A vaccine is a fraction of the cost of treatment, and it has no long-term side effects. Even better, a vaccine reduces the chance for a virus to mutate.
Treatments, even if they work, are going to have side effects, and there are still unknown risks from a severe (unvaccinated) infection anyway.
Vaccines are a miracle of proactivity, and there's no reason to try to replace them with something expensive, risky, and reactive.
To make an analogy, does spraying every surface in a hospital with an antibacterial solution result in no bacteria or just make it more likely to see resistant bacteria? I’d guess it’s a function of how potent the solution was and how well every last surface was coated. If you start with a 10% solution, don’t achieve full coverage and keep ramping up slowly perhaps we’ll just see something like this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=plVk4NVIUh8
Agree with the rest of your post though.
At this point, it looks like our mRNA vaccines:
- leave a short enough window between doses to minimize mutations
- reduce viral load within a vaccinated person[2]
- prevent many transmissions entirely[3][4][5]
...which, added all up, appears to net out the way you'd expect: the vaccine reduces the risk of mutations.
1. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/02/10/9659409...
2. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01316-7
3. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br...
4. https://www.physiciansweekly.com/covid-19-breakthrough-infec...
5. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-crucial-vacci...
How much do the treatments cost? Is it vastly different?
> No long term side effects.
How do you know? I thought the only study/data from Pfizer covered 6 months. That's not very long term? https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.28.21261159v...
I don't think we need to replace vaccines, but large swathes of the population still don't have access. It seems very likely that a multi-modal approach would allow us to treat more people, faster.
Even Pfizer sees vaccination as well as treatment as the path forward: https://www.pfizer.com/science/coronavirus/antiviral-efforts
An average hospitalization costs $73,000 in the US, according to data collected from insurance claims[1].
That means that a single hospitalization costs the same as vaccinating 2,400 people (using your $30/shot estimate).
> How do you know? I thought the only study/data from Pfizer covered 6 months. That's not very long term?
Although I'm not an expert, a friend of mine is getting his PhD studying the immune system and explained it to me this way:
Any additional risk of mRNA vaccines would (with almost 100% certainty) occur shortly after vaccination[2], theorized to be as a result of a strong(er) immune response.
After the immune response has subsided, the vaccinated person's immune system would be hard to distinguish from someone who received a traditional vaccine because the goal of the vaccines is the same: to teach the immune system what the virus looks like[3][4] without actually requiring an active virus.
So to put that together, we can be fairly confident in an mRNA vaccine's long-term safety because its long-term effects are similar to other vaccines that we've studied for more than 100 years and because the mechanism of action subsides within a few months[5].
1. https://www.fairhealth.org/article/costs-for-a-hospital-stay...
2. https://www.muhealth.org/our-stories/how-do-we-know-covid-19...
3. https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/why-are-mrna-vaccines-so...
4. https://www.vumc.org/viiii/infographics/how-does-mrna-vaccin...
5. https://www.uab.edu/news/health/item/12143-three-things-to-k...
1. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/07/why-pandemic-flu-sho...
English is not my native language so maybe I didn't understand what you meant by that.
From that link:
> The flu vaccine is designed to trigger antibodies to influenza’s surface proteins, but if it elicits antibodies to the nucleoprotein as well, those might well latch on to the hypocretin receptor, and eventually lead to death of the cells, the researchers thought.
That couldn't just spontaneously happen a year after getting a vaccine.
Today, there are no particularly effective treatments. Monoclonal antibodies might do something, and cost a few thousand quid, but you wouldn’t want to be relying on them as an alternative to a vaccine.
I’m not personally ruling it out 100%, but is there even a proposed mechanism through which vaccine side effects could emerge like years later?
[0]: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/vaccines-...
What are the long-term side effects of the vaccine? Or are you saying that you expect us to discover some in the future?
Biology "certitude" is far from being as strong as a mathematical proof. Humans are different, and the complexity of interaction inside a single body are horribly complex.
I'm very surprised decades of science fiction litterature isn't enough to make people think twice.
In what way do you think millions of doctors, disease experts, and drug researchers have gotten that wrong? They have evidence that Covid is worse, but where is evidence to the contrary?
> I'm very surprised decades of science fiction litterature isn't enough to make people think twice.
Isn't it arrogant to assume that all the experts on vaccines are less informed or less cautious than you are, just because you've read sci-fi?
They didn't just think twice. They've done decades of research and testing, and they've closely monitored safety at every stage of rollout.
in general i would also be very skeptical of "scientific consensus" related by the media when you see how much bad press some doctor got for criticising public health politics (even when proved right later on).
Reminder of the Thalidomide drug:
> Thalidomide is a sedative drug discovered at the end of the 50s, which caused a worldwide tragedy. The drug has been prescribed to many pregnant women in order to relieve pregnancy nausea. It was later found that thalidomide caused irreversible damages to the fetus and thousands of children were born with severe congenital malformations. Many of them did not survive more than a few days after they were born.
Good news, then. Viral vector vaccines (like the J&J version) have been studied and tested since the 1970s, and mRNA vaccines (like Pfizer) have been studied since the 1980s[1][2].
What ingredient in Covid vaccines do you suspect will become the new thalidomide?
We know that the actual viral vector and mRNA components of the vaccines will degrade and disappear from the body in the short term[3], so it must be one of the other ingredients, right?
It's also important to weigh the completely unknown long-term effects of Covid against the well-known long-term effects of training an immune system with a vaccine.
1. https://www.muhealth.org/our-stories/how-do-we-know-covid-19...
2. https://ec.europa.eu/research-and-innovation/en/horizon-maga...
3. https://www.nebraskamed.com/COVID/where-mrna-vaccines-and-sp...
If those aren’t true then the risk is probably worth it as a raging infection would almost certainly be worse for the baby. I just wish there was some nuance in our government’s recommendations.
The claim that the spike protein is dangerous in and of itself is a fixture of anti-vax disinformation online.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/06/08/fac...
You can't say "The spike protein absolutely does not cause damage". That's going too far. Speaking as someone who doesn't pay attention to whatever the conspiracy theory of the day is, I have nevertheless always wondered about the effect of of proteins in the blood whose sole purpose is to breach cell walls. Your comment motivated me to do a quick google. There are in fact many reputable papers hinting at unpredictable spike protein effects. Here's three:
SARS-CoV-2 Spike Protein Induces Degradation of Junctional Proteins That Maintain Endothelial Barrier Integrity [0]
The SARS-CoV-2 spike protein alters barrier function in 2D static and 3D microfluidic in-vitro models of the human blood–brain barrier [1]
SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins disrupt the blood-brain barrier, new research shows [2]
[0] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcvm.2021.68778...
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096999612...
[2] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/10/201029141941.h...
A little perspective - one way or another, we're all going to be exposed to this damn spike protein eventually, and the vaccine is by far the safer way. If it does do something bad, we haven't noticed it yet, which presumably means it can't be that bad. I haven't seen any reports of people getting long covid from a jab.
"While it is true that the spike protein has 'superantigen' properties, which means it has the POTENTIAL to cause adverse effects, we know that it doesn’t cause these effects in many infected patients, it doesn’t cause many of these superantigen effects in most vaccinated individuals, and the levels are incredibly low in the blood, suggesting this shouldn’t be a concern," he said."
Many, most, etc. is a pretty far cry from "absolutely does not." I already said for most people it shouldn't be an issue. Could it be developmentally harming fetuses? Maybe we'll find out 10 years from now that they'll have a slightly lower IQ than they should.
Or maybe for adults we'll see an increase in autoimmune diseases a few years from now. Or, hopefully, there will be no widespread long term effects. These things take time to suss out. I'm so incredibly sick of absolutism reigning over everything now. It should be perfectly acceptable to have a nuanced opinion over who should take the vaccine instead of everyone or noone.
Vaccines are great. Therapies are also great. This is absolutely not wrong.
Where's my portable cold fusion generator?
Vaccines just fucking work right now. Much like wind and solar.
Effective antivirals are like thorium nukes and carbon capture. Very hard problems that nobody can adequately solve.