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Comment by m0zg | Hacker News Reader

Everyone is excited about "90% efficacy", but nobody mentions the rate of side effects. Hmm. If this is injected into several billion people, twice into each person, wouldn't you want to know at least an estimate of the ratio before you do that? Especially with mandatory vaccination looming on the horizon.

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The UK have been cautious to point out that they don't have the full safety data yet, and that that is the next step:

> The Pfizer/BioNTech Vaccine has been tested on over 40,000 volunteers and interim results suggest it is proving 90 per cent effective at protecting people against the virus.

> But we haven’t yet seen the full safety data, and these findings also need to be peer-reviewed.

> So we have cleared one significant hurdle but there are several more to go before we know the vaccine can be used.

> [...] If the Pfizer vaccine passes all the rigorous safety checks and is proved to be effective then we will begin a UK-wide NHS led programme of vaccine distribution.

https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/prime-ministers-state...

do you really think the thousands of scientists working on this just forgot to take into account the harm caused by the vaccine in comparison to covid?

i know we all trust US and european science more than others, but we need to be careful with press releases until proper research is published. e.g. remdesivir is generally a fiasco yet widely publicized

Yes.

Mind reading doesn't work. I was merely pointing out there doesn't seem to be safety data yet, and it will be required to deploy this widely. This is PR pure and simple. It doesn't mean that "we have a vaccine" quite yet, unless you want to recklessly endanger a lot of people. We won't have it for a while.

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