As a virologist I’m shocked my work has been hijacked by anti-vaxxers

That is, are the "risks" real scientifically-documented complications (either from a clinical trial, or from solid arguments about mRNA vaccines and children), or are the "risks" just unknown-unknowns and a lack of sufficient data?

I don't trust the FDA. I believe they're subject to a bunch of nonsense political pressures. I believe they employ a bunch of good people trying to do the best job they can within a US federal bureaucracy and all the confines of that (including the inability to compete on salary with the private sector for skilled/experienced candidates). I have no reason to believe they're more competent than, oh, the DoD. So my distrust of the FDA doesn't extend to believing that they approve the vaccine, it's because they really want to implant microchips in us, but it absolutely extends to believing that if they don't approve the vaccine, it may well be for reasons entirely unrelated to its scientific merit.

The vaccines are not approved for children under 12 because the risks to young children from the virus are the lowest of any population group, so older groups were prioritized for efficacy and safety testing. It is being tested now in that age group (I know people with kids in the trial group) and will hopefully be approved shortly.

If this virus worked the way the flu does, doing the most damage to children and the elderly, then the vaccine would have been tested on children much sooner and would have been available to that group sooner. In that world, that's not because the vaccine was more dangerous to 25 year olds.

https://the-dna-universe.com/2021/04/15/the-history-of-mrna-...

Vaccines are tiny and you don't take them chronicially. They aren't like medicine.

The bad side effects are entirely your body attacking itself.

And there's a well-studied branch of medicine dealing with that. There's no autoimmune disease which emerges only >2 years after exposure to an antigen. In all of medicine that phenominon doesn't exist in order for to happen after an mRNA vaccine.

The way drugs interact with your body is incredibly complex and difficult, if not impossible, to fully monitor. You're putting some molecules in your body and hoping they'll end up doing x without knowing what else they might be effecting. Throw in another drug or medical condition that might interact with the first and it gets very crazy very fast. This is why most drugs require prescriptions.

Vaccines on the other hand are very straight forward. They mimic a the natural process of a foreign virus or bacteria entering your system and being found and eventually neutralized by your immune system, training it to know what to look for in the future in the process. It's inherently vastly less complicated with essentially no long term risk that could crop up out of nowhere.

If a knowledgeable person was truly concerned about a vaccine causing long term issues, they'd be absolutely terrified of every virus or bacteria entering their system since those have had no previous testing and will multiply many, many times more than the contents of a vaccine.

The mRNA sticks around for a day or three and then its all effectively gone and the 'infected' cells are disassembled by the immune system. The only thing that remains is the immune reaction, and the side effects (other than the rare immediate anaphylaxis) will be autoimmune reactions triggered by exposure to the antigen.

And we have 250 years of experience with vaccines and we've studied autoimmune conditions for many years, and there's a whole field of medicine devoted to it. And based on all that experience we know what kinds of side effects there could be and that they all show up within 3 months of exposure to the antigen. That is why vaccines don't need more than 3-6 months of a trial in order to determine safety (they often need much longer to determine efficacy).

If you get sick 6+ months after getting vaccinated then it wasn't the vaccine.

I also would take the mRNA vaccine over the Sinopharm, there's far more antigens in Sinopharm or viral vector vaccines that your body has never been exposed to. There's much less different types of antigens in the mRNA vaccines to trigger autoimmune effects. You're likely thinking about the risks backwards. The worrisome thing isn't the american pharmaceutical industry, the bigger issue is the entirely alien (to your body) proteins in the pandemic virus.

what level do you have certainty would you require before you think making something mandatory would be appropriate?

do you have any reason to believe any of those concerns are even rational or theoretically reasonable? or you just afraid of them because they might happen?

Most trial studies only follow subjects for about 6 to 12 months for the bulk of the study, and at longer intervals only to determine if already known good / bad differences between active an placebo populations persist and to what degree.

The number one thing that changes with X years of "long term" study data is the number of study participants.

Around the world we have seen an unprecedented 'Phase 4' trial in response to a global pandemic. In the USA alone over 100 million have been vaccinated with the new mRNA technology and most of us for far longer than it would take for new symptoms to show.

Contrast with placebo patients who shun the vaccines: They're overflowing hospitals right now causing real deaths to OTHERS who need emergency medical care for non-pandemic reasons. Those who survive are at risk of 'long haul COVID' symptoms at a greatly increase rate of occurrence and severity compared to the vaccines. Needless to add, the risk of death from the vaccine is far lower as well; even the J&J / AZ vaccines are still better than the risk of Delta (the variant that ravaged India).

I also wonder how many people who claim to have natural immunity actually have that natural immunity. The tale of Manaus is cautionary here.

As for people with natural immunity but who haven't had it, that's everyone. Every person has what are called "naive B-cells," covered in random antibodies. One of them probably binds to coronavirus in some way, and that would be how your body would get started fighting the infection if you got it. However, the fact that people have some natural ability to fight it off explains why not everyone dies from it (every virus would kill you if you had no immune response, that's why HIV is deadly), but it's of little consolation to the people who found out too late that their natural immunity wasn't enough.

If there was a test to see in advance who would fight off the coronavirus without realizing they had it, I guess that would be a way to save some money and inconvenience giving them shots, but since we don't know for sure in advance who will or won't have an easy case, that's why we have to get vaccinated.

Your insistence on using it is telling.

What you really mean is disease-induced immunity.

Infection followed by an mRNA vaccine also acts as a boost which provides broad neutralization against mutated spikes and possibly some pan-sarbecovirus immunity.

The answer to the question is related to the question of how many people are going to get this thing before it stops spreading. From what I've heard we're looking at 70-80% based on herd immunity estimations, which is not a lot of risk attenuation on the virus side. If someone wants to chime in with a better-justified estimate, I'd appreciate that.

A high vaccination rate of high efficacy vaccine(s) can most certainly eradicate a disease. A virus can't do a whole lot without a host to incubate and spread it. If potential hosts can't meaningfully incubate or spread the virus, it stops spreading.

Once the good vaccines (80+% efficacy) became available, if they could have magically been distributed to everyone, COVID would be entirely contained by now and on the way to being eradicated in the population at large. Only the most remote reservoirs would contain the virus at transmissible levels.

That is not saying some 70% vaccination rate will eradicate the virus. It will bring the infection rates down to below pandemic and epidemic levels. If someone is unvaccinated for medical reasons but everyone around them is vaccinated the virus has a pretty huge moat to cross to infect them. Even when the vaccinated get a breakthrough infection the odds of it being serious are very low as is its transmissibility.

Considering we’ve eradicated other diseases with vaccinations, this is not an inherently incorrect assessment.

The concern I share with many other people is not as much about people who prevaricate about mRNA and get J&J, but about those who are armchair quarterbacking their way into believing things like science / all scientists are corrupt, we have no expert / collective knowledge of the various mechanisms by which vaccines work, there is a nebulous "they" that don't want you to know things, etc.

Yes, it is. Australia did a jab campaign inviting 24K children inside a stadium, and not permitting parents to enter with their child. https://twitter.com/unhealthytruth/status/142739608697777766...

Tell that to Australia?

Not really. The heliocentric systems of Copernicus and Galileo didn't do much better at predicting heavenly motion than did the earlier geocentric systems such as the Ptolemaic system. They were still largely implicitly based on the assumption of an intelligent creator (God) who would make the universe follow laws that were aesthetically pleasing geometrically/mathematically. Any observations that didn't fit the pleasing laws of a theorist's theory were dismissed as some kind of observational error or some kind of optical illusion or some such.

Galileo's trouble with the Church wasn't due to heliocentrism per se. The Church's position at the time was that if some empirical observation of the world (which God made) clearly contradicted their interpretation of something in the Bible it must be because they misinterpreted that part of the Bible.

Galileo's trouble was more due him being a genius who was also a major asshole with a big ego and a poor sense of politics.

His genius brought fame, which brought him to the attention of the rich and powerful. His ego fed on their attention, loving to play the roll of the celebrity. His ego also led him to be an asshole to people he considered lesser or his rivals. And his poor sense of politics made him clueless that some of those "lesser" people had a lot of political power and could make his life miserable if he kept being an asshole to them.