Complete protection by single dose skin patch delivered SARS-CoV-2 spike vaccine

You’re right, they completely differ from each other (regarding their relevance) and should therefore face an adjusted amount of scrutiny.

If you’re one of the top pharmaceutical companies in the world, some press releases and study protocols are simply not enough [1] and should be (imo) discarded.

If you’re a new player (Vaxxas) claiming “complete protection” by testing your product on mice, it’s simply not enough and should be (imo) discarded.

[1] https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2020/11/26/peter-doshi-pfizer-and-...

Huh, surely only a little subset of that group would refuse injection and agree to take a pill?

You can probably only make them take it when you ground the pill up in their BBQ sauce or Kale juice or something similar...

I think they made the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines extra strong (and double dose) because we were in the middle of a once-in-a-century pandemic. Would've been still somewhat effective at lower dosage. Folks have tested Pfizer at lower dose, and it seems to work still. But being high dose and double dose probably has also helped protect well against variants.

Not sure about this one specifically, but these microneedle array vaccines seem to use a slightly different mechanism to elicit an immune response (they stimulate Langerhans cells, which are dendritic cells in the skin). Hard to say if that would make side effects worse or better or have no effect -- this trial was in mice so it's not like the researchers could ask -- but it's probably different enough a system that people's experiences with the injectable vaccines probably aren't especially predictive either way.

The care givers who are vaccinated by now?

Kids weren’t even shown to be to be too infectious.

No vaccine is 100% safe, it’s very possible the risks of vaccinating kids outweighs the rewards.

> Schools can be considered continuous super-spreader events.

Where is the data to support this? Duke University released a peer reviewed study[1] in January that showed the opposite (when schools take appropriate measures).

> Duke and UNC researchers evaluated the secondary transmission of COVID-19 in 11 North Carolina school districts that held in-person instruction in the first nine weeks of the 2020-2021 school year and identified minimal COVID-19 transmission in the schools -- much lower than the rate of community spread.

The CDC have also published this[2] helpful overview about the susceptibility of children to the virus/disease (low) and the risk of transmission (also low).

I'd also urge you (or anyone) to read this very helpful article in the BMJ[3] about the risks of covid-19, but for those worried about their children it may help alleviate some concerns:

> The second row of table 2 shows that three deaths from covid-19 have been recorded among over 7 million schoolchildren aged 5 to 14 (around 1 in 2.4 million), an extremely low risk that represents only 2% of the average normal risk faced by this group. This amounts to around two days’ extra risk of dying during the 112 days of the epidemic. In the same period this age group experienced 138 deaths from other causes.

The CDC report gives a clue as to where the focus should be:

> Underlying medical conditions are also more commonly reported among children who are hospitalized or admitted to an ICU

In short, schools aren't providing super-spreader events.

[1] https://today.duke.edu/2021/01/duke-study-when-schools-take-...

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br...

[3] https://www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m3259

But this is also true of any communicable disease. Rare serious complications taken with anything and not just to “sick” people.

We don’t go back to normal when the earth is a sterile disease free environment, we go back when the outsized risk of this particular disease reduces to the noise floor of everything else.

it's not like we'll ever get anywhere near all US adults to take the vaccine anyways, the subject has become far too politicized.

At this point there's a substantial chunk of the US population hellbent on demonstrating the lockdowns and vaccines and everything that's been done throughout 2020 was completely unnecessary, by simply continuing to do nothing. They will never take a vaccine, they'll risk getting sick and let the natural immunity unfold. They're more concerned with overturning the 2020 election results.

So long as there's a reservoir of anti-vaxers for the virus to mutate in we'll keep seeing breakout mutations