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Comment by majewsky | Hacker News Reader

Not a doctor, but from what I've heard from immunologists, vaccines in general are incredibly unlikely to have long-term side effects on the scales that you think about. When an immunologist talks about "long-term side effects" of a vaccination, they're usually considering time ranges on the order of 6-8 weeks. Meanwhile, the 10000s of patients from the big Phase 3 trials have been vaccinated for 6-9 months, so the usual scale of long-term side effects has long been registered.

That's not to say that it's completely out of the question that there will be long-long-term side effects. But if anything is going to cause long-term issues, my money is on the virus, not any vaccine.

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The mRNA vaccines are new. We don't know that our experience with other vaccine types will be exactly the same.

The only reason we think that is because vaccines in the past have had most of their recorded side effects present in the first few weeks.

Past performance...

... is a pretty decent indicator in this case.

Vaccines are not the stock market. No one doubts gravity because "past performance is not indicative of future results".

> Vaccines are not the stock market

How many genetically engineered adenovirus vaccines have there been before?

The vaccines that are your prior are typically attenuated or inactivated virus.

Majorly different category, we are in untreaded space (I'm still planning on getting one)

Apparently there were studies on adenovirus 5 vector vaccines against HIV in 2007. The vaccine was not successful, but I cannot find any data on long-term adverse effects.

You realize attenuated virusues are also genetically modified? Just via artificial selection.

At least one for Ebola, IIRC.

so, no long-term studies.

The Ebola vaccine in question has been tested in humans since 2015. How long-term are you looking for?

more than 5 years? Cancer risk, etc. is probably something decadal in scope.

Biology doesn't work like that. Certainly not for replication-deficient adenoviruses used by AZ, Gamaleya and J&J.

Plenty of replication deficient things cause cancer, for example asbestos or igf-1. I highly doubt you can rule out accidental crosstalk between elicited immune antibodies and every oncogenic human receptor.

Past success is an invalid indicator on the stock market as well

mRNA vaccines are a new way to cause the body to develop an immune response - it's not using dead/deactivated tissue of the virus that the body detects and then its holistic system develops a response to. From my current understanding with this new type of vaccine it's skipping step(s), bypassing mechanisms, that leads to the body producing something that targets the "spike" of the virus - basically making it inoperable.

I don't think we know long-term how this may impact the immune system: does bypassing certain systems/mechanisms cause other problems with future immune response?

It took how long for us to realize as common sense that use of antibiotics allows superbugs to more likely evolve?

I don’t think gravity and medical intervention risk and uncertainty are in the same domain. I could be wrong.

I'm suggesting you apply the same cross-domain skepticism to your adage that comes from the financial domain.

The situation here is closer to financial domain than the law of gravity failing.

> Not a doctor, but from what I've heard from immunologists, vaccines in general are incredibly unlikely to have long-term side effects on the scales that you think about.

Fair enough, but the comment I responded to said: "We know that there are no side effects that are common enough to be of real concern."

Given this statement is not qualified for timescale, I want to know what the basis for it is.

How does the person who made it know there are no side effects on the order of six months or a year that are common enough to be a concern?

Look I am all happy chappy with the vaccine, I will inject that sweet MRNA Pfizer or Moderna vaccines as soon as someone lets me at it, but I still think we need to avoid what Fauci does, which is knowingly lie in order to get people to do what we want them to do.

There is blood clotting risk from AZ? Great, tell me what the risk is and I can deal with it, but lie to me and we are done talking.

You can never know anything for sure. This is why science, medicine and drug approvals are all about probabilities and calculated risks. If everyone suddenly dropped dead 10 years after taking a drug that was approved in 2015 there is no way we could know that right now. But we know it's very, very unlikely, so we accept that risk.

With vaccines we know from decades of experience that severe side effects tend to occur very shortly (days or maybe weeks) after the injection. So this is why vaccine trials observe participants for weeks or months, not years, before concluding that the vaccine is safe. Of course this doesn't guarantee that the Covid vaccine don't happen to be an exception. But if that was the approach we took then we would never be able to approve anything, and never get the benefits we know for sure it brings.

> You can never know anything for sure.

But you can? e.g. "We know that there are no side effects that are common enough to be of real concern."?

What deficiency do I have that prevents me from knowing anything for sure that you don't have?

Fair enough, I clearly should have phrased that differently. I simplified the wording at the cost of accuracy. The correct wording would be "We know that it is highly unlikely that there are any side effects that ...".

Thanks, that is a much more reasonable statement, and I agree. On the one hand we don't know, but on the other hand a lack of knowledge does not mean everything has equal probabilities.

I personally don't see any good reason to think that the risk for long term side effects from the vaccine is higher for the vaccine than for COVID itself.

Your deficiency is that you're not a time traveller. You can't know what the long term consequences are no matter how many studies you do, until the long term has come to pass.

You can however guess, and make good guesses (I'm planning on getting the vaccine). But it does no one any good to fail to outline unknowns that are steelmanned by "we can't possibly know".

DangerousPie probably meant "One can never know anything for sure", not "you, cheph, can never know anything for sure, but I, DangerousPie, can".

This is a common, but confusing, use of "you" in American English.

People need to remember that we're not taking the vaccine for fun, we're taking it because COVID is out there and we know for certain that it has some lethal side effects as well as non-lethal side effects and possibly other long-term side effects that we don't yet know about. We weigh that risk against the risk that there might be some long-term side effects of the vaccine. To the best of our knowledge, the risks posed by COVID are more dire than those posed by the vaccines and we basically have to choose one.

Maybe you responded to the wrong person. I am in no way suggesting it is better to not take the vaccine, or that there is good reason to think that the risks posed by COVID are less dire than those posed by the vaccines.

> Given this statement is not qualified for timescale

Keep in mind that we also don't know the long-term effects of COVID-19. It's possible that people who were infected with mild cases drop dead 1 year and 6 months after the infection. The disease hasn't been around that long, so we simply don't know.

mRNA has a short life span. It merely tricks the body into producing the spike protein. It breaks down in the body fairly rapidly. What long term effects would you anticipate from this?

There is a good chance for long term effects from covid. Completely the opposite for the vaccine.

I think the concerns would be around the delivery vehicle, which presumably is some big polycationic lipid thing.

From what I can gather, there’s not terribly much info on what’s known about what’s going into people’s bodies, and what info does exist has arisen from a thick soup of trade secrets and conflicts-of-interest.

> What long term effects would you anticipate from this?

Maybe you are responding to the wrong person? I never made any claims regarding what long term effects to anticipate. I asked how the person I responded to know there are no serious side effects on time scales longer than we have tested things on.

> There is a good chance for long term effects from covid. Completely the opposite for the vaccine.

Yes. I know.

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