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Comment by threeseed | Hacker News Reader

There were no hospitalisations or severe incidents for either the Pfizer and Moderna trials were was related to the vaccine.

And it's pretty easy to compare the vaccines. It will mostly come down to price, ease of manufacture and ease of distribution i.e. temperature. Given that for the 3 viruses all have no risks associated with their use.

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> There were no hospitalisations or severe for both the Pfizer and Moderna trials that was related to the vaccine.

I think the commenter wanted to know whether anyone who received the vaccine was hospitalized for anything covid related, not for anything vaccine related.

Eh, I think speed to manufacture/distribute is more important. The cost of these is trivial compared to social distancing/lockdown.

Only in the richest countries. Due to the totally different age pyramid and thus few severe cases, vaccination might not be worth it for the poorest countries even at this lower price.

Lockdown/social distancing hurts the economies everywhere. India and south east Asia has a huge population of street vendors that depend on buyers being out in the streets.

By "poorest" I meant countries like CAR or DRC, maybe that wasn't clear.

How do we know there aren't long term side effects?

We don't for absolute certainty, but there's no reason to think there would be. Consider:

a) A virus that is known to cause severe disease in a significant proportion of people, including months-long serious health effects, hospitalisation and death.

b) A virus chosen because it doesn't causing any ill-effects in humans, modified to take on some non-harmful aspects of virus a) and found to not cause any significant harm in tens of thousands of people over several months.

Which is more likely to cause long-term side effects?

And not only that but option (b) is a virus "that has been genetically changed so that it is impossible for it to grow in humans," according to the article.

I appreciate the need for caution, but these people are experts in what they do, any doubts we might have would have already been considered by them.

We can't. If everybody turns into superheros in 10 years, we wouldnt know; or maybe this is actually the backstory of 'children of men'; we can't know. RNA vaccines are researched in animals for about a decade, but long term effects are usually not beeing found in such studies (disection usually cuts that short). There is though no theoretical nor experiental evidence for that.

Downvoters: do you disagree with the 'we cant know', please explain then how you can know.

Most adverse events (narcolepsy and GBS included) occur within a few months (1-3) of administration. The fact that some are reported after years doesn't mean they are "long term": it only means it took a while to vaccinate those people. So far none of the trials (even more so AZ) has incurred in vaccine-related adverse events of this sort.

If there is no known mechanism by which side effects could occur with long gestation, and if experience with other vaccines and vaccine trials provides no evidence of any such, then it would seem unlikely.

My understanding from the Pfizer press release, and I quoted it, is that there was one severe case in the vaccinated group. Did I miss something?

There was one vaccinated but then severe case in Pfizer trial out of 170 cases evaluated where placebo-then-ill cases are included, or 1 from total 8 vaccinated but then ill.

“There were 10 severe cases of COVID-19 observed in the trial, with nine of the cases occurring in the placebo group and one in the BNT162b2 vaccinated group.” (1) “170 confirmed cases of COVID-19 were evaluated, with 162 observed in the placebo group versus 8 in the vaccine group.”

1) https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta...

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