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Comment by donutdan4114 | Hacker News Reader

Gosh, disturbing comment section for disturbing times. When experimental medical treatments become mandatory for illnesses that have a 99%+ survival rate, and there is absolutely NO LONG TERM safety data, some red flags should be raised.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jktvh6k0qys

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What about the long term safety data on catching / surviving COVID itself? Long COVID seems to affect between 10-30% of people who catch COVID. Why do I never hear anti-vaxxers being concerned about that?

Because its mostly undefined what long-covid even means. In the worst cases it means organ damage, but Ill bet you anything those are not anywhere near 10-30% of cases. More likely people randomly feel like shit for a while sometimes, like every other year in my adult life.

Which is exactly my point - we don't know what or how prevalent the long term effects of COVID are.

Agreed. But I guess I'm the odd-man out to err on the side of "not-fear".

> I'm the odd-man out to err on the side of "not-fear".

I'm not sure what this means. So you got the vaccine then because you're not afraid of it, right? Or you didn't get the vaccine because you're not afraid of COVID-19?

I am also not afraid really of COVID-19 but I got the vax because I'm also not afraid of that. Mostly I'm afraid I'd get it and then pass it to others where that could have been avoided by me just not being lazy for a second. I don't feel like an odd-man though.

Swine flu took me several months to fully recover. Nobody made this a topic back then but i know some other people who too had issues for months.

I put long COVID in the same bucket at long Lyme, which doesn't actually exist. It's a pretext for hypochondria, not a legitimate basis for public policy.

While I don't doubt that such psychosomatic disorders exist, there is simply not enough data yet to make such a strong statement. There are numerous reports of people not recovering their sense of taste / smell months after catching COVID, on top of all of the hospitalized people reporting symptoms long first catching it. It's not like there isn't legitimate evidence of this: https://time.com/6093164/long-covid-19-largest-study/. Obviously, it'll take a lot of time and care to sort out the effect that the lockdowns / hospitalization have vs. just the disease itself, and it's entirely possible that the mental effects of the lockdown play a large role in these prolonged recoveries.

But still, it's a novel, deadly disease which has a significant impact on the respiratory system (and perhaps the vascular system as well). The human body and our immune system are incredibly complex. It's far too reductive to categorize all of these collective experiences as just "hypochondria".

And it's not like post-lyme is a fiction either: https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/newsroom/news-releases/...

Ah yes, Long COVID the self diagnosed symptoms that surprisingly coincide with those that you would expect if you told a society to lockdown for 18 months.

For a nuanced take on long COVID I recommend Scott's post: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/long-covid-much-more-t...

> Gosh, disturbing comment section for disturbing times. When experimental medical treatments become mandatory for illnesses that have a 99%+ survival rate, and there is absolutely NO LONG TERM safety data, some red flags should be raised.

The current case fatality rate is averaging around 2%, but that's with access to medical care.

The CFR at the early stages of the pandemic, and in countries without good medical systems, is much higher. See Italy during the first wave, which peaked at around 15%, or several Central and South American countries, which have averaged between 5% and 10%.

> The current case fatality rate is averaging around 2%, but that's with access to medical care.

This is an order of magnitude off from what the data actually say.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

See table 4.

Delta: total cases: 92,029 Deaths within 28 days: 117

100 * (117 / 92,029) = 0.127%

No, not anywhere close to 2%. 5%? 10%? It never got anywhere near that.

This disease just isn't that deadly and we need to recognize that.

Your pamphlet was published in June, at the start of the Delta-variant infection spike. On average, it takes eighteen days before someone infected with COVID-19 passes away from it.

The UK had 769 COVID-19 related deaths over the last week, which was up from 654 the week before. Source: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...

The UK has had a total case fatality rate of 1.9%. Source: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality

> This disease just isn't that deadly

Vs. 4.6M dead worldwide, discounting 2nd order excess deaths.

How can you be so blithe?

The world has almost eight billion people.

I learned something very interesting the other day. Historically, virtually all cases of vaccine side effects occur in the first few months. I honestly can't believe I haven't seen this more widely discussed. It makes the concerns about "long-term safety data" mostly moot. By now, we have plenty of the relevant safety-critical data that we need for the covid vaccines.

Here is the director of the Alabama Vaccine Research Clinic discussing the issue [1]:

> “Vaccines are just designed to deliver a payload and then are quickly eliminated by the body,” Goepfert said. “This is particularly true of the mRNA vaccines. mRNA degrades incredibly rapidly. You wouldn’t expect any of these vaccines to have any long-term side effects. And in fact, this has never occurred with any vaccine.”

> “The side effects that we see occur early on, and that’s it,” Goepfert said. “In virtually all cases, vaccine side effects are seen within the first two months after rollout.”

[1] https://www.uab.edu/news/health/item/12143-three-things-to-k...

Without vaccine/lockdowns and too many people in need of hospitalization would it still be 99%?

What's your definition of long term? mRNA vaccines are built on science started 30 years ago, are being made by companies founded to make mRNA vaccines 10+ years ago, and have been to numerous trials for many years now.

The current set of vaccines have been fielded for nearly 2 years. How long term do you want to get?

I find it interesting that full approval has not affected people calling the vaccines "experimental" in any way. Seems that this goalpost was never real in the first place.

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