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Comment by standardUser | Hacker News Reader

"We have no idea of the long term effects"

Perhaps you have no idea, but the people closest to this science, including the countless government agencies around the world that have given authorization, have a pretty good idea. The design and length of clinical trials is not arbitrary, but your personal idea of "long term" is arbitrary.

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Do we have data on 5, 10 years after usage? I'm fairly certain that there won't be anything either (based on what experts have said), but we should withhold making assertions without data to back it up, right?

Why do you think 5 or 10 years are important metrics? Why not 40 or 60 years?

You start climbing ladders at the bottom rung. Do you have 40 to 60 year data? Or are you just avoiding the 5-10 year scale by redirecting?

Well, mRNA vaccines have been in human clinical trials for over 10 years now, so if 10 years is your metric you may want to look in to that. My greater point is that to you and I - people who do not research the human immune system - 5 or 20 or 40 years may all seem like reasonable metrics. The people closest to the science disagree with us, at least in part because they cannot identify any mechanism for these vaccines to possess stealth side effects that only emerge decades later.

To be fair, vast majority of those scientists also claimed the lab leak theory was impossible and a conspiracy theory and 1.5 year later flip flopped. If it was so easy to silence scientists on such an obvious issue, what else were the dissenting scientists silenced on?

>Well, mRNA vaccines have been in human clinical trials for over 10 years now, so if 10 years is your metric you may want to look in to that.

I've tried. I have not found any hard data from sources I would trust. I've found lots of opinions penned by people I have no reason to trust.

I don't care if this data exists or it doesn't. Even without this data, there's no good reason to think that the vaccine has a higher chance of long term complications than COVID itself, which makes the decision to get vaxxed an obvious one, even for young people.

Yes, training your cells to mass produce a new protein we're not familiar with is absolutely safer than your trained immune system possibly encountering a mild viral load, with the proteins attached to the shells as normal.

Anyone who doubts the safety of this new immune system programming is obviously either a science denier or a paid [insert foreign country] shill.

This is silly because of the strong evidence that has emerged about long COVID. We know there are often significant long-term complications to COVID. You can see things like reduced grey matter volume in people who have had COVID across multiple regions of their brain. Yet for mRNA vaccines there is simply no reason to expect anything remotely this bad. You're positing that there could be surprise side effects into the future that will, with non-trivial probability, outweigh the long-term side effects from COVID (e.g. literal brain damage) that we've already observed. If long COVID wasn't a well-established observation, then I'd grant that you have the ghost of a point.

I'm all for more data! 40 or 60 years sounds great.

Most vaccines take 10-15 years to develop, so that should probably be my target, but I'm willing to take on some extra risk.

Have we seen a vaccinated person conceive and have a healthy birth?

I’m not at all saying that’s a risk but just that it’s an example of something we haven’t had time to test.

Right, I am only arguing that we are not flying totally blind here. Is the risk 0%? No, never. But the people who know the science best think the risk of something occurring beyond the timeframe we have good data for is very, very low. And the idea that there is a certain amount of years or decades, or a certain life event that changes the expectations of how this impacts human health, is something that we are only guessing about. Whereas the people with the knowledge and background to make educated guesses generally have little to no concern.

Higher or lower than the chance of hospitalization for women of childbearing age for covid-19? Many people suspect that the answer to this question is "we don't really know". But public health agencies are trying to boost vaccination rates, period. So they say "just get the vax". It's getting exhausting trying to parse out the truth from the various "noble lies".

This leads many people who already mistrust "the system" to tune out future guidance and legitimate information. Black Americans, and Republicans, for example.

I upvoted this. I strongly agree that public health communication has been awful at times and has absolutely diminished trust. Especially the recent f*ck up at the CDC where they spread disinformation about vaccinated people and their ability to spread the Delta variant.

Thank you. I have appreciated your engagement.

Referring to unsettled science as "disinformation" seems premature. Is it not the case that we have some preliminary evidence that this may be the case? I've seen lots of criticism of the study that led to their updated guidance about this. Confounding variables, etc. But these are experts giving us their expert opinion. Surely it should at least be considered a possibility worthy of more study? Does referring to it as "disinformation" create a chilling effect around truth seeking?

Are there other studies, or a "preponderance of evidence", so to speak, that refutes their position? I'm not aware of any. Most often I hear people make "common sense" or "just so" arguments about vaccines in general and how they work. Nothing specific about the covid vaccines. The majority of which, at least in USA, utilize novel tech.

Fair points, and I don't stand by calling it disinformation. This particular incident has just really frustrated me. I'm not sure exactly what the CDC was thinking by elevating this study so much, or why it was leaked before publication. But it does look suspect to me.

The study: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7031e2.htm

The limitations discussed in the paper seem to have been completely ignored by the media. That isn't surprising at all, but it is a little suspiring that the CDC made a such a quick and resolute policy change based on a study with such obvious (and some might say peculiar) limitations.

That's an appeal to authority and we know there's a big problem with censorship right now. (Medical) doctors and professors who ask questions about the effectiveness of vaccination policy have a high chance of getting fired. In my country a researcher got fired a few months ago after publicly saying there's no guarantee that getting vaccinated means you will no longer spread the virus. By now he's been proven right of course, but meanwhile he did lose his job, his income, his reputation, and his voice in the media.

So how is it possible to have an honest, open discussion (not to mention conduct proper science) in such a highly censored environment?

(For the record, I'm not antivax and not against these new vaccines, and I think it's also worrying in and of itself that many people like me feel this needs to be said every time in these discussions in order to minimize the chance of name-calling and personal attacks.)

The frustrating thing about weaselly antivax nonsense like this is that if you just google your question, there is a clear answer:

> Over 20 women enrolled in the initial adult Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine trial became pregnant during the study period, and none suffered pregnancy loss or perinatal complications.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ninashapiro/2021/03/17/vaccinat...

I understand that some people are not as plugged into the internet, or have various difficulties understanding information, but I doubt that describes you as a hacker news commenter. There is really no excuse for you to be ignorant about things that you can find an answer to in mere seconds.

Just as they had a good idea that vaccinating would effectively make the virus transmissible, just as they had a good idea about masks working and not working, just as they...

Not sure what point you are making, but vaccines work and are neutralizing the pandemic in places with sufficient coverage. The Delta variant does spread more aggressively to recovered or vaccinated people, but very, very rarely sends them to the hospital.

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