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Comment by ashtonkem | Hacker News Reader

It’s time to move these vaccines up into regular approval, for a variety of reasons. This is probably the most scrutinized vaccine ever, keeping it in emergency use is mistake.

> A vaccine that provides for only a year is hardly the same as a booster shot which is good for 10 iirc.

As compared to the flu shot? The one that I’ve been given for free in every school and workplace I’ve attended in the past twenty years?

Logistically, yearly shots are nbd. Maybe we should make flu shots mandatory for education just like the MMR shot, given the number of kids killed by the flu every year.

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> This is probably the most scrutinized vaccine ever

Not in terms of long term data, at all

What exactly are you expecting to happen, for the vaccine to turn around and kill 600,000 Americans?

See these peer-reviewed papers for some insight into the second and third order evolutionary dynamics that we face with the current spike protein focused mRNA vaccines for SARS-CoV-2 [1][2].

These are serious long-term concerns, which may not manifest overnight, but they are certainly on the radar of many experts in the field.

[1] Risk of rapid evolutionary escape from biomedical interventions targeting SARS-CoV-2 spike protein https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33909660/

[2] SARS-CoV-2 immune evasion by the B.1.427/B.1.429 variant of concern https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2021/06/30/scie...

[3] Imperfect Vaccination Can Enhance the Transmission of Highly Virulent Pathogens https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371%2Fj...

On websites where covid vax hesitancy is rampant, I often see posts discussing antibody mediated enhancement, vascular damage caused by circulating spike protein increasing vascular damage and causing death from heart attack and stroke in a few years, prion disease development from misfolded protein propagation, and fertility issues. For most of these issues, long term data is needed to rule them out.

Over a long period of time anything is possible.

Isn’t this just an argument for nihilism? Over a long time anything is possible, but that’s not an excuse to ignore the data that we have right here and now. Never mind that there will never be a point where there isn’t a “long period of time” in front of us, which becomes a convenient excuse for permanent inaction.

Also, anything being possible is not the same as anything being probable. The vaccine might make me grow a third arm too, after all anything is possible in the long run, but you would laugh if I said that I wasn’t getting a vaccine for the fear of my tailoring bill.

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