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Comment by tiziniano | Hacker News Reader

How long were the trials? I recall a famous drug that was given in the 70s and it produced birth malformations. Took years for doctors to realize the cause and ban its use in pregnant women. Is there a possibility of unforeseen consequences from using RNA? What if someone has for XYZ reason more reverse transcriptase than usual? Will his-her DNA be altered?

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Of course there's a possibility. The problem with long-term effects is that if a problem takes 70 years to show up, then by definition we won't know about it for 70 years.

This applies not just to any drug you take, but also to the ingredients in the food you eat and the particles in the air we breath. We've come to such realizations before, and we will again.

But we also know for sure that COVID-19 is killing people right now.

The risk of long term effects is actually very small - almost insignificant. Long term effects tend to be an issue for drugs that are taken over the long term. With a vaccine that is only taken twice, the vaccine itself and its direct byproducts (ie the spike proteins) are only in the body for a limited period. After that it's only the immune response that remains. There's no realistic mechanism for a previously unseen effect to show up from it years down the line.

There is a small possibility that there could be detrimental effects to a fetus, which is why the vaccines are not currently recommended for pregnant women. It's not expected that there would be a negative effect; it just hasn't yet been tested. (Fortunately pregnancy is not a chronic condition, so people can still be vaccinated after giving birth.)

"The risk of long term effects is actually very small - almost insignificant"

Do you have sources for those claims?

I'm not an expert myself, but I've done a lot of reading. I don't have a specific source at hand, but this is the consensus I've gotten from any interviews of vaccinologists or epidemiologists I've read or heard. Essentially that any side effects from vaccinations show up within a few weeks—that there just isn't a mechanism for them to appear years down the line if they haven't already been seen sooner, for the reason I described.

Now again it is possible that side effects could still be discovered in patients with complicating factors that weren't represented in the trials (like pregnancy or other known or unknown pre-existing conditions). Or just because the effects were too rare to show up significantly in the trials. But again these would be expected to show up quickly as widespread vaccination begins, as did the few severe allergic reactions that have occurred.

Of course as with anything, especially as charged an issue as vaccines, if one goes looking for it one can find plenty of purported evidence that long-term side-effects (by which I mean here side effects that don't show up until long after the vaccine is taken) are possible or even common. But the expert consensus based on the totality of evidence appears to be that this is not a serious concern.

There will be a post-approval Phase IV surveillance stage to check for rare or long-term adverse effects.

> I recall a famous drug that was given in the 70s and it produced birth malformations.

You’re probably referring to thalidomide.

> What if someone has for XYZ reason more reverse transcriptase than usual? Will his-her DNA be altered?

Highly unlikely since the vaccines don’t code for transposable elements that could integrate into the host genome.

I think you mean contergan [0]. Seems to be still in use. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide

The main difference is that the way the mRNA vaccine works is much better understood. Maybe better understood,on a molecular level, than many other medications.

There's certainly unknown risks of a novel vaccine. As well as unknown risks of a novel disease.

From what I saw, currently there's no recommendation either way for pregnant people; but everyone is watching this group carefully.

> everyone is watching this group carefully.

My wife and I are trying to conceive and it's such a tough call whether or not she should get vaccinated. I try to read everything, even though I know the answer is "nobody knows." While we wait for more evidence we'll continue to quarantine and stay safe. We're hoping there's a bit more evidence by the time the vaccine is available to us.

I wish you weren’t downvoted, this is a valid, rational, and interesting question devoid of any kind of message or blanket statement like “all vaccines cause autism” or what have you.

There were also all the issues with the 1970s Swine Flu vaccine that turned out to not even be all that effective. 60 Minutes did a piece on it, and it's getting more and more difficult to search for on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bOHYZhL0WQ

> it's getting more and more difficult to search for on YouTube

Just to be clear, since this sounds conspiratorial - it is most likely difficult to search because 60 minutes is a copyrighted show and they have an official YT channel but only carries segments of their episodes. So, I suspect it is quite difficult to find any full episode.

Could be, but several months ago it was very easy to find and now it's buried further and further down. Considering everything YouTube and Twitter have been doing over the past few months to control the narrative, it's also equally likely they're intentionally burying it.

I assume you're referring to the very slight increase in cases of GBS in people who had that particular swine flu vaccine? It's interesting to note that the CDC says that having the flu is more likely to cause GBS than getting the vaccine. Both of those risks are extremely slight.

https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/guillain-barre-sy...

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