Virus is weak and has super low mortality rate (esp. if you take care of yourself and are not old or fat). Vaccine is new and w/o years of data behind it. I pick no vaccine.
Well you pick wrong. But that's fine I guess, at this point it's personal responsibility and if you want to make a stupid decision, go with god.
The virus has a fairly low mortality rate for healthy people, most people aren't healthy.
The fact the vaccine is new is irrelevant because generally speaking you can substitute time with quantity. Most effects are normally distributed in time, and so if you have enough doses given, you can replace the fact it hasn't been around too long with a high number of administrations when making a safety assessment. And it's been given literally billions of times. We've seen the full gamut of consequences.
But anyways, 'long-term side effects' don't refer to latent effects. It's not things that magically appear 10 years later. They're effects that last a long time but usually onset almost immediately. There's no reason to think that 5 years of data is better than 3 years of data when administered billions of times.
And frankly if you think 3 years and billions of data points are insufficient nothing's going to change your mind. So you may as well stop pretending it's a data issue.
As I said, irrationality is your prerogative. But you are wrong.
Yeah I'm speaking for myself, and I'm very healthy and fit. If I were not, I'd probably be on other prescription drugs, so what's one more thing? I don't think I've taken an OTC or prescription drug in 10-15 years. My medicine cabinet is empty. I've smoked some weed though. Agreed on the personal responsibility piece.
The long-term side effects piece is still undecided and that's undebatable, simply because not enough time has gone by. Maybe I'll be open to changing my mind in 5-10 years. Even then, I'd win, no?
> The long-term side effects piece is still undecided and that's undebatable, simply because not enough time has gone by. Maybe I'll be open to changing my mind in 5-10 years. Even then, I'd win, no?
Like I said long-term side effects doesn't mean latent effects. It doesn't mean things that show up years after administration. It means things that happen right after administration but last a long time. If getting the COVID vaccine caused your arm to fall off 30 seconds after administration, that's a long-term side-effect because last I checked arms don't re-grow.
Yes, we do know what the long-term side effects are. You've confused 'long-term' and 'latent'.
Yes, it's decided. No, it's not debatable.
> ... simply because not enough time has gone by.
Again that (a) doesn't matter and (b) unless you're a vaccineologist then your opinion about whether sufficient time has passed is totally meaningless.
Ok, so latent side effects are long term side effects that have no immediately observable impact. As in, we aren't aware of them until later. You're arguing over semantics, but latent effects absolutely do matter as well. And are just as important to consider in the risk profile. If I eat mad cow prions, I might not have any immediate issues, but those prions are folding around in my head. Is that a latent or a long term side effect? The only difference is whether it's observed or not. So does it matter? It's still an issue.
With the mRNA vaccines, one of the only side effects that's acknowledged now in public is the cardiovascular damage they can cause. You can damage your cardiovascular system and not notice it for a long time. Likewise, the iGG4 antibody triggering for the spike proteins, this actually has an immediate side effect that can be mistaken as a beneficial side effect, less symptoms! But, now your infections are treated like common allergens by your immune system and a "mild" case of COVID causes you to die suddenly. Latent, long term... what's the difference?
> unless you're a vaccineologist then your opinion about whether sufficient time has passed is totally meaningle
Also, outright dismissal of an argument based on appeal to authority is not productive.
Most people conflate latent with long-term. They believe when researchers are looking for 'long-term' effects they're looking for things that magically show up somewhere down the line, and therefore 'we haven't waited long enough!!' and 'there's not enough data!!' - but that's not what they're doing, although they're open to being surprised.
We've studied mRNA for like 50 years now, we understand how it works enough to know that what you're suggesting just isn't a real outcome.
You are right it doesn't matter per se because outcomes are normally distributed in severity and time and if you give enough people the vaccine you can substitute that for waiting. And by vaccinating 70% of the world, we can be utterly, completely, 100% sure it's safe.
It's safe, end of story.
> Also, outright dismissal of an argument based on appeal to authority is not productive.
To invoke appeal to authority there would have to be an attempt to invalidate evidence on the basis that someone is or isn't an expert. The parent didn't provide any evidence whatsoever. If they had either evidence or experience in the area I'd take their claim more seriously (but still inconclusively). However at this point it's just some random person on the internet saying "we need more time!" without explaining why or why I should believe them in absence of data.
Sorry bud, it's MSG all over again. But like I said it's a personal responsibility thing now and if you want to be wrong you're free to do so.
It's kind of true when you're looking for the long tail in anything.
The reality is most drugs and vaccines that you get are tested on a few hundred or a few thousand people over a long period of time. But mostly because it's very difficult to measure the efficacy of something with statistical significance if the prevalence rate is low.
So you can either give a bunch of people Ebola to check if the Ebola vaccine works, or you can wait a long time. Ethics boards frown on the former.
However with COVID like 1% of the population had it when we were ready to test vaccines so showing efficacy was very quick and very easy.
But aren't we talking about latent issues? It sounds like you are saying most drugs de-facto check this because the trials must go for so long. But that's the point isn't it? Because short term efficacy was proven so quickly the de-facto check on latent issues never occurred.
What reason do you or anyone else on earth have to think there would be a mechanism that yields latent issues? We have studied mRNA for about 50 years now. And the adenoviral vector vaccines are a completely different mechanism studied for about 50 years too.
What exactly bad thing do you think would miraculously appear 3 years later showing zero signs, symptoms or evidence in 6 billion people? And why would that be different after 5, 10 or even 15 years? There's no law that says Tylenol doesn't cause your arm to fall off 110 years later either, but that's not the standard of proof. Nothing in life has zero risk.
That aside I think if your n is large enough, I think even issues that are ordinarily latent would be at least detectable. Certainly 3 years later. The normal development cycle is as short as 5 years, 2 of which are in regulatory approval.
At some point we have to be guided by our past experience. You can't ever prove a negative, but you don't have to prove a negative to move forward.
I'm not really worried about mRNA per-se I'm worried about an unvetted delivery mechanism. Did you know its rare but accepted that some dogs get injection site tumors and we don't really know why? That would surely be a latent effect in dogs, why do we think it could never happen in humans who live much longer?
> I'm not really worried about mRNA per-se I'm worried about an unvetted delivery mechanism.
mRNA and the adenoviral vector vaccine delivery mechanisms have been studied for 50+ years and are vetted.
> Did you know its rare but accepted that some dogs get injection site tumors and we don't really know why?
Did you know dogs aren't humans, and there's no evidence of this kind of thing in humans at all?
btw it's also extremely extremely rare in dogs, to the extent it's hard to find any kind of data on it. It wasn't thought to occur except in cats until the 70s, so I've written up the rest of this generously assuming cats.
Most study headlines you read are fun achievements that only work on the animals under study and they don't have the same effects in humans. You can significantly increase the life of worms by not feeding them, but humans not so much. Weird huh.
Again this brings us back to our 'substitution of T with N' conversation. It's always a normal distribution. While these VAS tumors develop a few years in, in some cases they develop within a few months. So if you give 6 billion people vaccines over 3 years, you would have definitely seen this kind of latent thing by now, even if its peak effect is a few years later.
> That would surely be a latent effect in dogs, why do we think it could never happen in humans who live much longer?
That's not a thing. Again you're asking to prove a negative, which is not how we do anything because it's impossible. The burden of proof is on you to explain why you think it could happen, not on me to prove why it couldn't.
Prove to me that eating a tomato won't cause turbo-cancer of the elbow. You can't.
I love the way this progressed from, latent disease doesn't happen to prove to me tomatoes don't cause turbo-cancer. There's so much text there that its really nice and smooth.
It really doesn't. I keep illustrating the premise that you can replace time with sample count to make a best-effort, reasonable estimate of the long-tail risk of normally distributed outcomes. The ones to which you are alluding. Ideally, in a way you appreciate - or at the least understand.
I'm also saying that beyond that reasonable estimate based on the 300+ years of vaccine development behind us (and 50+ years of development of mRNA and viral vector vaccines) you are asking scientists to prove a negative which nobody can do.
That's not the standard we hold literally anything else to, nor should we.
I'm sorry for the snark and I do really appreciate the back and forth. I guess what I don't grasp is how we are confident that these are all normally distributed. We don't really know what these distributions look like until we resolve them in the real world. For things that could irreversibly fuck up a population it would seem to me you'd want to take that process tediously slow. I guess what you are saying is "YES goddamnit we are already doin it!" But still we are testing the whole package live without much of a holdback. The whole process felt imprudent for the likes of Covid.
> The other day I saw a well-known programmer tweet an "in memoriam" to his wife, who died of cardiac arrest at the age of 42 in April 2021. A bare minimum of digging revealed some of her last Twitter activity to be liking various vax booster posts. What are the odds her death was even reported as a potential adverse event?
For someone age 42 the odds of having a heart attack are about 97 in 100,000. The odds of a cardiac event due to COVID vaccine are two orders of magnitude lower.
This is the post hoc fallacy and proportionality bias. Just because one event follows another doesn't mean they're connected. Further, humans are biased to think big and impactful outcomes must have big and impactful causes. [1]
It is simply far more likely that she independently had a vaccine and a heart attack. It sucks, to say the least, but it happens.
When you give billions of people the vaccine you'll get basically everything happening after someone gets a vaccine including a death by train derailment. It's simply far more likely they're not connected at all.
You saw one anecdotal report of a bad thing that happened to someone after they took a COVID vaccine, without any evidence they were connected. I'm sure more than once someone took a tylenol and got hit by a bus. That doesn't mean taking tylenol causes getting hit by a bus.
This is why anecdotes aren't a substitute for medical research.
The data point is meant to be illustrative of broader habits and behaviors which put the lie to the absurd notion that there is robust pharmacovigilance being conducted on the COVID vaccines. So if we apply your line of reasoning across the board, why would any adverse event ever be recorded, followed up, or investigated? After all, bad things happen all the time, and we're giving out billions of doses. What do you think the typical bias of the typical doctor has been since the vaccine rollout started?
Where did you get your figures for the likelihood of a cardiac event from the COVID vaccines? Were they stratified by age? Were they derived from trials conducted by the manufacturers, who we now know to have excluded cardiac events from the trial results for no apparent reason other than "couldn't possibly have been our Safe & Effective shots"?
Why have excess deaths remained persistently high in countries which saw a high degree of vaccine uptake, when they should be expected to decline after a new contagious virus runs its course and the vast majority of a population gains exposure? If the answer is "Long COVID," then a.) why were the vaccines so ineffective in protecting against long-term sequelae, and b.) how is it possible to disambiguate the causes of deaths without, again, properly placebo-controlled RCTs?
> When you give billions of people the vaccine you'll get basically everything happening after someone gets a vaccine including a death by train derailment.
This is such a tendentious, dishonest argument. As though "hey maybe these shots which are known to cause a lot of people heart problems caused this sudden cardiac arrest in a 42 year old who had just taken them, I would bet no one even looked into it at all because everyone knew to trust the Safe & Effective Vaccine" is somehow comparable to spuriously linking them to a train derailment.
> As though "hey maybe these shots which are known to cause a lot of people heart problems ..."
Let me stop you're right there. This isn't true. The rest of your argument follows from this faulty premise.
> There were 1,626 cases of myocarditis among more than 354 million primary doses given between December 2020 and August 2021. This research was published in the journal JAMA on January 25, 2022. [1]
That is objectively and subjectively not "a lot." That's 1626 out of 354,000,000. 0.00045%. 0.45/100,000.
> There were 37 cases of myocarditis among more than 81 million booster doses given between September 22, 2021, and February 6, 2022. This research was published by the CDC on February 11, 2022. [2]
That is objectively and subjectively not "a lot." That's 37 out of 81,000,000. 0.000045%. 0.045/100,000.
The reality is with 5.56B people vaccinated, if it had any effects, it would be clearly and plainly visible in population-level data.
You are wrong, the monitoring is extensive, the vaccine is safe, and this is settled science.
The Thai prospective study of these shots in adolescents found biomarkers of cardiac disturbances in 3% of subjects who took them. That's not just a lot, it's a HELL of a lot. If the number is within even 1/100th of that for ~40 year olds it would still be 1 in 3,333, which is far higher than what used to be considered an acceptable adverse event rate.
What's even more absurd is that that kind of study was never even conducted as part of the broad clinical trials in the first place.
> The reality is with 5.56B people vaccinated, if it had any effects, it would be clearly and plainly visible in population-level data.
And indeed it is, as I've already pointed out. Excess deaths are remaining stubbornly high in highly vaccinated countries.
It's amazing to me that the CDC is leaving completely embarrassing numbers up like the ones you cite, but I suppose they have no shortage of suckers ready to believe and repeat them.
What on earth Thai study are you talking about? I provided my sources.
> Excess deaths are remaining stubbornly high in highly vaccinated countries.
That, not to put too fine a point on it, is because everyone became fat during COVID lockdowns.
> About 42% of U.S. adults reported undesired weight gain in the first year of the pandemic, with 29 pounds gained on average, a recent survey shows. [1]
An average increase of 29 pounds and a drinking problem for half the population is going to do a hell of a lot of the heavy lifting (pun intended) in regards to excess mortality.
I look forward to your theories on the moon landing, cadet ;)
Again this is all proportionality bias. Excess mortality is up because we're fatter now. Substantially. Off an already high baseline. And we drank a lot.
That Thai study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36006288/ Looks like the actual number was 2.33%, which is still completely godawful. Funny how you haven't heard of it! If you actually believe the CDC when they claim there have been <100 cases of myocarditis from these shots I have a bridge in New York to sell you.
Those are doses given to the entire population, not stratified by age! No shit you aren't going to see the signal when your bury it under an avalanche of old people who have heart attacks more or less every second.
37 out of 81,000,000 carries no signal. This isn't SETI.
The overall incidence of myocarditis is 10 to 20 per 100,000 so the data here is probably indistinguishable from population level noise anyways. However it's like 0.145% in actual COVID cases.
A 0.5-1% mortality rate for a virus that everyone gets is not "super low."
That's alarmingly high for such an infectious virus. It's why CoVID-19 caused such a spike in mortality around the world over the last three years, and why life expectancy in the US declined by two years.
0.5-1% is the average over the population of a country like the US. The mortality rate is far higher for the "super old," and lower for the "super young."
It changes gradually with age, and depends on a lot of other factors as well.
Given how infectious SARS-CoV-2 is, it is a very deadly virus. It's nearly a worst case for public health. It's not Ebola, but almost no one gets Ebola. It's far deadlier than other viruses that people get seasonally.
Not sure about where you live but in Australia the median age of covid deaths is 86 which is 8 years older than life expectancy here. For someone my age (43) the probability of death is less than 1 in 100,000
In Australia, because of the zero-CoVID policy, most people were vaccinated before getting CoVID.
In the US, the median age of people who died of CoVID is around 75 years. The average person who died lost about 10 years of life.
CoVID is a significant contribution to mortality for most age groups. 10% of all deaths among 40-something-year-olds are due to CoVID. There are around 40k confirmed CoVID deaths in this age group alone.
Many orders of magnitude fewer than the virus. The mRNA vaccines have proven to be very safe. Serious side effects are extremely rare, and not for lack of looking.
