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Comment by lmilcin | Hacker News Reader

Well, I wouldn't be so happy.

Think about it. Out of million people only small percentage would become infected with covid and of that, only small percentage would die.

On the other hand, vaccine must be distributed to everybody. Alternatively to people who, by occupation, have to contact many other people, daily.

We don't know yet if there are complications from the vaccine. It is not possible to judge long term effects of anything based on very short exposure.

The value of vaccine is in preventing future infections, but for a given person now it is not yet know if the vaccine is actually a good deal or not. Only time will tell.

Looking at this selfishly and from PoV of game theory, the best decision is to let vaccinate everybody else but don't take vaccine yourself. Obviously, not everybody can make same decision.

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Others have pointed out the misinformation in your comment, but even if you believed this, why talk about it? This is the type of idea you should probably keep to yourself (as it’s in your own best interest for it to not spread).

As much as OP's comment is wacko crazy, it's in everyone's best interest if people speak honestly. This whole white-lie-in-the-public-interest never turns out well. If there was one reason attributable to the USSR's downfall, it's this attitude. Because socialism was better, it was okay to lie in its defense, and this lead to the equivalent of hyperinflation on both the corruption and the truthiness fronts.

The rapid growth of racism in blue states comes back to this attitude. If people can't speak freely, when they have false beliefs, they keep them to themselves, and you can't address them. The sorts of blue state beliefs about minorities are just wacko at this point.

People should be free to speak.

No, I don't agree with OP, but this whole "why talk about it?" thing is an issue. You talk about things together, critically to come to a common understanding of the truth. That has a lot of value in itself. It's not all about impact of words, and how you can politick the change you want in the world. Society works better when people speak openly, even when those words are false and harmful, and when people can be confronted on that, not with cancel culture, but critically, logically, and civilly.

We've worked ourselves into a corner where we can't do that anymore.

Agree that it's best for society if we don't shame people for voicing their beliefs, and that wasn't my intent.

I actually think OC made a valid point - that is, there is an extremely small chance this vaccination causes long term effects, and therefore, if every individual were to act independetly according to their own self-interest, they would avoid the vaccine. This is true for all vaccines, and reminds me of the tragedy of the commons.

I'm actually curious, though, why the OC wants to discuss this. There is truth to his comment, but if you aren't willing to be a team player, there's no good in recruiting others to your way of thinking.

Sort of. It's a quantitative argument, and that's not how the numbers work out. In the US, about 1 in 30 people have had a reasonably confirmed case of COVID (10 million out of a bit over 300 million). The odds of being exposed to it are significant at this point, unless you're locked up in a bunker in the mountains.

If you do catch it, the risks of long-term disability are pretty high too. We don't know a lot about long COVID, but the known numbers on long COVID there are concerning.

1) Vaccines are 95% effective.

2) We didn't see any side effects in 30k person studies.

It's hard to run numbers where the "extremely small chance this vaccination causes long term effects" are greater than p(catching COVID) * p(long COVID).

There was a tragedy of the commons when there were a few dozens confirmed cases of COVID. There was virtually no individual risk to going out and partying, and if everyone did that, it would double in 5 days. Everyone went out and parties until the personal risks were high, and the collective costs of those decisions were huge.

In this case, though, we're comparing the risks of an engineered and rigorously tested vaccine against those of a relatively poorly understood new virus. I can't work any sensible numbers where it doesn't make sense to take the vaccine from that argument.

The only place where I could run reasonable numbers for a reason to wait is:

1) If you can afford to 100% quarantine at home

2) You want to pick between vaccines, waiting for a better one

I take issue with this assumption "Think about it. Out of million people only small percentage would become infected with covid and of that, only small percentage would die." The virus is very contagions eventually most people will get infected, not a small percentage. The death rate is nominally low, but a 1% chance of dying is still a lot to me. Also the chances of getting long term side effects or just having a very bad illness are much higher.

Is there an example of a vaccine in history that produced no initial side effects but only very long term side effects (ie. several years later)?

I haven't seen that, but I'd be careful to draw the meaningfulness of that metric, as there has also never been an mRNA vaccine deployed until this year.

That said, the large size of these studies should be extremely comforting to people.

What I don’t find comforting is the fact that companies have not had approval (or even applied) for approval for a mRNA based vaccine until now. Even though they’ve had many years to do so.

I know nothing about vaccines or medicine really, but I just find it hard to believe that it’s just luck that we’re all going to be taking one in under a year when there hasn’t been much push for approval before this ?

Hopefully we’re not going to be pressured to be inoculated with something, anything that works, because of desperation and because managing the situation in an adult way was too hard for most world leaders.

As others have said, if you’re not in a high risk group, maybe some skepticism is warranted?

2009-2010 GSK H1N1 - settled by the gov of multiple EU countries https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/history/narcoleps...

> In 2018, a study team including CDC scientists analyzed and published vaccine safety data on adjuvanted pH1N1 vaccines (arenaprix-AS03, Focetria-MF59, and Pandemrix-AS03) from 10 global study sites. Researchers did not detect any associations between the vaccines and narcolepsy.

tbh I had the vaccine back then and am still fine(or I'm dreaming right now). That doesn't mean I'm for or against this new vaccine. I'll draw my conclusion when I see enough data. At the end of the day it's my choice if I do it or not since if you take the jab you should be safe either way.

That being said: shutting down discourse I'm always against. Dumb or not everyone should be able to have their say as long as they don't preach violence in any way.

With respect to the last paragraph, vaccination is a sticky topic, because the vaccine protects both you and those around you.

Vaccines are not 100% effective, don't convey permanent immunity, and not everyone can be vaccinated due to various health restrictions. As a result, if you voluntarily choose not to be immunized when you could otherwise have been, you are voluntarily exposing some people you come into contact with to potential harm.

It's up to you whether that falls within your definition of "violence", but some would say so.

Putting aside the deplorable ethics of freeloading in this matter, I think your analysis of the situation is objectively problematical.

It is not plausible that, absent a vaccine or other cure, only a small percentage will contract it. The evidence strongly suggests that a large fraction of the population will end up catching it at some point.

We already have plenty of evidence how that goes, in the chicken-pox outbreaks in the communities that have chosen not vaccinate, presenting a threat both to themselves and others. This virus is known to be much more dangerous.

You seem to weigh your hypothetical problems of a vaccine much more heavily than the actual problems of the virus.

> We don't know yet if there are complications from the vaccine. It is not possible to judge long term effects of anything based on very short exposure

...

> Looking at this selfishly and from PoV of game theory, the best decision is to let vaccinate everybody else but don't take vaccine yourself. Obviously, not everybody can make same decision

There are two different ways a medicine might have long term unintended and currently unknown effects.

1. It does some kind of permanent damage to you fairly immediately after taking it that takes a long time to show noticeable effects, or

2. It does some some kind of damage that is not permanent and won't lead to any long term noticeable effects as long as the original damage is allowed to heal or at least not made worse.

Category two is what you have to worry about with things you have to take regularly, because they can accumulate the damage or risk and it can take many years before it accumulates to the point that we might notice.

Because this is a not a "take every year" kind of vaccine, I don't think there is much need to worry about category two.

With "take it once" types of medicine (yes, I know some vaccines require more than one dose over a week or two, which counts as taking it once when considering long term effects), with wide deployment, I'd expect any unintended and unknown long term side effects to start being found within maybe a year of wide deployment.

3. It does something that is not immediately apparent but develops into a terrible illness/problem year/s later.

If it caused cancer, or auto an autoimmune disease, its likely these wouldn't be apparent for months or years. This is unlikely, but possible, and we could not test for this thoroughly as we didn't have the time.

I also remind you that these companies are immune from lawsuits due to the indemnity clause in their contracts.

Isn't it a bit early to say it's not a take once a year vaccine? Afaik we don't even know if getting covid makes you immune to covid longterm, we definitely don't have the long term info on these vaccines yet.

There is some recent research indicating it produces the kind of immune response that provides long term protection [1], at least if you get a strong initial response. Here's an article about that research [2].

There have been some people who have been reinfected with it, but I saw another recent article about this latest research that talked a bit about those cases. It said that they are believe to be people who did not have a strong immune response the first time. The vaccines should produce a strong response.

[1] https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/10/27/scie...

[2] https://www.darkdaily.com/mount-sinai-researchers-find-that-...

There is truth to your comment, but don't expect people to validate your idea.

It's in our best collective interest for everyone to take this vaccine even if there's a 0.01% chance it has negative side effects.

Even on an individual level, the cost-benefit of taking the vaccine is a no-brainer. Even if there's a 0.01% chance of negative side effects, the individual benefit of re-opening society far outweighs that risk.

It's true you can freeload and reap the benefits without the small risk, but if everyone thinks this way, there are no benefits to go around. Can't you just be a team player?

To put things in perspective, a 0.01% risk is like going skydiving once, or getting out of bed and doing your usual routine for a week.

It goes without saying that if the general public doesn't get vaccinated, you should definitely get vaccinated because the risk of catching COVID is worse than the risk of this vaccine.

Being a coder and not a biologist, I asked a friend who regularly works with drug companies on FDA approval. I asked what the risks could be of a vaccine that was “rushed” through. In his opinion, there was virtually no risk of the vaccine actively causing harm. The biggest risk is giving people a vaccine they think is effective but isn’t and they contract the virus.

What was rushed through? The messaging from my government (not US) has been that approval process rules have not been changed.

From the article:

> for Emergency Use Authorization

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_use_authorization

> authorizes FDA to facilitate availability of an unapproved product, or an unapproved use of an approved product, during a declared state of emergency from one of several agencies or of a "material threat" by the Secretary of Homeland Security

Rushed, yes, but via an existing set of rules for this sort of scenario. It's an appropriate use of this sort of process, but it does come with some risks.

Wasn’t Remdesivir also given emergency approval and is now to be avoided ?

In the sense that it's not as helpful as initially thought, not that it's actively dangerous.

It's to be avoided because it doesn't seem to help, but it hasn't been shown to be harmful. Important distinction. https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/who-recommends-aga...

But of course, FDA has been pressured by Trump so perhaps you can look at what other health agencies that don't have a despot screaming at them do with the vaccine.

This, there's been so much lying and distrust lately I think this is why vaccine news is treated with some skepticism and not with joy.

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