How much scientific evidence for mRNA vaccines being safe and effective would need to be gathered for continued concern and hesitancy to count as "anti-vaxxer" thinking?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAh4uS4f78o
Recipient of the highest civilian honor in the US with 15 million highly engaged listeners told them covid was just a cold hyped up to hurt the then POTUS politically.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/feb/25/rush-limbaug...
Wuhan did slow the spread very very much with a few weeks of shutdown btw.
I was vaccinated with Sinopharm 6 months ago, preferring the older vaccine technology; now I’m being vaccinated with Pfizer, because I need to travel to countries which don’t accept Sinopharm. I’m still uncomfortable with MRNA vaccines, and feel a bit like a beta tester.
I understand that I asked for a drug that had later side effects and you provided one. But, I do not think what happened with Thalidomide is a good reason not to take this vaccine...I'm not even sure if you do.
I’m taking my second dose of Pfizer tomorrow (I explained the expedience of this in my first comment). I’m not some frothy anti-vaxxer. I just have a preference for tried and tested methods over the cutting edge.
I also don’t sign up to beta software when there’s a stable or LTS release that meets my needs.
I don't base my feelings about deploying Linux today on my experiences with getting Gentoo to work on randomly cobbled together hardware with no network connection in the early 2000s
>I also don’t sign up to beta software when there’s a stable or LTS release that meets my needs.
This makes sense to me! I've had issues with beta software before. I think there is evidence for this position, with regards to software running on systems that need to have good uptime numbers.
What I'm trying to figure out is why you hold that position with regards to medicine. When asked for an example, you provided one that I don't think makes the case. Like I said, I understand your position, I don't understand why you hold it.
https://www.fda.gov/drugs/drug-safety-and-availability/fda-u...
Alatrofloxacin (Trovan) was approved in 1997 and withdrawn in 2001 (USA) or 2006 (worldwide) because of serious hepatotoxicity leading to liver transplant or death.
i also probably ingested a million times more ranitidine than there is mRNA in a vaccine, and the ranitidine still hasn't killed me.
The Rotavirus vaccine RotaShield was approved in 1998 and withdrawn in 1999 due to risk of intussusception (telescoping intestine).
> The results of the investigations showed that RotaShield® vaccine caused intussusception in some healthy infants younger than 12 months of age who normally would be at low risk for this condition. The risk of intussusception increased 20 to 30 times over the expected risk for children of this age group within 2 weeks following the first dose of RotaShield® vaccine. The risk increased 3 to 7 times over the expected risk for this age group within two weeks after the second dose of RotaShield® vaccine. There was no increase in the risk of intussusception following the third dose of RotaShield® vaccine, or when three weeks had passed following any dose of the vaccine.
It didn't affect them 5 years later, it happened 2 weeks after the vaccine.
This is typical, and why it isn't particularly necessary to do safety studies of vaccines longer than 3-6 months.
You can argue that the safety study failed in that case and wasn't broad enough and the side effect wasn't noticed so that it wasn't approved, but it was found very quickly after approval, and the rate was 1 in 12,000 vaccinated infants. That is difficult statistically to find in studies of only 25,000 individuals.
And we've had a massive "phase 4" trial of mRNA vaccines involving >100M individuals that has gone on for months now. We know they're incredibly safe.
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.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41573-021-00163-y
Despite the unknowns, approved adjuvants are very safe and the presence of adjuvants isn't a reason to avoid vaccination.
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.
It blows my mind that people only seem to be thinking about “does the vaccine kill you within a week”. That’s literally the least of your worries. How the vaccine affects your heart, brain, or reproductive facilities 20 years from now is what I’m concerned about. And I’ve heard nothing to address that concern. So as far as I’m concerned, until this vaccine has a track record as proven as measles, it’s still experimental and still worth being skeptical.
I’m worried about the precedent of “safety” undermining human rights because “we’re in this together”.
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?
Literally the only thing the vaccine does is boost your own immune system's response to COVID. It doesn't protect others in any way shape or form. So making it mandatory is a terrible idea in general.
2.Other study findings suggest that fully or partially vaccinated people who got COVID-19 might be less likely to spread the virus to others. For example, fully or partially vaccinated study participants had 40 percent less detectable virus in their nose (i.e., a lower viral load), and the virus was detected for six fewer days (i.e., viral shedding) compared to those who were unvaccinated when infected. In addition, people who were partially or fully vaccinated were 66 percent less likely to test positive for SARS-CoV-2 infection for more than one week compared to those who were unvaccinated. While these indicators are not a direct measure of a person’s ability to spread the virus, they have been correlated with reduced spread of other viruses, such as varicella and influenza.
https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/p0607-mrna-reduce-ri...
If I didn't think that the ensuing violence would kill more people than it would save, I would absolutely vote for some level of mandatory vaccination.
I agree that the vaccine does not prevent all infections. but disagree that's the only thing that would give it value. the world of infectious diseases is not binary and attempting to evaluate or imply that a binary anything other than 100% efficacy is the only thing of value is either dishonest or negligent.
> Literally the only thing the vaccine does is boost your own immune system's response to COVID. It doesn't protect others in any way shape or form. So making it mandatory is a terrible idea in general.
Full disclosure I agree with the idea that mandatory vaccines are problematic. but I disagree with your argument about why it's problematic. and reject your assertions about the quality and usefulness of the vaccine. You define the vaccines capabilities as only improving an individual's immune system and then go on to assert that that doesn't protect others. Which is either a malicious argument or a gross misunderstanding of reality. if I have a vaccine that turns an infection from 2 weeks to 1 week I'm also infectious for half the time. thus in reality I would only be capable of infecting reasonably half the number of people.
you seem to me under the misunderstanding that because the vaccine doesn't prevent all infections and infectiousness that it doesn't prevent some infections and infectiousness. generally speaking the infection rate of a virus is low. as an example and hypothetically speaking for any virus one person will infect 1.01 people Which means the virus will spread if you could lower the infectivity rate of that virus by 2% you go from having a virus that spreads to one that dies out. so if the covid vaccine could lower the infectivity rate below one it would die out. and that's the average rate so if covids infectivity rate was 1.5 and the vaccine could lower it by half the impactivity rate would be 0.75 in other words it would die out in fact if only 70% of the population got the vaccine it would still die out. (assuming those number, I'm too lazy to look up the real infectivity rate from my phone)
If a vaccine can modify your DNA, is it still ethical to mandate it? Can we still bypass 20-year safety studies?
The short answer is yes a vaccine's ability to modify DNA doesn't weigh very heavily on the ethics of it becoming mandatory because nothing has been said about if it's a good or bad modification.
and I'm not sure what "can we still bypass 20-year safety studies" means because I don't think anyone has advocated or believes bypassing any safety study should happen or will 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).
But the big question (at least for me) is, can this actually modify my DNA? Because if so, that's potentially a Big Deal™ that we should be able to object to or at least discuss, right? But while the CDC is busy telling everyone that RNA cannot possibly ever change DNA, a group of scientists at Harvard and MIT accidentally found out—oops, maybe it can.[0]
Now look, there's still a lot of squinting and determining to be done here. By no means should we halt everything. But as long as there's still questions like this out there, there can be no reasonable mandate.
[0]: https://sciencewithdrdoug.com/2021/02/15/breaking-study-shed... [0]b: (The link to the actual study): https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33330870/