Ask HN: Finding data about vaccine vs. infection risks, and making sense of it | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Finding data about vaccine vs. infection risks, and making sense of it

2 pointsmdp20216 comments

Premise: this is a sensitive topic, but of strong intellectual and practical interest, and I see this community as one of the best to fruitfully tackle the matter.

I would be grateful for help in assessing the risks, in amount (probability, conditions/demographics) and details (what may happen, for how long), of the vaccines (foremostly of the vaccines, then of COVID-19) against the current in-focus epidemic. Any "Cost/Risk/Benefit" analysis is supposed to be based on numbers - these numbers may not be immediately available.

The consequences of interest are those of mid-long duration - what lasts only a few days is assumed as "endurable". What may instead last for many weeks, months etc. is relevant.

I have for now only directly checked the data from the USA VAERS system: it seems fairly reliable in terms of the data contained (it is reported to be mostly compiled by medical practitioners), but is very probably less reliable in terms of real amounts - reporting is voluntary. It would be useful to compare it to systems with "active monitoring" in which the compilation from practitioners is mandated. For the moment, I could only access the data from VAERS and could not enter other sources (e.g. the European and the Australian one). Already in the VAERS it does not seem immediate to discriminate the expected first-days side effects from the long duration ones.

I also do not know which repository about the consequences (condition, probability, duration, demographics...) of actual infection could be the most reliable. In fact, even calculating the odds of infection does not seem trivial.

Thank you.

As I am still looking for active monitoring for vaccine adverse events, in the attempt of finding more indicative numbers (when you meet passive monitoring numbers like those of VAERS you have to also guess the multiplier that comes from under-reporting), I noticed that reports of the Australian TGA system (Therapeutic Goods Administration) may be worth some credit. The reports are at:

https://www.tga.gov.au/periodic/covid-19-vaccine-weekly-safe...

The database itself can be browsed at

https://apps.tga.gov.au/PROD/DAEN/daen-entry.aspx

The DAEN (Database of Adverse Event Notifications) is unfortunately still part of a mostly "passive" endavour (to update the DB the vaccinated individual has to raise a notification), but with the notable exception of the case of death in some Australian states (unspecified), in which it is mandatory for the medical practitioner involved in the process to update the said DB. The TGA then reviews the said death reports. This is the closest I have yet found for active monitoring.

The DAEN unfortunately does not distinguish between Serious Adverse Event and temporary distress - "a few days" and "a few months" lasting effects are mixed.

Still looking (whenever possible), of course, consistently with the invitation to the community, for repositories of adverse events of vaccines. Very little luck for now.

While searching, a lateral interesting piece of information I just found on the relevant website of the Philippines:

> The government will have an indemnification fund for all those who will experience adverse events following immunization

I know that some countries have signed agreements with the vaccine manufacturers about possible post-vaccine damages, and that some countries have people sign a waver of responsibilities before inoculation. I do not know the details. If the Philippines have a programme of compensation (its meaning could be heavily calibrated by details I do not know) for those who face health damages that - to overwhelming rhetoric in some areas - come from a personal effort and contribution to protect the community, that could be just noble, fair and consistent, and a weapon against hesitance. It contrasts with the stance other countries adopted.

Canada also has a monitoring system, the government offers weekly summaries at

health-infobase.canada.ca/covid-19/vaccine-safety/

Again, the system seems to be bottom-up patient-active in reporting, not top-down practitioner-active in monitoring. So, the magnitude is still roughly 1:10000 but may not be representative of all actual cases. Plus, I am not sure how these numbers can represent long-duration side effects (assumed as the main concern), though one quarter of the reports (2.7k/10.8k) were considered serious.

Some access to the European repository, EudraVigilance, is given through

adrreports.eu/en/search_subst.html

which in the links like 'COVID-19 [...]' gives access to an Oracle dashboard (at dap.ema.europa.eu/analytics/saw.dll?PortalPages ).

There is an option to export to spreadsheet.

I understand this repository is again filled on a voluntary basis.

> The spontaneous cases reported to EudraVigilance come from patients and healthcare professionals and are submitted electronically by national medicines regulatory authorities and pharmaceutical companies

> I have for now only directly checked the data from the USA VAERS system

These links might be of interest regarding the VAERS system.

https://roundingtheearth.substack.com/p/defining-away-vaccin...

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1IAzK4a58a7M4ajHKOpqe-9KD9Pd...

Also, some interviews

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mxqC9SiRh8

And this is the site that is mentioned in the video https://www.c19vaxreactions.com/

Also there is data available from https://www.medsafe.govt.nz/COVID-19/safety-report-19.asp

But this is also voluntary reported.

Thank you! I see that the website you notified us about, c19vaxreactions, collects reports from people that were victims of severe adverse reactions. It is surely important that notion of these cases is spread, against a naive idea of granted full innocuity of the vaccines - but on the other hand, the narrative of these cases is of concern, in terms of damage, as much as the narrative of post-infection cases (a significant number of people hit by COVID are impaired). This is why it is important to understand whether a risk of a blow to one's health and quality of life after a vaccine, vs after an infection, is quantifiable as one tenth, one thousandth, one millionth etc.

Many of us have been exposed to direct narrative about adverse side effects from vaccines, i.e. from acquaintances. Those "nearby" cases, coming from a limited pool, may seem to indicate that the tens-per-million to few-hundreds-per-million cases emerging from the VAERS are only a subset of the actual cases. Hence the importance to clarify the magnitudes.

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