> Also don't think the long-tail risk of an mRNA vaccine can be worse then COVID's long-tail risk.
It absolutely could, and that should be self-evident.
> Also pretty sure risk of death outweighs literally any possible long-tail risk, so still seems sensible for the young to get the vax.
This is just not true. The risk of death in children from COVID-19 is so low you literally should not ever worry about it. If you want to compare numbers in an academic sense go ahead, but the fact that actual adults are wasting valuable cognitive and emotional energy worrying about their kids is a great tragedy.
The recorded COVID-19 deaths in children are, by the way, using the absurd definition of a COVID-19 case/death that most of the western world is using; a definition where having PCR-confirmed SARS-2 infection means that ANY death is classified as a COVID death. This is not how this is supposed to work; there is supposed to be a distinction between the virus and the disease, but we define the disease as merely having the virus! It's completely absurd. Indeed I'm writing an article about this concept (pathological vs physiological) right now
We've never taken such an attitude for any other endemic respiratory pathogen in existence, and for good reason. It's completely absurd and ignores not only the important health benefits of regular social contact, including direct physical contact, as well as the literal benefits of exchanging pathogens with others.
You and the other commenters arguing your "side" also seem to completely ignore the phenomenom of natural immunity, which I think very obviously has been fallaciously denied by "experts" precisely because they want to convince everyone in the world to get this vaccine. They're already talking about yearly booster shots because most people's mental models are from Flu which has a much greater space of possible genetic configurations, whereas SARS-2 is relatively constrained in how it can evolve and thus should not need a yearly booster if this weren't just about making absurd amounts of money (which it is).
In any case, you should know that there are people like me - very much in the minority - who refuse to submit to such absurdities and will keep fighting. We will continue to be literally as well as metaphorically discriminated against until your "side" stops brainwashing people into a completely disproportionate response to an endemic respiratory virus.
You can stay inside with a mask on while vaccinated all you want. Be my guest. But please stop advocating for and/or supporting mandates and restrictions on the rest of us who have not caught your specific strain of agoraphobia, germaphobia, OCD and misanthropy.
Sure we will get natural immunity, the difference between other diseases respiratory or otherwise is its effectiveness in killing people combined with its transmission. It is in the Goldilocks zone for deadliness and transmission , highly deadly diseases like Nipha or Ebola are easier to keep from being an pandemic precisely because they are so deadly. They still require a strong and immediate response to keep it in control and local.
The annual flu shot is not just for you, it is also to prevent you transmitting what is probably harmless to you but deadly to immuno-compromised like the elderly, they don't have ability to get natural immunity. Pneumonia is significant cause of death amongst senior citizens.
If 600,000 people dying U.S alone in the last year, does not convince you to stay masked and safe and follow some simple instructions for few more months until everyone is vaccinated even if you don't believe in them personally, nothing is going to.
It is true; the PDF linked in the GC has to make a number of assumptions and is very obviously made from a point of bias (which does not invalidate its claims but warrants extra scrutiny).
Also it's comparing raw ICU admissions, but there are a number of really nasty adverse reactions that don't throw you in the ICU. The general "second shot syndrome" that something like half of people getting Pfizer/Moderna experience is a great example of that. Yeah it's not bad enough to send them to the ICU, but for many people COVID-19 would be literally asymptomatic or would be minimally symptomatic, whereas the second shot syndrome can be quite brutal.
Why do you believe that? It seems to me that the reputational damage caused by the U of C centre putting out bad slides is going to be stronger than any benefit they might get from being "seen to be a team player" or similar. Skepticism is always good but in this particular case, I do trust that evidence.
> there are a number of really nasty adverse reactions that don't throw you in the ICU
OK, but you can make the same argument for COVID. It seems to me that the slides are at least comparing apples with apples.
> OK, but you can make the same argument for COVID. It seems to me that the slides are at least comparing apples with apples.
If you look at the rates of acute side effects to the vaccines, I forget the exact number but it's at least like 80%. It's insanely high. SARS-2 absolutely does not produce that given the massive proportion of asymptomatic individuals and significant amount of paucisymptomatic individuals
Why do you assume that people who are getting second shot syndrome would be the same people who would have asymptomatic COVID-19? That seems... far-fetched at best.
Second shot syndrome is apparently worse in the young (20's / 30's) due to the stronger immune response. I wasn't assuming that everyone who gets the syndrome would be asymp. but just that many would.
It's 6 in 1000 if you listen to the CDC; personally I think the real number is closer to 3 in 1000. That's not too far off from what you said but I prefer being more explicit rather than using such a fuzzy resolution.
And just to be explicit, that's the general IFR, the IFR for, say, people in their 20's, or even people in their 40's, is a fraction of that.
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Anyway, your point about risk management is somewhat true, but it is much more true if you apply that logic to the general public's fear of SARS-2 in the first place. I can't find it in my notes but surveys that have asked people what their chance of dying is if they catch the virus, are off by MULTIPLE orders of magnitude. And young people rank their individual risk of death higher than old people do (both estimate too high, even the old people), presumably due to them being more "plugged in" to "the system" so to speak.
Personally speaking, since I'm in my 20's, almost everyone I know who has gotten the vaccine has done so because they believe outright falsehoods about the virus that have been propagated not just by the media but by our so-called health experts themselves.
For example, I have multiple friends who had PCR-confirmed COVID-19, recovered months ago, and still got the vaccine. In the times I've probed at them to see why, they muttered some vague things about "the variants" and essentially said that the variants bypass naturalistic immunity which is just completely false.
I know for a fact that my likelihood of an acute adverse reaction (the all-too-common "feeling like death for a day" reaction) is far higher than the likelihood of comparable symptoms from SARS-2 infection. So I'm not getting the vaccine, and I'm not embarrassed to say so. For many people, the risks of the virus are less than risks of the vaccine; however, much less people than you would think. We don't have good enough data yet but I'd bet it crosses over somewhere in the 40's or 50's age range.
There's a huge difference between being an "anti-vaxxer" in the true sense of the word - i.e. you think all vaccines are inherently bad, period - and being someone who takes the same attitude towards vaccines that we do towards drugs: no drug is inherently safe; rather drugs that are proven to be safe are safe. By extension, no vaccine is inherently safe; vaccines that are proven to be safe are safe.
The latter statement is my personal view of it, and unfortunately such a statement can get you banned from social media platforms if you get unlucky.
This binary way of dividing the world into "anti-vaxxer" vs not, "AIDS denialist" vs not, etc is not just oversimplified but is intentionally done to suppress dissent. I refuse to participate in such a culture and I humbly implore you to do so as well.
It's extra frustrating because organizations like the CDC get held to lower standards than anyone else. They can make a pronouncement recommending the use of face masks for SARS-CoV-2 community transmission when the body of the research confirms that (a) such intervention has never been tried in an RCT and indeed the whole "my mask protects you" hypothesis is intentionally unfalsifiable, (b) the research literature documents numerous negative impacts whereas the positive impact on transmission is completely unproven at best, and yet their evidence-less pronouncement is considered evidence in its own right and such a pronouncement is used as a citation in Wikipedia articles, etc.
(Just using masking as an example, if any onlookers strongly believe that masking is efficacious for the stated purpose just imagine I gave a different example, although I don't see how anyone could reach that conclusion about masking specifically based on the research literature out there which is neutral at best)
Or as another example, the CDC loves to try to encourage people to take the flu vaccine, and yet I was shocked to discover that it takes 71 flu shots to prevent a single flu case, 29 flu shots to prevent one ILI (this is a better number than the flu case number since really we care about ILI in general, but even so 29 is an abysmal number), AND that regardless of the mediocre reduction in cases/ILI, it makes essentially no difference in hospitalizations.
I didn't realize until this year how much of "public health" involves (a) actively and intentionally lying to the public (for example, if you read about the AIDS crisis you learn about the "noble lies" told about who was vulnerable as well as the not-even-noble lies like when Fauci told people you could get AIDS from close contact with someone with AIDS when the scientific evidence showed that to be false), and (b) is really a giant marketing campaign for various big pharma interests (I say that as someone who is an unashamed free-market capitalist, not that the US is actually a true free market when it comes to the pharma/medical industry)
I hear this line being trotted out all over - especially from the "experts" - and I find it nothing short of enraging. There is a difference between saying "an mRNA platform in general might not be safe" and the actual claim real people make which is "this specific vaccine has not existed for more than a year and is being hastily rolled out on the world population via implicit or explicit coercion". The mRNA platform in general can be safe and, say, the Moderna vax could still have a poor safety profile. This is why we perform rigorous long-term testing and why most vaccine approvals (not that these are FDA approved of course) take several years.
If you can't be intellectually honest enough to admit that there is a difference between "we've used this platform in theoretical research in small numbers" to "we mass-market and roll out this novel vaccine to billions of humans worldwide", you shouldn't be in the discussion, IMO.
It's the same thing with flu vaccines, mind you. They only get a few months testing before entering mass use
The speed of access for these vaccines is that they started mass production while testing was ongoing, rather than waiting until after testing to start production
Thanks for the important clarification; I didn't read closely enough.
My argument was definitely tailored for the mRNA discussion, although the purpose was more to illustrate the broader principle, but, not knowing a whole lot about adenovirus vector vaccines specifically, is it even the case that adenovirus-vector vaccines have been widely used in the general population?
I couldn't find great info with a cursory search (indeed the top result is the CDC which consistently fails to cite anything they ever claim, ugh), but I wonder if the general argument still applies for these types of vaccines as well.
Anyway, thanks so much for catching and pointing out my error there.
> fwiw, new and better better technologies need to get used for the first time, eventually.
No-one disputed that, I'm just pointing out that it is a very valid point for someone to say "I have concerns that we're rushing out an experimental vaccine". You might take issue with the specific wording (I don't) but the general point I hope we can agree on.
It's not dishonest. It's a very adequate answer to the over-simplifying claim above. I.e. there is a difference between a newer and an older platform and there is a difference between an experimental platform and a new platform (that's not experimental but has been in development for a long time).
You can always argue for making things slower and experiments longer, the problem is, that there is a pandemic going on with 3M deaths in the past year. Actually people seem to think that you can develop vaccines without being rushed, but it doesn't seem to be the case. There are several reasons why other vaccines took years:
- it was a long time ago and scientists had a lot less knowledge, experience and older technology. (Think e.g. the mRNA vaccines, which J&J is not one of, where the first candidate could be completed in something like 2 weeks after the isolation and sequencing of the virus.)
- they had to start from 0 for a new virus (because they new less, etc.). Like for the polio, or HIV. In the case of SARS-CoV2, they could build a lot on the experiments from SARS-CoV1. As far as I know, there was a vaccine candidate back in 2003, but by the time it would go into phase-3, the epidemic was over. Also, it seems that research never stopped about the coronavirus vaccines, so there were new results between 2003 and 2020 that the mRNA vaccines built on.
- some viruses are easier to develop a vaccine for. (E.g. the HIV is not one of them, because it's very good at evading the immune system)
- I've already mentioned this, but if the vaccine candidate doesn't get ready on time because of the above reasons, then you may have to wait for years before you can do a phase3 trial because there will be no people getting infected, so you won't be able to measure the effectiveness. This is what happened with the ebola vaccine in 2014. Now the vaccine is 7 years old, but it doesn't make it any safer, because there weren't people who could be vaccinated. (Well, of course, you could vaccinate them and wait for any long term side effect, just in case, that would show up without being infected, but that doesn't seem like a very important data point.)
But again: why would you want to wait for several years in a situation like this when we do have a pretty clear picture of both the worst case risks of the vaccines and the risks of the disease (which are higher than the worst case risks of the vaccines).
> It's not dishonest. It's a very adequate answer to the over-simplifying claim above.
I would disagree that calling it "rushed, experimental, and not necessary for [the original commenter]" is an over-simplifying claim. Indeed I find the "we've done theoretical research with platform X for years" to be the oversimplification. That being said I do agree that there is a difference between an experimental platform and a new platform.
> But again: why would you want to wait for several years in a situation like this when we do have a pretty clear picture of both the worst case risks of the vaccines and the risks of the disease (which are higher than the worst case risks of the vaccines).
Starting with the "higher than the worst case risks of the vaccines" part, FWIW, this is true in general but not for all individuals. For someone like me (20's, active, no major health conditions), the acute side effects of getting a SARS-2 vaccine far outpace the expected level of symptoms from SARS-2 infection itself. (Speaking from a personal risk reduction standpoint only, I don't want to get into the ethics of medical collectivism for the purposes of this discussion). I don't think you would dispute that, but just wanted to mention it because it's because taboo (and indeed you can get actively censored) to say "for my specific health circumstance the vaccine is more dangerous to me".
As for the more general point about understanding the risks of the vaccines and the disease fairly clearly, I would say that we understand the virus far better than the vaccines. Indeed it really saddens me how we've wasted public health dollars on messaging to people that immunity to reinfection is not a thing (when it is most definitely a thing) and to be super spooked about variants despite the fact that SARS-2 is not going to magically mutate away from the spike protein anytime soon (i.e. there's plenty of epitopes for our immune system to work with even for the highly artificial immunity produced by making the body's cells manufacture spike protein exclusively).
I will grant though that we have bounds on how bad short or medium-term adverse reactions could be to the vaccines. Personally I worry less about the (using mRNA as an example here to illustrate a general point) "it's going to turn me into a human GMO" pseudo-argument than I do things like (a) "is the rate at which spike proteins get produced in the body much more of a steep increase followed by a steep dropoff leading to greater potential for acute inflammatory episodes than via naturalistic infection" as well as (b) "could we be over-sentitizing the immune system to react too strongly when it detects spike protein, particularly for those who already had COVID-19 before ever getting the vaccine". If you're not aware, an absurd amount of people who have already gotten COVID-19 and therefore have naturalistic immunity are still getting the vaccine, either because they're "required" to (aka they don't know or want to fight their job's requirements) or more often because they've been brainwashed to think that the variants evade natural immunity which is just a total media-propagated falsehood.
> In the case of SARS-CoV2, they could build a lot on the experiments from SARS-CoV1
Totally agreed and I wish more people knew that the virus causes COVID-19 is called SARS-2 and that it is directly related to SARS-1 (I'm referring to layfolk here). As a separate tangent I wish more people understood that the emergence of SARS-2 means we don't really need to worry about SARS-1 anymore because anyone exposed to SARS-2 will be cross-reactive with SARS-1.
> I've already mentioned this, but if the vaccine candidate doesn't get ready on time because of the above reasons, then you may have to wait for years before you can do a phase3 trial because there will be no people getting infected, so you won't be able to measure the effectiveness.
This is simply not the case for an endemic seasonal respiratory virus. You'll have plenty of cases, especially since we're basically PCR-testing the whole globe (I don't think we should be, to be clear). But I totally agree that the apparent benefit of vaccines declines exponentially as time goes on, particularly with SARS-2 where the fact that it is deadly for the very elderly and harmless for the very young means that yearly recurring mortality is going to essentially vanish after it's propagated through the current world population (as an aside, this fact is one of many reasons why all the hysteria around the virus was absurd from the get-go; amortized over several years the mortality of SARS-2 is entirely unremarkable)
> But again: why would you want to wait for several years in a situation like this when we do have a pretty clear picture of both the worst case risks of the vaccines and the risks of the disease (which are higher than the worst case risks of the vaccines).
Yeah, to conclude I want to bring it back to my earlier point which is that once the virus has propagated through the current world population (more or less), the set of SARS-2-naive individuals will become dominated by the very young, who are not at real risk of COVID-19 and therefore they will develop immunological memory while young when they are incapable of being harmed by SARS-2. This means that recurring yearly mortality will fall off a cliff (albeit, if we keep labelling deaths the way we do we won't see that reflected in the numbers nearly as much as we should). Which is why I think the restrictions and everything else, even if they had worked in places like the US or Europe where they totally failed, were always a bad idea. But the other side of that coin is: yes, insofar as you do think SARS-2 is something worth really freaking out over, we absolutely have to rush the vaccines because if we wait 2 years then there won't be any real COVID-19 deaths left to mitigate.
> All these anti-vaxers talking about living in fear of a virus that has 98% survival rate
Please cite a source here. Survival rate usually means IFR not CFR, and even the CDC's own number (the CDC is going to be incentivized to overstate risk) puts it at around a 99.4% general survival rate. Other estimates put it closer to 99.7% or even higher.
We live in a time in which we've thrown everything we knew about health and immunology out the window and have built a society in which all scientific (or philosophical) dissent to the COVID-19 fear-narrative is censored by large tech companies and scientific papers contrary to the consensus are prevented from being published (I'm thinking of https://twitter.com/mgmgomes1/status/1291162358962937857 / https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7239079/)
Traditionally, opioids/opiates kill via mu-opioid receptor agonism, which is why administration of a mu-opioid antagonist (Naloxone, brand name Narcan) is the first line of defense for avoiding mortality. However Fentanyl is unique in that respiratory depression isn't the only major cause of death, but noradrenergic and cholinergic mechanisms down-stream of the mu-opioid agonism can cause Wooden Chest Syndrome which can lead to cardiopulmonary arrest.
This has relevant implications for first-responders since this is generally only known in the anesthesiology community.
It absolutely could, and that should be self-evident.
> Also pretty sure risk of death outweighs literally any possible long-tail risk, so still seems sensible for the young to get the vax.
This is just not true. The risk of death in children from COVID-19 is so low you literally should not ever worry about it. If you want to compare numbers in an academic sense go ahead, but the fact that actual adults are wasting valuable cognitive and emotional energy worrying about their kids is a great tragedy.
The recorded COVID-19 deaths in children are, by the way, using the absurd definition of a COVID-19 case/death that most of the western world is using; a definition where having PCR-confirmed SARS-2 infection means that ANY death is classified as a COVID death. This is not how this is supposed to work; there is supposed to be a distinction between the virus and the disease, but we define the disease as merely having the virus! It's completely absurd. Indeed I'm writing an article about this concept (pathological vs physiological) right now