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Comment by xeromal | Hacker News Reader

I like the process the author walked through. I'll paste one of the paragraphs.

"So as the CDC link shows, the choice is clear: mass vaccination does indeed have rare side effects, but mass infection with the coronavirus (which is the only other choice) is absolutely worse. And to reiterate a point that’s been made many times, the faster we can vaccinate people, the lower the chances we have of encountering a new variant form that will make everything even worse. We have to get as many doses out to the world as we possibly can, as quickly as we can."

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> mass vaccination does indeed have rare side effects, but mass infection with the coronavirus (which is the only other choice) is absolutely worse.

This may be a true statement on a population level, but you have to be more careful for specific sub-populations. For boys under age 18, in particular, it's looking quite likely that avoiding the second dose is a smart risk/benefit calculation:

https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/second-opinions/93340

Likewise, it makes no sense for a younger (healthy, non-obese...) woman to get the J&J or AZ vaccines, so in certain countries, it makes no sense for young women to get vaccinated. The messaging here is far too blunt.

Oddly, the one blunt, true message that doesn't seem to get transmitted is that the bad effects of this virus are largely eliminated by vaccinating those over 65.

I am mostly on board with the vaccine, going to get my 2nd shot soon. But I do have a worry; This is setting a precedent where instead of treating disease now, we will preemptively vaccinate. It actually seems morally wrong to not take these steps to preemptively vaccinate. But will all these new vaccinations cause a virus to adapt to be more viral, similarly to how antibiotics has the potential to make bacteria resistant?

Quanta Magazine [1] has an interesting article about how vaccines can help pathogens evolve to be more virulent, a particularly interesting part:

> After the parasites circulated through 21 rounds of vaccinated mice, Barclay and Read studied them and compared them to malaria parasites that had circulated through 21 rounds of unvaccinated mice. The strains from the vaccinated mice, they found, had grown far more virulent, in that they replicated faster and killed more red blood cells. At the end of 21 rounds of infection, these more quickly growing, deadly parasites were the only ones left.

As a sibling mentioned, it doesn't appear to be as bad as bacterial resistance, or at least different in a nuanced way.

From what I've read there is a difference between vaccinating _before_ a pandemic and vaccinating _during_ a pandemic. With the safer preference being to vaccinate before a pandemic to avoid immunological escape.

[1] https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-vaccines-can-drive-pathog...

> This is setting a precedent where instead of treating disease now, we will preemptively vaccinate

This isn't setting any precedent. Polio, tetanus, hepatitis A/B, rubella, measles... Quite a lot of diseases where vaccination is the preferred method versus better treatment.

The big issue with bacterial resistance to antibiotics is that there's a quite limited number of antibiotics, sometimes ~one that works without terrible side effects, so resistance is a _big_ deal.

Vaccines don't work like that, there's an effectively unlimited number of vaccines, because they're tailored to the virus. It's still a problem if a virus mutates around your vaccine, but you're not worse off for trying.

I am not a virologist, but it doesn't seem to make common sense to me that we're safer if we let a virus spread and just treat it, instead of vaccinating. The more of the virus that's out there, spreading and multiplying, the greater the opportunity for problematic mutations to develop/spread.

That also assumes that there's a good treatment, and sufficient capacity to treat everyone quickly, otherwise there's really not a choice there.

Given that covid is entirely treatable in 99.9+% of cases (read the studies & physician anecdotes who have been treating it effectively since last March), it makes more sense to me to take the path of being proactive, healthy, and unvaccinated until it reaches Approved status. To each their own.

This is a very naive take on the risks of infection. Just because you survive doesn't mean you're getting out unscathed[1], and it's also a pretty entitled take on access to health care. If everyone followed this advice we'd be looking at full ICUs and a lot of people asphyxiating in hospital hallways again.

Concern trolling about the approval status is also just that. The risks are pretty well known at this point and approval is a forgone conclusion. If hundreds of millions of healthy vaccinated people aren't enough proof of safety for you, then final FDA approval won't be, either.

[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

There's no other way I can say this: you absolutely suck at risk analysis. The worst effects of COVID are much more common -- and much worse -- in the general population than the worst effects of any of the common vaccinations available in the US. Your opinion here contradicts all available scientific facts.

Sorry, but you're just plain wrong.

It’s only easily treatable while there is spare health system capacity. When the system is overwhelmed they’re only going to treat a select amount of people who need treatment.

It seems like the mortality rate is far higher than 0.1% according to the actual data (not anecdotes): https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality

Obviously this data is only for confirmed cases, so there may be far more unreported cases in the wild, but your made up number of 99.9+% is still pretty clearly wrong.

Also, given that you can be have covid, and be asymptomatic, there's actually no way to know if you are healthy (unless you're getting tested regularly). If you're infected, but asymptomatic, you're spreading the virus and you're part of the problem.

Once your hospitals are overwhelmed the deathrate went through the roof, you should catch up with recent news from India & South East Asea. https://www.reuters.com/world/india/indias-covid-death-rate-...

Literally nothing is going to change between now and when the mRNA vaccines get approved. Probably a month or two to go at this point.

Given that 0.2% of the U.S. population has died of COVID, this argument seems a bit outdated.

> But will all these new vaccinations cause a virus to adapt to be more viral, similarly to how antibiotics has the potential to make bacteria resistant?

Maybe, but it's not a big deal.[1]

[1] https://www.pnas.org/content/115/51/12878

Awesome thanks for the paper!

> This is setting a precedent where instead of treating disease now, we will preemptively vaccinate

That has been the general approach for over a century, yes, particularly for diseases without effective treatments.

> But will all these new vaccinations cause a virus to adapt to be more viral, similarly to how antibiotics has the potential to make bacteria resistant?

No particular reason to think so, and it hasn’t happened before. We don’t have super-smallpox, say.

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