Vaccines Are the Safest Medical Procedure We Have. Make Your Wager Wisely
m.nautil.us
m.nautil.us
1) Most (all?) humans on planet Earth are going to produce antibodies to COVID-19, or die. It's highly contagious and getting worse with new variants. 2) Given this, we have a choice: get the antibodies the easy way (take the vaccine), or get the antibodies the hard way (catch the virus).
For some people, the virus is no big deal. For me, it meant suffering for 2 weeks, and to others it is way worse, getting sent to the hospital, and some (a tiny percentage) not surviving it at all.
Given the risk of a new vaccine vs the risk of getting COVID and suffering, I would take the new vaccine 100 out of 100 times. I tell people that had I known how bad catching the virus was, I would have taken BOTH vaccines at the same time to avoid having to go through that. (Also, I'm under 40 and very healthy/athletic.)
I'm also highly averse to "optional vaccines" in the first place, and only give my children the absolute required vaccines to keep society and themselves safe.
Just my perspective on this, but I come across so many people who do not see things the same. In the end, a lot of people are going to suffer with the virus due to applying their fears to the wrong thing.
Now that the government's time line is proven true, people have to figure out if the news lies or the vaccine is a fraud.
https://streamable.com/i4ziur (October)
The White House and Trump repeatedly claimed, publicly, that the vaccine would be available before the election in November 2020. That turned out to be very false.
The media called out the lies and now you’re blaming the media for the administration’s lies and empty hope?
Here is a link to remind you.
* https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/516855-meadows-d... The administration was attacking its own expert timelines from the CDC and FDA. Of course that made the media and other observers suspicious. “Meadows told reporters that the Trump administration is aiming to have 100 million vials ready for distribution to vulnerable populations, namely the elderly, by the end of October”
* https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/519929-trump-las... “ New FDA Rules make it more difficult for them to speed up vaccines for approval before Election Day. Just another political hit job! @SteveFDA” - Donald Trump tweet
In the end, the vaccine came out on the FDA timeline, rather than Trump and Mark Meadows successfully pressuring the FDA to release the vaccine early like Russia did with Sputnik V. Edit: added another supporting link.
1. Make them implicitly commit to finish the conversation and not run away
2. Explain how the X thing works and how it doesn’t, to eliminate strawmen and educate (eg mRNA vaccines inject RNA into cell, not DNA into nucleus... masks reduce R0 by massively reducing the momentum of the airflow that carries particles going out, they don’t prevent particles from coming into your eyes etc.)
3. Ask them, given the information in 2, what they are still worried about. Really listen and understand their points.
4. Present them with a double standard where in other areas they do Y but here they do the opposite where the criteria are met at least as much
5. When they say “it’s totally different”, explore how, and be prepared to genuinely have your own mind changed if it turns out they don’t have a double standard
Use the seat belts analogy for example, when asking about vaccines. Seat belts can harm in certain rare cases, but if the “bad” stats are higher for seatbelts, why do you use them?
Do you just ask them explicitly to spend the time with you? I’m confused by the word “implicit.”
Intuitively that seems a great way to reach a productive point of the conversation, since it forces both of you to seek resolution so that you can go do your laundry after.
This will likely be the best most widely distributed medical treatment in history, so if something is wrong with it, the medical industry will be pushed as hard to develop a treatment as it was to develop the vaccine in the first place.
The riskiest treatment you can take is one for a rare disease or narrow use case. Because there's less financial incentive to fix it. When trying to divine any businesses' priorities, follow the money.
For example, from a layman pov I'm assuming if I've had an asymptomatic case of covid-19, and get injected with an mRNA vaccine, my body would simply fight it off in the same way it would to any other exposure to the virus, and this wouldn't count towards an increased amount of "viral-load" that's been spoken about online.
If this is their best argument, I'm alarmed rather than reassured.
If we're betting, I want to know the odds. Where's the latest adverse reaction data?
cdc.gov/vaccines/acip/meetings/downloads/slides-2020-12/slides-12-19/05-COVID-CLARK.pdf
2.3% had significant side effects from the vaccine.
If new data isn't being released, that suggests the news is bad.
I wonder if there are parallels with flying. All those behaviors that ensure incredible safety of traveling just make people think it's dangerous.
An allergic reaction to a vaccine is extremely rare but extremely serious. They don't have you stick around for 20 minutes because of the likelihood, only because of the consequences of something going wrong.
I don't consider it an adverse reaction, nor do doctors/scientists, because it is part of the exact process that vaccines aim to encourage: building immunity. It is anticipated, expected and, frankly, desirable.
In Canada, if all goes well, I should be able to get access to vaccine around middle of 2021 (unclear which one). As a Russian citizen - if pus really comes to shove - I can go there and get their adenoviral vector vaccine with unclear efficiency pretty much right now - but is it wise? That is my wager.
For Moderna and Phizer, even the technology of producing the vaccine is completely new and different. The specific genetic contents are different regardless of the technology anyway.
Other than genetic material is there anything in these vaccines that doesn't have a long history of being injected into huge numbers of human beings?
This article breaks up the ingredients pretty well, although you'll have to scroll down a bit. https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/what-e2-80-99s-in-t...
I think this post fails here and there despite trying really hard.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article...
I can’t make sense of what you’re even trying to say:
1. That the mechanism of harm is different tells us nothing about the relative risks. I don’t OD on cars, but cars are riskier than Asprin.
2. You can have long term negative impacts from, eg, vaccine carriers. (Which is why we stopped using some....)
3. Overdosing a live virus vaccine happens all the time, the result being you get the illness. A flu shot can kill you by giving you a deadly flu.
Edit: I was specifically referring to how the danger of everyday things are under estimated by people. That people e.g. text while driving a 1½ ton vehicle at 55+ mph is a great example of that. The danger isn't high enough to be "common" but definitely higher than people estimate it to be.
The more the media treats covid vaccines like they're marketing the latest iphone release the more skeptical I become. It's very unsettling to me personally.
Black people in this country have the Tuskeegee experiment as a huge reason to be skeptical of vaccines.
Over the course of the last year the sense-making organizations have lost a ton of credibility by lying to get the outcome they wanted instead of educating us. The most blatant examples are probably when the surgeon general and WHO told us wearing masks would kill us because they didn't want us to buy masks that would save our lives, they wanted to save those for healthcare workers. Fauci has recently admitted he lied about his estimates for herd immunity because he believed it would aid compliance. Birx told us not to mix family and then had a mixed family Thanksgiving. The list of governors/congress/media personalities hypocritically breaking the rules they push feels unending. Fourteen days to slow the spread turned into shut down everything until there's a cure. These things have a cost, and we are seeing it.
Everyone has been eagerly waiting for a vaccine, but now that it's here, most people don't want it?
The part regarding legality of making your own copies would help with the vaccination of poor regions such as africa, while transparency could be used by researchers in order to find ways to improve it, or to create new vaccines for other viruses, or for students to learn more about it. In addition it would increase the trust of the general public for the vaccine.
Sadly there is no gcc for vaccines. Yet.
Anyone have a good writeup or similar to relieve a bit of fear?
https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source...
Not going into the safety side that much, but a lot of background and technical details.
A few weeks ago, a prominent and "mainstream" French doctor said that he wouldn't get an mRNA vaccine shot until he had access to the corresponding scientific publications (not available at the time). In the meantime, he said he wouldn't be able to make an informed decision.
https://www.sortiraparis.com/news/coronavirus/articles/23798...
Personally, I mostly trust the medical institutions of my country and I'll probably follow their recommendations without second-thoughts. Yet, it never hurts to have some doubts, especially in this context.
EDIT: It's one of these topics where you're not allowed to express the slightest, tiniest, doubt.
It's a bit disappointing, since neither of us are particularly advocating any resistance to vaccines. HN is one of the last larger forums to properly dissect topics, ask questions (even difficult ones), and try to understand root causes & effects, second-level effects and so forth.
Unfortunately lately it seems the twitter/reddit culture has taken a bit of a foothold - cheap, popularity-seeking comments void of any substance are spammed into anything remotely relating to politics or breaking news. And questions/comments like ours are vehemently downvoted. Let's hope the trend breaks down rather than grows.
It's true mrna vaccines are new, but also the sars-cov2 virus is new. Your question shouldn't be if you're worried about mrna vaccines, your question should be if you should be more worried about mrna vaccines than about getting infected.
Serious long term sideeffects from mrna vaccines? Possible, but very unlikely. Serious long term sideeffects from covid-19? Absolutely, and there's a lot we still don't know.
It seems to be fine and without any noticeable side-effects, but the “how dare you even slightly doubt it, you monster” tone is frankly absurd and authoritarian.
Except for nearly 2 million dead people so far and many millions with long term adverse effects.
> vaccine is a novel gene therapy.
And those are just wrong words.
> "how dare you even slightly doubt it, you monster”
Given that at some point supply of the vaccine will exceed the demand and planting seeds of doubt in other people will reduce demand further and cause them to loose health or life ... yes, voicing uninformed concerns is acting like monster.
It's fine to have concerns but just go and read science quietly till they are resolved instead of voicing them.
Can you imagine the pretentiousness required to say this?
We all know the reaction of this were the words spoken to some identity group X.
“Go read biology quietly.”
“Go read history quietly.”
> > vaccine is a novel gene therapy.
> And those are just wrong words.
Ok - RNA therapy... gene therapy and RNA therapy are separate but they're often discussed as related things.
> Can you imagine the pretentiousness required to say this?
I'm just advising what I'm doing myself. Without pretence.
Ignorance is not a sin, but some forms of ignorance in our highly connected society become very dangerous when voiced. And since asking is not the only way to learn, other methods are preferable in those cases.
Right out of 1984...make "ignorance" inexpressible!
Dystopian utilitarian analysis says certain words shouldn't be uttered.
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28847694/ [2] https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/history/narcoleps...
Maybe all ten children killed in the Cutter incident had pre-existing conditions. Most people have a pre-existing condition of some sort or another. It was an effort to inoculate generally, so that's why I used the death rate of COVID in the general population as a comparison.
> Only 10 in 200,000 died from a vaccine
This doesn't negate the fact that vaccines can be dangerous. This just happens to be the number for that particular vaccine.
> 10 in 200,000 deaths is better than 1 in 100
The 10 could have been fine without the vaccine. Who knows, it's just speculation; maybe they had pre-existing conditions, maybe they did not. But comparing numbers like this knowing that the 10 in 200,000 are drawn from a different population from the 1 in 100 is being disingenuous.
The people getting the Polio vaccine (children) were the general population of people at highest risk of death by polio. The same is true for the Covid vaccine, at least for the next few months. Both are mass vaccination campaigns.
The definition of "intrinsically safe" doesn't even sound like a consistent bar. Nearly every aspect of living involves risks, even if that risk is of falling and hitting one's head.
Or if the side-effect subset is random.
* Injection site pain * Fatigue * Headache * Muscle pain * Chills * Joint pain * Fever
The effects are too mild and short term to pose an interesting research question, I would think.
For the more sever side effect of swollen lymph nodes, it has not been investigated, though that might provide enough immune system insight to be an interesting question to pursue.
The only other adverse event, Bell's Palsy, is currently indistinguishable from the background rate of occurrence, so I would doubt that anybody is investigating that.
There's a big methodological problem too: you can either get an extreme reaction to COVID-19, or you can have side effects from the vaccine, but a person going through one would poison the results of the other. So to come up with some sort of experiment, you'd need some sort or prognostic based on biomarkers that was strong and convincing enough to think it was related to what you're predicting, which we definitely don't have yet. Then you'd need to cross tab between effects. Potentially possible, but it relies on a pretty big discovery that would have better uses!
As you mentioned, vaccines are not safe because they are vaccines. They're safe because of the exhaustive testing trails. A majority of the forced vaccines have been tested for many decades, those are fine (speaking from a USA perspective). The problem we face now, the anti-vax idiots muddied the waters of actual problems of some vaccines. It's hard to determine what's true and what's just stupid. This is why it's important not to overblow anything. It makes it harder to weed out true, legit problems that can be legitimately fixed.
(In the western world. Russia's Sputnik approval did skip steps. Which has probably saved a bunch of lives there, but it was riskier than ours).
To address those two points in particular:
The trials for these FDA-approved vaccines were not "rushed". They included all the usual phases for their usual durations. That's why we only get the vaccines now (even though developing them took far less than a month). What made the trials faster is that they started preparing the next stage while the previous one was still ongoing - which is not normally done, so as to not waste money in case problems are found.
As for the duration of testing: As mentioned, the set of stages before approval was not reduced. Vaccines are indeed monitored after being cleared for use, but having to wait decades would not make sense. I understand that this is different for other vaccines that are "forced", but you admit yourself that this is not true for all of them in the first place.
Start with administering to anyone who wants it, and restrict once demand exceeds supply.
What's the source on this?
“The National Association of Healthcare Assistants surveyed more than 3,100 Certified Nursing Assistants last month. Around 71-percent indicated they wouldn't take a COVID-19 vaccine, while just over 22-percent said they would.”
https://abc7news.com/coronavirus-covid-19-vaccine-survey/887...
Created an account just to answer this. I'm a nurse. Most nurses and nursing aides that I work with do not wish to take the vaccine, worried about it being "rushed". There is also worry about the claims that vaccine recipients developed Bells palsy. Even though a good number of healthcare workers have the option to take the vaccine right now, few are doing so -- at least from what I'm seeing.
Well, I think nursing culture is very difficult to understand from the outside. It was for me before I went into nursing school. Also, it is not exactly about education. For example, in nursing, there is a great focus on having initiative. I remember that in nursing school it was much more praiseworthy to have done many skills during clinical time (e.g. inserting a urinary catheter, inserting an NG tube) than to be able to enumerate the safety risks associated with those very same skills. It was very odd to me, but it was the way things were. Even working in the field there is always a great focus on "getting stuff done", so to speak.
Therefore, although I think education is a natural thing to bring up when one wishes to argue that x should be happening, it doesn't really apply in the bigger context of the profession. I believe this also has to do with a lot of other "why aren't x people doing y thing" types of arguments. In nursing, practice - and the willingness to do things - will always be more important than any deep understanding of theory. Also, let me add that I don't mean to say that every nurse is reckless. Still, this doesn't change the fact that there are some really strange aspects of the working environment. No matter how well one practices one's individual role or how knowledgeable one is, they will still be there. And, ultimately, I think these things have to be taken into account when we want to understand what is driving a group of people to make certain choices.
And now, pieces like this need to be written to re-educate people about group behaviour and essentially socialism. The very thing that america even went to war against.
Weird world. And everyone not agreeing immediately is a heretic. Yeah. Talk about confusing messages.
In what way did this article allude to anything remotely describable as "socialism"?
Literally the only part of the article that is not 100% directed at the individual reader is "(and others)" in the very last paragraph.
It is mind-boggling to me that parenthetically mentioning the single word "others" is enough to provoke "but that's socialism" responses. And let me be clear that there is a mile-wide gap between "socialism" and "the opposite of pure individualism".
No, it is not? And - while it certainly doesn't help this discussion to point this out - the irony of you being led to believe so is incredible.
That is only fatality rate.
I don't see a good way to aggregate vaccination harm, especially with qualifiers such as "bad" and given the priors we have about the particular vaccines in question. However, let's take the narcolepsy issue that has been mentioned multiple times in this thread. According to [1]:
> During the first year after vaccination, the relative risk of narcolepsy was increased 5 to 14-fold in children and adolescents and 2 to 7-fold in adults. The vaccine attributable risk in children and adolescents was around 1 per 18,400 vaccine doses.
That puts the rate at 0.005% for a prominent "bad" vaccine. I will note that this disease is not exactly comparable to death.
Considering that ~70% of e.g. the US population are older than 20 (with COVID-19 infection fatality rate increasing exponentially with age, e.g. 1% at age 60) and that you are expected to pass it to about one person, you may want to include the assessment of risks not only to yourself but to everyone around you in your considerations.
[0]: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10654-020-00698-1
Probability of chronically illness - I do not think anyone has enough data yet.
[1] https://www.publichealthontario.ca/-/media/documents/ncov/ep...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-most-dangerous-vaccine/#app
Getting sick with Coronavirus for a person of your age can kill you in at least 30 cases per million. Chance of severe long term effects is way higher.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2020/10/06/what-i...
It seems that even the worst vaccine we use has orders of magnitude lower probability of causing harm then just getting sick with covid.
People get very defensive when we ask questions like this as they think it has an anti-vaxxer agenda. But I think having this order of magnitude in mind is the best way to argue with people who don't want to get vaccinated. Just trying to ridicule them isn't the solution.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...
For an individual patient in that group there is still a lot of variance based on age and co-morbid conditions. For a 49 year old with hypertension, diabetes, and morbid obesity then their risk will be significantly higher. For a 20 year old with no co-morbid conditions then their fatality risk is virtually zero.
That's only for fatalities. We don't have solid data on long term symptoms (those that last more than a few months), but those appear to be very rare among healthy 20 year olds.
Science is predominantly occupied with death due to COVID, not long COVID. We'll probably hear more information about it after we have widespread vaccination, after more studies regarding it, and after people recover from long COVID (assuming that they ever do).
Currently it looks like it could be anywhere from 1 to 10 percent of people who have recovered from COVID.
[1]: https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/long-covid-just-how-common...
Any procedure involving any invasive (derm-piercing) tool, you're one human/process mistake away from getting exposed to super-resistant bacteria via contaminated tooling. Any procedure involving body manipulation/massages, you're one human/process mistake away from getting paralyzed neck to toe or worse. Any procedure involving anesthesia, you're one human/process mistake away from dying right here and there due to OD or allergy.
If your life comprises undergoing a million medical procedures involving any kind of invasive tools, anesthesia or surgery, you'll die from human-caused complications way before you get randomly hit by lightning.
Nah, the numbers are pretty firmly on my side. I picked a fairly 'risky' procedure as far as the routine ones go to make the comparison really conservative.
I'm still more likely to get fried to a crisp by Lightning than die by the procedure.
That should give you an idea for how safe most procedures are.
I'm saying I have a higher chance of dying by getting hit by lightning going about my life as normal than dying by getting a whole slew of routine medical procedures done.
Really?
prenatal care, circumcisions, postnatal care, colonoscopies, x-rays, ultrasounds (to name a few)
Are all preventative/diagnostic procedures that may not accompany a disease.
Every treatment is aimed at an existing pathology, by definition, otherwise can we really call it a "treatment"? For what does it treat?
Circumcision is not really preventative of anything much, it's a cultural thing at this point.
It's among the most effective anti-cancer interventions we have, so worth being clear that there is potential to benefit from treatment during a colonoscopy.
As someone who had been suffering from persistent balanitis and phismosis for over a year until getting a Circumcision which magically fixed all my problems, I disagree vehemently.
And 2 articles from a quick Google search coincidentally show the same ~60% skip flu shots for both USA and UK:
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/ColdandFluNews/story?id=641897...
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-42634781
If I didn't see the above, my intuition would have made me guess that 90%+ of medical professionals get flu shots. It turns out I was way off.
However, the reasons don't appear to be safety like this thread's article. One doctor said he doesn't get flu shots because the CDC makes a guess for what goes into the next season's flu shot and they're only ~50% correct. Since he got sick from the flu shot (even with the weakened virus) many years ago, he now avoids them. He still believes in the science of flu shot and not anti-vaxx but he personally chooses to not take it.
EDIT: Apologize for posting bad statistic. Is the UK NHS statistic accurate? If so, why do most UK health workers avoid it?
Somehow you can make the same answer without denigration.
I don't believe in "anti-vaccine market penetration".
My model I use is that ALL people are ignorant of most things that happen around them and only SOME people are knowledgeable about SOME of the things.
Med school requires good analytical smarts and an excellent ability to retain information, but I'm quite convinced at this point that raw analyical ability has almost nothing to do with the ability to think critically to avoid insane beliefs. It's just not something that humans come built-in with.
They got tested and quarantined anyway... and came up negative, but are still changing PCP.
"By occupation, flu vaccination coverage was highest among physicians (98.0%), nurses (92.0%), pharmacists (90.6%), and nurse practitioners and physician assistants (88.8%) Flu vaccination coverage was lowest among other clinical health care personnel (81.7%), assistants and aides (72.4%), and nonclinical health care personnel (76.7%)."
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/vaccines-work/effectiveness-studies....
I always get it because even 10% is better than zero and it doesn't seem to cause me any serious side effects.
The data cited in that ABC article, published in 2008, is taken from the 2006-2007 flu season. Over the last 14 years, much has changed.
For example, in 2019-2020, over 80% of healthcare workers received the flu vaccine, including over 90% of those who work in hospitals.
Source: CDC https://www.cdc.gov/flu/professionals/healthcareworkers.htm
As most/all flu shots don’t contain weakened virus (FluMist, the nasal spray, does contain weakened virus, but the shot uses either inactivated virus or viral proteins), this doctor seems a bit out to lunch?
Moreover, it’s possible to get sick from another strain of flu or because the vaccine hasn’t yet become effective - it takes a week or two to be useful so an anecdote of getting sick before then doesn’t indicate anything about the flu shot.
As personal anecdote, I get flu shot from Costco every year but this year was the first time I got nasal FluMist because they ran out of the needle version. This was also the only time I've gotten sick from it. Immediate runny nose and headache even before I left the store.
Those side effects are apparently listed as normal, though it’s interesting to learn they can come on that quickly! I would have thought the immune system would take some hours to respond.
Most vaccines have amazing effectiveness. If you take something like measles, it's basically "take 2 shots and you have a more than 90% chance of being protected for a lifetime". This is a much easier win than "you need to have a shot every year and the effectiveness is varying somewhere between 40-60%".
Luckily it seems Covid vaccines are more like measles vaccines than like flu vaccines - at least in terms of effectiveness.
The average efficacy isn't necessarily high, but I don't see how that is enough to call it really bad. That gets balanced against the benefit it does have, the cost, the safety, etc.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4521706/
(the study evaluates medical costs and productivity, it's not doing a sentimental analysis to get to the savings)
Of course there is lots of room to improve a vaccine that is sometimes only 10% effective, but a reduction in costs to society by operating a vaccination program is a pretty good place to be starting from.
I hear this argument a lot and it doesn't make sense to me. If the CDC predicts strain A will be dominant and vacinates against it, shouldn't we expect strain A to be supressed?
> And 2 articles from a quick Google search coincidentally show the same ~60% skip flu shots for both USA and UK:
You've said "healthcare workers", but your link about the UK (it's about Scotland only) talks about all NHS workers. That's cleaners, accountants, cooks, etc. People who don't necessarily have any patient contact and it's not what we'd normally call a healthcare worker.
For England, for frontline healthcare workers, the number was 78% for sept 2019 to feb 2020.
Some NHS trusts do better than others. One got a rate as high as 94%.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...