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Comment by warent | Hacker News Reader

I've recently heard an argument that the probability of being injured/killed by a vaccine (e.g. due to complications, allergies, etc.) is on average greater than the probability of covid causing damage/fatality to an individual, therefore if people are administered these vaccines then we'll actually see an increase in mortality/illness.

Can anyone speak to this? I'm not sure how legitimate this is, but it sounds somewhat convincing enough to be concerning.

EDIT: Downvoting someone for asking questions, even if based on a false premise, is completely shameful, especially when there's no claim to fact and it's clearly not made to be inflammatory. This community should encourage asking questions. Think carefully before throwing around a downvote as a marker of disagreement.

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This is simply not the case except when talking about a totally untested vaccine. The whole point of phase III trials is to confirm "safety and efficacy" in a wide population. Moderna, for instance, aims to enroll 30k people in it's (currently ongoing) phase III trial. After that, it's just a matter of data analysis. The FDA would certainly not approve a vaccine that had comorbidity higher than the disease it is trying to treat.

I think ruling that out is the point of a phase 3 trial.

Exactly. Realistically vaccines are very safe, very occasionally they aren't. So you start small and increase the sample size gradually to manage that risk until you have enough data to show both efficacy and safety.

To be fair: it's also a global pandemic, and one very poorly controlled in the US. So there is real and quantifiable risk to being "too slow", also. Balancing between the two extremes isn't well-served by a static protocol, you'd do something different for a vaccine against ebola (where you want to take your time because there are very few cases) than you would for covid (more urgent, low thousands of people dying every day) than you would have in the 50's for polio (an ongoing global catastrophe).

So... sure. It's not at all unreasonable that an "emergency" vaccine approval might happen. Which is why it's such a disaster that the FDA has given the appearance of being politicized (c.f. the plasma nonsense announcement, the right wing journalist hired as a press manager by the white house and then fired from within the bureaucracy). There is real concern that this administration really would "cheat" with a vaccine announcement in a way unsupported by the science.

So now worry about blowback is forcing the pharma companies to, perhaps, err in the opposite direction by ruling out an emergency approval. I'm not sure that's right either.

(Or maybe they all know there's no way they'll have valid data before November and are just trying to shut the debate down early.)

> Realistically vaccines are very safe, very occasionally they aren't

Tell that to all the people bill gates fucked up with his third world vaccine program

Try finding out how many people have died from vaccines that have passed phase 1 & 2 in the past few decades.

The number seems to be closer to zero than anything else.

Even one of the worst vaccine disasters, the Cutter incident in 1955, seems to have resulted in only some 10 deaths, of which 5 were indirectly caused.

Somewhere around 0.5-1% of people who are infected with COVID die and a larger share experience very serious symptoms, some of which can be long lasting/permanent. The risks for the elderly are even higher, something like 15% death rate for people older than 80.

In comparison the risks of a vaccine are much much much smaller, as long as the risks are similar to existing approved vaccines. The testing process is explicitly designed to make sure that no vaccine gets released that causes more harm than good.

For comparison here is the symptom sheet for the flu vaccine https://www.who.int/vaccine_safety/initiative/tools/vaccinfo... Or an easier to read summary https://immunizebc.ca/side-effects The risks of serious complications for flu vaccine are closer to 1 in 100,000 or 1 in 1 million, and even then the effects are usually much less serious than death.

EDIT: Downvoting someone for asking questions, even if based on a false premise, is completely shameful, especially when there's no claim to fact and it's clearly not made to be inflammatory.

A lot of inflammatory topics are raised by asking questions based on false premises.

If you assert that a vaccine is more likely to kill/injury you than the disease it prevents, it is more than reasonable for others to assume you that are trolling rather than satisfying your curiosity, especially since you could have asked it in a different manner: what is the risk of being injured/killed by the vaccine compared to the risk of being injured/killed by the disease itself?

And nobody knows the answer to that question, yet. That's why they're doing the Phase III trials right now.

What are your sources?

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