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Comment by nicbou | Hacker News Reader

I have a genuine question about this. If we discover issues within 60 days of getting the vaccine, what does it mean for the next 70 years of my life?

I understand that the odds of getting thrombosis are very low, but what about the chances of other serious issues cropping up later? Is this a reasonable concern?

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The blood clotting is a side-effect of the immune response, so we expect it to be correlated with the initial dose, usually within 2 weeks. I think they chose 60 days here as the largest reasonable upper bound to be as certain as possible they caught all cases.

No one knows right now, but we will know more over time. I guess we can take comfort in that a lot of people are in the same boat. I would like to better understand how/why mRNA vaccines can't/won't eventually turn into a dangerous prion.

I am genuinely confused as to why there seems to be more side effects/issues with the 'traditional' J&J vaccine vs. the mRNA Moderna/Pfizer vaccines. I would have thought the opposite to have been true.

But then again the Sputnik vaccine seems to be doing ok? So maybe it's just the J&J formulation. Who knows though, the peer reviewed data for this hasn't had much time to go through rigorous scrutiny.

> I would like to better understand how/why mRNA vaccines can't/won't eventually turn into a dangerous prion.

Why would it? A prion is a specific protein, why would this specific mRNA molecule, which only exists in our body for hours, cause that specific protein expression, when we have hundreds of thousands of other mRNA molecules per cell all similarly experiencing their own self destruction?

Well, he did say he'd like to understand better.

I don't understand why you're so confused about the lack of knowledge from someone who declared their lack of knowledge.

I didn't take it as a genuine request as they are parroting an anti-vaccine claim.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/pfizer-neurological-damage...

It was a question, not a claim. I don't know what this crowd is about, so I did not pad my question with a notice of non-affiliation.

Science is about curiosity, not faith. Shaming people for asking questions discourages the former and expects the latter.

You're right, I may have been too dismissive, and you're right, science is about curiosity, but the "just asking questions" approach is a way to demolish perfectly good science. You can't prove a negative, and so throwing doubt after doubt at something is a good way to discredit a perfectly valid point because eventually you run out of answers. That's why I asked why they had that belief.

The user that asked the question didn't further engage, they just threw in some doubt and walked away. That doesn't feel like scientific curiosity. That feels like pot stirring.

The user that asked the question is me. I got the answers I came for, and didn't feel it necessary to add anything else.

Prions are proteins, so that's not much of a risk with the mRNA vaccines. But I do get your general point. As to why J&J seems to have more side-effects, its hard to tell. More than the peer-review step (which is attacked all the time), my sense is that the clot risk is so rare that the number of participants needed to observe enough clots was much much larger than the number of Phase 3 trial participants.

As for the Sputnik vaccine (and the Sinovac one in China), sampling rare events such as these and reporting them is a function of how many people have been given the vaccine + the amount of transparency of the authorities in the countries administering these vaccines.

That's what long-term studies are for, but we've bypassed those for this vaccine.

Just as a layman though, my instinct would be that something like a vaccine would have pretty short-lived side-effects. It's a single dose (or maybe two, depending) and it doesn't persist in the body for very long. Most drugs with bad long-term effects are ones that are taken on an ongoing basis.

I think the issue wouldn’t be that the vaccine is in the body for a long time to damage something but that it damages something in a way in a short time frame that keeps damaging other things or starts going wrong.

Hi throwawayboise, Boise resident and native myself for the record, the idea these bypassed needed studies is a complete fabrication. Please stop harming both of the communities we seem to share by spreading this nonsense.

It's not a fabrication. These vaccines haven't even existed for a year; there is no possible way to do a long term study in under a year. Whether you feel like a long term study is needed is certainly up for debate, but none have actually been done.

The idea that they have been "bypassed" is indeed a fabrication. That phrasing implies that long-term studies are usually carried out in vaccine trials and an exception was made for COVID-19 vaccines. That is not the case. Long-term studies are always carried out after a vaccine has already hit the market.

It would be correct to say that no long-term studies have taken place, not that they have been "bypassed."

What time frame would these long term studies normally be done over? My understanding is most of the acceleration came in the form of ramping up manufacturing early and moving to Phase III faster, but we're now 1 year out from when Pfizer started their first study and we've obviously been giving out ton of vaccines for a bit since then. We understand pretty well what sort of side-effects come from vaccines and they aren't invisible for this long

Most doctors I have heard from note that side effects for vaccines (if they occur) almost always pop up shortly after the vaccine is administered. There are rarely, if ever, side effects that have occurred years after vaccine administration. Thus, we have no reason to believe these vaccines will have any significant long term side effects.

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