usaspending.gov/search?hash=5ec35bf87ec1fd63d28d...
Remember when everyone was contributing spare dimes to fund a vaccine?
If the government never funded another study for vaccines, ever, pharma companies would continue to pump them out.
It is not yet clear whether mRNA will be treated like generics.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X1...
Also, for the record: very few (no?) vaccines are “mandated” by the federal government. Recommendations are made, and state and local governments do this, mainly through school districts.
Various agencies and the military will, of course, mandate things for their own staff.
It is really weird that even here in HN where everyone is aware of corporate greed and corruption, corporations becomes the good guys when it comes to vaccines.
Now you might think of bringing up regulators and checks and balances at this point...
But imagine this. If approving a vaccine, or like here, a vaccine technology could unlock 1 Trillion dollars in revenue, imagine how much of that can be paid politicians/regulators/scientists/thought leadrs to act favorably?
How many of those regulators, who are just average human beings, can resist that?
The game to compensate for that is to be to convince gullible investors that your commercially viable fusion plant, or quantum computer, or unrealistic space ambitions are just 5 years away! Invest now or miss out!
The line between research and scamming in an ultracapitalist economy becomes very blurry.
The "win" is occasionally getting a steadily profitable field or lode for multiple decades after the costs of proving and the fun of raising forward capital loans for extraction and processing plant capital.
Here's what we know: In 2014, Obama administration halted the so called "gain of function" research because of risk of laboratory accidents. In 2017, the Trump administration restarted this dangerous research. See links below.
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/18/us/white-house-to-cut-fun...
Excerpt: [Obama administration] White House announced Friday that it would temporarily halt all new funding for experiments that seek to study certain infectious agents by making them more dangerous. The White House said the moratorium decision had been made “following recent biosafety incidents at federal research facilities.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/19/health/lethal-viruses-nih...
Excerpt: [Trump administration] on Tuesday ended a moratorium imposed three years ago on funding research that alters germs to make them more lethal. Critics say these researchers risk creating a monster germ that could escape the lab and seed a pandemic.
So, Trump restarted the dangerous research that Obama had shut down. You may be thinking, what does that have to do with Covid? Covid started in Wuhan, China, right?
It turns out that the Trump administration, through the National Institutes of Health (NIH), provided funding to the EcoHealth Alliance, an American non-profit organization focused on studying emerging diseases. The EcoHealth Alliance, in turn, provided funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China for researching bat coronaviruses. The rest is history.
And then Trump also disbanded the pandemic preparedness team in 2018 just in time for the pandemic. See link below.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/nsc-pandemic-office-t...
Most left-wing critics are still struggling with admitting that Anthony Fauci really did provide funding to EcoHealth, despite ample documentation.
For the record, I don’t care who gets blamed. I just think it’s a hilarious twist of partisan rhetoric.
1. There were no labs.
2. There was no gain of function research being funded.
3. The baseless lab leak conspiracy theory is hateful extreme far right Russian disinformation that is very dangerous to our democracy and it has already been debunked by the science and 72 intelligence agencies and CNN. Fauci is a Saint!
4. There was a lab leak and it's Trump's fault and you're still a dangerous conspiracy theorist for having previously questioned "the experts" integrity or the possibility of a lab leak.
The WIV is 20km from the Huanan market where the pandemic started. There is no direct evidence linking the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 to laboratory work conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.[0] The evidence for zoonotic origin with multiple spillover events at the Huanan market is overwhelming.
This is just one review.
[0] https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annur...
Trump 1 was a very different administration.
And Trump himself has publicly backed off what was probably his one major achievement after receiving pushback from his supporters.
Trump one had a sane (terrible, but sane) cabinet that largely controlled his wilder impulses.
This time he went for loyalty above all else.
This is absurdly revisionist. The first administration’s cabinet/staff was a reality show and a merry go round of people like Anthony Scaramucci and Ryan Zinke. If anything “controlled” it, it was just the chaos of incompetence.
As far as loyalty goes, I suppose it’s worth reminding you that Kennedy was a Democrat, who ran in the Democratic presidential primary, and routinely criticized Trump.
1: https://apnews.com/article/maha-glyphosate-rfk-kennedy-trump...
Kennedy was a Democrat as a spoiler.
> "The heavens declare the almighty of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork."
There's a minimum level of actual competence needed for that job to not embarrass the Trump admin.
Thanks for the new toll in Hormuz though
Weren't the lockdowns supposed to go on forever and usher in the WEF Davos future? What happened to that?
The closest to “untested drug matter” that existed was the antibody cocktail that might have kept Trump alive.
The mRNA approach already had years of work prior to COVID, and was already reviewed for safety.
It's worth highlghting the importance of years of basic science-research and testing, all little pieces which were mostly there when we finally needed them, work that was always under-threat from people saying "what use is this, why would we ever need that?" (For which the pandemic is an implicit answe the pandemic answered: "Stuff like this!")
Among many of those collective small contributions that create a practical and effective outcome, one example of work thankfully done in advance:
> But the thing is, our vaccine is only generating the spikes itself, and we’re not mounting them on any kind of virus body. It turns out that, unmodified, freestanding Spike proteins collapse into a different structure. If injected as a vaccine, this would indeed cause our bodies to develop immunity.. but only against the collapsed spike protein. And the real SARS-CoV-2 shows up with the spiky Spike. The vaccine would not work very well in that case.
> In 2017 it was described how putting a double Proline substitution in just the right place would make the SARS-CoV-1 and MERS S proteins take up their ‘pre-fusion’ configuration, even without being part of the whole virus. This works because Proline is a very rigid amino acid. It acts as a kind of splint, stabilising the protein in the state we need to show to the immune system. The people that discovered this should be walking around high-fiving themselves incessantly. Unbearable amounts of smugness should be emanating from them. And it would all be well deserved.
[0] https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source...
A different roll of the mutation dice might have made a sars that spread easily. That would have thinned out the middle aged folks.
/s
/S
No /s
To the very best of my knowledge this is just misinformation. If you have a citation here, please provide it.
I can find you links, though it will be directly to the original studies done for the covid vaccines. The studies were well written and clearly called out their methodology. The problem was with how the studies were interpreted and explained to the public, not with the studies themselves.
From my first free of politics encounters with world class epidemiologists in 1980 or so I've not heard one claim that any vaccine had a 100% efficacy rate for both disease prevention and for eliminating spread - it has _always_ been a numbers game, like seat belts, of statistical reduction.
Your own link agrees:
95% protection is pretty good, but for all manner of reasons it's unusual to expect any vaccine to prevent 100% of all infections across millions of people or animals.Typically, in educated countries, phrases such as "prevent infection and spread*" are understood to mean that in the same manner as "seat belts prevent death and injury*"
( * exceptions expected )
Fauci, for example, claimed very early on that we needed herd immunity and would get thee with around a 60% vaccination rate. He both knew that number was too low for the hypothesis of herd immunity, raising it as time went on, and that herd immunity requires a treatment to prevent transmission, implying the vaccines were known to do that (they weren't).
More egregiously there was a political push, picked up by the media as well, that basically boiled down to an argument that anyone refusing the vaccine is actively killing old people and children. They would go so far as to say unvaccinated people shouldn't be allowed into hospitals for care for unrelated health conditions.
All that to say, my point was simply that this review paper seems to be making claims that would require research I never saw happen. Sadly the pay wall means I can't read their full claims, but even the overview of their results seem dubious.
The trials showed a minimal risk of adverse responses to the injection itself and what appeared to be a reduced rate of symptoms. The trials didn't cover impact on infection rates at all, that would have required proactively testing every participant for infection which wasn't done. The trials only followed self reported symptoms, meaning all the study can indicate is a correlation with reduced symptomatic infection.
This sounds a bit like providing evidence for global warming, gun control or evolution. The "skeptics" just want to remain ignorant. No amount of evidence will change them.
The silver lining about vaccine skeptics, though, is the Herman Cain award[1]. What this means is that conservatives die more than liberals from preventable diseases [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Cain_Award
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-026-02474-9
Seriously though, I am very pro-vax, but the fact that studies like these come out now is just confirmation that people had the right to doubt the safety of mRNA back then. Many people shamed others for being anti vax but everyone has the right to be careful.
I’m also pro-vax, so I don’t think it is correct to equate ignoring the preponderance of current evidence (in 2021 or 2026) for vaccine protection as being careful. That just seems the logical fallacy sold by “vax hesitant” and social media influencers to make people feel smart to ignore statistics and “make their own choice based on intuition”
Could the vaccines have side effects that became visible after 6 months? Yes and we couldn’t have known that they didn’t.
Could the vaccines have side effects on people with rare conditions? Sure, and we couldn’t have known that either.
My point is that in 2020, the decision to approve the vaccines and pretty much force everyone to get it was a risk tradeoff. It was way more risky to let the disease continue spreading and mutate than it was to release the vaccines. mrna vaccines had been in trials and there was no reason to believe they could have been harmful. But the reality is that we just didn’t know. Biology is complex enough that you can’t just assume everything will be fine without proper testing. And what we deem proper testing is a process that these drugs hadn’t gone through.
I happily got vaxed in early 2021, and did it again 4 times , so I was willing to trust the tradeoff.
But ignoring that it was a tradeoff and hiding behind a sign that says “science” is just taking people for dummies.
I understand that this is to not feed the vaccine hesitancy. But to anyone observing carefully, this is a crucial break in the information chain that can feedback any ill effects of any vaccine back to the creators.
In what alternative group think echo chamber did that happen within?
Here, in the real world, it was acknowledged from the get go that vaccines carried risks and that was why the call went out, from almost the start of 2020, for trial volunteers to find the risks associated with a number of new vaccine variants in the pipelines.
In that case, there is generally an effort from the practitioners that the vaccine could not have caused it, particularly when the said thing is not mentioned in the package insert or in the list of adverse effects from the manufacture.
It suffers many of the shortfalls of, say, a Haircut Adverse Event Reporting System (HAERS)
Basically, for starters, doctors should be free to report the events they see without getting labeled "Anti-vaccine doctor" or fear of getting their licence revoked.
When such barriers exist, no one could/should trust the product.
When you got your vaccine, were you told to report at VAERS if you have any problems? Most people does not even know such a thing exists.
Even then the reports from that database is not really considered trust worthy. It is often dismissed with a statement that "anyone can report anything there!"
It’s not very complicated.
trials ok => drug most likely ok
trials not done => we don’t really know.
We are kind of back to my initial question that is conceptually unrelated to the vaccine trial: do you need trials to run into millions or billions of participants or into decades if you want to capture certain (rare) things?.
That you believe in any claims of vaccine efficacy made by the manufacturers or the FDA and are more then willing to have them injected into your body?
If the only entity that you can get information from is an entity that is known to lie, you can trust this entity?
It is not that we know for a fact that X is not safe. It is that we have no reason to believe that the powers that can ensure that, does not have an incentive to do it, and a large financial incentive to NOT do it and instead grease a lot of palms and get it mandated.
This is particularly relevant when the cost to grease the palms is minuscule compared to the profit that can be made by the approval.
And it is particularly relavant when the common man cannot any relavant information about it from any other source.
We are sitting ducks here. But people apparently does not notice.
I'm saying that every developed country's medical bodies support that these vaccines are safe.
Are you claiming that every developed country's medical bodies do not have an incentive to make the right decisions around vaccines? That they will be too cautious because they are afraid of approving something that turns out to be unsafe, or the opposite that they have no fear of approving something unsafe?
Are there any examples you'd point to of where developed countries' medical bodies approved something unsafe because they were bribed, as you imply is the norm today?
But most importantly, if you think every developed country's medical bodies should not be used as the source of info about safety vs benefits, what should be? Or what should be the system even if it doesn't exist today?
> is an entity that is known to lie
What are you referring to?
> the common man cannot any relavant information about it from any other source.
The common man is inundated with info about vaccines from other sources, although much of it is misinformation, etc.
It is a question of how aligned the individual's incentives and the incentives of the medical body in question. And often it is extremely misaligned. So that is what is I mean when I said there is "no incentive".
So what do I mean by that?
When such an organization recommend X, it just mean that if everyone follows that recommendation, the population wide metric, that can be immediately measured or that is often measured will show good beneficial result.
So here if people follow the recommendation two things can happen
1. The number of covid deaths will drop. This is something that will show up immediately, because everyone was focused on daily death toll.
2. A substantial number of people will have adverse effects. This is something that can be managed (in terms of public opinion)
So the incentive of the organization end up being favorable to the recommendation despite the very good chance of point 2 happening. With financial incentives, this is just more pronounced...
> What are you referring to?
Any group of human beings.
Regardless, as far as the statistics about things like how vaccines changed covid deaths, and any change in non-covid deaths, a study of tens of millions of people found a very large drop in covid deaths among the vaccinated... and actually no increase in other cause morbidity either (different study than the OP study). https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
Even trained professionals fail to do that regularly...
And we shouldn’t assume that all mRna vaccines are the same. The rna sequence that’s used potentially can matter as well.
But because they were pushed by the government, many people do not trust them. Sure, they were pushed and mandated for good reasons, but the problem is that a lot of people have already lost trust in the government.
That trust was not lost because of one big decision. It was lost through many small, unrelated government decisions that may not seem noticeable or measurable on their own, but over time, they build up.
I do not know how this trust can be rebuilt but definitely not by publishing more reviews.
Case in point: look at all the people who’ve now built their entire political identities atop this unfalsifiable distrust. They’d even distrust “stand further apart” if the wrong person said it.
> I do not know how this trust can be rebuilt but definitely not by publishing more reviews.
This is the crux. Outrage spreads way faster than the boring truth.
They shouldn’t believe it no matter who says it. The entire concept of “social distancing” was completely made up and had no science behind it. It belongs in the same bucket of nonsense as “mask up between bites.”
Well, I think it’s pretty clear for starters that politicians lie (and yes this holds for both left and right; although indeed some presidents more than others), and that this isn’t helping trust.
Engage the skeptics in open debate and address their concerns, not censorship and embarking on cancellation campaigns.
However uncomfortable it seems, the median person in society isn't going to do a thorough literature review to make up their mind, they'll do it based on personal instincts.
It seemed that every conceivable way to pressure, force, guilt trip and coerce people into taking the CV was utilized during covid. Enough that no doubt many people are highly suspicious of any authority henceforth and no amount of research will sway them from that. The trust simply isn't there. Yet.
Time is the only cure.
Dear Previous Paragraph,
Couldn't many small published reviews which don't show a noticeable or measurable positive effect on their own build up over time to rebuild trust?
Sincerely, Your Reader
If the “do their own research” people don’t manage to kill their kids and family through complete and utter idiocy, those kids and family will 99.99999% of the time continue their idiocy.
We should hope they manage to end their idiocy lineage.
Hogwash. Wakefield predated anything Covid. And measles vaccines aren't mRNA and people would rather let their children die.
Had Trump and Co called the vaccine part of the second coming, people would be lining up at their churches to get them.
You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.
I see that your are yourself in a position you didn't reason you into.
At some point, you have to start believing what people say about themselves and their believes.
And second, yes that is attitude of political actors who spread fear of vaccines to get votes. Overall impact is exactly that and they know.
But by this logic, this is exactly what pro-vax people advocate as well. If a child die right after vaccination, they will still advice people to vaccinate their other kids, because this was just an anomaly?
So are all the pro-vax people maintaining the attitude that they would rather have their kid die or suffer life long than NOT getting the vaccine?
The fallacy in your logic is that you think people reject vaccines because they think the diseases does not have the potential to be dangerous. They do not think that. It is the same reason why you can continue driving despite knowing that accidents can be fatal.
People take a chance, and sometimes they get unlucky. Does not mean that taking the chance was wrong. In the same way you are not wrong if you go out for a pleasure trip in a car and get in a fatal accident.
> The fallacy in your logic is that you think people reject vaccines because they think the diseases does not have the potential to be dangerous. They do not think that.
They literally openly say that. Again and again and again. The above couple was saying something else in the interview, because the kid actually died. But if you actually listen to what anti-vaccine politicians and advocates say, they literally say that diseases don't have potential to be dangerous.
> But by this logic, this is exactly what pro-vax people advocate as well. If a child die right after vaccination, they will still advice people to vaccinate their other kids, because this was just an anomaly?
You can do that only if you are intent on twisting conversations and meanings into unrecognizable.
> Does not mean that taking the chance was wrong. In the same way you are not wrong if you go out for a pleasure trip in a car and get in a fatal accident.
You know what, sometimes it IS wrong to take the chance. Just like, if you race in a car in a place where you can kill bystanders and then die off it. Funny, people are quick to blame parents when 12 years old walk to school for not doing full surveillance, people blame parents for not having perfect control of kids socials, but somehow, blaming parents for refusing vaccination is a bridge too far.
They probably didn't. Because what is "bigger harm" than death?
>You can do that only if you are intent on twisting conversations and meanings into unrecognizable.
Eh..what?
Again, trust is a huge factor here.
Why do you think all the anti-vaxxers all of a sudden got pro-Russian and anti-Ukraine? Coincidence?
In the case of COVID, the effectiveness of vaccines was quite exaggerated at first[0]. That absolutely didn't help government rebuild the trust.
> I do not know how this trust can be rebuilt but definitely not by publishing more reviews.
At this point, quite sure more reviews will only trigger people's confirmation bias and make those who already don't trust vaccines trust them even less.
[0]: https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-business-health-governm...
One's model of "statement made by the POTUS" should be more like 'statement made by mildly likeable (to some segment of the population) boomer dad who probably doesn't know what he is talking about.' It'd be a different thing if a public health official said something like this (and I don't know if they did, but I certainly wasn't left with the impression that it was impossible for me to get vaccinated and still get covid).
Yes, you may still get Covid, but you don't die from drowning in your own body fluids anymore.
Of course, this only attends if you got the damn vaccine. All of the Covid deaths around me in the last couple years (7 deaths) were anti-vaxxers. But, hey, we know that reality has a well-known liberal bias.
Where exactly is this?
But I'm not quite sure how that's relevant to the article...
We're way beyond lysenko. China has no intellectual or political baggage in vaccine theory or bio engineering.